The distant moral agent

Abstract

Among the defining characteristics of moral cosmopolitanism are the convictions that personal relations, like membership in social or political organizations from local communities to nation-states are insignificant for moral agents in determining their scope of concern. The moral scope is unlimited and moral duties reach globally. Following up on observations made by Onora O’Neill and others, I argue that Peter Singer’s model of an expanding circle of moral concern needs a complementary tool to allocate duties. That tool can be found by supplementing the agent-centered perspective of the model with a regard for the social and institutional circles encompassing right holders. Instead of focusing on the duty holder, I suggest that the cosmopolitan’s “ultimate unit of moral concern” – here, the claim holder and the perspective from her or his position – is methodologically made the focus when investigating moral duties. In this article, Singer’s cosmopolitan model is kept, but turned around to serve as a rights-based approach for allocating duties. Methodologically, what needs to be examined is whether the scope of legitimate moral claims expands from the agent for the same reasons that the circle of moral concern expands from Singer’s agent. The reversed model is then used to discuss the ethical issue – raised most prominently perhaps by Iris Marion Young, David Miller and also Onora O’Neill – of how to identify agents that could reasonably be said to have duties towards troubled or needy people far away, whether that agent be oneself or others.