assesment 6

Uncategorized

D O I N G
E T H I C S
‘’
Moral Reasoning and Contemporary Issues
F I F T H E D I T I O N
Lewis Vaughn
n
W . W . N O R T O N & C O M P A N Y , I N C .
N E W Y O R K • L O N D O N

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iii
C O N T E N T S
‘’
P r e f a c e x i x
P A R T 1 : F U N D A M E N T A L S
C H A P T E R 1 Ethics and the Examined Life 3
The Ethical Landscape 5
The Elements of Ethics 6
The Preeminence of Reason 6
Quick Review 7
The Universal Perspective 7
The Principle of Impartiality 7
The Dominance of Moral Norms 8
Religion and Morality 8
Believers Need Moral Reasoning 9
When Conflicts Arise, Ethics Steps In 9
Moral Philosophy Enables Productive Discourse 9
Critical Thought—Ethics, Religion,
And Tough Moral Issues 1 0
SUMMARY 1 1
KEY TERMS 1 2
REVIEW QUESTIONS 1 2
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS 1 2
ETHICAL DILEMMAS 1 3
FURTHER READING 1 3
R E A D I N G S
What Is the Socratic Method? by Christopher Phillips 1 4
The Euthyphro by Plato 1 6

C H A P T E R 2 Subjectivism, Relativism, and Emotivism 2 0
Subjective Relativism 2 1
Quick Review 2 1
Judge Not? 2 2
Cultural Relativism 2 3
Critical Thought—“Female Circumcision”
And Cultural Relativism 2 4
Emotivism 2 8
SUMMARY 3 0
KEY TERMS 3 1
REVIEW QUESTIONS 3 1
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS 3 1
ETHICAL DILEMMAS 3 2
FURTHER READING 3 2
R E A D I N G S
Anthropology and the Abnormal by Ruth Benedict 3 3
Trying Out One’s New Sword by Mary Midgley 3 5
P A R T 2 : M O R A L R E A S O N I N G
C H A P T E R 3 Evaluating Moral Arguments 4 1
Claims and Arguments 4 1
Arguments Good and Bad 4 3
Critical Thought—The Moralit y
Of Critical Thinking 4 4
Implied Premises 4 7
Quick Review 4 7
Deconstructing Arguments 48
Moral Statements and Arguments 5 1
Testing Moral Premises 5 4
Assessing Nonmoral Premises 5 5
Quick Review 5 5
Á CONTENTSiv

Avoiding Bad Arguments 5 6
Begging the Question 5 6
Equivocation 5 7
Appeal to Authority 5 7
Appeal To Emotion 5 7
Slippery Slope 5 8
Faulty Analogy 5 8
Appeal to Ignorance 5 8
Straw Man 5 9
Appeal to the Person 5 9
Hasty Generalization 5 9
Quick Review 6 0
Writing and Speaking about Moral Issues 6 0
SUMMARY 6 2
KEY TERMS 6 2
REVIEW QUESTIONS 6 3
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS 6 3
ARGUMENT EXERCISES 6 3
FURTHER READING 6 4
C H A P T E R 4 The Power of Moral Theories 6 5
Theories of Right and Wrong 6 5
Moral Theories Versus Moral Codes 6 6
Major Theories 6 7
Consequentialist Theories 6 7
Nonconsequentialist Theories 6 8
Quick Review 6 9
Evaluating Theories 7 0
Criterion 1: Consistency with Considered Moral Judgments 7 1
Considered Moral Judgment s 7 2
Criterion 2: Consistency with Our Moral Experiences 7 2
Critical Thought—A 100 Percent All-Natural Theory 7 3
Criterion 3: Usefulness in Moral Problem Solving 7 3
CONTENTS Á v

Quick Review 7 4
Devising a Coherent Moral Theory 7 4
Moral Common Sense 7 4
Building a Moral Theory 7 5
Prima Facie Principles 7 6
Three Rules 7 7
Self-Evidence 8 0
SUMMARY 8 1
KEY TERMS 8 1
REVIEW QUESTIONS 8 1
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS 8 2
ETHICAL DILEMMAS 8 2
FURTHER READING 8 2
P A R T 3 : T H E O R I E S O F M O R A L I T Y
C H A P T E R 5 Consequentialist Theories: Maximize the Good 8 5
Ethical Egoism 8 5
Applying the Theory 8 6
Evaluating the Theory 8 7
Can Ethical Egoism Be Advocated? 8 9
Quick Review 9 1
Utilitarianism 9 1
Applying the Theory 9 4
Peter Singer, Utilitarian 9 5
Quick Review 9 6
Evaluating the Theory 9 6
Learning from Utilitarianism 1 0 0
Social Contract Theory 1 0 0
Critical Thought—Cross-Species Transplant s: What Would A
Utilitarian Do? 1 0 1
Hobbes’s Theory 1 0 1
Evaluating the Theory 1 0 2
Á CONTENTSvi

CONTENTS Á vii
SUMMARY 1 0 4
KEY TERMS 1 0 5
REVIEW QUESTIONS 1 0 5
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS 1 0 5
ETHICAL DILEMMAS 1 0 6
FURTHER READING 1 0 6
R E A D I N G S
Egoism and Altruism by Louis P. Pojman 1 0 7
Utilitarianism by John Stuart Mill 1 1 1
A Theory of Justice by John Rawls 1 1 5
The Entitlement Theory of Justice by Robert Nozick 1 2 2
C H A P T E R 6 Nonconsequentialist Theories: Do Your Duty 1 3 2
Kant’s Ethics 1 3 2
Critical Thought—Sizing Up The Golden Rule 1 3 4
Applying the Theory 1 3 5
Evaluating the Theory 1 3 6
Kant, Respect, And Personal Right s 1 3 7
Learning from Kant’s Theory 1 3 8
Natural Law Theory 1 3 9
Applying the Theory 1 4 1
Quick Review 1 4 1
Critical Thought—Double Effect
And The “Trolley Problem” 1 4 2
Evaluating the Theory 1 4 2
Learning from Natural Law 1 4 3
SUMMARY 1 4 4
KEY TERMS 1 4 4
REVIEW QUESTIONS 1 4 4

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS 1 4 5
ETHICAL DILEMMAS 1 4 5
FURTHER READING 1 4 6
R E A D I N G S
Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals
by Immanuel Kant 1 4 6
Summa Theologica by St. Thomas Aquinas 1 5 5
Morality as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives by Philippa Foot 1 6 5
C H A P T E R 7 Virtue Ethics: Be a Good Person 1 7 2
The Ethics of Virtue 1 7 2
Critical Thought—Learning Virtues
In The Classroom 1 7 3
Virtue in Action 1 7 4
Evaluating Virtue Ethics 1 7 4
Critical Thought—Warrior Virtues And Moral
Disagreement s 1 7 6
Quick Review 1 7 7
Learning from Virtue Ethics 1 7 7
SUMMARY 1 7 7
KEY TERMS 1 7 8
REVIEW QUESTIONS 1 7 8
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS 1 7 8
ETHICAL DILEMMAS 1 7 8
FURTHER READING 1 7 9
R E A D I N G S
Nicomachean Ethics by Aristotle 1 7 9
The Need for More Than Justice by Annette C. Baier 1 8 8
Á CONTENTSviii

C H A P T E R 8 Feminist Ethics and the Ethics of Care 1 9 6
Feminist Ethics 1 9 7
Critical Thought—Feminist Ethics In History 1 9 7
The Ethics of Care 1 9 8
Quick Review 1 9 9
SUMMARY 1 9 9
KEY TERMS 1 9 9
REVIEW QUESTIONS 1 9 9
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS 2 0 0
ETHICAL DILEMMAS 2 0 0
FURTHER READING 2 0 0
R E A D I N G S
Feminist Ethics by Alison M. Jaggar 2 0 1
The Ethics of Care as Moral Theory by Virginia Held 2 0 9
P A R T 4 : E T H I C A L I S S U E S
C H A P T E R 9 Abortion 2 2 1
Issue File: Background 2 2 1
Abortion In The United States: Fact s And Figures 2 2 3
Moral Theories 2 2 4
Majorit y Opinion In Ro e V. Wa d e 2 2 5
Abortion And The Scriptures 2 2 6
Moral Arguments 2 2 7
Quick Review 2 2 7
State Abortion Laws 2 2 9
Critical Thought—Fact-Checking Abortion Claims 2 3 1
CONTENTS Á ix

SUMMARY 2 3 3
KEY TERMS 2 3 4
REVIEW QUESTIONS 2 3 4
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS 2 3 4
FURTHER READING 2 3 5
ETHICAL DILEMMAS 2 3 5
R E A D I N G S
A Defense of Abortion by Judith Jarvis Thomson 2 3 7
On the Moral and Legal Status of Abortion by Mary Anne Warren 2 4 7
Why Abortion Is Immoral by Don Marquis 2 5 6
Virtue Theory and Abortion by Rosalind Hursthouse 2 6 8
Abortion Through a Feminist Ethics Lens by Susan Sherwin 2 7 4
C H A P T E R 1 0 Euthanasia and Physician-Assisted Suicide 2 8 5
The Death Of K aren Ann Quinlan 2 8 6
Issue File: Background 2 8 6
Landmark Court Rulings 2 8 8
Quick Review 2 8 9
Moral Theories 2 8 9
Critical Thought—Dr. Kevorkian
And Physician-Assisted Suicide 2 9 1
Moral Arguments 2 9 1
Public Opinion And Euthanasia 2 9 3
SUMMARY 2 9 5
KEY TERMS 2 9 6
REVIEW QUESTIONS 2 9 6
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS 2 9 6
FURTHER READING 2 9 6
ETHICAL DILEMMAS 2 9 7
Á CONTENTSx

R E A D I N G S
Active and Passive Euthanasia by James Rachels 3 0 0
The Wrongfulness of Euthanasia by J. Gay-Williams 3 0 4
Voluntary Active Euthanasia by Dan W. Brock 3 0 7
Euthanasia by Philippa Foot 3 1 5
Killing and Allowing to Die by Daniel Callahan 3 2 9
Euthanasia for Disabled People? by Liz Carr 3 3 2
C H A P T E R 1 1 Delivering Health Care 3 3 4
Issue File: Background 3 3 4
Health Care By Country 3 3 6
Critical Thought—Comparing Health Care Systems 3 3 7
Moral Theories 3 3 8
Moral Arguments 3 3 9
Quick Review 3 4 0
SUMMARY 3 4 0
KEY TERMS 3 4 1
REVIEW QUESTIONS 3 4 1
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS 3 4 1
FURTHER READING 3 4 2
ETHICAL DILEMMAS 3 4 2
R E A D I N G S
Autonomy, Equality and a Just Health Care System by Kai Nielsen 3 4 4
The Right to a Decent Minimum of Health Care by Allen E. Buchanan 3 5 0
Is There a Right to Health Care and, If So, What Does It Encompass?
by Norman Daniels 3 6 3
CONTENTS Á xi

C H A P T E R 1 2 Animal Welfare 3 7 1
Issue File: Background 3 7 2
Critical Thought—Using Animals To Test Consumer
Product s 3 7 4
Moral Theories 3 7 5
Critical Thought—Should We Experiment
On Orphaned Babies? 3 7 7
Quick Review 3 7 8
Moral Arguments 3 7 8
SUMMARY 3 7 9
KEY TERMS 3 8 0
REVIEW QUESTIONS 3 8 0
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS 3 8 0
FURTHER READING 3 8 0
ETHICAL DILEMMAS 3 8 1
R E A D I N G S
All Animals Are Equal by Peter Singer 3 8 4
The Case for Animal Rights by Tom Regan 3 9 4
Difficulties with the Strong Animal Rights Position
by Mary Anne Warren 4 0 1
The Case for the Use of Animals in Biomedical Research by Carl Cohen 4 0 7
How to Argue for (and Against) Ethical Veganism by Tristram McPherson 4 1 4
C H A P T E R 1 3 Environmental Ethics 4 2 9
Issue File: Background 4 3 0
Climate Change—How We Know It’s Real 4 3 2
Moral Theories 4 3 4
Quick Review 4 3 5
Moral Arguments 4 3 5
Critical Thought—Should Pandas Pay The Price? 4 3 6
SUMMARY 4 3 8
KEY TERMS 4 3 8
Á CONTENTSxii

REVIEW QUESTIONS 4 3 9
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS 4 3 9
FURTHER READING 4 3 9
ETHICAL DILEMMAS 4 4 0
R E A D I N G S
People or Penguins by William F. Baxter 4 4 2
It’s Not My Fault: Global Warming and Individual Moral Obligations by Walter
Sinnott-Armstrong 4 4 6
Are All Species Equal? by David Schmidtz 4 5 8
The Land Ethic by Aldo Leopold 4 6 5
C H A P T E R 1 4 Racism, Equality, and Discrimination 4 7 0
Issue File: Background 4 7 1
Critical Thought—White Privilege 4 7 4
Critical Thought—Are Legacy Admissions R acist? 4 7 9
Moral Theories 4 8 0
Critical Thought—Are Whites-Only Scholarships Unjust? 4 8 1
Quick Review 4 8 2
Moral Arguments 482
SUMMARY 484
KEY TERMS 485
REVIEW QUESTIONS 485
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS 486
FURTHER READING 486
ETHICAL DILEMMAS 4 8 6
R E A D I N G S
Racisms by Kwame Anthony Appiah 4 8 9
Racism: What It Is and What It Isn’t by Lawrence Blum 4 9 9
Dear White America by George Yancy 5 0 8
Uses and Abuses of the Discourse of White Privilege by Naomi Zack 5 1 1
The Case Against Affirmative Action by Louis P. Pojman 5 1 4
In Defense of Affirmative Action by Tom L. Beauchamp 5 2 6
CONTENTS Á xiii

C H A P T E R 1 5 Sexual Morality 5 3 6
Issue File: Background 5 3 6
Sexual Behavior 5 3 6
Vital Stat s—Sexual Behavior 5 3 7
Campus Sexual Assault 5 3 8
Critical Thought—Proving Sexual Assault 5 4 0
Moral Theories 5 4 1
Moral Arguments 5 4 2
Quick Review 5 4 4
SUMMARY 5 4 4
KEY TERMS 5 4 5
REVIEW QUESTIONS 5 4 5
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS 5 4 5
FURTHER READING 5 4 6
ETHICAL DILEMMAS 5 4 6
R E A D I N G S
Plain Sex by Alan H. Goldman 5 4 8
Sexual Morality by Roger Scruton 5 5 7
Why Shouldn’t Tommy and Jim Have Sex? A Defense of Homosexuality
by John Corvino 5 6 4
Seduction, Rape, and Coercion by Sarah Conly 5 7 1
Sex under Pressure: Jerks, Boorish Behavior, and Gender Hierarchy
by Scott A. Anderson 5 8 2
C H A P T E R 1 6 Free Speech on Campus 5 8 9
Issue File: Background 5 9 0
Critical Thought—Who Can Say The N-Word? 5 9 1
Microaggressions 5 9 3
Moral Theories 5 9 4
Critical Thought—Is Hate Speech Violence? 5 9 5
College Student s And Free Speech 5 9 6
Quick Review 5 9 7
Á CONTENTSxiv

CONTENTS Á xv
xv
Moral Arguments 5 9 7
SUMMARY 5 9 7
KEY TERMS 5 9 8
REVIEW QUESTIONS 5 9 8
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS 5 9 8
FURTHER READING 5 9 9
ETHICAL DILEMMAS 5 9 9
R E A D I N G S
Why It’s a Bad Idea to Tell Students Words Are Violence
by Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff 6 0 1
Restoring Free Speech on Campus by Geoffrey R. Stone and Will Creeley 6 0 5
Speech Codes and Expressive Harm by Andrew Altman 6 0 6
What “Snowflakes” Get Right About Free Speech by Ulrich Baer 6 1 5
The Progressive Ideas behind the Lack of Free Speech on Campus
by Wendy Kaminer 6 1 8
C H A P T E R 1 7 Drugs, Guns, and Personal Liberty 6 2 1
Issue File: Background 6 2 1
Drugs: Social Harms versus Personal Freedom 6 2 1
Critical Thought—Does Legalizing Medical Marijuana
Encourage Use Among Teenagers? 6 2 2
Diverse Views On Legalizing Marijuana 6 2 3
Gun Ownership: Security versus Individual Rights 6 2 4
Vital Stat s—Guns In The United States 6 2 5
Survey—Views Of U.S. Adult s On Gun Policy 6 2 6
Moral Theories 6 2 6
Moral Arguments 6 2 8
Quick Review 6 3 0
SUMMARY 6 3 1
KEY TERMS 6 3 1
REVIEW QUESTIONS 6 3 1

Á CONTENTSxvixvi
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS 6 3 2
FURTHER READING 6 3 2
ETHICAL DILEMMAS 6 3 2
R E A D I N G S
The Ethics of Addiction by Thomas Szasz 6 3 4
Against the Legalization of Drugs by James Q. Wilson 6 4 3
Gun Control by Hugh LaFollette 6 5 2
Political Philosophy and the Gun Control Debate: What Would Bentham,
Mills, and Nozick Have to Say? by Stacey Nguyen 6 6 3
C H A P T E R 1 8 Capital Punishment 6 6 6
Issue File: Background 6 6 6
Moral Theories 6 6 8
Critical Thought—The Moralit y Of Botched
Executions 6 7 0
Quick Review 6 7 2
Moral Arguments 6 7 3
Critical Thought—Different Cases,
Same Punishment 6 7 4
SUMMARY 6 7 5
KEY TERMS 6 7 6
REVIEW QUESTIONS 6 7 6
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS 6 7 6
FURTHER READING 6 7 6
ETHICAL DILEMMAS 6 7 7
R E A D I N G S
The Ultimate Punishment: A Defense by Ernest van den Haag 6 7 9
Justice, Civilization, and the Death Penalty: Answering van den Haag
by Jeffrey H. Reiman 6 8 4
The Case Against the Death Penalty by Hugo Adam Bedau 6 9 0
A Life for a Life by Igor Primoratz 6 9 8

CONTENTS Á xvii
C H A P T E R 1 9 Political Violence: War, Terrorism, and Torture 7 0 5
Issue File: Background 7 0 5
Critical Thought—Preemptive War On Iraq 7 0 8
Moral Theories 7 1 5
Moral Arguments 7 1 7
Quick Review 7 2 1
SUMMARY 7 2 1
KEY TERMS 7 2 2
REVIEW QUESTIONS 7 2 2
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS 7 2 2
FURTHER READING 7 2 3
ETHICAL DILEMMAS 7 2 3
R E A D I N G S
Reconciling Pacifists and Just War Theorists by James P. Sterba 7 2 6
Drones, Ethics, and the Armchair Soldier by John Kaag 7 3 5
Can Terrorism Be Morally Justified? by Stephen Nathanson 7 3 7
The Case for Torturing the Ticking Bomb Terrorist by Alan M. Dershowitz 7 4 5
My Tortured Decision by Ali Soufan 7 5 4
C H A P T E R 2 0 The Ethics of Immigration 7 5 6
Issue File: Background 7 5 6
Critical Thought—Deporting Children 7 6 0
Quick Review 7 6 0
Moral Theories 7 6 1
Critical Thought—Accepting Or Rejecting Refugees 7 6 1
Moral Arguments 7 6 2
SUMMARY 7 6 3
KEY TERMS 7 6 3
REVIEW QUESTIONS 7 6 3
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS 7 6 3
FURTHER READING 7 6 4
ETHICAL DILEMMAS 7 6 4

Á CONTENTSxviii
R E A D I N G S
The Morality of Migration by Seyla Benhabib 7 6 6
The Moral Dilemma of U.S. Immigration Policy Revisted: Open Borders vs. Social
Justice? by Stephen Macedo 7 6 8
Selecting Immigrants by David Miller 7 8 1
Immigration and Freedom of Association by Christopher Heath Wellman 7 8 7
Freedom of Association Is Not the Answer by Sarah Fine 8 0 8
C H A P T E R 2 1 Global Economic Justice 8 2 0
Issue File: Background 8 2 0
Moral Theories 8 2 2
Vital Stat s—The Planet’s Poor And Hungry 8 2 2
Moral Arguments 8 2 3
Quick Review 8 2 5
SUMMARY 8 2 6
KEY TERMS 8 2 6
REVIEW QUESTIONS 8 2 6
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS 8 2 6
FURTHER READING 8 2 7
ETHICAL DILEMMAS 8 2 7
R E A D I N G S
Famine, Affluence, and Morality by Peter Singer 8 2 9
Lifeboat Ethics by Garrett Hardin 8 3 5
A Critique of Lifeboat Ethics by William W. Murdoch and Allan Oaten 8 4 1
The Case for Aid by Jeffrey Sachs 8 5 0
G L O S S A R Y G – 1
A N S W E R S T O A R G U M E N T E X E R C I S E S A – 1
N O T E S N – 1
I N D E X I – 1

P R E F A C E
‘’
This fifth edition of Doing Ethics contains the most
extensive additions, updates, and improvements
of any previous version. The aims that have shaped
this text from the beginning have not changed: to
help students (1) see why ethics matters to society
and to themselves; (2) understand core concepts
(theories, principles, values, virtues, and the like);
(3) become familiar with the background (scientific,
legal, and otherwise) of contemporary moral prob-
lems; and (4) know how to apply critical reasoning
to those problems— to assess moral judgments and
principles, construct and evaluate moral arguments,
and apply and critique moral theories. This book,
then, tries hard to provide the strongest possible
support to teachers of applied ethics who want stu-
dents, above all, to think for themselves and compe-
tently do what is often required of morally mature
persons— that is, to do ethics.
These goals are reflected in the book’s extensive
introductions to concepts, cases, and issues; its
large collection of readings and exercises; and its
chapter- by- chapter coverage of moral reasoning—
perhaps the most thorough introduction to these
skills available in an applied ethics text. This latter
theme gets systematic treatment in five chapters,
threads prominently throughout all the others,
and is reinforced everywhere by “Critical Thought”
text boxes prompting students to apply critical
thinking to real debates and cases. The point of all
this is to help students not just study ethics but to
become fully involved in the ethical enterprise and
the moral life.
NEW FEATURES
• A new chapter on campus free speech, hate
speech, speech codes, speech and violence,
and news- making conflicts: Chapter 16—Free
Speech on Campus. It includes five readings by
notable free speech theorists and commentators.
• A new stand- alone chapter on an increasingly
influential approach to ethics: Chapter 8—
Feminist Ethics and the Ethics of Care. It
includes two new readings by important
theorists in the field.
• A new chapter on the justice of health care—
who should get it, who should supply it, and
who should pay for it: Chapter 11—Delivering
Health Care.
• A new chapter on immigration, immigration
policy, and contemporary conflicts over the
treatment of immigrants: Chapter 20—The Eth-
ics of Immigration. It includes recent research
on some widely believed but erroneous ideas
about U.S. immigration, as well as five readings
that represent contrasting perspectives on the
subject.
• A substantially revised chapter on social
equality, now covering race, racism, racial
prejudice, discrimination, white privilege,
and affirmative action: Chapter 14—Racism,
Equality, and Discrimination. It includes
four new readings on racism and inequality
by prominent participants in the ongoing
debates.
xix

xx Á PREFACE
• A revised chapter on sexuality, now including
examinations not only of sexual behavior but
also of campus sexual assault, rape, harass-
ment, and hookup culture: Chapter 15— Sexual
Morality.
• A greatly expanded chapter on personal liberty,
now including discussions and readings on
using drugs and owning guns: Chapter 17—
Drugs, Guns, and Personal Liberty.
• New sections in Chapter 4—The Power of
Moral Theories, on social contract theory and
one called “Devising a Coherent Moral Theory”
that shows by example how one might develop
a plausible theory of morality.
• A new focus on climate change in the envi-
ronmental ethics chapter and more emphasis
on torture and drone warfare in the political
violence chapter.
• Eleven new readings by women writers.
• Thirty- seven new readings in all to supplement
the already extensive collection of essays.
• New pedagogical elements: the inclusion of key
terms at the end of each chapter; the addition
of end- of- chapter review and discussion ques-
tions; and several new “Cases for Analysis”—
now called “Ethical Dilemmas.”
ORGANIZATION
Part 1 (Fundamentals) prepares students for the tasks
enumerated above. Chapter 1 explains why ethics is
important and why thinking critically about ethical
issues is essential to the examined life. It introduces
the field of moral philosophy, defines and illustrates
basic terminology, clarifies the connection between
religion and morality, and explains why moral rea-
soning is crucial to moral maturity and personal
freedom. Chapter 2 investigates a favorite doctrine
of undergraduates— ethical relativism— and exam-
ines its distant cousin, emotivism.
Part 2 (Moral Reasoning) consists of Chapters 3
and 4. Chapter 3 starts by reassuring students that
moral reasoning is neither alien nor difficult but
is simply ordinary critical reasoning applied to
ethics. They’ve seen this kind of reasoning before
and done it before. Thus, the chapter focuses on
identifying, devising, diagramming, and evaluat-
ing moral arguments and encourages practice and
competence in finding implied premises, testing
moral premises, assessing nonmoral premises, and
dealing with common argument fallacies.
Chapter 4 explains how moral theories work
and how they relate to other important elements
in moral experience: considered judgments, moral
arguments, moral principles and rules, and cases
and issues. It reviews major theories and shows how
students can evaluate them using plausible criteria.
Part 3 (Theories of Morality, Chapters 5–8) cov-
ers key theories in depth— utilitarianism, ethical
egoism, social contract theory, Kant’s theory, nat-
ural law theory, virtue ethics, feminist ethics, and
the ethics of care. Students see how each theory is
applied to moral issues and how their strengths and
weaknesses are revealed by applying the criteria of
evaluation.
In Part 4 (Ethical Issues), each of thirteen chap-
ters explores a timely moral issue through discus-
sion and relevant readings: abortion, euthanasia
and physician- assisted suicide, health care, animal
welfare, environmental ethics, racism and equality,
sexual morality, free speech on campus, drug use,
gun ownership, capital punishment, political vio-
lence, terrorism, torture, immigration, and global
economic justice. Every chapter supplies legal,
scientific, and other background information on
the issue; discusses how major theories have been
applied to the problem; examines arguments that
have been used in the debate; and includes addi-
tional cases for analysis with questions. The read-
ings are a mix of well- known essays and surprising
new voices, both classic and contemporary.

xxiPREFACE Á
PEDAGOGICAL FEATURES
In addition to “Critical Thought” boxes and “Ethi-
cal Dilemmas,” the end- of- chapter questions, and
the key terms, there are other pedagogical devices:
• “Quick Review” boxes that reiterate key points
or terms mentioned in previous pages
• Text boxes that discuss additional topics or
issues related to main chapter material
• Chapter summaries
• Suggestions for further reading for each issues
chapter
• Glossary
RESOURCES
This Fifth Edition is accompanied by InQuizi-
tive, Norton’s award- winning formative, adaptive
online quizzing program. InQuizitive activities,
written by Dan Lowe of University of Colorado
Boulder, motivate students to learn the core con-
cepts and theories of moral reasoning so that they’re
prepared to think critically about ethical issues.
The text is also supported by a full test bank, lecture
slides, and a coursepack of assignable quizzes and
discussion prompts that loads into most learning
management systems. Access these resources at
digital.wwnorton.com/doingethics5.
EBOOK
Norton Ebooks give students and instructors an
enhanced reading experience at a fraction of the
cost of a print textbook. Students are able to have
an active reading experience and can take notes,
bookmark, search, highlight, and even read offline.
As an instructor, you can even add your own notes
for students to see as they read the text. Norton
Ebooks can be viewed on— and synced among— all
computers and mobile devices. Access the ebook
for Doing Ethics at digital.wwnorton.com/
doingethics5.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The silent partners in this venture are the many
reviewers who helped in countless ways to make
the book better. They include Marshall Abrams
(University of Alabama at Birmingham), Harry
Adams (Prairie View A&M University), Alex Aguado
(University of North Alabama), Edwin Aiman
(University of Houston), Daniel Alvarez (Colorado
State University), Peter Amato (Drexel Univer-
sity), Robert Bass (Coastal Carolina University),
Ken Beals (Mary Baldwin College), Helen Becker
(Shepherd University), Paul Bloomfield (Univer-
sity of Connecticut), Robyn Bluhm (Old Dominion
University), Vanda Bozicevic (Bergen Community
College), Brent Braga (Northland Community and
Technical College), Joy Branch (Southern Union
State Community College), Barbara A. Brown
(Community College of Allegheny County),
Mark Raymond Brown (University of Ottawa),
David C. Burris (Arizona Western College), Mat-
thew Burstein (Washington and Lee University),
Gabriel R. Camacho (El Paso Community College),
Jay Campbell (St. Louis Community College at Mer-
amec), Kenneth Carlson (Northwest Iowa Commu-
nity College), Jeffrey Carr (Illinois State University),
Alan Clark (Del Mar College), Andrew J. Cohen
(Georgia State University), Elliot D. Cohen (Indian
River State College), Robert Colter (Centre Col-
lege), Timothy Conn (Sierra College), Guy Crain
(University of Oklahoma), Sharon Crasnow (Norco
College), Kelso Cratsley (University of Massachu-
setts, Boston), George Cronk (Bergen Community
College), Kevin DeCoux (Minnesota West Com-
munity and Technical College), Lara Denis (Agnes
Scott College), Steve Dickerson (South Puget Sound
Community College), Nicholas Diehl (Sacramento
City College), Robin S. Dillon (Lehigh University),
Peter Dlugos (Bergen Community College), Matt
Drabek (University of Iowa), David Drebushenko
(University of Southern Indiana), Clint Dunagan
(Northwest Vista College), Paul Eckstein (Bergen
Community College), Andrew Fiala (California

http://www.digital.wwnorton.com/doingethics5

xxii Á PREFACE
State University, Fresno), Stephen Finlay (Univer-
sity of Southern California), Matthew Fitzsimmons
(University of North Alabama), Tammie Foltz (Des
Moines Area Community College), Tim Fout (Uni-
versity of Louisville), Dimitria Gatzia (University
of Akron), Candace Gauthier (University of North
Carolina, Wilmington), Mark Greene (University
of Delaware), Kevin Guilfoy (Carroll University),
Katherine Guin (The College at Brockport: SUNY),
Meredith Gunning (University of Massachusetts,
Boston), Don Habibi (University of North Carolina,
Wilmington), Barbara M. Hands (University of
North Carolina, Greensboro), Craig Hanks (Texas
State University), Jane Haproff (Sierra College), Ed
Harris (Texas A&M University), Carol Hay (Univer-
sity of Massachusetts Lowell), Blake Heffner (Rari-
tan Valley Community College), Marko Hilgersom
(Lethbridge Community College), Andrew J. Hill
(St. Philip’s College), John Holder III (Pensacola
Junior College), Mark Hollifield (Clayton College
and State University), Margaret Houck (University
of South Carolina), Michael Howard (University of
Maine, Orono), Frances Howard- Snyder (Western
Washington University), Kenneth Howarth (Mer-
cer County Community College), Louis F. Howe, Jr.
(Naugatuck Valley Community College), Kyle Hub-
bard (Saint Anselm College), Robert Hull (Western
Virginia Wesleyan College), Amy Jeffers (Owens
Community College), Vicki Jenkins (Ivy Tech
Community College, Timothy Jessen (Ivy Tech
Community College, Bloomington), John John-
ston (College of the Redwoods), Marc Jolley (Mer-
cer University), Frederik Kaufman (Ithaca College),
Thomas D. Kennedy (Berry College), W. Glenn
Kirkconnell (Santa Fe College), Donald Knud-
sen (Montgomery County Community College),
Gilbert Kohler (Shawnee Community College),
Thomas Larson (Saint Anselm College), Matt
Lawrence (Long Beach City College), Clayton
Littlejohn (Southern Methodist University), Jes-
sica Logue (University of Portland), Ian D. MacK-
innon (The University of Akron), Tim Madigan
(St. John Fisher College), Ernâni Magalhães (West
Virginia University), Daniel Malotky (Greens-
boro College), Luke Manning (Auburn Univer-
sity), Ron Martin (Lynchburg College), Michael
McKeon (Barry University), Katherine Mendis
(Hunter College, CUNY), Joshua Mills- Knutsen
(Indiana University Southeast), Michael Monge
(Long Beach City College), Louisa Lee Moon (Mira
Costa College), Eric Moore (Longwood Univer-
sity), Jon S. Moran (Southwest Missouri State Uni-
versity), Dale Murray (Virginia Commonwealth
University), Elizabeth Murray (Loyola Marymount
University), Richard Musselwhite (North Carolina
Central University), Thomas Nadelhoffer (Dick-
inson College), Jay Newhard (East Carolina Uni-
versity), Marcella Norling (Orange Coast College),
Charles L. North (Southern New Hampshire Uni-
versity), Robert F. O’Connor (Texas State Univer-
sity), Jeffrey P. Ogle (Metropolitan State University
of Denver), Don Olive (Roane State Community
College), Leonard Olson (California State Univer-
sity, Fresno), Jessica Payson (Bryn Mawr College),
Gregory E. Pence (University of Alabama), Donald
Petkus (Indiana University School of Public and
Environmental Affairs), Trisha Philips (Mississippi
State University), Thomas M. Powers (University of
Delaware), Marjorie Price (University of Alabama),
Netty Provost (Indiana University, Kokomo), Elisa
Rapaport (Molloy College), Michael Redmond
(Bergen Community College), Daniel Regan (Vil-
lanova University), Joseph J. Rogers (University of
Texas, San Antonio), John Returra (Lackawanna
College), Robert M. Seltzer (Western Illinois Uni-
versity), Edward Sherline (University of Wyoming),
Aeon J. Skoble (Bridgewater Community College),
Eric Snider (Lansing Community College), Eric Sot-
nak (University of Akron), Susanne Sreedhar (Bos-
ton University), Piers H.G. Stephens (University of
Georgia), Grant Sterling (Eastern Illinois Univer-
sity), John Stilwell (University of Texas at Dallas),
Tyler Suggs (Virginia Tech), Michele Svatos (East-
field College), David Svolba (Fitchburg State Univer-
sity), Allen Thompson (Virginia Commonwealth
University), Peter B. Trumbull (Madison College),

xxiiiPREFACE Á
Donald Turner (Nashville State Community Col-
lege), Julie C. Van Camp (California State Univer-
sity, Long Beach), Michelle Rehwinkel Vasilinda
(Tallahassee Community College), Kris Vigneron
(Columbus State Community College), Christine
Vitrano (Brooklyn College, CUNY), Mark Vopat
(Youngstown State University), Matt Waldschla-
gel (University of North Carolina, Wilmington),
Steve Wall (Hillsborough Community College), Bill
Warnken (Granite State College), Jamie Carlin Wat-
son (Young Harris College), Rivka Weinberg (Scripps
College), Cheryl Wertheimer (Butler Community
College), Monique Whitaker (Hunter College,
CUNY), Phillip Wiebe (Trinity Western University),
Jonathan Wight (University of Richmond), John
Yanovitch (Molloy College), Steven Zusman (Wau-
bonsee Community College), and Matt Zwolinski
(University of San Diego). Thank you all.

P A R T
1
‘’
Fundamentals

C H A P T E R 1
‘’
Ethics and the Examined Life
3
all ethical concepts are irrelevant or empty, you
assume a particular view— a theory, in the broadest
sense—about morality and its place in your life. If
at some point you are intellectually brave enough
to wonder whether your moral beliefs rest on some
coherent supporting considerations, you will see
that you cannot even begin to sort out such con-
siderations without— again— doing ethics. In any
case, in your life you must deal with the rest of the
world, which turns on moral conflict and resolu-
tion, moral decision and debate.
What is at stake when we do ethics? In an
important sense, the answer is everything we hold
dear. Ethics is concerned with values— specifically,
moral values. Through the sifting and weighing of
moral values we determine what the most impor-
tant things are in our lives, what is worth living for,
and what is worth dying for. We decide what is the
greatest good, what goals we should pursue in life,
what virtues we should cultivate, what duties we
should or should not fulfill, what value we should
put on human life, and what pain and perils we
should be willing to endure for notions such as the
common good, justice, and rights.
Does it matter whether the state executes a
criminal who has the mental capacity of a ten-
year- old? Does it matter who actually writes the
term paper you turn in and represent as your own?
Does it matter whether we can easily save a drown-
ing child but casually decide not to? Does it matter
whether young girls in Africa undergo painful geni-
tal mutilation for reasons of custom or religion? Do
these actions and a million others just as contro-
versial matter at all? Most of us— regardless of our
Ethics, or moral philosophy, is the philosophi-
cal study of morality. Morality refers to beliefs
concerning right and wrong, good and bad—
beliefs that can include judgments, values, rules,
principles, and theories. These beliefs help guide
our actions, define our values, and give us reasons
for being the persons we are. (Ethical and moral,
the adjective forms, are often used to mean
simply “having to do with morality,” and ethics
and morality are sometimes used to refer to the
moral norms of a specific group or individual, as
in “Greek ethics” or “Russell’s morality.”) Eth-
ics, then, addresses the powerful question that
Socrates formulated twenty- four hundred years
ago: how ought we to live?
The scope and continued relevance of this
query suggest something compelling about ethics:
you cannot escape it. You cannot run away from all
the choices, feelings, and actions that accompany
ideas about right and wrong, good and bad— ideas
that persist in your culture and in your mind. After
all, for much of your life, you have been assimilat-
ing, modifying, or rejecting the ethical norms you
inherited from your family, community, and soci-
ety. Unless you are very unusual, from time to time
you deliberate about the rightness or wrongness of
actions, embrace or reject particular moral prin-
ciples or codes, judge the goodness of your char-
acter or intentions (or someone else’s), perhaps
even question (and agonize over) the soundness
of your own moral outlook when it conflicts with
that of others. In other words, you are involved
in ethics— you do ethics. Even if you try to remove
yourself from the ethical realm by insisting that

4 Á PART 1: FUNDAMENTALS
opinion on these issues— would say that they mat-
ter a great deal. If they matter, then ethics matters,
because these are ethical concerns requiring careful
reflection using concepts and reasoning peculiar to
ethics.
But even though ethics is inescapable and
important, you are still free to take the easy way
out, and many people do. You are free not to think
too deeply or too systematically about ethical con-
cerns. You can simply embrace the moral beliefs
and norms given to you by your family and your
society. You can accept them without question
or serious examination. In other words, you can
try not to do ethics. This approach can be simple
and painless— at least for a while— but it has some
drawbacks.
First, it undermines your personal freedom. If
you accept and never question the moral beliefs
handed to you by your culture, then those beliefs are
not really yours— and they, not you, control the path
you take in life. Only if you critically examine these
beliefs yourself and decide for yourself whether they
have merit will they be truly yours. Only then will
you be in charge of your own choices and actions.
Second, the no-questions-asked approach inc-
reases the chances that your responses to moral
dilemmas or contradictions will be incomplete,
confused, or mistaken. Sometimes in real life moral
codes or rules do not fit the situations at hand,
or moral principles conflict with one another, or
entirely new circumstances are not covered by any
moral policy at all. Solving these problems requires
something that a hand- me- down morality does not
include: the intellectual tools to critically evaluate
(and reevaluate) existing moral beliefs.
Third, if there is such a thing as intellectual
moral growth, you are unlikely to find it on the safe
route. To not do ethics is to stay locked in a kind of
intellectual limbo, where exploration in ethics and
personal moral progress are barely possible.
The philosopher Paul Taylor suggests that there
is yet another risk in taking the easy road. If some-
one blindly embraces the morality bequeathed
to him by his society, he may very well be a fine
embodiment of the rules of his culture and accept
them with certainty. But he will lack the ability to
defend his beliefs by rational argument against crit-
icism. What happens when he encounters others
who also have very strong beliefs that contradict
his? “He will feel lost and bewildered,” Taylor says,
and his confusion might leave him disillusioned
about morality. “Unable to give an objective, rea-
soned justification for his own convictions, he may
turn from dogmatic certainty to total skepticism.
And from total skepticism it is but a short step to
an ‘amoral’ life. . . . Thus the person who begins by
accepting moral beliefs blindly can end up denying
all morality.”1
There are other easy roads— roads that also
bypass critical and thoughtful scrutiny of morality.
We can describe most of them as various forms of
subjectivism, a topic that we examine closely in the
next chapter. You may decide, for example, that
you can establish all your moral beliefs by simply
consulting your feelings. In situations calling for
moral judgments, you let your emotions be your
guide. If it feels right, it is right. Alternatively, you
may come to believe that moral realities are relative
to each person, a view known as subjective relativ-
ism (also covered in the next chapter). That is, you
think that what a person believes or approves of
determines the rightness or wrongness of actions. If
you believe that abortion is wrong, then it is wrong.
If you believe it is right, then it is right.
But these facile roads through ethical terrain are
no better than blindly accepting existing norms.
Even if you want to take the subjectivist route,
you still need to examine it critically to see if there
are good reasons for choosing it— otherwise your
choice is arbitrary and therefore not really yours.
And unless you thoughtfully consider the mer-
its of moral beliefs (including subjectivist beliefs),
your chances of being wrong about them are
substantial.
Ethics does not give us a royal road to moral
truth. Instead, it shows us how to ask critical

CHAPTER 1: ETHiCS AND THE ExAMiNED LiFE Á 5
questions about morality and systematically seek
answers supported by good reasons. This is a tall
order because, as we have seen, many of the ques-
tions in ethics are among the toughest we can ever
ask— and among the most important in life.
THE ETHICAL LANDSCAPE
The domain of ethics is large, divided into sev-
eral areas of investigation and cordoned off from
related subjects. So let us map the territory care-
fully. As the term moral philosophy suggests, ethics
is a branch of philosophy. A very rough character-
ization of philosophy is the systematic use of critical
reasoning to answer the most fundamental ques-
tions in life. Moral philosophy, obviously, tries to
answer the fundamental questions of morality. The
other major branches of philosophy address other
basic questions; these branches are logic (the study
of correct reasoning), metaphysics (the study of the
fundamental nature of reality), and epistemology
(the study of knowledge). As a division of philoso-
phy, ethics does its work primarily through criti-
cal reasoning: the careful, systematic evaluation of
statements, or claims. Critical reasoning is a process
used in all fields of study, not just in ethics. The main
components of this process are the evaluation of log-
ical arguments and the careful analysis of concepts.
Science also studies morality, but not in the
way that moral philosophy does. Its approach is
known as descriptive ethics— the scientific study
of moral beliefs and practices. Its aim is to describe
and explain how people actually behave and think
when dealing with moral issues and concepts. This
kind of empirical research is usually conducted
by sociologists, anthropologists, and psycholo-
gists. In contrast, the focus of moral philosophy is
not what people actually believe and do, but what
they should believe and do. The point of moral phi-
losophy is to determine what actions are right (or
wrong) and what things are good (or bad).
Philosophers distinguish three major divisions
in ethics, each one representing a different way
to approach the subject. The first division is
normative ethics— the study of the principles,
rules, or theories that guide our actions and judg-
ments. (The word normative refers to norms, or
standards, of judgment— in this case, norms for
judging rightness and goodness.) The ultimate pur-
pose of doing normative ethics is to try to establish
the soundness of moral norms, especially the norms
embodied in a comprehensive moral system, or
moral theory. We do normative ethics when we use
critical reasoning to demonstrate that a moral prin-
ciple is justified, or that a professional code of con-
duct is contradictory, or that one proposed moral
theory is better than another, or that a person’s
motive is good. Should the rightness of actions be
judged by their consequences? Is happiness the
greatest good in life? Is utilitarianism a good moral
theory? Such questions are the preoccupation of
normative ethics.
Another major division of ethics is
metaethics— the study of the meaning and logi-
cal structure of moral beliefs. It asks not whether
an action is right or whether a person’s character is
good. It takes a step back from these concerns and
asks more fundamental questions about them: What
does it mean for an action to be right? Is good the
same thing as desirable? How can a moral principle
be justified? Is there such a thing as moral truth? To
do normative ethics, we must assume certain things
about the meaning of moral terms and the logical
relationships among them. But the job of metaeth-
ics is to question all these assumptions, to see if they
really make sense.
Finally, there is applied ethics— the applica-
tion of moral norms to specific moral issues or cases,
particularly those in a profession such as medicine
or law. Applied ethics in these fields goes under
names such as medical ethics, journalistic ethics,
and business ethics. In applied ethics we study the
results derived from applying a moral principle or
theory to specific circumstances. The purpose of
the exercise is to learn something important about
either the moral characteristics of the situation or

6 Á PART 1: FUNDAMENTALS
the adequacy of the moral norms. Did the doctor
do right in performing that abortion? Is it morally
permissible for scientists to perform experiments
on people without their consent? Was it right for
the journalist to distort her reporting to aid a par-
ticular side in the war? Questions like these drive
the search for answers in applied ethics.
In every division of ethics, we must be careful to
distinguish between values and obligations. Some-
times we may be interested in concepts or judg-
ments of value— that is, about what is morally good,
bad, blameworthy, or praiseworthy. We properly
use these kinds of terms to refer mostly to persons,
character traits, motives, and intentions. We may
say “She is a good person” or “He is to blame for
that tragedy.” At other times, we may be inter-
ested in concepts or judgments of obligation— that
is, about what is obligatory, or a duty, or what we
should or ought to do. We use these terms to refer
to actions. We may say “She has a duty to tell the
truth” or “What he did was wrong.”
When we talk about value in the sense just
described, we mean moral value. If she is a good per-
son, she is good in the moral sense. But we can also
talk about nonmoral value. We can say that things
such as televisions, rockets, experiences, and works
of art (things other than persons, intentions, and
so forth) are good, but we mean “good” only in a
nonmoral way. It makes no sense to assert that tele-
visions or rockets in themselves are morally good
or bad. Perhaps a rocket could be used to perform
an action that is morally wrong. In that case, the
action would be immoral, while the rocket itself
would still have only nonmoral value.
Many things in life have value for us, but they
are not necessarily valuable in the same way. Some
things are valuable because they are a means to
something else. We might say that gasoline is
good because it is a means to make a gas- powered
vehicle work, or that a pen is good because it can
be used to write a letter. Such things are said to be
instrumentally, or extrinsically, valuable—
they are valuable as a means to something else.
Some things, however, are valuable for their own
sakes. They are valuable simply because they are
what they are, without being a means to something
else. Things that have been regarded as valuable in
themselves include happiness, pleasure, virtue, and
beauty. These things are said to be intrinsically
valuable— they are valuable in themselves.
THE ELEMENTS OF ETHICS
We all do ethics, and we all have a general sense of
what is involved. But we can still ask, What are the
elements of ethics that make it the peculiar enter-
prise that it is? We can include at least the follow-
ing factors:
The Preeminence of Reason
Doing ethics typically involves grappling with our
feelings, taking into account the facts of the situa-
tion (including our own observations and relevant
knowledge), and trying to understand the ideas
that bear on the case. But above all, it involves, even
requires, critical reasoning— the consideration of
reasons for whatever statements (moral or other-
wise) are in question. Whatever our view on moral
issues and whatever moral outlook we subscribe to,
our commonsense moral experience suggests that
if a moral judgment is to be worthy of acceptance, it
must be supported by good reasons, and our delib-
erations on the issue must include a consideration
of those reasons.
The backbone of critical reasoning generally, and
moral reasoning in particular, is logical argument.
This kind of argument— not the angry- exchange
type— consists of a statement to be supported (the
assertion to be proved, the conclusion) and the
statements that do the supporting (the reasons
for believing the statement, the premises). With
such arguments, we try to show that a moral judg-
ment is or is not justified, that a moral principle
is or is not sound, that an action is or is not mor-
ally permissible, or that a moral theory is or is not
plausible.

CHAPTER 1: ETHiCS AND THE ExAMiNED LiFE Á 7
that applies in one situation must apply in all other
situations that are relevantly similar. If you say, for
example, that lying is wrong in a particular situa-
tion, then you implicitly agree that lying is wrong
for anyone in relevantly similar situations. If you
say that killing in self- defense is morally permis-
sible, then you say in effect that killing in self-
defense is permissible for everyone in relevantly
similar situations. It cannot be the case that an
action performed by A is wrong while the same
action performed by B in relevantly similar cir-
cumstances is right. It cannot be the case that the
moral judgments formed in these two situations
must differ just because two different people are
involved.
This point about universalizability also applies
to reasons used to support moral judgments. If rea-
sons apply in a specific case, then those reasons also
apply in all relevantly similar cases. It cannot be
true that reasons that apply in a specific case do not
apply to other cases that are similar in all relevant
respects.
The Principle of Impartiality
From the moral point of view, all persons are consid-
ered equal and should be treated accordingly. This
sense of impartiality is implied in all moral state-
ments. It means that the welfare and interests of
each individual should be given the same weight as
the welfare and interests of all others. Unless there
is a morally relevant difference between people, we
should treat them the same: we must treat equals
equally. We would think it outrageous for a moral
rule to say something like “Everyone must refrain
from stealing food in grocery stores— except for
Mr. X, who may steal all he wants.” Imagine that
there is no morally relevant reason for making
this exception for stealing food; Mr. X is exempted
merely because, say, he is a celebrity known for
outrageous behavior. We not only would object to
this rule but might even begin to wonder if it was
a genuine moral rule at all, because it lacks impar-
tiality. Similarly, we would reject a moral rule that
Our use of critical reasoning and argument helps
us keep our feelings about moral issues in perspective.
Feelings are an important part of our moral experience.
They make empathy possible, which gives us a deeper
understanding of the human impact of moral norms.
They can also serve as internal alarm bells, warning us
of the possibility of injustice, suffering, and wrongdo-
ing. But they are unreliable guides to moral truth. They
may simply reflect our own emotional needs, preju-
dices, upbringing, culture, and self- interests. Careful
reasoning, however, can inform our feelings and help
us decide moral questions on their merits.
The Universal Perspective
Logic requires that moral norms and judgments fol-
low the principle of universalizability— the idea that
a moral statement (a principle, rule, or judgment)
’ QUICK REVIEW
ethics (or moral philosophy)—The philosophical
study of morality.
morality— Beliefs concerning right and wrong,
good and bad; they can include judgments,
values, rules, principles, and theories.
descriptive ethics— The scientific study of moral
beliefs and practices.
normative ethics— The study of the principles,
rules, or theories that guide our actions and
judgments.
metaethics— The study of the meaning and logi-
cal structure of moral beliefs.
applied ethics— The application of moral norms
to specific moral issues or cases, particularly
those in a profession such as medicine or law.
instrumentally (or extrinsically) valuable—
Valuable as a means to something else.
intrinsically valuable— Valuable in itself, for its
own sake.

8 Á PART 1: FUNDAMENTALS
says something like “Everyone is entitled to basic
human rights— except Native Americans.” Such
a rule would be a prime example of discrimina-
tion based on race. We can see this blatant partial-
ity best if we ask what morally relevant difference
there is between Native Americans and everyone
else. Differences in income, social status, skin color,
ancestry, and the like are not morally relevant.
Apparently there are no morally relevant differ-
ences. Because there are none, we must conclude
that the rule sanctions unfair discrimination.
We must keep in mind, however, that some-
times there are good reasons for treating someone
differently. Imagine a hospital that generally gives
equal care to patients, treating equals equally. But
suppose a patient comes to the hospital in an ambu-
lance because she has had a heart attack and will die
without immediate care. The hospital staff responds
quickly, giving her faster and more sophisticated
care than other patients receive. The situation is
a matter of life and death— a good reason for not
treating everyone the same and for providing the
heart attack patient with special consideration. This
instance of discrimination is justified.
The Dominance of Moral Norms
Not all norms are moral norms. There are legal
norms (laws, statutes), aesthetic norms (for judging
artistic creations), prudential norms (practical con-
siderations of self- interest), and others. Moral norms
seem to stand out from all these in an interesting
way: they dominate. Whenever moral principles
or values conflict in some way with nonmoral prin-
ciples or values, the moral considerations usually
override the others. Moral considerations seem more
important, more critical, or more weighty. A princi-
ple of prudence such as “Never help a stranger” may
be well justified, but it must yield to any moral prin-
ciple that contradicts it, such as “Help a stranger in
an emergency if you can do so without endanger-
ing yourself.” An aesthetic norm that somehow
involved violating a moral principle would have to
take a backseat to the moral considerations. A law
that conflicted with a moral principle would be
suspect, and the latter would have to prevail over
the former. Ultimately the justification for civil dis-
obedience is that specific laws conflict with moral
norms and are therefore invalid. If we judge a law to
be bad, we usually do so on moral grounds.
RELIGION AND MORALITY
Many people believe that morality and religion are
inseparable— that religion is the source or basis of
morality and that moral precepts are simply what
God says should be done. This view is not at all sur-
prising, because all religions imply or assert a per-
spective on morality. The three great religions in
the Western tradition— Christianity, Judaism, and
Islam— provide their believers with commandments
or principles of conduct that are thought to constitute
the moral law, the essence of morality. For their mil-
lions of adherents, the moral law is the will of God,
and the will of God is the moral law. In the West, at
least, the powerful imprint of religion is evident in
secular laws and in the private morality of believers
and unbelievers alike. Secular systems of morality—
for example, those of the ancient Greek philosophers,
Immanuel Kant, the utilitarians, and others— have
of course left their mark on Western ethics. But they
have not moved the millions who think that moral-
ity is a product exclusively of religion.
So what is the relationship between religion and
morality? For our purposes, we should break this
question into two parts: (1) What is the relation-
ship between religion and ethics (the philosophical
study of morality)? and (2) What is the relationship
between religion and morality (beliefs about right
and wrong)? The first question asks about how reli-
gion relates to the kind of investigation we conduct
in this book— the use of experience and critical
reasoning to study morality. The key point about
the relationship is that whatever your views on
religion and morality, an open- minded expedition
into ethics is more useful and empowering than
you may realize, especially now, at the beginning

CHAPTER 1: ETHiCS AND THE ExAMiNED LiFE Á 9
of your journey into moral philosophy. You may
believe, for example, that God determines what is
right and wrong, so there is no need to apply critical
reasoning to morality— you just need to know what
God says. But this judgment— and similar dismiss-
als of ethics— would be premature, as we will see.
Believers Need Moral Reasoning
It is difficult— perhaps impossible— for most people
to avoid using moral reasoning. Religious people
are no exception. One reason is that religious
moral codes (such as the Ten Commandments)
and other major religious rules of conduct are usu-
ally vague, laying out general principles that may
be difficult to apply to specific cases. (Secular moral
codes have the same disadvantage.) For example,
we may be commanded to love our neighbor, but
what neighbors are included— people of a differ-
ent religion? people who denounce our religion?
the gay or lesbian couple? those who steal from us?
the convicted child molester next door? the drug
dealers on the corner? the woman who got an abor-
tion? Also, what does loving our neighbor demand
of us? How does love require us to behave toward
the drug dealers, the gay couple, or the person who
denounces our religion? If our terminally ill neigh-
bor asks us in the name of love to help him kill
himself, what should we do? Does love require us
to kill him— or to refrain from killing him? And, of
course, commandments can conflict— as when, for
example, the only way to avoid killing an innocent
person is to tell a lie, or the only way to save the life
of one person is to kill another. All these situations
force the believer to interpret religious directives,
to try to apply general rules to specific cases, to
draw out the implications of particular views— in
other words, to do ethics.
When Conflicts Arise, Ethics Steps In
Very often moral contradictions or inconsistencies
confront the religious believer, and only moral rea-
soning can help resolve them. Believers sometimes
disagree with their religious leaders on moral issues.
Adherents of one religious tradition may disagree
with those from another tradition on whether an
act is right or wrong. Sincere devotees in a religious
tradition may wonder if its moral teachings make
sense. In all such cases, intelligent resolution of the
conflict of moral claims can be achieved only by
applying a neutral standard that helps sort out the
competing viewpoints. Moral philosophy supplies
the neutral standard in the form of critical think-
ing, well- made arguments, and careful analysis. No
wonder then that many great religious minds—
Aquinas, Leibniz, Descartes, Kant, Maimonides,
Averroës, and others— have relied on reason to
examine the nature of morality. In fact, countless
theists have regarded reason as a gift from God that
enables human beings to grasp the truths of sci-
ence, life, and morality.
Moral Philosophy Enables Productive
Discourse
Any fruitful discussions about morality undertaken
between people from different religious traditions
or between believers and nonbelievers will require
a common set of ethical concepts and a shared pro-
cedure for deciding issues and making judgments.
Ethics provides these tools. Without them, conver-
sations will resolve nothing, and participants will
learn little. Without them, people will talk past
each other, appealing only to their own religious
views. Furthermore, in a pluralistic society, most
of the public discussions about important moral
issues take place in a context of shared values such
as justice, fairness, equality, and tolerance. Just as
important, they also occur according to an unwrit-
ten understanding that (1) moral positions should
be explained, (2) claims should be supported by
reasons, and (3) reasoning should be judged by
common rational standards. These skills, of course,
are at the heart of ethics.
Now consider the second question introduced
above: What is the relationship between religion
and morality? For many people, the most interest-
ing query about the relationship between religion

10 Á PART 1: FUNDAMENTALS
and morality is this: Is God the maker of morality?
That is, is God the author of the moral law? Those
who answer yes are endorsing a theory of morality
known as the divine command theory. It says that
right actions are those that are willed by God, that
God literally defines right and wrong. Something
is right or good only because God makes it so. In
the simplest version of the theory, God can deter-
mine right and wrong because he is omnipotent.
He is all- powerful— powerful enough even to create
moral norms. In this view, God is a divine lawgiver,
and his laws constitute morality.
In general, believers are divided on whether the
divine command theory gives an accurate account
of the source of morality. Notable among the the-
ory’s detractors are the great theistic philosophers
Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716) and Thomas Aqui-
nas (1225–1274). And conversely, as odd as it may
sound, some nonbelievers have subscribed to it. In
The Brothers Karamazov (1879–1880), the charac-
ter Ivan Karamazov declares, “If God doesn’t exist,
everything is permissible.” This very sentiment
was espoused by, among others, the famous atheist
philosopher Jean- Paul Sartre.
Both religious and secular critics of the divine
command theory believe that it poses a serious
dilemma, one first articulated by Socrates two and
a half millennia ago. In the dialogue Euthyphro,
Socrates asks, Is an action morally right because God
wills it to be so, or does God will it to be so because
it is morally right? Critics say that if an action is
right only because God wills it (that is, if right and
wrong are dependent on God), then many heinous
crimes and evil actions would be right if God willed
them. If God willed murder, theft, or torture, these
deeds would be morally right. If God has unlimited
power, he could easily will such actions. If the right-
ness of an action depended on God’s will alone, he
How can we hope to grapple with complex moral
issues that have emerged only in recent years? Can
religion alone handle the job? Consider the follow-
ing case:
According to a report by CNN, Jack and Lisa Nash
made history when they used genetic testing to
save the life of their six- year- old daughter, Molly,
by having another child. Molly had a rare genetic
disorder known as Fanconi anemia, which prevents
the generation of bone marrow and produces a
fatal leukemia. Molly’s best chance to live was to
get a transplant of stem cells from the umbilical
cord of a sibling, and Molly’s parents were deter-
mined to give her that sibling, brother Adam.
Through genetic testing (and in vitro fertilization),
Jack and Lisa were able to select a child who would
not only be born without a particular disease (Fan-
coni anemia, in this case) but also would help a sib-
ling combat the disease by being the optimal tissue
match for a transplant— a historic combination. As
Lisa Nash said, “I was going to save Molly no matter
what, and I wanted Molly to have siblings.”*
Is it right to produce a child to save the life or
health of someone else? More to the point, do
the scriptures of the three major Western religions
provide any guidance on this question? Do any
of these traditions offer useful methods for pro-
ductively discussing or debating such issues with
people of different faiths? How might ethics help
with these challenges? Is it possible to formulate a
reasonable opinion on this case without doing eth-
ics? Why or why not?
*“Genetic Selection Gives Girl a Brother and a Second
Chance,” CNN.com, October 3, 2000, http://archives.cnn
.com/2000/HEALTH/10/03/testube.brother/index.html
(December 8, 2005).
CRITICAL THOUGHT: Ethics, Religion, and Tough Moral Issues’

http://archives.cnn.com/2000/HEALTH/10/03/testube.brother/index.html

http://www.CNN.com

CHAPTER 1: ETHiCS AND THE ExAMiNED LiFE Á 11
could not have reasons for willing what he wills. No
reasons would be available or required. Therefore,
if God commanded an action, the command would
be without reason, completely arbitrary. Neither
the believer nor the nonbeliever would think this
state of affairs plausible. On the other hand, if God
wills an action because it is morally right (if moral
norms are independent of God), then the divine
command theory must be false. God does not create
rightness; he simply knows what is right and wrong
and is subject to the moral law just as humans are.
For some theists, this charge of arbitrariness is
especially worrisome. Leibniz, for example, rejects
the divine command theory, declaring that it
implies that God is unworthy of worship:
In saying, therefore, that things are not good accord-
ing to any standard of goodness, but simply by
the will of God, it seems to me that one destroys,
without realizing it, all the love of God and all his
glory; for why praise him for what he has done, if
he would be equally praiseworthy in doing the con-
trary? Where will be his justice and his wisdom if he
has only a certain despotic power, if arbitrary will
takes the place of reasonableness, and if in accord
with the definition of tyrants, justice consists in
that which is pleasing to the most powerful?2
Defenders of the divine command theory may
reply to the arbitrariness argument by contend-
ing that God would never command us to commit
heinous acts, because God is all- good. Because of
his supreme goodness, he would will only what is
good. Some thinkers, however, believe that such
reasoning renders the very idea of God’s goodness
meaningless. As one philosopher says,
[O]n this view, the doctrine of the goodness of God is
reduced to nonsense. It is important to religious believ-
ers that God is not only all- powerful and all- knowing,
but that he is also good; yet if we accept the idea that
good and bad are defined by reference to God’s will,
this notion is deprived of any meaning. What could it
mean to say that God’s commands are good? If “X is
good” means “X is commanded by God,” then “God’s
commands are good” would mean only “God’s com-
mands are commanded by God,” an empty truism.3
In any case, it seems that through critical rea-
soning we can indeed learn much about morality
and the moral life. After all, there are complete
moral systems (some of which are examined in
this book) that are not based on religion, that con-
tain genuine moral norms indistinguishable from
those embraced by religion, and that are justified
not by reference to religious precepts but by care-
ful thinking and moral arguments. As the philoso-
pher Jonathan Berg says, “Those who would refuse
to recognize as adequately justified any moral
beliefs not derived from knowledge of or about
God, would have to refute the whole vast range
of arguments put by Kant and all others who ever
proposed a rational basis for ethics!”4 Moreover, if
we can do ethics— if we can use critical reasoning
to discern moral norms certified by the best reasons
and evidence— then critical reasoning is sufficient
to guide us to moral standards and values. We
obviously can do ethics (as the following chapters
demonstrate), so morality is both accessible and
meaningful to us whether we are religious or not.
CHAPTER REVIEW
SUMMARY
Ethics is the philosophical study of morality, and
morality consists of beliefs concerning right and
wrong, good and bad. These beliefs can include judg-
ments, principles, and theories. Participating in the
exploration of morality— that is, doing ethics— is ines-
capable. We all must make moral judgments, assess
moral norms, judge people’s character, and question
the soundness of our moral outlooks. A great deal is
at stake when we do ethics, including countless deci-
sions that determine the quality of our lives.
You can decide to forgo any ethical delibera-
tions and simply embrace the moral beliefs and
norms you inherited from your family and culture.

12 Á PART 1: FUNDAMENTALS
But this approach undermines your freedom, for if
you accept without question whatever moral beliefs
come your way, they are not really yours. Only if
you critically examine them for yourself are they
truly yours.
The three main divisions of ethics proper are nor-
mative ethics (the study of the moral norms that guide
our actions and judgments), metaethics (the study of
the meaning and logical structure of moral beliefs),
and applied ethics (the application of moral norms to
specific moral issues or cases).
Ethics involves a distinctive set of elements. These
include the preeminence of reason, the universal per-
spective, the principle of impartiality, and the domi-
nance of moral norms.
Some people claim that morality depends on God,
a view known as the divine command theory. Both
theists and nontheists have raised doubts about this
doctrine. The larger point is that doing ethics— using
critical reasoning to examine the moral life— can be a
useful and productive enterprise for believer and non-
believer alike.
KEY TERMS
ethics or moral philosophy (p. 3)
morality (p. 3)
descriptive ethics (p. 5)
normative ethics (p. 5)
metaethics (p. 5)
applied ethics (p. 5)
instrumentally or extrinsically valuable (p. 6)
intrinsically valuable (p. 6)
EXERCISES
Review Questions
1. When can it be said that your moral beliefs are
not really yours? (p. 3)
2. In what ways are we forced to do ethics? What
is at stake in these deliberations? (pp. 3–4)
3. What is the unfortunate result of accepting moral
beliefs without questioning them? (pp. 4–5)
4. Can our feelings be our sole guide to morality?
Why or why not? (pp. 4–5)
5. What are some questions asked in normative
ethics? (p. 5)
6. What is the difference between normative ethics
and metaethics? (p. 5)
7. What is the dilemma about God and morality
that Socrates posed in Euthyphro? (pp. 10–11)
8. What kinds of moral contradictions or
inconsistencies confront religious believers?
(pp. 8–9)
9. What are the premises in the arbitrariness
argument against the divine command theory?
(p. 10)
10. Does the principle of impartiality imply that we
must always treat equals equally? Why or why
not? (pp. 7–8)
Discussion Questions
1. Do you think that morality ultimately depends
on God (that God is the author of the moral
law)? Why or why not?
2. Do you believe that you have absorbed or
adopted without question most of your moral
beliefs? Why or why not?
3. Formulate an argument against the divine
command theory, then formulate one for it.
4. Give an example of how you or someone you
know has used reasons to support a moral
judgment.
5. Identify at least two normative ethical
questions that you have wondered about in the
past year.
6. Name two things (such as persons, objects,
experiences) in your life that you consider
intrinsically valuable. Name three that are
instrumentally valuable.
7. How do your feelings affect the moral
judgments you make? Do they determine your
judgments? Do they inform them? If so, how?
8. What is the logic behind the principle of
universalizability? Cite an example of how
the principle has entered into your moral
deliberations.
9. How does racial discrimination violate the
principle of impartiality?

CHAPTER 1: ETHiCS AND THE ExAMiNED LiFE Á 13
10. What is the “dominance of moral norms”? Does
it strike you as reasonable? Or do you believe
that sometimes nonmoral norms can outweigh
moral ones? If the latter, provide an example.
ETHICAL DILEMMAS
1. You are the mayor of a major city, and you want
to keep the streets as clean as possible. You send
the city’s street sweepers to the more affluent
neighborhoods, but you ignore the poorer
neighborhoods because the poor residents pay
less in taxes than the rich people do. Is this
practice a violation of the impartiality principle?
Why or why not?
2. You try to live strictly by the moral rules
contained in your religion’s moral code. The
two most important rules are “Be merciful”
(don’t give people what they deserve) and
“Be just” (give people exactly what they
deserve). Now suppose a man is arrested
for stealing food from your house, and the
police leave it up to you whether he should
be prosecuted for his crime or set free. Should
you be merciful and set him free, or be just and
make sure he is appropriately punished? How
do you resolve this conflict of rules? Can your
moral code resolve it? To what moral principles
or theories do you appeal?
3. Suppose you are an engineer building a road
across a mountain. From a prudential point of
view, it would be easier and cheaper to build
it through a family’s farm. This option would
require compelling the family to move, which
would be an extreme hardship for them. From
a moral point of view, the family should be
allowed to stay on their farm. Which view
should take precedence?
FURTHER READING
Anita L. Allen, New Ethics: A Guided Tour of the Twenty-
First- Century Moral Landscape (New York: Miramax,
2004).
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, book 2, parts 1 and 4.
Simon Blackburn, Being Good: A Short Introduction to Ethics
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).
Donald M. Borchert and David Stewart, Exploring Ethics
(New York: Macmillan, 1986).
Steven M. Cahn and Joram G. Haber, eds., Twentieth Cen-
tury Ethical Theory (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall,
1995).
William K. Frankena, Ethics, 2nd ed. (Englewood Cliffs,
NJ: Prentice Hall, 1973).
Bernard Gert, Morality: Its Nature and Justification (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1998).
Brooke Noel Moore and Robert Michael Stewart, Moral
Philosophy: A Comprehensive Introduction (Belmont, CA:
Mayfield, 1994).
Dave Robinson and Chris Garrett, Introducing Ethics, ed.
Richard Appignanesi (New York: Totem Books, 2005).
Peter Singer, ed., A Companion to Ethics, corr. ed. (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1993).
Paul Taylor, Principles of Ethics: An Introduction (Encino,
CA: Dickenson, 1975).
Jacques P. Thiroux, Ethics: Theory and Practice, 3rd ed.
(New York: Macmillan, 1986).
Thomas F. Wall, Thinking Critically about Moral Problems
(Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2003).
G. J. Warnock, The Object of Morality (London: Methuen,
1971).

14 Á PART 1: FUNDAMENTALS
R E A D i N G S
From What Is the Socratic Method?
Christopher Phillips
The Socratic method is a way to seek truths by your
own lights.
It is a system, a spirit, a method, a type of philosophi-
cal inquiry, an intellectual technique, all rolled into one.
Socrates himself never spelled out a “method.”
However, the Socratic method is named after him
because Socrates, more than any other before or since,
models for us philosophy practiced— philosophy as deed,
as way of living, as something that any of us can do. It is
an open system of philosophical inquiry that allows one
to interrogate from many vantage points.
Gregory Vlastos, a Socrates scholar and profes-
sor of philosophy at Princeton, described Socrates’
method of inquiry as “among the greatest achieve-
ments of humanity.” Why? Because, he says, it makes
philosophical inquiry “a common human enterprise,
open to every man.” Instead of requiring allegiance
to a specific philosophical viewpoint or analytic tech-
nique or specialized vocabulary, the Socratic method
“calls for common sense and common speech.” And
this, he says, “is as it should be, for how many should
live is every man’s business.”
I think, however, that the Socratic method goes
beyond Vlastos’ description. It does not merely call
for common sense but examines what common
sense is. The Socratic method asks: Does the common
sense of our day offer us the greatest potential for self-
understanding and human excellence? Or is the pre-
vailing common sense in fact a roadblock to realizing
this potential?
Vlastos goes on to say that Socratic inquiry is by
no means simple, and “calls not only for the highest
degree of mental alertness of which anyone is capable”
but also for “moral qualities of a high order: sincerity,
humility, courage.” Such qualities “protect against the
possibility” that Socratic dialogue, no matter how rig-
orous, “would merely grind out . . . wild conclusions
with irresponsible premises.” I agree, though I would
replace the quality of sincerity with honesty, since one
can hold a conviction sincerely without examining it,
while honesty would require that one subject one’s
convictions to frequent scrutiny.
A Socratic dialogue reveals how different our out-
looks can be on concepts we use every day. It reveals how
different our philosophies are, and often how tenable—
or untenable, as the case may be— a range of philosophies
can be. Moreover, even the most universally recognized
and used concept, when subjected to Socratic scrutiny,
might reveal not only that there is not universal agree-
ment, after all, on the meaning of any given concept, but
that every single person has a somewhat different take
on each and every concept under the sun.
What’s more, there seems to be no such thing as
a concept so abstract, or question so off base, that it
can’t be fruitfully explored [using the Socratic method].
In the course of Socratizing, it often turns out to be the
case that some of the most so- called abstract concepts
are intimately related to the most profoundly relevant
human experiences. In fact, it’s been my experience
that virtually any question can be plumbed Socrati-
cally. Sometimes you don’t know what question will
have the most lasting and significant impact until you
take a risk and delve into it for a while.
What distinguishes the Socratic method from mere
nonsystematic inquiry is the sustained attempt to
explore the ramifications of certain opinions and then
offer compelling objections and alternatives. This scru-
pulous and exhaustive form of inquiry in many ways
Christopher Phillips, from Socrates Café. Copyright © 2001 by Chris-
topher Phillips. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company,
Inc. Although not specifically concerned with ethics, this short
piece by Christopher Phillips makes a persuasive case for using the
“Socratic method” to think through difficult philosophical issues.
To see the Socratic method applied to ethics, read the excerpt from
Plato’s Euthyphro that follows on p. 16.

CHAPTER 1: ETHiCS AND THE ExAMiNED LiFE Á 15
resembles the scientific method. But unlike Socratic
inquiry, scientific inquiry would often lead us to believe
that whatever is not measurable cannot be investigated.
This “belief” fails to address such paramount human
concerns as sorrow and joy and suffering and love.
Instead of focusing on the outer cosmos, Socrates
focused primarily on human beings and their cosmos
within, utilizing his method to open up new realms
of self- knowledge while at the same time exposing a
great deal of error, superstition, and dogmatic non-
sense. The Spanish- born American philosopher and
poet George Santayana said that Socrates knew that
“the foreground of human life is necessarily moral and
practical” and that “it is so even so for artists”—and
even for scientists, try as some might to divorce their
work from these dimensions of human existence.
Scholars call Socrates’ method the elenchus, which is
Hellenistic Greek for inquiry or cross- examination. But it
is not just any type of inquiry or examination. It is a type
that reveals people to themselves, that makes them see
what their opinions really amount to. C. D. C. Reeve,
professor of philosophy at Reed College, gives the stan-
dard explanation of an elenchus in saying that its aim
“is not simply to reach adequate definitions” of such
things as virtues; rather, it also has a “moral reforma-
tory purpose, for Socrates believes that regular elenctic
philosophizing makes people happier and more virtu-
ous than anything else. . . . Indeed philosophizing is so
important for human welfare, on his view, that he is
willing to accept execution rather than give it up.”
Socrates’ method of examination can indeed be a
vital part of existence, but I would not go so far as to
say that it should be. And I do not think that Socrates
felt that habitual use of this method “makes people
happier.” The fulfillment that comes from Socratizing
comes only at a price— it could well make us unhap-
pier, more uncertain, more troubled, as well as more
fulfilled. It can leave us with a sense that we don’t know
the answers after all, that we are much further from
knowing the answers than we’d ever realized before
engaging in Socratic discourse. And this is fulfilling—
and exhilarating and humbling and perplexing.
* * *
There is no neat divide between one’s views of phi-
losophy and of life. They are overlapping and kindred
views. It is virtually impossible in many instances to
know what we believe in daily life until we engage oth-
ers in dialogue. Likewise, to discover our philosophical
views, we must engage with ourselves, with the lives
we already lead. Our views form, change, evolve, as
we participate in this dialogue. It is the only way truly
to discover what philosophical colors we sail under.
Everyone at some point preaches to himself and oth-
ers what he does not yet practice; everyone acts in or
on the world in ways that are in some way contradic-
tory or inconsistent with the views he or she confesses
or professes to hold. For instance, the Danish philoso-
pher Søren Kierkegaard, the influential founder of
existentialism, put Socratic principles to use in writing
his dissertation on the concept of irony in Socrates,
often using pseudonyms so he could argue his own
positions with himself. In addition, the sixteenth-
century essayist Michel de Montaigne, who was called
“the French Socrates” and was known as the father of
skepticism in modern Europe, would write and add
conflicting and even contradictory passages in the
same work. And like Socrates, he believed the search
for truth was worth dying for.
The Socratic method forces people “to confront
their own dogmatism,” according to Leonard Nelson,
a German philosopher who wrote on such subjects as
ethics and theory of knowledge until he was forced by
the rise of Nazism to quit. By doing so, participants in
Socratic dialogue are, in effect, “forcing themselves to be
free,” Nelson maintains. But they’re not just confronted
with their own dogmatism. In the course of a [Socratic
dialogue], they may be confronted with an array of
hypotheses, convictions, conjectures and theories
offered by the other participants, and themselves— all
of which subscribe to some sort of dogma. The Socratic
method requires that— honestly and openly, rationally
and imaginatively— they confront the dogma by asking
such questions as: What does this mean? What speaks
for and against it? Are there alternative ways of consid-
ering it that are even more plausible and tenable?
At certain junctures of a Socratic dialogue, the
“forcing” that this confrontation entails— the insis-
tence that each participant carefully articulate her

16 Á PART 1: FUNDAMENTALS
From The Euthyphro
Plato
Euthyphro. True.
Socrates. Or suppose that we differ about mag-
nitudes, do we not quickly end the differences by
measuring?
Euthyphro. Very true.
Socrates. And we end a controversy about heavy and
light by resorting to a weighing machine?
Euthyphro. To be sure.
Socrates. But what differences are there which can-
not be thus decided, and which therefore make us
angry and set us at enmity with one another? I dare
say the answer does not occur to you at the moment,
and therefore I will suggest that these enmities arise
when the matters of difference are the just and unjust,
good and evil, honourable and dishonourable. Are not
these the points about which men differ, and about
which when we are unable satisfactorily to decide our
differences, you and I and all of us quarrel, when we
do quarrel?
Euthyphro. Yes, Socrates, the nature of the differ-
ences about which we quarrel is such as you describe.
Socrates. And the quarrels of the gods, noble Euthy-
phro, when they occur, are of a like nature?
Euthyphro. Certainly they are.
Socrates. They have differences of opinion, as you
say, about good and evil, just and unjust, honourable
and dishonourable: there would have been no quarrels
* * *
Euthyphro. Piety . . . is that which is dear to the gods,
and impiety is that which is not dear to them.
Socrates. Very good, Euthyphro; you have now given
me the sort of answer which I wanted. But whether what
you say is true or not I cannot as yet tell, although I make
no doubt that you will prove the truth of your words.
Euthyphro. Of course.
Socrates. Come, then, and let us examine what we
are saying. That thing or person which is dear to the
gods is pious, and that thing or person which is hate-
ful to the gods is impious, these two being the extreme
opposites of one another. Was not that said?
Euthyphro. It was.
Socrates. And well said?
Euthyphro. Yes, Socrates, I thought so; it was cer-
tainly said.
Socrates. And further, Euthyphro, the gods were
admitted to have enmities and hatreds and differences?
Euthyphro. Yes, that was also said.
Socrates. And what sort of difference creates enmity
and anger? Suppose for example that you and I, my
good friend, differ about a number; do differences of
this sort make us enemies and set us at variance with
one another? Do we not go at once to arithmetic, and
put an end to them by a sum?
Plato, The Euthyphro, translated by Benjamin Jowett.
singular philosophical perspective— can be upset-
ting. But that is all to the good. If it never touches
any nerves, if it doesn’t upset, if it doesn’t mentally
and spiritually challenge and perplex, in a won-
derful and exhilarating way, it is not Socratic dia-
logue. This “forcing” opens us up to the varieties of
experiences of others— whether through direct dia-
logue, or through other means, like drama or books,
or through a work of art or a dance. It compels us to
explore alternative perspectives, asking what might
be said for or against each.
* * *

CHAPTER 1: ETHiCS AND THE ExAMiNED LiFE Á 17
among them, if there had been no such differences—
would there now?
Euthyphro. You are quite right.
Socrates. Does not every man love that which he
deems noble and good, and hate the opposite of them?
Euthyphro. Very true.
Socrates. But, as you say, people regard the same
things, some as just and others as unjust,—about
these they dispute; and so there arise wars and fight-
ings among them.
Euthyphro. Very true.
Socrates. Then the same things are hated by the gods
and loved by the gods, and are both hateful and dear
to them?
Euthyphro. True.
Socrates. And upon this view the same things, Euthy-
phro, will be pious and also impious?
Euthyphro. So I should suppose.
Socrates. Then, my friend, I remark with surprise
that you have not answered the question which I
asked. For I certainly did not ask you to tell me what
action is both pious and impious: but now it would
seem that what is loved by the gods is also hated by
them. And therefore, Euthyphro, in thus chastising
your father you may very likely be doing what is agree-
able to Zeus but disagreeable to Cronos or Uranus, and
what is acceptable to Hephaestus but unacceptable to
Hera, and there may be other gods who have similar
differences of opinion.
Euthyphro. But I believe, Socrates, that all the gods
would be agreed as to the propriety of punishing a
murderer: there would be no difference of opinion
about that.
Socrates. Well, but speaking of men, Euthyphro, did
you ever hear any one arguing that a murderer or any
sort of evil- doer ought to be let off?
Euthyphro. I should rather say that these are the
questions which they are always arguing, especially
in courts of law: they commit all sorts of crimes, and
there is nothing which they will not do or say in their
own defence.
Socrates. But do they admit their guilt, Euthyphro,
and yet say that they ought not to be punished?
Euthyphro. No; they do not.
Socrates. Then there are some things which they do
not venture to say and do: for they do not venture to
argue that the guilty are to be unpunished, but they
deny their guilt, do they not?
Euthyphro. Yes.
Socrates. Then they do not argue that the evil- doer
should not be punished, but they argue about the fact
of who the evil- doer is, and what he did and when?
Euthyphro. True.
Socrates. And the gods are in the same case, if as you
assert they quarrel about just and unjust, and some
of them say while others deny that injustice is done
among them. For surely neither God nor man will
ever venture to say that the doer of injustice is not to
be punished?
Euthyphro. That is true, Socrates, in the main.
Socrates. But they join issue about the particulars—
gods and men alike; and, if they dispute at all, they
dispute about some act which is called in question,
and which by some is affirmed to be just, by others to
be unjust. Is not that true?
Euthyphro. Quite true.
Socrates. Well then, my dear friend Euthyphro, do
tell me, for my better instruction and information,
what proof have you that in the opinion of all the gods
a servant who is guilty of murder, and is put in chains
by the master of the dead man, and dies because he is
put in chains before he who bound him can learn from
the interpreters of the gods what he ought to do with
him, dies unjustly; and that on behalf of such an one
a son ought to proceed against his father and accuse
him of murder. How would you show that all the gods
absolutely agree in approving of his act? Prove to me
that they do, and I will applaud your wisdom as long
as I live.
Euthyphro. It will be a difficult task; but I could
make the matter very clear indeed to you.
Socrates. I understand; you mean to say that I am not
so quick of apprehension as the judges: for to them

18 Á PART 1: FUNDAMENTALS
you will be sure to prove that the act is unjust, and
hateful to the gods.
Euthyphro. Yes indeed, Socrates; at least if they will
listen to me.
Socrates. But they will be sure to listen if they find
that you are a good speaker. There was a notion that
came into my mind while you were speaking; I said to
myself: “Well, and what if Euthyphro does prove to
me that all the gods regarded the death of the serf as
unjust, how do I know anything more of the nature of
piety and impiety? for granting that this action may be
hateful to the gods, still piety and impiety are not ade-
quately defined by these distinctions, for that which is
hateful to the gods has been shown to be also pleasing
and dear to them.” And therefore, Euthyphro, I do not
ask you to prove this; I will suppose, if you like, that all
the gods condemn and abominate such an action. But
I will amend the definition so far as to say that what
all the gods hate is impious, and what they love pious
or holy; and what some of them love and others hate
is both or neither. Shall this be our definition of piety
and impiety?
Euthyphro. Why not, Socrates?
Socrates. Why not! Certainly, as far as I am con-
cerned, Euthyphro, there is no reason why not. But
whether this admission will greatly assist you in the
task of instructing me as you promised, is a matter for
you to consider.
Euthyphro. Yes, I should say that what all the gods
love is pious and holy, and the opposite which they all
hate, impious.
Socrates. Ought we to enquire into the truth of this,
Euthyphro, or simply to accept the mere statement on
our own authority and that of others? What do you say?
Euthyphro. We should enquire; and I believe that
the statement will stand the test of enquiry.
Socrates. We shall know better, my good friend, in
a little while. The point which I should first wish to
understand is whether the pious or holy is beloved by
the gods because it is holy, or holy because it is beloved
of the gods.
Euthyphro. I do not understand your meaning,
Socrates.
Socrates. I will endeavour to explain: we speak of
carrying and we speak of being carried, of leading and
being led, seeing and being seen. You know that in all
such cases there is a difference, and you know also in
what the difference lies?
Euthyphro. I think that I understand.
Socrates. And is not that which is beloved distinct
from that which loves?
Euthyphro. Certainly.
Socrates. Well; and now tell me, is that which is car-
ried in this state of carrying because it is carried, or for
some other reason?
Euthyphro. No; that is the reason.
Socrates. And the same is true of what is led and of
what is seen?
Euthyphro. True.
Socrates. And a thing is not seen because it is visible,
but conversely, visible because it is seen; nor is a thing led
because it is in the state of being led, or carried because
it is in the state of being carried, but the converse of this.
And now I think, Euthyphro, that my meaning will be
intelligible; and my meaning is, that any state of action
or passion implies previous action or passion. It does
not become because it is becoming, but it is in a state
of becoming because it becomes; neither does it suffer
because it is in a state of suffering, but it is in a state of
suffering because it suffers. Do you not agree?
Euthyphro. Yes.
Socrates. Is not that which is loved in some state
either of becoming or suffering?
Euthyphro. Yes.
Socrates. And the same holds as in the previous
instances; the state of being loved follows the act of
being loved, and not the act the state.
Euthyphro. Certainly.
Socrates. And what do you say of piety, Euthyphro;
is not piety, according to your definition, loved by all
the gods?
Euthyphro. Yes.
Socrates. Because it is pious or holy, or for some other
reason?

CHAPTER 1: ETHiCS AND THE ExAMiNED LiFE Á 19
Euthyphro. No, that is the reason.
Socrates. It is loved because it is holy, not holy
because it is loved?
Euthyphro. Yes.
Socrates. And that which is dear to the gods is loved
by them, and is in a state to be loved of them because
it is loved of them?
Euthyphro. Certainly.
Socrates. Then that which is dear to the gods, Euthy-
phro, is not holy, nor is that which is holy loved of
God, as you affirm; but they are two different things.
Euthyphro. How do you mean, Socrates?
Socrates. I mean to say that the holy has been
acknowledged by us to be loved of God because it is
holy, not to be holy because it is loved.
Euthyphro. Yes.
Socrates. But that which is dear to the gods is dear to
them because it is loved by them, not loved by them
because it is dear to them.
Euthyphro. True.
Socrates. But, friend Euthyphro, if that which is
holy is the same with that which is dear to God, and
is loved because it is holy, then that which is dear to
God would have been loved as being dear to God; but
if that which dear to God is dear to him because loved
by him, then that which is holy would have been holy
because loved by him. But now you see that the reverse
is the case, and that they are quite different from one
another. For one (Ueofilès) is of a kind to be loved
because it is loved, and the other (o9sion) is loved
because it is of a kind to be loved. Thus you appear to
me, Euthyphro, when I ask you what is the essence
of holiness, to offer an attribute only, and not the
essence— the attribute of being loved by all the gods.
But you still refuse to explain to me the nature of holi-
ness. And therefore, if you please, I will ask you not to
hide your treasure, but to tell me once more what holi-
ness or piety really is, whether dear to the gods or not
(for that is a matter about which we will not quarrel)
and what is impiety?
Euthyphro. I really do not know, Socrates, how to
express what I mean. For somehow or other our argu-
ments, on whatever ground we rest them, seem to turn
around and walk away from us.
* * *

20
principles are rigid rules that have no exceptions
(a view known as absolutism) or that they must be
applied in exactly the same way in every situation
and culture.
On the other hand, let us say that you assess the
case like this: “In societies that approve of honor
killing, the practice is morally right; in those that
do not approve, it is morally wrong. My society
approves of honor killing, so it is morally right.” If
you believe what you say, then you are a cultural
relativist. Cultural relativism is the view that an
action is morally right if one’s culture approves of
it. Moral rightness and wrongness are therefore rel-
ative to cultures. So in one culture, an action may
be morally right; in another culture, it may be mor-
ally wrong.
Perhaps you prefer an even narrower view of
morality, and so you say, “Honor killing may be
right for you, but it is most certainly not right for
me.” If you mean this literally, then you are com-
mitted to another kind of relativism called sub-
jective relativism— the view that an action is
morally right if one approves of it. Moral rightness
and wrongness are relative not to cultures but to
individuals. An action, then, can be right for you
but wrong for someone else. Your approving of an
action makes it right. There is therefore no objec-
tive morality, and cultural norms do not make right
or wrong— individuals make right or wrong.
Finally, imagine that you wish to take a differ-
ent tack regarding the subject of honor killing. You
say, “I abhor the practice of honor killing”—but
you believe that in uttering these words you are
saying nothing that is true or false. You believe that
Consider the following: Abdulla Yones killed his
sixteen- year- old daughter Heshu in their apart-
ment in west London. The murder was an example
of an “honor killing,” an ancient tradition still
practiced in many parts of the world. Using a
kitchen knife, Yones stabbed Heshu eleven times
and slit her throat. He later declared that he had to
kill her to expunge a stain from his family, a stain
that Heshu had caused by her outrageous behavior.
What was outrageous behavior to Yones, however,
would seem to many Westerners to be typical teen-
age antics, annoying but benign. Heshu’s precise
offense against her family’s honor is unclear, but
the possibilities include wearing makeup, having
a boyfriend, and showing an independent streak
that would be thought perfectly normal through-
out the West. In some countries, honor killings are
sometimes endorsed by the local community or
even given the tacit blessing of the state.
What do you think of this time- honored way
of dealing with family conflicts? Specifically, what
is your opinion regarding the morality of honor
killing? Your response to this question is likely to
reveal not only your view of honor killing but your
overall approach to morality as well. Suppose your
response is something like this: “Honor killing is
morally wrong— wrong no matter where it’s done
or who does it.” With this statement, you implic-
itly embrace moral objectivism— the theory that
moral truths exist and that they do so indepen-
dently of what individuals or societies think of
them. In other words, there are moral facts, and
they are not human inventions, fictions, or prefer-
ences. However, you need not hold that objective
C H A P T E R 2
‘’
Subjectivism, Relativism, and Emotivism

CHAPTER 2: SubjECTiviSm, RElATiviSm, And EmoTiviSm Á 21
despite what your statement seems to mean, you
are simply expressing your emotions. You there-
fore hold to emotivism— the view that moral
utterances are neither true nor false but are instead
expressions of emotions or attitudes. So in your
sentence about honor killing, you are not stating a
fact— you are merely emoting and possibly trying
to influence someone’s behavior. Even when emo-
tivists express a more specific preference regarding
other people’s behavior— by saying, for instance,
“No one should commit an honor killing”—they
are still not making a factual claim. They are simply
expressing a preference, and perhaps hoping to per-
suade other people to see things their way.
These four replies represent four distinct per-
spectives (though certainly not the only per-
spectives) on the meaning and import of moral
judgments. Moreover, they are not purely theoreti-
cal, but real and relevant. People actually live their
lives (or try to) as moral objectivists, or relativists,
or emotivists, or some strange and inconsistent
mixture of these. (There is an excellent chance, for
example, that you were raised as an objectivist but
now accept some form of relativism— or even try to
hold to objectivism in some instances and relativ-
ism in others.)
In any case, the question that you should ask
(and that ethics can help you answer) is not whether
you in fact accept any of these views, but whether you
are justified in doing so. Let us see, then, where an
examination of reasons for and against them will
lead.
SUBJECTIVE RELATIVISM
What view of morality could be more tempting (and
convenient) than the notion that an action is right
if someone approves of it? Subjective relativism
says that action X is right for Ann if she approves
of it yet wrong for Greg if he disapproves of it. Thus
action X can be both right and wrong— right for
Ann but wrong for Greg. A person’s approval of an
action makes it right for that person. Action X is not
objectively right (or wrong). It is right (or wrong)
relative to individuals. In this way, moral rightness
becomes a matter of personal taste. If to Ann straw-
berry ice cream tastes good, then it is good (for her).
If to Greg strawberry ice cream tastes bad, then it
is bad (for him). There is no such thing as straw-
berry ice cream tasting good objectively or gener-
ally. Likewise, the morality of an action depends on
Ann’s and Greg’s moral tastes.
Many people claim they are subjective relativists—
until they realize the implications of the doctrine
’ QUICK REVIEW
objectivism— The theory that moral truths exist
and that they do so independently of what
individuals or societies think of them.
cultural relativism— The view that an action is
morally right if one’s culture approves of it.
Implications: that cultures are morally infallible,
that social reformers can never be morally right,
that moral disagreements between individuals
in the same culture amount to arguments over
whether someone disagrees with her culture,
that other cultures cannot be legitimately criti-
cized, and that moral progress is impossible.
subjective relativism— The view that an action is
morally right if one approves of it. Implications:
that individuals are morally infallible and that
genuine moral disagreement between individ-
uals is nearly impossible.
emotivism— The view that moral utterances are
neither true nor false but are expressions of
emotions or attitudes. Implications: that people
cannot disagree over the moral facts because
there are no moral facts, that presenting reasons
in support of a moral utterance is a matter of
offering nonmoral facts that can influence some-
one’s attitude, and that nothing is actually good
or bad.

22 Á PART 1: FundAmEnTAlS
that are at odds with our commonsense moral expe-
rience. First, subjective relativism implies that in
the rendering of any moral opinion, each person is
incapable of being in error. Each of us is morally infal-
lible. If we approve of an action— and we are sincere
in our approval— then that action is morally right.
We literally cannot be mistaken about this, because
our approval makes the action right. If we say that
inflicting pain on an innocent child for no reason is
right (that is, we approve of such an action), then the
action is right. Our moral judgment is correct, and it
cannot be otherwise. Yet if anything is obvious about
our moral experience, it is that we are not infallible.
We sometimes are mistaken in our moral judgments.
We are, after all, not gods.
By all accounts, Adolf Hitler approved of (and
ordered) the extermination of vast numbers of
innocent people, including six million Jews. If so,
by the lights of subjective relativism, his facilitat-
ing those deaths was morally right. It seems that
the totalitarian leader Pol Pot approved of his
murdering more than a million innocent people
in Cambodia. If so, it was right for him to mur-
der those people. But it seems obvious that what
these men did was wrong and that their approv-
ing of their actions did not make the actions right.
Because subjective relativism suggests otherwise, it
is a dubious doctrine.
Another obvious feature of our commonsense
moral experience is that from time to time we have
moral disagreements. Maria says that capital pun-
ishment is right, but Carlos says that it is wrong. This
seems like a perfectly clear case of two people dis-
agreeing about the morality of capital punishment.
’
Jesus said “Judge not that ye be not judged.” Some
have taken this to mean that we should not make
moral judgments about others, and many who
have never heard those words are convinced that
to judge others is to be insensitive, intolerant, or
absolutist. Professor Jean Bethke Elshtain exam-
ines this attitude and finds it both mistaken and
harmful.
I have also found helpful the discussion of the
lively British philosopher, Mary Midgley. In her
book Can’t We Make Moral Judgments? Midgley
notes our contemporary search for a nonjudgmen-
tal politics and quotes all those people who cry, in
effect, “But surely it’s always wrong to make moral
judgments.” We are not permitted to make anyone
uncomfortable, to be “insensitive.” Yet moral judg-
ment of “some kind,” says Midgley, “is a necessary
element to our thinking.” Judging involves our
whole nature— it isn’t just icing on the cake of self-
identity. Judging makes it possible for us to “find
our way through a whole forest of possibilities.”
Midgley argues that Jesus was taking aim at
sweeping condemnations and vindictiveness:
he was not trashing the “whole faculty of judg-
ment.” Indeed, Jesus is making the “subtle point
that while we cannot possibly avoid judging, we
can see to it that we judge fairly, as we would
expect others to do to us.” This is part and par-
cel, then, of justice as fairness, as a discernment
about a particular case and person and deed. Sub-
jectivism in such matters— of the “I’m okay, you’re
okay,” variety— is a cop- out, a way to stop form-
ing and expressing moral judgments altogether.
This strange suspension of specific moments of
judgment goes hand- in- glove, of course, with an
often violent rhetoric of condemnation of whole
categories of persons, past and present— that all-
purpose villain, the Dead White European Male,
comes to mind.*
*Jean Bethke Elshtain, “Judge Not?” First Things,
no. 46, pp. 36–40, October 1994. Reprinted by permis-
sion of the publisher.
Judge Not?

CHAPTER 2: SubjECTiviSm, RElATiviSm, And EmoTiviSm Á 23
Subjective relativism, however, implies that such
disagreements cannot happen. Subjective relativ-
ism says that when Maria states that capital punish-
ment is right, she is just saying that she approves of
it. And when Carlos states that capital punishment
is wrong, he is just saying that he disapproves of it.
But they are not really disagreeing, because they
are merely describing their attitudes toward capital
punishment. In effect, Maria is saying “This is my
attitude on the subject,” and Carlos is saying “Here
is my attitude on the subject.” But these two claims
are not opposed to each other. They are about dif-
ferent subjects, so both statements could be true.
Maria and Carlos might as well be discussing how
strawberry ice cream tastes to each of them, for
nothing that Maria says could contradict what Car-
los says. Because genuine disagreement is a fact of
our moral life, and subjective relativism is inconsis-
tent with this fact, the doctrine is implausible.
In practice, subjective relativism is a difficult
view to hold consistently. At times, of course, you
can insist that an action is right for you but wrong
for someone else. But you may also find yourself
saying something like “Pol Pot committed abso-
lutely heinous acts; he was evil,” or “What Hitler
did was wrong”—and what you mean is that what
Pol Pot and Hitler did was objectively wrong, not
just wrong relative to you. Such slides from sub-
jective relativism to objectivism suggest a conflict
between these two perspectives and the need to
resolve it through critical reasoning.
CULTURAL RELATIVISM
To many people, the idea that morality is relative
to culture is obvious. It seems obvious primarily
because modern sociology has left no doubt that
people’s moral judgments differ from culture to
culture. The moral judgments of people in other
cultures are often shockingly different from our
own. In some societies, it is morally permissible
to kill infants at birth, burn widows alive with the
bodies of their husbands, steal and commit acts of
treachery, surgically remove the clitorises of young
girls for no medical reason, kill one’s elderly par-
ents, have multiple husbands or wives, and make
up for someone’s death by murdering others.
Among some people, it has been considered mor-
ally acceptable to kill those of a different sexual
orientation, lynch persons with a different skin
color, and allow children to die by refusing to give
them available medical treatment. (These latter acts
have all been practiced in subcultures within the
United States, so not all such cultural differences
happen far from home.) It is only a small step from
acknowledging this moral diversity among cultures
to the conclusion that cultures determine moral
rightness and that objective morality is a myth.
The philosopher Walter T. Stace (1886–1967)
illustrates how easily this conclusion has come to
many in Western societies:
It was easy enough to believe in a single absolute
morality in older times when there was no anthro-
pology, when all humanity was divided clearly into
two groups, Christian peoples and the “heathen.”
Christian peoples knew and possessed the one true
morality. The rest were savages whose moral ideas
could be ignored. But all this changed. Greater
knowledge has brought greater tolerance. We can
no longer exalt our own moralities as alone true,
while dismissing all other moralities as false or
inferior. The investigations of anthropologists have
shown that there exist side by side in the world a
bewildering variety of moral codes. On this topic
endless volumes have been written, masses of evi-
dence piled up. Anthropologists have ransacked the
Melanesian Islands, the jungles of New Guinea, the
steppes of Siberia, the deserts of Australia, the for-
ests of central Africa, and have brought back with
them countless examples of weird, extravagant,
and fantastic “moral” customs with which to con-
found us. We learn that all kinds of horrible prac-
tices are, in this, that, or the other place, regarded
as essential to virtue. We find that there is nothing,
or next to nothing, which has always and every-
where been regarded as morally good by all men.
Where then is our universal morality? Can we, in
face of all this evidence, deny that it is nothing but
an empty dream?1

24 Á PART 1: FundAmEnTAlS
Here, Stace spells out in rough form the most
common argument for cultural relativism, an infer-
ence from differences in the moral beliefs of cul-
tures to the conclusion that cultures make morality.
Before we conclude that objectivism is in fact an
empty dream, we should state the argument more
precisely and examine it closely. We can lay out the
argument like this:
1. People’s judgments about right and wrong
differ from culture to culture.
2. If people’s judgments about right and wrong
differ from culture to culture, then right and
wrong are relative to culture, and there are no
objective moral principles.
3. Therefore, right and wrong are relative to culture,
and there are no objective moral principles.
A good argument gives us good reason to
accept its conclusion, and an argument is good if
its logic is solid (the conclusion follows logically
from the premises) and the premises are true. So
is the foregoing argument a good one? We can
see right away that the logic is in fact solid. That
is, the argument is valid: the conclusion does
indeed follow from the premises. The question
then becomes whether the premises are true. As
we have seen, Premise 1 is most certainly true.
People’s judgments about right and wrong do
vary from culture to culture. But what of Prem-
ise 2? Does the diversity of views about right and
wrong among cultures show that right and wrong
are determined by culture, that there are no uni-
versal moral truths? There are good reasons to
think this premise false.
’
In recent years many conflicts have flared between
those who espouse universal human rights and those
who embrace cultural relativism. One issue that has
been a flash point in these contentious debates is a
practice called female genital cutting (FGC). Other
names include female circumcision and female
genital mutilation.
In FGC, all or part of the female genitals are
removed. The procedure, used mostly in Africa
and the Middle East, is usually performed on girls
between the ages of four and eight, but sometimes
on young women. A report in the Yale Journal of
Public Health states that in Sudan, 89 percent of
girls receive FGC and that the cutting tools used
“include knives, scissors, razors, and broken glass.
The operation is typically performed by elderly
women or traditional birth attendants, though
increasing numbers of doctors are taking over
these roles.”* The practice occurs for various rea-
sons, including religious and sociological ones, and
is defended by some who say that it prepares girls
for their role in society and marriage and discour-
ages illicit sex.
Public health officials regard FGC as a serious
health problem. It can cause reproductive tract
infections, pain during intercourse, painful men-
struation, complications during childbirth, greater
risk of HIV infection, bleeding, and even death.
International health agencies denounce FGC, but
many say that no one outside a culture using FGC
has a right to criticize the practice.
Do you think that FGC is morally permissible? If
you judge the practice wrong, are you appealing to
some notion of objective morality? If you judge it
permissible, are you doing so because you are a cul-
tural relativist? In either case, explain your reasoning.
*Sarah Cannon and Daniel Berman, “Cut Off: The
Female Genital- Cutting Controversy,” Yale Journal of
Public Health 1, no. 2 (2004).
CRITICAL THOUGHT: “Female Circumcision” and Cultural Relativism

CHAPTER 2: SubjECTiviSm, RElATiviSm, And EmoTiviSm Á 25
Premise 2 says that because there are disagree-
ments among cultures about right and wrong,
there must not be any universal standards of right
and wrong. But even if the moral judgments of
people in various cultures do differ, such differ-
ences in themselves do not show that morality is
relative to culture. Just because people in different
cultures have different views about morality, their
disagreement does not prove that no view can be
objectively correct— no more than people’s disagree-
ments about the size of a house show that no one’s
opinion about it can be objectively true. Suppose
Culture 1 endorses infanticide, but Culture 2 does
not. Such a disagreement does not demonstrate
that both cultures are equally correct or that there is
no objectively correct answer. After all, it is possible
that infanticide is objectively right (or wrong) and
that the relevant moral beliefs of either Culture 1 or
Culture 2 are false.
Another reason to doubt the truth of Premise
2 comes from questioning how deep the disagree-
ments among cultures really are. Judgments about
the rightness of actions obviously do vary across
cultures. But people can differ in their moral judg-
ments not just because they accept different moral
principles, but also because they have divergent
nonmoral beliefs. They may actually embrace the
same moral principles, but their moral judgments
conflict because their nonmoral beliefs lead them
to apply those principles in very different ways. If
so, the diversity of moral judgments across cultures
does not necessarily indicate deep disagreements
over fundamental moral principles or standards.
Here is a classic example:
[T]he story is told of a culture in which a son is
regarded as obligated to kill his father when the lat-
ter reaches age sixty. Given just this much informa-
tion about the culture and the practice in question
it is tempting to conclude that the members of that
culture differ radically from members of our cul-
ture in their moral beliefs and attitudes. We, after
all, believe it is immoral to take a human life, and
regard patricide as especially wrong. But suppose
that in the culture we are considering, those who
belong to it believe (a) that at the moment of death
one enters heaven; (b) one’s physical and mental
condition in the afterlife is exactly what it is at the
moment of death; and (c) men are at the peak of
their physical and mental powers when they are
sixty. Then what appeared at first to be peculiari-
ties in moral outlook on the part of the cultural
group in question regarding the sanctity of life and
respect for parents, turn out to be located rather in
a nonmoral outlook of the group. A man in that
culture who kills his father is doing so out of con-
cern for the latter’s well- being— to prevent him, for
example, from spending eternity blind or senile.
It is not at all clear that, if we shared the relevant
nonmoral beliefs of this other culture, we would
not believe with them that sons should kill their
fathers at the appropriate time.2
To find similar examples, we need not search for
the exotic. In Western cultures we have the famil-
iar case of abortion, an issue hotly debated among
those who at first glance appear to be disagreeing
about moral principles. But in fact the disputants
agree about the moral principle involved: that mur-
der (unjustly killing a person) is morally wrong.
What they do disagree about is a nonmoral factual
matter— whether the fetus is an entity that can be
murdered (that is, whether it is a person). Disagree-
ment over the nonmoral facts masks substantial
agreement on fundamental moral standards.
The work of several anthropologists provides
some evidence for these kinds of disagreements
as well as for the existence of cross- cultural moral
agreement in general. The social psychologist Solo-
mon Asch, for instance, maintains that differ-
ing moral judgments among societies often arise
when the same moral principles are operating but
the particulars of cultural situations vary.3 Other
observers claim that across numerous diverse cul-
tures we can find many common moral elements
such as prohibitions against murder, lying, incest,
and adultery and obligations of fairness, reciproc-
ity, and consideration toward parents and chil-
dren.4 Some philosophers argue that a core set of

26 Á PART 1: FundAmEnTAlS
moral values— including, for example, truth telling
and prohibitions against murder— must be univer-
sal, otherwise cultures would not survive.
These points demonstrate that Premise 2 of the
argument for cultural relativism is false. The argu-
ment therefore gives us no good reasons to believe
that an action is right simply because one’s culture
approves of it.
For many people, however, the failure of the
argument for cultural relativism may be beside the
point. They find the doctrine appealing mainly
because it seems to promote the humane and
enlightened attitude of tolerance toward other cul-
tures. Broad expanses of history are drenched with
blood and marked by cruelty because of the evil of
intolerance— religious, racial, political, and social.
Tolerance therefore seems a supreme virtue, and
cultural relativism appears to provide a justifica-
tion and vehicle for it. After all, if all cultures are
morally equal, does not cultural relativism both
entail and promote tolerance?
We should hope that tolerance does reign in a
pluralistic world, but there is no necessary connec-
tion between tolerance and cultural relativism. For
one thing, cultural relativists cannot consistently
advocate tolerance. To advocate tolerance is to
advocate an objective moral value. But if tolerance
is an objective moral value, then cultural relativism
must be false, because it says that there are no objec-
tive moral values. So instead of justifying tolerance
toward all, cultural relativism actually undercuts
universal tolerance. Moreover, according to cul-
tural relativism, intolerance can be justified just
as easily as tolerance can. If a culture approves of
intolerance, then intolerance is right for that cul-
ture. If a culture approves of tolerance, then toler-
ance is right for that culture. Cultural relativists are
thus committed to the view that intolerance can
in fact be justified, and they cannot consistently
claim that tolerance is morally right everywhere.
At this point we are left with no good reasons
to believe that cultural relativism is true. But the
problems for the doctrine are deeper than that. Like
subjective relativism, it has several implications
that render it highly implausible.
First, like subjective relativism, cultural relativ-
ism implies moral infallibility— that a culture sim-
ply cannot be mistaken about a moral issue. If it
approves of an action, then that action is morally
right, and there is no possibility of error as long as
the culture’s approval is genuine. But, of course,
cultural infallibility in moral matters is flagrantly
implausible, just as individual infallibility is. At one
time or another, cultures have sanctioned witch
burning, slavery, genocide, racism, rape, human
sacrifice, and religious persecution. Does it make
any sense to say that they could not have been
mistaken about the morality of these actions?
Cultural relativism also has the peculiar con-
sequence that social reformers of every sort would
always be wrong. Their culture would be the ultimate
authority on moral matters, so if they disagreed
with their culture, they could not possibly be right.
If their culture approved of genocide, genocide
would be right, and antigenocide reformers would
be wrong to oppose the practice. In this upside-
down world, the antigenocide reformers would
be immoral, and the genocidal culture would be
the real paragon of righteousness. Reformers such
as Martin Luther King Jr., Mahatma Gandhi, Mary
Wollstonecraft (champion of women’s rights), and
Frederick Douglass (American abolitionist) would
be great crusaders— for immorality. Our moral
experience, however, suggests that cultural relativ-
ism has matters exactly backward. Social reform-
ers have often been right when they claimed their
cultures were wrong, and this fact suggests that cul-
tural relativism is wrong about morality.
Where cultural relativism holds, if you have a
disagreement with your culture about the right-
ness of an action, you automatically lose. You are
in error by definition. But what about a disagree-
ment among members of the same society? What
does such a disagreement amount to? It amounts
to something very strange, according to cultural
relativism. When two people in the same culture

CHAPTER 2: SubjECTiviSm, RElATiviSm, And EmoTiviSm Á 27
disagree on a moral issue, what they are really dis-
agreeing about— the only thing they can rationally
disagree about— is whether their society endorses a
particular view. After all, society makes actions right
by approving or disapproving of them. According
to cultural relativism, if René and Michel (both
members of society X) are disagreeing about capital
punishment, their disagreement must actually be
about whether society X approves of capital pun-
ishment. Because right and wrong are determined
by one’s culture, René and Michel are disagreeing
about what society X says. But this view of moral
disagreement is dubious, to say the least. When we
have a moral disagreement, we do not think that
the crux of it is whether our society approves of an
action. We do not think that deciding a moral issue
is simply a matter of polling the public to see which
way opinion leans. We do not think that René and
Michel will ever find out whether capital punish-
ment is morally permissible by consulting public
opinion. Determining whether an action is right is
a very different thing from determining what most
people think. This odd consequence of cultural
relativism suggests that the doctrine is flawed.
One of the more disturbing implications of
cultural relativism is that cultures cannot be legiti-
mately criticized from the outside. If a culture
approves of the actions that it performs, then those
actions are morally right, regardless of what other
cultures have to say about the matter. One society’s
practices are as morally justified as any other’s, as
long as the practices are socially sanctioned. This
consequence of cultural relativism may not seem
too worrisome when the societies in question are
long dead. But it takes on a different tone when
the societies are closer to us in time. Consider the
1994 genocide committed in Rwanda in which a
million people died. Suppose the killers’ society
(their tribe) approved of the murders. Then the
genocide was morally justified. And what of Hitler’s
“final solution”—the murder of millions of Jews in
World War II? Say that German society approved
of Hitler’s actions (and those of the men who
carried out his orders). Then Hitler’s final solution
was morally right; engineering the Holocaust was
morally permissible. If you are a cultural relativist,
you cannot legitimately condemn these monstrous
deeds. Because they were approved by their respec-
tive societies, they were morally justified. They
were just as morally justified as the socially sanc-
tioned activities of Albert Schweitzer, Jonas Salk, or
Florence Nightingale. But all this seems implausi-
ble. We do in fact sometimes criticize other cultures
and believe that it is legitimate to do so.
Contrary to the popular view, rejecting cultural
relativism (embracing moral objectivism) does not
entail intolerance. In fact, it provides a plausible
starting point for tolerance. A moral objectivist
realizes that she can legitimately criticize other
cultures— and that people of other cultures can
legitimately criticize her culture. A recognition of
this fact together with an objectivist’s sense of falli-
bility can lead her to an openness to criticism of her
own culture and to acceptance of everyone’s right
to disagree.
We not only criticize other cultures but also
compare the past with the present. We compare
the actions of the past with those of the present
and judge whether moral progress has been made.
We see that slavery has been abolished, that we no
longer burn witches, that we recognize racism as
evil— then we judge that these changes represent
moral progress. For moral relativists, however,
there is no objective standard by which to com-
pare the ways of the past with the ways of the pres-
ent. Societies of the past approved or disapproved
of certain practices, and contemporary societies
approve or disapprove of them, and no transcul-
tural moral assessments can be made. But if there
is such a thing as moral progress, then there must
be some cross- cultural moral yardstick by which we
can evaluate actions. There must be objective stan-
dards by which we can judge that actions of the
present are better than those of the past. If there are
no objective moral standards, our judging that we
are in fact making moral progress is hard to explain.

28 Á PART 1: FundAmEnTAlS
Finally, there is a fundamental difficulty con-
cerning the application of cultural relativism to
moral questions: the doctrine is nearly impossi-
ble to use. The problem is that cultural relativism
applies to societies (or social groups), but we all
belong to several societies, and there is no way to
choose which one is the proper one. What soci-
ety do you belong to if you are an Italian Ameri-
can Buddhist living in Atlanta, Georgia, who is a
member of the National Organization for Women
and a breast cancer support group? The hope of
cultural relativists is that they can use the doc-
trine to make better, more enlightened moral
decisions. But this society- identification problem
seems to preclude any moral decisions, let alone
enlightened ones.
What, then, can we conclude from our exami-
nation of cultural relativism? We have found that
the basic argument for the view fails; we therefore
have no good reasons to believe that the doctrine
is true. Beyond that, we have good grounds for
thinking the doctrine false. Its surprising implica-
tions regarding moral infallibility, moral reformers,
moral progress, the nature of moral disagreements
within societies, and the possibility of cross- cultural
criticism show it to be highly implausible. The crux
of the matter is that cultural relativism does a poor
job of explaining some important features of our
moral experience. A far better explanation of these
features is that some form of moral objectivism is
true.
EMOTIVISM
The commonsense view of moral judgments is
that they ascribe moral properties to such things
as actions and people and that they are therefore
statements that can be true or false. This view of
moral judgments is known as cognitivism. The
opposing view, called noncognitivism, denies that
moral judgments are statements that can be true
or false; it holds that they do not ascribe prop-
erties to anything. Probably the most famous
noncognitivist view is emotivism, which says that
moral judgments cannot be true or false because
they do not make any claims— they merely express
emotions or attitudes. For the emotivist, moral
utterances are something akin to exclamations that
simply express approving or disapproving feel-
ings: “Violence against women— disgusting!” or
“ Shoplifting— love it!”
The English philosopher A. J. Ayer (1910–1989),
an early champion of emotivism, is clear and blunt
about what a moral utterance such as “Stealing
money is wrong” signifies. This sentence, he says,
expresses no proposition which can be either true
or false. It is as if I had written “Stealing money!!”—
where the shape and thickness of the exclamation
marks show, by a suitable convention, that a spe-
cial sort of moral disapproval is the feeling which
is being expressed. It is clear that there is nothing
said here which can be true or false. . . . For in saying
that a certain type of action is right or wrong, I am
not making any factual statement, not even a state-
ment about my own state of mind.5
If moral judgments are about feelings and not
the truth or falsity of moral assertions, then ethics
is a very different sort of inquiry than most people
imagine. As Ayer says,
[A]s ethical judgements are mere expressions of
feeling, there can be no way of determining the
validity of any ethical system, and, indeed, no
sense in asking whether any such system is true. All
that one may legitimately enquire in this connec-
tion is, What are the moral habits of a given per-
son or group of people, and what causes them to
have precisely those habits and feelings? And this
enquiry falls wholly within the scope of the exist-
ing social sciences.6
The emotivist points out that in addition to
expressing feelings and attitudes, moral utter-
ances also function to influence people’s attitudes
and behavior. So the sentence “Stealing money is
wrong” not only expresses feelings of disapproval
but can also influence others to have similar feel-
ings and act accordingly.

CHAPTER 2: SubjECTiviSm, RElATiviSm, And EmoTiviSm Á 29
Emotivists also take an unusual position on
moral disagreements. They maintain that moral
disagreements are not conflicts of beliefs, as is the
case when one person asserts that something is
true and another person asserts that it is not true.
Instead, moral disagreements are disagreements in
attitude. Jane has positive feelings or a favorable
attitude toward abortion, but Ellen has negative
feelings or an unfavorable attitude toward abor-
tion. The disagreement is emotive, not cognitive.
Jane may say “Abortion is right,” and Ellen may
say “Abortion is wrong,” but they are not really
disagreeing over the facts. They are expressing
conflicting attitudes and trying to influence each
other’s attitude and behavior.
Philosophers have criticized emotivism on
several grounds, and this emotivist analysis of dis-
agreement has been a prime target. As you might
suspect, their concern is that this notion of disagree-
ment is radically different from our ordinary view.
Like subjective relativism, emotivism implies that
disagreements in the usual sense are impossible.
People cannot disagree over the moral facts, because
there are no moral facts. But we tend to think that
when we disagree with someone on a moral issue,
there really is a conflict of statements about what
is the case. Of course, when we are involved in a
conflict of beliefs, we may also experience conflict-
ing attitudes. But we do not think that we are only
experiencing a disagreement in attitudes.
Emotivism also provides a curious account of
how reasons function in moral discourse. Our com-
monsense view is that a moral judgment is the kind
of thing that makes a claim about moral properties
and that such a claim can be supported by reasons.
If someone asserts “Euthanasia is wrong,” we may
sensibly ask her what reasons she has for believing
that claim. If she replies that there are no reasons
to back up her claim or that moral utterances are
not the kinds of things that can be supported by
reasons, we would probably think that she mis-
understood the question or the nature of moral-
ity. For the emotivist, “moral” reasons have a very
different function. Here reasons are intended not
to support statements (because there are no moral
statements) but to influence the emotions or atti-
tudes of others. Because moral utterances express
emotions or attitudes, “presenting reasons” is a
matter of offering nonmoral facts that can influ-
ence those emotions and attitudes. Suppose A has
a favorable attitude toward abortion, and B has an
unfavorable one (that is, A and B are having a dis-
agreement in attitude). For A, to present reasons is
to provide information that might cause B to have a
more favorable attitude toward abortion.
This conception of the function of reasons,
however, implies that good reasons encompass any
nonmoral facts that can alter someone’s attitude.
On this view, the relevance of these facts to the
judgment at hand is beside the point. The essen-
tial criterion is whether the adduced facts are suffi-
ciently influential. They need not have any logical
or cognitive connection to the moral judgment
to be changed. They may, for example, appeal to
someone’s ignorance, arrogance, racism, or fear.
But we ordinarily suppose that reasons should be
relevant to the cognitive content of moral judg-
ments. Moreover, we normally make a clear dis-
tinction between influencing someone’s attitudes
and showing (by providing reasons) that a claim is
true— a distinction that emotivism cannot make.
The final implication of emotivism is also prob-
lematic: there is no such thing as goodness or bad-
ness. We cannot legitimately claim that anything
is good or bad, because these properties do not
exist. To declare that something is good is simply
to express positive emotions or a favorable attitude
toward it. We may say that pain is bad, but badness
(or goodness) is not a feature of pain. Our saying
that pain is bad is just an expression of our unfavor-
able attitude toward pain.
Suppose a six- year- old girl is living in a small vil-
lage in Syria during the civil war between President
Bashar al- Assad’s Baathist government and rebel
forces. Assad’s henchmen firebomb the village,
destroying it and incinerating everyone except the

30 Á PART 1: FundAmEnTAlS
girl, who is burned from head to toe and endures
excruciating pain for three days before she dies.
Suppose that we are deeply moved by this tragedy
as we consider her unimaginable suffering and we
remark, “How horrible. The little girl’s suffering
was a very bad thing.”7 When we say something
like this, we ordinarily mean that the girl’s suffering
had a certain moral property: that the suffering was
bad. But according to emotivism, her suffering had
no moral properties at all. When we comment on
the girl’s suffering, we are simply expressing our
feelings; the suffering itself was neither good nor
bad. But this view of things seems implausible. Our
moral experience suggests that some things in fact
are bad and some are good.
The philosopher Brand Blanshard (1892–1987)
makes the point in the following way:
[T]he emotivist is cut off by his theory from admit-
ting that there has been anything good or evil in
the past, either animal or human. There have been
Black Deaths, to be sure, and wars and rumours
of war; there have been the burning of countless
women as witches, and the massacre in the Katyn
forest, and Oswiecim, and Dachau, and an unbear-
able procession of horrors; but one cannot mean-
ingfully say that anything evil has ever happened.
The people who suffered from these things did
indeed take up attitudes of revulsion toward them;
we can now judge that they took them; but in such
judgments we are not saying that anything evil
occurred. . . . [Emotivism], when first presented, has
some plausibility. But when this is balanced against
the implied unplausibility of setting down as mean-
ingless every suggestion that good or evil events
have ever occurred, it is outweighed enormously.8
Obviously, emotivism does not fare well when
examined in light of our commonsense moral
experience. We must keep in mind, though, that
common sense is fallible. On the other hand, we
should not jettison common sense in favor of
another view unless we have good reasons to do so.
In the case of emotivism, we have no good reasons
to prefer it over common sense— and we have good
grounds for rejecting it.
CHAPTER REVIEW
SUMMARY
Subjective relativism is the view that an action is mor-
ally right if one approves of it. A person’s approval
makes the action right. This doctrine (as well as cul-
tural relativism) is in stark contrast to moral objectiv-
ism, the view that moral truths exist and that they
do so independently of what individuals or societ-
ies think of them. Subjective relativism, though, has
some troubling implications. It implies that each per-
son is morally infallible and that individuals can never
have a genuine moral disagreement.
Cultural relativism is the view that an action is mor-
ally right if one’s culture approves of it. The argument
for this doctrine is based on the diversity of moral judg-
ments among cultures: because people’s judgments
about right and wrong differ from culture to culture,
right and wrong must be relative to culture, and there
are no objective moral principles. This argument is
defective, however, because the diversity of moral views
does not imply that morality is relative to cultures. In
addition, the alleged diversity of basic moral standards
among cultures may be only apparent, not real. Societ-
ies whose moral judgments conflict may be differing
not over moral principles but over nonmoral facts.
Some think that tolerance is entailed by cultural
relativism. But there is no necessary connection
between tolerance and the doctrine. Indeed, the cul-
tural relativist cannot consistently advocate tolerance
while maintaining his relativist standpoint. To advo-
cate tolerance is to advocate an objective moral value.
But if tolerance is an objective moral value, then cul-
tural relativism must be false, because it says that there
are no objective moral values.
Like subjective relativism, cultural relativism has
some disturbing consequences. It implies that cultures
are morally infallible, that social reformers can never
be morally right, that moral disagreements between
individuals in the same culture amount to arguments
over whether they disagree with their culture, that
other cultures cannot be legitimately criticized, and
that moral progress is impossible.

CHAPTER 2: SubjECTiviSm, RElATiviSm, And EmoTiviSm Á 31
Emotivism is the view that moral utterances are
neither true nor false but are expressions of emotions
or attitudes. It leads to the conclusion that people can
disagree only in attitude, not in beliefs. People can-
not disagree over the moral facts, because there are no
moral facts. Emotivism also implies that presenting
reasons in support of a moral utterance is a matter of
offering nonmoral facts that can influence someone’s
attitude. It seems that any nonmoral facts will do, as
long as they affect attitudes. Perhaps the most far-
reaching implication of emotivism is that nothing is
actually good or bad. There simply are no properties of
goodness and badness. There is only the expression of
favorable or unfavorable emotions or attitudes toward
something.
KEY TERMS
objectivism (p. 20)
cultural relativism (p. 20)
subjective relativism (p. 20)
emotivism (p. 21)
EXERCISES
Review Questions
1. Does objectivism entail intolerance? Why or
why not? (p. 20)
2. Does objectivism require absolutism? Why or
why not? (p. 20)
3. How does subjective relativism differ from
cultural relativism? (p. 20)
4. What is emotivism? How does emotivism differ
from objectivism? (p. 21)
5. How does subjective relativism imply moral
infallibility? (p. 22)
6. According to moral subjectivism, are moral
disagreements possible? Why or why not?
(pp. 22–23)
7. What is the argument for cultural relativism?
Is the argument sound? Why or why not?
(pp. 23–26)
8. Does the diversity of moral outlooks in cultures
show that right and wrong are determined by
culture? Why or why not? (pp. 24–26)
9. According to the text, how is it possible for
people in different cultures to disagree about
moral judgments and still embrace the same
fundamental moral principles? (pp. 25–26)
10. Is there a necessary connection between cultural
relativism and tolerance? Why or why not?
(p. 26)
11. What does cultural relativism imply about the
moral status of social reformers? (p. 26)
12. What is the emotivist view of moral
disagreements? (p. 29)
13. According to emotivism, how do reasons
function in moral discourse? (p. 29)
Discussion Questions
1. Are you a subjective relativist? If so, how did
you come to adopt this view? If not, what is
your explanation for not accepting it?
2. Suppose a serial killer approves of his murderous
actions. According to subjective relativism, are
the killer’s actions therefore justified? Do you
believe a serial killer’s murders are justified? If not,
is your judgment based on a subjective relativist’s
perspective or an objectivist perspective?
3. Are you a cultural relativist? Why or why not?
4. Suppose a majority of the German people
approved of Hitler’s murdering six million Jews
in World War II. Would this approval make
Hitler’s actions morally justified? If so, why? If
not, why not— and what moral outlook are you
using to make such a determination?
5. When cultural relativists say that every culture
should embrace a policy of tolerance, are they
contradicting themselves? If so, how? If cultural
relativism were true, would this fact make wars
between societies less or more likely? Explain
your answer.
6. If you traveled the world and saw that cultures
differ dramatically in their moral judgments,
would you conclude from this evidence that
cultural relativism was true? Why or why not?
7. According to a cultural relativist, would the
civil rights reforms that Martin Luther King Jr.
sought be morally right or wrong? Do you think

32 Á PART 1: FundAmEnTAlS
that his efforts at reform were morally wrong?
What are your reasons for your decision?
8. Do you believe that there has been moral
progress in the past thousand years of human
history? Why or why not?
9. Suppose a deer that had been shot by a hunter
writhed in agony for days before dying. You
exclaim, “How she must have suffered! Her
horrendous pain was a bad thing.” In this
situation, does the word bad refer to any moral
properties? Is there really something bad about
the deer’s suffering— or is your use of the word
just a way to express your horror without
making any moral statement at all? Explain
your answers.
ETHICAL DILEMMAS
1. In Western societies, some cultural subgroups
believe it is morally permissible to kill anyone
who criticizes their religion. Do you agree or
disagree with this view? On what grounds? Is
your position relativist or objectivist?
2. Suppose you are a social reformer campaigning
against your culture’s practice of systematically
discriminating against the poorest people
in your society. Do you think your stance is
morally right— or is your culture right while you
are wrong? Why?
3. Suppose you accept (approve of) premarital
sex. Is it possible for you to be mistaken
about this issue? Why or why not? Does
your answer suggest that you are a subjective
relativist?
FURTHER READING
A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic (1936; reprint,
New York: Dover, 1952).
Brand Blanshard, “Emotivism,” in Reason and Goodness
(1961; reprint, New York: G. Allen and Unwin, 1978).
Donald M. Borchert and David Stewart, “Ethical Emotiv-
ism,” in Exploring Ethics (New York: Macmillan, 1986).
Richard B. Brandt, chapter 11 in Ethical Theory: The Prob-
lems of Normative and Critical Ethics (Englewood Cliffs,
NJ: Prentice Hall, 1959).
Jean Bethke Elshtain, “Judge Not?” First Things, no. 46
(October 1994): 36–40.
Fred Feldman, chapter 11 in Introductory Ethics (Engle-
wood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1978).
Chris Gowans, “Moral Relativism,” in Stanford Encyclope-
dia of Philosophy, Spring 2004 ed., ed. Edward N. Zalta,
http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2004/entries
/moral-relativism (March 1, 2015).
Melville Herskovits, Cultural Relativism: Perspectives in Cul-
tural Pluralism, ed. Frances Herskovits (New York: Ran-
dom House, 1972).
J. L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (Harmond-
sworth: Penguin, 1977).
James Rachels, “Subjectivism,” in A Companion to Ethics,
ed. Peter Singer, corr. ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993),
432–41.
Theodore Schick Jr. and Lewis Vaughn, chapter 5 in Doing
Philosophy: An Introduction through Thought Experiments,
2nd ed. (Boston: McGraw- Hill, 2003).
Walter T. Stace, “Ethical Relativism,” in The Concept of
Morals (1937; reprint, New York: Macmillan, 1965).
Paul Taylor, chapter 2 in Principles of Ethics: An Introduc-
tion (Encino, CA: Dickenson, 1975).
David Wong, “Relativism,” in A Companion to Ethics,
ed. Peter Singer, corr. ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993),
442–50.

http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2004/entries/moral-relativism

CHAPTER 2: SubjECTiviSm, RElATiviSm, And EmoTiviSm Á 33
R E A d i n G S
From Anthropology and the Abnormal
Ruth Benedict
Modern social anthropology has become more and
more a study of the varieties and common elements of
cultural environment and the consequences of these
in human behavior. For such a study of diverse social
orders primitive peoples fortunately provide a labora-
tory not yet entirely vitiated by the spread of a standard-
ized worldwide civilization. Dyaks and Hopis, Fijians
and Yakuts are significant for psychological and socio-
logical study because only among these simpler peoples
has there been sufficient isolation to give opportunity
for the development of localized social forms. In the
higher cultures the standardization of custom and
belief over a couple of continents has given a false sense
of the inevitability of the particular forms that have
gained currency, and we need to turn to a wider sur-
vey in order to check the conclusions we hastily base
upon this near- universality of familiar customs. Most
of the simpler cultures did not gain the wide currency
of the one which, out of our experience, we identify
with human nature, but this was for various historical
reasons, and certainly not for any that gives us as its car-
riers a monopoly of social good or of social sanity. Mod-
ern civilization, from this point of view, becomes not
a necessary pinnacle of human achievement but one
entry in a long series of possible adjustments.
These adjustments, whether they are in manner-
isms like the ways of showing anger, or joy, or grief
in any society, or in major human drives like those of
sex, prove to be far more variable than experience in
any one culture would suggest. In certain fields, such
as that of religion or of formal marriage arrangements,
these wide limits of variability are well known and can
be fairly described. In others it is not yet possible to give
a generalized account, but that does not absolve us of
the task of indicating the significance of the work that
has been done and of the problems that have arisen.
One of these problems relates to the customary
modern normal- abnormal categories and our conclu-
sions regarding them. In how far are such categories
culturally determined, or in how far can we with assur-
ance regard them as absolute? In how far can we regard
inability to function socially as diagnostic of abnor-
mality, or in how far is it necessary to regard this as a
function of the culture?
As a matter of fact, one of the most striking facts
that emerge from a study of widely varying cultures is
the ease with which our abnormals function in other
cultures. It does not matter what kind of “abnormal-
ity” we choose for illustration, those which indicate
extreme instability, or those which are more in the
nature of character traits like sadism or delusions of
grandeur or of persecution, there are well- described
cultures in which these abnormals function at ease
and with honor, and apparently without danger or
difficulty to the society.
The most notorious of these is trance and cata-
lepsy. Even a very mild mystic is aberrant in our cul-
ture. But most peoples have regarded even extreme
psychic manifestations not only as normal and desir-
able, but even as characteristic of highly valued and
gifted individuals. This was true even in our own cul-
tural background in that period when Catholicism
made the ecstatic experience the mark of sainthood.
It is hard for us, born and brought up in a culture that
makes no use of the experience, to realize how impor-
tant a role it may play and how many individuals are
capable of it, once it has been given an honorable
place in any society.
* * *
Cataleptic and trance phenomena are, of course,
only one illustration of the fact that those whom we
regard as abnormals may function adequately in other
Ruth Benedict, excerpts from “Anthropology and the Abnormal,”
Journal of General Psychology 10 (1934), pp. 59–82. © 1934 Rout-
ledge. Reprinted by permission of the publisher (Taylor & Francis
Ltd., http://www.tand fonline.com).

http://www.tandfonline.com

34 Á PART 1: FundAmEnTAlS
cultures. Many of our culturally discarded traits are
selected for elaboration in different societies. Homosex-
uality is an excellent example, for in this case our atten-
tion is not constantly diverted, as in the consideration
of trance, to the interruption of routine activity which
it implies. Homosexuality poses the problem very sim-
ply. A tendency toward this trait in our culture exposes
an individual to all the conflicts to which all aberrants
are always exposed, and we tend to identify the conse-
quences of this conflict with homosexuality. But these
consequences are obviously local and cultural. Homo-
sexuals in many societies are not incompetent, but they
may be such if the culture asks adjustments of them that
would strain any man’s vitality. Wherever homosexu-
ality has been given an honorable place in any society,
those to whom it is congenial have filled adequately the
honorable roles society assigns to them. Plato’s Republic
is, of course, the most convincing statement of such a
reading of homosexuality. It is presented as one of the
major means to the good life, and it was generally so
regarded in Greece at that time.
The cultural attitude toward homosexuals has not
always been on such a high ethical plane, but it has
been varied. Among many American Indian tribes
there exists the institution of the berdache, as the
French called them. These men- women were men who
at puberty or thereafter took the dress and the occupa-
tions of women. Sometimes they married other men
and lived with them. Sometimes they were men with
no inversion, persons of weak sexual endowment who
chose this role to avoid the jeers of the women. The
berdaches were never regarded as of first- rate super-
natural power, as similar men- women were in Siberia,
but rather as leaders in women’s occupations, good
healers in certain diseases, or, among certain tribes, as
the genial organizers of social affairs. In any case, they
were socially placed. They were not left exposed to the
conflicts that visit the deviant who is excluded from
participation in the recognized patterns of his society.
* * *
No one civilization can possibly utilize in its mores
the whole potential range of human behavior. Just as
there are great numbers of possible phonetic articula-
tions, and the possibility of language depends on a
selection and standardization of a few of these in order
that speech communication may be possible at all, so
the possibility of organized behavior of every sort, from
the fashions of local dress and houses to the dicta of a
people’s ethics and religion, depends upon a similar
selection among the possible behavior traits. In the field
of recognized economic obligations or sex tabus this
selection is as nonrational and subconscious a process as
it is in the field of phonetics. It is a process which goes on
in the group for long periods of time and is historically
conditioned by innumerable accidents of isolation or of
contact of peoples. In any comprehensive study of psy-
chology, the selection that different cultures have made
in the course of history within the great circumference
of potential behavior is of great significance.
Every society, beginning with some slight inclina-
tion in one direction or another, carries its preference
farther and farther, integrating itself more and more
completely upon its chosen basis, and discarding
those types of behavior that are uncongenial. Most
of these organizations of personality that seem to us
most incontrovertibly abnormal have been used by
different civilizations in the very foundations of their
institutional life. Conversely the most valued traits of
our normal individuals have been looked on in dif-
ferently organized cultures as aberrant. Normality, in
short, within a very wide range, is culturally defined. It
is primarily a term for the socially elaborated segment
of human behavior in any culture; and abnormality,
a term for the segment that that particular civiliza-
tion does not use. The very eyes with which we see the
problem are conditioned by the long traditional hab-
its of our own society.
It is a point that has been made more often in
relation to ethics than in relation to psychiatry. We
do not any longer make the mistake of deriving the
morality of our own locality and decade directly from
the inevitable constitution of human nature. We do
not elevate it to the dignity of a first principle. We
recognize that morality differs in every society, and is
a convenient term for socially approved habits. Man-
kind has always preferred to say, “It is a morally good,”
rather than “It is habitual,” and the fact of this prefer-
ence is matter enough for a critical science of ethics.
But historically the two phrases are synonymous.
The concept of the normal is properly a variant
of the concept of the good. It is that which society

CHAPTER 2: SubjECTiviSm, RElATiviSm, And EmoTiviSm Á 35
has approved. A normal action is one which falls well
within the limits of expected behavior for a particu-
lar society. Its variability among different peoples is
essentially a function of the variability of the behavior
patterns that different societies have created for them-
selves, and can never be wholly divorced from a consid-
eration of culturally institutionalized types of behavior.
Each culture is a more or less elaborate working-
out of the potentialities of the segment it has chosen.
In so far as a civilization is well integrated and consis-
tent within itself, it will tend to carry farther and far-
ther, according to its nature, its initial impulse toward
a particular type of action, and from the point of view
of any other culture those elaborations will include
more and more extreme and aberrant traits.
Each of these traits, in proportion as it reinforces
the chosen behavior patterns of that culture, is for that
culture normal. Those individuals to whom it is conge-
nial either congenitally, or as the result of childhood
sets, are accorded to prestige in that culture, and are not
visited with the social contempt or disapproval which
their traits would call down upon them in a society that
was differently organized. On the other hand, those
individuals whose characteristics are not congenial to
the selected type of human behavior in that commu-
nity are the deviants, no matter how valued their per-
sonality traits may be in a contrasted civilization.
* * *
I have spoken of individuals as having sets toward
certain types of behavior, and of these sets as running
sometimes counter to the types of behavior which are
institutionalized in the culture to which they belong.
From all that we know of contrasting cultures it seems
clear that differences of temperament occur in every
society. The matter has never been made the subject of
investigation, but from the available material it would
appear that these temperament types are very likely of
universal recurrence. That is, there is an ascertainable
range of human behavior that is found wherever a suffi-
ciently large series of individuals is observed. But the pro-
portion in which behavior types stand to one another in
different societies is not universal. The vast majority of
the individuals in any group are shaped to the fashion of
that culture. In other words, most individuals are plastic
to the moulding force of the society into which they are
born. In a society that values trance, as in India, they will
have supernormal experience. In a society that institu-
tionalizes homosexuality, they will be homosexual. In
a society that sets the gathering of possessions as the
chief human objective, they will amass property. The
deviants, whatever the type of behavior the culture has
institutionalized, will remain few in number, and there
seems no more difficulty in moulding the vast mal-
leable majority to the “normality” of what we consider
an aberrant trait, such as delusions of reference, than
to the normality of such accepted behavior patterns as
acquisitiveness. The small proportion of the number of
the deviants in any culture is not a function of the sure
instinct with which that society has built itself upon
the fundamental sanities, but of the universal fact that,
happily, the majority of mankind quite readily take any
shape that is presented to them.
* * *
Trying Out One’s New Sword
Mary Midgley
lifetime which would have astonished our parents.
I want to discuss here one very short way of dealing
with this difficulty, a drastic way which many people
now theoretically favour. It consists in simply denying
that we can ever understand any culture except our
own well enough to make judgements about it. Those
who recommend this hold that the world is sharply
All of us are, more or less, in trouble today about try-
ing to understand cultures strange to us. We hear
constantly of alien customs. We see changes in our
Mary Midgley, “Trying Out One’s New Sword,” in Heart and Mind:
The Varieties of Moral Experience (Brighton, Sussex: Harvester Press,
1981), pp. 69–75. Reprinted by permission of David Higham
Associates.

36 Á PART 1: FundAmEnTAlS
divided into separate societies, sealed units, each with
its own system of thought. They feel that the respect
and tolerance due from one system to another forbids
us ever to take up a critical position to any other cul-
ture. Moral judgment, they suggest, is a kind of coin-
age valid only in its country of origin.
I shall call this position ‘moral isolationism’.
I shall suggest that it is certainly not forced upon us,
and indeed that it makes no sense at all. People usually
take it up because they think it is a respectful attitude
to other cultures. In fact, however, it is not respectful.
Nobody can respect what is entirely unintelligible to
them. To respect someone, we have to know enough
about him to make a favourable judgement, however
general and tentative. And we do understand people
in other cultures to this extent. Otherwise a great mass
of our most valuable thinking would be paralysed.
To show this, I shall take a remote example,
because we shall probably find it easier to think calmly
about it than we should with a contemporary one,
such as female circumcision in Africa or the Chinese
Cultural Revolution. The principles involved will still
be the same. My example is this. There is, it seems,
a verb in classical Japanese which means ‘to try out
one’s new sword on a chance wayfarer’. (The word is
tsujigiri, literally ‘ crossroads- cut’.) A samurai sword
had to be tried out because, if it was to work prop-
erly, it had to slice through someone at a single blow,
from the shoulder to the opposite flank. Otherwise,
the warrior bungled his stroke. This could injure his
honour, offend his ancestors, and even let down his
emperor. So tests were needed, and wayfarers had to
be expended. Any wayfarer would do— provided, of
course, that he was not another Samurai. Scientists
will recognize a familiar problem about the rights of
experimental subjects.
Now when we hear of a custom like this, we may
well reflect that we simply do not understand it; and
therefore are not qualified to criticize it at all, because
we are not members of that culture. But we are not
members of any other culture either, except our own.
So we extend the principle to cover all extraneous cul-
tures, and we seem therefore to be moral isolationists.
But this is, as we shall see, an impossible position. Let
us ask what it would involve.
We must ask first: Does the isolating barrier work
both ways? Are people in other cultures equally
unable to criticize us? This question struck me sharply
when I read a remark in The Guardian by an anthro-
pologist about a South American Indian who had
been taken into a Brazilian town for an operation,
which saved his life. When he came back to his vil-
lage, he made several highly critical remarks about
the white Brazilians’ way of life. They may very well
have been justified. But the interesting point was that
the anthropologist called these remarks ‘a damning
indictment of Western civilization’. Now the Indian
had been in that town about two weeks. Was he in a
position to deliver a damning indictment? Would we
ourselves be qualified to deliver such an indictment
on the Samurai, provided we could spend two weeks
in ancient Japan? What do we really think about this?
My own impression is that we believe that outsiders
can, in principle, deliver perfectly good indictments—
only, it usually takes more than two weeks to make
them damning. Understanding has degrees. It is not
a slapdash yes- or- no matter. Intelligent outsiders can
progress in it, and in some ways will be at an advan-
tage over the locals. But if this is so, it must clearly
apply to ourselves as much as anybody else.
Our next question is this: Does the isolating bar-
rier between cultures block praise as well as blame? If
I want to say that the Samurai culture has many vir-
tues, or to praise the South American Indians, am I
prevented from doing that by my outside status? Now,
we certainly do need to praise other societies in this
way. But it is hardly possible that we could praise them
effectively if we could not, in principle, criticize them.
Our praise would be worthless if it rested on no defi-
nite grounds, if it did not flow from some understand-
ing. Certainly we may need to praise things which we
do not fully understand. We say ‘there’s something
very good here, but I can’t quite make out what it is
yet’. This happens when we want to learn from strang-
ers. And we can learn from strangers. But to do this we
have to distinguish between those strangers who are
worth learning from and those who are not. Can we
then judge which is which?
This brings us to our third question: What is
involved in judging? Now plainly there is no question

CHAPTER 2: SubjECTiviSm, RElATiviSm, And EmoTiviSm Á 37
here of sitting on a bench in a red robe and sentencing
people. Judging simply means forming an opinion,
and expressing it if it is called for. Is there anything
wrong about this? Naturally, we ought to avoid
forming— and expressing— crude opinions, like that of
a simple- minded missionary, who might dismiss the
whole Samurai culture as entirely bad, because non-
Christian. But this is a different objection. The trouble
with crude opinions is that they are crude, whoever
forms them, not that they are formed by the wrong
people. Anthropologists, after all, are outsiders quite
as much as missionaries. Moral isolationism forbids
us to form any opinions on these matters. Its ground
for doing so is that we don’t understand them. But
there is much that we don’t understand in our own
culture too. This brings us to our last question: If we
can’t judge other cultures, can we really judge our
own? Our efforts to do so will be much damaged if we
are really deprived of our opinions about other soci-
eties, because these provide the range of comparison,
the spectrum of alternatives against which we set what
we want to understand. We would have to stop using
the mirror which anthropology so helpfully holds
up to us.
In short, moral isolationism would lay down a
general ban on moral reasoning. Essentially, this is the
programme of immoralism, and it carries a distressing
logical difficulty. Immoralists like Nietzsche are actu-
ally just a rather specialized sect of moralists. They
can no more afford to put moralizing out of business
than smugglers can afford to abolish customs regula-
tions. The power of moral judgement is, in fact, not a
luxury, not a perverse indulgence of the self- righteous.
It is a necessity. When we judge something to be bad
or good, better or worse than something else, we are
taking it as an example to aim at or avoid. Without
opinions of this sort, we would have no framework of
comparison for our own policy, no chance of profiting
by other people’s insights or mistakes. In this vacuum,
we could form no judgements on our own actions.
Now it would be odd if Homo sapiens had really
got himself into a position as bad as this— a position
where his main evolutionary asset, his brain, was so
little use to him. None of us is going to accept this
sceptical diagnosis. We cannot do so, because our
involvement in moral isolationism does not flow
from apathy, but from a rather acute concern about
human hypocrisy and other forms of wickedness. But
we polarize that concern around a few selected moral
truths. We are rightly angry with those who despise,
oppress or steamroll other cultures. We think that
doing these things is actually wrong. But this is itself a
moral judgement. We could not condemn oppression
and insolence if we thought that all our condemna-
tions were just a trivial local quirk of our own culture.
We could still less do it if we tried to stop judging
altogether.
Real moral scepticism, in fact, could lead only to
inaction, to our losing all interest in moral questions,
most of all in those which concern other societies.
When we discuss these things, it becomes instantly
clear how far we are from doing this. Suppose, for
instance, that I criticize the bisecting Samurai, that I
say his behaviour is brutal. What will usually happen
next is that someone will protest, will say that I have
no right to make criticisms like that of another culture.
But it is most unlikely that he will use this move to
end the discussion of the subject. Instead, he will jus-
tify the Samurai. He will try to fill in the background,
to make me understand the custom, by explaining
the exalted ideals of discipline and devotion which
produced it. He will probably talk of the lower value
which the ancient Japanese placed on individual life
generally. He may well suggest that this is a healthier
attitude than our own obsession with security. He may
add, too, that the wayfarers did not seriously mind
being bisected, that in principle they accepted the
whole arrangement.
Now an objector who talks like this is implying
that it is possible to understand alien customs. That is
just what he is trying to make me do. And he implies,
too, that if I do succeed in understanding them, I shall
do something better than giving up judging them.
He expects me to change my present judgement to a
truer one— namely, one that is favourable. And the
standards I must use to do this cannot just be Samu-
rai standards. They have to be ones current in my
own culture. Ideals like discipline and devotion will
not move anybody unless he himself accepts them.
As it happens, neither discipline nor devotion is very

38 Á PART 1: FundAmEnTAlS
popular in the West at present. Anyone who appeals to
them may well have to do some more arguing to make
them acceptable, before he can use them to explain
the Samurai. But if he does succeed here, he will have
persuaded us, not just that there was something to be
said for them in ancient Japan, but that there would
be here as well.
Isolating barriers simply cannot arise here. If we
accept something as a serious moral truth about one
culture, we can’t refuse to apply it— in however differ-
ent an outward form— to other cultures as well, wher-
ever circumstance admit it. If we refuse to do this, we
just are not taking the other culture seriously. This
becomes clear if we look at the last argument used by
my objector— that of justification by consent of the
victim. It is suggested that sudden bisection is quite in
order, provided that it takes place between consenting
adults. I cannot now discuss how conclusive this justi-
fication is. What I am pointing out is simply that it can
only work if we believe that consent can make such a
transaction respectable— and this is a thoroughly mod-
ern and Western idea. It would probably never occur to
a Samurai; if it did, it would surprise him very much.
It is our standard. In applying it, too, we are likely to
make another typically Western demand. We shall ask
for good factual evidence that the wayfarers actually do
have this rather surprising taste— that they are really
willing to be bisected. In applying Western standards
in this way, we are not being confused or irrelevant.
We are asking the questions which arise from where
we stand, questions which we can see the sense of. We
do this because asking questions which you can’t see
the sense of is humbug. Certainly we can extend our
questioning by imaginative effort. We can come to
understand other societies better. By doing so, we may
make their questions our own, or we may see that they
are really forms of the questions which we are asking
already. This is not impossible. It is just very hard work.
The obstacles which often prevent it are simply those
of ordinary ignorance, laziness and prejudice.
If there were really an isolating barrier, of course,
our own culture could never have been formed. It is no
scaled box, but a fertile jungle of different influences—
Greek, Jewish, Roman, Norse, Celtic and so forth, into
which further influences are still pouring— American,
Indian, Japanese, Jamaican, you name it. The moral
isolationist’s picture of separate, unmixable cultures
is quite unreal. People who talk about British history
usually stress the value of this fertilizing mix, no doubt
rightly. But this is not just an odd fact about Britain.
Except for the very smallest and most remote, all cul-
tures are formed out of many streams. All have the
problem of digesting and assimilating things which, at
the start, they do not understand. All have the choice
of learning something from this challenge, or, alterna-
tively, of refusing to learn, and fighting it mindlessly
instead.
This universal predicament has been obscured
by the fact that anthropologists used to concentrate
largely on very small and remote cultures, which did
not seem to have this problem. These tiny societies,
which had often forgotten their own history, made
neat, self- contained subjects for study. No doubt it
was valuable to emphasize their remoteness, their
extreme strangeness, their independence of our
cultural tradition. This emphasis was, I think, the
root of moral isolationism. But, as the tribal stud-
ies themselves showed, even there the anthropolo-
gists were able to interpret what they saw and make
judgements— often favourable— about the tribesmen.
And the tribesmen, too, were quite equal to making
judgements about the anthropologists— and about
the tourists and Coca- Cola salesmen who followed
them. Both sets of judgements, no doubt, were some-
what hasty, both have been refined in the light of
further experience. A similar transaction between us
and the Samurai might take even longer. But that is
no reason at all for deeming it impossible. Morally as
well as physically, there is only one world, and we all
have to live in it.

P A R T
2
‘’
Moral Reasoning

C H A P T E R 3
‘’
Evaluating Moral Arguments
41
We therefore begin this chapter with the basics
of critical reasoning. The focus is on the skills that
are at the heart of this kind of thinking—the formu-
lation and evaluation of logical arguments. The rest
of the chapter is about applying critical reasoning
to the claims and arguments of ethics.
CLAIMS AND ARGUMENTS
When you use critical reasoning, your ultimate
aim is usually to figure out whether to accept, or
believe, a statement—either someone else’s state-
ment or one of your own. A statement, or claim,
is an assertion that something is or is not the case; it
is either true or false. These are statements:
• The ship sailed on the wind-tossed sea.
• I feel tired and listless.
• Murder is wrong.
• 5 + 5 = 10.
• A circle is not a square.
These statements assert that something is or is
not the case. Whether you accept them, reject them,
or neither, they are still statements because they are
assertions that can be either true or false.
The following, however, are not statements;
they do not assert that something is or is not the
case:
• Why is Anna laughing?
• Is abortion immoral?
This much is clear: we cannot escape the ethical
facts of life. We often must make moral judgments,
assess moral principles or rules, contend with moral
theories, and argue the pros and cons of moral
issues. Typically we do all of these things believing
that in one way or another they really matter.
Because we think that ethics (that is, moral
philosophy) matters, it follows that moral reasoning
matters, for we could make little headway in these
difficult waters without the use of reasons and argu-
ments. Along the way we may take into account
our feelings, desires, beliefs, and other factors, but
getting to our destination depends mostly on the
quality of our moral reasoning. Through moral rea-
soning we assess what is right and wrong, good and
bad, virtuous and vicious. We make and dismantle
arguments for this view and for that. In our fin-
est moments, we follow the lead of reason in the
search for answers, trying to rise above subjectiv-
ism, prejudice, and confusion.
In this chapter you will discover (if you haven’t
already) that you are no stranger to moral reason-
ing. Moral reasoning is ordinary critical reason-
ing applied to ethics. Critical reasoning (or critical
thinking) is the careful, systematic evalu ation of
statements or claims. We use critical reasoning
every day to determine whether a statement is wor-
thy of acceptance—that is, whether it is true. We
harness critical reasoning to assess the truth of all
sorts of claims in all kinds of contexts—personal,
professional, academic, philosophical, scientific,
political, and ethical. Moral reasoning, then, is not
a type of reasoning that you have never seen before.

42 Á PART 2: MORAL REASONING
• Hand me the screwdriver.
• Don’t speak to me.
• Hello, Webster.
• For heaven’s sake!
A fundamental principle of critical reasoning is
that we should not accept a statement as true with-
out good reasons. If a statement is supported by
good reasons, we are entitled to believe it. The bet-
ter the reasons supporting a statement, the more
likely it is to be true. Our acceptance of a statement,
then, can vary in strength. If a statement is sup-
ported by strong reasons, we are entitled to believe
it strongly. If it is supported by weaker reasons, our
belief should likewise be weaker. If the reasons are
equivocal—if they do not help us decide one way
or another—we should suspend judgment until the
evidence is more definitive.
Reasons supporting a statement are themselves
statements. To lend credence to another claim,
these supporting statements may assert something
about scientific evidence, expert opinion, relevant
examples, or other considerations. In this way they
provide reasons for believing that a statement is true,
that what is asserted is actual. When this state of
affairs exists—when at least one statement attempts
to provide reasons for believing another statement—
we have an argument. An argument is a group of
statements, one of which is supposed to be supported
by the rest. An argument in this sense, of course, has
nothing to do with the common notion of argu-
ments as shouting matches or vehement quarrels.
In an argument, the supporting statements
are known as premises; the statement being sup-
ported is known as a conclusion. Consider these
arguments:
Argument 1. Capital punishment is morally permis-
sible because it helps to deter crime.
Argument 2. If John killed Bill in self-defense, he did
not commit murder. He did act in self-defense.
Therefore, he did not commit murder.
Argument 3. Telling a white lie is morally permissible.
We should judge the rightness of an act by its
impact on human well-being. If an act increases
human well-being, then it is right. Without ques-
tion, telling a white lie increases human well-
being, because it spares people’s feelings; that’s
what white lies are for.
These arguments are fairly simple. In Argu-
ment 1, a single premise (“because it helps to deter
crime”) supports a straightforward conclusion—
“Capital pun ishment is morally permissible.”
Argument 2 has two premises: “If John killed Bill
in self-defense, he did not commit murder” and
“He did act in self-defense.” And the conclusion is
“Therefore, he did not commit murder.” Argument
3 has three premises: “We should judge the rightness
of an act by its impact on human well-being,” “If an
act increases human well-being, then it is right,”
and “Without question, telling a white lie increases
human well-being, because it spares people’s feel-
ings.” Its conclusion is “Telling a white lie is morally
permissible.”
As you can see, these three arguments have
different structures. Argument 1, for example, has
just one premise, but Arguments 2 and 3 have two
and three premises. In Arguments 1 and 3, the con-
clusion is stated first; in Argument 2, last. Obviously,
arguments can vary dramatically in their number of
premises, in the placement of premises and conclu-
sion, and in the wording of each of these parts. But
all arguments share a common pattern: at least one
premise is intended to support a conclusion. This
pattern is what makes an argument an argument.
Despite the simplicity of this premise-con-
clusion arrangement, though, arguments are not
always easy to identify. They can be embedded
in long passages of nonargumentative prose, and
nonargumentative prose can often look like argu-
ments. Consider:
The number of abortions performed in this state is
increasing. More and more women say that they
favor greater access to abortion. This is an outrage.

CHAPTER 3: EvALuATING MORAL ARGuMENTS Á 43
Do you see an argument in this passage? You
shouldn’t, because there is none. The first two sen-
tences are meant to be assertions of fact, and the
last one is an expression of indignation. There is no
premise providing reasons to accept a conclusion.
But what if we altered the passage to make it an
argument? Look:
The number of abortions performed in this state
is increasing, and more and more women say that
they favor greater access to abortion. Therefore, in
this state the trend among women is toward greater
acceptance of abortion.
This is now an argument. There is a conclusion
(“Therefore, in this state the trend among women
is toward greater acceptance of abortion”) sup-
ported by two premises (“The number of abortions
performed in this state is increasing, and more and
more women say that they favor greater access to
abortion”). We are given reasons for accepting a
claim.
Notice how easy it would be to elaborate on the
nonargumentative version, adding other unsup-
ported claims and more expressions of the writer’s
attitude toward the subject matter. We would end
up with a much longer passage piled high with more
assertions—but with no argument in sight. Often
those who write such passages believe that because
they have stated their opinion, they have presented
an argument. But a bundle of unsupported claims—
however clearly stated—does not an argument make.
Only when reasons are given for believing one of
these claims is an argument made.
Learning to distinguish arguments from non-
argumentative material takes practice. The job gets
easier, however, if you pay attention to indicator
words. Indicator words are terms that often appear
in arguments and signal that a premise or conclu-
sion may be nearby. Notice that in the argument
about abortion, the word therefore indicates that the
conclusion follows, and in Argument 1 the word
because signals the beginning of a premise. In addi-
tion to therefore, common conclusion indicators
include consequently, hence, it follows that, thus, so,
it must be that, and as a result. Besides because, some
common premise indicators are since, for, given that,
due to the fact that, for the reason that, the reason being,
assuming that, and as indicated by.
Understand that indicator words are not fool-
proof evidence that a premise or conclusion is near.
Sometimes words that often function as indicators
appear when no argument at all is present. Indica-
tor words are simply hints that an argument may
be close by.
Probably the most reliable way to identify
arguments is to look for the conclusion first. When
you know what claim is being supported, you can
more easily see what statements are doing the sup-
porting. A true argument always has something
to prove. If there is no statement that the writer is
trying to convince you to accept, no argument is
present.
Finally, understand that argumentation (the pre-
sentation of an argument) is not the same thing as
persuasion. To offer a good argument is to present
reasons why a particular assertion is true. To per-
suade someone of something is to influence her
opinion by any number of means, including emo-
tional appeals, linguistic or rhetorical tricks, decep-
tion, threats, propaganda, and more. Reasoned
argument does not necessarily play any part at all.
You may be able to use some of these ploys to per-
suade people to believe a claim. But if you do, you
will not have established that the claim is worth
believing. On the other hand, if you articulate a
good argument, then you prove something—and
others just might be persuaded by your reasoning.
ARGUMENTS GOOD AND BAD
A good argument shows that its conclusion is wor-
thy of belief or acceptance; a bad argument fails to
show this. A good argument gives you good reasons
to accept a claim; a bad argument proves nothing.
So the crucial question is, How can you tell which is
which? To start, you can learn more about different

44 Á PART 2: MORAL REASONING
kinds of arguments and what makes them good
or bad.
There are two basic types of arguments: deduc-
tive and inductive. Deductive arguments are
supposed to give logically conclusive support to
their conclusions. Inductive arguments, on the
other hand, are supposed to offer only probable
support for their conclusions.
Consider this classic deductive argument:
All men are mortal.
Socrates is a man.
Therefore, Socrates is mortal.
It is deductive because the support offered for the
conclusion is meant to be absolutely unshakable.
When a deductive argument actually achieves this
kind of conclusive support, it is said to be valid.
In a valid argument, if the premises are true, then
the conclusion absolutely has to be true. In the
Socrates argument, if the premises are true, the
conclusion must be true. The conclusion follows
inexorably from the premises. The argument is
therefore valid. When a deductive argument does
’
not offer conclusive support for the conclusion, it
is said to be invalid. In an invalid argument, it is
not the case that if the premises are true, the con-
clusion must be true. Suppose the first premise of
the Socrates argument was changed to “All ducks
are mortal.” Then the argument would be invalid
because even if the premises were true, the conclu-
sion would not necessarily be true. The conclusion
would not follow inexorably from the premises.
Notice that the validity or invalidity of an argu-
ment is a matter of its form, not its content. The
structure of a deductive argument renders it either
valid or invalid, and validity is a separate mat-
ter from the truth of the argument’s statements.
Its statements (premises and conclusion) may be
either true or false, but that has nothing to do with
validity. Saying that an argument is valid means
that it has a particular form that ensures that if the
premises are true, the conclusion can be nothing
but true. There is no way that the premises can be
true and the conclusion false.
Recall that there are indicator words that point
to the presence of premises and conclusions. There
are also indicator words that suggest (but do not
You might be surprised to learn that some philoso-
phers consider reasoning itself a moral issue. That
is, they think that believing a claim without good
reasons (an unsupported statement) is immoral.
Probably the most famous exposition of this point
comes from the philosopher and mathematician
W. K. Clifford (1845–79). He has this to say on the
subject:
It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone,
to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.
If a man, holding a belief which he was taught
in childhood or persuaded of afterwards, keeps
down and pushes away any doubts which arise
about it in his mind . . . and regards as impious
those questions which cannot easily be asked
without disturbing it—the life of that man is one
long sin against mankind.*
Do you agree with Clifford? Can you think of a
counterexample to his argument—that is, instances
in which believing without evidence would be mor-
ally permissible? Suppose the power of reason is a
gift from God to be used to help you live a good
life. If so, would believing without evidence (fail-
ing to use critical thinking) be immoral?
*W. K. Clifford, “The Ethics of Belief,” in The Rational-
ity of Belief in God, ed. George I. Mavrodes (Engle-
wood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1970), 159–60.
CRITICAL THOUGHT: The Morality of Critical Thinking

CHAPTER 3: EvALuATING MORAL ARGuMENTS Á 45
prove) that an argument is deductive. Some of the
more common are it necessarily follows that, it must
be the case that, it logically follows that, conclusively,
and necessarily.
Now let us turn to inductive arguments.
Examine this one:
Almost all the men at this college have high SAT
scores.
Therefore, Julio (a male student at the college)
probably has high SAT scores.
This argument is inductive because it is intended
to provide probable, not decisive, support to the
conclusion. That is, the argument is intended to
show only that, at best, the conclusion is probably
true. With any inductive argument, it is possible for
the premises to be true and the conclusion false. An
inductive argument that manages to actually give
probable support to the conclusion is said to be
strong. In a strong argument, if the premises are
true, the conclusion is probably true (more likely to
be true than not). The SAT argument is strong. An
inductive argument that does not give probable sup-
port to the conclusion is said to be weak. In a weak
argument, if the premises are true, the conclusion
is not probable (not more likely to be true than not
true). If we change the first premise in the SAT argu-
ment to “Twenty percent of the men at this college
have high SAT scores,” the argument would be weak.
Like deductive arguments, inductive ones are
often accompanied by indicator words. These terms
include probably, likely, in all probability, it is reason
able to suppose that, odds are, and chances are.
Good arguments provide you with good reasons
for believing their conclusions. You now know that
good arguments must be valid or strong. But they
must also have true premises. Good arguments
must both have the right form (be valid or strong)
and have reliable content (have true premises). Any
argument that fails in either of these respects is a
bad argument. A valid argument with true premises
is said to be sound; a strong argument with true
premises is said to be cogent.
To evaluate an argument is to determine whether
it is good or not, and establishing that requires
you to check the argument’s form and the truth
of its premises. You can check the truth of prem-
ises in many different ways. Sometimes you can
see immediately that a premise is true (or false). At
other times you may need to examine a premise
more closely or even do some research. Assessing
an argument’s form is also usually a straightfor-
ward process. With inductive arguments, common
sense may be all that’s required to see whether they
are strong or weak (whether the conclusions follow
from the premises). With deductive arguments, just
thinking about how the premises are related to the
conclusion is often sufficient. In all cases, the key to
correctly and efficiently determining the validity or
strength of arguments is practice.
Fortunately, there are some techniques that can
improve your ability to check the validity of deduc-
tive arguments. Some deductive forms are so com-
mon that just being familiar with them can give
you a big advantage. Let’s look at some of them.
To begin, understand that you can easily indi-
cate an argument’s form by using a kind of standard
shorthand, with letters standing for statements.
Consider, for example, this argument:
If Maria walks to work, then she will be late.
She is walking to work.
Therefore, she will be late.
Here’s how we symbolize this argument’s form:
If p, then q.
p.
Therefore, q.
We represent each statement with a letter,
thereby laying bare the argument’s skeletal form.
The first premise is a compound statement, con-
sisting of two constituent statements, p and q. This
particular argument form is known as a conditional.
A conditional argument has at least one condi-
tional premise—a premise in an if-then pattern

46 Á PART 2: MORAL REASONING
(If p, then q). The two parts of a conditional premise
are known as the antecedent (which begins with if)
and the consequent (which follows then).
This argument form happens to be very
common—so common that it has a name, modus
ponens, or affirming the antecedent. The first prem-
ise is conditional (“If Maria walks to work, then she
will be late”), and the second premise affirms the
antecedent of that conditional (“She is walking to
work”). This form is always valid: if the premises are
true, the conclusion has to be true. Any argument
that has this form will be valid regardless of the
subject matter.
Another frequently occurring form is known as
modus tollens, or denying the consequent:
If Maria walks to work, then she will be late.
She will not be late.
Therefore, she will not walk to work.
Symbolized, modus tollens looks like this:
If p, then q.
Not q.
Therefore, not p.
Modus tollens is always valid, no matter what
statements you plug into the formula.
Here are two more common argument forms.
These, however, are always invalid.
Denying the antecedent:
If Maria walks to work, then she will be late.
She will not walk to work.
Therefore, she will not be late.
If p, then q.
Not p.
Therefore, not q.
Affirming the consequent:
If Maria walks to work, then she will be late.
She will be late.
Therefore, she will walk to work.
If p, then q.
q.
Therefore, p.
Do you see the problem with these two? In
the first one (denying the antecedent), even a
false antecedent (if Maria will not walk to work)
doesn’t mean that she will not be late. Maybe she
will sit at home and be late, or be late for some other
reason. When the antecedent is denied, the prem-
ises can be true and the conclusion false—clearly
an invalid argument. In the second argument
(affirming the consequent), even a true conse-
quent (if Maria will be late) doesn’t mean that
she will walk to work. Some other factor besides
her walking could cause Maria to be late. Again,
the premises can be true while the conclusion is
false—definitely invalid.
Consider one last form, the hypothetical syllo-
gism (hypothetical means conditional; a syllogism is a
three-statement deductive argument):
If Maria walks to work, then she will be late.
If she is late, she will be fired.
Therefore, if Maria walks to work, she will be fired.
If p, then q.
If q, then r.
Therefore, if p, then r.
The hypothetical syllogism is a valid argument
form. If the premises are true, the conclusion must
be true.
Obviously, if modus ponens, modus tollens, and
the hypothetical syllogism are always valid, then
any arguments you encounter that have the same
form will also be valid. And if denying the ante-
cedent and affirming the consequent are always
invalid, any arguments you come across that have
the same form will also be invalid. The best way to
make use of these facts is to memorize each argu-
ment form so you can tell right away when an
argument matches one of them—and thereby see
immediately that it is valid (or invalid).

