Positive and negative morality

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Similar in some ways to the idea of positive or negative freedom, we can think about moral concerns as being positive or negative. Also related to two of the The Three Most Important Problems.

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Two types of morality

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Negative morality is making a life satisfactory.

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Positive morality is making a satisfactory life better.

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In this construction, our obligation would be to negative morality. It is the kind of morality that we usually focus on in discussions of ethics and obligation. It is essentially a concern with Full security of human rights. I call it a “negative” morality because it is essentially a reduction of immorality. It certainly is not a bad type of morality!

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While negative morality holds most of our attention, I suggest here that there is a positive morality as well. Anything that does not impact a being’s basic rights but still makes a non-trivial contribution to their quality of life falls under this idea of positive morality. This probably includes aesthetic considerations and issues of personal and interpersonal fulfillment.

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The hidden spectrum underneath

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This duality is an attempt to describe two buckets of moral consideration. Under the hood, I believe Quality Adjusted Life Years (or some metric like that) is still the more precise way to measure moral value.

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These buckets serve to remind us of two things.

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  1. Useful heuristics that make intuitive sense can coexist well with a Utilitarian moral thinking.
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  1. The scope of our moral thinking can be wide, we don’t need to limit ourselves to only negative moral considerations.
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Useful heuristic

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Even for Utilitarians, this duality serves as a line in the sand. Some considerations will clearly fall on one side or the other: assuring humans are not tortured is an obvious negative morality concern, while assuring humans have access to affordable sushi is probably a positive morality concern.

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Some considerations are hard to categorize: is access to a job a human right? Perhaps only if a job is the only way to access other human rights (i.e. pay for food, shelter, etc). Is access to leisure time a human right? There are many questions of this sort.

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These questions are hard for all types of ethical thinking, and thus this heuristic is an option for ways to communicate about these more nebulous issues.

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The heuristic is essentially: Is this a human right? Everyone who is concerned with moral decision making must have some sort of response to that question.

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For pure “util-driven” Utilitarians, it’s possible to claim there are no metaphysical rights, only degrees of better or worse (which I am actually pretty convinced is a true idea), thus making this distinction meaningless. But they must still respond to a question of cost, and this duality really only emphasizes that all moral considerations can fall into two buckets based on higher cost (negative morality) or lower cost (positive morality).

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Widen our scope

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This duality also serves to widen the scope of what we consider morally relevant. We can add more to our considerations because we know that the bucket of positive morality is open-ended, and does not convolute the importance of the negative moral considerations.

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Util-driven thinking likely already has a wide scope as, in theory, all effects could impact life quality.

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Other notes:

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I don’t think I actually hold moral conceptions to a binary duality like this. Under the hood, moral considerations hold a value (and I consider that value to be determined by something like Friendly Utilitarianism).

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Hard to categorize

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This distinction does not try to draw a clear line, rather it serves to remind us that not all moral considerations are the same. Negative and positive morality are not isolated from each other. It’s possible that improving a positive moral consideration is worth the downside of making a negative moral consideration worse, as is aligned from standard utilitiarian thinking.

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Widen scope

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This duality also serves to widen the scope of what we consider morally relevant. We can add more to our consideration of what falls under morality when we don’t require all types of moral considerations to fight with each other on an equal playing field.

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