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Utilitarian Idealism and Personal Relations

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Earl R. Winkler
Earl R. Winkler*
Affiliation:
University of British Columbia
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Extract

‘To be is to be the value of a bound variable’

W.V. Quine

In ‘Should the Numbers Count?’ John Taurek asks whether the relative numbers of people whose welfare is affected by a given choice is ever of itself a determining factor in moral trade-off situations. No one raises a question like this unless they have a surprise, and so Taurek unsurprisingly concludes that numbers alone should not, or need not, ever be regarded as significant in moral decision. Taurek's strategy is to argue that the common belief that, other things being equal, we are morally required to help the greater number is incompatible with other things that many of us commonly believe. He additionally argues that the preference for higher numbers in itself represents a dubious and confused way of thinking.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 12 , Issue 2 , June 1982 , pp. 265 - 286
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1982

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References

1 Taurek, John M. ‘Should the Numbers Count?', Philosophy and Public Affairs, 6 (1976-7)Google Scholar

2 Parfit, Derek ‘Innumerate Ethics,’ Philosophy and Public Affairs, 7 (1977-8)Google Scholar

3 The example comes from Philippa Foot, ‘Abortion and the Doctrine of Double Effect,’ in Rachels, James ed., Moral Problems (New York: 1971).Google Scholar

4 Taurek, 297

5 Ibid., 303

6 Ibid., 301

7 Parfit, 287-8

8 Taurek, 304

9 Ibid., 307

10 Parfit, 288-90

11 Taurek, 304

12 It may be worth remarking that Just as there are non-distributable collective rights, like the right of the greater number to receive help, there are also nonassignable collective obligations. These appear under conditions of failure. For example, it may be felt at a certain stage of social and economic development that society owes its members adequate medical care, without its being clear at that point who is to supply this care. Or consider the feminist claim that women's rights to equal employment opportunity, and many other things, have been violated. The claim is that certain fundamental social obligations have not been met. I agree with this. Now who specifically has failed to provide these things? Employers? ‘Men'? Mothers who taught their daughters not to want to fly planes? lt's been a systematic failing in the operations of society and culture.

13 Parfit, 300

14 See Parfit's answer to correspondence, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 8 (1978-9), 396-7.

15 Perhaps the first explicit statement of modified utilitarianism appears in Sikora, R.I. ‘Utilitarianism, Supererogation and Future Generations,’ Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 9 (1979), 461-6.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

16 R. Norman gives a more extended description of the self-constitutive aspects of personal relations. The final draft of my paper was complete when I discovered this paper, and complete with the notion of personal relations as partly selfconstitutive, contributory to conceptions of life significance, and so forth. However, I was able to improve my expression of these relations by borrowing his reference to personal relations as being in these ways internal to the individual. Norman appropriately relates this conception to Hegel. See Norman, R. 'Self and Others: The Inadequacy of Utilitarianism,’ in Cooper, W. Nielsen, K. and Patten, S. eds., New Essays on John Stuart Mill and Utilitarianism, Canadian Journal of Philosophy. Supplementary Volume V (Guelph, Ont.: C.A.P.P. 1979).Google Scholar See particularly pp. 191-4. There are various affinities between the position I argue in this paper and Norman's views. Our papers differ widely, however, in scope, approach, strategy, and substantive conclusions.

17 I choose these labels for their provocative and impressionistic qualities over any descriptive import.

18 The sense that this whole organ-transplant possibility is severely underdescribed can be alleviated somewhat by supposing that the practice is first introduced to accommodate people who are determined on suicide. Then, in time, screening requirements are gradually relaxed and people with more purely altruistic motives are accepted. Finally, in stages, examples like the adolescent and the supportive parents begin to appear.

19 The intent of this paragraph is quite similar to the point of view expressed by Strawson in his ‘Social Morality and Individual Ideal,’ reprinted in his Freedom and Resentment and other Essays (London: Methuen 1974). In this piece he argues for a ‘positive evaluation of evaluative diversity.’ It is a measure of the influence of his paper on my thought that several sentences in this paragraph are merely paraphrases from memory of sentences Strawson employs in making his argument. See esp. pp. 26-9.

20 I am greatly indebted to Wayne Westergard-Thorpe for extensive criticism of an earlier draft of this paper. I also benefited from the comments and suggestions of my colleagues Don Brown, Dick Sikora, and Jim Dybikowski.