On Minding Your Own Business: Differentiating Accountability Relations Within the Moral Community (Essay‪)‬

1. Introduction This well-known passage from John Stuart Mill highlights the conceptual link between obligation and the legitimacy of sanctions. To be obliged to act in some way is to be liable to legitimate sanctions for not acting in that way. This idea is defended at length in Stephen Darwall's recent book, The Second-Person Standpoint. (2) Yet, despite quoting this passage from Mill prominently, (3) Darwall does not reflect on the distinctions Mill seems to draw here among types of sanctioners or the questions that those distinctions raise: Who has the standing to sanction a particular immoral act? What gives that party the right to punish? What makes an act of wrongdoing accountable to one's fellows although it is not illegal? What might make an act of wrongdoing accountable only to one's own conscience and not to one's fellows? And just who are one's fellows anyway? (4)