Labeling and Moral Theorizing

From guest blogger, Mark.

This might not be very significant, but I had a thought about labeling theory when formulating philosophical viewpoints.

Labeling theory is a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy, where an individual might accept or reject certain traits, behaviors, evidences, etc. based on terms that would be used to describe or classify them. A good example would be personality tests, where results that would validate one's (or others') perception of their self are more easily accepted.  

Going a step further, labeling may be projected and alter one's perception of others.  The implications of this can range from benign ("that one friend...", "people like you...", etc.) to malicious e.g. certain races being perceived as inferior, thereby justifying activity such as slavery or genocide.

With such a heavy importance placed on what constitutes a moral being, and the weight of consequences in regards to said moral beings, we have to wonder how self-fulfilling prophecies might influence one's ability to evaluate philosophical theory.

We have already experienced this when discussing deontology; any case can be made abstract enough to be justifiable.  What about when judging consequences?

Is Happiness Hard to Calculate?

We talked about Utilitarianism in class yesterday and I thought it'd be worth continuing the discussion of one of the main objections leveled against it. Utilitarianism is a moral theory set out by Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. You can check Mill's seminal work, Utilitarianism, here. The theory is that what one ought to do is determined by the amount of happiness or pleasure that one can bring about. More precisely, the right action is the the one that maximizes total aggregate happiness.

The most common objection from my students had to do with a claimed impossibility of measuring happiness. In a similar vein, some students claimed that we cannot predict how much happiness or pain an action will produce.

As I said in class, these don't strike me as a devastating criticisms. It seems to me that the Utilitarian could admit that we may sometimes be "in the dark" about whether a given action will result in making people happy/sad. In addition, she could admit that we often don't know the extent to which our actions will make people happy/sad. As we discussed, the Utilitarian might simply respond by insisting that we should do the best we can when it comes to calculating/predicting overall happiness. In addition, it seems to me that we're really not that bad at anticipating consequences. We often know which actions will result in overall positive consequences and which will result in overall negative consequences; and we're fairly good at predicting how much pleasure or pain a given action is likely to produce.

What would be helpful are examples that shed some light on this supposed problem. 

My wife's birthday is a few months away and (being the obsessive-planner that I am) I'm thinking of a gift or something nice to do for her. I can't predict with absolute certainty what will make her most happy. Further, I can't predict what gift will result in the highest total aggregate happiness. But I have a good sense of what she likes and doesn't like; and what sorts of things are apt to produce greater aggregate happiness. I know that taking her on a trip to Vegas would not make her very happy. She'd prefer that we spend that kind of money on something else... indeed, just about anything else. I've thought of at least ten things that she'll probably really appreciate and which will bring her joy; and these things would also produce a great deal of happiness in others. 

Now my task is to decide which of these should be my gift. Here's where the objection to Utilitarianism seems to raise its head. I have no way of determining the exact amount of happiness each of these options will produce and so I supposedly have no way of weighing my options. But is this correct? Not quite. First, I can rule out various possible gifts (e.g., the trip to Vegas). Second, I can predict which of the various options are most likely to result in the a great deal of overall happiness. Third, once I have a list of "good options," I might randomly pick from the ones at the top of the list (supposing that they're indistinguishable with respect to likely consequences). This reply strikes me as fairly plausible. It's probably what I'll end up doing. Note that I'm not paralyzed by the various options before me and, more importantly, what I end up getting for her birthday will very probably end up being a good gift if I follow this procedure. So I do have a clue about what would be best. What I ought to do is do as well as I can in choosing the gift which is most likely to produce the best consequences.

You might object that the case of a birthday gift is not a moral decision, but is rather a practical decision. But this is beside the point of the present post. All I'm saying is that we are often relatively good at predicting overall consequences if we are careful and fair-minded. Of course, this is not to say that we can always predict how much happiness will result from an action or that our predictions will necessarily be correct. We are ignorant of quite a bit. But, so the line goes, what we ought to do is try to do the best we can at making such predictions. Finally, it's worth stressing that a Utilitarian could say the same sorts of things about cases that involve more obviously moral decisions.

There are a multitude of other objections to Utilitarianism (some of which I find especially troubling). But, as you can tell, I'm not at all persuaded by this one. I wonder what readers of this blog make of all of this. Am I missing something? Are there examples that make a stronger case for the impossibility of calculating/comparing happiness?

