It seems like a scalar solution to the paradox of supererogation also gives a pretty neat answer here. Words like "right," "wrong," "permissible," etc., are simply imperfect paraphrases over lesser and greater degrees of rightness.
So what is wrong with what Alice does? Well, she doesn't do anything strictly "wrong" per se, as "wrong" is just a useful paraphrase. Rather the problem is that she could easily have done something better. She could easily have just not forced Bob to work for her, which would (let us suppose) be much better.
Similarly, giving someone $1000 on the condition that you get to punch them in the face isn't "wrong" per se, assuming they value $1000 over not being punched in the face. It's simply like, why the hell would you do that, as you could easily do something better by not also punching them in the face?
>It's simply like, why the hell would you do that, as you could easily do something better by not also punching them in the face?
The same could be said of any "unnecessary" purchase you make. It assumes that gifting the other $1000 is good, but that cant be true in general, because then it would also be good for him to gift it back, and youve created a morality pump.
I don't think supererogation makes much sense as a concept -- I think a good analogy is how Christianity thinks about sin; it's impossible for anyone to be sinfree like Jesus was, but Christians aspire to be as good as possible.
It also seems unfair to characterize Bob's situation as "consensual". The meaningful info here is that Bob will die unless Alice intervenes. Suppose an assassin has a gun to Cindy's head. Dave offers to tell the assassin not to kill Cindy, but only if she has sex with Dave. Does Cindy consent to this situation? Doesn't seem like it!
Finally, empirical data suggests that sweatshops actually are beneficial for maximizing utility in poor countries, helping them get rich and enter the first world. Noah Smith has a good article about it [here](https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/the-only-thing-worse-than-sweatshops) that discusses the various tradeoffs.
I think the experiment yields different results if Alice's rescue costs are onerous but not dangerous, in the context of superogation. There is a categorical difference between costly and risky.
“ Still, we might wonder if Alice really is obliged to make a dangerous rescue merely because she’ll be compensated by Bob’s labor. (Suppose you’ll be compensated for donating bone marrow. Does that undercut your right not to give it?)”
In this case, it seems easy to note that the “compensation” for donating bone marrow is going to be of a very different kind. It doesn’t eliminate the pain and suffering of the donation process. Whatever specific compensation you are imagining here, there is a reasonable person those doesn’t think it is enough to make up for the harms of donation.
In the case where it’s compensation of $10,000 later for paying $10,000 now, it’s much harder to come up with important differences (though if Alice really needs the $10,000 now to avoid being evicted, it becomes plausible that Bob paying Alice back later isn’t proper compensation).
Notice that theres a wide range of prices at which Alice could save Bob, and have it be mutually beneficial. They are in some way playing an ultimatum game, and it makes sense that Bob would want to feel aversive to paying a high price, even if its still beneficial to him.
Now from the perspective of an external observer, you just need to break the symmetry somehow. For example, if being an Alice is a specialised role, and falling into holes happens to people randomly, then everyone who doesnt plan on being an Alice will side with Bob. I think that well explains the intuition against exploitation, whether its a justification is up to you.
I would absolutely read your thoughts on exploitation as defined by Marx. I have never fully gotten behind Marx, at least in most respects, but this is an area I find myself sympathetic to him, even if it’s an (obviously) loaded term.
Virtue ethically, in each of these situations it would appear that Alice is left in a non-desirable situation: she could become a kinder person by releasing Bob from his pledge, and yet she chooses not to.
This does not quite have bearing on the initial decision to rescue Bob in the first place. If Alice knows that she simply won’t rescue Bob uncompensated, then she should offer the deal and rescue Bob. But if Alice never reconsiders her decision, then she is liable to block her ability to learn how to feel greater sympathy for Bob. She will become an exploiter, and a self-satisfied one at that.
