1. Doing Wrong and Wronging Someone

There is a difference between doing something that is morally wrong and wronging someone in particular. Texting while driving is wrong. Contributing to the climate disaster through overconsumption is wrong. Refusing to ever help people in need is wrong. But injuring a pedestrian because you were texting while driving, polluting a neighboring farmer’s field, or failing to perform an easy rescue of a drowning child constitutes a wrong against a particular individual (Thompson, Reference Thompson, Wallace, Pettit, Scheffler and Smith2004).

The concept of a wrong is, as Judith Thomson put it, a “two-hat concept”: a concept that “attaches two people,” so that in every case of wronging there are two parties—the one who wrongs, and the one who is wronged—the victim of the wrong done (Thomson, Reference Thomson1990, p. 62). The concept of a right against another person is also a two-hat concept, and it has been common to maintain that these 2 two-hat concepts are closely connected to one another: to wrong someone just is to violate a right that the victim has against the wrongdoer.Footnote ¹ Rights and wrongs always go hand in hand.

This long-standing view has recently been challenged by authors who argue that there are also wrongs that are not rights violations (Cornell, Reference Cornell2015, Reference Cornell2025; Martin, Reference Martin2021). Rights and wrongs come apart (Cornell, Reference Cornell2025).

In this article, I will suppose that these challengers of the long-standing view are correct. Their arguments raise a further question: what are wrongs, if not just rights violations? Here, I offer an account of what it is to wrong someone that accommodates wrongs that are, and wrongs that are not, violations of someone’s rights.

2. The Stakes

Before we proceed, let me explain what is at stake in accepting or rejecting the idea that wrongs and rights go hand in hand and in answering the question of what wrongs are, if not just rights violations.

First and most importantly, accepting or rejecting this idea makes a practical (moral) difference. A wrong is suffered by someone—the victim of the wrong—and victims of wrongs are standardly owed amends (remedies) for the wrongs they have suffered: compensation, apology, expressions of remorse, and the like, as is appropriate to the case.Footnote ² If wrongs and rights in fact come apart but our interpersonal and institutional practices for making amends embody the assumption that they go hand in hand, then some victims may be denied amends that they are entitled to (Cornell, Reference Cornell2015, 141–143).

Accepting or rejecting the idea also makes a difference in theory. Many writers who endorse the idea do so largely (or entirely) for terminological reasons, and some of them acknowledge that the choice to do so leaves out something of interest. For example, Judith Thomson writes:

Thomson’s task in the context of this passage was to investigate what rights are, so the choice to restrict our ordinary way of talking makes sense. Insofar as we want to investigate what wrongs are, it would be a mistake to limit our attention to rights-violation alone. That would leave out something significant to our inquiry: wrongs without rights, like the wrong that I commit against you when I think you killed Cock Robin, when in fact you did not.Footnote ³

More of what is at stake in theorizing wrongs without rights, in practice and in theory, will come to light by considering some of the ways in which the two have been said to come apart. In the following section, I will introduce some of the kinds of wrongs that plausibly occur without rights violation; an account of what it is to wrong someone should accommodate these cases and explain what these wrongs have in common with wrongs that are violations of the victim’s rights.

3. Wrongs and Rights Come Apart

A second long-standing idea about rights is that rights correlate with duties that are owed to the right holder or directed duties.Footnote ⁴ But—contrary to that long-standing idea—some directed duties do not correlate with rights. So one way in which wrongs and rights can come apart is as follows: a wrongdoer violates a duty that is directed but does not correlate with a right.

Duties of this kind often arise in the context of close personal relationships (Martin, Reference Martin2021). Friendship, partnership, and family relations give rise to legitimate expectations in the parties to each other’s care, emotional investment, attention, and support. When we fail to act in ways that our loved ones can legitimately expect us to act, we sometimes wrong them.Footnote ⁵

Imagine, for example, that a close friend of yours has experienced a difficult breakup. She is now in need of emotional support from someone who knows and understands her, and whose guidance she can trust. You are well-positioned and able to provide such support to your friend. But you choose not to do so, for no good reason. Maybe you think that the lost relationship is not worth crying over, or maybe you just want to do something that is more fun.

We would ordinarily say that you have wronged your friend in this case by failing to support her and by ignoring her needs. We owe our friends these kinds of things, and we wrong them when we fail to live up to what our friendship requires of us. Of course, close personal relationships sometimes give rise to duties that do correlate with rights: children have certain rights against their caregivers, spouses have certain rights against one another, and so on. But not all duties that arise in the context of such relationships are matters of right. We would not ordinarily say that your friend has a right to your giving her your attention and advice, or that she has a right to your emotional support.

