Abstract
Many writers believe there can be cases which satisfy the following description: starting from an initial state of affairs, it is possible to make a series of changes, none of which alters the value of the state of affairs in any way, but such that the final state of affairs that results from the series of changes is worse than the initial state of affairs.1 I shall call the claim that there can be such cases the “ex nihilo” claim, since in a sense it asserts that the bad effects of the complete series of changes arise ex nihilo. Proponents of the ex nihilo claim — ex nihilists, as I shall call them — usually advance the claim as part of an argument against act-utilitarianism.2 If there were cases such as the ex nihilist imagines, then it would be possible to construct variants in which act-utilitarianism unequivocally required behavior which in the aggregate produced sub-optimal consequences. We could construct the sort of case I have called (while denying its possibility) an “act-utilitarian prisoners’ dilemma”.3 Act-utilitarianism would be, in Derek Parfit’s phrase, “directly collectively self-defeating”.4
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Notes
E.g., Jonathan Harrison, “Rule-Utilitarianism and Cumulative-Effect Utilitarianism,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy Supp. Vol. V (1979), 21–45; Warren Quinn, “The Puzzle of the Self-Torturer,” Philosophical Studies 59 (1990), 79-90.
Quinn argues even more ambitiously against consequentialism in prudential decision-making.
Utilitarianism and Co-operation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), 54–65. Wlodzimierz Rabinowicz, “Act-Utilitarian Prisoner’s Dilemmas,” Theoria 55 (1989), 1-44, who is not an ex nihilist, makes a number of other ingenious suggestions about how act-utilitarian prisoner’s dilemmas might arise; but since in the end he admits that all of his suggestions are either avoidable or seriously controvertible, I shall not pause here over the possibilities.
Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 53–55.
Rabinowicz, “Act-Utilitarian Prisoner’s Dilemmas,” 41.
Michael Otsuka, “The Paradox of Group Beneficence,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 20 (1991), 132–149.
Larry Temkin, “A Continuum Argument for Intransitivity,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 25 (1996), 175–210.
E.g., Parfit, Reasons and Persons, 79 (one might regard my remarks that follow as a spelling out of why we might believe, and how it could be, that “someone can mind his pain slightly less … even though he cannot notice any difference,” as Parfit suggests); Jonathan Glover, “It Makes No Difference Whether or Not I Do It,” Proceedings of the Aristotelean Society Supp. Vol. XLIX, 171-190; Torbjörn Tsjö, “Classical Hedonistic Utilitarianism,” Philosophical Studies 81 (19%), 97-115.
Utilitarianism and Co-operation, 13–17.
Reasons and Persons, 67–69.
Frank Jackson makes a similar point about chains of indiscernible color patches in Perception (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 113 ff.
Quinn, “Self-Torturer,” 84.
It may occur to the reader that the ex nihilist’s unavoidable appeal to valuing “the way it feels” at each stimulus would not really commit him to the coherence of this thought if the appeal could be viewed as a step in a reductio of consequential reasoning. But there is no reductio. As we shall see in the discussion of Quinn below, the ex nihilist fails to prove anything at all.
Quinn, “Self-Torturer”.
Id. 81.
Id. 82.
Id. 82-83.
Cf. Regan, Utilitarianism and Co-operation, 63–65; Otsuka, “Group Beneficence,” 146.
Larry Temkin, “A Continuum Argument for Intransitivity,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 25 (1996), 175–210.
Id. 175.
Jonathan Harrison, “Rule-Utilitarianism and Cumulative-Effect Utilitarianism,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy Supp. Vol. V (1979), 21–45.
Id. 32.
Id. 32-33.
Id. 33.
Crispin Wright, “Further Reflections on the Sorites Paradox,” in Rosanna Keefe & Peter Smith (eds), Vagueness: A Reader (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996), 204–250.
Michael Dummett, “Wang’s Paradox”, in Keefe & Smith, Vagueness, 99–118
Epistemological theorists, for example, argue that there is some particular step that makes the crucial difference to “redness”, or “heapness”, or whatever, even though we cannot know which step it is. E.g., Timothy Williamson, “Vagueness and Ignorance,” in Keefe & Smith, Vagueness, 264-280. Supervaluationists argue that there is some step that makes the difference, even though it is not true of any particular step that it is the one. E.g., Kit Fine, “Vagueness, Truth and Logic,” in Keefe & Smith, Vagueness, 119-150. Degree-theorists argue that the induction premise is not completely true at any step, but only almost true everywhere. E.g., Dorothy Edgington, “Vagueness by Degrees,” in Keefe & Smith, Vagueness, 294-316. (It is not actually true that I have read nothing about vagueness and sorites elsewhere than the Keefe & Smith volume. But it is a collection of extraordinary quality, probably the best philosophical “reader” I have encountered.)
Harrison,“Cumulative-Effect Utilitarianism”, 33
Utilitarianism and Co-operation, 231–232, note 6
Parfit, Reasons and Persons, 73–74
If it is not clear how these requirements differ, see Regan, Utilitarianism and Co-operation, 264-265, note 1, and 231-232, note 6.
Id. 12-53.
Id. If Michael Otsuka is denying this when he says “it is impossible for the maximization of the positive difference each individual makes to result in a state of affairs in which the benefits produced by all of humanity are not maximized”, he is mistaken. Otsuka, “Group Beneficence”, 148-149.
Regan, Utilitarianism and Co-operation, 124–145.
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Regan, D.H. (2000). Perceiving Imperceptible Harms (with other Thoughts on Transitivity, Cumulative Effects, and Consequentialism). In: Almeida, M.J. (eds) Imperceptible Harms and Benefits. Library of Ethics and Applied Philosophy, vol 8. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-4144-4_3
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