On the relative stringency of negative and positive moral duties

Abstract

It has frequently been argued that negative duties, duties to refrain from performing certain actions (in particular, harming others), prevail over positive duties, duties to perform certain actions (in particular, helping others). Major lines of libertarian thought rest on this view of the relative stringency of each type of duty (henceforth, "the priority principle"). One goal of this paper is to question the priority principle, at least when it is read as mirroring the k¡al rights recognized by libertarian institutions. Section 2 will show that the impact of a well-known counterexample to the priority principie invalidates it to a greater extent than has often been admitted. In Section 3 I will suggest, however, that libertarían institutions need not be undermined by the conclusions of the previous section, and that such institutions gain support from their being located within a reflective equilibrium in which firmly held moral beliefs and well-established nonmoral beliefs mesh together within a coherent whole.