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I. The Doctrine of Doing and Allowing
N.B. If you’ve studied the DDA and the DDE already as part of your work with me for the Ethics paper (103), we may skip this and the next topic and begin with topic III.
Common-sense moral thinking endorses agent-relative constraints, which stand in the way of doing harm even when the cost of refraining from harm is that more harm is done overall (e.g. by others). In this way, it makes doing harm to others harder to justify than merely allowing harm to come to them. This is the Doctrine of Doing and Allowing (DDA). But it is not clear that the distinction can bear such weight or even that it can be applied in any coherent way, and sceptics—particularly consequentialists—argue that the DDA should be rejected. This week, we analyse and investigate the plausibility of the DDA.
Question: Can a distinction in moral significance be defended between harms I do and harms I merely fail to prevent?
Priority reading (Hide)
- James Rachels, ‘Active and Passive Euthanasia’, The New England Journal of Medicine vol. 292 (1975) (3pp)
In the context of an argument against the view that ‘passive euthanasia’ is morally superior to ‘active euthanasia’, Rachels argues that the distinction between killing and letting die is not morally significant in itself, and that our inclination to judge otherwise is the result of distorting factors.
- Shelly Kagan, The Limits of Morality (Oxford, 1991), chapter 3 (45pp)
Kagan argues that every formulation of the distinction between doing and allowing will face decisively counterintuitive implications, and furthermore that the distinction cannot be given a compelling rationale.
- Jeff McMahan, ‘Killing, Letting Die, and Withdrawing Aid’, Ethics vol. 103, no. 2 (1993) (30pp)
Through examination of intuitive reactions to a series of hypothetical cases, McMahan defends the view that a carefully formulated version of the distinction between killing and letting die is morally significant. He goes on to suggest that the commonsense morality of harm has a structure that is too complex to be captured in one or two simple principles, ending with a note of scepticism about whether a satisfying rationale can be found for it.
- Kai Draper, ‘Rights and the Doctrine of Doing and Allowing’, Philosophy & Public Affairs vol. 33, no. 3 (2005) (28pp)
Draper argues that an appeal to rights does a better job of explaining the intuitive verdicts that are adduced in favour of the DDA than the DDA itself does.
- Fiona Woollard, Doing and Allowing Harm (Oxford, 2015), chapter 6 (21 pp)
The first five chapters in Woollard’s book are devoted to arriving at the formulation of the DDA that best accounts for our intuitions about various examples. Chapter 6 offers a rationale for the DDA so formulated, appealing to the idea of imposition.
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Further reading (Hide)
- Peter Unger, Living High and Letting Die: our illusion of innocence (Oxford, 1996), chapter 4
Unger defends “Liberationist” moral thinking, which, guided by “Basic Moral Values”, rejects the sorts of non-consequentialist distinctions (including that between doing and allowing) accepted by what he calls “Preservationist” moral thinking. He argues that acceptance of these constraints reflects distorting factors, as is made evident, he thinks, by the way our intuitions are affected by the presentation of some examples that he details.
- Warren Quinn, ‘Actions, Intentions, and Consequences: The Doctrine of Doing and Allowing’, The Philosophical Review vol. 98, no. 3 (1989)
- Jonathan Bennett, The Act Itself (Oxford, 1998)
- Victor Tadros, The Ends of Harm (Oxford, 2011), pp. 149–155
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II. The Doctrine of Double Effect
A second, more controversial doctrine, the Doctrine of Double Effect (DDE), also attracts hostility from consequentialists, but there are plenty of non-consequentialists who are sceptical about it too. The DDE distinguishes between harms we intend and harms we foresee but don’t intend, placing a greater obstacle to permissibility in the case of the former. Critics argue that it has absurd implications; defenders argue that it is necessary to explain powerful intuitive verdicts about well-known ‘Trolley Cases’, among other examples.
Question: Are intentions relevant to permissibility in the way that defenders of the DDE suppose? Why?
Priority reading (Hide)
- Warren Quinn, ‘Actions, Intentions, and Consequences: The Doctrine of Double Effect’, Philosophy & Public Affairs vol. 18, no. 4 (1989) (18pp)
In this influential defence of the DDE, Quinn analyses pairs of examples that are adduced in its favour and argues for a particular formulation of the DDE’s requirements on that basis. He goes on to defend the DDE as one expression of “a Kantian ideal of human community and interaction.”
