The Ethics of Altruism PDF
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THE ETHICS OF ALTRUISM Books of Related Interest SCANLON AND CONTRACTUALISM edited by Matt Matravers TRUSTING IN REASON: MARTIN HOLLIS AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF SOCIAL ACTION edited by Preston King THE PHILOSOPHY OF UTOPIA edited by Barbara Goodwin PLURALISM AND LIBERAL NEUTRALITY edited by Richard Bellamy and Martin Hollis THE IDEOLOGY OF ORDER by Preston King HUMAN RIGHTS AND GLOBAL DIVERSITY edited by Simon Caney and Peter Jones TOLERATION by Preston King The Ethics of Altruism edited by JONATHAN SEGLOW Royal Holloway, University of London FRANK CASS LONDON • PORTLAND, OR First Published in 2004 in Great Britain by FRANK CASS PUBLISHERS Crown House, 47 Chase Side, Southgate London, N14 5BP This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” and in the United States of America by FRANK CASS PUBLISHERS c/o ISBS, 920 NE 58th Avenue, Suite 300 Portland, Oregon, 97213–3786 Copyright © 2004 Frank Cass & Co. Ltd Website: www.frankcass.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data The ethics of altruism 1. Altruism I. Seglow, Jonathan 171.8 ISBN 0-7146-5594-5 (cloth) ISBN 0-7146-8481-3 (paper) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The ethics of altruism/edited by Jonathan Seglow. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-7146-5594-5 (alk. paper)— ISBN 0-7146-8481-3 (pbk.: alk. paper) 1. Altruism. I. Seglow, Jonathan, 1968– BJ1474. E84 2004 171′.8–dc22 2003019751 This group of studies first appeared as a special issue of Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, ISSN 1369-8230, Vol.5, No.4 (Winter 2002) published by Frank Cass and Co. Ltd. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. ISBN 0-203-31991-5 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-7146-8481-3 (Print Edition) Contents Acknowledgements 26 The Ethics of Altruism: Introduction 1 Jonathan Seglow Altruism, Impartiality and Moral Demands 9 Jurgen De Wispelaere Gratitude, Contribution and Ethical Theory 35 Saul Smilansky Altruism, Self-Interest and the Indistinctness of Persons 51 Keith Graham Between Egoism and Altruism: Outlines for a Materialist Conception of the Good 71 Jeff Noonan Is There a Paradox of Altruism? 195 Robert Paul Churchill and Erin Street ‘Are They My Poor?’: The Problem of Altruism in a World of Strangers 107 David Miller Good Samaritanism: A Matter of Justice 129 Cécile Fabre Altruism and Freedom 145 Jonathan Seglow Canaries in the Mines? 163 Alasdair Maclean The Right to Trade in Human Body Parts 185 Hillel Steiner vi Abstracts 193 Notes on Contributors 199 Index 207 Acknowledgments The essays in this volume have their origin in The Ethics of Altruism conference of the Association for Legal and Social Philosophy, held at Royal Holloway, University of London in April 2002. I would like to thank Richard Bellamy and Preston King, and Jeff Mazo at Frank Cass, for their encouragement of this project, as well as all the contributors. Keith Graham’s paper draws on his Practical Reasoning in a Social World: How We Act Together (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Used with kind permission from Cambridge University Press. viii 1 The Ethics of Altruism: Introduction JONATHAN SEGLOW Since altruism is never far away from the moral and political assessments we make in everyday life, it is odd that it should be discussed so little. Besides personal acts of charity and beneficence, discussions of welfarism, the ethics of the market and our duties to the poor in distant countries all turn on issues of altruism. It is a recurrent theme of everyday discourse, and to lack it—to be selfish—is one of the most common terms of moral condemnation. It is odd, then, that political philosophers are not exercised by altruism. Examining the concept in its own right—exploring the nature and scope of people’s altruism, and the kinds of motives that altruists have—should throw some light on these more concrete problems. The chapters in this volume aim to do that. They interrogate the concept, revealing its possibilities, and also its limits. In considering also the areas and issues where altruistic motives are important, and making connections between these and the core idea itself, they help address this omission, and vindicate the claim that altruism should be a central topic of our political theorising. How much altruism is it reasonable to ask of us? What might be regarded as the central issue with which contemporary Anglophone political philosophy is concerned—how to reconcile the freedom of the individual to live as she wishes with our moral duties to other people of equal worth—can be interpreted as a question about just how altruistic we are obliged to be. As David Miller notes in his essay, where obligation used to be localised— through practices of mutual aid, good neighbourliness, and so on—people knew straightforwardly to whom they owed their responsibilities: ‘Ethical space was fully occupied by concrete obligations to others.’1 Altruism becomes a moral problem in a world of strangers, a world where through our acts and omissions we can affect the fates of millions of people, the vast majority of whom we will never meet. Since this is—increasingly, in an age of globalisation—our world, altruism is very much on our contemporary agenda.
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