The Ethics of Altruism

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THE ETHICS OF ALTRUISM

Books of Related Interest SCANLON AND CONTRACTUALISM edited by Matt Matravers

TRUSTING IN REASON: MARTIN HOLLIS AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF SOCIAL ACTION edited by Preston King

THE PHILOSOPHY OF UTOPIA edited by Barbara Goodwin

PLURALISM AND LIBERAL NEUTRALITY edited by Richard Bellamy and Martin Hollis

THE IDEOLOGY OF ORDER by Preston King

HUMAN RIGHTS AND GLOBAL DIVERSITY edited by Simon Caney and Peter Jones

TOLERATION by Preston King

The Ethics of Altruism edited by

JONATHAN SEGLOW Royal Holloway, University of London

FRANK CASS LONDON • PORTLAND, OR

First Published in 2004 in Great Britain by FRANK CASS PUBLISHERS Crown House, 47 Chase Side, Southgate London, N14 5BP This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” and in the United States of America by FRANK CASS PUBLISHERS c/o ISBS, 920 NE 58th Avenue, Suite 300 Portland, Oregon, 97213–3786 Copyright © 2004 Frank Cass & Co. Ltd Website: www.frankcass.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data The ethics of altruism 1. Altruism I. Seglow, Jonathan 171.8 ISBN 0-7146-5594-5 (cloth) ISBN 0-7146-8481-3 (paper) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The ethics of altruism/edited by Jonathan Seglow. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-7146-5594-5 (alk. paper)— ISBN 0-7146-8481-3 (pbk.: alk. paper) 1. Altruism. I. Seglow, Jonathan, 1968– BJ1474. E84 2004 171′.8–dc22 2003019751 This group of studies first appeared as a special issue of Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, ISSN 1369-8230, Vol.5, No.4 (Winter 2002) published by Frank Cass and Co. Ltd. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

ISBN 0-203-31991-5 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-7146-8481-3 (Print Edition)

Contents

Acknowledgements

26

The Ethics of Altruism: Introduction Jonathan Seglow

1

Altruism, Impartiality and Moral Demands Jurgen De Wispelaere

9

Gratitude, Contribution and Ethical Theory Saul Smilansky

35

Altruism, Self-Interest and the Indistinctness of Persons Keith Graham

51

Between Egoism and Altruism: Outlines for a Materialist Conception of the Good Jeff Noonan Is There a Paradox of Altruism? Robert Paul Churchill and Erin Street ‘Are They My Poor?’: The Problem of Altruism in a World of Strangers David Miller

71 195

107

Good Samaritanism: A Matter of Justice Cécile Fabre

129

Altruism and Freedom Jonathan Seglow

145

Canaries in the Mines? Alasdair Maclean

163

The Right to Trade in Human Body Parts Hillel Steiner

185

vi

Abstracts

193

Notes on Contributors

199

Index

207

Acknowledgments

The essays in this volume have their origin in The Ethics of Altruism conference of the Association for Legal and Social Philosophy, held at Royal Holloway, University of London in April 2002. I would like to thank Richard Bellamy and Preston King, and Jeff Mazo at Frank Cass, for their encouragement of this project, as well as all the contributors. Keith Graham’s paper draws on his Practical Reasoning in a Social World: How We Act Together (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Used with kind permission from Cambridge University Press.

viii

1 The Ethics of Altruism: Introduction JONATHAN SEGLOW

Since altruism is never far away from the moral and political assessments we make in everyday life, it is odd that it should be discussed so little. Besides personal acts of charity and beneficence, discussions of welfarism, the ethics of the market and our duties to the poor in distant countries all turn on issues of altruism. It is a recurrent theme of everyday discourse, and to lack it—to be selfish—is one of the most common terms of moral condemnation. It is odd, then, that political philosophers are not exercised by altruism. Examining the concept in its own right—exploring the nature and scope of people’s altruism, and the kinds of motives that altruists have—should throw some light on these more concrete problems. The chapters in this volume aim to do that. They interrogate the concept, revealing its possibilities, and also its limits. In considering also the areas and issues where altruistic motives are important, and making connections between these and the core idea itself, they help address this omission, and vindicate the claim that altruism should be a central topic of our political theorising. How much altruism is it reasonable to ask of us? What might be regarded as the central issue with which contemporary Anglophone political philosophy is concerned—how to reconcile the freedom of the individual to live as she wishes with our moral duties to other people of equal worth—can be interpreted as a question about just how altruistic we are obliged to be. As David Miller notes in his essay, where obligation used to be localised— through practices of mutual aid, good neighbourliness, and so on—people knew straightforwardly to whom they owed their responsibilities: ‘Ethical space was fully occupied by concrete obligations to others.’1 Altruism becomes a moral problem in a world of strangers, a world where through our acts and omissions we can affect the fates of millions of people, the vast majority of whom we will never meet. Since this is—increasingly, in an age of globalisation—our world, altruism is very much on our contemporary agenda.

2 THE ETHICS OF ALTRUISM

In fact, there are two ways that altruism occupies a place in our moral thinking, corresponding to two ways that the term is used (both of them reflected in the essays in this volume). First, and most straightforwardly, altruism can simply be equated with the other-regarding duties that are a central part of morality. This is the sense in which we contrast altruism with egoism, and enjoin people to properly take others’ interests into account in their practical reasoning. It remains true that altruism is not the whole of morality: there are moral virtues (courage, for example) which are not altruistic, and there are some who argue that people have moral duties towards themselves (Hampton 1993). Nevertheless, if, as many believe, selfinterest is most people’s basic attitude, it seems natural to regard altruistic, other-regarding and moral behaviour as all of a piece. At the same time, however, we also think of altruism in a further sense where it refers to the motives of those who wish to further other people’s good in ways that go beyond what morality strictly requires. Thus, when someone bemoans the selfishness of the world, he is not usually interpreted as pointing to a failure of people to do their duty. The concern is rather that people don’t care enough about each other’s interests (even if they do all that they are obliged to do). On this view, altruism is a kind of supererogatory virtue, a particular concern for the good of some particular other person(s). Clearly, interpreted this way, it would be good if altruistic dispositions were more plentiful in today’s societies. At the same time, however, supererogatory altruism can have an over-exclusive focus—its beneficiaries are just those people fortunate enough to be the objects of other people’s good wills. Moreover, it is not clear why, having fulfilled all morality’s demands, we should be encouraged to be more altruistic too.2 The relationship between these two kinds altruism, and between altruism, however interpreted, and other moral concepts, and the extent to which it is realistic and reasonable to improve people’s altruistic motives are all explored in the essays in this volume. While the first five contributions examine these and related questions in fairly abstract terms, the second five look at them more concretely with regard to particular moral norms, laws and aspects of public policy. The first two essays, by Jurgen De Wispelaere and Saul Smilansky, explore the basic relationship between altruism and the nature of morality. De Wispelaere interprets altruism as being centrally concerned with people’s motives, rather than the other-regarding sphere as such. He argues that, though it is a morally valuable disposition, altruism needs embedding within a comprehensive moral framework if we are to avoid various undesirable moral consequences. An altruistic disposition on its own does not always meet the

INTRODUCTION 3

demands of common sense morality, and De Wispelaere examines three ways this can occur. First, in cases where people cannot assist all those who need help, they might prioritise their aid using criteria—racial prejudice, for example—that we would judge morally unacceptable. Similarly, where communities of altruists seek to aid those worse off, it is consistent with their altruism not to employ any recognisably moral criteria to do so—thus they may pass on their wealth, but not according to need, for example. Finally, in societies where some people are more altruistic and others more selfish, it is not clear that the altruists should do all the moral work there is to be done. If they do so, they take on more than their fair share of moral burdens, but if they do not, they will leave many moral demands unsatisfied. What altruism lacks is some kind of objective structuring of moral demands, and the solution, according to De Wispelaere, is to shape people’s altruistic dispositions using the sort of impartialist moral theory popular with many liberal writers. While De Wispelaere’s basic argument is that altruistic motives are not enough from a moral point of view, the following essay, by Saul Smilansky, reverses that conclusion by reflecting on the fact that gratitude, the response typically evoked in the beneficiaries of others’ altruism, is hard to explain using standard moral terms. Deontology, consequentialism, contractarianism and virtue ethics all have trouble with gratitude. The reason why gratitude is an ‘embarrassment’ to ethical theory stems from the way these traditional approaches neglect the centrality of contribution, and the rest of Smilansky’s essay sketches an alternative moral perspective that makes sense of it. On this ‘contributivist’ view, the basic imperative of the moral agent is to act in such a way that he benefits the lives of others, and, in general has a positive moral input in the world. (Such an attitude is clearly related to, but not identical with, consequentialism). Gratitude is the appropriate response towards those who are moral contributors: indeed Smilansky stresses how our ‘reactivecontributions’ to others’ valuable efforts—the gratitude, enjoyment, satisfaction and so on, manifested in us—tend to enhance their value and thus make a further positive contribution to the world. Rather than locating moral action in rules, contracts, virtue or overall utility, the contributivist view, focuses on each person’s own input of value. In doing so, it retains an intimate connection between who we are and what we do, a connection that is also central to our intuitions about altruism (of the supererogatory kind). While the first two essays explore the connection between altruism and morality, the third, by Robert Paul Churchill and Erin Street, shifts attention away from the general nature of altruistic or moral action towards the nature of the agent who engages in it. Several studies of altruistic behaviour—in particular, those that looked at rescuers of Jews in


Nazi-occupied Europe—have concluded that it could be explained less by external, for example socio-cultural, circumstances, but rather by the personality traits of those who chose to help others—often at considerable cost to themselves (Oliner & Oliner 1988; Monroe 1996). Examining what this research concludes about the altruistic personality, however, Churchill and Street identify a paradox. On the one hand, altruists perceived themselves to be part of a common humanity and identified strongly with those whom they rescued. But on the other hand, and bearing in mind that the vast majority of people were not rescuers, the altruists were distinguished by a strong sense of self-direction and independence from others. With these two contradictory tendencies, it remains somewhat mysterious what sort of personality the altruist has. Churchill and Street survey a number of attempts to dissolve this paradox. They conclude that in extending their sphere of concern for others, altruists can actually enhance their individuality: a person can show compassion for others without necessarily weakening the boundaries between herself and them. Churchill and Street cast doubt on any simple distinction between self-interested and other-regarding action from a psychological perspective. Benefiting others can serve one’s larger interest in self-development. The following two essays, by Keith Graham and Jeff Noonan, reach similar conclusions from the standpoint of moral philosophy: for Graham and Noonan, the moral question is ‘What are the circumstances when other people’s interests and desires should take precedence over my own?’ Their starting point is the essentially self-interested agent who needs some reason to take others’ interests into account. Graham explores two sets of intuitions which disrupt this starkly individualist picture. The first of these takes issue with the doctrine of the distinctness of persons, defended by Rawls, Nozick and other anti-utilitarian writers. Graham notes the myriad ways that the satisfaction of one person’s desires has implications for other people’s lives, and in particular the satisfaction or frustration of other people’s desires. This, in itself, should unsettle any simple view of the distinctness of persons. Second, Graham draws attention to the way that through their participation in groups, individuals collectively identify with common ends and intentions, thus displacing a pre-occupation with their own ends. The commitment to joint activities which collective identification involves, though related to altruistic motivation, is, in an important sense, not altruistic since it is a shared good, not the particular good of others which people seek to advance. The message of Graham’s essay is that the polarity between self- and other-regarding (altruistic) interests is an inadequate way to describe the complexity of people’s actual motivations.

INTRODUCTION 5

Noonan’s essay goes further than Graham’s in attacking the very idea that moral reasoning should begin with a basic presumption of self-interest. Noonan begins with a historical survey which reveals the common presumption of an agent-relative characterisation of the good in the otherwise quite different moral theories of Hobbes, Kant and Mill. In contrast with individualist approaches which locate the good in the different desires of disembodied individuals, Noonan outlines a materialist conception of ethics which stresses our deep interdependence on each other for meeting our basic needs of life. The mutual dependence that comes from our organic nature can, contra individualism, found a universal and substantive notion of the good as need satisfaction. The basic question of materialist ethics is whether or not human beings’ needs of life can or cannot be met in different types of social formations, in sharp distinction to the narrower liberal question of whether my pursuit of my own desires harms other people. Noonan goes on to explicate the different classes of needs that humans possess—from basic survival needs to more complex needs to develop our higher capacities. In adopting the perspective of universal need satisfaction, the moral agent is, once again, neither self-interested nor altruistic but rather conscious of playing his part in realising human persons’ shared good. While Noonan’s essay, inspired by Marxism and critical theory, radically challenges the individualism and inequality of market societies, the following three essays, by Miller, Fabre and Seglow, all start (and finish) closer to home. They are pre-occupied with the question of how altruistic motives might be strengthened in the large, anonymous societies which are our own; societies where most people are strangers to one another and are more pre-concerned with their own affairs than the needs and interests of distant others. David Miller’s central question is ‘When should I be altruistic?’, that is, given the virtually unlimited ways that I could benefit needy people, how should I decide when I should act? Surveying empirical studies of when and where people were willing to assist others reveals that people’s altruism is strongly influenced by contextual factors such as the similarity of the person in distress to the person willing to help. Rather than reject this fact as evidence of moral weakness, Miller appeals to the widely held altruistic motivation to do one’s fair share of meeting people’s needs. Institutionalised altruism (such as the welfare state) and Good Samaritan laws which require people to come to the aid of fellow citizens in great peril by calling the emergency services, giving first aid and so on, are two examples. Miller considers at more length the possibility of strengthening norms that connect people in need to those people able to help them, an approach which has the advantage of building on altruistic practices within different social groups, even though (as he


recognises) it raises the danger of unequal access to others’ assistance. Here again, then, we see the conflict between altruism as a general other-regarding concern for people’s interests—with the assumption that each person’s interests count equally—and altruism interpreted in a more exclusionary way, as a desire to further only certain people’s good. Cécile Fabre’s essay defends at more length Good Samaritan laws, common in many continental legal systems, but largely absent from Anglo-American law. A common liberal attitude towards such laws is that, though the failure to help those in distress is morally blameworthy, a person who fails to assist a fellow citizen in peril has not violated any moral duty. But rather than view this as an unfortunate lack of altruism, Fabre argues that imperilled people have a right to the assistance of those who can help. Her reasons for thinking so hinge on an analogy with enforceable duties of justice. If better-off people have duties to help provide the worse-off with those material resources they need in order to lead decent lives—a fairly uncontroversial view—then it seems hard to deny that we have a duty to help those in great distress since serious injury also stands in the way of living a decent life. Fabre concludes that Good Samaritan laws can and should be enforced by the state. What some might see as an area of discretionary choice—should I altruistically go to the aid of my fellow citizens or not?—is for her too important to be left so contingent: thus some kinds of altruism come to be assimilated to the enforceable part of morality. The original Good Samaritan was of course an archetypical altruist, but whether legally enforced Good Samaritan laws make us more altruistic is a separate question. In my own essay I argue that coercively enforcing altruistic duties submerges people’s altruistic motives under the demands of justice (which is not to say that these intrusions on our freedom may not be justified). I go on to consider the more subtle ways the state can encourage people’s altruism and whether we can have reasonable objections to it doing so from the point of view of individual freedom. I argue that there should be no general presumption in favour of some intrinsic value called freedom. Whether the state can justifiably interfere in our freedom depends on the value of the opportunities which we freely engage. Directly and indirectly, the state helps create and maintain valuable social opportunities. Strengthening communities and social networks can be an indirect way of improving people’s altruistic motives, and may even enlarge our freedom by providing more valuable social opportunities with which we can engage. Alasdair Maclean’s essay returns to consider the issues involved in the more directly freedom-restricting policy of compulsory organ donation. Normally people must give their consent to be donors (although given that organs are

INTRODUCTION 7

required for prolonging life one might argue that this should be an enforceable duty too). At any rate, the moral and legal problems arise in a particularly acute way where the potential donors are children or mentally incompetent adults, since the law deems them incapable of giving consent. The question then arises of what can stand as a proxy for consent, and in particular whether those incapable of consenting might be compelled to part with their organs. Maclean surveys a number of legal cases where judges have indeed sanctioned such drastic action, on the grounds that it is in the ‘best interests’ of the potential donor—for example, where donation enabled the continuance of a valuable close relationship between donor and recipient. He concludes, however, that the best interests test has generally been manipulated by the courts in order to engineer results that judges think morally good. Thus just those people who cannot choose to be altruistic are being used to help engineer results that third parties would judge to be so. Hillel Steiner’s short essay also considers organ donation, this time in the context of Richard Titmuss’s famous study of blood donation, The Gift Relationship (Titmuss 1997). Titmuss famously argued against the commercialisation of blood on the grounds that, in the absence of a market, individuals would be more likely to donate to others, thus fostering altruism and strengthening the gift relationship. (Since donation is voluntary, Titmuss clearly intended altruism in its supererogatory sense). In contrast to Titmuss’s broadly utilitarian perspective, Steiner examines the possible marketisation of human body parts from the perspective of individual rights. Steiner notes that altruistic donation implies that individuals must own what they donate—their blood or their body parts—but, if that is the case, it is not clear why they should be forbidden to sell them. In a further argument, Titmuss objects to the possible corruption in scientific or medical standards which commercialisation may entail, and the exploitation of the poor and needy which a market for blood or body parts may bring. Steiner responds that the possible corruption of social practices is best prevented by a controlled and regulated market, not by no market at all. A market for body parts is the most efficient means of redistributing resources and meeting needs, and therefore should be endorsed from both a rights-based perspective and Titmuss’s utilitarian concern with people’s welfare. Whatever one’s view of Steiner’s conclusions, or indeed that of the other contributors to this volume, the questions they raise about the nature and value of altruism, and its relationship to the rest of morality, remain pressing ones. Taken as a whole, the contributions to this volume make explicit the role of altruism in negotiating our present day moral and political dilemmas.


NOTES 1. D.Miller, ‘Are they my poor?’, pp. 106–27 in this volume. 2. For further discussion on the different ways that altruism can be interpreted and its relation to impartialist moral philosophy, see the Introduction and papers collected in McBride and Seglow (2003).

REFERENCES Hampton, J. 1993,‘Selflessness and loss of Self’. Paul 1993:135–65. McBride, C. & J.Seglow, eds. 2003. Altruism, Egoism and Impartiality, special issue of Res Publica, 9/3. Monroe, K.R. 1996. The Heart of Altruism. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Oliner, S.P. & P.M.Oliner. 1988. The Altruistic Personality. New York: The Free Press. Paul, E.F. et al. eds. 1993. Altruism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Titmuss, R. 1997. The Gift Relationship: From Human Blood to Social Policy. Ed. Ann Oakley & John Ashton. New York: The New Press.

2 Altruism, Impartiality and Moral Demands JURGEN DE WISPELAERE

Moral Demands and Moral Motivation Morality typically imposes considerable demands on individuals. That is, any practical account of how people should behave towards one another—whether to establish a modus vivendi to avoid a Hobbesian war-of-allagainst-all, or to promote a more inclusive Rawlsian well-ordered society—requires that individuals adhere to a set of rules, guidelines or maxims that pose some constraints on their decisions, choices and actions. The specific content of these demands obviously varies with the particular features of the moral theory in question, but even theories that are explicitly concerned with promoting agents’ self-interest readily accept the idea of moral demands as justified constraints on personal (or group) agency.1 The idea of moral demands as a constraint on agency immediately raises the question whether a moral theory needs an account of why people should acknowledge these demands and adjust their behaviour accordingly. Following Christine Korsgaard (1996a) we can discern reasons for thinking that we ought to abide by moral demands—the justificatory component—and reasons that agents actually employ when engaging in action or decision-making—the motivational component. There is undoubtedly considerable dispute amongst contemporary moral theorists about the question whether a motivational component should be an inclusive part of a moral theory (Mendus 2002:9–18). But I think Korsgaard (1996a:14) has it basically right when she claims that ‘a theory of moral concepts which left the practical and psychological effects of moral ideas inexplicable could not even hope to justify it’. A moral theory that imposes overly demanding requirements—that is, requirements that would render it effectively impossible to motivate individuals to behave in accordance with them2—is inherently


problematic as a theory of practical reasoning (O’Neill 2000; Nagel 1970, 1991). Motivations to respect moral demands come in two basic forms. Some agents will be directly motivated to adhere to the terms of the moral theory: they accept the demands—rules, regulations and maxims—dictated by the theory and consequently comply with them out of a sense of morality.3 For instance, I may refrain from cheating on my tax returns because I firmly believe that, as a matter of justice, the state has a right to require me to contribute towards the provision of public goods and the assistance of fellow citizens who face less favourable life prospects. My willingly allowing the state to tax my income or wealth here signifies my acceptance of the basic rules of justice, and the way they apply to society as a whole and me in particular.4 This motivation can be contrasted with that of agents who are motivated, not by acceptance of the requirement of justice, but by a concern for others. Concern for others reflects a distinctive moral disposition from the other-regarding outlook entailed in most common moral theories.5 The distinction between both is complex, but I believe it has important implications. When I express a concern for others, and a willingness to respond positively to certain moral demands because I care about others, I do not in any way signal acceptance of any particular moral theory. Of course this is not to say that a disposition to care for others cannot indirectly support the moral demands associated with a moral theory. Suppose I happily donate to a poverty relief charity because I am deeply touched by the fate of those living in dire poverty. I may not think about justice at all, or even agree that I have a duty grounded in justice to do so, yet I may inadvertently discharge precisely the sort of obligations that a particular theory of justice would require of me. Adherents of that particular theory of justice might then have no qualms about ‘enlisting’ my caring disposition to bring poverty relief about. However, because of this rather loose connection between my disposition to care for others and the requirements associated with a moral theory, it is also entirely possible that I fail to respond appropriately to moral demands. It is this latter aspect that is the prime topic of this paper, and I shall proceed by outlining a number of cases that appear to fail in this respect. Note that an ‘inappropriate’ response might mean that I fail to address certain moral demands, despite being disposed to care about others; it could also mean that I take on more demands than I should to discharge my obligations. The problem has some similarity to the occurrence of Type I and II statistical errors in social policy. In social policy, rules often imperfectly track certain social objectives—say, poverty relief—and policy makers regularly have to make a choice between minimising errors that provide relief to non-deserving or

ALTRUISM, IMPARTIALITY AND MORAL DEMANDS 11

non-eligible recipients and failing to provide relief to deserving or eligible recipients (Goodin 1985). Perhaps one could argue, following the analogy of welfare policy, that a disposition to care for others only tracks moral demands imperfectly, thus leading to the mentioned two types of failure to respond accurately to moral demands.6 To illustrate these issues I shall look at how altruistic dispositions fare in respect to the compliance with moral demands. Altruism is a theory about individuals’ inherently beneficial and, therefore, morally desirable motivational dispositions towards furthering other people’s good, and as such a prime example of a disposition to act out of a concern for others.7 To say that altruism is inherently beneficial is not to say that the theory provides us with decisive moral reasons for behaving altruistically at all times; this would clearly be too strong a requirement. The sort of altruistic theory I believe would be much more plausible—call it pro tanto altruism—generates only conditional reasons, which, it is accepted, at times may be overridden by moral or even non-moral considerations.8 But accepting pro tanto altruism implies an explicit endorsement that performing an altruistic action is always good, while allowing an altruistic act to be overridden by other pressing reasons, while justified, nevertheless implies some sort of moral loss. It is precisely this dual claim I want to argue against in this essay by showing how it fails to address moral demands that most common-sense accounts of morality would consider plausible. Outlining Altruism A first task of this essay is to outline unambiguously what altruistic dispositions are. Many writers outline altruism in vague terms, thereby inviting confusion and failing to point out what (if anything) is really distinctive about altruism. I propose to restrict altruism to a motivational disposition, according to which an intention or motivation to furthering other persons’ good is both the necessary and sufficient condition for an act to classify as altruistic. This raises a number of important issues, which will be discussed further. Altruism and Purposive Benefits Intuitively, the idea that the altruist purposively benefits herself is hard to combine with the notion of genuinely altruistic motivations. Acts that appear altruistic while in fact being motivated by an ‘enlightened’ form of self-interest only appear altruistic at face value: they are best referred to as quasi-altruistic. A well-known example of quasi-altruism is the traditional


custom of gift-giving in the Trobriand culture, famously described by Bronislaw Malinowski and others (Malinowski 1932; Mauss 1954). Anthropologists have discovered that the custom of the gift is in fact a social mechanism, rooted in the structure of kinship relations, aimed at producing socially beneficial reciprocal obligations. Richard Titmuss, author of a seminal book on the gift of blood donation, comments that to give is to receive—to compel some return or create some obligation—either in the form of a similar or different material gift or in the overt expression of sentiment, pleasure or pain, manifested in physical acts of behaviour on the part of the recipient. No such gift is or can be utterly detached, disinterested or impersonal. Each carries messages and motives in its own language. (Titmuss 1997:227; Arrow, 1972) What is often described as ‘reciprocal altruism’ in evolutionary biology and game theory bears little resemblance to the moral disposition under review here (Trivers 1971). Quasi-altruistic social transfers are both very common and very valuable in society, but they do not fit the analytical category of an altruistic act precisely because their primary motivation is not a fundamental concern for the other but rather a Humean enlightened self-interest.10 Once we accept the distinction between altruism and quasi-altruism, many apparent cases of altruistic behaviour turn out not to properly fit the definition. Altruism and Unintentional Benefits The same arguments do not affect the case where an agent unintentionally benefits from an act that was entirely motivated by a concern for others. Provided the benefit is genuinely an unintentional side-effect, there is little reason to doubt the altruistic character of the act. If we were to impose a ‘no-benefit rule’ on altruistic actions we face a number of problems of a predominantly epistemic nature. First, since individuals have only limited foresight into the effects of their actions, it is conceivable that what started out as an altruistic act—that is, an act entirely motivated to benefit others and not oneself—has long-term consequences that end up benefiting the altruist. Suppose I save a little child from being run over by a speeding car. The boy grows up to become a medical researcher and invents the cure for a disease I end up suffering in my old days. Does my initial altruistic act suddenly become any less altruistic because I happen to end up benefiting from it decades later? A related problem arises in cases where altruism generates an immediate


benefit but the altruist is not aware of it, or could not in any way have foreseen it. Suppose I save another little child from a speeding car. This time the boy happens to have extremely rich and grateful parents who insist on depositing a large sum of money into my account. The split-second I decided to pull the boy away from of the car I could not have known that his rich parents would reward me handsomely—in fact, I would hardly have the time to deliberate costs and benefits associated with my action—and thus my action can be said to be genuinely motivated by my concern for the child’s welfare. Again, it would seem rather absurd to insist that because of my benefiting from my actions the act itself does not qualify as an example of altruistic behaviour. The relation between altruism and unintended benefits is of considerable importance, for genuine altruism may, on balance, produce systematic beneficial side-effects for those who exhibit altruistic dispositions. The economist Robert Frank (1988) has advanced an original evolutionary argument to explain why genuine altruists overall do better in a competitive society than non-altruists. According to Frank, people are more likely to cooperate with genuine altruists since the latter are less likely to renege on promises or contracts or pursue adverse rent-seeking strategies. Frank’s argument of course depends crucially on individuals’ capacity to effectively distinguish genuine altruists from quasi-altruists, since the latter have every reason to want to be perceived as genuine by potential cooperators. The adequate perception of altruistic or at least cooperative dispositions is channelled through the public display of emotions, including minute signals sent out by our body language that are notoriously hard to fake.11 In all these examples the key to determining the altruistic character of the respective acts is that the benefits to the altruist are relevantly independent from the motivation underlying the act. In each case, it is the failure to observe this independence, and not the level of benefit to the altruist, that separates altruism from quasi-altruism. Altruism and Self-Sacrifice Let us now turn to perhaps the most controversial dimension of altruism. The need for self-sacrifice is often12 thought of as closely associated with altruism, but I believe this thought rests on a serious confusion between conceptual analysis and valuation. It is of course trivially true that each act of altruism requires some sacrifice: each action has opportunity costs, so an action geared at advancing someone else’s well-being implies foregoing options for pure personal gain. But this trivial notion of self-sacrifice is not what is at stake in the altruism debate.13 To see this, consider the question whether there is a


positive correlation between the degree of self-sacrifice and the degree of altruism exhibited in a particular act. Is the fact that someone incurs additional costs necessarily a reason for thinking that act more altruistic? I believe not. Suppose a friend of yours has fallen on hard times and asks for your help. You are quite keen to help her and figure there are two ways of doing this. The first would make her better off in absolute terms; a second solution would help her out significantly but not quite as much as the first. Assume in addition that the first situation requires less in terms of self-sacrifice compared to the second. You now face a choice between maximising your friend’s well-being or maximising the level of your personal effort in helping her. I think the act that maximises your friend’s well-being is more altruistic than the one that implies more sacrifice on your part.14 So why is it widely held that an altruistic act deserves more appreciation when it involves some self-sacrifice than an equally beneficial act that was less demanding? I do not think such an appreciation is misconceived or irrelevant; on the contrary, I wholeheartedly agree that acts of personal sacrifice should be commended and merit social respect. But I simply do not think the sacrifice element renders the act itself any more altruistic. In my view, the degree of altruism is solely determined by how strong a person’s commitment is to furthering other people’s well-being entirely independent of regard of her own personal gain or loss.15 The latter qualification equally implies to the level of personal sacrifice involved.16 In other words, self-sacrifice is not central but rather epiphenomenal to altruism: while taking into account that certain sacrifices rightly command admiration and commendation, to determine whether an act is more or less altruistic we only need look at the motivation for furthering other people’s good. Altruism ‘Tracking’ Moral Demands In this section I question whether altruism properly ‘tracks’ moral demands by analysing to what extent it allows—approves or fails to disapprove of—actions that are on some plausible common-sense view considered immoral. Typical examples of altruism include instances of gift-giving—the voluntary17 transfer of goods and resources from oneself to others—and rescue cases—often involving personal action rather than material aid.18 In this section I will make ample use of such examples to elucidate my arguments. Mixed Motivations Let me begin by introducing a typical example of altruism:


Random Rescue—You are taking a walk along the neighbourhood lake and witness how two individuals fall out of a little boat. They are both clearly in distress and are at risk of drowning, shouting out for your help. You want to help but you face a hard choice: being only a moderately good swimmer with little experience, you guesstimate you can save one of them but not both. You make a random choice and swim towards one victim and pull her out: unfortunately by the time you return to save the other person, he has drowned. In this crude example there is little doubt that your action is to be recommended. You have acted altruistically by saving one person, at some personal discomfort and possibly even risk, and should be commended for your action. The drowning of the second person is an unfortunate event, but surely there is no way you should be blamed for failing to save him under those conditions. To put it differently, the drowned person has no cause for complaint against you for making a random judgement call to save the other person first. But let us now vary the example a little, by focusing a bit more on the choice of whom to save. Consider the following variation on the story: Bigot—You are a bigot at heart and you notice that one of the people at risk of drowning is of your own race, while the other is clearly not. Again you jump in and save one person, but in making a choice between them you let yourself be guided by your racist inclinations. How should we evaluate your action in this case? On the one hand, you deserve commendation for saving one person. Moreover, one could even argue that, on a purely consequentialist basis, your action produced exactly the same outcome as in our initial example: one person is saved, the other unfortunately drowned. Does the fact that your bigotry influenced your choice of whom to save have any further relevance? I think it does once we consider again whether the person that was not saved had a reason for a complaint. It appears she would have, since her being of a different race clearly meant she had less chances of being saved (perhaps no chance, if your bigotry runs deep). And since those reasons themselves would appear to be unacceptable in common-sense morality, that complaint carries serious moral weight. To fully appreciate the ethical importance of the reasons underlying the choice of which to save, consider two further cases: Prudence—You make a choice in favour of one person solely based on the grounds that she has drifted less far so the risks of saving her would


be substantially smaller, while the chances of succeeding would be higher. Parent—You see that one of the drowning children is your own child, while the other is that of a friend. You decide saving your own child first. First compare the situation of Bigot with that of Prudence. Could the drowned person have a possible complaint against the saviour because of a decision weighted by non-moral properties? It would seem farfetched to think he does: it is true that his chances of being saved where effectively reduced, but prudential reasoning in this case seems fully acceptable.19 The cases of Parent and Bigot perhaps bear closer resemblance in that both judgements are based on non-prudential properties between those in need. The question whether personal attachments such as parent and child, or friends, or perhaps even fellow-nationals may provide sufficient reason for prioritising amongst the needy is a matter of some controversy.20 But let us assume, following conventional wisdom, that associative attachments and close relationship represent a different category of moral reasons than those based on ‘objective’ properties such as race, class or gender. Thus here too we might conclude that parent was fully justified to save her own child first, given strong maternal ties and the psychological difficulties in disassociating oneself from them, whereas Bigot’s reason for preferring to save the same-race person remain highly suspect. What are the implications of this discussion for altruism? The first thing to note is that altruism suffers from a serious form of moral myopia in that it appears to have few resources to appreciate the problematic issues at hand. It is not just that Bigot has a deplorable disposition that mixes with his (commendable) altruistic outlook; the real issue is that altruism as a moral perspective has no way of judging what has been going on in Bigot’s ‘altruistic’ rescue act. For the altruist, the only thing that counts is a motivation to advance the wellbeing of (some) other(s): by jumping in and saving one person, Bigot has satisfied this requirement. Any further assessment of the larger picture—in particular, the mixing of ulterior reasons with one’s altruistic disposition—does not feature. The result may be reformulated as a failure to abide by the moral demand to respect a person irrespective of her race, an outcome that discredits the idea that pro tanto altruism is inherently desirable.


Mixed Outcomes However, we do not necessarily have to rely on morally suspect ulterior motives to appreciate the limited scope of altruism. Consider yet another story: Unbalanced Gifts—Suppose a society of altruists have a convention in which those who are rich regularly donate part of their wealth to some of those who are poor. But let us now assume that those altruists are only governed by the motivation to donate to someone who is less well off, and employ a completely random selection of whom to pass their wealth to. The outcome of this gift-giving is an unequal distribution in which some of the poor receive multiple gifts while others are left without a gift. In this story there is no problem with unacceptable ulterior motivations. The resulting outcome is entirely caused by what might be called systematic bad luck (Dowding 1996). In reality many examples seem to fit with the presence of systematic bad luck. For instance, the fact that few women are actively present in electoral politics may have nothing to do with preferences or actions from their male colleagues, but may be due to a social environment that systematically singles out properties that favour male politicians (Phillips 1995). Similarly, labour markets often discriminate against people who have no access to a network of ‘weak ties’, without there being any instance of wrong-doing on the part of employers or fellow job-seekers (Granovetter 1974). Conventional wisdom and many moral and political theories, in particular those rooted in impartiality or substantial equality, would consider this a deplorable outcome despite the absence of bad actions. The fact that the rich are willing to share their wealth is undoubtedly good, but the actual distribution runs afoul of what a more egalitarian or impartial account would require. Altruism’s focus on strict motivations again appears to lack the necessary resources to fully appreciate the situation. The supposedly inherently desirable disposition towards altruism may in fact be instrumental in maintaining an ethically suboptimal outcome, which in turn might be considered a failure to observe particular moral demands.21 This again contradicts the assumption that pro tanto altruism always contributes to the good. The examples in this and the previous subsection establish ways in which altruists fail to fully observe moral demands. To put it differently, each case


could be interpreted as grounds for some agents to lodge a complaint against altruists. Next I examine ways in which altruists would be entitled to lodge a complaint against others for not observing moral demands.22 Some readers may object to this because they believe that altruists can never be said to have cause for complaint since, by definition, they gain personal satisfaction from other agents’ increased satisfaction.23 I disagree, because altruists, like any other person, might be susceptible to perverse pressures to adapt their preferences. The hallmark of adaptive preferences is that they are often considered deplorable on an objective account precisely because they render an agent worse off than they would have been in the absence of that particular preference or disposition. An agent who has an altruistic disposition may not lament unfair demands but might still deplore the fact that she actually has an altruistic disposition. In fact, as I will show, it is merely another example of altruism’s limited scope that altruists often cannot properly assess whether their action presents a case of taking on too many burdens. Partial Compliance Dilemma Let us consider a world in which two facts hold. First, fully satisfying moral demands requires collective action. Individually, moral demands impose restrictions on agents’ actions—sometimes requiring them to act against their immediate self-interest, and modify or perhaps even abandon some personal projects—but since few (if any) moral demands can be fully satisfied by any single person, we need to think about moral demands as requiring moral agents to cooperate to collectively ensure demands are satisfied.24 Second, far from constituting a one-motivational selfish or saint-like society, I assume a more plausible world that contains something like a normal distribution of self-centred ‘knaves’ and radically other-regarding ‘knights’ at either extreme, with a large number of mixed-motive moderate altruists (or ‘moderates’) in between. Moderates are individuals who respond altruistically or selfinterestedly depending on certain properties of the situation (LeGrand 1997; Frey 1997).25 Consider first an example in which agents deliberate non-strategically by assessing moral demands strictly in terms of the level of what needs to be done. Poverty Relief—To ensure that not a single individual ends up living below the poverty level, a society with 100 rich individuals requires each of them to donate 1% of their wealth to the poor. If only the


altruists (knights) among them comply with this demand, they would have to donate 20% of their wealth. Given a fixed background distribution of motivational dispositions, it becomes relatively easy to predict that knaves will largely neglect moral demands, knights most likely will behave altruistically, and the large contingent of moderates acting will end up wavering between altruistic or self-interested action. So in the context of a normal distribution of moral dispositions, altruists or knights encounter the familiar problem of partial compliance, which might lead to the following moral dilemma. All those who act altruistically succeed in jointly satisfying all the moral demands—leaving no real ‘moral deficit’, as it were. This effectively requires that some agents take on more than their fair share of the burden in the face of others shirking their moral obligations. Alternatively, altruists abide by what Liam Murphy (2000:76–82) has called the compliance condition. The compliance condition requires that agents respecting moral demands under partial compliance should not be left worse off compared with a situation in which everyone would comply fully: it ‘gives expression to the idea that an agent should not be required to “take up the slack left by the non-compliance of others’” (Murphy 2000:77).26 But remaining within the boundaries of the compliance condition of course means that not every moral demand will be satisfied, and a second type of unfairness ensues because now some legitimate moral claims are not addressed. The partial compliance dilemma forces altruists as it were to make a choice between ‘unfairness in the distribution of benefits’ and ‘unfairness in the distribution of burdens’. Partial compliance with moral demands also threatens the stability of an altruistic morality to the extent that most agents are in fact ‘conditional co-operators’ who, roughly put, comply with norms and rules provided a sufficient number of others are doing so as well.27 Significant failure to comply might then have a negative snowball effect in which, over time, all but the most extreme moral saints become non-compliers. This obviously represents the worst of possible outcomes, for it combines unfairness in the distribution of benefits with unfairness in the distribution of burdens.28 In such a situation it is primarily altruists who can lodge a complaint against those who shirk their moral obligations and initiate the vicious circle of ever-decreasing compliance. But this depends on altruists being able to discern whether others have shirked their obligations, which would require some account of a fair distribution of burdens in the first place—an account that is lacking in the altruist’s moral outlook. And even if altruism could provide such a theory this would not mean that it could prevent altruists from taking on more than their fair share in


virtue of being possessed with a disposition that attaches more importance to what happens to others than what happens to oneself. I shall return to this issue below. Samaritan’s Dilemma The partial compliance dilemma arises when agents deliberate parametrically, only looking at the demands to be fulfilled and not really taking into account the distribution of motivations of other agents. Next, consider a case where agents do not merely deliberate parametrically but also strategically. Once strategic interaction is introduced, altruistic morality becomes caught up in another famous social dilemma, introduced by James Buchanan in the 1970s (Buchanan 1975). The samaritan’s dilemma is a moral hazard problem rooted in the interaction of differentially motivated agents under conditions of imperfect information. The basic problem is as follows: agents who have a reasonable expectation of altruists assisting them in case of need may alter their own behaviour to shift the costs of preventing needs onto altruists.29 Buchanan’s analysis applies as much to one-to-one samaritan acts as to public systems of ‘samaritan support’, where the state takes on the role of a central altruist—typical examples include welfare assistance, health care, pension saving and so on. An often debated example would be the welfare parasite: Welfare Parasite—I know that if I do not finish school and get a proper qualification I may seriously jeopardise my chances of getting a well-paid job. But I happen to live in a society with generous unemployment benefits and other social assistance, so I do not actively pursue a degree or qualification. When later in life I cannot get a job as predicted, I happily rely on society’s generous assistance. The samaritan’s dilemma seems to take unfairness one step further by producing manifest exploitation. Free-riders who intentionally shift the costs of their actions onto those providing assistance do not merely fail to respond appropriately to moral obligations, but actively cause harm by externalising costs.30 In addition to the prospect of manifest exploitation, the samaritan’s dilemma too poses a considerable threat to the stability of altruistic morality. Where moderate altruists consider shifting towards non-compliance in cases where not enough other people comply because of a lack of solidarity, they are certainly likely to feel taken advantage of when realising that it is now the very


individuals they are assisting that take advantage of their altruistic dispositions. Altruists, again, have little defence against the samaritan’s dilemma: their disposition to care for others does not as such take strategic considerations into account. Once altruists start behaving strategically as well—a precondition for Buchanan to remedy the dilemma—they run the danger of actually having to modify their altruistic dispositions. Embedding Altruism In all the examples discussed above, the problem for altruism is clearly one of limited scope. The problems identified above are all symptoms of altruism’s common illness: a failure to perceive the full extent of moral demands. Altruism’s significant blind spot when it comes to identifying objective moral demands has at least two important implications. Since the altruist’s reasons for action are solely rooted in a concern for the well-being of others (without, it is important to keep in mind, affirming any moral theory about the need to further other agents’ well-being), the more altruistically an agent is disposed the more she will try to further others’ well-being. But the possession of an altruistic disposition is at the same time the only source of moral obligation; it therefore does not say anything about obligations for agents who are not similarly disposed. More worryingly, pro tanto altruists assume that their disposition is inherently desirable because it furthers the good; but the various examples above show that this is not self-evidently true. One key problem for altruists, then, is that they actually have no proper account of why we should value altruism as a motivational disposition in the first place if it turns out not always to deliver the good, understood as an appropriate response to moral demands.31 Altruistic dispositions produce a ‘push’ for agents to behave with concern for others, but this push remains essentially without direction—or rather, its direction might be determined by factors that form no part of a comprehensive moral theory—which explains why it fails to respond appropriately to a number of moral demands.32 The solution, I propose, is to embed altruistic dispositions into a more comprehensive moral theory. Such a theory would need to meet two requirements. First, it needs to have the capacity to determine and justify a set of moral demands, in addition to detailing how these demands give rise to various duties and obligations that agents are required to meet. Second, such a theory ideally has room for altruistic dispositions to operate within the constraints set by the theory, and at the same time explain why altruistic dispositions are valuable and should be actively promoted—again, within the confines of this theory.


The Theory of Impartiality One plausible candidate for the job, I think, is the political theory championed by Brian Barry (1995), justice as impartiality. Impartiality is a moral and political theory that captures a particular view of how people should relate to one another. Barry (1995:7) writes: ‘Principles of justice that satisfy its conditions are impartial because they capture a certain kind of equality: all those affected have to be able to feel that they have done as well as they could reasonably hope to.’ Barry readily admits that this account presumes a number of substantive moral ideas, while resisting any consequentialist reading of his theory. Impartiality as a substantive moral idea clearly provides ‘direction’ in practical reason (although many complexities enter the picture once we try to figure out precisely what it is that impartiality requires of us). As such it appears to provide the sort of ‘pull’ that might ‘direct’ altruism to a more acceptable position (provided of course one accepts impartiality as a good moral theory). However, at this point an important objection springs to mind: if the altruist is now motivated by impartiality, does this not render altruistic dispositions obsolete? If this were the case, it would amount to a failure of the second condition specified above and effectively render impartiality unsuitable as a candidate for embedding altruism. To counter the objection, we need to turn to a crucial distinction between first-order and second-order impartiality. In Justice as Impartiality, Barry (1995:11) explains the distinction as follows: What the theory of impartiality calls for are principles and rules that are capable of forming the basis of free agreement among people seeking agreement on reasonable terms. If we call impartiality in this context second-order impartiality, we can contrast it with first-order impartiality, which is a requirement of impartial behaviour incorporated in a precept. Roughly speaking, behaving impartially here means not being motivated by private considerations. Barry furthermore argues that second-order impartiality does not require universal first-order impartiality, which opens up opportunities for combining partial considerations at the level of day-to-day decision making with the requirement that our background rules are governed by the principle of impartiality.33 If we concede, with Barry, that impartiality only requires us to accept and promote impartial rules, regulations and procedures at the ‘constitutional’ level, this means altruists can go about their daily business being motivated by their altruistic dispositions. In other words, there is no


conflict between altruism—which is essentially a first-order account of morality—and second-order impartiality. Of course, once second-order impartial rules are in place and properly instituted, they will mediate and to some extent constrain altruists’ range of actions. But this is of course precisely what we are looking for: second-order impartial mediation can be interpreted as a form of self-binding that prevents altruists and other agents from violating in their day-to-day engagements the very principles of impartiality they endorse at the level of abstract principle.34 Once designed and implemented, impartial social institutions may significantly raise the costs of acting in a partial way, or even eradicating the option of doing so altogether, thus countering overly partialist outcomes of actions initiated by altruists.35 How does an ‘impartially embedded altruism’ fare with respect to the moral and social dilemmas discussed before. First, in the case of ‘mixed motivations’, impartial background rules would clearly rule out the sort of special privilege of Bigot. One could doubt whether in that particular story an impartial morality could properly regulate an altruist’s behaviour. To those critics I submit another example that is relevantly similar to the rescuing case. Suppose Bigot indicates that he is willing to donate his organs after death for transplant purposes, but specifies that they should only be used for same-race transplants.36 Second-order impartiality could easily render such a decision legally invalid, offering the altruist a mere choice whether to donate his organs or not. Second, similar arguments apply to the case of ‘mixed outcomes’: even when no unacceptable motives are present, impartial regulations might be instituted to prevent the sort of hidden discrimination we still come across with respect to, say, the position of women or racial minorities in politics or the labour market (Barry 1995). In both cases, the altruist’s dispositions to care for others are left intact while being simultaneously mediated by impartial second-order considerations. Let us now consider the final two cases. First, in my view impartially embedded altruism provides a good answer to the problem of partial compliance. When impartial institutions properly enforce compliance with general rules, they make it harder for knaves to shirk their social obligations. This has not only implications concerning the prevention of knights being unfairly disadvantaged, but has also important consequences with respect to the stability the social system. A reliable system of rules provides just the sort of reassurance that moderate altruists require in order to keep complying with moral demands.37 One might still wonder why we need impartiality to set enforceable rules and not simply argue the case for ‘altruistic’ regulation. The reason this option is a non-starter is precisely because the first-order/


second-order distinction simply does not apply to altruism. There is something distinctively odd about ‘being forced to behave altruistically’; either one has an altruistic disposition or not.38 Finally, in the case of the ‘samaritan’s dilemma’, impartial rules provide the sort of solution Buchanan himself advocates: social institutions restrain the free-riding option of claimants or recipients, thus preventing altruists from being exploited and ensuring stability.39 Now, nothing prevents one from adopting an altruistic perspective and, at the same time, recommending rules that prevent the sort of free-riding that produces the samaritan’s dilemma.40 After all, altruism is not incompatible with forcibly constraining free-riding recipients. Hence one might conclude first-order altruism is not really threatened by the samaritan’s dilemma after all. But perhaps there remains a subtle but important distinction between altruistic and impartial theories of morality. An important question in the regulation of the samaritan’s dilemma concerns the sort of rules or regulations one needs to introduce to achieve the objective. Impartialist moral theory has the resources to impose a set of principles that apply across the board by setting a common standard of morality for knaves, knights and (potentially free-riding) claimants alike. Each set of rules, even when applying to different agents, must be justified by the same impartial background considerations. Altruism, on the other hand, in effect needs to make up an entirely novel set of principles for regulating the behaviour of claimants. Impartiality has the advantage of being the more parsimonious of both theories in this respect. In a sense, the last point gets us back to an argument introduced earlier—to wit, altruism lacks an objective account of moral demands. Why (and How) to Value Altruism? One final aspect of impartially embedded altruism needs to be addressed. So far I have argued that embedding altruism resolves the sort of problems detailed before, but I have not yet said anything why an altruistic disposition should be valued within an impartial theory. One could after all argue that it is the second-order impartial considerations that seem to be doing all the ethical work in an impartially embedded altruism. Rejecting altruism clearly flies in the face of common-sense morality, which, across the board, deeply values altruistic acts, but this does not preclude the possibility that common-sense morality may be wrong. Is there a way to justify positively valuing altruism within a theory of impartial morality? I believe there is, and in the remaining section I shall briefly provide one possible argument.


