Saturday, April 28, 2007










The man who runs this won the 2006 Nobel Peace prize for his micro-financing projects.
Posted by at No comments:
What Should A Billionaire Give -- and What Should You?



December 17, 2006
By PETER SINGER
The New York Times

What is a human life worth? You may not want to put a price tag on a it. But if we really had to, most of us would agree that the value of a human life would be in the millions. Consistent with the foundations of our democracy and our frequently professed belief in the inherent dignity of human beings, we would also agree that all humans are created equal, at least to the extent of denying that differences of sex, ethnicity, nationality and place of residence change the value of a human life.

With Christmas approaching, and Americans writing checks to their favorite charities, it’s a good time to ask how these two beliefs — that a human life, if it can be priced at all, is worth millions, and that the factors I have mentioned do not alter the value of a human life — square with our actions. Perhaps this year such questions lurk beneath the surface of more family discussions than usual, for it has been an extraordinary year for philanthropy, especially philanthropy to fight global poverty.

For Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, the ideal of valuing all human life equally began to jar against reality some years ago, when he read an article about diseases in the developing world and came across the statistic that half a million children die every year from rotavirus, the most common cause of severe diarrhea in children. He had never heard of rotavirus. “How could I never have heard of something that kills half a million children every year?” he asked himself. He then learned that in developing countries, millions of children die from diseases that have been eliminated, or virtually eliminated, in the United States. That shocked him because he assumed that, if there are vaccines and treatments that could save lives, governments would be doing everything possible to get them to the people who need them. As Gates told a meeting of the World Health Assembly in Geneva last year, he and his wife, Melinda, “couldn’t escape the brutal conclusion that — in our world today — some lives are seen as worth saving and others are not.” They said to themselves, “This can’t be true.” But they knew it was.

Gates’s speech to the World Health Assembly concluded on an optimistic note, looking forward to the next decade when “people will finally accept that the death of a child in the developing world is just as tragic as the death of a child in the developed world.” That belief in the equal value of all human life is also prominent on the Web site of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, where under Our Values we read: “All lives — no matter where they are being led — have equal value.”

We are very far from acting in accordance with that belief. In the same world in which more than a billion people live at a level of affluence never previously known, roughly a billion other people struggle to survive on the purchasing power equivalent of less than one U.S. dollar per day. Most of the world’s poorest people are undernourished, lack access to safe drinking water or even the most basic health services and cannot send their children to school. According to Unicef, more than 10 million children die every year — about 30,000 per day — from avoidable, poverty-related causes.

Last June the investor Warren Buffett took a significant step toward reducing those deaths when he pledged $31 billion to the Gates Foundation, and another $6 billion to other charitable foundations. Buffett’s pledge, set alongside the nearly $30 billion given by Bill and Melinda Gates to their foundation, has made it clear that the first decade of the 21st century is a new “golden age of philanthropy.” On an inflation-adjusted basis, Buffett has pledged to give more than double the lifetime total given away by two of the philanthropic giants of the past, Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller, put together. Bill and Melinda Gates’s gifts are not far behind.

Gates’s and Buffett’s donations will now be put to work primarily to reduce poverty, disease and premature death in the developing world. According to the Global Forum for Health Research, less than 10 percent of the world’s health research budget is spent on combating conditions that account for 90 percent of the global burden of disease. In the past, diseases that affect only the poor have been of no commercial interest to pharmaceutical manufacturers, because the poor cannot afford to buy their products. The Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI), heavily supported by the Gates Foundation, seeks to change this by guaranteeing to purchase millions of doses of vaccines, when they are developed, that can prevent diseases like malaria. GAVI has also assisted developing countries to immunize more people with existing vaccines: 99 million additional children have been reached to date. By doing this, GAVI claims to have already averted nearly 1.7 million future deaths.

Philanthropy on this scale raises many ethical questions: Why are the people who are giving doing so? Does it do any good? Should we praise them for giving so much or criticize them for not giving still more? Is it troubling that such momentous decisions are made by a few extremely wealthy individuals? And how do our judgments about them reflect on our own way of living?

Let’s start with the question of motives. The rich must — or so some of us with less money like to assume — suffer sleepless nights because of their ruthlessness in squeezing out competitors, firing workers, shutting down plants or whatever else they have to do to acquire their wealth. When wealthy people give away money, we can always say that they are doing it to ease their consciences or generate favorable publicity. It has been suggested — by, for example, David Kirkpatrick, a senior editor at Fortune magazine — that Bill Gates’s turn to philanthropy was linked to the antitrust problems Microsoft had in the U.S. and the European Union. Was Gates, consciously or subconsciously, trying to improve his own image and that of his company?

This kind of sniping tells us more about the attackers than the attacked. Giving away large sums, rather than spending the money on corporate advertising or developing new products, is not a sensible strategy for increasing personal wealth. When we read that someone has given away a lot of their money, or time, to help others, it challenges us to think about our own behavior. Should we be following their example, in our own modest way? But if the rich just give their money away to improve their image, or to make up for past misdeeds — misdeeds quite unlike any we have committed, of course — then, conveniently, what they are doing has no relevance to what we ought to do.

A famous story is told about Thomas Hobbes, the 17th-century English philosopher, who argued that we all act in our own interests. On seeing him give alms to a beggar, a cleric asked Hobbes if he would have done this if Christ had not commanded us to do so. Yes, Hobbes replied, he was in pain to see the miserable condition of the old man, and his gift, by providing the man with some relief from that misery, also eased Hobbes’s pain. That reply reconciles Hobbes’s charity with his egoistic theory of human motivation, but at the cost of emptying egoism of much of its bite. If egoists suffer when they see a stranger in distress, they are capable of being as charitable as any altruist.

Followers of the 18th-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant would disagree. They think an act has moral worth only if it is done out of a sense of duty. Doing something merely because you enjoy doing it, or enjoy seeing its consequences, they say, has no moral worth, because if you happened not to enjoy doing it, then you wouldn’t do it, and you are not responsible for your likes and dislikes, whereas you are responsible for your obedience to the demands of duty.

Perhaps some philanthropists are motivated by their sense of duty. Apart from the equal value of all human life, the other “simple value” that lies at the core of the work of the Gates Foundation, according to its Web site, is “To whom much has been given, much is expected.” That suggests the view that those who have great wealth have a duty to use it for a larger purpose than their own interests. But while such questions of motive may be relevant to our assessment of Gates’s or Buffett’s character, they pale into insignificance when we consider the effect of what Gates and Buffett are doing. The parents whose children could die from rotavirus care more about getting the help that will save their children’s lives than about the motivations of those who make that possible.