CHAPTER 3: EvALuATING MORAL ARGuMENTS Á 47
But what if you bump into a deductive argu-
ment that does not match one of these common
forms? You can try the counterexample method. This
approach is based on a fundamental fact that you
already know: it is impossible for a valid argument to
have true premises and a false conclusion. So to test
the validity of an argument, you first invent a twin
argument that has exactly the same form as the
argument you are examining—but you try to give
this new argument true premises and a false conclu-
sion. If you can construct such an argument, you
have proven that your original argument is invalid.
Suppose you want to test this argument for
validity:
If capital punishment deters crime, then the num-
ber of death row inmates will decrease over time.
But capital punishment does not deter crime.
Therefore, the number of death row inmates will
not decrease over time.
You can probably see right away that this argu-
ment is an example of denying the antecedent, an
invalid form. But for the sake of example, let’s use
the counterexample method in this case. Suppose
we come up with this twin argument:
If lizards are mammals, then they have legs.
But they are not mammals.
Therefore, they do not have legs.
We have invented a twin argument that has
true premises and a false conclusion, so we know
that the original argument is invalid.
IMPLIED PREMISES
Most of the arguments that we encounter in every-
day life are embedded in larger tracts of nonargu-
mentative prose—in essays, reports, letters to the
editor, editorials, and the like. The challenge is to
pick out the premises and conclusions and evaluate
the assembled arguments. In many cases, though,
there is an additional obstacle: some premises may
’ QUICK REVIEW
statement—An assertion that something is or is
not the case.
argument—A group of statements, one of which
is supposed to be supported by the rest.
premise—A supporting statement in an argument.
conclusion—The statement supported in an
argument.
indicator words—Terms that often appear in
arguments to signal the presence of a premise
or conclusion, or to indicate that an argument
is deductive or inductive.
deductive argument—An argument that is sup-
posed to give logically conclusive support to its
conclusion.
inductive argument—An argument that is sup-
posed to offer probable support to its conclusion.
valid argument—A deductive argument that
does in fact provide logically conclusive sup-
port for its conclusion.
invalid argument—A deductive argument that
does not offer logically conclusive support for
the conclusion.
strong argument—An inductive argument that
does in fact provide probable support for its
conclusion.
weak argument—An inductive argument that does
not give probable support to the conclusion.
sound argument—A valid argument with true
premises.
cogent argument—A strong argument with true
premises.
be implied instead of stated. Sometimes the prem-
ises are implicit because they are too obvious to
mention; readers mentally fill in the blanks. But
in most cases, implicit premises should not be left
unstated. It is often unclear what premises have

48 Á PART 2: MORAL REASONING
been assumed, and unless these are spelled out,
argument evaluation becomes difficult or impos-
sible. More to the point, unstated premises are
often the most dubious parts of an argument. This
problem is especially common in moral arguments,
in which the implicit premises are frequently the
most controversial and the most in need of close
scrutiny.
Here is a typical argument with an unstated
premise:
The use of condoms is completely unnatural. They
have been manufactured for the explicit purpose
of interfering with the natural process of procre-
ation. Therefore, the use of condoms should be
banned.
In this argument, the first two sentences con-
stitute a single premise, the gist of which is that
using condoms is unnatural. The conclusion is
that the use of condoms should be banned. This
conclusion, however, does not follow from the
stated premise. There is a logical gap between
premise and conclusion. The argument will work
only if the missing premise is supplied. Here’s a
good possibility: “Anything that interferes with a
natural process should not be allowed.” The argu-
ment then becomes:
The use of condoms is completely unnatural. They
have been manufactured for the explicit purpose of
interfering with the natural process of procreation.
Anything that interferes with a natural process
should not be allowed. Therefore, the use of con-
doms should be banned.
By adding the implicit premise, we have filled
out the argument, making it valid and a little less
mysterious. But now that the missing premise has
been brought out into the open, we can see that it
is dubious or, at least, controversial. Should every-
thing that interferes with a natural process be
banned? If so, we would have to ban antibiotics,
anticancer drugs, deodorants, and automobiles.
(Later in this chapter, ways to judge the truth of
moral premises are discussed.)
When you evaluate an argument, you should
try to explicitly state any implied premise (or
premises) when (1) there seems to be a logical gap
between premises or between premises and the
conclusion and (2) the missing material is not a
commonsense assumption. In general, the supplied
premise should make the argument valid (when the
argument is supposed to be deductive) or strong
(when the argument is supposed to be inductive). It
should also be plausible (as close to the truth as pos-
sible) and fitting (coinciding with what you think
is the author’s intent). The point of these stipula-
tions is that when you supply a missing premise,
you should be fair and honest, expressing it in
such a way that the argument is as solid as possible
and in keeping with the author’s purpose. Adding
a premise that renders an argument ridiculous is
easy, and so is distorting the author’s intent—and
with neither tack are you likely to learn anything
or uncover the truth.
Be aware, though, that some arguments are
irredeemably bad, and no supplied premise that
is properly made can save them. They cannot be
turned into good arguments without altering them
beyond recognition or original intent. You need
not take these arguments seriously, and the respon-
sibility of recasting them lies with those who offer
them.
DECONSTRUCTING ARGUMENTS
In the real world, arguments do not come neatly
labeled, their parts identified and their relation-
ships laid bare. So you have to do the labeling and
connecting yourself, and that can be hard work.
Where are the premises and the conclusion?
Are there implied premises? What statements
are irrelevant to the argument, just background
or window dressing? How are all these pieces
related? Fortunately there is a tool that can help
you penetrate all the verbiage to uncover the
essential argument (or arguments) within: argu
ment diagramming.

CHAPTER 3: EvALuATING MORAL ARGuMENTS Á 49
So let’s try to diagram the argument in this
passage:
In 2003 the United States attacked Iraq and thereby
started a war. President Bush justified his decision
to go to war by saying that the action was necessary
to preempt Iraq from launching a military strike
against the United States. But the obvious question
about the war has hardly been addressed and rarely
answered: Was the United States morally justified
in going to war against Iraq? I think just war theory
gives us an answer. The theory says a preemptive
attack against a state is justified only if that state
presents a substantial danger that is “immediate
and imminent.” That is, to meet this criterion, an
attack by an aggressor nation must be in the final
planning stages—an attack must not be merely
feared, but about to happen. If invading Iraq were
justified, there would have been clear indications
of Iraq’s final preparations to attack the United
States. But there were no such indications. There
was only a fantasy about Iraq’s having weapons of
mass destruction, and in the Bush administration,
there was only the fear that the Iraqis were up to
no good. In addition, because there was no serious
attempt by the United States to try to find a peace-
ful solution, the war was premature and therefore
unjust. Most news accounts at the time reveal that
steps by the United States to head off war were half-
hearted at best. Finally, the war was unjustified
because it violated the moral standard that must be
met by any war: the cause of the war must be just.
Consequently we are forced to conclude that the
war in Iraq was not morally justified.
The first step is to number all the statements
for identification and underline any premise or
conclusion indicator words. (Note: We count an if-
then, or conditional, statement as one statement,
and we count multiple statements in a compound
sentence separately.) Next we search for the con-
clusion and draw a double line under it. Locating
the conclusion can then help us find the premises,
which we tag by underlining them. The marked-up
passage should then look like this:
(1) In 2003 the United States attacked Iraq and thereby
started a war. (2) President Bush justified his decision
to go to war by saying that the action was neces-
sary to preempt Iraq from launching a military strike
against the United States. (3) But the obvious question
about the war has hardly been addressed and rarely
answered: Was the United States morally justified in
going to war against Iraq? (4) I think just war theory
gives us an answer. (5) The theory says a preemptive
attack against a state is justified only if that state pres-
ents a substantial danger that is “immediate and immi-
nent.” (6) That is, to meet this criterion, an attack by an
aggressor nation must be in the final planning stages—
an attack must not be merely feared, but about to hap-
pen. (7) If invading Iraq were justified, there would
have been clear indications of Iraq’s final preparations
to attack the United States. (8) But there were no such
indications. (9) There was only a fantasy about Iraq’s
having weapons of mass destruction, (10) and in the
Bush administration, there was only the fear that the
Iraqis were up to no good. (11) In addition, because
there was no serious attempt by the United States to
try to find a peaceful solution, the war was premature
and therefore unjust. (12) Most news accounts at the
time reveal that steps by the United States to head off
war were halfhearted at best. (13) Finally, the war was
unjustified because it violated the moral standard that
must be met by any war: the cause of the war must be
just. (14) Consequently we are forced to conclude that
the war in Iraq was not morally justified.
A key reason for diagramming is to distinguish
the premises and conclusions from everything
else: background information, redundancies, asides,
clar ifications, illustrations, and any other material
that is logically irrelevant to the argument (or argu-
ments). So the next step is to cross out these irrel-
evancies, like this:
(1) In 2003 the United States attacked Iraq and
thereby started a war that continues to this day. (2)
President Bush justified his decision to go to war by
saying that the action was necessary to preempt Iraq
from launching a military strike against the United
States. (3) But the obvious question about the war
has hardly been addressed and rarely answered:
Was the United States morally justified in going to
war against Iraq? (4) I think just war theory gives us
an answer. (5) The theory says a preemptive attack
against a state is justified only if that state pres-
ents a substantial danger that is “immediate and

50 Á PART 2: MORAL REASONING
imminent.” (6) That is, to meet this criterion, an
attack by an aggressor nation must be in the final
planning stages—an attack must not be merely
feared, but about to happen. (7) If invading Iraq were
justified, there would have been clear indications of
Iraq’s final preparations to attack the United States.
(8) But there were no such indications. (9) There was
only a fantasy about Iraq’s having weapons of mass
destruction, (10) and in the Bush administration,
there was only the fear that the Iraqis were up to no
good. (11) In addition, because there was no serious
attempt by the United States to try to find a peace-
ful solution, the war was premature and therefore
unjust. (12) Most news accounts at the time reveal
that steps by the United States to head off war were
halfhearted at best. (13) Finally, the war was unjusti-
fied because it violated the moral standard that must
be met by any war: the cause of the war must be just.
(14) Consequently we are forced to conclude that
the war in Iraq was not morally justified.
We now can see that most of this passage is logi-
cally extraneous material. Statements 1 through
6 are background information and introductory
remarks. Statement 3, for example, is an assertion of
the issue to be addressed in the passage. Statements
9 and 10 are embellishments of Statement 8.
The premises and conclusion are asserted in
Statements 7, 8, 11, 12, 13, and 14:
(7) If invading Iraq were justified, there would have
been clear indications of Iraq’s final preparations to
attack the United States.
(8) But there were no such indications.
(11) In addition, because there was no serious attempt
by the United States to try to find a peaceful solution,
the war was premature and therefore unjust.
(12) Most news accounts at the time reveal that
steps by the United States to head off war were half-
hearted at best.
(13) Finally, the war was unjustified because it vio-
lated the moral standard that must be met by any
war: the cause of the war must be just.
(14) Consequently we are forced to conclude that
the war in Iraq was not morally justified.
But how are these statements related? To find
out, we draw a diagram. Using the numbers to
represent the premises and conclusion, we write
down the number for the conclusion and place the
numbers for the premises above it. Then, to show
how the premises support the conclusion, we draw
arrows from the premises to the conclusion. Each
arrow indicates the logical connection between
premise and conclusion, representing such expres-
sions as “Premise 11 supports the Conclusion (14)”
or “the Conclusion (14) is supported by Premise 11.”
Here’s the completed diagram:
7 + 8
14
1312
11
In the simplest relationship depicted here, Prem-
ise 13 provides direct support to the conclusion (14).
Premise 11 also supplies direct support to the con-
clusion, and this premise in turn is backed up by
Premise 12. (See how an arrow goes from 11 to 14,
and then from 12 to 11.) Premises 7 and 8 are linked
to the conclusion in a different way, reflecting the
fact that some premises are dependent and some are
independent. An independent premise (such as Prem-
ise 13) supports a conclusion without relying on any
other premises; a dependent premise gives little or
no support on its own and requires the assistance
of at least one other premise. Premises 7 and 8 are
dependent premises and are joined by a plus sign
to represent this fact. Together, Premises 7 and 8
provide support to the conclusion; they give a rea-
son for accepting it. But if either premise is deleted,
the remaining premise can provide no substantial
support.

CHAPTER 3: EvALuATING MORAL ARGuMENTS Á 51
As you work through the diagramming exercises
at the end of this chapter, you will come to under-
stand why diagramming arguments can be so use-
ful. You will learn a great deal about the structure of
arguments—which is a prerequisite for being able
to devise, deconstruct, and evaluate them.
MORAL STATEMENTS
AND ARGUMENTS
When we deliberate about the rightness of our
actions, make careful moral judgments about the
character or behavior of others, or strive to resolve
complex ethical issues, we are usually making or
critiquing moral arguments—or trying to. And
rightly so. To a remarkable degree, moral argu-
ments are the vehicles that move ethical thinking
and discourse along. The rest of this chapter should
give you a demonstration of how far skill in devis-
ing and evaluating moral arguments can take you.
Arguments, as you will recall, are made up of
statements (premises and conclusions), and thus
moral arguments are too. What makes an argument
a moral argument is that its conclusion is always a
moral statement. A moral statement is a state-
ment affirming that an action is right or wrong or
that a person (or one’s motive or character) is good
or bad. These are moral statements:
• Capital punishment is wrong.
• Jena should not have lied.
• You ought to treat him as he treated you.
• Tania is a good person.
• Cruelty to animals is immoral.
Notice the use of the terms wrong, should, ought,
good, and immoral. Such words are the mainstays of
moral discourse, though some of them (for exam-
ple, good and wrong) are also used in nonmoral
senses.
Nonmoral statements are very different.
They do not affirm that an action is right or wrong
or that a person is good or bad. They assert that a
state of affairs is actual (true or false) but do not
assign a moral value to it. Most of the statements
that we encounter every day are nonmoral. Of
course, nonmoral statements may assert nonmoral
normative judgments, such as “This is a good
library” or “Jack ought to invest in stocks,” but
they are clearly not moral statements. They may
also describe a state of affairs that touches on moral
concerns—without being moral statements. For
example:
• Many people think that capital punishment is
wrong.
• Jena did not lie.
• You treated him as he treated you.
• Tania tries to be a good person.
• Animals are treated cruelly.
Now we can be more specific about the struc-
ture of moral arguments. A typical moral argu-
ment consists of premises and a conclusion, just
as any other kind of argument does, with the con-
clusion being a moral statement, or judgment.
The premises, however, are a combination of the
moral and nonmoral. At least one premise must
be a moral statement affirming a moral principle
or rule (a general moral standard), and at least
one premise must be a nonmoral statement about
a state of affairs, usually a specific type of action.
Beyond these simple requirements, the structure
of moral arguments can vary in standard ways:
there may be many premises or few; premises may
be implicit or overt; and extraneous material may
be present or absent. Take a look at this moral
argument:
1. Committing a violent act to defend yourself
against physical attack is morally permissible.
2. Assaulting someone who is attacking you is a
violent act of self-defense.
3. Therefore, assaulting someone who is attacking
you is morally permissible.

52 Á PART 2: MORAL REASONING
Premise 1 is a moral statement asserting a
general moral principle about the rightness of a
category of actions (violent acts in self-defense).
Premise 2 is a nonmoral statement about the char-
acteristics of a specific kind of action (violent acts
against someone who is attacking you). It asserts
that a specific kind of action falls under the general
moral principle expressed in Premise 1. Premise
3, the conclusion, is a moral judgment about the
rightness of the specific kind of action in light of
the general moral principle.
Why must we have at least one premise that is
a moral statement? Without a moral premise, the
argument would not get off the ground. We can-
not infer a moral statement (conclusion) from a
nonmoral statement (premise). That is, we cannot
reason that a moral statement must be true because
a nonmoral state of affairs is actual. Or as philoso-
phers say, we cannot establish what ought to be or
should be solely on the basis of on what is. What
if our self-defense argument contained no moral
premise? Look:
2. Assaulting a person who is attacking you is a
violent act of self-defense.
3. Therefore, assaulting a person who is attacking
you is morally permissible.
The conclusion no longer follows. It says
something about the rightness of an action, but
the premise asserts nothing about rightness—it
just characterizes the nonmoral aspects of an
action. Perhaps the action described is morally
permissible, or perhaps it is not—Premise 2 does
not say.
Another example:
1. Not using every medical means available to keep
a seriously ill newborn infant alive is allowing
the infant to die.
3. Therefore, not using every medical means avail-
able to keep a seriously ill newborn infant alive
is wrong.
As it stands, this argument is flawed. The con-
clusion (a moral statement) does not follow from
the nonmoral premise. Even if we know that “not
using every medical means” is equivalent to allow-
ing a seriously ill newborn to die, we cannot then
conclude that the action is wrong. We need a prem-
ise making that assertion:
2. Allowing seriously ill newborn infants to die is
wrong.
Here’s the complete argument:
1. Not using every medical means available to keep
a seriously ill newborn infant alive is allowing
the infant to die.
2. Allowing seriously ill newborn infants to die is
wrong.
3. Therefore, not using every medical means avail-
able to keep a seriously ill newborn infant alive
is wrong.
A nonmoral premise is also necessary in a moral
argument. Why exactly? Recall that the conclusion
of a typical moral argument is a moral judgment, or
claim, about a particular kind of action. The moral
premise is a general moral principle, or standard,
concerning a wider category of actions. But we can-
not infer a statement (conclusion) about a particu
lar kind of action from a moral statement (premise)
about a broad category of actions—unless we have
a nonmoral premise to link the two. We saw, for
example, that we cannot infer from the general
principle that “committing a violent act to defend
yourself . . . is morally permissible” the conclusion
that “assaulting a person who is attacking you is
morally permissible” unless a nonmoral premise
tells us that assaulting a person who is attacking
you is an instance of self-defense. (The nonmoral
premise may seem obvious here, but not everyone
would agree that violence against a person who is
attacking you is an example of self-defense. Some
might claim that such violence is an unnecessary act

CHAPTER 3: EvALuATING MORAL ARGuMENTS Á 53
of retaliation or revenge.) The role of the nonmoral
premise, then, is to affirm that the general moral
principle does indeed apply to the particular case.
Unfortunately, both moral and nonmoral pre-
mises are often left unstated in moral arguments. As
we noted earlier, making implicit premises explicit
is always a good idea, but in moral arguments it is
critical. The unseen premises (of which an argu-
ment may have several) are the ones most likely to
be dubious or unfounded, a problem that can arise
whether an argument is yours or someone else’s.
Too many times, unstated premises are assump-
tions that you may be barely aware of; they might
be the true, unacknowledged source of disagree-
ment between you and others. No premise should
be left unexamined. (We’ll learn more about assess-
ing the truth of premises in the next section.)
The general guidelines for uncovering unst-
ated premises discussed earlier apply to moral
arguments—but we need to add a proviso. Remem-
ber, in a moral argument, as in any other kind of
argument, you have good reason to look for implicit
premises if there is a logical gap between premises
and the missing premise is not simply common
sense. And any premise you supply should be both
plausible and fitting. But note: The easiest way to
identify implied premises in a moral argument is to
treat it as deductive. Approaching moral arguments
this way helps you not only to find implied prem-
ises but also to assess the worth of all the premises.
Consider this example:
1. The use of capital punishment does not deter
crime.
2. Therefore, the use of capital punishment is
immoral.
This is an invalid argument. Even if the prem-
ise is true, the conclusion does not follow from
it. The argument needs a premise that can bridge
the gap between the current premise and the con-
clusion. So we should ask, “What premise can we
add that will be plausible and fitting and make the
argument valid?” This premise will do: “Admin-
istering a punishment to criminals that does
not deter crime is immoral.” The argument then
becomes:
1. Administering a punishment to criminals that
does not deter crime is immoral.
2. The use of capital punishment does not deter
crime.
3. Therefore, the use of capital punishment is
immoral.
Now the argument is valid, and trying to
make it valid has helped us find at least one prem-
ise that might work. Moreover, if we know that
the argument is valid, we can focus our inquiry
on the truth of the premises. After all, if there is
something wrong with a valid argument (that is,
if the argument is not sound), we know that the
trouble is in the premises—specifically, that at
least one premise must be false. To put it another
way, whether or not such an argument is a good
argument depends entirely on the truth of the
premises.
As it turns out, our added premise is a general
moral principle. And like many implied premises,
it is questionable. Deterrence is not necessarily the
only reason for administering punishment. Some
would say that justice is a better reason; others,
that rehabilitation is. (The second premise is also
dubious, but we won’t worry about that now.)
In any case, if the supplied premise renders the
argument valid, and the premise is plausible and
fitting, we can then conclude that we have filled
out the argument properly. We can then examine
the resulting argument and either accept or reject
it. And if we wish to explore the issue at greater
depth, we can overhaul the argument altogether to
see what we can learn. We can radically change or
add premises until we have a sound argument or at
least a valid one with plausible premises.

54 Á PART 2: MORAL REASONING
TESTING MORAL PREMISES
But how can we evaluate moral premises? After all,
we cannot check them by consulting a scientific
study or opinion poll as we might when examining
nonmoral premises. Usually the best approach is to
use counterexamples.
If we want to test a universal generalization
such as “All dogs have tails,” we can look for
counterexamples—instances that prove the gen-
eralization false. All we have to do to show that
the statement “All dogs have tails” is false is to
find one tailless dog. And a thorough search for
tailless dogs is a way to check the generalization.
Likewise, if we want to test a moral premise (a vari-
ety of universal generalization), we can look for
counterexamples.
Examine this valid moral argument:
1. Causing a person’s death is wrong.
2. Individuals in a deep, irreversible coma are
incapacitated persons.
3. “Pulling the plug” on someone in a deep, irre-
versible coma is causing a person to die.
4. Therefore, “pulling the plug” on someone in a
deep, irreversible coma is wrong.
Premise 1 is the moral premise, a general moral
principle about killing. Premises 2 and 3 are non-
moral premises. (Premise 2 is entailed by Premise
3, but we separate the two to emphasize the impor-
tance to this argument of the concept of person-
hood.) Statement 4, of course, is the conclusion,
the verdict that causing someone in a deep coma to
die is immoral.
Is Premise 1 true? It is at least dubious, because
counterexamples abound in which the principle
seems false. Is it wrong to kill one person to save a
hundred? Is it wrong to kill a person in self-defense?
Is it wrong to kill a person in wartime? As it stands,
Premise 1 seems implausible.
To salvage the argument, we can revise Premise 1
(as well as Premise 3) to try to make it impervious
to counterexamples. We can change it like this:
1. Causing the death of a person who is incapac-
itated is wrong.
2. Individuals in a deep, irreversible coma are
incapac itated persons.
3. “Pulling the plug” on someone in a deep, irre-
versible coma is causing an incapacitated per-
son to die.
4. Therefore, “pulling the plug” on someone in a
deep, irreversible coma is wrong.
Premise 1 now seems a bit more reasonable. In
its current form, it rules out the counterexamples
involving self-defense and war. But it does not
escape the killing-to-save-lives counterexample. In
some circumstances it may be morally permissible
to kill someone to save many others, even if the
person is incapacitated. To get around this prob-
lem, we can amend Premise 1 so the counterexam-
ple is no longer a threat (and make a corresponding
change in the conclusion). For example:
1. Causing the death of a person who is incapac-
itated is wrong, except to save lives.
2. Individuals in a deep, irreversible coma are
incapac itated persons.
3. “Pulling the plug” on someone in a deep, irre-
versible coma is causing an incapacitated per-
son to die.
4. Therefore, “pulling the plug” on someone in a
deep, irreversible coma is wrong, except to save
lives.
Premise 1 now seems much closer to being cor-
rect than before. It may not be flawless, but it is
much improved. By considering counterexamples,
we have made the whole argument better.
Checking a moral premise against possible
counterexamples is a way to consult our consid-
ered moral judgments, a topic we broached in
Chapter 1 and take up again in Part 3 (Theories of
Morality). If our considered moral judgments are at

CHAPTER 3: EvALuATING MORAL ARGuMENTS Á 55
odds with a moral premise that is based on a cher-
ished moral principle or moral theory, we may have
a prima facie (at first sight) reason to doubt not only
the premise but also the principle or theory from
which it is derived. We may then need to reexam-
ine the claims involved and how they are related.
If we do, we may find that our judgments are on
solid ground and the premise, principle, or theory
needs to be adjusted—or vice versa. If our purpose
is solely to evaluate a moral premise in an argu-
ment, we need not carry our investigation this far.
But we should understand that widening our inves-
tigation may sometimes be appropriate and that
our moral beliefs are often more interconnected
than we might realize. Our ultimate goal should be
to ensure that all our moral beliefs are as logically
consistent as we can make them.
ASSESSING NONMORAL PREMISES
Sometimes the sticking point in a moral argument
is not a moral premise but a nonmoral one—a claim
about a nonmoral state of affairs. Often people on
both sides of a dispute may agree on a moral prin-
ciple but differ dramatically on the nonmoral facts.
Usually these facts concern the consequences of an
action or the characteristics of the parties involved.
Does pornography cause people to commit sex
crimes? Does capital punishment deter crime? Is a
depressed person competent to decide whether to
commit suicide? When does a fetus become viable?
Are African Americans underrepresented among
executives in corporate America? Does gay mar-
riage undermine the institution of heterosexual
marriage? These and countless other questions
arise—and must be answered—as we try to develop
and analyze moral arguments.
The most important principle to remember is
that nonmoral premises, like all premises, must be
supported by good reasons. As we have already seen,
simply believing or asserting a claim does not make
it so. We should insist that our own nonmoral
premises and those of others be backed by reliable
scientific research, the opinions of trustworthy
experts, pertinent examples and analogies, his-
torical records, or our own background knowledge
(claims that we have excellent reasons to believe).
Ensuring that nonmoral premises are supported
by good reasons is sometimes difficult but always
worth the effort. The process begins by simply ask-
ing, “Is this statement true?” and “What reasons do
I have for believing this?”
In your search for answers, keep the following
in mind:
1. Use reliable sources. If you have reason to doubt
the accuracy of a source, do not use it. Doubt it if it
produces statements you know to be false, ignores
reliable data (such as the latest scientific research),
or has a track record of presenting inaccurate infor-
mation or dubious arguments. Make sure that any
’ QUICK REVIEW
• Look for an implicit premise when (1) there
seems to be a logical gap between premises
or between premises and the conclusion and
(2) the missing material is not a commonsense
assumption.
• Any supplied unstated premise should be valid
or strong, plausible, and fitting.
• A typical moral argument has at least one moral
premise and at least one nonmoral premise.
• The easiest way to identify implied premises in
a moral argument is to treat it as deductive.
• Test moral premises with counterexamples.
moral statement—A statement affirming that an
action is right or wrong or that a person (or
one’s motive or character) is good or bad.
nonmoral statement—A statement that does not
affirm that an action is right or wrong or that
a person (or one’s motive or character) is good
or bad.

56 Á PART 2: MORAL REASONING
experts you rely on are in fact experts in their cho-
sen field. In general, true experts have the requisite
education and training, the relevant experience in
making reliable judgments, and a good reputation
among peers.
Probably every major moral issue discussed in
this book is associated with numerous advocacy
groups, each one devoted to promoting its par-
ticular view of things. Too often the information
coming from many of these groups is unreliable.
Do not automatically assume otherwise. Double-
check any information you get from them with
sources you know are reliable and see if it is sup-
ported by scientific studies, expert opinion, or
other evidence.
2. Beware when evidence conflicts. You have good
reason to doubt a statement if it conflicts with other
statements you think are well supported. If your
nonmoral premise is inconsistent with another
claim you believe is true, you cannot simply choose
the one you like best. To resolve the conflict, you
must evaluate them both by weighing the evidence
for each one.
3. Let reason rule. Deliberating on moral issues
is serious business, often involving the question-
ing of cherished views and the stirring of strong
feelings. Many times the temptation to dispense
with reason and blindly embrace a favorite outlook
is enormous. This common—and very human—
predicament can lead us to veer far from the
relevant evidence and true nonmoral premises.
Specifically, we may reject or disregard evidence
that conflicts with what we most want to believe.
We may even try to pretend that the conflicting
evidence actually supports our preconceptions. Yet
resisting the relevant evidence is just one side of
the coin. We may also look for and find only evi-
dence that supports what we want to believe, going
around the world to confirm our prejudices.
Our best chance to avert these tendencies is
to try hard to be both critical and fair—to make a
deliberate effort to examine all the relevant evi-
dence, both for and against our preferred beliefs.
After all, the point of assessing a moral argument is
to discover the truth. We must be brave enough to
let the evidence point where it will.
AVOIDING BAD ARGUMENTS
Recall that a good argument has true premises plus
a conclusion that follows from those premises.
A bad argument fails at least one of these condi-
tions—it has a false premise or a conclusion that
does not follow. This failure, however, can appear
in many different argument forms, some of which
are extremely common. These common bad argu-
ments are known as fallacies. They are so distinc-
tive and are used so often that they have been
given names and are usually covered in courses
on critical reasoning. Though flawed, fallacies
are often persuasive and are frequently employed
to mislead the unwary—even in (or especially in)
moral reasoning. The best way to avoid using
fallacies—or being taken in by them—is to study
them so you know how they work and can eas-
ily identify them. The following is a brief review
of the fallacies that are most prevalent in moral
argumentation.
Begging the Question
Begging the question is the fallacy of arguing in
a circle—that is, trying to use a statement as both
a premise in an argument and the conclusion of
that argument. Such an argument says, in effect, p
is true because p is true. That kind of reasoning, of
course, proves nothing.
For example:
1. Women in Muslim countries, regardless of their
social status and economic limitations, are enti-
tled to certain rights, including but not neces-
sarily limited to suffrage.
2. Therefore, all women in Muslim countries have
the right to vote in political elections.
This argument is equivalent to saying “Women
in Muslim countries have a right to vote because

CHAPTER 3: EvALuATING MORAL ARGuMENTS Á 57
women in Muslim countries have a right to vote.”
The conclusion merely repeats the premise but in
different words. The best protection against circu-
lar reasoning is a close reading of the argument.
Equivocation
The fallacy of equivocation assigns two different
meanings to the same term in an argument. Here’s
an example that, in one form or another, is com-
monplace in the abortion debate:
1. A fetus is an individual that is indisputably
human.
2. A human is endowed with rights that cannot be
invalidated, including a right to life.
3. Therefore, a fetus has a right to life.
This argument equivocates on the word human.
In Premise 1, the term means physiologically
human, as in having human DNA. This claim, of
course, is indeed indisputable. But in Premise 2,
human is used in the sense of person—that is, an
individual having full moral rights. Since the prem-
ises refer to two different things, the conclusion
does not follow. If you are not paying close atten-
tion, though, you might not detect the equivoca-
tion and accept the argument as it is.
Appeal to Authority
This fallacy consists of relying on the opinion
of someone thought to be an expert who is not.
An expert, of course, can be a source of reliable
information—but only if he really is an authority in
the designated subject area. A true expert is some-
one who is both knowledgeable about the facts and
able to make reliable judgments about them. Ulti-
mately, experts are experts because they carefully
base their opinions on the available evidence.
We make a fallacious appeal to authority
when we (1) cite experts who are not experts in
the field under discussion (though they may be
experts in some other field) or (2) cite nonexperts
as experts. Expertise in one field does not automati-
cally carry over to another, and even non experts
who are prestigious and famous are still nonex-
perts. In general, on subjects outside an expert’s
area of expertise, her opinions are no more reliable
than those of nonexperts.
Two rules of thumb should guide your use of
expert opinion. First, if a claim conflicts with the
consensus of opinion among experts, you have
good reason to doubt the claim. Second, if experts
disagree about a claim, you again have good reason
to doubt it.
’
Emotions have a role to play in the moral life. In
moral arguments, however, the use of emotions
alone as substitutes for premises is a fallacy. We
commit this fallacy when we try to convince some-
one to accept a conclusion not by providing them
with relevant reasons but by appealing only to
fear, guilt, anger, hate, compassion, and the like.
For example:
The defendant is obviously guilty of murder in
this case. Look at him in the courtroom—he’s
terrifying and menacing. And no one can ignore
the way he stabbed that girl and mutilated her
body. And her poor parents. . . .
The question here is whether the defendant com-
mitted the crime, and the feelings of fear and
pity that he evokes are not relevant to it. But if
the question were about the anguish or torment
inflicted on the victim or her parents, then our feel-
ings of empathy would indeed be relevant—and so
would any pertinent moral principles or theories.
Appeal to Emotion

58 Á PART 2: MORAL REASONING
Slippery Slope
The slippery slope fallacy is the use of dubious
premises to argue that doing a particular action will
inevitably lead to other actions that will result in
disaster, so that first action should not be done. This
way of arguing is perfectly legitimate if the premises
are solid—that is, if there are good reasons to believe
that the first step really will lead to ruin. Consider:
1. Rampant proliferation of pornography on the
Internet leads to obsession with pornographic
materials.
2. Obsession with pornographic materials dis-
rupts relationships, and that disruption leads
to divorce.
3. Therefore, we should ban pornography on the
Internet.
Perhaps the chain of events laid out here could
actually occur, but we have been given no reason
to believe that it would. (You can see that this argu-
ment is also missing a moral premise.) Scientific
evidence showing that this sequence of cause and
effect does occur as described would constitute
good reason to accept Premises 1 and 2.
Faulty Analogy
The use of an analogy to argue for a conclusion is
known, not surprisingly, as argument by analogy.
It is a type of inductive argument that says because
two things are alike in some ways, they must be
alike in some additional way. For example:
1. Humans feel pain, care for their young, live in
social groups, and understand nuclear physics.
2. Apes also feel pain, care for their young, and live
in social groups.
3. Therefore, apes can understand nuclear physics.
In argument by analogy, the probability that
the conclusion is true depends on the relevant sim-
ilarities between the two things being compared.
The greater the relevant similarities, the more likely
it is that the conclusion is true. Humans and apes
are relevantly similar in several ways, but the ques-
tion is, Are they relevantly similar enough to ren-
der the conclusion probable? In this case, though
humans and apes are similar in some ways, they
are not relevantly similar enough to adequately
support the conclusion. Humans and apes have
many differences—the most relevant of which for
this argument is probably in the physiology of their
brains and in their capacity for advanced learning.
Arguments by analogy are common in moral
reasoning. For example:
1. When a neighbor needs your help (as when he
needs to borrow your garden hose to put out a
fire in his house), it is morally permissible to
lend the neighbor what he needs.
2. Britain is a neighbor of the United States, and
it is in dire need of help to win the war against
Germany.
3. Therefore, it is morally permissible for the
United States to lend Britain the material and
equipment it needs to defeat Germany.
This is roughly the moral argument that Presi-
dent Franklin Roosevelt made during World War II
to convince Americans to aid Britain in its strug-
gle. The strength of the argument depends on the
degree of similarity between the two situations
described. At the time, many Americans thought
the argument strong.
The fallacy of faulty analogy is argument
by an analogy that is weak. In strong arguments
by analogy, not only must the degree of similarity
be great, but the similarities must also be relevant.
This means that the similarities must relate specifi-
cally to the conclusion. Irrelevant similarities can-
not strengthen an argument.
Appeal to Ignorance
This fallacy consists of arguing that the absence
of evidence entitles us to believe a claim. Consider
these two arguments:
• No one has proven that the fetus is not a per-
son, so it is in fact a person.

CHAPTER 3: EvALuATING MORAL ARGuMENTS Á 59
• It is obviously false that a fetus is a person,
because science has not proven that it is a
person.
Both of these arguments are appeals to igno-
rance. The first one says that because a statement
has not been proven false, it must be true. The sec-
ond one has things the other way around: because
a statement has not been proven true, it must be
false. The problem in both of these cases is that a
lack of evidence cannot be evidence for anything.
A dearth of evidence simply indicates that we are
ignorant of the facts. If having no evidence could
prove something, we could prove all sorts of outra-
geous claims. We could argue that because no one
has proven that there are no space aliens control-
ling all our moral decisions, there are in fact space
aliens controlling all our moral decisions.
Straw Man
Unfortunately, the straw man fallacy is rampant
in debates about moral issues. It amounts to mis-
representing someone’s claim or argument so it can
be more easily refuted. For example, suppose you
are trying to argue that a code of ethics for your pro-
fessional group should be secular so that it can be
appreciated and used by as many people as possi-
ble, regardless of their religious views. Suppose fur-
ther that your opponent argues against your claim
in this fashion:
X obviously wants to strip religious faith away
from every member of our profession and to ban-
ish religion from the realm of ethics. We should not
let this happen. We should not let X have his way.
Vote against the secular code of ethics.
This argument misrepresents your view, distort-
ing it so that it seems outrageous and unacceptable.
Your opponent argues against the distorted version
and then concludes that your (original) position
should be rejected.
The straw man fallacy is not just a bad
argument— it flies in the face of the spirit of moral
reasoning, which is about seeking understanding
through critical thinking and honest and fair explo-
ration of issues. If you agree with this approach,
then you should not use the straw man fallacy—
and you should beware of its use by others.
Appeal to the Person
Appeal to the person (also known as ad homi
nem) is the fallacy of arguing that a claim should be
rejected solely because of the characteristics of the
person who makes it. Look at these:
• We should reject Alice’s assertion that cheat-
ing on your taxes is wrong. She’s a political
libertarian.
• Jerome argues that we should all give a portion
of our income to feed the hungry people of the
world. But that’s just what you’d expect a rich
guy like him to say. Ignore him.
• Maria says that animals have rights and that
we shouldn’t use animal products on moral
grounds. Don’t believe a word of it. She owns a
fur coat—she’s a big hypocrite.
In each of these arguments, a claim is rejected
on the grounds that the person making it has a par-
ticular character, political affiliation, or motive.
Such personal characteristics, however, are irrel-
evant to the truth of a claim. A claim must stand or
fall on its own merits. Whether a statement is true
or false, it must be judged according to the quality
of the reasoning and evidence behind it. Bad peo-
ple can construct good arguments; good people can
construct bad arguments.
Hasty Generalization
Hasty generalization is a fallacy of inductive
reasoning. It is the mistake of drawing a conclusion
about an entire group of people or things based on
an undersized sample of the group.
• In this town three pro-life demonstrators have
been arrested for trespassing or assault. I’m
telling you, pro-lifers are lawbreakers.

60 Á PART 2: MORAL REASONING
• In the past thirty years, at least two people on
death row in this state have been executed and
later found to be innocent by DNA evidence.
Why is the state constantly executing innocent
people?
’ QUICK REVIEW
begging the question—The fallacy of arguing in
a circle—that is, trying to use a statement as
both a premise in an argument and the conclu-
sion of that argument. Such an argument says,
in effect, p is true because p is true.
equivocation—The fallacy of assigning two
different meanings to the same term in an
argument.
appeal to authority—The fallacy of relying on the
opinion of someone thought to be an expert
who is not.
slippery slope—The fallacy of using dubious
premises to argue that doing a particular
action will inevitably lead to other actions that
will result in disaster, so that first action should
not be done.
faulty analogy—The use of a flawed analogy to
argue for a conclusion.
appeal to ignorance—The fallacy of arguing that
the absence of evidence entitles us to believe
a claim.
straw man—The fallacy of misrepresenting some-
one’s claim or argument so it can be more eas-
ily refuted.
appeal to the person—The fallacy (also known as
ad hominem) of arguing that a claim should be
rejected solely because of the characteristics of
the person who makes it.
hasty generalization—The fallacy of drawing a con-
clusion about an entire group of people or things
based on an undersized sample of the group.
In the first argument, a conclusion is drawn
about all people with pro-life views from a sample
of just three people. When it is spelled out plainly,
the leap in logic is clearly preposterous. Yet such
preposterous leaps are extremely common. In the
second argument, the conclusion is that wrong-
ful executions in the state happen frequently. This
conclusion, though, is not justified by the tiny
sample of cases.
WRITING AND SPEAKING ABOUT
MORAL ISSUES
A common view about ethics is that arguing about
morality is unproductive, unenlightening, frustrat-
ing, unsatisfying—and therefore pointless. A typi-
cal moral disagreement can go like this:
“The university should ban alcohol everywhere
on campus,” says X. “Drinking is immoral,
whether on campus or off.”
“You sound like the administration hacks. They’re
all idiots!” says Y.
X: “They’re not all idiots. Some are nice.”
Y: “Wrong. They’re idiots, and they drink plenty
of alcohol every day. Alcohol helps them forget
they’re idiots.”
X: “What about Professor Jones? She doesn’t
drink.”
Y: “Yeah, but she’s boring. And for a college pro-
fessor, being boring is the worst moral failing
imaginable.”
This exchange really is pointless; it’s going
nowhere. It’s the kind of conversation that gives
moral discourse a bad name. As we’ve seen, proper
discussions about moral issues—whether in writ-
ten or oral form—are not at all pointless. They
are often productive, thought-provoking, even
enlightening. You may not always like where
the conversation ends up (what conclusions are
arrived at), but you will probably think the trip is
worthwhile.

CHAPTER 3: EvALuATING MORAL ARGuMENTS Á 61
Good moral essays or conversations have sev-
eral essential elements, without which no progress
could be made in resolving the issue at hand.
1. A claim to be proved. Almost always, the point
of writing or speaking about a moral issue is to
resolve it—that is, to determine whether the central
moral claim or statement (a judgment, principle, or
theory) is true. Is it the case that same-sex marriage
is wrong (or right)? Is it true that Maria’s action is
morally permissible (or impermissible)? Should
actions always be judged right or wrong according
to the consequences they produce? To answer such
questions is to resolve the issue at hand, and resolv-
ing the issue at hand is the point of the written or
spoken discourse. Without a clear idea of the claim
in question, the essay or conversation will mean-
der, as it does in the previous example.
In an essay, the claim should be spelled out (or
sometimes implied) in the first one or two para-
graphs. In a conversation, it is most often men-
tioned (or understood) at the beginning. In either
case, it is by grasping the claim that we come to
understand the point of it all and to follow the
thread of the discussion.
In the most productive moral essays or con-
versations, something else is made apparent early
on: the reason the claim is worth discussing in
the first place. This means making sure that the
meaning of the claim is clear and that its implica-
tions are apparent. Sometimes this step requires
only a sentence or two, but usually much more
explaining is necessary. Just as essential is ensur-
ing that readers or listeners understand why any-
one would want to address the issue—why the
issue is deemed important enough to warrant
an essay or serious conversation. Often all that’s
required is a brief explanation of how the issue
directly affects people’s lives. How, for example,
might attitudes and lives change if everyone agreed
that same-sex marriage was morally permissible?
Or how differently might we view the world if all
moral judgments were based on the cons equences
of actions?
Many times, the best reason for dealing with a
particular moral issue is that others have addressed it
and we want to disagree or agree with their response.
So we might say, “Juan argues that using illicit drugs
is morally right, but I think he’s wrong on several
counts.” Or, “In the debates over abortion, many
commentators have asserted that a human fetus is
a person with moral standing. But there are at least
three reasons for rejecting this view.” Or, “Does sci-
ence prove that persons do not have free will? Some
philosophers think so. But I, along with many astute
commentators, beg to differ.”
2. An argument for or against the claim. By now,
you know that the essence of moral reasoning, the
means for resolving (or trying to resolve) a moral
issue, and the overall shape of an essay or conver-
sation about a moral claim is the moral argument.
The common pattern in an essay is to follow the
introduction (where the moral claim is stated) with
a moral argument. Likewise, in a truly rewarding
conversation on a moral issue, the main event is
the presentation of a moral argument and the ensu-
ing discussion about the quality of that argument
(whether the premises are true and whether the
conclusion logically follows from them).
Setting forth the argument involves explain-
ing and amplifying each premise and supporting it
with evidence (expert opinion, studies, statistics),
examples, or analogies. The aim is to demonstrate
clearly and carefully that the conclusion follows
from the premises and that the premises are true.
In a worthwhile oral debate, the elements are
much the same. Enough time and attention must
be allowed for giving and explaining an argument
and for thoughtful responses to that argument.
3. Consideration of alternative views. In any good
essay or conversation about moral issues, present-
ing an argument is not enough. There must be space
or time to consider alternative views on the subject.
Specifically, there should be an honest and thor-
ough assessment of objections to your argument
and its conclusion. Students are often reluctant to
take this step because they think it will weaken their

62 Á PART 2: MORAL REASONING
case. But the opposite is true. When you carefully
consider contrary opinions, you gain credibility,
because you show that you are fair-minded and care-
ful. You demonstrate to readers or listeners that you
are aware of possible objections and that you have
good replies to them. Would you trust the assertions
of someone who dogmatically pushes his own view
and ignores or dismisses out of hand anyone who
disagrees? Remember that a logical argument is not
a quarrel or spat and that a truly productive debate
is not a competition or shouting match. In ethics,
written and oral approaches to moral issues are hon-
est searches for truth and sincere exchanges of ideas.
In an essay, an assessment of objections can
come early or late but usually appears after the pre-
sentation of the argument. In conversation, objec-
tions may be taken up throughout and be addressed
as interlocutors raise them. Mutual respect and fair-
ness is a necessity in oral debate. Speakers must be
given a chance to have their say—to present argu-
ments, raise objections, or respond to objections.
Handling objections properly involves both
summarizing and examining them. We should
always avoid the fallacies mentioned earlier, of
course, but in considering alternative views, we
need to be especially alert to the straw man. Because
the essence of the straw man fallacy is the misrep-
resenting of someone’s claim or argument so it can
be more easily refuted, inserting the fallacy into
discussions is both dishonest and counterproduc-
tive. And by using it, you miss an opportunity to
spot weaknesses in your case, which means you
also miss a chance to strengthen it.
CHAPTER REVIEW
SUMMARY
An argument is a group of statements, one of which
is supposed to be supported by the rest. To be more
precise, an argument consists of one or more premises
and a conclusion. In a good argument, the conclusion
must follow from the premises, and the premises must
be true.
Arguments come in two basic types: deductive
and inductive. Deductive arguments are meant to give
logically conclusive support for their conclusions. A
deductive argument that actually provides this kind of
support is said to be valid. If it also has true premises, it
is said to be sound. An inductive argument is meant to
provide probable support for its conclusion. An induc-
tive argument that actually provides this kind of sup-
port is said to be strong. If it also has true premises, it is
said to be cogent.
Deductive arguments come in different forms.
Some of these forms are known to be valid; some,
invalid. Knowing these patterns helps you determine
the validity of deductive arguments. Using the coun-
terexample method can also aid your analysis.
The typical moral argument consists of at least one
moral premise and at least one nonmoral premise. The
best approach to evaluating moral arguments is to treat
them as deductive. This tack enables you to uncover
implicit premises. Implicit premises are often moral
premises, which may be controversial or dubious. They
can be tested through the use of counterexamples.
In moral reasoning, you frequently encounter
fallacies—forms of bad arguments that arise repeat-
edly. Some of those you are most likely to come across
are begging the question, equivocation, appeal to
authority, slippery slope, faulty analogy, appeal to
ignorance, straw man, appeal to the person, and hasty
generalization.
KEY TERMS
statement (p. 41)
argument (p. 42)
premise (p. 42)
conclusion (p. 42)
indicator words (p. 43)
deductive argument (p. 44)
inductive argument (p. 44)
valid argument (p. 44)
invalid argument (p. 44)
strong argument (p. 45)

CHAPTER 3: EvALuATING MORAL ARGuMENTS Á 63
weak argument (p. 45)
sound argument (p. 45)
cogent argument (p. 45)
moral statement (p. 51)
nonmoral statement (p. 51)
begging the question (p. 56)
equivocation (p. 57)
appeal to authority (p. 57)
slippery slope (p. 58)
faulty analogy (p. 58)
appeal to ignorance (p. 59)
straw man (p. 59)
appeal to the person (p. 59)
hasty generalization (p. 59)
EXERCISES
Review Questions
1. Are all persuasive arguments valid? Recount
a situation in which you tried to persuade
someone of a view by using an argument.
(p. 44)
2. Can a valid deductive argument ever have false
premises? Why or why not? (p. 44)
3. Are the premises of a cogent argument always
true? Is the conclusion always true? Explain.
(p. 45)
4. What is the term designating a valid argument
with true premises? a strong argument with true
premises? (p. 45)
5. Is the following argument form valid or invalid?
Why or why not? (p. 45)
If p, then q.
p.
Therefore, q.
6. Is the following argument form valid or invalid?
Why or why not? (p. 46)
If p, then q.
If q, then r.
Therefore, if p, then r.
7. What is the counterexample method? (p. 47)
8. What kinds of premises must a moral argument
have? (p. 57)
9. What is the best method for evaluating moral
premises? (pp. 54–55)
10. Explain the method for locating implied
premises. (pp. 47–48)
Discussion Questions
1. Is it immoral to believe a claim without
evidence? Why or why not?
2. If moral reasoning is largely about providing
good reasons for moral claims, where do feelings
enter the picture? Is it possible to present a good
argument that you feel strongly about? If so,
provide an example of such an argument.
3. Which of the following passages are arguments
(in the sense of displaying critical reasoning)?
Explain your answers.
• If you harm someone, they will harm you.
• Racial profiling is wrong. It discriminates
against racial groups, and discrimination is
wrong.
• If you say something that offends me,
I have the right to prevent you from saying
it again. After all, words are weapons, and
I have a right to prevent the use of weapons
against me.
4. What is the difference between persuading
someone to believe a claim and giving them
reasons to accept it? Can a good argument be
persuasive? Why or why not?
5. Why do you think people are tempted to use
the straw man fallacy in disagreements on
moral issues? How do you feel when someone
uses this fallacy against you?
Argument Exercises
Diagram the following arguments. Exercises marked
with an asterisk (*) have answers in Answers to Argu-
ment Exercises at the end of the text.
*1. If John works out at the gym daily, he will be
healthier. He is working out at the gym daily. So
he will be healthier.
2. If when you are in a coma you are no longer a
person, then giving you a drug to kill you would
not be murder. In a coma, you are in fact not
a person. Therefore, giving you the drug is not
murder.

64 Á PART 2: MORAL REASONING
*3. Ghosts do not exist. There is no reliable
evidence showing that any disembodied persons
exist anywhere.
4. If you smoke, your heart will be damaged. If
your heart is damaged, your risk of dying due
to heart problems will increase. Therefore,
smoking can increase your risk of dying due to
heart problems.
*5. The mayor is soft on crime. He cut back on
misdemeanor enforcement and told the police
department to be more lenient with traffic
violators.
6. Grow accustomed to the belief that death is
nothing to us, since every good and evil lie in
sensation. However, death is the deprivation of
sensation. Therefore, death is nothing to us.
*7. The president is either dishonest or
incompetent. He’s not incompetent, though,
because he’s an expert at getting self-serving
legislation through Congress. I guess he’s just
dishonest.
8. Most Republicans are conservatives, and Kurt
is a Republican. Therefore, Kurt is probably
a conservative. Therefore Kurt is probably
opposed to increases in welfare benefits, because
most conservatives are opposed to increased
welfare benefits.
*9. Can people without strong religious beliefs
be moral? Countless people have been
nonbelievers or nontheists and still behaved
according to lofty moral principles; for
example, the Buddhists of Asia and the
Confucianists of China. Consider also the
great secular philosophers, from the ancient
Greeks to the likes of David Hume and
Bertrand Russell. So it’s not true that those
without strong religious beliefs cannot be
moral.
10. Jan is a student at Harvard. No student at
Harvard has won a Pulitzer prize. Therefore, Jan
has not won a Pulitzer.
*11. We shouldn’t pay the lawnmower guy so much
money because he never completes the work,
and he will probably just gamble the money
away because he has no self-control.
12. Either Manny, Mo, or Jack crashed the car.
Manny couldn’t have done it, because he
was sleeping in his room and was observed
the whole time. Mo couldn’t have done it,
because he was out of town at the time and has
witnesses to prove it. So the guy who crashed
the car had to be Jack.
FURTHER READING
Richard Feldman, Reason and Argument, 2nd ed. (Upper
Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1999).
Richard M. Fox and Joseph P. DeMarco, Moral Reasoning:
A Philosophic Approach to Applied Ethics, 2nd ed. (Fort
Worth, TX: Harcourt College Publishers, 2001).
Brooke Noel Moore and Richard Parker, Critical Thinking,
7th ed. (Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2004).
Lewis Vaughn, The Power of Critical Thinking: Effective Rea
soning about Ordinary and Extraordinary Claims, 5th ed.
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).

C H A P T E R 4
‘’
The Power of Moral Theories
65
such considerations and ask ourselves if a trusted
moral principle is truly sound, whether a conflict
of principles can be resolved, or if a new principle
can handle cases that we have never had to address
before. When we puzzle over such things, we enter
the realm of moral theory. We theorize— trying to
use, make, or revise a moral theory or a piece of one.
A moral theory is an explanation of what
makes an action right or what makes a person or
thing good. Its focus is not the rightness or good-
ness of specific actions or persons but the very
nature of rightness or goodness itself. Moral theo-
ries concerned with the goodness of persons or
things are known as theories of value. Moral theo-
ries concerned with the rightness or wrongness of
actions are called theories of obligation. In this text,
we focus mostly on theories of obligation and,
unless otherwise indicated, will use the more gen-
eral term moral theories to refer to them. A moral
theory in this sense, then, is an explanation of what
makes an action right or wrong. It says, in effect,
that a particular action is right (or wrong) because
it has this property or characteristic.
Moral theories and theorizing are hard to avoid.
To wonder what makes an action right is to theo-
rize. To try not to think much about morality but
to rely on your default moral theory— the one you
inherited from your family or culture— is of course
to live by the lights of a moral theory. To reject all
moral theories, to deny the possibility of objective
morality, or to embrace a subjectivist view of right
and wrong is to have a particular overarching view
of morality, a view that in the broadest sense con-
stitutes a moral theory or part of one.
Recall that Part 1 (Fundamentals) gave you a broad
view of our subject, outlining the major concerns of
moral philosophy, the function of moral judgments
and principles, the nature of moral problems, the
elements of our common moral experience, and
the challenges of moral relativism and emotiv-
ism. Part 2 (Moral Reasoning) covered ethics at the
ground level— the fundamentals of critical reason-
ing as applied to everyday moral claims, arguments,
and conflicts. Here in Part 3 (Chapters 4–7) we touch
again on a great deal of this previous material as we
explore a central concern of contemporary ethics:
moral theory.
THEORIES OF RIGHT AND WRONG
Whatever else the moral life entails, it surely has
moral reasoning at its core. We act, we feel, we
choose, and in our best moments, we are guided
by the sifting of reasons and the weighing of argu-
ments. Much of the time, we expect— and want—
this process to yield plausible moral judgments.
We confront the cases that unsettle us and hope to
respond to them with credible assessments of the
right and the good. In making these judgments, we
may appeal to moral standards— principles or rules
that help us sort out right and wrong, good and bad.
Our deliberations may even work the other way
around: moral judgments may help us mold moral
principles. If we think carefully about our own delib-
erations, however, we will probably come to under-
stand that this interplay between moral judgments
and principles cannot be the whole story of moral
reasoning. From time to time we step back from

66 Á PART 2: MORAL REASONING
Moral theories and moral arguments often work
together. A statement expressing a moral theory
may itself act as the moral premise in an argument.
More often, an argument’s moral premise is ulti-
mately backed by a moral theory from which the
moral premise (principle or rule) is derived. Testing
the premise may require examining one or more
supporting principles or perhaps the most general
norm (the theory) itself.
Classic utilitarianism (covered in the next chap-
ter) is an example of a simple moral theory, one
based on a single, all- encompassing standard: right
actions are those that directly produce the greatest
overall happiness, everyone considered. What mat-
ters most are the consequences of actions. Thus, in
a particular situation, if there are only two possible
actions, and action X produces, say, 100 units of
overall happiness for everyone involved (early util-
itarians were the first to use this strange- sounding
notion of units of happiness), while action Y pro-
duces only 50 units, action X is the morally right
action to perform. The theory therefore identifies
what is thought to be the most important factor
in the moral life (happiness) and provides a proce-
dure for making judgments about right and wrong
actions.
Should we therefore conclude that a moral
theory is the final authority in moral reasoning?
Not at all. A moral theory is not like a mathemati-
cal axiom. From a moral theory we cannot derive in
strict logical fashion principles or judgments that
will solve all the problems of our real- world cases.
Because moral theories are by definition general
and theoretical, they cannot by themselves give
us precisely tailored right answers. But neither can
we dispense with moral theories and rely solely on
judgments about particular cases and issues. In the
field of ethics, most philosophers agree that care-
fully made moral judgments about cases and issues
are generally reliable data that we should take very
seriously. Such opinions are called considered
moral judgments, because they are formed after
careful deliberation that is as free of bias as possible.
’Moral Theories versus Moral Codes
A moral theory explains what makes an action
right; a moral code is simply a set of rules. We
value a moral theory because it identifies for us
the essence of rightness and thereby helps us
make moral judgments, derive moral principles,
and resolve conflicts between moral statements.
A moral code is much less useful than a moral the-
ory. The rules in a moral code inevitably conflict
but provide no means for resolving their incon-
sistencies. Rules saying “Do not kill” and “Protect
human life,” for example, will clash when the
only way to protect human life is to kill. Also,
rules are always general— usually too general
to cover many specific situations that call for a
moral decision— yet not general enough (in the
way that theories are) to help us deal with such
an array of specifics. How does a rule insisting
“Children must obey their parents” apply when
the parents are criminally insane or under the
influence of drugs, or when there are no parents,
just legal guardians? To make the rule apply, we
would have to interpret it— and that gets us back
into the realm of moral theory.
The point is that moral codes may have their
place in the moral life, but they are no substitute
for a plausible moral theory. Rules are rules, but
a moral theory can help us see beyond the rules.
A moral theory provides us with very general
norms, or standards, that can help us make sense of
our moral experiences, judgments, and principles.
(Some moral theories feature only one overarch-
ing standard.) The standards are meant to be gen-
eral enough and substantial enough to inform our
moral reasoning— to help us assess the worth of less
general principles, to shed light on our moral judg-
ments, to corroborate or challenge aspects of our
moral experience, and even to generate new lower-
level principles if need be.

CHAPTER 4: THE POwER Of MORAL THEORIES Á 67
(or deontological). In general, consequentialist
theories say that what makes an action right is its
consequences. Specifically, the rightness of an action
depends on the amount of good it produces. A con-
sequentialist theory may define the good in dif-
ferent ways— as, for example, pleasure, happiness,
well- being, flourishing, or knowledge. But however
good is defined, the morally right action is the one
that results in the most favorable balance of good
over bad.
Nonconsequentialist theories say that the
rightness of an action does not depend entirely on
its consequences. It depends primarily, or com-
pletely, on the nature of the action itself. To a non-
consequentialist, the balance of good over bad that
results from an action may matter little or not at all.
What is of primary concern is the kind of action in
question. To a consequentialist, telling a lie may be
considered wrong because it leads to more unhap-
piness than other actions do. To a nonconsequen-
tialist, telling a lie may be considered wrong simply
because it violates an exceptionless rule. Thus, by
nonconsequentialist lights, an action could be
morally right even though it produces less good
than any alternative action.
Consequentialist Theories
There are several consequentialist theories, each
differing from the others on who is to benefit from
goods or what kinds of goods are to be pursued.
But two theories have received the most attention
from moral philosophers: utilitarianism and ethi-
cal egoism.
Utilitarianism says that the morally right
action is the one that produces the most favorable
balance of good over evil, everyone considered.
That is, the right action maximizes the good (how-
ever good is defined) better than any alternative
action, everyone considered. Utilitarianism insists
that everyone affected by an action must be included
in any proper calculation of overall consequences.
The crucial factor is how much net good is produced
when everyone involved is counted.
Our considered moral judgments (including the
principles or rules sanctioned by those judgments)
by themselves, however, are sometimes of limited
use. They may conflict. They may lack sufficient
justification. A moral theory provides standards
that can help overcome these limitations.
So where does theory fit in our moral delibera-
tions? Theory plays a role along with judgments
and principles or rules. In trying to determine the
morally right thing to do in a specific case, we
may find ourselves reflecting on just one of these
elements or on all of them at once. We may, for
example, begin by considering the insights embod-
ied in our moral theory, which give some justifica-
tion to several relevant principles. In light of these
principles, we may decide to perform a particular
action. But we may also discover that our consid-
ered moral judgment in the case conflicts with the
deliverances of the relevant principles or even with
the overarching theory. Depending on the weight
we give to the particular judgment, we may decide
to adjust the principles or the theory so that it is
compatible with the judgment. A moral theory
can crystallize important insights in morality and
thereby give us general guidance as we make judg-
ments about cases and issues. But the judgments—
if they are indeed trustworthy— can compel us to
reconsider the theory.
The ultimate goal in this give- and- take of the-
ory and judgment (or principle) is a kind of close
coherence between the two— what has come to
be known as reflective equilibrium.1 They should
fit together as closely as possible, with maximum
agreement between them. This process is similar
to the one used in science to reconcile theory and
experimental data, a topic we address in more
detail later in this chapter.
MAJOR THEORIES
Moral philosophers have traditionally grouped the-
ories of morality into two major categories: conse-
quentialist (or teleological) and nonconsequentialist

68 Á PART 2: MORAL REASONING
the egoist. This approach to morality seems to radi-
cally conflict with commonsense moral experience
as well as with the basic principles of most other
moral theories.
Nonconsequentialist Theories
Nonconsequentialist (deontological) theories also
take various forms. They differ on, among other
things, the number of foundational principles or
basic rules used and the ultimate basis of those
principles.
By far the most influential nonconsequentialist
theory is that of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). Kant
wants to establish as the foundation of his theory a
single principle from which all additional maxims
can be derived, a principle he calls the categori-
cal imperative. One way that he states his prin-
ciple is “Act only on that maxim through which
you can at the same time will that it should become
a universal law.”2 (Kant insists that he formulates
just one principle but expresses it in several differ-
ent forms; the forms, however, seem to be separate
principles.) The categorical imperative, Kant says,
is self- evident— and therefore founded on reason.
The principle and the maxims derived from it are
also universal (applying to all persons) and absolut-
ist, meaning that they are moral laws that have no
exceptions. Kant’s theory, then, is the view that
the morally right action is the one done in accor-
dance with the categorical imperative.
For Kant, every action implies a rule or maxim
that says, in effect, always do this in these circum-
stances. An action is right, he says, if and only if
you could rationally will the rule to be universal—
to have everyone in a similar situation always act
according to the same rule. Breaking promises is
wrong because if the implied rule (something like
“Break promises whenever you want”) were uni-
versalized (if everyone followed the rule), then
no promise anywhere could be trusted, and the
whole convention of promise making would be
obliterated— and no one would be willing to live
in such a world. In other words, universalizing the
Moral philosophers distinguish two major types
of utilitarianism according to whether judgments
of rightness focus on individual acts (without ref-
erence to rules) or on rules that cover various cat-
egories of acts. Act- utilitarianism says that right
actions are those that directly produce the greatest
overall good, everyone considered. The conse-
quences that flow directly from a particular act are
all that matter; rules are irrelevant to this calcula-
tion. In act- utilitarianism, each situation calling
for a moral judgment is unique and demands a new
calculation of the balance of good over evil. Thus,
breaking a promise may be right in one situation and
wrong in another, depending on the consequences.
Rule- utilitarianism, on the other hand, says
that the morally right action is the one covered by
a rule that if generally followed would produce the
most favorable balance of good over evil, every-
one considered. The consequences of generally
following a rule are of supreme importance— not
the direct consequences of performing a particular
action. Specific rules are justified because if people
follow them all the time (or most of the time), the
result will be a general maximization of good over
evil. We are to follow such rules consistently, even if
doing so in a particular circumstance results in bad
consequences.
Ethical egoism says that the morally right
action is the one that produces the most favorable
balance of good over evil for oneself. That is, in every
situation the right action is the one that advances
one’s own best interests. In each circumstance, the
ethical egoist must ask, “Which action, among all
possible actions, will result in the most good for
me?” Ironically, it may be possible for an ethical
egoist to consistently practice this creed without
appearing to be selfish or committing many self-
ishly unkind acts. The egoist may think that com-
pletely disregarding the welfare of others is not in
his or her best interests. After all, people tend to
resent such behavior and may respond accordingly.
Nevertheless, the bottom line in all moral delibera-
tions is whether an action maximizes the good for

CHAPTER 4: THE POwER Of MORAL THEORIES Á 69
breaking of promises would result in a logically
contradictory state of affairs, a situation that makes
no moral sense.
Notice again the stark contrast between utili-
tarianism and Kant’s theory. For the former, the
rightness of an action depends solely on its conse-
quences, on what results the action produces for
everyone involved. For the latter, the consequences
of actions for particular individuals never enter
into the equation. An action is right if and only if
it possesses a particular property— the property of
according with the categorical imperative, of not
involving a logical contradiction.
Another notable nonconsequentialist view is
the theory of natural law. Natural law theory
says that the morally right action is the one that fol-
lows the dictates of nature. What does nature have
to do with ethics? According to the most influential
form of this theory (traditional natural law theory),
the natural world, including humankind, exhibits
a rational order in which everything has its proper
place and purpose, with each thing given a spe-
cific role to play by God. In this grand order, natu-
ral laws reflect how the world is as well as how it
should be. People are supposed to live according to
natural law— that is, they are to fulfill their rightful,
natural purpose. To act morally, they must act natu-
rally; they must do what they were designed to do
by God. They must obey the absolutist moral rules
that anyone can read in the natural order.
A natural law theorist might reason like this:
Lying is immoral because it goes against human
nature. Truth telling is natural for humans because
they are social creatures with an inborn tendency to
care about the welfare of others. Truth telling helps
humans get along, maintain viable societies, and
show respect for others. Lying is therefore unnat-
ural and wrong. Another example: Some natural
law theorists claim that “unnatural” sexual activ-
ity is immoral. They argue that because the natural
purpose of sex is procreation, and such practices
as homosexual sex or anal sex have nothing to do
with procreation, these practices are immoral.
’ QUICK REVIEW
moral theory— An explanation of what makes an
action right or what makes a person or thing
good.
considered moral judgment— A moral assessment
that is as free from bias and distorting passions
as possible. We generally trust such a judgment
unless there is a reason to doubt it.
consequentialist theory— A theory asserting that
what makes an action right is its consequences.
nonconsequentialist theory— A theory assert-
ing that the rightness of an action does not
depend on its consequences.
utilitarianism— A theory asserting that the mor-
ally right action is the one that produces the
most favorable balance of good over evil,
everyone considered.
act- utilitarianism— A utilitarian theory asserting
that the morally right action is the one that
directly produces the most favorable balance
of good over evil, everyone considered.
rule- utilitarianism— A utilitarian theory asserting
that the morally right action is the one covered
by a rule that, if generally followed, would pro-
duce the most favorable balance of good over
evil, everyone considered.
ethical egoism— A theory asserting that the mor-
ally right action is the one that produces the
most favorable balance of good over evil for
oneself.
categorical imperative— An imperative that we
should follow regardless of our particular wants
and needs; also, the principle that defines Kant’s
theory.
Kant’s theory— A theory asserting that the mor-
ally right action is the one done in accordance
with the categorical imperative.
(continued)

70 Á PART 2: MORAL REASONING
incorporate one principle only (the core principle
that God makes rightness) or the core principle plus
several subordinate rules, as is the case with divine
command views that designate the Ten Command-
ments as a God- made moral code.
EVALUATING THEORIES
We come now to the question that moral philoso-
phers have been asking in one way or another for
centuries: Is this moral theory a good theory? That
is, is it true? Does it reliably explain what makes an
action right? As we have seen, not all moral theo-
ries are created equal. Some are better than oth-
ers; some are seriously flawed; and some, though
imperfect, have taught the world important lessons
about the moral life.
The next question, of course, is, How do we go
about answering the first question? At first glance,
it seems that impartially judging the worth of a
moral theory is impossible, because we all look at
the world through our own tainted lens, our own
moral theory or theory fragments. However, our
review of subjectivism and relativism (see Chap-
ter 2) suggests that this worry is overblown. More
to the point, there are plausible criteria that we can
use to evaluate the adequacy of moral theories (our
own and those of others), standards that moral phi-
losophers and others have used to appraise even
the most complex theories of morality. These are
what we may call the moral criteria of adequacy.
The first step in assessing any theory (before
using these criteria) is to ensure that the theory
meets the minimum requirement of coherence. A
moral theory that is coherent is eligible to be evalu-
ated using the criteria of adequacy. A coherent
theory is internally consistent, which means that
its central claims are consistent with one another—
they are not contradictory. An internally consistent
theory would not assert, for example, both that (1)
actions are right if and only if they are natural and
that (2) it is morally right to use unnatural means
to save a life. Contradictory claims assert both that
natural law theory— A theory asserting that the
morally right action is the one that follows the
dictates of nature.
divine command theory— A theory asserting that
the morally right action is the one that God
commands.
prima facie principle— A principle that applies in
a situation unless exceptions are justified.
negative right— A person’s right that obligates oth-
ers not to interfere with that person’s obtaining
something.
positive right— A person’s right that obligates
others to help that person obtain something.
retributive justice— The fair use of punishment
for wrongdoing.
distributive justice— The fair distribution of soci-
ety’s benefits and costs (such as income, taxes,
jobs, and public service).
self- evident statement— An assertion that a per-
son is justified in believing merely by under-
standing it, such as “No bachelors are married.”
Another critical aspect of the traditional theory
is that it insists that humans can discover what is
natural, and thus moral, through reason. God has
created a natural order and given humans the gift
of rationality to correctly apprehend this order.
This means that any rational person— whether
religious or not— can discern the moral rules and
live a moral life.
One of the simplest nonconsequentialist theo-
ries is the divine command theory, a view dis-
cussed in Chapter 1. It says that the morally right
action is the one that God commands. An action
is right if and only if God says it is. The rightness
of an action does not depend in any way on its
consequences. According to the divine command
theory, an action may be deemed right even
though it does not maximize the good, or deemed
wrong even if it does maximize the good. It may

CHAPTER 4: THE POwER Of MORAL THEORIES Á 71
Now consider the following criteria of adequacy
for moral theories:
Criterion 1: Consistency with Considered
Moral Judgments
To be worth evaluating, a plausible scientific theory
must be consistent with the data it was introduced
to explain. A theory meant to explain an epidemic,
for example, must account for the nature of the
disease and the method of transmission. Other-
wise it is a very poor theory. A moral theory must
also be consistent with the data it was introduced
to explain. A moral theory is supposed to explain
what makes an action right, and the data relevant
to that issue are our considered moral judgments.
Recall that considered moral judgments are
views that we form after careful deliberation
under conditions that minimize bias and error.
They are therefore thought to have considerable
weight as reasons or evidence in moral matters,
even though they can be mistaken and other con-
siderations (such as an established moral prin-
ciple or a well- supported theory) can sometimes
overrule them.
A moral theory that is inconsistent with trust-
worthy judgments is at least dubious and likely to
be false and in need of drastic overhaul or rejection.
There is something seriously wrong, for example,
with a theory that approves of the murder of inno-
cent people, the wanton torture of children, or the
enslavement of millions of men and women. As
we will see in the next chapter, inconsistency with
considered moral judgments can be the undoing
of even the most influential and attractive moral
theories.
Consider Theory 1. It says that right actions are
those that enhance the harmonious functioning of
a community. On the face of it, this theory appears
to be a wise policy. But it seems to imply that cer-
tain heinous acts are right. It suggests, for example,
that if killing an innocent person would enhance
a community’s harmonious functioning, killing
that person would be right. This view conflicts
something is and is not the case; one statement says
X and another says not- X. When claims conflict in
this way, we know that at least one of them is false.
So if two substantial claims in a theory are contra-
dictory, one of the claims must be false— and the
theory is refuted. This kind of inconsistency is such
a serious shortcoming in a moral theory that fur-
ther evaluation of it would be unnecessary. It is, in
fact, not eligible for evaluation. Ineligible theories
would get low marks on each criterion of adequacy.
Eligible moral theories are a different matter.
Unlike ineligible theories, they are not guaranteed
to fare poorly when evaluated, and testing their
mettle with the moral criteria of adequacy is almost
always revealing. But how do we use these criteria?
The answer is that we apply them in much the same
way and for a few of the same reasons that scientists
apply their criteria to scientific theories.
Scientific theories are introduced to explain
data concerning the causes of events— why some-
thing happens as it does or why it is the way it is.
Usually scientists devise several theories (explana-
tions) of a phenomenon, ensuring that each one is
minimally adequate for evaluation. Then they try
to determine which of these is best, which offers
the best explanation for the data in question, for
they know that the best theory is the one most
likely to be true. To discover which is the best, they
must judge each theory according to some gener-
ally accepted standards— the scientific criteria of
adequacy. One criterion, for example, is conser-
vatism: how well a theory fits with what scientists
already know. A scientific theory that conflicts
with existing knowledge ( well- established facts,
scientific laws, or extensively confirmed theories)
is not likely to be true. On the other hand, the more
conservative a theory is (that is, the less it conflicts
with existing knowledge), the more likely it is to be
true. All things being equal, a conservative theory
is better than one that is not conservative. Another
criterion is fruitfulness: how many successful novel
predictions the theory makes. The more such pre-
dictions, the more plausible the theory is.

72 Á PART 2: MORAL REASONING
’
The philosopher John Rawls devised the notion of
reflective equilibrium and put heavy emphasis on
the quality of moral judgments in his own moral
theory. This is what he has to say about the nature
of considered moral judgments:
Now, as already suggested, [considered judg-
ments] enter as those judgments in which our
moral capacities are most likely to be displayed
without distortion. Thus in deciding which of our
judgments to take into account we may reason-
ably select some and exclude others. For exam-
ple, we may discard those judgments made with
hesitation, or in which we have little confidence.
Similarly, those given when we are upset or fright-
ened, or when we stand to gain one way or the
other can be left aside. All these judgments are
likely to be erroneous or to be influenced by an
excessive attention to our own interests. Consid-
ered judgments are simply those rendered under
conditions favorable to the exercise of the sense
of justice, and therefore in circumstances where
the more common excuses and explanations for
making a mistake do not obtain. The person mak-
ing the judgment is presumed, then, to have the
ability, the opportunity, and the desire to reach a
correct decision (or at least, not the desire not to).
Moreover, the criteria that identify these judg-
ments are not arbitrary. They are, in fact, similar
to those that single out considered judgments of
any kind.*
*John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, rev. ed. (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press, 1999), 42.
Considered Moral Judgments
dramatically with our considered moral judgment
that murdering an innocent person just to make
a community happy is wrong. Theory 1 should be
rejected.
Criterion 2: Consistency with Our
Moral Experiences
As we saw earlier, a good scientific theory should be
conservative. It should, in other words, be consistent
with scientific background knowledge— with the
many beliefs that science has already firmly estab-
lished. Likewise, a plausible moral theory should
be consistent with moral background knowledge—
with what we take to be the fundamental facts of our
moral experience. Whatever our views on morality,
few of us would deny that we do in fact have these
experiences:
• We sometimes make moral judgments.
• We often give reasons for particular moral
beliefs.
• We are sometimes mistaken in our moral beliefs.
• We occasionally have moral disagreements.
• We occasionally commit wrongful acts.
As is the case with theories that conflict with
considered moral judgments, a theory in conflict
with these experiences is at least dubious and prob-
ably false. A moral theory is inconsistent with the
moral life if it implies that we do not have one or
more of these basic moral experiences.
Suppose Theory 2 says that our feelings alone
determine whether actions are right—that if our
feelings lead us to believe that an action is right,
then it is right. But this theory suggests that we are
never mistaken in our moral beliefs, for if our feel-
ings determine what is right, we cannot be wrong.
Whatever we happen to feel tells us what actions
are right. Our moral experience, however, is good
evidence that we are not morally infallible. Theory
2 therefore is problematic, to say the least.
Could we possibly be mistaken about our moral
experience? Yes. It is possible that our experience
of the moral life is illusory. Perhaps we are mor-
ally infallible after all, or maybe we do not actually

CHAPTER 4: THE POwER Of MORAL THEORIES Á 73
’
Imagine that you come across a theory based on
this moral standard: Only actions that are “natural”
are morally right; “unnatural” actions are wrong.
We can call it the all- natural theory. It defines nat-
ural actions as (1) those done in accordance with
the normal biological urges and needs of human
beings, (2) those that reflect typical human psy-
chological tendencies and patterns, and (3) those
that help ensure the survival of the human spe-
cies. (This approach should not be confused with
the more sophisticated and historically important
natural law theory.) An all- natural theorist might
view these actions as morally permissible: walking,
talking, eating, having sex, cooperating with oth-
ers, caring for loved ones, teaching children, creat-
ing art, growing food, building shelters, going to
war, solving problems, and protecting the environ-
ment. Impermissible actions might include building
spaceships, using birth control, using performance-
enhancing drugs, being a loner or a hermit, and
intervening in reproductive processes (as in clon-
ing, abortion, fertility treatments, in vitro fertiliza-
tion, and stem cell research).
Is this a good theory? Is it internally inconsis-
tent? (For example, do the three definitions of
natural actions conflict? Would applying Defini-
tion 3 contradict the results of applying Definitions
1 and 2?) Is the all- natural theory consistent with
our considered moral judgments? (Hint: Would it
condone murder? Would it conflict with our usual
concepts of justice?) If it is not consistent, supply
an example (a counterexample). Is the theory con-
sistent with our moral experience? Give reasons for
your answer. Is the theory useful? If not, why not?
CRITICAL THOUGHT: A 100 Percent All- Natural Theory
make moral judgments. But like our considered
moral judgments, our commonsense moral expe-
riences carry weight as evidence— good evidence
that the moral life is, for the most part, as we think
it is. We are therefore entitled to accept this evi-
dence as trustworthy unless we have good reason
to think otherwise.
Criterion 3: Usefulness in
Moral Problem Solving
Good scientific theories increase our understand-
ing of the world, and greater understanding leads
to greater usefulness— the capacity to solve prob-
lems and answer questions. The more useful a sci-
entific theory is, the more credibility it acquires. A
good moral theory is also useful— it helps us solve
moral problems in real- life situations. It helps us
make reliable judgments about moral principles
and actions and resolve conflicts among conflicting
judgments and principles and within the theory
itself. A major reason for devising a moral theory is
to obtain this kind of practical guidance.
Usefulness is a necessary, though not sufficient,
characteristic of a good moral theory. This means
that all good theories are useful, but usefulness
alone does not make a moral theory good. It is pos-
sible for a bad theory to be useful as well (to be use-
ful but fail some other criterion of adequacy). But
any moral theory that lacks usefulness is a dubious
theory.
Now we can be more specific about the similari-
ties between science and ethics in handling theory
and data. In science, the interaction between a the-
ory and the relevant data is dynamic. The theory is
designed to explain the data, so the data help shape
the theory. But a plausible theory can give scien-
tists good reasons to accept or reject specific data
or to reinterpret them. Both the theory and the
data contribute to the process of searching for the
truth. Scientists work to get the balance between

74 Á PART 2: MORAL REASONING
for example, also believe that it makes a valuable
point that any theory should take into account:
the consequences of actions do matter. Judiciously
applying the criteria of adequacy to a theory can
help us see a theory’s strengths as well as its weak-
nesses. Such insights can inspire us to improve any
moral theory— or perhaps create a new one.
You will get a chance to see firsthand how
theory evaluation is done. In Chapters 5 and 6, we
will apply the moral criteria of adequacy to several
major moral theories.
DEVISING A COHERENT
MORAL THEORY
By now you know that we are all chronic moral
theorizers. We can’t help ourselves. We usually
operate on the ground level of ethics, making judg-
ments about the rightness or wrongness of particu-
lar actions or the moral worth of particular people
or motives, trying to align our lives with moral
norms that we think rest on a solid footing. But
sometimes we must take a bird’ s- eye view of moral-
ity to see how these particulars are related, whether
they reveal a pattern that informs the moral life,
and whether the moral principles we embrace are
really worth embracing. In other words, we theorize.
In the next few pages, I show you how I do some
of this big- picture theorizing. I try to work out a
plausible moral theory of obligation— an explana-
tion of what makes an action right or wrong. I base
this theory on what I consider the best aspects of
the moral theories discussed earlier and on the ele-
ments of the moral life in which we have the great-
est confidence.
Moral Common Sense
As we have seen, some of the more influential
theories of the past— utilitarianism, Kant’s theory,
and natural law theory— offer invaluable moral
insights. But each one overlooks at least one feature
that seems vital to morality and to any adequate
moral theory. Some leave out the consequences of
these two just right. They try to ensure a very close
fit between them— so close that there is no need for
major alterations in either the theory or the data.
In ethics, the link between theory and data (consid-
ered moral judgments) is similar. Considered moral
judgments help shape theory (and its principles or
rules), and a good theory sheds light on judgments
and helps adjudicate conflicts between judgments
and other moral statements. As in science, we
should strive for a strong logical harmony between
theory, data, and subordinate principles.
Remember, though, that theory evaluation is
not a mechanical process, and neither is the appli-
cation of theories to moral problems. There is no
formula or set of instructions for applying our three
criteria to a theory. Neither is there a calculating
machine for determining how much weight to give
each criterion in particular situations. We must
make an informed judgment about the importance
of particular criteria in each new instance. Never-
theless, applying the criteria is not a subjective,
arbitrary affair. It is rational and objective— like, for
example, the diagnosis of an illness, which is based
on the educated judgment of a physician using
appropriate guidelines.
Now suppose you apply the moral criteria of
adequacy and reach a verdict on the worth of a the-
ory: you reject it. Should this verdict be the end of
your inquiry? In general, no. There is often much
to be learned from even seriously defective theo-
ries. Many philosophers who reject utilitarianism,
’ QUICK REVIEW
The Moral Criteria of Adequacy
Criterion 1: Consistency with considered judg ments.
Criterion 2: Consistency with our moral experi ences.
Criterion 3: Usefulness in moral problem solving.

CHAPTER 4: THE POwER Of MORAL THEORIES Á 75
is the starting point of our theorizing as well as the
corroboration of what we learn.
Building a Moral Theory
Here is one way a moral theory is built: Suppose we
begin with our data— our considered moral judg-
ments rendered about specific cases. We judge that
the actions in these cases are morally wrong, and
then we look for what these wrong actions have
in common. Suppose we notice that all of them
share the property of being instances in which
people are prevented from exercising their auton-
omy (their capacity for self- governance). Perhaps a
doctor operates on them without their consent, or
they are denied their right to live and work where
they choose, or they are forced to practice a reli-
gion they despise. After much reflection, we think
we see a moral principle threading through these
cases: people have a right of self- determination.
But to avoid jumping to conclusions, we examine
many similar cases, and this forces us to modify
our principle, perhaps a little bit or perhaps a lot.
And our modified principle sheds new light on our
cases, perhaps revealing that some of them are not
really instances of wrongdoing after all. We gather
more considered moral judgments, and we think
they suggest other principles. Ultimately we may
conclude that all our principles can be summed up
in one dominant principle (as is the case with utili-
tarianism). Or perhaps we are left with an appar-
ently irreducible set of principles that seem to cover
all our moral duties (as in natural law theory). In
either situation, we continually test the principles
to determine if they lead to reasonable judgments,
and we check the plausibility of the judgments by
comparing them with the principles. The idea is to
eliminate conflicts between the two and to achieve
the closest possible agreement between them.
Thus, common sense shapes theory, and theory
informs common sense.
So in developing a moral theory, we begin with
what we know or think we know. And through much
critical reflection on our data and the generalizations
actions, some the claims of autonomy and rights,
and some the demands of justice. I think the
absence of these elements constitutes a disabling
flaw for these theories. But if this assessment is
correct— if our best theories to date are not entirely
adequate to the task of providing moral guidance
and ethical understanding— how can we expect to
devise something better? What are our prospects
for improving on what we have?
I think our prospects are good. Recall that we
are all capable of forming considered moral judg-
ments, the assessments we make about cases and
principles after careful reflection that is as clear
and unbiased as possible. These judgments— what
some call our moral common sense— are fallible
and revisable, but they can constitute credible
evidence in favor of particular judgments or prin-
ciples. They are used regularly by philosophers not
only to formulate principles and theories but also
to test them for soundness. When a judgment or
principle or theory or value seems questionable, we
usually fall back on our most trusted data: our con-
sidered moral judgments.
Our considered moral judgments tell us that
wantonly killing people is wrong, that slavery is
a moral abomination, that equals must be treated
equally, that respecting the rights of innocent peo-
ple is morally required, and that inflicting unde-
served and unnecessary suffering on others is evil.
We are rightly suspicious of any theory that says
otherwise. We should have more confidence in our
considered moral judgment that abusing babies
is wrong than in any theory that condones it. Of
course, our moral common sense can be in error;
we can be wrong about what at first seems obvious;
and a good moral theory can show us that a con-
sidered moral judgment should be revised. But we
are entitled to trust the urgings of common sense
unless we have good reasons to doubt them. Utili-
tarianism, Kant’s theory, and natural law theory
have all been found wanting, in large part because
they conflict in some way with our considered
moral judgments. Our moral common sense, then,

76 Á PART 2: MORAL REASONING
high enough— if obeying an absolute rule would
cause, say, death and destruction— violating the
rule would appear to be the right thing to do.
Our moral common sense also tells us, I think,
that there must be more than one basic moral rule
that defines our duties. More than one primary
rule must be necessary, because we obviously have
many basic duties, and we cannot derive them all
from one another or from one overarching prin-
ciple. Our duty to benefit others is distinct from our
duty to respect their rights; if anything, these are
competing duties. Utilitarianism and Kant’s theory,
which boast just one ultimate rule, have trouble
accounting for these disparate obligations.
Any theory that consists of two or more funda-
mental rules must explain how those rules relate to
one another. For the absolutist, multiple rules lead
to a serious problem: they will inevitably produce
irresolvable contradictions. Honoring one rule may
force the violation of another. Suppose an absolut-
ist theory consists of just two rules: “Care for loved
ones in dire need” and “Keep your promises.”
Suppose you promise to take your mother to see
a Broadway show, something she has looked for-
ward to for years, but on that same night your son
becomes seriously ill and will suffer horribly if you
do not tend to him. If you keep your promise and
take your mother to the show, your son will suf-
fer; if you take care of your son, you will break your
promise to your mother. You cannot obey one rule
without violating the other. In absolutist theories
consisting of two or more basic rules, such contra-
dictions are common, and they render the theories
implausible. Various attempts have been made by
absolutists to answer this kind of criticism, but in
my opinion none of these efforts has succeeded or
ever will succeed.
I think nonabsolutist, multiple- rule theories
have a much better way of dealing with conflict-
ing rules. Their approach hinges on the concept of
prima facie principles— principles that apply
in a situation unless exceptions are justified. Excep-
tions are justified when two rules conflict (when
arising from them, we can formulate a theory— a
work in progress— and a more or less useful guide to
the moral life.
Prima Facie Principles
But what shape would an adequate moral theory
take? The overall structure of a moral theory of
obligation depends largely on the number of fun-
damental principles it has and whether those prin-
ciples are absolute— that is, whether they are rigid
rules that allow no exceptions. Utilitarianism has
a single ultimate rule (the principle of utility), and
so does Kant’s theory (the categorical imperative).
For these theories, no principles are more basic.
Each basic principle is also absolute; the rule must
always be followed in every circumstance. There is
no clause that says the rule must be strictly adhered
to except in circumstance X or Y. Other theories,
however, feature not one but several fundamental
principles, which may or may not be absolute. Nat-
ural law theory, for example, is based on a handful
of absolute rules. But some theories that also con-
tain more than one basic rule reject absolutism.
Of these possible theory configurations, I think
only the latter type is plausible. Deep down, we
may all want moral principles to be reassuringly
sturdy and absolute, but I think this is a false hope.
It seems that for any absolute moral principle, we
can always find counter- examples in which adher-
ing strictly to the rule can lead to immoral actions
and unpalatable results. Kant offers the example
of the poor unfortunate who runs from an insane
murderer and hides in a friend’s house. When the
friend is asked for the whereabouts of the mur-
derer’s prey, he has a choice: he can lie and save
his friend’s life, or he can tell the truth and doom
her. Kant thinks he must tell the truth, even if the
result is a tragic loss of life. According to Kant, we
must do right though the heavens fall. His absolut-
ism compels him to obey the letter of the law. But
our considered moral judgments seem to suggest
that in situations like this, saving a life is far more
important than telling the truth. If the stakes are

CHAPTER 4: THE POwER Of MORAL THEORIES Á 77
but the job is actually simpler than it might ini-
tially appear. First, principles that may seem funda-
mental can often be subsumed under fewer, more
basic principles, with the highest- level principles
supporting subordinate ones. Second, the flawed
theories of the past have helped us see that the
moral life is defined by a relatively small number
of general norms or core values. We have learned
from utilitarianism and other consequentialist theo-
ries that any plausible moral theory must take into
account the effects of actions and the demands of
beneficence and non- maleficence, and we have seen
in Kant’s theory and other nonconsequentialist views
the supreme importance of autonomy, rights, and
justice. For most theorists, these concerns define the
full spectrum of moral norms that inform the moral
life. Although philosophers have parsed these general
norms in different ways, there is plenty of agreement
about what they are.
If all of these assumptions are correct, then a sat-
isfactory moral theory that reflects the facts of the
moral life should comprise a small number of prima
facie principles covering all the duties endorsed by
our considered moral judgments. Absolute rules
and a structure dominated by a single sovereign
principle cannot be features of this theory.
With these requirements in mind, I want to
argue for a theory that rests on three prima facie
principles: respect, justice, and beneficence. These
three, I think, can cover all our basic moral duties
while simplifying the process of identifying and
weighing obligations. For particular cases, we would
have to specify how, and to what, the principles
should be applied, but this process is a necessity for
any theory of general norms. As is the case with all
theories consisting of more than one moral norm,
the principles will often conflict. As suggested ear-
lier, the tension is resolved by weighing and balanc-
ing the prima facie principles to ascertain actual
duties— our “all things considered” obligations.
Respect refers to respect for persons, the guiding
value of Kant’s theory and other nonconsequen-
tialist theories. Respect is owed all persons equally,
both rules apply, but it is not possible to obey both)
and one is considered weightier than the other.
Viewing the duties in the mother- son case as prima
facie would require us to decide which duty was
more important and therefore which should be
performed. The two rules represent apparent duties,
but after weighting the duties appropriately, only
one constitutes our actual duty. This approach to
conflicting rules aligns better with our moral com-
mon sense: we know that our duties sometimes col-
lide, that a duty can be overridden by a weightier
one, and that occasionally we must break the rules
in order to do the right thing. We also seem to have
a sense that prima facie duties remain fundamen-
tally important even when they are overridden.
So I think that an adequate moral theory, how-
ever it is fleshed out, must be based on more than
one principle, and the principles should be prima
facie (nonabsolute) and irreducible (they cannot be
derived from one another).
Three Rules
The next issue to consider is what these principles
are and how they function in the theory. On this
point, theories of prima facie principles can differ
substantially in both the content of the principles
and their number. W.D. Ross (1877–1967), the
first philosopher to devise a theory of prima facie
duties, thought there were at least seven prima
facie duties: duties of fidelity (keeping promises,
telling the truth); reparation (making amends for
a wrongful act); gratitude (acknowledging services
done for us by others); justice (distributing benefits
and burdens fairly); beneficence (benefiting oth-
ers); self- improvement (enhancing our own virtue
or intelligence); and non- maleficence (not injur-
ing others).3 More recently, philosophers have
tended to argue for a smaller set of prima facie
principles— for example, four (autonomy, justice,
beneficence, and non- maleficence), or two (justice
and beneficence).
These variations may seem to make the task of
developing an acceptable theory fairly complex,

78 Á PART 2: MORAL REASONING
thousand people, we would most likely favor jail-
ing the person. From a moral standpoint, the loss
of so many lives seems far more important than the
injustice of false imprisonment.
The principle of justice requires that persons be
treated fairly and that they get what is due them.
Retributive justice concerns the fair use of pun-
ishment for wrongdoing. Distributive justice
(what I will focus on here) is about the fair distribu-
tion of society’s benefits and costs (such as income,
privileges, taxes, health care, jobs, and public ser-
vice). The essence of this principle is that equals
must be treated equally. A rule that applies to some-
one in a particular situation must apply to anyone
else in a relevantly similar situation. Justice, then,
reflects a central fact about the moral life: morality
requires impartiality. Racial discrimination is con-
trary to justice because it treats one group differ-
ently than it does another, even though no morally
relevant differences exist between them.
Like the principle of respect, the justice prin-
ciple generally overrides concerns about conse-
quences. In fact, one of the strongest criticisms
of utilitarianism is that its emphasis on maximiz-
ing happiness or welfare is often at odds with our
considered moral judgments about justice. Justice
demands equal treatment of persons, but utilitari-
anism seeks to produce the best balance of good
over evil, which may or may not amount to the
equal treatment of equals.
I think the proper way to take consequences
into account is through the prima facie principle
of beneficence. This principle is about the good and
bad effects of actions, the nonmoral consequences
of what we do or don’t do. It says we have a quali-
fied duty to benefit others and to avoid causing
them harm. This obligation has three different
dimensions: (1) we should not deliberately harm
others (should not kill, hurt, disable, rob, or terror-
ize them, for example); (2) we should act to benefit
others (to prevent harm or evil, remove harm or
evil, and promote good); and (3) we should strive
to produce the most favorable balance of good over
because they have intrinsic worth and dignity
due to their autonomy— that is, to their capacity
for rational decisions, autonomous action, and
moral choices. Kant made this point by insisting
that we must always treat persons as ends in them-
selves, never merely as a means to an end (a tool
to be used for someone else’s purposes). Another
way to express this is to say that, as persons, we
have rights— specifically, negative rights, which
obligate others not to interfere with our obtain-
ing something. (In my theoretical scheme, posi-
tive rights— the rights that obligate others to
help us obtain something— fall under the prin-
ciple of beneficence.) Persons have the right not
to be treated in certain ways: not to be used or
regarded as if they were mere instruments, and not
to have their autonomous actions and free choices
thwarted or constrained. The principle of respect
therefore would prohibit, among other things,
lying to persons, cheating them, coercing them,
falsely imprisoning them, and manipulating them.
This principle of respect can accommodate
most of Ross’s prima facie duties. It supports what
he calls duties of fidelity, reparation, gratitude, and
self- improvement. We can view this latter duty as
an obligation to respect ourselves, to more fully
develop those capacities that make us persons.
Duties of respect can override the moral weight
of an action’s consequences. In general, we may not
violate the rights of persons, even if the violation
would benefit them or others. We would probably
condemn a policy that mandated discrimination
against a minority just so the majority could be
happy. We would not countenance medical experi-
ments on people without their knowledge and
consent— even if the experiments were needed to
search for a cancer cure.
Respect, however, does not always trump util-
ity. It is, after all, a prima facie duty. In some cases
we might be justified in flouting the principle of
respect, but we would need very strong reasons to
do so. For example, if by jailing an innocent person
we could thwart a terrorist attack that would kill a

CHAPTER 4: THE POwER Of MORAL THEORIES Á 79
obligation to promote the welfare of our family,
friends, and others we are close to, but we do not
have an equally strong duty to help the rest of the
world. Treating everyone with such beneficence
would not be the fulfillment of a duty but the per-
formance of a supererogatory act (above the call
of duty). We might have a duty to help those in
the rest of the world, but that duty cannot be as
weighty as the one we have to our loved ones.
We are also not obliged to make extreme sacri-
fices to help those with whom we have no relation-
ship. The principle of beneficence, for example,
does not insist that we risk our lives and our health
to aid a stranger. Nevertheless I think we may have
at least a limited obligation to help those with
whom we have no connection. We surely must
sometimes have a “duty of rescue”—an obligation
to try to save a stranger in serious peril when we
have the wherewithal to do so without extreme risk
or cost to ourselves. If we can easily save a drown-
ing man without too much risk or trouble to our-
selves, we may be obligated to do so. And if we have
such a duty of rescue, we may have other duties of
beneficence in morally equivalent circumstances.
Because my proposed theory consists of princi-
ples that are prima facie, conflicts between them are
less of a problem than they are in absolutist views.
Much of the time, weighing and balancing prin-
ciples to determine our actual duties is straightfor-
ward, though sometimes difficult. In each situation
that calls for a moral judgment, the basic pattern of
our deliberations is something like this: (1) we dis-
cern which principles (respect, justice, and benefi-
cence) apply; (2) we weigh them according to their
importance in the case; (3) we determine which
principle dominates; and (4) we decide what action
best fits with this analysis.
The most challenging part of this process is
determining the weight of the basic principles.
Even if we know what those principles are, we
still have to figure out their relative importance in
context. But there is no formula or algorithm to
help us with this. Even a rough but firm ranking
evil effects, everyone considered (the utilitarian
standard). It is possible to view these three options
as separate principles in their own right, but I think
that approach would muddle the essential differ-
ence between our first two principles (respect and
justice) and beneficence, because the former are
not primarily concerned with the consequences of
actions, but the latter is.
In some cases we may see that only one ele-
ment of beneficence is relevant—either Option 1
or Option 2. But often both of these options apply,
and when considering whether to benefit or not
to harm persons, we must decide which duty is
weightier. Either consideration may override any
obligation to maximize utility. Suppose a physician
wants to try an experimental treatment that might
cure a patient’s disease but will also cause perma-
nent damage to her lungs. The overriding principle
would be not to cause such harm, even if the ben-
efit to be gained is substantial. A third possibility
is that both principles apply and that each duty
comes with costs and benefits. We then must make
a utilitarian calculation (Option 3) to determine
the best solution.
The prohibition against deliberately harming
others is a common feature in moral theories: inten-
tionally harming people is always deemed prima
facie wrong. Our duty calls not for some action but
for not performing an action. In most interactions
with others, we have an implicit duty not to harm
them, but not necessarily a duty to benefit them or
to maximize their welfare. If we are driving a heavy
truck on a busy highway, for example, our strongest
duty is likely to be to refrain from intentionally or
carelessly harming other drivers and pedestrains,
but we may not have an obligation to benefit them
(by, say, continually yielding the right of way to
them). And we would not ordinarily have a duty to
maximize their good.
It seems that our duty to benefit others (pre-
vent harm, remove harm, and promote good) does
not demand that we help all persons. Our consid-
ered moral judgments tell us that we may have an

80 Á PART 2: MORAL REASONING
principle of utility itself founded on common
sense, because the principle is not supported by a
more basic principle?”
But I think a more serious defense of moral com-
mon sense and our fundamental moral principles is
possible. I want to argue, as several contemporary
moral theorists do, that many of our basic moral
principles are self- evident.4 I don’t have the space
here to fully defend this claim, but I can point out a
few considerations that support it.
A self- evident statement is one that you are
justified in believing merely by understanding it.
Here are some self- evident assertions: “Whatever
has a shape has a size”; “No bachelors are married”;
and “If A is larger than B, and B is larger than C,
then A is larger than C.” If you understand what
these statements mean, then you are justified in
believing them, and you need no special faculty
to discern their truth. You don’t need to gather
evidence or conduct experiments to know them;
you know them as soon as you grasp their mean-
ing, whether you understand them immediately
or after long reflection. If someone insists that the
statement “No bachelors are married” is not true,
it is up to him to provide a counterexample— to
cite a circumstance in which the statement would
not be true. If he cannot, then he has no reasons
supporting his assertion that the statement is false;
his assertion is groundless. This is the only kind of
response we can make to those who reject beliefs
that we consider to be self- evidently true.
I take it that the following are self- evident
moral beliefs (which are also prima facie moral
principles):
• Equals should be treated equally.
• It is wrong to punish the innocent.
• It is wrong to inflict unnecessary and unde-
served suffering.
• It is wrong to torture people for fun.
I have come to know these statements in the
same way that I come to know nonmoral truths—
of principles— in which, say, respect would always
outweigh justice, and justice would always out-
weigh beneficence— would be a tremendous help.
But there is no such formula or ranking, and there
cannot be one, because the relative importance of
the principles fluctuates depending on the details
of the case. Sometimes justice may carry the most
moral weight, sometimes respect or beneficence.
Our only option is to rely on our reason and
experience— that is, our considered moral judg-
ments and the theory that provides the perspec-
tive and insight to these judgments. We must work
without a net while trying to grasp at answers,
and we will occasionally fail. But this difficulty of
assigning weight to principles without detailed
instructions is also a feature of other moral theo-
ries. And as discussed earlier, in their search for the
best theory to explain a set of data, scientists must
also decide the importance of divergent criteria—
and do it without a precise decision- making for-
mula. These judgments are like the ones that a
physician makes when diagnosing a disease in a
particular patient. There are usually rules of thumb
to follow, but in the end, the physician must use
her best judgment to arrive at an answer. Such
judgments are not formulaic, but they are rational
and far from arbitrary.
Self- Evidence
As you can see, my proposed theory appeals at
every turn to our moral common sense. But some
people might ask, “Who says our considered judg-
ments are reliable guides to moral truth? Why
should we trust common sense to identify the true
moral principles, especially given that we know
it to be fallible and sometimes unreliable?” For
example, in response to the claim that utilitarian-
ism conflicts with our moral common sense, some
utilitarians have said, in effect, “That’s too bad for
common sense.”
One facile response to this disparagement of
common sense is to ask, “Doesn’t every theory ulti-
mately rely on common sense? Isn’t the utilitarian’s

CHAPTER 4: THE POwER Of MORAL THEORIES Á 81
theories say that what makes an action right is its
consequences. Nonconsequentialist theories say that
the rightness of an action does not depend entirely on its
consequences. Consequentialist theories include utili-
tarianism (both act- and rule- utilitarianism) and ethical
egoism; nonconsequentialist theories include Kant’s
theory, natural law theory, and divine command theory.
Because not all theories are of equal worth, we
must try to discover which one is best— a task that we
can perform by applying the moral criteria of adequacy
to theories. The three criteria are (1) consistency with
considered moral judgments, (2) consistency with our
moral experiences, and (3) usefulness in moral prob-
lem solving.
KEY TERMS
moral theory (p. 65)
considered moral judgment (p. 66)
consequentialist theory (p. 67)
nonconsequentialist theory (p. 67)
utilitarianism (p. 67)
act- utilitarianism (p. 68)
rule- utilitarianism (p. 68)
ethical egoism (p. 68)
categorical imperative (p. 68)
Kant’s theory (p. 68)
natural law theory (p. 69)
divine command theory (p. 70)
prima facie principle (p. 76)
negative right (p. 78)
positive right (p. 78)
retributive justice (p. 78)
distributive justice (p. 78)
self- evident statement (p. 80)
EXERCISES
Review Questions
1. Is a moral theory the final authority in moral
reasoning? Why or why not? (p. 66)
2. What is the difference between a moral theory
and a moral code? (p. 66)
3. How can a moral theory be used in a moral
argument? (p. 66)
through reason and reflection, not by any extraordi-
nary faculties or irrational process.
As in the case of nonmoral statements, if some-
one thinks that “It is wrong to inflict unnecessary
and undeserved suffering” is not true, it is up to
her to cite circumstances in which the statement
would be false. If she cannot, then her rejection of
the principle is unwarranted.
If there are self- evident moral truths, it is rea-
sonable to expect that some of our prima facie
principles arising from our considered moral judg-
ments are in fact self- evident. Their self- evidence
would explain why we have such confidence in
some moral principles— so much confidence that
we would sooner give up a theory that denied those
principles than the principles themselves. If at least
some of my proposed theory’s prima facie princi-
ples are self- evident, then the theory (and theories
like it) is on firmer ground than some might think.
The hard truth about moral theorizing is that it
never seems to result in a widely accepted, complete,
or unblemished theory. My proposal is no exception
to the rule. But it does have the advantage of incor-
porating what I regard as the most manifest and least
questionable elements of the moral life.
CHAPTER REVIEW
SUMMARY
A moral theory is an explanation of what makes an
action right or what makes a person or thing good.
Theories concerned with the rightness or wrongness
of actions are known as theories of obligation (or, in this
text, simply moral theories). A moral theory is intercon-
nected with considered moral judgments and principles.
Considered moral judgments can shape a theory, and a
theory can shed light on judgments and principles.
The two major types of moral theories are conse-
quentialist and nonconsequentialist. Consequentialist

82 Á PART 2: MORAL REASONING
strong views to the contrary, and you know
she is a member of an anti- abortion group
that advocates violence. In light of these facts,
should you dismiss her arguments out of hand?
Why or why not? What would constitute a good
reason for rejecting her arguments?
2. You believe that all illegal immigrants should
be deported. You have no reasons for believing
this; you were simply taught to believe it by
your parents. Is it morally right for you to
adhere to such a view without good reasons?
Do you have a moral duty to apply critical
reasoning to your belief? Why or why not?
3. Your grandmother is near death in the hospital,
barely conscious but in great pain. She has
terminal cancer, and her medical team assures
you that she may linger in this state for a week
at most but will never recover. A year ago she
made you promise that no matter how much
she suffers, you are not to allow anyone to
shorten her life by removing her ventilator or
by letting her doctors administer “terminal
sedation”—medication that relieves pain while
slowly ending life (a legal form of euthanasia).
You can hardly bear to see her in such agony.
Should you keep your promise to her and ensure
that she lingers in horrible suffering, or should
you break your promise and request terminal
sedation or removal of all life support?
FURTHER READING
John D. Arras and Nancy K. Rhoden, “The Need for Ethi-
cal Theory,” in Ethical Issues in Modern Medicine, 3rd ed.
(Mountain View, CA: Mayfield, 1989).
Richard B. Brandt, Ethical Theory: The Problems of Norma-
tive and Critical Ethics (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice
Hall, 1959).
C. D. Broad, Five Types of Ethical Theory (1930; reprint,
London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1956).
John Hospers, Human Conduct: Problems of Ethics, shorter
ed. (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972).
John Rawls, “Some Remarks about Moral Theory,” in A
Theory of Justice, rev. ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Uni-
versity Press, Belknap Press, 1999).
4. What is a considered moral judgment? (p. 66)
5. What are the two main categories of moral
theories? (p. 67)
6. What is utilitarianism? ethical egoism?
(pp. 67–68)
7. According to Kant’s moral theory, what makes
an action right? (pp. 68–69)
8. What are the three moral criteria of adequacy?
(pp. 71–74)
Discussion Questions
1. Do you try to guide your moral choices with a
moral code or a moral theory, or both? If so, how?
2. Suppose you try to use the Ten Commandments
as a moral code to help you make moral decisions.
How would you resolve conflicts between
commandments? Does your approach to resolving
the conflicts imply a moral theory? If so, can you
explain the main idea behind the theory?
3. What considered moral judgments have you
made or appealed to in the past month? Do
you think that these judgments reflect a moral
principle or moral theory you implicitly appeal
to? If so, what is it?
4. Would you describe your approach to morality
as consequentialist, nonconsequentialist, or
some combination of both? What reasons do
you have for adopting this particular approach?
5. Give an example of a possible conflict between
a consequentialist theory and a considered
moral judgment. (Show how these two may be
inconsistent.)
6. Provide an example of a conflict between a
nonconsequentialist theory and a moral judgment
based on the consequences of an action.
7. Using the moral criteria of adequacy, evaluate
act- utilitarianism.
8. Using the moral criteria of adequacy, evaluate
natural law theory.
ETHICAL DILEMMAS
1. Suppose your friend puts forth several
arguments in an effort to convince you that all
abortions are morally wrong. You already have

P A R T
3
‘’
Theories of Morality

C H A P T E R 5
‘’
Consequentialist Theories: Maximize the Good
85
advance one’s own interests regardless of how oth-
ers are affected. Self- interested acts promote one’s
own interests but not necessarily to the detriment
of others. To further your own interests you may
actually find yourself helping others. To gain some
advantage, you may perform actions that are decid-
edly unselfish.
Just as we cannot equate ethical egoism with
selfishness, neither can we assume it is synony-
mous with self- indulgence or recklessness. An ethi-
cal egoist does not necessarily do whatever she
desires to do or whatever gives her the most imme-
diate pleasure. She does what is in her best interests,
and instant gratification may not be in her best
interests. She may want to spend all her money at
the casino or work eighteen hours a day, but over
the long haul doing so may be disastrous for her.
Even ethical egoists have to consider the long- term
effects of their actions. They also have to take into
account their interactions with others. At least
most of the time, egoists are probably better off
if they cooperate with others, develop reciprocal
relationships, and avoid actions that antagonize
people in their community or society.
Ethical egoism comes in two forms— one apply-
ing the doctrine to individual acts and one to rele-
vant rules. Act- egoism says that to determine right
action, you must apply the egoistic principle to
individual acts. Act A is preferable to act B because
it promotes your self- interest better. Rule- egoism
says that to determine right action, you must see
if an act falls under a rule that if consistently fol-
lowed would maximize your self- interest. Act A is
preferable to act B because it falls under a rule that
There is something in consequentialist moral theo-
ries that we find appealing, something simple and
commonsensical that jibes with everyday moral
experience. This attractive core is the notion that
right actions must produce the best balance of good
over evil. Never mind (for now) how good and evil
are defined. The essential concern is how much
good can result from actions performed. In this
chapter, we examine the plausibility of this conse-
quentialist maxim and explore how it is worked out
in its two most influential theories: ethical egoism
and utilitarianism.
ETHICAL EGOISM
Ethical egoism is the theory that the right action is
the one that advances one’s own best interests. It
is a provocative doctrine, in part because it forces
us to consider two opposing attitudes in ourselves.
On the one hand, we tend to view selfish or fla-
grantly self- interested behavior as wicked, or at
least troubling. Self- love is bad love. We frown on
people who trample others in life to get to the head
of the line. On the other hand, sometimes we want
to look out for number one, to give priority to our
own needs and desires. We think, If we do not help
ourselves, who will? Self- love is good love.
Ethical egoism says that one’s only moral duty
is to promote the most favorable balance of good
over evil for oneself. Each person must put his or
her own welfare first. Advancing the interests of
others is part of this moral equation only if it helps
promote one’s own good. Yet this extreme self-
interest is not necessarily selfishness. Selfish acts

86 Á PART 3: THEORIES OF MORALITY
maximizes your self- interest better than any other
relevant rule applying to act B. An ethical egoist can
define self- interest in various ways. The Greek phi-
losopher Epicurus (341–270 b.c.e.), a famous ethi-
cal egoist from whose name we derive the words
epicure and epicurean, gave a hedonist answer: The
greatest good is pleasure, and the greatest evil,
pain. The duty of a good ethical egoist is to maxi-
mize pleasure for oneself. (Contrary to legend, Epi-
curus thought that wanton overindulgence in the
delights of the senses was not in one’s best inter-
ests. He insisted that the best pleasures were those
of the contemplative life and that extravagant plea-
sures such as drunkenness and gluttony eventually
lead to misery.) Other egoistic notions of the great-
est good include self- actualization (fulfilling one’s
potential), security and material success, satisfac-
tion of desires, acquisition of power, and the expe-
rience of happiness.
To many people, ethical egoism may sound
alien, especially if they have heard all their lives
about the noble virtue of altruism and the evils of
self- centeredness. But consider that self- interest is
a pillar on which the economic system of capital-
ism is built. In a capitalist system, self- interest is
supposed to drive people to seek advantages for
themselves in the marketplace, compelling them
to compete against one another to build a better
mousetrap at a lower price. Economists argue that
the result of this clash of self- interests is a better,
more prosperous society.
Applying the Theory
Suppose Rosa is a successful executive at a large
media corporation, and she has her eye on a vice
president’s position, which has just become vacant.
Vincent, another successful executive in the com-
pany, also wants the VP job. Management wants
to fill the vacancy as soon as possible, and they are
trying to decide between the two most qualified
candidates— Rosa and Vincent. One day Rosa dis-
covers some documents left near a photocopier and
quickly realizes that they belong to Vincent. One of
them is an old memo from the president of a com-
pany where Vincent used to work. In it, the presi-
dent lambastes Vincent for botching an important
company project. Rosa knows that despite what she
reads in the memo, Vincent has had an exemplary
professional career in which he has managed most
of his projects extremely well. In fact, she believes
that the two of them are about equal in professional
skills and accomplishments. She also knows that
if management sees the memo, they will almost
certainly choose her over Vincent for the VP posi-
tion. She figures that Vincent has probably left the
documents there by mistake and will soon return to
retrieve them. Impulsively, she makes a copy of the
memo for herself.
Now she is confronted with a moral choice. Let
us suppose that she has only three options. First, she
can destroy her copy of the memo and forget about
the whole incident. Second, she can discredit Vin-
cent by showing it to management, thereby secur-
ing the VP slot for herself. Third, she can achieve
the same result by discrediting Vincent surrepti-
tiously: she can simply leave a copy where manage-
ment is sure to discover it. Let us also assume that
she is an act- egoist who defines her self- interest as
self- actualization. Self- actualization for her means
developing into the most powerful, most highly
respected executive in her profession while maxi-
mizing the virtues of loyalty and honesty.
So, by the lights of her act- egoism, what should
Rosa do? Which choice is in her best interests?
Option 1 is neutral regarding her self- interest. If
she destroys her copy of the memo, she will neither
gain nor lose an advantage for herself. Option 2
is more complicated. If she overtly discredits Vin-
cent, she will probably land the VP spot— a feat
that fits nicely with her desire to become a powerful
executive. But such a barefaced sabotaging of some-
one else’s career will probably trouble manage-
ment, and their loss of some respect for Rosa will
impede future advancement in her career. They
may also come to distrust her. Rosa’s backstabbing
will also probably erode the trust and respect of her

CHAPTER 5: COnSEquEnTIALIST THEORIES: MAxIMIzE THE GOOd Á 87
subordinates (those who report to her). If so, their
performance may suffer, and any deficiencies in
Rosa’s subordinates will reflect on her leadership
skills. Over time, she may be able to regain the
respect of management through dazzling successes
in her field, but the respect and trust of others may
be much harder to regain. Option 2 involves the
unauthorized, deceitful use of personal informa-
tion against another person— not an action that
encourages the virtue of honesty in Rosa. In fact,
her dishonesty may weaken her moral resolve
and make similar acts of deceit more probable.
Like Option 2, Option 3 will probably secure the
VP job for Rosa. But because the deed is surrepti-
tious, it will probably not diminish the respect and
trust of others. There is a low probability, however,
that Rosa’s secret will eventually be uncovered—
especially if Vincent suspects Rosa, which is likely.
If she is found out, the damage done to her reputa-
tion (and possibly her career) may be greater than
that caused by the more up- front tactic of Option 2.
Also like Option 2, Option 3 may weaken the virtue
of honesty in Rosa’s character.
Given this situation and Rosa’s brand of act-
egoism, she should probably go with Option 3—
but only if the risk of being found out is extremely
low. Option 3 promotes her self- interest dramati-
cally by securing the coveted job at a relatively low
cost (a possible erosion of virtue). Option 2 also
lands the job but at a very high cost— a loss of other
people’s trust and respect, a possible decrease in
her chances for career advancement, damage to her
professional reputation, and a likely lessening of a
virtue critical to Rosa’s self- actualization (honesty).
If Rosa believes that the risks to her career and
character involved in Options 2 and 3 are too high,
she should probably choose Option 1. This choice
will not promote her best interests, but it will not
diminish them either.
Would Rosa’s action be any different if judged
from the perspective of rule- egoism? Suppose Rosa,
like many other ethical egoists, thinks that her
actions should be guided by this rule (or something
like it): People should be honest in their dealings
with others— that is, except in insignificant matters
(white lies), they should not lie to others or mislead
them. She believes that adhering to this prohibi-
tion against dishonesty is in her best interests. The
rule, however, disallows Options 2 and 3, for they
involve significant deception. Only Option 1 is left.
But if obeying the rule will lead to a major setback
for her interests, Rosa may decide to ignore it in this
case (or reject it altogether as contrary to the spirit
of ethical egoism). If so, she may have to fall back to
act- egoism and decide in favor of Option 3.
Evaluating the Theory
Is ethical egoism a plausible moral theory? Let us
find out by examining arguments in its favor and
applying the moral criteria of adequacy.
The primary argument for ethical egoism
depends heavily on a scientific theory known as
psychological egoism, the view that the motive
for all our actions is self- interest. Whatever we do,
we do because we want to promote our own wel-
fare. Psychological egoism, we are told, is simply a
description of the true nature of our motivations.
We are, in short, born to look out for number one.
Putting psychological egoism to good use, the
ethical egoist reasons as follows: We can never be
morally obligated to perform an action that we can-
not possibly do. This is just an obvious fact about
morality. Because we are not able to prevent a hur-
ricane from blasting across a coastal city, we are not
morally obligated to prevent it. Likewise, because we
are not able to perform an action except out of self-
interest (the claim of psychological egoism), we are
not morally obligated to perform an action unless
motivated by self- interest. That is, we are morally
obligated to do only what our self- interest motivates
us to do. Here is the argument stated more formally:
1. We are not able to perform an action except out
of self- interest (psychological egoism).
2. We are not morally obligated to perform an
action unless motivated by self- interest.

88 Á PART 3: THEORIES OF MORALITY
3. Therefore, we are morally obligated to do only
what our self- interest motivates us to do.
Notice that even if psychological egoism is true,
this argument does not establish that an action is
right if and only if it promotes one’s self- interest
(the claim of ethical egoism). But it does demon-
strate that an action cannot be right unless it at
least promotes one’s self- interest. To put it another
way, an action that does not advance one’s own
welfare cannot be right.
Is psychological egoism true? Many people
think it is, and they offer several arguments in its
favor. One line of reasoning is that psychological
egoism is true because experience shows that all
our actions are in fact motivated by self- interest. In
other words, all our actions— including seemingly
altruistic ones— are performed to gain some benefit
for ourselves. This argument, however, is far from
conclusive. Sometimes people do perform altruistic
acts because doing so is in their best interests. Smith
may contribute to charity because such generos-
ity furthers his political ambitions. Jones may do
volunteer work for the Red Cross because it looks
good on her résumé. But people also seem to do
things that are not motivated by self- interest. They
sometimes risk their lives by rushing into a burning
building to rescue a complete stranger. They may
impair their health by donating a kidney to prevent
one of their children from dying. Explanations that
appeal to self- interest in such cases seem implau-
sible. Moreover, people often have self- destructive
habits (for example, drinking excessively and driv-
ing recklessly)—habits that are unlikely to be in
anyone’s best interests.
Some ethical egoists may argue in a slightly dif-
ferent vein: People get satisfaction (or happiness
or pleasure) from what they do, including their
so- called unselfish or altruistic acts. Therefore,
they perform unselfish or altruistic actions because
doing so gives them satisfaction. A man saves a
child from a burning building because he wants
the emotional satisfaction that comes from saving
a life. Our actions, no matter how we characterize
them, are all about self- interest.
This argument is based on a conceptual confu-
sion. It says that we perform selfless acts to achieve
satisfaction. Satisfaction is the object of the whole
exercise. But if we experience satisfaction in per-
forming an action, that does not show that our
goal in performing the action is satisfaction. A
much more plausible account is that we desire
something other than satisfaction and then expe-
rience satisfaction as a result of getting what we
desired. Consider, for example, our man who saves
the child from a fire. He rescues the child and feels
satisfaction— but he could not have experienced
that satisfaction unless he already had a desire to
save the child or cared what happened to her. If he
did not have such a desire or care about her, how
could he have derived any satisfaction from his
actions? To experience satisfaction he had to have
a desire for something other than his own satisfac-
tion. The moral of the story is that satisfaction is
the result of getting what we want— not the object
of our desires.
This view fits well with our own experience.
Most often when we act according to some pur-
pose, we are not focused on, or aware of, our sat-
isfaction. We concentrate on obtaining the real
object of our efforts, and when we succeed, we then
feel satisfaction.
The philosopher Joel Feinberg makes a similar
point about the pursuit of happiness. He asks us
to imagine a person, Jones, who has no desire for
much of anything— except happiness. Jones has no
interest in knowledge for its own sake, the beauty of
nature, art and literature, sports, crafts, or business.
But Jones does have “an overwhelming passion for,
a complete preoccupation with, his own happiness.
The one desire of his life is to be happy.”1 The irony
is that using this approach, Jones will not find hap-
piness. He cannot pursue happiness directly and
expect to find it. To achieve happiness, he must
pursue other aims whose pursuit yields happiness
as a by- product. We must conclude that it is not the

CHAPTER 5: COnSEquEnTIALIST THEORIES: MAxIMIzE THE GOOd Á 89
against it, and therefore it does not tell us anything
about self- interested actions. Anything we say
about such actions would be consistent with the
theory. Any theory that is so uninformative could
not be used to support another theory— including
ethical egoism.
So far we have found the arguments for ethi-
cal egoism ineffective. Now we can ask another
question: Are there any good arguments against
ethical egoism? This is where the moral criteria of
adequacy come in.
Recall that an important first step in evaluating a
moral theory (or any other kind of theory) is to deter-
mine if it meets the minimum requirement of coher-
ence, or internal consistency. As it turns out, some
critics of ethical egoism have brought the charge of
logical or practical inconsistency against the theory.
But in general these criticisms seem to fall short of a
knockout blow to ethical egoism. Devising counter-
arguments that can undercut the criticisms seems to
be a straightforward business. Let us assume, then,
that ethical egoism is in fact eligible for evaluation
using the moral criteria of adequacy.
’
case that our only motivation for our actions is the
desire for happiness (or satisfaction or pleasure).
These reflections show that psychological ego-
ism is a dubious theory, and if we construe self-
interest as satisfaction, pleasure, or happiness, the
theory seems false. Still, some may not give up the
argument from experience (mentioned earlier),
insisting that when properly interpreted, all our
actions (including those that seem purely altruis-
tic or unselfish) can be shown to be motivated by
self- interest. All the counterexamples that seem to
suggest that psychological egoism is false actually
are evidence that it is true. Smith’s contributing to
charity may look altruistic, but he is really trying to
impress a woman he would like to date. Jones’s vol-
unteer work at the Red Cross may seem unselfish,
but she is just trying to cultivate some business con-
tacts. Every counterexample can be reinterpreted to
support the theory.
Critics have been quick to charge that this
way of defending psychological egoism is a mis-
take. It renders the theory untestable and useless.
It ensures that no evidence could possibly count
Some critics of ethical egoism say that it is a very
strange theory because its adherents cannot urge
others to become ethical egoists! The philosopher
Theodore Schick Jr. makes the point:
Even if ethical egoism did provide necessary and
sufficient conditions for an action’s being right, it
would be a peculiar sort of ethical theory, for its
adherents couldn’t consistently advocate it. Sup-
pose that someone came to an ethical egoist for
moral advice. If the ethical egoist wanted to do
what is in his best interest, he would not tell his
client to do what is in her best interest because
her interests might conflict with his. Rather, he
would tell her to do what is in his best interest.
Such advice has been satirized on national TV. Al
Franken, a former writer for Saturday Night Live
and author of Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot
and Other Observations, proclaimed on a number
of Saturday Night Live shows in the early 1980s
that whereas the 1970s were known as the “me”
decade, the 1980s were going to be known as the
“Al Franken” decade. So whenever anyone was
faced with a difficult decision, the individual should
ask herself, “How can I most benefit Al Franken?”*
*Theodore Schick Jr., in Doing Philosophy: An
Intro duction through Thought Experiments, by The-
odore Schick Jr. and Lewis Vaughn, 2nd ed. (Boston:
McGraw- Hill, 2003), 327.
Can Ethical Egoism Be Advocated?

90 Á PART 3: THEORIES OF MORALITY
We begin with Criterion 1, consistency with
considered moral judgments. A major criticism of
ethical egoism is that it is not consistent with many
of our considered moral judgments— judgments
that seem highly plausible and commonsensi-
cal. Specifically, ethical egoism seems to sanction
actions that we would surely regard as abominable.
Suppose a young man visits his elderly, bedridden
father. When he sees that no one else is around, he
uses a pillow to smother the old man in order to
collect on his life insurance. Suppose, too, that the
action is in the son’s best interests; it will not cause
the least bit of unpleasant feeling in him, and the
crime will remain his own terrible secret. According
to ethical egoism, this heinous act is morally right.
The son has done his duty.
An ethical egoist might object to this line by
saying that refraining from committing evil acts is
actually endorsed by ethical egoism— one’s best
interests are served by refraining. You should not
murder or steal, for example, because it might
encourage others to do the same to you, or it might
undermine trust, security, or cooperation in society,
which would not be in your best interests. For these
reasons, you should obey the law or the rules of con-
ventional morality (as the rule- egoist might do).
But following the rules is clearly not always
in one’s best interests. Sometimes committing a
wicked act really does promote one’s own welfare.
In the case of the murdering son, no one will seek
revenge for the secret murder, cooperation and
trust in society will not be affected, and the mur-
derer will suffer no psychological torments. There
seems to be no downside here— but the son’s
rewards for committing the deed will be great. Con-
sistently looking out for one’s own welfare some-
times requires rule violations and exceptions. In
fact, some argue that the interests of ethical egoists
may be best served when they urge everyone else to
obey the rules while they themselves secretly break
them.
If ethical egoism does conflict with our consid-
ered moral judgments, it is questionable at best.
But it has been accused of another defect as well:
it fails Criterion 2, consistency with our moral
experiences.
One aspect of morality is so fundamental that
we may plausibly view it as a basic fact of the moral
life: moral impartiality, or treating equals equally.
We know that in our dealings with the world, we
are supposed to take into account the treatment of
others as well as that of ourselves. The moral life is
lived with the wider world in mind. We must give
all persons their due and treat all equals equally,
for in the moral sense we are all equals. Each per-
son is presumed to have the same rights as— and
to have interests that are just as important as those
of— everyone else, unless we have good reason for
thinking otherwise. If one person is qualified for
a job, and another person is equally qualified, we
would be guilty of discrimination if we hired one
and not the other based solely on race, sex, skin
color, or ancestry. These factors are not morally
relevant. People who do treat equals unequally in
such ways are known as racists, sexists, bigots, and
the like. Probably the most serious charge against
ethical egoism is that it discriminates against people
in the same fashion. It arbitrarily treats the interests
of some people (oneself) as more important than
the interests of all others (the rest of the world)—
even though there is no morally relevant difference
between the two.
The failure of ethical egoism to treat equals
equally seems a serious defect in the theory. It con-
flicts with a major component of our moral exis-
tence. For many critics, this single defect is enough
reason to reject the theory.
Recall that Criterion 3 is usefulness in moral
problem solving. Some philosophers argue that
ethical egoism fails this standard because the the-
ory seems to lead to contradictory advice or con-
flicting actions. If real, this problem constitutes a
significant failing of the theory. But this criticism
depends on controversial assumptions about ethi-
cal egoism or morality in general, so we will not
dwell on it here. Our analysis of ethical egoism’s

CHAPTER 5: COnSEquEnTIALIST THEORIES: MAxIMIzE THE GOOd Á 91
man with no living relatives and no friends—
some one who would not be missed. Through some
elaborate subterfuge she manages to secretly do
what needs to be done, killing the man and suc-
cessfully performing the operation. She formulates
the cure and saves countless lives. No one ever dis-
covers how she obtained the last bit of information
she needed to devise the cure, and she feels not the
slightest guilt for her actions.
Did Dr. X do right? If you think so, then you
may be a utilitarian. A utilitarian is more likely
to believe that Dr. X’s action was right because of
its consequences: it brought about consequences
that were more good than bad. One man died,
but countless others were saved. If you think that
Dr. X did wrong, you may be a nonconsequentialist.
A nonconsequentialist is likely to believe that Dr. X
did wrong because of the nature of her action: it was
murder. The consequences are beside the point.
In this example, we get a hint of some of the
elements that have made utilitarianism so attrac-
tive (and often controversial) to so many. First,
whether or not we agree with the utilitarian view
in this case, we can see that it has some plausibil-
ity. We tend to think it entirely natural to judge
the morality of an action by the effects that it has
on the people involved. To decide if we do right or
wrong, we want to know whether the consequences
of our actions are good or bad, whether they bring
pleasure or pain, whether they enhance or dimin-
ish the welfare of ourselves and others. Second,
the utilitarian formula for distinguishing right and
wrong actions seems exceptionally straightforward.
We simply calculate which action among several
possible actions has the best balance of good over
evil, everyone considered— and act accordingly.
Moral choice is apparently reduced to a single
moral principle and simple math. Third, at least
sometimes, we all seem to be utilitarians. We may
tell a white lie because the truth would hurt some-
one’s feelings. We may break a promise because
keeping it causes more harm than good. We may
want a criminal punished not because he broke
problems using the first two criteria should be suf-
ficient to raise serious doubts about the theory.
UTILITARIANISM
Are you a utilitarian? To find out, consider the fol-
lowing scenario: After years of research, a medical
scientist— Dr. X— realizes that she is just one step
away from developing a cure for all known forms of
heart disease. Such a breakthrough would save hun-
dreds of thousands of lives— perhaps millions. The
world could finally be rid of heart attacks, strokes,
heart failure, and the like, a feat as monumental as
the eradication of deadly smallpox. That one last
step in her research, however, is technologically
feasible but morally problematic. It involves the
killing of a single healthy human being to examine
the person’s heart tissue under a microscope just
seconds after the heart stops beating. The crucial
piece of information needed to perfect the cure
can be acquired only as just described; it cannot be
extracted from the heart of a cadaver, an accident
victim, someone suffering from a disease, or a per-
son who has been dead for more than sixty seconds.
Dr. X decides that the benefits to humanity from
the cure are just too great to ignore. She locates a
suitable candidate for the operation: a homeless
’ QUICK REVIEW
act- egoism— The theory that to determine right
action, you must apply the egoistic principle to
individual acts.
rule- egoism— The theory that to determine right
action, you must see if an act falls under a rule
that, if consistently followed, would maximize
your self- interest.
psychological egoism— The view that the motive
for all our actions is self- interest.

92 Á PART 3: THEORIES OF MORALITY
happiness of the party whose interest is in ques-
tion: or, what is the same thing in other words, to
promote or to oppose that happiness. . . .
By utility is meant that property in any object,
whereby it tends to produce benefit, advantage,
pleasure, good, or happiness, (all this in the pres-
ent case comes to the same thing) or (what comes
again to the same thing) to prevent the happening
of mischief, pain, evil, or unhappiness to the party
whose interest is considered[.]2
The principle of utility, of course, makes the
theory consequentialist. The emphasis on happi-
ness or pleasure makes it hedonistic, for happiness
is the only intrinsic good.
As you can see, there is a world of difference
between the moral focus of utilitarianism (in all
its forms) and that of ethical egoism. The point
of ethical egoism is to promote one’s own good.
An underlying tenet of utilitarianism is that you
should promote the good of everyone concerned
and that everyone counts equally. When deliberat-
ing about which action to perform, you must take
into account the happiness of everyone who will be
affected by your decision as well as your own— and
no one is to be given privileged status. Such even-
handedness requires a large measure of impartial-
ity, a quality that plays a role in every plausible
moral theory. Mill says it best:
[T]he happiness which forms the utilitarian stan-
dard of what is right in conduct, is not the agent’s
own happiness, but that of all concerned. As between
his own happiness and that of others, utilitarian-
ism requires him to be as strictly impartial as a
disinterested and benevolent spectator.3
In classic act- utilitarianism, knowing how to
total the amount of utility, or happiness, gener-
ated by various actions is essential. Bentham’s
answer to this requirement is the hedonic calcu-
lus, which quantifies happiness and handles the
necessary calculations. His approach is straight-
forward in conception but complicated in the
details: For each possible action in a particular sit-
uation, determine the total amount of happiness
the law but because the punishment may deter
him from future crimes. We justify such departures
from conventional morality on the grounds that
they produce better consequences.
Utilitarianism is one of the most influential
moral theories in history. The English philosopher
Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) was the first to fill
out the theory in detail, and the English philoso-
pher and economist John Stuart Mill (1806–1873)
developed it further. In their hands utilitarianism
became a powerful instrument of social reform. It
provided a rationale for promoting women’s rights,
improving the treatment of prisoners, advocating
animal rights, and aiding the poor— all radical ideas
in Bentham’s and Mill’s day. In the twenty- first
century, the theory still has a strong effect on moral
and policy decision making in many areas, includ-
ing health care, criminal justice, and government.
Classic utilitarianism— the kind of act- utili-
tarianism formulated by Bentham— is the simplest
form of the theory. It affirms the principle that the
right action is the one that directly produces the
best balance of happiness over unhappiness for all
concerned. Happiness is an intrinsic good— the only
intrinsic good. What matters most is how much
net happiness comes directly from performing an
action (as opposed to following a rule that applies
to such actions). To determine the right action, we
need only compute the amount of happiness that
each possible action generates and choose the one
that generates the most. There are no rules to take
into account— just the single, simple utilitarian
principle. Each set of circumstances calling for a
moral choice is unique, requiring a new calculation
of the varying consequences of possible actions.
Bentham called the utilitarian principle the
principle of utility and asserted that all our
actions can be judged by it. (Mill called it the great-
est happiness principle.) As Bentham says,
By the principle of utility is meant that principle
which approves or disapproves of every action
whatsoever, according to the tendency which
it appears to have to augment or diminish the

CHAPTER 5: COnSEquEnTIALIST THEORIES: MAxIMIzE THE GOOd Á 93
that happiness can vary in quantity and quality.
There are lower pleasures, such as eating, drink-
ing, and having sex, and there are higher pleasures,
such as pursuing knowledge, appreciating beauty,
and creating art. The higher pleasures are superior
to the lower ones. The lower ones can be intense
and enjoyable, but the higher ones are qualitatively
better and more fulfilling. In this scheme, a person
enjoying a mere taste of a higher pleasure may be
closer to the moral ideal than a hedonistic glutton
who gorges on lower pleasures. Thus Mill declared,
“It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a
pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than
a fool satisfied.”5 In Bentham’s view, the glutton—
who acquires a larger quantity of pleasure— would
be closer to the ideal.
The problem for Mill is to justify his hierarchi-
cal ranking of the various pleasures. He tries to do
so by appealing to what the majority prefers— that
is, the majority of people who have experienced
both the lower and higher pleasures. But this
approach probably will not help, because people
can differ drastically in how they rank pleasures. It
is possible, for example, that a majority of people
who have experienced a range of pleasures would
actually disagree with Mill’s rankings. In fact, any
effort to devise such rankings using the principle of
utility seems unlikely to succeed.
Many critics have argued that the idea of
defining right action in terms of some intrinsic
nonmoral good (whether pleasure, happiness, or
anything else) is seriously problematic. Attempts
to devise such a definition have been fraught with
complications— a major one being that people
have different ideas about what things are intrin-
sically valuable. Some utilitarians have tried to
sidestep these difficulties by insisting that maxi-
mizing utility means maximizing people’s prefer-
ences, whatever they are. This formulation seems
to avoid some of the difficulties just mentioned
but falls prey to another: some people’s prefer-
ences may be clearly objectionable when judged by
almost any moral standard, whether utilitarian or
or unhappiness produced by it for one individual
(that is, the net happiness— happiness minus
unhappiness). Gauge the level of happiness with
seven basic characteristics such as intensity, dura-
tion, and fecundity (how likely the pleasure or
pain is to be followed by more pleasure or pain).
Repeat this process for all individuals involved
and sum their happiness or unhappiness to arrive
at an overall net happiness for that particular
action. Repeat for each possible action. The action
with the best score (the most happiness or least
unhappiness) is the morally right one.
Notice that in this arrangement, only the total
amount of net happiness for each action matters.
How the happiness is distributed among the per-
sons involved does not figure into the calculations.
This means that an action that affects ten people
and produces 100 units of happiness is to be pre-
ferred over an action that affects those same ten
people but generates only 50 units of happiness—
even if most of the 100 units go to just one individ-
ual, and the 50 units divide equally among the ten.
The aggregate of happiness is decisive; its distri-
bution is not. Classic utilitarianism, though, does
ask that any given amount of happiness be spread
among as many people as possible— thus the utili-
tarian slogan “The greatest happiness for the great-
est number.”
Both Bentham and Mill define happiness as
pleasure. In Mill’s words,
The creed which accepts as the foundation of mor-
als utility, or the greatest happiness principle, holds that
actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote
happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse
of happiness. By “happiness” is intended pleasure, and
the absence of pain; by “unhappiness,” pain, and the
privation of pleasure.4
They differ, though, on the nature of happiness
and on how it should be measured. Bentham thinks
that happiness varies only in quantity— different
actions produce different amounts of happiness.
To judge the intensity, duration, or fecundity of
happiness is to calculate its quantity. Mill contends

94 Á PART 3: THEORIES OF MORALITY
nonconsequentialist. Some people, after all, have
ghastly preferences— preferences, say, for torturing
children or killing innocent people for fun. Some
critics say that repairing this preference utilitari-
anism to avoid sanctioning objectionable actions
seems unlikely without introducing some nonutili-
tarian moral principles such as justice, rights, and
obligations.
Like act- utilitarianism, rule- utilitarianism aims
at the greatest good for all affected individuals,
but it maintains that we travel an indirect route to
that goal. In rule- utilitarianism, the morally right
action is not the one that directly brings about the
greatest good, but the one covered by a rule that,
if followed consistently, produces the greatest good
for all. In act- utilitarianism, we must examine each
action to see how much good (or evil) it generates.
Rule- utilitarianism would have us first determine
what rule an action falls under, then see if that rule
would be likely to maximize utility if everyone fol-
lowed it. In effect, the rule- utilitarian asks, “What if
everyone followed this rule?”
An act- utilitarian tries to judge the rightness of
actions by the consequences they produce, occa-
sionally relying on “rules of thumb” (such as “Usu-
ally we should not harm innocents”) merely to save
time. A rule- utilitarian, however, tries to follow
every valid rule— even if doing so may not maxi-
mize utility in a specific situation.
In our example featuring Dr. X and the cure
for heart disease, an act- utilitarian might compare
the net happiness produced by performing the
lethal operation and by not performing it, opting
finally for the former because it maximizes happi-
ness. A rule- utilitarian, on the other hand, would
consider what moral rules seem to apply to the situ-
ation. One rule might be “It is permissible to con-
duct medical procedures or experiments on people
without their full knowledge and consent in order
to substantially advance medical science.” Another
one might say “Do not conduct medical procedures
or experiments on people without their full knowl-
edge and consent.” If the first rule is generally
followed, happiness is not likely to be maximized
in the long run. Widespread adherence to this rule
would encourage medical scientists and physicians
to murder patients for the good of science. Such
practices would outrage people and cause them to
fear and distrust science and the medical profes-
sion, leading to the breakdown of the entire health
care system and most medical research. But if the
second rule is consistently adhered to, happiness is
likely to be maximized over the long haul. Trust in
physicians and medical scientists would be main-
tained, and promising research could continue as
long as it was conducted with the patient’s consent.
The right action, then, is for Dr. X not to perform
the gruesome operation.
Applying the Theory
Let us apply utilitarianism to another type of case.
Imagine that for more than a year a terrorist has
been carrying out devastating attacks in a devel-
oping country, killing hundreds of innocent men,
women, and children. He seems unstoppable. He
always manages to elude capture. In fact, because
of his stealth, the expert assistance of a few accom-
plices, and his support among the general popula-
tion, he will most likely never be captured or killed.
The authorities have no idea where he hides or
where he will strike next. But they are sure that he
will go on killing indefinitely. They have tried every
tactic they know to put an end to the slaughter, but
it goes on and on. Finally, as a last resort, the chief
of the nation’s antiterrorist police orders the arrest
of the terrorist’s family— a wife and seven children.
The chief intends to kill the wife and three of the
children right away (to show that he is serious),
then threaten to kill the remaining four unless the
terrorist turns himself in. There is no doubt that
the chief will make good on his intentions, and
there is excellent reason to believe that the terror-
ist will indeed turn himself in rather than allow his
remaining children to be executed.
Suppose that the chief has only two options:
(1) refrain from murdering the terrorist’s family

CHAPTER 5: COnSEquEnTIALIST THEORIES: MAxIMIzE THE GOOd Á 95
would guarantee that four innocent people (and
perhaps eight) would lose their lives, and the terror-
ist (whose welfare must also be included in the cal-
culations) would be imprisoned for life or executed.
In addition, many citizens would be disturbed by
the killing of innocent people and the flouting of
the law by the police, believing that these actions
are wrong and likely to set a dangerous precedent.
Over time, though, these misgivings might dimin-
ish. All things considered, then, Action 2 would
probably produce more happiness than unhappi-
ness. Action 1, on the other hand, maintains the
status quo. It would allow the terrorist to continue
murdering innocent people and spreading fear
throughout the land— a decidedly unhappy result.
It clearly would produce more unhappiness than
and continue with the usual antiterrorist tactics
(which have only a tiny chance of being success-
ful); or (2) kill the wife and three of the children
and threaten to kill the rest (a strategy with a very
high chance of success). According to utilitarian-
ism, which action is right?
As an act- utilitarian, the chief might reason like
this: Action 2 would probably result in a net gain of
happiness, everyone considered. Forcing the terror-
ist to turn himself in would save hundreds of lives.
His killing spree would be over. The general level
of fear and apprehension in the country might sub-
side, and even the economy— which has slowed
because of terrorism— might improve. The pres-
tige of the antiterrorism chief and his agents might
increase. On the downside, performing Action 2
’
The distinguished philosopher Peter Singer is argu-
ably the most famous (and controversial) utilitarian
of recent years. Many newspaper and magazine
articles have been written about him, and many
people have declared their agreement with, or
vociferous opposition to, his views. This is how one
magazine characterizes Singer and his ideas:
The New Yorker calls him “the most influential
living philosopher.” His critics call him “the most
dangerous man in the world.” Peter Singer, the
De Camp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton Uni-
versity’s Center for Human Values, is most widely
and controversially known for his view that ani-
mals have the same moral status as humans. . . .
Singer is perhaps the most thoroughgoing
philosophical utilitarian since Jeremy Bentham.
As such, he believes animals have rights because
the relevant moral consideration is not whether a
being can reason or talk but whether it can suffer.
Jettisoning the traditional distinction between
humans and nonhumans, Singer distinguishes
instead between persons and non- persons. Persons
are beings that feel, reason, have self- awareness,
and look forward to a future. Thus, fetuses and
some very impaired human beings are not persons
in his view and have a lesser moral status than,
say, adult gorillas and chimpanzees.
Given such views, it was no surprise that anti-
abortion activists and disability rights advo-
cates loudly decried the Australian- born Singer’s
appointment at Princeton last year. Indeed, his
language regarding the treatment of disabled
human beings is at times appallingly similar to the
eugenic arguments used by Nazi theorists con-
cerning “life unworthy of life.” Singer, however,
believes that only parents, not the state, should
have the power to make decisions about the fates
of disabled infants.*
*Peter Singer, “The Pursuit of Happiness: Peter Singer
Interviewed by Ronald Bailey,” Reason Magazine,
December 2000. Reprinted with permission from Rea-
son Magazine and Reason.com.
Peter Singer, Utilitarian

http://www.Reason.com

96 Á PART 3: THEORIES OF MORALITY
undermine the very foundations of a free society.
In a particular case, killing innocent people to fight
terror could possibly have more utility than not
killing them. But whether such a strategy would be
advantageous to society over the long haul is not
at all certain. Consistently following Rule 1 would
have none of these unfortunate consequences. If
so, a society living according to Rule 1 would be
better off than one adhering to Rule 2, and there-
fore the innocent should not be killed to stop the
terrorist.
Evaluating the Theory
Bentham and Mill do not offer ironclad arguments
demonstrating that utilitarianism is the best moral
theory. Mill, however, does try to show that the
principle of utility is at least a plausible basis for
the theory. After all, he says, humans by nature
desire happiness and nothing but happiness. If so,
then happiness is the standard by which we should
judge human conduct, and therefore the principle
of utility is the heart of morality. But this kind of
moral argument is controversial because it rea-
sons from what is to what should be. In addition, as
pointed out in the discussion of psychological ego-
ism, the notion that happiness is our sole motiva-
tion is dubious.
What can we learn about utilitarianism by
applying the moral criteria of adequacy? Let us
begin with classic act- utilitarianism and deal with
rule- utilitarianism later. We can also postpone
discussion of the minimum requirement of coher-
ence, because critics have been more inclined to
charge rule- utilitarianism than act- utilitarianism
with having significant internal inconsistencies.
If we begin with Criterion 1 (consistency with
considered moral judgments), we run into what
some have called act- utilitarianism’s most serious
problem: it conflicts with commonsense views
about justice. Justice requires equal treatment of
persons. It demands, for example, that goods such
as happiness be distributed fairly— that we not
harm one person to make several other persons
’ QUICK REVIEW
principle of utility— Bentham’s “principle which
approves or disapproves of every action what-
soever, according to the tendency which it
appears to have to augment or diminish the
happiness of the party whose interest is in
question.”
greatest happiness principle— Mill’s principle that
“holds that actions are right in proportion as
they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they
tend to produce the reverse of happiness.”
social contract theory—The doctrine that moral-
ity arises from a social contract that self-
interested and rational people would abide by
in order to secure a degree of peace, prosper-
ity, and safety.
happiness. Action 2, therefore, would produce the
most happiness and would therefore be the morally
right option.
As a rule- utilitarian, the chief might make a dif-
ferent choice. He would have to decide what rules
would apply to the situation, then determine which
one, if consistently followed, would yield the most
utility. Suppose he must decide between Rule 1 and
Rule 2. Rule 1 says, “Do not kill innocent people in
order to prevent terrorists from killing other inno-
cent people.” Rule 2 says, “Killing innocent people
is permissible if it helps to stop terrorist attacks.”
The chief might deliberate as follows: We can be
confident that consistently following Rule 2 would
have some dire consequences for society. Innocent
people would be subject to arbitrary execution,
civil rights would be regularly violated, the rule
of law would be severely compromised, and trust
in government would be degraded. In fact, adher-
ing to Rule 2 might make people more fearful and
less secure than terrorist attacks would; it would

CHAPTER 5: COnSEquEnTIALIST THEORIES: MAxIMIzE THE GOOd Á 97
young man who has just come into your clinic for
his yearly check- up has exactly the right blood type
and is in excellent health. Lo, you have a possible
donor. All you need do is cut him up and distribute
his parts among the five who need them. You ask,
but he says, “Sorry. I deeply sympathize, but no.”
Would it be morally permissible for you to operate
anyway?6
This scenario involves the possible killing of an
innocent person for the good of others. There seems
little doubt that carrying out the murder and trans-
planting the victim’s organs into five other people
(and thus saving their lives) would maximize util-
ity (assuming, of course, that the surgeon’s deed
would not become public and he would suffer no
untoward psychological effects). Compared with
the happiness produced by doing the transplants,
the unhappiness of the one unlucky donor seems
minor. Therefore, according to act- utilitarianism,
you (the surgeon) should commit the murder
and do the transplants. But this choice appears to
conflict with our considered moral judgments.
Killing the healthy young man to benefit the five
unhealthy patients seems unjust.
Look at one final case. Suppose a tsunami dev-
astates a coastal area of Singapore. Relief agencies
arrive on the scene to distribute food, shelter, and
medical care to 100 tsunami victims— disaster aid
that amounts to, say, 1,000 units of happiness.
There are only two options for the distribution
of the 1,000 units. Option 1 is to divide the 1,000
units equally among all 100 victims, supplying
10 units to each person. Option 2 is to give 901
units to one victim (who happens to be the rich-
est man in the area) and 99 units to the remaining
victims, providing 1 unit per person. Both options
distribute the same amount of happiness to the
victims— 1,000 units. Following the dictates of
act- utilitarianism, we would have to say that the
two actions (options) have equal utility and so are
equally right. But this conclusion seems wrong. It
seems unjust to distribute the units of happiness
so unevenly when all recipients are equals in all
happy. Utilitarianism says that everyone should
be included in utility calculations, but it does
not require that everyone get an equal share.
Consider this famous scenario from the philoso-
pher H. J. McCloskey:
While a utilitarian is visiting an area plagued by
racial tension, a black man rapes a white woman.
Race riots ensue, and white mobs roam the streets,
beating and lynching black people as the police
secretly condone the violence and do nothing to
stop it. The utilitarian realizes that by giving false
testimony, he could bring about the quick arrest
and conviction of a black man whom he picks at
random. As a result of this lie, the riots and the
lynchings would stop, and innocent lives would be
spared. As a utilitarian, he believes he has a duty to
bear false witness to punish an innocent person.
If right actions are those that maximize hap-
piness, then it seems that the utilitarian would
be doing right by framing the innocent person.
The innocent person, of course, would experience
unhappiness (he might be sent to prison or even
executed), but framing him would halt the riots
and prevent many other innocent people from
being killed, resulting in a net gain in overall happi-
ness. Framing the innocent is unjust, though, and
our considered moral judgments would be at odds
with such an action. Here the commonsense idea
of justice and the principle of utility collide. The
conflict raises doubts about act- utilitarianism as a
moral theory.
Here is another famous example:
This time you are to imagine yourself to be a sur-
geon, a truly great surgeon. Among other things
you do, you transplant organs, and you are such a
great surgeon that the organs you transplant always
take. At the moment you have five patients who
need organs. Two need one lung each, two need
a kidney each, and the fifth needs a heart. If they
do not get those organs today, they will all die; if
you find organs for them today, you can transplant
the organs and they will all live. But where to find
the lungs, the kidneys, and the heart? The time is
almost up when a report is brought to you that a

98 Á PART 3: THEORIES OF MORALITY
try to keep our promises even when we know that
doing so will result in a decrease in utility. Some
say that if our obligations to others sometimes out-
weigh considerations of overall happiness, then
act- utilitarianism must be problematic.7
What can an act- utilitarian say to rebut these
charges? One frequent response goes like this: The
scenarios put forth by critics (such as the cases just
cited) are misleading and implausible. They are
always set up so that actions regarded as immoral
produce the greatest happiness, leading us to
conclude that utilitarianism conflicts with com-
monsense morality and therefore cannot be an
adequate moral theory. But in real life these kinds
of actions almost never maximize happiness. In
the case of Dr. X, her crime would almost certainly
be discovered by physicians or other scientists,
and she would be exposed as a murderer. This rev-
elation would surely destroy her career, undermine
patient- physician trust, tarnish the reputation
of the scientific community, dry up funding for
legitimate research, and prompt countless law-
suits. Scientists might even refuse to use the data
from Dr. X’s research because she obtained them
through a heinous act. As one philosopher put it,
“Given a clearheaded view of the world as it is and a
realistic understanding of man’s nature, it becomes
more and more evident that injustice will never
have, in the long run, greater utility than justice. . . .
Thus injustice becomes, in actual practice, a source
of great social disutility.”8
The usual response to this defense is that the
act- utilitarian is probably correct that most viola-
tions of commonsense morality do not maximize
happiness— but at least some violations do. At
least sometimes, actions that have the best conse-
quences do conflict with our credible moral princi-
ples or considered moral judgments. The charge is
that the act- utilitarian cannot plausibly dismiss all
counterexamples, and only one counterexample is
required to show that maximizing utility is not a
necessary and sufficient condition for right action.9
Unlike ethical egoism, act- utilitarianism (as
well as rule- utilitarianism) does not fail Criterion
morally relevant respects. Like the other examples,
this one suggests that act- utilitarianism may be an
inadequate theory.
Detractors make parallel arguments against the
theory in many cases besides those involving injus-
tice. A familiar charge is that act- utilitarianism con-
flicts with our commonsense judgments both about
people’s rights and about their obligations to one
another. Consider first this scenario about rights:
Mr. Y is a nurse in a care facility for the elderly. He
tends to many bedridden patients who are in pain
most of the time, are financial and emotional bur-
dens to their families, and are not expected to live
more than a few weeks. Despite their misery, they
do not wish for death; they want only to be free of
pain. Mr. Y, an act- utilitarian, sees that there would
be a lot more happiness in the world and less pain
if these patients died sooner rather than later. He
decides to take matters into his own hands, so he
secretly gives them a drug that kills them quietly
and painlessly. Their families and the facility staff
feel enormous relief. No one will ever know what
Mr. Y has done, and no one suspects foul play. He
feels no guilt— only immense satisfaction knowing
that he has helped make the world a better place.
If Mr. Y does indeed maximize happiness in this
situation, then his action is right, according to act-
utilitarianism. Yet most people would probably say
that he violated the rights of his patients. The com-
monsense view is that people have certain rights
that should not be violated merely to create a better
balance of happiness over unhappiness.
Another typical criticism of act- utilitarianism is
that it appears to fly in the face of our considered
moral judgments about our obligations to other
people. Suppose Ms. Z must decide between two
actions: Action 1 will produce 1,001 units of hap-
piness; Action 2, 1,000 units. The only other sig-
nificant difference between them is that Action 1
entails the breaking of a promise. By act- utilitarian
lights, Ms. Z should choose Action 1 because it
yields more happiness than Action 2 does. But
we tend to think that keeping a promise is more
important than a tiny gain in happiness. We often

CHAPTER 5: COnSEquEnTIALIST THEORIES: MAxIMIzE THE GOOd Á 99
consciousness, but I tended to take the view “so
much the worse for the common moral conscious-
ness.” That is, I was inclined to reject the common
methodology of testing general ethical principles
by seeing how they square with our feelings in par-
ticular instances.10
These utilitarians would ask, Isn’t it possible
that in dire circumstances, saving a hundred inno-
cent lives by allowing one to die would be the best
thing to do even though allowing that one death
would be a tragedy? Aren’t there times when the
norms of justice and duty should be ignored for the
greater good of society?
To avoid the problems that act- utilitarianism
is alleged to have, some utilitarians have turned to
rule- utilitarianism. By positing rules that should be
consistently followed, rule- utilitarianism seems to
align its moral judgments closer to those of com-
mon sense. And the theory itself is based on ideas
about morality that seem perfectly sensible:
In general, rule utilitarianism seems to involve two
rather plausible intuitions. In the first place, rule
utilitarians want to emphasize that moral rules are
important. Individual acts are justified by being
shown to be in accordance with correct moral rules.
In the second place, utility is important. Moral rules
are shown to be correct by being shown to lead,
somehow, to the maximization of utility. . . . Rule
utilitarianism, in its various forms, tries to combine
these intuitions into a single, coherent criterion of
morality.11
But some philosophers have accused the theory
of being internally inconsistent. They say, in other
words, that it fails the minimum requirement of
coherence. (If so, we can forgo discussion of our
three moral criteria of adequacy.) They argue as
follows: Rule- utilitarianism says that actions are
right if they conform to rules devised to maximize
utility. Rules with exceptions or qualifications,
however, maximize utility better than rules with-
out them. For example, a rule like “Do not steal
except in these circumstances” maximizes utility
better than the rule “Do not steal.” It seems, then,
that the best rules are those with amendments
that make them as specific as possible to particular
2 (consistency with our moral experiences), so we
can move on to Criterion 3 (usefulness in moral
problem solving). On this score, some scholars
argue that act- utilitarianism deserves bad marks.
Probably their most common complaint is what
has been called the no- rest problem. Utilitarianism
(in all its forms) requires that in our actions we
always try to maximize utility, everyone consid-
ered. Say you are watching television. Utilitarian-
ism would have you ask yourself, “Is this the best
way to maximize happiness for everyone?” Proba-
bly not. You could be giving to charity or working
as a volunteer for the local hospital or giving your
coat to a homeless person or selling everything
you own to buy food for hungry children. What-
ever you are doing, there is usually something else
you could do that would better maximize net hap-
piness for everyone.
If act- utilitarianism does demand too much of
us, then its usefulness as a guide to the moral life is
suspect. One possible reply to this criticism is that
the utilitarian burden can be lightened by devising
rules that place limits on supererogatory actions.
Another reply is that our moral common sense is
simply wrong on this issue— we should be willing
to perform, as our duty, many actions that are usu-
ally considered supererogatory. If necessary, we
should be willing to give up our personal ambitions
for the good of everyone. We should be willing,
for example, to sacrifice a very large portion of our
resources to help the poor.
To some, this reply seems questionable pre-
cisely because it challenges our commonsense
moral intuitions— the very intuitions that we use
to measure the plausibility of our moral judgments
and principles. Moral common sense, they say, can
be mistaken, and our intuitions can be tenuous or
distorted— but we should cast them aside only for
good reasons.
But a few utilitarians directly reject this appeal
to common sense, declaring that relying so heavily
on such intuitions is a mistake:
Admittedly utilitarianism does have consequences
which are incompatible with the common moral

100 Á PART 3: THEORIES OF MORALITY
is right regardless of the good (or evil) it does. And
sometimes they may say that the good it does
matters a great deal.
Second, utilitarianism— perhaps more than any
other moral theory— incorporates the principle of
impartiality, a fundamental pillar of morality itself.
Everyone concerned counts equally in every moral
decision. As Mill says, when we judge the rightness
of our actions, utilitarianism requires us to be “as
strictly impartial as a disinterested and benevolent
spectator.” Discrimination is forbidden, and equal-
ity reigns. We would expect no less from a plausible
moral theory.
Third, utilitarianism is through and through
a moral theory for promoting human welfare. At
its core is the moral principle of beneficence— the
obligation to act for the well- being of others. Benef-
icence is not the whole of morality, but to most
people it is at least close to its heart.
SOCIAL CONTRACT THEORY
So far we have examined several moral theories and
observed that each is based on, and justified by,
some distinctive fundamental feature. For utilitari-
anism, that feature is utility; for the divine com-
mand theory, God’s will; for Kant’s theory, the
categorical imperative. But suppose you don’t
believe in any of these justifying principles. You
think the universe is entirely physical— just atoms
in motion, devoid of divinity and purpose. You
believe reason can never yield an authoritative
rational principle like the categorical imperative,
and you are sure that utilitarianism is hopelessly
unrealistic because people can never be trusted to
promote the common good. At their core, people
are egoistic and self- interested. And in service to
their own needs and desires, they will, given the
chance, commit all manner of horrific cruelties
and vile wrongs. In such a world, on what founda-
tion can morality rest? In such a perilous and cor-
rosive environment, how can morality ever find a
foothold?
cases. But if the rules were changed in this way to
maximize utility, they would end up mandating
the same actions that act- utilitarianism does. They
all would say, in effect, “Do not do this except to
maximize utility.” Rule- utilitarianism would lapse
into act- utilitarianism.
Some rule- utilitarians respond to this criti-
cism by denying that rules with a lot of excep-
tions would maximize utility. They say that people
might fear for their own well- being when others
make multiple exceptions to rules. You might be
reassured by a rule such as “Do not harm others,”
but feel uneasy about the rule “Do not harm others
except in this situation.” What if you end up in that
particular situation?
Those who criticize the theory admit that it is
indeed possible for an exception- laden rule to pro-
duce more unhappiness than happiness because
of the anxiety it causes. But, they say, it is also
possible for such a rule to generate a very large mea-
sure of happiness— large enough to more than off-
set any ill effects spawned by rule exceptions. If so,
then rule- utilitarianism could easily slip into act-
utilitarianism, thus exhibiting all the conflicts with
commonsense morality that act- utilitarianism is
supposed to have.
LEARNING FROM UTILITARIANISM
Regardless of how much credence we give to the
arguments for and against utilitarianism, we must
admit that the theory seems to embody a large part
of the truth about morality. First, utilitarianism
begs us to consider that the consequences of our
actions do indeed make a difference in our moral
deliberations. Whatever factors work to make an
action right (or wrong), surely the consequences of
what we do must somehow be among them. Even
if lying is morally wrong primarily because of the
kind of act it is, we cannot plausibly think that a
lie that saves a thousand lives is morally equivalent
to one that changes nothing. Sometimes our con-
sidered moral judgments may tell us that an action

CHAPTER 5: COnSEquEnTIALIST THEORIES: MAxIMIzE THE GOOd Á 101
freedom and giving up the option to kill, wound,
and cheat our neighbors at will, but it also ensures
a better life and a measure of protection from the
ravages of continual conflict and fear. From this
social contract comes morality, for the rules consti-
tute morality. Morality comprises the social rules
that are in everyone’s best interests to heed. In a
well- ordered society, the rules are embodied in
laws and policies, enforced by the state and recog-
nized by most citizens as necessary and legitimate.
They are deemed legitimate because they are the
result of an agreement among rational equals who
understand that the contract, however restrictive,
is for the best.
Hobbes’s Theory
The first well- developed social contract theory in
modern times was devised by the British philoso-
pher and linguist Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679).
He argues for the necessity of a social contract by
first giving us a glimpse of a world without one.
For some, the answer is social contract
theory (or contractarianism). This doctrine says
that morality arises from a social contract that
self- interested and rational people abide by in
order to secure a degree of peace, prosperity, and
safety. Without such an agreement, life would be
nearly unlivable, with each person competing with
everyone else to promote his or her own interests,
to grab as much wealth and power as possible, and
to defend his or her person and property against
all comers. Humanity, as the saying goes, would
be red in tooth and claw. But such a dog- eat- dog
world is in no one’s interests. Only in a world
where people restrain their greed and try to coop-
erate with one another can they achieve a mod-
estly satisfying and secure life. And this kind of
restraint and cooperation, says the social contract
theorist, is possible only through a social contract
in which people agree to obey practical, benefi-
cial rules as long as everyone else does the same.
Obedience means relinquishing some personal
’
Like any adequate moral theory, utilitarianism
should be able to help us resolve moral problems,
including new moral issues arising from advances
in science and medicine. A striking example of one
such issue is cross- species transplantation, the trans-
planting of organs from one species to another,
usually from nonhuman animals to humans. Scien-
tists are already bioengineering pigs so that their
organs will not provoke tissue rejection in human
recipients. Pigs are thought to be promising organ
donors because of the similarities between pig and
human organs. Many people are in favor of such
research because it could open up new sources
of transplantable organs, which are now in short
supply and desperately needed by thousands of
people whose organs are failing.
Would an act- utilitarian be likely to condone
cross- species transplants of organs? If so, on what
grounds? Would the unprecedented, “unnatu-
ral” character of these operations bother a utili-
tarian? Why or why not? Would you expect an
act- utilitarian to approve of cross- species organ
transplants if they involved the killing of one hun-
dred pigs for every successful transplant? If only a
very limited number of transplants could be done
successfully each year, how do you think an act-
utilitarian would decide who gets the operations?
Would she choose randomly? Would she ever be
justified (by utilitarian considerations) in, say,
deciding to save a rich philanthropist while letting
a poor person die for lack of a transplant?
CRITICAL THOUGHT: Cross- Species Transplants: What Would a Utilitarian Do?

