Moral extremists argue for highly demanding duties of beneficence on the ground that accepting a more moderate position commits us to denying the common-sense moral intuition elicited by easy rescue cases. I argue that a moderate duty of beneficence is consistent with this intuition in light of what I call aggregationism, the view that the large aggregate cost of performing many low-cost acts of beneficence is relevant to what moral agents may do in cases where they face multiple low-cost occasions (...) to rescue. After demonstrating how the debate between moderates and extremists turns on the truth of aggregationism, I defend aggregationism against the challenge that it is inconsistent with respecting the separateness of persons. (shrink)

Moral extremists argue for a demanding duty of poverty relief by leveraging powerful intuitions about our duties to rescue those close at hand. I clear the way for a less demanding duty by arguing that this argumentative strategy commits the extremist to a conception of our duty in the face of global poverty that is deeply at odds with our convictions about how we may discharge that duty. These convictions reveal that global poverty and easy rescue cases give rise to (...) duties of different kinds: whereas duties of rescue are ultimately explicable by appeal to moral claims to assistance, duties of poverty relief are not. The extremist’s most compelling argumentative strategy is therefore not viable—he may not straightforwardly appeal to facts about the demandingness of duties of rescue in arguing for demanding duties of poverty relief. (shrink)

Some ideas are at the heart of the world’s great ethical and religious traditions, yet they play little or no role within certain debates in modern philosophical ethics. One such idea is that most of us have unreliable moral intuitions and we must transform ourselves into better people before we can reliably judge how to behave. This paper explores that idea by focusing on a transformative experience that I will call the moral experience. In the paper’s initial sections, I describe (...) the moral experience and explain why it constitutes a genuine transformation in ethical outlook. I then argue that the moral experience could thereby affect our views on certain contemporary ethical debates, illustrating those points with a discussion of the debate about global poverty. (shrink)

Peter Singer’s defense of the duty to aid the world’s poor by the pond analogy is self-defeating. It cannot be both true that you ought to save the drowning child from a pond at the expense of ruining your shoes and that you ought to aid the world’s poor if you thereby do not sacrifice anything of comparable moral importance. Taking the latter principle seriously would lead you to let the child in front of you drown whenever you could thereby (...) save more children in the developing world. Though Singer can defend the duty to aid the world’s poor starting from consequentialist principles requiring you to make things go best in the impartial sense, he cannot have it invoking the commonsense judgment about what you ought to do in the pond case. There is no sound path from commonsense morality to Singer’s principles of beneficence. (shrink)

This paper examines the rhetorical dimension of arguments about global justice. It draws on postcolonial theory, an approach that has explored the relationship between knowledge and power. The global justice literature has elaborated critiques of global inequality and advanced arguments about how to overcome the legacies of domination. These concerns are also shared by critics of colonialism, yet there are also epistemological differences that separate the two scholarly communities. Despite these differences, I argue that bringing the two literatures into conversation (...) generates important benefits. Postcolonial theory draws attention to the way that abstract concepts can function as metaphors that have the unintended consequence of reinforcing power relations. Normative theory will be more effective at promoting global justice if it pays more attention to the politics of representation. (shrink)

It is common for philosophers to reject otherwise plausible moral theories on the ground that they are objectionably demanding, and to endorse “Moderate” alternatives. I argue that while support can be found within the method of reflective equilibrium for Moderate moral principles of the kind that are often advocated, it is much more difficult than Moderates have supposed to provide support for the view that morality’s demands in circumstances like ours are also Moderate. Once we draw a clear distinction between (...) Moderate accounts of the content of moral principles, and Moderate accounts of morality’s demands in circumstances like ours, we can see that defenses of Moderate views that include both of these components are subject to both methodological and substantive objections. I consider arguments for Moderate views that have been made by Samuel Scheffler and Richard Miller, and argue that both are methodologically problematic because they rely on appeals to intuitions that we have strong grounds to think are unreliable. I conclude that we must take seriously the possibility that Moderate principles, applied to well off people in circumstances like ours, imply demands that are much more extensive than Moderates typically accept. (shrink)

I argue that moral philosophers have either misunderstood the problem of moral demandingness or at least failed to recognize important dimensions of the problem that undermine many standard assumptions. It has been assumed that utilitarianism concretely directs us to maximize welfare within a generation by transferring resources to people currently living in extreme poverty. In fact, utilitarianism seems to imply that any obligation to help people who are currently badly off is trumped by obligations to undertake actions targeted at improving (...) the value of the long-term future. Reflecting on the demands of beneficence in respect of the value of the far future forces us to view key aspects of the problem of moral demandingness in a very different light. GPI Working Paper No. 1-2020. (shrink)