Negative Duties Research Articles

Two Methods for Evaluating Duty to Rescue Proposals

Under American law, a stranger generally bears no duty to rescue another, even another in a life-threatening situation, and even if the rescue could be accomplished with little or no inconvenience or risk. This contrasts with the rule in many European countries that people do bear a legal obligation to render assistance to others in imminent peril when doing so would not place the potential actor at risk.1 In his contribution to this symposium, Professor Kleinig examines the support for the American view. Many who defend the American rule argue that a sharp, categorical distinction separates harm-causing conduct that is properly sanctionable from failures to rescue. Failures to act, including failures to rescue, allegedly exhibit a difference in kind from actions that justify, indeed demand, different legal treatment. That difference is variously described: as the difference between causing harm and conferring a benefit; as that between negative duties and positive duties; as that between duties of a specific obligor to a specific obligee (perfect duties) and those that take no specific obligee (imperfect duties); or as that between obligations that do not intrude upon individual liberties and those that do. One or more of these distinctions

Some Reflections on the Difference between Positive and Negative Duties

Some Reflections on the Difference between Positive and Negative Duties

Negative and positive duties

Negative and positive duties

Business Ethics

Many current discussions of business ethics seem in the end to locate the ethical concern some distance from the central and essential activity of business. One way this is done is to assume that the content of business ethics is no more and no less than the prevailing moral code of the society as applied to business activities. Business persons and institutions, like all other citizens, are expected to refrain from murder, from fraud, and from polluting the environment. But we cannot limit business ethics to such matters. In fact, perhaps we ought not even call this business ethics for the same reasons that we do not say that parental ethics prohibits my brutalizing my children. That is not parental ethics but just ethics plain and simple. This constraint arises from what it means to be a decent human being, not from what it means to be a parent. Similarly, the prohibition upon murdering to eliminate a business competitor is not part of a business ethic, for it does not arise from what it means to be engaged in business, nor does it apply to one simply because one is engaged in business. It too arises from what it means to be a decent, moral human being. The second way of moving ethical issues to the edge of activities usually occurs under the rubric of business's social responsibilities. The most remote of the issues raised here involve the question of whether corporations should devote any of their profits to philanthropic, educational and other sorts of humanitarian undertakings. This is a controversial issue which will not be easily resolved, but even if we concluded that this was a social responsibility of business, it would again fail to be business ethics in any specific and distinctive sense. It would simply be the application to this corporate member of a general societal expectation that members of a society existing in extensive interdependence with and benefitting from that society ought, if able, to contribute some portion of their wealth to such worthy causes. It should in passing be noted that there are persuasive grounds for rejecting this form of social responsibility for business. Another class of social responsibilities urged upon business is somewhat closer to business activity as such since they can be fulfilled in the course of central activity of producing and marketing goods and services. These are the negative duties

Negative and Positive Duties: A Reply

Negative and Positive Duties: A Reply

Negative and Positive Duties

Negative and Positive Duties