- Judith Jarvis Thomson, ‘Self-Defense’, Philosophy & Public Affairs vol. 20, no. 4 (1991), section V (pp. 292–6) (4pp)
Thomson expresses scepticism about the DDE, offering a famous objection based on the seeming absurdity of distinguishing between pilots to carry out a strategic bombing mission by reference to the intentions they would have in doing so.
- Jonathan Bennett, The Act Itself (Oxford, 1998), chapter 11 (32pp)
Bennett argues against the DDE, introducing what has come to be known as the ‘closeness’ problem for it and offering careful analysis and rebuttal of various ways of formulating and defending it.
- William J. Fitzpatrick, ‘Acts, intentions, and moral permissibility: in defence of the doctrine of double effect’, Analysis vol. 63, no. 4 (2003) (4pp)
Fitzpatrick defends the DDE against an interpretation that takes it to suggest that permissibility may depend simply on the token intention of the agent, so that another agent with different intention but performing exactly the same physical actions could permissibly do what the first could not. Fitzpatrick’s suggestion is that the DDE focuses on the possibility of licit intention, not the fact of it.
- Dana K. Nelkin and Samuel C. Rickless, ‘Three Cheers for Double Effect’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research vol. 89, no. 1 (2014)
(32pp)Nelkin and Rickless defend the DDE against Thomson, Scanlon, and other sceptics, proposing a revision and justification of the doctrine that refine Quinn’s defence.
- Ketan H. Ramakrishnan, ‘Treating People as Tools’, Philosophy & Public Affairs vol. 44, no. 2 (2016) (33pp)
Ramakrishnan argues against intention-focused explanations of the distinction in permissibility that is intuitively supposed by many to obtain in examples typically used to illustrate the DDE. He appeals instead to a principle he calls “Utility”, according to which a person’s rights are particularly resistant to infringement on the basis of her usefulness to others.
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Further reading (Hide)
- Philippa Foot, ‘The Problem of Abortion and the Doctrine of Double Effect’, in her Virtues and Vices (Blackwell, 1978)
In this seminal article, Foot introduces the ‘Doctrine of Double Effect’ (DDE) and explains why it has seemed suspicious to many, before offering a series of examples that might be thought to justify it—most famously, the ‘trolley case’. She argues, however, that intuitions about these examples are better explained by appeal to a distinction between negative and positive duties instead.
- Judith Jarvis Thomson, ‘The Trolley Problem’, The Yale Law Journal vol. 94, no. 6 (1985)
Thomson examines a variety of different ways in which we might hope to account for the apparent moral difference between two ‘trolley cases’ that she discusses: ‘Bystander’ and ‘Transplant’. Making a number of interesting distinctions along the way, she ends up defending a view that distinguishes between deflecting and creating threats and between infringing rights as a means and infringing them as mere side-effects.
- Frances Kamm, Intricate Ethics (Oxford, 2007), chapters 4–5
- T.M. Scanlon, Moral Dimensions: Permissibility, Meaning, Blame (Harvard, 2008), chapters 1–3
Scanlon argues that the appeal of the DDE is illusory, derived from a failure to distinguish between two significantly different ways of employing moral principles and a failure to take into account the necessity of exceptions to them. He goes on to offer an account of the moral significance of intention and to argue against the Means Principle, a principle—closely related to the DDE—according to which it is harder to justify treating people as causal means than otherwise.
- Jeff McMahan, ‘Intention, Permissibility, Terrorism, and War’, Philosophical Perspectives vol. 23, no. 1 (2009)
- Howard Nye, ‘Objective Double Effect and the Avoidance of Narcissism’, in Timmons (ed.), Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics vol. 3 (2013)
- Victor Tadros, ‘Wrongful Intentions without Closeness’, Philosophy & Public Affairs vol. 43, no. 1 (2015)
Tadros attempts to defend the view that intentions can make a difference to permissibility from the closeness problem, building on Quinn’s account and defence of the DDE.
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III. Killing in self-defence
Many people believe that it is permissible to use lethal force, if necessary, in self-defence against culpable aggressors who themselves pose a lethal threat. But there are surely limits to the permissibility of killing in self-defence. No one thinks that you may kill someone who is about to pull your hair accidentally, for instance. This week we look at attempts to answer questions about the ground and limits of permissions to kill in self-defence.
Question: Do we have a right to use lethal force in self-defence? Are there any limits to it?
