Blogosophy

More Headaches

I think the thing that gripes me about Norcross's argument Great harms from small benefits grow: how death can be outweighed by headaches. is that the way he sets it up presupposes the truth of some form of consequentialism. When he asserts that "many, perhaps most, people would agree to an even stronger claim:

Worse: other things being equal, it is worse that one person die a premature death than that any number of people suffer moderate headaches for twenty-four hours.

" he is phrasing it in such a way as to assume that Worse contains all the morally relevant detail. In particular he is assuming (or burying it under "all else being equal", which I think most people would read simply as discounting counter-hypotheticals where the death of that one person would lead to the death or other disutility of many others) that for the purposes of moral reasoning it is completely irrelevant whether that single premature death is the result of a freak accident, a risk knowingly assumed by the person who died, negligence by someone else, deliberate withholding of aid by someone else, suicide, or even murder. But that assumption is consequentialism. To be charitable, this seems to be a blind spot for Norcross. Repeatedly during the course of the article he sets up a particular actor-specific situation. For example in the initial scenario a young woman is dying of fever and you are present, aware of the situation, and have the medicine to cure her and haven't sworn any Hippocratic oath and moreover the medicine has no other use--but if you do so a billion people will suffer a moderate 24-hour headache with no other consequences or lasting effects (not even decreased productivity). It's pretty obvious that this is quite carefully constructed to generate the normal moral intuition that you ought to cure the young woman. But when it comes time to express this intuition as a proposition, away drops all the specifics and the actors involved and what emerges is Worse above. Norcross may be right that most people would endorse Worse, particularly after having heard his scenario, but I think that it's both wrong and misleading to assume that Worse is just equivalent to agreeing that under those conditions, saving the young woman is the correct thing to do.
Norcross does this move repeatedly. An argument for accepting the proposition that if you choose to go to the store, risking a one in a million chance of death, to get some pain reliever it's not irrational is recast as an accepting that it's morally correct for one person to bear a one in a million chance of death for relieving some (potentially other) person's headache. It's not that he even bothers to argue that accepting the former gives us a reason for believing the latter might be true, as far as I can tell he views the latter as no more than making a proposition entailed by the former explicit.
So where does that leave Norcross's argument? Well if you can transform particular scenarios about which there is some agreement according ordinary moral intuitions into restatements that assume a particular consequentialist proposition, then it hardly seems surprising that you can "back" a consequentialist position (here the rejection of Worse) through a series of ordinary beliefs. I think, though, that if you expose the hidden proposition, almost everyone who doesn't already subscribe to consequentialism will reject it, and thus reject that the restatement, so Norcross's claim to making explicit what we already believe fails.
Jonathan Ichikawa (in a comment to the previous post) feels that at least "the anti-utilitarian is robbed of the option of claiming that *life* is what makes murder fundamentally different from headaches," but I don't think that follows. It's not necessary to go into whether life is fundamentally different from headaches in order to refute Norcross, but that's because Worse isn't on point. If you had a good argument for supposing that it was morally right to kill yourself rather than endure some number of minor headaches, you would have to address the question of whether they were fundamentally different, but none is yet on the table. Personally, I think that there are specific objective differences, but I won't go into that here. Or at least not unless someone besides me is interested.

Posted by joshua at October 1, 2003 12:01 PM