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Ethics (Stroud: (2. Three ways extreme moral demands come about (in…

- - - - He maintains that “ when all considerations of this sort have been taken into account, the conclusion remains: we ought to be preventing as much suffering as we can without sacrificing something else of comparable moral importance.”
  - - - By comparable moral importance he means: He admits the fact that his notion of comparable moral importance & moral significance is vague. Roughly it means the following:
        
        Causing anything else comparably bad to happen
        
        Doing something that is wrong in itself
        
        Failing to promote some moral good comparable in significance to the bad thing that we can prevent
      - “ I can see no good reason for holding the moderate version of the principle rather than the strong version.”
    - - Why the adherence to what sounds like a relatively simple and reasonable principle would result in such drastic societal and personal change:
        
        Primary reasons because of what is not distinguished between:
        
        Proximity or distance: “If we accept the principle of impartiality, universalizability, equality or whatever we cannot discriminate against someone merely because he is far away from us.”
        
        Collective Action: Cases in which I am the only person who could possibly do anything and cases in which I am just one among millions in the same position
        
        Should I consider that I am less obliged to pull the drowning child out of the pond if on looking around I see other people, no further away than I am, who have also noticed the child but are doing nothing? One has only to ask this question to see the absurdity of the view that numbers lessen obligation.
        
        Just had a very interesting possible response here based on Robert Cialdini's book influence which proves empircally that we have a cognitive bias toward not acting when there are other people who also COULD act even if our acting would prevent seriously damaging influences. It's part of our psychological makeup.
        
        Charity would become duty and duty alone would become immorality. Reduction in what was once considered supergatory.
- - - - Rights & Deserts: one cannot assess the goodness or badness of an event or state of affairs independently of ascertaining whether it involves (for example) the-infringement of a right. The more thoroughgoing anticonsequentialist objection is the denial that the rightness or wrongness of an action is ever a function of impersonally assigned values of those states of affairs which are its consequences.'4 (It can make a difference to the wrongness of an action, on this view, whether it involves the agent's infringing a right, or whether it will lead to others' doing so.)
    - - Singer's discussion of the child in the pond begins by luring in our intuitions and then proposing a principle which will support the judgement that the action in question within his case is wrong.
        
        One may doubt that you can draw and morally justify universal moral principles by determining right action and in a single case and inferring the existence of these principles from that case.
        
        To most people, it is about as obvious that there is a moral difference between our relations to a child drowning in front of us and a child starving in another country as it is that failing to save a drowning child is wrong. Accordingly, if we are to produce a principle which accords with our intuitive judgments, we had better adopt one which distinguishes cases of immediate emergency, like that of the drowning child, from other, more remote, cases of dire need.'
        
        Can accordance with intuition be a constraint on the acceptability of moral principles. Possibly.
    - - A practical consideration is a consideration which an agent regards (rightly or wrongly) as a justifying reason for action-that is, as a practical justification.
        
        An ethical theory is a conceptual structure that justifies practical condiserations with non-practical principles. .
        
        Practical ethicists deny that any ethical theory can provide us with good reason to revise our ethical practice.
        
        Based upon this then the practical ethicists objection is pretty straightforward and is more or less that the immediacy of the situation is a practical concern and so from there they can argue that Singer’s revision of ethical practice cannot be defended.
    - - His goal with this has been to make sense of a moral error without resorting to a moral theory so as to be able to counter the practical ethicists reply.
        
        The way he does this is by holding that the practical ethicist justifies ethical practice with certain virtuous concerns, not just doing what is a well-entrenched practice.
        
        From here then he can hold that kindness and justice/fairness inform the need to pull the kid out of the pond and thus to donate to aid agencies is unjust and unfair and from here is the reformulation of his argument.
        
        Cullity & Demandingness: Where does he end up finding that the conclusion is too demanding? One thing he has is the countervailing condition so that when aid-donating reaches a certain point one must not donate past that because doing so counts as a countervailing condition.
        
        However the issue is that this point of countervailing conditions may only be reached when the cost to me of not donating further money to aid is the same as the cost to me of justifying me not saving a child from drowning right in front of me.
      - Can one just reply that the non-immediacy of a threat (ie. it being in the third world and far away from us) not be enough to count as a countervailing consideration and then let us get away with it?
- - - - Agent neutral - benefits or costs to me of doing something are only considered in terms of the benefits or costs of my action to someone else.
    - - Broadly consequentialist in spirit but not strictly consequentialist.
        
        "Comparable moral importance" is not "importance to me".
      - Weaker than consequentialism because of the fact that its reactionary whereas consequentialism is proactive. Also vagueness around comparable moral importance may also make it weaker.
    - - His base case & Iteration Argument: "If I could easily save someone's life right in front of me at negligble cost to myself then not doing so would be wrong."
        
