The Limits of Moral Demandingness

A dissertation submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Cincinnati in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

in the Department of Philosophy of the College of Arts and Sciences by

Walter Scott Stepanenko

M.A. University of Toledo May 2014

Committee Chair: Vanessa Carbonell, Ph.D.

Dissertation Abstract

Some moral theories are extremely demanding; they ask a lot of moral agents. However, giving an account of what is wrong with extreme moral demands and how it is possible to legitimately reject extreme moral demands is difficult. Call the problem of identifying, explaining, and justifying limits on moral requirement the problem of moral demandingness. In this dissertation, I argue that this problem can be best solved through an examination of the critical literature on Act Utilitarianism, the paradigmatic example of an extremely demanding moral theory. I argue that objections to Act Utilitarianism fall into four classes, that Act

Utilitarianism is extremely demanding because it is alienating, confining, unfair, and because it compromises the well-being of agents.

I then examine several other extreme demands emerging from sources other than Act

Utilitarianism, such as the extreme demands that can emerge from special relations, from the demands of non-maleficence, and from the demands of cooperation. I argue that the four objections to Act Utilitarianism are equally applicable to other extreme demands, and I suggest that this means our informed reactions to extreme moral demands are more coherent and more explicable than is sometimes appreciated.

I contend that the four classes of objections to extreme moral demands can be transformed into general limits of moral demandingness. For example, if the reason an agent has for behaving a particular way would treat that agent unfairly, then, that agent cannot be morally required to behave that way. If an agent were to comply with the unfair demand, they may be doing something heroic, or supererogatory, but they are not doing anything morally requisite. So, when the reason an agent has for complying with a moral demand runs afoul of a limit of moral

demandingness, I argue, it is transformed from a reason that grounds an obligation into one that counts merely as a consideration in favor of supererogatory action.

I contend that a view which recognizes my proposed limits of moral demandingness can make moderate, but compelling moral demands in difficult contemporary moral crises, such as climate change and global poverty. I also argue that a view which recognizes my proposed limits of moral demandingness can give a compelling account of just how much slack an agent should pick up when other agents fail morally and that such a view could therefore make reasonable demands in a range of conditions from full to partial compliance.

Finally, I argue that extreme moral demands all involve distortions of agential capacity: they undermine or strain personal development and personal relationships. I argue that agents can justifiably rejects extreme moral demands because agents have a legitimate interest in personal development and personal relationships and pursuit of these interests is consistent with significant concern for others.

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Acknowledgements

I would first, and foremost, like to thank my committee chair, Vanessa Carbonell.

Without her wisdom, guidance, and support, this dissertation truly would not have been possible.

Throughout the writing process, I have routinely felt as if Vanessa was multiple steps ahead of me, and this dissertation has greatly benefitted from her patience and expertise. I cannot think of anyone better to have been the chair of this dissertation, and I am overwhelmingly grateful for the opportunity to have worked with Vanessa on this project. I would also like to thank Larry

Jost for his advice and assistance on this dissertation, as well as his general tutelage and friendship throughout my time at UC. The kindness he has shown me is something I will remember for the rest of my life and strive to emulate with all of my students. I would also like to thank Heidi Maibom for her advice and guidance as a committee member on this dissertation.

I cannot thank the University of Cincinnati and Department of Philosophy enough for professional and financial support throughout my graduate career and the writing of this dissertation. I’d like to thank all of the faculty and graduate students in the Department of

Philosophy at the University of Cincinnati for their support and helpful conversations over the years. I would especially like to thank my colleagues in my graduate cohort, Vicente Raja and

Gui Sanches de Oliveira. Being a member of a graduate cohort entirely committed to a pragmatic and radical empiricist approach to philosophy has been one of the great honors and learning experiences of my life. I couldn’t have asked for better colleagues or friends to have shared this journey with.

I would also like to thank my friends and mentors in the Department of Philosophy at

Emmanuel College. I especially want to thank Tom Wall for encouragement and support all those years ago, as well as Michelle Maiese for being such a wonderful mentor and friend well

after my graduation. I would also like to thank my friends and mentors in the Department of

Philosophy and Religious Studies at the University of Toledo. I especially want to thank Jeanine

Diller for her mentorship. I couldn’t have asked for a better teacher and model, and I count every step I have followed Jeanine’s example a success, even as I stumble.

I especially want to thank Laurie Michaels for her support, love, and friendship through all these years of school. We’ve come quite far from conversations of C-fibers and capitalist exploitation on our walks along the Muddy River, but our dialogues are still the cornerstone on which my philosophical church is built. And there are many cathedrals still to be remade.

Finally, I would like to thank my parents for more than I could ever put in words. It was from my parents that I first learned the value of education and doing what is right, even when it’s unpopular. Without them, I would have accomplished very little, let alone this dissertation. I cannot thank them enough.

Table of Contents

Introduction…………………………………………………………………………………….…1

Chapter One: What Does it Mean for a Moral Theory to be Too Demanding?...... 8

Chapter Two: The Various Sources of Extreme Moral Demands……………………………….38

Chapter Three: The Responsiveness of Moral Obligation to the Compliance of Others………..64

Chapter Four: The Rejection of Extreme Morality……………………………………………..106

Chapter Five: Climate Change and the Limits of Moral Demandingness……………………...131

Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………………...…162

Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………………169

Introduction

This morning I awoke to another message from my friend, Thelismond Ronald, a teacher and pastor in the village of Ranquitte in Haiti. He is struggling to care for orphan children in his community, children who are the victims of natural disaster, global capitalism, and an accident of birth. Many of the children have no shoes. They have no home. They have no food. I have all of these things. Thelis knows this. He is asking if I can make another donation so that he can at the very least buy something for these dozens of children to eat. He has hardly any money himself. He makes $95 a week, $25 of which he already donates to pay for subsistence resources for these orphan children every month. I make a lot more than that, even living on a graduate stipend. I can send him some money. I can spread the word. I can tell everyone I know about these children. I can alert as many charitable organizations as I possibly can about the plight of these children. I can do quite a lot to help. I can donate more money, and I can volunteer a lot more of my time.

But there are other folks who need help as well. Some of these persons aren’t even human. Some of them are nonhuman animals. After all, this morning when I awoke, I also awoke to budding trees, green lawns, and chirping birds. It’s spring. That means it is kitten season.

Across the city, the state of Ohio, and the rest of the nation and world, kittens will be born by the dozen. Many of them face a life that is almost as difficult as the life the orphan children in

Ranquitte face. Fortunately, there are very many organizations working to place these kittens in shelters, and hopefully, in forever homes. But these organizations need money and volunteer help as well. Trapping kittens isn’t easy work. It requires patience, diligence, and a whole lot of compassion. My friend, Mary Lopez, who helps with the organization Angels Assisting Felines,

knows this well. She’s always looking for volunteers to help rescue kittens, to provide rescued kittens with foster homes, and money to keep the whole operation afloat. But she’s not alone.

Shelters in every community need money to pay for veterinarian visits and other subsistence resources for the companion animals they nurture. They also need volunteers to clean the shelters, to play with the animals, and to help organize fundraising events. I can do a lot to help them, too. I can donate more money, and I can volunteer more of my time.

But I also face the demands of living in a nation state. It’s 2019, and while 2020 is a

Presidential Election year in the United States, the primary process has already begun. There are several candidates emerging in the field of Democratic Presidential hopefuls, and many are likely to do a great deal of good in my neighborhood, in neighborhoods across the country, and in neighborhoods around the world, if they are elected. One easy way to make a big impact would be to throw my support behind one of these candidates, donate money to their campaign, and volunteer to spread the word about them. If these efforts are successful, a whole lot of good can be done, and a whole lot of harm can be averted. But none of that will happen unless many people do their part, including me. So, I should probably donate more money to one, or more, of these candidates. I should probably volunteer to do some canvassing, to help organize rallies, and to spread the word through online activism.

But even if I do all of these things now, opportunities to help will still emerge. I can donate money to one, or all, of these organizations now. But if I do, they will still need and ask for money later. I can also donate my time and effort to one, or all, of these causes now. But if I do, those causes will still require more volunteer help in the future. If I’m on the hook whenever someone needs my help, in whatever form they need it, my life might begin to look bleak. If I have to give most of what I have, in terms of money, time, and effort, whenever I can help

someone else, I am going to have to give up a lot. I might have to give up some of my hobbies, some of my comfort and luxury, perhaps even some of my sanity. Of course, I might have to give up some of these things, if I want to live a morally justifiable life. But do I really have to give up all of these things? Does morality demand that much?

When we ask ourselves questions like this, about how much money we should donate, about how much time we should volunteer, about what kind of causes we should support and when, we are posing questions about moral demandingness. If we think that there is something like a floor, or line, of minimal moral decency, then when we ask questions about moral demandingness, we are asking about how much morality demands of us, if we are to be minimally morally decent people. Here, we can identify a couple possible answers. At one end of the spectrum, we can say that morality demands everything, that whenever we can help, we have an obligation to, unless doing so causes something equally bad, or worse, to happen. Call this the extremist response. On the other end of the spectrum, we can say that morality demands nothing, that whenever we can help, we actually have no obligation to. Call this the nihilist response.

Very few people are nihilists about morality. But very few people are extremists, too. If these folks are even remotely justified in rejecting extremism and nihilism, then morality must demand something between these two positions.

But there’s quite a gap between these two positions. Most people who reject both extremism and nihilism about moral demandingness hope that morality doesn’t demand the next closest thing to extremism. Most people who reject extremism about moral demandingness hope that morality’s demands are consistent with some kind of worthwhile, or somewhat comfortable, life. The question is whether this kind of thought is justified and what kind of life morality recommends. This is the problem this dissertation explores. I argue that this problem, the

problem of moral demandingness, can be solved, that moderate moral demands are identifiable, explicable, and justifiable. That’s not to say that we’re all already there and that I am letting most affluent persons off the hook. I am not. In fact, I will argue that extremists often fail to distinguish between the thought that moral failing can be pervasive in a culture, and the thought that morality is extremely demanding. In some cultures, such as the post-colonial global industrial capitalist culture we currently live in, moral failure is quite pervasive. But, in my view, this just proves that our ancestors weren’t very good people, that they built a world with blood on the roots, and that we have, very unfortunately, inherited their mess. It’s ours to clean up. This much I suggest. But I will argue we can do so without embracing extremism.

This suggestion might raise one or two skeptical eyebrows. If we have benefitted from problematic behavior, it may seem as if we should give these benefits up. But I will argue that this is exactly what I am insisting we should do. I am just resisting the suggestion that everyone can be turned into an unfortunate case. It’s unfortunate that people have been harmed by historical behavior. It’s unfortunate that people don’t do the right thing. But to follow the path of extremism and suggest that everyone in a position of privilege needs to be turned into an unfortunate case is quixotic and difficult to justify, especially when a moderate, justifiable, alternative is available. This is the alternative I hope to construct. The advantage of this proposal is that it provides agents with some direction for transforming, and improving, the world while preserving their place in that world. It also provides an account that people can actually be motivated to pursue, unlike extremism, which saddles moral agents with demands any agent would have difficulty finding motivation to comply with.

Now, some folks might suggest that this moderate response is itself a product of rationalization with respect to the problematic culture we have inherited. Perhaps extreme moral

demands are difficult to motivate people to comply with, but perhaps this is just because we are, in fact, located in the problematic culture that has created the problems of global poverty and climate change, to name just two moral crises this dissertation will deal with, in the first place.

This is a plausible thought, to be sure, but history is not so unkind. Consider the gospel scene in which Mary Magdalene anoints Jesus with nard. After she does this, Judas Iscariot scolds her, and asks Jesus “Why wasn’t this perfume sold and the money given to the poor?” (Mark 14:5,

NIV). But Jesus rebukes Judas. “Leave her alone,” he says. “She has done a beautiful thing to me” (Mark 14:6, NIV). Consider also the Third Order of St. Francis of Assisi, which was designed specifically to enable people “to share in [Francis’] movement without leaving the homes and habits of normal humanity” (Chesterton, 2013, 101). Neither Jesus of Nazareth, nor

Francis of Assisi, were familiar with global industrial capitalism, but both felt a moral compunction to sainthood and neither held an extremist view of moral demandingness. This suggests that other people, in other cultures, very different from ours, are committed to a moderate conception of moral demandingness (and that they did so without rationalizing the problematic behavior of their cultures).

If morality is moderately demanding in this way, then we should expect to be able to give some kind of account of the limits of moral demandingness. In Chapter One, I argue that we can begin developing this kind of account by looking at cases of extreme moral demands and asking what we find problematic about them. To do this, I examine the critical literature on Act

Utilitarianism, a prime example of an extremely demanding moral theory. I argue that Act

Utilitarianism is criticized on the grounds that it is alienating, confining, unfair, and bad for moral agents in the sense that it can impede their flourishing, or make them worse-off. In

Chapter Two, I argue that extreme moral demands, emerging from sources other than Act

Utilitarianism, are often extremely demanding in exactly these ways. I ague that this suggests that the problem of moral demandingness generalizes beyond Act Utilitarianism and that these extreme demands are violating the same limits of moral demandingness. In Chapter Three, I argue that these same limits can be violated when moral approaches ask individual agents to make up for others’ non-compliance, and that a view which recognizes these limits could provide an account of the responsiveness of an individual’s obligations to the compliance of others in general.

In Chapter Four, I discuss whether my proposed limits of moral demandingness are justifiable. I argue that moderate moral demands can, and often do, involve significant concern and action on behalf of others, and that this behavior is very difficult to condemn as less than morally adequate. I concede that my proposed limits are defeasible, that they can be overridden, or outweighed, in some circumstances, but that for most agents most of the time this is not the case. In Chapter Five, I corroborate this thought by applying my proposed limits to the case of an individual agent’s climate change obligations. I argue that while climate change is a pressing moral matter, and while it truly threatens us with global catastrophe, my proposed limits are nonetheless reasonable and justified in the case of climate change. I suggest that these limits are even serviceable in some difficult circumstances, and that this suggests my proposed limits of moral demandingness are an indispensable component of good moral thinking and practice.

This proposal advances the literature on moral demandingness by defending a moderately demanding morality viz a viz an examination of the limits of moral demandingness. In contrast to Sin (2010), Singer (1972), and Unger (1994), this dissertation argues that morality is not extremely demanding, but it does so without challenging peripheral commitments regarding practical reason, as Dorsey (2016) and McElwee (2007) have done. Instead this dissertation

focuses on finding a method for reliably avoiding extreme moral demands and requiring agents to perform actions that are not extremely demanding. In this way, this dissertation advocates a moderately demanding morality that asks agents to address difficult moral problems, as

Lichtenberg (2014) does, without systematically appealing to the notion of an agent’s share of moral labor, as Murphy (2000) and Ridge (2010) have done. This view therefore requires more of agents than some other moderate theories without embracing the demands of extremism.

Chapter One. What Does It Mean for a Moral Theory to be Too Demanding?

Abstract

Some moral theories are extremely demanding; they ask too much of agents. But to say that a moral theory can be too demanding is to suggest that there is a limit to how much morality can require of agents, and the character of such a limit is far from clear. Call the problem of identifying, explaining, and justifying a limit to how much morality can require of agents the problem of demandingness. In this chapter, I argue that this problem can be approached by identifying ethical theories that intuitively run afoul of this limit and by explaining why we regard these moralities to be extreme. Examining the critical literature on Act Utilitarianism, I argue that a moral theory can be too demanding insofar as it alienates agents, confines agents, imposes unfair burdens on agents, and makes agents worse-off.

Introduction

Many people believe that there is a limit to how much morality can require of agents. For example, most people think that it is acceptable to behave in ways that do not exhibit the maximum amount of concern for others (and perhaps even themselves). This thought can be expressed in many forms. It might come in the form of the thought that one need not donate to every charity or that it’s not necessary to throw oneself in traffic to save a lost puppy. Or an implicit commitment to a moral limit might come in the form of the thought that given the threat

to human life posed by climate change, one should take colder showers and run the air conditioning less, but that it is not necessary to leave the air conditioning off all summer or give up warm baths altogether. Of course, some of these thoughts might be wrong. We might need to do more than we intuitively feel we should. We might need to do the very best thing all the time.

Or we might not. To ask how much morality requires of us is to inquire into the philosophical problem of moral demandingness. This is the philosophical problem of identifying, explaining, and justifying a limit to how much morality can require of agents. If there are limits to moral demandingness, it should at least be possible to construct a plausible solution to this problem. I think that a plausible solution can be constructed, and, in this chapter, I explain how to begin.

To begin, we need to notice that the idea that there is a limit to how much morality can require of agents is in direct opposition to the idea that morality requires agents to do the very best thing all the time. One prominent ethical theory, Act Utilitarianism, makes this very suggestion, that morality requires us to do the very best thing all the time. If there are limits to moral demandingness, then, we should expect Act Utilitarianism to run afoul of these limits. My view is that Act Utilitarianism does run afoul of these limits and that objections to Act

Utilitarianism are likely indicators of limits on moral demandingness in general. By surveying the critical literature on Act Utilitarianism, I argue that we can justifiably conclude that Act

Utilitarianism requires agents to do too much. I argue that Act Utilitarianism alienates agents, confines agents, imposes unfair burdens on agents, and makes agents worse-off. I argue that each of these complaints represents a distinct way of understanding how a moral theory can be too demanding and that if it can be shown that other moral theories are demanding in similar ways, this is reason to suspect that a plausible solution to the problem of moral demandingness will involve recognition of these limits.

What Does It Mean for a Morality to be Too Demanding?

The problem of demandingness has not always been approached directly.12 Mill (1861) briefly discusses the objection that Utilitarianism “is exacting too much,” but dismisses the objection on the grounds that it conflates “the rule of action with the motive of it” (18). Sidgwick

(1907) raised the problem in the context of a discussion of filial obligation, but claimed that “we are even reluctant to investigate this” because “we do not think that [an agent] ought to ask for a precise measure of his duty, in order that he may do just so much and no more” (243).3 But this is a poor reason not to investigate the problem. We may, after all, adopt a view that regards a certain class of actions as not morally required, but laudable. If we accept such a class of actions, a class we call supererogatory, we don’t obviously encourage agents to do only the minimal amount of required moral labor. And it may very well be the case that the absence of identifiable limits on moral obligation permits agents to shirk their minimal responsibility. Ambiguity may just as much encourage moral inaction as discourage moral bravery. The preponderance of one over the other is partly an empirical question, but that project cannot be undertaken in the

1 The problem of demandingness is not altogether foreign to many of the world’s religions. Ascetic leaning religions have long confronted the problem of cumbersome moral obligation with specific religious appeals to the spiritual benefits of doing so. If these appeals are objectionable, as Sin (2013) argues in the case of Confucian obligations to provide for the elderly, this increases the need for a philosophical treatment of the problem of demandingness. But the problem does not need this skeptical view to be motivated. One might think such appeals establish a class of rationally permissible supererogatory actions or one might still wonder whether non-religious appeals cannot be found to legitimately limit moral obligation. 2 Also, the problem has received more recent philosophical attention. For example, Goodin (2009) argues that moral requirements cannot be shirked because they are too demanding and others, such as McElwee (2007) and Dorsey (2016), contend that the problem of demandingness challenges a thesis about the supremacy of moral, or practical, reasons rather than any substantive ethical theory. Lichtenberg (2014) has explored a pluralist approach to the problem. See also Barry & Overland (2013), Braddock (2013), Cottingham (2009), Chappell (2009), Cullity (2009), Dougherty (2016), Ferry (2013), Harris (2015), Hooker (2009), Hurley (2006), Mulgan (2001), and Sin (2010). 3 Sidgwick does raise the problem in a few other instances. For example, Sidgwick (1907) says that “Utilitarianism is plausibly charged with setting up too high a standard…and making exaggerated demands” (87). And he later argues that “it is natural…to compare any individual’s character or conduct, not with our highest ideal…but with a certain average standard” determined by “the particular state of moral progress reached by mankind generally in his age and country” (492-3).

absence of sound normative analysis of plausible limits. This makes an investigation into the problem of moral demandingness more rather than less pressing. Fortunately, a great deal of good normative work on the limits of moral obligation has been developed.

The paradigmatic example of an extremely demanding moral theory is Act Utilitarianism.

Act Utilitarianism (AU) is the view that acts are right if and only if, and because, they produce the greatest total net happiness for all affected. According to AU, happiness or well-being is the only thing of intrinsic value. AU is universal insofar as it considers the happiness of all sentient beings, impartial insofar as counts each being’s happiness equally, and maximizing4 insofar as it requires choosing the action which produces the most happiness.

Together, these features of AU imply that moral agents are morally required to perform quite extraordinary feats in the name of morality. Consider, for example, the fact that many people in the world die from lack of basic necessities. Notice also that because freedom from want of basic necessities is the prerequisite for all other forms of happiness (or well-being), the possession of basic necessities has moral priority, especially for an Act Utilitarian. And because economic efficiencies make it such that one could often promote the most well-being by securing basic necessities for the desperately poor, AU requires a privileged person with more than basic necessities to convert those resources into resources that alleviate suffering from lack of basic necessities.5

4 Sometimes, AU is described as an optimizing view. If maximize is defined as “make as large or as great as possible” then it is synonymous with optimizing. 5 Notice the difference between this account and the one provided by Peter Singer in “Famine, Affluence, and Morality.” There, Singer starts from a principle of easy rescue and argues from there that common-sense morality must be committed to a duty to aid the global poor. Nonetheless, Singer arrives at the position I attribute here to the friend of AU. This demonstrates that the problem of over-demandingness may face ethical theories other than AU (as I will argue next chapter). This makes a proper philosophical treatment of the problem more rather than less important.

More recent proponents of Utilitarianism recognize the demandingness of their view so much so that they often describe the view as extreme.6 JJC Smart (1956), for example, distinguished between “restricted utilitarianism,” or what we now call Rule Utilitarianism, and

“extreme utilitarianism,” or what we now call Act Utilitarianism.7 This sentiment is shared by

Kagan (1989) who defined “extreme morality” as the view that “(m)orality requires that you perform that act which can be reasonably expected to lead to the best overall consequences” (1).8

Kagan contrasted the extremist with the moderate, who “denies that we are morally required to do all that we can to promote the overall good” (3); and the minimalist who believes “one is never required to aid another” (6).

Of course, other theories than just Act Utilitarianism may be too demanding.9 To determine if this is so, one first needs some account of what it means to be too demanding. One

6 In fact, some proponents of utilitarianism have even attempted to dissolve the problem of demandingness. For an often-cited example, see Sobel (2007). 7 Although, it should be noted that Smart permits, as Mill does, Act Utilitarians to think in non-utilitarian terms when “he will…act in an extreme utilitarian way if he does not think as a utilitarian” (346). 8 See also Kagan (1991). 9 Brian Berkey (2016) has argued that theories other than Act Utilitarianism can be “too demanding.” According to Berkey, one can separate “Extremism about Principles” from an “Extremism about Demands” (3019). On this view, an extremist about principles believes that “the correct moral principles have fully impartial contents” (3019-20). An extremist about demands believes that “in circumstances like ours, morality is significantly more demanding than common-sense morality takes it to be” (3021). I agree that theories other than Act Utilitarianism can be “too demanding,” but I see a central difficulty for Berkey’s approach to establishing this conclusion. First, it is not clear that a principle, in and of itself, can be extreme or moderate. An impartial principle is not obviously extreme if included in an ethical theory which claims that the correct moral principles have fully impartial contents but must only be observed some of the time. Imperfect duties are often understood this way. Kant is sometimes said to have committed to such a view, although Barbara Herman (2001) presents a cogent case for thinking otherwise. Anticipating this problem, Berkey stipulates that “Extremism about Principles” “entail(s) that individuals are always morally obligated to act in accordance with principles that take everyone’s interests equally into account” (3020). But, in making this stipulation, Berkey blurs the distinction between principles and demands. Intuitively, principles are rules that specify how an agent should behave, and this content is distinct from a specification of how strict the rule is, or how important the rule is, and from a specification of how taxing the rule is, or the extent to which a principle needs to be complied with. According to Berkey, extremism about principles entails that individuals are always morally obligated to act in accordance with impartial principles. But the directive “to always act in accordance with impartial principles” is itself a specification of the principle’s demandingness insofar as it is a specification of the principle’s stringency. Now, even if I am wrong and demandingness and stringency cannot come apart, Berkey still cannot make the distinction between extremism about principles and extremism about demands because, on this view, principles will not still not be accurately described as extreme. Alternatively, we can suppose

suggestion developed by Samuel Scheffler (1992) defines demandingness in terms of

“stringency” (26). As I see it, demandingness tracks how taxing a demand is whereas stringency tracks how strict a demand is and thus demandingness factors in stringency but cannot be reduced to or identified with it. For example, consider the moral injunction not to lie. This injunction instructs an agent to behave in a particular way, but this alone doesn’t say how important not lying is or how much opportunity cost one must incur to comply with the injunction. Some moral theorists might think the principle is very important and thus claim it is very seriously wrong to lie about trivial things like one’s favorite color. Other moral theorists might deny this. These moral theorists disagree about how stringent this principle is. But that’s not all. Some moral theorists might think the principle is taxing and that one cannot lie even to save one’s own life. Other moral theorists might deny this. These moral theorists disagree about how demanding this principle is. Scheffler implies demandingness and stringency are two sides of the same coin, but it is difficult for me to imagine that this is the case. If stringent means strict and demanding means taxing, a rule can be strict without being demanding. For example, the principle “always do what is locally or culturally required” is strict, but if you are in a place where local culture leans towards egoism, following this rule strictly would not be taxing. So, I

that principles are partly constituted by their demands. On this view, a principle is composed of three elements: a prescription, a specification of the principle’s stringency, and a specification of the principle’s demandingness. I find this picture hard to accept, but I need only note that this conception of principles is not open to Berkey who wants to distinguish between extremism about principles and extremism about demands. Either principles are distinguishable from demands, in which case it makes no sense to regard principles as extreme or they are indistinguishable from demands, in which case it is misguided to base a philosophical inquiry on the distinction between principles and demands. In either case, Berkey’s attempt to define extreme morality is less than successful. Again, this is not to say Act Utilitarianism is the only moral theory one can regard as too demanding. I do in fact believe views other than Act Utilitarianism can be too demanding. This is just to suggest that it is best to stick to characterizing principles as overly demanding only when properly understood in the context of a more complete ethical theory or approach. That’s because, as the preceding demonstrates, either demands are built into principles in virtue of their accommodation in an ethical approach or else demands are generated in virtue of a moral principle’s interaction with the other components of the approach in which it is a part. None of this amounts, however, to an account of what it means to for a moral theory to be too demanding. To make progress towards giving such an account, it will help to consult the philosophical literature critical of Act Utilitarianism in search of clues.

am inclined to say demandingness factors in stringency, but that the two are not synonymous.

And yet, even if I am wrong about this, it will still be helpful, in the way of defining what an extreme moral demand is, to give a fuller account of what an extreme moral demand is. My view is that a good place to start is by asking what exactly is so extreme about Act Utilitarianism.

Interpretation One: Alienation and Integrity

AU requires agents to always promote the greatest total net happiness. Earlier I mentioned that this involves converting surplus resources into aid for the needy, but it also involves more than this. AU says parents must devote time to their neighbors’ children when those children need more help than their own, that agents must wear old clothes when new ones wouldn’t result in increased happiness or career success, devote leisure time to volunteer work, and more, whenever more promotes greater total net happiness. This strikes most people as extremely demanding. But what does it mean to say AU, or any moral theory, is too demanding?

One thing it might mean is that compliance with AU would be alienating. There are two central ways critics claim AU is alienating. The first form of the alienation objection claims AU is extremely demanding because compliance with AU would alienate an agent from the commitments they have voluntarily adopted, commitments which give agents meaning to their lives. Here, the thought is that because AU says one must always do the thing that would most promote total net happiness, AU directs agents to regard their personal commitments in such a way that they might easily be given up. In this way, AU creates psychological distance between an agent and what gives meaning to her life. This form of the alienation objection is attributed, in its original form, to Bernard Williams, who connected the alienating effects of Utilitarianism to the insensitivity of Utilitarianism to the value of integrity. To show this, Williams appealed to two imagined cases.

In the first case, Jim, “on a botanical expedition,” comes across the captain of a military outfit who is about to execute twenty villagers from “a random group of…inhabitants who, after recent attacks against the government, are about to be killed” (98). Because “Jim is an honoured visitor from another land, the captain is happy to offer him a guest’s privilege of killing one of the [villagers] himself. If Jim accepts, then…the other [villagers] will be let off.” Finally, “the other villagers understand the situation, and are…begging” Jim to perform the single execution

(99).10

In the second case, “George, who has just taken his Ph.D. in chemistry” is deciding whether or not to take “a decently paid job in a certain laboratory” (97). He has a wife and children he would like to provide for, but the job involves research on “chemical and biological warfare” which George is opposed to. Moreover, George knows that if he “refuses the job, it will…go to a contemporary of” his “who is not inhibited by [George’s] scruples and is likely if appointed to push along the research with greater zeal than George” (98).

According to Williams, the Act Utilitarian will suggest both that Jim perform the execution and that George take the job. But, Williams argues it is wrong to suggest George should take the job. George should be held “specifically responsible for what he does, rather than for what other people do” (99). This, Williams tells us, “is an idea closely connected with the value of integrity” (99). Act Utilitarianism violates George’s integrity by asking him to regard his own commitments as “one satisfaction among others” (116). George’s commitment to a world without bio-chemical weapons is a “commitment” or “project” with which George is

“deeply and extensively involved and identified” (116). George’s pacifism thus contributes to the

10 In the original text, Williams describes the prisoners as “Indians,” a term I am here omitting.

meaning of George’s life. And yet Act Utilitarianism asks George to give up this commitment in the name of promoting utility. The Jim case, Williams tell us, is different. Williams claims the utilitarian is “probably right” that Jim should accept the offer to kill one villager to save the rest, but that appropriate convergence on this conclusion will involve a way of thinking that is not utilitarian, a way of deliberating sensitive to personal projects and to considerations of “how far one’s powerful objection to killing people just is…an application of a powerful objection to their being killed” (117).

According to Williams, “utilitarianism alienates one from one’s moral feelings” and

“from one’s actions as well” (104). It does so, Williams says, by asking agents to regard their feelings and actions as an outsider would, which would be to lose “one’s moral identity; to lose, in the most literal way, one’s integrity” (104). These claims require some unpacking. First, and foremost, is the invoked notion of integrity. What is integrity? According to Chappell (2007), one way of reading integrity understands integrity “to name a virtue consisting in honesty about one’s real values and a refusal to compromise those values” (256). On this understanding of integrity, integrity denotes a unity between one’s views or values and one’s actions.11 To compromise one’s integrity is to act in ways that are inconsistent with one’s previous actions or deeply held values. Understood in this way, one might account for the disanology between the

Jim and George case by claiming that Jim’s performance of the execution does not require that he forgo his valuing and commitment to botany whereas by taking the job George must forgo his valuing and commitment to a world without biological or chemical weapons. But this is an apparently unstable interpretation of the integrity objection. After all, Jim may have a perfectly justifiable commitment to leading a non-violent life. So, it would make sense to interpret

11 As Mulgan (2001) says “the integrity of a life is its wholeness, unity, or shape” (17).

Williams’ notion of integrity in this manner, if Williams was claiming that AU incorrectly prescribes that both George take the job and Jim perform the execution. But, as Chappell (2007) observes, “Williams does not say that consequentialism tells Jim and George to do the wrong things” (256). Williams’ view is that Jim should perform the execution. It’s just that Jim should not reach that conclusion using Utilitarian reasoning. So, it seems Williams is not making such an austere claim when he claims AU violates a person’s integrity.

Rather, Chappell understands Williams to take integrity as denoting “autonomous agency” and Williams’ integrity objection to AU as drawing attention to “the incompatibility of genuinely autonomous agency with the impartial perspective” of AU (257). According to

Chappell, Utilitarianism suggests that, “the various goods that constitute the overall human good are to be promoted, and there is nothing special about any individual’s relation to any one of those goods” (259). And this is certainly one of the central claims of AU: that the total net happiness is the overall good and every agent has reason to promote the overall good. In this sense, AU is said to be agent-neutral; AU claims that every agent has the same moral obligation: to promote total net happiness. Of course, empirical circumstances vary from agent to agent and so, according to AU, what one agent must do in one circumstance might be different than what another agent must do in another circumstance. It is just that on the Utilitarian view “there is no special relation between most particular agents and most particular goods that makes it intrinsically more apt for any one agent rather than any other to promote any one good” (259).

