How Morality Becomes Demanding Cost vs. Difficulty and Restriction

ABSTRACT

The standard view of demandingness understands demandingness exclusively as a matter of costs to the agent. The paper discusses whether the standard view must be given up because we should think of demandingness as a matter of difficulty or restriction of options. I will argue that difficulty can indeed increase demandingness, but only insofar as it leads to further costs. As to restrictions of options, I will show that confinement can become costly and thus increase demandingness in three ways, by prohibiting actions that the agent wants to perform in order to promote his well-being, by limiting the development of future preferences and projects and also by making the society less open. The paper thus defends a new variant of the standard view by arguing that difficulty and restrictions of options can increase the demandingness of morality on grounds of being costly.

KEYWORDS:

• Sacrifice
• demandingness
• difficulty
• costs
• willpower
• restriction of options

Acknowledgments

For very helpful discussion and comments I would like to thank Alfred Archer, Lee Klein, Jörg Löschke, Martin Sticker and especially Jeff McMahan and the other participants of the Moral Philosophy Seminar in Oxford.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Anscombe (1958) infamously links the religious use of ‘sacrifice’ with the modern metaethical debate by suggesting that the idea of moral obligations presupposes the belief in a divine lawgiver.

2. The concept of self-sacrifice presupposes that morality and the personal well-being of the addressees of the moral demands can conflict. Ethical theories like ancient eudaimonistic theories or ethical egoism do not allow for such conflicts.

3. Note that Raz does not endorse this view.

4. Taken as a historical account, this is somewhat wanting because, although the history of overdemandingness objections has not yet been investigated, there is already sufficient evidence that it did not start after Singer’s paper. Already Kant (VI: 409.13–9) criticized the Stoics for turning ‘the government of virtue into tyranny’. Then, some scholars, including Habermas, took Hegel’s critique of Kant to involve an overdemandingness objection (Hegel’s criticism of Kant: e.g., Elements of the Philosophy of Right §133, 135; Phenomenology V.C.c., VI.C). Also, it is important to note that Singer’s argument in his paper does not presuppose act-consequentialism. Thus, the story that demandingness objections came up 50 years ago as a response to Singer’s act-consequentialism is rather short-sighted.

5. A comprehensive survey of the arguments since ‘Famine, Affluence and Morality’ should include overdemandingness objections that use concepts like integrity, alienation, content, scope, authority and the stringency of moral demands.

6. Sobel (2007) objected to the idea that only costs for the agent count as demandingness (and not those of patients). Woollard (2016) provided a plausible defense.

7. See, for example, G. Cohen (2000, 172): ‘It’s of course unreasonable to ask someone to do something impossible, but it’s not unreasonable to ask someone to do something difficult, provided that it does not carry too high a cost.’

8. I will not discuss whether there is a common concept of difficulty. For my argument it suffices to show that difficulty related to the compliance with a moral demand differs from the difficulty related to prudential reasons.

9. See the locus classicus in the Bible (Dtn. 23:25). Italy’s highest appeals court ruled (Sentenza n. 18248 del 02/05/2016) that Roman Ostriakov, a homeless person, who stole a piece of cheese and a sausage (worth 4.07 Euros) from a supermarket, acted in the face of an immediate and essential need for nourishment, therefore acting in a state of need, and that he is thus not to be punished at all.

10. Apart from the obvious reason of being homosexual as a reason to marry someone of the same sex and the love of opera music as reason in favor of going to the opera, there might be other reasons. I could, for instance, wish to marry someone of the same sex in order save this person from being expelled from the country, or I could want to go the opera because I hope to meet my superiors there and impress them before negotiating my pay rise. I thank Martin Sticker for pointing this out to me.

11. On this, see Murphy 2000, 29.