by Todd May
10 Singer, “Famine, Affluence, and Authority,” 231.
11 Singer, “Famine, Affluence, and Authority,” 241.
12 Singer does not believe that we should treat all persons with equal respect but rather all interests equally. If, for instance, a one person has greater interests at stake than another, those interests should be privileged. This is the source of both of Singer’s most controversial claims: that animal suffering should be treated as just as deserving of moral consideration as an equal amount of human suffering, and that the cognitively disabled should (since they have fewer cognitive interests at stake) be treated more like nonhuman animals. We will return to these ideas in chapter 4.
13 This is a simplified version of an argument offered by Garrett Cullity in The Moral Demands of Affluence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
14 This is a version of an argument offered by Susan Wolf in her article “Moral Saints,” reprinted in her book The Variety of Values: Essays on Morality, Meaning, and Love (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).
15 See, for instance, Michael Slote’s Beyond Optimizing: A Study of Rational Choice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989). A different approach is offered by Samuel Scheffler in The Rejection of Consequentialism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982). He argues that consequentialism should allow for certain “agent-centered prerogatives,” something akin to small moral holidays.
16 Although I should note that Shelly Kagan, in his book The Limits of Morality (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), has offered some interesting arguments in favor of the idea that we should harm one innocent person if it will save two others.
17 Many years ago, for instance, I constructed a form of consequentialism that would avoid this recommendation. See chapter 2 of The Moral Theory of Poststructuralism (University Park: Penn State Press, 1995).
18 This again refers to Kant’s “perfect” rather than “imperfect” duties, the latter of which do admit of the more and the less.
19 I discuss these at length in chapters 3 and 4 of A Significant Life.
20 There is another problem with this approach. It is not clear that any such list of duties would give us proper moral guidance. In an article aptly entitled “Above and Below the Line of Duty,” the philosopher Susan Wolf argues that there are times when acting contrary to duty would be better and perhaps even required, and times when it is permissible not to perform one’s duties. In her argument, she appeals to examples that we have already seen, using them to show that duties, while good rules of thumb, do not always provide the right moral guidance.
Regarding the first, she asks us to consider a situation in which, on the way to our office hours, we see a frail old man inside a house that is on fire. We can save the old man and there is no one else to do it. “Now,” she writes, “it is generally believed that one does not have a duty to rush into a burning building to save the life of a stranger. But surely it would be absurd to be deterred from this act by the thought that one does have a duty to keep office hours” (“Above and Below the Line of Duty,” in The Variety of Values, 207). Here it would be better to act contrary to duty; however, if one is not willing to do so, surely it cannot be for the reason that one has a competing duty to be present at office hours. The duties here cannot determine how we should act.
Alternatively, she asks us to imagine you are in your office hours “when you get a call telling you that your philosophical heroine is in the States on a rare visit. In fact—the caller here apologizes for the late notice—she is giving a lecture this very afternoon at another university in a nearby town. There would even be a place for you at dinner” (210). Here it would seem permissible to act “below the line” of duty rather than, as in the previous case, above it.
All this, as Wolf mentions, is not to deny that there are duties or that we should for the most part fulfill them. Her point instead is that thinking in terms of duties cannot act as the final arbiter of what we should or should not do, or of what is and is not permissible. As she puts the point, “there is a line of duty, but it is, necessarily, a dotted line” (200). If we are to understand our moral space aright, we cannot simply rely on a set of duties to tell us its contours.
21 To pick one of many examples, Thomas Nagel gets at a similar idea in The Possibility of Altruism (Oxford: Clarendon) when he writes, “Recognition of the other person’s reality, and the possibility of putting yourself in his place, is essential,” 83.
22 Todd May, Nonviolent Resistance: A Philosophical Introduction (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2015), 51.
23 Singer, “Famine, Affluence, and Authority,” 231.
24 Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, 1094b25.
25 Those who are familiar with the history of moral philosophy will see parallels between the structure of my discussion and those of the eighteenth-century philosopher David Hume; others will find resonance with the thought of the ancient Chinese philosopher Confucius. For Hume, morality is rooted in the sympathy people have for their immediate fellows. “Sympathy,” he writes, “is the chief source of moral distinctions” (David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. David Fate Norton and Mary J. Norton [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000], 394). Sympathy, however, is local. It arises with those in our immediate surroundings. There is no such thing as an abstract love of justice or sympathy with those who are distant from us. Therefore, “the sense of justice and injustice is not deriv’d from nature, but arises artificially, tho’ necessarily from education and human convention.” We start from sympathy toward those immediately around us, and through “education and human convention” can extend and modify that sympathy such that we can form a sense of justice regarding our larger social setting.