Impartiality sets out providing a set of rules, principles and maxims that form a background against which agents can pursue their personal goals—whatever they are. Second-order impartial principles also require a set of social mechanisms that ensure that agents will operate within the constraints imposed by considerations of impartiality. Possible mechanisms could include a system of monitoring in combination with material penalties in case of transgression, but an equally plausible arrangement is to employ social carrots and sticks such as esteem and disesteem (Brennan & Pettit 2000). Unfortunately, institutions often track moral principles only imperfectly, leaving a niche for agents non-complying with moral demands. A possible solution might be to employ individual’s intrinsic motivation to care for one another as a further ‘proximate mechanism’ to ensure impartiality (Sober and Wilson 2000: 109–122). Under these conditions, altruism has a significant beneficial effect to the extent that the more people are altruistically motivated the less they will take advantage of niches for opportunistic behaviour. A good measure of altruism improves the effectiveness of impartial rules and regulations. A second reason why altruism might have a beneficial impact on second-order impartiality has to do with the efficient organisation of impartial rules. Minimising opportunities for free-riding or otherwise non-complying with moral demands might prove to be a task that becomes self-defeating in terms of implying extensive moral and organisational costs—for instance, immense monitoring is often associated with considerable intrusion in our private lives. Altruistic dispositions might contribute to the efficiency of impartial regulation by allowing comparatively less intrusive monitoring. We should not underestimate the extent to which moral motivation contributes to the co-ordination of behaviour (Frey 1997), even within social institutions that combine screening, monitoring and sanctioning to ensure compliance with moral demands as fully as possible, and should actively make use of those motivations wherever possible. I think this provides a good instrumental rationale for a theory of impartiality to value altruistic acts. Clearly, if we accept that altruistic dispositions play an important role at the level of proximate mechanisms, it appears impartial regulators have every reason to actively promote altruism. Unfortunately it is not the case that altruism can simply be plugged into any kind of regulatory system. In recent years scholars have warned against the tendency of policy makers to focus solely or even primarily on external incentives—principally financial incentives—to ensure compliance, arguing that a system that relies heavily on such external incentives runs a serious risk of crowding out intrinsic altruistic motivations (Frey 1997). This point was already made forcefully in Richard


Titmuss’s (1997) study on blood donation, but the force of his insight is increasingly appreciated across many policy areas (Le Grand 1997). Most studies now accept that there are important demonstration effects to consider in the design of social institutions (e.g., Jones and Cullis 2000). A policy design that is sensitive to the effects of crowding out must clearly balance two related concerns. First, what sort of policies are immediately required as a matter of impartial justice, given a particular distribution of knaves, knights and moderates? Second, how do we ensure impartiality today with concerns regarding the stability of future arrangements, given the dynamics of crowding in/crowding out? Managing these potentially conflicting policy goals requires an approach that exhibits sensitivity to variation and contingency in background circumstances.41 It is not the purpose of this essay to further consider these issues, but moral theorists should be aware that there are important practical considerations at play when trying to embed altruism within impartiality. Conclusion This essay is informed by the conviction that a theory of morality built on altruistic foundations is a non-starter, and that contemporary political philosophy has rightly replaced a concern for altruism with a concern for impartiality.42 I have made two main claims. First, I argued pro tanto altruism, and its insistence on every altruistic act being inherently desirable, is untenable. Next I maintained the problems associated with pro tanto altruism could be mediated by embedding altruism within a more comprehensive moral theory, and I suggested Brian Barry’s (1995) theory of impartiality might be a suitable candidate for this job. While the upshot of this essay is to argue against the foundational status of pro tanto altruism, I do not in any way intend to deny the fact that altruism could play an important role as a proximate mechanism. Once embedded within a robust theory of impartiality, an agent’s altruistic dispositions are safeguarded against the problems and dilemmas identified in this essay. In addition, I believe altruism has a significant positive impact on the fairness and stability of a society governed by impartialist principles, and for that reason deserves to be valued and promoted. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am grateful to the Hoover Chair in Economic and Social Ethics, Catholic University of Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve for providing a stimulating environment in which to write this essay, and to Els Compernolle,


Cillian McBride, Jonathan Seglow, Lindsay Stirton, Philippe Van Parijs and the participants of a Hoover Chair seminar for useful comments on a previous draft. Finally, thanks are due to Jonathan Seglow for being an extremely patient editor. NOTES 1. See e.g. David Gauthier (1986) on ‘constrained maximization’, or Nozick (1974) on rights as side-constraints on personal action. 2. There is a relevant distinction between requirements being motivationally demanding (the sense employed above) and requirements being normatively demanding. In the latter usage we are concerned about satisfying one set of demands to the detriment of another valuable set. An example here is Bertrand Williams’ (1973) integrity objection against utilitarianism, or Railton’s (1984) alienation objection against consequentialism. 3. Accepting a rule or maxim implies more than simple compliance. For discussion, see Hooker (2000:75–80). 4. The same goes for people who deny part of their tax obligations precisely because they believe the goals on which the money will be spent to be in violation of the requirements of justice. Consider e.g. a citizen who refuses to pay that fraction of tax that would go towards defence spending. 5. This distinction has been invoked by a number of moral philosophers. David Schmidtz (1993:52–3) distinguishes ‘concern’ and ‘respect’ for others, while Susan Wolf (1997: 80ff) talks about the ‘Loving Saint’ versus the ‘Rational Saint’. In a review of Titmuss’ Gift Relationship, economist Kenneth Arrow (1972:348) differentiates between motives that cause a person to derive ‘a utility from seeing someone else’s satisfaction increased’ from the quite different set of motives based on ‘an implicit social contract such that each performs duties for the other in a way calculated to enhance the satisfaction of all’. 6. Note that in social policy Type I and II errors are typically linked in a way that means that they need to be traded-off against one another. I do not want to suggest a similar trade-off in the case of moral demands. 7. It could be argued that altruism is a virtue, since this rough-and-ready definition of altruism accords with Philippa Foot’s (1997:165) description of a virtue as a set of ‘general beneficial characteristics’ that ‘a human being needs to have, for his own sake and that of his fellows’. 8. The association of pro-tanto altruism with reasons that constitute genuine but not necessarily decisive reasons is of course informed by David Ross’s (2002:16–47) famous discussion of prima facie duties as conditional reasons. Many commentators accept what Ross himself already hinted at, namely that the term prima facie is misleading in that it refers to an epistemological rather than a normative problem. For discussion, see Philip Straton-Lake’s excellent introduction to the 2002 edition of Ross (2002); also Kagan (1989:17).


9. Evolutionary biologist E.O Wilson (1978) refers to ‘soft-core altruism’. 10. In contemporary society a common form of quasi-altruism is the provision of commodities with public goods properties (they appear to represent a case of altruism when its provision is taken on by a limited number of individuals). But for cases where consumption is extended beyond those who produce the good, it is typically the supplier’s inability to restrict such consumption, rather than genuine concern for the other’s welfare, that motivates a unilateral provision of a public good—though, admittedly, it may be good political strategy to mask one’s real self-interested intentions. 11. Cf. the ‘costly-to-fake’ principle (Frank 1988:99–102, 109–13). 12. Often but not always: Jean Hampton (1993:136), for instance, suggests that ‘not all self-sacrifice is worthy of our respect or moral commendation’. This is because the act of persistently ‘denying’ oneself is not necessarily a morally worthy goal. See on this also Wolf (1997). 13. Schmidtz (1993:65) rightly points out that ‘cost-bearing becomes self-sacrificial only when the agent prefers the value foregone to the value gained’, which is evidently not the case with altruists. He furthermore suggests that altruism ‘is necessarily self-sacrificial only for purely self-regarding agents’, but I find this confuses the issues since clearly self-regarding agents must have a good ulterior motive to engage in actions that may be perceived as altruistic (cf. the discussion of quasi-altruism above). 14. There are obvious epistemic problems with determining what maximises someone’s well-being. However, since altruism is concerned with motivation rather than outcome, we can allow room for genuine errors of judgement. 15. Jonathan Seglow suggested to me that self-sacrifice becomes relevant when we look at altruism from a comparative perspective. Consider the following example: a billionaire donates £1,000 to an orphanage and a homeless person offers his only blanket to a fellow homeless during a cold night. Both acts are altruistically motivated, but while the billionaire maximises overall well-being, the homeless person’s act implies a higher sacrifice. Comparing both we would intuitively favour the homeless person as performing the most altruistic act, and this might cast doubt on my earlier insistence of the irrelevance of self-sacrifice. However, I do not think the example invalidates my argument. If we were really to insist on ranking altruistic acts across agents, we presumably would have to first weight them according to some sort of ‘altruistic capacity scale’. My claim would be that, even when using such a weighted scale, maximising well-being remains the proper conceptual dimension along which to assess the altruistic nature of a particular act. 16. The argument could be put the other way around. Consider the case of someone with a masochistic nature who likes to assist people because it involves a sacrifice on his part; or the example of a thrill-seeker who loves to defy death in rescue operations because this is his preferred way of satisfying his craving for danger. Both cases score highly on the sacrifice dimension, but neither of these people are


17.

18.

19.

20. 21.

22. 23. 24. 25.

26. 27.

28. 29.

30.

considered altruists precisely because the genuine commitment to furthering another person’s good is lacking. It seems counter-intuitive to argue that involuntary transfers—‘coercive altruism’—constitute a proper form of altruism. But it should be kept in mind that many first-order coercion acts are not coercive at all if they are agreed to at a higher level, and I shall use the term to refer to both first-order and second-order types of voluntariness. One should be careful not to read too much into this distinction. Both ‘transfer’ and ‘rescue’ cases share many essential features, such as the possibility of opportunity costs or even self-sacrifice, and there are many examples that could fit both categories—e.g., private contributions to foreign aid. One could perhaps even argue that the choice that maximises the probability of saving at least one person is not only acceptable, but in fact morally required. Prudential and moral reasons often intersect in this way. The locus classicus is of course Godwin (1976). If one accepts the idea of negative responsibility, altruists may be held ‘passively’ responsible for either not being more discriminate in how to spread their gifts or perhaps even not instituting an alternative arrangement which satisfies a more egalitarian distribution of gifts. On the notion of negative responsibility see in particular Nagel (1991:99–102, 166–7). So the next subsections focus on the other side of the Type I and II error analogy mentioned above. The standard economists’ interpretation of altruism presumes ‘interdependent preferences’ (Collard 1978:18–29). This point has been most fully analysed by Russell Hardin (1988; 1991). The particular distribution of knaves, knights and moderates might differ considerably across time, across groups of individuals and even across particular contexts. But this variation does not detract from the main argument, which is based on the assumption of motivational variation itself. See also Murphy (1993) and Mulgan (2001) for further discussion. This social phenomenon is sometimes referred to as the Hume-Titmuss contagion thesis, after its classical sources (Collard 1978:11). For further discussion, see also Miller (1988). Altruism thus can be conceived as a ‘public good’. See Collard (1978) for discussion. In an extension of the reasoning behind the Samaritan’s dilemma, known as rentseeking theory, Buchanan’s then collaborator Gordon Tullock relates how in some cases such behaviour does not only impose costs on others, but even on the agents themselves. Tullock (1980:275) relates the anecdote of how Chinese beggars would ‘deliberately and usually quite horribly mutilate themselves in order to increase their charitable take’. I here refer to the definition of exploitation employed by Gauthier (1986) and further developed with respect to welfare policies by Van Donselaar (1997; 2003). Buchanan (1975:82) also argues that altruists’ behaviour may have further


31.

32.

33. 34.

35.

36.

externalities towards the wider community by imposing potential costs on other potential samaritans. This of course does not in itself imply that the altruistic act should not be performed even if it does not fully track moral demands. It would certainly go to far to suggest that Bigot should be actively prevented from jumping in the water: clearly, saving one person is always better than saving none. But it is equally conceivable that society institutes a set of rules that may cause some altruistic acts to be prevented, based on the view that the short-run costs of restricting altruism are outweighed by the long-term benefits of countering racial discrimination. I believe my claims are closely related to Thomas Nagel’s view in Equality and Partiality. ‘Ethics does not license an unmediated universal altruism, precisely because that leads in ordinary circumstances of disagreement over the nature of the good to inevitable conflict rather than possible unanimity. Mere altruism, surprisingly enough, does not provide a common standpoint from which everyone can reach the same conclusions’ (Nagel 1991:164, italics added). For discussion of the relation between the first and second level, see also Mendus (2002), and on combining partiality and impartiality, Nagel (1991). On this see in particular Elster (1979). An example would be the vegetarian who abhors the industrial breeding and killing of cattle for human consumption, but is often tempted by the smell of sausages to give into his cravings. In this example a self-binding mechanism might be to tell all your friends about your views so that sheer social control raises the consequences of giving in to temptation. To suggest that those who accept impartiality as a valid moral account would have little reason not to abide by them would be to seriously misjudge human psychology. Thomas Nagel (1991:86) has rightly stressed that ‘the motivational problems connected with acceptance of a general social framework as legitimate are different from the motivational problems that arise for individuals acting within it’. Individuals are often motivationally ill-equipped to withstand the many easy ways out of hard situations. Rational choice theory provides us with one powerful mechanism of altering choice sets by raising the relative costs of adopting one option over another. Another possibility is taken from law: in cases where rules create options, changing a rule might effectively eliminate that option from one’s choice set. A few years ago debate on this issue raged in the UK. In 2001 the Council of Europe adopted a Recommendation (Rec 2001/5) on the management of organ transplant waiting lists and waiting times, specifying that the criteria for inclusion ‘should ensure there is no discrimination on the grounds of race, religion, disability or any other non-medical factor. Priority on the waiting list such as ‘urgent’ or ‘very-urgent’ categories should be based solely on medical factors relating to the severity of risk for the individual patient.’ Contrast this recommendation with the case of California State Senator Jeff Denham, who earlier this year proposed a bill to give California organ donors the freedom to decide that their organs not go to inmates. Denham argued that donors would like to know that their deaths have brought lives to those who will contribute to


37. 38. 39.

40.

41.

42.

society, and not to those behind bars who have not only failed at that task but have instead brought harm. See Collard (1978) on modelling altruism as an Assurance Game. For further discussion, see Jonathan Seglow, ‘Altruism and freedom’, pp. 145–63, this volume. There may be no escape from the generalised samaritan’s dilemma, in its public form, except through the collective adoption and enforcement of rules that will govern individual situational responses. As they are applied, such rules must be coercive, and they must act to limit individual freedom of action’ (Buchanan 1975:81). A further reason for countering free-riding behaviour is rooted in paternalistic concerns. Tyler Cowen (1993:238) writes that a ‘true altruist may sometimes precommit to not helping an individual he or she cares about’ because this would maximise that person’s well-being in the long run. Paternalist arguments of this type are often advanced at the level of public policy, chiefly by thinkers associated with the New Right. Amongst political theorists, Philip Petitt expresses an extreme sensitivity to these issues. Compare his recent discussion of ‘motivating’ versus ‘managing’ strategies in Pettit (2002). This is inter alia demonstrated by the relative lack of scholarly work on altruism as compared to impartiality.

REFERENCES Arrow, K. 1972. ‘Gifts and exchanges’, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 1/4, 343–62. Barry, B. 1995. Justice as Impartiality. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Brennan, G. & P.Pettit. 2000. ‘The hidden economy of esteem’. Economics and Philosophy, 16/1, 77–98. Buchanan, J., R.Tollison & G.Tullock, eds. 1980. Toward a Theory of the Rent-Seeking Society. College Station: Texas A&M University Press. Buchanan, J.1975,‘The Samaritan’s Dilemma’. Phelps 1975:71–85. Collard, D. 1978. Altruism and Economy: A Study in Non-Selfish Economics. Oxford: Martin Robertson. Crisp, R. & M.Slote, eds. 1997. Virtue Ethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cowen, Tyler. 1993. ‘Altruism and the argument from offsetting transfers’. Paul et al. 1993:211–15. Dowding, K. 1996. Power. Maidenhead: Open University Press. Dowding, K., J.De Wispelaere & S.White, eds. 2003. The Ethics of Stakeholding. Basingstoke: Palgrave/Macmillan. Elster, J. 1979. Ulysses and the Sirens. Studies in Rationality and Irrationality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Foot, P. 1997. ‘Virtues and vices’. Crisp & Slote 1997:163–77.


Frank, R. 1988. Passions within Reason: The Strategic Role of Emotions. New York: W.W. Norton. Paul, E., F.Miller & J.Paul, eds. 1993. Altruism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Frey, B. 1997. Not Just For the Money: An Economic Theory of Personal Motivation. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Gauthier, D. 1986. Morals by Agreement. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Godwin, W. 1976. An Inquiry Concerning Political Justice. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Goodin, R.E. 1985. ‘Erring on the side of kindness in social welfare policy’. Policy Sciences, 18/3, 141–56. Granovetter, M. 1974. Getting a Job: A Study of Contacts and Careers. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hampton, J. 1993. ‘Selflessness and the loss of self’. Paul et al. 1993:135–65. Hardin, R. 1988. Morality Within the Limits of Reason. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1991. Acting together, contributing together’. Rationality and Society, 3/3, 365–80. Hooker, B. 2000. Ideal Code, Real World. A Rule-consequentialist Theory of Morality. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Jones, P. & J.Cullis. 2000. ‘Individual failure and the analytics of social policy’. Journal of Social Policy, 29/1, 73–93. Kagan, K. 1989. The Limits of Morality. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Korsgaard, C. 1996a. ‘The normative question’. Korsgaard 1996b: 7–48. 1996b. The Sources of Normativity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. LeGrand, J. 1997. ‘Knights, knaves or pawns? Human behaviour and social policy’. Journal of Social Policy, 26/2, 149–69. Mauss, M. 1954. The Gift. London: Cohen & West. Malinowski, B. 1932. Argonauts of the Western Pacific. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Mendus, S. 2002. Impartiality in Moral and Political Philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press. Miller, D. 1988. ‘Altruism and the welfare state’. Moon 1988:163–88. Moon, J.D., ed. 1988. Rights, Responsibilities, and Welfare. Boulder: Westview Press. Mulgan, T. 2001. The Demands of Consequentialism. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Murphy, L. 1993. ‘The demands of beneficence’, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 22/4, 267–92. 2000. Moral Demands in Nonideal Theory. New York: Oxford University Press. Nagel, T. 1970. The Possibility of Altruism. Princeton: Princeton University Press.1991. Equality and Partiality. New York: Oxford University Press. Nozick, R. 1974. Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Oxford: Blackwell. O’Neill, O. 2000. Bounds of Justice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Petitt, P. 2002. Rules, Reasons, and Norms. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Phelps, E., ed. 1975 Altruism, Morality and Economic Theory. New York: Russell Sage. Phillips, A. 1995. The Politics of Presence. The Political Representation of Gender, Ethnicity, and Race. Oxford: Clarendon Press.


Railton, P. 1984 ‘Alienation, consequentialism, and the demands of morality’. Philosophy and Public Affairs, 13/2, 174–231. Rawls, J. 1999. A Theory of Justice. Rev. ed. New York: Oxford University Press. Ross, D. 2002. The Right and the Good, 2nd ed., ed. P.Stratton-Lake. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Schmidtz, D. 1993. ‘Reasons for altruism’. Paul et al. 1993:52–68. Smart, J.C.C. & B.Williams. 1973. Utilitarianism: For and Against. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Titmuss, R. 1997. The Gift Relationship: From Human Blood to Social Policy, Ed. A. Oakley & J.Ashton. New York: New Press. Trivers, R. 1971. The evolution of reciprocal altruism’. Quarterly Review of Biology, 46, 35–57. Tullock, G. 1980. The cost of transfers’. Buchanan et al. 1980:269–82. Van Donselaar, G. 1997. The Benefit of Another’s Pains. Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam. 2003. ‘The stake and exploitation’. Dowding et al. 2003:94–113. Williams, B. 1973. ‘A critique of utilitarianism’. Smart & Williams 1973:77–150. Wilson, E.O. 1978. On Human Nature. Cambridge MA, : Harvard University Press. Wolf, S. 1997. ‘Moral saints’. Crisp & Slote 1997:79–98 .

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3 Gratitude, Contribution and Ethical Theory SAUL SMILANSKY

It is common to begin ambitious philosophical projects with disclaimers, and the idea of ‘work in progress’ is a familiar cliché. I nevertheless wish to start by emphasising that this is indeed merely a preliminary report of my intellectual struggles on this topic so far, and I am painfully—if perhaps insufficiently—aware of its limitations. Preliminaries The project I am working on is the attempt to sketch an alternative moral perspective that in some ways goes beyond the traditional normative theories of deontology, consequentialism, contractualism and virtue ethics. This will, I hope, combine many of the merits of the older views, and follows from complex dissatisfaction with their respective faults. Part of the ‘solution’ is the focus on contribution. Caring about one’s contribution, it seems to me, lies at the centre of moral concern. I cannot go here into the full details of the proposed view. Many crucial matters, such as the criteria for limiting demands for making contributions, or the distinction between contributing positively and not harming, cannot be taken up here. What I wish to do in this essay, first, is to illustrate the need for a contribution-focused moral theory. This I do here primarily by considering gratitude, the typical required response to altruism. Second, I point out some of the motivational resources of such a focus on one’s own contribution, which enables us to go beyond simplistic egoistic-altruistic dichotomies. I conclude by showing how focusing on contributions can uncover neglected areas of moral significance, which both broaden our recognition of altruistic behaviour and raise questions concerning the moral centrality of altruism. In a nutshell, I claim that morality is not primarily about maximising overall utility, or keeping up one’s side of mutually beneficial bargains, or not diverging from a rational list of commandments, or other such traditional


suggestions, but about attending to the impact of one’s life, taking care not to be a force for bad and attempting to be a force for good. Morality, according to ‘contributivism’, is not some external list of constraints and obligations but is inherently internal to one’s being: altruistic behaviour, for instance, perforce is focused on the good of others, but at the same time involves self-concern. By being an altruistic moral contributor one enhances oneself. This is no mere by-product, but is inherent to the central moral concern, which is just concern for one’s contribution. Two Basic Contributivist Tools The contributivist perspective on morality has its distinct features. Just as utilitarianism is established through the Principle of Utility or Kantian deontology through the Generalization Principle, so contributivism requires a number of philosophical tools in order to be applied. I will sketch two of those, in order to give us a general picture of what contributivist ways of thinking would be like. The Moral Contribution Profile. The total account of each individual’s negative and positive contributions forms their Moral Contribution Profile, which charts their moral standing. Our Moral Contribution Profile represents our accumulating moral value in the light, essentially, of how we affect morally significant matters. The Moral Contribution Profile maps the overall contributivist contours of our activity. This means that we ought to take care of our overall interactions with specific individuals and with all individuals, and guard against being overall agents of badness. If one has repeatedly harmed a given person, one should take extra care not to add to it; if the balance of bad over good that one has caused another person is great, one should be especially concerned to correct the balance. Similarly, if one has wronged a great many people, then even if those people are long dead, one is morally obliged to make an effort to do more good in the world. If one has not harmed anyone, one’s existence is not morally problematic: of course, one is not permitted to gratuitously harm any person one encounters, but one’s interactions with others are not laden with other concerns, based on one’s past interactions with a particular person, or problematic general moral effects. The General Principle of Contribution. There are many people in the world, all of them count morally, and we may not act as though we are the only ones that matter. People also have different and often contrastive desires and interests, but must live together, and benefit from doing so. A moral attitude takes these matters into consideration: it can be said that the moral attitude as

GRATITUDE, CONTRIBUTION AND ETHICAL THEORY 37

such begins when one recognises the legitimacy of otherness and seeks to be considerate of it. A moral attitude is one of consideration for others, which translates into the desire not to be someone who harms another (as well as the wish that one might help others). Every moral person should follow the General Principle of Contribution: ‘Act so that you will not be a misfortune to others, and wish to be a good fortune to them.’ This means that the contributivist possesses an altruistic motivation, seeking to benefit others beyond merely discharging her traditional strict obligations. A moral society is, broadly speaking, a society in which institutions, practices and customs presuppose the General Principle of Contribution. In one way, the main purpose of morality is to bring about such a situation. In such a society, people will not be harmed by others (except in morally permissible ways) and will positively benefit from others. The Centrality of Contribution Ethical Contributivism sees the contributivist perspective as constitutive of moral being, and abiding by it as crucial for being moral. In a most general way, a moral person is concerned with her affect on others, with whether she is harming them or benefiting them. This, then, is the paradigmatic moral phenomenology of the good person when she is reflective; it is the moral point of view. The predominant nature of the moral life is a concern with one’s contribution. Why should a moral person be concerned essentially with his contribution rather than, say, with making the world as good as possible, or with operating according to reasons he can justify to others? Because his contribution is crucial for seeing what his existence means for other people. But why should he care about the significance of his existence for them? Because his significance for them is, broadly speaking, the value of his existence as a moral agent. In sum, morality is in large measure a guide to what individuals variously constituted and positioned ought to aim for, and how they ought to behave, in the light of the realities and possibilities of their negative and positive contributions. A moral person ought to reflect on what she is doing and not doing to others, and on what she could or could not do. She should follow the General Principle of Contribution and be concerned with her Moral Contribution Profile. Human beings are unique in the natural world in that they are able to reflect on their contribution and be guided by ideas as to what


it should be. They can realise that a gap exists between their actual and their moral contribution and can aim to reduce that gap. Some Applications Gratitude Gratitude is one of the embarrassments of ethical theory. Traditional theories of morality do not do very well in getting a hold on it. I believe that this follows from their neglect of the centrality of contribution. For gratitude to be required, four necessary conditions have been proposed: 1. The benefit must be granted voluntarily, intentionally (at least in the weak sense), freely, and not for disqualifying reasons. 2. The benefit must not be forced (unjustifiably) on the beneficiary against his will. 3. The beneficiary must accept the benefit (or would accept the benefit if certain impairing conditions were corrected). 4. It must be the case that the person to whom gratitude is owed provided a benefit or through great effort or sacrifice tried to provide a significant benefit. (McConnell 1993: ch.1; building upon Simmons 1979:170–79.) These conditions are reasonable, and would presumably be acceptable to all traditional theories. But what do the traditional positions say beyond these conditions, about the nature of gratitude? And why do I claim that what they say is inadequate? Interestingly, each is inadequate in its own way: a. Is gratitude a consequentialist notion? Let us take utilitarianism as a stand in for consequentialism. Clearly gratitude is morally useful. People are willing to do things for the sake of gratitude alone: to go out of their way and give of their time, make an effort to be thoughtful, open up and risk being emotionally hurt, and provide resources. Sometimes, indeed, people will be moved to give to others out of a desire to give that is related only to the expectation for gratitude, in a way in which they would not be willing to do for more tangible motivations. Some things cannot be bought, but can be received. People also often expect gratitude when benefiting others. If gratitude is not forthcoming, future good will is endangered. In other words, gratitude and the expectation of gratitude are two of the strongest utility-generating currencies around.


Gratitude indeed has great utility, but, nevertheless, utilitarianism cannot make sense of gratitude. We do not feel that we have to be grateful to our beneficiary because this will keep his beneficence flowing, or that we must do so in order to maintain the socially useful mechanism of the ‘gratitude game’. We feel that we owe gratitude to our beneficiary specifically, for the spirit and the substance of her beneficence. We feel that it is a ‘debt’ unrelated to future consequences. She deserves our gratitude in a way not at all connected to what will have the best consequences, and indeed she deserves it even if our gratitude will somehow make the world into a worse place. If, for some reason, to express gratitude would have extremely harmful consequences, then we might well see that we must refrain from expressing gratitude, but this will in no way affect our perception that gratitude is due! Gratitude is consequentially useful, but consequentialism is besides the point in the explication of gratitude. b. So, perhaps the metaphors of ‘debt’ and ‘owing show us what gratitude is all about, namely a deontological categorical obligation? There are moral laws, and those who behave properly deserve gratitude. Hence the backward-looking desertcharacter of gratitude that utilitarianism could not capture. There is something here, and yet deontology is also deficient in explicating gratitude. When a person we have benefited rushes to ‘settle the bill’, to ‘pay his debt’, we would not feel that all is well. We would not say, ‘Well, here for once is a man that knows his obligations, who is scrupulous in meeting his moral duties, a moral ideal for all to emulate.’ We would be more inclined to see this person in one of two uncomplimentary ways: perhaps, as a ‘human Robot’, a duty-fulfilling person who does not at all understand what gratitude is about. Alternatively, we might see him as a normal person who is merely not really grateful; he is capable of gratitude, but is not grateful in this case. The reasons why we would look for either of these two explanations is simple: gratitude is something you should feel towards your beneficiary, but not because you should feel it; it is not a burden to be got rid of as quickly as possible. We speak about a ‘debt of gratitude’ in order to point to its centrality and to the grave deficiency of ingratitude, but this is a peculiar ‘duty’, a duty to feel grateful not because one ought to feel so, not because one owes a debt. Gratitude is due, but it is not due as commercial debit. It is a species of an appreciation-attitude, not of a deontological sort of obedience to duty. Rushing in to give three times in kind to one’s beneficiary is not a proper show of gratitude but a disposal of the burden of gratitude, an elimination of it. We don’t want to receive tokens of gratitude because the person thinks he owes us


as much, and if this is how we perceive our scrupulous deontologist, then we will say that he does not know what gratitude is. c. So, the idea of the moral contract may appear more to the point: we do not feel gratitude because it is useful to do so, or because it is morally obligatory to do so, but because one has benefited us, as part of an (explicit or tacit) communal arrangement, and met her contractual obligations to us. The ungrateful are those whom one does not want as partners to mutually beneficial contracts, they are ‘free riders’ not meeting their gratitude-obligations. Gratitude lies in mutuality, in a contract of human relationships. Contractual interpretations of gratitude are less crude than utilitarian ones. They certainly capture important aspects of gratitude. And yet the contractual framework is also inadequate. Seeing gratitude as a contractual obligation is debasing of the giver and receiver of the beneficence alike, a misplaced ‘realism’. In the end, this interpretation is not better than the deontological one, and suffers from a similar fault. No doubt much contractual practice goes on with quasi-gratitude as the stand-in for the ‘pay’, but such examples, we feel, are the furthest from true gratitude. True gratitude is not about keeping one’s side of the bargain; it is what ought to be felt towards one whom, ideally, gives generously without a bargain in mind. d. So, perhaps the place to look for gratitude is in the emotions, and it is a matter of moral-emotional virtue. A virtuous person above all feels gratitude to his beneficiary. He perceives it not as a bargain he must keep or as a moral command to be obeyed, but as sensitivity to what another person has wished for him. Virtue theory is certainly more promising in capturing gratitude than the previous attempts (see also Wellman 1999). There is little here which lends itself to the ridiculous. The problem, however, is that the virtue account, while lacking the faults of its rivals, seems substantially at a loss to account for gratitude. If it is not our contractual or categorical or good-maximising obligations that do the work, why is gratitude so important? Recall that, according to Hume, ‘of all the crimes that human creatures are capable of committing, the most horrid and unnatural is ingratitude’ (Hume 1987:466; cf. Kant 1997). Even if this is exaggerated, why is ingratitude so bad? Gratitude is a response—a ‘virtuous’ response, if you like—but it is a response to something, and this is crucial. Gratitude is not explicable when we merely talk about virtue, nor is gratitude’s enormous importance.


Moreover, gratitude is typically particular: we ought to be grateful to a person for her specific good deeds benefiting us. We may discount actions without positive motivations, but the focus is nevertheless on the gratitudemeriting action rather that on the overall altruistic or otherwise virtuous character of the person. We ought to be grateful even to those who we hold to be generally non-virtuous, if only they have contributed to us. Well-intentioned contributions are nearly always necessary for gratitude, but the present point is that they are also sufficient, and concern with virtue hardly comes into the picture. How does the proto-theory I am searching for deal with this perplexing issue? It positions gratitude as a dominant attitude within the concept of a contribution-based morality. Gratitude is a reactive attitude appropriate to contribution, which is morally important because of the importance of contribution, both in the life of the contributor and of the contributee. When another person has benefited you (or made great efforts, risks or sacrifices in order to help you, even if she did not succeed), then her existence has been (or showed great willingness to be) a good fortune for you. You can recognise this cognitively, feel it as a form of goodness, and see how this commits you to be favourably inclined towards the contributing person. It is the contribution that elicits the cognitive and emotive recognition of the other’s existence as intentionally favourable to you, making it natural to be grateful, and faulty if one does not sense the appropriateness of gratitude. Gratitude is not essentially a consequentialist mechanism, an obligation incurred by a contract, a categorical debt, or a trait of a person’s character, but a fitting reaction to another’s beneficence. Only if it is seen in such contribution-focused ways can gratitude begin to be understood. Under such a perspective the partial but inherently limited deontological, contractual, consequentialist and virtue ethical aspects of gratitude can be seen in their proper places. Focusing on gratitude from a contributivist perspective allows us to see new things, to become aware of other people as contributors concerned for others and for value. This means that we can see them better as moral beings, for what they are as moral agents are essentially contributors. With gratitude, as elsewhere, we can see how concentrating on contribution ‘fills the world with value’: under its influence we better perceive the nature of moral appreciation.


Consider the following story: The Case of the Unique Contribution In one of O.Henry’s most interesting stories, The Last Leaf’ (1966), we are confronted with an unlikely hero: an elderly drunk, who has for 40 years been supposedly painting his master painting, but has in fact hardly done anything. The man, Behrman, seems an obvious failure, in painting as in everything else. A younger woman in his building, Johnsy, is seriously ill, and the firm idea has entered her mind that when all leaves on the plant outside her window will have fallen, she will die. The short story ends when the woman comes to think that the sole leaf that has remained is meant to tell her that she should continue to live, and the old man dies of pneumonia. It turns out that he went out in the brutal winter, painting his ‘masterpiece’ indeed—a permanent leaf looking to all appearances like the ones that have fallen. This ‘leaf’ remained ‘on the plant’ when all others had fallen, hence saving the ill women’s life. The story is inspirational and touching, and the old man a model of self-sacrifice, and of supererogatory morality. This is a story, and we have to fill in an interpretation of Behrman’s psychology. A contribution-focused normative theory is obviously able to reflect and explain our intuitions here. Every moral theory must be able to do so, we feel. But it seems that most traditional views will disappoint us here. Is the old man concerned for his own virtue or well-being? Does he, for instance, feel that the ideal of what a human being should be forces him to risk his life in that way? Is he following some universalizable command or other type of moral rule? Is he calculating the likelihood of success as compared to the risks to his health, or opting for self-sacrifice because he thinks that this is permissible in the light of comparative states of affairs? Is he concerned with the balance of good over evil in the world? Or is there some contract in this context? Or some contractual consideration in the old man’s motivation? In general, do we have any reason to think that the man feels that everyone should go out and paint the leaf? Traditional alternatives simply seem uninformative, irrelevant, and, indeed, often crass. It is as a gesture of contribution that we can best understand this noble moral effort. It is a supreme effort at making oneself a good fortune. Mr Behrman, O.Henry seems to tell us, at once saves Johnsy’s life and redeems his own existential value. Contribution, in such a case, is what it’s all about.


Some Motivational Benefits of Contributivism Contributivism should be motivationally helpful in a number of ways. Here I have space only to point out how it helps with moral motivation in the first person perspective, helping people to see the point of morality and its nature, their role in it, and what they can ‘get out of it’. What the Good Can Say About Themselves Contributivism provides resources for thinking morally about oneself and one’s life. A good person may be able to say the following things about him or herself: a. No one has been seriously and intentionally harmed by me (in a way not permitted by morality, i.e., we wish to set aside cases such as other’s disappointment in my not having fallen in love with them). No one can say that, for him or her, it is a misfortune that I exist. b. I have benefited more than I have harmed any person with whom I have interacted significantly. The balance of my goodness is positive with any of them. c. Some people have greatly benefited from me. For them, my existence has been a great good fortune. d. It is good, for the balance of good over bad in the world, that I was born. I am, however modestly, a force for good in the world. e. I am a significant partner and member in the Community of Contributors, sharing the work of contribution and carrying the torch of contribution, from which I have so benefited, onwards. f. I have chosen to contribute. My contributions have not been accidental, nor have they been extracted from me by necessity, fear, or temptation, but rather flow from my voluntary giving. Moreover, I have developed my character and abilities so as to become a contributor. g. I merit respect and should be appreciated for being a contributor, for not intentionally harming and for benefiting others, in specific interactions, and overall. Now, not all of those things can be said by individuals who are in fact manifestly good: such people may have significantly and intentionally harmed some person in the past, or even not benefited very much any one person. In other words, these matters are not necessary conditions in order to be good. And (c), at least, can be truly said by some manifestly bad people. Yet these


self-assertions are the sorts of things good people may say about themselves, when they are imbued with the concerns of contributivism. Not surprisingly, some of these things are daily said by people, or at least tacitly felt by them. This shows the intuitive relation between contributivism and the ordinary lives and concerns of people. The contributivist perspective is not some external or hyper-rational view of morality, but an elucidation and elaboration of typical, and typically important, feelings and thoughts. The Analogy of the Search for Truth When one is engaged in a professional scientific, philosophical or similar pursuit after knowledge and understanding, one typically shares two features: the desire to know and understand new things, and the desire that it be oneself that does so. When one wants to find a solution to a significant puzzle one wants there to be a solution, but also to find it. A researcher who is only interested that new things be learned, and is indifferent whether he or others learn them, is unlikely to contribute much. The motivation needs to be more closely connected to the self in order to fire the efforts needed. On the other hand, if there is not a genuine and deep passion for knowledge and understanding, there will also be little likelihood of sustained accomplishment. The intimacy with the subject matter which high achievement requires, the degree of self-honesty, and indeed obssessiveness, needs to connect to the specific subject matter and not merely to one’s desire to shine in something. Morality, and in particular wide morality which goes beyond strict obligations towards others, is, I claim, in important ways analogical. One needs to care for others in order to contribute to them, but the concern has to be motivated by an internal importance in one’s making the contribution, not only in its being a good result or in its abstract rightness. Contributivism is particularly equipped to make sense of this duality of concern, which transcends simple egoistic-altruistic dichotomies. The otherrelatedness of the concern for the beneficiaries of the contribution unites with the inner perspective of evaluating one’s existence in terms of its contributions. It would scarcely be a moral contribution if it were not better for those affected by it, but the fact that it is my contribution, and affects my moral value, is no less significant. For contributivism we are not essentially servants of the common good, of constraints and obligations, of ideals of the good person, or even of incurred commitments, but people concerned with the contributions following from our own moral presence in the world.


Widening the Scope of “Contribution” One possible effect of a contribution-focused moral view would be that we would pay more attention to the appreciation of contribution. This was already mentioned, in the context of gratitude and moral motivation in general. But another result of being contribution-minded may be an enlargement in what we see as a contribution. Contributing by Not Harming We need to pay attention to the way people contribute to us by taking care not to harm us—and even be grateful to them (Smilansky 1997). Contribution by beneficence is only a small part of the moral world of contribution. Often, not doing bad, such as in not harming others, may require risk, effort, or sacrifice. Preventing our children from disturbing others in restaurants, turning down the radio out of concern for the neighbours, keeping the environment clean, or taking extra care not to run over joggers when driving at night, are examples of ways in which we all do not harm others. Often the motivation for such concern and effort is morally worthy, and this non-harm needs to be acknowledged. Even when not heroic, such non-harming may merit moral notice, something that is generally unrecognised. We should often be grateful to people who do not harm us because they do not harm us, however paradoxical this view may seem. The fact that a contribution is made by taking care not to harm others and not by positively benefiting them does not erase the significance of that contribution. We should pay attention both to the daily forms of not harming others at which we all engage, and to the special burdens and efforts of specific individuals. The first, nearly universal form of mostly pedestrian non-malfeasance, makes us constant contributors-by-not-harming to a great many others, as well as beneficiaries of others who do not harm us. Most of morality occurs here, rather than in the much less frequent acts of positive beneficence. The neglect of the second form, the special condition of individuals who merit particular moral note for not harming others, is even more problematic. The temptations of the over-worked lorry-driver hurrying home, of the heavy smoker, or of the poor, are not shared by all. Once we see even ordinary varieties of non-harm as potentially morally meritorious, we open the door to a detailed examination of what people have sacrificed in order not to harm others, for which they ought to be praised, or, at least, noticed by morality. The fact that ordinary morality does not usually take account of non-malfeasance is often unfair to those who act morally by taking


care not to harm others, under conditions in which not everyone would do so. Our general acknowledgment of the efforts of non-harm, and the specific attention we ought to pay to those whose non-harm is particularly meritorious, also widens the scope of our understanding of altruism, and of considerations that might merit gratitude. Reactive-Contributions Another scarcely noticed form of contribution can be named ‘Reactive-Contribution’, the way we contribute by benefiting from the contributions of others (cf. Smilansky, forthcoming). When we enjoy a play or a film, learn from a book, fall in love, feel elated when walking in a park, savour a good meal at a restaurant, and experience many such acts or moments of benefiting, we thereby become prima facie contributors. We contribute by enhancing the contribution that the director, author, lover, gardener or chef has made. We already contribute merely by benefiting from the contribution. It is not, of course, that we must aim to benefit from everyone who is a potential contributor to ourselves, an idea that, if taken to extremes, would lead to absurdity. But we should consider ourselves as potential contributors to others, who help establish the value of others. By reacting to contributions we make them greater and this, in turn, is also a contribution. Were we not to enjoy, learn and so on, that original contribution would be that much smaller. It might seem odd to talk of Reactive-Contributions as contributions, but it seems to me that the oddity lies rather with our curious neglect of this important form of contribution. In our moral theories we have consistently under-valued the importance of contribution, but we have completely failed to see the centrality of Reactive-Contribution. The contributors themselves would, on reflection, find the importance of Reactive-Contributions immediately obvious. What researcher does not want his beneficial labours to be influential? What author does not want to be read? What restaurateur does not care for the reactions of those he feeds? The significance of this matter, however, is immense, for it shows, once more, the salience of the issue of contribution. The importance of Reactive-Contributions means that we all have large contributory powers at our disposal. Clearly an editor or publisher has greater influence than the ordinary reader on the form that contributions in her field may take, but even the reader is contributively potent. Consider what this means: in one way, one becomes a contributor merely by being a consumer! Does this entail that the more one consumes the greater a (reactive) contributor one


becomes? Contributivism will say that people who do not enjoy or otherwise benefit from virtually any of the contributions available in a modern society are not very good Reactive-Contributors. This applies not only to benefiting from ‘culture’ narrowly conceived but also to friendship, sport, technology and more. Our active, receptive, appetitive, sensitive, curious, interested capacities are important, and the dull, narrow, bored, passive and negative miss out twice: in not benefiting from the great wealth the world offers, and in not being significant Reactive-Contributors. However, there is no strict moral obligation to be a Reactive-Contributor, in such cases, the whole issue not being within the constraints of a strict morality of obligation. So, although morally significant matters are at issue, no one is at risk of being morally bad because she does not understand a joke, or even does not enjoy life. Moreover, a limited capacity for enjoyment is not always one’s own fault, although there is typically room for efforts at changing oneself. In any case, the language of categorical obligations is not pertinent here. Once again, new vistas for the consideration of gratitude are opened up. Both sides to a deep and successful psychoanalytic interaction ought to be grateful to each other; by benefiting from the treatment the patient is a Reactive-Contributor to the therapist. The readers of a masterpiece ought to be grateful to the author, who has not succumbed to prevailing mediocrity and its temptations, but the author should be grateful to those readers who make the effort to tackle the work and let it affect them, hence reactively contributing to the author. And so on. Our picture of morality ought to change in a number of ways, if the insights of contributivism are accepted. One major way is in terms of what becomes morally relevant. Mere innocent enjoyment is hardly the pinnacle of morality but, just as people who spread joy become morally significant contributors, so do those who have a capacity for joy in life. Not only is their joy prima facie valuable, but it also positively contributes to the value of those who contribute to them. In one way this enhances our perception of the scope for altruistic behaviour, but in other ways an emphasis on Reactive-Contributions takes moral concern beyond altruism. For, it is being proposed here that positive prima facie moral value be put on, e.g., mere enjoyment, while there need not be any explicit altruism (either on the side of the person producing the contribution or on that of the beneficiary and Reactive-Contributor). Conclusion I presented a sketch of a broad ethical view which can be called ‘contributivism’, and that sees morality, or much of it, as basically about


individual contribution. The adequate features of moral concern are not summed up by those given by proponents of any of the traditional theories. Rather, there is a distinct set of concerns that has to do with who one is, morally. The connection between what we contribute and who we are, morally, is intimate: we must be concerned above all not with making the world as good as possible overall, or with obeying some set of rules, or with making and keeping bargains, or with some ideal of virtue or of well-being, but with minding our own personal effect. We saw the inadequacy of the old theories in explicating gratitude, the typical required response to altruism, and how they seem unhelpful in understanding the hero in O.Henry’s story. A contribution-based approach seems necessary in order to understand moral phenomenology and the nature of moral concern. New spheres of concern that have been neglected, such as the idea of gratitude to people who take care not to harm us, or ReactiveContributions, need to be uncovered and recognized. These present doubts about traditional assumptions concerning the dominance of altruistic motivation within morality, doubts which we could not pursue in sufficient detail. Moreover, much of the way in which moral agents view themselves and their actions may be usefully enlarged. There is room for concern with reciprocal fairness, with meeting ideals, with making the world better, or with obeying absolute constraints, but we need also to make room for the agent’s concern for her own contribution. If we begin to do so, I suspect that we shall not only understand better what is going on, ethically, but be able to improve things: the focus on responsible contribution should strengthen our motivational resources, and refresh the moral areas other theories do not reach. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am grateful to participants who commented on this paper at the Ethics of Altruism Conference. I am also very grateful to Iddo Landau, Jonathan Seglow and Daniel Statman, for written comments on an earlier draft. REFERENCES Henry, O. [pseud.] 1966. ‘The Last Leaf’ in Surprises. Corbin, R. & Hoopes, N.E. eds. New York: Dell. Hume, D. 1987. A Treatise of Human Nature. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kant, I. 1997. Lectures on Ethics. Heath, P. & Schneewind, J.B. eds. Heath, P trans. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.


McConnell, T. 1993. Gratitude. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Simmons, A.J. 1979. Moral Principles and Political Obligations. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Smilansky, S. 1997. ‘Should I be grateful to you for not harming me?’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 42, 585–97. Smilansky, S. forthcoming. ‘Reactive-Contributions and Their Significance’. Public Affairs Quarterly. Wellman, C.H. 1999. ‘Gratitude as a virtue’, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 80, 284–300.

