Negative duties are different

Text by professor Timo Airaksinen

We also can understand PO in another way. Positive duties are negotiable, or sensitive to consequentialist arguments and conscientious objections. The field of positive duties is a field of freedom – we can get that much leeway. I may do what I want but then I must accept the ensuing punishment if I go too far. I can afford my punishment, or I do not. Suppose I can afford it, this is to say I can act as I like and then pay the price. 

Anything I do carries a price tag anyway. In this way, punishment is a price I must pay, and any reasonable person is willing to pay; free lunches do not exist. PO may lead us in this direction. The way out is by saying that one never can afford the penalty and thus it is not a price. Harsh penalties work like this, but the most important factor is the guilt, shame, and humiliation that any punishment brings about. 

Negative duties are different: to violate them always is morally wrong and as such unforgivable, or a crime against the good God, such as blasphemy. Positive duties are much more lenient, even too lenient, if you can afford their price.

Berkeley in PO realizes that his audience will insist on the basic human right of defending oneself against unnecessary and avoidable personal harm and violence, including harm to family, friends, and protégés: "Must we then submit our necks to the sword?" (PO 49). He tries his best to avoid the language of rights, like the right of self-defence, which may well be a wise choice. He is unwilling to complicate his argument by considering rights à la Grotius and Pufendorf, whom he mentions in PO 51. 

Hobbes says we have, in the condition of nature, the right to everything, and he means it; in civil society or commonwealth, we surrender our rights to the Sovereign, except one, that is, our right to live and defend our life.[i] However, this right is the key source of all the trouble and quarrel in the condition of nature. As Berkeley says, one may kill to defend his own life. (PO 32). Now, Hobbes says we may never surrender the right that is the most troublesome of them all. In other word, we keep the cause of trouble in the very situation where we hope to be free of trouble.

[i] Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651), Part I, Ch. 14, and Part II, Ch. 18.