Topics Ethics

Question Many people would say that it’s nearly always wrong not to act, whilst someone suffers an unnecessary death that could have easily been prevented. For example, simply watching a child wander onto a busy road, and not acting so as not to loose ones place in a queue at the post office. It’s difficult to see how this could be morally permissible. Many people would also say that they don’t feel any moral obligation to donate their spare money to charity. For example, the money that’s required for me to have the internet access I need to ask this question, could be used to pay for life saving medication which could spare many children in Africa from a needless death. On the one hand we’re morally obliged to help when we can, on the other it’s morally permissible not to help even though we can. Is there any way to make these seemingly conflicting beliefs compatible? Should we sell up and give the proceeds to the needy? Or should we admit to ourselves that we’re not prepared to live up to our own moral ideals? Thanks. S.G.

Accepted:
December 9, 2006

Comments

Your question raises a crucial issue for ethics, especially in the modern world where the internet makes it sometimes possible to save lives by clicking a few boxes. The issues is how to balance the needs of others, especially distant others, with other priorities that are part and parcel of living a full and meaningful life. One kind of answer is maximally demanding: the more you put your energies into helping others the better. But while a life devoted to relieving suffering may be right for some, a moral theory that made it mandatory for all would surely be excessivley demanding. It would also be forgetful of the conditions of having a meaningful life: having projects and commitments that generate reasons for action of a kind that have nothing to do with relieving others' suffering, or furthering the ends of others.

I think it's one of the jobs of philosophical ethics to situate moral considerations in the context of practical considerations more generally, in order to avoid a morality of perpetual guilt. Perhaps our immediate relationships and experience generates immediate obligations of beneficence (one passes a strange in the street who is in difficulty so one must help them; an acquaintance is in trouble so one must help them; and so on). But then, when it comes to our more distal confrontations with suffering (people in distant countries whose suffering we hear about in the papers and on the web) we perhaps have to negotiate some kind of midway policy for ourselves - we support some charities and not others, we respond to certain sorts of causes and not others - in order to find a balance between the demands of beneficence and the other practical demands of living a life that's distinctively one's own. (See Bernard Williams' critique of utilitarianism on this score - esp his section on Integrity in Utilitarianism For and Against, by J.J.C.Smart and B.Williams.)

As you may know, the question that you raise has been raised in very similar terms by Peter Singer in "Famine, Affluence, and Morality" Philosophy and Public Affairs 1 (1972). Singer himself presents the moral challenge not merely to Utilitarians like himself, but to all of us, who he believes are deeply committed to the following moral principle: "If one can prevent something very bad from happening (like the death of an innocent child) without any significant moral sacrifice, then one is morally obligated to do so." (Singer himself believes that a much stronger moral principle is true, but he believes that all of us will concede the truth of this principle.) He argues that it is this moral principle that explains our sense that it is not merely a nice thing to save a child from drowning, but in fact is a moral obligation, even if it would be a slight inconvenience for us to do so. If true, such a moral principle entails that it would be wrong for us to refrain giving away money that we have good reason to believe could be used to prevent horrible suffering and avoidable early death, when to do so would entail little inconvenience or sacrifice. While distance might make a psychological difference, and so could be appealed to in order to explain the difference in our propensity to respond to local drowning children and foreign starving children, Singer argues that distance from ourselves makes no more moral difference than skin color. People who are close in space to us are no more deserving of our moral concern than are those who further from us. Peter Unger argues for a similar position in his Living High and Letting Die. Morality is demanding, both of them would insist, and, they would reject the suggestion that it is the job of philosophical ethics to avoid a morality that implies perpetual guilt. To the contrary, they maintain that we should all feel much greater sense of guilt than we do, because we are all guilty of failing to meet our most basic moral obligations. Shelley Kagan, in The Limits of Morality, also argues against the suggestion that moral theories can be rejected on the grounds that they are more demanding than complete comfort and luxury allow.

That said, some Utilitarians have argued, to my mind convincingly, that, contrary to Bernard Williams, the best versions of Utilitarianism do not require that we become alienated from the sorts of personal projects and attachments that make it possible for us to live good and meaningful lives. I’d recommend Peter Railton’s, "Alienation, Consequentialism, and the Demands of Morality" and "How Thinking about Character and Utilitarianism Might Lead to Rethinking the Character of Utilitarianism," both reprinted in his collected essays, Facts and Values. I'd also recommend Roger Crisp’s "Utilitarianism and the Life of Virtue" The Philosophical Quarterly 42 (1992).