Saving lives, moral theory, and the claims of individuals

Philosophy and Public Affairs

Volumn 34, Issue 2, 2006, Pages 109-135

  Otsuka, Michael ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 33644915034     PISSN: 00483915     EISSN: 10884963     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1088-4963.2006.00058.x     Document Type: Article

References (57)

1. T. M. Scanlon, What We Owe to Each Other (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), pp. 229-30, 241.
2. Ibid., p. 230.
3. Here I borrow the concept of a "fixed point" from Rawls and apply it to moral theory. Rawls describes certain "considered convictions of justice" that "we now make intuitively and in which we have the greatest confidence" as "provisional fixed points which we presume any conception of justice must fit." See John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), pp. 19-20. I follow Rawls in maintaining that these fixed points are not unrevisable, but they must be taken very seriously.
4. John Taurek, "Should the Numbers Count?" Philosophy & Public Affairs 6 (1977):293-316, pp. 303-10.
5. Scanlon, What We Owe to Each Other, pp. 232-33.
6. F. M. Kamm, "Nonconsequentialism," in The Blackwell Guide to Ethical Theory, ed. Hugh LaFollette (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2000), p. 221.
7. Here she is summarizing an argument she advanced earlier in Kamm, Morality, Mortality, vol. I (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 101 and 114-19.
8. I do not, however, maintain that Taurek is invulnerable to all objections. In Michael Otsuka, "Skepticism about Saving the Greater Number, "Philosophy & Public Affairs 32(2004):413-26, I pursue a line of criticism of Taurek that differs from Kamm's and Scanlon's objection.
9. Elizabeth Anscombe, "Who is Wronged?" The Oxford Review, no. 5(1967):16-17.
10. For such a defense of the superiority of a lottery to a choice based on the preferences of the chooser, see George Sher, "What Makes a Lottery Fair?" Noûs 14(1980):203-16.
11. See John Broome, "Fairness," Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 91(1990):87-101.
12. See F. M. Kamm, "Aggregation and Two Moral Methods," Utilitas 17(2005):1-23, at pp. 10-11.
13. See Michael Otsuka, "Scanlon and the Claims of the Many versus the One, "Analysis 60(2000):288-93, at Sec. 2. (In Sec. 1 of that article, I offer a defense that is distinct from the one in this article of Taurek against Kamm's and Scanlon's charge that his approach to saving lives ignores the moral significance of each individual.)
14. See Kamm, "Aggregation and Two Moral Methods," pp. 11-12, for a recent attempt to show this. There she defends her balancing argument by appealing to an anonymous Pareto principle that I discuss, and to which I raise a counterexample, in Section IIC below. Kamm addresses this counterexample (pp. 12-15). I believe, however, that her remarks actually support rather than undermine my hypothesis that her balancing argument must at least implicitly rely on the notion that the combined weight of the claims to life of the second and third persons is sufficiently overwhelming to tip the balance decisively in favor of saving them rather than the first person.
15. Rahul Kumar, "Contractualism on Saving the Many," Analysis 61(2001):165-70.
16. Derek Parfit, "Justifiability to Each Person," Ratio 16 (2003): 368-90, at pp. 376-78
17. Scanlon, for example, has challenged Parfit's argument that leximin implies equal chances in cases such as the adjacent third-rock. See T. M. Scanlon, "Replies," Ratio 16(2003):424-39, at pp. 431-32.
18. This principle is weaker than leximin in the following respect: Leximin entails this principle, but not vice versa. (This principle does not entail leximin because it is also consistent with other principles such as classical utilitarianism.)
19. Kamm has deployed a version of the anonymous Pareto principle in order to explain why it is both better and right to save the greater number in cases such as the adjacent third-rock. See Kamm's "aggregation argument" as spelled out in Morality, Mortality, vol. I, chap. 5, and "Nonconsequentialism," p. 220.
20. See also Kamm, "Aggregation and Two Moral Methods," pp. 11-12.
21. Iwao Hirose defends this claim by showing that this principle is simply the conjunction of the following two apparently nonaggregative principles: (i) the standard nonanonymous Pareto principle and (ii) a principle of impartiality according to which "two outcomes are equally good if they differ only with regard to the identities of the individuals." See Iwao Hirose, "Saving the Greater Number without Combining Claims," Analysis 61(2001):341-42.
22. Kamm presents essentially the same counterexample to her "aggregation argument" in Morality, Mortality, vol. I, pp. 101-03, 145.