Interestingly, neither Gates nor Buffett seems motivated by the possibility of being rewarded in heaven for his good deeds on earth. Gates told a Time interviewer, “There’s a lot more I could be doing on a Sunday morning” than going to church. Put them together with Andrew Carnegie, famous for his freethinking, and three of the four greatest American philanthropists have been atheists or agnostics. (The exception is John D. Rockefeller.) In a country in which 96 percent of the population say they believe in a supreme being, that’s a striking fact. It means that in one sense, Gates and Buffett are probably less self-interested in their charity than someone like Mother Teresa, who as a pious Roman Catholic believed in reward and punishment in the afterlife.

More important than questions about motives are questions about whether there is an obligation for the rich to give, and if so, how much they should give. A few years ago, an African-American cabdriver taking me to the Inter-American Development Bank in Washington asked me if I worked at the bank. I told him I did not but was speaking at a conference on development and aid. He then assumed that I was an economist, but when I said no, my training was in philosophy, he asked me if I thought the U.S. should give foreign aid. When I answered affirmatively, he replied that the government shouldn’t tax people in order to give their money to others. That, he thought, was robbery. When I asked if he believed that the rich should voluntarily donate some of what they earn to the poor, he said that if someone had worked for his money, he wasn’t going to tell him what to do with it.

At that point we reached our destination. Had the journey continued, I might have tried to persuade him that people can earn large amounts only when they live under favorable social circumstances, and that they don’t create those circumstances by themselves. I could have quoted Warren Buffett’s acknowledgment that society is responsible for much of his wealth. “If you stick me down in the middle of Bangladesh or Peru,” he said, “you’ll find out how much this talent is going to produce in the wrong kind of soil.” The Nobel Prize-winning economist and social scientist Herbert Simon estimated that “social capital” is responsible for at least 90 percent of what people earn in wealthy societies like those of the United States or northwestern Europe. By social capital Simon meant not only natural resources but, more important, the technology and organizational skills in the community, and the presence of good government. These are the foundation on which the rich can begin their work. “On moral grounds,” Simon added, “we could argue for a flat income tax of 90 percent.” Simon was not, of course, advocating so steep a rate of tax, for he was well aware of disincentive effects. But his estimate does undermine the argument that the rich are entitled to keep their wealth because it is all a result of their hard work. If Simon is right, that is true of at most 10 percent of it.

In any case, even if we were to grant that people deserve every dollar they earn, that doesn’t answer the question of what they should do with it. We might say that they have a right to spend it on lavish parties, private jets and luxury yachts, or, for that matter, to flush it down the toilet. But we could still think that for them to do these things while others die from easily preventable diseases is wrong. In an article I wrote more than three decades ago, at the time of a humanitarian emergency in what is now Bangladesh, I used the example of walking by a shallow pond and seeing a small child who has fallen in and appears to be in danger of drowning. Even though we did nothing to cause the child to fall into the pond, almost everyone agrees that if we can save the child at minimal inconvenience or trouble to ourselves, we ought to do so. Anything else would be callous, indecent and, in a word, wrong. The fact that in rescuing the child we may, for example, ruin a new pair of shoes is not a good reason for allowing the child to drown. Similarly if for the cost of a pair of shoes we can contribute to a health program in a developing country that stands a good chance of saving the life of a child, we ought to do so.

Perhaps, though, our obligation to help the poor is even stronger than this example implies, for we are less innocent than the passer-by who did nothing to cause the child to fall into the pond. Thomas Pogge, a philosopher at Columbia University, has argued that at least some of our affluence comes at the expense of the poor. He bases this claim not simply on the usual critique of the barriers that Europe and the United States maintain against agricultural imports from developing countries but also on less familiar aspects of our trade with developing countries. For example, he points out that international corporations are willing to make deals to buy natural resources from any government, no matter how it has come to power. This provides a huge financial incentive for groups to try to overthrow the existing government. Successful rebels are rewarded by being able to sell off the nation’s oil, minerals or timber.

In their dealings with corrupt dictators in developing countries, Pogge asserts, international corporations are morally no better than someone who knowingly buys stolen goods — with the difference that the international legal and political order recognizes the corporations, not as criminals in possession of stolen goods but as the legal owners of the goods they have bought. This situation is, of course, beneficial for the industrial nations, because it enables us to obtain the raw materials we need to maintain our prosperity, but it is a disaster for resource-rich developing countries, turning the wealth that should benefit them into a curse that leads to a cycle of coups, civil wars and corruption and is of little benefit to the people as a whole.

In this light, our obligation to the poor is not just one of providing assistance to strangers but one of compensation for harms that we have caused and are still causing them. It might be argued that we do not owe the poor compensation, because our affluence actually benefits them. Living luxuriously, it is said, provides employment, and so wealth trickles down, helping the poor more effectively than aid does. But the rich in industrialized nations buy virtually nothing that is made by the very poor. During the past 20 years of economic globalization, although expanding trade has helped lift many of the world’s poor out of poverty, it has failed to benefit the poorest 10 percent of the world’s population. Some of the extremely poor, most of whom live in sub-Saharan Africa, have nothing to sell that rich people want, while others lack the infrastructure to get their goods to market. If they can get their crops to a port, European and U.S. subsidies often mean that they cannot sell them, despite — as for example in the case of West African cotton growers who compete with vastly larger and richer U.S. cotton producers — having a lower production cost than the subsidized producers in the rich nations.

The remedy to these problems, it might reasonably be suggested, should come from the state, not from private philanthropy. When aid comes through the government, everyone who earns above the tax-free threshold contributes something, with more collected from those with greater ability to pay. Much as we may applaud what Gates and Buffett are doing, we can also be troubled by a system that leaves the fate of hundreds of millions of people hanging on the decisions of two or three private citizens. But the amount of foreign development aid given by the U.S. government is, at 22 cents for every $100 the nation earns, about the same, as a percentage of gross national income, as Portugal gives and about half that of the U.K. Worse still, much of it is directed where it best suits U.S. strategic interests — Iraq is now by far the largest recipient of U.S. development aid, and Egypt, Jordan, Pakistan and Afghanistan all rank in the Top 10. Less than a quarter of official U.S. development aid — barely a nickel in every $100 of our G.N.I. — goes to the world’s poorest nations.