Priority reading (Hide)
- Helen Frowe, The Ethics of War and Peace: an Introduction (Routledge, 2011), chapter 1 (21pp)
Frowe provides a clear introduction to contemporary debates about self-defence, helpfully setting out in particular the leading accounts of the basis of what is known as liability (= having a Hohfeldian no-claim) to defensive harm.
- Judith Jarvis Thomson, ‘Self-Defense’, Philosophy & Public Affairs vol. 20, no. 4 (1991) (27pp)
Thomson presents a number of examples in which an agent’s life is threatened and tries to identify plausible principles underlying intuitive responses in each case to the question whether lethal self-defensive action is permissible for the threatened agent. Her headline conclusions are that the permissibility of lethal self-defence does not depend upon the threatening party’s being in the wrong—or even upon the threat’s being the product of the threatening party’s agency.
- Jeff McMahan, ‘The basis of moral liability to defensive killing’, Philosophical Issues vol. 15, no. 1 (2005) (19pp)
After setting out two competing accounts of the basis of the liability to defensive harm, the ‘rights account’ (e.g. Thomson’s) and the ‘culpability account’, McMahan defends his favoured ‘responsibility account’, according to which responsibility for an unjust lethal threat (even if it’s not culpable) renders an agent liable. McMahan refines the account so as to make clear various accompanying conditions, including the condition that responsibility for a treat implies its foreseeability and the condition that “justification defeats liability”.
- Michael Otsuka, ‘Killing the Innocent in Self-Defense’, Philosophy & Public Affairs vol. 23, no. 1 (1994) (20pp)
Otsuka argues from the claim that it is impermissible to kill ‘innocent bystanders’ in self-defence to the conclusion that it is also impermissible to kill ‘innocent threats’ and ‘innocent aggressors’. The underlying explanation that he suggests is that none of them are morally responsible for the threat that is posed to the agent.
- Jonathan Quong, ‘Killing in Self-Defense’, Ethics vol. 119, no. 3 (2009) (30pp)
Quong defends the view that it is permissible to kill innocent threats and aggressors, but not (most) bystanders, in self-defence. Arguing against Thomson, Otsuka, and McMahan, he founds the permissibility of lethal self-defence against the innocent in the agent-relative value one's life has for one, at the same time holding that this value does not give rise to an unrestricted permission, being constrained by a version of what is known as the ‘Means Principle’.
- Uwe Steinhoff, ‘Justifying Defense Against Non-Responsible Threats and Justified Aggressors’, Philosophia vol. 44, no. 1 (2016) (19pp)
Steinhoff defends a liability account of defensive harm (such as Thomson’s), according to which defensive harm is made permissible by the absence of claims against it, and argues in particular against Quong’s justified-infringement view, according to which defensive harm is in some cases a matter of permissible infringement of others’ claims rather than a matter of their having no such claims.
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Further reading (Hide)
- Helen Frowe, ‘Equating innocent threats and bystanders’, Journal of Applied Philosophy vol. 25, no. 4 (2008)
Frowe argues against Otsuka's arguments from the wrongness of self-defensive killings of bystanders to the wrongness of killing innocent threats, arguing that one of them disregards a morally significant difference between lethally using a person as a means and killing her as a means, and that the other depends upon disputable intuitions about a particular example. She goes on to argue for revisions in standard views about innocent threats and ‘Innocent Shields’.
- Jeff McMahan, ‘Self-Defense and the Problem of the Innocent Attacker’, Ethics vol. 104, no. 2 (1994)
- Shlomit Wallerstein, ‘Justifying Self-Defense: A Theory of Forced Consequences’, Virginia Law Review vol. 91, no. 4 (2005)
- David Rodin, War and Self-Defense (Oxford University Press, 2002), Part I
- Seth Lazar, ‘Responsibility, Risk, and Killing in Self-Defense’, Ethics vol. 119, no. 4 (2009)
- Jonathan Quong, ‘Liability to Defensive Harm’, Philosophy & Public Affairs vol. 40, no. 1 (2012)
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IV. Killing in war
Much international law relating to the conduct of war assumes ‘the moral equality of combatants’ (MEC)—the view that soldiers on all sides of the conflict are equally permitted to engage in lethal violence and equally liable to be killed. But this is a relatively recent development; prior to the seventeenth century, philosophers and jurists made principles of jus in bello (right in the conduct of war) dependent on principles of jus ad bellum (right in declaring war). In the last couple of decades, MEC has come under renewed attack, most notably by Jeff McMahan. This week we consider arguments for and against MEC.
