Inclusive Ethics: Extending Beneficence and Egalitarian Justice

281 Pages·2017·1.439 MB·English

by  Persson, Ingmar

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 12/19/2016, SPi
Inclusive Ethics
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 12/19/2016, SPi
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 12/19/2016, SPi
Inclusive Ethics
Extending Beneficence and
Egalitarian Justice
Ingmar Persson
1
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 12/19/2016, SPi
3
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OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 12/19/2016, SPi
Contents
Acknowledgements vii
Introduction 1
Part I. The Inclusiveness of Benefiting and
Reasons of Beneficence
1. Two Aspects of Things Being Intrinsically Valuable for Us:
Well-Being and Autonomy 27
2. Defence of an Inclusive View of Benefiting and
Reasons of Beneficence 48
3. Three Problems of Procreation: Replaceability, the Asymmetry,
and the Non-Identity Problem 77
4. The Repugnant Conclusion and the Non-Transitivity of
Value Relations 103
5. The End of Life and of Consciousness 119
6. The Inclusion of Non-Human Animals 137
Part II. Extreme Egalitarianism
7. The Ground for the Justice of Equality 149
8. The Badness of Unjust Inequality 172
9. Prioritarianism and Its Problems 183
10. Some Alternative Bases of Equality 208
Part III. Philosophical Thinking about How to Live
11. On the Usefulness of the Principles of Beneficence and Justice 225
12. The Point of Moral Philosophy 235
13. Beyond Ethical Inclusiveness: The Philosophy of Life 247
References 263
Index 269
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 12/19/2016, SPi
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 12/19/2016, SPi
Acknowledgements
This book is based on a number of papers that I have published during the last twenty
years or so. In many cases what has been harvested from them has only been smaller
bits, or has undergone significant revision. These are marked as references in the
text. But in a few cases, I have derived larger bits without much revision. Thus, the
argument against transitivity in 4.2 appears in a fuller form in Chapter 9 of From
Morality to the End of Reason: An Essay on Rights, Reasons and Responsibility, Oxford
University Press, 2013. The defence of egalitarianism in Chapter 7 is found in ‘A
Defence of Extreme Egalitarianism’, in N. Holtug and K. Lippert-Rasmussen (eds)
Egalitarianism: New Essays on the Nature and Value of Equality, Oxford University
Press, 2007. The account of when one unjust inequality is worse than another in
Chapter 8 has earlier been published as ‘The Badness of Unjust Inequality’, Theoria,
69 (2003). The criticism of prioritarianism in 9.2 comes from ‘Prioritarianism and
Welfare Reductions’, Journal of Applied Philosophy, 29 (2012).
During the last couple of years when I have been putting together this book, I have
greatly benefited from discussions on the various issues it contains with Roger Crisp,
David DeGrazia, Jeff McMahan, Derek Parfit, Melinda Roberts, Julian Savulescu,
Shlomi Segall, Victor Tadros, and Larry Temkin. I am also very grateful to two
anonymous readers for OUP for constructive criticisms, and to OUP’s excellent phil-
osophy editor, Peter Momtchiloff, for skilfully guiding me through the production of
this book—like my earlier OUP books—in every way an author would want. There is
of course a much larger number of people from whom I benefited through all the years
when I worked on the papers on which the book is based. The fact that I do not now
repeat my thanks to them does not mean that I am no longer grateful to them. Finally,
I would like to express my gratitude to the Uehiro Foundation for Ethics and Education
for generously providing financial and academic support through the Oxford Uehiro
Centre for Practical Ethics.
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 12/19/2016, SPi
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 12/22/2016, SPi
Introduction
The Inclusiveness of Ethics
The title of this book, Inclusive Ethics, is meant to designate an ethics that develops and
defends a morality that regulates actions affecting anything which has or could have
consciousness.1 Such a morality is inclusive compared to most existing moralities. It is
a plausible hypothesis that morality originated as something quite exclusive: in order
to promote unity and cohesion within human groups, so as to make them more suc-
cessful in struggles with other human groups, and natural adversaries and adversities.
Thus, morality was restricted to in-groups and excluded various kinds of outsiders.
It promoted unity and cohesion within in-groups by generally prohibiting harmful acts
against their members, and by encouraging cooperation between them, but it did not
prohibit harming members of other groups, or encourage cooperation with them.
The morality expounded in this book is also more inclusive than a more wide-ranging
morality according to which all that has consciousness or will have consciousness
independently of what is done matters in itself at the time of action, since it takes
possible conscious beings or individuals, who could—but perhaps will not—be made
to exist with consciousness, to matter morally in themselves. Entities which do not
carry with them this possibility of consciousness—whether they be organic and bio-
logically alive, or inorganic and non-living—cannot morally matter in themselves,
though they can morally matter extrinsically because of their relations to individuals
who do matter morally in themselves. Thus, having intrinsic moral importance or sig-
nificance is anchored in the possibility or actuality of consciousness, according to the
morality here advanced. This is because entities with these relations to consciousness
are the only entities for which things can be intrinsically good or bad at some point.
However, I believe not just that only entities for which things can be intrinsically
good or bad at some point—because they could then have consciousness—have
intrinsic moral significance, but that all such entities have such significance. I cannot
see what justification there could be for excluding some of them—for instance, those
who do not exist—from such significance. I am a bit uncomfortable with saying that
possible individuals who might begin to exist and acquire consciousness have moral
1 It seems reasonable to take ‘ethics’ to differ from ‘morality’ by being a more ‘theoretical’ enterprise
which explores various aspects of morality—meta-morality, if you like—but I do not propose any clear
distinction between ‘inclusive ethics’ and ‘inclusive morality’.