Francesco Orsi
Strangers and Special Obligations
Ordinarily we think that some of our relationships ground moral obligations towards other people, so-called special obligations. My aim is to understand and critically evaluate a view that grounds all our obligations on special relationships (relationship-based view: RBV). Basically, I have an obligation to A if and only if I am in a special relationship to A. Facts intrinsic to A (e.g., her well-being) will obligate only on the condition that such relationship holds. Such a view can be found in passages by the British intuitionists Prichard, Ross, Broad. I sketch its theoretical attractions: it provides a good unification of apparently unrelated duties, and it gives an explanation of the seeming relational nature of obligation. But RBV needs to face a serious challenge. Suppose a complete stranger needs our help. No special relationship seems involved here, thus there is no obligation on our part. I consider and reject various attempts at coming up with a supposedly special relationship providing the required ground: 1) our common humanity, 2) her being a possible beneficiary of my action, 3) my being near her. I argue that these facts either fail to be relationships at all, or fail to be grounds, but they play different normative roles: they enable the obligation, or intensify it. If so, RBV cannot provide grounds for obligations to strangers. I also suggest we adopt the idea that only intrinsically valuable relationships generate special obligations. This will exclude relations like physical proximity from generating special obligations. Finally, I try to make sense of RBV’s attractions. In particular, one can explain the relational nature of obligation without always supposing there to be a relational ground of the obligation.