Question: Are combatants in war equally permitted to use lethal violence against their enemies even if their causes are not equally just?
Priority reading (Hide)
- Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars: a moral argument with historical illustrations (Basic Books, 1977), chapter 3 (17pp)
Walzer argues eloquently that “when soldiers fight freely ... their war is not a crime; when they fight without freedom, their war is not their crime”&8212;even though their cause may be unjust. He argues this on the basis of the idea that war is a social creation, structured by a set of conventions.
- Helen Frowe, The Ethics of War and Peace: an Introduction (Routledge, 2011), chapter 6 (24pp)
Frowe offers a concise overview of the debate about the moral equality of combatants, setting out standard defences of the so-called ‘orthodox view’ (including Walzer’s) and McMahan’s revisionist arguments, and reviewing some of the major lines of response to McMahan.
- Jeff McMahan, ‘On the Moral Equality of Combatants’, The Journal of Political Philosophy vol. 14, no. 4 (2006) (17pp)
After setting out a case against MEC based on the fact that nothing analogous holds in everyday cases of unjust aggression, McMahan reviews and rejects various reasons for thinking that war and everyday life are disanalogous: that the combatants have consented or would consent, that war is like gladiatorial combat, that combatants in war must be obedient, and that it is asking too much of combatants to say that they should fight only for just causes.
- Thomas Hurka, ‘Liability and just cause’, Ethics & International Affairs vol. 21, no. 2 (2007) (20pp)
Hurka explains the distinction between independent and conditional just causes for war, and explores the implications for such causes of McMahan’s account of just causes for war (see further reading below). He then offers a sophisticated consent-based defence of MEC against the objections that McMahan raises.
- David Estlund, ‘On Following Orders in an Unjust War’, The Journal of Political Philosophy vol. 15, no. 2 (2007) (22pp)
Estlund offers a more detailed discussion of the analogy between following orders to fight in an unjust war and jailing an innocent person in accordance with the verdict of a court, defending the claim that under certain conditions, combatants can permissibly fight for an unjust cause, contrary to McMahan’s view.
- Cécile Fabre, ‘Guns, Food, and Liability to Attack in War’, Ethics vol. 120, no. 1 (2009) (28pp)
Fabre explains and then rejects a widely accepted distinction in liability to attack in war between civilians who provide military resources to combatants and civilians who provide non-military resources to them. She argues that what matters is whether a given civilian is sufficiently causally and morally responsible for wrongful enemy deaths, but then suggests that epistemic difficulties and individual causal insignificance give immunity to even those civilians whose activities directly contribute to wrongful deaths.
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Further reading (Hide)
- Jeff McMahan, ‘Just Cause for War’, Ethics & International Affairs vol. 19, no. 3 (2005)
- F. M. Kamm, ‘Failures of Just War Theory: Terror, Harm, and Justice’, Ethics vol. 114, no. 4 (2004)
- Lionel K. McPherson, ‘Is Terrorism Distinctively Wrong?’, Ethics vol. 117, no. 3 (2007)
- Uwe Steinhoff, ‘Jeff McMahan on the Moral Inequality of Combatants’, The Journal of Political Philosophy vol. 16, no. 2 (2008)
- Seth Lazar, ‘The Responsibility Dilemma for Killing in War: A Review Essay’, Philosophy & Public Affairs vol. 38, no. 2 (2010)
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V. Torture
There is a widely held view that there exists an absolute moral prohibition on torture—i.e. that torture is not permissible under any circumstances. But it is difficult to explain what it is about torture that might justify such a stringent prohibition, even in the face of very powerful considerations that might otherwise seem to favour it, as in the well-known ‘ticking time-bomb’ example. This week, we try to identify the distinctive wrong-making features of torture and ascertain whether they justify an absolute prohibition.
Question: What’s wrong with torture? Is it ever permissible?
