Duties of Rescue: a Moderate Account The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Nishimoto, Craig Takeshi. 2013. Duties of Rescue: a Moderate Account. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University. Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:11181182 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA DUTIES OF RESCUE: A MODERATE ACCOUNT A DISSERTATION PRESENTED BY CRAIG TAKESHI NISHIMOTO TO THE DEPARTMENT OF PHILOSOPHY IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN THE SUBJECT OF PHILOSOPHY HARVARD UNIVERSITY CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS September 2013 © 2013 Craig Nishimoto All rights reserved. Advisor: Selim Berker Craig Nishimoto Duties of Rescue: A Moderate Account ABSTRACT Peter Singer’s famine-relief argument forces attention upon a class of requirements that make demands of an interesting kind. These are requirements to rescue another when hardly anything is at stake for the would-be rescuer and yet the utmost is at stake for the would-be rescuee. It is common to regard such requirements as moral duties, with all the significance that this implies. Since, however, the circumstances in which such duties apply can apparently repeat ad infinitum, the cumulative costs of compliance threaten to become shockingly great. I argue that there is a deep and legitimate challenge here that should neither be dismissed nor combined with superficially similar puzzles. Rather, for those of us wishing to maintain a comfortably moderate view about the demands of morality, the challenge is to find something to say that doesn’t smack of mere rationalization. It is the kind of challenge that, when duly addressed, is likely to force broader changes in the way we think. Broadly speaking, my method is to give successive clarifications of the challenge interspersed with attempts to locate and develop the most promising conservative response to it. Clarifications of the challenge inform the response, which in turn allows refinements to the challenge. The result is a clarified version of the famine-relief argument along with a comfortably moderate response that, while it asks us to accept iii certain broader implications, recommends those implications as crucial and plausible alternatives to revisions that would, I expect, seem to many more radical. Rather than creating problems elsewhere, the recommended implications may provide useful perspective on a variety of moral phenomena, including the general relevance of compliance costs, the nature of deontological constraints, the category of special duties, and the justification of consequence-based evaluations of actions when the individual effects of such actions are negligible. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter One: The Problems of Demandingness…………………………………… 1 1. The Demandingness of Morality Generally………………………... 1 2. The Demandingness of Moral Theories……………………………. 5 3. Self-Standing Moral Demandingness………………………………. 9 Chapter Two: The Limitations of the Famine-Relief Argument………………… 15 1. The Famine-Relief Argument and Its Weaknesses…………………. 15 1.1 The methodological challenge 1.2 The grounding challenge 1.3 The disanalogy challenge 1.4 The empirical challenge 2. Efforts to Improve the Famine-Relief Argument………………….. 30 2.1 Unger’s attempt 2.2 Cullity’s attempt Chapter Three: The Differentiation Question…………………….……………... 39 1. The Differentiation Question……………………………………… 39 2. Pressing the Differentiation Question…………………………….. 43 2.1 A general duty-specifying principle 2.2 Appeals to analogy 2.3 Appeals to analogy and skepticism of the will 2.4 Side-stepping the empirical challenge 2.5 Taking stock 3. Are We Committing Some Fallacy? ……………………………… 58 3.1 Iterating when we should aggregate? 3.2 A Sorites paradox? 3.3 Like the paradox of the self-torturer? Chapter Four: The Pond Question and the Famine Question…………………… 71 v 1. The Pond Question……………………………………………….. 72 1.1 Sufficient answers and inappropriate additions 1.2 Avoiding Fishkin’s inference 2. The Famine Question…………………………………………….. 80 2.1 The centrality of the costs of repeated rescue 2.2 The student’s progression of thought 2.3 A normative lens 2.4 The pond asymmetry 2.5 Applying the constraints 2.6 The alignment test 2.7 The possibility of more ideal collective responses 2.8 Feinberg on the relevance of the more ideal collective solution 2.9 Rawls’s division of labor 2.10 Herman on inherited obligations 2.11 Respecting the priority 2.12 Respecting the content 2.13 Murphy on responsibility only for one’s fair share 2.14 Conclusions 3. The Composite Question…………………………………………108 3.1 The promising shape of a moderate solution 3.2 Recasting the challenge 3.3 Biting the first bullet 3.4 Biting the second bullet 3.5 Conclusions Chapter Five: The Stringent Duty of Rescue……………………………………. 