Needs and Moral Necessity

Soran Reader

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781135902872
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Needs and Moral Necessity analyses ethics as a practice, explains why we have three moral theory-types, consequentialism, deontology and virtue ethics, and argues for a fourth needs-based theory.

1 Introduction

Things matter. They make moral demands. They have needs, they can lack what they need, and they can need help to avoid lack and to be restored from it. I think that ethics is our response to this aptness of things to lack what they need, and to require help.

Ethics, then, is something we do. But it is not everything we do. It is one kind, but an important kind, of human activity. Its importance is shown in the way we think of moral demands as especially strong. We think we ‘must’ help someone in need in a far stronger sense than we ‘must’, say, get to work on time. Moral philosophers have puzzled for centuries over how to understand the strength of this ‘must’. I think this ‘must’ of ethics is a special kind of necessity, moral necessity. I also think that up to now moral philosophers have looked for the source of this necessity in the wrong places.

We morally must help someone in need, not because we feel something about them, not because they possess some value-earning property, and not because of any fact about our rational will or about what human excellence involves. We morally must help someone in need, because they really need us to. The source of moral necessity lies in facts about the patient of an ethical action, the being that is acted on, not in facts about the agent, or the act, or the agent’s values and goals.

My view of ethics is controversial. The idea that things matter turns the conventional wisdom, according to which things are negligible unless they possess some value-earning property, on its head. The idea that the source of moral necessity lies in facts about patients, namely their need, also departs from the more familiar view, that moral necessity can be grounded in facts about agents, like their well-being or the structure of their will. The idea that moral philosophical attention should be directed primarily towards patients, again, goes against the grain. Moral philosophers tend to focus on the rights and wrongs of what agents do, or the general appraisal of agents’ lives or, even more abstractly, the logical form of ethical statements.

In contemporary analytic philosophy, ethics tends not to be defined, contributions are divided into ‘metaethical’, ‘normative’ and ‘applied’, and the possibilities for ‘normative’ theories are taken to be exhausted by the theoretical frameworks already on the table, consequentialism, deontology and virtue ethics. ‘Metaethics’ is supposed to describe and analyse, but not contribute to, first-order moral thought and action. ‘Normative ethics’ is supposed to deliver first-order moral judgments. ‘Applied ethics’ is supposed to help with difficult moral problems. Thus as a ‘normative’ theorist, a ‘consequentialist’ might say ‘agents should maximize the amount of well-being produced by their actions’, a metaethicist might analyse the consequentialist’s concepts of value, well-being, measurement, maximization and right action, without making moral judgments, and an applied ethicist might apply the consequentialist’s theory to a particular case, say, identifying the right action, or appraising what has been done.

The moral philosophy I do in this book does not fall neatly into these three divisions. When I make claims about what ethics is, as I do here and in Chapters 2 and 3, I seem to be doing ‘metaethics’. But when I claim that we should do ethics, and moral philosophy, differently – as I do throughout, but especially in Chapters 4 to 9, where I argue a new normative theory captures our moral commitments better and suggests ways in which those commitments should be revised – I seem to be doing ‘normative’ ethics. The right way to see my contribution, I suggest, is as giving a well-rounded account of a practice. If someone were to offer an account of navigation, say, we would not imagine they were obliged to choose between a ‘normative’ theory of how navigation should be done and a ‘metaethical’ theory describing how navigation works. Their account of the best practice of navigation will obviously be ‘normative’, and apt to be ‘applied’. But it will as obviously be ‘metanavigational’ as well.

My view of ethics is controversial, and my philosophical approach unusual. There is a danger readers will not know what to make of it. They may be tempted to dismiss it from the off as too alien to their interests and methods, or they may struggle to make any connections between it and what they and others are doing. I do want readers to be able to see why I am doing things this way, and I do want others to take up the issues I raise, since they raise far more questions than I can address satisfactorily here. Although I reject much contemporary analytic moral philosophy, I know the only way to improve it is to work collaboratively on what we have already done, learning from our mistakes, going slowly, asking questions, making things a bit clearer. So although my starting point is a radical view, I approach that radical view via familiar questions about the nature of ethics, the source of normativity, and the purpose and quality of ‘normative’ theories. In Chapter 2, I begin with examples, some from other moral philosophers, others invented by me. I refer to these examples frequently throughout this book, to illustrate questions, but more importantly to build common ground with readers, and ensure the discussion stays down-to-earth.

