Personal and omnipersonal duties:

Abstract

Moral duties are distinguished by whether they assign unique aims to individual agents or establish common aims for all agents. While personal duties suggest that different individuals should pursue distinct ends, omnipersonal duties provide shared moral objectives. These duties also possess significant temporal dimensions: time-relative principles focus on the moral quality of immediate acts, while temporally neutral principles evaluate the consequences of an agent’s actions over their entire lifespan. In scenarios involving the prevention of significant harm, temporally neutral and omnipersonal principles offer more robust moral guidance than time-relative or personal approaches. Specifically, an agent should act to ensure that the total number of individuals harmed by the combined actions of all relevant actors is minimized. This omnipersonal framework demonstrates that the duty to save lives often aligns with the duty to minimize killings, as saving a life can reduce the total harm attributable to a collective or a sequence of actions over time. Consequently, many perceived conflicts between common-sense morality and consequentialist aims are resolved when duties are viewed through a temporally neutral and omnipersonal lens. This perspective remains applicable even when harms result from the combined effects of independent acts or past behaviors, such as those contributing to long-term environmental damage. – AI-generated abstract.