Due Care

This chapter explores the imperfect duty of non-negligence or due care. It is a complex secondary duty that regulates the performance of primary duties. Its norms of attention and execution are responsive to a primary duty’s interpreted value. Due care often requires motivational capacities that track moral value across complex circumstances of action—a claim inconsistent with a dictum that duties cannot impose requirements that depend on motive. Middle Work 3 argues that the dictum depends on a rejectable view of motive, one modeled on a modular account of simple desires. The idea of a system motive is introduced as an affective organization that make an agent responsive to a region of value. This makes a moral motive an agential response to moral value and moral agency a motive-involved competence. We can then have a motive-involved duty without having a duty to have a motive.

The Moral Habitat

The Moral Habitat is a book in three parts that begins with an investigation of three understudied imperfect duties which together offer some important and challenging insights about moral requirements and moral agency: that our duties only make sense as a system; that actions can be morally wrong to do and yet not be impermissible; and that there are motive-dependent duties. In Part Two, these insights are used to launch a substantial reinterpretation of Kant’s ethics as a system of duties, juridical and ethical, perfect and imperfect, that can incorporate what we learn from imperfect duties and do much more. The system of duties provides the structure for what I call a moral habitat: a made environment, created by and for free and equal persons living together. It is a dynamic system, with duties from the juridical and ethical spheres shaping and being affected by each other, each level further interpreting the system’s core anti-subordination value initiated in Kant’s account of innate right. The structure of an imperfect duty is exhibited in a detailed account of the duty of beneficence, including its latitude of application and demandingness. Part Three takes up some implications and applications of the moral habitat idea. Its topics range from the adjustments to the system that would come with recognizing a human right to housing to meta-ethical issues about objectivity and our responsibility for moral change. The upshot is a transformative, holistic agent- and institution-centered, account of Kantian morality.

Incompleteness and Moral Change

This chapter argues that the objectivity and determinacy of moral requirement can be maintained even though the moral habitat system of duties is subject to progressive change and amendment. Like engineering or medicine, it has the structure of a practical science with fundamental laws and values and a deliberative pragmatics for absorbing new knowledge and taking on new tasks. There is no complete or ideal system of duties. A significant upshot of this is that individuals have an imperfect duty to be agents of moral change. They must attend to moral practices and give voice to faults they see. Responding explicitly to a region of concern can have due care priority over unilaterally making things better. It is part of the idea of the moral habitat project to expect moral change as an ongoing collective project of responsiveness to its defining set of moral values.

Tracking Value and Extending Duties

This chapter shows how both perfect and imperfect duties require both agents and institutions to take responsibility for tracking moral value across their respective contexts of right and duty. The casuistry that belongs to perfect duties is contrasted with the exercise of discretion essential to acting on an imperfect duty. A defense of juridical imperfect duties is offered. Citizens and officials of the state acting under the auspices of a juridical right or duty may need to exercise the kind of discretion that is the mark of an imperfect duty. Questions about moral change in the content and locus of duties are introduced.

Gratitude

The chapter explores the paradoxical feature of the imperfect duty of gratitude: in response to a good freely given with no expectation of return we incur a duty, imperfect but seriously wrong to violate. Rejecting a justice or debt repayment model of gratitude, the chapter argues that being the recipient of free giving in support of one’s agency is a threat to independence that gratitude is able to remove. It is further argued that the way we view the duty of gratitude is tied to an interpretation of the moral rationale for a system of ownership and property. Middle Work 1 explores the consequences of treating gratitude not as a free-standing duty but doing its work in a lattice of more fundamental interpreted moral ideas. An example of this structure is identified at the intersection of duties of gratitude and friendship.

Kant’s conception of enlightenment

By interpreting the basic concepts of Kant?s definition of enlightenment, as well as pointing out the importance of discussion for the development of understanding and explaining the role of state power in educating citizens, the author argues that enlightenment ought to be understood as an imperfect duty of every human being. This duty belongs to the duty of virtue according to which we are obligated, among other things, to advance our own perfection. In order to better understand the responsibility for one?s own minority and meaning of the independent use of one?s own understanding, she explains the cultivation of character as an educational phase in the moral development of an autonomous person. The last chapter responds to a critique of Kant?s theory and offers an interpretation of his ?motto of enlightenment.?