1. Arguments from Beneficence, Part 1

So this is the first of four undergraduate lectures on the topic of global poverty. And normally they will be held on Wednesdays at ten in this room.

So global poverty uh is regarded by many as one of the most pressing and important moral problems that people today face. 감사합니다. Uh and there are some very obvious reasons why that is. It's plausible to think that poverty is the source of the largest amount of preventable suffering in the world today. Um A recent estim estimate quoted by Thomas Poggy suggested that around fifty thousand people per day die due to poverty poverty related causes. Amen.

Uh that's far more than uh you know is than wars alone or natural disasters alone. Uh And it's on an entirely different scale as well. I think it's worth pointing out. than the poverty that most of us will have come across. So people who live in extreme poverty in other countries uh are in an entirely different state. than people who are poor by the standards of a Western country, affluent Western country.

Uh it's striking to think that most of us probably have never even met someone who lives in these conditions uh and who will be in large measure the topic of these lectures.

Um The topic the f in focus of these lectures is the duties of comparatively well off people towards people in severe poverty in other countries. And so because of this, the focus is not going to be on a number of related questions that you might ask about global poverty and that are raised by it. So one thing that we're not going to be focusing on is questions about the moral status of affluent people who help or don't help.

people in s situations of extreme poverty. So quite generally, in morality, among the things that we can evaluate morally Uh persons are one of them, we can describe people as praiseworthy, blameworthy, evil, good, saintly, etcetera. on the one hand, but on the other hand we can also describe actions or omissions and evaluate them in moral terms. Focus of these lectures is going to be on actions and omissions.

Uh this is not to say that what we decide about actions and omissions has no implications for how we should evaluate the people who perform those actions or who omit to perform relevant actions. Uh but there's more to assessing a person morally than the actions that they perform and the moral status of those actions.

So someone can do what as a matter of fact is wrong but out of ignorance, for example. Uh and that would prevent us from uh blaming them in many contexts or describing them as uh evil if it's a particularly wrong action in the way that we normally would. So we're bracketing questions about the moral status of persons. The second distinction that I'd like to draw is what is called the distinction between duty and uh super arrogation.

So an action is a duty if not performing it is wrong. I think that's the quickest, simplest way to get one's head around the notion of a duty. An action is what moral philosophers describe as super erogatory if performing it is morally valuable, although not performing it is not wrong. So soup superogation is derived from a Latin Latin term meaning more than what is asked. Now, the existence of super irogatory actions is hotly disputed by some anyway.

But if we draw this distinction, then that's another question that we're bracketing. So it's quite commonly thought that uh doing things to relieve the suffering of extremely poor people in other countries is at the very least morally valuable. though some might deny that, of certain kinds of help. Uh but nevertheless not doing it is not wrong, according to a very common view on this.

So we're not looking into the question merely of whether Affluent people can do morally valuable things for extremely poor people, but what sort of duties they have. whether certain actions or omitting to perform certain actions would actually be wrong. Likewise uh within duties We can draw a distinction between the question of what your duty is and whether it is permissible to compel you to perform it, to fulfill it.

And another question we're bracketing is whether it's permissible to force you to fulfil whatever duties that you may have towards people in extremely poor countries. Thank you. So it may or may not be morally permissible if you do have a duty, say, to donate large quantities of money to aid organisations. Even if that's the case, it may or may not be morally permissible to compel you to donate such an amount. That's a separate question, um which again we're leaving aside.

So, what we're going to focus on in these lectures is that question of the duties of relatively well-off people towards extremely poor people in other countries. A lot of attention in political philosophy and in ethics has focused on the question of what duties we have towards poor people in our own country. And various arguments for views on that question have appealed to facts about uh bonds of citizenship, things like this.

recently within ethics and political philosophy a lot more attention has been devoted than was previously devoted to the question of What sorts of duties do we have to people whom we don't share bonds of citizenship with? And that raises new issues. So obviously we can't appeal to the kinds of considerations specific to co nationals.

in order to determine what sort of duties we have towards people in other countries. And within this debate I think we can distinguish at least three species of argument that have been presented in favour of the view that we have certain duties to help the extremely poor in other countries. And those are the kinds that I'm going to focus on in these four lectures.

I don't mean to suggest by this that these are the only kinds of arguments that have been offered or that are possible, but they're certainly extremely prominent within the literature on this.

