The Challenge: Identifying Individual Duties for Collective Harm

Author(s):  
Luis Cabrera

While there have been numerous recent analyses of the legitimacy of suprastate governance institutions such as the World Trade Organization (WTO) or United Nations Security Council, few accounts have considered individual duties in relation to those institutions, broadly analogous to suprastate political obligation. Identified in this chapter are three categories of duties that should be salient to a range of institutions. These include duties to support their reform, to resist specific institutional features or practices, and to reject the continued operation of some institutions and support the creation of alternate ones. These duties would correspond roughly to how well an institution would appear to fit into a global institutional scheme that actually would fulfill cosmopolitan aims for rights promotion and protections and related global moral goods. An implication is that the current global system itself is a candidate for rejection, given its inherent tendencies toward the gross underfulfillment of individual rights.


Author(s):  
Lisa Herzog

This chapter sets out the normative foundations on which the book is based. It starts by defending the case for the ‘pervasiveness’ of morality: no social sphere is ‘beyond’ morality, even if there is some degree of institutional ‘division of labour’. Next, it states and explains the moral norms this study is based on: the norm to respect all individuals as moral equals, and norms about the avoidance of individual harm, and about avoiding contributing to collective harm. These norms lie within an ‘overlapping consensus’ of different moral theories and worldviews. In pluralist societies, we should focus on such a consensus—even if it may sometimes be hard to delineate—when reflecting on the moral dimensions of organizations.


Author(s):  
Anne Schwenkenbecher

Abstract This chapter explores the question of whether or not individual agents are under a moral obligation to reduce their ‘antimicrobial footprint’. An agent’s antimicrobial footprint measures the extent to which her actions are causally linked to the use of antibiotics. As such, it is not necessarily a measure of her contribution to antimicrobial resistance. Talking about people’s antimicrobial footprint in a way we talk about our carbon footprint may be helpful for drawing attention to the global effects of individual behaviour and for highlighting that our choices can collectively make a real difference. But can we be morally obligated to make a contribution to resolving a collective action problem when our individual contributions by themselves make no discernible difference? I will focus on two lines of argument in favour of such obligations: whether a failure to reduce one’s antimicrobial footprint is unfair and whether it constitutes wrongdoing because it is harmful. I conclude by suggesting that the argument from collective harm is ultimately more successful.


Author(s):  
Murray Rachel

This section is about Articles 27–29 of the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights dealing with Individual Duties.


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