Sleep Schedules and Equal Consideration

People generally appreciate that sleep is important, and so one shouldn't make a lot of noise in residential areas late at night. That's great. What bothers me is that people often treat the mornings rather differently. Scheduling maintenance work on campus housing for 7:45am somehow doesn't strike the university as grossly inconsiderate, the way that scheduling it for 11pm surely would. Of course, one can imagine circumstances in which this would be perfectly reasonable, i.e. if one had a reasonable expectation that everyone would ordinarily be awake at that time anyhow. But we're talking about graduate student housing here, and it should be common knowledge that there's a fair bit of variation in the sleep schedules of graduate students. Many find that they work better at night, and so don't ordinarily wake up until fairly late in the morning.

Desiring Each Good

Some critics allege that the utilitarian agent has but a single desire: to maximize welfare. This would seem to embody an objectionably instrumental attitude towards individual persons. Rather than caring about each of Tom, Dick, and Harry in their own right, the utilitarian (allegedly) just cares about helping them as a constitutive means to promoting aggregate welfare. Tom serves as a faceless 'receptacle' of utility, rather than mattering for his own sake.

The obvious response for the utilitarian is to deny that their psychology is accurately characterized, at the fundamental level, by such a totalizing desire. They don't just desire a single thing (namely, goodness in general). Rather, they desire each possible good, in proportion to its value. They value Tom's welfare in particular, and also Dick's, Harry's, and everyone else's. And it's just a mistake -- a gross mischaracterization on the part of critics -- to confuse this vast collection of particularized desires with the single, extensionally equivalent, generic desire for aggregate welfare.

Philosophers' Carnival #103

Welcome to the 103rd Philosophers' Carnival: a round-up of recent philosophical blog posts from around the web.

Expecting Better of the Ignorantly Unreasonable

Suppose that Mr. Potter falsely and unreasonably believes that it's morally permissible to advance one's own interests, no matter the harm done to others. As a result, he happily harms others for his own gain, without the slightest twinge of conscience. (He's never done anything he thinks is wrong.) Is Potter blameworthy? Neil Levy claims not. In 'Culpable Ignorance and Moral Responsibility: A Reply to FitzPatrick', Levy argues that we can't reasonably expect any better of Potter, as it would be irrational (by his lights) for him to act any differently:

Species and Cognitive Enhancement

Here's a fun puzzle case that's been (independently) suggested to me by a couple of different people recently. Consider Moe, a relatively intelligent monkey, and his psychological counterpart Hugh, a severely retarded human. Let's stipulate that, despite their differing species, they are psychological duplicates: they have all the same experiences, thoughts, and feelings. This is at least conceivable. Now suppose we can cognitively enhance just one of them, to turn them into a rational person. Do we have any (non-instrumental) reason to prefer enhancing one of them over the other? Would one of them benefit more, for example, or have a stronger moral 'claim' to such treatment?

Teaching Precepts

I'd be curious to hear from other college teachers what kinds of structured activities they've found to work well for philosophy discussion sections (also called 'precepts' here, or 'tutorials' back home in NZ). The default of whole class discussion is fine as far as it goes, but tends to lead to very imbalanced participation. Occasionally splitting the class up into small groups can help with this, though their assigned task needs to be very clearly defined or there's a risk that they'll just sit there and not know what to do. Let me describe a structure that I found worked really well for my applied ethics class this year -- then I hope others will chip in with their own suggestions.

Voting, Vegetarianism, and Other Chunky Impacts

A common justification for buying meat is that one's individual consumer choices won't make any difference: the supermarket buys steaks by the crate, and so isn't sensitive to such tiny changes in demand. It'd take (say) a hundred boycotters to make a difference. But there's a subtle fallacy here. It might typically take 100 boycotters to ensure that one less crate of 100 steaks is bought. But one of those hundred individual choices must have made the difference between the store choosing to buy X crates or X-1. We just don't know which one -- where the tipping point lies -- whether we just need to decrease demand by 1 more steak, or 36, or 99, before the store will respond. So, in the absence of any further information, any individual consumer should see their personal steak boycott as having a 1/100 chance of reducing the store's purchasing by 100 steaks. (And so on up the supply chain.) That's an expected impact of (ta-da) one steak. The "chunkiness" of the market's sensitivity thus makes no difference. Your lessened chance of making an individual impact is exactly counterbalanced by the higher steaks payoff if you happen to succeed in influencing an entire 'chunk' of demand.

Harming Future Humanity, Future Persons, or Persons' Futures

Non-identity cases force us to distinguish harming people in general from harming particular future persons. (Suppose that someone would have lived a happy life, but instead I bring it about that a different, less happy, person comes to exist in their place. This is an impersonally worse outcome -- "bad for humanity", we might say -- though there's no particular person who is worse off than they otherwise would have been.) Frances Kamm further suggests that we need to distinguish harming future persons from harming an already-existing person's future. She claims that some harms are permissible to impose on future persons but not on already existing persons, as the latter have additional rights.

Helping Wrongdoers

Garrett Cullity, in The Moral Demands of Affluence, argues against extremely demanding conceptions of beneficence by appeal to the following principle: "Someone else's interests in getting what it is wrong for her to have cannot be a good reason for requiring me to help her." (For example, we obviously shouldn't help a gangster unjam his gun and shoot his victims, in the absence of any other reason to do so. His interests in wrongdoing don't suffice.) Let's call this the 'No Helping Wrongdoers' principle, or NHW for short. In this post, I'll briefly explain how Cullity uses NHW to argue against extreme demands of beneficence, and then I'll show that NHW is actually false. The intuitive cases appealed to in its support really only support a weaker principle that is insufficient for Cullity's purposes.

January Open Thread

Given that I've just offered a kind of global summary of my views, it seems like a good time to invite readers to identify and discuss any points of general disagreement. Time, that is, for an open thread:

Sometimes, when reading a blog, you may get the feeling that the blogger's posts are infused by a fundamentally misguided assumption. But such deep-rooted disagreements can't typically be raised within the scope of any particular post. So consider this open thread an invitation. Do you find yourself raising an eyebrow at some of my basic presuppositions? Any disagreements that run so deep you wouldn't even know where to start? Try here!