Can there be a moral duty not to help? Suppose two persons, A and B. A suffers from an illness that makes him behave antisocially, at times constituting a danger both to himself and to others. B, a close relative, has been caring for A for many years, preventing A from the most serious consequences (jail/psychiatric clinic). However, A's state of health is not improving. Doctors suggest that B's help may indeed be counterproductive - they suppose that A needs to feel the consequences of his acts to find the strength to fight his disease. How to act in this situation, from a moral point of view? Imagine A, not 'supervised' by B anymore, injured another person. Even if the punishment helped A, what about the damaged person? And what if the punishment did not help?

I think you are using the verb "help" in two different senses. When you talk about B helping A, you mean something like B intervening in A's situation with the intent of improving it. When you speak of the punishment helping A, you mean the punishment actually improving A's situation. Either sense can apply without the other. It's pretty obvious that there can be a moral duty not to help in the first sense. In many cases, an amateur should not help others in situations she does not understand, for example, when there possibly is a considerable danger of her making matters worse. There can also be duties not to help in the second sense -- for instance in situations where the potential helpee is explicitly asking not to be helped. A frail man is struggling to get up from his wheelchair. You walk over to help; but he says "please don't help me, I want to do this on my own." It seems right that such duties not to help (in both senses) may give way when the interests of third parties are affected...

I just saw an advertisement on a website, the advertisement features a poor African child who is on the verge of starvation. Is it wrong for me to think that a child of his standards should die, because if everyone would have the chance to live to their 70-80s that our world would over populate? I sound like an very immoral person, but if the end result is world overpopulation, then I would want to sacrifice the unlucky ones, for the sake of all others.

Suppose it is true that, if everyone had the chance to live to their 70-80s, our world would become very overpopulated. In this case, the best way to bring relief would be to get rid of an appropriate number of affluent people who, through their much greater ecological footprint, are imposing much greater burdens on everyone else than the poor African child does, whose existence would barely be felt by others even if she lived to 120. In numbers, while the consumption of US residents produces about 20 tons of CO2 annually on average, 60 poor countries have average annual CO2 emissions below 1 ton per person, and 11 countries even have annual emission below 0.1 ton per person. You would have to sacrifice about 500 unlucky people in one of those very poor countries to get the same effect as you would get from sacrificing one of us. Yes, this is beginning to sound a bit immoral. Fortunately, the choice is not this stark. If everyone had the chance to live to their 70-80s, our world would actually...

We recently learned about racial profiling in my social studies class. While I disagree that it is unethical (and plain old incorrect) to assume that all people of a certain race are criminals, there did seem to be some logic behind the idea that I didn't want to bring up in class. I am not a racist and am in fact involved in closing the achievement gap in my school district, so although this question is definitely not PC, I am hoping I can ask it here without being judged: If statistics show that for whatever unfair reason (maybe because of discrimination), a greater percentage of people of race A become alcoholics or grow up in poverty or something, and statistics also show that alcoholics or people who grow up in poverty are more likely to commit crimes, then isn't it only logical to conclude that a randomly-chosen person of race A is more likely to be a criminal than a randomly-chosen person of race B? I acknowledge that there is definitely some circular logic going on here, and saying "he's of race...

First of all, I think it's good you bring this up. Better to discuss such matters openly than to pretend they don't exist. One should be clearer, perhaps, about the step from belief to action. Surely many things correlate with race, gender, or religion; and we may notice these correlations and form beliefs about them and perhaps even test these beliefs through large-scale data collection. In some case, the mere researching of such correlations is morally dubious, by fostering contempt for a group even while serving no legitimate social purpose. But in the case of crimes, there is a legitimate social purpose: deterrence and apprehension. So it is hard to deny that knowing more about the people who tend to commit certain kinds of crimes can be useful. But then how useful such knowledge will be depends on what one would be able and morally permitted do with it if one had it. In the case of serious crimes there is, I think, a clear presumption in favor of using such knowledge and hence of...