Duties of gratitude have a similar structure: gratitude is something that we owe to a particular other—the benefactor—but gratitude is not owed as a matter of right.Footnote ⁶ And ingratitude is not merely wrong, but a wrong against the benefactor to whom one owes one’s gratitude (Manela, Reference Manela and Timmons2015).

We might wonder why the language of rights seems inappropriate to describe the sense in which gratitude is owed and the sense in which we owe care, attention, and emotional investment to our loved ones. One plausible idea has to do with the role that rights have in regulating the conduct of third parties. If Sandra is about to do something that would violate Susan’s rights—say, steal Susan’s car—then third parties who are in a position to protect Susan against that rights violation (by means that are permissible, proportionate, and so on) have reason to do so. Susan’s right against Sandra can justify interfering with Sandra’s actions in ways that would otherwise be impermissible (Hart, Reference Hart1955). In some sense, our rights against others are the business of the moral community at large.

By contrast, duties of gratitude and duties that arise from our close personal relationships are typically not the business of unrelated third parties (Martin, Reference Martin2021). A stranger who overhears you talking about how much you do not want to listen to your friend after their breakup would be overstepping their boundaries if they intervened by, say, urging you to do so. Citing the fact that you owe it to her as a friend would not justify meddling in what is not their business.

4. Wrongs and Directed Duties Come Apart

Based on what I have said so far, we might think that to wrong someone just is to violate a directed duty. That idea is plausible, but it is complicated by cases where wrongs appear to come apart from both rights and directed duties. In one kind of case discussed at length by Nicolas Cornell (Reference Cornell2015, Reference Cornell2025) a wrong is suffered by a third party whose rights are not violated, and who has no directed duty against the wrongdoer.

Suppose a drunk driver tragically causes a severe injury to a small child. The child’s parents, it seems clear, are wronged. The driver violates the child’s right, but it is not obvious that the driver violates any right of the parents. So the parents suffer a wrong without a violation of their rights.

It is also not obvious that the driver violates any directed duty that he owes to the parents in particular. He does, of course, violate his duty not to drive while drunk. But that duty is not owed to any particular person: the driver would have violated that duty even if no one was harmed as a result of his drunk driving. So the parents suffer a wrong that is not a violation of their rights and is also not a violation of a directed duty that the driver owes to them.

Now, intuitions about the case (and its variants) may (and do) differ.Footnote ⁷ But when understood as I have described it here, the case illustrates a central difference between wrongs and rights (and their correlative duties). As Cornell puts it,

Whereas rights describe a kind of relationship that can be invoked to constrain the actions of another “ex ante.” Rights are what we can enforce, claim from, and assert against one another.

Another case that is likely to elicit diverging responses, but provides an even starker illustration of essentially the same point, is Bernard Williams’s unlucky lorry driver who—without any wrongdoing and without being neglectful or reckless—causes severe injury to a small child (Williams, Reference Williams1981).Footnote ⁸

The lorry driver does not violate a right or a duty owed to the child or the parents. That is to say, there is no relationship that could be invoked ex ante to constrain his actions, or to show that the decision he made was unjustified. But, as Williams tells us, it would be appropriate for him to (agent-)regret over that decision and the outcome of his actions (ibid. 27). And an appropriate expression of that regret would be for the driver to “act in some way which he hopes will constitute or at least symbolise some kind of recompense or restitution” (ibid. 28). Failure to feel any regret and refusal to express it in appropriate ways would be an added insult against the injured child. So the case involves an ex post relationship that makes moral repair at the very least fitting, if not required. It involves a wrong without rights, and without directed duty.

Is there any reason to think that the lorry driver does not wrong the child? We might think that since the driver’s decision to drive was justified ex ante, he did nothing wrong. And on certain views of moral obligation, wronging a particular other always entails that what the wrongdoer did was wrong, period. Stephen Darwall writes:

Since the lorry driver does nothing wrong period, this view of obligation entails that he also does not wrong the child who is injured.

But this way of thinking about the relation between directed (bipolar) duties and moral obligation period does not sit well with some of the less controversial cases of wrongs without rights. Recall the friend who needs your emotional support. Suppose that instead of helping her, you spend your day leisurely at the beach with your partner. If doing this is not only a wrong against your friend but wrong period, then at least some third parties should be in a position to rebuke you for choosing to prioritize leisure time with your partner. At least some third parties should be able to urge you to do otherwise and blame you for not helping the friend. At least some third parties should have, as Darwall calls it, “representative authority” to hold you accountable on behalf of the moral community (Darwall, Reference Darwall2013, Reference Darwall2006). But whether you provide emotional support to your friend or not is not the business of the moral community: it is between you and her.

