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A Diachronic Consistency Argument for Minimizing One’s Own Rights Violations

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Abstract

Deontologists are united in asserting that there are side-constraints on permissible action, prohibiting acts of murder, theft, infidelity, etc., even in cases where performing such acts would make things better overall from an impartial standpoint. These constraints are enshrined in the vocabulary of rights apply even when violating those constraints would lead to fewer constraint-violations overall: I am prohibited from killing an innocent even when doing so is the only way to prevent you from killing five. However, deontologists are divided over whether we have a duty to violate a smaller number of rights when this is necessary to prevent ourselves from later violating a larger number of rights that are at least as stringent. I argue that individuals do have such a duty, a duty which follows from widely accepted consistency constraints on choice.

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Notes

  1. Up to a point, of course, as the numbers may matter. Maybe they would say it is permissible to violate one right to prevent yourself from later violating twenty.

  2. If the reader is skeptical that parents like Sophie have special duties to save their children from harm if they can, suppose she has promised each of her children that she would save them.

  3. There are some who would contest this: partisans of Taurek (1977) views on the ethics of saving from harm might wish to adapt this view to argue that, regardless of how many equally stringent rights you stand to violate by not violating the one right, it is permissible to violate either the one or the arbitrarily many. I find this wildly implausible, but in fact even if we assume it’s only permissible and not required to violate the fewer rights in synchronic cases, the diachronic consistency conditions I am imposing here imply it is also permissible to violate the fewer rights in diachronic cases, and this would be enough to contradict time-relativism. So I set aside the Taurek-type view for the purposes of this article.

  4. Strictly speaking, Johnson denies that this makes minimization morally permissible, because we are in a case of moral dilemma. Nonetheless, she concedes that the balance of reasons favours minimization, and so this is what we ought to do. This concession is enough for my purposes, for it follows from this and Johnson’s views about diachronic cases that individuals ought to be diachronically inconsistent – and this is a problem.

  5. Strictly speaking, Hammerton only asserts that if we have to choose between violating fewer of a person’s rights now, or more of their rights later, then we ought to minimize the number of their rights which we violate overall. I take it though, that it’s harmless to assume that if our choice is between violating some of their rights now, and violating just as many of their rights later plus the rights of another person, the exception would still apply, since it makes no difference to the one person whose rights we violate either way, but the second person has a serious complaint against our choosing to violate their rights. But if the exception doesn’t apply, then no matter, for then despite A being Pareto-superior from a rights-based perspective to B + C, Hammerton would advise choosing B + C, and there is no need to belabour again the point that this is irrational.

  6. This is why, contra Scheffler (1994, ch. 4), I don’t believe there is even an appearance of paradox in time-neutral deontology.

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Acknowledgements

For their insightful comments on previous versions of this draft, I would like to thank Ralf Bader, Alex Voorhoeve, Campbell Brown, and the two anonymous reviewers at Ethical Theory and Moral Practice.

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Correspondence to Nicolas Côté.

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Côté, N. A Diachronic Consistency Argument for Minimizing One’s Own Rights Violations. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 24, 1109–1121 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-021-10253-w

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