To Whom: The Reorganization of the Common Condition as the Ground of Directed Duty

A directed duty is owed to someone in particular. The leading contemporary accounts — justifiability to those affected, practical-reason constructivism, and irreducible-duty realism — all presuppose, in order to operate, a delimitation of addressees they do not themselves produce. This paper offers a positive route to the direction problem: the addressee of a duty is the one whose participation was sustained by the condition upon which the action bore. It argues, first, that dependence on the unproduced does not decrease as means increase; second, that the constitutive condition of a form of participation can be distinguished non-arbitrarily from what merely suits it, provided the form is described before the candidate condition is examined; third, that once description is complete in a case built to exclude harm, promise, office, rule and informational utility, a remainder persists which description does not dissolve. That remainder is not deduced into a duty: a reason is openly assumed — whoever reorganizes a condition in which others participate cannot treat it as an exclusively private matter. The ensuing adjudication claims not refutation of rivals but explanatory priority over the first moment of the normative demand. Two consequences follow: a floor defined by the persistence of the identity of goods, and assertive suspension of judgement where equally defensible descriptions diverge.

DIETRICH, Pablo. To Whom: The Reorganization of the Common Condition as the Ground of Directed Duty. Zenodo, tradução do autor, 2026. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.23818217.