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Notes
See Williams, B. (1973) ”A Critique of Utilitarianism,” in J. Smart & B. Williams (Eds.), Utilitarianism: For and Against (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press): 77–150; Williams, B. (1985) Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press).
See, inter alia, Ashford (2003) “The Demandingness of Contractualism,” Ethics, 113(2): 273–302.
See, inter alia, Sobel, D. (2007) “The Impotence of the Demandingness Objection,” Philosophers’ Imprint, 7(8): 1–17.
Some may want to take up demandingness concerns only at the level of a moral theory rather than at the level of a particular moral duty. We believe, in a context in which duties of systemic justice may—and in fact ought to be able to—place a large number of putative obligations at our feet, this is a problematic approach. For more on how demandingness concerns can operate at the level of duties, see Fruh, K. & Hedahl, M. (2013) “Coping with Climate Change: What Justice Demands of Surfers, Mormons, and the Rest of Us,” Ethics, Policy, and the Environment 16 (3):273–296.
See, inter alia, Tanyi, A., & Bruder, M. (2014) “Consequentialism and Its Demands: A Representative Study,” Journal of Value Inquiry, 48: 293–314.
See, for example, Sobel, D. (2007) op. cit.
See, for example, Murphy, L. (2000) Moral Demands in Nonideal Theory (New York: Oxford University Press.)
Berkey, B. (2016) “The Demandingness of Morality: Towards a reflective equilibrium,” Philosophical Studies, 173(11): 3015–3035.
We recognize, of course, that not everyone will endorse this interpretation. Nonetheless, we will assume for the remainder of this paper that this latter interpretation does, in fact, highlight a distinctive worry about the reach of moral duties. There may well be other, related moral concerns that are sometimes also referred to by others as ‘demandingness concerns.’ For a broader defense of this interpretation, see Fruh & Hedahl (2013) op. cit.
See Murphy, L. (2000) op. cit.
Schroeder, S. A. (2014) “Imperfect Duties, Group Obligations, and Beneficence,” Journal of Moral Philosophy, 11(5): 1–28.
Collins, S. (2013) “Collectives’ Duties and Collectivization Duties.” Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 91: 231–48.
Miklós, A., & Tanyi, A. (2017)“Institutional Consequentialism and Global Governance,” Journal of Global Ethics, 13(3): 279–297.
Ibid. pp. 280–281.
One important avenue of criticism of such views reasserts a demandingness problem, now in association with individual moral duties to create, support, and sustain just and functional institutions (see, for example Pellegrino, G. (2016) “ Beneficence, Justice and Demandingness: A Criticism of the Main Mitigation Strategies,” in S. Maffettone, & A. S. Rathore (Eds.) Global Justice: Critical Perspectives (London: Routledge.): 91–120.). Another important avenue of criticism of such views is that the demandingness problem re-emerges as duties get distributed to individuals in potentially demanding ways, so the move to ground these duties in collectives does not ultimately settle the question of individual demandingness (see, for example, Collins, S. (2019) Group Duties: Their existence and their implications for individuals, (New York: Oxford University Press.). The possibility we develop in this paper offers a distinct way in which demandingness problems might reappear on collectivist views, so we don’t directly engage with these or other criticisms.
For an excellent orientation to collective approaches to moral obligation, see Schwenkenbecher, A. (2018) “Making Sense of Collective Moral Obligations: A Comparison of Current Approaches,” in Collectivity: Ontology, Ethics, and Social Justice, T. Isaacs, K. Hess, and V. Igneski (Eds.), Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 109–132.
Lichtenberg, J. (2014) Distant Strangers: Ethics, Psychology, and Global Poverty (New York: Cambridge University Press: 68.
For a small sampling of the historically influential analysis of these issues, and how they have changed over time, see Weber, M. (1914) Economy and Society, Vol. 1. Reprinted 1978. (Berkeley: University of California Press); Hayek, F. (1942) “Scientism and the Study of Man,” Economica 9: 267–291; Lewis, H.D. (1948) “Collective Responsibility,” Philosophy, 24: 3–18; French, P. (1984) Collective and Corporate Responsibility, (New York: Columbia University Press); Graham, K. (2002) Practical Reasoning in a Social World: How We Act Together (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Two important exceptions worthy of note are Berkey and Collins & Lawford-Smith, both of which we consider in §3.
For an excellent illustration of this, see Miklós & Tanyi (2017), op. cit. p. 282.