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4 Altruism, Self-Interest and the Indistinctness of Persons KEITH GRAHAM

The Problem of Altruism Auguste Comte, the coiner of the term altruism, was in no doubt: The chief problem of human life [is] the subordination of egoism to altruism…The whole of social science consists therefore in duly working out this problem, the essential principle being the reaction of collective over individual life. (Comte 1851–54:400) An entire view of human beings and the nature of the motivations to which they are most susceptible is implicit in Comte’s remark, and it is a view which would find resonance with many people. At its simplest, the thought would be that egoistic concerns loom larger for us than altruistic ones, that rooted in our dispositions is a propensity to favour our own individual interests over those of others. As stated, that looks like a thesis about human psychology, but it is a thesis which fairly transparently calls out for philosophical elaboration and evaluation. In what might be seen as a contribution to such an elaboration and evaluation, Christine Korsgaard has put one of the problems about altruism as follows: Human beings are subject to practical claims from various sources—our own interests, the interests of others, morality itself. The normative question is answered by showing that the points of view from which these different interests arise are congruent, that meeting the claims made from one point of view will not necessarily mean violating those that arise from another. And that in turn shows how the threat is conceived. The threat is that the various claims which our nature makes


on us will tear us apart…The concern is that morality might be bad or unhealthy for us…We reply to the challenge by showing that morality’s claims are not going to hurt us or tear us apart. (Korsgaard et al. 1996: 60–61) Here the elaboration consists in calling into question the implicit stark contrast between egoistic and altruistic concerns, and offering a corresponding rapprochement between claims on us which are generated from these different sources. Now in fact it might readily be agreed that accepting the claims from one of these sources does not necessarily mean violating those arising from another. For example, it might well turn out that my acting in an altruistic way, to serve the interests of another, also as a matter of fact serves to further my own interests. But that will not be enough to secure a rapprochement or convergence. The threat or problem perceived by Korsgaard would be better conceived as consisting in the fact that such convergence is not bound to occur. And if it is not bound to occur then, at least given certain assumptions about the motivations to which human beings are most susceptible, Comte’s problem will stand. Even if we are not torn apart, we will be pulled in different directions. But the problem of altruism can be presented more starkly than that, and it is presented more starkly by Sidgwick: It would be contrary to Common Sense to deny that the distinction between any one individual and any other is real and fundamental, and that consequently ‘I’ am concerned with the quality of my existence as an individual in a sense, fundamentally important, in which I am not concerned with the quality of the existence of other individuals: and this being so, I do not see how it can be proved that this distinction is not to be taken as fundamental in determining the ultimate end of rational action for an individual. (Sidgwick 1907, cited in Brink 1997:103) That is a starker presentation of the problem since it seems to imply that Comte’s desired subordination of egoism to altruism is not capable of rational achievement, that the best we can hope for is that egoism is somehow prepared to accommodate altruism, but still only on egoism’s terms. That implication is borne out by Sidgwick’s further observation: even if a man admits the self-evidence of the principle of Rational Benevolence, he may still hold that his own happiness is an end which it

ALTRUISM, SELF-INTEREST AND INDISTINCTNESS 53

is irrational for him to sacrifice to any other; and that therefore a harmony between the maxim of Prudence and the maxim of Rational Benevolence must be somehow demonstrated, if morality is to be made completely rational. (Sidgwick 1907, cited in Brink 1997:103) There are important differences among the views expressed in these presentations of the problem of altruism, but they proceed from a common assumption. That is the thought that any human being may find him or herself subject to conflicting demands arising out of his or her own interests, goals and desires, on the one hand, and the interests, goals and desires of someone else, on the other hand. That should be taken as a bedrock fact, which no philosophical argument or theory is ever likely to alter. Here, as so often in philosophy, at some level of generality we know what the facts are and we are not likely to make startling discoveries which will overturn them. What we can do, however, consistently with accepting such bedrock facts, is call attention to other facts whose existence is perhaps neglected and not allowed as much influence as they deserve. And, connected with that, we can suggest new ways of looking at the undisputed bedrock facts, we can invest them with a different kind of significance from that which they are standardly thought to carry. That is the kind of enterprise I am concerned with in this essay. There are separate individuals with their own interests, goals and desires; and the interests, goals and desires of different individuals may very well conflict. But I explore two thoughts which should influence our overall picture of the demands on each of us arising from this bedrock fact. The first thought concerns the appropriate ways of aggregating the interests, goals and desires which different individuals possess. This is explored in the section The Distinctness of Persons. The second thought concerns the fact that it is not only individuals but also certain kinds of corporate or collective entity which possess interests, goals and desires. This is explored in the section Collective Agency. Henceforth, I abstract from the important differences among interests, goals and desires and speak with stipulative generality of desires. The differences are important, but their importance is not central for the general claims I wish to make in this essay. The Distinctness of Persons From the fact that there are individuals with distinct sets of desires nothing follows about the rational way to cluster such desires. The doctrine of the distinctness of persons urges us to cluster them in a particular way, namely according to their point of origin in a particular individual.


Consider one of Rawls’s criticisms of classical utilitarianism. He objects that it ‘fails to take seriously the distinction between persons. The principle of rational choice for one man is taken as the principle of social choice as well’(Rawls 1972:187). This comes about through reliance on the notion of an ideal observer, a person who includes all desires and satisfactions within one experience as he imaginatively identifies in turn with the members of society. It is he who compares their aspirations and approves of institutions according to the extent to which they satisfy the one system of desire that he constructs as he views everyone’s desires as if they were his own. The classical view results, then, in impersonality, in the conflation of all desires into one system of desire. (Rawls 1972: 187–8) But, Rawls objects, the ‘reasoning which balances the gains and losses of different persons as if they were one person is excluded’ (Rawls 1972: 28). Nozick argues in a similar way. If I can forego the satisfaction of some desire so as to achieve some greater overall good (for example dieting to improve my health) then, it might be asked, why should it not be possible and legitimate for some individual similarly to be expected to forego some satisfaction for the sake of the greater overall social good? Nozick’s reply is that there is no social entity with a good that undergoes some sacrifice for its own good. There are only individual people, different individual people, with their own individual lives. Using one of these people for the benefit of others, uses him and benefits the others. Nothing more…To use a person in this way does not sufficiently respect and take account of the fact that he is a separate person, that his is the only life he has. (Nozick 1974:32–3; emphasis original) Neither Rawls nor Nozick says any more about the doctrine of the distinctness of persons. In the absence of further elaboration we should not too readily assume that it is one clear and unambiguous doctrine, or that it is obvious what follows from it. This is especially true in the light of the fact that Rawls and Nozick themselves disagree over what follows from it.1 Can we offer any elaboration of the doctrine, then? Well, presumably there is a basic level of agreement that desires fall within individual lives and that there is something unacceptable about detaching desires from the context of the individual life within which they are located. And one reason which might be given for why they must remain so located and not be treated in abstraction from an


individual’s life is that the satisfaction or frustration of a desire is itself something which falls within an individual life. So the frustration of one desire cannot be compensated by the satisfaction of some other desire unless both desires fall within the same life. The basic level of agreement about the doctrine can be brought out symbolically. Imagine a series of individuals who desire particular ends as follows (where I stands for an individual, d stands for desiring and E stands for the end):

According to the doctrine, it is particularly important to bundle together

because they represent the desires of a single individual. By contrast, the same importance does not attach to the bundle

which represents the desires of a number of different individuals for the same end. Classical utilitarianism does attach special importance for the latter kind of bundle, since it involves a commitment to maximising overall desiresatisfaction, regardless of whose desires they happen to be. There is not necessarily anything wrong with this symbolic representation of the desires of distinct individuals, provided we remember, of course, that the relations implicit in this representation are intentional ones; but it may nevertheless obscure as much as it reveals. There is, for one thing, considerably more complexity surrounding individuals’ desires than is manifest here. We may prioritise some over others; we may notoriously have meta-desires concerning first-order desires—wanting to be rid of them or wanting to acquire them; and, as a distinct matter from having meta-desires, we may pass judgement on our desires, thinking some worthy of our positive judgement and others not. In that process we may then take into account the desires, meta-desires and related judgements of others individuals and quite possibly come to the conclusion that bracketing desires across individuals, in a manner analogous to that employed in utilitarianism, has something to be said


for it. In some contexts, for example, we might think it appropriate to adopt a majoritarian procedure with regard to desires—the fewer frustrated desires, the better—and that would perforce involve detaching them from their owners, metaphorically speaking. In a related way, I might myself come to regard the desires which I share with others as more important than those which I do not, and give the former priority over the latter. Now it might be objected that these complications, while real, do nothing to disturb the basic point enunciated in the distinctness of persons. Desires are still located in individuals, and nothing has been said to establish the claim that the frustration of a desire in one individual might be justified by the satisfaction of a desire in a different individual. After all, what the complexities show is that I might well come to believe that a frustration of some of my individual desires is acceptable in the interest of promoting the satisfaction of other of my desires which I happen to share with others. But that is merely a more complex example of how one individual can trade off satisfactions against one another within their own life. This objection has force, but what it prompts is the question why, in the first place, it should be thought that frustration of a desire in one person cannot be offset by the satisfaction of a desire in another. Once again, the basic symbolism

may obscure as much as it reveals. While it is true that a desire is an intentional state of an individual, the representation of that state as consisting in an insulated dyadic relation between a desirer and the end desired leaves out something important about the desires of an individuals, namely that their satisfaction is likely to involve other individuals. For example, suppose I want to wear a green shirt. The satisfaction of this desire brings in the lives of many other people since I am not capable of making the shirt myself, much less producing the raw materials which need to go into its manufacture. Even the satisfaction of a relatively simple desire like this, therefore, will necessarily bring with it questions about the satisfaction or otherwise of the desires of others, since the satisfaction of my desire as a matter of fact requires that the lives of others should take a particular course, and that may or may not coincide with their own desires. It is not clear why this fact about the nature of the fulfilment of desires should be treated as any less important than their place of residence, as it were, in the given individual. And if the fact is treated as having equivalent importance, then the distinctness of persons will be seen to express a rather one-sided truth. Even if desires and their satisfaction inhere


in individuals, the boundary between one individual and another will already have been crossed in many cases so far as the satisfaction of the desire is concerned.2 So far, I have attempted to put forward some reasons for thinking that there is a degree of indistinctness about persons: individuals may have separate systems of ends, but the complexity of the ends themselves and the implications of what is involved in fulfilling them suggest that we should not necessarily give some pre-eminence to the clustering of ends within an individual. The interrelations between individuals are stronger than is properly allowed for if all we focus on is their separateness from one another. Very often, the satisfaction of a desire within an individual life will necessitate the frustration of some other desire within some other individual life. Very often, no doubt, such consequential frustration will be justified. The satisfaction of my desire to maintain an uninjured body justifies the frustration of a murderer’s desire to attack me. However we decide to nuance the doctrine of the distinctness of persons, therefore, it would prove too much and it would rest on a misunderstanding of the nature of human action and interaction if it placed any completely general embargo on trading off desires in separate lives. It is a further, and much wider, question what consequences follow specifically for the problems of altruism described in the first section from the indistinctness of persons which I have called attention to. I do not attempt to answer that question here. What I do assert, however, is that when we bear this indistinctness in mind, those problems will not look the same. As we saw, Sidgwick asserts that the distinction between one individual and another is ‘real and fundamental’. But, leaving aside whether his appeal to common sense is a sufficient means of sustaining that view, the question just how real and fundamental this distinction is is itself part of the issue. It does not bear its significance on its sleeve: the nature and the extent of the conceptual gulf between one person and the next is not something which can simply be taken for granted. As David Brink has correctly observed, appeal to the distinctness of persons should be regarded as a conversation-starter, not a conversationstopper (Brink 1993:258–9).3 Collective Agency I now move to another kind of indistinctness of persons which is germane to questions of altruism. We can add a further fact to the bedrock fact that individuals are confronted by the pull of their own ends and the pull of the ends of other individuals. That is the fact that there are also collective ends, such as winning a team game, performing a symphony, electing a government. To


take the example of a team (designated by T), our social world contains states of affairs represented by:

as well as those represented by the original series

And where such collective agencies have their own characteristic good, such as winning a game, performing a symphony, furthering the interests of the nation or the culture, they or their constituents can indeed undergo sacrifices for the good of that entity. For example, a literal team in the form of a football club or a metaphorical team in the form of a business corporation may own collective assets such that it does not make sense to ask ‘How do these assets distribute to individual members?’ The assets do not divide in that way, they belong indivisibly to the collective entity, and in any case its constituent members may change—even totally—over a period of time. In these circumstances a team may sell some of its collective assets in order to buy a player whose presence will enhance the team’s results. Hence, pace Nozick, it is not true that there is no social entity which can undergo a sacrifice for its own good.4 I now turn to a particular aspect of an individual’s relation to a collective agency: individuals sometimes identify with the interests and desires of the team or other collective entity to which they belong. This identification can take different forms, ranging from identification anchored wholly in individual considerations to identification which rests on the valuing of the collective entity itself. For example, it may matter to me that my team wins only because I want to get the bonus in my pay packet which results from a win. Or in contrast, I may just regard it as important in itself that we win: the well-being of the team matters intrinsically to me. It is this latter case which I want to explore. Suppose that the success of the team matters in itself to me. I act so as to further its success for that reason and I identify with the interests of the team for no further self-connected reason. I shall refer to identification in this form as pure collective identification.5 How does solidarity in this form relate to the idea of individual goods, and in particular to the idea of individual goods as conceptualised in the polarity between self-interest and altruism? My suggestion is that it shares some


features with altruism and some with self-interest but it is sui generis and distinct from both.6 Agents have many different calls on their commitment from many different sources of reasons for acting. But even if we just take one such source, it will still be true that agents have many different calls on their commitment. Consider just self-interest as a source of reasons, for example. Someone may have an interest in living a comfortable existence, an interest in achieving certain important goals, and an interest in settling some old score. And it is standard, rather than exceptional, for the reasons stemming from such considerations to conflict: sometimes the merely contingent circumstances of the world and sometimes the nature of the interests themselves dictate that they cannot all be realised, that choices have to be made. In any event, if an agent is not to suffer from paralysis and inaction, decisions must be reached which privilege some reasons over others. Where that occurs, we can usefully speak of pro tanto reasons, to reflect the fact that the reasons not so privileged continue to have force, unlike prima facie reasons, which fall out of the picture altogether when not so privileged (Hurley 1989:130).7 I may, for example, have a reason for staying in bed and a reason for getting up, and decide that the reason for getting up is stronger. But then I suffer from weakness of will and stay in bed. In that case I fail to act on the reason which I have privileged; but I still act for a reason, and the continued influence of the non-privileged reason makes this intelligible. This is a framework which is apposite for reasons of all types, including those associated with pure collective identification. Suppose that you decide to privilege the reason you have for identifying with the collectivity but then act against your decision, and for some other reason which you had not so privileged. That is also a case in which you act for a reason which you had already decided was outweighed by other reasons. It is, to that extent, a manifestation of irrationality, and no special considerations would apply if the other reason in question happened to be one relating to your individual self-interest. Now there is a tendency to suppose otherwise, a tendency to suppose that privileging a self-interested reason over other types is a kind of default position requiring no explanation. That is the thought which can underlie the uneasiness about altruism expressed in the passages from Comte, Korsgaard and Sidgwick cited in the first section above: it is felt that the force of moral considerations must be made intellectually compelling in the face of the fact that considerations pertaining to self-interest are much more obviously and unproblematically compelling. Correspondingly, there is a tendency to suppose that sacrifice is involved if a collectivity-related reason is privileged


over a self-interested reason, because acting for the good of the collectivity is taken to be, or to be sufficiently similar to, acting altruistically. (Taking that view does not depend on the thought that the collectivity itself is altruistic: on the contrary, it may be malign in the extreme. Rather, it may be thought that acting for some other entity than oneself involves self-abnegation and sacrifice in the same way that altruism on the part of an individual does, regardless of the nature of that other entity.) The language of sacrifice is apt to be invoked even in sympathetic discussions of collective identification. In arguing against the claim that all human behaviour is self-interested, for example, Amartya Sen says ‘actions based on group loyalty may involve, in some respects, a sacrifice of purely personal interests, just as they can also facilitate, in other respects, a greater fulfilment of personal interests’ (Sen 1987:20). Offe and Wiesenthal say that no trade union could function ‘in the absence of some rudimentary notions held by the members that being a member is of value in itself, that the individual organization costs must not be calculated in a utilitarian manner but have to be accepted as necessary sacrifices’ (Offe and Wiesenthal 1985:183). Susan Hurley does not speak of sacrifice but she describes an individual who identifies with a co-ordinated collective agent as becoming ‘public-spirited’ (Hurley 1989:157). Of course, in one tautological sense there is a sacrifice if I fail to act on a self-interested reason. That reason is sacrificed in the sense that it is overridden, it does not prevail. But sacrifice in that sense will equally be involved if I act out of self-interest and override a reason from some other source. The question, therefore, is whether sacrifice in any further sense is involved if I act out of solidarity, in the form of pure collective identification, rather than out of self-interest. In particular, does such solidarity involve a sacrifice of self, as opposed merely to a sacrifice of one kind of reason. I suggest a negative answer to the question, in the light of the exact relation of this form of solidarity to altruism and self-interest. I proceed now, therefore, to describe the points of similarity and difference between pure collective identification, on the one hand, and altruism and self-interest respectively, on the other. The language of sacrifice assimilates pure collective identification too closely to altruism. There are two components to altruism: positively, a concern for the interests of another person; negatively, a lack of concern with one’s own interests. (I take it, that is, that if a concern for the interests of another person is motivated by the thought that one’s own interests will be promoted through that concern, the case ceases to be one of genuine altruism as opposed to enlightened self-interest.) Now it is true that pure collective


identification shares the negative characteristic. In pure collective identification I have reason to promote the good of an entity distinct from myself, and a reason which is unmediated by any consideration of self-interest as normally construed. The motivation is not traceable back to some individual state of myself which my behaviour or attitudes are designed to realise. But in the positive respect pure collective identification is unlike altruistic motivation. Altruistic motivation necessarily involves the good of some other human being, whereas pure collective identification involves it only per accidens. It may consist in commitment to some joint activity for its own sake, as in the case of an orchestra, so that properly speaking the good of other human beings simply fails to enter the picture. It may, alternatively, consist in commitment to some joint activity which I believe will promote some abstract value that I endorse, and though this will have beneficial effects on or for other human beings that is not the reason for my commitment. For example, perhaps I belong to a regiment which I regard as the embodiment of honour, and it is not that I value honour because of its payoff for human beings, myself or others; rather, I welcome the existence and appropriate relations between human beings precisely as giving an opportunity for the actualisation of this abstract value. Or, thirdly, it may consist in commitment to some joint activity for the sake of its effects on us considered as members of the collectivity, as when we are committed to attempting to secure success for the team. In none of these cases, however, is there the necessary connection with the good of other individuals which is the positive defining characteristic of altruism. Now it might be objected at this point that, even if the positive similarity with altruism is absent, the negative similarity (lack of concern for self) is sufficient to justify talk of sacrifice in such cases. It might be said: if solidarity here involves a neglect of self-interest, how could it be otherwise? But matters are not quite so simple, and now we must turn to the complicated relation between pure collective identification and self-interest as normally construed. In pure collective identification my concern is indeed with an entity distinct from myself, but not an entity entirely distinct from myself. I am part of it and it is part of what I am, so my concern reaches outside my own skin yet at the same time is a concern for an entity which exists in part within my own skin. My concern is therefore in the most literal sense a concern with a part of my self, or a concern with something of which my self is a part. In pure collective identification I am committed to activities which necessarily touch my own existence. But if that is a respect in which pure collective identification draws near to self-interested motivation, there is a respect in which it keeps its distance from


it, as it does from altruism. For although my solidarity is with an entity of which I am part, in the pure case my identification is not dependent on the fact that the collective entity and I are mutually implicated in that way: it is not mediated by thoughts about my individual self or my individual self-interest. There are forms of collective identification which are, as when I identify with and further the aims of the collectivity simply for my own ends; but pure collective identification is not of that form. It is a form of identification which is irreducibly plural, where what I am concerned with is what we want to do, what is good for us, etc., and it therefore contrasts with identification driven by the thought of advancing my individual self-interest. The commitment to undivided plurality precisely displaces such a preoccupation with self and selfinterest. It necessarily involves a broadening of horizons beyond the personal, even though as a matter of fact the person is not left behind. This form of solidarity marks the point at which a framework consisting of a polarity between a concern with one’s own self and a concern with other selves is simply inadequate. It is not that the polarity needs replacing, it is rather that we need to remind ourselves that it does not adequately reflect an important aspect of human social relations. It does not reflect the fact that we individual agents are often constituents in plural subjects,8 rather than simply being individual agents. At the same time, once a concern with a collectivity of which one is a member is added to the framework, it is less plausible to talk in terms of a polarity between the self and the collectivity. To be sure, there can still be tensions between the self and the collectivity, but they will be tensions between me and us, so to speak, and that is a very different matter from tensions between me and you.9 Accordingly, I believe that there are no stronger grounds for using the language of sacrifice in the case of pure collective identification than in the case where one self-interested reason is privileged over another. You have a reason for living a comfortable life but you may sacrifice this to the achievement of some cherished and worthwhile personal goal, or vice versa. In the same way, and no other way, you may sacrifice the comfortable life for the furthering of some collective goal which is similarly cherished and worthwhile. There is a symmetry between the two cases. Such symmetry is remarked on by Thomas Scanlon: We do speak of making a sacrifice when, for example, we give up comfort and leisure for the sake of a family member or a friend, or for the good of some group, team, or institution of which we are a member. But it also feels like a sacrifice when we give up present


comfort and leisure for the sake of our own longer life or future health. The fact that in the latter case we will be ‘paid back’ in the same coin, our own well-being, does not make this case feel less like a sacrifice than the other at the time that it is made. The term ‘sacrifice’ is appropriate in both cases because we give up something of present, palpable appeal for the sake of some other, possibly more distant concern…In both cases we are giving up something that we have reason to want for the sake of some other consideration that we judge to be more important. (Scanlon 1998: 127–8) The difference between Scanlon’s position and mine is that whereas Scanlon says that both cases are the same and therefore both merit the description of sacrifice, what I want to say is that they are both the same and don’t merit that description, neither of them. Conclusion I began by citing a number of statements which sought to articulate the problem of altruism by drawing a contrast between (a) an individual’s relation to, and consequent concern for, their own states and (b) their relation to, and consequent concern for, the states of others. I have attempted to render the contrast between self and others less stark by calling attention to two complications in the implicit picture of the distinct individual with their distinct concerns. The first complication is that individuals typically have sophisticated, second-order attitudes towards their own aspirations as well as ground-level, unreflective aspirations. And typically, the fulfilment of an individual’s aspirations will carry implications for the lives of others and not just for the life of the individual whose aspirations they are. In consequence, it is at best not obvious that an individual’s ground-level aspirations should be clustered together as forming some important unity with some particular claim on the attention either of us or of the individual him- or herself. It is therefore at best not obvious that the doctrine of the distinctness of persons, taken in that sense, is something we should simply accept on the nod. And if the kind of unity implied by the doctrine is not established, then the kind of separateness which forms the other side of the same coin is not made out either. The second complication arises from the existence of aspirations which do not attach to individuals as such: collective aspirations. What I have tried to suggest is that there is a form of motivation available to us, quite unmysterious in itself though greatly undertheorised in our philosophy, in which we identify


with the interests, goals and desires of some collective entity to which we belong. That form of motivation does not sit easily along the polarity of altruism and self-interest, precisely because it reminds us that we do not populate a world containing only individuals, whether separate or not. When we add this form of motivation to the stock of motivations available, then the polarity of altruism and self-interest is once again bound to look rather different. In the remainder of this concluding section I address an uneasiness which may naturally arise in the wake of my earlier discussion. It may be felt that the doctrine of the distinctness of persons, whatever its philosophical shortcomings, is a doctrine which is essentially protective of individual human beings. It articulates the thought that each of us has a life to lead and that the integrity of our individual life is deserving of protection. As such, it certainly corresponds to a deeply held belief in our culture. By contrast, an emphasis on the existence of irreducibly collective entities with irreducibly collective goods will serve to threaten the eclipse of the individual, to encourage the sacrifice of individuals in the name of impersonal, collective goods and perhaps even to encourage the totalitarian modes of thought which naturally go with those possibilities. Better to have the problem of altruism, it may be felt, than that. Such thoughts clearly exercised Nozick, but they represent an uneasiness which might be experienced well beyond those sharing the rather particular political position which Nozick helped to popularise over the last quarter of the twentieth century. The history of the other three-quarters of the twentieth century might well be thought to give us plenty of reason to be on our guard against any form of collectivism. One possible response to this uneasiness, which I do not endorse, would be to take the Humean line: There is no method of reasoning more common, and yet none more blameable, than, in philosophical disputes, to endeavour the refutation of any hypothesis, by a pretence of its dangerous consequences to religion and morality. When any opinion leads to absurdities, it is certainly false; but it is not certain that an opinion is false, because it is of dangerous consequence. Such topics, therefore, ought entirely to be forborne; as serving nothing to the discovery of truth, but only to make the person of an antagonist odious. (Hume 1748:96) In other words, it might be said that we should simply stick to what we think is the philosophical truth and not become entangled in discussion of the likely


consequences of believing a particular theory, since that will be irrelevant to its truth. I do not endorse this response because it seems to me to draw the limits of philosophical discussion too narrowly. It would be an error, even a philosophical error, not to recognise that all human communication carries perlocutionary effect and illocutionary force, as well as locutionary content. It seems to me an arbitrary limiting of philosophical enquiry to focus on the content of a philosophical theory to the exclusion of a consideration of its role and likely effects. We should have an unnecessarily restrictive view of the writings of Rawls and Nozick, for example, if it were confined only to what they had said and took no account of the fact that, regardless of the intentions of the authors and the structure of their arguments, those writings also carried a particular significance and played a particular ideological role in the circumstances in which they were produced. A more extended consideration, then, of the significance of philosophical theories seems to me entirely appropriate. That said, there will always be a complex interplay between the content of a philosophical theory and its broader significance, a complexity which will depend in part on the complexity, in its turn, of the content of the theory. In the present case, complexity in content is present with regard to the exact status of collective entities. This is evident in the temptation to say both that a collective entity is nothing but a number of individuals and that it is something more than that. It is true that teams, literal and metaphorical, are composed of individuals and nothing else. A recognition of the existence of collective entities does not therefore imply the introduction of some supra-individual entity, independently of that composition, which can then set about bullying us. The actions of a collective entity are necessarily powered, as it were, by the actions of its constituents and there is nowhere else for its own actions to come from. Any state of affairs represented by the form

consists in a state of affairs represented in part by the form

Individuals have certainly not been eclipsed here, therefore.


Yet at the same time the brackets in the symbolic representation have to be taken seriously as indicating that individuals in this context are indissolubly linked: it is as members of the team that they deliberate and act. What then has to be dropped is the idea that there are only distinct individuals and that desires cannot be summed in any way except as belonging to individuals. More than that, we have seen that a collective entity can have a characteristic good which is distinct from the goods of its individual members. Given this, and given the fact that a collective entity may persist in existence even if all its constituents change, it follows that a harm can befall such an entity which is distinct from any harm befalling the individuals who compose it. A loss to General Motors may cascade down to individual constituents of that entity in all kinds of ways but it is also a loss to that entity as a separate matter. Considerations like these fuel the Nozickian worry: avoidance of harm to the collective entity might come to be preferred to avoidance of harm to an individual. Notice that it must be that specific comparative preference for the collectivity over the individual which is found perturbing: individuals constantly experience harm as a result of the avoidance of harm for some other individual. But in a world which contains very powerful collectivities, from banks to government agencies to multinationals, the worry is not a fanciful one. The question, however, is not whether a collectivity may flourish at the expense of an individual—we have ample historical evidence of that—but rather whether we should refrain from formulating a theory of collectivity since it may result in bad effects. Here are four reasons for thinking that we should not so refrain. First, it is difficult to know with any degree of certainty what the results of formulating and promulgating a theory will be.10 Second, we would in any case have a wholly inadequate picture of the social world we inhabit if it did not include a conception of collectivities as persisting entities, together with an account of the relation between them and their individual constituents. Third, a theory of collectivity (certainly the one sketched in this article) does not necessarily imply that it is ever right for the good of a collectivity to take precedence over that of individuals. That is a further matter which depends on further argument. Fourth, suppose it is held that such precedence is sometimes indeed right. We do not yet know whether this would be a bad effect of the theory. That depends on whether such a view is ever defensible, and we should not conclude too hastily that it could not be. On what grounds do we think it is sometimes right for the good of one individual to take precedence over that of another? We cite what it is about them which licenses this, some property they possess or some relation they stand in. In other words, we cite relatively abstract grounds, involving appeals to justice, honesty, avoidance of cruelty


and so on. We cannot be sure that none of these considerations has application in the case of individuals’ relation to a collectivity, and we cannot therefore be sure that bad effects follow from such a theory. Individuals have suffered appallingly at the hands of collectivities, but then individuals have also suffered appallingly at the hands of other individuals. So my tentative conclusion is that we have strong enough reasons for going ahead and constructing a decent philosophical theory of collectivity and of the ways in which individuals relate to the collectivities to which they belong. Only when we have such a theory will we be in a position to work out exactly what its normative consequences are. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am grateful to participants in the ALSP conference on altruism for helpful discussion, and especially to Daniel Attas and Cécile Fabre who subsequently provided me with written comments. I am also obliged to G.A.Cohen for characteristically acute comments on the material in section 3. NOTES 1. Rawls having objected that utilitarianism does not take seriously the distinctness of persons, Nozick objects that Rawls himself does not take the distinctness of persons seriously when he proposes treating natural talents as common assets (Nozick 1974: 228). For discussion of the ambiguities in the doctrine, see Brink 1993:252–89, Brink 1997:96–134, Graham 1998:182–8, Raz 1986:271–87. 2. Whether this is true only of many desires or of all is a further question. Could there be a desire whose fulfilment did not involve at some point the life and the desires of some other person? Common sense and the classical distinction between self-regarding and other-regarding acts might suggest an affirmative answer, but for some thoughts on that matter see Graham 2000. 3. For similar thoughts, see Scheffler 1982:99–100. 4. But it may be felt that what more accurately reflects Nozick’s concerns is the case where an individual undergoes some sacrifice for the good of the collective entity. For example, a member of the team foregoes their wages in the hope that this sacrifice can be utilised to enhance the performance of the team. That is a concern which I address in the concluding section. 5. For a fuller account of pure collective identification and other forms of identification with collectivies, see Graham 2002: ch. 4. 6. The remainder of this section is adapted from passages in Graham 2002: ch. 6.3. 7. Hurley suggests that the relationships between different pro tanto reasons are in some ways like the relationships between individuals whose wills clash (ibid.: 34). Harry Frankfurt makes a similar point in suggesting that one person’s making


up their mind is like two people’s making up their differences. This is compatible with conflict or tension continuing, but a certain order has been introduced into it (Frankfurt 1988: 173). 8. The term is due to Margaret Gilbert. See Gilbert 1996:7–9. 9. For a compelling account of dramatic tensions between me and us in a fictional context, see McEwen: 1997:14–15. 10. I am reminded of a passage in the preface of O.K.Bouwsma’s Philosophical Essays: ‘I have long hesitated to assume the risk of the incalculable harm these essays might do but now in view of the likewise incalculable good they might do, I have tossed a coin and it came down as I thought it would. It stood on its edge. And I knocked it down.’ (Bouwsma: 1969: v).

REFERENCES Bouwsma, O.K. 1969. Philosophical Essays. Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press. Brecher, B., J.Halliday & K.Kolinská, eds. 1998. Nationalism and Racism in the Liberal Order. Aldershot: Ashgate. Brink, D. 1993. ‘The separateness of persons, distributive norms and moral theory’. Frey & Morris 1993:252–89. 1997. ‘Rational egoism and the separateness of persons’. Dancy 1997:96–134. Comte, A. 1851–54. Système de Politique Positive. Lenzer 1983. Dancy, J., ed. 1997. Reading Parfit. Oxford: Blackwell. Frankfurt, H. 1988. The Importance of What We Care About. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Frey, R. & C.C.Morris, eds. 1993. Value, Welfare and Morality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gilbert, M. 1996. Living Together: Rationality, Sociality and Obligation. New York: Rowman and Littlefield. Graham, K. 1998. ‘Being some body’. Brecher et al. 1998:176–92. 2000. ‘Are all preferences nosy?’. Res Publica, 6, 133–54. 2002. Practical Reasoning in a Social World: How we act together. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hume, D. 1748. Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, ed. L.A.Selby-Bigge 1902. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Hurley, S. 1989. Natural Reasons. New York: Oxford University Press. Keane, J., ed. 1985. Disorganised Capitalism. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Korsgaard, C., G.A.Cohen, R.Geuss, T.Nagel & B.Williams, 1996. The Sources of Normativity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lenzer, G., ed. 1983. Auguste Comte and Positivism: The Essential Writings. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. McEwen, I. 1997. Enduring Love. London: Jonathan Cape. Nozick, R. 1974. Anarchy, State, and Utopia. New York: Basic Books.


Offe, C. & H.Wiesenthal, 1985. ‘Two logics of collective action’. Keane 1985: 170–220. Rawls, J. 1972. A Theory of Justice. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Raz, J. 1986. The Morality of Freedom. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Scanlon, T. 1998. What We Owe to Each Other. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Scheffler, S. 1982. The Rejection of Consequentialism. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Sen, A. 1987. On Ethics and Economics. Oxford: Blackwell. Sidgwick, H. 1907. Methods of Ethics, 7th ed. 1963. London: Macmillan.

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5 Between Egoism and Altruism: Outlines for a Materialist Conception of the Good JEFF NOONAN

O goodness without result! Unnoticed attitude! I have altered nothing. Swiftly, fruitlessly departing from this world I say to you: Take care that when you leaver this world you were not only good but are leaving a good world (Brecht 1968:120). Even the mind of the small man is no different, only he himself makes it so. Therefore, when he sees a child about to fall into a well he cannot help a feeling of alarm and commiseration. This shows that his humanity (jen) forms one body with that of the child (Wang Yang Ming, cited in McMurtry 1988:368) These two epigraphs allude to the principles of materialist ethics that will be sketched and defended in this paper. Unlike liberal moral theory, materialist ethics is concerned, like St Joan, with the development of good worlds and not simply good wills or people. The ground from which it constructs its normative understanding of a good world is a conception of humans as essentially linked at the level of their organic being, a connection that Wang Yang Ming’s poetic evocation of the involuntariness of concern brings to light. This linkage suggests nothing mystical but refers to the shared material nature of human beings as expressed in a common set of fundamental needs. By grounding itself in consciousness of the shared organic nature of human beings and the social grounds of individual activity materialist ethics hopes to bring to light a universal idea of the good which is beyond the antithesis egoismaltruism, good-for-self versus good-for-other. The universality of the good in materialist ethics contrasts sharply with what I will call the agent-relativism of the idea of the good in traditional liberal moral theories. The examples we will focus upon are the contractarianism of Hobbes, the deontology of Kant, and the utilitarianism of Mill.1 Important


differences between them notwithstanding, each share a set of common assumptions called into question by materialist ethics. Each assumes that desire is the origin of ideas of the good, and because desires differ from person to person, there is a fundamental difference between the good for me and the good for you. Given the agent-relative nature of the good, liberal ethical theory argues that ethical principles admit of only formal universality and must not privilege one conception of the good life over another. These principles are arrived at by an ego reasoning in abstraction from its embodied reality. That is, human material-organic nature does not constitute the object of liberal ethical thinking except as a negative limit to be transcended. To the extent that bodies are ethically significant in traditional liberal moral theory they are the basis of desire and thus of those differences between individual interpretations of the good that potentially generate conflict. Unity can only be restored between selves who differ as to the good by the discovery of a set formal principles, let us call them principles of right, to which rational egos can all agree. This understanding of the ethical significance of embodiment rests, however, on inattention to the material grounds of human life activity. If ethics begins from our material being, rather than our rational ego in abstraction from its embodied self, a fundamental distinction between need and desire comes to light, a distinction elided in classical liberal ethical theory. As a consequence of this elision liberal ethical theory sees in our bodily drives only the source of discord and difference rather than, as materialist ethics contends, an objective ground for a universal notion of the good in which substantive, rather than merely formal ethical principles, can be anchored. I will develop this argument in two parts. In the first I will examine the agent-relativist notion of the good in Hobbes, Kant, and Mill, drawing out its problematic implications for ethical philosophy generally. In the second part I will try to resolve the aporias of liberal ethical philosophy brought to light in the first part by developing a materialist understanding of the good. The Agent-Relative Character of the Good in Traditional Liberal Ethical Philosophy The development of liberal moral philosophy is co-extensive with the development of liberal society out of the rigidly stratified feudal world that preceded it. From the perspective of materialist ethics the relevant feature of this social transformation is the separation it imposed between human beings, the life-sustaining resources of the land, and one another. Society was no longer conceived of as an organic totality organised by an over-arching conception of the good. Modernisation discredited substantive universal

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conceptions of the good and led to the articulation of society into distinct spheres. Most relevant for our purposes are the political-legal system, the economic system and the moral-personal sphere. The moment of universality is divided between the political-legal, in which citizens are to recognise one another through the law as members in a collective enterprise, and the moralpersonal, in which the rationally reflective and formally free individual is to discover some set of formal principles that regulate self-interest. It is assumed that there is no ethical conflict between the universality of the political-legal and moral-personal spheres and the economy, because the economy purports to be ‘an ethically neutralized system of action’ (Habermas 1989:178). Capitalist economic relations are assumed to be the natural outgrowth of selfinterest and ethically indifferent provided the ground rules that govern them are fair. The consequences for the life-horizons of people subjected to these economic relations, measured by their level of need satisfaction and the range of capacity realisation, are not the focus of classical liberal ethical concern. While the separation of moral reasoning from substantive cultural and religious interpretations of the good represents an historic gain for the range of permissible individual activities, it did not come without costs. The key cost from my perspective is that it privileges a conception of ethical reasoning as an ego-centric self-relation over a conception of ethical reasoning as a socially critical world-relation. By ‘ego-centric self-relation’ I mean that ethical reasoning is understood as the private act of a self conceived of as a ‘solitary will’ (Proudfoot 1999:199) the immediate goal of which is conformity to formally universal principles that presuppose rather than challenge the dominant social and economic dynamics. In contrast, ethics as a socially critical world relation is the act of a self conceived as interdependent with other selves and the natural world the immediate goal of which is conformity to substantively universal ethical principles that both expose and challenge the hidden normative assumptions of the given social and economic environment. It is the former conception which dominates ethical philosophy from Hobbes to the present day. Of course, the division of the human being into rational ego and desiring body is central to the main traditions of Western philosophy. The ethical prioritisation of an abstract rationality over the body is central to Plato, to Christian ethics in the tradition of Augustine, and to Descartes. However, it is in Hobbes that the implications of the sundering of the human being into body and rational ego for the ethical evaluation of social and economic systems becomes clearly evident. Humans are driven by their appetites to secure the object of their desire. It appears that Hobbes anchors his idea of the good in an objective relationship between body and world. Such is not in fact the case.


Bodies are the basis for desire, but desire properly speaking is a psychological phenomenon: But whatsoever is the object of any man’s appetite or desire is that which for his part he calleth good…these words of good evil…are ever used in relation to the person that useth them, there being nothing simply and absolutely so, nor any common rule to be taken from the nature of the objects themselves. (Hobbes 1994:28–9) The goodness or badness of a thing is thus not determined by a material relationship between the nature of the thing and the requirements of the human body, but rather by the psychological relationship between desire and things. As the above quotation implies, there are no natural limits to desire, and thus no natural limits to good or bad. As anything is therefore desirable in principle, but not everything is tolerable by the body, it is not the body as an organic system that determines desire but psychological operations unhinged from the body’s requirements. Life-destructive practices can be called good just as easily as life-affirmative ones so long as there is someone who in fact desires to engage in them. Humans left to their natural devices thus exist in a state of war. While it is the desire to live that motivates the move out of the state of nature, the grounds for peace are not fixed by reflecting on the requirements of life. The idea of life requirements cannot be conceptually distinguished from mere desire within the Hobbesian system, and therefore the material basis of life security is ignored as the bedrock of peaceful relations. Reason must therefore search out another set of principles, principles which are not directly grounded in material life requirements but rather in a formal conception of what is required for naturally egoistic self-maximisers to get along with each other. The idea of the social contract is designed to capture the voluntary and rational agreement that is the origin of sovereignty in Hobbes’s system. Through this multilateral agreement future citizens mutually relinquish their rights against each other and agree to abide by a system of law. While the content and scope of the law is determined by the arbitrary power of the sovereign, it need not be opposed to the self-interest of individual citizens. Indeed, once citizens see that they (and their property) are safer in a commonwealth than in the state of nature, a reconciliation between law and self-interest is possible. Individual rational commitment to the formal coherence of a law-system, rather than substantive commitment to the material well-being of self and other, thus constitutes (abstracting from the role of fear) the binding force of ethical-legal norms in Hobbes.


The problem, from my perspective, is not with law as such as a legitimate framework for individual behaviour but rather with its formal character. Hobbes argues that civil law does not necessarily interfere with the egocentric pursuit of private goods. Well-made laws are those whose reasons are publicly known and which help rather than hinder the achievement of self-interested goals. Hobbes compares the function of law to hedgerows which are designed to guide and not impeded travellers on their way (Hobbes 1994:229). While Hobbes does not develop a political economy in Leviathan, the implication of his understanding of good laws seems to be that the socio-economic system is not ethically relevant, that is, that it can be left under the rule of private economic agents. Ethical reasoning for Hobbes thus involves (1) reflection and agreement on the legal and political conditions for peace and (2) prudential reasoning about why not to break the law once the commonwealth has been established. While there are many illiberal elements to Hobbes’s philosophy, his understanding of good laws prioritises the right over the good in a classically liberal way. Ethical and legal principles are not designed to positively ensure the material well-being of others but only to negatively ensure the formal conditions for peaceful pursuit of self-interest. The state is not grounded in a substantive universal value but in the arbitrary power of the sovereign who exists to enforce the laws, keep the peace, and prevent self-interest from becoming socially destructive but otherwise permitting egoistic pursuits. Ethical action is essentially negative, or better, a form of non-action, a commitment to not transgress the law. That which is not forbidden is permitted; beyond a willingness to adhere to the law I have no binding duties to others who are not by law my dependents. To be sure, Hobbes is an extreme proponent of self-maximising individualism. While Kant and Mill both reject the extremes of Hobbes’ egoism, they nevertheless share his egocentric understanding of the good. In both Kant and Mill the universality required of ethical principles is once again purely formal and expressed in a system of right that is prioritised over the good. Deontology and utilitarianism are the two great traditions of liberal ethical philosophy. What interests me here is their shared commitment to an agent-relative understanding of the good. Of most interest is the way in which both assume a separation of self from self and the shared manner in which each system tries to ethically unite what society has sundered. As J.M.Bernstein argues: If one were to approach these opposed moral theories from a diagnostic perspective, one would notice their shared premise: the systematic


dislocation of moral intentions from consequences…Modern moral agents cannot assume that the immediate context of moral action provides a reliable guide as to what is morally required. Which is to say that the systematic dislocation of moral intentions from consequences presupposes the moral isolation of the agent from the others most affected by her actions. In both cases, the mode of coping with this isolation and dislocation is to find impersonal rules that will indirectly cross the gap separating the agent from others (Bernstein 2001:46). Because there appears to be no material or substantive connection between agents, the only means available to link them ethically are formal rules (of law, or right, of utility calculation). Ethical reasoning is again a form of self-relation between an abstract solitary ego and the merely formal principles defining its duties. Ethical action, in turn, is again understood as a form of self-consistency divorced from immediate concern for the material well-being of other agents. We will take up this argument first in relation to Kant and then in relation to Mill. Kant is surprisingly Hobbesian when it comes to the question of the nature of desire and its implications for social relations. As he argues: Man is an animal which, if it lives among others of its kind, requires a master. For he constantly abuses his freedom with respect to other men and, although as a reasonable being he wishes to have a law which limits the freedom of all, is selfish animal impulses tempt him, where possible, to except himself from them. (Kant 1963:17) As in Hobbes, there is no formal distinction made between desire (selfish animal impulses) and needs. The objective life requirements of human beings play no role independent of agent relative and arbitrary desires. Since Kant assimilates needs to desires, and assumes that desires vary endlessly, the satisfaction of desire cannot play a foundational role in the discovery or formulation of ethical principles: The principle of happiness can give rise to maxims, but never maxims such as would be suited to function as laws for the will…as regards knowledge of happiness everything rests on empirical data on the ground that when judgement is made it depends altogether on the opinion held by each man. (Kant 1998:41)


That which makes one happy one calls ‘good’ and that which makes different people happy is different. Thus the good cannot be the ground of universal principles for Kant any more than for Hobbes. He, like Hobbes, therefore, turns to our abstract rational capacity in order to find the principles that can link ‘naturally’ separate selves and thereby constrain self-interest. Kant’s conception of reason and rational being is, of course, fundamentally distinct from Hobbes. The function of reason, however, to connect otherwise disconnected selves through commitment to formally universal principles of right, is not. Under a political interpretation these principles would define the legislative system of a ‘kingdom of ends’ for rational beings. Rational being, however, is radically distinct from natural, material being. The unity between selves expressed in the idea of the Kingdom of Ends is ungrounded, indeed, is opposed to, our nature as embodied beings. The rational being does not get hungry, does not feel pain, and exists outside of the natural order of causes and material relationships. Kant’s rational being ‘belongs to a purely intelligible world’ (Kant 1998:59). In so far as others too are rational beings we must treat them as ends in themselves. But careful attention to Kant’s words make it evident that this duty does not extend to the material being of others. He writes that a rational being is ‘never to be treated as a mere means, but always, at the same time, as an end in itself’ (Kant 1969:107). He does not therefore rule out treating others as means, but only treating others exclusively as means. The fact that we have dignity as rational beings does not preclude the pricing of the necessities of life by the market (Kant 1969:60). In so far as we are natural material beings we are entitled to pursue self-interest within the limits of respecting the right of others to do the same. Ethical principles thus withdraw from any essential connection to productive and exchange relationships, from any direct connection to judging the moral adequacy of those relations from the standpoint of whether they satisfy fundamental needs. Ethical principles leave that system and that relation alone and concern, firstly, the rational consistency of maxims and secondly the duties we have to others in so far as they are members of an intelligible kingdom of ends. Mill’s utilitarianism, grounded as it is in the capacity to feel pleasure and pain, would appear to take more seriously the possibility of grounding ethical claims in our material nature. As in Hobbes and Kant, however, so too in Mill, organic nature does not function as an objective ground for ethical principles. Once again, the material requirements of life are collapsed into the normatively vacant category of desire. The only evidence it is possible to give that something is desirable is that somebody desires it’ (Mill 1985:44). While this principle allows for the possibility that there is something in the nature of the relationship between body and object that determines the object’s


desirability, Mill makes no mention of any criterion to distinguish between wants and needs. While some desires may be more noble than others Mill does not argue that some objects are necessary for human beings. What makes Mill interesting, however, is that he does not immediately infer ethical principles from calculating or law giving reason but rather links ethical reason to the ‘social feelings’ of human being. Ethics has a history for Mill. As humanity becomes more civilised its social feelings increase. As its social feelings increase it gains more insight into the principles necessary for a flourishing social and individual existence: In the comparatively early state of human advancement in which we now live, a person cannot, indeed, feel that entireness of sympathy with all other which could make any real discordance in the general direction of their conduct of life impossible, but already a person in whom the social feeling is at all developed cannot bring himself to think of the rest of his fellow creatures as struggling rivals with him for the means of happiness whom he must desire to see defeated in their object in order that he may succeed in his. (Mill 1985:42) There is a tension in Mill’s work between his philosophical anthropology and his sociological individualism. He believes that the full cultivation of individuality depends upon social organisation, but he also fails to ground his conception of individual good in a social conception that corresponds to the ‘social feelings of mankind’. Those social feelings are not explained as a function of our material interdependence. Instead, he implies that a human being’s natural interest is in his own good and he only learns through reflectively appropriating the history of human development that the full flowering of self-interest requires a disinterested appreciation for the good of others. Thus for Mill the collective good is a function of disinterested reflection rather than a presupposition of individuals realising their good. Rather than a goal that follows from our shared human nature, the ‘good of the world’ as he calls it, is determined by the addition of individual goods. (Mill 1985:25) The fact that Mill believes that social feelings must be deliberately cultivated is a sign of the alienated social system in which he is writing, a system in which the social dependence of individuals is mystified by market relations and egocentric ethical doctrines. What Bernstein argues in relation to liberal ethical philosophy in general applies in particular to Mill, namely, that the use of ethical theory to argue against an assumed natural egoism is a ‘coded way of expressing universal injustice’ (Bernstein 2001:152). Because Mill is blind to


the necessary ground of social unity existing in our material nature he is forced to a construct a concept of the happiness of all concerned: the happiness which forms the utilitarian standard of what is right in conduct is not the agent’s own happiness but the happiness of all concerned. As between his own happiness and that of others the utilitarian requires him to be as strictly impartial as a sympathetic and benevolent observer. (Bernstein 2001:22) While it again appears that Mill reserves a central role for consciousness of human connection here, such is not in fact the case. Sympathy and benevolence may be natural dispositions for Mill, but he does not anchor them in our objective need for one another. While he assigns important value to human interconnection, he does not see human interconnection as the ground of possibility for individual conceptions of the good. Rather, individuals naturally develop conflicting accounts of the good that must then be resolved through disinterested reflection. Social feelings are not spontaneous feelings of connection deriving from our interdependence buried under alienated social conditions and forms of consciousness but dispositions adopted as a result of abstract reflection on the constraints other people’s conception of the good impose on our own. Mill, like Hobbes and Kant, thus overlooks our shared organic nature as the material ground for a universal conception of the good. Outline for a Materialist Ethics Classical liberal philosophy in its major permutations conceives of ethics as a structure of principles of right designed to constrain natural self-interest. The gain for the autonomy of individuals is, I would contend, outweighed, and eventually undermined by, the exclusion of material relations, in particular socio-economic relations, from the centre of ethical concern. Accepting self-interest as natural and the proper motor of the economy, liberal ethical philosophy is unable to perceive the ethical significance of connection between the normal operations of that economy and harm to life. In what follows I want to try to return those relations to the centre of ethical concern by developing a materialist conception of the good grounded in the organic nature of human being. Before expanding upon that notion of the good, however, it is important to discuss what I mean in this context by ‘materialism’. By materialism I do not intend a reductionist causal account of the origin of morals. Neither do I mean an ideological critique of morality as mere


obfuscation of particularist class interest (Horkheimer 1986). Nor do I mean by materialism simply, ‘an acknowledgment that physical matter pre-exists all human thought and actions and exerts its particular determinations upon the latter’ (Soper 1979:70). In my usage materialism is not reductionist or identical to a crude physicalism. It develops its explanations from the nature of the phenomenon under question. Medicine and physics are both materialist in so far as they assume that the real is exhausted by measurable bodily states and relationships, but the bodies that they study are not the same. Medicine studies bodies at a more complex level of living integration. The methods of physics, developed to study matter and energy in its most basic, non-living forms, would thus not be appropriate to medicine. Medicine is not, however, less materialist because it is not reductionist; the materialist character of both depends upon their respective methods being adequate to the level of complexity and integration of their object. Likewise, materialist ethics does not attempt to reduce ethical principles to either principles of genetics or evolution, or counterpose material and mental processes. It too is articulated as a set of universal principles, but unlike liberal ethical theory it derives its principles from a conception of the human being as defined by an objective set of needs and orients them towards the value of enhancing the activities of human life. It agrees with Marcuse that ‘prior to all ethical behaviour in accordance with specific social standards…morality is a disposition of the organism…to create and preserve “ever greater unities of life’” (Marcuse 1969:10). Human organic nature is understood as a striving to maintain itself in existence, a striving which brings it into necessary connection with others. To be sure, the unity of life can be disrupted by scarcity, by racism, and by other divisive systems of thinking. Nevertheless, underneath the disruptions of divisive economic and thought systems there remains a necessary connection between human beings and their natural and social environments that is the basis of materialist ethical criticism. It is just because divisive systems impede the maintenance and development of life’s capacities that they are criticized. To insist upon the epithet ‘materialist’, then, is to insist that ethical judgment must focus upon the way in which the needs of life are met or not met in given social formations. This demand presupposes that human beings are defined by a set of basic organic requirements that, if unmet, cause objective harm to the agent. Harm here means both direct physical harm and loss or restriction in the range of capacities caused by harm of the first type. For example, a child deprived of calcium because his parents cannot afford milk is harmed both in so far as his bones will be weakened and in so far as he will thus be unable to engage in a whole series of physical activities because of his


weak bones. This conception of harm is thus anchored in a conception of humans as organic, embodied, socially interrelated beings. Sebastiano Timpanaro explains the understanding of human being relevant for materialist ethics: The historicist polemic against ‘man in general’…errs when it overlooks the fact that man is a biological being, endowed with a certain (not unlimited) adaptability to his external environment, and with certain impulses towards activity and the pursuit of happiness, subject to old age and death, is not an abstract construction, nor one of our prehistoric ancestors…now superseded by historical and social man, but still exists in each of us (Timpanaro 1980:45). The reality of this organic nature weds human beings together into different and historically changing social formations. Our organic nature defines us in so far as it places a shared set of demands upon every human being, demands that must be met if individuals are to survive and flourish. But the requirements of human being are not abstract species requirements, they exist in each of us and, more importantly, they establish relations between individuals and between human beings and their natural environment. These requirements thus constitute for us a shared reality; to know the requirements of my being is to know the requirements of human being, since in knowing my requirements the object of my knowing is human organic nature in this individuated form. As Hegel said, ‘Life does not differ from life’ (cited in Bernstein 2001: 331). I know that failure to satisfy these requirements in another leads directly to harm for that other because I know that such deprivation would harm me. Taking my ethical stand on the grounds of the types of harm suffered by living beings entails that I work against social systems that harm their citizens because their economic dynamics operate in abstraction from satisfying the needs of life. Harm is thus the bridging principle linking the materialist conception of human organic requirements to ethical theory. The basic value axiom of materialist ethics thus states that the unnecessary harm caused by the disconnection between economic systems and the needs of life is the basic form of wrong. Materialist ethical principles follow from the conception of human being, in self or in otherness, as an organic being capable of suffering harm. When the object of ethical consciousness is the liability of the human, in self or in other, to suffer harm the difference between human beings disappears. Ethical consciousness is no longer motivated by a conception of the good for self or the good for other, but rather by a universal concern to prevent harms due to socially structured need deprivation.


