Sophia Reibetanz Moreau

Many of our moral obligations result partly from other people’s wrongdoing or from broader institutional or structural injustices. The author argues that in some of these cases, the agent is left morally compromised by their own moral obligations. Because of the relationship between these obligations and the wrongs or injustices that gave rise to them, such agents may perpetuate or exacerbate the original wrong; they may, more strongly, become the instrument of the original wrongdoer; or they may severely harm those whom they are obliged to assist, in ways that echo the original wrong or injustice. However, as these are all things considered moral obligations, those who do not fulfill them act wrongly, and may wrong those closest to them. Such obligations, then, can leave agents morally compromised no matter what they do. When they do, they are morally objectionable, or “objectionable obligations.” While the idea of an objectionable obligation can sound paradoxical, the article argues that it is quite coherent and provides us with an important normative resource, helping us better to understand social subordination and exploitation and to make progress in certain debates in normative ethics and political philosophy.

This chapter develops an original account of what unjust subordination consists in. It then uses this account to argue that both direct and indirect discrimination are often wrongful because of their contribution to unjust subordination. The chapter begins by arguing that we need to move away from individualistic conceptions of subordination and to consider subordination as something that happens to a person by virtue of her membership in social groups. It then lays out a set of four common and morally salient features of situations in which one social group is subordinated by others, and it uses these to help analyze cases of discrimination. In particular, the chapter calls attention to the role of “structural accommodations.” These are policies, practices, and physical structures that tacitly accommodate a more privileged group’s needs at the expense of subordinated groups. Structural accommodations help us understand how indirect discrimination, too, can be wrongfully subordinating.

There is a rich philosophical literature on the value of equality: on whether and why it matters, what its “currency” ought to be, and whether it should be balanced against other important values, such as freedom, or conceptualized in terms of equal access to them. Most of this literature is a contribution to debates about distributive justice: it is concerned with how we should understand equality when our aim is to arrive at general principles of justice that could guide social or political authorities in distributing goods under their control. But there is also a different context in which we can, and do, ask about equality. Sometimes, when we ask whether someone has been treated equally, our aim is to assess whether they have faced discrimination. This is, of course, what courts and human rights tribunals do when interpreting constitutional or statutory equality rights – for these rights are usually understood not as general rights to equal treatment in the distribution of social goods, but rather as rights not to be discriminated against on the basis of a select number of prohibited grounds.

I argue that T.M. Scanlon's contractualist account of morality has difficulty accommodating our intuitions about the moral relevance of the number of people affected by an action. I first consider the "Complaint Model" of reasonable rejection, which restricts the grounds for an individual's rejection of a principle to its effects upon herself. I argue that it can accommodate our intuitions about numbers only if we assume that, whenever we do not know who will be affected, each individual may appeal only to the _expected effects on her. This assumption, I suggest, leads to counterintuitive results in cases where, although we do not know who will be affected, we do know that _someone will be. I then consider two proposals to supplement the complaint model with a direct appeal to aggregation. I argue that both are open to serious objections

The Doctrine of Double Effect has been defended not only as a test of character but also as a criterion of wrongness for action. This paper criticises one attempt to justify the doctrine in the latter capacity. The justification, first proposed by Warren Quinn, traces the wrongness of intending harm as a means to the objectionable features of certain reasons for making this our intention. As I argue, however, some of the actions which seem to us to be permissible, and whose permissibility the DDE is supposed to explain, can be performed for these objectionable reasons. Since the proposed justification implies that any action is wrong when performed for these reasons, it renders the DDE incapable of accommodating the very intuitions about action which its proponents would have it explain