102 Á PART 3: THEORIES OF MORALITY
as well as harming, threatening, and defrauding
others, because such behavior threatens the peace
and prosperity that the social contract makes
possible.
But people are people, and they will renege on
the deal if given half a chance. So what’s needed is
a fearsome, powerful person or persons to enforce
the rules, to threaten punishment, and to deliver it
swiftly to rule breakers. Specifically, what’s required
is an absolute sovereign, what Hobbes refers to as
the Leviathan (the name of a terrifying monster
mentioned in the Bible). The Leviathan’s job is
to ensure that the social contract is honored and
that agreements are kept. His subjects agree to
cede to him much of their freedom and right of
self- determination in exchange for an orderly and
secure society.
Before the Leviathan rules society, Hobbes says,
there is no right and wrong:
[In the state of nature] nothing can be unjust. The
notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice
have there no place. . . . It is consequent also to
the same condition, that there be no propriety, no
dominion, no mine and thine distinct; but only
that to be every man’s, that he can get; and for so
long, as he can keep it.13
Morality comes into existence only when the Levi-
athan takes control and guarantees the strength
and stability of the social contract.
Evaluating the Theory
Many thinkers have tried to improve on Hobbes’s
theory or offer alternatives, and as a result, several
types of social contract theory have been put forth.
But let’s limit our discussion to Hobbes’s theory
(and those like it). Like every major moral theory,
Hobbesian social contract theory has both appeal-
ing and questionable features, so let’s examine
both.
On the positive side, the theory provides an
answer to skeptics and relativists who question
whether morality is objective or consists of a set
In his masterpiece Leviathan, he presents a pessi-
mistic picture of human beings in their natural,
unfettered, lawless state. They are, he says, greedy,
selfish, violent, self- destructive, and desperate.
Their cutthroat struggle for advantage and sur-
vival rages on and on because they are roughly
equal in strength and ability, ensuring that no
one can win. So conflict, chaos, death, and loss
reign— and humankind is reduced to living in a
horrifying and gruesome “state of nature.” This
state is not merely a Hobbesian construct: it arises
in the real world when there is a breakdown in the
forces that preserve law and order— in times of
revolution, war, natural disaster, famine, and civil
unrest. According to Hobbes,
Hereby it is manifest, that during the time men
live without a common power to keep them all in
awe, they are in that condition which is called war;
and such a war, as is of every man, against every
man. . . .
Whatsoever therefore is consequent to a time
of war, where every man is enemy to every man;
the same is consequent to the time; wherein men
live without other security, than what their own
strength, and their own invention shall furnish
them withal. In such condition, there is no place
for industry; because the fruit thereof is uncer-
tain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no
navigation, nor use of the commodities that may
be imported by sea; no commodious building; no
instruments of moving, and removing such things
as require much force; no knowledge of the face of
the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters;
no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear,
and danger of violent death; and the life of man,
solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.12
As long as people continue to trample others
on the way to steal the biggest piece of pie, life will
remain a “war of every man against every man.”
The only rational alternative, says Hobbes, is to
accept a social contract that mandates coopera-
tion and restraint. By following the rules, everyone
wins. The agreement prohibits contract breaking

CHAPTER 5: COnSEquEnTIALIST THEORIES: MAxIMIzE THE GOOd Á 103
allegiance or signed on the dotted line? Most
people have not.
Some defenders of social contract theory reply
that people may not have given their explicit
consent, but they surely have given their implicit
consent. By enjoying the social and material advan-
tages that the social contract makes possible, these
advocates say, people implicitly agree to abide by
its rules. If they accept the benefits, they tacitly
agree to shoulder the obligations.
But this notion of implicit consent will not do.
There are many who benefit from living in a well-
ordered society, but we cannot plausibly say they
consented to be bound by any social contract.
People are born into a particular society without
their consent; they have no choice in the matter.
They do not agree to be part of the social order.
And as adults, many may hate the society they find
themselves in but cannot leave it because the polit-
ical, financial, and social costs of trying to emigrate
may be prohibitive. In any case, it is hard to see
how such citizens could be said to implicitly accept
a social contract.
At this point the contractarian might say that
we can be duty- bound to obey the moral tenets of a
social contract even if we don’t consent to it, either
explicitly or implicitly. Our moral duties are estab-
lished not because we accept the social contract
from which they come, but because the contract is
one that we would embrace if we were rational indi-
viduals searching for rules that would best serve
everyone’s interests. The social contract, in other
words, is hypothetical but nevertheless binding.
This is how most contemporary contractarians view
social contracts: they see them as fictions— but very
useful fictions. For example, today’s most influen-
tial social contract theory comes from the philos-
opher John Rawls (1921–2002). He attempted to
determine what moral principles a society would
accept if they were arrived at through a hypotheti-
cal give- and- take that was as fair and impartial as
possible. According to Rawls, such principles are
of beliefs we merely happen to accept. It says that
morality is objective because it consists of the
rules— the standards of right and wrong— that
rational members of society have determined to
be most beneficial for all. The source of moral-
ity is therefore apparent. We need not ask— as
we would with many other theories— whether it
is based on God’s will, nature, or pure reason. Its
rules make peaceful coexistence and productive
cooperation possible, and they are the very rules
that would be enacted by rational people of equal
status whose goal is to see that the rules benefit
everyone.
These attributes ensure that, at least in one
respect, Hobbes’s theory scores high on the moral
criterion of usefulness: there is no mystery about
how to find out if an action is morally right or
wrong. The social rules are those that promote
social harmony. It is clear that theft, murder, fraud,
promise breaking, exploitation, intolerance, and
other malicious acts are contrary to social order, so
they are immoral.
But why should we be moral in the first place?
Or to put it another way, What is the purpose of
morality? This is a difficult question for any moral
theory. The social contract answer is straightfor-
ward: We should be moral in a society where the
rules are generally followed because we are better
off doing so. In addition, breaking the rules would
bring punishment from the Leviathan, and trying
to avoid the pain of such punishment is rational.
Philosophers have faulted Hobbes’s theory on
several counts. Among the most important of these
is the charge that few people have ever actually
consented to the terms of a social contract. (Critics
make this point against other forms of the theory,
not just Hobbes’s.) The essence of a contract is
that people freely agree to abide by its terms. Pre-
sumably, if they don’t give their consent, they are
not obliged to obey the contract’s rules. But who
has explicitly agreed to be bound by a social con-
tract? Who has raised their right hand and sworn

104 Á PART 3: THEORIES OF MORALITY
what “free and rational persons concerned to fur-
ther their own interests would accept in an initial
position of equality as defining the fundamental
terms of their association.”14
There is a stronger objection that has been
made against Hobbes’s theory and contractarian
theories generally: the category of individuals
that we normally think should have moral status
is restricted. Living beings have moral status if
they are suitable candidates for moral concern or
respect. This means we cannot treat them just any
way we want; we have direct moral duties to them.
We know that normal, rational, adult human
beings have full moral status— they deserve our
highest level of respect and consideration no
matter their social situation. And we typically
think that vulnerable individuals— for example, the
severely disabled, the very poor, nonhuman ani-
mals, children, and infants— also have moral sta-
tus: they also deserve a measure of our respect and
consideration. But critics charge that social con-
tract theories conflict with these intuitions. The
theories generally hold that the only ones who
have moral status are those who can legitimately
be party to a social contract (the contractors), and
that the only ones who can participate in a social
contract are those for whom participation would
be mutually beneficial. The vulnerable individu-
als who cannot take part in this give- and- take for
mutual benefit may have no moral status and no
rights.
Modern contractarians have responded to these
complaints in several ways. Their general conten-
tion is that although vulnerable individuals may
not be contractors, it does not follow that they
can be mistreated or left unprotected. They point
out, for example, that it may be mutually advan-
tageous for society to care for disabled children
because some contractors (namely, parents) care
about such children, and this concern makes the
benevolent treatment of disabled children a mat-
ter of the parents’ self- interest. Also, it may be
in everyone’s interests for society to care for the
elderly, the chronically ill, and victims of acci-
dents, because in the future we all may find our-
selves in one of these situations. Or benefiting
the vulnerable could be viewed as a psychological
need of contractors, so fulfilling this need by help-
ing the vulnerable may be in every contractor’s
best interests.
CHAPTER REVIEW
SUMMARY
Ethical egoism is the theory that the right action is
the one that advances one’s own best interests. It pro-
motes self- interested behavior but not necessarily self-
ish acts. The ethical egoist may define his self- interest
in various ways— as pleasure, self- actualization,
power, happiness, or other goods. The most impor-
tant argument for ethical egoism relies on the theory
known as psychological egoism, the view that the
motive for all our actions is self- interest. Psychologi-
cal egoism, however, seems to ignore the fact that
people sometimes do things that are not in their best
interests. It also seems to misconstrue the relationship
between our actions and the satisfaction that often
follows from them. We seem to desire something
other than satisfaction and then experience satisfac-
tion as a result of getting what we desire.
Utilitarianism is the view that the morally right
action is the one that produces the most favorable
balance of good over evil, everyone considered. Act-
utilitarianism says that right actions are those that
directly produce the greatest overall happiness, every-
one considered. Rule- utilitarianism says that the mor-
ally right action is the one covered by a rule that if
generally followed would produce the most favorable
balance of good over evil, everyone considered.
Critics argue that act- utilitarianism is not con-
sistent with our considered moral judgments about
justice. In many possible scenarios, the action that

CHAPTER 5: COnSEquEnTIALIST THEORIES: MAxIMIzE THE GOOd Á 105
3. What is the psychological egoist argument for
ethical egoism? (pp. 87–88)
4. Is psychological egoism true? Why or why not?
(pp. 88–89)
5. In what way is ethical egoism not consistent
with our considered moral judgments? (p. 90)
6. What is the principle of utility? (p. 92)
7. According to Hobbes, where does morality come
from? (p. 102)
8. What is the difference between act- and rule-
utilitarianism? (p. 94)
9. How do act- and rule- utilitarians differ in their
views on rules? (p. 94)
10. Is act- utilitarianism consistent with our
considered moral judgments regarding justice?
Why or why not? (pp. 96–98)
Discussion Questions
1. Is psychological egoism based on a conceptual
confusion? Why or why not?
2. Why do critics regard ethical egoism as an
inadequate moral theory? Are the critics right?
Why or why not?
3. How would your life change if you became a
consistent act- utilitarian?
4. How would your life change if you became a
consistent rule- utilitarian?
5. To what was Mill referring when he said, “It is
better to be a human being dissatisfied than a
pig satisfied”? Do you agree with this statement?
Why or why not?
6. If you were on trial for your life (because of an
alleged murder), would you want the judge
to be an act- utilitarian, a rule- utilitarian, or
neither? Why?
7. Do you agree with Hobbes’s view of human
nature? Why or why not?
8. Does act- utilitarianism conflict with
commonsense judgments about rights? Why or
why not?
9. Is there such a thing as a supererogatory
act— or are all right actions simply our duty?
What would an act- utilitarian say about
supererogatory acts?
maximizes utility in a situation also seems blatantly
unjust. Likewise, the theory seems to collide with
our notions of rights and obligations. Again, it seems
relatively easy to imagine scenarios in which utility
is maximized while rights or obligations are short-
changed. An act- utilitarian might respond to these
points by saying that such examples are unrealistic—
that in real life, actions thought to be immoral almost
never maximize happiness.
Rule- utilitarianism has been accused of being
internally inconsistent— of easily collapsing into act-
utilitarianism. The charge is that the rules that maxi-
mize happiness best are specific to particular cases, but
such rules would sanction the same actions that act-
utilitarianism does.
Regardless of criticisms lodged against it, utilitaria-
nism offers important insights into the nature of moral-
ity: The consequences of our actions surely do matter in
our moral deliberations and in our lives. The principle
of impartiality is an essential part of moral decision
making. And any plausible moral theory must some-
how take into account the principle of beneficence.
Social contract theory is the view that morality
arises from a social contract that self- interested and
rational people would abide by to secure a degree of
security and prosperity. Restraint and cooperation
are possible only through a social contract in which
people agree to obey practical, beneficial rules as long
as everyone else does the same.
KEY TERMS
act- egoism (p. 85)
rule- egoism (p. 85)
psychological egoism (p. 87)
principle of utility (p. 92)
greatest happiness principle (p. 92)
social contract theory (p. 101)
EXERCISES
Review Questions
1. What is ethical egoism? What is the difference
between act- and rule- egoism? (p. 85)
2. What is psychological egoism? (p. 87)

106 Á PART 3: THEORIES OF MORALITY
FURTHER READING
Jeremy Bentham, “Of the Principle of Utility,” in An Intro-
duction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789;
reprint, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1879).
C. D. Broad, “Egoism as a Theory of Human Motives,” in
Twentieth Century Ethical Theory, ed. Steven M. Cahn
and Joram G. Haber (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice
Hall, 1995).
Steven M. Cahn and Joram G. Haber, eds., Twentieth
Century Ethical Theory (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice
Hall, 1995).
Fred Feldman, “Act Utilitarianism: Pro and Con,” in
Introductory Ethics (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall,
1978).
William Frankena, “Utilitarianism, Justice, and Love,”
in Ethics, 2nd ed. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall,
1973).
C. E. Harris, “The Ethics of Utilitarianism,” in Apply-
ing Moral Theories, 3rd ed. (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth,
1997).
Kai Nielsen, “A Defense of Utilitarianism,” Ethics 82
(1972): 113–24.
Robert Nozick, “The Experience Machine,” in Anarchy,
State and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974).
Louis P. Pojman, ed., The Moral Life: An Introductory Reader
in Ethics and Literature, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2004).
John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1999).
John Simmons, Political Philosophy (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2008).
J. J. C. Smart, “Extreme and Restricted Utilitarianism,”
in Essays Metaphysical and Moral: Selected Philosophical
Papers (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987).
Paul W. Taylor, “Ethical Egoism,” in Principles of Ethics: An
Introduction (Encino, CA: Dickenson, 1975).
Bernard Williams, “A Critique of Utilitarianism,” in Utilitar-
ianism: For and Against, ed. J. J. C. Smart and Bernard Wil-
liams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973).
Jonathan Wolff, An Introduction to Political Philosophy
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).
10. Suppose you had to decide which one of a
dozen dying patients should receive a lifesaving
drug, knowing that there was only enough of
the medicine for one person. Would you feel
comfortable making the decision as an act-
utilitarian would? Why or why not?
ETHICAL DILEMMAS
1. Suppose you are an act- utilitarian, and you
must choose between two courses of action. In
the first action, you could make a stranger very
happy by giving her $100. In the second action,
you could make another stranger even happier
by giving him the same amount of money— but
this action would involve breaking a promise to
a friend. According to act- utilitarianism, which
action is the morally right one? Do you agree
with this choice? Why or why not?
2. Imagine that your preferred moral theory
implies that racial discrimination is morally
permissible— an implication that is in
direct conflict with your considered moral
judgments. Would such a conflict suggest to
you that the theory must be defective? Why or
why not?
3. Suppose your preferred moral theory is based
entirely on love— that is, you believe that right
actions are those that issue from a feeling of
empathy, compassion, or mercy. Now imagine
that a homeless man assaults you and steals
your wallet, and then you see him do the same
thing to two other people. How would your
love theory apply to this case? Would there be
a conflict between love and the principle of
justice or the community’s moral standards?
Would your theory lead you to go against your
considered moral judgments? Assess the worth
of the love theory.

CHAPTER 5: COnSEquEnTIALIST THEORIES: MAxIMIzE THE GOOd Á 107
R E A d I n G S
Egoism and Altruism
Louis P. Pojman
Universal ethical egoism is the theory that everyone
ought always to serve his or her own self- interest. That
is, everyone ought to do what will maximize one’s
own expected utility or bring about one’s own greatest
happiness, even if it requires harming others. Ethical
egoism is utilitarianism reduced to the pinpoint of the
single individual ego. Instead of advocating the great-
est happiness for the greatest number, as utilitarianism
does, it advocates the greatest happiness for myself,
whoever I may be. It is a self- preoccupied prudence,
urging one to postpone enjoyment today for long- term
benefits. In its more sophisticated form, it compares life
to a competitive game, perhaps a war- game, and urges
each person to try to win in the game of life.
In her books The Virtue of Selfishness and Atlas
Shrugged, Ayn Rand argues that selfishness is a virtue
and altruism a vice, a totally destructive idea that leads
to the undermining of individual worth. She defines
altruism as the view that
any action taken for the benefit of others is good, and
any action taken for one’s own benefit is evil. Thus, the
beneficiary of an action is the only criterion of moral
value— and so long as the beneficiary is anybody other
than oneself, anything goes.1
As such, altruism is suicidal:
If a man accepts the ethics of altruism, his first concern
is not how to live his life, but how to sacrifice it. . . .
Altruism erodes men’s capacity to grasp the value of an
individual life; it reveals a mind from which the reality
of a human being has been wiped out.
Since finding happiness is the highest goal and good in
life, altruism, which calls on us to sacrifice our happiness
for the good of others, is contrary to our highest good.
Her argument seems to go like this:
1. The perfection of one’s abilities in a state of hap-
piness is the highest goal for humans. We have a
moral duty to attempt to reach this goal.
2. The ethics of altruism prescribes that we sacrifice
our interests and lives for the good of others.
3. Therefore, the ethics of altruism is incompatible
with the goal of happiness.
4. Ethical egoism prescribes that we seek our own
happiness exclusively, and as such it is consistent
with the happiness goal.
5. Therefore ethical egoism is the correct moral theory.
Ayn Rand’s argument for the virtue of selfish-
ness is flawed by the fallacy of a false dilemma. It
simplistically assumes that absolute altruism and
absolute egoism are the only alternatives. But this
is an extreme view of the matter. There are plenty
of options between these two positions. Even a pre-
dominant egoist would admit that (analogous to
the paradox of hedonism) sometimes the best way
to reach self- fulfillment is for us to forget about our-
selves and strive to live for goals, causes, or other
persons. Even if altruism is not required (as a duty),
it may be permissible in many cases. Furthermore,
self- interest may not be incompatible with other-
regarding motivation. Even the Second Great Com-
mandment set forth by Moses and Jesus states not
that you must always sacrifice yourself for the other
person, but that you ought to love your neighbor as
yourself (Lev. 19:19; Matt. 23). Self- interest and self-
love are morally good things, but not at the expense
of other people’s legitimate interests. When there is
moral conflict of interests, a fair process of adjudica-
tion needs to take place.
But Rand’s version of egoism is only one of many.
We need to go to the heart of ethical egoism: the thesis
that our highest moral duty is always to promote our
From Louis P. Pojman, “Egoism and Altruism: A Critique of Ayn
Rand,” Philosophy: The Quest for Truth, 10th ed., 461–65. © 2016 by
Oxford University Press, Inc. By permission of Oxford University
Press, USA.

108 Á PART 3: THEORIES OF MORALITY
ethical egoism worth the price of letting the cat out of
the bag?)
Thus it would be self- defeating for the egoist to
argue for her position, and even worse that she should
convince others of it. But it is perfectly possible to
have a private morality that does not resolve conflicts
of interest. So the egoist should publicly advocate
standard principles of traditional morality— so that
society doesn’t break down— while adhering to a pri-
vate, nonstandard, solely self- regarding morality. So,
if you’re willing to pay the price, you can accept the
solipsistic- directed norms of egoism.
If the egoist is prepared to pay the price, egoism
could be a consistent system that has some limita-
tions. Although the egoist can cooperate with others
in limited ways and perhaps even have friends— so
long as their interests don’t conflict with his— he has
to be very careful about preserving his isolation. The
egoist can’t give advice or argue about his position—
not sincerely at least. He must act alone, atomistically
or solipsistically in moral isolation, for to announce
his adherence to the principle of egoism would be
dangerous to his project. He can’t teach his children
the true morality or justify himself to others or forgive
others.
The Paradox of Egoism
The situation may be even worse than the sophisti-
cated, self- conscious egoist supposes. Could the ego-
ist have friends? And if limited friendship is possible,
could he or she ever be in love or experience deep
friendship? Suppose the egoist discovers that in the
pursuit of the happiness goal, deep friendship is
in his best interest. Can he become a friend? What
is necessary to deep friendship? A true friend is one
who is not always preoccupied about his own inter-
est in the relationship but who forgets about himself
altogether, at least sometimes, in order to serve or
enhance the other person’s interest. “Love seeketh
not its own.” It is an altruistic disposition, the very
opposite of egoism. So the paradox of egoism is that
in order to reach the goal of egoism one must give up
egoism and become (to some extent) an altruist, the
very antithesis of egoism.
individual interests. Let us focus on the alleged prob-
lems of this thesis.
FOUR CRITICISMS OF ETHICAL EGOISM
The Inconsistent Outcomes Argument
Brian Medlin argues that ethical egoism cannot be
true because it fails to meet a necessary condition of
morality, that of being a guide to action. He claims
that it will be like advising people to do inconsistent
things based on incompatible desires.2 His argument
goes like this:
1. Moral principles must be universal and categorical.
2. I must universalize my egoist desire to come out
on top over Tom, Dick, and Harry.
3. But I must also prescribe Tom’s egoist desire to come
out on top over Dick, Harry, and me (and so on).
4. Therefore I have prescribed incompatible outcomes
and have not provided a way of adjudicating con-
flicts of desire. In effect, I have said nothing.
The proper response to this is that of Jesse Kalin, who
argues that we can separate our beliefs about ethical
situations from our desires.3 He likens the situation
to a competitive sports event, in which you believe
that your opponent has a right to try to win as much
as you, but you desire that you, not he, will in fact
win. An even better example is that of the chess game
in which you recognize that your opponent ought to
move her bishop to prepare for checkmate, but you
hope she won’t see the move. Belief that A ought to do
Y does not commit you to wanting A to do Y.
The Publicity Argument
On the one hand, in order for something to be a moral
theory it seems necessary that its moral principles be
publicized. Unless principles are put forth as univer-
sal prescriptions that are accessible to the public, they
cannot serve as guides to action or as aids in resolving
conflicts of interest. But on the other hand, it is not
in the egoist’s self- interest to publicize them. Egoists
would rather that the rest of us be altruists. (Why did
Nietzsche and Rand write books announcing their
positions? Were the royalties taken in by announcing

CHAPTER 5: COnSEquEnTIALIST THEORIES: MAxIMIzE THE GOOd Á 109
In the past, linking ethics to evolution meant
justifying exploitation. Social Darwinism justified
imperialism and the principle that “Might makes right”
by saying that survival of the fittest is a law of nature.
This philosophy lent itself to a promotion of ruthless
egoism. This is nature’s law, “nature red in tooth and
claw.” Against this view ethologists such as Robert
Ardrcy and Konrad Lorenz argued for a more benign
view of the animal kingdom— one reminiscent of Rud-
yard Kipling’s, in which the animal kingdom survives
by cooperation, which is at least as important as com-
petition. On Ardrey’s and Lorenz’s view it is the group
or the species, not the individual, that is of primary
importance.
With the development of sociobiology— in the
work of E. O. Wilson but particularly the work of Rob-
ert Trivers, J. Maynard Smith, and Richard Dawkins—
a theory has come to the fore that combines radical
individualism with limited altruism. It is not the
group or the species that is of evolutionary impor-
tance but the gene, or, more precisely, the gene type.
Genes— the parts of the chromosomes that carry the
blueprints for all our natural traits (e.g., height, hair
color, skin color, intelligence)—copy themselves as
they divide and multiply. At conception they com-
bine with the genes of a member of the opposite sex to
form a new individual.
In his fascinating sociobiological study, Richard
Dawkins describes human behavior as determined
evolutionarily by stable strategies set to replicate the
gene.4 This is not done consciously, of course, but by
the invisible hand that drives consciousness. We are
essentially gene machines.
Morality— that is, successful morality— can be seen
as an evolutionary strategy for gene replication. Here’s
an example: Birds are afflicted with life- endangering
parasites. Because they lack limbs to enable them to
pick the parasites off their heads, they— like much of
the animal kingdom— depend on the ritual of mutual
grooming. It turns out that nature has evolved two
basic types of birds in this regard: those who are dis-
posed to groom anyone (the non- prejudiced type?),
and those who refuse to groom anyone but who pres-
ent themselves for grooming. The former type of bird
Dawkins calls “Suckers” and the latter “Cheaters.”
The Argument from Counterintuitive
Consequences
The final argument against ethical egoism is that it is an
absolute ethics that not only permits egoistic behavior
but demands it. Helping others at one’s own expense is
not only not required, it is morally wrong. Whenever I
do not have good evidence that my helping you will end
up to my advantage, I must refrain from helping you. If
I can save the whole of Europe and Africa from destruc-
tion by pressing a button, then so long as there is noth-
ing for me to gain by it, it is wrong for me to press that
button. The Good Samaritan was, by this logic, morally
wrong in helping the injured victim and not collect-
ing payment for his troubles. It is certainly hard to see
why the egoist should be concerned about environ-
mental matters if he or she is profiting from polluting
the environment. (For example, if the egoist gains 40
hedons in producing P, which produces pollution that
in turn causes others 1,000 dolors— units of suffering—
but suffers only 10 of those dolors himself, then by an
agent- maximizing calculus he is morally obligated to
produce P.) There is certainly no obligation to preserve
scarce natural resources for future generations. “Why
should I do anything for posterity?” the egoist asks
“What has posterity ever done for me?”
In conclusion, we see that ethical egoism has a
number of serious problems. It cannot consistently
publicize itself, nor often argue its case. It tends
towards solipsism and the exclusion of many of the
deepest human values, such as love and deep friend-
ship. It violates the principle of fairness, and, most
of all, it entails an absolute prohibition on altruis-
tic behavior, which we intuitively sense as morally
required (or, at least, permissible).
EVOLUTION AND ALTRUISM
If sheer unadulterated egoism is an inadequate moral
theory, does that mean we ought to aim at complete
altruism, total self- effacement for the sake of others? What
is the role of self- love in morality? An interesting place
to start answering these queries is with the new field
of sociobiology, which theorizes that social structures
and behavioral patterns, including morality, have a
biological base, explained by evolutionary theory.

110 Á PART 3: THEORIES OF MORALITY
someone who is willing to share with those willing to
cooperate.
Mackie may caricature the position of the religious
altruist, but he misses the subtleties of wisdom involved
(Jesus said, “Be as wise as serpents but as harmless as
doves”). Nevertheless, he does remind us that there is
a difference between core morality and complete altru-
ism. We have duties to cooperate and reciprocate, but
no duty to serve those who manipulate us nor an obvi-
ous duty to sacrifice ourselves for people outside our
domain of special responsibility. We have a special duty
of high altruism toward those in the close circle of our
concern, namely, our family and friends.
CONCLUSION
Martin Luther once said that humanity is like a man
who, when mounting a horse, always falls off on the
opposite side, especially when he tries to overcom-
pensate for his previous exaggerations. So it is with
ethical egoism. Trying to compensate for an irra-
tional, guilt- ridden, Sucker altruism of the morality
of self- effacement, it falls off the horse on the other
side, embracing a Cheater’s preoccupation with self-
exaltation that robs the self of the deepest joys in life.
Only the person who mounts properly, avoiding both
extremes, is likely to ride the horse of happiness to its
goal.
NOTES
1. Ayn Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness (New American Library,
1964), pp. vii and 27–32; 80ff.
2. Brian Medlin, “Ultimate Principles and Ethical Ego-
ism,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy (1957), pp. 111–118;
reprinted in Louis Pojman, Ethical Theory, pp. 91–95.
3. See Jesse Kalin, “In Defense of Egoism,” in Ethical Theory,
4th ed., ed. Louis Pojman (Wadsworth, 2002), p. 95f.
4. Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (Oxford University Press,
1976), Ch. 10.
5. J. L. Mackie, “The Law of the Jungle: Moral Alternatives and
Principles of Evolution,” Philosophy 53 (1978).
In a geographical area containing harmful para-
sites and where there are only Suckers or Cheaters,
Suckers will do fairly well, but Cheaters will not sur-
vive, for want of cooperation. However, in a Sucker
population in which a mutant Cheater arises, the
Cheater will prosper, and the Cheater gene- type will
multiply. As the Suckers are exploited, they will gradu-
ally die out. But if and when they become too few to
groom the Cheaters, the Cheaters will start to die off
too and eventually become extinct.
Why don’t birds all die off, then? Well, somehow
nature has come up with a third type, call them “Grudg-
ers.” Grudgers groom all and only those who reciprocate
in grooming them. They groom each other and Suck-
ers, but not Cheaters. In fact, once caught, a Cheater is
marked forever. There is no forgiveness. It turns out then
that unless there are a lot of Suckers around, Cheaters
have a hard time of it— harder even than Suckers. How-
ever, it is the Grudgers that prosper. Unlike Suckers, they
don’t waste time messing with unappreciative Cheat-
ers, so they are not exploited and have ample energy to
gather food and build better nests for their loved ones.
J. L. Mackie argues that the real name for Suckers
is “Christian,” one who believes in complete altru-
ism, even turning the other cheek to one’s assailant
and loving one’s enemy. Cheaters are ruthless egoists
who can survive only if there are enough naive altru-
ists around. Whereas Grudgers are reciprocal altruists
who have a rational morality based on cooperative
self- interest, Suckers, such as Socrates and Jesus, advo-
cate “turning the other cheek and repaying evil with
good.”5 Instead of a Rule of Reciprocity, “I’ll scratch
your back if you’ll scratch mine,” the extreme altruist
substitutes the Golden Rule, “If you want the other fel-
low to scratch your back, you scratch his— even if he
won’t reciprocate.”
The moral of the story is this: Altruist morality (so
interpreted) is only rational given the payoff of eternal
life (with a scorekeeper as Woody Allen says). Take that
away, and it looks like a Sucker system. What replaces
the “Christian” vision of submission and saintliness
is the reciprocal altruist with a tit- for- tat morality,

CHAPTER 5: COnSEquEnTIALIST THEORIES: MAxIMIzE THE GOOd Á 111
From Utilitarianism
John Stuart Mill
CHAPTER II.
WHAT UTILITARIANISM IS
* * *
The creed which accepts, as the foundation of morals,
Utility, or the Greatest Happiness Principle, holds that
actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote
happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse
of happiness. By happiness is intended pleasure, and
the absence of pain; by unhappiness, pain, and the
privation of pleasure. To give a clear view of the moral
standard set up by the theory, much more requires to
be said; in particular, what things it includes in the
ideas of pain and pleasure; and to what extent this is
left an open question. But these supplementary expla-
nations do not affect the theory of life on which this
theory of morality is grounded— namely, that plea-
sure, and freedom from pain, are the only things desir-
able as ends; and that all desirable things (which are
as numerous in the utilitarian as in any other scheme)
are desirable either for the pleasure inherent in them-
selves, or as means to the promotion of pleasure and
the prevention of pain.
Now, such a theory of life excites in many minds,
and among them in some of the most estimable in feel-
ing and purpose, inveterate dislike. To suppose that life
has (as they express it) no higher end than pleasure—
no better and nobler object of desire and pursuit— they
designate as utterly mean and grovelling; as a doc-
trine worthy only of swine, to whom the followers of
Epicurus were, at a very early period, contemptuously
likened; and modern holders of the doctrine are occa-
sionally made the subject of equally polite comparisons
by its German, French, and English assailants.
When thus attacked, the Epicureans have always
answered, that it is not they, but their accusers, who
represent human nature in a degrading light; since the
accusation supposes human beings to be capable of
no pleasures except those of which swine are capable.
If this supposition were true, the charge could not be
gainsaid, but would then be no longer an imputation;
for if the sources of pleasure were precisely the same
to human beings and to swine, the rule of life which
is good enough for the one would be good enough for
the other. The comparison of the Epicurean life to that
of beasts is felt as degrading, precisely because a beast’s
pleasures do not satisfy a human being’s conceptions
of happiness. Human beings have faculties more
elevated than the animal appetites, and when once
made conscious of them, do not regard anything as
happiness which does not include their gratification.
I do not, indeed, consider the Epicureans to have been
by any means faultless in drawing out their scheme
of consequences from the utilitarian principle. To do
this in any sufficient manner, many Stoic, as well as
Christian elements require to be included. But there
is no known Epicurean theory of life which does not
assign to the pleasures of the intellect, of the feel-
ings and imagination, and of the moral sentiments, a
much higher value as pleasures than to those of mere
sensation. It must be admitted, however, that utili-
tarian writers in general have placed the superiority
of mental over bodily pleasures chiefly in the greater
permanency, safety, uncostliness, &c., of the former—
that is, in their circumstantial advantages rather than
in their intrinsic nature. And on all these points utili-
tarians have fully proved their case; but they might
have taken the other, and, as it may be called, higher
ground, with entire consistency. It is quite compatible
with the principle of utility to recognise the fact, that
some kinds of pleasure are more desirable and more
valuable than others. It would be absurd that while,
in estimating all other things, quality is considered as
well as quantity, the estimation of pleasures should be
supposed to depend on quantity alone.
If I am asked, what I mean by difference of qual-
ity in pleasures, or what makes one pleasure more
valuable than another, merely as a pleasure, except
its being greater in amount, there is but one possible
answer. Of two pleasures, if there be one to which John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism, Chapter 2 (edited).

112 Á PART 3: THEORIES OF MORALITY
contribute to it: but its most appropriate appellation is
a sense of dignity, which all human beings possess in
one form or other, and in some, though by no means in
exact, proportion to their higher faculties, and which
is so essential a part of the happiness of those in whom
it is strong, that nothing which conflicts with it could
be, otherwise than momentarily, an object of desire
to them. Whoever supposes that this preference takes
place at a sacrifice of happiness— that the superior
being, in anything like equal circumstances, is not hap-
pier than the inferior— confounds the two very differ-
ent ideas, of happiness, and content. It is indisputable
that the being whose capacities of enjoyment are low,
has the greatest chance of having them fully satisfied;
and a highly- endowed being will always feel that any
happiness which he can look for, as the world is consti-
tute, is imperfect. But he can learn to bear its imperfec-
tions, if they are at all bearable; and they will not make
him envy the being who is indeed unconscious of the
imperfections, but only because he feels not at all the
good which those imperfections qualify. It is better to
be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; bet-
ter to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if
the fool, or the pig, is of a different opinion, it is because
they only know their own side of the question. The
other party to the comparison knows both sides.
It may be objected, that many who are capable of
the higher pleasures, occasionally, under the influ-
ence of temptation, postpone them to the lower.
But this is quite compatible with a full appreciation
of the intrinsic superiority of the higher. Men often,
from infirmity of character, make their election for
the nearer good, though they know it to be the less
valuable; and this no less when the choice is between
two bodily pleasures, than when it is between bodily
and mental. They pursue sensual indulgences to the
injury of health, though perfectly aware that health
is the greater good. It may be further objected, that
many who begin with youthful enthusiasm for every-
thing noble, as they advance in years sink into indo-
lence and selfishness. But I do not believe that those
who undergo this very common change, voluntarily
choose the lower description of pleasures in prefer-
ence to the higher. I believe that before they devote
themselves exclusively to the one, they have already
all or almost all who have experience of both give
a decided preference, irrespective of any feeling of
moral obligation to prefer it, that is the more desirable
pleasure. If one of the two is, by those who are compe-
tently acquainted with both, placed so far above the
other that they prefer it, even though knowing it to
be attended with a greater amount of discontent, and
would not resign it for any quantity of the other plea-
sure which their nature is capable of, we are justified
in ascribing to the preferred enjoyment a superiority
in quality, so far outweighing quantity as to render it,
in comparison, of small account.
Now it is an unquestionable fact that those who are
equally acquainted with, and equally capable of appre-
ciating and enjoying, both, do give a most marked
preference to the manner of existence which employs
their higher faculties. Few human creatures would con-
sent to be changed into any of the lower animals, for a
promise of the fullest allowance of a beast’s pleasures;
no intelligent human being would consent to be a fool,
no instructed person would be an ignoramus, no per-
son of feeling and conscience would be selfish and base,
even though they should be persuaded that the fool, the
dunce, or the rascal is better satisfied with his lot than
they are with theirs. They would not resign what they
possess more than he, for the most complete satisfac-
tion of all the desires which they have in common with
him. If they ever fancy they would, it is only in cases
of unhappiness so extreme, that to escape from it they
would exchange their lot for almost any other, how-
ever, undesirable in their own eyes. A being of higher
faculties requires more to make him happy, is capable
probably of more acute suffering, and is certainly
accessible to it at more points, than one of an inferior
type; but in spite of these liabilities, he can never really
wish to sink into what he feels to be a lower grade of
existence. We may give what explanation we please of
this unwillingness; we may attribute it to pride, a name
which is given indiscriminately to some of the most
and to some of the least estimable feelings of which
mankind are capable; we may refer it to the love of lib-
erty and personal independence, an appeal to which
was with the Stoics one of the most effective means for
the inculcation of it; to the love of power, or the love
of excitement, both of which do really enter into and

CHAPTER 5: COnSEquEnTIALIST THEORIES: MAxIMIzE THE GOOd Á 113
I have dwelt on this point, as being a necessary
part of a perfectly just conception of Utility or Happi-
ness, considered as the directive rule of human con-
duct. But it is by no means an indispensable condition
to the acceptance of the utilitarian standard; for that
standard is not the agent’s own greatest happiness, but
the greatest amount of happiness altogether; and if it
may possibly be doubted whether a noble character is
always the happier for its nobleness, there can be no
doubt that it makes other people happier, and that the
world in general is immensely a gainer by it. Utilitari-
anism, therefore, could only attain its end by the gen-
eral cultivation of nobleness of character, even if each
individual were only benefited by the nobleness of
others, and his own, so far as happiness is concerned,
were a sheer deduction from the benefit. But the bare
enunciation of such an absurdity as this last, renders
refutation superfluous.
According to the Greatest Happiness Principle, as
above explained, the ultimate end, with reference to
and for the sake of which all other things are desirable
(whether we are considering our own good or that of
other people), is an existence exempt as far as possible
from pain, and as rich as possible in enjoyments, both
in point of quantity and quality; the test of quality,
and the rule for measuring it against quantity, being
the preference felt by those who, in their opportu-
nities of experience, to which must be added their
habits of self- consciousness and self- observation, are
best furnished with the means of comparison. This
being, according to the utilitarian opinion, the end
of human action, is necessarily also the standard of
morality; which may accordingly be defined, the rules
and precepts for human conduct, by the observance of
which an existence such as has been described might
be, to the greatest extent possible, secured to all man-
kind; and not to them only, but, so far as the nature of
things admits, to the whole sentient creation.
* * *
I must again repeat, what the assailants of utilitari-
anism seldom have the justice to acknowledge, that
the happiness which forms the utilitarian standard of
what is right in conduct, is not the agent’s own hap-
piness, but that of all concerned. As between his own
become incapable of the other. Capacity for the nobler
feelings is in most natures a very tender plant, easily
killed, not only by hostile influences, but by mere want
of sustenance; and in the majority of young persons it
speedily dies away if the occupations to which their
position in life has devoted them, and the society into
which it has thrown them, are not favourable to keep-
ing that higher capacity in exercise. Men lose their
high aspirations as they lose their intellectual tastes,
because they have not time or opportunity for indulg-
ing them; and they addict themselves to inferior plea-
sures, not because they deliberately prefer them, but
because they are either the only ones to which they
have access, or the only ones which they are any lon-
ger capable of enjoying. It may be questioned whether
any one who has remained equally susceptible to both
classes of pleasures, ever knowingly and calmly pre-
ferred the lower; though many, in all ages, have bro-
ken down in an ineffectual attempt to combine both.
From this verdict of the only competent judges,
I apprehend there can be no appeal. On a question
which is the best worth having of two pleasures, or
which of two modes of existence is the most grate-
ful to the feelings, apart from its moral attributes and
from its consequences, the judgment of those who
are qualified by knowledge of both, or, if they differ,
that of the majority among them, must be admitted as
final. And there needs be the less hesitation to accept
this judgment respecting the quality of pleasures,
since there is no other tribunal to be referred to even
on the question of quantity. What means are there of
determining which is the acutest of two pairs, or the
intensest of two pleasurable sensations, except the
general suffrage of those who are familiar with both?
Neither pains nor pleasures are homogeneous, and
pain is always heterogeneous with pleasure. What is
there to decide whether a particular pleasure is worth
purchasing at the cost of a particular pain, except the
feelings and judgment of the experienced? When,
therefore, those feelings and judgment declare the
pleasures derived from the higher faculties to be pref-
erable in kind, apart from the question of intensity, to
those of which the animal nature, disjoined from the
higher faculties, is susceptible, they are entitled on
this subject to the same regard.

114 Á PART 3: THEORIES OF MORALITY
any opinion against which they entertain a prejudice,
and men are in general so little conscious of this vol-
untary ignorance as a defect, that the vulgarest mis-
understandings of ethical doctrines are continually
met with in the deliberate writings of persons of the
greatest pretensions both to high principle and to
philosophy. We not uncommonly hear the doctrine
of utility inveighed against as a godless doctrine. If it
be necessary to say anything at all against so mere an
assumption, we may say that the question depends
upon what idea we have formed of the moral charac-
ter of the Deity. If it be a true belief that God desires,
above all things, the happiness of his creatures, and
that this was his purpose in their creation, utility is
not only not a godless doctrine, but more profoundly
religious than any other. If it be meant that utilitari-
anism does not recognise the revealed will of God as
the supreme law of morals, I answer, that an utilitar-
ian who believes in the perfect goodness and wisdom
of God, necessarily believes that whatever God has
thought fit to reveal on the subject of morals, must ful-
fil the requirements of utility in a supreme degree. But
others besides utilitarians have been of opinion that
the Christian revelation was intended, and is fitted, to
inform the hearts and minds of mankind with a spirit
which should enable them to find for themselves what
is right, and incline them to do it when found, rather
than to tell them, except in a very general way, what it
is: and that we need a doctrine of ethics, carefully fol-
lowed out, to interpret to us the will of God. Whether
this opinion is correct or not, it is superfluous here to
discuss; since whatever aid religion, either natural or
revealed, can afford to ethical investigation, is as open
to the utilitarian moralist as to any other. He can use
it as the testimony of God to the usefulness or hurtful-
ness of any given course of action, by as good a right as
others can use it for the indication of a transcenden-
tal law, having no connexion with usefulness or with
happiness.
Again, Utility is often summarily stigmatized as
an immoral doctrine by giving it the name of Expedi-
ency, and taking advantage of the popular use of that
term to contrast it with Principle. But the Expedient,
in the sense in which it is opposed to the Right, gener-
ally means that which is expedient for the particular
happiness and that of others, utilitarianism requires
him to be as strictly impartial as a disinterested and
benevolent spectator. In the golden rule of Jesus of
Nazareth, we read the complete spirit of the ethics of
utility. To do as one would be done by, and to love
one’s neighbour as oneself, constitute the ideal per-
fection of utilitarian morality. As the means of mak-
ing the nearest approach to this ideal, utility would
enjoin, first, that laws and social arrangements should
place the happiness, or (as speaking practically it may
be called) the interest, of every individual, as nearly as
possible in harmony with the interest of the whole;
and secondly, that education and opinion, which
have so vast a power over human character, should
so use that power as to establish in the mind of every
individual an indissoluble association between his
own happiness and the good of the whole; especially
between his own happiness and the practice of such
modes of conduct, negative and positive, as regard for
the universal happiness prescribes: so that not only he
may be unable to conceive the possibility of happiness
to himself, consistently with conduct opposed to the
general good, but also that a direct impulse to pro-
mote the general good may be in every individual one
of the habitual motives of action, and the sentiments
connected therewith may fill a large and prominent
place in every human being’s sentient existence. If the
impugners of the utilitarian morality represented it
to their own minds in this its true character, I know
not what recommendation possessed by any other
morality they could possibly affirm to be wanting to
it: what more beautiful or more exalted developments
of human nature any other ethical system can be sup-
posed to foster, or what springs of action, not acces-
sible to the utilitarian, such systems rely on for giving
effect to their mandates.
* * *
It may not be superfluous to notice a few more
of the common misapprehensions of utilitarian eth-
ics, even those which are so obvious and gross that it
might appear impossible for any person of candour
and intelligence to fall into them: since persons, even
of considerable mental endowments, often give them-
selves so little trouble to understand the bearings of

CHAPTER 5: COnSEquEnTIALIST THEORIES: MAxIMIzE THE GOOd Á 115
that the violation, for a present advantage, of a rule of
such transcendent expediency, is not expedient, and
that he who, for the sake of a convenience to himself or
to some other individual, does what depends on him to
deprive mankind of the good, and inflict upon them the
evil, involved in the greater or less reliance which they
can place in each other’s word, acts the part of one of
their worst enemies. Yet that even this rule, sacred as it
is, admits of possible exceptions, is acknowledged by all
moralists; the chief of which is when the withholding
of some fact (as of information from a malefactor, or
of bad news from a person dangerously ill) would pre-
serve some one (especially a person other than oneself)
from great and unmerited evil, and when the withhold-
ing can only be effected by denial. But in order that the
exception may not extend itself beyond the need, and
may have the least possible effect in weakening reliance
on veracity, it ought to be recognized, and, if possible, its
limits defined; and if the principle of utility is good for
anything, it must be good for weighing these conflict-
ing utilities against one another, and marking out the
region within which one or the other preponderates.
* * *
interest of the agent himself: as when a minister sacri-
fices the interest of his country to keep himself in place.
When it means anything better than this, it means that
which is expedient for some immediate object, some
temporary purpose, but which violates a rule whose
observance is expedient in a much higher degree. The
Expedient, in this sense, instead of being the same
thing with the useful, is a branch of the hurtful. Thus,
it would often be expedient, for the purpose of getting
over some momentary embarrassment, or attaining
some object immediately useful to ourselves or others,
to tell a lie. But inasmuch as the cultivation in ourselves
of a sensitive feeling on the subject of veracity, is one
of the most useful, and the enfeeblement of that feel-
ing one of the most hurtful, things to which our con-
duct can be instrumental; and inasmuch as any, even
unintentional, deviation from truth, does that much
towards weakening the trustworthiness of human
assertion, which is not only the principal support of
all present social well- being, but the insufficiency of
which does more than any one thing that can be named
to keep back civilisation, virtue, everything on which
human happiness on the largest scale depends; we feel
From A Theory of Justice
John Rawls
THE ROLE OF JUSTICE
Justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth
is of systems of thought. A theory however elegant and
economical must be rejected or revised if it is untrue;
likewise laws and institutions no matter how efficient
and well- arranged must be reformed or abolished if
they are unjust. Each person possesses an inviolability
founded on justice that even the welfare of society as
a whole cannot override. For this reason justice denies
that the loss of freedom for some is made right by a
greater good shared by others. It does not allow that the
sacrifices imposed on a few are outweighed by the larger
sum of advantages enjoyed by many. Therefore in a just
society the liberties of equal citizenship are taken as
settled, the rights secured by justice are not subject to
political bargaining or to the calculus of social interests.
The only thing that permits us to acquiesce in an erro-
neous theory is the lack of a better one; analogously, an
injustice is tolerable only when it is necessary to avoid
an even greater injustice. Being first virtues of human
activities, truth and justice are uncompromising.
These propositions seem to express our intuitive
conviction of the primacy of justice. No doubt they are
From John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, rev. ed. (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1999) 3–6, 10–15, 52–54. Copyright © 1971,
1999 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Reprinted
by permission of the publisher.

116 Á PART 3: THEORIES OF MORALITY
expressed too strongly. In any event I wish to inquire
whether these contentions or others similar to them
are sound, and if so how they can be accounted for. To
this end it is necessary to work out a theory of justice in
the light of which these assertions can be interpreted
and assessed. I shall begin by considering the role of
the principles of justice. Let us assume, to fix ideas,
that a society is a more or less self- sufficient associa-
tion of persons who in their relations to one another
recognize certain rules of conduct as binding and who
for the most part act in accordance with them. Sup-
pose further that these rules specify a system of coop-
eration designed to advance the good of those taking
part in it. Then, although a society is a cooperative
venture for mutual advantage, it is typically marked
by a conflict as well as by an identity of interests. There
is an identity of interests since social cooperation
makes possible a better life for all than any would have
if each were to live solely by his own efforts. There is a
conflict of interests since persons are not indifferent
as to how the greater benefits produced by their col-
laboration are distributed, for in order to pursue their
ends they each prefer a larger to a lesser share. A set
of principles is required for choosing among the vari-
ous social arrangements which determine this divi-
sion of advantages and for underwriting an agreement
on the proper distributive shares. These principles are
the principles of social justice: they provide a way of
assigning rights and duties in the basic institutions
of society and they define the appropriate distribution
of the benefits and burdens of social cooperation.
Now let us say that a society is well- ordered when
it is not only designed to advance the good of its
members but when it is also effectively regulated by a
public conception of justice. That is, it is a society in
which (1) everyone accepts and knows that the oth-
ers accept the same principles of justice, and (2) the
basic social institutions generally satisfy and are gen-
erally known to satisfy these principles. In this case
while men may put forth excessive demands on one
another, they nevertheless acknowledge a common
point of view from which their claims may be adjudi-
cated. If men’s inclination to self- interest makes their
vigilance against one another necessary, their public
sense of justice makes their secure association together
possible. Among individuals with disparate aims and
purposes a shared conception of justice establishes the
bonds of civic friendship; the general desire for justice
limits the pursuit of other ends. One may think of a
public conception of justice as constituting the funda-
mental charter of a well- ordered human association.
Existing societies are of course seldom well- ordered
in this sense, for what is just and unjust is usually in
dispute. Men disagree about which principles should
define the basic terms of their association. Yet we may
still say, despite this disagreement, that they each
have a conception of justice. That is, they understand
the need for, and they are prepared to affirm, a char-
acteristic set of principles for assigning basic rights
and duties and for determining what they take to be
the proper distribution of the benefits and burdens of
social cooperation. Thus it seems natural to think of
the concept of justice as distinct from the various con-
ceptions of justice and as being specified by the role
which these different sets of principles, these different
conceptions, have in common.1 Those who hold dif-
ferent conceptions of justice can, then, still agree that
institutions are just when no arbitrary distinctions are
made between persons in the assigning of basic rights
and duties and when the rules determine a proper bal-
ance between competing claims to the advantages of
social life. Men can agree to this description of just
institutions since the notions of an arbitrary distinc-
tion and of a proper balance, which are included in the
concept of justice, are left open for each to interpret
according to the principles of justice that he accepts.
These principles single out which similarities and
differences among persons are relevant in determin-
ing rights and duties and they specify which division
of advantages is appropriate. Clearly this distinction
between the concept and the various conceptions of
justice settles no important questions. It simply helps
to identify the role of the principles of social justice.
Some measure of agreement in conceptions of jus-
tice is, however, not the only prerequisite for a viable
human community. There are other fundamental
social problems, in particular those of coordination,
efficiency, and stability. Thus the plans of individu-
als need to be fitted together so that their activities
are compatible with one another and they can all be

CHAPTER 5: COnSEquEnTIALIST THEORIES: MAxIMIzE THE GOOd Á 117
principles that free and rational persons concerned
to further their own interests would accept in an ini-
tial position of equality as defining the fundamental
terms of their association. These principles are to regu-
late all further agreements; they specify the kinds of
social cooperation that can be entered into and the
forms of government that can be established. This way
of regarding the principles of justice I shall call justice
as fairness.
Thus we are to imagine that those who engage in
social cooperation choose together, in one joint act,
the principles which are to assign basic rights and
duties and to determine the division of social benefits.
Men are to decide in advance how they are to regulate
their claims against one another and what is to be the
foundation charter of their society. Just as each person
must decide by rational reflection what constitutes his
good, that is, the system of ends which it is rational for
him to pursue, so a group of persons must decide once
and for all what is to count among them as just and
unjust. The choice which rational men would make in
this hypothetical situation of equal liberty assuming
for the present that this choice problem has a solution,
determines the principles of justice.
In justice as fairness the original position of equal-
ity corresponds to the state of nature in the traditional
theory of the social contract. This original position is
not, of course, thought of as an actual historical state
of affairs, much less as a primitive condition of cul-
ture. It is understood as a purely hypothetical situa-
tion characterized so as to lead to a certain conception
of justice.3 Among the essential features of this situa-
tion is that no one knows his place in society, his class
position or social status, nor does any one know his
fortune in the distribution of natural assets and abili-
ties, his intelligence, strength, and the like. I shall even
assume that the parties do not know their conceptions
of the good or their special psychological propensities.
The principles of justice are chosen behind a veil of
ignorance. This ensures that no one is advantaged or
disadvantaged in the choice of principles by the out-
come of natural chance or the contingency of social
circumstances. Since all are similarly situated and no
one is able to design principles to favor his particular
condition, the principles of justice are the result of a
carried through without anyone’s legitimate expecta-
tions being severely disappointed. Moreover, the exe-
cution of these plans should lead to the achievement
of social ends in ways that are efficient and consistent
with justice. And finally, the scheme of social coopera-
tion must be stable: it must be more or less regularly
complied with and its basic rules willingly acted upon;
and when infractions occur, stabilizing forces should
exist that prevent further violations and tend to
restore the arrangement. Now it is evident that these
three problems are connected with that of justice. In
the absence of a certain measure of agreement on what
is just and unjust, it is clearly more difficult for indi-
viduals to coordinate their plans efficiently in order
to insure that mutually beneficial arrangements are
maintained. Distrust and resentment corrode the ties
of civility, and suspicion and hostility tempt men to
act in ways they would otherwise avoid. So while the
distinctive role of conceptions of justice is to specify
basic rights and duties and to determine the appropri-
ate distributive shares, the way in which a conception
does this is bound to affect the problems of efficiency,
coordination, and stability. We cannot, in general,
assess a conception of justice by its distributive role
alone, however useful this role may be in identify-
ing the concept of justice. We must take into account
its wider connections; for even though justice has a
certain priority, being the most important virtue of
institutions, it is still true that, other things equal, one
conception of justice is preferable to another when its
broader consequences are more desirable.
* * *
THE MAIN IDEA OF THE THEORY OF JUSTICE
My aim is to present a conception of justice which
generalizes and carries to a higher level of abstraction
the familiar theory of the social contract as found,
say, in Locke. Rousseau, and Kant.2 In order to do this
we are not to think of the original contract as one to
enter a particular society or to set up a particular form
of government. Rather, the guiding idea is that the
principles of justice for the basic structure of society
are the object of the original agreement. They are the

118 Á PART 3: THEORIES OF MORALITY
some particular society, and the nature of this posi-
tion materially affects his life prospects. Yet a society
satisfying the principles of justice as fairness comes as
close as a society can to being a voluntary scheme, for
it meets the principles which free and equal persons
would assent to under circumstances that are fair. In
this sense its members are autonomous and the obli-
gations they recognize self- imposed.
One feature of justice as fairness is to think of the
parties in the initial situation as rational and mutu-
ally disinterested. This does not mean that the par-
ties are egoists, that is, individuals with only certain
kinds of interests, say in wealth, prestige, and domina-
tion. But they are conceived as not taking an interest
in one another’s interests. They are to presume that
even their spiritual aims may be opposed, in the way
that the aims of those of different religions may be
opposed. Moreover, the concept of rationality must
be interpreted as far as possible in the narrow sense,
standard in economic theory, of taking the most effec-
tive means to given ends. I shall modify this concept
to some extent, as explained later, but one must try to
avoid introducing into it any controversial ethical ele-
ments. The initial situation must be characterized by
stipulations that are widely accepted.
In working out the conception of justice as fair-
ness one main task clearly is to determine which
principles of justice would be chosen in the original
position. To do this we must describe this situation
in some detail and formulate with care the problem
of choice which it presents. These matters I shall take
up in the immediately succeeding chapters. It may be
observed, however, that once the principles of justice
are thought of as arising from an original agreement in
a situation of equality, it is an open question whether
the principle of utility would be acknowledged. Off-
hand it hardly seems likely that persons who view
themselves as equals, entitled to press their claims
upon one another, would agree to a principle which
may require lesser life prospects for some simply for
the sake of a greater sum of advantages enjoyed by
others. Since each desires to protect his interests, his
capacity to advance his conception of the good, no
one has a reason to acquiesce in an enduring loss for
himself in order to bring about a greater net balance
fair agreement or bargain. For given the circumstances
of the original position, the symmetry of everyone’s
relations to each other, this initial situation is fair
between individuals as moral persons, that is, as ratio-
nal beings with their own ends and capable, I shall
assume, of a sense of justice. The original position is,
one might say, the appropriate initial status quo, and
thus the fundamental agreements reached in it are
fair. This explains the propriety of the name “justice
as fairness”: it conveys the idea that the principles of
justice are agreed to in an initial situation that is fair.
The name does not mean that the concepts of justice
and fairness are the same, any more than the phrase
“poetry as metaphor” means that the concepts of
poetry and metaphor are the same.
Justice as fairness begins, as I have said, with
one of the most general of all choices which persons
might make together, namely, with the choice of the
first principles of a conception of justice which is to
regulate all subsequent criticism and reform of insti-
tutions. Then, having chosen a conception of justice,
we can suppose that they are to choose a constitu-
tion and a legislature to enact laws, and so on, all in
accordance with the principles of justice initially
agreed upon. Our social situation is just if it is such
that by this sequence of hypothetical agreements we
would have contracted into the general system of
rules which defines it. Moreover, assuming that the
original position does determine a set of principles
(that is, that a particular conception of justice would
be chosen), it will then be true that whenever social
institutions satisfy these principles those engaged in
them can say to one another that they are cooperat-
ing on terms to which they would agree if they were
free and equal persons whose relations with respect
to one another were fair. They could all view their
arrangements as meeting the stipulations which they
would acknowledge in an initial situation that embod-
ies widely accepted and reasonable constraints on the
choice of principles. The general recognition of this
fact would provide the basis for a public acceptance
of the corresponding principles of justice. No society
can, of course, be a scheme of cooperation which men
enter voluntarily in a literal sense; each person finds
himself placed at birth in some particular position in

CHAPTER 5: COnSEquEnTIALIST THEORIES: MAxIMIzE THE GOOd Á 119
suggest to be convincing to everyone. It is, therefore,
worth noting from the outset that justice as fairness,
like other contract views, consists of two parts: (1) an
interpretation of the initial situation and of the prob-
lem of choice posed there, and (2) a set of principles
which, it is argued, would be agreed to. One may
accept the first part of the theory (or some variant
thereof), but not the other, and conversely. The con-
cept of the initial contractual situation may seem rea-
sonable although the particular principles proposed
are rejected. To be sure, I want to maintain that the
most appropriate conception of this situation does
lead to principles of justice contrary to utilitarianism
and perfectionism, and therefore that the contract
doctrine provides an alternative to these views. Still,
one may dispute this contention even though one
grants that the contractarian method is a useful way
of studying ethical theories and of setting forth their
underlying assumptions.
Justice as fairness is an example of what I have
called a contract theory. Now there may be an objec-
tion to the term “contract” and related expressions,
but I think it will serve reasonably well. Many words
have misleading connotations which at first are likely
to confuse. The terms “utility” and “utilitarianism”
are surely no exception. They too have unfortunate
suggestions which hostile critics have been willing to
exploit; yet they are clear enough for those prepared
to study utilitarian doctrine. The same should be true
of the term “contract” applied to moral theories. As
I have mentioned, to understand it one has to keep
in mind that it implies a certain level of abstraction.
In particular, the content of the relevant agreement is
not to enter a given society or to adopt a given form
of government, but to accept certain moral prin-
ciples. Moreover, the undertakings referred to are
purely hypothetical: a contract view holds that certain
principles would be accepted in a well- defined initial
situation.
The merit of the contract terminology is that it
conveys the idea that principles of justice may be
conceived as principles that would be chosen by
rational persons, and that in this way conceptions
of justice may be explained and justified. The theory
of justice is a part, perhaps the most significant part,
of satisfaction. In the absence of strong and lasting
benevolent impulses, a rational man would not accept
a basic structure merely because it maximized the alge-
braic sum of advantages irrespective of its permanent
effects on his own basic rights and interests. Thus it
seems that the principle of utility is incompatible with
the conception of social cooperation among equals for
mutual advantage. It appears to be inconsistent with
the idea of reciprocity implicit in the notion of a well-
ordered society. Or, at any rate, so I shall argue.
I shall maintain instead that the persons in the ini-
tial situation would choose two rather different prin-
ciples: the first requires equality in the assignment
of basic rights and duties, while the second holds
that social and economic inequalities, for example
inequalities of wealth and authority are just only if
they result in compensating benefits for everyone, and
in particular for the least advantaged members of soci-
ety. These principles rule out justifying institutions on
the grounds mat the hardships of some are offset by a
greater good in the aggregate. It may be expedient but
it is not just that some should have less in order that
others may prosper. But there is no injustice in the
greater benefits earned by a few provided that the situ-
ation of persons not so fortunate is thereby improved.
The intuitive idea is that since everyone’s well- being
depends upon a scheme of cooperation without which
no one could have a satisfactory life, the division of
advantages should be such as to draw forth the willing
cooperation of everyone taking part in it, including
those less well situated. The two principles mentioned
seem to be a fair basis on which those better endowed,
or more fortunate in their social position, neither of
which we can be said to deserve, could expect the
willing cooperation of others when some workable
scheme is a necessary condition of the welfare of all.4
Once we decide to look for a conception of justice that
prevents the use of the accidents of natural endow-
ment and the contingencies of social circumstance as
counters in a quest for political and economic advan-
tage, we are led to these principles. They express the
result of leaving aside those aspects of the social world
that seem arbitrary from a moral point of view.
The problem of the choice of principles, however,
is extremely difficult. I do not expect the answer I shall

120 Á PART 3: THEORIES OF MORALITY
TWO PRINCIPLES OF JUSTICE
I shall now state in a provisional form the two prin-
ciples of justice that I believe would be agreed to in
the original position The first formulation of these
principles is tentative. As we go on I shall consider
several formulations and approximate step by step
the final statement to be given much later. I believe
that doing this allows the exposition to proceed in a
natural way.
The first statement of the two principles reads as
follows.
First: each person is to have an equal right to the
most extensive scheme of equal basic liberties com-
patible with a similar scheme of liberties for others.
Second: social and economic inequalities are to
be arranged so that they are both (a) reasonably
expected to be to everyone’s advantage, and (b)
attached to positions and offices open to all.
* * *
These principles primarily apply, as I have said, to
the basic structure of society and govern the assign-
ment of rights and duties and regulate the distribution
of social and economic advantages. Their formula-
tion presupposes that, for the purposes of a theory
of justice, the social structure may be viewed as hav-
ing two more or less distinct parts, the first principle
applying to the one, the second principle to the other.
Thus we distinguish between the aspects of the social
system that define and secure the equal basic liberties
and the aspects that specify and establish social and
economic inequalities. Now it is essential to observe
that the basic liberties are given by a list of such liber-
ties. Important among these are political liberty (the
right to vote and to hold public office) and freedom
of speech and assembly: liberty of conscience and
freedom of thought: freedom of the person, which
includes freedom from psychological oppression and
physical assault and dismemberment (integrity of the
person); the right to hold personal property and free-
dom from arbitrary arrest and seizure as defined by
the concept of the rule of law. These liberties are to be
equal by the first principle.
of the theory of rational choice. Furthermore, prin-
ciples of justice deal with conflicting claims upon the
advantages won by social cooperation; they apply to
the relations among several persons or groups. The
word “contract” suggests this plurality as well as the
condition that the appropriate division of advantages
must be in accordance with principles acceptable to
all parties. The condition of publicity for principles
of justice is also connoted by the contract phraseol-
ogy. Thus, if these principles are the outcome of an
agreement, citizens have a knowledge of the prin-
ciples that others follow. It is characteristic of con-
tract theories to stress the public nature of political
principles. Finally there is the long tradition of the
contract doctrine. Expressing the tie with this line of
thought helps to define ideas and accords with natu-
ral piety. There are then several advantages in the use
of the term “contract.” With due precautions taken,
it should not be misleading.
A final remark. Justice as fairness is not a com-
plete contract theory. For it is clear that the contrac-
tarian idea can be extended to the choice of more
or less an entire ethical system, that is, to a system
including principles for all the virtues and not only
for justice. Now for the most part I shall consider
only principles of justice and others closely related
to them; I make no attempt to discuss the virtues in
a systematic way. Obviously if justice as fairness suc-
ceeds reasonably well, a next step would be to study
the more general view suggested by the name “right-
ness as fairness.” But even this wider theory fails to
embrace all moral relationships, since it would seem
to include only our relations with other persons and
to leave out of account how we are to conduct our-
selves toward animals and the rest of nature. I do
not contend that the contract notion offers a way
to approach these questions which are certainly of
the first importance; and I shall have to put them
aside. We must recognize the limited scope of jus-
tice as fairness and of the general type of view that it
exemplifies. How far its conclusions must be revised
once these other matters are understood cannot be
decided in advance.
* * *

CHAPTER 5: COnSEquEnTIALIST THEORIES: MAxIMIzE THE GOOd Á 121
assumptions that I must eventually try to explain
and justify. For the present, it should be observed
that these principle are a special case of a more gen-
eral conception of justice that can be expressed as
follows.
All social values— liberty and opportunity, income
and wealth, and the social bases of self- respect— are
to be distributed equally unless an unequal distri-
bution of any, or all, of these values is to everyone’s
advantage.
Injustice, then, is simply inequalities that are not
to the benefit of all. Of course, this conception is
extremely vague and requires interpretation.
NOTES
1. Here I follow H. L. A. Hart, The Concept of Law (Oxford, The
Clarendon Press, 1961), pp. 155–159.
2. As the text suggests, I shall regard Locke’s Second Treatise of
Government, Rousseau’s The Social Contract, and Kant’s ethical
works beginning with The Foundations of the Metaphysics of Mor-
als as definitive of the contract tradition. For all of its greatness,
Hobbes’s Leviathan raises special problems. A general historical
survey is provided by J. W. Gough, The Social Contract, 2nd ed.
(Oxford, The Clarendon Press, 1957), and Otto Gierke, Natural
Law and the Theory of Society. trans. with an introduction by
Ernest Barker (Cambridge, The University Press, 1934). A pre-
sentation of the contract view as primarily an ethical theory is
to be found in G. R. Grice, The Grounds of Moral Judgment (Cam-
bridge, The University Press, 1967). See also §19, note 30.
3. Kant is clear that the original agreement is hypothetical. See
The Metaphysics of Morals, pt. I (Rechtslehre), especially §§47, 52;
and pt. II of the essay “Concerning the Common Saying: This
May Be True in Theory but It Does Not Apply in Practice,” in
Kant’s Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss and trans. by H. B. Nisbet
(Cambridge, The University Press, 1970), pp. 73–87. See Georges
Vlachos, La Pensée politique de Kant (Paris, Presses Universitaires
de France, 1962), pp. 326–335; and J. G. Murphy, Kant: The
Philosophy of Right (London, Macmillan, 1970), pp. 109–112,
133–136, for a further discussion.
4. For the formulation of this intuitive idea I am indebted to
Allan Gibbard.
The second principle applies, in the first approxi-
mation, to the distribution of income and wealth and
to the design of organizations that make use of dif-
ferences in authority and responsibility. While the
distribution of wealth and income need not be equal,
it must be to everyone’s advantage and at the same
time, positions of authority and responsibility must
be accessible to all. One applies the second principle
by holding positions open, and then, subject to this
constraint, arranges social and economic inequalities
so that everyone benefits.
These principles are to be arranged in a serial
order with the first principle prior to the second. This
ordering means that infringements of the basic equal
liberties protected by the first principle cannot be
justified, or compensated for, by greater social and
economic advantages. These liberties have a central
range of application within which they can be lim-
ited and compromised only when they conflict with
other basic liberties. Since they may be limited when
they clash with one another, none of these liberties
is absolute; but however they are adjusted to form
one system, this system is to be the same for all. It is
difficult, and perhaps impossible, to give a complete
specification of these liberties independently from
the particular circumstances— social, economic, and
technological— of a given society. The hypothesis is
that the general form of such a list could be devised
with sufficient exactness to sustain this conception
of justice. Of course, liberties not on the list, for
example, the right to own certain kinds of property
(e.g., means of production) and freedom of contract
as understood by the doctrine of laissez- faire are not
basic; and so they are not protected by the priority
of the first principle. Finally, in regard to the second
principle, the distribution of wealth and income, and
positions of authority and responsibility, are to be
consistent with both the basic liberties and equality
of opportunity.
The two principles are rather specific in their
content, and their acceptance rests on certain

122 Á PART 3: THEORIES OF MORALITY
The Entitlement Theory of Justice
Robert Nozick
holdings, the appropriation of unheld things. This
includes the issues of how unheld things may come
to be held, the process, or processes, by which unheld
things may come to be held, the things that may come
to be held by these processes, the extent of what comes
to be held by a particular process, and so on. We shall
refer to the complicated truth about this topic, which
we shall not formulate here, as the principle of justice
in acquisition. The second topic concerns the transfer
of holdings from one person to another. By what pro-
cesses may a person transfer holdings to another? How
may a person acquire a holding from another who
holds it? Under this topic come general descriptions of
voluntary exchange, and gift and (on the other hand)
fraud, as well as reference to particular conventional
details fixed upon in a given society. The complicated
truth about this subject (with placeholders for con-
ventional details) we shall call the principle of justice
in transfer. (And we shall suppose it also includes prin-
ciples governing how a person may divest himself of a
holding, passing it into an unheld state.)
If the world were wholly just, the following induc-
tive definition would exhaustively cover the subject of
justice in holdings.
1. A person who acquires a holding in accordance
with the principle of justice in acquisition is enti-
tled to that holding.
2. A person who acquires a holding in accordance
with the principle of justice in transfer, from
someone else entitled to the holding, is entitled to
the holding.
3. No one is entitled to a holding except by
(repeated) applications of 1 and 2.
The complete principle of distributive justice would say
simply that a distribution is just if everyone is entitled
to the holdings they possess under the distribution.
A distribution is just if it arises from another just dis-
tribution by legitimate means. The legitimate means of
The term “distributive justice” is not a neutral one.
Hearing the term “distribution,” most people presume
that some thing or mechanism uses some principle or
criterion to give out a supply of things. Into this process
of distributing shares some error may have crept. So it
is an open question, at least, whether redistribution
should take place; whether we should do again what
has already been done once, though poorly. However,
we are not in the position of children who have been
given portions of pie by someone who now makes last
minute adjustments to rectify careless cutting. There is
no central distribution, no person or group entitled to
control all the resources, jointly deciding how they are
to be doled out. What each person gets, he gets from
others who give to him in exchange for something, or as
a gift. In a free society, diverse persons control different
resources, and new holdings arise out of the voluntary
exchanges and actions of persons. There is no more a
distributing or distribution of shares than there is a dis-
tributing of mates in a society in which persons choose
whom they shall marry. The total result is the product
of many individual decisions which the different indi-
viduals involved are entitled to make. Some uses of the
term “distribution,” it is true, do not imply a previous
distributing appropriately judged by some criterion (for
example, “probability distribution”); nevertheless, . . .
it would be best to use a terminology that clearly is
neutral. We shall speak of people’s holdings; a principle
of justice in holdings describes (part of) what justice tells
us (requires) about holdings. I shall state first what I take
to be the correct view about justice in holdings, and
then turn to the discussion of alternate views.
THE ENTITLEMENT THEORY
The subject of justice in holdings consists of three
major topics. The first is the original acquisition of
From Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia ( New York: Basic
Books, 1994), 149–57, 160–63, 167–74. Copyright © 1974.
Reprinted by permission of Basic Books, an imprint of Hachette
Book Group, Inc.

CHAPTER 5: COnSEquEnTIALIST THEORIES: MAxIMIzE THE GOOd Á 123
principles of justice and rights against interference),
and information about the actual course of events that
flowed from these injustices, until the present, and it
yields a description (or descriptions) of holdings in the
society. The principle of rectification presumably will
make use of its best estimate of subjunctive informa-
tion about what would have occurred (or a probability
distribution over what might have occurred, using the
expected value) if the injustice had not taken place. If
the actual description of holdings turns out not to be
one of the descriptions yielded by the principle, then
one of the descriptions yielded must be realized.2
The general outlines of the theory of justice in
holdings are that the holdings of a person are just if he
is entitled to them by the principles of justice in acqui-
sition and transfer, or by the principle of rectification
of injustice (as specified by the first two principles).
If each person’s holdings are just, then the total set
(distribution) of holdings is just.
* * *
HISTORICAL PRINCIPLES AND
END- RESULT PRINCIPLES
The general outlines of the entitlement theory illu-
minate the nature and defects of other conceptions
of distributive justice. The entitlement theory of
justice in distribution is historical; whether a distri-
bution is just depends upon how it came about. In
contrast, current time- slice principles of justice hold
that the justice of a distribution is determined by
how things are distributed (who has what) as judged
by some structural principle(s) of just distribution.
A utilitarian who judges between any two distribu-
tions by seeing which has the greater sum of util-
ity and, if the sums tie, applies some fixed equality
criterion to choose the more equal distribution,
would hold a current time- slice principle of justice.
As would someone who had a fixed schedule of
trade- offs between the sum of happiness and equal-
ity. According to a current time- slice principle, all
that needs to be looked at, in judging the justice of
a distribution, is who ends up with what; in com-
paring any two distributions one need look only at
moving from one distribution to another are specified
by the principle of justice in transfer. The legitimate
first “moves” are specified by the principle of justice in
acquisition.1 Whatever arises from a just situation by
just steps is itself just. The means of change specified by
the principle of justice in transfer preserve justice.
* * *
Not all actual situations are generated in accor-
dance with the two principles of justice in holdings:
the principle of justice in acquisition and the princi-
ple of justice in transfer. Some people steal from oth-
ers, or defraud them, or enslave them, seizing their
product and preventing them from living as they
choose, or forcibly exclude others from competing
in exchanges. None of these are permissible modes of
transition from one situation to another. And some
persons acquire holdings by means not sanctioned by
the principle of justice in acquisition. The existence
of past injustice (previous violations of the first two
principles of justice in holdings) raises the third major
topic under justice in holdings: the rectification of
injustice in holdings. If past injustice has shaped pres-
ent holdings in various ways, some identifiable and
some not, what now, if anything, ought to be done to
rectify these injustices? What obligations do the per-
formers of injustice have toward those whose position
is worse than it would have been had the injustice not
been done? Or, than it would have been had compen-
sation been paid promptly? How, if at all, do things
change if the beneficiaries and those made worse off
are not the direct parties in the act of injustice, but,
for example, their descendants? Is an injustice done
to someone whose holding was itself based upon an
unrectified injustice? How far back must one go in
wiping clean the historical slate of injustices? What
may victims of injustice permissibly do in order to rec-
tify the injustices being done to them, including the
many injustices done by persons acting through their
government? I do not know of a thorough or theoreti-
cally sophisticated treatment of such issues. Idealizing
greatly, let us suppose theoretical investigation will
produce a principle of rectification. This principle uses
historical information about previous situations and
injustices done in them (as defined by the first two

124 Á PART 3: THEORIES OF MORALITY
entitled to under D, namely very little. This socialist
rightly, in my view, holds onto the notions of earning,
producing, entitlement, desert, and so forth, and he
rejects current time- slice principles that look only to
the structure of the resulting set of holdings. (The set
of holdings resulting from what? Isn’t it implausible
that how holdings are produced and come to exist has
no effect at all on who should hold what?) His mistake
lies in his view of what entitlements arise out of what
sorts of productive processes.
We construe the position we discuss too narrowly
by speaking of current time- slice principles. Nothing
is changed if structural principles operate upon a
time sequence of current time- slice profiles and, for
example, give someone more now to counterbalance
the less he has had earlier. A utilitarian or an egalitar-
ian or any mixture of the two over time will inherit
the difficulties of his more myopic comrades. He is
not helped by the fact that some of the information
others consider relevant in assessing a distribution
is reflected, unrecoverably, in past matrices. Hence-
forth, we shall refer to such unhistorical principles
of distributive justice, including the current time-
slice principles, as end- result principles or end- state
principles.
In contrast to end- result principles of justice, his-
torical principles of justice hold that past circumstances
or actions of people can create differential entitle-
ments or differential deserts to things. An injustice
can be worked by moving from one distribution to
another structurally identical one, for the second, in
profile the same, may violate people’s entitlements or
deserts; it may not fit the actual history.
PATTERNING
The entitlement principles of justice in holdings that
we have sketched are historical principles of justice. To
better understand their precise character, we shall dis-
tinguish them from another subclass of the historical
principles. Consider, as an example, the principle of
distribution according to moral merit. This principle
requires that total distributive shares vary directly
with moral merit; no person should have a greater share
than anyone whose moral merit is greater. (If moral
the matrix presenting the distributions. No further
information need be fed into a principle of justice.
It is a consequence of such principles of justice
that any two structurally identical distributions
are equally just. (Two distributions are structurally
identical if they present the same profile, but per-
haps have different persons occupying the particu-
lar slots. My having ten and your having five, and
my having five and your having ten are structurally
identical distributions.) Welfare economics is the
theory of current time- slice principles of justice.
The subject is conceived as operating on matrices
representing only current information about dis-
tribution. This, as well as some of the usual con-
ditions (for example, the choice of distribution is
invariant under relabeling of columns), guarantees
that welfare economics will be a current time- slice
theory, with all of its inadequacies.
Most persons do not accept current time- slice
principles as constituting the whole story about dis-
tributive shares. They think it relevant in assessing the
justice of a situation to consider not only the distribu-
tion it embodies, but also how that distribution came
about. If some persons are in prison for murder or war
crimes, we do not say that to assess the justice of the
distribution in the society we must look only at what
this person has, and that person has, and that person
has, . . . at the current time. We think it relevant to ask
whether someone did something so that he deserved
to be punished, deserved to have a lower share. Most
will agree to the relevance of further information with
regard to punishments and penalties. Consider also
desired things. One traditional socialist view is that
workers are entitled to the product and full fruits of
their labor; they have earned it; a distribution is unjust
if it does not give the workers what they are entitled
to. Such entitlements are based upon some past his-
tory. No socialist holding this view would find it com-
forting to be told that because the actual distribution
A happens to coincide structurally with the one he
desires D, A therefore is no less just than D; it differs
only in that the “parasitic” owners of capital receive
under A what the workers are entitled to under D,
and the workers receive under A what the owners are

CHAPTER 5: COnSEquEnTIALIST THEORIES: MAxIMIzE THE GOOd Á 125
natural dimensions that yields the distributions gener-
ated in accordance with the principle of entitlement.
The set of holdings that results when some persons
receive their marginal products, others win at gam-
bling, others receive a share of their mate’s income,
others receive gifts from foundations, others receive
interest on loans, others receive gifts from admirers,
others receive returns on investment, others make
for themselves much of what they have, others find
things, and so on, will not be patterned.
* * *
HOW LIBERTY UPSETS PATTERNS
It is not clear how those holding alternative con-
ceptions of distributive justice can reject the enti-
tlement conception of justice in holdings. For
suppose a distribution favored by one of these non-
entitlement conceptions is realized. Let us suppose
it is your favorite one and let us call this distribution
D1; perhaps everyone has an equal share, perhaps
shares vary in accordance with some dimension
you treasure. Now suppose that Wilt Chamberlain is
greatly in demand by basketball teams, being a great
gate attraction. (Also suppose contracts run only
for a year, with players being free agents.) He signs
the following sort of contract with a team: In each
home game, twenty- five cents from the price of each
ticket of admission goes to him. (We ignore the ques-
tion of whether he is “gouging” the owners, letting
them look out for themselves.) The season starts, and
people cheerfully attend his team’s games; they buy
their tickets, each time dropping a separate twenty-
five cents of their admission price into a special box
with Chamberlain’s name on it. They are excited
about seeing him play; it is worth the total admis-
sion price to them. Let us suppose that in one sea-
son one million persons attend his home games, and
Wilt Chamberlain winds up with $250,000, a much
larger sum than the average income and larger even
than anyone else has. Is he entitled to this income?
Is this new distribution D2, unjust? If so, why? There
is no question about whether each of the people was
entitled to the control over the resources they held in
D1; because that was the distribution (your favorite)
merit could be not merely ordered but measured on
an interval or ratio scale, stronger principles could be
formulated.) Or consider the principle that results by
substituting “usefulness to society” for “moral merit”
in the previous principle. Or instead of “distribute
according to moral merit,” or “distribute according
to usefulness to society,” we might consider “distrib-
ute according to the weighted sum of moral merit,
usefulness to society, and need,” with the weights of
the different dimensions equal. Let us call a principle
of distribution patterned if it specifies that a distribu-
tion is to vary along with some natural dimension,
weighted sum of natural dimensions, or lexicographic
ordering of natural dimensions. And let us say a distri-
bution is patterned if it accords with some patterned
principle. (I speak of natural dimensions, admittedly
without a general criterion for them, because for any
set of holdings some artificial dimensions can be gim-
micked up to vary along with the distribution of the
set.) The principle of distribution in accordance with
moral merit is a patterned historical principle, which
specifies a patterned distribution. “Distribute accord-
ing to I.Q.” is a patterned principle that looks to infor-
mation not contained in distributional matrices. It
is not historical, however, in that it does not look to
any past actions creating differential entitlements to
evaluate a distribution; it requires only distributional
matrices whose columns are labeled by I.Q. scores. The
distribution in a society, however, may be composed
of such simple patterned distributions, without itself
being simply patterned. Different sectors may operate
different patterns, or some combination of patterns
may operate in different proportions across a society.
A distribution composed in this manner, from a small
number of patterned distributions, we also shall term
“patterned.” And we extend the use of “pattern” to
include the overall designs put forth by combinations
of end- state principles.
Almost every suggested principle of distributive
justice is patterned: to each according to his moral
merit, or needs, or marginal product, or how hard he
tries, or the weighted sum of the foregoing, and so
on. The principle of entitlement we have sketched is
not patterned.3 There is no one natural dimension or
weighted sum or combination of a small number of

126 Á PART 3: THEORIES OF MORALITY
D1). Thus, persons either must do without some extra
things that they want, or be allowed to do something
extra to get some of these things. On what basis could
the inequalities that would eventuate be forbidden?
Notice also that small factories would spring up in a
socialist society, unless forbidden. I melt down some
of my personal possessions (under D1) and build a
machine out of the material. I offer you, and others, a
philosophy lecture once a week in exchange for your
cranking the handle on my machine, whose prod-
ucts I exchange for yet other things, and so on. (The
raw materials used by the machine are given to me
by others who possess them under D1, in exchange
for hearing lectures.) Each person might participate
to gain things over and above their allotment under
D1. Some persons even might want to leave their job
in socialist industry and work full time in this private
sector. I shall say something more about these issues
in the next chapter. Here I wish merely to note how
private property even in means of production would
occur in a socialist society that did not forbid people
to use as they wished some of the resources they are
given under the socialist distribution D1. The socialist
society would have to forbid capitalist acts between
consenting adults.
The general point illustrated by the Wilt Cham-
berlain example and the example of the entrepreneur
in a socialist society is that no end- state principle or
distributional patterned principle of justice can be
continuously realized without continuous interfer-
ence with people’s lives. Any favored pattern would
be transformed into one unfavored by the prin-
ciple, by people choosing to act in various ways; for
example, by people exchanging goods and services
with other people, or giving things to other people,
things the transferrers are entitled to under the
favored distributional pattern. To maintain a pattern
one must either continually interfere to stop people
from transferring resources as they wish to, or con-
tinually (or periodically) interfere to take from some
persons resources that others for some reason chose
to transfer to them.
* * *
that (for the purposes of argument) we assumed
was acceptable. Each of these persons chose to give
twenty- five cents of their money to Chamberlain.
They could have spent it on going to the movies, or
on candy bars, or on copies of Dissent magazine, or
of Monthly Review. But they all, at least one million
of them, converged on giving it to Wilt Chamber-
lain in exchange for watching him play basketball.
If D1 was a just distribution, and people voluntarily
moved from it to D2, transferring parts of their shares
they were given under D1 (what was it for if not to
do something with?), isn’t D2 also just? If the people
were entitled to dispose of the resources to which
they were entitled (under D1), didn’t this include
their being entitled to give it to, or exchange it with,
Wilt Chamberlain? Can anyone else complain on
grounds of justice? Each other person already has his
legitimate share under D1. Under D1, there is noth-
ing that anyone has that anyone else has a claim of
justice against. After someone transfers something
to Wilt Chamberlain, third parties still have their
legitimate shares; their shares are not changed. By
what process could such a transfer among two per-
sons give rise to a legitimate claim of distributive jus-
tice on a portion of what was transferred, by a third
party who had no claim of justice on any holding of
the others before the transfer?4 To cut off objections
irrelevant here, we might imagine the exchanges
occurring in a socialist society, after hours. After play-
ing whatever basketball he does in his daily work, or
doing whatever other daily work he does, Wilt Cham-
berlain decides to put in overtime to earn additional
money. (First his work quota is set; he works time over
that.) Or imagine it is a skilled juggler people like to
see, who puts on shows after hours.
Why might someone work overtime in a society in
which it is assumed their needs are satisfied? Perhaps
because they care about things other than needs. I like
to write in books that I read, and to have easy access
to books for browsing at odd hours. It would be very
pleasant and convenient to have the resources of Wid-
ener Library in my back yard. No society, I assume,
will provide such resources close to each person who
would like them as part of his regular allotment (under

CHAPTER 5: COnSEquEnTIALIST THEORIES: MAxIMIzE THE GOOd Á 127
this way and not to characteristics, is an interesting
and puzzling question.
Proponents of patterned principles of distribu-
tive justice focus upon criteria for determining
who is to receive holdings; they consider the rea-
sons for which someone should have something,
and also the total picture of holdings. Whether or
not it is better to give than to receive, proponents
of patterned principles ignore giving altogether.
In considering the distribution of goods, income,
and so forth, their theories are theories of recipient
justice; they completely ignore any right a person
might have to give something to someone. Even
in exchanges where each party is simultaneously
giver and recipient, patterned principles of justice
focus only upon the recipient role and its supposed
rights. Thus discussions tend to focus on whether
people (should) have a right to inherit, rather
than on whether people (should) have a right to
bequeath or on whether persons who have a right
to hold also have a right to choose that others hold
in their place. I lack a good explanation of why the
usual theories of distributive justice are so recipient
oriented; ignoring givers and transferrers and their
rights is of a piece with ignoring producers and their
entitlements. But why is it all ignored?
Patterned principles of distributive justice neces-
sitate redistributive activities. The likelihood is small
that any actual freely- arrived- at set of holdings fits a
given pattern; and the likelihood is nil that it will con-
tinue to fit the pattern as people exchange and give.
From the point of view of an entitlement theory, redis-
tribution is a serious matter indeed, involving, as it
does, the violation of people’s rights. (An exception is
those takings that fall under the principle of the recti-
fication of injustices.) From other points of view, also,
it is serious.
Taxation of earnings from labor is on a par with
forced labor.6 Some persons find this claim obvi-
ously true: taking the earnings of n hours labor is
like taking n hours from the person; it is like forc-
ing the person to work n hours for another’s pur-
pose. Others find the claim absurd. But even these,
if they object to forced labor, would oppose forcing
REDISTRIBUTION AND PROPERTY RIGHTS
Apparently, patterned principles allow people to
choose to expend upon themselves, but not upon
others, those resources they are entitled to (or rather,
receive) under some favored distributional pattern
D1. For if each of several persons chooses to expend
some of his D1 resources upon one other person, then
that other person will receive more than his D1 share,
disturbing the favored distributional pattern. Main-
taining a distributional pattern is individualism with
a vengeance! Patterned distributional principles do
not give people what entitlement principles do, only
better distributed. For they do not give the right to
choose what to do with what one has; they do not
give the right to choose to pursue an end involv-
ing (intrinsically, or as a means) the enhancement
of another’s position. To such views, families are
disturbing; for within a family occur transfers that
upset the favored distributional pattern. Either fami-
lies themselves become units to which distribution
takes place, the column occupiers (on what ratio-
nale?), or loving behavior is forbidden. We should
note in passing the ambivalent position of radicals
toward the family. Its loving relationships are seen
as a model to be emulated and extended across the
whole society, at the same time that it is denounced
as a suffocating institution to be broken and con-
demned as a focus of parochial concerns that inter-
fere with achieving radical goals. Need we say that it
is not appropriate to enforce across the wider society
the relationships of love and care appropriate within
a family, relationships which are voluntarily under-
taken?5 Incidentally, love is an interesting instance
of another relationship that is historical, in that (like
justice) it depends upon what actually occurred.
An adult may come to love another because of the
other’s characteristics; but it is the other person,
and not the characteristics, that is loved. The love
is not transferrable to someone else with the same
characteristics, even to one who “scores” higher for
these characteristics. And the love endures through
changes of the characteristics that gave rise to it.
One loves the particular person one actually encoun-
tered. Why love is historical, attaching to persons in

128 Á PART 3: THEORIES OF MORALITY
goods or services differently from the man whose
preferences and desires make such goods unneces-
sary for his happiness? Why should the man who
prefers seeing a movie (and who has to earn money
for a ticket) be open to the required call to aid the
needy, while the person who prefers looking at a
sunset (and hence need earn no extra money) is
not? Indeed, isn’t it surprising that redistribution-
ists choose to ignore the man whose pleasures are
so easily attainable without extra labor, while add-
ing yet another burden to the poor unfortunate who
must work for his pleasures? If anything, one would
have expected the reverse. Why is the person with
the nonmaterial or nonconsumption desire allowed
to proceed unimpeded to his most favored feasible
alternative, whereas the man whose pleasures or
desires involve material things and who must work
for extra money (thereby serving whomever con-
siders his activities valuable enough to pay him) is
constrained in what he can realize? Perhaps there is
no difference in principle. And perhaps some think
the answer concerns merely administrative con-
venience. (These questions and issues will not dis-
turb those who think that forced labor to serve the
needy or to realize some favored end- state pattern
is acceptable.) In a fuller discussion we would have
(and want) to extend our argument to include inter-
est, entrepreneurial profits, and so on. Those who
doubt that this extension can be carried through,
and who draw the line here at taxation of income
from labor, will have to state rather complicated
patterned historical principles of distributive justice,
since end- state principles would not distinguish
sources of income in any way. It is enough for now
to get away from end- state principles and to make
clear how various patterned principles are depen-
dent upon particular views about the sources or the
ille gitimacy or the lesser legitimacy of profits, inter-
est, and so on; which particular views may well be
mistaken.
What sort of right over others does a legally
institutionalized end- state pattern give one? The
central core of the notion of a property right in X,
unemployed hippies to work for the benefit of the
needy.7 And they would also object to forcing each
person to work five extra hours each week for the
benefit of the needy. But a system that takes five
hours’ wages in taxes does not seem to them like one
that forces someone to work five hours, since it offers
the person forced a wider range of choice in activi-
ties than does taxation in kind with the particular
labor specified. (But we can imagine a gradation of
systems of forced labor, from one that specifies a
particular activity, to one that gives a choice among
two activities, to . . . ; and so on up.) Furthermore,
people envisage a system with something like a pro-
portional tax on everything above the amount nec-
essary for basic needs. Some think this does not force
someone to work extra hours, since there is no fixed
number of extra hours he is forced to work, and since
he can avoid the tax entirely by earning only enough
to cover his basic needs. This is a very uncharacter-
istic view of forcing for those who also think people
are forced to do something whenever the alternatives
they face are considerably worse. However, neither
view is correct. The fact that others intentionally
intervene, in violation of a side constraint against
aggression, to threaten force to limit the alterna-
tives, in this case to paying taxes or (presumably the
worse alternative) bare subsistence, makes the taxa-
tion system one of forced labor and distinguishes it
from other cases of limited choices which are not
forcings.
The man who chooses to work longer to gain an
income more than sufficient for his basic needs pre-
fers some extra goods or services to the leisure and
activities he could perform during the possible non-
working hours; whereas the man who chooses not to
work the extra time prefers the leisure activities to
the extra goods or services he could acquire by work-
ing more. Given this, if it would be illegitimate for
a tax system to seize some of a man’s leisure (forced
labor) for the purpose of serving the needy, how can
it be legitimate for a tax system to seize some of a
man’s goods for that purpose? Why should we treat
the man whose happiness requires certain material

CHAPTER 5: COnSEquEnTIALIST THEORIES: MAxIMIzE THE GOOd Á 129
and what’s going where, patterned principles of dis-
tributive justice involve appropriating the actions of
other persons. Seizing the results of someone’s labor
is equivalent to seizing hours from him and direct-
ing him to carry on various activities. If people force
you to do certain work, or unrewarded work, for a cer-
tain period of time, they decide what you are to do
and what purposes your work is to serve apart from
your decisions. This process whereby they take this
decision from you makes them a part- owner of you;
it gives them a property right in you. Just as having
such partial control and power of decision, by right,
over an animal or inanimate object would be to have
a property right in it.
End- state and most patterned principles of dis-
tributive justice institute (partial) ownership by others
of people and their actions and labor. These principles
involve a shift from the classical liberals’ notion of
self- ownership to a notion of (partial) property rights
in other people.
* * *
May a person emigrate from a nation that has
institutionalized some end- state or patterned distri-
butional principle? For some principles (for example,
Hayek’s) emigration presents no theoretical prob-
lem. But for others it is a tricky matter. Consider a
nation having a compulsory scheme of minimal
social provision to aid the neediest (or one orga-
nized so as to maximize the position of the worst- off
group); no one may opt out of participating in it.
(None may say, “Don’t compel me to contribute to
others and don’t provide for me via this compulsory
mechanism if I am in need.”) Everyone above a cer-
tain level is forced to contribute to aid the needy. But
if emigration from the country were allowed, any-
one could choose to move to another country that
did not have compulsory social provision but oth-
erwise was (as much as possible) identical. In such a
case, the person’s only motive for leaving would be
to avoid participating in the compulsory scheme of
social provision. And if he does leave, the needy in
his initial country will receive no (compelled) help
relative to which other parts of the notion are to be
explained, is the right to determine what shall be
done with X; the right to choose which of the con-
strained set of options concerning X shall be realized
or attempted. The constraints are set by other prin-
ciples or laws operating in the society; in our theory,
by the Lockean rights people possess (under the min-
imal state). My property rights in my knife allow me
to leave it where I will, but not in your chest. I may
choose which of the acceptable options involving
the knife is to be realized. This notion of property
helps us to understand why earlier theorists spoke
of people as having property in themselves and their
labor. They viewed each person as having a right to
decide what would become of himself and what he
would do, and as having a right to reap the benefits
of what he did.
* * *
When end- result principles of distributive justice
are built into the legal structure of a society, they (as
do most patterned principles) give each citizen an
enforceable claim to some portion of the total social
product; that is, to some portion of the sum total of
the individually and jointly made products. This total
product is produced by individuals laboring, using
means of production others have saved to bring into
existence, by people organizing production or creat-
ing means to produce new things or things in a new
way. It is on this batch of individual activities that pat-
terned distributional principles give each individual
an enforceable claim. Each person has a claim to the
activities and the products of other persons, indepen-
dently of whether the other persons enter into par-
ticular relationships that give rise to these claims, and
independently of whether they voluntarily take these
claims upon themselves, in charity or in exchange for
something.
Whether it is done through taxation on wages
or on wages over a certain amount, or through sei-
zure of profits, or through there being a big social
pot so that it’s not clear what’s coming from where

130 Á PART 3: THEORIES OF MORALITY
of transfer” that would lead to the pattern. For example, the
principle that if one has more than the mean income one
must transfer everything one holds above the mean to per-
sons below the mean so as to bring them up to (but not over)
the mean. We can formulate a criterion for a “principle of
transfer” to rule out such obligatory transfers, or we can say
that no correct principle of transfer, no principle of transfer
in a free society will be like this. The former is probably the
better course, though the latter also is true.
Alternatively, one might think to make the entitlement
conception instantiate a pattern, by using matrix entries that
express the relative strength of a person’s entitlements as
measured by some real- valued function. But even if the limi-
tation to natural dimensions failed to exclude this function,
the resulting edifice would not capture our system of entitle-
ments to particular things.
4. Might not a transfer have instrumental effects on a third
party, changing his feasible options? (But what if the two par-
ties to the transfer independently had used their holdings in
this fashion?) I discuss this question below, but note here that
this question concedes the point for distributions of ultimate
intrinsic non instrumental goods (pure utility experiences, so
to speak) that are transferable. It also might be objected that
the transfer might make a third party more envious because it
worsens his position relative to someone else. I find it incom-
prehensible how this can be thought to involve a claim of
justice. . . .
Here and elsewhere in this chapter, a theory which incor-
porates elements of pure procedural justice might find what
I say acceptable, if kept in its proper place; that is, if back-
ground institutions exist to ensure the satisfaction of certain
conditions on distributive shares. But if these institutions
are not themselves the sum or invisible- hand result of
people’s voluntary (nonaggressive) actions, the constraints
they impose require justification. At no point does our argu-
ment assume any background institutions more extensive
than those of the minimal night- watchman state, a state
limited to protecting persons against murder, assault, theft,
fraud, and so forth.
5. One indication of the stringency of Rawls’ difference prin-
ciple, which we attend to in the second part of this chap-
ter, is its inappropriateness as a governing principle even
within a family of individuals who love one another. Should
a family devote its resources to maximizing the position of
its least well off and least talented child, holding back the
other children or using resources for their education and
from him. What rationale yields the result that the
person be permitted to emigrate, yet forbidden to
stay and opt out of the compulsory scheme of social
provision? If providing for the needy is of overrid-
ing importance, this does militate against allowing
internal opting out; but it also speaks against allow-
ing external emigration. (Would it also support, to
some extent, the kidnapping of persons living in a
place without compulsory social provision, who
could be forced to make a contribution to the needy
in your community?) Perhaps the crucial compo-
nent of the position that allows emigration solely
to avoid certain arrangements, while not allowing
anyone internally to opt out of them, is a concern
for fraternal feelings within the country. “We don’t
want anyone here who doesn’t contribute, who
doesn’t care enough about the others to contribute.”
That concern, in this case, would have to be tied to
the view that forced aiding tends to produce fra-
ternal feelings between the aided and the aider (or
perhaps merely to the view that the knowledge that
someone or other voluntarily is not aiding produces
unfraternal feelings).
NOTES
1. Applications of the principle of justice in acquisition
may also occur as part of the move from one distribution to
another. You may find an unheld thing now and appropriate
it. Acquisitions also are to be understood as included when, to
simplify, I speak only of transitions by transfers.
2. If the principle of rectification of violations of the first two
principles yields more than one description of holdings, then
some choice must be made as to which of these is to be real-
ized. Perhaps the sort of considerations about distributive jus-
tice and equality that I argue against play a legitimate role in
this subsidiary choice. Similarly, there may be room for such
considerations in deciding which otherwise arbitrary fea-
tures a statute will embody, when such features are unavoid-
able because other considerations do not specify a precise
line; yet a line must be drawn.
3. One might try to squeeze a patterned conception of dis-
tributive justice into the framework of the entitlement con-
ception, by formulating a gimmicky obligatory “principle

CHAPTER 5: COnSEquEnTIALIST THEORIES: MAxIMIzE THE GOOd Á 131
plausible and illuminating to view such taxation in the
light of forced labor. This latter approach would remind
one of how John Wisdom conceives of the claims of meta-
physicians.
7. Nothing hangs on the fact that here and elsewhere I speak
loosely of needs, since I go on, each time, to reject the cri-
terion of justice which includes it. If, however, something
did depend upon the notion, one would want to examine it
more carefully. For a skeptical view, see Kenneth Minogue,
The Liberal Mind, (New York: Random House, 1963),
pp. 103–112.
development only if they will follow a policy through their
lifetimes of maximizing the position of their least fortunate
sibling? Surely not. How then can this even be considered
as the appropriate policy for enforcement in the wider soci-
ety? (I discuss below what I think would be Rawls’ reply: that
some principles apply at the macro level which do not apply
to micro- situations.)
6. I am unsure as to whether the arguments I present below
show that such taxation merely is forced labor; so that “is
on a par with” means “is one kind of.” Or alternatively,
whether the arguments emphasize the great similari-
ties between such taxation and forced labor, to show it is

132
C H A P T E R 6
‘’
Nonconsequentialist Theories: Do Your Duty
For the consequentialist, the rightness of an action
depends entirely on the effects of that action (or
of following the rule that governs it). Good effects
make the deed right; bad effects make the deed
wrong. But for the nonconsequentialist (otherwise
known as a deontologist), the rightness of an action
can never be measured by such a variable, contin-
gent standard as the quantity of goodness brought
into the world. Rightness derives not from the
consequences of an action but from its nature, its
right- making characteristics. An action is right (or
wrong) not because of what it produces but because
of what it is. Yet for all their differences, both conse-
quentialist and deontological theories contain ele-
ments that seem to go to the heart of morality and
our moral experience. So in this chapter, we look at
ethics through a deontological lens and explore the
two deontological theories that historically have
offered the strongest challenges to consequentialist
views: Kant’s moral theory and natural law theory.
KANT’S ETHICS
The German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–
1804) is considered one of the greatest moral phi-
losophers of the modern era. Many scholars would
go further and say that he is the greatest moral
philosopher of the modern era. As a distinguished
thinker of the Enlightenment, he sought to make
reason the foundation of morality. For him, reason
alone leads us to the right and the good. There-
fore, to discover the true path we need not appeal
to utility, religion, tradition, authority, happiness,
desires, or intuition. We need only heed the dictates
of reason, for reason informs us of the moral law
just as surely as it reveals the truths of mathemat-
ics. Because of each person’s capacity for reason, he
or she is a sovereign in the moral realm, a supreme
judge of what morality demands. What morality
demands (in other words, our duty) is enshrined in
the moral law— the changeless, necessary, univer-
sal body of moral rules.
In Kant’s ethics, right actions have moral value
only if they are done with a “good will”—that is,
a will to do your duty for duty’s sake. To act with
a good will is to act with a desire to do your duty
simply because it is your duty, to act out of pure rev-
erence for the moral law. Without a good will,
your actions have no moral worth— even if they
accord with the moral law, even if they are done
out of sympathy or love, even if they produce good
results. Only a good will is unconditionally good,
and only an accompanying good will can give your
talents, virtues, and actions moral worth. As Kant
explains,
Nothing can possibly be conceived in the world,
or even out of it, which can be called good with-
out qualification, except a good will. Intelligence,
wit, judgement, and the other talents of the mind,
however they may be named, or courage, resolu-
tion, perseverance, as qualities of temperament, are
undoubtedly good and desirable in many respects;
but these gifts of nature may also become extremely
bad and mischievous if the will which is to make use
of them, and which, therefore, constitutes what is
called character, is not good. It is the same with the
gifts of fortune. Power, riches, honour, even health,
and the general well- being and contentment with
one’s condition which is called happiness, inspire

CHAPTER 6: NoNCoNsEquENTiAlisT THEoRiEs: Do YouR DuTY Á 133
maxim. If you steal a car, then your action implies
a maxim such as “In this situation, steal a car if you
want one.” So the first version of the categorical
imperative says that an action is right if you could
will the maxim of an action to become a moral law
applying to all persons. That is, an action is permissi-
ble if (1) its maxim can be universalized (if everyone
can consistently act on the maxim in similar situa-
tions) and (2) you would be willing to let that hap-
pen. If you can so will the maxim, then the action
is right (permissible). If you cannot, the action is
wrong (prohibited). Right actions pass the test of the
categorical imperative; wrong actions do not.
Some of the duties derived from the categorical
imperative are, in Kant’s words, perfect duties and
some, imperfect duties. Perfect duties are those
that absolutely must be followed without fail; they
have no exceptions. Some perfect duties cited by
Kant include duties not to break a promise, not to
lie, and not to commit suicide. Imperfect duties
are not always to be followed; they do have excep-
tions. As examples of imperfect duties, Kant men-
tions duties to develop your talents and to help
others in need.
Kant demonstrates how to apply the first ver-
sion of the categorical imperative to several cases,
the most famous of which involves a lying prom-
ise. Imagine that you want to borrow money from
someone, and you know you will not be able to
repay the debt. You also know that you will get
the loan if you falsely promise to pay the money
back. Is such deceptive borrowing morally permis-
sible? To find out, you have to devise a maxim for
the action and ask whether you could consistently
will it to become a universal law. Could you con-
sistently will everyone to act on the maxim, “If
you need money, make a lying promise to borrow
some”? Kant’s emphatic answer is no. If all per-
sons adopted this rule, then they would make lying
promises to obtain loans. But then everyone would
know that such promises are false, and the prac-
tice of giving loans based on a promise would no
longer exist, because no promises could be trusted.
pride, and often presumption, if there is not a good
will to correct the influence of these on the mind. . . .
A good will is good not because of what it performs
or effects, not by its aptness for the attainment of
some proposed end, but simply by virtue of the
volition— that is, it is good in itself, and considered
by itself is to be esteemed much higher than all that
can be brought about by it in favour of any inclina-
tion, nay, even of the sum- total of all inclinations.1
So to do right, we must do it for duty’s sake,
motivated solely by respect for the moral law. But
how do we know what the moral law is? Kant sees
the moral law as a set of principles, or rules, stated
in the form of imperatives, or commands. Impera-
tives can be hypothetical or categorical. A hypo-
thetical imperative tells us what we should do
if we have certain desires: for example, “If you need
money, work for it” or “If you want orange juice,
ask for it.” We should obey such imperatives only
if we desire the outcomes specified. A categorical
imperative, however, is not so iffy. It tells us that
we should do something in all situations regardless of
our wants and needs. A moral categorical imperative
expresses a command such as “Do not steal” or “Do
not commit suicide.” Such imperatives are universal
and unconditional, containing no stipulations con-
tingent on human desires or preferences. Kant says
that the moral law consists entirely of categorical
imperatives. They are the authoritative expression
of our moral duties. Because they are the products
of rational insight and we are rational agents, we
can straightforwardly access, understand, and know
them as the great truths that they are.
Kant says that all our duties, all the moral cate-
gorical imperatives, can be logically derived from a
principle that he calls the categorical imperative. It
tells us to “act only on that maxim through which
you can at the same time will that it should become
a universal law.”2 (Kant actually devised three state-
ments, or versions, of the principle, the one given
here and two others; in the next few pages we will
examine only the two most important ones.) Kant
believes that every action implies a general rule, or

134 Á PART 3: THEoRiEs oF MoRAliTY
action is permissible if everyone can consistently
act on it in similar situations and you would be
willing to let that happen.) Kant asks us to con-
sider a maxim that mandates not contributing
anything to the welfare of others or aiding them
when they are in distress. If you willed this maxim
to become a universal moral law (if everyone fol-
lowed it), no self- defeating state of affairs would
obtain. Everyone could conceivably follow this
rule. But you probably would not want people
to act on this maxim, because one day you might
need their help and sympathy. Right now you
might will the maxim to become universal law, but
later, when the tables are turned, you might regret
that policy. The inconsistency lies in wanting the
rule to be universalized and not wanting it to be
The maxim, if acted on by everyone, would defeat
itself. As Kant says, the “maxim would necessar-
ily destroy itself as soon as it was made a univer-
sal law.”3 Therefore, you cannot consistently will
the maxim to become a universal law. The action,
then, is not morally permissible.
Kant believes that besides the rule forbidding
the breaking of promises, the categorical impera-
tive generates several other duties. Among these he
includes prohibitions against committing suicide,
lying, and killing innocent people.
Some universalized maxims may fail the test
of the categorical imperative (first version) not by
being self- defeating (as in the case of a lying prom-
ise) but by constituting rules that you would not
want everyone else to act on. (Remember that an
The Golden Rule—”Do unto others as you would
have them do unto you”—has some resemblance
to Kant’s ethics and has been, in one form or
another, implicit in many religious traditions and
moral systems. Moral philosophers generally think
that it touches on a significant truth about moral-
ity. But some have argued that taken by itself,
without the aid of any other moral principles or
theory, the Golden Rule can lead to implausible
conclusions and absurd results. Here is part of a
famous critique by Richard Whately (1787–1863):
Supposing any one should regard this golden rule
as designed to answer the purpose of a complete
system of morality, and to teach us the difference
of right and wrong; then, if he had let his land
to a farmer, he might consider that the farmer
would be glad to be excused paying any rent for
it, since he would himself, if he were the farmer,
prefer having the land rent- free; and that, there-
fore, the rule of doing as he would be done by
requires him to give up all his property. So also
the shopkeeper might, on the same principle,
think that the rule required him to part with his
goods under prime cost, or to give them away,
and thus to ruin himself. Now such a procedure
would be absurd. . . .
You have seen, then, that the golden rule was
far from being designed to impart to men the first
notions of justice. On the contrary, it presupposes
that knowledge; and if we had no such notions,
we could not properly apply the rule. But the real
design of it is to put us on our guard against the
danger of being blinded by self- interest.*
How does the Golden Rule resemble Kant’s theory?
How does it differ? Do you agree with Whately’s criti-
cism? Why or why not? How could the Golden Rule
be qualified or supplemented to blunt Whate ly’s
critique? John Stuart Mill said that the Golden Rule
was the essence of utilitarianism. What do you think
he meant by this?
*Richard Whately, quoted in Louis P. Pojman and Lewis
Vaughn, The Moral Life (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2007), 353–54.
CRITICAL THOUGHT: Sizing Up the Golden Rule’

CHAPTER 6: NoNCoNsEquENTiAlisT THEoRiEs: Do YouR DuTY Á 135
universalized. Kant says that this alternative kind
of inconsistency shows that the action embodied
in the maxim is not permissible.
Kant’s second version of the categorical impera-
tive is probably more famous and influential than
the first. (Kant believed the two versions to be vir-
tually synonymous, but they seem to be distinct
principles.) He declares, “So act as to treat human-
ity, whether in thine own person or in that of any
other, in every case as an end withal, never as means
only.”4 This rule— the means- ends principle—
says that we must always treat people (including
ourselves) as ends in themselves, as creatures of
great intrinsic worth, never merely as things of
instrumental value, never merely as tools to be used
for someone else’s purpose.
This statement of the categorical imperative
reflects Kant’s view of the status of rational beings,
or persons. Persons have intrinsic value and dignity
because they, unlike the rest of creation, are ratio-
nal agents who are free to choose their own ends,
legislate their own moral laws, and assign value to
things in the world. Persons are the givers of value,
so they must have ultimate value. They therefore
must always be treated as ultimate ends and never
merely as means.
Kant’s idea is that people not only have intrinsic
worth— they also have equal intrinsic worth. Each
rational being has the same inherent value as every
other rational being. This equality of value cannot
be altered by, and has no connection to, social and
economic status, racial and ethnic considerations,
or the possession of prestige or power. Any two per-
sons are entitled to the same moral rights, even if
one is rich, wise, powerful, and famous— and the
other is not.
To treat people merely as a means rather than
as an end is to fail to recognize the true nature and
status of persons. Because people are by nature
free, rational, autonomous, and equal, we treat
them merely as a means if we do not respect these
attributes— if we, for example, interfere with their
right to make informed choices by lying to them,
inhibit their free and autonomous actions by
enslaving or coercing them, or violate their equal-
ity by discriminating against them. For Kant, lying
or breaking a promise is wrong because to do so is to
use people merely as a means to an end rather than
as an end in themselves.
Sometimes we use people to achieve some end,
yet our actions are not wrong. To see why, we must
understand that there is a moral difference between
treating people as a means and treating them merely,
or only, as a means. We may treat a mechanic as a
means to repair our cars, but we do not treat him
merely as a means if we also respect his status as a
person. We do not treat him only as a means if we
neither restrict his freedom nor ignore his rights.
As noted earlier, Kant insists that the two ver-
sions of the categorical imperative are two ways
of stating the same idea. But the two principles
seem to be distinct, occasionally leading to differ-
ent conclusions about the rightness of an action.
The maxim of an action, for example, may pass the
first version (be permissible) by being universaliz-
able but fail the second by not treating persons as
ends. A more plausible approach is to view the two
versions not as alternative tests but as a single two-
part test that an action must pass to be judged mor-
ally permissible. So before we can declare a maxim
a bona fide categorical imperative, we must be able
to consistently will it to become a universal law and
know that it would have us treat persons not only
as means but as ends.
Applying the Theory
How might a Kantian decide the case of the anti-
terrorist chief of police, discussed in Chapter 5,
who considers killing a terrorist’s wife and chil-
dren? Recall that the terrorist is murdering hun-
dreds of innocent people each year and that the
chief has good reasons to believe that killing the
wife and children (who are also innocent) will
end the terrorist’s attacks. Recall also the ver-
dicts on this case rendered from the act- and rule-
utilitarian perspectives. By act- utilitarian lights,

136 Á PART 3: THEoRiEs oF MoRAliTY
Evaluating the Theory
Kant’s moral theory meets the minimum require-
ment of coherence and is generally consistent with
our moral experience (Criterion 2). In some trou-
bling ways, however, it seems to conflict with our
commonsense moral judgments (Criterion 1) and
appears to have some flaws that restrict its useful-
ness in moral problem solving (Criterion 3).
As we saw earlier, some duties generated by
the categorical imperative are absolute— they are,
as Kant says, perfect duties, allowing no excep-
tions whatsoever. We have, for example, a perfect
(exceptionless) duty not to lie— ever. But what
should we do if lying is the only way to prevent a
terrible tragedy? Suppose a friend of yours comes
to your house in a panic and begs you to hide her
from an insane man intent on murdering her. No
sooner do you hide her in the cellar than the insane
man appears at your door with a bloody knife in his
hand and asks where your friend is. You have no
doubt that the man is serious and that your friend
will in fact be brutally murdered if the man finds
her. Imagine that you have only two choices (and
saying “I don’t know” is not one of them): either
you lie to the man and thereby save your friend’s
life, or you tell the man where she is hiding and
guarantee her murder. Kant actually considers such
a case and renders this verdict on it: you should
tell the truth though the heavens fall. He says, as
he must, that the consequences of your action here
are irrelevant. Yet Kant’s answer seems contrary to
our considered moral judgments. Moral common
sense seems to suggest that in a case like this, saving
a life would be much more important than telling
the truth.
Another classic example involves promise keep-
ing, which is also a perfect duty. Suppose you
promise to meet a friend for lunch, and on your
way to the restaurant you are called on to help
someone injured in a car crash. No one else can
help her, and she will die unless you render aid.
But if you help her, you will break your promise
to meet your friend. What should you do? Kant
the chief should kill some of the terrorist’s inno-
cent relatives (and threaten to kill others). The
rule- utilitarian view, however, is that the chief
should not kill them.
Suppose the maxim in question is “When the
usual antiterrorist tactics fail to stop terrorists
from killing many innocent people, the authori-
ties should kill (and threaten to kill) the terrorists’
relatives.” Can we consistently will this maxim to
become a universal law? Does this maxim involve
treating persons merely as a means to an end rather
than as an end in themselves? To answer the first
question, we should try to imagine what would
happen if everyone in the position of the relevant
authorities followed this maxim. Would any incon-
sistencies or self- defeating states of affairs arise? We
can see that the consequences of universalizing
the maxim would not be pleasant. The authorities
would kill the innocent— actions that could be as
gruesome and frightening as terrorist attacks. But
our willing that everyone act on the maxim would
not be self- defeating or otherwise contradictory.
Would we nevertheless be willing to live in a world
where the maxim was universally followed? Again,
there seems to be no good reason why we could
not. The maxim therefore passes the first test of the
categorical imperative.
To answer the second ( means- ends) question,
we must inquire whether following the maxim
would involve treating someone merely as a
means. The obvious answer is yes. This antiter-
rorism policy would use the innocent relatives of
terrorists as a means to stop terrorist acts. Their
freedom and their rights as persons would be vio-
lated. The maxim therefore fails the second test,
and the acts sanctioned by the maxim would not be
permissible. From the Kantian perspective, using
the innocent relatives would be wrong no mat-
ter what— regardless of how many lives the policy
would save or how much safer the world would
be. So in this case, the Kantian verdict would coin-
cide with that of rule- utilitarianism but not that of
act- utilitarianism.

CHAPTER 6: NoNCoNsEquENTiAlisT THEoRiEs: Do YouR DuTY Á 137
would say that come what may, your duty is to
keep your promise to meet your friend. Under
these circumstances, however, keeping the prom-
ise just seems wrong.
These scenarios are significant because, con-
trary to Kant’s view, they suggest that we have no
absolute, or exceptionless, moral duties. We can
easily imagine many cases like those just men-
tioned. Moreover, we can also envision situations
in which we must choose between two allegedly
perfect duties, each one prohibiting some action.
We cannot fulfill both duties at once, and we must
make a choice. Such conflicts provide plausible evi-
dence against the notion that there are exception-
less moral rules.5
Conflicts of duties, of course, are not just defi-
ciencies under Criterion 1. They also indicate diffi-
culties with Criterion 3. Like many moral theories,
Kant’s system fails to provide an effective means of
resolving major conflicts of duties.
Some additional inconsistencies with our con-
sidered moral judgments seem to arise from
applications of the first version of the categori-
cal imperative. Remember that the first version
says that an action is permissible if everyone can
consistently act on it and if you would be willing
to have that happen. At first glance, it seems to
guarantee that moral rules are universally fair. But
it makes the acceptability of a moral rule depend
largely on whether you personally are willing to live
in a world that conforms to the rule. If you are not
willing to live in such a world, then the rule fails the
first version of the categorical imperative, and your
conforming to the rule is wrong. But if you are the
sort of person who would prefer such a world, then
conforming to the rule would be morally permis-
sible. This subjectivity in Kant’s theory could lead
to the sanctioning of heinous acts of all kinds. Sup-
pose the rule is “Kill everyone with dark skin” or
“Murder all Jews.” Neither rule would be contradic-
tory if universalized; everyone could consistently
act on it. Moreover, if you were willing to have
everyone act on it— even willing to be killed if you
have dark skin or are a Jew— then acts endorsed by
the rule would be permissible. Thus the first version
seems to bless acts that are clearly immoral.
Critics say that another difficulty with Kant’s
theory concerns the phrasing of the maxims to be
universalized. Oddly enough, Kant does not pro-
vide any guidance for how we should state a rule
’
Respect is the guiding value of Kantian ethics.
Respect is owed all persons equally, Kant says,
because they have intrinsic worth and dignity
due to their autonomy— that is, their capacity for
rational decisions, autonomous action, and moral
choices. Kant made this point by insisting that we
must always treat persons as ends in themselves,
never merely as a means to an end (as tools to be
used for someone else’s purposes). Another way
to express this is to say that, as persons, we have
rights— specifically, negative rights, which obli-
gate others not to interfere with our obtaining
something. (Positive rights are rights that obli-
gate others to help us obtain something.) Persons
have the right not to be treated in certain ways:
not to be used or regarded as if they were mere
instruments, and not to have their autonomous
actions and free choices thwarted or constrained.
The principle of respect therefore would prohibit,
among other things, lying to persons, cheating
them, coercing them, falsely imprisoning them,
discriminating against them, and manipulating
them. Their negative rights can be violated or
overridden only for very strong reasons.
Kant, Respect, and Personal Rights

138 Á PART 3: THEoRiEs oF MoRAliTY
treating him merely as a cause of infection to others.
But, if we refuse to isolate him, we are treating other
people merely as means to his comfort and culture.6
Kant’s means- ends principle captures an impor-
tant truth about the intrinsic value of persons. But
apparently we cannot fully implement it, because
sometimes we are forced to treat people merely as a
means and not as an end in themselves.
LEARNING FROM KANT’S THEORY
Despite these criticisms, Kant’s theory has been
influential because it embodies a large part of the
whole truth about morality. At a minimum, it
promotes many of the duties and rights that our
considered moral judgments lead us to embrace.
Furthermore, it emphasizes three of morality’s most
important features: (1) universality, (2) impartial-
ity, and (3) respect for persons.
Kant’s first version of the categorical imperative
rests firmly on universality— the notion that the
moral law applies to all persons in relevantly simi-
lar situations. Impartiality requires that the moral
law apply to everyone in the same way, that no one
can claim a privileged moral status. In Kantian eth-
ics, double standards are inherently bad. Ethical
egoism fails as a moral theory in large part because
it lacks this kind of impartiality. The first version of
the categorical imperative, in contrast, enshrines
impartiality as essential to the moral life. Kant’s
principle of respect for persons (the means- ends
imperative) entails a recognition that persons have
ultimate and inherent value, that they should not
be used merely as a means to utilitarian ends, that
equals should be treated equally, and that there are
limits to what can be done to persons for the sake of
good consequences. To many scholars, the central
flaw of utilitarianism is that it does not incorporate
a fully developed respect for persons. But in Kant’s
theory, the rights and duties of persons override
any consequentialist calculus.
So Kantian ethics has many of the most impor-
tant qualities that we associate with adequate
describing an action, an oversight that allows us to
word a rule in many different ways. Consider, for
example, our duty not to lie. You might state the rel-
evant rule like this: “Lie only to avoid injury or death
to others.” But you could also say “Lie only to avoid
injury, death, or embarrassment to anyone who
has green eyes and red hair” (a group that includes
you and your relatives). Neither rule would lead to
an inconsistency if everyone acted on it, so they
both describe permissible actions. The second rule,
though, is obviously not morally acceptable. More to
the point, it shows that we can use the first version
of the categorical imperative to sanction all sorts
of immoral acts if we state the rule in enough detail.
This result suggests not only a problem with Crite-
rion 1 but also a limitation on the usefulness of the
theory, a fault measured by Criterion 3. Judging the
rightness of an action is close to impossible if the lan-
guage of the relevant rule can change with the wind.
It may be feasible to remedy some of the short-
comings of the first version of the categorical imper-
ative by combining it with the second. Rules such as
“Kill everyone with dark skin” or “Lie only to avoid
injury, death, or embarrassment to anyone who
has green eyes and red hair” would be unaccept-
able because they would allow people to be treated
merely as a means. But the means- ends principle
itself appears to be in need of modification. The
main difficulty is that our duties not to use people
merely as a means can conflict, and Kant provides
no counsel on how to resolve such dilemmas. Say,
for example, that hundreds of innocent people are
enslaved inside a brutal Nazi concentration camp,
and the only way we can free them is to kill the
Nazis guarding the camp. We must therefore choose
between allowing the prisoners to be used merely as
a means by the Nazis or using the Nazis merely as a
means by killing them to free the prisoners.
Here is another example, a classic case from the
philosopher C. D. Broad:
Again, there seem to be cases in which you must
either treat A or treat B, not as an end, but as a means.
If we isolate a man who is a carrier of typhoid, we are

CHAPTER 6: NoNCoNsEquENTiAlisT THEoRiEs: Do YouR DuTY Á 139
and finally into an oak. The end toward which the
acorn strives is the good (for acorns)—that is, to be
a well- formed and well- functioning oak. Natural
law determines how an oak functions— and indi-
cates how an oak should function. If the oak does
not function according to its natural purpose (if, for
example, it is deformed or weak), it fails to be as it
should be, deviating from its proper path laid down
in natural law. Likewise, humans have a nature—
a natural function and purpose unique among all
living things. In human nature, in the mandates of
the natural law for humanity, are the aims toward
which human life strives. In these teleological striv-
ings, in these facts about what human nature is, we
can perceive what it should be.
What is it, exactly, that human nature aims at?
Aquinas says that humans naturally incline toward
preservation of human life, avoidance of harm,
basic functions that humans and animals have in
common (sexual intercourse, raising offspring,
and the like), the search for truth, the nurturing of
social ties, and behavior that is benign and reason-
able. For humans, these inclinations constitute the
good— the good of human flourishing and well-
being. Our duty, then, is to achieve the good, to
fully realize the goals to which our nature is already
inclined. As Aquinas says,
[T]his is the first precept of law, that good is to be
done and promoted, and evil is to be avoided. All other
precepts of the natural law are based upon this; so
that all things which the practical reason naturally
apprehends as man’s good belong to the precepts of
the natural law under the form of things to be done
or avoided.
Since, however, good has the nature of an end, and
evil, the nature of the contrary, hence it is that all
those things to which man has a natural inclination
are naturally apprehended by reason as good, and
consequently as objects of pursuit, and their contrar-
ies as evil, and objects of avoidance. Therefore, the
order of the precepts of the natural law is according to
the order of natural inclinations.7
In this passage, Aquinas refers to the aspect
of human nature that enables us to decipher and
moral theories. And no one has explained better
than Kant why persons deserve full respect and
how we are to determine whether persons are get-
ting the respect they deserve.
NATURAL LAW THEORY
The natural law theory of morality comes to us from
ancient Greek and Roman philosophers (most nota-
bly, Aristotle and the Stoics) through the theologian
and philosopher Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274).
Aquinas molded it into its most influential form and
bequeathed it to the world and the Roman Catholic
Church, which embraced it as its official system of
ethics. To this day, the theory is the primary basis
for the church’s views on abortion, homosexuality,
euthanasia, and other controversial issues.
Here we focus on the traditional version of the
theory derived from Aquinas. This form is theistic,
assuming a divine lawgiver that has given us the gift
of reason to comprehend the order of nature. But
there are other natural law theories of a more recent
vintage that dispense with the religious elements,
basing objective moral standards on human nature
and the natural needs and interests of humans.
According to Aquinas, at the heart of the tra-
ditional theory is the notion that right actions are
those that accord with the natural law— the moral
principles that we can “read” clearly in the very
structure of nature itself, including human nature.
We can look into nature and somehow uncover
moral standards because nature is a certain way: it
is rationally ordered and teleological ( goal- directed),
with every part having its own purpose or end at
which it naturally aims. From this notion about
nature, traditional natural law theorists draw the
following conclusion: How nature is reveals how it
should be. The goals to which nature inclines reveal
the values that we should embrace and the moral
purposes to which we should aspire.
In conformity with an inherent natural pur-
pose or goal— that is, according to natural law— an
acorn develops into a seedling, then into a sapling,

140 Á PART 3: THEoRiEs oF MoRAliTY
is that such inconsistencies cannot happen. The
natural law tradition gives a different answer: con-
flicts between duties are possible, but they can be
resolved by applying the doctrine of double
effect. This principle pertains to situations in
which an action has both good and bad effects. It
says that performing a good action may be permis-
sible even if it has bad effects, but performing a bad
action for the purpose of achieving good effects is
never permissible. More formally, in a traditional
interpretation of the doctrine, an action is permis-
sible if four conditions are met:
1. The action is inherently (without reference to con
sequences) either morally good or morally neutral.
That is, the action itself must at least be morally
permissible.
2. The bad effect is not used to produce the good effect
(though the bad may be a side effect of the good).
Killing a fetus to save the mother’s life is never
permissible. However, using a drug to cure the
mother’s life- threatening disease— even though
the fetus dies as a side effect of the treatment—
may be permissible.
3. The intention must always be to bring about the
good effect. For any given action, the bad effect
may occur, and it may even be foreseen, but it
must not be intended.
4. The good effect must be at least as important as
the bad effect. The good of an action must be
proportional to the bad. If the bad heavily
outweighs the good, the action is not permis-
sible. The good of saving your own life in an act
of self- defense, for example, must be at least
as great as the bad of taking the life of your
attacker.
The doctrine of double effect is surprisingly ver-
satile. Natural law theorists have used it to navigate
moral dilemmas in medical ethics, reproductive
health, warfare, and other life- and- death issues, as
we will see in the next section.
implement the precepts of natural law: reason.
Humans, unlike the rest of nature, are rational crea-
tures, capable of understanding, deliberation, and
free choice. Because all of nature is ordered and ratio-
nal, only rational beings such as humans can peer
into it and discern the inclinations in their nature,
derive from the natural tendencies the natural laws,
and apply the laws to their actions and their lives.
Humans have the gift of reason (a gift from God,
Aquinas says), and reason gives us access to the laws.
Reason therefore is the foundation of morality. Judg-
ing the rightness of actions, then, is a matter of con-
sulting reason, of considering rational grounds for
moral beliefs.
It follows from these points that the natural
(moral) laws are both objective and universal.
The general principles of right and wrong do not
vary from person to person or culture to culture.
The dynamics of each situation may alter how a
principle is applied, and not every situation has a
relevant principle, but principles do not change
with the tide. The natural laws are the natural
laws. Further, not only are they binding on all per-
sons, but they can be known by all persons. Aqui-
nas insists that belief in God or inspiration from
above is not a prerequisite for knowledge of moral-
ity. A person’s effective use of reason is the only
requirement.
Like Kant’s categorical imperative, traditional
natural law theory is, in the main, strongly abso-
lutist. Natural law theorists commonly insist on
several exceptionless rules. Directly killing the
innocent is always wrong (which means that direct
abortion is always wrong). Use of contraceptives
is always wrong (on the grounds that it interferes
with the natural human inclination toward pro-
creation). Homosexuality is always wrong (again
because it thwarts procreation). For Aquinas, lying,
adultery, and blasphemy are always wrong.
As we have seen, moral principles— especially
absolutist rules— can give rise to conflicts of
duties. Kant’s view on conflicting perfect duties

CHAPTER 6: NoNCoNsEquENTiAlisT THEoRiEs: Do YouR DuTY Á 141
the chemotherapy is the method used to achieve
the good effect. The loss of the fetus is an indirect,
unintended result of the attempt to destroy the
cancer. The action therefore meets Condition 2.
The intention behind the action is to kill the can-
cer and thereby save the woman’s life— not to kill
the fetus. The woman and her doctors know that
the unfortunate consequence of treating the can-
cer will be the death of the fetus. They foresee the
death, but their intention is not to kill the fetus.
Thus, the action meets Condition 3. Is the good
effect proportional to the bad effect? In this case, a
life is balanced against a life, the life of the woman
and the life of the fetus. From the natural law per-
spective, both sides of the scale seem about equal
in importance. If the good effect to be achieved for
the woman was, say, a nicer appearance through
cosmetic surgery, and the bad effect was the death
of the fetus, the two sides would not have the same
level of importance. But in this case, the action does
meet Condition 4. Because the action meets all four
conditions, receiving the chemotherapy is morally
permissible for the woman.
Now let us examine a different kind of scenario.
Remember that earlier in this chapter, we applied
both utilitarianism and Kant’s theory to the antiter-
rorism tactic of killing a terrorist’s relatives. To stop
the murder of many innocent people by a relentless
terrorist, the authorities consider killing his wife
and three of his children and threatening to kill the
remaining four children. What verdict would the
doctrine of double effect yield in this case?
The good effect of this action is preventing
the deaths of innocent citizens; the bad effect is
the killing of other innocents. Right away we can
see that the action, in itself, is not morally good.
Directly killing the innocent is never permissible,
so the action does not meet Condition 1. Failing to
measure up to even one condition shows the action
to be prohibited, but we will continue our analysis
anyway. Is the bad effect used to produce the good
effect? Yes. The point of the action is to prevent
Applying the Theory
Traditional natural law theory and its double- effect
doctrine figure prominently in obstetrics cases in
which a choice must be made between harming
a pregnant woman or harming her fetus. A typi-
cal scenario goes something like this: A pregnant
woman has cancer and will die unless she receives
chemotherapy to destroy the tumors. If she does
take the chemotherapy, the fetus will die. Is it mor-
ally permissible for her to do so?
In itself, the act of taking the chemotherapy
is morally permissible. There is nothing inher-
ently wrong with using a medical treatment to
try to cure a life- threatening illness. So the action
meets Condition 1. We can also see that the bad
effect (killing the fetus) is not used to produce the
good effect (saving the woman’s life). Receiving
’ QUICK REVIEW
hypothetical imperative— An imperative that tells
us what we should do if we have certain desires.
categorical imperative— An imperative that we
should follow regardless of our particular wants
and needs; also, the principle that defines Kant’s
ethical system.
perfect duty— A duty that has no exceptions.
imperfect duty— A duty that has exceptions.
means- ends principle— The rule that we must
always treat people (including ourselves) as
ends in themselves, never merely as a means.
doctrine of double effect— The principle that
performing a good action may be permissible
even if it has bad effects, but performing a
bad action for the purpose of achieving good
effects is never permissible; any bad effects
must be unintended.

142 Á PART 3: THEoRiEs oF MoRAliTY
Evaluating the Theory
Traditional natural law theory appears to contain
no crippling internal inconsistencies, so we will
regard it as an eligible theory for evaluation. But it
does encounter difficulties with Criteria 1 and 3.
The theory seems to fall short of Criterion 1 (it
conflicts with commonsense moral judgments) in
part because of its absolutism, a feature that also
encumbers Kant’s theory. As we have seen, natural
law theorists maintain that some actions are always
wrong: for example, intentionally killing the inno-
cent, impeding procreation (through contracep-
tion, sterilization, or sexual preferences), or lying.
Such absolutes, though, can lead to moral judg-
ments that seem to diverge from common sense.
The absolute prohibition against directly killing
the innocent, for example, could actually result in
great loss of life in certain extreme circumstances.
Imagine that a thousand innocent people are taken
hostage by a homicidal madman, and the only way
to save the lives of nine hundred and ninety- nine
further terrorist killings, and the means to that end
is killing the terrorist’s wife and children. The bad
is used to achieve the good. So the action does not
meet Condition 2, either. It does, however, meet
Condition 3 because the intention behind the
action is to bring about the good effect, prevent-
ing further terrorist killings. Finally, if we view
the good effect (preventing the deaths of citizens)
as comparable to the bad effect (the killing of the
terrorist’s wife and children), we should infer that
the action meets Condition 4. In any case, because
the action fails Conditions 1 and 2, we have to
say that killing members of the terrorist’s family is
not permissible.
As suggested earlier, a Kantian theorist would
be likely to agree with this decision, and a rule-
utilitarian would probably concur. However, judg-
ing that the good consequences outweigh the bad,
an act- utilitarian might very well say that killing
the wife and children to prevent many other deaths
would be not only permissible, but obligatory.
Consider the following thought experiment, first
proposed by the philosopher Philippa Foot and
set forth here by the philosopher Judith Jarvis
Thomson:
Suppose you are the driver of a trolley. The trolley
rounds a bend, and there come into view ahead
five track workmen, who have been repairing the
track. The track goes through a bit of a valley at
that point, and the sides are steep, so you must
stop the trolley if you are to avoid running the
five men down. You step on the brakes, but alas
they don’t work. Now you suddenly see a spur of
track leading off to the right. You can turn the
trolley onto it, and thus save the five men on the
straight track ahead. Unfortunately, Mrs. Foot has
arranged that there is one track workman on that
spur of track. He can no more get off the track in
time than the five can, so you will kill him if you
turn the trolley onto him. Is it morally permissible
for you to turn the trolley?*
If you were the driver of the trolley, which option
would you choose? Would you consider it morally
permissible to turn the trolley onto the one work-
man to save the other five? Why or why not? What
would the doctrine of double effect have you do in
this case? Does your moral intuition seem to conflict
with what the doctrine would have you do? What
reasons can you give for the choice you make?
*Judith Jarvis Thomson, “Critical Thought: Double
Effect and the ‘Trolley Problem,’” Yale Law Journal,
vol. 94, no. 6, May 1985. Reprinted with permission
from the Yale Law Journal.
CRITICAL THOUGHT: Double Effect and the “Trolley Problem”’

CHAPTER 6: NoNCoNsEquENTiAlisT THEoRiEs: Do YouR DuTY Á 143
problematic. The kinds of moral principles that
we might extract from nature depend on our con-
ception of nature, and such conceptions can vary.
Taking their cue from Aquinas, many natural law
theorists see the inclinations of human nature as
benign; others, as fundamentally depraved. His-
torically, humans have shown a capacity for both
great good and monstrous evil. Which inclination
is the true one? And even if we could accurately
identify human inclinations, there seems to be no
reliable procedure for uncovering the correspond-
ing moral values or telling whether moral princi-
ples should be absolutist.
LEARNING FROM NATURAL LAW
Like Kantian ethics, natural law theory is univer-
salist, objective, and rational, applying to all per-
sons and requiring that moral choices be backed
by good reasons. The emphasis on reason makes
morality independent of religion and belief in
God, a distinction also found in Kant’s ethics. At
the heart of natural law theory is a strong respect
for human life, an attitude that is close to, but not
quite the same thing as, Kant’s means- ends prin-
ciple. Respect for life or persons is, of course, a pri-
mary concern of our moral experience and seems
to preclude the kind of wholesale end- justifies- the-
means calculations that are a defining characteris-
tic of many forms of utilitarianism.
Natural law theory emphasizes a significant
element in moral deliberation that some other
theories play down: intention. In general, inten-
tion plays a larger role in natural law theory than
it does in Kant’s categorical imperative. To many
natural law theorists, the rightness of an action
often depends on the intentions of the moral agent
performing it. In our previous example of the preg-
nant woman with cancer, the intention behind the
act of taking the chemotherapy is to kill the cancer,
not the fetus, though the fetus dies because of the
treatment. So the action is thought to be morally
permissible. If the intention had been to kill the
is to intentionally kill one of them. If the one is not
killed, all one thousand will die. Most of us would
probably regard the killing of the one hostage as a
tragic but necessary measure to prevent a massive
loss of life. The alternative— letting them all die—
would seem a much greater tragedy. But many nat-
ural law theorists would condemn the killing of the
one innocent person even if it would save the lives
of hundreds.
Similarly, suppose a pregnant woman will die
unless her fetus is aborted. Would it be morally
permissible for her to have the abortion? Given the
natural law prohibition against killing the inno-
cent, many natural law theorists would say no.
Aborting the fetus would be wrong, even to save
the mother’s life. But most people would probably
say that this view contradicts our considered moral
judgments.
The absolutism of natural law theory arises
from the notion that nature is authoritatively tele-
ological. Nature aims toward particular ends that
are ordained by the divine, and the values inher-
ent in this arrangement cannot and must not be
ignored or altered. How nature is reveals how it
should be. Period. But the teleological character of
nature has never been established by logical argu-
ment or empirical science— at least not to the satis-
faction of most philosophers and scientists. In fact,
science (including evolutionary theory) suggests
that nature is not teleological at all, but instead
random and purposeless, changing and adapting
according to scientific laws, blind cause and effect,
chance mutation, and competition among species.
Moreover, the idea that values can somehow be
extracted from the facts of nature is as problematic
for natural law theory as it is for ethical egoism and
utilitarianism. From the fact that humans have a
natural inclination toward procreation it does not
follow that discouraging procreation through con-
traception is morally wrong.
Natural law theory seems to falter on Crite-
rion 3 (usefulness) because, as just mentioned,
discovering what values are inscribed in nature is

144 Á PART 3: THEoRiEs oF MoRAliTY
moral principles embedded in nature itself. How nature
is reveals how it should be. The inclinations of human
nature reveal the values that humans should live by.
Aquinas, who gave us the most influential form of
natural law theory, says that humans naturally incline
toward preservation of human life, procreation, the
search for truth, community, and benign and reason-
able behavior. Like Kant’s theory, traditional natural
law theory is absolutist, maintaining that some actions
are always wrong. These immoral actions include
directly killing the innocent, interfering with procre-
ation, and lying. The theory’s absolutist rules do occa-
sionally conflict, and the proposed remedy for any such
inconsistencies is the doctrine of double effect. That
principle applies to situations in which an action pro-
duces both good and bad effects. It says that perform-
ing a good action may be permissible even if it has bad
effects, but performing a bad action for the purpose of
achieving good effects is never permissible. Despite the
double- effect doctrine, the theory’s biggest weakness
is still its absolutism, which seems to mandate actions
that conflict with our considered moral judgments.
In some cases, for example, the theory might require
someone to allow hundreds of innocent people to die
just to avoid the direct killing of a single person.
KEY TERMS
hypothetical imperative (p. 133)
categorical imperative (p. 133)
perfect duty (p. 133)
imperfect duty (p. 133)
means- ends principle (p. 135)
doctrine of double effect (p. 140)
EXERCISES
Review Questions
1. What is the significance of a “good will” in
Kant’s ethics? (pp. 132–133)
2. What is the difference between a hypothetical
and a categorical imperative? (p. 133)
3. What is the moral principle laid out in the
first version of Kant’s categorical imperative?
(p. 133)
fetus directly, the action would have been deemed
wrong. In our everyday moral experience, we fre-
quently take intentions into account in evaluating
an action. We usually would think that there must
be some morally relevant difference between a ter-
rorist’s intentionally killing ten people and a police
officer’s accidentally killing those same ten people
while chasing the terrorist, though both scenarios
result in the same tragic loss of life.
CHAPTER REVIEW
SUMMARY
Kant’s moral theory is perhaps the most influential of
all nonconsequentialist approaches. In his view, right
actions have moral value only if they are done with a
“good will”—for duty’s sake alone. The meat of Kant’s
theory is the categorical imperative, a principle that
he formulates in three versions. The first of the two
versions we discuss says that an action is right if you
could will the maxim of that action to become a moral
law applying to all persons. An action is permissible
if (1) its maxim can be universalized (if everyone can
consistently act on it) and (2) you would be willing to
have that happen. The second version of the categorical
imperative says that we must always treat people as ends
in themselves and never merely as means to an end.
Kant’s theory seems to conflict with our common-
sense moral judgments (Criterion 1) and has flaws
that limit its usefulness in moral problem solving (Cri-
terion 3). The theory falters under Criterion 1 mainly
because some duties generated by the categorical
imperative are absolute. Absolute duties can conflict,
and Kant provides no way to resolve these incon-
sistencies, a failure under Criterion 3. Furthermore,
counterexamples suggest that we have no genuine
absolute duties.
Natural law theory is based on the notion that right
actions are those that accord with natural law— the

CHAPTER 6: NoNCoNsEquENTiAlisT THEoRiEs: Do YouR DuTY Á 145
8. Do you believe, as Kant does, that there are
perfect (absolute) duties? Why or why not?
9. According to the textbook, natural law
theory generates judgments that conflict with
commonsense morality. Do you agree with this
assessment? Why or why not?
10. Is natural law theory more plausible than
utilitarianism? Why or why not?
ETHICAL DILEMMAS
Explain how Kant’s theory could be applied in the
following scenarios to determine the proper course
of action.
1. Julie and Chan have been dating for three
months, and their relationship has slowly
blossomed into one of sincere affection and
trust. At the time they began dating, Chan had
a sexually transmitted disease, but he never
disclosed this information to Julie. Without
Julie’s knowledge, Chan sought treatment and
was eventually cured of the infection. Chan
has kept his secret from the beginning and has
no intention of ever revealing it to anyone.
How would Kant evaluate this situation?
Would he approve or disapprove of Chan’s
actions?
2. Imagine a World War II scenario in which
German soldiers strap innocent people to the
front of their tanks to dissuade Allied troops
from firing on the vehicles. If the Allies hold
their fire, their positions will be overrun, and
hundreds of their troops will be killed. The
Allied commander gives the order for his troops
to shoot at the tanks, knowing that the civilians
will perish. Should the Allies have killed these
innocents?
Explain how natural law theory could be applied in
the following scenario to determine the proper course
of action.
3. A scientist is conducting an experiment using
one hundred adult subjects, hoping to finally
discover a cure for liver cancer. Conducting this
one last study is the only way to identify the
substance that can cure the disease and save the
4. What is the difference between perfect and
imperfect duties? (p. 133)
5. How does Kant distinguish between treating
someone as a means and treating someone
merely as a means? (p. 135)
6. How can the absolutism of Kant’s theory lead
to judgments that conflict with moral common
sense? (pp. 136–137)
7. How might the subjectivity of Kant’s theory
lead to the sanctioning of heinous acts?
(p. 137)
8. What is natural law theory? (pp. 139–140)
9. According to natural law theorists, how
can nature reveal anything about morality?
(pp. 139–140)
10. According to Aquinas, what is the good that
human nature aims at? (p. 139)
11. According to natural law theory, how are moral
principles objective? How are they universal?
(p. 140)
12. What is the doctrine of double effect? (p. 140)
13. How can the absolutism of natural law theory
lead to moral judgments that conflict with
moral common sense? (p. 143)
Discussion Questions
1. Which moral theory— Kant’s or natural law—
seems more plausible to you? Why?
2. What elements of Kant’s theory do you think
could or should be part of any viable moral
theory?
3. In what way is Kant’s ethics independent of (not
based on) religious belief? Is natural law theory
independent of religious belief? Why or why not?
4. According to Kant, why is breaking a promise
or lying immoral? Do you agree with Kant’s
reasoning? Why or why not?
5. How might your life change if you completely
embraced Kant’s theory of morality?
6. How might your life change if you adopted the
natural law theory of morality?
7. Would a Kantian and a natural law theorist
agree on whether having an abortion is moral?
Why or why not?

146 Á PART 3: THEoRiEs oF MoRAliTY
Mark Murphy, “The Natural Law Tradition in Ethics,”
in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Winter 2002
ed., ed. Edward N. Zalta, http://plato.stanford.edu
/archives/win2002/entries/natural-law-ethics (1 March
2015).
Kai Nielsen, Ethics without God (London: Pemberton;
Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1973).
Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia (New York: Basic
Books, 1974).
Onora O’Neill, “Kantian Ethics,” in A Companion to Ethics,
ed. Peter Singer, corr. ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993).
Louis P. Pojman, “Natural Law,” in Ethics: Discovering
Right and Wrong, 4th ed. (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth,
2002).
James Rachels, chapter 9 in The Elements of Moral Philo
sophy, 4th ed. (Boston: McGraw- Hill, 2003).
Paul Taylor, chapter 5 in Principles of Ethics: An Introduc
tion (Encino, CA: Dickenson, 1975).
Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, in Basic Writings
of Saint Thomas Aquinas, ed. and annotated by
Anton C. Pegis (New York: Random House, 1945).
Robert N. Van Wyk, chapters 4 and 6 in Introduction to
Ethics (New York: St. Martin’s, 1990).
lives of countless people. But the experiment
causes long- lasting, horrible pain in the
subjects, and they will not be able to benefit in
any way from the study’s success. The researcher
would ordinarily never be able to enlist any
subjects for the study because of these two facts,
so to ensure the cooperation of the subjects,
he lies to them: he says that being a part of the
study will be painless and that it will increase
their life span. The study is completed, the cure
is found, and the subjects spend the next year
in agony. What would natural law theory say
about the scientist’s actions?
FURTHER READING
Stephen Buckle, “Natural Law,” in A Companion to Ethics,
ed. Peter Singer, corr. ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993).
John Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights (Oxford: Clar-
endon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 1980).
C. E. Harris, chapters 6 and 8 in Applying Moral Theories,
3rd ed. (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1997).
R E A D i N G s
From Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals
Immanuel Kant
* * *
Nothing can possibly be conceived in the world, or
even out of it, which can be called good, without quali-
fication, except a good will. Intelligence, wit, judge-
ment, and the other talents of the mind, however, they
may be named, or courage, resolution, perseverance, as
qualities of temperament, are undoubtedly good and
desirable in many respects; but these gifts of nature
may also become extremely bad and mischievous if the
will which is to make use of them, and which, there-
fore, constitutes what is called character, is not good.
It is the same with the gifts of fortune. Power, riches,
honour, even health, and the general well- being and
contentment with one’s condition which is called hap
piness, inspire pride, and often presumption, if there is
not a good will to correct the influence of these on the
mind, and with this also to rectify the whole principle
of acting and adapt it to its end. The sight of a being
who is not adorned with a single feature of a pure and
good will, enjoying unbroken prosperity, can never
give pleasure to an impartial rational spectator. Thus a
good will appears to constitute the indispensable con-
dition even of being worthy of happiness.
Immanuel Kant, Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals,
trans. Thomas K. Abbott (edited).

