Moral philosophy is filled to the brim with talk of deontic principles: duties, responsibilities, obligations, requirements, imperatives. If you have a special deontic obligation, you are expected to act accordingly in order to see that you can fulfill this obligation. If you do, you are praised, and if you do not, you are condemned. But where do these deontic obligations come from?

My claim is that the only situation in which a second-order (explained later) moral agent (an individual capable of making rational decisions) has deontic responsibilities is when they voluntarily enter a mutual agreement based on reasonable terms and conditions. Those familiar with social contract theory will see the similarities.

For example, say I promise my friend I will help her with her math homework later this evening. She agrees and plans her schedule around the event. We are now committed to meeting up and working on math homework together. I have a special duty to show up prepared and ready to work on math homework, as does she.

But say the country I live in (without any realistic alternative) decides to go to war with another country, for a reason I find to be illegitimate. Do I have a responsibility to support my country and even fight and die for it? It doesn’t seem so. This is an instance of coercion - the ascription of special obligations without any prior consent.

Many consequentialists like to argue that we have some special responsibility to reduce suffering and promote happiness. I myself am a consequentialist of sorts (but actually more of an axiological welfarist), and I’ll agree that we have genuinely good reasons to consider the value of maximizing sentient welfare. What I will not concede is that we have a special deontic obligation to do so.

In other words, I claim that there is nothing wrong with maximizing sentient welfare, but neither is there anything (technically) wrong with not doing so. To be more precise: sentient welfare ought to be maximized, but not necessarily by us. I see no incoherence in stating that something ought to happen, even if we aren’t obligated to make it happen. Something can be a problem, but it doesn’t have to be our problem. We have no responsibility to clean things up - janitorial service is optional.

I believe a couple of piggy-backing reasons justify this view:

The Argument from Technicality (or the pointing-out of Affirmative Hypocrisy)

1.) Sentient existence is, in the words of Hannah Arendt, both mortal and “natal” - that is to say, sentients have both mortality and “natality” in the sense that they exist in virtue of a contingent event of creation (birth) and are destined to be annihilated (death).

2.) Birth is manipulatively asymmetrical: those affected cannot be asked for approval before being born. The very capability of giving consent is dependent upon an event that transpired without consent.

3.) Special deontic obligations are legitimate only when grounded in agreement.

4.) Sentient life is filled with eventual promises and agreements that inevitably lead to special deontic obligations.

5.) However, although those alive right now may consent to the terms and conditions of intra-wordly agreements, no sentient being had the opportunity to consent to the terms and conditions of having terms and conditions in the first place.

6.) Therefore, no sentient agent has any inherent special deontic obligations. All special deontic responsibilities are second-order and contingent.

Summed up: unless you are eternal, you cannot possibly have any special, intrinsic deontic responsibilities.


The Argument from Legitimate Rational Self-Preservation (or the Negation of Affirmative Aggressive-ness)

1.) Again referencing Arendt, sentient existence is mortal. We also have the (unfortunate) capability to experience suffering. And although it’s sometimes easy to simply talk about suffering in an abstract and impersonal manner, Arendt tells us that suffering is perhaps one of the most personal of all experiences. The upshot is that continual existence is a legitimate threat to the welfare of the sentient being - paradoxically, we can either choose to die right now, or choose to persist and risk dying anyway (in perhaps very painful and traumatic ways).

2.) The future, despite what we like to tell ourselves, is never completely known. There is always the possibility of unknown, unexpected contingencies arising.

3.) An inherent special deontic obligation ascribes a path of action for an agent that did not consent to the terms of conditions of the obligation - a path that may lead the agent into unknown terrain and has a possibility of severely damaging this person.

4.) No person can be expected to sacrifice their own life and ultimate well-being without any approval on their part. Alternatively, no person can be expected to lower their own well-being below that of those who they are assisting.

5.) Therefore, no agent can be legitimately expected to oblige to apparently-inherent special deontic responsibilities.

Take, for example, the drowning child thought experiment. Although at first glance it seems as though the man standing by the water has a moral obligation to get his shoes and pants wet and save the child, there are unknown contingencies at play. Perhaps there is a crocodile in the lake, and if the man enters the lake, he’ll get eaten alive by the beast. Now it seems ambiguous whether or not the man has any special obligation. Not saving the child because the man might ruin his shoes is a poor reason, but not saving the child because the man might himself die in agony does seem like a pretty fair and good reason. Thus, simply being in the right place at the right time doesn’t seem to be enough to entail special obligations. Since perfect, omniscient knowledge of all possible moves is impossible, a rational agent cannot be expected to obey apparently-inherent special deontic responsibilities.

To deny this is strikingly similar to the optimist demanding that all dissenting pessimists “suck it up”. Indeed, when one is confronted with the objection that you simply have to imagine how horrible the suffering of someone else is to realize there’s an obligation to assist, one simply has to imagine themselves experiencing identical experiences. If it’s happening to someone else, it can happen to you.

The failure to recognize a fundamental breach of consent in the creation of a life, paired with or left independently of the inherent risk of personal persistence, leads to the uncomfortable conclusion that life, or Being for that matter, is not adequate for morality. The paradox arises when we see that morality arises within life, but when taken to its radical conclusion, ends up condemning its own origins. This is, more or less, the kernel of the meta-ethics of Julio Cabrera in his A Critique of Affirmative Morality. Life, or perhaps even Being, produces ideals (possibilities) that are inevitably disappointed by the imperfect and degraded actuality.

Affirmative morality, for Cabrera (and henceforth myself as well), is that sort of system that is pseudo-legitimate: it appears to be justified, but is actually very shallow in its roots. The value of life (as a whole) is not questioned. The inevitable inconsistencies and contradictions are swept away as unimportant contingencies: accidents that apparently don’t represent life as a whole, like the awkward stepson at a family reunion. As such, affirmative morality is aggressive and hypocritical. The radical questioning brought up by people like Cabrera is seen as unimportant - the show must go on, for whatever reason.

A first-order moral agent does have special, intrinsic deontic responsibilities - but none of us qualify as first-order moral agents, and neither do we live in a world in which first-order morality is even possible. Second-order morality is all that can be fruitfully pursued, and because of this, intrinsic deontic responsibilities must be jettisoned.