The Price of Duty

Abstract State officials regularly impose harm on the citizens they are supposed to serve, some of it wrongful. Who should bear the burden of paying compensation for these wrongs? Should it be the agents themselves, or should the burden be spread across the citizenry via taxation? This essay develops a theory of limited official immunity , according to which citizens have a moral duty to assume the costs of certain official wrongs. I argue that limited official immunity is an upshot of a general principle of compensatory morality, according to which those who are morally required to participate in some project are for that reason required to share the compensatory costs of that project. Understand official immunity as an upshot of this principle helps us to identify, not just the grounds, but also some of the limits of official immunity: it helps us to sort between the kinds of official wrongs for which the burdens should fall on the individual agents themselves and the kinds of wrongs for which those burdens should be assumed by the citizenry.