Harming in context

Philosophical Studies

Volumn 123, Issue 1-2, 2005, Pages 149-173

  Norcross, Alastair ^a  

^a RICE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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EID: 55449133318     PISSN: 00318116     EISSN: 15730883     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1007/s11098-004-5220-3     Document Type: Article

References (16)

1. I owe the example to Frances Howard-Snyder.
2. An asymmetry between reasons not to harm and reasons to benefit is also implausible from a non-consequentialist perspective that treats harms in certain respects as more basic than overall harms. Consider an approach to harm that classifies causing pain (among other things) as harming, and preventing pain as benefiting, and that claims that our reasons not to harm are stronger than our reasons to benefit. Such an approach may well, depending on the size of the supposed asymmetry between reasons, judge that Doctor has stronger reason not to administer the pain-relieving drugs than to administer them. This should clearly be unacceptable to non-consequentialists as well as consequentialists.
3. Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons, 70.
4. Parfit doesn't use the term 'preemption'.
5. This was the thesis of Ben Eggleston's paper, "Does Participation Matter? An Inconsistency in Parfit's Moral Mathematics", presented at the APA Eastern Division, December 1999, to which I delivered the response. The current paper has grown out of my reply to Eggleston's paper.
6. It might be objected that my elaboration of the example prevents Y's true belief in the actual world that X has poisoned me from being knowledge. If the closest world in which X doesn't poison me is one in which Y believes that X has poisoned me, it seems that Y's actual belief doesn't track the truth in the right way to be knowledge. This objection relies on a controversial theory of knowledge. It's not even clear that it succeeds in the context of that theory. Given that the contexts in which we consider whether Y has knowledge and in which we consider whether Y is a member of the group that harms me are different, different possible worlds may be relevant to each. Furthermore, if we simply changed Case Three to specify either that Y simply believes that I am about to die painfully, or that Y knows that it is almost certain that I am about to die painfully, our intuitive judgements of Y's behavior would remain unchanged.
7. Frank Jackson makes a similar point in his "Which Effects?", in Reading Parfit, ed. Jonathan Dancy, Blackwell 1997.
8. See my "Comparing Harms: Headaches and Human Lives", Philosophy and Public Affairs, Spring 1997, for arguments against this view.
9. This approach can be subject to many variations. For example, do we compare (C1) and (C2) with respect to a particular person, a particular type of person, the "average" person, etc.? Do we compare propensities with respect to the circumstances a particular individual is likely to encounter, given what we know about her, given her social position, given "normal" circumstances, etc.?
10. For discussion of this point see my "Consequentialism and Commitment", Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, December 1997.
11. See, for example, the accounts of counterfactuals developed by David Lewis and Robert Stalnaker.
12. The problem here is both that the proposal makes character relevant to whether actions harm or benefit, and that it does so in a particularly counterintuitive way. For a consequentialist, the former problem is more significant.
13. I mean by salience, roughly, the degree to which the participants in a conversational context consciously focus on an alternative. There may be more sophisticated accounts of salience, but this is certainly a common one.
14. I owe at least the general idea of this example, though not the details, to Ben Bradley. He suggested something like this in discussion as a problem for my account.
15. I owe thes suggestion to Julia Driver.
16. I am grateful for comments on various versions of this paper by Jonathan Bennett, Ben Bradley, Julia Driver, Doug Ehring, Mark Heller, Frances Howard-Snyder, Elinor Mason, Stuart Rachels, George Sher, Steve Sverdlik, and an anonymous referee for this journal.