This benefit is perhaps easiest to see if the collective that holds the initial duty is organized (e.g. a state or international organization). While some theorists (e.g. Murphy, Schroeder) hold that the initial duty holder is something more akin to all moral agents, the question of distribution remains. And here, this advantage would provide a reason to have the collective duty to be distributed to individual moral agents via structured collectives (as would the benefits of redistribution in the face of non-compliance). Even if moral duties were initially held by an unstructured group and immediately passed to individuals, however, the advantages remain, although they are attenuated somewhat. For example, unstructured collective duty holders lack the ability to reallocate duties in the face of non-compliance in the way more structured collective duty holders can. Yet even a collective as unstructured as the community of moral agents has the authority to constitute new duties for individuals when presented with novel moral situations. For more on this possibility, see Richardson, H. (2018) Articulating the Moral Community: Toward a Constructive Ethical Pragmatism (Oxford: Oxford University Press.)
For the purposes of this paragraph, we leave to one side the possibility of special obligations borne by some individuals in virtue of, for example, a position they had previously agreed to fill (to be a rescue diver in the employment of the government, for example).
We are grateful to an anonymous reviewer for this point.
See Vollman, A (2019) “Surge in Hikers Means More Search-and-Rescues for National Parks,” Modern Conservationist, May 27.
Lango, J. (2001), ‘Is armed humanitarian intervention to stop mass killing morally obligatory?’ Public Affairs Quarterly, 15 (3): 173–91: 174.
Buchanan, A. (1999) “The International Legitimacy of Humanitarian Intervention,” The Journal of Political Philosophy, 7:71–87: 85.
Lango, J. (2001), op. cit., p. 174.
See, for example, Walzer (1977) Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations, (New York: Basic Books).
See Oberman, K. (2015) “The Myth of the Optional War: Why States Are Required to Wage the Wars They Are Permitted to Wage,” Philosophy and Public Affairs, 43(4):255–286.
See, for example, Lango (2001), op. cit.
Sadly this is not true of all work on these issues. Domestic analogies, popularized by Walzer, have unfortunately led some theorists to look only at the sacrifices of the nation as a whole, without thinking about the limitations on how those sacrifices can be distributed.
Thunberg, G. (2019) “Speech At The U.N. Climate Action Summit,” npr.com, Sept. 23, https://www.npr.org/2019/09/23/763452863/transcript-greta-thunbergs-speech-at-the-u-n-climate-action-summit.
The difference between establishing new institutions and reforming existing institutions is relevant to consequentialist discussions inasmuch as it is generally accepted that the latter has a higher probability of achieving success. For example, see Miklos, A. & Tanyi, A. (2019) “Consequentialism and Its demands: The Role of Institutions,” SSRN: https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3333408. Miklós & Tanyi concede that in the absence of even moderately just institutions, there is likely no consequentialist reason to think that individuals have a duty to fight for reform since it is unlikely that such efforts will succeed.
Shue, H. (1999) “Global Environment and International Inequality,” International Affairs, 75: 531– 545.
Pogge, T. (2008) World Poverty and Human Rights, (Cambridge: Polity Press).
Shrader-Frechette, K. (2007) Taking Action, Saving Lives, (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
See, for example, Horton, J. (2017) “The All or Nothing Problem,” The Journal of Philosophy, 114(2): 94–104. We are thankful for an anonymous reviewer for this point.
This seeming incongruity may be why those who consider collective demandingness typically do not frame the demandingness objection the way we do in §1. We believe, however, that such a framing is the most in line with the original objection and ultimately best aligns with duties of systemic justice. For more on this contention, see Fruh & Hedahl (2013) op. cit.
Roberts, J. (2011) “Opinion of the Court,” Federal Communications Commision, et al., v. AT&T Inc. et a: 12.
Berkey, B. (2019) “Collective Obligations and Demandingness Complaints,” Moral Philosophy and Politics, 6(1): 113–132.
Ibid., p. 120.
The view that collective are not experiencing subjects, and so are not moral patients in the same sense that individuals are, is argued by Hess, K. (2013) ‘If You Tickle Us…: How Corporations Can Be Moral Agents without Being Persons,’ Journal of Value Inquiry, 47 (3): 319–335, and by Pasternak, A. (2017) “From Corporate Moral Agency to Corporate Moral Rights,” Law and Ethics of Human Rights, 11 (1): 135–159. Pasternak (2017), and taken as a given by List, C. & Pettit, P. (2011) Group Agency: The Possibility, Design, and Status of Corporate Agents (New York: Oxford University Press).