Most analytic moral philosophers avoid the question of what ethics is, or deal with it cursorily with a single hand-waving example or an appeal to intuition. Those who do discuss the question in more detail rapidly find themselves in difficulty. In the rest of Chapter 2, I describe the difficulties that face accounts of ethics which make sentiment, normativity or some special content definitive of ethics. I also consider the merits of the proposal, often made in the face of the difficulty of saying anything sensible about what ethics is, that ethics cannot be defined. I conclude that a better alternative is available, which will allow us to see the unity in ethics without being overwhelmed by its sheer diversity. In the course of discussing accounts of ethics, I highlight those difficulties which are of particular interest to me, given the view of ethics I want to develop and defend.

For example, I comment critically on what I call the ‘bystander bias’ which pervades moral philosophy. According to this bias, moral theory is done from the perspective of a bystander, someone who is not actually involved in the moral context but who observes it from outside, either to guide the agent or to apprehend or judge the action or the agent more generally. I point out that this bias is optional, and questionable. At least as important, but rather more neglected, is the perspective of the patient, the being that characteristically needs help and is acted upon in moral contexts.

From the perspective of the needing patient, another distortion of our moral thinking also looms large. What I call a ‘presumption of moral negligibility’ is at least as pervasive as the bystander bias. According to the presumption of negligibility, nothing in the world matters, makes any moral demands, unless it earns moral considerability by the possession of some special property (most commonly rational personhood, sentience, life or significance to some person, or sentient or living being). The presumption of negligibility arguably follows from the bystander bias, since the idea that patients are negligible until proven otherwise would hardly grip any thinker approaching ethics from the standpoint of the patient.

I do not think any rationale for this presumption has ever been offered. But it is so entrenched and pervasive that it has managed to pass under the radar of even the most radically suspicious philosophical hermeneutics. I hold this presumption up to the light and argue that, if we are serious about doing moral philosophy, we should dispense with it. Why should we think of moral worth as something to be earned by the possession of rare, special properties? Why don’t we instead adopt a better presumption, which I call the ‘presumption of moral worth’? The presumption of moral worth makes moral considerability a permissive rather than restrictive concept. Shifting the burden of proof from those who want to establish to those who want to deny the moral considerability of any thing seems to me philosophically right, and also morally satisfying. Why should the cultivated sensibility prove itself to the barbarian?

If available accounts of ethics fail, and if moral philosophy is distorted by a pervasive bystander bias and a presumption of negligibility, how can we begin to get a better philosophical handle on it? In Chapter 3, I argue that the best way to do this is to think of ethics as a distinctive practice. A practice is a kind of action. Aristotle’s theory of action suggests we should expect to be able to identify within a kind of action not just distinctive kinds of agents, acts and goals, but also patients, which are acted on. Alasdair MacIntyre’s rich account of practices further elaborates just what kind of action they are. Practices characteristically have cultural and historical support, internal and external goods, supporting institutions, and the virtues play a distinctive enabling role in them. I argue that ethics satisfies all these criteria, and conclude we should think of it as a practice, at least until someone has a better idea.

The resulting ‘practice conception of ethics’ has several philosophical implications which enable me to develop my view of ethics in various ways. The practice conception reveals what might be wrong with available accounts of ethics, and it has some useful ‘metaethical’ spin-offs, for example explaining how moral normativity works, and showing how the ‘ethics/science debate’ is ill-formed. It also implies that a ‘normative’ moral theory may take any one of at least those four possible starting points that Aristotle’s philosophy of action allows us to identify. A moral theory may start with the agent, as virtue ethical theories do, or it may start with the action, as deontological theories do, or it may start with the valuable goals the agent seeks, as consequentialist theories do.

The irreducible but limited and structured plurality of possible perspectives on ethics thus revealed by the practice conception shows that the type and number of moral theories we have are not accidental, as is often thought, but are determined by the range of possible perspectives on the phenomenon they describe, ethical practice. It also implies that the theories we have are necessarily complementary perspectives, mutually constraining each other, and cannot be competing global accounts or ‘rivals’ as is usually supposed. Most importantly for the development of my own view of ethics, the practice conception also implies that we need a fourth theory, which approaches ethics from the standpoint of the patient.

In Chapter 4, I begin to develop the patient-need-centred theory. I first emphasize the different demands that the patient-standpoint places on moral theory, then discuss some features of the kinds of example which best illustrate the moral demandingness of patients’ needs, which I call ‘simple cases’. As well as being distorted by a bias in favour of bystanders and ‘intrinsically valuable’ person-related things, moral philosophy is distorted by a preoccupation with complex, contested and horrific cases. I argue that the possibilities of dispute and error, and the sheer difficulty of such cases, depend on a prior, sure grasp of simple cases, and I try to show that the moral knowledge involved in simple cases is at least as sophisticated and philosophically interesting as that involved in complex ones. I then go on to look at the feature of patients which is the source of moral necessity in simple and complex ethical cases: need.