So the first kind uh is what I'm going to describe, and which is commonly described this way, as arguments from beneficence. So what arguments from beneficence have in common? Is that they claim that well off people have a duty to promote the well being of poor people in other countries in some way and to some extent. They differ about what way that is and to what extent that is. Again, derived from some Latin words meaning doing well. In this context, promoting the well being of other people.

The second broad kind I think we can describe as arguments from distributive justice. And these have in common that they don't claim specifically that we have a duty to promote the well being of others. but that the requirements of distributive justice people in extreme poverty in other countries in certain ways. And then they then attempt to say in what what ways those are. what ways are demanded by distributive justice. And the third kind are what we can describe as arguments from harm.

And these have in common that they claim that well off people have a duty to stop harming poor people in other countries or to compensate them for harm already done. And they tend to differ in terms of what they claim these harms are, that well off people have done towards extremely poor people, and what forms of compensation are required. Now in this first lecture I'm going to focus on one kind of argument from beneficence.

And I think within the literature on this you can divide arguments from beneficence, broadly speaking, into two kinds. Some argue for extremely demanding duties towards the global core, and others argue for more moderate duties, although typically more demanding duties than many people think that they have towards people in other countries, poor people in other countries.

This week I'm going to focus on the ones that argue for extremely demanding duties. Next week I'm going to take a look at arguments for benef from beneficence that argue for less demanding duties.

By far the best known of arguments from beneficence for a duty to help extremely poor people in other countries is Peter Singer's argument. originally presented in his paper Famine, Affluence and Morality and elaborated since then that was published in nineteen seventy two and elaborated in various other ways since then. And I've set out Singer's argument on the handout. And I will go through it in summary and then I'll focus on each of the steps.

So Singer's first claim, at least in its most recent version, is this. So the first premise of the argument. Is that if you can prevent something bad from happening without sacrificing anything nearly as important, then it is wrong not to do so. It is wrong not to prevent that bad thing from happening. Second step. Suffering in death from lack of food, shelter and medical care, such as occurs to large numbers of people in extreme poverty, is bad.

It's something bad. Third step You can prevent such suffering and death without sacrificing anything nearly as important by donating to aid agencies. Now I've set out a more specific claim than that on the handout, and I'll explain why in a moment. Third step, conclusion, therefore, it is wrong for you not to donate this amount to aid agencies.

So let's go back and look at Singer's rationale for each of these claims in this argument. So this first step, if you can prevent something bad from happening without sacrificing anything nearly as important, it is wrong not to do so. Now Singer has used different formulations of this first premise. In his original article he didn't say without sacrificing anything nearly as important.

The phrase he used was without sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance. And he glossed that phrase as follows. He says, By this I mean without causing anything else comparably bad to happen, or doing something that is wrong in itself, or failing to promote some good comparable in significance to the bad thing you can prevent. Sacrificing something of comparable moral importance is to be understood in that way as involving those sacrifices.

The claim then is that if you can prevent something bad from happening without making sacrifices of those kinds, it is wrong not to prevent the bad thing from happening. And in a very famous Example he uses to illustrate this. He says, Suppose that you were walking past a pond in which a child is drowning. And you can wade in to save this child uh at very little cost yourself. You might get your trousers muddy.

But that's about it. Quite obviously it would be wrong to walk past the child and let the child drown. And this principle uh this illustrates. This principle, says Singer. It illustrates the fact that if you can prevent something bad from happening without sacrificing anything nearly as important, it's wrong not to do so. Singer lays a great deal of stress on here is the fact that this is not a consequentialist principle. So consequentialism, as many of you know, no doubt.

is the claim that we have a duty to maximize good consequences. So to do that action that produces the best overall consequences of the actions that are available to us. Obviously a consequentialist Would save the child as well and would claim we have very demanding duties to the global poor, at least given certain facts about the world. But Singer wants to make this art argument consistent with a range of ethical theories, including consequentialism but not restricted to it.

So the claim is not that if you can do something good or maximize good consequences, then you have a duty to do so. The claim is merely if you can prevent something bad from happening and do so without sacrificing anything nearly as important, then it's wrong not to do so. He thinks non consequentialists should be able to accept that principle. Because he says most non consequentialists also agree that we ought to prevent bad things from happening. Where they differ from consequentialists.

is that they sometimes believe it is wrong to prevent what is bad, even when doing so would have better consequences in the long run. But Singer has budgeted for that in his premise here. So, because he thinks that non consequentialists believe that in cases like that, where it's wrong to prevent something bad from happening, they believe that preventing what is bad would involve a sacrifice of something nearly as important.