Berkey (2019), op. cit., p. 120–121.
Collins, S., & Lawford-Smith, H. (2016) “Collectives’ and Individuals’ Obligations: A Parity Argument,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 46(1), 38–58.
Ibid, p. 52.
There is some ambiguity about what ultimate thesis about collective demandingness Collins and Lawford-Smith are committed to. We would agree with the contention that constitutive ends can sometimes ground collective demandingness complaints (see the argument in §3.2). But the language “there’s no disanalogy here” [emphasis ours] leaves the impression that Collins and Lawford-Smith more likely hold that the mere existence of collective constitutive ends is sufficient to ground demandingness complaints; and, moreover that it is the collective ends themselves that ground those complaints. While this possibility seems problematic for reasons we consider shortly, we ultimately defend a position that may have a great deal of affinity with Collins and Lawford-Smith’s aims, if not necessarily their argument.
Or, at the very least, this approach is contrary to the interpretation of the demandingness objection we laid out in §1.
Of course, there may be some extreme cases in which morality will require an individual moral agent to sacrifice her own life. A common unifying belief of those that take the demandingness objection seriously, however, is that morality cannot demand an agent sacrifice her own life in each and every situation in which the consequences would be better if they were to do so—in part because of the inherent worth of individual persons. It is not at all clear, however, that the same goes for collectives, as the possibility of collectives whose interests and constitutive ends have become alienated from those of their members demonstrates rather vividly.
Margaret Gilbert, A Theory of Political Obligations (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), p. 141.
Ibid., p. 142.
Or at least the defining feature of one reading of Collins & Lawford-Smith.
Cf., Réaume, D. (1994) “The Group Right to Linguistic Security: Whose Right, What Duties,” in. J. Baker (Ed.) Group Rights (Toronto: University of Toronto Press), p. 122.
This argument originally appeared in Hedahl, M. (2017) “Collective Directionality: A new possibility for collectives as objects of normative consideration” The Journal of Value Inquiry, 51(2): 233-250.
Raz, J. (1986) The Morality of Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 51.
McMahon, C. (1994) Authority and Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press), p. 65.
Our contentions in this subsection should therefore be acceptable whether one embraces a more robust sense of collective patienthood (e.g. Silver, K. (2019) “Can a Corporation be Worthy of Moral Consideration,” Journal of Business Ethics, 159: 253–265) or a more modest sense of collective moral patienthood (e.g. Hedahl (2017), op. cit.)
Perhaps Collins & Lawford-Smith’s claim that “there is no disanalogy” between individual demandingness claims and collective demandingness claims is meant less literally than we are interpreting here. Perhaps Collins & Lawford-Smith merely mean to imply that as individual interests and constitutive ends can prevent putative duties from becoming actual duties collective interests and constitutive ends can prevent putative duties from becoming actual duties. On that interpretation, our argument could be read as building on theirs, providing more context to how the term ‘can’ in the collective case differs from the term ‘can’ in the individual case. In effect, as we argue in §3.2, not only does the constitutive end need to exist (as Collins & Lawford-Smith argue) but also the collective constitutive end needs to be tied to the constitutive ends of a subset of its members in a normatively significant manner. For more on this possibility, see Hedahl (2017), op. cit.
That is the conclusion reached by Berkey (2019) op. cit. about the promise of collective demandingness.
For more on this point, see Kymlicka, W. (1989) Liberalism, Community, and Culture, (Oxford: Clarendon Press.)
This formulation is not intended to eliminate the possibility that other factors could be combined with collective constitutive ends to make them capable of underwriting demandingness complaints.
For more on how ends and interests become integrated, see Hedahl (2017), op. cit.
Lewis, R. (2009) “Interview at the House of Dance and Feathers” with Marcus Hedahl, March 13.
Collins & Lawford-Smith (2016) op. cit. also raise the prospect of double-counting in their discussion of collective obligations (p. 53).
To see how we believe this works at the level of individuals, see Fruh & Hedahl (2013) op. cit.
An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Rocky Mountain Ethics Congress and the Northwest Philosophy Conference, both in 2018. We are grateful to many fellow participants who helped us clarify the ideas presented there, especially Blake Hereth who provided commentary. We also want to thank two anonymous reviewers, whose insightful comments helped us to substantially improve the paper. This paper has also been improved by discussions with Bryce Huebner and Judith Lichtenberg.
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Hedahl, M., Fruh, K. Duties and Demandingness, Individual and Collective. J Value Inquiry 56, 563–585 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-020-09791-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-020-09791-w