I then describe how needs are particularly apt to function as moral demands because they are objective (unlike, say, desires) and two-directional, pointing both to a gap in the world and to the action that will fill it. Above all, though, needs are apt to function as moral demands for moral agents, because this is precisely the job that the concept of need has been evolved to fill. The need concept fulfils an ecological necessity, if you like, marking a crucial threshold between morally demanding need and nondemanding mere ability to benefit. The presence of a need functions as a signal to the responsive moral agent that they must drop what they are doing and meet the need. In contrast, the presence of a morally neutral mere ability to benefit, if it is noticed at all, indicates to the moral agent that they can relax. They can get on with pursuing their own ends, or they can benefit the patient if they like. But they are not morally required to do so. Without need, there is no moral necessity.

I go on to discuss Aristotle’s general account of necessities to give a clearer sense of which needs are morally demanding, and why they are so. I argue that needs relating to existence, rather than to flourishing or agency or any other contingent end a needing being might have, are paradigmatically morally demanding. But I argue that ‘existence’ needs to be understood in a more subtle way than it normally tends to be. Aided by David Wiggins’ work, I explore the idea of substantial sortal identity, and especially what I call ‘second-natural phased-sortal identity’. I use this to clarify the sense in which moral agents are aiming to respond to needs relating to substantial existence, even when responding to idiosyncratic or high-level needs, like my need for quiet, or your need as a pianist for a piano, which a less careful analysis might fail to connect with existence at all.

In Chapter 5, I look in more detail at the way judgments about the moral demandingness of essential needs are made. Although the connection with existence ensures that morally demanding needs must be ‘entrenched’ in some fairly robust way, I argue that the associated ideas, that the only morally demanding needs are very ‘basic’ needs which are entrenched by biology, and widely shared, are mistaken. The connection with existence is what moral agents are characteristically interested in, not whether the connection is biologically fixed or widely shared.

In Chapter 5 and throughout, I emphasize the inalienability of need. To be needy is not an exceptional or shameful state, it is the normal condition of every contingent being in the universe. Neediness per se is no more ‘passive’ or less ‘active’ than any other state a being might be in. But in addition to having the need in its inalienable, dispositional form, for their need to present a moral demand, a patient must also be in occurrent need. A need is occurrent when the patient lacks, or is about to lack, something they need. And even that, strictly, is not sufficient for a need to place an actual moral demand on an agent.

What is also required is for the patient to be in moral relationship with an agent. Only when their need is presented in relationship can it present an actual moral demand, just as only when someone asks a question can it present a demand for an answer. I offer an original analysis of what a moral relationship is, to show how moral relationships pervade our lives and place demands on us, and how even rather cursory interactions are counted in ethical practice as morally demanding relationships.

I also emphasize, here and throughout, the way that morally demanding needs are not tradable. Moral culpability for failing to meet a need cannot be reduced by meeting a different need, or by supplying a non-needed benefit. In the case of basic needs, this is obvious. If I give you food when you need emergency surgery, it will not be possible to set off the benefit of the food against the harm of the lack of surgery when assessing my action. But I argue it is just as true, if more seldom recognized, in the case of other second-natural phased-sortal needs, for example political ones.

In Chapter 6, I respond to objections that are often made to claims about the part I think the concept of need can play in moral philosophy. Needs theories are said to be especially vulnerable to paternalism, manipulation and problems of specification. I argue that this isn’t so. To the extent that a needs theory does face such problems, so must any possible normative theory. The problems lie in normative codes as such, not in needs-based codes. I argue that the concept of need is as important for getting complex cases right, and as adequate for doing so, as any other thin normative concept could be. I show how I think the objection that the needs-centred theory permits evasion of moral demands is mistaken.

Against the objection that not all things’ needs present moral demands, I argue that the need concept still structures our judgments about what it is permissible and morally necessary to do in response to ‘negligible’ beings, bad agents and transient and becoming beings. Against the claim that not all moral demands are needs, I consider examples of promise-keeping and truth-telling, to show how a needs-centred theory can plausibly capture the morally significant aspects of such cases.

