Abstract
Sometimes, a group of people can produce a morally bad outcome despite each person’s individual act making no difference to whether the outcome is produced. Since each person’s act makes no difference, it seems the effects of the act cannot provide a reason not to perform it. This is problematic, because if each person acts in accordance with their reasons, each will presumably perform the act—and thus, the bad outcome will be brought about. I suggest that the key to solving this problem is to make it true of each person that their act would in fact make a difference to the relevant outcome. Fortunately, I contend, this can be accomplished by each person simply forming a particular type of attitude. I argue that each person has an obligation to form the relevant attitude in collective action cases, on pain of being immoral or irrational.
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Notes
This is adapted from Parfit (1984, p. 76).
I borrow this terminology from Julia Nefsky (2017, p. 2744).
While these real-world cases may not be perfectly analogous to Drops of Water, they are nevertheless collective impact cases, and so a solution to our problem in Drops of Water would also seem to apply to them.
Taking the first option would also force us to reject the stronger claim that the demands of morality will not lead us to morally suboptimal outcomes, or (roughly) what has elsewhere been called “the principle of moral harmony.” Proponents of this principle include Parfit (1984, p. 54), Pinkert (2015), Portmore (2018), and Regan (1980).
It is worth mentioning that these authors do not present their account of caring as any kind of solution to cases of the sort we’re currently considering. I use their account only because I see the current proposal as worth considering, given its potential initial plausibility, and see their account as a good one for filling the proposal out.
See Nefsky (2017, p. 2748).
Nefsky (2015) also discusses this, as well as the following, failed solution to the problem of collective impact, and the following few paragraphs have greatly benefitted from her discussion.
See Tänssjö (1989).
It might be argued, of course, that the act may still be good to perform, even if it would be no more than a symbolic display. See, for example, Hill (1979). On this type of view, by adding our water to the cart, we disassociate ourselves from a policy that would lead to a bad outcome, and thereby honor a type of cause that is more morally deserving (Hill 1979, p. 99). The problem here, however, is that it simply isn’t clear that by adding our water we are associating ourselves with any cause at all. Since adding our own water would not make any difference to the outcome, it’s unclear how this act would constitute our associating ourselves with a good outcome or policy. Again, we need a view that explains why our act would be a good one to perform; and so long as this act would make no difference, it will not help to simply paint our act as one that would be good to perform, as this view (among others) would seem to do.
In a recent paper, Nefsky (2017) has argued that each person does have a reason, issuing from morality, to add their water to the cart. This reason stems from the fact that, while each act cannot make a difference, each act could help relieve the suffering of those in the desert—that is, each act could make a non-superfluous causal contribution to bringing the morally good outcome about. I think that this approach is inadequate as well, however, for reasons offered in Fanciullo (2019).
Each of the variants of Drops of Water considered in this paper are introduced in Fanciullo (2019).
Here I have in mind something similar to what Michael Bratman (2014, p. 72) calls a shared intention involving obligation-based interdependence.
This means that, if one were merely informed that “enough others” (whoever they may be) each possess an analogous intention, one may have no reason to form the conditional intention, or to contribute, on the current approach. This is because one’s own intention would not concern the intentions of any particular others, and none of the particular others’ intentions would concern one’s own intention. While this conclusion may initially seem troubling, I think it actually is exactly right. Since one would believe that enough others intended to contribute, and thus (we can assume) that the sufferers would receive enough water, it is difficult to see how one could be rationally compelled to act so as to make the state of affairs in which the sufferers would receive enough water more likely. After all, anything one did would, by one’s own lights, make no difference to the desired outcome—the sufferers would receive enough water in any case. What is needed is instead for one’s own intention and the intentions of others to depend on each other for their motivational force, so that one’s belief that enough others have formed the relevant intention cannot lead one to conclude that one’s own intention or contribution would make no difference.
This is why it is important that your intention is not conditional merely on whether “enough others” (whoever they may be) form an analogous intention, and is instead conditional on whether it is true of enough other particular agents that they form an analogous intention. The first approach would fail to make the intentions depend on each other in a way that made their motivational force depend on each of the others’ particular intentions. On that approach, it would only matter that “enough” others had the intention, in which case the loss of one intender (and so you in particular) would presumably not affect whether that condition was met. The current approach, on the other hand, makes each individual intention interlock with, and depend for its motivational force on, each of the other particular intentions, which means that the loss of any one intender would lead to the loss of each of the others.
It is also worth mentioning that this solution to the problem of collective impact can be naturally adapted to apply to the analogous, intrapersonal problem of rational self-torture (Quinn 1990). The latter problem concerns a series of choices faced by a subject who is hooked up to a machine that can apply electric current to the subject’s body in unnoticeably small increments. The machine has settings from 0, where the machine is off, to 1000, which would be torturous. Each week the subject must choose: advance the machine’s dial one setting—where this can never be reversed—and receive $10,000, or stay put and receive nothing. Since each step between settings entails an unnoticeable difference in pain, there seems to be little reason not to advance to the next setting each week. And since receiving $10,000 would be good, there seems to be good reason to advance to the next setting each week. If this reasoning is applied each week, however, the subject will eventually be in torturous pain, which they will gladly return their acquired fortune to relieve. The account I’ve provided here suggests the following solution. At the start, the subject should choose a setting, call it Sp, whose application leaves them in a state that they prefer to their current one (even if Sp is 1), and then intend to advance to the next setting each week until Sp is reached if and only if they intend to not advance to Sp + 1. Thus, they should form a conditional intention to increase the setting each week iff (they believe that) they intend not to advance to the next setting once Sp is reached—just as, in Drops of Water, the subjects should form a conditional intention to add their water iff (they believe that) enough particular others so intend. While the choice of any particular Sp may be in one sense arbitrary (since there will presumably be an Sp + 1 whose application would involve no noticeably greater pain yet noticeably more money), the subject here at least does better than the one who is forced to choose between torturous pain and passing up on an effectively free $10,000. For a similar approach to this problem, see Portmore 2019.
Though this blameworthiness may not in each case be explained by a failure of the same kind. As I see it, if one fails to satisfy P1 or P2, any blameworthiness seems to derive from a moral failing; and if one fails to satisfy any of P3-C, any blameworthiness seems to derive from either a rational or epistemic failing.
Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for pressing me on this.
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Acknowledgements
Many thanks to an anonymous reviewer for truly helpful comments. And special thanks to Cheshire Calhoun and Doug Portmore for extremely helpful comments, discussions, encouragement, and advice.
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Fanciullo, J. The psychological basis of collective action. Philos Stud 178, 427–444 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-020-01439-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-020-01439-6