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Consequentialism and Collective Action

Ethics 130 (4):530-554 (2020)

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  1. Strategic collective action and the proportionality of reasons to expected benefits.Howard Leo Nye, Madeline Youngman & Avontay Williams - 2024 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy:1-32.
    We argue that, in order to explain the relative strengths of our reasons to contribute to different collective endeavours, approaches to the ethics of collective action must understand the strengths of our reasons to make a given contribution as proportional to its expected benefits, or its chances of bringing about benefits in proportion to their magnitudes. The view that most clearly meets this proportionality requirement is the expected consequences approach, which identifies our reasons to perform an act with its expected (...)
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  • Participation and Collective Harm.Rutger van Oeveren & Jan Willem Wieland - 2024 - Journal of Moral Philosophy:1-28.
    Many global problems nowadays are collective action problems. It is only because many people act in some way that certain problems arise (e.g., climate harms). But when can one be said to participate in such groups in the first place? As Derek Parfit asked, “When we appeal to what groups together do, whom should we count as members of these groups?” As Julia Nefsky has shown, this problem has proven to be notoriously tricky, and without any adequate solution. We present (...)
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  • Why you shouldn’t serve meat at your next catered event.Zachary Ferguson - 2024 - Politics, Philosophy and Economics.
    Much has been written about the ethics of eating meat. Far less has been said about the ethics of serving meat. In this paper I argue that we often shouldn’t serve meat, even if it is morally permissible for individuals to purchase and eat meat. Historically, the ethical conversation surrounding meat has been limited to individual diets, meat producers, and government actors. I argue that if we stop the conversation there, then the urgent moral problems associated with industrial animal agriculture (...)
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  • (1 other version)Climate Change and Decision Theory.Andrea S. Asker & H. Orri Stefánsson - 2023 - In Pellegrino Gianfranco & Marcello Di Paola (eds.), Handbook of Philosophy of Climate Change. Springer Nature. pp. 267-286.
    Many people are worried about the harmful effects of climate change but nevertheless enjoy some activities that contribute to the emission of greenhouse gas (driving, flying, eating meat, etc.), the main cause of climate change. How should such people make choices between engaging in and refraining from enjoyable greenhouse-gas-emitting activities? In this chapter, we look at the answer provided by decision theory. Some scholars think that the right answer is given by interactive decision theory, or game theory; and moreover think (...)
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  • Inefficacy, Pre-emption and Structural Injustice.Nikhil Venkatesh - 2023 - Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 123 (3):395-404.
    Many pressing problems are of the following kind: some collection of actions of multiple people will produce some morally significant outcome (good or bad), but each individual action in the collection seems to make no difference to the outcome. These problems pose theoretical problems (especially for act-consequentialism), and practical problems for agents trying to figure out what they ought to do. Much recent literature on such problems has focused on whether it is possible for each action in such a collection (...)
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  • Against the no-difference argument.Adam Elga - 2023 - Analysis 84 (3):476-482.
    There are 1,000 of us and one victim. We each increase the level at which a ‘discomfort machine’ operates on the victim – leading to great discomfort. Suppose that consecutive levels of the machine are so similar that the victim cannot distinguish them. Have we acted permissibly? According to the ‘no-difference argument’ the answer is ‘yes’ because each of our actions was guaranteed to make the victim no worse off. This argument is of interest because, if it is sound, similar (...)
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  • The problem of collective impact: why helping doesn’t do the trick.Andrea S. Asker - 2023 - Philosophical Studies 180 (8):2377-2397.
    Collective impact cases are situations where people collectively bring about a morally significant outcome by each acting in a certain way, and yet each individual action seems to make no, or almost no difference to the outcome. Intuitively, the beneficial or harmful outcomes give individuals moral reason to act (or refrain from acting) in collective impact situations. However, if the individual action does not make a difference to the outcome, it is not clear what those moral reasons are. The problem (...)
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  • Counting Your Chickens.Yoaav Isaacs, Adam Lerner & Jeffrey Sanford Russell - 2024 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 102 (3):675-692.
    Suppose that, for reasons of animal welfare, it would be better if everyone stopped eating chicken. Does it follow that you should stop eating chicken? Proponents of the “inefficacy objection” argue that, due to the scale and complexity of markets, the expected effects of your chicken purchases are negligible. So the expected effects of eating chicken do not make it wrong. -/- We argue that this objection does not succeed, in two steps. First, empirical data about chicken production tells us (...)
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  • Multidimensional Adjectives.Justin D’Ambrosio & Brian Hedden - 2024 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 102 (2):253-277.
    Multidimensional adjectives are ubiquitous in natural language. An adjective F is multidimensional just in case whether F applies to an object or pair of objects depends on how those objects stand with respect to multiple underlying dimensions of F-ness. Developing a semantics for multidimensional adjectives requires us to address the problem of dimensional aggregation: how do the application conditions of an adjective F in its positive and comparative forms depend on its underlying dimensions? Here we develop a semantics for multidimensional (...)
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  • A risky challenge for intransitive preferences.Timothy Luke Williamson - forthcoming - Noûs.
    Philosophers have spent a great deal of time debating whether intransitive preferences can be rational. I present a risky decision that poses a challenge for the defender of intransitivity. The defender of intransitivity faces a trilemma and must either: (i) reject the rationality of intransitive preferences, (ii) deny State-wise Dominance, or (iii) accept the bizarre verdict that you can be required to pay to relabel the tickets of a fair lottery. If we take the first horn, then we have a (...)