Confucius view was similar. For him, the proper form of moral development starts from the right relation to one’s family and extends outward from there. (I am indebted to an anonymous reader for calling my attention to this point.)
Although my approach is like Hume’s and Confucius’s in that way, I don’t want to claim that our moral relations to others necessarily unfold through the extension and modification of sympathy or empathy or proper filial relationships. As we will see in chapter 2, there are debates about the respective roles of empathy and reason in grounding our moral relations with others. The parallels with Hume and Confucius are methodological rather than substantial; that is, they are grounded in ease of presentation rather than in a particular commitment to how morality develops or emerges within us. It may be that a moral sense or moral commitments arise differently for different people. I simply don’t know. The only commitment I have to this way of proceeding—from the morally near to the morally more distant—is that it will be easier to present things that way. My goal is not to offer a theory of moral development but only a framework for thinking about mundane moral activity.
Chapter Two
1 The account here, including the quotes, is taken from Eli Saslow, “The White Flight of Derek Black,” Washington Post, October 15, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/the-white-flight-of-derek-black/2016/10/15/ed5f906a-8f3b-11e6-a6a3-d50061aa9fae_story.html.
2 See Black’s discussion in the New York Times, “Why I Left White Nationalism,” November 26, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/26/opinion/sunday/why-i-left-white-nationalism.html.
3 Among the most famous philosophers to write about the face of the other is the French thinker Emmanuel Levinas. See, for instance, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1969). He thinks of the experience face of the other as involving a confrontation with the other’s infinite otherness. In contrast, I think the experience is not something other, but rather something like Hume’s sympathy, discussed in the previous chapter. Rather than alterity it is an intimate sense of similarity that we are faced with. I argue for this in chapter 3 Reconsidering Difference: Nancy, Derrida, Levinas, Deleuze (University Park: Penn State Press, 1997).
4 John Protevi, “The Act
of Killing in Contemporary Warfare,” in Life, War, Earth: Deleuze and the Sciences (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 62, 65. Levinas offers a biblical interpretation of this idea when he writes, “The first word of the face is ‘Thou shalt not kill.’” Levinas, Emmanuel, Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1995), 89.
5 For more on Mitch Snyder’s life, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitch_Snyder.
6 These examples have been gathered from other articles by Yotam Benziman in “The Ethics of Common Decency,” Journal of Value Inquiry 48, no. 1 (2014), 87–94. His purpose in the piece is to offer a general interpretation of the role of common decency in reinforcing the fabric of society. A sensitive discussion of common decency is offered by Cheshire Calhoun in her essay, “Common Decency” in Moral Aims: Essays on the Importance of Getting It Right (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). There she casts common decency as essential to a “minimally well-formed agent.” Another interesting discussion is provided by John Kekes in chapter 3 of Moral Tradition and Individuality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989). He distinguishes between “rule-following” decency and “identity-conferring” decency: “Rule-following decency is to do what social morality prescribes. Identity-conferring decency is to do so because the agent feels a deep allegiance to social morality” (84). The latter involves a more engaged relationship to one’s fellows and the society in which one finds oneself.
7 The Analects of Confucius, trans. Arthur Waley (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), 86.
8 This is Benziman’s point in the article.
9 Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority (New York: Harper and Row, 1974).
10 Aaron James, Assholes: A Theory (New York: Doubleday, 2014), 4–5.
11 James, Assholes, 23.
12 Modern social contract theory finds its roots in Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan, although it appears as early as Plato’s Republic. Among more contemporary examples, T. M. Scanlon’s What We Owe to Each Other (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998) is important, although the locus classicus for current discussion is John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971). One thing that has always annoyed me about the title of Scanlon’s book, important though the book is, is that it is grammatically incorrect. The proper title would be What We Owe to One Another, since it is a theory of social contract, not of duties owed between two people.
13 Singer, The Most Good You Can Do: How Effective Altruism Is Changing Ideas about Living Ethically (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015), 102.
14 Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982).
15 Here is a chart of his six stages.
Premoral Level
Stage 1: Punishment-Avoidance and Obedience
Make moral decisions strictly on the basis of self-interests. Disobey rules if can do so without getting caught.
Stage 2: Exchange of Favors
Recognize that others have needs, but make satisfaction of own needs a higher priority
Conventional Level
Stage 3: Good Boy/Good Girl
Make decisions on the basis of what will please others. Concerned about maintaining interpersonal relations.
Stage 4: Law and Order
Look to society as a whole for guidelines about behavior. Think of rules as inflexible, unchangeable.
Principled Level
Stage 5: Social Contract
Recognize that rules are social agreements that can be changed when necessary.
Stage 6: Universal Ethical Principle
Adhere to a small number of abstract principles that transcend specific, concrete rules. Answer to an inner conscience.