Keeping in mind that AU is committed to an entirely agent-neutral account of the good, the integrity objection can be interpreted as the challenge that not all that is valuable is agent- neutral. One thing that is valuable is autonomous agency, or integrity. Unlike many of the goods that constitute the overall good, autonomous agency is a good “only one agent…has the ability to

promote…directly: namely…himself” (Chappell, Ibid.). Because the value of autonomous agency provides agent-relative reasons for acting, it cannot be assimilated in a framework such as AU which treats all good as providing agent-neutral reasons for acting. To do so would be to treat autonomous agency as a value to be distributed along with all other values. This is what

Williams apparently means when he claims AU makes an agent “into a channel between the input of everyone’s projects…and an output of optimific decision” (Williams, 1973, 116). If autonomous agency is treated as an agent-neutral good every agent has reason to promote, then, it may very well turn out that one can most promote autonomous agency by sacrificing one’s own. But to do so would be to violate an agent’s integrity.

For these reasons, Chappell prefers a non-consequentialist form of value pluralism. On this view, there are first-order values that provide agent-neutral reasons for acting, but the honoring of these values is also considered valuable, so, there are second-order duties to not harm first-order values. For example, feeding a starving person is good. It is a valuable activity.

But it is also an activity any agent has reason to engage in. So, feeding the hungry is an agent- neutral form of value: whenever an agent is confronted with a hungry person that agent has at least some reason to assist. But it is also good not to interfere with poverty efforts. So, there is a second-order duty not to harm first-order values. In other words, it is good not to interfere with good. The consequentialist treats first and second-order values as both providing agent-neutral reasons for acting. But Chappell’s non-consequential value pluralism treats only the first-order goods in this manner. Second-order goods are not to be promoted, but “honored” (262). To honor a good is not to promote a good. To promote a good is to permit trade-offs between various concrete instances of the good; for example, in the case where one can promote more of some good by sacrificing other instances of that same good. To honor a good is to permit no trade-offs.

To honor a good is not to sacrifice a single instance of that type of good. It is to respect that good. So, because Chappell’s value pluralism involves both the promoting and honoring of goods, Chappell’s value pluralism can be summarized as the view that one should

“promote…good where it can be promoted without dishonoring it” (263).12

With value pluralism in mind, it is easy to see how Chappell thinks a Williams-inspired view can avoid advocating an extremely demanding morality. Because an agent’s autonomous agency provides agent-relative reasons for acting, an agent’s autonomous agency cannot be promoted and must therefore be honored. To do otherwise would, presumably, be to treat one’s autonomous agency as just another part of the overall good any agent has reason to promote.

Because this is the case, agents must honor their own autonomous agency and promote the overall good within this constraint. Because agent’s projects are themselves the product an agent’s autonomy, these projects consequently serve as constraints on the promotion of the overall good. That’s why AU’s prescription that George take the laboratory job is so extreme:

AU disregards George’s autonomous and morally acceptable commitment to a world without biochemical weapons. But that’s not to say that constraints are absolute and completely indefeasible. Sometimes the consequences can be so bad, the constraints must be disregarded.

This is also, presumably, why Williams unenthusiastically conceded Jim should perform the execution.

One lingering difficulty for Chappell is that AU appears to have the resources available to account for the value of autonomous agency even in an entirely agent-neutral framework. To see this, remember that moral requirements, on AU, are sensitive to empirical circumstances. If no

12 Chappell (2011) later amends her view to accommodate a plurality of ways in which one might react to value. But see Chappell (2015) for an even more radical departure.

agent other than the agent herself is in a position to promote her autonomy, and her autonomy is a part of the overall good, then, to produce the most overall good it seems the agent must promote her own autonomy. To fail to do so would be a failure to promote the most overall good, on the lights of AU. Now, it might be true that AU cannot accommodate the value of integrity given its commitment to hedonism, but even if that is the case, the integrity objection would fail to stand on its own as an objection to extremely demanding morality. The objection would amount to little more than a simple objection to hedonism. Furthermore, it might even be the case that no agent is in the sole position to promote her own autonomy. Properly cultivated autonomy may very well require the effort of others, for instance, parents, and/or community members.13 But if that’s the case, it is less clear that there are only agent-relative reasons emergent in response to the value of autonomy. If autonomy requires the efforts of others to be well-cultivated, that may itself be reason to think there are agent-neutral reasons to promote autonomy.

Nonetheless, it is the case that by counting autonomy as an agent-neutral value, any consequentialist calculus could still compromise any one agent’s personal autonomy. This would be the case where an agent could most promote autonomy by sacrificing her own, as Chappell observes. So, a theory which recognized only agent-neutral forms of value could still compromise an agent’s autonomy. Thus, we have discovered one reason why Act Utilitarianism is regarded as an extremely demanding theory: it can compromise an agent’s autonomy, and this counts as a form of the alienation objection because it would mean separating an agent from her own agency, or ability to self-rule. Of course, this is just a description of the view. The problem

13 For example, Brink (1997) argues that T.H. Green was correct when he observed that “the proper conception of self-realization involves the good of others as a constituent part” (133).

of moral demandingness requires the development of a case for rejecting extremely demanding views. But to develop such a case first requires the identification of plausible limits. So, it will help to explore other possible objections.

Interpretation One Continued: Alienation and the Personal Point of View

The second form of the alienation objection, the objection from the personal point of view, can be attributed to Samuel Scheffler (1982). For Scheffler, it is not just AU that is alienating, but all forms of impartial consequentialism. On his view, all “act- consequentialist…theories...specify some principle for ranking overall states of affairs from best to worst from an impersonal point of view” (1). This means that the rankings are “not agent- relative” in the sense that “they do not vary from person to person” (Ibid.).14 But, on Scheffler’s view, requiring agents to act on impartial reasons is extremely demanding and it is extremely demanding irrespective of whether doing so amounts to a loss of an agent’s integrity.

As Scheffler sees it, Williams’ integrity objection cannot provide an account of what is extreme about AU. On his view, “an objection to the in-principle dispensability of the agent’s projects…must be regarded as a criticism of almost all non-egoistic theories” (8). That’s because, Scheffler thinks “any moral theory will make the permissibility of pursuing one’s own projects depend at least in part on the state of the world from an impersonal standpoint” (Ibid.).

To suggest otherwise would be flatly absurd.

14 Here, Scheffler appeals to a somewhat outdated way of distinguishing agent-neutral and agent-relative reasons. As McNaughton & Rawling (1990; 1992) make clear, even a deontological view posits duties that, in at least one sense, give all agents the same aim. For example, on a deontological view, all agents have the same aim of not lying themselves. Rather an agent-relative reason is a reason that “makes essential reference to” the agent (McNaughton & Rawling, 1992, 835). Consider, for instance, the difference between the claim “x should care for y because y is a child” and the claim “x should care for y because y is x’s child.” For a contemporary argument suggesting that deontologists can also recognize agent-neutral reasons, see Dougherty (2013).

As I have explained, it is doubtful that Williams’ integrity objection can be understood as the simple claim that personal projects are not to be sacrificed in pursuit of the good. That is certainly not the case for Chappell’s value pluralism which explicitly permits very bad consequences to outweigh, or override, second-order constraints. Still the contrast to Williams helps put the form of Scheffler’s alienation objection in view. Whereas Williams objected to

AU’s infringement of autonomous agency, Scheffler objects to AU’s infringement of personal priority. For Scheffler, AU is objectionable insofar as it “require(s) the agent to allocate energy and attention to the projects and people he cares most about in strict proportion to the value from an impartial standpoint” (9).15

To correct for this alienation, Scheffler advocates for a view that includes an “agent- centered prerogative” or a permission for a person to hold their own interests “out of proportion to the weight from an impersonal standpoint” (14). The result is a view that permits agents to perform a less than best outcome, viewed impersonally. However, Scheffler does not allow that agents might attribute to their own interests any weight whatsoever. To do that would be to establish a “protected zone” and thus permit “the egoistic self to pursue whatever projects and activities it desired in complete freedom from all moral restraints” (18).

For Scheffler, an acceptable agent-centered prerogative must “permit the coherent integration of the agent’s values and actions within the structure of a unified personality” as well as “place appropriate restrictions on the values and actions whose coherent integration and development it will protect” (19). To meet both of these desiderata, Scheffler permits agents to

15 Scheffler implies that all forms of consequentialism require this form of allocation, but that is not exactly correct. Railton (1984) develops a compelling case for thinking that if one understands consequentialism as establishing a criteria of right action rather than a decision procedure one might allocate more time and energy to the people one cares most about than a strictly impartial allocation would demand and yet still promote the most value in the long run.

“assign a certain proportionately greater weight to (their) own interests than to the interests of other people” (20). By doing so, Scheffler gives agents more space to pursue their projects without giving agents permission to do whatever they please.

We may have reservations about Scheffler’s view. But even if we do, we can agree with

Scheffler’s contention that moral theories which recognize only agent-neutral forms of value alienate agents from their personal point of view. This is possible even if we reject Scheffler’s interpretation of Williams’ integrity objection. That’s because Williams’ integrity objection suggests that autonomous agency is a form of value one cannot regard as agent-neutral, unless one wants to suggest that there are cases where one’s agency can be violated in ways we intuitively regard to be too demanding. So, if we think that autonomous agency is a form of value at least partly constitutive of the personal point of view, then, in cases where we regard the violation of agency to be too demanding, we will regard such demands as alienating an agent from their personal point of view as well. Thus, to recap the preceding, I have suggested that complaints about a moral theory being “too demanding” can sometime be interpreted as concerns about alienation. One version of this complaint has it that a moral theory is too demanding when it separates agents from their moral values, as Williams and Chappell argue. A second version is that a moral approach is too demanding when it separates agents from their personal point of view, as Scheffler argues.

Interpretation Two: Confinement

Another thing one might mean when one says that AU is too demanding is that AU is confining. This interpretation of the claim that AU is too demanding might be pulled from Susan

Wolf’s critique of moral saints. On Wolf’s (1982) view, a “moral saint” is not unlike an Act-

Utilitarian; a moral saint is “a person whose every action is as morally good as possible” (419).

For Wolf, this is a person whose life is “dominated by a commitment to improving the welfare of others” (420). The problem with such a person, for Wolf, is that the “moral virtues…are apt to crowd out the non-moral virtues” (421). The result is that the moral saint is confined to a life of virtue, in which “he is not reading Victorian novels, playing the oboe, or improving his backhand” (Ibid.). To make matters worse, such a saint would not even possess many character traits people find pleasing or admirable. According to Wolf, such a saint will not develop “a cynical or sarcastic wit,” or a taste for “gourmet cooking;” instead, such a saint will be “dull- witted or humorless or bland” (422).

Of course, we might take exception with Wolf’s characterization of moral saints.

Carbonell (2009) convincingly argues that real-life moral saints are not the miserly sort of people

Wolf imagines. Nonetheless, should we take exception with Wolf’s characterization of saints, we will only have rejected Wolf’s contention that it is not better to be a moral saint. The question remains whether all moral agents can be expected to become saints and we might still think the answer is negative. That is, we might think that there are certain things that it would be better for us to give up in pursuit of some moral end, but that such sacrifices are not required of us.

The strongest way to resist views that require sainthood is to suggest that there are certain things morality can never take away from us, or to suggest that some interests constitute a sphere protected from the reach of morality. This interpretation of the confinement objection has some appeal, but as Buss (2006) argues, it is ultimately untenable. To show this, Buss begins by asking how the reasons generated by others’ needs “stack up against the reasons of self-interest and inclination” (380). To think that there is a space in agent’s lives protected from morality is thus to suggest that the reasons generated by others’ needs are not decisive, in the sense of not giving one sufficient reason to act on those reasons. Thus, Buss says “all versions” of what we can call

the “protected space defense” “begin with the observation that whatever formal principles of rationality there may be, they do not provide me with grounds for choosing among all of the otherwise acceptable possibilities” (382). The next step in the argument is to articulate a set of conditions in which the agent is able to “make the further discriminations” (383). One suggestion is “that I need to care about certain things” to “be disposed to regard certain facts as more compelling reasons than others” (383). To act in ways inconsistent with caring about these things is “to contradict ourselves” (383-4). So, to treat the things way we care about as even subject to sacrifice is irrational. As Buss says, on the protected space view, “to be at odds with oneself in this way is a paradigm case of irrationality” (384).

Buss argues that the problem with this protected space argument is that the conclusion does not follow from the premises. Even if it is the case that a person’s concern for themselves or other people or other things is a precondition for rationality, it need not be the case that any particular object of concern is necessary for rationality. As Buss puts it, “[e]ven if my reasons do depend on my identity,” “my identity is not self-justifying” (385). This conclusion is buttressed by Stroud (2013) who asks whether there exists “a ‘hands-off’ or ‘no-fly’ zone which moral requirements could not penetrate” (3).16 Like Buss, Stroud thinks that there is not such a zone.

To demonstrate this, Stroud invokes the story of Frau Paul. Frau Paul gave birth in a Berlin hospital in 1961. Due to complications at birth, her child, named Torsten, suffered a ruptured diaphragm. The next night, the Berlin Wall was constructed. Doctors at the hospital tried to care for Torsten, but they were limited in their ability to help. Eventually, the doctors at the hospital were able to sneak Torsten across the Berlin Wall to a Western hospital where he could be cared for properly. Frau Paul and her husband were subsequently granted permission to individually

16 See also Stroud (1998; 2010).

visit Torsten on the West side of the wall (the Eastern government feared the couple would take permanent refuge in the West if permitted to travel together). Over time, Frau Paul and her husband become well-established acquaintances with a network of citizens trying to secretly usher people from East to West Berlin and eventually offered the network their help. One day, the East Berlin officials picked Frau Paul up off the street and offered her a deal: she could lead the officials to the leader of the secret network in exchange for permission to visit her son in

West Berlin. On Stroud’s view, Frau Paul’s visitation trips to West Berlin to see Torsten count as a deep and personal commitment. But in the scenario just described, Frau Paul should not acquiesce to the East Berlin officials and turn in the leader of the secret network. The results would be very bad for those persons. Thus, Stroud concludes morality can ask an agent to give up something they are deeply and personally committed to.

Of course, Buss and Stroud are not suggesting that morality can demand anything from agents. Stroud (2013) explicitly suggests that we “rely on ex ante vigilance” to resist “extreme demands” (32). It might just be that it does not make sense to say morality can be too demanding because it confines agents. Kagan (1989) suggests something similar. Kagan argues against the claim that morality must deliver a set of options from which to choose. Kagan, an advocate of

AU, must deny this possibility given its opposition to the Utilitarian thesis that one must always do the best thing. Because the confinement objection is just the objection that morality should not unduly box one in, and AU is just the view that there is one thing agents always must do, to advocate AU, Kagan needs to reject the confinement objection (213). He does this by arguing that the defense of options is most plausibly motivated by an appeal to the cost to the agent of having to the very best thing. The problem, Kagan argues, is that “the appeal to cost would support not only options to allow harm, but also options to do harm” (186). This is the same

strategy as Stroud’s. Stroud argues that if morality establishes a protected zone, then, one can cause harm when this zone is threatened. This is what the Frau Paul case illustrates. Frau Paul has a personal commitment threatened. Her only means of protecting this commitment is to cause harm, and yet Stroud says, Frau Paul should not cause harm to protect this commitment.

To salvage the confinement objection, we might just reject the strategy of motivating the objection by brute appeal to cost to the agent. The confinement objection might not be so much about cost to the agent in general as it is about violations of the agent’s freedom. Whereas the alienation objection emphasizes the way extreme moral demands separate agents from sources of value, the confinement objection might just emphasize the way extreme moral demands chain agents to some forms of value. Viewed this way, the Frau Paul case is not a case of moral confinement. Frau Paul might be alienated from a personal project, but her case might just be similar to Williams’ Jim case: one case where alienation is acceptable given the threat of disaster. So, an extreme moral demand may be extreme in virtue of confining agents, even if there are no “spaces” protected from the reach of morality. It is not so much that morality cannot take things away from us, but that morality cannot chain us to certain values. Act Utilitarianism is a confining theory because it chains us to the task of promoting the greatest total net happiness. That is something we regard as extreme.

Interpretation Three: Fairness

A third thing one might mean when one says AU is too demanding is that AU is unfair.

What is fairness? One possibility is that fairness is a synonym for equality, but this raises the question “equality of what?” AU is a view that considers the interests of all sentient beings equally insofar as it directs agents to regard all interests as possessing the same numerical value, or weight. (Some proponents of AU, such as Peter Singer (1982), accept a tiered view of moral

status where some beings have more complex interests than other beings, but this is consistent with equal consideration for equal interests.) So, if AU is unfair, it cannot be because it fails to consider everyone’s interests equally in this sense.

Fairness might just involve equality of outcome. Perhaps AU is unfair because it leaves agents with less than others. This is plausible. Act Utilitarianism requires agents to donate money or resources whenever doing so promotes the greatest total net happiness. This is the case even if an agent is the only potential benefactor donating. That we might say is unfair.17 But the problem with emphasizing this interpretation of fairness is that it ignores the fact that potential beneficiaries are often even worse-off.18 If fairness is about equality of outcome, the proponent of Act Utilitarianism can very convincingly argue that AU is the view that most directly aims at fairness. That’s why the Utilitarian insists on the view that complying agents should continue donating, even if others are not: the needy are in bad shape and the complying agent is in a place of privilege.

Fairness seems to involve a notion of equality of entitlement. Consider, for example, the claim “every dog in the shelter deserves a home.” This claim could be interpreted as a claim about the intrinsic moral value of dogs. It could also be interpreted as a claim about the outcome we hope all dogs experience. But it also seems to indispensably involve the thought that there are certain goods certain individuals are entitled to in virtue of being who they are. If fairness simply involved a claim about the intrinsic moral value of dogs, then, it wouldn’t be unfair to return a

17 Murphy (2000) argues for something similar. On his view, the problem of demandingness is more accurately cast a problem of unfair moral burdens. As Murphy sees it, AU is unfair because it asks agents to do more than the share of moral labor they would have to do to contribute to a beneficent aim if everyone did an equal share. For a somewhat different account of this objection, see Horton (2011). For a critical discussion of Murphy’s view see Sonderholm (2012). For a view that agents can be asked to do more than Murphy requires, see Ridge (2010). 18 See Sobel (2007).

St. Bernard to the shelter in exchange for two chihuahuas because the St. Bernard’s food cost twice the amount of the chihuahuas’ food. Yet, this is a paradigmatic instance of unfairness. And if fairness simply involved a claim about equality of outcome, we would expect our sense of unfairness to be engaged as we learned that not only were two dogs adopted, but that one was adopted into a home on two acres of fenced land and one was adopted into a home with a modest, but serviceable backyard. And yet this is not an obviously unfair scenario. That’s not to say that a move from a thin to a thick description of an outcome cannot change our evaluation of the situation. Two dogs in the shelter may both find homes, but if one is an abusive home, the situation is no longer fair. The point rather is that fairness is not simply tracking equality of outcome. Fairness seems to indispensably involve the notions of intrinsic value, outcome, and entitlement. So, at a minimum, we might say fairness involves the entitlement of equally valuable beings to some recognizable and equally valuable, minimal outcome.

If we adopt this preliminary view of fairness, we can recognize the unfairness that can befall both benefactors and beneficiaries in the kinds of cases where Act Utilitarianism generates controversy. These are the kinds of cases where a large pool of benefactors is not all working to assist a large pool of very needy persons. In this condition, a potential beneficiary is in an unfair position because they are very badly off, and they are a being with a certain worth and they therefore deserve the kind of life in which they are not so badly off. And a potential benefactor can be treated unfairly when they are being asked to do more moral labor because other potential benefactors are not helping and helping would still leave them better off than a potential beneficiary. That’s because the potential benefactor is also a being with a certain value and they also therefore deserve the kind of life in which they are not so badly off, the kind of life that is threatened by further moral demands.

At this point, it may seem as if I am defending nothing other than a minimal level of well-being Act Utilitarianism cannot drop agents below. If this were the case, I would surely be missing my mark. After all, Peter Singer (1972) admits that an affluent agent need not sacrifice anything of “comparable moral importance” when aiding a beneficiary (231). So, what gives?

Well, for one thing, the account of fairness I am describing here does not need to cast the equally valuable outcomes equally valuable beings are minimally entitled to in terms of well-being. I spoke earlier of the claim that “every dog in the shelter deserves a home.” Note that this is true even as the shelter provides the dogs with adequate food, water, and housing. Of course, part of what it is to have a home is to have love. And love certainly contributes to well-being.19 But love is also symbolic.20 Part of what we are entitled to, in virtue of fairness, is also symbolic. For example, the dogs in shelters who deserve homes also deserve caregivers who do not adopt them just to run them in a dog show, even if doing so doesn’t actually harm the dog.

Of course, our entitlements can be overridden. This is, after all, the kind of consideration that gets Act Utilitarianism up and running. The problem with Act Utilitarianism is that it says we should always give whenever giving promotes the greatest total net happiness. To require this much is unfair. We deserve more than that. And that more is not just about our well-being. Of course, our well-being is very important. We certainly are entitled to that. But our entitlements cannot be reduced to our entitlement to a specific level, or understanding, of well-being, and Act

Utilitarianism is extremely demanding partly in virtue of infringing these entitlements.21 This is

19 See Chappell (2009) for an extended defense of this claim. 20 A loving parent never looks on a child with disdain, even in the privacy of her bedroom at night. This shows that part of what it is to love someone is to regard them in a certain way. Secret, fleeting disdain might never actually harm anyone, but the beloved is entitled to something better than this. 21 Nor can this objection be reduced to the objection I have called the alienation objection. To be sure, we are entitled to our own point of view, and Act Utilitarianism does separate us from this point of view. But our entitlements can extend beyond what we are entitled to in virtue of this point of view, as our entitlement to well-

not to say that Act Utilitarianism is not extremely demanding because it compromises our well- being. In fact, that might be one of the most important reasons why Act Utilitarianism is too demanding. Fortunately, the subject of the next section is how to understand that claim.

Interpretation Four: Loss of Flourishing

A fourth thing one might mean when one says AU is extremely demanding is that compliance with AU would make an agent worse off. This claim will be more or less plausible depending on how one understands well-being. I suspect that many rival accounts of well-being can corroborate the contention that AU makes an agent unreasonably worse-off, but I will restrict the present discussion to a eudaimonistic, or flourishing, account of well-being.

Flourishing has been understood in several ways. Kraut (2007) advocates a developmental view. On this view, flourishing involves “the growing, maturing, (and) making full use of the potentialities, capacities, and faculties” a being has in virtue of their biological and/or cultural inheritance “at an early stage of their existence” (131). To discover what amounts to flourishing for some particular being one must identify what kind of being one is concerned with and examine a large enough sample of those beings to extrapolate a typical developmental pattern for that kind of being. This typical developmental pattern can then be used to fix or specify the relation between a good and a subject. A good contributes to a subject’s flourishing just in case that good contributes to that subject’s realizing the typical development pattern for the kind of being the subject is.22

being implies. The fact that there is some overlap between the various interpretations of extreme moral demands should be encouraging, rather than discouraging, as these are meant to be distinct interpretations of what is so extreme about the same demand. But I will have more to say about the relationship between the objections in Chapter Four. 22 As I see it, a typically developed subject is a mature adult subject, not a “normal” or “able-bodied” subject. Disabled persons follow development patterns as much as anyone and clearly are capable of flourishing.

Nussbaum (2006) advocates a capabilities approach to flourishing. For Nussbaum, a capability is “implicit in the idea of a life worthy of…dignity” (70). Capabilities are defined derivatively in terms of “functioning” (74). If a dignified being performs a typical function, that function is constitutive of one of that being’s central capabilities. But capabilities are not to be reduced to or identified with functioning. That’s because capabilities also involve an

“opportunity” component (171). This means that a capability is not just something an organism does, but the capacity to determine when and how to do something. In this way, Nussbaum’s capabilities can be described as freedoms. Freedoms involve the capacity to perform some particular function, but also the opportunity to forgo that function. For instance, the freedom to vote involves the capacity to exercise one’s powers to cast a ballot, but it also involves the capacity to abstain if one so chooses. Similarly, a leisure capability involves the capacity to rest, to decide how to rest, and to work overtime if one chooses, while a reproductive capability involves the capacity to reproduce, to decide when, and to refrain from doing so if one chooses.

To identify capabilities, Nussbaum invokes a method called “sympathetic imagining”

(355). For Nussbaum, this process is both descriptive and evaluative. It involves “narrative” descriptions of a being’s life and normative judgments regarding what contributes to that life going well. This process begins with “considered judgments” and revises, or confirms, these judgments as the process of sympathetic imagining is undertaken (353). If a sympathetic imaginer judges a capability as contributing to a being’s leading a dignified life, that capability is partly constitutive of that being’s flourishing, on this view.

A third way of understanding flourishing is phenomenological.23 On this view, flourishing involves the possession of perceivable values tailored to the well-being of a particular subject.24 Flourishing is simply the possession of a sufficient number of perceivable values such that were the individual in question to possess more value that individual’s life would not go much better. This leaves open the possibility that values contributing to the flourishing of one being do not contribute to the flourishing of another, even if both individuals are the same kind of being. To identify flourishing-contributing values, on this view, one need only perceive that such values do in fact contribute to a subject’s life going well or that the absence of some value

23 For instance, Chappell (2015) describes how “values are encountered” and how “their presence before us is none of our doing,” but that “we bump into them” just as we bump into “trees and tables and tax-invoices” (84). These values are “transculturally available” and “not the product of any single sensory-modality.” They “give rise to reasons to act,” and often come in the form of “epiphanies” or “encounters with value…that revolutionizes...the…way we see the world” or our “motivational and justificatory outlook” (85). These encounters with value are not presented as arguments. For Chappell, arguments and phenomenological accounts are subject to disparate criteria of success. Arguments succeed only by valid movement from “true premises to true conclusions” (Ibid.). Phenomenological descriptions are successful when “they are sincere,” “offered…in good faith,” “without conscious bias,” “accurate,” and “significant” or “existentially central” insofar as their rejection or acceptance results in practical differences (85-6). 24 Chappell asks whether we can go straight from a “phenomenology of value to an outright disproof of any moral theory” and answers in the negative (90). The reason Chappell gives is Duhemian and that in philosophy, in general, “not just in ethics,” it is always possible to “avoid outright refutation” by modifying elements of one’s position, others’ objections, the rules of philosophy, or “all three” (91). I agree with Chappell’s metaphilosophical stance, but one can consistently think that accurate phenomenological descriptions of encounters with value strongly suggest a eudaimonistic theory of well-being and accept this stance. Now, Chappell considers and rejects, on the basis of a phenomenology of value, Mark LeBar’s virtue approach. Specifically, Chappell attacks LeBar’s idea that the “normative depends on the telic” insofar as the “ethical reasons that I have must all pass the test of being reasons that I have reason to have” (92). Chappell thinks an accurate phenomenology of value, which she describes as “recognitionalism” suggests that this claim is false. I wish to remain agnostic on the dispute between Chappell and LeBar on the relationship between the telic and the normative, but I would argue that this rejection is consistent with the view of flourishing I have described as phenomenological. In fact, every single encounter Chappell draws from involves recognizing some good fixed to some subject(s). Xerxes recognizes the beauty of a plane tree and is inspired to contemplate natural beauty. The crowd at Venus Victrix’s second consulship pity the elephants harmed in gladiatorial games. The character in Coetzee’s novel learns to love and care for the dogs and cats he puts down in the animal shelter. St. Francis recognizes the needs of the beggar he ignores in the market. Jesus’ disciples recognize the need of the neighbor rescued by the Good Samaritan in his parable. In every single one of these instances, one apparently encounters value as a relation between some good, or complex of goods, and some particular subject. Contemplating beauty is good for Xerxes. Freedom from fear and harm is good for elephants. Companionship is good for dogs and cats. Rescue is good for the neighbor in Jesus’ parable. Social recognition is good for the beggar St. Francis initially ignores. And Chappell (2014) does, in fact, speak of “human eudaimonia” in the sense I am describing, despite her rejection of LeBar’s telic view (156).

does in fact detract from a subject’s life going well. For example, we see the benefit water, food, shelter, and company bring to the emaciated and abandoned dog because we see that the absence of these values detracts from the dog’s life going well and we see that their presence contributes to the dog’s life going well. Similarly, we see that social relationships, especially friendship, are critical values to human flourishing because we witness the pain of the loner kid at school just as much as we witness the various processes through which friends uplift one another.25

Is there any way to assimilate these various thoughts about flourishing into a single account of eudaimonia? One response to this kind of question is just to say that we don’t need to.

We might just take these various insights about flourishing as indicators of a complex phenomenon we can’t capture with a simple definition. There is, after all, no reason to suggest every phenomenon we are interested in is simple enough to be captured by a definition (but I suppose that depends on what our philosophical view on kinds is). Still, I think there is something we can say about eudaimonia, given the insights characterized above. First, we can try to assimilate Nussbaum’s notion of capabilities and Kraut’s conception of faculties, capacities, and potentials we inherit at an early stage of our existence. We might then just say that flourishing partly consists in the development of species-specific capabilities, where we understand development in Kraut’s terminology of growing, maturing, and making full use of our capabilities. We might also subsume Nussbaum’s sympathetic imagining method under a phenomenological approach. After all, there is no reason why we can’t perceive, or otherwise experience, the objects of our imagination as much as the external objects of our senses. If we do

25 This is not to say that we cannot be taught how to encounter these values or taught how to ignore them. Nor is it to presuppose any specific account of perception. Perhaps values are encountered directly and externally, as so-called behavioralists imagine, or perhaps values are encountered directly and internally as synthesized representations, as Kantian inspired psychologists imagine. For present purposes, the difference does not matter.

this, we can say that eudaimonia consists in the development and use of species-specific capabilities and values that recognizably make a subject’s life go better, where recognition is understood to involve both what we can literally see and what we can imagine.26

If we turn back to the discussion of what is problematic about Act Utilitarianism, this formulation of eudaimonia helps us see how the demands of Act Utilitarianism make agents worse-off. Recall that Act Utilitarianism requires agents to always act to produce the greatest total net well-being. Remember, also, that many people in the world die from lack of basic necessities and that freedom from want of basic necessities is the prerequisite for all forms of well-being.27 This being the case, AU requires a privileged person with more than basic necessities to donate their surplus resources to trustworthy organizations that alleviate suffering.

This clearly makes agents worse-off, and using the above definition of eudaimonia, we can clearly see how this compromises an agent’s flourishing. To have nothing more than what is requisite for one’s physical subsistence is to have no books, to see no films, to attend no art museums, and so on. Without these things in their lives, humans cannot adequately develop their cognitive, affective, sensory, or social powers. So, a human being with only basic necessities would not follow a typical developmental pattern of a human being. This amounts to a compromise of flourishing on Kraut’s developmental view. Similarly, if we imagine a human person’s life with only basic necessities, we do perceive a less than dignified life. Such a person would be robbed of stimuli crucial to a dignified life. We can imagine several ways in which the life of someone with only basic necessities could be improved. This suggests that Utilitarianism

26 This formulation of eudaimonia has two considerable advantages. First, it avoids conservative estimates of what flourishing involves. If we only follow Kraut’s view and we identify flourishing by examining all instances of humans who do and have existed, we run the risk of underselling human potential. Humans may be more plastic and more creative than Kraut’s view can handle. Second, the pairing together of Kraut’s faculties and capacities with Nussbaum’s capabilities helps shed light on what are slightly ambiguous concepts considered in isolation. 27 For more on this claim, see Ruger (2012).

compromises an agent’s flourishing, on Nussbaum’s view, as well. And finally, this amounts to a compromise of flourishing on the phenomenological view, too. Part of what we find so troubling about the instances of human poverty we encounter in the world, both at home and abroad, is the perception that the absence of goods detracts from the well-being of the poor. But then this means that the absence of these same goods detracts from the well-being of the affluent, too. So, we can phenomenologically recognize just how the demands of Act Utilitarianism can make the affluent extremely worse-off. Thus, Act Utilitarianism does in fact compromise an agent’s flourishing. This is another reason AU is too demanding: it makes agents worse-off; it compromises their flourishing.

Conclusion

In this chapter, I argued that Act Utilitarianism is an extremely demanding moral theory.

First, I argued that Act Utilitarianism is an alienating moral theory. It separates agents from valuable projects chosen through the exercise of legitimate and autonomous agency. Second, I argued that Act Utilitarianism is a confining moral theory. It chains agents to one form of value, well-being or happiness promotion, and precludes legitimate exercises of freedom. Third, I argued that Act Utilitarianism is an unfair moral theory. It ignores the entitlements of agents.

Finally, I argued that Act Utilitarianism compromises an agent’s flourishing. It prevents an agent from developing and exercising the capacities, faculties, and abilities that contribute to an agent’s well-being.

To solve the problem of demandingness, two additional tasks need to be completed. First, other cases of extremely demanding moral theories need to be identified and the four interpretations of the “too demanding” objection need to be applied to these cases. If they are applicable, this increases the likelihood that the account of what is wrong with Act Utilitarianism

can be leveraged into an account of what is wrong with extremely demanding moral theories in general. Second, the rejection of extremely demanding moral theories must be itself justified. It is not enough to identify an extremely demanding moral theory and to explain why it is too demanding. It might be the case that only extremely demanding moral theories are acceptable.