So encapsulated often in slogans like It's wrong to do evil that good may come of it. Some things, according to various non consequentialists, are simply wrong in themselves, even if they have very good consequences, including even if they prevent some other bad things from happening. If we believe that torturing is wrong, for example. We might believe that it is wrong in itself, and wrong even if it saves lives. That would be a typical non consequentialist view.

Singer says that view is perfectly consistent with my first premise here. Because that view just claims that preventing something bad from happening is not acceptable when you would sacrifice something nearly as important. And sacrificing something nearly as important can be understood as including doing something that's wrong in itself. So they should have no problem with the claim that when you can prevent something bad without such a sacrifice, it's wrong not to prevent it. Thank you.

So that's one point about this first premise that he lays a great deal of stress on. He thinks that a whole range of plausible views should be able to accept this first premise of his argument. Second point on which he places a great deal of stress regarding first premise. is that no mention is made of how far away the person to whom the bad thing is happening is from you. Nor, thirdly, no mention is made of how many other people are in a position to prevent the bad thing from happening.

Insofar as this view is plausible, this first premise is plausible, it's plausible as it stands. And it doesn't need to be qualified by saying, provided that they're near to you. you don't have a duty. Uh and only if they're near to you rather, do you have a duty or only if other people are doing their fair share to prevent the bad thing from happening. Only in that case do you have a duty. That's not what this first claim says. Nor should it, he says, because discriminating based on distance.

is as arbitrary as discriminating based on things like skin color. Not helping somebody because they're far away is comparable to that kind of discrimination. And so too.

If other people are in a position to help but are not helping, not preventing the bad thing from happening, that shouldn't affect our duty. So you can imagine if you're walking past the drowning child, loads of people are just Looking at the drowning child, not doing anything, that still doesn't make it okay for you to walk past. You also have a duty to help. Again, an illustration of the pre of this first premise as it stands.

Now, Singer and not many other people say much about the second premise that suffering and death from lack of food, shelter, and medical care are bad. Even people who don't think it's wrong to fail to prevent such suffering can agree that such suffering is a bad thing. Wrongness and badness are different notions. The third premise, uh I think Looking at Singer's writings as a whole, or those of them that I have read, uh I think the way I've set it out here captures what he thinks Our duty is...

So I think it's not just that he thinks we can prevent such suffering and death without comparable sacrifice by donating to aid agencies. Thank you. What we really want to know if we do have a do duty to donate to aid agencies is how much? And I think this captures what he means. So I think in the first place his view is that you have a duty to donate to the most efficient aid agencies you can donate to.

So he spends a great deal of time for example in the most recent book talking about aid agencies that do the most good with the money that you give them. Uh efficiency here is not efficiency as measured by, for example, how much they spend on overhead versus other things, but rather how many lives and s and amount of suffering

how many lives are saved and how much suffering is prevented per dollar given to them. His claim is that that's the relevant measure, not things that are usually quoted like, how much do they spend on overhead? Because of course, spending more on overhead might prevent more suffering. might save more lives. So that's not to the point.

So the money the duty is that they go to those paid agencies Secondly, that you donate to them the largest amount of money you can donate without falling below what he calls the level of marginal utility. And this he explains as The level at which it is true that if you donated more, you would cause as much suffering to yourself or your dependents as you would prevent by donating more. And I'll say a bit more about that in a moment.

From this he draws the conclusion that it's wrong for you not to donate that amount to the most efficient aid agencies that you can donate to.

Now the best known implication of Singer's conclusion Is that it's wrong to spend money on what most of us spend a lot of our money on. indeed, that it's as wrong as walking past the drowning child. So spending money on travel, on fine wine, on luxuries under certain circumstances that I'll get to. But most of the time that is as wrong as walking past the drowning child. But there are some other implications of his argument that are less often pointed out.

So one of them, quite obviously, given the way that I've formulated it is that it is wrong not to donate to the most efficient aid agencies that you could donate to. Strictly speaking, that it's wrong to donate to much less efficient aid agencies than you could donate to. And this simply follows from his first premise. So suppose that you did donate to a much less efficient aid agency.

Well, in that case, you could have prevented something bad from happening, but you did not prevent it, namely the much larger amount of suffering that you would have prevented if you donated to the much more efficient aid agency. And moreover, it seems to follow, although this is not something Singer says explicitly, uh I don't think. that you could have prevented it without sacrificing anything nearly as important.

