GEORGIA LAW REVIEW - StephanKinsella.com

1184 GEORGIA LAW REWEW [Vol. 13:1171
and hence these rights, for such an account is just not plausible.43
Now the PGC is a causal principle. It is addressed to agents as
follows: "Act in accord with the generic rights of your recipients as
well as of yo~rself."~~ Recipients are those who stand opposite
agents, who are "affected by" or "recipients of" their actions. These
are very loose idioms, to be sure, which we will tighten up shortly.
But here we should note that in order for an agent to come under
the prescription of the PGC at all, there must be a recipient of his
action, a threshold condition the ordinary not-doing situation does
not satisfy. Consider: at time tl A is standing on the shore "doing
nothing"; at time ti B falls out of his boat; A could rescue B
"without comparable cost," but instead he continues "doing nothing."
If B is not a recipient of A's "act" at &', are we to suppose that
he becomes a recipient of that same act at t2, in virtue of his (B's)
act? (If so, then who is the causal agent here?) We could always
change the description of A's "same act," of course; but that would
beg a very important question. I submit, in short, that A's "agency"
here simply does not make B a recipient; thus absent a plausible
theory of not-doing causation, the PGC is powerless to impose positive
obligations between generally related individuals.
What then does the PGC entail? What actions does it prohibit,
permit, or require? The actions it prohibits or requires are obligations,
of course, correlative to which are rights; those it permits are
rights, correlative to which are obligations. Now the first thing to
be noticed is the point just brought out: the PGC does not require -
anyone to do anything. It is addressed to agents, but it does not
require anyone to be an agent who has recipients. An individual can
"do nothing" if he chooses, spending his life in idle contemplation.
Provided there are no recipients of this behavior, he is at perfect
liberty to perform it. And if there are recipients, the PGC requires
only that he act in accord with the generic rights of those recipients,
e . , that he not coerce or harm them. In sum, and stated most
generally, in a world of general relationships, (a) there are no obligations
toward others to act, (b) there are no obligations not to act
when doing so involves no recipient, and (c) when there is a recipient
there is an obligation not to coerce or harm him, i.e., to obtain
43 See, e.g., Epstein, A Theory of Strict Liability, 2 J. LEGAL STUD. 151, 160-66, 189-204
(1973).
'' Gewirth, supra note 6, at 1155. This too has changed; in earlier writings it went: "Apply
to your recipient the same generic features of action that you apply to yourself." Cf. Gewirth,
Moral Rationality, supra note 8, at 25.