To prevent this possibility, one must proffer an argument in favor of rejecting extremely demanding moralities. This is the task I turn to in Chapter Four. In the next chapter, I examine some additional sources of extreme moral demands and I begin to explain what it means to leverage an account of what is wrong with the extreme demands of Act Utilitarianism into a solution to the problem of moral demandingness in general.

Chapter Two. The Various Sources of Extreme Moral Demands

Abstract

Some moral theories are too demanding. In the last chapter, I argued that common objections to the demands of Act Utilitarianism, the paradigmatic example of an extremely demanding moral theory, fall into four classes. In this chapter, I argue that the problem of moral demandingness generalizes beyond Act Utilitarianism, that extreme moral demands emerge from sources other than Act Utilitarianism. I demonstrate how the four kinds of objections to the extreme demands of Act Utilitarianism apply to these other sources of extreme demands and I suggest that this means the demandingness of morality is moderate, clearer, and more explicable than is sometimes appreciated.

Introduction

In the last chapter, I examined Act Utilitarianism, a paradigmatic case of an extremely demanding morality. I argued that there are four main types of objections to the extreme demands of Act Utilitarianism: alienation objections, confinement objections, fairness objections, and loss of well-being objections. In this chapter, I argue that the problem of moral demandingness generalizes beyond Act Utilitarianism, that extreme demands may emerge from sources other than Act Utilitarianism. To develop this case, I examine the extreme demands that emerge from the sources Garrett Cullity calls the morality of concern, the morality of respect,

and the morality of cooperation. I argue that many of the objections to the extreme demands of

Act Utilitarianism are applicable to these sources as well. I suggest that this means that the problem of moral demandingness is not just a problem for Act Utilitarians, and that the demandingness of morality is moderate, clearer and more explicable than is sometimes appreciated.

Cullity on Three Sources of Extreme Moral Demands

Cullity (2009) argues that the problem of moral demandingness is not just a problem

“about the promotion of welfare” and that extreme demands can emerge from three sources: “the morality of concern,” “the morality of respect,” and “the morality of cooperation” (9). The morality of concern involves “the various ways in which we ought to respond to the welfare of others” where welfare is understood as “what is good or bad” for others. The morality of concern requires “helping others…get what is good for them” and “not harming them,” or “beneficence and non-maleficence.” The morality of respect involves “the ways in which we ought to take proper account of the rights and dignity of others” (10). The morality of respect requires “non- interference with others’ autonomous projects” and “positive obligations to secure for others the conditions in which autonomous deliberation and agency can be fully exercised.” The morality of cooperation involves “the ways in which we ought to treat each other as partners in a common project.” The morality of cooperation requires “cooperating to further…a common purpose”

(11).

The potential for extreme demands to emerge from “the morality of concern” is partly illustrated by the demandingness of Act Utilitarianism. But Cullity argues that extreme demands can emerge from even weaker requirements of beneficence than the optimizing principle involved in Act Utilitarianism. As Cullity says, “any sensible moral outlook should accept that

when I can directly meet someone’s desperate need at little cost…I can be morally required to do so.” But “in the world we now inhabit, these stark situations seem ubiquitous.” In this world, it appears as if one “could almost always be doing something equivalent to saving a life at tiny personal cost.” Given how “many desperately needy people” there are in the world “iterating this requirement would impose a total cost that is very high” (13). So, the problem of demandingness can emerge from less controversial considerations than those that motivate Act Utilitarianism, such as the imperative to maximize happiness, or well-being. In fact, Cullity thinks this problem emerges even for “anyone who accepts that each of us is permitted to grant much more weight to her own interests than she does to those of other people.” That’s because the problem emerges so long as a moral outlook requires action when “the cost…of helping is trivial and the cost to someone of not being helped is catastrophic” (14).

The potential for extreme demands to emerge from “the morality of respect” derives from

“the moral norms that properly govern our relationship to each other as equal bearers of autonomous agency.” This involves “a set of entitlements to, and complementary constraints on, the exercise of that agency.” These “fall into two broad kinds”: “entitlements to freedom from interference, deception, manipulation, and coercion” and “entitlements to others’ fidelity in carrying out their undertakings to us” (15). For Cullity, these entitlements can generate requirements whenever “others’ freedoms would be curtailed far more drastically” than one’s own freedom were one to have to refrain some behavior. This seems plausible, but the repeated application of this principle threatens to generate extreme demands. For example, while obligations to not “make deafening noise all night” or “release toxic chemicals into the water supply” are reasonable restrictions on individual behavior, the “repeated application” of such a

curtailment principle “would result in an accumulation of small constraints that would, overall, result in a curtailment of personal liberties far greater than most of us would find tolerable” (16).

Finally, extreme demands can emerge from “the morality of cooperation,” which involves a “core requirement…that when I am a member of a group that ought…to be cooperating towards a certain end and enough members of the group are in fact cooperating…I am morally required to join in.” “Once more” Cullity argues, this morality can generate extreme demands “by the repeated application” of its core requirement. There are, for instance, “a vast number of collective projects that ought to be conducted by groups of which [one] can naturally be regarded as a member” (18). The problem is that the core requirement of the morality of cooperation “carries the implication that I am morally required to contribute to all of these...projects” and “that leave would leave [agents] with no time” of their own (19).

In other words, these three moralities signify three distinct kinds of moral reasons agents must respond to given three distinct ways of relating to other subjects. The morality of respect, for instance, captures the reasons an agent has to respond to another agent while the morality of cooperation captures the reasons an agent has to respond to a comrade, or fellow group member.

As Cullity defines them, these reasons cut across distinction between kinds of ethical principles.

For example, as Cullity defines the morality of concern, it includes both “beneficence and non- maleficence” (10). By examining the extreme demands that emerge from Cullity’s taxonomy, I am not claiming that singular principles, such as the principle of non-maleficence, can never generate extreme demands. I do, in fact, think that.28 It just adds little to my thesis to extend my

28 In footnote 8 in Chapter One, I suggested that it is best to regard principles as extreme only when understood in the larger context of a theory. The point I am making here is that a simple theory with a singular principle could generate extreme demands, but that’s a case I won’t be developing here.

argument that far, given that my present purpose is just to demonstrate that the problem of moral demandingness generalizes beyond Act Utilitarianism.

Another reason to use Cullity’s taxonomy is that it approximates several popular ethical theories. The morality of concern, as I have already indicated, is an approximation of Act

Utilitarianism. But the morality of concern approximates any moral view that takes morality to be solely, or fundamentally, a response to the well-being of others. Various sorts of consequentialism, for instance, often take the promotion of well-being to be the only, or fundamental way, of responding to value. Some of these views might regard the promotion of well-being to be the only moral task while others might recognize other moral tasks, but somehow subordinate these tasks to the well-being promotion task. For example, an Act

Utilitarian can recognize that it’s often not good to lie, but they will argue that this is because lying fails to promote total net happiness. Similarly, the morality of respect is an approximation of Kantian Deontology. One of Kant’s formulations of the categorical imperative is the formula of humanity which requires agents never be treated as mere means, but as ends in themselves and the morality of respect captures the reasons we have to respond to others as agents. And the morality of cooperation is an approximation of Contractualism. A Contractual approach to ethical theory is one that takes morality to be fundamentally, or solely about the coordination of behavior.29 Culity’s morality of cooperation involves “the ways in which we ought to treat each other as partners in a common project” (11).

29 Scanlon (1998) for example takes morality to be essentially a matter of justifying oneself “to others on grounds I could expect them to accept” (4). I take this to be a minimal sense in which morality is regarded primarily as a matter of coordinating behavior. Other contractual views, especially political theories, such as the contractualism of John Rawls, are more robust ways of coordinating behavior.

Now, partisans of these traditions can, and should, argue that Cullity’s three moralities are only approximations of their positions. For one, many partisans of these traditions can argue that their tradition recognizes the reasons signified by all three of the moralities. As is the case with Act Utilitarianism, partisans of these theories might just argue that one of these particular moralities is fundamental and that the others are subordinate to this morality. Perhaps, partisans of these theories do not even need to go this far. My only point in drawing attention to the way

Cullity’s three moralities approximate these traditions is to draw attention to the fact that the problem of demandingness generalizes beyond Act Utilitarianism. 30 Perhaps that is not a strike against any moral theory. I have not yet argued that we can justifiably reject a theory for being extremely demanding. But even if we can, nothing I am going to argue for in this chapter necessarily rules out the possibility that a clearer articulation of these traditions will not deliver the resources necessary to solve the problem of demandingness. To repeat, I am only arguing that the problem is not just a problem for Act Utilitarians, but something all ethicists need to take seriously.

The Extreme Demands of the Morality of Concern

For Cullity, the morality of concern consists in the norms that govern our relationship to others as patients, norms that require “helping others…get what is good for them” and “not harming them” (10). Because Act Utilitarianism is a view that takes the morality of concern to be either the whole of, or the fundamental part of, morality, the four objections to the extreme demands of Act Utilitarianism are ipso facto applicable to the extreme demands that can be

30 As Cullity argues: “all that is required” to recognize the extreme demands generated by the reasons representing each of the three “moralities,” is the acceptance “that each of the three groups of norms…is indeed a part of morality” (12).

generated by the morality of concern. However, this does not show that the objections to Act

Utilitarianism are applicable to any of the other extreme demands that can be generated by the morality of concern. According to Cullity, the morality of concern can generate extreme demands irrespective of Act Utilitarianism. This is best seen through Cullity’s appeal to the repeated application of the principle of easy rescue. This principle states that an agent is morally required to make a small sacrifice whenever doing so can prevent a serious disaster from befalling another. While individual instances of this principle do not generate extreme demands, the repeated application of this principle in a tragic world much like our own does generate extreme demands.

Extreme moral demands grounded in the morality of concern are often alienating. A moral demand is alienating when it separates an agent from the agential point of view, or from what otherwise gives meaning to the agent’s life. Oftentimes, an extreme moral demand is alienating when it is unduly disruptive of an agent’s life narrative. Some agents, of course, have to give up a narrative. A White Nationalist, for example, doesn’t get a free pass because his life’s narrative is constructed around his bigotry. But in this case, and others like it, that’s because the agent is already failing in some basic agential way; they are vicious in a childlike way, totally oblivious to other’s perspectives. An extreme demand is alienating when it unduly disrupts an agent’s life narrative and that narrative is not failing in some basic agential way. The repeated application of the principle of easy rescue is alienating in this sense specifically because the repeated application of the principle threatens to make agents a tool of well-being promotion in a way not unlike Act Utilitarianism. The repeated application of this principle asks agents to regard their own interests as negotiable in a way that is inconsistent with the kind of zeal agents have for their own lives.

The extreme demands of the morality of concern are also confining. A moral demand is confining when it unduly restricts an agent’s freedom. Oftentimes, an extreme moral demand is confining when it chains an agent to a value, set of values, or cumbersome decision-procedure.

An alienating moral demand is also often a confining moral demand. That’s because when an agent is chained to a specific task that agent is often separated from their own point of view. This is the case with the repeated application of the principle of easy rescue. This iterated principle begins to treat an agent as an instrument for well-being promotion. When this happens, the agent is also chained to the task assigned to this tool. By being chained to some task, an agent’s freedom is compromised. In this way, the iterated principle of easy rescue is also confining.

The morality of concern can also generate unfair moral demands. The demands of fairness are controversial and difficult to get a handle on. In the last chapter, I said that, as a preliminary, we can say that fairness indispensably involves three notions: intrinsic value, outcome, and entitlement. Consider again the claim “every dog in the shelter deserves a home.”

This is a paradigmatic instance of a demand of fairness, and it involves each of these three notions. This claim says something about the intrinsic value of the dogs, something about what kind of outcome they should expect, and something about an entitlement these dogs possess.

Notice, however, that the notion of intrinsic value invoked here is not necessarily the intrinsic moral value the Utilitarian posits all sentient beings possess. An Aristotelian virtue ethicist could understand intrinsic value in terms of final value, or telos-realization. Other theorists might understand intrinsic value in other terms. But these differences in moral approach will only be plausible to the extent that they suggest all dogs are entitled to a home. Thus, these differences don’t suggest that any one dog isn’t entitled to a home. In this sense, all dogs are entitled to the minimally same outcome. But notice that even this outcome is not given in much detail, and as

we imagine what detail this might involve, it need not amount to any clear articulation of the exact same stuff.31 So, the outcome aimed for is not necessarily the kind of outcome where everyone can expect to receive an identical bundle of goods.

With this in mind, it’s easy to see how the principle of easy rescue can generate unfair demands. The iterated principle of easy rescue can generate extremely unfair moral demands because it asks agents to express, and act on, concern for the well-being of patients even when doing so infringes on an agent’s entitlements, on the lives we are entitled to living. An iterated principle of easy rescue would have an agent donate the extra cash for an evening dinner, for example, even if that dinner was celebrating the return home from a volunteer medical mission in a developing country. That is as unfair as any demand of Act Utilitarianism. In fact, that is another paradigmatic instance of unfairness. And notice that, here, we are not just concerned with the well-being of the agent. This particular agent need not be any worse-off were she to skip the dinner. And here we aren’t just concerned with her personal point of view. She need not abandon that point of view, or take up some impartial perspective, to forgo this dinner. And yet, it seems clear to me at least, that she is entitled to this dinner. So, the morality of concern can impose extreme demands insofar as it imposes obviously unfair demands. We deserve more than what the iterated principle of easy rescue would leave us with (and that more isn’t just stuff, wellness, or health).

The appeal to the iterated principle of easy rescue is important because any adequate ethical approach needs to recognize something like this principle (and get a hold of it before it

31 Does a dog in suburbia fare better or worse than a dog in the country? And how many bones does a dog have to have to be happy? Three? How many bones is equal to a chew toy? My claim here is that when we focus on questions of this sort and imagine what it means to have a home, we imagine all kinds of stuff this would entail dogs getting. But at no point does it necessarily involve the idea that each dog in every home is entitled to the exact same stuff.

generates extreme demands). But extreme demands can emerge from the morality of concern irrespective of both Act Utilitarianism and the iterated principle of easy rescue. The morality of concern comprises the norms governing our relationship to others as patients. So, the morality of concern need not be anthropocentric in scope. All animals have a recognizable well-being, something that it is for their lives to go better or worse. In fact, all biological lifeforms are goal- directed entities, and anything with a goal can be either helped or hindered (at least with respect to reaching that goal). A seed, for example, has the potential, or the goal, of developing into a tree. It can be helped (e.g., watered) or hindered (e.g., cut down or uprooted). So, there is no reason why the morality of concern could not be so wide as to be biocentric in scope. This being the case, it is easy to see how the morality of concern can generate other extreme moral demands.

The morality of concern also generates extreme moral demands that are bad for moral agents. They make agents worse-off. In the last chapter, I focused on a eudaimonistic theory of well-being and argued that Act Utilitarianism compromises an agent’s eudaimonia. Moral concern for the well-being of all lifeforms is extreme because it too compromises an agent’s eudaimonia. Eudaimonia, I have said, consists in the development and use of species-specific capabilities and values that recognizably make a subject’s life go better. Maximal concern for the well-being of all biological lifeforms would compromise eudaimonia, on this understanding of the term, but even minimal harming of biological life would do so. An agent hoping to minimally harm biological life would have to give up jogs in the park in favor of running in place in the sanctity of their own apartment. They would have to start a garden, procure food from local croppers, visit orchards and farms, or pay neighbors for fruits and vegetables from the garden so as not to procure food from sources that caused harm to plants. All of this is incredibly time

consuming and a gigantic drain on one’s mental and physical energy. A person who tried to live while causing minimal harm to all living things might settle into a routine and as such experience some relief. But the committed biocentric evangelist will nonetheless persistently face the challenges of meeting her evangelic standards. These standards can impinge on things all healthy humans do, such as meet with friends, develop talents, and so on. In this way, then, the morality of concern can compromise an agent’s well-being.

The Extreme Demands of the Morality of Respect

The morality of concern primarily involves the norms that govern our responses to others’ well-being. As such, ethical theories which appeal to an objective view of well-being will most feel the pinch of the previous section. To be sure, other theorists might feel the pressure as well. For example, preference-satisfaction versions of consequentialism do not appeal to an objective view of well-being (so far as we understand objective to mean not just a function of an individual’s wants, wishes, and desires) and yet the problem of demandingness applies to these views as well. But still other theorists might argue that they escape this problem specifically because they do not appeal to a notion of well-being, perhaps because they don’t see any way of cashing such a notion out. Some theorists, for example, might think that only rational agents are worthy of moral consideration, and that part of what it is to be a rational agent is to (entirely? mostly?) construct one’s own sense of a worthwhile life and to pursue that. Thus, these theorists might argue there is no notion of well-being agents must respond to, and so, even if the problem of demandingness generalizes from Act Utilitarianism to the morality of concern in general, the problem need not apply to other sorts of ratiocentric theories. Now, I believe that views of this sort are fundamentally mistaken (on several issues). But the main claim I want to argue for in this section is that even if a theory of this sort were plausible, it would still face the problem of

demandingness. To demonstrate that this is so, I will examine, much as I did in the last section, the extreme demands that can emerge from what Cullity calls the morality of respect.

According to Cullity, the “morality of respect governs our relationship to others as agents who are our equals” (11). As such, the morality of respect involves “the ways in which we ought to take proper account of the rights and dignity of others” (10). According to Cullity, the morality of respect requires “non-interference with others’ autonomous projects” and “positive obligations to secure for others the conditions in which autonomous deliberation and agency can be fully exercised” (11). The norms involved in this morality require us to refrain from behaviors whenever those behaviors curtail others’ liberties more than ours would be curtailed were we to refrain. For example, we are required to refrain from murdering another agent because in death an agent loses all of her liberties. In being asked to refrain from murdering our liberty is only curtailed in one measly way: we can’t perform the murderous act in question. In most cases, this is not too demanding a norm. But if the principle in question here is the principle that we should minimize liberty curtailment, then we should curtail our liberty whenever doing so prevents the curtailment of more liberties than we would lose. But then the principle would begin to generate extreme demands. As Cullity notes, the iteration of this principle “would result in an accumulation of small constraints that would, overall, result in a curtailment of personal liberties far greater than most of us would find tolerable” (16).

How is this so? Imagine you are an artistic director supervising an artistic co-op and that your co-op has just received a charitable donation you have to allocate. Imagine also that you have proposed a performance art project that involves the construction of a rather elaborate set while your colleagues have proposed projects that involve more traditional art projects done on canvas. If you settle for a more traditional and less expensive project, as you have done in

previous years, you can finance everyone in your co-op’s projects one month longer than you would be able to if you finance your proposed performance art project. Your colleagues don’t necessarily need the extra month, but the extra month would buy them more time to work on their projects, and amount to one more month they don’t have to go back to a job they hate doing just to make ends meet. So, in this case, if your duty is to minimize liberty violations, it seems you have no choice: you have to forgo your ideal project yet again. But that seems wrong.

Here, it seems we have a proper case of supererogatory behavior. If you don’t finance your proposed project, you are certainly doing something helpful. But if you do, you are not clearly doing anything wrong, or even bad. So, if the morality of respect suggests that you do something wrong when you allocate money for your project, it seems to be generating extreme demands. Now, a proponent of a view that takes the morality of respect to be the whole of morality might argue that this is only the case if we misconstrue her view. When we talk of liberty curtailment, for example, we seem to be adopting an agent-neutral conception of liberty curtailment. Our principle says that agents must curtail a liberty whenever doing so prevents more liberties from being curtailed. But it might not be necessary, or even accurate, to cast the morality of respect in these terms. The morality of respect might be more about making sure one does not curtail liberty oneself. While these do seem like distinct ways of conceiving the morality of respect, the distinction does nothing to stave off the problem of demandingness. In the above case, you are not being asked to refrain from allocating funds for your project because more liberty gets curtailed in the world in general. You are being asked to not to allocate the money for your project because your doing so curtails more liberty, not in general, but in front of your own face, at your own hand.

So, the morality of respect can clearly generate extreme demands. Are these demands extreme in analogous ways to the extreme demands of the morality of concern? I think so.

Extreme demands are often alienating. They ask us to look at our lives with a certain separation that seems to detach us from our perspectives. In the last section, I said that this often comes in the form of undue disruption of our life narratives. Each of us is, in a hopefully healthy way, the main character in our life’s drama. If things are going to turn out well for us, we have to give it our all, so to speak. We have to pursue our ends with gusto. Alienating moral demands ask us to step back from giving it our all in this sense, and to regard our commitments as negotiable in a way we otherwise wouldn’t take them to be. This is alienating, and therefore, extremely demanding. This is also how the morality of respect asks the agent in the fund allocation case to think and to behave. Whereas our agent might have otherwise allocated the funds for her project with a healthy gusto, she is, under the guidance of the morality of respect, sitting on the sideline, with a sheepish respect for her colleagues’ pursuits and a project she doesn’t care about.

The morality of respect’s demands can also be confining. Confinement involves undue restriction on an agent’s freedom. As I said earlier, a confining ethical theory often confines agents by chaining agents to a value, set of values, or decision-procedure. Sometimes, the result, as is the case with Act Utilitarianism, involves literal confinement to some cumbersome way of life. If we imagine what a life expressive of respect for the rights and dignity of others would entail in any possible case, we can start to imagine the morality of respect inducing agents to pursue similarly cumbersome ways of life. Consider, for example, how many workers are harmed in food production processes. Workers in fruit and vegetable fields can suffer from the harmful effects of herbicide and pesticides. Workers in slaughterhouses suffer from the dangers of those occupations. Doesn’t the morality of respect demand agents refrain from consuming

these products? And what about the choice of occupation in the first place? Not all companies are equal. Some pollute rivers, exploit child laborers in foreign countries, or contribute to socioeconomic inequality. Doesn’t the morality of respect demand agents pursue only these kinds of jobs? It seems more than possible. But if so, then, the morality of respect generates extremely confining demands.

Respecting others can also generate demands that are extreme in the sense of being unfair. The artistic director case I have been belaboring is one such example. In that case, the agent in question is entitled to the funds for her project. She is a member of the co-op as well, and, in that case, the agent has put off her more expensive project to help her colleagues out year after year. But because of the repeated application of the liberty curtailment principle the agent is forever precluded from pursuing her dream project. This is unfair. The agent deserves to be able to pursue her passions as much as anyone else. The allocation of funds for her performance art project isn’t going to prevent anyone from completing their project. It’s just going to send them back to a job they don’t enjoy one month earlier than they otherwise might have. Besides, who really knows exactly what is going to happen? Any of the artists could fall ill or crash their car and have to go back to a 9-5 sooner rather than later, anyway. And yet the liberty curtailment principle dashes the agent’s dreams even though she is entitled to her projects as much as her colleagues.

In the artistic director case, the agent in question is not necessarily made any worse-off.

She might experience some disappointment, but nothing necessarily like depression. Still, the morality of respect can generate extreme demands that do make agents worse-off. Consider, again, the diet of someone operating under the robotic guidance of the morality of respect. This person is not unlike the person expressing maximal concern for the well-being of all lifeforms I

described last section. Both of these agents spend an exorbitant amount of time and energy procuring food from morally sanctioned sources, understood in the terms of the morality of concern and the morality of respect, respectively. In this way, there is a partial deontic equivalence between these two moralities’ demands. But then the standards of the morality of respect can also present agents with persistent challenges that impinge on human health. So, the morality of respect can also compromise an agent’s well-being.

As I mentioned two sections ago, Cullity defines the morality of respect and concern so as to cut across distinctions between ethical principles. As he defines it, the morality of concern involves both duties of beneficence and non-maleficence whereas the morality of respect involves both duties to respect others’ agency and to promote the conditions of this agency. In this section, I have discussed examples of extreme demands that emerge both from what the morality of respect requires us not to do and what the morality of respect requires us to promote.

The artistic director case is an example where the morality of respect requires us to promote the conditions of others agency while the various considerations about what to eat, what jobs to pursue, and what kind of lifestyle to pursue are all cases where the morality of respect requires us not to do specific things. Thus, the morality of respect generates extreme demands in several ways. It may also generate extreme demands in very similar ways to the morality of concern. For example, if the duty to promote the conditions of others’ agency covers foreign, as well as domestic, parties, the morality of respect will increasingly begin to generate demands that look a lot like the demands of Act Utilitarianism. As I have recited that case already, I won’t repeat it here. What is worth pausing to note, at this point, however, is that thus far in the discussion we have seen that extreme demands can emerge with respect to two fundamental ways of responding to value: the promoting and honoring of value. These are not the only ways of responding to

value. We also create value, sustain value, care for, and participate in value.32 Some of these ways of responding to value are captured by what Cullity calls the morality of cooperation. This morality and its potential for generating extreme moral demands is the subject of the next section.

The Extreme Demands of the Morality of Cooperation

The morality of concern signifies our relationship to patients and the morality of respect signifies our relationship to other agents. But these are not the only ways we relate to others. We also relate to other subjects as fellows of particular sorts, as family, as friends, as party members, etc. The morality of cooperation consists in norms that govern these relationships. According to

Cullity, this involves a “core requirement…that when I am a member of a group that ought…to be cooperating towards a certain end and enough members of the group are in fact cooperating…I am morally required to join in” (18). Thus, the morality of concern involves

“cooperating to further…a common purpose” (11). Here, the thought is not that one has to cooperate whenever doing so comes at little cost, but that one has to cooperate whenever enough others are cooperating in an effort to achieve an end one is implicated in oneself. In many cases, that might not be too demanding at all. But as, Cullity observes, there are “a vast number of collective projects that ought to be conducted by groups of which [one] can naturally be regarded as a member” (18). But then this means the morality of cooperation can generate extreme demands.

How is this so? Consider the curious case of the suburban high school parent. Imagine you are this parent and that you have several unheard voicemails on your iPhone. As you listen

32 I am not the first to notice this plurality of value responses. See also Swanton (2003) and Chappell (2014).

to the messages, you are exhorted time and again for her help. Saturday the girls’ volleyball team is holding a car wash. The team really needs new jerseys and the weekend forecast is great. The haul could be tremendous. But, wait, there needs to be at least several parent chaperones. Can you help? Your daughter is after all on the team and all they need is one more volunteer. Fine enough. Oh, here’s another message. This one’s from the theater teacher. The drama club has its spring show Saturday night and Franny, the stage manager, is sick. The kids have worked so hard. It would be a shame to have to cancel the show. Besides, all they’re asking for is one volunteer, for one night. Can you help? Surely you can. But here’s a third message. This one’s from Marissa, the Sunday school teacher at the Unitarian Universalist church you attend every weekend. Her great Aunt passed last night, and she has to be at a funeral this weekend.

Unfortunately, that means no one is going to be there to hold Sunday school for the elementary level kids. Can you help? You, after all, have a minor in Religious Studies. Sheesh. Well, you can. And wait. There’s a fourth message. This one’s from the Macomb County Green Party.

Those spineless Democrats are corrupting the progressive agenda again. There needs to be another meeting. Unfortunately, it has to be Sunday afternoon, right after lunch. Can you grab coffee for everyone? Oh, you’re going to be coming from church? Great. Starbucks is on the way. Excellent. See you Sunday afternoon.

We don’t have to work at the Department of Homeland Security or sift through mountains of metadata to know that this parent might have many more messages of this sort on her phone than this. And we don’t have to reach beyond the realm of plausibility to imagine that our parent might have several messages of this sort on her phone every week. So, even if we think that our parent is obligated to accept all of these requests on any one weekend, we might still think that an obligation to accept all of these requests every single weekend is extremely

demanding (and what about all those requests for after school help?). This seems to be what

Cullity has in mind when he says that the core requirement of the morality of cooperation

“carries the implication that I am morally required to contribute to all of these...projects” and

“that would leave [agents] with no time” of their own (19). If our parent accepted every one of these obligations, she would never have any time to rest. Now, most parents might protest here.33

Perhaps parenthood just means never having any opportunity to rest. But notice that if our parent accepted every one of these obligations, she wouldn’t have any time to parent either. Perhaps life, in Sinatra’s “That’s Life” sense, often leaves most parents with insufficient time to parent.

That may be true. But even if it is, that’s not to say that morality can, or should. And yet, that seems to be exactly what the morality of cooperation demands.

Here, as with the moralities of respect and concern, part of the problem, as Cullity perceives, is “the repeated application” of the morality’s core principle (18). Each of these moralities, as defined by Cullity, seems to lack the resources to stop the train once it gets rolling.

If any particular ethical theory is to solve the problem of demandingness part of what it needs to do is accommodate the important bits of each of these moralities and provide the resources necessary to block their potential to generate extreme demands. But this is not to say that the three moralities I have been examining in this chapter do not generate extreme demands independent of the iteration of particular principles. Consider, for example, the fact that duties of special obligation towards relatives are one constitutive part of the morality of cooperation, which involves the norms that regulate our behavior towards the people with whom we constitute a group. One such group is constituted by the agents who raise and care for us. The morality of

33 Parents of newborn infants, in particular.

cooperation governs how we need to relate to these persons and these demands can be extreme even when they aren’t iterated.

To see this, consider the demands Confucian ethics makes with respect to our parents and/or caregivers. As Sin (2013) explains, Confucian ethics involves “a central place” for the virtue of “Xiao” or “filial piety” (168). Xiao entails that Confucians should not only provide care for elderly parents, but that they must also “present respect,” “present happiness,” “present worry during illness,” “present grief” when mourning, and “pay reverence” whenever any offering is made (169). Importantly, the duty of “Xiao” is not imperfect, in the sense of being sometimes required and sometimes not. Rather, as Sin explains, “on Confucianism, an agent is always expected to choose a virtuous course of life” (172). But, then, this demand can be quite extreme.

To see this, imagine the case of a young professional who has worked her way through graduate school and found employment in the job of her dreams. Imagine all of the long, tiring hours she has spent studying to pass her exams, her classes, and her thesis and how much time and dedication she’s put in to her career. All of her hard work is beginning to pay off, and though she’s taken on some more responsibility at work, her accomplishments and her increased skill have also made it possible for her to relax a bit. Suppose next that her parents fall ill. She can afford to send some money to help pay for medical bills and she can find some time to visit her parents on more than just a few weekends. Is this sufficient to express the virtue of Xiao?

According to Sin, Xiao requires children to actually provide care for elderly parents. This seems to require more than just increased attention. Confucian ethicist Mencius would certainly think so. As Lee (2013) explains, Mencius praised the sage king Shun whose family tried to kill him for his “willingness to endure…abuse” in the name of filial piety (162). No one’s asking the young professional for that much. So, to express the virtue of Xiao, it seems the young

professional needs to get much more involved in her parents’ lives. It seems as if she should take a better paying job and perhaps even move back home to care for her parents. But to require this much is extremely demanding.

And importantly, the demands of Xiao are extremely demanding in all of the familiar ways I have been describing in this chapter. Recall that extreme demands are often alienating.

They separate agents from the sources of meaning in their lives, often by unduly disrupting a life narrative that is not failing in some obviously basic agential way (e.g., by being basically rude, ignorant, hateful, etc.). The demands of Xiao are alienating in this sense. The demand for the young professional to move home is very much disruptive of the young professional’s life narrative. Everything she has done has been organized around pursuit of her job, and yet Xiao demands that she give up all of this, despite how much more she can actually do from her position. That is incredibly alienating.

It’s also confining. Confining demands are demands that unduly compromise an agent’s freedom. Oftentimes this occurs when an ethical theory chains an agent to a certain value, set of values, or decision-procedure. The result is often a life confined to a certain cumbersome lifestyle. The demands of Xiao are likewise confining. These demands require the young professional to take on a burdensome lifestyle, one with an exorbitant amount of attention to one’s parents. In fact, it seems Xiao requires a life entirely organized around devotion to one’s parents. That’s breathtakingly confining. Whatever freedom this young professional has remaining, it is so boxed in, it is hardly recognizable. So, the demands of Xiao can clearly compromise an agent’s freedom.

Extreme demands are often also unfair. Fairness, remember, indispensably involves three basic notions: entitlement, intrinsic value, and outcome. (As a preliminary, I have said that

fairness involves the claim that equally valuable individuals are equally entitled to a minimum of recognizably equal outcomes.) The young professional deserves the job of her dreams. She’s worked countless hours, spent several years in school, and done more than what her job description requires of her. And yet Confucian ethics entirely ignores this. To sufficiently express the virtue of Xiao, Confucian ethics demands that the young professional abandon everything she has worked hard to deserve. That’s extremely demanding; it’s extremely unfair.

Extreme demands often also make agents worse-off. Confucian ethics also follows this pattern. In this chapter, and the last, I have focused on a eudaimonistic view of well-being. On the eudaimonistic view I prefer, well-being consists in the development, use, and possession of species-specific capabilities and values that recognizably contribute to a subject’s life going better. The demands of Xiao compromise the young professional’s eudaimonia, so understood.

This young professional has spent most of her adult life developing her faculties in pursuit of her job to much success. But to express the virtue of Xiao, this professional has to give up her job and thereby forgo their use. She will, if she finds another job, be able to utilize some of these.