23. See also n. 13 above.
24. See ibid., p. 101.
25. Those who are not convinced by this counterexample to the anonymous Pareto principle might nevertheless be convinced by the following example: Suppose a two-rock case in which you can save either P1 or P2 from death and everything else is equal except for that fact that P2 would benefit a little more than P1 from being saved because he would go on to live for forty years and a day, whereas P1 would go on to live for forty years only. The anonymous Pareto principle dictates the saving of P2, but intuitively you ought to toss a coin.
26. See Kamm, Morality, Mortality, vol. I, p. 120: "if each had had an equal chance to be in his actual position or in that of anyone else, there would be no need to toss a coin; a coin (of sorts) would already have been tossed. We would then be free to pick the best consequences (save the greater number) without a conflict with the claim of each to be given an equal chance."
27. David Wasserman and Alan Strudler, "Can a Nonconsequentialist Count Lives?" Philosophy & Public Affairs 31(2003):71- 94, at p. 88, n. 26.
28. Compare Kamm, Morality, Mortality, vol. I, p. 121.
29. The term "veil of ignorance" is, of course, Rawls's. The veil I have just described is, however, closer to Harsanyi's. Like Harsanyi and unlike Rawls, for example, we are here assuming an equal probability of being in the position of each person. See John Harsanyi, "Cardinal Utility in Welfare Economics and in the Theory of Risk-taking," Journal of Political Economy 61(1953):434-35
30. and Rawls, A Theory of Justice, pp. 12 136-37, and 161-73.
31. One might, however, protest that what is really going on is that the chooser has considered the implications of the chosen principle for everyone in a manner that gives equal weight to the interests of each, and it is only by sleight of veil-lowering hand that this appears to be the chooser's self-interest.
32. I therefore deny the rationality of choosing leximin given the non-Rawlsian assumption of equiprobability. Rawls might not disagree, as his claim that people from behind the veil would choose leximin depends on a number of assumptions that I do not make here, including the denial of equiprobability.
33. or a definitive formulation and a defense of a prioritarian version of utilitarianism, see Derek Parfit, "Equality or Priority?" The Lindley Lecture (Lawrence, Kansas: University of Kansas, 1991).
34. See Scanlon, "Replies," p. 433, where he says just this in order to cast doubt on prioritarianism.
35. Unlike an intrapersonal case, where there may be a rationale for discounting the value of additional benefits of a given specific type (e.g., a given pleasurable sensation) when the same person receives this benefit a repeated number of times, there is no rationale for discounting the value of additional benefits of a given specific type to additional people. It is not as if a given benefit such as a pleasurable sensation is of less value to a person on account of the high number of others who have received this benefit. Hence we cannot claim that the same type of small benefit to infinitely many people may sum to a finite number because of the diminishing marginal utility of benefits to additional people. Rather, these benefits to different people are all of equal utility, and even very small benefits of the same positive value to an infinite number of people will sum to infinity.
36. This holds at least insofar as cardinal infinities are concerned. This particular problem can be avoided by recourse to ordinal infinities, as the adding together of same-sized ordinal infinities yields a larger infinity. (I am indebted to Frederick Teti for this point.) Even if, however, this particular problem is avoided via an ordinalization of the measure of utility, one is still faced with the other problems that are mentioned in the paragraph to which this note is attached.
37. For defenses of the claim that the individualist restriction is inessential to Scanlon's contractualism, see David Brink, "The Separateness of Persons, Distributive Norms, and Moral Theory," in Value, Welfare, and Morality, ed. R. G. Frey and Christopher Morris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 252-89,
38. and Parfit, "Justifiability to Each Person."
39. See n. 1 above for Scanlon's indications that it is essential.
40. See also, however, his more recent remarks in "Replies," pp. 430 and 433-34, which might indicate a softening of his commitment to this restriction.
41. See T. M. Scanlon, "Contractualism and Utilitarianism," in Utilitarianism and Beyond, ed. Amartya Sen and Bernard Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 103-28, at pp. 122-23 (including n. 17).
42. These remarks can be found ibid., p. 123.
43. Scanlon, What We Owe to Each Other, p. 229.
