Demandingness and Boundaries Between Persons

ABSTRACT

Demandingness objections to consequentialism often claim that consequentialism underestimates the moral significance of the stranger/special other distinction, mistakenly extending to strangers demands it is proper for special others to make on us, and concluding that strangers may properly demand anything of us if it increases aggregate goodness. This argument relies on false assumptions about our relations with special others. Boundaries between ourselves and special others are both a common and a good-making feature of our relations with them. Hence, demandingness objections that rely on the argument in question fail. But the same observations about our relations with special others show that there are many demands special others may not properly make, and since we cannot be more guilty of unjustified partiality in insisting on boundaries between ourselves and strangers than on boundaries between ourselves and special others, there are – as demandingness objections maintain – some demands strangers may not properly make on us.

KEYWORDS:

• Consequentialism
• strangers
• special others
• separateness of persons
• partiality
• psychotherapy

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. I do not present any argument here as to how we should treat (plausible) pre-theoretical conviction in assessing ethical theories, simply on the grounds that any view on this question will bear equally on any (plausible) pre-theoretical conviction, and I am interested in unearthing a particular conviction or set of convictions that I think has been insufficiently attended to so far. Obviously if no pre-theoretical convictions deserve any weight in evaluating ethical theories, then this one won’t, but it is still worth dragging the conviction out into the open and seeing what difference it might make, prior to this general methodological issue being settled.

2. I say ‘let us suppose’: there are situations where we may have to inhibit the desire to give up our lives for the sake of a loved one, because we know that if we did so, other loved ones would die – see some of the accounts in Yarov (2017). But if my argument goes through on the assumption that we would always lay down our own life for that of a special other, it will presumably go through if the assumption is waived, so I do not explore these tragic cases.

3. Miller says both that Sarah’s parents had been ‘holding out against the paternal function’ but also that ‘even in the earliest stages of a baby’s development there needs to be the growing intimation that there is a division between mother and infant’. That is, Miller officially subscribes to the idea that all life begins in psychic mergedness with the mother which the paternal function, if not the father in person, needs to disrupt for development to occur; but at the same time shows awareness of the limitations of this idea, in claiming that the ‘division’ between mother and infant ought to be there ‘even in the earliest stages’. This is an uneasy theoretical compromise because if the latter claim is true, then healthy psychic life doesn’t begin in mergedness, so if all goes well there is nothing for the ‘paternal function’ to do. See Harcourt, 2018. The myth of original mergedness is of course related to what I am claiming is the false picture of special relationships that underlies the particular version of the demandingness objection I’m examining – that in them, individuals are (ideally at least) not separate from one another.