Prospective Duties and the Demands of Beneficence

Abstract

I argue that (1) an agent can be appropriately blamed for failing to assist someone in need, even if her failure to assist is not wrong, and that (2) an agent can be morally required to assist even if assisting is overly costly for her—more costly than what the relevant moral baseline is ordinarily taken to allow. Whether this is the case depends on whether the agent has previously failed (or not) to discharge her “prospective duties.” Once these duties are taken into consideration, even apparently moderate accounts of beneficence appear to be not very moderate after all.

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