Review: Sacrificing for the Good of Strangers-Repeatedly Author(s): Brad Hooker Reviewed work(s): Living High and Letting Die by Peter Unger Source: Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 59, No. 1, (Mar., 1999), pp. 177-181 Published by: International Phenomenological Society Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2653466 Accessed: 28/04/2008 16:41 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=ips. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1995 to build trusted digital archives for scholarship. We enable the scholarly community to preserve their work and the materials they rely upon, and to build a common research platform that promotes the discovery and use of these resources. For more information about JSTOR, please contact
[email protected].
http://www.jstor.org
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research Vol. LIX, No. 1, March 1999
Sacrificingfor the Good of Strangers-Repeatedly BRAD HOOKER
The University of Reading
Peter Unger's Living High and Letting carefullyconsiders how much you are morally required to sacrifice for the sake of helping strangers (by which I merely mean other people to whom you have no special connection). It also carefully considers the question of when you are morally permittedto harm some people for the sake of preventingeither greaterharmsto the same number of others or equal harmsto more others. And it considers the connection between harmingothersin orderto minimize early deathand pointless suffering and sacrificing your own good for these ends. But the centerpiece of the book is definitely the questionabout sacrificingyour own good. Unger's discussion of this question constitutes an enormous achievement-indeed it must now be the basic text for study of the issues involved. And the importanceof these issues could hardlybe overstated.True,more has perhapsbeen publishedaboutharmingsome for the sake of benefitingothers. But as utilitarianstirelessly and rightly point out, very rarelyshould ordinary agents (as opposed to trolley operators) think they can produce large net benefits only by harminginnocent others.In contrast,given the effectiveness of UNICEF, OXFAM, and similar agencies which aim to prevent death and minimize pointless suffering, the opportunitiesmost ordinaryagents (or at least most people in relativelyrich countries)have to make sacrificesin order to help rescue others are ubiquitous.1Thus the question how much are we requiredto sacrifice for needy strangershas everyday relevance. Because so much is at stake-large numbersof innocent lives-and so many people regularly have opportunitiesto help, the central question of Living High and Letting Die is the most importantone in contemporarynormativeethics. The philosophical problem here is this. Many people espouse principles about helping the world's needy that, if rigorously applied, demandfar more self-sacrifice than these same people seem to expect from themselves or others. For example, many people would espouse principles like "Do unto others as you would like them to do unto you if your situations were These two points are ones Unger himself notes on p. 14. BOOKSYMPOSIUM 177
reversed,"or "Do as much as you can to help those who are desperatelyneedy through no fault of their own," or "Help innocent others in desperate need whenever doing so would provide huge benefits for them at small cost to yourself." But seldom do people make the level of contributionsto UNICEF or OXFAM that such principles require. People's behavior suggests they don't really believe what they say about moral requirements to help the needy. But espousal of such principles cannot be dismissed as completely hypocritical. To take Singer's classic example, everyone agrees that you must pull the drowning child out of the shallow pond, given that this involves small sacrifice and no risk to yourself. The puzzle is how you can be obligated to do this and yet not be obligatedto make a similarly small sacrifice in orderto contributeto UNICEF when you know that this too would save an innocent child. We react extremely negatively to a refusal to answer the cries for help from the child drowningin the shallow pond; we do not reactextremelynegatively (if negatively at all) to a refusal to put a check in the envelope preaddressedto UNICEF. So our reactions to these two cases diverge dramatically. But whatjustifies the divergence? At first the divergence might not seem difficult to justify. The drowning child is right in front of you; the person whom a contributionto UNICEF would save isn't. The drowningchild is probablyfrom your own community and culture; the person whom UNICEF would help probably isn't. The drowning child will die right now if you don't help; this isn't true of the potential beneficiaryof your contributionto UNICEF. In the drowning child case as initially described, you