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Altruism and Desert
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 June 2019
Abstract
Suppose that virtue is intrinsically morally good, and that we have a pro tanto moral reason to act in ways which promote it. Further suppose that the failure of agents to receive what they deserve is intrinsically morally bad, and that we have a pro tanto moral reason not to act in ways which frustrate desert. When we are deciding whether to encourage others to make altruistic sacrifices, these two pro tanto moral reasons come into conflict. To encourage such sacrifices promotes virtue; it also causes virtuous agents to be worse off, preventing them from receiving their deserts. I argue that these effects on desert can reduce the moral desirability of promoting altruism so significantly as to make it morally wrong. This has implications for public policy, since certain practical questions turn on the extent to which we ought to rely on altruism as a means of solving social problems.
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References
1 Singer, Peter, The Life You Can Save (New York, 2009)Google Scholar.
2 To my knowledge, the only existing treatments of a related phenomenon are Kagan, Shelly, ‘Indeterminate Desert’, The Good, the Right, Life and Death: Essays in Honor of Fred Feldman, ed. McDaniel, Kris, Raibley, Jason R., Feldman, Richard and Zimmerman, Michael J. (New York, 2017), pp. 45–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Skow, Bradford, ‘A Solution to the Problem of Indeterminate Desert’, Mind 121 (2012), pp. 37–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar. I explain, in section II, the relationship of their claims to mine.
3 Titmuss, Richard, The Gift Relationship: From Human Blood to Social Policy (New York, 1997)Google Scholar.
4 Hurka, Thomas, Virtue, Vice, and Value (New York, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hurka, Thomas, ‘The Common Structure of Virtue and Desert’, Ethics 112 (2001), pp. 6–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
5 In this I am adapting Hurka's (‘Common Structure’) practice of referring to the value contributed by an agent's receiving his desert as ‘desert-good’, and the disvalue contributed by his failing to receive it as ‘desert-evil’. Throughout the article I refer to ‘bad’ and ‘badness’ where Hurka refers to ‘evil’. This is for the sake of clarity; I wish to avoid the potentially misleading connotations of malice or ill will associated with ‘evil’.
6 I do wish to assume that each agent deserves some level of well-being, as opposed to deserving specific rewards or punishments as the result of particular actions. An anonymous reviewer suggests a case in which an agent finds a bag of money on the street; not having earned the money, there is some sense in which she does not deserve it. But this is not the sense of ‘desert’ that is of interest here. On the kind of view which I am assuming, the discovery of a bag of unearned money may or may not have a desirable effect on desert – this depends on whether the money brings the agent closer to, or further away from, the level of well-being she deserves.
7 Kagan, ‘Indeterminate Desert’.
8 For simplicity I have chosen a case in which there is no stable assignation of desert, although Kagan is more troubled by cases in which there are multiple stable assignations and in which an agent's desert is therefore indeterminate. Not everyone is convinced by Kagan's argument; see Skow's ‘Solution’ for a dissenting view.
9 Alternatively: it is acceptable to read such claims as ‘Ad Campaign produces virtue-goodness’ as ‘Ad Campaign produces virtue-goodness relative to Global Tax’, or ‘Ad Campaign is virtue-better than Global Tax’, meaning that its overall effects on virtue are more desirable than those of the alternative.
10 Since Global Tax makes all agents in the developed world somewhat worse off, it may make some of them worse off than they deserve and thus have a minor undesirable effect on desert. Because this effect is not concentrated on the virtuous, it is dwarfed by Ad Campaign's undesirable effects on desert, and can be ignored for the purposes of comparing the two plans.
11 Oddly, Hurka – whose view will be the subject of the next section – seems to conflate the claim that virtue is good simpliciter with the claim that it is good for the virtuous agent (see e.g. Hurka, Virtue, pp. 55, 153). It seems to me that he ought to hold that virtue is good in the former rather than the latter sense, especially in light of the structural analogies he suggests between virtue and desert. It is good for a vicious agent to be punished and therefore to receive his desert, but surely it is not good for the punished agent – rather, it is good simpliciter.
12 An anonymous reviewer suggests that agents are likely to derive some psychological satisfaction from acting altruistically, and offset the reduction in their well-being thereby. But I take it that this satisfaction is limited in magnitude and that it cannot be expected to outweigh or even significantly mitigate the reduction in well-being incurred by a sufficiently large material sacrifice.
13 I take it that the saving of lives and the alleviation of intense suffering are likely to strike us as extremely important, which explains why they can outweigh any effects on virtue and desert.
14 Perhaps this seems like cheating, given my earlier admonition that Ad Campaign and Global Tax should be simplified in such a way that they differ only in their respective effects on virtue and desert. But I do not think that it is cheating. Unlike other potential differences, the social effects of Ad Campaign are an unavoidable consequence of mass altruism and cannot be simplified away.
