Conversely, Hart is too quick to assimilate certain individual moral ideals
–
the examples he
gives are ‘the pursuit of heroic, romantic, aesthetic or scholarly ideals’ –
to the cardinalcharacteristics he takes to be exhibited by social morality. He argues that the analogy betweensuch individual ideals, insofar as they are moral in character, and social morality, is one of
form and function, rather than content. One supposed point of analogy is that: ‘They are
ranked as supremely important, so that their pursuit is felt as duty to which other interests ordesire
s are to be sacrificed’ (p.184). Here, I think, we run up against the limitations of Hart’s
analysis of importance, which lapses into spelling out the idea of anything having moralimportance in terms of its being a matter of duty or obligation. But this is clearly not so.Consider someone whose life is inspired by the ideal of promoting human rights. Humanrights, of course, involve counterpart duties. But the reasons generated by human rights,including the reasons we have to promote the fulfillment of counterpart duties, need not allthemselves be duties. It is a travesty of human rights morality, one encouraged by certainconsequentialist outlooks, to suppose that we have a duty to do whatever we can reasonablyforesee will promote the observance by others of human rights duties. So, for example, thelover of human rights may, at great risk to her own life, publicly expose and condemn therights-violating practices of an oppressive regime in the hope that this will help reduce thenumber of future violations. Yet she is not necessarily thereby acting in conformity with any
duty
: the reason she has to put her life at risk in this way does not exclude or outweigh her
reasons of self-interest to preserve her own life, nor does the failure to comply with thatreason render her an appropriate object of blame or self-blame, i.e. guilt.