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T he Right Thing to Do

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T he Right Thing to Do Basic Readings in Moral Philosophy

SEVENTH EDITION

Edited by

Stuart Rachels and

James Rachels

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THE RIGHT THING TO DO, SEVENTH EDITION

Published by McGraw-Hill Education, 2 Penn Plaza, New York, NY 10121. Copyright © 2015 by

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The right thing to do: basic readings in moral philosophy/edited

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v

Preface viii

About the Authors ix

INTRODUCTION

1. A Short Introduction to Moral Philosophy James Rachels 1 2. Some Basic Points about Arguments James Rachels 19

UTILITARIANISM

3. Utilitarianism John Stuart Mill 29 4. Utilitarianism and Integrity Bernard Williams 40 5. The Experience Machine Robert Nozick 45

OTHER THEORETICAL ESSAYS

6 . The Subjectivity of Values J. L. Mackie 48 7. Our Sense of Right and Wrong C. S. Lewis 60 8. The Categorical Imperative Immanuel Kant 65 9. The Virtues Aristotle 69 10. Master Morality and Slave Morality Friedrich Nietzsche 76 11. Caring Relations and Principles of Justice Virginia Held 80

ABORTION

12. On the Moral and Legal Status of Abortion

and Postscript on Infanticide Mary Anne Warren 87 13. Why Abortion Is Immoral Don Marquis 99 14. A Defense of Abortion Judith Jarvis Thomson 106

ANIMALS

15. All Animals Are Equal Peter Singer 123 16. Torturing Puppies and Eating Meat: It’s All in

Good Taste Alastair Norcross 133 17. Do Animals Have Rights? Tibor R. Machan 141

Contents

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vi CONTENTS

POVERTY

18. Famine, Affluence, and Morality Peter Singer 154 19. Poverty and Parenthood Stuart Rachels 164

THE DEATH PENALTY

20. A Defense of the Death Penalty Louis P. Pojman 182 21 . Why the United States Will Join the Rest of the World in

Abandoning Capital Punishment Stephen B. Bright 191

WAR, TERRORISM, AND TORTURE

22. Hellhole Atul Gawande 203 23. The Ethics of War and Peace Douglas P. Lackey 221 24. Fifty Years after Hiroshima John Rawls 230 25 . What Is Wrong with Terrorism? Thomas Nagel 238 26. Liberalism, Torture, and the Ticking Bomb David

Luban 241

SEX AND DRUGS

27. America’s Unjust Drug War Michael Huemer 255 28 . Our Sexual Ethics Bertrand Russell 269 29. A Few Words about Gay Marriage Andrew Sullivan 276 30. Same-Sex Marriage and the Argument from Public

Disagreement David Boonin 278 31. Alcohol and Rape Nicholas Dixon 289

RACE, WOMEN, AND IMMIGRATION

32. Letter from the Birmingham City Jail Martin Luther King Jr. 301

33. Is Racial Discrimination Arbitrary? Peter Singer 309 34 . In Defense of Quotas James Rachels 321 35. Homeward Bound Linda Hirshman 336 36. The Case for Open Immigration Michael Huemer 345

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BIOETHICS

37. The Morality of Euthanasia James Rachels 348 38. The Wrongfulness of Euthanasia J. Gay-Williams 353 39. The New Eugenics Matt Ridley 358 40 . Human Cloning and the Challenge of Regulation

John A. Robertson 365 41. Selling Organs for Transplantation Lewis Burrows 372 42. A Free Market Would Reduce Donations and Would Commodify

the Human Body James F. Childress 378

CONTENTS vii

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viii

Moral philosophy is the study of how one should live. This anthology

is an introduction to that great subject. The readings cover the main

moral theories and present a wealth of ideas about various practical

matters.

This book is a companion to The Elements of Moral Philosophy, which was also written by James Rachels and revised by Stuart Rachels. These

two books complement each other and may be read together. However,

nothing in either book presupposes knowledge of the other.

In selecting the pieces for this volume, I was looking for articles

on serious moral topics that are deftly argued; that are pleasant to read;

that lend themselves to lively discussion; and that the average college

student can grasp. I believe that the selections chosen are not merely

good articles on suitable topics; they are first-rate essays on compelling

issues. Students who read this book will want to read more, unless the

subject is simply not for them.

This edition contains five new essays, replacing two that were elim-

inated. Thus, there is now more to choose from. As a counterpoise to

Mackie, I’ve added an essay by C.S. Lewis on the objectivity of morals.

Peter Singer’s “Famine, Affluence, and Morality” has now replaced “The

Singer Solution to World Poverty.” I’ve paired Singer’s piece with an

essay in which I argue that we should not have children, according to

Singer’s argument. In the section of the book called “Race, Women, and

Immigration,” I’ve added articles by Linda Hirshman, on equality in the

home, and Michael Huemer, who argues that U.S. immigration policy is

unjust because it imposes serious harms on non-citizens. The only essay

I have simply eliminated is John McMurtry’s “Monogamy: A Critique.”

I thank Heather Elliott, Daniel Hollingshead, Tucker Meyers, and

Carol Rachels for their help in preparing this edition.

To learn more about James Rachels, visit www.jamesrachels.org .

If you have suggestions for the next edition, please let me know:

[email protected].

—Stuart Rachels

Preface

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ix

James Rachels (1941–2003) wrote The End of Life: Euthanasia and Morality (1986), Created from Animals: The Moral Implications of Darwinism (1990), Can Ethics Provide Answers? And Other Essays in Moral Philosophy (1997), Problems from Philosophy (first edition, 2005), and The Legacy of Socrates: Essays in Moral Philosophy (2007). His website is www.jamesrachels.org .

Stuart Rachels is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the

University of Alabama. He has revised several of James Rachels’

books, including The Elements of Moral Philosophy (eighth edition, 2015), and Problems from Philosophy . Stuart won the United States Chess Championship in 1989, at the age of 20, and is a Bronze Life

Master at bridge. He is currently writing a book about his chess

career called The Best I Saw in Chess .

About the Authors

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1

CHAPTER 1 A Short Introduction to

Moral Philosophy James Rachels

An ancient legend tells the story of Gyges, a poor shepherd who

found a magic ring in a fissure opened by an earthquake. The ring

would make its wearer invisible, so he could go anywhere and do any-

thing undetected. Gyges was an unscrupulous fellow, and he quickly

realized that the ring could be put to good advantage. We  are told

that he used its power to gain entry to the royal palace where he

seduced the queen, murdered the king, and seized the throne. (It is

not explained how invisibility helped him to seduce the queen—but

let that pass.) In no time at all, he went from being a poor shepherd

to being king of all the land.

This story is recounted in Book II of Plato’s Republic. Like all of Plato’s works, The Republic is written in the form of a dialogue between Socrates and his companions. Glaucon, who is having an argument

with Socrates, uses the story of Gyges’s ring to make a point.

Glaucon asks us to imagine that there are two such rings, one

given to a man of virtue and the other given to a rogue. How might we

expect them to behave? The rogue, of course, will do anything neces-

sary to increase his own wealth and power. Since the cloak of invisibility

will protect him from discovery, he can do anything he pleases without

fear of being caught. Therefore, he will recognize no moral constraints

on his conduct, and there will be no end to the mischief he will do.

But how will the so-called virtuous man behave? Glaucon sug-

gests that he will do no better than the rogue:

No one, it is commonly believed, would have such iron strength

of mind as to stand fast in doing right or keep his hands off other

men’s goods, when he could go to the market-place and fearlessly

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2 T HE RIGHT THING TO DO

help himself to anything he wanted, enter houses and sleep with

any woman he chose, set prisoners free and kill men at his plea-

sure, and in a word go about among men with the powers of a

god. He would behave no better than the other; both would take

the same course.

Moreover, Glaucon asks, why shouldn’t he? Once he is freed from

the fear of reprisal, why shouldn’t a person simply do what he

pleases, or what he thinks is best for himself? Why should he care

at all about “morality”?

The Republic, written over 2300 years ago, was one of the first great works of moral philosophy in Western history. Since then, phi-

losophers have formulated theories to explain what morality is, why

it is important, and why it has the peculiar hold on us that it does.

What, if anything, justifies our belief that we morally ought to act in one way rather than another?

Relativism Perhaps the oldest philosophical theory about morality is that right and

wrong are relative to the customs of one’s society—on this view, there

is nothing behind the demands of morality except social convention.

Herodotus, the first of the great Greek historians, lived at about the

time of Socrates. His History is full of wonderful anecdotes that illustrate his belief that “right” and “wrong” are little more than names for social

conventions. Of the Massagetae, a tribe in Central Asia, he writes:

The following are some of their customs—Each man has but one

wife, yet all the wives are held in common. . . . Human life does

not come to its natural close with these people; but when a man

grows very old, all his kinsfolk collect together and offer him up

in sacrifi ce; offering at the same time some cattle also. After the

sacrifi ce they boil the fl esh and feast on it; and those who thus

end their days are reckoned the happiest. If a man dies of disease

they do not eat him, but bury him in the ground, bewailing his ill-

fortune that he did not come to be sacrifi ced. They sow no grain,

but live on their herds, and on fi sh, of which there is great plenty

in the Araxes. Milk is what they chiefl y drink. The only god they

worship is the sun, and to him they offer the horse in sacrifi ce,

under the notion of giving the swiftest of the gods the swiftest of

all mortal creatures.

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A SHORT INTRODUCTION TO MORAL PHILOSOPHY 3

Herodotus did not think the Massagetae were to be criticized for

such practices. Their customs were neither better nor worse than

those of other peoples; they were merely different. The Greeks,

who considered themselves more “civilized,” might have thought

that their customs were superior, but, Herodotus says, that is only

because everyone believes the customs of his own society to be the

best. The “truth” depends on one’s point of view—that is, on the

society in which one happens to have been raised.

Relativists think that Herodotus was obviously on to something

and that those who believe in “objective” right and wrong are merely

naïve. Critics, however, object to the theory on a number of grounds.

First, it is exceedingly conservative, in that the theory endorses what-

ever moral views happen to be current in a society. Consider our own

society. Many people believe that our society’s moral code is mistaken,

at least on some points—for example, they may disagree with the

dominant social view regarding capital punishment or homosexuality

or the treatment of nonhuman animals. Must we conclude that these

would-be reformers are wrong, merely because they oppose the major-

ity view? Why must the majority always be right?

But there is a deeper problem with Relativism, emphasized by

Socrates. Some social customs are, indeed, merely arbitrary, and when

these customs are at issue it is fruitless to insist that one society’s

practices are better than another’s. Funerary practices are a good

example. The Greeks burned their dead, while the Callatians ate their

dead, but neither practice is better than the other. However, it does

not follow from this that all social practices are arbitrary in the same way. Some are, and some are not. The Greeks and the Callatians

were free to accept whatever funerary practices they liked because

no objective reason could be given why one practice was superior to

the other. In the case of other practices, however, there may be good

reasons why some are superior. It is not hard, for example, to explain

why honesty and respect for human life are socially desirable, and

similarly it is not hard to explain why slavery and racism are unde-

sirable. Because we can support our judgments about these matters

with rational arguments, we do not have to regard those judgments as

“merely” the expression of our particular society’s moral code.

Divine Commands A second ancient idea, also familiar to Socrates, was that moral living

consists in obedience to divine commands. If this were true, then we

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4 T HE RIGHT THING TO DO

could easily answer the challenge of Gyges’s ring—even if we had the

power of invisibility, we would still be subject to divine retribution, so

ultimately we could not “get away with” doing whatever we wanted.

But Socrates did not believe that right living could consist

merely in trying to please the gods. In the Euthyphro, another of Plato’s dialogues, Socrates is shown considering at some length

whether “right” can be the same as “what the gods command.” Now

we may notice, to begin with, that there are considerable practical

difficulties with this as a general theory of ethics. How, for example,

are we supposed to know what the gods command? There are those who claim to have spoken with God about the matter and who there-

fore claim to be in a position to pass on his instructions to the rest

of us. But people who claim to speak for God are not the most

trustworthy folks—hearing voices can be a sign of schizophrenia or

megalomania just as easily as an instance of divine communication.

Others, more modestly, rely on scripture or church tradition for

guidance. But those sources are notoriously ambiguous—they give

vague and often contradictory instructions—so, when people consult

these authorities, they typically rely on whatever elements of scrip-

ture or church tradition support the moral views they are already

inclined to agree with. Moreover, because scripture and church tra-

dition have been handed down from earlier times, they provide little

direct help in addressing distinctively contemporary problems: the

problem of environmental preservation, for example, or the prob-

lem of how much of our resources should be allocated to cancer

research as opposed to other worthy endeavors.

Still, it may be thought that God’s commands provide the ulti-

mate authority for ethics, and that is the issue Socrates addressed. Socrates accepted that the gods exist and that they may issue

instructions. But he showed that this cannot be the ultimate basis

of ethics. He pointed out that we have to distinguish two possibili-

ties: Either the gods have some reason for the instructions they

issue, or they do not. If they do not, then their commands are

merely arbitrary—the gods are like petty tyrants who demand that

we act in this way and that, even though there is no good reason

for it. But this is an impious view that religious people will not want

to accept. On the other hand, if we say that the gods do have good

reasons for their instructions, then we have admitted that there is

a standard of rightness independent of their commands—namely,

the standard to which the gods themselves refer in deciding what

to require of us.

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A SHORT INTRODUCTION TO MORAL PHILOSOPHY 5

It follows, then, that even if one accepts a religious picture of

the world, the rightness or wrongness of actions cannot be under-

stood merely in terms of their conformity to divine prescriptions.

We may always ask why the gods command what they do, and the

answer to that question will reveal why right actions are right and why wrong actions are wrong.

Aristotle Although Relativism and the Divine Command Theory have always

had supporters, they have never been popular among serious stu-

dents of moral philosophy. The first extended, systematic treatise

on moral philosophy, produced two generations after Socrates, was

Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (ca. 330 bc ), and Aristotle wasted no time on such notions. Instead, Aristotle offered a detailed account of

the virtues—the qualities of character that people need to do well in

life. The virtues include courage, prudence, generosity, honesty, and

many more; Aristotle sought to explain what each one is and why

it is important. His answer to the question of Gyges’s ring was that

virtue is necessary for human beings to achieve happiness; therefore,

the man of virtue is ultimately better off because he is virtuous. Aristotle’s view of the virtuous life was connected with his over-

all way of understanding the world and our place in it. Aristotle’s

conception of what the world is like was enormously influential; it

dominated Western thinking for over 1700 years. A central feature

of this conception was that everything in nature exists for a purpose. “Nature,” Aristotle said, “belongs to the class of causes which act for

the sake of something.”

It seems obvious that artifacts such as knives and chariots have

purposes, because we have their purposes in mind when we make

them. But what about natural objects that we do not make? Do they

have purposes too? Aristotle thought so. One of his examples was

that we have teeth so that we can chew. Such biological examples

are quite persuasive; the parts of our bodies do seem, intuitively,

to have particular purposes—eyes are for seeing, the heart is for

pumping blood, and so on. But Aristotle’s thesis was not limited to

organic beings. According to him, everything in nature has a purpose. He also thought, to take a different sort of example, that rain falls

so that plants can grow. As odd as it may seem to a modern reader,

Aristotle was perfectly serious about this. He considered other alter-

natives, such as that the rain falls “of necessity” and that this helps

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6 T HE RIGHT THING TO DO

the plants only “by coincidence,” and rejected them. His considered

view was that plants and animals are what they are, and that the rain

falls as it does, “because it is better so.”

The world, therefore, is an orderly, rational system, with each

thing having its own proper place and serving its own special pur-

pose. There is a neat hierarchy: The rain exists for the sake of the

plants, the plants exist for the sake of the animals, and the animals

exist—of course—for the sake of people. Aristotle says: “If then we

are right in believing that nature makes nothing without some end

in view, nothing to no purpose, it must be that nature has made all

things specifically for the sake of man.” This worldview is stunningly

anthropocentric, or human-centered. But Aristotle was hardly alone

in having such thoughts; almost every important thinker in human

history has advanced such a thesis. Humans are a remarkably vain

species.

Natural Law The Christian thinkers who came later found Aristotle’s view of

the world appealing. There was only one thing missing: God. Thus,

the Christian thinkers said that the rain falls to help the plants

because  that is what the Creator intended, and the animals are for human use because that is what God made them for. Values and pur- poses were, therefore, conceived to be a fundamental part of the

nature of things, because the world was believed to have been cre-

ated according to a divine plan.

This view of the world had a number of consequences for eth-

ics. On the most general level, it affirmed the supreme value of

human life, and it explained why humans are entitled to do whatever

they please with the rest of nature. The basic moral arrangement—

human beings, whose lives are sacred, dominating a world made for

their benefit—was enshrined as the Natural Order of Things.

At a more detailed level, a corollary of this outlook was that the

“laws of nature” specify how things ought to be, as well as describing how things are. In turn, knowing how things ought to be enables us to evaluate states of affairs as objectively good or bad. Things are as

they ought to be when they are serving their natural purposes; when

they do not or cannot serve those purposes, things have gone wrong.

Thus, teeth that have decayed and cannot be used for chewing are

defective; and drought, which deprives plants of the rain they need,

is a natural, objective evil.

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A SHORT INTRODUCTION TO MORAL PHILOSOPHY 7

There are also implications for human action: On this view,

moral rules are one type of law of nature. The key idea here is that

some forms of human behavior are “natural” while others are not;

and “unnatural” acts are said to be wrong. Beneficence, for example,

is natural for us because God has made us as social creatures. We

want and need the friendship of other people, and we have natu-

ral affections for them; hence, behaving brutishly toward them is

unnatural. Or to take a different sort of example, the purpose of

the sex organs is procreation. Thus, any use of them for other pur-

poses is “contrary to nature”—which is why the Christian church has

traditionally regarded any form of sexual activity that cannot result

in pregnancy, such as masturbation, gay sex, or sex with contracep-

tives, as impermissible.

This combination of ideas, together with others like them,

formed the core of an outlook known as natural-law ethics. The

Theory of Natural Law was developed most fully by Saint Thomas

Aquinas (1225–1274), who lived at a time when the Aristotelian

worldview was unchallenged. Aquinas was the foremost thinker

among traditional Catholic theologians. Today natural-law theory

still has adherents inside the Catholic Church, but few outside. The

reason is that the Aristotelian worldview, on which natural-law eth-

ics depends, has been replaced by the outlook of modern science.

Galileo, Newton, Darwin, and others developed ways of under-

standing natural phenomena that made no use of evaluative notions.

In their way of thinking, the rain has no purpose. It does not fall

in order to help the plants grow. Plants typically get the amount of

water they need because each species has evolved, by natural selec-

tion, in the environment in which that amount of water is available.

Natural selection produces an orderly arrangement that appears to have been designed, but that is only an illusion. To explain nature

there is no need to assume purpose-involving principles, as Aristotle

and the Christians had done. This new outlook was threatening to

the Catholic Church, and they condemned it.

Modern science transformed people’s view of what the world is

like. But part of the transformation, inseparable from the rest, was

an altered view of the nature of ethics. Right and wrong could no

longer be deduced from the nature of things, for on the new view

the natural world does not, in and of itself, manifest value and pur-

pose. The inhabitants of the world may have needs and desires that generate values special to them, but that is all. The world apart from

those inhabitants knows and cares nothing for their values, and it

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8 T HE RIGHT THING TO DO

has no values of its own. A hundred and fifty years before Nietzsche

declared, “There are no moral facts,” the Scottish philosopher David

Hume had come to the same conclusion. Hume summed up the

moral implications of the new worldview in his Treatise of Human Nature (1739) when he wrote:

Take any action allow’d to be vicious: Willful murder, for in-

stance. Examine it in all lights, and see if you can fi nd that matter

of fact, or real existence, which you call vice. In whichever way you take it, you fi nd only certain passions, motives, volitions and

thoughts. There is no other matter of fact in the case.

To Aristotle’s idea that “nature has made all things for the sake of

man,” Hume replied: “The life of a man is of no greater importance

to the universe than that of an oyster.”

The Social Contract If morality cannot be based on God’s commands, nor on the idea of

natural purpose, then what can it be based on? Ethics must somehow

be understood as a purely human phenomenon—as the product of

human needs, interests, and desires—and nothing else. Figuring out

how to do this has been the basic project of moral philosophy from

the 17 th

century on.

Thomas Hobbes, the foremost English philosopher of the 17 th

century, suggested one way in which ethics might be understood in

purely human terms. Hobbes assumed that “good” and “bad” are just

names we give to things we like and dislike. Thus, because we may

like different things, we may disagree about what is good or bad.

However, Hobbes said, in our fundamental psychological makeup

we are all very much alike. We are all basically self-interested crea-

tures who want to live and to live as well as possible. This is the key

to understanding ethics. Ethics arises when people realize what they must do to live well.

Hobbes was the first important modern thinker to provide a

secular, naturalistic basis for ethics. He pointed out that each of us

is enormously better off living in a mutually cooperative society than

we would be if we tried to make it on our own. The benefits of social

living go far beyond companionship: Social cooperation makes it

possible to have schools, hospitals, and highways; houses with elec-

tricity and central heating; airplanes and telephones; newspapers

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A SHORT INTRODUCTION TO MORAL PHILOSOPHY 9

and  books; movies, opera, and bingo; science and agriculture.

Without social cooperation we would lose these benefits and more.

Therefore, it is to the advantage of each of us to do whatever is

necessary to establish and maintain a cooperative society.

But it turns out that a mutually cooperative society can exist

only if we adopt certain rules of behavior—rules that require telling

the truth, keeping our promises, respecting one another’s lives and

property, and so on:

• Without the presumption that people will tell the truth, there

would be no reason for people to pay any attention to what

other people say. Communication would be impossible. And

without communication among its members, society would

collapse.

• Without the requirement that people keep their promises,

there could be no division of labor—workers could not count

on getting paid, retailers could not rely on their agreements

with suppliers, and so on—and the economy would collapse.

There could be no business, no building, no agriculture, no

medicine.

• Without assurances against assault, murder, and theft, no

one could feel secure; everyone would have to be constantly

on guard against everyone else, and social cooperation would

be impossible.

Thus, to obtain the benefits of social living, we must strike a bar-

gain with one another, with each of us agreeing to obey these rules,

provided others do likewise. We must also establish mechanisms for

enforcing these rules—such as legal sanctions and other, less formal

methods of enforcement—so that we can count on one another to obey them. This “social contract” is the basis of morality. Indeed,

morality can be defined as nothing more or less than the set of rules that rational people will agree to obey, for their mutual benefit, provided that other people will obey them as well.

This way of understanding morality has a number of appealing

features. First, it takes the mystery out of ethics and makes it a practi-

cal, down-to-earth business. Living morally is not a matter of blind

obedience to the mysterious dictates of a supernatural being; nor is

it a matter of fidelity to lofty but pointless abstract rules. Instead,  it

is a matter of doing what it takes to make social living possible.

Second, the Social Contract Theory explains why we should

care about ethics—it offers at least a partial response to the problem

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10 T HE RIGHT THING TO DO

of Gyges’s ring. If there is no God to punish us, why should we

bother to do what is “right,” especially when it is not to our advan-

tage? The answer is that it is to our advantage to live in a society where people behave morally—thus, it is rational for us to accept

moral restrictions on our conduct as part of a bargain we make with

other people. We benefit directly from the ethical conduct of others,

and our own compliance with the moral rules is the price we pay to

secure their compliance.

Third, the Social Contract approach gives us a sensible and

mature way of determining what our ethical duties really are. When

“morality” is mentioned, the first thing that pops into many people’s

minds is an attempt to restrict their sex lives. It is unfortunate that

the word morals has come to have such a connotation. The whole purpose of having a system of morality, according to Social Contract

Theory, is to make it possible for people to live their individual lives

in a setting of social cooperation. Its purpose is not to tell people what kinds of lives they should lead (except insofar as it is necessary

to restrict conduct in the interests of maintaining social coopera-

tion). Therefore, an ethic based on the Social Contract would have

little interest in what people do in their bedrooms.

Finally, we may note again that the Social Contract Theory

assumes relatively little about human nature. It treats human beings

as self-interested creatures and does not assume that they are naturally

altruistic, even to the slightest degree. One of the theory’s charms is

that it can reach the conclusion that we ought, often, to behave altru- istically, without assuming that we are naturally altruistic. We want to live as well as possible, and moral obligations are created as we band

together with other people to form the cooperative societies that are

necessary for us to achieve this fundamentally self-interested goal.

Altruism and Self-Interest Are people essentially self-interested? Although the Social Contract

Theory continues to attract supporters, not many philosophers and psy-

chologists today would accept Hobbes’s egoistic view of human nature.

It seems evident that humans have at least some altruistic feelings, if only for their family and friends. We have evolved as social creatures just as

surely as we have evolved as creatures with legs—caring for our kin and

members of our local group is as natural for us as walking.

If humans do have some degree of natural altruism, does this

have any significance for morals? Hume thought so. Hume agreed with

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A SHORT INTRODUCTION TO MORAL PHILOSOPHY 11

Hobbes that our moral opinions are expressions of our feelings. In

1739, when he invited his readers to consider “willful murder” and see

if they could find that “matter of fact” called “vice,” Hume concluded:

You can never fi nd it, till you turn your refl exion into your own

breast, and fi nd a sentiment of [disapproval], which arises in you,

towards this action. Here is a matter of fact; but ’tis the object

of feeling. . . . It lies in yourself, not in the object. So that when

you pronounce any action or character to be vicious, you mean

nothing, but that from the constitution of your nature you have a

feeling or sentiment of blame from the contemplation of it.

And what, exactly, is “the constitution of our nature”? Of course, it

is part of our nature to care about ourselves and our own welfare.

But Hume added that we also have “ social sentiments”—feelings that connect us with other people and make us concerned about their

welfare. That is why, Hume said, we measure right and wrong by

“the true interests of mankind”:

In all determinations of morality, this circumstance of public util-

ity is ever principally in view; and wherever disputes arise, either in

philosophy or common life, concerning the bounds of duty, the

question cannot, by any means, be decided with greater certainty

than by ascertaining, on any side, the true interests of mankind.

This view came to be known as Utilitarianism. In modern moral

philosophy, it is the chief alternative to the Social Contract Theory.

Utilitarianism Utilitarians believe that one principle sums up all of our moral

duties. The precept is that we should always do whatever will produce the greatest possible balance of happiness over unhappiness for everyone who will be affected by our action. This “principle of utility” is deceptively simple. It is actually a combination of three ideas: First, in determining what

to do, we should be guided by the expected consequences of our

actions—we should do whatever will have the best consequences.

Second, in determining which consequences are best, we should

give the greatest possible weight to the happiness or unhappiness

that would be caused—we should do whatever will cause the most

happiness or the least unhappiness. And finally, the principle of

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12 T HE RIGHT THING TO DO

utility assumes that each individual’s happiness is equally as impor-

tant as anyone else’s.

Although Hume expressed the basic idea of Utilitarianism, two

other philosophers elaborated it in greater detail. Jeremy Bentham,

an Englishman who lived in the late 18 th

and early 19 th

centuries, was

the leader of a group of philosophical radicals who aimed to reform

the laws of Britain along utilitarian lines. This group was remarkably

successful in advancing such causes as prison reform and restric-

tions on the use of child labor. John Stuart Mill, the son of one of

Bentham’s original followers, gave the theory its most popular and

influential defense in his book Utilitarianism, published in 1861. The Utilitarian movement attracted critics from the start. It was

an easy target because it ignored conventional religious notions. The

point of morality, according to the Utilitarians, had nothing to do

with obeying God or gaining credit in Heaven. Rather, the point was

just to make life in this world as comfortable and happy as possible.

So some critics condemned Utilitarianism as a godless doctrine.

To  this Mill replied:

[T]he question depends upon what idea we have formed of the

moral character of the Deity. If it be a true belief that God de-

sires, above all things, the happiness of his creatures, and that

this was his purpose in their creation, utility is not only not a

godless doctrine, but more profoundly religious than any other.

Utilitarianism was also an easy target because it was (and still is)

a subversive theory, in that it turned many traditional moral ideas upside down. Bentham argued, for example, that the purpose of the

criminal justice system cannot be understood in the traditional way

as “paying back” wrongdoers for their wicked deeds—that only piles

misery upon misery. Instead, the social response to crime should be

threefold: to identify and deal with the causes of criminal behavior;

where possible, to reform individual lawbreakers and make them

into productive citizens; and to “punish” people only insofar as it

is necessary to deter others from committing similar crimes. Or, to

take a different example, by insisting that everyone’s happiness is

equally important, the Utilitarians offended various elitist notions

of group superiority. According to the Utilitarian standard, neither

race, sex, nor social class makes a difference to one’s moral status.

Mill himself wrote a book on The Subjection of Women that became a classic of the 19

th century suffragist movement.

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A SHORT INTRODUCTION TO MORAL PHILOSOPHY 13

Finally, Utilitarianism was controversial because it had no use

for “absolute” moral rules. The Utilitarians regarded the traditional

rules—against killing, lying, breaking one’s promises, and so on—as

“rules of thumb,” useful because following them will generally be for

the best. But they are not absolute—whenever breaking such a rule

will have better results for everyone concerned, the rule should be

broken. The rule against killing, for example, might be suspended

in the case of voluntary euthanasia for someone dying of a painful

illness. Moreover, the Utilitarians regarded some traditional rules as

dubious, even as rules of thumb. For example, Christian moralists

had traditionally said that masturbation is evil because it violates the

Natural Law; but from the point of view of the Principle of Utility, it

appears to be harmless. A more serious matter is the traditional reli-

gious condemnation of homosexuality, which has resulted in misery

for countless people. Utilitarianism implies that if an activity makes

people happy, without anyone being harmed, it cannot be wrong.

But it is one thing to describe a moral view; it is another thing

to justify it. Utilitarianism says that our moral duty is to “promote the

general happiness.” Why should we do that? How can the challenge

of Gyges’s ring be answered? As Mill puts it:

I feel that I am bound not to rob or murder, betray or deceive;

but why am I bound to promote the general happiness? If my

own happiness lies in something else, why may I not give that the

preference?

Aside from the “external sanctions” of law and public opinion, Mill

thinks there is only one possible reason for accepting this or any

other moral standard. The “internal sanction” of morality must

always be “a feeling in our minds,” regardless of what sort of ethic

this feeling endorses. The kind of morality we accept will, therefore,

depend on the nature of our feelings: If human beings have “social

feelings,” then Mill says that utilitarian morality will be the natural

standard for them:

The fi rm foundation [of utilitarian morality] is that of the social

feelings of mankind—the desire to be in unity with our fellow

creatures, which is already a powerful principle in human nature,

and happily one of those which tend to become stronger, even

without express inculcation, from the infl uences of advancing

civilization.

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14 T HE RIGHT THING TO DO

Impartiality Utilitarianism, as we have seen, has implications that are at odds with

traditional morality. Much the same could be said about the Social

Contract Theory. In most of the practical matters that have been

mentioned—punishment, racial discrimination, women’s rights,

euthanasia, homosexuality—the two theories have similar implica-

tions. But there is one matter on which they differ dramatically.

Utilitarians believe that we have a very extensive moral duty to help

other people. Social Contract theorists deny this.

Suppose, for example, you are thinking of spending $1000 for

a new living room carpet. Should you do this? What are the alterna-

tives? One alternative is to give the money to an agency such as the

United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF). Each year millions of

third-world children die of easily preventable diseases, because there

isn’t enough money to provide the vitamin-A capsules, antibiotics,

and oral rehydration treatments they need. By giving the money to

UNICEF, and making do a while longer with your old carpet, you

could provide much-needed medical care for dozens of children.

From the point of view of utility—seeking the best overall outcome

for everyone concerned—there is no doubt you should give the

money to UNICEF. Obviously, the medicine will help the kids a lot

more than the new rug will help you.

But from the point of view of the Social Contract, things

look very different. If morality rests on an agreement between

people—remember, an agreement they enter into to promote their own interests —what would the agreement say about helping other people? Certainly, we would want the contract to impose a duty not to harm

other people, even strangers. Each of us would obviously benefit

from that. And it might be in our best interests to accept a mutual

obligation to provide aid to others when it is easy and convenient to

do so. But would rational people accept a general duty to provide

virtually unlimited aid to strangers, even at great cost to themselves?

From the standpoint of self-interest, that sounds crazy. Jan Narveson,

a contract theorist, writes in his book Moral Matters (1993):

[M]orals, if they are to be rational, must amount to agreements

among people—people of all kinds, each pursuing his or her

own interests, which are various and do not necessarily include

much concern for others and their interests. But people . . . have

a broad repertoire of powers including some that can make them

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A SHORT INTRODUCTION TO MORAL PHILOSOPHY 15

exceedingly dangerous, as well as others that can make them very

helpful. This gives us reason to agree with each other that we will

refrain from harming others in the pursuit of our interests, to

respect each other’s property and grant extensive civil rights, but

not necessarily to go very far out of our way to be very helpful to

those we don’t know and may not particularly care for. . . .

Unlike many philosophers who prefer to keep things abstract,

Narveson is good about spelling out the implications of his view in

a way that leaves no room for misunderstanding:

What about parting with the means for making your sweet little

daughter’s birthday party a memorable one, in order to keep a

dozen strangers alive on the other side of the world? Is this some-

thing you are morally required to do? Indeed not. She may well

matter to you more than they. This illustrates again the fact that people do not “count equally” for most of us. Normal people care more about some people than others, and build their very lives

around those carings.

Which view is correct? Do we have a moral duty to provide

extensive aid to strangers, or not? Both views appeal ultimately to

our emotions. A striking feature of Narveson’s argument is its appeal

to the fact that we care more for some people than others. This is certainly true: As he says, we care more for our own children than

for “strangers on the other side of the world.” But does this really

mean that I may choose some trivial benefit for my children over

the very lives of the strangers? Suppose there are two buttons on my

desk at this moment, and by pressing button A, I can provide my

son with a nice party; by pressing B, I can save the lives of a dozen

strangers. Is it really all right for me to press A, just because I “care

more” for my son? Mill agrees that the issue must be decided on

the basis of feelings (how else could it be?), but for him it is not

these small-scale personal feelings that have the final say. Instead,

it is one’s “conscientious feelings”—the feelings that prevail after

everything has been thought through—that finally determine one’s

obligations. Mill assumes that we cannot, when we are thoughtful

and reflective, approve of pushing button A.

However, some contemporary Utilitarians have argued that the

matter need not be left to the uncertainties of individual feeling. It

may be true, they say, that we all care more for ourselves, our family,

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16 T HE RIGHT THING TO DO

and our friends than we care for strangers. But we have rational capac-

ities as well as feelings, and if we think objectively about the matter,

we will realize that other people are no different. Others, even strang-

ers, also care about themselves, their families, and their friends, in

the same way that we do. Their needs and interests are comparable

to our own. In fact, there is nothing of this general sort that makes anyone different from anyone else —and if we are in all relevant respects similar to one another, then there is no justification for anyone taking his

or her own interests to be more important. Peter Singer, a utilitarian

philosopher, writes in his book How Are We to Live? (1995):

Reason makes it possible for us to see ourselves in this way. . . .

I am able to see that I am just one being among others, with

interests and desires like others. I have a personal perspective on

the world, from which my interests are at the front and center of

the stage, the interests of my family and friends are close behind,

and the interests of strangers are pushed to the back and sides.

But reason enables me to see that others have similarly subjective

perspectives, and that from “the point of view of the universe” my

perspective is no more privileged than theirs. Thus my ability to

reason shows me the possibility of detaching myself from my own

perspective, and shows me what the universe might look like if

I had no personal perspective.

So, from an objective viewpoint, each of us must acknowledge

that our own perspective—our own particular set of needs, interests,

likes, and dislikes—is only one among many and has no special status.

Kant The idea of impartiality is also central to the third major alternative

in modern moral philosophy, the system of ethical ideas devised by

the great German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). Like

the Social Contract theorists and the Utilitarians, Kant sought to

explain ethics without appealing to divine commands or “moral

facts.” Kant’s solution was to see morality as a product of “pure

reason.” Just as we must do some things because of our desires —for example, because I desire to go to a concert, I must buy a ticket—the

moral law is binding on us because of our reason. Like the Utilitarians, Kant believed that morality can be

summed up in one ultimate principle, from which all our duties

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A SHORT INTRODUCTION TO MORAL PHILOSOPHY 17

and obligations are derived. But his version of the “ultimate moral

principle” was very different from the Principle of Utility, because

Kant did not emphasize the outcomes of actions. What was impor-

tant for him was “doing one’s duty,” and he held that a person’s

duty is not determined by calculating consequences.

Kant called his ultimate moral principle the “Categorical

Imperative.” But he gave this principle two very different formulations.

The first version of the Categorical Imperative, as expressed in his

Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785), goes like this:

Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same

time will that it should become a universal law.

Stated in this way, Kant’s principle summarizes a procedure for decid-

ing whether an act is morally permissible. When you are contemplating

a particular action, you are to ask what rule you would be following

if you were to do it. (This will be the “maxim” of the act.) Then you

are to ask whether you would be willing for that rule to be followed

by everyone all the time. (That would make it a “universal law” in the

relevant sense.) If so, the rule may be followed, and the act is permis-

sible. However, if you would not be willing for everyone to follow the

rule, then you may not follow it, and the act is morally impermissible.

This explains why the Moral Law is binding on us simply by

virtue of our rationality. The first requirement of rationality is that

we be consistent, and it would not be consistent to act on a maxim

that we could not want others to adopt as well. Kant believed, in

addition, that consistency requires us to interpret moral rules as

having no exceptions. For this reason, he endorsed a whole range

of absolute prohibitions, covering everything from lying to suicide.

However, Kant also gave another formulation of the Categori-

cal Imperative. Later in the same book, he said that the ultimate

moral principle may be understood as saying:

So act that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in

that of another, always as an end and never as means only.

What does it mean to say that persons are to be treated as “ends”

and never as a “means only”? Kant gives this example: Suppose you

need money, and so you want a “loan,” but you know you could not

repay it. In desperation, you consider making a false promise (to

repay) in order to trick a friend into giving you the money. May you

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18 T HE RIGHT THING TO DO

do this? Perhaps you need the money for a good purpose—so good,

in fact, that you might convince yourself that the lie would be justi-

fied. Nevertheless, if you lied to your friend, you would merely be

manipulating him and using him “as a means.”

On the other hand, what would it be like to treat your friend

“as an end”? Suppose you told the truth—that you need the money

for a certain purpose but could not repay it. Then your friend could

make up his own mind about whether to let you have it. He could

exercise his own powers of reason, consulting his own values and

wishes, and make a free, autonomous choice. If he did decide to

give the money for this purpose, he would be choosing to make

that purpose his own. Thus, you would not merely be using him as

a means to achieving your goal.

Conclusion Our purpose here is not to reach any firm conclusion about which of

these approaches, if any, is correct. But we may end with an observa-

tion about how that project might be undertaken.

Philosophical ideas are often very abstract, and it is difficult to

see what sort of evidence counts for or against them. It is easy enough

to appreciate, intuitively, the ideas behind each of these theories, but

how do we determine which, if any, is correct? It is a daunting ques-

tion. Faced with this problem, people are tempted to accept or reject

philosophical ideas on the basis of their intuitive appeal—if an idea

sounds good, one may embrace it; or if it rubs one the wrong way,

it may be discarded. But this is hardly a satisfactory way to proceed if

we want to discover the truth. How an idea strikes us is not a reliable

guide, for our “intuitions” may be mistaken.

Happily, there is an alternative. An idea is no better than the

arguments that support it. So, to evaluate a philosophical idea, we

may examine the reasoning behind it. The great philosophers knew

this very well: They did not simply announce their philosophical

opinions; instead, they presented arguments in support of their

views. The leading idea, from the time of Socrates to the present,

has been that truth is discovered by considering the reasons for and

against the various alternatives. The “correct” theory is the one that

has the best arguments on its side. Thus, philosophical thinking

consists, to a large extent, of formulating and assessing arguments.

This is not the whole of philosophy, but it is a big part of it. It is

what makes philosophy a rational enterprise.

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19

CHAPTER 2 S ome Basic Points

about Arguments James Rachels

Philosophy without argument would be a lifeless exercise. What

good would it be to produce a theory if there were no reasons

for thinking it correct? And of what interest is the rejection of

a theory if there are no good reasons for thinking it incorrect?

A philosophical idea is exactly as good as the arguments in its

support.

Therefore, if we want to think clearly about philosophical mat-

ters, we have to learn something about the evaluation of arguments.

We have to learn to distinguish the sound ones from the unsound

ones. This can be a tedious business, but it is indispensable if we

want to discover the truth.

Arguments In ordinary English, the word argument often means a fight, and there is a hint of unpleasantness in the word. That is not the way the

word is used here. In the logician’s sense, an argument is a chain of

reasoning designed to prove something. It consists of one or more

premises and a conclusion, together with the claim that the conclusion follows from the premises. Here is a simple argument. This example is not particularly interesting in itself, but it is short and clear, and

it will help us grasp the main points.

(1) All men are mortal.

Socrates is a man.

Therefore, Socrates is mortal.

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20 T HE RIGHT THING TO DO

The first two statements are the premises; the third statement is the

conclusion; and the word therefore indicates that the conclusion is supposed to follow from the premises.

What does it mean to say that the conclusion “follows

from”  the premises? It means that a certain logical relation exists

between the premises and the conclusion, namely, that if the prem- ises are true, then the conclusion must be true also. (Another way

to put the same point is: The conclusion follows from the premises

if, and only if, it is impossible for the premises to be true and the

conclusion false at the same time.) In example (1), we can see that

the conclusion does follow from the premises. If it is true that all

men are mortal, and Socrates is a man, then it must be true that

Socrates is mortal. (Or, it is impossible for it to be true that all

men are mortal, and for Socrates to be a man, and be false that

Socrates is mortal.)

In example (1), the conclusion follows from the premises, and the premises are in fact true. However, the conclusion of an argu-

ment may follow from the premises even if the premises are not

actually true. Consider this argument:

(2) All people from Georgia are famous.

Jimmy Carter is from Georgia.

Therefore, Jimmy Carter is famous.

Clearly, the conclusion of this argument does follow from

the premises: If it were true that all Georgians were famous, and Jimmy Carter was from Georgia, then it would follow that

Jimmy Carter is famous. This logical relation holds between the

premises and conclusion even though one of the premises is in

fact false.

At this point, logicians customarily introduce a bit of terminol-

ogy. They say that an argument is valid just in case its conclusion follows from its premises. Both of the examples given above are valid

arguments in this technical sense.

In order to be a sound argument, however, two things are nec- essary: The argument must be valid, and its premises must be true. Thus, the argument about Socrates is a sound argument, but the

argument about Jimmy Carter is not sound, because even though it

is valid, its premises are not all true.

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SOME BASIC POINTS ABOUT ARGUMENTS 21

It is important to notice that an argument may be unsound

even though its premises and conclusion are both true. Consider

the following silly example:

(3) The earth has one moon.

John F. Kennedy was assassinated.

Therefore, snow is white.

The premises of this “argument” are both true, and the conclusion

is true as well. Yet it is obviously a bad argument, because it is not

valid—the conclusion does not follow from the premises. The point

is that when we ask whether an argument is valid, we are not asking whether the premises actually are true, or whether the conclusion actually is true. We are only asking whether, if the premises were true, the conclusion would really follow from them.

I have used these trivial examples because they permit us to

make the essential logical points clearly and uncontroversially. But

these points are applicable to the analysis of any argument, trivial

or not. To illustrate, let us consider how these points can be used

to analyze a more important and controversial issue. We will look at

the arguments for Moral Skepticism in some detail.

Moral Skepticism Moral Skepticism is the idea that there is no such thing as objective moral truth. It is not merely the idea that we cannot know the truth about right and wrong. It is the more radical idea that, where ethics

is concerned, “truth” does not exist. The essential point may be put

in several different ways. It may be said that:

• Morality is subjective; it is a matter of how we feel about

things, not a matter of how things are. • Morality is only a matter of opinion, and one person’s opin-

ion is just as good as another’s.

• Values exist only in our minds, not in the world outside us.

However the point is put, the underlying thought is the same: The

idea of “objective moral truth” is only a fiction; in reality, there is

no such thing.

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22 T HE RIGHT THING TO DO

We want to know whether Moral Skepticism is correct. Is the

idea of moral “truth” only an illusion? What arguments can be given

in favor of this idea? In order to determine whether it is correct, we

need to ask what arguments can be given for it and whether those

arguments are sound.

The Cultural Differences Argument. One argument for Moral Skepticism might be based on the observation that in different cul-

tures people have different ideas concerning right and wrong. For

example, in traditional Eskimo society, infanticide was thought to

be morally acceptable—if a family already had too many children,

a new baby might have been left to die in the snow. In our own

society, however, this would be considered wrong. There are many

other examples of the same kind. Different cultures have different

moral codes.

Reflecting on such facts, many people have concluded that

there is no such thing as objective right and wrong. Thus, they

advance the following argument:

(4) In some societies, such as among the Eskimos, infanticide is thought to be morally acceptable.

In other societies, such as our own, infanticide is thought to

be morally vile.

Therefore, infanticide is neither objectively right nor

objectively wrong; it is merely a matter of opinion that varies

from culture to culture.

We may call this the “Cultural Differences Argument.” This kind of

argument has been tremendously influential; it has persuaded many

people to be skeptical of the whole idea of “moral truth.” But is it

a sound argument? We may ask two questions about it: First, are the premises true, and second, does the conclusion really follow from

them? If the answer to either question is no, then the argument

must be rejected. In this case, the premises seem to be correct—

there have been many cultures in which infanticide was accepted.

Therefore, our attention must focus on the second matter: Is the

argument valid? To figure this out, we may begin by noting that the premises

concern what people believe. In some societies, people think infanticide is all right. In others, people believe it is immoral. The conclusion,

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SOME BASIC POINTS ABOUT ARGUMENTS 23

however, concerns not what people believe, but whether infanticide

really is immoral. The problem is that this sort of conclusion does not follow from those sorts of premises. It does not follow, from the

mere fact that people have different beliefs about something, that

there is no “truth” in the matter. Therefore, the Cultural Differences

Argument is not valid.

To make this point clearer, consider this analogous argument:

(5) In some societies, the world is thought to be fl at.

In other societies, the world is thought to be round.

Therefore, objectively speaking, the world is neither fl at nor

round. It is merely a matter of opinion that varies from cul-

ture to culture.

