Topics Ethics

Question Does one good turn deserve another? Intuitively, when someone does something for me which I perceive as kind and selfless, I feel disposed to perform a similarly "kind" action for that person - more so than for some other person. But, if faced with the choice of selflessly helping person A, who once helped me, or person B, with whom I have no history, is there any ethical reason (other than the possible value of my intuition) why I should help person A? Why should the "good turn" which person A did me yesterday have a legitimate bearing on my ethical decision today?

Accepted:
March 3, 2007

Comments

My own view is that, other things being equal, you do have a special reason to return a good turn; a reason that is lacking in the case where you're considering to do a similarly good turn to a stranger. This is because ethical life is a mixture of reasons generated by a 'partial' perspective (the perspective we take up when we are personally engaged with other people) and an 'impartial' perspective (the perspective we take up when we are precisely not personally engaged, but are acting more like legislators of the good). The place of partial reasons (what the philosopher Thomas Nagel calls 'agent-relative' reasons - after Derek Parfit's use - see ch. 8 of Nagel's book The View From Nowhere) remains controversial in philosophical ethics. There is ongoing debate about how far any moral reasons should take partial form, rather than a more impartial form that subsumes the values inherent in the partial perspective: so, for instance, one might think that the partial perspective can be honoured by subsuming your reason to return a good turn under some general principle to the effect that 'We should all return good turns done to us.' Such a general principle expresses an impartial (or agent-neutral) reason which attempts to subsume the partial reason. But other will not be satisfied with this. They might think that in converting partial reasons into impartial ones (agent-relative reasons into agent-neutral ones) we lose the value of the partiality, an end up constructing a moral system that is in unnecessary denial about the proper ethical place of partiality - of doing good things out of love, out of friendship, out of special personal concern, or personal commitment, and so on. Ask yourself whether you think that someone's moral reason and motivation for defending a friend properly takes the form 'People should defend their friends' or whether the moral value of such loyalty is better expressed in the following irreducibly partial reason 'She's my friend'.

Kant is a classic expression of impartialism in ethics (Groundwork for a Metaphysics of Morals. For a critique of impartialism in ethics, see Bernard Williams's essay 'Persons, Character and Morality' in his collection Moral Luck. Nagel explores these issues in the work cited above.