Adding private philanthropy to U.S. government aid improves this picture, because Americans privately give more per capita to international philanthropic causes than the citizens of almost any other nation. Even when private donations are included, however, countries like Norway, Denmark, Sweden and the Netherlands give three or four times as much foreign aid, in proportion to the size of their economies, as the U.S. gives — with a much larger percentage going to the poorest nations. At least as things now stand, the case for philanthropic efforts to relieve global poverty is not susceptible to the argument that the government has taken care of the problem. And even if official U.S. aid were better-directed and comparable, relative to our gross domestic product, with that of the most generous nations, there would still be a role for private philanthropy. Unconstrained by diplomatic considerations or the desire to swing votes at the United Nations, private donors can more easily avoid dealing with corrupt or wasteful governments. They can go directly into the field, working with local villages and grass-roots organizations.

Nor are philanthropists beholden to lobbyists. As The New York Times reported recently, billions of dollars of U.S. aid is tied to domestic goods. Wheat for Africa must be grown in America, although aid experts say this often depresses local African markets, reducing the incentive for farmers there to produce more. In a decision that surely costs lives, hundreds of millions of condoms intended to stop the spread of AIDS in Africa and around the world must be manufactured in the U.S., although they cost twice as much as similar products made in Asia.

In other ways, too, private philanthropists are free to venture where governments fear to tread. Through a foundation named for his wife, Susan Thompson Buffett, Warren Buffett has supported reproductive rights, including family planning and pro-choice organizations. In another unusual initiative, he has pledged $50 million for the International Atomic Energy Agency’s plan to establish a “fuel bank” to supply nuclear-reactor fuel to countries that meet their nuclear-nonproliferation commitments. The idea, which has been talked about for many years, is widely agreed to be a useful step toward discouraging countries from building their own facilities for producing nuclear fuel, which could then be diverted to weapons production. It is, Buffett said, “an investment in a safer world.” Though it is something that governments could and should be doing, no government had taken the first step.

Aid has always had its critics. Carefully planned and intelligently directed private philanthropy may be the best answer to the claim that aid doesn’t work. Of course, as in any large-scale human enterprise, some aid can be ineffective. But provided that aid isn’t actually counterproductive, even relatively inefficient assistance is likely to do more to advance human wellbeing than luxury spending by the wealthy.

The rich, then, should give. But how much should they give? Gates may have given away nearly $30 billion, but that still leaves him sitting at the top of the Forbes list of the richest Americans, with $53 billion. His 66,000-square-foot high-tech lakeside estate near Seattle is reportedly worth more than $100 million. Property taxes are about $1 million. Among his possessions is the Leicester Codex, the only handwritten book by Leonardo da Vinci still in private hands, for which he paid $30.8 million in 1994. Has Bill Gates done enough? More pointedly, you might ask: if he really believes that all lives have equal value, what is he doing living in such an expensive house and owning a Leonardo Codex? Are there no more lives that could be saved by living more modestly and adding the money thus saved to the amount he has already given?

Yet we should recognize that, if judged by the proportion of his wealth that he has given away, Gates compares very well with most of the other people on the Forbes 400 list, including his former colleague and Microsoft co-founder, Paul Allen. Allen, who left the company in 1983, has given, over his lifetime, more than $800 million to philanthropic causes. That is far more than nearly any of us will ever be able to give. But Forbes lists Allen as the fifth-richest American, with a net worth of $16 billion. He owns the Seattle Seahawks, the Portland Trailblazers, a 413-foot oceangoing yacht that carries two helicopters and a 60-foot submarine. He has given only about 5 percent of his total wealth.

Is there a line of moral adequacy that falls between the 5 percent that Allen has given away and the roughly 35 percent that Gates has donated? Few people have set a personal example that would allow them to tell Gates that he has not given enough, but one who could is Zell Kravinsky. A few years ago, when he was in his mid-40s, Kravinsky gave almost all of his $45 million real estate fortune to health-related charities, retaining only his modest family home in Jenkintown, near Philadelphia, and enough to meet his family’s ordinary expenses. After learning that thousands of people with failing kidneys die each year while waiting for a transplant, he contacted a Philadelphia hospital and donated one of his kidneys to a complete stranger.

After reading about Kravinsky in The New Yorker, I invited him to speak to my classes at Princeton. He comes across as anguished by the failure of others to see the simple logic that lies behind his altruism. Kravinsky has a mathematical mind — a talent that obviously helped him in deciding what investments would prove profitable — and he says that the chances of dying as a result of donating a kidney are about 1 in 4,000. For him this implies that to withhold a kidney from someone who would otherwise die means valuing one’s own life at 4,000 times that of a stranger, a ratio Kravinsky considers “obscene.”

What marks Kravinsky from the rest of us is that he takes the equal value of all human life as a guide to life, not just as a nice piece of rhetoric. He acknowledges that some people think he is crazy, and even his wife says she believes that he goes too far. One of her arguments against the kidney donation was that one of their children may one day need a kidney, and Zell could be the only compatible donor. Kravinsky’s love for his children is, as far as I can tell, as strong as that of any normal parent. Such attachments are part of our nature, no doubt the product of our evolution as mammals who give birth to children, who for an unusually long time require our assistance in order to survive. But that does not, in Kravinsky’s view, justify our placing a value on the lives of our children that is thousands of times greater than the value we place on the lives of the children of strangers. Asked if he would allow his child to die if it would enable a thousand children to live, Kravinsky said yes. Indeed, he has said he would permit his child to die even if this enabled only two other children to live. Nevertheless, to appease his wife, he recently went back into real estate, made some money and bought the family a larger home. But he still remains committed to giving away as much as possible, subject only to keeping his domestic life reasonably tranquil.

Buffett says he believes in giving his children “enough so they feel they could do anything, but not so much that they could do nothing.” That means, in his judgment, “a few hundred thousand” each. In absolute terms, that is far more than most Americans are able to leave their children and, by Kravinsky’s standard, certainly too much. (Kravinsky says that the hard part is not giving away the first $45 million but the last $10,000, when you have to live so cheaply that you can’t function in the business world.) But even if Buffett left each of his three children a million dollars each, he would still have given away more than 99.99 percent of his wealth. When someone does that much — especially in a society in which the norm is to leave most of your wealth to your children — it is better to praise them than to cavil about the extra few hundred thousand dollars they might have given.