There are some odd wrinkles in this answer, of course. If Alice knows she will be required to become an even better person in the future, then perhaps she will refuse to take that first step to become a slightly better person by rescuing Bob. In that case, this solution eats itself by making Alice even more callous to begin with.
Thus, much of the effectiveness of this solution depends on whether Alice is in a state of trying to pre-game her later self into not becoming a better person in ways that her current self would not like.
I think one possible argument against exploitation comes from externalities, just not the simple effluent-based ones you cited. Paying the lowest possible sweatshop wages, perhaps including indenture of a rescued Bob, supports a social norm of paying the lowest possible wages, which increases the probability that more people are going to have less good lives than they might. Whereas paying more than the minimum it takes for this transaction to be better for the worker than the alternative can spill over into greater welfare throughout society by increasing how much of the generated surplus accrues to the worker. The mention of norms suggests this must be a deontological argument, but I am looking at it purely in terms of consequences.
Of course, this observation triggers thoughts about political philosophy and social organization; what it takes for capitalists to not have monopsony powers over individual workers (unions, Marxism, whatever), etc. But even from the perspective of the individual act, each {mutually beneficial but still maximally exploitive in one direction} act tends to lower the welfare of everyone else in society who faces the bad side of another instance of that transaction. So, perhaps one could argue, giving Bob a better deal than he would accept is not a moral obligation with respect to that transaction in isolation, but because of its spillover effects it is the right thing to do.
I hold to a view where to say that an act is wrong is to say that people generally have reasons to give each other reasons not to perform acts of that type. For example, drunk driving is wrong because people generally have reasons to avoid the death and injuries that drunk drivers cause (for themselves and those they care about).
We give each other reasons by creating deterrence and by using condemnation to nurture in each other internal reasons (aversions) to performing certain types of action. Punishment is a combination of deterrence with condemnation.
And the only reasons to do or not do some action come from desires. Desires feed an instruction into deliberation to favor some outcome. Nothing else has this power. Nothing else can provide an agent with reasons.
Given those assumptions, it seems clear in the first example where Alice could easily rescue Bob but forces Bob to pay a huge cost for rescue. Regardless of which option Alice chooses, people generally have reasons to give each other reasons to prefer the low-cost rescue option. We have reasons to condemn both the failure to rescue, and we have reasons to condemn the requirement of signing a contract for labor. Because we want people to have reasons not to perform actions of that type.
As far as the costly rescue, it seems fair to condemn Alice if she does not accept Bob's offer (or somebody else's offer) to cover the costs. Even then, it must truly be a costly rescue. $10,000 for somebody with $1 billion need not be considered a costly rescue. However, here we are getting away from the issue of exploitation.
We are now asking if the wealthy have an obligation to contribute to provide the starving with food and basic medical care. I would argue that people generally have reasons to establish a community that secures for them basic food and medical care (which are no less valuable than life, liberty, and property in the pursuit of happiness). I would agree with those above that if these minimum goods are not provided, then no arrangement that provides them can truly be said to be a matter of consent.
Under such an obligation, "sweatshops" would need to offer more than food and basic medical are to get people to agree to the work. If they only offer food and basic medical care (or sufficient income to cover that and no more) - which each person has a right to but are otherwise being denied - then they would be guilty of exploitation.
Those thought experiments are from a Marxist political theorist! Forgive me for taking him seriously.
Also I don’t see any reason whatsoever why “abstract thought experiments” would be by nature unable to “penetrate the phenomenon.” All of the most successful sciences use abstract experiments—there’s nothing more “ahistorical” than a controlled laboratory environment. Thought experiments are similar! If you don’t do any abstraction, you can’t learn anything deep, because you’ll just be distracted by spurious correlations.
Of course, that doesn’t mean that thought experiments are the only technique in the toolkit. But every moral philosopher should use them. Even Williams relies on them (with lots of caution and hedging).
Finally, I’m disturbed by your insouciance towards political violence. Even in a war fought for just cause, terror is inexcusable.