But if the job she is being asked to leave is truly her dream job, as I have stipulated in this case, this job will presumably involve a much wider use of her skills. Even if it doesn’t, the possession of her dream job is a value that recognizably makes her life go better. So, she is clearly made worse-off when she is required to give this job up. (If it’s hard to see this we can remind ourselves of the psychological suffering doing this is likely to cause, even if leaving her job doesn’t involve any obvious drop in her ability to procure dry goods, or what I have earlier called stuff).

Conclusion

The problem of demandingness is most often associated with Act Utilitarianism, and

Consequentialism, in general. But as many have noted, the problem of demandingness generalizes beyond Act Utilitarianism. 34 In this chapter, I have contributed to this case by examining three sources of extreme moral demands: the morality of concern, the morality of respect, and the morality of cooperation. In each of these cases, extreme demands emerge with respect to various ways of responding to value. In the case of the morality of concern, I have emphasized how obligations to promote value can become extreme. In the case of the morality of respect, I have emphasized how an obligation to honor value can become extreme. And in the case of the morality of cooperation, I have emphasized how obligations to sustain and/or care for value can become extreme. This is not an exhaustive list of the ways agents might respond to value. And yet an examination of the ways in which these responses can become extremely demanding reveals several interesting things.

One reaction to the preceding is to marvel at just how clear and articulate our reactions to extreme moral demands are.35 In the last chapter, I worked the common objections to the demands of Act Utilitarianism into a four-part typology. In this chapter, I demonstrated how this typology applies to several other extreme moral demands. In each case of Cullity’s three moralities, the extreme demands generated by that morality’s principles are either alienating, confining, unfair, or bad for moral agents. In many cases, the extreme demands generated by these moralities are extreme in all four of these senses. This illustrates how far the problem of moral demandingness generalizes beyond Act Utilitarianism, but it also illustrates something deeper. It reveals just how coherent and reliable our common reactions to extreme moral

34 See for example the articles in Chappell (2009). 35 Perhaps it is more accurate to say that our reactions to extreme moral demands can be worked into clear and articulate responses. I will have more to say about moral reactions and moral intuitions in Chapter 4 and 5, but, for now, the point remains.

demands are. While many ethicists have recognized that the problem of demandingness generalizes beyond Act Utilitarianism, few have exposed these features of our reactions. In this chapter, I have gone some way towards developing this case.

Another important observation to make about the preceding involves an appreciation of just how moderate our moral reactions are. The coherence and reliability of our reactions to extreme moral demands suggests that we are far from as quick as Utilitarians are to regard heroic action as morally obligatory. Our moral reactions seem to be more in the business of making the world a better place than it currently is than they are in the business of making the world as good a place as is presently possible. Of course, our moral reactions may be moderate, and our contemporary world may yet be rife with moral failing. Pace Kagan, we do not need to be extremists to recognize how pervasive moral failing can be.36 Our reactions to extreme moral demands suggest we do not need to take a vow of poverty to lead morally adequate lives. But nothing in the preceding suggests that the American practice of raising cattle for beef is justified.

Or that the American highway system predicated on the inefficient use of automotive vehicles, rather than high speed trains, is acceptable. Or that the Canadian seal hunt is acceptable. Or that

Japanese fishing practices are morally ok. Or that either domestic or foreign income inequality is at presently acceptable levels. Morality can be moderate and yet we can still fail morally when we contribute our share to the perpetuation of these practices. So, to say that our moral reactions are moderate is not to say that our moral reactions vindicate any particular culture, or cultural practices.

36 Kagan (1989) defines extremism as if it involves several distinct thoughts: (a) the view that morality requires optimific acts, (b) that most of our “actions are immoral,” (c) that the demands of morality pervade and dictate “every aspect of our life,” and (d) that our life plans require “reshaping” (1-8). My point is that depending on the society one is evaluating, one could advocate for a moderately demanding morality and still argue for (b), (c), and (d).

Still, a word of caution is in order. I have not yet argued that we are justified in rejecting extreme moral demands. If we adopt a coherentist view of philosophical justification, we may very well think that this chapter and the preceding chapter have gone quite far in this direction.

By revealing how systematic and reliable our moral reactions are, a coherentist might argue that I have justified the rejection of extreme moral demands. This is a welcome result, and I am tempted to take this route. Nonetheless, I hope I can say more to convince those theorists who do not adopt this view of philosophical justification that a moderately demanding morality is legitimate. To go some way towards developing this case, one observation I can make at present involves an appreciation of how morally loaded our reactions to extreme moral demands are.

This is best exemplified by the fairness objection to extreme moral demands. This objection involves the thought that asking me to comply with an extreme moral demand treats me wrongly.

If this is the case, perhaps our common reactions to extreme moral demands already contain the seeds of a legitimate rejection of extreme moral demands. I will return to this subject in Chapter

Four.

But before I do so, there is one more bit of business I need to address. I have argued that the problem of moral demandingness generalizes beyond Act Utilitarianism. But one might argue that this is only the case when an agent faces demands generated not by any theory, but by the failure of other agents to comply with the demands of that theory. In this way, one might argue that a theory like Act Utilitarianism, or any other sort of theory, does indeed possess the resources necessary to solve the problem of moral demandingness; in fact, the solution might be so simple as to be ingenious. This argumentative route should evoke two responses. First, extreme demands do not need to be generated by the failure of moral agents. Earthquakes, scarcity, disease- each of these environmental phenomena can make large numbers of people

badly off, and their plight can easily generate extreme demands for the better off moral agents.37

Second, any plausible ethical outlook will need to give an account of how responsive an agent’s moral obligations are to the compliance of others. If an ethical theory offers no guidance about how to respond to other agents’ moral failings, then it is flat out a bad theory. Still, this is a thorny issue, and to get a handle on it, one needs to find safe passage through these thickets. So, in the next chapter, I take the issue of the responsiveness of an individual’s moral obligation to the compliance of others head on. As I hope to demonstrate, our reactions to extreme moral demands are more than helpful there as well.

37 This may make it sound as if extreme demands emerge from non-agential sources only when derived from the morality of concern. I doubt that this is the case. Scarcity can engage the morality of respect and cooperation in ways that don’t necessarily impact well-being. Consider the scarcity of a good that isn’t necessary for survival and how it might engage questions of fairness.

Chapter Three. The Responsiveness of Moral Obligation to the Compliance of Others

Abstract

Any adequate ethical theory needs to give an account of the responsiveness of an individual’s moral obligation to the compliance of other agents. Specifically, any adequate ethical approach needs to make reasonable demands in a range of conditions from full to partial compliance. In this chapter, I examine several accounts of moral requirement in conditions of partial compliance. I argue that each has its disadvantages and that an alternative approach is needed. I develop such an alternative by leveraging four objections to extreme moral demands into an account of the limits of moral obligation in general. I argue that extreme moral demands are alienating, confining, unfair to, and/or bad for moral agents and that a view acknowledging these limits can make reasonable demands in a range of conditions from full to partial compliance. I contend that a view partly constituted by these limits will be much more plausible than rival accounts of the responsiveness of an individual agent’s moral obligation to the compliance of others.

Introduction

A moral theory can make extreme demands in one or both of the following conditions: when all the agents in a particular scenario comply with the demand imposed by the theory or when only some, or none, of the agents comply with the demand imposed by the theory. A moral demand to

donate to non-governmental organizations minimizing suffering from lack of basic necessities in a developing country is more or less demanding depending on several factors including the population size of potential beneficiaries, the population size of potential benefactors, and the empirical details of the situation. If an agent is in a small group of potential benefactors and there are very many potential beneficiaries in great need, the moral demand might be greater than if one is an agent in a large group of potential benefactors faced with the needs of a small group of not too badly-off potential beneficiaries. Given this somewhat remarkable variation, it is important to give an account of the responsiveness of an individual agent’s moral obligation to the compliance of others.38 Because the world is constantly changing, and moral obligations can be more or less demanding, adequate ethical approaches will need to give plausible accounts of an individual agent’s moral obligation in conditions of full and partial compliance.

In Chapter One, I argued that Act Utilitarianism is extremely demanding because it is alienating, confining, unfair, and bad for moral agents. In Chapter Two, I broadened my investigation and considered several other sources of extreme moral demands. I argued that each of the objections leveled against Act Utilitarianism is equally applicable to these other sources of extreme demands. In this chapter, I argue that each of these objections to extreme moral demands can be thought of as indicating a unique limit on moral obligation. To demonstrate how this can be the case, I first examine several accounts of moral obligation in conditions of partial compliance, conditions in which not all agents fulfill their individual moral obligations. I argue that each of these accounts has its disadvantages. I then argue that an ethical theory acknowledging four limits corresponding to each of the objections to extreme moral demands

38 See Carbonell (2015).

can give a more plausible account of the responsiveness of an individual agent’s moral obligation to the compliance of others.

Peter Singer on the Demands of Assistance and the Compliance of Others

Peter Singer’s “Famine, Affluence, and Morality” was written in November 1971 while people were “dying in East Bengal from lack of food, shelter, and medical care” (229). This tragedy was exacerbated, Singer implied at the time, by several facts. First, it was “not beyond the capacities of the richer nations to give enough assistance to reduce any further suffering to very small proportions” and yet “at the government level, no government” gave “aid that would enable the refugees to survive more than a few days” (229). Second, it was in the power of individual human beings to “prevent this kind of suffering” and yet “at the individual level…people” did “not given large sums to relief funds” (229). Third, the Bengal emergency was also given “adequate publicity” so that “neither individuals nor governments” could “claim to be unaware” of what was happening in Bengal (230). For Singer, all of this meant that “the way people react to a situation like that in Bengal cannot be justified” and that we need to alter

“the whole way we look at moral issues” including “the way of life that has come to be taken for granted in our society” (230).

To make this case, Singer began with the assumptions that “suffering and death from the lack of food, shelter, and medical care are bad” and that “if it is in our power to prevent something bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, we ought morally to do it” (231). Something was of “comparable moral importance,” Singer explained, if it didn’t cause “anything else comparably bad to happen,” didn’t involve “doing something that was wrong in itself” or if it didn’t involve a failure to

“promote some moral good, comparable in significance to the bad thing that we can prevent”

(231). According to Singer, both of these principles were “uncontroversial” (231). The first principle, that “suffering and death from the lack of food, shelter, and medical care are bad,”

Singer took to be so uncontroversial that he permitted “those who disagree” to “read no further”

(231). But the second principle Singer suggested could be accepted on the grounds that it didn’t involve anything onerous. According to Singer, the second principle only required us “to prevent what is bad, and not to promote what is good,” and even this much “only when we can do it without sacrificing anything that is…comparably important” (231).

Still, Singer noted that the “uncontroversial appearance of the principle” was “deceptive” and that “if it were acted upon…our lives…would be fundamentally changed” (231). One reason

Singer pointed to was the principle’s insensitivity to “proximity and distance” (232). This unresponsiveness to proximity, Singer defended with an appeal to the notion of a “global village” which enabled foreign aid to be given “almost as effectively as we could get it to someone in our own block” (232). But Singer noted “a greater need to defend the second implication” of his comparable moral importance principle, which involved the claim that “the fact that there are millions of other people in the same position, in respect to the Bengali refugees…does not make the situation significantly different from a situation in which I am the only person who can prevent something very bad from happening” (232). With respect to this implication, Singer admitted that “there is a psychological difference between the cases,” but he denied that this makes a “real difference to our moral obligations” (232-3).

To defend the claim that our moral obligations are determined irrespective of the compliance of others, Singer invoked the now famous example of a child drowning in a shallow pond. He suggested that if we were to come across a small child drowning in a shallow pond, we would have an obligation to rescue that child which would not be mitigated “if on looking

around I see other people…who have also noticed the child but are doing nothing” (233). Still,

Singer admitted that the number of compliers could be relevant in some ways. For instance, he admitted that “if everyone in circumstances like mine gave £5, there would be enough…for the refugees” and so one would “have no obligation to give more than £5” (233). But Singer insisted that the consideration “has no bearing on a situation in which it is not the case that everyone else gives £5” (233). Thus, Singer concluded that “neither our distance from a preventable evil nor the number of people who, in respect to that evil, are in the same situation as we are, lessens our obligation to mitigate or prevent that evil” (234). Of course, if enough people are doing nothing and our contribution would be completely ineffective, then, the contribution might not be required. But, as Singer insists, his principle only requires action “if it is in our power to prevent something very bad from happening” (235).

For Singer, the upshot of all of this is the conclusion “that our traditional moral categories are upset” and that the “traditional distinction between duty and charity cannot be drawn…in the place we normally draw it” (235). Given the principle of comparable moral importance, “we ought to give money away rather than spend it on” commodities we don’t need for our continued subsistence (235). This is not to say “that there are no acts which are charitable, or that there are no acts which it would be good to do but not wrong not to do” (235). It is just to say that we are morally obligated to do so, at least, when doing so does not involve giving up anything of comparable moral significance.

The principle of comparable moral importance Singer advocates in “Famine, Affluence, and Morality” is more or less a principle of easy rescue. As Cullity (2009) describes it, a principle of easy rescue requires moral action whenever “the cost…of helping is trivial and the cost to someone of not being helped is catastrophic” (14). This is basically the core of the

principle of comparable moral importance, which says that helping is required to prevent an evil whenever it doesn’t cause “anything else comparably bad to happen,” doesn’t involve “doing something that was wrong in itself” or doesn’t involve a failure to “promote some moral good, comparable in significance to the bad thing that we can prevent” (231). And as Singer (1993) repeats in Practical Ethics, this principle doesn’t require a commitment to consequentialism. It simply involves an “injunction to prevent what is bad…only when nothing comparably significant is at stake” (229).

Still, Singer repeats his claim that “the uncontroversial appearance of the principle…is deceptive” (230). And, in Practical Ethics, Singer admits that the principle may set so high a standard that it “will discourage many from even attempting” to meet it (242). But he insists that

“the conventionally accepted standard…is obviously far too low” (246). Thus, he advocates an

“arbitrary” income level which he sets at “10 per cent” (246). But even this much he admits might put “a considerable strain on” some families’ finances (246). So, he suggests that the 10% figure might only apply to “those earning average or above average incomes in affluent societies” (246). Here, Singer implicitly appeals to a notion of “absolute affluence,” which involves the possession of “more income than [one] need[s] to provide themselves adequately with all the basic necessities of life” (221). The idea seems to be that those earning “average or above incomes in affluent societies” are absolutely affluent and therefore in a position to make annual contributions that do not involve the loss of anything comparably morally important.

And yet it still seems as if Singer is pulling from more theoretical assumptions than he lets on. He later rejects the idea that his proposal is problematic because it would leave us

“without a great deal that makes life interesting” on the grounds that “it is wrong to assume that” a life with some degree of affluence “remains a good life in a world in which buying luxuries for

oneself means accepting the continued avoidable suffering of others” (244). But here he is implicitly appealing to a strict view of the world as a state of affairs in which well-being is the only value that matters, and it is strictly measured and aggregated in terms of his distinction between absolute affluence and subsistence. How else could the suffering of some so drastically change our evaluation of a life above subsistence levels? If all we heard about someone was that they bought a new sweater and a couple of books our initial reactions are likely to be in the direction of: What kind of sweater? What kind of books? Was it Gogol or Dostoevsky? And if we were also told that someone somewhere else has their life threatened by diarrhea our initial reactions are likely to be in the direction of: That’s an awful shame! I wish that never happened!

What kind of fallen world is this? In order for these kinds of reactions to change the evaluation of our sweater shopper, the two have to be brought together in some manner. Singer’s proposal is to bring them together in virtue of their causal relationship to one another: the sweater shopper could have helped the suffering patient.

And this, of course, is true. But a lot of people could have helped the suffering patient.

Why is the sweater shopper special or singled out? Well, on Singer’s view, she isn’t. She’s just like everyone who was in a position to do something. That’s fine enough but notice that when we say this we are already judging people’s actions solely with respect to the consequences of those actions. We can agree that this causal relationship exists. And we can even agree that the existence of this causal relationship suggests that agents should contribute to poverty relief efforts. But Singer also rejects the idea that agents might have rights or entitlements to some level of affluence (234-5). And he also rejects the idea that a government’s non-compliance has any bearing on an individual agent’s obligations (241-2). So, Singer is only counting what matters from an impartial perspective and only counting in a way that is clearly consequentialist.

This means that there may very well be obligations to contribute to poverty relief efforts, but that these obligations are not as onerous as Singer imagines them to be because there are more moral resources than Singer recognizes, and these resources block principles from generating extreme demands. These might include considerations that involve the compliance of others. Singer seems to reject the idea that the non-compliance of others affects individuals’ obligations in any important moral way other than their influence on the contingent facts of an outcome. But some people might disagree with this. They might think that they can’t be morally obligated to do something other people aren’t doing. The question is: are thoughts like this justified? How exactly are our moral obligations influenced by the moral compliance of others?

Liam Murphy and the Compliance Condition

Singer suggests, or implies, that others’ idleness is never a reason not to do something.

But we might think that we don’t have to make up for others’ idleness at all. This is Liam

Murphy’s view, which Murphy specifically develops in response to the extreme demands of a view Singer knows well, Act Utilitarianism (AU). Murphy’s view is that a theory like AU goes wrong by failing to take account of the directionality of moral principles. According to Murphy

(2000), “principles of beneficence take an agent-neutral form, in the sense that they give us all the same aim” (75). “Deontological constraints…are, by contrast, agent-relative, in that they give each agent a different aim” (75).39 Given this distinction, Murphy claims that “a principle of beneficence is directed to agents as a group, whereas other moral principles are directed to agents

39 As I mentioned in a footnote in a discussion of Samuel Scheffler in Chapter One, McNaughton & Rawling (1990; 1992) have developed a compelling case for thinking that even deontological theories give all agents the same aim, in a sense. For example, they all tell agents not to lie themselves. The crucial distinction between agent-neutral and agent-relative reasons is that the latter, unlike the former, include essential reference to the agent. Consider the difference between “x should make sure x doesn’t lie” and “x should make sure lying doesn’t happen” or “x should take care of y because y is a child” and “x should take care of y because y is x’s child.” However, neither Murphy nor Scheffler seem to share McNaughton & Rawling’s view.

individually” (75). The problems of demandingness emerge for AU because it fails to take account of the directionality of the principle of beneficence: AU treats the principle of beneficence as if it is directed at agents individually rather than primarily at a group.

For Murphy, “there are two questions that naturally arise for a principle directed to people as a group that do not arise for principles directed to each person individually” (75). The first is the question of “how responsibility…should be distributed among the members of the group” (75). The second is the question of “how an agent’s responsibility is affected when another member of the group shirks her responsibility” (75). On Murphy’s view, Act

Utilitarianism, in virtue of its commitment to what Murphy calls the “optimizing principle of beneficence” gives the wrong answer to the second of these questions (76). AU requires complying agents to pick up too much of the slack of non-complying agents.

In fact, Murphy formulates what he calls the “compliance condition” in response to the thought that “we cannot be required to do other people’s shares as well as our own” (76-7). So, for Murphy, the problem with Act Utilitarianism is that it requires complying agents to pick up the slack of non-complying agents at all. This is evident in Murphy’s formulation of the compliance condition:

An agent-neutral moral principle should not increase its demands on agents as expected compliance with the principle by other agents decreases. Demands on agents under partial compliance should not exceed what they would be…under full compliance. (77) This means that while an agent’s obligation is determined by how much they could be expected to contribute to some beneficent aim if everyone were to do their fair share, an agent’s obligation is insensitive to whether an agent’s peers do in fact do their fair share. So, if x number of benefactors could each donate n amount of resources to alleviate some particular need, an agent

A need not donate more than n if fewer than x benefactors make an n-size donation. So,

according to Murphy, agent-neutral principles impose obligations on agents that are completely unresponsive to the compliance of others.

There are two major objections to the compliance condition. The first objection is that it is a response to a poorly formulated thought. The second objection is that it generates intuitively erroneous prescriptions. The first objection picks on the thought Murphy spotlights as motivating the compliance condition: the thought that “we cannot be required to do other people’s shares as well as our own” (76-7). Whether the compliance condition follows from this intuition depends on what we take to be other people’s shares. If a share means the sum of labor an agent must do or resources they must forgo, or relinquish, the intuition will be consistent with asking agents to do some of the things another agent can be expected to do in an ideal condition.

The thought “we can’t be asked to do others’ shares” may also simply speak to what fairness involves in initial labor distributions, not downstream distributions. To explain, a moral theory could impose an obligation on some agent simply because that agent can deliver on the aim of the obligation. (Schematically, a theory could require an agent to sacrifice n in pursuit of x whenever the sacrifice of n delivers x.) But a theory can also impose an obligation on some agent because doing so would result in an agent contributing to the deliverance of the aim of the obligation. (Schematically, a theory could require an agent to sacrifice n in pursuit of x whenever n is a reasonable, or equal, contribution to the deliverance of x.) Here is a concrete example of the difference. Suppose you are a parent of triplets and you must assign weekend chores. You need the dishes washed, the grass cut, and the garbage taken out (and let’s stipulate that each of these chores involves equal labor, but more on the legitimacy of stipulations of this sort later).

According to the first formulation, you will be justified if you assign all three tasks to the first child you see. That’s because, according to the first formula, agents can be required to do moral

labor whenever they are in position to accomplish a moral feat. According to the second formulation, you should assign each of the children one of the tasks or divide the tasks into sub tasks so that each performs a roughly equal share of labor. That’s because according to the second formula, agents can only be required to equally contribute to a moral feat.

If, as a parent, you required one child to do all three tasks, you might anticipate hearing your child complain “I can’t be asked to do their chores for them!” Now, as a parent, you might protest that each of your children had an equal chance of being the unfortunate soul saddled with all three chores. But then you would misunderstand the child’s objection. A fair requirement involves more than having an equal chance of being bound by it. A fair requirement involves an equal, or equitable, distribution of moral labor.40 The reason why Murphy’s compliance condition is a poor response to the intuition “we cannot be asked to do others’ shares” is that this intuition speaks only to the first of Murphy’s two questions. Recall that Murphy claimed two questions arise when asking about the individual obligations of actors in a group: the question of how responsibility is to be distributed and the question of how responsive the obligation of an individual is to the compliance of others. Murphy takes the thought that “we cannot be asked to do others shares for them” as speaking to the second question. But, as the preceding case demonstrates, the thought fits just as well as a response to the first question. So, Murphy needs to provide additional reasons for formulating the compliance condition as a response to the thought that “we cannot be asked to do others shares for them.” As it stands, the compliance condition is insufficiently motivated. The intuition about fair shares may just be the articulation of a standard

40 In this case, at least. I will say more about the demands of fairness later, although I have already hinted at the account of fairness I prefer in the previous two chapters.

set on initial labor distributions. Murphy needs to argue that it is an articulation of a standard set on labor distributions downstream from their ideal distribution.

The second problem with Murphy’s compliance condition is that it generates intuitively wrong prescriptions in many cases. An often-discussed case involves two bystanders confronted with two strangers drowning in a pond. 41 In this case, a principle of beneficence consistent with the compliance condition would require each of the bystanders to save one of the two strangers.

But, in the event one bystander refuses to save one of the strangers, Murphy’s compliance condition implies that the compliant bystander is not obligated to save the second stranger. That seems wrong.

Murphy’s view is that there is “no special problem raised by the two-rescuer case in particular” (128). Murphy entertains the notion that “the morality of rescue is distinct from that of general beneficence” to explain why another principle, in addition to a limited principle of beneficence, might still require the complying agent to save both strangers (129). But Murphy says that he “doubt[s] that the idea of a special obligation to rescue can be defended” (131).

Rather, Murphy turns to a strategy borrowed from Peter Unger (1994), in which one seeks to identify a “factor…that seems to prompt the wrong intuitive response” (130). For Murphy, this factor is character. On his view, what explains “our strong negative reaction to failures to rescue” isn’t a sense that the agent acted incorrectly, but that “his emotional indifference to the victim’s plight shows him to have an appalling character” (133).

These considerations suggest Murphy’s view is that a pluralistic theory with a commitment to the compliance condition is the best justified systematization of our ethical

41 For example, see Mulgan (2001) and Kamm (2000; 2004) for discussions of this case. See also Reader (2003).

intuitions. So, for Murphy an adequate ethical theory must be coherent, intuitively satisfying, and justifiable. This means that no intuition needs to be enshrined and that modifications to brute intuitive judgments are acceptable in the process of systematizing a coherent set from them. That is acceptable enough, but for the former claim to be true, Murphy will need to bridge the gap between the thoughts about fair moral labor distribution and the compliance condition I highlighted earlier. Supposing that could be done, Murphy would still leave open the door for the construction of a rival approach that is coherent, justifiable, and even more intuitively satisfying and that approach may very well reject the compliance condition. I think such an approach can in fact be constructed, but I will say more about what some of the features such an approach might have in coming sections. Murphy’s work suggests collectivist approaches to morality may have resources helpful for illuminating how responsive individual agents’ obligations are to the compliance of others. So, in the next section, I consider Rule Consequentialism and its application to conditions of partial compliance.

Rule Consequentialism and Collective Approaches

AU is an individualist approach to consequentialism. As Mulgan (2001) observes, AU sees morality “as an individual project given to me as a single moral agent” (53). For example,

AU says that an individual agent acts rightly if and only if, and because, that action promotes the greatest total net happiness for all affected. One could adopt an individual approach to consequentialism with a different theory of the good, and one would have a form of Act

Consequentialism as opposed to Act Utilitarianism. By contrast, one can prefer a consequentialist view that takes morality to “be a group project, which is mine only because I belong to some group” (53). Following Mulgan, we can say that these approaches are collectivist approaches to consequentialism. One of most popular forms of collective consequentialism is

Brad Hooker’s (2000) Rule Consequentialism. On Hooker’s Rule Consequentialist view, “an act is wrong if and only if it is forbidden by the code of rules whose internalization by the overwhelming majority of everyone everywhere in each new generation has maximum expected value in terms of well-being (with some priority for the worst off)” (32). Here, Hooker says “rule consequentialism taps into and develops the thought that an act is wrong if everyone’s feeling free to do it would have bad consequences” (5). The rules that are enshrined in the ideal code are those rules that if accepted by mostly everyone, would promote the greatest total net well-being of everyone. So, for example, an agent performs the right action when she tells the truth because telling the truth is consistent with the rule “do not lie” and because a world that permitted lying would experience less total net well-being, than a world that prohibited lying.42

More can be said about Rule Consequentialism. Many philosophers wonder whether it is even a form of consequentialism, how it can be motivated, and whether it is coherent. These are all interesting questions, but my interest is in how responsive Rule Consequentialism takes an individual’s obligation to be to the compliance of others. Rule Consequentialism clearly invokes ideal conditions to identify an appropriate distribution of moral labor. That’s because Rule

Consequentialism asks real-world agents to comply with rules that we would expect to produce the most well-being if accepted by almost everyone and the world with the greatest expected well-being is just an ideal world where almost everyone is morally compliant. So, Rule

Consequentialism is consistent with the second formula I mentioned last section: the schematic requirement that a theory require agents to sacrifice only what would reasonably contribute to the deliverance of a beneficent aim. Rule Consequentialism thus answers Murphy’s first question

42 More accurately, a society that prohibited lying, among other things, should be one that experiences more total net happiness than any other society (at least in virtue of its moral code).

“how responsibility…should be distributed among the members of the group” with the response

“fairly, or equally.”

But this leaves the second question, the question of how responsive an individual’s obligation is to the compliance of others, unanswered, and this is the question I am primarily interested in. Hooker (2000) claims that Rule Consequentialism is “implausible if it holds that how much I should contribute is completely insensitive to how much others are actually contributing” (164). Rather Hooker says that “over time agents should help those in greater need…even if the personal sacrifices involved…add up to a significant cost to the agents” and that these costs are “to be assessed aggregately, not iteratively” (166). But then the question becomes what is a “significant aggregative personal cost” and Hooker is aware that the answer is

“obviously vague” (166). Unfortunately, Hooker offers little in the way of clarifying the point.

He says that “most of us believe that morality…requires one to come to the aid of the needy” and that “most of us also believe there are limits on how much self-sacrifice morality can reasonably demand” (168). What Rule Consequentialism demands in conditions of partial compliance is

“something between these thresholds” (169).43

The vagueness of Hooker’s appeal to “significant aggregative personal cost” means that any view appealing to a more determinate limit between Hooker’s two thresholds may very well be preferable to Hooker’s.44 But there is a more serious worry that threatens the possibility of

Rule Consequentialism giving an answer to our question at all. Rule Consequentialism says that an individual agent should comply with a rule partly constitutive of a set of rules which would

43 Hooker (2009) is not clearer on the matter: “What level of aggregate self-sacrifice is required? What counts as a disaster? I have always admitted the vagueness here” (162). 44 I am not expecting to entirely conquer ambiguity. I am only asking for as much clarity as seems possible to give in any case, as I will explain later.

promote the greatest expected total net well-being if mostly everyone accepted those rules. But this means that whatever Rule Consequentialism prescribes that an agent should do will involve an appeal to the fact that an agent is a member of a specific group: namely an ideal group of persons who accept a set of rules productive of the best consequences. But when we ask about the responsiveness of an agent’s obligation to the compliance of others, we are talking about an agent who belongs to both the following groups: a mixed group of compliers and non-compliers and a smaller group of compliers. What we want to know is what each of the individual agents in the smaller group of compliers must do. An appeal to the ideal group of persons who accept a set of rules productive of the best consequences will be of no obvious help.

Perhaps this conclusion is reached too quickly. Hooker’s Rule Consequentialism involves an appeal to a set of rules which would promote the greatest expected total net happiness if everyone accepted those rules, not if everyone followed them. Specifically, Hooker says that

“this is to be thought of as 90 per cent of everyone, cutting across all social, economic, national, and geographic distinctions” (85). So, the ideal code will recognize some degree of non- compliance. And we can also suppose that well-intentioned people who accept a set of rules because it would produce the best expected consequences if everyone accepted them will recognize that from time to time, perhaps because of laziness or absent-mindedness or exhaustion or some other combination of factors, not everyone who accepts the optimal set of rules will comply with them. And seeing this, we can reasonably suppose that these ideal persons have formulated rules about what to do when this happens. So, perhaps the appeal to the ideal group of persons can offer some guidance about what to do in non-ideal conditions of partial compliance.

For the sake of argument, grant that this is so. The question to ask then is what kind of rule these ideal people would accept as governing an individual’s obligation when others fail to do their part. Hooker’s suggestion is that they accept a rule which directs them to help others over time, even if the costs add up. But one wonders why these ideal agents would move so quickly to such an individualist rule. Given their commitment to a collectivist view of morality, it seems that these ideal persons would iterate the Rule Consequentialist prescription and simply direct agents to contribute to the group of compliers joint effort to deliver on the desired beneficent aim.

The problem now is that in the real world many actors will be non-compliant, and even contributing to some beneficent aim may involve great demands. Now the ideal group of persons won’t ever have to deal with this circumstance. Their non-compliance is generated more by non- ideal empirical circumstances than moral hypocrisy. So, while the logical implications of this approach threaten to generate extremely demanding moral requirements and thus suggest Hooker is right to look elsewhere, it is not clear that Hooker’s prescription can be derived from the scenario Rule Consequentialism appeals to when determining an agent’s obligations. If this is right, then, the Rule Consequentialist is faced with a dilemma: either opt for some apparently ad hoc rule which seems to betray the spirit of Rule Consequentialism or accept that Rule

Consequentialism can generate extreme demands in conditions of partial compliance. Both options are unattractive, but they suggest a deeper problem. Collectivist approaches to morality cannot alone avoid generating extreme moral demands. The problem with Rule

Consequentialism puts this in clear sight. Either the Rule Consequentialist needs to abandon their collectivism, or they need to accept that collectivism can sometimes make extreme demands. We might think that there are some cases where an extreme demand is legitimate. Science fiction

“save the world” type cases are one kind. But these are fanciful examples, and in the “real- world” we are often confronted with having to make up for others’ non-compliance even when existence itself is not at stake. So, if we want a real-world morality that does not make extreme demands, it doesn’t seem a collectivist approach will be of much help.

Mulgan’s Combined Consequentialism and the Wrong Facts Objection

In addition to the problems of moral demandingness for Rule Consequentialism, the problem of moral demandingness puts pressure on most collectivist approaches, especially in conditions of partial compliance. To see this, consider what Tim Mulgan (2001) calls the wrong facts objection. In a nutshell, the wrong facts objection suggests that while an agent’s obligation is shaped by empirical contingencies, there is a reasonable extent to which agents can be required to know or understand these contingencies. For Mulgan, the problem with collective approaches to morality is that they require agents to know more about their own empirical circumstances than they reasonably need to if they are to identify their own obligations. As a result, collectivist approaches to morality construe an individual’s obligation as hyper-sensitive to empirical facts. I will explain.

