Andrew Lichter

If I am obligated to perform an action, you can wrong me by preventing me from performing it. The possibility of being wronged in this way suggests the existence of enabling rights— claim-rights that function to protect our ability to do our duty. At first glance, the notion of an enabling right indicates that some of our rights are justified directly by our duties. I label this the Default View. This view presents a puzzle: it appears to ground some of my rights in something that does not reflect my importance: my duties, which appear to reflect the importance of others. I vindicate the Default View by showing that a person’s obligations are the right sort of features to ground fundamental rights: status-embodying features the moral importance of which reflects her own. The idea that our obligations reflect our status is made vivid in cases of marginalization and oppression, where the public denial of the importance of a person’s obligations can function as an element of demeaning social erasure. I conjecture that we can situate these observations about the reflections of moral importance by reviving a traditional claim about human dignity: it is reflected in responsibilities, not merely entitlements.

I argue that we have reasons to blame wrongdoers for their own sake. Then, I offer an account of the nature of these reasons. One of blame’s key functions, I suggest, is to express concern for wrongdoers’ quality of will—a form of concern I call contribution recognition. We can disrespect people by treating them as though the quality of will expressed in their moral contributions (specifically, their blameworthy actions) does not much matter. Conversely, we can affirm a person’s moral significance or significance to us by expressing concern with her quality of will.

Conventionalism about promising is the view that the power to make binding promises depends essentially on the existence of a social practice or convention of promising. This paper explores an objection to conventionalism that says that—(allegedly) contra conventionalism—there is no morally acceptable world in which we lack the power of promise. Instead, normative powers theorists claim that our power of promise is morally basic or necessary. I argue that the conventionalist need not deny this claim. There are several ways to develop a noncontingent conventionalism: a version of the view that can accommodate the insight that the power of promise is indispensable to morally acceptable lives. Then, I argue that the conventionalist is indeed on the hook for accommodating this insight. I wrap up by considering the state of play in the debate over conventionalism about promising. Once we note the theoretical possibility of noncontingent conventionalism, it looks like the theatre of battle shifts to the difficult question of whether “natural” morality always provides “moral necessities.”

Abraham Roth argues that to accept a promise is to intend the performance of the promised action. I argue that this proposal runs into trouble because it makes it hard to explain how promises provide reasons for the performance of the promised action. Then, I ask whether we might fill the gap by saying that a promisor becomes entitled to the reasons for which her promise is accepted. I argue that this fix would implausibly shrink the class of binding promises and suggest that similar difficulties may arise for any theory that casts promises as an exercise of shared agency.