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Is Failing to Give to
Famine Relief Wrong?
II
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John Arthur: “World Hunger and Moral Obligation”
Arthur’s Central Argument
Singer’s argument:
1) Ignores an important moral factor: entitlement.
2) Requires an overhauling of our moral code, which is not
required.
The General Principle
Singer’s General Principle (Arthur calls it the “greater moral evil
rule”) requires substantial redistribution of wealth.
• “If it is in out power to prevent something bad from happening,
without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral
importance, we ought, morally, to do it.”
• Recall pond example: “The greater moral evil rule thus seems
a natural way of capturing why we think it would be wrong not
to help.” (545)
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The General Principle
• Moral Equality: We are attracted to the idea that like amounts
of suffering (or the opposite) are of equal significance,
regardless of who is experiencing them: “[E]quality demands
equal consideration of interests as well as respect for certain
rights.” (545)
• If we fail to give to famine relief, instead spending our money
on a new car or fancy clothes, we are giving special
consideration to ourselves or to our group, like a racist does.
Equal consideration leads naturally to the greater moral evil
rule.
• There is, however, a flip-side to equality that Singer ignores:
entitlement, which falls into two broad categories.
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Forms of Entitlement: (1) Rights
Thought Experiment 1: Where you have two eyes and two
kidneys, some other person is blind or has a disease that is
destroying her kidneys. You can donate one of your eyes or one
of your kidneys, to restore her sight, or extend her life. Of course,
you will, in doing so, lose something: either depth perception, or,
possibly, some life expectancy.
Thought Experiment 2: There is some person who, we can
imagine, will be psychologically harmed by your not granting
sexual favors to them. Of course, you do not want to grant such
sexual favors, and you will be, in some less strong way, harmed
by granting them.
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Forms of Entitlement: (1) Rights (cont’d)
• According to the General Principle, to be justified in refusing,
you must show that the unpleasantness you would experience
is of equal importance to the harm you are preventing.
Otherwise, you must consent.
• “If anything is clear, however, it is that our code does not
require such heroism; you are entitled to keep your second eye
and kidney and not bestow sexual favors on anyone who may
be harmed without them.” (546)
• That it’s your body, and you have a right to it, outweighs any
duty you have to help.
• (Recall discussion on a woman’s right to her body versus her
duty to the fetus.)
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Forms of Entitlement: (1) Rights (cont’d)
Moral rights are divided into two categories:
1) Negative Rights: rights of noninterference.
 The right to life, property rights, the right to privacy, etc.
 Negative rights are natural, depending on what you are.
2) Positive Rights: rights of recipience.
 Your legal wards have a right to be fed, clothed, and
housed.
 Contractual rights, say, in business dealings, include the
right not to be left holding the bag.
 Positive rights are not natural; they arise because others
have promised, agreed, or contracted to give you
something.
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Forms of Entitlement: (1) Rights (cont’d)
A duty to help a stranger in need is not the result of a right he
has.
• Such a right would be positive, but you have made no
promises nor entered into any contract with this person, so no
such right exists.
• Where the wards of a lifeguard, for instance, have a right to
the lifeguard’s help, they do not have the same right to help
from bystanders.
• Bystanders may act cruelly in not helping a drowning child,
but they do not thereby violate anyone’s rights.
• We are entitled to invoke our own rights as justification for not
giving to distant strangers or when the cost to us is substantial
(an eye or a kidney, for example).
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Forms of Entitlement: (2) Deserts
The farmer who grows his good deserves it because he earned it
through his hard work.
• A farmer’s deserts may be outweighed by the needs of his
neighbors, but this is not to say that his deserts have no moral
weight.
• Negative Deserts: A Nazi war criminal deserves punishment,
and that will be a reason to send him to jail. But if nobody will
be deterred by his suffering, or if he is old and harmless, this
may weigh against his punishment. But this doesn’t mean that
he doesn’t still deserve punishment.
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Our Moral Code
Where our moral code tends to look to the future (toward
consequences), entitlements look to the past:
• Whether we have rights to our money, property, eyes, etc.,
depends on how we came to acquire them.
• Our common moral code requires that we ignore neither
consequences nor entitlements.
• Rights and deserts should not be discounted when
considering the morality of our actions.
Are such values as rights and entitlements outweighed by more
fundamental values, such as fairness, justice, or respect for
others?
• There seems no easy way to compare these factors.
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Our Moral Code (cont’d)
Above all else, the moral code that it is rational for us to support
must be practical—i.e., it must work.
1) As such, it must gain the support of (almost) everyone.
2) An ideal code cannot assume people are more unselfish
than we are: “Rules that would work only for angels are not
the ones it is rational to support for humans.” (547)
3) An ideal code cannot assume we are more objective than we
are.
