Abstract
Liberalist thinking argues that moral agents have a right (or duty) to pursue an ordinary life. It also insists that moral agent can be bystanders. A bystander is involved with morally bad states of affairs in the sense that they are bound by moral duty, but for a non-blameworthy reason. A common view on the morality of commercial life argues that commercial agents cannot and ought not to assume the status of bystander, when confronted with child labor, pollution, or other overwhelmingly big morally bad states of affairs (oMBS). According to the common view, the agent will get overdemanded. In this paper, the overdemandingness charge is interpreted as a criticism of the liberalist position. According to this charge, bystander status must be given up in the market because otherwise the right (or duty) to pursue a personal life is crushed. In this paper, we demonstrate that the overdemandingness charge fails. It does not make sense if bystander status is grounded in the duty of beneficence. It would make sense if the status were grounded in the duty of rescue but that duty does not apply in relation to oMBS. The condition of ‘subjective urgency’ is not fulfilled. Hence, liberalist thinking can withstand the charge of overdemandingness and commercial agents cannot assume a right never to acknowledge bystander status (on account of the overdemandingness argument).
Highlights
Moral agents are often confronted with ‘morally bad states of affairs’ (MBS)
When a moral agent is a bystander to a MBS, what is the basis for the actions they may have to perform on account of duty: rescue or beneficence? In this paper, it is argued that a proper understanding of the ground, helps avoiding the charge that commercial agents cannot be considered bystanders because that would create an overdemandingness problem
We investigated the argument that bystander duties must be excluded because they imply overdemandingness
Summary
Moral agents are often confronted with ‘morally bad states of affairs’ (MBS). A MBS can formally be defined as a situation that is objectionable, reprehensible, or even intolerable from the moral point of view. We must be able to make a meaningful distinction between ‘wrong’ and ‘(merely) bad’ (Fried 1978) This presupposition only makes sense when it is assumed that moral agents must have concern for their own life plan; either as a right (Miller 2004; Schmidtz 2000) or as an (indirect) duty as well as a right (Kant 1797/1996). If I am confronted with a MBS while taking the personal perspective, I only have to consider my relation to its coming about as ‘wrong’ when my personal involvement in this process makes me blameworthy; it is ‘merely bad’ when I am not so involved. A defining aspect of this minimum market morality (MMM) is the exclusion of all the duties of the bystander
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