Clearly, this argument is not valid. We cannot conclude that the world is shapeless simply because not everyone agrees what shape it

has. But exactly the same can be said about the Cultural Differences

Argument: We cannot validly move from premises about what peo-

ple believe to a conclusion about what is so, because people—even

whole societies—may be wrong. The world has a definite shape, and

those who think it is flat are mistaken. Similarly, infanticide might

be objectively wrong (or not wrong), and those who think differently

might be mistaken. Therefore, the Cultural Differences Argument is

not valid, and so it provides no legitimate support for the idea that

“moral truth” is only an illusion.

There are two common reactions to this analysis. These reac-

tions illustrate traps that people often fall into.

1. The first reaction goes like this: Many people find the con- clusion of the Cultural Differences Argument very appealing. This

makes it hard for them to believe that the argument is invalid—

when the argument is shown to be fallacious, they tend to respond:

“But right and wrong really are only matters of opinion!” They make the mistake of thinking that if we reject an argument, we are

somehow impugning the truth of its conclusion. But that is not so.

Remember example (3) above; it illustrates how an argument may

have a true conclusion and still be a bad argument. If an argument

is unsound, then it fails to provide any reason for thinking the

conclusion is true. The conclusion may still be true—that remains

an open question—but the point is just that the unsound argument

gives it no support.

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24 T HE RIGHT THING TO DO

2. One may object that it is unfair to compare morality with an obviously objective matter like the shape of the earth, because

we can prove what shape the earth has by scientific methods.

Therefore, we know that the flat-earthers are simply wrong. But

morality is different. There is no way to prove that a moral opinion

is true or false.

This objection misses the point. The Cultural Differences

Argument tries to derive the skeptical conclusion about morality from a certain set of facts, namely, the facts about cultural disagreements. This objection suggests that the conclusion might be derived from

a different set of facts, namely, facts about what is and what is not provable. It suggests, in effect, a different argument, which might

be formulated like this:

(6) If infanticide (or anything else, for that matter) is objectively right or wrong, then it should be possible to prove that it is right or wrong.

But it is not possible to prove that infanticide is right or

wrong.

Therefore, infanticide is neither objectively right nor objec-

tively wrong. It is merely a matter of opinion that varies from

culture to culture.

This argument is fundamentally different from the Cultural Differences

Argument, even though the two arguments have the same conclusion.

They are different because they appeal to different considerations in

trying to prove that conclusion—in other words, they have different

premises. Therefore, the question of whether argument (6) is sound

is separate from the question of whether the Cultural Differences

Argument is sound. The Cultural Differences Argument is not valid

(and, therefore, is not sound), for the reason given above.

We should emphasize the importance of keeping arguments separate. It is easy to slide from one argument to another without realizing what one is doing. It is easy to think that if moral judgments

are “unprovable,” then the Cultural Differences Argument is

strengthened. But it is not. Argument (6) merely introduces a dif-

ferent set of issues. It is important to pin down an argument and

evaluate it as carefully as possible, before moving on to different considerations.

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SOME BASIC POINTS ABOUT ARGUMENTS 25

The Provability Argument. Now let us consider in more detail the question of whether it is possible to prove a moral judgment true or

false. The following argument, which we might call the “Provability

Argument,” is a more general form of argument (6):

(7) If there were any such thing as objective truth in ethics, we should be able to prove that some moral opinions are true

and others false.

But in fact we cannot prove which moral opinions are true

and which are false.

Therefore, there is no such thing as objective truth in ethics.

Once again, we have an argument with a certain superficial

appeal. But are the premises true? And does the conclusion

really follow from them? It seems that the conclusion does fol-

low. Therefore, the crucial question will be whether the premises

are in fact true.

The general claim that moral judgments can’t be proven sounds right: Anyone who has ever argued about a matter like abortion

knows how frustrating it can be to try to “prove” that one’s point

of view is correct. However, if we inspect this claim more closely, it

turns out to be questionable.

Suppose we consider a matter that is simpler than abortion.

A student says that a test given by a teacher was unfair. This is

clearly a moral judgment—fairness is a basic moral value. Can the

student prove the test was unfair? She might point out that the test

was so long that not even the best students could complete it in

the time allowed (and the test was to be graded on the assumption

that it should be completed). Moreover, the test covered trivial

matters while ignoring matters the teacher had stressed as impor-

tant. And finally, the test included questions about some matters

that were not covered in either the assigned readings or the class

discussions.

Suppose all this is true. And further suppose that the

teacher, when asked to explain, has no defense to offer. (In fact,

the teacher seems confused about the whole thing and doesn’t

seem to have any idea what he was doing.) Now, hasn’t the student

proved the test was unfair? What more in the way of proof could

we possibly want?

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26 T HE RIGHT THING TO DO

It is easy to think of other examples that make the same point:

• Jones is a bad man. To prove this, one might point out that Jones is a habitual liar; he manipulates people; he cheats

when he thinks he can get away with it; he is cruel to other

people; and so on.

• Dr. Smith is irresponsible. She bases her diagnoses on superfi- cial considerations; she drinks Budweiser before performing

delicate surgery; she refuses to listen to other doctors’ advice;

and so on.

• A certain used-car salesman is unethical. He conceals defects in his cars; he takes advantage of poor people by pressuring

them into paying high prices for cars he knows are defective;

he runs false advertisements on the web; and so on.

The point is that we can, and often do, back up our ethical judg-

ments with good reasons. Thus, it does not seem right to say that

they are all unprovable, as though they were nothing more than

“mere opinions.” If a person has good reasons for his judgments,

then he is not merely giving “his opinion.” On the contrary, he may be making a judgment which any reasonable person would have to

agree with.

If we can sometimes give good reasons for our moral judg-

ments, what accounts for the persistent impression that they are

“unprovable”? There are two reasons why the Provability Argument

appears better than it is.

First, there is a tendency to focus attention only on the most

difficult moral issues. The question of abortion, for example, is

an enormously difficult and complicated matter. If we think only

of questions like this, it is easy to believe that “proof” in ethics is impossible. The same could be said of the sciences. There are many

complicated matters that physicists cannot agree on; if we focused

our attention entirely on them, we might conclude that there is no “proof” in physics. But, of course, there are many simpler matters in

physics that can be proven and about which all competent physicists

agree. Similarly, in ethics, there are many matters far simpler than

abortion, about which all reasonable people must agree.

Second, it is easy to confuse two matters that are really very

different:

1. Proving an opinion to be correct

2. Persuading someone to accept your proof

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SOME BASIC POINTS ABOUT ARGUMENTS 27

Suppose you are discussing a moral issue with a friend. You have

perfectly cogent reasons in support of your position, while he has no

good reasons on his side. Still, he refuses to accept your logic and

continues to insist that he is right. This is a common, if frustrating,

experience. You may be tempted to conclude that it is impossible to

prove you are right. But this would be a mistake. Your proof may be

impeccable; the trouble may be that your friend is being stubborn.

(Of course, that is not the only possible explanation of what is going on, but it is one possible explanation.) The same thing can hap-

pen in any sort of discussion. You may be arguing about intelligent

design versus evolution, and the other person may be unreasonable.

But that does not necessarily mean that something is wrong with

your arguments. Something may be wrong with the other person.

Conclusion We have examined two of the most important arguments in support

of Moral Skepticism and seen that these arguments are no good.

Moral Skepticism might still turn out to be true, but if so, then

other, better arguments will have to be found. Provisionally, at least,

we have to conclude that Moral Skepticism is not nearly as plausible

as we might have thought.

The purpose of this exercise, however, was to illustrate the

process of evaluating philosophical arguments. We may summarize

the main points like this:

1. Arguments are offered to provide support for a theory or

idea; a philosophical theory may be regarded as acceptable

only if there are sound arguments in its favor.

2. An argument is sound only if its premises are true and the

conclusion follows logically from them.

(a) A conclusion “follows from” the premises just in case the

following is so: If the premises were true, then the con- clusion would have to be true also. (An alternative way

of saying the same thing: A conclusion follows from the

premises just in case it is impossible for the premises to be

true and the conclusion false at the same time.)

(b) A conclusion can follow from premises even if those

premises are in fact false.

(c) A conclusion can be true and yet not follow from a given

set of premises.

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28 T HE RIGHT THING TO DO

3. Therefore, in evaluating an argument, we ask two separate questions: Are the premises true? and Does the conclusion

follow from them?

4. It is important to avoid two common mistakes. We should be

careful to keep arguments separate, and not slide from one to

the other, thereby confusing different issues. And, we should

not think an argument stronger than it is simply because we

happen to agree with its conclusion. Moreover, we should

remember that, if an argument is unsound, that does not

mean the conclusion must be false—it only means that this argument does nothing to show that the conclusion is true.

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29

CHAPTER 3 Utilitarianism

John Stuart Mill

In the history of moral philosophy, the name of John Stuart Mill

(1806–1873) is inevitably linked with that of Jeremy Bentham (1748–

1832). Few philosophers have combined theory and practice as suc-

cessfully as Bentham. A wealthy Londoner, he studied law but never

practiced, instead devoting himself to writing and working for social

reform. He became the leader of a group of philosophical radicals

known as the Benthamites, who campaigned for causes like prison

reform and restrictions on the use of child labor. Bentham was an

effective member of the British establishment, and almost all the

Benthamites’ legislative proposals eventually became law.

Bentham was convinced that both law and morals must be based

on a realistic, nonsupernatural conception of human beings. The first

sentence of his greatest work, The Principles of Morals and Legislation, declares: “Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two

sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. ” Some things give us pleasure, and others cause us pain. This fundamental fact explains why we behave

as we do—we seek pleasure and avoid pain—and it explains why we

judge some things to be good and other things to be evil. Therefore,

he reasoned, morality must consist in trying to bring about as much

pleasure as possible, while striving to minimize pain. This ultimate

moral principle, the Principle of Utility, requires us to always choose

the action or social policy that provides the most happiness for all.

One of Bentham’s followers was James Mill, a distinguished

Scottish philosopher, historian, and economist. James Mill’s son, John

Stuart, would become the leading advocate of utilitarian moral theory

for the next generation. James Mill, in fact, educated his son with this

in mind. He had the boy studying Greek and Latin at age 3, and  by

From John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism (1861).

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30 T HE RIGHT THING TO DO

the time he entered his teens, John Stuart was already mastering the

blend of subjects that the British call “political economy.” He was

26 when Bentham died, and he knew the older man well. He was

not, however, merely a follower of the master. Mill became more

accomplished than Bentham, contributing to subjects that Bentham

barely knew, such as the philosophy of science and the foundations

of mathematical knowledge.

Unlike Bentham, the Mills were not wealthy, and John Stuart

earned his living in the office of the East India Company, as had his

father. In 1830, he met and fell in love with Harriet Taylor, who, alas,

was married with three children. Harriet was faithful to her husband

until he died in 1849. Two years later, she and Mill married. With

Harriet as his partner, Mill became a leader in the women’s rights

movement and published The Subjection of Women in 1869. The following excerpts are from Mill’s book Utilitarianism, in

which he develops some of the basic ideas of utilitarian moral theory.

II. What Utilitarianism Is .  .  .  The creed which accepts as the foundation of morals, Utility,

or the Greatest Happiness Principle, holds that actions are right in

proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to

produce the reverse of happiness. By happiness is intended pleasure,

and the absence of pain; by unhappiness, pain, and the privation of

pleasure. To give a clear view of the moral standard set up by the

theory, much more requires to be said; in particular, what things

it includes in the ideas of pain and pleasure; and to what extent

this is left an open question. But these supplementary explanations

do not affect the theory of life on which this theory of morality is

grounded—namely, that pleasure, and freedom from pain, are the

only things desirable as ends; and that all desirable things (which

are as numerous in the utilitarian as in any other scheme) are desir-

able either for the pleasure inherent in themselves, or as means to

the promotion of pleasure and the prevention of pain.

Now, such a theory of life excites in many minds, and among

them in some of the most estimable in feeling and purpose, inveter-

ate dislike. To suppose that life has (as they express it) no higher

end than pleasure—no better and nobler object of desire and

pursuit—they designate as utterly mean and grovelling; as a doc-

trine worthy only of swine, to whom the followers of Epicurus were,

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UTILITARIANISM 31

at a very early period, contemptuously likened; and modern holders

of the doctrine are occasionally made the subject of equally polite

comparisons by its German, French, and English assailants.

When thus attacked, the Epicureans have always answered,

that it is not they, but their accusers, who represent human nature

in a degrading light; since the accusation supposes human beings

to be capable of no pleasures except those of which swine are

capable. If this supposition were true, the charge could not be

gainsaid, but would then be no longer an imputation; for if the

sources of pleasure were precisely the same to human beings and

to swine, the rule of life which is good enough for the one would

be good enough for the other. The comparison of the Epicurean

life to that of beasts is felt as degrading, precisely because a beast’s

pleasures do not satisfy a human being’s conceptions of happi-

ness. Human beings have faculties more elevated than the animal

appetites, and when once made conscious of them, do not regard

anything as happiness which does not include their gratification.

I do not, indeed, consider the Epicureans to have been by any

means faultless in drawing out their scheme of consequences from

the utilitarian principle. To do this in any sufficient manner, many

Stoic, as well as Christian elements require to be included. But

there is no known Epicurean theory of life which does not assign

to the pleasures of the intellect, of the feelings and imagination,

and of the moral sentiments, a much higher value as pleasures

than to those of mere sensation. It must be admitted, however,

that utilitarian writers in general have placed the superiority of

mental over bodily pleasures chiefly in the greater permanency,

safety, uncostliness, etc. of the former—that is, in their circum-

stantial advantages rather than in their intrinsic nature. And on all

these points utilitarians have fully proved their case; but they might

have taken the other, and, as it may be called, higher ground,

with entire consistency. It is quite compatible with the principle

of utility to recognise the fact, that some kinds of pleasure are more desirable and more valuable than others. It would be absurd

that while, in estimating all other things, quality is considered as

well as quantity, the estimation of pleasures should be supposed to

depend on quantity alone.

If I am asked, what I mean by difference of quality in pleasures,

or what makes one pleasure more valuable than another, merely

as a pleasure, except its being greater in amount, there is but one

possible answer. Of two pleasures, if there be one to which all or

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32 T HE RIGHT THING TO DO

almost all who have experience of both give a decided preference,

irrespective of any feeling of moral obligation to prefer it, that is

the more desirable pleasure. If one of the two is, by those who are

competently acquainted with both, placed so far above the other

that they prefer it, even though knowing it to be attended with

a greater amount of discontent, and would not resign it for any

quantity of the other pleasure which their nature is capable of, we

are justified in ascribing to the preferred enjoyment a superiority in

quality, so far outweighing quantity as to render it, in comparison,

of small account.

Now it is an unquestionable fact that those who are equally

acquainted with, and equally capable of appreciating and enjoying,

both, do give a most marked preference to the manner of existence

which employs their higher faculties. Few human creatures would

consent to be changed into any of the lower animals, for a promise

of the fullest allowance of a beast’s pleasures; no intelligent human

being would consent to be a fool, no instructed person would be

an ignoramus, no person of feeling and conscience would be self-

ish and base, even though they should be persuaded that the fool,

the dunce, or the rascal is better satisfied with his lot than they are

with theirs. They would not resign what they possess more than he,

for the most complete satisfaction of all the desires which they have

in common with him. If they ever fancy they would, it is only in

cases of unhappiness so extreme, that to escape from it they would

exchange their lot for almost any other, however undesirable in

their own eyes. A being of higher faculties requires more to make

him happy, is capable probably of more acute suffering, and is cer-

tainly accessible to it at more points, than one of an inferior type;

but in spite of these liabilities, he can never really wish to sink into

what he feels to be a lower grade of existence. We may give what

explanation we please of this unwillingness; we may attribute it to

pride, a name which is given indiscriminately to some of the most

and to some of the least estimable feelings of which mankind are

capable; we may refer it to the love of liberty and personal inde-

pendence, an appeal to which was with the Stoics one of the most

effective means for the inculcation of it; to the love of power, or

to the love of excitement, both of which do really enter into and

contribute to it: but its most appropriate appellation is a sense of

dignity, which all human beings possess in one form or other, and

in some, though by no means in exact, proportion to their higher

faculties, and which is so essential a part of the happiness of those

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UTILITARIANISM 33

in whom it is strong, that nothing which conflicts with it could be,

otherwise than momentarily, an object of desire to them. Whoever

supposes that this preference takes place at a sacrifice of happiness—

that the superior being, in anything like the equal circumstances,

is not happier than the inferior—confounds the two very different

ideas, of happiness, and content. It is indisputable that the being

whose capacities of enjoyment are low, has the greatest chance of

having them fully satisfied; and a highly endowed being will always

feel that any happiness which he can look for, as the world is con-

stituted, is imperfect. But he can learn to bear its imperfections, if

they are at all bearable; and they will not make him envy the being

who is indeed unconscious of the imperfections, but only because

he feels not at all the good which those imperfections qualify. It is

better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better

to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or

the pig, is of a different opinion, it is because they only know their

own side of the question. The other party to the comparison knows

both sides.

It may be objected, that many who are capable of the higher

pleasures, occasionally, under the influence of temptation, post-

pone them to the lower. But this is quite compatible with a full

appreciation of the intrinsic superiority of the higher. Men often,

from infirmity of character, make their election for the nearer

good, though they know it to be the less valuable; and this no

less when the choice is between two bodily pleasures, than when

it is between bodily and mental. They pursue sensual indulgences

to the injury of health, though perfectly aware that health is the

greater good. It may be further objected, that many who begin

with youthful enthusiasm for everything noble, as they advance in

years sink into indolence and selfishness. But I do not believe that

those who undergo this very common change, voluntarily choose

the lower description of pleasures in preference to the higher.

I believe that before they devote themselves exclusively to the

one, they have already become incapable of the other. Capacity

for the nobler feelings is in most natures a very tender plant,

easily killed, not only by hostile influences, but by mere want

of sustenance; and in the majority of young persons it speedily

dies away if the occupations to which their position in life has

devoted them, and the society into which it has thrown them, are

not favourable to keeping that higher capacity in exercise. Men

lose their high aspirations as they lose their intellectual tastes,

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34 T HE RIGHT THING TO DO

because they have not time or opportunity for indulging them;

and they addict themselves to inferior pleasures, not because they

deliberately prefer them, but because they are either the only

ones to which they have access, or the only ones which they are

any longer capable of enjoying. It may be questioned whether

any one who has remained equally susceptible to both classes of

pleasures, ever knowingly and calmly preferred the lower, though

many, in all ages, have broken down in an ineffectual attempt to

combine both.

From this verdict of the only competent judges, I apprehend

there can be no appeal. On a question which is the best worth hav-

ing of two pleasures, or which of two modes of existence is the most

grateful to the feelings, apart from its moral attributes and from its

consequences, the judgment of those who are qualified by knowl-

edge of both, or, if they differ, that of the majority among them,

must be admitted as final. And there needs be the less hesitation

to accept this judgment respecting the quality of pleasures, since

there is no other tribunal to be referred to even on the question of

quantity. What means are there of determining which is the acutest

of two pains, or the intensest of two pleasurable sensations, except

the general suffrage of those who are familiar with both? Neither

pains nor pleasures are homogeneous, and pain is always heteroge-

neous with pleasure. What is there to decide whether a particular

pleasure is worth purchasing at the cost of a particular pain, except

the feelings and judgment of the experienced? When, therefore,

those feelings and judgment declare the pleasures derived from the

higher faculties to be preferable in kind, apart from the question of intensity, to those of which the animal nature, disjoined from the

higher faculties, is susceptible, they are entitled on this subject to

the same regard.

I have dwelt on this point, as being a necessary part of a perfectly

just conception of Utility or Happiness, considered as the directive

rule of human conduct. But it is by no means an indispensable con-

dition to the acceptance of the utilitarian standard; for that standard

is not the agent’s own greatest happiness, but the greatest amount

of happiness altogether; and if it may possibly be doubted whether a

noble character is always the happier for its nobleness, there can be

no doubt that it makes other people happier, and that the world in

general is immensely a gainer by it. Utilitarianism, therefore, could

only attain its end by the general cultivation of nobleness of charac-

ter, even if each individual were only benefitted by the nobleness of

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UTILITARIANISM 35

others, and his own, so far as happiness is concerned, were a sheer

deduction from the benefit. But the bare enunciation of such an

absurdity as this last, renders refutation superfluous.

According to the Greatest Happiness Principle, as above

explained, the ultimate end, with reference to and for the sake of

which all other things are desirable (whether we are considering our

own good or that of other people), is an existence exempt as far as

possible from pain, and as rich as possible in enjoyments, both in

point of quantity and quality; the test of quality, and the rule for

measuring it against quantity, being the preference felt by those

who, in their opportunities of experience, to which must be added

their habits of self-consciousness and self-observation, are best fur-

nished with the means of comparison. This, being, according to

the utilitarian opinion, the end of human action, is necessarily also

the standard of morality; which may accordingly be defined, the

rules and precepts for human conduct, by the observance of which

an existence such as has been described might be, to the great-

est extent possible, secured to all mankind; and not to them only,

but, so far as the nature of things admits, to the whole sentient

creation.  .  .  .

I must again repeat, what the assailants of utilitarianism seldom

have the justice to acknowledge, that the happiness which forms the

utilitarian standard of what is right in conduct, is not the agent’s

own happiness, but that of all concerned. As between his own hap-

piness and that of others, utilitarianism requires him to be as strictly

impartial as a disinterested and benevolent spectator. In the golden

rule of Jesus of Nazareth, we read the complete spirit of the ethics of

utility. To do as one would be done by, and to love one’s neighbour

as oneself, constitute the ideal perfection of utilitarian morality. As

the means of making the nearest approach to this ideal, utility would

enjoin, first, that laws and social arrangements should place the hap-

piness, or (as speaking practically it may be called) the interest, of

every individual, as nearly as possible in harmony with the interest of

the whole; and secondly, that education and opinion, which have so

vast a power over human character, should so use that power as to

establish in the mind of every individual an indissoluble association

between his own happiness and the good of the whole; especially

between his own happiness and the practice of such modes of con-

duct, negative and positive, as regard for the universal happiness

prescribes: so that not only he may be unable to conceive the pos-

sibility of happiness to himself, consistently with conduct opposed

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36 T HE RIGHT THING TO DO

to the general good, but also that a direct impulse to promote the

general good may be in every individual one of the habitual motives

of action, and the sentiments connected therewith may fill a large

and prominent place in every human being’s sentient existence. If

the impugners of the utilitarian morality represented it to their own

minds in this its true character, I know not what recommendation

possessed by any other morality they could possibly affirm to be

wanting to it: what more beautiful or more exalted developments of

human nature any other ethical system can be supposed to foster, or

what springs of action, not accessible to the utilitarian, such systems

rely on for giving effect to their mandates.  .  .  .

IV. Of What Sort of Proof the Principle of Utility Is Susceptible

It has already been remarked, that questions of ultimate ends do

not admit of proof, in the ordinary acceptation of the term. To be

incapable of proof by reasoning is common to all first principles;

to the first premises of our knowledge, as well as to those of our

conduct. But the former, being matters of fact, may be the subject

of a direct appeal to the faculties which judge of fact—namely, our

senses, and our internal consciousness. Can an appeal be made to

the same faculties on questions of practical ends? Or by what other

faculty is cognizance taken of them?

Questions about ends are, in other words, questions about

what things are desirable. The utilitarian doctrine is, that hap-

piness is desirable, and the only thing desirable, as an end; all

other things being only desirable as means to that end. What

ought to be required of this doctrine—what conditions is it req-

uisite that the doctrine should fulfill—to make good its claim to

be believed?

The only proof capable of being given that an object is visible,

is that people actually see it. The only proof that a sound is audible,

is that people hear it: and so of the other sources of our experience.

In like manner, I apprehend, the sole evidence it is possible to pro-

duce that anything is desirable, is that people do actually desire it. If

the end which the utilitarian doctrine proposes to itself were not, in

theory and in practice, acknowledged to be an end, nothing could

ever convince any person that it was so. No reason can be given

why the general happiness is desirable, except that each person,

so far as he believes it to be attainable, desires his own happiness.

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UTILITARIANISM 37

This,  however, being a fact, we have not only all the proof which the

case admits of, but all which it is possible to require, that happiness

is a good: that each person’s happiness is a good to that person,

and the general happiness, therefore, a good to the aggregate of

all persons. Happiness has made out its title as one of the ends of conduct, and consequently one of the criteria of morality.

But it has not, by this alone, proved itself to be the sole crite-

rion. To do that, it would seem, by the same rule, necessary to show,

not only that people desire happiness, but that they never desire

anything else. Now it is palpable that they do desire things which,

in common language, are decidedly distinguished from happiness.

They desire, for example, virtue, and the absence of vice, no less

really than pleasure and the absence of pain. The desire of virtue

is not as universal, but it is as authentic a fact, as the desire of hap-

piness. And hence the opponents of the utilitarian standard deem

that they have a right to infer that there are other ends of human

action besides happiness, and that happiness is not the standard of

approbation and disapprobation.

But does the utilitarian doctrine deny that people desire virtue,

or maintain that virtue is not a thing to be desired? The very reverse.

It maintains not only that virtue is to be desired, but that it is to

be desired disinterestedly, for itself. Whatever may be the opinion

of utilitarian moralists as to the original conditions by which virtue

is made virtue; however they may believe (as they do) that actions

and dispositions are only virtuous because they promote another

end than virtue; yet this being granted, and it having been decided,

from considerations of this description, what is virtuous, they not only place virtue at the very head of the things which are good as

means to the ultimate end, but they also recognise as a psychologi-

cal fact the possibility of its being, to the individual, a good in itself,

without looking to any end beyond it; and hold, that the mind is

not in a right state, not in a state comfortable to Utility, not in the

state most conducive to the general happiness, unless it does love vir-

tue in this manner—as a thing desirable in itself, even although, in

the individual instance, it should not produce those other desirable

consequences which it tends to produce, and on account of which

it is held to be virtue. This opinion is not, in the smallest degree, a

departure from the Happiness principle. The ingredients of happi-

ness are very various, and each of them is desirable in itself, and not

merely when considered as swelling an aggregate. The principle of

utility does not mean that any given pleasure, as music, for  instance,

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38 T HE RIGHT THING TO DO

or any given exemption from pain, as for example health, are to be

looked upon as a means to a collective something termed happiness,

and to be desired on that account. They are desired and desirable

in and for themselves; besides being means, they are a part of the

end. Virtue, according to the utilitarian doctrine, is not naturally

and originally part of the end, but it is capable of becoming so; and

in those who love it disinterestedly it has become so, and is desired

and cherished, not as a means to happiness, but as a part of their

happiness.

To illustrate this farther, we may remember that virtue is not

the only thing, originally a means, and which if it were not a means

to anything else, would be and remain indifferent, but which by

association with what it is a means to, comes to be desired for itself,

and that too with the utmost intensity. What, for example, shall we

say of the love of money? There is nothing originally more desirable

about money than about any heap of glittering pebbles. Its worth

is solely that of the things which it will buy; the desires for other

things than itself, which it is a means of gratifying. Yet the love of

money is not only one of the strongest moving forces of human life,

but money is, in many cases, desired in and for itself; the desire to

possess it is often stronger than the desire to use it, and goes on

increasing when all the desires which point to ends beyond it, to

be encompassed by it, are falling off. It may be then said truly, that

money is desired not for the sake of an end, but as part of the end.

From being a means to happiness, it has come to be itself a principal

ingredient of the individual’s conception of happiness. The same

may be said of the majority of the great objects of human life—

power, for example, or fame; except that to each of these there is

a certain amount of immediate pleasure annexed, which has at least

the semblance of being naturally inherent in them; a thing which

cannot be said of money. Still, however, the strongest natural attrac-

tion, both of power and of fame, is the immense aid they give to the

attainment of our other wishes; and it is the strong association thus

generated between them and all our objects of desire, which gives to

the direct desire of them the intensity it often assumes, so as in some

characters to surpass in strength all other desires. In these cases the

means have become a part of the end, and a more important part

of it than any of the things which they are means to. What was once

desired as an instrument for the attainment of happiness, has come

to be desired for its own sake. In being desired for its own sake it

is, however, desired as part of happiness. The  person is made, or

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UTILITARIANISM 39

thinks he would be made, happy by its mere possession; and is made

unhappy by failure to obtain it. The desire of it is not a different

thing from the desire of happiness, any more than the love of music,

or the desire of health. They are included in happiness. They are

some of the elements of which the desire of happiness is made up.

Happiness is not an abstract idea, but a concrete whole; and these

are some of its parts. And the utilitarian standard sanctions and

approves their being so. Life would be a poor thing, very ill pro-

vided with sources of happiness, if there were not this provision of

nature, by which things originally indifferent, but conducive to, or

otherwise associated with, the satisfaction of our primitive desires,

become in themselves sources of pleasure more valuable than the

primitive pleasures, both in permanency, in the space of human

existence that they are capable of covering, and even in intensity.

Virtue, according to the utilitarian conception, is a good of

this description. There was no original desire of it, or motive to it,

save its conduciveness to pleasure, and especially to protection from

pain. But through the association thus formed, it may be felt a good

in itself, and desired as such with as great intensity as any other

good; and with this difference between it and the love of money, of

power, or of fame, that all of these may, and often do, render the

individual noxious to the other members of the society to which

he belongs, whereas there is nothing which makes him so much

a blessing to them as the cultivation of the disinterested love of

virtue. And consequently, the utilitarian standard, while it tolerates

and approves those other acquired desires, up to the point beyond

which they would be more injurious to the general happiness than

promotive of it, enjoins and requires the cultivation of the love of

virtue up to the greatest strength possible, as being above all things

important to the general happiness.

It results from the preceding considerations, that there is in real-

ity nothing desired except happiness. Whatever is desired otherwise

than as a means to some end beyond itself, and ultimately to hap-

piness, is desired as itself a part of happiness, and is not desired for

itself until it has become so.

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40

CHAPTER 4 Utilitarianism and Integrity

Bernard Williams

Utilitarianism is the theory that we should always try to maximize

happiness. It is hard to argue against the value of being happy, but

critics are quick to point out that we value other things as well.

Sir Bernard Williams (1929–2003), one of the great critics of

Utilitarianism, held professorships at both Cambridge University and

Oxford University. In this selection, he considers two difficult test

cases for the utilitarian theory.

(1) George, who has just taken his Ph.D. in chemistry, finds it extremely difficult to get a job. He is not very robust in health, which

cuts down the number of jobs he might be able to do satisfactorily.

His wife has to go out to work to support them, which itself causes

a great deal of strain, since they have small children and there are

severe problems about looking after them. The results of all this,

especially on the children, are damaging. An older chemist, who

knows about this situation, says that he can get George a decently

paid job in a certain laboratory, which pursues research into chemi-

cal and biological warfare. George says that he cannot accept this,

since he is opposed to chemical and biological warfare. The older

man replies that he is not too keen on it himself, come to that, but

after all George’s refusal is not going to make the job or the labo-

ratory go away; what is more, he happens to know that if George

refuses the job, it will certainly go to a contemporary of George’s

Excerpted from Bernard Williams, “A Critique of Utilitarianism,” Utilitarianism: For and Against, Cambridge University Press, 1973. Reprinted by permission of Cambridge University Press.

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UTILITARIANISM AND INTEGRITY 41

who is not inhibited by any such scruples and is likely if appointed

to push along the research with greater zeal than George would.

Indeed, it is not merely concern for George and his family, but (to

speak frankly and in confidence) some alarm about this other man’s

excess of zeal, which has led the older man to offer to use his influ-

ence to get George the job. . . . George’s wife, to whom he is deeply

attached, has views (the details of which need not concern us) from

which it follows that at least there is nothing particularly wrong with

research into CBW. What should he do?

(2) Jim finds himself in the central square of a small South American town. Tied up against the wall are a row of twenty Indians,

most terrified, a few defiant, in front of them several armed men in

uniform. A heavy man in a sweat-stained khaki shirt turns out to be the

captain in charge and, after a good deal of questioning of Jim which

establishes that he got there by accident while on a botanical expedi-

tion, explains that the Indians are a random group of the inhabitants

who, after recent acts of protest against the government, are just about

to be killed to remind other possible protestors of the advantages

of not protesting. However, since Jim is an honoured visitor from

another land, the captain is happy to offer him a guest’s privilege of

killing one of the Indians himself. If Jim accepts, then as a special

mark of the occasion, the other Indians will be let off. Of course, if

Jim refuses, then there is no special occasion, and Pedro here will do

what he was about to do when Jim arrived, and kill them all. Jim, with

some desperate recollection of schoolboy fiction, wonders whether if

he got hold of a gun, he could hold the captain, Pedro and the rest

of the soldiers to threat, but it is quite clear from the set-up that noth-

ing of that kind is going to work: any attempt at that sort of thing will

mean that all the Indians will be killed, and himself. The men against

the wall, and the other villagers, understand the situation, and are

obviously begging him to accept. What should he do?

To these dilemmas, it seems to me that utilitarianism replies, in

the first case, that George should accept the job, and in the second,

that Jim should kill the Indian. Not only does utilitarianism give these

answers but, if the situations are essentially as described and there are

no further special factors, it regards them, it seems to me, as obviously the right answers. But many of us would certainly wonder whether, in

(1), that could possibly be the right answer at all; and in the case of (2),

even one who came to think that perhaps that was the answer, might

well wonder whether it was obviously the answer. Nor is it just a question

of the rightness or obviousness of these answers. It is also a question

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42 T HE RIGHT THING TO DO

of what sort of considerations come into finding the answer. A feature

of utilitarianism is that it cuts out a kind of consideration which for

some others makes a difference to what they feel about such cases: a

consideration involving the idea, as we might first and very simply put it,

that each of us is specially responsible for what he does, rather than for what other people do. This is an idea closely connected with the value

of integrity. It is often suspected that utilitarianism, at least in its direct

forms, makes integrity as a value more or less unintelligible. I shall try

to show that this suspicion is correct. Of course, even if that is cor-

rect, it would not necessarily follow that we should reject utilitarianism;

perhaps, as utilitarians sometimes suggest, we should just forget about

integrity, in favour of such things as a concern for the general good.

However, if I am right, we cannot merely do that, since the reason why

utilitarianism cannot understand integrity is that it cannot coherently

describe the relations between a man’s projects and his actions.

Two Kinds of Remoter Effect A lot of what we have to say about this question will be about

the relations between my projects and other people’s projects. But

before we get on to that, we should first ask whether we are assum-

ing too hastily what the utilitarian answers to the dilemmas will be.

In terms of more direct effects of the possible decisions, there does

not indeed seem much doubt about the answer in either case; but

it might be said that in terms of more remote or less evident effects

counterweights might be found to enter the utilitarian scales. Thus

the effect on George of a decision to take the job might be invoked,

or its effect on others who might know of his decision. The pos-

sibility of there being more beneficent labours in the future from

which he might be barred or disqualified, might be mentioned; and

so forth. Such effects—in particular, possible effects on the agent’s

character, and effects on the public at large—are often invoked by

utilitarian writers dealing with problems about lying or promise-

breaking, and some similar considerations might be invoked here.

There is one very general remark that is worth making about

arguments of this sort. The certainty that attaches to these hypothe-

ses about possible effects is usually pretty low; in some cases, indeed,

the hypothesis invoked is so implausible that it would scarcely pass if

it were not being used to deliver the respectable moral answer, as in

the standard fantasy that one of the effects of one’s telling a particu-

lar lie is to weaken the disposition of the world at large to tell the

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UTILITARIANISM AND INTEGRITY 43

truth. The demands on the certainty or probability of these beliefs as

beliefs about particular actions are much milder than they would be

on beliefs favouring the unconventional course. It may be said that

this is as it should be, since the presumption must be in favour of

the conventional course: but that scarcely seems a utilitarian answer, unless utilitarianism has already taken off in the direction of not

applying the consequences to the particular act at all.

Leaving aside that very general point, I want to consider now

two types of effect that are often invoked by utilitarians, and which

might be invoked in connexion with these imaginary cases. The

attitude or tone involved in invoking these effects may sometimes

seem peculiar; but that sort of peculiarity soon becomes familiar in

utilitarian discussions, and indeed it can be something of an achieve-

ment to retain a sense of it.

First, there is the psychological effect on the agent. Our

descriptions of these situations have not so far taken account of

how George or Jim will be after they have taken the one course or

the other; and it might be said that if they take the course which

seemed at first the utilitarian one, the effects on them will be in fact

bad enough and extensive enough to cancel out the initial utilitarian

advantages of that course. Now there is one version of this effect in

which, for a utilitarian, some confusion must be involved, namely

that in which the agent feels bad, his subsequent conduct and rela-

tions are crippled and so on, because he thinks that he has done the wrong thing —for if the balance of outcomes was as it appeared to be before invoking this effect, then he has not (from the utilitarian point of view) done the wrong thing. So that version of the effect,

for a rational and utilitarian agent, could not possibly make any

difference to the assessment of right and wrong. However, perhaps

he is not a thoroughly rational agent, and is disposed to have bad

feelings, whichever he decided to do. Now such feelings, which are

from a strictly utilitarian point of view irrational—nothing, a utilitar-

ian can point out, is advanced by having them—cannot, consistently,

have any great weight in a utilitarian calculation. I shall consider in

a moment an argument to suggest that they should have no weight

at all in it. But short of that, the utilitarian could reasonably say

that such feelings should not be encouraged, even if we accept their

existence, and that to give them a lot of weight is to encourage them.

Or, at the very best, even if they are straightforwardly and without

any discount to be put into the calculation, their weight must be

small: they are after all (and at best) one man’s feelings.

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44 T HE RIGHT THING TO DO

That consideration might seem to have particular force in

Jim’s case. In George’s case, his feelings represent a larger propor-

tion of what is to be weighed, and are more commensurate in char-

acter with other items in the calculation. In Jim’s case, however, his

feelings might seem to be of very little weight compared with other

things that are at stake. There is a powerful and recognizable appeal

that can be made on this point: as that a refusal by Jim to do what

he has been invited to do would be a kind of self-indulgent squea-

mishness. .  .  .  If he does not see [the situation] from a utilitarian

point of view, he will not see his resistance to the invitation, and the

unpleasant feelings he associates with accepting it, just as disagree- able experiences of his; they figure rather as emotional expressions

of a thought that to accept would be wrong. He may be asked, as

by the appeal, to consider whether he is right, and indeed whether

he is fully serious, in thinking that. But the assertion of the appeal,

that he is being self-indulgently squeamish, will not itself answer

that question, or even help to answer it, since it essentially tells him

to regard his feelings just as unpleasant experiences of his, and he

cannot, by doing that, answer the question they pose when they are

precisely not so regarded, but are regarded as indications of what

he thinks is right and wrong. If he does come round fully to the

utilitarian point of view then of course he will regard these feelings

just as unpleasant experiences of his. And once Jim—at least—has

come to see them in that light, there is nothing left for the appeal

to do, since of course his feelings, so regarded, are of virtually no weight at all in relation to the other things at stake. The “squeamish-

ness” appeal is not an argument which adds in a hitherto neglected

consideration. Rather, it is an invitation to consider the situation,

and one’s own feelings, from a utilitarian point of view.

The reason why the squeamishness appeal can be very unset-

tling, and one can be unnerved by the suggestion of self-indulgence

in going against utilitarian considerations, is not that we are utili-

tarians who are uncertain what utilitarian value to attach to our

moral feelings, but that we are partially at least not utilitarians, and

cannot regard our moral feelings merely as objects of utilitarian

value. Because our moral relation to the world is partly given by

such feelings, and by a sense of what we can or cannot “live with,”

to come to regard those feelings from a purely utilitarian point of

view, that is to say, as happenings outside one’s moral self, is to

lose a sense of one’s moral identity; to lose, in the most literal way,

one’s integrity.  .  .  .

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45

CHAPTER 5 The Experience Machine

Robert Nozick

Robert Nozick (1938–2002) was Joseph Pellegrino University

Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University. The following selec-

tion is from his book Anarchy, State, and Utopia, a brilliant and enter- taining defense of minimal government. In this excerpt, Nozick uses

a thought experiment to explore questions about what matters to us

other than what our experiences are like. How we answer these questions will cast light on the ethics of drug use, television watching, and

perhaps even sleeping late.

. . . Suppose there were an experience machine that would give you

any experience you desired. Superduper neuropsychologists could

stimulate your brain so that you would think and feel you were writ-

ing a great novel, or making a friend, or reading an interesting

book. All the time you would be floating in a tank, with electrodes

attached to your brain. Should you plug into this machine for life,

preprogramming your life’s experiences? If you are worried about

missing out on desirable experiences, we can suppose that business

enterprises have researched thoroughly the lives of many others.

You can pick and choose from their large library or smorgasbord of

such experiences, selecting your life’s experiences for, say, the next

two years. After two years have passed, you will have ten minutes

or ten hours out of the tank, to select the experiences of your next two years. Of course, while in the tank you won’t know that you’re

there; you’ll think it’s all actually happening. Others can also plug

Excerpted from Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974). Reprinted by permission of Basic Books, a member of Perseus Books, L.L.C.

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46 T HE RIGHT THING TO DO

in to have the experiences they want, so there’s no need to stay

unplugged to serve them. (Ignore problems such as who will service

the machines if everyone plugs in.) Would you plug in? What else can matter to us, other than how our lives feel from the inside? Nor should you refrain because of the few moments of distress between the

moment you’ve decided and the moment you’re plugged. What’s

a few moments of distress compared to a lifetime of bliss (if that’s

what you choose), and why feel any distress at all if your decision

is the best one? What does matter to us in addition to our experiences? First,

we want to do certain things, and not just have the experience of doing them. In the case of certain experiences, it is only because

first we want to do the actions that we want the experiences of

doing them or thinking we’ve done them. (But why do we want to do the activities rather than merely to experience them?) A

second reason for not plugging in is that we want to be a certain way, to be a certain sort of person. Someone floating in a tank is

an indeterminate blob. There is no answer to the question of what

a person is like who has long been in the tank. Is he courageous,

kind, intelligent, witty, loving? It’s not merely that it’s difficult to

tell; there’s no way he is. Plugging into the machine is a kind of

suicide. It will seem to some, trapped by a picture, that nothing

about what we are like can matter except as it gets reflected in

our experiences. But should it be surprising that what we are is important to us? Why should we be concerned only with how our

time is filled, but not with what we are?

Thirdly, plugging into an experience machine limits us to a

man-made reality, to a world no deeper or more important than

that which people can construct. There is no actual contact with any deeper reality, though the experience of it can be simulated.

Many persons desire to leave themselves open to such contact and

to a plumbing of deeper significance. This clarifies the intensity

of the conflict over psychoactive drugs, which some view as mere

local experience machines, and others view as avenues to a deeper

reality; what some view as equivalent to surrender to the experi-

ence machine, others view as following one of the reasons not to surrender!

We learn that something matters to us in addition to expe-

rience by imagining an experience machine and then realizing

that we would not use it. We can continue to imagine a sequence

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THE EXPERIENCE MACHINE 47

of machines each designed to fill lacks suggested for the earlier

machines. For example, since the experience machine doesn’t meet

our desire to be a certain way, imagine a transformation machine which transforms us into whatever sort of person we’d like to be

(compatible with our staying us). Surely one would not use the trans-

formation machine to become as one would wish, and thereupon

plug into the experience machine! So something matters in addi-

tion to one’s experiences and what one is like. Nor is the reason merely that one’s experiences are unconnected with what one is

like. For the experience machine might be limited to provide only

experiences possible to the sort of person plugged in. Is it that we

want to make a difference in the world? Consider then the result

machine, which produces in the world any result you would produce

and injects your vector input into any joint activity. We shall not

pursue here the fascinating details of these or other machines. What

is most disturbing about them is their living of our lives for us. Is it

misguided to search for particular additional functions beyond the competence of machines to do for us? Perhaps what we desire is

to live (an active verb) ourselves, in contact with reality. (And this,

machines cannot do for us.) Without elaborating on the implications of this, which I believe connect surprisingly with issues about free

will and causal accounts of knowledge, we need merely note the

intricacy of the question of what matters for people other than their experiences. .  .  . 

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48

CHAPTER 6 The Subjectivity of Values

J. L. Mackie

Everyone agrees that ethics is subjective in the sense that people have

their own personal moral beliefs. But in this selection, John L. Mackie

contends that ethics is subjective in a much more radical sense—that,

really, there is no right or wrong.

Consider this analogy: The earth is spherical, and not flat,

because there is this thing—the earth—that has the property of being

spherical. But when someone says abortion is wrong, according to

Mackie, there can be no property of wrongness that inheres in abor-

tion in analogy to how spherical-ness adheres in the earth; there is

just the feeling or belief that abortion is wrong.

In Mackie’s view, the belief that Abraham Lincoln is morally

better than John Wilkes Booth is similar to the cartoon character

Homer Simpson’s belief that syrup is better than jelly. Homer Simpson

might like syrup more than jelly, but he’s not “right” in feeling that

way. Similarly, Mackie thinks, you might approve of the president who

freed the slaves more than you approve of the man who shot him, but

you are not “right” in feeling that way. It’s just how you feel.

John L. Mackie (1917–1981) was born in Australia and taught

at the University of Oxford. This selection is from his book Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (1977).

Moral Scepticism There are no objective values. This is a bald statement of the thesis of this

chapter, but before arguing for it I shall try to clarify and restrict it in ways

that may meet some objections and prevent some misunderstanding.

Excerpted from J. L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong, Penguin, 1977, pp. 15–17, 25–28, 29–31, 34–35, 35–39, 40, 41. Reproduced by permission of Penguin Books, Ltd.

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THE SUBJECTIVITY OF VALUES 49

The statement of this thesis is liable to provoke one of three

very different reactions. Some will think it not merely false but per-

nicious; they will see it as a threat to morality and to everything

else that is worthwhile, and they will find the presenting of such a

thesis in what purports to be a book on ethics paradoxical or even

outrageous. Others will regard it as a trivial truth, almost too obvious

to be worth mentioning, and certainly too plain to be worth much

argument. Others again will say that it is meaningless or empty, that

no real issue is raised by the question whether values are or are not

part of the fabric of the world. But, precisely because there can be

these three different reactions, much more needs to be said.

The claim that values are not objective, are not part of the fab-

ric of the world, is meant to include not only moral goodness, which

might be most naturally equated with moral value, but also other

things that could be more loosely called moral values or disvalues—

rightness and wrongness, duty, obligation, an action’s being rotten

and contemptible, and so on. It also includes non-moral values, nota-

bly aesthetic ones, beauty and various kinds of artistic merit. I shall

not discuss these explicitly, but clearly much the same considerations

apply to aesthetic and to moral values, and there would be at least

some initial implausibility in a view that gave the one a different

status from the other.

