Literature on testimonial injustice and ways that perpetrators might combat it have flourished since Miranda Fricker’s ground-breaking work on testimonial injustice. Less attention has been given, however, to the role of bystanders. In this paper, I examine the accountability that bystanders may have for their omissions to redress testimonial injustice. I argue that bystander accountability applies in cases where it is opportune for bystanders to intervene, and if they are also sufficiently equipped and able to redress the testimonial injustice. Moreover, (...) I recommend that we move beyond virtue responsibilism for ameliorative thinking about testimonial injustice. (shrink)

Journal of Social Philosophy, EarlyView.

International law holds that states are holistically responsible for their acts. Yet what does the ascription of responsibility to the state imply about the responsibility of its citizens? This article argues that most citizens in a representative democracy bear culpability in association with their state's wrongful acts. Most democratic citizens can be blamed for empowering representatives to act on their behalf, and then failing to adequately oversee and dissent from the specific wrongful decisions their representatives made. This gives culpable citizens (...) duties that go beyond compensation, especially duties to foster a reparative social ethos towards state victims. (shrink)

Global threats to academic freedom are multiplying not only in an era of authoritarian resurgence, but also – less overtly – in an era of increasingly managerial governance of higher‐education sectors in democratic nations, where protection of institutional revenue streams, and of institutional reputation, may take priority over protection of scholars' and students' academic freedoms. In such circumstances, justifications for rendering aid to at‐risk scholars and students have become obscured. This article argues that the Kantian concept of imperfect duty can (...) be adapted to theorizing collective, institutional obligations to aid those scholars and students, undertaken in light of academic freedom as a constitutive institutional value. (shrink)

Scholars who favor shareholder primacy usually claim either that managers should not fulfill corporate duties of beneficence or that, if they are required to fulfill them, they do so by going against their obligations to shareholders. Distinguishing between structurally different types of duties of beneficence and recognizing the full force of the normative demands imposed on managers reveal that this view needs to be qualified. Although it is correct to think that managers, when acting on behalf of shareholders, are not (...) required to fulfill wide duties of charity, they are nevertheless required to fulfill a variety of narrow duties of beneficence. What is more, the obligation to fulfill these duties arises precisely because they are acting on behalf of shareholders. As such, this article 1) refines our understanding of the duties of corporate beneficence and 2) helps to identify which duties of beneficence are imposed on managers when they are acting on behalf of shareholders. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:The distinction between what I call nonelective obligations and discretionary obligations, a distinction that focuses on one particular thread of the distinction between perfect and imperfect duties, helps us to identify the obligations that carry over from principals to agents. Clarity on this issue is necessary to identify the moral obligations within “shareholder primacy”, which conceives of managers as agents of shareholders. My main claim is that the principal-agent relation requires agents to fulfill nonelective obligations, but it does not always (...) require discharging discretionary obligations. I show that the requirement to fulfill nonelective obligations is more far-reaching than has been acknowledged by most defenders and critics of shareholder primacy. But I also show that managers are not bound by certain discretionary obligations like charity, showing that their moral obligations are more circumscribed than the obligations that apply to human beings in general. (shrink)

We have the duty to object to things that people say. If you report something that I take to be false, unwarranted, or harmful, I may be required to say as much. In this paper, I explore how to best understand the distinctively epistemic dimension of this duty. I begin by highlighting two central features of this duty that distinguish it from others, such as believing in accordance with the evidence or promise‐keeping. In particular, I argue that whether we are (...) obligated to object is directly influenced not only by what other relevant members of the conversational context or community do, but also by the social status of the agent in question. I then show that these features are shared by the duty to be charitable, and the similarities between these two duties point to a potentially deeper explanation: while promise‐keeping is regarded as a classic perfect duty, charity is an imperfect one. I then argue that the duty to object can be modeled on a particular conception of imperfect duties, one that takes the duty to belong to communities and other collectives, rather than to individuals. I conclude by showing that this framework provides us with reason for accepting that there are imperfect epistemic duties in general. (shrink)

I attempt first to disentangle three aspects of Kant’s distinction between perfect and imperfect duty. There is the central distinction between principles of duty contrary to that which is contradictory in conception/consistent in conception but contradictory in will. There is also a distinction between essential and non-essential duties: those which cannot, or occasionally can, be passed over consistent with the requirements of morality. Finally, there is a distinction between duties that exhibit a scalar aspect – degrees of goodness or virtue (...) – and duties that do not. My aim is to show how these distinct considerations can be reconciled as aspects of a single distinction, and I conclude that the remarkable complexity of Kant’s perfect/imperfect distinction is actually a strength, rather than a weakness. (shrink)

Concern regarding overly demanding duties has been a prominent feature of moral debate ever since the possibility was famously sounded out by Bernard Williams nearly fifty years ago. More recently, some theorists have attempted to resolve the issue by reconsidering its underlying structure, drawing attention to the possibility that the duties to respond to large-scale moral issues like global poverty, systemic racism, and climate change may be fundamentally collective duties rather than indi- vidual ones. On this view, the relationship between (...) potentially overly demanding individual duties and large-scale moral issues is mediated by the fact that the duties are, first and foremost, ours together rather than each of ours on our own. We believe this theoretical shift constitutes an important development for moral theory regarding large-scale moral problems, but in this paper we focus on two dis- tinct reasons to think that the interplay between collective duties and demanding- ness is more complicated than has typically been appreciated. First, we argue that in cases in which risks or burdens are indivisible, the move to collectivize duties fails to fulfill its promise to alleviate demandingness concerns, and moreover that those kinds of cases are far more widespread than they may initially appear to be. Sec- ond, we argue that if concerns over individual demandingness could block a putative obligation from becoming an actual moral duty, then, in some cases at least, con- cerns over collective demandingness could do so as well. These complications help elucidate the fact that while the move to collectivize duties can address demanding- ness concerns in a particular subset of cases, in others doing so may merely relo- cate—or even exacerbate—the problem. (shrink)