This may confirm our confidence in the correlative view of the obligation to know that philosophical reflection on political authority has focused from the earliest days on the obligation to obey. The passive obligation to obey is certainly not all we owe to the law (Parekh 1993, 243; Green 2003, 543-47), but many considered it the minimum requirement of the law. This creates a mystery. As Wolff puts it: “If the individual retains his autonomy by reserving the final decision on cooperation in all cases, he thus denies the authority of the state; On the other hand, he submits to the state and accepts his claim to authority, then. it loses its autonomy” (Wolff 1970, 9). Wolff solves the dilemma in favor of autonomy and defends anarchism on this basis. But beyond that, I think as doctors and ethicists, we still have a lot of work to do to look in more detail at how we should balance legal structures in our work. Do we even have a moral obligation to obey the law? If so, how big is a moral obligation? How bad does a law have to be before we can justly recommend disobedience? It is interesting to note that this presentation assumes that one can say what the authority requires, whether or not the requirement is justified on the merits. Richard Friedman argues that “if there is no way of knowing whether a statement is authoritative other than by evaluating its content to see whether it merits acceptance as such, then the distinction between an authoritative statement and a rational advice or belief will have collapsed” (Friedman 1973, 132). Such an idea is developed by Raz in one of the main arguments in favor of the “source thesis”, the idea that an adequate test of the existence and content of law must be based solely on social facts and not on moral arguments. (See the entry on legal positivism.) The subjects of authority “can benefit from its decisions only if they can verify their existence and content in a way that does not depend on raising the same issues that the authority must regulate” (Raz 1994, 219). If the law aims to settle disputes on moral issues, then the law must be identifiable without resolving the same disputes.
The law is thus exhausted by its sources (such as legislative decrees, court decisions and customs, as well as local conventions of interpretation). This type of reasoning has been generalized (cf. Shapiro 1998), but also criticized. It is unclear what kind of limitation the idea that it should not include “the same subjects” represents – perhaps if morality is a necessary condition, there could be moral tests of authority that leave the relevant dependent reasons intact (Coleman 2001, 126-7). And while law does serve as a blueprint for controlling and evaluating behavior, it can also have other functions, such as educating its subjects about right and wrong, and this may serve poorly the attitude that rules must in part be followed because they are rules (Walukhov 1994). My arguments will find particular application in the international context. Sometimes a multinational operates in a lower-middle-income country where law enforcement agencies have resource constraints that prevent them from effectively enforcing all socially important laws. I argue that the moral obligation to obey socially important laws is not limited to the laws of one`s own country. One may also have a moral obligation to obey socially important laws when doing business as a visitor.
It is plausible that you have a moral obligation to contribute to some extent to the reduction of extreme poverty. This commitment, in charity, may require you to give money at a time when donations are accepted and you can contribute at low cost to yourself. Every legal system contains mandatory laws, but there is no decisive linguistic marker that determines what they are. It is not necessary to use the term “obligation” or its term almost synonymous with “duty”. Mood is rarely found imperative. The Canadian Penal Code requires not condoning genocide: “Anyone who advocates or promotes genocide is guilty of a criminal offence and may be punished by imprisonment for a term not exceeding five years.” The English law on the sale of goods states: “If the seller sells goods in a transaction, there is an implied condition that the goods delivered under the contract are of merchantable quality.” The fact that these laws create obligations stems from the way the terms “offence” and “implied condition” operate in their respective jurisdictions, not from the language in which they are expressed. Moral principles may be prescribed by religious doctrine or derived by rational philosophical reasoning. In some cases, principles such as justice and benevolence simply flow from an intuitive moral sense. Whatever their source, however, these principles are at the heart of ethics.
So (C) means that you did something morally wrong by going to war. But the war looks like a counterexample to (C). Although you are doing something that you have good reason to believe will greatly reduce your chances of fulfilling at least one moral obligation, the war seems to show that such an act is not morally reprehensible. (C) is therefore incorrect. (B) captures our intuitions. This means that you are doing something morally wrong in the car* by taking your car, which, compared to the bus, greatly reduces the chances of fulfilling your moral obligation. Also, this does not mean that in Car or in the case used to illustrate (A) you are doing anything morally wrong. These random actions are not the ones that significantly reduce the chances of fulfilling your moral obligation compared to other actions available to you.
Footnote 6 While there is no ethical doubt that we have a moral obligation to keep our promises, many people in business and politics do not accept this moral duty. Instead, they believe it`s right, maybe even wise, to do whatever you can do. As a result, many lawyers and executives view their contractual and other obligations solely from the perspective of economic impact. This leads to believe that in business, you have the right to break a promise as long as you are willing to pay for the damage caused. The moral obligation to keep its word is treated as irrelevant sentimentality. Second, it captures our intuition that when agents perform actions that they have good reason to believe are very likely to significantly reduce their chances of performing their duty, they are doing something morally reprehensible (Auto*). Job rejection is something that you have good reason to believe will significantly reduce your chances of meeting your commitment to support people living in extreme poverty relative to employment, because you will be giving up money to provide that assistance. But you don`t seem to have done anything wrong by staying unemployed. If (D) means you have, then it seems wrong. The existence of this moral obligation would explain why there is a general obligation to take reasonable steps to ensure that we fulfill our moral obligations: because it is wrong to do things that, without important competing moral considerations, will greatly reduce our chances of fulfilling a moral obligation in the future. This revised form of the second objection is therefore rejected.
Since the rigor with which the term “rights” is used does not clarify questions concerning the obligations of moral actors towards beings who are not moral actors, more needs to be said. The first contrast relates to whether or by what means (e.g. only by confiscation) the right of the person may be withdrawn; the second, whether the law belongs to everyone; third, whether the claim to the right is to receive something or simply to be left alone; and the fourth with the question of whether it can ever be just (morally acceptable) to override the claims of this right. The philosopher Annette Baier points out that people of every human group with every social organization make claims and give moral justifications. Therefore, in every society there are claims with moral justification. Since rights are legitimate claims, there is an equivalent to the concept of right in all societies, even in those that do not have a ready-made term for legitimate claims.
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