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CHAPTER 6: NoNCoNsEquENTiAlisT THEoRiEs: Do YouR DuTY Á 147
reason as the governor of our will. Therefore we will
examine this idea from this point of view.
* * *
To be beneficent when we can is a duty; and besides
this, there are many minds so sympathetically consti-
tuted that, without any other motive of vanity or self-
interest, they find a pleasure in spreading joy around
them and can take delight in the satisfaction of others
so far as it is their own work. But I maintain that in such
a case an action of this kind, however proper, how-
ever amiable it may be, has nevertheless no true moral
worth, but is on a level with other inclinations, e.g., the
inclination to honour, which, if it is happily directed to
that which is in fact of public utility and accordant with
duty and consequently honourable, deserves praise
and encouragement, but not esteem. For the maxim
lacks the moral import, namely, that such actions be
done from duty, not from inclination. Put the case that
the mind of that philanthropist were clouded by sor-
row of his own, extinguishing all sympathy with the lot
of others, and that, while he still has the power to ben-
efit others in distress, he is not touched by their trouble
because he is absorbed with his own; and now suppose
that he tears himself out of this dead insensibility, and
performs the action without any inclination to it, but
simply from duty, then first has his action its genuine
moral worth. Further still, if nature has put little sym-
pathy in the heart of this or that man; if he, supposed to
be an upright man, is by temperament cold and indif-
ferent to the sufferings of others, perhaps because in
respect of his own he is provided with the special gift of
patience and fortitude and supposes, or even requires,
that others should have the same— and such a man
would certainly not be the meanest product of nature—
but if nature had not specially framed him for a philan-
thropist, would he not still find in himself a source from
whence to give himself a far higher worth than that of a
good- natured temperament could be? Unquestionably.
It is just in this that the moral worth of the character is
brought out which is incomparably the highest of all,
namely, that he is beneficent, not from inclination, but
from duty.
* * *
There are even some qualities which are of service
to this good will itself and may facilitate its action, yet
which have no intrinsic unconditional value, but always
presuppose a good will, and this qualifies the esteem that
we justly have for them and does not permit us to regard
them as absolutely good. Moderation in the affections
and passions, self- control, and calm deliberation are not
only good in many respects, but even seem to constitute
part of the intrinsic worth of the person; but they are far
from deserving to be called good without qualification,
although they have been so unconditionally praised by
the ancients. For without the principles of a good will,
they may become extremely bad, and the coolness of a
villain not only makes him far more dangerous, but also
directly makes him more abominable in our eyes than
he would have been without it.
A good will is good not because of what it performs
or effects, not by its aptness for the attainment of some
proposed end, but simply by virtue of the volition—
that is, it is good in itself, and considered by itself is to
be esteemed much higher than all that can be brought
about by it in favour of any inclination, nay, even of
the sum- total of all inclinations. Even if it should hap-
pen that, owing to special disfavour of fortune, or the
niggardly provision of a step- motherly nature, this
will should wholly lack power to accomplish its pur-
pose, if with its greatest efforts it should yet achieve
nothing, and there should remain only the good will
(not, to be sure, a mere wish, but the summoning of
all means in our power), then, like a jewel, it would
still shine by its own light, as a thing which has its
whole value in itself. Its usefulness or fruitfulness can
neither add nor take away anything from this value.
It would be, as it were, only the setting to enable us
to handle it the more conveniently in common com-
merce, or to attract to it the attention of those who are
not yet connoisseurs, but not to recommend it to true
connoisseurs, or to determine its value.
There is, however, something so strange in this
idea of the absolute value of the mere will, in which no
account is taken of its utility, that notwithstanding the
thorough assent of even common reason to the idea,
yet a suspicion must arise that it may perhaps really be
the product of mere high- flown fancy, and that we may
have misunderstood the purpose of nature in assigning

148 Á PART 3: THEoRiEs oF MoRAliTY
must be well considered whether there may not here-
after spring from this lie much greater inconvenience
than that from which I now free myself, and as, with all
my supposed cunning, the consequences cannot be so
easily foreseen but that credit once lost may be much
more injurious to me than any mischief which I seek
to avoid at present, it should be considered whether it
would not be more prudent to act herein according to
a universal maxim and to make it a habit to promise
nothing except with the intention of keeping it. But it
is soon clear to me that such a maxim will still only be
based on the fear of consequences. Now it is a wholly
different thing to be truthful from duty, and to be so
from apprehension of injurious consequences. In the
first case, the very notion of the action already implies
a law for me; in the second case, I must first look about
elsewhere to see what results may be combined with
it which would affect myself. For to deviate from the
principle of duty is beyond all doubt wicked; but to
be unfaithful to my maxim of prudence may often
be very advantageous to me, although to abide by it
is certainly safer. The shortest way, however, and an
unerring one, to discover the answer to this question
whether a lying promise is consistent with duty, is to
ask myself, “Should I be content that my maxim (to
extricate myself from difficulty by a false promise)
should hold good as a universal law, for myself as well
as for others?” and should I be able to say to myself,
“Every one may make a deceitful promise when he
finds himself in a difficulty from which he cannot oth-
erwise extricate himself?” Then I presently become
aware that while I can will the lie, I can by no means
will that lying should be a universal law. For with such
a law there would be no promises at all, since it would
be in vain to allege my intention in regard to my future
actions to those who would not believe this allegation,
or if they over hastily did so would pay me back in my
own coin. Hence my maxim, as soon as it should be
made a universal law, would necessarily destroy itself.
I do not, therefore, need any far- reaching pen-
etration to discern what I have to do in order that
my will may be morally good. Inexperienced in the
course of the world, incapable of being prepared for
all its contingencies, I only ask myself: Canst thou
also will that thy maxim should be a universal law? If
Thus the moral worth of an action does not lie
in the effect expected from it, nor in any principle of
action which requires to borrow its motive from this
expected effect. For all these effects— agreeableness of
one’s condition and even the promotion of the happi-
ness of others— could have been also brought about by
other causes, so that for this there would have been no
need of the will of a rational being; whereas it is in this
alone that the supreme and unconditional good can
be found. The pre- eminent good which we call moral
can therefore consist in nothing else than the concep-
tion of law in itself, which certainly is only possible
in a rational being, in so far as this conception, and
not the expected effect, determines the will. This is a
good which is already present in the person who acts
accordingly, and we have not to wait for it to appear
first in the result.
* * *
But what sort of law can that be, the conception
of which must determine the will, even without pay-
ing any regard to the effect expected from it, in order
that this will may be called good absolutely and with-
out qualification? As I have deprived the will of every
impulse which could arise to it from obedience to any
law, there remains nothing but the universal confor-
mity of its actions to law in general, which alone is
to serve the will as a principle, i.e., I am never to act
otherwise than so that I could also will that my maxim
should become a universal law. Here, now, it is the
simple conformity to law in general, without assum-
ing any particular law applicable to certain actions,
that serves the will as its principle and must so serve
it, if duty is not to be a vain delusion and a chimeri-
cal notion. The common reason of men in its practical
judgements perfectly coincides with this and always
has in view the principle here suggested. Let the ques-
tion be, for example: May I when in distress make a
promise with the intention not to keep it? I readily
distinguish here between the two significations which
the question may have: Whether it is prudent, or
whether it is right, to make a false promise? The for-
mer may undoubtedly often be the case. I see clearly
indeed that it is not enough to extricate myself from
a present difficulty by means of this subterfuge, but it

CHAPTER 6: NoNCoNsEquENTiAlisT THEoRiEs: Do YouR DuTY Á 149
be obtained by abstraction from any empirical, and
therefore merely contingent, knowledge; that it is
just this purity of their origin that makes them wor-
thy to serve as our supreme practical principle, and
that just in proportion as we add anything empirical,
we detract from their genuine influence and from
the absolute value of actions; that it is not only of
the greatest necessity, in a purely speculative point
of view, but is also of the greatest practical impor-
tance, to derive these notions and laws from pure rea-
son, to present them pure and unmixed, and even to
determine the compass of this practical or pure ratio-
nal knowledge, i.e., to determine the whole faculty
of pure practical reason; and, in doing so, we must
not make its principles dependent on the particular
nature of human reason, though in speculative phi-
losophy this may be permitted, or may even at times
be necessary; but since moral laws ought to hold
good for every rational creature, we must derive them
from the general concept of a rational being. In this
way, although for its application to man morality
has need of anthropology, yet, in the first instance,
we must treat it independently as pure philosophy,
i.e., as metaphysic, complete in itself (a thing which
in such distinct branches of science is easily done);
knowing well that unless we are in possession of this,
it would not only be vain to determine the moral ele-
ment of duty in right actions for purposes of specu-
lative criticism, but it would be impossible to base
morals on their genuine principles, even for com-
mon practical purposes, especially of moral instruc-
tion, so as to produce pure moral dispositions, and
to engraft them on men’s minds to the promotion of
the greatest possible good in the world.
But in order that in this study we may not merely
advance by the natural steps from the common moral
judgement (in this case very worthy of respect) to the
philosophical, as has been already done, but also from a
popular philosophy, which goes no further than it can
reach by groping with the help of examples, to meta-
physic (which does not allow itself to be checked by
anything empirical and, as it must measure the whole
extent of this kind of rational knowledge, goes as far
as ideal conceptions, where even examples fail us), we
must follow and clearly describe the practical faculty of
not, then it must be rejected, and that not because of
a disadvantage accruing from it to myself or even to
others, but because it cannot enter as a principle into a
possible universal legislation, and reason extorts from
me immediate respect for such legislation. I do not
indeed as yet discern on what this respect is based (this
the philosopher may inquire), but at least I under-
stand this, that it is an estimation of the worth which
far outweighs all worth of what is recommended by
inclination, and that the necessity of acting from pure
respect for the practical law is what constitutes duty,
to which every other motive must give place, because
it is the condition of a will being good in itself, and the
worth of such a will is above everything.
* * *
Nor could anything be more fatal to morality than
that we should wish to derive it from examples. For
every example of it that is set before me must be first
itself tested by principles of morality, whether it is
worthy to serve as an original example, i.e., as a pat-
tern; but by no means can it authoritatively furnish
the conception of morality. Even the Holy One of the
Gospels must first be compared with our ideal of moral
perfection before we can recognise Him as such; and
so He says of Himself, “Why call ye Me (whom you
see) good; none is good (the model of good) but God
only (whom ye do not see)?” But whence have we the
conception of God as the supreme good? Simply from
the idea of moral perfection, which reason frames a
priori and connects inseparably with the notion of a
free will. Imitation finds no place at all in morality,
and examples serve only for encouragement, i.e., they
put beyond doubt the feasibility of what the law com-
mands, they make visible that which the practical rule
expresses more generally, but they can never autho-
rize us to set aside the true original which lies in reason
and to guide ourselves by examples.
* * *
From what has been said, it is clear that all moral
conceptions have their seat and origin completely
a priori in the reason, and that, moreover, in the
commonest reason just as truly as in that which is
in the highest degree speculative; that they cannot

150 Á PART 3: THEoRiEs oF MoRAliTY
of this or that one, and not as a principle of reason,
which holds for every one.
* * *
Now all imperatives command either hypotheti-
cally or categorically. The former represent the practi-
cal necessity of a possible action as means to something
else that is willed (or at least which one might possibly
will). The categorical imperative would be that which
represented an action as necessary of itself without ref-
erence to another end, that is, as objectively necessary.
Since every practical law represents a possible
action as good and, on this account, for a subject who
is practically determinable by reason, necessary, all
imperatives are formulae determining an action which
is necessary according to the principle of a will good in
some respects. If now the action is good only as a means
to something else, then the imperative is hypothetical;
if it is conceived as good in itself and consequently as
being necessarily the principle of a will which of itself
conforms to reason, then it is categorical.
Thus the imperative declares what action possible
by me would be good and presents the practical rule
in relation to a will which does not forthwith perform
an action simply because it is good, whether because
the subject does not always know that it is good, or
because, even if it know this, yet its maxims might be
opposed to the objective principles of practical reason.
Accordingly the hypothetical imperative only says
that the action is good for some purpose, possible or
actual. In the first case it is a problematical, in the sec-
ond an assertorial practical principle. The categorical
imperative which declares an action to be objectively
necessary in itself without reference to any purpose,
i.e., without any other end, is valid as an apodeictic
(practical) principle.
* * *
Finally, there is an imperative which commands
a certain conduct immediately, without having as its
condition any other purpose to be attained by it. This
imperative is categorical. It concerns not the matter of
the action, or its intended result, but its form and the
principle of which it is itself a result; and what is essen-
tially good in it consists in the mental disposition, let
reason, from the general rules of its determination to
the point where the notion of duty springs from it.
Everything in nature works according to laws.
Rational beings alone have the faculty of acting accord-
ing to the conception of laws— that is, according to
principles, that is, have a will. Since the deduction of
actions from principles requires reason, the will is noth-
ing but practical reason. If reason infallibly determines
the will, then the actions of such a being which are rec-
ognised as objectively necessary are subjectively neces-
sary also, that is, the will is a faculty to choose that only
which reason independent of inclination recognises
as practically necessary, that is, as good. But if reason
of itself does not sufficiently determine the will, if the
latter is subject also to subjective conditions (particu-
lar impulses) which do not always coincide with the
objective conditions; in a word, if the will does not in
itself completely accord with reason (which is actually
the case with men), then the actions which objectively
are recognised as necessary are subjectively contingent,
and the determination of such a will according to objec-
tive laws is obligation, that is to say, the relation of the
objective laws to a will that is not thoroughly good is
conceived as the determination of the will of a rational
being by principles of reason, but which the will from
its nature does not of necessity follow.
The conception of an objective principle, in so far
as it is obligatory for a will, is called a command (of
reason), and the formula of the command is called an
imperative.
All imperatives are expressed by the word ought
[or shall], and thereby indicate the relation of an
objective law of reason to a will, which from its sub-
jective constitution is not necessarily determined by
it (an obligation). They say that something would
be good to do or to forbear, but they say it to a will
which does not always do a thing because it is con-
ceived to be good to do it. That is practically good,
however, which determines the will by means of the
conceptions of reason, and consequently not from
subjective causes, but objectively, that is, on princi-
ples which are valid for every rational being as such.
It is distinguished from the pleasant, as that which
influences the will only by means of sensation from
merely subjective causes, valid only for the sense

CHAPTER 6: NoNCoNsEquENTiAlisT THEoRiEs: Do YouR DuTY Á 151
arbitrary purpose may be considered as in itself contin-
gent, and we can at any time be free from the precept
if we give up the purpose; on the contrary, the uncon-
ditional command leaves the will no liberty to choose
the opposite; consequently it alone carries with it that
necessity which we require in a law.
Secondly, in the case of this categorical impera-
tive or law of morality, the difficulty (of discerning
its possibility) is a very profound one. It is an a priori
synthetical practical proposition; and as there is so
much difficulty in discerning the possibility of spec-
ulative propositions of this kind, it may readily be
supposed that the difficulty will be no less with the
practical.
* * *
In this problem we will first inquire whether the
mere conception of a categorical imperative may not
perhaps supply us also with the formula of it, contain-
ing the proposition which alone can be a categorical
imperative; for even if we know the tenor of such an
absolute command, yet how it is possible will require
further special and laborious study, which we post-
pone to the last section.
When I conceive a hypothetical imperative, in
general I do not know beforehand what it will contain
until I am given the condition. But when I conceive
a categorical imperative, I know at once what it con-
tains. For as the imperative contains besides the law
only the necessity that the maxims shall conform to
this law, while the law contains no conditions restrict-
ing it, there remains nothing but the general state-
ment that the maxim of the action should conform to
a universal law, and it is this conformity alone that the
imperative properly represents as necessary.
* * *
There is therefore but one categorical imperative,
namely, this: Act only on that maxim whereby thou
canst at the same time will that it should become a
universal law.
Now if all imperatives of duty can be deduced
from this one imperative as from their principle, then,
although it should remain undecided what is called
duty is not merely a vain notion, yet at least we shall
the consequence be what it may. This imperative may
be called that of morality.
* * *
[The] question how the imperative of morality is
possible, is undoubtedly one, the only one, demand-
ing a solution, as this is not at all hypothetical, and
the objective necessity which it presents cannot rest
on any hypothesis, as is the case with the hypotheti-
cal imperatives. Only here we must never leave out
of consideration that we cannot make out by any
example, in other words empirically, whether there is
such an imperative at all, but it is rather to be feared
that all those which seem to be categorical may yet be
at bottom hypothetical. For instance, when the pre-
cept is: “Thou shalt not promise deceitfully”; and it is
assumed that the necessity of this is not a mere coun-
sel to avoid some other evil, so that it should mean:
“Thou shalt not make a lying promise, lest if it become
known thou shouldst destroy thy credit,” but that an
action of this kind must be regarded as evil in itself,
so that the imperative of the prohibition is categorical;
then we cannot show with certainty in any example
that the will was determined merely by the law, with-
out any other spring of action, although it may appear
to be so. For it is always possible that fear of disgrace,
perhaps also obscure dread of other dangers, may
have a secret influence on the will. Who can prove
by experience the non- existence of a cause when
all that experience tells us is that we do not perceive
it? But in such a case the so- called moral imperative,
which as such appears to be categorical and uncondi-
tional, would in reality be only a pragmatic precept,
drawing our attention to our own interests and merely
teaching us to take these into consideration.
We shall therefore have to investigate a priori the
possibility of a categorical imperative, as we have not
in this case the advantage of its reality being given in
experience, so that [the elucidation of] its possibility
should be requisite only for its explanation, not for its
establishment. In the meantime it may be discerned
beforehand that the categorical imperative alone has
the purport of a practical law; all the rest may indeed
be called principles of the will but not laws, since
whatever is only necessary for the attainment of some

152 Á PART 3: THEoRiEs oF MoRAliTY
of one’s own advantage may perhaps be consistent
with my whole future welfare; but the question now
is, “Is it right?” I change then the suggestion of self-
love into a universal law, and state the question thus:
“How would it be if my maxim were a universal law?”
Then I see at once that it could never hold as a uni-
versal law of nature, but would necessarily contradict
itself. For supposing it to be a universal law that every-
one when he thinks himself in a difficulty should be
able to promise whatever he pleases, with the purpose
of not keeping his promise, the promise itself would
become impossible, as well as the end that one might
have in view in it, since no one would consider that
anything was promised to him, but would ridicule all
such statements as vain pretences.
3. A third finds in himself a talent which with the
help of some culture might make him a useful man in
many respects. But he finds himself in comfortable cir-
cumstances and prefers to indulge in pleasure rather
than to take pains in enlarging and improving his
happy natural capacities. He asks, however, whether
his maxim of neglect of his natural gifts, besides agree-
ing with his inclination to indulgence, agrees also
with what is called duty. He sees then that a system of
nature could indeed subsist with such a universal law
although men (like the South Sea islanders) should
let their talents rest and resolve to devote their lives
merely to idleness, amusement, and propagation of
their species— in a word, to enjoyment; but he can-
not possibly will that this should be a universal law
of nature, or be implanted in us as such by a natural
instinct. For, as a rational being, he necessarily wills
that his faculties be developed, since they serve him
and have been given him, for all sorts of possible
purposes.
4. A fourth, who is in prosperity, while he sees
that others have to contend with great wretchedness
and that he could help them, thinks: “What concern
is it of mine? Let everyone be as happy as Heaven
pleases, or as he can make himself; I will take nothing
from him nor even envy him, only I do not wish to
contribute anything to his welfare or to his assistance
in distress!” Now no doubt if such a mode of think-
ing were a universal law, the human race might very
well subsist and doubtless even better than in a state
be able to show what we understand by it and what
this notion means.
Since the universality of the law according to
which effects are produced constitutes what is prop-
erly called nature in the most general sense (as to
form), that is the existence of things so far as it is deter-
mined by general laws, the imperative of duty may be
expressed thus: Act as if the maxim of thy action were
to become by thy will a universal law of nature.
We will now enumerate a few duties, adopting the
usual division of them into duties to ourselves and to
others, and into perfect and imperfect duties.
* * *
1. A man reduced to despair by a series of misfor-
tunes feels wearied of life, but is still so far in posses-
sion of his reason that he can ask himself whether it
would not be contrary to his duty to himself to take
his own life. Now he inquires whether the maxim of
his action could become a universal law of nature. His
maxim is: “From self- love I adopt it as a principle to
shorten my life when its longer duration is likely to
bring more evil than satisfaction.” It is asked then sim-
ply whether this principle founded on self- love can
become a universal law of nature. Now we see at once
that a system of nature of which it should be a law to
destroy life by means of the very feeling whose special
nature it is to impel to the improvement of life would
contradict itself and, therefore, could not exist as a sys-
tem of nature; hence that maxim cannot possibly exist
as a universal law of nature and, consequently, would
be wholly inconsistent with the supreme principle of
all duty.
2. Another finds himself forced by necessity to
borrow money. He knows that he will not be able to
repay it, but sees also that nothing will be lent to him
unless he promises stoutly to repay it in a definite time.
He desires to make this promise, but he has still so
much conscience as to ask himself: “Is it not unlawful
and inconsistent with duty to get out of a difficulty in
this way?” Suppose however that he resolves to do so:
then the maxim of his action would be expressed thus:
“When I think myself in want of money, I will borrow
money and promise to repay it, although I know that
I never can do so.” Now this principle of self- love or

CHAPTER 6: NoNCoNsEquENTiAlisT THEoRiEs: Do YouR DuTY Á 153
of every rational being to be wholly free from them.
Thus the worth of any object which is to be acquired
by our action is always conditional. Beings whose exis-
tence depends not on our will but on nature’s, have
nevertheless, if they are irrational beings, only a rela-
tive value as means, and are therefore called things;
rational beings, on the contrary, are called persons,
because their very nature points them out as ends in
themselves, that is as something which must not be
used merely as means, and so far therefore restricts
freedom of actions (and is an object of respect). These,
therefore, are not merely subjective ends whose exis-
tence has a worth for us as an effect of our action, but
objective ends, that is, things whose existence is an
end in itself; an end moreover for which no other can
be substituted, which they should subserve merely as
means, for otherwise nothing whatever would possess
absolute worth; but if all worth were conditioned and
therefore contingent, then there would be no supreme
practical principle of reason whatever.
If then there is a supreme practical principle or, in
respect of the human will, a categorical imperative,
it must be one which, being drawn from the concep-
tion of that which is necessarily an end for everyone
because it is an end in itself, constitutes an objective
principle of will, and can therefore serve as a univer-
sal practical law. The foundation of this principle is:
rational nature exists as an end in itself. Man necessar-
ily conceives his own existence as being so; so far then
this is a subjective principle of human actions. But
every other rational being regards its existence simi-
larly, just on the same rational principle that holds for
me: so that it is at the same time an objective principle,
from which as a supreme practical law all laws of the
will must be capable of being deduced. Accordingly
the practical imperative will be as follows: So act as
to treat humanity, whether in thine own person or in
that of any other, in every case as an end withal, never
as means only. We will now inquire whether this can
be practically carried out.
* * *
To abide by the previous examples:
Firstly, under the head of necessary duty to one-
self: He who contemplates suicide should ask himself
in which everyone talks of sympathy and goodwill, or
even takes care occasionally to put it into practice, but,
on the other side, also cheats when he can, betrays
the rights of men, or otherwise violates them. But
although it is possible that a universal law of nature
might exist in accordance with that maxim, it is
impossible to will that such a principle should have
the universal validity of a law of nature. For a will
which resolved this would contradict itself, inasmuch
as many cases might occur in which one would have
need of the love and sympathy of others, and in which,
by such a law of nature, sprung from his own will, he
would deprive himself of all hope of the aid he desires.
These are a few of the many actual duties, or at least
what we regard as such, which obviously fall into two
classes on the one principle that we have laid down. We
must be able to will that a maxim of our action should
be a universal law. This is the canon of the moral appre-
ciation of the action generally. Some actions are of such
a character that their maxim cannot without contradic-
tion be even conceived as a universal law of nature, far
from it being possible that we should will that it should
be so. In others this intrinsic impossibility is not found,
but still it is impossible to will that their maxim should
be raised to the universality of a law of nature, since
such a will would contradict itself. It is easily seen that
the former violate strict or rigorous (inflexible) duty;
the latter only laxer (meritorious) duty. Thus it has been
completely shown how all duties depend as regards the
nature of the obligation (not the object of the action)
on the same principle.
* * *
Now I say: man and generally any rational being
exists as an end in himself, not merely as a means
to be arbitrarily used by this or that will, but in all
his actions, whether they concern himself or other
rational beings, must be always regarded at the same
time as an end. All objects of the inclinations have
only a conditional worth, for if the inclinations and
the wants founded on them did not exist, then their
object would be without value. But the inclinations,
themselves being sources of want, are so far from hav-
ing an absolute worth for which they should be desired
that on the contrary it must be the universal wish

154 Á PART 3: THEoRiEs oF MoRAliTY
Looking back now on all previous attempts to dis-
cover the principle of morality, we need not wonder
why they all failed. It was seen that man was bound to
laws by duty, but it was not observed that the laws to
which he is subject are only those of his own giving,
though at the same time they are universal, and that
he is only bound to act in conformity with his own
will; a will, however, which is designed by nature to
give universal laws. For when one has conceived man
only as subject to a law (no matter what), then this law
required some interest, either by way of attraction or
constraint, since it did not originate as a law from his
own will, but this will was according to a law obliged by
something else to act in a certain manner. Now by this
necessary consequence all the labour spent in finding a
supreme principle of duty was irrevocably lost. For men
never elicited duty, but only a necessity of acting from
a certain interest. Whether this interest was private or
otherwise, in any case the imperative must be condi-
tional and could not by any means be capable of being
a moral command. I will therefore call this the principle
of autonomy of the will, in contrast with every other
which I accordingly reckon as heteronomy.
The conception of the will of every rational being
as one which must consider itself as giving in all the
maxims of its will universal laws, so as to judge itself
and its actions from this point of view— this concep-
tion leads to another which depends on it and is very
fruitful, namely that of a kingdom of ends.
By a kingdom I understand the union of differ-
ent rational beings in a system by common laws. Now
since it is by laws that ends are determined as regards
their universal validity, hence, if we abstract from the
personal differences of rational beings and likewise
from all the content of their private ends, we shall
be able to conceive all ends combined in a system-
atic whole (including both rational beings as ends in
themselves, and also the special ends which each may
propose to himself), that is to say, we can conceive a
kingdom of ends, which on the preceding principles
is possible.
For all rational beings come under the law that
each of them must treat itself and all others never
merely as means, but in every case at the same time as
ends in themselves. Hence results a systematic union
whether his action can be consistent with the idea of
humanity as an end in itself. If he destroys himself in
order to escape from painful circumstances, he uses a
person merely as a mean to maintain a tolerable con-
dition up to the end of life. But a man is not a thing,
that is to say, something which can be used merely as
means, but must in all his actions be always consid-
ered as an end in himself. I cannot, therefore, dispose
in any way of a man in my own person so as to muti-
late him, to damage or kill him. (It belongs to ethics
proper to define this principle more precisely, so as
to avoid all misunderstanding, for example, as to the
amputation of the limbs in order to preserve myself as
to exposing my life to danger with a view to preserve
it, etc. This question is therefore omitted here.)
Secondly, as regards necessary duties, or those of
strict obligation, towards others: He who is thinking of
making a lying promise to others will see at once that he
would be using another man merely as a mean, without
the latter containing at the same time the end in him-
self. For he whom I propose by such a promise to use for
my own purposes cannot possibly assent to my mode of
acting towards him and, therefore, cannot himself con-
tain the end of this action. This violation of the princi-
ple of humanity in other men is more obvious if we take
in examples of attacks on the freedom and property of
others. For then it is clear that he who transgresses the
rights of men intends to use the person of others merely
as a means, without considering that as rational beings
they ought always to be esteemed also as ends, that is,
as beings who must be capable of containing in them-
selves the end of the very same action.
* * *
Thirdly, as regards contingent (meritorious) duties
to oneself: It is not enough that the action does not
violate humanity in our own person as an end in
itself, it must also harmonize with it. Now there are
in humanity capacities of greater perfection, which
belong to the end that nature has in view in regard to
humanity in ourselves as the subject: to neglect these
might perhaps be consistent with the maintenance of
humanity as an end in itself, but not with the advance-
ment of this end.
* * *

CHAPTER 6: NoNCoNsEquENTiAlisT THEoRiEs: Do YouR DuTY Á 155
Morality consists then in the reference of all action
to the legislation which alone can render a kingdom of
ends possible. This legislation must be capable of exist-
ing in every rational being and of emanating from his
will, so that the principle of this will is never to act on
any maxim which could not without contradiction be
also a universal law and, accordingly, always so to act
that the will could at the same time regard itself as giv-
ing in its maxims universal laws. If now the maxims of
rational beings are not by their own nature coincident
with this objective principle, then the necessity of act-
ing on it is called practical necessitation, that is, duty.
Duty does not apply to the sovereign in the kingdom
of ends, but it does to every member of it and to all in
the same degree.
* * *
of rational being by common objective laws, that is,
a kingdom which may be called a kingdom of ends,
since what these laws have in view is just the relation
of these beings to one another as ends and means. It is
certainly only an ideal.
A rational being belongs as a member to the king-
dom of ends when, although giving universal laws in
it, he is also himself subject to these laws. He belongs
to it as sovereign when, while giving laws, he is not
subject to the will of any other.
A rational being must always regard himself as giv-
ing laws either as member or as sovereign in a kingdom
of ends which is rendered possible by the freedom of
will. He cannot, however, maintain the latter position
merely by the maxims of his will, but only in case he
is a completely independent being without wants and
with unrestricted power adequate to his will.
From Summa Theologica, First Part of the Second Part
St. Thomas Aquinas
QUESTION 91.
OF THE VARIOUS KINDS OF LAW.
* * *
First Article.
Whether There Is an Eternal Law?
Objection 1. It would seem that there is no eternal
law. Because every law is imposed on someone. But
there was not someone from eternity on whom a law
could be imposed: since God alone was from eternity.
Therefore no law is eternal.
Obj. 2. Further, promulgation is essential to law.
But promulgation could not be from eternity: because
there was no one to whom it could be promulgated
from eternity. Therefore no law can be eternal.
Obj. 3. Further, a law implies order to an end. But
nothing ordained to an end is eternal: for the last end
alone is eternal. Therefore no law is eternal.
On the contrary, Augustine says: That Law which is
the Supreme Reason cannot be understood to be otherwise
than unchangeable and eternal.
I answer that . . . a law is nothing else but a dictate
of practical reason emanating from the ruler who gov-
erns a perfect community. Now it is evident, granted
that the world is ruled by Divine Providence . . . that
the whole community of the universe is governed by
Divine Reason. Wherefore the very Idea of the govern-
ment of things in God the Ruler of the universe, has
the nature of a law. And since the Divine Reason’s
conception of things is not subject to time but is eter-
nal, according to Proverbs 8:23, therefore it is that this
kind of law must be called eternal.
Reply Obj. 1. Those things that are not in them-
selves, exist with God, inasmuch as they are fore-
known and preordained by Him, according to Romans
Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, First Part of the Second Part,
Questions 91 and 94 (edited). Translated by Fathers of the English
Dominican Province, 1911.

156 Á PART 3: THEoRiEs oF MoRAliTY
that are of the law, comments as follows: Although
they have no written law, yet they have the natural law,
whereby each one knows, and is conscious of, what is good
and what is evil.
I answer that . . . law, being a rule and measure, can
be in a person in two ways: in one way, as in him that
rules and measures; in another way, as in that which
is ruled and measured, since a thing is ruled and mea-
sured, in so far as it partakes of the rule or measure.
Wherefore, since all things subject to Divine provi-
dence are ruled and measured by the eternal law . . . ; it
is evident that all things partake somewhat of the eter-
nal law, in so far as, namely, from its being imprinted
on them, they derive their respective inclinations to
their proper acts and ends. Now among all others, the
rational creature is subject to Divine providence in the
most excellent way, in so far as it partakes of a share of
providence, by being provident both for itself and for
others. Wherefore it has a share of the Eternal Reason,
whereby it has a natural inclination to its proper act
and end: and this participation of the eternal law in the
rational creature is called the natural law. Hence the
Psalmist after saying (Psalms 4:6): Offer up the sacrifice
of justice, as though someone asked what the works of
justice are, adds: Many say, Who showeth us good things?
in answer to which question he says: The light of Thy
countenance, O Lord, is signed upon us: thus implying
that the light of natural reason, whereby we discern
what is good and what is evil, which is the function
of the natural law, is nothing else than an imprint on
us of the Divine light. It is therefore evident that the
natural law is nothing else than the rational creature’s
participation of the eternal law.
Reply Obj. 1. This argument would hold, if the
natural law were something different from the eternal
law: whereas it is nothing but a participation thereof,
as stated above.
Reply Obj. 2. Every act of reason and will in us is
based on that which is according to nature . . . : for
every act of reasoning is based on principles that are
known naturally, and every act of appetite in respect
of the means is derived from the natural appetite in
respect of the last end. Accordingly the first direction
of our acts to their end must needs be in virtue of the
natural law.
4:17: Who calls those things that are not, as those that
are. Accordingly the eternal concept of the Divine law
bears the character of an eternal law, in so far as it is
ordained by God to the government of things fore-
known by Him.
Reply Obj. 2. Promulgation is made by word of
mouth or in writing; and in both ways the eternal
law is promulgated: because both the Divine Word
and the writing of the Book of Life are eternal. But the
promulgation cannot be from eternity on the part of
the creature that hears or reads.
Reply Obj. 3. The law implies order to the end
actively, in so far as it directs certain things to the end;
but not passively— that is to say, the law itself is not
ordained to the end— except accidentally, in a gover-
nor whose end is extrinsic to him, and to which end
his law must needs be ordained. But the end of the
Divine government is God Himself, and His law is
not distinct from Himself. Wherefore the eternal law
is not ordained to another end.
Second Article.
Whether There Is in Us a Natural Law?
Objection 1. It would seem that there is no natu-
ral law in us. Because man is governed sufficiently by
the eternal law: for Augustine says that the eternal law
is that by which it is right that all things should be most
orderly. But nature does not abound in superfluities as
neither does she fail in necessaries. Therefore no law is
natural to man.
Obj. 2. Further, by the law man is directed, in his
acts, to the end . . . But the directing of human acts
to their end is not a function of nature, as is the case
in irrational creatures, which act for an end solely by
their natural appetite; whereas man acts for an end by
his reason and will. Therefore no law is natural to man.
Obj. 3. Further, the more a man is free, the less is
he under the law. But man is freer than all the animals,
on account of his free- will, with which he is endowed
above all other animals. Since therefore other animals
are not subject to a natural law, neither is man subject
to a natural law.
On the contrary, A gloss on Romans 2:14: When the
Gentiles, who have not the law, do by nature those things

CHAPTER 6: NoNCoNsEquENTiAlisT THEoRiEs: Do YouR DuTY Á 157
are called human laws, provided the other essential
conditions of law be observed . . . Wherefore Tully
[Cicero] says in his Rhetoric that justice has its source in
nature; thence certain things came into custom by reason of
their utility; afterwards these things which emanated from
nature and were approved by custom, were sanctioned by
fear and reverence for the law.
Reply Obj. 1. The human reason cannot have a full
participation of the dictate of the Divine Reason, but
according to its own mode, and imperfectly. Conse-
quently, as on the part of the speculative reason, by
a natural participation of Divine Wisdom, there is in
us the knowledge of certain general principles, but not
proper knowledge of each single truth, such as that
contained in the Divine Wisdom; so too, on the part of
the practical reason, man has a natural participation
of the eternal law, according to certain general prin-
ciples, but not as regards the particular determinations
of individual cases, which are, however, contained in
the eternal law. Hence the need for human reason to
proceed further to sanction them by law.
Reply Obj. 2. Human reason is not, of itself, the rule
of things: but the principles impressed on it by nature,
are general rules and measures of all things relating to
human conduct, whereof the natural reason is the rule
and measure, although it is not the measure of things
that are from nature.
Reply Obj. 3. The practical reason is concerned with
practical matters, which are singular and contingent:
but not with necessary things, with which the specu-
lative reason is concerned. Wherefore human laws
cannot have that inerrancy that belongs to the dem-
onstrated conclusions of sciences. Nor is it necessary
for every measure to be altogether unerring and cer-
tain, but according as it is possible in its own particular
genus.
Fourth Article.
Whether There Was Any Need for a Divine Law?
Objection 1. It would seem that there was no need
for a Divine law. Because . . . the natural law is a par-
ticipation in us of the eternal law. But the eternal law
is a Divine law . . . Therefore there was no need for a
Divine law in addition to the natural law, and human
laws derived therefrom.
Reply Obj. 3. Even irrational animals partake in
their own way of the Eternal Reason, just as the ratio-
nal creature does. But because the rational creature
partakes thereof in an intellectual and rational man-
ner, therefore the participation of the eternal law in
the rational creature is properly called a law, since a
law is something pertaining to reason . . . Irrational
creatures, however, do not partake thereof in a ratio-
nal manner, wherefore there is no participation of the
eternal law in them, except by way of similitude.
Third Article.
Whether There Is a Human Law?
Objection 1. It would seem that there is not a human
law. For the natural law is a participation of the eternal
law . . . Now through the eternal law all things are most
orderly, as Augustine states. Therefore the natural law
suffices for the ordering of all human affairs. Conse-
quently there is no need for a human law.
Obj. 2. Further, a law bears the character of a mea-
sure. . . . But human reason is not a measure of things,
but vice versa. . . . Therefore no law can emanate from
human reason.
Obj. 3. Further, a measure should be most certain. . . .
But the dictates of human reason in matters of conduct
are uncertain, according to Book of Wisdom 9:14: The
thoughts of mortal men are fearful, and our counsels uncer
tain. Therefore no law can emanate from human reason.
On the contrary, Augustine distinguishes two kinds
of law, the one eternal, the other temporal, which he
calls human.
I answer that . . . a law is a dictate of the practical
reason. Now it is to be observed that the same pro-
cedure takes place in the practical and in the specu-
lative reason: for each proceeds from principles to
conclusions . . . Accordingly we conclude that just
as, in the speculative reason, from naturally known
indemonstrable principles, we draw the conclusions
of the various sciences, the knowledge of which is not
imparted to us by nature, but acquired by the efforts
of reason, so too it is from the precepts of the natural
law, as from general and indemonstrable principles,
that the human reason needs to proceed to the more
particular determination of certain matters. These
particular determinations, devised by human reason,

158 Á PART 3: THEoRiEs oF MoRAliTY
Consequently human law could not sufficiently curb
and direct interior acts; and it was necessary for this
purpose that a Divine law should supervene.
Fourthly, because, as Augustine says, human law
cannot punish or forbid all evil deeds: since while aim-
ing at doing away with all evils, it would do away with
many good things, and would hinder the advance
of the common good, which is necessary for human
intercourse. In order, therefore, that no evil might
remain unforbidden and unpunished, it was neces-
sary for the Divine law to supervene, whereby all sins
are forbidden.
And these four causes are touched upon in Psalms
118:8, where it is said: The law of the Lord is unspot
ted, i.e. allowing no foulness of sin; converting souls,
because it directs not only exterior, but also interior
acts; the testimony of the Lord is faithful, because of
the certainty of what is true and right; giving wisdom
to little ones, by directing man to an end supernatural
and Divine.
Reply Obj. 1. By the natural law the eternal law is
participated proportionately to the capacity of human
nature. But to his supernatural end man needs to be
directed in a yet higher way. Hence the additional law
given by God, whereby man shares more perfectly in
the eternal law.
Reply Obj. 2. Counsel is a kind of inquiry: hence it
must proceed from some principles. Nor is it enough for
it to proceed from principles imparted by nature, which
are the precepts of the natural law, for the reasons given
above: but there is need for certain additional princi-
ples, namely, the precepts of the Divine law.
Reply Obj. 3. Irrational creatures are not ordained
to an end higher than that which is proportionate to
their natural powers: consequently the comparison
fails.
Fifth Article.
Whether There Is But One Divine Law?
Objection 1. It would seem that there is but one
Divine law. Because, where there is one king in one
kingdom there is but one law. Now the whole of man-
kind is compared to God as to one king, according to
Psalms 46:8: God is the King of all the earth. Therefore
there is but one Divine law.
Obj. 2. Further, it is written (Ecclesiastes 15:14)
that God left man in the hand of his own counsel. Now
counsel is an act of reason . . . Therefore man was left
to the direction of his reason. But a dictate of human
reason is a human law . . . Therefore there is no need
for man to be governed also by a Divine law.
Obj. 3. Further, human nature is more self- sufficing
than irrational creatures. But irrational creatures
have no Divine law besides the natural inclination
impressed on them. Much less, therefore, should the
rational creature have a Divine law in addition to the
natural law.
On the contrary, David prayed God to set His law
before him, saying (Psalms 118:33): Set before me for a
law the way of Thy justifications, O Lord.
I answer that, Besides the natural and the human
law it was necessary for the directing of human con-
duct to have a Divine law. And this for four reasons.
First, because it is by law that man is directed how to
perform his proper acts in view of his last end. And
indeed if man were ordained to no other end than that
which is proportionate to his natural faculty, there
would be no need for man to have any further direc-
tion of the part of his reason, besides the natural law
and human law which is derived from it. But since
man is ordained to an end of eternal happiness which
is inproportionate to man’s natural faculty . . . there-
fore it was necessary that, besides the natural and the
human law, man should be directed to his end by a law
given by God.
Secondly, because, on account of the uncertainty
of human judgment, especially on contingent and
particular matters, different people form different
judgments on human acts; whence also different and
contrary laws result. In order, therefore, that man may
know without any doubt what he ought to do and
what he ought to avoid, it was necessary for man to be
directed in his proper acts by a law given by God, for it
is certain that such a law cannot err.
Thirdly, because man can make laws in those mat-
ters of which he is competent to judge. But man is
not competent to judge of interior movements, that
are hidden, but only of exterior acts which appear:
and yet for the perfection of virtue it is necessary for
man to conduct himself aright in both kinds of acts.

CHAPTER 6: NoNCoNsEquENTiAlisT THEoRiEs: Do YouR DuTY Á 159
Obj. 2. Further, every law is directed to the end
which the lawgiver intends for those for whom he
makes the law. But God intends one and the same
thing for all men; since according to 1 Timothy
2:4: He will have all men to be saved, and to come to
the knowledge of the truth. Therefore there is but one
Divine law.
Obj. 3. Further, the Divine law seems to be more
akin to the eternal law, which is one, than the natural
law, according as the revelation of grace is of a higher
order than natural knowledge. Therefore much more
is the Divine law but one.
On the contrary, The Apostle says (Hebrews 7:12):
The priesthood being translated, it is necessary that a
translation also be made of the law. But the priesthood is
twofold, as stated in the same passage, viz. the levitical
priesthood, and the priesthood of Christ. Therefore
the Divine law is twofold, namely the Old Law and the
New Law.
I answer that . . . distinction is the cause of num-
ber. Now things may be distinguished in two ways.
First, as those things that are altogether specifically
different, e.g., a horse and an ox. Secondly, as perfect
and imperfect in the same species, e.g., a boy and a
man: and in this way the Divine law is divided into
Old and New. Hence the Apostle (Galatians 3:24, 25)
compares the state of man under the Old Law to that
of a child under a pedagogue; but the state under the
New Law, to that of a full grown man, who is no longer
under a pedagogue.
Now the perfection and imperfection of these
two laws is to be taken in connection with the three
conditions pertaining to law, as stated above. For, in
the first place, it belongs to law to be directed to the
common good as to its end . . . This good may be two-
fold. It may be a sensible and earthly good; and to this,
man was directly ordained by the Old Law: wherefore,
at the very outset of the law, the people were invited
to the earthly kingdom of the Chananaeans (Exodus
3:8, 17). Again it may be an intelligible and heavenly
good: and to this, man is ordained by the New Law.
Wherefore, at the very beginning of His preaching,
Christ invited men to the kingdom of heaven, saying
(Matthew 4:17): Do penance, for the kingdom of heaven is
at hand. Hence Augustine says that promises of temporal
goods are contained in the Old Testament, for which reason
it is called old; but the promise of eternal life belongs to the
New Testament.
Secondly, it belongs to the law to direct human acts
according to the order of righteousness: wherein also
the New Law surpasses the Old Law, since it directs our
internal acts, according to Matthew 5:20: Unless your
justice abound more than that of the Scribes and Pharisees,
you shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven. Hence the
saying that the Old Law restrains the hand, but the New
Law controls the mind.
Thirdly, it belongs to the law to induce men to
observe its commandments. This the Old Law did by
the fear of punishment: but the New Law, by love,
which is poured into our hearts by the grace of Christ,
bestowed in the New Law, but foreshadowed in the
Old. Hence Augustine says that there is little difference
between the Law and the Gospel— fear and love.
Reply Obj. 1. As the father of a family issues dif-
ferent commands to the children and to the adults,
so also the one King, God, in His one kingdom, gave
one law to men, while they were yet imperfect, and
another more perfect law, when, by the preceding
law, they had been led to a greater capacity for Divine
things.
Reply Obj. 2. The salvation of man could not be
achieved otherwise than through Christ, according
to Acts 4:12: There is no other name . . . given to men,
whereby we must be saved. Consequently the law that
brings all to salvation could not be given until after
the coming of Christ. But before His coming it was
necessary to give to the people, of whom Christ was
to be born, a law containing certain rudiments of righ-
teousness unto salvation, in order to prepare them to
receive Him.
Reply Obj. 3. The natural law directs man by way
of certain general precepts, common to both the per-
fect and the imperfect: wherefore it is one and the
same for all. But the Divine law directs man also in
certain particular matters, to which the perfect and
imperfect do not stand in the same relation. Hence
the necessity for the Divine law to be twofold, as
already explained.
* * *

160 Á PART 3: THEoRiEs oF MoRAliTY
that virtue is a principle of action, he mentions only
those things which are principles of human acts, viz.
powers, habits and passions. But there are other things
in the soul besides these three: there are acts; thus to
will is in the one that wills; again, things known are in
the knower; moreover its own natural properties are in
the soul, such as immortality and the like.
Reply Obj. 2. Synderesis is said to be the law of our
mind, because it is a habit containing the precepts
of the natural law, which are the first principles of
human actions.
Reply Obj. 3. This argument proves that the natural
law is held habitually; and this is granted.
To the argument advanced in the contrary sense
we reply that sometimes a man is unable to make
use of that which is in him habitually, on account of
some impediment: thus, on account of sleep, a man
is unable to use the habit of science. In like manner,
through the deficiency of his age, a child cannot use
the habit of understanding of principles, or the natu-
ral law, which is in him habitually.
Second Article.
Whether the Natural Law Contains Several
Precepts, or Only One?
Objection 1. It would seem that the natural law
contains, not several precepts, but one only. For law
is a kind of precept. . . . If therefore there were many
precepts of the natural law, it would follow that there
are also many natural laws.
Obj. 2. Further, the natural law is consequent
to human nature. But human nature, as a whole, is
one; though, as to its parts, it is manifold. Therefore,
either there is but one precept of the law of nature,
on account of the unity of nature as a whole; or there
are many, by reason of the number of parts of human
nature. The result would be that even things relating
to the inclination of the concupiscible faculty belong
to the natural law.
Obj. 3. Further, law is something pertaining to rea-
son . . . Now reason is but one in man. Therefore there
is only one precept of the natural law.
On the contrary, The precepts of the natural law
in man stand in relation to practical matters, as the
QUESTION 94.
OF THE NATURAL LAW.
First Article.
Whether the Natural Law Is a Habit?
Objection 1. It would seem that the natural law is a
habit. Because, as the Philosopher [Aristotle] says, there
are three things in the soul: power, habit, and passion. But
the natural law is not one of the soul’s powers: nor is
it one of the passions; as we may see by going through
them one by one. Therefore the natural law is a habit.
Obj. 2. Further, Basil says that the conscience or
synderesis is the law of our mind; which can only apply
to the natural law. But the synderesis is a habit. . . .
Therefore the natural law is a habit.
Obj. 3. Further, the natural law abides in man
always . . . But man’s reason, which the law regards,
does not always think about the natural law. Therefore
the natural law is not an act, but a habit.
On the contrary, Augustine says that a habit is that
whereby something is done when necessary. But such is
not the natural law: since it is in infants and in the
damned who cannot act by it. Therefore the natural
law is not a habit.
I answer that, A thing may be called a habit in two
ways. First, properly and essentially: and thus the nat-
ural law is not a habit. For . . . the natural law is some-
thing appointed by reason, just as a proposition is a
work of reason. Now that which a man does is not the
same as that whereby he does it: for he makes a becom-
ing speech by the habit of grammar. Since then a habit
is that by which we act, a law cannot be a habit prop-
erly and essentially.
Secondly, the term habit may be applied to that
which we hold by a habit: thus faith may mean that
which we hold by faith. And accordingly, since the
precepts of the natural law are sometimes considered
by reason actually, while sometimes they are in the
reason only habitually, in this way the natural law
may be called a habit. Thus, in speculative matters,
the indemonstrable principles are not the habit itself
whereby we hold those principles, but are the prin-
ciples the habit of which we possess.
Reply Obj. 1. The Philosopher [Aristotle] proposes
to discover the genus of virtue; and since it is evident

CHAPTER 6: NoNCoNsEquENTiAlisT THEoRiEs: Do YouR DuTY Á 161
whatever the practical reason naturally apprehends as
man’s good (or evil) belongs to the precepts of the natu-
ral law as something to be done or avoided.
Since, however, good has the nature of an end,
and evil, the nature of a contrary, hence it is that all
those things to which man has a natural inclination,
are naturally apprehended by reason as being good,
and consequently as objects of pursuit, and their
contraries as evil, and objects of avoidance. Where-
fore according to the order of natural inclinations, is
the order of the precepts of the natural law. Because
in man there is first of all an inclination to good in
accordance with the nature which he has in common
with all substances: inasmuch as every substance seeks
the preservation of its own being, according to its
nature: and by reason of this inclination, whatever is a
means of preserving human life, and of warding off its
obstacles, belongs to the natural law. Secondly, there
is in man an inclination to things that pertain to him
more specially, according to that nature which he has
in common with other animals: and in virtue of this
inclination, those things are said to belong to the nat-
ural law, which nature has taught to all animals, such as
sexual intercourse, education of offspring and so forth.
Thirdly, there is in man an inclination to good, accord-
ing to the nature of his reason, which nature is proper
to him: thus man has a natural inclination to know
the truth about God, and to live in society: and in this
respect, whatever pertains to this inclination belongs
to the natural law; for instance, to shun ignorance, to
avoid offending those among whom one has to live,
and other such things regarding the above inclination.
Reply Obj. 1. All these precepts of the law of nature
have the character of one natural law, inasmuch as
they flow from one first precept.
Reply Obj. 2. All the inclinations of any parts what-
soever of human nature, e.g. of the concupiscible and
irascible parts, in so far as they are ruled by reason,
belong to the natural law, and are reduced to one first
precept, as stated above: so that the precepts of the
natural law are many in themselves, but are based on
one common foundation.
Reply Obj. 3. Although reason is one in itself, yet it
directs all things regarding man; so that whatever can
be ruled by reason, is contained under the law of reason.
first principles to matters of demonstration. But there
are several first indemonstrable principles. Therefore
there are also several precepts of the natural law.
I answer that . . . the precepts of the natural law are
to the practical reason, what the first principles of dem-
onstrations are to the speculative reason; because both
are self- evident principles. Now a thing is said to be self-
evident in two ways: first, in itself; secondly, in relation
to us. Any proposition is said to be self- evident in itself,
if its predicate is contained in the notion of the subject:
although, to one who knows not the definition of the
subject, it happens that such a proposition is not self-
evident. For instance, this proposition, Man is a rational
being, is, in its very nature, self- evident, since who says
man, says a rational being: and yet to one who knows
not what a man is, this proposition is not self- evident.
Hence it is that, as Boethius says, certain axioms or
propositions are universally self- evident to all; and such
are those propositions whose terms are known to all, as,
Every whole is greater than its part, and, Things equal to one
and the same are equal to one another. But some proposi-
tions are self- evident only to the wise, who understand
the meaning of the terms of such propositions: thus to
one who understands that an angel is not a body, it is
self- evident that an angel is not circumscriptively in a
place: but this is not evident to the unlearned, for they
cannot grasp it.
Now a certain order is to be found in those things
that are apprehended universally. For that which,
before aught else, falls under apprehension, is being, the
notion of which is included in all things whatsoever a
man apprehends. Wherefore the first indemonstrable
principle is that the same thing cannot be affirmed and
denied at the same time, which is based on the notion of
being and not being: and on this principle all others are
based . . . Now as being is the first thing that falls under
the apprehension simply, so good is the first thing that
falls under the apprehension of the practical reason,
which is directed to action: since every agent acts for
an end under the aspect of good. Consequently the
first principle of practical reason is one founded on the
notion of good, viz. that good is that which all things seek
after. Hence this is the first precept of law, that good is
to be done and pursued, and evil is to be avoided. All other
precepts of the natural law are based upon this: so that

162 Á PART 3: THEoRiEs oF MoRAliTY
Reply Obj. 1. Temperance is about the natural con-
cupiscences of food, drink and sexual matters, which
are indeed ordained to the natural common good, just
as other matters of law are ordained to the moral com-
mon good.
Reply Obj. 2. By human nature we may mean either
that which is proper to man— and in this sense all
sins, as being against reason, are also against nature, as
Damascene states: or we may mean that nature which
is common to man and other animals; and in this
sense, certain special sins are said to be against nature;
thus contrary to sexual intercourse, which is natural
to all animals, is unisexual lust, which has received the
special name of the unnatural crime.
Reply Obj. 3. This argument considers acts in them-
selves. For it is owing to the various conditions of
men, that certain acts are virtuous for some, as being
proportionate and becoming to them, while they are
vicious for others, as being out of proportion to them.
Fourth Article.
Whether the Natural Law Is the Same in All Men?
Objection 1. It would seem that the natural law is
not the same in all. For it is stated in the Decretals that
the natural law is that which is contained in the Law and
the Gospel. But this is not common to all men; because,
as it is written (Romans 10:16), all do not obey the gospel.
Therefore the natural law is not the same in all men.
Obj. 2. Further, Things which are according to the law
are said to be just. . . . But . . . nothing is so universally
just as not to be subject to change in regard to some
men. Therefore even the natural law is not the same
in all men.
Obj. 3. Further . . . to the natural law belongs every-
thing to which a man is inclined according to his
nature. Now different men are naturally inclined to
different things; some to the desire of pleasures, others
to the desire of honors, and other men to other things.
Therefore there is not one natural law for all.
On the contrary, Isidore says: The natural law is com
mon to all nations.
I answer that . . . to the natural law belongs those
things to which a man is inclined naturally: and
among these it is proper to man to be inclined to act
Third Article.
Whether All Acts of Virtue Are Prescribed by the
Natural Law?
Objection 1. It would seem that not all acts of vir-
tue are prescribed by the natural law. Because . . . it is
essential to a law that it be ordained to the common
good. But some acts of virtue are ordained to the pri-
vate good of the individual, as is evident especially in
regards to acts of temperance. Therefore not all acts of
virtue are the subject of natural law.
Obj. 2. Further, every sin is opposed to some virtu-
ous act. If therefore all acts of virtue are prescribed by the
natural law, it seems to follow that all sins are against
nature: whereas this applies to certain special sins.
Obj. 3. Further, those things which are according
to nature are common to all. But acts of virtue are not
common to all: since a thing is virtuous in one, and
vicious in another. Therefore not all acts of virtue are
prescribed by the natural law.
On the contrary, Damascene says that virtues are
natural. Therefore virtuous acts also are a subject of the
natural law.
I answer that, We may speak of virtuous acts in two
ways: first, under the aspect of virtuous; secondly, as
such and such acts considered in their proper species.
If then we speak of acts of virtue, considered as virtu-
ous, thus all virtuous acts belong to the natural law.
For it has been stated that to the natural law belongs
everything to which a man is inclined according to
his nature. Now each thing is inclined naturally to an
operation that is suitable to it according to its form:
thus fire is inclined to give heat. Wherefore, since
the rational soul is the proper form of man, there is
in every man a natural inclination to act according
to reason: and this is to act according to virtue. Con-
sequently, considered thus, all acts of virtue are pre-
scribed by the natural law: since each one’s reason
naturally dictates to him to act virtuously. But if we
speak of virtuous acts, considered in themselves, i.e. in
their proper species, thus not all virtuous acts are pre-
scribed by the natural law: for many things are done
virtuously, to which nature does not incline at first;
but which, through the inquiry of reason, have been
found by men to be conducive to well- living.

CHAPTER 6: NoNCoNsEquENTiAlisT THEoRiEs: Do YouR DuTY Á 163
number of conditions added, the greater the number of
ways in which the principle may fail, so that it be not
right to restore or not to restore.
Consequently we must say that the natural law, as
to general principles, is the same for all, both as to rec-
titude and as to knowledge. But as to certain matters
of detail, which are conclusions, as it were, of those
general principles, it is the same for all in the majority
of cases, both as to rectitude and as to knowledge; and
yet in some few cases it may fail, both as to rectitude,
by reason of certain obstacles (just as natures subject
to generation and corruption fail in some few cases on
account of some obstacle), and as to knowledge, since
in some the reason is perverted by passion, or evil
habit, or an evil disposition of nature; thus formerly,
theft, although it is expressly contrary to the natural
law, was not considered wrong among the Germans,
as Julius Caesar relates.
Reply Obj. 1. The meaning of the sentence quoted
is not that whatever is contained in the Law and the
Gospel belongs to the natural law, since they contain
many things that are above nature; but that whatever
belongs to the natural law is fully contained in them.
Wherefore Gratian, after saying that the natural law is
what is contained in the Law and the Gospel, adds at once,
by way of example, by which everyone is commanded to
do to others as he would be done by.
Reply Obj. 2. The saying of the Philosopher is to
be understood of things that are naturally just, not
as general principles, but as conclusions drawn from
them, having rectitude in the majority of cases, but
failing in a few.
Reply Obj. 3. As, in man, reason rules and com-
mands the other powers, so all the natural inclinations
belonging to the other powers must needs be directed
according to reason. Wherefore it is universally right
for all men, that all their inclinations should be
directed according to reason.
Fifth Article.
Whether the Natural Law Can Be Changed?
Objection 1. It would seem that the natural law can
be changed. Because on Ecclesiastes 17:9, He gave them
instructions, and the law of life, the gloss says: He wished
according to reason. Now the process of reason is from
the common to the proper . . . The speculative reason,
however, is differently situated in this matter, from the
practical reason. For, since the speculative reason is
busied chiefly with the necessary things, which cannot
be otherwise than they are, its proper conclusions, like
the universal principles, contain the truth without fail.
The practical reason, on the other hand, is busied with
contingent matters, about which human actions are
concerned: and consequently, although there is neces-
sity in the general principles, the more we descend to
matters of detail, the more frequently we encounter
defects. Accordingly then in speculative matters truth
is the same in all men, both as to principles and as to
conclusions: although the truth is not known to all as
regards the conclusions, but only as regards the princi-
ples which are called common notions. But in matters
of action, truth or practical rectitude is not the same
for all, as to matters of detail, but only as to the gen-
eral principles: and where there is the same rectitude in
matters of detail, it is not equally known to all.
It is therefore evident that, as regards the gen-
eral principles whether of speculative or of practical
reason, truth or rectitude is the same for all, and is
equally known by all. As to the proper conclusions of
the speculative reason, the truth is the same for all, but
is not equally known to all: thus it is true for all that
the three angles of a triangle are together equal to two
right angles, although it is not known to all. But as to
the proper conclusions of the practical reason, neither
is the truth or rectitude the same for all, nor, where it
is the same, is it equally known by all. Thus it is right
and true for all to act according to reason: and from this
principle it follows as a proper conclusion, that goods
entrusted to another should be restored to their owner.
Now this is true for the majority of cases: but it may
happen in a particular case that it would be injurious,
and therefore unreasonable, to restore goods held in
trust; for instance, if they are claimed for the purpose of
fighting against one’s country. And this principle will
be found to fail the more, according as we descend fur-
ther into detail, e.g. if one were to say that goods held in
trust should be restored with such and such a guaran-
tee, or in such and such a way; because the greater the

164 Á PART 3: THEoRiEs oF MoRAliTY
is inflicted by the power of God on account of origi-
nal sin, according to 1 Kings 2:6: The Lord killeth and
maketh alive. Consequently, by the command of God,
death can be inflicted on any man, guilty or inno-
cent, without any injustice whatever. In like manner
adultery is intercourse with another’s wife; who is
allotted to him by the law emanating from God. Con-
sequently intercourse with any woman, by the com-
mand of God, is neither adultery nor fornication. The
same applies to theft, which is the taking of another’s
property. For whatever is taken by the command of
God, to Whom all things belong, is not taken against
the will of its owner, whereas it is in this that theft
consists. Nor is it only in human things, that what-
ever is commanded by God is right; but also in natu-
ral things, whatever is done by God, is, in some way,
natural . . .
Reply Obj. 3. A thing is said to belong to the natural
law in two ways. First, because nature inclines thereto:
e.g. that one should not do harm to another. Sec-
ondly, because nature did not bring in the contrary:
thus we might say that for man to be naked is of the
natural law, because nature did not give him clothes,
but art invented them. In this sense, the possession of
all things in common and universal freedom are said to be
of the natural law, because, to wit, the distinction of
possessions and slavery were not brought in by nature,
but devised by human reason for the benefit of human
life. Accordingly the law of nature was not changed in
this respect, except by addition.
Sixth Article.
Whether the Law of Nature Can Be Abolished
from the Heart of Man?
Objection 1. It would seem that the natural law
can be abolished from the heart of man. Because on
Romans 2:14, When the Gentiles who have not the law, etc.
a gloss says that the law of righteousness, which sin had
blotted out, is graven on the heart of man when he is restored
by grace. But the law of righteousness is the law of nature.
Therefore the law of nature can be blotted out.
Obj. 2. Further, the law of grace is more efficacious
than the law of nature. But the law of grace is blotted
out by sin. Much more therefore can the law of nature
be blotted out.
the law of the letter to be written, in order to correct the
law of nature. But that which is corrected is changed.
Therefore the natural law can be changed.
Obj. 2. Further, the slaying of the innocent, adultery,
and theft are against the natural law. But we find these
things changed by God: as when God commanded
Abraham to slay his innocent son (Genesis 22:2); and
when he ordered the Jews to borrow and purloin the
vessels of the Egyptians (Exodus 12:35); and when He
commanded Osee to take to himself a wife of fornications
(Hosea 1:2). Therefore the natural law can be changed.
Obj. 3. Further, Isidore says that the possession of all
things in common, and universal freedom, are matters of
natural law. But these things are seen to be changed by
human laws. Therefore it seems that the natural law is
subject to change.
On the contrary, It is said in the Decretals: The natu
ral law dates from the creation of the rational creature. It
does not vary according to time, but remains unchangeable.
I answer that, A change in the natural law may be
understood in two ways. First, by way of addition. In
this sense nothing hinders the natural law from being
changed: since many things for the benefit of human
life have been added over and above the natural law,
both by the Divine law and by human laws.
Secondly, a change in the natural law may be under-
stood by way of subtraction, so that what previously
was according to the natural law, ceases to be so. In this
sense, the natural law is altogether unchangeable in its
first principles: but in its secondary principles, which,
as we have said, are certain detailed proximate conclu-
sions drawn from the first principles, the natural law is
not changed so that what it prescribes be not right in
most cases. But it may be changed in some particular
cases of rare occurrence, through some special causes
hindering the observance of such precepts.
Reply Obj. 1. The written law is said to be given for
the correction of the natural law, either because it sup-
plies what was wanting to the natural law; or because
the natural law was perverted in the hearts of some
men, as to certain matters, so that they esteemed those
things good which are naturally evil; which perver-
sion stood in need of correction.
Reply Obj. 2. All men alike, both guilty and inno-
cent, die the death of nature: which death of nature

CHAPTER 6: NoNCoNsEquENTiAlisT THEoRiEs: Do YouR DuTY Á 165
or some other passion . . . But as to the other, i.e. the
secondary precepts, the natural law can be blotted out
from the human heart, either by evil persuasions, just
as in speculative matters errors occur in respect of nec-
essary conclusions; or by vicious customs and corrupt
habits, as among some men, theft, and even unnatural
vices, as the Apostle states, were not esteemed sinful.
Reply Obj. 1. Sin blots out the law of nature in partic-
ular cases, not universally, except perchance in regard
to the secondary precepts of the natural law, in the way
stated above.
Reply Obj. 2. Although grace is more efficacious
than nature, yet nature is more essential to man, and
therefore more enduring.
Reply Obj. 3. This argument is true of the second-
ary precepts of the natural law, against which some
legislators have framed certain enactments which are
unjust.
Obj. 3. Further, that which is established by law
is made just. But many things are enacted by men,
which are contrary to the law of nature. Therefore the
law of nature can be abolished from the heart of man.
On the contrary, Augustine says: Thy law is written
in the hearts of men, which iniquity itself effaces not. But
the law which is written in men’s hearts is the natural
law. Therefore the natural law cannot be blotted out.
I answer that . . . there belong to the natural law,
first, certain most general precepts, that are known to
all; and secondly, certain secondary and more detailed
precepts, which are, as it were, conclusions following
closely from first principles. As to those general prin-
ciples, the natural law, in the abstract, can nowise be
blotted out from men’s hearts. But it is blotted out
in the case of a particular action, in so far as reason is
hindered from applying the general principle to a par-
ticular point of practice, on account of concupiscence
Morality as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives
Philippa Foot
There are many difficulties and obscurities in Kant’s
moral philosophy, and few contemporary moralists
will try to defend it all; many, for instance, agree in
rejecting Kant’s derivation of duties from the mere
form of law expressed in terms of a universally legisla-
tive will. Nevertheless, it is generally supposed, even
by those who would not dream of calling themselves
his followers, that Kant established one thing beyond
doubt— namely, the necessity of distinguishing moral
judgments from hypothetical imperatives. That moral
judgments cannot be hypothetical imperatives has
come to seem an unquestionable truth. It will be
argued here that it is not.
In discussing so thoroughly Kantian a notion as
that of the hypothetical imperative, one naturally
begins by asking what Kant himself meant by a hypo-
thetical imperative, and it may be useful to say a little
about the idea of an imperative as this appears in
Kant’s works. In writing about imperatives Kant seems
to be thinking at least as much of statements about
what ought to be or should be done, as of injunctions
expressed in the imperative mood. He even describes as
an imperative the assertion that it would be “good to
do or refrain from doing something”1 and explains that
for a will that “does not always do something simply
because it is presented to it as a good thing to do” this
has the force of a command of reason. We may there-
fore think of Kant’s imperatives as statements to the
effect that something ought to be done or that it would
be good to do it.
Philippa Foot, “Morality as a System of Hypothetical Impera-
tives,” Philosophical Review, vol. 81, no. 3 ( July 1972): 305–16.

166 Á PART 3: THEoRiEs oF MoRAliTY
philosopher,5 and this can be the foundation of a
desire- dependent hypothetical imperative. The term
“desire” as used in the original account of the hypo-
thetical imperative was meant as a grammatically con-
venient substitute for “want,” and was not meant to
carry any implication of inclination rather than long-
term aim or project. Even the word “project,” taken
strictly, introduces undesirable restrictions. If some-
one is devoted to his family or his country or to any
cause, there are certain things he wants, which may
then be the basis of hypothetical imperatives, without
either inclinations or projects being quite what is in
question. Hypothetical imperatives should already be
appearing as extremely diverse; a further important
distinction is between those that concern an indi-
vidual and those that concern a group. The desires on
which a hypothetical imperative is dependent may
be those of one man, or may be taken for granted as
belonging to a number of people, engaged in some
common project or sharing common aims.
Is Kant right to say that moral judgments are cat-
egorical, not hypothetical, imperatives? It may seem
that he is, for we find in our language two different
uses of words such as “should” and “ought,” appar-
ently corresponding to Kant’s hypothetical and cat-
egorical imperatives, and we find moral judgments on
the “categorical” side. Suppose, for instance, we have
advised a traveler that he should take a certain train,
believing him to be journeying to his home. If we find
that he has decided to go elsewhere, we will most likely
have to take back what we said: the “should” will now
be unsupported and in need of support. Similarly, we
must be prepared to withdraw our statement about
what he should do if we find that the right relation
does not hold between the action and the end— that
it is either no way of getting what he wants (or doing
what he wants to do) or not the most eligible among
possible means. The use of “should” and “ought” in
moral contexts is, however, quite different. When
we say that a man should do something and intend a
moral judgment we do not have to back up what we say
by considerations about his interests or his desires; if no
such connection can be found the “should” need not
be withdrawn. It follows that the agent cannot rebut an
assertion about what, morally speaking, he should do
The distinction between hypothetical imperatives
and categorical imperatives, which plays so important
a part in Kant’s ethics, appears in characteristic form
in the following passages from the Foundations of the
Metaphysics of Morals:
All imperatives command either hypothetically or cat-
egorically. The former present the practical necessity
of a possible action as a means to achieving something
else which one desires (or which one may possibly
desire). The categorical imperative would be one which
presented an action as of itself objectively necessary,
without regard to any other end.2
If the action is good only as a means to something
else, the imperative is hypothetical; but if it is thought
of as good in itself, and hence as necessary in a will
which of itself conforms to reason as the principle of
this will, the imperative is categorical.3
The hypothetical imperative, as Kant defines it, “says
only that the action is good to some purpose” and
the purpose, he explains, may be possible or actual.
Among imperatives related to actual purposes Kant
mentions rules of prudence, since he believes that all
men necessarily desire their own happiness. Without
committing ourselves to this view it will be useful
to follow Kant in classing together as “hypothetical
imperatives” those telling a man what he ought to do
because (or if) he wants something and those telling
him what he ought to do on grounds of self- interest.
Common opinion agrees with Kant in insisting that
a moral man must accept a rule of duty whatever his
interests or desires.4
Having given a rough description of the class of
Kantian hypothetical imperatives it may be useful to
point to the heterogeneity within it. Sometimes what
a man should do depends on his passing inclination,
as when he wants his coffee hot and should warm the
jug. Sometimes it depends on some long- term project,
when the feelings and inclinations of the moment are
irrelevant. If one wants to be a respectable philoso-
pher one should get up in the mornings and do some
work, though just at that moment when one should
do it the thought of being a respectable philosopher
leaves one cold. It is true nevertheless to say of one,
at that moment, that one wants to be a respectable

CHAPTER 6: NoNCoNsEquENTiAlisT THEoRiEs: Do YouR DuTY Á 167
It follows that if a hypothetical use of “should”
gives a hypothetical imperative, and a non- hypo thetical
use of “should” a categorical imperative, then “should”
statements based on rules of etiquette, or rules of a
club, are categorical imperatives. Since this would not
be accepted by defenders of the categorical imperative
in ethics, who would insist that these other “should”
statements give hypothetical imperatives, they must
be using this expression in some other sense. We must
therefore ask what they mean when they say that “You
should answer . . . in the third person” is a hypothetical
imperative. Very roughly the idea seems to be that one
may reasonably ask why anyone should bother about
what shoulde (should from the point of view of eti-
quette) be done, and that such considerations deserve
no notice unless reason is shown. So although people
give as their reason for doing something the fact that
it is required by etiquette, we do not take this consid-
eration as in itself giving us reason to act. Considerations
of etiquette do not have any automatic reason- giving
force, and a man might be right if he denied that he
had reason to do “what’s done.”
This seems to take us to the heart of the matter,
for, by contrast, it is supposed that moral consider-
ations necessarily give reasons for acting to any man.
The difficulty is, of course, to defend this proposition
which is more often repeated than explained. Unless
it is said, implausibly, that all “should” or “ought”
statements give reasons for acting, which leaves the
old problem of assigning a special categorical status to
moral judgment, we must be told what it is that makes
the moral “should” relevantly different from the
“shoulds” appearing in normative statements of other
kinds.7 Attempts have sometimes been made to show
that some kind of irrationality is involved in ignor-
ing the “should” of morality: in saying “ Immoral— so
what?” as one says “Not comme il faut— so what?” But
as far as I can see these have all rested on some illegiti-
mate assumption, as, for instance, of thinking that the
amoral man, who agrees that some piece of conduct is
immoral but takes no notice of that, is inconsistently
disregarding a rule of conduct that he has accepted; or
again of thinking it inconsistent to desire that others
will not do to one what one proposes to do to them.
The fact is that the man who rejects morality because
by showing that the action is not ancillary to his inter-
ests or desires. Without such a connection the “should”
does not stand unsupported and in need of support; the
support that it requires is of another kind.6
There is, then, one clear difference between moral
judgments and the class of “hypothetical impera-
tives” so far discussed. In the latter “should” is used
“hypothetically,” in the sense defined, and if Kant
were merely drawing attention to this piece of linguis-
tic usage his point would be easily proved. But obvi-
ously Kant meant more than this; in describing moral
judgments as non- hypothetical— that is, categorical
imperatives— he is ascribing to them a special dignity
and necessity which this usage cannot give. Modern
philosophers follow Kant in talking, for example, about
the “unconditional requirement” expressed in moral
judgments. These tell us what we have to do whatever
our interests or desires, and by their inescapability they
are distinguished from hypothetical imperatives.
The problem is to find proof for this further feature
of moral judgments. If anyone fails to see the gap that
has to be filled it will be useful to point out to him that
we find “should” used non- hypothetically in some
non- moral statements to which no one attributes the
special dignity and necessity conveyed by the descrip-
tion “categorical imperative.” For instance, we find
this non- hypothetical use of “should” in sentences
enunciating rules of etiquette, as, for example, that an
invitation in the third person should be answered in
the third person, where the rule does not fail to apply to
someone who has his own good reasons for ignoring
this piece of nonsense, or who simply does not care
about what, from the point of view of etiquette, he
should do. Similarly, there is a non- hypothetical use
of “should” in contexts where something like a club
rule is in question. The club secretary who has told a
member that he should not bring ladies into the smok-
ing room does not say, “Sorry, I was mistaken” when
informed that this member is resigning tomorrow and
cares nothing about his reputation in the club. Lacking
a connection with the agent’s desires or interests, this
“should” does not stand “unsupported and in need of
support”; it requires only the backing of the rule. The
use of “should” is therefore “ non- hypothetical” in the
sense defined.

168 Á PART 3: THEoRiEs oF MoRAliTY
he sees no reason to obey its rules can be convicted of
villainy but not of inconsistency. Nor will his action
necessarily be irrational. Irrational actions are those
in which a man in some way defeats his own pur-
poses, doing what is calculated to be disadvantageous
or to frustrate his ends. Immorality does not neces
sarily involve any such thing.
It is obvious that the normative character of moral
judgment does not guarantee its reason- giving force.
Moral judgments are normative, but so are judgments
of manners, statements of club rules, and many oth-
ers. Why should the first provide reasons for acting as
the others do not? In every case it is because there is
a background of teaching that the non- hypothetical
“should” can be used. The behavior is required, not
simply recommended, but the question remains as
to why we should do what we are required to do. It is
true that moral rules are often enforced much more
strictly than the rules of etiquette, and our reluctance to
press the non- hypothetical “should” of etiquette may
be one reason why we think of the rules of etiquette as
hypothetical imperatives. But are we then to say that
there is nothing behind the idea that moral judgments
are categorical imperatives but the relative strin-
gency of our moral teaching? I believe that this may
have more to do with the matter than the defenders of
the categorical imperative would like to admit. For if we
look at the kind of thing that is said in its defense we
may find ourselves puzzled about what the words can
even mean unless we connect them with the feelings
that this stringent teaching implants. People talk, for
instance, about the “binding force” of morality, but
it is not clear what this means if not that we feel our-
selves unable to escape. Indeed the “inescapability” of
moral requirements is often cited when they are being
contrasted with hypothetical imperatives. No one, it
is said, escapes the requirements of ethics by having
or not having particular interests or desires. Taken in
one way this only reiterates the contrast between the
“should” of morality and the hypothetical “should,”
and once more places morality alongside of etiquette.
Both are inescapable in that behavior does not cease to
offend against either morality or etiquette because the
agent is indifferent to their purposes and to the disap-
proval he will incur by flouting them. But morality is
supposed to be inescapable in some special way and
this may turn out to be merely the reflection of the way
morality is taught. Of course, we must try other ways
of expressing the fugitive thought. It may be said, for
instance, that moral judgments have a kind of neces-
sity since they tell us what we “must do” or “have to
do” whatever our interests and desires. The sense of
this is, again, obscure. Sometimes when we use such
expressions we are referring to physical or mental
compulsion. (A man has to go along if he is pulled by
strong men, and he has to give in if tortured beyond
endurance.) But it is only in the absence of such condi-
tions that moral judgments apply. Another and more
common sense of the words is found in sentences
such as “I caught a bad cold and had to stay in bed”
where a penalty for acting otherwise is in the offing.
The necessity of acting morally is not, however, sup-
posed to depend on such penalties. Another range of
examples, not necessarily having to do with penalties,
is found where there is an unquestioned acceptance of
some project or role, as when a nurse tells us that she
has to make her rounds at a certain time, or we say that
we have to run for a certain train.8 But these too are
irrelevant in the present context, since the acceptance
condition can always be revoked.
No doubt it will be suggested that it is in some
other sense of the words “have to” or “must” that
one has to or must do what morality demands. But
why should one insist that there must be such a sense
when it proves so difficult to say what it is? Suppose
that what we take for a puzzling thought were really
no thought at all but only the reflection of our feel
ings about morality? Perhaps it makes no sense to say
that we “have to” submit to the moral law, or that
morality is “inescapable” in some special way. For
just as one may feel as if one is falling without believ-
ing that one is moving downward, so one may feel
as if one has to do what is morally required without
believing oneself to be under physical or psychologi-
cal compulsion, or about to incur a penalty if one does
not comply. No one thinks that if the word “falling” is
used in a statement reporting one’s sensations it must
be used in a special sense. But this kind of mistake may
be involved in looking for the special sense in which
one “has to” do what morality demands. There is no

CHAPTER 6: NoNCoNsEquENTiAlisT THEoRiEs: Do YouR DuTY Á 169
hypothetical imperatives as that of not lying if it harms
one to lie. In the Metaphysics of Morals he says that
ethics cannot start from the ends which a man may
propose to himself, since these are all “selfish.”9 In
the Critique of Practical Reason he argues explicitly that
when acting not out of respect for the moral law but
“on a material maxim” men do what they do for the
sake of pleasure or happiness.
All material practical principles are, as such, of one and
the same kind and belong under the general principle
of self love or one’s own happiness.10
Kant, in fact, was a psychological hedonist in respect
of all actions except those done for the sake of the
moral law, and this faulty theory of human nature
was one of the things preventing him from seeing that
moral virtue might be compatible with the rejection of
the categorical imperative.
If we put this theory of human action aside, and
allow as ends the things that seem to be ends, the pic-
ture changes. It will surely be allowed that quite apart
from thoughts of duty a man may care about the suf-
fering of others, having a sense of identification with
them, and wanting to help if he can. Of course he
must want not the reputation of charity, nor even a
gratifying role helping others, but, quite simply, their
good. If this is what he does care about, then he will be
attached to the end proper to the virtue of charity and
a comparison with someone acting from an ulterior
motive (even a respectable ulterior motive) is out of
place. Nor will the conformity of his action to the rule
of charity be merely contingent. Honest action may
happen to further a man’s career; charitable actions
do not happen to further the good of others.
Can a man accepting only hypothetical impera-
tives possess other virtues besides that of charity?
Could he be just or honest? This problem is more com-
plex because there is no one end related to such virtues
as the good of others is related to charity. But what rea-
son could there be for refusing to call a man a just man
if he acted justly because he loved truth and liberty,
and wanted every man to be treated with a certain
minimum respect? And why should the truly honest
man not follow honesty for the sake of the good that
honest dealing brings to men? Of course, the usual
difficulty about the idea that we feel we have to behave
morally, and given the psychological conditions of the
learning of moral behavior it is natural that we should
have such feelings. What we cannot do is quote them
in support of the doctrine of the categorical impera-
tive. It seems, then, that in so far as it is backed up by
statements to the effect that the moral is inescapable,
or that we do have to do what is morally required of us,
it is uncertain whether the doctrine of the categorical
imperative even makes sense.
The conclusion we should draw is that moral judg-
ments have no better claim to be categorical impera-
tives than do statements about matters of etiquette.
People may indeed follow either morality or etiquette
without asking why they should do so, but equally
well they may not. They may ask for reasons and may
reasonably refuse to follow either if reasons are not to
be found.
It will be said that this way of viewing moral
considerations must be totally destructive of moral-
ity, because no one could ever act morally unless he
accepted such considerations as in themselves suf-
ficient reason for action. Actions that are truly moral
must be done “for their own sake,” “because they are
right,” and not for some ulterior purpose. This argu-
ment we must examine with care, for the doctrine
of the categorical imperative has owed much to its
persuasion.
Is there anything to be said for the thesis that
a truly moral man acts “out of respect for the moral
law” or that he does what is morally right because it is
morally right? That such propositions are not prima
facie absurd depends on the fact that moral judgment
concerns itself with a man’s reasons for acting as well
as with what he does. Law and etiquette require only
that certain things are done or left undone, but no
one is counted as charitable if he gives alms “for the
praise of men,” and one who is honest only because it
pays him to be honest does not have the virtue of hon-
esty. This kind of consideration was crucial in shaping
Kant’s moral philosophy. He many times contrasts
acting out of respect for the moral law with acting
from an ulterior motive, and what is more from one
that is self- interested. In the early Lectures on Ethics he
gave the principle of truth- telling under a system of

170 Á PART 3: THEoRiEs oF MoRAliTY
will recognize in the statement that one ought to care
about these things a correct application of the non-
hypothetical moral “ought” by which society is apt to
voice its demands. He will not, however, take the fact
that he oughtm to have certain ends as in itself reason
to adopt them. If he himself is a moral man then he
cares about such things, but not “because he ought.”
If he is an amoral man he may deny that he has any
reason to trouble his head over this or any other moral
demand. Of course he may be mistaken, and his life
as well as others’ lives may be most sadly spoiled by
his selfishness. But this is not what is urged by those
who think they can close the matter by an emphatic
use of “ought.” My argument is that they are relying
on an illusion, as if trying to give the moral “ought” a
magic force.12
This conclusion may, as I said, appear dangerous
and subversive of morality. We are apt to panic at the
thought that we ourselves, or other people, might stop
caring about the things we do care about, and we feel
that the categorical imperative gives us some control
over the situation. But it is interesting that the people
of Leningrad were not similarly struck by the thought
that only the contingent fact that other citizens shared
their loyalty and devotion to the city stood between
them and the Germans during the terrible years of
the siege. Perhaps we should be less troubled than we
are by fear of defection from the moral cause; perhaps
we should even have less reason to fear it if people
thought of themselves as volunteers banded together
to fight for liberty and justice and against inhumanity
and oppression. It is often felt, even if obscurely, that
there is an element of deception in the official line
about morality. And while some have been persuaded
by talk about the authority of the moral law, others
have turned away with a sense of distrust.
NOTES
1. Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, Sec. II, trans. by
L. W. Beck.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. According to the position sketched here we have three
forms of the hypothetical imperative: “If you want x you
difficulties can be raised about the rare case in which
no good is foreseen from an individual act of honesty.
But it is not evident that a man’s desires could not give
him reason to act honestly even here. He wants to live
openly and in good faith with his neighbors; it is not
all the same to him to lie and conceal.
If one wants to know whether there could be a
truly moral man who accepted moral principles as
hypothetical rules of conduct, as many people accept
rules of etiquette as hypothetical rules of conduct, one
must consider the right kind of example. A man who
demanded that morality should be brought under
the heading of self- interest would not be a good can-
didate, nor would anyone who was ready to be chari-
table or honest only so long as he felt inclined. A cause
such as justice makes strenuous demands, but this is
not peculiar to morality, and men are prepared to toil
to achieve many ends not endorsed by morality. That
they are prepared to fight so hard for moral ends— for
example, for liberty and justice— depends on the fact
that these are the kinds of ends that arouse devotion.
To sacrifice a great deal for the sake of etiquette one
would need to be under the spell of the emphatic
“oughte.” One could hardly be devoted to behav-
ing comme il faut.
In spite of all that has been urged in favor of the
hypothetical imperative in ethics, I am sure that many
people will be unconvinced and will argue that one
element essential to moral virtue is still missing. This
missing feature is the recognition of a duty to adopt
those ends which we have attributed to the moral
man. We have said that he does care about others, and
about causes such as liberty and justice; that it is on
this account that he will accept a system of morality.
But what if he never cared about such things, or what
if he ceased to care? Is it not the case that he ought to
care? This is exactly what Kant would say, for though
at times he sounds as if he thought that morality is
not concerned with ends, at others he insists that the
adoption of ends such as the happiness of others is
itself dictated by morality.11 How is this proposition
to be regarded by one who rejects all talk about the
binding force of the moral law? He will agree that a
moral man has moral ends and cannot be indifferent
to matters such as suffering and injustice. Further, he

CHAPTER 6: NoNCoNsEquENTiAlisT THEoRiEs: Do YouR DuTY Á 171
7.

To say that moral considerations are called reasons is
blatantly to ignore the problem.
8.

I am grateful to Rogers Albritton for drawing my attention to
this interesting use of expressions such as “have to” or “must.”
9.

Pt. II, Introduction, sec. II.
10.

Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, trans. by
L. W. Beck, p. 133.
11. See, e.g., The Metaphysics of Morals, pt. II, sec. 30.
12.

See G. E. M. Anscombe, “Modern Moral Philosophy,” Phi
losophy (1958). My view is different from Miss Anscombe’s,
but I have learned from her.
should do y,” “Because you want x you should do y,” and
“Because x is in your interest you should do y.” For Kant the
third would automatically be covered by the second.
5. To say that at that moment one wants to be a respectable
philosopher would be another matter. Such a statement
requires a special connection between the desire and the
moment.
6.

I am here going back on something I said in an earlier
article (“Moral Beliefs,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society,
1958–1959) where I thought it necessary to show that virtue
must benefit the agent. I believe the rest of the article can
stand.

172
Consequentialist moral theories are concerned with
the consequences of actions, for the consequences
determine the moral rightness of conduct. The pro-
duction of good over evil is the essence of morality.
Nonconsequentialist moral theories are concerned
with the moral nature of actions, for the right-
making characteristics of actions determine the
rightness of conduct. Virtue ethics, however, takes
a different turn. Virtue ethics is a theory of moral-
ity that makes virtue the central concern. When
confronted with a moral problem, a utilitarian or
a Kantian theorist asks, “What should I do?” But a
virtue ethicist asks, in effect, “What should I be?”
For the former, moral conduct is primarily a matter
of following or applying a moral principle or rule to
a particular situation, and morality is mainly duty-
based. For the latter, moral conduct is something
that emanates from a person’s moral virtues, from
his or her moral character, not from obedience to
moral laws. In this chapter we try to understand
both the main attractions and the major criticisms
of this virtue- centered approach to ethics and the
moral life.
THE ETHICS OF VIRTUE
Most modern virtue ethicists trace their theo-
retical roots back to the ancients, most notably to
Aristotle (384–322 b.c.e.). His ethics is a coherent,
virtue- based view that interlocks with his broader
philosophical concerns— his theories about cau-
sation, society, self, education, mind, and meta-
physics. He says the moral life consists not in
following moral rules that stipulate right actions
but in striving to be a particular kind of person— a
virtuous person whose actions stem naturally from
virtuous character.
For Aristotle, every living being has an end
toward which it naturally aims. Life is teleological;
it is meant not just to be something but to aspire
toward something, to fulfill its proper function.
What is the proper aim of human beings? Aristotle
argues that the true goal of humans— their greatest
good— is eudaimonia, which means “happiness”
or “flourishing” and refers to the full realization of
the good life. To achieve eudaimonia, human beings
must fulfill the function that is natural and distinc-
tive to them: living fully in accordance with reason.
The life of reason entails a life of virtue because the
virtues themselves are rational modes of behav-
ing. Thus Aristotle says, “Happiness is an activity
of the soul in accordance with complete or perfect
virtue.” The virtuous life both helps human beings
achieve true happiness and is the realization of true
happiness. Virtues make you good, and they help
you have a good life.
A virtue is a stable disposition to act and feel
according to some ideal or model of excellence. It
is a deeply embedded character trait that can affect
actions in countless situations. Aristotle distin-
guishes between intellectual and moral virtues.
Intellectual virtues include wisdom, prudence, ratio-
nality, and the like. Moral virtues include fairness,
benevolence, honesty, loyalty, conscientiousness,
and courage. He believes that intellectual virtues
can be taught, just as logic and mathematics can
be taught. But moral virtues can be learned only
through practice:
C H A P T E R 7
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CHAPTER 7: ViRTuE ETHiCs: BE A Good PERson Á 173
Like Aristotle, contemporary virtue ethicists put
the emphasis on quality of character and virtues
(character traits), rather than on adherence to par-
ticular principles or rules of right action. They are
of course concerned with doing the right thing, but
moral obligations, in their view, are derived from
virtues. These thinkers are, for example, less likely
to ask whether lying is wrong in a particular situ-
ation than whether the action or person is honest
or dishonest, or whether honesty precludes lying in
this case, or whether an exemplar of honesty (say,
Gandhi or Jesus) would lie in these circumstances.
Contemporary virtue ethicists are also Aristote-
lian in believing that a pure duty- based morality of rule
adherence represents a barren, one- dimensional
conception of the moral life. First, they agree
with Aristotle that the cultivation of virtues is not
merely a moral requirement— it is a way (some
would say the only way) to ensure human flourish-
ing and the good life. Second, they maintain that a
full- blown ethics must take into account motives,
feelings, intentions, and moral wisdom— factors
that they think duty- based morality neglects. This
view contrasts dramatically with Kant’s duty- based
ethics. He argues that to act morally is simply to
[M]oral virtue comes about as a result of habit. . . .
From this it is also plain that none of the moral vir-
tues arises in us by nature. . . . [B]ut the virtues we get
by first exercising them, as also happens in the case of
the arts as well. For the things we have to learn before
we can do them, we learn by doing them, e.g. men
become builders by building and lyreplayers by play-
ing the lyre; so too we become just by doing just acts,
temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing
brave acts.1
Aristotle’s notion of a moral virtue is what he
calls the “Golden Mean,” a balance between two
behavioral extremes. A moral virtue (courage, for
example) is the midpoint between excess (an
excess of courage, or foolhardiness) and deficit (a def-
icit of courage, or cowardice). For Aristotle, then, the
virtuous— and happy— life is a life of moderation in
all things.
Modern virtue ethicists follow Aristotle’s lead
in many respects. Some thinkers take issue with his
teleological theory of human nature and his concept
of a virtue as a mean between opposing tendencies.
And some have offered interesting alternatives to
his virtue ethics. But almost all virtue theories owe a
debt to Aristotle in one way or another.
’
Years ago the New York Times reported that the
teaching of traditional virtues such as honesty
and civility was becoming more common in public
schools. The article highlighted Paul Meck, an ele
mentary school guidance counselor who spent much
of his time teaching students about virtues and
values. Meck’s approach was to visit classrooms and
lead discussions on such topics as honesty, friendship,
and shoplifting. When he talked to younger stu
dents, he played his guitar and sang lyrics that
underscored his points. “Whether through song,
discussion or simply a straightforward lecture,” the
reporter noted, “there is an effort afoot to awaken
the interest of youngsters in these subjects.”*
Would Aristotle approve of the methods cited
here (song, discussion, lecture)? Why or why not?
What type of virtue education would he approve
of? Which approach— Aristotle’s or the one men
tioned in this news article— do you think would be
most effective? Give reasons for your answer.
*Gene I. Maeroff, “About Education; Values Regain
Their Popularity,” New York Times, Science Desk,
April 10, 1984.
CRITICAL THOUGHT: Learning Virtues in the Classroom

174 Á PART 3: THEoRiEs oF MoRALiTY
and feelings appropriate to the actions. Helen
avoids dishonest dealings, and she does so because
that is what a virtuous person would do, because
she has compassion and sympathy for innocent
people who are cheated, and because dishonesty is
not conducive to human happiness and flourishing.
What guidance can Helen obtain in her strivings
toward a moral ideal? Like most virtue ethicists, she
looks to moral exemplars— people who embody the
virtues and inspire others to follow in their steps.
(For exemplars of honesty, Helen has several moral
heroes to choose from— Socrates, Gandhi, Jesus, the
Buddha, Thomas Aquinas, and many others.) As the
philosopher Louis Pojman says of virtue systems,
The primary focus is not on abstract reason but on
ideal types of persons or on actual ideal persons. Dis-
covering the proper moral example and imitating
that person or ideal type thus replace casuistic reason
as the most significant aspects of the moral life. Even-
tually, the apprentice- like training in virtue gained by
imitating the ideal model results in a virtuous person
who spontaneously does what is good.2
EVALUATING VIRTUE ETHICS
A case can be made for virtue ethics based on how
well it seems to explain important aspects of the
moral life. Some philosophers, for example, claim
that the virtue approach offers a more plausible
explanation of the role of motivation in moral
actions than duty- based moral systems do. By
Kantian lights your conduct may be morally accept-
able even if you, say, save a friend’s life out of a sense
of duty alone (that is, without any sincere regard for
your friend). But this motivation— your calculat-
ing sense of duty— seems a very cold and anemic
motivation indeed. Virtue theorists would say that
a more natural and morally appropriate response
would be to save your friend primarily out of com-
passion, love, loyalty, or something similar— and
these motives are just what we would expect from a
virtuous person acting from fully developed virtues.
Some philosophers also remind us that virtue
ethics puts primary emphasis on being a good
act out of duty— that is, to do our duty because it is
our duty. We need not act out of friendship, loy-
alty, kindness, love, or sympathy. But in virtue eth-
ics, acting from such motivations is a crucial part
of acting from a virtuous character, for virtues are
stable dispositions that naturally include motiva-
tions and feelings. Contrast the action of someone
who methodically aids his sick mother solely out of
a sense of duty with the person who tends to her
mother out of sympathy, love, and loyalty (perhaps
in addition to a sense of duty). Most people would
probably think that the latter is a better model of
the moral life, while the former seems incomplete.
VIRTUE IN ACTION
If moral rules are secondary in virtue ethics, how
does a virtue ethicist make moral decisions or guide
his or her conduct or judge the behavior of oth-
ers? Suppose Helen, a conscientious practitioner
of Aristotelian virtue ethics, hears William lie to a
friend to avoid paying a debt. She does not have to
appeal to a moral rule such as “Do not lie” to know
that William’s action is an instance of dishonesty
(or untruthfulness) and that William himself is dis-
honest. She can see by his actions that he lacks the
virtue of honesty.
But to Helen, honesty is more than just a charac-
ter trait: it is also an essential part of human happi-
ness and flourishing. In her case, honesty is a virtue
that she has cultivated for years by behaving hon-
estly and truthfully in a variety of situations (not
just in cases of lying). She has taken such trouble in
part because cultivating this virtue has helped her
become the kind of person she wants to be. She has
developed the disposition to act honestly; acting
honestly is part of who she is. She sometimes relies
on moral rules (or moral rules of thumb) to make
moral decisions, but she usually does not need
them, because her actions naturally reflect her vir-
tuous character.
In addition, Helen’s trained virtues not only
guide her actions but also inspire the motivations

CHAPTER 7: ViRTuE ETHiCs: BE A Good PERson Á 175
virtuous person is the one who performs the right
action. But this is to argue in a circle and to give us
no help in figuring out what to do. To avoid this cir-
cularity, they say, we must appeal to some kind of
moral standard or principle to evaluate the action
itself. Before we can decide if a person is virtuous,
we need to judge if her actions are right or wrong—
and such judgments take us beyond virtue ethics.
Some argue in a similar vein by pointing out
that a person may possess all the proper virtues
and still be unable to tell right from wrong actions.
Dr. Green may be benevolent and just and still
not know if stem cell research should be contin-
ued or stopped, or if he should help a terminal
patient commit suicide, or if he should perform
a late- term abortion. Likewise, we know that it is
possible for a virtuous person to act entirely from
virtue— and still commit an immoral act. This
shows, critics say, that the rightness of actions does
not necessarily (or invariably) depend on the con-
tent of one’s character. We seem to have indepen-
dent moral standards— independent of character
considerations— by which we judge the moral per-
missibility of actions.
The virtue theorist can respond to these criti-
cisms by asserting that there is actually plenty
of moral guidance to be had in statements about
virtues and vices. According to the virtue ethicist
Rosalind Hursthouse,
[A] great deal of specific action guidance could be
found in rules employing the virtue and vice terms
(“ v- rules”) such as “Do what is honest/charitable;
do not do what is dishonest/uncharitable.” (It is a
noteworthy feature of our virtue and vice vocabu-
lary that, although our list of generally recognised
virtue terms is comparatively short, our list of vice
terms is remarkably, and usefully, long, far exceed-
ing anything that anyone who thinks in terms of
standard deontological rules has ever come up
with. Much invaluable action guidance comes from
avoiding courses of action that would be irrespon-
sible, feckless, lazy, inconsiderate, uncooperative,
harsh, intolerant, selfish, mercenary, indiscreet,
tactless, arrogant . . . and on and on.)3
person and living a good life, a life of happiness
and flourishing. They say that these aims are obvi-
ously central to the moral life and should be part of
any adequate theory of morality. Duty- based moral
systems, however, pay much less attention to these
essential elements.
Many duty- based theorists are willing to concede
that there is some truth in both these claims. They
believe that motivation for moral action cannot be
derived entirely from considerations of duty, just
as appropriate motivation cannot be based solely
on virtuous character. And they recognize that the
moral life involves more than merely honoring rules
and principles. As Aristotle insists, there should be
room for moral achievement in morality, for striv-
ing toward moral ideals. But even if these claims of
the virtue ethicist are true, it does not follow that tra-
ditional virtue ethics is the best moral theory or that
an ethics without duties or principles is plausible.
Virtue- based ethics seems to meet the mini-
mum requirement of coherence, and it appears to
be generally consistent with our commonsense
moral judgments and moral experience. Neverthe-
less critics have taken it to task, with most of the
strongest criticisms centering on alleged problems
with applying the theory— in other words, with
usefulness (Criterion 3).
The critics’ main contention is that appeals to
virtues or virtuous character without reference to
principles of duty cannot give us any useful guid-
ance in deciding what to do. Suppose we are try-
ing to decide what to do when a desperately poor
stranger steals money from us. Should we have him
arrested? Give him even more money? Ignore the
whole affair? According to virtue ethics, we should
do what a virtuous person would do, or do what
moral exemplars such as Jesus or Buddha would
do, or do what is benevolent or conscientious.
But what exactly would a virtuous person do? Or
what precisely is the benevolent or conscientious
action? As many philosophers see it, the problem
is that virtue ethics says that the right action is the
one performed by the virtuous person and that the

176 Á PART 3: THEoRiEs oF MoRALiTY
do that in this particular case. You need to know
which virtue is more important in this situation,
but virtue ethics does not seem to provide a useful
answer.
The proponent of virtue ethics has a ready
reply to this criticism: some duty- based moral
theories, such as Kantian ethics, are also troubled
by conflicts (conflicts of rules or principles, for
example). Obviously the existence of such con-
flicts is not a fatal flaw in duty- based ethics, and so
it must not be in virtue approaches either. When
principles seem to conflict, the duty- based theo-
rist must determine if the conflict is real and, if so,
if it can be resolved (by, say, weighting one prin-
ciple more than another). Virtue ethics, the argu-
ment goes, can exercise the same kinds of options.
Some might observe, however, that incorporating
a weighting rule or similar standard into virtue
ethics seems to make the theory a blend of duty-
based and virtue- based features.
Hursthouse believes we can discover our moral
duties by examining terms that refer to virtues and
vices because moral guidance is implicit in these
terms.
Another usefulness criticism crops up because
of apparent conflicts between virtues. What
should you do if you have to choose between
performing or not performing a particular action,
and each option involves the same two virtues
but in contradictory ways? Suppose your best
friend is on trial for murder, and under oath you
must testify about what you know of the case—
and what you know will incriminate her. The
question is, Should you lie? If you lie to save your
friend, you will be loyal but dishonest. If you tell
the truth, you will be honest but disloyal. The vir-
tues of loyalty and honesty conflict; you simply
cannot be both loyal and honest. Virtue ethics
says you should act as a virtuous person would.
But such advice gives you no guidance on how to
A 2005 report from Voice of America told of
a dispute over the war in Iraq among highly
regarded war veterans. Democratic Represen
tative John Murtha, a decorated Marine Corps
veteran who fought in Vietnam, was a strong
supporter of the military— but thought the
war in Iraq was a disaster and demanded that
U.S. forces be withdrawn from Iraq within six
months. Democratic Senator John Kerry, also a
decorated veteran of the Vietnam War, disagreed
with Murtha’s timetable for troop withdrawal.
He proposed that troops start to leave Iraq later,
in early 2007. Republican Senator John McCain,
a former Navy fighter pilot and POW in the
Vietnam conflict, supported the president’s view
that the troops should stay in Iraq until the job
was done.*
Assume that all these men were honorable
and had all the appropriate warrior virtues such as
courage and loyalty. If they were then compara
bly virtuous in the ways indicated, how could they
have disagreed about the conduct of the war? Sup
pose they all possessed exactly the same virtues
to exactly the same degree and had access to the
same set of facts about the war. Would it still have
been possible for them to disagree? Why or why
not? Do you think that any of these considerations
suggest that virtue ethics may be a flawed moral
theory? Why or why not?
*Jim Malone, “Waning US Iraq War Support Stirs New
Comparisons to Vietnam Conflict,” VOANews.com (Nov
ember 22, 2005), http://www.51voa.com/VOA_Standard
_English/VOA_Standard_3636.html (January 9, 2015).
CRITICAL THOUGHT: Warrior Virtues and Moral Disagreements’

http://www.51voa.com/VOA_Standard_English/VOA_Standard_3636.html

http://www.VOANews.com

CHAPTER 7: ViRTuE ETHiCs: BE A Good PERson Á 177
dispositions and traits? Must we choose? It is hard
to see how a morality of principles can get off the
ground except through the development of dispo-
sitions to act in accordance with its principles, else
all motivation to act on them must be of an ad hoc
kind, either prudential or impulsively altruistic.
Moreover, morality can hardly be content with a
mere conformity to rules, however willing and self-
conscious it may be, unless it has no interest in the
spirit of its law but only in the letter. On the other
hand, one cannot conceive of traits of character
except as including dispositions and tendencies to
act in certain ways in certain circumstances. Hating
involves being disposed to kill or harm, being just
involves tending to do just acts (acts that conform
to the principle of justice) when the occasion calls.
Again, it is hard to see how we could know what
traits to encourage or inculcate if we did not sub-
scribe to principles, for example, to the principle of
utility, or to those of benevolence and justice.4
Kant would have us act out of duty alone, grant-
ing no bonus points for acting from virtue. Utili-
tarianism doesn’t require, but also doesn’t reject,
virtuous motives. Yet virtue seems to be as much
a part of our moral experience as moral disagree-
ments, moral errors, and moral reasoning. The
question is not whether we should care about vir-
tues but how much we should care and how we can
incorporate them into our lives.
CHAPTER REVIEW
SUMMARY
Virtue ethics is a moral theory that makes virtue the
central concern. In virtue ethics, moral conduct is sup-
posed to radiate naturally from moral virtues. That is,
moral actions are derived from virtues. A virtue is a
stable disposition to act and feel according to an ideal
or model of excellence.
Most modern virtue ethicists take their inspira-
tion from Aristotle. He argues that humankind’s
greatest good is happiness, or eudaimonia. To achieve
LEARNING FROM VIRTUE ETHICS
Why does the ancient moral tradition of virtue
ethics persist— and not just persist, but thrive, even
enjoying a revival in modern times? Many thinkers
would say that virtue ethics is alive and well because
it is sustained by an important ethical truth: virtue
and character are large, unavoidable constituents
of our moral experience. As moral creatures, we
regularly judge the moral permissibility of actions—
and assess the goodness of character. If someone
commits an immoral act (kills an innocent human
being, for example), it matters to us whether the act
was committed out of compassion (as in euthana-
sia), benevolence, loyalty, revenge, rage, or igno-
rance. The undeniable significance of virtue in
morality has obliged many philosophers to con-
sider how best to accommodate virtues into their
principle- based theories of morality or to recast
those theories entirely to give virtues a larger role.
The rise of virtue ethics has also forced many
thinkers to reexamine the place of principles in
morality. If we have virtues, do we need principles?
Most philosophers would probably say yes and
agree with the philosopher William Frankena that
“principles without traits [virtues] are impotent
and traits without principles are blind”:
To be or to do, that is the question. Should we con-
strue morality as primarily a following of certain
principles or as primarily a cultivation of certain
’ QUICK REVIEW
virtue ethics— A theory of morality that makes
virtue the central concern.
eudaimonia— Happiness, or flourishing.
virtue— A stable disposition to act and feel
according to some ideal or model of excellence.
Golden Mean— Aristotle’s notion of a virtue as a
balance between two behavioral extremes.

178 Á PART 3: THEoRiEs oF MoRALiTY
5. What, according to Aristotle, must humans do
to achieve eudaimonia? (p. 172)
6. What is a virtue? Give three examples of moral
virtues. Give two examples of intellectual
virtues. (p. 172)
7. What important elements do virtue ethicists
think are missing from traditional duty- based
ethics? (p. 174)
8. How do virtue ethicists use moral exemplars?
(p. 175)
9. Does virtue ethics seem to offer a more plausible
explanation of the role of motivation in moral
actions than does Kantian ethics? If so, how?
(p. 175)
10. What is the chief argument against virtue ethics?
How can the virtue ethicist respond? (p. 175)
Discussion Questions
1. For Aristotle, what is the central task in morality
and how does it differ from the central task in
utilitarianism?
2. How does Aristotle’s conception of the virtuous
life differ from Kant’s?
3. Is Aristotle’s notion of the Golden Mean helpful
in identifying the virtues in any situation? Why
or why not?
4. Kant says that to act morally is to act out of
duty. How does this differ from the virtue ethics
approach? Are you likely to admire someone
who always acts out of duty alone? Why or
why not?
5. Compare the advantages and disadvantages of
act- utilitarianism and virtue ethics. Which do
you think is the better theory? How would you
combine the two approaches to fashion a better
theory?
6. William Frankena says that morality requires
both principles and virtues. Do you agree? Why
or why not?
ETHICAL DILEMMAS
Explain how virtue ethics could be applied in the fol-
lowing scenarios to determine the proper course of
action.
happiness, human beings must fulfill their natural
function— to live fully in accordance with reason.
To live this way is to cultivate the virtues, for they are
rational ways of being and flourishing. Aristotle sug-
gests that a moral virtue is a Golden Mean, a midpoint
between two extreme ways of behaving. So he says that
the good life is a life in the middle, a life of moderation.
Virtue theorists think that acting out of duty alone
is a distortion of true morality. A full- blown morality,
they insist, must include motives, emotions, inten-
tions, and moral wisdom. Acting morally means acting
from virtue— from the appropriate motives and feel-
ings, taking all the factors of the situation into account.
Virtue- based ethics seems to meet the minimum
requirement of coherence, and it fits with our com-
monsense moral judgments and experience. But it
has been accused of not being useful. The main criti-
cism is that appeals to virtue alone (sans principles)
give us little or no guidance about how to act. Critics
argue that virtue ethics defines virtue in terms of right
actions and defines right actions in terms of virtue.
But this is circular reasoning and provides no help for
making moral decisions. Virtue theorists, however,
can reply that guidance in moral decision making is
in fact available— it is inherent in statements about
virtues and vices.
KEY TERMS
virtue ethics (p. 172)
eudaimonia (p. 172)
virtue (p. 172)
Golden Mean (p. 173)
EXERCISES
Review Questions
1. What are the strengths and weaknesses of
Aristotle’s virtue ethics theory? (pp. 174–176)
2. What does Aristotle mean when he says that the
virtuous life helps us achieve happiness and is
happiness? (p. 172)
3. How does virtue ethics differ from duty- based
ethics? (p. 172)
4. In what way is Aristotle’s virtue ethics
considered teleological? (p. 172)

CHAPTER 7: ViRTuE ETHiCs: BE A Good PERson Á 179
will ever know who stole the money unless you
report the theft to the authorities. Should you
turn your father in to the police? Should you
keep quiet about the matter? What would a
virtuous person do?
FURTHER READING
G. E. M. Anscombe, “Modern Moral Philosophy,” Philoso-
phy 33, no. 124 (January 1958): 1–19.
Philippa Foot, “Virtues and Vices,” in Virtues and Vices and
Other Essays in Moral Philosophy (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1978).
William K. Frankena, “Ethics of Virtue,” in Ethics, 2nd ed.
(Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1973).
Rosalind Hursthouse, “Virtue Ethics,” in Stanford Encyclo-
pedia of Philosophy, Fall 2003 ed., ed. Edward N. Zalta,
http://plato.stanford/archives/fall2003/entries/ethics
– virtue/ (March 1, 2015).
Alasdair MacIntyre, “The Nature of the Virtues,” in
After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame, IN:
University of Notre Dame Press, 1984).
Greg Pence, “Virtue Theory,” in A Companion to Ethics, ed.
Peter Singer, corr. ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993).
1. You are walking across town, and a homeless
person bumps into you, takes your wallet, and
runs away. What would a virtuous person do
in this instance? Should the guiding virtue be
compassion? fairness? honesty?
2. You are a physician treating a terminally ill
woman who is in a great deal of pain that no
drug can relieve. She says she has lived a full
life and now wants you to end her anguish by
helping her die quickly and quietly. She has
no known relatives. The American Medical
Association’s code of ethics absolutely forbids
physician- assisted suicide, and the hospital
where she is a patient has a similar policy. But
you want to alleviate her agony and give her
a chance to die with dignity. What would a
virtuous person do?
3. Your father has stolen $30,000 from his
employer to pay for surgery that his sister
desperately needs. Without the surgery, she
will be dead within six months. Only you know
about his crime. You also know that no one
R E A d i n G s
From Nicomachean Ethics
Aristotle
BOOK I
1
Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action
and pursuit, is thought to aim at some good; and for
this reason the good has rightly been declared to be
that at which all things aim. But a certain difference
is found among ends; some are activities, others are
products apart from the activities that produce them.
Where there are ends apart from the actions, it is the
nature of the products to be better than the activities.
Now, as there are many actions, arts, and sciences,
their ends also are many; the end of the medical art is
health, that of shipbuilding a vessel, that of strategy
victory, that of economics wealth. But where such arts
fall under a single capacity— as bridle- making and the
other arts concerned with the equipment of horses
fall under the art of riding, and this and every military
action under strategy, in the same way other arts fall
under yet others— in all of these the ends of the mas-
ter arts are to be preferred to all the subordinate ends;
for it is for the sake of the former that the latter are
pursued. It makes no difference whether the activities
themselves are the ends of the actions, or something
else apart from the activities, as in the case of the sci-
ences just mentioned.
Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, trans. W. D. Ross, books I and II,
(edited) (eBooks@Adelaide, 2004).

http://plato.stanford/archives/fall2003/entries/ethics-virtue/

http://plato.stanford/archives/fall2003/entries/ethics-

180 Á PART 3: THEoRiEs oF MoRALiTY
will be vain and unprofitable, because the end aimed at
is not knowledge but action. And it makes no difference
whether he is young in years or youthful in character;
the defect does not depend on time, but on his living,
and pursuing each successive object, as passion directs.
For to such persons, as to the incontinent, knowledge
brings no profit; but to those who desire and act in accor-
dance with a rational principle knowledge about such
matters will be of great benefit. These remarks about the
student, the sort of treatment to be expected, and the
purpose of the inquiry, may be taken as our preface.
4
Let us resume our inquiry and state, in view of the fact
that all knowledge and every pursuit aims at some
good, what it is that we say political science aims at and
what is the highest of all goods achievable by action.
Verbally there is very general agreement; for both the
general run of men and people of superior refinement
say that it is happiness, and identify living well and
doing well with being happy; but with regard to what
happiness is they differ, and the many do not give the
same account as the wise. For the former think it is some
plain and obvious thing, like pleasure, wealth, or hon-
our; they differ, however, from one another— and often
even the same man identifies it with different things,
with health when he is ill, with wealth when he is poor;
but, conscious of their ignorance, they admire those
who proclaim some great ideal that is above their com-
prehension. Now some thought that apart from these
many goods there is another which is self- subsistent
and causes the goodness of all these as well. To exam-
ine all the opinions that have been held were perhaps
somewhat fruitless; enough to examine those that are
most prevalent or that seem to be arguable.
* * *
5
Let us, however, resume our discussion from the point
at which we digressed. To judge from the lives that men
lead, most men, and men of the most vulgar type, seem
(not without some ground) to identify the good, or hap-
piness, with pleasure; which is the reason why they love
the life of enjoyment. For there are, we may say, three
2
If, then, there is some end of the things we do, which
we desire for its own sake (everything else being desired
for the sake of this), and if we do not choose everything
for the sake of something else (for at that rate the pro-
cess would go on to infinity, so that our desire would be
empty and vain), clearly this must be the good and the
chief good. Will not the knowledge of it, then, have a
great influence on life? Shall we not, like archers who
have a mark to aim at, be more likely to hit upon what
is right? If so, we must try, in outline at least, to deter-
mine what it is, and of which of the sciences or capaci-
ties it is the object. It would seem to belong to the most
authoritative art and that which is most truly the mas-
ter art. And politics appears to be of this nature; for it is
this that ordains which of the sciences should be stud-
ied in a state, and which each class of citizens should
learn and up to what point they should learn them; and
we see even the most highly esteemed of capacities to
fall under this, e.g. strategy, economics, rhetoric; now,
since politics uses the rest of the sciences, and since,
again, it legislates as to what we are to do and what we
are to abstain from, the end of this science must include
those of the others, so that this end must be the good
for man. For even if the end is the same for a single man
and for a state, that of the state seems at all events some-
thing greater and more complete whether to attain or
to preserve; though it is worth while to attain the end
merely for one man, it is finer and more godlike to
attain it for a nation or for city- states. These, then, are
the ends at which our inquiry aims, since it is political
science, in one sense of that term.
* * *
3
Now each man judges well the things he knows, and of
these he is a good judge. And so the man who has been
educated in a subject is a good judge of that subject,
and the man who has received an all- round education
is a good judge in general. Hence a young man is not a
proper hearer of lectures on political science; for he is
inexperienced in the actions that occur in life, but its
discussions start from these and are about these; and,
further, since he tends to follow his passions, his study

CHAPTER 7: ViRTuE ETHiCs: BE A Good PERson Á 181
in the other arts likewise. What then is the good of
each? Surely that for whose sake everything else is
done. In medicine this is health, in strategy victory,
in architecture a house, in any other sphere some-
thing else, and in every action and pursuit the end;
for it is for the sake of this that all men do whatever
else they do. Therefore, if there is an end for all that
we do, this will be the good achievable by action, and
if there are more than one, these will be the goods
achievable by action.
So the argument has by a different course reached
the same point; but we must try to state this even more
clearly. Since there are evidently more than one end,
and we choose some of these (e.g. wealth, flutes, and
in general instruments) for the sake of something else,
clearly not all ends are final ends; but the chief good is
evidently something final. Therefore, if there is only
one final end, this will be what we are seeking, and if
there are more than one, the most final of these will
be what we are seeking. Now we call that which is in
itself worthy of pursuit more final than that which is
worthy of pursuit for the sake of something else, and
that which is never desirable for the sake of something
else more final than the things that are desirable both
in themselves and for the sake of that other thing,
and therefore we call final without qualification that
which is always desirable in itself and never for the
sake of something else.
Now such a thing happiness, above all else, is held
to be; for this we choose always for self and never for
the sake of something else, but honour, pleasure, rea-
son, and every virtue we choose indeed for themselves
(for if nothing resulted from them we should still
choose each of them), but we choose them also for the
sake of happiness, judging that by means of them we
shall be happy. Happiness, on the other hand, no one
chooses for the sake of these, nor, in general, for any-
thing other than itself.
From the point of view of self- sufficiency the same
result seems to follow; for the final good is thought
to be self- sufficient. Now by self- sufficient we do not
mean that which is sufficient for a man by himself, for
one who lives a solitary life, but also for parents, chil-
dren, wife, and in general for his friends and fellow cit-
izens, since man is born for citizenship. But some limit
prominent types of life— that just mentioned, the polit-
ical, and thirdly the contemplative life. Now the mass of
mankind are evidently quite slavish in their tastes, pre-
ferring a life suitable to beasts, but they get some ground
for their view from the fact that many of those in high
places share the tastes of Sardanapallus. A consideration
of the prominent types of life shows that people of supe-
rior refinement and of active disposition identify hap-
piness with honour, for this is, roughly speaking, the
end of the political life. But it seems too superficial to
be what we are looking for, since it is thought to depend
on those who bestow honour rather than on him who
receives it, but the good we divine to be something
proper to a man and not easily taken from him. Further,
men seem to pursue honour in order that they may be
assured of their goodness; at least it is by men of practi-
cal wisdom that they seek to be honoured, and among
those who know them, and on the ground of their vir-
tue; clearly, then, according to them, at any rate, virtue
is better. And perhaps one might even suppose this to
be, rather than honour, the end of the political life.
But even this appears somewhat incomplete; for pos-
session of virtue seems actually com patible with being
asleep, or with lifelong inactivity, and, further, with the
greatest sufferings and misfortunes; but a man who was
living so no one would call happy, unless he were main-
taining a thesis at all costs. But enough of this; for the
subject has been sufficiently treated even in the current
discussions. Third comes the contemplative life, which
we shall consider later.
The life of money- making is one undertaken
under compulsion, and wealth is evidently not the
good we are seeking; for it is merely useful and for the
sake of something else. And so one might rather take
the aforenamed objects to be ends; for they are loved
for themselves. But it is evident that not even these are
ends; yet many arguments have been thrown away in
support of them. Let us leave this subject, then.
* * *
7
Let us again return to the good we are seeking, and ask
what it can be. It seems different in different actions
and arts; it is different in medicine, in strategy, and

182 Á PART 3: THEoRiEs oF MoRALiTY
cases, eminence in respect of goodness being added to
the name of the function (for the function of a lyre-
player is to play the lyre, and that of a good lyre- player
is to do so well): if this is the case, and we state the func-
tion of man to be a certain kind of life, and this to be an
activity or actions of the soul implying a rational princi-
ple, and the function of a good man to be the good and
noble performance of these, and if any action is well
performed when it is performed in accordance with
the appropriate excellence: if this is the case, human
good turns out to be activity of soul in accordance with
virtue, and if there are more than one virtue, in accor-
dance with the best and most complete.
But we must add ‘in a complete life.’ For one swal-
low does not make a summer, nor does one day; and
so too one day, or a short time, does not make a man
blessed and happy.
* * *
BOOK II
1
Virtue, then, being of two kinds, intellectual and moral,
intellectual virtue in the main owes both its birth and
its growth to teaching (for which reason it requires
experience and time), while moral virtue comes about
as a result of habit, whence also its name ( e thike) is one
that is formed by a slight variation from the word ethos
(habit). From this it is also plain that none of the moral
virtues arises in us by nature; for nothing that exists
by nature can form a habit contrary to its nature. For
instance the stone which by nature moves downwards
cannot be habituated to move upwards, not even if one
tries to train it by throwing it up ten thousand times;
nor can fire be habituated to move downwards, nor
can anything else that by nature behaves in one way
be trained to behave in another. Neither by nature,
then, nor contrary to nature do the virtues arise in us;
rather we are adapted by nature to receive them, and
are made perfect by habit.
Again, of all the things that come to us by nature
we first acquire the potentiality and later exhibit the
activity (this is plain in the case of the senses; for it
was not by often seeing or often hearing that we got
these senses, but on the contrary we had them before
must be set to this; for if we extend our requirement
to ancestors and descendants and friends’ friends we
are in for an infinite series. Let us examine this ques-
tion, however, on another occasion; the self- sufficient
we now define as that which when isolated makes life
desirable and lacking in nothing; and such we think
happiness to be; and further we think it most desir-
able of all things, without being counted as one good
thing among others— if it were so counted it would
clearly be made more desirable by the addition of even
the least of goods; for that which is added becomes
an excess of goods, and of goods the greater is always
more desirable. Happiness, then, is something final
and self- sufficient, and is the end of action.
Presumably, however, to say that happiness is the
chief good seems a platitude, and a clearer account of
what it is still desired. This might perhaps be given, if
we could first ascertain the function of man. For just
as for a flute- player, a sculptor, or an artist, and, in
general, for all things that have a function or activ-
ity, the good and the ‘well’ is thought to reside in the
function, so would it seem to be for man, if he has a
function. Have the carpenter, then, and the tanner
certain functions or activities, and has man none? Is
he born without a function? Or as eye, hand, foot, and
in general each of the parts evidently has a function,
may one lay it down that man similarly has a func-
tion apart from all these? What then can this be? Life
seems to be common even to plants, but we are seek-
ing what is peculiar to man. Let us exclude, therefore,
the life of nutrition and growth. Next there would be
a life of perception, but it also seems to be common
even to the horse, the ox, and every animal. There
remains, then, an active life of the element that has a
rational principle; of this, one part has such a principle
in the sense of being obedient to one, the other in the
sense of possessing one and exercising thought. And,
as ‘life of the rational element’ also has two meanings,
we must state that life in the sense of activity is what
we mean; for this seems to be the more proper sense
of the term. Now if the function of man is an activity
of soul which follows or implies a rational principle,
and if we say ‘a so- and- so’ and ‘a good so- and- so’ have
a function which is the same in kind, e.g. a lyre, and
a good lyre- player, and so without qualification in all

CHAPTER 7: ViRTuE ETHiCs: BE A Good PERson Á 183
to become good, since otherwise our inquiry would
have been of no use), we must examine the nature of
actions, namely how we ought to do them; for these
determine also the nature of the states of character
that are produced, as we have said. Now, that we must
act according to the right rule is a common principle
and must be assumed— it will be discussed later, i.e.
both what the right rule is, and how it is related to the
other virtues. But this must be agreed upon before-
hand, that the whole account of matters of conduct
must be given in outline and not precisely, as we said
at the very beginning that the accounts we demand
must be in accordance with the subject- matter; mat-
ters concerned with conduct and questions of what is
good for us have no fixity, any more than matters of
health. The general account being of this nature, the
account of particular cases is yet more lacking in exact-
ness; for they do not fall under any art or precept but
the agents themselves must in each case consider what
is appropriate to the occasion, as happens also in the
art of medicine or of navigation.
But though our present account is of this nature
we must give what help we can. First, then, let us con-
sider this, that it is the nature of such things to be
destroyed by defect and excess, as we see in the case
of strength and of health (for to gain light on things
imperceptible we must use the evidence of sensible
things); both excessive and defective exercise destroys
the strength, and similarly drink or food which is
above or below a certain amount destroys the health,
while that which is proportionate both produces and
increases and preserves it. So too is it, then, in the case
of temperance and courage and the other virtues. For
the man who flies from and fears everything and does
not stand his ground against anything becomes a cow-
ard, and the man who fears nothing at all but goes to
meet every danger becomes rash; and similarly the man
who indulges in every pleasure and abstains from none
becomes self- indulgent, while the man who shuns
every pleasure, as boors do, becomes in a way insen-
sible; temperance and courage, then, are destroyed by
excess and defect, and preserved by the mean.
But not only are the sources and causes of their orig-
ination and growth the same as those of their destruc-
tion, but also the sphere of their actualization will be
we used them, and did not come to have them by
using them); but the virtues we get by first exercising
them, as also happens in the case of the arts as well.
For the things we have to learn before we can do them,
we learn by doing them, e.g. men become builders by
building and lyre- players by playing the lyre; so too
we become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing
temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts.
This is confirmed by what happens in states; for
legislators make the citizens good by forming habits
in them, and this is the wish of every legislator, and
those who do not effect it miss their mark, and it is in
this that a good constitution differs from a bad one.
Again, it is from the same causes and by the
same means that every virtue is both produced and
destroyed, and similarly every art; for it is from play-
ing the lyre that both good and bad lyre- players are
produced. And the corresponding statement is true
of builders and of all the rest; men will be good or
bad builders as a result of building well or badly. For
if this were not so, there would have been no need of
a teacher, but all men would have been born good or
bad at their craft. This, then, is the case with the vir-
tues also; by doing the acts that we do in our transac-
tions with other men we become just or unjust, and
by doing the acts that we do in the presence of danger,
and being habituated to feel fear or confidence, we
become brave or cowardly. The same is true of appe-
tites and feelings of anger; some men become tem-
perate and good- tempered, others self- indulgent and
irascible, by behaving in one way or the other in the
appropriate circumstances. Thus, in one word, states
of character arise out of like activities. This is why
the activities we exhibit must be of a certain kind; it
is because the states of character correspond to the
differences between these. It makes no small differ-
ence, then, whether we form habits of one kind or of
another from our very youth; it makes a very great dif-
ference, or rather all the difference.
2
Since, then, the present inquiry does not aim at theo-
retical knowledge like the others (for we are inquir-
ing not in order to know what virtue is, but in order

184 Á PART 3: THEoRiEs oF MoRALiTY
very conditions which result from often doing just
and temperate acts.
Actions, then, are called just and temperate when
they are such as the just or the temperate man would
do; but it is not the man who does these that is just and
temperate, but the man who also does them as just
and temperate men do them. It is well said, then, that
it is by doing just acts that the just man is produced,
and by doing temperate acts the temperate man; with-
out doing these no one would have even a prospect of
becoming good.
But most people do not do these, but take refuge
in theory and think they are being philosophers and
will become good in this way, behaving somewhat like
patients who listen attentively to their doctors, but do
none of the things they are ordered to do. As the latter
will not be made well in body by such a course of treat-
ment, the former will not be made well in soul by such
a course of philosophy.
5
Next we must consider what virtue is. Since things that
are found in the soul are of three kinds— passions, fac-
ulties, states of character, virtue must be one of these.
By passions I mean appetite, anger, fear, confidence,
envy, joy, friendly feeling, hatred, longing, emulation,
pity, and in general the feelings that are accompanied
by pleasure or pain; by faculties the things in virtue of
which we are said to be capable of feeling these, e.g. of
becoming angry or being pained or feeling pity; by states
of character the things in virtue of which we stand well
or badly with reference to the passions, e.g. with refer-
ence to anger we stand badly if we feel it violently or too
weakly, and well if we feel it moderately; and similarly
with reference to the other passions.
Now neither the virtues nor the vices are passions,
because we are not called good or bad on the ground
of our passions, but are so called on the ground of
our virtues and our vices, and because we are neither
praised nor blamed for our passions (for the man who
feels fear or anger is not praised, nor is the man who
simply feels anger blamed, but the man who feels it in
a certain way), but for our virtues and our vices we are
praised or blamed.
the same; for this is also true of the things which are
more evident to sense, e.g. of strength; it is produced
by taking much food and undergoing much exertion,
and it is the strong man that will be most able to do
these things. So too is it with the virtues; by abstaining
from pleasures we become temperate, and it is when we
have become so that we are most able to abstain from
them; and similarly too in the case of courage; for by
being habituated to despise things that are terrible and
to stand our ground against them we become brave,
and it is when we have become so that we shall be most
able to stand our ground against them.
* * *
4
The question might be asked, what we mean by saying
that we must become just by doing just acts, and tem-
perate by doing temperate acts; for if men do just and
temperate acts, they are already just and temperate,
exactly as, if they do what is in accordance with the
laws of grammar and of music, they are grammarians
and musicians.
Or is this not true even of the arts? It is possible
to do something that is in accordance with the laws
of grammar, either by chance or at the suggestion of
another. A man will be a grammarian, then, only
when he has both done something grammatical and
done it grammatically; and this means doing it in accor-
dance with the grammatical knowledge in himself.
Again, the case of the arts and that of the virtues
are not similar; for the products of the arts have their
goodness in themselves, so that it is enough that they
should have a certain character, but if the acts that are
in accordance with the virtues have themselves a certain
character it does not follow that they are done justly or
temperately. The agent also must be in a certain con-
dition when he does them; in the first place he must
have knowledge, secondly he must choose the acts,
and choose them for their own sakes, and thirdly his
action must proceed from a firm and unchangeable
character. These are not reckoned in as conditions of
the possession of the arts, except the bare knowledge;
but as a condition of the possession of the virtues
knowledge has little or no weight, while the other con-
ditions count not for a little but for everything, i.e. the

CHAPTER 7: ViRTuE ETHiCs: BE A Good PERson Á 185
for it exceeds and is exceeded by an equal amount; this
is intermediate according to arithmetical proportion.
But the intermediate relatively to us is not to be taken
so; if ten pounds are too much for a particular person to
eat and two too little, it does not follow that the trainer
will order six pounds; for this also is perhaps too much
for the person who is to take it, or too little— too little
for Milo, too much for the beginner in athletic exer-
cises. The same is true of running and wrestling. Thus a
master of any art avoids excess and defect, but seeks the
intermediate and chooses this— the intermediate not in
the object but relatively to us.
If it is thus, then, that every art does its work well—
by looking to the intermediate and judging its works
by this standard (so that we often say of good works of
art that it is not possible either to take away or to add
anything, implying that excess and defect destroy the
goodness of works of art, while the mean preserves it;
and good artists, as we say, look to this in their work),
and if, further, virtue is more exact and better than any
art, as nature also is, then virtue must have the quality
of aiming at the intermediate. I mean moral virtue; for
it is this that is concerned with passions and actions,
and in these there is excess, defect, and the intermedi-
ate. For instance, both fear and confidence and appe-
tite and anger and pity and in general pleasure and
pain may be felt both too much and too little, and in
both cases not well; but to feel them at the right times,
with reference to the right objects, towards the right
people, with the right motive, and in the right way, is
what is both intermediate and best, and this is charac-
teristic of virtue. Similarly with regard to actions also
there is excess, defect, and the intermediate. Now vir-
tue is concerned with passions and actions, in which
excess is a form of failure, and so is defect, while the
intermediate is praised and is a form of success; and
being praised and being successful are both charac-
teristics of virtue. Therefore virtue is a kind of mean,
since, as we have seen, it aims at what is intermediate.
Again, it is possible to fail in many ways (for evil
belongs to the class of the unlimited, as the Pythago-
reans conjectured, and good to that of the limited),
while to succeed is possible only in one way (for which
reason also one is easy and the other difficult— to miss
the mark easy, to hit it difficult); for these reasons also,
Again, we feel anger and fear without choice, but
the virtues are modes of choice or involve choice.
Further, in respect of the passions we are said to be
moved, but in respect of the virtues and the vices we
are said not to be moved but to be disposed in a par-
ticular way.
For these reasons also they are not faculties; for
we are neither called good nor bad, nor praised nor
blamed, for the simple capacity of feeling the passions;
again, we have the faculties by nature, but we are not
made good or bad by nature; we have spoken of this
before. If, then, the virtues are neither passions nor
faculties, all that remains is that they should be states
of character.
Thus we have stated what virtue is in respect of its
genus.
6
We must, however, not only describe virtue as a state of
character, but also say what sort of state it is. We may
remark, then, that every virtue or excellence both brings
into good condition the thing of which it is the excel-
lence and makes the work of that thing be done well;
e.g. the excellence of the eye makes both the eye and its
work good; for it is by the excellence of the eye that we
see well. Similarly the excellence of the horse makes a
horse both good in itself and good at running and at car-
rying its rider and at awaiting the attack of the enemy.
Therefore, if this is true in every case, the virtue of man
also will be the state of character which makes a man
good and which makes him do his own work well.
How this is to happen we have stated already, but
it will be made plain also by the following consider-
ation of the specific nature of virtue. In everything that
is continuous and divisible it is possible to take more,
less, or an equal amount, and that either in terms of the
thing itself or relatively to us; and the equal is an inter-
mediate between excess and defect. By the intermedi-
ate in the object I mean that which is equidistant from
each of the extremes, which is one and the same for all
men; by the intermediate relatively to us that which is
neither too much nor too little— and this is not one, nor
the same for all. For instance, if ten is many and two is
few, six is the intermediate, taken in terms of the object;

186 Á PART 3: THEoRiEs oF MoRALiTY
general apply more widely, but those which are par-
ticular are more genuine, since conduct has to do with
individual cases, and our statements must harmonize
with the facts in these cases. We may take these cases
from our table. With regard to feelings of fear and con-
fidence courage is the mean; of the people who exceed,
he who exceeds in fearlessness has no name (many of
the states have no name), while the man who exceeds
in confidence is rash, and he who exceeds in fear and
falls short in confidence is a coward. With regard to
pleasures and pains— not all of them, and not so much
with regard to the pains— the mean is temperance, the
excess self- indulgence. Persons deficient with regard
to the pleasures are not often found; hence such per-
sons also have received no name. But let us call them
‘insensible’.
With regard to giving and taking of money the
mean is liberality, the excess and the defect prodi-
gality and meanness. In these actions people exceed
and fall short in contrary ways; the prodigal exceeds
in spending and falls short in taking, while the mean
man exceeds in taking and falls short in spending. (At
present we are giving a mere outline or summary, and
are satisfied with this; later these states will be more
exactly determined.) With regard to money there are
also other dispositions— a mean, magnificence (for
the magnificent man differs from the liberal man;
the former deals with large sums, the latter with small
ones), an excess, tastelessness and vulgarity, and a
deficiency, niggardliness; these differ from the states
opposed to liberality, and the mode of their difference
will be stated later. With regard to honour and dishon-
our the mean is proper pride, the excess is known as
a sort of ‘empty vanity’, and the deficiency is undue
humility; and as we said liberality was related to
magnificence, differing from it by dealing with small
sums, so there is a state similarly related to proper
pride, being concerned with small honours while
that is concerned with great. For it is possible to desire
honour as one ought, and more than one ought, and
less, and the man who exceeds in his desires is called
ambitious, the man who falls short unambitious,
while the intermediate person has no name. The dis-
positions also are nameless, except that that of the
ambitious man is called ambition. Hence the people
who are at the extremes lay claim to the middle place;
then, excess and defect are characteristic of vice, and the
mean of virtue;
For men are good in but one way, but bad in many.
Virtue, then, is a state of character concerned with
choice, lying in a mean, i.e. the mean relative to us,
this being determined by a rational principle, and by
that principle by which the man of practical wisdom
would determine it. Now it is a mean between two
vices, that which depends on excess and that which
depends on defect; and again it is a mean because the
vices respectively fall short of or exceed what is right
in both passions and actions, while virtue both finds
and chooses that which is intermediate. Hence in
respect of its substance and the definition which states
its essence virtue is a mean, with regard to what is best
and right an extreme.
But not every action nor every passion admits of
a mean; for some have names that already imply bad-
ness, e.g. spite, shamelessness, envy, and in the case
of actions adultery, theft, murder; for all of these and
suchlike things imply by their names that they are
themselves bad, and not the excesses or deficiencies
of them. It is not possible, then, ever to be right with
regard to them; one must always be wrong. Nor does
goodness or badness with regard to such things depend
on committing adultery with the right women, at the
right time, and in the right way, but simply to do any of
them is to go wrong. It would be equally absurd, then,
to expect that in unjust, cowardly, and voluptuous
action there should be a mean, an excess, and a defi-
ciency; for at that rate there would be a mean of excess
and of deficiency, an excess of excess, and a deficiency
of deficiency. But as there is no excess and deficiency
of temperance and courage because what is interme-
diate is in a sense an extreme, so too of the actions we
have mentioned there is no mean nor any excess and
deficiency, but however they are done they are wrong;
for in general there is neither a mean of excess and defi-
ciency, nor excess and deficiency of a mean.
7
We must, however, not only make this general state-
ment, but also apply it to the individual facts. For
among statements about conduct those which are

CHAPTER 7: ViRTuE ETHiCs: BE A Good PERson Á 187
by it mock- modest. With regard to pleasantness in
the giving of amusement the intermediate person
is ready- witted and the disposition ready wit, the
excess is buffoonery and the person characterized by
it a buffoon, while the man who falls short is a sort of
boor and his state is boorishness. With regard to the
remaining kind of pleasantness, that which is exhib-
ited in life in general, the man who is pleasant in the
right way is friendly and the mean is friendliness,
while the man who exceeds is an obsequious person
if he has no end in view, a flatterer if he is aiming at
his own advantage, and the man who falls short and
is unpleasant in all circumstances is a quarrelsome
and surly sort of person.
* * *
9
That moral virtue is a mean, then, and in what sense it
is so, and that it is a mean between two vices, the one
involving excess, the other deficiency, and that it is
such because its character is to aim at what is interme-
diate in passions and in actions, has been sufficiently
stated. Hence also it is no easy task to be good. For in
everything it is no easy task to find the middle, e.g. to
find the middle of a circle is not for every one but for
him who knows; so, too, any one can get angry— that
is easy— or give or spend money; but to do this to the
right person, to the right extent, at the right time, with
the right motive, and in the right way, that is not for
every one, nor is it easy; wherefore goodness is both
rare and laudable and noble.
* * *
and we ourselves sometimes call the intermediate
person ambitious and sometimes unambitious, and
sometimes praise the ambitious man and sometimes
the unambitious. The reason of our doing this will be
stated in what follows; but now let us speak of the rem-
aining states according to the method which has been
indicated.
With regard to anger also there is an excess, a defi-
ciency, and a mean. Although they can scarcely be
said to have names, yet since we call the intermedi-
ate person good- tempered let us call the mean good
temper; of the persons at the extremes let the one who
exceeds be called irascible, and his vice irascibility,
and the man who falls short an inirascible sort of per-
son, and the deficiency inirascibility.
There are also three other means, which have a
certain likeness to one another, but differ from one
another: for they are all concerned with intercourse
in words and actions, but differ in that one is con-
cerned with truth in this sphere, the other two with
pleasantness; and of this one kind is exhibited in giv-
ing amusement, the other in all the circumstances of
life. We must therefore speak of these two, that we
may the better see that in all things the mean is praise-
worthy, and the extremes neither praiseworthy nor
right, but worthy of blame. Now most of these states
also have no names, but we must try, as in the other
cases, to invent names ourselves so that we may be
clear and easy to follow. With regard to truth, then,
the intermediate is a truthful sort of person and the
mean may be called truthfulness, while the pretence
which exaggerates is boastfulness and the person
characterized by it a boaster, and that which under-
states is mock modesty and the person characterized

188 Á PART 3: THEoRiEs oF MoRALiTY
In recent decades in North American social and moral
philosophy, alongside the development and discus-
sion of widely influential theories of justice, taken
as Rawls takes it as the ‘first virtue of social institu-
tions,’1 there has been a counter- movement gathering
strength, one coming from some interesting sources.
For some of the most outspoken of the diverse group
who have in a variety of ways been challenging the
assumed supremacy of justice among the moral and
social virtues are members of those sections of society
whom one might have expected to be especially aware
of the supreme importance of justice, namely blacks
and women. Those who have only recently seen the
correction or partial correction of long- standing racist
and sexist injustices to their race and sex, are among the
philosophers now suggesting that justice is only one
virtue among many, and one that may need the pres-
ence of the others in order to deliver its own undenied
value. Among these philosophers of the philosophical
counterculture, as it were— but an increasingly large
counterculture— I include Alasdair MacIntyre, Michael
Stocker, Lawrence Blum, Michael Slote, Laurence
Thomas, Claudia Card, Alison Jaggar, Susan Wolf and a
whole group of men and women, myself included, who
have been influenced by the writings of Harvard edu-
cational psychologist Carol Gilligan, whose book In a
Different Voice (Harvard 1982; hereafter D.V.) caused a
considerable stir both in the popular press and, more
slowly, in the philosophical journals.
Let me say quite clearly at this early point that
there is little disagreement that justice is a social value
of very great importance, and injustice an evil. Nor
would those who have worked on theories of justice
want to deny that other things matter besides justice.
Rawls, for example, incorporates the value of free-
dom into his account of justice, so that denial of basic
freedoms counts as injustice. Rawls also leaves room
for a wider theory of the right, of which the theory
of justice is just a part. Still, he does claim that justice
is the ‘first’ virtue of social institutions, and it is only
that claim about priority that I think has been chal-
lenged. It is easy to exaggerate the differences of view
that exist, and I want to avoid that. The differences are
as much in emphasis as in substance, or we can say
that they are differences in tone of voice. But these dif-
ferences do tend to make a difference in approaches to
a wide range of topics not just in moral theory but in
areas like medical ethics, where the discussion used to
be conducted in terms of patients’ rights, of informed
consent, and so on, but now tends to get conducted in
an enlarged moral vocabulary, which draws on what
Gilligan calls the ethics of care as well as that of justice.
For ‘care’ is the new buzz- word. It is not, as Shake-
speare’s Portia demanded, mercy that is to season jus-
tice, but a less authoritarian humanitarian supplement,
a felt concern for the good of others and for community
with them. The ‘cold jealous virtue of justice’ (Hume) is
found to be too cold, and it is ‘warmer’ more communi-
tarian virtues and social ideals that are being called in to
supplement it. One might say that liberty and equality
are being found inadequate without fraternity, except
that ‘fraternity’ will be quite the wrong word, if as Gil-
ligan initially suggested, it is women who perceive this
value most easily. (‘Sorority’ will do no better, since it is
too exclusive, and English has no gender- neuter word
for the mutual concern of siblings.) She has since modi-
fied this claim, allowing that there are two perspectives
on moral and social issues that we all tend to alternate
between, and which are not always easy to combine,
one of them what she called the justice perspective, the
other the care perspective. It is increasingly obvious
that there are many male philosophical spokespersons
for the care perspective (Laurence Thomas, Lawrence
Blum, Michael Stocker) so that it cannot be the pre-
rogative of women. Nevertheless Gilligan still wants
to claim that women are most unlikely to take only the
justice perspective, as some men are claimed to, at least
The Need for More Than Justice
Annette C. Baier
Annette C. Baier, “The Need for More Than Justice,” Canadian
Journal of Philosophy, supplementary vol. 13 (1988): 41–56. Pub-
lished by University of Calgary Press. Reprinted with permission
of University of Calgary Press.

CHAPTER 7: ViRTuE ETHiCs: BE A Good PERson Á 189
she calls the justice perspective, necessary though that
was and is seen by them to have been to their hard won
liberation from sexist oppression. They, like the blacks,
used the language of rights and justice to change their
own social position, but nevertheless see limitations
in that language, according to Gilligan’s findings as a
moral psychologist. She reports their discontent with
the individualist more or less Kantian moral framework
that dominates Western moral theory and which influ-
enced moral psychologists such as Lawrence Kohlberg,
to whose conception of moral maturity she seeks an
alternative. Since the target of Gilligan’s criticism is the
dominant Kantian tradition, and since that has been
the target also of moral philosophers as diverse in their
own views as Bernard Williams, Alasdair MacIntyre,
Philippa Foot, Susan Wolf, Claudia Card, her book
is of interest as much for its attempt to articulate an
alternative to the Kantian justice perspective as for its
implicit raising of the question of male bias in Western
moral theory, especially liberal- democratic theory. For
whether the supposed blind spots of that outlook are
due to male bias, or to nonparental bias, or to early trau-
mas of powerlessness or to early resignation to ‘detach-
ment’ from others, we need first to be persuaded that
they are blind spots before we will have any interest in
their cause and cure. Is justice blind to important social
values, or at least only one- eyed? What is it that comes
into view from the ‘care perspective’ that is not seen
from the ‘justice perspective’?
Gilligan’s position here is mostly easily described by
contrasting it with that of Kohlberg, against which she
developed it. Kohlberg, influenced by Piaget and the
Kantian philosophical tradition as developed by John
Rawls, developed a theory about typical moral develop-
ment which saw it to progress from a pre- conventional
level, where what is seen to matter is pleasing or not
offending parental authority- figures, through a con-
ventional level in which the child tries to fit in with a
group, such as a school community, and conform to
its standards and rules, to a post- conventional critical
level, in which such conventional rules are subjected to
tests, and where those tests are of a Utilitarian, or, even-
tually, a Kantian sort— namely ones that require respect
for each person’s individual rational will, or autonomy,
and conformity to any implicit social contract such
until some mid- life crisis jolts them into ‘bifocal’ moral
vision (see D.V., ch. 6).
Gilligan in her book did not offer any explanatory
theory of why there should be any difference between
female and male moral outlook, but she did tend to link
the naturalness to women of the care perspective with
their role as primary care- takers of young children, that
is with their parental and specifically maternal role. She
avoided the question of whether it is their biological
or their social parental role that is relevant, and some
of those who dislike her book are worried precisely by
this uncertainty. Some find it retrograde to hail as a spe-
cial sort of moral wisdom an outlook that may be the
product of the socially enforced restriction of women
to domestic roles (and the reservation of such roles
for them alone). For that might seem to play into the
hands of those who still favor such restriction. (Marx-
ists, presumably, will not find it so surprising that moral
truths might depend for their initial clear voicing on
the social oppression, and memory of it, of those who
voice the truths.) Gilligan did in the first chapter of
D.V. cite the theory of Nancy Chodorow (as presented
in The Reproduction of Mothering [Berkeley 1978]) which
traces what appears as gender differences in personality
to early social development, in particular to the effects
of the child’s primary care-taker being or not being of
the same gender as the child. Later, both in ‘The Con-
quistador and the Dark Continent: Reflections on the
Nature of Love’ (Daedalus [Summer 1984]), and ‘The
Origins of Morality in Early Childhood’ (in press), she
develops this explanation. She postulates two evils that
any infant may become aware of, the evil of detach-
ment or isolation from others whose love one needs,
and the evil of relative powerlessness and weakness.
Two dimensions of moral development are thereby
set— one aimed at achieving satisfying community
with others, the other aiming at autonomy or equality
of power. The relative predominance of one over the
other development will depend both upon the rela-
tive salience of the two evils in early childhood, and
on early and later reinforcement or discouragement in
attempts made to guard against these two evils. This
provides the germs of a theory about why, given current
customs of childrearing, it should be mainly women
who are not content with only the moral outlook that

190 Á PART 3: THEoRiEs oF MoRALiTY
in Kohlberg’s stages, a progression in the understand-
ing, not of mutual care, but of mutual respect, where
this has its Kantian overtones of distance, even of
some fear for the respected, and where personal auton-
omy and independence, rather than more satisfactory
interdependence, are the paramount values.
This contrast, one cannot but feel, is one which
Gilligan might have used the Marxist language of
alienation to make. For the main complaint about the
Kantian version of a society with its first virtue justice,
constructed as respect for equal rights to formal goods
such as having contracts kept, due process, equal
opportunity including opportunity to participate in
political activities leading to policy and law- making,
to basic liberties of speech, free association and assem-
bly, religious worship, is that none of these goods do
much to ensure that the people who have and mutu-
ally respect such rights will have any other relation-
ships to one another than the minimal relationship
needed to keep such a ‘civil society’ going. They may
well be lonely, driven to suicide, apathetic about their
work and about participation in political processes,
find their lives meaningless and have no wish to leave
offspring to face the same meaningless existence.
Their rights, and respect for rights, are quite compat-
ible with very great misery, and misery whose causes
are not just individual misfortunes and psychic sick-
ness, but social and moral impoverishment.
What Gilligan’s older male subjects complain of
is precisely this sort of alienation from some dimly
glimpsed better possibility for human beings, some
richer sort of network of relationships. As one of Gilli-
gan’s male subjects put it, ‘People have real emotional
needs to be attached to something, and equality does
not give you attachment. Equality fractures society and
places on every person the burden of standing on his
own two feet’ (D.V., 167). It is not just the difficulty of
self- reliance which is complained of, but its socially
‘fracturing’ effect. Whereas the younger men, in their
college years, had seen morality as a matter of recipro-
cal non- interference, this old man begins to see it as
reciprocal attachment. ‘Morality is . . . essential . . . for
creating the kind of environment, interaction between
people, that is a prerequisite to the fulfillment of indi-
vidual goals. If you want other people not to interfere
wills are deemed to have made, or to any hypotheti-
cal ones they would make if thinking clearly. What
was found when Kohlberg’s questionnaires (mostly by
verbal response to verbally sketched moral dilemmas)
were applied to female as well as male subjects, Gilligan
reports, is that the girls and women not only scored
generally lower than the boys and men, but tended to
revert to the lower stage of the conventional level even
after briefly (usually in adolescence) attaining the post-
conventional level. Piaget’s finding that girls were defi-
cient in ‘the legal sense’ was confirmed.
These results led Gilligan to wonder if there might
not be a quite different pattern of development to be
discerned, at least in female subjects. She therefore
conducted interviews designed to elicit not just how
far advanced the subjects were towards an apprecia-
tion of the nature and importance of Kantian auton-
omy, but also to find out what the subjects themselves
saw as progress or lack of it, what conceptions of moral
maturity they came to possess by the time they were
adults. She found that although the Kohlberg ver-
sion of moral maturity as respect for fellow persons,
and for their rights as equals (rights including that
of free association), did seem shared by many young
men, the women tended to speak in a different voice
about morality itself and about moral maturity. To
quote Gilligan, ‘Since the reality of interconnexion
is experienced by women as given rather than freely
contracted, they arrive at an understanding of life
that reflects the limits of autonomy and control. As a
result, women’s development delineates the path not
only to a less violent life but also to a maturity real-
ized by interdependence and taking care’ (D.V., 172).
She writes that there is evidence that ‘women per-
ceive and construe social reality differently from men,
and that these differences center around experiences
of attachment and separation . . . because women’s
sense of integrity appears to be intertwined with an
ethics of care, so that to see themselves as women is
to see themselves in a relationship of connexion, the
major changes in women’s lives would seem to involve
changes in the understanding and activities of care’
(D.V., 171). She contrasts this progressive understand-
ing of care, from merely pleasing others to helping and
nurturing, with the sort of progression that is involved

CHAPTER 7: ViRTuE ETHiCs: BE A Good PERson Á 191
becomes defined by responses to dependence and to
patterns of interconnexion, both chosen and uncho-
sen. It is not something a person has, and which she
then chooses relationships to suit, but something that
develops out of a series of dependencies and interde-
pendencies, and responses to them. This conception
of individuality is not flatly at odds with, say, Rawls’
Kantian one, but there is at least a difference of tone
of voice between speaking as Rawls does of each of
us having our own rational life plan, which a just
society’s moral traffic rules will allow us to follow,
and which may or may not include close association
with other persons, and speaking as Gilligan does of
a satisfactory life as involving ‘progress of affiliative
relationship’ (D.V., 170) where ‘the concept of iden-
tity expands to include the experience of intercon-
nexion’ (D.V., 173). Rawls can allow that progress to
Gilligan- style moral maturity may be a rational life
plan, but not a moral constraint on every life- pattern.
The trouble is that it will not do just to say ‘let this ver-
sion of morality be an optional extra. Let us agree on
the essential minimum, that is on justice and rights,
and let whoever wants to go further and cultivate this
more demanding ideal of responsibility and care.’
For, first, it cannot be satisfactorily cultivated without
closer cooperation from others than respect for rights
and justice will ensure, and second, the encourage-
ment of some to cultivate it while others do not could
easily lead to exploitation of those who do. It obvi-
ously has suited some in most societies well enough
that others take on the responsibilities of care (for the
sick, the helpless, the young) leaving them free to pur-
sue their own less altruistic goods. Volunteer forces of
those who accept an ethic of care, operating within a
society where the power is exercised and the institu-
tions designed, redesigned, or maintained by those
who accept a less communal ethic of minimally con-
strained self- advancement, will not be the solution.
The liberal individualists may be able to ‘tolerate’ the
more communally minded, if they keep the liberals’
rules, but it is not so clear that the more communally
minded can be content with just those rules, nor be
content to be tolerated and possibly exploited.
For the moral tradition which developed the
concept of rights, autonomy and justice is the same
with your pursuit of whatever you are into, you have
to play the game,’ says the spokesman for traditional
liberalism (D.V., 98). But if what one is ‘into’ is inter-
connexion, interdependence rather than an individual
autonomy that may involve ‘detachment,’ such a ver-
sion of morality will come to seem inadequate. And Gil-
ligan stresses that the interconnexion that her mature
women subjects, and some men, wanted to sustain was
not merely freely chosen interconnexion, nor inter-
connexion between equals, but also the sort of inter-
connexion that can obtain between a child and her
unchosen mother and father, or between a child and
her unchosen older and younger siblings, or indeed
between most workers and their unchosen fellow work-
ers, or most citizens and their unchosen fellow citizens.
A model of a decent community different from the
liberal one is involved in the version of moral matu-
rity that Gilligan voices. It has in many ways more in
common with the older religion- linked versions of
morality and a good society than with the modern
Western liberal idea. That perhaps is why some find it
so dangerous and retrograde. Yet it seems clear that it
also has much in common with what we call Hegelian
versions of moral maturity and of social health and
malaise, both with Marxist versions and with so- called
right- Hegelian views.
Let me try to summarize the main differences, as
I see them, between on the one hand Gilligan’s ver-
sion of moral maturity and the sort of social structures
that would encourage, express and protect it, and on
the other the orthodoxy she sees herself to be chal-
lenging. I shall from now on be giving my own inter-
pretation of the significance of her challenges, not
merely reporting them. The most obvious point is the
challenge to the individualism of the Western tradi-
tion, to the fairly entrenched belief in the possibility
and desirability of each person pursuing his own good
in his own way, constrained only by a minimal for-
mal common good, namely a working legal apparatus
that enforces contracts and protects individuals from
undue interference by others. Gilligan reminds us that
noninterference can, especially for the relatively pow-
erless, such as the very young, amount to neglect, and
even between equals can be isolating and alienating.
On her less individualist version of individuality, it

192 Á PART 3: THEoRiEs oF MoRALiTY
inclusion in the group of full members of a commu-
nity. The tradition of liberal moral theory has in fact
developed so as to include the women it had for so
long excluded, to include the poor as well as rich,
blacks and whites, and so on. Women like Mary Woll-
stonecraft used the male moral theories to good pur-
pose. So we should not be wholly ungrateful for those
male moral theories, for all their objectionable earlier
content. They were undoubtedly patriarchal, but they
also contained the seeds of the challenge, or antidote,
to this patriarchal poison.
But when we transcend the values of the Kantians,
we should not forget the facts of history— that those
values were the values of the oppressors of women.
The Christian church, whose version of the moral law
Aquinas codified, in his very legalistic moral theory,
still insists on the maleness of the God it worships, and
jealously reserves for males all the most powerful posi-
tions in its hierarchy. Its patriarchical prejudice is open
and avowed. In the secular moral theories of men, the
sexist patriarchal prejudice is today often less open,
not as blatant as it is in Aquinas, in the later natural
law tradition, and in Kant and Hegel, but is often still
there. No moral theorist today would say that women
are unfit to vote, to make laws, or to rule a nation
without powerful male advisors (as most queens had),
but the old doctrines die hard. In one of the best male
theories we have, John Rawls’s theory, a key role is
played by the idea of the ‘head of a household.’ It is
heads of households who are to deliberate behind a
‘veil of ignorance’ of historical details, and of details
of their own special situation, to arrive at the ‘just’
constitution for a society. Now of course Rawls does
not think or say that these ‘heads’ are fathers rather
than mothers. But if we have really given up the age-
old myth of women needing, as Grotius put it, to be
under the ‘eye’ of a more ‘rational’ male protector and
master, then how do families come to have any one
‘head,’ except by the death or desertion of one parent?
They will either be two- headed, or headless. Traces
of the old patriarchal poison still remain in even the
best contemporary moral theorizing. Few may actu-
ally say that women’s place is in the home, but there
is much muttering, when unemployment figures rise,
about how the relatively recent flood of women into
tradition that provided ‘justifications’ of the oppres-
sion of those whom the primary right- holders
depended on to do the sort of work they themselves
preferred not to do. The domestic work was left to
women and slaves, and the liberal morality for right-
holders was surreptitiously supplemented by a differ-
ent set of demands made on domestic workers. As long
as women could be got to assume responsibility for the
care of home and children, and to train their children
to continue the sexist system, the liberal morality
could continue to be the official morality, by turning
its eyes away from the contribution made by those it
excluded. The long unnoticed moral proletariat were
the domestic workers, mostly female. Rights have usu-
ally been for the privileged. Talking about laws, and
the rights those laws recognize and protect, does not
in itself ensure that the group of legislators and rights-
holders will not be restricted to some elite. Bills of
rights have usually been proclamations of the rights
of some in- group, barons, landowners, males, whites,
non- foreigners. The ‘justice perspective,’ and the legal
sense that goes with it, are shadowed by their patriar-
chal past. What did Kant, the great prophet of auton-
omy, say in his moral theory about women? He said
they were incapable of legislation, not fit to vote, that
they needed the guidance of more ‘rational’ males.2
Autonomy was not for them, only for first- class, really
rational persons. It is ironic that Gilligan’s original
findings in a way confirm Kant’s views— it seems that
autonomy really may not be for women. Many of
them reject that ideal (D.V., 48), and have been found
not as good at making rules as are men. But where
Kant concludes—‘so much the worse for women,’ we
can conclude—‘so much the worse for the male fixa-
tion on the special skill of drafting legislation, for the
bureaucratic mentality of rule worship, and for the
male exaggeration of the importance of independence
over mutual interdependence.’
It is however also true that the moral theories that
made the concept of a person’s rights central were not
just the instruments for excluding some persons, but
also the instruments used by those who demanded
that more and more persons be included in the
favored group. Abolitionists, reformers, women,
used the language of rights to assert their claims to

CHAPTER 7: ViRTuE ETHiCs: BE A Good PERson Á 193
another, states and citizens, doctors and patients, the
well and the ill, large states and small states, have had
to be shunted to the bottom of the agenda, and then
dealt with by some sort of ‘promotion’ of the weaker
so that an appearance of virtual equality is achieved.
Citizens collectively become equal to states, children
are treated as adults- to- be, the ill and dying are treated
as continuers of their earlier more potent selves, so
that their ‘rights’ could be seen as the rights of equals.
This pretence of an equality that is in fact absent may
often lead to desirable protection of the weaker, or
more dependent. But it somewhat masks the question
of what our moral relationships are to those who are
our superiors or our inferiors in power. A more realistic
acceptance of the fact that we begin as helpless chil-
dren, that at almost every point of our lives we deal
with both the more and the less helpless, that equal-
ity of power and interdependency, between two per-
sons or groups, is rare and hard to recognize when it
does occur, might lead us to a more direct approach to
questions concerning the design of institutions struc-
turing these relationships between unequals (families,
schools, hospitals, armies) and of the morality of our
dealings with the more and the less powerful. One rea-
son why those who agree with the Gilligan version of
what morality is about will not want to agree that the
liberals’ rules are a good minimal set, the only ones we
need pressure everyone to obey, is that these rules do
little to protect the young or the dying or the starv-
ing or any of the relatively powerless against neglect,
or to ensure an education that will form persons
to be capable of conforming to an ethics of care and
responsibility. Put baldly, and in a way Gilligan cer-
tainly has not put it, the liberal morality, if unsupple-
mented, may unfit people to be anything other than
what its justifying theories suppose them to be, ones
who have no interest in each others’ interests. Yet
some must take an interest in the next generation’s
interests. Women’s traditional work, of caring for the
less powerful, especially for the young, is obviously
socially vital. One cannot regard any version of moral-
ity that does not ensure that it gets well done as an
adequate ‘minimal morality,’ any more than we could
so regard one that left any concern for more distant
future generations an optional extra. A moral theory,
the work force complicates the problem, as if it would
be a good thing if women just went back home when-
ever unemployment rises, to leave the available jobs
for the men. We still do not really have a wide accep-
tance of the equal rights of women to employment
outside the home. Nor do we have wide acceptance of
the equal duty of men to perform those domestic tasks
which in no way depend on special female anatomy,
namely cooking, cleaning, and the care of weaned
children. All sorts of stories (maybe true stories), about
children’s need for one ‘primary’ parent, who must be
the mother if the mother breast- feeds the child, shore
up the unequal division of domestic responsibility
between mothers and fathers, wives and husbands.
If we are really to transvalue the values of our patriar-
chal past, we need to rethink all of those assumptions,
really test those psychological theories. And how will
men ever develop an understanding of the ‘ethics of
care’ if they continue to be shielded or kept from that
experience of caring for a dependent child, which
complements the experience we all have had of being
cared for as dependent children? These experiences
form the natural background for the development of
moral maturity as Gilligan’s women saw it.
Exploitation aside, why would women, once liber-
ated, not be content to have their version of morality
merely tolerated? Why should they not see themselves
as voluntarily, for their own reasons, taking on more
than the liberal rules demand, while having no quar-
rel with the content of those rules themselves, nor
with their remaining the only ones that are expected
to be generally obeyed? To see why, we need to move
on to three more differences between the Kantian lib-
erals (usually contractarians) and their critics. These
concern the relative weight put on relationships
between equals, and the relative weight put on free-
dom of choice, and on the authority of intellect over
emotions. It is a typical feature of the dominant moral
theories and traditions, since Kant, or perhaps since
Hobbes, that relationships between equals or those
who are deemed equal in some important sense, have
been the relations that morality is concerned primar-
ily to regulate. Relationships between those who are
clearly unequal in power, such as parents and chil-
dren, earlier and later generations in relation to one

194 Á PART 3: THEoRiEs oF MoRALiTY
on care goes with a recognition of the often unchosen
nature of the responsibilities of those who give care,
both of children who care for their aged or infirm par-
ents, and of parents who care for the children they in
fact have. Contract soon ceases to seem the paradigm
source of moral obligation once we attend to parental
responsibility, and justice as a virtue of social institu-
tions will come to seem at best only first equal with
the virtue, whatever its name, that ensures that each
new generation is made appropriately welcome and
prepared for their adult lives.
This all constitutes a belated reminder to West-
ern moral theorists of a fact they have always known,
that as Adam Ferguson, and David Hume before him
emphasized, we are born into families, and the first
society we belong to, one that fits or misfits us for later
ones, is the small society of parents (or some sort of
child- attendants) and children, exhibiting as it may
both relationships of near equality and of inequality in
power. This simple reminder, with the fairly consider-
able implications it can have for the plausibility of con-
tractarian moral theory, is at the same time a reminder
of the role of human emotions as much as human rea-
son and will in moral development as it actually comes
about. The fourth feature of the Gilligan challenge to
liberal orthodoxy is a challenge to its typical rational-
ism, or intellectualism, to its assumption that we need
not worry what passions persons have, as long as their
rational wills can control them. This Kantian picture of
a controlling reason dictating to possibly unruly pas-
sions also tends to seem less useful when we are led
to consider what sort of person we need to fill the role
of parent, or indeed want in any close relationship. It
might be important for father figures to have rational
control over their violent urges to beat to death the
children whose screams enrage them, but more than
control of such nasty passions seems needed in the
mother or primary parent, or parent- substitute, by most
psychological theories. They need to love their chil-
dren, not just to control their irritation. So the empha-
sis in Kantian theories on rational control of emotions,
rather than on cultivating desirable forms of emotion,
is challenged by Gilligan, along with the challenge to
the assumption of the centrality of autonomy, or rela-
tions between equals, and of freely chosen relations.
it can plausibly be claimed, cannot regard concern
for new and future persons as an optional charity left
for those with a taste for it. If the morality the theory
endorses is to sustain itself, it must provide for its
own continuers, not just take out a loan on a carefully
encouraged maternal instinct or on the enthusiasm of
a self- selected group of environmentalists, who make
it their business or hobby to be concerned with what
we are doing to mother earth.
The recognition of the importance for all parties
of relations between those who are and cannot but
be unequal, both of these relations in themselves and
for their effect on personality formation and so on
other relationships, goes along with a recognition of
the plain fact that not all morally important relation-
ships can or should be freely chosen. So far I have dis-
cussed three reasons women have not to be content
to pursue their own values within the framework of
the liberal morality. The first was its dubious record.
The second was its inattention to relations of inequal-
ity or its pretence of equality. The third reason is its
exaggeration of the scope of choice, or its inattention
to unchosen relations. Showing up the partial myth of
equality among actual members of a community, and
of the undesirability of trying to pretend that we are
treating all of them as equals, tends to go along with
an exposure of the companion myth that moral obli-
gations arise from freely chosen associations between
such equals. Vulnerable future generations do not
choose their dependence on earlier generations. The
unequal infant does not choose its place in a family
or nation, nor is it treated as free to do as it likes until
some association is freely entered into. Nor do its
parents always choose their parental role, or freely
assume their parental responsibilities any more than
we choose our power to affect the conditions in which
later generations will live. Gilligan’s attention to the
version of morality and moral maturity found in
women, many of whom had faced a choice of whether
or not to have an abortion, and who had at some point
become mothers, is attention to the perceived inade-
quacy of the language of rights to help in such choices
or to guide them in their parental role. It would not be
much of an exaggeration to call the Gilligan ‘different
voice’ the voice of the potential parents. The emphasis

CHAPTER 7: ViRTuE ETHiCs: BE A Good PERson Á 195
to harmonize justice and care. The morality it theo-
rizes about is after all for all persons, for men and for
women, and will need their combined insights. As
Gilligan said (D.V., 174), what we need now is a ‘mar-
riage’ of the old male and the newly articulated female
insights. If she is right about the special moral apti-
tudes of women, it will most likely be the women who
propose the marriage, since they are the ones with
moral natural empathy, with the better diplomatic
skills, the ones more likely to shoulder responsibil-
ity and take moral initiative, and the ones who find
it easiest to empathize and care about how the other
party feels. Then, once there is this union of male and
female moral wisdom, we maybe can teach each other
the moral skills each gender currently lacks, so that
the gender difference in moral outlook that Gilligan
found will slowly become less marked.
NOTES
1. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Harvard University Press).
2. Immanuel Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, sec. 46.
3. Laurence Thomas, ‘Sexism and Racism: Some Concep-
tual Differences,’ Ethics 90 (1980), 239–50; republished in
Philosophy, Sex and Language, Vetterling- Braggin, ed. (Totowa,
NJ: Littlefield Adams 1980).
The same set of challenges to ‘orthodox’ liberal
oral theory has come not just from Gilligan and other
women, who are reminding other moral theorists of
the role of the family as a social institution and as an
influence on the other relationships people want to
or are capable of sustaining, but also, as I noted at the
start, from an otherwise fairly diverse group of men,
ranging from those influenced by both Hegelian and
Christian traditions (MacIntyre) to all varieties of
other backgrounds. From this group I want to draw
attention to the work of one philosopher in particu-
lar, namely Laurence Thomas, the author of a fairly
remarkable article3 in which he finds sexism to be a
more intractable social evil than racism. . . . Thomas
makes a strong case for the importance of supplement-
ing a concern for justice and respect for rights with an
emphasis on equally needed virtues, and on virtues
seen as appropriate emotional as well as rational capac-
ities. Like Gilligan (and unlike MacIntyre) Thomas
gives a lot of attention to the childhood beginnings of
moral and social capacities, to the role of parental love
in making that possible, and to the emotional as well
as the cognitive development we have reason to think
both possible and desirable in human persons.
It is clear, I think, that the best moral theory has
to be a cooperative product of women and men, has

196
Beyond the moral theorizing of Aquinas, Kant,
Hobbes, and Mill, there is a different approach to
moral thinking and feeling that constitutes a seri-
ous challenge to them: feminist ethics. Feminist
ethics is not a moral theory so much as an alterna-
tive way of looking at the concepts and concerns of
the moral life. It is an approach focused on wom-
en’s interests and experiences and devoted to sup-
porting the moral equality of women and men.
Those who see ethics from this perspective are
reacting to some hard facts. One is that most of the
great ethical theorists (and many of their followers,
past and present) have assumed that women are
somehow morally inferior to men— less rational,
less important, less mature, or less moral. Coupled
with this bias is a trend that is even more alarm-
ing: most women throughout the world are in a
thousand ways second- class citizens (or worse). By
law, by religion, or by custom, they are the victims
of violence, stereotype, bigotry, coercion, forced
dependence, and social, political, and professional
inequality. Modern Western societies are as guilty
of some of these evils as many countries in the
developing world.
In the West, some ways of thinking and feeling
have been regarded as characteristic of women, and
these ways, whether distinctive of women or not,
have been largely neglected by moral philosophers
(who have traditionally been men). According to
the feminist philosopher Alison M. Jaggar,
Western moral theory is said to embody values
that are “masculine,” insofar as they are associ-
ated, empirically, normatively, or symbolically with
men. For instance, western ethics is alleged to prefer
the supposedly masculine or male- associated values
of independence, autonomy, intellect, will, wari-
ness, hierarchy, domination, culture, transcendence,
product, asceticism, war and death over the suppos-
edly feminine or female- associated values of interde-
pendence, community, connection, sharing, emotion,
body, trust, absence of hierarchy, nature, immanence,
process, joy, peace and life.1
Some moral issues are more likely to arise from
women’s experiences than men’s, and these, too,
have been overlooked:
Issues of special concern to women are said to have
been ignored by modern moral philosophers, who
have tended to portray the domestic realm as an
arena outside the economy and beyond justice, pri-
vate in the sense of being beyond the scope of legiti-
mate political regulation. Even philosophers like
Aristotle or Hegel (1770–1831), who give some ethi-
cal importance to the domestic realm, have tended
to portray the home as an arena in which the most
fully human excellences are incapable of being real-
ized. . . . [Feminist philosophers] argued that the phil-
osophical devaluation of the domestic realm made
it impossible to raise questions about the justice of
the domestic division of labor, because it obscured
the far- reaching social significance and creativity
of women’s work in the home, and concealed, even
legitimated, the domestic abuse of women and girls.2
In the past few decades, feminist philosophers
and other thinkers (mostly women but some men)
have tried to shed light on all of these dark corners.
The result— still an ongoing project— is feminist
ethics and its grandchild, the ethics of care.
C H A P T E R 8
‘’
Feminist Ethics and the Ethics of Care

CHAPTER 8: FEminisT ETHiCs And THE ETHiCs oF CARE Á 197
FEMINIST ETHICS
Feminists are a diverse group with contrasting
viewpoints, so it should not be a surprise that they
approach feminist ethics in different ways and
arrive at different conclusions. Still, some general-
izations are possible.
An emphasis on personal relationships. For the
most part, traditional moral theories have been
concerned with what we could call “public life”—
the realm in which unrelated individuals try to
figure out how to behave toward one another and
how to ensure that, among strangers, justice is
done, rights are respected, and utility is maximized.
The focus has been mostly on moral judgments and
theories pertaining to people as separate members
of the community, the polity, and the culture. But
feminist ethics narrows down the area of moral
concern to the interconnected and familiar small
group— to the people with whom we have close
personal relationships. The relationships of interest
are the ties of kinship, the bonds of friendship, or
the connections between caregivers and the cared-
for— the sphere of the domestic and the private.
This is the realm of intimate relationships, sexual
behavior, child rearing, and family struggles— the
place we all come from and perhaps never leave,
and where we live a large part of our moral lives.
Differing views on moral principles. Some feminist
philosophers resist the temptation to map out moral
actions according to moral principles. Whereas Kant
wants to reduce all moral deliberation to adherence
to a single rule (the categorical imperative), some
feminists demur. They argue that principles such as
autonomy, justice, and utility are too general and
too unwieldy to be of much use in the complicated,
multifaceted arena of the domestic, social, and per-
sonal. Many feminist philosophers, however, are
comfortable with moral principles and see them as
essential to moral reasoning. Some of these thinkers
are working within the context of traditional moral
theories and see these frameworks as compatible
with feminist ethics.
’
The increased contemporary focus on feminist eth-
ics is new, but important work in the area is not.
Rosemarie Tong and Nancy Williams explain:
Feminist approaches to ethics, as well as debates
about the gendered nature of morality, are not
recent developments. During the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries, a wide variety of thinkers
including Mary Wollstonecraft, John Stuart Mill,
Catherine Beecher, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and
Elizabeth Cady Stanton addressed topics related
to “women’s morality.” Each of these thinkers
raised questions such as: Are women’s “feminine”
traits the product of nature/biology or are they
instead the outcome of social conditioning? Are
moral virtues as well as gender traits connected
with one’s affective as well as cognitive capacities,
indeed with one’s physiology and psychology? If
so, should we simply accept the fact that men and
women have different moral virtues as well as dif-
ferent gender traits and proceed accordingly? If
not, should we strive to get men and women to
adhere to the same morality: a one- size- fits- all
human morality?*
What would be the social implications of scientific
proof that alleged feminine traits are entirely the
result of either biology or social conditioning?
*Rosemarie Tong and Nancy Williams, “Feminist Eth-
ics,” in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Winter
2016 ed. Edward N. Zalta, https://plato.stanford.edu
/archives/win2016/entries/feminism-ethics/.
CRITICAL THOUGHT: Feminist Ethics in History

https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2016/entries/feminism-ethics/

198 Á PART 3: THEoRiEs oF moRALiTY
apart . . . But real life is much messier and involves
humans who are often irrational, who have histories
of oppression, who only sometimes follow rules, and
who have a variety of complex needs. . . . Many femi-
nist ethicists appreciate the value of the nonideal and
make it a cornerstone of feminist ethics.3
THE ETHICS OF CARE
The ethics of care is a good example of femi-
nist ethics. It is a perspective on moral issues that
emphasizes close personal relationships and moral
virtues such as compassion, faithfulness, kindness,
love, and sympathy. It contrasts dramatically with
traditional moral theories preoccupied with prin-
ciples and legalistic moral reasoning.
Much of the interest in the ethics of care was
sparked by research done by the psychologist Carol
Gilligan on how men and women think about
moral problems.4 She maintained that men and
women think in radically different ways when
making moral decisions. In moral decision making,
she said, men deliberate about rights, justice, and
rules; women, on the other hand, focus on personal
relationships, caring for others, and being aware
of people’s feelings, needs, and viewpoints. She
dubbed these two approaches the ethic of justice and
the ethic of care. Later she rejected the notion that
women and men have distinct traits or essences
that lead them to different styles of moral reason-
ing. She now denies that these two styles are inher-
ently linked to being male or female.
More recent research has raised doubts about
whether there really is a gap between the moral
thinking styles of men and women. But these find-
ings do not dilute the relevance of caring to eth-
ics. The ethics of care, regardless of any empirical
underpinnings, is a reminder that caring is a vital
and inescapable part of the moral life— a conclu-
sion that few philosophers would deny. If virtues
are a part of the moral life (as they surely are), and if
caring (or compassion, sympathy, or love) is a vir-
tue, then there must be a place for caring alongside
Contrasting attitudes toward impartiality. Recall
that the principle of impartiality is regarded as a
defining characteristic of morality itself. Impar-
tiality says that from the moral point of view, all
persons are considered equal and should be treated
accordingly. But in the domestic sphere we are
anything but impartial. We are naturally partial to
the people we care about— our family and friends.
Typically we would not think of treating our spouse
the same way we treat a store clerk or the bus driver.
We have moral duties to the former that we do not
have to the latter. Some feminists (most notably
care ethicists) make these duties central to their
moral outlook instead of ignoring them as Kant
and Mill would have us do.
A higher regard for emotions. As we’ve seen, Kant
has no place for emotions in his theory. Reading
our moral duties off the categorical imperative is
all that is required. But feminist philosophers have
greater respect for the emotional side of our lives
than many non- feminist ethicists do. Moral phi-
losophers of all stripes recognize the importance of
emotions. They understand that emotions can alert
us to moral evil, provide the motivation to pursue
the good, and enable us to empathize with the suf-
fering of others. (Moral philosophers also caution
that feelings without thinking are blind, and think-
ing without feelings makes for a sterile morality.)
An emphasis on the nonideal. Feminist thinkers
take issue with the tendency of traditional moral
theories to assume an idealized view of human
beings, their capacities, and their social interac-
tions. These philosophers charge that to the tra-
ditional theorist, the world consists of atomistic
individuals with perfect rationality living in an
idealized society without oppression, where moral
agents are unaffected by poor living conditions and
unjust institutions. As feminist philosopher Sarah
Clark Miller says,
Ideal theories commence and operate from the
best of what humans can be, conveniently overlook-
ing the ways in which we break down, fail, and fall

CHAPTER 8: FEminisT ETHiCs And THE ETHiCs oF CARE Á 199
are permanently disabled will need care the whole of
their lives. Moralities built on the image of the inde-
pendent, autonomous, rational individual largely
overlook the reality of human dependence and the
morality for which it calls. The ethics of care attends
to this central concern of human life and delineates
the moral values involved. It refuses to relegate care
to a realm “outside morality.”6
CHAPTER REVIEW
SUMMARY
Feminist ethics is an alternative way of looking at
the concepts and concerns of the moral life. It is an
approach focused on women’s interests and experi-
ences and devoted to supporting the moral equality of
women and men. The main elements of this approach
are an emphasis on personal relationships, a suspicion
of moral principles, the rejection of impartiality, and a
greater respect for emotions.
The ethics of care is a perspective on moral issues
that emphasizes personal relationships and the virtues
of compassion, love, sympathy, and the like. It can be
thought of as an essential element in virtue ethics. The
ethics of care is a reminder that caring is a crucial part
of the moral life. Many philosophers have acknowl-
edged this fact by trying to incorporate care into moral
theories containing principles.
KEY TERMS
feminist ethics (p. 196)
ethics of care (p. 198)
EXERCISES
Review Questions
1. How does feminist ethics differ from Kantian
ethics? (pp. 197–198)
2. What attitudes did many of the great ethical
theorists have toward women? (p. 196)
principles of moral conduct and moral reasoning.
The philosopher Annette C. Baier, an early propo-
nent of the ethics of care, makes a case for both care
and justice: “It is clear, I think, that the best moral
theory has to be a cooperative product of women
and men, has to harmonize justice and care. The
morality it theorizes about is after all for all per-
sons, for men and women, and will need their com-
bined insights.”5
Here is the feminist philosopher Virginia Held
explaining the need for care in the moral life:
[T]he central focus of the ethics of care is on the com-
pelling moral salience of attending to and meeting
the needs of the particular others for whom we take
responsibility. Caring for one’s child, for instance,
may well and defensibly be at the forefront of a per-
son’s moral concerns. The ethics of care recognizes
that human beings are dependent for many years of
their lives, that the moral claim of those dependent
on us for the care they need is pressing, and that there
are highly important moral aspects in developing the
relations of caring that enable human beings to live
and progress. All persons need care for at least their
early years. Prospects for human progress and flour-
ishing hinge fundamentally on the care that those
needing it receive, and the ethics of care stresses
the moral force of the responsibility to respond
to the needs of the dependent. Many persons will
become ill and dependent for some periods of their
later lives, including in frail old age, and some who
’ QUICK REVIEW
feminist ethics— An alternative way of looking
at the concepts and concerns of the moral life;
an approach focused on women’s interests and
experiences and devoted to supporting the
moral equality of women and men.
ethics of care— A perspective on moral issues that
emphasizes close personal relationships and
moral virtues such as compassion, faithfulness,
kindness, love, and sympathy.