Philosophers like Liam Murphy of New York University and my colleague Kwame Anthony Appiah at Princeton contend that our obligations are limited to carrying our fair share of the burden of relieving global poverty. They would have us calculate how much would be required to ensure that the world’s poorest people have a chance at a decent life, and then divide this sum among the affluent. That would give us each an amount to donate, and having given that, we would have fulfilled our obligations to the poor.

What might that fair amount be? One way of calculating it would be to take as our target, at least for the next nine years, the Millennium Development Goals, set by the United Nations Millennium Summit in 2000. On that occasion, the largest gathering of world leaders in history jointly pledged to meet, by 2015, a list of goals that include:

Reducing by half the proportion of the world’s people in extreme poverty (defined as living on less than the purchasing-power equivalent of one U.S. dollar per day).

Reducing by half the proportion of people who suffer from hunger.

Ensuring that children everywhere are able to take a full course of primary schooling.

Ending sex disparity in education.

Reducing by two-thirds the mortality rate among children under 5.

Reducing by three-quarters the rate of maternal mortality.

Halting and beginning to reverse the spread of H.I.V./AIDS and halting and beginning to reduce the incidence of malaria and other major diseases.

Reducing by half the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water.

Last year a United Nations task force, led by the Columbia University economist Jeffrey Sachs, estimated the annual cost of meeting these goals to be $121 billion in 2006, rising to $189 billion by 2015. When we take account of existing official development aid promises, the additional amount needed each year to meet the goals is only $48 billion for 2006 and $74 billion for 2015.

Now let’s look at the incomes of America’s rich and superrich, and ask how much they could reasonably give. The task is made easier by statistics recently provided by Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, economists at the École Normale Supérieure, Paris-Jourdan, and the University of California, Berkeley, respectively, based on U.S. tax data for 2004. Their figures are for pretax income, excluding income from capital gains, which for the very rich are nearly always substantial. For simplicity I have rounded the figures, generally downward. Note too that the numbers refer to “tax units,” that is, in many cases, families rather than individuals.

Piketty and Saez’s top bracket comprises 0.01 percent of U.S. taxpayers. There are 14,400 of them, earning an average of $12,775,000, with total earnings of $184 billion. The minimum annual income in this group is more than $5 million, so it seems reasonable to suppose that they could, without much hardship, give away a third of their annual income, an average of $4.3 million each, for a total of around $61 billion. That would still leave each of them with an annual income of at least $3.3 million.

Next comes the rest of the top 0.1 percent (excluding the category just described, as I shall do henceforth). There are 129,600 in this group, with an average income of just over $2 million and a minimum income of $1.1 million. If they were each to give a quarter of their income, that would yield about $65 billion, and leave each of them with at least $846,000 annually.

The top 0.5 percent consists of 575,900 taxpayers, with an average income of $623,000 and a minimum of $407,000. If they were to give one-fifth of their income, they would still have at least $325,000 each, and they would be giving a total of $72 billion.

Coming down to the level of those in the top 1 percent, we find 719,900 taxpayers with an average income of $327,000 and a minimum of $276,000. They could comfortably afford to give 15 percent of their income. That would yield $35 billion and leave them with at least $234,000.

Finally, the remainder of the nation’s top 10 percent earn at least $92,000 annually, with an average of $132,000. There are nearly 13 million in this group. If they gave the traditional tithe — 10 percent of their income, or an average of $13,200 each — this would yield about $171 billion and leave them a minimum of $83,000.

You could spend a long time debating whether the fractions of income I have suggested for donation constitute the fairest possible scheme. Perhaps the sliding scale should be steeper, so that the superrich give more and the merely comfortable give less. And it could be extended beyond the Top 10 percent of American families, so that everyone able to afford more than the basic necessities of life gives something, even if it is as little as 1 percent. Be that as it may, the remarkable thing about these calculations is that a scale of donations that is unlikely to impose significant hardship on anyone yields a total of $404 billion — from just 10 percent of American families.

Obviously, the rich in other nations should share the burden of relieving global poverty. The U.S. is responsible for 36 percent of the gross domestic product of all Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development nations. Arguably, because the U.S. is richer than all other major nations, and its wealth is more unevenly distributed than wealth in almost any other industrialized country, the rich in the U.S. should contribute more than 36 percent of total global donations. So somewhat more than 36 percent of all aid to relieve global poverty should come from the U.S. For simplicity, let’s take half as a fair share for the U.S. On that basis, extending the scheme I have suggested worldwide would provide $808 billion annually for development aid. That’s more than six times what the task force chaired by Sachs estimated would be required for 2006 in order to be on track to meet the Millennium Development Goals, and more than 16 times the shortfall between that sum and existing official development aid commitments.

If we are obliged to do no more than our fair share of eliminating global poverty, the burden will not be great. But is that really all we ought to do? Since we all agree that fairness is a good thing, and none of us like doing more because others don’t pull their weight, the fair-share view is attractive. In the end, however, I think we should reject it. Let’s return to the drowning child in the shallow pond. Imagine it is not 1 small child who has fallen in, but 50 children. We are among 50 adults, unrelated to the children, picnicking on the lawn around the pond. We can easily wade into the pond and rescue the children, and the fact that we would find it cold and unpleasant sloshing around in the knee-deep muddy water is no justification for failing to do so. The “fair share” theorists would say that if we each rescue one child, all the children will be saved, and so none of us have an obligation to save more than one. But what if half the picnickers prefer staying clean and dry to rescuing any children at all? Is it acceptable if the rest of us stop after we have rescued just one child, knowing that we have done our fair share, but that half the children will drown? We might justifiably be furious with those who are not doing their fair share, but our anger with them is not a reason for letting the children die. In terms of praise and blame, we are clearly right to condemn, in the strongest terms, those who do nothing. In contrast, we may withhold such condemnation from those who stop when they have done their fair share. Even so, they have let children drown when they could easily have saved them, and that is wrong.

Similarly, in the real world, it should be seen as a serious moral failure when those with ample income do not do their fair share toward relieving global poverty. It isn’t so easy, however, to decide on the proper approach to take to those who limit their contribution to their fair share when they could easily do more and when, because others are not playing their part, a further donation would assist many in desperate need. In the privacy of our own judgment, we should believe that it is wrong not to do more. But whether we should actually criticize people who are doing their fair share, but no more than that, depends on the psychological impact that such criticism will have on them, and on others. This in turn may depend on social practices. If the majority are doing little or nothing, setting a standard higher than the fair-share level may seem so demanding that it discourages people who are willing to make an equitable contribution from doing even that. So it may be best to refrain from criticizing those who achieve the fair-share level. In moving our society’s standards forward, we may have to progress one step at a time.