Recall that Rule Consequentialism is consistent with the requirement that a theory require agents to sacrifice only what would contribute to the deliverance of a beneficent aim and that because of this I said Rule Consequentialism thus answers Murphy’s first question “how responsibility…should be distributed among the members of the group” with the response

“fairly, or equally.” The wrong facts objection spotlights how this methodological commitment can go awry. If the distribution of moral labor involves an identification of an equal share, then, agents will need to be unreasonably sensitive to the empirical facts relevant to identifying an equal share. To use Mulgan’s example, one could imagine that one of the following conditions is

true: there are only 1 million people starving in an affluent world, there are 50 million people starving or facing famine, or there are 2.5 billion people starving. A collectivist approach to morality that insists moral labor should be distributed equally will require an agent to determine just which of these following conditions holds and just how many affluent people there are who can contribute to poverty relief efforts so that the agent can calculate how much she is required to give. But, as Mulgan observes, “these extreme differences seem unreasonable” (93). That is, it does not seem as if any individual’s obligation is just a function of the empirical facts.

Collectivist approaches to morality thus make any individual’s obligation contingent on the

“wrong facts.”

So, an investigation into collectivist approaches to morality has revealed something interesting. Not only can an individual’s obligations be too insensitive to the compliance of others, an ethical theory can also treat an individual’s obligation as too sensitive to the compliance of others. Our investigation into Murphy’s Compliance Condition demonstrated that an individual’s moral obligation is, in fact, sensitive to the compliance of others. That’s why the compliance condition is so implausible: it suggested otherwise. But, now our investigation into collectivist approaches to morality reveals something else: that an individual’s moral obligation is not hyper-sensitive to the compliance of others. This means that an adequate account of an individual agent’s moral obligation will need to suggest that the compliance of others can affect what a given agent is required to do, but that there is a limit to how sensitive an individual agent’s obligation in fact is to the compliance of others.

Thus far, we have seen the dire straits consequentialists find themselves in. On the one hand, we have the individualists, the Act Utilitarians, who have trouble reining in their theory before it generates extreme demands. On the other hand, we have the collectivists who seem to

get some handle on extreme demands, but only after they render an individual’s moral obligations to be something of a function of the compliance of others. And then we have the hybrid theorists, such as Murphy, who borrow from both approaches. The problem with

Murphy’s view, as I have argued, is that it implausibly suggests agents never have to pick up other agents’ moral slack. But perhaps there is a way to construct a more plausible hybrid view.

This is the strategy Tim Mulgan (2001) adopts. Mulgan distinguishes between “two moral realms” “first characterized in terms of two broad categories of components of well-being: needs and goals” (169). Mulgan calls the first realm the “Realm of Necessity.” This realm governs

“active members of the moral community’s” interaction with someone “who currently lacks the resources or capabilities to participate fully in the moral community” (170). The second realm,

Mulgan calls the “Realm of Reciprocity” and this realm governs the inside interactions between

“active members of the moral community” (170). For Mulgan “most morally significant decisions involve both reciprocity and necessity” so “it is more accurate to see the two realms as representing two kinds of reasons” than as representing any “ontological joints” in the moral life

(173).

For Mulgan distinguishing between the two moral realms is important because the two moral realms represent the ways in which moral reasons are directed at both agents and at the moral community at large. On Mulgan’s view, the Realm of Necessity generates moral reasons for individual agents to act in virtue of being agents while the Realm of Reciprocity generates moral reasons for individual agents to act in virtue of belonging to the wider moral community.

According to Mulgan, even some collective approaches to consequentialism fail to appreciate the latter. For example, Rule Consequentialism says an individual should comply with a rule belonging to a set of rules which would promote the greatest expected total net happiness were

that set of rules accepted by a world at large. In the last section, I argued that this involves contributing one’s equal share to a beneficent aim. But notice that Rule Consequentialism requires this even if no one else is doing anything. So, as Mulgan sees it, even collectivist approaches to morality can underappreciate the moral reasons directed at agents qua members of a moral community. By emphasizing the two realms, Mulgan intends to offer an improved theory that does a better job recognizing this directionality. He constructs a view that responds to and mediates the reasons generated by the two moral realms he calls “Combined Consequentialism”

(260).

On Mulgan’s view, the Realm of Reciprocity has priority over the Realm of Necessity.

That’s because, for Mulgan, the goals of a person provide any agent with reason not to interfere with those goals. This is to be contrasted with needs, which provide any agent with reasons to interfere in another’s life, namely, by providing or helping provide subsistence goods.

Importantly, on Mulgan’s view, any agent’s goals generate reasons that ground restrictions on other agents’ behavior. For Mulgan, these goals require other agents to respond in ways that do not interfere with the general pursuit of goals. So, even when responding to need based reasons, an active member of the moral community must operate within the confines of the Realm of

Reciprocity. This means then that “basic structural features of the Realm of Reciprocity permeate the whole of morality” (265).

Mulgan’s Combined Consequentialism enables him to navigate the two problems raised earlier regarding the responsiveness of an individual’s obligation to the compliance of others.

Recall that the discussion of the compliance condition suggested that an individual’s obligation is sensitive to the compliance of others while the wrong facts objection suggested that there is a limit to how sensitive an individual’s obligation is to the compliance of others. On Mulgan’s

view, the reasons generated in the Realm of Reciprocity are primarily reasons to respect, or not interfere, with other people’s goals. These reasons are insensitive to the compliance of others.

Reasons generated in the Realm of Necessity, by contrast, are sensitive to the compliance of others. Famines may be caused by corruption in developing world governments, but when this happens the needs of people in these countries still generate reasons for other better off agents to act. The demands of Combined Consequentialism are mitigated by a permission for an agent to favor her interests (given the priority of the Realm of Reciprocity) and the wrong facts objection is circumvented by permitting agents to ignore reasons generated in the Realm of Necessity when acting on those reasons would infringe on the pursuit of goals an agent is permitted to pursue in the Realm of Reciprocity.45

Mulgan’s view is sophisticated and promising as an account of the responsiveness of an individual’s obligation to the compliance of others, but it asks distinctions between kinds of reasons to do too much work.46 As I argued in the last chapter, there are different moral reasons agents have for responding in particular ways, and these are grounded in the different ways agents relate to others. Mulgan’s Realm of Reciprocity is not altogether distinct from Cullity’s morality of respect. Both involve norms that govern an agent’s relationship to other agents. And

Mulgan’s Realm of Necessity is not altogether distinct from Cullity’s morality of concern. Both involve norms that govern an agent’s relationship to other patients. Mulgan’s contribution to consequentialism involves the use of one realm, the Realm of Reciprocity, to limit the demands

45 For a more detailed discussion of the demandingness of Mulgan’s view, see page 286. 46 One might also worry about the distinction between needs and goals. As Reader (2006) observes, Aristotle appealed to “a core generic sense of necessity as ‘that which cannot be otherwise’” and he derived four further senses of necessity from the core generic sense: “that which must be if life…is to be,” “that which must be if some good is to be achieved,” “that which must be because coerced against will” and “that which must be because logically compelled” (339). If goals are necessary for a human life to go well, then, it seems goals are just a special case of needs. Still, Mulgan can rightly object to this type of response by stipulating that goals are those needs not necessary for existence or life.

of another, the Realm of Necessity. But if the Realm of Reciprocity roughly tracks Cullity’s morality of respect, and Cullity’s morality of respect can generate extreme moral demands, then,

Mulgan cannot block the generation of extreme demands just by constraining one morality with another.

But suppose that the morality of respect doesn’t generate extreme moral demands, at least, in the form of Mulgan’s Realm of Reciprocity. There is still a problem. Mulgan seems to be suggesting that agents should pursue their goals, and then, and only then, should they worry about the needs of others. That seems wrong. Agents can contour their goals to the needs of others. Agents can also contour their goals to their own needs, and even their needs to their own goals. Consider the animal rights zeitgeist sweeping the globe. Increasing numbers of people are going vegan, vegetarian, pescatarian, reducetarian, or simply observing ‘Meatless Mondays.’

These agents have subsistence needs. But they refuse to meet their subsistence needs any old way. These agents have the goal of meeting their needs in a manner they find ethically justifiable. These agents believe their goals and their needs should be brought together into a greater harmony. In claiming that the Realm of Reciprocity has priority, Mulgan seems to suggest the goals of human moral agents should constrain the reasons others’ needs generate for human moral agents, but a public increasingly concerned with the well-being of animals will surely think the matter more dynamic than that. Most thoughtful people don’t approach the question of what they owe to animals by asking what they owe to animals after they have accomplished their goals. Increasingly, people are approaching the question of what they owe to animals by asking how concern for animals should shape their goals and constrain how they meet their needs. This is the case even for folks who have no interest in changing their diet. Most

people think that factory farming involves abhorrent practices, even if they (confusedly) believe the consumption of animal products is morally acceptable.47

So, the Combined Consequentialism approach, though sophisticated, doesn’t seem capable of giving an adequate account of the responsiveness of an individual’s obligation to the compliance of others. Extreme moral demands do not emerge only when other agents fail to be sufficiently beneficent. Extreme moral demands can also emerge when other agents fail to be sufficiently respectful, or cooperative. So, one cannot solve the problem of partial compliance simply by constraining the demands of beneficence with the demands of respect. As a result,

Mulgan can only partly avoid the two extremes of construing an agent’s obligations as a function of need and the compliance of others and construing an agent’s obligation as entirely unresponsive to the compliance of others. To solve the problem of partial compliance, Mulgan needs to explain how an agent should respond to moral failures other than failures of beneficence. But to do so, it seems Mulgan will need to entirely rework the structure of

Combined Consequentialism.

Michael Ridge on Fairness and Partial Compliance

So far, I have been examining various sorts of consequentialist solutions to the problem of partial compliance. Perhaps a different kind of solution is needed. One such solution might involve revisiting, and revising, Murphy’s appeal to fairness. Perhaps a view involving a central

47 The point here is not really about animals, but about an implausible view of the relationship between needs and goals. Still, Mulgan has several strange, and outright false views on animals that speak to this implausible relationship. Mulgan (2001) claims that “Animals have only needs, not goals” (203). And that in “a Need-Free society where we can assume that all the needs of all animals are met, moral theory need not concern itself with animals” (229). But both of these claims are obviously false. The suggestion that animals only have needs is so outrageous one wonders whether Mulgan has ever even been around a non-human animal. And even if we suppose that animals do not have goals, in a world where all animals have all their needs met, human moral agents could still exploit animals for entertainment in zoos, parks or other places. Moral theories will still be needed to prevent these possibilities.

appeal to fairness can solve the problem of partial compliance. Michael Ridge (2010) has constructed a proposal of this sort. Does this proposal have the resources needed to navigate the two extremes a solution to the problem of partial compliance must navigate? While Ridge’s proposal has some advantages over the other proposals I have canvassed in this chapter, I don’t think it ultimately succeeds, and I will explain why.

Ridge, like Murphy, assumes that in some situations “moral obligations are…owed by us” and “plausibly understood in the first personal plural.” Ridge also assumes that when

“obligations are held in common the burdens of discharging them should be fairly divided”

(194). This raises the question of how the compliance of others should affect the distribution of moral burdens. One answer, the one provided by Liam Murphy’s compliance condition, is that the compliance of others should not affect any individual’s obligation at all. Another answer is that others should pick up non-compliers’ slack as much as possible. Both these solutions seem wrong, and Ridge argues both seem unfair. To accept Murphy’s compliance condition is to impose unfair burdens on the needy whom the compliant could aid if they did more than their fair share. On the other hand, the idea that compliers should pick up as much of non-compliers’ slack as possible seems unfair to the compliers. For Ridge, this means that “unfair burdens” are inevitable in conditions of partial compliance. However, this does not mean that “any particular distribution of burdens” is inevitable and, importantly, “unfair burdens can in general be themselves more or less fairly distributed” (197). In fact, Ridge’s view is that this in fact should be done and in conditions of partial compliance it is unfair burdens that should be distributed more or less equally.

To give a concrete example derived from a case Ridge considers, suppose you are out with your friend at dinner and it is time to pay the bill. 48 You notice that your friend has paid his bill, but that he did not leave a tip. If you pick up his portion of the tip, you will have assumed the total share of unfair burdens generated by your friend’s non-compliance. If you pay only your portion of the tab, you will have left the total share of unfair burdens generated by your friend’s non-compliance on the waiter. Ridge’s view is that you should pay half of your friend’s tip thereby assuming half of the unfair burdens generated by your friends’ non-compliance and leaving the other half on the waiter.

Ridge’s emphasis on unfair burdens provides an answer to both questions Murphy claimed arise for principles aimed at a group. Recall that these were the questions of how responsibility should be distributed among members of a group and how an agent’s responsibility is affected by the compliance of other members of the group. Ridge’s view is that moral responsibility should be distributed fairly, or equally, among members of a group and that when some members of a group are non-compliant, the additional unfair burdens should be shared between the compliers and the potential beneficiaries of the joint obligation. Ridge’s proposal also navigates the two extremes we have seen must be navigated: Ridge’s proposal acknowledges that an individual’s obligation is sensitive to the compliance of others, but it also recognizes that there is a limit to this sensitivity.

However, Ridge’s proposal succumbs to the wrong facts objection. To know what an agent must do in any given circumstance, an agent will not only need to know how much she needs to contribute to some joint beneficent effort, she will also need to know how many of her

48 Ridge examines the diner scene from Quentin Tarantino’s film Reservoir Dogs.

peers will fail to contribute and then divide the unfair burdens between herself, the remaining compliers, and the potential beneficiaries. But then, what an agent will need to give will vary tremendously depending on how many compliers there are or on how many beneficiaries there are. But presumably an agent’s actual obligation does not vary that greatly when there are 1 million starving people compared to when there are 2 million and presumably an agent’s actual obligation does not vary that greatly when 1,000 people comply compared to when 10,000 people comply.

Still, Ridge has noticed something of importance. Ridge notices that an individual’s obligation is sensitive, but not hypersensitive to the compliance of others. But he also notices something else important that too many ethicists are missing, and that’s that some degree of tragedy is inevitable when agents fail to live up to expectations. Ridge’s proposal recognizes that unfair burdens are inevitable, and the advantage of his proposal is that he doesn’t entirely try to clean this up. Part of the problem with views that ask agents to pick up too much of others’ slack is that they insist on minimizing the damage that is done when agents fail to behave as they should. But some missed opportunities are just lost opportunities. An ethical approach doesn’t need to solve every moral dilemma and it doesn’t need to pretend there aren’t any lost moral opportunities. To solve the problem of partial compliance, we need a view that accommodates this insight without succumbing to the wrong facts objection. I am not going to construct an entire view here, but I do have something to say about some of the features a view of the right sort might have in the next section.

The Limits of Moral Demandingness

I have argued that some very promising, very plausible accounts of moral obligation in conditions of partial compliance are objectionable. I now want to argue that a view which

recognized four limits on moral demandingness would fare much better in conditions of partial compliance. The four limits I have in mind derive their content from the four objections to extreme demands I discussed in the previous two chapters. In those chapters, I argued that extreme demands are objectionable because they are alienating, confining, unfair, and bad for moral agents. Now, I want to argue that a view which recognized these objections as limits on moral demandingness can provide the resources to solve the problem of partial compliance. Such a view would regard an individual agent’s obligation as sensitive, but not hypersensitive to the compliance of others without running into the wrong facts objection and without any strenuous need to obviate lost moral opportunities, as Singer’s view requires.

Start with the idea that a moral demand can be extreme in virtue of alienating an agent. If an ethical theory recognized an alienation limit on moral obligation, that approach can acknowledge that an individual agent can be asked to do more than what they would be required to do to equitably contribute to a moral aim without making the individual agent’s obligation hyper-sensitive to the compliance of others. To borrow Ridge’s example, morality might legitimately require an individual to pick up the tip on a dinner bill when one’s fellow party goer fails to leave their share. But to know this, one need not determine how many non-compliers there are and how non-ideal burdens can be equitably distributed. One need only know that one is a party goer oneself and that one is in position to alleviate some of the burden of the underpaid wait staff. This obligation exists whenever one is in this condition and doing more than one’s ideal share of moral labor does not prevent one from satisfying other commitments, such as those one might have to one’s family, friends, or personal projects.

Of course, as I argued in Chapter One, morality can sometimes legitimately demand agents act in ways that are detrimental, and even catastrophic, to their personal projects. This is

just to notice that an alienation limit on moral demandingness is defeasible: in the face of disaster, morality can sometimes demand agents behave in ways that are alienating. Bernard

Williams’ case of Jim, who must decide between killing one person or watching twenty die, is arguably one such case. The point I want to emphasize is that in many typical cases, disaster is not impending. When one dines with people who fail to leave a tip, one is not faced with a choice between leaving more or sitting tight as disaster descends. Wait staffs can struggle financially, sure, and this prospect grounds strong reasons for an agent to do more. If we recognize an alienation limit on moral demandingness, we can say that the agent should pick up more of the tip, so long as doing so does not prevent one from satisfying other important commitments. When giving more would involve sacrificing these commitments, or part of these commitments, the reason one has to give more may simply fail to ground an obligation. To leave more, then, would be to do something good, but not required. To leave more would be to do something supererogatory.

A confinement limit can function in a similar manner. To know that one should do more when others fail to do their ideal share, one need only know that one is in a position to help, that others are in a position of need, and that helping does not preclude one from exploring other opportunities, hobbies, or projects. For example, someone confronted with a request to donate to

Oxfam might be obligated to donate, even if they have donated before. To know this, an agent doesn’t need to know exactly how many non-compliers there or how non-ideal burdens can be evenly distributed. One need only know that there is a need, that others are not likely to respond to that need, and that they are in position to help without loss of freedom. An agent can recognize that an obligation exists whenever they are in position to help. Doing more does not mean committing oneself to the personal project of world poverty relief. Such an agent can very

well recognize that future requests will emerge. When they do so, the agent recognizes that the obligation to donate is grounded in the fact that making a donation does not restrict the agent’s freedom, but that the obligation to donate in the future would start to impose on their freedom.

For this reason, the agent can recognize that they are not obligated to indefinitely pick up the slack of the non-compliant.

Perhaps there are cases in which morality can legitimately confine moral agents. Perhaps a post-apocalyptic world, or a Hobbesian state of nature, is a condition in which agents have no possibility of building friendship, taking up hobbies, or pursuing a career. In these conditions, morality might require agents to devote their life to minimizing suffering or rebuilding society.

So, like an alienation limit on moral demandingness, a confinement limit might be defeasible. To suggest that we recognize a confinement limit is just to suggest that the reasons one has to do what would be confining are reasons that fail to ground moral obligation in typical cases. To act in a way that is confining might be to act in a way that is good, but not required. It would be to act in a supererogatory manner.

The account of fairness I emphasized in Chapter One and Chapter Two can also be used to limit moral demands in a manner similar to the alienation and confinement limits. Fairness, I have emphasized, indispensably involves three notions: entitlement, worth, and outcome. The requirements of fairness, on my view, are requirements governing the relationship between these three ideas. This is a slightly different notion than the notion of fairness Murphy and Ridge appeal to. Both Murphy and Ridge assume that fairness requires equal distributions of moral labor. One problem with this proposal is that it already invites the wrong facts objection. To know what an equal distribution of moral labor is, we have to know quite a bit about what is to be done, how it can be done, and how to compare these disparate means of achieving what we

want done. The other problem is that it’s not clear what an equal distribution of moral labor looks like. Here, Murphy and Ridge both have a monetary contribution in mind. But a monetary contribution is no good unless there are ways to convert that contribution into something else and that requires the activity of human persons. But this activity is also moral labor and there is no easy, or obvious way, to compare this kind of labor to the labor involved in a monetary contribution.49

Here, we have a problem in need of solving. Murphy noticed that there are two questions that arise when we are thinking about how exactly agents have to contribute to a particular aim.50

The first was the question of how responsibility is distributed and the second was the question of how responsive obligation is to the compliance of others. If we reject the idea that moral labor should be distributed equally on the grounds established by the wrong facts objections, but we want to solve the second problem, the problem of partial compliance, it’s not clear we will be defending a coherent position at all. We will be saying obligation should be responsive, but not too responsive to the compliance of others, and yet will not be able to say at all just how anyone is complying or not, because we will not be able to say what anyone should do in the first place.

This is a challenge, but we can meet it. We don’t have to give up on the idea of equal moral labor in general, we just have to give up on the idea that this can be distributed, in the divvied up and doled out sense of distributed. Rather than saying moral labor should be distributed equally

49 And even if we can come up with a plausible way of operationalizing moral labor so that we can make these kinds of comparisons, that operationalization will often be less obvious than the considerations that support thinking agents do need to do any specifiable degree of moral labor in the first place. So, a slightly different version of the wrong facts objection will apply to any attempt of this sort. For a more extensive, but slightly different argument in this direction, see Chappell (2009) and (2014). 50 Murphy’s actual phrasing is that these two questions arise for principles directed at a group. But remember, as I mentioned in footnote 2 above, the view Murphy assumes regarding the directionality of principles is suspect. Still, I think the two questions Murphy raises are the right ones and I am attempting to salvage the importance of those two questions without subscribing to a controversial, and in my opinion, flawed view of the directionality of principles.

among moral agents, we can say that equally advantaged, equally capable agents should perform equal labor.51 This idea requires some unpacking.

First, how do we know how advantaged we are? Here, we can contrast ourselves with a potential beneficiary as well as potential benefactors to get an idea of our relative advantage.

And how do we know how capable we are? Here too we can contrast ourselves with a potential beneficiary and potential benefactors to get an idea of our relative capability. And notice that we can arrive at both of these ideas without having to know the entire spectrum of potential capability and advantage. To know our relative capability or our relative advantage, we only need to triangulate ourselves between some imaginable or real person with more capability/advantage and some imaginary or real person with less. In other words, to know our relative advantage and capability, we don’t need to know all of the facts about who is contributing, and how much exactly, and how close all of this gets us to our aim (all of these things are what I have thus far called the wrong facts). We only need to know something about what position we are in, something about how much others are doing, something about who these others are, and something about how close all of this gets us to our aim. And when we have to give more, it’s because we know a person of comparable ability would give more in a similar circumstance and giving more doesn’t result in the loss of any other entitlements. In other words, we only have to know what is necessary for understanding that we are even in a position to make a contribution to a collective moral project. If we pull over to the side of the road because we see someone is pinned underneath a disabled vehicle, we should help lift the vehicle if we are of comparable ability with respect to the good Samaritans who have already stopped (and working

51 Here something like a principle of historical advantage is at work. This principle seems to require moral effort to be discharged proportionally to our relative ability and advantage.

together will succeed or do more good than harm). If we have two broken arms ourselves, we get the task of calling 911. And if we stop, and we are in good health ourselves, and three people have also stopped, but one is refusing to help lift, we should help lift, too, even if doing so requires more labor than the call we were about to put into 911.

That’s enough for now about fairness. Extreme moral demands are extreme in a fourth, and final way. Extreme moral demands are also bad for moral agents; they make agents worse- off. This objection to extreme demands can also be transformed into a limit of moral demands.

We can say that a moral demand is not morally required so long as it is inconsistent with an agent’s flourishing. Call this the eudaimonistic limit. Like the previous three limits, this limit may be defeasible. In a Hobbesian state of nature, flourishing may not even be possible and so the reason one has to promote any value may not be countered by the reason one has to promote their own well-being. In this case, the reason one has to promote any value will not be outweighed by any countervailing consideration and so this reason can ground an obligation.

But, in typical circumstances, flourishing is possible and so the interest one has in one’s own flourishing outweighs the reason one has to promote any value. In these cases, to behave in a way that compromises one’s flourishing is to behave in a supererogatory manner.

As with the previous three limits, the eudaimonistic limit can be recognized without making an individual agent’s moral obligation hyper-sensitive to the compliance of others. To know that they should do more when they have already done something to contribute to a moral aim, an agent only needs to know that the aim fell short, that they are still in position to help, and that doing more is entirely consistent with their flourishing. In these cases, an agent’s obligation is responsive to the compliance of others, but it is not reduced to a function of need and the compliance of others. Thus, the eudaimonistic limit is not objectionable on wrong facts grounds.

Agents should be aware of the compliance levels of others and respond appropriately, but to do so an agent need not have any complete knowledge of the compliance levels of others.

In the last section, I argued that no ethical approach needs to try to minimize the lost moral opportunities created by agent’s moral failures. An adequate ethical approach needs to make the world a better place, and this certainly involves some cleaning up after negligent others, but no agent should be turned into one of the world’s moral janitors. Moral failing is tragic, and tragedy cannot, and should not be, whitewashed.5253 A view which recognized the four limits I have described in this section can acknowledge that moral failing creates a mess, and that compliant agents might need to do some cleaning, but cleaning cannot be their day job.

Morality is not only about keeping our own house in order. The consequentialist moral tradition is a great testament to this fact. What others do, it turns out, is part of our business. But it’s only part. And we can’t lose sight of that fact, either.

One final word of caution is in order. In this section, I have spoken of what an agent needs to do to contribute to a moral aim. This may make it seem as if an agent’s obligations are only sensitive to the compliance of others when we are talking about the morality of concern, or the morality of cooperation. But an agent can be required to pick up others’ slack even when other agents fail to express adequate respect. Suppose, for example, you witness an instance of bullying: one agent is acting rudely to another agent. In some cases, the ones where the prospect of physical violence doesn’t loom over you, you might be required to intervene. In other cases, you might just be required to console the victim. In these cases, one is not being asked to contribute to a moral aim, in the sense of doing a contributory share of moral labor. But if we

52 I owe this insight to William James’s critique of Hegel, developed with great punch in The Will to Believe, Pragmatism and A Pluralistic Universe. 53 See also Tessman (2014).

think that recognition of humanity, or personhood, is a moral aim, and that certainly seems to be why expressions of respect are called for, then, in another sense, the bully in this case fails to deliver on this aim. When this happens, the obligation to console, or intervene, amounts to taking up this aim oneself. For this reason, I have used the catch-all phrase “contribute to a moral aim” when describing the responsiveness of an individual’s obligations to others’ compliance, despite the ways the phrase might mislead.

An Example: World Poverty and the Limits of Moral Demandingness

To reinforce the case for the proposed limits of moral demandingness, I want to briefly consider the demands of morality for affluent persons living in a world where very many people suffer from lack of basic necessities and then compare my proposal to some of those canvassed in this chapter. In our present state of affairs, many people suffer from lack of basic necessities and some even die. As this occurs, others live lavish lifestyles and enjoy a surplus of resources.

To simplify things a bit, I will focus only on what morality demands of those affluent persons living far above the poverty line: the class of people with an annual income of one million or more dollars.54 With respect to this group of persons, I will focus on two questions. First, what does morality demand of these persons? And can they be asked to do more if others don’t do anything at all?

To start, let’s go back to the beginning: to Singer’s proposal that everyone with absolute affluence, defined as everyone with more than the basic necessities of life, should contribute to poverty relief efforts to the point of comparable moral importance, that is, to the point at which a

54 The class of persons with an annual income of a millionaire might often overlap with the class of billionaires. In what follows, I use the term millionaires so as to include all those folks who could spend their entire adult life earning a million dollars annually and yet never amass a billion dollars. But the ensuing discussion applies equally to billionaires.

further contribution would compromise a person’s procuring and enjoying the basic necessities of life. Singer’s proposal clearly asks the very affluent to give more than a person with an annual income of, say, $100,000. As Singer (2006) has explained elsewhere, the “top 0.1 percent” of US taxpayers includes 129,600 people with a minimum income of $1.1 million. Thus, in terms of absolute monetary contributions and as a proportion of their income, Singer is asking these agents to give a much greater amount of money than others.55 That seems right. But Singer is also requiring a person in this group to give to the point that they would give up something of comparable moral importance, even if no one is giving anything.56 That seems wrong. But why?

One possible reason is that, as Singer (2006) perhaps ironically notes, the top 0.01 percent of US taxpayers could give “an average of $4.3 million” annually for a total of “$61 billion” and still earn “an annual income of at least $3.3 million” while the top 0.1 percent of US taxpayers could give about $250,000 annually and still have about $846,000 annually. In other words, the very wealthy can make incredibly large annual donations, if they all worked together, and therefore make a serious dent in world poverty without the complete loss of their absolute affluence. So, one reason why Singer’s demand might seem extreme is that it asks very wealthy persons to do more than their fair share. This is the second proposal I considered earlier:

Murphy’s proposal that the demands of beneficence should be distributed equally, and not any further. Murphy’s account suggests that to satisfy their moral demand, each person in the class of persons earning a million dollars annually should calculate how many people in this class there

55 More specifically, Singer is asking each person in the top tax brackets to give more in absolute dollar amount and as a proportion of their income. For example, Singer asks the top .01% to give 33% of their income, the next bracket (the top .1%) to give 25%, the next bracket (the top .5%) to give 20%, the next bracket (the top 1%) to give 15%, and the next bracket (the top 10%) to give 10%. 56 Of course, Singer doesn’t say much about how to reconcile his academic view and the tax bracket proposal which he has adopted in his nonacademic articles, but this is exactly the kind of unhelpful bifurcation between theory and practice I am trying to resist in constructing my alternative proposal. 99

are, how much need there is, and how much each person in this class should contribute to satisfy this need. If one morally concerned person in this class knows that others will not contribute to the poverty relief effort, that person is not obligated to pick up any of the others’ slack, on

Murphy’s view. This, as I argued earlier, means that, on Murphy’s view, moral obligation is completely unresponsive to the compliance of others. But that seems wrong. It seems that any one of the very wealthy persons should do more than they would have to do if every person in this class made an equal monetary contribution. After all, as Singer demonstrated, the very wealthy can make sizable contributions and still earn hundreds of thousands of dollars, even millions, every year.

The next view I considered was Hooker’s Rule Consequentialism. Hooker’s Rule

Consequentialism asks real world agents to comply with rules that would produce the greatest expected well-being if accepted by everyone. Earlier I argued that the world with the greatest expected well-being is just an ideal world where everyone is morally compliant and so Rule

Consequentialism requires agents to contribute an equal amount of moral labor to moral aims.

However, as we saw earlier, Hooker (2000) claims that Rule Consequentialism is “implausible if it holds that how much I should contribute is completely insensitive to how much others are actually contributing” (164). Rather Hooker says that “over time agents should help those in greater need…even if the personal sacrifices involved…add up to a significant cost to the agents” and that these costs are “to be assessed aggregately, not iteratively” (166).

Insofar as this is the case, Hooker’s view is more attractive than Murphy’s. Hooker’s

Rule Consequentialism corroborates the thought that a compliant person in the class of persons earning a million dollars annually should pick up some of the slack of the non-compliant persons in this class whereas Murphy’s view does not. Unfortunately, Hooker does not say much about

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how much more a person in this class should do. Recall that Hooker claims that “most of us believe that morality…requires one to come to the aid of the needy,” that “most of us also believe there are limits on how much self-sacrifice morality can reasonably demand,” and only that Rule Consequentialism demands “something between these thresholds” (168-9).

Of course, indeterminacy is perfectly acceptable. Absolute precision is not something to be desired nor expected in all matters. But in the present case greater precision seems desirable and possible. It seems as if we should be able to give a more determinate account of how much of the non-compliant persons in this class’s slack our compliant person should pick up. Ridge’s proposal gives us one example of how we might do so. On Ridge’s view, non-ideal burdens are to be evenly distributed. Recall that a non-ideal burden involves both the share of moral labor a compliant agent must pick up because of others’ non-compliance and the benefits the needy lose when (some) agents are non-compliant. So, on Ridge’s view, a compliant person should determine how many needy people there are, how many compliant persons in this class there are, how much the needy lose when not all the persons in this class contribute, and then divide the amount the needy lose when not all the persons in this class contribute between the needy and the compliant persons.

Ridge’s proposal gives us what Hooker’s does not: a more precise answer as to how much a compliant person in this class should do. Unfortunately, Ridge purchases precision at the cost of making an agent’s moral obligation hyper-sensitive to the compliance of others. On

Ridge’s view, our obligation is something akin to a function of need and the compliance of others. That seems wrong. This is what Mulgan’s wrong facts objection highlights. The objection, to be clear, does not imply that moral obligation is insensitive to empirical facts or contingencies, but that moral obligation is not a mere function of these contingencies. Ridge’s

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proposal suggests otherwise, and this is what is objectionable about the view. (It’s also what is objectionable about Singer’s view.)

The limits of moral demandingness I have proposed do not, as I explained last section, render the compliant millionaire’s obligation a function of need and the compliance of others.

These limits indicate that a compliant person in the class of people who earn a million dollars annually should contribute more to a poverty relief effort so long as doing so does not sacrifice any important project, compromise her freedom, treat her unfairly, or compromise her flourishing. And this assumption seems reasonable. As Singer (2006) observes, Bill Gates “may have given away nearly $30 billion, but that still leaves him…with $53 billion.” My proposal requires someone like Gates to give say…about $52-53 billion more (and Gates has, in fact, pledged to give most of his wealth away over time).

To see this, remember that my proposal begins by asking about an agent’s relative advantages and capability. Bill Gates is someone who is one of the richest people to ever live.