Since it is with moral values that I am primarily concerned, the

view I am adopting may be called moral scepticism. But this name is

likely to be misunderstood: “moral scepticism” might also be used as

a name for either of two first order views, or perhaps for an incoher-

ent mixture of the two. A moral sceptic might be the sort of person

who says “All this talk of morality is tripe,” who rejects morality and

will take no notice of it. Such a person may be literally rejecting all

moral judgements; he is more likely to be making moral judgements

of his own, expressing a positive moral condemnation of all that

conventionally passes for morality; or he may be confusing these two

logically incompatible views, and saying that he rejects all morality,

while he is in fact rejecting only a particular morality that is current

in the society in which he has grown up. But I am not at present

concerned with the merits or faults of such a position. These are

first order moral views, positive or negative: the person who adopts

either of them is taking a certain practical, normative, stand. By

contrast, what I am discussing is a second order view, a view about

the status of moral values and the nature of moral valuing, about

where and how they fit into the world. These first and second order

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50 T HE RIGHT THING TO DO

views are not merely distinct but completely independent: one could

be a second order moral sceptic without being a first order one, or

again the other way round. A man could hold strong moral views,

and indeed ones whose content was thoroughly conventional, while

believing that they were simply attitudes and policies with regard to

conduct that he and other people held. Conversely, a man could

reject all established morality while believing it to be an objective

truth that it was evil or corrupt.

With another sort of misunderstanding moral scepticism would

seem not so much pernicious as absurd. How could anyone deny that

there is a difference between a kind action and a cruel one, or that

a coward and a brave man behave differently in the face of danger?

Of course, this is undeniable; but it is not to the point. The kinds

of behaviour to which moral values and disvalues are ascribed are

indeed part of the furniture of the world, and so are the natural,

descriptive, differences between them; but not, perhaps, their differ-

ences in value. It is a hard fact that cruel actions differ from kind

ones, and hence that we can learn, as in fact we all do, to distinguish

them fairly well in practice, and to use the words “cruel” and “kind”

with fairly clear descriptive meanings; but is it an equally hard fact

that actions which are cruel in such a descriptive sense are to be con-

demned? The present issue is with regard to the objectivity specifically

of value, not with regard to the objectivity of those natural, factual,

differences on the basis of which differing values are assigned. .  .  . 

Standards of Evaluation One way of stating the thesis that there are no objective values is

to say that value statements cannot be either true or false. But this

formulation, too, lends itself to misinterpretation. For there are cer-

tain kinds of value statements which undoubtedly can be true or

false, even if, in the sense I intend, there are no objective values.

Evaluations of many sorts are commonly made in relation to agreed

and assumed standards. The classing of wool, the grading of apples,

the awarding of prizes at sheepdog trials, flower shows, skating and

diving championships, and even the marking of examination papers

are carried out in relation to standards of quality or merit which are

peculiar to each particular subject-matter or type of contest, which

may be explicitly laid down but which, even if they are nowhere

explicitly stated, are fairly well understood and agreed upon by those

who are recognized as judges or experts in each particular field.

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THE SUBJECTIVITY OF VALUES 51

Given any sufficiently determinate standards, it will be an objective

issue, a matter of truth and falsehood, how well any particular speci-

men measures up to those standards. Comparative judgements in

particular will be capable of truth and falsehood: it will be a factual

question whether this sheepdog has performed better than that one.

The subjectivist about values, then, is not denying that there

can be objective evaluations relative to standards, and these are as

possible in the aesthetic and moral fields as in any of those just

mentioned. More than this, there is an objective distinction which

applies in many such fields, and yet would itself be regarded as a

peculiarly moral one: the distinction between justice and injustice.

In one important sense of the word it is a paradigm case of injustice

if a court declares someone to be guilty of an offence of which it

knows him to be innocent. More generally, a finding is unjust if it is

at variance with what the relevant law and the facts together require,

and particularly if it is known by the court to be so. More generally

still, any award of marks, prizes, or the like is unjust if it is at variance

with the agreed standards for the contest in question: if one diver’s

performance in fact measures up better to the accepted standards for

diving than another’s, it will be unjust if the latter is awarded higher

marks or the prize. In this way the justice or injustice of decisions

relative to standards can be a thoroughly objective matter, though

there may still be a subjective element in the interpretation or appli-

cation of standards. But the statement that a certain decision is thus

just or unjust will not be objectively prescriptive: in so far as it can be

simply true it leaves open the question whether there is any objective

requirement to do what is just and to refrain from what is unjust,

and equally leaves open the practical decision to act in either way.

Recognizing the objectivity of justice in relation to standards,

and of evaluative judgements relative to standards, then, merely

shifts the question of the objectivity of values back to the standards

themselves. The subjectivist may try to make his point by insisting

that there is no objective validity about the choice of standards.

Yet he would clearly be wrong if he said that the choice of even

the most basic standards in any field was completely arbitrary. The

standards used in sheepdog trials clearly bear some relation to the

work that sheepdogs are kept to do, the standards for grading apples

bear some relation to what people generally want in or like about

apples, and so on. On the other hand, standards are not as a rule

strictly validated by such purposes. The appropriateness of standards

is neither fully determinate nor totally indeterminate in relation to

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52 T HE RIGHT THING TO DO

independently specifiable aims or desires. But however determinate

it is, the objective appropriateness of standards in relation to aims or

desires is no more of a threat to the denial of objective values than

is the objectivity of evaluation relative to standards. In fact it is logi-

cally no different from the objectivity of goodness relative to desires.

Something may be called good simply in so far as it satisfies or is

such as to satisfy a certain desire; but the objectivity of such relations

of satisfaction does not constitute in our sense an objective value.

Hypothetical and Categorical Imperatives We may make this issue clearer by referring to Kant’s distinction

between hypothetical and categorical imperatives, though what

he called imperatives are more naturally expressed as “ought”

statements than in the imperative mood. “If you want X, do Y ” (or “You ought to do Y ”) will be a hypothetical imperative if it is based on the supposed fact that Y is, in the circumstances, the only (or the best) available means to X, that is, on a causal rela- tion between Y and X. The reason for doing Y lies in its causal connection with the desired end, X; the oughtness is contingent upon the desire. But “You ought to do Y ” will be a categorical imperative if you ought to do Y irrespective of any such desire for any end to which Y would contribute, if the oughtness is not thus contingent upon any desire.

A categorical imperative, then, would express a reason for acting

which was unconditional in the sense of not being contingent upon

any present desire of the agent to whose satisfaction the recommended

action would contribute as a means—or more directly: “You ought to

dance,” if the implied reason is just that you want to dance or like

dancing, is still a hypothetical imperative. Now Kant himself held that

moral judgements are categorical imperatives, or perhaps are all appli-

cations of one categorical imperative, and it can plausibly be main-

tained at least that many moral judgements contain a categorically

imperative element. So far as ethics is concerned, my thesis that there

are no objective values is specifically the denial that any such categori-

cally imperative element is objectively valid. The objective values which

I am denying would be action-directing absolutely, not contingently (in

the way indicated) upon the agent’s desires and inclinations.

Another way of trying to clarify this issue is to refer to moral rea-

soning or moral arguments. In practice, of course, such reasoning is

seldom fully explicit: but let us suppose that we could make explicit

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THE SUBJECTIVITY OF VALUES 53

the reasoning that supports some evaluative conclusion, where this

conclusion has some action-guiding force that is not contingent

upon desires or purposes or chosen ends. Then what I am saying

is that somewhere in the input to this argument—perhaps in one

or more of the premisses, perhaps in some part of the form of

the argument—there will be something which cannot be objectively

validated—some premiss which is not capable of being simply true,

or some form of argument which is not valid as a matter of general

logic, whose authority or cogency is not objective, but is constituted

by our choosing or deciding to think in a certain way.

The Claim to Objectivity If I have succeeded in specifying precisely enough the moral values

whose objectivity I am denying, my thesis may now seem to be trivi-

ally true. Of course, some will say, valuing, preferring, choosing, rec-

ommending, rejecting, condemning, and so on, are human activities,

and there is no need to look for values that are prior to and logically

independent of all such activities. There may be widespread agree-

ment in valuing, and particular value-judgements are not in general

arbitrary or isolated: they typically cohere with others, or can be

criticized if they do not, reasons can be given for them, and so on:

but if all that the subjectivist is maintaining is that desires, ends, pur-

poses, and the like figure somewhere in the system of reasons, and

that no ends or purposes are objective as opposed to being merely

intersubjective, then this may be conceded without much fuss.

But I do not think that this should be conceded so easily. As I

have said, the main tradition of European moral philosophy includes

the contrary claim, that there are objective values of just the sort

I have denied.  .  .  . Kant in particular holds that the categorical

imperative is not only categorical and imperative but objectively so:

though a rational being gives the moral law to himself, the law that

he thus makes is determinate and necessary. Aristotle begins the

Nicomachean Ethics by saying that the good is that at which all things aim, and that ethics is part of a science which he calls “politics,”

whose goal is not knowledge but practice; yet he does not doubt that

there can be knowledge of what is the good for man, nor, once he has identified this as well-being or happiness, eudaimonia, that it can be known, rationally determined, in what happiness consists; and it

is plain that he thinks that this happiness is intrinsically desirable,

not good simply because it is desired.  .  .  . Even the sentimentalist

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54 T HE RIGHT THING TO DO

Hutcheson defines moral goodness as “some quality apprehended

in actions, which procures approbation, .  .  .” while saying that the

moral sense by which we perceive virtue and vice has been given to

us (by the Author of nature) to direct our actions. Hume indeed

was on the other side, but he is still a witness to the dominance of

the objectivist tradition, since he claims that when we “see that the

distinction of vice and virtue is not founded merely on the relations

of objects, nor is perceiv’d by reason,” this “wou’d subvert all the

vulgar systems of morality.”  .  .  . 

The prevalence of this tendency to objectify values—and not

only moral ones—is confirmed by a pattern of thinking that we

find in existentialists and those influenced by them. The denial of

objective values can carry with it an extreme emotional reaction, a

feeling that nothing matters at all, that life has lost its purpose. Of

course this does not follow; the lack of objective values is not a good

reason for abandoning subjective concern or for ceasing to want

anything. But the abandonment of a belief in objective values can

cause, at least temporarily, a decay of subjective concern and sense

of purpose. That it does so is evidence that the people in whom

this reaction occurs have been tending to objectify their concerns

and purposes, have been giving them a fictitious external authority.

A claim to objectivity has been so strongly associated with their sub-

jective concerns and purposes that the collapse of the former seems

to undermine the latter as well.

This view, that conceptual analysis would reveal a claim to

objectivity, is sometimes dramatically confirmed by philosophers

who are officially on the other side. Bertrand Russell, for example,

says that “ethical propositions should be expressed [as desires]”; he

defends himself effectively against the charge of inconsistency in

both holding ultimate ethical valuations to be subjective and express-

ing emphatic opinions on ethical questions. Yet at the end he admits:

Certainly there seems to be something more. Suppose, for exam- ple, that someone were to advocate the introduction of bullfi ght-

ing in this country. In opposing the proposal, I should feel, not only that I was expressing my desires, but that my desires in the

matter are right, whatever that may mean. As a matter of argu- ment, I can, I think, show that I am not guilty of any logical in-

consistency in holding to the above interpretation of ethics and

at the same time expressing strong ethical preferences. But in

feeling I am not satisfi ed.

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THE SUBJECTIVITY OF VALUES 55

But he concludes, reasonably enough, with the remark: “I can only

say that, while my own opinions as to ethics do not satisfy me, other

people’s satisfy me still less.”

I conclude, then, that ordinary moral judgements include a

claim to objectivity, an assumption that there are objective values

in just the sense in which I am concerned to deny this. And I

do not think it is going too far to say that this assumption has

been incorporated in the basic, conventional, meanings of moral

terms. Any analysis of the meanings of moral terms which omits

this claim to objective, intrinsic, prescriptivity is to that extent

incomplete.  .  .  .

If second order ethics were confined, then, to linguistic and

conceptual analysis, it ought to conclude that moral values at least

are objective: that they are so is part of what our ordinary moral

statements mean: the traditional moral concepts of the ordinary man

as well as of the main line of western philosophers are concepts of

objective value. But it is precisely for this reason that linguistic and

conceptual analysis is not enough. The claim to objectivity, however

ingrained in our language and thought, is not self- validating. It can

and should be questioned. But the denial of objective values will

have to be put forward not as the result of an analytic approach,

but as an “error theory,” a theory that although most people in mak-

ing moral judgements implicitly claim, among other things, to be

pointing to something objectively prescriptive, these claims are all

false. It is this that makes the name “moral scepticism” appropriate.

But since this is an error theory, since it goes against assump-

tions ingrained in our thought and built into some of the ways in

which language is used, since it conflicts with what is sometimes

called common sense, it needs very solid support. It is not something

we can accept lightly or casually and then quietly pass on. If we are

to adopt this view, we must argue explicitly for it. Traditionally it has

been supported by arguments of two main kinds, which I shall call

the argument from relativity and the argument from queerness, but

these can, as I shall show, be supplemented in several ways.

The Argument from Relativity The argument from relativity has as its premiss the well-known varia-

tion in moral codes from one society to another and from one period

to another, and also the differences in moral beliefs between different

groups and classes within a complex community. Such variation is in

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56 T HE RIGHT THING TO DO

itself merely a truth of descriptive morality, a fact of anthropology

which entails neither first order nor second order ethical views. Yet it

may indirectly support second order subjectivism: radical differences

between first order moral judgements make it difficult to treat those

judgements as apprehensions of objective truths. But it is not the

mere occurrence of disagreements that tells against the objectivity of

values. Disagreement on questions in history or biology or cosmol-

ogy does not show that there are no objective issues in these fields

for investigators to disagree about. But such scientific disagreement

results from speculative inferences or explanatory hypotheses based

on inadequate evidence, and it is hardly plausible to interpret moral

disagreement in the same way. Disagreement about moral codes

seems to reflect people’s adherence to and participation in differ-

ent ways of life. The causal connection seems to be mainly that way

round: it is that people approve of monogamy because they partici-

pate in a monogamous way of life rather than that they participate

in a monogamous way of life because they approve of monogamy. Of

course, the standards may be an idealization of the way of life from

which they arise: the monogamy in which people participate may be

less complete, less rigid, than that of which it leads them to approve.

This is not to say that moral judgements are purely conventional. Of

course there have been and are moral heretics and moral reformers,

people who have turned against the established rules and practices

of their own communities for moral reasons, and often for moral

reasons that we would endorse. But this can usually be understood

as the extension, in ways which, though new and unconventional,

seemed to them to be required for consistency, of rules to which

they already adhered as arising out of an existing way of life. In

short, the argument from relativity has some force simply because

the actual variations in the moral codes are more readily explained

by the hypothesis that they reflect ways of life than by the hypothesis

that they express perceptions, most of them seriously inadequate and

badly distorted, of objective values.

But there is a well-known counter to this argument from

relativity; namely to say that the items for which objective validity

is in the first place to be claimed are not specific moral rules or

codes but very general basic principles which are recognized at least

implicitly to some extent in all society—such principles as provide

the foundations of what Sidgwick has called different methods of

ethics:  the  principle of universalizability, perhaps, or the rule that

one ought to conform to the specific rules of any way of life in which

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THE SUBJECTIVITY OF VALUES 57

one takes part, from which one profits, and on which one relies, or

some utilitarian principle of doing what tends, or seems likely, to

promote the general happiness. It is easy to show that such general

principles, married with differing concrete circumstances, different

existing social patterns or different preferences, will beget different

specific moral rules; and there is some plausibility in the claim that

the specific rules thus generated will vary from community to com-

munity or from group to group in close agreement with the actual

variations in accepted codes.

The argument from relativity can be only partly countered in

this way. To take this line the moral objectivist has to say that it is

only in these principles that the objective moral character attaches

immediately to its descriptively specified ground or subject: other

moral judgements are objectively valid or true, but only derivatively

and contingently—if things had been otherwise, quite different sorts

of actions would have been right. And despite the prominence in

recent philosophical ethics of universalization, utilitarian principles,

and the like, these are very far from constituting the whole of what

is actually affirmed as basic in ordinary moral thought. Much of

this is concerned rather with what Hare calls “ideals” or, less kindly,

“fanaticism.” That is, people judge that some things are good or

right, and others are bad or wrong, not because—or at any rate

not only because—they exemplify some general principle for which

widespread implicit acceptance could be claimed, but because some-

thing about those things arouses certain responses immediately in

them, though they would arouse radically and irresolvably differ-

ent responses in others. “Moral sense” or “intuition” is an initially

more plausible description of what supplies many of our basic moral

judgements than “reason.” With regard to all these starting points of

moral thinking the argument from relativity remains in full force.

The Argument from Queerness Even more important, however, and certainly more generally appli-

cable, is the argument from queerness. This has two parts, one

metaphysical, the other epistemological. If there were objective val-

ues, then they would be entities or qualities or relations of a very

strange sort, utterly different from anything else in the universe.

Correspondingly, if we were aware of them, it would have to be by

some special faculty of moral perception or intuition, utterly dif-

ferent from our ordinary ways of knowing everything else. These

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58 T HE RIGHT THING TO DO

points were recognized by Moore when he spoke of non-natural

qualities, and by the intuitionists in their talk about a “faculty of

moral intuition.” Intuitionism has long been out of favour, and it

is indeed easy to point out its implausibilities. What is not so often

stressed, but is more important, is that the central thesis of intu-

itionism is one to which any objectivist view of values is in the end

committed: intuitionism merely makes unpalatably plain what other

forms of objectivism wrap up. Of course the suggestion that moral

judgements are made or moral problems solved by just sitting down

and having an ethical intuition is a travesty of actual moral thinking.

But, however complex the real process, it will require (if it is to yield

authoritatively prescriptive conclusions) some input of this distinc-

tive sort, either premisses or forms of argument or both. When we

ask the awkward question, how we can be aware of this authoritative

prescriptivity, of the truth of these distinctively ethical premisses or

of the cogency of this distinctively ethical pattern of reasoning, none

of our ordinary accounts of sensory perception or introspection or

the framing and confirming of explanatory hypotheses or inference

or logical construction or conceptual analysis, or any combination of

these, will provide a satisfactory answer; “a special sort of intuition” is

a lame answer, but it is the one to which the clearheaded objectivist

is compelled to resort.

Indeed, the best move for the moral objectivist is not to evade

this issue, but to look for companions in guilt. For example, Richard

Price argues that it is not moral knowledge alone that such an

empiricism as those of Locke and Hume is unable to account for,

but also our knowledge and even our ideas of essence, number,

identity, diversity, solidity, inertia, substance, the necessary existence

and infinite extension of time and space, necessity and possibility

in general, power, and causation. If the understanding, which Price

defines as the faculty within us that discerns truth, is also a source

of new simple ideas of so many other sorts, may it not also be a

power of immediately perceiving right and wrong, which yet are real

characters of actions?

This is an important counter to the argument from queerness.

The only adequate reply to it would be to show how, on empiricist

foundations, we can construct an account of the ideas and beliefs

and knowledge that we have of all these matters. I cannot even begin

to do that here, though I have undertaken some parts of the  task

elsewhere. I can only state my belief that satisfactory accounts of

most of these can be given in empirical terms. If some supposed

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THE SUBJECTIVITY OF VALUES 59

metaphysical necessities or essences resist such treatment, then they

too should be included, along with objective values, among the tar-

gets of the argument from queerness. .  .  . 

Plato’s Forms give a dramatic picture of what objective values

would have to be. The Form of the Good is such that knowledge

of it provides the knower with both a direction and an overriding

motive; something’s being good both tells the person who knows

this to pursue it and makes him pursue it. An objective good would

be sought by anyone who was acquainted with it, not because of

any contingent fact that this person, or every person, is so consti-

tuted that he desires this end, but just because the end has to-be-

pursuedness somehow built into it. Similarly, if there were objective

principles of right and wrong, any wrong (possible) course of action

would have not-to-be-doneness somehow built into it. Or we should

have something like Clarke’s necessary relations of fitness between

situations and actions, so that a situation would have a demand for

such-and-such an action somehow built into it. .  .  . 

Another way of bringing out this queerness is to ask, about any-

thing that is supposed to have some objective moral quality, how this

is linked with its natural features. What is the connection between

the natural fact that an action is a piece of deliberate cruelty—say,

causing pain just for fun—and the moral fact that it is wrong? It

cannot be an entailment, a logical or semantic necessity. Yet it is not

merely that the two features occur together. The wrongness must

somehow be “consequential” or “supervenient”; it is wrong because

it is a piece of deliberate cruelty. But just what in the world is signified by this “because”? And how do we know the relation that it signifies, if

this is something more than such actions being socially condemned,

and condemned by us too, perhaps through our having absorbed

attitudes from our social environment? It is not even sufficient to

postulate a faculty which “sees” the wrongness: something must be

postulated which can see at once the natural features that constitute

the cruelty, and the wrongness, and the mysterious consequential

link between the two. Alternatively, the intuition required might be

the perception that wrongness is a higher order property belonging

to certain natural properties; but what is this belonging of properties

to other properties, and how can we discern it? How much simpler

and more comprehensible the situation would be if we could replace

the moral quality with some sort of subjective response which could

be causally related to the detection of the natural features on which

the supposed quality is said to be consequential. .  .  . 

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60

CHAPTER 7 Our Sense of Right and Wrong

C. S. Lewis

C. S. Lewis (1898–1963), a beloved defender of Christian faith, argued

that in grasping the moral law we understand something about what

the world is really like. The world is not the cold, impersonal place

pictured by science; it includes the moral standards that bind all

human beings together.

Lewis wrote dozens of books, mostly novels and short stories.

His more philosophical works include The Problem of Pain (1940), Surprised by Joy (1955), and Mere Christianity (1952), from which this selection is taken.

The Law of Human Nature Every one has heard people quarrelling. Sometimes it sounds funny

and sometimes it sounds merely unpleasant; but however it sounds,

I  believe we can learn something very important from listening

to the kind of things they say. They say things like this: “How’d

you like it if anyone did the same to you?”—“That’s my seat, I was

there first”—“Leave him alone, he isn’t doing you any harm”—“Why

should you shove in first?”—“Give me a bit of your orange, I gave

you a bit of mine”—“Come on, you promised.” People say things like

that every day, educated people as well as uneducated, and children

as well as grown-ups.

Now what interests me about all these remarks is that the

man who makes them is not merely saying that the other man’s

behavior does not happen to please him. He is appealing to some

Source: C. S. Lewis, “The Law of Human Nature” from Mere Christianity. Copyright © C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. 1942, 1943, 1944, 1952. Extract reprinted by permission.

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OUR SENSE OF RIGHT AND WRONG 61

kind of standard of behavior which he expects the other man to

know about. And the other man very seldom replies: “To hell with

your standard.” Nearly always he tries to make out that what he

has been doing does not really go against the standard, or that if it

does there is some special excuse. He pretends there is some special

reason in this particular case why the person who took the seat first

should not keep it, or that things were quite different when he was

given the bit of orange, or that something has turned up which lets

him off keeping his promise. It looks, in fact, very much as if both

parties had in mind some kind of Law or Rule of fair play or decent

behavior or morality or whatever you like to call it, about which they

really agreed. And they have. If they had not, they might, of course,

fight like animals, but they could not quarrel in the human sense

of the word. Quarrelling means trying to show that the other man

is in the wrong. And there would be no sense in trying to do that

unless you and he had some sort of agreement as to what Right and

Wrong are; just as there would be no sense in saying that a footballer

had committed a foul unless there was some agreement about the

rules of football.

Now this Law or Rule about Right and Wrong used to be called

the Law of Nature. Nowadays, when we talk of the “laws of nature”

we usually mean things like gravitation, or heredity, or the laws of

chemistry. But when the older thinkers called the Law of Right and

Wrong “the Law of Nature,” they really meant the Law of Human

Nature. The idea was that, just as all bodies are governed by the

law of gravitation, and organisms by biological laws, so the creature

called man also had his law—with this great difference, that a body

could not choose whether it obeyed the law of gravitation or not,

but a man could choose either to obey the Law of Human Nature

or to disobey it.

We may put this in another way. Each man is at every moment

subjected to several different sets of law but there is only one of

these which he is free to disobey. As a body, he is subjected to

gravitation and cannot disobey it; if you leave him unsupported in

mid-air, he has no more choice about falling than a stone has. As

an organism, he is subjected to various biological laws which he

cannot disobey any more than an animal can. That is, he cannot

disobey those laws which he shares with other things; but the law

which is peculiar to his human nature, the law he does not share

with animals or vegetables or inorganic things, is the one he can

disobey if he chooses.

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62 T HE RIGHT THING TO DO

This law was called the Law of Nature because people thought

that every one knew it by nature and did not need to be taught it.

They did not mean, of course, that you might not find an odd indi-

vidual here and there who did not know it, just as you find a few

people who are color-blind or have no ear for a tune. But taking

the race as a whole, they thought that the human idea of decent

behavior was obvious to every one. And I believe they were right. If

they were not, then all the things we said about the war were non-

sense. What was the sense in saying the enemy were in the wrong

unless Right is a real thing which the Nazis at bottom knew as well

as we did and ought to have practiced? If they had had no notion

of what we mean by right, then, though we might still have had to

fight them, we could no more have blamed them for that than for

the color of their hair.

I know that some people say the idea of a Law of Nature or

decent behavior known to all men is unsound, because different

civilizations and different ages have had quite different moralities.

But this is not true. There have been differences between

their moralities, but these have never amounted to anything like

a total difference. If anyone will take the trouble to compare the

moral teaching of, say, the ancient Egyptians, Babylonians, Hindus,

Chinese, Greeks and Romans, what will really strike him will be

how very like they are to each other and to our own. Some of the

evidence for this I have put together in the appendix of another

book called The Abolition of Man; but for our present purpose I need only ask the reader to think what a totally different morality would

mean. Think of a country where people were admired for running

away in battle, or where a man felt proud of double-crossing all the

people who had been kindest to him. You might just as well try to

imagine a country where two and two made five. Men have differed

as regards what people you ought to be unselfish to—whether it

was only your own family, or your fellow countrymen, or every one.

But they have always agreed that you ought not to put yourself first.

Selfishness has never been admired. Men have differed as to whether

you should have one wife or four. But they have always agreed that

you must not simply have any woman you liked.

But the most remarkable thing is this. Whenever you find a

man who says he does not believe in a real Right and Wrong, you

will find the same man going back on this a moment later. He may

break his promise to you, but if you try breaking one to him he will

be complaining “It’s not fair” before you can say Jack Robinson.

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OUR SENSE OF RIGHT AND WRONG 63

A  nation may say treaties don’t matter; but then, next minute, they

spoil their case by saying that the particular treaty they want to break

was an unfair one. But if treaties do not matter, and if there is

no such thing as Right and Wrong—in other words, if there is no

Law of Nature—what is the difference between a fair treaty and an

unfair one? Have they not let the cat out of the bag and shown

that, whatever they say, they really know the Law of Nature just like

anyone else?

It seems, then, we are forced to believe in a real Right and

Wrong. People may be sometimes mistaken about them, just as

people sometimes get their sums wrong; but they are not a mat-

ter of mere taste and opinion any more than the multiplication

table. Now if we are agreed about that, I go on to my next point,

which is this. None of us are really keeping the Law of Nature. If

there are any exceptions among you, I apologize to them. They had

much better read some other book, for nothing I am going to say

concerns them. And now, turning to the ordinary human beings

who are left:

I hope you will not misunderstand what I am going to say.

I  am not preaching, and Heaven knows I do not pretend to be bet-

ter than anyone else. I am only trying to call attention to a fact; the

fact that this year, or this month, or, more likely, this very day, we

have failed to practice ourselves the kind of behavior we expect from

other people. There may be all sorts of excuses for us. That time you

were so unfair to the children was when you were very tired. That

slightly shady business about the money—the one you have almost

forgotten—came when you were very hard-up. And what you prom-

ised to do for old So-and-so and have never done—well, you never

would have promised if you had known how frightfully busy you were

going to be. And as for your behavior to your wife (or husband) or

sister (or brother) if I knew how irritating they could  be, I would

not wonder at it—and who the dickens am I, anyway? I am just the

same. That is to say, I do not succeed in keeping the Law of Nature

very well, and the moment anyone tells me I am not keeping it,

there starts up in my mind a string of excuses as long as your arm.

The question at the moment is not whether they are good excuses.

The point is that they are one more proof of how deeply, whether we

like it or not, we believe in the Law of Nature. If we do not believe

in decent behavior, why should we be so anxious to make excuses for

not having behaved decently? The truth is, we believe in decency so

much—we feel the Rule of Law pressing on us so—that we cannot

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64 T HE RIGHT THING TO DO

bear to face the fact that we are breaking it, and consequently we

try to shift the responsibility. For you notice that it is only for our

bad behavior that we find all these explanations. It is only our bad

temper that we put down to being tired or worried or hungry; we

put our good temper down to ourselves.

These, then, are the two points I wanted to make. First, that

human beings, all over the earth, have this curious idea that they

ought to behave in a certain way, and cannot really get rid of it.

Secondly, that they do not in fact behave in that way. They know the

Law of Nature; they break it. These two facts are the foundation of

all clear thinking about ourselves and the universe we live in.

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65

CHAPTER 8 The Categorical Imperative

Immanuel Kant

Immanuel Kant, whom many regard as the greatest modern philoso-

pher, led an uneventful life. He never traveled more than a few miles

from Königsberg, East Prussia, where he was born in 1724. He was a

popular professor in the local university and a much-sought-after din-

ner guest. He was also known for his regular habits: A bachelor, he

arose each morning at 4 am, prepared his lectures, taught from 7 am

until noon, read until 4 pm, took a walk, had dinner, and wrote until

bedtime. He repeated this routine every day for years. Yet, despite his

quiet habits, on the day he was buried in 1804, thousands of people fol-

lowed his coffin down the street, and the bells of all the churches tolled.

Kant’s unorthodox views on religion did cause some contro-

versy. However, Kant was not an atheist. He was from a family of

Pietists, who distrusted organized religion. In his later years, when

he was rector of the university, it was his duty to lead the faculty pro-

cession to the university chapel for religious services; and he would,

but, upon reaching the chapel, he would stand aside and not enter.

In 1786, having become the most famous philosopher in Germany,

and having argued that God’s existence cannot be proven, Kant was

ordered to publish nothing more on the subject.

Today, “Kant scholarship” is an academic specialty unto itself;

many scholars spend their whole lives trying to understand what Kant

wrote. Every year new books appear defending new interpretations of

his philosophy. The multitude of interpretations is partly due to the

richness of Kant’s thought. But it is also due to the fact that Kant was

an exceedingly obscure writer.

Excerpted from Immanuel Kant, “Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals” (1785), in The Critique of Practical Reason and Other Writings in Moral Philosophy, trans. Lewis White Beck (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949), pp. 73–74, 80–83, 86–87. Reprinted by permission of the Estate of Lewis White Beck.

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66 T HE RIGHT THING TO DO

Kant believed that morality can be summed up in one ultimate

principle, the Categorical Imperative. According to the Categorical

Imperative, to act morally is to act from motives that everyone, every-

where could live by.

The following selection is from Kant’s Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, the most accessible presentation of his ethical theory.

All imperatives command either hypothetically or categorically. . . .

The hypothetical imperative . . . says only that the action is good to

some purpose, possible or actual. . . . The categorical imperative,

which declares the action to be of itself objectively necessary without

making any reference to a purpose, i.e., without having any other

end, holds as an apodictical (practical) principle. . . .

If I think of a hypothetical imperative as such, I do not know what it

will contain until the condition is stated [under which it is an impera-

tive]. But if I think of a categorical imperative, I know immediately

what it contains. For since the imperative contains besides  the law

only the necessity of the maxim of acting in accordance with this law,

while the law contains no condition to which it is restricted, there

is nothing remaining in it except the universality of law as such to

which the maxim of the action should conform; and in effect this

conformity alone is represented as necessary by the imperative.

There is, therefore, only one categorical imperative. It is: Act

only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time

will that it should become a universal law.

Now if all imperatives of duty can be derived from this one

imperative as a principle, we can at least show what we understand by

the concept of duty and what it means, even though it remain unde-

cided whether that which is called duty is an empty concept or not.

The universality of law according to which effects are produced

constitutes what is properly called nature in the most general sense

(as to form), i.e., the existence of things so far as it is determined by

universal laws. [By analogy], then, the universal imperative of duty

can be expressed as follows: Act as though the maxim of your action

were by your will to become a universal law of nature.

We shall now enumerate some duties. . . .

1. A man who is reduced to despair by a series of evils feels a weariness with life but is still in possession of his reason sufficiently

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THE CATEGORICAL IMPERATIVE 67

to ask whether it would not be contrary to his duty to himself to take

his own life. Now he asks whether the maxim of his action could

become a universal law of nature. His maxim, however, is: For love

of myself, I make it my principle to shorten my life when by a longer

duration it threatens more evil than satisfaction. But it is questionable

whether this principle of self-love could become a universal law of

nature. One immediately sees a contradiction in a system of nature,

whose law would be to destroy life by the feeling whose special office

is to impel the improvement of life. In this case it would not exist as

nature; hence that maxim cannot obtain as a law of nature, and thus

it wholly contradicts the supreme principle of all duty.

2. Another man finds himself forced by need to borrow money. He well knows that he will not be able to repay it, but he also sees

that nothing will be loaned him if he does not firmly promise to

repay it at a certain time. He desires to make such a promise, but he

has enough conscience to ask himself whether it is not improper and

opposed to duty to relieve his distress in such a way. Now, assuming

he does decide to do so, the maxim of his action would be as follows:

When I believe myself to be in need of money, I will borrow money

and promise to repay it, although I know I shall never do so. Now

this principle of self-love or of his own benefit may very well be com-

patible with his whole future welfare, but the question is whether it

is right. He changes the pretension of self-love into a universal law

and then puts the question: How would it be if my maxim became

a universal law? He immediately sees that it could never hold as a

universal law of nature and be consistent with itself; rather it must

necessarily contradict itself. For the universality of a law which says

that anyone who believes himself to be in need could promise what

he pleased with the intention of not fulfilling it would make the

promise itself and the end to be accomplished by it impossible; no

one would believe what was promised to him but would only laugh

at any such assertion as vain pretense.

3. A third finds in himself a talent which could, by means of some cultivation, make him in many respects a useful man. But he

finds himself in comfortable circumstances and prefers indulgence

in pleasure to troubling himself with broadening and improving

his fortunate natural gifts. Now, however, let him ask whether his

maxim of neglecting his gifts, besides agreeing with his propensity to

idle amusement, agrees also with what is called duty. He sees that a

system of nature could indeed exist in accordance with such a law,

even though man (like the inhabitants of the South Sea Islands)

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68 T HE RIGHT THING TO DO

should let his talents rust and resolve to devote his life merely to

idleness, indulgence, and propagation—in a word, to pleasure. But

he cannot possibly will that this should become a universal law of

nature or that it should be implanted in us by a natural instinct. For,

as a rational being, he necessarily wills that all his faculties should

be developed, inasmuch as they are given to him for all sorts of

possible purposes.

4. A fourth man, for whom things are going well, sees that others (whom he could help) have to struggle with great hardships,

and he asks, “What concern of mine is it? Let each one be as happy

as heaven wills, or as he can make himself; I will not take anything

from him or even envy him; but to his welfare or to his assistance in

time of need I have no desire to contribute.” If such a way of think-

ing were a universal law of nature, certainly the human race could

exist, and without doubt even better than in a state where everyone

talks of sympathy and good will or even exerts himself occasionally

to practice them while, on the other hand, he cheats when he can

and betrays or otherwise violates the rights of man. Now although

it is possible that a universal law of nature according to that maxim

could exist, it is nevertheless impossible to will that such a principle

should hold everywhere as a law of nature. For a will which resolved

this would conflict with itself, since instances can often arise in which

he would need the love and sympathy of others, and in which he

would have robbed himself, by such a law of nature springing from

his own will, of all hope of the aid he desires.

The foregoing are a few of the many actual duties, or at least

of duties we hold to be actual, whose derivation from the one stated

principle is clear. We must be able to will that a maxim of our action

become a universal law; this is the canon of the moral estimation of

our action generally. Some actions are of such a nature that their

maxim cannot even be thought as a universal law of nature with- out contradiction, far from it being possible that one could will

that it should be such. In others this internal impossibility is not

found though it is still impossible to will that their maxim should be raised to the universality of a law of nature, because such a will

would contradict itself. We easily see that the former maxim conflicts

with the stricter or narrower (imprescriptable) duty, the latter with

broader (meritorious) duty. Thus all duties, so far as the kind of

obligation (not the object of their action) is concerned, have been

completely exhibited by these examples in their dependence on the

one principle. . . .

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69

CHAPTER 9 The Virtues

Aristotle

Aristotle (384–322 bc ) may be the most influential thinker of all time.

His theory of physics reigned for a thousand years; his system of logic

was dominant until the 19 th

century; Charles Darwin called him “the

greatest biologist of all time”; and his theory of ethics has many fol-

lowers today.

Aristotle was born in Stagira in northern Greece and moved to

Athens when he was 17. There he became a pupil of Plato. Aristotle

left Athens after Plato’s death in 347 bc; four years later, he became

tutor to the young boy who was to become Alexander the Great. From

334 bc until his death, Aristotle headed his own school in Athens.

The following selection, from Books I and II of Aristotle’s

Nicomachean Ethics, discusses two central themes in his moral philosophy: The nature of the good life, and what it means to be virtuous.

But what is happiness? If we consider what the function of man is, we find that happiness is a virtuous activity of the soul

But presumably to say that happiness is the supreme good seems a

platitude, and some more distinctive account of it is still required.

This might perhaps be achieved by grasping what is the function of

man. If we take a flautist or a sculptor or any artist—or in general

any class of men who have a specific function or activity—his good-

ness and proficiency is considered to lie in the performance of that

function; and the same will be true of man, assuming that man has

Excerpted from The Ethics of Aristotle, trans. J. A. K. Thomson (London: Penguin Books, 1976), bks. 1, 2, pp. 75–80, 84, 91–92, 94, 100–102. Reprinted by permission of Taylor & Francis Books UK.

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70 T HE RIGHT THING TO DO

a function. But is it likely that whereas joiners and shoemakers have

certain functions or activities, man as such has none, but has been left

by nature a functionless being? Just as we can see that eye and hand

and foot and every one of our members has some function, should we

not assume that in like manner a human being has a function over

and above these particular functions? What, then, can this possibly

be? Clearly life is a thing shared also by plants, and we are looking

for man’s proper function; so we must exclude from our definition the life that consists in nutrition and growth. Next in order would

be a sort of sentient life; but this too we see is shared by horses and

cattle and animals of all kinds. There remains, then, a practical life

of the rational part. (This has two aspects: one amenable to reason,

the other possessing it and initiating thought.) As this life also has two

meanings, we must lay down that we intend here life determined by

activity, because this is accepted as the stricter sense. Now if the func-

tion of man is an activity of the soul in accordance with, or implying,

a rational principle; and if we hold that the function of an individual

and of a good individual of the same kind—e.g., of a harpist and

of a good harpist, and so on generally—is generically the same, the

latter’s distinctive excellence being attached to the name of the func-

tion (because the function of the harpist is to play the harp, but that

of the good harpist is to play it well); and if we assume that the func-

tion of man is a kind of life, viz., an activity or series of actions of the

soul, implying a rational principle; and if the function of a good man

is to perform these well and rightly; and if every function is performed

well when performed in accordance with its proper excellence: if all

this is so, the conclusion is that the good for man is an activity of soul

in accordance with virtue, or if there are more kinds of virtue than

one, in accordance with the best and most perfect kind.

There is a further qualification: in a complete lifetime. One

swallow does not make a summer; neither does one day. Similarly

neither can one day, or a brief space of time, make a man blessed

and happy. . . .

Our view of happiness is supported by popular beliefs

viii. We must examine our principle not only as reached logically, from a conclusion and premises, but also in the light of what is com-

monly said about it; because if a statement is true all the data are in

harmony with it, while if it is false they soon reveal a discrepancy.

Now goods have been classified under three heads, as ( a ) exter- nal, ( b ) of the soul, and ( c ) of the body. Of these we say that goods

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THE VIRTUES 71

of the soul are good in the strictest and fullest sense, and we rank

actions and activities of soul as goods of the soul; so that according

to this view, which is of long standing and accepted by philoso-

phers, our definition will be correct. We are right, too, in saying

that the end consists in certain actions or activities, because this

puts it among goods of the soul and not among external goods. Our

definition is also supported by the belief that the happy man lives

and fares well; because what we have described is virtually a kind of

good life or prosperity. Again, our definition seems to include all the

required constituents of happiness; for some think that it is virtue,

others prudence, and others wisdom; others that it is these, or one

of these, with the addition of pleasure, or not in total separation

from it; and others further include favourable external conditions.

Some of these views are popular beliefs of long standing; others are

those of a few distinguished men. It is reasonable to suppose that

neither group is entirely mistaken, but is right in some respect, or

even in most.

Now our definition is in harmony with those who say that hap-

piness is virtue, or a particular virtue; because an activity in accor-

dance with virtue implies virtue. But presumably it makes no little

difference whether we think of the supreme good as consisting in

the possession or in the exercise of virtue: in a state of mind or in an activity. For it is possible for the state to be present in a person without effecting any good result (e.g., if he is asleep or quiescent

in some other way), but not for the activity: he will necessarily act, and act well. Just as at the Olympic Games it is not the best-looking

or the strongest men present that are crowned with wreaths, but the

competitors (because it is from them that the winners come), so it

is those who act that rightly win the honours and rewards in life. Moreover, the life of such people is in itself pleasant. For plea-

sure is an experience of the soul, and each individual finds pleasure

in that of which he is said to be fond. For example, a horse gives

pleasure to one who is fond of horses, and a spectacle to one who is

fond of sight-seeing. In the same way just acts give pleasure to a lover

of justice, and virtuous conduct generally to the lover of virtue. Now

most people find that the things which give them pleasure conflict,

because they are not pleasant by nature; but lovers of beauty find

pleasure in things that are pleasant by nature, and virtuous actions

are of this kind, so that they are pleasant not only to this type of

person but also in themselves. So their life does not need to have

pleasure attached to it as a sort of accessory, but contains its own

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72 T HE RIGHT THING TO DO

pleasure in itself. Indeed, we may go further and assert that anyone

who does not delight in fine actions is not even a good man; for

nobody would say that a man is just unless he enjoys acting justly,

nor liberal unless he enjoys liberal actions, and similarly in all the

other cases. If this is so, virtuous actions must be pleasurable in

themselves. What is more, they are both good and fine, and each in

the highest degree, assuming that the good man is right in his judge-

ment of them; and his judgement is as we have described. So hap-

piness is the best, the finest, the most pleasurable thing of all; and

these qualities are not separated as the inscription at Delos suggests:

Justice is loveliest, and health is best,

But sweetest to obtain is heart’s desire.

All these attributes belong to the best activities; and it is these, or

the one that is best of them, that we identify with happiness.

Nevertheless it seems clear that happiness needs the addition

of external goods, as we have said; for it is difficult if not impossible

to do fine deeds without any resources. Many can only be done by

the help of friends, or wealth, or political influence. There are also

certain advantages, such as good ancestry or good children, or per-

sonal beauty, the lack of which mars our felicity; for a man is scarcely

happy if he is very ugly to look at, or of low birth, or solitary and

childless; and presumably even less so if he has children or friends

who are quite worthless, or if he had good ones who are now dead.

So, as we said, happiness seems to require this sort of prosperity too;

which is why some identify it with good fortune, although others

identify it with virtue. . . .

We are now in a position to define the happy man as “one who

is active in accordance with complete virtue, and who is adequately

furnished with external goods, and that not for some unspecified

period but throughout a complete life.” And probably we should add

“destined both to live in this way and to die accordingly”; because

the future is obscure to us, and happiness we maintain to be an end in every way utterly final and complete. . . .

Moral virtues, like crafts, are acquired by practice and habituation

i. Virtue, then, is of two kinds, intellectual and moral. Intellectual virtue owes both its inception and its growth chiefly to instruction,

and for this very reason needs time and experience. Moral goodness,

on the other hand, is the result of habit, from which it has actually

got its name, being a slight modification of the word ethos. This fact

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THE VIRTUES 73

makes it obvious that none of the moral virtues is engendered in us

by nature, since nothing that is what it is by nature can be made to

behave differently by habituation. For instance, a stone, which has a

natural tendency downwards, cannot be habituated to rise, however

often you try to train it by throwing it into the air; nor can you train

fire to burn downwards; nor can anything else that has any other

natural tendency be trained to depart from it. The moral virtues,

then, are engendered in us neither by nor contrary to nature; we are constituted by nature to receive them, but their full development

in us is due to habit.

Again, of all those faculties with which nature endows us we

first acquire the potentialities, and only later effect their actualiza-

tion. (This is evident in the case of the senses. It was not from

repeated acts of seeing or hearing that we acquired the senses but

the other way round: we had these senses before we used them; we

did not acquire them as the result of using them.) But the virtues

we do acquire by first exercising them, just as happens in the arts.

Anything that we have to learn to do we learn by the actual doing of

it: people become builders by building and instrumentalists by play-

ing instruments. Similarly we become just by performing just acts,

temperate by performing temperate ones, brave by performing brave

ones. This view is supported by what happens in city-states. Legisla-

tors make their citizens good by habituation; this is the intention

of every legislator, and those who do not carry it out fail of their

object. This is what makes the difference between a good constitu-

tion and a bad one.

Again, the causes or means that bring about any form of excel-

lence are the same as those that destroy it, and similarly with art; for

it is as a result of playing the harp that people become good and bad

harpists. The same principle applies to builders and all other crafts-

men. Men will become good builders as a result of building well,

and bad ones as a result of building badly. Otherwise there would

be no need of anyone to teach them: they would all be born either good or bad. Now this holds good also of the virtues. It is the way

that we behave in our dealings with other people that makes us just

or unjust, and the way that we behave in the face of danger, accus-

toming ourselves to be timid or confident, that makes us brave or

cowardly. Similarly with situations involving desires and angry feel-

ings: some people become temperate and patient from one kind

of conduct in such situations, others licentious and choleric from

another. In a word, then, like activities produce like dispositions.

