Negative duties, positive duties, and the "New harms"

Ethics

Volumn 120, Issue 3, 2010, Pages 557-578

  Lichtenberg, Judith ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 77953934171     PISSN: 00141704     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/652294     Document Type: Article

References (68)

1. Peter Singer, "Famine, Affluence, and Morality," Philosophy & Public Affairs 1 (1972): 229-43. Singer has since weakened his proposals considerably, and in the interest of seeing these problems solved he has focused on pragmatic approaches that might convince ordinary people.
2. See, e.g., Peter Singer, One World: The Ethics of Globalization, 2nd ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), chap. 5, 194
3. and, especially, The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty (New York: Random House, 2009), 148-72.
4. Liam Murphy, "The Demands of Beneficence," Philosophy & Public Affairs 22 (1993): 266-92, 268.
5. See Roberta Kwok, "Is Local Food Really Miles Better?" Salon.com, June 24, 2008.
6. See, e.g., Mark Bittman, "Loving Fish, This Time with the Fish in Mind," New York Times, June 9, 2009. Despite the title, the article focuses less on harms to fish than to the environment.
7. For comparison of the drawbacks of plastic and paper bags (each bad in its own way), see, e.g., Skaidra Smith-Heisters, "Paper Grocery Bags Require More Energy than Plastic Bags," Reason.org, April 17, 2008
8. and "Paper versus Plastic: The Shopping Bag Debate," blog.greenfeet.com, n.d., http://blog.greenfeet.com/index.php/paper-vsplastic- the-shopping-bag-debate/reducing-your-footprint/121.
9. See, e.g., Elizabeth Colbert, "Turf Wars," New Yorker, July 21, 2008.
10. John Peterson, "A Green Curriculum Involves Everyone on the Campus," Chronicle of Higher Education, June 20, 2008, A25.
11. Leif Wenar, "Property Rights and the Resource Curse," Philosophy & Public Affairs 36 (2008): 2-32, 2.
12. Thomas Pogge, "Recognized and Violated by International Law: The Human Rights of the Global Poor," Leiden Journal of International Law 18 (2005): 717-45, 720.
13. I use the term "would-be" in order not to beg the question of whether there is in fact a duty in either the negative or positive case. In what follows the qualifier is often omitted but should be understood.
14. H. L. A. Hart and A. M. Honoré, Causation in the Law, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985), lxxx.
15. Of course every event is the effect of a concatenation of many prior events and conditions, including human actions. Which one we pick out as the cause depends on context, our interests, and what is unusual or departs from the routine. See ibid., 64 ff. for further discussion.
16. Samuel Scheffler, "Individual Responsibility in a Global Age," Social Philosophy and Policy 12 (1995): 219-36, 233.
17. Ibid., 228.
18. Ibid., 227.
19. Ibid., 223.
20. The locus classicus for this view can be found in Bernard Williams's essay, "A Critique of Utilitarianism," in Utilitarianism: For and Against, ed. J. J. C. Smart and Bernard Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 93-100. See Sec. IV for further discussion.
21. Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974), passim; see especially 181-82, where Nozick discusses the medical researcher who synthesizes an important drug out of easily available materials. According to Nozick, he has no responsibility to make the drug available to those who need it because his actions have not made anyone worse off (since he has not made any resources more scarce).
22. Disagreement, although perhaps not argument. The disagreement seems to be of the brute variety: certainly one cannot prove that we have, or do not have, positive duties.
23. See Adam Hochschild, Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005), 192-96.
24. The comparisons are not easy to draw, since refraining from harm, as by using less energy, serves some of the agent's interests and to that extent should not be counted as a cost to him. In these cases, the cost to some of our interests (sweltering without air-conditioning, giving up the cherished gas-guzzler) is offset by gains to our economic interests. But not all cases possess this feature, and in any event people do consider many of the demands required by not contributing to global harms a sacrifice to their interests. For present purposes, we can subtract whatever benefit people derive by refraining from harm and consider only the net cost to them.
25. Michael Maren, The Road to Hell: The Ravaging Effects of Foreign Aid and International Charity (New York: Free Press, 1997);
26. Graham Hancock, Lords of Poverty: The Power, Prestige, and Corruption of the International Aid Business (London: Mandarin, 1991);
27. Alex de Waal, Famine Crimes: Politics and the Disaster Relief Industry in Africa (London: Africa Rights and the International African Institute, 1997);
28. Fiona Terry, Condemned to Repeat? The Paradox of Humanitarian Action (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002);
29. Frances Moore Lappé and David Kinley, Aid as Obstacle: Twenty Questions about Our Foreign Aid and the Hungry (San Francisco: Institute for Food and Development Policy, 1980);
30. David Kennedy, The Dark Sides of Virtue: Reassessing International Humanitarianism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005);
31. Dambisa Moyo, Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2009).
32. Garrett Cullity, The Moral Demands of Affluence (Oxford: Clarendon, 2004), 39. Chapter 3 of Cullity's book provides an excellent analysis of the issues.
33. Diavlog between Peter Singer and William Easterly, bloggingheads.tv, December 24, 2009, at http://www.bloggingheads.tv/diavlogs/24804. Easterly, an economist at New York University, is author of The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good (New York: Penguin, 2006), which has received much attention.