SOURCE: https://thesacredprofession.wordpress.com/2012/08/31/classroom-management-kohlbergs-stages-of-moral-development/
16 Gilligan, In a Different Voice, 22.
17 Virginia Held, The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, and Global (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 46.
18 Held, Ethics of Care, 10–12.
19 For more on Molly Rush’s life, see Liane Norman’s Hammer of Justice: Molly Rush and the Plowshares Eight (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2016).
20 See “Does Empathy Guide or Hinder Moral Action?” in the Room for Debate section of the New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2016/12/29/does-empathy-guide-or-hinder-moral-action.
21 Held, Ethics of Care, 41.
22 For an interesting and sensitive discussion of this issue, see Barbara Herman’s “The Practice of Moral Judgment,” in The Practice of Moral Judgment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).
23 Susan Wolf, “Morality and Partiality,” in her book The Variety of Values: Essays on Morality, Meaning, and Love (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 41.
24 Wolf, “Morality and Partiality,” 44.
Chapter Three
1 Kant discusses benevolence in The Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals as an imperfect duty, that is, a duty that one performs when one can rather than all the time. So while for Kant telling the truth is a perfect duty—one can never lie—benevolence is an imperfect duty—one should engage in it when one can. The discussion of benevolence in this chapter has affinities with Kant’s view, but it is grounded in a very different perspective on morality.
2 Kagan, Limits of Morality, 21, 22.
3 Kagan clarifies his conception of impartiality on pages 62–63, noting that by impartiality he means, “if one outcome is objectively better than another, it is so for everyone, and everyone has a reason to promote it” (62).
4 Wolf, “Morality and Impartiality,” 42.
5 There is a complication here, which is why I added the word “largely.” Wolf’s conception of an impartial morality seems to be in conflict with the ethics of care discussed in the previous chapter. For Wolf, partial emotions such as love are outside an impartial morality, and sometimes in conflict with it. For Held, by contrast, caring is part of an adequate morality. She reserves the idea of justice for a more impartial view. The issue here is whether morality should or should not encompass partiality. On the one hand I believe there can be conflict between one’s partial feelings and morality. In the case of the mother hiding her child, Wolf writes, “To describe the woman’s conflict as one between morality and the bonds of love seems to me to capture or preserve the split, almost schizophrenic reaction I think we ought to have to her dilemma” (“Morality and Partiality,” 44). This seems right, at least to me. On the other hand, Held seems right in saying that care is an important component of our moral relationships toward others; care leads us toward acting more properly in regard to others (although recall the limits of empathy discussed in the previous chapter). My own way of resolving this tension is to say that care is an important component of our moral relations with others, particularly in face-to-face interaction, but that moral judgment should be impartial: that is, when asking about what should or should not happen or have happened in a situation from a moral perspective, one should occupy the impartial standpoint advocated by Wolf.
6 For more on this, see Barry Estabrook’s Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit (Andrew Meel Publishing, 2011).
7 Stephen Gardiner, A Perfect Moral Storm: The Ethical Tragedy of Climate Change (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
8 This is from Parfit’s Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 358.
9 He offers this solution in chapter 16 of Reasons and Persons, but in the following chapters considers a number of complications to his initial solution. Essentially, he argues that we need our moral considerations in these issues to be more “impersonal,” that is, focusing on how much good we can contribute rather than the particular people who might or might not be affected. But as he admits, this solution works for future generations only where there would be the same number of people in o
ne future scenario as in another. He wanted to work out how to think about “different number” scenarios but died before he could come up with a solution for that.
10 Chapter 5 of John Broome’s Climate Matters: Ethics in a Warming World (New York: W.W. Norton, 2012) is what convinced me. Although Broome is clear that much of the onus for addressing climate change falls on governmental policy, his case for carbon offsets is a compelling one. After reading the book I emailed him to let him know that his was the most expensive book I had ever read, costing me not only the list price of $23.95 but an additional $1,000 a year.
Chapter Four
1 For a nuanced discussion of this conundrum, see Jeff McMahan’s “Eating Animals the Nice Way,” Daedalus, 2008, 1–11.
2 The term was first introduced by James Rachels in his book Created from Animals: The Moral Implications of Darwinism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990). He writes, “If we think it is wrong to treat a human in a certain way, because the human has certain characteristics, and a particular nonhuman animal also has those characteristics, then consistency requires that we also object to treating the nonhuman animal in that way” (175). Moral individualism has been richly debated in philosophy. One of its key recent defenders is Jeff McMahan. See, for instance, The Ethics of Killing: Problems at the Margins of Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), esp. 203–32, and “Our Fellow Creatures,” Journal of Ethics 9, no. 3/4 (2005), 353–80.