Is Failing to Give to Famine Relief Wrong?

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Is Failing to Give toFamine Relief Wrong?
Is Failing to Give toFamine Relief Wrong?
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John Arthur World Hunger and Moral Obligation
Arthurs Central Argument
Singers argument

• Ignores an important moral factor entitlement.
• Requires an overhauling of our moral code, which
  is not required.

The General Principle
Singers General Principle (Arthur calls it the
greater moral evil rule) requires substantial
redistribution of wealth.

• If it is in out power to prevent something bad
  from happening, without thereby sacrificing
  anything of comparable moral importance, we
  ought, morally, to do it.
• Recall pond example The greater moral evil rule
  thus seems a natural way of capturing why we
  think it would be wrong not to help. (545)

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The General Principle

• Moral Equality We are attracted to the idea that
  like amounts of suffering (or the opposite) are
  of equal significance, regardless of who is
  experiencing them Equality demands equal
  consideration of interests as well as respect for
  certain rights. (545)
• If we fail to give to famine relief, instead
  spending our money on a new car or fancy clothes,
  we are giving special consideration to ourselves
  or to our group, like a racist does. Equal
  consideration leads naturally to the greater
  moral evil rule.
• There is, however, a flip-side to equality that
  Singer ignores entitlement, which falls into two
  broad categories.

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Forms of Entitlement (1) Rights
Thought Experiment 1 Where you have two eyes and
two kidneys, some other person is blind or has a
disease that is destroying her kidneys. You can
donate one of your eyes or one of your kidneys,
to restore her sight, or extend her life. Of
course, you will, in doing so, lose something
either depth perception, or, possibly, some life
expectancy. Thought Experiment 2 There is some
person who, we can imagine, will be
psychologically harmed by your not granting
sexual favors to them. Of course, you do not want
to grant such sexual favors, and you will be, in
some less strong way, harmed by granting them.
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Forms of Entitlement (1) Rights (contd)

• According to the General Principle, to be
  justified in refusing, you must show that the
  unpleasantness you would experience is of equal
  importance to the harm you are preventing.
  Otherwise, you must consent.
• If anything is clear, however, it is that our
  code does not require such heroism you are
  entitled to keep your second eye and kidney and
  not bestow sexual favors on anyone who may be
  harmed without them. (546)
• That its your body, and you have a right to it,
  outweighs any duty you have to help.
• (Recall discussion on a womans right to her body
  versus her duty to the fetus.)

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Forms of Entitlement (1) Rights (contd)
Moral rights are divided into two categories

• Negative Rights rights of noninterference.

• The right to life, property rights, the right to
  privacy, etc.
• Negative rights are natural, depending on what
  you are.

• Positive Rights rights of recipience.

• Your legal wards have a right to be fed, clothed,
  and housed.
• Contractual rights, say, in business dealings,
  include the right not to be left holding the bag.
• Positive rights are not natural they arise
  because others have promised, agreed, or
  contracted to give you something.

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Forms of Entitlement (1) Rights (contd)
A duty to help a stranger in need is not the
result of a right he has.

• Such a right would be positive, but you have made
  no promises nor entered into any contract with
  this person, so no such right exists.
• Where the wards of a lifeguard, for instance,
  have a right to the lifeguards help, they do not
  have the same right to help from bystanders.
• Bystanders may act cruelly in not helping a
  drowning child, but they do not thereby violate
  anyones rights.
• We are entitled to invoke our own rights as
  justification for not giving to distant strangers
  or when the cost to us is substantial (an eye or
  a kidney, for example).

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Forms of Entitlement (2) Deserts
The farmer who grows his good deserves it because
he earned it through his hard work.

• A farmers deserts may be outweighed by the needs
  of his neighbors, but this is not to say that his
  deserts have no moral weight.
• Negative Deserts A Nazi war criminal deserves
  punishment, and that will be a reason to send him
  to jail. But if nobody will be deterred by his
  suffering, or if he is old and harmless, this may
  weigh against his punishment. But this doesnt
  mean that he doesnt still deserve punishment.

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Our Moral Code
Where our moral code tends to look to the future
(toward consequences), entitlements look to the
past

• Whether we have rights to our money, property,
  eyes, etc., depends on how we came to acquire
  them.
• Our common moral code requires that we ignore
  neither consequences nor entitlements.
• Rights and deserts should not be discounted when
  considering the morality of our actions.

Are such values as rights and entitlements
outweighed by more fundamental values, such as
fairness, justice, or respect for others?

• There seems no easy way to compare these factors.

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Our Moral Code (contd)
Above all else, the moral code that it is
rational for us to support must be
practicali.e., it must work.

• As such, it must gain the support of (almost)
  everyone.
• An ideal code cannot assume people are more
  unselfish than we are Rules that would work
  only for angels are not the ones it is rational
  to support for humans. (547)
• An ideal code cannot assume we are more objective
  than we are.
• An ideal code cannot assume that we have perfect
  knowledge.