So you would miss the opportunity to prevent the suffering and death that you did prevent by donating to the less efficient age aid agency. Uh but that's not nearly comparable to the much larger amount of suffering and death that you could have prevented by donating to the more efficient one. A second little known implication, but one which Singer draws attention to.

uh is that it is wrong to make much less money, to earn much less money than you could earn without falling below the level of marginal utility. So Singer here gives the example of Warren Buffett, who became a billionaire and is now donating very large amounts of that money to poverty reduction. He says if you have the skills of Warren Buffett keep investing, keep acquiring that money to donate to poverty reduction.

And it seems that he has to say this, given his first premise, because suppose that you do make much less money than you could have made without falling below the level of marginal utility. Once again it seems that there is a certain perhaps a very large amount of suffering and death that you could have prevented but didn't prevent, and could have prevented it without comparable sacrifice.

That didn't prevent because you took the lower paying job, you invested less wisely than you could have, and so forth. So that's a second implication. But by far, as I say, the best known one is that it is wrong to spend money on yourself When the only effects of doing so are much less important than the suffering and death you could prevent by spending it differently. Now, it's not wrong to spend money on luxuries

according to Singer, if doing so is needed to get the largest amount of money that you can donate without falling below the level of marginal utility. So for example, if you have a very high paying job And to retain that job you need to dress respectably or drive a nice car. then provided that the consequences of doing so work out in the right ways.

then you ought to keep dressing respectably, keep maintaining the company car, if that's the only way to keep the significant amount of money that you're making. Provided that you know you wouldn't do more good by getting rid of it, obviously. But for our purposes and again what has drawn the most attention in Singer's argument is its upshot that most of us most of the time on spending money on luxuries, going on vacation, going to the theater, fine dining, and so forth.

are doing something as wrong as the person who lets the child die. by failing to donate that money to aid agencies.

Naturally, with a conclusion like that. Singer's argument has drawn a lot of criticism. And I think we can focus these criticisms or organise these criticisms in certain ways. So with any argument, at least two criticisms you can make of it, if it's subject to criticism, are the following one is that the conclusion doesn't follow from the premises. Another is that one or more of the premises are not true.

That's what I'm going to focus on in my discussion here of the objections that have been raised to Singer. So I think one objection that can be raised to Singer's argument um is that the conclusion doesn't follow from the premises.

So if you look at the argument The conclusion that it's not the conclusion that it is wrong not to donate to aid agencies that amount only follows if donating that amount to aid agencies is the only way to prevent something bad from happening without sacrificing anything nearly as important. That is, if it's the only way, in this case even, to prevent suffering and death due to lack of food, shelter and medical care without sacrificing something nearly as important.

He needs to make that claim rather than the claim he makes in order for the conclusion to follow from the premises. If there are other ways equally good for preventing suffering and death without comparable sacrifice, then it doesn't follow that it's wrong not to donate to aid agencies. He needs to establish that this is the only way in order to establish the conclusion that not donating to aid agencies specifically is wrong. That's one objection.

A range of objections have been raised against his premise C that in order to fulfil this duty to prevent suffering and death without comparable s sacrifice We ought to donate to aid agencies. Uh but I'm not going to focus on them because many of them concern objections to donating to aid agencies in general. And they're not specific to Singer's arguments.

So I'm going to take a look at some of them in later lectures. But for the moment, I'm going to focus on objections to Singer's premise A. That is that claim that if you can prevent something bad from happening without comparable sacrifice, it's wrong not to do so.

Garrett Culity has raised an objection he describes as a methodological objection to Singer's approach. And this would apply to a wide range of arguments in ethics. But he thinks it also applies to Singers. So he says Singer is using the following methods to establish the wrongness of not donating to aid agencies. So the first step is he identifies an act that is clearly wrong, namely walking past the drowning child.

The second step is to identify a general principle that explains why this act is wrong. namely, premise A of the argument. Third step is he then uses this principle that explains why the obviously wrong act is wrong as a test of whether other acts are wrong. So he uses it obviously as a test of whether or not donating this amount to aid agencies is wrong. No, if this is his method, says Cullity, then A question arises.

Because principles other than A would also explain why walking past the child is wrong. So for example the principle if you can help another person directly in an immediately presented emergency at comparatively comparatively insignificant cost yourself, it is wrong not to do so. That also would have the implication that it's wrong to walk past the drowning child. However, if we use that as a test of whether not donating to aid agencies is wrong. we won't get the conclusion that that is wrong.

