Give till it hurts? Beneficence, imperfect duties, and a moderate response to the aid question

Journal of Social Philosophy

Volumn 40, Issue 1, 2009, Pages 1-16

  Noggle, Robert ^a  

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EID: 84857921009     PISSN: 00472786     EISSN: 14679833     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9833.2009.01435.x     Document Type: Article

References (34)

1. Peter Singer, "Famine, Affluence, and Morality," Philosophy and Public Affairs 1, no. 1 (1972): 229-43.
2. Shelly Kagan, "Does Consequentialism Demand Too Much?" Philosophy and Public Affairs 13, no. 3 (1984): 239.
3. For the term "yuppie ethics," see Marcia Baron, "Kantian Ethics and Supererogation," Journal of Philosophy 84, no. 5 (1987): 249.
4. James Fishkin, The Limits of Obligation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982), 46-59, 70-79.
5. Samuel Scheffler, The Rejection of Consequentialism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), 16-21.
6. For an exception see Tim Mulgan, The Demands of Consequentialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). He addresses the objection just raised by claiming that the prerogative does not relieve us of the obligation to provide emergency aid to "fellow citizens" of our "moral community" because different moral principles apply to them than to the faraway needy (see esp. p. 287). For reasons similar to those found in Timothy Chappell's review of Mulgan's book Mind 111, no. 444 [2002]: 896), I think that the distinction between "fellow citizens" and the distant needy is not sufficiently clear or motivated to do the work Mulgan needs it to do.
7. Liam Murphy, Moral Demands in Nonideal Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 76.
8. Richard Arneson, "Moral Limits on the Demands of Beneficence," in The Ethics of Assistance, ed. Deen Chatterjee (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 37.
9. This is, of course, Singer's famous example from "Famine, Affluence, and Morality," 231.
10. Brad Hooker, Ideal Code, Real World (Oxford: Clarendon, 2000), 166.
11. Mulgan criticizes Hooker's defense of this claim in Demands of Consequentialism, 67-87.
12. Hooker, Ideal Code, 168.
13. Garrett Cullity, The Moral Demands of Affluence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 136-43.
14. Some remarks in Cullity's works (Moral Demands of Affluence, 181-86;
15. and "Moral Character and the Iteration Problem," Utilitas 7, no. 2 [1995]: 289-99) suggest subtler ways to limit beneficence, but they are not sufficiently developed to provide a clear alternative to the capping approach.
16. Murphy, Moral Demands, 71-72.
17. Judith Lichtenberg, "Absence and the Unfond Heart," in The Ethics of Assistance, ed. Deen Chat-terjee (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 96.
18. Daniel Statman, "Who Needs Imperfect Duties?" American Philosophical Quarterly 33, no. 2 (1996): 221-22.
19. Thomas E. Hill, Jr., Dignity and Practical Reason in Kant's Moral Theory (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), 149-50.
20. See also Barbara Herman, The Practice of Moral Judgment (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 63-65;
21. Onora O'Neill, Towards Justice and Virtue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 195-200;
22. and Acting on Principle (New York: Columbia University Press, 1975), 90-91. I am not suggesting that these works get Kant wrong-only that they emphasize just one part of his account of beneficence.
23. Thomas Hill, Jr., Human Welfare and Moral Worth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 206.
24. Marcia Baron, "Kantian Ethics," in Three Methods of Ethics, ed. Marcia Baron, Phillip Pettit, and Michale Slote (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1997), 18;
25. see also her Kantian Ethics (Almost) Without Apology (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), 99-107.
26. Immanuel Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 146-48 (Akademie pagination: 6: 381-83; 6: 390-91).
27. Bernard Williams, "Persons, Character, and Morality," in his Moral Luck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 1-19. Harry Frankfurt develops these themes in much of his work.
28. William Styron, Sophie's Choice (New York: Random House, 1979).
29. Compare Onora O'Neill's suggestion that "a conscientious Kantian, it seems, has only to avoid being unjust to those who suffer famine and can then be beneficent to those nearer home. He or she would not be obliged to help the starving, even if no others were equally distressed." (See Onora O'Neill, "The Moral Perplexities of Famine Relief," in Matters of Life and Death, ed. Tom Regan [Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1980], 289.)
30. Later, however, O'Neill writes that "famine relief must stand very high among duties of beneficence" (p. 292). In matters of global poverty, O'Neill argues that justice rather than beneficence creates the most important duties toward poor nations-duties that fall mainly to states, NGOs, and transnational businesses rather than to individuals. (See Onora O'Neill, Faces of Hunger [London: Allen & Unwin, 1986], 159-63.)
31. Compare Baron, "Kantian Ethics," 17.
32. I draw here on ideas found (among other places) in John Cottingham, "Partiality, Favouritism, and Morality," Philosophical Quarterly 36, no. 144 (1986): 364-66;
33. and Samuel Scheffler, Human Morality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 118-25.
34. Thomas Nagel, The Possibility of Altruism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970), 100.