Abstract
In 2004, Garrett Cullity made a significant contribution to the literature on what the world’s relatively affluent owe to the world’s relatively poor through the publishing of The Moral Demands of Affluence. In this discussion note, I draw attention to a logical problem in Cullity’s master argument in favor of the view that affluent individuals are justified in spending monetary resources on themselves at a level that lies well above what Peter Singer finds justified. The proposition I defend is that the premises leading to Cullity’s conclusion about the moderate, and not extremely demanding, nature of his position are inconsistent. These premises license any conclusion, including the negation of the one preferred by Cullity.
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Notes
In (1972:241), Singer defends a principle which requires well-off individuals to prevent bad things from happening unless they by doing so would be sacrificing something of comparable moral significance. According to Singer, acceptance of this principle commits one to the idea that “we ought to give until we reach the level of marginal utility, that is, the level at which by giving more, I would cause as much suffering to myself or my dependents as I would relieve by my gift. This would mean, of course, that one would reduce oneself to very near the material circumstances of a Bengali refugee”. It is in comparison to this outlook that Cullity finds his own position moderate and not extremely demanding.
Cullity is committed to this premise in virtue of writing “I am justified in stopping before my overall sacrifice is excessive” (Cullity 2004:177). Cullity also writes “We are justified, that is, in thinking that there is a degree of overall sacrifice beyond which you can defensibly refuse to contribute to giving life-saving help to other people, even though the cost of helping another individual is small” (Cullity 2004:173).
Cullity is committed to this premise in virtue of writing “But there is no incremental sacrifice which is the last one I am able to make before my overall sacrifice becomes excessive” (Cullity 2004:177).
It should be noted here that it is not plausible to counter this line of thought by saying that what we have knowledge of is not what the exact cut-off point is between an overall sacrifice that is excessive and one that is not. There is a gray area between an overall sacrifice that is excessive and one that is not, and what we have knowledge of is where this gray area begins and ends. If a defender of Cullity’s position takes this line, then she implicitly assumes that we can know, and do know, what the cut-off points are that demarcate that gray area, and on an epistemological reading of (2), it is difficult to see how we can have knowledge of these cut-off points. It is no easier to know the cut-off point between an overall sacrifice that lies outside the gray area, and one that lies within that area, than it is to know the cut-off point between an overall sacrifice that is excessive and one that is not.
This supposition is neither far-fetched nor irrelevant. Cullity’s book addresses a distinctively practical question, and the book is supposed to offer practical advice on this question. What this question is can be instructively gleaned from what Cullity writes in the preface to his book: “This is a book about aid to the world’s poorest people, and how much you and I ought to be doing to support it” (Cullity 2004:viii).
I would like to emphasize that the main point I argue for in the preceding two paragraphs, in the main text, is that Cullity cannot offer significant practical advice on how much to donate to poverty relief. This is something he wants to do and sees his book as offering (see the previous footnote). If Cullity cannot say where, in between N and some overall sacrifice that, according to Cullity’s intuition, is clearly/obviously non-excessive, the cut-off point is between an overall sacrifice that is excessive and one that is not, his theory cannot be of practical help to someone who desires to do as much as morality requires in terms of donating to poverty relief.
This is especially the case when it comes to very wealthy individuals. Measured in terms of how many percent of their combined assets they must sacrifice, Singer’s theory is only marginally more demanding than Cullity’s.
Cullity says that there is controversy among logicians with respect to the question of how sorites puzzles are a form of reasoning that is fallacious and that the only claim he relies on is the obviousness of the claim that sorites puzzles are a form of reasoning that is fallacious (2004:256, note 4).
As a prelude to his discussion of sorites puzzles and how issues involved in such puzzles are of relevance to his ideas about how an individual’s overall sacrifice can move from being not excessive to excessive, Cullity writes that “now there is a danger of committing a fallacy” (2004:176). If this remark is directed at the argument in section two, it can easily be accepted by the argument’s proponent. The important question is whether or not one is committing a fallacy by putting it forward, and it is difficult to see why this is the case.
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Sonderholm, J. The Moral Demands of Affluence: a Logical Problem for Cullity. Acta Anal 30, 409–417 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-015-0251-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-015-0251-2