are the only one who can save the child; the potential beneficiary of your contribution to UNICEF could be helped by someone else's making a contribution.The drowning child's desperateneed you see with your own eyes; you have to rely on others for your information about the need of the person UNICEF would help. Finally, your saving the drowning child will have vastly more experientialimpact on you than would your contributingto UNICEF. Some of these differences can be morally relevant. But, as Unger ingeniously demonstratesin his second chapter,examples can be constructed where every one of these differences is eliminatedand yet our reactionsdon't change. Perhapsthe most common difference appealed to when people first start thinking about such matters is the one concerning physical proximity. The geographicaldistance between us and the needy is often correlatedwith other obviously importantfactors, such as our ability to help them and how much we would have to sacrificeto do so. But considera case where such correlations do not hold. Suppose we can help only one of two people. These two are alike in all respects except that one is a shorterdistance from us but the other we can help more. Obviously, if we are going to help one of them, we should help the one whom we can help more, even if this person is farther 178
BRAD HOOKER
away. The physical distance potential beneficiariesare from us does not dictate the strengthof the moral reason we have to help them.2 Nor, contraryto what is sometimes supposed,does close physical proximity guarantee a strong moral obligation to help.3 Suppose you live in Calcutta (or even New York). There is someone to rescue on every street corner. Yet you don't have an obligation to rescue as many of these people as you possibly can. Of course you should do things to help such people, such as supporting social policies and programs that aid the truly needy, and contributingto the best private charities.Nevertheless, you are not obligated to make as much of a sacrifice for each of the people on the streets you walk down as you are for someone in an isolated case of distress. The physical proximityis there, but not the same degree of obligation. If we can't justify the divergence in our reactions to the drowning child case and the UNICEF case by pointing to any of the differences I mentioned between the cases, can we justify this divergence at all? The most promising avenue, I think, is the thoughtthat what might be requiredin an isolated case may be differentfrom what is requiredin a case thatwill reoccurover an over again.
There are two ways of developing this thought. One focuses on the distinction between rare and everyday cases. The other focuses on Garrett Cullity's distinctionbetween consideringcases aggregativelyand considering them iteratively.4 For most of the rich, being able to rescue drowningchildrenis a rareoccasion. But being able to save a life by giving to aid agencies like UNICEF is an everyday opportunity.We might then hold that the level of self-sacrifice appropriatein rarecases is greaterthanin everydaycases. Hence you are obligated to rescue the drowningchild even if this will ruin your clothes or make you miss your airline flight, because this is a rare situationfor you. But you aren'tobligatedto make a correspondinglylarge sacrificeover and over in the everyday situationof being solicited by aid agencies. I certainly admit that the moral relevance of the distinction between rare and everyday situations is not immediately obvious. Hence, commenting on the principlethat "we ought to prevent what is bad when we can do so without sacrificing anything of comparable moral significance," Peter Singer writes that this principle "applies,not just to raresituationsin which one can save a child from a pond, but to the everyday situationin which we can assist 2
3 4
Peter Singer, "Famine,Affluence and Morality,"Philosophy land Public Affiairs1 (1972): 229-43, p. 231; see also his Practical Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 232; and Unger, pp. 34-35. Cf. Liam Murphy, "The Demands of Beneficence," Philosophy and Public Affairs 22 (1993): 267-92, p. 292. GarrettCullity, "MoralCharacterand the IterationProblem," Utilitas 7 (1995): 289-99, pp. 293-95. BOOK SYMPOSIUM
179