Priority reading (Hide)
- Seumas Miller, ‘Torture’, in Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (44pp)
- Henry Shue, ‘Torture’, Philosophy & Public Affairs vol. 7, no. 2 (1978) (20pp)
- Frances Kamm, Ethics for Enemies: Terror, Torture, and War (Oxford University Press, 2001), chapter 1 (71pp)
- David Sussman, ‘What’s Wrong with Torture?’, Philosophy & Public Affairs vol. 33, no. 1 (2004) (33pp)
- Jeff McMahan, ‘Torture in Principle and in Practice’, Public Affairs Quarterly vol. 22, no. 2 (2008) (18pp)
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Further reading (Hide)
- Vittorio Bufacchi and Jean Maria Arrigo, ‘Torture, Terrorism and the State: a Refutation of the Ticking-Bomb Argument’, Journal of Applied Philosophy vol. 23, no. 3 (2006)
- Uwe Steinhoff, ‘Torture – The Case for Dirty Harry and against Alan Dershowitz’, Journal of Applied Philosophy vol. 23, no. 3 (2006)
- Stephen Kershnar, ‘For Interrogational Torture’, International Journal of Applied Philosophy vol. 19, no. 2 (2005)
- Jeremy Waldron, ‘Torture and Positive Law: Jurisprudence for the White House’, Columbia Law Review vol. 105, no. 6 (2005)
- Yuval Ginbar, Why Not Torture Terrorists? Moral, Practical, and Legal Aspects of the ‘Ticking Time Bomb’ Justification for Torture (Oxford University Press, 2008)
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VI. The moral demands of affluence
Few who think about them much are untroubled by the extremes of poverty and inequality that characterise the contemporary world. Given the scale of the problem, the odd donation to charity seems woefully inadequate. At the same time, anything that wouldn't be woefully inadequate seems almost impossibly demanding. So what are we to do? This week, we consider a famous challenge due to Peter Singer together with some developments of it and some responses.
Question: What do affluent members of wealthy states owe to those whose lives are threatened by severe poverty?
Priority reading (Hide)
- Peter Singer, ‘Famine, Affluence, and Morality’, Philosophy & Public Affairs vol. 1, no. 3 (1972) (14pp)
In this enormously influential article, Singer suggests that what we do wrong in failing to make extensive sacrifices in order to provide aid to the world’s poorest and most needy individuals in just the way that we would do wrong in walking on by a child whom we could easily rescue from drowning in a shallow pond.
- Peter Unger, Living High and Letting Die: our illusion of innocence (Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 3–13, 24–61 (50pp)
Unger develops Singer's argument, patiently setting out various proposed disanalogies between Shallow Pond-type cases and our situation vis-à-vis the world's poorest and arguing that none of them makes for a moral difference.
- Garrett Cullity, ‘Asking Too Much’, The Monist vol. 86, no. 3 (2003) (17pp)
Cullity considers just how demanding the conclusion that the remoteness of the needy makes no difference to the strength of our duties of assistance is. He argues that it is less demanding than it might seem, because the duty itself must be grounded in morally legitimate interests, and the best specification of these will make it permissible not to respond to the interests of the needy by impoverishing oneself.
- Frances Kamm, Intricate Ethics (Oxford, 2007), chapter 11 (22pp)
In this ingenious discussion, Kamm attempts to isolate what it is about the distance of the distant needy that makes it seem plausible to distinguish morally between global poverty and the situation of the child in Shallow Pond, before proposing a rationale for treating the two cases differently that appeals to ideas related to Samuel Scheffler’s ‘agent-relative prerogative’.
- Neera K. Badhwar, ‘International Aid: When Giving Becomes a Vice’, Social Philosophy and Policy vol. 23, no. 1 (2006) (32pp)
Badhwar argues that the Singer-Unger view neglects and devalues a variety of goods, denies the permissibility of most forms of meaningful life, forces a kind of doublethink, and ignores certain economic principles that predict disastrous consequences if the view’s recommendations are followed. In the course of making these arguments, she claims among other things that our intuitions about Shallow Pond shift if it is modified so as to make it more precisely analogous to the case of global poverty, and that Singer and Unger’s argument would anyway prove too much if it were successful.