The aim would be trivial if we did not inhabit a globe that regularly and systematically deprives morally significant numbers of people of even the most basic need-satisfying objects. Two billion people live without adequate sanitation. 35,000 children a day die of preventable diseases, most caused by malnutrition; 800 million people suffer from hunger; in Canada tens of thousands of people lack homes and in the United States 30 million people lack affordable access to health care. Given these realities, the imperative of materialist ethics—to prevent the harms caused by the disconnection between the needs of life and the economy—is far from trivial but forms the core of a deep moral concern for the well-being of others. What we require is a criterion of need that is sensitive to both social complexity and the fixed organic basis of needs. Such a criterion would enable us to distinguish needs from desires without thereby ignoring the complexity of needs. This criterion must still be anchored in human organic nature, but must grasp this nature in such a way that the greater scope of human needs is understood. That criterion is found in the work of John McMurtry and states that ‘N is a need if and only if, and to the extent that, deprivation of N always results in a reduction of organic capability’ (McMurtry 1998:163). Any life form is defined by a set of capacities for activity; the greater the range of capacities for activity the greater complexity of the life form. The basic forms of organic activity are sentience and feeling, movement, and cognition. Human beings have the greatest range of capacities since alone amongst the life forms we know of we are self-conscious and capable of abstractive thought and planning. Thus, when we speak of the material nature of human beings in terms of its basic needs and organic capabilities we do not distinguish between ‘physical’ and mental’ capabilities. Thought is every bit as much an organic capability of human being as moving one’s arm, and is thus properly included under a concept of our material nature. The value of life for a human being is determined by the extent to which it is able to realise those capacities definitive of its organic being. If we define good in relation to values then it follows from this perspective that the good for a human being is to realise those capacities. Capacity realisation presupposes that three classes of needs are met: the physical requirements of life including health care, socio-cultural requirements of intellectual and bodily cultivation, especially education, and temporal requirements of self-reflection, essentially time that is not under the control of somebody else. The first class of needs must be satisfied as a condition of maintaining life and health. The second class of needs must be satisfied as a condition for the development of cognitive and creative capacities. The third class of needs must be satisfied so that those cognitive and creative capacities can be developed


freely. Failure to satisfy any of these three classes of needs results in felt harm to the being so deprived in the two senses of harm given above. Despite the fact that these three classes of needs are of very wide scope it may seem as if we are operating with far too restricted a concept of need, one which in fact excludes most of what is truly human—cultural, intellectual, and psychological complexity. In order to meet this objection we need to reflect more deeply on the meaning of need. Needs are anchored in the organic nature of human beings but they are not satisfied in an abstractly ‘natural’ way. Because needs are satisfied through social practices, and social practices change, the temptation has been to see needs themselves as socially constituted all the way down (Baudrillard 1981; Fraser 1989). In the Marxist tradition the expansion of needs has been employed as a yardstick with which to measure the growth of human freedom (Fraser 1998; Heller 1976; Jagger 1987). The problem with the way in which needs are socialised in this manner, however, is that the distinction between need and desire tends to break down and Marxist criticism ends up in the uncomfortable position of arguing for a limitless and consumeristic expansion of needs without due refection on either the carrying capacity of the environment or the genuine requirements of human freedom and well-being (Soper 1979: 85–6). The criterion of need given above is sensitive to cultural mediation, but insists that any genuine need derives from the material organic nature of human being, its ability to feel, to move and act, to think and to reflect upon itself and its horizons. For example, people in different cultures might require different types of education, but education, understood generally as instruction from someone of greater experience, is a requirement of anyone choosing to develop some skill or capacity, whether that be the capacity for philosophy or Inuit throat singing. To borrow a term from Doyal and Gough’s important work on the theory of need, basic needs are universal while specific need satisfiers can vary from culture to culture (Doyal & Gough 1991). Thus, in our education example everyone has a basic need for education but the specific need satisfier, the particular type of education needed, will vary. There is no radical difference in the force of the ethical claim on resources entailed by the existence of the need. As Martha Nussbaum argues, ‘human beings have common resources and common problems wherever they live, and their special dilemmas can best be seen as growing out of their special circumstances rather than out of a nature or identity that is altogether unlike that of other humans’ (Nussbaum 1999:7). Measured from the perspective of organic requirements the materialist ethical principle of harm avoidance cuts through cultural differences.


The requirements of life defined by needs are categorically distinct from the liberal understanding of desires. Although needs are felt uniquely in each human individual they are not for that reason agent relative. The conception of desire typical of liberal philosophy is agent relative and serves to divide individuals from each other. The foregoing conception of need is also distinct from a common definition of need in philosophy according to which an object ‘a’ is an object of need if it is instrumental to some purpose, regardless of the nature of that purpose. This definition is quite proper at the level of descriptive use of the term, but it detaches the concept of need satisfaction from any normative ground, and is thus not appropriate for materialist ethics. If I am to stab someone it is clear that I need a knife. But while the ability to inflict violence on another is clearly a capacity of human being, it is not a capacity the lack of development of which harms me in any way, and hence not a capacity that has any positive ethical significance. Indeed, the desire to harm is a pathology that arises in social formations in which we have been set against one another and detached from consciousness of the shared nature and needs that link human beings together. We must now explore the nature of that link more closely. It follows from the definition of need given above that all human beings, in so far as they are living organic beings of a definite type, have the same interest in need satisfaction. This interest is neither egocentric nor altruistic. In so far as I am conscious of myself as a needy being I am conscious of human needs in me. In so far as I take an interest in need satisfaction I take an interest in the human in me and the human in me, in respect of its organic requirements and general capabilities, is the same as the human in others. The interest in need satisfaction derives not from my private psyche, but from my membership in a human community of life. When this shared organic nature becomes the focus of my ethical consciousness it changes the way relations between human being are understood. It gives rise to what Keith Graham has called ‘pure collective identification’: In pure collective identification my concern is with an entity distinct from myself, but not entirely distinct from myself. I am part of it and it is part of what I am, so my concern reaches outside my own skin yet at the same time is a concern for an entity which exists in part within my own skin. My concern is therefore in the most literal sense a concern with a part of myself. (Graham 2002:183). The relevant collective for materialist ethics is neither class nor culture but the universal collective, humanity, membership in which is given by our very


existence. This collective embraces every more limited identity as the obligatory material ground of its possibility of existence. To be motivated by the interest of this collectivity is to be motivated by what is most one’s own and yet what is equally everyone else’s. To think of oneself as a human therefore is to connect oneself in consciousness to the human in others. Such conscious interconnection does not entail, however, that I strive to become the universal benefactor of every suffering human everywhere at every time. Materialist ethics recognises degrees of responsibility that radiate out from each person at the centre to the persons we are best in a position to help. The degree of moral connection between people is measured by the efficacy of possible actions. I may be better positioned to fight homelessness in Windsor than in New York and it might be more efficacious for me to fight the coming war with Iraq by fighting against my Canadian government than going to Iraq to serve as a human shield. If my brother is sick I might be better positioned to help him (by driving him to the hospital, say) than I am to help fight scarlet fever in Africa. However, what motivates me in each case, according to the materialist perspective, is not the fact that my brother as my brother is suffering, or that my fellow Windsorites as Windsorites are homeless, but that human beings closest to me are suffering. As living beings humans therefore have a shared interest in need satisfaction. But no one satisfies needs simply for the sake of satisfying needs; the satisfaction of needs enables us to develop those capacities that distinguish and individuate us. We are dependent upon others and they upon us for the resources that satisfy our fundamental organic requirements. In being dependent we are not thereby diminished in our individuality, anymore than my index finger is diminished in its specificity by its dependence on its connections with the rest of my hand. Cut off from the rest of my hand the index finger loses its reality by losing its specific form of activity. In the same way a human being cut off from others by being need deprived loses its reality as an active individual. Just as my index finger depends upon its connection with my hand in order to do the types of things it is capable of doing, so too human individuals are dependent upon their connections with others if they are to do in reality the types of things they are capable of doing. These connections between human beings are developed in the evolved institutions of society through which need satisfying goods and services are produced and distributed. McMurtry calls these evolved institutions society’s ‘civil commons’ (McMurtry 1998:24). As living beings connected one to each other by our shared needs, we each have an interest in social connections which are geared towards need satisfaction. When social connections are not geared towards need satisfaction some people are need deprived, and to be need


deprived is to suffer harm. Grounding itself in the consciousness of our shared nature, materialist ethics cultivates in everyone the ability to understand and respond to harm, whether in oneself or in others, caused by social connections becoming divorced from their need satisfying ground. If we turn the situation around, and examine the problem from the perspective of need satisfaction we light upon the materialist concept of the good. If to be need deprived is to be disabled in some fundamental way, to have one’s needs satisfied is to enable the development of the capacities definitive of human being. The drive of life, human life included, is to realise its capacities. In human beings, as Nussbaum argues ‘human capabilities exert a moral claim that they should be developed’ (Nussbaum 1999:43). In taking as my goal the development of the capabilities that define me I am not simply concerned with my private and radically distinct good. If the good in general is capacity realisation, and these capacities are human, then the good in question is a collective good. For me to realise my particular capabilities is part of the collective ‘humanity’ realising its collective good. My good, as part of the human good, is damaged, not only when I fail to develop capabilities, but equally when others fail to develop theirs. In so far as I am oriented by the human good of capacity realisation, then, I stand under a substantively and not merely formally universal obligation to work against definitions of the good life that can be proven to cause material harm to human beings. As in classical ethics the good in materialist ethics means that which human beings aim at or strive for. That which we all strive for is the realisation of capacities. Although the way in which capacities are developed differs, the general structure of life activity is the same. On analogy with the relation between needs and need satisfiers we can say that the good is the same for all although the capacities that satisfy the drive for the good in particular cases differs. The good that is realised in particular cases is a moment of a more universal good anchored in the drive of living beings to individuate themselves. Thus, when I become a philosopher and my neighbour becomes a painter we do not develop discreet and irreconcilable ‘definitions of the good life’ but we develop in a conscious fashion different capacities that are anchored in our shared organic being. Like consciousness of needs, consciousness of the material nature of the good is neither egoistic nor altruistic. To explain, let us see how what appears to be mere self-interest can radiate out into a general concern for human well-being if we treat particular conceptions of the good as moments of an underlying human good. In taking an interest in becoming a philosopher I take an interest in the availability of academic positions. In taking an interest in the availability of academic positions I take an interest in the way that the


government funds higher education. Hence my concern with being a philosopher has led me to a general concern with the state of higher education. In taking an interest in the funding of higher education I am focussing on the fiscal priorities of government. My initial interest has now become general. I now examine those fiscal policies and see that they are skewed towards corporate tax cuts rather than funding the social infrastructure required to satisfy my needs and the needs of my fellow citizens. Concerned, I decide to look around the globe to see if there are better funding models and if other states are doing a better job funding their society’s infrastructure. I notice that there seems to be a global pattern of cutting infrastructure to satisfy business interests. Moreover, as my concern becomes global I realise that millions of my fellow humans face a far more serious plight than I do. Hence, I use my academic position to develop philosophical arguments that I hope will awaken people’s critical consciousness and sense of ethical connection to their fellow human beings in the interest of addressing the causes of global suffering. In so doing my concern is neither with my own career nor with sacrificing my career for others but rather with developing my good in a way that advances the possibility that others will be able to do the same. NOTES 1. I choose these three thinkers because their works are uncontroversial classics in the history of liberal ethical philosophy and because the connection between their ethical premises and the historical development of liberal capitalist society is clear. 2. Since it is a premise of the materialist understanding of human being that individuals always and necessarily exist in social relationships I do not include a general ‘need’ for others’ in the list of basic needs.

REFERENCES Baudrillard, J. 1981. For A Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign. New York: Telos. Bernstein, J.M. 2001. Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brecht, B. 1968. St. Joan of the Stockyards. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Doyal, I. & L.Gough. 1991. A Theory of Human Need. New York: Guilford. Fraser, I. 1998. Marx and Hegel: The Concept of Need. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Fraser, N. 1989 Unruly Practices. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Graham, K. 2002. Practical Reasoning in a Social World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.


Habermas, J. 1989. The Theory of Communicative Action, Volume Two: Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Heller, A. 1976. Marx’s Theory of Needs. New York: St Martin’s Press. Hobbes, T. 1994. Leviathan. Indianapolis: Hackett. Horkheimer, M. 1986 ‘Materialism and morality’. Telos, 69, 85–121. Jagger, A. 1987. Feminist Politics and Human Nature. Langham, MA: Rowman and Littlefield. Kant, I. 1963 Kant on History. New York: MacMillan. Kant, I. 1969. Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill. 1998. Critique of Practical Reason. Milwaukee: Marquette University Press. Marcuse, H. 1969. An Essay on Liberation. Boston: Beacon Press. McMurtry, J. 1998. Unequal Freedoms: The Global Market as an Ethical System. Toronto: Garamond. Mepham, J. & D.H.Ruben, eds. 1979. Issues in Marxist Philosophy, Volume Two: Materialism. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press Mill, J.S. 1985. Utilitarianism. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merill. Nussbaum, M. 1999. Sex and Social Justice. New York: Oxford University Press. Proudfoot, W. 1999. ‘Rawls on the individual and the social.’ Richardson & Weithman 1999:199. Richardson, H. & P.Weithman, eds. 1999. The Philosophy of Rawls: Volume 4: Moral Psychology and Community. New York: Garland. Soper, K. 1979. ‘Marxism, materialism, and biology’. Mepham & Ruben 1979:70. Timpanaro, S. 1980. On Materialism. London: Verso.

6 Is There a Paradox of Altruism? ROBERT PAUL CHURCHILL and ERIN STREET

Introduction As far as we know, there has been no logical examination of the conceptual plausibility of altruism as a personality construct. Inferences from empirical studies, most notably those of Samuel and Pearl Oliner (1988) and of Kristin Renwick Monroe (1996), strongly support the existence of altruistic acts and underlying altruistic personalities. Yet, despite abundant and persuasive evidence that altruists exist, their personalities remain puzzling. They appear to involve inconsistent, or paradoxical, elements. This issue is of critical importance: the incoherency of the altruistic personality would undermine the possibility that there are persons for whom genuine concern for the good of others is an integral part of personality. In this essay we highlight and offer a resolution to the apparent paradox of the altruistic personality. We argue that the altruistic personality is a coherent construct after all. In the first section we present the view that altruism is behaviour genuinely directed at helping others for their own sake and not reducible to selfinterested or pro-social behaviour. We do not argue for this claim here, however, as we join Galston (1993) in viewing this issue as settled through the work of the Oliners, Monroe and others. The paradigmatic and most completely studied altruists are the rescuers of Jews in Nazi Germany and Nazi-occupied Europe. Social science research indicates altruism to be the only explanation for the acts of these extraordinary individuals, and concurrently, the thesis of absolute self-interest to be implausible. This same research supports a distinctive personality underlying altruistic acts; altruistic acts were not randomly distributed, but concentrated among a certain group who engaged in long-term rescuing commitments and who shared certain personality traits (Smolenska & Reykowski 1992).


In the second section of this essay, we concede that efforts to account for rescuing behaviour as altruistic are problematic due to an apparent paradox that will continue to perpetuate confusion unless addressed. The altruistic personality construct appears to contain incompatible elements: an altruist compassionately identifies with others and possesses ‘extensivity’, or an unbounded sense of self; but altruists also must have a high capacity for critical discernment and a well-developed sense of autonomy and self-efficacy; that is, they must have a bounded sense of self, or strong ‘individuation’. The individuation element enables the potential altruist to both perceive and possess the agency and efficacy as an independent and competent being necessary to affect positively others. By contrast, extensivity allows the potential altruist to accept the other’s good as her own and experience the requisite motivation to help others. The altruist is apparently both connected and individuated, both dependent and independent. In the third section, we argue that this paradox is only apparent. We maintain that the confusion will dissolve from a better understanding of the relationship between concern for others and concern for one’s self. We argue further that a correct explanation must show how rescuing behaviour involves a non-egoistic enlargement of the self. This allows individuation to increase directly with extensivity without being pegged to a narrowly-defined concept of self-interest. Thus, contrary to diminishing autonomy, selflessness serves to affirm the self; caring, as a manifestation of the altruist’s extensivity, we argue, actually enhances individuation in situations calling for rescue. We conclude, therefore, that despite the appearance of paradox, the altruistic personality is a coherent construct. We believe, moreover, that an understanding of the altruistic personality as a coherent construct needs greater attention to features of altruism not clearly distinguished in research. Thus, in the fourth and final section, we address a further puzzle related to personality dynamics implied by the simultaneous presence of autonomy and extensivity. How can we explain the supposed ‘negotiation’ between the soft, or permeable, ego boundaries, presumably implied by extensivity, and the harder, or impermeable, ego boundaries, presumably implied by autonomy? How can altruists be affected so strongly by others as to adopt their concerns as their own, while maintaining the concentration and separation necessary to exercise effective action? The answer, we believe, requires a better appreciation of the differences between compassion and empathy (or perspective taking), as well as a better understanding of distinctions among types of empathy involved, and of the way empathy mediates between compassionate co-feeling and individuation.

IS THERE A PARADOX OF ALTRUISM? 91

The Altruistic Personality Empirical research supports arguments for the existence of altruism in a strong sense as behaviour directed at helping others for their own sake. It is not disputed that there are a range of ‘mixed’ cases, that is, pro-social actions involving different degrees of self-interest and other-directed behaviour. But altruism, for our purposes, is defined by the motivation of the agent rather than the benefit resulting from the agent’s acts; thus it differs significantly from other pro-social behaviour, namely, any behaviour that has the effect of helping others (Kohn 1992). Altruistic and pro-social acts are not mutually implicative. Just as an act may be pro-social, but self-interested and not altruistic in the strong sense we use here, an act can be other directed but not helpful, and thus altruistic but not pro-social. More important, the existence of altruism in this strong sense and of an altruistic personality appears to refute arguments that all altruistic acts constitute self-interested, pro-social behaviours. In 1988, Samuel P.Oliner and Pearl S.Oliner published The Altruistic Personality, the results of the Altruistic Personality Project and an in-depth analysis of 406 ‘rescuers of Jews’, people who, despite grave risk and terrible hardship, rescued Jews during the Holocaust. The Oliners’ study further inspired a major international and interdisciplinary conference that resulted in the publication in 1992 of the collection of essays called Embracing the Other. Based on these studies, and especially those of the Oliners themselves and Lawrence Blum, it is possible to define altruism as behaviour that meets the following conditions: (1) It is voluntarily undertaken. (2) It is motivated by concern for others, or by conscience or moral principle (or by some combination of these). (3) It is done in the absence of expectation of gain—of receiving ‘external’ rewards.1 (4) It manifests an absence of concern for the self, or more accurately, the subjection of concern for safety or material well being of the self to concerns for the other. (5) It manifests care marked by a significant degree of ‘inclusiveness’ that renders irrelevant such characteristics as the gender, race, ethnicity, religion, or nationality, of the others toward whom concern is shown (Oliner and Oliner 1988, Blum 1994).2


To be sure, this definition of altruism rules out as non-altruistic only helping behaviours that involve the expectation of ‘external’ rewards. It does not eliminate the possibility that heroic rescuers were self-interested in seeking ‘internal rewards’. Some researchers have suggested that, although another person benefits materially, helping behaviour is directed towards the helper’s own psychological state. They maintain that, because helping behaviour is directed at improving the helper’s own internal state or avoiding self-censure it is, in fact, an egoistic act with pro-social effect (Monroe 1996:180; Kohn 1992:241). One major difficulty with this view is that experimental tests claiming to support such self-directed ‘altruism’ have involved highly artificial designs and very simple helping, or pro-social, tasks, such as picking up dropped index cards, or offering directions to strangers (Krebs & Hesteren 1992). These experiments do not show that all ‘internal’ motivators are ‘rewards’ for the self; moreover, as we argue later, motivations to care for others may be deeply satisfying or consistent with moral convictions although they do not seek one’s self-interest. Suppose that some heroic rescuers are motivated by a desire for a clear conscience. Is it possible that all, or even most, acts of rescue are similarly selfdirected and self-interested, notwithstanding their morally significant consequences? The research of Monroe and her colleagues is of critical importance as a response to this question (Monroe et al. 1990; Monroe 1991). Monroe and her associates demonstrate that the acts of a group of gentile rescuers of Jews during the Second World War simply cannot be explained through any non-vacuous account of self-interest. Both Monroe and the Oliners identify a class of ‘rescuers’ (identified through Yad Vashem, an Israeli agency established to honour Holocaust victims and their rescuers). This is a group whose acts on behalf of endangered Jews continued over an extended period, required enormous sacrifice, entailed huge risks to liberty and life itself, and, for some, yielded condemnation or ostracism from family and former friends and associates (Oliner & Oliner 1988; Monroe et al. 1990; Monroe 1991, 1996). She then inventories the numerous explanatory theories that seek to explain their acts as the product of deeper self-interest simply disguised as altruism. She tests these hypotheses against information about individual rescuers in contrast to non-rescuers. She demonstrates that the motivational variables emphasized by economists and evolutionary biologists, which both seek to explain potentially altruistic behaviour as self-interested, fail to explain rescuing behaviour and concludes, therefore, that the theory that the rescuers acted altruistically is the only reasonable explanation remaining (Monroe 1996).


What is the motivational basis for altruism? The Oliners used questionnaires to interview 682 individuals—406 rescuers, 126 non-rescuers, and 150 rescued survivors—who lived in Nazi-occupied Europe (Oliner & Oliner 1988:261). Monroe and her associates used narrative interviews and questionnaires to study intensively smaller groups of rescuers, entrepreneurs, philanthropists, heroes (identified by the Carnegie Hero Fund Committee) and (in one study) non-rescuers who had lived in Nazi-occupied Europe. The objective of each study was to isolate the characteristics that were distinctive of rescuers. These studies show that ‘external opportunity’, including knowledge, risk, pre-war occupation, material resources (money, ownership of home or apartment or access to shelter) and being asked, were not significant in determining who acted to save Jews and who stood by (Monroe 1996: 123–41). The Oliners add that rescuers were not distinguished by a lack of concern for self, by the need for external approval, or by high achievement drives (Oliner & Oliner 1988). Monroe shows there is no direct link between socio-cultural variables (that is, religion, family background, wealth, occupation, family position, birth order, family size, or closeness of community) and rescuing behaviour (Monroe 1996: 121–36). By Monroe’s account, that which distinguishes altruists from their non-altruistic counterparts is a perception of oneself as a part of a common humanity rather than as a more isolated being (Monroe 1991, 1996). This is a distinctive sense of personal identity ‘that erodes typical divisions between self and others’ (Galston 1993:119). Just as this self-identify as a part of humanity sets apart rescuers from the other groups studied, Monroe found that it is a commonality among altruists. The Oliners augment Monroe’s view by claiming that the altruistic rescuers are ‘extensive’ persons (Oliner & Oliner 1988:249). Extensive persons have two salient personality dimensions: attachment, that is, the propensity to attach oneself to others in committed interpersonal relationships, and inclusiveness, the propensity towards the ‘breadth’ of feelings of interpersonal connectedness (Oliner & Oliner 1992:370). Additional research reinforces the view that altruistic acts are rooted in personality. Rescuers did not participate in only single acts of rescue but made substantial commitments over long periods of time, during the Second World War. Furthermore, the rescuers partook in helping behaviour before and after their Holocaust-specific commitments (Oliner & Oliner 1992:375; Smolenska & Reykowski 1992:214). Altruism thus is based in a personality structure of which it is a significant and inextricable part. Altruism has both internal and external causes. It can


both radiate out of the altruistic agent as well as be pulled out of her by dire circumstances (Krebs & Hesteren 1992:161). However, despite circumstantial ‘pulls’, altruism can only be sparked in those who are predisposed to it, establishing the importance of an underlying personality. The Apparent Paradox It is common for researchers to use language that presupposes identification between altruist and other. For instance, Kryysztof Konarzewski argues that an inclination to help emerges if and when the other has been ‘incorporated into himself’, in the sense that ‘the fear and pain of another becomes his [the altruist’s] own fear and pain’ (Konarzewski 1992:22). Moreover, on his account, the altruist’s ‘behaviour to others, in rescuing, is not essentially different from the way he would rescue himself. Rescuing of the other is rescuing the self-in-the-other’ (Konarzewski 1992:23). This is consistent with Monroe’s claims about altruists’ perceptions of themselves: a person who experiences the concerns of others as his own would consider himself a part of a common humanity. If this model is correct, then ‘the scope of altruism is predominately limited just by how fully we allow others to share our subjective identities’ (Vine 1992:95). One could only help the other to the extent that she loses her individuality and becomes identified with the other. This, in turn, causes a serious disjunction between inclusiveness and independence, as Konarzewski supposes.3 In his view altruists whose ‘ego boundaries were sufficiently broadened so that other people were experienced as part of the self’ (Oliner & Oliner 1988: 183) are not sufficiently distinctive for their independence (Konarzewski 1992:24). This view of a split between inclusion, or extensivity, and independence embodies the paradox of which we speak. To muster sufficient motivation to rescue the other, one includes the concerns of the other within her sphere of commitment. Yet, understanding how to effectively help the other implies keen awareness of separation between the self and the person being helped, a discrete separation between the knower and the known. To succeed in rescue under the most difficult of circumstances, one must be acutely aware of one’s potential and limitations as an agent and believe with certainty that she can effectively actualise motivations to help. Konarzewski suggests that the motivation and agency needed for altruism are incompatible, or at best that the combination of the two within a unified personality structure is ‘by no means easy to achieve’ (Konarzewski 1992:29). We go a step farther and ask whether this combination is even possible. To state the possible paradox in its strongest form and make it as explicit as possible, think of two halves of a


dilemma. We conceive of it in terms of extensivity and soft ego boundaries, on one hand, and independence, individuation, and hard ego boundaries, on the other hand. On one side, there is extensivity, the ability to bring others within one’s sphere of concern. It is in this sense that the person helped is ‘inside’ the other, that the altruist sacrifices her individuality to have a stake in the well being of the other. Extensivity implies high levels of co-feeling, identification, and compassion, and thus ego boundaries that are presumably permeable by the feelings and concerns of others. This provides the key motivational component of altruistic action, but it also suggests a lack of individuation, a type of selflessness. To the extent that inclusion of the concerns of others reduces the emphasis one can place on her own individual distinctiveness, such inclusion implies a type of self-sacrifice in which one sacrifices her own individuality to partake in a type of collective concern. Furthermore, inclusion of the concerns of others suggests diluted agency as a result of being ‘spread too thin’; the altruist losses self-efficacy and is unable to affect her surroundings as an independent agent. It would hardly be surprising, therefore, if research showed that, on the basis of inclusion, altruists were insufficiently capable of independent thought and judgment. Even in her notable study of rescuers, Monroe comes close to saying as much. She claims that, almost without exception, rescuers were found to have acted instinctively rather than reflectively, expressing a perception of self at one with all mankind. ‘Their perception of themselves as part of a common humanity formed such a central core of their identity that it left them no choice in their behaviour towards others’ (Monroe 1990:89; Seidler 1992). This strongly suggests an image of self as connected to the world, rather than independent of and able to affect it. On the other side, there is individuation and autonomy. These personality attributes allow individuals to possess ‘volitional capacity’: the ability to transform altruistic motives into helpful action, as well as to be sufficiently separate from others so as to be able to affect them as an independent agent (Vine 1992:93). This individuation implies the capacity to decide and to act on one’s own irrespective of what others think or need, and hence, low identification with others; strong ego boundaries; a sophisticated ability to act with efficacy; and critical discernment to bring about the effect one expects. Self-efficacy must be backed up by confidence in one’s abilities to carry through consistently; an altruist must possess self-confidence to prevent apathy-cultivating responses based on an inability to affect positively the situation (Kohn 1992:139).


In fact, the altruistic rescuers studied by Monroe were capable not only of assuming huge risks to their own liberty and lives, but also of withstanding condemnation from family and former friends, and associates. It is well known, too, that most did not need and did not want the gratitude of those they had saved. The rescuers’ actions imply a high degree of agency and selfconfidence. As noted, ‘the solitary, self-willed courage most rescuers displayed would simply be beyond the powers of most individuals’ (Galston 1993:119). Clearly, then, the evidence shows that, for these individuals, rescuing actions were independent of identification with others. Their ability to act decisively and to succeed required a high degree of self-direction and self-interest in the outcome of their actions. The dilemma described above reveals the apparent paradox of altruism. A paradox, as commonly understood, is a statement that is self-contradictory and hence false even though this may not be immediately apparent. It is flatly inconsistent to claim that the rescuers possessed both weak ego boundaries and strong ego boundaries with respect to the same activity—altruistic rescue—and in the same time frame. For, as explained above, weak ego boundaries imply extensivity just as strong ego boundaries imply individuation. So, if altruists possess both extensivity and individuation, then altruism is self-contradictory. But, as we have seen, the evidence shows that, according to the model of the altruistic personality, altruists do possess both extensivity and individuation. Indeed, evidence shows that altruists have both the genuine motivations to help associated with extensivity, as well as the ability to help associated with individuation. Thus, this personality construct is self-contradictory, or at least, there is a presumptive case that it is selfcontradictory. Moreover, the model of the altruistic personality discussed here implies a dilemma in which the altruist is either selfless and thus incapable of autonomous choice for the sake of others, or not truly motivated by concern for the other. Either option depreciates the positive and praiseworthy nature of altruism by denying the possibility of one human being freely choosing, on her own accord, to promote the concerns of the other. In addition, if the paradox is genuine, and extensivity dominates the altruistic personality, then it remains mysterious how altruistic rescuers were able to succeed in rescuing Jews, given a deficit of autonomous decision-making and volitional capacity. On this model, self-interest is inevitable, and dissolving the ‘paradox’ of altruism is hardly a subject of legitimate interest for character development and education. Either the extensivity-dominated agent acted with self-interest by helping the other in herself, in a manner no different than she would for herself (Konarzewski), or the individuation-dominated agent acted to satisfy


her own willfulness or need to follow her own principles. In either case, altruistic acts differed from other self-interested but pro-social acts only insofar as the former produced undeniably great benefits for those rescued. Either horn of the dilemma confirms the self-interest thesis. Dissolving the Paradox It is difficult to accept that the altruistic personality cannot possess both genuine extensivity and full-fledged individuation. It seems impossible to reject either of the apparently inconsistent elements. We cannot deny extensivity because empirical research shows that the rescuers of Jews did subordinate themselves in making the interests of others their own, and in willing the good of others for their own sake and ahead of their own good. Likewise, we fare no better in attempting to deny their autonomy, for the research establishes that the rescuers were able to think independently and rationally, in order to transform empathy and compassionate co-feeling into successful rescuing action. But how can a personality construct be coherently conceived to contain these incompatible elements, especially when they must operate together in other-directed action? If the construct is coherent, then how is this to be shown? A common philosophical procedure in overcoming a contradiction is to identify a false presumption jointly affirmed by both sides of a debate, to expose the falsity of the presumption, and then to show how the formerly contradictory positions, now minus the false presumption, can be synthesized. The present situation can be thought of as analogous: on one side altruism is conceived to be purely selfless; on the other side the agency and autonomy required are seen as implying self-interest. In this case, the false assumption is that there is a sharp divide between selflessness and self-interest. This approach is taken by some philosophers, most notably Neera Badhwar and Martha Nussbaum. In ‘Altruism Versus Self-Interest’, Neera Badhwar addresses head on the distinction Thomas Nagel makes between self-interest and moral interest, the claim that self-interest is intrinsically non-moral (Badhwar 1993). Badhwar argues that altruism and self-interest are not contradictory or in tension insofar as one can act altruistically as an ‘expression or actualization’ of one’s altruistic personality. To the extent that the values associated with altruism comprise the core of an individual’s identity, altruistic acts are a means of selfaffirmation and thus are self-interested. Yet, because the rescued other is not a means to one’s ends, self-affirmation does not become egoistic rather than altruistic. Badhwar argues, instead, that the intended beneficiaries are both


self and other in an integrated way (Badhwar 1993:109). Rescuers possessed a ‘recognizable excellence of character and action’ that was simultaneously deeply altruistic and self-interested (Badhwar 1993:93). This accounts, Badhwar believes, for the rescuers’ testimony that for them, there were no other choices, as well as the capacities of the rescuers to have inclusiveness and independence as they both perceived their shared humanity with the victimized Jews and acted against and independently of governing regimes (Badhwar 1993:99). In Upheavals of Thought, Martha Nussbaum argues that altruism, which she understands as helping behaviour promoted by compassion, is based on eudaimonistic judgments about the agent’s own flourishing. This argument follows from her cognitive account of compassion. On Nussbaum’s view, the compassionate agent makes three cognitive judgments about the plight of the rescuee: first, a serious harm or evil has or will befall a person; second, the person has not brought the suffering on himself or herself; and third, the eudaimonistic judgment that the person ‘is a significant element in my scheme of goals and projects, an end whose good is to be promoted’ (Nussbaum 2002:321). In response to claims that altruism is really self-interested, Nussbaum discounts the view that altruists respond primarily to their internal states. She admits that the agent may feel his own vulnerability in observing the plight of the other, and that this is often a contributing influence for most altruists. Nevertheless, she argues that ‘the compassionate person remains fully aware of the distinction between her own life and that of the sufferer, and seeks the good of the sufferer as a separate person (Nussbaum 2002:335–6). Hence, on Nussbaum’s view, acting to relieve one’s own pain or anxiety is not necessary for altruism; rather, it is sufficient that the agent make the requisite judgments, especially the judgment that the good of the other is ‘a part of her own scheme of goods and ends’ (Nussbaum 2002:335–6). The accounts of Badhwar and Nussbaum can be called ‘teleological’, for they call attention to altruism as a teleological process, aimed at the joint development of the other and the agent through pursuit of the same goals. As such, they share much in common with the earlier insight of Abraham Maslow that an ‘altruistic orientation’ is a ‘highly salient, integral characteristic of the personalities of self-actualizing individuals’ (Van Hesteren 1992:171). Likewise, there is a high degree of compatibility between teleological accounts and the ‘developmental-interaction model of altruism’ presented by researchers Dennis Krebs and Frank Van Hesteren, according to which agents act altruistically to actualize an ideal self, thus truly acting for both the good of self and other (Krebs and Van Hesteren 1992:159). The same is true of a further


account by Van Hesteren, according to which the altruist’s own ‘ideal self-conception’ regulates the shaping of the altruist’s personality such that altruistic acts simultaneously serve to express the altruist’s ideas about the kind of person she wishes to become (Van Hesteren 1992: 177). Inasmuch as these respective models were developed to account for a body of empirical research data, their similarity with the teleological accounts offers some prima facie reasons for accepting the latter. The teleological accounts of Badhwar and Nussbaum overcome the selflessness/selfish binary by showing how, in choosing to act for the good of others, the altruist simultaneously acts for the good of herself, and hence, how selflessness serves to affirm the self. Teleological accounts also help us to see the ‘wholeness’, or integral unity, of the altruist’s motivational structure. They address the component of the paradox that suggests that, in concerning herself with the good of the other, the altruist loses her individuality. They provide a philosophical explanation of Krebs and Van Hesteren’s claim that altruism is not all there is to a person, but rather part of a unified personality structure. Moreover, they address the claim of critics, such as Jean Hampton (1993), who claim that in acting altruistically, the altruist neglects herself and thus lacks proper self-respect. Thus, teleological accounts, if true, offer some reason to regard the paradox as only apparent and not real. But teleological accounts offer no conclusive reason to dismiss the critic’s view that connectedness (letting others ‘in’) must defeat independent thinking and self-directed action, or that independence limits abilities for connectedness. In fact, if examined as efforts to overcome the paradox of altruism, then these teleological accounts suffer from a particular circularity. Assuming that care for others implies extensivity and that care for the self implies autonomy, these accounts would presuppose what they would need to demonstrate: namely, that altruists can possess both extensivity and autonomy. This circularity is most apparent in the developmental models of Krebs and Van Hesteren. In these models altruistic individuals advance from rudimentary to intermediate stages, and then to full-fledged altruism, but this progression is possible because of the potentialities and personality ideals altruists already possess. What we need, therefore, is an account of how the altruist enlarges her self in including others within her sphere of concern, and hence, how selflessness serves to affirm the self. Thus while Badhwar asserts that altruists choose to express their self-identities in helping others, she does not explain how, once they choose to identify with others’ interests, altruists can continue to choose freely. Nussbaum offers no adequate account of how the altruist can


make the sufferer’s ends her own developmental aims (rather than a means to her own ends), while maintaining her full-fledged independence. To be fair, teleological accounts attempt to solve a different problem, the supposed incompatibility between self-interest and care for others. But, as we have seen, dispensing with this false belief is not enough to dissolve the paradox of altruism. We believe it necessary to consider a further assumption underlying the paradox. In highlighting the presumed incompatibility between self and other interest, another questionable assumption is unaddressed. This is the assumption that a person’s motivational structure and agentic efficacy are isomorphic, or symmetrical. Recall that the paradox involves cases in which, in choosing to act for the good of others, the altruist must compassionately identify, or co-feel, with those she helps, while maintaining her individuality as an agent. Despite feeling ‘at one’ with those helped, the altruist must be able to act simultaneously as one who is ‘not one’ with the other. Now, it is easy to make two assumptions: first, that a person lacking selfish interests is also incapable of self-initiated action. Second, that a person who cares about helping others is extended in terms of both agency and motivation, in a way that leads to a dilution of agency. The extended agent spreads herself too thin; due to overidentification, she loses grasp of her ability to act as a distinct, single-minded agent. Or so it may seem. But this view of things presupposes an unwarranted isomorphism or symmetry between extensivity and autonomy. A non-egoistic enlargement of the self, brought about through expanded care for others, does not decrease one’s independent decision-making capacity, efficacy, or agency. The expansion is in the sphere of one’s concern—extensivity—and not in one’s agentic self. Thus, although a compassionate person’s motivations encompass more ‘territory’ as a result of non-egoist-self-enlargement, the individual retains her self-identity, remaining separate from those whom she is newly motivated to help. The altruist necessarily retains her self-identity and individuality; otherwise she would be unable to assist effectively. Research corroborates this point, for those who lack self-efficacy and critical discernment see themselves as unable to help; consequently, their motivation to assist is sapped, and they are liable to see those in need as emotional burdens (Kohn 1992:139). Thus, perceived self-efficacy and compassion are mutually reinforcing, but distinct. Hence, we believe that dissolution of the apparent paradox requires understanding that the altruist’s co-feeling and identification with the other, and the compassion that motivates helping—in a word, her extensivity— does not entail a corresponding ‘expansion’, or merging, of capacities for


decision-making and agency. Insofar as individuation and autonomy may require strong ego boundaries, then expansion of the self in caring does not entail a diluting, or weakening, of the altruist’s ego boundaries. At the same time, however, individuation and autonomous decision making serve the expanded self. In other words, individuation and autonomous decision making each move the self towards realizing its expanded co-feeling and identity with the other. This is hardly surprising, given the plausibility of teleological accounts of the way expansion of the self through caring promotes one’s own good defined as lying within, or inseparable from, the good of the other. One can indeed exercise agency in the service of the extended self. A Further Problem? Compassion and Empathy One might object that we have just re-located the paradoxical elements from one ‘place’ to another within the altruistic personality. Now we have a picture of the altruistic personality somehow, mysteriously, mediating between open and closed ego boundaries—or so it seems. The altruist is both compassionate and autonomous. However, the former, as a type of co-feeling, requires permeable ego boundaries, while the latter involves a discrete, rigid boundary between self and other. How does a unified personality handle these apparently opposed dynamics; is there some sort of ‘negotiation’ between these elements? We believe that this final puzzle arises from a persistent but questionable tendency to identify the ‘self’ exclusively with the self-directed, autonomous and bounded ego. As we argue above, however, we need to understand personality as a richer, more complicated set of processes. Additionally, we need to move beyond vague and ambiguous metaphorical references to ‘soft’, or permeable, ego boundaries, and ‘hard’, or rigid, ego boundaries. If further research supports the account we give above, the issue is not one of a negotiation, or cross over, between open and closed boundaries. To speak of opening and closing ego boundaries is misleading as the altruist does not literally open herself up to others; she never truly loses herself in the affective states of the other. By contrast, on our view, it would be more appropriate to speak metaphorically of the re-setting of ego boundaries, or of one’s sphere of concern. By promoting the other’s good, the altruist redefines, or resets, her own aims and therefore what is to be understood as ‘inside’ the self. As noted above, the altruist’s capacities for critical discernment and decision making remain undiminished by this process, and therefore readily accessible in the pursuit of altruistic goals.


Whatever its source, any remaining confusion about the co-ordination of identification (or co-feeling) and individuation should dissipate with a better understanding of empathy and compassion and how they interact with each other. Empirical research, oriented towards measuring overt behaviour, frequently confuses empathy and compassion. But empathy and compassion are different and distinct capacities. Empathy designates a set of cognitive capacities, sometimes referred to as ‘perspective taking’. Nussbaum provides a serviceable characterization of empathy as involving an ‘imaginative reconstruction of the experience of the sufferer’ (Nussbaum 2002:327). But this is accompanied by awareness that one is not oneself the sufferer. In other words, empathy involves what Richard Wolheim had called a ‘twofold attitude’, according to which, as Nussbaum says, ‘One both imagines what it is like to be in the sufferer’s place and, at the same time, retains securely the awareness that one is not in that place’ (Nussbaum 2002:328). In contrast with empathy, compassion is primarily an affective condition with motivational effect (Kohut 1981:543).4 It is very similar to sympathy in the co-feeling and identification involved. Whatever the intensity of the co-feeling, one feels as the other feels; consequently, one’s condition is, in being compassionate, as a co-participant in an emotive state that transcends one while in relationship with the other.5 Sympathy differs from compassion in motivational structure and intensity. It is not difficult to think of one as sympathetic with the plight of another without responding. However, to think of the absence of a response in the case of compassion is much more difficult. To be compassionate is to be moved in a certain way; it is to be motivated to act for the benefit of the other as one might act for oneself in a similar situation. Hence, the initial attraction of Konarzewski’s reference to rescuing the other as if it is a rescuing of the self-in-the-other. Altruism involves a highly developed interplay between empathy and compassion. Compassion involves no literal contagion of feeling or mysterious merger. A compassionate helper literally cannot feel the same way as the person being rescued. The key is that rescuers’ feelings are self-consciously presented to them as the way sufferers must feel; hence when empathy, as a cognitive function, works in tandem with compassionate sensibilities, it is entirely plausible that altruists will claim to know how sufferers feel. In feeling compassion, altruists affectively identify with the cognitive reactions associated with empathy. In cases of altruism, empathy (or perspective taking) yields not only a cognitive understanding of the plight of others, but also effective mental representations and feelings of themselves in others’ shoes. The presumably mysterious identification, or rescuing of the ‘self-in-theother’, can now be explained. Because her empathic capacities enable her to


understand how the other feels and to represent mentally herself in the other’s place—as feeling as the sufferer feels—her compassion for the other brings about her identification with these mental representations. Thus, though they are mental representations of states of the other, they are her mental states, and they are represented as fully ‘owned’ as hers—as her feeling ‘into’ the other. Motivation to help consequently has a phenomenological familiarity with the altruist’s motivation to act for herself. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that the rescuers describe their acts as ways of ‘being in the world’. Consequently, we find that what initially seems problematic—the apparently incompatible elements of autonomy, with which empathy is associated—and extensivity, with which compassion is associated, are not so puzzling after all. The same point can be made regarding the imagery of a permeable and impermeable ego. Inasmuch as empathic cognitive capacities are similar to those needed for critical discernment, independent decisionmaking, and reality testing (in assessing risks, one’s own capacities, etc.), these remain relatively permanent resources, or ‘hard’, elements of the personality. By contrast, expansion of one’s spheres of concern to include the good of others can be designated as relatively permeable, or ‘soft’, elements as they are so often ‘pulled’ into play by the circumstances in which help is desperately needed. Both empathy and compassion are highly developed in altruists; what characterizes rescuers is not the peculiarity of the combination of individuation and identification, as it had seemed, but rather, that these two, especially in empathy and compassion, are so finely attuned and co-responsive. Conclusion The most extensive research on altruism, in contrast to more general prosocial behaviour, and on altruism in real life, in contrast to artificial experimental settings, involved studies of rescuers of Jewish people during the Holocaust. In examining these studies, we became concerned with an apparent paradox: the apparent impossibility of the possession, within an altruistic personality, of both extensivity and autonomy, where these are understood in the non-trivial sense as requisite for both identification with the needs of strangers and for the self-efficacy of successful rescue. We found, on reflection, that disentangling and successively refuting three incorrect assumptions resolved the apparent paradox. We argue, first, that in altruism, there is no sharp distinction between self-interest and selflessness: caring for others can enhance individuation. Second, we reveal as false the assumption that there is an isomorphic relationship between extensivity and autonomy. As we maintain, a non-egoistic enlargement of the self does not


entail a dilution of the altruist’s agency or individuality. And third, we demonstrate that a better understanding of the coordinated functioning of compassion and empathy overturns the view that there must be a mysterious negotiation between hard, or impermeable, and soft, or permeable, ego boundaries. By disposing of these mistaken assumptions, we show that the altruistic personality, possessing both extensivity and autonomy, is a coherent construct. We conclude that altruists stand out not so much for their possession of both extensivity and autonomy, as for other highly developed abilities. These are empathy and compassion, in addition to refined capacities for selfmonitoring involved in tracking efforts to realize the ‘self-ideal’ of compassionate concern. What is most remarkable about heroic altruists is their retention of integrity of character, and hence motivational consistency, under conditions of great risk and hardship that would defeat most persons’ capacities to care about endangered strangers, or to act effectively. What is really more puzzling, and of far greater concern, is why such a great number of people experience a disjunction of the elements unified in the altruistic personality. Apparently non-altruists are unable to balance compassion and extensivity, with autonomy and individuation, while altruists present the fully integrated, coherent personality. Among the most notorious failures are those who know and have the ability to carry out ‘the right thing to do’, but are indifferent bystanders through their inability to experience compassion for others or, through self-deception, have undermined their cognitive bases for empathy. Other non-altruistic bystanders may feel sympathy, but be unable to motivate themselves to act or to perceive that they have the ability to affect positive change. Even in non-altruists, individuation and extensivity appear to depend on one another. The perceived inability to help is associated with a lack of empathy. Kohn reports that social service workers, who originally have a predisposition to help others, tend to see their charges as ‘emotional burdens to be serviced without personal involvement’ when they perceive a disparity between the services necessary and the services they can provide (Kohn 1992: 139). On the other hand, perception of the ability to help others while retaining one’s individuality is necessary for extension of the self in care for others. Kohn suggests that ‘self esteem serves to facilitate responsiveness to others’ needs by freeing us from the self-absorption that a precarious view of self worth can generate’ (Kohn 1992:77). Even in non-altruists, it is those who can give that are most self-confident, and it is those who most believe in themselves that can care for others.