129 1. A Neglected Question…………………………………………… 129 2. The Challenge of Stringency…………………………………….. 132 2.1 Priority 2.2 Priority and special duties 2.3 Significance 2.4 Direction 3. From the Millerian Value to a Stringent Duty…………….…….. 145 3.1 Unacceptability judgments 3.2 To practical norms applying to individuals 3.3 Adding deontic direction 3.4 Explaining deontic priority 4. The Pond Question Revisited……………………………….…… 165 5. The Differentiation Question Revisited…………………………. 168 vi 6. Rescue Duties as Special Duties……………………...…………. 172 6.1 Responding to Scheffler 6.2 The category of special duties 6.3 Dismissing the over-demandingness loophole 7. Conclusions…………………………………………………...… 184 Bibliography……………………………………………………………...... 186 vii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I thank Tim Scanlon and Frances Kamm for conversations and feedback on this project and on all of its drafts. I am especially grateful to Selim Berker for inquiring after me and joining my committee while I was out of residence. I have greatly profited from his careful eye and exceptional ability to readily engage my ideas, both written and spoken. On separate occasions I presented content from chapters 2-5 to the Workshop on Moral and Political Philosophy at Harvard. Many of my arguments were constructed with an ever-optimistic eye towards convincing this famously critical audience. The participants provided helpful comments, and I am grateful to Nico Cornell, Johann Frick, Micha Glaeser, Kristi Olson, and Jeremy Fix for follow-up conversations. I thank Mathias Risse for highlighting to me Richard Miller’s contribution, and Derek Parfit for his encouragements about the importance of the topic. Christine Korsgaard turned my interests towards moral philosophy, and to duties of rescue in particular. Reaching further back, I again thank Andrew Hsu. I want to thank Jim Scheer, my selfless mentor, for his encouragements towards academic pursuits when my own mind was elsewhere. I wrote most of this dissertation in Chapel Hill, where generous members of the UNC department welcomed me into their community. I am especially grateful to Adam Cureton, Doug MacLean, Susan Wolf, Tom Hill, Ryan Preston-Roedder, Geoffrey Sayre- McCord, and Kiran Bhardwaj. I thank Rob Rempher for always keeping his home open to me late. I owe my deepest debt of gratitude to my family, whose unquestioning support for my work made it possible. I have lost count of the cross continental trips made by my viii parents and by Eugene and Irena so that I might study with the full assurance that my children, now nearly four-years old, were superbly cared for. My debts to Katya, my eminently reasonable partner, are too numerous to list. I dedicate this dissertation to Sarah VanWagenen, our cherished friend. Amidst several concurrent pursuits she has been writing her thesis, in linguistics and neuroscience, while I have worked on mine. If not for her struggle against cancer we would have finished these dissertations together. My argument defends the permissibility of a comfortably moderate position, but I know of no one who better demonstrates the beauty of casting aside moderation in exchange for richer ideals and fuller attentiveness to others. ix For Sarah VanWagenen whose aspirations lend honor to this pursuit x CHAPTER ONE: THE PROBLEMS OF DEMANDINGNESS 1. THE DEMANDINGNESS OF MORALITY GENERALLY Philosophers commonly think about the demandingness of morality, but not about the demandingness of self-interest, personal projects, aesthetic ideals, sportsmanship, philosophical rigor, etc. This focus plausibly arises from four properties that characterize moral requirements, each inferred from the way we ordinarily think about such requirements, and from the role of moral judgment in our practical deliberations and our assessments of actions and people. These four properties are priority, importance, categorical application, and pervasiveness.1 The priority of moral requirements is their status relative to other sorts of practical considerations. We commonly associate this feature of deliberative priority with the idea that moral requirements are overriding, or decisive. That is, if an action is morally required, then this is often assumed to give us decisive reason to perform the action—regardless of any and all our reasons for doing otherwise. If faced 1 I draw the ideas of priority and importance from Scanlon 1998: ch. 4, categorical nature from Kant, with the choice of either violating a moral requirement or sacrificing