Subjective Obligation

This chapter offers an account of subjective obligation. Different accounts of rightness and wrongness meet different versions of a ‘responsibility constraint’. Subjective rightness meets a very strong version of the responsibility constraint, and correlates closely with praise- and blameworthiness. It also seems that subjective obligation must be accessible and action guiding. This chapter argues for some modifications to these starting points. First, subjective obligation should be action guiding, but not in the rich sense that people often intend when they say that subjective obligation should be action guiding. Second, it should be anchored in the true Morality, and so is accessible only to those in our moral community. Finally, we cannot formulate subjective obligation in terms of the agent’s beliefs about what ought to be done. Rather, we need to formulate subjective obligation in terms of trying: an agent is fulfilling her subjective obligation when she is trying to do well by Morality.