For more than 30 years, I’ve been reading, writing and teaching about the ethical issue posed by the juxtaposition, on our planet, of great abundance and life-threatening poverty. Yet it was not until, in preparing this article, I calculated how much America’s Top 10 percent of income earners actually make that I fully understood how easy it would be for the world’s rich to eliminate, or virtually eliminate, global poverty. (It has actually become much easier over the last 30 years, as the rich have grown significantly richer.) I found the result astonishing. I double-checked the figures and asked a research assistant to check them as well. But they were right. Measured against our capacity, the Millennium Development Goals are indecently, shockingly modest. If we fail to achieve them — as on present indications we well might — we have no excuses. The target we should be setting for ourselves is not halving the proportion of people living in extreme poverty, and without enough to eat, but ensuring that no one, or virtually no one, needs to live in such degrading conditions. That is a worthy goal, and it is well within our reach.

Peter Singer is the Ira W. DeCamp professor of bioethics at the Center for Human Values at Princeton University. He is the author of many books, including most recently “The Way We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter.”







Posted by at No comments:

Friday, April 27, 2007

Paper 5

“There is perhaps no set of social issues on which otherwise sane people on either side of the question allow themselves to be so overwhelmingly irrational as in matters pertaining to the treatment of animals, and our moral obligations to them.” – Philosopher Bernard Rollin

PAPER 5: Topics: Racism, Sexism and Speciesism: Is it Permissible to Harm Animals for Pleasure?

4-5 PAGES, DUE AT TIME OF THE FINAL, IN CLASS AND THROUGH TURNITIN
No late papers and no (late) papers accepted via email unless you have prior approval

Your paper should have a short introduction, a thesis (“I will argue that _____), and be well-organized, clear and readable to someone who is not familiar with these issues. Your paper’s claims should be carefully and thoughtfully defended: objections must be responded to with well-thought out reasons.

This paper focuses on you providing well-thought out, carefully-defended answers to these questions:
 Is the fur industry engaged in morally permissible behavior, or are they doing things that are morally wrong?
 Are the animal agribusiness industries engaged in morally permissible behavior, or are they doing things that are morally wrong?
 What, if any, are there any relations between these two questions? Does your view about the morality of the fur industry have logical implications for your view about the morality of the, e.g., meat industry, and vice versa?
 Should you personally support the fur industry? Should you personally support the meat (and related) industries?

To answer these questions, you must carefully present and explain the arguments by Peter Singer (the fundamental principle of equality, from “All Animals Are Equal,”) and John Simmons (from “Reasonable Humans and Animals” [online; handout]). Explain their arguments for the conclusion that – in our circumstances: i.e., modern America – it is wrong to raise and kill animals to wear them and to eat them. You must explain and defend your view on whether either of their main arguments are sound or not. Since thinking about moral problems involves applying moral principles to factual circumstances, you must briefly give some factual information about these industries and practices.

You must discuss at least five of what you think are the strongest and/or most common objections to arguments like Singer’s & Simmons. (Kant and Machan provide some of these arguments; others are from class and a handout). Fully explain how Singer and/or Simmons would respond to these objections. Explain whether these objections show that their arguments are unsound.

Note: if you discuss anything about nutrition science, you must provide the source of your information (i.e., the study’s citation) from PubMed from the National Library of Medicine: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/ or our books. Random, anecdotal reports from various webpages are not a reliable source for scientific information: you need a reputable source

Some industry groups:
 Fur Commission USA (http://www.furcommission.com/video/index.htm ).
 National Animal Interest Alliance: http://naiaonline.org
 Animal Agriculture Alliance: http://animalagalliance.org
Some pro-animal groups:
 Compassion Over Killing: http://www.tryveg.com/
 PETA TV: http://www.petatv.com/
 Vegan Outreach http://www.veganoutreach.org/
www.Blackvegetarians.org

Suggested restaurant field trip, to ask for advice on how to answer these questions:
Soul Veg Restaurant: 879-A Ralph Abernathy Blvd. SW – Atlanta, (404) 752-5194
Soul Veg Restaurant: 652 North Highland - Atlanta, GA 30306 (404) 874-0145
Posted by at No comments:

WORKSHEET:

Some responses to Singer’s & John Simmons’ arguments for the conclusion that

not eating animals (in our circumstances) is morally obligatory.

Directions: On a separate piece of paper, state these objections as valid arguments. Add the missing premise(s) needed to make them valid. Are all the premises true? Are there good reasons to be given in defense of all the premises? Are any of the arguments question begging? Explain whether the arguments are sound (i.e., valid with true premises) or not and so whether these objections show that Singer’s argument is not sound. If an argument below is sound, then that implies that a premise in Singer’s and/or Simmons’ argument above is false. If so, which premise is false? Explain.

1. Singer and Simmons are “forcing” someone to not eat meat (perhaps much like Singer was “forcing” people to help starving children). Therefore, their arguments are unsound and so raising animals to kill and eat them is morally permissible.

2. Meat is a necessary part of the diet. Therefore . . .

3. Protein is a necessary part of the diet. Therefore, their arguments are unsound.

4. Cholesterol is a necessary part of the diet. Therefore . . .

5. If Engel’s argument is sound (and so, his moral premises true), then it’s wrong to kill ants and roaches. Therefore . . .

6. Animals are weaker than humans. Therefore . .

7. Meat-eating is a tradition in our society. Therefore . . .

8. There are no other jobs for slaughterhouse workers, and jobs in slaughterhouses are excellent jobs. Therefore . . .

9. Meat tastes good to some people; they like eating it. Therefore . . .

10. Some animals eat other animals. Therefore . . .

11. Humans are animals. Therefore . . .

12. Bad things happen all the time. Therefore . . .

13. We are too busy to not eat animals; not eating animals will prevent us from doing the many good things we are working on. Therefore . . .

14. If Engel’s argument is sound, then all restaurants (esp. fast-food) should close. Therefore . . .

15. Animals have no moral rights. Therefore . .

16. Eskimos and people in the desert have to eat meat and fat; that’s all they have to eat. Therefore . . .

17. Humans do not have natural predators: no other species depends on eating humans to survive. (So we are at the “top” of the “food chain”). Therefore . . .

18. Humans are able to eat animals: it’s something we can do. Therefore . . .

19. People can do whatever they want. Therefore . . .

20. Humans are more important than animals. Therefore . . .

21. Animals are not rational beings: they are not capable of abstract thinking. Therefore .

22. If animals were not raised to be killed and eaten, then the world would be overrun with cows, chickens, and pigs. Therefore . . .