It seems like a scalar solution to the paradox of supererogation also gives a pretty neat answer here. Words like "right," "wrong," "permissible," etc., are simply imperfect paraphrases over lesser and greater degrees of rightness.
So what is wrong with what Alice does? Well, she doesn't do anything strictly "wrong" per se, as "wrong" is just a useful paraphrase. Rather the problem is that she could easily have done something better. She could easily have just not forced Bob to work for her, which would (let us suppose) be much better.
Similarly, giving someone $1000 on the condition that you get to punch them in the face isn't "wrong" per se, assuming they value $1000 over not being punched in the face. It's simply like, why the hell would you do that, as you could easily do something better by not also punching them in the face?
>It's simply like, why the hell would you do that, as you could easily do something better by not also punching them in the face?
The same could be said of any "unnecessary" purchase you make. It assumes that gifting the other $1000 is good, but that cant be true in general, because then it would also be good for him to gift it back, and youve created a morality pump.
I don't think supererogation makes much sense as a concept -- I think a good analogy is how Christianity thinks about sin; it's impossible for anyone to be sinfree like Jesus was, but Christians aspire to be as good as possible.
It also seems unfair to characterize Bob's situation as "consensual". The meaningful info here is that Bob will die unless Alice intervenes. Suppose an assassin has a gun to Cindy's head. Dave offers to tell the assassin not to kill Cindy, but only if she has sex with Dave. Does Cindy consent to this situation? Doesn't seem like it!
Finally, empirical data suggests that sweatshops actually are beneficial for maximizing utility in poor countries, helping them get rich and enter the first world. Noah Smith has a good article about it [here](https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/the-only-thing-worse-than-sweatshops) that discusses the various tradeoffs.
I think the experiment yields different results if Alice's rescue costs are onerous but not dangerous, in the context of superogation. There is a categorical difference between costly and risky.
“ Still, we might wonder if Alice really is obliged to make a dangerous rescue merely because she’ll be compensated by Bob’s labor. (Suppose you’ll be compensated for donating bone marrow. Does that undercut your right not to give it?)”
In this case, it seems easy to note that the “compensation” for donating bone marrow is going to be of a very different kind. It doesn’t eliminate the pain and suffering of the donation process. Whatever specific compensation you are imagining here, there is a reasonable person those doesn’t think it is enough to make up for the harms of donation.
In the case where it’s compensation of $10,000 later for paying $10,000 now, it’s much harder to come up with important differences (though if Alice really needs the $10,000 now to avoid being evicted, it becomes plausible that Bob paying Alice back later isn’t proper compensation).
Notice that theres a wide range of prices at which Alice could save Bob, and have it be mutually beneficial. They are in some way playing an ultimatum game, and it makes sense that Bob would want to feel aversive to paying a high price, even if its still beneficial to him.
Now from the perspective of an external observer, you just need to break the symmetry somehow. For example, if being an Alice is a specialised role, and falling into holes happens to people randomly, then everyone who doesnt plan on being an Alice will side with Bob. I think that well explains the intuition against exploitation, whether its a justification is up to you.
I would absolutely read your thoughts on exploitation as defined by Marx. I have never fully gotten behind Marx, at least in most respects, but this is an area I find myself sympathetic to him, even if it’s an (obviously) loaded term.
Virtue ethically, in each of these situations it would appear that Alice is left in a non-desirable situation: she could become a kinder person by releasing Bob from his pledge, and yet she chooses not to.
This does not quite have bearing on the initial decision to rescue Bob in the first place. If Alice knows that she simply won’t rescue Bob uncompensated, then she should offer the deal and rescue Bob. But if Alice never reconsiders her decision, then she is liable to block her ability to learn how to feel greater sympathy for Bob. She will become an exploiter, and a self-satisfied one at that.
