The Limits of Morality by Shelly Kagan

Context

The Limits of Morality, published by Clarendon Press in 1984, grew out of Shelly Kagan's doctoral work at Princeton under Thomas Nagel, and it appeared at the height of the consequentialist revival in analytic ethics. The book's target is not utilitarianism itself but the cluster of assumptions that constitute what Kagan calls "ordinary morality": the view that while we have duties to help others, those duties have limits — we are not required to sacrifice our own interests beyond a certain point, and we are permitted to give our own projects and relationships special weight. This "moderate" picture, defended by philosophers from W.D. Ross to Bernard Williams, had become the default position in normative ethics. Kagan's book is a sustained, rigorous assault on it, arguing that the standard arguments for limiting the demands of morality fail, and that consequentialism — or something very close to it — may be the truth about what we ought to do.

Core Arguments

Kagan's central argument proceeds in three stages. First, he defends the possibility of "extreme" moral views: views, like consequentialism, according to which our obligations extend to everything we can do, with no agent-centered permissions to prefer our own interests. He argues that the common objections to extreme views — that they are fanatical, alienating, or impossible to live by — do not refute them as accounts of what we ought to do. Second, he attacks the distinction between "negative duties" (duties not to harm) and "positive duties" (duties to help), arguing that the alleged moral asymmetry between killing and letting die, or between harming and failing to help, cannot be defended. Third, he attacks the idea that morality contains "options" — permissions to pursue our own projects even when doing so fails to maximize the good. He argues that no principled line can be drawn that limits our duty to promote the good without collapsing into consequentialism.

The book's deeper strategy is a demand for justification: if ordinary morality claims that our duty to help has limits, it owes us an account of where those limits come from. Kagan examines the candidate justifications — appeals to rights, to the agent's integrity, to the "distinction" between what we do and what we allow — and finds each wanting. The conclusion is that the burden of proof lies on the moderate: absent a successful defense, the extreme view stands as the default account of morality.

Key Concepts

The book's key concepts are the contrast between "ordinary morality" and "extreme morality"; the distinction between negative and positive duties, and the attack on its moral significance; the notion of agent-centered "options" (permissions not to maximize the good) and agent-centered "constraints" (prohibitions on certain acts even when they would maximize the good); and the "demandingness objection" to consequentialism — the claim that a morality which demands so much is, for that reason, false. Kagan distinguishes sharply between the question of what we ought to do (which he argues may well be extreme) and the question of how we should live or what we should blame (which may involve different considerations). This separation of "the moral" from "the practical" is one of the book's most influential moves, and it anticipates the later literature on "moral demandingness" and "personal prerogatives."

Legacy & Influence

The Limits of Morality is a landmark of contemporary ethics. It set the agenda for the "demandingness objection" debate, which has since become one of the largest sub-literatures in normative ethics: defenders of ordinary morality (Samuel Scheffler, Barbara Herman, and others) have had to answer Kagan's challenge, and consequentialists have used the book as the definitive statement of why the objection fails. The book is also a model of analytic method: its relentless dialectic, in which every assumption of the moderate view is interrogated, is widely taught as an example of how to do rigorous moral philosophy. Alongside Derek Parfit's Reasons and Persons (1984) and Peter Singer's applied work, it anchored the consequentialist revival of the 1980s, and it remains a reference point for anyone who asks whether morality is as demanding as the utilitarian tradition says it is.

Reading Guide

The Limits of Morality is a demanding book, written for advanced readers. Chapter 1 sets up the dialectic between ordinary and extreme morality; Chapters 2–4 attack the negative/positive duty distinction; Chapters 5–7 attack options; Chapter 8 concludes. Readers new to the debate should first read a general survey of consequentialism and the demandingness objection (the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entries are ideal), and should read Kagan's book alongside its principal opponents: Scheffler's The Rejection of Consequentialism (1982) and Bernard Williams's essays on integrity. The book rewards slow reading: its arguments are cumulative, and each chapter depends on the ones before.

Related Works

• The Rejection of Consequentialism by Samuel Scheffler (1982): the defense of options Kagan attacks.
• Reasons and Persons by Derek Parfit (1984): the companion consequentialist classic.
• Practical Ethics by Peter Singer (1979): the applied consequences of extreme morality.
• The book connects to consequentialism, utilitarianism, and meta-ethics, and it bears directly on the drowning child debate.