I motivated the needs-centred theory of ethics by showing the unsatisfactoriness of available accounts and picking up on one implication of my preferred practice conception, the need for a fourth theory which studies ethics from the patient-standpoint. It remains to set the needs-centred theory in the context of other more familiar ‘normative’ ethical theories. This is the task of Chapters 7 to 9. In each of these chapters, I describe the theory under discussion, and consider what the arguments of this book imply about how we should now think of it.

I trace the effects of bystander bias and presumption of negligibility on all the theories, and consider where mistakes have arisen and how they persist. I suggest that one effect of the fact that these theories have generally been formulated without the light, as it were, of a viable account of the nature of ethics is that they have tended to focus too broadly, on human practical rationality generally. The practice conception of ethics, again, enables us to see what is wrong with this, and how to avoid it. But perhaps most seriously, I criticize our available ‘normative’ theories for their ‘competing global account’ way of thinking about ethics. Rather than seeing their work as perspectival and complementary, as the practice conception implies they must be, defenders of these theories typically see themselves as ‘rivals’ contending for the position of the single, dominant global theory of ethics. Theorists typically make excessive claims for their own theories, and offer unfair or under-motivated criticisms of others’ theories as a result.

I also consider the effects of the neglect of patients and needs on each of the theories. In relation to consequentialism, I argue that inattention to need distorts the consequentialist conception of moral response, misrepresenting it as unstructured and excessive, more closely resembling the action of cancer cells than of immune cells, which I suggest provide a better analogy for the activity of moral agents. In relation to deontology, I argue that neglect of patients and needs leads to an irresponsible elevation of rational agents as the only morally important beings, and that the resulting idea of ‘rights’ which must be respected lacks an essential practical context, and overcorrects the consequentialists’ conception of moral response as promotion. In relation to virtue ethics, I argue, again, that the focus of the theory inward, on facts about agents, rather than outward, on facts about the patient and their need, fails to capture what is essential about ethical virtue in particular, as opposed to human virtue in general, which virtue ethical theories may be better suited to describe.

2 What ethics is

We need at least a rough idea of what ethics is before we start work in moral philosophy.¹ This is the only way to ensure we don’t make absurd assumptions, or miss objections that stem from the construction of the concept itself, or talk at cross-purposes, or draw trivial or useless conclusions. But most philosophers do not proceed this way. Only a few philosophers even attempt to say what ethics is, and their attempts are typically rudimentary and seem to fail in the face of obvious objections. Perhaps aware of this trap that lies in wait for the philosopher who dares to make a claim about what ethics is, most moral philosophers pretend there is no problem, and go ahead and write their metaethical, or normative, or applied ethical theories as if we all already know what ethics is, or as if we don’t need to know, or as if some other philosopher will come along later and do the difficult work our author postpones for the sake of more pressing commitments. Such moral philosophers must think either that no account of ethics is necessary, or that none is possible.

In this chapter, I consider the progress analytic philosophy has made towards answering the question of what ethics is. I begin with examples. Analytic moral philosophy is usually done at a very high level of abstraction. Examples are few and far between, and those that are given often increase uncertainty about what we are talking about, rather than resolve it.² To avoid this particular source of confusion, I begin with a couple of long lists, one of examples which I think show what ethics is, another of examples which show what it isn’t. Some examples come from other philosophers, some are my own.

First, examples which show what ethics is. A baby in a pram is rolling down a hill towards a busy road. Someone sees the pram, and stops it.³ Some children are pouring petrol on a cat, planning to light it. An adult stops them.⁴ A boy at his dog’s first fight is crying. His father silences him, and explains ‘boys don’t cry’. A baby is hungry. Its mother notices, and feeds it. Another baby is hungry, soiled and cold. Its parents don’t respond, and it dies. A colleague is bullied at work. Someone notices, and stands up for her. A toddler is drowning in a pond. Someone wades in to save it.⁵ A beggar holds out her hand. Chloe gives her £5.

A collector for famine-relief asks for money. I donate. Someone drops their wallet on the pavement. I return it.⁶ My child wants to take flowers from our neighbours’ garden. I explain they belong to somebody else.⁷ An action would involve harsh treatment. I decide not to do it.⁸ A friend is in hospital. Several people visit her.⁹ Our child is retarded. We find a good group home for her to live in.¹⁰ I have a choice of schools. I send my child to the best one.¹¹ A boy does not wish to join the army. His mother encourages him to run away. Or he wants to serve the dramatic political cause, and she pleads with him to stay with her instead.¹² I receive important news that will distress my sister. I tell her.¹³ My wife is arriving at the station in a dark, insalubrious part of town. I break the sp...