There are some odd wrinkles in this answer, of course. If Alice knows she will be required to become an even better person in the future, then perhaps she will refuse to take that first step to become a slightly better person by rescuing Bob. In that case, this solution eats itself by making Alice even more callous to begin with.
Thus, much of the effectiveness of this solution depends on whether Alice is in a state of trying to pre-game her later self into not becoming a better person in ways that her current self would not like.
I think one possible argument against exploitation comes from externalities, just not the simple effluent-based ones you cited. Paying the lowest possible sweatshop wages, perhaps including indenture of a rescued Bob, supports a social norm of paying the lowest possible wages, which increases the probability that more people are going to have less good lives than they might. Whereas paying more than the minimum it takes for this transaction to be better for the worker than the alternative can spill over into greater welfare throughout society by increasing how much of the generated surplus accrues to the worker. The mention of norms suggests this must be a deontological argument, but I am looking at it purely in terms of consequences.
Of course, this observation triggers thoughts about political philosophy and social organization; what it takes for capitalists to not have monopsony powers over individual workers (unions, Marxism, whatever), etc. But even from the perspective of the individual act, each {mutually beneficial but still maximally exploitive in one direction} act tends to lower the welfare of everyone else in society who faces the bad side of another instance of that transaction. So, perhaps one could argue, giving Bob a better deal than he would accept is not a moral obligation with respect to that transaction in isolation, but because of its spillover effects it is the right thing to do.
Greetings:
I hold to a view where to say that an act is wrong is to say that people generally have reasons to give each other reasons not to perform acts of that type. For example, drunk driving is wrong because people generally have reasons to avoid the death and injuries that drunk drivers cause (for themselves and those they care about).
We give each other reasons by creating deterrence and by using condemnation to nurture in each other internal reasons (aversions) to performing certain types of action. Punishment is a combination of deterrence with condemnation.
And the only reasons to do or not do some action come from desires. Desires feed an instruction into deliberation to favor some outcome. Nothing else has this power. Nothing else can provide an agent with reasons.
Given those assumptions, it seems clear in the first example where Alice could easily rescue Bob but forces Bob to pay a huge cost for rescue. Regardless of which option Alice chooses, people generally have reasons to give each other reasons to prefer the low-cost rescue option. We have reasons to condemn both the failure to rescue, and we have reasons to condemn the requirement of signing a contract for labor. Because we want people to have reasons not to perform actions of that type.
As far as the costly rescue, it seems fair to condemn Alice if she does not accept Bob's offer (or somebody else's offer) to cover the costs. Even then, it must truly be a costly rescue. $10,000 for somebody with $1 billion need not be considered a costly rescue. However, here we are getting away from the issue of exploitation.
We are now asking if the wealthy have an obligation to contribute to provide the starving with food and basic medical care. I would argue that people generally have reasons to establish a community that secures for them basic food and medical care (which are no less valuable than life, liberty, and property in the pursuit of happiness). I would agree with those above that if these minimum goods are not provided, then no arrangement that provides them can truly be said to be a matter of consent.
Under such an obligation, "sweatshops" would need to offer more than food and basic medical are to get people to agree to the work. If they only offer food and basic medical care (or sufficient income to cover that and no more) - which each person has a right to but are otherwise being denied - then they would be guilty of exploitation.
Those thought experiments are from a Marxist political theorist! Forgive me for taking him seriously.
Also I don’t see any reason whatsoever why “abstract thought experiments” would be by nature unable to “penetrate the phenomenon.” All of the most successful sciences use abstract experiments—there’s nothing more “ahistorical” than a controlled laboratory environment. Thought experiments are similar! If you don’t do any abstraction, you can’t learn anything deep, because you’ll just be distracted by spurious correlations.
Of course, that doesn’t mean that thought experiments are the only technique in the toolkit. But every moral philosopher should use them. Even Williams relies on them (with lots of caution and hedging).
Finally, I’m disturbed by your insouciance towards political violence. Even in a war fought for just cause, terror is inexcusable.