Elizabeth Ashford

The Demandingness of Scanlon’s Contractualism*

Utilitarianism has long faced the objection that it is unreasonably demanding. One of the reasons why Kantian contractualism has been seen as an appealing alternative is that it seems to be able to avoid utilitarianism’s extreme demandingness, while retaining a fully impartial moral point of view. I will argue that contractualist moral obligations to help others when their basic interests are at stake are just as demanding as utilitarian obligations. My discussion will focus on Thomas Scanlon’s formulation of contractualism, since I take it to be the most fully developed and powerful version of contractualism as an account of individual moral obligations. There are two main contexts in which such obligations arise. The first context is that of emergency situations; two central features of emergencies are that persons’ basic interests are at stake, and an agent is in a position to give help. The term ‘emergency’ is also generally used to refer to short-term and rare episodes. The steady state of chronic malnutrition that kills millions each year does not count as an emer-

The Inadequacy of our Traditional Conception of the Duties Imposed by Human Rights

I argue that our traditional conception of the duties imposed by human rights is unable to acknowledge the nature of many contemporary human rights violations. The traditional conception is based on a broadly deontological view according to which human rights impose primarily negative and perfect duties, and these duties are held to be specific prohibitions on certain kinds of actions (duties not to kill, assault and so on). I argue that given this conception of the nature of the duties imposed by human rights, not only claims to aid, but in addition, claims against many of the most serious and prevalent contemporary active harms will not count as genuine human rights claims. These harms increasingly result from extremely complex causal chains involving the behaviour of a huge number of agents, few or none of whom can be singled out as responsible for a serious harm to any specific victim. Institutional structures can have just as central a role to play in specifying and allocating responsibility for fulfilling many of the negative duties imposed by human rights as the positive duties. These structures can therefore be equally important in the realisation of both kinds of rights. Before the necessary institutional reforms have taken place, both kinds of rights are equally genuine, and ground the imperative of justice to reform existing social institutions.