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74 T HE RIGHT THING TO DO

Hence we must give our activities a certain quality, because it is their

characteristics that determine the resulting dispositions. So it is a

matter of no little importance what sort of habits we form from the

earliest age—it makes a vast difference, or rather all the difference

in the world. . . .

A cardinal rule: right conduct is incompatible with excess or deficiency in feelings and actions

First, then, we must consider this fact: that it is in the nature of

moral qualities that they are destroyed by deficiency and excess, just

as we can see (since we have to use the evidence of visible facts to

throw light on those that are invisible) in the case of bodily health

and strength. For both excessive and insufficient exercise destroy

one’s strength, and both eating and drinking too much or too little

destroy health, whereas the right quantity produces, increases and

preserves it. So it is the same with temperance, courage and the

other virtues. The man who shuns and fears everything and stands

up to nothing becomes a coward; the man who is afraid of nothing

at all, but marches up to every danger, becomes foolhardy. Similarly

the man who indulges in every pleasure and refrains from none

becomes licentious; but if a man behaves like a boor and turns his

back on every pleasure, he is a case of insensibility. Thus temperance

and courage are destroyed by excess and deficiency and preserved

by the mean. . . .

If, then, every science performs its function well only when

it observes the mean and refers its products to it (which is why

it is customary to say of well-executed works that nothing can be

added to them or taken away, the implication being that excess and

deficiency alike destroy perfection, while the mean preserves  it)—

if  good craftsmen, as we hold, work with the mean in view; and if

virtue, like nature, is more exact and more efficient than any art,

it follows that virtue aims to hit the mean. By virtue I mean moral

virtue since it is this that is concerned with feelings and actions,

and these involve excess, deficiency and a mean. It is possible, for

example, to feel fear, confidence, desire, anger, pity, and pleasure

and pain generally, too much or too little; and both of these are

wrong. But to have these feelings at the right times on the right

grounds towards the right people for the right motive and in the

right way is to feel them to an intermediate, that is to the best,

degree; and this is the mark of virtue. Similarly there are excess and

deficiency and a mean in the case of actions. But it is in the field

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THE VIRTUES 75

of actions and feelings that virtue operates; and in them excess and

deficiency are failings, whereas the mean is praised and recognized

as a success: and these are both marks of virtue. Virtue, then, is a

mean condition, inasmuch as it aims at hitting the mean.

Again, failure is possible in many ways (for evil, as the

Pythagoreans represented it, is a form of the Unlimited, and good

of the Limited), but success is only possible in one way. That is why

the one is easy and the other difficult; it is easy to miss the target

and difficult to hit it. Here, then, is another reason why excess and

deficiency fall under evil, and the mean state under good:

For men are bad in countless ways, but good in only one.

A provisional definition of virtue

So virtue is a purposive disposition, lying in a mean that is relative

to us and determined by a rational principle, and by that which a

prudent man would use to determine it. It is a mean between two

kinds of vice, one of excess and the other of deficiency; and also

for this reason, that whereas these vices fall short of or exceed the

right measure in both feelings and actions, virtue discovers the mean

and chooses it. Thus from the point of view of its essence and the

definition of its real nature, virtue is a mean; but in respect of what

is right and best, it is an extreme.

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76

CHAPTER 10 M aster Morality and Slave

Morality Friedrich Nietzsche

The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) is one of

the most controversial figures in intellectual history. He expressed

himself in angry, flamboyant prose, and he hated women. After he

went insane and died, apparently from syphilis, his sister used his

work to further her own dark agenda. Under her influence, Nietzsche

became the favorite philosopher of the Nazis, including Adolph Hitler,

who was once photographed contemplating a bust of Nietzsche. How-

ever, Friedrich Nietzsche was not an anti-Semite; he called the Jews

“the strongest, toughest, and purest race” living in Europe. Nietzsche’s

sister Elisabeth was the Nazi.

In this selection, Nietzsche contrasts “Master Morality” with

“Slave Morality,” and there is no doubt which he prefers. Master moral-

ity is the morality of the proud and the strong; slave morality is the

morality of the groveling and the weak. Nietzsche regards “slave values”

as pathetic. For good or for ill, Nietzsche was consistent: His books con-

tain sections with titles such as “Why I Am So Clever” and “Why I Write

Such Good Books.” Nietzsche exemplified the values he praised.

Wandering through the many subtler and coarser moralities which

have so far been prevalent on earth, or still are prevalent, I found

that certain features recurred regularly together and were closely

associated—until I finally discovered two basic types and one basic

difference.

Excerpted from Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1966), pp. 204–207.

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MASTER MORALITY AND SLAVE MORALITY 77

There are master morality and slave morality —I add immediately that in all the higher and more mixed cultures there also appear

attempts at mediation between these two moralities, and yet more

often the interpenetration and mutual misunderstanding of both,

and at times they occur directly alongside each other—even in the

same human being, within a single soul. The moral discrimination of values has originated either among a ruling group whose con-

sciousness of its difference from the ruled group was accompanied

by delight—or among the ruled, the slaves and dependents of every

degree.

In the first case, when the ruling group determines what is

“good,” the exalted, proud states of the soul are experienced as

conferring distinction and determining the order of rank. The noble

human being separates from himself those in whom the opposite

of such exalted, proud states finds expression: he despises them. It

should be noted immediately that in this first type of morality the

opposition of “good” and “bad” means approximately the same as “noble” and “contemptible.” (The opposition of “good” and  “evil” has a different origin.) One feels contempt for the cowardly, the

anxious, the petty, those intent on narrow utility; also for the

suspicious with their unfree glances, those who humble themselves,

the doglike people who allow themselves to be maltreated, the

begging flatterers, above all the liars: it is part of the fundamental

faith of all aristocrats that the common people lie. “We truthful

ones”—thus the nobility of ancient Greece referred to itself.

It is obvious that moral designations were everywhere first

applied to human beings and only later, derivatively, to actions. There- fore it is a gross mistake when historians of morality start from such

questions as: why was the compassionate act praised? The noble type

of man experiences itself as determining values; it does not need approval; it judges, “what is harmful to me is harmful in itself”;

it knows itself to be that which first accords honor to things; it is

value-creating. Everything it knows as part of itself it honors: such a morality is self-glorification. In the foreground there is the feeling

of fullness, of power that seeks to overflow, the happiness of high

tension, the consciousness of wealth that would give and bestow: the

noble human being, too, helps the unfortunate, but not, or almost

not, from pity, but prompted more by an urge begotten by excess

of power. The noble human being honors himself as one who is

powerful, also as one who has power over himself, who knows how

to speak and be silent, who delights in being severe and hard with

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78 T HE RIGHT THING TO DO

himself and respects all severity and hardness. “A hard heart Wotan

put into my breast,” says an old Scandinavian saga: a fitting poetic

expression, seeing that it comes from the soul of a proud Viking.

Such a type of man is actually proud of the fact that he is not made for pity, and the hero of the saga therefore adds as a warning: “If

the heart is not hard in youth it will never harden.” Noble and

courageous human beings who think that way are furthest removed

from that morality which finds the distinction of morality precisely

in pity, or in acting for others; faith in oneself, pride in oneself,

a fundamental hostility and irony against “selflessness” belong just

as definitely to noble morality as does a slight disdain and caution

regarding compassionate feelings and a “warm heart.”

It is the powerful who understand how to honor; this is their art, their realm of invention. The profound reverence for age and

tradition—all law rests on this double reverence—the faith and

prejudice in favor of ancestors and disfavor of those yet to come

are typical of the morality of the powerful; and when the men of

“modern ideas,” conversely, believe almost instinctively in “progress”

and “the future” and more and more lack respect for age, this in

itself would sufficiently betray the ignoble origin of these “ideas.”

A morality of the ruling group, however, is most alien and

embarrassing to the present taste in the severity of its principle that

one has duties only to one’s peers; that against beings of a lower

rank, against everything alien, one may behave as one pleases or “as

the heart desires,” and in any case “beyond good and evil”—here

pity and like feelings may find their place. The capacity for, and the

duty of, long gratitude and long revenge—both only among one’s

peers—refinement in repaying, the sophisticated concept of friend-

ship, a certain necessity for having enemies (as it were, as drainage

ditches for the affects of envy, quarrelsomeness, exuberance—at

bottom, in order to be capable of being good friends ): all these are typical characteristics of noble morality which, as suggested, is not

the morality of “modern ideas” and therefore is hard to empathize

with today, also hard to dig up and uncover.

It is different with the second type of morality, slave morality. Suppose the violated, oppressed, suffering, unfree, who are uncer-

tain of themselves and weary, moralize: what will their moral valua-

tions have in common? Probably, a pessimistic suspicion about the

whole condition of man will find expression, perhaps a condemna-

tion of man along with his condition. The slave’s eye is not favor-

able to the virtues of the powerful: he is skeptical and suspicious,

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MASTER MORALITY AND SLAVE MORALITY 79

subtly suspicious, of all the “good” that is honored there—he would like to persuade himself that even their happiness is not genuine.

Conversely, those qualities are brought out and flooded with light

which serve to ease existence for those who suffer: here pity, the

complaisant and obliging hand, the warm heart, patience, industry,

humility, and friendliness are honored—for here these are the most

useful qualities and almost the only means for enduring the pressure

of existence. Slave morality is essentially a morality of utility.

Here is the place for the origin of that famous opposition of

“good” and “evil”: into evil one’s feelings project power and dan-

gerousness, a certain terribleness, subtlety, and strength that does

not permit contempt to develop. According to slave morality, those

who are “evil” thus inspire fear; according to master morality it is

precisely those who are “good” that inspire, and wish to inspire, fear,

while the “bad” are felt to be contemptible.

The opposition reaches its climax when, as a logical conse-

quence of slave morality, a touch of disdain is associated also with

the “good” of this morality—this may be slight and benevolent—

because the good human being has to be undangerous in the slaves’ way of thinking: he is good-natured, easy to deceive, a little stupid

perhaps. Wherever slave morality becomes preponderant, language

tends to bring the words “good” and “stupid” closer together. . . .

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80

CHAPTER 11 C aring Relations and

Principles of Justice Virginia Held

Historically, men have dominated public life, and in the public sphere,

relationships are often impersonal and contractual. Businessmen

negotiate; they bargain and make deals. Moreover, public figures may

make decisions that affect large numbers of people, and so they may

need to calculate which decision would have the best overall outcome.

Small wonder, then, that men’s moral theories emphasize duty, con-

tracts, and the calculation of costs and benefits.

A moral theory tailored to the traditional concerns of women

would look very different. In the small-scale world of friends and

family, bargaining and calculating play a much smaller role, while

love and caring dominate. According to Virginia Held, the values of

care are no less important than the values of justice.

Virginia Held (1929–) is Professor Emerita at the City University

of New York. She wrote The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, and Global (2005).

The Controversy The question of whether impartial, universal, and rational moral

principles must always be given priority over other possible grounds

for moral motivation continues to provoke extensive debate. David

Velleman has recently added his defense of Kantian ethics. . . .

From Controversies in Feminism, edited by James P. Sterba (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001), pp. 67–81. Reprinted by permission of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.

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CARING RELATIONS AND PRINCIPLES OF JUSTICE 81

Velleman concentrates on the case that Bernard Williams

discusses . . . of whether a man may justifiably save his wife rather

than a stranger, if he can save only one. Williams suggests that if the

man stops to think about whether universal principles could permit

him to give special consideration to his wife rather than treating both

persons impartially, the man is having “one thought too many.” . . .

Williams’s arguments are presented from the point of view of a

man with a set of projects, the sorts of projects that make life worth

living for this man. The image, like its Kantian alternative, is still that

of an individual deliberator. Williams pits the individual’s particular

goals—to live life with his wife or, in another case, to be a painter—

against the individual’s rational and impartial moral principles, and

he doubts that the latter should always have priority. Williams disputes

the view that our particular projects must always be constrained by uni-

versal principles requiring that we should only pursue what universal

principles permit. If a man’s life would be worth living only if he put,

for example, his art ahead of his universalizable moral obligations to

his family, Williams is not willing to give priority to his moral obliga-

tions. In the example of the man and the drowning others, the man’s

wife may be his project, but the dilemma is posed in terms of an

individual’s own particular goals versus his universal moral obligations.

At a formal level it remains within the traditional paradigm of egoism

versus universalism. Williams is unwilling to yield the claims of the ego,

especially those that enable it to continue to be the person it is, to the

requirements of universalization. But he does not reject the traditional

way of conceptualizing the alternatives. . . . The problem is seen as

pitting the claims of an individual ego against those of impartial rules.

The feminist challenge to Kantian moralities does require a

change in this paradigm. It does not pit an individual ego against

universal principles, but considers a particular relationship between

persons, a caring relationship, and questions whether it should

always yield to universal principles of justice. . . . When universal

principles conflict with the claims of relationships, the feminist chal-

lenge disputes that the principles should always have priority. The

feminist critique . . . gives us reason to doubt that . . . justice should

always have priority over care. . . .

Differences Among Feminists . . . The feminist critique of liberalism . . . is the more fundamental

one that turning everyone into a complete liberal individual leaves

no one adequately attentive to relationships between persons. . . .

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82 T HE RIGHT THING TO DO

It is possible for two strangers to have a so-called “relation” of equal-

ity between them, with nothing at all to bind them together into a

friendship or a community. Liberal equality doesn’t itself provide or

concern itself with the more substantial components of relationship.

It is in evaluating and making recommendations for the latter that

an ethic of care is most appropriate. As many feminists argue, the

issues for moral theory are less a matter of justice versus care than

of how to appropriately integrate justice and care, or care and justice

if we are wary of the traditional downgrading and marginalizing of

care. And it is not satisfactory to think of care, as it is conceptu-

alized by liberal individualism, as a mere personal preference an

individual may choose or not. Neither is it satisfactory to think of

caring relationships as merely what rational individuals may choose

to care about as long as they give priority to universal, and impartial,

moral principles.

Marilyn Friedman calls attention to when partiality is or is not

morally valuable. “Personal relationships,” she writes, “vary widely

in their moral value. The quality of a particular relationship is pro-

foundly important in determining the moral worth of any partiality

which is necessary for sustaining that relationship.” Partiality toward

other white supremacists on the part of a white supremacist, for

instance, does not have moral worth. When relationships cause

harm, or are based on such wrongful relations as that of master and

slave, we should not be partial toward them. But when a relationship

has moral worth, such as a caring relationship between parents and

children, or a relation of trust between friends and lovers clearly may

have, the question of the priority, or not, of impartiality can arise.

And as moralities of impartial rules so easily forget, and as Friedman

makes clear, “close relationships call . . . for personal concern,

loyalty, interest, passion, and responsiveness to the uniqueness of

loved ones, to their specific needs, interests, history, and so on. In

a word, personal relationships call for attitudes of partiality rather

than impartiality.”

Evaluating the worth of relationships does not mean that uni-

versal norms have priority after all. It means that from the perspec-

tive of justice, some relationships are to be judged unjustifiable,

often to the point that they should be ended to the extent possible,

although this is often a limited extent. (For instance, we will never

stop being the sibling of our siblings, or the ex-friend or ex-spouse

of the friends or spouse with whom we have broken a relation.) But

once a relationship can be deemed to have value, moral issues can

arise as to whether the claims of the relationship should or should

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CARING RELATIONS AND PRINCIPLES OF JUSTICE 83

not be subordinated to the perspective of justice. . . . Moreover, the

aspects of a relationship that make it a bad relationship can often

be interpreted as failures to appropriately care for particular others,

rather than only as violations of impartial moral rules. Certainly,

avoiding serious moral wrongs should take priority over avoiding

trivial ones, and pursuing highly important moral goods should take

priority over pursuing insignificant ones. But this settles nothing

about caring relations versus impartial moral rules. . . . Some car-

ing relations are of the utmost importance, . . . while some of the

requirements of impartial moral rules are relatively insignificant.

And sometimes it is the reverse. . . .

A Look at Some Cases Let me now try to examine in greater detail what is at issue between

an ethic of care and a morality built on impartiality, and why a satis-

factory feminist morality should not accept the view that universal,

impartial, liberal moral principles of justice and right should always

be accorded priority over the concerns of caring relationships,

which include considerations of trust, friendship, and loyalty. The

argument needs to be examined both at the level of personal rela-

tionships and at the level of social policy. Advocates of an ethic of

care have argued successfully against the view that care—within the

bounds of what is permitted by universal principles—is admirable in

personal relations, but that the core value of care is inappropriate

for the impersonal relations of strangers and citizens. I will explore

issues of both kinds.

Consider, first, the story of Abraham. It has been discussed by

a number of defenders of an ethic of care who do not agree with

the religious and moral teaching that Abraham made the right deci-

sion when he chose to obey the command of God and kill his infant

son. . . . From the perspective of an ethic of care, the relationship

between child and parent should not always be subordinated to the

command of God or of universal moral rules. But let’s consider a

secular case in which there is a genuine conflict between impartialist

rules and the parent-child relation. . . .

Suppose the father of a young child is by profession a teacher

with a special skill in helping troubled young children succeed

academically. Suppose now that on a utilitarian calculation of how

much overall good will be achieved, he determines that, from the

point of view of universal utilitarian rules, he ought to devote more

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84 T HE RIGHT THING TO DO

time to his work, staying at his school after hours and so on, letting

his wife and others care for his own young child. But he also thinks

that from the perspective of care, he should build his relationship

with his child, developing the trust and mutual consideration of

which it is capable. Even if the universal rules allow him some time

for family life, and even if he places appropriate utilitarian value

on developing his relationship with his child—the good it will do

the child, the pleasure it will give him, the good it will enable the

child to do in the future, etc.—the calculation still comes out, let’s

say, as before: he should devote more time to his students. But the

moral demands of care suggest to him that he should spend more

time with his child. . . .

The argument for impartiality might go something like this:

Reasoning as an abstract agent, I should act on moral rules that

all could accept from a perspective of impartiality. Those rules rec-

ommend that we treat all persons equally, including our children,

with respect to exercising our professional skills, and that when we

have special skills we should use them for the benefit of all persons

equally. For example, a teacher should not favor his own child if his

child happens to be one of his students. And if one has the abilities

and has had the social advantages to become a teacher, one should

exercise those skills when they are needed, especially when they are

seriously needed.

But the father in my example also considers the perspective

of care. From this perspective his relationship with his child is of

enormous and irreplaceable value. He thinks that out of concern

for this particular relationship he should spend more time with his

child. He experiences the relationship as one of love and trust and

loyalty, and thinks in this case that he should subordinate such other

considerations as exercising his professional skills to this relation-

ship. He thinks he should free himself to help his child feel the

trust and encouragement his development will require, even if this

conflicts with impartial morality.

He reflects on what the motives would be in choosing between

the alternatives. For one alternative, the motive would be: because

universal moral rules recommend it. For the other, the motive would

be: because this is my child and I am the father of this child and the

relationship between us is no less important than universal rules. He

reflects on whether the latter can be a moral motive and concludes

that it can in the sense that he can believe it is the motive he ought

to act on. And he can do this without holding that every father

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CARING RELATIONS AND PRINCIPLES OF JUSTICE 85

ought to act similarly toward his child. He can further conclude that

if Kantian and utilitarian moralities deny that such a motive can be

moral, then they have mistakenly defined the moral to suit their

purposes, and, by arbitrary fiat, excluded whatever might challenge

their universalizing requirements. He may have read Annette Baier’s

discussion of the possible tendency of women to resist subordinat-

ing their moral sensitivities to autonomously chosen Kantian rules.

Baier writes:

What did Kant, the great prophet of autonomy, say in his moral

theory about women? He said they were incapable of legislation,

not fit to vote, that they needed the guidance of more “rational”

males. Autonomy was not for them; it was only for first-class,

really rational persons. . . . But where Kant concludes “so much

the worse for women,” we can conclude “so much the worse

for  the male fixation on the special skill of drafting legislation,

for the bureaucratic mentality of rule-worship, and for the male

exaggeration of the importance of independence over mutual

interdependence.”

The father in my example may think fathers should join mothers in

paying more attention to relationships of care and in resisting the

demands of impartial rules when they are excessive.

From the perspective of all, or everyone, perhaps particular

relationships should be subordinated to universal rules. But from

the perspective of particular persons in relationships, it is certainly

meaningful to ask: Why must we adopt the perspective of all and

everyone when it is a particular relationship that we care about at

least as much as “being moral” in the sense required by universal

rules? . . . What I am arguing is that in the ethics of care, the moral

claims of caring are no less valid than the moral claims of impar-

tial rules. This is not to say that considerations of impartiality are

unimportant; it does deny that they should always have priority. This

makes care ethics a challenge to liberalism as a moral theory, not a

mere supplement. . . .

Models of Morality At the level of morality, we need to decide which “models” are

appropriate for which contexts. . . .

An ethic of care suggests that the priority of justice is at best

persuasive for the legal-judicial context. It might also suggest that cal-

culations of general utility are at best appropriate for some choices

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86 T HE RIGHT THING TO DO

about public policy. A moral theory is still needed to show us how,

within the relatedness that should exist among all persons as fellow

human beings, and that does exist in many personal contexts and

numerous group ones, we should apply the various possible models.

We will then be able to see how we should apply the legal-judicial

model of impartiality to given ranges of issues, or the utilitarian

model of concern for the general welfare to another range of issues,

all the time recognizing other issues, such as those that can be seen

most clearly among friends and within families and in cases of group

solidarity, for which these models are inappropriate or inadequate.

And we will see how the model of caring relations can apply and

have priority in some contexts, and how it should not be limited to

the personal choices made by individuals after they have met all the

requirements of justice. A comprehensive moral theory would show,

I believe, how care and its related values are not less important than

justice. Whether they are more important remains to be argued, but

not in this paper.

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87

CHAPTER 12 O n the Moral and Legal

Status of Abortion and Postscript on Infanticide Mary Anne Warren

Abortion was not traditionally treated as a crime in Western law. Under

English common law, abortion was tolerated even when performed

late in the pregnancy, and in the United States, no laws prohibited it

until well into the 19 th

century. When such laws were enacted, they

were motivated by three concerns: a desire to discourage illicit sexual

activity, the belief that abortion was an unsafe medical procedure, and

the feeling that it is morally wrong to kill an unborn baby.

In the 20 th

century, every American state passed laws forbidding

abortion. However, these laws were deemed unconstitutional by the

U.S. Supreme Court in its famous (some would say infamous) decision

in Roe v. Wade (1973). The Court held that states cannot ban abortion until the fetus is “viable”—that is, until the fetus is mature enough to

survive outside the womb. The upshot is that American women can

get abortions until they are about six months pregnant.

Today, most Americans support the Roe v. Wade decision, and the Supreme Court is unlikely to overturn it so long as a Democrat

remains president. Five Supreme Court justices out of nine currently

agree with the decision. If a vacancy arises on the Court, then a

Democratic president would almost certainly nominate someone who

supports legalized abortion.

Mary Anne Warren believes that physical characteristics, such

as genes, are never enough to make someone a person. Persons, she

From the Monist, vol. 57, no. 1 (1973), pp. 43–61; and from The Problem of Abortion, edited by Joel Feinberg (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishers), 1984, pp. 116–119.

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88 T HE RIGHT THING TO DO

says, are defined by their mental capacities, such as self-awareness

and the ability to use a language. Fetuses lack such characteristics, so

they are not persons. Warren also rejects the idea that the potential of the fetus might outweigh the mother’s rights. Thus, she concludes

that abortion is morally acceptable. However, she does not believe

it is permissible to kill a baby when there are people out there who

would want to take care of it, either through adoption or through

something like foster care.

Mary Anne Warren (1946–2010) was a professor of philosophy at

San Francisco State University.

We will be concerned with both the moral status of abortion, which

for our purposes we may define as the act which a woman performs

in voluntarily terminating, or allowing another person to terminate,

her pregnancy, and the legal status which is appropriate for this

act. . . . It is possible to show that, on the basis of intuitions which

we may expect even the opponents of abortion to share, a fetus is

not a person, and hence not the sort of entity to which it is proper

to ascribe full moral rights.

Of course, while some philosophers would deny the possibil-

ity of any such proof, others will deny that there is any need for it,

since the moral permissibility of abortion appears to them to be

too obvious to require proof. But the inadequacy of this attitude

should be evident from the fact that both the friends and the foes of

abortion consider their position to be morally self-evident. Because

pro-abortionists have never adequately come to grips with the con-

ceptual issues surrounding abortion, most, if not all, of the argu-

ments which they advance in opposition to laws restricting access to

abortion fail to refute or even weaken the traditional antiabortion

argument, namely, that a fetus is a human being, and therefore

abortion is murder.

These arguments are typically of one of two sorts. Either they

point to the terrible side effects of the restrictive laws, e.g., the

deaths due to illegal abortions, and the fact that it is poor women

who suffer the most as a result of these laws, or else they state that

to deny a woman access to abortion is to deprive her of her right to

control her own body. Unfortunately, however, the fact that restrict-

ing access to abortion has tragic side effects does not, in itself, show

that the restrictions are unjustified, since murder is wrong regardless

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ON THE MORAL AND LEGAL STATUS OF ABORTION 89

of the consequences of prohibiting it; and the appeal to the right

to control one’s body, which is generally construed as a property

right, is at best a rather feeble argument for the permissibility of

abortion. Mere ownership does not give me the right to kill inno-

cent people whom I find on my property, and indeed I am apt to

be held responsible if such people injure themselves while on my

property. It is equally unclear that I have any moral right to expel

an innocent person from my property when I know that doing so

will result in his death. . . .

The question which we must answer in order to produce a satisfactory

solution to the problem of the moral status of abortion is this: How

are we to define the moral community, the set of beings with full and

equal moral rights, such that we can decide whether a human fetus is

a member of this community or not? What sort of entity, exactly, has

the inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?

Jefferson attributed these rights to all men, and it may or may not be fair to suggest that he intended to attribute them only to men. Perhaps he ought to have attributed them to all human beings. . . .

1. On the Definition of ‘Human’ . . . The term ‘human’ has two distinct, but not often distinguished,

senses. This fact results in a slide of meaning, which serves to con-

ceal the fallaciousness of the traditional argument that since (1) it is

wrong to kill innocent human beings, and (2) fetuses are innocent

human beings, then (3) it is wrong to kill fetuses. For if ‘human’ is

used in the same sense in both (1) and (2) then, whichever of the

two senses is meant, one of these premises is question-begging. And

if it is used in two different senses then of course the conclusion

doesn’t follow.

Thus, (1) is a self-evident moral truth, and avoids begging the

question about abortion, only if ‘human being’ is used to mean

something like “a full-fledged member of the moral community.”

(It  may or may not also be meant to refer exclusively to members

of the species Homo sapiens. ) We may call this the moral sense of ‘human.’ It is not to be confused with what we will call the genetic sense, i.e., the sense in which any member of the species is a human being, and no member of any other species could be. If (1) is accept-

able only if the moral sense is intended, (2) is non-question-begging

only if what is intended is the genetic sense. . . .

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90 T HE RIGHT THING TO DO

2. Defining the Moral Community Can it be established that genetic humanity is sufficient for moral

humanity? I think that there are very good reasons for not defining

the moral community in this way. I would like to suggest an alter-

native way of defining the moral community, which I will argue for

only to the extent of explaining why it is, or should be, self-evident.

The suggestion is simply that the moral community consists of all

and only people, rather than all and only human beings; and probably the best way of demonstrating its self-evidence is by considering the

concept of personhood, to see what sorts of entity are and are not

persons, and what the decision that a being is or is not a person

implies about its moral rights.

What characteristics entitle an entity to be considered a per-

son? This is obviously not the place to attempt a complete analysis

of the concept of personhood, but we do not need such a fully

adequate analysis just to determine whether and why a fetus is or

isn’t a person. All we need is a rough and approximate list of the

most basic criteria of personhood, and some idea of which, or how

many, of these an entity must satisfy in order to properly be con-

sidered a person.

In searching for such criteria, it is useful to look beyond the

set of people with whom we are acquainted, and ask how we would

decide whether a totally alien being was a person or not. (For we

have no right to assume that genetic humanity is necessary for

personhood.) Imagine a space traveler who lands on an unknown

planet and encounters a race of beings utterly unlike any he has ever

seen or heard of. If he wants to be sure of behaving morally toward

these beings, he has to somehow decide whether they are people,

and hence have full moral rights, or whether they are the sort of

thing which he need not feel guilty about treating as, for example,

a source of food.

How should he go about making this decision? If he has some

anthropological background, he might look for such things as reli-

gion, art, and the manufacturing of tools, weapons, or shelters, since

these factors have been used to distinguish our human from our

prehuman ancestors, in what seems to be closer to the moral than

the genetic sense of ‘human.’ And no doubt he would be right to

consider the presence of such factors as good evidence that the

alien beings were people, and morally human. It would, however, be

overly anthropocentric of him to take the absence of these things as

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ON THE MORAL AND LEGAL STATUS OF ABORTION 91

adequate evidence that they were not, since we can imagine people

who have progressed beyond, or evolved without ever developing,

these cultural characteristics.

I suggest that the traits which are most central to the concept

of personhood, or humanity in the moral sense, are, very roughly,

the following:

(1) consciousness (of objects and events external and/or internal to the being), and in particular the capacity to

feel pain;

(2) reasoning (the developed capacity to solve new and rela- tively complex problems);

(3) self-motivated activity (activity which is relatively indepen- dent of either genetic or direct external control);

(4) the capacity to communicate, by whatever means, messages of an indefinite variety of types, that is, not just with an

indefinite number of possible contents, but on indefinitely

many possible topics;

(5) the presence of self-concepts, and self-awareness. . . .

Admittedly, there are apt to be a great many problems

involved in formulating precise definitions of these criteria, let

alone in developing universally valid behavioral criteria for decid-

ing when they apply. But I will assume that both we and our

explorer know approximately what (1)–(5) mean, and that he is

also able to determine whether or not they apply. How, then,

should he use his findings to decide whether or not the alien

beings are people? We needn’t suppose that an entity must have

all of these attributes to be properly considered a person; (1) and (2) alone may well be sufficient for personhood, and quite prob-

ably (1)–(3) are sufficient. Neither do we need to insist that any

one of these criteria is necessary for personhood, although once again (1) and (2) look like fairly good candidates for necessary

conditions, as does (3), if ‘activity’ is construed so as to include

the activity of reasoning.

All we need to claim, to demonstrate that a fetus is not a

person, is that any being which satisfies none of (1)–(5) is certainly not a person. I consider this claim to be so obvious that I think any-

one who denied it, and claimed that a being which satisfied none of

(1)–(5) was a person all the same, would thereby demonstrate that

he had no notion at all of what a person is—perhaps because he

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92 T HE RIGHT THING TO DO

had confused the concept of a person with that of genetic humanity.

If the opponents of abortion were to deny the appropriateness of

these five criteria, I do not know what further arguments would con-

vince them. We would probably have to admit that our conceptual

schemes were indeed irreconcilably different, and that our dispute

could not be settled objectively.

I do not expect this to happen, however, since I think that the

concept of a person is one which is very nearly universal (to peo-

ple), and that it is common to both pro-abortionists and antiabor-

tionists, even though neither group has fully realized the relevance

of this concept to the resolution of their dispute. Furthermore,

I  think that on reflection even the antiabortionists ought to agree

not only that (1)–(5) are central to the concept of personhood,

but also that it is a part of this concept that all and only people

have full moral rights. The concept of a person is in part a moral

concept; once we have admitted that x is a person we have recog- nized, even if we have not agreed to respect, x ’s right to be treated as a member of the moral community. It is true that the claim that

x is a human being is more commonly voiced as part of an appeal to treat x decently than is the claim that x is a person, but this is either because ‘human being’ is here used in the sense which

implies personhood, or because the genetic and moral senses of

‘human’ have been confused.

Now if (1)–(5) are indeed the primary criteria of personhood,

then it is clear that genetic humanity is neither necessary nor suffi-

cient for establishing that an entity is a person. Some human beings

are not people, and there may well be people who are not human

beings. A man or woman whose consciousness has been perma-

nently obliterated but who remains alive is a human being which

is no longer a person; defective human beings, with no appreciable

mental capacity, are not and presumably never will be people; and

a fetus is a human being which is not yet a person, and which

therefore cannot coherently be said to have full moral rights. Citi-

zens of the next century should be prepared to recognize highly

advanced, self-aware robots or computers, should such be devel-

oped, and intelligent inhabitants of other worlds, should such be

found, as people in the fullest sense, and to respect their moral

rights. But to ascribe full moral rights to an entity which is not a

person is as absurd as to ascribe moral obligations and responsibili-

ties to such an entity.

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ON THE MORAL AND LEGAL STATUS OF ABORTION 93

3. Fetal Development and the Right to Life . . . It is clear that even though a seven- or eight-month fetus has

features which make it apt to arouse in us almost the same powerful

protective instinct as is commonly aroused by a small infant, nev-

ertheless it is not significantly more personlike than is a very small

embryo. It is somewhat more personlike; it can apparently feel and respond to pain, and it may even have a rudimentary form of con-

sciousness, insofar as its brain is quite active. Nevertheless, it seems

safe to say that it is not fully conscious, in the way that an infant of a

few months is, and that it cannot reason, or communicate messages

of indefinitely many sorts, does not engage in self-motivated activ-

ity, and has no self-awareness. Thus, in the relevant respects, a fetus, even a fully developed one, is considerably less personlike than is the

average mature mammal, indeed the average fish. And I think that

a rational person must conclude that if the right to life of a fetus

is to be based upon its resemblance to a person, then it cannot be

said to have any more right to life than, let us say, a newborn guppy

(which also seems to be capable of feeling pain), and that a right of

that magnitude could never override a woman’s right to obtain an

abortion, at any stage of her pregnancy. . . .

Thus, since the fact that even a fully developed fetus is not

personlike enough to have any significant right to life on the basis

of its personlikeness shows that no legal restrictions upon the stage

of pregnancy in which an abortion may be performed can be justi-

fied on the grounds that we should protect the rights of the older

fetus; and since there is no other apparent justification for such

restrictions, we may conclude that they are entirely unjustified. . . .

4. Potential Personhood and the Right to Life

We have seen that a fetus does not resemble a person in any way

which can support the claim that it has even some of the same rights.

But what about its potential, the fact that if nurtured and allowed to develop naturally it will very probably become a person? Doesn’t

that alone give it at least some right to life? It is hard to deny that

the fact that an entity is a potential person is a strong prima facie

reason for not destroying it; but we need not conclude from this

that a potential person has a right to life, by virtue of that potential.

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94 T HE RIGHT THING TO DO

It may be that our feeling that it is better, other things being equal,

not to destroy a potential person is better explained by the fact that

potential people are still (felt to be) an invaluable resource, not to

be lightly squandered. Surely, if every speck of dust were a potential

person, we would be much less apt to conclude that every potential

person has a right to become actual.

Still, we do not need to insist that a potential person has no

right to life whatever. There may well be something immoral, and

not just imprudent, about wantonly destroying potential people,

when doing so isn’t necessary to protect anyone’s rights. But even

if a potential person does have some prima facie right to life, such

a right could not possibly outweigh the right of a woman to obtain

an abortion, since the rights of any actual person invariably outweigh

those of any potential person, whenever the two conflict. Since this

may not be immediately obvious in the case of a human fetus, let

us look at another case.

Suppose that our space explorer falls into the hands of an alien

culture, whose scientists decide to create a few hundred thousand

or more human beings, by breaking his body into its component

cells, and using these to create fully developed human beings, with,

of course, his genetic code. We may imagine that each of these

newly created men will have all of the original man’s abilities, skills,

knowledge, and so on, and also have an individual self-concept, in

short that each of them will be a bona fide (though hardly unique)

person. Imagine that the whole project will take only seconds, and

that its chances of success are extremely high, and that our explorer

knows all of this, and also knows that these people will be treated

fairly. I maintain that in such a situation he would have every right to

escape if he could, and thus to deprive all of these potential people

of their potential lives; for his right to life outweighs all of theirs

together, in spite of the fact that they are all genetically human, all

innocent, and all have a very high probability of becoming people

very soon, if only he refrains from acting.

Indeed, I think he would have a right to escape even if it were

not his life which the alien scientists planned to take, but only a year

of his freedom, or, indeed, only a day. Nor would he be obligated

to stay if he had gotten captured (thus bringing all these people-

potentials into existence) because of his own carelessness, or even if

he had done so deliberately, knowing the consequences. Regardless

of how he got captured, he is not morally obligated to remain in cap-

tivity for any period of time for the sake of permitting any number

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ON THE MORAL AND LEGAL STATUS OF ABORTION 95

of potential people to come into actuality, so great is the margin by

which one actual person’s right to liberty outweighs whatever right

to life even a hundred thousand potential people have. And it seems

reasonable to conclude that the rights of a woman will outweigh by

a similar margin whatever right to life a fetus may have by virtue of

its potential personhood.

Thus, neither a fetus’s resemblance to a person, nor its poten-

tial for becoming a person provides any basis whatever for the claim

that it has any significant right to life. Consequently, a woman’s right

to protect her health, happiness, freedom, and even her life, by

terminating an unwanted pregnancy, will always override whatever

right to life it may be appropriate to ascribe to a fetus, even a fully

developed one. And thus, in the absence of any overwhelming social

need for every possible child, the laws which restrict the right to

obtain an abortion, or limit the period of pregnancy during which

an abortion may be performed, are a wholly unjustified violation of

a woman’s most basic moral and constitutional rights.

Postscript on Infanticide One of the most troubling objections to the argument presented

in this article is that it may appear to justify not only abortion but

infanticide as well. A newborn infant is not a great deal more per-

sonlike than a nine-month fetus, and thus it might seem that if

late-term abortion is sometimes justified, then infanticide must also

be sometimes justified. Yet most people consider that infanticide is

a form of murder, and thus never justified.

While it is important to appreciate the emotional force of this

objection, its logical force is far less than it may seem at first glance.

There are many reasons why infanticide is much more difficult to

justify than abortion, even though if my argument is correct nei-

ther constitutes the killing of a person. In this country, and in this

period of history, the deliberate killing of viable newborns is vir-

tually never justified. This is in part because neonates are so very

close to being persons that to kill them requires a very strong moral justification—as does the killing of dolphins, whales, chimpanzees,

and other highly personlike creatures. It is certainly wrong to kill

such beings just for the sake of convenience, or financial profit, or

“sport.”

Another reason why infanticide is usually wrong, in our society,

is that if the newborn’s parents do not want it, or are unable to care

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96 T HE RIGHT THING TO DO

for it, there are (in most cases) people who are able and eager to

adopt it and to provide a good home for it. Many people wait years

for the opportunity to adopt a child, and some are unable to do

so even though there is every reason to believe that they would be

good parents. The needless destruction of a viable infant inevitably

deprives some person or persons of a source of great pleasure and

satisfaction, perhaps severely impoverishing their lives. Furthermore,

even if an infant is considered to be unadoptable (e.g., because of

some extremely severe mental or physical handicap) it is still wrong

in most cases to kill it. For most of us value the lives of infants, and

would prefer to pay taxes to support orphanages and state institu-

tions for the handicapped rather than to allow unwanted infants to

be killed. So long as most people feel this way, and so long as our

society can afford to provide care for infants which are unwanted

or which have special needs that preclude home care, it is wrong

to destroy any infant which has a chance of living a reasonably sat-

isfactory life.

If these arguments show that infanticide is wrong, at least in

this society, then why don’t they also show that late-term abortion is

wrong? After all, third trimester fetuses are also highly personlike,

and many people value them and would much prefer that they be

preserved, even at some cost to themselves. As a potential source of

pleasure to some family, a viable fetus is just as valuable as a viable

infant. But there is an obvious and crucial difference between the

two cases: once the infant is born, its continued life cannot (except,

perhaps, in very exceptional cases) pose any serious threat to the

woman’s life or health, since she is free to put it up for adoption,

or, where this is impossible, to place it in a state-supported institu-

tion. While she might prefer that it die, rather than being raised

by others, it is not clear that such a preference would constitute a

right on her part. True, she may suffer greatly from the knowledge

that her child will be thrown into the lottery of the adoption sys-

tem, and that she will be unable to ensure its well-being, or even to

know whether it is healthy, happy, doing well in school, etc.; for the

law generally does not permit natural parents to remain in contact

with their children, once they are adopted by another family. But

there are surely better ways of dealing with these problems than by

permitting infanticide in such cases. (It might help, for instance,

if the natural parents of adopted children could at least receive

some information about their progress, without necessarily being

informed of the identity of the adopting family.)

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ON THE MORAL AND LEGAL STATUS OF ABORTION 97

In contrast, a pregnant woman’s right to protect her own life

and health clearly outweighs other people’s desire that the fetus be

preserved—just as, when a person’s life or limb is threatened by

some wild animal, and when the threat cannot be removed without

killing the animal, the person’s right to self-protection outweighs the

desires of those who would prefer that the animal not be harmed.

Thus, while the moment of birth may not mark any sharp disconti-

nuity in the degree to which an infant possesses a right to life, it does

mark the end of the mother’s absolute right to determine its fate.

Indeed, if and when a late-term abortion could be safely performed

without killing the fetus, she would have no absolute right to insist

on its death (e.g., if others wish to adopt it or to pay for its care),

for the same reason that she does not have a right to insist that a

viable infant be killed.

It remains true that according to my argument neither abor-

tion nor the killing of neonates is properly considered a form of

murder. Perhaps it is understandable that the law should classify

infanticide as murder or homicide, since there is no other existing

legal category which adequately or conveniently expresses the force

of our society’s disapproval of this action. But the moral distinction

remains, and it has several important consequences.

In the first place, it implies that when an infant is born into a

society which—unlike ours—is so impoverished that it simply cannot

care for it adequately without endangering the survival of existing

persons, killing it or allowing it to die is not necessarily wrong—

provided that there is no other society which is willing and able to provide such care. Most human societies, from those at the hunting

and gathering stage of economic development to the highly civi-

lized Greeks and Romans, have permitted the practice of infanticide

under such unfortunate circumstances, and I would argue that it

shows a serious lack of understanding to condemn them as morally

backward for this reason alone.

In the second place, the argument implies that when an infant

is born with such severe physical anomalies that its life would pre-

dictably be a very short and/or very miserable one, even with the

most heroic of medical treatment, and where its parents do not

choose to bear the often crushing emotional, financial and other

burdens attendant upon the artificial prolongation of such a tragic

life, it is not morally wrong to cease or withhold treatment, thus

allowing the infant a painless death. It is wrong (and sometimes

a form of murder) to practice involuntary euthanasia on persons,

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98 T HE RIGHT THING TO DO

since they have the right to decide for themselves whether or not

they wish to continue to live. But terminally ill neonates cannot

make this decision for themselves, and thus it is incumbent upon

responsible persons to make the decision for them, as best they can.

The mistaken belief that infanticide is always tantamount to murder

is responsible for a great deal of unnecessary suffering, not just on

the part of infants which are made to endure needlessly prolonged

and painful deaths, but also on the part of parents, nurses, and other

involved persons, who must watch infants suffering needlessly, help-

less to end that suffering in the most humane way.

I am well aware that these conclusions, however modest and

reasonable they may seem to some people, strike other people as

morally monstrous, and that some people might even prefer to aban-

don their previous support for women’s right to abortion rather

than accept a theory which leads to such conclusions about infanti-

cide. But all that these facts show is that abortion is not an isolated

moral issue; to fully understand the moral status of abortion we

may have to reconsider other moral issues as well, issues not just

about infanticide and euthanasia, but also about the moral rights

of women and of nonhuman animals. It is a philosopher’s task to

criticize mistaken beliefs which stand in the way of moral under-

standing, even when—perhaps especially when—those beliefs are

popular and widespread. The belief that moral strictures against kill-

ing should apply equally to all genetically human entities, and only to genetically human entities, is such an error. The overcoming of

this error will undoubtedly require long and often painful struggle;

but it must be done.

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99

CHAPTER 13 Why Abortion Is Immoral

Don Marquis

When people discuss the morality of abortion, they usually begin by

asking, Is the fetus a person, with a right to life? However, Don Marquis

of the University of Kansas asks a different question: Do we have the

same reasons not to kill a fetus that we have not to kill an adult? Killing

adults, he says, is wrong because it deprives them of their future. But

in killing a fetus, we are also depriving it of its future. Thus, it seems

inconsistent to object to one but not the other.

The view that abortion is, with rare exceptions, seriously immoral has

received little support in the recent philosophical literature. No doubt

most philosophers affiliated with secular institutions of higher educa-

tion believe that the anti-abortion position is either a symptom of

irrational religious dogma or a conclusion generated by seriously con-

fused philosophical argument. The purpose of this essay is to under-

mine this general belief. This essay sets out an argument that purports

to show, as well as any argument in ethics can show, that abortion is,

except possibly in rare cases, seriously immoral, that it is in the same

moral category as killing an innocent adult human being. . . .

I A sketch of standard anti-abortion and pro-choice arguments exhibits

how those arguments possess certain symmetries that explain why parti-

sans of those positions are so convinced of the correctness of their own

From The Journal of Philosophy, vol. 86 (1989), pp. 183–85, 189–92, 194. Reprinted by permission.

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100 T HE RIGHT THING TO DO

positions, why they are not successful in convincing their opponents,

and why, to others, this issue seems to be unresolvable. An analysis of

the nature of this standoff suggests a strategy for surmounting it.

Consider the way a typical anti-abortionist argues. She will argue

or assert that life is present from the moment of conception or that

fetuses look like babies or that fetuses possess a characteristic such as

a genetic code that is both necessary and sufficient for being human.

Anti-abortionists seem to believe that (1) the truth of all of these

claims is quite obvious, and (2) establishing any of these claims is

sufficient to show that abortion is morally akin to murder.

A standard pro-choice strategy exhibits similarities. The pro-

choicer will argue or assert that fetuses are not persons or that

fetuses are not rational agents or that fetuses are not social beings.

Pro-choicers seem to believe that (1) the truth of any of these claims

is quite obvious, and (2) establishing any of these claims is sufficient

to show that an abortion is not a wrongful killing.

In fact, both the pro-choice and the anti-abortion claims do

seem to be true, although the “it looks like a baby” claim is more

difficult to establish the earlier the pregnancy. We seem to have a

standoff. How can it be resolved?

