Civil Recourse as Mutual Accountability

Abstract

In The Second-Person Standpoint (SPS) and a number of papers since, I have attempted to work out a theory of moral obligations as involving mutual accountability between equals, where the latter, I argue, is irreducibly second personal, since it entails an equal authority we have to address claims and demands to one another and ourselves.1 As many writers have pointed out, moral obligations concern the part of morality that is modeled conceptually on legal, or as Sidgwick called them, “quasi-jural,” concepts of responsibility and authoritative demands and claims.2 What we are morally obligated to do is not just what morality recommends or what there is good, weighty, or perhaps even conclusive reason to do from the moral point of view. It is what morality requires. It is what is legitimately demanded of us as moral agents or persons, just as legal obligations concern what the law demands of citizens subject to it. Illegal and