‘I didn't know it was you’: The impersonal grounds of relational normativity

Abstract

A notable feature of our moral and legal practices is the recognition of privileges, powers, and entitlements belonging to a select group of individuals in virtue of their status as victims of wrongful conduct. A philosophical literature on relational normativity purports to account for this status in terms of such notions as interests, rights, and attitudes of disregard. This paper argues that such individualistic notions cannot account for prevailing and intuitive ways of demarcating the class of victims. The paper is focused on the wrongful infliction of harm, and centers on the mediating role played by impersonal “danger‐making properties” in the determination of the class of victims. The paper begins with an analysis of one of the most well‐ known discussions of negligently‐inflicted harm — from the most famous case of the American common law tradition, Palsgraf v. Long Island Railroad Co. — and the analysis is then extended to the morality of harm‐doing more broadly, negligent and intentional alike. The paper's chief targets are interest theories of rights — including contractualist theories of moral claim‐rights of the kind defended by R. Jay Wallace — and neo‐Strawsonian Quality of Will theories of “moral injury”.