34. See the GiveWell Web site at http://www.givewell.net/.
35. See the Aidwatchers Web site at http://aidwatchers.com. Easterly directs this organization. Another blog, Good Intentions Are Not Enough, offers the views of a former disaster relief worker. These blogs link to other useful sites. The Center for Social Innovation at Stanford University publishes the Stanford Social Innovation Review, online at http://www.ssireview.org/. Charity Navigator assesses the financial health of over 5,400 American charitable organizations, providing information about how contributions are allocated and comparing organizations with similar missions.
36. Singer on bloggingheads.tv; Saundra Shimmelpfennig, "Charity Ratings Based on Administration Costs Can Do More Harm than Good," at Good Intentions Are Not Enough, May 20, 2009.
37. See bloggingheads.tv/diavlogs/2484.
38. "It is not enough to ask, 'Will my act harm other people?' Even if the answer is No, my act may still be wrong, because of its effects on other people. I should ask, 'Will my act be one of a set of acts that will together harm other people?' The answer may be Yes. And the harm to others may be great. If this is so, I may be acting very wrongly" (Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons [Oxford: Clarendon, 1984], 86).
39. For those who believe that animals' interests should not count in a serious way in our moral reflections or calculations, this example can be seen as an analogy; for those who think animals' interests should count, it's simply another relevant case.
40. Williams, "A Critique of Utilitarianism," 97-100.
41. In Williams's version of the example, the person waiting in the wings lacks George's scruples "and is likely to push along the research with greater zeal than George would"
42. (ibid., 98)
43. This detail (which would give George more reason to take the job) does not apply to the cases I am interested in, and I shall ignore it.
44. Ibid., 99.
45. Who is responsible for environmental harms? In a democratic society the people are accountable, but the people's representatives, who have the opportunity to pass laws and enact policies, are more accountable.
46. Williams, "A Critique of Utilitarianism," 99.
47. See also Scheffler, "Individual Responsibility in a Global Age," 223.
48. Scheffler, "Individual Responsibility in a Global Age," 223.
49. See Murphy, "The Demands of Beneficence."
50. Note that talking about "how to live" rather than "what to do" is less likely to lead to negative/positive confusion.
51. This is, of course, an artificial accounting. It is impossible, in theory, to say how much contribution to creating the harm adds to one's duty. And there is no general answer to the question how much more one can help by acting than one can avoiding harming by refraining from acting; the answer will depend on the details of specific cases.
52. See, e.g., Robert Goodin, "Demandingness as a Virtue," Journal of Ethics 13 (2009): 1-13. For a different typology of views than the one I offer here
53. see Samuel Scheffler, "Morality's Demands and Their Limits," Journal of Philosophy 83 (1986), 531-37.
54. Richard Arneson, "Moral Limits on the Demands of Beneficence," in The Ethics of Assistance: Morality and the Distant Needy, ed. Deen K. Chatterjee (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 51-56.
55. For further discussion, see Judith Lichtenberg, "How to Judge Soldiers Whose Cause Is Unjust," in Just and Unjust Warriors, ed. David Rodin and Henry Shue (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 118-22.
56. U.S. v. Carroll Towing Co., 159 F.2d 169 (2d Cir. 1947).
57. But there are differences. Instead of the probabilistic character typical of torts (harms are more or less likely, not certain), we have the fractional contribution any individual's conduct makes to the harm.
58. This is consistent with the sort of account given by Scheffler, described earlier. One might ask whether our psychological reactions themselves have moral significance-whether the fact that people are relatively unfazed by the distant effects of their actions must be factored into moral judgments. I think the answer is that they are relevant to judgments of blameworthiness and character but not directly to judgments of right or wrong action.
59. See Singer, One World, 191-92.
60. See Goodin, "Demandingness as a Virtue";
61. and Arneson, "Moral Limits on the Demands of Beneficence."
62. It is also distinct from the further question of the relationship between what people's duties are and what it is practical or effective to announce is their duty. Those who think publicity is a necessary part of a moral theory will insist that what cannot be announced as duty is not duty; but not everyone will agree. I leave this question open here.
63. Charlie Goodyear, "S.F. First City to Ban Plastic Shopping Bags," San Francisco Chronicle, March 28, 2007.
64. "As much as 45 percent of what we do every day is habitual-that is, performed almost without thinking in the same location or at the same time each day, usually because of subtle cues," according to studies reported in Charles Duhigg, "Warning: Habits May Be Good for You," New York Times, July 13, 2008. The article describes the use of advertising strategies in public health campaigns to change habits such as smoking, drug use, and sanitation practices.
65. For elaboration of these arguments, see Judith Lichtenberg, "Consuming Because Others Consume," Social Theory and Practice 22 (1996): 53-72;
66. reprinted in David Crocker and Toby Linden, eds., Ethics of Consumption: The Good Life, Justice, and Global Stewardship (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997).
67. This is not an entirely attractive motive, but perhaps that doesn't matter.
68. Henry Shue, Basic Rights: Subsistence, Affluence, and U.S. Foreign Policy, 2nd ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996).