Rights in the Balance

Professor Walen’s book rejects the familiar argument of “double effect,” namely the doctrine that an action that knowingly causes the death of another person cannot be justified merely by its good consequences but only by its good intentions. Professor Walen offers a rival argument. He proposes that we rethink the killing of non-combatants in war on the basis of a theory of “the mechanics of claims” so that the intentional killing of civilians may be occasionally permissible. Such targeting of civilians may be justified, according to the book’s argument, by the aim of eliminating the threat that these civilians may pose—innocently or not—to other persons. In these circumstances, it will not only be permissible, but it would also be a matter of right to kill civilians, which would be derived from a balancing of “claims.” The argument is impressively made but is ultimately unconvincing. All the decisive questions appear to be matters of a balance of “goodness.” The “mechanics of claims” organizes a structure of welfare values that ultimately work as a proxy for act-utilitarianism. As a result, the argument is open to well-known objections regarding justice and the separateness of persons.

Separating Persons

In Reasons and Persons, Derek Parfit argues for a reductionist view of persons and that our ethical thinking should become more impersonal. While doing so, he argues that we may need to give up some widely shared intuitions about the Separateness of Persons and all of those views which crucially hinge upon it. However, this chapter argues that Parfit was mistaken. His reductionist views of persons and his more general claim that our ethical thinking should become more impersonal are in fact compatible with several plausible interpretations of the Separateness of Persons. Parfit’s project in Reasons and Persons should thus be understood not as undermining the Separateness of Persons, but as transforming our understanding of it. The chapter closes by considering the degree to which Parfit had reason by his own lights to accept some version of the Separateness of Persons.

Equality for Prospective People: A Novel Statement and Defence

A possible person's conditional expected well-being is what the quality of their prospects would be if they were to come into existence. This article examines the role that this form of expected well-being should play in distributing benefits among prospective people and in deciding whom to bring into existence. It argues for a novel egalitarian view on which it is important to ensure equality in people's life prospects, not merely between actual individuals, but also between all individuals who, given our choices, have a chance of coming into existence. The article argues that such egalitarianism for prospective people springs from equal concern for each prospective person and has plausible implications. It further shows that it has a rationale in respect for both the unity of the individual and the separateness of persons. Finally, it defends this view against a key objection and shows it is superior to a rival view.

Consequentialism, the Separateness of Persons, and Aggregation

This essay reconstructs and assesses claims that utilitarianism and, more generally, consequentialism have inadequate conceptions of distributive justice, because their aggregative character ignores the separateness of persons. On this view, the separateness of persons requires a fundamentally anti-aggregative conception of distributive justice. Even if this objection applies to some forms of utilitarianism, it won’t apply to forms of consequentialism that recognize some conception of distributive justice as an important nonderivative good. Moreover, the separateness of persons poses, rather than resolves, questions about the role of aggregation within distributive justice. This essay explores the adequacy of some consequentialist answers to these questions and defends selective, rather than unrestricted, aggregation.

The Twilight of Utilitarianism

Social contract theory arose as a response to the twilight of utilitarianism. For many years utilitarianism had been seen as a political philosophy of human emancipation. Like social contract theory, utilitarianism was a critical and rationalistic morality. However, it was judged incapable of recognizing the separateness of persons, the claim by each person to be treated with justice. Utilitarianism defined the good in terms of pleasure, conceived in a naturalistic way. It regarded pleasure as the guide to choice. It promised to provide an intellectual framework within which everyday intuitive morality could be rendered consistent. And it sought to ground action in practical reasoning about the promotion of the good. However, these distinctive elements came under challenge. With the rise of modern utility theory, pleasure was no longer thought of as the guide to choice. Pleasure was no longer conceived as the sole good. Doubts were raised about the extent to which the principle of utility could explicate the principle of justice. And even utilitarianism had to concede the dualism of practical reason. One response was the rise of intuitionism in the early part of the twentieth century. Another response was the rise of social contract theory, as discussed in this book.

The Unwritten Theory of Justice

Rawls’s Theory of Justice has had two parallel lives in political theory. The first—the version Rawls wrote—is a response to utilitarianism’s failure to take seriously the separateness of persons. The second—the unwritten version “received” by its general audience—is a response to libertarianism’s failure to take seriously our moral obligations to the well-being of our fellow citizens. This chapter explores how, had he written the second version, Rawls might have dealt with libertarians’ critique of “justice as fairness” as fundamentally illiberal, and how his two principles might have been transformed in the process.

Income Redistribution, Body Part Redistribution, and Respect for the Separateness of Persons

This article considers the question of why labor income may be permissibly redistributed to the poor even though non-essential body parts should generally be protected from redistribution to the infirm – the body-income puzzle. It argues that proposed solutions that affirm self-ownership but reject ownership of labor income are unsuccessful. And proposed solutions that grant individuals entitlements to resources based on the centrality of those resources to the individual’s personal identity are also unsuccessful. Instead, this article defends a solution to the body-income puzzle based on a novel conception of respect for the separateness of persons. This conception holds that the sphere of moral authority protected from interference by respect for the separateness of persons includes both the body and labor income. And the strength of the negative rights constituting this sphere vary based on these rights' importance to the personal identity of the right-holder. It is shown that a commitment to helping the disadvantaged tempered by this conception of respect for the separateness of persons can solve the body-income puzzle.

Why It Does Not Matter What Matters: Relation R, Personal Identity, and Moral Theory

Derek Parfit famously argued that personal identity is not what matters for prudential concern about the future. Instead, he argues what matters is Relation R, a combination of psychological connectedness and continuity with any cause. This revisionary conclusion, Parfit argued, has profound implications for moral theory. It should lead us, among other things, to deny the importance of the separateness of persons as an important fact of morality. Instead, we should adopt impersonal consequentialism. In this paper, I argue that Parfit is mistaken about this last step. His revisionary arguments about personal identity and rationality have no implications for moral theory. We need not decide whether Relation R or personal identity contain what matters if we want to retain the importance of the separateness of persons.

Six Objections

This chapter identifies and discusses six powerful objections to utilitarianism. These are that it has an inadequate account of value, that it countenances abhorrent actions, that it is too demanding, that it fails to recognize the separateness of persons, that it does not recognize the distinctiveness of political issues as compared with moral issues, and that it has a deficient account of decision making and virtue. Each objection is analysed and its application to different forms of utilitarianism is noted. The test for whether we should take utilitarianism seriously will be whether it can answer these objections.