        From here he deduces that not giving trivial amounts of aid (not costing me) to save others lives is also wrong.
        
        This doesn't have direct rescue component but Cullity holds that this made no difference in the first place.
        
        This is sly though because of how the case gets extreme when you iterate. The cost is trivial but always trivial and so it adds up unitl it is no longer trivial to you.
        
        This has the direct rescue component to it.
      - Circularity of Beneficence Argument:
        
        The very things that beneficence demands entail limits on what beneficence can demand.
        
        Very interesting, he's basically saying that we're simultaneously acknowledging the fact that we should benefit others interests whilst ignoring their interests:
        "beneficience requires us to accept that other people's interests give us compelling moral reasons for acting in their favour; but in accepting this we are making presuppositions from which it follows that acting out of partiality towards our own interests is not wrong."
        
        Indigenously Advantageous: One of the advantages of this response is that it does not grow out a different normative moral theory but rather comes about organically from the same theory being advocated in the first place.
        
        This argument holds that there is a kind of internal incoherence in holding that beneficence can require me to give up the kinds of goods which I am required by beneficience to aid others in obtaining or retaining.
        
        The interests that we think ground requirements of beneficence include people's interests in their cherished projects and relationships even when they are not altruistically focused.
        
        Strouds Response:
        
        1. What is sauce for the goose may not be sauce for the gander: In other words, because certain other people in worse off situations are entitled to things based on beneficence does not mean that I am necessarily also especially given the difference in the circumstances between me and those other people (them being much worse off).
  - - - (B) Utility Network Inapplicability: "it's absurd to demand of a man when the sums come in from the utility network that he should just step aside from his own projects"
        
        Part of his reasoning is that utilitarianism treats "my" ground projects simply as "someones" ground projects and thus diminishes the real value they hold for me.
      - (A) Frau Paul: She provides the frau paul case which shows that sometimes it is not wrong to give up ground projects.
        
        From here she holds that the reasons one should not give up their ground projects are not moral reasons and are exogenous to morality.
  - - - Holds that we need to object to the argument at an earlier stage.
- - - - McGinn's Principle: "We should help out the distant poor when and only when their need is desperate and we will not sacrifice anything in our own life that is meaningful to us."
        
        An uncharitable interpretation would see this as basically just saying that we actually have no real obligation to help the poor or needy at all.
      - Agent themself determines what is meaningful and what adds value to their life and thus also where the limits lie
        
        This seems much more reasonable and is also kind of what is actually done. Then the more an individual agent includes the benefit of others within what is meaningful to them and thus the further they push out the limits of their morality and concern for others the more a moral person they are to be considered.
        This is what actually kind of happens in reality too.
      - She thinks some kind of reasonable middle between McGinn & Singer may make sense.
        
        Makes the good point that an impersonal value comparison between something that we could or may sacrifice and the value that could be provided to another's life
        
        It seems that comparing from a NOT-impersonal standpoint would be called agent-relative value and she says this is beyond the scope of the article.
        
        Another way she wants to put it is that asking agents to give up as much as Singer's argument asks them to fails to give individual agents the respect they deserve and doesn't honour their autonomy. It could be argue that it treats individual agents as mere means for the satisfaction of others.
  - - - One issue with this is in the constant comparing of our individual pursuits and projects to the value of saving lives. This is always going to result in our individual ends not being justified.
        
        She says that rather than just conceiving of our lives and projects as just another entity to be weighed against the value of the lives of those in need we should shift our thinking and conceive of these as two different components of the same life that must coexist.
    - - Crux of her argument: The duty to aid the needy may be a demanding duty indeed, but it is not a duty that requires that we radically alter the course of our lives. To be denied the moral space to set ends and pursue them contradicts the very rationale of the duty to aid. We must aid others to protect their agency, not merely to prevent them from dying, but so they can have the capacity to construct meaningful lives. If this is something we truly value then we should not be required to give it up ourselves.
        
        My own thought is that these may be in a sense categorically distinct and thus incomparable.
- - - - The limits of what we are demanded to do can in a sense be set by the fact that a person's answerability for their own well-being is more extensive than what she may appropriately be held to answer for when it comes to the lives of others.
  - - - In order for one to justify action one must be able to defend their choice on the grounds that there was nothing more that could have been done to contribute to aggregate well-being.
        
        This excessive need for justification to act alone could be an excessive burden for subjects to bear under Utilitarianism.
    - - Its a significant burden to be held responsible for everyones burden and misery. This leads to the phenomenon of agent regret whereby ever action one takes that doesn't maximise well-being is resulting in the death and suffering of others.