When does ‘Can’ imply ‘Ought’?

ABSTRACT

The Assistance Principle is common currency to a wide range of moral theories. Roughly, this principle states: if you can fulfil important interests, at not too high a cost, then you have a moral duty to do so. I argue that, in determining whether the ‘not too high a cost’ clause of this principle is met, we must consider three distinct costs: ‘agent-relative costs’, ‘recipient-relative costs’ and ‘ideal-relative costs’.

KEYWORDS:

• Assistance principle
• rescue duties
• sacrifice
• demandingness

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Of course, some disagree. Jan Narveson (2003), for example, claims that you have done nothing wrong by defaulting in Singer’s example. But even he agrees you have done something very bad.

2. When I refer to ‘agent’, I mean ‘the entity (individual or collective) with the duty in a particular context’. This label is always context-relative: everyone who is an agent in one context has been, and could yet be, a recipient in another context; and most entities who are recipients in one context have been, or could yet be, agents in other contexts (non-human animals aside).

3. Others have developed versions of the assistance principle (e.g. Singer 1972, 231; 2009, 15; Unger 1996, 12; Goodin 1985, 118; Scanlon 1998, 224). These authors’ formulations tend to be brief – usually only a sentence long – and do not distinguish between the well-placed and best-placed versions. I developed these two principles in some detail in [omitted], but there I did not consider the implications for conceptualising sacrifice, did not separate the three kinds of sacrifice, and did not consider how the notion of sacrifice can explain the two principles’ differential strength.

4. The idea of X’s important interests may seem to evoke Raz’s (1986, 166) idea of ‘an aspect of X’s well-being (his interest) [that] is a sufficient reason for holding some other person(s) under a duty’. I will suggest that an (unfulfilled) important interest is merely necessary, not sufficient, for an assistance duty: there are other necessary conditions regarding cost to the duty-bearer, the duty-bearer’s capacities and so on. Assistance duties are thus perhaps what Raz (1986, 167–168) calls a ‘conditional duty’. Though what I say is consistent with Raz’s general account of interests, rights and duties, my account isn’t meant to imply anything about non-assistance duties and the rights associated with them. It’s thus more specific than Raz’s (1986) account.

5. Of course, other agents might have duties to (take measures to) make my father capable of loving me. But these other people’s duties would be duties to fulfil my interest in ‘having parents that are capable of loving me’. This is a different interest, which might generate well-placed or best-placed duties for those people.

6. If the reader prefers to have a constant likelihood threshold – rather than varying that threshold in proportion to the interest’s importance – then (2) becomes ‘If: S takes measure M, where M is the most efficacious measure open to S to fulfil I; then I will be fulfilled with sufficient likelihood’. I thank an anonymous reviewer for pressing me to be neutral on this issue.

7. And as we shall see, my analysis of ‘best-placed’ will state that the best-placed agent is that whose most efficacious measures will not realise less value than any other agent – it will not require that she realise more value than any other agent. On this analysis, all else being equal, both the novelist and the painter would have a best-placed duty.

8. As an anonymous reviewer pointed out, there will be some situations in which it’s best if a few agents help together, rather than one agent helping alone. I lack space to deal with such cases here, though I discuss them in Collins 2013.