So not donating to aid agencies is not covered by that principle. Which s which succeeds in explaining why walking past the drowning child is wrong. That's one concern. But of course, the fact that you could explain the wrongness of walking past the drowning child with some other principle does not mean that it's a plausible explanation of why walking past the drowning child is wrong.

However, says Cullity, it looks like some other explanations would be better tests of wrongness than the one that Singer offered. So you might think when we're doing ethics, what are we aiming at? When we're trying to get a general principle by looking at all kinds of actions that are clearly wrong, and then use that principle as a test of whether More controversial actions are wrong. What are we doing?

You might think, says Cullity, it's natural at least to think, that a principle would be a better principle than Singer's premise A, as a test of wrongness. If it explains all the confidently endorsed moral judgments that A explains, and then some. As people like to put it, we want principles that capture as many of our intuitions as possible about particular cases. Then we can use that as a test of cases in which we don't have clear intuitions, like perhaps donating to agent aid agencies.

But Kelly says there's another confidently endorsed moral judgment that we commonly make. And that judgment is there's a moral difference between failing to help someone you can save directly at small cost and failing to contribute to help people at a distance. And some principles explain both this judgment and and the judgment that walking past the drowning child is wrong. So if that's how we decide whether a principle is a better test of wrongness.

then it looks like this principle will be at least better than Singer's premise A. It explains the confidently endorsed moral judgments that A does and more besides. It captures the intuitions that A does, as some would say, in the Drowning Child case, and the further intuition that there's a moral difference between walking past someone whose need is presented to you directly and Failing to contribute to help people at a distance.

Now as I say, this objection, which is aptly called by Cullity a methodological objection, uh could be raised against any number of other arguments in ethics. And it raises a lot of very difficult issues about how we argue in ethics. how we try to establish that something is wrong on the basis of general principles and so forth. Uh so I'm just going to leave those aside for the moment.

And I'm going to mention Singer's reply to this. So Singer's reply uh occurs in his response to a criticism by Francis Cam, I've given the reference on the handout in the volume Singer and his critics. In that volume he's not responding to Cullity directly, but it serves as a reply to Cullity. And Singer's replies to say this is not my method for establishing that something is wrong.

So he says The fact that a principle explains more of our intuitions about what ought to be done in specific situations is no reason at all to believe that it is a better test of wrongness. For the simple reason that many of our moral intuitions about what ought to be done in a specific situation are due to things like prejudice, superstition, Envy, arrogance, false beliefs, and outmoded beliefs about sexuality and so forth.

So he's saying I'm not treating intuitions as having the kind of favored status that this objection represents me as doing. Rather, he says, a better method than finding principles that best match intuitions about specific situations is to begin by carefully seeking principles general principles that as far as we can tell are self evident. and then seeing what follows from them.

He discusses this methodology at further length in that early paper, Sidgwick and Reflective Equilibrium, which I've given a reference to on the handout. So he says, if we follow this method of looking for self-evident general principles And if we find one, principle that, as far as we can tell, is pretty self evident. and we find that it entails that some intuition we have about a specific case is mistaken. then we should keep the principle and drop the intuition.

And so he says we can use particular judgments as supporting evidence for principles. And we can use particular judgments that our opponent shares to show that our opponent is being inconsistent in making that particular judgment and supporting some general principle that's inconsistent with it. But we should never do so in such a way that suggests that the validity of our our general principles is determined by how well it matches our intuitions about particular cases.

Now, as I say, this objection and the reply to it raises much broader issues than the particular one we're concerned with. Um I mean one question it does raise though is what's the status or the force of The drowning child example. So I think what a lot of people take. to be one of the most persuasive features of Singer's argument is the use he seems to be making of the Drowning Child example, and to take him as using that example in the way that Cullity represents him as doing.

Uh and to my knowledge he doesn't explain this. Uh and so I think there's still sort of a question mark here over his reply. Uh it sounds like his reply is in effect. It's the self evidentness of premise A, or the self evidentness of some principle from which premise A follows. that is doing the real work in this argument. But that's all I'll say on that.

Second objection that's been raised to Singer. uh was raised by Colin McGuinn in that volume that I just mentioned, Singer and His Critics. And McGinn says Well if premise A were either right or self evident If it were either true or self evident that if you can prevent something bad from happening without sacrificing anything nearly as important, then it's wrong not to prevent it, then it would have all kinds of other more mundane consequences. That are obviously mistaken.