In my work there are clear inequalities between colleagues for choosing the holidays period and for choosing morning or evening shift. The more senior a worker is the more privileges he has. Let’s suppose that one of the senior workers decides voluntarily to give some of his privileges to another worker even though other senior workers probably will not do the same. Should the junior worker feel and express gratitude for this action? Or, as the decision could be considered as a matter of justice and more equality, it is what everybody should do, and so gratitude is not necessary, and the senior worker should not be expecting gratitude.

One relevant factor here is whether the seniority privileges you describe are unjust. If they are long-standing rules fairly administered, then they may not be. Unlike privileges based on race or gender or religion, such seniority privileges do treat everyone equally over time. Everyone is disadvantaged early in her/his tenure on the job, and everyone has an equal opportunity to be advantaged later on (but what about those who die early?). If the privileges are morally defensible in this way, then gratitude is appropriate when a more senior worker waives a privilege for the benefit of a more junior one. Now suppose that, for some reason, the seniority system is not morally defensible after all. Even in this case a senior worker may not be morally obliged to waive her/his privileges. After all, s/he is not responsible for the flaws of the system, and s/he is also not a net beneficiary of these flaws (having presumably gone through many years of disadvantage early in her/his tenure). Once again, then,...

Asymmetrical Morality Hello, I would like to know if there are ethical frameworks that can at the same time consider “good” performing action X, and not consider “bad” not performing it. The above does not seem possible with utilitarian frameworks. To give one example, it strikes me as odd that while many people would consider devolving a part of one’s salary to help the poor a “good” thing, they wouldn’t say that not devolving it is “bad”. Good if you do, OK if you don’t ... Thanks in advance.

Yes, there are such views. Some ethicists deploy the controversial notion of the supererogatory: of conduct beyond the call of duty. They might give an example such as this. If you risk your life to save a child from a burning building, you have done something very good. But if you decide not to risk your life for the child, you have done nothing wrong. Many ethicists also recognize imperfect duties. These are duties that leave the agent some discretion about when to act on the duty in question and how much to do. For example, we have a duty to help the poor. But we are not duty-bound to do as much as we can for every poor person. It is wrong (for a reasonably well-to-do person) never to help at all. But it may not be wrong to do less than one might and less than others similarly situated. There could then be persons who fulfill their imperfect duties alongside other, similarly situated persons who do more. The latter act especially well, but the former do not act badly.

Hi, I'm writing about the Act-Omission idea within consequentialism. Is it the case that consequentialists would argue that there is no moral significance between an act or an omission if they cause the same consequences??? Therefore, one who carries out an action and causes a set of consequences is no different to one who causes the same set of consequences by omitting to perform an action?

Yes, this is the view of those who bring their consequentialism to bear upon conduct directly -- though they may also hold that there is reason to blame and punish omissions less because here blame and punishment are less effective. There are also indirect consequentialists. They bring their consequentialist assessment to bear on rules or on motives and then only indirectly on conduct. Thus they hold that we should follow the rules that are such that, if we follow them, the world will go best -- and we should follow these optimal rules even in those cases where a violation would make the world go even better. Motive consequentialists hold that we ought to have (and thus develop in ourselves and others) the motives that are such that, if we have them, the world will go best -- even though these motives will sometimes lead to conduct that is not optimal. Then there are institutional consquentialist who, like Bentham, bring their consequentialism to bear on the institutional structure of society....

Hello. I think that I have a personality disorder called the Schizoid Personality disorder. I am actually fairly certain of this. If this is the case, I have a question that pertains to ethics. I am wondering if it is immoral in some sense to cloister oneself from the world and to spend one's time primarily by oneself. I would consider myself of a high intellect with much college behind me and I enjoy intellectual pursuits and the life of the mind very much. Though I currently have some close friends (from high school) and socialize several times a week, I can see a day in which I would like to be mostly alone. I envision a day, after several more years of graduate school, when I could leave America and get lost in Europe and break all ties with former friends, and (as I am a Schizoid) my family--whom I feel nothing for and do not enjoy being around. I am an atheist and a Darwinian and believe this is the only life I am going to get and I would like to, despite what contemporary social standards...

