Rationality and the distant needy

Philosophy and Public Affairs

Volumn 35, Issue 2, 2007, Pages 161-178

  Hare, Caspar ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 34247493865     PISSN: 00483915     EISSN: 10884963     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1088-4963.2007.00100.x     Document Type: Article

References (10)

1. See Peter Singer, "Famine, Affluence and Morality," Philosophy & Public Affairs 1 (1972): 229-43, and Peter Singer, The Expanding Circle (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1981), and Peter Unger, Living High and Letting Die: Our Illusion of Innocence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). I will spare you a review of the enormous secondary literature. Suffice it to say that some people are yet to be persuaded. A common complaint against Singer is that the principles to which he appeals are no more plausible than the claims they support. A common complaint against Unger is that, while each of the differences between pond-type cases and Oxfam-type cases may be morally insignificant, a collection of insignificant differences can add up to a significant one.
2. Observations of this general kind (that by shifting the weight you place on different factors, for the purposes of making different pair-wise comparisons, you get intransitivity) have been made before. See Larry Temkin, "A Continuum Argument for Intransitivity," Philosophy & Public Affairs 25 (1996): 175-210, and Stuart Rachels, "Counterexamples to the Transitivity of Better Than," Australasian Journal of Philosophy 76 (1998): 71-83.
3. I discuss this case in detail elsewhere. The thought behind the case is inspired by Parfit's discussion of other-directed time-bias in Section 69 of Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984).
4. Because conforming to Transitivity does not protect you from having seemingly cyclical preferences between entities, vulnerability to money-pumping, etc., some philosophers have been concerned that it is 'empty.' If it is to rule out certain manifestly irrational patterns of desire, belief, and behavior, then it needs to be supplemented in some way. See John Broome, Weighing Lives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), section 5.4. I do not think that the constraint is entirely empty - that is the whole point of this article. But I will say, in passing, that the most promising way to supplement it is to demand that the preferences between complete world-histories of a rational agent be sensitive to considerations whose significance is reflected inthe agent's other preferences...
5. What they have in mind may be a principle variously called 'The Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives,' in John Nash, "The Bargaining Problem," Econometrica 18 (1950): 155-62, 'the Chernoff condition,' after H. Chernoff, "Rational Selection of Decision Functions," Econometrica 22 (1954): 423-43, and 'Basic Contraction Consistency,' in Amartya Sen, "Internal Consistency of Choice," Econometrica 61 (1993): 495-521. Formulations differ, but the basic idea is that if I prefer x to y, given alternatives x,y,z, then I should prefer x to y, given alternatives x,y. As my example illustrates, if the notion of alternative is construed broadly enough to encompass things that are coarser grained than complete worldhistories, this principle is very implausible indeed.
6. Amartya Sen has several examples in his "Internal Consistency of Choice," and his "Liberty and Social Choice," Journal of Philosophy 80 (1983): 5-28.
7. Thanks to an Editor of Philosophy & Public Affairs for pointing out that the objector needs to make this very debatable assumption.
8. It may be difficult to know whether a particular preference is the fruit of the petty or noble attitude. The classic discussion of how to distinguish such attitudes is in Bernard Williams, "Utilitarianism and Moral Self-Indulgence," in his Moral Luck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).
9. AbandonNear is underdetermined by the description of the Cryptic Oxfam Worker case (it does not specify whether therewill be more or less grave wrongdoing if Peter is near etc. or distant etc.). This response would imply, at best, that we are not obliged to help the distant needy when their misfortunes, if we do not help them, will not be the result of grave wrongdoing on the part of anybody close etc. to them. Thanks to Peter Singer for pointing this out.
10. Assuming, of course, that Oxfam succeeds in making it the case that there is a particular child who will live if you give, and die otherwise.