200 Á PART 3: THEoRiEs oF moRALiTY
ETHICAL DILEMMAS
Explain how feminist ethics or the ethics of care could
be applied in the following scenarios to determine the
proper course of action.
1. Suppose your best friend is in the hospital
battling a serious illness and would deeply
appreciate a visit from you. But you are also on
spring break and, after a very stressful semester,
need to forget about all your commitments and
just relax. What might the ethics of care have
you do? What is a utilitarian likely to do?
2. You want to help your brother overcome a
serious addiction to drugs. You know that
because he is a member of your family, you have
a duty to help him. But your main reason for
trying to help is that you love him and care
what happens to him. Which of these two
motivating factors (duty and love) would Kant
approve of, and which would he reject? How
might the attitude of someone who embraces
feminist ethics differ from Kant’s response?
3. Imagine that your town has been hit by a
tornado, and you are in a position to rescue
only one of a dozen people who are nearby
and trapped in demolished houses. The victim
who happens to be farthest from you, but still
reachable, is your mother. Which of these
twelve people should you rescue? Who would
you rescue if feminist ethics was your preferred
moral outlook? Who would you rescue if you
were a strict act- utilitarian?
FURTHER READING
Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory
and Women’s Development (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1982).
Carol Hay, Kantianism, Liberalism, and Feminism: Resisting
Oppression (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
Virginia Held, Feminist Morality: Transforming Culture,
Society, and Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1993).
Virginia Held, The Ethics of Care (Oxford: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 2006).
Alison M. Jaggar, Feminist Politics and Human Nature
(Totowa, NJ: Allenheld, 1983).
3. What ways of feeling and thinking have been
regarded in the West as characteristic of women?
(p. 196)
4. What kinds of moral issues are more likely to arise
from women’s experiences than men’s? (p. 196)
5. What elements of the moral life does feminist
ethics emphasize? What elements does it
deemphasize? (pp. 197–198)
6. Why do feminist philosophers think an ethics
of care is needed? (p. 198)
7. What are the hard facts that have helped to
propel the rise of feminist ethics? (p. 196)
8. What are some of the fundamental elements of
the ethics of care? (p. 198)
9. What is Annette Baier’s claim about care and
justice? (p. 199)
10. What is Carol Gilligan’s thesis about moral
thinking? (p. 198)
Discussion Questions
1. What features of feminist ethics do you find
most plausible? Why?
2. Do you think moral principles such as justice
and rights have a place in any good moral
theory? Why or why not?
3. What part do you think emotions should play
in morality?
4. Do you believe there are innate differences in
the ways men and women deliberate about
moral issues? Or do you think any differences
are the result of cultural influences? Explain.
5. Do you believe there are situations in which
impartiality is important in moral reasoning?
If not, why not? If so, give an example.
6. Suppose you have an opportunity to either
(1) send $800 to Africa to save a dozen people
from starvation or (2) give the money to your
little sister to buy books for college. Which
would you do? Why?
7. What is the attitude of feminist ethics toward
moral principles? Compare it with Kant’s view.
8. Are there instances of moral decision making
in which moral impartiality is not appropriate?
Explain.

CHAPTER 8: FEminisT ETHiCs And THE ETHiCs oF CARE Á 201
Rosemarie Tong and Nancy Williams, “Feminist Ethics,”
in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Winter 2016
ed., ed. Edward N. Zalta, https://plato.stanford.edu
/archives/win2016/entries/feminism-ethics/.
Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman,
ed. M. Brody (London: Penguin, 1988).
Alison M. Jaggar, “Feminist Ethics,” in Encyclopedia of
Ethics, ed. Lawrence C. Becker and Charlotte B. Becker
(New York: Garland, 1992), 361–70.
Martha Nussbaum, “The Feminist Critique of Liberal-
ism,” in Women’s Voices, Women’s Rights, ed. A. Jeffries
(Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999).
Susan Moller Okin, Justice, Gender, and the Family (New
York: Basic Books, 1989).
R E A d i n G s
Feminist Ethics
Alison M. Jaggar
Feminist approaches to ethics, often known col-
lectively as feminist ethics, are distinguished by an
explicit commitment to correcting male biases they
perceive in traditional ethics, biases that may be mani-
fest in rationalizations of women’s subordination, or
in disregard for, or disparagement of, women’s moral
experience. Feminist ethics, by contrast, begins from
the convictions that the subordination of women
is morally wrong and that the moral experience of
women is as worthy of respect as that of men. The
practical goals of feminist ethics, then, are the follow-
ing: first, to articulate moral critiques of actions and
practices that perpetuate women’s subordination;
second, to prescribe morally justifiable ways of resist-
ing such actions and practices; and, third, to envision
morally desirable alternatives that will promote wom-
en’s emancipation. The meta- ethical goal of feminist
ethics is to develop theoretical understandings of the
nature of morality that treat women’s moral experi-
ence respectfully, though never uncritically.
Just as feminist ethics may be identified by its
explicit commitment to challenging perceived male
bias in ethics, so approaches that do not express such
a commitment may be characterized as nonfeminist.
Nonfeminist approaches to ethics are not necessarily
anti- feminist or male- biased; they may or may not be so.
THE DEVELOPMENT OF CONTEMPORARY
FEMINIST ETHICS
The history of western philosophy includes a num-
ber of isolated but indisputable instances of moral
opposition to women’s subordination. Noteworthy
examples are Mary Wollstonecraft’s (1759–1797) A
Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), John Stuart
Mill’s (1806–1873) The Subjection of Women (1869),
Frederick Engels’ (1820–1895) The Origin of the Fam-
ily, Private Property and the State (1884), and Simone de
Beauvoir’s (1908–1986) The Second Sex (1949).
In the late 1960s, however, as part of a general resur-
gence of feminist activism, an unprecedented explo-
sion of feminist ethical debate occurred, first among
the general public, soon in academic discourse.
Actions and practices whose gendered dimensions
hitherto either had been unnoticed or unchallenged
now became foci of public and philosophical atten-
tion, as feminists subjected them to outspoken moral
critique, developed sometimes dramatic strategies for
opposing them, and proposed alternatives that non-
feminists often perceived as dangerously radical. First
grassroots and soon academic feminist perspectives
were articulated on topics such as abortion, equality
of opportunity, domestic labor, portrayals of women
Alison M. Jaggar, “Feminist Ethics,” in Encyclopedia of Ethics, ed.
Lawrence C. Becker and Charlotte B. Becker (New York: Garland
Publishing, 1992). Reproduced by permission of Taylor and
Francis Group, LLC, a division of Informa plc.

https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2016/entries/feminism-ethics/

202 Á PART 3: THEoRiEs oF moRALiTY
and seek to resolve those dilemmas in ways that will
repair and strengthen webs of relationship. Further-
more, Gilligan described females as supposedly less
likely than males to make or justify moral decisions
by the application of abstract moral rules; instead,
she claimed girls and women were more likely to act
on their feelings of love and compassion for particu-
lar individuals. Gilligan concluded that whereas men
typically adhere to a morality of justice, whose pri-
mary values are fairness and equality, women often
adhere to a morality of care, whose primary values are
inclusion and protection from harm. For this reason,
studies of moral development based exclusively on a
morality of justice do not provide an appropriate stan-
dard for measuring female moral development and
may be said to be male- biased.
Many feminists seized on Gilligan’s work as offer-
ing evidence for the existence of a characteristically
feminine approach to morality, an approach assumed
to provide the basis for a distinctively feminist ethics.
For some, indeed, feminist ethics became and remains
synonymous with an ethics of care. Just how an eth-
ics of care should be delineated, however, was far from
evident; nor was it clear whether it should supplement
or supplant an ethics of justice. Many feminists today
are exploring such questions, even though the con-
nection between women and care is challenged by
some psychologists who allege Gilligan’s samples to
be nonrepresentative, her methods of interpreting her
data suspect, and her claims impossible to substanti-
ate, especially when the studies are controlled for
occupation and class.
Regardless of empirical findings in moral psychol-
ogy, debate continues over whether the fundamen-
tal tenets of western ethics are male biased in some
sense: if not in the sense that they express a moral
sensibility characteristic of men rather than women,
then perhaps in that they promote a culturally mas-
culine image of moral psychology, discourage preoc-
cupation with issues defined culturally as feminine,
or in other ways covertly advance men’s interests over
women’s. Since feminism is essentially a normative
stance, and since its meaning is continually contested
by feminists themselves, all feminists are constantly
engaged in ethical reflection. In this sense, feminist
in the media, and a variety of issues concerning sexu-
ality, such as rape and compulsory heterosexuality.
A little later, feminists displayed increasing ethical
concern about pornography, reproductive technol-
ogy, so- called surrogate motherhood, militarism, the
environment and the situation of women in develop-
ing nations.
Despite the long history of feminist ethical
debate, the term “feminist ethics” itself did not
come into general use until the late 1970s or early
1980s. At this time, a number of feminists began
expressing doubts about the possibility of fruitfully
addressing so- called women’s issues in terms of the
conceptual apparatus supplied by traditional ethical
theory. For instance, a rights framework was alleged
by some to distort discussions of abortion insofar
as it constructed pregnancy and motherhood as
adversarial situations. Other feminists charged that
certain assumptions widely accepted by traditional
ethical theory were incompatible with what was now
beginning to be claimed as a distinctively feminine
moral experience or sensibility. Contract theory, for
instance, was criticized for postulating a conception
of human individuals as free, equal, independent
and mutually disinterested, a conception claimed by
some to be contrary to the moral experience of most
women. Even the requirement of impartiality, usu-
ally taken as a defining feature of morality, became
the object of feminist criticism insofar as it was
alleged to generate prescriptions counter to many
women’s moral intuitions. Some feminists began
to speculate that traditional ethics was more deeply
male- biased and needed more fundamental rethink-
ing than they had realized hitherto.
Such speculations were fuelled by the much-
publicized work of developmental psychologist Carol
Gilligan, whose 1982 book, In a Different Voice: Psy-
chological Theory and Women’s Development, seemed
to demonstrate empirically that the moral develop-
ment of women was significantly different from that
of men. Claiming that females tend to fear separa-
tion or abandonment while males, by contrast, tend
to perceive closeness as dangerous, Gilligan reported
that girls and women often construe moral dilemmas
as conflicts of responsibilities rather than of rights

CHAPTER 8: FEminisT ETHiCs And THE ETHiCs oF CARE Á 203
FEMINIST CRITICISMS OF WESTERN ETHICS
Since most feminist ethics is done in a western con-
text, it is western ethics, particularly (though not
exclusively) the European Enlightenment tradition,
that is the most frequent target of feminist critique.
The feminist challenges to this tradition may be
grouped conveniently under five main headings.
Lack of concern for women’s interests. Many of the
major theorists, such as Aristotle (384–322 b.c.) and
Rousseau (1712–1778), are accused of having given
insufficient consideration to women’s interests, a
lack of concern expressed theoretically by their pre-
scribing for women allegedly feminine virtues such as
obedience, silence, and faithfulness. Some feminists
charge that many contemporary ethical discussions
continue the tendency to regard women as instrumen-
tal to male- dominated institutions, such as the fam-
ily or the state; in debates on abortion, for instance,
the pregnant woman may be portrayed as little more
than a container or environment for the fetus, while
debates on reproductive technology are alleged to
assume frequently that infertility is a problem only for
heterosexual married women, i.e., women defined in
relationship to men.
Neglect of “women’s issues.” Issues of special con-
cern to women are said to have been ignored by mod-
ern moral philosophers, who have tended to portray
the domestic realm as an arena outside the economy
and beyond justice, private in the sense of being
beyond the scope of legitimate political regulation.
Even philosophers like Aristotle or Hegel (1770–1831),
who give some ethical importance to the domestic
realm, have tended to portray the home as an arena in
which the most fully human excellences are incapable
of being realized. Feminist philosophers began early to
criticized this conceptual bifurcation of social life. They
pointed out that the home was precisely that realm to
which women historically had been confined, and
that it had become symbolically associated with the
feminine, despite the fact that heads of households
were paradigmatically male. They argued that the phil-
osophical devaluation of the domestic realm made it
impossible to raise questions about the justice of the
domestic division of labor, because it obscured the far-
reaching social significance and creativity of women’s
ethics is practiced both inside and outside the acad-
emy. Within the academy, its main practitioners are
scholars in philosophy, religion and jurisprudence.
These scholars represent a variety of philosophical
traditions, secular and religious, Anglo- American and
continental European; in challenging perceived male
bias in those traditions, they draw extensively on fem-
inist scholarship in other disciplines, such as litera-
ture, history and psychology.
Scholarly work in feminist ethics often is also
responsive to the ethical reflections of nonacademic
feminists as these occur, for instance, in much femi-
nist fiction and poetry. In addition, a considerable
body of nonfiction, written by nonacademics and
directed towards a nonacademic audience, presents
itself as feminist ethics. Popular feminist books and
journals frequently engage in ethical consideration of
moral or public policy issues and sometimes also offer
more general discussions of supposedly “masculine”
and “feminine” value systems. There are even grass-
roots journals of feminist ethics, such as Lesbian Ethics,
published in the United States, and Gossip: A Journal
of Lesbian Feminist Ethics, published in the United
Kingdom. Feminist Ethics, published in Canada, seeks
to combine academic scholarship with accessibility
to a general audience. One may note striking parallels
between many of the claims made by feminists inside
the academy and those on the outside.
Those who currently claim the field of feminist
ethics are mainly, though not exclusively, white west-
ern women. Nevertheless, a few male philosophers are
doing significant work in feminist ethics, and people
of color have produced a considerable amount of
writing, both fiction and nonfiction, that seems com-
patible with the moral and theoretical inspiration of
feminist ethics. It is predictable that women would be
more likely than men to identify themselves as femi-
nists, and both nonwestemers and western people of
color are less likely than western whites either to be
philosophers or, because of feminism’s racist history,
to be feminists. “Womanist” is a term that many Afri-
can American authors currently prefer to “feminist”
but they might not object to the description of their
work as feminist ethics if feminism could be cleansed
of racism and ethnocentrism.

204 Á PART 3: THEoRiEs oF moRALiTY
by relying on empathic feeling rather than by appeal-
ing to rules.
Not all feminists endorse all of the above clus-
ters of criticisms— and even where they agree with
the general statement, they may well disagree over
its applicability in the case of specific philosophers
or debates. Despite such differences of relative detail,
feminists tend generally to agree on the first three
clusters of criticisms, whose correction seems not
only attainable in principle within the framework of
Enlightenment moral theory but even to be required
by that framework. However, there is sharp feminist
disagreement on the last two clusters of criticisms,
especially the fifth, which obviously contains clear
parallels with a number of nonfeminist criticisms
of Enlightenment ethics made by proponents of, for
example, situation ethics, virtue ethics, communitari-
anism and postmodernism.
COMMON MISCONSTRUALS OF
FEMINIST ETHICS
Feminist ethics has sometimes been construed, both
by some of its proponents and some of its critics, as
a simple inversion of the criticisms listed above. In
other words, it has sometimes been identified with one
or more of the following: putting women’s interests
first; focusing exclusively on so- called women’s issues;
accepting women (or feminists) as moral experts or
authorities; substituting “female” (or feminine) for
“male” (or masculine) values; or extrapolating directly
from women’s moral experience. These characteriza-
tions of feminist ethics are sufficiently pervasive that
it is worth noting just why they cannot be correct.
1. Putting women’s interests first occasionally has
been recommended as a way of achieving a “ woman-
centered” ethics that transcends the covert bias of a
supposed humanism grounded in fact on male norms.
Whatever might be said for or against this recom-
mendation, however, it cannot be definitive of femi-
nist ethics. This is because the formula, as it stands,
raises more questions than it answers insofar as it fails
to specify not only which women’s interests should
be preferred over which men’s (or children’s) and in
what circumstances, but also what should be done
work in the home, and concealed, even legitimated,
the domestic abuse of women and girls.
Denial of women’s moral agency. Women’s moral
agency is said to have often been denied, not simply
by excluding women from moral debate or ignoring
their contributions, but through philosophical claims
to the effect that women lack moral reason. Such
claims were made originally by Aristotle, but they
have been elaborated and refined by modem theorists
such as Rousseau, Kant (1724–1804), Hegel, and Freud
(1856–1939).
Depreciation of “feminine” values. Western moral
theory is said to embody values that are “mascu-
line,” insofar as they are associated, empirically, nor-
matively, or symbolically, with men. For instance,
western ethics is alleged to prefer the supposedly
masculine or male- associated values of independence,
autonomy, intellect, will, wariness, hierarchy, domi-
nation, culture, transcendence, product, asceticism,
war and death over the supposedly feminine or female-
associated values of interdependence, community,
connection, sharing, emotion, body, trust, absence of
hierarchy, nature, immanence, process, joy, peace and
life. Claims like this are common in both popular and
academic feminist writings on ethics.
Devaluation of women’s moral experience. Finally,
prevailing western conceptualizations of the nature
of morality, moral problems, and moral reason-
ing are also charged with being masculine insofar as
they too are associated with men, an association that
again may be empirical, symbolic or normative. For
instance, feminists have accused modem moral theory
of being excessively preoccupied with rules, obsessed
with impartiality and exclusively focussed on discrete
deeds. In addition, feminists have charged modern
moral theory with taking the contract as the paradig-
matic moral relation and construing moral rational-
ity so narrowly as to exclude emotions of assessment,
sometimes called moral emotions. All these charac-
teristics have been asserted to be masculine in some
sense. A feminine approach to ethics, by contrast,
has been supposed to avoid assuming that individu-
als ordinarily are free, equal and independent; to take
more account of the specificities of particular con-
texts; and to be more likely to resolve moral dilemmas

CHAPTER 8: FEminisT ETHiCs And THE ETHiCs oF CARE Á 205
not imply, of course, that any women, or even femi-
nists, therefore should be regarded as moral experts
whose moral authority is beyond question. Not only
are there deep disagreements among women and
even among feminists such that it would be difficult
to know whom to select as an expert, but many pain-
ful examples of the failure of insight or principle on
the part of feminist leaders also demonstrate only too
clearly that no women, even feminists, are morally
infallible.
4. There are also serious difficulties with thinking
of feminist ethics as the substitution of female or femi-
nine for male or masculine values. These difficulties
include problems with establishing that any values are
male or female in the sense of being generally held by
men or women, when both women’s and men’s values
vary so much, both within cultures as well as across
them. Similar problems confront attempts to estab-
lish that certain values are masculine or feminine in
the sense of being considered socially appropriate for
individuals of one gender or the other. Again, norms
of masculinity and femininity vary not only between
societies but even within the same society along such
axes as class and ethnicity: some social groups, for
instance, value physical health, strength or athletic
prowess in women; others value physical fragility,
weakness or incompetence. But even if certain values
could be identified in some sense as male or female,
masculine or feminine, the conclusive objection to
identifying feminist ethics with the elaboration of
female or feminine values is that the feminine is not
necessarily the feminist. Indeed, since the feminine
typically has been constructed in circumstances of
male domination, it is likely to be quite opposed to the
feminist. Personal charm, for example, may be valued
not only in women but also by them; even if charm
were, in these senses, a feminine value, however, it
would seem at least as likely to undermine feminist
goals as to promote them.
5. Similar problems apply to defining feminist eth-
ics as the systematic extrapolation of women’s moral
experience, exclusive of men’s. While no approach
to morality can be adequate if it ignores the moral
experience of women, it seems most unlikely that
women generally are similar enough to each other and
about conflicts of interest between women and even
how interests should be identified at all. Most obvi-
ously, feminist ethics cannot be identified with “put-
ting women’s interests first” simply because many
feminists would refuse to accept and, indeed, be mor-
ally outraged by what they would perceive as blatant
partiality and immorality.
2. Feminist ethics certainly is concerned to address
issues of special concern to women, issues that have
been neglected by modern moral theory, but it can-
not be identified with an exclusive focus on such
issues. This is partly because nonfeminists as well as
feminists have addressed these issues— and, indeed,
are doing so increasingly as feminism grows stron-
ger and more articulate. It is also because feminism
rejects the notion that moral issues can be divided
cleanly into those that are and those that are not of
special concern to women. On the one hand, since
men’s and women’s lives are inextricably intertwined,
there are no “women’s issues” that are not also men’s
issues; the availability or otherwise of child care and
abortion, for instance, has significant consequences
for the lives of men as well as women. On the other
hand, since men and women typically are not what
lawyers call “similarly situated” relative to each other,
it is difficult to think of any moral or public policy
(“human”) issue in which women do not have a spe-
cial interest. For instance, such “human” issues as war,
peace and world starvation have special significance
for women because the world’s hungry are dispropor-
tionately women (and children), because women are
primarily those in need of the social services neglected
to fund military spending, and because women ben-
efit relatively little from militarism and the weapons
industries. For these reasons, it would be a mistake to
identify feminist ethics with attention to some explic-
itly gendered subset of ethical issues. On the con-
trary, rather than being limited to a restricted ethical
domain, feminist ethics has enlarged the traditional
concerns of ethics, both through identifying previ-
ously unrecognized ethical issues and by introducing
fresh perspectives on issues already acknowledged as
having an ethical dimension.
3. Feminist ethics certainly is being developed by
feminists, most of whom are women, but this does

206 Á PART 3: THEoRiEs oF moRALiTY
ethics must understand individual actions in the con-
text of broader social practices, evaluating the sym-
bolic and cumulative implications of action as well as
its immediately observable consequences. They must
be equipped to recognize covert as well as overt mani-
festations of domination, subtle as well as blatant
forms of control, and they must develop sophisticated
accounts of coercion and consent. Similarly, they
must provide the conceptual resources for identifying
and evaluating the varieties of resistance and struggle in
which women, particularly, have engaged. They must
recognize the often unnoticed ways in which women
and other members of the underclass have refused
cooperation and opposed domination, while acknowl-
edging the inevitability of collusion and the impos-
sibility of totally clean hands. In short, feminist
approaches to ethics must be transitional and nonuto-
pian, often extensions of, rather than alternatives to,
feminist political theory, exercises in non- ideal rather
than ideal theory.
3. Since most of most women’s lives have been
excluded from that domain conceptualized as pub-
lic, a third requirement for feminist approaches to
ethics is that they should be able to provide guidance
on issues of so- called private life: intimate relations,
sexuality and childrearing. Thus, they must articulate
the moral dimensions of issues that may not hitherto
have been recognized as moral. In addition, we have
seen that feminist approaches to ethics must provide
appropriate guidance for dealing with national and
international issues, strangers and foreigners. In
developing the conceptual tools for undertaking these
tasks, feminist ethics cannot assume that moral con-
cepts developed originally for application to the so-
called public realm, concepts such as impartiality or
exploitation, are appropriate for use in the so- called
private; neither can it assume that concepts such as
care, developed in intimate relationships, will neces-
sarily be helpful in the larger world. Indeed, the whole
distinction between public and private life must be
examined critically by feminist ethics, with no prior
assumptions as to whether the distinction should be
retained, redrawn or rejected.
4. Finally, feminist ethics must take the moral expe-
rience of all women seriously, though not, of course,
different enough from men that a single distinctively
female or feminine approach to ethics can be identi-
fied. Attempts to establish such an identification fre-
quently commit the fallacy of generalizing about the
experience of all or most women from the moral expe-
rience of some women; this seems to have been one
flaw at least in Gilligan’s earlier work. Again, even if a
distinctively feminine approach to morality could be
identified, perhaps in terms of symbolic or normative
connections with women rather than empirical ones,
there is no reason to suppose that such an approach
would be feminist. Indeed, given the feminist commit-
ment to a critical rethinking of cultural constructions
of both masculinity and femininity, there is good
prima facie reason to suppose that it would not.
MINIMUM CONDITIONS OF ADEQUACY
FOR FEMINIST ETHICS
Even though feminist ethics is far broader and more
open than it appears in the foregoing misconstru-
als, its goals are sufficiently specific, especially when
taken in conjunction with its criticisms of traditional
ethics, as to generate certain minimum conditions of
adequacy for any approach to ethics that purports to
be feminist.
1. First of all, feminist ethics can never begin
by assuming that women and men are similarly
situated— although it may discover that this is the
case in certain respects in specific contexts. In addi-
tion, not only does feminist ethics need constant vigi-
lance to detect subtle as well as blatant manifestations
of gender privilege, it must also be sensitive to the
ways in which gendered norms are different for differ-
ent groups of women— or in which the same norms,
such as a cultural preference for slimness or blond-
ness, affect different groups of women differently.
Ultimately feminism’s concern for all women means
that feminist ethics must address not only “domes-
tic” issues of racism or homophobia or class privilege
but also such international issues as environmental
destruction, war, and access to world resources.
2. In order to offer guides to action that will tend
to subvert rather than reinforce the present system-
atic subordination of women, feminist approaches to

CHAPTER 8: FEminisT ETHiCs And THE ETHiCs oF CARE Á 207
CURRENT CONCERNS IN FEMINIST ETHICS
Despite the scope and diversity of feminist ethics, cer-
tain current preoccupations may be identified. These
preoccupations are not definitive of feminist ethics,
but they are characteristic of its present stage of devel-
opment. (They are also, sometimes in different ways,
preoccupations of much contemporary nonfeminist
ethics.) They include concern with issues of univer-
sality and particularity, sociality and individuality,
moral emotion and moral rationality. These concerns
are not independent of each other and they may be
discerned underlying many contemporary feminist
approaches to practical issues, such as equality, health
care, or the environment, as well as being foci of femi-
nist reflection on such traditional philosophical issues
as moral subjectivity and moral epistemology.
Feminist challenges to traditional views of moral
subjectivity are not limited to assertions (contra Aris-
totle, Rousseau, Kant and Hegel) that women are as
capable as men of moral virtue or rationality. Instead,
many feminists have drawn on and extended non-
feminist criticisms of the basic model of the moral self
most characteristic of Enlightenment moral theory, a
model derived from Descartes (1596–1650) and por-
traying the self as disembodied, asocial, autonomous,
unified, rational and essentially similar to all other
selves. This model, of course, has been under attack for
over a century from, among others, Marxists, Freud-
ians, contemporary communitarians, and postmod-
ernists. Feminists often share many conclusions with
such nonfeminist critics of Enlightenment theory, but
they arrive at those conclusions by different routes, and
often they add to them the claim that the Cartesian
model is male- biased (as well as class- and possibly
race- biased), in that it reflects the interests and values
of European bourgeois men and either ignores diver-
gent interests and values or portrays them as less than
fully human.
One source of feminist challenge to the Cartesian
self is a growing philosophical interest in embodi-
ment. This itself springs partly from feminist outrage
over the male control and exploitation of women’s
bodies, partly from the feminist recognition that much
of the responsibility for physical reproduction and
bodily maintenance traditionally has been assigned
uncritically. Though what is feminist often will turn
out to be very different from what is feminine, a basic
respect for women’s moral experience is necessary to
acknowledging women’s capacities as moralists and
to countering traditional stereotypes of women as less
than full moral agents, as childlike or close to nature.
Furthermore, empirical claims about differences in the
moral sensibility of women and men make it impos-
sible to assume that any approach to ethics will be
unanimously accepted if it fails to consult the moral
experience of women. Additionally, it seems plausible
to suppose that women’s distinctive social experi-
ence may make them especially perceptive regarding
the implications of domination, especially gender
domination, and especially well equipped to detect
the male bias that feminists believe has pervaded so
much of male- authored western moral theory.
Most feminist, and perhaps even many non femi-
nist, philosophers might well find the general state-
ment of these conditions quite uncontroversial, but
they will inevitably disagree sharply over when the
conditions have been met. Not only may feminists
disagree with nonfeminists, but they are likely even
to differ with each other over, for instance, what
are women’s interests, what are manifestations of
domination and coercion, how resistance should be
expressed, and which aspects of women’s moral expe-
rience are worth developing and in which directions.
Those who practice feminist ethics thus may be
seen both as united by a shared project and as diverg-
ing widely in their views as to how this project may be
accomplished. Their divergences result from a variety
of philosophical differences, including differing con-
ceptions of feminism itself, which, as we have seen, is
[a] constantly contested concept. The inevitability of
such divergence means that feminist ethics can never
be identified in terms of a specific range of topics,
methods or orthodoxies. While feminist ethics is dis-
tinguished by its explicit commitment to developing
approaches to ethics that will respect women’s moral
experience and avoid rationalizing women’s subordi-
nation, attempts to define it more precisely or substan-
tively than this are likely to disregard the richness and
variety of feminist moral thinking and prematurely
foreclose the feminist moral debate.

208 Á PART 3: THEoRiEs oF moRALiTY
Enlightenment moral psychology for its failure to rec-
ognize that, if autonomy exists at all, it is an achieve-
ment with complex material and social preconditions.
That people in fact have certain psychologi-
cal propensities of course does not entail that those
propensities are morally relevant, let alone mor-
ally desirable; on the other hand, an adequate moral
theory cannot be grounded in a psychology that
is descriptively inadequate. Many feminists claim
that much Enlightenment moral psychology is so
alien to the ways in which people in fact do act and
think morally that it cannot serve even as an accept-
able reconstruction of moral reasoning. For instance,
by failing to appreciate the moral significance of the
psychological characteristics noted above, it offers a
model of moral rationality that is unduly narrow in
disregarding emotion, and likely to generate morally
repugnant conclusions that ignore our responsibility
for the welfare of others, neglect the claims of conven-
tional morality, and undervalue the moral weight of
particular relationships. Some feminists go on to argue
that most Enlightenment models of moral rationality
are not only empirically and morally inadequate but
also serve, insofar as they are culturally accepted, as
oppressive norms for those social groups, including
perhaps some groups of women, whose moral think-
ing is stigmatized as amoral or immoral for failing to
conform to these models.
Morality on most Enlightenment views is a sys-
tem of rationally justified rules or principles that
guide action in specific cases. Many contemporary
feminists, by contrast, deny that morality is reduc-
ible to rules and assert the impossibility of justifying
the claims of ethics by appeal to a universal, impar-
tial reason. They charge that undue emphasis on the
epistemological importance of moral rules obscures
the crucial role of moral insight, virtue and character
in determining the right course of action. Some give a
feminist twist to this essentially Aristotelian criticism
by claiming that excessive reliance on rules reflects a
juridical- administrative interest that is characteristic
of modem masculinity— contemporary women, by
contrast, are claimed to be more likely to disregard
conventionally accepted moral rules because such
rules are insensitive to the specificities of particular
to women— both of which reinforce symbolic western
associations between women and the body. Philosophi-
cal reflection that begins from the body tends to high-
light features of human nature very different from those
emphasized by Cartesianism: temporality rather than
timelessness, growth and decay rather than change-
lessness, particularity rather than universality, sociality
rather than isolation. These features, in turn, tend to
generate concerns for ethics different from those that
dominated much Enlightenment theory: inequality,
dependence and interdependence, specificity, social
embeddedness and historical community now must all
be recognized as permanent circumstances of moral
life, never to be avoided or transcended by focusing
on equality, independence, autonomy, generality,
isolated individuals, ideal communities or the uni-
versal human condition. It does not escape feminist
authors that concern with precisely the former
circumstances has been claimed by many to be dis-
tinctively feminine— preoccupying women in virtue
of their social situation, associated symbolically with
women or defined culturally as appropriate to women.
Conceiving moral subjects as embodied also has
psychological implications: insofar as their identity is
significantly constituted by their specific social rela-
tionships (relationships determined at least in part by
the social meaning attributed to bodily characteristics
such as parentage, age or sex), moral subjects con-
ceived in this way are revealed as likely to be moved
by considerations of particular attachment as much
as abstract concern for duty, care as much as respect,
solidarity as much as dignity, responsibility as much
as right. Many feminists currently argue that much
Enlightenment moral psychology is inadequate inso-
far as it fails to take adequate account of these propen-
sities, conceiving them at best as morally irrelevant, at
worst as morally subversive. In addition, noting the
ways in which the psyche is shaped by social practices,
especially childrearing and other gendered practices,
many feminists criticize the common Enlightenment
assumption that people are essentially alike, rational
and autarchic. Noting the significance of fantasy in
our lives, they deny that consciousness is transparent
and unified and that individuals always know their
own interests best. In general, they challenge much

CHAPTER 8: FEminisT ETHiCs And THE ETHiCs oF CARE Á 209
both to their concrete particularity and their intrin-
sic shared value— the ideal expressed in Enlighten-
ment claims about common humanity, equality and
impartiality; developing “particularist” epistemolo-
gies that recognize the moral validity of immediate,
emotion- laden responses to particular others while
avoiding subjective relativism; and finding ways of
simultaneously acknowledging and criticizing the
claims of conventional morality— known colloqui-
ally as living with contradictions. They are exploring
these approaches in the context of developing femi-
nist perspectives on many of the most pressing moral
issues of our time.
situations. Some feminists assert, therefore, that
a morality of rule devalues the moral wisdom of
women and gives insufficient weight to such suppos-
edly feminine virtues as kindness, generosity, help-
fulness and sympathy.
Though many feminists continue to defend vari-
ous versions of Enlightenment moral theory, many
others are concerned not merely to criticize them but
also to develop alternatives to them— alternatives
that will avoid their perceived shortcomings while
meeting the conditions of adequacy identified earlier.
Thus, contemporary feminists are exploring ways
of thinking about moral subjects that are sensitive
The Ethics of Care as Moral Theory
Virginia Held
The ethics of care is only a few decades old. Some
theorists do not like the term ‘care’ to designate this
approach to moral issues and have tried substitut-
ing ‘the ethic of love,’ or ‘relational ethics,’ but the
discourse keeps returning to ‘care’ as the so far more
satisfactory of the terms considered, though dissatis-
factions with it remain. The concept of care has the
advantage of not losing sight of the work involved in
caring for people and of not lending itself to the inter-
pretation of morality as ideal but impractical to which
advocates of the ethics of care often object. Care is
both value and practice.
By now, the ethics of care has moved far beyond its
original formulations, and any attempt to evaluate it
should consider much more than the one or two early
works so frequently cited. It has been developed as a
moral theory relevant not only to the so- called private
realms of family and friendship but to medical prac-
tice, law, political life, the organization of society, war,
and international relations.
The ethics of care is sometimes seen as a poten-
tial moral theory to be substituted for such dominant
moral theories as Kantian ethics, utilitarianism, or
Aristotelian virtue ethics. It is sometimes seen as a
form of virtue ethics. It is almost always developed
as emphasizing neglected moral considerations of at
least as much importance as the considerations cen-
tral to moralities of justice and rights or of utility and
preference satisfaction. And many who contribute to
the understanding of the ethics of care seek to inte-
grate the moral considerations, such as justice, which
other moral theories have clarified, satisfactorily
with those of care, though they often see the need to
reconceptualize these considerations.
FEATURES OF THE ETHICS OF CARE
Some advocates of the ethics of care resist generalizing
this approach into something that can be fitted into
the form of a moral theory. They see it as a mosaic of
insights and value the way it is sensitive to contextual
nuance and particular narratives rather than making
the abstract and universal claims of more familiar
moral theories. Still, I think one can discern among
Virginia Held, “The Ethics of Care as Moral Theory,” in The Ethics
of Care (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 9–20. © 2006 by
Oxford University Press, Inc. By permission of Oxford University
Press, USA.

210 Á PART 3: THEoRiEs oF moRALiTY
better ascertain what morality recommends. Even
anger may be a component of the moral indignation
that should be felt when people are treated unjustly
or inhumanely, and it may contribute to (rather than
interfere with) an appropriate interpretation of the
moral wrong. This is not to say that raw emotion can
be a guide to morality; feelings need to be reflected on
and educated. But from the care perspective, moral
inquiries that rely entirely on reason and rationalistic
deductions or calculations are seen as deficient.
The emotions that are typically considered and
rejected in rationalistic moral theories are the egoistic
feelings that undermine universal moral norms, the
favoritism that interferes with impartiality, and the
aggressive and vengeful impulses for which morality
is to provide restraints. The ethics of care, in contrast,
typically appreciates the emotions and relational
capabilities that enable morally concerned persons
in actual interpersonal contexts to understand what
would be best. Since even the helpful emotions can
often become misguided or worse— as when excessive
empathy with others leads to a wrongful degree of self-
denial or when benevolent concern crosses over into
controlling domination— we need an ethics of care,
not just care itself. The various aspects and expres-
sions of care and caring relations need to be subjected
to moral scrutiny and evaluated, not just observed and
described.
Third, the ethics of care rejects the view of the dom-
inant moral theories that the more abstract the reason-
ing about a moral problem the better because the more
likely to avoid bias and arbitrariness, the more nearly
to achieve impartiality. The ethics of care respects
rather than removes itself from the claims of particu-
lar others with whom we share actual relationships. It
calls into question the universalistic and abstract rules
of the dominant theories. When the latter consider
such actual relations as between a parent and child,
if they say anything about them at all, they may see
them as permitted and [indicative of] a preference
that a person may have. Or they may recognize a uni-
versal obligation for all parents to care for their chil-
dren. But they do not permit actual relations ever to
take priority over the requirements of impartiality. As
Brian Barry expresses this view, there can be universal
various versions of the ethics of care a number of
major features.
First, the central focus of the ethics of care is on
the compelling moral salience of attending to and
meeting the needs of the particular others for whom
we take responsibility. Caring for one’s child, for
instance, may well and defensibly be at the forefront
of a person’s moral concerns. The ethics of care rec-
ognizes that human beings are dependent for many
years of their lives, that the moral claim of those
dependent on us for the care they need is pressing,
and that there are highly important moral aspects in
developing the relations of caring that enable human
beings to live and progress. All persons need care for
at least their early years. Prospects for human prog-
ress and flourishing hinge fundamentally on the
care that those needing it receive, and the ethics of
care stresses the moral force of the responsibility to
respond to the needs of the dependent. Many per-
sons will become ill and dependent for some peri-
ods of their later lives, including in frail old age, and
some who are permanently disabled will need care
the whole of their lives. Moralities built on the image
of the independent, autonomous, rational indi-
vidual largely overlook the reality of human depen-
dence and the morality for which it calls. The ethics
of care attends to this central concern of human life
and delineates the moral values involved. It refuses
to relegate care to a realm “outside morality.” How
caring for particular others should be reconciled with
the claims of, for instance, universal justice is an
issue that needs to be addressed. But the ethics of care
starts with the moral claims of particular others, for
instance, of one’s child, whose claims can be compel-
ling regardless of universal principles.
Second, in the epistemological process of trying
to understand what morality would recommend and
what it would be morally best for us to do and to be,
the ethics of care values emotion rather than rejects
it. Not all emotion is valued, of course, but in con-
trast with the dominant rationalist approaches, such
emotions as sympathy, empathy, sensitivity, and
responsiveness are seen as the kind of moral emo-
tions that need to be cultivated not only to help in
the implementation of the dictates of reason but to

CHAPTER 8: FEminisT ETHiCs And THE ETHiCs oF CARE Á 211
actual relations that are trusting, considerate, and
caring and concerning those that are not.
Dominant moral theories tend to interpret moral
problems as if they were conflicts between egoistic
individual interests on the one hand, and universal
moral principles on the other. The extremes of “self-
ish individual” and “humanity” are recognized, but
what lies between these is often overlooked. The eth-
ics of care, in contrast, focuses especially on the area
between these extremes. Those who conscientiously
care for others are not seeking primarily to further
their own individual interests; their interests are
intertwined with the persons they care for. Neither
are they acting for the sake of all others or humanity in
general; they seek instead to preserve or promote an
actual human relation between themselves and par-
ticular others. Persons in caring relations are acting for
self- and- other together. Their characteristic stance is
neither egoistic nor altruistic; these are the options
in a conflictual situation, but the well- being of a car-
ing relation involves the cooperative well- being of
those in the relation and the well- being of the rela-
tion itself.
In trying to overcome the attitudes and prob-
lems of tribalism and religious intolerance, dominant
moralities have tended to assimilate the domains
of family and friendship to the tribal, or to a source
of the unfair favoring of one’s own. Or they have
seen the attachments people have in these areas as
among the nonmoral private preferences people are
permitted to pursue if restrained by impartial moral
norms. The ethics of care recognizes the moral value
and importance of relations of family and friendship
and the need for moral guidance in these domains to
understand how existing relations should often be
changed and new ones developed. Having grasped the
value of caring relations in such contexts as these more
personal ones, the ethics of care then often examines
social and political arrangements in the light of these
values. In its more developed forms, the ethics of care
as a feminist ethic offers suggestions for the radical
transformation of society. It demands not just equal-
ity for women in existing structures of society but
equal consideration for the experience that reveals the
values, importance, and moral significance, of caring.
rules permitting people to favor their friends in cer-
tain contexts, such as deciding to whom to give holi-
day gifts, but the latter partiality is morally acceptable
only because universal rules have already so judged
it. The ethics of care, in contrast, is skeptical of such
abstraction and reliance on universal rules and ques-
tions the priority given to them. To most advocates of
the ethics of care, the compelling moral claim of the
particular other may be valid even when it conflicts
with the requirement usually made by moral theories
that moral judgments be universalizeable, and this is
of fundamental moral importance. Hence the poten-
tial conflict between care and justice, friendship and
impartiality, loyalty and universality. To others, how-
ever, there need be no conflict if universal judgments
come to incorporate appropriately the norms of care
previously disregarded.
Annette Baier considers how a feminist approach
to morality differs from a Kantian one and Kant’s claim
that women are incapable of being fully moral because
of their reliance on emotion rather than reason. She
writes, “Where Kant concludes ‘so much the worse
for women,’ we can conclude ‘so much the worse for
the male fixation on the special skill of drafting legis-
lation, for the bureaucratic mentality of rule worship,
and for the male exaggeration of the importance of
independence over mutual interdependence.’ ”
Margaret Walker contrasts what she sees as femi-
nist “moral understanding” with what has tradition-
ally been thought of as moral “knowledge.” She sees
the moral understanding she advocates as involving
“attention, contextual and narrative appreciation,
and communication in the event of moral delibera-
tion.” This alternative moral epistemology holds that
“the adequacy of moral understanding decreases as its
form approaches generality through abstraction.”
The ethics of care may seek to limit the applicabil-
ity of universal rules to certain domains where they are
more appropriate, like the domain of law, and resist
their extension to other domains. Such rules may sim-
ply be inappropriate in, for instance, the contexts of
family and friendship, yet relations in these domains
should certainly be evaluated, not merely described,
hence morality should not be limited to abstract rules.
We should be able to give moral guidance concerning

212 Á PART 3: THEoRiEs oF moRALiTY
groups to be brought up in, yet these sorts of ties may
be important aspects of who they are and how their
experience can contribute to moral understanding.
A fifth characteristic of the ethics of care is the con-
ception of persons with which it begins. This will be
dealt with in the next section.
THE CRITIQUE OF LIBERAL INDIVIDUALISM
The ethics of care usually works with a conception of
persons as relational, rather than as the self- sufficient
independent individuals of the dominant moral the-
ories. The dominant theories can be interpreted as
importing into moral theory a concept of the person
developed primarily for liberal political and economic
theory, seeing the person as a rational, autonomous
agent, or a self- interested individual. On this view,
society is made up of “independent, autonomous
units who cooperate only when the terms of cooper-
ation are such as to make it further the ends of each
of the parties,” in Brian Barry’s words. Or, if they are
Kantians, they refrain from actions that they could
not will to be universal laws to which all fully rational
and autonomous individual agents could agree. What
such views hold, in Michael Sandel’s critique of them,
is that “what separates us is in some important sense
prior to what connects us— epistemologically prior as
well as morally prior. We are distinct individuals first
and then we form relationships. In Martha Nussbaum’s
liberal feminist morality, “the flourishing of human
beings taken one by one is both analytically and nor-
matively prior to the flourishing” of any group.
The ethics of care, in contrast, characteristically
sees persons as relational and interdependent, mor-
ally and epistemologically. Every person starts out
as a child dependent on those providing us care, and
we remain interdependent with others in thoroughly
fundamental ways throughout our lives. That we can
think and act as if we were independent depends on
a network of social relations making it possible for us
to do so. And our relations are part of what constitute
our identity. This is not to say that we cannot become
autonomous; feminists have done much interesting
work developing an alternative conception of auton-
omy in place of the liberal individualist one. Feminists
A fourth characteristic of the ethics of care is that
like much feminist thought in many areas, it recon-
ceptualizes traditional notions about the public and
the private. The traditional view, built into the domi-
nant moral theories, is that the household is a pri-
vate sphere beyond politics into which government,
based on consent, should not intrude. Feminists have
shown how the greater social, political, economic, and
cultural power of men has structured this “private”
sphere to the disadvantage of women and children,
rendering them vulnerable to domestic violence with-
out outside interference, often leaving women eco-
nomically dependent on men and subject to a highly
inequitable division of labor in the family. The law has
not hesitated to intervene into women’s private deci-
sions concerning reproduction but has been highly
reluctant to intrude on men’s exercise of coercive
power within the “castles” of their homes.
Dominant moral theories have seen “public” life
as relevant to morality while missing the moral signifi-
cance of the “private” domains of family and friend-
ship. Thus the dominant theories have assumed that
morality should be sought for unrelated, indepen-
dent, and mutually indifferent individuals assumed
to be equal. They have posited an abstract, fully ratio-
nal “agent as such” from which to construct moral-
ity, while missing the moral issues that arise between
interconnected persons in the contexts of family,
friendship, and social groups. In the context of the
family, it is typical for relations to be between persons
with highly unequal power who did not choose the
ties and obligations in which they find themselves
enmeshed. For instance, no child can choose her
parents yet she may well have obligations to care for
them. Relations of this kind are standardly noncon-
tractual, and conceptualizing them as contractual
would often undermine or at least obscure the trust
on which their worth depends. The ethics of care
addresses rather than neglects moral issues arising in
relations among the unequal and dependent, rela-
tions that are often laden with emotion and involun-
tary, and then notices how often these attributes apply
not only in the household but in the wider society as
well. For instance, persons do not choose which gen-
der, racial, class, ethnic, religious, national, or cultural

CHAPTER 8: FEminisT ETHiCs And THE ETHiCs oF CARE Á 213
economics students to be less cooperative and more
inclined to free ride than other students.
The conception of the person adopted by the
dominant moral theories provides moralities at best
suitable for legal, political, and economic interac-
tions between relative strangers, once adequate trust
exists for them to form a political entity. The ethics of
care is, instead, hospitable to the relatedness of per-
sons. It sees many of our responsibilities as not freely
entered into but presented to us by the accidents of
our embeddedness in familial and social and histori-
cal contexts. It often calls on us to take responsibility,
while liberal individualist morality focuses on how we
should leave each other alone. The view of persons as
embedded and encumbered seems fundamental to
much feminist thinking about morality and especially
to the ethics of care.
JUSTICE AND CARE
Some conceptions of the ethics of care see it as con-
trasting with an ethic of justice in ways that suggest
one must choose between them. Carol Gilligan’s sug-
gestion of alternative perspectives in interpreting and
organizing the elements of a moral problem lent itself
to this implication; she herself used the metaphor of
the ambiguous figure of the vase and the faces, from
psychological research on perception, to illustrate how
one could see a problem as either a problem of justice
or a problem of care, but not as both simultaneously.
An ethic of justice focuses on questions of fair-
ness, equality, individual rights, abstract principles,
and the consistent application of them. An ethic of
care focuses on attentiveness, trust, responsiveness to
need, narrative nuance, and cultivating caring rela-
tions. Whereas an ethic of justice seeks a fair solution
between competing individual interests and rights,
an ethic of care sees the interests of carers and cared-
for as importantly intertwined rather than as simply
competing. Whereas justice protects equality and free-
dom, care fosters social bonds and cooperation.
These are very different emphases in what moral-
ity should consider. Yet both deal with what seems of
great moral importance. This has led many to explore
how they might be combined in a satisfactory morality.
have much experience rejecting or reconstituting
relational ties that are oppressive. But it means that
from the perspective of an ethics of care, to construct
morality as if we were Robinson Crusoes, or, to use
Hobbes’s image, mushrooms sprung from nowhere, is
misleading. As Eva Kittay writes, this conception fosters
the illusion that society is composed of free, equal, and
independent individuals who can choose to associate
with one another or not. It obscures the very real facts
of dependency for everyone when they are young, for
most people at various periods in their lives when they
are ill or old and infirm, for some who are disabled, and
for all those engaged in unpaid “dependency work.”
And it obscures the innumerable ways persons and
groups are interdependent in the modern world.
Not only does the liberal individualist conception
of the person foster a false picture of society and the
persons in it, it is, from the perspective of the ethics of
care, impoverished also as an ideal. The ethics of care
values the ties we have with particular other persons
and the actual relationships that partly constitute
our identity. Although persons often may and should
reshape their relations with others— distancing them-
selves from some persons and groups and develop-
ing or strengthening ties with others— the autonomy
sought within the ethics of care is a capacity to reshape
and cultivate new relations, not to ever more closely
resemble the unencumbered abstract rational self of
liberal political and moral theories. Those motivated
by the ethics of care would seek to become more admi-
rable relational persons in better caring relations.
Even if the liberal ideal is meant only to instruct
us on what would be rational in the terms of its ideal
model, thinking of persons as the model presents
them has effects that should not be welcomed. As
Annette Baier writes, “Liberal morality, if unsupple-
mented, may unfit people to be anything other than
what its justifying theories suppose them to be,
ones who have no interest in each others’ interests.”
There is strong empirical evidence of how adopting
a theoretical model can lead to behavior that mirrors
it. Various studies show that studying economics,
with its “repeated and intensive exposure to a model
whose unequivocal prediction” is that people will
decide what to do on the basis of self- interest, leads

214 Á PART 3: THEoRiEs oF moRALiTY
others in need of being cared for. She writes that “far
from being extraneous impositions . . . considerations
of justice arise from within the practice of care itself
and therefore are an important part of the ethic of
care, properly understood.” The ethics of care must
thus also concern itself with the justice (or lack of it) of
the ways the tasks of caring are distributed in society.
Traditionally, women have been expected to do most
of the caring work that needs to be done; the sexual
division of labor exploits women by extracting unpaid
care labor from them, making women less able than
men to engage in paid work. “Femininity” constructs
women as carers, contributing to the constraints by
which women are pressed into accepting the sexual
division of labor. An ethic of care that extols caring but
that fails to be concerned with how the burdens of car-
ing are distributed contributes to the exploitation of
women, and of the minority groups whose members
perform much of the paid but ill- paid work of caring
in affluent households, in day care centers, hospitals,
nursing homes, and the like.
The question remains, however, whether justice
should be thought to be incorporated into any ethic
of care that will be adequate or whether we should
keep the notions of justice and care and their associ-
ated ethics conceptually distinct. There is much to
be said for recognizing how the ethics of care values
interrelatedness and responsiveness to the needs of
particular others, how the ethics of justice values fair-
ness and rights, and how these are different emphases.
Too much integration will lose sight of these valid dif-
ferences. I am more inclined to say that an adequate,
comprehensive moral theory will have to include the
insights of both the ethics of care and the ethics of jus-
tice, among other insights, rather than that either of
these can be incorporated into the other in the sense
of supposing that it can provide the grounds for the
judgments characteristically found in the other. Equi-
table caring is not necessarily better caring, it is fairer
caring. And humane justice is not necessarily better
justice, it is more caring justice.
Almost no advocates of the ethics of care are will-
ing to see it as a moral outlook less valuable than the
dominant ethics of justice. To imagine that the con-
cerns of care can merely be added on to the dominant
One can persuasively argue, for instance, that justice is
needed in such contexts of care as the family, to pro-
tect against violence and the unfair division of labor or
treatment of children. One can also persuasively argue
that care is needed in such contexts of justice as the
streets and the courts, where persons should be treated
humanely, and in the way education and health and
welfare should be dealt with as social responsibilities.
The implication may be that justice and care should
not be separated into different “ethics,” that, in Sara
Ruddick’s proposed approach, “justice is always seen
in tandem with care.”
Few would hold that considerations of justice have
no place at all in care. One would not be caring well for
two children, for instance, if one showed a persistent
favoritism toward one of them that could not be justi-
fied on the basis of some such factor as greater need.
The issues are rather what constellation of values have
priority and which predominate in the practices of the
ethics of care and the ethics of justice. It is quite possi-
ble to delineate significant differences between them.
In the dominant moral theories of the ethics of justice,
the values of equality, impartiality, fair distribution,
and noninterference have priority; in practices of jus-
tice, individual rights are protected, impartial judg-
ments are arrived at, punishments are deserved, and
equal treatment is sought. In contrast, in the ethics of
care, the values of trust, solidarity, mutual concern,
and empathetic responsiveness have priority; in prac-
tices of care, relationships are cultivated, needs are
responded to, and sensitivity is demonstrated.
An extended effort to integrate care and justice is
offered by Diemut Bubeck. She makes clear that she
“endorse[s] the ethic of care as a system of concepts,
values, and ideas, arising from the practice of care
as an organic part of this practice and responding to
its material requirements, notably the meeting of
needs.” Yet her primary interest is in understanding
the exploitation of women, which she sees as tied to
the way women do most of the unpaid work of car-
ing. She argues that such principles as equality in
care and the minimization of harm are tacitly, if not
explicitly, embedded in the practice of care, as carers
whose capacities and time for engaging in caring labor
are limited must decide how to respond to various

CHAPTER 8: FEminisT ETHiCs And THE ETHiCs oF CARE Á 215
grudgingly, though fairly, issue an allotment to those
deemed unfit.
Care is probably the most deeply fundamen-
tal value. There can be care without justice: There
has historically been little justice in the family, but
care and life have gone on without it. There can be
no justice without care, however, for without care no
child would survive and there would be no persons to
respect.
Care may thus provide the wider and deeper eth-
ics within which justice should be sought, as when
persons in caring relations may sometimes compete
and in doing so should treat each other fairly, or, at
the level of society, within caring relations of the thin-
ner kind we can agree to treat each other for limited
purposes as if we were the abstract individuals of lib-
eral theory. But although care may be the more fun-
damental value, it may well be that the ethics of care
does not itself provide adequate theoretical resources
for dealing with issues of justice. Within its appropri-
ate sphere and for its relevant questions, the ethics of
justice may be best for what we seek. What should be
resisted is the traditional inclination to expand the
reach of justice in such a way that it is mistakenly
imagined to be able to give us a comprehensive moral-
ity suitable for all moral questions.
IMPLICATIONS FOR SOCIETY
Many advocates of the ethics of care argue for its rel-
evance in social and political and economic life. Sara
Ruddick shows its implications for efforts to achieve
peace. I argue that as we see the deficiencies of the con-
tractual model of human relations within the house-
hold, we can see them also in the world beyond and
begin to think about how society should be reorga-
nized to be hospitable to care, rather than continuing
to marginalize it. We can see how not only does every
domain of society need transformation in light of the
values of care but so would the relations between such
domains if we took care seriously, as care would move
to the center of our attention and become a primary
concern of society. Instead of a society dominated
by conflict restrained by law and preoccupied with
economic gain, we might have a society that saw as
theories, as, for instance, Stephen Darwall suggests,
is seen as unsatisfactory. Confining the ethics of care
to the private sphere while holding it unsuitable for
public life, as Nel Noddings did at first and as many
accounts of it suggest, is also to be rejected. But how
care and justice are to be meshed without losing
sight of their differing priorities is a task still being
worked on.
My own suggestions for integrating care and jus-
tice are to keep these concepts conceptually distinct
and to delineate the domains in which they should
have priority. In the realm of law, for instance, jus-
tice and the assurance of rights should have priority,
although the humane considerations of care should
not be absent. In the realm of the family and among
friends, priority should be given to expansive care,
though the basic requirements of justice surely should
also be met. But these are the clearest cases; others will
combine moral urgencies. Universal human rights
(including the social and economic ones as well as
the political and civil) should certainly be respected,
but promoting care across continents may be a more
promising way to achieve this than mere rational rec-
ognition. When needs are desperate, justice may be
a lessened requirement on shared responsibility for
meeting needs, although this rarely excuses violations
of rights. At the level of what constitutes a society in
the first place, a domain within which rights are to
be assured and care provided, appeal must be made
to something like the often weak but not negligible
caring relations among persons that enable them to
recognize each other as members of the same society.
Such recognition must eventually be global; in the
meantime, the civil society without which the lib-
eral institutions of justice cannot function presume a
background of some degree of caring relations rather
than of merely competing individuals . . . Further-
more, considerations of care provide a more fruitful
basis than considerations of justice for deciding much
about how society should be structured, for instance,
how extensive or how restricted markets should be . . .
And in the course of protecting the rights that ought
to be recognized, such as those to basic necessities,
policies that express the caring of the community for
all its members will be better policies than those that

216 Á PART 3: THEoRiEs oF moRALiTY
Instead of seeing the corporate sector, and military
strength, and government and law as the most impor-
tant segments of society deserving the highest levels
of wealth and power, a caring society might see the
tasks of bringing up children, educating its members,
meeting the needs of all, achieving peace and treasur-
ing the environment, and doing these in the best ways
possible to be that to which the greatest social efforts
of all should be devoted. One can recognize that
something comparable to legal constraints and police
enforcement, including at a global level, may always
be necessary for special cases, but also that caring soci-
eties could greatly decrease the need for them. The
social changes a focus on care would require would be
as profound as can be imagined.
The ethics of care as it has developed is most cer-
tainly not limited to the sphere of family and personal
relations. When its social and political implications are
understood, it is a radical ethic calling for a profound
restructuring of society. And it has the resources for
dealing with power and violence . . .
THE ETHICS OF CARE AND VIRTUE ETHICS
Insofar as the ethics of care wishes to cultivate in per-
sons the characteristics of a caring person and the
skills of activities of caring, might an ethic of care be
assimilated to virtue theory?
To some philosophers, the ethics of care is a form
of virtue ethics. Several of the contributors to the vol-
ume Feminists Doing Ethics adopt this view. Leading
virtue theorist Michael Slote argues extensively for
the position that caring is the primary virtue and that
a morality based on the motive of caring can offer a
general account of right and wrong action and politi-
cal justice.
Certainly there are some similarities between
the ethics of care and virtue theory. Both examine
practices and the moral values they embody. Both
see more hope for moral development in reforming
practices than in reasoning from abstract rules. Both
understand that the practices of morality must be
cultivated, nurtured, shaped.
Until recently, however, virtue theory has not
paid adequate attention to the practices of caring in
its most important task the flourishing of children
and the development of caring relations, not only in
personal contexts but among citizens and using gov-
ernmental institutions. We would see that instead of
abandoning culture to the dictates of the marketplace,
we should make it possible for culture to develop in
ways best able to enlighten and enrich human life.
Joan Tronto argues for the political implications
of the ethics of care, seeing care as a political as well
as moral ideal advocating the meeting of needs for
care as “the highest social goal.” She shows how unac-
ceptable are current arrangements for providing care:
“Caring activities are devalued, underpaid, and dis-
proportionately occupied by the relatively powerless
in society.” Bubeck, Kittay, and many others argue
forcefully that care must be seen as a public concern,
not relegated to the private responsibility of women,
the inadequacy and arbitrariness of private charities,
or the vagaries and distortions of the market. In her
recent book Starting at Home, Noddings explores what
a caring society would be like.
When we concern ourselves with caring relations
between more distant others, this care should not be
thought to reduce to the mere “caring about” that has
little to do with the face- to- face interactions of caring
labor and can easily become paternalistic or patroniz-
ing. The same characteristics of attentiveness, respon-
siveness to needs, and understanding situations from
the points of view of others should characterize car-
ing when the participants are more distant. This also
requires the work of understanding and of expending
varieties of effort.
Given how care is a value with the widest pos-
sible social implications, it is unfortunate that many
who look at the ethics of care continue to suppose it
is a “family ethics,” confined to the “private” sphere.
Although some of its earliest formulations suggested
this, and some of its related values are to be seen most
clearly in personal contexts, an adequate understand-
ing of the ethics of care should recognize that it elabo-
rates values as fundamental and as relevant to political
institutions and to how society is organized, as those
of justice. Perhaps its values are even more funda-
mental and more relevant to life in society than those
traditionally relied on.

CHAPTER 8: FEminisT ETHiCs And THE ETHiCs oF CARE Á 217
The ethics of care, in my view, is a distinctive ethical
outlook, distinct even from virtue ethics. Certainly it has
precursors, and such virtue theorists as Aristotle, Hume,
and the moral sentimentalists contribute importantly
to it. As a feminist ethic, the ethics of care is certainly
not a mere description or generalization of women’s
attitudes and activities as developed under patriarchal
conditions. To be acceptable, it must be a feminist ethic,
open to both women and men to adopt. But in being
feminist, it is different from the ethics of its precursors
and different as well from virtue ethics.
The ethics of care is sometimes thought inad-
equate because of its inability to provide definite
answers in cases of conflicting moral demands. Vir-
tue theory has similarly been criticized for offering no
more than what detractors call a “bag of virtues,” with
no clear indication of how to prioritize the virtues or
apply their requirements, especially when they seem
to conflict. Defenders of the ethics of care respond
that the adequacy of the definite answers provided by,
for instance, utilitarian and Kantian moral theories is
illusory. Cost- benefit analysis is a good example of a
form of utilitarian calculation that purports to provide
clear answers to questions about what we ought to
do, but from the point of view of moral understand-
ing, its answers are notoriously dubious. So, too, often
are casuistic reasonings about deontological rules. To
advocates of the ethics of care, its alternative moral
epistemology seems better. It stresses sensitivity to
the multiple relevant considerations in particular
contexts, cultivating the traits of character and of rela-
tionship that sustain caring, and promoting the dia-
logue that corrects and enriches the perspective of any
one individual. The ethics of care is hospitable to the
methods of discourse ethics, though with an emphasis
on actual dialogue that empowers its participants to
express themselves rather than on discourse so ideal
that actual differences of viewpoint fall away.
* * *
which women have been so heavily engaged. Although
this might be corrected, virtue theory has characteristi-
cally seen the virtues as incorporated in various tradi-
tions or traditional communities. In contrast, the ethics
of care as a feminist ethic is wary of existing traditions
and traditional communities: Virtually all are patriar-
chal. The ethics of care envisions caring not as practiced
under male domination, but as it should be practiced
in postpatriarchal society, of which we do not yet have
traditions or wide experience. Individual egalitarian
families are still surrounded by inegalitarian social and
cultural influences.
In my view, although there are similarities between
them and although to be caring is no doubt a virtue,
the ethics of care is not simply a kind of virtue ethics.
Virtue ethics focuses especially on the states of charac-
ter of individuals, whereas the ethics of care concerns
itself especially with caring relations. Caring relations
have primary value.
If virtue ethics is interpreted, as with Slote, as
primarily a matter of motives, it may neglect unduly
the labor and objective results of caring, as Bubeck’s
emphasis on actually meeting needs highlights. Car-
ing is not only a question of motive or attitude or vir-
tue. On the other hand, Bubeck’s account is unduly
close to a utilitarian interpretation of meeting needs,
neglecting that care also has an aspect of motive and
virtue. If virtue ethics is interpreted as less restricted
to motives, and if it takes adequate account of the
results of the virtuous person’s activities for the per-
sons cared for, it may better include the concerns of
the ethics of care. It would still, however, focus on the
dispositions of individuals, whereas the ethics of care
focuses on social relations and the social practices and
values that sustain them. The traditional Man of Vir-
tue may be almost as haunted by his patriarchal past
as the Man of Reason. The work of care has certainly
not been among the virtuous activities to which he
has adequately attended.

P A R T
4
‘’
Ethical Issues

C H A P T E R 9
‘’
Abortion
221
our most fundamental moral principles, and much
more. For many women, the abortion controversy
is personal, involving judgments about their own
bodies, their own health and happiness, and their
own inner turmoil provoked by life- and- death
decisions. Uncritical acceptance of particular moral
perspectives on abortion seems to be the norm for
people on all sides of the debate. Often, discus-
sion of the issue is reduced to shouting; informed
reflection, to knee- jerk conclusions; and reasoned
argument, to cases built on assumptions never
questioned.
In this chapter, we try to do better, relying
heavily on critical reasoning and striving for a more
objective approach. We begin with a review of the
(nonmoral) facts of abortion— biological, medi-
cal, psychological, semantic, and legal. Then we
consider how the moral theories discussed in pre-
vious chapters can be applied to this issue. Finally,
we examine a range of common arguments in the
debate, from liberal to conservative as well as some
intermediate positions.
ISSUE FILE: BACKGROUND
Abortion (also called induced abortion) is the delib-
erate termination of a pregnancy by surgical or
medical (with drugs) means. The unintentional ter-
mination of a pregnancy (due to a medical disorder
or injury) is known as a spontaneous abortion, or mis-
carriage. An abortion performed to protect the life or
health of the mother is referred to as a therapeutic
abortion. Therapeutic abortions are usually not
thought to be morally problematic. (The Roman
If somehow you had unobstructed access for a
single day to all the public and private dramas pro-
voked by the issue of abortion, you might see scenes
like this: a forty- year- old mother of five agonizing
over whether she should terminate her pregnancy
(which is both unexpected and unwanted); anti-
abortion activists shouting “Thou shall not kill!”
at a woman hurrying inside a clinic that performs
abortions; a frightened sixteen- year- old rape vic-
tim having an abortion against her family’s wishes;
a Catholic bishop asserting on the eleven o’clock
news that abortion in any form is murder; the
head of an abortion rights organization declaring
in a CNN interview that anti- abortion activists are
violent and dangerous; a politician getting elected
solely because he favors a constitutional amend-
ment to ban virtually all abortions; two women
who have been friends for years disagreeing bit-
terly about whether a fetus has a right to life; and
state legislators angrily debating a bill requiring
any woman seeking an abortion to watch a fifteen-
minute video titled “The Tragedy of Abortion.”
Such scenes are emblematic of the abortion
issue in that they are intensely emotional and usu-
ally accompanied by uncritical or dogmatic think-
ing. Passions surge because abortion touches on
some of our deepest values and most basic beliefs.
When we grapple with the issue of abortion, we
must consider whose rights (the mother’s or the
unborn’s) carry the most moral weight, what
the meaning of human being or person is, when—
if ever— the unborn achieves personhood, how
having an aborti on affects the health and mind
of the mother, how much importance to assign to

222 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
Abortion methods vary depending largely on
the stage of a woman’s pregnancy. Within the first
seven weeks or so, drugs can be used to induce an
abortion. A combination of mifepristone ( RU- 486)
and prostaglandins (hormonelike agents that pro-
voke uterine contractions) can force the embryo
out of the uterus and through the vagina. This
approach, sometimes called a medical or medication
abortion, has an extremely high success rate.
With a method known as menstrual aspiration
(or manual vacuum aspiration), an abortion can
be performed in the first three weeks. In this pro-
cedure, a physician expands the opening of the
uterus (the cervix) and uses a syringe to draw out
the embryo from the uterine wall. Up until twelve
weeks of pregnancy (the period when most abor-
tions are performed, also called the first trimester), a
method called suction curettage (or dilation and suc-
tion curettage) is often used. A physician widens the
cervix, then inserts a thin, flexible tube through it
and into the uterus itself. A vacuum device attached
to the other end of the tube then provides suction
to empty the uterus. A method often used after
twelve weeks is dilation and evacuation. After the
cervix is opened up, forceps and suction are used
to extract the fetus. A nonsurgical technique used
in some late abortions involves inducing the con-
tractions of labor so the fetus is expelled from the
uterus. To force the contractions, physicians often
use drugs as well as saline injection, the substitution
of saltwater for amniotic fluid in the uterus.
Like any medical procedure, abortion poses
some risk of complications. Its risks, however, are
relatively low. Fewer than 0.05 percent of women
who have a first- trimester abortion suffer from a
major complication. The risk of death for women
who have an abortion at eight weeks or earlier is 0.3
deaths per hundred thousand abortions. The risk of
death for abortions performed at eighteen weeks or
later is 6.7 per hundred thousand. The health risks
linked to abortion are directly related to the timing
of the procedure. The earlier in the pregnancy an
abortion is performed, the lower the risk.
Catholic stance, however, is that induced abortion
is always wrong, though the unintended death of
the fetus during an attempt to save the mother’s
life is morally permissible.) But induced abortions
are intensely controversial and are the focus of the
ongoing moral debate.
Throughout our discussion of abortion in
this chapter, we will use the word fetus to refer to
the unborn during its entire development from
conception to birth. But technically, the term
indicates a particular phase of this development.
Development begins at conception, or fertil-
ization, when a sperm cell enters an ovum and
the two merge into a single cell called a zygote.
The zygote contains a complete set of forty- six
chromosomes, half of them from the mother,
half from the father— all the genetic informa-
tion needed to make a unique human individual.
Over the next few days the zygote inches down
the fallopian tube toward the uterus, expanding
as cells divide. In three to five days it reaches the
uterus, where it grows in a tiny orb of cells called a
blastocyst. By day ten the blastocyst fully implants
itself in the lining of the uterus, and from implan-
tation until the eighth week after fertilization it
is known technically as an embryo. In the embry-
onic phase, most major organs form (though the
brain and spinal cord will keep developing during
pregnancy), and the embryo grows to just over an
inch long. At about the third week the embryo
first acquires a human shape; by the eighth, doc-
tors can detect brain activity. From the end of
the eighth week until birth (approximately week
forty), the embryo is known in medical terminol-
ogy as a fetus.
In the abortion debate, certain other aspects
of fetal development are thought by some to be of
special significance. For example, usually at about
sixteen to twenty weeks, the mother can feel the
fetus moving, an event known as quickening.
At about twenty- three or twenty- four weeks, the
fetus may be able to live outside the uterus, a state
referred to as viability.

CHAPTER 9: ABORTION Á 223
’
• Nearly half (45 percent) of all pregnancies
among U.S. women in 2011 were unintended,
and about four in ten of these were terminated
by abortion.
• Nineteen percent of pregnancies (excluding mis-
carriages) in 2014 ended in abortion.
• Approximately 926,200 abortions were performed
in 2014, down 12 percent from 1.06 million in
2011. In 2014, some 1.5 percent of women aged
fifteen to forty- four had an abortion.
• The abortion rate in 2014 was 14.6 abortions
per thousand women aged fifteen to forty- four,
down 14 percent from 16.9 per thousand in
2011. This is the lowest rate ever observed in the
United States; in 1973, the year abortion became
legal, the rate was 16.3 per thousand.
• Seventeen percent of abortion patients in 2014
identified as mainline Protestant, 13 percent as
evangelical Protestant, and 24 percent as Catho-
lic; 38 percent reported no religious affiliation,
and the remaining 8 percent reported some
other affiliation.
• More than half of all U.S. abortion patients
in 2014 were in their twenties: patients aged
twenty to twenty- four obtained 34 percent of
all abortions, and patients aged twenty- five to
twenty- nine obtained 27 percent.
• Twelve percent of abortion patients in 2014 were
adolescents: those aged eighteen to nineteen
accounted for 8 percent of all abortions, fifteen-
to seventeen- year- olds for 3 percent, and those
younger than fifteen for 0.2 percent.
• White patients accounted for 39 percent of abor-
tion procedures in 2014, blacks for 28 percent,
Hispanics for 25 percent, and patients of other
races and ethnicities for 9 percent.
• In 2014, 59 percent of abortions were obtained
by women who had had at least one birth.
• In 2014, nearly half of the women seeking an
abortion were living with a male partner, and 14
percent of them were married.
• The reasons patients gave for having an abor-
tion underscored their understanding of the
responsibilities of parenthood and family life.
The three most common reasons— each cited
by three- fourths of patients— were concern
for or responsibility to other individuals; the
inability to afford raising a child; and the belief
that having a baby would interfere with work,
school, or the ability to care for dependents.
Half said they did not want to be a single par-
ent or were having problems with their hus-
band or partner.
• A first- trimester abortion is one of the safest
medical procedures and carries minimal risk—
less than 0.05 percent— of major complications
that might necessitate hospital care.
• Leading experts have concluded that among
women who have an unplanned pregnancy, the
risk of mental health problems is no greater if
they have a single first- trimester abortion than if
they carry the pregnancy to term.
• The risk of death associated with abortion
increases with the length of pregnancy, from
0.3 for every hundred thousand abortions at or
before eight weeks to 6.7 per hundred thousand
at eighteen weeks or later.
• Medication abortions accounted for 31 per-
cent of all nonhospital abortions in 2014 and
for 45 percent of abortions before nine weeks’
gestation.*
*Derived from “Fact Sheet” and “National Reproduc-
tive Health Profile,” data compiled and developed by
the Alan Guttmacher Institute, January 2017, January
2018, www.guttmacher.org (March 7, 2018).
Abortion in the United States: Facts and Figures

http://www.guttmacher.org

224 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
abortions; and held that states may require a girl
under eighteen to obtain either the informed con-
sent of a parent or a court order before getting an
abortion.
MORAL THEORIES
How would a utilitarian judge the moral permissi-
bility of abortion? How would a Kantian theorist or
a natural law theorist evaluate it? Let us take utili-
tarianism first. An act- utilitarian would say that an
abortion is morally right if it results in the greatest
overall happiness, everyone considered. To argue
for abortion, she might point to all the unhappi-
ness that could be caused by the mother’s remain-
ing pregnant against her wishes: the mother’s
impaired mental and physical health (and possible
death), her loss of personal freedom and future
opportunities, financial strain on the mother as
well as on her family, the anguish of being preg-
nant as a result of rape or incest, the agony of bring-
ing a seriously impaired baby to term only to see
it die later, and the stress that all these social and
financial problems would have on a child after
birth. The philosopher Mary Anne Warren cites a
possible consequentialist argument that says when
women do not have the option of abortion, unhap-
piness can be created on a global scale:
In the long run, access to abortion is essential for the
health and survival not just of individual women and
families, but also that of the larger social and biologi-
cal systems on which all our lives depend. Given the
inadequacy of present methods of contraception
and the lack of universal access to contraception,
the avoidance of rapid population growth gener-
ally requires some use of abortion. Unless popula-
tion growth rates are reduced in those impoverished
societies where they remain high, malnutrition and
starvation will become even more widespread than at
present.3
An act- utilitarian, of course, could also argue
against abortion on exactly the same grounds—
the overall happiness (or unhappiness) brought
When we try to evaluate arguments in the
abortion debate, we must distinguish between the
moral question (Is abortion right?) and the legal
one (What should the law allow?). Our main con-
cern here is the former, not the latter. But to be fully
informed about the issue, we should understand,
at least in general terms, what the law does allow.
In 1973, in the landmark case of Roe v. Wade, the
United States Supreme Court ruled that a woman
has a constitutional, but not unlimited, right to
obtain an abortion in a range of circumstances.
According to the court, in the first trimester of
pregnancy, the woman’s right is unrestricted. The
decision to have an abortion is up to the woman in
consultation with her physician. After the first tri-
mester, a state may regulate (but not ban) abortion
to protect the health of the mother. After viability,
however, a state may regulate and even forbid abor-
tions in the interests of “the potentiality of human
life,” except when abortion is necessary to preserve
the health or life of the woman.1
In Roe the court maintained that a woman’s
right to an abortion is based on a fundamental right
of personal privacy and that this right, derived
from several constitutional amendments, applies
to numerous situations involving reproduction,
families, and children. The court also pointed
out that the word person as used in the Constitu-
tion “does not include the unborn” and that “the
unborn have never been recognized in the law as
persons in the whole sense.”2
Over the next thirty years the Court handed
down other abortion decisions that clarified or
supplemented Roe. Among other things, the jus-
tices prohibited or constrained the use of Medicaid
(a government entitlement program) to subsidize
abortions; forbade the use of public employees and
facilities to perform abortions (except to save the
life of the mother); declared that a woman seek-
ing an abortion does not have to notify her hus-
band of her intent; affirmed that states may not
impose restrictions that present an “undue bur-
den,” or excessive impediment, to women seeking

CHAPTER 9: ABORTION Á 225
results from adhering to it. He could argue on vari-
ous grounds that generally following a rule such as
“Abortion is not morally permissible except to save
the mother’s life” would maximize happiness. Or
he could claim that generally following this rule
instead would maximize happiness: “Abortion is
morally permissible for any reason during the first
trimester and always in cases of rape, incest, fetal
impairment, and serious threats to the mother’s
health or life.”
A premise (often unstated) in many arguments
about abortion is that the fetus is (or is not) a
about by particular actions. She could contend, for
example, that not having an abortion would pro-
duce more net happiness than having one because
having one would cause the mother tremendous
psychological pain, because the happiness brought
into the world with the birth of the child would
be considerable, and because the social stigma of
having an abortion would be extremely painful for
both the mother and her family.
A rule- utilitarian could also view abortion as
either morally right or wrong depending on the
rule being followed and how much net happiness
’
Seven justices concurred with the U.S. Supreme
Court’s opinion in Roe v. Wade, including Justice
Harry Blackmun, who wrote it. Here is an excerpt:
This right of privacy, whether it be founded in
the Fourteenth Amendment’s concept of per-
sonal liberty and restrictions upon state action, as
we feel it is, or, as the District Court determined,
in the Ninth Amendment’s reservation of rights
to the people, is broad enough to encompass a
woman’s decision whether or not to terminate her
pregnancy. . . .
[A]ppellant and some amici argue that the
woman’s right is absolute and that she is entitled
to terminate her pregnancy at whatever time, in
whatever way, and for whatever reason she alone
chooses. With this we do not agree. Appellant’s
arguments that Texas either has no valid inter-
est at all in regulating the abortion decision, or
no interest strong enough to support any limita-
tion upon the woman’s sole determination, are
unpersuasive. The Court’s decisions recognizing
a right of privacy also acknowledge that some
state regulation in areas protected by that right is
appropriate. As noted above, a State may properly
assert important interests in safeguarding health,
in maintaining medical standards, and in protect-
ing potential life. At some point in pregnancy,
these respective interests become sufficiently
compelling to sustain regulation of the factors
that govern the abortion decision. The privacy
right involved, therefore, cannot be said to be
absolute. . . .
We, therefore, conclude that the right of per-
sonal privacy includes the abortion decision, but
that this right is not unqualified and must be
considered against important state interests in
regulation. . . .
[This] decision leaves the State free to place
increasing restrictions on abortion as the period
of pregnancy lengthens, so long as those restric-
tions are tailored to the recognized state interests.
The decision vindicates the right of the physician
to administer medical treatment according to his
professional judgment up to the points where
important state interests provide compelling justi-
fications for intervention. Up to those points, the
abortion decision in all its aspects is inherently, and
primarily, a medical decision, and basic responsibil-
ity for it must rest with the physician. If an individ-
ual practitioner abuses the privilege of exercising
proper medical judgment, the usual remedies, judi-
cial and intra- professional, are available.*
*Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113, 153–54, 165–66 (1973).
Majority Opinion in Roe v. Wade

226 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
intrinsic value and dignity— then he would insist
that it has all the rights and is due all the respect
that any other person has. This would mean that the
unborn should not be regarded as just another quan-
tity in a utilitarian calculation of consequences. Like
any adult human, the fetus has rights, and these
rights cannot be overridden merely for utility’s sake.
Only for the most compelling moral reasons can
these rights be set aside. A Kantian might say that
one such reason is self- defense: killing a person in
self- defense is permissible. He might therefore argue
person— an entity with full moral rights. In general,
utilitarian arguments about abortion do not depend
heavily, if at all, on whether the fetus is regarded
as a person. Whether the fetus is a person is not
likely to dramatically affect the hedonic calculus.
The main issue is not personhood but utility. For
the Kantian theorist, however, the moral status of
the fetus is likely to matter much more. (Whether
Kant himself thought the fetus a person is an open
question.) If the Kantian maintains that the fetus
is a person— that is, an end in itself, a thing of
’
Do the Jewish or Christian scriptures forbid abor-
tion? Many people believe that they do, but the
philosopher James Rachels argues that they do not:
It is difficult to derive a prohibition of abortion
from either the Jewish or the Christian Scriptures.
The Bible does not speak plainly on the mat-
ter. There are certain passages, however, that
are often quoted by conservatives because they
seem to suggest that fetuses have full human sta-
tus. One of the most frequently cited passages is
from the first chapter of Jeremiah, in which God
is quoted as saying: “Before I formed you in the
womb I knew you, and before you were born
I consecrated you.” These words are presented as
though they were God’s endorsement of the con-
servative position: They are taken to mean that
the unborn, as well as the born, are “consecrated”
to God.
In context, however, these words obviously
mean something quite different. Suppose we read
the whole passage in which they occur:
Now the word of the Lord came to me saying,
“Before I formed you in the womb I knew you,
and before you were born I consecrated you;
I appointed you a prophet to the nations.” Then
I said, “Ah, Lord God! Behold, I do not know
how to speak, for I am only a youth.” But the
Lord said to me, “Do not say, ‘I am only a youth’
for to all to whom I send you you shall go, and
whatever I command you you shall speak. Be
not afraid of them, for I am with you to deliver
you,” says the Lord.
Neither abortion, the sanctity of fetal life, nor any-
thing else of the kind is being discussed in this pas-
sage. Instead, Jeremiah is asserting his authority as
a prophet. He is saying, in effect, “God authorized
me to speak for him; even though I resisted, he
commanded me to speak.” But Jeremiah puts the
point more poetically; he has God saying that God
had intended him to be a prophet even before
Jeremiah was born. . . .
The scriptural passage that comes closest to
making a specific judgment about the moral sta-
tus of fetuses occurs in the 21st chapter of Exo-
dus. This chapter is part of a detailed description
of the law of the ancient Israelites. Here the pen-
alty for murder is said to be death; however, it is
also said that if a pregnant woman is caused to
have a miscarriage, the penalty is only a fine, to be
paid to her husband. Murder was not a category
that included fetuses. The Law of Israel appar-
ently regarded fetuses as something less than full
human beings.*
*James Rachels, from The Elements of Moral Philoso-
phy, 4th Ed. pp. 59–60. Copyright © 2003 McGraw Hill
Education. Reprinted with permission.
ABORTION AND THE SCRIPTURES

CHAPTER 9: ABORTION Á 227
is abortion morally permissible? Recall that in ethics
the proper response to such a question is to provide
good reasons for a particular position. The usual
fireworks that accompany the abortion debate—
strident denunciations of the other side, appeals to
emotion and pity, extremist rhetoric, exaggerated
claims, political posturing, and the like— are not
appropriate, not germane, and not helpful. So here
we try to cut through all that and examine a few of
the main arguments offered for a range of views.
The conservative position is that abortion is
never, or almost never, morally permissible. Typi-
cally the “almost never” refers to situations in
which abortion may be permissible to save the
life of the mother. (Generally, both the liberal and
conservative positions hold that abortion may be
permissible to save the mother’s life, usually on the
grounds that the mother has a right of self- defense.
But as mentioned earlier, the Roman Catholic posi-
tion is that in any case, the death of the fetus must
be unintended.)
that if the mother’s life is being threatened by the
fetus she carries (if being pregnant is somehow life-
threatening), therapeutic abortion is permissible,
just as killing someone who is trying to kill you is
permissible. In this view, abortion would seem to
be only rarely justified.
On the other hand, if the Kantian does not
regard the fetus as a person, he may believe that
abortion is often justified to protect the rights and
dignity of the mother, who is a person. In other
words, the fetus— like any other nonperson— can
be used as a means to an end, whereas the mother
must be treated as an end in herself.
Traditional natural law theorists would view
abortion very differently, for two reasons. First, to
them, there is no question about the moral status
of the fetus: it is a person with full moral rights. Sec-
ond, the theory is very clear about the treatment
of innocent persons: it is always morally wrong
to directly kill the innocent. So the direct, inten-
tional killing of a fetus through abortion is never
permissible. According to the doctrine of double
effect, killing an innocent person for the purpose
of achieving some greater good is immoral. But
indirectly, unintentionally killing an innocent per-
son while trying to do good may be permissible.
Therefore, intentionally killing a fetus through
abortion, even to save the mother’s life, is wrong.
But trying to, say, cure a pregnant woman’s can-
cer by performing a hysterectomy on her or giving
her chemotherapy— treatment that has the unin-
tended side effect of aborting the fetus— may be
morally acceptable. In this view, very few abortions
are morally acceptable.
MORAL ARGUMENTS
Arguments for and against abortion are plenti-
ful and diverse, their quality ranges from good to
bad, and their conclusions vary from conservative
(“ pro- life”) to liberal (“ pro- choice”), with several
moderate positions in between. We can sum up the
central issue of the debate like this: When, if ever,
’ QUICK REVIEW
abortion— The deliberate termination of a preg-
nancy by surgical or medical (with drugs)
means.
therapeutic abortion— An abortion performed to
protect the life or health of the mother.
conception— The merging of a sperm cell and an
ovum into a single cell; also called fertilization.
quickening— The point in fetal development
when the mother can feel the fetus moving (at
about sixteen to twenty weeks).
viability— The stage of fetal development at
which the fetus is able to survive outside the
uterus.
person— A being thought to have full moral
rights.

228 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
Yet there are conservative arguments that do
not equivocate. Consider this one:
1. The unborn is an innocent person from
conception.
2. It is wrong to kill an innocent person.
3. Abortion is the killing of an innocent person.
4. Therefore, abortion is wrong.
This argument is valid. The only significant
difference between it and the previous one is
Premise 1, which asserts that the unborn is a being
with full moral rights from the very moment of fer-
tilization. If Premise 1 is true, then the argument
is sound— the premises are true and the conclusion
follows from them.
But is the premise true? The conservative insists
that it is and can argue for it in this fashion. Birth
is generally thought to be the point at which the
fetus is most clearly (and legally) a person. The
development of the unborn from conception to birth,
however, is one continuous process, with no obvious
points along the way that might signal a transition
into personhood. Moreover, whatever essential prop-
erties a born human has that make it a person seem to
be present at the moment of conception. Therefore,
because no unambiguous point of personhood can
be located in this process, the most reasonable option
is to identify personhood with conception.
Opponents of this argument contend that it is
fallacious. We may not be able to pinpoint a pre-
cise moment when day becomes night, they say,
but that does not mean that day is night. Likewise,
we may not be able to determine the precise point
in the continuous process of human development
when a zygote becomes a full- fledged person. But
that does not mean that a zygote is a person.
The conservative, however, can propose a more
nuanced reason for supposing that conception
marks the beginning of personhood:
One evidence of the nonarbitrary character of the line
drawn [at conception] is the difference of probabili-
ties on either side of it. If a spermatozoon is destroyed,
one destroys a being which had a chance of far less
Like many arguments about abortion, the con-
servative case is built on a proposition about the
moral status of the fetus. For most conservatives,
the fetus is a person (a human being, as some would
say) with full moral rights, the same rights that any
adult human has, and these rights emerge at the
moment of conception. Of course, the moral right
at the heart of it all is the right to life. Taking the
life of a fetal person is just as immoral as killing an
innocent adult human.
Here is one version of the conservative
argument:
1. The unborn is obviously a human life.
2. It is wrong to take a human life.
3. Abortion is the taking of a human life.
4. Therefore, abortion is wrong.
To evaluate this argument (or any argument),
we must determine (1) whether the conclusion
follows from the premises; and (2) whether the
premises are true. A cursory glance at this argument
might suggest that the conclusion does follow from
the premises and that the premises are true. But we
must be careful. This argument commits the fallacy
of equivocation. The term human life is assigned
two different meanings in the premises, rendering
the argument invalid. In Premise 1, “human life”
means something like “biologically human”—an
entity with human DNA, an entity that is from the
human species. But in Premises 2 and 3, the term
means “person”—a being entitled to full moral
rights. If “human life” is used in different senses in
the premises, then the argument is not valid (the
conclusion does not follow from the premises)—
even if the premises, using their respective mean-
ings of the term, are true. As it stands, Premise 1 is
unmistakably true: a fetus born of human parents
with human DNA is certainly biologically human.
And in its present form, Premise 2 is also true: the
killing of a person is indeed wrong (except perhaps
to save a life). Still, the argument fails and does
not provide us with good reasons to accept the
conclusion.

CHAPTER 9: ABORTION Á 229
The positive argument for conception as the deci-
sion moment of humanization is that at conception
the new being receives the genetic code. It is this
genetic information which determines his character-
istics, which is the biological carrier of the possibility
of human wisdom, which makes him a self- evolving
being. A being with a human genetic code is man.4
than 1 in 200 million of developing into a reasoning
being, possessed of the genetic code, a heart and other
organs, and capable of pain. If a fetus is destroyed,
one destroys a being already possessed of the genetic
code, organs and sensitivity to pain, and one which
had an 80 percent chance of developing further into
a baby outside the womb who, in time, would reason.
’
The legal status of abortion has been shaped not
only by the U.S. Supreme Court but also by many
state statutes, some of which have been struck
down by the court, and some that have been left
standing but are still challenged by many organiza-
tions and groups. Here’s a brief summary of current
state requirements:
• Physician and hospital requirements: Thirty-
eight states require an abortion to be performed
by a licensed physician. Nineteen states require
an abortion to be performed in a hospital after
a specified point in the pregnancy, and nineteen
states require the involvement of a second physi-
cian after a specified point.
• Gestational limits: Forty- three states prohibit
abortions, generally except when necessary to
protect the woman’s life or health, after a speci-
fied point in pregnancy.
• “ Partial- birth” abortion: Nineteen states have
laws in effect that prohibit “ partial- birth” abor-
tion. Three of these laws apply only to postviabil-
ity abortions.
• Coverage by private insurance: Eleven states
restrict coverage of abortion in private insurance
plans, most often limiting coverage to cases in
which the woman’s life would be endangered if
the pregnancy were carried to term. Most states
allow the purchase of additional abortion cover-
age at an additional cost.
• Refusal: Forty- five states allow individual
health care providers to refuse to participate
in an abortion. Forty- two states allow institu-
tions to refuse to perform abortions, sixteen
of which limit refusal to private or religious
institutions.
• State- mandated counseling: Sixteen states man-
date that women be given counseling before
an abortion that includes information on at
least one of the following: the purported link
between abortion and breast cancer (five states),
the ability of a fetus to feel pain (twelve states),
or long- term mental health consequences for
the woman (six states).
• Waiting periods: Twenty- seven states require
a woman seeking an abortion to wait a speci-
fied period of time, usually twenty- four hours,
between when she receives counseling and
when the procedure is performed. Fourteen of
these states have laws that effectively require
the woman to make two separate trips to the
clinic to obtain the procedure.
• Parental involvement: Thirty- seven states require
some type of parental involvement in a minor’s
decision to have an abortion. Twenty- six states
require one or both parents to consent to the
procedure, while eleven require that one or both
parents be notified.*
*Derived from “An Overview of Abortion Laws,” data
compiled by the Alan Guttmacher Institute, August 1,
2017, www.guttmacher.org (August 17, 2017).
State Abortion Laws

http://www.guttmacher.org

230 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
disagreement is not over this fundamental moral
principle, but over the nature of persons and who
does or does not qualify as such an entity. Prem-
ise 1, then, is the crux of the liberal’s argument (just
as Premise 1 is the heart of the conservative’s argu-
ment). How might the liberal defend this premise?
The obvious approach is to plausibly explain
what a person is and then show that the fetus does
not qualify as one. The most influential argument
along these lines is that of Mary Anne Warren.
“What characteristics entitle an entity to be
considered a person?” she asks. What criteria, for
example, would we use to decide whether alien
beings encountered on an unknown planet deserve
to be treated morally or treated as, say, a source of
food? How would we tell whether the creatures
are persons? Warren says that the characteristics
most important to our idea of personhood are (1)
consciousness, (2) the ability to reason, (3) self-
motivated activity, (4) the capacity to commu-
nicate, and (5) the presence of self- concepts and
self- awareness. Any being that has all of these traits
we would surely regard as a person. Even a being
that has only some of these traits would prob-
ably qualify as a person. More to the point, Warren
says, we must admit that any being that has none
of these traits is unquestionably not a person. And
since a fetus lacks all these, we have to conclude
that it, too, is not a person.
These considerations suggest that being geneti-
cally human is not the same thing as being a person
in the moral sense, the sense of having full moral
rights. As Warren notes,
Now if [these five traits] are indeed the primary crite-
ria of personhood, then it is clear that genetic human-
ity is neither necessary nor sufficient for establishing
that an entity is a person. Some human beings are
not people [persons], and there may well be people
who are not human beings. A man or woman whose
consciousness has been permanently obliterated but
who remains alive is a human being which is no lon-
ger a person; defective human beings, with no appre-
ciable mental capacity, are not and presumably never
Others who oppose abortion argue that although
the fetus may not be a person, it has the potential
to become a person and is therefore entitled to the
same rights as full- fledged persons. But critics reject
this view:
This argument is implausible, since in no other case
do we treat the potential to achieve some status
entailing certain rights as itself entailing those same
rights. For instance, every child born in the United
States is a potential voter, but no- one under the age
of 18 has the right to vote in that country. If a fetus is
a potential person, then so is an unfertilized human
ovum, together with enough viable spermatozoa to
achieve fertilization; yet few would seriously suggest
that these living human entities should have full and
equal moral status.5
The liberal position is that abortion is always
(or almost always) permissible. Like the conserva-
tive’s argument, the liberal’s is based on a particular
view of the moral status of the fetus. But in oppo-
sition to the conservative view, the liberal asserts
that the fetus is not a person, not a being with full
moral rights. Abortion therefore is morally permis-
sible because the fetus does not possess a right to
life (unlike the mother, who has a full complement
of rights). Generally, for the liberal, the event that
makes the unborn a person is not conception but
birth.
Here is a version of a common liberal argument:
1. The unborn is not a person until birth (and thus
does not have a right to life).
2. It is wrong to kill an innocent person.
3. Abortion before birth would not be the killing
of an innocent person.
4. If abortion before birth is not the killing of an
innocent person, it is permissible.
5. Therefore, abortion before birth is permissible.
Notice that this argument and the conserva-
tive one have a common premise: it is wrong to kill
an innocent person. Thus the liberal and the con-
servative agree on the immorality of murder. Their

CHAPTER 9: ABORTION Á 231
other worlds, should such be found, as people in the
fullest sense, and to respect their moral rights.6
Against the liberal’s argument, the conservative
can lodge the following objections. First, he can
point out that if Warren’s view of personhood is
will be people; and a fetus is a human being which is
not yet a person, and which therefore cannot coher-
ently be said to have full moral rights. Citizens of the
next century should be prepared to recognize highly
advanced, self- aware robots or computers, should
such be developed, and intelligent inhabitants of
’
Because abortion is so controversial, and because conflicts over it are so intense, abortion debates often
abound in falsehoods and half- truths. Here are some recent examples, along with the verdicts of the fact-
checking website PolitiFact.com:
Claim Verdict
“Abortion providers like Planned Parenthood do little more than False
provide abortions.”—Sean Duffy
“Toomey and Trump will ban abortion and punish women who have False
them.”—NARAL Pro- Choice America
“Today in America, between 40 and 50 percent of all African- American Mostly False
babies, virtually 1- in- 2, are killed before they are born.”—Trent Franks
Ohio budget item later signed into law by Gov. John Kasich requires False
women seeking an abortion to undergo a “mandatory vaginal
probe.”—Rachel Maddow
Birth control pioneer Margaret Sanger “believed that people like me False
should be eliminated.”—Ben Carson
Attorney general candidate Brad Schimel “is in cahoots with Wisconsin Mostly False
Right to Life to make abortion a crime in Wisconsin.”—Chris Taylor
“A salesclerk at Hobby Lobby who needs contraception . . . is not Mostly False
going to get that service through her employer’s health care plan
because her employer doesn’t think she should be using
contraception.”—Hillary Clinton
“Upwards of 90 percent” of women seeking an abortion decide not to False
have an abortion after seeing an ultrasound.—Rachel Campos- Duffy
Mitt Romney “backed a bill that outlaws all abortions, even in cases of False
rape and incest.”—Barack Obama
Can you trust advocacy groups such as NARAL and National Right to Life to provide accurate information
about abortion? Do you accept every claim they make just because you agree with their stand on the abor-
tion issue? How would you fact- check an abortion claim that you’re not sure of?
CRITICAL THOUGHT: Fact- checking Abortion Claims

http://www.PolitiFact.com

232 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
that personhood depends on medical expertise.
Quickening, the first detection of fetal movement by
the mother, signifies nothing that can be plausibly
linked to personhood. It does not indicate the start
of fetal movement— the fetus begins moving in the
very first week of life. Sentience refers to conscious-
ness, specifically the capacity to have sense experi-
ences. If being sentient (especially the capacity to feel
pleasure and pain) is proof of personhood, then per-
sonhood must not arise in the fetus until the second
trimester, when neurological pathways are devel-
oped enough to make sense experience possible. But
why should we regard sentience as a marker for per-
sonhood in the first place? Kittens, birds, crabs, and
spiders are sentient, but few of us would insist that
they are persons with full moral rights.
Some moderate positions can be mapped out
without reference to the issue of personhood. The
most impressive argument for this sort of view is
that of Judith Jarvis Thomson. She contends that
even if we grant that the fetus is a person with full
moral rights, abortion still may be permissible in
certain cases— more cases than the conservative
would permit and fewer than the liberal would.
She argues that the fetus has a right to life, but not
a right to sustain that life by using the mother’s
body against her will. To underscore her argument,
Thomson asks us to consider this strange scenario:
You wake up in the morning and find yourself back to
back in bed with an unconscious violinist. A famous
unconscious violinist. He has been found to have a
fatal kidney ailment, and the Society of Music Lov-
ers has canvassed all the available medical records
and found that you alone have the right blood type
to help. They have therefore kidnapped you, and last
night the violinist’s circulatory system was plugged
into yours, so that your kidneys can be used to extract
poisons from his blood as well as your own. The
director of the hospital now tells you, “Look, we’re
sorry the Society of Music Lovers did this to you— we
would never have permitted it if we had known. But
still, they did it, and the violinist now is plugged into
you. To unplug you would be to kill him. But never
mind, it’s only for nine months. By then he will
correct, then a fetus is not a person— but neither is a
newborn. After all, it is doubtful that a newborn (or
perhaps even an older baby) can meet Warren’s cri-
teria for personhood. If a newborn is not a person,
then killing it— the crime of infanticide— would
seem to be permissible. But we tend to think that
infanticide is obviously wrong.
To this criticism the liberal may say that though
a newborn is not a person, it still has value— either
because it is a potential person or because it is valued
by others. The liberal might even argue that though
a baby is not a person, infanticide should never be
permitted because it is a gruesome act that cheapens
life or cultivates a callous attitude toward it.
The conservative can offer a related objec-
tion to the liberal’s position. The liberal argument
implies that the unborn is a person at birth, but
not a person a day or even an hour before birth, and
therefore that abortion is immoral after birth but
permissible an hour before. But because the physi-
ological and psychological differences between the
newborn and unborn are virtually nil, the liberal’s
distinction seems both arbitrary and ghastly.
The moderate rejects the claim that abortions
are almost never permissible (as conservatives say)
as well as the notion that they almost always are
(as liberals maintain). In a variety of ways, moder-
ates take intermediate positions between these two
ends of the spectrum, asserting that abortion may
be justified in more cases than conservatives would
allow and fewer than liberals would like.
One moderate approach is to argue that the
fetus becomes a person (and acquires full rights) at
some time after conception and before birth— at
viability, quickening, sentience (sensory experi-
ence), or some other notable milestone. Each of
these points, however, is problematic in one way or
another. The viability of the fetus (the point when it
can survive outside the womb) is largely a function
of modern medical know- how. Physicians are get-
ting better at sustaining fetal life outside the womb,
gradually pushing viability further back toward con-
ception. But this observation suggests, implausibly,

CHAPTER 9: ABORTION Á 233
3. The unborn uses the mother’s body against her
will when the pregnancy is the result of rape,
incest, or defective contraception.
4. Therefore, abortion is permissible in cases of
rape, incest, or defective contraception.
Probably the most common criticism of this
argument is that the mother may in fact not have
the right to disconnect herself from the fetus if she
bears some responsibility for being connected. In
the case of Thomson’s violinist, the woman was
not at all responsible for being connected to him.
However, if the woman’s own actions somehow
precipitated her being attached to the violinist,
then she would be responsible for her predicament
and thus would have no right to disconnect herself.
Likewise, this objection goes, if a woman consents
to sexual intercourse and knows that her actions
can lead to pregnancy, she bears some responsibil-
ity for getting pregnant and therefore has no right
to abort the fetus, even though it is using her body
to survive. If this view is right, an abortion would
seem to be justified only in cases of rape, when the
woman is clearly not responsible for her pregnancy.
CHAPTER REVIEW
SUMMARY
Abortion is the deliberate termination of a pregnancy
by surgical or medical means. Therapeutic abortions are
those performed to protect the life of the mother. An
abortion can be performed at any point in the develop-
ment of the unborn— from conception to birth.
Abortion methods vary depending on how long the
woman has been pregnant. Very early abortions can
be done with drugs. Other types of abortions are per-
formed by widening the cervix and drawing out the
embryo from the uterus with a syringe (manual vac-
uum aspiration), by opening the cervix and using a thin
have recovered from his ailment, and can safely be
unplugged from you.”7
Would you agree to such an arrangement?
Would you be morally obligated to do so? The vio-
linist, like all persons, has a right to life. But does
this right, in Thomson’s phrase, “[outweigh] your
right to decide what happens in and to your body”?
Thomson concludes that the unborn’s right to life
does not entail the right to use the mother’s body
without her consent; the mother has a right to
defend herself against unauthorized exploitation
of her body. Abortion then is morally permissible
when pregnancy is forced on the mother— that is,
in cases of rape, incest, and defective contracep-
tion. (Like most people involved in the abortion
debate, Thomson also thinks that abortion is mor-
ally acceptable to save the life of the mother.)
While laying out her argument, Thomson makes
a distinction that further moderates her views. She
points out that though women have a right to ter-
minate a pregnancy in some cases, they do not have
a right to “secure the death of the unborn child”:
It is easy to confuse these two things in that up to a
certain point in the life of the fetus it is not able to
survive outside the mother’s body; hence removing
it from her body guarantees its death. But they are
importantly different. I have argued that you are not
morally required to spend nine months in bed, sus-
taining the life of that violinist; but to say this is by no
means to say that if, when you unplug yourself, there
is a miracle and he survives, you then have a right to
turn round and slit his throat. You may detach your-
self even if this costs him his life; you have no right
to be guaranteed his death, by some other means, if
unplugging yourself does not kill him.8
Here is a greatly simplified version of Thomson’s
basic argument:
1. Whether or not the unborn has a right to life, it
does not have a right to sustain its life by using
the mother’s body against her will.
2. The mother has a right to defend herself against
the unborn’s use of her body against her will (a
right to have an abortion).

234 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
and in fewer situations than would be accepted by
the liberal. A moderate position can be formulated by
arguing that the unborn is a person some time after
conception and before birth— perhaps at viability,
quickening, or sentience.
KEY TERMS
abortion (p. 221)
therapeutic abortion (p. 221)
conception (p. 222)
quickening (p. 222)
viability (p. 222)
person (p. 226)
EXERCISES
Review Questions
1. What is a therapeutic abortion? (p. 221)
2. At what point in a woman’s pregnancy is the
fetus thought to be viable? (p. 222)
3. What is a zygote? a blastocyst? (p. 222)
4. What was the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in
Roe v. Wade? (p. 224)
5. What is an abortion? (p. 221)
6. In Roe v. Wade, the court held that a woman’s
right to an abortion was based on what
fundamental right? (p. 224)
7. In the last few years, has the abortion rate in the
United States been going down or up? (p. 223)
8. In 2011, what percentage of unintended
pregnancies were terminated by abortion?
(p. 223)
9. In 2014, white patients accounted for what
percentage of abortion procedures? What
percentage of patients were black? (p. 223)
10. Do most medical experts think that abortion in
the first trimester is relatively safe? (p. 223)
Discussion Questions
1. Why is personhood such an important concept
in abortion debates?
2. How might an act- utilitarian judge the moral
permissibility of abortion?
suction tube to empty the uterus (suction curettage), by
using forceps and suction to extract the fetus (dilation
and evacuation), and by using drugs or saline solution
to cause contractions to expel the fetus from the uterus.
In 1973, in the famous case Roe v. Wade, the
United States Supreme Court ruled that a woman has
a constitutional, but limited, right to obtain an abor-
tion. According to the court, in the first trimester, the
woman’s right is unrestricted. The decision to have an
abortion is up to the woman in consultation with her
physician. After the first trimester, a state may regu-
late but not ban abortion to protect the health of the
mother. After the fetus reaches viability, a state may
regulate and even forbid abortions in the interests of
the fetus, except when an abortion is necessary to pre-
serve the health or life of the woman.
Major moral theories offer different perspectives
on the issue of abortion. An act- utilitarian would
argue that an abortion is morally right (or wrong)
depending on its consequences. A rule- utilitarian
could also judge abortion to be either morally right
or wrong depending on the rule being followed and
how much net happiness results from adhering to it.
A Kantian theorist is likely to judge the issue according
to the moral status of the fetus. If the Kantian believes
that the fetus is a person, then she would say that the
fetus has full moral rights and that these rights cannot
be overridden on utilitarian grounds. If she does not
think the fetus a person, she may believe that abortion
is sometimes justified to protect the rights and dignity
of the mother.
Arguments for and against abortion can be roughly
grouped into three major categories— conservative,
liberal, and moderate. The conservative position is
that abortion is never, or almost never, morally per-
missible. The conservative case is built on the supposi-
tion that the fetus is a person with full moral rights.
The liberal position is that abortion is always, or almost
always, permissible. The liberal asserts that the fetus is
not a person and therefore does not have a right to life.
The moderate can take a number of intermediate posi-
tions between these two extremes, asserting on vari-
ous grounds that abortion may be permissible in more
situations than would be allowed by the conservative

CHAPTER 9: ABORTION Á 235
Sidney Callahan, “A Case for Pro- Life Feminism,” Com-
monweal 25 (April 1986): 232–38.
Jane English, “Abortion and the Concept of a Person,”
Canadian Journal of Philosophy 5, no. 2 (October 1975):
233–43.
Joel Feinberg, “Abortion,” in Matters of Life and Death, ed.
Tom Regan, 3rd ed. (New York: McGraw- Hill, 1993).
Ronald Munson, “Abortion,” in Intervention and Reflec-
tion: Basic Issues in Medical Ethics, ed. Ronald Munson,
7th ed. (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2004).
John T. Noonan Jr., “An Almost Absolute Value in His-
tory,” in The Morality of Abortion: Legal and Historical
Perspectives, ed. John T. Noonan Jr. (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1970).
Louis P. Pojman and Francis J. Beckwith, eds., The Abor-
tion Controversy: 25 Years After Roe v. Wade: A Reader,
2nd ed. (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1998).
Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113, 113–67 (1973). Justice Harry
Blackmun, Majority Opinion of the Court.
Michael Tooley, Abortion and Infanticide (Oxford: Clar-
endon Press; New York: Oxford University Press,
1983).
3. What is the conservative argument against
abortion?
4. What is the liberal argument for a woman’s
right to an abortion?
5. What is Thomson’s argument for a woman’s
right to an abortion? Is it sound?
6. What is Warren’s abortion argument? Is it sound?
7. Why does Warren reject the argument that
because a fetus has a potential to become a person,
it has the same rights as a full- fledged person?
8. Is being genetically human the same thing as
being a person? Why or why not?
9. What argument can the conservative lodge
against Warren’s view?
10. What claims about abortion does the moderate
reject? Do you agree? Why or why not?
FURTHER READING
Daniel Callahan, “Abortion Decisions: Personal Moral-
ity,” in Abortion: Law, Choice and Morality (New York:
Macmillan, 1970).
E T H I C A L D I L E M M A S
1. Aborting Daughters
The illegal abortion of female foetuses solely to ensure that families have sons is widely
practised within some ethnic communities in Britain and has resulted in significant
shortfalls in the proportion of girls, according to an investigation by The Independent.
The practice of sex-selective abortion is now so commonplace that it has affected
the natural 50:50 balance of boys to girls within some immigrant groups and has
led to the “disappearance” of between 1,400 and 4,700 females from the national
census records of England and Wales, we can reveal.
A government investigation last year found no evidence that women living in
the UK, but born abroad, were preferentially aborting girls. However, our deeper
statistical analysis of data from the 2011 National Census has shown widespread
discrepancies in the sex ratio of children in some immigrant families, which can only
be easily explained by women choosing to abort female foetuses in the hope of
becoming quickly pregnant again with a boy. The findings will reignite the debate
over whether pregnant women should be legally allowed to know the sex of their
babies following ultrasound scans at 13 weeks.*

236 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
Do you think sex- selection abortions are morally
permissible? What reasons can you provide to back
up your view? Some Chinese parents could argue
that such abortions are acceptable on utilitarian
grounds: aborting female fetuses prevents eco-
nomic harm to the family. Is this a good moral
argument? Why or why not?
*Steve Connor, “The Lost Girls: Illegal Abortion Widely Used by Some UK Ethnic Groups to Avoid Daughters
‘Has Reduced Female Population by Between 1,500 and 4,700,’” The Independent, January 15, 2014,
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/the-lost-girls-illegal-abortion-widely-used-by-some-uk-ethnic-
groups-to-avoid-daughters-has-reduced-9059790.html. Reprinted by permission of ESI Media.
2. Parental Notification
USA Today— Sabrina Holmquist trained as a physician in low- income neighborhoods
in the Bronx, N.Y. She says she often saw pregnant teenagers in desperate health and
family crises, including some girls who had been abused at home. That, Holmquist
says, led her to believe that doctors sometimes should be able to perform abortions
on minors without informing a parent.
But in Texas, Linda W. Flower, who practiced obstetrics for two decades, disagrees.
She says that in the vast majority of cases in which a teenage girl seeks an abortion,
a parent’s guidance is helpful and needed. Flower says she knows of young women
who have regretted having abortions.
The doctors’ views reflect the dueling arguments in the first abortion case to
come before the Supreme Court in five years: a New Hampshire dispute that tests
whether a state may bar physicians from performing an abortion on a girl younger
than 18 unless one of her parents has been notified at least 48 hours in advance—
even in instances in which the girl faces a health emergency.
The case, to be heard by the court Wednesday, is the first abortion dispute
before the justices since 2000, when they voted 5–4 to strike down Nebraska’s ban
on a procedure that critics call “partial birth” abortion because the ban lacked
an exception for cases in which the woman’s health was at risk. The new dispute
tests whether such a health exception should be required in parental- involvement
mandates, which have been passed in various forms by 43 states.†
Which doctor do you think is right about parental
notification? Under what circumstances, if any,
do you think it morally permissible for an under-
eighteen girl to have an abortion without notifying
a parent or guardian? when the girl’s life is at stake?
when she is a victim of sexual abuse, including
incest? Would it be reasonable to require parental
notification in all cases without exception?
†Joan Biskupic, “High Court Case May Signal Shift on Abortion” from USA Today, February 7, 2006. © 2006
Gannett-USA Today. All rights reserved. Used by permission and protected by the Copyright Laws of the
United States. The printing, copying, redistribution, or retransmission of this Content without express
written permission is prohibited. www.usatoday.com.

http://www.usatoday.com

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/the-lost-girls-illegal-abortion-widely-used-by-some-uk-ethnic-groups-to-avoid-daughters-has-reduced-9059790.html

CHAPTER 9: ABORTION Á 237
3. Abortion to Avert Health Risks
Medical News Today— The European Court of Human Rights on Tuesday began
considering the appeal of a Polish woman who says that in 2000 she was denied
an abortion despite warnings from physicians that she could become blind if she
continued the pregnancy, the Scotsman reports (Neighbour, Scotsman, 2/8). Alicja
Tysiac— who has three children— alleges that Poland’s abortion law violated her
rights under Article 8 and Article 14 of the European Convention for the Protection
of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, which guarantee “respect for privacy
and family life” and “prohibition of discrimination,” respectively. Polish law allows
abortion only if a woman has been raped, if there is danger to the life of the woman
or if the fetus will have birth defects, according to the Jurist (Onikepe, Jurist, 2/8).
The European Court could rule that Tysiac’s rights were violated but cannot mandate
that Poland change its abortion laws (Reuters, 2/7).‡
Should Alicja Tysiac have been permitted an abor-
tion even though her life was not at risk? Why or
why not? How serious must pregnancy- related
health problems be before a risk- lowering abortion
is permissible (if ever)? When such health dan-
gers are involved, why should— or should not— a
woman be allowed to decide for herself about
whether to have an abortion?
‡Kaiser Daily Health Policy Report, “European Court of Human Rights Considers Appeal of Polish
Woman,” published in Medical News Today, February 10, 2006. Copyright © 2005 The Henry J. Kaiser
Family Foundation. Reprinted with permission.
R E A D I N G S
A Defense of Abortion
Judith Jarvis Thomson
Most opposition to abortion relies on the premise that
the fetus is a human being, a person, from the moment
of conception. The premise is argued for, but, as I think,
not well. Take, for example, the most common argu-
ment. We are asked to notice that the development of
a human being from conception through birth into
childhood is continuous; then it is said that to draw
a line, to choose a point in this development and say
“before this point the thing is not a person, after this
point it is a person” is to make an arbitrary choice, a
choice for which in the nature of things no good rea-
son can be given. It is concluded that the fetus is, or
anyway that we had better say it is, a person from the
moment of conception. But this conclusion does not
Judith Jarvis Thomson, excerpts from “A Defense of Abortion.”
Philosophy & Public Affairs 1(1): 47–66. Copyright © 1971 Black-
well Publishing Ltd. Reproduced with permission of Blackwell
Publishing Ltd.

238 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
what shall happen in and to her body; everyone would
grant that. But surely a person’s right to life is stronger
and more stringent than the mother’s right to decide
what happens in and to her body, and so outweighs it.
So the fetus may not be killed; an abortion may not be
performed.
It sounds plausible. But now let me ask you to imag-
ine this. You wake up in the morning and find yourself
back to back in bed with an unconscious violinist. A
famous unconscious violinist. He has been found to
have a fatal kidney ailment, and the Society of Music
Lovers has canvassed all the available medical records
and found that you alone have the right blood type
to help. They have therefore kidnapped you, and last
night the violinist’s circulatory system was plugged
into yours, so that your kidneys can be used to extract
poisons from his blood as well as your own. The direc-
tor of the hospital now tells you, “Look, we’re sorry
the Society of Music Lovers did this to you— we would
never have permitted it if we had known. But still, they
did it, and the violinist now is plugged into you. To
unplug you would be to kill him. But never mind, it’s
only for nine months. By then he will have recovered
from his ailment, and can safely be unplugged from
you.” Is it morally incumbent on you to accede to this
situation? No doubt it would be very nice of you if you
did, a great kindness. But do you have to accede to it?
What if it were not nine months, but nine years? Or
longer still? What if the director of the hospital says,
“Tough luck, I agree, but you’ve now got to stay in bed,
with the violinist plugged into you, for the rest of your
life. Because remember this. All persons have a right
to life, and violinists are persons. Granted you have a
right to decide what happens in and to your body, but
a person’s right to life outweighs your right to decide
what happens in and to your body. So you cannot ever
be unplugged from him.” I imagine you would regard
this as outrageous, which suggests that something
really is wrong with that plausible- sounding argu-
ment I mentioned a moment ago.
In this case, of course, you were kidnapped; you
didn’t volunteer for the operation that plugged the vio-
linist into your kidneys. Can those who oppose abor-
tion on the ground I mentioned make an exception for
a pregnancy due to rape? Certainly. They can say that
follow. Similar things might be said about the develop-
ment of an acorn into an oak tree, and it does not follow
that acorns are oak trees, or that we had better say they
are. Arguments of this form are sometimes called “slip-
pery slope arguments”—the phrase is perhaps self-
explanatory— and it is dismaying that opponents of
abortion rely on them so heavily and uncritically.
I am inclined to agree, however, that the pros-
pects for “drawing a line” in the development of the
fetus look dim. I am inclined to think also that we
shall probably have to agree that the fetus has already
become a human person well before birth. Indeed, it
comes as a surprise when one first learns how early in
its life it begins to acquire human characteristics. By
the tenth week, for example, it already has a face, arms
and legs, fingers and toes; it has internal organs, and
brain activity is detectable. On the other hand, I think
that the premise is false, that the fetus is not a person
from the moment of conception. A newly fertilized
ovum, a newly implanted clump of cells, is no more a
person than an acorn is an oak tree. But I shall not dis-
cuss any of this. For it seems to me to be of great inter-
est to ask what happens if, for the sake of argument,
we allow the premise. How, precisely, are we supposed
to get from there to the conclusion that abortion is
morally impermissible? Opponents of abortion com-
monly spend most of their time establishing that the
fetus is a person, and hardly any time explaining the
step from there to the impermissibility of abortion.
Perhaps they think the step too simple and obvious
to require much comment. Or perhaps instead they
are simply being economical in argument. Many of
those who defend abortion rely on the premise that
the fetus is not a person, but only a bit of tissue that
will become a person at birth; and why pay out more
arguments than you have to? Whatever the explana-
tion, I suggest that the step they take is neither easy
nor obvious, that it calls for closer examination than
it is commonly given, and that when we do give it this
closer examination we shall feel inclined to reject it.
I propose, then, that we grant that the fetus is a
person from the moment of conception. How does
the argument go from here? Something like this, I take
it. Every person has a right to life. So the fetus has a
right to life. No doubt the mother has a right to decide

CHAPTER 9: ABORTION Á 239
to grant— the sum of her rights now outweighing the
fetus’ right to life?
The most familiar argument here is the follow-
ing. We are told that performing the abortion would
be directly killing1 the child, whereas doing nothing
would not be killing the mother, but only letting her
die. Moreover, in killing the child, one would be kill-
ing an innocent person, for the child has committed
no crime, and is not aiming at his mother’s death. And
then there are a variety of ways in which this might be
continued. (1) But as directly killing an innocent per-
son is always and absolutely impermissible, an abor-
tion may not be performed. Or, (2) as directly killing
an innocent person is murder, and murder is always
and absolutely impermissible, an abortion may not be
performed. Or, (3) as one’s duty to refrain from directly
killing an innocent person is more stringent than
one’s duty to keep a person from dying, an abortion
may not be performed. Or, (4) if one’s only options are
directly killing an innocent person or letting a person
die, one must prefer letting the person die, and thus an
abortion may not be performed.
Some people seem to have thought that these are
not further premises which must be added if the con-
clusion is to be reached, but that they follow from the
very fact that an innocent person has a right to life.
But this seems to me to be a mistake, and perhaps the
simplest way to show this is to bring out that while
we must certainly grant that innocent persons have a
right to life, the theses in (1) through (4) are all false.
Take (2), for example. If directly killing an innocent
person is murder, and thus is impermissible, then the
mother’s directly killing the innocent person inside
her is murder, and thus is impermissible. But it cannot
seriously be thought to be murder if the mother per-
forms an abortion on herself to save her life. It cannot
seriously be said that she must refrain, that she must sit
passively by and wait for her death. Let us look again
at the case of you and the violinist. There you are, in
bed with the violinist, and the director of the hospital
says to you, “It’s all most distressing, and I deeply sym-
pathize, but you see this is putting an additional strain
on your kidneys, and you’ll be dead within the month.
But you have to stay where you are all the same. Because
unplugging you would be directly killing an innocent
persons have a right to life only if they didn’t come
into existence because of rape; or they can say that all
persons have a right to life, but that some have less of
a right to life than others, in particular, that those who
came into existence because of rape have less. But these
statements have a rather unpleasant sound. Surely the
question of whether you have a right to life at all, or
how much of it you have, shouldn’t turn on the ques-
tion of whether or not you are the product of a rape.
And in fact the people who oppose abortion on the
ground I mentioned do not make this distinction, and
hence do not make an exception in case of rape.
Nor do they make an exception for a case in which
the mother has to spend the nine months of her preg-
nancy in bed. They would agree that would be a great
pity, and hard on the mother; but all the same, all
persons have a right to life, the fetus is a person, and
so on. I suspect, in fact, that they would not make an
exception for a case in which, miraculously enough,
the pregnancy went on for nine years, or even the rest
of the mother’s life.
Some won’t even make an exception for a case
in which continuation of the pregnancy is likely to
shorten the mother’s life; they regard abortion as
impermissible even to save the mother’s life. Such
cases are nowadays very rare, and many opponents
of abortion do not accept this extreme view. All the
same, it is a good place to begin: a number of points of
interest come out in respect to it.
1. Let us call the view that abortion is impermis-
sible even to save the mother’s life “the extreme view.”
I want to suggest first that it does not issue from the
argument I mentioned earlier without the addition of
some fairly powerful premises. Suppose a woman has
become pregnant, and now learns that she has a car-
diac condition such that she will die if she carries the
baby to term. What may be done for her? The fetus,
being a person, has a right to life, but as the mother
is a person too, so has she a right to life. Presumably
they have an equal right to life. How is it supposed to
come out that an abortion may not be performed? If
mother and child have an equal right to life, shouldn’t
we perhaps flip a coin? Or should we add to the moth-
er’s right to life her right to decide what happens in
and to her body, which everybody seems to be ready

240 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
violinist, and that’s murder, and that’s impermissible.”
If anything in the world is true, it is that you do not
commit murder, you do not do what is impermissible,
if you reach around to your back and unplug yourself
from that violinist to save your life.
The main focus of attention in writings on abor-
tion has been on what a third party may or may not do
in answer to a request from a woman for an abortion.
This is in a way understandable. Things being as they
are, there isn’t much a woman can safely do to abort
herself. So the question asked is what a third party may
do, and what the mother may do, if it is mentioned at
all, is deduced, almost as an afterthought, from what
it is concluded that third parties may do. But it seems
to me that to treat the matter in this way is to refuse to
grant to the mother that very status of person which is
so firmly insisted on for the fetus. For we cannot sim-
ply read off what a person may do from what a third
party may do. Suppose you find yourself trapped in
a tiny house with a growing child. I mean a very tiny
house, and a rapidly growing child— you are already
up against the wall of the house and in a few minutes
you’ll be crushed to death. The child on the other
hand won’t be crushed to death; if nothing is done to
stop him from growing he’ll be hurt, but in the end
he’ll simply burst open the house and walk out a free
man. Now I could well understand it if a bystander
were to say, “There’s nothing we can do for you. We
cannot choose between your life and his, we cannot
be the ones to decide who is to live, we cannot inter-
vene.” But it cannot be concluded that you too can do
nothing, that you cannot attack it to save your life.
However innocent the child may be, you do not have
to wait passively while it crushes you to death. Perhaps
a pregnant woman is vaguely felt to have the status
of house, to which we don’t allow the right of self-
defense. But if the woman houses the child, it should
be remembered that she is a person who houses it.
I should perhaps stop to say explicitly that I am
not claiming that people have a right to do anything
whatever to save their lives. I think, rather, that there
are drastic limits to the right of self- defense. If someone
threatens you with death unless you torture someone
else to death, I think you have not the right, even to
save your life, to do so. But the case under consideration
here is very different. In our case there are only two
people involved, one whose life is threatened, and one
who threatens it. Both are innocent: the one who is
threatened is not threatened because of any fault, the
one who threatens does not threaten because of any
fault. For this reason we may feel that we bystanders
cannot intervene. But the person threatened can.
In sum, a woman surely can defend her life against
the threat to it posed by the unborn child, even if
doing so involves its death. And this shows not merely
that the theses in (1) through (4) are false; it shows also
that the extreme view of abortion is false, and so we
need not canvass any other possible ways of arriving at
it from the argument I mentioned at the outset.
2. The extreme view could of course be weak-
ened to say that while abortion is permissible to save
the mother’s life, it may not be performed by a third
party, but only by the mother herself. But this cannot
be right either. For what we have to keep in mind is
that the mother and the unborn child are not like two
tenants in a small house which has, by an unfortunate
mistake, been rented to both: the mother owns the
house. The fact that she does adds to the offensiveness
of deducing that the mother can do nothing from the
supposition that third parties can do nothing. But it
does more than this: it casts a bright light on the sup-
position that third parties can do nothing. Certainly it
lets us see that a third party who says “I cannot choose
between you” is fooling himself if he thinks this is
impartiality. If Jones has found and fastened on a cer-
tain coat, which he needs to keep him from freezing,
but which Smith also needs to keep him from freezing,
then it is not impartiality that says “I cannot choose
between you” when Smith owns the coat. Women
have said again and again “This body is my body!” and
they have reason to feel angry, reason to feel that it has
been like shouting into the wind. Smith, after all, is
hardly likely to bless us if we say to him, “Of course it’s
your coat, anybody would grant that it is. But no one
may choose between you and Jones who is to have it.”
We should really ask what it is that says “no one may
choose” in the face of the fact that the body that houses
the child is the mother’s body. It may be simply a failure to
appreciate this fact. But it may be something more inter-
esting, namely the sense that one has a right to refuse to

CHAPTER 9: ABORTION Á 241
For we should now, at long last, ask what it comes
to, to have a right to life. In some views having a right
to life includes having a right to be given at least the
bare minimum one needs for continued life. But sup-
pose that what in fact is the bare minimum a man
needs for continued life is something he has no right
at all to be given? If I am sick unto death, and the
only thing that will save my life is the touch of Henry
Fonda’s cool hand on my fevered brow, then all the
same, I have no right to be given the touch of Henry
Fonda’s cool hand on my fevered brow. It would be
frightfully nice of him to fly in from the West Coast
to provide it. It would be less nice, though no doubt
well meant, if my friends flew out to the West Coast
and carried Henry Fonda back with them. But I have
no right at all against anybody that he should do this
for me. Or again, to return to the story I told earlier,
the fact that for continued life that violinist needs the
continued use of your kidneys does not establish that
he has a right to be given the continued use of your
kidneys. He certainly has no right against you that you
should give him continued use of your kidneys. For
nobody has any right to use your kidneys unless you
give him such a right; and nobody has the right against
you that you shall give him this right— if you do allow
him to go on using your kidneys, this is a kindness on
your part, and not something he can claim from you
as his due. Nor has he any right against anybody else
that they should give him continued use of your kid-
neys. Certainly he had no right against the Society of
Music Lovers that they should plug him into you in
the first place. And if you now start to unplug yourself,
having learned that you will otherwise have to spend
nine years in bed with him, there is nobody in the
world who must try to prevent you, in order to see to
it that he is given something he has a right to be given.
Some people are rather stricter about the right to
life. In their view, it does not include the right to be
given anything, but amounts to, and only to, the right
not to be killed by anybody. But here a related diffi-
culty arises. If everybody is to refrain from killing that
violinist, then everybody must refrain from doing a
great many different sorts of things. Everybody must
refrain from slitting his throat, everybody must refrain
from shooting him— and everybody must refrain
lay hands on people, even where it would be just and
fair to do so, even where justice seems to require that
somebody do so. Thus justice might call for somebody
to get Smith’s coat back from Jones, and yet you have a
right to refuse to be the one to lay hands on Jones, a right
to refuse to do physical violence to him. This, I think,
must be granted. But then what should be said is not
“no one may choose,” but only “I cannot choose,” and
indeed not even this, but “I will not act,” leaving it open
that somebody else can or should, and in particular that
anyone in a position of authority, with the job of secur-
ing people’s rights, both can and should. So this is no
difficulty. I have not been arguing that any given third
party must accede to the mother’s request that he per-
form an abortion to save her life, but only that he may.
I suppose that in some views of human life the
mother’s body is only on loan to her, the loan not
being one which gives her any prior claim to it. One
who held this view might well think it impartiality to
say “I cannot choose.” But I shall simply ignore this
possibility. My own view is that if a human being has
any just, prior claim to anything at all, he has a just,
prior claim to his own body. And perhaps this needn’t
be argued for here anyway, since, as I mentioned, the
arguments against abortion we are looking at do grant
that the woman has a right to decide what happens in
and to her body.
But although they do grant it, I have tried to show
that they do not take seriously what is done in grant-
ing it. I suggest the same thing will reappear even more
clearly when we turn away from cases in which the
mother’s life is at stake, and attend, as I propose we
now do, to the vastly more common cases in which a
woman wants an abortion for some less weighty rea-
son than preserving her own life.
3. Where the mother’s life is not at stake, the
argument I mentioned at the outset seems to have a
much stronger pull. “Everyone has a right to life, so
the unborn person has a right to life.” And isn’t the
child’s right to life weightier than anything other than
the mother’s own right to life, which she might put
forward as ground for an abortion?
This argument treats the right to life as if it were
unproblematic. It is not, and this seems to me to be
precisely the source of the mistake.

242 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
given him any such right. But we have to notice that in
unplugging yourself, you are killing him; and violin-
ists, like everybody else, have a right to life, and thus in
the view we were considering just now, the right not
to be killed. So here you do what he supposedly has a
right you shall not do, but you do not act unjustly to
him in doing it.
The emendation which may be made at this point
is this: the right to life consists not in the right not
to be killed, but rather in the right not to be killed
unjustly. This runs a risk of circularity, but never mind:
it would enable us to square the fact that the violin-
ist has a right to life with the fact that you do not act
unjustly toward him in unplugging yourself, thereby
killing him. For if you do not kill him unjustly, you do
not violate his right to life, and so it is no wonder you
do him no injustice.
But if this emendation is accepted, the gap in the
argument against abortion stares us plainly in the face:
it is by no means enough to show that the fetus is a
person, and to remind us that all persons have a right
to life— we need to be shown also that killing the fetus
violates its right to life, i.e., that abortion is unjust kill-
ing. And is it?
I suppose we may take it as a datum that in a case
of pregnancy due to rape the mother has not given
the unborn person a right to the use of her body for
food and shelter. Indeed, in what pregnancy could it
be supposed that the mother has given the unborn
person such a right? It is not as if there were unborn
persons drifting about the world, to whom a woman
who wants a child says “I invite you in.”
But it might be argued that there are other ways
one can have acquired a right to the use of another
person’s body than by having been invited to use it by
that person. Suppose a woman voluntarily indulges
in intercourse, knowing of the chance it will issue in
pregnancy, and then she does become pregnant; is she
not in part responsible for the presence, in fact the very
existence, of the unborn person inside her? No doubt
she did not invite it in. But doesn’t her partial respon-
sibility for its being there itself give it a right to the use
of her body? If so, then her aborting it would be more
like the boy’s taking away the chocolates, and less like
your unplugging yourself from the violinist— doing so
from unplugging you from him. But does he have a
right against everybody that they shall refrain from
unplugging you from him? To refrain from doing
this is to allow him to continue to use your kidneys.
It could be argued that he has a right against us that
we should allow him to continue to use your kid-
neys. That is, while he had no right against us that
we should give him the use of your kidneys, it might
be argued that he anyway has a right against us that
we shall not now intervene and deprive him of the
use of your kidneys. I shall come back to third- party
interventions later. But certainly the violinist has no
right against you that you shall allow him to continue
to use your kidneys. As I said, if you do allow him to
use them, it is a kindness on your part, and not some-
thing you owe him.
The difficulty I point to here is not peculiar to the
right to life. It reappears in connection with all the
other natural rights; and it is something which an
adequate account of rights must deal with. For pres-
ent purposes it is enough just to draw attention to it.
But I would stress that I am not arguing that people do
not have a right to life— quite to the contrary, it seems
to me that the primary control we must place on the
acceptability of an account of rights is that it should
turn out in that account to be a truth that all persons
have a right to life. I am arguing only that having a
right to life does not guarantee having either a right to
be given the use of or a right to be allowed continued
use of another person’s body— even if one needs it for
life itself. So the right to life will not serve the oppo-
nents of abortion in the very simple and clear way in
which they seem to have thought it would.
4. There is another way to bring out the difficulty.
In the most ordinary sort of case, to deprive someone
of what he has a right to is to treat him unjustly. Sup-
pose a boy and his small brother are jointly given a box
of chocolates for Christmas. If the older boy takes the
box and refuses to give his brother any of the choco-
lates, he is unjust to him, for the brother has been
given a right to half of them. But suppose that, hav-
ing learned that otherwise it means nine years in bed
with that violinist, you unplug yourself from him. You
surely are not being unjust to him, for you gave him
no right to use your kidneys, and no one else can have

CHAPTER 9: ABORTION Á 243
or falls in. Again, suppose it were like this: people- seeds
drift about in the air like pollen, and if you open your
windows, one may drift in and take root in your car-
pets or upholstery. You don’t want children, so you fix
up your windows with fine mesh screens, the very best
you can buy. As can happen, however, and on very,
very rare occasions does happen, one of the screens is
defective; and a seed drifts in and takes root. Does the
person- plant who now develops have a right to the use
of your house? Surely not— despite the fact that you
voluntarily opened your windows, you knowingly
kept carpets and upholstered furniture, and you knew
that screens were sometimes defective. Someone may
argue that you are responsible for its rooting, that it
does have a right to your house, because after all you
could have lived out your life with bare floors and furni-
ture, or with sealed windows and doors. But this won’t
do— for by the same token anyone can avoid a preg-
nancy due to rape by having a hysterectomy, or any-
way by never leaving home without a (reliable!) army.
It seems to me that the argument we are looking at
can establish at most that there are some cases in which
the unborn person has a right to the use of its mother’s
body, and therefore some cases in which abortion is
unjust killing. There is room for much discussion and
argument as to precisely which, if any. But I think we
should sidestep this issue and leave it open, for at any
rate the argument certainly does not establish that all
abortion is unjust killing.
5. There is room for yet another argument here,
however. We surely must all grant that there may be
cases in which it would be morally indecent to detach
a person from your body at the cost of his life. Suppose
you learn that what the violinist needs is not nine
years of your life, but only one hour: all you need do
to save his life is to spend one hour in that bed with
him. Suppose also that letting him use your kidneys
for that one hour would not affect your health in the
slightest. Admittedly you were kidnapped. Admittedly
you did not give anyone permission to plug him into
you. Nevertheless it seems to me plain you ought to
allow him to use your kidneys for that hour— it would
be indecent to refuse.
Again, suppose pregnancy lasted only an hour,
and constituted no threat to life or health. And
would be depriving it of what it does have a right to,
and thus would be doing it an injustice.
And then, too, it might be asked whether or not
she can kill it even to save her own life: If she volun-
tarily called it into existence, how can she now kill it,
even in self- defense?
The first thing to be said about this is that it is
something new. Opponents of abortion have been so
concerned to make out the independence of the fetus,
in order to establish that it has a right to life, just as
its mother does, that they have tended to overlook
the possible support they might gain from making out
that the fetus is dependent on the mother, in order to
establish that she has a special kind of responsibility
for it, a responsibility that gives it rights against her
which are not possessed by any independent person—
such as an ailing violinist who is a stranger to her.
On the other hand, this argument would give the
unborn person a right to its mother’s body only if her
pregnancy resulted from a voluntary act, undertaken
in full knowledge of the chance a pregnancy might
result from it. It would leave out entirely the unborn
person whose existence is due to rape. Pending the
availability of some further argument, then, we would
be left with the conclusion that unborn persons whose
existence is due to rape have no right to the use of their
mothers’ bodies, and thus that aborting them is not
depriving them of anything they have a right to and
hence is not unjust killing.
And we should also notice that it is not at all plain
that this argument really does go even as far as it pur-
ports to. For there are cases and cases, and the details
make a difference. If the room is stuffy, and I there-
fore open a window to air it, and a burglar climbs in,
it would be absurd to say, “Ah, now he can stay, she’s
given him a right to the use of her house— for she is
partially responsible for his presence there, having
voluntarily done what enabled him to get in, in full
knowledge that there are such things as burglars, and
that burglars burgle.” It would be still more absurd to
say this if I had had bars installed outside my windows,
precisely to prevent burglars from getting in, and a
burglar got in only because of a defect in the bars. It
remains equally absurd if we imagine it is not a burglar
who climbs in, but an innocent person who blunders

244 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
morally unacceptable. Take the case of Henry Fonda
again. I said earlier that I had no right to the touch
of his cool hand on my fevered brow, even though
I needed it to save my life. I said it would be frightfully
nice of him to fly in from the West Coast to provide
me with it, but that I had no right against him that he
should do so. But suppose he isn’t on the West Coast.
Suppose he has only to walk across the room, place a
hand briefly on my brow— and lo, my life is saved. Then
surely he ought to do it, it would be indecent to refuse.
Is it to be said “Ah, well, it follows that in this case she
has a right to the touch of his hand on her brow, and so
it would be an injustice in him to refuse”? So that I have
a right to it when it is easy for him to provide it, though
no right when it’s hard? It’s rather a shocking idea that
anyone’s rights should fade away and disappear as it
gets harder and harder to accord them to him.
So my own view is that even though you ought to
let the violinist use your kidneys for the one hour he
needs, we should not conclude that he has a right to
do so— we should say that if you refuse, you are, like
the boy who owns all the chocolates and will give
none away, self- centered and callous, indecent in fact,
but not unjust. And similarly, that even supposing a
case in which a woman pregnant due to rape ought to
allow the unborn person to use her body for the hour
he needs, we should not conclude that he has a right
to do so; we should conclude that she is self- centered,
callous, indecent, but not unjust, if she refuses. The
complaints are no less grave; they are just different.
However, there is no need to insist on this point. If
anyone does wish to deduce “he has a right” from
“you ought,” then all the same he must surely grant
that there are cases in which it is not morally required
of you that you allow that violinist to use your kid-
neys, and in which he does not have a right to use
them, and in which you do not do him an injustice if
you refuse. And so also for mother and unborn child.
Except in such cases as the unborn person has a right
to demand it— and we were leaving open the possibil-
ity that there may be such cases— nobody is morally
required to make large sacrifices, of health, of all other
interests and concerns, of all other duties and com-
mitments, for nine years, or even for nine months, in
order to keep another person alive.
suppose that a woman becomes pregnant as a result of
rape. Admittedly she did not voluntarily do anything
to bring about the existence of a child. Admittedly she
did nothing at all which would give the unborn per-
son a right to the use of her body. All the same it might
well be said, as in the newly emended violinist story,
that she ought to allow it to remain for that hour— that
it would be indecent in her to refuse.
Now some people are inclined to use the term
“right” in such a way that it follows from the fact that
you ought to allow a person to use your body for the
hour he needs, that he has a right to use your body for
the hour he needs, even though he has not been given
that right by any person or act. They may say that it
follows also that if you refuse, you act unjustly toward
him. This use of the term is perhaps so common that
it cannot be called wrong; nevertheless it seems to
me to be an unfortunate loosening of what we would
do better to keep a tight rein on. Suppose that box of
chocolates I mentioned earlier had not been given to
both boys jointly, but was given only to the older boy.
There he sits, stolidly eating his way through the box,
his small brother watching enviously. Here we are
likely to say “You ought not to be so mean. You ought
to give your brother some of those chocolates.” My
own view is that it just does not follow from the truth
of this that the brother has any right to any of the
chocolates. If the boy refuses to give his brother any,
he is greedy, stingy, callous— but not unjust. I suppose
that the people I have in mind will say it does follow
that the brother has a right to some of the chocolates,
and thus that the boy does act unjustly if he refuses
to give his brother any. But the effect of saying this is
to obscure what we should keep distinct, namely the
difference between the boy’s refusal in this case and
the boy’s refusal in the earlier case, in which the box
was given to both boys jointly, and in which the small
brother thus had what was from any point of view
clear title to half.
A further objection to so using the term “right” that
from the fact that A ought to do a thing for B, it follows
that B has a right against A that A do it for him, is that it
is going to make the question of whether or not a man
has a right to a thing turn on how easy it is to provide
him with it; and this seems not merely unfortunate, but

CHAPTER 9: ABORTION Á 245
even trouble to pick up a phone to call the police. Min-
imally Decent Samaritanism would call for doing at
least that, and their not having done it was monstrous.
After telling the story of the Good Samaritan, Jesus
said “Go, and do thou likewise.” Perhaps he meant
that we are morally required to act as the Good Samari-
tan did. Perhaps he was urging people to do more than
is morally required of them. At all events it seems plain
that it was not morally required of any of the thirty-
eight that he rush out to give direct assistance at the
risk of his own life, and that it is not morally required
of anyone that he give long stretches of his life— nine
years or nine months— to sustaining the life of a per-
son who has no special right (we were leaving open
the possibility of this) to demand it.
Indeed, with one rather striking class of excep-
tions, no one in any country in the world is legally
required to do anywhere near as much as this for any-
one else. The class of exceptions is obvious. My main
concern here is not the state of the law in respect to
abortion, but it is worth drawing attention to the fact
that in no state in this country is any man compelled
by law to be even a Minimally Decent Samaritan
to any person; there is no law under which charges
could be brought against the thirty- eight who stood
by while Kitty Genovese died. By contrast, in most
states in this country women are compelled by law
to be not merely Minimally Decent Samaritans, but
Good Samaritans to unborn persons inside them. This
doesn’t by itself settle anything one way or the other,
because it may well be argued that there should be
laws in this country— as there are in many European
countries— compelling at least Minimally Decent
Samaritanism. But it does show that there is a gross
injustice in the existing state of the law. And it shows
also that the groups currently working against liberal-
ization of abortion laws, in fact working toward hav-
ing it declared unconstitutional for a state to permit
abortion, had better start working for the adoption
of Good Samaritan laws generally, or earn the charge
that they are acting in bad faith.
I should think, myself, that Minimally Decent
Samaritan laws would be one thing, Good Samaritan
laws quite another, and in fact highly improper. But
we are not here concerned with the law. What we
6. We have in fact to distinguish between two
kinds of Samaritan: the Good Samaritan and what we
might call the Minimally Decent Samaritan. The story
of the Good Samaritan, you will remember, goes like
this:
A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho,
and fell among thieves, which stripped him of his rai-
ment, and wounded him, and departed, leaving him
half dead.
And by chance there came down a certain priest
that way; and when he saw him, he passed by on the
other side.
And likewise a Levite, when he was at the place,
came and looked on him, and passed by on the other
side.
But a certain Samaritan, as he journeyed, came
where he was; and when he saw him he had compas-
sion on him.
And went to him, and bound up his wounds, pour-
ing in oil and wine, and set him on his own beast, and
brought him to an inn, and took care of him.
And on the morrow, when he departed, he took out
two pence, and gave them to the host, and said unto
him, “Take care of him; and whatsoever thou spendest
more, when I come again, I will repay thee.”
(Luke 10:30–35)
The Good Samaritan went out of his way, at some
cost to himself, to help one in need of it. We are not
told what the options were, that is, whether or not
the priest and the Levite could have helped by doing
less than the Good Samaritan did, but assuming they
could have, then the fact they did nothing at all shows
they were not even Minimally Decent Samaritans, not
because they were not Samaritans, but because they
were not even minimally decent.
These things are a matter of degree, of course,
but there is a difference, and it comes out perhaps
most clearly in the story of Kitty Genovese, who, as
you will remember, was murdered while thirty- eight
people watched or listened, and did nothing at all to
help her. A Good Samaritan would have rushed out
to give direct assistance against the murderer. Or per-
haps we had better allow that it would have been a
Splendid Samaritan who did this, on the ground that
it would have involved a risk of death for himself. But
the thirty- eight not only did not do this, they did not

246 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
I have in effect dealt (briefly) with this argument
in section 4 above; but a (still briefer) recapitulation
now may be in order. Surely we do not have any such
“special responsibility” for a person unless we have
assumed it, explicitly or implicitly. If a set of parents
do not try to prevent pregnancy, do not obtain an
abortion, and then at the time of birth of the child do
not put it out for adoption, but rather take it home
with them, then they have assumed responsibility
for it, they have given it rights, and they cannot now
withdraw support from it at the cost of its life because
they now find it difficult to go on providing for it. But
if they have taken all reasonable precautions against
having a child, they do not simply by virtue of their
biological relationship to the child who comes into
existence have a special responsibility for it. They may
wish to assume responsibility for it, or they may not
wish to. And I am suggesting that if assuming respon-
sibility for it would require large sacrifices, then they
may refuse. A Good Samaritan would not refuse— or
anyway, a Splendid Samaritan, if the sacrifices that
had to be made were enormous. But then so would a
Good Samaritan assume responsibility for that violin-
ist; so would Henry Fonda, if he is a Good Samaritan,
fly in from the West Coast and assume responsibility
for me.
8. My argument will be found unsatisfactory on
two counts by many of those who want to regard abor-
tion as morally permissible. First, while I do argue that
abortion is not impermissible, I do not argue that it is
always permissible. There may well be cases in which
carrying the child to term requires only Minimally
Decent Samaritanism of the mother, and this is a stan-
dard we must not fall below. I am inclined to think it
a merit of my account precisely that it does not give a
general yes or a general no. It allows for and supports
our sense that, for example, a sick and desperately
frightened fourteen- year- old schoolgirl, pregnant due
to rape, may of course choose abortion, and that any
law which rules this out is an insane law. And it also
allows for and supports our sense that in other cases
resort to abortion is even positively indecent. It would
be indecent in the woman to request an abortion, and
indecent in a doctor to perform it, if she is in her sev-
enth month, and wants the abortion just to avoid the
should ask is not whether anybody should be com-
pelled by law to be a Good Samaritan, but whether
we must accede to a situation in which somebody is
being compelled— by nature, perhaps— to be a Good
Samaritan. We have, in other words, to look now at
third- party interventions. I have been arguing that
no person is morally required to make large sacri-
fices to sustain the life of another who has no right to
demand them, and this even where the sacrifices do
not include life itself; we are not morally required to
be Good Samaritans or anyway Very Good Samaritans
to one another. But what if a man cannot extricate
himself from such a situation? What if he appeals to
us to extricate him? It seems to me plain that there are
cases in which we can, cases in which a Good Samari-
tan would extricate him. There you are, you were kid-
napped, and nine years in bed with that violinist lie
ahead of you. You have your own life to lead. You are
sorry, but you simply cannot see giving up so much of
your life to the sustaining of his. You cannot extricate
yourself, and ask us to do so. I should have thought
that— in light of his having no right to the use of your
body— it was obvious that we do not have to accede
to your being forced to give up so much. We can do
what you ask. There is no injustice to the violinist in
our doing so.
7. Following the lead of the opponents of abortion,
I have throughout been speaking of the fetus merely as
a person, and what I have been asking is whether or
not the argument we began with, which proceeds only
from the fetus’ being a person, really does establish its
conclusion. I have argued that it does not.
But of course there are arguments and arguments,
and it may be said that I have simply fastened on the
wrong one. It may be said that what is important is
not merely the fact that the fetus is a person, but that
it is a person for whom the woman has a special kind
of responsibility issuing from the fact that she is its
mother. And it might be argued that all my analo-
gies are therefore irrelevant— for you do not have that
special kind of responsibility for that violinist, Henry
Fonda does not have that special kind of responsibil-
ity for me. And our attention might be drawn to the
fact that men and women both are compelled by law
to provide support for their children.

CHAPTER 9: ABORTION Á 247
thought of a child, a bit of herself, put out for adop-
tion and never seen or heard of again. She may there-
fore want not merely that the child be detached from
her, but more, that it die. Some opponents of abortion
are inclined to regard this as beneath contempt—
thereby showing insensitivity to what is surely a pow-
erful source of despair. All the same, I agree that the
desire for the child’s death is not one which anybody
may gratify, should it turn out to be possible to detach
the child alive.
At this place, however, it should be remembered
that we have only been pretending throughout that
the fetus is a human being from the moment of con-
ception. A very early abortion is surely not the killing
of a person, and so is not dealt with by anything I have
said here.
NOTE
1. The term “direct” in the arguments I refer to is a technical
one. Roughly, what is meant by “direct killing” is either
killing as an end in itself, or killing as a means to some
end, for example, the end of saving someone else’s life.
nuisance of postponing a trip abroad. The very fact
that the arguments I have been drawing attention to
treat all cases of abortion, or even all cases of abortion
in which the mother’s life is not at stake, as morally on
a par ought to have made them suspect at the outset.
Secondly, while I am arguing for the permissibil-
ity of abortion in some cases, I am not arguing for
the right to secure the death of the unborn child.
It is easy to confuse these two things in that up to a
certain point in the life of the fetus it is not able to
survive outside the mother’s body; hence removing
it from her body guarantees its death. But they are
importantly different. I have argued that you are not
morally required to spend nine months in bed, sus-
taining the life of that violinist; but to say this is by no
means to say that if, when you unplug yourself, there
is a miracle and he survives, you then have a right to
turn round and slit his throat. You may detach your-
self even if this costs him his life; you have no right
to be guaranteed his death, by some other means, if
unplugging yourself does not kill him. There are some
people who will feel dissatisfied by this feature of my
argument. A woman may be utterly devastated by the
On the Moral and Legal Status of Abortion
Mary Anne Warren
not a human being, in the morally relevant sense of
that term, we ought not to conclude that the difficul-
ties involved in determining whether or not a fetus is
human make it impossible to produce any satisfactory
solution to the problem of the moral status of abor-
tion. For it is possible to show that, on the basis of
intuitions which we may expect even the opponents
of abortion to share, a fetus is not a person, and hence
not the sort of entity to which it is proper to ascribe
full moral rights.
Of course, while some philosophers would deny
the possibility of any such proof, others will deny that
there is any need for it, since the moral permissibility of
We will be concerned with both the moral status of
abortion, which for our purposes we may define as
the act which a woman performs in voluntarily termi-
nating, or allowing another person to terminate, her
pregnancy, and the legal status which is appropriate
for this act. I will argue that, while it is not possible
to produce a satisfactory defense of a woman’s right
to obtain an abortion without showing that a fetus is
Mary Anne Warren, excerpts from “On the Moral and Legal Status
of Abortion” in The Monist Volume 57, pp. 43–61. Copyright © The
Monist: An International Quarterly Journal of General Philosophical
Inquiry, The Hegeler Institute, Peru, IL. Reprinted by permission.

248 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
abortion a form of murder of the existence of any
such right unless we are able to produce a clear and
convincing refutation of the traditional antiabortion
argument, and this has not, to my knowledge, been
done. With respect to the two most vital issues which
that argument involves, i.e., the humanity of the fetus
and its implication for the moral status of abortion,
confusion has prevailed on both sides of the dispute.
Thus, both proabortionists and antiabortionists
have tended to abstract the question of whether abor-
tion is wrong to that of whether it is wrong to destroy
a fetus, just as though the rights of another person
were not necessarily involved. This mistaken abstrac-
tion has led to the almost universal assumption that
if a fetus is a human being, with a right to life, then
it follows immediately that abortion is wrong (except
perhaps when necessary to save the woman’s life), and
that it ought to be prohibited. It has also been gener-
ally assumed that unless the question about the status
of the fetus is answered, the moral status of abortion
cannot possibly be determined.
* * *
Judith Thomson is . . . the only writer I am aware
of who has seriously questioned this assumption; she
has argued that, even if we grant the antiabortion-
ist his claim that a fetus is a human being, with the
same right to life as any other human being, we can
still demonstrate that, in at least some and perhaps
most cases, a woman is under no moral obligation to
complete an unwanted pregnancy.1 Her argument is
worth examining, since if it holds up it may enable us
to establish the moral permissibility of abortion with-
out becoming involved in problems about what enti-
tles an entity to be considered human, and accorded
full moral rights. To be able to do this would be a great
gain in the power and simplicity of the proabortion
position, since, although I will argue that these prob-
lems can be solved at least as decisively as can any
other moral problem, we should certainly be pleased
to be able to avoid having to solve them as part of the
justification of abortion.
On the other hand, even if Thomson’s argument
does not hold up, her insight, i.e., that it requires argu-
ment to show that if fetuses are human then abortion
abortion appears to them to be too obvious to require
proof. But the inadequacy of this attitude should be
evident from the fact that both the friends and the
foes of abortion consider their position to be morally
self- evident. Because proabortionists have never ade-
quately come to grips with the conceptual issues sur-
rounding abortion, most if not all, of the arguments
which they advance in opposition to laws restricting
access to abortion fail to refute or even weaken the
traditional antiabortion argument, i.e., that a fetus is a
human being, and therefore abortion is murder.
These arguments are typically of one of two sorts.
Either they point to the terrible side effects of the
restrictive laws, e.g., the deaths due to illegal abortions,
and the fact that it is poor women who suffer the most
as a result of these laws, or else they state that to deny a
woman access to abortion is to deprive her of her right
to control her own body. Unfortunately, however, the
fact that restricting access to abortion has tragic side
effects does not, in itself, show that the restrictions are
unjustified, since murder is wrong regardless of the con-
sequences of prohibiting it; and the appeal to the right
to control one’s body, which is generally construed as
a property right, is at best a rather feeble argument for
the permissibility of abortion. Mere ownership does
not give me the right to kill innocent people whom
I find on my property, and indeed I am apt to be held
responsible if such people injure themselves while on
my property. It is equally unclear that I have any moral
right to expel an innocent person from my property
when I know that doing so will result in his death.
Furthermore, it is probably inappropriate to describe
a woman’s body as her property, since it seems natural
to hold that a person is something distinct from her
property, but not from her body. Even those who would
object to the identification of a person with his body, or
with the conjunction of his body and his mind, must
admit that it would be very odd to describe, say, break-
ing a leg, as damaging one’s property, and much more
appropriate to describe it as injuring oneself. Thus it is
probably a mistake to argue that the right to obtain an
abortion is in any way derived from the right to own
and regulate property.
But however we wish to construe the right to abor-
tion, we cannot hope to convince those who consider

CHAPTER 9: ABORTION Á 249
I
We turn now to Professor Thomson’s case for the
claim that even if a fetus has full moral rights, abortion
is still morally permissible, at least sometimes, and for
some reasons other than to save the woman’s life. Her
argument is based upon a clever, but I think faulty,
analogy. She asks us to picture ourselves waking up
one day, in bed with a famous violinist. Imagine that
you have been kidnapped, and your bloodstream
hooked up to that of the violinist, who happens to
have an ailment which will certainly kill him unless
he is permitted to share your kidneys for a period of
nine months. No one else can save him, since you
alone have the right type of blood. He will be uncon-
scious all that time, and you will have to stay in bed
with him, but after the nine months are over he may
be unplugged, completely cured, that is provided that
you have cooperated.
Now then, she continues, what are your obliga-
tions in this situation? The antiabortionist, if he is
consistent, will have to say that you are obligated to
stay in bed with the violinist: for all people have a
right to life, and violinists are people, and therefore it
would be murder for you to disconnect yourself from
him and let him die [p. 238]. But this is outrageous,
and so there must be something wrong with the same
argument when it is applied to abortion. It would cer-
tainly be commendable of you to agree to save the
violinist, but it is absurd to suggest that your refusal
to do so would be murder. His right to life does not
obligate you to do whatever is required to keep him
alive; nor does it justify anyone else in forcing you to
do so. A law which required you to stay in bed with the
violinist would clearly be an unjust law, since it is no
proper function of the law to force unwilling people
to make huge sacrifices for the sake of other people
toward whom they have no such prior obligation.
Thomson concludes that, if this analogy is an apt
one, then we can grant the antiabortionist his claim
that a fetus is a human being, and still hold that it is at
least sometimes the case that a pregnant woman has
the right to refuse to be a Good Samaritan towards the
fetus, i.e., to obtain an abortion. For there is a great
gap between the claim that x has a right to life, and the
is properly classified as murder, is an extremely
valuable one. The assumption she attacks is particu-
larly invidious, for it amounts to the decision that it
is appropriate, in deciding the moral status of abor-
tion, to leave the rights of the pregnant woman out
of consideration entirely, except possibly when her
life is threatened. Obviously, this will not do; deter-
mining what moral rights, if any, a fetus possesses is
only the first step in determining the moral status of
abortion. Step two, which is at least equally essen-
tial, is finding a just solution to the conflict between
whatever rights the fetus may have, and the rights of
the woman who is unwillingly pregnant. While the
historical error has been to pay far too little attention
to the second step, Ms. Thomson’s suggestion is that
if we look at the second step first we may find that a
woman has a right to obtain an abortion regardless of
what rights the fetus has.
Our own inquiry will also have two stages. In Sec-
tion I, we will consider whether or not it is possible
to establish that abortion is morally permissible even
on the assumption that a fetus is an entity with a
full- fledged right to life. I will argue that in fact this
cannot be established, at least not with the conclu-
siveness which is essential to our hopes of convinc-
ing those who are skeptical about the morality of
abortion, and that we therefore cannot avoid deal-
ing with the question of whether or not a fetus really
does have the same right to life as a (more fully devel-
oped) human being.
In Section II, I will propose an answer to this ques-
tion, namely, that a fetus cannot be considered a mem-
ber of the moral community, the set of beings with
full and equal moral rights, for the simple reason that
it is not a person, and that it is personhood, and not
genetic humanity, . . . which is the basis for member-
ship in this community. I will argue that a fetus, what-
ever its stage of development, satisfies none of the basic
criteria of personhood, and is not even enough like a
person to be accorded even some of the same rights on
the basis of this resemblance. Nor, as we will see, is a
fetus’s potential personhood a threat to the morality of
abortion, since, whatever the rights of potential people
may be, they are invariably overridden in any conflict
with the moral rights of actual people.

