In Jeske and Fumerton’s Special Obligations objection to (non-radically relativistic) consequentialism, it was shown that in certain cases people have certain preference in their action based on the intimate relationship with the person who is going to be affected by that action. This is the common intuition that most people have all over the world. For example- most people give priority to their family and friends over a stranger or at least think that it is morally permissible to do so. This intuition is referred as special obligation which creates a huge problem in consequentialism where everyone is obliged to perform an action that maximizes the intrinsic value of the consequences of that action. Jeske and Fumerton showed that in certain cases, our intuition goes against what we ought to do and this is the special obligations objection. In this paper, I will defend the special obligations objection to (non-radically relativistic) consequentialism against an objection from a consequentialist.

But before I discuss further about that, let’s discuss what consequentialism is and how one must adopt a radically relativistic consequentialism if he/she wants to accommodate special obligations.

According to Jeske and Fumerton,

“We will use the term" consequentialist" to refer to those ethical theories in which the rightness or wrongness of actions is defined solely in terms of the act's maximizing(or not)the intrinsic value of actual, probable, or possible consequences. If the theory's definition of right action makes reference to probable or possible consequences, the values of consequences will no doubt be adjusted for probability in one of the standard ways.” (Jeske and Fumerton, 143)

Depending on what it is to have (intrinsic) value, Consequentialism can take the following forms: non-relativistic consequentialism and relativistic consequentialism. Relativistic consequentialism can be divided into two sub-groups: non-radical relativistic consequentialism and radically relativistic consequentialism. So finally we have three main form of act- consequentialism:

(i)non-relativistic consequentialism

(ii) non-radical relativistic consequentialism and

(iii) radically relativistic consequentialism

Now, let’s discuss how these forms of consequentialism creates problems if we adopt special obligations. Consider the following case:

Suppose a man sees that three children are drowning in the middle of the river. To his horror, he sees that one of them is his own child. Judging from their positions, he can either save his child or he can save two other children. What should he do? According to our intuition or the special obligation, it should be morally permissible to save his own child in such cases.

However, in non-relativistic consequentialism, intrinsic values are not relative-they are same for everyone. So, according to that, the total sum of intrinsic value of saving two children is greater than the net sum of intrinsic value of saving just one child. Therefore, according to non-relativistic consequentialism, it is obligatory to save the other two children abandoning his own child. This is a clear contradiction to the special obligation which most of us share in common.

In non-radically relativistic consequentialism, relativistic intrinsic value is used for determining the right action. But unlike the radically relativistic consequentialism, the intrinsic value is not necessarily valuable only to the agent himself/herself. Intrinsic values with respect to other people are also counted along with the agent’s value. So the right action for an agent to perform is not the action that maximizes that which has value only for the agent but it is such action which maximizes the net sum of intrinsic value of all people including the agent. In this case, let’s assume that saving one’s own child has certain intrinsic value to the person. So now, saving his own child has certain intrinsic value to him, but saving the other two children also has twice as much intrinsic value to their respective parents. And so, to maximize the net sum of intrinsic value, the person is obliged to save the other two children which is against the fulfillment of special obligation.

Having discussed about the special obligation objection against different forms of non-radically relativistic consequentialism, let’s focus on this special obligation towards intimate ones from a different perspective. There is still a possible way for a non-radically relativistic consequentialist to comply with special obligation by showing that performing special obligation maximizes the net sum of intrinsic values. To demonstrate this, let’s consider the pervious case of man with three children once again. Now if we can show that by saving his child, the person will be able to maximize the net sum of intrinsic values, we can say that special obligation is not an objection to consequentialism. This can be done by counting the increase of intrinsic value of special obligation and counting the intrinsic value of the act of this increase. But first we have to assume the following premises:

Premise1: special obligation is common intuition for all.

Premise2: people are normally in best positions to benefit their intimate ones.

Having these premises, let’s consider the following approach:

By saving his child, he will let the other two children to die. Everyone knows about special obligation. So, no one can say that saving the other two was his responsibility. By saving his child and letting other two die, he is promoting the idea that the parents are responsible for their children’s well-being or death. This will make those parents feel the responsibility for their children’s death. (Hence, guilt will emerge. They might say: “I should have been there to save my children as that person did”).This act of the person makes people in the society more responsible about their children. This act will indicate that it’s their duty to save intimate ones and people will be more cautious than before. In other words, it will increase the necessity and significance of special obligations by raising more concern. They will think that if they don’t take care of their intimate ones, no one will. This will increase the intrinsic value of special obligations and it will be higher than before. As people are in best position to benefit their intimate ones (In this case, parents should be in the best position to help their children), this will decrease the possibility of seeing this type of dire situation of three children again in the future. So, by saving his child, he is actually preventing similar cases like this from happening where minimum one child will have died. This prevention has intrinsic value and he also increased the intrinsic value of special obligation itself. Now if we add these intrinsic value with the intrinsic value of saving his child, it out-weights the intrinsic value of saving the other two children. Actually, here we looked at the consequences of the action in the overall society, and found that complying with the special obligation increases the significance of special obligations. This will make people more interested in helping intimate ones and as people are in best positions to help their intimate ones, this will be more beneficial for people. Hence, saving own child maximizes net intrinsic values. So, although being a consequentialist, one can adopt special obligation without any contradiction.

Although this approach looks promising, Jeske and Fumerton can strongly object to this by the following argument: In this case, the effect of the action of the person on the society is highly over-estimated. One action of a person is not significant enough to affect the society in that scale which was assumed in the argument above. We can easily assume such a case where after seeing the action of the person, the society did not change much and the intrinsic value of special obligation did not increase. So, in that case we would not get the intrinsic value of prevention of such situations in the future.

Hence, the intrinsic value of saving the two children would be greater than the intrinsic value of saving own child and the person would be oblige to save the two children. Another problem is the second premise which says that people are in the best position to help their intimates. This is clearly not the case in some situations. For example, in our three children case, the parents of those two children were helpless.

Overall, in this paper, I have discussed about the special obligation objection of Jeske and Fumerton to (non-radically relativistic) consequentialism and briefly showed that all forms of consequentialism except the radically relativistic consequentialism fails to comply with the special forms of objection. After presenting those cases, an attempt was made in favor of a (non-radically relativistic) consequentialist to reconcile with the special obligation which was then refuted in favor of Jeske and Fumerton.

Reference:

Diane Jeske, and Richard Fumerton .Philosophical Studies: An International Journal for Philosophy in the Analytic Tradition. Vol. 87, No. 2 (Aug., 1997), pp. 143

026:102:001 Fall13 Introduction to Ethics

Md. Fahim Anjum