15 If this characterization seems doubtful, it is helpful to consider an analogous case. Suppose that I leave my desperately sick dog on your doorstep, knowing that you, a virtuous person, will feel obligated to take it to the veterinarian and incur the significant costs of treatment. Although I have not literally compelled you to do anything, it still seems that I have wronged you, and that I have, at least in a loose sense, punished you – by targeting you – for your virtue. My suggestion here is that a society which does not systematically work to alleviate poverty does essentially the same thing, though perhaps unintentionally, on a massive scale – it leaves the problem of poverty to be taken care of, and the attendant costs to be incurred by, the virtuous.
16 Hurka, Virtue; Hurka, ‘Common Structure’.
17 Hurka, Virtue, pp. 11–12.
18 Hurka, Virtue, p. 30.
19 Hurka, Virtue, pp. 11–21; Hurka, ‘Common Structure’, pp. 8–10.
20 Hurka, ‘Common Structure’, pp. 10–12.
21 Hurka, Virtue, pp. 3–4.
22 Hurka, Virtue, pp. 83–7; Hurka, ‘Common Structure’, pp. 24–5.
23 Hurka, Virtue, pp. 88–9.
24 Hurka, ‘Common Structure’, pp. 26–7.
25 My usage of ‘individual’ and ‘proportional’ follows Hurka's usage (Virtue, pp. 193–7) of the same to describe two facets of desert, although he does not use them to distinguish different species of desert-badness.
26 Might Ad Campaign also produce two desirable effects on virtue? In causing an agent to care about global poverty, we cause him to acquire a new attitude which is individually virtuous. It seems likely that we also cause his attitudes to become better proportioned relative to one another – this would be the case if he had previously cared about global poverty less than he should have relative to other objects. However, this proportional effect on virtue does not represent an additional source of goodness which needs to be factored independently into our evaluation of Ad Campaign. In so far as this proportional effect increases the virtue of the agents in Ad Campaign, it makes them deserve even better lives and increases the extent to which they fail to receive their deserts; thus, the effect is offset by a corresponding increase in desert-badness.
27 Hurka, Virtue, p. 129.
28 For instance, Hurka thinks that this principle is required to prevent base-level goods and bads from being overwhelmed by the goodness of higher-order attitudes towards virtue. Since virtue is good, a correct attitude towards a virtuous attitude is also good – so it is not only good that I feel happiness at your pleasure, but also good that I feel happiness at my happiness at your pleasure, that I feel happiness at my happiness at my happiness at your pleasure, and so on. To prevent these ‘infinite hierarchies of virtuous attitudes’ (Virtue, p. 136) from outweighing the base-level goods at the bottom, Hurka thinks that the goodness of each level must be less than that of its object at the level below it. This argument does not seem to apply to desert, however, because desert admits of no analogues to these infinite chains of higher-level attitudes.
29 Hurka, Virtue, p. 141.
30 For somewhat technical reasons, Hurka himself does not think that an analogous principle limits the weight of desert-badness (‘Common Structure’, pp. 17–20). There is insufficient space to discuss these reasons here, and they need not concern us. In this section I have assumed that we accept the broad contours of Hurka's framework, but we are not compelled to agree with all of its details. And I describe here a reason to worry that we should accept such a limiting principle, even if Hurka does not.
31 See e.g. Kasiske, Bertram L., ‘Outcomes after Living Kidney Donation: What We Still Need to Know and Why’, American Journal of Kidney Disease 64 (2014), pp. 335–7CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
32 See e.g. Richards, Janet Radcliffe, Careless Thought Costs Lives: The Ethics of Transplants (New York, 2012)Google Scholar.
33 As Richards (Careless, pp. 50–1) points out, it is reasonable to presume that agents who sell their kidneys make themselves better off by doing so; they have, after all, chosen to act in the way that they judge to be in their best interests. This presumption is rebuttable; the agents in question could be mistaken about where their best interests lie. Some research suggests that kidney sales are generally harmful to the sellers, though this seems to reflect conditions under the current black market regime rather than one in which kidney sales are legal; see e.g. Goyal, Madhav, Schneiderman, Ravindra L. Mehta, Lawrence J. and Sehgal, Ashwini R., ‘Economic and Health Consequences of Selling a Kidney in India’, Journal of the American Medical Association 288 (2002), pp. 1589–93CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.
34 For the seminal article, see Cass Sunstein, R. and Thaler, Richard H., ‘Libertarian Paternalism is Not an Oxymoron’, The University of Chicago Law Review 70 (2003), pp. 1159–202CrossRefGoogle Scholar; for an overview, see Richard Noggle, ‘The Ethics of Manipulation’, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, <https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-manipulation/> (2018).
35 Many former colleagues at Syracuse University offered helpful feedback on earlier versions of this article; I wish to thank, in particular, Ben Bradley, Hille Paakkunainen and Travis Timmerman. Thanks also to two anonymous referees for Utilitas for their comments. This research was supported by a grant from China's Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities programme.