23. If animals were not raised to be killed and eaten, then cows, chickens, and pigs would go extinct. Therefore . . .

24. If it’s wrong to eat animals, then it’s wrong to eat plants. But it’s not wrong to eat plants. Therefore . .

25. It’s not wrong to keep cats and dogs, if they are well-cared for. Therefore . . .

26. Some, but perhaps only a few, humans in the US need meat or milk to survive: that’s all they can digest, nothing else. Therefore . . .

27. If Engel’s argument is sound, then if animals weren’t fed and raised to be killed and eaten, then plants would have to be raised to be eaten by humans. This would take much more land, more land than we have. Therefore . . .

28. Farmers and ranchers are hard-working people. Therefore . .

29. Farmers and ranchers are not doing anything illegal. Therefore . .

30. Animals do not make moral choices: they don’t make decisions about what they do is right or wrong. Therefore . . .

31. Most people will not accept Engel’s argument as sound, or if they do they will not act on it. Therefore . . .

32. The theory of Darwinian evolution is true. Therefore . . .

33. People make choices to eat meat, and people make choices to not eat meat. They make these decisions. Therefore . . .

34. If vegetarian diets were healthy (or healthier), then the government and doctors would encourage people to be vegetarians (and meat wouldn’t be in the Food Pyramid). Therefore . . .

35. For the main moral premises of his argument, Simmons appeals to common moral beliefs that people already accept, not controversial philosophical theories. Therefore . . .

36. Singer appeals to utilitarianism in making his argument. Therefore . . .

37. Everything on Earth, i.e., everything God made, is good. Therefore . . .

38. God and the Bible says eat meat is morally permissible.[1] Therefore . . .

39. Some good athletes are vegetarian; some good athletes are not. Therefore . . .

40. Humans and animals are not equally important. Therefore . . .

41. If you were starving to death, it would be OK to eat meat. Therefore . .

42. Kant’s arguments, i.e., that ___________, are sound. Therefore . .

43. Machan’s arguments are sound, i.e., that ___________, are sound. Therefore . .

44. Eating animals is natural. Therefore . .

45. It’s inconvenient to not eat meat. Therefore . .

46. People have a moral right to raise and kill animals to eat them. Therefore . .

47. Animals are not harmed when they are raised to raise and kill animals to eat them. Therefore . .

48. Animals are not biologically human. Therefore . .

49. Animals are not people. Therefore . .

50. Animals are raised to be eaten; if they weren’t raised to be eaten, then these animals wouldn’t exist. Therefore . .

[1] For excellent, lively discussion of these claims, listen to Dr. Matt Haltemann’s "Living Toward the Peaceable Kingdom" (mp3), "Animal Rights & Christian Responsibility" , (mp3) and notes
“Compassionate Eating as Care of Creation” and “Animal Rights and Christian Responsibility” all available at Wheaton College’s Center for Applied Christian Ethics: http://www.wheaton.edu/CACE/

Posted by at No comments:

Wednesday, April 25, 2007

Study Guide

I will have a complete study guide for the last test sometime soon, but you know that it'll cover everything we've done since the last test.

So:
  • utilitarianism readings and notes,
  • euthanasia readings and notes,
  • a bit of Kant's ethics (from a handout, below; might want to re-read A Short Introduction to Moral Philosophy from RTD),
  • Singer on racism, sexism, "intelligence"-ism and speciesism,
  • Kant on animals,
  • Machan on animals,
  • Simmons on animals,
  • "mad-libs" handout on 50+ objections to Simmons & Singer,
  • we'll likely read MLK's "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" on the last day
There will be a final paper on Singer/Simmons and animals, due at time of the final. I'll give you the assignment soon.

12 PM MWF Wednesday, May 9th 1 PM – 3 PM

1 PM MWF Monday, May 7th 8 AM – 10 AM

Senior Finals Thursday & Friday, May 3rd & 4th

Posted by at No comments:

Monday, April 23, 2007

Wed

For Wed., re-read Singer's "All Animals Are Equal," and John Simmon's "Reasonable Humans and Animals" http://aphilosopher.googlepages.com/veg.pdf

We'll also read that Kant page that I gave you (attached to the Simmons article) and the Machan article in RTD.
Posted by at No comments:
Accentuate college's positive, not rap's negative

By Dr. Michael L. Lomax
April 22, 2007

True or false: A college education is more important than ever.

True or false: There are more African-American men attending college today.

True or false: There are more college-age black men in prison than in college.

Give yourself credit if you marked the first question true. People who get ahead in today's economy start by getting a college degree. Almost all the fastest-growing careers require at least a college degree. The college graduate makes twice as much as the high school graduate.

You can also give yourself credit if you marked the second question true. More black males than ever before are applying to college, enrolling and getting their degrees.

The third question? That one is false -- 179,500 black men ages 18 to 24 are in prison. But 469,000 -- more than two-and-a-half times as many -- are enrolled in college.

You often read that there are more black men in prison than in college. But that misleading statistic compares the number of black men in college, almost all of whom are in their teens or twenties, with the number of all black men, of any age, in prison. It's like comparing apples to oranges.

But what about those 179,500 young black men who are in prison? As president of the United Negro College Fund (UNCF), an association of 39 private historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and America's largest minority college scholarship provider, I'm concerned about what we can do to keep them out of trouble and out of jail.

There is one thing that drastically reduces the chances of going to prison: having a college degree. We also know that African-Americans are statistically much more likely to stay in college and graduate if they attend an HBCU like LeMoyne-Owen College, our UNCF member school here in Memphis, or all-male Morehouse College in Atlanta or co-ed Claflin University in Orangeburg, S.C.

Getting a college degree doesn't start in college. You have to have a good high school education. Far too many African-American males have been tracked into courses that won't ever get them ready for college, as Bill Gates has put it, no matter how well the students learn or the teachers teach.

There are proven models for helping young black men achieve success in school, and one of them is in Memphis: the KIPP Diamond Academy, part of a national group of predominantly minority, nonprofit public charter and contract schools. (I am on KIPP's national board of directors.) With longer school days and more effective teaching approaches, KIPP students' average test scores equal those for all City of Memphis and State of Tennessee public schools, which have a much smaller percentage of minority and low-income students.

But the path to getting a college degree -- and the sharply improved chances of staying out of trouble that come with that degree -- has to start even before high school. It has to start at home and in the community.