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Our Moral Code (contd)
A reasonable moral code, then, would require
people to help when there is no substantial cost
to themselveswhere helping would not mean
significant reduction in a persons current level
of happiness.

• Getting ones pants muddy would likely not result
  in significant reduction in ones happiness.
• Giving up ones savings, ones eye, or ones
  kidney would likely result in significant
  reduction in ones happiness.
• An ideal moral code would probably not look too
  much different from our current working code.

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Michael Slote Famine, Affluence, and Empathy
Slotes Virtue Ethics
Virtue Ethics of caring built on the tradition of
18th Century sentimentalism.

• Caring is an overall attitude or motivational
  state.
• Roughly, an ethics of caring holds that an act is
  morally right or permissible if it doesnt
  exhibit a lack of caring (not mere neutrality),
  and wrong if it does.
• When I speak of acts exhibiting a caring
  attitude or one inconsistent with caring, the
  caring I am speaking of includes attitudes toward
  distant and personally-unknown others. (548)

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Slotes Virtue Ethics (contd)

• An ethics of caring will hold that it is
  virtuous to be more concerned about near and dear
  than about strangers or those one knows about
  merely by description but it will also insist
  that an ideally or virtuously caring individual
  will be substantially concerned about people who
  are distant from her. (549)
• That we have special or stronger moral
  obligations to those who are (physically or
  sentimentally) closer to us is commonsensically
  appealing.

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Slotes Virtue Ethics (contd)
Rather than sympathy (the word Hume uses in
forming his sentimentalist theory, which today
means, roughly, a favorable attitude toward
someone), Slote is concerned with empathy (the
state or process in which one takes on the
feelings of another).

• Question Is the development of empathy necessary
  to ones development of altruistic concern for
  others?
• Psychology, generally, hypothesizes that caring
  works via empathy, and that morally good caring
  can be specified in relation to the development
  of human empathy.

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Slotes Virtue Ethics (contd)
If we believe that empathy has moral force or
relevance, then we can argue that

• Since it is easier to empathize with another
  adult human than with a squidge
• It is as such morally worse to harm an adult
  human than to do the same to a squidge.
• That is, we can say that an action is right or
  wrong depending on whether or not such actions
  reflect a deficiency of normally or fully-capable
  caring motivation.
• It would then (other things being equal) be
  morally worse to prefer a fetus or embryo to a
  born human being because such a preference runs
  counter to the flow of developed human empathy
  (550)
• Contra Singer, then, a failure to save the life
  of a distant child (by making a charitable
  donation) is not as morally bad as failing to
  save the life of a child drowning in front of
  you.

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Empathy and Spatial Distance
Singer holds that spatial distance simply cannot
be morally relevant to our obligations to aid
others.

• Empathy gives us a firmer basis than distance for
  distinguishing the strength of our obligations in
  the cases Singer compares.
• Spatial distance and (decreasing) empathy do, in
  fact, correlate in a wide variety of cases.
• Such a view can not only help to explain why
  failing to help in the drowning case seems worse
  than a failure to give to famine relief, but it
  can also justify that ordinary moral intuition.

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Empathy and Spatial Distance (contd)

• Turning away from someone we see who is in need
  seems worse than ignoring someone whom one knows
  only by description is in need.

• Our empathic capacities respond to immediacy.
• What makes failing to give aid in the former case
  more objectionable than failing to give aid in
  the latter is, Slote claims, a failure in ones
  empathic response to someone whose need one
  directly perceives.

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Empathy and Temporal Distance
The same principle applies to temporal distance

• Given the choice, we would typically feel more
  compelled to spend money to aid miners trapped in
  a cave-in than to spend that money on shoring up
  other mines to save a greater number of lives in
  the future.
• The danger in the former case engages our
  empathic juices in a way that the danger in the
  latter case does not the danger is not as
  immediate.

In the cases of the miners and of Singers
drowning child vs. famine relief cases, our
negative moral responses to ones choosing to
help in the distant cases rather than the
(proximally or temporally) immediate cases is
explained by some lack of (normal) human empathy
on the part of the agent.
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Obligations and Sacrifice
Current social-psychological research supports
the idea that humans have a substantial capacity
for empathy and for altruistic concerns based on
empathy.

• We are not morally obligated to sacrifice most of
  our time and money to aid others, because a
  failure to do so doesnt evince an absence of
  normal or fully-developed human empathy.
• Such a sacrifice would be morally
  supererogatorymorally praiseworthy and/or good,
  but not (contra Singer) obligatory.
• It may be obligatory for individuals like us to
  make some substantial contribution towards famine
  relief and other causes, but not to the point of
  becoming like a Bengali refugee.