His Windows software is found in virtually every corner of the industrialized world. He lives in a

“66,000-square-foot high-tech lakeside estate near Seattle…reportedly worth more than $100 million.” He owns Leonardo da Vinci’s “Leicester Codex…for which he paid $30.8 million in

1994.” It is no stretch to say that human civilization has been organized to his great advantage.

So, Bill Gates should easily recognize that he is one of the most well-off persons in the contemporary world. He can also easily contrast himself with middle-class persons and the very badly off. Once he gets this in sight, he should be able to appreciate the fact that he must give more than almost anybody else.

But what if Warren Buffet, the Koch brothers, and people like them give nothing? The fairness limit I have proposed suggests that Gates should do as much as a person with

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comparable ability can do without loss of other entitlements. Here, things might get tricky.

Accepting this principle of relative advantage and capability, we might still accept the idea that work entitles workers to pay. We might also accept, what I believe to be a rather dubious idea, that entrepreneurs somehow have stuck their necks out, risked something tremendous, and therefore, deserve more than middle-class and blue-collar workers. If so, we might think that whatever Bill Gates ends up with, he should still end up with more than the lot of us, and he should still be a very wealthy person. But then it seems clear that Gates should give up the lion’s share of his remaining $53 billion, even though he already given $30 billion and others have given nothing. He could still give $52 billion and remain a billionaire.

And the other three limits corroborate this conclusion. Someone like Bill Gates may have expensive tastes, but no one needs yachts, Lamborghinis, and 66,000 square foot lakeside estates to lead a meaningful life. And being asked to make a very sizable monetary contribution to poverty efforts is a very different thing than being asked to walk away from a company or abandon one’s family legacy. So, the moral demands of affluence need not alienate any persons in this very wealthy class. And being asked to give up exorbitant income doesn’t amount to a serious compromise of a person in this class’s freedom. The great majority of people living in the world still get to make serious choices between vehicles, places to live, and commodities to consume. Our very wealthy person is no different. So, the moral demands of affluence need not confine any people in this class. And people living well above the poverty line still get to develop their faculties, pick up hobbies, and pursue interests. They can still afford healthy groceries, clean water, and adequate shelter. So, the moral demands of affluence need not compromise the flourishing of any other very wealthy persons.

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So, a moral obligation for a very wealthy person to contribute more than what any very wealthy agent would need to do to seriously alleviate world poverty is not extreme at all, even if some agents don’t do what they should. The limits of moral obligation I have proposed thus corroborate the thought that our compliant agent should pick up some of the slack of the non- compliant very wealthy agents. And this proposal does not require the compliant agent to have an advanced degree in economics to figure this out. The compliant agent doesn’t need to know how many needy people there are, how much others are donating, and how much exactly she needs to do to achieve some perfectly even ideal or non-ideal distribution of moral burdens. A very wealthy agent just needs to know that he is in a position to help, that others would greatly benefit from him doing so, and that he is not liable to suffering as a result in any serious, or legitimate, way.

Of course, many very wealthy persons aren’t going to do anything. So, even though compliant wealthy agents could significantly alleviate some poverty on their own, people with more modest, but still sizable, incomes are going to have to step up to the plate. My proposal accords with Singer in this regard. But my proposal also leaves agents with much of what Singer calls absolute affluence, and I take this to be an advantage of my account. And yet this example has focused mostly on the case of world poverty. Now, the global poor is, to be sure, a class of people cutting across the boundaries of nation-states. But citizens in nation-states also have responsibilities with respect to domestic poverty. And domestic poverty, unlike global poverty, is not necessarily a problem that one can throw money at. Domestic poverty is often exacerbated by neighborhood segregation, institutional norms, and emergent behavior patterns of individuals.

So, confronting issues of domestic poverty might require agents to walk away from cherished family properties to permit spatial redistributions of people, which might seem alienating for

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some folks. This is a complex issue that I can’t address here. But grappling with the issue does not itself imply anything about my proposed limits of moral demandingness. By grappling with the issue of domestic poverty, we may very well get clearer on what it means to say a moral demand is alienating. Or we might just find some instances where the limit is defeasible. The advantage of my proposal is that it gives sensible answers to some important, but difficult moral questions and it provides some useful resources for an investigation of even deeper, more complicated issues.

Conclusion

In this chapter, I examined several rival accounts of moral obligation in conditions of partial compliance and I presented several reasons for thinking them inadequate. I argued that agents can be expected to do more than their ideal share of moral labor, but that an individual agent’s moral obligation should not be regarded as hyper-sensitive to the compliance of others.

To give an account of moral obligation in conditions of partial compliance, I appealed to the four limits on moral demandingness developed in Chapter One and Chapter Two. I suggested that a view which makes use of these four limits can make reasonable moral demands in conditions of partial compliance without making an individual agent’s obligation hyper-sensitive to the compliance of others. However, this does not amount to a complete solution to the problem of demandingness I presented in Chapter One. To complete that solution, one needs an argument suggesting that it is philosophically acceptable to reject extremely demanding moral theories.

This is the subject to which I turn in the next chapter.

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Chapter Four. The Rejection of Extreme Morality

Abstract

Extremely demanding moralities are unattractive to most people, but it is notoriously difficult to give an account of what exactly is wrong with these moralities and why we are entitled to reject their demands. In this chapter, I argue that extreme moralities are bad moral approaches; they fail to account for indispensable aspects of any life lived well and for this reason they can be rejected. Specifically, I argue that extreme moralities fail to account for the importance of personal relationships and personal development in human life, that extreme moralities possess a structure that is inconsistent with the structure of personal relationships and personal development, and that, therefore, an extremely demanding morality can never serve as an adequate ethical approach. I argue that agents can reject extreme moral demands because agents have a legitimate, justifiable interest in personal development and personal relationships.

Introduction

To start, briefly recall what the previous chapters have established. In Chapter One, I set out in search of a solution to the problem of moral demandingness. I said that this is the problem of determining how much morality can require of agents, or the problem of identifying, explaining, and justifying limits to an individual agent’s moral obligations, limits that need to be in place if extremism is to be rejected. To solve this problem, I began by examining Act

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Utilitarianism, the paradigmatic example of an extremely demanding ethical theory. Act

Utilitarianism is the view that an act is right, if and only if, and because, that act promotes the greatest total net happiness for all affected.57Act Utilitarianism therefore suggests that agents should promote as much well-being as is possible.58 This requirement can be extremely demanding, but it’s not uniquely so. In Chapter Two, I argued that a moral theory could generate extreme demands without requiring agents to have concern for large numbers of people. I said that a moral theory could also generate extreme demands by requiring agents to promote the well-being of one’s relatives as much as possible, and a moral theory could generate extreme demands without requiring anyone to promote well-being at all. A moral theory could also prohibit agents from causing harm, or from setting back anyone’s well-being in the slightest.

This requirement can be extremely demanding as well.

In developing this case, I have gone some of the way towards solving the problem of moral demandingness. At the very least, I have identified four potential limits on moral obligation. Insofar as these limits explain why an extreme moral requirement is extreme, these limits might also explain why there are limits to moral requirement in general. In other words, there may be limits on moral obligation simply because these limits protect agents from various forms of distortion. In Chapter Two, I briefly discussed the suggestion that by identifying and explaining limits on moral obligation, I have also justified the rejection of extreme morality. I said that this is especially true if we adopt a coherentist view of ethical justification. On a coherentist view of justification, an approach is justified insofar as it accommodates more commitments than other approaches and all of its commitments are consistent with one another.

57 See Smart (1956) and Kagan (1989). 58 See Singer (1995) and Scarre (1996).

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A coherentist might think that by identifying and explaining limits on moral obligation, I have shown that a moderately demanding ethical approach can accommodate a wider range of commitments than extreme ethical approaches and that a moderately demanding ethical approach is thoroughly consistent. But in that case, a coherentist might argue, I will have just shown that it is perfectly acceptable to reject extreme moral approaches. While there might be something to this approach, I have some reservations. Some of these are just reservations about a coherentist view of justification. We shouldn’t, for instance, believe there are fire animals on the moon just because Aristotle says there are, and his view is otherwise coherent. But other reservations stem from a need to engage the proponents of extreme morality on their own terms. Kagan (1989), for example, is one of the most vociferous advocates of extreme morality, and explicitly rejects coherentist approaches to ethical justification. Consider what Kagan has to say about the most popular form of coherentist justification in ethics, reflective equilibrium:

It is not sufficient justification for a set of moral principles…that they yield (the bulk of) our intuitions about specific cases. All that this guarantees is that we will have succeeded in axiomatizing the moral view, so to speak. But we want more from a moral theory…a theory must be explanatory…An adequate justification for a set of principle requires an explanation of those principles (12-3). Here, Kagan is asking for something explanatorily deep.59 So to satisfy an extremist like Kagan, it will not be enough to demonstrate that a moderately demanding morality is coherent, or that it is consonant with as many moral commitments as possible. Now, we might have qualms about

59 A bit of confusion might emerge here. Kagan describes reflective equilibrium, which is a view I have been describing as coherentist, as a view which takes “coherence” to be “only a matter of consistency” (12). What Kagan is searching for is what he calls “a base,” or a fundamental principle, or set of principles, from which other recognized principles can be derived (13). Kagan’s decision to describe his methodology as coherentist is therefore unfortunate because he isn’t just looking for coherence, but for a deductive, or quasi-deductive, structure. We might be tempted to describe Kagan’s method as coherentist and foundationalist and to describe reflective equilibrium as coherentist and non-foundationalist, as Rawls (2001) does (31). But if a coherentist approach can be foundational or non-foundational, then, there is nothing in a coherentist approach that requires foundations. Kagan needs a foundation because he thinks it satisfies the desire for “power” and “simplicity” (11). That is fine enough, but it’s hard to see exactly how that demand is merely coherentist.

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Kagan’s theoretical desiderata.60 So, to be clear, I am only suggesting that it is perfectly reasonable to think that we need to say a bit more about why we can legitimately reject extreme moral approaches besides just saying a moderately demanding moral approach is coherent and available.

This means that there is one method for rejecting extreme moral approaches that I am ruling out from the outset. This is the method which asks us only to present an alternative to an extreme moral approach, and to show that this alternative is plausible. If this strategy were successful, one could invoke an extremely demanding theory, such as Act Utilitarianism, contrast the theory with a plausible, but more moderate theory, say a form of Contractualism, and reject Act Utilitarianism on the grounds that one has a plausible ethical theory with more palatable demands. The problem with this strategy is that it seems to beg the question and to provide unreliable guidance. To reject a theory for these reasons seems to amount to nothing more than preferring moderate demands. Even the coherentist method goes farther than this. That method at least says that a more moderate approach is justified because it is more coherent and accommodating than an alternative. To simply adopt a particular theoretical perspective and reject an extremely demanding theory from inside that perspective is just to enshrine that perspective without good, or clear reason to do so. The other problem with this strategy is that it could leave us with an extremely demanding theory, so long as that theory is less demanding than an even more demanding theory. And it could also leave us with a theory that asks too little of us. If we are always permitted to reject a demand because we can find a plausible theory

60 We might, for example, reject the idea of explanatory depth. Perhaps we have read Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols and are convinced, as I am, that explanatory depth is unnecessary, even misleading. We might also reject Kagan’s demand for a single theoretical foundation. Perhaps we are partisans of Pragmatism, as I also am, and follow William James (1975) in thinking that “profusion, not economy” is “reality’s key-note” (93). If so, we might think, as I do, that Kagan’s demands are fundamentally misguided.

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which asks less of us, it’s not clear we will ever have the resources needed to identify a theory that asks enough of us.

Perhaps the strategy can be refurbished. We cannot just reject an extremely demanding moral approach because there are less demanding alternatives available. But if we have good independent reason for taking up one of those alternative approaches, and that approach accommodates just as many of our moral commitments as its competitors, then, if that approach is less demanding than some extreme alternative, can we justifiably reject the extreme alternative? Probably not. One reason why not is that we don’t know much about the view’s competitors. Perhaps these competitors aren’t very good. Another reason is that the view might be extremely demanding itself. This strategy would only leave us with a less demanding alternative, but that doesn’t tell us whether this alternative still asks too much of us. So, what does this mean? What do the failures of these kinds of strategies tell us? As I see it, the failure of these kinds of strategies tells us that the path towards the legitimate rejection of extreme moral approaches doesn’t involve comparing the demandingness of theories. We just can’t burrow inside of one approach, decide we like the Feng Shui, and determine to make it our home. We need to say a bit more about why extreme morality is wrong.

To make this case, I first reinforce my prior claim that extreme moral demands have similar structures. I argue that if we were consciously guided by the demands of extremism, we would immediately find ourselves separated from the sources of meaning in our lives, shaken out of the disposition to pursue our own interests, and therefore alienated from what we have come to associate with our personal point of view.61 We would also be confined to a particular

61 See Scheffler (1982), Williams (1973), and Chappell (2007).

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lifestyle.62 We would have to pursue the job extremism recommends, eat the foods extremism permit us to eat, take the mode of transportation extremism demands, and we would have to do this all the time, without reprieve. We would also have to give up many of our entitlements, our rights, and our share of the good. We would have to sacrifice resources necessary for our personal development and for the development of our loved ones. This strikes us as unfair, and as something that would compromise our well-being.63 To give up these resources is to give up the materials necessary for our intellectual and aesthetic development.64 This threatens to make us appreciably worse-off.

As I see it, these structural similarities suggest extreme moral demands inhibit personal development and undermine personal relationships. On my view, personal development requires agents to acquire, hone, and exercise various skills and interests, and to draw from their unique set of experiences and turn this into authentic self-expression. I argue that the structural features of extreme moral demands systematically threaten to undermine development of this sort. I also argue that extreme moral demands threaten to crowd out the presumption agents should have for maintaining and strengthening loving, personal relationships. Following Chappell (2009), I argue that love is “self-referential;” that it involves the “desire…that I should see” to the securing of the beloved’s well-being, “that I should be involved in bringing it about” (75). I argue that the structural features of extreme moral demands force agents to direct their attention elsewhere and that this undermines the ongoing sympathetic engagement agents should have with their family, their spouses, their children, and their community.

62 Wolf’s (1982) critique of moral saints might involve this claim. 63 See Cullity (2009). See also Murphy (2000) and Ridge (2010). 64 See Kraut (2007) for an objection of this sort.

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I conclude agents can justifiably reject extreme moral demands because agents have a legitimate interest in personal development and personal relationships. I argue that to suggest otherwise extremists must claim that pursuit of personal development and ongoing engagement in personal relationships is selfish when the well-being of others is at risk. But I argue that this claim is difficult to motivate. I argue that agents can be self-interested without being selfish, and that to make their case, extremists must argue that anything less than compliance with extremism is selfish.65 I argue that this suggestion is absurd, that pursuit of personal development and ongoing engagement in personal relationships is consistent with significant concern for global neighbors, nonhuman animals, and the environment more generally. I also claim that any viable ethical approach should be able to tell us how to live a worthwhile life, that every worthwhile life involves personal relationships and personal development, and that because extremism is unduly strains personal relationships and personal development, any form of extremism can never serve as an adequate ethical approach.

The Structure of Extreme Moral Demands

Some moral approaches ask quite a bit of agents. Act Utilitarianism is one such view, but other moral approaches can be quite demanding as well. While Act Utilitarianism asks agents to promote as much well-being as possible, other approaches might ask agents to promote the well- being of their relatives as much as possible, or to live a life that harms no one, even slightly.

These approaches can be extremely demanding, despite having different aims. And yet, these demands can have strikingly similar effects on agents. Whether they emerge from Act

65 See Rachels (1971) for more on this distinction.

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Utilitarianism or some other source, extreme demands are alienating, confining, unfair, and bad for moral agents insofar as they tend to make agents worse-off.

Recall that Act Utilitarianism is the view that an action is right, if and only if, and because, that act promotes the greatest total net happiness for all affected. This may sound innocuous, but if any agent complied with this principle in their daily life, they would wind up doing many things they might not otherwise do. They might have to tend to their neighbor’s garden or to their neighbor’s children rather than their own whenever doing so promoted more total net well-being. This threatens to separate agents from the sources of meaning in their lives.

To be consciously guided by Act Utilitarianism is to be prepared to give up on one’s own interests and projects whenever more well-being can be promoted. This can damage the presumption agents need to enthusiastically pursue aims of various sorts. In this sense, Act

Utilitarianism alienates agents from their own point of view, from their sources of motivation, and from the tendency to engage with the world in a way that furthers their own pursuits.

Other extreme moral demands have a similar effect. Consider the demand to promote the well-being of one’s relatives as much as possible. This demand could also require agents to give up on their own projects. But then this demand also damages the presumption agents have for pursuing aims they have adopted themselves. So, while this demand protects the historical ties an agent has to their caregivers and relatives, it fails to protect the individual’s tendency to engage with the world from their vantage point. So, this demand is also alienating. The same goes for the obligation to live a life that harms no one, even slightly. In a biodiverse world containing finite resources, continued subsistence is sure to have some marginal impact on other beings, even if it just makes the task of procuring resources somewhat harder. To be consciously guided by these

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kinds of considerations is to be prepared to give up one’s own pursuits in a way that prevents healthy presumptive engagement in them. So, this demand is alienating as well.

Act Utilitarianism is also confining. An agent is confined when their freedom, and their capacity to choose, is seriously restricted. Of course, not all forms of coercion, or restriction, count as confinement. In order to count as confinement, a form of coercion, or restriction, needs to be systematic. This is the case with Act Utilitarianism. Act Utilitarianism is confining because it tells agents what to do all the time, because it systematically restricts behavior by chaining agents to the task of maximizing well-being. The demand to promote the well-being of one’s relatives as much as possible has a similar effect. That demand systematically restricts behavior by requiring agents to always tend to the interests of their relatives.66 This is also the case with respect to the demand to lead the least harmful life. That demand systematically restricts behavior by requiring agents to always pursue the course of action that sets others back the least.

So, these demands are confining as well.

Of course, any viable ethical approach is going to need to give agents some idea of what to pursue, what to avoid, and when particular responses are called for rather than others. To count as a confining approach, a moral theory has to restrict an agent’s freedom, or capacity to choose, in such a way that offers an agent little to no chance for reprieve. A moral theory isn’t confining because it requires personal transformation. Some cultures are more harmful than others and some parenting styles make moral compliance easier for some people compared to others. Any viable ethical approach has to provide agents with resources for reforming problematic inherited behavior, but this only requires replacing one set of habits with another. To

66 Of course, parenting minor children can involve this kind of restriction, but minor children age out, and so this form of restriction need not be confining.

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count as a confining approach, an approach needs to generate demands that dictate behavior insofar as they offer agents little to no chance of reprieve.

Besides alienating and confining agents, extreme moral demands can also be unfair. An unfair demand is one that violates the rights of an agent, that infringes on an agent’s entitlements, or prevents agents from enjoying their share of the good. Of course, it’s not always possible to satisfy everyone in every regard. Rights and entitlements can conflict. Any viable ethical approach is going to need to be able to help agents navigate conflicts of this sort.67 In some cases, tragedy might be unavoidable, and no course of action need be better than any other. But a moral approach is unfair when it systematically infringes on the rights and entitlements of an agent, when it systematically requires agents to sacrifice something the approach suggests it is good for anyone to have. That’s not to say that fairness prohibits taking from the well-off and giving to the worst-off to improve their condition. This is just to say that no fair ethical approach can underemphasize the rights or entitlements of anyone, in theory or practice.

Act Utilitarianism is an unfair theory, for instance, because it tends to marginalize individuals with more resource intensive needs. Because Act Utilitarianism instructs agents to maximize well-being, Act Utilitarianism inadvertently directs moral attention towards individuals who can be helped with fewer resources. This is unfair to people in conditions we need to use more resources to improve. For example, if prospective parents had to maximize total net well-being, they would have to adopt children without mobility impairments or cognitive disabilities because children with those conditions would require more resources and prevent those parents from making larger intercontinental cash contributions to poverty relief

67 Although no approach needs to suggest every conflict is resolvable.

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efforts. This is patently unfair to these children; they deserve a home as much as any other child.

And so do the global affluent. Because Act Utilitarianism instructs agents to maximize well- being, and subsistence can be promoted with fewer resources than other forms of well-being,

Utilitarianism threatens to reduce well-off agents to subsistence levels. This is unfair to these agents. If we think the global affluent are often morally negligent, it might very well be because they need to do more to alleviate global poverty. But to be asked to give up all non-basic resources because other people are suffering from the lack of them threatens to turn everyone into an unfortunate case. This is unfair.

The demand to do as much for one’s family as possible or to lead the least harmful life as possible can also be unfair. That’s because both of these demands underemphasize the rights or entitlements of the agent. To do as much for one’s family as possible, one must underemphasize the pursuit of one’s own happiness and overemphasize the right of one’s relatives to their happiness. And to lead the least harmful life possible, one must underemphasize one’s own well- being and overemphasize the well-being of everyone else. As I argued earlier, this is likely to have an alienating effect on an agent, but that is partly because extreme moral demands are also often unfair. They require agents to aim at states of affairs where everyone is well-off, as they instruct agents not to worry very much about their own place in that better world.

This clearly threatens to make agents worse-off. When a view like Act Utilitarianism precisely threatens to make us worse-off will, of course, depend on how we understand well- being, but so long as any account of well-being can corroborate the thought that our lives go better when we have more than basic resources, that account can corroborate the thought that Act

Utilitarianism can make agents worse-off. That’s because, as I just explained, Act Utilitarianism threatens to take away all non-basic resources from agents whenever doing so can alleviate more

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suffering than one would feel if reduced to basic subsistence. But this is also the case with respect to the demand to lead the least harmful life. The least harmful life is a life lived as near to subsistence level as possible. This is inconsistent with the development of intellectual and aesthetic capabilities, which surely contribute to the well-being of agents. So, this demand can make agents worse-off as well. The demand to do the best one can for one’s family might not be as severe. That demand might not drop agents to subsistence levels, but there will clearly be times when one can do more for one’s family than one could if one spent the weekend in the library or in art museums. If these activities contribute to well-being, which they surely do, then even special relations can generate moral demands that make agents worse-off.

If that’s right, then extreme moral demands do, in fact, have a similar structure. Extreme moral demands are alienating, confining, unfair, and just bad for moral agents. Some extremists might disagree. Utilitarians might reject my account of fairness, for instance.68 That’s fine enough. Perhaps extreme moral demands are only alienating, confining, or bad for moral agents.

So long as the demands I discussed have most of these effects on agents my central contention, that extreme moral demands have similar structures, holds true. Still, the preceding suggests that extremists have their work cut out for them if they want to argue that their demands do not have these effects. That’s because I have only stressed the tendency of extreme moral demands to have these effects. This shouldn’t come as a surprise. Claims about moral demandingness are similar to statistical generalizations made in the social sciences: they identify trends and norms.

To reject these kinds of claims, it’s not enough to find a few fortunate counterexamples. If our father is John Mill, and he raised us to be a Utilitarian, we might have a personal project of being a Utilitarian, but Utilitarianism is still extremely demanding. Of course, extremists might be

68 See Sobel (2007).

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better served by just admitting this much. Extreme demands may have similar structures, but perhaps morality is just extreme. To counter this possibility, I need to argue that the structural features of extreme demands undermine personal development and personal relationships, and that agents can justifiably rejects demands that have this effect on their lives. These are the tasks to which I turn in the next two sections respectively.

Extreme Moral Demands, Relationships, and Personal Development

Extreme moral demands appear to have a similar structure; they have similar effects on agent’s lives. In the preceding, I argued that extreme moral demands are alienating, confining, unfair, and bad for moral agents. In this section, I argue that these features of extreme demands all involve forms of agential incapacity. Specifically, I argue that extreme moral demands undermine personal development and personal relationships. On my view, personal development requires agents to acquire, hone, and exercise various skills and interests, and to draw from their unique set of experiences and turn this into authentic self-expression. But, I argue, the structural features of extreme moral demands systematically threaten to undermine development of this sort. They also threaten to crowd out the presumption agents should have for maintaining and strengthening loving, personal relationships.

Consider first an alienating moral demand. An alienating moral demand is one that systematically separates an agent from something that makes their life meaningful. In the preceding, I suggested that alienating demands prevent agents from appreciating and acting from their literal vantage point. I also argued that Act Utilitarianism tends to have this effect. This is largely due to the structure of Act Utilitarianism. Act Utilitarianism says that no matter who we are, we all have an obligation to promote the greatest total net happiness for all affected by our actions. Act Utilitarianism is therefore a view that recognizes only agent-neutral reasons, or

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reasons for behaving that do not make essential reference to an agent, or to facts about an agent.

Reasons that make essential reference to an agent, or that depend on facts about an agent, are agent-relative reasons. They are reasons agents have for behaving a certain way only if agents possess certain features or if certain facts apply to them specifically. Because Act Utilitarianism suggests all agents have reason to promote the greatest total net happiness, Act Utilitarianism denies that agents have reasons for behaving in a certain way because of facts about them specifically. So, Act Utilitarianism is a view that makes no use of agent-relative considerations or reasons.

The problem is that this feature of Act Utilitarianism threatens to undermine the presumption agents should have for the pursuit of their own projects and the well-being of their relatives. To appreciate this, remember that Act Utilitarianism instructs parents to help other children rather than their own whenever those children need more help with their homework, their tee-ball swing, or their hopscotch form. In many cases, Act Utilitarianism will permit, and even require, parents to help their own children.69 That’s because more happiness will often be promoted by promoting the well-being of one’s children. But this is not always the case. So, if any parent is going to justify putting their attention and effort into their own child, they are going to need to ask if more well-being can be promoted by directing that attention and effort elsewhere. This prevents parents from appreciating and acting from their vantage point; it undermines the presumption they should have to act from their perspective.

This threatens to undermine loving, personal relationships. Love, as Chappell (2009) explains, is “self-referential;” it involves the “desire…that I should see” to the securing of the

69 See Jackson (1991).

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beloved’s well-being, “that I should be involved in bringing it about” (75). Because love is self- referential it requires agents to implicate themselves in the lives of others in some form of ongoing fashion.70 Love thus generates agent-relative reasons for behaving in specific ways.

Whether an agent has reason to act in a loving manner towards someone depends on facts about the agent, about how the two relate, and the history they share. But because Act Utilitarianism only makes use of agent-neutral considerations, it suggests that to act on agent-relative considerations those considerations must pass a test set by an agent-neutral standard. This has an alienating effect on agents.

But agent-relative considerations can also alienate agents. Recall the alienating effects an obligation to do the best one can for one’s family can have. As William Sin (2013) describes it,

Confucian ethics seems to demand something like this with respect to care for the elderly. And we can easily imagine a scenario where a young professional, who has worked all her life to find employment in the job of her dreams, comes across an employment opportunity at the precise time her parents fall very ill. If we have an obligation to do the very best for our family all the time, we can easily see how filial demands could require an agent to forgo the job opportunity and to stay home caring for her parents. This is alienating as well, but this extreme demand emerges from an agent-relative consideration. Confucian ethics doesn’t require just anyone to care for the elderly. Confucian ethics requires capable children to care for their elderly parents.

The problem is that Confucian ethics requires some agent-relative considerations to swamp other agent-relative considerations. This still alienates an agent from their own pursuits.

Though Confucian ethics recognizes the ties any particular agent has to particular people, namely

70 Of course, love might involve more than this. See Helm (2010).

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the caregivers who saw them through childhood and adolescence, Confucian ethics marginalizes and neglects the particular interests and experiences of the agent, experiences and interests that make the agent who they are. This threatens to undermine personal development, which requires agents to hone and exercise skills, and to draw from their unique set of experiences and turn this into authentic self-expression. Of course, caregiving can involve the cultivation of many different skills, but Confucian ethics only incidentally permits this not for one’s own sake, but accidentally, for others’ sake.

The other features of extreme moral demands have similar effects. A confining demand also threatens to undermine personal development and relationships. Recall that an agent is confined when their freedom, and their capacity to choose, is seriously restricted, but that not all forms of coercion, or restriction, count as confinement. To count as confining, a moral demand has to systematically restrict an agent’s freedom, or capacity to choose. Act Utilitarianism is confining because it tells agents what to do all the time. Act Utilitarianism tells agents to promote as much well-being as one can all the time. In this sense, Act Utilitarianism dictates an agent’s life. This threatens to undermine loving personal relationships, which requires agents to be implicated in the lives of particular people in an ongoing sympathetic way. To be asked to promote as much well-being as one can is to be asked to put one’s effort wherever it does the most good. But this might often involve directing one’s attention towards people with whom one does not share an ongoing history. This can also threaten personal development. To be asked to promote as much well-being as one can is to be asked to put one’s own projects and pursuits on hold in many instances. This damages the presumptive readiness an agent should have for the pursuit of their own interests and projects.

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A demand to lead the least harmful life is also confining and it too strains personal development and relationships. This obligation chains agents to a lifestyle and thus prevents agents from exercising their freedom to pursue alternative courses of action. To see this, notice that the least harmful life is one that uses the fewest possible resources. This life requires agents to take the least impactful mode of transportation, to eat the least impactful foods, and to pursue employment in the most environmentally friendly job sectors. Of course, environmental concern is something any adequate contemporary ethical approach is going to require agents to have. The problem is that the demand to lead the least harmful life allows these kinds of concerns to crowd out the concerns for personal development and relationships agents should also have.

Extreme moral demands are also often unfair and unfair demands can also put undue pressure on personal development and relationships. An unfair demand is one that systematically takes away something we think everyone is entitled to. Act Utilitarianism is unfair because it asks agents to be prepared to sacrifice entitlements whenever more entitlements could be promoted by doing so. This is unfair to whomever Utilitarianism’s calculus robs, whether we are talking about ourselves, our family, our friends, or our neighbors. Because all personal relationships require us to be implicated in our own lives and the lives of those we love in an ongoing sympathetic way, and unfair demands require us to systematically transfer entitlements, unfair demands threaten this ongoing sympathetic engagement, and therefore unduly strain personal relationships. And unfair demands can also impede personal development. For example, the obligation to lead the least harmful life can prevent agents from traveling and broadening their horizons.

Thus, extreme moral demands can also make agents worse-off. The least harmful life anyone can possibly lead in a world of finite resources is one of mere subsistence. But

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intellectual and aesthetic development are not necessary for mere subsistence. So, if each of us had to lead the least harmful life possible we would have to forgo the materials necessary for this kind of development. This clearly makes agents worse-off, but it can also compromise personal relationships. Personal relationships require sympathetic ongoing engagement with particular persons. This means regularly spending time with other people, which can involve significant resources, especially in the form of transportation. If our friends and family are within walking distance, ongoing engagement with these folks might be consistent with the least harmful life.

But even in this case that obligation puts undue strain on these relationships.

Justifying Moderate Demandingness

If the preceding is correct, extreme moral demands involve forms of agential incapacity: they inhibit personal development and undermine personal relationships. Of course, extreme moral demands might involve more than this. But if all extreme moral demands involve these forms of agential incapacity, then, it might very well be possible to avoid extremely demanding moral theories by requiring adequate ethical approaches to protect agents from these incapacities.

One easy way to do this is to constrain forms of obligation with one another. This is the strategy

Chappell employs. According to Chappell (2014) partial and impartial moral obligations “both have the right…to act as a limit and a constraint on the other” (96). And that’s certainly one way to reign in the extreme demands of a view like Act Utilitarianism. The trouble with Chappell’s proposal is that extreme moral demands can emerge from special relations as well. Still, we do not have to entirely give up on Chappell’s strategy. Part of the problem with the obligation to do the best for our family all the time is that this demand threatens to overwhelm our own interests and projects. This is a threat to personal development, as I argued earlier. So, if we constrain

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partiality and impartiality with the demands of personal development, then, we may very well be able to block the emergence of extreme demands.

Of course, the details of how this can be done will depend on what theory we ultimately prefer to adopt, but we can identify some schematic features such an approach will need to have.

First, the approach will likely need to construct defeasible constraints. Any viable ethical approach is going to have to concede the fact that great impending disasters, like world catastrophe, require behavior that is out of the ordinary.71 Second, the approach will likely need to find a plausible way of accounting for the relative importance of relationships and personal development. Conflicts can emerge between these demands, and most of us want an approach that prohibits agents from selling out their children in the pursuit of some long-shot career.72

Third, the approach will need to expand our moral concern while avoiding extremism. We might prefer moderate moral demands, but we still need an approach that asks agents to have concern for all of humanity, or all sentient creatures, or all living beings, and so on. Anything short of that strikes us as hopelessly parochial. Fourth, and finally, the approach will need to permit sacrifices of personal development. If we want a moderate ethical approach, then we want an approach that acknowledges a category of supererogatory actions, or actions that are laudable, but not minimally morally required. The easiest, least morally problematic way for an approach to accommodate this category is to permit sacrifices of self-concern in the name of concern for others.73

71 In the preceding, I have suggested Utilitarianism illegitimately takes things away from agents in some situations, but I do not mean to suggest that there is a protected sphere from the reach of morality. See Buss (2006) and Stroud (2013) for more on this claim. 72 Williams (1981) would disagree, as his discussion of the Gauguin case demonstrates. Jane Addams (1967) takes a different approach: “the man…who deserts his family that he may cultivate an artistic sensibility…must always arouse our contempt” (76). As much as I admire Williams, I strongly prefer not to disagree with Jane Addams. 73 Of course, we might still think moral demands are pervasive, even though they are moderate. See, for example, Scheffler (1992).