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  • Ethical Veganism and Free Riding.Jacob Barrett & Sarah Raskoff - 2023 - Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 24 (2):184-212.
    The animal agriculture industry causes animals a tremendous amount of pain and suffering. Many ethical vegans argue that we therefore have an obligation to abstain from animal products in order to reduce this suffering. But this argument faces a challenge: thanks to the size and structure of the animal agriculture industry, any individual’s dietary choices are overwhelmingly unlikely to make a difference. In this paper, we criticize common replies to this challenge and develop an alternative argument for ethical veganism. Specifically, (...)
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  • The Minority Retort: in Defense of Defection in Marginalized Groups.Connor K. Kianpour - 2022 - Public Affairs Quarterly 36 (4):280-311.
    The defection thesis holds that members of marginalized social groups are obligated not to express views important to others in the group that are regarded by the others as substantively wrong. In this essay, I evaluate arguments that seek to vindicate the defection thesis and conclude they all fail. Then, I argue that we have reason to believe sanctioning defectors in certain ways is wrongful and that the expression of their contentious ideas is good for members of marginalized groups. We (...)
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  • The Significance of Tiny Contributions : Barnett and Beyond.Erik Carlson, Magnus Jedenheim-Edling & Jens Johansson - forthcoming - Utilitas.
    In a discussion of Parfit's Drops of Water case, Zach Barnett has recently proposed a novel argument against “No Small Improvement”; that is, the claim that a single drop of water cannot affect the magnitude of a thirsty person's suffering. We first show that Barnett's argument can be significantly strengthened, and also that the fundamental idea behind it yields a straightforward argument for the transitivity of equal suffering. We then suggest that defenders of No Small Improvement could reject a Pareto (...)
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  • Climate Change and Individual Obligations: A Dilemma for the Expected Utility Approach, and the Need for an Imperfect View.Julia Nefsky - 2021 - In Budolfson Mark, McPherson Tristram & Plunkett David (eds.), Philosophy and Climate Change. Oxford University Press. pp. 201-221.
    This chapter concerns the nature of our obligations as individuals when it comes to our emissions-producing activities and climate change. The first half of the chapter argues that the popular ‘expected utility’ approach to this question faces a problematic dilemma: either it gives skeptical verdicts, saying that there are no such obligations, or it yields implausibly strong verdicts. The second half of the chapter diagnoses the problem. It is argued that the dilemma arises from a very general feature of the (...)
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  • The Case for ‘Contributory Ethics’: Or How to Think about Individual Morality in a Time of Global Problems.Travis N. Rieder & Justin Bernstein - 2020 - Ethics, Policy and Environment 23 (3):299-319.
    Many of us believe that we can and do have individual obligations to refrain from contributing to massive collective harms – say, from producing luxury greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions; however, our individual actions are so small as to be practically meaningless. Can we then, justify the intuition that we ought to refrain? In this paper, we argue that this debate may have been mis-framed. Rather than investigating whether or not we have obligations to refrain from contributing to collective action, perhaps (...)
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  • Consequentialism, Collective Action, and Blame.Andreas T. Schmidt - 2024 - Journal of Moral Philosophy:1-33.
    Several important questions in applied ethics – like whether to switch to a plant-based diet, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, or vote in elections – seem to share the following structure: if enough people ‘cooperate’ and become vegan for example, we bring about a better outcome; but what you do as an individual seems to make no difference whatsoever. Such collective action problems are often thought to pose a serious challenge to consequentialism. In response, I defend the Reactive Attitude Approach: rather (...)
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  • Parity and Pareto.Brian Hedden - 2024 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 109 (2):575-592.
    Pareto principles are at the core of ethics and decision theory. The Strong Pareto principle says that if one thing is better than another for someone and at least as good for everyone else, then the one is overall better than the other. But a host of famous figures express it differently, with ‘not worse’ in place of ‘at least as good.’ In the presence of parity (or incommensurability), this results in a strictly stronger Pareto principle, which I call Super‐Strong (...)
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  • Collective Actions, Individual Reasons, and the Metaphysics of Consequence.Samuel Lee - 2022 - Ethics 133 (1):72-105.
    I defend the view that individual agents have instrumental moral reasons for and against contributing to collective actions. I distinguish three versions of this view found in the literature and argue that only one withstands scrutiny: the version on which each individual contribution to a collective action is a cause of the latter’s large-scale outcomes. The central difficulty with this view is its apparent incompatibility with leading theories of causation. Against these theories I motivate a general structural principle about causation (...)
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  • Making a vague difference: Kagan, Nefsky and the Sorites Paradox.Mattias Gunnemyr - 2024 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 67 (9):3501-3526.
    In collective harm cases, bad consequences follow if enough people act in a certain way even though no such individual act makes a difference for the worse. Global warming, overfishing and Derek Parfit’s famous case of the harmless torturers are some examples of such harm. Shelly Kagan argues that there is a threshold such that one single act might trigger harm in all collective harm cases. Julia Nefsky points to serious shortcomings in Kagan’s argument, but does not show that his (...)
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  • Overbooking: Permissible when and only when scaled up.Roy Sorensen - 2024 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 108 (3):676-686.
    Bumped from a flight? Relax with this defense of the big business practice of deliberately promising more services than one will provide. On a small scale, over‐promising yields a toxic moral dilemma and a lie. At a large scale, the dilemma becomes dilute, and the lie completely disappears. Overbooking is honest because there is a sufficiently high probability of fulfilling each promise. Overbooking is socially beneficial because the promised resources are used more efficiently. There are fewer wasted seats on jumbo (...)
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