Our conceptualization of the altruistic personality as fully-integrated and coherent, and of the non-altruistic personality as somehow fractured and incomplete, is compatible with Aristotle’s observation, in his account of megalopsychia, that the person with a great soul is most able to give up his share of resources, opportunities, and even life itself. The rescuers indicate that it is those for whom life is most full, that the gift of giving life is the most precious, and the prospect of losing one’s life the least fearful. NOTES 1. To be sure, there are many shades of grey between ‘pure’ altruism and ‘pure’ egoism, and many commentators sensibly speak of a continuum between these extremes. However, we focus here on paradigmatic cases of altruism—the rescue of Jews during the Holocaust—we do not discuss issues related to differences on this continuum. 2. Note that the fifth criterion is controversial. It is claimed by some that altruism can be directed at only one’s loved ones or only at those within one’s ‘in-group’. We include this criteria because we contend that concern for human beings as part of humanity is a crucial component of the altruistic personality, and that helping behaviour directed at loved ones is likely to manifest self-interest in a way that helping behaviour directed at anonymous others does not. 3. In fact, Konarzewski presents as an entirely different class of ‘altruists’, those who rescued Jews only because doing so was for them an effective—and perhaps the only effective—means of protest against an evil regime. Although these individuals are not real altruists, on our definition, the key point for the present is that Konarzewski associates these protest-motivated individuals with the independence and autonomy behind effective ‘altruism’. By his account, protest ‘assumes independence as the basic prerequisite of altruism’, that independence from authorities and the ability to think autonomously are necessary for effective altruism (Konarzewski 1992). 4. Neither empathy nor compassion is necessary or sufficient for the other. Heinz Kohut, the leading psychoanalytic theorist of empathy, sees it as limited, flexible, and value-neutral. It is notorious that persons with empathic capacities may be lacking in compassion. For example, even an ‘exquisitely’ cruel psychological torment inflicted by a sadist might result from the capacity to empathetically understand the victim, and therefore, how best to destroy him. 5. J.Glenn Gray discusses at length the possibility of co-participation of different persons in a transcendent experience, although in contexts other than altruism (Gray 1959).


REFERENCES Badhwar, N.K. 1993. ‘Altruism versus self-interest: sometimes a false dichotomy’. Paul et al. 1993:90–117. Blum, L.A. 1994. Moral Perception and Particulartiy. New York: Cambridge University Press. Galston, W.A. 1993. ‘Cosmopolitan altruism’. Paul et al. 1993:118–34. Gray, J.G. 1959. The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle. New York: Colophon Books. Hampton, J. 1993. ‘Selflessness and the loss of self’. Paul et al. 1993:135–65. Kohn, A. 1992. The Brighter Side of Human Nature: Altruism and Empathy in Everyday Life. Chicago: Everyday Books. Kohut, H. 1981 ‘lntrospection, empathy and the semicircle of mental health’. Orstein 1981:543. Konarzewski, K. 1992 ‘Empathy and protest: two roots of heroic altruism’. Oliner & Oliner: 22–9. Krebs, D.L., & F.Van Hesteren. 1992. The development of altruistic personality’. Oliner et al. 1992:147. Monroe, K.R., M.C.Barton & U.Klingemann. 1990. ‘Altruism and the theory of rational action: rescuers of Jews in Nazi Europe’. Ethics, 101, 102–22. Monroe, K.R. 1991. ‘John Donne’s people: explaining differences between rational actors and altruists through cognitive frameworks’. Journal of Politics, 53, 394–433. 1996. The Heart of Altruism: Perceptions of Common Humanity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Nussbaum, M.C. 2002. Upheavals of Thought. New York: Cambridge University Press. Oliner, S.P. & P.M.Oliner. 1988. The Altruistic Personality: Rescuers of Jews in Nazi Europe. New Jersey: The Free Press. 1992. ‘Promoting extensive altruistic bonds: a conceptual elaboration and some pragmatic implications’. Oliner et al. 1992:370. Oliner, P.M., S.P.Oliner, L.Baron, L.A.Blum, D.L.Krebs & M.Z.Smolenska, eds. 1992. Embracing the Other: Philosophical Psychological, and Historical Perspectives on Altruism. New York: New York University Press. Orstein, P.H, ed. 1981. The Search for the Self: Selected Writings of Heinz Kohut: 1978–1981 Madison, CT: International Universities Press. Paul, E.F., D.Miller & J.Paul, eds. 1993. Altruism. New York: Cambridge University Press. Seidler, V.J. 1992. ‘Rescue, Righteousness and Morality’. Oliner et al. 1992:55. Smolenska, M.Z. & J.Reykowski. 1992. ‘Motivations of people who helped Jews survive the Nazi occupation’. Oliner et al. 1992:214. Van Hesteren, F. 1992. ‘The self in moral agency: toward a theoretical model of the ideal altruistic personality’. Oliner et al. 1992:171. Vine, I. 1992. ‘Altruism and human nature: resolving the evolutionary paradox’. Oliner et al. 1992:95.

7 ‘Are They My Poor?’: The Problem of Altruism in a World of Strangers DAVID MILLER

‘Are they my poor?’ This question comes, as readers may know, from an essay by Ralph Waldo Emerson entitled ‘Self Reliance’. I do not have a very secure grasp either of Emerson’s general philosophy of life or of the particular point of view that he expresses in this essay, but it is safe to say that Emerson was not keen on altruism as we would normally understand it. He believed that when each person cultivated his or her individuality—developed and expressed all his or her mental and physical powers to the full—other people would benefit spontaneously, whereas activities performed to meet these others’ expectations or demands would diminish both giver and receiver. The surrounding passage reads: Do not tell me, as a good man did today, of my obligation to put all poor men in good situations. Are they my poor? I tell thee, thou foolish philanthropist, that I grudge the dollar, the dime, the cent, I give to such men as do not belong to me and to whom I do not belong. (Emerson 1901:59) And there follows a list of charitable causes in relation to which, Emerson says, ‘though I confess with shame I sometimes succumb and give the dollar, it is a wicked dollar, which by and large I shall have the manhood to withhold’ (Emerson 1901:60). You may feel, then, that this is not a very promising place to begin an essay on altruism, though on Emerson’s behalf it should be said that he did sometimes hand over the dollar, and often a great deal more, in particular for the cause of abolishing slavery to which in the 1850s especially he devoted a great deal of his time and energy. So perhaps we can read his remarks differently, not as repudiating any idea of altruistic concern for the poor, but as one way of signalling the problem that I want to address, as the frustration of a man who having given a good deal to one very worthy cause found himself


inundated with requests for other kinds of help. The question it is very natural to ask in such circumstances is ‘why me?’ ‘why is it my responsibility to look after these particular needy people?’ For although there may be many people in need, there are also very many who would be able to offer relief if they chose. So how can I decide where to direct my efforts and how much of the burden I should shoulder? This predicament is very familiar to us. Step out into the street and it will not be long before you encounter someone who needs help. Open your morning post and the chances are that you will find an appeal from a charity or a political lobby for your time or your money. It is hard not to have an Emersonian reaction. But it is worth noting that this is a peculiar feature of our world, not shared with the human societies that have come before, which embodied mechanisms that put potentially needy people into the care of particular others—for instance, some embodied practices of mutual aid whereby within a well-defined community, a village say, people were expected to help those who suffered misfortune. Those whose crops failed in a bad year were permitted to take grain from the communal store; someone whose house burnt down could call on neighbours to help rebuild it and give or lend basic furniture.1 Other societies relied on a well-defined hierarchy of responsibility: under the English Poor Law, for instance, officers in each parish raised funds through local rates and distributed them in cash or in kind to the parish poor. Obligation was localised: people had responsibility for those who stood close by, according to rules that everyone understood. The system could work as long as most people stayed put: it was supplemented by rules governing hospitality to strangers, but these again assumed that strangers would only show up occasionally and in limited numbers. No doubt these arrangements broke down from time to time—people defaulted on their obligations, or there were simply not enough resources available to meet them—but in principle everyone knew whose poor were theirs and what they were expected to do as a result. In this world—‘the world we have lost’, to use Peter Laslett’s phrase (Laslett 1983)—there was no room and no need for altruism, understood loosely for the moment as an attitude of undiscriminating concern for the welfare of others. Altruism becomes appropriate and relevant in a world of strangers, in a world, that is, where we regularly encounter, either directly or through the media of communication, unknown people who nevertheless we might be able to help if we so chose. Both parts of this formula are necessary: we must be aware of the strangers’ needs, and it must be possible for us to do something about them, for instance by putting a cheque in an envelope. In the older world neither of these conditions held, and so ethical space was fully

‘ARE THEY MY POOR?’ 109

occupied by concrete obligations to others. It is not surprising, then, that the concept of altruism should have appeared in the midst of the transition from pre-modern to modern society, coined apparently by Auguste Comte in about 1840 and quickly catching on as a way of identifying the moral perspective that was appropriate to the new society. People could either be egoists, pursuing their own self-interest, or they could be altruists, pursuing the interests of humanity at large. But that of course left open the question when and towards whom one was supposed to be altruistic. Since there is no standard definition of altruism, I need to stipulate how I shall use the term in the discussion that follows. Comte’s usage suggests dividing human actions into two categories, egoistic acts motivated by the agent’s own self-interest, and altruistic acts motivated by any other reason that is positively connected to the welfare of others. But this defines altruism very broadly—too broadly to be useful, at least for present purposes—and it leaves in limbo those actions performed for mixed motives. In particular I propose to exclude from the definition of altruism actions that are performed in order to comply with institutional rules, even in cases where the motive for compliance is a sense of obligation or duty. For instance if I promise you to do something and then fulfil my promise because I believe I ought to, should that count as altruism? Or suppose it is part of my job to help people in certain specified ways. When I dutifully perform the actions in question, am I being altruistic? Is it altruism when I read and mark students’ essays? Most people, I think, would not regard such behaviour as altruistic, and this suggests a narrower definition of altruism as behaviour that is intended to meet the needs of others, where there is no immediate self-interested reason to help, and where there is no institutional requirement that one should. Let me say a little more about the three parts of this tentative definition. I assume first that altruism comes into play when people are in need, though this can range from acute need like starvation to cases like the person whose shopping bag breaks in the middle of the street. Anyone who goes to the rescue intending to help is an altruist in my book. This leaves out behaviour whose aim is to give pleasure, even though the recipients are not in need—present-giving, throwing parties, and so forth. I have no objection to someone who wishes to expand the definition of altruism so that it covers such behaviour, but the present discussion will focus on altruism as a response to need, since the interesting ethical questions seem to arise only about altruism in this narrower sense. Second, helping behaviour undertaken in the hope of getting something directly back in return is not altruistic, though I want to leave the door open to actions undertaken in the spirit of what has been called ‘generalised


reciprocity’—that’s to say, a sense that we will all benefit if people help each other in certain ways. When I take time to give directions to a stranger I meet in the street, I am behaving altruistically, even if at the back of my mind there is the thought that I might find myself lost one day, and need to ask a passerby, though almost certainly not this particular one. In excluding self-interest, one need not require the motivation for altruistic actions to be 100 per cent other-regarding, so to speak. Third, as already indicated, I want to exclude actions that are undertaken in order to comply with legal or institutional rules, or that are part and parcel of my social role. It is not altruism when I keep my promises, obey the law, feed my children or write comments on my students’ essays, even if my motives in each case are unselfish. It does not follow, however, that altruistic acts are by definition non-obligatory. When I pull the drowning child out of the river at little cost to myself, or drive someone injured in a car accident to hospital, I am acting altruistically even though I have an obligation to act in this way. The obligation reflects the seriousness of the need I am responding to: it is obligatory to save people’s lives or to help the badly injured; it is not obligatory to pick up people’s shopping or give directions in the street, though it is good to do these things.2 Acts are both altruistic and obligatory when there is no institutional requirement to perform them, so my rescuing the drowning child is altruistic, while the lifeguard’s rescuing her is not, at least in standard cases. It might be said in reply here that calling actions altruistic implies that the agent has a choice as to whether she performs them or not, so if an act is obligatory it cannot at the same time be altruistic. I agree that there is a sense of altruism—I noted above that the term has no fixed definition —in which it implies supererogation, actions done above and beyond the call of duty. In the present context, however, there is a particular reason for drawing the line where I have drawn it. Actions can be obligatory, in the sense that it is obligatory that someone should perform them, and yet it may be uncertain who that someone should be. There may be a number of spectators who see the child getting into trouble in the river, and then there is an obligation that falls initially on the group as a whole that someone should wade in and pull him out, but there is so far no way of identifying one particular spectator as the person who should discharge the obligation. Someone who took the initiative and jumped in might then say, with a slight air of paradox, both that she was obliged to act as she did—the child would have drowned otherwise—and that she had a choice whether to jump in or not—there were plenty of others who would no doubt have rescued the child if she did not. This is the feature that distinguishes the case from instances of institutional obligation, where a particular individual is picked out as the person who has the duty, and allies it


with other cases of altruism, such as giving directions to a stranger in the street, where the need is less urgent, but once again there are many who could potentially meet it. Altruistic acts have a fourth feature, which is so obvious that it is barely worth specifying in the definition: they are more or less costly to the agent who performs them, if only in lost time. When we help people in need, we give up resources, expose ourselves to risk, or forgo other opportunities. One could imagine cases in which helping cost nothing, but was for instance simply a matter of diverting resources from less needy B to more needy C, or giving away resources that one had no use for at all, and we could debate whether this should count as altruism or not, but the point is that these examples will nearly all be artificial ones. The obvious point is worth stating only because it forms the backdrop to the discussion that follows. ‘Are they my poor?’ is a resonant question because people are generally willing to be altruists if they must, but would rather not have demands for altruism crowding in on them all the time. The problem I want to address is not the basic question ‘why should I be altruistic?’ but the more nuanced one ‘when should I be altruistic?’ In a world of strangers, where there are many needy people, but also many others who could respond to their need, how should I decide when it is my turn to help? Or should it always be my turn, so long as there are people in need? To get to grips with the question, I want to begin by looking briefly at some studies of altruism in practice, in particular at some experiments designed to uncover the factors that encourage people to help, or discourage them from doing so. I will ask about how these studies should inform our practical thinking, whether we can learn positive lessons from them, or whether we should just set them aside as evidence of moral fallibility or weakness. The first thing one learns, looking at these studies, is how situationally specific people’s altruism is. It would be natural to think that altruism is a function of personality, the world dividing up into selfish and unselfish people, but although personality differences undoubtedly play some part, it is striking how far altruistic behaviour is affected by the framing of the situation in which agent and patient find themselves. To begin with, altruism is quite costsensitive: small differences in what must be given up in order to perform the altruistic act can make a big difference to the result. There is a classic experiment that reveals this (Darley & Batson 1973). The experimenters wanted to recreate the parable of the Good Samaritan, so they arranged for their subjects, who were students at a theological seminary, to be sent between two buildings, passing on the way a victim who was slumped in the street and evidently in some distress. Who would stop to help the victim?


Dropping a big hint, some of the students were asked to prepare a talk on the Good Samaritan parable itself, others on a tangential subject, careers open to theology students. As one might expect, those who had been thinking about the parable were more likely to help—53 per cent as against 29 per cent. But much more strongly correlated with helping behaviour was a second variable, how much time the students had. Some were told that they were a few minutes late for the next session, others that they were on time, a third group that they had a bit of time to spare. This had a dramatic impact on their willingness to help the unfortunate victim: 63 per cent of those with time to spare helped, 45 per cent of the middle group, but only 10 per cent of those who had been told they were running late. The experimenters witnessed on several occasions the bizarre spectacle of theology students hurrying to deliver a talk on the Good Samaritan and in the process literally stepping over a man who to all appearances had fallen in the street. Changing the cost of helping, in this case the cost of being a few minutes late to give a talk, transformed the subjects’ willingness to be altruistic. Another important factor is how the potential altruist views the person who needs help. A multitude of studies have shown that altruism is significantly affected by perceptions of similarity between giver and receiver (see Piliavin et al. 1981). So, for example, smartly dressed people help other smartly dressed people more often that they help scruffy people. More worryingly, perhaps, people are more likely to help those who share physical features like skin colour—in some circumstances, for example, white people are less likely to help blacks than they are other white people, though this depends on whether they can justify the differential treatment to themselves on grounds other than race (see Dovidio 1984). People discriminate racially, in other words, but they have a bad conscience about doing so, so they need an excuse. Their altruism is also influenced by what they learn about the political views of the would-be recipient: one study using letters dropped randomly in the street found that the chances of a letter being picked up and posted fell dramatically when it was addressed c/o Friends of the Communist Party (Hansson 1977); another study found that when an unlocked car was left with its headlights on, passers-by were much less likely to switch them off when it displayed a bumper sticker reading ‘Support the Black Panthers’, but also (reassuringly perhaps) somewhat less likely to be altruistic when the sticker read ‘America—Love it or Leave it’ (Ehlert et al. 1973). Would-be altruists are not only influenced by their perception of the needy person as ‘someone like me’. They also make moral judgements about the character of the recipient. Most obviously, they are influenced by the extent to which the person in question can be held responsible for his or her own needy


condition. One set of experiments tested people’s response to someone collapsing in an underground train, where in some instances the victim was presented as having a medical condition, and in other instances as drunk (Piliavin et al. 1969). Helping rates were significantly higher in the former case, and in a further refinement which tested for control of the two conditions, it becomes clear that judgements about personal responsibility play an important part in explaining why people are less willing to help drunks (Weiner 1980). But wider moral questions can also intrude: in one experiment people were called by telephone with the following story: the caller says that his car has a flat tyre, that he is due to meet someone, that he has dialled the wrong number by mistake and has no more change. Would the person he has called mind phoning on his behalf?…and he gives the number. Significantly, however, when he says he is meeting his girlfriend 70 per cent of women and 90 per cent of men make the call, whereas when he says he is meeting his boyfriend these numbers fall to 35 per cent and 30 per cent respectively (Shaw et al 1994). So here then disapproval of homosexuality makes a big difference to people’s willingness to engage in a not-very-costly piece of altruism. What can we learn from these studies? One understandable reaction is to say that what they reveal is above all people’s moral weakness—the fact that they are only too ready to avoid behaving altruistically, and that therefore they will seize on anything—the cost of the action, some disqualifying feature of the recipient—that lets them off the hook. Good people, it might be said, would not discriminate: they would help whenever help was needed and they were able to provide it. But there is an alternative, Emersonian, interpretation as well. Perhaps people are being selective in their altruism because they are willing to help their own poor but not everyone else’s. Admittedly they are using somewhat arbitrary criteria to decide who their own poor are, but the underlying impulse is that of wanting to do one’s fair share, but no more than that, of the world’s altruistic work. I will come back to this idea shortly. But first let me conclude our brief tour of the empirical evidence by looking at studies that focus on the number of people available to carry out a rescue. These studies were inspired by some well-publicised real-life cases in which people were harmed or killed despite the presence of many witnesses who were able to help. So the experimenters created artificial emergencies in which subjects had to decide whether or not to intervene, and then varied the number of people available to take action (see the helpful overview in Latané & Darley 1970; see also Latané & Nida 1981). For instance in one study (Latané & Darley 1970: ch.11) an accomplice faked an epileptic seizure, and subjects were led to think either that they were the only witness to the event, or that they were part of a group of two, three or six (there was no communication with


other group members, a fact whose significance I’ll comment on later). Other studies were carried out in real-life settings—one for instance involved researchers dropping handfuls of pencils on the floors of lifts with different numbers of passengers and seeing how much help they got in retrieving the pencils (Latané & Dabbs 1975). The consistent finding from these experiments is that increasing the number of potential rescuers always decreases the chances of any individual helping, often to the point where the likelihood of being rescued by anybody at all declines for the unlucky victim. What explains this finding? Three processes seem to be involved, all tending to inhibit people from giving help when numbers of others are present (see Latané & Nida 1981). First, people interpret other people’s inaction as a sign that the situation they are confronting is not one that requires them to intervene. Before they act altruistically, people need to believe first that the victim really needs help and second that they are able to give some. If other people are doing nothing, then this suggests either that what looks at first glance like a person in need is actually something else, or that nothing can be done in any case, or that intervening is too risky, etc. In other words, there is a cognitive effect: people tend to redefine the situation in the light of others’ inaction. Second, we know that altruistic behaviour is often affected by norms telling us what is expected of us in particular contexts. We know, for instance, that people who witness someone else behaving altruistically—putting money in a collection box, stopping to help a motorist with a flat tyre—are more likely to follow suit themselves (see Bryan & Test 1967; further evidence is surveyed in Krebs 1970). Here, witnessing others’ behaviour brings a specific altruistic norm into play. But in the multi-person cases I am discussing, inaction becomes the norm. If no one else is bending down to pick up dropped pencils, then I shall feel slightly embarrassed, or uncool, if I get down and help. It is just not the done thing to pick up pencils for strangers in lifts, so it seems. But third, and most importantly, where numbers of people are available to help, responsibility for helping becomes diffused. If I fail to help, and the victim suffers, I may be part-responsible for what happens, but my responsibility is shared with two, six or however many others there are present. And responsibility shared is responsibility diminished.3 To connect this to diminished altruism, we only need to observe that altruism has two sides to it: it is praiseworthy to help people in need, but blameworthy to fail to help them. If I fail to act in a multi-person case, I may miss out on the praise, or self-praise, that I would have received, but at least I am not much to blame for what happens to the victim. So I am less likely to do the altruistic deed.


The diffusion of responsibility effect is well documented, and experiments have been designed to isolate it from the two previous effects, by creating situations in which subjects were unable to discover how other members of the group were behaving, and therefore unable to draw either cognitive or normative inferences from that behaviour (Schwartz & Gottlieb 1980). Even here, the more people there are in the group, the less likely any one member is to behave altruistically. Does it matter that the groups who fail to respond are non-communicating groups—they are people artificially separated by partitions in psychology laboratories, or groups of unknown passers-by in the street, and so on? Would they be more likely to help if they talked to each other? Yes and no: it depends on the content of the talk. Looking back at the three processes just discussed, talking to people is likely to consolidate a shared interpretation of the situation the group is facing, so if that interpretation is a negative one from the point of view of altruistic intervention—‘He’s probably just drunk’, ‘I’m sure he’ll sort himself out if we leave him alone’—talk will make intervention less likely still. On the other hand, talk typically has the effect of making the group more cohesive, and there is evidence that cohesive groups are more likely to take action than non-cohesive ones, so long as a norm of social responsibility is activated (Rutkowski et al. 1983). Again this depends on whether the group sees the victim as in legitimate need of help. Finally, talk can of course be important simply as a way of co-ordinating behaviour, or dividing up tasks, and this makes effective intervention more likely. One study found that groups of three people sitting together responded about as effectively to a minor emergency as single individuals, whereas isolated threesomes took much longer to respond or did not respond at all (Misavage & Richardson 1974). In general, though, multi-person cases confirm what we have already found, namely that people are keen to avoid acting altruistically if they can manage it, taking refuge in groups either as a way of confirming their reasons for inaction or in order to lessen their share of responsibility if the needy person is not helped. So let me now change into normative gear and ask what, if anything, these studies can teach us about how we should behave. How much responsibility for meeting the needs of others can we be asked to assume in a world of strangers? One quite common response is that we must learn to overcome the limits to our altruism that these studies reveal. When people are in need, the only question we should be asking is ‘where can I do most good, without impairing my own capacity to do good in the future?’. We should not consider the costs of behaving altruistically, unless these costs become so great as to leave the


agent worse off than the person she is trying to help. We should not draw distinctions between people as being more or less eligible for our help—the extent of their need is all that should concern us. And we should not consider our own responsibility as in any way lessened by the fact that there are others who might equally well help; indeed the less others do to help, the greater our altruistic responsibilities become. Moral philosophers who take this line—people like Peter Singer and Peter Unger, for example (see Singer 1993: ch.8; Unger 1996)—devote their energies to exposing and dismantling the various reasons given for limiting the scope of altruism. They admit that, in a world in which many are poor, the implications of what they say are very demanding indeed, but that is no reason to weaken the moral requirement to give aid. From this perspective, the experimental work I have discussed is no more than a catalogue of human frailty, an exploration of the mechanisms that people use to avoid facing up to their genuine responsibilities. But there is also another way of thinking about these studies, which begins with the idea that we are collectively responsible for meeting the needs that altruism aims to satisfy (a similar idea is developed in Cohen 1981). Instead of thinking of one individual confronting a world with many needy others, and asking what that individual should do, we should recognise that there are many others who could help too. And then, given that altruistic actions are burdensome to the person who performs them, the natural question to ask is ‘What is my fair share of responsibility?’ ‘How much can I be expected to do myself, and how much can I properly leave to others?’ One might spell this out by thinking of a sum total of need that has to be met, where needs range from the trivial to the profound, and then dividing this up so that each person bears an equal part of the cost of meeting that total, or perhaps a share that reflects each person’s capacity for altruistic behaviour, in line with the famous formula ‘From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs’. However one does the calculation, the idea is that each person has an altruistic ‘quota’ that she is supposed to meet, that she can be asked or in some cases required to fulfil that quota, but that she should not be asked to take on anyone else’s. But, it may be said in reply, even if such a calculation could be made, we know that as a matter of fact most people won’t fulfil their quota. Look around you and you see people throwing the Oxfam letter into the bin, stepping over homeless people on the street, and so forth. One can not limit one’s altruism to what would be required in a world in which everyone behaved properly. Well, we might want to modify the quota idea a bit to cope with the fact that most people aren’t going to do their share, while still holding on to the idea that need is a collective responsibility, perhaps along the


lines suggested in a recent book by Liam Murphy (Murphy 2000). Murphy’s basic idea is that one should first work out what each person would be required to do assuming full compliance by everyone else, and then in situations of partial compliance one should do as much good as one can, so long as the sacrifice involved does not exceed what would be demanded under full compliance. The fact that others are defaulting on their altruistic responsibilities will change the set of costs and benefits that an agent faces, so he will need to act differently than under full compliance, but he should not have to give up more than he would if everyone else did their fair share. Of course, following something like the Murphy principle may well mean that many needy people are not helped, so what can be said in its defence? First, it obviously appeals to an idea of fairness. Given that helping behaviour is costly, we shouldn’t expect some people to perform more than their fair share of it, while others perform little or none. Altruistic behaviour has implications for the distribution of resources among those who engage in it, whether this is a matter of contributing money, or time, or bearing personal costs. These are matters to which principles of distributive justice apply. It does not make sense on the one hand to attempt to shape the basic structure of our society so as to achieve a fair distribution of the benefits and burdens of social co-operation, while on the other hand endorsing the Singer/Unger view that each person should bear the costs of meeting needs up to the point where she becomes needy herself. The latter view is a recipe for arbitrary distribution, unless everyone coordinates their behaviour and agrees how to share the responsibility for meeting needs, in which case it becomes indistinguishable from the Murphy position. Second, even if one thought that the Singer/Unger position gave a correct account of one’s private moral obligations to the needy, it is not a view that could reliably serve as the basis for a shared public morality.4 For if a sufficient number of people declare themselves willing to help the needy up to the point at which they become needy themselves, this immediately allows others to exploit their willingness by doing nothing, secure in the knowledge that the Singers and Ungers of the world will respond by taking up the slack. In other words, the Singer/Unger view, publicly avowed, becomes a recipe for exploitation. Like other members of the utilitarian family, it is at best a doctrine that one should espouse in private. By contrast, in declaring openly that one is willing to do one’s fair share to help those in need, but not more than that, one simultaneously assures others that they will not be exploited if they do their bit, and gives them an (altruistic) incentive to contribute. Finally, the Singer/Unger view seems not to tally with our sense of how responsibility and blame should be assigned in cases where needs are not met.


Consider a case in which there is some simple way to settle what each person’s altruistic quota should be—there are this many people needing help, that many people able to supply it, and we can calculate what each person’s contribution (of time or money, say) must be (Cohen 1981 provides an example with this structure). Suppose some of the potential helpers make their contribution and others do not. It is natural then to say that the plight of the people who are left in need is the responsibility of the non-contributors. Even if we think that, because the need is grave, and the non-contributors seem determined not to put their hands into their pockets, those who have already contributed should contribute some more, we should surely regard this additional contribution as qualitatively different from the original one. We would not blame someone who refused to make it, even if we thought more highly of someone who did. But we cannot make sense of this qualitative gap if we adopt the Singer/Unger view. From that perspective, which focuses simply on the victim’s need and my capacity to meet it, the two contributions are equivalent: if I gave £100 in the first instance, and that paid for medical treatment for a sick child, then if I have to give another £100 to help a second child because someone else refuses to contribute, I am equally praiseworthy if I give and equally blameworthy if I do not.5 There is no room here for the thought that I am responsible for the health status of the first child but not responsible for the health status of the second. So in principle, I believe, there is a good deal to be said for the view that sees altruism as a matter of doing one’s share of the work of meeting needs. But unfortunately the principle that Murphy elaborates is going to be very little help in practice. It’s not just that the calculation involved is one that is impossibly difficult to perform—first work out the sum total of unmet need in the world today, and then work out how much of the cost of meeting that need is down to each person. It is also that occasions for altruism typically arise in much more discrete settings. The Murphy approach might just work if one was thinking about Third World poverty, say, where it may be possible to calculate how much each of us needs to put into the Oxfam envelope. But more often altruism is a matter of a particular person taking action now to rescue a particular other—the stranded motorist with a flat tyre, the child drowning in the river—and it hardly seems appropriate for potential rescuers to perform Murphy-type calculations before deciding when to help. (Indeed Murphy admits that his principle cannot accommodate common intuitions about rescue cases; see Murphy 2000: ch.7.) So we are left with our dilemma. Altruism is an enormously important contributor to the quality of our lives, whether one is thinking of urgent life-threatening situations, or simply of everyday acts of helpfulness, giving directions, picking up the spilled


shopping, and so on, and we ought all to do our bit, but none of us can tell what that bit amounts to. How can we move forward here? Let me explore three possible avenues. One is that we should formally collectivise our altruism. We should create institutions that discharge our altruistic obligations for us, and we should all contribute—financially, above all—to the costs of those institutions. That way, each of us can pay our fair share. That’s a route that we already follow to a large extent. For instance we pay taxes to support the welfare state, and one thing that the welfare state does is to employ professionals to carry out tasks that might otherwise be dependent on individual altruism, like caring for the elderly. Or on a much smaller scale, we hire lifeguards to sit on crowded beaches, and relieve ordinary bathers of their responsibility to pluck swimmers who get into trouble out of the surf. Where it can be made to work, this is a good solution, and I am among those who think that, rather than relying on individual acts of altruism to cope with world poverty, for instance, we should empower the state to act on our behalf, by voting for increases in the foreign aid budget. By collectivising our altruism we can ensure both fairness and effectiveness. It might be said in reply that when altruism is formally collectivised in this way, it ceases to be altruism. In one sense this is perfectly true. For the public at large, the act of giving becomes compulsory, and for those who become professional helpers or rescuers, it becomes a job requirement that they should give help or carry out rescues, and so in neither case do the acts in question qualify as altruistic according to my original definition. Nonetheless one could still say that the scheme as a whole is altruistically motivated, so long as people support it because they see it as fulfilling aims that they would otherwise pursue themselves for altruistic reasons (whether this is the case with existing schemes of this nature is hard to judge). Beside this conceptual worry stands a more substantive concern that because collective schemes diminish the scope for individual acts of altruism, they may diminish altruism in other areas of life—the theory here being that altruism is a quality that is strengthened by being exercised, and atrophies otherwise. Whatever the truth about this, I think that the evidence surveyed above adds up to a strong case for collectivising altruism when it is feasible to do so and the needs in question are serious ones. For we saw how susceptible individual altruism is to contingencies such as perceptions of the person in need, and the number of people available to help. Where people are at risk of serious harm, it is better to have a system in place that formally identifies the person or persons responsible for helping them.


The problem, however, is that very often formal institutions cannot be created, or only created at a cost that is out of all proportion to the harm in question. We could, I suppose, employ official direction-givers to linger on street corners looking for lost pedestrians, or river wardens to patrol the banks of streams on the off chance that a child might fall in somewhere, but what these examples reveal is that in a world of strangers need arises in such a random way that each of us has to be ready to meet it when we encounter it. Even in those areas where we have opted for professional provision, we still have to rely on ordinary citizens to fill in the cracks, alerting somebody if an elderly neighbour seems not to be moving about as usual, or a child appears to be suffering from neglect. So we cannot shift the burden of altruism entirely off the shoulders of the ordinary person. But might we try to formalise it in a different way, by laying down rules that require people to assume responsibility for the needs of others in specific circumstances? This is the second way forward, and the clearest example of this approach in practice is so-called Bad Samaritan legislation.6 This is legislation imposing a duty of rescue that requires any citizen to come to the aid of another in certain specified circumstances. Many legal systems, including most of those in Continental Europe, now include a duty of rescue, whereas Anglo-American law has not generally recognised such a duty except in cases where there is some prior relationship between aid-giver and recipient, so that the duty to rescue is subsumed under a wider duty of care.7 Contemplating this state of affairs, most legal philosophers seem to think that Bad Samaritan laws are not objectionable in principle, provided the duty of rescue is closely circumscribed. And this appears to be the case in those existing legal systems that have such laws. Aid-giving is required only when the victim is facing a threat of death or serious injury; the rescuer is normally required to intervene only when he can do so without incurring significant risk; and often he is given a choice between carrying out the rescue himself and contacting the authorities, for instance the police. Why is the legal duty of rescue interpreted so narrowly? In order to justify punishing someone whose failure to help is the source of harm to the victim, two conditions would have to be met. First it would be necessary to establish the right kind of causal relationship between actor and victim. The potential rescuer must have seen the victim, recognised that he was in need of help, understood that there was something he could do to provide the help, and understood also that it was his responsibility rather than anyone else’s to effect the rescue. Of course we can readily imagine cases in which all these conditions hold (bather evidently drowning not waving, sea calm, no-one else on beach etc.) but equally there will be many other cases in which the agent


could reasonably claim that one or more of them was not. Failure to rescue is after all an omission rather than an act, and there are good reasons why the law punishes omissions only in special circumstances—typically circumstances in which A stands in a special relationship to B and therefore has well-defined responsibilities towards her. Under these circumstances an omission becomes a failure to discharge a responsibility—say a duty of care—that A either was or should have been aware of. But this does not in general apply to people who are simply physically juxtaposed in such a way that A could, if he was aware of the situation and decided to act, rescue B. The second condition is that the costs of the rescue should be relatively low: the duty to rescue is a duty to carry out easy rescues. But what if A’s psychology is such that an action which would be low cost for most other people becomes high cost for him? This might for instance be because A knows that he will faint at the sight of blood, or has a phobia about entering the water; or it may be that the action is one that carries a risk to A himself, and he assesses that risk as much greater than others would (perhaps because of his past experience).8 In other areas of law a ‘reasonable person’ standard is used to determine, for example, whether someone was provoked to such an extent that it was reasonable for him to retaliate. But would we be justified in using such a standard here?9 A reasonable person would surely wade waist-deep in water to save a drowning child, for example, but would it be right to prosecute someone who claimed that his fear of water was such that he could not bring himself to do it? Feinberg suggests that the way forward here would be to confine liability to those who clearly face no unreasonable risk, cost or inconvenience in carrying out a rescue, in other words not to prosecute if there is any reasonable doubt in the matter (Feinberg 1984: ch.4, sect.3). This seems defensible, but it does of course narrow the scope of the duty to rescue very considerably. Taking these two points together—that the rescuer must stand in the right kind of causal relationships to the person in need, and that the cost of the rescue should be minimal—we can see why formalising altruism by means of Bad Samaritan laws is not an appropriate solution in the great majority of cases. In particular, it is inappropriate in situations of the kind that I discussed earlier, when a relatively large number of people, each of whom could intervene to rescue the person in need, all fail to act. On what grounds could all the bystanders be prosecuted? Each could claim that it was not her inaction that led to the victim being harmed. Each could add that she reasonably believed that another person was better placed to carry out the rescue, or faced fewer costs in the course of doing so. There have not been many prosecutions to date under Bad Samaritan laws, but to the best of my


knowledge, all those who have actually been prosecuted have been lone individuals who were uniquely positioned to carry out a rescue but chose not to do so. So formalising altruistic duties, by turning them into legal requirements for individuals, can only work in narrowly-defined circumstances, and in particular cannot work in just those cases which sparked my discussion, cases where there are many potential aid-givers who might be held responsible for the person or persons in need. We need to explore a third avenue, one that both leaves altruistic behaviour in the hands of ordinary citizens, and makes them responsible for judging what help they should give without legal enforcement. The key idea, I want to suggest, is to encourage the growth of norms that connect particular people in need of help to particular other people who are able to give it. One of the main lessons that I tried to draw from my review of the empirical evidence about altruistic behaviour is that people’s altruism is discriminating: they behave altruistically when, and only when, they interpret the situation in front of them as one that requires helping behaviour on their part. The other main lesson was that when many potential helpers are present, each individual is much less likely to intervene. The Singer/Unger response to this is to try to transform people’s altruism through rational argument so as to turn them into simple consequentialists, considering only the overall consequences of various courses of action they might take. My suggestion is quite different: we should build on what we know about existing behaviour, and find ways of forging links between individuals, or between individuals and groups, that serve to identify a particular A as the salient aid-giver for a particular P.10 How might this be done? Sometimes one person will be distinguished by having a special capacity or a special status that marks them out from the rest of the group, and the primary responsibility for helping will naturally devolve on to that person—the medically qualified bystander, for instance. But more often there will be no substantive reason why one person rather than another should help, and here all that matters is that somebody should be singled out. What we are looking for are psychological connections that form spontaneously in people’s minds and that could then be used to generate norms of altruistic behaviour. One example is physical similarity between the person needing help and the potential helper—similarity based on age, sex, ethnicity etc. We saw earlier that this was a factor that already influences people’s behaviour when they are rationing out their altruism. The proposed norm is that the person who should help is the person most like the victim. Another example is proximity: the person who should help is the person physically closest to the


person in need, say in cases where someone collapses in the street or falls into the river (recall that by assumption no spectator has a special competence to deal with the situation). If these ‘natural’ connections fail, we may try to create artificial ones in their place. We know, for instance, that people are quite responsive to the mere fact of being picked out as aid-givers. Asking someone sitting next to you to look after your possessions proves to increase greatly the chance that the person asked will intervene to stop a thief (Piliavin et al. 1981:104). At a much more serious level, studies of people who rescued Jews from the threat of persecution during the Nazi occupation of Europe show that the single most important variable distinguishing rescuers from nonrescuers was the simple fact of being asked to shelter a particular Jew (Varese & Yaish 2000). This mechanism does of course rely on the victim, or someone already connected to the victim, being in a position to make the request, otherwise the problem recurs at a higher level—which B should approach an A to beg help for P? Except in the case where one potential rescuer has a special capacity to help, these mechanisms of connection essentially pick helpers out at random, and it might be asked how this approach can be squared with my normative claim that our altruism should take the form of a willingness to do one’s fair share of helping those in need. Two points are worth making here. First, random allocation mechanisms will allocate the costs of helping fairly over time so long as each person has an equal chance of being picked out by these mechanisms—for instance, is equally likely to be the one standing next to someone who collapses in the street. Second, the norms I am envisaging are norms that would assign primary responsibility to one helper in situations where there are many potential helpers, and therefore each may decide not to act in the hope or expectation that someone else will. But the person who is assigned primary responsibility might then turn to another helper—if she is a poor swimmer, say, or can’t cope with the sight of blood—or recruit a small team to work together. In other words, she is not required to carry all the costs of the rescue herself if these are significant. As we have seen, people respond well when asked to help; they will no doubt respond even better when they can see that the costs of helping are being fairly shared. I have suggested some possible ways to connect particular helpers to those in need of aid, but the question remains how to turn these mechanisms of connection into shared norms of altruism. It is much easier to establish conventions of this kind within well-defined groups, so it is tempting to say that the way to solve the problem of altruism is to localise it within fairly small groups who can then establish norms that single out individuals as responsible aid-givers in particular circumstances. But this solution evades the real issue,


because as I argued earlier, the Emerson problem—are they my poor?—arises precisely in a society of strangers where we continually encounter unknown others in need of help. In these circumstances, we cannot rely on guidance from local groups: we need to have norms that are widely diffused throughout societies. So we need to understand how norms of this kind can emerge, and how we might encourage this to happen. I have no positive suggestions to make here, so rather than speculate, let me pull the threads together and say a few more words in defence of the approach I favour. I have been arguing that the problem of altruism in a world of strangers is the relative absence of mechanisms that tell us who is responsible for meeting the needs of particular others, and I have suggested three ways in which we might try to remedy this: creating public institutions that discharge our altruistic obligations for us, imposing legal requirements on individuals via Bad Samaritan laws, and promulgating norms that link salient helpers to needy recipients. Each of these, I should stress, is a partial solution only: each works in some cases but not in others. Underlying this approach are two basic intuitions. One is that people’s altruistic capacities are limited. They are willing to go to considerable lengths to help—think of those who rescued Jews in Nazi Europe—once they see helping P as their particular responsibility, but they are quite selective about who they will take responsibility for (one may speculate that this limited altruism can be explained in evolutionary terms). The other intuition is that limited altruism is morally justified. Helping those in need is something we are all collectively responsible for, and the burden this imposes is one that should be shared as fairly as possible. As moral agents, people should not take other peoples’ inaction in the face of need as simply a fact of life. I don’t say that in an emergency one shouldn’t be willing to do more than one’s share. But it’s better still to work to establish systems, whether institutional, legal, or moral, that distribute the burden of altruism fairly. Emerson was right to complain about being asked to help all the poor that were brought to his attention. Whatever the merits of his general philosophy of life, the question he asked was a good one. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This essay was given as the Austin lecture at the Association of Legal and Social Philosophy’s Annual Conference on the Ethics of Altruism at Royal Holloway, in April 2002, and subsequently presented to a workshop on Economics, Philosophy and Cognition at Nuffield College. I am grateful to both audiences for questions and comments which have helped me revise the


essay. I am particularly grateful to Cécile Fabre, Patti Lenard and Jonathan Seglow for their written comments on earlier drafts. Finally I must thank Natalie Gold for research assistance without which the essay could not have been written. NOTES 1. These examples and many others are discussed in the classic work on mutual aid, Kropotkin 1910. 2. This contrast is sometimes expressed differently, as a distinction between perfect and imperfect duties. An imperfect duty is one that gives the agent discretion as to whether she performs it on a given occasion or not. For a good account of where the distinction falls, and why it falls there, see Smith 1998: ch.3. 3. This, at any rate, is how the onlookers are likely to see things. It is not so clear whether they are justified in doing so. For the counter-argument, see Smith 1998: 53–6. But Smith concedes that ‘this issue is quite unsettled’. 4. ‘Public morality is not simply a general name for the sum of all the autonomous private moralities; rather, it is essentially a way of coordinating private efforts for common goals. In some matters it makes no sense to determine what an individual’s duty is in isolation from the public system of assigned shares and responsibilities’ (Feinberg 1992:195). 5. Assuming that contributing the second £100 does not take me below some morally relevant threshold. 6. Legislation that imposes a duty of rescue on individuals is referred to in this way, since its purpose is to penalise Bad Samaritans, whereas Good Samaritan laws are those whose aim is to protect people who carry out rescues from being penalised (e.g. from being sued by the victim if the rescue miscarries). 7. A few American states now impose such a duty, however. For discussion both of existing legislation and of the jurisprudential arguments for and against Bad Samaritan laws, see Ratcliffe 1966, Weinrib 1980–81, Feinberg 1984: ch.4 and Menlowe & Smith 1993. 8. This point is powerfully made, with some vivid examples, in Malm 2000. 9. For a defence of the reasonableness standard in the context of a duty of rescue, see Fabre 2004. 10. I have proposed a similar approach to the problem of how to assign responsibility internationally for helping deprived or suffering people in Miller 2001.

REFERENCES Berkowitz, L., ed. 1984. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, Vol. 17. London: Academic Press.


Bryan, J.H. & M.A.Test. 1967. ‘Models and helping: naturalistic studies in aiding behavior’. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 6, 400–407. Cohen, L.J. 1981. ‘Who is starving whom?’. Theoria, 47, 65–81. Darley, J. & C.C.Batson. 1973. “From Jerusalem to Jericho’: a study of situational and dispositional variables in helping behavior’. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 27, 100–108. Dovidio, J.F. 1984. ‘Helping behavior and altruism’. Berkowitz 1984:361–427. Ehlert, J., N.Ehlert & M.Merrens. 1973. ‘The influence of ideological affiliation on helping behavior’. Journal of Social Psychology, 89, 315–16. Emerson, R.W. 1901. Emerson’s Essays, Vol.1. London: Gibbings and Co. Fabre, C. 2004. ‘Good samaritanism: a matter of justice’, this volume, pp. 128–44. Feinberg, J. 1984. The Moral Limits of the Criminal Law, Vol.1: Harm to Others. New York: Oxford University Press. 1992. Freedom and Fulfillment. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Hansson, O. 1977. ‘Altruism towards a deviant in city and small town’. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 7, 272–9. Krebs, D.L. 1970. Altruism—an examination of the concept and a review of the literature’. Psychological Bulletin, 73, 258–302. Kropotkin, P. 1910. Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution. London: Heinemann. Laslett, P. 1983. The World We Have Lost, 3rd ed.. London: Methuen. Latané, B. & J.M.Dabbs, 1975. ‘Sex, group size and helping in three cities’. Sociometry, 38, 180–94. & J.M.Darley. 1970. The Unresponsive Bystander: Why Doesn’t He Help?. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. & S.Nida. 1981. ‘Ten years of research on group size and helping’. Psychological Bulletin, 89, 308–24. Malm, H.H. 2000. ‘Bad Samaritan laws: harm, help or hype?’. Law and Philosophy, 19, 707–50. Menlowe, M.A. & A.M.Smith, eds. 1993. The Duty to Rescue: The Jurisprudence of Aid. Aldershot, Dartmouth. Miller, D. 2001. ‘Distributing responsibilities’. Journal of of Political Philosophy, 9, 453–71. Misavage, R. & J.T.Richardson. 1974. ‘The focusing of responsibility: an alternative hypothesis in help-demanding situations’. European Journal of Social Psychology, 4, 5–15. Murphy, L. 2000. Moral Demands in Non-ideal Theory. New York: Oxford University Press. Piliavin, I.M., J.Rodin and J.A.Piliavin. 1969. ‘Good Samaritanism: an underground phenomenon?’. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 13, 289–99. Piliavin, J.A., J.F.Dovidio, S.L.Gaertner & R.D.Clark. 1981. Emergency Intervention. New York: Academic Press. Ratcliffe, J.M., ed. 1966. The Good Samaritan and the Law. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books.