250 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
claim that y is obligated to do whatever is necessary to
keep x alive, let alone that he ought to be forced to do
so. It is y’s duty to keep x alive only if he has somehow
contracted a special obligation to do so; and a woman
who is unwillingly pregnant, e.g., who was raped,
has done nothing which obligates her to make the
enormous sacrifice which is necessary to preserve the
conceptus.
This argument is initially quite plausible, and in
the extreme case of pregnancy due to rape it is prob-
ably conclusive. Difficulties arise, however, when we
try to specify more exactly the range of cases in which
abortion is clearly justifiable even on the assumption
that the fetus is human. Professor Thomson consid-
ers it a virtue of her argument that it does not enable
us to conclude that abortion is always permissible. It
would, she says, be “indecent” for a woman in her sev-
enth month to obtain an abortion just to avoid having
to postpone a trip to Europe. On the other hand, her
argument enables us to see that “a sick and desperately
frightened schoolgirl pregnant due to rape may of
course choose abortion, and that any law which rules
this out is an insane law” [p. 246]. So far, so good; but
what are we to say about the woman who becomes
pregnant not through rape but as a result of her own
carelessness, or because of contraceptive failure, or
who gets pregnant intentionally and then changes
her mind about wanting a child? With respect to such
cases, the violinist analogy is of much less use to the
defender of the woman’s right to obtain an abortion.
Indeed, the choice of a pregnancy due to rape,
as an example of a case in which abortion is permis-
sible even if a fetus is considered a human being,
is extremely significant; for it is only in the case of
pregnancy due to rape that the woman’s situation is
adequately analogous to the violinist case for our intu-
itions about the latter to transfer convincingly. The
crucial difference between a pregnancy due to rape
and the normal case of an unwanted pregnancy is that
in the normal case, we cannot claim that the woman is
in no way responsible for her predicament; she could
have remained chaste, or taken her pills more faith-
fully, or abstained on dangerous days, and so on. If,
on the other hand, you are kidnapped by strangers,
and hooked up to a strange violinist, then you are free
of any shred of responsibility for the situation, on the
basis of which it could be argued that you are obligated
to keep the violinist alive. Only when her pregnancy is
due to rape is a woman clearly just as nonresponsible.2
Consequently, there is room for the antiabor-
tionist to argue that in the normal case of unwanted
pregnancy a woman has, by her own actions, assumed
responsibility for the fetus. For if x behaves in a way
which he could have avoided, and which he knows
involves, let us say, a 1 percent chance of bringing
into existence a human being, with a right to life, and
does so knowing that if this should happen then that
human being will perish unless x does certain things to
keep him alive, then it is by no means clear that when it
does happen x is free of any obligation to what he knew
in advance would be required to keep that human
being alive.
The plausibility of such an argument is enough to
show that the Thomson analogy can provide a clear
and persuasive defense of a woman’s right to obtain
an abortion only with respect to those cases in which
the woman is in no way responsible for her pregnancy,
e.g., where it is due to rape. In all other cases, we would
almost certainly conclude that it was necessary to
look carefully at the particular circumstances in order
to determine the extent of the woman’s responsibil-
ity, and hence the extent of her obligation. This is an
extremely unsatisfactory outcome, from the view-
point of the opponents of restrictive abortion laws,
most of whom are convinced that a woman has a right
to obtain an abortion regardless of how and why she
got pregnant.
Of course a supporter of the violinist analogy
might point out that it is absurd to suggest that forget-
ting her pill one day might be sufficient to obligate a
woman to complete an unwanted pregnancy. And
indeed it is absurd to suggest this. As we will see, the
moral right to obtain an abortion is not in the least
dependent upon the extent to which the woman is
responsible for her pregnancy. But unfortunately, once
we allow the assumption that a fetus has full moral
rights, we cannot avoid taking this absurd suggestion
seriously. Perhaps we can make this point more clear
by altering the violinist story just enough to make it
more analogous to a normal unwanted pregnancy

CHAPTER 9: ABORTION Á 251
and less to a pregnancy due to rape, and then seeing
whether it is still obvious that you are not obligated to
stay in bed with the fellow.
Suppose, then, that violinists are peculiarly prone
to the sort of illness the only cure for which is the use
of someone else’s bloodstream for nine months, and
that because of this there has been formed a society
of music lovers who agree that whenever a violinist
is stricken they will draw lots and the loser will, by
some means, be made the one and only person capable
of saving him. Now then, would you be obligated to
cooperate in curing the violinist if you had volun-
tarily joined this society, knowing the possible conse-
quences, and then your name had been drawn and you
had been kidnapped? Admittedly, you did not promise
ahead of time that you would, but you did deliberately
place yourself in a position in which it might happen
that a human life would be lost if you did not. Surely
this is at least a prima facie reason for supposing that
you have an obligation to stay in bed with the violin-
ist. Suppose that you had gotten your name drawn
deliberately; surely that would be quite a strong reason
for thinking that you had such an obligation.
It might be suggested that there is one important
disanalogy between the modified violinist case and
the case of an unwanted pregnancy, which makes the
woman’s responsibility significantly less, namely, the
fact that the fetus comes into existence as the result of
the woman’s actions. This fact might give her a right to
refuse to keep it alive, whereas she would not have had
this right had it existed previously, independently,
and then as a result of her actions become dependent
upon her for its survival.
My own intuition, however, is that x has no more
right to bring into existence, either deliberately or as a
foreseeable result of actions he could have avoided, a
being with full moral rights (y), and then refuse to do
what he knew beforehand would be required to keep
that being alive, then he has to enter into an agree-
ment with an existing person, whereby he may be
called upon to save that person’s life, and then refuse
to do so when so called upon. Thus, x’s responsibility
for y’s existence does not seem to lessen his obligation
to keep y alive, if he is also responsible for y’s being in a
situation in which only he can save him.
Whether or not this intuition is entirely correct, it
brings us back once again to the conclusion that once
we allow the assumption that a fetus has full moral
rights it becomes an extremely complex and difficult
question whether and when abortion is justifiable.
Thus the Thomson analogy cannot help us produce a
clear and persuasive proof of the moral permissibility of
abortion. Nor will the opponents of the restrictive laws
thank us for anything less; for their conviction (for the
most part) is that abortion is obviously not a morally
serious and extremely unfortunate, even though some-
times justified act, comparable to killing in self- defense
or to letting the violinist die, but rather is closer to
being a morally neutral act, like cutting one’s hair.
The basis of this conviction, I believe, is the real-
ization that a fetus is not a person, and thus does not
have a full- fledged right to life. Perhaps the reason why
this claim has been so inadequately defended is that
it seems self- evident to those who accept it. And so it
is, insofar as it follows from what I take to be perfectly
obvious claims about the nature of personhood, and
about the proper grounds for ascribing moral rights,
claims which ought, indeed, to be obvious to both the
friends and foes of abortion. Nevertheless, it is worth
examining these claims, and showing how they dem-
onstrate the moral innocuousness of abortion, since
this apparently has not been adequately done before.
II
The question which we must answer in order to pro-
duce a satisfactory solution to the problem of the
moral status of abortion is this: How are we to define
the moral community, the set of beings with full and
equal moral rights, such that we can decide whether a
human fetus is a member of this community or not?
What sort of entity, exactly, has the inalienable rights
to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? . . . What
reason is there for identifying the moral community
with the set of all human beings, in whatever way we
have chosen to define that term?
1. On the Definition of ‘Human’
One reason why this vital . . . question is so frequently
overlooked in the debate over the moral status of

252 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
way of defining the moral community, which I will
argue for only to the extent of explaining why it is, or
should be, self- evident. The suggestion is simply that
the moral community consists of all and only people,
rather than all and only human beings;5 and probably
the best way of demonstrating its self- evidence is by
considering the concept of personhood, to see what
sorts of entity are and are not persons, and what the
decision that a being is or is not a person implies about
its moral rights.
What characteristics entitle an entity to be con-
sidered a person? This is obviously not the place to
attempt a complete analysis of the concept of person-
hood, but we do not need such a fully adequate analy-
sis just to determine whether and why a fetus is or isn’t
a person. All we need is a rough and approximate list
of the most basic criteria of personhood, and some
idea of which, or how many, of these an entity must
satisfy in order to properly be considered a person.
In searching for such criteria, it is useful to
look beyond the set of people with whom we are
acquainted, and ask how we would decide whether a
totally alien being was a person or not. (For we have no
right to assume that genetic humanity is necessary for
personhood.) Imagine a space traveler who lands on
an unknown planet and encounters a race of beings
utterly unlike any he has ever seen or heard of. If he
wants to be sure of behaving morally toward these
beings, he has to somehow decide whether they are
people, and hence have full moral rights, or whether
they are the sort of thing which he need not feel guilty
about treating as, for example, a source of food.
How should he go about making this decision? If
he has some anthropological background, he might
look for such things as religion, art, and the manufac-
turing of tools, weapons, or shelters, since these fac-
tors have been used to distinguish our human from
our prehuman ancestors, in what seems to be closer
to the moral than the genetic sense of ‘human’. And
no doubt he would be right to consider the presence
of such factors as good evidence that the alien beings
were people, and morally human. It would, however,
be overly anthropocentric of him to take the absence
of these things as adequate evidence that they were
not, since we can imagine people who have progressed
abortion is that the term ‘human’ has two distinct,
but not often distinguished, senses. This fact results in
a slide of meaning, which serves to conceal the falla-
ciousness of the traditional argument that since (1) it
is wrong to kill innocent human beings, and (2) fetuses
are innocent human beings, then (3) it is wrong to kill
fetuses. For if ‘human’ is used in the same sense in
both (1) and (2) then, whichever of the two senses is
meant, one of these premises is question- begging. And
if it is used in two different senses then of course the
conclusion doesn’t follow.
Thus, (1) is a self- evident moral truth,3 and avoids
begging the question about abortion, only if ‘human
being’ is used to mean something like “a full- fledged
member of the moral community.” (It may or may not
also be meant to refer exclusively to members of the
species Homo sapiens.) We may call this the moral sense
of ‘human’. It is not to be confused with what we will
call the genetic sense, i.e., the sense in which any mem-
ber of the species is a human being, and no member
of any other species could be. If (1) is acceptable only
if the moral sense is intended, (2) is non- question-
begging only if what is intended is the genetic sense.
In “Deciding Who is Human,” [John] Noonan
argues for the classification of fetuses with human
beings by pointing to the presence of the full genetic
code, and the potential capacity for rational thought.4
It is clear that what he needs to show, for his version
of the traditional argument to be valid, is that fetuses
are human in the moral sense, the sense in which it
is analytically true that all human beings have full
moral rights. But, in the absence of any argument
showing that whatever is genetically human is also
morally human, and he gives none, nothing more
than genetic humanity can be demonstrated by the
presence of the human genetic code. And, as we will
see, the potential capacity for rational thought can at
most show that an entity has the potential for becom-
ing human in the moral sense.
2. Defining the Moral Community
Can it be established that genetic humanity is suffi-
cient for moral humanity? I think that there are very
good reasons for not defining the moral community
in this way. I would like to suggest an alternative

CHAPTER 9: ABORTION Á 253
that he had no notion at all of what a person is—
perhaps because he had confused the concept of a per-
son with that of genetic humanity. If the opponents
of abortion were to deny the appropriateness of these
five criteria, I do not know what further arguments
would convince them. We would probably have to
admit that our conceptual schemes were indeed irrec-
oncilably different, and that our dispute could not be
settled objectively.
I do not expect this to happen, however, since
I think that the concept of a person is one which is very
nearly universal (to people), and that it is common
to both proabortionists and antiabortionists, even
though neither group has fully realized the relevance
of this concept to the resolution of their dispute. Fur-
thermore, I think that on reflection even the antiabor-
tionists ought to agree not only that (1)–(5) are central
to the concept of personhood, but also that it is a part
of this concept that all and only people have full moral
rights. The concept of a person is in part a moral con-
cept; once we have admitted that x is a person we have
recognized, even if we have not agreed to respect, x’s
right to be treated as a member of the moral commu-
nity. It is true that the claim that x is a human being is
more commonly voiced as part of an appeal to treat x
decently than is the claim that x is a person, but this is
either because ‘human being’ is here used in the sense
which implies personhood, or because the genetic and
moral senses of ‘human’ have been confused.
Now if (1)–(5) are indeed the primary criteria of
personhood, then it is clear that genetic humanity is
neither necessary nor sufficient for establishing that
an entity is a person. Some human beings are not
people, and there may well be people who are not
human beings. A man or woman whose consciousness
has been permanently obliterated but who remains
alive is a human being which is no longer a person;
defective human beings, with no appreciable mental
capacity, are not and presumably never will be people;
and a fetus is a human being which is not yet a person,
and which therefore cannot coherently be said to have
full moral rights. Citizens of the next century should
be prepared to recognize highly advanced, self- aware
robots or computers, should such be developed, and
intelligent inhabitants of other worlds, should such
beyond, or evolved without ever developing, these
cultural characteristics.
I suggest that the traits which are most central to
the concept of personhood, or humanity in the moral
sense, are, very roughly, the following:
1. consciousness (of objects and events external and/
or internal to the being), and in particular the
capacity to feel pain;
2. reasoning (the developed capacity to solve new and
relatively complex problems);
3. self- motivated activity (activity which is relatively
independent of either genetic or direct external
control);
4. the capacity to communicate, by whatever means,
messages of an indefinite variety of types, that
is, not just with an indefinite number of possible
contents, but on indefinitely many possible topics;
5. the presence of self- concepts, and self- awareness,
either individual or racial, or both.
Admittedly, there are apt to be a great many prob-
lems involved in formulating precise definitions of
these criteria, let alone in developing universally valid
behavioral criteria for deciding when they apply. But
I will assume that both we and our explorer know
approximately what (1)–(5) mean, and that he is also
able to determine whether or not they apply. How,
then should he use his findings to decide whether or
not the alien beings are people? We needn’t suppose
that an entity must have all of these attributes to be
properly considered a person; (1) and (2) alone may
well be sufficient for personhood, and quite probably
(1)–(3) are sufficient. Neither do we need to insist that
any one of these criteria is necessary for personhood,
although once again (1) and (2) look like fairly good
candidates for necessary conditions, as does (3), if
‘activity’ is construed so as to include the activity of
reasoning.
All we need to claim, to demonstrate that a fetus is
not a person, is that any being which satisfies none of
(1)–(5) is certainly not a person. I consider this claim to
be so obvious that I think anyone who denied it, and
claimed that a being which satisfied none of (1)–(5)
was a person all the same, would thereby demonstrate

254 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
in us almost the same powerful protective instinct as
is commonly aroused by a small infant, nevertheless
it is not significantly more personlike than is a very
small embryo. It is somewhat more personlike; it can
apparently feel and respond to pain, and it may even
have a rudimentary form of consciousness, insofar as
its brain is quite active. Nevertheless, it seems safe to
say that it is not fully conscious, in the way that an
infant of a few months is, and that it cannot reason,
or communicate messages of indefinitely many sorts,
does not engage in self- motivated activity, and has no
self- awareness. Thus, in the relevant respects, a fetus,
even a fully developed one, is considerably less per-
sonlike than is the average mature mammal, indeed
the average fish. And I think that a rational person
must conclude that if the right to life of a fetus is to be
based upon its resemblance to a person, then it cannot
be said to have any more right to life than, let us say,
a newborn guppy (which also seems to be capable of
feeling pain), and that a right of that magnitude could
never override a woman’s right to obtain an abortion,
at any stage of her pregnancy.
There may, of course, be other arguments in favor
of placing legal limits upon the stage of pregnancy in
which an abortion may be performed. Given the rela-
tive safety of the new techniques of artificially induc-
ing labor during the third trimester, the danger to the
woman’s life or health is no longer such an argument.
Neither is the fact that people tend to respond to the
thought of abortion in the later stages of pregnancy
with emotional repulsion, since mere emotional
responses cannot take the place of moral reasoning in
determining what ought to be permitted. Nor, finally,
is the frequently heard argument that legalizing abor-
tion, especially late in the pregnancy, may erode the
level of respect for human life, leading, perhaps, to an
increase in unjustified euthanasia and other crimes.
For this threat, if it is a threat, can be better met by edu-
cating people to the kinds of moral distinctions which
we are making here than by limiting access to abortion
(which limitation may, in its disregard for the rights of
women, be just as damaging to the level of respect for
human rights).
Thus, since the fact that even a fully developed
fetus is not personlike enough to have any significant
be found, as people in the fullest sense, and to respect
their moral rights. But to ascribe full moral rights to an
entity which is not a person is as absurd as to ascribe
moral obligations and responsibilities to such an
entity.
3. Fetal Development and the Right to Life
Two problems arise in the application of these sugges-
tions for the definition of the moral community to the
determination of the precise moral status of a human
fetus. Given that the paradigm example of a person is a
normal adult human being, then (1) How like this par-
adigm, in particular how far advanced since concep-
tion, does a human being need to be before it begins
to have a right to life by virtue, not of being fully a
person as of yet, but of being like a person? and (2) To
what extent, if any, does the fact that a fetus has the
potential for becoming a person endow it with some of
the same rights? Each of these questions requires some
comment.
In answering the first question, we need not
attempt a detailed consideration of the moral rights
of organisms which are not developed enough, aware
enough, intelligent enough, etc., to be considered
people, but which resemble people in some respects.
It does seem reasonable to suggest that the more like a
person, in the relevant respects, a being is, the stronger
is the case for regarding it as having a right to life, and
indeed the stronger its right to life is. Thus we ought
to take seriously the suggestion that, insofar as “the
human individual develops biologically in a continu-
ous fashion . . . the rights of a human person might
develop in the same way.”6 But we must keep in mind
that the attributes which are relevant in determining
whether or not an entity is enough like a person to
be regarded as having some of the same moral rights
are no different from those which are relevant to
determining whether or not it is fully a person— i.e.,
are no different from (1)–(5)—and that being geneti-
cally human, or having recognizably human facial
and other physical features, or detectable brain activ-
ity, or the capacity to survive outside the uterus, are
simply not among these relevant attributes.
Thus it is clear that even though a seven- or eight-
month fetus has features which make it apt to arouse

CHAPTER 9: ABORTION Á 255
a few hundred thousand or more human beings, by
breaking his body into its component cells, and using
these to create fully developed human beings, with, of
course, his genetic code. We may imagine that each of
these newly created men will have all of the original
man’s abilities, skills, knowledge, and so on, and also
have an individual self- concept, in short that each of
them will be a bona fide (though hardly unique) per-
son. Imagine that the whole project will take only
seconds, and that its chances of success are extremely
high, and that our explorer knows all of this, and also
knows that these people will be treated fairly. I main-
tain that in such a situation he would have every right
to escape if he could, and thus to deprive all of these
potential people of their potential lives; for his right to
life outweighs all of theirs together, in spite of the fact
that they are all genetically human, all innocent, and
all have a very high probability of becoming people
very soon, if only he refrains from acting.
Indeed, I think he would have a right to escape
even if it were not his life which the alien scientists
planned to take, but only a year of his freedom, or,
indeed, only a day. Nor would he be obligated to stay
if he had gotten captured (thus bringing all these
people- potentials into existence) because of his own
carelessness, or even if he had done so deliberately,
knowing the consequences. Regardless of how he
got captured, he is not morally obligated to remain
in captivity for any period of time for the sake of per-
mitting any number of potential people to come into
actuality, so great is the margin by which one actual
person’s right to liberty outweighs whatever right to
life even a hundred thousand potential people have.
And it seems reasonable to conclude that the rights of
a woman will outweigh by a similar margin whatever
right to life a fetus may have by virtue of its potential
personhood.
Thus, neither a fetus’s resemblance to a person,
nor its potential for becoming a person provides any
basis whatever for the claim that it has any significant
right to life. Consequently, a woman’s right to protect
her health, happiness, freedom, and even her life,7
by terminating an unwanted pregnancy, will always
override whatever right to life it may be appropriate
to ascribe to a fetus, even a fully developed one. And
right to life on the basis of its personlikeness shows
that no legal restrictions upon the stage of pregnancy
in which an abortion may be performed can be justi-
fied on the grounds that we should protect the rights
of the older fetus; and since there is no other apparent
justification for such restrictions, we may conclude that
they are entirely unjustified. Whether or not it would
be indecent (whatever that means) for a woman in her
seventh month to obtain an abortion just to avoid hav-
ing to postpone a trip to Europe, it would not, in itself,
be immoral, and therefore it ought to be permitted.
4. Potential Personhood and the Right to Life
We have seen that a fetus does not resemble a per-
son in any way which can support the claim that
it has even some of the same rights. But what about
its potential, the fact that if nurtured and allowed to
develop naturally it will very probably become a per-
son? Doesn’t that alone give it at least some right to
life? It is hard to deny that the fact that an entity is a
potential person is a strong prima facie reason for not
destroying it; but we need not conclude from this that
a potential person has a right to life, by virtue of that
potential. It may be that our feeling that it is better,
other things being equal, not to destroy a potential
person is better explained by the fact that potential
people are still (felt to be) an invaluable resource, not
to be lightly squandered. Surely, if every speck of dust
were a potential person, we would be much less apt
to conclude that every potential person has a right to
become actual.
Still, we do not need to insist that a potential per-
son has no right to life whatever. There may well be
something immoral, and not just imprudent, about
wantonly destroying potential people, when doing so
isn’t necessary to protect anyone’s rights. But even if a
potential person does have some prima facie right to
life, such a right could not possibly outweigh the right
of a woman to obtain an abortion, since the rights of
any actual person invariably outweigh those of any
potential person, whenever the two conflict. Since
this may not be immediately obvious in the case of a
human fetus, let us look at another case.
Suppose that our space explorer falls into the hands
of an alien culture, whose scientists decide to create

256 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
3. Of course, the principle that it is (always) wrong to kill inno-
cent human beings is in need of many other modifications,
e.g., that it may be permissible to do so to save a greater num-
ber of other innocent human beings, but we may safely ignore
these complications here.
4. John Noonan, “Deciding Who Is Human,” Natural Law
Forum 13 (1968): 135.
5. From here on, we will use ‘human’ to mean genetically
human, since the moral sense seems closely connected to, and
perhaps derived from, the assumption that genetic humanity
is sufficient for membership in the moral community.
6. Thomas L. Hayes, “A Biological View,” Commonweal 85
(March 17, 1967): 677–78; quoted by Daniel Callahan, in
Abortion: Law, Choice, and Morality (New York: Macmillan,
1970).
7. That is, insofar as the death rate, for the woman, is higher
for childbirth than for early abortion.
thus, in the absence of any overwhelming social need
for every possible child, the laws which restrict the
right to obtain an abortion, or limit the period of preg-
nancy during which an abortion may be performed,
are a wholly unjustified violation of a woman’s most
basic moral and constitutional rights.
NOTES
1. Judith Thomson, “A Defense of Abortion,” Philosophy &
Public Affairs 1, no. 1 (Fall 1971): 47–66.
2. We may safely ignore the fact that she might have avoided
getting raped, e.g., by carrying a gun, since by similar means
you might likewise have avoided getting kidnapped, and in
neither case does the victim’s failure to take all possible pre-
cautions against a highly unlikely event (as opposed to rea-
sonable precautions against a rather likely event) mean that
he is morally responsible for what happens.
Why Abortion Is Immoral
Don Marquis
The argument is based on a major assumption.
Many of the most insightful and careful writers on the
ethics of abortion . . . believe that whether or not abor-
tion is morally permissible stands or falls on whether
or not a fetus is the sort of being whose life it is seri-
ously wrong to end. The argument of this essay will
assume, but not argue, that they are correct.
Also, this essay will neglect issues of great impor-
tance to a complete ethics of abortion. Some anti-
abortionists will allow that certain abortions, such as
abortion before implantation or abortion when the
life of a woman is threatened by a pregnancy or abor-
tion after rape, may be morally permissible. This essay
will not explore the casuistry of these hard cases. The
purpose of this essay is to develop a general argument
for the claim that the overwhelming majority of delib-
erate abortions are seriously immoral.
The view that abortion is, with rare exceptions, seri-
ously immoral has received little support in the recent
philosophical literature. No doubt most philosophers
affiliated with secular institutions of higher educa-
tion believe that the anti- abortion position is either
a symptom of irrational religious dogma or a conclu-
sion generated by seriously confused philosophical
argument. The purpose of this essay is to undermine
this general belief. This essay sets out an argument
that purports to show, as well as any argument in eth-
ics can show, that abortion is, except possibly in rare
cases, seriously immoral, that it is in the same moral
category as killing an innocent adult human being.
Don Marquis, “Why Abortion Is Immoral,” The Journal of Philoso-
phy LXXXVI, 4 (April 1989): 183–202. Reprinted by permission of
the publisher and the author.

CHAPTER 9: ABORTION Á 257
always prima facie seriously wrong to take a human
life” or “It is always prima facie seriously wrong to end
the life of a baby.” Since these are generally accepted
moral principles, her position is certainly not obviously
wrong. The pro- choicer will claim that her position is
supported by such plausible moral principles as “Being
a person is what gives an individual intrinsic moral
worth” or “It is only seriously prima facie wrong to
take the life of a member of the human community.”
Since these are generally accepted moral principles, the
pro- choice position is certainly not obviously wrong.
Unfortunately, we have again arrived at a standoff.
Now, how might one deal with this standoff? The
standard approach is to try to show how the moral
principles of one’s opponent lose their plausibility
under analysis. It is easy to see how this is possible. On
the one hand, the anti- abortionist will defend a moral
principle concerning the wrongness of killing which
tends to be broad in scope in order that even fetuses at
an early stage of pregnancy will fall under it. The prob-
lem with broad principles is that they often embrace
too much. In this particular instance, the principle
“It is always prima facie wrong to take a human life”
seems to entail that it is wrong to end the existence
of a living human cancer- cell culture, on the grounds
that the culture is both living and human. Therefore,
it seems that the anti- abortionist’s favored principle is
too broad.
On the other hand, the pro- choicer wants to find
a moral principle concerning the wrongness of kill-
ing which tends to be narrow in scope in order that
fetuses will not fall under it. The problem with narrow
principles is that they often do not embrace enough.
Hence, the needed principles such as “It is prima facie
seriously wrong to kill only persons” or “It is prima
facie wrong to kill only rational agents” do not explain
why it is wrong to kill infants or young children or the
severely retarded or even perhaps the severely men-
tally ill. Therefore, we seem again to have a standoff.
The anti- abortionist charges, not unreasonably, that
pro- choice principles concerning killing are too nar-
row to be acceptable; the pro- choicer charges, not
unreasonably, that anti- abortionist principles con-
cerning killing are too broad to be acceptable.
I.
A sketch of standard anti- abortion and pro- choice
arguments exhibits how these arguments possess cer-
tain symmetries that explain why partisans of those
positions are so convinced of the correctness of their
own positions, why they are not successful in con-
vincing their opponents, and why, to others, this issue
seems to be unresolvable. An analysis of the nature of
this standoff suggests a strategy for surmounting it.
Consider the way a typical anti- abortionist argues.
She will argue or assert that life is present from the
moment of conception or that fetuses look like babies
or that fetuses possess a characteristic such as a genetic
code that is both necessary and sufficient for being
human. Anti- abortionists seem to believe that (1) the
truth of all of these claims is quite obvious, and (2)
establishing any of these claims is sufficient to show
that abortion is morally akin to murder.
A standard pro- choice strategy exhibits similari-
ties. The pro- choicer will argue or assert that fetuses are
not persons or that fetuses are not rational agents or
that fetuses are not social beings. Pro- choicers seem to
believe that (1) the truth of any of these claims is quite
obvious, and (2) establishing any of these claims is suffi-
cient to show that an abortion is not a wrongful killing.
In fact, both the pro- choice and the anti- abortion
claims do seem to be true, although the “it looks like
a baby” claim is more difficult to establish the earlier
the pregnancy. We seem to have a standoff. How can
it be resolved?
As everyone who has taken a bit of logic knows, if
any of these arguments concerning abortion is a good
argument, it requires not only some claim characteriz-
ing fetuses, but also some general moral principle that
ties a characteristic of fetuses to having or not having
the right to life or to some other moral characteristic
that will generate the obligation or the lack of obli-
gation not to end the life of a fetus. Accordingly, the
arguments of the anti- abortionist and the pro- choicer
need a bit of filling in to be regarded as adequate.
Note what each partisan will say. The anti-
abortionist will claim that her position is supported
by such generally accepted moral principles as “It is

258 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
chromosomes in one’s cells than on the color of one’s
skin? If ‘human being’, on the other hand, is taken
to be a moral category, then the claim that a fetus is a
human being cannot be taken to be a premise in the
anti- abortion argument, for it is precisely what needs
to be established. Hence, either the anti- abortionist’s
main category is a morally irrelevant, merely biologi-
cal category, or it is of no use to the anti- abortionist in
establishing (noncircularly, of course) that abortion is
wrong.
Although this problem with the anti- abortionist
position is often noticed, it is less often noticed that
the pro- choice position suffers from an analogous
problem. The principle “Only persons have the right
to life” also suffers from an ambiguity. The term ‘per-
son’ is typically defined in terms of psychological
characteristics, although there will certainly be dis-
agreement concerning which characteristics are most
important. Supposing that this matter can be settled,
the pro- choicer is left with the problem of explaining
why psychological characteristics should make a moral
difference. If the pro- choicer should attempt to deal
with this problem by claiming that an explanation is
not necessary, that in fact we do treat such a cluster of
psychological properties as having moral significance,
the sharp- witted anti- abortionist should have a ready
response. We do treat being both living and human
as having moral significance. If it is legitimate for the
pro- choicer to demand that the anti- abortionist pro-
vide an explanation of the connection between the
biological character of being a human being and the
wrongness of being killed (even though people accept
this connection), then it is legitimate for the anti-
abortionist to demand that the pro- choicer provide an
explanation of the connection between psychological
criteria for being a person and the wrongness of being
killed (even though that connection is accepted).
[Joel] Feinberg has attempted to meet this objec-
tion (he calls psychological personhood “common-
sense personhood”):
The characteristics that confer commonsense person-
hood are not arbitrary bases for rights and duties, such
as race, sex or species membership; rather they are traits
that make sense out of rights and duties and without
which those moral attributes would have no point or
Attempts by both sides to patch up the difficulties
in their positions run into further difficulties. The anti-
abortionist will try to remove the problem in her posi-
tion by reformulating her principle concerning killing
in terms of human beings. Now we end up with: “It is
always prima facie seriously wrong to end the life of
a human being.” This principle has the advantage of
avoiding the problem of the human cancer- cell cul-
ture counterexample. But this advantage is purchased
at a high price. For although it is clear that a fetus is
both human and alive, it is not at all clear that a fetus
is a human being. There is at least something to be said
for the view that something becomes a human being
only after a process of development, and that therefore
first trimester fetuses and perhaps all fetuses are not
yet human beings. Hence, the anti- abortionist, by this
move, has merely exchanged one problem for another.
The pro- choicer fares no better. She may attempt
to find reasons why killing infants, young children,
and the severely retarded is wrong which are indepen-
dent of her major principle that is supposed to explain
the wrongness of taking human life, but which will
not also make abortion immoral. This is no easy task.
Appeals to social utility will seem satisfactory only to
those who resolve not to think of the enormous dif-
ficulties with a utilitarian account of the wrongness
of killing and the significant social costs of preserving
the lives of the unproductive. A pro- choice strategy
that extends the definition of ‘person’ to infants or
even to young children seems just as arbitrary as an
anti- abortion strategy that extends the definition of
‘human being’ to fetuses. Again, we find symmetries
in the two positions and we arrive at a standoff.
There are even further problems that reflect sym-
metries in the two positions. In addition to counterex-
ample problems, or the arbitrary application problems
that can be exchanged for them, the standard anti-
abortionist principle “It is prima facie seriously wrong
to kill a human being,” or one of its variants, can be
objected to on the grounds of ambiguity. If ‘human
being’ is taken to be a biological category, then the
anti- abortionist is left with the problem of explain-
ing why a merely biological category should make a
moral difference. Why, it is asked, is it any more rea-
sonable to base a moral conclusion on the number of

CHAPTER 9: ABORTION Á 259
Furthermore, the pro- choicer cannot any more
escape her problem by making person a purely moral
category than the anti- abortionist could escape by
the analogous move. For if person is a moral category,
then the pro- choicer is left without the recourses for
establishing (noncircularly, of course) the claim that a
fetus is not a person, which is an essential premise in
her argument. Again, we have both a symmetry and a
standoff between pro- choice and antiabortion views.
Passions in the abortion debate run high. There
are both plausibilities and difficulties with the stan-
dard positions. Accordingly, it is hardly surprising
that partisans of either side embrace with fervor the
moral generalizations that support the conclusions
they preanalytically favor, and reject with disdain the
moral generalizations of their opponents as being sub-
ject to inescapable difficulties. It is easy to believe that
the counterexamples to one’s own moral principles
are merely temporary difficulties that will dissolve
in the wake of further philosophical research, and
that the counterexamples to the principles of one’s
opponents are as straightforward as the contradiction
between A and O propositions in traditional logic.
This might suggest to an impartial observer (if there
are any) that the abortion issue is unresolvable.
There is a way out of this apparent dialectical
quandary. The moral generalizations of both sides
are not quite correct. The generalizations hold for the
most part, for the usual cases. This suggests that they
are all accidental generalizations, that the moral claims
made by those on both sides of the dispute do not
touch on the essence of the matter.
This use of the distinction between essence and
accident is not meant to invoke obscure metaphysical
categories. Rather, it is intended to reflect the rather
atheoretical nature of the abortion discussion. If
the generalization a partisan in the abortion dispute
adopts were derived from the reason why ending the
life of a human being is wrong, then there could not be
exceptions to that generalization unless some special
case obtains in which there are even more powerful
countervailing reasons. Such generalizations would
not be merely accidental generalizations; they would
point to, or be based upon, the essence of the wrong-
ness of killing, what it is that makes killing wrong. All
function. It is because people are conscious; have a sense
of their personal identities; have plans, goals, and proj-
ects; experience emotions; are liable to pains, anxieties,
and frustrations; can reason and bargain, and so on— it
is because of these attributes that people have values
and interests, desires and expectations of their own,
including a stake in their own futures, and a personal
well- being of a sort we cannot ascribe to unconscious or
nonrational beings. Because of their developed capaci-
ties they can assume duties and responsibilities and can
have and make claims on one another. Only because
of their sense of self, their life plans, their value hierar-
chies, and their stakes in their own futures can they be
ascribed fundamental rights. There is nothing arbitrary
about these linkages.1
The plausible aspects of this attempt should not be
taken to obscure its implausible features. There is
a great deal to be said for the view that being a psy-
chological person under some description is a neces-
sary condition for having duties. One cannot have a
duty unless one is capable of behaving morally, and
a being’s capability of behaving morally will require
having a certain psychology. It is far from obvious,
however, that having rights entails consciousness or
rationality, as Feinberg suggests. We speak of the rights
of the severely retarded or the severely mentally ill,
yet some of these persons are not rational. We speak
of the rights of the temporarily unconscious. The
New Jersey Supreme Court based their decision in the
Quinlan case on Karen Ann Quinlan’s right to privacy,
and she was known to be permanently unconscious at
that time. Hence, Feinberg’s claim that having rights
entails being conscious is, on its face, obviously false.
Of course, it might not make sense to attribute
rights to a being that would never in its natural history
have certain psychological traits. This modest connec-
tion between psychological personhood and moral
personhood will create a place for Karen Ann Quinlan
and the temporarily unconscious. But then it makes a
place for fetuses also. Hence, it does not serve Feinberg’s
pro- choice purposes. Accordingly, it seems that the pro-
choicer will have as much difficulty bridging the gap
between psychological personhood and personhood
in the moral sense as the anti- abortionist has bridging
the gap between being a biological human being and
being a human being in the moral sense.

260 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
valued by me as I grow older and as my values and
capacities change. When I am killed, I am deprived
both of what I now value which would have been part
of my future personal life, but also what I would come
to value. Therefore, when I die, I am deprived of all of
the value of my future. Inflicting this loss on me is ulti-
mately what makes killing me wrong. This being the
case, it would seem that what makes killing any adult
human being prima facie seriously wrong is the loss of
his or her future.
How should this rudimentary theory of the
wrongness of killing be evaluated? It cannot be faulted
for deriving an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’, for it does not.
The analysis assumes that killing me (or you, reader)
is prima facie seriously wrong. The point of the analy-
sis is to establish which natural property ultimately
explains the wrongness of the killing, given that it is
wrong. A natural property will ultimately explain the
wrongness of killing, only if (1) the explanation fits
with our intuitions about the matter and (2) there is
no other natural property that provides the basis for
a better explanation of the wrongness of killing. This
analysis rests on the intuition that what makes kill-
ing a particular human or animal wrong is what it
does to that particular human or animal. What makes
killing wrong is some natural effect or other of the
killing. Some would deny this. For instance, a divine-
command theorist in ethics would deny it. Surely this
denial is, however, one of those features of divine-
command theory which renders it so implausible.
The claim that what makes killing wrong is the
loss of the victim’s future is directly supported by two
considerations. In the first place, this theory explains
why we regard killing as one of the worst of crimes.
Killing is especially wrong, because it deprives the vic-
tim of more than perhaps any other crime. In the sec-
ond place, people with AIDS or cancer who know they
are dying believe, of course, that dying is a very bad
thing for them. They believe that the loss of a future
to them that they would otherwise have experienced
is what makes their premature death a very bad thing
for them. A better theory of the wrongness of killing
would require a different natural property associated
with killing which better fits with the attitudes of the
dying. What could it be?
this suggests that a necessary condition of resolving
the abortion controversy is a more theoretical account
of the wrongness of killing. After all, if we merely
believe, but do not understand, why killing adult
human beings such as ourselves is wrong, how could
we conceivably show that abortion is either immoral
or permissible?
II.
In order to develop such an account, we can start from
the following unproblematic assumption concerning
our own case: it is wrong to kill us. Why is it wrong?
Some answers can be easily eliminated. It might be
said that what makes killing us wrong is that a killing
brutalizes the one who kills. But the brutalization con-
sists of being inured to the performance of an act that
is hideously immoral; hence, the brutalization does
not explain the immorality. It might be said that what
makes killing us wrong is the great loss others would
experience due to our absence. Although such hubris
is understandable, such an explanation does not
account for the wrongness of killing hermits, or those
whose lives are relatively independent and whose
friends find it easy to make new friends.
A more obvious answer is better. What primarily
makes killing wrong is neither its effect on the mur-
derer nor its effect on the victim’s friends and rela-
tives, but its effect on the victim. The loss of one’s life
is one of the greatest losses one can suffer. The loss of
one’s life deprives one of all the experiences, activities,
projects, and enjoyments that would otherwise have
constituted one’s future. Therefore, killing someone
is wrong, primarily because the killing inflicts (one of)
the greatest possible losses on the victim. To describe
this as the loss of life can be misleading, however. The
change in my biological state does not by itself make
killing me wrong. The effect of the loss of my biologi-
cal life is the loss to me of all those activities, projects,
experiences, and enjoyments which would otherwise
have constituted my future personal life. These activi-
ties, projects, experiences, and enjoyments are either
valuable for their own sakes or are means to something
else that is valuable for its own sake. Some parts of my
future are not valued by me now, but will come to be

CHAPTER 9: ABORTION Á 261
prohibition of active euthanasia, but that is another
matter. Sanctity- of- human- life theories seem to hold
that active euthanasia is seriously wrong even in an
individual case where there seems to be good reason
for it independently of public policy considerations.
This consequence is most implausible, and it is a
plus for the claim that the loss of a future of value is
what makes killing wrong that it does not share this
consequence.
In the fourth place, the account of the wrongness
of killing defended in this essay does straightforwardly
entail that it is prima facie seriously wrong to kill chil-
dren and infants, for we do presume that they have
futures of value. Since we do believe that it is wrong to
kill defenseless little babies, it is important that a the-
ory of the wrongness of killing easily account for this.
Personhood theories of the wrongness of killing, on
the other hand, cannot straightforwardly account for
the wrongness of killing infants and young children.
Hence, such theories must add special ad hoc accounts
of the wrongness of killing the young. The plausibil-
ity of such ad hoc theories seems to be a function of
how desperately one wants such theories to work. The
claim that the primary wrong- making feature of a kill-
ing is the loss to the victim of the value of its future
accounts for the wrongness of killing young children
and infants directly; it makes the wrongness of such
acts as obvious as we actually think it is. This is a fur-
ther merit of this theory. Accordingly, it seems that
this value of a future- like- ours theory of the wrong-
ness of killing shares strengths of both sanctity- of- life
and personhood accounts while avoiding weaknesses
of both. In addition, it meshes with a central intuition
concerning what makes killing wrong.
The claim that the primary wrong- making fea-
ture of a killing is the loss to the victim of the value of
its future has obvious consequences for the ethics of
abortion. The future of a standard fetus includes a set
of experiences, projects, activities, and such which are
identical with the futures of adult human beings and
are identical with the futures of young children. Since
the reason that is sufficient to explain why it is wrong
to kill human beings after the time of birth is a reason
that also applies to fetuses, it follows that abortion is
prima facie seriously morally wrong.
The view that what makes killing wrong is the loss
to the victim of the value of the victim’s future gains
additional support when some of its implications are
examined. In the first place, it is incompatible with the
view that it is wrong to kill only beings who are biolog-
ically human. It is possible that there exists a different
species from another planet whose members have a
future like ours. Since having a future like that is what
makes killing someone wrong, this theory entails that
it would be wrong to kill members of such a species.
Hence, this theory is opposed to the claim that only
life that is biologically human has great moral worth,
a claim which many anti- abortionists have seemed to
adopt. This opposition, which this theory has in com-
mon with personhood theories, seems to be a merit of
the theory.
In the second place, the claim that the loss of one’s
future is the wrong- making feature of one’s being
killed entails the possibility that the futures of some
actual nonhuman mammals on our own planet are
sufficiently like ours that it is seriously wrong to kill
them also. Whether some animals do have the same
right to life as human beings depends on adding to
the account of the wrongness of killing some addi-
tional account of just what it is about my future or the
futures of other adult human beings which makes it
wrong to kill us. No such additional account will be
offered in this essay. Undoubtedly, the provision
of such an account would be a very difficult matter.
Undoubtedly, any such account would be quite con-
troversial. Hence, it surely should not reflect badly on
this sketch of an elementary theory of the wrongness
of killing that it is indeterminate with respect to some
very difficult issues regarding animal rights.
In the third place, the claim that the loss of one’s
future is the wrong- making feature of one’s being
killed does not entail, as sanctity of human life theo-
ries do, that active euthanasia is wrong. Persons who
are severely and incurably ill, who face a future of
pain and despair, and who wish to die will not have
suffered a loss if they are killed. It is, strictly speak-
ing, the value of a human’s future which makes kill-
ing wrong in this theory. This being so, killing does
not necessarily wrong some persons who are sick and
dying. Of course, there may be other reasons for a

262 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
actions is a property of actions sometimes directed at
individuals other than postnatal human beings. If the
structure of the argument for the wrongness of the
wanton infliction of pain on animals is sound, then
the structure of the argument for the prima facie seri-
ous wrongness of abortion is also sound, for the struc-
ture of the two arguments is the same. The structure
common to both is the key to the explanation of how
the wrongness of abortion can be demonstrated with-
out recourse to the category of person. In neither argu-
ment is that category crucial.
This defense of an argument for the wrongness of
abortion in terms of a structurally similar argument
for the wrongness of the wanton infliction of pain on
animals succeeds only if the account regarding ani-
mals is the correct account. Is it? In the first place, it
seems plausible. In the second place, its major compe-
tition is Kant’s account. Kant believed that we do not
have direct duties to animals at all, because they are
not persons. Hence, Kant had to explain and justify
the wrongness of inflicting pain on animals on the
grounds that “he who is hard in his dealings with ani-
mals becomes hard also in his dealing with men.”2 The
problem with Kant’s account is that there seems to be
no reason for accepting this latter claim unless Kant’s
account is rejected. If the alternative to Kant’s account
is accepted, then it is easy to understand why some-
one who is indifferent to inflicting pain on animals is
also indifferent to inflicting pain on humans, for one
is indifferent to what makes inflicting pain wrong in
both cases. But, if Kant’s account is accepted, there is
no intelligible reason why one who is hard in his deal-
ings with animals (or crabgrass or stones) should also
be hard in his dealings with men. After all, men are
persons: animals are no more persons than crabgrass
or stones. Persons are Kant’s crucial moral category.
Why, in short, should a Kantian accept the basic claim
in Kant’s argument?
Hence, Kant’s argument for the wrongness of
inflicting pain on animals rests on a claim that, in a
world of Kantian moral agents, is demonstrably false.
Therefore, the alternative analysis, being more plausible
anyway, should be accepted. Since this alternative analy-
sis has the same structure as the anti-abortion argument
being defended here, we have further support for the
This argument does not rely on the invalid infer-
ence that, since it is wrong to kill persons, it is wrong
to kill potential persons also. The category that is mor-
ally central to this analysis is the category of having a
valuable future like ours; it is not the category of per-
sonhood. The argument to the conclusion that abor-
tion is prima facie seriously morally wrong proceeded
independently of the notion of person or potential
person or any equivalent. Someone may wish to start
with this analysis in terms of the value of a human
future, conclude that abortion is, except perhaps in
rare circumstances, seriously morally wrong, infer
that fetuses have the right to life, and then call fetuses
“persons” as a result of their having the right to life.
Clearly, in this case, the category of person is being
used to state the conclusion of the analysis rather than
to generate the argument of the analysis.
The structure of this anti- abortion argument can
be both illuminated and defended by comparing it to
what appears to be the best argument for the wrong-
ness of the wanton infliction of pain on animals. This
latter argument is based on the assumption that it is
prima facie wrong to inflict pain on me (or you, reader).
What is the natural property associated with the inflic-
tion of pain which makes such infliction wrong? The
obvious answer seems to be that the infliction of pain
causes suffering and that suffering is a misfortune.
The suffering caused by the infliction of pain is what
makes the wanton infliction of pain on me wrong.
The wanton infliction of pain on other adult humans
causes suffering. The wanton infliction of pain on ani-
mals causes suffering. Since causing suffering is what
makes the wanton infliction of pain wrong and since
the wanton infliction of pain on animals causes suf-
fering, it follows that the wanton infliction of pain on
animals is wrong.
This argument for the wrongness of the wan-
ton infliction of pain on animals shares a number of
structural features with the argument for the serious
prima facie wrongness of abortion. Both arguments
start with an obvious assumption concerning what it
is wrong to do to me (or you, reader). Both then look
for the characteristic or the consequence of the wrong
action which makes the action wrong. Both recog-
nize that the wrong- making feature of these immoral

CHAPTER 9: ABORTION Á 263
valuable experience to continue. Therefore, it might
be said, what makes killing wrong is the discontinua-
tion of that experience for the victim. Let us call this
the discontinuation account. Another rival account is
based upon the obvious fact that people strongly desire
to continue to live. This suggests that what makes kill-
ing us so wrong is that it interferes with the fulfillment
of a strong and fundamental desire, the fulfillment
of which is necessary for the fulfillment of any other
desires we might have. Let us call this the desire account.
Consider first the desire account as a rival account
of the ethics of killing which would provide the basis
for rejecting the anti- abortion position. Such an
account will have to be stronger than the value of a
future- like- ours account of the wrongness of abor-
tion if it is to do the job expected of it. To entail the
wrongness of abortion, the value of a future- like- ours
account has only to provide a sufficient, but not a
necessary, condition for the wrongness of killing. The
desire account, on the other hand, must provide us
also with a necessary condition for the wrongness of
killing in order to generate a pro- choice conclusion
on abortion. The reason for this is that presumably
the argument from the desire account moves from the
claim that what makes killing wrong is interference
with a very strong desire to the claim that abortion
is not wrong because the fetus lacks a strong desire to
live. Obviously, this inference fails if someone’s hav-
ing the desire to live is not a necessary condition of its
being wrong to kill that individual.
One problem with the desire account is that we do
regard it as seriously wrong to kill persons who have
little desire to live or who have no desires to live or,
indeed, have a desire not to live. We believe it is seri-
ously wrong to kill the unconscious, the sleeping,
those who are tired of life, and those who are suicidal.
The value- of- a- human- future account renders stan-
dard morality intelligible in these cases; these cases
appear to be incompatible with the desire account.
The desire account is subject to a deeper difficulty.
We desire life, because we value the goods of this life.
The goodness of life is not secondary to our desire for
it. If this were not so, the pain of one’s own premature
death could be done away with merely by an appro-
priate alteration in the configuration of one’s desires.
argument for the immorality of abortion being defended
in this essay.
Of course, this value of a future- like- ours argu-
ment, if sound, shows only that abortion is prima
facie wrong, not that it is wrong in any and all circum-
stances. Since the loss of the future to a standard fetus,
if killed, is, however, at least as great a loss as the loss
of the future to a standard adult human being who
is killed, abortion, like ordinary killing, could be jus-
tified only by the most compelling reasons. The loss
of one’s life is almost the greatest misfortune that can
happen to one. Presumably abortion could be justified
in some circumstances, only if the loss consequent on
failing to abort would be at least as great. Accordingly,
morally permissible abortions will be rare indeed
unless, perhaps, they occur so early in pregnancy that
a fetus is not yet definitely an individual. Hence, this
argument should be taken as showing that abortion
is presumptively very seriously wrong, where the pre-
sumption is very strong— as strong as the presumption
that killing another adult human being is wrong.
III.
How complete an account of the wrongness of killing
does the value of a future- like- ours account have to
be in order that the wrongness of abortion is a conse-
quence? This account does not have to be an account
of the necessary conditions for the wrongness of kill-
ing. Some persons in nursing homes may lack valuable
human futures, yet it may be wrong to kill them for
other reasons. Furthermore, this account does not
obviously have to be the sole reason killing is wrong
where the victim did have a valuable future. This anal-
ysis claims only that, for any killing where the victim
did have a valuable future like ours, having that future
by itself is sufficient to create the strong presumption
that the killing is seriously wrong.
One way to overturn the value of a future- like- ours
argument would be to find some account of the wrong-
ness of killing which is at least as intelligible and which
has different implications for the ethics of abortion.
Two rival accounts possess at least some degree of plau-
sibility. One account is based on the obvious fact that
people value the experience of living and wish for that

264 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
Is the discontinuation account just as good an
account as the value of a future- like- ours account?
The discontinuation account will not be adequate
at all, if it does not refer to the value of the experi-
ence that may be discontinued. One does not want
the discontinuation account to make it wrong to kill
a patient who begs for death and who is in severe
pain that cannot be relieved short of killing. (I leave
open the question of whether it is wrong for other
reasons.) Accordingly, the discontinuation account
must be more than a bare discontinuation account.
It must make some reference to the positive value of
the patient’s experiences. But, by the same token,
the value of a future- like- ours account cannot be a
bare future account either. Just having a future surely
does not itself rule out killing the above patient. This
account must make some reference to the value of the
patient’s future experiences and projects also. Hence,
both accounts involve the value of experiences, proj-
ects, and activities. So far we still have symmetry
between the accounts.
The symmetry fades, however, when we focus
on the time period of the value of the experiences,
etc., which has moral consequences. Although both
accounts leave open the possibility that the patient
in our example may be killed, this possibility is left
open only in virtue of the utterly bleak future for the
patient. It makes no difference whether the patient’s
immediate past contains intolerable pain, or consists
in being in a coma (which we can imagine is a situa-
tion of indifference), or consists in a life of value. If
the patient’s future is a future of value, we want our
account to make it wrong to kill the patient. If the
patient’s future is intolerable, whatever his or her
immediate past, we want our account to allow kill-
ing the patient. Obviously, then, it is the value of that
patient’s future which is doing the work in rendering
the morality of killing the patient intelligible.
This being the case, it seems clear that whether
one has immediate past experiences or not does not
work in the explanation of what makes killing wrong.
The addition the discontinuation account makes to
the value of a human future account is otiose. Its addi-
tion to the value- of- a- future account plays no role at
all in rendering intelligible the wrongness of killing.
This is absurd. Hence, it would seem that it is the loss of
the goods of one’s future, not the interference with the
fulfillment of a strong desire to live, which accounts
ultimately for the wrongness of killing.
It is worth noting that, if the desire account is
modified so that it does not provide a necessary, but
only a sufficient, condition for the wrongness of kill-
ing, the desire account is compatible with the value
of a future- like- ours account. The combined accounts
will yield an anti- abortion ethic. This suggests that
one can retain what is intuitively plausible about the
desire account without a challenge to the basic argu-
ment of this paper.
It is also worth noting that, if future desires
have moral force in a modified desire account of the
wrongness of killing, one can find support for an
anti- abortion ethic even in the absence of a value of
a future- like- ours account. If one decides that a mor-
ally relevant property, the possession of which is suf-
ficient to make it wrong to kill some individual, is the
desire at some future time to live— one might decide to
justify one’s refusal to kill suicidal teenagers on these
grounds, for example— then, since typical fetuses will
have the desire in the future to live, it is wrong to kill
typical fetuses. Accordingly, it does not seem that a
desire account of the wrongness of killing can provide
a justification of a pro- choice ethic of abortion which
is nearly as adequate as the value of a human- future
justification of an anti- abortion ethic.
The discontinuation account looks more promis-
ing as an account of the wrongness of killing. It seems
just as intelligible as the value of a future- like- ours
account, but it does not justify an anti- abortion posi-
tion. Obviously, if it is the continuation of one’s activi-
ties, experiences, and projects, the loss of which makes
killing wrong, then it is not wrong to kill fetuses for that
reason, for fetuses do not have experiences, activities,
and projects to be continued or discontinued. Accord-
ingly, the discontinuation account does not have the
anti- abortion consequences that the value of a future-
like- ours account has. Yet, it seems as intelligible as the
value of a future- like- ours account, for when we think
of what would be wrong with our being killed, it does
seem as if it is the discontinuation of what makes our
lives worthwhile which makes killing us wrong.

CHAPTER 9: ABORTION Á 265
Accordingly, Tooley concludes that abortion cannot
be seriously prima facie wrong.3
What could be the evidence for Tooley’s basic
claim? Tooley once argued that individuals have a
prima facie right to what they desire and that the lack
of the capacity to desire something undercuts the
basis of one’s right to it.4 This argument plainly will
not succeed in the context of the analysis of this essay,
however, since the point here is to establish the fetus’s
right to life on other grounds. Tooley’s argument
assumes that the right to life cannot be established
in general on some basis other than the desire for life.
This position was considered and rejected in the pre-
ceding section of this paper.
One might attempt to defend Tooley’s basic claim
on the grounds that, because a fetus cannot apprehend
continued life as a benefit, its continued life cannot be
a benefit or cannot be something it has a right to or
cannot be something that is in its interest. This might
be defended in terms of the general proposition that,
if an individual is literally incapable of caring about or
taking an interest in some X, then one does not have
a right to X or X is not a benefit or X is not something
that is in one’s interest.
Each member of this family of claims seems to be
open to objections. As John C. Stevens5 has pointed
out, one may have a right to be treated with a certain
medical procedure (because of a health insurance
policy one has purchased), even though one can-
not conceive of the nature of the procedure. And, as
Tooley himself has pointed out, persons who have
been indoctrinated, or drugged, or rendered tempo-
rarily unconscious may be literally incapable of car-
ing about or taking an interest in something that is
in their interest or is something to which they have
a right, or is something that benefits them. Hence,
the Tooley claim that would restrict the scope of the
value of a future- like- ours argument is undermined by
counterexamples.
Finally, Paul Bassen6 has argued that, even though
the prospects of an embryo might seem to be a basis
for the wrongness of abortion, an embryo cannot be a
victim and therefore cannot be wronged. An embryo
cannot be a victim, he says, because it lacks sentience.
His central argument for this seems to be that, even
Therefore, it can be discarded with the discontinua-
tion account of which it is a part.
IV.
The analysis of the previous section suggests that
alternative general accounts of the wrongness of kill-
ing are either inadequate or unsuccessful in getting
around the anti- abortion consequences of the value
of a future- like- ours argument. A different strategy for
avoiding these anti- abortion consequences involves
limiting the scope of the value of a future argument.
More precisely, the strategy involves arguing that
fetuses lack a property that is essential for the value- of-
a- future argument (or for any anti- abortion argument)
to apply to them.
One move of this sort is based upon the claim that
a necessary condition of one’s future being valuable is
that one values it. Value implies a valuer. Given this
one might argue that, since fetuses cannot value their
futures, their futures are not valuable to them. Hence,
it does not seriously wrong them deliberately to end
their lives.
This move fails, however, because of some ambi-
guities. Let us assume that something cannot be of
value unless it is valued by someone. This does not
entail that my life is of no value unless it is valued by
me. I may think, in a period of despair, that my future
is of no worth whatsoever, but I may be wrong because
others rightly see value— even great value— in it. Fur-
thermore, my future can be valuable to me even if
I do not value it. This is the case when a young per-
son attempts suicide, but is rescued and goes on to sig-
nificant human achievements. Such young people’s
futures are ultimately valuable to them, even though
such futures do not seem to be valuable to them at
the moment of attempted suicide. A fetus’s future can
be valuable to it in the same way. Accordingly, this
attempt to limit the anti- abortion argument fails.
Another similar attempt to reject the anti- abortion
position is based on [Michael] Tooley’s claim that an
entity cannot possess the right to life unless it has
the capacity to desire its continued existence. It fol-
lows that, since fetuses lack the conceptual capacity
to desire to continue to live, they lack the right to life.

266 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
Bassen wishes to impose upon the possibility of being
victimized here seem far too strong. Perhaps this
author, due to his unrealistic standards of excellence
and his low self- esteem, regarded his work as unwor-
thy of survival, even though it possessed genuine lit-
erary merit. Destruction of such work would surely
victimize its author. In such a case, empathy with the
victim concerning the loss is clearly impossible.
Of course, Bassen does not make the possibility of
empathy a necessary condition of victimizability; he
requires only mentation. Hence, on Bassen’s actual
view, this author, as I have described him, can be a vic-
tim. The problem is that the basic intuition that ren-
ders Bassen’s view plausible is missing in the author’s
case. In order to attempt to avoid counterexamples,
Bassen has made his thesis too weak to be supported
by the intuitions that suggested it.
Even so, the mentation requirement on victimiz-
ability is still subject to counterexamples. Suppose
a severe accident renders me totally unconscious
for a month, after which I recover. Surely killing me
while I am unconscious victimizes me, even though
I am incapable of mentation during that time. It fol-
lows that Bassen’s thesis fails. Apparently, attempts
to restrict the value of a future- like- ours argument so
that fetuses do not fall within its scope do not succeed.
V.
In this essay, it has been argued that the correct ethic
of the wrongness of killing can be extended to fetal life
and used to show that there is a strong presumption
that any abortion is morally impermissible. If the ethic
of killing adopted here entails, however, that contra-
ception is also seriously immoral, then there would
appear to be a difficulty with the analysis of this essay.
But this analysis does not entail that contracep-
tion is wrong. Of course, contraception prevents the
actualization of a possible future of value. Hence, it
follows from the claim that futures of value should be
maximized that contraception is prima facie immoral.
This obligation to maximize does not exist, however;
furthermore, nothing in the ethics of killing in this
paper entails that it does. The ethics of killing in this
though plants and the permanently unconscious
are alive, they clearly cannot be victims. What is the
explanation of this? Bassen claims that the explana-
tion is that their lives consist of mere metabolism and
mere metabolism is not enough to ground victimiz-
ability. Mentation is required.
The problem with this attempt to establish the
absence of victimizability is that both plants and the
permanently unconscious clearly lack what Bassen
calls “prospects” or what I have called “a future life
like ours.” Hence, it is surely open to one to argue that
the real reason we believe plants and the permanently
unconscious cannot be victims is that killing them
cannot deprive them of a future life like ours; the real
reason is not their absence of present mentation.
Bassen recognizes that his view is subject to this
difficulty, and he recognizes that the case of children
seems to support this difficulty, for “much of what we
do for children is based on prospects.” He argues, how-
ever, that, in the case of children and in other such
cases, “potentially comes into play only where victim-
izability has been secured on other grounds. . . .”
Bassen’s defense of his view is patently question-
begging, since what is adequate to secure victimiz-
ability is exactly what is at issue. His examples do not
support his own view against the thesis of this essay.
Of course, embryos can be victims: when their lives
are deliberately terminated, they are deprived of their
futures of value, their prospects. This makes them vic-
tims, for it directly wrongs them.
The seeming plausibility of Bassen’s view stems
from the fact that paradigmatic cases of imagining
someone as a victim involve empathy, and empathy
requires mentation of the victim. The victims of flood,
famine, rape, or child abuse are all persons with whom
we can empathize. That empathy seems to be part of
seeing them as victims.
In spite of the strength of these examples, the
attractive intuition that a situation in which there
is victimization requires the possibility of empathy
is subject to counterexamples. Consider a case that
Bassen himself offers: “Posthumous obliteration of an
author’s work constitutes a misfortune for him only if
he had wished his work to endure”. . . The conditions

CHAPTER 9: ABORTION Á 267
to make killing an adult human being wrong, abor-
tion is wrong. This way of dealing with the problem
of abortion seems superior to other approaches to the
ethics of abortion, because it rests on an ethics of kill-
ing which is close to self- evident, because the crucial
morally relevant property clearly applies to fetuses,
and because the argument avoids the usual equivo-
cations of ‘human life’, ‘human being’, or ‘person’.
The argument rests neither on religious claims nor
on Papal dogma. It is not subject to the objection of
“speciesism.” Its soundness is compatible with the
moral permissibility of euthanasia and contracep-
tion. It deals with our intuitions concerning young
children.
Finally, this analysis can be viewed as resolving a
standard problem— indeed, the standard problem—
concerning the ethics of abortion. Clearly, it is wrong
to kill adult human beings. Clearly, it is not wrong to
end the life of some arbitrarily chosen single human
cell. Fetuses seem to be like arbitrarily chosen human
cells in some respects and like adult humans in other
respects. The problem of the ethics of abortion is the
problem of determining the fetal property that settles
this moral controversy. The thesis of this essay is that
the problem of the ethics of abortion, so understood,
is solvable.
NOTES
1. Joel Feinberg, “Abortion,” in Matters of Life and Death: New
Introductory Essays in Moral Philosophy, ed. Tom Regan (New
York: Random House, 1986), p. 270.
2. “Duties to Animals and Spirits,” in Lectures on Ethics, trans.
Loius Infeld (New York: Harper, 1963), p. 239.
3. Michael Tooley, Abortion and Infanticide (New York: Oxford,
1984), pp. 46–47.
4. Tooley, Abortion and Infanticide, pp. 44–45.
5. “Must the Bearer of a Right Have the Concept of That to
Which He Has a Right?” Ethics 95, no. 1 (1984): 68–74.
6. “Present Sakes and Future Prospects: The Status of Early
Abortion,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 11, no. 4 (1982):
314–37.
essay would entail that contraception is wrong only
if something were denied a human future of value by
contraception. Nothing at all is denied such a future
by contraception, however.
Candidates for a subject of harm by contracep-
tion fall into four categories: (1) some sperm or other,
(2) some ovum or other, (3) a sperm and an ovum
separately, and (4) a sperm and an ovum together.
Assigning the harm to some sperm is utterly arbi-
trary, for no reason can be given for making a sperm
the subject of harm rather than an ovum. Assigning
the harm to some ovum is utterly arbitrary, for no
reason can be given for making an ovum the subject
of harm rather than a sperm. One might attempt to
avoid these problems by insisting that contraception
deprives both the sperm and the ovum separately of
a valuable future like ours. On this alternative, too
many futures are lost. Contraception was supposed
to be wrong, because it deprived us of one future
of value, not two. One might attempt to avoid this
problem by holding that contraception deprives
the combination of sperm and ovum of a valuable
future like ours. But here the definite article mis-
leads. At the time of contraception, there are hun-
dreds of millions of sperm, one (released) ovum and
millions of possible combinations of all of these.
There is no actual combination at all. Is the subject
of the loss to be a merely possible combination?
Which one? This alternative does not yield an actual
subject of harm either. Accordingly, the immoral-
ity of contraception is not entailed by the loss of a
future- like- ours argument simply because there is no
nonarbitrarily identifiable subject of the loss in the
case of contraception.
VI.
The purpose of this essay has been to set out an argu-
ment for the serious presumptive wrongness of
abortion subject to the assumption that the moral per-
missibility of abortion stands or falls on the moral sta-
tus of the fetus. Since a fetus possesses a property, the
possession of which in adult human beings is sufficient

268 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
From Virtue Theory and Abortion
Rosalind Hursthouse
have a moral right to do as they choose with their own
bodies, or, more particularly, to terminate their preg-
nancies, then it may well follow that a law forbidding
abortion would be unjust. Indeed, even if they have
no such right, such a law might be, as things stand
at the moment, unjust, or impractical, or inhumane:
on this issue I have nothing to say in this article. But,
putting all questions about the justice or injustice of
laws to one side, and supposing only that women have
such a moral right, nothing follows from this supposi-
tion about the morality of abortion, according to vir-
tue theory, once it is noted (quite generally, not with
particular reference to abortion) that in exercising a
moral right I can do something cruel, or callous, or
selfish, light- minded, self- righteous, stupid, inconsid-
erate, disloyal, dishonest— that is, act viciously.2 Love
and friendship do not survive their parties’ constantly
insisting on their rights, nor do people live well when
they think that getting what they have a right to is of
preeminent importance; they harm others, and they
harm themselves. So whether women have a moral
right to terminate their pregnancies is irrelevant
within virtue theory, for it is irrelevant to the question
“In having an abortion in these circumstances, would
the agent be acting virtuously or viciously or neither?”
What about the consideration of the status of the
fetus— what can virtue theory say about that? One
might say that this issue is not in the province of any
moral theory; it is a metaphysical question, and an
extremely difficult one at that. Must virtue theory then
wait upon metaphysics to come up with the answer?
At first sight it might seem so. For virtue is said to
involve knowledge, and part of this knowledge con-
sists in having the right attitude to things. “Right”
here does not just mean “morally right” or “proper”
or “nice” in the modern sense; it means “accurate,
true.” One cannot have the right or correct attitude to
something if the attitude is based on or involves false
beliefs. And this suggests that if the status of the fetus
* * *
As everyone knows, the morality of abortion is com-
monly discussed in relation to just two consider-
ations: first, and predominantly, the status of the fetus
and whether or not it is the sort of thing that may or
may not be innocuously or justifiably killed; and sec-
ond, and less predominantly (when, that is, the dis-
cussion concerns the morality of abortion rather than
the question of permissible legislation in a just soci-
ety), women’s rights. If one thinks within this familiar
framework, one may well be puzzled about what virtue
theory, as such, could contribute. Some people assume
the discussion will be conducted solely in terms of
what the virtuous agent would or would not do . . .
Others assume that only justice, or at most justice and
charity, will be applied to the issue, generating a dis-
cussion very similar to Judith Jarvis Thomson’s.1
Now if this is the way the virtue theorist’s discus-
sion of abortion is imagined to be, no wonder people
think little of it. It seems obvious in advance that in
any such discussion there must be either a great deal of
extremely tendentious application of the virtue terms
just, charitable, and so on or a lot of rhetorical appeal
to “this is what only the virtuous agent knows.” But
these are caricatures; they fail to appreciate the way in
which virtue theory quite transforms the discussion of
abortion by dismissing the two familiar dominating
considerations as, in a way, fundamentally irrelevant.
In what way or ways, I hope to make both clear and
plausible.
Let us first consider women’s rights. Let me
emphasize again that we are discussing the morality
of abortion, not the rights and wrongs of laws prohib-
iting or permitting it. If we suppose that women do
Rosalind Hursthouse, excerpts from “Virtue Theory and Abor-
tion.” Philosophy and Public Affairs 20(3): 233–44. Copyright ©
1991 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Reproduced with permission of
Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

CHAPTER 9: ABORTION Á 269
other, nearly everything written on the status of the
fetus and its bearing on the abortion issue would be
consistent with the human reproductive facts (to say
nothing of family life) being totally different from
what they are. Imagine that you are an alien extra-
terrestrial anthropologist who does not know that
the human race is roughly 50 percent female and 50
percent male, or that our only (natural) form of repro-
duction involves heterosexual intercourse, viviparous
birth, and the female’s (and only the female’s) being
pregnant for nine months, or that females are capable
of childbearing from late childhood to late middle
age, or that childbearing is painful, dangerous, and
emotionally charged— do you think you would pick
up these facts from the hundreds of articles written on
the status of the fetus? I am quite sure you would not.
And that, I think, shows that the current philosophi-
cal literature on abortion has got badly out of touch
with reality.
Now if we are using virtue theory, our first ques-
tion is not “What do the familiar biological facts
show— what can be derived from them about the sta-
tus of the fetus?” but “How do these facts figure in the
practical reasoning, actions and passions, thoughts
and reactions, of the virtuous and the nonvirtuous?
What is the mark of having the right attitude to these
facts and what manifests having the wrong attitude
to them?” This immediately makes essentially rele-
vant not only all the facts about human reproduction
I mentioned above, but a whole range of facts about
our emotions in relation to them as well. I mean such
facts as that human parents, both male and female,
tend to care passionately about their offspring, and
that family relationships are among the deepest and
strongest in our lives— and, significantly, among the
longest- lasting.
These facts make it obvious that pregnancy is not
just one among many other physical conditions; and
hence that anyone who genuinely believes that an
abortion is comparable to a haircut or an appendec-
tomy is mistaken.4 The fact that the premature termi-
nation of a pregnancy is, in some sense, the cutting off
of a new human life, and thereby, like the procreation
of a new human life, connects with all our thoughts
about human life and death, parenthood, and family
is relevant to the rightness or wrongness of abortion,
its status must be known, as a truth, to the fully wise
and virtuous person.
But the sort of wisdom that the fully virtuous per-
son has is not supposed to be recondite; it does not
call for fancy philosophical sophistication, and it does
not depend upon, let alone wait upon, the discover-
ies of academic philosophers.3 And this entails the
following, rather startling, conclusion: that the status
of the fetus— that issue over which so much ink has
been spilt— is, according to virtue theory, simply not
relevant to the rightness or wrongness of abortion
(within, that is, a secular morality).
Or rather, since that is clearly too radical a conclu-
sion, it is in a sense relevant, but only in the sense that
the familiar biological facts are relevant. By “the famil-
iar biological facts” I mean the facts that most human
societies are and have been familiar with— that, stan-
dardly (but not invariably), pregnancy occurs as the
result of sexual intercourse, that it lasts about nine
months, during which time the fetus grows and devel-
ops, that standardly it terminates in the birth of a liv-
ing baby, and that this is how we all come to be.
It might be thought that this distinction—
between the familiar biological facts and the status
of the fetus— is a distinction without a difference. But
this is not so. To attach relevance to the status of the
fetus, in the sense in which virtue theory claims it is
not relevant, is to be gripped by the conviction that
we must go beyond the familiar biological facts, deriv-
ing some sort of conclusion from them, such as that
the fetus has rights, or is not a person, or something
similar. It is also to believe that this exhausts the rel-
evance of the familiar biological facts, that all they are
relevant to is the status of the fetus and whether or not
it is the sort of thing that may or may not be killed.
These convictions, I suspect, are rooted in the
desire to solve the problem of abortion by getting it
to fall under some general rule such as “You ought
not to kill anything with the right to life but may kill
anything else.” But they have resulted in what should
surely strike any nonphilosopher as a most bizarre
aspect of nearly all the current philosophical litera-
ture on abortion, namely, that, far from treating abor-
tion as a unique moral problem, markedly unlike any

270 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
same reasons in the early stages in a way that matches
the fact that deep grief over miscarriage in the later
stages is more appropriate than it is over miscarriage
in the earlier stages (when, that is, the grief is solely
about the loss of this child, not about, as might be the
case, the loss of one’s only hope of having a child or
of having one’s husband’s child). Imagine (or recall)
a woman who already has children; she had not
intended to have more, but finds herself unexpect-
edly pregnant. Though contrary to her plans, the
pregnancy, once established as a fact, is welcomed—
and then she loses the embryo almost immediately. If
this were bemoaned as a tragedy, it would, I think, be
a misapplication of the concept of what is tragic. But
it may still properly be mourned as a loss. The grief is
expressed in such terms as “I shall always wonder how
she or he would have turned out” or “When I look
at the others, I shall think, ‘How different their lives
would have been if this other one had been part of
them.’” It would, I take it, be callous and light- minded
to say, or think, “Well, she has already got four chil-
dren; what’s the problem?”; it would be neither, nor
arrogantly intrusive in the case of a close friend, to
try to correct prolonged mourning by saying, “I know
it’s sad, but it’s not a tragedy; rejoice in the ones you
have.” The application of tragic becomes more appro-
priate as the fetus grows, for the mere fact that one
has lived with it for longer, conscious of its existence,
makes a difference. To shrug off an early abortion is
understandable just because it is very hard to be fully
conscious of the fetus’s existence in the early stages
and hence hard to appreciate that an early abortion
is the destruction of life. It is particularly hard for the
young and inexperienced to appreciate this, because
appreciation of it usually comes only with experience.
I do not mean “with the experience of having an
abortion” (though that may be part of it) but, quite
generally, “with the experience of life.” Many women
who have borne children contrast their later pregnan-
cies with their first successful one, saying that in the
later ones they were conscious of a new life growing
in them from very early on. And, more generally, as
one reaches the age at which the next generation is
coming up close behind one, the counterfactuals “If
relationships, must make it a serious matter. To dis-
regard this fact about it, to think of abortion as noth-
ing but the killing of something that does not matter,
or as nothing but the exercise of some right or rights
one has, or as the incidental means to some desirable
state of affairs, is to do something callous and light-
minded, the sort of thing that no virtuous and wise
person would do. It is to have the wrong attitude not
only to fetuses, but more generally to human life and
death, parenthood, and family relationships.
Although I say that the facts make this obvious,
I know that this is one of my tendentious points. In
partial support of it I note that even the most dedi-
cated proponents of the view that deliberate abortion
is just like an appendectomy or haircut rarely hold the
same view of spontaneous abortion, that is, miscar-
riage. It is not so tendentious of me to claim that to
react to people’s grief over miscarriage by saying, or
even thinking, “What a fuss about nothing!” would
be callous and light- minded, whereas to try to laugh
someone out of grief over an appendectomy scar or a
botched haircut would not be. It is hard to give this
point due prominence within act- centered theories,
for the inconsistency is an inconsistency in attitude
about the seriousness of loss of life, not in beliefs
about which acts are right or wrong. Moreover, an
act- centered theorist may say, “Well, there is nothing
wrong with thinking ‘What a fuss about nothing!’ as
long as you do not say it and hurt the person who is
grieving. And besides, we cannot be held responsible
for our thoughts, only for the intentional actions they
give rise to.” But the character traits that virtue theory
emphasizes are not simply dispositions to intentional
actions, but a seamless disposition to certain actions
and passions, thoughts and reactions.
To say that the cutting off of a human life is
always a matter of some seriousness, at any stage, is
not to deny the relevance of gradual fetal develop-
ment. Notwithstanding the well- worn point that clear
boundary lines cannot be drawn, our emotions and
attitudes regarding the fetus do change as it develops,
and again when it is born, and indeed further as the
baby grows. Abortion for shallow reasons in the later
stages is much more shocking than abortion for the

CHAPTER 9: ABORTION Á 271
their connection with having the right attitude to par-
enthood and family relationships. But it may well be
thought that failing to bring in women’s rights still
leaves some important aspects of the problem of abor-
tion untouched.
Speaking in terms of women’s rights, people some-
times say things like, “Well, it’s her life you’re talking
about too, you know; she’s got a right to her own life,
her own happiness.” And the discussion stops there.
But in the context of virtue theory, given that we are
particularly concerned with what constitutes a good
human life, with what true happiness or eudaimonia
is, this is no place to stop. We go on to ask, “And is this
life of hers a good one? Is she living well?”
If we are to go on to talk about good human lives,
in the context of abortion, we have to bring in our
thoughts about the value of love and family life, and
our proper emotional development through a natu-
ral life cycle. The familiar facts support the view that
parenthood in general, and motherhood and child-
bearing in particular, are intrinsically worthwhile, are
among the things that can be correctly thought to be
partially constitutive of a flourishing human life. If
this is right, then a woman who opts for not being a
mother (at all, or again, or now) by opting for abortion
may thereby be manifesting a flawed grasp of what her
life should be, and be about— a grasp that is childish,
or grossly materialistic, or shortsighted, or shallow.
I said “may thereby”: this need not be so. Consider,
for instance, a woman who has already had several
children and fears that to have another will seriously
affect her capacity to be a good mother to the ones she
has— she does not show a lack of appreciation of the
intrinsic value of being a parent by opting for abor-
tion. Nor does a woman who has been a good mother
and is approaching the age at which she may be look-
ing forward to bring a good grandmother. Nor does a
woman who discovers that her pregnancy may well
kill her, and opts for abortion and adoption. Nor, nec-
essarily, does a woman who has decided to lead a life
centered around some other worthwhile activity or
activities with which motherhood would compete.
People who are childless by choice are sometimes
described as “irresponsible,” or “selfish,” or “refusing
I, or she, had had an abortion, Alice, or Bob, would
not have been born” acquire a significant application,
which casts a new light on the conditionals “If I or
Alice have an abortion then some Caroline or Bill will
not be born.”
The fact that pregnancy is not just one among
many physical conditions does not mean that one
can never regard it in that light without manifest-
ing a vice. When women are in very poor physical
health, or worn out from childbearing, or forced to
do very physically demanding jobs, then they cannot
be described as self- indulgent, callous, irresponsible,
or light- minded if they seek abortions mainly with a
view to avoiding pregnancy as the physical condition
that it is. To go through with a pregnancy when one is
utterly exhausted, or when one’s job consists of crawl-
ing along tunnels hauling coal, as many women in
the nineteenth century were obliged to do, is perhaps
heroic, but people who do not achieve heroism are not
necessarily vicious. That they can view the pregnancy
only as eight months of misery, followed by hours if
not days of agony and exhaustion, and abortion only
as the blessed escape from this prospect, is entirely
understandable and does not manifest any lack of
serious respect for human life or a shallow attitude to
motherhood. What it does show is that something is
terribly amiss in the conditions of their lives, which
make it so hard to recognize pregnancy and childbear-
ing as the good that they can be.
* * *
The foregoing discussion, insofar as it emphasizes
the right attitude to human life and death, parallels to
a certain extent those standard discussions of abortion
that concentrate on it solely as an issue of killing. But
it does not, as those discussions do, gloss over the fact,
emphasized by those who discuss the morality of abor-
tion in terms of women’s rights, that abortion, wildly
unlike any other form of killing, is the termination of
a pregnancy, which is a condition of a woman’s body
and results in her having a child if it is not aborted.
This fact is given due recognition not by appeal to
women’s rights but by emphasizing the relevance of
the familiar biological and psychological facts and

272 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
or guilt inappropriate. For, by virtue of the fact that
a human life has been cut short, some evil has prob-
ably been brought about,5 and that circumstances
make the decision to bring about some evil the right
decision will be a ground for guilt if getting into those
circumstances in the first place itself manifested a
flaw in character.
What “gets one into those circumstances” in
the case of abortion is, except in the case of rape,
one’s sexual activity and one’s choices, or the lack
of them, about one’s sexual partner and about con-
traception. The virtuous woman (which here of
course does not mean simply “chaste woman” but
“woman with the virtues”) has such character traits
as strength, independence, resoluteness, decisiveness,
self- confidence, responsibility, serious- mindedness,
and self- determination— and no one, I think, could
deny that many women become pregnant in circum-
stances in which they cannot welcome or cannot face
the thought of having this child precisely because they
lack one or some of these character traits. So even in
the cases where the decision to have an abortion is
the right one, it can still be the reflection of a moral
failing— not because the decision itself is weak or cow-
ardly or irresolute or irresponsible or light- minded,
but because lack of the requisite opposite of these fail-
ings landed one in the circumstances in the first place.
Hence the common universalized claim that guilt
and remorse are never appropriate emotions about
an abortion is denied. They may be appropriate, and
appropriately inculcated, even when the decision was
the right one.
Another motivation for bringing women’s
rights into the discussion may be to attempt to cor-
rect the implication, carried by the killing- centered
approach, that insofar as abortion is wrong, it is a
wrong that only women do, or at least (given the pre-
ponderance of male doctors) that only women insti-
gate. I do not myself believe that we can thus escape
the fact that nature bears harder on women than it
does on men, but virtue theory can certainly correct
many of the injustices that the emphasis on women’s
rights is rightly concerned about. With very little
to grow up,” or “not knowing what life is about.”
But one can hold that having children is intrinsi-
cally worthwhile without endorsing this, for we are,
after all, in the happy position of there being more
worthwhile things to do than can be fitted into one
lifetime. Parenthood, and motherhood in particu-
lar, even if granted to be intrinsically worthwhile,
undoubtedly take up a lot of one’s adult life, leaving
no room for some other worthwhile pursuits. But
some women who choose abortion rather than have
their first child, and some men who encourage their
partners to choose abortion, are not avoiding par-
enthood for the sake of other worthwhile pursuits,
but for the worthless one of “having a good time,”
or for the pursuit of some false vision of the ideals
of freedom or self- realization. And some others who
say “I am not ready for parenthood yet” are making
some sort of mistake about the extent to which one
can manipulate the circumstances of one’s life so as
to make it fulfill some dream that one has. Perhaps
one’s dream is to have two perfect children, a girl and
a boy, within a perfect marriage, in financially secure
circumstances, with an interesting job of one’s own.
But to care too much about that dream, to demand
of life that it give it to one and act accordingly, may
be both greedy and foolish, and is to run the risk of
missing out on happiness entirely. Not only may fate
make the dream impossible, or destroy it, but one’s
own attachment to it may make it impossible. Good
marriages, and the most promising children, can be
destroyed by just one adult’s excessive demand for
perfection.
Once again, this is not to deny that girls may
quite properly say “I am not ready for motherhood
yet,” especially in our society, and, far from mani-
festing irresponsibility or light- mindedness, show
an appropriate modesty or humility, or a fearfulness
that does not amount to cowardice. However, even
when the decision to have an abortion is the right
decision— one that does not itself fall under a vice-
related term and thereby one that the perfectly virtu-
ous could recommend— it does not follow that there
is no sense in which having the abortion is wrong,

CHAPTER 9: ABORTION Á 273
3. This is an assumption of virtue theory, and I do not
attempt to defend it here. An adequate discussion of it
would require a separate article, since, although most moral
philosophers would be chary of claiming that intellectual
sophistication is a necessary condition of moral wisdom
or virtue, most of us, from Plato onward, tend to write as if
this were so. Sorting out which claims about moral knowl-
edge are committed to this kind of elitism and which can,
albeit with difficulty, be reconciled with the idea that moral
knowledge can be acquired by anyone who really wants it
would be a major task.
4. Mary Anne Warren, in “On the Moral and Legal Status of
Abortion,” Monist 57 (1973), sec. 1, says of the opponents of
restrictive laws governing abortion that “their conviction
(for the most part) is that abortion is not a morally serious
and extremely unfortunate, even though sometimes justi-
fied, act, comparable to killing in self- defense or to letting
the violinist die, but rather is closer to being a morally neu-
tral act, like cutting one’s hair” (italics mine). I would like
to think that no one genuinely believes this. But certainly in
discussion, particularly when arguing against restrictive laws
or the suggestion that remorse over abortion might be appro-
priate, I have found that some people say they believe it (and
often cite Warren’s article, albeit inaccurately, despite its
age). Those who allow that it is morally serious, and far from
morally neutral, have to argue against restrictive laws, or the
appropriateness of remorse, on a very different ground from
that laid down by the premise “The fetus is just part of the
woman’s body (and she has a right to determine what hap-
pens to her body and should not feel guilty about anything
she does to it).”
5. I say “some evil has probably been brought about” on
the ground that (human) life is (usually) a good and hence
(human) death usually an evil. The exceptions would be
(a) where death is actually a good or a benefit, because the
baby that would come to be if the life were not cut short
would be better off dead than alive, and (b) where death,
though not a good, is not an evil either, because the life that
would be led (e.g., in a state of permanent coma) would not
be a good.
amendment, everything that has been said above
applies to boys and men too. Although the abortion
decision is, in a natural sense, the woman’s decision,
proper to her, boys and men are often party to it,
for well or ill, and even when they are not, they are
bound to have been party to the circumstances that
brought it up. No less than girls and women, boys and
men can, in their actions, manifest self- centeredness,
callousness, and light- mindedness about life and
parenthood in relation to abortion. They can be
self- centered or courageous about the possibility of
disability in their offspring; they need to reflect on
their sexual activity and their choices, or the lack of
them, about their sexual partner and contraception;
they need to grow up and take responsibility for their
own actions and life in relation to fatherhood. If it
is true, as I maintain, that insofar as motherhood is
intrinsically worthwhile, being a mother is an impor-
tant purpose in women’s lives, being a father (rather
than a mere generator) is an important purpose in
men’s lives as well, and it is adolescent of men to turn
a blind eye to this and pretend that they have many
more important things to do.
* * *
NOTES
1. Judith Jarvis Thomson, “A Defense of Abortion,”
Philosophy & Public Affairs 1, no. 1 (Fall 1971): 47–66. One
could indeed regard this article as proto- virtue theory (no
doubt to the surprise of the author) if the concepts of cal-
lousness and kindness were allowed more weight.
2. One possible qualification: if one ties the concept of jus-
tice very closely to rights, then if women do have a moral
right to terminate their pregnancies it may follow that in
doing so they do not act unjustly. (Cf. Thomson, “A Defense
of Abortion.”) But it is debatable whether even that much
follows.

274 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
Abortion Through a Feminist Ethics Lens
Susan Sherwin
Although feminists welcome the support of non-
feminists in pursuing policies that will grant women
control over abortion decisions, they generally envi-
sion very different sorts of policies for this purpose
than those considered by non- feminist sympathizers.
For example, Kathleen McDonnell (1984) urges femi-
nists to develop an explicitly “‘feminist morality’ of
abortion. . . . At its root it would be characterized by
the deep appreciations of the complexities of life, the
refusal to polarize and adopt simplistic formulas” (p.
52). Here, I propose one conception of the shape such
an analysis should take.
WOMEN AND ABORTION
The most obvious difference between feminist and
non- feminist approaches to abortion can be seen in
the relative attention each gives to the interests and
experiences of women in its analysis. Feminists con-
sider it self- evident that the pregnant woman is a
subject of principal concern in abortion decisions.
In most non- feminist accounts, however, not only
is she not perceived as central, she is rendered virtu-
ally invisible. Non- feminist theorists, whether they
support or oppose women’s right to choose abortion,
focus almost all their attention on the moral status of
the developing embryo or the fetus.
In pursuing a distinctively feminist ethics, it is
appropriate to begin with a look at the role of abortion
in women’s lives. Clearly, the need for abortion can be
very intense: women have pursued abortions under
appalling and dangerous conditions, across widely
diverse cultures and historical periods. No one denies
that if abortion is not made legal, safe, and accessible,
women will seek out illegal and life- threatening abor-
tions to terminate pregnancies they cannot accept.
Anti- abortion activists seem willing to accept this price,
but feminists judge the inevitable loss of women’s lives
associated with restrictive abortion policies to be a
matter of fundamental concern.
Abortion has long been a central issue in the arena of
applied ethics, but, the distinctive analysis of feminist
ethics is generally overlooked in most philosophic
discussions. Authors and readers commonly presume
a familiarity with the feminist position and equate
it with liberal defences of women’s right to choose
abortion, but, in fact, feminist ethics yields a different
analysis of the moral questions surrounding abortion
than that usually offered by the more familiar liberal
defenders of abortion rights. Most feminists car agree
with some of the conclusions that arise from certain
non- feminist arguments on abortion, but they often
disagree about the way the issues are formulated and
the sorts of reasons that are invoked in the main-
stream literature.
Among the many differences found between
feminist and non- feminist arguments about abor-
tion, is the fact that most non- feminist discussions of
abortion consider the questions of the moral or legal
permissibility of abortion in isolation from other ques-
tions, ignoring (and thereby obscuring) relevant con-
nections to other social practices that oppress women.
They are generally grounded in masculinist concep-
tions of freedom (e.g., privacy, individual choice,
individuals’ property rights in their own bodies) that
do not meet the needs, interests, and intuitions of
many of the women concerned. In contrast, feminists
seek to couch their arguments in moral concepts that
support their general campaign of overcoming injus-
tice in all its dimensions, including those inherent
in moral theory itself.1 There is even disagreement
about how best to understand the moral question at
issue: non- feminist arguments focus exclusively on
the morality and/or legality of performing abortions,
whereas feminists insist that other questions, includ-
ing ones about accessibility and delivery of abortion
services must also be addressed.
Susan Sherwin, “Abortion Through a Feminist Ethics Lens,”
Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review, vol. 30, no. 1–2 (1991),
© Canadian Philosophical Association 1991, published by Cam-
bridge University Press, reproduced with permission.

CHAPTER 9: ABORTION Á 275
she will have—between one and three more than her
working childless counterpart” (Petchesky 1984, p.
150). In many circumstances, having a child will exac-
erbate the social and economic forces already stacked
against her by virtue of her sex (and her race, class, age,
sexual orientation, or the effects of some disability,
etc.). Access to abortion is a necessary option for many
women if they are to escape the oppressive conditions
of poverty.
Whatever the reason, most feminists believe that
a pregnant woman is in the best position to judge
whether abortion is the appropriate response to her
circumstances. Since she is usually the only one able
to weigh all the relevant factors, most feminists reject
attempts to offer any general abstract rules for deter-
mining when abortion is morally justified. Women’s
personal deliberations about abortion include con-
textually defined considerations reflecting her com-
mitment to the needs and interests of everyone
concerned—including herself, the fetus she carries,
other members of her household, etc. Because there is
no single formula available for balancing these com-
plex factors through all possible cases, it is vital that
feminists insist on protecting each woman’s right to
come to her own conclusions. Abortion decisions are,
by their very nature, dependent on specific features of
each woman’s experience; theoretically dispassionate
philosophers and other moralists should not expect to
set the agenda for these considerations in any univer-
sal way. Women must be acknowledged as full moral
agents with the responsibility for making moral deci-
sions about their own pregnancies.2 Although I think
that it is possible for a woman to make a mistake in her
moral judgment on this matter (i.e., it is possible that a
woman may come to believe that she was wrong about
her decision to continue or terminate a pregnancy),
the intimate nature of this sort of decision makes it
unlikely that anyone else is in a position to arrive at
a more reliable conclusion; it is, therefore, improper
to grant others the authority to interfere in women’s
decisions to seek abortions.
Feminist analysis regards the effects of unwanted
pregnancies on the lives of women individually and
collectively as a central element in the moral evalua-
tion of abortion. Even without patriarchy, bearing a
Although anti- abortion campaigners imagine that
women often make frivolous and irresponsible deci-
sions about abortion, feminists recognize that women
have abortions for a wide variety of reasons. Some
women, for instance, find themselves seriously ill and
incapacitated throughout pregnancy: they cannot
continue in their jobs and may face enormous difficul-
ties in fulfilling their responsibilities at home. Many
employers and schools will not tolerate pregnancy in
their employees or students, and not every woman is
able to put her job, career, or studies on hold. Women
of limited means may be unable to take adequate care
of children they have already borne and they may
know that another mouth to feed will reduce their abil-
ity to provide for their existing children. Women who
suffer from chronic disease, or who feel too young, or
too old, or who are unable to maintain lasting rela-
tionships may recognize that they will not be able to
care properly for a child at this time. Some who are
homeless, or addicted to drugs, or who are diagnosed
as carrying the AIDS virus may be unwilling to allow a
child to enter the world under such circumstances. If
the pregnancy is a result of rape or incest, the psycho-
logical pain of carrying it to term may be unbearable,
and the woman may recognize that her attitude to the
child after birth will always be tinged with bitterness.
Some women have learned that the fetuses they carry
have serious chromosomal anomalies and consider it
best to prevent them from being born with a condition
bound to cause suffering. Others, knowing the fathers
to be brutal and violent, may be unwilling to subject a
child to the beatings or incestuous attacks they antici-
pate: some may have no other realistic way to remove
the child (or themselves) from the relationship.
Or a woman may simply believe that bearing a
child is incompatible with her life plans at this time,
since continuing a pregnancy is likely to have pro-
found repercussions throughout a woman’s entire life.
If the woman is young, a pregnancy will very likely
reduce her chances of education and hence limit her
career and life opportunities: “The earlier a woman
has a baby, it seems, the more likely she is to drop
out of school; the less education she gets, the more
likely she is to remain poorly paid, peripheral to the
labour market, or unemployed, and the more children

276 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
the participants, but is the price of continued “good
will”—popularity, economic survival, peace, or simple
acceptance. Few women have not found themselves in
circumstances where they do not feel free to refuse a
man’s demands for intercourse, either because he is
holding a gun to her head or because he threatens to
be emotionally hurt if she refuses (or both). Women
are socialized to be compliant and accommodating,
sensitive to the feelings of others, and frightened of
physical power; men are socialized to take advantage
of every opportunity to engage in sexual intercourse
and to use sex to express dominance and power.
Under such circumstances, it is difficult to argue that
women could simply “choose” to avoid heterosexual
activity if they wish to avoid pregnancy. Catherine
MacKinnon neatly sums it up: “the logic by which
women are supposed to consent to sex [is]: preclude
the alternatives, then call the remaining option ‘her
choice’ ” (MacKinnon 1989, p. 192).
Nor can women rely on birth control alone to
avoid pregnancy. There simply is no form of reversible
contraception available that is fully safe and reliable.
The pill and the IUD are the most effective means
offered, but both involve significant health hazards to
women and are quite dangerous for some. No woman
should spend the 30 to 40 years of her reproductive
life on either form of birth control. Further, both have
been associated with subsequent problems of involun-
tary infertility, so they are far from optimal for women
who seek to control the timing of their pregnancies.
The safest form of birth control involves the use
of barrier methods (condoms or diaphragms) in com-
bination with spermicidal foams or jelly. But these
methods also pose difficulties for women. They may
be socially awkward to use: young women are discour-
aged from preparing for sexual activity that might
never happen and are offered instead romantic models
of spontaneous passion. (Few films or novels interrupt
scenes of seduction for the fetching of contraceptives.)
Many women find their male partners unwilling to
use barrier methods of contraception and they do not
have the power to insist. Further, cost is a limiting fac-
tor for many women. Condoms and spermicides are
expensive and are not covered under most health care
plans. There is only one contraceptive option which
child would be a very important event in a woman’s
life. It involves significant physical, emotional, social,
and (usually) economic changes for her. The ability
to exert control over the incidence, timing, and fre-
quency of childbearing is often tied to her ability to
control most other things she values. Since we live in a
patriarchal society, it is especially important to ensure
that women have the authority to control their own
reproduction.3 Despite the diversity of opinion among
feminists on most other matters, virtually all feminists
seem to agree that women must gain full control over
their own reproductive lives if they are to free them-
selves from male dominance.4 Many perceive the
commitment of the political right wing to opposing
abortion as part of a general strategy to reassert patri-
archal control over women in the face of significant
feminist influence (Petchesky 1980, p.112).
Women’s freedom to choose abortion is also
linked with their ability to control their own sexuality.
Women’s subordinate status often prevents them from
refusing men sexual access to their bodies. If women
cannot end the unwanted pregnancies that result
from male sexual dominance, their sexual vulner-
ability to particular men can increase, because caring
for an(other) infant involves greater financial needs
and reduced economic opportunities for women.5 As
a result, pregnancy often forces women to become
dependent on men. Since a woman’s dependence on a
man is assumed to entail that she will remain sexually
loyal to him, restriction of abortion serves to channel
women’s sexuality and further perpetuates the cycle
of oppression.
In contrast to most non- feminist accounts, femi-
nist analyses of abortion direct attention to the ques-
tion of how women get pregnant. Those who reject
abortion seem to believe that women can avoid
unwanted pregnancies by avoiding sexual inter-
course. Such views show little appreciation for the
power of sexual politics in a culture that oppresses
women. Existing patterns of sexual dominance mean
that women often have little control over their sexual
lives. They may be subject to rape by strangers, or by
their husbands, boyfriends, colleagues, employers,
customers, fathers, brothers, uncles, and dates. Often,
the sexual coercion is not even recognized as such by

CHAPTER 9: ABORTION Á 277
The woman on whom the fetus depends for sur-
vival is considered as secondary (if she is considered
at all) in these debates. The actual experiences and
responsibilities of real women are not perceived as
morally relevant (unless they, too, can be proved
innocent by establishing that their pregnancies are a
result of rape or incest). It is a common assumption
of both defenders and opponents of women’s right
to choose abortion that many women will be irre-
sponsible in their choices. The important question,
though, is whether fetuses have the sort of status that
justifies interfering in women’s choices at all. In some
contexts, women’s role in gestation is literally reduced
to that of “fetal containers”; the individual women
disappear or are perceived simply as mechanical life-
support systems.9
The current rhetoric against abortion stresses the
fact that the genetic make- up of the fetus is determined
at conception and the genetic code is incontestably
human. Lest there be any doubt about the humanity of
the fetus, we are assailed with photographs of fetuses
at various stages of development demonstrating the
early appearance of recognizably human characteris-
tics, e.g., eyes, fingers, and toes. The fact that the fetus
in its early stages is microscopic, virtually indistin-
guishable from other primate fetuses to the untrained
eye, and lacking in the capacities that make human
life meaningful and valuable is not deemed relevant
by the self- appointed defenders of fetuses. The anti-
abortion campaign is directed at evoking sympathetic
attitudes towards this tiny, helpless being whose life
is threatened by its own mother; it urges us to see the
fetus as entangled in an adversarial relationship with
the (presumably irresponsible) woman who carries
it. We are encouraged to identify with the “unborn
child” and not with the (selfish) woman whose life is
also at issue.
Within the non- feminist literature, both defend-
ers and opponents of women’s right to choose abor-
tion agree that the difference between a late- term
fetus and a newborn infant is “merely geographical”
and cannot be considered morally significant. But a
fetus inhabits a woman’s body and is wholly depen-
dent on her unique contribution to its maintenance
while a newborn is physically separate though still in
offers women safe and fully effective birth control:
barrier methods with the back- up option of abortion.6
From a feminist perspective, a central moral fea-
ture of pregnancy is that it takes place in women’s
bodies and has profound effects on women’s lives
Gender- neutral accounts of pregnancy are not avail-
able; pregnancy is explicitly a condition associated
with the female body.7 Because the need for abortion
is experienced only by women, policies about abor-
tion affect women uniquely. Thus, it is important to
consider how proposed policies on abortion fit into
general patterns of oppression for women. Unlike
non- feminist accounts, feminist ethics demands that
the effects on the oppression of women be a principal
consideration when evaluating abortion policies.
THE FETUS
In contrast, most non- feminist analysts believe that
the moral acceptability of abortion turns on the ques-
tion of the moral status of the fetus. Even those who
support women’s right to choose abortion tend to
accept the central premise of the anti- abortion propo-
nents that abortion can only be tolerated if it can be
proved that the fetus is lacking some criterion of full
personhood.8 Opponents of abortion have structured
the debate so that it is necessary to define the status of
the fetus as either valued the same as other humans
(and hence entitled not to be killed) or as lacking in
all value. Rather than challenging the logic of this
formulation, many defenders of abortion have con-
centrated on showing that the fetus is indeed with-
out significant value (Tooley 1972, Warren 1973);
others, such as Wayne Sumner (1981), offer a more
subtle account that reflects the gradual development
of fetuses whereby there is some specific criterion that
determines the degree of protection to be afforded
them which is lacking in the early stages of pregnancy
but present in the later stages. Thus, the debate often
rages between abortion opponents who describe the
fetus as an “innocent,” vulnerable, morally impor-
tant, separate being whose life is threatened and who
must be protected at all costs, and abortion supporters
who try to establish some sort of deficiency inherent
to fetuses which removes them from the scope of the
moral community.

278 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
women are being coerced into undergoing unwanted
Caesarean deliveries and technologically monitored
hospital births. Some states have begun to imprison
women for endangering their fetuses through drug
abuse and other socially unacceptable behaviours. An
Australian state recently introduced a bill that makes
women liable to criminal prosecution “if they are found
to have smoked during pregnancy, eaten unhealthful
foods, or taken any other action which can be shown to
have adversely affected the development of the fetus”
(Warren 1989, p. 60).
In other words, physicians have joined with anti-
abortionist activists in fostering a cultural acceptance
of the view that fetuses are distinct individuals, who
are physically, ontologically, and socially separate
from the women whose bodies they inhabit, and
who have their own distinct interests. In this picture,
pregnant women are either ignored altogether or are
viewed as deficient in some crucial respect and hence
subject to coercion for the sake of their fetuses. In the
former case, the interests of the women concerned
are assumed to be identical with those of the fetus:
in the latter, the women’s interests are irrelevant
because they are perceived as immoral, unimportant,
or unnatural. Focus on the fetus as an independent
entity has led to presumptions which deny pregnant
women their roles as active, independent, moral
agents with a primary interest in what becomes of the
fetuses they carry. Emphasis on the fetus’s status has
led to an assumed licence to interfere with women’s
reproductive freedom.
A FEMINIST VIEW OF THE FETUS
Because the public debate has been set up as a competi-
tion between the rights of women and those of fetuses,
feminists have often felt pushed to reject claims of
fetal value in order to protect women’s claims. Yet, as
Addelson (1987) has argued, viewing abortion in this
way “tears [it] out of the context of women’s lives”
(p.107). There are other accounts of fetal value that are
more plausible and less oppressive to women.
On a feminist account, fetal development is exam-
ined in the context in which it occurs, within women’s
bodies rather than in the imagined isolation implicit
need of a lot of care. One can only view the distinction
between being in or out of a woman’s womb as mor-
ally irrelevant if one discounts the perspective of the
pregnant woman: feminists seem to be alone in recog-
nizing her perspective as morally important.10
Within anti- abortion arguments, fetuses are iden-
tified as individuals: in our culture which views the
(abstract) individual as sacred, fetuses qua individu-
als should be honoured and preserved. Extraordinary
claims are made to try to establish the individuality and
moral agency of fetuses. At the same time, the women
who carry these fetal individuals are viewed as passive
hosts whose only significant role is to refrain from
aborting or harming their fetuses. Since it is widely
believed that the woman does not actually have to do
anything to protect the life of the fetus, pregnancy is
often considered (abstractly) to be a tolerable burden
to protect the life of an individual so like us.11
Medicine has played its part in supporting these
sorts of attitudes. Fetal medicine is a rapidly expanding
specialty, and it is commonplace in professional medi-
cal journals to find references to pregnant women as
“fetal environments.” Fetal surgeons now have at their
disposal a repertory of sophisticated technology that
can save the lives of dangerously ill fetuses; in light
of such heroic successes, it is perhaps understandable
that women have disappeared from their view. These
specialists see fetuses as their patients, not the women
who nurture them. Doctors perceive themselves as the
active agents in saving fetal lives and, hence, believe
that they are the ones in direct relationship with the
fetuses they treat.
Perhaps even more distressing than the tendency to
ignore the woman’s agency altogether and view her as
a purely passive participant in the medically controlled
events of pregnancy and childbirth is the growing prac-
tice of viewing women as genuine threats to the well-
being of the fetus. Increasingly, women are viewed as
irresponsible or hostile towards their fetuses, and the
relationship between them is characterized as adver-
sarial (Overall 1987, p. 60). Concern for the well- being
of the fetus is taken as licence for doctors to intervene
to ensure that women comply with medical “advice.”
Courts are called upon to enforce the doctors’ orders
when moral pressure alone proves inadequate, and

CHAPTER 9: ABORTION Á 279
the essential arts of personhood. Persons essentially are
second persons, who grow up with other persons. . . . The
fact that a person has a life history, and that a people
collectively have a history depends upon the hum-
bler fact that each person has a childhood in which a
cultural heritage is transmitted, ready for adolescent
rejection and adult discriminating selection and con-
tribution. Persons come after and before other per-
sons. (P. 84–85; her emphasis.)
Persons, in other words, are members of a social com-
munity which shapes and values them, and person-
hood is a relational concept that must be defined in
terms of interactions and relationships with others.
A fetus is a unique sort of being in that it cannot
form relationships freely with others, nor can others
readily form relationships with it. A fetus has a pri-
mary and particularly intimate relationship with the
woman in whose womb it develops; any other rela-
tionship it may have is indirect, and must be mediated
through the pregnant woman. The relationship that
exists between a woman and her fetus is clearly asym-
metrical, since she is the only party to the relationship
who is capable of making a decision about whether
the interaction should continue and since the fetus
is wholly dependent on the woman who sustains it
while she is quite capable of surviving without it.
However much some might prefer it to be other-
wise, no one else can do anything to support or harm
a fetus without doing something to the woman who
nurtures it. Because of this inexorable biological real-
ity, she bears a unique responsibility and privilege in
determining her fetus’s place in the social scheme of
things. Clearly, many pregnancies occur to women
who place very high value on the lives of the partic-
ular fetuses they carry, and choose to see their preg-
nancies through to term despite the possible risks and
costs involved; hence, it would be wrong of anyone to
force such a woman to terminate her pregnancy under
these circumstances. Other women, or some of these
same women at other times, value other things more
highly (e.g., their freedom, their health, or previous
responsibilities which conflict with those generated
by the pregnancies), and choose not to continue their
pregnancies. The value that women ascribe to indi-
vidual fetuses varies dramatically from case to case,
in many theoretical accounts. Fetuses develop in spe-
cific pregnancies which occur in the lives of particular
women. They are not individuals housed in generic
female wombs, nor are they full persons at risk only
because they are small and subject to the whims of
women. Their very existence is relational, developing
as they do within particular women’s bodies, and their
principal relationship is to the women who carry them.
On this view, fetuses are morally significant, but
their status is relational rather than absolute. Unlike
other human beings, fetuses do not have any indepen-
dent existence; their existence is uniquely tied to the
support of a specific other. Most non- feminist com-
mentators have ignored the relational dimension of
fetal development and have presumed that the moral
status of fetuses could be resolved solely in terms of
abstract metaphysical criteria of personhood. They
imagine that there is some set of properties (such as
genetic heritage, moral agency, self- consciousness,
language use, or self- determination) which will entitle
all who possess them to be granted the moral status of
persons (Warren 1973, Tooley 1972). They seek some
particular feature by which we can neatly divide the
world into the dichotomy of moral persons (who are
to be valued and protected) and others (who are not
entitled to the same group privileges); it follows that it
is a merely empirical question whether or not fetuses
possess the relevant properties.
But this vision misinterprets what is involved in
personhood and what it is that is especially valued
about persons. Personhood is a social category, not
an isolated state. Persons are members of a commu-
nity; they develop as concrete, discrete, and specific
individuals. To be a morally significant category, per-
sonhood must involve personality as well as biologi-
cal integrity.12 It is not sufficient to consider persons
simply as Kantian atoms of rationality: persons are all
embodied, conscious beings with particular social his-
tories. Annette Baier (1985) has developed a concept
of persons as “second persons” which helps explain
the sort of social dimension that seems fundamental
to any moral notion of personhood:
A person, perhaps, is best seen as one who was long
enough dependent upon other persons to acquire

280 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
repercussions for women’s oppressed status gener-
ally, it is important to ensure that abortion not only
be made legal but that adequate services be made
accessible to all women who seek them. This means
that within Canada, where medically approved abor-
tion is technically recognized as legal (at least for the
moment), we must protest the fact that it is not made
available to many of the women who have the great-
est need for abortions; vast geographical areas offer
no abortion services at all, but unless the women of
those regions can afford to travel to urban clinics,
they have no meaningful right to abortion. Because
women depend on access to abortion in their pursuit
of social equality, it is a matter of moral as well as polit-
ical responsibility that provincial health plans should
cover the cost of transport and service in the abortion
facilities women choose. Ethical study of abortion
involves understanding and critiquing the economic,
age, and social barriers that currently restrict access to
medically acceptable abortion services.14
Moreover, it is also important that abortion services
be provided in an atmosphere that fosters women’s
health and well- being; hence the care offered should
be in a context that is supportive of the choices women
make. Abortions should be seen as part of women’s
overall reproductive health and could be included
within centres that deal with all matters of reproduc-
tive health in an open, patient- centred manner where
effective counselling is offered for a wide range of
reproductive decisions.15 Providers need to recognize
that abortion is a legitimate option so that services will
be delivered with respect and concern for the physical,
psychological, and emotional effects on a patient. All
too frequently, hospital-based abortions are provided
by practitioners who are uneasy about their role and
treat the women involved with hostility and resent-
ment. Increasingly, many anti- abortion activists have
personalized their attacks and focussed their atten-
tion on harassing the women who enter and leave
abortion clinics. Surely requiring a woman to pass a
gauntlet of hostile protesters on her way to and from
an abortion is not conducive to effective health care.
Ethical exploration of abortion raises questions about
how women are treated when they seek abortions;16
achieving legal permission for women to dispose of
and may well change over the course of any particular
pregnancy. There is no absolute value that attaches to
fetuses apart from their relational status determined in
the context of their particular development.
Since human beings are fundamentally relational
beings, it is important to remember that fetuses are
characteristically limited in the relationships in which
they can participate; within those relationships, they
can make only the most restricted “contributions.”13
After birth, human beings are capable of a much wider
range of roles in relationships with an infinite variety
of partners: it is that very diversity of possibility and
experience that leads us to focus on the abstraction of
the individual as a constant through all her/his rela-
tionships. But until birth, no such variety is possible,
and the fetus is defined as an entity within a woman
who will almost certainly be principally responsible
for it for many years to come.
No human, and especially no fetus, can exist
apart from relationships; feminist views of what is
valuable about persons must reflect the social nature
of their existence. Fetal lives can neither be sustained
nor destroyed without affecting the women who sup-
port them. Because of a fetus’s unique physical status—
within and dependent on a particular woman—the
responsibility and privilege of determining its specific
social status and value must rest with the woman car-
rying it. Fetuses are not persons because they have not
developed sufficiently in social relationships to be per-
sons in any morally significant sense (i.e., they are not
yet second persons). Newborns, although just begin-
ning their development into persons, are immediately
subject to social relationships, for they are capable of
communication and response in interaction with a
variety of other persons. Thus, feminist accounts of
abortion stress the importance of protecting women’s
right to continue as well as to terminate pregnancies
as each sees fit.
FEMINIST POLITICS AND ABORTION
Feminist ethics directs us to look at abortion in the
context of other issues of power and not to limit dis-
cussion to the standard questions about its moral and
legal acceptability. Because coerced pregnancy has

CHAPTER 9: ABORTION Á 281
also object to the conditions which lead women to
abort wanted fetuses because there are not adequate
financial and social supports available to care for a
child. Because feminist accounts value fetuses that are
wanted by the women who carry them, they oppose
practices which force women to abort because of pov-
erty or intimidation. Yet, the sorts of social changes
necessary if we are to free women from having abor-
tions out of economic necessity are vast; they include
changes not only in legal and health- care policy,
but also in housing, child care, employment, etc.
(Petchesky 1980, p. 112). Nonetheless, feminist ethics
defines reproductive freedom as the condition under
which women are able to make truly voluntary choices
about their reproductive lives, and these many dimen-
sions are implicit in the ideal.
Clearly, feminists are not “ pro- abortion,” for
they are concerned to ensure the safety of each preg-
nancy to the greatest degree possible; wanted fetuses
should not be harmed or lost. Therefore, adequate
pre- and postnatal care and nutrition are also impor-
tant elements of any feminist position on reproduc-
tive freedom. Where anti- abortionists direct their
energies to trying to prevent women from obtain-
ing abortions, feminists seek to protect the health of
wanted fetuses. They recognize that far more could
be done to protect and care for fetuses if the state
directed its resources at supporting women who con-
tinue their pregnancies, rather than draining away
resources in order to police women who find that
they must interrupt their pregnancies. Caring for the
women who carry fetuses is not only a more legiti-
mate policy than is regulating them; it is probably
also more effective at ensuring the health and well-
being of more fetuses.
Feminist ethics also explores how abortion poli-
cies fit within the politics of sexual domination. Most
feminists are sensitive to the fact that many men sup-
port women’s right to abortion out of the belief that
women will be more willing sexual partners if they
believe that they can readily terminate an unwanted
pregnancy. Some men coerce their partners into
obtaining abortions the women may not want.19
Feminists understand that many women oppose abor-
tion for this very reason, being unwilling to support
their fetuses if they are determined enough to manage
the struggle should not be accepted as the sole moral
consideration.
Nonetheless, feminists must formulate their dis-
tinctive response to legislative initiatives on abortion.
The tendency of Canadian politicians confronted
by vocal activists on both sides of the abortion issue
has been to seek “compromises” that seem to give
something to each (and, thereby, also deprives each
of important features sought in policy formation).
Thus, the House of Commons recently passed a law
(Bill C- 43) that allows a woman to have an abortion
only if a doctor certifies that her physical, mental, or
emotional health will be otherwise threatened. Many
non- feminist supporters of women’s right to choose
consider this a victory and urge feminists to be satis-
fied with it, but feminists have good reason to object.
Besides their obvious objection to having abortion
returned to the Criminal Code, feminists also object
that this policy considers doctors and not women
the best judges of a woman’s need for abortion; femi-
nists have little reason to trust doctors to appreciate
the political dimension of abortion or to respond
adequately to women’s needs. Abortion must be a
woman’s decision, and not one controlled by her doc-
tor. Further, experience shows that doctors are already
reluctant to provide abortions to women; the opportu-
nity this law presents for criminal persecution of doc-
tors by anti- abortion campaigners is a sufficient worry
to inhibit their participation.17 Feminists want women’s
decision- making to be recognized as legitimate, and
cannot be satisfied with a law that makes abortion a
medical choice.
Feminists support abortion on demand because
they know that women must have control over their
reproduction. For the same reason, they actively
oppose forced abortion and coerced sterilization, prac-
tices that are sometimes inflicted on the most pow-
erless women, especially those in the Third World.
Feminist ethics demands that access to voluntary,
safe, effective birth control be part of any abortion dis-
cussion, so that women have access to other means of
avoiding pregnancy.18
Feminist analysis addresses the context as well
as the practice of abortion decisions. Thus, feminists

282 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
irresponsible; they ought not to be perpetuated. Women,
seeking moral guidance in their own deliberations about
choosing abortion, do not find such hypothetical discus-
sions of much use.
3. In her monumental historical analysis of the early roots
of Western patriarchy, Gerda Lerner (1986) determined that
patriarchy began in the period from 3100 to 600 B.C. when
men appropriated women’s sexual and reproductive capac-
ity; the earliest states entrenched patriarchy by institutional-
izing the sexual and procreative subordination of women to
men.
4. There are some women who claim to be feminists against
choice in abortion. See, for instance, Callahan (1987),
though few spell out their full feminist program. For reasons
I develop in this paper, I do not think this is a consistent
position.
5. There is a lot the state could do to ameliorate this condi-
tion. If it provided women with adequate financial support,
removed the inequities in the labour market, and provided
affordable and reliable childcare, pregnancy need not so
often lead to a woman’s dependence on a particular man. The
fact that it does not do so is evidence of the state’s complicity
in maintaining women’s subordinate position with respect to
men.
6. See Petchesky (1984), especially Chapter 5, “Considering
the Alternatives: The Problems of Contraception,” where she
documents the risks and discomforts associated with pill use
and IUDs and the increasing rate at which women are choos-
ing the option of diaphragm or condom with the option of
early legal abortions as backup.
7. See Zillah Eisenstein (1988) for a comprehensive theory of
the role of the pregnant body as the central element in the
cultural subordination of women.
8. Thomson (1971) is a notable exception to this trend.
9. This seems reminiscent of Aristotle’s view of women as
“flower pots” where men implant the seed with all the impor-
tant genetic information and the movement necessary for
development and women’s job is that of passive gestation,
like the flower pot. For exploration of the flower pot picture
of pregnancy, see Whitbeck (1973) and Lange (1983).
10. Contrast Warren (1989) with Tooley (1972).
11. The definition of pregnancy as a purely passive activity
reaches its ghoulish conclusion in the increasing acceptabil-
ity of sustaining brain- dead women on life support systems
to continue their functions as incubators until the fetus can
a practice that increases women’s sexual vulnerabil-
ity (Luker 1984, p. 209–15). Thus, it is important that
feminists develop a coherent analysis of reproduc-
tive freedom that includes sexual freedom (as women
choose to define it). That requires an analysis of sexual
freedom that includes women’s right to refuse sex:
such a right can only be assured if women have equal
power to men and are not subject to domination by
virtue of their sex.20
In sum, then, feminist ethics demands that moral
discussions of abortion be more broadly defined than
they have been in most philosophic discussions. Only
by reflecting on the meaning of ethical pronounce-
ments on actual women’s lives and the connections
between judgments on abortion and the conditions
of domination and subordination can we come to an
adequate understanding of the moral status of abor-
tion in our society. As Rosalind Petchesky (1980)
argues, feminist discussion of abortion “must be
moved beyond the framework of a ‘woman’s right to
choose’ and connected to a much broader revolution-
ary movement that addresses all of the conditions of
women’s liberation” (p. 113).
NOTES
1. For some idea of the ways in which traditional moral
theory oppresses women, see Morgan (1987) and Hoagland
(1988).
2. Critics continue to want to structure the debate around
the possibility of women making frivolous abortion deci-
sions and hence want feminists to agree to setting boundar-
ies on acceptable grounds for choosing abortion. Feminists
ought to resist this injunction, though. There is no practi-
cal way of drawing a line fairly in the abstract; cases that
may appear “frivolous” at a distance, often turn out to be
substantive when the details are revealed, i.e., frivolity is
in the eyes of the beholder. There is no evidence to sug-
gest that women actually make the sorts of choices wor-
ried critics hypothesize about: e.g., a woman eight months
pregnant who chooses to abort because she wants to take a
trip or gets in “a tiff” with her partner. These sorts of fanta-
sies, on which demands to distinguish between legitimate
and illegitimate personal reasons for choosing abortion
chiefly rest, reflect an offensive conception of women as

CHAPTER 9: ABORTION Á 283
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Baier, Annette, 1985. Postures of the Mind: Essays on Mind
and Morals. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Callahan, Sidney, 1987. “A Pro- life Feminist Makes Her
Case.” Utne Reader (March/April): 104–14.
CARAL/Halifax, 1990. Telling Our Stories: Abortion Sto-
ries from Nova Scotia. Halifax: CARAL/Halifax (Canadian
Abortion Rights Action League).
Daly, Mary, 1973. Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philoso-
phy of Women’s Liberation. Boston: Beacon Press.
Diamond, Irene, and Lee Quinby, 1988. “American
Feminism and the Language of Control.” In Feminism
and Foucault: Reflections on Resistance. Edited by Irene
Diamond and Lee Quinby. Boston: Northeastern Uni-
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Eisenstein, Zillah R, 1988. The Female Body and the Law.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Hoagland, Sara Lucia, 1988. Lesbian Ethics: Toward New
Value. Palo Alto, CA: Institute of Lesbian Studies.
Lange, Lynda, 1983. “Woman Is Not a Rational Animal:
On Aristotle’s Biology of Reproduction.” In Discovering
Reality: Feminist Perspectives on Epistemology, Metaphysics,
Methodology, and Philosophy of Science. Edited by Sandra
Harding and Merill B. Hintickka. Dordrecht, Holland: D.
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Lerner, Gerda, 1986. The Creation of Patriarchy. New York
Oxford.
Luker, Kristin, 1984. Abortion and the Politics of Mother-
hood. Berkeley: University of California Press.
MacKinnon, Catherine, 1989. Toward a Feminist Theory of
the State. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
McDonnell, Kathleen, 1984. Not an Easy Choice: A Femi-
nist Re- examines Abortion. Toronto: The Women’s Press.
McLaren, Angus, and Arlene Tigar McLaren, 1986. The
Bedroom and the State: The Changing Practices and Poli-
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Morgan, Kathryn Pauly, 1987. “Women and Moral Mad-
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be safely delivered. For a discussion of this new trend, see
Murphy (1989).
12. This apt phrasing is taken from Petchesky (1986), p. 342.
13. Fetuses are almost wholly individuated by the women
who bear them. The fetal “contributions” to the relationship
are defined by the projections and interpretations of the preg-
nant woman in the latter stages of pregnancy if she chooses
to perceive fetal movements in purposeful ways (e.g., “it likes
classical music, wine, exercise”).
14. Some feminists suggest we seek recognition of the
legitimacy of non- medical abortion services. This would
reduce costs and increase access dramatically, with no appar-
ent increase in risk, provided that services were offered by
trained, responsible practitioners concerned with the well-
being of their clients. It would also allow the possibility of
increasing women’s control over abortion. See, for example
McDonnell (1984), chap. 8.
15. For a useful model of such a centre, see Wagner and Lee
(1989).
16. See CARAL/Halifax (1990) for women’s stories about
their experiences with hospitals and free- standing abortion
clinics.
17. The Canadian Medical Association has confirmed those
fears. In testimony before the House of Commons commit-
tee reviewing the bill, the CMA reported that over half the
doctors surveyed who now perform abortions expect to stop
offering them if the legislation goes through. Since the Com-
mons passed the bill, the threats of withdrawal of service have
increased. Many doctors plan to abandon their abortion service
once the law is introduced, because they are unwilling to accept
the harassment they anticipate from anti- abortion zealots.
Even those who believe that they will eventually win any court
case that arises, fear the expense and anxiety involved as the
case plays itself out.
18. Therefore, the Soviet model, where women have access to
multiple abortions but where there is no other birth control
available, must also be opposed.
19. See CARAL/Halifax (1990), p. 20–21, for examples of this
sort of abuse.
20. It also requires that discussions of reproductive and
sexual freedom not be confined to “the language of con-
trol and sexuality characteristic of a technology of sex”
(Diamond and Quinby 1988, p. 197), for such language is
alienating and constrains women’s experiences of their own
sexuality.

284 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
_____. 1984. Abortion and Woman’s Choice: The State, Sexu-
ality, and Reproductive Freedom. Boston: Northeastern Uni-
versity Press.
Sumner, L. W., 1981. Abortion and Moral Theory. Princ-
eton: Princeton University Press.
Thomson, Judith Jarvis, 1971. “A Defense of Abortion.”
Philosophy and Public Affairs, 1:47–66.
Tooley, Michael, 1972. “Abortion and Infanticide.” Phi-
losophy and Public Affairs, 2,1 (Fall): 37–65.
Van Wagner, Vicki, and Bob Lee, 1989. “Principles into
Practice: An Activist Vision of Feminist Reproductive
Health Care.” In The Future of Human Reproduction. Edited
by Christine Overall. Toronto: The Women’s Press.
Marsha Hanen and Kai Nielsen. Canadian Journal of Phi-
losophy, Supplementary Volume 13:201–26.
Murphy, Julien S., 1989. “Should Pregnancies Be Sustained
in Brain- dead Women?: A Philosophical Discussion of
Postmortem Pregnancy.” In Healing Technology: Feminist
Perspectives. Edited by Kathryn Srother Ratcliff et al. Ann
Arbor: The University of Michigan Press.
Overall, Christine, 1987. Ethics and Human Reproduction: A
Feminist Analysis. Winchester, MA: Allen & Unwin.
Petchesky, Rosalind Pollack, 1980. “Reproductive Free-
dom: Beyond ‘A Woman’s Right to Choose.” In Women: Sex
and Sexuality. Edited by Catherine R. Stimpson and Ethel
Spector Person. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

285
C H A P T E R 1 0
‘’
Euthanasia and Physician- Assisted Suicide
For fifteen years, Terri Schiavo existed between life
and death in that shadow land called a persistent
vegetative state, a place where she was wakeful but
without awareness or any purposeful behavior.
Severe brain damage had left her there, with vir-
tually no chance of recovery. And all the while, a
storm of caustic debate swirled around her, reach-
ing its greatest strength in the last few days before
her death on March 31, 2005. In 1990 her heart had
stopped briefly because of a chemical imbalance,
leaving her in that twilight state, kept alive by a
feeding tube. She had left no living will, no written
record of her wishes should she become indefinitely
incapacitated. Her husband, Michael Schiavo,
insisted that Terri had told him once that she would
prefer death to being kept alive with machines. Her
parents rejected his claim and demanded that Terri
be kept alive, holding out hope that with proper
care she might recover.
The battle between Michael Schiavo and Terri’s
parents raged on in the courts for years. Again and
again, state and federal courts sided with the hus-
band, while the U.S. Supreme Court repeatedly
refused to hear the case. In the final days before
Terri died, President George W. Bush, the U.S. Con-
gress, the governor of Florida (where she lived), and
Florida legislators weighed in on the controversy,
supporting Terri’s parents.
Finally, a judge allowed the feeding tube to be
removed, and Terri Schiavo, age forty- one, died
thirteen days later. The parents called the removal
“judicial homicide.” A Vatican official called it “an
attack against God.”1
So it goes with all public debates on the moral
permissibility of euthanasia. Passions rise, claims
and counterclaims collide, and stakes are high. In
the balance are issues of life and death, science and
religion, murder and mercy. The tragic end of Terri
Schiavo is only the most dramatic (and dramatized)
case in a series of tragic ends that turned into widely
publicized moral battlegrounds (see the box “The
Death of Karen Ann Quinlan”). The moral ques-
tions it incited are typical of such cases: Was remov-
ing Terri Schiavo’s feeding tube really a case of
murder? Or was it a morally permissible act allow-
ing her to die with dignity and escape her bleak
condition? What if instead of stopping the tube
feeding, her doctors had never started it because
they deemed her situation hopeless? Would that
have been murder— or a permissible act of mercy?
Or suppose that soon after Schiavo collapsed, her
doctors had decided to give her a lethal injection?
Would such an act have been morally wrong? What
if Schiavo had left a living will that clearly specified
that she did not want to be kept alive by any means
if she fell into a persistent vegetative state? Would
withdrawing the feeding tube or giving her a lethal
injection then have been morally acceptable?
Of course, in every instance of euthanasia there
are plenty of nonmoral questions too— primarily
legal, judicial, medical, scientific, and political.
(In the Schiavo case, for example, the moral ques-
tions arose side by side with what most informed
observers saw as the real issue: Who, if anyone,
had the legal right to decide for Schiavo what was
to become of her?) But these nonmoral concerns
285

286 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
preserved in the Greek roots of euthanasia, which
literally means “easy death.” Euthanasia makes
sense to many people because they believe that a
quick and painless death would be preferable to a
slow and painful dying (such as the kind that some
terminal cancer patients endure) or a long, vegeta-
tive sleep without a chance for a meaningful life.
As you might expect, the moral permissibility
of euthanasia depends heavily on the consent of
the patient (the person whose death is being con-
sidered). Moral philosophers therefore distinguish
between euthanasia that is voluntary, nonvolun-
tary, and involuntary. In voluntary euthanasia,
the patient requests or agrees to the act. She may
make the request in person or leave instructions to
be followed in case she becomes incapacitated. Such
instructions are usually in the form of an advance
directive (for example, a living will), a legal docu-
ment allowing physicians to withhold or withdraw
treatments if a patient becomes terminally ill and
unable to express her wishes. For any voluntary
euthanasia request to be valid, the patient at the
time of the request must be competent— that is,
capable of making an informed, rational choice. In
nonvoluntary euthanasia, others besides the
patient (family or physicians, for example) choose
euthanasia for her because she is not competent
(due to illness or injury) and has left no instruc-
tions regarding her end- of- life preferences. Eutha-
nasia performed on infants and small children is, of
course, nonvoluntary. In involuntary euthana-
sia, the act is carried out against the wishes of the
patient and is therefore illegal and widely regarded
as immoral.
People also draw a distinction between active
and passive euthanasia. Active euthanasia is
taking a direct action to kill someone, to carry out
a “mercy killing.” A doctor who gives a patient a
lethal injection is performing active euthanasia,
and so is a man who suffocates his dying brother
to spare him from an unbearably painful pass-
ing. Passive euthanasia is allowing someone
to die by not doing something— by withholding
are intertwined with the moral concerns. Our task
here is to apply moral reasoning to try to unravel
the knot.
ISSUE FILE: BACKGROUND
Euthanasia is directly or indirectly bringing
about the death of another person for that person’s
sake.2 It is thought to provide a benefit or a good for
the person by ending a life deemed no longer worth
living— a situation that typically arises when some-
one has an incurable or terminal disease that causes
great suffering or when someone experiences an
irreversible loss of consciousness (as in the Schiavo
case). This notion of dying as a kind of blessing is
’The Death of Karen Ann Quinlan
Like nothing else before it, the case of Karen
Ann Quinlan focused the world’s attention on
the medical truths, the legal complexities, and
the moral problems of euthanasia. She was just
twenty- one years old when she sustained acute
brain damage after imbibing alcohol along with
a tranquilizer. She was left in a persistent vege-
tative state, kept alive by a feeding tube and a
respirator, a machine that maintained her breath-
ing mechanically. After several months, members
of her family came to accept that her recovery
was hopeless and sought permission from the
courts to unplug the respirator to allow her to
die. Finally in 1976 the New Jersey Supreme Court
granted their request. But to everyone’s surprise,
she continued to breathe without the respirator
until 1985, ten years after she slipped into the
vegetative state. She died on June 11.*
*See “Famous Cases: Karen Ann Quinlan,” CBC News
Online, March 22, 2005, http://www.cbc.ca/news2
/back ground/schiavo/vegetative_state.html (January
20, 2015); Barran H. Lerner, “Planning for the Long
Goodbye,” New York Times, June 18, 2004.

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CHAPTER 10: EUTHAnASIA And PHySICIAn- ASSISTEd SUICIdE Á 287
the agent who ultimately causes the death in active
voluntary euthanasia is the physician, whereas the
ultimate causal agent in physician- assisted suicide is
the patient. In the former, the physician is primarily
responsible for the killing; in the latter, the patient
is. In most cases, the physician provides help by pre-
scribing a lethal dose of drugs, which the patient
then administers to himself.
In the United States, physician- assisted suicide is
legal in six states— Oregon, Washington, Montana,
Colorado, Vermont, and California— and in the
District of Columbia. U.S. Supreme Court rul-
ings allow each state to decide for itself whether
to legalize assisted suicide. The official position
of the American Medical Association (AMA), the
main professional group for American physicians,
is that “ physician- assisted suicide is fundamentally
incompatible with the physician’s role as healer,
would be difficult or impossible to control, and
would pose serious societal risks.”3
A factor that can complicate all the foregoing
issues is the concept of death itself. One prob-
lem is that thanks to modern medical technol-
ogy, determining when a person is dead is not
so straightforward as it once seemed. Death has
become more difficult to define. Years ago the pre-
vailing notion was that a person is dead when his
breathing and blood flow stop (no respiration and
no heartbeat). But nowadays machines can keep
an individual’s heart and lungs functioning long
after the brain permanently and completely shuts
down. Thus we can have an individual whose
organs are mechanically operated while he is in
a coma or persistent vegetative state— for years.
By the traditional definition of death, such an
individual would still be alive, but many people
would insist that he is no longer there: he is dead.
So the conventional notion of death seems to be
inadequate.
Why does correctly defining death matter at
all? Say an individual is in the kind of state just
described. If we judge him to be dead and thus no
longer a person, then perhaps it would be morally
or withdrawing measures necessary for sustaining
life. A doctor, then, would be performing passive
euthanasia if she removed a patient’s respirator, did
not administer antibiotics to halt a life- threatening
infection, or withdrew hydration and nutrition
(fluids and nutrients).
Many believe that this active- passive distinc-
tion is essential to understanding the moral permis-
sibility of euthanasia. It allows them to maintain
that whereas active euthanasia is always wrong, in
some cases passive euthanasia may be permissible.
This view is widespread among physicians and fits
with the popular notion that killing people is mor-
ally worse than letting them die. Others, however,
argue that there is no moral difference between
killing and letting die: in both active and passive
euthanasia the patient’s death is caused, and they
are therefore morally equivalent.
Taking into account the categories of voluntary,
nonvoluntary, active, and passive (and disregarding
involuntary), we can identify four kinds of euthana-
sia: (1) active voluntary (mercy killing at the patient’s
request), (2) active nonvoluntary (mercy killing with-
out the patient’s consent or request), (3) passive
voluntary (letting the patient die at her request),
and (4) passive nonvoluntary (letting the patient
die without his consent or request). Generally, the
law forbids active euthanasia (either voluntary or
nonvoluntary), and the medical profession is offi-
cially opposed to it (though the views of individual
physicians vary). Passive voluntary euthanasia is
legal; by law, competent patients have the right to
refuse any kind of medical treatment. Passive non-
voluntary euthanasia may be legal provided that
someone (a family member, for example) can be des-
ignated to make decisions on behalf of the patient.
Related to, but distinct from, active voluntary
euthanasia is physician- assisted suicide— the
killing of a person by the person’s own hand with
the help of a physician. Like active voluntary eutha-
nasia, physician- assisted suicide is requested by the
patient, and the intended outcome is the patient’s
death for the relief of pain and suffering. But

288 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
permissible to disconnect him from the machines,
or administer a fatal drug overdose, or remove his
feeding tube, or even harvest his organs for trans-
plant into another person. Or would it? If we deem
him alive and still a person, perhaps we are not jus-
tified in doing any of the above. Maybe taking any
one of these actions is to commit murder. Depend-
ing on the concept of death accepted by the legal
system, killing him or allowing him to die could
have serious legal consequences.
To overcome the drawbacks of the traditional
definition of death, alternative definitions have
been suggested. According to the whole- brain defi-
nition of death, an individual is dead when all
brain functions (including those performed in
the brain stem) permanently stop. It has become
the primary standard in both medicine and the
law for determining death. Critics of the whole-
brain standard, though, have pointed out that it
is based on a faulty assumption: that the brain is
the control center for all physiological functions.
Yet some functions (such as respiration) are par-
tially independent of brain activity. In addition,
by the whole- brain standard, individuals in an
’
In the past five decades, U.S. courts have several
times weighed in on the controversial issues of
euthanasia and physician- assisted suicide. The fol-
lowing are some of the more far- reaching rulings:
• 1976 The New Jersey Supreme Court ruled that
a life- sustaining respirator could be legally dis-
connected from Karen Ann Quinlan, a young
woman who had lapsed into a persistent vegeta-
tive state. After it was removed, she remained
comatose and lived for another ten years, finally
dying in June 1985.
• 1990 The U.S. Supreme Court (in Cruzan v. Direc-
tor, Missouri Department of Health) ruled that
a feeding tube could be removed from Nancy
Cruzan, a woman in a persistent vegetative state
due to an automobile accident, if “clear and
convincing evidence” shows that she would have
approved of the withdrawal. The ruling recog-
nized the legitimacy of living wills, surrogates to
act for incapacitated individuals, and a qualified
“right to die.”
• 1997 The U.S. Supreme Court (in Washington
v. Glucksberg) ruled that a Washington State
prohibition of physician- assisted suicide did not
violate the due process clause of the Fourteenth
Amendment.
• 1997 The U.S. Supreme Court (in Vacco v. Quill)
ruled that a New York State prohibition of physi-
cian- assisted suicide did not violate the equal pro-
tection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The
Court acknowledged a crucial distinction between
withdrawing life- sustaining treatment and assisted
suicide. People may refuse life- sustaining treat-
ment, but assisted suicide is prohibited.
• 2006 In a 6–3 decision in Gonzales v. Oregon, the
U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the U.S. attorney
general is not authorized to ban controlled sub-
stances used in physician- assisted suicide. The
decision had the effect of upholding Oregon’s
Death with Dignity Act.
• 2009 In a 4–3 decision in Baxter v. State of Mon-
tana, the Montana Supreme Court ruled that
physician- assisted suicide is not “against public
policy.” The decision applied only to Montana.
The court also ruled that doctors who help
terminally ill patients commit suicide cannot be
prosecuted under Montana state law.
• 2015 In a 2–1 ruling, the New Mexico Court of
Appeals struck down a lower court ruling legal-
izing physician- assisted suicide, concluding that
“aid in dying is not a fundamental liberty inter-
est under the New Mexico Constitution.”
Landmark Court Rulings

CHAPTER 10: EUTHAnASIA And PHySICIAn- ASSISTEd SUICIdE Á 289
disappeared is no longer a person and is therefore
rightly considered dead. By the higher- brain stan-
dard, individuals in a persistent vegetative state
(who continue to breathe and have a heartbeat)
but whose higher brain functions have ceased are
thought to be dead— also a result that some people
find counterintuitive.
MORAL THEORIES
Utilitarianism, Kant’s ethics, and natural law the-
ory lead to divergent conclusions on the issue of
euthanasia. An act- utilitarian would certainly try
to take into account how much overall happiness
various possible actions could bring about, every-
one considered. But she could make this calcula-
tion in different ways. The basic approach would
be to consider the patient’s suffering (as well as
that of others involved, such as family members)
and the likely success of any treatments and try to
determine how much overall happiness would be
generated by different actions, including bring-
ing about the patient’s death. If the patient’s situ-
ation were hopeless and his suffering great, an
act- utilitarian could decide that the greatest net
happiness would result from killing the patient
or letting him die. The patient’s consent to eutha-
nasia might or might not be a primary concern,
depending on how his consent would affect overall
happiness. On the other hand, the act- utilitarian
might say that euthanasia is contrary to the goal
of maximizing happiness because killing a person
rules out any possibility of his experiencing hap-
piness in the future. Happiness does not occur in
a vacuum; it exists only when persons experience
it. So eliminating a person eliminates potential
happiness.
Some people— even those who are not thor-
oughgoing utilitarians— argue against euthanasia
on what amounts to rule- utilitarian grounds or
something close to it. They contend that regard-
less of the moral permissibility of euthanasia in
irreversible persistent vegetative state (who have
some detectable brain activity) are thought to be
alive— a result that some regard as counterintui-
tive or puzzling.
The higher- brain definition of death says
that an individual is dead when higher brain
functions— those that give rise to consciousness—
permanently stop. Some have maintained that
because consciousness is necessary for personhood,
an individual whose higher brain functions have
’ QUICK REVIEW
euthanasia— Directly or indirectly bringing about
the death of another person for that person’s
sake.
voluntary euthanasia— Euthanasia performed on
a person with his or her permission.
advance directive— A legal document allowing
physicians to withhold or withdraw treatments
if a patient becomes terminally ill and unable
to express his or her wishes.
nonvoluntary euthanasia— Euthanasia performed
on a person who is not competent to decide the
issue and has left no instructions regarding end-
of- life preferences. In such cases, family or physi-
cians usually make the decision.
involuntary euthanasia— Euthanasia performed
on a person against his or her wishes.
active euthanasia— Euthanasia performed by tak-
ing a direct action to cause someone’s death;
“mercy killing.”
passive euthanasia— Euthanasia performed by
withholding or withdrawing measures neces-
sary for sustaining life.
physician- assisted suicide— The killing of a per-
son by that person’s own hand with the help
of a physician.

290 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
who have slipped from waking life into a coma or
a vegetative state? Are they still persons with full
moral rights? If they are persons, then performing
euthanasia on them would be immoral. If they are
not persons, then euthanasia might be morally
acceptable. In fact, a Kantian might argue that
performing euthanasia on individuals in comas or
vegetative states may be morally permissible pre-
cisely because persons have intrinsic worth and
dignity. The bioethicist Ronald Munson explains
this view well:
It may be more in keeping with our freedom and dig-
nity for us to instruct others either to put us to death
or to take no steps to keep us alive should we ever be in
such a state. Voluntary euthanasia may be compatible
with (if not required by) Kant’s ethics.
By a similar line of reasoning, it may be that
nonvoluntary euthanasia might be seen as a duty
that we have to others. We might argue that by put-
ting to death a comatose and hopeless person we
are recognizing the dignity that person possessed
in his or her previous state.5
According to the dominant reading of natural
law theory, euthanasia is wrong in almost every
instance. It is wrong because we have a moral duty
to preserve life. So intentionally performing any
kind of euthanasia, active or passive, is impermis-
sible. The doctrine of double effect, however, allows
one exception to this rule. Recall that this doctrine
makes a distinction between (1) performing a good
action that happens to have a bad effect and (2) per-
forming a bad action to achieve a good effect. The
former may be permissible, but the latter is not. In
the case of euthanasia, the doctrine implies that
giving a pain- racked patient a large dose of mor-
phine to end her life (a practice known as terminal
sedation) is never morally acceptable. But giving
her a large dose of morphine with the intention of
easing her pain— an act that has the side effect of
expediting her death— is permissible. The hasten-
ing of the patient’s death is permissible because
even though it was foreseen, it was not intended.
specific cases, a general rule (that is, a social policy
or law) permitting some types of euthanasia would
cause more harm than good. They offer slippery
slope arguments such as the following: Passing a
law (making a rule) permitting active voluntary
euthanasia would inevitably lead to abuses such as
more frequent use of nonvoluntary euthanasia and
unnecessary killing; therefore, no such law should
be passed. Similarly, some argue that a general rule
allowing physician- assisted suicide would destroy
the “moral center” of the medical profession; if
physicians are allowed to kill patients, they will
violate their pledge to protect life and to heal, caus-
ing patients to distrust them. Of course, it is also
possible to argue for euthanasia on rule- utilitarian
grounds. (Whether such arguments are sound is
another matter.) A rule- utilitarian could devise a
rule that he thinks would result in a maximization
of happiness for everyone if the rule were consis-
tently followed.
Like the utilitarian, the Kantian theorist could
also take several different positions on euthana-
sia, consistent with Kantian principles. She could
argue that euthanasia is never permissible because
it would entail treating persons as mere disposable
things. Kant underscores this view in his discus-
sion of suicide. He maintains that “suicide is in
no circumstances permissible” because it robs
individuals of their personhood, which is the very
foundation of all moral values. Furthermore, it
treats persons as if they had no more value than
a beast. As Kant puts it, “But the rule of moral-
ity does not admit of [suicide] under any condi-
tion because it degrades human nature below the
level of animal nature and so destroys it.”4 This
stern prohibition against suicide may or may not
apply equally well to euthanasia— depending on
whether those considered for euthanasia are to
be regarded as persons. Certainly those who are
competent (coherent and rational) are persons
and therefore should not be killed or allowed to
die. But what would Kant say about individuals

CHAPTER 10: EUTHAnASIA And PHySICIAn- ASSISTEd SUICIdE Á 291
is morally permissible and that it should not be
legalized— or vice versa. We might plausibly argue
that in some cases, performing active voluntary
euthanasia is the right thing to do but that legal-
izing it would have terrible consequences. Legal-
ization could, say, lead doctors to practice active
nonvoluntary euthanasia or encourage them to care
less about preserving life or cause patients to fear
or mistrust doctors. To mix up these two kinds of
issues— moral and legal— is to invite confusion.
We begin by examining arguments for active
voluntary euthanasia. The strongest of these are
built on two fundamental moral principles: per-
sons have (1) a right of self- determination and
(2) an obligation to help someone in serious dis-
tress or peril (if they are in a position to help with-
out great risk to themselves). Principle 1 refers
to the patient’s right of self- determination, and
Principle 2 to other persons who might be able to
benefit her. Principle 1 assumes that persons have
autonomy— the capacity, as Kant would have it,
to use reason to guide their own actions and make
their own decisions. It asserts that persons have the
In the doctrine of double effect, intention makes all
the difference.
MORAL ARGUMENTS
Most plausible euthanasia arguments are about
active euthanasia (mercy killing, as opposed to let-
ting the patient die). As suggested earlier, passive
euthanasia (both voluntary and nonvoluntary)
is legal, provided certain conditions are met, and
both forms of it are widely believed to be morally
acceptable. So let us confine our evaluation here
to moral arguments for and against active voluntary
euthanasia (mercy killing at the patient’s request).
The question these arguments address, then, is
straightforward: Is active voluntary euthanasia mor-
ally permissible?
As we proceed, we must keep an important dis-
tinction in mind: moral permissibility is not the
same thing as legal permissibility. Whether eutha-
nasia is morally acceptable is a separate issue from
whether it should be legalized. It is possible that we
could be justified in believing both that euthanasia
’
Dr. Jack Kevorkian was known as a champion of the
right- to- die movement, having helped many incur-
ably ill people commit suicide. He was also known
as “Dr. Death,” the physician who helped desper-
ate people kill themselves. After many unsuccessful
tries, prosecutors finally won a conviction against
him for murder: in 1999, he was sentenced to ten
to twenty- five years in prison. The New York Times
reported that the sentence was handed down
“despite emotional courtroom pleas on his behalf
from the widow and brother of the terminally ill
man he was convicted of killing.”*
Do you agree with the verdict in this case? Why
or why not? If you do not agree, would your opinion
change if you knew that many of Dr. Kevorkian’s sui-
cide patients were not mentally competent at the
time of their deaths (because of depression), as some
people allege? If so, why? If you were terminally ill
and in horrendous pain with no hope of relief, might
you think it morally permissible to use the services of
someone like Dr. Kevorkian? If not, why not?
*Dirk Johnson, “Kevorkian Sentenced to 10 to 25
Years in Prison,” New York Times, April 14, 1999.
CRITICAL THOUGHT: Dr. Kevorkian and Physician- Assisted Suicide

292 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
patient is in agony and asks to be put out of her
misery (active voluntary euthanasia), rejecting her
plea for mercy would be both cruel and wicked.
They also insist that merely withholding treatment
from her to hasten her death (passive euthanasia)
would only prolong her suffering.
Here is one way to incorporate both Principles
1 and 2 into a single argument for active voluntary
euthanasia:
1. Competent persons have a right of self-
determination (as long as exercising this right
does not violate others’ rights).
2. The right of self- determination includes the
right of competent persons to decide the man-
ner of their dying and to choose active (volun-
tary) euthanasia.
3. We have an obligation to help others in serious
distress or peril (if we are in a position to help
without great risk to ourselves).
4. This duty of beneficence includes the duty,
under appropriate conditions, to ease the pain
and suffering of competent dying persons by
performing active (voluntary) euthanasia.
5. Therefore, active voluntary euthanasia for com-
petent dying persons is permissible.
The central idea behind this argument is that
if competent dying persons have a right to choose
active euthanasia, and if the duty of beneficence
includes performing active voluntary euthanasia,
then active voluntary euthanasia is morally permis-
sible. But does the conclusion follow from the prem-
ises, and are the premises true? The answer to the
first part of this question is yes. The answer to the
second part is more complicated. Look at Premises 1
and 3; they articulate the two basic moral principles
we began with. These principles qualify as consid-
ered moral judgments and are accepted by virtually
all parties to the euthanasia debate. We have good
reason, then, to say that Premises 1 and 3 are true.
Premises 2 and 4, however, are controversial.
Critics of Premise 2 would say that we do indeed
right to exercise this power to direct their lives as
they see fit (with the proviso that their actions not
violate the rights of others). Many who appeal to
this principle argue that if it applies to how persons
live, then it surely applies to how they die, because
their dying is part of their life. This is how the bio-
ethicist Dan W. Brock explains the importance of
this end- of- life self- determination:
Most people are very concerned about the nature of
the last stage of their lives. This reflects not just a fear
of experiencing substantial suffering when dying,
but also a desire to retain dignity and control dur-
ing this last period of life. Death is today increasingly
preceded by a long period of significant physical and
mental decline, due in part to the technological inter-
ventions of modern medicine. Many people adjust to
these disabilities and find meaning and value in new
activities and ways. Others find the impairments and
burdens in the last stage of their lives at some point
sufficiently great to make life no longer worth living.
For many patients near death, maintaining the qual-
ity of one’s life, avoiding great suffering, maintaining
one’s dignity, and insuring that others remember us
as we wish them to become of paramount importance
and outweigh merely extending one’s life. But there
is no single, objectively correct answer for everyone
as to when, if at all, one’s life becomes all things con-
sidered a burden and unwanted. If self- determination
is a fundamental value, then the great variability
among people on this question makes it especially
important that individuals control the manner, cir-
cumstances, and timing of their dying and death.6
Principle 2 is a duty of beneficence (a duty
to benefit others). Applied to euthanasia, it says
that if we are in a position to ease the agony of
another, and we can do so without excessive cost
to ourselves, we should try to render aid. This tenet
applies to persons generally, but it carries extra
weight for people with a special relationship with
the suffering person, such as family members, close
friends, and doctors. Physicians have an explicit
obligation to try to relieve the misery of their
patients— especially dying patients who often must
endure horrific pain and suffering. Many advocates
of euthanasia contend that if a competent dying

CHAPTER 10: EUTHAnASIA And PHySICIAn- ASSISTEd SUICIdE Á 293
escape her agony. Modern medicine is better than
ever at alleviating pain— even very intense pain.
Spinal blocks, drug combinations, new ways to
deliver powerful analgesics (drugs that ease pain)—
these options and others can offer dying patients
unprecedented levels of pain relief. So euthanasia is
uncalled for. If this claim is correct, then opponents
can argue that contrary to Premise 4, active eutha-
nasia will actually harm patients by cutting their
lives short unnecessarily and thus depriving them
of the benefits that may accrue in their remain-
ing days— benefits such as profoundly meaningful
moments spent with their families, the chance to
come to terms with their dying, and even the pos-
sibility of a newfound cure for their disease.7 Pro-
ponents of active euthanasia, however, charge that
this upbeat view of pain management is not accu-
rate. They point to several unpleasant facts: though
it is possible to manage even severe pain well, too
often pain is not well managed (for a variety of
reasons, including the reluctance of health care
workers to administer large doses of pain- relieving
drugs); the side effects of the best pain medications
(especially when used over the long term) often
add to the suffering of the patient; and many dying
patients endure not physical pain, but psychologi-
cal suffering that is unbearable and untreatable by
any medication.
Proponents can put forth another kind of argu-
ment for active voluntary euthanasia, this one
based on the moral significance of killing (active
euthanasia) and letting die (passive euthanasia). As
we saw earlier, active euthanasia is taking a direct
action to kill someone, while passive euthanasia is
allowing someone to die by withholding or with-
drawing measures necessary for sustaining life. Pas-
sive euthanasia is legal (competent patients have
the right to refuse treatment) and widely believed
to be morally permissible. Active euthanasia is gen-
erally illegal, and debate continues over its moral
permissibility. Opponents of active euthanasia
generally think that there is a profound moral dif-
ference between killing and letting die: killing is
have a right of self- determination but that this
right does not include the right to opt for active vol-
untary euthanasia. The reason is that active eutha-
nasia is killing, and killing is always wrong. We may
have all sorts of rights, but killing is still killing.
This reply, though, is based on a superficial
understanding of prohibitions against killing. Some
kinds of killing are considered by most people to
be morally permissible— for example, killing in
self- defense and killing in war. These are regarded
as justified killings; unjustified killings are known
as murder. So even though all killing may be regret-
table, not all killing is immoral. Active euthanasia
may in fact be a form of acceptable killing.
The opponent of active euthanasia can make a
stronger reply along the same lines. He can say that
the problem with active euthanasia is not that it is
a type of killing, but that it is a type of unwarranted
killing. A dying patient in the grip of unimagina-
ble pain, for example, does not have to be killed to
’Public Opinion and Euthanasia
Many opinion polls have shown that most people
favor some form of euthanasia or physician assis-
tance in dying. A 2016 Gallup poll of 1,025 adults
aged eighteen and over echoed these findings:
• 69 percent of Americans approve of doctor-
assisted suicide.
• 51 percent of Americans say they would con-
sider ending their own lives by some painless
means if they had an incurable disease and
they were in severe pain.
• 53 percent of Americans say they believe
doctor- assisted suicide is morally acceptable.*
*“Euthanasia Still Acceptable to Solid Majority
in U.S.,” Gallup Poll, May 4–6, 2016, http://www
. gallup.com/poll/193082/euthanasia-acceptable-solid
-majority.aspx.

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294 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
morally, then we would judge one man’s action
(either Smith’s or Jones’s) to be more blamewor-
thy than that of the other. But our judgment is
the same for both, so there must be no moral
difference.
Some reject this argument and insist that
there is in fact a moral difference between killing
and letting die but that the distinction is often
obscured in thought experiments like the Smith-
Jones story. One critic claims, for example, that
in this scenario the two men are equally repre-
hensible and the two actions appear to be morally
equivalent simply because both men were prepared
to kill. Remove this common factor, and the moral
difference between killing and letting die will be
apparent.9
Some of the strongest arguments against active
voluntary euthanasia take a slippery slope approach.
The gist of most of them is that lifting a moral or
legal prohibition against this kind of mercy killing
will dilute respect for life and encourage a slow slide
from active voluntary euthanasia to active nonvol-
untary euthanasia and then perhaps to involuntary
euthanasia. This argument is therefore consequen-
tialist: active voluntary euthanasia is wrong because
it leads to bad consequences. (The argument is also
sometimes lodged against legalizing this form of
euthanasia.) Here is how one bioethicist describes
the descent down the slope:
A person apparently hopelessly ill may be allowed
to take his own life. Then he may be permit-
ted to deputize others to do it for him should he
no longer be able to act. The judgment of others
then becomes the ruling factor. Already at this
point euthanasia is not personal and voluntary,
for others are acting “on behalf of” the patient
as they see fit. This may well incline them to act
on behalf of other patients who have not autho-
rized them to exercise their judgment. It is only a
short step, then, from voluntary euthanasia ( self-
inflicted or authorized), to directed euthanasia
administered to a patient who has given no autho-
rization, to involuntary euthanasia conducted as
part of a social policy.10
far worse than letting die; in fact, killing is morally
wrong while letting die is permissible. But propo-
nents of active voluntary euthanasia assert that
the two are morally equivalent. Using this alleged
moral equivalence, proponents can construct an
argument like this:
1. Passive euthanasia is morally permissible.
2. If passive euthanasia is morally equivalent to
active euthanasia, active euthanasia is also
morally permissible.
3. Passive euthanasia is morally equivalent to
active euthanasia.
4. Therefore, active (voluntary) euthanasia is mor-
ally permissible.
The conclusion follows from the premises, and
Premises 1 and 2 are uncontroversial. The crux of
the matter is Premise 3. What reasons are there for
thinking that it is true? Here is an argument for
Premise 3 in the form of a classic thought experi-
ment. Suppose Smith will inherit a fortune if his
six- year- old cousin dies. So he decides to take mat-
ters into his own hands. He slips into the bathroom
while his little cousin is taking a bath and drowns
him. He makes the whole thing look like an acci-
dent and leaves undetected. Now consider Jones,
who also will inherit a fortune if his six- year- old
cousin dies. He too decides to kill the child, and he
too slips into the bathroom while the boy is bath-
ing. But before Jones has a chance to commit the
deed, the boy slips in the tub, gets knocked uncon-
scious, and will surely drown unless Jones rescues
him. Jones is happy to do nothing and lets the
boy drown on his own— a simple “accident.” Now
which man behaves better morally? If there is a sig-
nificant moral difference between killing and let-
ting die, we would want to say that Jones’s actions
are less blameworthy than Smith’s. But this distinc-
tion doesn’t seem correct. The motives and aims of
both men are the same.8
The line taken here is that if the difference
between killing and letting die really is important

CHAPTER 10: EUTHAnASIA And PHySICIAn- ASSISTEd SUICIdE Á 295
possible slippery slope worry could have been raised
to securing competent patients’ rights to decide about
life support, but recent history shows such a worry
would have been unfounded.11
CHAPTER REVIEW
SUMMARY
Euthanasia is directly or indirectly bringing about the
death of another person for that person’s sake. Its moral
status depends in large measure on the consent of the
patient. In voluntary euthanasia, the patient agrees to
the act. In nonvoluntary euthanasia, others besides
the patient decide on euthanasia because he or she is
incompetent and has left no statement about end- of-
life preferences. In involuntary euthanasia, the act is
performed against the patient’s wishes. Active euthana-
sia is taking direct action to kill someone (administer-
ing a lethal injection, for example); passive euthanasia
is allowing the patient to die by withholding or with-
drawing life- sustaining measures.
The traditional notion of death as the cessation
of breathing and heartbeat has been revised in light
of new developments in medical technology. Accord-
ing to the whole- brain view of death, the individual is
dead when all brain functions permanently stop. The
higher- brain view of death says that an individual is
dead when higher brain functions permanently stop.
An act- utilitarian might see euthanasia as morally
permissible because it results in the greatest happi-
ness for all concerned. She could also consistently say
that euthanasia is contrary to the goal of maximizing
happiness because killing an individual rules out any
possibility of that person’s future happiness. A rule-
utilitarian might say that a general rule permitting
some kinds of euthanasia would do more harm than
good— or that such a rule would maximize happiness
in the long run. A Kantian theorist could consistently
reject euthanasia because it entails treating persons as
disposable things. Or he could consistently maintain
We can formulate a version of the argument
thus:
1. If the general acceptance or approval of active
voluntary euthanasia leads to widespread abuses
(unjustified killing), then the practice is mor-
ally wrong.
2. The general acceptance or approval of active
voluntary euthanasia will lead to widespread
abuses (unjustified killing).
3. Therefore, active voluntary euthanasia is morally
wrong.
This is a valid argument, an instance of modus
ponens, so we need to focus only on the truth or
falsity of the premises. Probably most people who
have thought carefully about this kind of argu-
ment accept Premise 1 or a variation of it. Premise
2 is the sticking point. Because of a lack of solid
evidence on the subject, the social consequences
of a general acceptance of active euthanasia are
difficult to ascertain. For example, to prove their
case, some opponents of euthanasia cite reports
on the Dutch experience with physician- assisted
suicide. Proponents point to the same reports to
undermine that case. The difficulty is that the
research is not robust enough to lend unequivo-
cal support to one side or the other. It therefore
does not show that Premise 2 is true. Many of the
arguments for Premise 2 are arguments by analogy
or inferences based on observations concerning
human behavior. Generally, these arguments, too,
are weak and conjectural.
Those who are skeptical of Premise 2 often sim-
ply point out that no good reasons have been pro-
vided to support it. At best, they say, arguments for
Premise 2 show only that dreadful consequences
from widespread use of active euthanasia are pos-
sible. As one skeptic puts it,
Now it cannot be denied that it is possible that per-
mitting euthanasia could have these fateful con-
sequences, but that cannot be enough to warrant
prohibiting it if it is otherwise justified. A similar

296 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
8. What is the American Medical Association’s
official view of physician- assisted suicide?
(p. 287)
9. What is an advance directive? (p. 286)
10. What is the higher- brain definition of death?
(p. 289)
Discussion Questions
1. Do you think voluntary active euthanasia is
morally permissible in some cases? Why or why
not?
2. Critique the Terri Schiavo case. Who was right
in their view of what should be done for Terri?
Was the participation of politicians in the case
helpful? Distracting? Wrong?
3. Was removing Terri Schiavo’s feeding tube a case
of murder? If not, what was it?
4. What actions (or lack of actions) should have
been performed in her case?
5. Would you consider her a person in her brain-
damaged state? Why or why not?
6. Do you consider Dr. Kevorkian’s practice of
physician- assisted suicide morally acceptable?
Why or why not?
7. Is there a moral difference between killing and
letting die? Give reasons for your answer.
8. How might an act- utilitarian argue for
physician- assisted suicide? Critique this
argument.
9. How might a Kantian argue against physician-
assisted suicide?
10. Is the use of terminal sedation ever morally
permissible? If so, in what situations?
FURTHER READING
Tom L. Beauchamp, ed., Intending Death: The Ethics of
Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia (Englewood Cliffs, NJ:
Prentice Hall, 1995).
R. B. Brandt, “The Morality and Rationality of Suicide,” in
A Handbook for the Study of Suicide, ed. Seymour Perlin
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1975).
Lonnie R. Bristow, President of the American Medical
Association, statement on physician- assisted suicide
to the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on the
that individuals in comas or persistent vegetative
states are no longer persons, and therefore euthanasia
is morally acceptable.
Arguments in favor of active voluntary euthanasia
are often based on a right of self- determination and
a duty to help others in distress. Some arguments for
euthanasia, however, depend on the alleged equiva-
lence between active and passive euthanasia. Some
of the strongest arguments against euthanasia are of
the slippery slope type: active voluntary euthanasia is
wrong because it leads to bad consequences, such as
an increased risk of unjustified killings.
KEY TERMS
euthanasia (p. 286)
voluntary euthanasia (p. 286)
advance directive (p. 286)
nonvoluntary euthanasia (p. 286)
involuntary euthanasia (p. 286)
active euthanasia (p. 286)
passive euthanasia (p. 286)
physician- assisted suicide (p. 287)
EXERCISES
Review Questions
1. What is euthanasia? What is physician- assisted
suicide? (p. 286)
2. What is the difference between voluntary
euthanasia and nonvoluntary euthanasia?
(p. 286)
3. What is the difference between active and
passive euthanasia? (p. 286)
4. Who was Terri Schiavo and what are the
main medical and legal facts of her case?
(p. 285)
5. Who was Dr. Kevorkian and what role did
he play in the debate over physician- assisted
suicide? (p. 291)
6. What percentage of American adults
think physician- assisted suicide is morally
permissible? (p. 293)
7. In what states is physician- assisted suicide legal?
(p. 287)

CHAPTER 10: EUTHAnASIA And PHySICIAn- ASSISTEd SUICIdE Á 297
Medical Ethics, ed. Ronald Munson, 7th ed. (Belmont,
CA: Wadsworth, 2004).
Jeffrey Olen and Vincent Barry, “Euthanasia,” in Apply-
ing Ethics: A Text with Readings, 6th ed. (Belmont, CA:
Wadsworth, 1999).
The President’s Commission for the Study of Ethical Prob-
lems in Medicine and Biomedical and Behavioral Research
(Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1983).
Bonnie Steinbock and Alastair Norcross, eds., Killing and
Letting Die, 2nd ed. (New York: Fordham University
Press, 1994).
Thomas D. Sullivan, “Active and Passive Euthanasia: An
Impertinent Distinction?” Human Life Review 3, no. 3
(1977): 40–46.
Robert Young, “Voluntary Euthanasia,” in Stanford Ency-
clopedia of Philosophy, Summer 2005 ed., ed. Edward
N. Zalta, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2005/
entries/ euthanasia- voluntary/ (March 1, 2015).
Judiciary, Subcommittee on the Constitution, 104th
Cong., 2nd sess., Congressional Record 142 (April 29,
1996).
Dan W. Brock, “Medical Decisions at the End of Life,” in
A Companion to Bioethics, ed. Helga Kuhse and Peter
Singer (1998; reprint, Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2001).
Daniel Callahan, “When Self- Determination Runs Amok,”
Hastings Center Report 22, no. 2 (March/April 1992):
52–55.
Philippa Foot, “Euthanasia,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 6,
no. 2 (1977): 85–112.
Walter Glannon, “Medical Decisions at the End of Life,”
in Biomedical Ethics (New York: Oxford University Press,
2005).
John Lachs, “When Abstract Moralizing Runs Amok,”
Journal of Clinical Ethics 5, no. 1 (1994): 10–13.
Ronald Munson, “Euthanasia and Physician- Assisted
Suicide,” in Intervention and Reflection: Basic Issues in
E T H I C A L d I L E M M A S
1. Assisted Suicide or Murder?
One of the more bizarre cases of assisted suicide in recent times came to its con-
clusion on September 29, 2014, when New Yorker Kenneth Minor was convicted of
manslaughter after stabbing a Long Island motivational speaker. Minor claimed that
the man wished to die and had paid him to help him do so.
Minor received a sentence of twelve years when he accepted the prosecutors’
plea deal and pled guilty to first- degree manslaughter.
However, Minor’s lawyer claims, “We will be back again . . . Our hope is the
appellate division will once again reverse this case.”
Minor’s lawyer, Daniel J. Gotlin, hopes to overturn the conviction by bringing the
case to an appeals court. Gotlin argues that the verdict should be thrown out based
on procedural grounds. Minor’s indictment includes murder charges and assisted
suicide charges, which Gotlin claims are mutually exclusive.
Minor has been incarcerated for more than five years, and, according to Gotlin,
accepted the plea deal because “he wants finality; he wants this to be over.” If
Minor is unsuccessful in his appeal, he will have to serve five more years before he
is eligible to be released.
Moments before Minor entered his plea, Justice Laura A. Ward of the New York
Supreme Court in Manhattan denied Gotlin’s request to dismiss the case, stating that
a man can be charged for both murder and assisted suicide. However, she did not
refute that Minor had a right to appeal her ruling, and said, “Perhaps we will get
a definite ruling from the appellate division.”