As everyone who has taken a bit of logic knows, if any of these

arguments concerning abortion is a good argument, it requires

not only some claim characterizing fetuses, but also some general

moral principle that ties a characteristic of fetuses to having or

not having the right to life or to some other moral character-

istic that will generate the obligation or the lack of obligation

not to end the life of a fetus. Accordingly, the arguments of the

anti- abortionist and the pro-choicer need a bit of filling in to be

regarded as adequate.

Note what each partisan will say. The anti-abortionist will claim

that her position is supported by such generally accepted moral prin-

ciples as “It is always prima facie seriously wrong to take a human

life” or “It is always prima facie seriously wrong to end the life of

a baby.” Since these are generally accepted moral principles, her

position is certainly not obviously wrong. The pro-choicer will claim

that her position is supported by such plausible moral principles as

“Being a person is what gives an individual intrinsic moral worth” or

“It is only seriously prima facie wrong to take the life of a member

of the human community.” Since these are generally accepted moral

principles, the pro-choice position is certainly not obviously wrong.

Unfortunately, we have again arrived at a standoff.

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WHY ABORTION IS IMMORAL 101

Now, how might one deal with this standoff? The standard

approach is to try to show how the moral principles of one’s oppo-

nent lose their plausibility under analysis. It is easy to see how this is

possible. On the one hand, the anti-abortionist will defend a moral

principle concerning the wrongness of killing which tends to be broad

in scope in order that even fetuses at an early stage of pregnancy will

fall under it. The problem with broad principles is that they often

embrace too much. In this particular instance, the principle “It is

always prima facie wrong to take a human life” seems to entail that

it is wrong to end the existence of a living human cancer-cell culture,

on the grounds that the culture is both living and human. Therefore,

it seems that the anti-abortionist’s favored principle is too broad.

On the other hand, the pro-choicer wants to find a moral prin-

ciple concerning the wrongness of killing which tends to be narrow

in scope in order that fetuses will not fall under it. The problem with narrow principles is that they often do not embrace enough. Hence,

the needed principles such as “It is prima facie seriously wrong to

kill only persons” or “It is prima facie wrong to kill only rational

agents” do not explain why it is wrong to kill infants or young chil-

dren or the severely retarded or even perhaps the severely mentally

ill. Therefore, we seem again to have a standoff. The anti-abortionist

charges, not unreasonably, that pro-choice principles concerning

killing are too narrow to be acceptable; the pro-choicer charges,

not unreasonably, that anti-abortionist principles concerning killing

are too broad to be acceptable. . . .

. . . All this suggests that a necessary condition of resolving the

abortion controversy is a more theoretical account of the wrongness

of killing. After all, if we merely believe, but do not understand, why

killing adult human beings such as ourselves is wrong, how could

we conceivably show that abortion is either immoral or permissible?

II In order to develop such an account, we can start from the follow-

ing unproblematic assumption concerning our own case: it is wrong

to kill us. Why is it wrong? Some answers can be easily eliminated. It might be said that what makes killing us wrong is that a killing

brutalizes the one who kills. But the brutalization consists of being

inured to the performance of an act that is hideously immoral;

hence, the brutalization does not explain the immorality. It might be

said that what makes killing us wrong is the great loss others would

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102 T HE RIGHT THING TO DO

experience due to our absence. Although such hubris is understand-

able, such an explanation does not account for the wrongness of

killing hermits, or those whose lives are relatively independent and

whose friends find it easy to make new friends.

A more obvious answer is better. What primarily makes kill-

ing wrong is neither its effect on the murderer nor its effect on the

victim’s friends and relatives, but its effect on the victim. The loss

of one’s life is one of the greatest losses one can suffer. The loss

of one’s life deprives one of all the experiences, activities, proj-

ects, and enjoyments that would otherwise have constituted one’s

future. Therefore, killing someone is wrong, primarily because the

killing inflicts (one of) the greatest possible losses on the victim.

To describe this as the loss of life can be misleading, however.

The change in my biological state does not by itself make killing

me wrong. The effect of the loss of my biological life is the loss

to me of all those activities, projects, experiences, and enjoyments

which would otherwise have constituted my future personal life.

These activities, projects, experiences, and enjoyments are either

valuable for their own sakes or are means to something else that

is valuable for its own sake. Some parts of my future are not val-

ued by me now, but will come to be valued by me as I grow older

and as my values and capacities change. When I am killed, I am

deprived both of what I now value which would have been part

of my future personal life, but also what I would come to value.

Therefore, when I die, I am deprived of all of the value of my

future. Inflicting this loss on me is ultimately what makes killing

me wrong. This being the case, it would seem that what makes

killing any adult human being prima facie seriously wrong is the loss of his or her future.

1 . . .

The claim that what makes killing wrong is the loss of the vic-

tim’s future is directly supported by two considerations. In the first

place, this theory explains why we regard killing as one of the worst

of crimes. Killing is especially wrong, because it deprives the victim

of more than perhaps any other crime. In the second place, people

with AIDS or cancer who know they are dying believe, of course, that

dying is a very bad thing for them. They believe that the loss of a

future to them that they would otherwise have experienced is what

makes their premature death a very bad thing for them. A better

theory of the wrongness of killing would require a different natural

property associated with killing which better fits with the attitudes

of the dying. What could it be?

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WHY ABORTION IS IMMORAL 103

The view that what makes killing wrong is the loss to the victim

of the value of the victim’s future gains additional support when

some of its implications are examined. In the first place, it is incom-

patible with the view that it is wrong to kill only beings who are

biologically human. It is possible that there exists a different species

from another planet whose members have a future like ours. Since

having a future like that is what makes killing someone wrong, this

theory entails that it would be wrong to kill members of such a spe-

cies. Hence, this theory is opposed to the claim that only life that

is biologically human has great moral worth, a claim which many

anti-abortionists have seemed to adopt. This opposition, which this

theory has in common with personhood theories, seems to be a

merit of the theory.

In the second place, the claim that the loss of one’s future

is the wrong-making feature of one’s being killed entails the pos-

sibility that the futures of some actual nonhuman mammals on our

own planet are sufficiently like ours that it is seriously wrong to kill

them also. Whether some animals do have the same right to life

as human beings depends on adding to the account of the wrong-

ness of killing some additional account of just what it is about my

future or the futures of other adult human beings which makes

it wrong to kill us. No such additional account will be offered in

this essay. Undoubtedly, the provision of such an account would

be a very difficult matter. Undoubtedly, any such account would be

quite controversial. Hence, it surely should not reflect badly on this

sketch of an elementary theory of the wrongness of killing that it is

indeterminate with respect to some very difficult issues regarding

animal rights.

In the third place, the claim that the loss of one’s future is

the wrong-making feature of one’s being killed does not entail, as

sanctity of human life theories do, that active euthanasia is wrong.

Persons who are severely and incurably ill, who face a future of pain

and despair, and who wish to die will not have suffered a loss if they

are killed. It is, strictly speaking, the value of a human’s future which

makes killing wrong in this theory. This being so, killing does not

necessarily wrong some persons who are sick and dying. Of course,

there may be other reasons for a prohibition of active euthanasia,

but that is another matter. Sanctity-of-human-life theories seem to

hold that active euthanasia is seriously wrong even in an individual

case where there seems to be good reason for it independently of

public policy considerations. This consequence is most implausible,

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104 T HE RIGHT THING TO DO

and it is a plus for the claim that the loss of a future of value is

what makes killing wrong that it does not share this consequence.

In the fourth place, the account of the wrongness of killing

defended in this essay does straightforwardly entail that it is prima

facie seriously wrong to kill children and infants, for we do presume

that they have futures of value. Since we do believe that it is wrong

to kill defenseless little babies, it is important that a theory of the

wrongness of killing easily account for this. Personhood theories

of the wrongness of killing, on the other hand, cannot straight-

forwardly account for the wrongness of killing infants and young

children. Hence, such theories must add special ad hoc accounts

of  the wrongness of killing the young. The plausibility of such ad

hoc theories seems to be a function of how desperately one wants

such theories to work. The claim that the primary wrong-making

feature of a killing is the loss to the victim of the value of its future

accounts for the wrongness of killing young children and infants

directly; it makes the wrongness of such acts as obvious as we actu-

ally think it is. This is a further merit of this theory. Accordingly, it

seems that this value of a future-like-ours theory of the wrongness

of killing shares strengths of both sanctity-of-life and personhood

accounts while avoiding weaknesses of both. In addition, it meshes

with a central intuition concerning what makes killing wrong.

The claim that the primary wrong-making feature of a killing

is the loss to the victim of the value of its future has obvious conse-

quences for the ethics of abortion. The future of a standard fetus

includes a set of experiences, projects, activities, and such which are

identical with the futures of adult human beings and are identical

with the futures of young children. Since the reason that is sufficient

to explain why it is wrong to kill human beings after the time of

birth is a reason that also applies to fetuses, it follows that abortion

is prima facie seriously morally wrong.

This argument does not rely on the invalid inference that,

since it is wrong to kill persons, it is wrong to kill potential persons

also. The category that is morally central to this analysis is the cat-

egory of having a valuable future like ours; it is not the category

of personhood. The argument to the conclusion that abortion is

prima facie seriously morally wrong proceeded independently of the

notion of person or potential person or any equivalent. Someone

may wish to start with this analysis in terms of the value of a human

future, conclude that abortion is, except perhaps in rare circum-

stances, seriously morally wrong, infer that fetuses have the right to

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WHY ABORTION IS IMMORAL 105

life, and then call fetuses “persons” as a result of their having the

right to life. Clearly, in this case, the category of person is being

used to state the conclusion of the analysis rather than to generate the argument of the analysis. . . .

Of course, this value of a future-like-ours argument, if sound,

shows only that abortion is prima facie wrong, not that it is wrong

in any and all circumstances. Since the loss of the future to a stan-

dard fetus, if killed, is, however, at least as great a loss as the loss of

the future to a standard adult human being who is killed, abortion,

like ordinary killing, could be justified only by the most compelling

reasons. The loss of one’s life is almost the greatest misfortune that

can happen to one. Presumably abortion could be justified in some

circumstances, only if the loss consequent on failing to abort would

be at least as great. Accordingly, morally permissible abortions will

be rare indeed unless, perhaps, they occur so early in pregnancy

that a fetus is not yet definitely an individual. Hence, this argument

should be taken as showing that abortion is presumptively very seri-

ously wrong, where the presumption is very strong—as strong as

the presumption that killing another adult human being is wrong.

Note

1. I have been most influenced on this matter by Jonathan Glover,

Causing Death and Saving Lives (New York: Penguin, 1977), ch. 3; and Robert Young, “What Is So Wrong with Killing People?” Philosophy I.IV, 210 (1979), 515–28.

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106

CHAPTER 14 A Defense of Abortion

Judith Jarvis Thomson

For the sake of argument, Judith Jarvis Thomson grants that a fetus

is a person, with a right to life, from the moment of conception. Can

we conclude from that assumption that abortion is immoral? The

answer turns out to be surprisingly complicated. Thomson’s discus-

sion not only throws light on the abortion issue, but also illuminates

the nature of rights.

Readers of this essay who are unfamiliar with Henry Fonda may

instead think of Channing Tatum, George Clooney, or Justin Timberlake.

The philosophical point involving Fonda will be the same.

Judith Jarvis Thomson is Professor Emerita at the Massachusetts

Institute of Technology (MIT).

Most opposition to abortion relies on the premise that the fetus is a

human being, a person, from the moment of conception. . . .

. . . I think that the premise is false, that the fetus is not a

person from the moment of conception. A newly fertilized ovum, a

newly implanted clump of cells, is no more a person than an acorn

is an oak tree. But I shall not discuss any of this. For it seems to

me to be of great interest to ask what happens if, for the sake of

argument, we allow the premise. How, precisely, are we supposed to

get from there to the conclusion that abortion is morally impermis-

sible? Opponents of abortion commonly spend most of their time

establishing that the fetus is a person, and hardly any time explain-

ing the step from there to the impermissibility of abortion. Perhaps

From Philosophy and Public Affairs, vol. 1, no. 1 (Autumn 1971), pp. 47–66. Reprinted by permission.

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A DEFENSE OF ABORTION 107

they think the step too simple and obvious to require much com-

ment. . . . Whatever the explanation, I suggest that the step they

take is neither easy nor obvious, that it calls for closer examination

than it is commonly given, and that when we do give it this closer

examination we shall feel inclined to reject it.

I propose, then, that we grant that the fetus is a person from

the moment of conception. How does the argument go from here?

Something like this, I take it. Every person has a right to life. So the

fetus has a right to life. No doubt the mother has a right to decide

what shall happen in and to her body; everyone would grant that.

But surely a person’s right to life is stronger and more stringent

than the mother’s right to decide what happens in and to her body,

and so outweighs it. So the fetus may not be killed; an abortion may

not be performed.

It sounds plausible. But now let me ask you to imagine this.

You wake up in the morning and find yourself back to back in bed

with an unconscious violinist. A famous unconscious violinist. He has

been found to have a fatal kidney ailment, and the Society of Music

Lovers has canvassed all the available medical records and found

that you alone have the right blood type to help. They have there-

fore kidnapped you, and last night the violinist’s circulatory system

was plugged into yours, so that your kidneys can be used to extract

poisons from his blood as well as your own. The director of the hos-

pital now tells you, “Look, we’re sorry the Society of Music Lovers

did this to you—we would never have permitted it if we had known.

But still, they did it, and the violinist now is plugged into you. To

unplug you would be to kill him. But never mind, it’s only for nine

months. By then he will have recovered from his ailment, and can

safely be unplugged from you.” Is it morally incumbent on you to

accede to this situation? No doubt it would be very nice of you if

you did, a great kindness. But do you have to accede to it? What if it were not nine months, but nine years? Or longer still? What if the

director of the hospital says, “Tough luck, I agree, but you’ve now

got to stay in bed, with the violinist plugged into you, for the rest

of your life. Because remember this. All persons have a right to life,

and violinists are persons. Granted you have a right to decide what

happens in and to your body, but a person’s right to life outweighs

your right to decide what happens in and to your body. So you can-

not ever be unplugged from him.” I imagine you would regard this

as outrageous, which suggests that something really is wrong with that

plausible-sounding argument I mentioned a moment ago.

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108 T HE RIGHT THING TO DO

In this case, of course, you were kidnapped; you didn’t volun-

teer for the operation that plugged the violinist into your kidneys.

Can those who oppose abortion on the ground I mentioned make

an exception for a pregnancy due to rape? Certainly. They can say

that persons have a right to life only if they didn’t come into exis-

tence because of rape; or they can say that all persons have a right

to life, but that some have less of a right to life than others, in

particular, that those who came into existence because of rape have

less. But these statements have a rather unpleasant sound. Surely the

question of whether you have a right to life at all, or how much of it

you have, shouldn’t turn on the question of whether or not you are

the product of a rape. And in fact the people who oppose abortion

on the ground I mentioned do not make this distinction, and hence

do not make an exception in case of rape.

Nor do they make an exception for a case in which the mother

has to spend the nine months of her pregnancy in bed. They would

agree that would be a great pity, and hard on the mother; but all

the same, all persons have a right to life, the fetus is a person, and

so on. I suspect, in fact, that they would not make an exception for

a case in which, miraculously enough, the pregnancy went on for

nine years, or even the rest of the mother’s life.

Some won’t even make an exception for a case in which con-

tinuation of the pregnancy is likely to shorten the mother’s life;

they regard abortion as impermissible even to save the mother’s life.

Such cases are nowadays very rare, and many opponents of abortion

do not accept this extreme view. All the same, it is a good place to

begin: a number of points of interest come out in respect to it.

1. Let us call the view that abortion is impermissible even to save the mother’s life “the extreme view.” I want to suggest first that

it does not issue from the argument I mentioned earlier without the

addition of some fairly powerful premises. Suppose a woman has

become pregnant, and now learns that she has a cardiac condition

such that she will die if she carries the baby to term. What may be

done for her? The fetus, being a person, has a right to life, but as

the mother is a person too, so has she a right to life. Presumably they

have an equal right to life. How is it supposed to come out that an

abortion may not be performed? If mother and child have an equal

right to life, shouldn’t we perhaps flip a coin? Or should we add to

the mother’s right to life her right to decide what happens in and

to her body, which everybody seems to be ready to grant—the sum

of her rights now outweighing the fetus’ right to life?

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A DEFENSE OF ABORTION 109

The most familiar argument here is the following. We are told

that performing the abortion would be directly killing the child,

whereas doing nothing would not be killing the mother, but only

letting her die. Moreover, in killing the child, one would be killing

an innocent person, for the child has committed no crime, and is

not aiming at his mother’s death. And then there are a variety of

ways in which this might be continued. (1) But as directly killing

an innocent person is always and absolutely impermissible, an abor-

tion may not be performed. Or, (2) as directly killing an innocent

person is murder, and murder is always and absolutely impermis-

sible, an abortion may not be performed. Or, (3) as one’s duty to

refrain from directly killing an innocent person is more stringent

than one’s duty to keep a person from dying, an abortion may not

be performed. Or, (4) if one’s only options are directly killing an

innocent person or letting a person die, one must prefer letting the

person die, and thus an abortion may not be performed.

Some people seem to have thought that these are not further

premises which must be added if the conclusion is to be reached,

but that they follow from the very fact that an innocent person has a

right to life. But this seems to me to be a mistake, and perhaps the

simplest way to show this is to bring out that while we must certainly

grant that innocent persons have a right to life, the theses in (1)

through (4) are all false. Take (2), for example. If directly killing

an innocent person is murder, and thus is impermissible, then the

mother’s directly killing the innocent person inside her is murder,

and thus is impermissible. But it cannot seriously be thought to be

murder if the mother performs an abortion on herself to save her

life. It cannot seriously be said that she must refrain, that she must sit passively by and wait for her death. Let us look again at the case

of you and the violinist. There you are, in bed with the violinist, and

the director of the hospital says to you, “It’s all most distressing, and

I deeply sympathize, but you see this is putting an additional strain

on your kidneys, and you’ll be dead within the month. But you have to stay where you are all the same. Because unplugging you would

be directly killing an innocent violinist, and that’s murder, and that’s

impermissible.” If anything in the world is true, it is that you do not

commit murder, you do not do what is impermissible, if you reach

around to your back and unplug yourself from that violinist to save

your life.

The main focus of attention in writings on abortion has been

on what a third party may or may not do in answer to a request from

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110 T HE RIGHT THING TO DO

a woman for an abortion. This is in a way understandable. Things

being as they are, there isn’t much a woman can safely do to abort

herself. So the question asked is what a third party may do, and what

the mother may do, if it is mentioned at all, is deduced, almost as an

afterthought, from what it is concluded that third parties may do. But

it seems to me that to treat the matter in this way is to refuse to grant

to the mother that very status of person which is so firmly insisted on

for the fetus. For we cannot simply read off what a person may do

from what a third party may do. Suppose you find yourself trapped

in a tiny house with a growing child. I mean a very tiny house, and

a rapidly growing child—you are already up against the wall of the

house and in a few minutes you’ll be crushed to death. The child on

the other hand won’t be crushed to death; if nothing is done to stop

him from growing he’ll be hurt, but in the end he’ll simply burst

open the house and walk out a free man. Now I could well under-

stand it if a bystander were to say, “There’s nothing we can do for

you. We cannot choose between your life and his, we cannot be the

ones to decide who is to live, we cannot intervene.” But it cannot be

concluded that you too can do nothing, that you cannot attack it to

save your life. However innocent the child may be, you do not have

to wait passively while it crushes you to death. Perhaps a pregnant

woman is vaguely felt to have the status of house, to which we don’t

allow the right of self-defense. But if the woman houses the child, it

should be remembered that she is a person who houses it.

I should perhaps stop to say explicitly that I am not claiming

that people have a right to do anything whatever to save their lives. I

think, rather, that there are drastic limits to the right of self-defense.

If someone threatens you with death unless you torture someone else

to death, I think you have not the right, even to save your life, to do

so. But the case under consideration here is very different. In our

case there are only two people involved, one whose life is threatened,

and one who threatens it. Both are innocent: the one who is threat-

ened is not threatened because of any fault, the one who threatens

does not threaten because of any fault. For this reason we may feel

that we bystanders cannot intervene. But the person threatened can.

In sum, a woman surely can defend her life against the threat

to it posed by the unborn child, even if doing so involves its death.

And this shows not merely that the theses in (1) through (4) are

false; it shows also that the extreme view of abortion is false, and so

we need not canvass any other possible ways of arriving at it from

the argument I mentioned at the outset.

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A DEFENSE OF ABORTION 111

2. The extreme view could of course be weakened to say that while abortion is permissible to save the mother’s life, it may not

be performed by a third party, but only by the mother herself. But

this cannot be right either. For what we have to keep in mind is

that the mother and the unborn child are not like two tenants in

a small house which has, by an unfortunate mistake, been rented

to both: the mother owns the house. The fact that she does adds to the offensiveness of deducing that the mother can do nothing

from the supposition that third parties can do nothing. But it does

more than this: it casts a bright light on the supposition that third

parties can do nothing. Certainly it lets us see that a third party who

says “I cannot choose between you” is fooling himself if he thinks

this is impartiality. If Jones has found and fastened on a certain coat,

which he needs to keep him from freezing, but which Smith also

needs to keep him from freezing, then it is not impartiality that says

“I cannot choose between you” when Smith owns the coat. Women

have said again and again “This body is my body!” and they have reason to feel angry, reason to feel that it has been like shouting

into the wind. Smith, after all, is hardly likely to bless us if we say

to him, “Of course it’s your coat, anybody would grant that it is. But

no one may choose between you and Jones who is to have it.” . . .

I suppose that in some views of human life the mother’s body

is only on loan to her, the loan not being one which gives her

any prior claim to it. One who held this view might well think it

impartiality to say “I cannot choose.” But I shall simply ignore this

possibility. My own view is that if a human being has any just, prior

claim to anything at all, he has a just, prior claim to his own body.

And perhaps this needn’t be argued for here anyway, since, as I

mentioned, the arguments against abortion we are looking at do

grant that the woman has a right to decide what happens in and

to her body.

But although they do grant it, I have tried to show that they

do not take seriously what is done in granting it. I suggest the same

thing will reappear even more clearly when we turn away from cases

in which the mother’s life is at stake, and attend, as I propose

we now do, to the vastly more common cases in which a woman

wants an abortion for some less weighty reason than preserving her

own  life.

3. Where the mother’s life is not at stake, the argument I men- tioned at the outset seems to have a much stronger pull. “Everyone

has a right to life, so the unborn person has a right to life.” And

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112 T HE RIGHT THING TO DO

isn’t the child’s right to life weightier than anything other than the

mother’s own right to life, which she might put forward as ground

for an abortion?

This argument treats the right to life as if it were unproblematic.

It is not, and this seems to me to be precisely the source of the mistake.

For we should now, at long last, ask what it comes to, to have a

right to life. In some views having a right to life includes having a right

to be given at least the bare minimum one needs for continued life.

But suppose that what in fact is the bare minimum a man needs for continued life is something he has no right at all to be given? If I am

sick unto death, and the only thing that will save my life is the touch

of Henry Fonda’s cool hand on my fevered brow, then all the same,

I have no right to be given the touch of Henry Fonda’s cool hand on

my fevered brow. It would be frightfully nice of him to fly in from the

West Coast to provide it. It would be less nice, though no doubt well

meant, if my friends flew out to the West Coast and carried Henry

Fonda back with them. But I have no right at all against anybody that

he should do this for me. Or again, to return to the story I told earlier,

the fact that for continued life that violinist needs the continued use

of your kidneys does not establish that he has a right to be given the

continued use of your kidneys. He certainly has no right against you

that you should give him continued use of your kidneys. For nobody has any right to use your kidneys unless you give him such a right; and

nobody has the right against you that you shall give him this right—if

you do allow him to go on using your kidneys, this is a kindness on

your part, and not something he can claim from you as his due. Nor

has he any right against anybody else that they should give him contin- ued use of your kidneys. Certainly he had no right against the Society

of Music Lovers that they should plug him into you in the first place.

And if you now start to unplug yourself, having learned that you will

otherwise have to spend nine years in bed with him, there is nobody

in the world who must try to prevent you, in order to see to it that

he is given something he has a right to be given.

Some people are rather stricter about the right to life. In

their view, it does not include the right to be given anything, but

amounts to, and only to, the right not to be killed by anybody. But

here a related difficulty arises. If everybody is to refrain from killing

that violinist, then everybody must refrain from doing a great many

different sorts of things. Everybody must refrain from slitting his

throat, everybody must refrain from shooting him—and everybody

must refrain from unplugging you from him. But does he have a

right against everybody that they shall refrain from unplugging you

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A DEFENSE OF ABORTION 113

from him? To refrain from doing this is to allow him to continue

to use your kidneys. It could be argued that he has a right against

us that we should allow him to continue to use your kidneys. That is, while he had no right against us that we should give him the

use of your kidneys, it might be argued that he anyway has a right

against us that we shall not now intervene and deprive him of the

use of your kidneys. I shall come back to third-party interventions

later. But certainly the violinist has no right against you that you shall allow him to continue to use your kidneys. As I said, if you

do allow him to use them, it is a kindness on your part, and not

something you owe him.

. . . I would stress that I am not arguing that people do not

have a right to life—quite to the contrary, it seems to me that the

primary control we must place on the acceptability of an account of

rights is that it should turn out in that account to be a truth that all

persons have a right to life. I am arguing only that having a right to

life does not guarantee having either a right to be given the use of

or a right to be allowed continued use of another person’s body—

even if one needs it for life itself. So the right to life will not serve

the opponents of abortion in the very simple and clear way in which

they seem to have thought it would.

4. There is another way to bring out the difficulty. In the most ordinary sort of case, to deprive someone of what he has a right to

is to treat him unjustly. Suppose a boy and his small brother are

jointly given a box of chocolates for Christmas. If the older boy

takes the box and refuses to give his brother any of the chocolates,

he is unjust to him, for the brother has been given a right to half

of them. But suppose that, having learned that otherwise it means

nine years in bed with that violinist, you unplug yourself from him.

You surely are not being unjust to him, for you gave him no right

to use your kidneys, and no one else can have given him any such

right. But we have to notice that in unplugging yourself, you are

killing him; and violinists, like everybody else, have a right to life,

and thus in the view we were considering just now, the right not to

be killed. So here you do what he supposedly has a right you shall

not do, but you do not act unjustly to him in doing it.

The emendation which may be made at this point is this: the

right to life consists not in the right not to be killed, but rather in

the right not to be killed unjustly. This runs a risk of circularity, but

never mind: it would enable us to square the fact that the violinist

has a right to life with the fact that you do not act unjustly toward

him in unplugging yourself, thereby killing him. For if you do not

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114 T HE RIGHT THING TO DO

kill him unjustly, you do not violate his right to life, and so it is no

wonder you do him no injustice.

But if this emendation is accepted, the gap in the argument

against abortion stares us plainly in the face: it is by no means enough

to show that the fetus is a person, and to remind us that all persons

have a right to life—we need to be shown also that killing the fetus

violates its right to life, i.e., that abortion is unjust killing. And is it?

I suppose we may take it as a datum that in a case of pregnancy

due to rape the mother has not given the unborn person a right to

the use of her body for food and shelter. Indeed, in what pregnancy

could it be supposed that the mother has given the unborn person

such a right? It is not as if there were unborn persons drifting about

the world, to whom a woman who wants a child says “I invite you in.”

But it might be argued that there are other ways one can have

acquired a right to the use of another person’s body than by hav-

ing been invited to use it by that person. Suppose a woman volun-

tarily indulges in intercourse, knowing of the chance it will issue

in pregnancy, and then she does become pregnant; is she not in

part responsible for the presence, in fact the very existence, of the

unborn person inside her? No doubt she did not invite it in. But

doesn’t her partial responsibility for its being there itself give it a

right to the use of her body? If so, then her aborting it would be

more like the boy’s taking away the chocolates, and less like your

unplugging yourself from the violinist—doing so would be depriv-

ing it of what it does have a right to, and thus would be doing it

an injustice.

And then, too, it might be asked whether or not she can kill it

even to save her own life: If she voluntarily called it into existence,

how can she now kill it, even in self-defense?

The first thing to be said about this is that it is something new.

Opponents of abortion have been so concerned to make out the

independence of the fetus, in order to establish that it has a right

to life, just as its mother does, that they have tended to overlook the

possible support they might gain from making out that the fetus is

dependent on the mother, in order to establish that she has a special kind of responsibility for it, a responsibility that gives it rights against

her which are not possessed by any independent person—such as

an ailing violinist who is a stranger to her.

On the other hand, this argument would give the unborn

person a right to its mother’s body only if her pregnancy resulted

from a voluntary act, undertaken in full knowledge of the chance

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A DEFENSE OF ABORTION 115

a pregnancy might result from it. It would leave out entirely the

unborn person whose existence is due to rape. Pending the avail-

ability of some further argument, then, we would be left with the

conclusion that unborn persons whose existence is due to rape have

no right to the use of their mothers’ bodies, and thus that aborting

them is not depriving them of anything they have a right to and

hence is not unjust killing.

And we should also notice that it is not at all plain that this

argument really does go even as far as it purports to. For there are

cases and cases, and the details make a difference. If the room is

stuffy, and I therefore open a window to air it, and a burglar climbs

in, it would be absurd to say, “Ah, now he can stay, she’s given him

a right to the use of her house—for she is partially responsible for

his presence there, having voluntarily done what enabled him to get

in, in full knowledge that there are such things as burglars, and that

burglars burgle.” It would be still more absurd to say this if I had

had bars installed outside my windows, precisely to prevent burglars

from getting in, and a burglar got in only because of a defect in the

bars. It remains equally absurd if we imagine it is not a burglar who

climbs in, but an innocent person who blunders or falls in. Again,

suppose it were like this: people-seeds drift about in the air like pol-

len, and if you open your windows, one may drift in and take root

in your carpets or upholstery. You don’t want children, so you fix up

your windows with fine mesh screens, the very best you can buy. As

can happen, however, and on very, very rare occasions does happen,

one of the screens is defective; and a seed drifts in and takes root.

Does the person-plant who now develops have a right to the use of

your house? Surely not—despite the fact that you voluntarily opened

your windows, you knowingly kept carpets and upholstered furni-

ture, and you knew that screens were sometimes defective. Someone

may argue that you are responsible for its rooting, that it does have

a right to your house, because after all you could have lived out your life with bare floors and furniture, or with sealed windows and

doors. But this won’t do—for by the same token anyone can avoid a

pregnancy due to rape by having a hysterectomy, or anyway by never

leaving home without a (reliable!) army.

It seems to me that the argument we are looking at can estab-

lish at most that there are some cases in which the unborn person has a right to the use of its mother’s body, and therefore some cases in which abortion is unjust killing. There is room for much discussion

and argument as to precisely which, if any. But I think we should

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116 T HE RIGHT THING TO DO

sidestep this issue and leave it open, for at any rate the argument

certainly does not establish that all abortion is unjust killing.

5. There is room for yet another argument here, however. We surely must all grant that there may be cases in which it would be

morally indecent to detach a person from your body at the cost of

his life. Suppose you learn that what the violinist needs is not nine

years of your life, but only one hour: all you need do to save his life

is to spend one hour in that bed with him. Suppose also that letting

him use your kidneys for that one hour would not affect your health

in the slightest. Admittedly you were kidnapped. Admittedly you did

not give anyone permission to plug him into you. Nevertheless it

seems to me plain you ought to allow him to use your kidneys for that hour—it would be indecent to refuse.

Again, suppose pregnancy lasted only an hour, and constituted

no threat to life or health. And suppose that a woman becomes

pregnant as a result of rape. Admittedly she did not voluntarily do

anything to bring about the existence of a child. Admittedly she did

nothing at all which would give the unborn person a right to the

use of her body. All the same it might well be said, as in the newly

emended violinist story, that she ought to allow it to remain for that hour—that it would be indecent in her to refuse.

Now some people are inclined to use the term “right” in such

a way that it follows from the fact that you ought to allow a person

to use your body for the hour he needs, that he has a right to use

your body for the hour he needs, even though he has not been given

that right by any person or act. They may say that it follows also

that if you refuse, you act unjustly toward him. This use of the term

is perhaps so common that it cannot be called wrong; nevertheless

it seems to me to be an unfortunate loosening of what we would

do better to keep a tight rein on. Suppose that box of chocolates I

mentioned earlier had not been given to both boys jointly, but was

given only to the older boy. There he sits, stolidly eating his way

through the box, his small brother watching enviously. Here we are

likely to say “You ought not to be so mean. You ought to give your

brother some of those chocolates.” My own view is that it just does

not follow from the truth of this that the brother has any right to

any of the chocolates. If the boy refuses to give his brother any, he

is greedy, stingy, callous—but not unjust. I suppose that the people

I have in mind will say it does follow that the brother has a right

to some of the chocolates, and thus that the boy does act unjustly

if he refuses to give his brother any. But the effect of saying this

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A DEFENSE OF ABORTION 117

is to obscure what we should keep distinct, namely the difference

between the boy’s refusal in this case and the boy’s refusal in the

earlier case, in which the box was given to both boys jointly, and in

which the small brother thus had what was from any point of view

clear title to half.

A further objection to so using the term “right” that from the

fact that A ought to do a thing for B, it follows that B has a right

against A that A do it for him, is that it is going to make the ques-

tion of whether or not a man has a right to a thing turn on how easy

it is to provide him with it; and this seems not merely unfortunate,

but morally unacceptable. Take the case of Henry Fonda again. I

said earlier that I had no right to the touch of his cool hand on my

fevered brow, even though I needed it to save my life. I said it would

be frightfully nice of him to fly in from the West Coast to provide

me with it, but that I had no right against him that he should do

so. But suppose he isn’t on the West Coast. Suppose he has only to

walk across the room, place a hand briefly on my brow—and lo, my

life is saved. Then surely he ought to do it, it would be indecent to

refuse. Is it to be said “Ah, well, it follows that in this case she has a

right to the touch of his hand on her brow, and so it would be an

injustice in him to refuse”? So that I have a right to it when it is easy

for him to provide it, though no right when it’s hard? It’s rather a

shocking idea that anyone’s rights should fade away and disappear

as it gets harder and harder to accord them to him.

So my own view is that even though you ought to let the vio-

linist use your kidneys for the one hour he needs, we should not

conclude that he has a right to do so—we should say that if you

refuse, you are, like the boy who owns all the chocolates and will

give none away, self-centered and callous, indecent in fact, but not

unjust. And similarly, that even supposing a case in which a woman

pregnant due to rape ought to allow the unborn person to use her

body for the hour he needs, we should not conclude that he has a

right to do so; we should conclude that she is self-centered, callous,

indecent, but not unjust, if she refuses. The complaints are no less

grave; they are just different. However, there is no need to insist on

this point. If anyone does wish to deduce “he has a right” from “you

ought,” then all the same he must surely grant that there are cases

in which it is not morally required of you that you allow that violinist

to use your kidneys, and in which he does not have a right to use

them, and in which you do not do him an injustice if you refuse.

And so also for mother and unborn child. Except in such cases as

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118 T HE RIGHT THING TO DO

the unborn person has a right to demand it—and we were leaving

open the possibility that there may be such cases—nobody is morally

required to make large sacrifices, of health, of all other interests and concerns, of all other duties and commitments, for nine years, or

even for nine months, in order to keep another person alive.

6. We have in fact to distinguish between two kinds of Samaritan: the Good Samaritan and what we might call the Minimally Decent

Samaritan. The story of the Good Samaritan, you will remember, goes

like this:

A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell

among thieves, which stripped him of his raiment, and wounded

him, and departed, leaving him half dead.

And by chance there came down a certain priest that way;

and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side.

And likewise a Levite, when he was at the place, came and

looked on him, and passed by on the other side.

But a certain Samaritan, as he journeyed, came where he

was; and when he saw him he had compassion on him.

And went to him, and bound up his wounds, pouring in

oil and wine, and set him on his own beast, and brought him

to an inn, and took care of him.

And on the morrow, when he departed, he took out two

pence, and gave them to the host, and said unto him, “Take

care of him; and whatsoever thou spendest more, when I come

again, I will repay thee.” (Luke 10:30–35)

The Good Samaritan went out of his way, at some cost to himself,

to help one in need of it. We are not told what the options were,

that is, whether or not the priest and the Levite could have helped

by doing less than the Good Samaritan did, but assuming they could

have, then the fact they did nothing at all shows they were not even

Minimally Decent Samaritans, not because they were not Samaritans,

but because they were not even minimally decent.

These things are a matter of degree, of course, but there is a

difference, and it comes out perhaps most clearly in the story of Kitty

Genovese, who, as you will remember, was murdered while thirty-

eight people watched or listened, and did nothing at all to help her.

A Good Samaritan would have rushed out to give direct assistance

against the murderer. Or perhaps we had better allow that it would

have been a Splendid Samaritan who did this, on the ground that it

would have involved a risk of death for himself. But the thirty-eight

not only did not do this, they did not even trouble to pick up a phone

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A DEFENSE OF ABORTION 119

to call the police. Minimally Decent Samaritanism would call for

doing at least that, and their not having done it was monstrous.

After telling the story of the Good Samaritan, Jesus said “Go,

and do thou likewise.” Perhaps he meant that we are morally required

to act as the Good Samaritan did. Perhaps he was urging people to

do more than is morally required of them. At all events it seems plain

that it was not morally required of any of the thirty-eight that he rush

out to give direct assistance at the risk of his own life, and that it is not

morally required of anyone that he give long stretches of his life—

nine years or nine months—to sustaining the life of a person who

has no special right (we were leaving open the possibility of this) to

demand it.

Indeed, with one rather striking class of exceptions, no one in

any country in the world is legally required to do anywhere near as much as this for anyone else. The class of exceptions is obvious. My

main concern here is not the state of the law in respect to abortion,

but it is worth drawing attention to the fact that in no state in this

country is any man compelled by law to be even a Minimally Decent

Samaritan to any person; there is no law under which charges could

be brought against the thirty-eight who stood by while Kitty Genovese

died. By contrast, in most states in this country women are compelled

by law to be not merely Minimally Decent Samaritans, but Good

Samaritans to unborn persons inside them. This doesn’t by itself settle

anything one way or the other, because it may well be argued that

there should be laws in this country—as there are in many European

countries—compelling at least Minimally Decent Samaritanism. But

it does show that there is a gross injustice in the existing state of the

law. And it shows also that the groups currently working against liber-

alization of abortion laws, in fact working toward having it declared

unconstitutional for a state to permit abortion, had better start work-

ing for the adoption of Good Samaritan laws generally, or earn the

charge that they are acting in bad faith.

I should think, myself, that Minimally Decent Samaritan laws

would be one thing, Good Samaritan laws quite another, and in fact

highly improper. But we are not here concerned with the law. What

we should ask is not whether anybody should be compelled by law to

be a Good Samaritan, but whether we must accede to a situation in

which somebody is being compelled—by nature, perhaps—to be a

Good Samaritan. We have, in other words, to look now at third-party

interventions. I have been arguing that no person is morally required

to make large sacrifices to sustain the life of another who has no right

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120 T HE RIGHT THING TO DO

to demand them, and this even where the sacrifices do not include

life itself; we are not morally required to be Good Samaritans or

anyway Very Good Samaritans to one another. But what if a man can-

not extricate himself from such a situation? What if he appeals to us

to extricate him? It seems to me plain that there are cases in which we

can, cases in which a Good Samaritan would extricate him. There you

are, you were kidnapped, and nine years in bed with that violinist lie

ahead of you. You have your own life to lead. You are sorry, but you

simply cannot see giving up so much of your life to the sustaining of

his. You cannot extricate yourself, and ask us to do so. I should have

thought that—in light of his having no right to the use of your body—

it was obvious that we do not have to accede to your being forced to

give up so much. We can do what you ask. There is no injustice to the

violinist in our doing so.

7. Following the lead of the opponents of abortion, I have throughout been speaking of the fetus merely as a person, and what

I have been asking is whether or not the argument we began with,

which proceeds only from the fetus’ being a person, really does estab-

lish its conclusion. I have argued that it does not.

But of course there are arguments and arguments, and it may

be said that I have simply fastened on the wrong one. It may be said

that what is important is not merely the fact that the fetus is a per-

son, but that it is a person for whom the woman has a special kind of

responsibility issuing from the fact that she is its mother. And it might

be argued that all my analogies are therefore irrelevant—for you do

not have that special kind of responsibility for that violinist, Henry

Fonda does not have that special kind of responsibility for me. And

our attention might be drawn to the fact that men and women both

are compelled by law to provide support for their children. I have in effect dealt (briefly) with this argument in section 4

above; but a (still briefer) recapitulation now may be in order. Surely

we do not have any such “special responsibility” for a person unless

we have assumed it, explicitly or implicitly. If a set of parents do not

try to prevent pregnancy, do not obtain an abortion, and then at the

time of birth of the child do not put it out for adoption, but rather

take it home with them, then they have assumed responsibility for

it, they have given it rights, and they cannot now withdraw support from it at the cost of its life because they now find it difficult to go

on providing for it. But if they have taken all reasonable precautions

against having a child, they do not simply by virtue of their biologi-

cal relationship to the child who comes into existence have a special

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A DEFENSE OF ABORTION 121

responsibility for it. They may wish to assume responsibility for it, or

they may not wish to. And I am suggesting that if assuming respon-

sibility for it would require large sacrifices, then they may refuse. A

Good Samaritan would not refuse—or anyway, a Splendid Samaritan,

if the sacrifices that had to be made were enormous. But then so

would a Good Samaritan assume responsibility for that violinist; so

would Henry Fonda, if he is a Good Samaritan, fly in from the West

Coast and assume responsibility for me.

8. My argument will be found unsatisfactory on two counts by many of those who want to regard abortion as morally permissible.

First, while I do argue that abortion is not impermissible, I do not

argue that it is always permissible. There may well be cases in which

carrying the child to term requires only Minimally Decent Samaritan-

ism of the mother, and this is a standard we must not fall below. I am

inclined to think it a merit of my account precisely that it does not give a general yes or a general no. It allows for and supports our sense

that, for example, a sick and desperately frightened fourteen-year-old

schoolgirl, pregnant due to rape, may of course choose abortion, and that any law which rules this out is an insane law. And it also allows for

and supports our sense that in other cases resort to abortion is even

positively indecent. It would be indecent in the woman to request

an abortion, and indecent in a doctor to perform it, if she is in her

seventh month, and wants the abortion just to avoid the nuisance of

postponing a trip abroad. The very fact that the arguments I have

been drawing attention to treat all cases of abortion, or even all cases

of abortion in which the mother’s life is not at stake, as morally on a

par ought to have made them suspect at the outset.

Secondly, while I am arguing for the permissibility of abortion

in some cases, I am not arguing for the right to secure the death of

the unborn child. It is easy to confuse these two things in that up to

a certain point in the life of the fetus it is not able to survive outside

the mother’s body; hence removing it from her body guarantees its

death. But they are importantly different. I have argued that you are

not morally required to spend nine months in bed, sustaining the life

of that violinist; but to say this is by no means to say that if, when you

unplug yourself, there is a miracle and he survives, you then have a

right to turn around and slit his throat. You may detach yourself even

if this costs him his life; you have no right to be guaranteed his death,

by some other means, if unplugging yourself does not kill him. There

are some people who will feel dissatisfied by this feature of my argu-

ment. A woman may be utterly devastated by the thought of a child,

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122 T HE RIGHT THING TO DO

a bit of herself, put out for adoption and never seen or heard of again.

She may therefore want not merely that the child be detached from

her, but more, that it die. Some opponents of abortion are inclined

to regard this as beneath contempt—thereby showing insensitivity to

what is surely a powerful source of despair. All the same, I agree that

the desire for the child’s death is not one which anybody may gratify,

should it turn out to be possible to detach the child alive.

At this place, however, it should be remembered that we have

only been pretending throughout that the fetus is a human being

from the moment of conception. A very early abortion is surely not

the killing of a person, and so is not dealt with by anything I have said

here.

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123

CHAPTER 15 All Animals Are Equal

Peter Singer

Peter Singer has written about assisted reproduction, animal rights,

abortion, infanticide, the environment, and famine relief. Because of

his controversial beliefs, Singer’s appointment to Princeton University

in 1999 created a public uproar reminiscent of 1940, when the

City College of New York appointed Bertrand Russell, one of the

20 th

century’s greatest philosophers, to a one-year professorship. In

Russell’s case, the outcry culminated in a judge’s ruling that cancelled

the state university’s appointment. Commenting on the case, Albert

Einstein said, “Great spirits have always found violent opposition from

mediocrities.” Since Princeton is a private university, Singer’s ordeal

stayed out of the courts.

The treatment of nonhuman animals has traditionally been

regarded as a trivial matter. Until recently, almost every ethicist who

wrote on the subject provided some rationale for excluding animals

from moral concern. Aristotle said that, in the natural order of things,

animals exist to serve human purposes. The Christian tradition added

that man alone is made in God’s image and that animals do not have

souls. Immanuel Kant said that animals are not self-conscious, so we

can have no duties to them.

The utilitarians took a different view, holding that we should con-

sider the interests of all beings, human and nonhuman. Peter Singer

(1946–) took up this argument in the mid-1970s.

This selection is taken from the second edition of Singer’s book,

Animal Liberation . Today, Professor Singer splits his time between Princeton University in the United States and Melbourne University

in Australia.

From Peter Singer, Animal Liberation: The Definitive Classic of the Animal Movement (Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2009). Reprinted by permission of Peter Singer.

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124 T HE RIGHT THING TO DO

“Animal Liberation” may sound more like a parody of other libera-

tion movements than a serious objective. The idea of “The Rights of

Animals” actually was once used to parody the case for women’s rights.

When Mary Wollstonecraft, a forerunner of today’s feminists, pub-

lished her Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792, her views were widely regarded as absurd, and before long an anonymous publication

appeared entitled A Vindication of the Rights of Brutes. The author of this satirical work (now known to have been Thomas Taylor, a distin-

guished Cambridge philosopher) tried to refute Mary Wollstonecraft’s

arguments by showing that they could be carried one stage further.

If the argument for equality was sound when applied to women,

why should it not be applied to dogs, cats, and horses? The reason-

ing seemed to hold for these “brutes” too; yet to hold that brutes had

rights was manifestly absurd. Therefore the reasoning by which this

conclusion had been reached must be unsound, and if unsound when

applied to brutes, it must also be unsound when applied to women,

since the very same arguments had been used in each case.

In order to explain the basis of the case for the equality of

animals, it will be helpful to start with an examination of the case

for the equality of women. Let us assume that we wish to defend the

case for women’s rights against the attack by Thomas Taylor. How

should we reply?