So McGinn says, for example, witty conversationalists would have a duty to abandon their lives and friends, to bring cheer to bored and depressed people. Tennis professionals would be obliged to abandon their careers to teach remedial tennis classes, and so on. Give some other examples too. But quite clearly, in these more mundane contexts, when it's not matters of life and death, people don't have an obligation to prevent something bad from happening.

Without comparable sacrifice. And therefore, Singer's premise is neither right nor self evident. Now Singer's reply to this is to say Well for each of these counterexamples Thank you. McGinn's argument amounts to the claim that what is sacrificed Would be of comparable moral importance to the suffering that's prevented. So the witty conversationalist who sacrifices his life and friends.

The implication is that sacrifice is of comparable moral importance to the good cheer that would be brought to the bored and depressed people. Similarly, the tennis professional's career is of comparable moral importance to the benefit brought to the beginning tennis players. And if that's right, then Singer says, my premise doesn't have the consequence that you'd be required to do these things, to prevent the suffering in question.

And McGuinn thinks it has this consequence only because he misinterprets premise A as claiming that whenever you can relieve suffering without causing others to suffer comparably, you ought to relieve it. But that's not what it says. It says the claim is about comparable moral importance, not about comparable suffering. If it were about comparable suffering, it would be a lot more consequentialist than Singer intends it to be.

Now a third objection. is what I'm calling on the handout the particular person's objection. And this was offered in a paper by Michael McKinsey. McKinsey says One problem with premise A is this. It's true of each particular person whose suffering you can prevent without comparable sacrifice. that her suffering would be something bad. So consider each particular person whom it is within your power to help without comparable sacrifice. It's true that that person's suffering is bad.

However, because of that, if premise A were right. then for each particular person whose suffering you can prevent without sacrificing anything nearly as important, you would have a duty to help her. So for all X, if X is a person whose suffering you can prevent without comparable sacrifice, you have a duty to help X. But, says McKinsey, you do not have such a duty, because this is a quote.

I cannot save all of those starving persons, each of whom I am in a position to save, without sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance. What premise A implies is that you have a duty that it would be impossible to fulfill. So you go through each person in the world of whom it is true that you could help him or her without comparable sacrifice.

Premise A implies that you have a duty to Peter, if that's true of Peter, to Paul, if that's true of Paul, to Mary, if that's true of Mary, and so forth. But when you add up all these implications, the implication is that you have a duty to help all of them. Because you have a duty to help each of them. And that's going to result in a astronomically higher number of people than you could possibly help. Thank you. Now it's important to uh understand the force of McKinsey's point here.

So it would be natural to reply, well, premise A doesn't imply that, because premise A says if you can prevent such suffering without comparable sacrifice, then you have a duty to do so. And it wouldn't say you have a duty to help, say, all billion people, that it's in your power to help, each of whom it's in your power to help. because you cannot save a billion people.

If you cannot save all of them full stop, then you cannot save all of them with comparable sacrifice. Therefore, premise A doesn't say that you have a duty to save all of them. But I think that would be to misread premise A as saying that If you can prevent something bad without comparable sacrifice, and only if you can prevent something bad from happening without comparable sacrifice, then you have a duty to prevent it.

Premise A doesn't say anything as it stands or imply anything about when you don't have a duty. And so it doesn't say or imply anything about your not having a duty to help the billion people. In fact, when you plug in each particular person whose suffering you can prevent without comparable sacrifice, it implies that you have a duty to prevent the suffering of each of them. Therefore it implies you have a duty to prevent the suffering of all of them.

It wouldn't have implied that if it was an if and only if claim. But it's a conditional, not a biconditional. And I've spelled this out in more detail on the more detailed handout, if that's a bit of a mouthful as it stands. Uh but McKinsey's argument is Very interesting because It is different from the claim commonly made about Singer's premise here. The claim commonly made about Singer's premise is that it would be possible to fulfil it, but it's too demanding. Yeah.

That's not McKinsey's argument. McKinsey's argument is it would not be possible to fulfil the duties that premise A implies that we have to fulfill all of them. And since if it's not possible to fulfill a duty, then it's not actually a duty. Premise A has got to be false. Now McKinsey's argument's not much discussed in the literature on Singer. For the most part, the objections have focused on the question of whether premise A is too demanding.

Which relates to the much broader question of whether morality itself can ever make excessively demanding claims on us, uh, or what kinds of limits there are on the kinds of sacrifice morality can demand. And because some people find it very plausible that we have duties to poor people in other countries A range of other arguments from beneficence have been offered for conclusions of that kind, and next week I will discuss them. Bye.