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298 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
The man who Minor admits to killing, Jeffrey Locker, was found tied up in his
car in East Harlem in July 2009. Multiple stab wounds were found on his chest.
Minor claims that Locker, a middle- aged father who had fallen deeply into debt,
had hired him to assist in his suicide plan. Minor says he held a knife to a steering
wheel while Locker flung himself against it multiple times. Minor’s prosecutors found
his story incredible and brought a murder charge against him instead of a charge
of assisting suicide.
In 2011, Minor was tried and convicted of second- degree murder by a jury. The
judge gave him twenty years to life in prison, but the verdict was invalidated two
years later by an appellate panel. They concluded that the trial judge had given the
jury an incorrect definition of assisted suicide.
Minor was given another trial in January. This time, a charge of assisting suicide
was added to his indictment at the request of Cyrus R. Vance Jr., Manhattan district
attorney. A jury could now convict him of a lesser charge.
During Minor’s first trial, the defense and the prosecution agreed that Minor
had participated in Locker’s suicide at the request of the deceased, who wished
to make his death look like a murder so that his family could claim life insurance.
However, prosecutors argued that it was a case of murder for hire, not assisted
suicide, as Minor was still the cause of Locker’s death. According to a medical
expert, Minor did not simply hold a knife to a steering wheel, but stabbed Locker
as he lay in his car. He then used Locker’s credit card to withdraw money from
an ATM.*
Suppose Minor killed Locker at Locker’s request.
Would the killing then be morally permissible? Is
there a moral difference between physician- assisted
suicide and Locker’s murder when both actions are
taken at the victim’s request? What is the differ-
ence, if any, between murder and assisted suicide?
Suppose Locker’s motive for asking Minor for aid in
dying, and for making the death look like murder,
was that Locker’s life insurance money would pay
for the only medical treatment that could save his
daughter’s life. How would these facts change your
moral judgment about the killing?
*Based on James C. McKinley Jr., “Harlem Man Pleads Guilty to Assisting 2009 Death,” New York Times, September
29, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/30/nyregion/- harlem- man-pleads-guilty-to-assisting-2009-death.
html?_r=0 (March 23, 2015).
2. Euthanasia for Newborns
Imagine the unimaginable: Your newborn baby is born with a severe, deadly birth
defect or contracts a fatal illness. The baby will die and is in tremendous pain. In
this case, is it justified, perhaps even humane, to euthanize the child?
In Holland, some doctors and parents say the answer is yes. Back in 2005, the
Netherlands adopted the Groningen Protocol, which is designed to help doctors
end the suffering of very sick newborns through euthanasia. The rule requires that
five criteria must be met before taking the decision to end the child’s life: beyond-

CHAPTER 10: EUTHAnASIA And PHySICIAn- ASSISTEd SUICIdE Á 299
a- doubt diagnosis; presence of unbearable suffering; a second expert medical
opinion to verify the child’s condition; consent of both parents; and compliance
with medical standards.
Some critics feared that this would create a “slippery slope” of infanticide, but
new research published in the Journal of Medical Ethics contends that that has
not been the case. The authors reviewed all reported cases of infant euthanasia
between 2001 and 2010 (doctors sometimes covertly practiced infanticide before the
protocol was passed) and found that in 95 percent of cases the mode of euthanasia
was withholding or withdrawing treatment. In 60 percent of those cases, this was
because the infant would soon die from an incurable disease. For the remaining
40 percent, quality of life prompted the decision.
However, since 2007, doctors reported euthanizing just two babies. The authors
of the new paper suspect that an increase in abortions when fatal problems are
detected in the womb may explain this. Alternatively, doctors may be confused about
what constitutes euthanasia– such as withholding treatment, food or water— and may
be underreporting it. Either way, the authors write, there has not been a detectable
snowballing of euthanized babies in Holland as a result of the new protocol.†
Provide reasons for your answers to the follow-
ing questions. Under the circumstances described
(severe pain, terminal illness), would child eutha-
nasia ever be morally permissible? Would child
euthanasia be permissible if the newborn was not
terminal, but in an unalterable vegetative state?
Would it be permissible if the newborn suffered
from a severe birth defect such as Down syndrome,
which causes severe disabilities but does not rule
out a worthwhile life?
† Rachel Nuwer, “Is It Ever OK to Euthanize a Baby?” Smithsonianmag.com, May 3, 2013. Copyright 2013 Smith-
sonian Institution. Reprinted with permission from Smithsonian Enterprises. All rights reserved. Reproduction in
any medium is strictly prohibited without permission from Smithsonian Institution.
3. The Suicide of Admiral Nimitz
The name of Chester W. Nimitz is legendary in the annals of naval warfare. In
June 1942, Admiral Nimitz commanded the U.S. forces assigned to block a Japanese
invasion of Midway.
In the Battle of Midway, Nimitz’s fighter- bombers caught the Japanese fleet off
guard, as its carrier aircraft were being refueled on deck. His pilots swooped in and
sent to the bottom four of the Japanese carriers— Hiryu, Soryu, Akagi and Kaga—
that had led the attack on Pearl Harbor. Midway broke the back of Japanese naval
power and was among the most decisive battles in all of history.
Nimitz’s son and namesake, Chester W. Nimitz Jr., would rise to the same rank
of admiral and become a hero of the Pacific war— a submarine commander who
would sink a Japanese destroyer bearing down on his boat by firing torpedoes
directly into its bow.

http://www.Smithsonianmag.com

300 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
But Chester W. Nimitz Jr. achieved another kind of fame on Jan. 2. In a suicide
pact with his 89- year- old wife, the 86- year- old hero ended his life with an overdose
of sleeping pills.
Having lost 30 pounds from a stomach disorder, suffering from congestive heart
failure and in constant back pain, the admiral had been determined to dictate the
hour of his death. His wife, who suffered from osteoporosis so severe her bones
were breaking, had gone blind. She had no desire to live without her husband.
So, as the devoted couple had spent their lives together, they decided to end
their lives together. The admiral’s final order read: “Our decision was made over a
considerable period of time and was not carried out in acute desperation. Nor is it
the expression of a mental illness. We have consciously, rationally, deliberately and
of our own free will taken measures to end our lives today because of the physical
limitations on our quality of life placed upon us by age, failing vision, osteoporosis,
back and painful orthopedic problems.”
According to The New York Times obituary, “The Nimitzes did not believe in any
afterlife or God, and embraced no religion. But one of Mr. Nimitz’s three surviving
sisters, Mary Aquinas, 70, is a Catholic nun. . . . Sister Mary said that she could not
condone her brother’s decision to end his life, but that she felt sympathetic. ‘If you
cannot see any value to suffering for yourself or others,’ she said, ‘Then maybe it
does make sense to end your life.’”‡
Provide reasons for your answers: Was Admiral
Nimitz justified in his decision to commit suicide?
Is suicide morally wrong in all circumstances? Is
suicide a matter of personal choice, morally per-
missible if a person freely opts to end her life for
whatever reason?
‡Patrick J. Buchanan, “The Sad Suicide of Admiral Nimitz,” World Net Daily, January 18, 2002. Reprinted by per-
mission of Patrick J. Buchanan and Creators Syndicate, Inc.
The distinction between active and passive eutha-
nasia is thought to be crucial for medical ethics. The
idea is that it is permissible, at least in some cases, to
withhold treatment and allow a patient to die, but it
is never permissible to take any direct action designed
to kill the patient. This doctrine seems to be accepted
by most doctors, and it is endorsed in a statement
adopted by the House of Delegates of the American
Medical Association on December 4, 1973:
The intentional termination of the life of one human
being by another— mercy killing— is contrary to that
for which the medical profession stands and is contrary
to the policy of the American Medical Association.
R E A d I n G S
Active and Passive Euthanasia
James R achels
James Rachels, excerpts from “Active and Passive Euthana-
sia,” from The New England Journal of Medicine, Vol. 292, No. 2,
pp. 78–80. Copyright © 1975 Massachusetts Medical Society.
Reprinted with permission from Massachusetts Medical Society.

CHAPTER 10: EUTHAnASIA And PHySICIAn- ASSISTEd SUICIdE Á 301
The cessation of the employment of extraordinary
means to prolong the life of the body when there is irre-
futable evidence that biological death is imminent is
the decision of the patient and/or his immediate fam-
ily. The advice and judgment of the physician should
be freely available to the patient and/or his immediate
family.
However, a strong case can be made against this doc-
trine. In what follows I will set out some of the relevant
arguments, and urge doctors to reconsider their views
on this matter.
To begin with a familiar type of situation, a patient
who is dying of incurable cancer of the throat is in ter-
rible pain, which can no longer be satisfactorily alle-
viated. He is certain to die within a few days, even if
present treatment is continued, but he does not want
to go on living for those days since the pain is unbear-
able. So he asks the doctor for an end to it, and his fam-
ily joins in the request.
Suppose the doctor agrees to withhold treatment,
as the conventional doctrine says he may. The justifi-
cation for his doing so is that the patient is in terrible
agony, and since he is going to die anyway, it would
be wrong to prolong his suffering needlessly. But now
notice this. If one simply withholds treatment, it may
take the patient longer to die, and so he may suffer
more than he would if more direct action were taken
and a lethal injection given. This fact provides strong
reason for thinking that, once the initial decision not
to prolong his agony has been made, active euthana-
sia is actually preferable to passive euthanasia, rather
than the reverse. To say otherwise is to endorse the
option that leads to more suffering rather than less, and
is contrary to the humanitarian impulse that prompts
the decision not to prolong his life in the first place.
Part of my point is that the process of being
“allowed to die” can be relatively slow and painful,
whereas being given a lethal injection is relatively
quick and painless. Let me give a different sort of
example. In the United States about one in 600 babies
is born with [Down] syndrome. Most of these babies
are otherwise healthy— that is, with only the usual
pediatric care, they will proceed to an otherwise nor-
mal infancy. Some, however, are born with congeni-
tal defects such as intestinal obstructions that require
operations if they are to live. Sometimes, the parents
and the doctor will decide not to operate, and let the
infant die. Anthony Shaw describes what happens
then:
. . . When surgery is denied [the doctor] must try to
keep the infant from suffering while natural forces sap
the baby’s life away. As a surgeon whose natural incli-
nation is to use the scalpel to fight off death, standing
by and watching a salvageable baby die is the most
emotionally exhausting experience I know. It is easy at
a conference, in a theoretical discussion, to decide that
such infants should be allowed to die. It is altogether
different to stand by in the nursery and watch as dehy-
dration and infection wither a tiny being over hours
and days. This is a terrible ordeal for me and the hospi-
tal staff— much more so than for the parents who never
set foot in the nursery.1
I can understand why some people are opposed to
all euthanasia, and insist that such infants must be
allowed to live. I think I can also understand why
other people favor destroying these babies quickly and
painlessly. But why should anyone favor letting “dehy-
dration and infection wither a tiny being over hours
and days”? The doctrine that says that a baby may be
allowed to dehydrate and wither, but may not be given
an injection that would end its life without suffering,
seems so patently cruel as to require no further refu-
tation. The strong language is not intended to offend,
but only to put the point in the clearest possible way.
My second argument is that the conventional
doctrine leads to decisions concerning life and death
made on irrelevant grounds.
Consider again the case of the infants with [Down]
syndrome who need operations for congenital defects
unrelated to the syndrome to live. Sometimes, there
is no operation, and the baby dies, but when there is
no such defect, the baby lives on. Now, an operation
such as that to remove an intestinal obstruction is not
prohibitively difficult. The reason why such opera-
tions are not performed in these cases is, clearly, that
the child has [Down] syndrome and the parents and
doctor judge that because of that fact it is better for the
child to die.
But notice that this situation is absurd, no matter
what view one takes of the lives and potentials of such

302 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
push the child’s head back under if it is necessary, but
it is not necessary. With only a little thrashing about,
the child drowns all by himself, “accidentally,” as
Jones watches and does nothing.
Now Smith killed the child, whereas Jones
“merely” let the child die. That is the only difference
between them. Did either man behave better, from
a moral point of view? If the difference between kill-
ing and letting die were in itself a morally important
matter, one should say that Jones’s behavior was less
reprehensible than Smith’s. But does one really want
to say that? I think not. In the first place, both men
acted from the same motive, personal gain, and both
had exactly the same end in view when they acted.
It may be inferred from Smith’s conduct that he is a
bad man, although that judgment may be withdrawn
or modified if certain further facts are learned about
him— for example, that he is mentally deranged. But
would not the very same thing be inferred about Jones
from his conduct? And would not the same further
considerations also be relevant to any modification of
this judgment? Moreover, suppose Jones pleaded, in
his own defense, “After all, I didn’t do anything except
just stand there and watch the child drown. I didn’t
kill him: I only let him die.” Again, if letting die were
in itself less bad than killing, this defense should have
at least some weight. But it does not. Such a “defense”
can only be regarded as a grotesque perversion of
moral reasoning. Morally speaking, it is no defense
at all.
Now, it may be pointed out, quite properly, that
the cases of euthanasia with which doctors are con-
cerned are not like this at all. They do not involve
personal gain or the destruction of normal healthy
children. Doctors are concerned only with cases in
which the patient’s life is of no further use to him,
or in which the patient’s life has become or will soon
become a terrible burden. However, the point is the
same in these cases: the bare difference between killing
and letting die does not, in itself, make a moral differ-
ence. If a doctor lets a patient die, for humane reasons,
he is in the same moral position as if he had given the
patient a lethal injection for humane reasons. If his
decision was wrong— if, for example, the patient’s
illness was in fact curable— the decision would be
babies. If the life of such an infant is worth preserv-
ing, what does it matter if it needs a simple operation?
Or, if one thinks it better that such a baby should not
live on, what difference does it make that it happens
to have an unobstructed intestinal tract? In either
case, the matter of life and death is being decided on
irrelevant grounds. It is the [Down] syndrome, and
not the intestines, that is the issue. The matter should
be decided, if at all, on that basis, and not be allowed
to depend on the essentially irrelevant question of
whether the intestinal tract is blocked.
What makes this situation possible, of course, is
the idea that when there is an intestinal blockage, one
can “let the baby die,” but when there is no such defect
there is nothing that can be done, for one must not
“kill” it. The fact that this idea leads to such results as
deciding life or death on irrelevant grounds is another
good reason why the doctrine should be rejected.
One reason why so many people think that there
is an important moral difference between active and
passive euthanasia is that they think killing someone
is morally worse than letting someone die. But is it?
Is killing, in itself, worse than letting die? To investi-
gate this issue, two cases may be considered that are
exactly alike except that one involves killing whereas
the other involves letting someone die. Then, it can be
asked whether this difference makes any difference to
the moral assessments. It is important that the cases
be exactly alike, except for this one difference, since
otherwise one cannot be confident that it is this dif-
ference and not some other that accounts for any
variation in the assessments of the two cases. So, let us
consider this pair of cases:
In the first, Smith stands to gain a large inheri-
tance if anything should happen to his six- year- old
cousin. One evening while the child is taking his
bath, Smith sneaks into the bathroom and drowns the
child, and then arranges things so that it will look like
an accident.
In the second, Jones also stands to gain if anything
should happen to his six- year- old cousin. Like Smith,
Jones sneaks in planning to drown the child in his
bath. However, just as he enters the bathroom Jones
sees the child slip and hit his head, and fall face down
in the water. Jones is delighted; he stands by, ready to

CHAPTER 10: EUTHAnASIA And PHySICIAn- ASSISTEd SUICIdE Á 303
however, the doctor does something to bring about
the patient’s death: he kills him. The doctor who gives
the patient with cancer a lethal injection has himself
caused his patient’s death: whereas if he merely ceases
treatment, the cancer is the cause of the death.”
A number of points need to be made here. The
first is that it is not exactly correct to say that in pas-
sive euthanasia the doctor does nothing, for he does
do one thing that is very important: he lets the patient
die. “Letting someone die” is certainly different, in
some respects, from other types of action— mainly in
that it is a kind of action that one may perform by way
of not performing certain other actions. For example,
one may let a patient die by way of not giving medi-
cation, just as one may insult someone by way of not
shaking his hand. But for any purpose of moral assess-
ment, it is a type of action nonetheless. The decision
to let a patient die is subject to moral appraisal in the
same way that a decision to kill him would be subject
to moral appraisal: it may be assessed as wise or unwise,
compassionate or sadistic, right or wrong. If a doctor
deliberately let a patient die who was suffering from a
routinely curable illness, the doctor would certainly be
to blame for what he had done, just as he would be to
blame if he had needlessly killed the patient. Charges
against him would then be appropriate. If so, it would
be no defense at all for him to insist that he didn’t “do
anything.” He would have done something very seri-
ous indeed, for he let his patient die.
Fixing the cause of death may be very impor-
tant from a legal point of view, for it may determine
whether criminal charges are brought against the doc-
tor. But I do not think that this notion can be used to
show a moral difference between active and passive
euthanasia. The reason why it is considered bad to be
the cause of someone’s death is that death is regarded
as a great evil— and so it is. However, if it has been
decided that euthanasia— even passive euthanasia— is
desirable in a given case, it has also been decided that
in this instance death is no greater an evil than the
patient’s continued existence. And if this is true, the
usual reason for not wanting to be the cause of some-
one’s death simply does not apply.
Finally, doctors may think that all of this is only of
academic interest— the sort of thing that philosophers
equally regrettable no matter which method was used
to carry it out. And if the doctor’s decision was the
right one, the method used is not in itself important.
The AMA policy statement isolates the crucial
issue very well: the crucial issue is “the intentional ter-
mination of the life of one human being by another.”
But after identifying this issue, and forbidding “mercy
killing,” the statement goes on to deny that the ces-
sation of treatment is the intentional termination of
a life. This is where the mistake comes in, for what is
the cessation of treatment, in these circumstances, if
it is not “the intentional termination of the life of one
human being by another”? Of course it is exactly that,
and if it were not, there would be no point to it.
Many people will find this judgment hard to
accept. One reason, I think, is that it is very easy to
conflate the question of whether killing is, in itself,
worse than letting die, with the very different ques-
tion of whether most actual cases of killing are more
reprehensible than most actual cases of letting die.
Most actual cases of killing are clearly terrible (think,
for example, of all the murders reported in the news-
papers), and one hears of such cases every day. On the
other hand, one hardly ever hears of a case of letting
die, except for the actions of doctors who are moti-
vated by humanitarian reasons. So one learns to think
of killing in a much worse light than of letting die.
But this does not mean that there is something about
killing that makes it in itself worse than letting die,
for it is not the bare difference between killing and
letting die that makes the difference in these cases.
Rather, the other factors— the murderer’s motive of
personal gain, for example, contrasted with the doc-
tor’s humanitarian motivation— account for different
reactions to the different cases.
I have argued that killing is not in itself any worse
than letting die: if my contention is right, it follows
that active euthanasia is not any worse than passive
euthanasia. What arguments can be given on the other
side? The most common, I believe, is the following:
“The important difference between active and pas-
sive euthanasia is that, in passive euthanasia, the doc-
tor does not do anything to bring about the patient’s
death. The doctor does nothing, and the patient dies
of whatever ills already afflict him. In active euthanasia,

304 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
However, the preceding considerations suggest that
there is really no moral difference between the two,
considered in themselves (there may be important
moral differences in some cases in their consequences,
but, as I pointed out, these differences may make active
euthanasia, and not passive euthanasia, the morally
preferable option). So, whereas doctors may have to
discriminate between active and passive euthanasia to
satisfy the law, they should not do any more than that.
In particular, they should not give the distinction any
added authority and weight by writing it into official
statements of medical ethics.
NOTE
1. Anthony Shaw, “Doctor, Do We Have a Choice?” New York
Times Magazine, 30 January 1972, 54.
may worry about but that has no practical bearing on
their own work. After all, doctors must be concerned
about the legal consequences of what they do, and
active euthanasia is clearly forbidden by the law.
But even so, doctors should also be concerned with
the fact that the law is forcing upon them a moral
doctrine that may well be indefensible, and has a
considerable effect on their practices. Of course, most
doctors are not now in the position of being coerced
in this matter, for they do not regard themselves as
merely going along with what the law requires. Rather,
in statements such as the AMA policy statement that
I have quoted, they are endorsing this doctrine as a
central point of medical ethics. In that statement,
active euthanasia is condemned not merely as illegal
but as “contrary to that for which the medical profes-
sion stands,” whereas passive euthanasia is approved.
The Wrongfulness of Euthanasia
J. Gay- Williams
conclusion is wrong. I want to show that euthanasia
is wrong. It is inherently wrong, but it is also wrong
judged from the standpoints of self- interest and of
practical effects.
Before presenting my arguments to support this
claim, it would be well to define “euthanasia.” An
essential aspect of euthanasia is that it involves tak-
ing a human life, either one’s own or that of another.
Also, the person whose life is taken must be someone
who is believed to be suffering from some disease or
injury from which recovery cannot reasonably be
expected. Finally, the action must be deliberate and
intentional. Thus, euthanasia is intentionally taking
the life of a presumably hopeless person. Whether the
life is one’s own or that of another, the taking of it is
still euthanasia.
It is important to be clear about the deliberate and
intentional aspect of the killing. If a hopeless person
is given an injection of the wrong drug by mistake
and this causes his death, this is wrongful killing but
not euthanasia. The killing cannot be the result of
My impression is that euthanasia— the idea, if not
the practice— is slowly gaining acceptance within our
society. Cynics might attribute this to an increasing
tendency to devalue human life, but I do not believe
this is the major factor. The acceptance is much more
likely to be the result of unthinking sympathy and
benevolence. Well- publicized, tragic stories like that of
Karen Quinlan elicit from us deep feelings of compas-
sion. We think to ourselves, “She and her family would
be better off if she were dead.” It is an easy step from
this very human response to the view that if someone
(and others) would be better off dead, then it might
be all right to kill that person. Although I respect the
compassion that leads to this conclusion, I believe the
J. Gay- Williams, “The Wrongfulness of Euthanasia.” Copy-
right © 1979 by Ronald Munson. Published from Ronald
Munson, Intervention and Reflection: Basic Issues in Medical
Ethics, 4th Edition. Wadsworth Publishing Company: Belmont,
California. Reprinted with permission.

CHAPTER 10: EUTHAnASIA And PHySICIAn- ASSISTEd SUICIdE Á 305
bacteria, antibodies are produced to fight against the
alien organisms, and their remains are swept out of the
body by special cells designed for clean- up work.
Euthanasia does violence to this natural goal of
survival. It is literally acting against nature because
all the processes of nature are bent towards the end of
bodily survival. Euthanasia defeats these subtle mech-
anisms in a way that, in a particular case, disease and
injury might not.
It is possible, but not necessary, to make an appeal
to revealed religion in this connection. Man as trustee
of his body acts against God, its rightful possessor,
when he takes his own life. He also violates the com-
mandment to hold life sacred and never to take it
without just and compelling cause. But since this
appeal will persuade only those who are prepared to
accept that religion has access to revealed truths, I
shall not employ this line of argument.
It is enough, I believe, to recognize that the organiza-
tion of the human body and our patterns of behavioral
responses make the continuation of life a natural goal.
By reason alone, then, we can recognize that euthanasia
sets us against our own nature. Furthermore, in doing
so, euthanasia does violence to our dignity. Our dignity
comes from seeking our ends. When one of our goals
is survival, and actions are taken that eliminate that
goal, then our natural dignity suffers. Unlike animals,
we are conscious through reason of our nature and our
ends. Euthanasia involves acting as if this dual nature—
inclination towards survival and awareness of this as an
end— did not exist. Thus, euthanasia denies our basic
human character and requires that we regard ourselves
or others as something less than fully human.
2. THE ARGUMENT FROM SELF- INTEREST
The above arguments are, I believe, sufficient to show
that euthanasia is inherently wrong. But there are rea-
sons for considering it wrong when judged by stan-
dards other than reason. Because death is final and
irreversible, euthanasia contains within it the possi-
bility that we will work against our own interest if we
practice it or allow it to be practiced on us.
Contemporary medicine has high standards of
excellence and a proven record of accomplishment,
accident. Furthermore, if the person is given an injec-
tion of a drug that is believed to be necessary to treat
his disease or better his condition and the person dies
as a result, then this is neither wrongful killing nor
euthanasia. The intention was to make the patient
well, not kill him. Similarly, when a patient’s condi-
tion is such that it is not reasonable to hope that any
medical procedures or treatments will save his life, a
failure to implement the procedures or treatments
is not euthanasia. If the person dies, this will be as a
result of his injuries or disease and not because of his
failure to receive treatment.
The failure to continue treatment after it has been
realized that the patient has little chance of benefit-
ing from it has been characterized by some as “passive
euthanasia.” This phrase is misleading and mistaken.
In such cases, the person involved is not killed (the
first essential aspect of euthanasia), nor is the death of
the person intended by the withholding of additional
treatment (the third essential aspect of euthanasia).
The aim may be to spare the person additional and
unjustifiable pain, to save him from the indignities of
hopeless manipulations, and to avoid increasing the
financial and emotional burden on his family. When
I buy a pencil it is so that I can use it to write, not to
contribute to an increase in the gross national prod-
uct. This may be the unintended consequence of my
action, but it is not the aim of my action. So it is with
failing to continue the treatment of a dying person. I
intend his death no more than I intend to reduce the
GNP by not using medical supplies. His is an unin-
tended dying, and so- called “passive euthanasia” is
not euthanasia at all.
1. THE ARGUMENT FROM NATURE
Every human being has a natural inclination to con-
tinue living. Our reflexes and responses fit us to fight
attackers, flee wild animals, and dodge out of the way
of trucks. In our daily lives we exercise the caution and
care necessary to protect ourselves. Our bodies are sim-
ilarly structured for survival right down to the molecu-
lar level. When we are cut, our capillaries seal shut, our
blood clots, and fibrogen is produced to start the pro-
cess of healing the wound. When we are invaded by

306 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
enough to save the patient. They might decide that
the patient would simply be “better off dead” and take
the steps necessary to make that come about. This
attitude could then carry over to their dealings with
patients less seriously ill. The result would be an over-
all decline in the quality of medical care.
Finally, euthanasia as a policy is a slippery slope.
A person apparently hopelessly ill may be allowed to
take his own life. Then he may be permitted to depu-
tize others to do it for him should he no longer be able
to act. The judgment of others then becomes the rul-
ing factor. Already at this point euthanasia is not per-
sonal and voluntary, for others are acting “on behalf
of” the patient as they see fit. This may well incline
them to act on behalf of other patients who have not
authorized them to exercise their judgment. It is only
a short step, then, from voluntary euthanasia ( self-
inflicted or authorized), to directed euthanasia admin-
istered to a patient who has given no authorization, to
involuntary euthanasia conducted as part of a social
policy. Recently many psychiatrists and sociologists
have argued that we define as “mental illness” those
forms of behavior that we disapprove of. This gives us
license then to lock up those who display the behav-
ior. The category of the “hopelessly ill” provides the
possibility of even worse abuse. Embedded in a social
policy, it would give society or its representatives the
authority to eliminate all those who might be con-
sidered too “ill” to function normally any longer. The
dangers of euthanasia are too great to all to run the
risk of approving it in any form. The first slippery step
may well lead to a serious and harmful fall.
I hope that I have succeeded in showing why the
benevolence that inclines us to give approval of eutha-
nasia is misplaced. Euthanasia is inherently wrong
because it violates the nature and dignity of human
beings. But even those who are not convinced by this
must be persuaded that the potential personal and
social dangers inherent in euthanasia are sufficient to
forbid our approving it either as a personal practice or
as a public policy.
Suffering is surely a terrible thing, and we have a
clear duty to comfort those in need and to ease their
suffering when we can. But suffering is also a natural
part of life with values for the individual and for others
but it does not possess perfect and complete knowl-
edge. A mistaken diagnosis is possible, and so is a mis-
taken prognosis. Consequently, we may believe that
we are dying of a disease when, as a matter of fact, we
may not be. We may think that we have no hope of
recovery when, as a matter of fact, our chances are
quite good. In such circumstances, if euthanasia were
permitted, we would die needlessly. Death is final and
the chance of error too great to approve the practice of
euthanasia.
Also, there is always the possibility that an experi-
mental procedure or a hitherto untried technique will
pull us through. We should at least keep this option
open, but euthanasia closes it off. Furthermore, spon-
taneous remission does occur in many cases. For no
apparent reason, a patient simply recovers when those
all around him, including his physicians, expected
him to die. Euthanasia would just guarantee their
expectations and leave no room for the “miraculous”
recoveries that frequently occur.
Finally, knowing that we can take our life at any
time (or ask another to take it) might well incline us
to give up too easily. The will to live is strong in all of
us, but it can be weakened by pain and suffering and
feelings of hopelessness. If during a bad time we allow
ourselves to be killed, we never have a chance to recon-
sider. Recovery from a serious illness requires that we
fight for it, and anything that weakens our determi-
nation by suggesting that there is an easy way out is
ultimately against our own interest. Also, we may be
inclined towards euthanasia because of our concern
for others. If we see our sickness and suffering as an
emotional and financial burden on our family, we may
feel that to leave our life is to make their lives easier.
The very presence of the possibility of euthanasia may
keep us from surviving when we might.
3. THE ARGUMENT FROM PRACTICAL EFFECTS
Doctors and nurses are, for the most part, totally com-
mitted to saving lives. A life lost is, for them, almost
a personal failure, an insult to their skills and knowl-
edge. Euthanasia as a practice might well alter this. It
could have a corrupting influence so that in any case
that is severe doctors and nurses might not try hard

CHAPTER 10: EUTHAnASIA And PHySICIAn- ASSISTEd SUICIdE Á 307
NOTE
1. Arthur Dyck, “Beneficent Euthanasia and Benemortasia,”
in Beneficent Euthanasia, ed. Marvin Kohl (Buffalo, NY: Pro-
metheus Books, 1975), 117–29.
that we should not overlook. We may legitimately
seek for others and for ourselves an easeful death, as
Arthur Dyck has pointed out.1 Euthanasia, however, is
not just an easeful death. It is a wrongful death. Eutha-
nasia is not just dying. It is killing.
From Voluntary Active Euthanasia
Dan W. Brock
administered, for example, in cases of serious dementia
or treatable clinical depression.
Does the value of individual self- determination
extend to the time and manner of one’s death? Most
people are very concerned about the nature of the last
stage of their lives. This reflects not just a fear of expe-
riencing substantial suffering when dying, but also a
desire to retain dignity and control during this last
period of life. Death is today increasingly preceded
by a long period of significant physical and mental
decline, due in part to the technological interven-
tions of modern medicine. Many people adjust to
these disabilities and find meaning and value in new
activities and ways. Others find the impairments and
burdens in the last stage of their lives at some point
sufficiently great to make life no longer worth living.
For many patients near death, maintaining the qual-
ity of one’s life, avoiding great suffering, maintaining
one’s dignity, and insuring that others remember us
as we wish them to become of paramount impor-
tance and outweigh merely extending one’s life.
But there is no single, objectively correct answer for
everyone as to when, if at all, one’s life becomes all
things considered a burden and unwanted. If self-
determination is a fundamental value, then the great
variability among people on this question makes it
especially important that individuals control the
manner, circumstances, and timing of their dying
and death.
The other main value that supports euthanasia is
individual well- being. It might seem that individual
well- being conflicts with a person’s self- determination
when the person requests euthanasia. Life itself is
* * *
THE CENTRAL ETHICAL ARGUMENT FOR
VOLUNTARY ACTIVE EUTHANASIA
The central ethical argument for euthanasia is familiar.
It is that the very same two fundamental ethical values
supporting the consensus on patient’s rights to decide
about life- sustaining treatment also support the ethical
permissibility of euthanasia. These values are individual
self- determination or autonomy and individual well-
being. By self- determination as it bears on euthanasia,
I mean people’s interest in making important decisions
about their lives for themselves according to their own
values or conceptions of a good life, and in being left
free to act on those decisions. Self- determination is valu-
able because it permits people to form and live in accor-
dance with their own conception of a good life, at least
within the bounds of justice and consistent with others
doing so as well. In exercising self- determination people
take responsibility for their lives and for the kinds of
persons they become. A central aspect of human dig-
nity lies in people’s capacity to direct their lives in this
way. The value of exercising self- determination presup-
poses some minimum of decision making capacities or
competence, which thus limits the scope of euthanasia
supported by self- determination; it cannot justifiably be
Dan W. Brock, excerpts from “Voluntary Active Euthanasia”
from Hastings Center Report 22(2): 10–22. Copyright © 1992 The
Hastings Center. Reproduced with permission of John Wiley &
Sons, Inc.

308 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
against it that on their view outweigh or override this
support. The first kind of argument is that in any indi-
vidual case where considerations of the patient’s self-
determination and well- being do support euthanasia,
it is nevertheless always ethically wrong or impermis-
sible. The second kind of argument grants that in
some individual cases euthanasia may not be ethi-
cally wrong, but maintains nonetheless that public
and legal policy should never permit it. The first kind
of argument focuses on features of any individual case
of euthanasia, while the second kind focuses on social
or legal policy. In the next section I consider the first
kind of argument.
* * *
WOULD THE BAD CONSEQUENCES OF
EUTHANASIA OUTWEIGH THE GOOD?
The argument against euthanasia at the policy level is
stronger than at the level of individual cases, though
even here I believe the case is ultimately unpersua-
sive, or at best indecisive. The policy level is the place
where the main issues lie, however, and where moral
considerations that might override arguments in
favor of euthanasia will be found, if they are found
anywhere. It is important to note two kinds of dis-
agreement about the consequences for public policy
of permitting euthanasia. First, there is empirical or
factual disagreement about what the consequences
would be. This disagreement is greatly exacerbated
by the lack of firm data on the issue. Second, since
on any reasonable assessment there would be both
good and bad consequences, there are moral dis-
agreements about the relative importance of dif-
ferent effects. In addition to these two sources of
disagreement, there is also no single, well- specified
policy proposal for legalizing euthanasia on which
policy assessments can focus. But without such
specification, and especially without explicit proce-
dures for protecting against well- intentioned mis-
use and ill- intentioned abuse, the consequences for
policy are largely speculative. Despite these difficul-
ties, a preliminary account of the main likely good
and bad consequences is possible. This should help
clarify where better data or more moral analysis and
commonly taken to be a central good for persons,
often valued for its own sake, as well as necessary for
pursuit of all other goods within a life. But when a
competent patient decides to forgo all further life-
sustaining treatment then the patient, either explic-
itly or implicitly, commonly decides that the best life
possible for him or her with treatment is of sufficiently
poor quality that it is worse than no further life at all.
Life is no longer considered a benefit by the patient,
but has now become a burden. The same judgment
underlies a request for euthanasia: continued life is
seen by the patient as no longer a benefit, but now a
burden. Especially in the often severely compromised
and debilitated states of many critically ill or dying
patients, there is no objective standard, but only the
competent patient’s judgment of whether continued
life is no longer a benefit.
Of course, sometimes there are conditions, such
as clinical depression, that call into question whether
the patient has made a competent choice, either to
forgo life- sustaining treatment or to seek euthanasia,
and then the patient’s choice need not be evidence
that continued life is no longer a benefit for him or
her. Just as with decisions about treatment, a deter-
mination of incompetence can warrant not honoring
the patient’s choice: in the case of treatment, we then
transfer decisional authority to a surrogate, though
in the case of voluntary active euthanasia a determi-
nation that the patient is incompetent means that
choice is not possible.
The value or right of self- determination does not
entitle patients to compel physicians to act contrary
to their own moral or professional values. Physi-
cians are moral and professional agents whose own
self- determination or integrity should be respected
as well. If performing euthanasia became legally
permissible, but conflicted with a particular physi-
cian’s reasonable understanding of his or her moral
or professional responsibilities, the care of a patient
who requested euthanasia should be transferred to
another.
Most opponents do not deny that there are
some cases in which the values of patient self-
determination and well- being support euthanasia.
Instead, they commonly offer two kinds of arguments

CHAPTER 10: EUTHAnASIA And PHySICIAn- ASSISTEd SUICIdE Á 309
who have it, not just those whose houses actually burn
down, by reassuring them that in the unlikely event
of their house burning down, they will receive the
money needed to rebuild it. Likewise, the legalization
of euthanasia can be thought of as a kind of insurance
policy against being forced to endure a protracted dying
process that one has come to find burdensome and
unwanted, especially when there is no life- sustaining
treatment to forgo. The strong concern about losing
control of their care expressed by many people who
face serious illness likely to end in death suggests that
they give substantial importance to the legalization of
euthanasia as a means of maintaining this control.
A third good consequence of the legalization of
euthanasia concerns patients whose dying is filled
with severe and unrelievable pain or suffering. When
there is a life- sustaining treatment that, if forgone,
will lead relatively quickly to death, then doing so
can bring an end to these patients’ suffering with-
out recourse to euthanasia. For patients receiving no
such treatment, however, euthanasia may be the only
release from their otherwise prolonged suffering and
agony. This argument from mercy has always been the
strongest argument for euthanasia in those cases to
which it applies.
The importance of relieving pain and suffering is
less controversial than is the frequency with which
patients are forced to undergo untreatable agony
that only euthanasia could relieve. If we focus first on
suffering caused by physical pain, it is crucial to dis-
tinguish pain that could be adequately relieved with
modern methods of pain control, though it in fact is
not, from pain that is relievable only by death. For a
variety of reasons, including some physicians’ fear of
hastening the patient’s death, as well as the lack of a
publicly accessible means for assessing the amount
of the patient’s pain, many patients suffer pain that
could be, but is not, relieved.
Specialists in pain control, as for example the
pain of terminally ill cancer patients, argue that
there are very few patients whose pain could not be
adequately controlled, though sometimes at the cost
of so sedating them that they are effectively unable
to interact with other people or their environment.
Thus, the argument from mercy in cases of physical
argument are needed, as well as where policy safe-
guards must be developed.
Potential Good Consequences of
Permitting Euthanasia
What are the likely good consequences? First, if eutha-
nasia were permitted it would be possible to respect
the self- determination of competent patients who
want it, but now cannot get it because of its illegality.
We simply do not know how many such patients and
people there are. In the Netherlands, with a popula-
tion of about 14.5 million (in 1987), estimates in a
recent study were that about 1,900 cases of voluntary
active euthanasia or physician- assisted suicide occur
annually. No straightforward extrapolation to the
United States is possible for many reasons, among
them, that we do not know how many people here
who want euthanasia now get it, despite its illegality.
Even with better data on the number of persons who
want euthanasia but cannot get it, significant moral
disagreement would remain about how much weight
should be given to any instance of failure to respect a
person’s self- determination in this way.
One important factor substantially affecting the
number of persons who would seek euthanasia is the
extent to which an alternative is available. The wide-
spread acceptance in the law, social policy, and medi-
cal practice of the right of a competent patient to forgo
life- sustaining treatment suggests that the number of
competent persons in the United States who would
want euthanasia if it were permitted is probably rela-
tively small.
A second good consequence of making euthana-
sia legally permissible benefits a much larger group.
Polls have shown that a majority of the American pub-
lic believes that people should have a right to obtain
euthanasia if they want.1 No doubt the vast majority of
those who support this right to euthanasia will never
in fact come to want euthanasia for themselves. Nev-
ertheless, making it legally permissible would reassure
many people that if they ever do want euthanasia they
would be able to obtain it. This reassurance would sup-
plement the broader control over the process of dying
given by the right to decide about life- sustaining treat-
ment. Having fire insurance on one’s house benefits all

310 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
Potential Bad Consequences of
Permitting Euthanasia
Some of the arguments against permitting euthanasia
are aimed specifically against physicians, while others
are aimed against anyone being permitted to perform
it. I shall first consider one argument of the former
sort. Permitting physicians to perform euthanasia, it
is said, would be incompatible with their fundamental
moral and professional commitment as healers to care
for patients and to protect life. Moreover, if euthanasia
by physicians became common, patients would come
to fear that a medication was intended not to treat or
care, but instead to kill, and would thus lose trust in
their physicians. This position was forcefully stated in
a paper by Willard Gaylin and his colleagues:
The very soul of medicine is on trial. . . . This issue touches
medicine at its moral center; if this moral center col-
lapses, if physicians become killers or are even licensed
to kill, the profession— and, therewith, each physician—
will never again be worthy of trust and respect as healer
and comforter and protector of life in all its frailty.
These authors go on to make clear that, while they
oppose permitting anyone to perform euthanasia,
their special concern is with physicians doing so:
We call on fellow physicians to say that they will not
deliberately kill. We must also say to each of our fellow
physicians that we will not tolerate killing of patients
and that we shall take disciplinary action against doctors
who kill. And we must say to the broader community
that if it insists on tolerating or legalizing active eutha-
nasia, it will have to find nonphysicians to do its killing.2
If permitting physicians to kill would undermine
the very “moral center” of medicine, then almost cer-
tainly physicians should not be permitted to perform
euthanasia. But how persuasive is this claim? Patients
should not fear, as a consequence of permitting vol-
untary active euthanasia, that their physicians will
substitute a lethal injection for what patients want
and believe is part of their care. If active euthanasia is
restricted to cases in which it is truly voluntary, then
no patient should fear getting it unless she or he has
voluntarily requested it. (The fear that we might in
time also come to accept nonvoluntary, or even invol-
untary, active euthanasia is a slippery slope worry
pain can probably be met in a large majority of cases
by providing adequate measures of pain relief. This
should be a high priority, whatever our legal policy on
euthanasia— the relief of pain and suffering has long
been, quite properly, one of the central goals of medi-
cine. Those cases in which pain could be effectively
relieved, but in fact is not, should only count signifi-
cantly in favor of legalizing euthanasia if all reason-
able efforts to change pain management techniques
have been tried and have failed.
Dying patients often undergo substantial psycho-
logical suffering that is not fully or even principally
the result of physical pain. The knowledge about how
to relieve this suffering is much more limited than in
the case of relieving pain, and efforts to do so are prob-
ably more often unsuccessful. If the argument from
mercy is extended to patients experiencing great and
unrelievable psychological suffering, the numbers of
patients to which it applies are much greater.
One last good consequence of legalizing eutha-
nasia is that once death has been accepted, it is often
more humane to end life quickly and peacefully,
when that is what the patient wants. Such a death will
often be seen as better than a more prolonged one.
People who suffer a sudden and unexpected death,
for example by dying quickly or in their sleep from
a heart attack or stroke, are often considered lucky
to have died in this way. We care about how we die
in part because we care about how others remember
us, and we hope they will remember us as we were in
“good times” with them and not as we might be when
disease has robbed us of our dignity as human beings.
As with much in the treatment and care of the dying,
people’s concerns differ in this respect, but for at
least some people, euthanasia will be a more humane
death than what they have often experienced with
other loved ones and might otherwise expect for
themselves.
Some opponents of euthanasia challenge how
much importance should be given to any of these
good consequences of permitting it, or even whether
some would be good consequences at all. But more
frequently, opponents cite a number of bad conse-
quences that permitting euthanasia would or could
produce, and it is to their assessment that I now turn.

CHAPTER 10: EUTHAnASIA And PHySICIAn- ASSISTEd SUICIdE Á 311
surrogates’ rights to forgo life- sustaining treatment, yet
there is no persuasive evidence that recognizing the
right to refuse treatment has caused a serious erosion in
the quality of care of dying patients. The second reason
for skepticism about this worry is that only a very small
proportion of deaths would occur from euthanasia if
it were permitted. In the Netherlands, where eutha-
nasia under specified circumstances is permitted by
the courts, though not authorized by statute, the best
estimate of the proportion of overall deaths that result
from it is about 2 percent.3 Thus, the vast majority of
critically ill and dying patients will not request it, and
so will still have to be cared for by physicians, families,
and others. Permitting euthanasia should not dimin-
ish people’s commitment and concern to maintain
and improve the care of these patients.
A third possible bad consequence of permitting
euthanasia (or even a public discourse in which strong
support for euthanasia is evident) is to threaten the
progress made in securing the rights of patients or their
surrogates to decide about and to refuse life- sustaining
treatment. This progress has been made against the
backdrop of a clear and firm legal prohibition of eutha-
nasia, which has provided a relatively bright line limit-
ing the dominion of others over patients’ lives. It has
therefore been an important reassurance to concerns
about how the authority to take steps ending life might
be misused, abused, or wrongly extended.
Many supporters of the right of patients or their
surrogates to refuse treatment strongly oppose eutha-
nasia, and if forced to choose might well withdraw
their support of the right to refuse treatment rather
than accept euthanasia. Public policy in the last fif-
teen years has generally let life- sustaining treatment
decisions be made in health care settings between
physicians and patients or their surrogates, and with-
out the involvement of the courts. However, if eutha-
nasia is made legally permissible greater involvement
of the courts is likely, which could in turn extend to
a greater court involvement in life- sustaining treat-
ment decisions. Most agree, however, that increased
involvement of the courts in these decisions would
be undesirable, as it would make sound decisionmak-
ing more cumbersome and difficult without sufficient
compensating benefits.
I address below.) Patients’ trust of their physicians
could be increased, not eroded, by knowledge that
physicians will provide aid in dying when patients
seek it.
. . . In spelling out above what I called the posi-
tive argument for voluntary active euthanasia, I sug-
gested that two principal values— respective patients’
self- determination and promoting their well- being—
underlie the consensus that competent patients, or
the surrogates of incompetent patients, are entitled
to refuse any life- sustaining treatment and to choose
from among available alternative treatments. It is the
commitment to these two values in guiding physi-
cians’ actions as healers, comforters, and protectors of
their patients’ lives that should be at the “moral cen-
ter” of medicine, and these two values support physi-
cians’ administering euthanasia when their patients
make competent requests for it.
What should not be at that moral center is a com-
mitment to preserving patients’ lives as such, without
regard to whether those patients want their lives pre-
served or judge their preservation a benefit to them. . . .
A second bad consequence that some foresee
is that permitting euthanasia would weaken soci-
ety’s commitment to provide optimal care for dying
patients. We live at a time in which the control of
health care costs has become, and is likely to continue
to be, the dominant focus of health care policy. If
euthanasia is seen as a cheaper alternative to adequate
care and treatment, then we might become less scru-
pulous about providing sometimes costly support and
other services to dying patients. Particularly if our
society comes to embrace deeper and more explicit
rationing of health care, frail, elderly, and dying
patients will need to be strong and effective advocates
for their own health care and other needs, although
they are hardly in a position to do this. We should do
nothing to weaken their ability to obtain adequate
care and services.
This second worry is difficult to assess because
there is little firm evidence about the likelihood
of the feared erosion in the care of dying patients.
There are at least two reasons, however, for skepticism
about this argument. The first is that the same worry
could have been directed at recognizing patients’ or

312 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
This argument correctly identifies the reason why
offering some patients the option of euthanasia would
not benefit them. [David] Velleman takes it not as a
reason for opposing all euthanasia, but for restricting
it to circumstances where there are “unmistakable and
overpowering reasons for persons to want the option
of euthanasia,”4 and for denying the option in all
other cases. But there are at least three reasons why
such restriction may not be warranted. First, polls and
other evidence support that most Americans believe
euthanasia should be permitted (though the recent
defeat of the referendum to permit it in the state of
Washington raises some doubt about this support).
Thus, many more people seem to want the choice
than would be made worse off by getting it. Second,
if giving people the option of ending their life really
makes them worse off, then we should not only pro-
hibit euthanasia, but also take back from people the
right they now have to decide about life- sustaining
treatment. The feared harmful effect should already
have occurred from securing people’s right to refuse
life- sustaining treatment, yet there is no evidence of
any such widespread harm or any broad public desire
to rescind that right. Third, since there is a wide range
of conditions in which reasonable people can and do
disagree about whether they would want continued
life, it is not possible to restrict the permissibility of
euthanasia as narrowly as Velleman suggests without
thereby denying it to most persons who would want it;
to permit it only in cases in which virtually everyone
would want it would be to deny it to most who would
want it.
A fifth potential bad consequence of making
euthanasia legally permissible is that it might weaken
the general legal prohibition of homicide. This pro-
hibition is so fundamental to civilized society, it is
argued, that we should do nothing that erodes it. If
most cases of stopping life support are killing, as I have
already argued, then the court cases permitting such
killing have already in effect weakened this prohibi-
tion. However, neither the courts nor most people
have seen these cases as killing and so as challenging
the prohibition of homicide. The courts have usually
grounded patients’ or their surrogates’ rights to refuse
life- sustaining treatment in rights to privacy, liberty,
As with the second potential bad consequence
of permitting euthanasia, this third consideration
too is speculative and difficult to assess. The feared
erosion of patients’ or surrogates’ rights to decide
about life- sustaining treatment, together with greater
court involvement in those decisions, are both pos-
sible. However, I believe there is reason to discount
this generally worry. The legal rights of competent
patients and, to a lesser degree, surrogates of incom-
petent patients to decide about treatment are very
firmly embedded in a long line of informed consent
and life- sustaining treatment cases, and are not likely
to be eroded by a debate over, or even acceptance
of, euthanasia. It will not be accepted without safe-
guards that reassure the public about abuse, and if
that debate shows the need for similar safeguards for
some life- sustaining treatment decisions they should
be adopted there as well. In neither case are the only
possible safeguards greater court involvement, as
the recent growth of institutional ethics committees
shows.
The fourth potential bad consequence of permit-
ting euthanasia . . . turns on the subtle point that
making a new option or choice available to people
can sometimes make them worse off, even if once
they have the choice they go on to choose what is best
for them. Ordinarily, people’s continued existence is
viewed by them as given, a fixed condition with which
they must cope. Making euthanasia available to peo-
ple as an option denies them the alternative of stay-
ing alive by default. If people are offered the option of
euthanasia, their continued existence is now a choice
for which they can be held responsible and which
they can be asked by others to justify. We care, and are
right to care, about being able to justify ourselves to
others. To the extent that our society is unsympathetic
to justifying a severely dependent or impaired exis-
tence, a heavy psychological burden of proof may be
placed on patients who think their terminal illness or
chronic infirmity is not a sufficient reason for dying.
Even if they otherwise view their life as worth living,
the opinion of others around them that it is not can
threaten their reason for living and make euthanasia
a rational choice. Thus the existence of the option
becomes a subtle pressure to request it.

CHAPTER 10: EUTHAnASIA And PHySICIAn- ASSISTEd SUICIdE Á 313
cases of euthanasia we should not permit even mor-
ally justified performance of it.
Slippery slope arguments of this form are prob-
lematic and difficult to evaluate. From one per-
spective, they are the last refuge of conservative
defenders of the status quo. When all the opponent’s
objections to the wrongness of euthanasia itself have
been met, the opponent then shifts ground and
acknowledges both that it is not in itself wrong and
that a legal policy which resulted only in its being
performed would not be bad. Nevertheless, the
opponent maintains, it should still not be permitted
because doing so would result in its being performed
in other cases in which it is not voluntary and would
be wrong. In this argument’s most extreme form,
permitting euthanasia is the first and fateful step
down the slippery slope to Nazism. Once on the
slope we will be unable to get off.
Now it cannot be denied that it is possible that
permitting euthanasia could have these fateful con-
sequences, but that cannot be enough to warrant pro-
hibiting it if it is otherwise justified. A similar possible
slippery slope worry could have been raised to secur-
ing competent patients’ rights to decide about life
support, but recent history shows such a worry would
have been unfounded. It must be relevant how likely
it is that we will end with horrendous consequences
and an unjustified practice of euthanasia. How like,
and widespread would the abuses and unwarranted
extensions of permitting it be? By abuses, I mean the
performance of euthanasia that fails to satisfy the
conditions required for voluntary active euthanasia,
for example, if the patient has been subtly pressured
to accept it. By unwarranted extensions of policy,
I mean later changes in legal policy to permit not just
voluntary euthanasia, but also euthanasia in cases in
which, for example, it need not be fully voluntary.
Opponents of voluntary euthanasia on slippery slope
grounds have not provided the data or evidence nec-
essary to turn their speculative concerns into well-
grounded likelihoods.
It is at least clear, however, that both the charac-
ter and likelihood of abuses of a legal policy permit-
ting euthanasia depend in significant part on the
procedures put in place to protect against them. I will
self- determination, or bodily integrity, not in excep-
tions to homicide laws.
Legal permission for physicians or others to per-
form euthanasia could not be grounded in patients’
rights to decide about medical treatment. Permit-
ting euthanasia would require qualifying, at least in
effect, the legal prohibition against homicide, a pro-
hibition that in general does not allow the consent
of the victim to justify or excuse the act. Neverthe-
less, the very same fundamental basis of the right to
decide about life- sustaining treatment— respecting
a person’s self- determination— does support eutha-
nasia as well. Individual self- determination has long
been a well- entrenched and fundamental value in
the law, and so extending it to euthanasia would
not require appeal to novel legal values or princi-
ples. That suicide or attempted suicide is no longer
a criminal offense in virtually all states indicates an
acceptance of individual self- determination in the
taking of one’s own life analogous to that required
for voluntary active euthanasia. The legal prohibi-
tion (in most states) of assisting in suicide and the
refusal in the law to accept the consent of the vic-
tim as a possible justification of homicide are both
arguably a result of difficulties in the legal process
of establishing the consent of the victim after the
fact. If procedures can be designed that clearly estab-
lish the voluntariness of the person’s request for
euthanasia it would under those procedures repre-
sent a carefully circumscribed qualification on the
legal prohibition of homicide. Nevertheless, some
remaining worries about this weakening can be
captured in the final potential bad consequence, to
which I will now turn.
This final potential bad consequence is the cen-
tral concern of many opponents of euthanasia and,
I believe, is the most serious objection to a legal pol-
icy permitting it. According to this “slippery slope”
worry, although active euthanasia may be morally
permissible in cases in which it is unequivocally
voluntary and the patient finds his or her condi-
tion unbearable, a legal policy permitting euthana-
sia would inevitably lead to active euthanasia being
performed in many other cases in which it would
be morally wrong. To prevent those other wrongful

314 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
THE ROLE OF PHYSICIANS
If euthanasia is made legally permissible, should physi-
cians take part in it? Should only physicians be permit-
ted to perform it, as is the case in the Netherlands? In
discussing whether euthanasia is incompatible with
medicine’s commitment to curing, caring for, and
comforting patients, I argued that it is not at odds with
a proper understanding of the aims of medicine, and so
need not undermine patients’ trust in their physicians.
If that argument is correct, then physicians probably
should not be prohibited, either by law or by profes-
sional norms, from taking part in a legally permissible
practice of euthanasia (nor, of course, should they be
compelled to do so if their personal or professional
scruples forbid it). Most physicians in the Netherlands
appear not to understand euthanasia to be incompat-
ible with their professional commitments.
Sometimes patients who would be able to end
their lives on their own nevertheless seek the assis-
tance of physicians. Physician involvement in such
cases may have important benefits to patients and oth-
ers beyond simply assuring the use of effective means.
Historically, in the United States suicide has carried
a strong negative stigma that many today believe
unwarranted. Seeking a physician’s assistance, or what
can almost seem a physician’s blessing, may be a way
of trying to remove that stigma and show others that
the decision for suicide was made with due seriousness
and was justified under the circumstances. The physi-
cian’s involvement provides a kind of social approval,
or more accurately helps counter what would other-
wise be unwarranted social disapproval.
There are also at least two reasons for restricting
the practice of euthanasia to physicians only. First,
physicians would inevitably be involved in some of
the important procedural safeguards necessary to a
defensible practice, such as seeing to it that the patient
is well- informed about his or her condition, prognosis,
and possible treatments, and ensuring that all reason-
able means have been taken to improve the quality of
the patient’s life. Second, and probably more impor-
tant, one necessary protection against abuse of the
practice is to limit the persons given authority to per-
form it, so that they can be held accountable for their
not try to detail fully what such procedures might be,
but will just give some examples of what they might
include:
1. The patient should be provided with all relevant
information about his or her medical condition,
current prognosis, available alternative treat-
ments, and the prognosis of each.
2. Procedures should ensure that the patient’s request
for euthanasia is stable or enduring (a brief wait-
ing period could be required) and fully voluntary
(an advocate for the patient might be appointed to
ensure this).
3. All reasonable alternatives must have been explored
for improving the patient’s quality of life and reliev-
ing any pain or suffering.
4. A psychiatric evaluation should ensure that the
patient’s request is not the result of a treatable
psychological impairment such as depression.
These examples of procedural safeguards are all designed
to ensure that the patient’s choice is fully informed,
voluntary, and competent, and so a true exercise of self-
determination. Other proposals for euthanasia would
restrict its permissibility further— for example, to the
terminally ill— a restriction that cannot be supported by
self- determination. Such additional restrictions might,
however, be justified by concern for limiting potential
harms from abuse. At the same time, it is important
not to impose procedural or substantive safeguards so
restrictive as to make euthanasia impermissible or prac-
tically infeasible in a wide range of justified cases.
These examples of procedural safeguards make
clear that it is possible to substantially reduce, though
not to eliminate, the potential for abuse of a policy
permitting voluntary active euthanasia. Any legaliza-
tion of the practice should be accompanied by a well-
considered set of procedural safeguards together with an
ongoing evaluation of its use. Introducing euthanasia
into only a few states could be a form of carefully limited
and controlled social experiment that would give us evi-
dence about the benefits and harms of the practice. Even
then firm and uncontroversial data may remain elusive,
as the continuing controversy over what has taken place
in the Netherlands in recent years indicates.5
* * *

CHAPTER 10: EUTHAnASIA And PHySICIAn- ASSISTEd SUICIdE Á 315
2. Willard Gaylin, Leon R. Kass, Edmund D. Pellegrino, and
Mark Siegler, “Doctors Must Not Kill,” Journal of the American
Medical Association 259 (1988): 2139–40.
3. Paul J. Van der Maas et al., “Euthanasia and Other Medi-
cal Decisions Concerning the End of Life,” Lancet 338 (1991):
669–74.
4. David Velleman commented on an earlier version of the
paper delivered at the American Philosophical Association
Central Division meetings.
5. Richard Fenigsen, “A Case against Dutch Euthanasia,”
Special Supplement, Hastings Center Report 19, no. 1 (1989):
22–30.
exercise of that authority. Physicians, whose training
and professional norms give some assurance that they
would perform euthanasia responsibly, are an appro-
priate group of persons to whom the practice may be
restricted.
* * *
NOTES
1. P. Painton and E. Taylor, “Love or Let Die,” Time, 19
March 1990, 62–71; Boston Globe/Harvard University Poll,
Boston Globe, 3 November 1991.
Euthanasia
Philippa Foot
Under this program, planned before the War but
brought into full operation by a decree of 1 Septem-
ber 1939, some 275,000 people were gassed in centers
which were to be a model for those in which Jews were
later exterminated. Anyone in a state institution could
be sent to the gas chambers if it was considered that he
could not be “rehabilitated” for useful work. As Dr. Leo
Alexander reports, relying on the testimony of a neu-
ropathologist who received 500 brains from one of the
killing centers,
In Germany the exterminations included the mentally
defective, psychotics (particularly schizophrenics), epi-
leptics and patients suffering from infirmities of old age
and from various organic neurological disorders such as
infantile paralysis, Parkinsonism, multiple sclerosis and
brain tumors. . . . In truth, all those unable to work and
considered nonrehabilitable were killed.1
These people were killed because they were “useless”
and “a burden on society”; only the manner of their
deaths could be thought of as relatively easy and quiet.
Let us insist, then, that when we talk about eutha-
nasia we are talking about a death understood as a good
or happy event for the one who dies. This stipulation
follows etymology, but is itself not exactly in line with
The widely used Shorter Oxford English Dictionary gives
three meanings for the word “euthanasia”: the first, “a
quiet and easy death”; the second, “the means of pro-
curing this”; and the third, “the action of inducing a
quiet and easy death.” It is a curious fact that no one of
the three gives an adequate definition of the word as it
is usually understood. For “euthanasia” means much
more than a quiet and easy death, or the means of pro-
curing it, or the action of inducing it. The definition
species only the manner of the death, and if this were
all that was implied a murderer, careful to drug his vic-
tim, could claim that his act was an act of euthanasia.
We find this ridiculous because we take it for granted
that in euthanasia it is death itself, not just the man-
ner of death, that must be kind to the one who dies.
To see how important it is that “euthanasia”
should not be used as the dictionary definition allows
it to be used, merely to signify that a death was quiet
and easy, one has only to remember that Hitler’s
“euthanasia” program traded on this ambiguity.
Philippa Foot, “Euthanasia” from Philosophy and Public Affairs 6(2):
85–112. Copyright © 1977 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Reproduced
with permission of Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

316 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
But is it enough that he acts with this thought, or must
things actually be as he thinks them to be? If one man
kills another, or allows him to die, thinking that he is
in the last stages of a terrible disease, though in fact
he could have been cured, is this an act of euthanasia
or not? Nothing much seems to hang on our decision
about this. The same condition has got to enter into the
definition whether as an element in reality or only as an
element in the agent’s belief. And however we define an
act of euthanasia culpability or justifiability will be the
same: if a man acts through ignorance his ignorance
may be culpable or it may not.2
These are relatively easy problems to solve, but
one that is dauntingly difficult has been passed over
in this discussion of the definition, and must now be
faced. It is easy to say, as if this raised no problems,
that an act of euthanasia is by definition one aim-
ing at the good of the one whose death is in question,
and that it is for his sake that his death is desired. But
how is this to be explained? Presumably we are think-
ing of some evil already with him or to come on him
if he continues to live, and death is thought of as a
release from this evil. But this cannot be enough.
Most people’s lives contain evils such as grief or pain,
but we do not therefore think that death would be a
blessing to them. On the contrary life is generally sup-
posed to be a good even for someone who is unusu-
ally unhappy or frustrated. How is it that one can ever
wish for death for the sake of the one who is to die?
This difficult question is central to the discussion of
euthanasia, and we shall literally not know what we
are talking about if we ask whether acts of euthanasia
defined as we have defined them are ever morally per-
missible without first understanding better the reason
for saying that life is a good, and the possibility that it
is not always so.
If a man should save my life he would be my
benefactor. In normal circumstances this is plainly
true; but does one always benefit another in saving
his life? It seems certain that he does not. Suppose, for
instance, that a man were being tortured to death and
was given a drug that lengthened his sufferings; this
would not be a benefit but the reverse. Or suppose that
in a ghetto in Nazi Germany a doctor saved the life of
someone threatened by disease, but that the man once
current usage, which would be captured by the condi-
tion that the death should not be an evil rather than
that it should be a good. That this is how people talk is
shown by the fact that the case of Karen Ann Quinlan
and others in a state of permanent coma is often dis-
cussed under the heading of “euthanasia.” Perhaps it
is not too late to object to the use of the word “eutha-
nasia” in this sense. Apart from the break with the
Greek origins of the word there are other unfortunate
aspects of this extension of the term. For if we say that
the death must be supposed to be a good to the subject
we can also specify that it shall be for his sake that an
act of euthanasia is performed. If we say merely that
death shall not be an evil to him, we cannot stipulate
that benefiting him shall be the motive where eutha-
nasia is in question. Given the importance of the ques-
tion, For whose sake are we acting? it is good to have
a definition of euthanasia which brings under this
heading only cases of opting for death for the sake
of the one who dies. Perhaps what is most important
is to say either that euthanasia is to be for the good
of the subject or at least that death is to be no evil to
him, thus refusing to talk Hitler’s language. However,
in this paper it is the first condition that will be under-
stood, with the additional proviso that by an act of
euthanasia we mean one of inducing or otherwise opt-
ing for death for the sake of the one who is to die.
A few lesser points need to be cleared up. In the
first place it must be said that the word “act” is not to
be taken to exclude omission: we shall speak of an act
of euthanasia when someone is deliberately allowed
to die, for his own good, and not only when posi-
tive measures are taken to see that he does. The very
general idea we want is that of a choice of action or
inaction directed at another man’s death and causally
effective in the sense that, in conjunction with actual
circumstances, it is a sufficient condition of death. Of
complications such as overdetermination, it will not
be necessary to speak.
A second, and definitely minor, point about the
definition of an act of euthanasia concerns the question
of fact versus belief. It has already been implied that one
who performs an act of euthanasia thinks that death
will be merciful for the subject since we have said that
it is on account of this thought that the act is done.

CHAPTER 10: EUTHAnASIA And PHySICIAn- ASSISTEd SUICIdE Á 317
people have more evil than good in their lives; we do
not, however, conclude that we would do these people
no service by rescuing them from death.
To get around this last difficulty Thomas Nagel has
suggested that experience itself is a good which must
be brought in to balance accounts.
. . . life is worth living even when the bad elements of
experience are plentiful, and the good ones too meager
to outweigh the bad ones on their own. The additional
positive weight is supplied by experience itself, rather
than by any of its contents.4
This seems implausible because if experience itself
is a good it must be so even when what we experi-
ence is wholly bad, as in being tortured to death. How
should one decide how much to count for this experi-
encing; and why count anything at all?
Others have tried to solve the problem by arguing
that it is a man’s desire for life that makes us call life a
good: if he wants to live then anyone who prolongs his
life does him a benefit. Yet someone may cling to life
where we would say confidently that it would be better
for him if he died, and he may admit it too. Speaking
of those same conditions in which, as he said, a bullet
would have been merciful, Panin writes,
I should like to pass on my observations concerning the
absence of suicides under the extremely severe condi-
tions of our concentration camps. The more that life
became desperate, the more a prisoner seemed deter-
mined to hold onto it.5
One might try to explain this by saying that hope
was the ground of this wish to survive for further days
and months in the camp. But there is nothing unintel-
ligible in the idea that a man might cling to life though
he knew those facts about his future which would
make any charitable man wish that he might die.
The problem remains, and it is hard to know where
to look for a solution. Is there a conceptual connection
between life and good? Because life is not always a good
we are apt to reject this idea, and to think that it must
be a contingent fact that life is usually a good, as it is a
contingent matter that legacies are usually a benefit, if
they are. Yet it seems not to be a contingent matter that
to save someone’s life is ordinarily to benefit him. The
problem is to find where the conceptual connection lies.
cured was transported to an extermination camp; the
doctor might wish for the sake of the patient that he
had died of the disease. Nor would a longer stretch of
life always be a benefit to the person who was given
it. Comparing Hitler’s camps with those of Stalin,
Dmitri Panin observes that in the latter the method of
extermination was made worse by agonies that could
stretch out over months.
Death from a bullet would have been bliss compared
with what many millions had to endure while dying
of hunger. The kind of death to which they were
condemned has nothing to equal it in treachery and
sadism.3
These examples show that to save or prolong
a man’s life is not always to do him a service: it may
be better for him if he dies earlier rather than later. It
must therefore be agreed that while life is normally a
benefit to the one who has it, this is not always so.
The judgment is often fairly easy to make— that
life is or is not a good to someone— but the basis for it
is very hard to find. When life is said to be a benefit or a
good, on what grounds is the assertion made?
The difficulty is underestimated if it is supposed
that the problem arises from the fact that one who is
dead has nothing, so that the good someone gets from
being alive cannot be compared with the amount he
would otherwise have had. For why should this par-
ticular comparison be necessary? Surely it would be
enough if one could say whether or not someone
whose life was prolonged had more good than evil in
the extra stretch of time. Such estimates are not always
possible, but frequently they are; we say, for example,
“He was very happy in those last years,” or, “He had
little but unhappiness then.” If the balance of good
and evil determined whether life was a good to some-
one we would expect to find a correlation in the judg-
ments. In fact, of course, we find nothing of the kind.
First, a man who has no doubt that existence is a good
to him may have no idea about the balance of happi-
ness and unhappiness in his life, or of any other posi-
tive and negative factors that may be suggested. So the
supposed criteria are not always operating where the
judgment is made. And secondly the application of
the criteria gives an answer that is often wrong. Many

318 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
as that an animal is better or worse off for something
that happened, or that it was a good or bad thing for
it that it did happen. And new things count as benefit.
In the first place, there is comfort, which often is, but
need not be, related to health. When loosening a col-
lar which is too tight for a dog we can say, “That will
be better for it.” So we see that the words “better for
it” have two different meanings which we mark when
necessary by a difference of emphasis, saying “better
for it” when health is involved. And secondly an ani-
mal can be benefited by having its life saved. “Could
you do anything for it?” can be answered by, “Yes, I
managed to save its life.” Sometimes we may under-
stand this, just as we would for a plant, to mean that
we had checked some disease. But we can also do
something for an animal by scaring away its preda-
tor. If we do this, it is a good thing for the animal that
we did, unless of course it immediately meets a more
unpleasant end by some other means. Similarly, on
the bad side, an animal may be worse off for our inter-
vention, and this not because it pines or suffers but
simply because it gets killed.
The problem that vexes us when we think about
euthanasia comes on the scene at this point. For if we
can do something for an animal— can benefit it— by
relieving its suffering but also by saving its life, where
does the greater benefit come when only death will
end pain? It seemed that life was a good in its own
right; yet pain seemed to be an evil with equal status
and could therefore make life not a good after all. Is
it only life without pain that is a good when animals
are concerned? This does not seem a crazy suggestion
when we are thinking of animals, since unlike human
beings they do not have suffering as part of their nor-
mal life. But it is perhaps the idea of ordinary life that
matters here. We would not say that we had done
anything for an animal if we had merely kept it alive,
either in an unconscious state or in a condition where,
though conscious, it was unable to operate in an ordi-
nary way; and the fact is that animals in severe and
continuous pain simply do not operate normally. So
we do not, on the whole, have the option of doing the
animal good by saving its life though the life would
be a life of pain. No doubt there are borderline cases,
but that is no problem. We are not trying to make new
It may be good tactics to forget for a time that it is
euthanasia we are discussing and to see how life and
good are connected in the case of living beings other
than men. Even plants have things done to them that
are harmful or beneficial, and what does them good
must be related in some way to their living and dying.
Let us therefore consider plants and animals, and then
come back to human beings. At least we shall get away
from the temptation to think that the connection
between life and benefit must everywhere be a mat-
ter of happiness and unhappiness or of pleasure and
pain; the idea being absurd in the case of animals and
impossible even to formulate for plants.
In case anyone thinks that the concept of the ben-
eficial applies only in a secondary or analogical way
to plants, he should be reminded that we speak quite
straightforwardly in saying, for instance, that a certain
amount of sunlight is beneficial to most plants. What
is in question here is the habitat in which plants of
particular species flourish, but we can also talk, in a
slightly different way, of what does them good, where
there is some suggestion of improvement or remedy.
What has the beneficial to do with sustaining life? It
is tempting to answer, “everything,” thinking that a
healthy condition just is the one apt to secure survival.
In fact, however, what is beneficial to a plant may have
to do with reproduction rather than the survival of the
individual member of the species. Nevertheless there is
a plain connection between the beneficial and the life-
sustaining even for the individual plant; if something
makes it better able to survive in conditions normal for
that species it is ipso facto good for it. We need go no
further, and could go no further, in explaining why a
certain environment or treatment is good for a plant
than to show how it helps this plant to survive.6
This connection between the life- sustaining and
the beneficial is reasonably unproblematic, and there
is nothing fanciful or zoomorphic in speaking of ben-
efiting or doing good to plants. A connection with its
survival can make something beneficial to a plant. But
this is not, of course, to say that we count life as a good
to a plant. We may save its life by giving it what is ben-
eficial; we do not benefit it by saving its life.
A more ramified concept of benefit is used in
speaking of animal life. New things can be said, such

CHAPTER 10: EUTHAnASIA And PHySICIAn- ASSISTEd SUICIdE Á 319
a good to one permanently in the latter state, and we
must return to this topic later on.
When are we to say that life is a good or a benefit to
a man? The dilemma that faces us is this. If we say that
life as such is a good we find ourselves refuted by the
examples given at the beginning of this discussion. We
therefore incline to think that it is as bringing good
things that life is a good, where it is a good. But if life is
a good only because it is the condition of good things
why is it not equally an evil when it brings bad things?
And how can it be a good even when it brings more
evil than good?
It should be noted that the problem has here been
formulated in terms of the balance of good and evil,
not that of happiness and unhappiness, and that it
is not to be solved by the denial (which may be rea-
sonable enough) that unhappiness is the only evil or
happiness the only good. In this paper no view has
been expressed about the nature of goods other than
life itself. The point is that on any view of the goods
and evils that life can contain, it seems that a life with
more evil than good could still itself be a good.
It may be useful to review the judgments with
which our theory must square. Do we think that life
can be a good to one who suffers a lot of pain? Clearly
we do. What about severely handicapped people; can
life be a good to them? Clearly it can be, for even if
someone is almost completely paralyzed, perhaps liv-
ing in an iron lung, perhaps able to move things only
by means of a tube held between his lips, we do not
rule him out of order if he says that some benefactor
saved his life. Nor is it different with mental handicap.
There are many fairly severely handicapped people—
such as those with [Down] Syndrome (Mongolism)—
for whom a simple affectionate life is possible. What
about senility? Does this break the normal connection
between life and good? Here we must surely distin-
guish between forms of senility. Some forms leave a life
which we count someone as better off having than not
having, so that a doctor who prolonged it would ben-
efit the person concerned. With some kinds of senility
this is however no longer true. There are some in geri-
atric wards who are barely conscious, though they can
move a little and swallow food put into their mouths.
To prolong such a state, whether in the old or in the
judgments possible, but rather to find the principle
of the ones we do make.
When we reach human life the problems seem
even more troublesome. For now we must take quite
new things into account, such as the subject’s own
view of his life. It is arguable that this places extra
constraints on the solution: might it not be counted
as a necessary condition of life’s being a good to a
man that he should see it as such? Is there not some
difficulty about the idea that a benefit might be done
to him by the saving or prolonging of his life even
though he himself wished for death? Of course he
might have a quite mistaken view of his own pros-
pects, but let us ignore this and think only of cases
where it is life as he knows it that is in question. Can
we think that the prolonging of his life would be a
benefit to him even though he would rather have it
end than continue? It seems that this cannot be ruled
out. That there is no simple incompatibility between
life as a good and the wish for death is shown by the
possibility that a man should wish himself dead, not
for his own sake, but for the sake of someone else.
And if we try to amend the thesis to say that life can-
not be a good to one who wishes for his own sake that
he should die, we find the crucial concept slipping
through our fingers. As Bishop Butler pointed out
long ago not all ends are either benevolent or self-
interested. Does a man wish for death for his own
sake in the relevant sense if, for instance, he wishes
to revenge himself on another by his death? Or what
if he is proud and refuses to stomach dependence or
incapacity even though there are many good things
left in life for him? The truth seems to be that the
wish for death is sometimes compatible with life’s
being a good and sometimes not, which is possible
because the description “wishing for death” is one
covering diverse states of mind from that of the
determined suicide, pathologically depressed, to that
of one who is surprised to find that the thought of a
fatal accident is viewed with relief. On the one hand,
a man may see his life as a burden but go about his
business in a more or less ordinary way; on the other
hand, the wish for death may take the form of a rejec-
tion of everything that is in life, as it does in severe
depression. It seems reasonable to say that life is not

320 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
goods are already absent for a different reason. So, for
instance, the connection between life and good may
be broken because consciousness has sunk to a very
low level, as in extreme senility or severe brain dam-
age. In itself this kind of life seems to be neither good
nor evil, but if suffering sets in one would hope for a
speedy end.
The idea we need seems to be that of life which is
ordinary human life in the following respect— that it
contains a minimum of basic human goods. What is
ordinary in human life— even in very hard lives— is
that a man is not driven to work far beyond his capac-
ity; that he has the support of a family or community;
that he can more or less satisfy his hunger; that he
has hopes for the future; that he can lie down to rest
at night. Such things were denied to the men in the
Vyatlag camps described by Panin; not even rest at
night was allowed them when they were tormented
by bed- bugs, by noise and stench, and by routines
such as body- searches and bath- parades— arranged
for the night time so that work norms would not be
reduced. Disease too can so take over a man’s life that
the normal human goods disappear. When a patient
is so overwhelmed by pain or nausea that he cannot
eat with pleasure, if he can eat at all, and is out of the
reach of even the most loving voice, he no longer has
ordinary human life in the sense in which the words
are used here. And we may now pick up a thread from
an earlier part of the discussion by remarking that
crippling depression can destroy the enjoyment of
ordinary goods as effectively as external circumstances
can remove them.
This, admittedly inadequate, discussion of the
sense in which life is normally a good, and of the
reasons why it may not be so in some particular case,
completes the account of what euthanasia is here
taken to be. An act of euthanasia, whether literally act
or rather omission, is attributed to an agent who opts
for the death of another because in his case life seems
to be an evil rather than a good. The question now to
be asked is whether acts of euthanasia are ever justi-
fiable. But there are two topics here rather than one.
For it is one thing to say that some acts of euthanasia
considered only in themselves and their results are
morally unobjectionable, and another to say that it
very severely mentally handicapped is not to do them
a service or confer a benefit. But of course it need not
be the reverse: only if there is suffering would one wish
for the sake of the patient that he should die.
It seems, therefore, that merely being alive even
without suffering is not a good, and that we must
make a distinction similar to that which we made
when animals were our topic. But how is the line to be
drawn in the case of men? What is to count as ordinary
human life in the relevant sense? If it were only the
very senile or very ill who were to be said not to have
this life it might seem right to describe it in terms of
operation. But it will be hard to find the sense in which
the men described by Panin were not operating, given
that they dragged themselves out to the forest to work.
What is it about the life that the prisoners were living
that makes us put it on the other side of the dividing
line from that of some severely ill or suffering patients,
and from most of the physically or mentally handi-
capped? It is not that they were in captivity, for life in
captivity can certainly be a good. Nor is it merely the
unusual nature of their life. In some ways the prison-
ers were living more as other men do than the patient
in an iron lung.
The suggested solution to the problem is, then,
that there is a certain conceptual connection between
life and good in the case of human beings as in that of
animals and even plants. Here, as there, however, it is
not the mere state of being alive that can determine,
or itself count as, a good, but rather life coming up to
some standard of normality. It was argued that it is as
part of ordinary life that the elements of good that a
man may have are relevant to the question of whether
saving his life counts as benefiting him. Ordinary
human lives, even very hard lives, contain a minimum
of basic goods, but when these are absent the idea of
life is no longer linked to that of good. And since it is
in this way that the elements of good contained in a
man’s life are relevant to the question of whether he is
benefited if his life is preserved, there is no reason why
it should be the balance of good and evil that counts.
It should be added that evils are relevant in one
way when, as in the examples discussed above, they
destroy the possibility of ordinary goods, but in a dif-
ferent way when they invade a life from which the

CHAPTER 10: EUTHAnASIA And PHySICIAn- ASSISTEd SUICIdE Á 321
of others. An act of charity is in question only where
something is not demanded by justice, but a lack
of charity and of justice can be shown where a man
is denied something which he both needs and has a
right to; both charity and justice demand that wid-
ows and orphans are not defrauded, and the man who
cheats them is neither charitable nor just.
It is easy to see that the two grounds of objec-
tion to inducing death are distinct. A murder is an
act of injustice. A culpable failure to come to the aid
of someone whose life is threatened is normally con-
trary, not to justice, but to charity. But where one
man is under contract, explicit or implicit, to come to
the aid of another injustice too will be shown. Thus
injustice may be involved either in an act or an omis-
sion, and the same is true of a lack of charity; charity
may demand that someone be aided, but also that an
unkind word not be spoken.
The distinction between charity and justice will
turn out to be of the first importance when voluntary
and nonvoluntary euthanasia are distinguished later
on. This is because of the connection between justice
and rights, and something should now be said about
this. I believe it is true to say that wherever a man acts
unjustly he has infringed a right, since justice has to
do with whatever a man is owed, and whatever he is
owed is his as a matter of right. Something should
therefore be said about the different kinds of rights.
The distinction commonly made is between having
a right in the sense of having a liberty, and having a
“ claim- right” or “right of recipience.” The best way to
understand such a distinction seems to be as follows.
To say that a man has a right in the sense of liberty is
to say that no one can demand that he do not do the
thing which he has a right to do. The fact that he has a
right to do it consists in the fact that a certain kind of
objection does not lie against his doing it. Thus a man
has a right in this sense to walk down a public street or
park his car in a public parking space. It does not fol-
low that no one else may prevent him from doing so.
If for some reason I want a certain man not to park in
a certain place I may lawfully park there myself or get
my friends to do so, thus preventing him from doing
what he has a right (in the sense of a liberty) to do. It is
different, however, with a claim- right. This is the kind
would be all right to legalize them. Perhaps the prac-
tice of euthanasia would allow too many abuses, and
perhaps there would be too many mistakes. Moreover
the practice might have very important and highly
undesirable side effects, because it is unlikely that we
could change our principles about the treatment of
the old and the ill without changing fundamental
emotional attitudes and social relations. The topics
must, therefore, be treated separately. In the next part
of the discussion, nothing will be said about the social
consequences and possible abuses of the practice of
euthanasia, but only about acts of euthanasia consid-
ered in themselves.
What we want to know is whether acts of eutha-
nasia, defined as we have defined them, are ever mor-
ally permissible. To be more accurate, we want to know
whether it is ever sufficient justification of the choice
of death for another that death can be counted a ben-
efit rather than harm, and that this is why the choice
is made.
It will be impossible to get a clear view of the area
to which this topic belongs without first marking the
distinct grounds on which objection may lie when
one man ops for the death of another. There are two
different virtues whose requirements are, in general,
contrary to such actions. An unjustified act of killing,
or allowing to die, is contrary to justice or to charity, or
to both virtues, and the moral failings are distinct. Jus-
tice has to do with what men owe each other in the way
of noninterference and positive service. When used in
this wide sense, which has its history in the doctrine of
the cardinal virtues, justice is not especially connected
with, for instance, law courts but with the whole area
of rights, and duties corresponding to rights. Thus
murder is one form of injustice, dishonesty another,
and wrongful failure to keep contracts a third; chi-
canery in a law court or defrauding someone of his
inheritance are simply other cases of injustice. Justice
as such is not directly linked to the good of another,
and may require that something be rendered to him
even where it will do him harm, as Hume pointed out
when he remarked that a debt must be paid even to a
profligate debauchee who “would rather receive harm
than benefit from large possessions.”7 Charity, on the
other hand, is the virtue which attaches us to the good

322 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
should be said to have “a claim,” distinguishing this
from a “valid claim,” which gives a claim- right.
The manifesto writers on the other side who seem to
identify needs, or at least basic needs, with what they
call “human rights,” are more properly described,
I think, as urging upon the world community the
moral principle that all basic human needs ought to
be recognized as claims (in the customary prima facie
sense) worthy of sympathy and serious consideration
right now, even though, in many cases, they cannot yet
plausibly be treated as valid claims, that is, as grounds
of any other people’s duties. This way of talking avoids
the anomaly of ascribing to all human beings now,
even those in pre- industrial societies, such “economic
and social rights” as “periodic holidays with pay.”8
This seems reasonable, though we notice that
there are some actual rights to service which are not
based on anything like a contract, as for instance the
right that children have to support from their parents
and parents to support from their children in old age,
though both sets of rights are to some extent depen-
dent on existing social arrangements.
Let us now ask how the right to life affects the
morality of acts of euthanasia. Are such acts some-
times or always ruled out by the right to life? This is
certainly a possibility; for although an act of euthana-
sia is, by our definition, a matter of opting for death for
the good of the one who is to die, there is, as we noted
earlier, no direct connection between that to which a
man has a right and that which is for his good. It is
true that men have the right only to the kind of thing
that is, in general, a good: we do not think that people
have the right to garbage or polluted air. Neverthe-
less, a man may have the right to something which
he himself would be better off without; where rights
exist it is a man’s will that counts not his or anyone
else’s estimate of benefit or harm. So the duties com-
plementary to the right to life— the general duty of
noninterference and the duty of service incurred by
certain persons— are not affected by the quality of
a man’s life or by his prospects. Even if it is true that
he would be, as we say, “better off dead,” so long as he
wants to live this does not justify us in killing him and
may not justify us in deliberately allowing him to die.
All of us have the duty of noninterference, and some
of right which I have in addition to a liberty when, for
example, I have a private parking space; now others
have duties in the way of noninterference, as in this
case, or of service, as in the case where my claim- right
is to goods or services promised to me. Sometimes one
of these rights gives other people the duty of securing
to me that to which I have a right, but at other times
their duty is merely to refrain from interference. If a
fall of snow blocks my private parking space there is
normally no obligation for anyone else to clear it away.
Claim- rights generate duties; sometimes these duties
are duties of noninterference; sometimes they are
duties of service. If your right gives me the duty not to
interfere with you I have “no right” to do it; similarly,
if your right gives me the duty to provide something
for you I have “no right” to refuse to do it. What I lack
is the right which is a liberty; I am not “at liberty” to
interfere with you or to refuse the service.
Where in this picture does the right to life belong?
No doubt people have the right to live in the sense of
a liberty, but what is important is the cluster of claim-
rights brought together under the title of the right to
life. The chief of these is, of course, the right to be free
from interferences that threaten life. If other people
aim their guns at us or try to pour poison into our
drink we can, to put it mildly, demand that they desist.
And then there are the services we can claim from doc-
tors, health officers, bodyguards, and firemen; the
rights that depend on contract or public arrangement.
Perhaps there is no particular point in saying that the
duties these people owe us belong to the right to life;
we might as well say that all the services owed to any-
one by tailors, dressmakers, and couturiers belong to a
right called the right to be elegant. But contracts such
as those understood in the patient- doctor relationship
come in an important way when we are discussing the
rights and wrongs of euthanasia, and are therefore
mentioned here.
Do people have the right to what they need in
order to survive, apart from the right conferred by spe-
cial contracts into which other people have entered for
the supplying of these necessities? Do people in the
underdeveloped countries in which starvation is rife
have the right to the food they so evidently lack? Joel
Feinberg, discussing this question, suggests that they

CHAPTER 10: EUTHAnASIA And PHySICIAn- ASSISTEd SUICIdE Á 323
speak of the disconnecting of the apparatus as killing
the man, or of the hospital as allowing him to die. By
and large, it is the act of killing that is ruled out under
the heading of noninterference, but not in every case.
Doctors commonly recognize this distinction,
and the grounds on which some philosophers have
denied it seem untenable. James Rachels, for instance,
believes that if the difference between active and pas-
sive is relevant anywhere, it should be relevant every-
where, and he has pointed to an example in which it
seems to make no difference which is done. If some-
one saw a child drowning in a bath it would seem just
as bad to let it drown as to push its head under water.
If “it makes no difference” means that one act would
be as iniquitous as the other this is true. It is not that
killing is worse than allowing to die, but that the two
are contrary to distinct virtues, which gives the pos-
sibility that in some circumstances one is impermis-
sible and the other permissible. In the circumstances
invented by Rachels, both are wicked: it is contrary
to justice to push the child’s head under the water—
something one has no right to do. To leave it to drown
is not contrary to justice, but it is a particularly glar-
ing example of lack of charity. Here it makes no prac-
tical difference because the requirements of justice
and charity coincide; but in the case of the retreating
army they did not: charity would have required that
the wounded soldier be killed had not justice required
that he be left alive.9 In such a case it makes all the dif-
ference whether a man opts for the death of another in
a positive action, or whether he allows him to die. An
analogy with the right to property will make the point
clear. If a man owns something he has the right to it
even when its possession does him harm, and we have
no right to take it from him. But if one day it should
blow away, maybe nothing requires us to get it back
for him; we could not deprive him of it, but we may
allow it to go. This is not to deny that it will often be an
unfriendly act or one based on an arrogant judgment
when we refuse to do what he wants. Nevertheless,
we would be within our rights, and it might be that
no moral objection of any kind would lie against our
refusal.
It is important to emphasize that a man’s rights
may stand between us and the action we would dearly
of us may have the duty to sustain his life. Suppose,
for example, that a retreating army has to leave behind
wounded or exhausted soldiers in the wastes of an arid
or snowbound land where the only prospect is death
by starvation or at the hands of an enemy notoriously
cruel. It has often been the practice to accord a mer-
ciful bullet to men in such desperate straits. But sup-
pose that one of them demands that he should be left
alive? It seems clear that his comrades have no right
to kill him, though it is a quite different question as to
whether they should give him a life- prolonging drug.
The right to life can sometimes give a duty of positive
service, but does not do so here. What it does give is
the right to be left alone.
Interestingly enough we have arrived by way of
a consideration of the right to life at the distinction
normally labeled “active” versus “passive” euthana-
sia, and often thought to be irrelevant to the moral
issue. Once it is seen that the right to life is a distinct
ground of objection to certain acts of euthanasia, and
that this right creates a duty of noninterference more
widespread than the duties of care there can be no
doubt about the relevance of the distinction between
passive and active euthanasia. Where everyone may
have the duty to leave someone alone, it may be that
no one has the duty to maintain his life, or that only
some people do.
Where then do the boundaries of the “active”
and “passive” lie? In some ways the words are
themselves misleading, because they suggest the dif-
ference between act and omission which is not quite
what we want. Certainly the act of shooting someone
is the kind of thing we were talking about under the
heading of “interference,” and omitting to give him a
drug a case of refusing care. But the act of turning off
a respirator should surely be thought of as no different
from the decision not to start it; if doctors had decided
that a patient should be allowed to die, either course
of action might follow, and both should be counted
as passive rather than active euthanasia if euthanasia
were in question. The point seems to be that interfer-
ence in a course of treatment is not the same as other
interference in a man’s life, and particularly if the
same body of people are responsible for the treatment
and for its discontinuance. In such a case we could

324 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
classes of persons such as bodyguards, firemen, or doc-
tors? Unlike the general public they are not within
their rights if they merely refrain from interfering and
do not try to sustain life. The subject’s claim- rights are
two- fold as far as they are concerned and passive as
well as active euthanasia may be ruled out here if it is
against his will. This is not to say that he has the right
to any and every service needed to save or prolong
his life; the rights of other people set limits to what
may be demanded, both because they have the right
not to be interfered with and because they may have
a competing right to services. Furthermore one must
enquire just what the contract or implicit agreement
amounts to in each case. Firemen and bodyguards
presumably have a duty which is simply to preserve
life, within the limits of justice to others and of rea-
sonableness to themselves. With doctors it may how-
ever be different, since their duty relates not only to
preserving life but also to the relief of suffering. It is
not clear what a doctor’s duties are to his patient if life
can be prolonged only at the cost of suffering or suffer-
ing relieved only by measures that shorten life. George
Fletcher has argued that what the doctor is under con-
tract to do depends on what is generally done, because
this is what a patient will reasonably expect.10 This
seems right. If procedures are part of normal medical
practice then it seems that the patient can demand
them however much it may be against his interest to
do so. Once again it is not a matter of what is “most
humane.”
That the patient’s right to life may set limits to
permissible acts of euthanasia seems undeniable. If he
does not want to die no one has the right to practice
active euthanasia on him, and passive euthanasia may
also be ruled out where he has a right to the services of
doctors or others.
Perhaps few will deny what has so far been said
about the impermissibility of acts of euthanasia sim-
ply because we have so far spoken about the case of
one who positively wants to live, and about his rights,
whereas those who advocate euthanasia are usually
thinking either about those who wish to die or about
those whose wishes cannot be ascertained either
because they cannot properly be said to have wishes
or because, for one reason or another, we are unable
like to take for his sake. They may, of course, also pre-
vent action which we would like to take for the sake
of others, as when it might be tempting to kill one
man to save several. But it is interesting that the lim-
its of allowable interference, however uncertain, seem
stricter in the first case than the second. Perhaps there
are no cases in which it would be all right to kill a
man against his will for his own sake unless they could
equally well be described as cases of allowing him to
die, as in the example of turning off the respirator.
However, there are circumstances, even if these are
very rare, in which one man’s life would justifiably be
sacrificed to save others, and “killing” would be the
only description of what was being done. For instance,
a vehicle which had gone out of control might be
steered from a path on which it would kill more than
one man to a path on which it would kill one. But it
would not be permissible to steer a vehicle towards
someone in order to kill him, against his will, for his
own good. An analogy with property rights illustrates
the point. One may not destroy a man’s property
against his will on the grounds that he would be bet-
ter off without it; there are however circumstances in
which it could be destroyed for the sake of others. If his
house is liable to fall and kill him that is his affair; it
might, however, without injustice be destroyed to stop
the spread of a fire.
We see then that the distinction between active
and passive, important as it is elsewhere, has a special
importance in the area of euthanasia. It should also
be clear why James Rachels’ other argument, that it
is often “more humane” to kill than to allow to die,
does not show that the distinction between active and
passive euthanasia is morally irrelevant. It might be
“more humane” in this sense to deprive a man of the
property that brings evils on him, or to refuse to pay
what is owed to Hume’s profligate debauchee; but if
we say this we must admit that an act which is “more
humane” than its alternative may be morally objec-
tionable because it infringes rights.
So far we have said very little about the right to
service as opposed to the right to noninterference,
though it was agreed that both might be brought
under the heading of “the right to life.” What about
the duty to preserve life that may belong to special

CHAPTER 10: EUTHAnASIA And PHySICIAn- ASSISTEd SUICIdE Á 325
In the last paragraph we have begun to broach the
topic of voluntary euthanasia, and this we must now
discuss. What is to be said about the case in which there
is no doubt about someone’s wish to die: either he has
told us beforehand that he would wish it in circum-
stances such as he is now in, and has shown no sign of
a change of mind, or else he tells us now, being in pos-
session of his faculties and of a steady mind. We should
surely say that the objections previously urged against
acts of euthanasia, which it must be remembered were
all on the ground of rights, had disappeared. It does
not seem that one would infringe someone’s right to
life in killing him with his permission and in fact at
his request. Why should someone not be able to waive
his right to life, or rather, as would be more likely to
happen, to cancel some of the duties of noninterfer-
ence that this right entails? (He is more likely to say
that he should be killed by this man at this time in
this manner, than to say that anyone may kill him
at any time and in any way.) Similarly someone may
give permission for the destruction of his property,
and request it. The important thing is that he gives a
critical permission, and it seems that this is enough to
cancel the duty normally associated with the right. If
someone gives you permission to destroy his property
it can no longer be said that you have no right to do
so, and I do not see why it should not be the case with
taking a man’s life. An objection might be made on the
ground that only God has the right to take life, but in
this paper religious as opposed to moral arguments are
being left aside. Religion apart, there seems to be no
case to be made out for an infringement of rights if a
man who wishes to die is allowed to die or even killed.
But of course it does not follow that there is no moral
objection to it. Even with property, which is after all a
relatively small matter, one might be wrong to destroy
what one had the right to destroy. For, apart from its
value to other people, it might be valuable to the man
who wanted it destroyed, and charity might require us
to hold our hand where justice did not.
Let us review the conclusion of this part of the
argument, which has been about euthanasia and the
right to life. It has been argued that from this side come
stringent restrictions on the acts of euthanasia that
could be morally permissible. Active nonvoluntary
to form a reliable estimate of what they are. The ques-
tion that must now be asked is whether the latter type
of case, where euthanasia though not involuntary
would again be nonvoluntary, is different from the
one discussed so far. Would we have the right to kill
someone for his own good so long as we had no idea
that he positively wished to live? And what about
the life- prolonging duties of doctors in the same cir-
cumstances? This is a very difficult problem. On the
one hand, it seems ridiculous to suppose that a man’s
right to life is something which generates duties only
where he has signaled that he wants to live; as a bor-
rower does indeed have a duty to return something
lent on indefinite loan only if the lender indicates
that he wants it back. On the other hand, it might be
argued that there is something illogical about the idea
that a right has been infringed if someone incapable
of saying whether he wants it or not is deprived of
something that is doing him harm rather than good.
Yet on the analogy of property we would say that a
right has been infringed. Only if someone had ear-
lier told us that in such circumstances he would not
want to keep the thing could we think that his right
had been waived. Perhaps if we could make confident
judgments about what anyone in such circumstances
would wish, or what he would have wished before-
hand had he considered the matter, we could agree
to consider the right to life as “dormant,” needing to
be asserted if the normal duties were to remain. But as
things are we cannot make any such assumption; we
simply do not know what most people would want, or
would have wanted, us to do unless they tell us. This is
certainly the case so far as active measures to end life
are concerned. Possibly it is different, or will become
different, in the matter of being kept alive, so general
is the feeling against using sophisticated procedures
on moribund patients, and so much is this dreaded
by people who are old or terminally ill. Once again
the distinction between active and passive euthana-
sia has come on the scene, but this time because most
people’s attitudes to the two are so different. It is just
possible that we might presume, in the absence of spe-
cific evidence, that someone would not wish, beyond
a certain point, to be kept alive; it is certainly not pos-
sible to assume that he would wish to be killed.

326 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
wounded soldier a drug that would keep him alive to
meet a terrible end. And it is even more obvious that
charity does not always dictate that life should be
prolonged where a man’s own wishes, hypothetical or
actual, are not known.
So much for the relation of charity to nonvolun-
tary passive euthanasia, which was not, like nonvol-
untary active euthanasia, ruled out by the right to life.
Let us now ask what charity has to say about voluntary
euthanasia both active and passive. It was suggested
in the discussion of justice that if of sound mind and
steady desire a man might give others the right to allow
him to die or even to kill him, where otherwise this
would be ruled out. But it was pointed out that this
would not settle the question of whether the act was
morally permissible, and it is this that we must now
consider. Could not charity speak against what justice
allowed? Indeed it might do so. For while the fact that
a man wants to die suggests that his life is wretched,
and while his rejection of life may itself tend to take
the good out of the things he might have enjoyed,
nevertheless his wish to die might here be opposed
for his own sake just as it might be if suicide were in
question. Perhaps there is hope that his mental condi-
tion will improve. Perhaps he is mistaken in thinking
his disease incurable. Perhaps he wants to die for the
sake of someone else on whom he feels he is a burden,
and we are not ready to accept this sacrifice whether
for ourselves or others. In such cases, and there will
surely be many of them, it could not be for his own
sake that we kill him or allow him to die, and there-
fore euthanasia as defined in this paper would not be
in question. But this is not to deny that there could be
acts of voluntary euthanasia both passive and active
against which neither justice nor charity would speak.
We have now considered the morality of euthana-
sia both voluntary and nonvoluntary, and active and
passive. The conclusion has been that nonvoluntary
active euthanasia (roughly, killing a man against his will
or without his consent) is never justified; that is to say,
that a man’s being killed for his own good never justifies
the act unless he himself has consented to it. A man’s
rights are infringed by such an action, and it is there-
fore contrary to justice. However, all the other combi-
nations, nonvoluntary passive euthanasia, voluntary
euthanasia is ruled out by that part of the right to life
which creates the duty of noninterference though
passive nonvoluntary euthanasia is not ruled out,
except where the right to life- preserving action has
been created by some special condition such as a
contract between a man and his doctor, and it is not
always certain just what such a contract involves. Vol-
untary euthanasia is another matter: as the preceding
paragraph suggested, no right is infringed if a man is
allowed to die or even killed at his own request.
Turning now to the other objection that nor-
mally holds against inducing the death of another,
that it is against charity, or benevolence, we must tell
a very different story. Charity is the virtue that gives
attachment to the good of others, and because life is
normally a good, charity normally demands that it
should be saved or prolonged. But as we so defined
an act of euthanasia that it seeks a man’s death for his
own sake— for his good— charity will normally speak
in favor of it. This is not, of course, to say that charity
can require an act of euthanasia which justice forbids,
but if an act of euthanasia is not contrary to justice—
that is, it does not infringe rights— charity will rather
be in its favor than against.
Once more the distinction between nonvoluntary
and voluntary euthanasia must be considered. Could
it ever be compatible with charity to seek a man’s
death although he wanted to live, or at least had not
let us know that he wanted to die? It has been argued
that in such circumstances active euthanasia would
infringe his right to life, but passive euthanasia would
not do so, unless he had some special right to life-
preserving service from the one who allowed him to
die. What would charity dictate? Obviously when a
man wants to live there is a presumption that he will
be benefited if his life is prolonged, and if it is so the
question of euthanasia does not arise. But it is, on
the other hand, possible that he wants to live where
it would be better for him to die: perhaps he does not
realize the desperate situation he is in, or perhaps he is
afraid of dying. So, in spite of a very proper resistance
to refusing to go along with a man’s own wishes in the
matter of life and death, someone might justifiably
refuse to prolong the life even of someone who asked
him to prolong it, as in the case of refusing to give the

CHAPTER 10: EUTHAnASIA And PHySICIAn- ASSISTEd SUICIdE Á 327
in our sense or only as the Nazis understood it is
another matter. We must ask the crucial question,
“Is it for the sake of the child himself that the doc-
tors and parents choose his death?” In some cases the
answer may really be yes, and what is more important
it may really be true that the kind of life which is a
good is not possible or likely for this child, and that
there is little but suffering and frustration in store
for him.12 But this must presuppose that the medi-
cal prognosis is wretchedly bad, as it maybe for some
spina bifida children. With children who are born
with [Down] Syndrome it is, however, quite different.
Most of these are able to live on for quite a time in
a reasonably contented way, remaining like children
all their lives but capable of affectionate relationships
and able to play games and perform simple tasks.
The fact is, of course, that the doctors who recom-
mend against life- saving procedures for handicapped
infants are usually thinking not of them but rather of
their parents and of other children in the family or of
the “burden on society” if the children survive. So it
is not for their sake but to avoid trouble to others that
they are allowed to die. When brought out into the
open this seems unacceptable: at least we do not eas-
ily accept the principle that adults who need special
care should be counted too burdensome to be kept
alive. It must in any case be insisted that if children
with [Down] Syndrome are deliberately allowed to
die this is not a matter of euthanasia except in Hitler’s
sense. And for our children, since we scruple to gas
them, not even the manner of their death is “quiet
and easy”; when not treated for an intestinal obstruc-
tion a baby simply starves to death. Perhaps some will
take this as an argument for allowing active eutha-
nasia, in which case they will be in the company of
an S.S. man stationed in the Warthgenau who sent
Eichmann a memorandum telling him that “Jews in
the coming winter could no longer be fed” and sub-
mitting for his consideration a proposal as to whether
“it would not be the most humane solution to kill
those Jews who were incapable of work through some
quicker means.”13 If we say we are unable to look after
children with handicaps we are no more telling the
truth than was the S.S. man who said that the Jews
could not be fed.
active euthanasia, and voluntary passive euthanasia
are sometimes compatible with both justice and char-
ity. But the strong condition carried in the definition of
euthanasia adopted in this paper must not be forgotten;
an act of euthanasia as here understood is one whose
purpose is to benefit the one who dies.
In the light of this discussion let us look at our
present practices. Are they good or are they bad? And
what changes might be made, thinking now not only
of the morality of particular acts of euthanasia but
also of the indirect effects of instituting different prac-
tices, of the abuses to which they might be subject and
of the changes that might come about if euthanasia
became a recognized part of the social scene.
The first thing to notice is that it is wrong to ask
whether we should introduce the practice of eutha-
nasia as if it were not something we already had. In
fact we do have it. For instance it is common, where
the medical prognosis is very bad, for doctors to rec-
ommend against measures to prolong life, and par-
ticularly where a process of degeneration producing
one medical emergency after another has already set
in. If these doctors are not certainly within their legal
rights this is something that is apt to come as a sur-
prise to them as to the general public. It is also obvious
that euthanasia is often practiced where old people
are concerned. If someone very old and soon to die
is attacked by a disease that makes his life wretched,
doctors do not always come in with life- prolonging
drugs. Perhaps poor patients are more fortunate in this
respect than rich patients, being more often left to die
in peace; but it is in any case a well recognized piece of
medical practice, which is a form of euthanasia.
No doubt the case of infants with mental or phys-
ical defects will be suggested as another example of
the practice of euthanasia as we already have it, since
such infants are sometimes deliberately allowed to
die. That they are deliberately allowed to die is cer-
tain; children with severe spina bifida malformations
are not always operated on even where it is thought
that without the operation they will die; and even in
the case of children with [Down] Syndrome who have
intestinal obstructions the relatively simple opera-
tion that would make it possible to feed them is some-
times not performed.11 Whether this is euthanasia

328 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
people want, and want very badly, to be rid of their
elderly relatives and even of their ailing husbands or
wives. Would any safeguards ever be able to stop them
describing as euthanasia what was really for their own
benefit? And would it be possible to prevent the occur-
rence of acts which were genuinely acts of euthana-
sia but morally impermissible because infringing the
rights of a patient who wished to live?
Perhaps the furthest we should go is to encourage
patients to make their own contracts with a doctor by
making it known whether they wish him to prolong
their life in case of painful terminal illness or of inca-
pacity. A document such as the Living Will seems emi-
nently sensible, and should surely be allowed to give
a doctor following the previously expressed wishes
of the patient immunity from legal proceedings by
relatives.14 Legalizing active euthanasia is, however,
another matter. Apart from the special repugnance
doctors feel towards the idea of a lethal injection, it
may be of the very greatest importance to keep a psy-
chological barrier up against killing. Moreover it is
active euthanasia which is the most liable to abuse.
Hitler would not have been able to kill 275,000 peo-
ple in his “euthanasia” program if he had had to wait
for them to need life- saving treatment. But there are
other objections to active euthanasia, even voluntary
active euthanasia. In the first place it would be hard
to devise procedures that would protect people from
being persuaded into giving their consent. And sec-
ondly the possibility of active voluntary euthanasia
might change the social scene in ways that would be
very bad. As things are, people do, by and large, expect
to be looked after if they are old or ill. This is one of
the good things that we have, but we might lose it,
and be much worse off without it. It might come to
be expected that someone likely to need a lot of look-
ing after should call for the doctor and demand his
own death. Something comparable could be good in
an extremely poverty- stricken community where the
children genuinely suffered from lack of food; but in
rich societies such as ours it would surely be a spiri-
tual disaster. Such possibilities should make us very
wary of supporting large measures of euthanasia, even
where moral principle applied to the individual act
does not rule it out.
Nevertheless if it is ever right to allow deformed
children to die because life will be a misery to them,
or not to take measures to prolong for a little the life
of a newborn baby whose life cannot extend beyond
a few months of intense medical intervention, there
is a genuine problem about active as opposed to pas-
sive euthanasia. There are well- known cases in which
the medical staff has looked on wretchedly while an
infant died slowly from starvation and dehydration
because they did not feel able to give a lethal injection.
According to the principles discussed in the earlier
part of this paper they would indeed have had no right
to give it, since an infant cannot ask that it should be
done. The only possible solution— supposing that vol-
untary active euthanasia were to be legalized— would
be to appoint guardians to act on the infant’s behalf.
In a different climate of opinion this might not be
dangerous, but at present, when people so readily
assume that the life of a handicapped baby is of no
value, one would be loath to support it.
Finally, on the subject of handicapped children,
another word should be said about those with severe
mental defects. For them too it might sometimes be
right to say that one would wish for death for their
sake. But not even severe mental handicap automati-
cally brings a child within the scope even of a possible
act of euthanasia. If the level of consciousness is low
enough it could not be said that life is a good to them,
any more than in the case of those suffering from
extreme senility. Nevertheless if they do not suffer it
will not be an act of euthanasia by which someone
opts for their death. Perhaps charity does not demand
that strenuous measures are taken to keep people in
this state alive, but euthanasia does not come into the
matter, any more than it does when someone is, like
Karen Ann Quinlan, in a state of permanent coma.
Much could be said about this last case. It might even
be suggested that in the case of unconsciousness this
“life” is not the life to which “the right to life” refers.
But that is not our topic here.
What we must consider, even if only briefly, is the
possibility that euthanasia, genuine euthanasia, and
not contrary to the requirements of justice or char-
ity, should be legalized over a wider area. Here we are
up against the really serious problem of abuse. Many

CHAPTER 10: EUTHAnASIA And PHySICIAn- ASSISTEd SUICIdE Á 329
act of injustice which would have been for someone’s
good.
10. George Fletcher, “Legal Aspects of the Decision not
to Prolong Life,” Journal of the American Medical
Association 203, no. 1 (1 Jan. 1968): 119–122. Reprinted in
Gorovitz.
11. I have been told this by a pediatrician in a well- known
medical center in the United States. It is confirmed
by Anthony M. Shaw and Iris A. Shaw, “Dilemma of
Informed Consent in Children,” The New England Journal of
Medicine 289, no. 17 (25 Oct. 1973): 885–890. Reprinted in
Gorovitz.
12. It must be remembered, however, that many of the
social miseries of spina bifida children could be avoided.
Professor R.B. Zachary is surely right to insist on this. See,
for example, “Ethical and Social Aspects of Spina Bifida,” The
Lancet, 3 Aug. 1968, pp. 274–276. Reprinted in Gorovitz.
13. Quoted by Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem (Lon-
don, 1963), p. 90.
14. Details of this document are to be found in J.A. Behnke
and Sissela Bok, eds., The Dilemmas of Euthanasia (New York,
1975), and in A.B. Downing, ed., Euthanasia and the Right to
Life: The Case for Voluntary Euthanasia (London, 1969).
NOTES
1. Leo Alexander, “Medical Science under Dictatorship,” New
England Journal of Medicine, 14 July 1949, p. 40.
2. For a discussion of culpable and nonculpable ignorance see
Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, First Part of the Second
Part, Question 6, article 8, and Question 19, articles 5 and 6.
3. Dmitri Panin, The Notebooks of Sologdin (London, 1976),
pp. 66–67.
4. Thomas Nagel, “Death,” in James Rachels, ed., Moral Prob-
lems (New York, 1971), p. 362.
5. Panin, Sologdin, p. 85.
6. Yet some detail needs to be filled in to explain why we
should not say that a scarecrow is beneficial to the plants it
protects. Perhaps what is beneficial must either be a feature
of the plant itself, such as protective prickles, or else must
work on the plant directly, such as a line of trees which give
it shade.
7. David Hume, Treatise, Book III, Part II, Section 1.
8. Feinberg, “Human Rights,” Moral Problems in Medicine,
p. 465.
9. It is not, however, that justice and charity conflict. A
man does not lack charity because he refrains from an
Killing and Allowing to Die
Daniel Callahan
rests on the commonplace observation that lives can
come to an end as the result of: (a) the direct action of
another who becomes the cause of death (as in shoot-
ing a person), and (b) the result of impersonal forces
where no human agent has acted (death by lightning,
or by disease). The purpose of the distinction has been
to separate those deaths caused by human action, and
those caused by nonhuman events. It is, as a distinc-
tion, meant to say something about human beings
and their relationship to the world. It is a way of
articulating the difference between those actions for
which human beings can be held rightly responsible,
or blamed, and those of which they are innocent. At
* * *
If a lessened worry about the consequences of legal
euthanasia has been gaining ground, there has been
an even more powerful threat to the traditional pro-
hibition against it. No valid distinction, many now
argue, can be made between killing and allowing
to die, or between an act of commission and one of
omission. The standard distinction being challenged
Daniel Callahan, “Can We Return Death to Disease?” from
Hastings Center Report 19(1): 4–6. Copyright © 1989 The Hastings
Center. Reproduced with permission of John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

330 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
Of course that is a fantasy. The fact that we can
intervene in nature, and cure or control many dis-
eases, does not erase the difference between the self
and the external world. It is as “out there” as ever,
even if more under our sway. That sway, however
great, is always limited. We can cure disease, but not
always the chronic illness that comes with the cure.
We can forestall death with modern medicine, but
death always wins in the long run because of the
innate limitations of the body, inherently and stub-
bornly beyond final human control. And we can dis-
tinguish between a diseased body and an aging body,
but in the end if we wait long enough they always
become one and the same body. To attempt to deny
the distinction between killing and allowing to die
is, then, mistakenly to impute more power to human
action than it actually has and to accept the conceit
that nature has now fallen wholly within the realm of
human control. Not so.
Moral. At the center of the distinction between
killing and allowing to die is the difference between
physical causality and moral culpability. To bring
the life of another to an end by an injection kills the
other directly; our action is the physical cause of the
death. To allow someone to die from a disease we
cannot cure (and that we did not cause) is to permit
the disease to act as the cause of death. The notion
of physical causality in both cases rests on the differ-
ence between human agency and the action of exter-
nal nature. The ambiguity arises precisely because
we can be morally culpable for killing someone (if
we have no moral right to do so, as we would in self-
defense) and no less culpable for allowing someone
to die (if we have both the possibility and the obli-
gation of keeping that person alive). Thus there are
cases where, morally speaking, it makes no difference
whether we killed or allowed to die; we are equally
responsible. In those instances, the lines of physical
causality and moral culpability happen to cross. Yet
the fact that they can cross in some cases in no way
shows that they are always, or even usually, one and
the same. We can normally find the difference in all
but the most obscure cases. We should not, then, use
the ambiguity of such cases to do away altogether
with the distinction between killing and allowing to
issue is the difference between physical causality, the
realm of impersonal events, and moral culpability, the
realm of human responsibility.
The challenges encompass two points. The first is
that people can become equally dead by our omissions
as well as our commissions. We can refrain from saving
them when it is possible to do so, and they will be just
as dead as if we shot them. It is our decision itself that
is the reason for their death, not necessarily how we
effectuate that decision. That fact establishes the basis
of the second point: if we intend their death, it can be
brought about as well by omitted acts as by those we
commit. The crucial moral point is not how they die,
but our intention about their death. We can, then, be
responsible for the death of another by intending that
they die and accomplish that end by standing aside
and allowing them to die.
Despite these criticisms— resting upon ambigui-
ties that can readily be acknowledged— the distinction
between killing and allowing to die remains, I con-
tend, perfectly valid. It not only has a logical validity
but, no less importantly, a social validity whose place
must be central in moral judgments. As a way of put-
ting the distinction into perspective, I want to suggest
that it is best understood as expressing three differ-
ent, though overlapping, perspectives on nature and
human action. I will call them the metaphysical, the
moral, and the medical perspectives.
Metaphysical. The first and most fundamental
premise of the distinction between killing and allow-
ing to die is that there is a sharp difference between
the self and the external world. Unlike the childish
fantasy that the world is nothing more than a projec-
tion of the self, or the neurotic person’s fear that he
or she is responsible for everything that goes wrong,
the distinction is meant to uphold a simple notion:
there is a world external to the self that has its own,
and independent, causal dynamism. The mistake
behind a conflation of killing and allowing to die is to
assume that the self has become master of everything
within and outside of the self. It is as if the conceit
that modern man might ultimately control nature
has been internalized: that, if the self might be able
to influence nature by its actions, then the self and
nature must be one.

CHAPTER 10: EUTHAnASIA And PHySICIAn- ASSISTEd SUICIdE Á 331
be, and be seen to be, a limited power. It may be used
only to cure or comfort, never to kill. They have not
been given, nor should they be given, the power to use
their knowledge and skills to bring life to an end. It
would open the way for powerful misuse and, no less
importantly, represent an intrinsic violation of what it
has meant to be a physician.
Yet if it is possible for physicians to misuse their
knowledge and power to kill people directly, are they
thereby required to use that same knowledge always
to keep people alive, always to resist a disease that
can itself kill the patient? The traditional answer has
been: not necessarily. For the physician’s ultimate
obligation is to the welfare of the patient, and exces-
sive treatment can be as detrimental to that welfare
as inadequate treatment. Put another way, the obliga-
tion to resist the lethal power of disease is limited—
it ceases when the patient is unwilling to have it
resisted, or where the resistance no longer serves the
patient’s welfare. Behind this moral premise is the
recognition that disease (of some kind) ultimately
triumphs and that death is both inevitable sooner or
later and not, in any case, always the greatest human
evil. To demand of the physician that he always strug-
gle against disease, as if it was in his power always to
conquer it, would be to fall into the same metaphysi-
cal trap mentioned above: that of assuming that no
distinction can be drawn between natural and human
agency.
A final word. I suggested earlier that the most
potent motive for active euthanasia and assisted sui-
cide stems from a dread of the power of medicine.
That power then seems to take on a drive of its own
regardless of the welfare or wishes of patients. No
one can easily say no— not physicians, not patients,
not families. My guess is that happens because too
many have already come to believe that it is their
choice, and their choice alone, which brings about
death; and they do not want to exercise that kind of
authority. The solution is not to erase the distinction
between killing and allowing to die, but to under-
score its validity and importance. We can bring
disease as a cause of death back into the care of the
dying.
die. The ambiguity may obscure, but does not erase,
the line between the two.
There is one group of ambiguous cases that is
especially troublesome. Even if we grant the ordi-
nary validity between killing and allowing to die,
what about those cases that combine (a) an illness
that renders a patient unable to carry out an ordi-
nary biological function (to breathe or eat on his
own, for example), and (b) our turning off a respi-
rator or removing an artificial feeding tube? On the
level of physical causality, have we killed the patient
or allowed him to die? In one sense, it is our action
that shortens his life, and yet in another sense his
underlying disease brings his life to an end. I believe
it reasonable to say that, since his life was being
sustained by artificial means (respirator or feeding
tube) made necessary because of the fact that he had
an incapacitating disease, his disease is the ultimate
reality behind his death. But for its reality, there
would be no need for artificial sustenance in the
first place and no moral issue at all. To lose sight of
the paramount reality of the disease is to lose sight
of the difference between our selves and the outer
world.
I quickly add, and underscore, a moral point: the
person who, without good moral reason, turns off a
respirator or pulls a feeding tube, can be morally cul-
pable; that the patient has been allowed to die of his
underlying condition does not morally excuse him.
The moral question is whether we are obliged to con-
tinue treating a life that is being artificially sustained.
To cease treatment may or may not be morally accept-
able; but it should be understood, in either case,
that the physical cause of death was the underlying
disease.
Medical. An important social purpose of the dis-
tinction between killing and allowing to die has been
that of protecting the historical role of the physician
as one who tries to cure or comfort patients rather
than to kill patients. Physicians have been given spe-
cial knowledge about the body, knowledge that can be
used to kill or to cure. They are also given great privi-
leges in making use of that knowledge. It is thus all the
more important that physicians’ social role and power

332 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
Euthanasia for Disabled People?
Liz Carr
Frustrated by the lack of opportunity to have the
voices of people like me— of disabled people— heard
on this issue, I have decided to combine my activism
with my career as a performer.
I’ve never seen a piece of art or theatre which
expresses opposition to legalising assisted suicide from
a disabled person’s perspective— so I decided to try to
rectify that. The result is Assisted Suicide: The Musical—
a show which premieres this weekend at the Royal Fes-
tival Hall, London, and marks the first anniversary of
the defeat of the assisted dying bill in parliament.
There were of course religious people there with
me and many others outside Westminster on Friday
11 September 2015. But MPs who glanced out the
window would have seen more Not Dead Yet (NDY) T-
shirts and banners than religious ones. NDY is made
up of disabled people opposed to a change in the law.
Every major disabled group in the UK, it should be
stressed, is opposed to this legislation.
Suicide is, of course, an individual choice. Dis-
abled people who are determined to take their lives
may even find it easier to do so than abled people,
given the often precarious nature of their existences.
But that does not mean that when a fellow human
being— disabled or abled— expresses the wish to die
because their life is shit, that we should agree with
them. The value of a life is not just in its physicality
but in our relationships with those around us.
The bill, had it passed, would have licensed doc-
tors to assist in the deaths of terminally ill people who
had less than six months to live, were mentally compe-
tent and requested such assistance. But the direction
legislation has taken in other countries shows that the
sympathy we disabled people evoke can be used to jus-
tify support for us to kill ourselves while non- disabled
people are told they have “everything to live for”. How
many times has someone come up to me and said how
much they admired me just for existing because they
could not, in my condition?
There is a fine line between those who are ter-
minally ill and those who are disabled in public
If I said I wanted to die, the press, celebrities and the
public would support my choice, seeing it as rational
and understandable. Hell, they would probably set up
a GoFundMe campaign to help me make it happen.
Yet when a healthy, non- disabled person wants
to kill themself it’s seen as a tragedy, and support and
prevention tools are provided. If nothing else convinces
me that to legalise assisted suicide is not a safe option
for many of us, then this does. Suicide is not seen as
socially desirable— so why is assisted suicide seen as
compassionate when it’s for ill or disabled people?
Marieke Vervoort, the 38- year- old Belgian Para-
lympian gold medallist, is only the most recent dis-
abled person to announce that she is considering
euthanasia, saying her “body is exhausted”. She is not
imminently dying. Yet no one seems to be trying to
persuade her that life is worthwhile. Would Usain Bolt
be met with the same reaction if he announced his
decision to end it all after his last Olympics?
Although proponents of assisted suicide legisla-
tion say it’s only for those with six months or less to
live, they propagandise with cases like that of Daniel
James, the 23- year- old man paralysed (but not dying)
following a rugby accident, who killed himself at the
Swiss clinic Dignitas after he said he did not want
to live a “ second- class” (that is, disabled) life. Jeffrey
Spector, a 54- year- old man also not imminently dying,
also killed himself at Dignitas.
The Netherlands, which legalised euthanasia to pro-
vide relief for the terminally ill, now regularly provides
euthanasia for disabled people who can demonstrate
“unbearable suffering”. Canada, the most recent nation
to legalise euthanasia and assisted suicide, allows it for
“serious and incurable illness, disease or disability”.
Usually, the two sides of the argument are char-
acterised as “religious” (opposed to legalisation) or
“secular” (in favour). But it’s not that simple.
Liz Carr, “Legalising Assisted Dying Is Dangerous for Disabled
People, Not Compassionate,” The Guardian, September 9, 2016.
Copyright © Guardian News & Media Ltd. 2018. Reprinted with
permission.

CHAPTER 10: EUTHAnASIA And PHySICIAn- ASSISTEd SUICIdE Á 333
also know from the US that some people have been
denied life- extending treatments because they are too
costly while the cheaper assisted suicide option has
been offered as an alternative. Think this won’t hap-
pen here? Medical rationing is the reality of our over-
stretched NHS.
No one wants us, those we love, or even those
we don’t to suffer and die in pain. But shouldn’t
we try to get end- of- life care right before we throw
physician- assisted killing into the mix? Currently
hospices and palliative care are only available to the
few, and hospices continue to rely on donations for
their survival.
Please, don’t wish death upon us because you feel
pity for our condition. It is demoralising when dis-
abled people like Vervoort express— understandably—
exhaustion with the everyday struggle of existence
and discouragement with life and are met with sad,
understanding nods. On Saturday, it is world suicide
prevention day. Can we be included in suicide preven-
tion efforts, too, please?
perception, and the emotional power behind the cam-
paign for assisted suicide is based on misplaced pity.
Rather than telling us we have everything to live for—
and we do— we are helped to the proverbial cliff edge
and offered a push.
People— disabled and not, with many years or
only a few months ahead of them— become suicidal
for many, many reasons. We know from surveys in
Oregon, one of just four states in the US where assisted
suicide is legal, that the reasons people choose this
option have little to do with pain, although this is
always the emphasis of supporters of assisted dying.
In fact, loss of dignity, loss of autonomy, loss
of ability to do daily activities, and fear of being a
burden— reasons which are essentially more about the
realities of living with a disability in our society— are
all more important than pain.
It is worth keeping in mind, too, that, in the con-
text of economic arguments about a health service
overly concerned with “waste” of resources, disabled
people may be seen as a drain, just like the elderly. We

C H A P T E R 1 1
‘’
Delivering Health Care
justice demands impartiality— that is, it requires
that equals be treated equally unless there is a mor-
ally relevant reason for treating them differently.
Based on this understanding of justice, many who
have thought carefully about the U.S. system of
distributing health care think it is unjust. This
judgment sits uneasily alongside an even more
common criticism: the system is ineffective and
unworkable.
ISSUE FILE: BACKGROUND
Health care is expensive, which is why so many
Americans do not have access to it: they cannot
afford it. Health insurance exists to help people
cover the expense of health care, but health insur-
ance itself is expensive, which is why millions
lack coverage. Here is a nonpartisan report on the
problem:
In the past, gaps in the public insurance system
and lack of access to affordable private coverage
left millions without health insurance, and the
number of uninsured Americans grew over time,
particularly during economic downturns. By 2013,
the year before the major coverage provisions of
the Affordable Care Act (ACA) [“Obamacare”] went
into effect, more than 44 million nonelderly indi-
viduals lacked coverage. . . .
Under the ACA, as of 2014, Medicaid coverage
has expanded to nearly all adults with incomes at or
below 138% of poverty in states that have adopted
the expansion, and tax credits are available for
people with incomes up to 400% of poverty who
purchase coverage through a health insurance mar-
ketplace. Millions of people have enrolled in these
new coverage options, and the uninsured rate has
At the burning center of debates about health care
in the United States— debates that rage in the U.S.
Congress, in the media, at kitchen tables, and in
medical and health organizations of all kinds—
are a few seemingly simple moral questions: Who
should get health care, who should supply it, and
who should pay for it? (Health care, in this context,
includes medical treatment, disease prevention,
emergency care, and public health measures.)
This debate is not about the morality of individual
actions and decisions; it’s about the morality of
the policies and programs of a society as a whole.
It arises from disturbing facts about the citizens of
such a prosperous nation: millions afflicted with
disease and disability have no access to health
care, and many suffer and die as a result. Reality
forces society to confront a host of related ques-
tions: What do we owe, if anything, to these mil-
lions? Are the more fortunate obligated to help
those in need? Are citizens entitled only to the
health care they can pay for out of their own pock-
ets? Or should everyone— rich and poor— have
access to health care? If they should, what level of
health care should they have— the best that medi-
cal science can offer, the same care that rich peo-
ple can buy, a bare minimum package of health
care? Does everyone have a right to health care—
such that a society’s failure to provide it would be
morally wrong?
The fundamental moral issue involved in the
health care debate is justice, which is about persons
getting what is fair or what is their due. With an eye
to justice, we condemn racial discrimination and
unequal punishments for the same crime because
334

CHAPTER 11: DElivERing HEAlTH CARE Á 335
dropped to a historic low. Coverage gains were par-
ticularly large among low- income people living in
states that expanded Medicaid.
Still, millions of people— 27.6 million non-
elderly individuals as of 2016—remain without
coverage. Those most at risk of being uninsured
include low- income individuals, adults, and people
of color. Cost continues to pose a major barrier
to coverage with nearly half (45%) of nonelderly
uninsured adults in 2016 saying that they remained
uninsured because the cost of coverage was too
high.1
Uninsured people pay a price for being without
health insurance. They often have to forgo or delay
treatment, skip medical tests that can detect dis-
ease early, go without prescription drugs, and pass
on life- saving surgery. They are forced to seek treat-
ment at hospital emergency departments and com-
munity clinics, but these options cannot entirely
make up for the more comprehensive health care
provided through adequate insurance coverage.
According to researchers, not having health insur-
ance can be deadly: each year a lack of coverage is
responsible for 45,000 deaths.2
In 1999, 67 percent of people under 65 (the
“nonelderly”) got their health coverage through
their employer. But in 2014, only 56 percent of
the nonelderly got their coverage this way.3 Fewer
employers provided health insurance as a benefit
to their employees, and many employees could not
afford it or were ineligible for it.
For some, Medicare is a source of basic cover-
age. It’s a federally funded insurance program that
covers people 65 and older, some adults under 65
with disabilities, and people with end- stage kidney
disease. The program is supported by payroll taxes
paid by workers during their years of employment.
It insures elderly people regardless of health or
income, covering hospital care, short- term nurs-
ing home services, physicians’ bills, outpatient
care, and prescription drugs. Medicaid is an insur-
ance program supported jointly by the federal
government and the states, with the former pro-
viding matching funds to the latter. It covers some
low- income families, pregnant women, families
and children, and people with disabilities. States
may cover additional groups, including individuals
receiving home- based care and children in foster
care. But because of certain eligibility rules, Medic-
aid does not cover many who are below the pov-
erty line.
In the U.S. health care system, a troubling con-
tradiction hides in plain sight: while the United
States spends an impressively large amount of
money on health care, the country earns shock-
ingly low scores on standard assessments of national
health. In 2016, the United States spent more on
health care than any other country in the world:
$9,892 per capita.4 Yet the United States scored
worse on fundamental measures of health than
most other developed countries. In 2015, the
average life expectancy in the United States was
78.8 years— below that in Australia, Germany,
the United Kingdom, Sweden, France, and Japan.
The infant mortality rate in the United States was
5.8 deaths per 1,000, which was higher than those
in most other developed countries— including
the United Kingdom, Japan, Korea, Switzerland,
Poland, and Estonia.5
The United States has a reputation for offering
“the best health care in the world,” and in some
ways, its care really is the best. The U.S. system
outperforms comparable countries in the devel-
opment and use of medical technologies, and it
has shorter wait times for specialist visits, lower
in- hospital mortality rates for heart attack and
ischemic stroke, and higher five- year survival rates
for some cancers. But at the same time, the United
States has the highest rate of deaths that could
have been prevented through better health care,
and it has more frequent hospital admissions for
preventable diseases, fewer physicians per capita,
higher rates of errors in care (medical, medication,
and laboratory errors), and longer wait times to
see a doctor.6
A 2014 study of the strengths and weaknesses
of advanced health care systems around the world

336 Á PART 4: ETHiCAl iSSUES
health insurance in which providers (doctors and
hospitals, for example) contract with a managed
care plan (an HMO, PPO, or POS) to offer health
care to a group of patients (members of the plan)
at discounted costs. The managed care plan agrees
to pay the providers a fixed fee; the providers agree
to reduce the price of their services in exchange for
the plan’s pool of patients; and, to keep costs down,
the patients may be restricted to certain medical
services and to only those providers that are part of
the plan (“in the network”).
Managed care plans get credit for trying to con-
tain costs and improve efficiency, but some critics
charge that the emphasis on these business values
could ultimately degrade the quality of care. They
say that physicians in these plans may spend less
time with patients, forgo necessary tests and treat-
ments, avoid treating serious health problems, and
engender distrust in patients. Physicians, for their
part, may worry that their managed care organi-
zation will expect them to practice a less compas-
sionate, less conscientious form of medicine. In
any case, physicians are expected to try to serve the
needs of patients while meeting the demands of a
cost- conscious business.
The Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”), enacted
in 2010, was an attempt by the administration of
President Barack Obama to solve two of the most
intractable problems of the U.S. health care sys-
tem: the lack of health insurance coverage among
millions of Americans and the seemingly unstop-
pable rise in health care costs. The administration
believed that the best way to achieve these ends
was to expand both private and public health
insurance. Here’s a brief summary of the ACA’s
major provisions:
• It required employers to cover their work-
ers or pay penalties, with exceptions for small
employers.
• It provided tax credits to certain small busi-
nesses that cover specified costs of health insur-
ance for their employees.
’
Country Health
care
spend-
ing
(per
capita)
Avg.
life
expec-
tancy
Infant
mor-
tality
(deaths
per
1,000)
% of
Pop.
cov-
ered by
insur-
ance
United States $9,892 78.8 5.8 90.9
Canada $4,753 79.6 4.8 100
United
Kingdom
$4,192 81.0 3.9 100
Germany $5,551 80.7 3.3 100
Switzerland $7,919 80.8 3.9 100
Australia $4,708 82.5 3.2 100
Sweden $5,488 82.3 2.5 100
France $4,600 82.4 3.7 99.9
Japan $4,519 83.9 2.1 100
Data from OECD, “Health at a Glance 2017: OECD
Indicators,” November 10, 2017; OECD.org, OECD
Data, “Health Spending,” 2016, https://data.oecd.org/
healthres/health-spending.htm; Melissa Etehad and Kyle
Kim, “The U.S. Spends More on Healthcare Than Any
Other Country— but Not with Better Health Outcomes,”
Los Angeles Times, July 18, 2017.
Health Care by Country
reinforced the idea that the U.S. system was in trou-
ble. The study findings were summarized like this:
Despite having the most expensive health care
system, the United States ranks last overall among
11 industrialized countries on measures of health
system quality, efficiency, access to care, equity,
and healthy lives, according to a new Common-
wealth Fund report. The other countries included
in the study were Australia, Canada, France, Ger-
many, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway,
Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom.
While there is room for improvement in every
country, the U.S. stands out for having the highest
costs and lowest performance. . . .7
Much of the health care in the United States
is delivered through managed care, a type of

https://data.oecd.org/healthres/health-spending.htm

http://www.OECD.org

CHAPTER 11: DElivERing HEAlTH CARE Á 337
• It required the creation of temporary high- risk
pools for those who cannot purchase health
insurance on the private market due to preex-
isting health conditions.
• It required health insurance plans to cover
young adults on their parents’ policies.
• It required health insurance plans to cover cer-
tain preventive care, such as immunizations,
preventive care for children, and specified health
screening tests for adults.8
The ACA has been controversial since its debut,
with political parties lining up for and against it,
supporters and detractors arguing over key com-
ponents, and repeated challenges to the law in fed-
eral courts. Supporters have embraced it because
it has increased access to health insurance, made
• It required individuals to have basic health
insurance, with some exceptions, such as for
financial hardship or religious belief (this pro-
vision is known as the individual mandate).
• It required the creation of state- based (or
multi- state) insurance exchanges to help indi-
viduals and small businesses purchase insur-
ance. Federal subsidies were established to
limit premium costs to between 2 percent of
income, for those with incomes at 133 percent
of the federal poverty level, and 9.5 percent of
income, for those who earn between 300 per-
cent and 400 percent of the federal poverty
level.
• It expanded Medicaid to cover people with
incomes below [138] percent of federal poverty
level.
’
Consider the features of these four health care
systems:
• Canada. A single- payer, universal system in
which the national government pays for health
care through taxes while the private sector
provides the care. Private health insurance is
available to cover people who choose not to
participate in the national plan.
• Germany. A universal health care system in which
the government pays for care with mandatory
contributions, based on income, from employers
and employees. The private sector delivers the
care. Most Germans obtain coverage through
the public system, but some can opt for private
health insurance.
• United Kingdom. A universal single- payer system
of socialized medicine. The government not only
pays for health care through taxes, but also deliv-
ers care through state- owned medical facilities.
Some private health insurance is also available.
• United States. A less- than- universal mixed sys-
tem of health care consisting of private health
insurance obtained through employers, pri-
vate health insurance acquired through ACA
exchanges, single- payer Medicare, and state-
financed and state- run Medicaid.
Based on the information above and in the rest of
this chapter, which health care system do you think
is best? Which system covers the most people, at
the lowest cost, with the best health outcomes?
Why? Consider the U.S. system. What are its advan-
tages and disadvantages? Would you like to see it
move closer to a system like the one in the United
Kingdom? Why or why not?
CRITICAL THOUGHT: Comparing Health Care Systems

338 Á PART 4: ETHiCAl iSSUES
in a free market. To compel someone to help
others— say, to tax a person to pay for someone
else’s health care— is a violation of personal lib-
erty. In other words, for the libertarian, there are
no positive rights— rights that obligate others to
help a person obtain something. There are only
negative rights— rights that obligate others not
to interfere with a person’s obtaining something.
The state should use coercion only to protect these
negative rights and to ensure that the economic
marketplace is free of fraud, theft, and contract
breaches.
Critics of the libertarian view of health care reject
the theory’s fundamental premise. For example:
The problem is, [the fundamental libertarian assump-
tion] leads directly to the conclusion that “if you
don’t have any money, you shouldn’t be entitled to
any medicine.” This is not a quibble. It’s a very basic
point about the trouble libertarians have with argu-
ments about fairness in health- care distribution.
Essentially, libertarians don’t believe in positive
rights. They believe that no matter how rich a soci-
ety may be, no member of that society has a right to
demand a minimal share of basic goods from that
society. People have the right not to be interfered
with, but they don’t have the right to actually get
anything. One can think of the position in terms of
a desert- island castaway analogy. Let’s say two cast-
aways wash up on a desert island, along with their
trunks. One is fantastically rich, and he has several
trunks full of tinned meat, a water filter, and so on.
The other guy just has a carry- on bag with a tooth-
brush. The question is: is the rich guy morally obliged
to share his water filter with the poor guy? Does the
poor guy have a right to potable water, given that the
filter makes adequate water available for everyone?
Or would it just be a nice thing, but not a rights- based
moral obligation, for the rich guy to share his water?
Libertarians believe the poor guy doesn’t have
a right to the water. Liberals believe he does. If
there’s enough water to ensure nobody goes thirsty,
then the poor guy has a fundamental right to get
a decent share. There may be arguments over how
large that decent share is, but fundamentally, peo-
ple have the right to adequate water in a society
where there’s enough water to go around.10
that insurance more affordable, addressed concerns
about fairness, and seems to fit well with the notion
of a right to health care. Critics complain about
increases in premiums and out- of- pocket costs,
object to the individual mandate, and insist that
providing health insurance is not a legitimate role
for the government. In late 2017, the U.S. Congress
eliminated the individual mandate; the loss of this
key provision of the ACA is likely to add millions of
people to the uninsured rolls.9
MORAL THEORIES
In Chapter 21 (Global Economic Justice), we dis-
cuss justice as it applies to nations and their obli-
gations to the impoverished people of the world.
Here we delve into theories of justice as they apply
to health care systems.
Broad questions about who should get health
care, who should provide it, and who should pay
for it are ultimately questions about justice— in
particular, about distributive justice. This kind of
justice concerns the fair distribution of a society’s
benefits and burdens, such as taxes, jobs, income,
government services, social obligations, property,
and rights. The idea of distributive justice is that in
any society, morality demands that people receive
what they are due, what is fair. Debates about the
distribution of health care are often, at their most
fundamental level, clashes between rival theo-
ries of distributive justice. If you ask people why
they think a particular allocation of health care
resources is good or right, they may give you a
variety of reasons— and these reasons can often
be traced back logically to a supporting theory of
justice. Two types of theories have been especially
prominent in moral arguments about health care:
libertarian and egalitarian theories.
Libertarian theories of justice say that the
advantages and disadvantages of society must be
allotted in a way that does not curtail personal
liberty. People are entitled only to what they can
freely acquire through their own legitimate efforts

CHAPTER 11: DElivERing HEAlTH CARE Á 339
theory of justice set forth by the philosopher John
Rawls. Rawls argues in his book A Theory of Justice
that people are entitled not to equal shares of the
basic goods of society, but to an equal chance to
acquire them. A society is just when it ensures
“fair equality of opportunity” to obtain available
benefits.12
Daniels contends that disease and disability
impair “normal species functioning” and that this
impairment limits people’s opportunities, under-
mining equality of opportunity. But, he says,
health care can equalize opportunities:
[H]ealth care in all its forms, whether public health or
medical, preventive or acute or chronic, aims to keep
people functioning as close to normally as possible. . . .
Health care thus preserves for us the range of oppor-
tunities we would have, were we not ill or disabled,
given our talents and skills.13
We can outline Daniels’s argument like this:
1. Everyone is entitled to (has a right to) an equal
opportunity to obtain the basic goods of society
(but not to an equal share of them).
2. To secure equal opportunity, a just society must
ensure the “normal species functioning” of its
citizens.
3. Disease and disability weaken people’s “normal
species functioning,” limiting the opportuni-
ties open to them.
4. Adequate health care can keep people function-
ing as close to normally as possible and thus
preserve their normal range of opportunities.
5. Therefore, people have a positive right to ade-
quate health care.
This is a valid argument, so someone attacking
it must focus on the truth of the premises. Prem-
ises 3 and 4 are empirical claims that are very likely
true. Premises 1 and 2 may be plausible moral prin-
ciples, but they would be disputed by libertarians
who reject the notion of positive rights and by
some utilitarians who reject rights that are weight-
ier than considerations of utility.
Egalitarian theories of justice maintain that
because every person is of equal value and is worthy
of equal moral consideration, the only just way to
distribute society’s benefits and burdens is equally.
People are entitled to equal portions, and no per-
son is “more equal” than others. In the case of
health care, some egalitarians contend that every-
one should get the same basic minimum allotment
of health care. Others assert that all health care
should be distributed equally, even if this means
taking resources away from the wealthy to give
to the less well- off. And some say that health care
should be divided equally among those most in
need. The libertarian, of course, rejects this argu-
ment, declaring that economic equality should
never take precedence over personal liberties. Lib-
erty trumps equality.
Probably the strongest egalitarian claim is that
people have a moral right to health care— a guaran-
teed positive right. As Norman Daniels, an influen-
tial advocate for this position, says,
[A] right to health care imposes an obligation
on others to assist the right- bearers in obtain-
ing needed and appropriate services. Specifically,
claiming a right to health care includes these other
claims: society has the duty to its members to
allocate an adequate share of its total resources to
health- related needs; society has the duty to pro-
vide a just allocation of different types of health
care services, taking into account the competing
claims of different types of health- care needs; each
person is entitled to a fair share of such services,
where a “fair share” includes an answer to the ques-
tion, who should pay for the services? Health- care
rights thus form a part of a broader family of posi-
tive “welfare” rights that includes rights to educa-
tion and to income support.11
MORAL ARGUMENTS
One of the more interesting arguments in health
care policy is the one Daniels uses to try to estab-
lish health care as a moral right. He thinks that
a right to health care can be derived from the

340 Á PART 4: ETHiCAl iSSUES
CHAPTER REVIEW
SUMMARY
Debates about health care in the United States are
mostly about who should get health care, who should
supply it, and who should pay for it. The fundamental
moral issue involved in these debates is justice. Many
who have thought carefully about the U.S. system of
distributing health care think it is unjust, and some
claim that it is ineffective and unworkable. Even after
the passage of the Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”),
millions of people have no access to health care, cannot
afford health insurance, and sometimes die as a result.
Medicare is a federally funded U.S. health insur-
ance program that covers people 65 and older, some
adults under 65 with disabilities, and people with
end- stage kidney disease. The program is supported
by payroll taxes paid by workers during their years of
’ QUICK REVIEW
Medicare— A federally funded U.S. health insur-
ance program that covers people 65 and older,
some adults under 65 with disabilities, and
people with end- stage kidney disease.
Medicaid— A health insurance program sup-
ported jointly by the U.S. federal government
and the states, with the former providing
matching funds to the latter. It covers some
low- income families, pregnant women, and
people with disabilities.
managed care— A type of health insurance in
which providers contract with a managed care
plan to offer health care to a particular group
of patients (members of the plan) at discounted
costs.
But how much health care does this right
include? The difficulty of answering this question
is a challenge to Daniels’s view, but he recognizes
the problem:
How equal must our rights to health care be? Specifi-
cally, must everyone receive exactly the same kinds
of health- care services and coverage, or is fairness
in health care compatible with a “tiered” system?
Around the world, even countries that offer univer-
sal health insurance differ in their answers to this
question. In Canada and Norway, for example, no
supplementary insurance is permitted. Everyone
is served solely by the national health- insurance
schemes; though people who seek additional ser-
vices or more rapid service may go elsewhere, as
some Canadians do by crossing the border. In Brit-
ain, supplementary private insurance allows about
10 percent of the population to gain quicker access
to services for which there is extensive queuing in
the public system. Basing a right to health care on an
obligation to protect equality of opportunity is com-
patible with the sort of tiering the British have, but it
does not require it, and it imposes some constraints
on the kind of tiering allowed.14
It seems implausible that an equal right to
health care includes universal equal access to all
available health care resources. Such a robust allo-
cation would not be economically possible. A bet-
ter idea, some argue, is a weaker right to a “decent
minimum” of health care. This proposal involves a
two- tier system: one tier would offer a universally
available guaranteed package of basic health care;
another tier would provide additional health care
options (such as elective services) to anyone who
could afford them.
Specifying what’s included in a decent mini-
mum is problematic. It might include basics such
as immunizations, physical exams, and recom-
mended screening tests. But should it also include
hospice care, organ transplants, cosmetic surgery,
care for special- needs children or institutional-
ized mentally impaired persons, and experimental
treatments?

CHAPTER 11: DElivERing HEAlTH CARE Á 341
EXERCISES
Review Questions
1. What is the main reason why so many people
in the United States lack access to health care?
(p. 334)
2. What is Medicare? What is Medicaid? (p. 335)
3. What is the troubling contradiction in the U.S.
health care system? (p. 335)
4. In 2016 which country spent more money
on health care per capita than any other?
(p. 335)
5. In 2015 which of these countries had the highest
average life expectancy: Canada, the United
Kingdom, Japan, or the United States? (p. 335)
6. What is managed care? (p. 336)
7. Name three of the Affordable Care Act’s major
provisions. (pp. 336–337)
8. What kind of health care system does the
United States have? What are its main features?
Is it a system of socialized medicine? How does
it differ from the health care system in the
United Kingdom? (p. 337)
9. What is distributive justice? (p. 338)
10. What are the chief characteristics of libertarian
theories of justice? Of egalitarian theories of
justice? (pp. 338–339)
Discussion Questions
1. Which theory of justice is more plausible—
libertarian or egalitarian? Why?
2. Does the United States offer the best care in the
world? Why or why not?
3. Do libertarian theories favor positive rights?
Why or why not?
4. Do people have a moral right to health care?
Explain.
5. What is Daniels’s argument for a moral right
to health care? Do you think it sound? Why or
why not?
6. Do you agree that everyone is entitled to an
equal opportunity to obtain the basic goods of
society? Explain.
employment. Medicaid is a health insurance program
supported jointly by the federal government and the
states that covers some low- income families, pregnant
women, and people with disabilities. But Medicaid
does not cover many who are below the poverty line.
The United States spends more money on health
care than any other developed country, yet it gets low
scores on standard assessments of national health.
The average life expectancy in the United States is
lower than that of other developed countries, and the
infant mortality rate is higher.
The United States has a less- than- universal mixed
system of health care consisting of private insur-
ance obtained through employers, private insurance
acquired through Affordable Care Act exchanges,
single- payer Medicare, and state- run Medicaid. In
contrast, Canada has a universal single- payer system
in which the government pays for health care and the
private sector provides the care.
Two types of justice theories— libertarian and
egalitarian— have been especially prominent in moral
arguments about health care. Libertarian theories of
justice say that the advantages and disadvantages of
society must be allotted in a way that does not cur-
tail personal liberty. People are entitled only to what
they can freely acquire through their own legitimate
efforts in a free market. For the libertarian, there are no
positive rights. Egalitarian theories of justice maintain
that because every person is of equal value and is wor-
thy of equal moral consideration, the only just way to
distribute society’s benefits and burdens is equally.
Norman Daniels believes that health care is a
moral right. He argues that a society is just when it
ensures “fair equality of opportunity,” and that dis-
ease and disability impair “normal species function-
ing,” undermining equality of opportunity. Because
health care can equalize opportunities, he argues, it is
a positive right.
KEY TERMS
Medicare (p. 335)
Medicaid (p. 335)
managed care (p. 336)

342 Á PART 4: ETHiCAl iSSUES
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/justice-health
careaccess/.
The Guardian, “How Does the US Healthcare System Com-
pare with Other Countries?” July 25, 2017, https://
www.theguardian.com/ us-news/ng-interactive/2017/
jul/25/us-healthcare system- vs- other- countries.
Donna K. Hammaker and Thomas M. Knadig, Health Care
Ethics and the Law (Burlington, MA: Jones & Bartlett,
2017).
Kaiser Family Foundation, “Understanding Health
Insu rance,” KFF.org, https://www.kff.org/understand ing-
health-insurance/ (December 24, 2017).
Medline Plus, U.S. National Library of Medicine, “Health
Insurance,” https://medlineplus.gov/healthinsurance
.html (December 24, 2017).
Rosamond Rhodes, Margaret P. Battin, and Anita Silvers,
eds., Medicine and Social Justice (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2002).
Elisabeth Rosenthal, An American Sickness (New York:
Penguin Press, 2017).
Leiyu Shi and Douglas A. Singh, Essentials of the U.S. Health
Care System (Burlington, MA: Jones & Bartlett, 2017).
Lewis Vaughn, Bioethics: Principles, Issues, and Cases
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2017).
7. Do you agree with the view that if you don’t
have any money, you shouldn’t be entitled to
any medicine?
8. Is everyone entitled to a “decent minimum” of
health care? Why or why not?
9. Are there any circumstances in which it
is reasonable to blame people for getting
sick and to therefore judge them to be
undeserving of health care financed by others?
Explain.
10. What should be done, if anything, for the
millions of Americans who lack health care
because they cannot afford it?
FURTHER READING
Aaron E. Carroll and Austin Frakt, “The Best Health Care
System in theWorld: Which One Would You Pick?”
New York Times, September 18, 2017, https://www
.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/09/18/upshot/best-
health-care-systemcountrybracket. html.
Norman Daniels, Just Health Care (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1985).
Norman Daniels, “Justice and Access to Health Care,” in
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, October 20, 2017,
E T H i C A l D i l E M M A S
1. Health Care for Undocumented Immigrants?
The U.S. Affordable Care Act makes no provisions for undocumented (unauthorized)
immigrants to that country. Consider the implications of this seldom-publicized aspect of
the (ACA):
[T]he ACA’s fundamental changes to the healthcare system exclude undocumented
immigrants entirely from any potential for improvement to their current situations,
and, arguably, will make their circumstances much worse. . . . The means and
the services on which they relied before the ACA— whether the volunteer work
of physicians, community health clinics, and/or emergency rooms— will likely
undergo policy changes that direct resources away from those without healthcare
coverage.*
*Ken Och, “The Affordable Care Act and Distributive Justice: Is It Ethical to Exclude Undocumented Immi-
grants?” Ethics and Society, February 25, 2014, https://ethicsandsociety.org/2014/02/25/the-affordable
-careact- and- distributive- justice- is- it- ethical- to- exclude- undocumented- immigrants/.

https://www.kff.org/understandinghealth-insurance/

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/09/18/upshot/best-health-care-systemcountrybracket.html

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2017/jul/25/us-healthcaresystem-vs-other-countries

https://www.kff.org/understandinghealth-insurance/

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/justice-healthcareaccess/

https://medlineplus.gov/healthinsurance.html

https://ethicsandsociety.org/2014/02/25/the-affordable-careact-and-distributive-justice-is-it-ethical-to-exclude-undocumented-immigrants/

http://www.KFF.org

CHAPTER 11: DElivERing HEAlTH CARE Á 343
Lack of health care is likely to worsen the situation of undocumented immigrants, who
may have escaped from horrendous economic and political conditions in their native
country. Is it then morally permissible to deny health care to them? In any case, they
have human rights. Do these rights require the United States to provide basic health care
to them? Why or why not?
2. No Health Coverage for the “Undeserving Sick”?
In debates about health coverage, some have argued that we should distinguish between
healthy people who have lived their lives the “right way” and unhealthy people who have
not taken proper care of themselves. People in the latter group are the “undeserving
sick,” and they don’t deserve health care. For example:
In a CNN interview, Representative Mo Brooks, an Alabama Republican, makes the
case for Trumpcare in much starker terms: It will free healthy people from having
to pay the cost of the sick. “It will allow insurance companies to require people
who have higher health care costs to contribute more to the insurance pool that
helps offset all these costs, thereby reducing the cost to those people who lead
good lives, they’re healthy, they’ve done the things to keep their bodies healthy,”
explained Brooks. “And right now, those are the people who have done things
the right way that are seeing their costs skyrocketing.”†
Is there a morally relevant difference between deserving and underserving sick
people? Is it reasonable to blame people for getting cancer, asthma, heart disease,
diabetes, and Parkinson’s disease? Many diseases arise because of bad genes— should
people be blamed for their genetic deficiencies? Should a smoker who gets cancer
be considered undeserving of affordable health care? Is a policy of denying health
coverage to people because they have not led the right kind of life morally defensible?
If so, how?
†Jonathan Chait, “Republican Blurts Out That Sick People Don’t Deserve Affordable Care” New York Maga-
zine, May 1, 2017, http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/05/ republican- sick-people-dont-deserve-
affordable-care.html/.
3. When People Can’t Afford Health Care
Study after study has shown that millions of Americans can afford neither health care nor
health insurance. Here’s another one:
In a new survey of 9,200 people across 15 states by my organization, the Texas
Medical Center Health Policy Institute, 49% of respondents said they must cut
other expenses to pay for health care. And they aren’t cutting back on frivolities

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/05/republican-sick-people-dont-deserve-affordable-care.html/

344 Á PART 4: ETHiCAl iSSUES
like expensive electronics. Most often, they said, they had to cut back on their
savings, as well as spending on food and clothing, to pay for health care.‡
In the American health care system, those who don’t have the money to pay for health
care— even people with serious illnesses or injuries— often simply get no medical care at
all. Is this a fair system? Should health care be available only to those who can pay for
it? Only to the well- off? Why or why not?
‡Arthur “Tim” Garson Jr., “Half of America Skimps to Pay for Health Care. The Only Fix Is to Cut Waste,” USA
Today, October 23, 2017, https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2017/10/23/ cut- health-costs-put-
doctors-onsalaries-arthur- tim- garson- jr- column/777179001/.
R E A D i n g S
Autonomy, Equality and a Just Health Care System
Kai Nielsen
I
Autonomy and equality are both fundamental values
in our firmament of values, and they are frequently
thought to be in conflict. Indeed the standard liberal
view is that we must make difficult and often morally
ambiguous trade- offs between them.1 I shall argue
that this common view is mistaken and that auton-
omy cannot be widespread or secure in a society which
is not egalitarian: where, that is, equality is not also a
very fundamental value which has an operative role
within the society.2 I shall further argue that, given
human needs and a commitment to an autonomy
respecting egalitarianism, a very different health care
system would come into being than that which exists
at present in the United States.
I shall first turn to a discussion of autonomy and
equality and then, in terms of those conceptions,
to a conception of justice. In modernizing societ-
ies of Western Europe, a perfectly just society will be
a society of equals and in such societies there will be
a belief held across the political spectrum in what
has been called moral equality. That is to say, when
viewed with the impartiality required by morality,
the life of everyone matters and matters equally.3
Individuals will, of course, and rightly so, have their
local attachments but they will acknowledge that jus-
tice requires that the social institutions of the society
should be such that they work on the premiss that the
life of everyone matters and matters equally. Some
privileged elite or other group cannot be given special
treatment simply because they are that group. More-
over, for there to be a society of equals there must be a
rough equality of condition in the society. Power must
be sufficiently equally shared for it to be securely the
case that no group or class or gender can dominate
others through the social structures either by means of
their frequently thoroughly unacknowledged latent
functions or more explicitly and manifestly by insti-
tutional arrangements sanctioned by law or custom.
Roughly equal material resources or power are not
things which are desirable in themselves, but they are
essential instrumentalities for the very possibility of
equal well- being and for as many people as possible
Kai Nielsen, “Autonomy, Equality and a Just Health Care System,”
International Journal of Applied Philosophy, vol. 4, no. 3 (Spring
1989). Reprinted by permission of Philosophy Documentation
Center.