One way in which we might reply is by saying that the case for

equality between men and women cannot validly be extended to non-

human animals. Women have a right to vote, for instance, because they

are just as capable of making rational decisions about the future as men

are; dogs, on the other hand, are incapable of understanding the sig-

nificance of voting, so they cannot have the right to vote. There are

many other obvious ways in which men and women resemble each other

closely, while humans and animals differ greatly. So, it might be said,

men and women are similar beings and should have similar rights, while

humans and nonhumans are different and should not have equal rights.

The reasoning behind this reply to Taylor’s analogy is correct up

to a point, but it does not go far enough. There are obviously impor-

tant differences between humans and other animals, and these differ-

ences must give rise to some differences in the rights that each have.

Recognizing this evident fact, however, is no barrier to the case for

extending the basic principle of equality to nonhuman animals. The

differences that exist between men and women are equally undeni-

able, and the supporters of Women’s Liberation are aware that these

differences may give rise to different rights. Many  feminists hold that

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ALL ANIMALS ARE EQUAL 125

women have the right to an abortion on request. It does not follow

that since these same feminists are campaigning for equality between

men and women they must support the right of men to have abor-

tions too. Since a man cannot have an abortion, it is meaningless to

talk of his right to have one. Since dogs can’t vote, it is meaningless to

talk of their right to vote. There is no reason why either Women’s Lib-

eration or Animal Liberation should get involved in such nonsense.

The extension of the basic principle of equality from one group to

another does not imply that we must treat both groups in exactly the

same way, or grant exactly the same rights to both groups. Whether

we should do so will depend on the nature of the members of the two

groups. The basic principle of equality does not require equal or iden-

tical treatment; it requires equal consideration. Equal consideration for different beings may lead to different treatment and different rights.

So there is a different way of replying to Taylor’s attempt to

parody the case for women’s rights, a way that does not deny the

obvious differences between human beings and nonhumans but goes

more deeply into the question of equality and concludes by finding

nothing absurd in the idea that the basic principle of equality applies

to so-called brutes. At this point such a conclusion may appear odd;

but if we examine more deeply the basis on which our opposition to

discrimination on grounds of race or sex ultimately rests, we will see

that we would be on shaky ground if we were to demand equality for

blacks, women, and other groups of oppressed humans while denying

equal consideration to nonhumans. To make this clear we need to

see, first, exactly why racism and sexism are wrong. When we say that

all human beings, whatever their race, creed, or sex, are equal, what

is it that we are asserting? Those who wish to defend hierarchical,

inegalitarian societies have often pointed out that by whatever test

we choose it simply is not true that all humans are equal. Like it or

not we must face the fact that humans come in different shapes and

sizes; they come with different moral capacities, different intellectual

abilities, different amounts of benevolent feeling and sensitivity to the

needs of others, different abilities to communicate effectively, and

different capacities to experience pleasure and pain. In short, if the

demand for equality were based on the actual equality of all human

beings, we would have to stop demanding equality.

Still, one might cling to the view that the demand for equal-

ity among human beings is based on the actual equality of the

different races and sexes. Although, it may be said, humans differ

as individuals, there are no differences between the races and sexes

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126 T HE RIGHT THING TO DO

as such. From the mere fact that a person is black or a woman

we cannot infer anything about that person’s intellectual or moral

capacities. This, it may be said, is why racism and sexism are wrong.

The white racist claims that whites are superior to blacks, but this is

false; although there are differences among individuals, some blacks

are superior to some whites in all of the capacities and abilities that

could conceivably be relevant. The opponent of sexism would say

the same: a person’s sex is no guide to his or her abilities, and this

is why it is unjustifiable to discriminate on the basis of sex.

The existence of individual variations that cut across the lines

of race or sex, however, provides us with no defense at all against

a more sophisticated opponent of equality, one who proposes that,

say, the interests of all those with IQ scores below 100 be given

less consideration than the interests of those with ratings over 100.

Perhaps those scoring below the mark would, in this society, be

made the slaves of those scoring higher. Would a hierarchical soci-

ety of this sort really be so much better than one based on race or

sex? I think not. But if we tie the moral principle of equality to the

factual equality of the different races or sexes, taken as a whole, our

opposition to racism and sexism does not provide us with any basis

for objecting to this kind of inegalitarianism.

There is a second important reason why we ought not to base

our opposition to racism and sexism on any kind of factual equality,

even the limited kind that asserts that variations in capacities and

abilities are spread evenly among the different races and between the

sexes: we can have no absolute guarantee that these capacities and

abilities really are distributed evenly, without regard to race or sex,

among human beings. So far as actual abilities are concerned there

do seem to be certain measurable differences both among races and

between sexes. These differences do not, of course, appear in every

case, but only when averages are taken. More important still, we do

not yet know how many of these differences are really due to the

different genetic endowments of the different races and sexes, and

how many are due to poor schools, poor housing, and other factors

that are the result of past and continuing discrimination. Perhaps all

of the important differences will eventually prove to be environmen-

tal rather than genetic. Anyone opposed to racism and sexism will

certainly hope that this will be so, for it will make the task of ending

discrimination a lot easier; nevertheless, it would be dangerous to rest

the case against racism and sexism on the belief that all significant

differences are environmental in origin. The opponent of, say, racism

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ALL ANIMALS ARE EQUAL 127

who takes this line will be unable to avoid conceding that if differ-

ences in ability did after all prove to have some genetic connection

with race, racism would in some way be defensible.

Fortunately there is no need to pin the case for equality to

one particular outcome of a scientific investigation. The appropriate

response to those who claim to have found evidence of genetically

based differences in ability among the races or between the sexes is

not to stick to the belief that the genetic explanation must be wrong,

whatever evidence to the contrary may turn up; instead we should

make it quite clear that the claim to equality does not depend on

intelligence, moral capacity, physical strength, or similar matters of

fact. Equality is a moral idea, not an assertion of fact. There is no

logically compelling reason for assuming that a factual difference in

ability between two people justifies any difference in the amount of

consideration we give to their needs and interests. The principle of the equality of human beings is not a description of an alleged actual equality among humans: it is a prescription of how we should treat human beings.

Jeremy Bentham, the founder of the reforming utilitarian school

of moral philosophy, incorporated the essential basis of moral equal-

ity into his system of ethics by means of the formula: “Each to count

for one and none for more than one.” In other words, the interests

of every being affected by an action are to be taken into account and

given the same weight as the like interests of any other being. A later

utilitarian, Henry Sidgwick, put the point in this way: “The good of any

one individual is of no more importance, from the point of view (if I

may say so) of the Universe, than the good of any other.” More recently

the leading figures in contemporary moral philosophy have shown a

great deal of agreement in specifying as a fundamental presupposition

of their moral theories some similar requirement that works to give

everyone’s interests equal consideration—although these writers gener-

ally cannot agree on how this requirement is best formulated.

It is an implication of this principle of equality that our concern

for others and our readiness to consider their interests ought not to

depend on what they are like or on what abilities they may possess.

Precisely what our concern or consideration requires us to do may

vary according to the characteristics of those affected by what we do:

concern for the well-being of children growing up in America would

require that we teach them to read; concern for the well-being of pigs

may require no more than that we leave them with other pigs in a

place where there is adequate food and room to run freely. But the

basic element—the taking into account of the interests of the being,

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128 T HE RIGHT THING TO DO

whatever those interests may be—must, according to the principle

of equality, be extended to all beings, black or white, masculine or

feminine, human or nonhuman.

Thomas Jefferson, who was responsible for writing the prin-

ciple of the equality of men into the American Declaration of

Independence, saw this point. It led him to oppose slavery even

though he was unable to free himself fully from his slaveholding back-

ground. He wrote in a letter to the author of a book that emphasized

the notable intellectual achievements of Negroes in order to refute

the then common view that they had limited intellectual capacities:

Be assured that no person living wishes more sincerely than I do, to

see a complete refutation of the doubts I myself have entertained

and expressed on the grade of understanding allotted to them by

nature, and to fi nd that they are on a par with ourselves . . . but

whatever be their degree of talent it is no measure of their rights.

Because Sir Isaac Newton was superior to others in understanding,

he was not therefore lord of the property or persons of others.

Similarly, when in the 1850s the call for women’s rights was

raised in the United States, a remarkable black feminist named

Sojourner Truth made the same point in more robust terms at a

feminist convention:

They talk about this thing in the head; what do they call it? [“In-

tellect,” whispered someone nearby.] That’s it. What’s that got to

do with women’s rights or Negroes’ rights? If my cup won’t hold

but a pint and yours holds a quart, wouldn’t you be mean not to

let me have my little half-measure full?

It is on this basis that the case against racism and the case

against sexism must both ultimately rest; and it is in accordance with

this principle that the attitude that we may call “speciesism,” by anal-

ogy with racism, must also be condemned. Speciesism—the word is

not an attractive one, but I can think of no better term—is a preju-

dice or attitude of bias in favor of the interests of members of one’s

own species and against those of members of other species. It should

be obvious that the fundamental objections to racism and sexism

made by Thomas Jefferson and Sojourner Truth apply equally to

speciesism. If possessing a higher degree of intelligence does not

entitle one human to use another for his or her own ends, how

can it entitle humans to exploit nonhumans for the same purpose?

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ALL ANIMALS ARE EQUAL 129

Many philosophers and other writers have proposed the prin-

ciple of equal consideration of interests, in some form or other, as

a basic moral principle; but not many of them have recognized that

this principle applies to members of other species as well as to our

own. Jeremy Bentham was one of the few who did realize this. In a

forward-looking passage written at a time when black slaves had been

freed by the French but in the British dominions were still being

treated in the way we now treat animals, Bentham wrote:

The day may come when the rest of the animal creation may ac- quire those rights which never could have been withholden from

them but by the hand of tyranny. The French have already dis-

covered that the blackness of the skin is no reason why a human

being should be abandoned without redress to the caprice of a

tormentor. It may one day come to be recognized that the num-

ber of the legs, the villosity of the skin, or the termination of the

os sacrum are reasons equally insuffi cient for abandoning a sensi- tive being to the same fate. What else is it that should trace the

insuperable line? Is it the faculty of reason, or perhaps the faculty

of discourse? But a full-grown horse or dog is beyond comparison

a more rational, as well as a more conversable animal, than an

infant of a day or a week or even a month, old. But suppose they

were otherwise, what would it avail? The question is not, Can they

reason? nor Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?

In this passage Bentham points to the capacity for suffering as

the vital characteristic that gives a being the right to equal consider-

ation. The capacity for suffering—or more strictly, for suffering and/

or enjoyment or happiness—is not just another characteristic like the

capacity for language or higher mathematics. Bentham is not saying

that those who try to mark “the insuperable line” that determines

whether the interests of a being should be considered happen to have

chosen the wrong characteristic. By saying that we must consider the

interests of all beings with the capacity for suffering or enjoyment

Bentham does not arbitrarily exclude from consideration any interests

at all—as those who draw the line with reference to the possession

of reason or language do. The capacity for suffering and enjoyment

is a prerequisite for having interests at all, a condition that must be satis- fied before we can speak of interests in a meaningful way. It would

be nonsense to say that it was not in the interests of a stone to be

kicked along the road by a schoolboy. A stone does not have interests

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130 T HE RIGHT THING TO DO

because it cannot suffer. Nothing that we can do to it could possibly

make any difference to its welfare. The capacity for suffering and

enjoyment is, however, not only necessary, but also sufficient for us

to say that a being has interests—at an absolute minimum, an interest

in not suffering. A mouse, for example, does have an interest in not

being kicked along the road, because it will suffer if it is.

Although Bentham speaks of “rights” in the passage I have

quoted, the argument is really about equality rather than about rights.

Indeed, in a different passage, Bentham famously described “natu-

ral rights” as “nonsense” and “natural and imprescriptable rights” as

“nonsense upon stilts.” He talked of moral rights as a shorthand way

of referring to protections that people and animals morally ought to

have; but the real weight of the moral argument does not rest on the

assertion of the existence of the right, for this in turn has to be justi-

fied on the basis of the possibilities for suffering and happiness. In this

way we can argue for equality for animals without getting embroiled

in philosophical controversies about the ultimate nature of rights.

In misguided attempts to refute the arguments of this book,

some philosophers have gone to much trouble developing arguments

to show that animals do not have rights. They have claimed that to

have rights a being must be autonomous, or must be a member of a

community, or must have the ability to respect the rights of others, or

must possess a sense of justice. These claims are irrelevant to the case

for Animal Liberation. The language of rights is a convenient politi-

cal shorthand. It is even more valuable in the era of thirty-second

TV news clips than it was in Bentham’s day; but in the argument for

a radical change in our attitude to animals, it is in no way necessary.

If a being suffers there can be no moral justification for

refusing to take that suffering into consideration. No matter what

the nature of the being, the principle of equality requires that

its suffering be counted equally with the like suffering—insofar

as rough comparisons can be made—of any other being. If a

being is not capable of suffering, or of experiencing enjoyment

or happiness, there is nothing to be taken into account. So the

limit of sentience (using the term as a convenient if not strictly

accurate shorthand for the capacity to suffer and/or experience

enjoyment) is the only defensible boundary of concern for the

interests of others. To mark this boundary by some other char-

acteristic like intelligence or rationality would be to mark it in

an arbitrary manner. Why not choose some other characteristic,

like skin color?

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ALL ANIMALS ARE EQUAL 131

Racists violate the principle of equality by giving greater weight

to the interests of members of their own race when there is a clash

between their interests and the interests of those of another race.

Sexists violate the principle of equality by favoring the interests of

their own sex. Similarly, speciesists allow the interests of their own

species to override the greater interests of members of other species.

The pattern is identical in each case. . . .

Animals can feel pain. As we saw earlier, there can be no moral

justification for regarding the pain (or pleasure) that animals feel as

less important than the same amount of pain (or pleasure) felt by

humans. But what practical consequences follow from this conclu-

sion? To prevent misunderstanding I shall spell out what I mean a

little more fully.

If I give a horse a hard slap across its rump with my open hand,

the horse may start, but it presumably feels little pain. Its skin is thick

enough to protect it against a mere slap. If I slap a baby in the same

way, however, the baby will cry and presumably feel pain, for its skin

is more sensitive. So it is worse to slap a baby than a horse, if both

slaps are administered with equal force. But there must be some

kind of blow—I don’t know exactly what it would be, but perhaps a

blow with a heavy stick—that would cause the horse as much pain as

we cause a baby by slapping it with our hand. That is what I mean by

“the same amount of pain,” and if we consider it wrong to inflict that

much pain on a baby for no good reason then we must, unless we

are speciesists, consider it equally wrong to inflict the same amount

of pain on a horse for no good reason.

Other differences between humans and animals cause other

complications. Normal adult human beings have mental capacities

that will, in certain circumstances, lead them to suffer more than

animals would in the same circumstances. If, for instance, we decided

to perform extremely painful or lethal scientific experiments on nor-

mal adult humans, kidnapped at random from public parks for this

purpose, adults who enjoy strolling in parks would become fearful that

they would be kidnapped. The resultant terror would be a form of suf-

fering additional to the pain of the experiment. The same experiments

performed on nonhuman animals would cause less suffering since the

animals would not have the anticipatory dread of being kidnapped

and experimented upon. This does not mean, of course, that it would

be right to perform the experiment on animals, but only that there is a reason, which is not speciesist, for preferring to use animals rather

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132 T HE RIGHT THING TO DO

than normal adult human beings, if the experiment is to be done at

all. It should be noted, however, that this same argument gives us a

reason for preferring to use human infants—orphans perhaps—or

severely retarded human beings for experiments, rather than adults,

since infants and retarded humans would also have no idea of what

was going to happen to them. So far as this argument is concerned

nonhuman animals and infants and retarded humans are in the same

category; and if we use this argument to justify experiments on nonhu-

man animals we have to ask ourselves whether we are also prepared

to allow experiments on human infants and retarded adults; and if we

make a distinction between animals and these humans, on what basis

can we do it, other than a bare-faced—and morally indefensible—

preference for members of our own species?

There are many matters in which the superior mental powers of

normal adult humans make a difference: anticipation, more detailed

memory, greater knowledge of what is happening, and so on. Yet

these differences do not all point to greater suffering on the part

of the normal human being. Sometimes animals may suffer more

because of their more limited understanding. If, for instance, we are

taking prisoners in wartime we can explain to them that although

they must submit to capture, search, and confinement, they will

not otherwise be harmed and will be set free at the  conclusion of

hostilities. If we capture wild animals, however, we cannot explain that

we are not threatening their lives. A wild animal cannot distinguish

an attempt to overpower and confine from an attempt to kill; the

one causes as much terror as the other.

It may be objected that comparisons of the sufferings of dif-

ferent species are impossible to make and that for this reason when

the interests of animals and humans clash the principle of equality

gives no guidance. It is probably true that comparisons of suffering

between members of different species cannot be made precisely, but

precision is not essential. Even if we were to prevent the infliction

of suffering on animals only when it is quite certain that the inter-

ests of humans will not be affected to anything like the extent that

animals are affected, we would be forced to make radical changes

in our treatment of animals that would involve our diet, the farming

methods we use, experimental procedures in many fields of science,

our approach to wildlife and to hunting, trapping and the wearing

of furs, and areas of entertainment like circuses, rodeos, and zoos.

As a result, a vast amount of suffering would be avoided. . . .

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133

CHAPTER 16 T orturing Puppies and Eating

Meat: It’s All in Good Taste Alastair Norcross

Farm animals in America once grazed on open fields beside country

roads. Those days, however, are gone. Today, farm animals live in

smelly, high-density, automated warehouses. Every independent study

has found these places to be inhumane. The cramped conditions are

stressful and unnatural for the animals; cows pumped full of food

often experience internal abscesses; chickens and turkeys have their

beaks cut off, and pigs and cows have their tails severed—all without

anesthesia—to avoid the fighting that occurs precisely because the

animals are crushed together.

The number of animals that suffer under these conditions is stag-

gering—in the billions, year after year. When people in our culture

think of a moral horror, they think of the Holocaust—the campaign

of genocide in which Hitler and his Nazi thugs starved, beat, and ulti-

mately murdered 5.7 million Jews. They do not think of factory farm-

ing. Yet for every human being who suffered under Hitler’s tyranny,

several thousand animals have suffered in these farms during the past

twenty years. The Nobel Laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer wrote, “In rela-

tion to [animals], all people are Nazis; for the animals it is an eternal

Treblinka.”

In this selection, Alastair Norcross asks how we can justify our

treatment of chickens when we would never dream of treating pup-

pies in the same way. Despite the seriousness of the topic, Norcross’s

piece contains humor—some of it directed at my home state of

From the Southwest Philosophy Review, vol. 20, no. 1 (January 2004), pp. 117–123. Reprinted by permission.

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134 T HE RIGHT THING TO DO

Alabama, and some directed specifically at the city of Tuscaloosa,

where I live. We Alabamians can take the ridicule—even when it’s not

in good taste.

Alastair Norcross is a professor of philosophy at the University of

Colorado at Boulder, where many people play the banjo.

Consider the story of Fred, who receives a visit from the police one

day. They have been summoned by Fred’s neighbors, who have been

disturbed by strange sounds emanating from Fred’s basement. When

they enter the basement they are confronted by the following scene:

Twenty-six small wire cages, each containing a puppy, some whining,

some whimpering, some howling. The puppies range in age from

newborn to about six months. Many of them show signs of mutilation.

Urine and feces cover the bottoms of the cages and the basement

floor. Fred explains that he keeps the puppies for twenty-six weeks,

and then butchers them while holding them upside-down. During

their lives he performs a series of mutilations on them, such as slic-

ing off their noses and their paws with a hot knife, all without any

form of anesthesia. Except for the mutilations, the puppies are never

allowed out of the cages, which are barely big enough to hold them at

twenty-six weeks. The police are horrified, and promptly charge Fred

with animal abuse. As details of the case are publicized, the public is

outraged. Newspapers are flooded with letters demanding that Fred

be severely punished. There are calls for more severe penalties for

animal abuse. Fred is denounced as a vile sadist.

Finally, at his trial, Fred explains his behavior, and argues that

he is blameless and therefore deserves no punishment. He is, he

explains, a great lover of chocolate. A couple of years ago, he was

involved in a car accident, which resulted in some head trauma.

Upon his release from the hospital, having apparently suffered no

lasting ill effects, he visited his favorite restaurant and ordered

their famous rich dark chocolate mousse. Imagine his dismay when

he discovered that his experience of the mousse was a pale shadow

of its former self. The mousse tasted bland, slightly pleasant, but

with none of the intense chocolaty flavor he remembered so well.

The waiter assured him that the recipe was unchanged from the

last time he had tasted it, just the day before his accident. In some

consternation, Fred rushed out to buy a bar of his favorite Belgian

chocolate. Again, he was dismayed to discover that his experience

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TORTURING PUPPIES AND EATING MEAT: IT’S ALL IN GOOD TASTE 135

of the chocolate was barely even pleasurable. Extensive investiga-

tion revealed that his experience of other foods remained unaf-

fected, but chocolate, in all its forms, now tasted bland and insipid.

Desperate for a solution to his problem, Fred visited a renowned

gustatory neurologist, Dr. T. Bud. Extensive tests revealed that the

accident had irreparably damaged the godiva gland, which secretes

cocoamone, the hormone responsible for the experience of choc-

olate. Fred urgently requested hormone replacement therapy.

Dr.  Bud informed him that, until recently, there had been no

known source of cocoamone, other than the human godiva gland,

and that it was impossible to collect cocoamone from one person

to be used by another. However, a chance discovery had altered

the situation. A forensic veterinary surgeon, performing an autopsy

on a severely abused puppy, had discovered high concentrations of

cocoamone in the puppy’s brain. It turned out that puppies, who

don’t normally produce cocoamone, could be stimulated to do so

by extended periods of severe stress and suffering. The research

that led to this discovery, while gaining tenure for its authors, had

not been widely publicized, for fear of antagonizing animal welfare

groups. Although this research clearly gave Fred the hope of tast-

ing chocolate again, there were no commercially available sources

of puppy-derived cocoamone. Lack of demand, combined with fear

of bad publicity, had deterred drug companies from getting into

the puppy torturing business. Fred appeals to the court to imagine

his anguish, on discovering that a solution to his severe deprivation

was possible, but not readily available. But he wasn’t inclined to sit

around bemoaning his cruel fate. He did what any chocolate lover

would do. He read the research, and set up his own cocoamone

collection lab in his basement. Six months of intense puppy suffer-

ing, followed by a brutal death, produced enough cocoamone to

last him a week, hence the twenty-six cages. He isn’t a sadist or an

animal abuser, he explains. If there were a method of collecting

cocoamone without torturing puppies, he would gladly employ it.

He derives no pleasure from the suffering of the puppies itself. He

sympathizes with those who are horrified by the pain and misery

of the animals, but the court must realize that human pleasure is

at stake. The puppies, while undeniably cute, are mere animals.

He admits that he would be just as healthy without chocolate, if

not more so. But this isn’t a matter of survival or health. His life

would be unacceptably impoverished without the experience of

chocolate.

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136 T HE RIGHT THING TO DO

End of story. Clearly, we are horrified by Fred’s behavior, and

unconvinced by his attempted justification. It is, of course, unfor-

tunate for Fred that he can no longer enjoy the taste of chocolate,

but that in no way excuses the imposition of severe suffering on

the puppies. I expect near universal agreement with this claim (the

exceptions being those who are either inhumanly callous or thinking

ahead, and wish to avoid the following conclusion, to which such

agreement commits them). No decent person would even contem-

plate torturing puppies merely to enhance a gustatory experience.

However, billions of animals endure intense suffering every year for

precisely this end. Most of the chicken, veal, beef, and pork con-

sumed in the U.S. comes from intensive confinement facilities, in

which the animals live cramped, stress-filled lives and endure unan-

aesthetized mutilations. The vast majority of people would suffer

no ill health from the elimination of meat from their diets. Quite

the reverse. The supposed benefits from this system of factory farm-

ing, apart from the profits accruing to agribusiness, are increased

levels of gustatory pleasure for those who claim that they couldn’t

enjoy a meat-free diet as much as their current meat-filled diets. If

we are prepared to condemn Fred for torturing puppies merely to

enhance his gustatory experiences, shouldn’t we similarly condemn

the millions who purchase and consume factory-raised meat? Are

there any morally significant differences between Fred’s behavior

and their behavior?

The first difference that might seem to be relevant is that

Fred tortures the puppies himself, whereas most Americans con-

sume meat that comes from animals that have been tortured by

others. But is this really relevant? What if Fred had been squeamish

and had employed someone else to torture the puppies and extract

the cocoamone? Would we have thought any better of Fred? Of

course not.

Another difference between Fred and many consumers of

factory-raised meat is that many, perhaps most, such consumers

are unaware of the treatment of the animals, before they appear in

neatly wrapped packages on supermarket shelves. Perhaps I should

moderate my challenge, then. If we are prepared to condemn Fred

for torturing puppies merely to enhance his gustatory experiences,

shouldn’t we similarly condemn those who purchase and consume

factory-raised meat, in full, or even partial, awareness of the suffering

endured by the animals? While many consumers are still blissfully

ignorant of the appalling treatment meted out to meat, that number

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TORTURING PUPPIES AND EATING MEAT: IT’S ALL IN GOOD TASTE 137

is rapidly dwindling, thanks to vigorous publicity campaigns waged

by animal welfare groups. Furthermore, any meat-eating readers of

this article are now deprived of the excuse of ignorance.

Perhaps a consumer of factory-raised animals could argue as

follows: While I agree that Fred’s behavior is abominable, mine is

crucially different. If Fred did not consume his chocolate, he would

not raise and torture puppies (or pay someone else to do so). There-

fore Fred could prevent the suffering of the puppies. However, if I

did not buy and consume factory-raised meat, no animals would be

spared lives of misery. Agribusiness is much too large to respond

to the behavior of one consumer. Therefore I cannot prevent the

suffering of any animals. I may well regret the suffering inflicted on

animals for the sake of human enjoyment. I may even agree that

the human enjoyment doesn’t justify the suffering. However, since

the animals will suffer no matter what I do, I may as well enjoy the

taste of their flesh.

There are at least two lines of response to this attempted

defense. First, consider an analogous case. You visit a friend in

an exotic location, say Alabama. Your friend takes you out to eat

at the finest restaurant in Tuscaloosa. For dessert you select the

house specialty, “Chocolate Mousse à la Bama,” served with a small

cup of coffee, which you are instructed to drink before eating the

mousse. The mousse is quite simply the most delicious dessert you

have ever tasted. Never before has chocolate tasted so rich and

satisfying. Tempted to order a second, you ask your friend what

makes this mousse so delicious. He informs you that the mousse

itself is ordinary, but the coffee contains a concentrated dose of

cocoamone, the newly discovered chocolate-enhancing hormone.

Researchers at Auburn University have perfected a technique for

extracting cocoamone from the brains of freshly slaughtered pup-

pies, who have been subjected to lives of pain and frustration. Each

puppy’s brain yields four doses, each of which is effective for about

fifteen minutes, just long enough to enjoy one serving of mousse.

You are, naturally, horrified and disgusted. You will certainly not

order another serving, you tell your friend. In fact, you are shocked

that your friend, who had always seemed to be a morally decent

person, could have both recommended the dessert to you and eaten

one himself, in full awareness of the loathsome process necessary for

the experience. He agrees that the suffering of the puppies is outra-

geous, and that the gain in human pleasure in no way justifies the

appalling treatment they have to endure. However, neither he nor

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138 T HE RIGHT THING TO DO

you can save any puppies by refraining from consuming cocoamone.

Cocoamone production is now Alabama’s leading industry, surpass-

ing even banjo-making and inbreeding. 1 The industry is much too

large to respond to the behavior of one or two consumers. Since

the puppies will suffer no matter what either of you does, you may

as well enjoy the mousse.

If it is as obvious as it seems that a morally decent person, who

is aware of the details of cocoamone production, couldn’t order

Chocolate Mousse à la Bama, it should be equally obvious that a

morally decent person, who is aware of the details of factory farming,

can’t purchase and consume factory-raised meat. If the attempted

excuse of causal impotence is compelling in the latter case, it should

be compelling in the former case. But it isn’t.

The second response to the claim of causal impotence is to

deny it. Consider the case of chickens, the most cruelly treated of all

animals raised for human consumption, with the possible exception

of veal calves. In 1998, almost 8 billion chickens were slaughtered

in the U.S., 2 almost all of them raised on factory farms. Suppose

that there are 250 million chicken eaters in the U.S., and that each

one consumes, on average, 25 chickens per year (this leaves a fair

number of chickens slaughtered for nonhuman consumption, or

for export). Clearly, if only one of those chicken eaters gave up

eating chicken, the industry would not respond. Equally clearly,

if they all gave up eating chicken, billions of chickens (approxi-

mately 6.25  billion per year) would not be bred, tortured, and killed.

But there must also be some number of consumers, far short of

250  million, whose renunciation of chicken would cause the indus-

try to reduce the number of chickens bred in factory farms. The

industry may not be able to respond to each individual’s behavior,

but it must respond to the behavior of fairly large numbers. Suppose

that the industry is sensitive to a reduction in demand for chicken

equivalent to 10,000 people becoming vegetarians. (This seems like

a reasonable guess, but I have no idea what the actual numbers are,

nor is it important.) For each group of 10,000 who give up chicken,

a quarter of a million fewer chickens are bred per year. It appears,

then, that if you give up eating chicken, you have only a one in ten

thousand chance of making any difference to the lives of chickens,

unless it is certain that fewer than 10,000 people will ever give up

eating chicken, in which case you have no chance. Isn’t a one in

ten thousand chance small enough to render your continued con-

sumption of chicken blameless? Not at all. While the chance that

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TORTURING PUPPIES AND EATING MEAT: IT’S ALL IN GOOD TASTE 139

your behavior is harmful may be small, the harm that is risked is

enormous. The larger the numbers needed to make a difference to

chicken production,  the larger the difference such numbers would

make. A one in ten thousand chance of saving 250,000 chickens per

year from excruciating lives is morally and mathematically equivalent

to the certainty of saving 25 chickens per year. We commonly accept

that even small risks of great harms are unacceptable. That is why

we disapprove of parents who fail to secure their children in car

seats or with seat belts, who leave their small children unattended at

home, or who drink or smoke heavily during pregnancy. Or consider

commercial aircraft safety measures. The chances that the oxygen

masks, the lifejackets, or the emergency exits on any given plane will

be called on to save any lives in a given week, are far smaller than

one in ten thousand. And yet we would be outraged to discover that

an airline had knowingly allowed a plane to fly for a week with non-

functioning emergency exits, oxygen masks, and lifejackets. So, even

if it is true that your giving up factory raised chicken has only a tiny

chance of preventing suffering, given that the amount of suffering

that would be prevented is in inverse proportion to your chance of

preventing  it, your continued consumption is not thereby excused.

But perhaps it is not even true that your giving up chicken

has only a tiny chance of making any difference. Suppose again

that the poultry industry only reduces production when a threshold

of 10,000 fresh vegetarians is reached. Suppose also, as is almost

certainly true, that vegetarianism is growing in popularity in the

U.S. (and elsewhere). Then, even if you are not the one, newly

converted vegetarian, to reach the next threshold of 10,000, your

conversion will reduce the time required before the next threshold

is reached. The sooner the threshold is reached, the sooner pro-

duction, and therefore animal suffering, is reduced. Your behavior,

therefore, does make a difference. Furthermore, many people who

become vegetarians influence others to become vegetarian, who in

turn influence others, and so on. It appears, then, that the claim

of causal impotence is mere wishful thinking, on the part of those

meat lovers who are morally sensitive enough to realize that human

gustatory pleasure does not justify inflicting extreme suffering on

animals. . . .

I have been unable to discover any morally relevant differences

between the behavior of Fred, the puppy torturer, and the behavior

of the millions of people who purchase and consume factory-raised

meat, at least those who do so in the knowledge that the animals

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140 T HE RIGHT THING TO DO

live lives of suffering and deprivation. Just as morality demands that

we not torture puppies merely to enhance our own eating pleasure,

morality also demands that we not support factory farming by pur-

chasing factory-raised meat.

Notes

1. I realize that I am playing on stereotypes for comic effect.

Banjo-making, of course, has never really been one of Alabama’s leading

industries.

2. Livestock Slaughter 1998 Summary, NASS, USDA (Washington, DC: March 1999), 2; and Poultry Slaughter , NASS, USDA (Washington, DC: February 2, 1999), 1f.

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141

CHAPTER 17 Do Animals Have Rights?

Tibor R. Machan

Animals are not moral agents—they are not morally responsible for

what they do, nor are they capable of moral goodness. People are

moral agents—we are smarter and more valuable than animals. Tibor

R. Machan emphasizes ideas like these in this selection. Even though

we should treat animals humanely, he says, we should recognize that

they have no fundamental right to life, liberty, or property. Animals

have no such rights because they cannot make free choices based on

their own values.

Tibor R. Machan is the author of Putting Humans First: Why We Are Nature’s Favorite (2004). Machan is a professor at Chapman University.

Although the idea that animals have rights goes back to the 18 th

century, at least, it has only recently become something of a cause celebre among numerous serious and well-placed intellectuals, includ- ing moral and political philosophers. Although Jeremy Bentham

seems to have suggested legislation requiring humane treatment

of animals, he didn’t defend animal rights, per se—not surpris-

ingly, since Bentham himself had not been impressed with the more

basic (Lockean) doctrine of natural rights—calling them “nonsense

upon stilts.” John Locke’s idea of individual rights has had enor-

mous influence, and even where it is not respected, it is ultimately

invoked as some kind of model for what it would take for something

to have rights.

From Public Affairs Quarterly, vol. 5, no. 2, April 1991. Reprinted by permission of Public Affairs Quarterly.

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142 T HE RIGHT THING TO DO

In recent years the doctrine of animals rights has found

champions in important circles where the general doctrine of rights

is itself well respected. For example, Professor Tom Regan, in his

important book The Case for Animal Rights (UC Press, 1983), finds the idea of natural rights intellectually congenial but then extends this

idea to cover animals near humans on the evolutionary scale. The

tradition from within which Regan works is clearly Lockean, only he

does not agree that human nature is distinctive enough, in relevant

respects, to restrict the scope of natural rights to human beings alone.

Following a different tradition, namely, utilitarianism, the idea

of animal liberation has emerged. And this idea comes to roughly

the same thing, practically speaking. Only the argument is different

because for utilitarians what is important is not that someone or

something must have a specific sphere of dominion but that they

be well off in their lives. So long as the bulk of the relevant crea-

tures enjoy a reasonably high living standard, the moral and political

objectives for us will have been met. But if this goal is neglected,

moral and political steps are required to improve on the situation.

Animal liberation is such a step.

This essay will maintain that animals have no rights and need no

liberation. I will argue that to think they do is a category mistake—it

is, to be blunt, to unjustifiably anthropomorphize animals, to treat

them as if they were what they are not, namely, human beings.

Rights and liberty are political concepts applicable to human beings

because human beings are moral agents, in need of what Harvard

philosopher Robert Nozick calls “moral space,” that is, a definite

sphere of moral jurisdiction where their authority to act is respected

and protected so it is they, not intruders, who govern themselves and

either succeed or fail in their moral tasks.

Oddly, it is clearly admitted by most animal rights or liberation

theorists that only human beings are moral agents—for example,

they never urge animals to behave morally (by, e.g., standing up

for their rights, by leading a political revolution). No animal rights

theorist proposes that animals be tried for crimes and blamed for

moral wrongs.

If it is true that the moral nature of human beings gives rise

to the conception of basic rights and liberties, then by this alone

animal rights and liberation theorists have made an admission fatal

to their case.

Before getting under way I want to note that rights and lib-

erty are certainly not the whole of moral concern to us. There are

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DO ANIMALS HAVE RIGHTS? 143

innumerable other moral issues one can raise, including about the

way human beings relate to animals. In particular, there is the ques-

tion of how people should treat animals. Should they be hunted even

when this does not serve any vital human purpose? Should they be uti-

lized in hurtful—indeed, evidently agonizing—fashion even for trivial

human purposes? Should their pain and suffering be ignored in the

process of being made use of for admittedly vital human purposes?

It is clear that once one has answered the question of whether

animals have rights (or ought to be liberated from human beings)

in the negative, one has by no means disposed of these other issues.

In this essay I will be dealing mostly with the issue of animal rights

and liberation. Yet I will also touch briefly on the other moral issues

just raised. I will indicate why they may all be answered in the nega-

tive without it being the case that animals have rights or should be

liberated—i.e., without raising any serious political issues.

Why Might Animals Have Rights? To have a right amounts to having those around one abstain from

intruding on one within a given sphere of jurisdiction. If I have the

right to the use of our community swimming pool, no one may prevent

me from making the decision as to whether I do or do not use the

pool. Someone’s having a right is a kind of freedom from the unavoid-

able interference of moral agents, beings who are capable of choosing

whether they will interfere or not interfere with the rights holder.

When a right is considered natural, the freedom involved in

having this right is supposed to be justified by reference to the kind

of being one is, one’s nature as a certain kind of entity. The idea

of natural rights was formulated in connection with the issue of the

proper relationship between human beings, especially citizens and

governments. The idea goes back many centuries. . . .

The major political thinker with an influential doctrine of

natural rights was John Locke. In his Second Treatise on Government he argued that each human being is responsible to follow the Law

of Nature, the source of morality. But to do so, each also requires

a sphere of personal authority, which is identified by the principle

of the natural right to property—including one’s person and estate.

In other words, to be a morally responsible being in the company

of other persons one needs what Robert Nozick has called “moral

space,” i.e., a sphere of sovereignty or personal jurisdiction so that

one can engage in self-government—for better or for worse.

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144 T HE RIGHT THING TO DO

Locke made it a provision of having such a right that there

be sufficient and good enough of whatever one may have a right to

left for others—i.e., the Lockean proviso against absolute monopoly.

For Locke the reason government is necessary is “that though in the

state of Nature [every human being] hath such a right [to absolute

freedom], yet the enjoyment of it is very uncertain and constantly

exposed to the invasion of others.” 1 So we establish government to

make us secure in the enjoyment of our rights.

Since Locke’s time the doctrine of natural rights has under-

gone a turbulent intellectual history, falling into disrepute at the

hands of empiricism and positivism but gaining a revival at the

hands of some influential political philosophers of the second half

of the 20 th

century.

Ironically, at a time in recent intellectual history when natural

rights theory had not been enjoying much support, the idea that

animals might also have rights came under increasing discussion.

Most notable among those who proposed such a notion was Thomas

Taylor, whose anonymous work, Vindication of the Rights of Brutes, was published in 1792 but discussed animal rights only in the context of

demeaning human rights. More positive (though brief) was the con-

tribution of Jeremy Bentham, who in his An Introduction to the Princi- ples of Morals and Legislation (1789) argued that those animals that can suffer are owed moral consideration, even if those that molest us or

those we may make good use of may be killed—but not “tormented.”

In the latter part of the 19 th

century an entire work was devoted

to the idea by Henry S. Salt, entitled Animals’ Rights. 2 And in our time numerous philosophers and social commentators have made

the attempt to demonstrate that if we are able to ascribe basic rights

to life, liberty and property to human beings, we can do the same

for many of the higher animals. In essentials their arguments can

be broken down into two parts. First, they subscribe to Darwin’s

thesis that no difference of kind, only a difference of degree, can

be found between other animals and human beings. 3 Second, even

if there were a difference in kind between other animals—especially

mammals—and human beings, since they both can be shown to

have interests (e.g., the avoidance of pain or suffering), for certain

moral and legal purposes the difference does not matter, only the

similarity does. In connection with both of these arguments the cen-

tral conclusion is that if human beings can be said to have certain

basic rights—e.g., to life, liberty or consideration for their capacity

to suffer—then so do (higher) animals. 4

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DO ANIMALS HAVE RIGHTS? 145

Now I do not wish to give the impression that no diversity

exists among those who defend animal rights. Some do so from the

viewpoint of natural rights, treating animals’ rights as basic limiting

principles which may not be ignored except when it would also make

sense to disregard the rights of human beings. Even on this matter

there are serious differences among defenders of animal rights—

some do not allow any special regard for human beings, 5 some hold

that when it comes to a choice between a person and a dog, it is

ordinarily the person who should be given protection. 6 But others

choose to defend animal rights on utilitarian grounds—to the extent

that it amounts to furthering overall pleasure or happiness in the

world, animals must be given equal consideration to what human

beings receive. Thus only if there really is demonstrable contribu-

tion to the overall pleasure or happiness on earth, may an animal

capable of experiencing pleasure or happiness be sacrificed for the

sake of some human purpose. Barring such demonstrable contribu-

tion, animals and humans enjoy equal rights. 7

At times the argument for animal rights begins with the rather

mild point that “reason requires that other animals are as much

within the scope of moral concern as are men” but then moves on

to the more radical claim that therefore “we must view our entire his-

tory as well as all aspects of our daily lives from a new perspective.” 8

Of course, people have generally invoked some moral con-

siderations as they treated animals—I can recall living on a farm

in Hungary when I was 11 and getting all kinds of lectures about

how I ought to treat the animals, receiving severe rebuke when I

mistreated a cat and lots of praise when I took the favorite cow

grazing every day and established a close bond with it over time.

Hardly anyone can have escaped one or another moral lecture from

parents or neighbors concerning the treatment of pets, household

animals, or birds. When a young boy once tried out an air gun by

shooting a pigeon sitting on a telephone wire before the apartment

house in which he lived, I recall that there was no end of rebuke in

response to his wanton callousness. Yet none of those who engaged

in the moralizing ever entertained the need to “view our entire his-

tory as well as all aspects of our daily lives from a new perspective.”

Rather they seemed to have understood that reckless disregard for

the life or well-being of animals shows a defect of character, lack of

sensitivity, callousness—realizing, at the same time, that numerous

human purposes justify our killing and using animals in the various

ways most of us do use them.

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146 T HE RIGHT THING TO DO

And this really is the crux of the matter. But why? Why is it

more reasonable to think of animals as available for our sensible use

rather than owed the kind of respect and consideration we ought to

extend to other human beings? It is one thing to have this as a com-

monsense conviction, it is another to know it as a sound viewpoint,

in terms of which we may confidently conduct ourselves.

Why We May Use Animals While I will return to the arguments for animal rights, let me first

place on record the case for the use of animals for human purposes.

Without this case reasonably well established, it will not be possible

to critically assess the case for animal rights. After all, this is a com-

parative matter—which viewpoint makes better sense, which is, in

other words, more likely to be true?

One reason for the propriety of our use of animals is that we

are more important or valuable than other animals and some of

our projects may require animals for them to be successful. Notice

that this is different from saying that human beings are “uniquely

important,” a position avidly ridiculed by Stephen R. L. Clark, who

claims that “there seems no decent ground in reason or revelation

to suppose that man is uniquely important or significant.” 9 If man

were uniquely important, that would mean that one could not assign

any value to plants or non-human animals apart from their relation-

ship to human beings. That is not the position I am defending. I

argue that there is a scale of importance in nature, and among all

the various kinds of being, human beings are the most important—

even while it is true that some members of the human species may

indeed prove themselves to be the most vile and worthless, as well.

How do we establish that we are more important or valuable?

By considering whether the idea of lesser or greater importance or

value in the nature of things makes clear sense and applying it to

an understanding of whether human beings or other animals are

more important. If it turns out that ranking things in nature as more

or less important makes sense, and if we qualify as more important

than other animals, there is at least the beginning of a reason why

we may make use of other animals for our purposes.

That there are things of different degrees of value in nature is

admitted by animal rights advocates, so there is no great need here

to argue about that. When they insist that we treat animals differ-

ently from the way we treat, say, rocks or iron ore—so that while we

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DO ANIMALS HAVE RIGHTS? 147

may not use the former as we choose, we may use the latter—they

testify, at least by implication, that animals are more important than,

say, iron ore. Certainly they invoke some measure of importance or

value and place animals higher in line with this measure than they

place other aspects of nature. They happen, also, to deny that human

beings rank higher than animals, or at least they do not admit that

human beings’ higher ranking warrants their using animals for their

purposes. But that is a distinct issue which we can consider later.

Quite independently of the implicit acknowledgment by ani-

mal rights advocates of the hierarchy of nature, there simply is

evidence through the natural world of the existence of beings of

greater complexity and of higher value. For example, while it makes

no sense to evaluate as good or bad such things as planets or rocks

or pebbles—except as they may relate to human purposes—when it

comes to plants and animals the process of evaluation commences

very naturally indeed. We can speak of better or worse trees, oaks,

redwoods, or zebras, foxes or chimps. While at this point we confine

our evaluation to the condition or behavior of such beings without

any intimation of their responsibility for being better or worse, when

we start discussing human beings our evaluation takes on a moral

component. Indeed, none are more ready to testify to this than ani-

mal rights advocates who, after all, do not demand any change of

behavior on the part of non-human animals and yet insist that human

beings conform to certain moral edicts as a matter of their own

choice. This means that even animal rights advocates admit outright

that to the best of our knowledge it is with human beings that the

idea of moral goodness and moral responsibility enters the universe.

Clearly this shows a hierarchical structure in nature: some

things do not invite evaluations at all—it is a matter of no signifi-

cance or of indifference whether they are or are not or what they

are or how they behave. Some things invite evaluation but without

implying any moral standing with reference to whether they do well

or badly. And some things—namely, human beings—invite moral

evaluation. The level of importance or value may be noted to move

from the inanimate to the animate world, culminating, as far as

we now know, with human life. Normal human life involves moral

tasks, and that is why we are more important than other beings in

nature—we are subject to moral appraisal, it is a matter of our doing

whether we succeed or fail in our lives.

Now when it comes to our moral task, namely, to succeed as

human beings, we are dependent upon reaching sensible conclusions

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148 T HE RIGHT THING TO DO

about what we should do. We can fail to do this and too often do so.

But we can also succeed. The process that leads to our success involves

learning, among other things, what it is that nature avails us with to

achieve our highly varied tasks in life. Clearly among these highly

varied tasks could be some that make judicious use of animals—for

example, to find out whether some medicine is safe for human use,

we might wish to use animals. To do this is the rational thing for us

to do, so as to make the best use of nature for our success in living

our lives. That does not mean there need be no guidelines involved

in how we might make use of animals—any more than there need

be no guidelines involved in how we use anything else.