Duty to Save Lives

I started my summer Contemporary Moral Issues class today. We discussed a bunch of interesting issues and, as usual in a course like this, we had to brush quite a bit under the rug. One thing that came up that I thought was worth writing about was whether one is morally obligated to try to save another person from peril. Although we were careful to distinguish legal from moral responsibility, we did briefly mention that there are some legal systems where a person is held legally responsible for helping others in peril. For example, in some countries, parents or guardians are legally responsible for rescuing minors in their care from peril, and so-called "common carriers" (such as airlines or cruise ships) have a legal responsibility to rescue their patrons if they are able to save them. But, of course, this doesn't show that we bear a moral obligation to save those in danger. The oft-reviled-in-academia Wikipedia has a nice summary of reasons for thinking that people have a moral duty to save others (and not simply legally in some places).

Ethical justifications

Legal requirements for a duty to rescue do not pertain in all nations, states, or localities. However, a moral or ethical duty to rescue may exist even where there is no legal duty to rescue. There are a number of potential justifications for such a duty.

One sort of justification is general and applies regardless of role-related relationships (doctor to patient; firefighter to citizen, etc.). Under this general justification, persons have a duty to rescue other persons in distress by virtue of their common humanity, regardless of the specific skills of the rescuer or the nature of the victim's distress.

These would justify cases of rescue and in fact make such rescue a duty even between strangers. They explain why philosopher Peter Singer suggests that if one saw a child drowning and could intervene to save him, they should do so, if the cost is moderate to themselves. Damage to their clothing or shoes or how late it might make them for a meeting would be insufficient excuse to avoid assistance. Singer goes on to say that one should also attempt to rescue distant strangers, not just nearby children, because globalization has made it possible to do so.^[39] Such general arguments for a duty to rescue also explain why after the 2010 Haiti earthquake, Haitians were digging family members, friends, and strangers out of the rubble with their bare hands and carrying injured persons to whatever medical care was available.^[40] They also explain why, while covering that same earthquake, journalist and physician Sanjay Gupta and a number of other MD-journalists began acting as physicians to treat injuries rather than remaining uninvolved in their journalistic roles. Similarly, they justify journalist Anderson Cooper's attempt to shepherd an injured young boy away from some "toughs" nearby in the aftermath of the Haiti earthquake.^[41]

Specific arguments for such a duty to rescue include, but are not limited to:

• The Golden Rule: treat others as one would wish to be treated. This assumes that all persons would wish to be rescued if they were in distress, and so they should in turn rescue those in distress to the best of their abilities. What counts as distress requiring rescue may, of course, differ from person to person, but being trapped or at risk of drowning are emergency situations which this position assumes all humans would wish to be rescued from.
• Utilitarianism: utilitarianism posits that those actions are right which best maximize happiness and reduce suffering ("maximize the good").^[42] Utilitarian reasoning generally supports acts of rescue which contribute to overall happiness and reduced suffering. Rule utilitarianism would look not just at whether individual acts of rescue maximize the good, but whether certain types of acts do so. It then becomes one's duty to perform those types of actions. Generally, having strangers rescue those in distress maximizes good so long as the rescue attempt does not make things worse, so one has a duty to rescue to the best of her or his ability as long as doing so will not make things worse.
• Humanity: the rules of humanity advise that the essence of morality and right behavior is tending to human relationships. Therefore, virtues (desirable character traits) such as compassion, sympathy, honesty, and fidelity are to be admired and developed.^[43] Acting out of compassion and sympathy will often require rescue where someone is in need. Indeed, it would not be compassionate to ignore someone's need, though the way one fulfills that need may vary. In cases of emergency, rescue would be the most compassionate act compared with allowing a person to remain trapped in rubble.

There are also ethical justifications for role-specific or skill-specific duties of rescue such as those described above under the discussion of U.S. Common Law. Generally, these justifications are rooted in the idea that the best rescues, the most effective rescues, are done by those with special skills. Such persons, when available to rescue, are thus even more required to do so ethically than regular persons who might simply make things worse (for a utilitarian, rescue by a skilled professional in a relevant field would maximize the good even better than rescue by a regular stranger). This particular ethical argument makes sense when considering the ability firefighters to get both themselves and victims safely out of a burning building, or of health care personnel such as physicians, nurses, physician's assistants, and EMTs to provide medical rescue.^[44]

These are some of the ethical justifications for a duty to rescue, and they may hold true for both regular citizens and skilled professionals even in the absence of legal requirements to render aid.

So it seems we might have some good reasons, after all, for thinking that we morally ought to help people in peril. I'm curious what arguments opponents to this position might give. What objections might be (a) raised against the arguments for thinking that we have such a moral obligation (at least sometimes) and what arguments can be given to show that (b) we don't bear such an obligation (ever)?