Rutkowski, G., C.L.Gruder and D.Romer. 1983. ‘Group Cohesiveness, Social Norms, and Bystander Intervention’. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 44, 545–52. Schwartz, S.H. and A.Gottlieb. 1980. ‘Bystander anonymity and reactions to emergencies’. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 39, 418–30. Shaw, J.I., H.W Borough and M.I.Fink. 1994. ‘Perceived sexual orientation and helping behavior by males and females: the wrong number effect’. Journal of Psychology and Human Sexuality, 6, 73–81. Singer, P. 1993. Practical Ethics, 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Smith, P. 1998. Liberalism and Affirmative Obligation. New York: Oxford University Press. Unger, P. 1996. Living High and Letting Die: Our Illusion of Innocence. New York: Oxford University Press. Varese F. & M.Yaish. 2000. The importance of being asked: the rescue of Jews in Nazi Europe’. Rationality and Society, 12, 307–34. Weiner, B. 1980. ‘A cognitive (attribution)-emotion-action model of motivated behavior: an analysis of judgments of help-giving’. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 39, 186–200. Weinrib, E. 1980–81. The case for a duty to rescue’. Yale Law Journal, 90, 247–93.

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8 Good Samaritanism: A Matter of Justice CÉCILE FABRE

Introduction By far the most important question, in contemporary political philosophy, is that of the just distribution of material resources. Radical egalitarians argue that a society is just if, and only if, no one is worst off than others through no fault of his own.1 Less radical proponents of the coercive distribution of resources from the well-off to the badly off claim, by contrast, that a society is just if, and only if, everybody has the resources they need in order to lead a minimally flourishing life, provided—or some such proponents will add—that they are not responsible for lacking those resources. Let us take for granted, with less radical proponents of coercive redistribution, that when someone leads a less than minimally flourishing life through no fault of his own, he can claim the required material resources against the well off, provided the latter would not jeopardise their prospects for such a life by providing help. In many cases, however, the needy need things other than material resources in order to lead a minimally flourishing life. For example, they need a kidney transplant or a blood transfusion, which may require not only that the better-off channel part of their income towards (something like) a national health system, but also that someone make their kidney or their blood available to them. In this essay, I look at a different kind of need which cannot be met through tax transfers, to wit, our need for other people’s bodily services, which arises when, for example, we are in danger of drowning, collapse in the street following a heart attack, are attacked on the way home after dark, are stranded on the roadside with a flat tyre, etc. To help those needy individuals—whom I shall term, for short, the imperilled—is to be a Good Samaritan. Now, liberal theorists of justice, be they radical egalitarians or not, hardly ever study duties of Good Samaritanism.2 This is not altogether surprising: duties of Good Samaritanism,


after all, do not sit very well with liberals’ deep seated commitment to the view that, barring national emergencies such as war, individuals alone have the right to decide how to use their body (provided that they do not thereby infringe on someone else’s similar rights).3 Indeed, the Anglo-American political and legal tradition, within which those theorists write, is hostile to the view that we have a stringent moral, and enforceable, duty to be a Good Samaritan. (By contrast, as is often noted in the literature on the topic, most European countries have adopted so-called Bad Samaritan laws—laws, that is, which make it a crime for someone not to help the imperilled, when he could help them at very little cost to himself.)4 This is not to say that AngloAmerican liberals regard a failure to be a Good Samaritan as morally acceptable: indeed, most of them think that it is morally wrong. But they tend not to think -or at least they do not explicitly argue—that it constitutes a violation of a duty of justice. Rather, they condemn it as a failure to perform a duty of charity. My aim, in this essay, is to show that if liberals are committed to the view that the needy have a right, as a matter of justice, to some of the material resources of the well-off, they must endorse the view that the imperilled have a right, as a matter of justice, to the bodily services of those who are in a position to help. In the second section, I examine and reject the claim, put forward by some, that the duty to rescue is a duty of justice only in so far as it is a duty to support just institutions. In the third section, I argue that the duty to rescue is a duty of justice which is owed to the imperilled themselves, and which can be enforced by the state. Four preliminary remarks before I begin. First, a Good Samaritan, for my purpose here, does not stand in a special relationship to the person in peril; nor does he have a professional or contractual obligation to help those in need. A Good Samaritan, in short, is not a parent, a friend, a physician, or a policeman: he is a stranger who is not particularly qualified, professionally, to help, and who happens to be at the critical place, at the critical time. Second, I focus on needs which cannot be met through ordinary methods of resource transfers (such as taxation), and which can only be met by a physical and timeconsuming contribution. A Good Samaritan, here, is not someone who discharges his duty by giving money to the beggar; he is someone who discharges his duty by providing bodily services to those who need them. Third, throughout this paper, I adopt the interest theory of rights, whereby to have a right means that an interest one has is important enough to hold some other person(s) under a duty (Raz 1986:166). Fourth, I do not address the difficult issue of the ways in which duties of Good Samaritanism can be discharged: David Miller’s piece, in this volume, does precisely that. Nor,

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unlike Keith Graham, do I try to identify what acting altruistically (which Good Samaritans do) means. My aim, rather, is to assess what falls within the scope of justice. Good Samaritanism: A Duty of Justice to Support Just Institutions Before I offer my own defence of the duty to rescue as a duty of justice, I should like to examine, and refute, a standard argument to that effect. On that view, our duty to provide emergency assistance is owed, not to the imperilled, but to society writ large. Thus, Alison McIntyre argues that there is a connection between a Good Samaritan’s duty to obtain assistance and the organisation of emergency services. Take the case of fire-fighters. As a community we want them to operate efficiently, for they maximise the general welfare; yet, they cannot do so unless citizens assist in reporting fires. As she writes, ‘One’s duty to report a fire is a public duty, just as the fire-fighter is carrying out his duty to the community that employs him, rather than a duty to the individual whose property needs protection’ (McIntyre 1994:181–2). McIntyre is not alone in thinking along those lines. Arthur Ripstein, for example, also thinks that a duty to rescue is a duty to support a just institution. In that sense, or so he claims, it is analogous to a duty to help via taxation, which is owed to social institutions, and not to those who need help. On Ripstein’s view, the reason why we are under a duty to the community as a whole to rescue others lies in the value of reciprocity: ‘Reciprocity requires that the misfortunes which stand in the way of each person being able to live a self-directing life be held in common, so that all have the wherewithal to participate as full and equal members of society’ (Ripstein 2000:765). And the reason, in turn, why we owe that duty not to those in need but to society at large is that relational duties of that sort would make a mockery of liberals’ cherished view that we should all bear some responsibility for the way our life goes. For me to be under a duty to you if you are in danger undermines my freedom, since the conditions of our interaction are laid down unilaterally by your need for help. By contrast, for me to be under a duty to the community to get out of the way of the ambulance that takes you to the hospital does not undermine my freedom, since it simply amounts to helping a just institution—the ambulance services—to do their job properly (Ripstein 2000:768–9). There are several problems with Ripstein’s and McIntyre’s line of argument. First, it justifies not so much duties to rescue as duties to help emergency services; in so doing, it justifies a weaker kind of Good


Samaritanism—albeit one which could save lives—than its proponents explicitly recognise. And this is troublesome: after all, most instances of Good Samaritanism are ones where the rescuer needs to do something before the emergency services arrive, and not to help them, assuming that they will be needed at all (such as administering CPR, helping someone get up after a heavy fall, helping a swimmer in difficulty swim ashore, etc). Second, and more importantly, it is plain odd to say that we are under a duty to report a fire because we ought to support just institutions. Suppose that I see a fire breaking out in the house next door, that there are not any emergency services (the government has run out of money), and that I can very easily, at no cost to myself, help its inhabitants to get out. It is unclear what McIntyre and Ripstein would say here. Should they hold that I am not under a duty to rescue, they would be vulnerable to the charge that the absence or existence of emergency services cannot determine my moral duty, at least when the rescue is easy; should they hold that I am under a duty to rescue but that it is not a duty of justice, they would be vulnerable to the charge that the absence or existence of emergency services cannot determine whether my duty is of justice or not. Third, it would be odd, in either case (absent or with emergency services), to deny that my duty is grounded in my neighbour’s interest in survival. If this is correct, this implies that I owe him a duty to rescue him (which, in so far as to have a right means that an interest of one’s is important enough to hold some other person under a duty, in turn implies that my neighbour has a right against me that I rescue him.) Fourth, and relatedly, assuming for the sake of argument that a duty of Good Samaritanism is a duty to assist emergency services, it nevertheless does not follow that it is a duty owed to society as whole. Consider a fire-fighter employed by the city council. To claim that he is under a duty to help to his employer—the community—and not to the imperilled, does not account for the fact that the latter are, in some cases, allowed to sue fire-fighting services themselves, and not the city council, for gross negligence. True, they do not always have the power to do so. But cases where the courts have exonerated rescuers—in particular the police—from a duty to help particular individuals have elicited the following response: what is the point of having a police, or a rescue service, if, when not performing an easy rescue, they cannot be taken to court by civilians? Setting that aside, even if emergency services are under a duty to help to their employer and not to the imperilled themselves, it does not follow that those whom they deputise to act—namely, civilians, are not themselves under a duty to act to the imperilled.


Fifth—and this is directed at Ripstein’s argument specifically—it is very unclear why helping a just institution, namely emergency services, to assist someone else does not constitute a violation of my freedom, whereas helping that very person myself does. So to contrast those two acts make sense only if one takes the following two propositions to be true: (a) one is under a duty not to free-ride on just institutions; (b) one’s freedom is not undermined if one is prevented from acting in violation of one’s moral duties. Now, the proposition that one is under a duty not to free-ride on just institutions is not really in dispute. But the second proposition is implausible. For if it is indeed the case that one does not suffer a loss of freedom if one is prevented from acting in violation of one’s moral duties, it follows that imprisonment does not render the rightfully convicted murderer unfree—which is ludicrously counter-intuitive (Cohen 1991). Consequently, this second proposition cannot support the view that being held under a duty to someone to help them violates one’s freedom whereas a duty to the community to assist emergency services does not constitute such violation. The Duty to Rescue: An Enforceable Duty of Justice It is time to take stock. So far, I have claimed that arguing for the duty to rescue as a duty of justice on the grounds that one has a duty to support just institutions is unsatisfactory. Here, I argue that we owe it to the imperilled, as a matter of justice, to rescue them, whether or not they belong to our society, and irrespective of the presence, or absence, of emergency services. I then argue that duties of Good Samaritanism should be enforced by the state. The Duty to Rescue: A Duty of Justice Owed to the Imperilled On what grounds, then, do we owe it to others to help them if they need emergency assistance? I am assuming, you recall, that the needy have a right, as a matter of justice, to some of the material resources of the better off; that is, that they have rights to minimum income, education, housing and health care. The rationale for holding the better-off under that kind of duty is this: if one believes that individuals’ fundamental interest in leading a minimally flourishing life is important enough to hold others under negative duties not to kill them, not to take their livelihood from them, etc., one must accept that it is important enough to hold them under positive duties to provide them with the resources they need in order to lead a minimally flourishing life.5


By the very same token, one must believe that an individual’s interest in leading a minimally flourishing life is important enough to hold others not simply under a duty to provide material resources, but also under a duty to provide emergency assistance to them, in cases where, absent such assistance, they would not be able to lead a minimally flourishing life. The fact that in the former case material resources are needed, whilst in the latter bodily services are, is not weighty enough to justify holding the better off under a duty to distribute and to exonerate potential rescuers from the task of helping. The imperilled, in short, have a right to emergency assistance against those who are in a position to help. Moreover, they do not have that right in virtue of their membership in a scheme of cooperation, any more than the needy have welfare rights against the better off in virtue of their membership in such a scheme. Just as the needy have those rights in virtue of their neediness, the imperilled have the right to be rescued in virtue of their being in danger. Having established that duties of Good Samaritanism correlate into rights does not suffice to establish that they are duties of justice. After all, not all such duties are duties of justice: my moral duty not to lie to you can conceivably be thought to be grounded in your right not to be lied to; however, it would not be appropriate to say that in lying to you, I would act unjustly towards you. A principle for the regulation of individual behaviour counts as a principle of justice if it solves conflicts between individuals over the distribution of moderately scarce resources. The principle ‘one ought not to lie to others’ does regulate individual behaviour but cannot in any way be taken to settle conflicts over a distribution of moderately scarce resources. As I noted above, arguments about distributive justice are (nearly always) arguments about the distribution of goods, such as money, housing and health care, which are scarce, and distributable, resources. In order to show, then, that a duty to provide emergency assistance is a duty of justice, one must show that our body, as we use it in emergency rescues, does count as a scarce resource. I, for one, see no reason not to think of the body as such a resource (which is not to say that it is nothing but such a resource.) If the lifebelt I can throw to one of two drowning individuals can count as a resource, why cannot my arms, which I use to throw the lifebelt, or indeed to swim towards you, also count as such? After all, we are accustomed to thinking about labour as a resource: but labour simply consists in using one’s body in certain ways. Moreover, our body is a scarce resource: as I only have two arms and two legs, I cannot rescue you from the river and prune my flower beds at the same time. Even if I had enough limbs to perform both tasks at the same time, I could not do so, since I cannot be in two different places at the same time. Now, you have an interest in controlling the use of my arms and legs, as well as the


location of my body, in such a way as to be rescued; but I have an interest in controlling them in such a way as to tend to my garden. If that is not a conflict over a scarce resource, I do not know what is. In fact, whilst it is possible to imagine a world of abundant material resources (abundant, that is, in the sense that there are enough of them to satisfy everybody’s needs and wants), indeed whilst it is possible to imagine a world of abundant body parts (thanks to stem cell research and cloning), it is impossible to imagine a world of abundant bodily services, precisely because such services cannot but be performed by individuals who have to be at the right place, at the right time, and yet may not be, and who have to use their body as required by the needs of the imperilled, and yet may not want to. To recapitulate, our body, when used to provide services, is a scarce resource. Accordingly, a principle which delineates duties grounded in rights and pertaining to the provision of such services, can, on that count at least, be regarded as a principle of justice. I say ‘on that count at least’, because in the eyes of some philosophers, a moral duty has to fulfil yet another condition in order to qualify as a duty of justice. Thus, Rawlsians would deny that duties to rescue as imposed on individuals are duties of justice, on the grounds that justice regulates the behaviour of institutions, as opposed to that of individuals. Duties of Good Samaritanism, on that view, belong to the category of natural duties, to wit, duties which, like the duties of justice imposed on us by the principles of justice, are chosen in the original position, but which, unlike them, apply to us irrespective of our membership in a cooperative scheme and of our consenting to them, and the content of which is not determined by social institutions (Rawls 1999).6 According to Rawls himself, we have several natural duties. One of them, namely the natural duty to support just institutions, is, precisely in virtue of its content, a duty of justice. Duties of Good Samaritanism, by contrast, do not partake of justice, because we must fulfil them whether or not we have agreed to submit to them, and because their content is not determined by social institutions. Whilst I agree with Rawls’ characterisation of the content and binding force of duties of Good Samaritanism, I disagree with the contrast he draws between those duties and duties of justice. If natural duties are chosen in the original position, and are thereby ‘the outcome of a hypothetical agreement’ (Rawls 1999:99) it is unclear why they apply to us irrespective of our having consented to them. Moreover, it is unclear why the content of our obligations of justice, and of the rights with which they correlate, is determined by the rules of social institutions, whilst the content of natural duties is not. Rawls, in fact, seems to vacillate on this point. On the one hand, he claims that the duty not to harm or injure others is a natural duty; on the other hand, he claims


that the right to be free from physical assault and dismemberment is one of the rights secured by the first principle of justice.7 But why should the content of the latter be determined by social institutions, and not that of the former? If the content of natural duties can be determined by social institutions, in that respect at least they, and therefore the duty to rescue, can partake of justice. To recap, if one thinks that the needy have a right, as matter of justice, to some of the material resources of the well-off, one is committed to the view that the imperilled have a right, as matter of justice, to the bodily services of potential rescuers. At this juncture, it pays to note that there are two differences between the duty to provide material resources and the duty to provide bodily services—neither of which, I now argue, undermines my case. In the introduction to this essay, I posited that when someone leads a less than minimally flourishing life through no fault of his own, he can claim the required material resources against the better off, provided the latter would not jeopardise their prospects for such a life by providing help. Clearly, the imperilled’s claim for help against rescuers is subject to the same proviso. For just as it would be arbitrary to exonerate potential rescuers from a duty to help whilst holding the materially better-off under that duty, it would arbitrary not to release them from it when their prospect for a minimally flourishing life would be jeopardised whilst releasing the latter in similar circumstances. Now, although the duty to provide material help and the duty to rescue are similar in their demandingness, the first of the aforementioned two differences between them pertains to the costs incurred by help providers. When a needy person calls upon the well-off to give him material resources, he is (merely) imposing a cost on them, to wit, the cost of losing a share of their income. When someone in peril calls upon potential rescuers to help him, not only is he imposing on them the cost of not being able to make use of their body as they see fit; he is also imposing on them a risk of incurring a further cost, to wit, the cost of suffering some injury, in some cases death, in the course of the rescue attempt. Is he entitled to do so? At this juncture, some might be tempted to hold the following principle P1 to be true:8 P1: one is under a duty to help and thereby incur a risk of cost C (Rc) only if one is under a duty to help and thereby incur C. On that view, one determines whether imposing Rc is legitimate merely by determining whether imposing C is legitimate. This has the merit of simplicity as well as, unfortunately, the disadvantage of implausibility. For consider. Suppose that S has been knocked unconscious by a falling branch into a shallow


pond and that Q happens to pass by. You are quite heavy, and if Q lifts S out of the pond, there is a risk, but an absolutely minuscule one (much, much lower, say, than the similar risk Q incurs by cycling to work everyday) that Q may have a heart attack. Now, as should be clear by now, I believe that Q ought to lift S out of the pond. If P1 is true, though, then it follows that one cannot hold the following two claims to be true: (1) One is not under a duty to die for the sake of someone else. (2) Q is under a duty to lift S out of the pond. For if Q lifts S out of the pond, and suffers a heart attack, from which he dies, then in so far as (1) is true, which it surely is, it seems that Q was not, in fact, under a duty to lift S out of the pond. But that strikes us as rather unacceptable. Consider another example: S is very ill, in bed, and needs some medicine: he asks Q to go to the chemist’s, a five minute walk which involves crossing a traffic-heavy thoroughfare. Surely Q ought to go, even though he risks being run over and dying. Consider now a final, contrastive, example: S is drowning in very stormy seas; Q is not a very good swimmer, and if he goes in to try to get S out, there is a 30 per cent risk—a very high risk by all accounts—that Q will drown himself. In that case, surely Q is not under a duty to attempt to rescue S. In order to claim, in the first two cases, that Q is under a duty to rescue S and thereby to put himself at risk of dying, and, in the third case, that Q is not under such duty, one must accept that P1 is not always true, and that every single instance of it should be justified, or denied, separately, on its own merits. That it should be so does not entail that it is impossible to adopt a general principle for what counts as acceptable and not acceptable risk. To defend such a principle in detail is beyond the scope of this essay. I suggest, though, that a reasonable risk, as incurred in the course of a rescue, is one no greater than the risks we standardly incur, and impose on others, in our everyday life, when driving, cycling, etc. When engaging in those activities, we run, and impose, risks of death and serious injuries. Accordingly, we are under a moral duty to help out of the water someone who is drowning, to drive to the hospital, ambulance services failing, someone who is in serious pain, etc. To sum up, although duties to rescue raise the question of risk-imposition and are thereby not strictly analogous to duties to provide material help, that particular disanalogy does not threaten my case for holding potential rescuers under a duty of justice to provide bodily help to those who need it. This having been said, those two kinds of provision differ in yet another, potentially


threatening, respect. In the case of welfare assistance, the burden of helping the needy can be spread fairly amongst all potential contributors, through taxation. Not so with emergency rescues, since whether or not one is under a duty to help depends on whether one finds oneself in the right place, at the right time. It seems unfair, or so one might be tempted to argue, that some people, and not all, are under a duty to provide emergency rescues, simply out of the bad luck of being present when someone is in peril. Now, there is no way, obviously, to spread the burden of rescuing amongst rescuers and nonrescuers. I do not think, though, that this suffices to undermine the view that duties to rescue are relevantly analogous to duties to provide welfare provision. Just as one can spread the cost of expropriation by compensating expropriated property-owners through taxation, one can spread the (small) costs incurred by rescuers through a compensation scheme funded by taxation. And just as the fact that expropriated property-owners may sometimes find that compensation does not fully make up for their loss is not a good reason to deem expropriation illegitimate, the fact that rescuers may sometimes find that compensation does not make up for the costs incurred in the rescue attempt is not a good reason to exempt them from a duty to rescue. From a Moral to a Legal Right to Rescue That we have a moral right to emergency rescue clearly does not entail that the state ought to enforce it, anymore than my having a right that you meet me at 5 pm, as you promised, entails that the state ought to force you to do so. There are, broadly, two kinds of considerations that might dictate against the enforcement of moral rights; (a) enforcing moral rights might prove too difficult to do in practice; (b) enforcing moral rights might compromise some other moral values. The case of promises illustrates both kinds of consideration. If you promise me, absent any witness, to feed my cat while I am away, I acquire a right against you that you do so. But if you fail to fulfil your obligation towards me to feed my cat, it is highly unlikely that the state will enforce my right and punish you, since it could in all likelihood find no reliable evidence in support of my claim. Enforcing that promise would be, in practice, impossible. Assuming that enforcing promises would be possible, it would nevertheless be morally costly, since it would undermine the role played by trust in our personal relationships. In cases where it would be practically impossible, or very difficult, but not morally costly for the state to enforce moral rights, the state has the moral power to do so, but it has good, practical reasons for not exercising that power. In cases where enforcing a


moral right would be too costly morally, although not impossible nor too difficult in practice, the state does not have the moral power to do so. Now, if one agrees that obligations of Good Samaritanism are obligations of justice, and if one thinks, with liberal proponents of coercive taxation for distributive purposes, that the state has the moral power to make it compulsory to contribute to the provision of welfare services, then, pace Miller, one cannot dismiss Bad Samaritan laws on the grounds that the state does not have the moral power to enforce positive rights to be helped.9 However, there might be other reasons as to why advocating legal welfare rights does not commit one to legal rights of rescue. Indeed, many commentators have claimed that a badly drafted Bad Samaritan law would be too costly from a moral and practical point of view. Practically, it would be very hard to prosecute someone for a failure to rescue an imperilled individual: if I flee the scene of an accident, without anyone to see me, nobody will be any the wiser. If I fail to alert the police from the privacy of my home when I hear someone scream for help in the street, I can always pretend that I did not hear, or that the screams I heard seemed to come from the TV next door and not from the street.10 This practical objection to Bad Samaritan laws does not strike me as convincing. For although it may be very difficult, in some—indeed in many—cases, to assess whether someone was in a position to help, it nevertheless is true that in some cases, one will be able to make that assessment: it may happen that some witness will see potential rescuers fleeing the scene of an accident and will be quick enough to take down their plate number, thereby allowing the police to track them down. After all, it is usually not thought that the fact that rape (in particular marital rape) and racial and sexual discrimination are notoriously difficult to prove constitutes a good reason for not criminalizing them. Why treat failures to rescue differently? Of course, other considerations, such as the moral costs attendant on enforcing duties of Good Samaritanism, may dictate against enforcement. A proponent of Bad Samaritan laws will find such considerations harder to deal with. In what follows, I shall address the deepest critique of Bad Samaritan laws in that regard, as deployed by H.M.Malm.11 According to Malm, such laws cannot lay down precise criteria for what counts as a reasonable cost for a potential rescuer, in the precise circumstances in which he is called upon to rescue; nor can they lay down precise criteria for what count as a reasonable risk. For there are too many possible scenarios for statutes to be able to foresee. Compare with taxation. It is not that difficult to legislate in such a way as to ensure that individuals contribute to welfare provision to the extent that they are in a position to do so: one can state, in the law, that taxes will be


levied in proportion of income, with possibilities of rebate for, say, being a lone parent, having special medical needs, etc. Whereas tax law can be relatively precise, Bad Samaritan laws cannot, with the effect that it will be up to the courts to decide, in every instance, whether a potential rescuer would in fact have incurred an unacceptable cost, and whether his assessment of the risks attendant on the rescue was plausible. In many cases, or so Malm argues, courts will end up penalising individuals who were not, in fact, under a moral duty to rescue. Malm makes her case by way of several examples, the following two of which are particularly telling. Suppose I nearly drowned myself 10 years ago, and that I now find it extraordinarily difficult to get into the water; suppose further that I alone witness someone drowning, and that paralysed by fear, I cannot bring myself to go to his rescue. As a result, the imperilled swimmer dies; suppose further that rescuing him would not have been risky. Should I be prosecuted? Should judges, or the jury, be lenient towards me? Suppose now that I have been attending weekly religious meditation meetings, without fail, in the last five years. It is crucially important to me, to my understanding of the way in which I should lead my life, not only that I go to these meetings for the peace and comfort they bring me, but also that I unflinchingly commit myself to them. On my way to one such meeting, I drive past the scene of a car accident: I can see that the driver is slumped, motionless, over the wheel. There is no sign that emergency services are on the way. If I do stop and start helping, I will miss my meeting; so I speed along. In that scenario, there is no doubt that I would have incurred a high cost had I stopped. Again, what should the courts do? On what grounds can they decide that not missing one religious meeting is not important enough to justify my not helping? I concede that the fact that there is risk involved in helping, which there is not in paying taxes, complicates the issue of enforcement. I also concede that it is not easy to establish whether or not the cost of rescuing was too high. However, the fact that drawing the line between acceptable and unacceptable risks and costs is a difficult task does not entail that one can never make such assessment: the standard of reasonableness is constantly used in other areas of the law; and in many cases it is used, precisely, so as to assess risks and costs. I do not see why it cannot be used here as well.12 Consider self-defence: if I am attacked, I must assess what risk I would incur by not shooting back and reasoning with the attacker; if I kill him, I will be called upon to explain why I thought killing was the only response to the attack. Consider also standards for convicting someone: juries are asked to convict only if they find the defendant guilty beyond reasonable doubt. Consider, further, cost assessment in the context of paying taxes: someone who refuses to pay them on the grounds that


the importance of providing others with the resources they need is outweighed by the importance for him of subsidising a religious group is unlikely to be met with sympathy by judges. By contrast, judges might be inclined to be lenient (in fact, in the UK, have been lenient) towards needy individuals who refused to pay the poll tax on the grounds that they would not, as a result, be able to pay for heating in the winter. Judges, then, do assess costs and risks on a regular basis, and there therefore does not seem to be any good reason not to ask them to do so when applying a Bad Samaritan law. Malm remains unmoved by such considerations, for the following reason: if judges make a mistake of judgement, and end up convicting someone who in fact was not under a moral duty to rescue (for the cost in her case was indeed too high), they will unfairly impose a penalty on her. The prospect of unfair convictions presents us with a dilemma. If we make the penalty light, i.e. a £100 fine, so as to alleviate the effects of unfair convictions, we send the wrong signal to genuinely Bad Samaritans, since we are, in effect, telling them that their failure to rescue is not that reprehensible—that it is less reprehensible, for example, than stealing a car, for which one can incur a jail sentence. If we do make failures to perform easy rescues punishable by a jail sentence (as is the case in France, for example) in order to impress on them that their failure to rescue is very serious, we risk sending to jail innocent people. Again, one cannot but concede that such problems are serious, and may arise. But they also arise in other areas of criminal laws, such as homicide. The risk of wrongful conviction may be a good reason to oppose capital punishment; it does not seem to be a good reason to oppose any kind of punishment whatsoever. Similarly, the risk of wrongfully convicting someone for failure to rescue may, indeed should deter us from imposing harsh sentences, but it should not deter us from imposing any sentence at all. I cannot, in this essay, offer guidelines as to which tariff would enable us to avoid being impaled on either horn of the dilemma. My aim was more modest: it was merely to show that one has good reasons to confer on the state the moral power to enforce individuals’ right to be rescued. Conclusion To conclude, I have argued that the imperilled have a right against potential rescuers that they help them provided that they would not, in so doing, run an unreasonable risk of incurring an unreasonable cost. Duties to rescue the imperilled, moreover, are not merely moral duties; they are duties of justice, owed to the imperilled themselves, protective of their fundamental interest in


leading a minimally flourishing life. Or so should think liberal proponents of coercive taxation for the purpose of providing the needy with the material resources they need in order to lead such a life: after all, bodily services, as deployed in rescue attempts, are a resource, and a scarce one at that, over which conflicts arise between those who need them and those who are in a position to offer them. The foregoing considerations, of course, raise the question of body parts: they too are a scarce resource, and are needed by many patients, often as a matter of life and death. If I am correct that proponents of the distribution of material resources are committed to endorsing duties to rescue, it seems that they are also committed, much more controversially, to endorsing duties to provide body parts, as a matter of justice. Whether they are indeed so committed, and whether they can be so without thereby jettisoning their commitment to bodily integrity and autonomy, must be dealt with elsewhere (Fabre 2003). NOTES 1. Egalitarians differ from one another on the question of the egalitarian metric. For a defence of equality of resources, see Dworkin 2000; for a defence of equality of opportunity for welfare, see Arneson 1989:77–93; for a defence of equality of access to advantage, see Cohen 1989:906–44. 2. In his ‘Property Rights in Persons’, Richard Arneson gestures towards the view that welfare egalitarianism dictates holding individuals under such duties. I say ‘gestures’, because the focus of his piece is freedom of occupational choice. See Arneson 1992: 201–30. For the Biblical parable, see Luke, 10, 30–35. 3. I take that proviso as given throughout the essay. The qualification barring national emergencies’ is important: most liberals would agree that in times of war, conscription is legitimate; some would agree that in other kinds of national emergencies (serious flooding, forest fires, etc.), we are under a stringent duty to help those in need. 4. In the US, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Rhode Island, and Vermont have passed such Bad Samaritan laws. In Wisconsin, one is required to provide aid, or to summon aid, for crime victims who have suffered bodily harm. In Europe, France, Germany, Belgium, The Netherlands, Portugal and Russia have passed Bad Samaritan laws. Russia was one of the first countries to do so, as early as 1889 (see Tunc 1981; Rudzinski 1981). Note that Bad Samaritan laws, which criminalize failures to rescue, must not be confused with Good Samaritan laws, which prevent people from suing their rescuers on the grounds that the latter occasioned them some harm in the course of the rescue. 5. For a fuller argument to that effect, see Fabre 2000.


6. For Rawls’ account of the natural duty of mutual aid -his terminology for duties of good Samaritanism—see A Theory of Justice (1999:297–8). 7. See Rawls (1999:98 and 53 respectively). Rawls claims that there are two reasons why the parties will want to adopt the (natural) duty to rescue in the original position, neither of which is convincing. First, Rawls argues, assuming that they stand as much of a chance of needing help as of being called upon to provide it, and given that the cost of helping is outweighed by the gain of being helped, it is in their direct interest to do so. Now, this suggests that, if it is not in my interest to help you, then I have no reason to adopt the duty; nor, indeed, do I have any reason to fulfil it. True, I may stand as much of a chance of needing help as of giving it. However, should I need help, potential rescuers will be unable to check whether I did, or would do, my bit when called upon to help myself—indeed they are unlikely to ask me whether I have ever helped or would help, before undertaking the rescue. As a result, I would not incur any cost by demanding help and not giving it; it is in my interest, then, not to act as a Good Samaritan when called upon to do so. The second reason why, according to Rawls, we acknowledge the duty to rescue as a natural duty in the original position is this. Individuals get a sense of confidence and trust from knowing that they live in a society where, should they need it, others will come to their aid: whether they will, as a matter of fact, need their aid, does not really matter. But this point is vulnerable to the objection that if the reason why we ought to impose on ourselves a natural duty to aid others lies in our interest in living in a society where we know we will be helped if we need it, then we will have no incentive in helping individuals who, we know, are very unlikely ever to be in a position to help us themselves, for example because they are physically or mentally disabled. 8. In this paragraph and the next two, I draw from Thomson 1986. 9. Miller, ‘Are they my poor?: The problem of altruism in a world of strangers’. This volume, pp. 106–27. 10. I allude here to what is, possibly, the most notorious case of Good Samaritanism failure in the US. On 13 March 1964, in the early hours of the morning, Kitty Genovese, a 28 year-old woman living in Queens’ (NYC) was attacked three times by the same individual (who first struck at 3:15 am, and then on two occasions came back and struck at a few minutes intervals to finish his job). Genovese cried for help, but the police were notified at 3:50 am only, at which point she was dead. The police later established that no fewer than 38 of her neighbours, none of whom called the police before 3:50 am, had, at some point or other, witnessed her three-assault ordeal. When asked later on, by the police themselves and by disbelieving journalists why they had not called the police, some of those neighbours claimed that they thought they had heard a lovers’ quarrel, or that they could not see very well, or that they felt too frightened to do anything. 11. For a detailed account of such difficulties, see Malm 1995:4–31; 2000:707–50. The two scenarios described in the next paragraph are taken from the latter and former pieces respectively.


12. For a similar argument, see J.Feinberg 1984:156–7. 13. See Fabre 2003.

REFERENCES Arneson, R. 1989. ‘Equality and equal opportunity for welfare’. Philosophical Studies, 56, 77–93. 1992. ‘Property rights in persons’. Social Philosophy and Policy, 9, 201–30. Cohen, G.A. 1989. ‘On the currency of egalitarian justice’. Ethics, 99, 906–44. 1991. ‘Capitalism, freedom and the proletariat’. Miller 1991:163–82. Dworkin, R. 2000. Sovereign Virtue. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Fabre, C. 2000. Social Rights Under the Constitution: Government Under the Decent Life. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 2003. ‘Justice and the coercive taking of live body parts’. Utilitas, 15 (Forthcoming). Feinberg, J. 1984. The Moral Limits of the Criminal Law, Vol 1: Harm to Others. New York: Oxford University Press. Malm, H.M. 1995. ‘Liberalism, Bad Samaritan, and legal paternalism’. Ethics, 106, 4–31. 2000. ‘Bad Samaritan laws: harm, help, or hype?’. Law and Philosophy, 19, 707–50. McIntyre, A. 1994. ‘Guilty bystanders? On the legitimacy of duty to rescue statutes.’ Philosophy and Public Affairs, 23, 157–91. Miller, D. ed. 1991. Liberty. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ratcliffe, J.M. ed. 1981. The Good Samaritan and the Law. Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith. Rawls, J. 1999. A Theory of Justice. 2nd ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Raz, J. 1986. The Morality of Freedom. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Ripstein, A. 2000. ‘Three duties to rescue: moral, civil, and criminal’. Law and Philosophy, 19, 751–79. Rudzinski, A.W 1986. ‘The duty to rescue: a comparative analysis’. Thomson 1986. Thomson, J.J. 1986. Rights, Restitution, and Risks. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Tunc, A. 1981. The volunteer and the good samaritan’. Ratcliffe 1981.

9 Altruism and Freedom JONATHAN SEGLOW

Introduction Though most people are altruistic to some degree, a pre-occupation with one’s own affairs seems part of the natural condition of humankind (cf. Rawls 1972:127). We want altruistic motives to be encouraged and we think that society would be better if altruism were more abundant. It is natural to think that of what legal measures and institutional arrangements might be designed to engineer more altruistic behaviour among people. Indeed in some situations—where failures of altruism can cause great harm—we may even require that people are altruistic by punishing them if they are not. The paradigm case of such coercively imposed altruism is the sphere of Bad Samaritan legislation, defended in Cécile Fabre’s contribution to this volume. There remain, however, powerful objections to the institutionalisation of altruism in cases where it is coercively enforced by the state, and even, I think, where it is merely officially encouraged. ‘I may choose to be altruistic’, a person might say, ‘if and when I wish to be, but why should the state impel me to be so, in fact why should it exhort or cajole me into behaving in a way I do not wish to behave?’. The source of our objections to state sponsored altruism is the value of individual freedom, and in this chapter it is the relationship between altruism and freedom that I want to explore. I shall compare cases where altruism is coerced, with less controversial cases where it is merely encouraged. In the next section I shall argue that if altruism is coerced it is no longer altruism.1 Turning to non-coerced altruism in the third section, I examine our attachment to individual freedom which stands in its way. The strength of this objection is weakened once we distinguish between the different freedoms—some more significant than others—to which we are attached. Though altruism cannot be coerced, there remain compelling reasons to


encourage it. I conclude by sketching a few of the social and political benefits of a more altruistic society. How should we define altruism? Our intuitive understanding of an altruistic act is one that is self-consciously undertaken to further another person’s good at some cost to oneself—or at least a willingness to bear such a cost if required. This does not mean that altruists do not gain by their altruism, only that they also tend to pay a price for doing so. (The person who does voluntary work in a charity shop might gain companionship, for example, and the psychic benefits of furthering a good cause). I say ‘self-consciously’ because I find it hard to imagine that a person could be an altruist without understanding that they were being so (a point to which I shall return briefly). The importance of self-consciously borne personal costs suggests one further central feature of altruistic behaviour: that it is impossible to be an altruist without having altruistic motives, without, that is, the desire to help another at some cost to oneself. Motives are central to altruistic behaviour because they are what power people to bear the costs which their altruism entails. It is hard (perhaps impossible) to be altruistic without at least some desire to be so. Coerced Altruism In some cases, it is not merely unfortunate if people don’t want to be altruistic, it is a disaster. The best example of a case of this kind is so-called Bad Samaritan legislation, common in Continental legal systems, which impose legal penalties for failing to assist people in distress. Bad Samaritan laws do not exist in Britain: were they to be introduced it would become a crime not to call the emergency services or even to help a person in mortal danger oneself (provided one did not put oneself in undue risk). Bad Samaritan laws are an example of coercively imposed institutionalised altruism where the alternative—simply relying on people’s goodwill or a non-enforced duty which they may think they are under—is too much of a risk. Another example is the duty of care which a local authority owes to vulnerable people who live there; although unlike Bad Samaritan legislation the duty to be altruistic is borne here by a collective (the local authority), not an individual. A final, highly controversial, example of coercively imposed altruism are cases where children and mentally incompetent adults have been legally compelled to give bone marrow or other bodily parts to their relatives where this was the only way of preventing their relatives’ deaths. (The legal and moral issues involved here are explored in Alasdair Maclean’s contribution in this volume). If a witness to an accident fails to call an ambulance, or a local authority fails in its duty of care, or a person refuses their sibling life-saving bone

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marrow, then it is tempting to say, not merely that they are behaving non-altruistically, but that they are also being unjust. And it is plausible to think, therefore, that it is not only altruism that is legally institutionalised in these cases, but also justice. In what follows I want to explore the general idea of enforcing altruism through duties of justice that institutionalise it. Theories of justice provide, among other things, moral reasons for limiting individual freedom. The demands of justice limit our freedom in morally justifiable ways. This is compatible with the view that some crucial freedoms—freedom of speech, for example—may never be limited, indeed those freedoms are part of justice too. Thus while Rawls sets out a list of basic liberties which he regards as inviolable, he also implies that other—nonbasic— liberties can justifiably be limited in order to ensure another principle of justice, that social and economic inequalities benefit the least advantaged (Rawls 1993:289–371). Along similar lines, Peter de Marneffe has set out a principle of liberty which states that ‘individual liberty may not be limited…unless this is necessary in order to protect equal basic liberty, to promote fair equality of opportunity, or to maintain an adequate material minimum for each person’ (de Marneffe 1994:768). A just society is one where people comply with the demands of justice, but they may comply more or less willingly. Some people will discharge the duties of justice zealously because they highly value the justness of those duties. A keen environmentalist who responds to laws on recycling would be an example. Other people may be willing but less zealous. Most taxation probably falls into this category. Others may comply reluctantly, though they do recognise the justness of their duty. Burdensome demands such as jury service or military conscription are cases of this. A few people may believe the law is mistaken, but comply anyway because that is for the general good. An instance of this is where a driver keeps to the speed limit even though she believes that speed limits are wrong. Finally, there are cases where people observe the law only because they are afraid of being punished if they do not. Provided people comply with justice that is enough to make society just (though it may of course be better for other reasons if they acted with more zeal and earnestness). The idea that it is people’s compliance with justice that matters is consistent with our common sense view about enforceable duties. Positive duties are usually enforced when it is important that something gets done. But while enforcing a duty is usually an efficient means of ensuring compliance, it is not effective in ensuring agents acquire the best motives. An enforceable duty that is recognised to be such by those against whom it is enforced will, other things be equal, be discharged. But, as we have just seen, it may be discharged


reluctantly, unwillingly or half-heartedly. Second, positive duties are also sometimes enforced because an authority hopes that with sufficient habituation people will come to have motives or attitudes which the authority regards it important that people acquire. Compulsory voting is an example of this. Part of the reason for its introduction is that people will come to see the importance of voting as a civic duty. In both kinds of cases authorities recognise that people may not do what it is thought important that they do, unless their doing so is enforced. Both these sets of considerations apply to cases where altruism is institutionalised, but the former is more important. Consider again Bad Samaritan legislation. What is important is that people are saved from drowning, escorted quickly to hospital, and so on. It would also be good if people came to acquire the sorts of dispositions that the original Good Samaritan had: they willingly came to the aid of other people because that is what they believe they should do, regardless of the fact there is a law which requires that in any case. But this second reason is not the prime motive for such legislation. The main concern is that help is given in cases of dire need. That is the reason for enforcing the duty. The problem with such institutionalised altruism lies with the fact that our enthusiasm or reluctance to discharge its duties is submerged beneath the fact that we do discharge them. We may be good Samaritans enthusiastically, willingly or reluctantly but whatever kind we are, provided we discharge the duty we have done all that justice can demand of us. However, as I suggested in the last section, this is not the way we generally think about altruism. For we generally think that motives are not incidental but central to people’s altruistic behaviour. The desire to further another’s good at some cost to oneself, and the fact that we do advance another’s good, are what makes our behaviour altruistic. When altruism is institutionalised in the form of Bad Samaritan legislation, or any other case where its demands are enforceable, our motives become eroded by the importance of doing what the duty demands. If X is made compulsory, then people’s altruistic motives to do X (if they ever had them) become less important—both from their own point of view and the point of view of the political authority which institutionalised X -than the fact that they comply with X. Think of blood donation. Suppose that, for some reason, there was a shortage of blood and the government responded by requiring every healthy adult to donate once a year. Although of course some people (many of the formerly voluntary donators) would still give very willingly, it is very unlikely that everyone would. The important question would simply be: do you do what the law requires?


Good Samaritans may act with greater or lesser degrees of enthusiasm. And in many emergency situations people will think first of the person in need and not the Bad Samaritan law. But that cannot always be true or there would not be no need to pass Bad Samaritan laws in the first place. Institutionalising altruism is an effective way of ensuring that aid is given. Its aim is not to make people give aid more willingly, but to ensure that they do give it. It would be a beneficial secondary affect, if as a result of acting to help another person, I become more willing to assist a second time or if my willingness is increased by hearing stories of others’ good Samaritanism. It is possible that public discourse on Bad Samaritan legislation may itself encourage people to come to acquire altruistic motives.2 But whether these things will happen is a contingent matter. The point is that once altruism becomes a duty whose nonobservance renders me liable for punishment, my motives become less important than the fact I did observe my duty. Motives are important but sometimes ensuring that we comply with our positive duties is more important. It is sometimes argued, against the institutionalisation of welfare, that coercing people to part with their tax money, robs them of the opportunity to show benevolence through charitable giving. Against this, the welfarist will argue that the latter is capricious and uncertain; it is more important that the needy are helped. Moreover, compulsory taxation is also justified on the grounds that it solves a collective action problem: since no one person’s contribution will make a decisive difference, all must be compelled to contribute. With altruism, there is usually no collective action problem, but the former point remains: summoning help is good and praiseworthy, but the very facts which make it so, that it is a burden voluntarily undertaken, are also why we cannot rely on the fact that people will summon help. Again, it would be good if young people abandoned by their parents were looked after by other members of the community. However, we cannot guarantee this, and that is why the local council is under a duty of care. But it is the foster family who takes in the child and not the social workers who discharge the duty who are the altruists. I have argued that once altruism is institutionalised in the form of coercively imposed duties, it is no longer altruism since what becomes important are not motives, but simply the fact of compliance. This view is not uncontroversial, so let us consider some objections to it. First, it could be counter-argued that this view of altruism and justice only has credibility because it implicitly defines altruistic acts as voluntary, uncoerced ones and acts that meet duties of justice as non-voluntary and coercively imposed. Provided we can think of either duties of justice that are voluntarily undertaken or behaviour which is plausibly altruistic but


nonetheless subject to coercion (or both), then there is no problem with saying that altruistic behaviour may also be just. In reply to this: while it would be a mistake, I think, to claim that altruistic behaviour is by definition voluntary, I am simply arguing that people will generally not have altruistic motives in meeting duties that are coercively imposed. The argument is a contingent not conceptual one; the claim is that once a duty is enforced by law, then it tends to be a less effective channel for people to direct their altruistic motives. Of course, it is possible to think of failures of the fulfilment of duties where we would, nonetheless, not wish legally to impose the right of course of action: a rich person who fails to help his needy relatives could be an example. Here therefore we can just refine the original argument and say that it applies not to justice as such but institutional justice in the domain of what Rawls calls the basic structure of society (Rawls 1993:11). If justice (on this understanding) is equated with the coercive imposition of legal norms, it remains true that altruism is not being defined voluntaristically. Second, it might be objected that what is important for altruism is that people do good at some cost to themselves (or at least are willing to bear costs) and that their motives are of little importance. Suppose a person decides to sponsor a child in Africa. In return for his monthly standing order he receives a letter with news of the child’s progress. After a while, for some reason, the letters stop. He begins to forget about the child. But the money continues to leave his account and the child continues to receive the benefit. Would we say, on account of his forgetting, that he has ceased to be altruistic? The intuitive answer is no: an apparent counter-example to my earlier claim that altruistic behaviour must be self-conscious. Though this person has institutionalised his own altruism, so to speak, that does not make him less of an altruist. Perhaps then the good that he does is sufficient to make a person altruistic, provided there is also some cost that he bears? However, what is important in this case is that the person did have altruistic motives, even if he has forgotten them. It would not take much to re-acquaint him with his original motives, for example if the letters resumed. His motives are not far below the surface, even if temporarily forgotten. But suppose, to take another example, that a beneficiary of a will discovers that its terms include a standing order to a children’s home. She approves of this provision, though she would be unable to change the terms of the will even if she did not. In this case, it is the person who drafted the will who is the altruist, even though the cost is borne by the will’s beneficiary. (Thus this seems a good example of where altruism does not have a cost attached). Our intuition would be, I believe, that the latter person would have to do something extra, such as increase the monthly amount given to the home, in order to be altruistic herself.