Why Individual Human Rights? Where do individual human rights come into this picture? The rights being talked of in connection with human beings have as

their source, as we have noted earlier, the human capacity to make

moral choices. We have the right to life, liberty and property—as

well as more specialized rights connected with politics, the press,

religion—because we have as our central task in life to act morally.

And in order to be able to do this throughout the scope of our

lives, we require a reasonably clear sphere of personal jurisdiction—

a dominion where we are sovereign and can either succeed or fail

to live well, to do right, to act properly.

If we did not have rights, we would not have such a sphere of

personal jurisdiction and there would be no clear idea as to whether

we are acting in our own behalf or those of other persons. No one

could be blamed or praised, for we would not know clearly enough

whether what the person is doing is in his or her authority to do or in

someone else’s. This is precisely the problem that arises in commu-

nal living and, especially, in totalitarian countries where everything

is under forced collective governance. The reason moral distinctions

are still possible to make under such circumstances is that in fact—as

distinct from law—there is always some sphere of personal jurisdic-

tion wherein people may exhibit courage, prudence, justice, hon-

esty, and other virtues. But where collectivism has been successfully

enforced, there is no individual responsibility at play and people’s

morality and immorality are submerged within the group.

Indeed the main reason for governments has for some time

been recognized to be nothing other than that our individual human

rights should be protected. In the past—and in many places even

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DO ANIMALS HAVE RIGHTS? 149

today—it was thought that government (or the State) has some kind

of leadership role in human communities. This belief followed the

view that human beings differ amongst themselves radically, some

being lower, some higher class, some possessing divine rights, others

lacking them, some having a personal communion with God, others

lacking this special advantage.

With such views in place, it made clear enough sense to

argue that government should have a patriarchal role in human

communities—the view against which John Locke forcefully argued

his theory of natural individual human rights. 10

Where Is There Room for Animal Rights? We have seen that the most sensible and influential doctrine of human

rights rests on the fact that human beings are indeed members of a

discernibly different species—the members of which have a moral life

to aspire to and must have principles upheld for them in communities

that make their aspiration possible. Now there is plainly no valid intel-

lectual place for rights in the non-human world, the world in which

moral responsibility is for all practical purposes absent. Some would

want to argue that some measure of morality can be found within

the world of at least higher animals—e.g., dogs. For example, Rollin

holds that “In actual fact, some animals even seem to exhibit behavior

that bespeaks something like moral agency or moral agreement.” 11

His argument for this is rather anecdotal but it is worth considering:

Canids, including the domesticated dog, do not attack another

when the vanquished bares its throat, showing a sign of sub-

mission. Animals typically do not prey upon members of their

own species. Elephants and porpoises will and do feed injured

members of their species. Porpoises will help humans, even at

risk to themselves. Some animals will adopt orphaned young of

other species. (Such cross-species “morality” would certainly not

be explainable by simple appeal to mechanical evolution, since

there is no advantage whatever to one’s own species.) Dogs will

act “guilty” when they break a rule such as one against stealing

food from a table and will, for the most part, learn not to take it. 12

Animal rights advocates such as Rollin maintain that it is impos-

sible to clearly distinguish between human and non-human animals,

including on the grounds of the former’s characteristic as a moral

agent. Yet what they do to defend this point is to invoke borderline

cases, imaginary hypotheses and anecdotes.

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150 T HE RIGHT THING TO DO

In contrast, in his book The Difference of Man and the Difference It Makes, Mortimer Adler undertakes the painstaking task of showing that even with the full acknowledgment of the merits of Darwinian

and, especially, post-Darwinian evolutionary theory, there is ample

reason to uphold the doctrine of species-distinction—a distinction,

incidentally, that is actually presupposed within Darwin’s own work. 13

Adler shows that although the theistic doctrine of radical species dif-

ferences is incompatible with current evolutionary theory, the more

naturalistic view that species are superficially (but nonnegligibly)

different is indeed necessary to it. The fact of occasional borderline

cases is simply irrelevant—what is crucial is that the generalization is

true that human beings are basically different from other animals—

by virtue of “a crucial threshold in a continuum of degrees.” As

Adler explains:

Distinct species are genetically isolated populations between

which interbreeding is impossible, arising (except in the case of

polyploidy) from varieties between which interbreeding was not

impossible, but between which it was prevented. Modern theo-

rists, with more assurance than Darwin could manage, treat dis-

tinct species as natural kinds, not as man-made class distinctions. 14

Adler adds that “Without the critical insight provided by the dis-

tinction between superficial and radical differences in kind, biolo-

gists [as well as animal rights advocates, one should add] might be

tempted to follow Darwin in thinking that all differences in kind

must be apparent, not real.” 15

Since Locke’s admittedly incomplete—sometimes even

confusing—theory had gained respect and, especially, practical

import (e.g., in British and American political history), it became

clear enough that the only justification for the exercise of state

power—namely the force of the law—is that the rights of individuals

are being or have been violated. But as with all successful doctrines,

Locke’s idea became corrupted by innumerable efforts to concoct

rights that government must protect, rights that were actually dis-

guised special interest objectives—values that some people, perhaps

quite legitimately, wanted very badly to have secured for them.

While it is no doubt true that many animal rights advocates

sincerely believe that they have found a justification for the actual

existence of animal rights, it is equally likely that if the Lockean

doctrine of rights had not become so influential, they would now be

putting their point differently—in a way, namely, that would secure

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DO ANIMALS HAVE RIGHTS? 151

for them what they, as a special interest group, want: the protection

of animals they have such love and sympathy for.

Closing Reflections As with most issues on the minds of many intelligent people as

well as innumerable crackpots, a discussion of whether there

are animal rights and how we ought to treat animals cannot be

concluded with dogmatic certainty one way or the other. Even

though those who defend animal rights are certain almost beyond

a shadow of doubt, all I can claim is to being certain beyond a

reasonable doubt. Animals are not the sort of beings with basic

rights to life, liberty and property, whereas human beings, in the

main, are just such beings. Yet we know that animals can feel

pain and can enjoy themselves and this must give us pause when

we consider using them for our legitimate purposes. We ought to

be humane, we ought to kill them and rear them and train them

and hunt them in a fashion consistent with such care about them

as sentient beings.

In a review of Tom Regan’s provocative book already men-

tioned, The Case for Animal Rights, John Hospers makes the following observations that I believe put the matter into the best light we can

shed on our topic:

As one reads page after page of Regan’s book, one has the grow-

ing impression that his thesis is in an important way “going

against nature.” It is a fact of nature that living things have to

live on other living things in order to stay alive themselves. It is a

fact of nature that carnivores must consume, not plants (which

they can’t digest), but other sentient beings capable of intense

pain and suffering, and that they can survive in no other way.

It is a fact of nature that animal reproduction is such that far

more creatures are born or hatched than can possibly survive.

It is a fact of nature that most creatures die slow lingering tor-

tuous deaths, and that few animals in the wild ever reach old

age. It is a fact of nature that we cannot take one step in the

woods without killing thousands of tiny organisms whose lives we

thereby extinguish. This has been the order of nature for mil-

lions of years before man came on the scene, and has indeed

been the means by which any animal species has survived to the

present day; to fight it is like trying to fight an atomic bomb with

a dartgun. . . . This is the world as it is, nature in the raw, unlike

the animals in Disney cartoons. 16

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152 T HE RIGHT THING TO DO

Of course, one might then ask, why should human beings make any

attempt to behave differently among themselves, why bother with

morality at all?

The fact is that with human nature a problem arose in nature

that had not been there before—basic choices had to be confronted,

which other animals do not have to confront. The question “How

should I live?” faces each human being. And that is what makes it

unavoidable for human beings to dwell on moral issues as well as

to see other human beings as having the same problem to solve,

the same question to dwell on. For this reason we are very different

from other animals—we also do terrible, horrible, awful things to

each other as well as to nature, but we can also do much, much

better and achieve incredible feats nothing else in nature can come

close to.

Indeed, then, the moral life is the exclusive province of human

beings, so far as we can tell for now. Other—lower(!)—animals sim-

ply cannot be accorded the kind of treatment that such a moral life

demands, namely, respect for and protection of basic rights.

Notes

1. John Locke, Two Treatises on Government, Par. 123. 2. Henry S. Salt, Animals’ Rights (London: George Bell & Sons, Ltd.,

1892; Clark Summit, PA: Society for Animal Rights, Inc., 1980). This is per-

haps the major philosophical effort to defend animals’ rights prior to Tom Regan’s treatises on the same topic.

3. Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, Chpts. 3 and 4. Reprinted in Tom Regan and Peter Singer, eds., Animal Rights and Human Obligations (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1976), pp. 72–81.

4. On these points both the deontologically oriented Tom Regan

and the utilitarian Peter Singer tend to agree, although they differ consid-

erably in their arguments.

5. Peter Singer holds that “we would be on shaky grounds if we were

to demand equality for blacks, women, and other groups of oppressed

humans while denying equal consideration to nonhumans.” “All Animals

Are Equal,” op. cit. , Regan & Singer, Animal Rights, p. 150. 6. Tom Regan contends that “[it] is not to say that practices that

involve taking the lives of animals cannot possibly be justified . . . in order

to seriously consider approving such a practice [it] would [have to] pre-

vent, reduce, or eliminate a much greater amount of evil . . . there is no

other way to bring about these consequences . . . and . . . we have very good

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DO ANIMALS HAVE RIGHTS? 153

reason to believe that these consequences will obtain.” “Do Animals Have a

Right to Life?” op. cit ., Regan & Singer, Animal Rights, pp. 205–6. 7. This is the gist of Singer’s thesis.

8. Bernard E. Rollin, Animal Rights and Human Morality (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1981), p. 4.

9. Stephen R. L. Clark, The Moral Status of Animals (Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1977), p. 13.

10. John Locke, Two Treatises. 11. Rollin, Animal Rights, p. 14. 12. Ibid.

13. See a discussion of this in Mortimer Adler, The Difference of Man and the Difference It Makes (New York: World Publishing Co., 1968), pp. 73ff.

14. Ibid.

15. Ibid., p. 75.

16. John Hospers, “Review of the Case for Animal Rights,” Reason Papers, No. 10, p. 123.

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154

CHAPTER 18 F amine, Affluence, and

Morality Peter Singer

The Australian philosopher Peter Singer (1946–) is the most widely

read author in the field of ethics. In this essay, he considers whether

it is morally defensible for well-off people to spend money on luxuries

while other people are starving.

As I write this, in November 1971, people are dying in East Bengal

from lack of food, shelter, and medical care. The suffering and

death that are occurring there now are not inevitable, not unavoid-

able in any fatalistic sense of the term. Constant poverty, a cyclone,

and a civil war have turned at least nine million people into destitute

refugees; nevertheless, it is not beyond the capacity of the richer

nations to give enough assistance to reduce any further suffering to

very small proportions. The decisions and actions of human beings

can prevent this kind of suffering. Unfortunately, human beings

have not made the necessary decisions. At the individual level, peo-

ple have, with very few exceptions, not responded to the situation

in any significant way. Generally speaking, people have not given

large sums to relief funds; they have not written to their parliamen-

tary representatives demanding increased government assistance;

they have not demonstrated in the streets, held symbolic fasts, or

done anything else directed toward providing the refugees with the

means to satisfy their essential needs. At the government level, no

government has given the sort of massive aid that would enable the

Source: Philosophy and Public Affairs , vol. 1, no. 1 (Spring 1972), pp. 229–243.

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FAMINE, AFFLUENCE, AND MORALITY 155

refugees to survive for more than a few days. Britain, for instance,

has given rather more than most countries. It has, to date, given

£14,750,000. For comparative purposes, Britain’s share of the nonre-

coverable development costs of the Anglo-French Concorde project

is already in excess of £275,000,000, and on present estimates will

reach £440,000,000. The implication is that the British government

values a supersonic transport more than thirty times as highly as it

values the lives of the nine million refugees. Australia is another

country which, on a per capita basis, is well up in the “aid to Bengal”

table. Australia’s aid, however, amounts to less than one-twelfth of

the cost of Sydney’s new opera house. . . .

These are the essential facts about the present situation in

Bengal. So far as it concerns us here, there is nothing unique about

this situation except its magnitude. The Bengal emergency is just the

latest and most acute of a series of major emergencies in various parts

of the world, arising both from natural and from manmade causes.

There are also many parts of the world in which people die from

malnutrition and lack of food independent of any special emergency.

I take Bengal as my example only because it is the present concern,

and because the size of the problem has ensured that it has been

given adequate publicity. Neither individuals nor governments can

claim to be unaware of what is happening there.

What are the moral implications of a situation like this? In

what follows, I shall argue that the way people in relatively affluent

countries react to a situation like that in Bengal cannot be justified;

indeed, the whole way we look at moral issues—our moral concep-

tual scheme—needs to be altered, and with it, the way of life that

has come to be taken for granted in our society. . . .

I begin with the assumption that suffering and death from lack

of food, shelter, and medical care are bad. I think most people will

agree about this, although one may reach the same view by different

routes. I shall not argue for this view. People can hold all sorts of

eccentric positions, and perhaps from some of them it would not

follow that death by starvation is in itself bad. It is difficult, perhaps

impossible, to refute such positions, and so for brevity I will hence-

forth take this assumption as accepted. Those who disagree need

read no further.

My next point is this: if it is in our power to prevent some-

thing bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything of

comparable moral importance, we ought, morally, to do it. By “with-

out sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance” I mean

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156 T HE RIGHT THING TO DO

without causing anything else comparably bad to happen, or doing

something that is wrong in itself, or failing to promote some moral

good, comparable in significance to the bad thing that we can pre-

vent. This principle seems almost as uncontroversial as the last one.

It requires us only to prevent what is bad, and to promote what is

good, and it requires this of us only when we can do it without sac-

rificing anything that is, from the moral point of view, comparably

important. I could even, as far as the application of my argument

to the Bengal emergency is concerned, qualify the point so as to

make it: if it is in our power to prevent something very bad from

happening, without thereby sacrificing anything morally significant,

we ought, morally, to do it. An application of this principle would

be as follows: if I am walking past a shallow pond and see a child

drowning in it, I ought to wade in and pull the child out. This will

mean getting my clothes muddy, but this is insignificant, while the

death of the child would presumably be a very bad thing.

The uncontroversial appearance of the principle just stated is

deceptive. If it were acted upon, even in its qualified form, our lives,

our society, and our world would be fundamentally changed. For the

principle takes, firstly, no account of proximity or distance. It makes

no moral difference whether the person I can help is a neighbor’s

child ten yards from me or a Bengali whose name I shall never

know, ten thousand miles away. Secondly, the principle makes no

distinction between cases in which I am the only person who could

possibly do anything and cases in which I am just one among mil-

lions in the same position.

I do not think I need to say much in defense of the refusal

to take proximity and distance into account. The fact that a person

is physically near to us, so that we have personal contact with him,

may make it more likely that we shall assist him, but this does not show that we ought to help him rather than another who happens to be further away. If we accept any principle of impartiality, uni-

versalizability, equality, or whatever, we cannot discriminate against

someone merely because he is far away from us (or we are far away

from him). Admittedly, it is possible that we are in a better position

to judge what needs to be done to help a person near to us than

one far away, and perhaps also to provide the assistance we judge

to be necessary. If this were the case, it would be a reason for help-

ing those near to us first. This may once have been a justification

for being more concerned with the poor in one’s town than with

famine victims in India. Unfortunately for those who like to keep

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FAMINE, AFFLUENCE, AND MORALITY 157

their moral responsibilities limited, instant communication and swift

transportation have changed the situation. From the moral point of

view, the development of the world into a “global village” has made

an important, though still unrecognized, difference to our moral

situation. Expert observers and supervisors, sent out by famine relief

organizations or permanently stationed in famine-prone areas, can

direct our aid to a refugee in Bengal almost as effectively as we could

get it to someone in our own block. There would seem, therefore,

to be no possible justification for discriminating on geographical

grounds.

There may be a greater need to defend the second implica-

tion of my principle—that the fact that there are millions of other

people in the same position, in respect to the Bengali refugees, as I

am, does not make the situation significantly different from a situ-

ation in which I am the only person who can prevent something

very bad from occurring. Again, of course, I admit that there is

a psychological difference between the cases; one feels less guilty

about doing nothing if one can point to others, similarly placed,

who have also done nothing. Yet this can make no real difference

to our moral obligations. Should I consider that I am less obliged

to pull the drowning child out of the pond if on looking around I

see other people, no further away than I am, who have also noticed

the child but are doing nothing? One has only to ask this question

to see the absurdity of the view that numbers lessen obligation. It

is a view that is an ideal excuse for inactivity; unfortunately most of

the major evils—poverty, overpopulation, pollution—are problems

in which everyone is almost equally involved.

The view that numbers do make a difference can be made

plausible if stated in this way: if everyone in circumstances like mine

gave £5 to the Bengal Relief Fund, there would be enough to pro-

vide food, shelter, and medical care for the refugees; there  is no

reason why I should give more than anyone else in the same cir-

cumstances as I am; therefore I have no obligation to give more

than £5. Each premise in this argument is true, and the argument

looks sound. It may convince us, unless we notice that it is based on

a hypothetical premise, although the conclusion is not stated hypo-

thetically. The argument would be sound if the conclusion were: if

everyone in circumstances like mine were to give £5, I would have

no obligation to give more than £5. If the conclusion were so stated,

however, it would be obvious that the argument has no bearing on a

situation in which it is not the case that everyone else gives £5. This,

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158 T HE RIGHT THING TO DO

of course, is the actual situation. It is more or less certain that not

everyone in circumstances like mine will give £5. So there will not

be enough to provide the needed food, shelter, and medical care.

Therefore by giving more than £5 I will prevent more suffering than

I would if I gave just £5. . . .

If my argument so far has been sound, neither our distance

from a preventable evil nor the number of other people who, in

respect to that evil, are in the same situation as we are, lessens our

obligation to mitigate or prevent that evil. I shall therefore take as

established the principle I asserted earlier. As I have already said, I

need to assert it only in its qualified form: if it is in our power to

prevent something very bad from happening, without thereby sacri-

ficing anything else morally significant, we ought, morally, to do it.

The outcome of this argument is that our traditional moral

categories are upset. The traditional distinction between duty and

charity cannot be drawn, or at least, not in the place we normally

draw it. Giving money to the Bengal Relief Fund is regarded as

an act of charity in our society. The bodies which collect money

are known as “charities.” These organizations see themselves in this

way—if you send them a check, you will be thanked for your “gen-

erosity.” Because giving money is regarded as an act of charity, it is

not thought that there is anything wrong with not giving. The chari-

table man may be praised, but the man who is not charitable is not

condemned. People do not feel in any way ashamed or guilty about

spending money on new clothes or a new car instead of giving it to

famine relief. (Indeed, the alternative does not occur to them.) This

way of looking at the matter cannot be justified. When we buy new

clothes not to keep ourselves warm but to look “well-dressed” we are

not providing for any important need. We would not be sacrificing

anything significant if we were to continue to wear our old clothes,

and give the money to famine relief. By doing so, we would be pre-

venting another person from starving. It follows from what I have

said earlier that we ought to give money away, rather than spend it

on clothes which we do not need to keep us warm. To do so is not

charitable, or generous. Nor is it the kind of act which philosophers

and theologians have called “supererogatory”—an act which it would

be good to do, but not wrong not to do. On the contrary, we ought

to give the money away, and it is wrong not to do so. . . .

One objection to the position I have taken might be simply that

it is too drastic a revision of our moral scheme. People do not ordi-

narily judge in the way I have suggested they should. Most people

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FAMINE, AFFLUENCE, AND MORALITY 159

reserve their moral condemnation for those who violate some moral

norm, such as the norm against taking another person’s property.

They do not condemn those who indulge in luxury instead of giving

to famine relief. But given that I did not set out to present a mor-

ally neutral description of the way people make moral judgments,

the way people do in fact judge has nothing to do with the validity

of my conclusion. My conclusion follows from the principle which I

advanced earlier, and unless that principle is rejected, or the argu-

ments are shown to be unsound, I think the conclusion must stand,

however strange it appears. . . .

It has been argued by some writers, among them Sidgwick and

Urmson, that we need to have a basic moral code which is not too

far beyond the capacities of the ordinary man, for otherwise there

will be a general breakdown of compliance with the moral code.

Crudely stated, this argument suggests that if we tell people that they

ought to refrain from murder and give everything they do not really

need to famine relief, they will do neither, whereas if we tell them

that they ought to refrain from murder and that it is good to give

to famine relief but not wrong not to do so, they will at least refrain

from murder. The issue here is: Where should we draw the line

between conduct that is required and conduct that is good although

not required, so as to get the best possible result? This would seem

to be an empirical question, although a very difficult one. One

objection to the Sidgwick-Urmson line of argument is that it takes

insufficient account of the effect that moral standards can have on

the decisions we make. Given a society in which a wealthy man who

gives 5 percent of his income to famine relief is regarded as most

generous, it is not surprising that a proposal that we all ought to give

away half our incomes will be thought to be absurdly unrealistic. In

a society which held that no man should have more than enough

while others have less than they need, such a proposal might seem

narrow-minded. What it is possible for a man to do and what he is

likely to do are both, I think, very greatly influenced by what people

around him are doing and expecting him to do. In  any case, the

possibility that by spreading the idea that we ought to be doing very

much more than we are to relieve famine we shall bring about a

general breakdown of moral behavior seems remote.  If the stakes

are an end to widespread starvation, it is worth the risk. Finally, it

should be emphasized that these considerations are relevant only to

the issue of what we should require from others, and not to what

we ourselves ought to do.

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160 T HE RIGHT THING TO DO

The second objection to my attack on the present distinction

between duty and charity is one which has from time to time been

made against utilitarianism. It follows from some forms of utilitar-

ian theory that we all ought, morally, to be working full time to

increase the balance of happiness over misery. The position I have

taken here would not lead to this conclusion in all circumstances,

for if there were no bad occurrences that we could prevent without

sacrificing something of comparable moral importance, my argu-

ment would have no application. Given the present conditions in

many parts of the world, however, it does follow from my argument

that we ought, morally, to be working full time to relieve great

suffering of the sort that occurs as a result of famine or other

disasters. Of course, mitigating circumstances can be adduced—for

instance, that if we wear ourselves out through overwork, we shall

be less effective than we would otherwise have been. Nevertheless,

when all considerations of this sort have been taken into account,

the conclusion remains: we ought to be preventing as much suf-

fering as we can without sacrificing something else of comparable

moral importance. This conclusion is one which we may be reluc-

tant to face. I cannot see, though, why it should be regarded as

a criticism of the position for which I have argued, rather than a

criticism of our ordinary standards of behavior. Since most people

are self-interested to some degree, very few of us are likely to do

everything that we ought to do. It would, however, hardly be hon-

est  to take this as evidence that it is not the case that we ought

to do it.

It may still be thought that my conclusions are so wildly out

of line with what everyone else thinks and has always thought that

there must be something wrong with the argument somewhere.

In order to show that my conclusions, while certainly contrary to

contemporary Western moral standards, would not have seemed so

extraordinary at other times and in other places, I would like to

quote a passage from a writer not normally thought of as a way-out

radical, Thomas Aquinas.

Now, according to the natural order instituted by divine provi-

dence, material goods are provided for the satisfaction of human

needs. Therefore the division and appropriation of property,

which proceeds from human law, must not hinder the satisfac-

tion of man’s necessity from such goods. Equally, whatever a

man has in superabundance is owed, of natural right, to the

poor for their sustenance. So Ambrosius says, and it is also to be

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FAMINE, AFFLUENCE, AND MORALITY 161

found in the Decretum Gratiani : “The bread which you withhold belongs to the hungry; the clothing you shut away, to the naked;

and the money you bury in the earth is the redemption and

freedom of the penniless.” 1

I now want to consider a number of points, more practical than

philosophical, which are relevant to the application of the moral

conclusion we have reached. These points challenge not the idea

that we ought to be doing all we can to prevent starvation, but the

idea that giving away a great deal of money is the best means to

this end. . . .

Another, more serious reason for not giving to famine relief

funds is that until there is effective population control, relieving

famine merely postpones starvation. If we save the Bengal refugees

now, others, perhaps the children of these refugees, will face starva-

tion in a few years’ time. In support of this, one may cite the now

well-known facts about the population explosion and the relatively

limited scope for expanded production.

. . . I accept that the earth cannot support indefinitely a

population rising at the present rate. This certainly poses a prob-

lem for anyone who thinks it important to prevent famine. Again,

however, one could accept the argument without drawing the con-

clusion that it absolves one from any obligation to do anything to

prevent famine. The conclusion that should be drawn is that the

best means of preventing famine, in the long run, is population

control. It would then follow from the position reached earlier that

one ought to be doing all one can to promote population control

(unless one held that all forms of population control were wrong

in themselves, or would have significantly bad consequences).

Since there are organizations working specifically for population

control, one would then support them rather than more orthodox

methods of preventing famine.

A third point raised by the conclusion reached earlier relates to

the question of just how much we all ought to be giving away. One

possibility . . . is that we ought to give until we reach the level of mar-

ginal 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 will

be recalled that earlier I put forward both a strong and a moderate

version of the principle of preventing bad occurrences. The strong

version, which required us to prevent bad things from happening

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162 T HE RIGHT THING TO DO

unless in doing so we would be sacrificing something of comparable

moral significance, does seem to require reducing ourselves to the

level of marginal utility. I should also say that the strong version

seems to me to be the correct one. I proposed the more moderate

version—that we should prevent bad occurrences unless, to do so,

we had to sacrifice something morally significant—only in order to

show that, even on this surely undeniable principle, a great change

in our way of life is required. On the more moderate principle,

it may not follow that we ought to reduce ourselves to the level

of marginal utility, for one might hold that to reduce oneself and

one’s family to this level is to cause something significantly bad to

happen. Whether this is so I shall not discuss, since, as I have said,

I can see no good reason for holding the moderate version of the

principle rather than the strong version. Even if we accepted the

principle only in its moderate form, however, it should be clear that

we would have to give away enough to ensure that the consumer

society, dependent as it is on people spending on trivia rather than

giving to famine relief, would slow down and perhaps disappear

entirely. There are several reasons why this would be desirable in

itself. The value and necessity of economic growth are now being

questioned not only by conservationists, but by economists as well.

There is no doubt, too, that the consumer society has had a distort-

ing effect on the goals and purposes of its members. Yet looking

at the matter purely from the point of view of overseas aid, there

must be a limit to the extent to which we should deliberately slow

down our economy; for it might be the case that if we gave away,

say, 40  percent of our Gross National Product, we would slow down

the economy so much that in absolute terms we would be giving less

than if we gave 25  percent of the much larger GNP that we would

have if we limited our contribution to this smaller percentage.

I mention this only as an indication of the sort of factor that

one would have to take into account in working out an ideal. Since

Western societies generally consider 1 percent of the GNP an accept-

able level for overseas aid, the matter is entirely academic. Nor does

it affect the question of how much an individual should give in a

society in which very few are giving substantial amounts.

. . . The issue is one which faces everyone who has more money

than he needs to support himself and his dependents, or who is

in a position to take some sort of political action. These categories

must include practically every teacher and student of philosophy in

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FAMINE, AFFLUENCE, AND MORALITY 163

the universities of the Western world. If philosophy is to deal with

matters that are relevant to both teachers and students, this is an

issue that philosophers should discuss.

Discussion, though, is not enough. What is the point of relat-

ing philosophy to public (and personal) affairs if we do not take

our conclusions seriously? In this instance, taking our conclusion

seriously means acting upon it. The philosopher will not find it any

easier than anyone else to alter his attitudes and way of life to the

extent that, if I am right, is involved in doing everything that we

ought to be doing. At the very least, though, one can make a start.

The philosopher who does so will have to sacrifice some of the ben-

efits of the consumer society, but he can find compensation in the

satisfaction of a way of life in which theory and practice, if not yet

in harmony, are at least coming together.

Note

1. Summa Theologica , II-II, Question 66, Article 7, in Aquinas, Selected Political Writings , ed. A. P. d’Entrèves, trans. J. G. Dawson (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1948), p. 171.

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164

CHAPTER 19 Poverty and Parenthood

Stuart Rachels

Many people believe that having children is immoral under certain

circumstances—for example, if the mother is very young, or if the child

would suffer from a severe genetic disorder. Some philosophers, how-

ever, have argued that parenthood is immoral even in the usual case.

This argument usually takes one of three forms: (a) Pessimism about human life : Human life contains more bad than good; therefore, we shouldn’t create more lives. Sometimes people express this idea by say-

ing, “I wouldn’t want to bring a child into this world.” (b) An unusual rights violation : Creating a child exposes her to all the harms of life, without her permission. Yet we cannot obtain the consent of the non-

existent. Therefore, we shouldn’t make babies. (c) Environmental strain : Increasing the population of first-world countries adds to their overuse

of scarce, depletable, and environmentally hazardous resources. There-

fore, people in those countries shouldn’t have children.

In this selection, however, the author takes a different approach.

The Famine Relief Argument against Having Children appeals to what economists call “opportunity costs”—in other words, the cost of not

being able to do something because you’ve chosen to do something

else. The argument goes like this: In countries like the United States,

parents typically spend over $200,000 to raise a child. That money

would be much better spent on the poor. Therefore, people in such

countries shouldn’t have children. Anyone who accepts Peter Singer’s

Famine Relief Argument, the author claims, should accept this argu-

ment as well.

This essay originally appeared as “The Immorality of Having Children” in Ethical Theory and Moral Practice (published online September 17, 2013). Reprinted by permission.

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POVERTY AND PARENTHOOD 165

1. The Biggest Decision in Life Parenthood, Not Marriage. My father, who taught college for nearly four decades, was fond of saying that the biggest decision people

face in forming their worldview is whether to believe in God. Some-

times he put the point this way: If the question is not what to do , but what to believe , then God’s existence matters most. Religious belief is crucial because so much turns on it. If you embrace Christianity,

for example, then this may affect your view of anthropology, biol-

ogy, cosmology, history, love, morality, metaphysics, politics, and

much else.

But what if we’re interested in action rather than belief? What

is the biggest practical decision that most of us will face at some point in our lives? I think our culture favors a particular answer to this

question, namely: Should I get married? This does not mean, “Should I ever get married?” or “Do I want to involve the government in my most intimate relationship?” Rather, our culture’s most celebrated

question is, “Should I marry [fill in the name of one’s girlfriend/

boyfriend]?” We ask ourselves: Is s/he good enough? Am I ready?

Am I in love? Will it last forever? Note that our culture glorifies mar-

riage with its biggest ritual celebration: the wedding. . . .

However, that emphasis is misplaced. To be sure, tying the

knot is a big decision: marriage is currently supposed to last a life-

time, and if a couple participates in the (aptly nicknamed) wedding-

industrial complex, then their nuptials will be both time-consuming

and expensive (over $25,000 on average 1 ). But, to be crass, there’s

always divorce: marriage has an escape hatch. It’s not an easy hatch

to open; divorce is almost always emotionally traumatic. Yet once

it’s done, it’s done. And divorce is so common in our society that

divorced individuals are not stigmatized.

Instead, I suggest, the biggest decision that most of us will face

is whether to have children. There are three reasons for this.

First, each additional person profoundly affects the world. For

starters, an individual is likely to have a marked effect on the envi-

ronment over the course of her life. 2 But also, each person probably

impacts the social world even more: given the vagaries of social life,

each of us affects whom others will meet, befriend, fall in love with,

and lust for—which, in turn, will affect [who will exist in the future].

In sum, just as one’s religious beliefs have logical implications that

ripple across one’s worldview, so one’s procreative decisions have

causal implications that ripple across one’s world.

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166 T HE RIGHT THING TO DO

Second, being a parent entails drastically changing one’s

lifestyle for at least eighteen years. Parenting consumes vast sums of

time, money, and energy. It is a monumental undertaking.

Third, parenthood has no morally viable escape hatch. You

can divorce your spouse, but you can’t divorce your kids—you can

only neglect them. You can give your children up for adoption (and thus opt out of parenthood), but even that wouldn’t put the genie

fully back in the bottle: someone else would still have to raise your

biological children, and those children would still affect the world

profoundly.

So, in sum, the question of whether to have a child is more

important than the question of whether to marry one’s sweetheart—

and, indeed, is the most significant question that most people will face—because every new child will profoundly affect the world in

general and two parents in particular. Moreover, whereas marriage

can be undone by divorce, once a baby exists, there’s no turning

back: a human life will unfold with all of its ramifications. The deci-

sion to beget is awesome and irrevocable.

Our Culture Downplays the Biggest Decision. Why doesn’t our cul- ture regard parenthood as being the biggest decision in life? There

are several reasons. (i) Although creating a new human being will

have profound effects on the world, most of those effects are unpre-

dictable. Would the world be better in the long run if my spouse

and I have a child? Would people be happier? Would justice prevail

more often? Those questions dissolve into countless others, whose

answers can’t be known. And what we can’t know, we don’t mull

over. . . .

(ii) Parenthood might seem like the default option in life.

Having kids in our home may seem normal to us simply because we

grew up in a home that had kids in it. Perhaps we learn subliminally

from a young age that When I grow up, I will be the mommy (or daddy) in the home . Some children even play games to this effect.

(iii) In the real world, many parents didn’t choose to become

parents, exactly: they chose to have sex; the woman accidentally

became pregnant; and then the woman chose not to abort. We call

such babies “accidents”—a term that stands in contrast to choice.

Many children are accidental. For example, in 1994, 31% of babies

born in the United States were accidents. 3 Even though the specter

of unintentional pregnancy makes some people think harder about

whether to have kids, the frequency of such pregnancies also makes

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POVERTY AND PARENTHOOD 167

some people view parenthood as something that simply happens at

a certain stage of life. And parenthood can’t be a big decision if it

isn’t (really) a decision at all.

(iv) Sometimes, one member of a couple (or both) wants to

have a child really badly. In such cases, we may see parenthood as automatic or inevitable—in other words, as not (really) chosen. And

again, if parenthood isn’t chosen, then it can’t be life’s biggest deci-

sion. For all these reasons, our society views begetting more lightly

than it should.

Our Culture Commends Begetting. Yet I want to emphasize a fur- ther reason, (v): Our culture downplays the importance of the critical

decision by viewing the choice to conceive as being obviously respect-

able so long as certain minimal conditions are fulfilled (for exam-

ple, the mother is not in extreme poverty, neither parent is dying,

and the parents are not on the verge of divorce). In other words, we

view begetting as an obviously good thing. In our culture, nothing

seems more natural than to congratulate someone who has just had a

baby: “What a blessing!” “It’s a little miracle!” “What a bundle of joy!”

We’ve all seen someone react to the presence of a baby like Frances

McDormand’s character in the movie Raising Arizona (1987): “He’s an angel! He’s an angel straight from Heaven!” Our own parents

are likely to foster a positive view of parenthood in us, first because

they may want grandchildren; and second, because emphasizing the

advantages of parenting to one’s children is a way of expressing love

to them—it is a way of saying, I’m glad I had you . In general, almost no parent wants to talk publicly about the disadvantages of parenthood,

for fear of looking like a bad parent or uncaring person. Thus, we

tend to hear mostly positive things. Furthermore, many of us want to

be like our parents, and one way to do that is to become parents our-

selves. Further still, some subcultures put a special premium on large

families: Italian-Americans, Catholics, Jews, and Mormons, for exam-

ple, all traditionally prize big families. Finally, most people in our

society are either Christians or Jews, and the Book of Genesis quotes

God as saying, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth . . .” 4 —a

clear directive to make babies. Thus, people in our culture tend to

view parenthood favorably.

However, few people in our culture see parenthood as obliga-

tory; these days, a young couple is unlikely to be pressured by out-

siders to start a family. Instead of censuring the childless, we are

more likely to pity them. We may suspect, for example, that an older

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168 T HE RIGHT THING TO DO

couple who have no kids tried and failed, and we assume that their

lives are the poorer for it. So, we feel sorry for them. The upshot is

that our culture views parenthood as a no-pressure dilemma: if you

choose to have kids, great; but if you don’t, no one will complain.

Again, we view the decision surprisingly lightly.

On the whole, then, our culture regards the decision to procre-

ate as being both less important and less controversial than it should.

I have emphasized these points in order to say to the reader: I expect

this essay to rub you wrong; please keep an open mind. In what fol-

lows, I will argue that it is immoral to have a child, by which I mean it is immoral to conceive and rear a child . The argument will be limited in two ways. First, it will say nothing about adoption. Adoptive parents

do not conceive their children and thus do not “have children” in

the sense relevant to my argument. (In another, perfectly normal

sense, adoptive parents do of course have children.) Second, I won’t

argue that it is always, in every conceivable circumstance, immoral

to have children; rather, I will assume some background conditions,

which almost always hold true in contemporary Western society. The

argument itself is simple. As I’ve said, parenting consumes vast sums

of time, money, and energy. It would be much better to direct those

resources elsewhere—so much better, that having a child must be

considered immoral.

2. The Famine Relief Argument against Having Children

How much does raising a child cost in the United States? Each

year, the U.S. Department of Agriculture answers this question in

its Expenditures on Children by Families . The latest report estimates that a middle-income family with a child born in 2010 will spend

about $226,920 on child rearing. 5 That figure, however, doesn’t rep-

resent the full price of having children, because it ignores all the

costs that accrue after the child turns 18—for example, the cost of

college tuition. Also, many young adults live at home where they

can receive routine assistance from Mom and Dad. 6 Robert Schoeni

and Karen Ross estimate that children between the ages of 18 and

34 receive an average of $38,000 from their parents (plus a lot of

free labor!). 7 Thus, the overall (average) cost of parenthood might

be closer to $226,920 + $38,000 = $264,920. However, I can’t offer

a total estimate because I don’t know what financial arrangements

hold, on average, between children over the age of 34 and their

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POVERTY AND PARENTHOOD 169

parents. On the one hand, the children may continue to receive

support (here and there, and eventually via inheritance); on the

other hand, the parents may increasingly depend on their grown

children as they get older. But we needn’t settle on a final figure;

my argument will merely assume that having a child is so expensive

that a significant amount of moral good could be accomplished by

using that money for other purposes. In what follows, I’ll assume

that having a child costs around $227,000, although I suspect that

the true figure is even higher.

Now let’s consider how much good could be accomplished by

giving $227,000 to humanitarian causes. I’m not asking the utopian

question, how much good would $227,000 accomplish if spent opti- mally ? Rather, I am asking how much good would likely result from giving $227,000 to a smattering of reputable poverty relief organiza-

tions over the next 20 years. Even that question, however, requires

philosophical clarification, because there are two ways to understand

the notion of accomplishing good. On the simple causal interpretation , I do good by bringing about a valuable state of affairs. For example,

I do good by helping an old woman carry her groceries into her

home. On the causal / counterfactual interpretation , I do good by bring- ing about a better state of affairs than would have existed without my

action. On that understanding, I do good by helping the old woman

only if no one else would have helped her. For reasons I’ll explain

later, I’ll employ the causal / counterfactual interpretation. Thus,

I am asking: how much better would things be if we gave $227,000

to charity than if we gave none?

It would be easy to assess the value of charitable giving if it

worked like this: you send a $20 bill to a large organization (UNI-

CEF, say); that organization uses your $20 bill to achieve a specific,

short-term goal (feeding a particular child, say); and your donation

“makes the difference” in the sense that the goal would not have

been achieved without your donation. Under those conditions, your

donation has the value of the accomplished goal. In the real world,

however, it is typical for contributions to simply be added to the

large operating budgets of charities. Thus, to assess the value of a

donation, we must know what the charity would have done differ-

ently without the amount of one’s donation. And we never know

that. Even employees at the charity will not know the answer to ques-

tions like this: how would the Hunger Eradication Initiative have

differed with $710,861 in its budget instead of $710,881? Moreover,

let’s not forget that charitable organizations often pursue long-term

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170 T HE RIGHT THING TO DO

economic development projects alongside short-term assistance

programs. And long-term endeavors are hard to assess.

The upshot is that we rarely know what difference we make

when we give to large charities. That fact may dishearten us, but

it doesn’t mean that our efforts are wasted. The major charities

provide birth control to millions of women; vaccinate multitudes

of infants; educate legions of children; feed vast camps of refugees;

and so on. They need money to do these things. Giving $227,000

to such groups is likely to make a wonderful difference, even if we

don’t know exactly what that difference will be.

Let’s now consider the main argument. Having a child costs

hundreds of thousands of dollars; that money would be much better spent on famine relief; therefore, it is immoral to have children.

This is essentially an expected-utility argument: we shouldn’t have

children because having a child is a poor way to squeeze benefit

out of $227,000. If the language of expected utility seems cold, then

we might say: We should immunize, feed and clothe impoverished children who already exist rather than spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on having one child of our own. I will call this the Famine Relief Argument against Having Children . It applies almost across-the-board within our culture. However, it would not apply in cultures that expect children

to economically benefit their parents—where, for example, children

work on the family farm from a young age and then support their

parents later in life. In such cases, remaining childless might make

one poorer and thus diminish one’s ability to give. Before continuing, let me say [two] things about the argument.

1. We can now see why we need the “causal / counterfactual” conception of doing good rather than the “simple causal” concep-

tion. The Famine Relief Argument against Having Children urges us

to remain childless in order to be more generous. However, for many

people, remaining childless would be a sacrifice, and I would not

urge anyone to sacrifice anything unless the sacrifice paid off coun-

terfactually. Suppose, for example, that you gave $227,000 to a char-

ity that eventually vaccinated 10,000 children against the rotavirus.

Further suppose that the same children would have been vaccinated

without your donation, because a wealthy benefactor was waiting

in the wings, poised to donate whatever the charity needed in the

end. If you knew all this in advance, then I can’t see why you’d give

$227,000 to that charity, unless you simply preferred for the wealthy

benefactor to have an extra $227,000 rather than you. The Famine

Relief Argument against Having Children urges us to sacrifice for

others only if those others would be worse off without our sacrifice.

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POVERTY AND PARENTHOOD 171

2. Although the argument concludes that it is immoral to have children, I do not believe that parents should be punished, admon-

ished, or blamed in any way, simply for being parents. Blame is

usually irritating and unwelcome to the blamed, and in this case,

I doubt that blaming parents would do any good. Would chastis-

ing parents make them less likely to have more children and more

likely to give to charity? Would it deter potential parents from hav-

ing children? Casting blame on parents would probably have little

effect other than bothering the parents and pointlessly diminishing

the world’s limited appetite for moral ideas and moral debate. Also,

I reject the Kantian idea that people should be punished simply

because they have done something wrong. Thus, I oppose parent-

hood and the blaming of parents. . . .

3. Connections to Singer’s Argument The great philosophical advocate of generosity in our time is Peter

Singer. My argument is named after Singer’s “Famine Relief Argu-

ment.” 8 One version of Singer’s argument goes like this: “If we can

prevent something very bad from happening, without sacrificing

anything of comparable or nearly comparable moral significance,

then we ought, morally, to do it; we can prevent something very bad from happening, without sacrificing anything of comparable

or nearly comparable moral significance, by foregoing our luxu-

ries and giving our money to famine relief instead. Therefore,

we ought to do so.” Like Singer, I use the phrase “famine relief”

as a stand-in for whatever charitable causes make sense. Feeding

the hungry is one excellent charitable idea, but of course there

are others.

My argument relates to Singer’s in two key ways. First, my

argument might merely be a special case of his. Singer says that

we should forego our luxuries in favor of generosity, and having

children might be one of those luxuries. Thus, we might amplify

Singer’s second premise to read: “We can prevent something very

bad from happening, without sacrificing anything of comparable or

nearly comparable moral significance, by foregoing our luxuries (for

example, by foregoing having children) and giving our money to

famine relief instead.”

Admittedly, it seems odd to call children a “luxury.” We

think of luxuries as things typically enjoyed by the rich—diamond

earrings, Ferraris, and summer holidays in the South of France, for

example. But people of all economic classes have children. Also,

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172 T HE RIGHT THING TO DO

we contrast “luxury” with “necessity,” and children are necessary for

the continuation of our species. Yet, despite these observations, we

might still consider children luxuries. After all, having kids is expen-

sive and isn’t necessary for the parents’ health or survival. . . .

The second connection may be deeper. Before stating it, let

me fill in some background. Singer’s argument is part of a moral

worldview that sees suffering as the greatest evil and the preven-

tion of suffering as the greatest good. The morally best life that a

person of wealth and opportunity can lead, on this view, is a life of

saintly self-sacrifice—she sacrifices everything to combat the causes

of suffering, where those causes are things like factory farming,

depression, poverty, microbial illness, and political repression. Even

if perfect beneficence is unrealistic for creatures like us, it is at least

a noble ideal: we can always strive to be more generous, and we

can morally assess people by seeing how close they come to this

benevolent endpoint.

Most people don’t come very close. Money is easy to spend, and

many people feel like their expected lifestyle leaves little room for

giving. In the United States, even the wealthy may find themselves

in credit-card debt after making only “normal” purchases. “I don’t

know where all my money goes,” they might say, as though their

money had hotwired their Lexus and driven off, whereas in fact they

made concrete choices that resulted in their money’s going to the

mortgage company, the school, the car dealership, the airline, the

clothing designer, the online electronics store, and so on. If we can

admit that we choose our lifestyle, then we can honestly address the

question: What are the biggest decisions we make that affect how

much we give to charity?

Our relevant decisions fall into two groups: those that affect

our own level of wealth, and those that affect how much of our

wealth we donate. I’ll consider these topics, briefly, in turn.

How can we affect our own wealth-level? Naturally, there’s a

lot of advice out there, most of it bad. The most common route

to wealth is being born into a rich family, but we can’t choose our

lineage. Instead, the biggest wealth-affecting decision we make is

probably that of career choice. And certainly, one attains brighter

economic prospects by choosing to go to law school than by choos-

ing to become a dishwasher. However, I wish to emphasize the

extent to which luck and circumstance, rather than choice, influ-

ences our ultimate income level. Let me make three observations

about this.

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POVERTY AND PARENTHOOD 173

First, the idea that a person has a variety of career options

representing a variety of possible income levels largely assumes the

perspective of the well off. Most people don’t have the personal

connections or educational background to compete for any high- paying job. Indeed, they may be lucky to be employed. Choice is not

irrelevant here; one can try to network and to maximize the educa-

tional opportunities one has. However, choice can only do so much.

Second, people’s employment options are limited by their talents,

interests, and personality traits. To some extent, we can shape these

things through our decisions; but to some extent, we cannot. Third,

pure luck often determines how well a person’s career goes. Did a

good job open up at the right time and place? Did the interview go

well? Did the market unexpectedly turn? Did you get a good boss?