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Further reading (Hide)
- Elizabeth Ashford, ‘The Duties Imposed by the Human Right
to Basic Necessities’, in Pogge (ed.), Freedom from Poverty
as a Human Right (UNESCO/Oxford University Press, 2007)
- Thomas Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights, Second Edition (Polity, 2008), chapters 4–5, 7–8
- Liam B. Murphy, ‘The Demands of Beneficence’, Philosophy & Public Affairs vol. 22, no. 4 (1993)
- Bernard W. Miller, ‘Beneficence, Duty, and Distance’, Philosophy & Public Affairs vol. 32, no. 4(2004)
- Richard Arneson, ‘What Do We Owe to Distant Needy Strangers?’, in Schaler (ed.), Peter Singer Under Fire: The Moral Iconoclast Faces His Critics (Carus Publishing, 2009)
- Garrett Cullity, The Moral Demands of Affluence (Oxford University Press, 2004)
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VII. Effective altruism
Suppose that you are convinced that you ought to do something to alleviate extreme poverty. What considerations should guide you as you think about what in particular to do? Effective altruists argue that considerations of cost-effectiveness are of overriding moral importance, and that this forces us to rethink charitable giving and the structure of ethics and obligation more generally. This week, we consider some defences and criticisms of effective altruism, attempting to ascertain to what degree cost-effectiveness really is a moral requirement and whether effective altruists are really asking too much.
Question: Is it wrong to be inefficient in one's altruism?
Priority reading (Hide)
- Peter Singer, The Most Good You Can Do (Yale University Press, 2015), chapter 1 (10pp)
Singer gives a brief overview of effective altruism, clarifying its core claims and answering a few frequently asked questions about it.
- William MacAskill, Doing Good Better (Guardian Books/Faber & Faber, 2015), chapters 2–3, 7 (65pp)
In chapters 3 and 4, MacAskill explains and defends the effective altruist’s emphasis on determining the cost-effectiveness of charitable activities and disregarding emotional connections to particular causes. In chapter 7, he details some of the practical implications of adopting the effective altruist approach to assessing charities, and lists seven charities that do particularly well by the metrics he advocates.
- Iason Gabriel, ‘Effective Altruism and its Critics’, Journal of Applied Philosophy (2016) (17pp)
Gabriel describes the key ideas of effective altruism and then discusses some of the most common objections to it, arguing for various relatively minor amendments to effective altruism as a way to respond to these objections.
- Theron Pummer, ‘Whether and Where to Give’, Philosophy & Public Affairs vol. 44, no. 1 (2016) (19pp)
Pummer defends effective altruism as a moral requirement conditional upon agents’ making the non-obligatory choice to do good at all, so that only agents who choose to act altruistically beyond the call of duty incur the further obligation to maximise the effectiveness of their altruism. In this way, he tries to show that effective altruism can have moral force even for those who reject a more comprehensive consequentialist view.
- Jeff McMahan, ‘Doing Good and Doing the Best’, in Paul Woodruff (ed.), Philanthropy and Philosophy: Putting Theory into Practice (Oxford University Press, 2017) (7pp)
McMahan considers a Pummer-style argument for the effective altruist claim that one is morally required to maximise the effectiveness of charitable donations that it is permissible not to make. He points out some potentially morally significant disanalogies between the case of charitable donation and the examples that are used to argue for the effective altruist view, and reflects on some of the implications of these for effective altruists.
- Elizabeth Ashford, ‘Severe Poverty as an Unjust Emergency’, in Paul Woodruff (ed.), Philanthropy and Philosophy: Putting Theory into Practice (Oxford University Press, 2017) (50pp)
Ashford argues that duties of effective altruism should be framed as ‘back-up duties’ to help those who have been unjustly deprived of their economic entitlements, alongside ‘primary duties’ of justice to reform the structures that engender severe poverty. Back-up duties are urgent and stringent, but nevertheless their fulfilment is inadequate as compared with that of the primary duties. Thus Ashford hopes to show that the views of effective altruists and of some of their most trenchant critics can be reconciled.
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Further reading (Hide)
- Joseph Horton, ‘The All or Nothing Problem’, The Journal of Philosophy (2017)
- William MacAskill, ‘Replaceability, Career Choice, and Making a Difference’, Ethical Theory and Moral Practice vol. 17, no. 2(2014)
- Garrett Cullity, The Moral Demands of Affluence (Oxford University Press, 2004), chapter 4
- Frances M. Kamm, ‘Deciding Whom to Help, Health-Adjusted Life Years and Disabilities’, in Anand, Peter, and Sen (eds.), Public Health, Ethics, and Equity (Oxford University Press, 2004)
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VIII. The non-identity problem
One of the most interesting problems in contemporary moral philosophy is the ‘non-identity problem’. The problem is that acts that bring about circumstances in which people suffer harms that intuitively wrong them may also be acts that bring those people into existence. Thus, it’s hard to see how the acts can in fact wrong them, unless their lives are so bad as not to be worth living. This week, we get to grips with and consider attempts to solve the non-identity problem.
