Abstracts
Timothy Mulgan: Can liberal rule consequentialism survive threats of human extinction?
My broader project asks how consequentialists should think about our obligations to people living in a variety of possible futures. In this paper, I ask how rule consequentialism (hereafter RC) might adapt to very adverse futures. In particular, can moderate liberal consequentialism survive into broken futures and/or futures involving threats of imminent human extinction? I will focus on the following imaginary tale that combines broken futures, extinction threats, and the problem of treating some future people as a means to advance the interests of others:
Generation Starship: Scientists discover that deadly cosmic rays will hit the Earth in two hundred years, instantly and painlessly killing all living things and rendering the Earth uninhabitable. We cannot prevent this. However, we can avoid total human extinction by constructing interstellar ‘generation starships’ where a small population and their descendants will continue the human story in space, in the hope that their distant descendants will establish a thriving human civilization on some habitable exoplanet.
Fiona Woollard: Doing and Allowing, Future Generations and Causal Distance
Suppose that Victor has died and if I had acted differently he would not have done so. I may have done harm to Victor. I may have merely allowed harm to Victor. But there may also be cases in which I do not count as doing harm to Victor even though I certainly have not merely allowed him to come to harm. For example, suppose I rescue a man from a burning building. He goes on to have a child, Bob. Bob is bitten by a snake and, desperate to get to the hospital, pushes a boulder out of his route. The boulder rolls down the slope, hitting Victor, who is trapped on the slope. Nonetheless, I do not count as doing harm because the causal distance between my behaviour and the harm to Victor is too great. I argue that all plausible ethical theories, not just those that endorse the doing/allowing distinction, require an account of causal distance in order to account for our obligations to future generations. However, I will discuss a special challenge that causal distance raises for some defenders of the DDA. I argue that these concerns do not undermine such defences of the DDA. I then explore what thinking about causal distance implies about the application of the DDA to behaviour affecting future generations. I will argue that an adequate account of causal distance should entail that the DDA applies to some cases of doing harm to future generations but not to most such cases.
Molly Gardner: Doing Harm, Allowing Harm, and Future Generations
In this paper I argue that our intuitions about doing and allowing harm are better captured by a four-part distinction between (1) doing harm by action, (2) doing harm by omission, (3) allowing harm by action, and (4) allowing harm by omission. I also argue that, other things being equal, the reason against doing or allowing harm gets progressively weaker as the status of the action or omission changes from 1 to 2 to 3 to 4. Finally, I argue that this fourfold distinction has significant implications for our treatment of future generations: although standard non-identity cases involve doing harm by either action or omission, there are other, less widely recognized cases in which we can allow harm to befall future people by action or omission.
Charlotte Unruh: Is it worse to harm future people than it is to allow harm to present people?
Brian Berkey (2014) points out an apparent inconsistency in people’s moral intuitions. First, we have strong moral obligations to future generations to prevent climate change. Second, we do not have such strong moral obligations to aid the present global poor.
One might try to justify this difference in moral judgement with reference to the Doctrine of Doing and Allowing (DDA), which says that, other things equal, doing harm is harder to justify than allowing harm.
In this paper, I argue that this reasoning fails. The DDA only applies to cases involving intergenerational comparisons if we adopt what I call the Equivalence View: the view that the reason against harming in these cases is, at least generally and in principle, equally strong. I argue that the Equivalence View is false. First, the reason against harming is stronger if harm is caused directly, and if it is easier to control and foresee. Second, the reason against harming is stronger if we can establish an appropriate baseline to clearly define and measure the harm. This is true on the two main accounts of harming in the literature, action-relative and effect-relative accounts, as classified in (Gardner 2017).
What emerges is a difficult challenge for the defender of the DDA: If future person cases are fundamentally unlike present person cases, the DDA seems inapplicable to most cases in intergenerational ethics, and therefore some of the most pressing issues of contemporary global politics. Another upshot of the paper is that it supports Berkey’s conclusion that our intuitions regarding climate change are inconsistent with intuitions regarding global poverty, and we should give up one of them.