As members of the black community, we are all responsible for refocusing on education, especially college education, as the pathway to professional careers and the middle class. We must teach our young people that in the 21st century, the jobs that are available to applicants with only high school diplomas will not support the middle-class life style, the lives of security, stability and service that we want for them and that they want for themselves.

Part of that refocusing is challenging the seductive, but destructive, role that popular culture plays among our young people. We have to reject the voice of gangsta rap becoming the voice of black authenticity. Gangsta rap is a siren song to young people who don't have better, more constructive male role models who demonstrate positive alternatives to the false bravado of thugs.

The values espoused by gangsta rap are wrong, destructive and lead not to college but to jail. Violence against women -- or anyone-- is wrong. Exploitation of members of our own community through the drug trade is wrong. Living outside the law is wrong. And setting these values to music or weaving them into a gangsta or convict line of clothes is wrong.

A college degree is no magic stay-out-of jail card. Not every college graduate stays out of trouble with the law. And, of course, not everyone without a college degree gets into trouble.

But let me end as I began, with a question: Which path -- the one that leads to college or the one that doesn't -- offers young African-American men the best chance of staying out of trouble and out of prison?

I know my answer.

What's yours?

Dr. Michael L. Lomax is president and chief executive officer of the United Negro College Fund.

Posted by at No comments:

Friday, April 20, 2007

For Monday

For Monday, read, in RTD, Peter Singer's "All Animals Are Equal"
Posted by at No comments:

Monday, April 16, 2007

A Kant Handout

Can't find the Kant handout? It's here!
http://aphilosopher.googlepages.com/Kant.pdf
Posted by at No comments:

Paper 4

Two options:

Options 1:

Should you donate 25 cents a day to help people living in absolute poverty?


Paper 4:

A Second Option (for the first option, see the previous assignment handout &/or the blog!)

4-5 pages, typed, double spaced, 12 pt. font, Name, email, class time

Due: Friday April 27, 2006: in class and through the Turnitin system.

In this paper, you should present and critically discuss Singer’s arguments regarding world poverty (Engel and Rachels prove some useful information and arguments also). You should make the discussion personal – i.e., think about what you personally should do – but start small and consider whether you should donate a quarter a day to help people living in absolute poverty. I know of no better place to start – in terms of efficiently making a direct, concrete difference in people’s lives – than The $10 Club (www.TheTenDollarClub.org). In this paper, you should discuss whether you should join (perhaps with others?) The $10 Club. If you join (or start supporting some other worthy cause) and prove it, then not only will you have helped better the lives of people living in absolute poverty, you will get a free poster from Professor Nobis! J

Please meet to discuss this assignment with your peers. Follow all good directions on how to write papers.


Your papers should have these sections:
Title: ________.
1. Introduction
An introduction, culminating in a thesis, e.g., “I will argue that ______.” Your introduction should introduce the issue or topic to the reader. Assume your reader does not know anything about the topic or the article. You need to explain things so they will understand: see things from their point of view and write accordingly!
2. Singer’s Argument
A section where you carefully and fully explain Singer’s argument, i.e., his conclusion [what exactly is his conclusion? What conclusion have we been considering, for purposes of discussion?] and the reasoning he gives for his conclusion. He gives the examples of Dora and Bob: explain what role these examples play in his argument.
3. Objections
Carefully explain at least three of what you think are the best objections to Singer’s argument.
4. Evaluation of these objections and Singer’s argument
Explain whether any of the objections are sound arguments against his argument. Explain whether Singer’s argument is sound, and why, and whether it is not sound. That is, is Singer right, or are the objectors? Should you do something (if yes, what?) to help people living in absolute poverty? Why or why not? DEFEND YOUR VIEW WITH REASONS. Defend your view from objections: e.g., does your response imply that it would not be wrong for you to let a child drown in a pond, even if you could easily save the child?!

5. Conclusion
Explain things in your own words: do not take exact words from the book or any handouts.NO PLAGIARISM. Think for yourself! What you think and what you do reflect who you are: be excellent!
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dear Yahoo!: How many people in the world live in extreme poverty?
According to NetAid, over a billion people, or roughly one in six, live in extreme poverty. Extreme poverty is defined as living on less than US$1 a day.
The World Bank goes on to define moderate poverty as basic subsistence living, on $1 to $2 a day. All told, nearly half the world's population lives in poverty -- that's 2.8 billion people living on less than two dollars a day. Some other facts to keep in mind:
• Each year over 8 million people die because they are simply too poor to stay alive.
• More than 800 million people go hungry every day.
• The gross domestic product of the poorest 48 nations is less than the wealth of the world's three richest people.
• Thirty-thousand children die every day due to hunger and treatable illnesses.
• 6 million children die every year before their fifth birthday, as a result of malnutrition.

Option 2:


Can You Morally Justify Your Choice of Career and Lifestyle?

Paper 4: Philosophy 302: 3-5 pages; due __________________


Important philosophy isn’t just abstract theorizing: it relates to the concrete realities of everyday life. The most important philosophical thinking asks personally challenging questions about our own lives and what we ourselves do: it asks us to justify our own beliefs, feelings, attitudes, goals and actions.

For this paper, I want you to start thinking more about your “personal” and “professional” life from a moral or ethical standpoint.[1] I want you to give reasons and arguments about yourself.

I want you to think about your career plans and discuss whether what you hope and plan on doing career-wise is morally justified. That is, can you give reasons to think that what you hope to do in your career is morally permissible? Can you defend your plans from possible arguments that, morally, you should be doing something else?

To develop arguments that might challenge your career plans, I want you to develop Peter Singer’s or Rachels’ arguments about poverty assistance. Singer’s and Rachels’ main theme is that we all should be doing far more to help people who are far less fortunate than ourselves: indeed, we are morally obligated to do this. They gives reasons for why should do this: they give reasons why ethical egoism should be rejected and why we should even go beyond “common sense” morality [EMP p. 69] to improve the world.

These arguments about famine aid can be transformed into arguments for the view that we are morally obligated to bring about the most good – or at least, more good – that we can in and through our lives. It’s this standard (which you need to develop and explain in greater detail – and there are various subtleties that you don’t want to ignore) that I want you to compare your career plans to, to see if they meet this moral standard. If they don’t, then you might want to argue that your plans are morally impermissible. You might then want to think about other career options that would, in your view, yield more goods. On the other hand, you might want to argue that Singer’s and Rachels’ views about how much good we are morally obligated to produce is mistaken and so, perhaps, almost all career choices are morally permissible.