Question: Can I wrong someone by acting in a way that causes them to exist?
Priority reading (Hide)
- Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford University Press, 1984), chapter 16 (30pp)
- Elizabeth Harman, ‘Can We Harm and Benefit in Creating?’, Philosophical Perspectives vol. 18, no. 1 (2004) (25pp)
Harman attempts to solve the non-identity problem by appeal to the idea that bringing a person into existence is a benefit, but one that is present whichever way we act, in many of the relevant examples, and which is less morally significant than harm, together with an account of harm that does not depend upon temporal or counterfactual comparisons. Harman writes with exemplary clarity—her style is a good model for your essays.
- Rahul Kumar, ‘Who Can Be Wronged?’, Philosophy & Public Affairs vol. 31, no. 2 (2003) (20pp)
Kumar argues for a contractualist approach to the non-identity problem, which he thinks avoids the counter-intuitive implications that the non-identity problem is standardly supposed to have.
- Melinda A. Roberts, ‘The Non-Identity Fallacy: Harm, Probability and Another Look at Parfit's Depletion Example’, Utilitas vol. 19, no. 3 (2007) (45pp)
Roberts argues that key presentations of the non-identity problem must rely upon an ‘expectational’ account of harm, and that this account of harm does not support the claim that there is a problem. As she puts it, “these apparently ‘different peoplersquo; cases can, and should, be understood as ‘same people’ cases”.
- Jeff McMahan, ‘Causing People to Exist and Saving People’s Lives’, The Journal of Ethics vol. 17, no. 1 (2013) (30pp)
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Further reading (Hide)
- Seana Valentine Shiffrin, ‘Wrongful Life, Procreative Responsibility, and the Significance of Harm’, Legal Theory vol. 5, no. 2 (1999)
- Caspar Hare, ‘Voices from Another World: Must We Respect the Interests of People Who Do Not, and Will Never, Exist?’, Ethics vol. 117, no. 3 (2007)
- J. David Velleman, ‘Persons in Prospect’, Philosophy & Public Affairs vol. 36, no. 3 (2008)
- James Woodward, ‘The Non-Identity Problem’, Ethics vol. 96, no. 4 (1986)
- Hilary Greaves, ‘Population Axiology’, Philosophy Compass (forthcoming)
- John Broome, ‘Should We Value Population?’, The Journal of Political Philosophy vol. 13, no. 4 (2005)
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IX. The moral status of non-human animals
Some animal rights activists have planted bombs and committed arson in defence of non-human animals’ lives. At the other extreme, AA Gill notoriously shot a baboon merely to “get a sense of what it might be like to kill someone”. In between, there are Jains, vegans, pescatarians, vegetarians, ‘ethical carnivores’, and representatives of a wide range of other attitudes to non-human animals. This week, we try to get to grips with the ethics of human relations with non-human animals, focusing on the question whether it is ethically defensible to treat humans as if they have a special moral status.
Question: What is ‘speciesism’? Is it defensible?
Priority reading (Hide)
- Peter Singer, Animal Liberation (Pimlico, 1975), chapter 1 (24pp)
Singer argues that it is a fundamental moral principle that individuals are owed equal consideration of their interests, and that from this principle it follows that ‘speciesism’—“a prejudice or attitude of bias in favor of the interests of members of one's own species and against those of members of other species”—is a moral wrong analogous to racism and sexism. He then draws out various practical and theoretical implications of this conclusion.
- Tom Regan, ‘Animal Rights, Human Wrongs’, Environmental Ethics vol. 2, no. 2 (1980) (21pp)
Regan argues against a number of proposed justifications, including Singer’s, for the claim that widespread treatment of non-human animals is wrong. Drawing on his objections to these justifications, Regan argues for the view that non-human animals have rights grounded in their (the animals’) value as distinct subjects of lives that can go better or worse for them.
- Jeff McMahan, The Ethics of Killing: Problems at the Margins of Life (Oxford University Press, 2002), chapter 3, sections 1.2–2.3 (34pp)
McMahan raises a problem for what he calls the ‘Time-Relative Interest’ account of the badness of killing, namely, that it seems to imply that it is no worse to kill certain humans than to kill certain animals. Investigating this problem, he considers and rejects various arguments for a speciesist approach.
