Some ethical theories emphasize constraints—prohibitions against violating rights, using people as mere means, or harming innocents—while others emphasize promotion of good outcomes, virtues, or flourishing. Constraint-based theories restrict what we may do even to achieve good; promotion-based theories require maximizing value. This structural choice affects how to handle conflicts: a constraint prevents torturing innocents; a promotion framework might permit it to prevent greater harm.
Your prerequisite work on normative ethics introduced the landscape of ethical theories — consequentialism, deontology, virtue ethics, and others. The distinction between moral constraints and moral promotion cuts across these theories and identifies a fundamental structural choice every ethical framework must make: does morality tell you what you may not do, or what you must bring about?
A promotion framework says that morality is fundamentally about making the world better. You have an ongoing obligation to increase good outcomes — more welfare, more justice, more flourishing. Consequentialism is the clearest example: the right action is always the one that produces the best consequences. There are no actions that are prohibited *no matter what* on a pure promotion view; everything depends on what will produce the most good. If torturing one person prevents the torture of ten others, a strict promoter must say you should do it. The moral demand is open-ended: you are always obligated to do whatever maximizes value.
A constraint framework says that morality places limits on what you may do, regardless of outcomes. Some actions are prohibited — not because they usually lead to bad results, but because they violate a constraint that holds unconditionally or near-unconditionally. Agent-relative constraints are prohibitions on *you* taking certain actions, even when doing so would prevent more of the same bad thing from happening. The classic example: you may not push one person in front of a runaway trolley to save five, even though five deaths are worse than one. The constraint is against *you* killing the one person; it does not track net deaths. This structure is central to deontological ethics and to ordinary moral intuitions about rights.
The practical difference is sharpest in dilemmas involving numbers. Promotion views straightforwardly permit — and often require — violating individual welfare when the aggregate calculation favors it. Constraint views resist this: a right is a kind of fence around a person that cannot be crossed for aggregate benefit. Robert Nozick's phrase for why rights constrain rather than merely figure in a calculus is that they are side constraints — limits on action, not factors to be traded off. The moral landscape on a constraint view is not a surface to be maximized but a terrain full of barriers. This does not mean constraints can never be overridden — most deontologists allow that constraints can be thresholds beyond which catastrophic consequences override them. But the burden of justification is high and the override is described as a moral tragedy, not a clean calculation.
Understanding this distinction helps you map the internal debates within utilitarianism (act vs rule utilitarianism is partly a debate about whether rules can function as genuine constraints), interpret trolley problems (they are specifically designed to isolate the constraint structure by varying whether you are the agent of harm), and understand the debate about moral rights (whether rights are best understood as side constraints or as very weighty considerations that generally but not always override). The underlying question is one of moral architecture: is morality a goal-directed project of making things as good as possible, or is it a system of prohibitions and permissions that defines what kinds of agency are permissible, independent of what they produce?
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