Justice_ What's the Right Thing to Do_ - Michael Sandel [107]
Unlike natural duties, voluntary obligations are particular, not universal, and arise from consent. If I’ve agreed to paint your house (in exchange for a wage, say, or to repay a favor), I have an obligation to do so. But I don’t have an obligation to paint everyone’s house. On the liberal conception, we must respect the dignity of all persons, but beyond this, we owe only what we agree to owe. Liberal justice requires that we respect people’s rights (as defined by the neutral framework), not that we advance their good. Whether we must concern ourselves with the good of other people depends on whether, and with whom, we have agreed to do so.
One striking implication of this view is that “there is no political obligation, strictly speaking, for citizens generally.” Although those who run for office voluntarily incur a political obligation (that is, to serve their country if elected), the ordinary citizen does not. As Rawls writes, “it is not clear what is the requisite binding action or who has performed it.”44 So if the liberal account of obligation is right, the average citizen has no special obligations to his or her fellow citizens, beyond the universal, natural duty not to commit injustice.
From the standpoint of the narrative conception of the person, the liberal account of obligation is too thin. It fails to account for the special responsibilities we have to one another as fellow citizens. More than this, it fails to capture those loyalties and responsibilities whose moral force consists partly in the fact that living by them is inseparable from understanding ourselves as the particular persons we are—as members of this family or nation or people; as bearers of that history; as citizens of this republic. On the narrative account, these identities are not contingencies we should set aside when deliberating about morality and justice; they are part of who we are, and so rightly bear on our moral responsibilities.
So one way of deciding between the voluntarist and narrative conceptions of the person is to ask if you think there is a third category of obligations—call them obligations of solidarity, or membership—that can’t be explained in contractarian terms. Unlike natural duties, obligations of solidarity are particular, not universal; they involve moral responsibilities we owe, not to rational beings as such, but to those with whom we share a certain history. But unlike voluntary obligations, they do not depend on an act of consent. Their moral weight derives instead from the situated aspect of moral reflection, from a recognition that my life story is implicated in the stories of others.
THREE CATEGORIES OF MORAL RESPONSIBILITY
Natural duties: universal; don’t require consent
Voluntary obligations: particular; require consent
Obligations of solidarity: particular; don’t require consent
Solidarity and Belonging
Here are some possible examples of obligations of solidarity or membership. See if you think they carry moral weight, and if so, whether their moral force can be accounted for in contractarian terms.
Family obligations
The most elemental example is the special obligation of family members to one another. Suppose two children are drowning, and you have time to save only one. One child is your child, and the other is the child of a stranger. Would it be wrong to rescue your own child? Would it be better to flip a coin? Most people would say there’s nothing wrong with rescuing your own child, and would find it odd to think that fairness requires flipping a coin. Lying behind this reaction is the thought that parents have special responsibilities for the welfare of their children. Some argue that this responsibility arises from consent; by choosing to have children, parents