Recent work by Ingmar Persson and Jason Hanna has posed an interesting new challenge for deontologists: How can they account for so-called cases of letting oneself do harm? In this article, I argue that cases of letting oneself do harm are structurally similar to real-world cases such as climate change, and that deontologists need an account of the moral status of these cases to provide moral guidance in real-world cases. I then explore different ways in which deontologists can solve this (...) challenge and argue that the most promising way to conceive of cases of letting oneself do harm is as nonstandard cases of allowing harm, supplemented with an additional argument for the moral relevance of one's own agency. The upshot is that cases of letting oneself do harm are both more theoretically challenging and practically important than has been acknowledged. (shrink)

Deontologists believe that it is wrong to violate a right even if this will prevent a greater number of violations of the same right. This leads to the paradox of deontology: If respecting everyone’s rights is equally important, why should we not minimize the number of rights violations? One possible answer is agent-based. This answer points out that you should not violate rights even if this will prevent someone else’s violations. In this paper, I defend a relational agent-based justification that (...) focuses on the relation in which the agent stands to her would-be victims. I argue that this justification can avoid two key objections levelled against agent-based justifications: It can explain why we are not permitted to minimize our own rights violations, and the justification avoids the charge of being excessively self-concerned. (shrink)

In the article, the scenario-moulding is evaluated through the linguistic and conceptual accessibility of the future and the moral challenges of doing and allowing harm to the future participants of the practical discourses rooted in the present-centered scenarios. The viability of the scenarios is suggested to be defined by the alienation from the present and past imaginative contexts, as well as by overcoming the projections of humanity exclusiveness through inversible forecasting with the shift from human power to vulnerability as the (...) key issue in scenario-making. The eccentric approach to the future makes it possible to review both intergenerational and intragenerational perspectives of the future through the chronological distance and yet-inexistent subjects’ expectations and needs simulation. Taking to account the impact of the past, present and future otherness implies the three-dimensional assessment model involving metaphorical evaluation of the past-rooted patterns as paradise lost, illusions of the accessible futures as paradise found, and refusal of the futurized present expectations for the yetunknown imaginative future contexts as paradise conceptually postponed. The approach can find its practical application in tailoring and evaluating migration solutions and scenarios. (shrink)