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Does Participation Matter? An Inconsistency in Parfit's Moral Mathematics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 January 2009

Ben Eggleston
Ben Eggleston
Affiliation:
University of Kansas, [email protected]
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Abstract

Consequentialists typically think that the moral quality of one's conduct depends on the difference one makes. But consequentialists may also think that even if one is not making a difference, the moral quality of one's conduct can still be affected by whether one is participating (even if only ineffectually, or redundantly) in an endeavour that does make a difference. Derek Parfit discusses this issue – the moral significance of what I call ‘participation’ – in the chapter of Reasons and Persons that he devotes to what he calls ‘moral mathematics’. In my paper, I expose an inconsistency in Parfit's discussion of moral mathematics by showing how it gives conflicting answers to the question of whether participation matters. I conclude by showing how an appreciation of Parfit's error sheds some light on consequentialist thought generally, and on the debate between act- and rule-consequentialists specifically.

Type
Discussions
Information
Utilitas , Volume 15 , Issue 1 , March 2003 , pp. 92 - 105
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2003

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References

1 Parfit, Derek, Reasons and Persons, Oxford, 1984Google Scholar.

2 Jackson, Frank, ‘Which Effects?’ in Dancy, Jonathan (ed.), Reading Parfit, Oxford, 1997, pp. 42–53Google Scholar.

3 Eggleston, Ben, ‘Should Consequentialists Make Parfit's Second Mistake? A Refutation of Jackson’, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, lxxviii (2000)Google Scholar.

4 Simple parenthetical references are to Parfit's Reasons and Persons.

5 According to R. M. Hare, in such a case not only do I not benefit J, but I do not even act at all, since ‘To act is to make a difference to the course of events, and what the act is, is determined by what difference’ (Sorting Out Ethics, Oxford, 1997, p. 164)Google Scholar. I shall not evaluate this strong claim here.

6 Parfit's rejection of the Share-of-the-Total View echoes Regan's, Donald rejection of the ‘contributory consequences’ approach in favour of the traditional ‘marginal con-sequences’ approach. Regan's discussion of these competing approaches (Utilitarianism and Co-operation, Oxford, 1980, pp. 13–17)CrossRefGoogle Scholar is extremely illuminating.

7 And other than what he says on p. 443, where he repeats verbatim the statement of the second ‘mistake’ already quoted.

8 Jackson, p. 52n3.

9 Some support for this view can be drawn from American tort law. Courts have ruled that in over-determination cases, each agent is liable for all of the injury caused:

Where two or more causes combine to produce such a single result [i.e. an ‘indivisible’ one, such as death], incapable of division on any logical or reasonable basis, and each is a substantial factor in bringing about the harm, … each of the causes is charged with responsibility for the entire harm. …

… Such entire liability … is imposed where either cause would have been sufficient in itself to bring about the result. (American Law Institute, Restatement (Second) of the Law: Torts, St Paul, Minn., 1965, ii, p. 440Google Scholar.)

From this it would follow that in Case One, X and Y are each liable for the entire harm of my death. To the extent that we construe liability as a proxy for culpability (only a rough parallel, admittedly), we may think that several people each act wrongly when they together harm other people.

10 The thesis that participation matters does not, of course, mean that participation always matters to such an extent as to be decisive (as it happens to be in Case One). It simply means that participation is a morally relevant factor to be considered alongside others (including, presumably, making a difference).

11 It might be thought that (C7) does not necessarily mislead an agent in the First Rescue Mission, once the ‘set of acts’ to which (C7) refers is properly characterized. For if we take one ‘set of acts’ to involve my joining the others, and we take another ‘set of acts’ to involve the other four rescuers' standing on the platform and my going off on my own, then (C7) does not say that I have a moral reason to join the others rather than going off on my own, and thus does not mislead me. But if (C7) is to be interpreted in this way – in such a way that (C7) does not say that I have a moral reason to join the others rather than going off on my own – then it cannot be adduced as an example of a view that implies that participation matters, and (C7) ought not to be mentioned in connection with the objection described and answered in this subsection. But this would not change the content of the objection itself, or undermine my response to it. For if I join the others and defend my decision by appealing to some (C7)-like principle that does imply that participation matters, then clearly I have been led astray, in the sense that I have been led to make the wrong decision – indeed no less than if I had made the cruder error of thinking that, in joining the others, I would be causing fifteen more lives to be saved than if I were to go off on my own. I am indebted to an anonymous referee for this journal for making clear the need for this note.

12 This interpretation of (C6) was suggested to me by an anonymous referee for this journal.

13 We saw in note 9 that American tort law effectively implies that participation matters. It is also instructive to note the influence of rule-consequentialist considerations on this area of the law. In 1948, a court faced a case in which two hunters shot at a quail flushed by a third hunter and hit that third hunter with birdshot. The court held each of the shooters liable for all of the injury (even though possibly only one of them actually shot the plaintiff), saying that once the plaintiff had proved that the defendants had jointly injured him, it was up to each defendant to prove that he himself had not injured the plaintiff. Here is how the court justified shifting the burden of proof in this way (though the emphasis is added):

When we consider the relative positions of the parties and the results that would flow if plaintiff was required to pin the injury on one of the defendants only, a requirement that the burden of proof on that subject be shifted to defendants becomes manifest. (Summersv. Tice, 33 Cal. 2d at 86, 199 P. 2d at 4)

This support that American tort law derives from rule-consequentialism, combined with the support that American tort law provides for the view that participation matters, tends to confirm the suggestion in the text that rule consequentialism is especially congenial to the view that participation matters. For an illuminating discussion of the issues raised by Summers v. Tice, see Thomson, Judith Jarvis, ‘Remarks on Causation and Liability’, Philosophy & Public Affairs, xiii (1984)Google Scholar. She briefly mentions the possible role of rule-utilitarian considerations in apportioning costs at 114.

14 My thoughts on Reasons and Persons have been greatly influenced by conversations I have had with David Gauthier, and I want to thank him, Dale Miller, Donald Bruckner, Lad Sessions, Alastair Norcross, and an anonymous referee for this journal for giving me extensive comments on earlier drafts of this paper. I should also mention that I may well not have thought of writing the present paper if I had not first read the paper by Frank Jackson cited above. Finally, I want to thank the audience in front of whom I presented this paper on December 30, 1999, at a session of the Eastern Division meeting of the American Philosophical Association.