4) An ideal code cannot assume that we have perfect
knowledge.
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Our Moral Code (cont’d)
A reasonable moral code, then, would require people to help
when there is no substantial cost to themselves—where helping
would not mean significant reduction in a person’s current level of
happiness.
• Getting one’s pants muddy would likely not result in
significant reduction in one’s happiness.
• Giving up one’s savings, one’s eye, or one’s kidney would
likely result in significant reduction in one’s happiness.
• An ideal moral code would probably not look too much
different from our current working code.
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Michael Slote: “Famine, Affluence, and Empathy”
Slote’s Virtue Ethics
Virtue Ethics of caring built on the tradition of 18th Century
sentimentalism.
• Caring is an overall attitude or motivational state.
• Roughly, an ethics of caring holds that an act is morally right or
permissible if it doesn’t exhibit a lack of caring (not mere
neutrality), and wrong if it does.
• “[W]hen I speak of acts exhibiting a caring attitude or one
inconsistent with caring, the caring I am speaking of includes
attitudes toward distant and personally-unknown others.” (548)
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Slote’s Virtue Ethics (cont’d)
• “An ethics of caring will hold that it is virtuous to be more
concerned about near and dear than about strangers or those
one knows about merely by description; but it will also insist
that an ideally or virtuously caring individual will be
substantially concerned about people who are distant from
her.” (549)
• That we have special or stronger moral obligations to those
who are (physically or sentimentally) closer to us is
commonsensically appealing.
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Slote’s Virtue Ethics (cont’d)
Rather than “sympathy” (the word Hume uses in forming his
sentimentalist theory, which today means, roughly, a favorable
attitude toward someone), Slote is concerned with “empathy” (the
state or process in which one takes on the feelings of another).
• Question: Is the development of empathy necessary to one’s
development of altruistic concern for others?
• Psychology, generally, hypothesizes that caring works via
empathy, and that morally good caring can be specified in
relation to the development of human empathy.
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Slote’s Virtue Ethics (cont’d)
If we believe that empathy has moral force or relevance, then we
can argue that:
• Since it is easier to empathize with another adult human than
with a squidge…
• It is as such morally worse to harm an adult human than to do
the same to a squidge.
• That is, we can say that an action is right or wrong depending
on whether or not such actions reflect a deficiency of normally
or fully-capable caring motivation.
• It would then (other things being equal) be morally worse to
prefer a fetus or embryo to a born human being “because such
a preference runs counter to the flow of developed human
empathy…” (550)
• Contra Singer, then, a failure to save the life of a distant child
(by making a charitable donation) is not as morally bad as
failing to save the life of a child drowning in front of you.
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Empathy and Spatial Distance
Singer holds that spatial distance simply cannot be morally
relevant to our obligations to aid others.
• Empathy gives us a firmer basis than distance for
distinguishing the strength of our obligations in the cases
Singer compares.
• Spatial distance and (decreasing) empathy do, in fact, correlate
in a wide variety of cases.
• Such a view can not only help to explain why failing to help in
the drowning case seems worse than a failure to give to famine
relief, but it can also justify that ordinary moral intuition.
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Empathy and Spatial Distance (cont’d)
• Turning away from someone we see who is in need seems
worse than ignoring someone whom one knows only by
description is in need.
 Our empathic capacities respond to immediacy.
 What makes failing to give aid in the former case more
objectionable than failing to give aid in the latter is, Slote
claims, a failure in one’s empathic response to someone
whose need one directly perceives.
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Empathy and Temporal Distance
The same principle applies to temporal distance:
• Given the choice, we would typically feel more compelled to
spend money to aid miners trapped in a cave-in than to spend
that money on shoring up other mines to save a greater
number of lives in the future.
• The danger in the former case engages our empathic “juices”
in a way that the danger in the latter case does not: the danger
is not as immediate.
In the cases of the miners and of Singer’s drowning child vs.
famine relief cases, our negative moral responses to one’s
choosing to help in the distant cases rather than the (proximally
or temporally) immediate cases is explained by some lack of
(normal) human empathy on the part of the agent.
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Obligations and Sacrifice
Current social-psychological research supports the idea that
humans have a substantial capacity for empathy and for altruistic
concerns based on empathy.
• We are not morally obligated to sacrifice most of our time and
money to aid others, because a failure to do so doesn’t evince
an absence of normal or fully-developed human empathy.
• Such a sacrifice would be morally supererogatory—morally
praiseworthy and/or good, but not (contra Singer) obligatory.
• It may be obligatory for individuals like us to make some
substantial contribution towards famine relief and other causes,
but not to the point of becoming like a Bengali refugee.