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The easiest way to pursue such an approach is to adopt a conception of practical reason that permits reasons agents have for behaving in a specific way to be transformed by the violation of a limit of moral demandingness. Because most, if not all, extreme moral demands are alienating, confining, unfair, and bad for agents, I propose treating these features as limits.

When a moral demand would be alienating, confining unfair, or compromise an agent’s well- being that demand should only ground a moral requirement in the face of disaster. In all other situations, that demand should only provide non-decisive reason in favor of supererogatory action. With this conception of practical reason, an ethical approach could make compelling, pervasive, but moderate demands in all ordinary situations. It could induce most of us to do more than we are already doing, without the fear of self-abnegation we typically associate with a view like Act Utilitarianism.

But the extremist might protest that we still haven’t justified moderate moral demandingness. The preceding may have demonstrated any agent’s interest in avoiding alienation, confinement, unfairness, and compromised well-being, but even the extremist admits that much. No extremist needs to argue that people are happy when they are confined or alienated. The problem, the extremist is sure to argue, is that we can’t legitimately pursue our personal development in a world of scarcity and suffering if we can do something about that suffering by not pursuing that happiness. Here, the extremist is suggesting that pursuit of personal development and ongoing engagement in personal relationships is selfish when the well-being of others is at risk. But this claim is difficult to motivate. Agents can be self- interested without being selfish. Whether pursuit of personal development and ongoing engagement in personal relationships is selfish depends on what else the agent is doing. Pursuit of personal development is clearly selfish when it comes at the cost of concern for anyone else.

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But personal development and ongoing engagement in personal relationships is consistent with significant concern for others. So, advocates of moderate morality aren’t permitting selfish behavior; they are requiring agents to find ways to pursue their interests in conjunction with concern for others. This can be very difficult to do. Finding a way to balance personal development, personal relationships, and larger obligations can be very challenging. When we appreciate this fact, we can disarm the sense that our interest in avoiding self-effacement is selfish.

Consider, for instance, the ethnographic reflections Jane Addams makes in Democracy and Social Ethics. In this text, Addams recounts the difficulty befalling many young women at the turn of the 20th century, as they struggled to balance the demands of their parents and household with the emerging demands of an industrial society.74 Here, Addams is especially concerned with understanding the causes of social injustice and suffering in industrial urban life.

Her thesis is that human civilization, which she often refers to as a social organism, has advanced to such a state that the norms and morals of the past are no longer helpful.75 As Addams sees it, humans have throughout history carefully cultivated and inculcated an interpersonal ethic, particularly as it relates to kin and to friends, that has helped the human race advance to its present state. But Addams thinks that contemporary industrial urban life now calls for an emergent social ethic, one which involves an understanding and appreciation for one’s place in

74 Democracy and Social Ethics was first published in 1902. In what follows, I quote from the 1967 second printing of the 1964 The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press edition edited by Anne Firor Scott. 75 “Even Mill claims that the social feelings of man, his desire to be at unity with his fellow social creatures, are the natural basis for morality, and he defines a man of high culture as one who thinks of himself, not as an isolated individual, but as a part of a social organism” (268-9).

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industrial urban life.76 The problem, Addams thinks, is that too many people fail to feel the need for a social ethic and they fail to appropriately respond to the needs of the disadvantaged.

These people, Addams says, “demand that the radical, the reformer…be without stain or question in his personal and family relations” (71). According to Addams, there “is a certain justice in this;” “none of the established virtues which have been so slowly and hardly acquired shall be sacrificed for the sake of making problematic advance” (72). No agent is permitted to ignore one form of obligation in service of another. But, for some people, the demand to maintain personal and family commitments is more difficult than others. This is the case for young women, who are “more sensitive to the individual and family claims…because their training has tended to make them content with response to these claims alone” (72). But while these young women suffer from unjust treatment by their kin, they still must meet the challenge of balancing the demands of social and familial life.

This, Addams contends, is a challenge we have some familiarity with. “Each one of us,”

Addams says, “emerged from self-willed childhood into a recognition of family obligations”

(75). All that the moment now calls for is for us “to make a second adjustment between the family and the social claim, in which neither shall lose and both be ennobled” (75). In other words, we already know how to balance forms of obligation without sacrificing any. We know how to shape our pursuits so that they serve ourselves as well as others. This is what we did as we grew into adolescence. We learned when the right time to play was, when the time for studying was, and when the time came to help out around the house. To meet the demands of

76 Addams says, “much of our ethical maladjustment in social affairs arises from the fact that we are acting upon a code of social ethics adapted to individual relationships, but not to the larger social relationships to which it is bunglingly applied” (221).

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social morality, we need only recognize the aims of others and reshape our pursuits so that they better serve these folks as well.

Of course, this isn’t always easy. “We have all seen parental control and the family claim assert their authority” over a child (79). The “distinctively family tragedy of which we all catch glimpses now and then, is the assertion of this authority through all the entanglements of wounded affection” (80). And, to be sure, much of this particular difficulty can be attributed to obstinate, narrow-minded relatives, but balancing the demands of citizenship and kinship is still a difficult task without this kind of pushback. We all know how difficult life can be balancing the demands of work, of home, of friendship, and of citizenship. We can easily imagine our lives becoming much more difficult as we expand our notion of citizenship to the entire globe, and to the nonhuman environment. If we all ask ourselves whether we express concern for our global neighbors when we eat environmentally taxing foods like meat or when we splurge on luxury items, the answer is obviously no. We shouldn’t eat meat. We should forgo luxury items and make more donations to global and domestic poverty relief efforts. We should probably volunteer more. But we don’t have to accept extreme moral demands to appreciate this. And as we imagine what we might have to do if we get serious about our global neighbors and our planet, the suggestion that this life is somehow selfish seems outrageous.

Conclusion

Some ethical approaches are extremely demanding. They ask us to change the way we live, the way we think, and to take on some steep moral challenges. When we think about what our lives would be like if we did this, most of us realize we don’t want to do that at all. But we don’t want to be selfish either. We want to make the world a better place, to help out, and to be responsive to the concerns of others, but we also want to have a comfortable place in the world

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as well. We don’t want to shrink from moral challenges, but we don’t aspire to be moral champions. We are more interested in contributing to social efforts, in being a part of movements that make real differences. We don’t feel the need to maximize our impact at every moment.

Still, we hear the cries of the wounded, and we wonder whether we have been mistaken. Perhaps we are letting ourselves off the hook too easily. Perhaps we’re lazy, cynical, or deluded.

In the introduction to this chapter, I said that the problem of moral demandingness is the problem of identifying, explaining, and justifying limits on moral requirement. If there is a solution to the problem of moral demandingness, if the extremist is wrong, then, we aren’t letting ourselves off the hook too easily when we reject extremely demanding moral theories. In the preceding, I have suggested that there is a solution to this problem, that extremism is too demanding, and that we can reject theories that make some similar demands. I have argued that most, if not all, extreme moral demands are alienating, confining, unfair, and bad for moral agents. I suggested that extreme moral demands also place undue pressure on personal development and personal relationships.

In developing this case, I have identified four limits on moral obligation. Insofar as these limits explain why an extreme moral requirement is extreme, these limits also explain why there are limits to moral requirement in general. There are limits on moral obligation because these limits protect agential capacity, particularly the capacity to pursue personal development and engage in loving personal relationships. This isn’t just tautological, but informative. To say that there are limits of moral demandingness because these limits protect agents from various forms of distortion is not the same thing as saying that there are limits on moral obligation because without these limits, moral obligation would not be limited, or extreme. The idea that extreme demands strain personal relationships and distort agential capacity adds substantive content to

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the explanation of why there are, or might be, limits on moral obligation. This content is provided by each particular limit. For example, an alienation limit suggests that one reason why moral obligation is limited is that this limit preserves the agential point of view while a fairness limit suggests that another reason why moral obligation is limited is that this limit preserves an agent’s entitlements.

The idea that violations of these limits distorts the agential capacity to form and maintain relationships and personally develop suggests that agents can justifiably reject extreme moral demands. Extreme moralities have a structure that is inconsistent with personal development and personal relationships, and these are essential elements of the moral perspective. The moral perspective may include more than this. It probably does. But it certainly includes personal relationships and personal development. That’s why an extreme morality can never be a viable ethical approach. To suggest so would be to suggest that these elements are not essential parts of the moral perspective. But that suggestion is absurd. Whatever ethical approach we think best, it will surely have to countenance the roles relationships and development play in a life lived well.

No ethical approach could ever give us enough confidence to outweigh the importance we attribute to relationships and development when we honestly and authentically reflect on the best parts of human existence. Personal relationships and personal development constitute the most obvious parts of worthwhile life. So, it’s hard to see what could ever play this role for the extremist, and until extremists show us that we have missed something obvious, that our glasses have been on our face the whole time, we are free to go on thinking that we haven’t missed anything monumental, and that we can see just fine, and from a moderate position.

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Chapter Five. Climate Change and the Limits of Moral Demandingness

Abstract

In previous chapters, I argued that there is a solution to the problem of moral demandingness, and that there are limits of moral demandingness. In this chapter, I reinforce this solution by applying my proposed limits of moral demandingness in the case of climate change. Climate change is one of the most pressing moral challenges of the 21st century. When we think about the moral climate change obligations of an individual agent, we are concerned with the ways individual agents contribute to a longitudinal collective action problem through their everyday behavior. This behavior can be corrected by adopting a different set of habits that have a smaller impact on the environment, measured in terms of water use, land use, energy use, greenhouse contribution, and so on. Call the total impact each individual has measured in these terms an agent’s ecological footprint. When we are talking about doing something about climate change, we are talking about a choice between different sizes of footprints. We can therefore distinguish between something like an obligation to minimize our ecological footprints and an obligation to substantially reduce our ecological footprints, from its present size. We can also talk about our influence on others through political change and advocacy. In this chapter, I argue that an obligation to substantially reduce our ecological footprints, and to support environmental reforms, is not extremely demanding, given my solution to the problem of moral demandingness, but that an obligation to minimize our footprints is extremely demanding. I conclude that my solution therefore enables the identification of limits on climate change obligations that do

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substantive work to address the problem without placing undue strain on an agent’s life. I suggest that this should increase confidence in my solution to the problem of moral demandingness and to the notion that limits on moral demandingness are an indispensable aspect of moral thinking and practice.

Introduction

In the last chapter, I argued that there is a solution to the problem of moral demandingness, that it is possible to identify limits on what morality requires, that these limits can be explained, and that these limits justify the rejection of extremely demanding moral approaches. In advocating this position, I have advocated the view that moral demands are pervasive, but moderate. I specifically suggested that moral demands are not moderate, but extreme when they are alienating, confining, unfair, and bad for moral agents. I suggested that these features of extreme moral demands be transformed into limits of moral demandingness, that when a moral demand would have one or more of these effects an agent cannot be required to comply with it, although they might deserve praise for doing so. However, I also said that these limits are defeasible, that in some situations they may be overridden. If these situations are very common, or if most people in the contemporary world are in this situation most of the time, this would clearly threaten, or even undermine, my proposal.

In this chapter, I want to bolster the case for my solution to the problem of moral demandingness by applying this solution in the case of climate change. Climate change is one of the most pressing moral challenges of the 21st century. If climate change is so pressing, then, perhaps the seriousness of the problem overrides whatever limits on moral demandingness there

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are. If so, my solution to the problem of moral demandingness is practically irrelevant to almost all agents in the contemporary world. This, I argue, is not the case. While climate change is a pressing moral crisis, and while it may very well be the most important crisis in the contemporary world (if we had to rank them), I am going to argue that we can do a great deal to reduce our environmental impact without violating any limits of moral demandingness. Thus, I argue my solution to the problem of moral demandingness enables the identification of limits on climate change obligations that do substantive work to address the problem without placing undue strain on an agent’s life. I suggest that this should increase confidence in my solution to the problem of moral demandingness and to the notion that limits on moral demandingness are an indispensable aspect of moral thinking and practice.

When we think about moral climate change obligations, we are concerned with the ways individual agents contribute to a longitudinal collective action problem through their everyday behavior. This behavior can be corrected by adopting a different set of habits that have a smaller impact on the environment, measured in terms of water use, land use, energy use, greenhouse contribution, and so on. Call the total impact each individual has measured in these terms an agent’s ecological footprint. When we are talking about doing something about climate change, we are thus talking about a choice between different sizes of footprints. We can thus distinguish between something like an obligation to minimize our ecological footprints and an obligation to substantially reduce our ecological footprints, from its present size. In this chapter, I argue that the former, but not the latter, is extremely demanding, given my solution to the problem of moral demandingness. As I have already mentioned, I concede that my proposal identifies limits on moral demandingness that are defeasible, but that for most agents facing the contemporary moral

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demands of climate change, this is not the case, and that, for these agents, ecological footprint minimization is supererogatory.

To develop this case, I first explain what climate change is, what causes climate change, and what kind of behavioral changes can combat some of the effects of climate change. I then examine Fruh & Hedahl’s (2013) attempt to rein in the demands of climate change. I argue that their account is sensible, but that it needs to be better motivated. I introduce my alternative proposal and I explain how this proposal helps us make moderate, but compelling climate change obligations. I defend the proposal against the suggestion that it is selfish to do less than the least environmentally impactful thing in the case of climate change in particular. I close with a discussion of the role moral reactions, or “intuitions” play in moral thinking about the effects of climate change. I argue that some philosophers have been too quick to dismiss the relevance of moral intuitions in the case of climate change and that a careful examination of these intuitions suggests plausible ways of making moderate moral demands in very difficult situations.

In developing this case, I will focus on the issue of the demandingness of climate change obligations, and not directly address competing accounts of the grounds of individual climate change obligations. While some philosophers argue that individuals do not have climate change obligations because individuals do not individually cause harm, or because individual reductions do not alone avert harm, 77 I side with other philosophers who take these views to be mistaken.78

For one thing, as Fragniere (2016) notes, “climate change is best characterized as a broadly

77 See, for example, Sinnott-Armstrong (2005), Sandberg (2011), and Nefsky (2015), who accepts individual climate change obligations, but suggests that those obligations must be grounded in something other than instrumental utility. 78 See, for example, Almassi (2012), Broome (2015), Hedberg (2018), Hiller (2011), Hourdequin (2010), Jamieson (2013), Lawford-Smith (2016), and Nolt (2011).

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incremental phenomenon” such that once a “decisive amount” of greenhouse gas “has been released into the atmosphere, each supplemental amount…makes the problem worse” (801).79

So, individual contributions do cause harm. Second, and as Schwenkenbecher (2014a) observes,

“individual emission reductions can have a morally significant effect in aggregation and as a way to influence others towards changing their individual behavior” (182).80 So, individual footprint reductions do, or can, have a positive effect. Third, even if individual agents aren’t causally contributing to harm, and even if some harms can’t be averted, individual agents might still have an obligation to rescue potential, or actual, climate change victims through the development, and inculcation, of a better set of habits they can pass down to future actors who can avert harm, or perform rescues. So, one need not construe an individual’s climate change obligations as negative obligations to avoid contributing, or participating in, collective harms. In what follows,

I won’t be developing any particular account of how individual obligations relate to collective obligations,81 but I will say something about how individuals should respond to others’ non- compliance, as this issue directly bears on the demandingness of climate change obligations. I’ll argue that individuals can be required to reduce their footprint beyond a theoretically identifiable fair share and/or advocate for more environmentally friendly governance structures, but that my proposal still identifies limits to how much of others’ slack any individual can be asked to pick up and how much advocacy work individuals can be asked to engage in.

The Limits of Climate Change Obligations

79 This suggests that climate change is not a problem of overdetermination, but for an account of climate change obligations as a case of overdetermination, see Barry & Overland (2015). 80 See also Chi (2013). 81 See, for example, Banks (2013), Cripps (2011), Ostrom (2010), and Schwenkenbecher (2013; 2014b). 135

Climate change is caused by the emission of greenhouses gases, such as carbon dioxide and methane gas, released in man-made industrial practices, and its consequences are dire. This is especially true for humans in rural areas of developing countries, who rely on “climate- sensitive natural resources including local sources of drinking water, agricultural lands…and other natural products” (Aukema et al, 2017). Unlike other forms of natural disasters, the effects of which can mitigated by governance policies, the effects of climate change are not as easily managed (Neumayer et al, 2014). Recent research suggests that improvements in the quality of governance “will not help to counter the direct effects of climate change” (Daoud et al, 2016,

15). This suggests that the global poor, or people who have least contributed to climate change, may be its worst victims.

Given this, one way to frame an individual’s obligation to substantially reduce their own ecological footprint is as a duty of justice. This is Henry Shue’s (1999) view. For Shue, the effects of climate change threaten the basic rights of the global poor. Because climate change is mainly caused by affluent, developed countries, a failure to compensate the global poor for the effects of climate change would amount to a violation of the economic rule, known as the internalization of externalities. This rule states that it is unfair to transfer the costs of achieving a benefit on someone who does not reap those benefits. On Shue’s view, if the global affluent leave the global poor to drown in the rising waters caused by climate change, the global affluent will have passed the cost of their affluence onto populations who have not benefited from that affluence.

But, as Fruh & Hedahl (2013) point out, it is “not immediately clear just who it is that bears these duties to drastically reform ‘our’ emission entailing activity” (275). In fact, it seems clear that even when we are talking about disparities between nation-states, “individuals must

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hold at least some of the duties stemming from anthropogenic climate change” (275). For Fruh &

Hedahl, this must mean that “agents participate in the rights violations climate change produces”

(276). This means that each agent should “lobby for reform, work to overthrow the system, and strive to make our collective practices more just” (276). But because we are “currently without reform,” “we must accept that each of us has some individual duty to stop or at least attenuate offending behavior” (276).

The problem, for Fruh & Hedahl, is that the demand to reduce one’s ecological footprint can be quite severe. For one thing, the reduction of one’s ecological footprint requires a very demanding self-consciousness, forcing people to take stock of routine activities they have long taken for granted. Consider, for example, just a subset of things one could do to reduce one’s eco-footprint, courtesy of Judith Lichtenberg (2010):

Turn off the lights. Use compact fluorescent bulbs. Drive a small, fuel-efficient car. Drive less. Take public transportation. Don’t fly unless you really need to. Turn down the thermostat in winter. Turn off the air-conditioning in summer. Make sure your appliances are energy efficient. Take cooler showers. (559) Minor changes of this sort might not be too demanding or severe for most people, but some people may have personal projects with which they very seriously identify that this list of prescriptions threatens. Consider, for instance, the jet-setting cosmopolitan academic whose identity involves accepting several invitations to speak around the world every year. It’s not clear that such a person really needs to fly around the globe, at least not on a subsistence reading of the claim “really needs to.”

Consider, also, the fact that most people typically identify at least partly with their habits and routines as well as their family heritage. If every agent has a requirement to reduce their ecological footprint, it seems these people might need to change who they are. Think, for

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example, of the proud descendants of Irish or Italian immigrants, and how deeply they might cherish their grandmother’s recipes. Consider also groups of religious minorities, such as

Mormons, who have a traditional commitment to reproducing prodigiously, or the children of

Midwestern cattle farmers, who have organized their entire lives around the hope that they will inherit the family business. Consider also the legions of young men whose gender identities involve the consumption of animal protein. The production of food products derived from animal sources is, in general, extremely wasteful.82 According to the World Watch Institute, animal agriculture, not the fossil fuel industry, is the leading contributor of climate change.83 Given this, it seems going vegan is one of the most effective things one can do to reduce one’s ecological footprint.84 But, for many people, making this kind of change is unthinkable, radical, and life- altering. This raises the question of whether morality can demand this much of moral agents.

82 The production of a pound of animal protein requires as much as 17 times more land, 4.4 to 26 times more water, and 6 to 20 times more fossil fuels than is required to produce a pound of soy protein (Reijnders & Soret, 2003). This kind of waste can easily be avoided if people make changes to their diets. As Poore & Nemecek (2018) recently noted in Science, global farmland could be reduced by 75% if everyone adopted a vegan diet. And as Springman et al (2016) discovered, worldwide veganism could cut all food-related emissions, including both methane and carbon, by 75%. The exorbitant use of resources in animal agriculture is especially alarming given that consumption of animal food product is not necessary for optimal human health, regardless of stage of life (Craig & Mangels, 2009). In fact, the animal agricultural industry presents serious difficulties for human health. Residents living near factory farms, or as the government calls them animal feeding facilities (AFFs), are at risk for several respiratory issues, including wheezing and coughing (Cole et al, 2000; Donham et al, 2007). And these symptoms are reported as more severe by those who live near a factory farm than by those who do not (Wing & Wolf, 2000). The health impact of animal agriculture extends to consumers as well. According to the American Dietetic Association, a vegetarian diet is associated with lower risk of ischemic heart disease, lower cholesterol levels, lower rates of type 2 diabetes, a lower body mass index, and lower overall cancer rates (Craig & Mangels, 2009). 83 And as the WWF reports, 60% of all biodiversity loss is due to the clearing of land for animal agriculture (WWF, “Appetite for Destruction,” 2017). Even significant carbon dioxide emissions are traceable back to animal agriculture. Deforestation accounts for 20 percent of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions and is largely driven by the need to produce feed for livestock in agriculture sectors elsewhere in the world (Denman et al, 2007). 84 The case for veganism is very philosophically complex, and draws from prudential considerations for human health, moral considerations for animal welfare/rights, moral considerations for human population growth, and the climate change obligations I am focusing on here. My honest philosophical position is that morality demands something basically equivalent to veganism, but I think climate change obligations alone probably demand something a bit less stringent (e.g., vegan dining six days a week). But I do believe that climate change obligations require us to forgo all products derived from cows, given the impact of keeping and maintaining so-called beef or dairy cattle. 138

Henry Shue (1996) seems to think so. On his view, an agent “is required to sacrifice, as necessary, anything but one’s basic rights in order to honor the basic rights of others” (114). If participation in injustice involves violations of the basic rights of others, and individuals are participating in injustice when they fail to curb their carbon emission activities, then, it seems as if individuals have no choice but to stop engaging in those activities. But, for Fruh & Hedahl, the problem with this view is that it threatens to become too demanding. For Fruh & Hedahl, “to say…a moral duty is too demanding is to say that it damages an indexical relationship between an agent and her own projects in a significant way,” where a significant way is understood as the infringement of a “normatively protected space for an agent to make her life her own” (277). The problem with Shue’s conception of climate change obligations is that “demandingness concerns can play no role in determining if one is under a duty of justice” (278). That’s because, on Shue’s view, agents must sacrifice anything but basic rights to honor and/or promote the basic rights of others. But because personal projects involve more than basic rights, personal projects need to be sacrificed whenever doing so honors the basic rights of others. An agent may violate a duty of justice if that duty threatens one’s own basic rights, but in no other cases. This permits an agent to steal a loaf of bread to prevent starvation, but for Fruh & Hedahl, “that’s because the prohibition is overridden by other moral factors whose normative significance is independent of their connection to an agent’s own projects” (278). So, while an agent can sometimes be excused from compliance with a duty of justice, an agent cannot be excused from such compliance because doing so would amount to a sacrifice of her personal project.

To correct for this, and to allow reasons of integrity to “counter a prima facie duty,”

Fruh & Hedahl distinguish “between traditional duties of justice such as the duty not to kill and duties of justice stemming from collective harms such as climate change” (281). According to

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Fruh & Hedahl, the latter can be called “duties of systemic justice” defined as “duties not to participate in systemic, unjust harms” (282). For Fruh & Hedahl, the demandingness of a proposal like Shue’s emerges because traditional duties of justice are unresponsive to considerations of integrity. “According to the traditional view, no number or kind of integrity- based reasons will cause justice-based reasons to fail to give rise to a prima facie duty” (282).

For example, a person who performs the unjust act of stealing his neighbor’s car is obliged to rectify the injustice and return the car even though he might have a personal project of street racing stolen cars. Duties of systemic justice, by contrast, “emerge from the confluence of reasons of integrity and reasons of systemic justice” (283). Here, Fruh & Hedahl appeal to an analogy between duties of systemic justice and duties of rescue. On their view, “duties to rescue are underdetermined by the objective impacts of rescue on the person of need” (283). When the reasons generated by a person’s needs interact with an agent’s integrity-based reasons, the agent finds that either she is obligated to make the rescue or not. For example, when the cost of performing a rescue is her $1,000 watch, the agent has decisive reason to perform the rescue. Her interest in her expensive watch is outweighed by the potential impact of sacrificing that watch.

But when the cost of performing a rescue is her life, the reason an agent has to perform the rescue is outweighed. As Fruh & Hedahl interpret it, “a duty to rescue…is the result of strong reasons of beneficence and weaker or absent reasons of integrity” (283). This leaves open the possibility that some rescues are not obligatory because those rescues are inconsistent with the pursuit of some important personal projects.

On this conception of systemic justice, three types of cases are possible. In the first case,

“potential environmental impacts clearly outweigh the negative impacts to an agent’s personal projects.” In the second case, “the negative impacts to an agent’s personal projects clearly

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outweigh considerations of systemic justice.” And in the third case, “reasons of integrity” conflict with “reasons of justice” and “cannot be so easily resolved” (288). This suggests that

“actions that would be unjust for one agent to perform may not be unjust for another to perform”

(286). That’s because two agents in similar circumstances may have adopted very different personal projects and these personal projects might interact with the reasons generated by the duty of systemic justice in different ways. For example, a professional philosopher may have reason to travel to an international conference whereas someone with a minimal interest in the subject of the conference may not. That will depend on how committed each person is to the personal project of philosophizing on that subject. Similarly, some parents might have reason to have a small family and raise a small number of kids whereas Mormon parents might have reason to have a large family. That’s because, as Fruh & Hedahl explain, “an essential feature of what it is to live in the Mormon faith is to seek to reproduce prodigiously” (289).

Critiquing the Systemic Justice View

One reason to reject Fruh & Hedahl’s systemic justice view of an individual’s climate change related moral obligations is that their view rests on a mistaken interpretation of the integrity objection. Fruh & Hedahl understand integrity to involve a unity or consistency between one’s values and one’s actions, or as they phrase it “an indexical relationship between an agent and her own projects” (277). Chappell (2007) characterizes this understanding of integrity as identifying “a virtue consisting in honesty about one’s real values and a refusal to compromise those values” (256). On this view, an extreme moral demand is made when compliance with such a demand compromises one’s integrity, understood as a “normatively protected space for an agent to make her life her own” (Fruh & Hedahlm 2013, 277). Fruh &

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Hedahl assume this view and attribute it to Bernard Williams (274; 276). But, as Chappell observes, this is not how Williams understood this objection.

To see this, recall that Williams, in his discussion of the demands of Utilitarianism, invoked two cases. In the first case, Jim is “on a botanical expedition,” when he comes across the captain of a military outfit who is about to execute twenty villagers (98). Because “Jim is an honoured visitor from another land, the captain is happy to offer him a guest’s privilege of killing one of the [prisoners] himself.” If Jim performs the execution, the other prisoners will be

“let off” and thus the other prisoners are “begging” Jim to perform the single execution (99). In the second case, George, a recent “Ph.D. in chemistry” is deciding whether to take “a decently paid job in a certain laboratory” (97). He has a family to provide for, but this particular job involves research on “chemical and biological warfare” which George is opposed to. George also knows that if he declines the position, it will “go to a contemporary” “who is not inhibited by

[George’s] scruples” and who will “push along the research with greater zeal than George” (98).

According to Williams, Utilitarianism requires Jim to perform the execution and George to take the job. But Williams argues this is wrong. On his view, George should not take the job because he has a perfectly fine commitment or project with which George is “deeply and extensively involved and identified” that George cannot be required to regard “as one satisfaction among others” (116). According to Williams, the Jim case is different. Williams claims the utilitarian is “probably right” but that arrival at this conclusion will involve a method that is not utilitarian, a method of deliberating sensitive to personal projects (117).

The problem with Fruh & Hedahl’s interpretation of Williams’ objection is that if we understand integrity as denoting a unity between an agent’s values and her actions, and we think a moral demand is extreme when it compromises an individual’s integrity, Williams should

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condemn Jim’s performance of the execution. After all, it seems reasonable to suppose that Jim has a perfectly fine commitment to not killing that he deeply and extensively identifies with. But, as Chappell (2007) notes, “Williams does not say that consequentialism tells Jim and George to do the wrong thing” (256). So, Williams clearly advocates a view that permits integrity reasons to be silenced or outweighed.

Now, Fruh & Hedahl admit that integrity-based reasons might not outweigh reasons generated by considerations of justice. But the problem for Fruh & Hedahl is that Williams and

Chappell both adopt a view where disastrous consequences are permitted to override constraints established by personal commitments. Thus, Williams and Chappell both do not subscribe to

Fruh & Hedahl’s view that there is a “normatively protected space for an agent to make her life her own” (277). George’s commitment is protected from the demands of Utilitarianism, for

Williams, because it is already a perfectly fine moral commitment, and because forgoing that commitment does not necessarily prevent disaster. George’s commitment is not protected from the demands of Act Utilitarianism because all personal projects exist in a protected space.

Williams’ Jim case illustrates this clearly. So, Fruh & Hedahl need to argue that the effects of climate change are not so severe that they can override the often-indefeasible commitment to personal projects. This is necessary to protect Mormon parents’ commitment to having large families, to protect philosophers’ commitments to international conferences, and so on. These agents may have stronger integrity-based reasons than others to reject specific climate change obligations, but it’s not yet clear that they are strong enough to legitimately reject these obligations.

Climate Change and the Limits of Moral Demandingness

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To identify a limit to a moral obligation to substantially reduce one’s ecological footprint, one needs to first argue that an unrestricted obligation to minimize one’s ecological footprint is extremely demanding and then argue that extreme moral demands can be rationally rejected. If we think back to the demands of a paradigmatic extreme moral theory like Act Utilitarianism, I think we can all appreciate how extreme its demands are. A life consciously guided by the demands of Act Utilitarianism is going to be alienating, confining, unfair, and likely to compromise our well-being.85 In what follows, I argue that an unrestricted obligation to minimize one’s ecological footprint is extremely demanding in each of these senses. But I also contrast this obligation with an obligation to substantially reduce one’s ecological footprint. I argue that this obligation is not extremely demanding, and that agents should substantially reduce their ecological footprint. But I also argue that because an unrestricted obligation to minimize one’s footprint is extremely demanding, there are, therefore, legitimate limits to the moral obligations generated by the crisis of climate change.

One common complaint with Act Utilitarianism is that it is alienating. Williams’ critique of Utilitarianism might be thought to involve this complaint.86 As I have defined it, a moral demand is alienating when it separates agents from something important and Williams’ critique of Utilitarianism especially draws attention to the fact that Utilitarianism can separate an agent from the source of meaning in their life. For example, Act Utilitarianism recommends parents to help their neighbor’s children with their homework rather than their own children whenever doing so promotes more total net happiness. Pursuit of and commitment to sources of meaning

85 Many consequentialists reject the idea that they are recommending agents lead lives consciously guided by the imperatives of Act Utilitarianism. See, for example, Railton (1984). Others reject the agent-neutral framework of Utilitarianism. See, for example, Portmore (2003). When I am discussing the demands of Act Utilitarianism, I am not discussing the demands of these related, but unique approaches. 86 See also Scheffler (1982).

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will often involve a kind of narrative flow to one’s life, and narrative flow often entails a kind of consistency between action and value. So, it’s not surprising that some theorists would identify integrity with just this consistency. But a life can have narrative flow and involve significant development, or transformation. Therefore, at any one moment, a life might appear to be losing the consistency between action and value that may have held at a prior point in time, but not involve a loss of integrity. But, of course, integrity is only one value among many.

Think back to Williams’ Jim and George cases. As Williams describes the case, George is a chemist dedicated to improving the world through chemistry. He is deeply opposed to chemical and biological warfare. This isn’t just something he happens to believe. His training and education in chemistry acquaint him with the potential danger and benefits of chemical devices intimately. He specifically knows about chemistry in virtue of his personal experience with it and he has dedicated himself to the pursuit of chemistry because he wants to see chemistry benefit the world, not harm it. If he takes a job in a biochemical laboratory where he will be making biochemical weapons, he will be going out of his way to implicate himself in an industry he has been opposed to. He will be shaken out of his life narrative. Jim, too, may be shaken out of his life narrative. It’s not unreasonable to think that Jim will experience quite a bit of psychological trauma if he did shoot and kill one villager to save nineteen. The difference between the two cases is that Jim’s loss of integrity is outweighed by him saving nineteen people. If George takes the job, he might be able to delay the biochemical program, and save some lives in some long-run sense, but the world will still be closer to biochemical warfare, and eventually people will still die. George cannot, after all, sabotage the project; he would be fired.