I can think of two general ways in which someone might find your plan somewhat immoral. First, one might be concerned about the pain it might cause to your family, your parents and siblings, perhaps. Here you will obviously want to mitigate pain, explain to them how you feel, and so on. They know you well already, so will presumably understand to some extent. They may still prefer to have you around and in the swing of things, but here I think your own ambitions can legitimately trump. Second, one might say that, being bright and born into a reasonably privileged position, you ought to do something for people worse off than youself. But you can do some of this without much interaction: through writing or donations, or in many other ways. (It's hard to be specific here, because you do not say much about how you plan to get by in Europe or wherever you may settle down.) In short, I don't think you would do wrong to shun close friendships, intimacy, marriage. You have responsibilities toward...

Does the great size of the population give me an out, since my contribution, say one in 150,000,000, is neither here nor there, when it comes to,say, voting, recycling garbage, paying taxes? Of course, if "everybody did it", it would be a problem. But everybody, in fact, isn't doing it, so there is no actual problem. My failure to co-operate has a minimal impact. And, my keeping quiet about my non-co-operation further minimizes the minimal impact.

Suppose that by mailing in a postcard you could get a 1 in 10 chance to direct $10,000 to a good cause: an orphenage, say, or a promising development project in Africa. Would you mail the postcard? I suppose you would. You would say that a 1 in 10 chance of $10,000 is worth about as much as $1000 for certain. So this is very much worth a postage stamp. Now consider the same question in regard to a 1 in 20 chance of being able to direct $20,000 to a good cause. The probability that it will work out is smaller, to be sure, but the good it would do is correspondingly larger. So again it would seem that you have very strong reason to mail that postcard. Voting in the US election comes rather later in this chain. Your chance of affecting the result is very small, but the payoff is correspondingly larger. The difference between a good and a bad US President is huge for a generation of human beings and possibly future ones as well. So don't be fooled by the small probability; it isn't zero. And do not...

The following dilemma has arisen in my work as a health professional. I suppose it is more of an ethical conundrum than anything else. Imagine the following scenario: Someone is seeking help because they believe they may be at high risk of developing condition X. Our assessment suggests that they are in fact at high risk of developing condition X. Part of the reason they are high risk is BECAUSE they are worried they may develop condition X. As you can imagine informing the person of the results of their assessment can actually lead to that high risk person developing condition X. Health professionals have a clear duty to respect autonomy (including telling people the truth), balanced with a duty not to cause harm, and a duty to do good. Bearing this in mind, what should we tell the clients about the results of their assessment? NOTE: They would still be at high risk of developing condition X if we didn't assess or treat them. What we appear to do currently is assess them, but when communicating...

This is an interesting problem, very crisply stated. Variants of it occur in other life contexts as well. Thus truthful reporting of information can be counterproductive, for example, in the work of Human Rights Watch or Amnesty International in situations where such information may undermine the reputation of a political party or faction that, all things considered, is better than its rivals. This case is different from yours in that the responsibility for being truthful is primarily to third parties: to those who rely on the NGO to report the whole truth and nothing but the truth about the various governments, parties, or factions and their conduct. In your case, where the responsibility is basically to the patient, the practice you and your colleagues have developed seems entirely right to me. Maybe your slight doubts about this practice can be mitigated by a brief further thought about autonomy. Contrary to what you suggest, I do not think that respecting autonomy requires being entirely candid....

To what extent do philosophers, or people who think deeply about an issue, have a responsibility to some kind of direct action, especially in cases like climate change where they perceive a significant threat to the future of humanity?

I don't think this responsibility is confined to those who have thought deeply about an issue. If climate change is a menace to the poor today and to future generations, and if we are much involved in fuelling this menace, then we all have a responsibility to act to slow down and stop this phenomenon. If the responsibility were confined to those who have thought deeply about this, the others could easily get off the hook simply by avoiding deep thought. Still, I agree that as one who understands the problem better one has a special role to play, namely the role of alerting others to their responsibilities. This is something philosophers can do and should do much more of: Help citizens think clearly and critically about their responsibilities as citizens of their state and of the world. In most cases, this indirect way of doing something about the problem is likely to be more effective than direct action. And it has the additional advantage of helping one's fellow citizens avoid involvement in grave...

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