The final objection also focuses on the motives of altruists. Several studies have shown that altruistic people tend to cite their feelings of connectedness to a common humanity when asked to explain their altruism (see Monroe 1996: ch.10; Oliner and Oliner 1988:166–70; Geras 1995: ch.1). They do not cite personal or idiosyncratic reasons. Norman Geras, surveying studies into those who harboured Jews in Nazi Europe reports how some rescuers explicitly talked of the value of justice (Geras 1995:40). It was not the fact that the Jews were Jews which motivated the rescuers, it was simply the fact that some people were in danger, and they happened to be Jews. (At least, this is what they reported). Suppose we enquired into why those who donated their bone marrow, phoned the police or gave first aid did what they did. We might find a similar sort of answer: people did what they believed anyone should do. If this sentiment is common, there is not such a tension between altruists’ motives and the motives of those who act from justice, indeed there may be no tension at all. The problem with this argument is that while it may show that many altruists are people who do what justice requires, if altruism is enforced then everyone must do what justice requires and not all of them will be altruists. What this objection needs to show is that all those who comply with justice, including those who only comply because there is a rule, also act with altruistic motives, and that I think is unlikely. People comply with rules for a variety of reasons, not all of them connected with a desire to benefit those who stand to gain by the imposition of the rule. Altruists may act with the spirit of the rule in mind, unlike those who tend to do what rules say if they are enforced. But in practice both groups do the same thing, they both follow the rule. Once rules are enforced, people’s motives become less important. I have argued that enforcing altruistic behaviour tends to submerge our motives under the importance of the duties of justice that we are required to discharge. There are still good reasons for introducing Bad Samaritan laws and other institutionalised duties, but they are not obvious ways of making us more altruistic. The distinction between altruism and justice is important because there are certain social benefits which flow from people’s altruistic motives, which tend not to flow merely from compliance with justice. I shall say a little about what these benefits are in the fourth section. For now it is clear that to encourage altruism we need to think carefully about devising political arrangements which encourage people to acquire altruistic motives. However, there is a side-effect of doing this in societies in which justice is the pre-eminent virtue. In encouraging altruism, we might leave people’s commitment to justice just as it is, but it is more likely that proponents hope that altruism will augment it. Part of the point of encouraging people to act


altruistically, therefore, is that people will tend to become more just. But we have already seen that institutionalised duties of justice make it harder for people to be altruistic. We cannot say that altruism tends to encourage justice while at the same time acknowledging that justice makes it harder to be altruistic. Altruism and justice are two different things. Encouraging Altruism: The Problem of Freedom There are altruists and there are non-altruists, though both may be just. The reason why altruists’ motives to help others will tend to be eroded when that help is institutionalised has, I think, something to do with individual freedom. Part of the value of altruism—certainly for the altruist, but perhaps not only for her—is that it is so often a voluntary choice. Non-altruists, of course, are at least as attached to their individual freedom—though they too can concede that it may be abridged for reasons of justice. But many non-altruistic people might go further: they might object to political arrangements that made non-altruistic behaviour more costly or that even encouraged it. Suppose, for example, that people who chose not to recycle or not to give blood, or young people who chose not to do civilian service all suffered some cost, financial or social. Or suppose that we were bombarded with state-sponsored television adverts extolling the virtues of charitable giving. Although non-altruists are not coerced, and in that sense remain free, their choice of how to live is preempted by political arrangements which seek explicitly to encourage a more altruistic way of life. ‘lf I comply with justice’, a non-altruist might say, ‘why should I be encouraged to have altruistic motives, and to bear costs I did not choose to bear? I may choose to help others if I wish, my family and friends above all, but that is a personal matter’. Thus it remains a powerful objection to political arrangements that encourage altruistic behaviour that they demand more of us than we are morally required to give. In a society where people value their freedom, this argument goes, the state has no business encouraging altruism. To address this objection to encouraging people to acquire altruistic motives we must enquire more closely into the idea of freedom that informs it. In order to do so, we shall start by examining state interference in freedom, and then use that to sketch a view of freedom as engagement in valuable opportunities. We shall then use this view to address the issue of non-coercive altruism, where the state attaches costs and benefits to differently evaluated kinds of behaviour. The first thing to note is that the state may interfere in freedom in more or less significant ways. It interferes with our freedom when it bans a political


party, and it also interferes when it introduces a hosepipe ban during a drought. How do we account for the difference in seriousness between these two cases? One way is through the idea of basic and nonbasic freedoms. This is implicit in Rawls who refers to our basic liberties and developed by de Marneffe, who introduces the idea of nonbasic liberties (de Marneffe 1990). On de Marneffe’s view, it is morally arbitrary always to value a nonbasic liberty over the promotion of some other value (de Marneffe 1990:258–62). Nonbasic liberties may be limited provided this is the result of a democratic legislative decision. The basic/nonbasic liberties distinction substantiates the view that while some liberties may never be compromised, others, the nonbasic liberties, may be limited for reasons of justice, or simply if a democratic legislature votes to do so. However, the division into basic and nonbasic liberties is an unsatisfactory way to account for our intuitions about interferences in liberty, for two reasons. First, the mere categorisation of a liberty as a basic liberty does not resolve many disputes about when liberty may justifiably be curtailed. This is because the basic liberties are generic labels for a range of different freedoms that are more or less united. Consider the famous affaire du foulard in France (see Galeotti 2002: ch.4). Three Muslim girls wore traditional Islamic headscarves to their school. The school sent them home insisting that they did not wear them. Next day the girls wore the headscarves again. Our question is: Does a ban on headscarves interfere with the girls’ basic liberty of freedom of religion? Many considerations could be introduced here, but the one that is least helpful is the mere citation of the basic liberty, since this is precisely what is at issue. We need to know what is the point of the liberty and what are the other values at stake. The second problem with the basic/nonbasic liberties approach is that it is not difficult to think of cases where our freedom is unjustifiably curtailed but where there is no basic liberty at stake. Imagine that, in order to assist in transport planning, citizens were required to inform their local council every time they took a trip outside their town. Our freedom of movement is not affected, but there is clearly a serious invasion of liberty here.3 The distinction between basic and nonbasic liberties is unsatisfactory because it does not explain the rationale behind the various liberties, basic and nonbasic, over which disputes arise. The idea that liberties consist of different kinds, however, suggests a solution to the difficulty. Evidently, the ranking of basic over nonbasic liberties does not rest on there being a greater magnitude of liberty with the former. The difference is qualitative, not one of degree. We do typically make qualitative judgements about liberty, not just in the case of basic and nonbasic liberties, but with respect to a whole range of liberties.


The ban on the use of customised licence plates is less serious than the requirement to inform the council every time you take a trip by car, for example. The freedom to choose one’s own career is qualitatively more important than the freedom to choose one’s breakfast cereal. The intuition behind these common sense thoughts is that some opportunities are qualitatively more valuable than others. This intuition explains the thinking behind the division between basic and nonbasic liberties, but it is more subtle because the value of different opportunities lies on a continuum, not a straightforward distinction between basic and nonbasic.4 The freedom which matters to us is the freedom to engage in valuable opportunities (cf. Raz 1986: pt IV, 1999: ch.9). That is why a hosepipe ban is less serious than a ban on having more than one child. Our complaint at the freedom removed in the latter case is a complaint at no longer having the opportunity to have a family with two or more children. It is a complaint about no longer being able to do something which is important to us, not a complaint about the loss of some specific ‘thing’ called freedom per se. As a general claim, then, I suggest that the value of freedom is explained by the value of the opportunities with which we can engage. The freedom to marry and choose whom to marry, the freedom to pursue a career of one’s choice, the freedom to enjoy the company of friends and neighbours are all important because they are all valuable opportunities. By engaging in opportunities of value we instantiate our freedom in the world. The more valuable the opportunity, the more important the freedom to engage in it is. How does this view account for our intuition that freedom is valuable as such, intrinsically valuable? Does freedom not have value independent of the opportunities we engage in? Suppose that a girl’s husband is chosen for her by her parents. The resulting marriage may be happy and successful, indeed the girl may even come to think that she could not have chosen a better husband herself. But even if the latter is true she surely still has a legitimate complaint: the freedom to choose whom to marry was denied to her, and that is a wrong. On the opportunity view I have defended, however, there is no need to deny that freedom is valuable as such. My claim is not that freedom is not valuable per se, but rather that in all the cases where freedom matters to us—including cases where it is interfered with or where costs and benefits are attached to certain actions—the value of freedom is instantiated in our engagement in social practices. A pair of distinctions introduced by Christine Korsgaard is useful here (Korsgaard 1996: 249–74; cf. Mason, 2000:43–5). The first distinction is between instrumental and non-instrumental value. Instrumentally valuable things are valuable as a means to something else which is of value; by contrast what is non-instrumentally valuable is valuable for its


own sake. This distinction is familiar to us, but Korsgaard’s second distinction is less so. This is the distinction between intrinsically and extrinsically valuable things. ‘To say that something is intrinsically good…is to say that it has goodness in itself’, she writes. ‘The natural contrast to intrinsic goodness—the value a thing has “in itself”—is extrinsic goodness—the value a thing gets from some other source’ (Korsgaard 1996:250). Put another way, intrinsically valuable things are valuable on account of their intrinsic properties, those properties that do not rely for their existence on anything else, whereas extrinsically valuable things derive their value (at least in part) from the nature and properties of something else. A close relationship with another person, for example, has extrinsic value because its value depends on other properties, in particular the characteristics of the person with whom one has the relationship. Close relationship are plainly also non-instrumentally valuable, but there are also many extrinsically instrumentally valuable things. Money is extrinsically instrumentally valuable, because its value depends on there being an economic system in which it may be used, and because it is used to buy non-instrumentally valuable things. I believe that freedom is extrinsically not intrinsically valuable. Its value depends on other properties, the properties of the valuable opportunities in which it inheres. We experience our freedom in the world, but it is not independent from the social practices which instantiate it. I share with Raz the view that a condition of the value of freedom is that it be exercised in pursuit of valuable opportunities (Raz 1986:380–81). There is no value in a person using their freedom to do what is bad. However, while freedom may sometimes be merely instrumentally valuable, it is important to realise that freedom also has non-instrumental value, value for its own sake. The girl whose husband was chosen by her parents, for example, does not just value freedom instrumentally, as a means to gaining a husband, she also values it for itself. The claim is simply that the extrinsic value of freedom for her depends on a valuable social practice, the practice of freely choosing one’s spouse. The opportunity view of freedom clearly raises difficult questions about value which there is not the space to explore here. Let me instead set out two reasons why I think this view matters and makes a difference. The first is that the opportunity view of freedom affects our ideas about the wrongness of interfering in freedom. There is, on this account, no presumption in favour of freedom as an intrinsic value existing independently of the activities in which we freely engage. In evaluating whether state interference in freedom is justified, we look instead at the value of the relevant practices and opportunities. If a social practice is wrong or bad then that can ground a reason for the state to interfere in it (though of course we do


many wrong things which it would nonetheless be wrong for the state to interfere in). In the case of practices and opportunities which are valuable, or instrumental means to valuable ends, we need to make a comparative judgment about their value and the value(s) served by the possible interference. Suppose there is a drought. Water must be rationed in the public interest and the state decides to institute a hosepipe ban. The judgement it makes is that the public interest outweighs the freedom of using hosepipes, not that there is a general value, freedom, which in this case is justifiably outweighed. Banning hosepipes does not affect our far more important freedom to practice the religion that we choose. Indeed it is hard to think of what value(s) might justify state interference in the latter (that is the truth in Rawls’s and de Marneffe’s notion of basic liberties). The second reason why opportunity freedom makes a difference is that it directs our attention to the way that the state helps create and maintain valuable social opportunities which are the media of our freedom. The state does not just interfere in our freedom for reasons of justice or the general good, it is also part responsible, through the legal and policy levers at its command, for enabling the practices in which people freely engage (Raz 1986: 415–29). Marriage is what it is not just because partners choose each other, but because it is legally recognised too. If the state changes the laws affecting married couple’s children or joint property, or laws on divorce or same sex marriage, then marriage becomes a different kind of social practice. More broadly, changes in the nature of family life over the past few decades have been affected by changes in the economic climate encouraging labour mobility, through economic growth which has helped enable social mobility, through equal pay legislation and through improved public health, among myriad other factors—many of them affected by the state. The opportunity freedom to visit art galleries depends on public subsidies for artists and galleries, on education, on the institution of property rights (public and private), and many other rules and practices which are under the control of the state. Of course, there are also many social practices where the state has little input. I am not a sociologist or historian, but I would guess that changes in the nature of friendship over the years have not been affected very much by legal changes or government policy. There are, then, many different ways the state can affect our opportunity freedom. However, for our purposes here we can class them into two categories. The first is straightforward legal coercion. A certain activity is prohibited or made compulsory, or a hitherto illegal activity is decriminalised. Bad Samaritan laws, duties of care and the forcible transplantation of human body parts all fall into this category. An opportunity view of freedom, allied to


an argument that there is a principle of justice at stake in enforcing such laws, provides good grounds for justifying such interference, even though, as I argued previously, this is not an effective way of engineering altruism. The second way the state affects our opportunity freedom encompasses a range of different measures that all involve incentivising or disincentivising certain practices through attaching costs and benefits to them. It includes taxing activities thought harmful and subsidising those thought good, as well as the symbolic ways that the state can help shape the public political culture. All these measures affects the fabric of our freedom, so to speak, the particular character of different practices in which freedom inheres. To make the point again: all these practices are evolving all the time due not just to the authoritative directives of the state, but also the activities of ordinary people who subtly alter social practices at the same time as their participation serves to reproduce them. We have come a little way from our original concern with non-coercive altruism, but we are now in a position to address the original objection to the state incentivising altruistic behaviour, and disincentivising selfishness.5 That objection, as put by a reasonable person who concedes that freedom may be limited for a reason of justice, is: ‘Why should I be encouraged to be altruistic, why indeed should the state encourage me to behave one way rather than another at all? Provided I meet my obligations to others, I have done all that the state can demand of me; in the sphere of non-obligatory action I should be free to choose how to live.’ This argument rests on the notion that each person merits a set quantum of freedom in which (justice aside) it would be wrong for the state to interfere. On the opportunity view of freedom, however, different freedoms inhere in social practices which have greater or lesser value. There is no neutral baseline of freedom, but rather an everchanging complex of different social practices, with different costs and benefits attached to them. The state has special power and authority to alter these costs and benefits, but it is not the only agent with influence. If a private firm makes all its employees work longer hours, for example, so they have less time to spend with their families and friends, then that affects their opportunity freedom too. What each person in society faces, therefore, is a range of different opportunities, with different individual characters, and with different costs and benefits. And if that is the case then it undercuts the blanket argument against the non-coercive manipulation of our freedom by the state. Our freedom, on the opportunity view, is being affected all the time, by the state and by each other. It is true that freedom is valuable, but it is extrinsically valuable, dependent on the value of the opportunities in which it inheres. In the case of a putative state manipulation of our freedom, then, we


should not ask the general question, is the value served by that manipulation of greater weight than the value of freedom? Rather we should make a more particular comparative judgement: does the value of justice, or the public interest, or altruism or whatever, outweigh the affect it will have on valuable opportunities and social practices? Each freedom affecting policy is assessed on its individual merits. Altruism, as a moral value, is one important ground of freedom-affecting policies. From the perspective of opportunity freedom, there can be no general presumption against the state taking measures to encourage it. Conclusion The argument so far has been quite negative. I have only tried to show (1) one way the state cannot engineer altruistic motives among people, and (2) the irrelevancy of an objection against it trying to do so from the point of view of individual freedom. I have said nothing about the benefits of altruism, why it is a value the state should promote. In addressing this question, the first point to make is that the ways the state might best promote altruism may be quite subtle and indirect. Television advertisements urging people to give blood or join neighbourhood watch schemes no doubt have some effect in improving people’s altruistic motives, but they are quite a crude tool. Rather than simply enjoining people to be altruistic, a more effective strategy is often to help create the social conditions in which those motives will tend to grow by themselves. Designing public housing in ways that people are more likely to know their neighbours is one example. Grants and subsidies to charities and community groups is another. Improving ordinary people’s democratic participation in local decision-making affecting schools, hospitals, transport and the environment may be a third way of encouraging people to act in ways that benefit others. These and similar measures all involve a degree of what has pejoratively come to be known as ‘social engineering’: they involve the state seeking to improve the motives and attitudes of ordinary citizens, and even creating new social institutions. I have tried to show how liberals need have no fear of the state doing this from the point of view of individual freedom. In fact, I think we can take this argument further. For one of the benefits that more altruism might bring is an increase in opportunity freedom. This is because many of the social practices which are the media of opportunity freedom rely upon people having other-regarding, altruistic motives. Take the example of public housing. Suppose a local authority abandons high-rise anonymous tower blocks and builds instead low-rise, high-density housing


complete with community centres, public gardens and other common spaces. Increasing the density of interaction between residents makes it more likely that institutions like residents’ associations, crèches, nurseries, youth clubs and so on will emerge. People engage in these institutions in part for mutual benefit, but, whenever the density of interaction between people is increased, there is likely to be some altruism involved too. (Of course, whether people engage in them or not will depend on many other factors besides housing design, but some of these are also within an authority’s control—such as grants and subsidies as I mentioned). These institutions then represent an opportunity for residents, something they can freely choose to participate in if they wish. Granted, this argument assumes we can measure (opportunity) freedom by dimensions including the range, value and density of social opportunities, and this is not only a difficult (multi-dimensional) judgement to make, it also throws up conceptual questions about freedom which there is not the space to examine out here. So my claim must be a tentative one: a more altruistic society may for that reason be freer. The second class of benefits of increased altruism, however, is less controversial. An altruistic society helps generate social capital in a variety of different ways.6 First, practices of altruism and generalised reciprocity tend to increase trust, and this lowers many economic transaction costs (as well as reducing fraudulent behaviour such as tax evasion). Second, a society where people are accustomed to acting on other-regarding motives is one where many collective action problems can be overcome. Each person in a neighbourhood where people are used to doing things for each other is more likely to do her bit for the common good: limit their water use during a drought, for example. Third, people can find it easier to achieve their individual aims in a society that is altruistic. The social interaction which altruism involves brings more personal connections to participants, and thus more people to call on to do a favour, help mind the children, or put a job one’s way. Finally, many moral and political virtues, of value on their own account and indispensable for a properly functioning polity, are well maintained through social practices involving altruism. These include tolerance, empathy, solidarity and a willingness to participate in political and social life. To be sure, altruistic behaviour within a relatively isolated sub-group in society can quite easily co-exist with that group’s intolerance and distrust of outsiders. The strategy of state-encouraged altruism I have been urging, however, seeks less to build on altruistic behaviour among those who know each other well already, but rather to try to foster it among those who would otherwise be strangers. When a person gives blood, does voluntary work for a charity or meets their neighbours she is brought into contact with people she would not


otherwise meet. Of course, many kinds of altruistic behaviour exist between family and friends too. But when the state tries to create the conditions in which altruism flowers it is most likely to do so amongst those who have limited acquaintanceship. In a society of strangers like our own there is I think something especially valuable about this sort of unchosen, unforced contact with others. Besides those benefits we can catalogue the general heading of social capital, there is one other more overtly political gain: the epistemic good that comes from interactions between strangers in a democratic society. An important precondition of any well-functioning democracy, especially, but not only, a deliberative democracy, is that citizens are able to make informed judgements about alternative policies. My claim is that one way we gain the kind of civic knowledge democracy requires is through interaction with people quite different than ourselves. Suppose a person is being asked to vote in a referendum on abortion. If he has talked with women who have had abortions and those who have chosen to keep their children, then he is more likely to be able to make an informed, unprejudiced choice on how to vote. The argument for deliberative democracy turns (in part) on being able to improve the quality of public deliberation; I am suggesting that helping create social institutions where altruism flowers is one way to do this. In a society of relative strangers like our own people tend to be strongly attached to their individual freedom, and at the same time lament the lack of widespread altruism. I have tried to show how encouraging the latter need not threaten the former. True altruism is a choice made from the heart. We can be coerced into simulating it, but to be properly maintained, altruism requires an internal motive. Encouraging altruism often requires indirect strategies which may not always succeed. However, since the good society should be altruistic as well as just and free, there are very good reasons to try. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank Gideon Calder, Cécile Fabre, David Miller and Peter Seglow for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper. NOTES 1. The argument of the second section is that coercively enforcing altruistic duties submerges people’s altruistic motives under the demands of justice. I refer nonetheless to ‘coercively-enforced altruism’ and the like. Altruism in these and similar phrases must be understood as appropriate forms of other-directed


2. 3. 4.

5.

6.

behaviour, but without the motives to help others of (what I believe is) genuine altruism. I am grateful to Gideon Calder for this point. One might argue that the requirement violates our right to privacy, but since this is a matter of argument it would be liable to the first objection above. I think one can explain Rawls’s and de Marneffe’s basic/nonbasic liberty distinction through the idea (which I go on to outline in the text) of freedom as consisting of a valuable opportunities in the following way. Basic liberties are useful generic labels for a whole range of valuable opportunities. Freedom of speech, for example, includes particular social practices of political debate, historical enquiry, literary production and so on. While exercising freedom involves engaging in concrete social opportunities, it is useful in political theorising to group related opportunities together in more abstract concepts such as freedom of speech—they can then be enshrined as legal or constitutional rights. The argument in this paragraph is influenced by the debate between Joseph Raz and Jeremy Waldron in a symposium on the former’s work. See Waldron 1988: 1127–52 and Raz 1988:1230–53. The observations in this paragraph are heavily indebted to Putnam 2000: chs 16–21.

REFERENCES Galeotti, E.A. 2002. Toleration as Recognition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Geras, N. 1995. Solidarity in the Conversation of Humankind. London: Verso. Korsgaard, C. 1996. Creating the Kingdom of Ends. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. de Marneffe, P. 1990. ‘Liberty, legislation and neutrality’. Philosophy and Public Affairs 19, 253–74. 1994. ‘Contractualism, liberty, and democracy’. Ethics, 104, 764–83 Mason, A. 2000. Community, Solidarity and Belonging. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Monroe, K.R. 1996. The Heart of Altruism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Oliner, S.P. and Oliner P.M. 1988. The Altruistic Personality. New York: The Free Press. Putnam, R. 2000. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Simon & Schuster. Rawls, J. 1972. A Theory of Justice. Oxford: Oxford University Press 1993. ‘The Basic Liberties and their Priority’ in his Political Liberalism. New York: Columbia University Press.


Raz, J. 1986. The Morality of Freedom. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1988. ‘Facing Up: A Reply’. University of Southern California Law Review, 62, 1153–1235. 1999. Engaging Reason. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Waldron, J. 1988 ‘Autonomy and Perfectionism in Raz’s Morality of Freedom’, University of Southern California Law Review, 62, 1097–1152.

10 Canaries in the Mines? ALASDAIR MACLEAN

Introduction Other-regarding acts, which—if not duty-driven—may be altruistic, are generally believed to be morally good (Beauchamp & Childress 2001). Even where an other-regarding act is based on a moral obligation it may still be praiseworthy (Glannon & Ross 2002). Importantly, such acts may also be the only way in which certain needs are capable of being met. Despite this, in the absence of a dependent relationship the law does not require even the slightest self-sacrifice.1 Even where there is a dependent relationship, extreme selfsacrifice, such as organ donation, does not form part of any legal duty. While the courts may approve of such ‘altruistic’ acts, and may condemn the callous bystander who does nothing to assist the imperilled victim of misfortune, there is no legal sanction for fiddling as your neighbour burns. Thus, the law will not require a competent adult to give so much as a drop of blood to help his less fortunate fellow.2 By not making altruism a legal duty, the law allows such acts to remain the prerogative of the individual faced with the request for his assistance. For competent individuals, irrespective of any moral duty, it is simply a question of whether they will consent to help.3 Where only an incompetent adult or a child can meet the altruistic need the situation is not so straightforward. Because the incompetent is deemed not capable of choosing to help—by virtue of his incapacity to consent—the law is faced with a dilemma: do the courts have the necessary jurisdiction to make the choice for the incompetent? Perhaps the most suitable starting point is whether the courts currently do allow him to act ‘altruistically’.4 Following on from this is whether the courts, as the law stands, should permit these acts. Finally, in response to the previous questions, should the law be revised?


The answers to these questions may be context dependent; however, in this article I am concerned only with those situations in which the individual is required to submit to a third party intervention, such as for organ donation or participation in clinical research. My aim is to consider how the general decision-making test for children and incompetent adults is applied in the context of meeting altruistic needs. I hope to show that the current test of ‘best interests’ (see below) is a limited and misleading decision-making tool that, if strictly applied, denies an adequate consideration of the impact of the decision on others. In many cases a strict application of the test would be detrimental to both other individuals and the community. Consider, for example, the need to use children as non-therapeutic research subjects. Such research may benefit children as a group but will not benefit the individual child and so technically is impermissible under the best interests test (Grimes v Kennedy Krieger Institute, 782 A.2d 807, 2001). However, without such research children are disadvantaged. In order to justify this research, arguments are advanced that it is permissible provided it only causes ‘minimal harm’ (Robinson 1987:1243–4). As I will show, trying to incorporate third party interests into a test that linguistically purports to focus on the individual creates a tension that results in strained arguments. I will argue that the test fails to cope with this strain and is either avoided5 or manipulated in order to achieve the desired outcome. Furthermore, I will suggest that if we want to take third party interests into account we should adopt an alternative approach that more honestly reflects the balancing of those interests. Before considering these issues it may be helpful to outline the legal rules governing decision-making for children and incompetent adults.6 Decision Making for Children and Incompetent Adults For children, the primary decision-maker is the person with parental responsibility. The parental power of consent is no longer predicated on the historical view of the child as the property of the father and, as such, is open to challenge (F v Wirral Metropolitan Council, 1991). As Montgomery notes: ‘since [at least] 1925…the welfare of the child has been the “first and paramount consideration” before the court’ (Montgomery 1988:325). This view is reflected in case law. Thus, in F v Wirral Metropolitan Council (1991:1163), Lord Justice Gibson stated: ‘Over the years of the Century…the welfare of children has become a major concern of public policy transcending the “rights” of individual parents’. Similarly, in Gillick v W.Norfolk and Wisbech AHA (1986: 184), Lord Scarman stated: The principle of the law…is that parental rights

CANARIES IN THE MINES? 165

are derived from parental duty and exist only so long as they are needed for the protection of the person and property of the child’. Under both common law and statute, any ‘parental right must be exercised in accordance with the welfare principle and can be challenged, even overridden, if it be not’ (1986:184). Where the parent’s decision is questioned, or the court’s advice sought, judges are governed by the Children’s Act 1989. Under section 1(1), ‘the child’s welfare shall be the court’s paramount consideration’ and this is interpreted as equivalent to the best interests test. Thus, regardless of whether it is the parents or the courts that make the decision, proxy decision-making is predicated on the child’s best interests. The best interests test is effectively a balance of the benefits and burdens of a particular course of action to determine whether it is the most beneficial course possible under the circumstances.7 In J v C, Lord McDermott held that the determination to be made was: a process whereby, when all the relevant facts, relationships, claims and wishes of parents, risks, choices and other circumstances are taken into account and weighed, the course to be followed will be that which is most in the interests of the child’s welfare as that term has now to be understood (J v C, 1969). In England there is currently no lawful facility for providing consent on behalf of an incapacitated adult.8 Under common law, the decision rests on the best interests test as incorporated in the doctrine of necessity (F v West Berkshire HA, 1989). The House of Lords, in F v West Berkshire HA, argued that the right to bodily integrity was meant to protect, not disadvantage, the individual.9 Where that individual, by virtue of incapacity, was unable to give a valid consent and hence waive his right to bodily integrity it would be unjust if he were thereby excluded from treatment that would be beneficial to him. Thus, their Lordships held that, where there was a ‘necessity to act’, treatment in the incompetent adult’s best interests would be lawful (F v West Berkshire HA, 1989: 565–6). As may be apparent, proxy decision making, both for children and incompetent adults, is predicated on the best interests of the individual.10 This standard is seen as protecting the vulnerable from unwarranted or harmful interventions but at the same time allowing them the access to beneficial interventions that might otherwise be denied them. For most, if not all of these decisions, there will be a tension between the interests of the individual and the interests of relevant others. Bearing in mind the sometimes not so


subtle inductive and coercive pressures that arise through our relationships with others, competent persons are entitled and able to resolve those tensions for themselves. Thus, a competent individual may choose whether to act egoistically or altruistically, and whether to take or avoid risks.11 Unlike the competent person, the incompetent individual has no right to choose whether to act in his own interests or in the interests of others. Similarly, the law does not allow him a right to choose to engage in risky undertakings. Those decisions are made for him on the basis of his best interests. Intuitively it might be thought that the best interests test ought to preclude the interests of third parties from the decision-making process. But, even where the decision relates to directly beneficial medical treatment, the best interests test may be subjected to conflicting interests. In Re T, (1997) for example, the court upheld the parents’ decision to refuse consent to a lifesaving liver transplant. Lord Justice Waite held: it is the duty of the judge to allow the court’s own opinion to prevail in the perceived paramount interests of the child concerned, but…in the last analysis the best interests of every child include an expectation that difficult decisions affecting the length and quality of its life will be taken for it by the parent to whom its care has been entrusted by nature (Re T, 1997:254). Where the proposed intervention is of little or no direct benefit to the individual the best interests test is likely to be placed under even more strain. To illustrate the deficiencies of the best interests test, I will examine in some detail how the law has dealt with demands made on children and incompetent adults to act as organ donors. Many other examples could be discussed, such as, non-therapeutic research, vaccination, withdrawal of treatment, and the management of Siamese twins, but space does not permit a detailed examination of these. Children and Incompetents as Organ Donors Organ donation may be seen as a paradigmatic example of altruism. Certainly, from a medical perspective, the donor will both suffer certain harm and risk much greater harm and the decision is one made primarily to benefit the recipient. This is not to say that the donor does not receive some benefits but that those benefits are secondary to the purpose of providing the recipient with a functioning organ. Furthermore, those benefits are no less speculative than the possibility that the donor will suffer psychological harm should the


transplant fail (Cheyette 2000: 477–8; Griner 1994:596, 609). While it is true that psychological benefits have been found where the donor is an adult or adolescent (Bernstein & Simmons 1974; Fellner & Marshall 1970), it is not necessarily legitimate to import these benefits to younger children and incompetent adults. The benefits may arguably be even more speculative where the donor is institutionalised. The only English case to have considered the issue is Re Y (1996). The plaintiff, a married mother with a six-year-old daughter, suffered from nonHodgkin’s lymphoma and required a bone marrow transplant. The defendant was a 25-year-old severely mentally and physically disabled woman who resided in a community home and had not lived with the family since she was ten years old. Her mental disability was such that she was unable to understand that her sister was unwell, and Justice Connell noted that she: ‘understands her own basic needs but cannot understand the needs of others’(Re Y, 1996: 113). The court described her relationship with her sister in the following terms: It is not possible accurately to describe the relationship between the plaintiff and the defendant as particularly strong, because the plaintiff’s ill health has reduced her ability to visit the defendant. However, the plaintiff does keep in touch with the defendant, mainly by cards and presents and by sending to the defendant photographs of E [the plaintiff’s daughter] and further, during a recent visit by the family to the defendant, the Official Solicitor’s representative did notice that the defendant moved her wheelchair closer to the plaintiff (Re Y, 1996:113). This description is interesting because it sets the scene for being able to satisfy the best interests test. Thus, although the relationship is ‘not…particularly strong’, this is because of the plaintiff’s illness rather than any lack of affection or moral shortcomings. This is despite the fact that Justice Connell noted earlier that her visits had never been more than ‘occasional’. Also of note is the emphasis placed on the fact that the plaintiff had sent the defendant photographs of her daughter. Again this is important because it helps to establish a close family relationship. Finally, the icing on the cake is the somewhat dubious implication that because the defendant moved closer to the plaintiff this indicated a close bond between the two sisters. The judge went through a similar exercise in relation to the defendant’s mother. It was important to establishing a sufficiently close bond that the family’s decision to place the defendant in care was not seen as morally bad or as an indication of a


lack of love between them. Thus, it was the mother’s ill health rather than any flaw in their relationship with Y that forced the family’s hand. Justice Connell acknowledged that the bone marrow harvesting would be an assault ‘unless shown to be in the best interests of the defendant’ (Re Y, 1996:114), and he recognised that any benefit to the plaintiff would normally be irrelevant. But, it becomes relevant where: ‘as a result of the defendant helping the plaintiff in that way, the best interests of the defendant are served’ (Re Y, 1996:114). Justice Connell interpreted the test as: ‘whether the proposals placed before the court would benefit her and, if yes, whether those benefits outweigh any possible detriment to her’ (Re Y, 1996:115). This interpretation of the best interests test is problematic because it only determines that the course of action is beneficial and not that it is the most beneficial proposal. Any number of options might be beneficial but, as Lady Justice Butler-Sloss was at pains to point out in Re S (2000), there can only be one course that satisfies the best interests test. There may be many good choices but there can be only one best choice. In determining that the proposed bone marrow harvesting would be in the defendant’s best interests, Justice Connell again emphasised that ‘this was a close knit family’. Furthermore, a consultant psychiatrist testified that she may have ‘some recollection of her early years living in the family home’. He noted that the family visits were beneficial because the continued involvement with the family ‘maintain for her a link with the outside world’. In addition, the Official Solicitor’s representative noticed affection between the mother and her daughter ‘which demonstrated that her mother holds a special place in the defendant’s world even if the defendant does not appreciate that this lady is in fact her mother’ (Re Y, 1996:115–16). He went on to note that although there were two unrelated possible donors the survival rate following sibling transplant was put at 40 per cent as opposed to the 30 per cent for unrelated recipients. There was, therefore, a greater probability that the plaintiff would survive if the defendant were to donate. This would be in the defendant’s best interests because the death of her sister would mean that the defendant’s mother would visit her less frequently since she would be engaged in looking after her granddaughter. The plaintiff’s death may also adversely affect her mother’s health and this in turn would further affect her ability to visit. Finally, donation would improve the defendant’s relationship both with her mother and her sister—‘who will be eternally grateful’. These benefits outweighed the ‘small’ disadvantages arising from the harvesting procedure and the risk of harm from the necessary anaesthetic (Re Y, 1996).


As may be seen, Justice Connell worked hard to create a picture of a close loving family with strong emotional and psychological ties. However, given that the defendant may not even have been aware of the nature of her relationship with her mother or even have understood that her sister was sick, these supposed benefits are at best speculative. I would suggest, albeit with a sceptical eye, that Justice Connell treated the best interests test as an inconvenient hurdle to get over rather than as a essential safeguard to protect the interests of a vulnerable person. As Mumford noted: ‘Although many would agree with the court’s conclusion, the judicial reasoning applied certainly stretches the welfare test and leaves open the question whether it is in fact the best way of approaching the issue’ (Mumford 1998:140). It will be noted that the transplant in Re Y (1996), involved regenerative tissue that may be harvested by a relatively minor invasion of the donor’s bodily integrity, and Justice Connell was careful to point out that this decision might not be a useful precedent for more invasive procedures such as a kidney transplant. Since the courts in the UK have not been asked to consider nonregenerative organ donation, I turn now to the decisions from the United States. Incompetent Organ Donors: The US Experience Organ donation by incompetent adults and minors has also been sanctioned by a number of jurisdictions in the United States (Griner 1994). The courts have utilised three different tests to determine the lawfulness of the proposed procedure (Robbennolt et al. 1994–95), the most commonly used being the best interests test and the substituted judgement standard, in which the decision maker tries to decide on the basis of what the incompetent individual would have done if competent. The third approach was where the court assessed the reasonableness of the parental decision by balancing the interests of the child against those of the family (Robbennolt et al. 1994–95). In Strunk v Strunk (1969), the Kentucky Court of Appeals authorised the donation of a kidney from a 27 year-old incompetent man with a mental age of six to his half-sibling. Although the court technically employed the substituted judgment standard, Justice Osborne, in delivering the majority judgment, concluded that: The circuit court having found that the operative procedures in this instance are to the best interests of Jerry Strunk and this finding having been based upon substantial evidence, we are of the opinion that the judgment should be affirmed’ (Strunk v Strunk, 1969:149). The majority accepted the Department of Mental Health’s amicus brief that Tom’s survival was essential to ‘Jerry’s treatment and rehabilitation’ and that the ‘Department of Mental


Health must take all steps to prevent the occurrence of any guilt feelings Jerry would have if Tom were to die’ (Strunk v Strunk, 1969:146–7). Three of the seven judges dissented, noting that the harvesting procedure, while rarely life threatening, was still perilous and that ‘Opinions concerning psychological trauma are at best most nebulous’ (Strunk v Strunk, 1969:150). Other US courts have also doubted the value of speculative psychological benefits. In Hart v Brown (1972), the Superior Court of Connecticut sanctioned the donation of a kidney from a seven-year-old to her identical twin sister. In coming to this decision, however, the court suggested that: The psychiatric testimony is of limited value only because of the age of the minors’ (Hart v Brown, 1972:390). Justice Testo based his judgment not on the best interest test but on the reasonableness of the parental decision. The court noted that: ‘One of the legal problems in this matter presents a balancing of the rights of the natural parents and the rights of minor children—more directly the rights of the donor child’ (Hart v Brown, 1972:390). Justice Testo also emphasised that sanctioning the procedure would, in all probability, allow both children to survive and the parental decision was considered morally sound by a clergyman. In Re Richardson (1973), the Louisiana Court of Appeal rejected an application to allow kidney donation from an incompetent 17-year-old male with a mental age of three or four years. Apart from noting that dialysis was an alternative to transplantation, the Court of Appeal rejected, as highly speculative and unlikely, the argument that the recipient’s survival would be in the donor’s best interest because she would be around to take care of him after the deaths of his parents (Re Richardson, 1973:187). Similarly, in Re Guardianship of Pescinski (1975), the Supreme Court of Wisconsin rejected an application to authorise the donation of a kidney from a thirty-nine-year-old man suffering from catatonic schizophrenia. Chief Justice Wilkie held that in the absence of a real consent the court had no authority to sanction a procedure that was not in the best interests of the incompetent (Re Guardianship of Pescinski, 1975:182). Justice Day, giving the dissenting judgment, described the basis for the Strunk decision as ‘pretty thin soup’ (Re Guardianship of Pescinski, 1975:182). He then went on to suggest that: providing the transplant was a necessity; no other source of organ was available; the donor and recipient are close blood relations; the donor is in good health; and the operation posed minimal risk, ‘the fear expressed that institutions for the mentally ill will merely become storehouses for spare parts…is completely unjustified’(Re Guardianship of Pescinski, 1975:183). Relying on the doctrine of substituted judgment, Justice Day would have allowed the donation because, to do otherwise: ‘would


forever condemn the incompetent to be always a receiver, a taker, but never a giver’. He concluded by arguing that his ‘approach gives the incompetent the benefit of the doubt, endows him with the finest qualities of his humanity, assumes the goodness of his nature instead of assuming the opposite’ (Re Guardianship of Pescinski, 1975:184). In Little v Little, The Texas Court of Appeals, while noting that: ‘the testimony of psychiatrists and psychologists must still be classified as speculative’, reasoned that such evidence was still used to deprive citizens of their freedom and condemn criminals to death (Little v Little, 1979). The proposed donor was a 14-year-old girl with Down’s syndrome. The court noted that, while not a real consent, she was willing to donate her kidney and there was no apparent family pressure on her to do so. There was no ‘medically acceptable’ alternative, the benefit to the recipient would be great and the risks to the donor small. Furthermore, evidence from the literature suggested that donors experience positive effects such ‘heightened selfesteem, enhanced status in the family, renewed meaning in life, and other positive feelings including transcendental or peak experiences flowing from their gift of life to another’ (Little v Little, 1979). Finally, in Curran v Bosze (1990), the Supreme Court of Illinois was asked to authorise the donation of bone marrow from three-year-old twins to an older half-sibling. The court rejected the application because the prospective donors and the recipient had only met once so there was an insufficiently close relationship. Also of crucial importance was the fact that the twins’ mother was opposed to the donation. While rejecting the substituted judgment standard, the Court of Appeal noted that in all the previous cases—including those purporting to use the substituted judgment test—the ‘key inquiry was the presence or absence of a benefit to the potential donor’ (Curran v Bosze, 1990:1331). One of the medical experts gave evidence that there were two major benefits of donating an organ. First was the ‘important’ altruistic benefit of saving someone else’s life and second was the benefit of continued society with the recipient (Curran v Bosze, 1990:1338). The Supreme Court held that, while ‘individual altruism…may be a factor…The psychological benefit is grounded firmly in the fact that the donor and recipient are known to each other as family’ (Curran v Bosze, 1990: 1343). The three ‘critical factors’ were: the parental consent must be an informed one; ‘there must be emotional support available to the child from the…persons who take care of the child’; and there must be a close relationship between the donor and the recipient.12 Given that there was no such relationship, and the children’s mother was opposed to the


procedure, these conditions were not satisfied and it would not be in the best interests of the children to undergo bone marrow testing and harvesting. The European Convention on Human Rights and Biomedicine Although the United Kingdom has not ratified this convention13 it is worth noting that, despite requiring that any biomedical intervention be for the ‘direct benefit’ of any individual unable to consent for himself,14 the convention permits the donation of regenerative tissue.15 This is subject to there being no other compatible donor, the lack of objection of the donor, the potential for the donation to be life saving and the need for the recipient to be a sibling. Although it may seem odd to limit the donation to siblings rather than to allow other close family members to be recipients, the point of mentioning the convention is to demonstrate the widespread belief that using incompetent individuals as donors may be a ‘good’ thing. Discussion What is clear from these cases is that the courts will not sanction organ donation from an incompetent in the absence of a close relationship. It is equally clear that where the courts have approved of the procedure it is on the basis of somewhat speculative, and by no means universally accepted, psychological benefits. Most studies of the psychological implications of organ donation are based on the effects on adult donors (Cheyette 2000:474–80). Even these do not demonstrate a consistent psychological benefit to the donor and, in one study that specifically investigated children and adolescent donors, researchers found that, following donation, about a third of donors showed signs of post-traumatic stress. The donors were more withdrawn, anxious, depressed and had a lower self-esteem than their non-donor siblings (Cohen 1997; Packman et al. 1997). It is arguable that what the courts are doing when they sanction organ donation is to attempt a balance between the interests of the incompetent and the interests of relevant others. Thus, the courts argue that: • the donation is of minimal harm and risk to the donor, but of immense benefit to the recipient; • there is no reasonable alternative for the recipient; and • if the donation is limited to close relatives, the donor will receive a somewhat speculative indirect benefit through the survival of the recipient.


Two other themes are operative. First is the idea that, if the individual was competent, or—in the case of a child—when the individual matures, she would approve the decision. She would see the donation as a good thing, and be glad to have been allowed to contribute in this way.16 This idea of retrospective or presumed approval of Vicarious altruism’ is controversial. On the one hand, Robbenolt et al. (1994–95:228) argue: ‘The lack of respect for persons implicit in the best interests standard in this context emerges in the fact that it fails to allow children to act altruistically. Rather, the best interests standard only allows children to act when it is in their own best interest’. The authors later suggest that the best interests test should be revised to include the possibility of altruism. Thus, ‘the value of acting for the benefit of another ought to be considered in the weighing process’ (Robbenolt et al. 1994–95: 244). Closely related to the idea of allowing children to act altruistically is the suggestion that ‘donation teaches virtuous values’ (Spital 1997). Cheyette, on the other hand, argues: Children do not achieve the ability to act altruistically until sometime in early adolescence, and mentally disabled adults may never reach that stage. Imputing the psychological benefits of altruistic behavior to individuals who, because of age, cognitive abilities and circumstances cannot make altruistic choices, is myopic. Whatever lesson the child may learn from being compelled to donate an organ or from being conceived to donate an organ, it surely will not be about the good of giving of oneself utterly and selflessly (Cheyette 2000:508). Whether or not a particular child or incompetent adult is capable of acting altruistically is to a certain extent a moot point. The real issue here is whether the decision is in the individual’s best interests. By introducing arguments about the benefits of altruism or the value of training an individual to be altruistic the concept of the best interests test is distorted. This enables the courts to hide their utilitarian balancing act behind the banner of judicial protectionism. This balance, between protecting the individual and achieving the best overall outcome, is given effect in the courts’ argument that donation may be sanctioned, but only within the community of the family. That balance leads seamlessly on to the second theme underlying judicial decision making in this area. This is the idea of family autonomy. While the child may no longer be seen as the property of her father, the family unit is still seen as something desirable and the courts are generally reluctant to interfere with family decision making unless such intervention is necessary to protect the child. Thus, in S v McC; W v W (1972) the House of Lords argued


that a paternity blood test should be allowed unless it would clearly be contrary to the child’s interests. There is an impression then, that where it is reasonable the court will sanction the parents’ decision. The concept of reasonableness here would allow some limited harm to the child providing she receives an indirect benefit through the impact of that decision on other family members and the family as a whole. This value placed on the family unit can be seen running through the judgment in Re Y (1996) and was introduced as an independent standard in Hart v Brown (1972). The family may be seen as an autonomous community of persons with inextricably shared Values, interests, goals, and life stories’ (Hardart 2000: 166). In this context, decision making for children and incompetent adult members of the family ought to take into account both the interests of the individual and the interests of the family unit. As Hardart suggests: ‘lf the patient’s interests, values, and goals are intricately and inseparably tied to the family’s, how can the patient’s interests be considered separately from the family’s?’ (Hardart 2000: 166). Hardart goes on to contend that this argument undermines the value of the best interests test since the child’s interests and the family’s interests are co-dependent. Furthermore, he notes that in everyday life parents simply do not make every decision on the basis of the child’s best interests. This, of course, is not to suggest that the interests of an individual family member should be completely subjugated to the interests of the family. Nor does it sanction family decision making irrespective of motive or effect on the individual. However, it is certainly arguable that family interests may be a legitimate counterweight to the interests of any individual within the family. Dwyer and Vig adopt a slightly different approach and argue that the best interests test is ‘egocentric’ and ‘does not allow a direct account of ethical concern or responsibility’ (Dwyer & Vig 1995:9). They suggest that best interests test should incorporate an ‘injunction to do the right thing’. They argue that the use of putative psychological benefits are simply ‘rationalizations for decisions reached in some other way’—namely the belief that the procedure is morally justified. They do not suggest why it is justified but both consequential arguments and the idea that acting for the benefit of others is morally good may support their position. The difficulty with Dwyer and Vig’s stance is that incompetent individuals are arguably not morally responsible. Having said that, it remains plausible that decision making for incompetents should take into account the effect of those decisions on other members of the family. While the incompetent member could not be held morally responsible it is reasonable to require that decisions made for them take into account the impact of any such decision on


the family unit. Dwyer and Vig suggest that such decision making should acknowledge the ‘ethical import of [family] relationships’ and the obligations imposed by those relationships (Dwyer & Vig 1995:9). Thus, they plausibly argue that: The problem is not one of deciding what is best for an individual child, but one of resolving a situation in which there are competing concerns or claims’ (Dwyer & Vig 1995:10). One of the main problems with the best interests standard, then, arises from its origins in the individual as an autonomous creature when the reality of our existence as social beings entangled in a complex net of relationships belies that assumption. One possible response to this difficulty is to consider the individual within a broader social group such as the family. It is arguable, especially for an incompetent individual, that there is a benefit to remaining within a family unit. Even where a particular decision is not in the best interests of an individual family member, the benefit of being part of a cohesive, cooperative and supportive family means that, overall, the individual still gains. Given that a family may have to consider the competing interests of other incompetents and that the effect of a particular decision is rarely a certainty, the family decision makers should be allowed some leeway (Mumford 1998:144). However, this approach is not trouble free in that it requires a delicate balancing exercise between the individual, other family members and the family unit as a whole. The danger of placing too great an emphasis on family autonomy and dynamics, at the expense of the individual, may be seen in Re T (1997). In Re T (1997), the Court of Appeal was asked to decide whether the parents’ refusal to consent to a liver transplant for their child should be upheld. The child had a congenital liver disorder and the evidence was that he would die within a few years unless he received a liver transplant. The court rejected the argument that it should not interfere with ‘the reasonable decision’ of a parent, as this was incompatible with previous case law and with the welfare principle. However, the Court of Appeal was able to uphold the parents’ refusal despite acknowledging that the weight of medical evidence was that the transplant was in the child’s best interests. Lady Justice Butler-Sloss noted that the hospital fact sheet and one of the medical experts stated that the success of the transplant would depend on the co-operation of the child’s carer. This allowed Lady Justice Butler-Sloss to argue that: This mother and this child are one for the purposes of this unusual case and the decision of the court to consent to the operation jointly affects the mother and son and it also affects the father. The welfare of this child depends upon his mother (Re T, 1997:251).