Did you join a well-run or poorly-run company? No career protects

a person from the vagaries of life. Many lawyers are unemployed or

underemployed; businesses fail; banking is risky. Perhaps the best

bet is medicine—doctors can always make good money. However,

becoming a physician is notoriously difficult; it requires having a

knack for science, a strong work ethic, a tolerance for blood and

needles, an ability to function on little sleep, and a general high

intelligence—high enough to secure a spot in a medical school,

anyway. Thus, I am impressed by the extent to which luck and hap-

penstance contribute to a person’s ultimate level of wealth.

Choice matters more when we examine what we do with the money we have . The best advice for rich people who strive to be more generous is captured by the cliché, Live simply so that others can simply live. For example, one should drive an economy-class car rather than a luxury vehicle; live in a modest house rather than a mansion; fly

coach rather than first class; and not cultivate a taste for expensive

pleasures like fine wines, country club surroundings, and overseas

vacations. If an affluent person lives by such rules, he’ll have a lot

more money to donate at year’s end.

And now comes the rub: If you want to lead the most generous

kind of life, then the most important decision you’ll ever make is

whether to have kids. Having kids—with all the financial and emo-

tional commitments that parenthood involves—is the single greatest

impediment to the realization of the benevolent ideal. To put this

point another way: if you wish to help others, then the worst decision

you can make is to become a parent, because your child will tie up

most of your spare time and resources for the next two decades. This is

the deepest connection between Singer’s Famine Relief Argument and

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174 T HE RIGHT THING TO DO

the Famine Relief Argument against Having Children: my argument

tries to expose the most important practical implication of Singer’s

argument—namely, that it requires us to be childless. . . .

4. Five Objections My argument endorses a two-part plan for moral living: Don’t have kids , and spend the money you’ll save on the poor . Some readers might dislike the whole tenor of this. They might think, “Even if I were rich

and childless, I wouldn’t be obligated to use my money benevolently.”

That outlook, however, raises questions that are beyond the scope of

this paper. In general, I am assuming a viewpoint friendly to Singer’s

Famine Relief Argument. It would be too much, and too boringly

familiar, to review all of the standard objections to Singer’s position.

Instead, I’ll focus on what’s distinctive to this paper—namely, its

application of Singer’s perspective to parenthood. So let’s engage

with the objector who believes, “Even if it would be immoral for

me to spend $227,000 on a yacht, it would not be immoral for me to have a child knowing that I will spend $227,000 on her; children

are relevantly different from yachts.”

I’ll consider five objections to the Famine Relief Argument

against Having Children.

1. Some objections point to disastrous consequences that would ensue if everyone remained childless. If nobody had kids, then

the human race would die out, and before it did, there would be

the Era of the Elderly, when every living person would be over 70.

After that would come the Era of the Very Elderly, the Era of the

Half Dead, and, finally, the Era of Please Kill Me but There’s No

One Still Around Able to Do That. A different objection laments the

prospect of taking all the good people out of parenting. It says that

if every good person were to refrain from procreating, then tomor- row’s parents would come only from the Pool of Scoundrels, and the

future of humankind would be bleak. The first objection is of the

form, “What if everybody did that?” The second objection is of

the form, “What if all the good people did that?”

It would be fair, if un-philosophical-sounding, to respond by

saying, “But they won’t.” Both objections are fallacious. Consider the

principle underlying them: it would be wrong to do x if some very

large number of people’s doing x would have bad consequences. On

this principle, it would be wrong for the cable guy to come to my

house, because if billions of people came to my house, then there

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POVERTY AND PARENTHOOD 175

would be no place for anyone to park. Or, it would be wrong for me

to go to law school, because if everyone did that, then who would

teach the classes? The principle is indefensible.

I have not been arguing that we should all refrain from having kids ; I’ve only been arguing that you, the reader, shouldn’t have kids . Or, to put the thesis more generally: anyone in our position shouldn’t have kids (where “our position” includes facts about how others will behave as well as facts about our own economic situation). There

is nothing paradoxical in saying that you should do something but that it might be bad if everyone or if many people did it. In deciding what to do, we need to be realistic about what others will do. If we

become saints, then we do so alone. The rest of the world won’t

follow our lead, nor will all the people whom we think would make

good parents. . . .

2. The second objection says that having children isn’t wrong because having children is so natural for human beings. But show- ing that some behavior is natural is a poor moral defense of it. If

we were created in the image of a perfect God, then what’s natural

for us might always be good—indeed, might always be god-like. But,

as the world attests, we have no such nature. Rather, we evolved by

the morally blind forces of natural selection, and what’s natural for

us is what promoted our ancestors’ reproductive fitness. Yet what

promoted their fitness might have been something horrible, like

rape. Rape might be a natural consequence of males being sexually

voracious, aggressive, and physically stronger than females. However,

this is no defense of sexual assault.

In general, what’s natural bears no regular relation to what’s

good. Leukemia, failing eyesight, and aggression in males are all

natural for human beings, yet all are bad. Nor does saying that

something is “natural” entail that it is inevitable. Men can choose

whether to assault women, despite the “naturalness” of wanting sex.

Similarly, a couple can choose whether to have a baby, even if desir-

ing children is natural.

3. Some people will say that an ethic which prohibits parent- hood is too demanding. On this view, a moral system that forbids

procreation forbids too much: it is too intrusive, or it expects too

much of us, or something like that.

How exactly is the objection supposed to go? The thesis that

having children is immoral is not literally intrusive; stating the thesis does not, for example, involve going inside somebody’s house and

looking around to see whether they have kids. Nor does the thesis

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176 T HE RIGHT THING TO DO

“expect too much of people”—to say that x is immoral is not to

predict or expect that people won’t do x. So I think the objection

must instead go something like this: “to require that people remain

childless is to require them to make a big sacrifice, and we cannot

rightfully require big sacrifices of people, even if we can rightfully

demand small things from them.” The principle behind this objec-

tion is that you can’t be obliged to do x if x requires you to make

a large sacrifice.

In response, one might wonder why morality can’t demand

big sacrifices of us. Is there any good reason to think such a thing,

or do we believe it merely because we imagine ourselves making the sacrifice instead of benefitting from it, and we are too selfish to like what we imagine? However, I won’t pursue that response. Instead,

I’ll argue that remaining childless is not a big sacrifice.

What is a “big sacrifice?” In my [way of speaking], a big sac-

rifice involves giving something up for someone else’s benefit, at a

great cost to one’s own happiness. What is sacrificed is not the thing

given so much as the happiness attending it. Others might say that

a sacrifice counts as “big” if it involves a lot of effort or a change in

lifestyle, even if making the sacrifice doesn’t greatly diminish one’s

welfare.

None of these ideas implies that remaining childless is a big

sacrifice. First, not having kids requires no effort at all—it is the having of kids that requires great effort. Similarly, not having kids requires no lifestyle change—rather, it is the having of kids that requires a lifestyle change. Asking people not to have children is,

in a sense, asking them to do nothing at all (except, perhaps, to use

birth control). Thus, the Famine Relief Argument against Having

Children is not “demanding” of people in these ways. . . .

But the main question is whether being childless greatly

reduces one’s happiness. Until recently, such questions were left

to commonsense observation and good judgment. In the last fif-

teen years, however, a new academic subfield has emerged, variously

called “positive psychology,” “the economics of happiness” or “hap-

piness studies.” This new subfield uses survey data and statistical

analyses to investigate the causes of happiness and unhappiness. At

root, happiness is hard to study because it cannot be directly mea-

sured; instead, we must rely on self-reports, and those reports might

be inaccurate for various reasons. Thus, the findings of happiness

studies are rarely conclusive. However, they probably represent our

best-supported beliefs on the subject.

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POVERTY AND PARENTHOOD 177

Happiness researchers have studied how children affect

parental well-being. The details of these studies are fascinating, but

we needn’t delve into them, because the upshot is clear: being child-

less does not have a large negative impact on happiness. Instead, the data suggest that childless couples are actually happier than parents.

In part, this is because children hurt marital relations 9 — relations

that improve once the children leave home. “Despite what we read

in the popular press,” writes Daniel Gilbert, “the only known symp-

tom of ‘empty nest syndrome’ is increased smiling.” 10

Another expert

summarized the overall picture like this: “Parents experience lower

levels of emotional well-being, less frequent positive emotions and

more frequent negative emotions than their childless peers.” 11

Not

all researchers draw such depressing conclusions for parents, how-

ever; another said, “The broad message is not that children make

you less happy; it’s just that children don’t make you more happy” (unless, he adds, you have more than one child: “Then the studies

show a more negative impact”). 12

The range of current expert opinion on the impact of children

on parental happiness thus extends from “very little impact” to “a

medium-sized negative impact.” No expert believes what the third objection requires, namely, that parenting makes people much hap- pier, and so an ethic that forbids it could be too demanding. Nor

can one object that these studies focus on happiness but ignore

meaning. The studies ask respondents such broad questions about

their well-being that the respondents’ feelings of pride and fulfill-

ment and belonging (or, conversely, their feelings of despair and

listlessness and isolation) are taken into account alongside more

traditional hedonistic elements.

Some people find these conclusions incredible. In his best-

selling book, Stumbling on Happiness , Daniel Gilbert devotes only three pages to the topic, yet most of the skeptical questions he

receives at his lectures concern it. “I’ve never met anyone who didn’t

argue with me about this,” he says. 13

Given Gilbert’s experience, I’ll

say a little more about the drawbacks of parenting—not to prove that

parenting is miserable (it isn’t), but just to combat any incredulous

stares at the data. Gilbert writes: “Careful studies of how women

feel as they go about their daily activities show that they are less

happy when taking care of their children than when eating, exer-

cising, shopping, napping, or watching television. Indeed, looking

after the kids appears to be only slightly more pleasant than doing

housework.” 14

Gilbert, himself a parent, adds: “None of this should

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178 T HE RIGHT THING TO DO

surprise us. Every parent knows that children are a lot of work—a

lot of really hard work—and although parenting has many rewarding moments, the vast majority of its moments involve dull and selfless

service to people who will take decades to become even begrudg-

ingly grateful for what we are doing.” Another parent laments that

children are “all joy and no fun.” Still another says that kids are “a

huge source of joy, but they turn every other source of joy to shit.” 15

And now consider the alternative. If you don’t have children, then

what will you do with the time that you would have spent changing

diapers, constructing science fair projects, cleaning up spills, pur-

chasing school supplies, acting as a chauffeur, and responding to

toddler tantrums and adolescent freeze-outs? Answer: anything you want . Even if it’s not obvious that having children diminishes paren- tal happiness, it’s obvious that it might. . . .

As I said, happiness-study findings are rarely conclusive. How-

ever, overall, there is little reason to think that being childless is such

a deprivation that an ethic which requires it could be too demand-

ing. Yet I do recognize one type of exception. Some people want

kids really badly; their desire for children is like a desperate thirst that needs quenching. For them, it may be psychologically impos-

sible to choose childlessness. I don’t think it makes sense, either

as social policy or as abstract philosophy, to hold people account-

able for choices that are psychologically forced on them (even if

they could physically do otherwise). For that reason, even though it

would be regrettable for such people to have children (because their

$227,000 could be better spent), I would not regard their decision

to have children as immoral. Indeed, I’m not even sure I would

regard it as a decision.

4. The fourth objection goes something like this: “What if we raise our children to care about others, and to have the right values?

My child might give more than $227,000 to charity. And what if my child becomes the next great inventor or finds the cure for malaria?

My child might achieve goods far greater than I could achieve by

giving $227,000 to charity.”

This objection might be called the “Wishful Thinking Objec-

tion” or the “Pass-the-Buck-and-Hope Objection.” Of course it is pos- sible that our child would become a great humanitarian. But if we compare the number of well-meaning parents to the number of

great humanitarians, then we can see how improbable this is. More-

over, we must also consider the possibility of less welcome outcomes.

For example, there’s around a 1-in-68 chance that a child born today

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POVERTY AND PARENTHOOD 179

will be autistic. 16

Also, one’s child might have a tremendously bad

effect on the world—not necessarily due to malice; maybe just due

to causal bad luck.

We could try to improve the utility calculation by self-

consciously raising our child to become a great humanitarian. How-

ever, that would probably do more harm than good. Children tend

to respond to unusual parental pressure either by developing neuro-

ses or by rebelling as soon as they can. Our child might even decide

that we were right: the best way to improve the world is to have children and to raise them properly. Thus, they might do exactly

what we did. And so might their children. . . .

Sometimes people think that their child would have a decent chance of becoming a great benefactor, even though they’d admit

that a randomly selected child would have little such chance. But

that’s just vanity. Realistically, our children are probably going to

be like us: thoughtful and caring but also selfish and susceptible to

rationalization.

5. Finally, one might say that I have drawn the wrong conclu- sion from my arguments. Instead of not procreating, shouldn’t we

have children but raise them on less than $227,000? If we do, then

we’ll have more money than our neighbors to be generous with, and

our children can more easily right the scales later by benefiting the

world more than we could have done by not having them.

In response, I should begin by agreeing that, if you have chil- dren, then you should raise them frugally, for two reasons: you’ll

have more money to be generous with, and your children won’t

cultivate expensive tastes. Live simply so that others can simply live, and raise your children to do the same. However, I reject the fifth objection for three reasons.

First, I have been assuming that raising a child costs around

$227,000. Yet I would defend the Famine Relief Argument against

Having Children even if the cost were much less—say, $100,000.

Thus, I am not sure whether raising a child frugally would bring the

cost down enough to invalidate my argument—especially because

$227,000 was a conservative estimate.

Second, for simplicity I have focused on how much money it takes to raise a child, but I could also have focused on the time and energy that parenting consumes. If you have a child, then rais- ing that child will take up time and energy that you could have

spent doing volunteer work and/or making more money to give to

the poor. Thus, one advantage of not having kids, as compared to

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180 T HE RIGHT THING TO DO

frugal parenting, is that childless adults have more time and energy

to spend on others.

Finally, if you become a parent, then your love for your chil-

dren may impel you to spend more money on them than you had

intended. Love, though itself a great good, conflicts with benevo-

lence. The great altruist Zell Kravinsky understands this. Kravinsky,

who gave his entire $45-million fortune to charity, once lamented

that “The sacrosanct commitment to the family is the rationaliza-

tion for all manner of greed and selfishness.” 17

In practical terms,

it might be easier to remain childless than to deny one’s children

luxuries that other children enjoy. . . .

Notes

1. The exact estimate is $25,631, according to the May, 2012, Harper’s Index (source: The Wedding Report [Tucson]).

2. See, for example, Murtaugh, P. A. and Schlax, M. G., “Reproduction

and the Carbon Legacies of Individuals,” Global Environmental Change 19 (2009), pp. 14–20.

3. See Table 1 in “Unintended Pregnancy in the United States,” Family Planning Perspectives 30(1) (1998), pp. 24–29 and p. 46.

4. Genesis 1:28, The Holy Bible , English Standard Version. U.S.A.: Good News Publishers, 2001.

5. See Lino, M., U.S. Department of Agriculture / Center for Nutrition

Policy and Promotion, Expenditures on Children by Families, 2010 , released May 2011. The $226,920 figure is in today’s dollars; given projections about infla-

tion, one is likely to actually pay $286,860.

6. At the end of 2011, 29% of American adults aged 25 to 34 lived at

home—see Parker, K., Pew Research Center, “The Boomerang Generation:

Feeling OK about Living with Mom and Dad,” released March 15, 2012.

7. See Schoeni, R. F. and Ross, K. E., “Material Assistance from Families

during the Transition to Adulthood,” in R. A. Settersten Jr., F. F. Furstenberg Jr.,

and R. G. Rumbaut (eds.), On the Frontier of Adulthood: Theory, Research, and Public Policy , 2nd edition, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005, pp. 396–417.

8. See Singer, P., “Famine, Affluence and Morality,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 1 (1972), pp. 229–243.

9. See, for example, the National Marriage Project’s 2011 “State of Our

Unions” report as well as Twenge, J. M., Campbell, W. K., and Foster, C. A.,

“Parenthood and Marital Satisfaction: A Meta-Analytic Review,” Journal of Marriage and Family 65(3) (2003), pp. 574–583.

10. Gilbert, D. Stumbling on Happiness (New York: Vintage Books, 2006), p. 243.

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POVERTY AND PARENTHOOD 181

11. Robin Simon, quoted in Ali, L., “Having Kids Makes You Happy,”

Newsweek , July 7, 2008. 12. Andrew Oswald, quoted in Senior, J., “All Joy and No Fun: Why

Parents Hate Parenting,” New York Times Magazine , July 4, 2010. 13. Quoted in Senior, J.

14. D. Gilbert, pp. 244–245. The next quote is from p. 245.

15. The last two quotes come from J. Senior.

16. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

(CDC), March 2014.

17. Parker, I., “The Gift,” The New Yorker , August 2, 2004, pp. 54–63 (p. 60).

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182

CHAPTER 20 A Defense of the Death Penalty

Louis P. Pojman

Louis P. Pojman (1935–2005) was a professor at the United States Mili-

tary Academy. He argues that the death penalty is justified for two rea-

sons: It gives killers what they deserve, and it deters potential killers.

However, he does not believe that the death penalty should be used

only on those who murder.

Who so sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed.

(Genesis 9:6)

There is an ancient tradition, going back to biblical times, but

endorsed by the mainstream of philosophers, from Plato to Thomas

Aquinas, from Thomas Hobbes to Immanuel Kant, Thomas Jefferson,

John Stuart Mill, and C. S. Lewis, that a fitting punishment for mur-

der is the execution of the murderer. One prong of this tradition, the

backward-looking or deontological position, epitomized in Aquinas and Kant, holds that because human beings, as rational agents, have dig-

nity, one who with malice aforethought kills a human being forfeits

his right to life and deserves to die. The other, the forward-looking or consequentialist tradition, exemplified by Jeremy Bentham, Mill,

and Ernest van den Haag, holds that punishment ought to serve as

a deterrent, and that capital punishment is an adequate deterrent to

prospective murderers. . . . I will argue that both traditional defenses

are sound and together they make a strong case for retaining the

Excerpted from Louis P. Pojman, “Why the Death Penalty Is Morally Permissible,” in Debating the Death Penalty, edited by Hugo Adam Bedau and Paul G. Cassell (Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 51–75. Reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press.

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A DEFENSE OF THE DEATH PENALTY 183

death penalty. That is, I hold a combined theory of punishment. A

backward-looking judgment that the criminal has committed a hei-

nous crime plus a forward-looking judgment that a harsh punishment

will deter would-be murderers is sufficient to justify the death penalty.

I turn first to the retributivist theory in favor of capital punishment.

Retribution . . . I remember the grocer’s wife. She was a plump, happy

woman who enjoyed the long workday she shared with her hus-

band in their ma-and-pa store. One evening, two young men

came in and showed guns, and the grocer gave them everything

in the cash register.

For no reason, almost as an afterthought, one of the men

shot the grocer in the face. The woman stood only a few feet

from her husband when he was turned into a dead, bloody mess.

She was about 50 when it happened. In a few years her

mind was almost gone, and she looked 80. They might as well

have killed her too. . . .

Human beings have dignity as self-conscious rational agents

who are able to act morally. One could maintain that it is precisely

their moral goodness or innocence that bestows dignity and a right

to life on them. Intentionally taking the life of an innocent human

being is so evil that absent mitigating circumstances, the perpetrator

forfeits his own right to life. He or she deserves to die.

The retributivist holds three propositions: (1) that all the guilty

deserve to be punished; (2) that only the guilty deserve to be pun-

ished; and (3) that the guilty deserve to be punished in proportion

to the severity of their crime. . . .

Criminals like Steven Judy, Jeffrey Dahmer, Timothy McVeigh,

Ted Bundy (who is reported to have raped and murdered over 100

women), John Mohammed and John Lee Malvo, who murdered 12

people in the killing spree of 2002, and the two men who gunned

down the grocer have committed capital offenses and deserve noth-

ing less than capital punishment. No doubt malicious acts like the

ones committed by these criminals deserve worse punishment than

death, and I would be open to suggestions of torture (why not?),

but at a minimum, the death penalty seems warranted.

People often confuse retribution with revenge. . . . While moral people will feel outrage at acts of heinous crimes, the moral justifica-

tion of punishment is not vengeance, but desert. Vengeance signifies

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184 T HE RIGHT THING TO DO

inflicting harm on the offender out of anger because of what he has

done. Retribution is the rationally supported theory that the criminal

deserves a punishment fitting the gravity of his crime. . . .

Our natural instinct is for vengeance, but civilization demands that we restrain our anger and go through a legal process, letting

the outcome determine whether and to what degree to punish the

accused. Civilization demands that we not take the law into our own

hands, but it should also satisfy our deepest instincts when they are

consonant with reason. Our instincts tell us that some crimes, like

McVeigh’s, Judy’s, and Bundy’s, should be severely punished, but we

refrain from personally carrying out those punishments, committing

ourselves to the legal processes. The death penalty is supported by

our gut animal instincts as well as our sense of justice as desert.

The death penalty reminds us that there are consequences to

our actions, that we are responsible for what we do, so that dire

consequences for immoral actions are eminently appropriate. The

death penalty is such a fitting response to evil.

Deterrence The second tradition justifying the death penalty is the utilitar-

ian theory of deterrence. This holds that by executing convicted

murderers we will deter would-be murderers from killing innocent

people. The evidence for deterrence is controversial. . . . However,

one often hears abolitionists claiming the evidence shows that the

death penalty fails to deter homicide. This is too strong a claim.

The sociological evidence doesn’t show either that the death penalty

deters or that it fails to deter. The evidence is simply inconclusive.

But a commonsense case can be made for deterrence.

Imagine that every time someone intentionally killed an inno-

cent person he was immediately struck down by lightning. When

mugger Mike slashed his knife into the neck of the elderly pen-

sioner, lightning struck, killing Mike. His fellow muggers witnessed

the sequence of events. When burglar Bob pulled his pistol out and

shot the bank teller through her breast, a bolt leveled Bob, his com-

patriots beholding the spectacle. Soon men with their guns lying

next to them were found all across the world in proximity to the

corpses of their presumed victims. Do you think that the evidence

of cosmic retribution would go unheeded?

We can imagine the murder rate in the United States and every-

where else plummeting. The close correlation between murder and

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A DEFENSE OF THE DEATH PENALTY 185

cosmic retribution would serve as a deterrent to would-be murderers.

If this thought experiment is sound, we have a prima facie argument

for the deterrent effect of capital punishment. In its ideal, prompt

performance, the death penalty would likely deter. . . . The question

then becomes how do we institute the death penalty so as to have the

maximal deterrent effect without violating the rights of the accused.

We would have to bring the accused to trial more quickly and

limit the appeals process of those found guilty “beyond reasonable

doubt.” Having DNA evidence should make this more feasible than

hitherto. Furthermore, public executions of the convicted murderer

would serve as a reminder that crime does not pay. Public executions

of criminals seem an efficient way to communicate the message that

if you shed innocent blood, you will pay a high price. . . .

Common sense informs us that most people would prefer to

remain out of jail, that the threat of public humiliation is enough

to deter some people, that a sentence of 20 years will deter most

people more than a sentence of two years, that a life sentence will

deter most would-be criminals more than a sentence of 20 years. I

think that we have commonsense evidence that the death penalty is

a better deterrent than prison sentences. For one thing, as Richard

Herrnstein and James Q. Wilson have argued in Crime and Human Nature, a great deal of crime is committed on a cost-benefit schema, wherein the criminal engages in some form of risk assessment as to

his or her chances of getting caught and punished in some man-

ner. If he or she estimates the punishment mild, the crime becomes

inversely attractive, and vice versa. The fact that those who are con-

demned to death do everything in their power to get their sentences

postponed or reduced to long-term prison sentences, in the way lifers do not, shows that they fear death more than life in prison. . . .

Former Prosecuting Attorney for the State of Florida, Richard

Gernstein, has set forth the commonsense case for deterrence. First

of all, he claims, the death penalty certainly deters the murderer

from any further murders, including those he or she might com-

mit within the prison where he is confined. Second, statistics can-

not tell us how many potential criminals have refrained from taking

another’s life through fear of the death penalty. He quotes Judge

Hyman Barshay of New York: “The death penalty is a warning, just

like a lighthouse throwing its beams out to sea. We hear about ship-

wrecks, but we do not hear about the ships the lighthouse guides

safely on their way. We do not have proof of the number of ships it

saves, but we do not tear the lighthouse down.”

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186 T HE RIGHT THING TO DO

Some of the commonsense evidence is anecdotal. . . . Growing

up in the infamous Cicero, Illinois, home of Al Capone and the Mafia,

I had friends who went into crime, mainly burglary and larceny. It was

common knowledge that one stopped short of killing in the act of rob-

bery. A prison sentence could be dealt with—especially with a good

lawyer—but being convicted of murder, which at that time included a

reasonable chance of being electrocuted, was an altogether different

matter. No doubt exists in my mind that the threat of the electric chair

saved the lives of some of those who were robbed in my town. . . .

It seems likely that the death penalty does not deter as much

as it could due to its inconsistent and rare use. For example, . . . in

1994, there were 23,305 cases of murder and nonnegligent man-

slaughter and only 31 executions—for a ratio of better than 750 to 1.

The average length of stay for a prisoner executed in 1994 was 10

years and two months. If potential murderers perceived the death

penalty as a highly probable outcome of murder, would they not be

more reluctant to kill? . . .

The late Ernest van den Haag has set forth what he called the

Best Bet Argument. He argued that even though we don’t know for

certain whether the death penalty deters or prevents other murders,

we should bet that it does. Indeed, due to our ignorance, any social

policy we take is a gamble. Not to choose capital punishment for

first-degree murder is as much a bet that capital punishment doesn’t

deter as choosing the policy is a bet that it does. There is a significant

difference in the betting, however, in that to bet against capital pun-

ishment is to bet against the innocent and for the murderer, while

to bet for it is to bet against the murderer and for the innocent. . . .

Suppose that we choose a policy of capital punishment for capital

crimes. In this case we are betting that the death of some murderers

will be more than compensated for by the lives of some innocents not

being murdered (either by these murderers or others who would have

murdered). If we’re right, we have saved the lives of the innocent. If

we’re wrong, unfortunately, we’ve sacrificed the lives of some murder-

ers. But say we choose not to have a social policy of capital punish-

ment. If capital punishment doesn’t work as a deterrent, we’ve come

out ahead, but if it does work, then we’ve missed an opportunity to

save innocent lives. If we value the saving of innocent lives more highly

than the loss of the guilty, then to bet on a policy of capital punish-

ment turns out to be rational. Since the innocent have a greater right

to life than the guilty, it is our moral duty to adopt a policy that has a

chance of protecting them from potential murderers. . . .

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A DEFENSE OF THE DEATH PENALTY 187

If the Best Bet Argument is sound, or if the death penalty

does deter would-be murderers, as common sense suggests, then we

should support some uses of the death penalty. It should be used

for those who commit first-degree murder, for whom no mitigating

factors are present, and especially for those who murder police offi-

cers, prison guards, and political leaders. Many states rightly favor

it for those who murder while committing another crime, such as

burglary or rape. It should be used in cases of treason and terror-

ist bombings. It should also be considered for the perpetrators of

egregious white collar crimes such as bank managers embezzling the

savings of the public. . . .

Let me consider two objections often made to the implemen-

tation of the death penalty: that it sometimes leads to the death of

innocents and that it discriminates against blacks.

Objection 1: Miscarriages of justice occur. Capital punishment is to be rejected because of human fallibility in convicting inno-

cent parties and sentencing them to death. In a survey done in

1985, Hugo Adam Bedau and Michael Radelet found that of the

7,000 persons executed in the United States between 1900 and

1985, 25 were innocent of capital crimes. While some compensa-

tion is available to those unjustly imprisoned, the death sentence

is irrevocable. We can’t compensate the dead. As John Maxton, a

member of the British Parliament puts it, “If we allow one inno-

cent person to be executed, morally we are committing the same,

or, in some ways, a worse crime than the person who committed

the murder.”

Response: Mr. Maxton is incorrect in saying that mistaken judi- cial execution is morally the same as or worse than murder, for a

deliberate intention to kill the innocent occurs in a murder, whereas

no such intention occurs in wrongful capital punishment.

Sometimes the objection is framed this way: It is better to let

ten criminals go free than to execute one innocent person. If this

dictum is a call for safeguards, then it is well taken; but somewhere

there seems to be a limit on the tolerance of society toward capital

offenses. Would these abolitionists argue that it is better that 50 or

100 or 1,000 murderers go free than that one innocent person be

executed? Society has a right to protect itself from capital offenses

even if this means taking a finite chance of executing an innocent

person. If the basic activity or process is justified, then it is regret-

table, but morally acceptable, that some mistakes are made. Fire

trucks occasionally kill innocent pedestrians while racing to fires,

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188 T HE RIGHT THING TO DO

but we accept these losses as justified by the greater good of the

activity of using fire trucks. We judge the use of automobiles to be

acceptable even though such use causes an average of 50,000 traffic

fatalities each year. We accept the morality of a defensive war even

though it will result in our troops accidentally or mistakenly killing

innocent people. . . .

The abolitionist is incorrect in arguing that death is different

from long-term prison sentences because it is irrevocable. Impris-

onment also takes good things away from us that may never be

returned. We cannot restore to the inmate the freedom or oppor-

tunities he or she lost. Suppose an innocent 25-year-old man is

given a life sentence for murder. Thirty years later the error is

discovered and he is set free. Suppose he values three years of

freedom to every one year of life. That is, he would rather live 10

years as a free man than 30 as a prisoner. Given this man’s values,

the criminal justice system has taken the equivalent of 10 years of

life from him. If he lives until he is 65, he has, as far as his esti-

mation is concerned, lost 10 years, so that he may be said to have

lived only 55 years.

The numbers in this example are arbitrary, but the basic point

is sound. Most of us would prefer a shorter life of higher quality to

a longer one of low quality. Death prevents all subsequent quality,

but imprisonment also irrevocably harms one by diminishing the

quality of life of the prisoner.

Objection 2: The second objection made against the death pen- alty is that it is unjust because it discriminates against the poor and

minorities, particularly African Americans, over rich people and

whites. . . .

Response: First of all, it is not true that a law that is applied in a discriminatory manner is unjust. . . . The discriminatory applica-

tion, not the law itself, is unjust. . . . For example, a friend once

got two speeding tickets during a 100-mile trip (having borrowed

my car). He complained to the police officer who gave him his sec-

ond ticket that many drivers were driving faster than he was at the

time. They had escaped detection, he argued, so it wasn’t fair for

him to get two tickets on one trip. The officer acknowledged the

imperfections of the system but, justifiably, had no qualms about

giving him the second ticket. . . . Discriminatory practices should

be reformed, and in many cases they can be. But imperfect prac-

tices in themselves do not entail that the laws engendering these

practices themselves are unjust. . . .

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A DEFENSE OF THE DEATH PENALTY 189

. . . If we concluded that we should abolish a rule or practice,

unless we treated everyone exactly by the same rules all the time,

we would have to abolish, for example, traffic laws and laws against

imprisonment for rape, theft, and even murder. Carried to its logical

limits, we would also have to refrain from saving drowning victims

if a number of people were drowning but we could only save a few

of them. Imperfect justice is the best that we humans can attain.

We should reform our practices as much as possible to eradicate

unjust discrimination wherever we can, but if we are not allowed

to have a law without perfect application, we will be forced to have

no laws at all.

Nathanson . . . argues that the case of death is different.

“Because of its finality and extreme severity of the death penalty,

we need to be more scrupulous in applying it as punishment than

is necessary with any other punishment.” The retentionist agrees

that the death penalty is a severe punishment and that we need to

be scrupulous in applying it. The difference between the abolition-

ist and the retentionist seems to lie in whether we are wise and

committed enough as a nation to reform our institutions so that

they approximate fairness. Apparently, Nathanson is pessimistic

here, whereas I have faith in our ability to learn from our mistakes

and reform our systems. If we can’t reform our legal system, what

hope is there for us?

More specifically, the charge that a higher percentage of blacks

than whites are executed was once true but is no longer so. Many

states have made significant changes in sentencing procedures, with

the result that currently whites convicted of first-degree murder are

sentenced to death at a higher rate than blacks. . . .

Abolitionists often make the complaint that only the poor get

death sentences for murder. If their trials are fair, then they deserve

the death penalty, but rich murderers may be equally deserving. At

the moment only first-degree murder and treason are crimes deemed

worthy of the death penalty. Perhaps our notion of treason should

be expanded to include those who betray the trust of the public:

corporation executives who have the trust of ordinary people, but

who, through selfish and dishonest practices, ruin their lives. As

noted above, my proposal is to consider broadening, not narrowing,

the scope of capital punishment, to include business personnel who

unfairly harm the public. The executives in the recent corporation

scandals who bailed out of sinking corporations with golden, million-

dollar lifeboats while the pension plans of thousands of employees

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190 T HE RIGHT THING TO DO

went to the bottom of the economic ocean, may deserve severe

punishment, and if convicted, they should receive what they deserve.

My guess is that the threat of the death sentence would have a deter-

rent effect here. Whether it is feasible to apply the death penalty for

horrendous white-collar crimes is debatable. But there is something

to be said in its favor. It would remove the impression that only the

poor get executed. . . .

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191

CHAPTER 21 Why the United States Will

Join the Rest of the World in Abandoning Capital Punishment Stephen B. Bright

As a nation that executes prisoners, the United States is in poor com-

pany. Most countries that have the death penalty are terrible violators

of human rights. In 2012, only 21 countries performed executions,

and the top executors were China, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, the United

States, and Yemen. The United States carried out only 39 executions

in 2013. Most of the more than 3,000 death-row inmates in America

will never be put to death; they will die of natural causes.

Stephen B. Bright (1948–) believes that the United States should

and will get out of the execution business. Mr. Bright is president and

senior counsel at the Southern Center for Human Rights, which is in

Atlanta, Georgia.

The United States will inevitably join other industrialized nations in

abandoning the death penalty, just as it has abandoned whipping,

the stocks, branding, cutting off appendages, maiming, and other

primitive forms of punishment. It remains to be seen how long it

will be until the use of the death penalty becomes so infrequent as

From Debating the Death Penalty, edited by Hugo Adam Bedau and Paul G. Cassell (Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 152–182. Reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press.

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192 T HE RIGHT THING TO DO

to be pointless, and it is eventually abandoned. In the meantime,

capital punishment is arbitrarily and unfairly imposed, undermines

the standing and moral authority of the United States in the com-

munity of nations, and diminishes the credibility and legitimacy of

the courts within the United States.

Although death may intuitively seem to be an appropriate

punishment for a person who kills another person and polls show

strong support for the death penalty, most Americans know little

about realities of capital punishment, past and present. The death

penalty is a direct descendant of the darkest aspects of American

history—slavery, lynching, racial oppression, and perfunctory capital

trials known as “legal lynchings”—and racial discrimination remains

a prominent feature of capital punishment. The death penalty is

not imposed to avenge every killing and—as some contend—to

bring “closure” to the family of every victim, but is inflicted in less

than 1 percent of all murder cases. Of more than 20,000 murders

in the United States annually, an average of fewer than 300 people

are sentenced to death, and only 55 are executed each year. Only

19 states actually carried out executions between 1976, when the

U.S. Supreme Court authorized the resumption of capital punish-

ment after declaring it unconstitutional in 1972, and the end of

2002. Eighty-six percent of those executions were in the South. Just

two states—Texas and Virginia—carried out 45  percent of them.

Any assessment of the death penalty must not be based on abstract

theories about how it should work in practice or the experiences of

states like Oregon, which seldom impose the death penalty and carry

it out even less. To understand the realities of the death penalty, one

must look to the states that sentence people to death by the hundreds

and have carried out scores of executions. In those states, innocent

people have been sentenced to die based on such things as mistaken

eyewitness identifications, false confessions, the testimony of partisan

experts who render opinions that are not supported by science, failure

of police and prosecutors to turn over evidence of innocence, and tes-

timony of prisoners who get their own charges dismissed by testifying

that the accused admitted the crime to them. Even the guilty are sen-

tenced to death as opposed to life imprisonment without the possibility

of parole not because they committed the worst crimes but because of

where they happen to be prosecuted, the incompetence of their court-

appointed lawyers, their race, or the race of their victim. . . .

Further experimentation with lethal punishment after centu-

ries of failure has no place in a conservative society that is wary

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WHY THE U.S. WILL ABANDON CAPITAL PUNISHMENT 193

of too much government power and skeptical of the government’s

ability to do things well. Further experimentation might be justified

if it served some purpose. But capital punishment is not needed to

protect society or to punish offenders, as shown by over 100 coun-

tries around the world that do not have the death penalty and states

such as Michigan and Wisconsin, neither of which have had the

death penalty since the mid-1800s. It can be argued that capital

punishment was necessary when America was a frontier society and

had no prisons. But today the United States has not only maximum

security prisons, but “super maximum” prisons where serial killers,

mass murderers, and sadistic murderers can be severely punished

and completely isolated from guards and other inmates.

Nor is crime deterred by the executions in fewer than half

the states of an arbitrarily selected 1 percent of those who com-

mit murders, many of whom are mentally ill or have limited intel-

lectual functioning. The South, which has carried out 85 percent

of the nation’s executions since 1976, has the highest murder rate

of any region of the country. The Northeast, which has the fewest

executions by far—only 3 executions between 1976 and the end of

2002—has the lowest murder rate.

The United States does not need to keep this relic of the past

to show its abhorrence of murder. As previously noted, 99 percent of

the murders in the United States are not punished by death. Even at

war crimes trials in The Hague, genocide and other crimes against

humanity are not punished with the death penalty. The societies

that do not have capital punishment surely abhor murder as much

as any other, but they do not find it necessary to engage in killing

in order to punish, protect, or show their abhorrence with killing.

Finally, capital punishment has no place in a decent society

that places some practices, such as torture, off limits—not because

some individuals have not done things so bad that they arguably

deserved to be tortured, but because a civilized society simply does

not engage in such acts. It can be argued that rapists deserve to be

raped, that mutilators deserve to be mutilated. Most societies, how-

ever, refrain from responding in this way because the punishment

is not only degrading to those on whom it is imposed, but it is also

degrading to the society that engages in the same behavior as the

criminals. When death sentences are carried out, small groups of

people gather in execution chambers and watch as a human being

is tied down and put down. Some make no effort to suppress their

glee when the sentence is carried out and celebrations occur inside

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194 T HE RIGHT THING TO DO

and outside the prison. These celebrations of death reflect the dark

side of the human spirit—an arrogant, vengeful, unforgiving, uncar-

ing side that either does not admit the possibility of innocence or

redemption or is willing to kill people despite those possibilities.

A Human Rights Violation That Undermines the Standing and Moral Authority of the United States If people were asked 50 years ago which one of the following three

countries—Russia, South Africa, or the United States—would be

most likely to have the death penalty at the turn of the century,

few people would have answered the United States. And yet, the

United States was one of four countries that accounted for 90 per-

cent of all the executions in the world in 2001 (the others were

China, Iran, and Saudi Arabia), while Russia and South Africa are

among the nations that no longer practice capital punishment.

Since 1985, over 40 countries have abandoned capital punishment

whereas only four countries that did not have it have adopted it.

One of those, Nepal, has since abolished it. Turkey abolished the

death penalty in 2001 in its efforts to join the European Union,

leaving the United States the only NATO country that still has the

death penalty. . . .

The retention of capital punishment in the United States draws

harsh criticism from throughout the world. . . . Capital punish-

ment also affects the United States’s relations with other countries

in other ways. Canada and Mexico have repeatedly protested when

their nationals are executed by the United States, as have other

countries. Canada, Mexico, and most European countries will not

extradite suspects to the United States if they are subject to capital

punishment and will not assist in the prosecution of people facing

the death penalty. Just as the United States could not assert moral

leadership in the world as long as it allowed segregation, it will not

be a leader on human rights as long as it allows capital punishment.

Arbitrary and Unfair Infliction Regardless of the practices of the rest of the world or the morality

of capital punishment, the process leading to a death sentence is so

unfair and influenced by so many improper factors and the infliction

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WHY THE U.S. WILL ABANDON CAPITAL PUNISHMENT 195

of death sentences is so inconsistent that this punishment should

be abandoned.

The exoneration of many people who spent years of their lives

in prisons for crimes they did not commit—many of them on death

rows—has dramatically brought to light defects in the criminal jus-

tice system that have surprised and appalled people who do not

observe the system every day and assumed that it was working prop-

erly. The average person has little or no contact with the criminal

courts, which deal primarily with crimes committed against and by

poor people and members of racial minorities. It is a system that is

overworked and underfunded, and particularly underfunded when

it comes to protecting the rights of those accused.

Law enforcement officers, usually overworked and often under

tremendous public pressure to solve terrible crimes, make mistakes,

fail to pursue all lines of investigation, and, on occasion, overreach

or take shortcuts in pursuing arrests. Prosecutors exercise vast and

unchecked discretion in deciding which cases are to be prosecuted

as capital cases. The race of the victim and the defendant, politi-

cal considerations, and other extraneous factors influence whether

prosecutors seek the death penalty and whether juries or judges

impose it.

A person facing the death penalty usually cannot afford to

hire an attorney and is at the mercy of the system to provide a

court-appointed lawyer. While many receive adequate representation

(and often are not sentenced to death as a result), many others

are assigned lawyers who lack the knowledge, skill, resources—and

sometimes even the inclination—to handle a serious criminal case.

People who would not be sentenced to death if properly represented

are sentenced to death because of incompetent court-appointed law-

yers. In many communities, racial minorities are still excluded from

participation as jurors, judges, prosecutors, and lawyers in the sys-

tem. In too many cases, defendants are convicted on flimsy evidence,

such as eyewitness identifications, which are notoriously unreliable

but are seen as very credible by juries; the testimony of convicts who,

in exchange for lenient treatment in their own cases, testify that

the accused admitted to them that he or she committed the crime;

and confessions obtained from people of limited intellect through

lengthy and overbearing interrogations.

. . . These are not minor, isolated incidents; they are long-

standing, pervasive, systemic deficiencies in the criminal justice sys-

tem that are not being corrected and, in some places, are even

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196 T HE RIGHT THING TO DO

becoming worse. . . . Law enforcement agencies have been unwilling

to videotape interrogations and use identification procedures that

are more reliable than those presently employed. People who sup-

port capital punishment as a concept are unwilling to spend millions

of tax dollars to provide competent legal representation for those

accused of crimes. And courts have yet to find ways to overcome

centuries of racial discrimination that often influence, consciously

or subconsciously, the decisions of prosecutors, judges, and juries.

A Warning That Something Is Terribly Wrong: Innocent People Con- demned to Death. Over 100 people condemned to death in the last 30 years have been exonerated and released after new evidence estab-

lished their innocence or cast such doubt on their guilt that they could

not be convicted. The 100th of those people, Ray Krone, was convicted

and sentenced to death in Arizona based on the testimony of an expert

witness that his teeth matched bite marks on the victim. During the

ten years that Krone spent on death row, scientists developed the abil-

ity to compare biological evidence recovered at crime scenes with the

DNA of suspects. DNA testing established that Krone was innocent.

On Krone’s release, the prosecutor said, “[Krone] deserves an apology

from us, that’s for sure. A mistake was made here. . . . What do you

say to him? An injustice was done and we will try to do better. And

we’re sorry.” Although unfortunate to be wrongfully convicted, Krone

was very fortunate that there was DNA evidence in his case. In most

cases, there is no biological evidence for DNA testing.

Other defendants had their death sentences commuted to

life imprisonment without the possibility of parole because of ques-

tions about their innocence. For example, in 1994, the governor

of Virginia commuted the death sentence of a mentally retarded

man, Earl Washington, to life imprisonment without parole because

of questions regarding his guilt. Washington, an easily persuaded,

somewhat childlike special-education dropout, had been convicted

of murder and rape based on a confession he gave to police, even

though it was full of inconsistencies. For example, at one point in

the confession Washington said that the victim was white and at

another that the victim was black. Six years later, DNA evidence—

not available at the time of Washington’s trial or the commutation—

established that Washington was innocent and he was released.

Although DNA testing has been available only in cases where

there was biological evidence and the evidence has been preserved,

it has established the innocence of many people who were not

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WHY THE U.S. WILL ABANDON CAPITAL PUNISHMENT 197

sentenced to death. A Michigan judge in 1984 lamented the fact that

the state did not have the death penalty, saying that life imprison-

ment was inadequate for Eddie Joe Lloyd for the rape and murder of

a 16-year-old girl. Police had obtained a confession from Lloyd while

he was in a mental hospital. Seventeen years later, DNA evidence

established that Lloyd did not commit the crime. On his release,

Lloyd commented, “If Michigan had the death penalty, I would have

been through, the angels would have sung a long time ago.”

Sometimes evidence of innocence has surfaced only at the last

minute. Anthony Porter, sentenced to death in Illinois, went through

all the appeals and review that are available for one so sentenced.

Every court upheld his conviction and sentence. As Illinois prepared

to put him to death, a question arose as to whether Porter, who was

brain damaged and mentally retarded, understood what was happen-

ing to him. A person who lacks the mental ability to understand that

he is being put to death in punishment for a crime cannot be exe-

cuted unless he is treated and becomes capable of understanding why

he is being executed. Just two days before Porter was to be executed,

a court stayed his execution in order to examine his mental condi-

tion. After the stay was granted, a journalism class at Northwestern

University and a private investigator examined the case and proved

that Anthony Porter was innocent. They obtained a confession from

the person who committed the crime. Anthony Porter was released,

becoming the third person released from Illinois’s death row after

being proven innocent by a journalism class at Northwestern.

Some people have been executed despite questions of their

innocence. Gary Graham was sentenced to death in Texas based on

the identification of a witness who said she saw a murder from 40

feet away. Studies have demonstrated that such identifications are

often unreliable. But Graham had the misfortune to be assigned a

notoriously incompetent lawyer, Ron Mock, who had so many clients

sentenced to death that some refer to the “Mock Wing” of death

row. Mock failed to seriously contest the state’s case, conduct an

independent investigation, and present witnesses at the scene who

would have testified that Graham was not the person who committed

the crime and that the perpetrator was much shorter than Graham.

Although it was apparent that Graham did not receive a fair trial

and adequate legal representation, he was executed by Texas in

2000. Whether Graham was innocent or guilty will never be resolved

because in his case, like most others, there was no DNA evidence

that would conclusively establish guilt or innocence.

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