So your paper will need all this.

  • Your career plans.
  • Discussion of what kinds of goods will come from your career plans (some questions that might be worth addressing: will these be goods just for you, or just your family? Is your career more reflective of ethical egoism? Or will your career produce goods for others? If so, who? You might wish to discuss what “common sense” morality [EMP p. 69] or even utilitarianism or Kantianism might imply about your plans).
  • A discussion of other career plans you could have and whether these alternative careers would yield greater goods or not.
  • An argument that if there are other career plans you could follow that would yield greater goods, then you should pursue those plans.
  • A response to this argument.

Your paper should have an introduction and a thesis statement. You should follow all the guidance given about writing: re-read all those articles!

You are encouraging to meet in small groups to discuss the assignment, develop organizational outlines, develop the arguments that you’ll need to respond to, etc. You need to write your own paper though, of course!

www.TheTenDollarClub.org might give you some ideas for how to augment your career and lifestyle choices.


[1] Your next, and near final, paper will be even more personal. It will be about the moral choices involved in what you eat!


Posted by at No comments:

Sunday, April 15, 2007

Another Extra Credit Opp.

Tuesday, April 17, 2007 at Agnes Scott
Rabbi Hillel Norry and Mark Douglas
"Is Nature Ours? A Jewish-Christian Dialogue"
7:30 p.m.
Evans Hall, terrace level, rooms ABC

Hillel Norry is Rabbi at Congregation Shearith Israel, a Conservative, egalitarian congregation in Atlanta. Mark Douglas is Associate Professor of Christian Ethics at Columbia Theological Seminary. Rabbi Norry and Professor Douglas will discuss what they see their religions as suggesting about the proper relationship between human beings and the rest of creation. What, for example, do the Hebrew and Christian Bibles tell us about our relationship to other species, or our responsibilities to future generations?
Posted by at No comments:
For Monday: re-read chapters on utilitarianism in EMP.
Read EMP pages on euthanasia and the 2 essays in RTD on that.
Posted by at No comments:

Friday, April 13, 2007

Some Notes on Utilitarianism

How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.

-- Anne Frank

Utilitarianism:

1. What is it?

2. Why would anyone think it’s true?

3. What are the arguments against it?

Utilitarianism is a moral theory that provides answers to certain questions, such as:

• What makes right actions right (or what makes morally permissible actions morally permissible?) and what makes wrong actions wrong? What are the right and wrong-making features or characteristics of actions that make them right or wrong?

• What is the fundamental difference between a morally permissible action and a morally impermissible action?

• What rule(s) must our actions conform to if they are to be morally permissible?

Utilitarianism is designed to give a fully general answer to these questions: the answer is supposed to apply for all actions.

One possible way to reason towards utilitarianism (or any moral theory):

Think about what seem to be clear cases of right and wrong actions, develop a hypothesis about what makes them right and work with that to develop it into a more precise theory.

E.g. Our vivid examples from the beginning of class:

One the basis of these examples, come to think this:

a. pleasure / pain = bad , happiness / unhappiness = good

b. less pain is better than more, more pleasure is better than less, the most pleasure/happiness and least pain/unhappiness is best; consequences where pleasure is produced and pain lessened are better than others;

c. you should bring about the best consequences you can, i.e., produce the most pleasure / happiness and minimize pains / unhappiness that you can.

Rachels:

[Utilitarianism is the view that] we should always do whatever will produce the greatest possible balance of happiness over unhappiness for everyone who will be affected by our action. (RTD 11)

Another statement of the theory:

Utilitarianism is the view that an action “A” is morally permissible for a person if, and only if, of all the alternative actions available to the person at the time, action “A” produces the greatest overall net happiness; if it does not produce the greatest overall net happiness then it is wrong.

“net” happiness = total “amount” of happiness – total “amount” of unhappiness caused by the action

The theory is about improving the world: very concrete.

Not just following “the rules,” whatever their consequences.

If following some rule has good consequence, follow it. If there’s a time it doesn’t, break it!

So, no “absolute” moral rules, except for the rule “Do what will produce the most happiness!”

Lying, stealing, killing, breaking promises …. Only “rules of thumb.”

A rather “progressive” theory: it’s been appealed to in condemning:

  • “Old style” Prisons and punishment (where there was no concern with rehabilitation), child labor, the oppression of women (On the Subjugation of Women), racism
  • Why is this? Because everyone’s pleasures, if similar pleasures, are equally good, and everyone’s comparable pains are equally bad. Pleasure is good for men, women, blacks, whites, etc. and plain is bad for everyone also, regardless of sex, race, class, etc.
  • This is true of species also: Bentham: “The question is not, Can they reason?, nor Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?”

Utilitarians oppose anything that causes pain and suffering for little or no comparable happiness or pleasures (next issues: euthanasia). It requires that we do what produces the greatest overall happiness.

Some objections to utilitarianism:

1. Pleasure and pain, narrowly and simply construed, are not the only things that are bad and ; happiness and pleasure, narrowly and simply construed, are not the only things that are good.

Rachels’ examples. The cheered up pianist; your are happy yet your “friends” are not really your friends!

Utilitarians have generally responded by broadening their view about what’s good and bad.

New view: you should produce the greatest net good you can.

2. Objections that utilitarianism either permits or requires injustice:

The organ transplant case.

The case of “Racially motivated injustice”: EMP p. 103

1. If utilitarianism is true, then the sheriff should do the action that produces the best consequences, i.e., produces the greatest net happiness. (True)

2. If the sheriff should do the action that produces the best consequences, i.e., produces the greatest net happiness, then the sheriff should lynch the innocent man. (True? Or False?))

3. But the sheriff should not lynch the man. (True? Or False?)

4. So, it’s not true that the sheriff should do the action that produces the best consequences, i.e., produces the greatest net happiness.

5. So utilitarianism is not true.

[These objections take the same logical form as the others:

If utilitarianism is true, then X is morally right, but X is not morally right, so util is not true.]

  • An objection that utilitarianism either permits or requires rights violations: (EMP p. 104)
  • An objection that utilitarianism is “too demanding”
  • An objection that utilitarianism requires us to not give preference to friends and family.

Other cases: Williams “integrity” objections; Nozick’s “experience machine”. Both from RTD.

How utilitarians generally respond:

  • deny that these would be indeed be best consequences,
  • “bite the bullet” and argue that “common sense is wrong.
Posted by at No comments:
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)