Timothy Mulgan: Can liberal rule consequentialism survive threats of human extinction?
My broader project asks how consequentialists should think about our obligations to people living in a variety of possible futures. In this paper, I ask how rule consequentialism (hereafter RC) might adapt to very adverse futures. In particular, can moderate liberal consequentialism survive into broken futures and/or futures involving threats of imminent human extinction? I will focus on the following imaginary tale that combines broken futures, extinction threats, and the problem of treating some future people as a means to advance the interests of others:
Generation Starship: Scientists discover that deadly cosmic rays will hit the Earth in two hundred years, instantly and painlessly killing all living things and rendering the Earth uninhabitable. We cannot prevent this. However, we can avoid total human extinction by constructing interstellar ‘generation starships’ where a small population and their descendants will continue the human story in space, in the hope that their distant descendants will establish a thriving human civilization on some habitable exoplanet.
Fiona Woollard: Doing and Allowing, Future Generations and Causal Distance
Suppose that Victor has died and if I had acted differently he would not have done so. I may have done harm to Victor. I may have merely allowed harm to Victor. But there may also be cases in which I do not count as doing harm to Victor even though I certainly have not merely allowed him to come to harm. For example, suppose I rescue a man from a burning building. He goes on to have a child, Bob. Bob is bitten by a snake and, desperate to get to the hospital, pushes a boulder out of his route. The boulder rolls down the slope, hitting Victor, who is trapped on the slope. Nonetheless, I do not count as doing harm because the causal distance between my behaviour and the harm to Victor is too great. I argue that all plausible ethical theories, not just those that endorse the doing/allowing distinction, require an account of causal distance in order to account for our obligations to future generations. However, I will discuss a special challenge that causal distance raises for some defenders of the DDA. I argue that these concerns do not undermine such defences of the DDA. I then explore what thinking about causal distance implies about the application of the DDA to behaviour affecting future generations. I will argue that an adequate account of causal distance should entail that the DDA applies to some cases of doing harm to future generations but not to most such cases.
Molly Gardner: Doing Harm, Allowing Harm, and Future Generations
In this paper I argue that our intuitions about doing and allowing harm are better captured by a four-part distinction between (1) doing harm by action, (2) doing harm by omission, (3) allowing harm by action, and (4) allowing harm by omission. I also argue that, other things being equal, the reason against doing or allowing harm gets progressively weaker as the status of the action or omission changes from 1 to 2 to 3 to 4. Finally, I argue that this fourfold distinction has significant implications for our treatment of future generations: although standard non-identity cases involve doing harm by either action or omission, there are other, less widely recognized cases in which we can allow harm to befall future people by action or omission.
Charlotte Unruh: Is it worse to harm future people than it is to allow harm to present people?
Brian Berkey (2014) points out an apparent inconsistency in people’s moral intuitions. First, we have strong moral obligations to future generations to prevent climate change. Second, we do not have such strong moral obligations to aid the present global poor.
One might try to justify this difference in moral judgement with reference to the Doctrine of Doing and Allowing (DDA), which says that, other things equal, doing harm is harder to justify than allowing harm.
In this paper, I argue that this reasoning fails. The DDA only applies to cases involving intergenerational comparisons if we adopt what I call the Equivalence View: the view that the reason against harming in these cases is, at least generally and in principle, equally strong. I argue that the Equivalence View is false. First, the reason against harming is stronger if harm is caused directly, and if it is easier to control and foresee. Second, the reason against harming is stronger if we can establish an appropriate baseline to clearly define and measure the harm. This is true on the two main accounts of harming in the literature, action-relative and effect-relative accounts, as classified in (Gardner 2017).
What emerges is a difficult challenge for the defender of the DDA: If future person cases are fundamentally unlike present person cases, the DDA seems inapplicable to most cases in intergenerational ethics, and therefore some of the most pressing issues of contemporary global politics. Another upshot of the paper is that it supports Berkey’s conclusion that our intuitions regarding climate change are inconsistent with intuitions regarding global poverty, and we should give up one of them.