those living in absolute poverty."5But is the distinction between rare and everyday cases so clearly irrelevant?Might it not help explain why you have to make a fairly large additionalsacrifice to save the drowningchild, but not such a large sacrificeto make additionalcontributionsto UNICEF? The problemwith the rare/everydaydistinctionis that we need some principled way of deciding what counts as rareand what as everyday. Considera case where you are receiving a solicitation from UNICEF. Describe the case in enough detail and the case can begin to look like a kind of situation you will encounterrarely:e.g., you opened the envelope from UNICEFright after getting married.And, just as we can make the UNICEF case seem rare by describing it in a detailed way, we can make the drowning child case seem everyday by describing it as a 'great moral opportunity' (i.e., a situation "where behaving helpfully has no morally bad aspects and results in fewer folks suffering serious loss" (Unger, p. 61)). Such moral opportunitiesare an everyday feature of our lives precisely because of our daily opportunityto save lives by donating to UNICEF. So, if we think of the drowning child case as simply another such situation, we must think of it is an everyday case. And if this is right, then the rare/everydaydistinctionmay be unable to help make sense of the divergence in our reactionsto the drowningchild and UNICEFcases. Let us then turnto the relateddistinctionbetween iterativeand aggregative approaches.Considerthe suggestion thatpeople are requiredto help others in great need as long as this involves at least modest personalsacrifice, sacrifice being assessed aggregatively,not iteratively.If personal sacrifice is assessed iteratively, then a rule requiringyou to help others in great need when this involves modest personalsacrifice would requireyou to help anotherin great need wheneverthe sacrificeinvolved in helping on thatparticular occasion is relatively little. But if this sort of case is iteratedenough times, the requirement is immensely demandingover time. For enough sacrifices, though each is but modest taken on its own, can add up to a huge aggregate sacrifice. If every time you can help the needy you have to ignore whateversacrificesyou made in the past and sacrifice a little more of what you have left, then, if there are enough such occasions, you'll end up with only a very little yourself. So consideran aggregativeapproach.E.g., considera moralrequirementto make sacrifices over the course of your life that add up to something significant. This requirementrightly holds that moralityrequirespeople who are at least relatively well off by world standardsto make contributionsto UNICEF, OXFAM, and similar organizations (or to do something else instead which is equally helpful in minimizing early death and pointless suffering). But, if you do make sacrificesover the course of your life that add up 5
180
Singer, Practical Ethics, 2nd edition, p. 230.
BRAD HOOKER
to something significant,this moral requirementdoes not insist you do more than this, even when you could save some additionallives.6 (The requirement does not dispute, however, that you're allowed to make altruistic sacrifices beyond the amountrequired.Indeed, such sacrifices are not only permissible but also highly praiseworthy.) Unger offers an argumentthatcounts againstthe aggregativeapproach.He asks us to imagine you have alreadycontributedmore than virtually anyone else to aid agencies that are trying to prevent death and minimize pointless suffering. You now come across someone who desperately needs help that you can provide only by making a non-trivialsacrifice. Quite independently of whether you have helped others in the past, aren't you requiredto go on and help in this new case, given that the sacrifice to you, though non-trivial, will be relatively small and leave you still at least moderately well off? Unger's answer is that you are requiredto make the additional sacrifice (p. 61). I admit that Unger's answer to this question seems intuitively attractive when we focus on this case in isolation. But do we really accept his answer when we see its implicationfor the next case, and the next, and the next? Its implication is that, given the opportunities you have to -contribute to UNICEF, OXFAM, and other agencies, you are forbiddento stop contributing until you have reducedyourself to a state of being only modestly well off by world standards. Does morality really require you to make sacrifices repeatedlyto this extent in orderto do good for others? What we have here is a difficultdilemma in moral philosophy. On the one side, any line limiting our duty to help others that is short of the extremely demanding line Unger articulatescan seem counterintuitivelymean. It will seem counterintuitivelymean when we consider cases where an additional marginalsacrificewould leave the agent still above the level of the very modestly well off. On the other hand, Unger's line itself seems counterintuitively demanding. This dilemma marks out the frontier of the discussion of how much sacrificemoralityrequiresin the interestsof the world's needy.7
6
7
We would need to add a qualificationconcerning cases where self-sacrifice is necessary to save the world, or even just some significant proportionof humanity. Here heroism is positively required. For comments on an earlierdraftof this, I am gratefulto Keith Horton and Peter Unger.
BOOK SYMPOSIUM
181