- Shelly Kagan, ‘What’s Wrong with Speciesism?’, Journal of Applied Philosophy vol. 33, no. 1 (2016) (21pp)
Kagan identifies some important gaps in Singer’s argument against speciesism. He then argues that we are not speciesists but ‘personists’, and provides some provisional arguments in favour of a refined version of the personist view that he calls ‘modal personism’.
- Cora Diamond, ‘Eating Meat and Eating People’, Philosophy vol. 53, no. 206 (1978) (15pp)
Diamond argues that Singer-style arguments for vegetarianism and animal rights more generally fail to take into account the way in which our moral outlooks are fundamentally structured around responses to humanity, and not merely to things such as pain that humans share with non-humans.
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Further reading (Hide)
- Richard Arneson, ‘What, if Anything, Renders All Humans Morally Equal?’, in Jamieson (ed.), Singer and his Critics (Wiley-Blackwell, 1999)
- Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka, Zoopolis: a political theory of animal rights (OUP, 2011), chapters 2–3
- S. Matthew Liao, ‘The Basis of Human Moral Status’, Journal of Moral Philosophy vol. 7, no. 2 (2010)
- Elizabeth Anderson, ‘Animal Rights and the Values of Nonhuman Life’, in Sunstein and Nussbaum (eds.), Animal Rights: Current Debates and New Directions (Oxford University Press, 2005)
- Jeff McMahan, ‘Eating Animals the Nice Way’, Dædalus vol. 137, no. 1 (2008) (11pp)
McMahan investigates some possible grounds for ‘benign carnivorism’, the view that killing humanely reared animals for food is unobjectionable. He argues against a justification based on the view that animals have reduced capacity for welfare and illfare and reduced connectedness to their future selves, and then against the idea that since being caused to exist is a benefit to the animals themselves, benign carnivorism is good for everyone and bad for no one. He ends by suggesting that there is nevertheless room for the possibility of one technologically still remote but permissible form of benign carnivorism.
- Jeff McMahan, ‘The Moral Problem of Predation’, in Chignell, Cuneo, and Halteman (eds.), Philosophy Comes to Dinner: Arguments about the Ethics of Eating (Routledge, 2016)
- Philip Kitcher, ‘Experimental Animals’, Philosophy & Public Affairs vol. 43, no. 4 (2015)
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X. Abortion
Few topics are as politically controversial as the topic of abortion. Some believe that abortion at any stage of fœtal development is murder; others believe that almost any abortion-restricting legislation is an attack on women's rights. This week, we try to clarify the debate and arrive at a verdict about the moral permissibility of abortion.
Question: Under what circumstances, if any, is abortion permissible? What are the political implications of your answer?
Priority reading (Hide)
- Margaret Olivia Little, ‘Abortion’, in R.G. Frey and Christopher Heath Wellman (eds.), A Companion to Applied Ethics (Blackwell, 2005) (13pp)
- Judith Jarvis Thomson, ‘A Defense of Abortion’, Philosophy & Public Affairs vol. 1, no. 1 (1971) (20pp)
- Michael Tooley, ‘Abortion and Infanticide’, Philosophy & Public Affairs vol. 2, no. 1 (1972) (28pp)
- Don Marquis, ‘Why Abortion is Immoral’, The Journal of Philosophy vol. 86, no. 4 (1989) (20pp)
- Dan Moller, ‘Abortion and Moral Risk’, Philosophy vol. 86, no. 3 (2011) (19pp)
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Further reading (Hide)
- Ann E. Cudd, ‘Sensationalized Philosophy: A Reply to Maquis's “Why Abortion is Immoral”’, The Journal of Philosophy vol. 87, no. 5 (1990)
- Alison M. Jaggar, ‘Abortion Rights and Gender Justice Worldwide: An Essay in Political Philosophy’, in Tooley, Wolf-Devine, Devine, and Jaggar, Abortion: Three Perspectives (Oxford University Press, 2009)
- John Finnis, ‘The Rights and Wrongs of Abortion: A Reply to Judith Thomson’, Philosophy & Public Affairs vol. 2, no. 2 (1973)
- Warren Quinn, ‘Abortion: Identity and Loss’, Philosophy & Public Affairs vol. 13, no. 1 (1984)
- David Boonin, A Defense of Abortion (Cambridge University Press, 2003), chapter 4
- Nancy Davis, ‘Abortion and Self-Defense’, Philosophy & Public Affairs vol. 13, no. 3 (1984)
- Jeff McMahan, The Ethics of Killing: Problems at the Margins of Life (Oxford University Press, 2002), chapter 4
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