The possibility of wrongs without rights, then, puts pressure on the idea that something that wrongs another is also always wrong, period. And since the case of the lorry driver does involve an ex post relationship that makes moral repair fitting, I will assume in what follows that the driver does wrong the child who is injured. The child is a victim of the lorry driver’s misfortune—a victim of something the driver could not foresee when making his decision to drive, of course, but a victim nonetheless.Footnote ⁹

5. What it is to Wrong Someone

The various cases encountered so far all involve wrongs against particular others. To understand what it is to wrong someone, we should ask what these cases have in common. Very simply put, I think what the cases have in common is that they involve a victim—someone who stands to be wronged by another’s behavior.Footnote ¹⁰ In this section, I will propose an account of the conditions in virtue of which someone can stand to be wronged by another’s behavior. In a nutshell, there are two such conditions: a duty (or duties) in the wrongdoer to right the wrong against the victim, and the victim’s prerogative to determine when the wrong against them has been righted. Let us consider each element in turn.

Consider again the thought that “wrongs, at their core, describe a kind of relationship that exists ex post and makes fitting a kind of moral repair” (Cornell, Reference Cornell2025, p. 214). The fact that wrongs call for a response from the wrongdoer seems essential to what they are. The response that wrongs call for is moral repair: familiar, formal, or informal reparative actions and reactions like apology, compensation, confession, feelings and expressions of remorse, explanations, and the like.

Reparative responses are standardly owed to the victim who has suffered a wrong. But there are exceptions: for example, an apology for a wrong against one person can also be due to that person’s family or to their community (Radzik, Reference Radzik2004). So standing to be wronged is not simply a matter of being owed some form of moral repair. But the fact that moral repair is owed at all, and that reparative actions are owed to particular others on account of what the wrongdoer has done to the victim, seems essential to what it is to wrong someone. That is to say, the standing to be wronged consists in part of a relation between the wrongdoer and the victim that entitles the victim to moral repair from the wrongdoer. Let us call this element the wrongdoer’s accountability for amends.

The second element is a relation that distinguishes the victim of a wrong from third parties, including third parties to whom reparative actions are owed. What distinguishes the victim from such third parties is a prerogative that the victim has to make a determination as to which amends are owed on account of the wrong they have suffered, and which amends would constitute adequate repair for the wrong they have suffered (within limits—I’ll come to this in a moment). Call this element the victim’s prerogative over amends.

These two elements are present in each of the cases of wronging that we have encountered thus far. In each, the wrongdoer is accountable for righting the wrong that the victim has suffered; by apology, compensation, expressions of remorse, and so on, as is appropriate in the circumstances. And in each case, the victim of the wrong done plays a distinctive role in determining what kind of moral repair would be appropriate in the circumstances.

6. Remaining Questions

To recap, I have proposed that what the various cases of wrongs against a particular other have in common is just this: that they all involve someone who stands to be wronged by someone else’s behavior. The standing to be wronged consists of two elements: the wrongdoer’s accountability for amends, and the victim’s prerogative over those amends. What it is to wrong someone is to behave in a way that makes one accountable to a particular other for amending the wrong, where that particular other has a prerogative to determine which amends are owed, and which amends would be adequate.

The next questions we should ask are, first, what explains why someone stands to be wronged by another’s behavior, and second, who can be wronged.

Beyond addressing the objection that the account excludes some parties who clearly can be wronged, I have not attempted to answer these questions here. But my answer to the question of what it is to wrong someone does offer a starting point for thinking about who can be wronged, and it may lead us to discover that certain cases of apparent wrongdoing are in fact wrongs against particular others. Recall the contrast I made at the outset between wronging your neighboring farmer by polluting their field, and doing wrong by contributing to the climate catastrophe through overconsumption. This description of the two cases suggests that only the former is a wrong against a particular other. But for all that has been said so far, there may be someone, or some group of individuals, who do stand to be wronged in the latter case also.

One initial answer to the first question—why does a particular person (or group) stand to be wronged—might be that there is no single answer. What has been said so far tells us that someone can stand to be wronged by another’s doing thus-and-so in virtue of the fact that she has a right that the other not do thus-and-so; or in virtue of the fact that she is owed a duty by the other that they not do thus-and-so; or simply in virtue of the fact that the other’s doing thus-and-so calls for moral repair. It remains to be seen whether these scenarios have something in common beyond the fact that they each involve standing to be wronged.