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Another reason George should not take the job is that doing so confines him to a particular lifestyle.87 George is supposed to take the job because Utilitarianism requires him to promote the greatest total net utility and Act Utilitarianism makes no distinction between what

George does and what he merely prevents. If he slows down the project, he saves more lives than would be saved if the project continued at its present speed. The problem is that now Act

Utilitarianism is dictating George’s life. Not only must he take this job, if he is going to consistently apply the greatest happiness principle, he must also pursue the most environmentally friendly form of travel, eat the least harmful foods, wear the least harmful clothing, and so on.

This is also unfair to George. We typically think that everyone deserves some minimally worthwhile life, that we are all entitled to pursue our own lives, to draw from our unique experiences, and to turn this into authentic self-expression.88 In essence, an unfair demand is one that takes away something we think everyone is entitled to. This is the case with George. We think everyone is entitled to decide what kind of career they will pursue and what kind of job opportunities they will apply to. Many governments around the world enshrine a citizen’s right to pursue their own happiness. As much as we loathe income inequality, we also regret the loss of this right. One problem with a view like Act Utilitarianism is that it violates this right, but it can also do a lot more. It can also reduce agents to subsistence levels.

This can compromise the well-being of agents. Act Utilitarianism tells George what job to take, what car to drive, what kind of place to live in, what kind of food to eat, and what to wear, but it also tells George to donate any surplus resources whenever they can be converted into cash contributions to poverty relief efforts that would promote greater total net happiness.

87 Wolf’s (1982) critique of moral saints might be thought to involve this claim. 88 See Cullity (2004), Cullity (2009), and Chappell (2009).

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This threatens to reduce George, and his family, to subsistence levels. This is a compromise of

George’s well-being, on any view of well-being that takes well-being to consist in more than just mere subsistence. For the sake of convenience, I will adopt a eudaimonistic conception of well- being, and say that well-being consists in the development and use of species-specific values and capabilities. Because the development and use of aesthetic capabilities contribute to the well- being of human moral agents, and these capabilities are not required for mere subsistence,

Utilitarianism would have agents sacrifice opportunities to develop and use these capabilities. In this way, Act Utilitarianism is clearly inconsistent with human flourishing.89

Keeping this in mind, we can easily see how climate change obligations can become extremely demanding. After all, one problem with Shue’s proposal is that it also threatens to leave agents at subsistence levels. Both Act Utilitarianism and Shue’s proposal seem to involve an obligation to minimize our ecological footprints. This is an obligation that threatens to become extremely demanding in every sense in which Act Utilitarianism is also extremely demanding. As I will explain, an obligation to footprint minimize is alienating, confining, unfair, and inconsistent with human flourishing, but an obligation to substantially reduce one’s ecological footprint is not necessarily any of these things. So, there is no reason to think that the latter obligation is extreme.

Remember that an alienating demand is one that separates agents from the source of meaning in their lives, and that this often comes in the form of a shock to their life’s narrative. If agents were required to minimize their ecological footprints, then, agents would have to give up many sources of meaning in their lives. Consider again the example of the jet-setting

89 See Kraut (2007) for more on this claim.

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cosmopolitan academic. If this agent had to footprint minimize, they would have to give up going to conferences altogether. Even a road trip to an in-state conference via automobile would generate more greenhouse emissions than staying home for the weekend. Consider also the

Mormon parents with a religious obligation to reproduce prodigiously. If these parents had to minimize their footprint, they would have to give up the prospect of having children altogether.

That seems to alienate them from the Mormon faith.

Contrast this with the obligation to substantially reduce our ecological footprints. The obligation to substantially reduce our ecological footprints does not separate agents from something important. Many climate change obligations are trivial to most healthy persons.

Having to turn off the lights when you leave the room or turn down the thermostat in the winter isn’t going to separate any healthy person from anything very important. Of course, other obligations are much more difficult. Having to go vegan, or vegetarian, is quite difficult. It might seem alienating to some people. Remember the proud grandchildren of European immigrants and how much they can very rightly and understandably cherish their family recipes. It might seem as if vegetarianism requires these agents to give up their heritage, but almost any dish you can think of can be made vegan. As I mentioned earlier, our lives often involve significant growth and transformation, and we are not necessarily alienated when we have to make changes. A spaghetti dinner is still a celebration of Italian heritage when the meatballs are vegan.

Extreme demands can also be confining; they can unduly restrict an agent’s freedom. The obligation to minimize one’s footprint is confining. If agents had to minimize their eco-footprint, they would have to have eat the most environmentally friendly meal, drive the most environmentally friendly car, have the most environmentally friendly hobbies, and so on. That is the kind of life dictation we see from Act Utilitarianism. So, the obligation to minimize one’s

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eco-footprint can be quite extreme. But an obligation to substantially reduce our ecological footprint is not confining in this way. To see why not, we need to notice that an extreme moral demand, especially when it is confining, is a moral demand from which there is no reprieve. Act

Utilitarianism is confining, for example, because it says that agent must always perform the act that leads to the greatest total net happiness. In this way, Act Utilitarianism chains agents to the promotion of well-being. Footprint minimization chains agents to a moral task as well. There is no possibility of reprieve when we are talking about Act Utilitarianism or the obligation to minimize our eco-footprints because we are talking about views or obligations that chain agents to a task. But if we only have an obligation to substantially reduce our eco-footprints, we are only faced with an obligation to develop a new set of better habits, and this is something from which we can expect to experience reprieve.

To see this, think back to Lichtenberg’s (2010) list of things one must do to minimize one’s ecological foot print. One must turn off the lights, use fluorescent bulbs, drive fuel efficient cars, take the subway, turn down one’s thermostat in the winter, turn down one’s AC unit in the summer, refrain from eating meat, and so on. None of these things seems to systematically chain human agents to expressing respect for the environment or future generations. Sure, these things may be difficult to do, but the contrast with the eco-footprint minimizer is stark. It might be a difficult change of pace for most people to give up steak, to ride the bus, to give up some of the coziness of heat in the winter, and the comfort of air-conditioned life in the summer. But these are all changes people can grow accustomed to. These are all changes that, once made, do not need to be deliberated about. Vegans and vegetarians might need to read the back of labels at the grocer for some period of time, but there comes a time when a vegan or vegetarian no longer even sees the non-vegan or non-vegetarian options. The footprint minimizer, even if widespread

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cultural and social changes take place, must always be on the lookout, always seeking to understand the exact causal history of any one commodity. Footprint minimization is, therefore, confining because it requires an exorbitant amount of moral labor with little to no reprieve. A person trying to shift from an ecologically harmful to an ecologically sustainable lifestyle is not in the same position. For this person, there will come a time when the shift has been made, when less attention is needed, and when one will be able to pursue other engagements with ease. This is a chance for reprieve and so the obligation to substantially reduce one’s ecological footprint is not confining.

An extreme moral demand can also be unfair, it can ask agents to sacrifice something everyone is entitled to. Recall, for example, the claim that every dog in the shelter deserves a home. I have suggested that this is a paradigmatic claim about fairness. It suggests that we think everyone is entitled to a worthwhile life. When a demand is unfair it is often because it is inconsistent with a worthwhile life, but this is not the case with respect to the obligation to reduce our environmental impact. The obligation to substantially reduce our ecological footprints is consistent with a worthwhile life. We can take public transportation, eat environmentally friendly foods, and make our homes more energy efficient without loss of dignity, respect, or vibrancy. This is in contrast with the obligation to footprint minimize, which very much threatens to turn agents into eco-obsessed minimalists. The ideal footprint minimizer is a person who does not eagerly charge in to new experiences, with a healthy zest for diverse, artistic nuance, or a noble desire to fraternize and expand their horizons. The minimizer places no importance on the animal need for exploration, which is at the root of who they are. They instead pursue everything with reluctance, with a zealously guarded desire to leave everything as it was found. They are out of all contact with their individual need to explore, to grow, to draw on their

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unique experiences, and to turn this into authentic self-expression. In short, the obligation to footprint minimize threatens to take away an agent’s place in the world, in the name of providing everyone with a place in the world.

A moral demand can also compromise the well-being of agents and prevent them from flourishing. Flourishing, on my view, involves the use and development of species-specific values and capabilities that recognizably make a subject’s life go better. Act Utilitarianism prevents agents from flourishing because Act Utilitarianism requires agents to always act to produce the greatest total net well-being. In a world where people suffer from lack of basic necessities, Act Utilitarianism requires a privileged person with more than just basic necessities to donate surplus resources to trustworthy organizations that alleviate suffering. This reduces an agent to the point of having no more resources than are requisite for basic survival, and without these things in their lives, humans cannot adequately develop their cognitive, affective, sensory, or social powers.

Footprint minimization is also inconsistent with flourishing. Footprint minimization requires agents to lead inert, mostly stationary lives. That’s because all forms of transportation require more energy and resources than staying at home. So, footprint minimization precludes agents from taking vacations, from traveling to conferences, or even from taking a local cruise down the local river. This demand makes people worse-off. Vacations and travel not only contribute to the health of agents, they help broaden people’s horizons, expose them to different cultures, and thus contribute to the development of both aesthetic and social capacities. Footprint minimization is inconsistent with these kinds of experiences. So, footprint minimization does undermine typical human agential development, and thus compromises the flourishing of agents.

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An obligation to substantially reduce your eco-footprint is not necessarily inconsistent with flourishing. Think again of Lichtenberg’s (2010) list of things one must do to minimize one’s ecological footprint. One demand is to buy fluorescent light bulbs and to remember to turn the lights off when you leave the room. This might be difficult. It might involve a lot of going back and forth between rooms to flip the light switch, but habits and routines are established through perseverance. Another much more difficult demand is the demand to refrain from consuming many animal products. And yet this too gets easier with time. Labels need to be read at first, but soon shortcuts, or “hacks” as vegans call it, are discovered and the time spent at the grocer returns to normal. Agents adjust.

So, what does this go to show? Well, if the preceding is correct, there are two important conclusions to draw. First, there is a limit to how much can be required of agents given the threats of climate change. But second, this limit does not involve, as Fruh & Hedahl (2013) argue, an appreciation of a protected sphere of life, one beyond the reach of the demands of morality. Moral demands are pervasive. They pervade all aspects of life. But they are also moderate.90 And an appropriate appreciation for the limits of morality’s demands involves an appreciation of just how much is required of us. Most of us have to make serious changes because of climate change. But we don’t have to give up everything. Our commitments to organizations, to interests, and to each other matter. When we appreciate the way they matter, we appreciate the ways these commitments limit other requirements. This helps us determine what to do.

90 See Scheffler (1992).

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However, as I mentioned earlier, climate change is a longitudinal collective action problem. So, even if there is a theoretically identifiable footprint size every agent needs to reduce their footprint to, and this does not involve an obligation to minimize one’s footprint, in an effort to contribute to substantial climate harm aversion, it may still be the case that not everyone will so reduce their footprint. In this condition, one might wonder if any individual agent cannot be asked to pick up some others’ slack. So far as it is not alienating, confining, disrupting one’s entitlements, or preventing one from otherwise flourishing, my proposal suggests individual agents can be asked to pick up others’ slack. So, individual agents can be asked to do more than their “fair share,” in terms of footprint reduction (assuming that is identifiable).91 Perhaps, for example, every individual agent should go vegan, but not everyone will. In this case, vegans should be even more conscientious about the products they consume. Perhaps it’s better to drink almond milk than dairy milk, but perhaps the environmental cost of almonds is still high. In this case, it might be morally necessary to avoid almond milk, and opt instead for soy milk, or hemp milk products. It will also be necessary to engage in advocacy efforts to change people’s minds and lifestyles. This can involve something as simple as voting for politicians who believe in climate change, but it might also involve volunteering for climate advocacy organizations. In these cases, my proposal again suggests that so far as it is not alienating, confining, disrupting one’s entitlements, or preventing one from otherwise flourishing, agents can be required to partake in that kind of activity.

Climate Change, Disaster, and Defeasible Constraints

91 See also Caney (2016).

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In the preceding, I argued that there are limits to climate change obligations, but I also suggested that limits on moral demandingness are defeasible, that in some situations, these limits are overridden. This, one might argue, leaves the argument in an awkward position. Perhaps I have successfully contrasted an obligation to minimize one’s footprint with an obligation to substantially reduce one’s ecological footprint, and perhaps I have explained why the former, but not the latter, is extreme. Still, one might wonder whether the potential consequences of climate change are so disastrous that agents have no choice but to embrace the extremism of footprint minimization. The threat of disaster, after all, was one of the considerations that outweighed the integrity-based considerations Jim had not to participate in the ritual killing.

I do not want to suggest that climate change obligations can’t override integrity-based considerations. We all have reason to continue pursuing our projects exactly as we are pursuing them now. If we continued to pursue our projects exactly as we are pursuing them now our life narrative would continue unaltered. Everything would be easy. We’d already be done. These are integrity considerations. But the consequences of climate change are serious, and they will certainly not be averted if we maintain the status quo. So, we have to make some changes. Some of our integrity considerations should be overridden. This much I have argued. The real question is whether we have, in our present situation, to do the least environmentally impactful thing. If we have to minimize our footprints, then we have to do the least impactful thing. This is the claim I have resisted. But how we do know when we have to do the least impactful thing and when we don’t? Well, if we have to do the least impactful thing, then in some sense we are being selfish when we do anything less. So, one way of knowing whether we have to do the best thing in any situation is simply by asking ourselves whether it is selfish to do less than the best thing in

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that situation. We might be doing something self-interested, but not all self-interested behavior is selfish behavior.92 That depends on the situation.

In describing footprint minimization as extreme, I have attempted to account for the self- interest all agents have in avoiding the demands of extremism. I hope this helps to defuse any sense that avoiding footprint minimization is selfish. If not, I hope the contrast with the obligation substantially reduce one’s ecological footprint goes some way towards accomplishing this. The obligation to substantially reduce one’s ecological footprint is not an easy obligation to comply with. As all of us know, it’s very difficult to reduce our ecological footprint. We have to change up our routines. We have to read labels. We have to research products and commodity chains. We have to get up off the couch and turn off the light in the bathroom. We have to live with the guilt of our failures. We have to try harder tomorrow. We have to find a way to catch our breath and settle down because no matter how well we do tomorrow, we still have to try just as hard the day after. But I argued earlier that we just have to get to a better place, and this means things can get easier. This might seem imaginary at some points in our struggle for personal transformation, but it’s a real consolation.

But why not keep pushing once we get to that place? Well, we might want to. I have not argued that it’s impermissible to perform a supererogatory action. I have just argued that there are supererogatory actions even in the case of climate change. In fact, my proposal involving limits of moral demandingness helps give an account of supererogatory action as action that involves certain forms of self-sacrifice, namely, the forms of agential incapacity I have described. These considerations support the claim that doing less than the best thing isn’t

92 See Rachels (1971) for more on this distinction.

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necessarily selfish, and they are bolstered by the observation that extreme moral demands are often unduly strain personal relationships.

In all personal relationships, whether we are talking about familial relations, spousal relations, neighbor relations, and so on, a personal relationship involves an agent implicating themselves in an ongoing sympathetic way with a particular person or group of persons.93

Extreme moral demands often strain these relationships and impede personal development.

Remember that Act Utilitarianism requires parents to help their neighbor’s children rather than their own whenever doing so promotes greater total net happiness. But extreme demands also often strain personal development, and agent’s relationship with herself. When an agent is alienated, they are often separated from their own projects and pursuits. They are unable to continue to implicate themselves in their own interests in an ongoing sympathetic way. And when an agent is confined, they are chained to a particular task. If they are a footprint minimizer, for instance, they must aspire to only meet their subsistence needs. This is inconsistent with the procuring of even modest gifts for oneself or one’s spouse. So, footprint minimization strains these relations as well.

When we appreciate considerations like these, the case for footprint minimization seems overstated. Self-interested behavior is not necessarily selfish behavior. It’s hard to do the least impactful thing, but it’s almost always hard to do the next least impactful thing too. And when we really think about what the least impactful thing involves, it’s not clear that it’s a valuable course of action, anyway. One reason is that the least impactful life we could lead isn’t always consistent with our personal development or the maintaining, and strengthening, of our personal

93 My view is that what Chappell (2009b) says about love, that it is “self-referential” and that it involves the “desire…that I should see” to the securing of the beloved’s well-being, “that I should be involved in bringing it about” is true of all personal relationships, so far as they are personal relationships (75).

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relationships. But these things are what makes life worth living. Every worthwhile life involves personal development and strong personal relationships, or at least the prospect of them. Extreme moral demands threaten this prospect. That’s one reason why climate change is such a problem, anyhow. We should recognize that, for beings with agential capacity, a worthwhile life also involves moral development and exercise of moral talent, but the development of other talents and relationships are often consistent with this. In the case of climate change, the development of personal talent and relationships is consistent with doing quite a bit to curb our climate emissions. That doesn’t seem selfish at all. It doesn’t look like the wrong thing to do at all. In fact, I suspect it strikes us as the right thing to do. It’s just that, pace the extremist, it’s not the extreme thing to do.

Climate Change, Moral Demands, and Moral Intuitions

The case I developed in the preceding might be thought to involve an appeal to moral intuition. That is, it might seem as if I am arguing that the demands of personal development and personal relationships have an intuitive appeal that the demand to footprint minimize cannot capture, and so the demand to footprint minimize should be rejected on the basis of its failure to countenance our moral intuitions. But if that is the case, then, my argument entirely hinges on the legitimacy of the appeal to moral intuition. But that appeal might be illegitimate in general, or perhaps just in the specific case of climate change. Now, I am not quite sure what an intuition is. Cognitive scientists often define an intuition as a “judgment” we make without knowing how we do so, through the invocation of “implicit knowledge” (Anderson, 2010, 238; 326). But as

Chappell (2014) observes this doesn’t necessarily involve “quasi-magical insights;” this may just involve “someone’s pre-articulate, undefended, but strong feelings about what is good and bad”

(218). These pre-articulate feelings can, as Maiese (2013) observes, be the result of “deliberative

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processes” which have become “automatic and habitual” (4). Thus, we can have more or less informed intuitions. Not all intuitions are equally reliable. We can put presumptive trust in the intuitions of an adult, but we shouldn’t put presumptive trust in the intuitions of a child. The case

I developed last section doesn’t require us to place our trust in divine revelation or every general

“intuition” we might possibly have. It asks us only to place our trust in a consideration every competent adult is capable of appreciating, a consideration about the worthwhile value of personal development and personal relationships.

This might ward off a general anti-intuition skepticism, but perhaps there is reason to think intuitions are unreliable in the specific case of climate change. For instance, Tim Mulgan

(2009) suggests that “our intuitions…have evolved as a set of dispositions that helped our ancestors survive” and so they “are most reliable when deployed…in situations akin to those in which they evolved” (209). Similarly, Brian Berkey (2014) argues that climate change pits two general intuitions against one another. On the one hand, we are intuitively committed to what

Berkey calls the Mitigation-Obligation Intuition (MOI) which entails an obligation “to avoid leaving our descendants a broken world” (164). And, on the other hand, we are intuitively committed to what Berkey calls the Anti-Demandingness Intuiton (ADI) which entails the thought “that there are significant limits on how demanding morality can be” (165). Berkey’s view is that we should resolve the conflict by rejecting the Anti-Demandingness Intuition. For

Berkey we can intuitively appreciate the superior strength of the Mitigation-Obligation Intuition over the Anti-Demandingness Intuition.94

94 Berkey (2014) doesn’t quite phrase the matter this way, instead he says, “very few people would be inclined to reject the view that we are obligated” to avoid leaving our descendants a broken world “on demandingness grounds” (173). But the point is the same.

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The problem with Mulgan’s view is that we do not need to believe all of our intuitions are the product of our ancestors’ cognitive efforts. As I was just explaining, our intuitions can be learned and the result of habituation. So, there’s no reason to think that these habituated responses are unreliable in the case of climate change when, in fact, these responses have grown up inside the minds of people who live with the threat of climate change. And the problem with

Berkey’s view is that we do have a way of reconciling these “intuitions” without giving up either. If am right, we can recognize a distinction between an obligation to substantially reduce our eco-footprint and an obligation to minimize our eco-footprint. And we can recognize that the former is not consistent with a worthwhile life, but that the latter is. So, it seems we can accommodate our intuitions, accept the demands of climate change, and reject extreme demands.

To reject my view, Berkey needs to argue that we will leave our descendants with a broken world, unless we minimize our eco-footprints as far as possible. This is an empirical matter. To know that we will leave our descendants with a broken world unless we minimize our eco-footprints as far as possible, we need empirical evidence to suggest that anything less than this will still result in tragedy. But even this much will not quite undermine the view I am advocating for. The limits of moral demandingness I have identified are defeasible limits, as

Williams’ Jim case demonstrated. When agents are faced with impending catastrophe, these limits are overridden. If this is the situation present human moral agents are faced with, then perhaps the limits of moral demandingness I have identified are defeated. But even in this case, we will not have reason to reject our intuitions. We only have reason to recognize that our intentions identify defeasible limits. This suggests a way of reconciling our intuitions about extreme demands with our intuitions about our obligations to future people.

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And yet there is still reason to think that our intuitions are serviceable even when confronted with a broken world. The case I developed against footprint minimization suggests that we are strongly intuitively committed to the demands of personal relationships. I think there is reason to suspect we retain this commitment even in the face of a broken world. Consider, for example, the dilemma facing the characters in Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road. In

McCarthy’s novel, a family of three is facing life in an environmental wasteland. Several people are committing suicide. The mother and the father are debating whether to do the same.95 The mother wants to take the family gun and take her life and the life of her son, but the father refuses. After a period of great tension between them, the father reluctantly agrees to let the mother take a bullet and the gun into the woods to take her own life while the father stays and determines to look after the boy. If we have a clear obligation to footprint minimize, especially when confronted with the possibility of leaving our descendants a broken world, don’t we all have to take a bullet, as the mother in this novel does? In the novel, there is no clear indication that there is enough food to sustain everyone. In fact, the apocalyptic scenario suggests otherwise. This is what compels some families to take their lives. But if we all take a bullet, how do even actually help our descendants? What chance does the boy have without his mother or his father? As I argued earlier, climate change is a longitudinal collective action problem. We contribute to it both in terms of the environmental impact of our habits, and the environmental impact of the habits we pass on to each other, and our descendants. If we’re going to solve the climate problem, we need to develop, and inculcate, the habits of life in a sustainable world.

This is something the father in The Road insists on. In the novel, the father talks often about the importance of carrying “the fire” and keeping the fire alive inside of them. This is

95 This is much more explicit in the (2009) film adaptation.

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partly why the father insists on fighting and setting out on the road. While they’re on the road, the boy and the father struggle, to be sure, but they survive, at least until the father finally succumbs to illness, and the boy takes refuge with another family. Still, through the course of their journey, the father is reminded time and again how lucky he is to have his boy. And if we look around the world, we do, in fact, see people forging on, despite incredibly poverty. I think this means that wherever there is still the prospect of love, or a meaningful relationship, there is still something to live for. If that’s right, then, even in a broken world, we don’t have an obligation to minimize our footprints. We might have a permission. We can easily understand the mother’s perspective. We can even excuse her behavior. But we do excuse it. And that says something about morality. It says morality is very much in the business of maintaining good relationships. This is something we wouldn’t miss in everyday life, and something we can’t afford to miss in ethics.

If that’s right, then my proposed limits of moral demandingness are practically relevant to agents in the contemporary world. These limits help us identify something like a floor of minimal moral decency and provide us with a guide for how to transform our lives, given the very serious moral challenges we face. Their relevance to even the worst of situations suggests that they are not just the product of rationalization, or moral weakness, but an indispensable aspect of moral thinking and moral practice. Extreme moral approaches are bad moral approaches because they are insufficiently sensitive to the subtlety and nuance of good moral thinking and practice. Reform of culturally and historically situated behavior is surely needed.

The proponents of extreme morality have done us all a great service by reminding us of this fact.

But we can change the world without losing what wisdom we have inherited, and without embracing extremism. Moderately demanding morality suggests we must.

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Conclusion

In the introduction to this dissertation, I started out in search of a theoretical answer to an important practical moral problem: the problem of moral demandingness. I suggested that this problem was essentially about finding a way to navigate between the many moral demands placed on our attention, resources, time, and identity, among other things. An adequate solution to this problem, I suggested, had to come in the form of a conception of a life that makes important progress on difficult moral issues while allowing room for agents to lead a worthwhile, or somewhat comfortable, life. In the preceding, I developed some resources helpful for constructing, or imagining, this kind of life. I suggested that agents cannot be subjected to various forms of distortion by moral demands, but that agents can be obligated to devote attention, donate resources, and make contributions to others when doing so does not result in these forms of distortion. Insofar as this view protects agents from these forms of distortion, this view makes room for agents to lead a worthwhile life. But this view does not permit agents to prioritize themselves and their own pursuits. Instead I suggested that agents need to weave their own pursuits and concern for the pursuits of others into a conception of life that sustains both.

This is not to say that any two agents need to lead the exact same life. Every agent has their own unique sets of skills and experiences. These skills and experiences are sure to inform or otherwise shape an agent’s interests. The local context and circumstances of an agent’s education, and upbringing, are also influences insofar as they provide inspiration and examples of forms of life for agents. Every agent inevitably draws on their unique skills and experiences to improvise on these examples. So, no two agents will experience the same outcome, or engage the same process of decision-making. This much is to be expected if, as I have argued, one way

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extreme moral demands distort agency is by confining agents, or by dictating their own life to them. So, if my proposal is plausible, we shouldn’t expect to be able to determine a priori what a morally justifiable life looks like for every agent.

But we can identify some behaviors in some contexts that likely need to be reformed.

Because I started this dissertation by pointing to the fact that the problem of moral demandingness prominently emerges in contexts where moral failure is pervasive because it is inherited, I will focus here on modestly wealthy persons in an affluent country like the United

States. The easiest, and perhaps most effective way for these persons to address many contemporary moral problems is to support political change that directly addresses these issues.

The least costly way of doing so is to vote for politicians, at various government levels, that support policies that improve conditions for folks who are worse-off. Another effective, but more costly, way to support these kinds of reforms is to make cash donations to the campaigns of politicians who speak directly about these issues, and who support the kinds of reforms that would be most effective. When doing so is consistent with personal development and healthy personal relationships, many agents in this modestly wealthy group should also volunteer time to organizations, campaigns, and other social movements that speak to these issues as well. Insofar as this is the case, we can safely conclude that for most modestly wealthy persons in the United

States, moderately demanding morality requires them to pursue a life of more advocacy than they are probably doing now.

Of course, most moderately wealthy Americans should do a lot more than advocacy.

Most moderately wealthy Americans have several behaviors to reform. Many of these reforms need to come in modifications to everyday habits, as I discussed in Chapter Five. Some of these reforms concern ways that contemporary actors participate in, and perpetuate, inherited

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behaviors that contribute to the marginalization and oppression of vulnerable groups of persons.

In some cases, some of the ways agents speak to one another, or otherwise interact with other persons, has to change. The preceding chapters suggests that reforms of this sort are not too demanding. In other cases, agents might need to make cash contributions to organizations or spend time volunteering for events that raise awareness or otherwise make progress on these issues. As much as in the case of global economic poverty discussed in Chapter Three, the proposed limits of moral demandingness offer helpful resources for agents in concrete circumstances here.

But many contemporary moral problems run deep. In Chapter Three, I mentioned how many forms of domestic poverty are exacerbated by neighborhood segregation, institutional norms, and other emergent behavior patterns of individuals. I suggested that solutions to these issues might require agents to walk away from cherished family properties to permit spatial redistributions of people, but I also suggested that this is a complex issue that I couldn’t fully address in this dissertation. Future work on moral demandingness, and the limits of moral demandingness, should focus on issues of this sort. One central issue that needs to be grappled with concerns the nature of alienation and moral demandingness. In this dissertation, I have argued that moral demands should not alienate agents in the sense of separating agents from sources of meaning in their lives, or by precluding the pursuit of personal projects. But many people derive meaning from their origins, including their hometown, or place of childhood residence. If solving forms of domestic poverty requires spatial redistribution of people, it may be the case that some folks will have to give up these places. Future work needs to investigate whether morality can demand this much of agents. If, as I think, morality can demand this of

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agents, this raises the question of whether the demand is truly alienating, or if this is just a case where the limits of moral demandingness are overridden.

Another issue that deserves further investigation concerns the relationship between moral saints and the limits of moral demandingness. One advantage of my proposal over extremely demanding moral theories is that it does particularly well countenancing, and corroborating, the thoughts of ordinary agents about the demandingness of morality. But my proposal does not clearly do well in the case of moral saints. Moral saints are agents who often feel compelled to perform what my proposal regards as supererogatory actions.96 Perhaps then moral saints are just wrong about their obligations. But perhaps they aren’t. Perhaps these agents are just agents who identify as people with central moral projects. Perhaps the limits on moral demandingness are elastic and they can demand more of agents as agents increasingly identify with their own moral pursuits. If the limits of moral demandingness are elastic in this way, this may explain why moral saints feel bound to perform heroic actions. These persons deeply and extensively identify with their moral labor in such a way that they do not feel the cost of performing what is heroic action to the rest of us. This being the case, these persons may experience a higher bar of moral requirement than the rest of us. Future research on the limits of moral demandingness and moral saints should ascertain if this is so.

Future research on moral demandingness should also engage empirical literature to an extent the scope of this dissertation has not permitted. While I have argued that extreme moral demands are difficult to justify on normative ethical grounds, I think it likely that extreme moral demands are difficult to justify on empirical psychological grounds. Take, for example, the

96 See, for example, Archer (2015) and Carbonell (2012).

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extremely demanding theoretical view of Peter Singer and contrast it with the less demanding popular view Singer advocates for in the popular articles I discussed at the close of Chapter

Three. In my opinion, these two views cast doubt on one another and, as I see it, the very need for a practical, popular view suggests that Singer’s theoretically informed view is one that is difficult to motivate people to comply with. My proposed limits of moral demandingness partly explain why but notice that my proposal concerns many ways that extreme moral demands impinge moral agency. This being the case one might expect psychological literature on moral motivation and moral agency to explain, in part, why human moral agents find extreme moral demands so difficult to comply with. Future research on moral demandingness might illuminate some of these psychological processes and help clarify the nature of each proposed limit of moral demandingness.

Research of this sort may also be of crucial importance to political theorists grappling with issues related to advancing justice. As more and more political philosophers and theorists turn away from the task of explicating realistic utopias and towards concerns about how to advance justice from concrete contemporary circumstances, the issue of how much responsibility individual agents can be asked to bear should become increasingly relevant. This dissertation provides several resources for thinking about these issues, including, but not limited to the conclusions reached in Chapter Three concerning the responsiveness of an individual agent’s moral obligation to the compliance level of others. This dissertation also provides reason for thinking that political philosophers do not need to confine their scope to the nation-state in order to make reasonable demands on individual citizens. In this sense, this dissertation provides important resources for cosmopolitical political theorists seeking to expand the purview of justice without making unreasonable demands.

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Of course, this dissertation is partly in the business of reconciliation. While this dissertation identifies several ways in which many contemporary agents fail morally and while it does provide advice about how to reform this behavior, this dissertation also identifies other behaviors that are pervasive and yet morally acceptable. For example, this dissertation suggests that concern for one’s children, one’s spouse, and/or one’s relatives is concern agents should have. That’s not to say that this dissertation permits agents to prioritize the near and dear, and to only express concern, or act on behalf of, others after they have pursued the well-being of their relatives. But this dissertation does suggest it is acceptable to pursue the well-being of one’s relatives so long as one is also pursuing the well-being of others. This dissertation also suggests that it is perfectly acceptable to have projects, pursuits, and hobbies of one’s own, and that no one agent can be morally obligated to take a vow of poverty. Many people have passion-projects, endeavors that get them out of bed in the morning and contribute to the meaning of their lives.

This dissertation suggests that practices of this sort are acceptable. That’s not to say that this dissertation establishes a protected sphere of life safe from the reach of morality, but that agents can pursue their own interests and that they should weave concern for others into these pursuits as much as is consistent with still engaging those pursuits.

In summary, then, this dissertation advances a conception of morality as moderately demanding. This conception suggests that there are such things as actions that are good to perform, but that agents cannot be required to perform and it suggests that there are people who count as moral saints, but that agents cannot be required to become them. This suggests that a solution to the problem of moral demandingness does in fact lie somewhere between the suggestion that morality can require everything from agents and the suggestion that morality can require nothing. One contribution of this dissertation comes in the form of the suggestion that

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this is not terra incognita, but that extant philosophical work on moral demandingness can be leveraged into a clear and fruitful investigation of the limits of moral demandingness. This dissertation has proposed four such limits, but much more can be said about this issue. The very fact it can be said suggests that the primary contention of this proposal, that there is a moderate solution to the problem of moral demandingness, is sound after all.

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