44. Here I follow David Brink, "The Separateness of Persons, Distributive Norms, and Moral Theory," pp. 264 and 267. (For a more formal statement of this weighted function, see Alex Voorhoeve, "How Good Could it Be for You? A Problem for the Complaint Model" [unpublished manuscript].) Brink takes himself to be offering an interpretation of Scanlon's remarks in "Contractualism and Utilitarianism," p. 123.
45. Scanlon explicitly departs from such a complaint model in his more recent writings. See What We Owe to Each Other, pp. 213-18, 229, and 242-43,
46. and "Replies," p. 429. Nevertheless, he maintains in his book that this model "calls attention to a central feature of contractualism that I would not want to give up: Its insistence that the justifiability of a moral principle depends only on various individuals' reasons for objecting to that principle and alternatives to it" (What We Owe to Each Other, p. 229).
47. In attributing to Scanlon the claim that the fact of reasonable rejection is what makes an act wrong, I follow his description of his contractualist project in "Replies," pp. 437-38, rather than his earlier, contrary description in What We Owe to Each Other, pp. 10-11 and 391, n. 21. My attribution to Scanlon of the claim that the fact of reasonable rejection is not to be explained by the fact of moral wrongness is based on his remarks in What We Owe to Each Other, pp. 4-5, 214, and 216, and "Replies," pp. 429-30. See also Parfit, "Justifiability to Each Person," pp. 368-70, for an attribution of this claim to Scanlon.
48. Scanlon, What We Owe to Each Other, pp. 235-40.
49. Here Scanlon draws on Kamm, Morality, Mortality, vol. I, chaps. 8-10.
50. I do not maintain that any appeal to moral factors that takes him beyond the complaint model will land Scanlon in the circularity he wants to avoid. I am moved by his argument in What We Owe to Each Other, pp. 213-18, that some such appeals - to fairness, choice, or responsibility, for example - do not. Nevertheless, it is not clear to me how he can avoid this circularity in the cases involving aggregation under discussion.
51. Scanlon, "Contractualism and Utilitarianism," pp. 106 and 108-10. Scanlon describes "philosophical utilitarianism" as "the thesis that the only fundamental moral facts are facts about individual well-being" (p. 108).
52. On reflective equilibrium and the distinction between its narrow and wide forms, see John Rawls, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), pp. 29-32.
53. Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985), pp. 116-17. See also chaps. 5-6 more generally.
54. Kamm, Morality, Mortality, vol. I, p. 6. In most of the remainder of this book, Kamm deploys this method, which is a version of narrow reflective equilibrium, to justify many of the moral fixed points regarding duties to save from harm that I have invoked in this article. In the context of such duties, one challenge to this method is to show that the principles it yields do not give rise to a choice-defeating cycle of intransitive preferences.
55. For a discussion of this challenge, see my remarks on the "common-sense aggregator" in "Skepticism about Saving the Greater Number," pp. 424-26.
56. I am indebted to Ralph Wedgwood for the explanation following in the text of why this is not the case. Comments from him on the distinction between circular philosophical explanations and circular justifications of belief have also helped me see more clearly the particular nature of the circularity that threatens Scanlon's theory. I have also benefited from, and think what I say in this conclusion is of a piece with, Derek Parfit's discussion of Scanlon's theory and its relation to the method of reflective equilibrium in his Climbing the Mountain (book manuscript).
57. Nelson Goodman writes the following about the relevantly analogous reflective equilibrium that obtains between "the particular deductive inferences we actually make and sanction" and the "general rules" or "principles" of deduction: "I have said that deductive inferences are justified by their conformity to valid general rules, and that general rules are justified by their conformity to valid inferences. But this circle is a virtuous one. The point is that rules and particular inferences alike are justified by being brought into agreement with each other. A rule is amended if it yields an inference we are unwilling to accept; an inference is rejected if it violates a rule we are unwilling to amend. The process of justification is the delicate one of making mutual adjustments between rules and accepted inferences; and in the agreement achieved lies the only justification needed for either." See Nelson Goodman, Fact, Fiction, and Forecast, 4th ed. (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1983), pp. 63-64.