The Court of Appeal took into account considerations of how the court’s decision would impact on other members of the family and whether the child might be adversely affected by the conflict that his mother would face as a consequence of the decision. In including these factors, the Court of Appeal has taken a very broad view of the best interests test. It has, in effect, considered the family as an autonomous unit, rather than considering the child’s interests in isolation of the impact that such a decision might have on the family. On a strict interpretation of the best interests test this might be flawed because it fails to consider, for example, whether the child’s interests might have been better served through adoption or fostering. It is also arguable that the Court of Appeal was too ready to condemn the child on the basis that the child’s mother would face a conflict between her own opinion and the court’s decision. It is also of interest that Lady Justice Butler-Sloss factored in the practical difficulties of uprooting the family from their current country of residence. Given that they had only moved to a country where transplantation was unavailable after the child had been placed on the urgent transplant list, reliance on this factor seems misplaced. All of the court’s considerations suggest that—rather than the isolated child’s best interests—it was the interests of the family unit that were critical to the judgment. This is especially so given the fatal consequences of that decision. As Lord Justice Waite revealingly commented: The law’s insistence that the welfare of the child shall be paramount is easily stated and universally applauded, but the present case illustrates, poignantly and dramatically, the difficulties encountered when trying to put it into practice (Re T, 1997:251: 253). Decision Making for Incompetents: Best Interests and the Alternatives I hope that I have shown that the best interests test is a limited and misleading decision-making tool that is sometimes dishonestly manipulated to justify the decision that the court believes is best for all concerned.17 As Dwyer and Vig note: Although the discourse of best interests may be used to express the conclusions that people reach, it does not serve as a good guide in reaching those conclusions. It tends to obscure or give indirect importance to features that are morally salient…The problem with the discourse of best interests is that it may, in the long run, impede us from


seeing and feeling the ethical import of relationships (Dwyer & Vig 1995:12). One major problem with the best interests test is that the courts ask too much of it. The test is applied regardless of context and either distorted or circumvented by a creative interpretation of the law. The court’s job is made easier because the test has never really been adequately defined (McLean 1999). Although we are told that it includes, medical, social, emotional and psychological factors (Re S 2000; Re Y 1996), the test remains highly subjective and open to abuse. Tellingly, the Court of Appeal in Re S also held that the test includes ‘broader ethical’ and moral factors (Re S 2000). Quite what these moral factors might include is uncertain and will vary with context. But, is the court arguing that—although incompetent individuals are not morally responsible—it is in their best interests to require them to be subjected to decisions seen by the court as morally good? Actions are often held to be morally good where they are other-regarding and this is especially so where it benefits others more than, or at the expense, of the actor. Thus, altruistic organ donors and other ‘Good Samaritans’ are seen as heroes and gain status within the community. However, where the decision is forced on an individual the action should not be seen as altruistic or morally good (Herring 2002: 53). The individual is not responsible for the action and hence does not acquire an enhanced status within the community. Alternatively the court may see the individual as part of a community rather than in isolation. Within a community we have both rights and responsibilities. If we are to claim the protection or advantage of our rights then we should also live up to our responsibilities. As I mentioned at the beginning, there is no legal obligation on us to act altruistically. However, many people do choose to act for the benefit of others. Blood donation for the benefit of unknown others is common, and many people have registered as possible bone marrow donors. Some have even offered non-regenerative organs to unknown or unrelated others. These other-regarding acts are perhaps even more common amongst families. It might be argued that the ‘good’ family member will act to help another family member in need and that this is a reasonable thing to expect. Although competent family members are theoretically free to choose, there are many pressures within the family that may make a truly free choice difficult if not impossible. Since incompetent family members are unable to make the necessary decision it might be argued that it is fair to require them to do what the ‘good’ family member would do. In other words, the incompetent family


member does not escape the give and take of family life by virtue of their incompetence. Thus, Herring suggests that: A more compelling argument in favour of permitting donation from incompetent people is that donation may be permitted if the donation is a fair sacrifice in the light of the ongoing relationship between the donor and donee, where that relationship as a whole benefits the donor (Herring 2002:53). These possible moral arguments in favour of other-regarding decisions may be convincing to a greater or lesser extent. It is perhaps more acceptable to argue that, providing the incompetent benefits from being within the family relationship, he should be required to accept the obligations that he would were he a competent and ‘good’ member of the family. However, the idea that it is a just decision simply because it is something he ‘ought’ to do is more dubious. As Redmon argued: ‘It is extremely doubtful, to me at least, that all persons have a function or purpose in this world, especially a moral one. And even if we did, forcing or manipulating others to do good hardly seems a way to further their moral ends’ (Redmon 1986:80). However, even if we accept that these moral arguments are relevant to incompetents, it seems to me that they strain the best interests test beyond an acceptable limit. The test is perhaps even more problematic when making life or death decisions (McLean 1999:133–4). For handicapped infants, for example, the conceptual difficulties relate to the idea that A would be better off not existing and therefore it would be in A’s best interests to die. The problem is that once A no longer exists it is nonsensical to say he is better off since the statement no longer has a subject (Raphael 1988:7). This is even more apt for patients in permanent vegetative state where the individual is so incompetent as to have no awareness at all. In those circumstances death becomes irrelevant to the individual. In Airedale NHS Trust v Bland (1993), the House of Lords avoided this by focusing on the treatment rather than on the decision as a whole. Since the treatment was not in Anthony Bland’s best interests it could no longer be justified and may be withdrawn.18 This approach, however, makes a nonsense of the idea that the best interests protects the incompetent or even, in that case, that the incompetent person is the primary focus of the decision. An alternative test is the substituted judgment test. This ‘requires the surrogate to decide as the patient would have decided if competent and in the circumstances that currently obtain’ (Brock 1993:290). The immediately obvious problem with this is that it can only really apply to patients who have been previously competent (McLean 1999:103). Even then, it remains


something of a fiction to presume that the proxy decision maker can really determine what the previously incompetent person would have decided (Ditto et al. 2001). As McLean has argued: It does have some value in that it seems to place a direct attention on the individual herself. But it is subject to the fundamental flaw that evidence about the individual’s wishes must still come from third parties…whose interests—however caring—may realistically be expected, at least on some occasions, to be divergent from those of the woman herself’ (McLean 1999:103–4). It is also questionable whether it is legitimate to rely on the decisions of the previously competent individual. Given that the person has suffered a major change it is arguable that he is no longer the same person as he was and should therefore not be subjected to the values of his prior incarnation. The substituted judgment standard, if it is applied at all, may be best restricted to those individuals who are temporarily incapacitated. An alternative approach would be to allow a greater degree of family decision-making autonomy. This might work by allowing the family decision maker’s decision to stand unless it was unjustly contrary to the individual’s interests. The distribution amongst family members of risks, detriments and benefits could be determined against an agreed endpoint so that no one member of the family was unfairly disadvantaged by virtue of their incompetence. Unlike the best interests test this would require an open balancing of interests. As such it would allow a more honest approach that would enable discussion of what we expect of children and incompetent adults. Importantly, it recognises that a decision can still respect the individual without it necessarily being in his best interests. It would also, by determining the relevant endpoint, require us to face up to the relative value we place on incompetent individuals. For those who are institutionalised, this model may be problematic since they may not form part of a family. Because they are not part of a family, the question of justice will require a different balancing act. Given that they still benefit from being cared for by society and by the institution that looks after them, a similar model could be used if adapted to their particular circumstances. This might allow us, for example, to argue that it is just to include them in non-therapeutic research projects where the results may be beneficial to other similar incompetents. Whether the research would be just would depend on the level of risk that the incompetent individual is exposed


to be balanced against the benefits that he receives by virtue of being cared for by society. This kind of decision making is already reflected in both national and international guidelines and conventions on research. However, it does not sit easily with the best interests test, which does not allow for others’ interests to be considered. On a strict interpretation of the best interests test such nontherapeutic research might currently be unlawful. In this context, including the use of children as organ donors, Sheila McLean has noted that: ‘In all it presents an uncomfortable picture. On the one hand, we are all convinced of the value of scientific and medical progress. On the other our courage fails when it comes to adopting identifiable standards against which to test our goals’ (McLean 1992: 190). The important thing to realise is that while we proclaim the sanctity of the individual and stress that we cannot consider the impact of our decisions on anyone other than the incompetent individual, the reality is that we do take others into account. However, by hiding behind the best interests test, or by finding circuitous legal routes around it, we conceal the real justifications for the decisions we take. The best interests test is a smokescreen and we would respect incompetent individuals more by acknowledging that decisions are not always in their interests let alone their best interests. Conclusion Using organ donation as an example, I have discussed the difficulties that the best interest test creates and its limitations that force decision makers to find creative solutions. The main thrust of my argument has been to question why we persist with a test that so often fails to adequately measure up to the tasks required of it. It is, I believe, better to openly recognise that we do not exist as isolated individuals free from attachments and social encumbrances (Avineri & de-Shalit 1992b:3). In such a setting it may well be considered just and reasonable to require even incompetent individuals to accept responsibilities towards others. A strict interpretation of the best interests test would not allow this. However, court judgments and other social decisions clearly do consider the interests of others, both in the closer family and the wider community settings. Given that this is the case, it is better to abandon the best interests test and adopt a more open and honest approach that recognises the influence of third party interests. Finally, I have suggested that we might adopt a model based on the family as a decision making unit (or its analogous equivalent for those without a family)19 constrained by specifically determined criteria that


protect the individual from unjust exploitation but allow the give and take that is part of life within a family and the wider community.20 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The title is taken from a metaphor used by Justice Cathell, Grimes v Kennedy Krieger Institute (2001:813). I would like to acknowledge Professor Sheila McLean for her helpful comments in preparing the final draft of this paper. NOTES 1. This is true of the law in all the UK jurisdictions. The type of pre-existing special relationship I refer to here includes those between parent and child or doctor and patient. 2. See for example the US case, McFall v Shrimp (1978). 3. One possible exception is where the act will result in the certain death of the individual and requires the assistance of a third party, e.g. living heart donation. 4. I use altruism here in the loose sense of an other-regarding act not required by the law. In some of these cases it may be possible to argue that there is a moral duty and hence the act is not truly altruistic. However, a moral duty to donate an organ to a sibling—especially where the donor is very young, educationally subnormal or institutionalised—may be questionable. Rather than debate on the precise terminology that should be used, since it is arguable, I will refer to these acts as altruistic. 5. As in the leading case on the withdrawal of feeding from patients in permanent vegetative state, see Airedale NHS Trust v Bland [1993]. 6. In England and Wales. 7. Although in earlier cases the courts have allowed that there may be legitimately competing views as to the individual’s best interests (see: Airedale NHS Trust v Bland, 1993), Dame Butler-Sloss has subsequently held that there can only be one course of action that is in the individual’s ‘best interests’. See: Re A (2000); and Re S (2000). 8. The government has made proposals for change in Lord Chancellor (1999). The Draft Mental Capacity Bill 2003 is now available at . 9. The right to bodily integrity is the right not to have one’s body interfered with. It protects the individual—by allowing a cause of action in battery or by raising the possibility of a criminal charge of assault—from even minor non-consensual contact unless that contact is part of the bustle of everyday life or justified by, for example, the doctrine of necessity, self-defence or lawful arrest. This right may be waived by consent, which explains—at least legally—why medical treatment in the absence of consent (or other justification) is an assault. 10. At least in England and Wales.


11. This is not an absolute right as, for example, it would be unlikely that the law would allow an individual to consent to be a living heart donor. 12. This focus on the need for a close relationship denies the incompetent individual the opportunity to donate to a stranger, an arguably higher form of altruism. 13. Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Dignity of the Human Being with Regard to the Application of Biology and Medicine: Convention on Human Rights and Biomedicine 1997, Oviedo. 14. Article 6. 15. Article 20. 16. See e.g. Justice Day’s dissent in Re Guardianship of Pescinski (1975). From a moral perspective, a similar argument has been put forward to provide a ‘Kantian’ justification for non-therapeutic research on children: Redmon (1986). 17. By ‘dishonest’ I simply mean that the language of the best interests test conceals the true reasons for the decision. 18. Arguably, it had to be withdrawn as to treat an incompetent adult when it is not in their best interests is to commit a battery. 19. Some individuals will not live within a family unit. For these, for example those living in institutions, an alternative decision-making unit will exist. Any model developed in relation to a family unit may need to be adapted to fit this community (see earlier discussion). 20. If my argument is accepted, it still, of course, remains for those criteria to be determined, but that is not the purpose of this paper.

REFERENCES Airedale NHS Trust v Bland.1993. AC 789, HL. Alston, P., S.Parker & J.Seymour, eds. 1992. Children, Rights and the Law. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Avineri, S. & A.de-Shalit, eds.1992a. Communitarianism and Individualism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Avineri, S. & A.de-Shalit 1992b. ‘Introduction’. Avineri & de-Shalit 1992a: 1–11. Bainham, A., S.D.Sclater & M.Richards, eds. 2002. Body Lore and Laws. Oxford: Hart Publishing. Beauchamp, T.L. & J.F.Childress 2001. Principles of Biomedical Ethics, 5th ed. New York: Oxford University Press. Bernstein, D.M. & R.G.Simmons. 1974. ‘The adolescent kidney donor: the right to give’. American Journal of Psychiatry, 131, 1338–43. Brock, D.W. 1993. Life and Death. New York: Cambridge University Press Cheyette, C. 2000.‘Organ harvests from the legally incompetent: an argument against compelled altruism’. Boston College Law Review, 41, 465–515. Cohen, P. 1997. ‘Donors’ dread’. New Scientist, 155, 20. Curran v Bosze. 1990. 566 N.E.2d 1319.


Ditto, P.H., J.H.Danks, W.D.Smucker, J.Bookwala, K.M.Coppola, R.Dresser, A. Fagerlin, M.Gready, R.M.Houts, L.K.Lockhart & S.Zyzanski. 2001. ‘Advance directives as acts of communication’. Archives of Internal Medicine, 161, 421–30. Dwyer, J. & E.Vig. 1995. ‘Rethinking transplantation between siblings’. Hastings Center Report, 25, 7–19. F v West Berkshire HA.1989. 2 All ER 545, HL. F v Wirral Metropolitan Council. 1991. 2 WLR 1132. Fellner, C.H. & J.R.Marshall. 1970. ‘Kidney donors: the myth of informed consent’, American Journal of Psychiatry, 126, 1245–51. Gilllick v W. Norfolk and Wisbech AHA.1986. AC 112,184, HL. Glannon, W. & L.F.Ross. 2002. ‘Do genetic relationships create moral obligations in organ transplantation?’. Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics, 11, 153–9. Grimes v Kennedy Krieger Institute. 2001. 782 A.2d 807. Griner, R.W 1994. ‘Live organ donations between siblings and the best interest standard: time for stricter judicial intervention’. Georgia State University Law Review, 10, 589–613. Hardart, G. 2000. ‘Including the family’s interests in medical decision making in pediatrics’. Journal of Clinical Ethics, 11, 164–8. Hart v Brown. 1972. 289 A.2.d 386. Herring, J. 2002. ‘Giving, selling and sharing bodies’. Bainham et al. 2002:43–61. J v C. 1969. 1 All ER 688. Little v Little. 1979. 576 S.W.2d 493. Lord Chancellor. 1999. Making Decisions, Cmnd 4465. London: HMSO. McLean, S.A.M. 1992. ‘Medical experimentation with children’. Alston, Parker & Seymour 1992:173–91. 1999. Old Law, New Medicine. London: Pandora. McFall v Shrimp. 1978 10 Pa.D. & C.3d 90. Montgomery, J. 1988. ‘Children as property’. Modern Law Review, 51, 323–42. Mumford, S.E. 1998. ‘Bone marrow donation—the law in context’. Child and Family Law Quarterly, 10, 135–46. Packman, W.L., M.R.Crittenden, E.Schaeffer, B.Bongar, J.B.Fischer & M.J.Cowan. 1997. ‘Psychosocial consequences of bone marrow transplantation in donor and nondonor siblings’. Journal of Developmental & Behavioral Pediatrics, 18, 244–53. Raphael, D.D. 1988. ‘Handicapped infants: medical ethics and the law’. Journal of Medical Ethics, 14, 5–10. Re A (Male Sterilisation). 2000. 1 FLR 549. Re Guardianship of Pescinski. 1975. 226 N.W.2d 180. Re Richardson. 1973. 284 So.2d 185. Re S (Adult patient: Sterilisation).2000. 3 WLR 1288, CA. Re T (A Minor) (Wardship: Medical Treatment).1997. 1 WLR 242, CA. Re Y (adult patient) (transplant: bone marrow).l996. 35 BMLR 111. Redmon, R.B. 1986. ‘How children can be respected as “ends” yet still be used as subjects in non-therapeutic research’. Journal of Medical Ethics, 12, 77–82.


Robbennolt, J.K., V.Weisz & C.M.Lawson. 1994–95. ‘Advancing the rights of children and adolescents to be altruistic: bone marrow donation by minors’. Journal of Law And Health, 9, 213–45. Robinson, R.J. 1987 ‘Ethics committees and research in children’. British Medical Journal, 294, 1243–4. S v McC; W v W . 1972. AC 24, HL. Spital, A. 1997. ‘Should children ever donate kidneys? Views of US transplant centers’. Transplantation, 64, 232–36. Strunk v Strunk. 1969. 445 S.W.2d 145.

11 The Right to Trade in Human Body Parts HILLEL STEINER

Let me start with a silly question: Why is it so hard, so inordinately difficult, to sell snow to Alaskans? Why do companies engaged in this enterprise invariably fail? Now the obvious reason why finding the answer to this question is nowhere near as difficult as snow-selling in Alaska is that we are all broadly familiar, not only with what general weather conditions are like there, but also with the general pre-conditions of selling. You cannot sell anything to persons who already have free access to as much of it as they want. So the fact that something is an object of commercial trading is at least prima facie, if not conclusive, grounds for believing that it is in short supply relative to how much of it is wanted. What’s more—Richard Titmuss notwithstanding1—it is also fairly strong grounds for believing that it would be in even shorter supply if commercial trading in it were to be forbidden. Titmuss might well be right—indeed, he would almost certainly be right—if what he had claimed was that, at the margin, some persons who would have altruistically donated their bodies’ parts, had there been no opportunity for profitably selling them, would change their minds and avail themselves of that commercial opportunity when it becomes available. But this fact goes absolutely no distance toward supporting one of Titmuss’s two counterfactual claims: that large numbers of those who do avail themselves of that commercial opportunity would, in its absence, choose to donate. For if indeed they would, we’d have a great deal more difficulty in explaining why people are willing to pay for body parts than we do in explaining why Alaskans are not willing to pay for snow. Nor can we readily make sense of Titmuss’s major counterfactual claim: that there are large numbers of presumably rather fastidious persons who are unwilling either to sell or to donate their body parts, but who would donate them if selling were prohibited and that area of social activity were thus


untainted by commercialism. What we need here are reasons to think that persons’ attitudes to their expendable body parts are relevantly different from, say, their attitudes to their expendable clothing. That is, we need reasons to think that there are numerous people who keep on storing away their old clothing, just waiting for the day when the market in second-hand clothing closes down, whereupon they will immediately rush to give it all away to the needy. It seems more reasonable to believe that, as with expendable clothing, some of us will want to donate our body parts, some will want to sell them and some will want to do a bit of both. Now I do of course appreciate that, in so quickly dismissing Titmuss’s argument, I have hardly done justice to its complexity and, in particular, to his account of how well-established cultural norms of selfless giving can be seriously eroded by the commercialisation of some areas of social activity. It may, for instance, be unfair to suggest that his account of such erosion rests on the implicit if not cynical attribution of a rather shallow and precarious altruism to those two types of counterfactual donor. What would not be unfair to suggest, however, is that both Titmuss and many of his opponents who favour commercialisation of body parts transfers share a common foundational moral perspective. For what both are fundamentally concerned with is securing the greatest possible amount of such transfers, from those willing to relinquish body parts to those wishing to acquire them. Where they differ, and differ profoundly, is in their views of the appropriate institutional setting for securing this maximand. So both Titmuss and these commercialising opponents are, in that broad sense, utilitarians. They disagree, not over basic moral principles, but rather over the factual issue of whether permitting the sale of body parts will increase or decrease the general willingness to relinquish them. From this utilitarian standpoint, whether selling should be permitted or forbidden is a question to be settled by the facts, by empirical investigation and experimentation. In that regard, recently reported American experience seems not to support Titmuss’s claim. ‘The shortage of organs is so desperate that each day 17 people die while waiting for them’, said Kristof. A 1984 Congress ban on any payment for organs is to blame. ’…[T]he present policy costs up to 6, 000 American lives a year…A furious debate erupted in the medical community this year on this issue, and by the time the policy is overturned, as it will be, it’ll have killed more Americans than the entire Vietnam war’. The problem is that altruism is the only motivation allowed to persuade next-of-kin to donate a loved one’s

THE RIGHT TO TRADE IN HUMAN BODY PARTS 187

organ, and altruism isn’t working. So the medical community is coming round to the idea of paying fees of about $2,000 (£1,250) to the estates of the dead. As Professor Kaserman, author of a new book urging a market for organ donation, puts it, ‘We’re losing 6,000 lives a year, more than twice the number killed in the 9/11 attacks. And if we were paying for the organs, federal expenditures would go down. So we’re actually spending money to kill people.’ (Kristof 2002) Utilitarian maximisation, in this domain, appears strongly to indicate the permissibility of selling body parts. But utilitarianism is very far from being the only ethical perspective which can be brought to bear on this question. And prominent among the alternatives is a concern for justice or the integrity of individuals’ natural or human rights. From this perspective, the answer to whether trading in body parts should be permitted is not to be found in the answer to whether such trading would increase body part transfers. Rather, it’s to be found in the answer to whether the duties we have, to respect those basic rights, permit or forbid us to interfere with such trading. What are these duties? What are those basic rights? Let us take one step back before trying to address these latter questions. Every rule or principle classifies any activity as belonging in one of three alternative categories: obligatory, forbidden or permissible. (By ‘permissible’ I mean here simply neither obligatory nor forbidden: a permissible act is one which it is ‘okay’ both to do or not do.) So the question which commercialisation’s opponents have to answer comes down to this: Why should an activity—say, the interpersonal transfer of body parts—that falls into the ‘permissible’ category, be reclassified as ‘forbidden’ to the extent that it is commercialised? If it is okay both to donate body parts and to refuse to donate them, why is it not okay to sell them? Now of course this question would not arise at all if that activity, instead of being ‘permissible’, were deemed to be ‘obligatory’. It’s not difficult for us to imagine a rule under which expendable body parts are conscripted, under which body part transfers are compulsory like the paying of taxes. And indeed, it would seem that those whose primary concern here is to maximise the supply of transferable body products should logically favour such a conscription rule—which is exactly why some utilitarians do favour it. This regime would, after all, yield a much larger harvest and alleviate a strikingly greater amount of dire medical need than can ever be expected from either Titmuss’s pure donation regime or the commercialisers’ mixed regime of sale plus donation.2


Let’s try to think of why Titmuss himself might nonetheless object to such a conscription regime. Presumably his main objection would be that it seriously undermines the ‘gift relationship’: that is, it makes it impossible to attribute any significant element of altruism to those whose body parts are thereby compulsorily harvested. But we need to press a bit harder here and ask precisely why it would have this consequence. And the plain answer is that giving up something that is yours, unless done freely, isn’t usually regarded as an altruistic act. For there are two obvious features of altruism that imply this consequence: first, an altruistic act has to be one which the giver is not compelled to do, which he or she has the freedom not to do; and second, it has to be an act of giving up something that rightfully belongs to the giver. I am not being altruistic if the kidney I choose to have transferred to her is yours and not mine. So the very idea of altruism in body part transfers logically presupposes that we each have moral rights to our own body parts. Hence, if we are looking for a moral reason that unconditionally rules out the conscription of body parts, we (and Titmuss too) have to fall back on each person’s basic right to his or her own body’s parts. This is not, after all, such a long way to fall. Most of us, in one way or another, simply take it for granted that each person has this basic moral right which is sometimes compendiously referred to in the philosophical literature as ‘self-ownership’. It is on the basis of this same right, for instance, that slavery is universally regarded as a paradigmatic form of injustice. Given this fundamental human right, what possible reasons can there be for restricting its exercise? This brings us back to the question I previously put to commercialisation’s opponents: namely, why should an activity which falls into the ‘permissible’ category be reclassified as ‘forbidden’ to the extent that it is commercialised? Clearly, the transfer of my body parts, whether by sale or donation, is an exercise of my self-ownership right—just as my sale or donation of anything else I own is an exercise of my other ownership rights. So what reasons can there be for leaving the activities of both selling and donating in the ‘permissible’ category when it comes to these other things I own, but condemning selling to the ‘forbidden’ category when it comes to my body parts? One very good reason for restricting persons’ exercises of their selfownership rights—or for that matter, their exercises of any other ownership rights they have—arises when those exercises are activities which violate the rights of other persons. My ownership of my hands does not give me the liberty to assault you with them. It does not give me this liberty for the simple reason that this would be a violation of your self-ownership right. Any


coherent set of moral rights implicitly embodies this sort of restriction on their exercise.3 So what we need to ask ourselves is whether my selling my body parts similarly violates anyone else’s rights. And as far as I can see, it does not. Whereas, conversely, an enforcible prohibition against my selling them does begin to look very much like an encroachment on my self-ownership—just as we might consider enforced directives on our occupational and employment choices to be. For these too concern a body part of ours—namely, our labouring energy—our free and unforced disposition of which is what is standardly taken to distinguish us from slaves and serfs. If others’ (uncontracted) control of our labour would be a violation of our selfownership, then so too would their control of our body parts. And this is true regardless of whether that control takes the form of conscripting them or prohibiting us from selling them or, for that matter, prohibiting us from donating them as well. What then is left, by way of objections to trading in body parts?4 Apart from his concern for the erosion of altruism which I have already discussed, Titmuss’s other main worries have to do with commercialisation’s possible corrupting effects on scientific and medical standards and its liability to engender exploitation of the poor at home and abroad. Now it is just undeniable that such corruption and exploitation are morally deplorable. Indeed, some forms of it might well be interpreted as violating basic human rights including the fundamental right of self-ownership itself. The issue here, however, is one of causality, of ends and means. For as an argument telling against my being permitted to sell my body parts, invoking these deplorable prospects threatens a baby-and-bath-water result. Throwing out the baby with the bath-water is a proven quick and effective way of stopping it from catching a chill or developing a skin irritation. But it is overkill, by any standard, and rather drastic overkill at that. When it comes to other types of otherwise permissible social practice, we do not usually seize upon the abolition of the practice itself as the obvious remedy for unprofessional or corrupt conduct within it. Rather we rely upon regulative and incentive mechanisms, including the threat of competitive displacement by more creditable practitioners, to reduce the likelihood of such conduct. Similarly, curtailing the exploitation of the poor is not most effectively achieved by prohibiting their commerce with the rich: if anything, and as the experience of Second and Third World economies has shown, such isolation simply condemns them to ever-deepening poverty and to other forms of exploitation that generally rely upon the presence of such poverty. Instead, the appropriate remedy appears to lie in a mixture of policies directed at


fundamentally alleviating their poverty and, in the transitional shorter term, perhaps controlling the prices at which body parts are permitted to be exchanged. Surely it is better for any person to have the option of selling a kidney rather than be forced to continue either to scratch a precarious living out of drought-stricken land or to work in dangerous conditions for subsistence wages in some multinational corporation’s sweatshop down the road. Surely a prohibition against such selling serves no one’s interests other than those of local landowners and multinational corporations.5 In general, it seems mistaken to regard markets as the causes of corruption and exploitation. At worst, they operate as a neutral medium for the occurrence of such injustices as persons are independently inclined to commit or leave unredressed. At best, they work efficiently to redistribute resources—including body parts—from those who have them to those whose demand for them is greater. And at the very least, they act to dissolve the insulating privileges which protect those corrupt and exploitative local monopolies and concentrations of power that can flourish only when disadvantaged people are legally deprived of access to competing alternatives. If we generally think that competition has this desirable effect in the sphere of political choice—that multi-party systems engender far less corruption and exploitation than single-party systems—why on earth should we think otherwise when we come to consider the sphere in which people have to earn their livings? NOTES 1. The famous expression of his views on this matter is Titmuss 1970. 2. There may, of course, be even more radical conscription regimes—utilitarian or otherwise—under which the body parts compulsorily transferred are not limited solely to expendable ones. 3. For an extended discussion of this ‘compossibility’ feature of moral rights, see Steiner 1994: ch.3, and Steiner 1998:262–74. 4. A far more extensive discussion of possible objections to such commerce, along with convincing refutations of them, is to be found in Mark Nelson’s illuminating article (Nelson 1991). 5. The argument, that economic exploitation occurs in transaction situations from which competing bidders are forcibly excluded or restricted, is developed in Steiner 1984, 1987 and 1994 ch.5 (D).


REFERENCES Kramer, M., N.Simmonds & H.Steiner. 1998. A Debate Over Rights. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kristof, N. 2002. New York Times, 12 November 2002; reported in The Guardian, 16 November 2002. Nelson, M. 1991. ‘The morality of a free market for transplant organs’. Public Affairs Quarterly, 5, 63–79. Reeve, A., ed. 1987. Modern Theories of Exploitation. London & Los Angeles: Sage. Steiner, H. 1984. ‘A liberal theory of exploitation’. Ethics, 94, 225–41. 1987. ‘Exploitation: a liberal theory amended, defended and extended’. Reeve 1987: 132–48. 1994. An Essay on Rights. Oxford: Blackwell. 1998. ‘Working rights’. Kramer, Simmonds & Steiner 1998:233–301. Titmuss, R. 1970. The Gift Relationship. London: George Allen & Unwin.

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Abstracts

Altruism, Impartiality and Moral Demands JURGEN DE WISPELAERE Advocates of altruism maintain that altruism is an inherently beneficial and, therefore, morally desirable motivational disposition towards furthering other people’s good. In this essay I dispute this claim by showing various ways in which altruism might come into conflict with plausible moral demands. The underlying problem is always one of moral myopia, an altruistic blind spot that interferes with altruism’s capacity to track moral demands. To resolve the moral dilemmas associated with altruism, I argue, we need to embed altruistic dispositions in a more comprehensive moral framework. I propose that a theory of impartiality might succeed in embedding altruism in a way that avoids the problems outlined in this essay, in addition to allowing room for altruistic motivations to play a genuine part. The main purpose of this essay is to draw attention to the complexities associated with the moral assessment of altruistic acts and choices. Gratitude, Contribution and Ethical Theory SAUL SMILANSKY I attempt to sketch in general terms an alternative moral perspective that goes beyond the traditional normative theories, a moral perspective called ‘contributivism’. This focuses on contribution: caring about one’s contribution, I claim, lies at the centre of moral concern. First I illustrate the need for a contribution-focussed moral theory, primarily by considering gratitude, the typical required response to altruism. Second, I point out some of the motivational resources of such a contribution-based view. I conclude by showing how focusing on contributions can uncover neglected areas of moral


significance, which both broaden our recognition of altruistic behaviour, and raise questions concerning the moral centrality of altruism. Altruism, Self-Interest And The Indistinctness Of Persons KEITH GRAHAM The problem of altruism is to determine intellectually compelling grounds for allowing others’ interests and desires to weigh with us as well as our own. Two considerations impact on that problem. One concerns the clustering of particular interests and desires. The doctrine of the distinctness of persons gives prime importance to their origin in a particular individual. But clustering across individuals, rather than within individuals, may be more reasonable in the light of meta-attitudes towards our interests and desires and the interconnection of individuals’ interests. The other concerns individuals’ identification with the interests and desires of a collectivity to which they belong, for its own sake. This identification, while in some ways resembling altruism and self-interested motivation, is sui generis. It leads us to rethink the polarity of self and others by reminding us that the polarity does not adequately reflect an important aspect of human social relations. Between Egoism and Altruism: Outlines for a Materialist Conception of the Good JEFF NOONAN The essay argues that the most influential liberal accounts of moral theory (utilitarianism and deontology) assume that human material nature is the seat of desire, and that desire is essentially unsociable. Moral systems are then interpreted as a means of counteracting the essentially self-interested desires that are assumed to ordinarily drive human beings. The essay challenges the normative presuppositions of these arguments. It maintains that liberal moral philosophy must be interpreted in the historical context of the rise of a competitive market society. It then contends that contra liberal moral theory, human beings are neither essentially egoistic nor altruistic, but interdependent. Moral theory is better seen as following from a recognition of this material interdependence than as an ideal limit on ‘naturally’ self-interested and competitive behaviour.

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Is There a Paradox of Altruism? ROBERT PAUL CHURCHILL and ERIN STREET Behavioural scientists show altruism to exist as a distinctive personality. Yet when subjected to philosophical scrutiny, the altruistic personality is prima facie paradoxical. To motivate herself to help others, the altruist needs ‘extensivity’, the capacity to compassionately identify with others. To aid others effectively, however, the altruist must have individuation, the possession of highly developed autonomy and self-efficacy. We assert that a better understanding of the relationship between concern for others and concern for self reveals the paradox to be merely apparent. We find that, in extending themselves in caring behaviours, altruists actually enhance their individuality. Moreover, given the differences between compassion and empathy and the way empathy mediates between compassionate co-feeling and individuation, extensivity and individuation do not necessarily conflict. We conclude therefore that despite appearances the altruistic personality is a coherent construct. ‘Are They My Poor?’: The Problem of Altruism in a World of Strangers DAVID MILLER How should we decide when to be altruistic—who are the poor we ought to help? Empirical evidence reveals that in practice altruistic behaviour is strongly influenced by contextual factors such as the cost of helping, perceptions of the person in need, and the number of other people who are in a position to offer help. Philosophers often argue that we should discount such factors, but I claim that altruism is better understood as doing one’s proper share of the work of meeting needs. Three possible mechanisms for achieving this are explored: creating formal institutions to discharge our altruistic duties, imposing a legal duty of rescue on individuals, and fostering norms of responsibility that pick out individuals as salient helpers. Good Samaritanism: A Matter of Justice CÉCILE FABRE Liberal theorists of justice hardly ever study duties of Good Samaritanism. This is not to say that they regard a failure to be a Good Samaritan as morally acceptable: indeed, most of them think that it is morally wrong. But they tend


not to think that it is morally wrong on the grounds that it constitutes a violation of a duty of justice. Rather, they condemn it as a failure to perform a duty of charity, or as a failure to be appropriately altruistic. By contrast, they condemn as a violation of a duty of justice a failure to give to the poor the material resources they need. My aim, in this essay, is to show that if liberals are committed to the view that the needy have a right, as a matter of justice, to some of the material resources of the better off, they must endorse the view that the imperilled have a right, as a matter of justice, to the bodily services of those who are in a position to help. In short, or so I argue, Good Samaritan duties are not a matter of charity; nor are they a matter of altruism; rather, they firmly fall within the purview of justice. I make my case as follows. First, I rebut the claim that those are duties of charity, and not of justice. Second, I argue, pace many, that we owe it to the imperilled themselves, as a matter of justice, to rescue them: we do not owe it to society as a whole. Finally, I show, against a number of theorists, that such duty can and should be enforced by the state. Altruism and Freedom JONATHAN SEGLOW Though people value altruism, they also value freely choosing if and when to be altruistic. This essay explores the question of whether a society that is more altruistic would be one which is more free or less. It begins by considering cases where altruism is legally enforced, the paradigm example of which is good Samaritan legislation. I argue that coercively enforcing altruistic duties submerges people’s altruistic motives under the demands of justice (which is not to say that these intrusions on our freedom may not be justified). It goes on to consider state-encouraged altruism and examines our attachment to individual freedom which stands in its way. The strength of this objection is weakened once we distinguish between the different freedoms—some more significant than others—to which we are attached. Though altruism cannot be coerced, there remain compelling reasons to encourage it. The essay concludes by sketching a few of the social and political benefits of a more altruistic society: one benefit is that an altruistic society may contain more social opportunities in which people can freely engage.

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Canaries in the Mines? ALASDAIR MACLEAN Since we are generally not required to act altruistically, one question that arises is may children or incompetent adults be permitted—or required—to act for the benefit of others where the law would ordinarily only permit such an act if it were justified by a valid consent? In this article I consider how the law regulates decision making for children and incompetent adults and whether acts that would otherwise be considered altruistic are permissible. Using organ donation as an example I argue that the law does permit them but only by manipulating the ‘best interests’ test. I consider some of the arguments in favour of allowing such decisions and conclude that it is apparent that there are circumstances in which they should be permitted but that the best interests test is inadequate and dishonestly conceals the real justifications for the decision. The Right to Trade in Human Body Parts HILLEL STEINER This essay challenges the coherence of arguments brought in support of prohibiting the sale of human body parts. Considerations of neither social utility nor individual rights nor avoidance of exploitation seem sufficient to ground such a prohibition. Indeed, they may be sufficient to invalidate it.

198

Notes on Contributors

Robert Paul Churchill is Associate Dean for Undergraduate Studies and Professor of Philosophy, Columbian College of Arts and Sciences, George Washington University. His research interests include social and political philosophy, philosophical psychology, and nonviolence. He has written or edited books on logic and liberal democracy, and he is presently completing a monograph on human rights. He has published articles on a wide range of topics including pacifism, tolerance, crimes against humanity, just war theory, and the philosophical and strategic bases of nonviolent social change. Jurgen De Wispelaere is Lecturer at the Equality Studies Centre, University College Dublin, and completing a PhD in political theory at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He has published on the ethical and political aspects of employment regulation, welfare reform and basic income, and is co-editor of a forthcoming collection on The Ethics of Stakeholding (with Keith Dowding and Stuart White, 2003). Cécile Fabre is Lecturer in Political Theory at the London School Economics. Her research interests are justice and rights (especially the rights we have over ourselves). Keith Graham is Emeritus Professor of Social and Political Philosophy at the University of Bristol. He has held visiting research fellowships in the Department of Government, University of Manchester, the Centre for Philosophy and Public Affairs, University of St Andrews and the School of Advanced Study, University of London. His publications include The Battle of Democracy (Wheatsheaf 1986), Karl Marx: Our Contemporary (Harvester 1992) and Practical Reasoning in a Social World (Cambridge University Press 2002).


Alasdair Maclean is currently a Lecturer in Medical Law at the University of Glasgow. Previous to that, he tutored tort law at the University of Southampton. His original training was in medicine and he practiced clinically for a number of years before studying law. His main areas of interest are consent and human rights in healthcare. David Miller is Professor of Political Theory at the University of Oxford and an Official Fellow of Nuffield College. His recent books include On Nationality (Clarendon Press 1995), Principles of Social Justice (Harvard University Press 1999) and Citizenship and National Identity (Polity Press 2000). He is currently working on the idea of national responsibility and its implications for international justice, and completing a Very Short Introduction to Political Philosophy for Oxford University Press. Jeff Noonan received his PhD from McMaster University (Hamilton, Ontario, Canada) in 1996. He has taught at the University of Alberta and is currently Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Windsor (Ontario, Canada). His research interests are in the metaphysical foundations of critical theory, the universal foundations of cultural differences, democratic theory, and the possibility of a materialist ethics. His first book, Critical Humanism and the Politics of Difference was published in 2003, by McGillQueen’s University Press. He has published articles in journals such as The Canadian Journal of Philosophy, ReThinking Marxism, Capitalism, Nature, Socialism, and International Studies in Philosophy. Jonathan Seglow is Lecturer in Politics in the Department of Social and Political Science at Royal Holloway, University of London. His research interests are in contemporary political theory. He is co-editer, with Cillian McBride, of Altruism, Egoism and Impartiality, a special issue of Res Publica 9/3 (2003). Saul Smilansky is Associate Professor at the Department of Philosophy in the University of Haifa, Israel. He works primarily on normative ethics and on the free will problem. His book Free Will And Illusion (Oxford University Press) came out in 2000. The present paper is part of a larger ongoing project on normative ethical theories. Hillel Steiner is Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of Manchester and a Fellow of the British Academy. He is the author of An Essay on Rights (1994) and co-author of A Debate Over Rights: Philosophical Enquiries (with

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS 201

Matthew Kramer and Nigel Simmonds, 1998). He is also co-editor of The Origins of Left-Libertarianism: An Anthology of Historical Writings, and LeftLibertarianism and Its Critics: The Contemporary Debate (with Peter Vallentyne, 2000). His current research includes the application of libertarian principles to global, and to genetic, inequalities. Erin Street completed her BA in Philosophy at George Washington University in 2002 and is currently studying law at Howard University. She intends to continue studies in philosophy with a focuses in ethics, moral psychology, and issues of women and minority concern. She and Paul Churchill are currently collaborating on work concerning the philosophy of nonviolence.

202

Index

Altruism 1, 34, 49, 59, 106–25, 159–62, 189, 190 altruistic motives 2–3, 6, 18, 22–3, 26, 59, 89–91, 98–103, 145–6, 148, 151–2, 153, 159, 162 altruistic norms 123–4, 160–61 altruistic personality 4, 87–104 benefits of 13–14, 159–62, 172–5 definition of 2, 11, 89–90, 108–9, 146, 183 n.4 experimental studies of 111–15 institutionalised altruism 6, 110, 118–20, 147, 148–50 paradox of 88, 94–100 and reciprocity 12–13, 109, 130, 160 and responsibility 114–9, 122–5 and self-sacrifice 14–15, 29 nn15 & 16, 93, 164. See also Self-sacrifice. Aristotle 104 Augustine 71 Autonomy 88, 94, 99, 103, 142 family autonomy 175–8, 181

Body, the 77–8, 80, 134, 136, 188–91 bodily integrity 142, 184 n.9 Brink, David 56 Buchanan, James 20–21, 25 Butler-Sloss, Lady Justice 169, 177 Cheyette, Cara 175 Children 164–78, 182 Coercion 145, 146–52, 167 Collective entities 64–5 Collective identification 57–63, 82–3 Compassion 97, 100–102, 103 Comte, Auguste 49, 58, 108 Connell, Justice 168, 169, 170 Consequentialism see Utilitarianism Consent 166–7, 172, 173 Contractarianism 39–40 Contribution 34–6, 40–48, 116–8 Churchill, Robert Paul 4 Day, Justice 172 Deontology 38–9, 73 Descartes, René 71 Desert 38 Desires 18, 53–5, 66 n.2, 71, 74–5 Democracy 161–2 Distinctness of persons 51–6, 62–3 Doyal, Len 81 Duties altruistic 130, 164 of care 146, 158 of justice 6, 9, 129, 130–1, 147, 150

Badhwar, Neera 96 Barry, Brian 22–4, 27 Bernstein, J.M. 73, 76 Best interests 7, 165–83 Bland, Anthony 181 Blood donation 8, 12, 27, 128, 149, 153, 159, 164, 179 Blum, Lawrence 89 203

204 INDEX

legal 121, 138–42, 148, 164 moral 20, 38, 107–109, 117, 133–41, 183 n.4 natural 135 other-regarding 2 to rescue 129, 130, 131, 132–42, 142 n.7 Dwyer, James 176–7, 179 Ego boundaries 88, 92, 93, 94, 100, 103 Egoism 50–51, 73, 90, 99, 100–102 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 106, 124, 125 Empathy 100–102, 103 Exploitation 21, 191, 192 Fabre, Cécile 5, 145 Family, the 175–83 Feinberg, Joel 123–4 Frank, Robert 13 Freedom 7, 130–131, 145, 146–7, 152–9, 160 Basic liberties 147, 153–4, 157, 160 n.4 Free-riding 21, 132 Friendship 14, 16 Galston, William 87 Geras, Norman 151 Good, the 71–3, 76, 80, 84–5, 156 Good Samaritanism 111, 132, 133–5, 138–42, 143 n.10, 149, 179 Good Samaritan laws 6–7, 129, 141–3 n.4 Bad Samaritan laws 120, 122, 129, 138–9, 141, 142–3 n.4, 145, 146, 148–50, 152, 158 Samaritan’s dilemma 20–21, 25, 29 n.29 Gough, Ian 81 Graham, Keith 4–5, 82–3, 130 Gratitude 3, 37–40 Hampton, Jean 98

Happiness 74 Hardart, G. 176 Harm 44–5, 78, 79, 82, 84, 135, 165 Hegel, G.W.F. 79 Henry, O. 41–2 Hesteren, Frank van 97, 98 Hobbes, Thomas 4, 69, 71–3, 75, 77 Human nature 78–9, 82 Hume, David 40, 63 Hurley, Susan 58–9 Incompetent adults 165–83 Individuality 93, 94–100, 106 Individualism 4, 73 Joan of Arc 68 Justice 117, 128, 129, 133–42, 147–52, 182 Kant, Immanuel 4, 69, 73–5, 77 Kohn, Alfred 104. Konarzewski, Krystof 92, 93, 95, 101 Korsgaard, Christine 9, 49–50, 58, 155–6 Krebs, Dennis 97, 98 Laslett, Peter 107 Liberalism 69–70, 76–7, 78, 82, 129, 130 Maclean, Alasdair 7, 147 Malinoswki, Bronislaw 12 Malm, H.M. 139–41 Marcuse, Herbert 78 Market, the 8, 70, 78, 192 de Marneffe, Peter 147, 153, 157, 160 n.4 Marxism 81 Maslow, Abraham 97 Materialist ethics 5, 68–9, 77–85 McDermott, Lord 166 McIntyre, Alison 130, 131 McLean, Sheila 181, 182 McMurtry, John 80, 84 Mill, John Stuart 4, 69, 73, 75–7 Miller, David 1, 5, 6, 130, 138

THE ETHICS OF ALTRUISM 205

Monroe, Kristin 87, 90–91, 93–4 Montgomery, Jonathan 165 Morality 34–5, 70–86 common sense morality 16, 25 moral agency 9, 19–20, 22, 36, 94–101 moral demands 9–10, 15, 17–20, 25, 30 n.31 and impartiality 3, 22–7 and motivation 9–11, 15, 17–19, 22, 26, 36, 40–3 moral responsibility 176, 179 Mumford, S. 170 Murphy, Liam 19–20, 117, 118, 119 Nagel, Thomas 96 Needs 4, 79–81, 83–5, 116–18, 128, 129, 134 Noonan, Jeff 4 Nozick, Robert 4, 52–3, 56, 63, 64, 65, 66 n.4 Nussbaum, Martha 81–2, 84, 96–7, 99, 102 Offe, Claus 58 Oliner, Pearl 87, 89, 91–2 Oliner, Samuel 87, 89, 91–2 Organ donation 7, 24, 31 167, 170, 173– 4, 175, 180, 183, 187 n.36, 164, organ transplantation 158, 168, 172 Osborne, Justice 171 Plato 71 Preferences see Desires Promises 138 Punishment 139–41, 149 Rawls, John 4, 52–3, 64, 135, 143 n.7, 147, 150, 153, 157, 162 n.4 Raz, Joseph 156 Reactive-contributions 3, 40, 45–8 Redmon, Robert 180 Rescue 15–17, 119, 120, 137–42

rescuers of Jews 4, 87, 89–92, 94, 95, 96, 102, 123, 125, 151 Rights 129, 130, 133, 139, 141–2, 166, 171, 179, 189–91 Ripstein, Arthur 130, 131, 132 Robbenolt, Jennifer 174, 175 Scanlon, Thomas 61–2 Scarman, Lord 166 Seglow, Jonathan 5 Self-interest 2, 4, 49–51, 57–61, 72, 74, 77, 87–9, 96 Self-sacrifice 12, 58–61, 180 See also Altruism and self-sacrifice Sen, Amartya 58 Sidgwick, Henry 50–51, 55–6, 58 Singer, Peter 116, 117–18, 122 Smilanksy, Saul 2–3 Social contract 72 Social engineering 160 Social capital 160–1 Steiner, Hillel 7 Strangers 107–108, 124, 129, 161 Street, Erin 4 Testo, Justice 171 Timpanaro, Sebastiano 78–9 Titmuss, Richard 7, 12, 27, 187, 188, 190 Trust 160 Truth 43–4 Unger, Peter 116, 117–18, 122 Utilitarianism 37–8, 52–3, 75, 188–9 Vig, Elizabeth 176–7, 179 Virtue Ethics 40

206 INDEX

Waite, Lord Justice 167, 178 Welfare 6, 119, 138, 149 Wiesenthal, Helmut 58 Wilkie, Chief Justice 172 Wispelaere, Jurgen De 2–3 Wollheim, Richard 101 Yang Ming, Wang 68

The Ethics of Altruism

The Possibility of Altruism

Altruism

The Heart of Altruism

Altruism and Christian Ethics (New studies in Christian Ethics)

Origins of Altruism and Cooperation

Altruism in Humans

Altruism and beyond

The Ethics of Liberty

The ethics of ambiguity

The Ethics of Madness

The Ethics of Nationalism

The Ethics of War

The Ethics of Cyberspace

The Ethics of Bankruptcy (Professional Ethics)

The Principles of Ethics

The Ethics Of Liberty

The Retrieval of Ethics

The Ethics of Liberty

The Ethics of Identity

The Ethics of Authenticity

The Ethics of Romanticism

The Ethics of Madness

The Ethics of Voting

The Ethics of Biotechnology

The Ethics of Madness

The Ethics of Memory

The ethics of redistribution

The Bases of Ethics

The Ethics of Ambiguity

The ethics of Aristotle

The Ethics of Altruism

The Possibility of Altruism

Altruism

The Heart of Altruism

Altruism and Christian Ethics (New studies in Christian Ethics)

Origins of Altruism and Cooperation

Altruism in Humans

Altruism and beyond

The Ethics of Liberty

The ethics of ambiguity

The Ethics of Madness

The Ethics of Nationalism

The Ethics of War

The Ethics of Cyberspace

The Ethics of Bankruptcy (Professional Ethics)

The Principles of Ethics

The Ethics Of Liberty

The Retrieval of Ethics

The Ethics of Liberty

The Ethics of Identity

The Ethics of Authenticity

The Ethics of Romanticism

The Ethics of Madness

The Ethics of Voting

The Ethics of Biotechnology

The Ethics of Madness

The Ethics of Memory

The ethics of redistribution

The Bases of Ethics

The Ethics of Ambiguity

The ethics of Aristotle

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