Justification and Promises

As his opening statements point out that if we have any moral rights we have a natural right to be free. And we have this ‘natural’ right if we are capable of choice and this right is not created such as moral rights are. One thing that I found interesting is that if we have moral rights we have a natural right to be free, yet when we create moral rights one important feature he feels needs to be there is a moral justification for it because it will limit the rights of other people. It either requires a duty toward someone to act or a duty to restrain someone from acting. He then goes on to talk about how this moral justification needs to be of a certain kind to make it a right, such as, if one has a justification to act or if someone has no justification and is acting. It seems like a lot of this is based on judgment of individuals. Like when he talks about breaking a moral obligation in the next part of his essay.

Such as promises and how we have a moral obligation to the promisor to keep that promise, the trouble im having in this is why it is a “moral” obligation. It may be the wrong thing to do for some people to break a promise but he goes onto say that “reflection may show that it would be in the circumstances be wrong to keep this promise because of the suffering it might cause.”(86) How does one determine which promises one should keep? How can one accurately determine what the lesser of the two evils is? And which one will cause the least amount of suffering?