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CHAPTER 11: DElivERing HEAlTH CARE Á 345
basic needs. Believers in equality want to see a world
in which everyone, as far as this is possible, have equal
whole life prospects. This requires an equal consider-
ation of their needs and interests and a refusal to just
override anyone’s interests: to just regard anyone’s
interests as something which comes to naught, which
can simply be set aside as expendable. Minimally, an
egalitarian must believe that taking the moral point of
view requires that each person’s good is afforded equal
consideration. Moreover, this is not just a bit of egali-
tarian ideology but is a deeply embedded considered
judgment in modern Western culture capable of being
put into wide reflective equilibrium.4
II
What is a need, how do we identify needs and what are
our really basic needs, needs that are presumptively
universal? Do these basic needs in most circumstances
at least trump our other needs and our reflective con-
sidered preferences?
Let us start this examination by asking if we can
come up with a list of universal needs correctly ascrib-
able to all human beings in all cultures. In doing
this we should, as David Braybrooke has, distinguish
adventitious and course- of- life needs.5 Moreover, it is
the latter that it is essential to focus on. Adventitious
needs, like the need for a really good fly rod or com-
puter, come and go with particular projects. Course- of-
life needs, such as the need for exercise, sleep or food,
are such that every human being may be expected to
have them all at least at some stage of life.
Still, we need to step back a bit and ask: how do we
determine what is a need, course- of- life need or oth-
erwise? We need a relational formula to spot needs.
We say, where we are speaking of needs, B needs x in
order to y, as in Janet needs milk or some other form
of calcium in order to protect her bone structure. With
course- of- life needs the relation comes out platitudi-
nously as in ‘People need food and water in order to
live’ or ‘People need exercise in order to function nor-
mally or well’. This, in the very identification of the
need, refers to human flourishing or to human well-
being, thereby giving to understand that they are basic
needs. Perhaps it is better to say instead that this is to
having as thorough and as complete a control over
their own lives as is compatible with this being true
for everyone alike. Liberty cannot flourish without
something approaching this equality of condition,
and people without autonomous lives will surely live
impoverished lives. These are mere commonplaces.
In fine, a commitment to achieving equality of condi-
tion, far from undermining liberty and autonomy, is
essential for their extensive flourishing.
If we genuinely believe in moral equality, we will
want to see come into existence a world in which all
people capable of self- direction have, and have as
nearly as is feasible equally, control over their own
lives and can, as far as the institutional arrangements
for it obtaining are concerned, all live flourishing lives
where their needs and desires as individuals are met as
fully as possible and as fully and extensively as is com-
patible with that possibility being open to everyone
alike. The thing is to provide institutional arrange-
ments that are conducive to that.
People, we need to remind ourselves, plainly have
different capacities and sensibilities. However, even
in the extreme case of people for whom little in the
way of human flourishing is possible, their needs and
desires, as far as possible, should still also be satisfied in
the way I have just described. Everyone in this respect
at least has equal moral standing. No preference or
pride of place should be given to those capable, in
varying degrees, of rational self- direction. The more
rational, or, for that matter, the more loveable, among
us should not be given preference. No one should. Our
needs should determine what is to be done.
People committed to achieving and sustaining a
society of equals will seek to bring into stable existence
conditions such that it would be possible for every-
one, if they were personally capable of it, to enjoy an
equally worthwhile and satisfying life or at least a life
in which, for all of them, their needs, starting with
and giving priority to their more urgent needs, were
met and met as equally and as fully as possible, even
where their needs are not entirely the same needs.
This, at least, is the heuristic, though we might, to gain
something more nearly feasible, have to scale down
talk of meeting needs to providing conditions propi-
tious for the equal satisfaction for everyone of their

346 Á PART 4: ETHiCAl iSSUES
are in fact necessary for us to live or to function well.
Now an autonomy respecting egalitarian society with
an interest in the well- being of its citizens— something
moral beings could hardly be without— would (trivi-
ally) be a society of equals, and as a society of equals
it would be committed to (a) moral equality and (b) an
equality of condition which would, under conditions
of moderate abundance, in turn expect the equality
of condition to be rough and to be principally under-
stood (cashed in) in terms of providing the condi-
tions (as far as that is possible) for meeting the needs
(including most centrally the basic needs) of everyone
and meeting them equally, as far as either of these
things is feasible.
III
What kind of health care system would such an
autonomy respecting egalitarian society have under
conditions of moderate abundance such as we find in
Canada and the United States?
The following are health care needs which are
a so basic needs: being healthy and having condi-
tions treated which impede one’s functioning well or
which adversely affect one’s well- being or cause suf-
fering. These are plainly things we need. Where soci-
eties have the economic and technical capacity to do
so, as these societies plainly do, without undermin-
ing other equally urgent or more urgent needs, these
health needs, as basic needs, must be met, and the
right to have such medical care is a right for everyone
in the society regardless of her capacity to pay. This
just follows from a commitment to moral equality and
to an equality of condition. Where we have the belief,
a belief which is very basic in non- fascistic modern-
izing societies, that each person’s good is to be given
equal consideration, it is hard not to go in that way,
given a plausible conception of needs and reasonable
list of needs based on that conception.8 If there is the
need for some particular regime of care and the society
has the resources to meet that need, without under-
mining structures protecting other at least equally
urgent needs, then, ceteris paribus, the society, if it is a
decent society, must do so. The commitment to more
equality— the commitment to the belief that the life
specify in part what it is for something to be a basic
need. Be that as it may, there are these basic needs we
must have to live well. If this is really so, then, where
they are things we as individuals can have without
jeopardy to others, no further question arises, or can
arise, about the desirability of satisfying them. They
are just things that in such circumstances ought to
be met in our lives if they can. The satisfying of such
needs is an unequivocally good thing. The questions
‘Does Janet need to live?’ and ‘Does Sven need to func-
tion well?’ are at best otiose.
In this context David Braybrooke has quite prop-
erly remarked that being “essential to living or to
functioning normally may be taken as a criterion for
being a basic need. Questions about whether needs
are genuine, or well- founded, come to an end of the
line when the needs have been connected with life
or health.”6 Certainly to flourish we must have these
things and in some instances they must be met at least
to a certain extent even to survive. This being so, we
can quite properly call them basic needs. Where these
needs do not clash or the satisfying them by one per-
son does not conflict with the satisfying of the equally
basic needs of another no question about justifying
the meeting of them arises.
By linking the identification of needs with what
we must have to function well and linking course- of-
life and basic needs with what all people, or at least
almost all people, must have to function well, a list of
basic needs can readily be set out. I shall give such a list,
though surely the list is in complete. However, what will
be added is the same sort of thing similarly identified.
First there are needs connected closely to our physical
functioning, namely the need for food and water, the
need for excretion, for exercise, for rest (including sleep),
for a life supporting relation to the environment, and
the need for whatever is indispensable to preserve the
body intact. Similarly there are basic needs connected
with our function as social beings. We have needs for
companionship, education, social acceptance and rec-
ognition, for sexual activity, freedom from harassment,
freedom from domination, for some meaningful work,
for recreation and relaxation and the like.7
The list, as I remarked initially, is surely incom-
plete. But it does catch many of the basic things which

CHAPTER 11: DElivERing HEAlTH CARE Á 347
where these circumstances obtain, priority should
be given to the greater need that can feasibly be met.
A moral system or a social policy, plainly, cannot be
reasonably asked to do the impossible. But my account
does not ask that.
To have such a health care system would, I think,
involve taking medicine out of the private sector
altogether including, of course, out of private entre-
preneurship where the governing rationale has to be
profit and where supply and demand rules the roost.
Instead there must be a health care system firmly in the
public sector (publicly owned and controlled) where
the rationale of the system is to meet as efficiently and
as fully as possible the health care needs of everyone in
the society in question. The health care system should
not be viewed as a business anymore than a university
should be viewed as a business— compare a university
and a large hospital— but as a set of institutions and
practices designed to meet urgent human needs.
I do not mean that we should ignore costs or effi-
ciency. The state- run railroad system in Switzerland,
to argue by analogy, is very efficient. The state can-
not, of course, ignore costs in running it. But the aim
is not to make a profit. The aim is to produce the most
rapid, safe, efficient and comfortable service meeting
travellers’s needs within the parameters of the overall
socio- economic priorities of the state and the society.
Moreover, since the state in question is a democracy, if
its citizens do not like the policies of the government
here (or elsewhere) they can replace it with a govern-
ment with different priorities and policies. Indeed the
option is there (probably never to be exercised) to shift
the railroad into the private sector.
Governments, understandably, worry with aging
populations about mounting health care costs. This is
slightly ludicrous in the United States, given its mili-
tary and space exploration budgets, but is also a reality
in Canada and even in Iceland where there is no mili-
tary or space budget at all. There should, of course, be
concern about containing health costs, but this can be
done effectively with a state- run system. Modern soci-
eties need systems of socialized medicine, something
that obtains in almost all civilized modernizing soci-
eties. The United States and South Africa are, I believe,
the only exceptions. But, as is evident from my own
of each person matters and matters equally— entails,
given a few plausible empirical premisses, that each per-
son’s health needs will be the object of an equal regard.
Each has an equal claim, prima facie, to have her needs
satisfied where this is possible. That does not, of course,
mean that people should all be treated alike in the sense
of their all getting the same thing. Not everyone needs
flu shots, braces, a dialysis machine, a psychiatrist, or
a triple bypass. What should be equal is that each per-
son’s health needs should be the object of equal societal
concern since each person’s good should be given equal
consideration.9 This does not mean that equal energy
should be directed to Hans’s rash as to Frank’s cancer.
Here one person’s need for a cure is much greater than
the other, and the greater need clearly takes prece-
dence. Both should be met where possible, but where
they both cannot then the greater need has pride of
place. But what should not count in the treatment of
Hans and Frank is that Hans is wealthy or prestigious or
creative and Frank is not. Everyone should have their
health needs met where possible. Moreover, where the
need is the same, they should have (where possible),
and where other at least equally urgent needs are not
thereby undermined, the same quality treatment. No
differentiation should be made between them on the
basis of their ability to pay or on the basis of their being
(one more so than the other) important people. There
should, in short, where this is possible, be open and free
medical treatment of the same quality and extent avail-
able to everyone in the society. And no two- or three-
tier system should be allowed to obtain, and treatment
should only vary (subject to the above qualification) on
the basis of variable needs and unavoidable differences
in different places in supply and personnel, e.g., differ-
ences between town and country. Furthermore, these
latter differences should be remedied where technically
and economically feasible. The underlying aim should
be to meet the health care needs of everyone and meet
them, in the sense explicated, equally: everybody’s
needs here should be met as fully as possible; different
treatment is only justified where the need is different or
where both needs cannot be met. Special treatment for
one person rather than another is only justified where,
as I remarked, both needs cannot be met or cannot as
adequately be met. Constrained by ought implies can;

348 Á PART 4: ETHiCAl iSSUES
this in a reasonable way would improve the team-
work in hospitals, make morale all around a lot better,
improve medical treatment and save a very consider-
able amount of money. (It is no secret that the relations
between doctors and nurses are not good.) Finally, a
far greater emphasis should be placed on preventative
medicine than is done now. This, if really extensively
done, utilizing the considerable educational and fis-
cal powers of the state, would result in very consider-
able health care savings and a very much healthier and
perhaps even happier population. (Whether with the
states we actually have we are likely to get anything like
that is— to understate it— questionable. I wouldn’t hold
my breath in the United States. Still, Finland and Swe-
den are very different places from the United States and
South Africa.)
IV
It is moves of this general sort that an egalitarian and
autonomy loving society under conditions of mod-
erate scarcity should implement. (I say ‘general sort’
for I am more likely to be wrong about some of the
specifics than about the general thrust of my argu-
ment.) It would, if in place, limit the freedom of some
people, including some doctors and some patients, to
do what they want to do. That is obvious enough. But
any society, any society at all, as long as it had norms
(legal and otherwise) will limit freedom in some
way.10 There is no living in society without some
limitation on the freedom to do some things. Indeed
a society without norms and thus without any limi-
tation on freedom is a contradiction in terms. Such a
mass of people wouldn’t be a society. They, without
norms, would just be a mass of people. (If these are
‘grammatical remarks,’ make the most of them.) In
our societies I am not free to go for a spin in your car
without your permission, to practice law or medicine
without a license, to marry your wife while she is still
your wife and the like. Many restrictions on our liber-
ties, because they are so common, so widely accepted
and thought by most of us to be so reasonable, hardly
seem like restrictions on our liberty. But they are all
the same. No doubt some members of the medical
profession would feel quite reined in if the measures
country (Canada), socialized health care systems often
need altering, and their costs need monitoring. As a
cost- cutting and as an efficiency measure that would at
the same time improve health care, doctors, like univer-
sity professors and government bureaucrats, should be
put on salaries and they should work in medical units.
They should, I hasten to add, have good salaries but
salaries all the same; the last vestiges of petty entrepre-
neurship should be taken from the medical profession.
This measure would save the state- run health care sys-
tem a considerable amount of money, would improve
the quality of medical care with greater cooperation
and consultation resulting from economies of scale and
a more extensive division of labor with larger and better
equipped medical units. (There would also be less dupli-
cation of equipment.) The overall quality of care would
also improve with a better balance between health care
in the country and in the large cities, with doctors being
systematically and rationally deployed throughout the
society. In such a system doctors, no more than univer-
sity professors or state bureaucrats, could not just set up
a practice anywhere. They would no more be free to do
this than university professors or state bureaucrats. In
the altered system there would be no cultural space for
it. Placing doctors on salary, though not at a piece work
rate, would also result in its being the case that the
financial need to see as many patients as possible
as quickly as possible would be removed. This would
plainly enhance the quality of medical care. It would
also be the case that a different sort of person would go
into the medical profession. People would go into it
more frequently because they were actually interested
in medicine and less frequently because this is a rather
good way (though hardly the best way) of building a
stock portfolio.
There should also be a rethinking of the respective
roles of nurses (in all their variety), paramedics and doc-
tors. Much more of the routine work done in medicine—
taking the trout fly out of my ear for example— can be
done by nurses or paramedics. Doctors, with their more
extensive training, could be freed up for other more
demanding tasks worthy of their expertise. This would
require somewhat different training for all of these
different medical personnel and a rethinking of the
authority structure in the health care system. But doing

CHAPTER 11: DElivERing HEAlTH CARE Á 349
resemblance to the one I have gestured at will be put in
place. It is a health care system befitting an autonomy
respecting democracy committed to the democratic
and egalitarian belief that the life of everyone matters
and matters equally.
NOTES
1. Isaiah Berlin, “On the Pursuit of the Ideal,” The New York Review
of Books XXXV (March 1987), pp. 11–18. See also his “Equality”
in his Concepts and Categories (Oxford, England: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 1980), pp. 81–102. I have criticized that latter paper
in my “Formulating Egalitarianism: Animadversions on Berlin,”
Philosophia 13:3–4 (October 1983), pp. 299–315.
2. For three defenses of such a view see Kai Nielsen, Equal-
ity and Liberty (Totowa, New Jersey: Rowman and Allanheld,
1985), Richard Norman, Free and Equal (Oxford, England:
Oxford University Press, 1987), and John Baker, Arguing for
Equality (London: Verso Press, 1987).
3. Will Kymlicka, “Rawls on Teleology and Deontology,”
Philosophy and Public Affairs 17:3 (Summer 1988), pp. 173–
190 and John Rawls, “The Priority of Right and Ideas of the
Good,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 17:4 (Fall 1988), pp.
251–276.
4. Kai Nielsen, “Searching for an Emancipatory Perspective:
Wide Reflective Equilibrium and the Hermeneutical Circle”
in Evan Simpson (ed.), Anti- Foundationalism and Practical Rea-
soning (Edmonton, Alberta: Academic Printing and Publish-
ing, 1987), pp. 143–164 and Kai Nielsen, “In Defense of Wide
Reflective Equilibrium” in Douglas Odegard (ed.) Ethics and
Justification (Edmonton, Alberta: Academic Printing and Pub-
lishing, 1988), pp. 19–37.
5. David Braybrooke, Meeting Needs (Princeton, New Jersey:
Princeton University Press, 1987), p. 29.
6. Ibid., p. 31.
7. Ibid., p. 37.
8. Will Kymlicka, op cit., p. 190.
9. Ibid.
10. Ralf Dahrendorf, Essays in the Theory of Society (Stanford,
California: Stanford University Press, 1968), pp. 151–78 and
G.A. Cohen, “The Structure of Proletarian Unfreedom,” Phi-
losophy and Public Affairs 12 (1983), pp. 2–33.
11. Will Kymlicka, op cit., p. 190.
I propose were adopted. (These measures are not part
of conventional wisdom.) But the restrictions on the
freedom of the medical profession and on patients
I am proposing would make for both a greater lib-
erty all around, everything considered, and, as well,
for greater wellbeing in the society. Sometimes we
have to restrict certain liberties in order to enhance
the overall system of liberty. Not speaking out of turn
in parliamentary debate is a familiar example. Many
people who now have a rather limited access to medi-
cal treatment would come to have it and have it in
a more adequate way with such a socialized system
in place. Often we have to choose between a greater
or lesser liberty in a society, and, at least under con-
ditions of abundance, the answer almost always
should be ‘Choose the greater liberty’. If we really
prize human autonomy, if, that is, we want a world
in which as many people as possible have as full as is
possible control over their own lives, then we will be
egalitarians. Our very egalitarianism will commit us
to something like the health care system I described,
but so will the realization that, without reasonable
health on the part of the population, autonomy can
hardly flourish or be very extensive. Without the
kind of equitability and increased coverage in health
care that goes with a properly administered social-
ized medicine, the number of healthy people will
be far less than could otherwise feasibly be the case.
With that being the case, autonomy and well- being
as well [will] be neither as extensive nor so thorough
as it could otherwise be. Autonomy, like everything
else, has its material conditions. And to will the end
is to will the necessary means to the end.
To take— to sum up— what since the Enlight-
enment has come to be seen as the moral point of
view, and to take morality seriously, is to take it as
axiomatic that each person’s good be given equal
consideration.11 I have argued that (a) where that is
accepted, and (b) where we are tolerably clear about
the facts (including facts about human needs), and
(c) where we live under conditions of moderate abun-
dance, a health care system bearing at least a family

350 Á PART 4: ETHiCAl iSSUES
The Right to a Decent Minimum of Health Care
Allen E. Buchanan
level, or welfare floor, of health. I shall not explore this
variant of the decent minimum idea because I think
its implausibility is obvious. The main difficulty is that
assuring any significant level of health for all is simply
not within the domain of social control. If the alleged
right is understood instead as the right to everything
which can be done to achieve some significant level of
health for all, then the claim that there is such a right
becomes implausible simply because it ignores the
fact that in circumstances of scarcity the total social
expenditure on health must be constrained by the
need to allocate resources for other goods.
Though the concept of a right is complex and
controversial, for our purpose a partial sketch will do.
To say that a person A has a right to something, X, is
first of all to say that A is entitled to X, that X is due to
him or her. This is not equivalent to saying that if A
were granted X it would be a good thing, even a mor-
ally good thing, or that X is desired by or desirable for
A. Second, it is usually held that valid right- claims, at
least in the case of basic rights, may be backed by sanc-
tions, including coercion if necessary (unless doing
so would produce extremely great disutility or grave
moral evil), and that (except in such highly excep-
tional circumstances) failure of an appropriate author-
ity to apply the needed sanctions is itself an injustice.
Recent rights- theorists have also emphasized a third
feature of rights, or at least of basic rights or rights in
the strict sense: valid right- claims ‘trump’ appeals to
what would maximize utility, whether it be the util-
ity of the right- holder, or social utility. In other words,
if A has a right to X, then the mere fact that infring-
ing A’s right would maximize overall utility or even
A’s utility is not itself a sufficient reason for infringing
it.1 Finally, a universal (or general) right is one which
applies to all persons, not just to certain individuals or
classes because of their involvement in special actions,
relationships, or agreements.
The second feature— enforceability— is of cru-
cial importance for those who assume or argue that
THE ASSUMPTION THAT THERE IS A RIGHT TO
A DECENT MINIMUM
A consensus that there is (at least) a right to a decent
minimum of health care pervades recent policy
debates and much of the philosophical literature on
health care. Disagreement centers on two issues. Is
there a more extensive right than the right to a decent
minimum of health care? What is included in the
decent minimum to which there is a right?
PRELIMINARY CLARIFICATION
OF THE CONCEPT
Different theories of distributive justice may yield dif-
ferent answers both to the question ‘Is there a right
to a decent minimum?’ and to the question ‘What
comprises the decent minimum?’ The justification a
particular theory provides for the claim that there is a
right to a decent minimum must at least cohere with
the justifications it provides for other right- claims.
Moreover, the character of this justification will deter-
mine, at least in part, the way in which the decent
minimum is specified, since it will include an account
of the nature and significance of health- care needs. To
the extent that the concept of a decent minimum is
theory- dependent, then, it would be native to assume
that a mere analysis of the concept of a decent mini-
mum would tell us whether there is such a right and
what its content is. Nonetheless, before we proceed
to an examination of various theoretical attempts to
ground and specify a right to a decent minimum, a
preliminary analysis will be helpful.
Sometimes the notion of a decent minimum
is applied not to health care but to health itself, the
claim being that everyone is entitled to some minimal
Allen C. Buchanan, “The Right to a Decent Minimum of Health
Care,” Philosophy and Public Affairs, (13)1, pp. 55–78. Copyright
© 1984 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Reproduced with permission of
Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

CHAPTER 11: DElivERing HEAlTH CARE Á 351
attempts to establish right- claims by the use of what
Rawls calls the method of reflective equilibrium.
According to this method, we are to appeal to our
particular considered moral judgments as provisional
data to be accounted for and organized by a smaller
set of more general moral principles. The difficulty
is that we may be much surer that someone ought
not to lack a certain form of health care than we are
about whether the ground of this judgment is a prin-
ciple that structures our sense of justice or our sense of
charity or beneficence or generosity. And even if we
can show what makes health care, or certain kinds of
health care, morally important, this in itself will not
show that there is a right to health care, unless the
appropriate connection with principles of justice can
be made.
THE ATTRACTIONS OF THE IDEA
OF A DECENT MINIMUM
There are at least three features widely associated
with the idea of a right to a decent minimum which,
together with the facile consensus that vagueness pro-
motes, help explain its popularity over competing con-
ceptions of the right to health care. First, it is usually,
and quite reasonably, assumed that the idea of a decent
minimum is to be understood in a society- relative
sense. Surely it is plausible to assume that, as with other
rights to goods or services, the content of the right must
depend upon the resources available in a given society
and perhaps also upon a certain consensus of expecta-
tions among its members. So the first advantage of the
idea of a decent minimum, as it is usually understood,
is that it allows us to adjust the level of services to be
provided as a matter of right to relevant social condi-
tions and also allows for the possibility that as a society
becomes more affluent the floor provided by the decent
minimum should be raised.
Second, the idea of a decent minimum avoids
the excesses of what has been called the strong equal
access principle, while still acknowledging a substan-
tive universal right. According to the strong equal
access principle, everyone has an equal right to the
best health- care services available. Aside from the
weakness of the justifications offered in support of it,
there is a universal right to a decent minimum of
health care. For, once it is granted that there is such
a right and that such a right may be enforced (absent
any extremely weighty reason against enforcement),
the claim that there is a universal right provides the
moral basis for using the coercive power of the state to
assure a decent minimum for all. Indeed, the surpris-
ing absence of attempts to justify a coercively backed
decent minimum policy by arguments that do not aim
at establishing a universal right suggests the following
hypothesis: advocates of a coercively backed decent
minimum have operated on the assumption that such
a policy must be based on a universal right to a decent
minimum. The chief aim of this article is to show that
this assumption is false.
I think it is fair to say that many who confi-
dently assume there is a (universal) right to a decent
minimum of health care have failed to appreciate
the significance of the first feature of our sketch of
the concept of a right. It is crucial to observe that the
claim that there is a right to a decent minimum is
much stronger than the claim that everyone ought to
have access to such a minimum, or that if they did it
would be a good thing, or that any society which is
capable, without great sacrifice, of providing a decent
minimum but fails to do so is deeply morally defec-
tive. None of the latter assertions implies the existence
of a right, if this is understood as a moral entitle-
ment which ought to be established by the coercive
power of the state if necessary. This simple point finds
expression in traditional ethical theories and in our
ordinary moral discourse, for a distinction is made
between both ‘ought’-judgments that express claims
of right and those that express imperatives founded
on moral virtues other than justice. In particular, a
distinction is drawn between imperatives of justice
and imperatives of charity or beneficence or generos-
ity, the assumption usually being that only the former
may be enforced.
Further, the difference between ‘we ought to pro-
vide X to A’ and ‘A has a right to X’ is not a difference
between different degrees of strength or constancy in
our moral convictions. To the morally virtuous person
the imperatives of charity may be as urgent as those
of justice. This point has troubling implications for

352 Á PART 4: ETHiCAl iSSUES
THE NEED FOR A SUPPORTING THEORY
In spite of these attractions, the concept of a right to a
decent minimum of health care is inadequate as a moral
basis for a coercively backed decent minimum policy
in the absence of a coherent and defensible theory of
justice. Indeed, when taken together they do not even
imply that there is a right to a decent minimum. Rather,
they only support the weaker conditional claim that if
there is a right to health care, then it is one that is more
limited than a right of strong equal access, and is one
whose content depends upon available resources and
some scheme of priorities which shows certain health
services to be more basic than others. It appears, then,
that a theoretical grounding for the right to a decent
minimum of health care is indispensable.
ARGUMENTS FOR A UNIVERSAL RIGHT
TO A DECENT MINIMUM
Elsewhere I have explored what I believe to be the main
approaches to justifying and specifying a (universal)
right to a decent minimum of health care: utilitar-
ian arguments (for a derivative right), Rawlsian ideal
contract arguments, and an argument from equality
of opportunity developed by Norman Daniels.3 Here
I can only briefly summarize my reasons for conclud-
ing that none of these approaches is adequate.
Utilitarian Arguments
The chief difficulty with utilitarian arguments is that
they are not capable of providing a secure foundation
for a right to a decent minimum for everyone. Consider,
for example, the class of [Down] syndrome newborns.
These retarded individuals, who often suffer from vari-
ous physical defects as well, require a large expendi-
ture of social resources over a lifetime. And relative to
these costs the contribution these individuals make to
social utility is not large, at least as far as we must work
with a conception of contribution that is in some way
quantifiable. If this is so, then Utilitarianism will jus-
tify excluding these infants from even the most mini-
mal health care provided to others as a matter of right.
It is important to see that individuals in this
class are capable of various enjoyments and would
the most implausible feature of the strong equal access
principle is that it forces us to choose between two
unpalatable alternatives. We can either set the pub-
licly guaranteed level of health care lower than the
level that is technically possible or we can set it as high
as is technically possible. In the former case, we shall
be committed to the uncomfortable conclusion that
no matter how many resources have been expended
to guarantee equal access to that level, individuals
are forbidden to spend any of their resources for ser-
vices not available to all. Granted that individuals are
allowed to spend their after- tax incomes on more friv-
olous items, why shouldn’t they be allowed to spend
it on health? If the answer is that they should be so
allowed, as long as this does not interfere with the pro-
vision of an adequate package of health- care services
for everyone, then we have retreated from the strong
equal access principle to something very like the prin-
ciple of a decent minimum. If, on the other hand, we
set the level of services guaranteed for all so high as to
eliminate the problem of persons seeking extra care
beyond this level, this would produce a huge drain on
total resources, foreclosing opportunities for produc-
ing important goods other than health care.
So both the recognition that health care must com-
pete with other goods and the conviction that beyond
some less than maximal level of publicly guaranteed
services individuals should be free to purchase addi-
tional services point toward a more limited right than
the strong access principle asserts. Thus, the endorse-
ment of a right to a decent minimum may be more of a
recognition of the implausibility of the stronger right
to equal access than a sign of any definite position on
the content of the right to health care.2
A third attraction of the idea of a decent minimum
is that since the right to health care must be limited
in scope (to avoid the consequences of a strong equal
access right), it should be limited to the ‘most basic’
services, those normally ‘adequate’ for health, or
for a ‘decent’ or ‘tolerable’ life. However, although
this aspect of the idea of a decent minimum is useful
because it calls attention to the fact that health- care
needs are heterogeneous and must be assigned some
order of priority, it does not itself provide any basis for
determining which are most important.

CHAPTER 11: DElivERing HEAlTH CARE Á 353
and revise our conceptions of the good. Nonethe-
less, Rawls does not explicitly list health care among
the social primary goods included under the three
principles.
Let us suppose that health care is either itself a pri-
mary good covered by the difference principle or that
health care may be purchased with income or some
other form of wealth which is included under the dif-
ference principle. In the former case, depending upon
various empirical conditions, it might turn out that the
best way to satisfy the difference principle is to estab-
lish a state- enforced right to health care. But whether
maximizing the prospects of the worst off will require
such a right and what the content of the right will be
depends upon what weight is to be assigned to health
care relative to other primary goods included under
the difference principle. Similarly, a weighting must
also be assigned if we are to determine whether the
share of wealth one receives under the difference prin-
ciple would be sufficient both for health- care needs
and for other ends. Until we have some solution to
the weighting problem, Rawls’s theory can shed only
limited light upon the question of priority- relations
between health care and other goods and among vari-
ous forms of health care.
It is important to see that the informational con-
straints imposed by Rawls’s “veil of ignorance” pre-
clude a solution to the problem of weighting health
care against other primary goods because the answer
will depend upon facts about the particular condi-
tions of the society in which the notions in question
are to be applied. At best Rawls’s hypothetical contrac-
tors would choose a kind of placeholder for a principle
establishing a right to a decent minimum of health
care, on the assumption that the content of the right
can only be filled out at later stages of agreement in
the light of specific information about their particular
society.
However, nothing in Rawls’s conception of ratio-
nal decision suggests that once the relevant, concrete
information is available, rational persons will agree on
a single assignment of weights to the primary goods. It
follows that Rawls’s theory does not itself supply con-
tent for the notion of a right to a decent minimum of
health care: instead, at best, it lays down a very abstract
greatly benefit from the services from which they are
excluded. Thus Utilitarianism may require that, even
for the most basic services, what is guaranteed for
one individual may not be available to another, even
though their needs are equal and both would benefit
greatly from the service.
My purpose in developing this example is not to
show conclusively that there are no circumstances or
no likely circumstances in which Utilitarianism would
support a (derivative) universal right to a decent mini-
mum of health care. Instead I have only shown that,
granted certain plausible factual assumptions which
may in fact be satisfied in our society at this time, there
is good reason to doubt that Utilitarianism provides a
secure foundation for such a right.
Rawls’s Ideal Contract Theory
There are well- known objections to Rawls’s ideal con-
tract view as a general theory of rights. It has often
been noted that the parties’ choice of the difference
principle depends upon the implausible assumption
that they are extremely, indeed infinitely, averse to
risk. Further, Nozick and others have challenged
the intuitions about fairness on the basis of which
Rawls constructs the original position and have also
offered examples to show that the difference princi-
ple requires redistributions that are intuitively unfair
to the better off. Instead of rehearsing these familiar
issues, I will concentrate on a different question: Even
if these general objections can be met, does Rawls’s
theory provide the basis for a substantive right to a
decent minimum of health care? If Rawls’s theory sup-
ports a right to health care, it must be derivative upon
the basic rights laid down by the principle of greatest
equal liberty, the principle of equality of fair oppor-
tunity, or the difference principle. And if there is to
be such a derivative right to health care, then health
care must either be among the primary goods covered
by the three principles or it must be importantly con-
nected with some of those goods. Now at least some
forms of health care (such as broad services for pre-
vention and health maintenance, including mental
health) seem to bear the earmarks of Rawlsian primary
goods: they facilitate the effective pursuit of ends in
general and may also enhance our ability to criticize

354 Á PART 4: ETHiCAl iSSUES
to be understood as whatever promotes, restores, or
replaces normal species functioning achieves two
important goals of a theory of health care: it gives us a
way of ranking various health- care services as to their
relative importance for normal species functioning
and provides a principled way of defining the class of
health- care needs which does not limit them to medi-
cal needs as defined by the current health- care delivery
system.
A natural objection to Daniels’s view is that even
if one reason why health care is important is that it
contributes significantly to attainment of the normal
opportunity range, this is surely not the only reason, or
in many cases not the most basic one. After all, health
care often relieves suffering, prevents unwanted
death, or enhances one’s capacity for enjoying what
everyone is able to do, even when it does not extend
one’s range of opportunities. Though I think this criti-
cism has considerable force, I believe there are other,
more telling objections.
The first difficulty is the definition of “normal
opportunity range.” The phrase “the array of life- plans
reasonable to pursue” is ambiguous. For whom must a
life- plan be reasonable to pursue if it is to be included
in the normal opportunity range? If to be included a
plan must be reasonable for everyone to pursue, regard-
less of his or her physical abilities, skills, and talents,
then the list will be so modest that it is doubtful that
it could provide content for a substantive universal
right to health care of the sort Daniels wants. If, on the
other hand, inclusion in the normal opportunity range
requires only that the plan be such that it is reasonable
for someone or other to pursue it, then D becomes
astonishingly strong, since it will include life- plans
requiring exceptional talents and rare characteristics.
On this strong interpretation, Daniels’s principle
of equality of opportunity is vulnerable to the same
objection that leads to the rejection of the strong
equal access principle. Granted the gap between most
individuals’ actual opportunity ranges and the array
of plans it is reasonable for some individuals to pursue,
and granted the almost limitless possibility for tech-
nology and other services which can help narrow the
gap, a conscientious commitment to D would create
an enormous drain on resources. To say that everyone
structure within which this content will be worked
out through the democratic political processes speci-
fied by the list of equal basic liberties. Given this, Raw-
ls’s theory advances us very little beyond the broad
intuitive consensus that there is a universal right to a
decent minimum of health care.
Daniels’s Argument from Equality
of Opportunity
Partly in response to some of the difficulties noted
in the previous section, Norman Daniels has devel-
oped an alternative Rawlsian approach to the right to
health care. Instead of basing the right to health care
on an intuitive but ill- defined notion of a decent mini-
mum, Daniels founds a universal right to health care
on a stronger, more inclusive version of Rawls’s prin-
ciple of fair equality of opportunity.
Daniels approaches the right to health care by uti-
lizing the idea of “the normal opportunity range” for
a given society. This is “the array of life plans reason-
able to pursue within given conditions obtaining in a
society. Daniels suggests that we can best understand
the distinctive nature and importance of health care
if we see that it promotes, restores, or provides surro-
gates for “normal species functioning,” and that nor-
mal species functioning is an important contributor
to an individual’s attainment of the normal opportu-
nity range for his society.4 The principle from which
health- care rights are derived according to Daniels
may be stated as follows:
D. Social resources are to be allocated so as to insure
that everyone can attain the normal opportunity range
for his or her society.
The success of Daniels’s approach depends both
upon the plausibility of the overarching principle
of equality of opportunity (D) and on the plausibil-
ity of the implications of this principle for health-
care entitlements. Though he has not yet committed
himself unequivocally on this issue, Daniels seems to
believe that principle D implies that there is a right to
health care that exceeds what is usually thought of
as a right to a decent minimum. Daniels emphasizes
that the connection between normal species function-
ing and opportunity and the idea that health care is

CHAPTER 11: DElivERing HEAlTH CARE Á 355
normal opportunity range. Consequently, a principle
which requires only that resources be allocated so as
to assure that everyone attains the normal opportu-
nity range would be inadequate in situations in which
the normal opportunity range was unacceptably nar-
row due to a failure to allocate sufficient resources
for health care. This suggests that Daniels’s principle
requiring equal opportunity must be supplemented
with a principle requiring equal opportunity must be
supplemented with a principle requiring maximization
of the opportunity range, or at least that the opportu-
nity range is to be maximized up to some limit. After
all, the importance of health care on Daniels’s account
is that it facilitates opportunity, and anyone who is
concerned with opportunity rather than with equal-
ity for its own sake will desire arrangements which
require more than mere equality of opportunity if
opportunities are few but can be expanded.
Now a principle requiring equality of opportunity
relative to a given opportunity range and a principle
requiring maximization of the opportunity range (or
maximization up to some limit) may conflict with one
another. But if this is so, then some way of balancing
the demands of these two principles must be found. In
a society in which there were no legal barriers to oppor-
tunity and none based on racial or sexual discrimina-
tion, it is not obvious that either justice or rational
self- interest would require, as Daniels seems to assume,
the choice of a system that guarantees equality with
respect to the opportunity range rather than a system
that allows some inequalities but a wider opportunity
range. If the latter alternative is appropriate, then we
are again pushed in the direction of the vague but intui-
tively plausible notion of a decent minimum: this time
the notion of a decent minimum opportunity range to
which the requirement of equality applies.
A third and somewhat surprising feature of Dan-
iels’s position, and one which many will view as
objectionable, is that it appears that principle D does
not guarantee a universal right to a decent minimum
of health care. For D is silent on how we are to make
difficult and basic allocation decisions: it does not
tell us whether we are to devote all resources to nar-
rowing the distance between the opportunity ranges
of the worst off and the normal opportunity range
has a right to whatever arrangements are necessary to
insure that it is reasonable for him to aspire to become
a neurosurgeon, a first- class logician, an accomplished
pianist, or the spouse of a movie star seems excessive
to say the least.
It is important to see that this objection cannot
be met by replying that the right to health care is
only a right to the resources required to achieve nor-
mal species functioning for all. For even if it could be
shown that this goal is much more modest than that
of achieving the normal opportunity range (on the
strong interpretation) for all, this would be beside
the point. In Daniels’s view the basic consideration is
the attainment of equality with respect to the normal
opportunity range— normal species functioning is
only important as one factor among others that con-
tribute to it. So my objection is to the basic principle
of justice Daniels proposes.
Finally, if neither the strong nor the weak inter-
pretation is acceptable, Daniels might suggest that the
normal opportunity range is that of life- plans which
constitute a normal or tolerable or adequate or decent
life in the society in question. This strategy, however,
is one which Daniels should be reluctant to embrace,
since he introduced the notion of a normal opportu-
nity range in the first place to avoid the unilluminating
move of ‘specifying’ the notion of a decent minimum
by reference to equally uninformative notions such as
that of an adequate or tolerable life.
A second difficulty is that if we eschew the strong
interpretation, the attempt to derive a right to health
care from the right to enjoy the normal opportunity
range for one’s own society may involve a sort of cir-
cularity which has unfortunately conservative impli-
cations for health- care policy. The array of life- plans
which all (or most or many) people in a given society
can reasonably pursue or that constitute a tolerable or
normal or adequate life in that society will be deter-
mined in part by the availability and quality of health
care in that society. In other words, the normal oppor-
tunity range is itself in part a social artifact. Thus in a
society with very poor health- care services the normal
opportunity range is correspondingly narrow, even
if the society were in fact affluent enough to afford
a wider range of services which would allow a wider

356 Á PART 4: ETHiCAl iSSUES
hold this belief have mistaken the moral imperatives
of beneficence or charity for those of justice.
I shall argue, however, that even if the libertar-
ian were right thus far there is still a sound justifica-
tion for an enforced principle guaranteeing a decent
minimum of health care to everyone. The alternative
strategy I wish to explore is pluralistic. My sugges-
tion is that the combined weight of arguments from
special (as opposed to universal) rights to health care,
harm- prevention, prudential arguments of the sort
used to justify public health measures, and two argu-
ments that show that effective charity shares features
of public goods (in the technical sense) is sufficient to
do the work of an alleged universal right to a decent
minimum of health care.
Arguments from Special Rights
The right- claim we have been examining (and find
unsupported) has been a universal right- claim: one
that attributes the same right to all persons. Special
right- claims, in contrast, restrict the right in question
to certain individuals or groups.
There are at least three types of arguments that can
be given for special rights to health care. First, there
are arguments from the requirements of rectifying past
or present institutional injustices. It can be argued, for
example, that American blacks and native Americans
are entitled to a certain core set of health- care services
owing to their history of unjust treatment by govern-
ment or other social institutions, on the grounds that
these injustices have directly or indirectly had detrimen-
tal effects on the health of the groups in question. Second,
there are arguments from the requirements of compen-
sation to those who have suffered unjust harm or who
have been unjustly exposed to health risks by the assign-
able actions of private individuals or corporations— for
instance, those who have suffered neurological damage
from the effects of chemical pollutants.
Third, a strong moral case can be made for spe-
cial rights to health care for those who have under-
gone exceptional sacrifices for the good of society as
a whole— in particular those whose health has been
adversely affected through military service. The most
obvious candidates for such compensatory special
rights are soldiers wounded in combat.
or to divide resources among all who fall short of the
normal opportunity range. Indeed nothing in D even
acknowledges that there is a problem of scarcity.
Whether or not D will require some minimal set
of health- care services for all will depend upon which
additional principles we adopt to cope with priority
problems in the face of scarcity. If our first priority is to
narrow the gap between the worst off and the normal
opportunity range, then, depending on how badly
off the worst off are and depending upon the total
amount of resources available, there may be nothing
left for even minimal services for those who do not fall
within the worst off class. As in the case of Utilitarian-
ism, whether there is a universal right to a decent min-
imum will depend upon the facts about the society in
question. But in Daniels’s scheme it will also depend
upon what additional principles of distributive justice
are used to supplement the principle of equality of
opportunity when the commitment to such a strong
principle collides with the realities of scarcity.
If, on the other hand, the commitment to raising
the opportunity range of the worst off is to be limited
by a principle stating that everyone has a right to some
set of services even if there are others who are farther
from the normal opportunity range, then, unless this
universal right- claim can be nonarbitrarily specified
and supported, it appears that we have again ushered
in the idea of a decent minimum. And contrary to
what Daniels says, his principle of equality of opportu-
nity is a supplement, rather than a replacement for it.
A CHANGE OF STRATEGY
So far I have considered several proposed principles or
theories of justice and seen, rather surprisingly, that
they do not provide a firm basis for the claim that there
is a universal right to a decent minimum of health care
or else that they encounter serious difficulties in sup-
plying a practical specification of the content of that
right. These deflationary results would be welcomed
by a libertarian, who would explain them by the
hypothesis that there is no right to a decent minimum.
Further, a sophisticated libertarian would explain the
pervasiveness of the (false) belief that there is a right to
a decent minimum by the hypothesis that those who

CHAPTER 11: DElivERing HEAlTH CARE Á 357
health- care needs which those who advocate a uni-
versal right to a decent minimum are most concerned
about. In other words, once the strength of a more
pluralistic approach is appreciated, we may come to
question the popular dogma that policy initiatives
designed to achieve a decent minimum of health care
for all must be grounded in a universal moral right to
a decent minimum. This suggestion is worth consid-
ering because it again brings home the importance
of the methodological difficulty encountered earlier.
Even if, for instance, there is wide consensus on the
considered judgment that the lower health prospects
of inner city blacks are not only morally unacceptable
but an injustice, it does not follow that this injustice
consists of the infringement of a universal right to a
decent minimum of health care. Instead, the injustice
might lie in the failure to rectify past injustices or in
the failure to achieve public health arrangements that
meet a reasonable standard of equal protection for all.
Two Arguments for Enforced Beneficence
The pluralistic moral case for a legal entitlement to a
decent minimum of health care (in the absence of a
universal moral right) may be strengthened further
by non- rights- based arguments from the principle
of beneficence.5 The possibility of making out such
arguments depends upon the assumption that some
principles may be justifiably enforced even if they are
not principles specifying valid right- claims. There is
at least one widely recognized class of such principles
requiring contribution to the production of ‘public
goods’ in the technical sense (for example, tax laws
requiring contribution to national defense). It is char-
acteristic of public goods that each individual has an
incentive to withhold his contribution to the collec-
tive goal even though the net result is that the goal will
not be achieved. Enforcement of a principle requiring
all individuals to contribute to the goal is necessary
to overcome the individual’s incentive to withhold
contribution by imposing penalties for his own fail-
ure to contribute and by assuring him that others will
contribute. There is a special subclass of principles
whose enforcement is justified not only by the need
to overcome the individual’s incentive to withhold
compliance with the principle but also to ensure that
Arguments from the Prevention of Harm
The content of the right to a decent minimum is typi-
cally understood as being more extensive than those
traditional public health services that are usually justi-
fied on the grounds that they are required to protect
the citizenry from certain harms arising from the
interactions of persons living together in large num-
bers. Yet such services have been a major factor— if not
the major factor— in reducing morbidity and mortality
rates. Examples include sanitation and immunization.
The moral justification of such measures, which con-
stitute an important element in a decent minimum
of health care, rests upon the widely accepted Harm
(Prevention) Principle, not upon a right to health care.
The Harm Prevention argument for traditional
public health services, however, may be elaborated
in a way that brings them closer to arguments for a
universal right to health care. With some plausibility
one might contend that once the case has been made
for expending public resources on public health mea-
sures, there is a moral (and perhaps Constitutional)
obligation to achieve some standard of equal protection
from the harms these measures are designed to pre-
vent. Such an argument, if it could be made out, would
imply that the availability of basic public health ser-
vices should not vary greatly across different racial,
ethnic, or geographic groups within the country.
Prudential Arguments
Prudent arguments for health- care services typically
emphasize benefits rather than the prevention of
harm. It has often been argued, in particular, that the
availability of certain basic forms of health care make
for a more productive labor force or improve the fit-
ness of the citizenry for national defense. This type of
argument, too, does not assume that individuals have
moral rights (whether special or universal) to the ser-
vices in question.
It seems very likely that the combined scope of
the various special health- care rights discussed above,
when taken together with harm prevention and pru-
dential arguments for basic health services and an
argument from equal protection through public health
measures, would do a great deal toward satisfying the

358 Á PART 4: ETHiCAl iSSUES
true of the most important forms of medical research.
But if so, then the beneficent individual will not be
able to act effectively, in isolation. What is needed is a
coordinated joint effort.
First argument. There are many ways in which
I might help others in need. Granted the importance
of health, providing a decent minimum of health care
for all, through large- scale collective efforts, will be
a more important form of beneficence than the vari-
ous charitable acts A, B, and C, which I might perform
independently, that is, whose success does not depend
upon the contributions of others. Nonetheless, if I am
rationally beneficent I will reason as follows: either
enough others will contribute to the decent minimum
project to achieve this goal, even if I do not contribute
to it; or not enough others will contribute to achieve
a decent minimum, even if I do contribute. In either
case, my contribution will be wasted. In other words,
granted the scale of the investment required and the
virtually negligible size of my own contribution, I can
disregard the minute possibility that my contribu-
tion might make the difference between success and
failure. But if so, then the rationally beneficent thing
for me to do is not to waste my contribution on the
project of ensuring a decent minimum but instead to
undertake an independent act of beneficence; A, B, or
C— where I know my efforts will be needed and effi-
cacious. But if everyone, or even many people, reason
in this way, then what we each recognize as the most
effective form of beneficence will not come about.
Enforcement of a principle requiring contributions to
ensuring a decent minimum is needed.
The first argument is of the same form as standard
public goods arguments for enforced contributions
to national defense, energy conservation, and many
other goods, with this exception. In standard public
goods arguments, it is usually assumed that the indi-
vidual’s incentive for not contributing is self- interest
and that it is in his interest not to contribute because
he will be able to partake of the good, if it is produced,
even if he does not contribute. In the case at hand,
however, the individual’s incentive for not contribut-
ing to the joint effort is not self- interest, but rather his
desire to maximize the good he can do for others with
a given amount of his resources. Thus if he contributes
individuals’ efforts are appropriately coordinated. For
example, enforcing the rule of the road to drive only
on the right not only ensures a joint effort toward
the goal of safe driving but also coordinates individu-
als’ efforts so as to make the attainment of that goal
possible. Indeed, in the case of the ‘rule of the road’
a certain kind of coordinated joint effort is the pub-
lic good whose attainment justifies enforcement.
But regardless of whether the production of a public
good requires the solution of a coordination problem
or not, there may be no right that is the correlative of
the coercively backed obligation specified by the prin-
ciple. There are two arguments for enforced benefi-
cence, and they each depend upon both the idea of
coordination and on certain aspects of the concept of
a public good.
Both arguments begin with an assumption reason-
able libertarians accept: there is a basic moral obliga-
tion of charity or beneficence to those in need. In a
society that has the resources and technical knowledge
to improve health or at least to ameliorate important
health defects, the application of this requirement of
beneficence includes the provision of resources for
at least certain forms of health care. If we are sincere,
we will be concerned with the efficacy of our charitable
or beneficent impulses. It is all well and good for the
libertarian to say that voluntary giving can replace the
existing array of government entitlement programs,
but this possibility will be cold comfort to the needy if,
for any of several reasons, voluntary giving falters.
Social critics on the left often argue that in a highly
competitive acquisitive society such as ours it is native
to think that the sense of beneficence will win out over
the urgent promptings of self- interest. One need not
argue, however, that voluntary giving fails from weak-
ness of the will. Instead one can argue that even if each
individual recognizes a moral duty to contribute to the
aid of others and is motivationally capable of acting
on that duty, some important forms of beneficence
will not be forthcoming because each individual will
rationally conclude that he should not contribute.
Many important forms of health care, especially
those involving large- scale capital investment for
technology, cannot be provided except through the
contributions of large numbers of persons. This is also

CHAPTER 11: DElivERing HEAlTH CARE Á 359
better for him not to contribute regardless of whether
other do or not.
Neither argument depends on an assumption of
conflict between the individual’s moral motivation of
beneficence and his inclination of self- interest. Instead
the difficulty is that in the absence of enforcement,
individuals who strive to make their beneficence most
effective will thereby fail to benefit the needy as much
as they might.
A standard response to those paradoxes of ratio-
nality known as public goods problems is to introduce
a coercive mechanism which attaches penalties to
noncontribution and thereby provides each individ-
ual with the assurance that enough others will recip-
rocate so that his contribution will not be wasted and
an effective incentive for him to contribute even if he
has reason to believe that enough others will contrib-
ute to achieve the goal without his contribution. My
suggestion is that the same type of argument that is
widely accepted as a justification for enforced prin-
ciples requiring contributions toward familiar public
goods provides support for a coercively backed prin-
ciple specifying a certain list of health programs for
the needy and requiring those who possess the needed
resources to contribute to the establishment of such
programs, even if the needy have no right to the ser-
vices those programs provide. Such an arrangement
would serve a dual function: it would coordinate char-
itable efforts by focusing them on one set of services
among the indefinitely large constellation of possible
expressions of beneficence, and it would ensure that
the decision to allocate resources to these services will
become effective.
OBJECTIONS AND REPLIES
It might be objected that these two arguments rest
upon either of two unacceptable premises: (1) that
if something is a moral principle (or at least a basic
moral principle) then it may be given the status of
a law and enforced by the state, or (2) that it is the
role of the state to insure that its citizens are mor-
ally virtuous. If the enforced beneficence arguments
rested on either of these very general premises they
would be implausible, because both (1) and (2) have
but the goal of achieving a decent minimum for all
would have been achieved without his contribution,
then he has still failed to use his resources in a maxi-
mally beneficent way relative to the options of either
contributing or not to the joint project, even though
the goal of achieving a decent minimum is attained.
The rationally beneficent thing to do, then, is not to
contribute, even though the result of everyone’s act-
ing in a rationally beneficent way will be a relatively
ineffective patchwork of small- scale individual acts
of beneficence rather than a large- scale, coordinated
effort.
Second argument. I believe that ensuring a decent
minimum of health care for all is more important than
projects A, B, or C, and I am willing to contribute to
the decent minimum project, but only if I have assur-
ance that enough others will contribute to achieve the
threshold of investment necessary for success. Unless
I have this assurance, I will conclude that it is less than
rational— and perhaps even morally irresponsible— to
contribute my resources to the decent minimum proj-
ect. For my contribution will be wasted if not enough
others contribute. If I lack assurance of sufficient con-
tributions by others, the rationally beneficent thing
for me to do is to expend my ‘beneficence budget’ on
some less- than- optimal project A, B, or C, whose suc-
cess does not depend on the contribution of others.
But without enforcement, I cannot be assured that
enough others will contribute, and if others reason as
I do, then what we all believe to be the most effective
form of beneficence will not be forthcoming. Others
may fail to contribute either because the promptings
of self- interest overpower their sense of beneficence,
or because they reason as I did in the First Argument,
or for some other reason.
Both arguments conclude that an enforced decent
minimum principle is needed to achieve coordinated
joint effort. However, there is this difference. The Sec-
ond Argument focuses on the assurance problem, while
the first does not. In the Second Argument all that is
needed is the assumption that rational beneficence
requires assurance that enough others will contrib-
ute. In the First Argument the individual’s reason for
not contributing is not that he lacks assurance that
enough others will contribute, but rather that it is

360 Á PART 4: ETHiCAl iSSUES
enforced beneficence argument is vulnerable to the
same objection I leveled earlier at Utilitarianism: it
does not provide a firm moral foundation for a guar-
anteed minimum for all.
At this point, it is important to approach the tra-
ditional concept of beneficence more critically than is
usually done. Three points must be emphasized. First,
some support must be given for the view that benefi-
cence is discretionary with respect to the choice of
recipients of aid. It is not enough to offer this assump-
tion as an analytic truth which follows from the con-
cept of the duty of beneficence. Even if the boundaries
of the traditional concept could be so clearly delin-
eated, the question of whether it is permissible to
choose to aid A and not to aid B (when A’s and B’s
needs are identical) is a moral question. And depend-
ing on the answer we arrive at, we may find it appro-
priate to revise the traditional concept. Second, the
more plausible accounts of why the benefactor may be
selective seem to be pragmatic rather than conceptual
or moral. Third, these pragmatic considerations seem
to have less weight when beneficence is viewed— as it
is in the enforced beneficence arguments— as a collec-
tive, rather than an individual, enterprise.
Even if we could say with confidence that the tra-
ditional concept of beneficence includes the idea that
the benefactor may be selective, we should ask why
this is so. If one examines the grounds for the duty of
beneficence, either in common- sense morality or in
ethical theory, it seems that these are so general that
the conclusion they support is that there is a duty to
aid the needy— anyone in need, not just some, if one
is able to do so.
For example, in the Second Part of The Foundations
of the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant offers an argument
for the conclusion that one ought to help those in
need, at least if one can do so without excessive costs
to oneself. Kant’s claim is that one cannot consistently
will the universalization of a maxim of not aiding
others in need because to do so would be to deprive
oneself of aid from others: a world in which everyone
acted on this maxim of nonbeneficence would be one
in which one could not count on being helped by oth-
ers. Now it appears that the same argument would rule
out a maxim of helping another in need only if one
unacceptable implications for individual liberty. But
the enforced beneficence arguments do not assume
that any moral principle, or any basic moral principle,
may be enforced; nor do they assume that the state is
in general the guardian of our morals. Instead, they
only contend that one important moral principle may
be enforced if, in the absence of enforcement, familiar
problems of coordinated joint action would arise. Fur-
ther, it seems most plausible to regard the conclusion
of the enforced beneficence arguments as defeasible: if
political conditions were such that the establishment
of the required enforcement mechanism would con-
tribute to a dangerous concentration of government
power, then the lesser of evils might be to forgo a solu-
tion to the coordination and assurance problems.
However, it is unpersuasive to argue that— at least
in the United States at this time— a compulsory con-
tribution scheme constitutes an unacceptable threat
to liberty by endowing the government with uncon-
trollable powers. Moreover, some of the most sig-
nificant dangers which make a general policy of the
‘enforcement of morals’ unacceptable simply do not
apply with any force to the case at hand. In particu-
lar, opponents of the enforcement of morals usually
rightly point out that such policy would destroy the
conditions required for individual autonomy, privacy,
and for the flourishing of intimate personal relation-
ship. This is certainly true for the enforcement of
many moral principles, especially principles of sexual
or religious morality, but it is not at all convincing in
the case of arrangements to enforce the moral duty of
charity or beneficence. Nor is it obvious that enforced
beneficence should be rejected because it will inevita-
bly lead to the enforcement of those moral principles
which are more closely connected with autonomy,
privacy, and intimate personal relationships.
A more interesting objection is that the enforced
beneficence arguments rest on a misunderstanding
of the nature of the duty of beneficence: beneficence
is traditionally understood as an imperfect duty not
just in the sense that the amount of aid one renders
is a matter of choice but also in the sense that the
choice of recipients is also discretionary. In other
words, beneficence only requires that one render aid
to some who are needy, not to all. But if so, then the

CHAPTER 11: DElivERing HEAlTH CARE Á 361
that if each of us freely chooses some beneficiary or
other, everyone, or virtually everyone in need, will
receive some aid. This assumption ignores the prob-
lem of coordinating individual acts of beneficence
emphasized in the two arguments above.
Each of these reasons can, in particular circum-
stances, justify a policy of selective beneficence. How-
ever, in conditions in which a collective effort can
provide a minimum of care for all who can need it,
without excessive costs to the benefactors, the same
very general considerations that ground the duty of
beneficence support a nonselective policy.
It is true that two perplexing questions remain
unanswered. What counts as excessive costs? And
should a guaranteed decent minimum policy aim only
at the needy who dwell within the borders of a particu-
lar nation- state? Neither of these problems, however,
is peculiar to the enforced beneficence arguments; they
afflict rights- based approaches as well. Further, while
the various moral justifications offered to support
the alleged right to a decent minimum are also gen-
eral in that they apply to human beings as such, the
reasons for restricting the enforcement of rights to
the national level, when they are good reasons, are
as pragmatic as those that explain the assumption
that benefactors may be selective. Even if these prag-
matic considerations support a restriction of the class
of those who are to be aided (or those whose rights
are to be protected by our government), they do not
justify the much stronger claim that beneficence (or
the protection of rights) is essentially discretionary.
I conclude, then, that the idea that beneficence allows
discretion in the selection of recipients does not itself
constitute a telling objection to the enforced benefi-
cence argument for a decent minimum of health care.
Instead, it seems more accurate to conclude that the
enforced beneficence arguments force us to get clearer
about what is central to the concept of beneficence
and what is a practical concession to the difficulties of
being beneficent in an imperfect world.
A libertarian might raise the potentially more
serious objection that the enforced beneficence argu-
ment fails to recognize a fundamental qualification.
While acknowledging that there may be some rules
of social coordination or some principles specifying
chooses to: in a world of discretionary benefactors one
could not count on aid. Thus one would expect Kant
to reject a formulation of the duty of beneficence that
allows the benefactor to choose which of the needy he
will help (independently of any consideration of the
degree or importance of their need). However, Kant
does not draw this conclusion. Though he provides
an argument that supports the conclusion that we
ought to help whoever is in need, Kant does not chal-
lenge the traditional view that the duty of beneficence
allows the benefactor to exercise discretion in decid-
ing whom to aid.
Similarly, at the level of common- sense morality,
the considerations that underlie the duty of benefi-
cence seem very general. One ought to help those in
need because they are our fellow human beings in
need— not because of any further special characteris-
tics they happen to possess or because of any special
preferences we have. Yet here, too, as in Kant’s theory,
it is usually said that there is much latitude in dis-
charging the duty of beneficence. One may choose to
help some and not help others.
How can the very general character of the ground
of the duty of beneficence be reconciled with the
assumption that the benefactor may exercise discre-
tion? The explanation, I suggest, lies not in moral
theory or in an analysis of the concept of benefi-
cence, but in an appreciation of two facts about the
circumstances in which individual— opposed to
collective— beneficence often occurs. The first is that an
individual’s resources are so limited that either he will
not be able to render significant aid to anyone unless
he is selective or he will be able to do so only at exces-
sive cost. The second is that in many cases the individ-
ual has more control over his beneficent efforts, and
hence more assurance of their success, if he renders
aid directly to those close at hand. (One may refrain
from contributing to the aid of those far away simply
because one is aware that there are numerous oppor-
tunities for diverting and diluting one’s contribution
before it reaches the intended recipient.) It may also be
that some of those who accept uncritically the tradi-
tional view that beneficence is wholly discretionary as
to the choice of beneficiaries do so because of a rather
simplistic and overly optimistic assumption: namely,

362 Á PART 4: ETHiCAl iSSUES
our ability to adjudicate decisively between libertarian
and welfarist theories of basic rights.
I would like to conclude by observing that the
non- rights- based, enforced beneficence approach has
interesting implications for the issue of how we are
to specify the content of the decent minimum. We
have seen that while the type of rights- based argu-
ment determines the sorts of considerations which
are to guide the specification of content, little can be
said about the specification prior to the outcome of
political processes or extensive empirical research.
This conclusion will be disturbing if one assumes that
the guaranteed minimum is a matter of right, since we
often tend to think of rights as rather sharply defined.
However, the traditional notion of duties of charity or
beneficence is that they are ‘imperfect duties’: by their
very nature they are not precisely delineated.
Now those who favor the non-rights- based app-
roach can argue that the difficulty encountered by
rights- based approaches in specifying the content of
an alleged right to a decent minimum provides indi-
rect support for the position that there is no right to
a decent minimum but only an enforceable duty of
beneficence or charity to contribute to the attainment
of a decent minimum. In other words, the advocate of
the enforced beneficence approach can warmly wel-
come the lack of a principled specification as a vindi-
cation of his view rather than accept it begrudgingly
as an embarrassing theoretical lacuna. The idea would
be that we must frankly acknowledge that the char-
acter and scope of the list of services included in the
decent minimum is a matter of collective choice. All
that is necessary is that there be some fair procedure
for reaching a social decision on which set of services
to provide.
NOTES
1. Ronald Dworkin, Taking Rights Seriously (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1977), pp. 184–205.
2. It is not my purpose in this article to articulate the main
factors that should determine the content of the decent
minimum. For an attempt to do so, see Securing Access to
Health Care, Report of the President’s Commission for the
Study of Ethical Problems in Medicine and Biomedical and
moral obligations or obligations to contribute to pub-
lic goods that may be enforced, even in the absence
of corresponding rights, the libertarian will point out
that enforcing them is permissible only if doing so does
not violate important moral rights.
I agree wholeheartedly with this qualification.
However, if the qualification is to become a sound crit-
icism of the enforced beneficence arguments, the lib-
ertartian must discharge two difficult tasks, the second
of which no one has yet successfully executed. First,
he must clearly specify which basic moral rights would
be violated by any attempt to enforce the principle of
beneficence as it is applied to health care. Second, he
must provide a coherent and plausible justification for
the claim that these basic moral rights do exist. To rule
out in principle an enforceable duty of beneficence
the libertarian would have to specify and justify either
a virtually unlimited general right against interference
or coercion or a virtually unlimited right to private
property. The great obstacle to doing either is that
he must avoid begging the question by appealing to
intuitions that his nonlibertarian opponent does not
share. In the absence of a sound theoretical justifica-
tion for such rights, the burden of proof is on the liber-
tarian to substantiate the claim that the enforcement
in question violates important moral rights.
We have now come full circle. At the outset,
I noted that the burden of proof is on those who claim
that there is universal right to a decent minimum of
health care. I then argued that various attempts to
provide theoretical support for the claim that there is
such a right are inadequate. If we abandon the quest
for a justification for the claim that there is a universal
right, however, we should not conclude that the liber-
tarian view triumphs by default. The non- rights- based
enforced beneficence arguments shift a similar burden
of proof onto the libertarian.
If the approach I have outlined succeeds, it pro-
vides a way of avoiding both the burden of justifying
the claim that there is a universal right to health care
and the equally onerous burden of justifying a virtu-
ally unlimited right to private property or against
coercion. Surprising as it may seem, an answer to the
question of whether society ought to guarantee cer-
tain health- care services for all does not depend upon

CHAPTER 11: DElivERing HEAlTH CARE Á 363
5. For an exploration of various arguments for a duty of benef-
icence and an examination of the relationship between jus-
tice and beneficence, in general and in health care, see Allen
E. Buchanan, “Philosophical Foundations of Beneficence,”
Beneficence and Health Care, ed. Earl E. Shelp (Dordrecht, Hol-
land: Reidel Publishing Co., 1982).
Behavioral Research (Washington, D.C., U.S. Government
Printing Office, 1983), esp. chap. 1.
3. “Is There a Right to a Decent Minimum of Health Care?”
in Securing Access to Health Care, Appendix Two.
4. Norman Daniels, “ Health- Care Needs and Distributive
Justice,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 10, no. 2 (Spring 1981):
146–79.
Is There a Right to Health Care and, If So, What Does It Encompass?
Norman Daniels
of the legal right to health care in these countries. Most
cover ‘medically necessary’ services, including a broad
range of preventive, curative, rehabilitative and long-
term care for physical and mental diseases, disorders
and disabilities. Most exclude uses of medical technol-
ogies that enhance otherwise normal functioning or
appearance, such as purely cosmetic surgery. The legal
rights vary in significant ways, however, for example,
in the degree to which they cover new reproductive
technologies, or in the types of mental health and
long- term care services that are offered.
In the context of rising costs and the rapid dissem-
ination of new technologies, there is growing debate
in many countries about how to set limits on the scope
of a right to health care. This debate about the scope of
rights to health care pushes moral deliberation about
such a right into the forefront, even where a legal right
is recognized. Legal entitlements, most people believe,
should reflect what society is morally obliged to pro-
vide by way of medical services. What, then, is the
basis and scope of a moral right to health care?
Positive vs negative rights
A right to health care is a positive as opposed to a nega-
tive right. Put quite simply, a positive right requires
others to do something beneficial or enabling for
right- bearers, whereas a negative right requires oth-
ers to refrain from doing something, usually harm-
ful or restrictive, to right- bearers. To say that others
IS THERE A RIGHT TO HEALTH CARE?
Legal vs moral rights to health care
One way to answer this question is to adopt the stance
of legal positivists, who claim that there are no rights
except those that are embodied in actual institutions
through law. We would then be able to reply that in
nearly every advanced industrial democracy in the
world, there is a right to health care, since institutions
exist in them that assure everyone access to needed ser-
vices regardless of ability to pay. The notable exception
is the United States, where many poor and near poor
people have no insurance coverage for, and thus no
assured access to, medically necessary services, although
by law they cannot be denied emergency services.
The legal right to health care is embodied in a wide
variety of types of health- care systems. These range
from national health services, where the government
is the provider of services, as in Great Britain, to public
insurance schemes, where the government finances
services, as in Canada, to mixed public and private
insurance schemes, as in Germany and the Nether-
lands. Despite these differences in the design of sys-
tems, there is a broad overlap in the scope or content
Norman Daniels, “Is There a Right to Health Care and, If So, What
Does it Encompass?” from A Companion to Bioethics, pp. 316–25,
edited by Helga Kuhse and Peter Singer. Copyright © 1998, 2001
by Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Reproduced with permission of John
Wiley & Sons, Inc.

364 Á PART 4: ETHiCAl iSSUES
individuals into providing ‘needed’ resources or skills
(Nozick, 1974). Libertarians generally recognize an
‘imperfect’ duty to act beneficently or charitably, but
this duty involves discretion. It can be discharged
in different ways that are matters of choice. People
denied charity have no right to it and have no com-
plaint against people who act charitably in other ways.
Though some have argued that the difficulty of coor-
dinating the delivery of charitable assistance might
justify coercive measures (Buchanan, 1984), and oth-
ers have tried to show that even libertarians must
recognize some forms of welfare rights (Sterba, 1985),
most libertarians resist any weakening of the property
rights at the core of their view (Brennan and Fried-
man, 1981).
A spectre sometimes raised by libertarians against
the idea of a right to health care is that such a right
is a ‘bottomless pit’. Since new technologies continu-
ously expand the scope of ‘medical needs’, a right to
health care would give rise to unlimited claims on the
resources of others (Fried, 1969; Engelhardt, 1986).
Protecting such an expansive right to health care
would thus not be compatible with the function of a
libertarian ‘minimal state’ to assure the non- violation
of rights to liberty and property.
Though there remains controversy about whether
utilitarians can provide a basis for recognizing true
moral rights, there are strong utilitarian arguments in
favour of governments assuring access to at least some
broad range of effective medical services. Preventing
or curing disease or disability reduces suffering and
enables people to function in ways that contribute to
aggregate welfare. In addition, knowing that health-
care services are available increases personal security
and strengthens the ties of community. Utilitarians
can also justify redistributing the burden of delivering
these benefits to society as a whole, citing the decreas-
ing marginal utility of money to support progressive
financing of health- care services (Brandt, 1979).
Beneath these quite general arguments, how-
ever, there lies a more specific controversy about
the scope of utilitarian entitlements to health care.
There seems to be little utilitarian justification for
investing resources in health care if those resources
would produce more net welfare when invested in
are required to do something or to refrain from doing
something is to say they must so act or refrain even
if they could produce more good or improve the
world by not doing so (Thomson, 1990). For exam-
ple, a negative right to free expression requires oth-
ers to refrain from censuring the expression of the
right- bearer even if censuring this speech would
make a better world. Some public- health measures
that protect people against interference with their
health, such as environmental protections that pro-
tect people against polluters of air, water and food
sources, might be construed as requirements of a
negative right. More generally, however, a right to
health care imposes an obligation on others to assist
the right- bearers in obtaining needed and appropri-
ate services. Specifically, claiming a right to health
care includes these other claims: society has the
duty to its members to allocate an adequate share
of its total resources to health- related needs; society
has the duty to provide a just allocation of different
types of health care services, taking into account the
competing claims of different types of health- care
needs; each person is entitled to a fair share of such
services, where a ‘fair share’ includes an answer to the
question, who should pay for the services? (Daniels,
1985). Health- care rights thus form a part of a broader
family of positive ‘welfare’ rights that includes rights
to education and to income support. Because posi-
tive rights require other people to contribute their
resources or skills to benefit right- bearers, rather than
merely refraining from interfering with them, they
have often been thought more difficult to justify
than negative rights, and their scope and limits have
been harder to characterize.
Theories of justice and rights to health care
If we are to think of a right to health care as a require-
ment of justice, then we should look to more general
theories of justice as a way to specify the scope and
limits of that right. On some theories of justice, how-
ever, there is little basis for requiring people to assist
others by meeting their health care or other needs.
Libertarians. for example, believe that fundamental
rights to property, including rights to personal assets,
such as talents and skills, are violated if society coerces

CHAPTER 11: DElivERing HEAlTH CARE Á 365
enabling conditions for the exercise of other rights or
liberties, or as practical presuppositions of all views
of justice (Braybrooke, 1987) or as a way of avoid-
ing vulnerability and exploitation (Goodin, 1988).
One approach that has been developed in some
detail views a right to health care as a special case of a
right to equality of opportunity (Daniels, 1985). This
approach shows how the most important contractar-
ian theory of justice, Rawls’ (1971) account of justice
as fairness, can be extended to the problem of health
care, since that theory gives prominence to a princi-
ple protecting equality of opportunity (Rawls, 1993).
Without endorsing that account here, we shall use it
to illustrate further the complexity surrounding the
concept of a right to health care.
Equal opportunity and a right to health care
The central observation underlying this account of a
right to health care is that disease and disability restrict
the range of opportunities that would otherwise be
open to individuals. This is true whether they shorten
our lives or impair our ability to function, includ-
ing through pain and suffering. Health care in all its
forms, whether public health or medical, preventive
or acute or chronic, aims to keep people functioning
as close to normally as possible. Since we are complex
social creatures, our normal functional capabilities
include our capabilities for emotional and cognitive
functioning and not just physical capabilities. Health
care thus preserves for us the range of opportunities
we would have, were we not ill or disabled, given our
talents and skills.
The significant contribution health care makes
to protecting the range of opportunities open to
individuals is nevertheless limited in two important
ways. It is limited because other things, such as the
distribution of wealth and income and education,
also profoundly affect equality of opportunity. It is
also limited because health care, by restricting its aim
to protecting normal functioning, leaves the nor-
mal distribution of talents and skills unmodified. It
aims to help us function as ‘normal’ competitors, not
strictly equal ones.
Some argue that an equal opportunity account of
health care should abandon the limit set by a focus
other things, yet many people believe they have
moral obligations to assist others with their health-
care needs even at a net cost in utility. For example,
some highly expensive and effective medical treat-
ments that most people believe should be offered to
people might not be ‘cost beneficial’ and thus not
defensible on utilitarian grounds. Similarly, many
forms of long- term care, especially for those who
cannot be restored to productive social activity, are
also difficult to defend on utilitarian grounds, yet we
insist our health- care systems are obliged to provide
such services.
Lack of moral acceptance of the distributive
implications of utilitarianism makes many uncomfort-
able with the use of methods, such as cost- effectiveness
analysis, that are intended to guide decisions about
resource allocation in health care. For example, an
assumption of cost- effectiveness analysis is that a unit
of health benefit, such as a quality- adjusted life year
(QALY), is of equal value or importance regardless of
where it is distributed. But this assumption does not
capture the concerns many people have about how
much priority to give to the sickest patients, or when
aggregating modest benefits to large numbers of peo-
ple it outweighs the moral importance of delivering
more significant benefits to fewer people (Nord, 1993:
Daniels, 1993).
Two points about a utilitarian framework for a
right to health care are worth noting. Recognizing
a right to health care is compatible with recogniz-
ing limits on entitlements that result from resource
scarcity and the fact that there are competing uses of
those resources. Consequently, recognizing a right to
health care need not open a bottomless pit. Second,
just what entitlements to services follow from a right
to health care cannot be specified outside the context
of a system properly designed to deliver health care in
a way that promotes aggregate utility. For the utili-
tarian, entitlements are system- relative. The same two
points apply to other accounts of the foundations
and limits of a right to health care.
Because many people reject the utilitarian ratio-
nales for health care (and other welfare) rights, theo-
rists have explored other ways to ground such rights.
Some claim that these rights are presupposed as

366 Á PART 4: ETHiCAl iSSUES
WHAT DOES A RIGHT TO HEALTH CARE
INCLUDE?
System- relative entitlements
By making the right to health care a special case of
rights to equality of opportunity, we arrive at a rea-
sonable, albeit incomplete and imperfect, way of
restricting its scope while still recognizing its impor-
tance. The account does not give individuals a basic
right to have all of their health- care needs met. At
the same time, there are social obligations to design a
health- care system that protects opportunity through
an appropriate set of health- care services. If social
obligations to provide appropriate health care are
not met, then individuals are definitely wronged.
For example, if people are denied access— because
of discrimination or inability to pay— to a basic tier
of services adequate to protect normal functioning,
injustice is done to them. If the basic tier available
to people omits important categories of services
without consideration of their effects on normal
functioning, for example, whole categories of mental
health or long- term care or preventive services, their
rights are violated.
Still, not every medical need gives rise to an enti-
tlement to services. The scope and limits of rights
to health care, that is, the entitlements they actu-
ally carry with them, will be relative to certain facts
about a given system. For example, a health- care
system can protect opportunity only within the lim-
its imposed by resource scarcity and technological
development within a society. We cannot make a
direct inference from the fact that an individual has
a right to health care to the conclusion that this per-
son is entitled to some specific health- care service,
even if the service would meet a health- care need.
Rather the individual is entitled to a specific service
only if, in the light of facts about a society’s tech-
nological capabilities and resource limitations, it
should be a part of a system that appropriately pro-
tects fair equality of opportunity. The equal oppor-
tunity account of a right to health care, like the
utilitarian account, makes entitlements to health
care system- relative.
on normal functioning (see Arneson, 1988; G. A.
Cohen, 1989; Sen, 1992). They claim our concerns
about equality, including equality of opportunity,
require us to use health- care technologies whenever
doing so would equalize opportunity for welfare or
equalize capabilities. For example, if through medi-
cal intervention we can ‘enhance’ the otherwise nor-
mal capabilities of those who are at a competitive
disadvantage, then our commitment to equality of
opportunity requires us to do so. Obviously, this ver-
sion of an equal opportunity account would vastly
expand the moral requirements on medicine, yield-
ing a right to health care much more expansive than
any now embodied in actual systems and, arguably,
one that would make administration of a health- care
system unwieldy (Sabin and Daniels, 1994).
This expansive version of the appeal to equal
opportunity ignores an important fact about justice:
our concern for equality must be reconciled with con-
siderations of liberty and efficiency in arriving at the
overall requirements of justice (see Sen, 1992; Cohen,
1995; Daniels, 1996). Such a reconciliation seems
to underlie the limits we commonly accept when
we appeal to equality of opportunity. We generally
believe that rights to equal opportunity are violated
only if unfair social practices or preventable or cur-
able diseases or disabilities interfere with the pursuit
of reasonable plans of life within our society by mak-
ing us lose competitive advantage. We accept, how-
ever, the fact that the natural distribution of talents
and skills, working in an efficient market for them,
will both enhance the social product and lead to
inequalities in social outcomes. A just society will
try to mitigate the effects of these inequalities in
competitive advantage in other ways than by elimi-
nating all eliminable differences in capabilities. For
example, on Rawls’ account, transfers that make the
worst off as well off as they can be mitigate the effects
on equality of allowing the natural distribution of
talents and skills to enhance productivity. In what
follows, the account of a right to health care rests on
a more limited appeal to equal opportunity, one that
takes the maintenance of normal functioning as a
reasonable limit.

CHAPTER 11: DElivERing HEAlTH CARE Á 367
technologies. Abortion, where there is no preventive
or therapeutic need, does not count as ‘treatment’
because an unwanted pregnancy is not a disease
or disability. Some nevertheless insist that require-
ments of justice, including a right to control one’s
body, means that non- therapeutic abortion should
be included as an entitlement in a health- care system.
Some national health- insurance schemes do not cover
infertility services. Yet infertility is a departure from
normal functioning, even if some people never want
to bear children. Controversy may remain about how
much social obligation we have to correct this form
of impaired opportunity, especially where the costs
of some interventions, such as in vitro fertilization,
are high and their effectiveness is modest. Different
societies will judge this question differently, in part
because they may place different values on the rearing
of biologically related children or on the experience of
child- bearing.
Hard cases involve non- reproductive technologies
as well. In the United States, for example, many insur-
ers will cover growth hormone treatment only for
children deficient in growth hormone, not for those
who are equally short but without any pathology. Yet
the children denied therapy will suffer just as much as
those who are eligible. Similar difficulties are involved
in drawing a line between covered and non- covered
uses of mental health services (Sabin and Daniels,
1994). As in the cases of reproductive technologies,
there is room for different societies to ‘construct’ the
concept of mental disorder somewhat differently,
with resulting variation in decisions about insurance
coverage.
Rights and limits on effective treatments
Even when some health- care service is reasonably
effective at meeting a medical need, not all such
needs are equally important. When a disease or dis-
ability has little impact on the range of opportunities
open to someone, it is not as morally important to
treat as other conditions that more seriously impair
opportunity. The effect on opportunity thus gives us
some guidance in thinking about resource allocation
priorities.
Effective treatment of disease and disability
The health care we have strongest claim to is care that
effectively promotes normal functioning by reducing
the impact of disease and disability, thus protecting
the range of opportunities that would otherwise be
open to us. Just what counts as ‘effective’, however?
And what should we do about hard cases on the
boundary between treatment of disease or disability
and enhancement of capabilities?
It is a common feature of public and private insur-
ance systems to limit care to treatments that are not
‘experimental’ and have some ‘proven effectiveness’.
Unfortunately, many services that count as standard
treatment have little direct evidence about outcomes
to support their use (Hadorn, 1992). They are often
just customary treatment. Furthermore, it is often con-
troversial just when new treatments or technologies
should count as ‘safe and efficacious’. What counts as
‘reasonably effective’ is then a matter of judgement
and depends on the kind of condition and the conse-
quences of not correcting it. We might, for example,
want to lower our standards for effectiveness when we
face a treatment of last resort, or raise them if resource
scarcity is very great. On the other hand, we do not
owe people a chance to obtain miracles through what-
ever unproven procedures they prefer to try.
By focusing a right to health care on the mainte-
nance of normal functioning, a line is drawn between
uses of medical technologies that count as legitimate
‘treatments’ and those that we may want but which
do not meet our ‘ health- care needs’. Although we may
want medical services that can enhance our appear-
ance, like cosmetic (as opposed to reconstructive)
plastic surgery, or that can optimize our otherwise
normal functioning, like some forms of counselling or
some uses of Prozac, we do not truly need these ser-
vices to maintain normal functioning. We are obliged
to help others achieve normal functioning, but we
do not ‘owe’ each other whatever it takes to make us
more beautiful or strong or completely happy (Dan-
iels, 1985).
Though this line is widely used in both public
and private insurance practices, it leaves us with hard
cases. Some of the hardest issues involve reproductive

368 Á PART 4: ETHiCAl iSSUES
How equal must our rights to health care be?
How equal must our rights to health care be? Specifi-
cally, must everyone receive exactly the same kinds
of health- care services and coverage, or is fairness in
health care compatible with a ‘tiered’ system? Around
the world, even countries that offer universal health
insurance differ in their answers to this question. In
Canada and Norway, for example, no supplemen-
tary insurance is permitted. Everyone is served solely
by the national health- insurance schemes, though
people who seek additional services or more rapid
service may go elsewhere, as some Canadians do by
crossing the border. In Britain, supplementary private
insurance allows about 10 per cent of the population
to gain quicker access to services for which there is
extensive queuing in the public system. Basing a right
to health care on an obligation to protect equality of
opportunity is compatible with the sort of tiering the
British have, but it does not require it, and it imposes
some constraints on the kind of tiering allowed.
The primary social obligation is to assure everyone
access to a tier of services that effectively promotes
normal functioning and thus protects equality of
opportunity. Since health care is not the only impor-
tant good, resources to be invested in the basic tier are
appropriately and reasonably limited, for example,
by democratic decisions about how much to invest in
education or job training as opposed to health care.
Because of their very high ‘opportunity costs’, there
will be some beneficial medical services that it will be
reasonable not to provide in the basic tier, or to pro-
vide only on a limited basis, for example, with queu-
ing. To say that these services have ‘high opportunity
costs’ means that providing them consumes resources
that would produce greater health benefits and pro-
tect opportunity more if used in other ways.
In a society that permits significant income and
wealth inequalities, some people will want to buy
coverage for these additional services. Why not let
them? After all, we allow people to use their after- tax
income and wealth as they see fit to pursue the ‘qual-
ity of life’ and opportunities they prefer. The rich can
buy special security systems for their homes. They can
buy safer cars. They can buy private schooling for their
Unfortunately, the impact on our range of oppor-
tunities gives only a crude and incomplete measure
of the importance or priority we should give to a
need or service. In making decisions about priorities
for purposes of resource allocation in health care, we
face difficult questions about distributive fairness
that are not answered by this measure of importance.
For example, we must sometimes make a choice
between investing in a technology that delivers a
significant benefit to few people or one that delivers
a more modest benefit to a larger number of people.
Sometimes we must make a choice between invest-
ing in a service that helps the sickest, most impaired
patients or one that helps those whose functioning
is less impaired. Sometimes we must decide between
the fairness of giving a scarce resource to those who
derive the largest benefit or giving a broader range
of people some chance at getting a benefit. In all of
these cases, we lack clear principles for deciding how
to make our choices, and the account of a right to
health care we are discussing does not provide those
principles either (Daniels, 1993). Some methodolo-
gies, like cost- effectiveness analysis, are intended to
help us make appropriate resource allocation deci-
sions in these kinds of cases. But these methodolo-
gies may themselves embody controversial moral
assumptions about distributive fairness. This means
they cannot serve as decision procedures for making
these choices and can at best serve as aids to decision-
makers who must be explicit about the moral rea-
soning that determines the distributive choices they
make (Gold et al., 1996).
In any health- care system, then, some choices
will have to be made by a fair, publicly accountable,
decision- making process. Just what constitutes a fair
decision- making procedure for resolving moral dis-
putes about health care entitlements is itself a matter
of controversy. It is a problem that has been addressed
little in the literature. Our rights are not violated,
however, if the choices that are made through fair
decision- making procedures turn out to be ones that
do not happen to meet our personal needs, but instead
meet needs of others that are judged more important
(Daniels and Sabin, 1997).

CHAPTER 11: DElivERing HEAlTH CARE Á 369
treated properly with regard to health care and want-
ing to give people the liberty to use their resources
(after tax) to improve their lives as they see fit. In prac-
tice, the crucial constraint on the liberty we allow peo-
ple seems to depend on the magnitude of the benefit
available in the supplementary tier and unavailable
in the basic tier. Highly visible forms of saving lives
and improving function would be difficult to exclude
from the basic tier while we make them available in a
supplementary tier. In principle, however, some forms
of tiering will not be unfair even when they involve
medical benefits not available to everyone.
REFERENCES
Arneson, Richard (1988). Equality and equal opportunity
for welfare. Philosophical Studies, 54, 79–95.
Brandt, Richard (1979). A Theory of the Good and the Right.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Braybrooke, David (1987). Meeting Needs. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press.
Brennan, Geoffrey and Friedman, David (1981). A liber-
tarian perspective on welfare. In Peter G. Brown, Conrad
Johnson and Paul Vernier (eds), Income Support: Concep-
tual and policy issues. Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield.
Buchanan, Allen (1984). The right to a decent minimum
of health care. Philosophy and Public Affairs, 13, 55–78.
Cohen, G. A. (1989). On the currency of egalitarian
justice. Ethics, 99, 906–44.
Cohen, Joshua (1995). Amartya Sen: Inequality Reexam-
ined. Journal of Philosophy, 92/5, 275–88.
Daniels, N. (1985). Just Health Care. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
(1991). Is the Oregon rationing plan fair? Journal of
the American Medical Association, 265, 2232–5.
(1993). Rationing fairly: programmatic consider-
ations. Bioethics, 7, 224–33.
(1996). Justice and Justification: reflective equilibrium in
theory and practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Daniels, N. and Sabin, J. (1997). Limits to health care: fair
procedures, democratic deliberation, and the legitimacy
problem for insurers. Philosophy and Public Affairs, 26/4,
303–50.
children. Why not allow them to buy supplementary
health care for their families?
One objection to allowing a supplementary tier
is that its existence might undermine the basic tier
either economically or politically. It might attract
better- quality providers away from the basic tier, or
raise costs in the basic tier, reducing the ability of soci-
ety to meet its social obligations. The supplementary
tier might undermine political support for the basic
tier, for example, by undercutting the social solidarity
needed if people are to remain committed to protect-
ing opportunity for all. These objections are serious,
and where a supplementary tier undermines the basic
tier in either way, economically or politically, priority
must be given to protecting the basic tier. In principle,
however, it seems possible to design a system in which
the supplementary tier does not undermine the basic
one. If that can be done, then a system that permits
tiering avoids restricting liberty in ways that some find
seriously objectionable.
A second objection is not to tiering itself but to the
structure of inequality that results. Compare two sce-
narios. In one, most people are adequately served by
the basic tier and only the best- off groups in society
have the means and see the need to purchase supple-
mentary insurance. That is the case in Great Britain. In
the other, the basic tier serves only the poorest groups
in society and most other people buy supplementary
insurance. The Oregon plan to expand Medicaid eli-
gibility partly through rationing the services it covers
has aspects of this structure of inequality, since most
people are covered by plans that avoid these restric-
tions (Daniels, 1991). The first scenario seems pref-
erable to the second on grounds of fairness. In the
second, the poorest groups can complain that they
are left behind by others in society even in the protec-
tion of their health. In the first, the majority has less
grounds for reasonable resentment or regret.
If the basic tier is not undermined by higher tiers,
and if the structure of the inequality that results is not
objectionable, then it is difficult to see why some tier-
ing should not be allowed. There is a basic conflict here
between concerns about equality and concerns about
liberty, between wanting to make sure everyone is

370 Á PART 4: ETHiCAl iSSUES
Nozick, R. (1974). Anarchy, State, and Utopia. New York:
Basic Books.
Rawls, J. (1971). A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, MA: Har-
vard University Press.
—— (1993). Political Liberalism. New York: Columbia Uni-
versity Press.
Sabin, James and Daniels, Norman (1994). Determining
‘medical necessity’ in mental health practice. Hastings
Center Report, 24/6, 5–13.
Sen, Amartya (1992). Inequality Reexamined. Cambridge.
MA: Harvard University Press.
Sterba, James (1985). From liberty to welfare. Social The-
ory and Practice, 11, 285–305.
Thomson, Judith (1990). The Realm of Rights. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press.
Engelhardt. H. Tristram (1986). The Foundations of Bioeth-
ics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Fried, Charles (1969). An Anatomy of Value. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press.
Gold, Marthe, Siegel, Joanna, Russell, Louise and Wein-
stein, Milton (eds) (1996). Cost- Effectiveness in Health and
Medicine: recommendations of the Panel on Cost- Effectiveness
in Health and Medicine. New York: Oxford University Press.
Goodin, Robert (1988). Reasons for Welfare. Princeton. NJ:
Princeton University Press.
Hadorn, David (ed.) (1992). Basic Benefits and Clinical
Guidelines. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
Nord, Eric (1993). The relevance of health state after
treatment in prioritizing between different patients. Jour-
nal of Medical Ethics, 19, 37–42.

371
C H A P T E R 1 2
‘’
Animal Welfare
One of philosophy’s most important functions
is to help us critically examine beliefs that we
often simply accept without question. Philosophy
seems to have played this role especially well in the
issue of animal rights, for it was a philosopher who
helped engender the current animal rights move-
ment by arguing that something was very wrong
with the traditional attitude toward animals (that
is, nonhuman animals) and their treatment. The
traditional notion is that an animal is merely a
resource that humans may dispose of as they see
fit: an animal is food, fuel, or fun— something
with instrumental value only. Peter Singer was
the philosopher who challenged the received wis-
dom, declaring in his 1975 book Animal Liberation
that its subject was the “tyranny of human over
nonhuman animals. This tyranny has caused and
today is still causing an amount of pain and suf-
fering that can only be compared with that which
resulted from the centuries of tyranny by white
humans over black humans.”1
The traditional attitude toward animals has
been influential in the West for centuries. It
sprang from several sources, including Judeo-
Christian thought and the arguments of several
distinguished philosophers. The book of Gen-
esis declares that God created humans in his own
image, “saying to them, ‘Be fruitful, multiply, fill
the earth and conquer it. Be masters of the fish of
the sea, the birds of heaven and all living animals
on the earth’” (Genesis 1:28). Aristotle claims
that all of nature exists “specifically for the sake
of man,” that animals are merely instruments
for humankind. Thomas Aquinas is remarkably
explicit about humans’ proper attitude toward
animals:
Hereby is refuted the error of those who said it is
sinful for a man to kill dumb animals: for by divine
providence they are intended for man’s use in the
natural order. Hence it is no wrong for man to make
use of them, either by killing them or in any other
way whatever.2
Aquinas also says that we should avoid being cruel
to animals— but only because cruelty to animals
might lead to cruelty to humans. Animal cruelty
in itself, he explains, is no wrong. Likewise, René
Descartes thinks animals are ours to use any way we
want. After all, he asserts, animals are not sentient—
they are machines, like mechanical clocks, devoid
of feelings and incapable of experiencing pleasure
or pain. Immanuel Kant, who thinks that people
are not means to an end but ends in themselves,
contends that animals are means to the end known
as man. Today few would agree with Descartes that
animals cannot experience pain, but the traditional
idea that animals have no (or low) moral standing
is widespread.
Those who reject the traditional attitude remind
us that beliefs about the moral status of animals
influence how animals are treated in the real world—
and that treatment, they say, is horrendous on a vast
scale. In 2015 and 2016 in the United States alone,
more than 18 billion animals were slaughtered for
food— cows, poultry, calves, pigs, sheep, and lambs.3
Critics have charged that the animals are subjected
to appalling suffering, including lifelong confine-
ment in spaces so small the animals can hardly
move, isolation of veal calves in small crates (and,
371

372 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
is general agreement, among philosophers at least,
that sentient animals are worthy of some degree
of moral respect or concern. Most disputes turn on
interpretations of this last point: Exactly how much
moral concern do we owe animals? Do they deserve
the same level of moral consideration that we give to
humans? Do they deserve less? How should we treat
them?
Such questions are essentially about the moral
status, or moral considerability, of animals.
Something has moral status if it is a suitable candi-
date for moral concern or respect in its own right,
regardless of its relationships to humans. Ethically,
we cannot treat a being that has moral status just
any way we want, as if it were a mere thing. A being
with moral status is of moral importance regardless
of whether it is a means to something else, and in
our dealings with it, we must somehow take this
fact into account. Another way of expressing the
notion of moral status is to say that any being with
moral status is an object of direct moral consid-
eration or concern. That is, such a being is worthy
of moral concern for its own sake, not because of its
relationship to others. A being that is the object of
indirect moral consideration is granted respect
or concern because of its relationship to other indi-
viduals. Human beings are objects of direct moral
consideration; some say that animals such as dogs,
pigs, and rabbits are too. A screwdriver is not the
kind of thing that can be the object of direct moral
concern, but it may be of indirect moral concern
because of its value to a human being. Some peo-
ple insist that all nonhuman animals are of indi-
rect moral concern, deriving whatever value they
have from their usefulness to humans. Many oth-
ers reject this view, asserting that sentient animals
have independent moral status.
Moral status is typically understood to be
something that comes in degrees and that can be
overridden or discounted in some circumstances.
Philosophers speak of varying levels or weights
of moral considerability. Some contend that ani-
mals have the same moral status as normal adult
some say, in almost total darkness), routine muti-
lation or surgery such as branding and cutting off
pigs’ tails and chickens’ beaks, and the slaughter of
chickens and livestock without first stunning them
or using any other methods to minimize pain and
suffering.4
In addition, each year millions of animals—
from mice to dogs to primates— are used in labora-
tory experiments all over the world. Some of this
research— no one knows how much— causes sig-
nificant animal suffering. According to a U.S. gov-
ernment report, in 2007 about 8 percent of larger
animals used in experiments (excluding mice and
rats) endured “pain or distress” that could not be
relieved with medication.
These concerns push us toward the key moral
questions that we try to sort out in this chapter:
Do animals have instrumental value only? Do they
have rights? Do we owe them any moral respect or
concern at all? Is it morally permissible to experi-
ment on animals, to raise and kill them for food,
to cause them unnecessary pain and suffering? Do
animals have the same moral worth as an infant, a
mentally incompetent man, a woman with severe
senile dementia, or a man in a persistent vegetative
state?
ISSUE FILE: BACKGROUND
Fortunately, on these issues there is at least a parcel
of common ground. First, almost no one believes,
as Descartes did, that animals are equivalent to
windup clocks, mechanisms without feelings. Sci-
ence and common sense suggest that many animals
(mostly vertebrates) are sentient— that is, that they
can have experiences. They can experience bodily
sensations such as pain and pleasure as well as emo-
tions such as fear and frustration. Sentient beings are
thought to have the capacity to suffer. Second, vir-
tually everyone thinks that being cruel to animals—
unnecessarily causing them pain or misery— is
wrong. Even when we consider this judgment care-
fully and critically, it seems inescapable. Third, there

CHAPTER 12: AnImAL WELfARE Á 373
only human beings have moral status and that ani-
mals, if they matter at all, have only indirect value
as resources or tools for people. If cruelty to animals
is wrong, it is wrong only because it makes humans
callous or upsets people or damages personal prop-
erty. The usual tack of those who reject moral status
for animals is to argue that only beings that possess
a particular property have moral status— a property
that animals do not possess but humans do. The
proposed status- granting properties are numer-
ous and include having a soul, nurturing strong
family bonds, using language, being a member of
the human species, and being a person or a moral
agent.
The notion that animals lack souls and there-
fore have no moral status is, of course, a traditional
religious view defended on traditional religious
grounds. Generally, philosophers do not take this
path because their focus is on reason and argu-
ments rather than on faith, and because philo-
sophical analysis has rendered the concept of a soul
problematic or controversial.
The claim that animals have no moral standing
because they do not have the kind of strong family
relationships exhibited by humans has been under-
mined not by philosophy but by science. The same
goes for the parallel claim regarding animals’ lan-
guage skills. One philosopher sums up the relevant
empirical findings:
[M]any species of non- humans develop long-
lasting kinship ties— orangutan mothers stay with
their young for eight to ten years and while they
eventually part company, they continue to main-
tain their relationships. Less solitary animals, such
as chimpanzees, baboons, wolves, and elephants
maintain extended family units built upon com-
plex individual relationships, for long periods of
time. Meerkats in the Kalahari desert are known
to sacrifice their own safety by staying with sick
or injured family members so that the fatally ill
will not die alone. . . . While the lives of many,
perhaps most, non- humans in the wild are con-
sumed with struggle for survival, aggression and
battle, there are some non- humans whose lives are
humans— that, for example, the interests of animals
are as morally important as the comparable inter-
ests of humans. Some argue that humans deserve
more moral respect or concern than animals, that
the interests of humans always take precedence
over those of animals. Many maintain that moral
considerability varies depending on the species
(human or nonhuman), with humans enjoying the
greatest degree of moral considerability and other
species being assigned lower degrees on a sliding
scale. But philosophers disagree on the basis for
assigning the different rankings. Whatever a being’s
moral status, it is usually not viewed as absolute;
sometimes it may be overridden or canceled by fac-
tors thought to be more important. Some people
think, for example, that a dog’s moral status pro-
hibits humans from beating it just for fun but may
allow beatings under some circumstances— say, to
prevent it from straying into traffic and causing an
accident.
Frequently people use the term animal rights
as a synonym for moral status. When they say that
animals have rights, they mean only that animals
deserve some degree of direct moral consideration.
But often the term is used in a more restricted way
to refer to a particularly strong type of moral status.
In this stronger sense, for an animal to have rights
is for it to be entitled to a kind of moral respect that
cannot be overridden (or cannot be overridden eas-
ily) by other considerations. Those who accept this
notion of animal rights may argue that animals
should never be condemned to factory farms or used
in medical experimentation, even if such treat-
ment would make millions of humans happy. Such
rights are analogous to rights that people are sup-
posed to have. People are thought to have a right,
for instance, not to be unjustly imprisoned— even
if their imprisonment would increase the overall
happiness of society as a whole. (We take a closer
look at strong animal rights in the next section.)
Before examining arguments that animals have
moral status or rights, we should cite a few argu-
ments to the contrary. Some people claim that

374 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
attributes and capabilities that we have— self-
consciousness, intelligence, language skills, rea-
soning ability, emotions, and more. We would
presumably have to admit that these beings have
full moral status, just as we do. Yet they are not
human. They may not even be carbon- based life
forms. Physically they may be nothing like any
member of the human species. This strange (but
possible) state of affairs suggests that being human
is not a necessary condition for having moral status.
Taking a cue from Kant, some philosophers
contend that only persons or moral agents can be
candidates for moral considerability— and that
animals do not make the cut. Persons are typically
regarded as rational beings who are free to choose
their own ends and determine their own actions
and values. Moral agents are beings who can make
moral judgments and act according to moral rea-
sons or principles. So the basic claim is that because
characterized by expressions of joy, playfulness,
and a great deal of sex. Recent studies in cognitive
ethology have suggested that some non- humans
engage in manipulative and deceptive activity, can
construct “cognitive maps” for navigation, and
some non- humans appear to understand symbolic
representation and are able to use language.5
A more common claim is that just being human—
having the DNA of the human species, in other
words— is the property that gives a being moral con-
siderability. If so, then nonhumans do not and can-
not have moral status. This view has seemed initially
plausible to some, but critics have wondered why
simply having human DNA would bestow moral sta-
tus on a creature.
Perhaps the most telling objection against
the human species argument is based on a simple
thought experiment. Suppose we humans encoun-
ter extraterrestrial creatures who have all the same
’
Animals are used not only to test the safety and
effectiveness of medical treatments, but also to
determine the safety of consumer products such as
cosmetics. This practice is fraught with controversy.
For example:
Each year, American doctors inject more than
3 million doses of Botox to temporarily smooth
their patients’ wrinkles and frown lines. But
before each batch is shipped, the manufacturer
puts it through one of the oldest and most contro
versial animal tests available.
To check the potency of its product under federal
safety rules, Allergan Inc. injects mice with Botox
until it finds a dose at which half of the animals
die— a rough gauge of potential harm to humans.
Animal protection groups consider this “lethal
dose 50 (LD50)” test to be “the poster child for
everything that’s wrong with animal testing,” said
Martin Stephens, vice president for animal research
issues at the Humane Society of the United States.
“It’s as bad as it gets, poisoning animals to death.”
Allergan officials say they have no choice. With
out a federally approved safety test that does not
use animals, a company spokeswoman says, LD50
“is by default the required test.”*
Is this kind of animal testing morally permissible,
considering that its purpose is commercial and not
medical? Why or why not? Would your using prod
ucts that have been thoroughly tested using LD50
be morally acceptable? Would you change your
answer if you knew the testing was done on dogs
or horses instead of mice or guinea pigs?
*Gilbert M. Gaul, “In U.S., Few Alternatives to Testing
On Animals,” Washington Post, washingtonpost.com,
April 12, 2008.
CRITICAL THOUGHT: Using Animals to Test Consumer Products

http://www.washingtonpost.com

CHAPTER 12: AnImAL WELfARE Á 375
however— it was, in fact, advocated by utilitarian-
ism’s founder, Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832):
The day may come when the rest of the animal cre-
ation may acquire those rights which never could
have been withholden from them but by the hand
of tyranny. The French have already discovered that
the blackness of the skin is no reason why a human
being should be abandoned without redress to the
caprice of a tormentor. It may one day come to be
recognized that the number of the legs, the villosc-
ity of the skin, or the termination of the os sacrum,
are reasons equally insufficient for abandoning a
sensitive being to the same fate. What else is it that
should trace the insuperable line? Is it the faculty
of reason, or perhaps the faculty of discourse? But
a full grown horse or dog is beyond comparison a
more rational, as well as a more conversable animal,
than an infant of a day, or a week, or even a month,
old. But suppose they were otherwise, what would
it avail? The question is not, Can they reason? nor
Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?6
For both Bentham and Singer, what makes a
being worthy of moral concern, what requires us
to include it in the moral community, is its ability
to experience pain and pleasure— its ability to suf-
fer. Why do humans have moral status? Not, says
the utilitarian, because of their capacity for reason,
social relationships, and personhood— but because
of their capacity for suffering. Likewise, because
sentient animals can suffer, they too have moral sta-
tus. Furthermore, Bentham and Singer argue that
because both humans and animals can suffer, they
both deserve equal moral consideration. As Singer says,
[T]he interests of every being affected by an action
are to be taken into account and given the same
weight as the like interests of any other being. . . .
If a being suffers, there can be no moral justifica-
tion for refusing to take that suffering into consid-
eration. No matter what the nature of the being,
the principle of equality requires that its suffer-
ing be counted equally with the like suffering— in
so far as rough comparisons can be made— of any
other being. If a being is not capable of suffering,
or of experiencing enjoyment or happiness, there is
nothing to be taken into account.7
all or most animals are not persons or moral agents,
they can have no moral standing. They simply lack
the necessary property.
As many critics have pointed out, using person-
hood and moral agency as criteria for determining
moral status has a troublesome drawback: it not
only excludes animals from moral considerability
but some humans as well. This difficulty is com-
mon to all lack- of- some- necessary- property argu-
ments, which we will examine more closely in the
next section.
In any case, many think that all these stan-
dards for moral status are in a sense beside the
point. To them it is obvious that regardless of
whether an animal possesses these “higher”
capacities and characteristics, it can suffer. They
reason that if it can suffer, then it can be wronged
by deliberately causing it to suffer. If deliberately
hurting it is wrong, it must have some level of
moral considerability.
MORAL THEORIES
How might a utilitarian assess the treatment of
nonhuman animals? What would he or she say
about their moral status? The most famous answers
to these questions come from the utilitarian philos-
opher Peter Singer, credited with kindling through
his writings what is popularly known as the ani-
mal rights movement. His most celebrated book,
Animal Liberation, helped spark serious debates
about the treatment of animals, the meat industry,
and vegetarianism— debates that continue to this
day. Classic utilitarianism says that the right action
is the one that produces the best balance of hap-
piness over unhappiness (or pleasure over pain),
everyone considered. Singer’s approach is to include
both animals and humans in this “everyone.” The
pain and pleasure of all sentient beings must be
considered when we are deciding which action
maximizes the good.
This inclusion of all animals (human and non-
human) in utilitarian calculations is not new,

376 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
animals in order to eat them is a clear instance of
the sacrifice of the most important interests of other
beings in order to satisfy trivial interests of our own.
To avoid speciesism we must stop this practice, and
each of us has a moral obligation to cease supporting
this practice.8
Some see a problem in Singer’s stance, however,
because his call for eliminating meat production and
embracing vegetarianism does not seem to be fully
warranted by his arguments. By Singer’s own lights,
a humane form of meat production might be mor-
ally permissible. If animals could be raised and killed
without suffering— if their lives could be pleasant
and their deaths painless— then there might be a net
balance of good over evil in the process. Then both
meat production and meat eating might be accept-
able. It seems that Singer’s arguments could be used
to support reform of the meat production industry
just as easily as its total elimination.
As for scientific experimentation on animals,
Singer thinks that it might be permissible if the
benefits gained from the research outweigh any
suffering involved. “[I]f a single experiment could
cure a major disease, that experiment would be
justifiable,” he says.9 However, he believes that in
practice, animal experimentation usually results in
more evil than good because often the benefits to
humans are negligible.
How would a nonconsequentialist view the
treatment of animals? Probably the most influen-
tial example of the nonconsequentialist approach
is that of Tom Regan, another philosopher who has
helped define and inspire the animal rights move-
ment. He argues for animal rights proper— that
is, animal rights in the restricted sense of having
moral considerability that cannot be easily overrid-
den, not in the weaker, generic sense of simply pos-
sessing moral status. According to Regan,
The genius and the retarded child, the prince and
the pauper, the brain surgeon and the fruit vendor,
Mother Theresa and the most unscrupulous used car
salesman— all have inherent value, all possess it equally,
and all have an equal right to be treated with respect, to be
According to Singer, those who do not give equal
moral consideration to human and nonhuman
animals are guilty of speciesism— discrimination
against nonhuman animals just because of their
species. Speciesism, he says, is wrong for the same
reason that racism and sexism are wrong: it vio-
lates the principle of equal consideration— that is,
equal consideration of comparable interests.
Equal consideration of comparable interests,
however, does not mean equal treatment. Humans
and animals have some interests in common (such
as avoiding pain), and they differ dramatically in the
possession of other interests (humans are capable of
enjoying art and studying philosophy, but animals
are not). Singer’s utilitarianism demands that when
comparable interests are involved, those of humans
and those of animals must be given equal weight.
A pig’s suffering is just as important as a man’s or a
woman’s. If a pig and a man are both experiencing
intense pain, we must not assume that the man’s
pain should be taken more seriously. We should
regard the agony of both beings with equal concern.
But when interests are not comparable, we need not
pretend that they are. We may, for example, give
weight to a woman’s interest in enjoying a good
book, but we would give no weight to this interest in
a dog, because a dog has no such interest.
What are the implications of Singer’s view for the
treatment of animals? For one thing, it implies that
our system of meat production is wrong and should
be abolished. There is general agreement that the
meat industry currently causes immense suffering
to millions of sentient creatures. In standard utili-
tarian calculations, if we weigh this extreme suffer-
ing against the moderate pleasures it produces (the
gustatory enjoyment of humans), we see that the
meat industry generates a net balance of evil over
good. The alternative to having a meat industry—
vegetarianism— would result in far more good than
evil. As Singer puts it,
Since, as I have said, none of these [meat industry]
practices cater for anything more than our pleasures
of taste, our practice of rearing and killing other

CHAPTER 12: AnImAL WELfARE Á 377
death— all make a difference to the quality of our life
as lived, as experienced, by us as individuals. As the
same is true of those animals who concern us (those
who are eaten and trapped, for example), they too
must be viewed as the experiencing subjects of a life,
with inherent value of their own.11
How should we treat animals, then, if they have
such rights and if these rights are equal to our own?
Regan’s theory (what he calls the rights view) implies
that if it would be wrong to dissect, hurt, torture, eat,
cage, hunt, or trap a human, then it would also be
wrong to do the same to an animal— and that the
amount of good that might be produced by such acts
is irrelevant. Therefore, Regan concludes, all forms
of animal experimentation should be abolished.
“Because these animals are treated routinely, system-
atically as if their value were reducible to their use-
fulness to others,” Regan says, “they are routinely,
systematically treated with a lack of respect, and thus
are their rights routinely, systematically violated.”12
On the same grounds, he thinks that commercial
animal agriculture and commercial and sport hunt-
ing and trapping should also be abolished.
treated in ways that do not reduce them to the status of
things, as if they exist as resources for others.10
Regan maintains that such equal inherent value
and equal rights apply to animals just as much as
they do to humans. More specifically, he says, they
apply to all mature mammals, human and nonhu-
man. Creatures with inherent value must be treated,
in Kant’s famous phrase, as ends in themselves,
not merely as means to an end. Their value or their
treatment does not depend on some utilitarian cal-
culation of pain and pleasure. According to Regan,
humans and animals have equal value and equal
rights because they share particular mental capaci-
ties; they are sensitive, experiencing beings— or as
Regan says, “experiencing subjects of a life”:
[W]e are each of us the experiencing subject of a life,
a conscious creature having an individual welfare
that has importance to us whatever our usefulness to
others. We want and prefer things, believe and feel
things, recall and expect things. And all these dimen-
sions of our life, including our pleasure and pain,
our enjoyment and suffering, our satisfaction and
frustration, our continued existence or our untimely
’
Consider this controversial argument against spe
ciesism by Peter Singer:
In the past, argument about vivisection has often
missed the point, because it has been put in abso
lutist terms: Would the abolitionist be prepared to
let thousands die if they could be saved by experi
menting on a single animal? The way to reply
to this purely hypothetical question is to pose
another: would the experimenter be prepared to
perform his experiment on an orphaned human
infant, if that were the only way to save many
lives? (I say “orphan” to avoid the complication of
parental feelings, although in doing so I am being
overfair to the experimenter, since the nonhuman
subjects of experiments are not orphans.) If the
experimenter is not prepared to use an orphaned
human infant, then his readiness to use nonhu
mans is simple discrimination, since adult apes,
cats, mice, and other mammals are more aware
of what is happening to them, more self directing
and, so far as we can tell, at least as sensitive to
pain, as any human infant.*
What is Singer’s point here? Is he advocating the
practice of experimenting on orphaned human
infants? Suppose you disagree with Singer. What
argument would you make against his position?
*Peter Singer, “All Animals Are Equal,” Philosophic
Exchange 1 (1974). Copyright © Peter Singer 1974.
Reprinted by permission of author.
CRITICAL THOUGHT: Should We Experiment on Orphaned Babies?

378 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
This is a valid argument; the conclusion does
follow from the three premises. So we have good
reason to accept the conclusion if the premises
are true. Are they? Premise 1 is an empirical claim
about the mental capacities of animals (again, nor-
mal, fully developed mammals). There is scientific
evidence suggesting that animals do have at least
most of the capacities in question. For simplicity’s
sake, then, let us assume that Premise 1 is true.
Premises 2 and 3 are much more difficult to
sort out. We should not accept them unless there
are good reasons for doing so. Good reasons would
involve separate arguments that support each of
them. Regan has provided such arguments, and
several critics have responded to them. Some
have said, for example, that the notion of inher-
ent value is obscure and that the link between
inherent value and moral rights is unclear. Many
others have sidestepped these issues and attacked
the conclusion directly, arguing that regardless
of whether animals have some moral rights, they
surely do not have the same moral rights that
humans do— that is, the equal right to be treated
with respect.
Those who take this latter approach begin with
an advantage. Our moral common sense suggests
that there must be some sort of difference between
the moral status of most humans and that of most
animals. We tend to think that accidentally run-
ning over a man with our car is morally worse than
doing the same to a rabbit. Most of us believe that
there is an important moral difference between
imprisoning women in cages for later slaughter
and doing the same to chickens or hogs— even if
we also deem the latter cruel and immoral.
Our intuition about such things can be wrong,
of course. So those who reject equal moral rights
for animals have offered other considerations.
The philosopher Mary Anne Warren, for example,
argues that animals do indeed have some moral
rights, but that there are reasons for thinking that
these rights are weaker or less demanding than
the rights of humans. For one thing, she notes,
the human right to freedom is stronger or more
MORAL ARGUMENTS
Do animals really have equal rights in the strict sense
just mentioned? That is, do nonhuman animals
have the same right to respect and moral concern
that humans have? Using Tom Regan’s rights view as
inspiration without sticking strictly to his line of rea-
soning, let us examine some simple (and simplified)
arguments for and against this proposition.
For our purposes, we can state the argument for
the rights view like this:
1. Nonhuman animals (normal, fully developed
mammals) are experiencing subjects of a life
(or “experiencing subjects,” for short), just as
humans are.
2. All experiencing subjects have equal inherent
value.
3. All those with equal inherent value are enti-
tled to equal moral rights (the equal right to be
treated with respect).
4. Therefore, nonhuman animals have equal
moral rights.
’ QUICK REVIEW
moral status (or moral considerability)—The
property of being a suitable candidate for
direct moral consideration or respect.
direct moral consideration— Moral consideration
for a being’s own sake, rather than because of
its relationship to others.
indirect moral consideration— Moral consider
ation on account of a being’s relationship to
others.
animal rights— Possession by animals of (1) moral
status; (2) strong moral consideration that
cannot be easily overridden.
speciesism— Discrimination against nonhuman
animals just because of their species.

CHAPTER 12: AnImAL WELfARE Á 379
Neither, then, can we rationally sustain the view
that animals like them in being experiencing sub-
jects of a life have less inherent value. All who have
inherent value have it equally, whether they be
human animals or not.”14
CHAPTER REVIEW
SUMMARY
The traditional attitude toward animals is that they
are merely resources that humans can dispose of as
they see fit; that is, that animals have instrumental
value only. But many reject the traditional view and
put forward reasons for supposing that animals have
moral status. Something has moral status if it is a
suitable candidate for moral concern or respect in its
own right.
Some people claim that only humans have moral
status and that animals have only indirect moral con-
siderability. The usual approach of those who reject
moral status for animals is to argue that a being is
entitled to moral status only if it possesses particular
properties— and that animals do not possess them.
These status- granting properties include having a
soul, having strong family bonds, using language,
being a member of the human species, and being a
person or a moral agent.
One of the more common claims is that one must
be human to have moral status. Critics, however, have
asked what it is about being human that gives one moral
status. A thought experiment used against this claim
asks us to imagine meeting extraterrestrial creatures who
are like ourselves in many ways. We would presumably
have to admit that the aliens have moral status just as
we do, even though they are not human. Being human,
then, seems not to be necessary for having moral status.
The most famous utilitarian approach to the
treatment of animals is that of the philosopher Peter
Singer. He argues that the pain and pleasure of animals
as well as that of humans must be included in utilitar-
ian calculations. What makes a being worthy of moral
extensive than the animal right to freedom. This
right prohibits the unlawful imprisonment of
humans, even if the prison is comfortable and
spacious. Human dignity and the satisfaction of
human aspirations and desires demand a higher
degree of freedom of movement than would be
required for the satisfaction of the needs or inter-
ests of many nonhuman animals. Imprisonment
of animals in areas that allow them to satisfy their
needs and pursue their natural inclinations, War-
ren says, “need not frustrate the needs or interests
of animals in any significant way, and thus do not
clearly violate their rights.” In a similar vein, War-
ren argues that both humans and animals have a
prima facie right to life, but this right is generally
weaker for animals than for humans. As she puts it,
“Human lives, one might say, have greater intrin-
sic value, because they are worth more to their
possessors.”13 Humans have hopes, plans, and pur-
poses that make them value continued existence;
animals, apparently, lack this forward- looking
perspective. Warren adds that nonhuman animals
nevertheless have a right to life because, among
other things, their premature demise robs them of
any future pleasures they might have had.
Regan has responded to such arguments for
unequal rights for animals by offering a com-
mon counterargument. In general, the argu-
ments contend that animals have less inherent
value (and therefore weaker moral rights) because
animals lack something that adult humans
have— perhaps the ability to reason, intelligence,
autonomy, intellect, or some other valuable
property. But, Regan says, if this contention is
true, then we must say that some humans who
lack these characteristics (retarded children or
people with serious mental illness, for example)
also have less inherent value than normal adult
humans and therefore less robust moral rights.
In other words, if these critics of equal rights are
correct, we are fully justified in treating these
“deficient humans” as we would nonhuman
animals. “But it is not true,” he says, “that such
humans . . . have less inherent value than you or I.

380 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
Discussion Questions
1. How might a utilitarian assess the treatment of
nonhuman animals?
2. What reasons do people give for thinking that
animals do not have moral status? Do you agree
with any of these reasons?
3. Is having human DNA the property that gives a
being moral considerability? Why or why not?
4. What is the most telling objection against the
human species argument?
5. For Bentham and Mill, what makes a being
worthy of moral concern?
6. Which view of animal rights— Singer’s or Regan’ s—
do you think is morally reasonable? Why?
7. What is Warren’s critique of Regan’s view of
animal rights? Do you agree with her?
8. What is the traditional attitude toward animals?
Is it reasonable? Why or why not?
9. What do you believe it is about being human
that gives humans moral status? Why?
10. What conclusion do Bentham and Singer draw
from the fact that animals can suffer?
FURTHER READING
Carl Cohen, “The Case for the Use of Animals in Bio-
medical Research,” New England Journal of Medicine 315
(October 2, 1986): 865–70.
David DeGrazia, Animal Rights: A Very Short Introduction
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).
R. G. Frey, “Animals,” in The Oxford Handbook of Practical
Ethics, ed. Hugh LaFollette (New York: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 2003).
R. G. Frey, Interests and Rights: The Case against Animals
(Oxford: Clarendon; New York: Oxford University Press,
1980).
Lori Gruen, “Animals,” in A Companion to Ethics, ed. Peter
Singer, corr. ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993).
Mary Midgley, Animals and Why They Matter (Harmond-
sworth: Penguin, 1983).
James Rachels, Created from Animals: The Moral Implications
of Darwinism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990).
Tom Regan, The Case for Animal Rights (Berkeley: Univer-
sity of California Press, 1983).
Tom Regan and Peter Singer, eds., Animal Rights and
Human Obligations, 2nd ed. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Pren-
tice Hall, 1989).
concern, he says, is its capacity for suffering, and
because both humans and animals can suffer, they
deserve equal moral consideration. Consequently,
Singer maintains that our system of meat production
is wrong and should be abolished.
The most notable nonconsequentialist approach
to the treatment of animals is that of Tom Regan. He
argues for strong animal rights on the grounds that all
“experiencing subjects of a life” have equal inherent
value and therefore an equal right to be treated with
respect. Experiencing subjects of a life include healthy,
mature mammals (humans and nonhumans). Regan
maintains that because such animals have equal
rights, all commercial animal agriculture and sport
hunting and trapping should be abolished.
KEY TERMS
moral status (or moral considerability) (p. 372)
direct moral consideration (p. 372)
indirect moral consideration (p. 372)
animal rights (p. 373)
speciesism (p. 376)
EXERCISES
Review Questions
1. What does it mean for a creature to have moral
status? (p. 372)
2. What are the two meanings of “animal rights”?
(p. 373)
3. What is Aquinas’s view on the treatment of
animals? (p. 371)
4. What does Descartes believe about animals’
ability to experience pain? (p. 371)
5. What does “sentient” mean in relation to
animals and humans? (p. 372)
6. What is Regan’s view on animal rights?
(pp. 376–377)
7. What is “direct moral consideration”? What is
“indirect moral consideration”? (p. 372)
8. Do animals have the kind of strong family
relationships exhibited by humans? (p. 373)
9. What is speciesism? (p. 376)
10. What is Peter Singer’s view on animal rights?
(pp. 375–376)

CHAPTER 12: AnImAL WELfARE Á 381
Cass R. Sunstein and Martha C. Nussbaum, eds., Animal
Rights: Current Debates and New Directions (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2004).
Mary Anne Warren, “The Rights of the Nonhuman
World,” in Environmental Philosophy: A Collection of
Readings, eds. Robert Elliot and Arran Gare (University
Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1983).
Peter Singer, Animal Liberation, 2nd ed. (New York: New
York Review of Books, 1990).
Peter Singer, “Ethics beyond Species and beyond Instincts,”
in Animal Rights: Current Debates and New Directions, ed.
Cass R. Sunstein and Martha C. Nussbaum (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2004).
Bonnie Steinbock, “Speciesism and the Idea of Equality,”
Philosophy 53, no. 204 (April 1978): 247–56.
E T H I C A L D I L E m m A S
1. Animal Testing
The Guardian— Protesters for and against animal testing have predicted an escalating
conflict after the two sides clashed during weekend demonstrations in Oxford. Both
groups pledged to step up campaigns which have already resulted in death threats
aimed at advocates of animal testing and panic buttons installed at the home of a
leading provivisection protester.
Pro Test, the group which organised the Oxford rally of scientists, students and
patients, plans a march in London which it hopes will draw 5,000 supporters. A
spokesman for Speak, the animal rights group campaigning against a new animal
research laboratory in Oxford, said the Pro Test demonstration had left it “fired up”
to take tougher action.
Spokesman Mel Broughton said: “They should be worried, not because they are
in any danger of violence, but because they have fired us up even more against
them and the university.” . . .
Many researchers stayed away from the march, fearing reprisals against them
and their families. Professor Tipu Aziz, a leading neurosurgeon, said: “This country
has thousands of researchers paralysed by fear. That’s a travesty of democracy.” . . .
A spokesman for the Animal Liberation Front, Robin Webb, yesterday described
the Pro Test marchers as “irrelevant.”
“The ALF supporters will completely ignore this protest group and will continue
targeting institutions and companies which are directly involved in building the
proposed facility,” he said.
The Medical Research Council’s chief executive, Colin Blakemore, described the
Pro Test demonstration as “immensely gratifying. For a long time, we have needed
this kind of collective response. The people want this thuggery and nastiness off
the streets of Oxford.”*
Which side in this conflict do you sympathize
with more? Why? Suppose you are a member of
Pro- Test. How would you argue in favor of scien-
tific animal testing? Say you are an ALF supporter.

382 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
What arguments could you make for the ban-
ning of most (or all) animal testing? Is either side
justified in using violence or the threat of violence
to further its cause? Why or why not?
*Robert Booth, “Opposing Sides in Animal Testing Row Pledge to Step Up Action,” from The Guardian,
February 27, 2006. Copyright © 2006 Guardian News and Media Ltd. Reprinted with permission.
2. Seal Hunting and the Fate of the Inuit
Boston Globe— In the 1980s, postcards were distributed to 12 million United States
and United Kingdom households depicting the infamous Canadian Atlantic fisher
swinging a bat at a baby seal and eliciting an overwhelming emotional response. Major
legislative bodies relented to public pressure with a staggering impact on wildlife
management. The collapse of the sealskin market marked a victory for protesters who
had waged the most effective, international mass media campaign ever undertaken.
The moral victory for animal rights activists not only hurt Newfoundlanders,
it adversely affected thousands of Canadian Inuit living in tiny, remote, Arctic
hamlets. Antifur protesters lump all seal hunting methods together. It is tragic but
not surprising that there has been virtually no media coverage of the devastating
economic, social, and cultural impact of the collapse of the seal skin market on Inuit.
If outsiders had known more about Inuit life, perhaps they would not have so easily
dismissed all seal hunting as unethical and cruel.
Canadian Inuit, who number about 46,000, are part of a circumpolar Inuit
community numbering about 150,000 in Greenland, Alaska, and Russia. For Canadian
Inuit, the seal is not just a source of cash through fur sales, but the keystone of
their culture. Although Inuit harvest and hunt many species that inhabit the desert
tundra and ice platforms, the seal is their mainstay. . . .
Inuit no longer use seal oil lamps or kudlik for heating, as did their grandparents.
But seal meat, which is extremely high in protein, minerals, and vitamins and very low
in fat, is still the most valued meat in many parts of the Arctic. Seal skin mittens and
boots continue to provide the greatest protection against the harsh Arctic climate.
Like most people, Inuit respond to structural changes by adapting and innovating.
They were already dependent on costly hunting supplies by the 1980s. When fur
prices plummeted after the sealskin boycott, their credit and cash flow from furs
dried up while the cost of supplies rose. Many families could no longer afford
hunting equipment. Their fragile economy was imperiled and their vulnerability
increased. Their social order was ruptured as they were deprived of the complex
social aspect of sharing seal meat.
Their historical, legal, social, and economic situation already placed them at
alarmingly higher risks of poverty and violence than other Canadians even when they live
outside the North, as 10,000 Inuit have chosen to do. Life expectancy among the Inuit is
10 years lower than other Canadians. Rates of infant mortality, unemployment, illnesses
such as diabetes, violence against women, and overcrowded housing are chillingly high.
One of the most brutal aspects of the lack of cultural continuity is the epidemic
of youth suicide striking small communities in clusters where one death rapidly

CHAPTER 12: AnImAL WELfARE Á 383
engenders another. But the Inuit, having endured myths and misinformation about
their culture for decades, have carried on. . . .
The Inuit are resourceful people who deserve more respectful attention from
outsiders.†
Would a utilitarian like Peter Singer be likely to sup-
port a ban on all seal hunting even though it would
devastate the Inuit? Would he be likely to approve
of the Inuit’s hunting if they could always kill the
seals painlessly? Would a nonconsequentialist like
Tom Regan disapprove of the hunting of the seals
under all circumstances? If the fate of the Inuit
and the seals was to be decided by either Singer or
Regan, which philosopher do you think the Inuit
would prefer? Provide reasons for your answers.
†Kirt Ejesiak and Maureen Flynn- Burhoe, “Animal Rights vs. Inuit Rights,” The Boston Globe, May 8, 2005.
Reprinted by permission of the authors.
3. Should We Keep Animals in Zoos?
CNN— The judgment and criticism built quickly after a 3 year old got into the enclosure
of a 450pound gorilla at the Cincinnati Zoo. Where were the child’s parents? How could
the zoo let this happen? Why did an endangered gorilla have to be shot and killed?
But another question emerged among parents, too: Should we be going to
zoos at all?
The animal advocacy group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals said there’s
a problem with the larger concept of zoos. It said on Twitter that the tragic episode in
Cincinnati was the latest proof that “even under the ‘best’ circumstances . . . captivity
is never acceptable for gorillas or other primates.”
Change is already happening around the globe, PETA Senior Vice President Lisa
Lange said this year after SeaWorld made the stunning announcement that it’s moving
away from housing killer whales and ending its breeding program. SeaWorld faced
growing pressure about its orca policies and then declining park attendance after the
release of “Blackfish,” which documented the 2010 death of a trainer pulled underwater
by a 12,000pound orca. The current generation of killer whales will be the last orcas
housed in captivity at the park, SeaWorld said.
“What we’re seeing is the ‘Blackfish’ effect,” Lange said. “The public has
completely changed its opinion on exploiting and killing animals for entertainment.”‡
Is keeping animals in zoos morally permissible?
Does it amount to cruelty? Why or why not? Is
using animals for the entertainment of humans
wrong? If zoo captivity is morally wrong, is it also
wrong to visit animals in zoos?
‡Kelly Wallace, “After Gorilla Shooting, Are Zoos Becoming ‘Obsolete’?”, from CNN.com, May 31, 2016.
© 2016 Turner Broadcast Systems. All rights reserved. Used by permission and protected by the Copyright
Laws of the United States. The printing, copying, redistribution, or retransmission of this content without
express written permission is prohibited.

http://www.CNN.com

384 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
In recent years a number of oppressed groups have
campaigned vigorously for equality. The classic
instance is the Black Liberation movement, which
demands an end to the prejudice and discrimina-
tion that has made blacks second- class citizens. The
immediate appeal of the black liberation movement
and its initial, if limited success made it a model for
other oppressed groups to follow. We became familiar
with liberation movements for Spanish- Americans,
gay people, and a variety of other minorities. When
a majority group— women— began their campaign,
some thought we had come to the end of the road. Dis-
crimination on the basis of sex, it has been said, is the
last universally accepted form of discrimination, prac-
ticed without secrecy or pretense even in those liberal
circles that have long prided themselves on their free-
dom from prejudice against racial minorities.
One should always be wary of talking of “the last
remaining form of discrimination.” If we have learnt
anything from the liberation movements, we should
have learnt how difficult it is to be aware of latent prej-
udice in our attitudes to particular groups until this
prejudice is forcefully pointed out.
A liberation movement demands an expansion of
our moral horizons and an extension or reinterpreta-
tion of the basic moral principle of equality. Practices
that were previously regarded as natural and inevi-
table come to be seen as the result of an unjustifiable
prejudice. Who can say with confidence that all his or
her attitudes and practices are beyond criticism? If we
wish to avoid being numbered amongst the oppres-
sors, we must be prepared to re- think even our most
fundamental attitudes. We need to consider them
from the point of view of those most disadvantaged by
our attitudes, and the practices that follow from these
attitudes. If we can make this unaccustomed mental
switch we may discover a pattern in our attitudes and
practices that consistently operates so as to benefit
one group— usually the one to which we ourselves
belong— at the expense of another. In this way we
may come to see that there is a case for a new liberation
movement. My aim is to advocate that we make this
mental switch in respect of our attitudes and practices
towards a very large group of beings: members of spe-
cies other than our own— or, as we popularly though
misleadingly call them, animals. In other words, I am
urging that we extend to other species the basic prin-
ciple of equality that most of us recognise should be
extended to all members of our own species.
All this may sound a little far- fetched, more like a
parody of other liberation movements than a serious
objective. In fact, in the past the idea of “The Rights
of Animals” really has been used to parody the case for
women’s rights. When Mary Wollstonecraft, a fore-
runner of later feminists, published her Vindication
of the Rights of Women in 1792, her ideas were widely
regarded as absurd, and they were satirized in an anon-
ymous publication entitled A Vindication of the Rights
of Brutes. The author of this satire (actually Thomas
Taylor, a distinguished Cambridge philosopher) tried
to refute Wollstonecraft’s reasonings by showing that
they could be carried one stage further. If sound when
applied to women, why should the arguments not be
applied to dogs, cats and horses? They seemed to hold
equally well for these “brutes”: yet to hold that brutes
had rights was manifestly absurd; therefore the reason-
ing by which this conclusion had been reached must
be unsound, and if unsound when applied to brutes, it
must also be unsound when applied to women, since
the very same arguments had been used in each case.
One way in which we might reply to this argu-
ment is by saying that the case for equality between
men and women cannot validly be extended to non-
human animals. Women have a right to vote, for
R E A D I n G S
All Animals Are Equal
Peter Singer
Peter Singer, “All Animals Are Equal,” Philosophic Exchange
Vol. 1 (1974). Copyright © Peter Singer 1974. Reprinted by
permission of the author.

CHAPTER 12: AnImAL WELfARE Á 385
applies to so- called “brutes.” I believe that we reach
this conclusion if we examine the basis on which our
opposition to discrimination on grounds of race or sex
ultimately rests. We will then see that we would be on
shaky ground if we were to demand equality for blacks,
women, and other groups of oppressed humans while
denying equal consideration to non- humans.
When we say that all human beings, whatever
their race, creed or sex, are equal, what is it that we
are asserting? Those who wish to defend a hierarchi-
cal, inegalitarian society have often pointed out that
by whatever test we choose, it simply is not true that
all humans are equal. Like it or not, we must face the
fact that humans come in different shapes and sizes;
they come with differing moral capacities, differing
intellectual abilities, differing amounts of benevolent
feeling and sensitivity to the needs of others, differ-
ing abilities to communicate effectively, and differing
capacities to experience pleasure and pain. In short,
if the demand for equality were based on the actual
equality of all human beings, we would have to stop
demanding equality. It would be an unjustifiable
demand.
Still, one might cling to the view that the demand
for equality among human beings is based on the
actual equality of the different races and sexes.
Although humans differ as individuals in various
ways, there are no differences between the races and
sexes as such. From the mere fact that a person is black,
or a woman, we cannot infer anything else about that
person. This, it may be said, is what is wrong with rac-
ism and sexism. The white racist claims that whites are
superior to blacks, but this is false— although there are
differences between individuals, some blacks are supe-
rior to some whites in all of the capacities and abilities
that could conceivably be relevant. The opponent of
sexism would say the same: a person’s sex is no guide
to his or her abilities, and this is why it is unjustifiable
to discriminate on the basis of sex.
This is a possible line of objection to racial and
sexual discrimination. It is not, however, the way
that someone really concerned about equality would
choose, because taking this line could, in some cir-
cumstances, force one to accept a most inegalitarian
society. The fact that humans differ as individuals,
instance, because they are just as capable of making
rational decisions as men are; dogs, on the other hand,
are incapable of understanding the significance of vot-
ing, so they cannot have the right to vote. There are
many other obvious ways in which men and women
resemble each other closely, while humans and other
animals differ greatly. So, it might be said, men and
women are similar beings, and should have equal
rights, while humans and non- humans are different
and should not have equal rights.
The thought behind this reply to Taylor’s analogy
is correct up to a point, but it does not go far enough.
There are important differences between humans
and other animals, and these differences must give
rise to some differences in the rights that each have.
Recognizing this obvious fact, however, is no barrier
to the case for extending the basic principle of equal-
ity to non- human animals. The differences that exist
between men and women are equally undeniable,
and the supporters of Women’s Liberation are aware
that these differences may give rise to different rights.
Many feminists hold that women have the right to an
abortion on request. It does not follow that since these
same people are campaigning for equality between
men and women they must support the right of men to
have abortions too. Since a man cannot have an abor-
tion, it is meaningless to talk of his right to have one.
Since a pig can’t vote, it is meaningless to talk of its
right to vote. There is no reason why either Women’s
Liberation or Animal Liberation should get involved
in such nonsense. The extension of the basic principle
of equality from one group to another does not imply
that we must treat both groups in exactly the same
way, or grant exactly the same rights to both groups.
Whether we should do so will depend on the nature
of the members of the two groups. The basic principle
of equality, I shall argue, is equality of consideration;
and equal consideration for different beings may lead
to different treatment and different rights.
So there is a different way of replying to Taylor’s
attempt to parody Wollstonecraft’s arguments, a way
which does not deny the differences between humans
and non- humans, but goes more deeply into the ques-
tion of equality, and concludes by finding nothing
absurd in the idea that the basic principle of equality

386 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
It would be folly for the opponent of racism to
stake his whole case on a dogmatic commitment to
one particular outcome of a difficult scientific issue
which is still a long way from being settled. While
attempts to prove that differences in certain selected
abilities between races and sexes are primarily genetic
in origin have certainly not been conclusive, the same
must be said of attempts to prove that these differences
are largely the result of environment. At this stage of
the investigation we cannot be certain which view is
correct, however much we may hope it is the latter.
Fortunately, there is no need to pin the case for
equality to one particular outcome of this scientific
investigation. The appropriate response to those who
claim to have found evidence of genetically- based dif-
ferences in ability between the races or sexes is not to
stick to the belief that the genetic explanation must
be wrong, whatever evidence to the contrary may
turn up: instead we should make it quite clear that
the claim to equality does not depend on intelligence,
moral capacity, physical strength, or similar matters of
fact. Equality is a moral ideal, not a simple assertion of
fact. There is no logically compelling reason for assum-
ing that a factual difference in ability between two
people justifies any difference in the amount of con-
sideration we give to satisfying their needs and inter-
ests. The principle of the equality of human beings is
not a description of an alleged actual equality among
humans: it is a prescription of how we should treat
humans.
Jeremy Bentham incorporated the essential basis
of moral equality into his utilitarian system of eth-
ics in the formula: “Each to count for one and none
for more than one.” In other words, the interests of
every being affected by an action are to be taken into
account and given the same weight as the like inter-
ests of any other being. A later utilitarian, Henry Sidg-
wick, put the point in this way: “The good of any one
individual is of no more importance, from the point of
view (if I may say so) of the Universe, than the good of
any other.”1 More recently, the leading figures in con-
temporary moral philosophy have shown a great deal
of agreement in specifying as a fundamental presup-
position of their moral theories some similar require-
ment which operates so as to give everyone’s interests
rather than as races or sexes, is a valid reply to some-
one who defends a hierarchical society like, say, South
Africa, in which all whites are superior in status to
all blacks. The existence of individual variations that
cut across the lines of race or sex, however, provides
us with no defence at all against a more sophisticated
opponent of equality, one who proposes that, say, the
interests of those with I.Q. ratings above 100 be pre-
ferred to the interests of those with I.Q.s below 100.
Would a hierarchical society of this sort really be so
much better than one based on race or sex? I think
not. But if we tie the moral principle of equality to the
factual equality of the different races or sexes, taken as
a whole, our opposition to racism and sexism does not
provide us with any basis for objecting to this kind of
inegalitarianism.
There is a second important reason why we ought
not to base our opposition to racism and sexism on any
kind of factual equality, even the limited kind [that]
asserts that variations in capacities and abilities are
spread evenly between the different races and sexes:
we can have no absolute guarantee that these abili-
ties and capacities really are distributed evenly, with-
out regard to race or sex, among human beings. So far
as actual abilities are concerned, there do seem to be
certain measurable differences between both races
and sexes. These differences do not, of course, appear
in each case, but only when averages are taken. More
important still, we do not yet know how much of these
differences is really due to the different genetic endow-
ments of the various races and sexes, and how much
is due to environmental differences that are the result
of past and continuing discrimination. Perhaps all of
the important differences will eventually prove to be
environmental rather than genetic. Anyone opposed
to racism and sexism will certainly hope that this will
be so, for it will make the task of ending discrimina-
tion a lot easier; nevertheless it would be dangerous to
rest the case against racism and sexism on the belief
that all significant differences are environmental in
origin. The opponent of, say, racism who takes this
line will be unable to avoid conceding that if differ-
ences in ability did after all prove to have some genetic
connection with race, racism would in some way be
defensible.

CHAPTER 12: AnImAL WELfARE Á 387
suffering— or more strictly, for suffering and/or enjoy-
ment or happiness— is not just another characteristic
like the capacity for language, or for higher mathemat-
ics. Bentham is not saying that those who try to mark
“the insuperable line” that determines whether the
interests of a being should be considered happen to
have selected the wrong characteristic. The capacity
for suffering and enjoying things is a pre- requisite for
having interests at all, a condition that must be satis-
fied before we can speak of interests in any meaning-
ful way. It would be nonsense to say that it was not in
the interests of a stone to be kicked along the road by
a schoolboy. A stone does not have interests because it
cannot suffer. Nothing that we can do to it could pos-
sibly make any difference to its welfare. A mouse, on
the other hand, does have an interest in not being tor-
mented, because it will suffer if it is.
If a being suffers, there can be no moral justifica-
tion for refusing to take that suffering into consider-
ation. No matter what the nature of the being, the
principle of equality requires that its suffering be
counted equally with the like suffering— in so far as
rough comparisons can be made— of any other being.
If a being is not capable of suffering, or of experiencing
enjoyment or happiness, there is nothing to be taken
into account. This is why the limit of sentience (using
the term as a convenient, if not strictly accurate, short-
hand for the capacity to suffer or experience enjoy-
ment or happiness) is the only defensible boundary
of concern for the interests of others. To mark this
boundary by some characteristic like intelligence or
rationality would be to mark it in an arbitrary way.
Why not choose some other characteristic, like skin
color?
The racist violates the principle of equality by giv-
ing greater weight to the interests of members of his
own race, when there is a clash between their interests
and the interests of those of another race. Similarly
the speciesist allows the interests of his own species to
override the greater interests of members of other spe-
cies. The pattern is the same in each case. Most human
beings are speciesists. I shall now very briefly describe
some of the practices that show this.
For the great majority of human beings, especially
in urban, industrialized societies, the most direct form
equal consideration— although they cannot agree on
how this requirement is best formulated.
It is an implication of this principle of equality
that our concern for others ought not to depend on
what they are like, or what abilities they possess—
although precisely what this concern requires us to
do may vary according to the characteristics of those
affected by what we do. It is on this basis that the case
against racism and the case against sexism must both
ultimately rest; and it is in accordance with this prin-
ciple that speciesism is also to be condemned. If pos-
sessing a higher degree of intelligence does not entitle
one human to use another for his own ends, how can
it entitle humans to exploit non- humans?
Many philosophers have proposed the principle
of equal consideration of interests, in some form or
other, as a basic moral principle; but, as we shall see
in more detail shortly, not many of them have recog-
nised that this principle applies to members of other
species as well as to our own. Bentham was one of the
few who did realize this. In a forward- looking pas-
sage, written at a time when black slaves in the Brit-
ish dominions were still being treated much as we now
treat non- human animals, Bentham wrote:
The day may come when the rest of the animal cre-
ation may acquire those rights which never could
have been witholden from them but by the hand of
tyranny. The French have already discovered that the
blackness of the skin is no reason why a human being
should be abandoned without redress to the caprice of
a tormentor. It may one day come to be recognised that
the number of the legs, the villosity of the skin, or the
termination of the os sacrum, are reasons equally insuf-
ficient for abandoning a sensitive being to the same
fate. What else is it that should trace the insuperable
line? Is it the faculty of reason, or perhaps the faculty
of discourse? But a full- grown horse or dog is beyond
comparison a more rational, as well as a more convers-
able animal, than an infant of a day, or a week, or even
a month, old. But suppose they were otherwise, what
would it avail? The question is not, Can they reason?
nor Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?2
In this passage Bentham points to the capacity for
suffering as the vital characteristic that gives a being
the right to equal consideration. The capacity for

388 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
animals are comparable to dogs in intelligence, and
need a varied, stimulating environment if they are not
to suffer from stress and boredom. Anyone who kept a
dog in the way in which pigs are frequently kept would
be liable to prosecution, in England at least, but because
our interest in exploiting pigs is greater than our inter-
est in exploiting dogs, we object to cruelty to dogs while
consuming the produce of cruelty to pigs. Of the other
animals, the condition of veal calves is perhaps worst of
all, since these animals are so closely confined that they
cannot even turn around or get up and lie down freely.
In this way they do not develop unpalatable muscle.
They are also made anaemic and kept short of rough-
age, to keep their flesh pale, since white veal fetches a
higher price; as a result they develop a craving for iron
and roughage, and have been observed to gnaw wood
off the sides of their stalls, and lick greedily at any rusty
hinge that is within reach.
Since, as I have said, none of these practices cater
for anything more than our pleasures of taste, our prac-
tice of rearing and killing other animals in order to
eat them is a clear instance of the sacrifice of the most
important interests of other beings in order to satisfy
trivial interests of our own. To avoid speciesism we
must stop this practice, and each of us has a moral obli-
gation to cease supporting the practice. Our custom
is all the support that the meat- industry needs. The
decision to cease giving it that support may be diffi-
cult, but it is no more difficult than it would have been
for a white Southerner to go against the traditions of
his society and free his slaves; if we do not change our
dietary habits, how can we censure those slaveholders
who would not change their own way of living?
The same form of discrimination may be observed
in the widespread practice of experimenting on other
species in order to see if certain substances are safe for
human beings, or to test some psychological theory
about the effect of severe punishment on learning, or to
try out various new compounds just in case something
turns up. People sometimes think that all this experi-
mentation is for vital medical purposes, and so will
reduce suffering overall. This comfortable belief is very
wide of the mark. Drug companies test new shampoos
and cosmetics that they are intending to put on the
market by dropping them into the eyes of rabbits, held
of contact with members of other species is at meal-
times: we eat them. In doing so we treat them purely as
means to our ends. We regard their life and well- being
as subordinate to our taste for a particular kind of dish.
I say “taste” deliberately— this is purely a matter of
pleasing our palate. There can be no defence of eating
flesh in terms of satisfying nutritional needs, since it
has been established beyond doubt that we could sat-
isfy our need for protein and other essential nutrients
far more efficiently with a diet that replaced animal
flesh by soy beans, or products derived from soy beans,
and other high- protein vegetable products.3
It is not merely the act of killing that indicates
what we are ready to do to other species in order to
gratify our tastes. The suffering we inflict on the ani-
mals while they are alive is perhaps an even clearer
indication of our speciesism than the fact that we
are prepared to kill them.4 In order to have meat on
the table at a price that people can afford, our society
tolerates methods of meat production that confine
sentient animals in cramped, unsuitable conditions
for the entire durations of their lives. Animals are
treated like machines that convert fodder into flesh,
and any innovation that results in a higher “conver-
sion ratio” is liable to be adopted. As one authority on
the subject has said, “cruelty is acknowledged only
when profitability ceases.”5 So hens are crowded four
or five to a cage with a floor area of twenty inches by
eighteen inches, or around the size of a single page of
the New York Times. The cages have wire floors, since
this reduces cleaning costs, though wire is unsuitable
for the hens’ feet; the floors slope, since this makes
the eggs roll down for easy collection, although this
makes it difficult for the hens to rest comfortably. In
these conditions all the birds’ natural instincts are
thwarted: they cannot stretch their wings fully, walk
freely, dust- bathe, scratch the ground, or build a nest.
Although they have never known other conditions,
observers have noticed that the birds vainly try to per-
form these actions. Frustrated at their inability to do
so, they often develop what farmers call “vices,” and
peck each other to death. To prevent this, the beaks of
young birds are often cut off.
This kind of treatment is not limited to poultry. Pigs
are now also being reared in cages inside sheds. These

CHAPTER 12: AnImAL WELfARE Á 389
members of other species are very real. This is, again,
a clear indication of speciesism.
In the past, argument about vivesection has often
missed this point, because it has been put in absolut-
ist terms: would the abolitionist be prepared to let
thousands die if they could be saved by experiment-
ing on a single animal? The way to reply to this purely
hypothetical question is to pose another: would the
experimenter be prepared to perform his experiment
on an orphaned human infant, if that were the only
way to save many lives? (I say “orphan” to avoid the
complication of parental feelings, although in doing
so I am being overfair to the experimenter, since the
nonhuman subjects of experiments are not orphans.)
If the experimenter is not prepared to use an orphaned
human infant, then his readiness to use nonhumans is
simple discrimination, since adult apes, cats, mice and
other mammals are more aware of what is happening
to them, more self- directing and, so far as we can tell,
at least as sensitive to pain, as any human infant. There
seems to be no relevant characteristic that human
infants possess that adult mammals do not have to
the same or a higher degree. (Someone might try to
argue that what makes it wrong to experiment on a
human infant is that the infant will, in time and if
left alone, develop into more than the nonhuman,
but one would then, to be consistent, have to oppose
abortion, since the fetus has the same potential as the
infant— indeed, even contraception and abstinence
might be wrong on this ground, since the egg and
sperm, considered jointly, also have the same poten-
tial. In any case, this argument still gives us no reason
for selecting a nonhuman, rather than a human with
severe and irreversible brain damage, as the subject for
our experiments.)
The experimenter, then, shows a bias in favor of
his own species whenever he carries out an experi-
ment on a nonhuman for a purpose that he would not
think justified him in using a human being at an equal
or lower level of sentience, awareness, ability to be self-
directing, etc. No one familiar with the kind of results
yielded by most experiments on animals can have
the slightest doubt that if this bias were eliminated
the number of experiments performed would be a
minute fraction of the number performed today.
open by metal clips, in order to observe what damage
results. Food additives, like artificial colorings and pre-
servatives, are tested by what is known as the “LD50”—a
test designed to find the level of consumption at which
50% of a group of animals will die. In the process,
nearly all of the animals are made very sick before some
finally die, and others pull through. If the substance is
relatively harmless, as it often is, huge doses have to be
force- fed to the animals, until in some cases sheer vol-
ume or concentration of the substance causes death.
Much of this pointless cruelty goes on in the uni-
versities. In many areas of science, non- human ani-
mals are regarded as an item of laboratory equipment,
to be used and expended as desired. In psychology
laboratories experimenters devise endless variations
and repetitions of experiments that were of little value
in the first place. To quote just one example, from the
experimenter’s own account in a psychology journal:
at the University of Pennsylvania, Perrin S. Cohen
hung six dogs in hammocks with electrodes taped to
their hind feet. Electric shock of varying intensity
was then administered through the electrodes. If the
dog learnt to press its head against a panel on the left,
the shock was turned off, but otherwise it remained on
indefinitely. Three of the dogs, however, were required
to wait periods varying from 2 to 7 seconds while
being shocked before making the response that turned
off the current. If they failed to wait, they received
further shocks. Each dog was given from 26 to 46
“ sessions” in the hammock, each session consisting
of 80 “trials” or shocks, administered at intervals of
one minute. The experimenter reported that the dogs,
who were unable to move in the hammock, barked
or bobbed their heads when the current was applied.
The reported findings of the experiment were that
there was a delay in the dogs’ responses that increased
proportionately to the time the dogs were required to
endure the shock, but a gradual increase in the inten-
sity of the shock had no systematic effect in the timing
of the response. The experiment was funded by the
National Institutes of Health, and the United States
Public Health Service.
In this example, and countless cases like it, the
possible benefits to mankind are either nonexistent
or fantastically remote; while the certain losses to

390 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
of philosophy to challenge accepted beliefs. Still, phi-
losophers have found it difficult to discuss the issue
of human equality without raising, in a paragraph or
two, the question of the status of other animals. The
reason for this, which should be apparent from what
I have said already, is that if humans are to be regarded
as equal to one another, we need some sense of “equal”
that does not require any actual, descriptive equality of
capacities, talents or other qualities. If equality is to be
related to any actual characteristics of humans, these
characteristics must be some lowest common denomi-
nator, pitched so low that no human lacks them— but
then the philosopher comes up against the catch that
any such set of characteristics which covers all humans
will not be possessed only by humans. In other words, it
turns out that in the only sense in which we can truly
say, as an assertion of fact, that all humans are equal,
at least some members of other species are also equal—
equal, that is, to each other and to humans. If, on the
other hand, we regard the statement “All humans are
equal” in some non- factual way, perhaps as a prescrip-
tion, then, as I have already argued, it is even more
difficult to exclude non- humans from the sphere of
equality.
This result is not what the egalitarian philosopher
originally intended to assert. Instead of accepting
the radical outcome to which their own reasonings
naturally point, however, most philosophers try to
reconcile their beliefs in human equality and animal
inequality by arguments that can only be described as
devious.
As a first example, I take William Frankena’s
well- known article “The Concept of Social Justice.”
Frankena opposes the idea of basing justice on merit,
because he sees that this could lead to highly inegali-
tarian results. Instead he proposes the principle that:
. . . all men are to be treated as equals, not because
they are equal, in any respect but simply because they
are human. They are human because they have emo-
tions and desires, and are able to think, and hence are
capable of enjoying a good life in a sense in which other
animals are not.6
But what is this capacity to enjoy the good life
which all humans have, but no other animals? Other
Experimenting on animals, and eating their flesh,
are perhaps the two major forms of speciesism in our
society. By comparison, the third and last form of
speciesism is so minor as to be insignificant, but it is
perhaps of some special interest to those for whom
this paper was written. I am referring to speciesism in
contemporary philosophy.
Philosophy ought to question the basic assump-
tions of the age. Thinking through, critically and care-
fully, what most people take for granted is, I believe,
the chief task of philosophy, and it is this task that
makes philosophy a worthwhile activity. Regrettably,
philosophy does not always live up to its historic role.
Philosophers are human beings and they are subject
to all the preconceptions of the society to which they
belong. Sometimes they succeed in breaking free of
the prevailing ideology: more often they become its
most sophisticated defenders. So, in this case, phi-
losophy as practiced in the universities today does not
challenge anyone’s preconceptions about our rela-
tions with other species. By their writings, those phi-
losophers who tackle problems that touch upon the
issue reveal that they make the same unquestioned
assumptions as most other humans, and what they say
tends to confirm the reader in his or her comfortable
speciesist habits.
I could illustrate this claim by referring to the writ-
ings of philosophers in various fields— for instance,
the attempts that have been made by those interested
in rights to draw the boundary of the sphere of rights
so that it runs parallel to the biological boundaries of
the species homo sapiens, including infants and even
mental defectives, but excluding those other beings
of equal or greater capacity who are so useful to us at
mealtimes and in our laboratories. I think it would
be a more appropriate conclusion to this paper, how-
ever, if I concentrated on the problem with which
we have been centrally concerned, the problem of
equality.
It is significant that the problem of equality, in
moral and political philosophy, is invariably formu-
lated in terms of human equality. The effect of this is
that the question of the equality of other animals does
not confront the philosopher, or student, as an issue in
itself— and this is already an indication of the failure

CHAPTER 12: AnImAL WELfARE Á 391
goes back to both classical and Judeo- Christian
doctrines. Contemporary philosophers have cast
off these metaphysical and religious shackles and
freely invoke the dignity of mankind without need-
ing to justify the idea at all. Why should we not
attribute “intrinsic dignity” or “intrinsic worth”
to ourselves? Fellow- humans are unlikely to reject
the accolades we so generously bestow on them,
and those to whom we deny the honor are unable
to object. Indeed, when one thinks only of humans,
it can be very liberal, very progressive, to talk of the
dignity of all human beings. In so doing, we implic-
itly condemn slavery, racism, and other violations
of human rights. We admit that we ourselves are in
some fundamental sense on a par with the poor-
est, most ignorant members of our own species. It
is only when we think of humans as no more than
a small sub- group of all the beings that inhabit our
planet that we may realize that in elevating our own
species we are at the same time lowering the relative
status of all other species.
The truth is that the appeal to the intrinsic dig-
nity of human beings appears to solve the egalitarian’s
problems only as long as it goes unchallenged. Once
we ask why it should be that all humans— including
infants, mental defectives, psychopaths, Hitler, Stalin
and the rest— have some kind of dignity or worth that
no elephant, pig or chimpanzee can ever achieve, we
see that this question is as difficult to answer as our
original request for some relevant fact that justifies
the inequality of humans and other animals. In fact,
these two questions are really one: talk of intrinsic
dignity or moral worth only takes the problem back
one step, because any satisfactory defence of the
claim that all and only humans have intrinsic dig-
nity would need to refer to some relevant capacities
or characteristics that all and only humans possess.
Philosophers frequently introduce ideas of dignity,
respect and worth at the point at which other reasons
appear to be lacking, but this is hardly good enough.
Fine phrases are the last resource of those who have
run out of arguments.
In case there are those who still think it may be
possible to find some relevant characteristic that dis-
tinguishes all humans from all members of other
animals have emotions and desires, and appear to
be capable of enjoying a good life. We may doubt
that they can think— although the behavior of some
apes, dolphins and even dogs suggests that some of
them can— but what is the relevance of thinking?
Frankena goes on to admit that by “the good life”
he means “not so much the morally good life as the
happy or satisfactory life,” so thought would appear
to be unnecessary for enjoying the good life; in fact
to emphasise the need for thought would make diffi-
culties for the egalitarian since only some people are
capable of leading intellectually satisfying lives—
or morally good lives. This makes it difficult to see
what Frankena’s principle of equality has to do with
simply being human. Surely every sentient being is
capable of leading a life that is happier or less misera-
ble than some alternative life, and hence has a claim
to be taken into account. In this respect the distinc-
tion between humans and non- humans is not a
sharp division, but rather a continuum along which
we move gradually, and with overlaps between the
species, from simple capacities for enjoyment and
satisfaction, or pain and suffering, to more complex
ones.
Faced with a situation in which they see a need
for some basis for the moral gulf that is commonly
thought to separate humans and animals, but can find
no concrete difference that will do the job without
undermining the equality of humans, philosophers
tend to waffle. They resort to high- sounding phrases
like “the intrinsic dignity of the human individual”;7
they talk of the “intrinsic worth of all men” as if men
(humans?) had some worth that other beings did not,8
or they say that humans, and only humans, are “ends
in themselves,” while “everything other than a person
can only have value for a person.”9
This idea of a distinctive human dignity and
worth has a long history; it can be traced back
directly to the Renaissance humanists, for instance
to Pico della Mirandola’s Oration on the Dignity of
Man. Pico and other humanists based their estimate
of human dignity on the idea that man possessed
the central, pivotal position in the “Great Chain of
Being” that led from the lowliest forms of matter
to God himself; this view of the universe, in turn,

392 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
may be, it would be a monstrous sentimentality to
attribute to him interests that could be weighed in
an equal balance with those of human beings . . .
if, for instance, one had to decide between feeding
a hungry baby or a hungry dog, anyone who chose
the dog would generally be reckoned morally defec-
tive, unable to recognize a fundamental inequality
of claims.
This is what distinguishes our attitude to animals
from our attitude to imbeciles. It would be odd to say
that we ought to respect equally the dignity or per-
sonality of the imbecile and of the rational man . . .
but there is nothing odd about saying that we should
respect their interests equally, that is, that we should
give to the interests of each the same serious consider-
ation as claims to considerations necessary for some
standard of well- being that we can recognize and
endorse.
Benn’s statement of the basis of the consider-
ation we should have for imbeciles seems to me
correct, but why should there be any fundamental
inequality of claims between a dog and a human
imbecile? Benn sees that if equal consideration
depended on rationality, no reason could be given
against using imbeciles for research purposes, as we
now use dogs and guinea pigs. This will not do: “But
of course we do distinguish imbeciles from animals
in this regard,” he says. That the common distinc-
tion is justifiable is something Benn does not ques-
tion; his problem is how it is to be justified. The
answer he gives is this:
. . . we respect the interests of men and give them pri-
ority over dogs not insofar as they are rational, but
because rationality is the human norm. We say it is
unfair to exploit the deficiencies of the imbecile who
falls short of the norm, just as it would be unfair,
and not just ordinarily dishonest, to steal from a
blind man. If we do not think in this way about
dogs, it is because we do not see the irrationality of
the dog as a deficiency or a handicap, but as normal
for the species. The characteristics, therefore, that
distinguish the normal man from the normal dog
make it intelligible for us to talk of other men hav-
ing interests and capacities, and therefore claims,
of precisely the same kind as we make on our own
behalf. But although these characteristics may pro-
species, I shall refer again, before I conclude, to the
existence of some humans who quite clearly are below
the level of awareness, self- consciousness, intelli-
gence, and sentience, of many non- humans. I am
thinking of humans with severe and irreparable brain
damage, and also of infant humans. To avoid the com-
plication of the relevance of a being’s potential, how-
ever, I shall henceforth concentrate on permanently
retarded humans.
Philosophers who set out to find a characteris-
tic that will distinguish humans from other animals
rarely take the course of abandoning these groups
of humans by lumping them in with the other ani-
mals. It is easy to see why they do not. To take this
line without re- thinking our attitudes to other ani-
mals would entail that we have the right to perform
painful experiments on retarded humans for trivial
reasons; similarly it would follow that we had the
right to rear and kill these humans for food. To most
philosophers these consequences are as unacceptable
as the view that we should stop treating non- humans
in this way.
Of course, when discussing the problem of
equality it is possible to ignore the problem of
mental defectives, or brush it aside as if somehow
insignificant. This is the easiest way out. What else
remains? My final example of speciesism in contem-
porary philosophy has been selected to show what
happens when a writer is prepared to face the ques-
tion of human equality and animal inequality with-
out ignoring the existence of mental defectives, and
without resorting to obscurantist mumbo- jumbo.
Stanley Benn’s clear and honest article “Egalitarian-
ism and Equal Consideration of Interests”10 fits this
description.
Benn after noting the usual “evident human
inequalities” argues, correctly I think, for equality of
consideration as the only possible basis for egalitari-
anism. Yet Benn, like other writers, is thinking only
of “equal consideration of human interests.” Benn is
quite open in his defence of this restriction of equal
consideration:
. . . not to possess human shape is a disqualifying
condition. However faithful or intelligent a dog

CHAPTER 12: AnImAL WELfARE Á 393
rigid division in the amount of consideration due to
members of different species, despite admitted cases
of overlap. If the original did not, at first reading
strike us as being as outrageous as the revised version
does, this is largely because although we are not rac-
ists ourselves, most of us are speciesists. Like the other
articles, Benn’s stands as a warning of the ease with
which the best minds can fall victim to a prevailing
ideology.
NOTES
1. The Methods of Ethics (7th Ed.) p. 382.
2. Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation,
ch. XVII.
3. In order to produce 1 lb. of protein in the form of beef or
veal, we must feed 21 lbs. of protein to the animal. Other
forms of livestock are slightly less inefficient, but the aver-
age ratio in the U.S. is still 1:8. It has been estimated that the
amount of protein lost to humans in this way is equivalent to
90% of the annual world protein deficit.
4. Although one might think that killing a being is obviously
the ultimate wrong one can do to it, I think that the inflic-
tion of suffering is a clearer indication of speciesism because
it might be argued that at least part of what is wrong with kill-
ing a human is that most humans are conscious of their exis-
tence over time, and have desires and purposes that extend
into the future. Of course, if one took this view one would
have to hold that killing a human infant or mental defective
is not in itself wrong, and is less serious than killing certain
higher mammals that probably do have a sense of their own
existence over time.
5. Ruth Harrison, Animal Machines (Stuart, London, 1964).
6. In R. Brandt (ed.) Social Justice (Prentice Hall, Englewood
Cliffs, 1962): the passage quoted appears on p. 19.
7. Frankena, op. cit., p. 23.
8. H. A. Bedau, “Egalitarianism and the Idea of Equality” in
Nomos IX: Equality, ed. J. R. Pennock and J. W. Chapman,
New York, 1967.
9. G. Vlastos, “Justice and Equality” in Brandt. Social Justice,
p. 48.
10. Nomos IX: Equality: the passages quoted are on p. 62ff.
vide the point of the distinction between men and
other species, they are not in fact the qualifying
conditions for membership, or the distinguishing
criteria of the class of morally considerable persons;
and this is precisely because a man does not become
a member of a different species, with its own stan-
dards of normality, by reason of not possessing these
characteristics.
The final sentence of this passage gives the argu-
ment away. An imbecile, Benn concedes, may have
no characteristics superior to those of a dog; never-
theless this does not make the imbecile a member of
“a different species” as the dog is. Therefore it would
be “unfair” to use the imbecile for medical research
as we use the dog. But why? That the imbecile is not
rational is just the way things have worked out, and
the same is true of the dog— neither is any more
responsible for their mental level. If it is unfair to take
advantage of an isolated defect, why is it fair to take
advantage of a more general limitation? I find it hard
to see anything in this argument except a defence of
preferring the interests of members of our own spe-
cies because they are members of our own species.
To those who think there might be more to it, I sug-
gest the following mental exercise. Assume that it has
been proven that there is a difference in the average,
or normal, intelligence quotient for two different
races, say whites and blacks. Then substitute the term
“white” for every occurrence of “men” and “black”
for every occurrence of “dog” in the passage quoted;
and substitute “high I.Q.” for “rationality” and when
Benn talks of “imbeciles” replace this term by “dumb
whites”—that is, whites who fall well below the
normal white I.Q. score. Finally, change “species”
to “race.” Now re- read the passage. It has become a
defence of a rigid, no- exceptions division between
whites and blacks, based on I.Q. scores, not withstand-
ing an admitted overlap between whites and blacks in
this respect. The revised passage is, of course, outra-
geous, and this not only because we have made fic-
titious assumptions in our substitutions. The point
is that in the original passage Benn was defending a

394 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
The Case for Animal Rights
Tom Regan
our resources— the rest is as predictable as it is regret-
table. Why worry about their loneliness, their pain,
their death? Since animals exist for us, to benefit
us in one way or another, what harms them really
doesn’t matter— or matters only if it starts to bother
us, makes us feel a trifle uneasy when we eat our veal
escalope, for example. So, yes, let us get veal calves
out of solitary confinement, give them more space,
a little straw, a few companions. But let us keep our
veal escalope.
But a little straw, more space and a few compan-
ions won’t eliminate— won’t even touch— the basic
wrong that attaches to our viewing and treating these
animals as our resources. A veal calf killed to be eaten
after living in close confinement is viewed and treated
in this way: but so, too, is another who is raised (as
they say) ‘more humanely’. To right the wrong of our
treatment of farm animals requires more than making
rearing methods ‘more humane’; it requires the total
dissolution of commercial animal agriculture.
How we do this, whether we do it or, as in the case
of animals in science, whether and how we abolish
their use— these are to a large extent political ques-
tions. People must change their beliefs before they
change their habits. Enough people, especially those
elected to public office, must believe in change—
must want it— before we will have laws that protect
the rights of animals. This process of change is very
complicated, very demanding, very exhausting, call-
ing for the efforts of many hands in education, pub-
licity, political organization and activity, down to
the licking of envelopes and stamps. As a trained and
practising philosopher, the sort of contribution I can
make is limited but, I like to think, important. The
currency of philosophy is ideas— their meaning and
rational foundation— not the nuts and bolts of the
legislative process, say, or the mechanics of commu-
nity organization. That’s what I have been exploring
over the past ten years or so in my essays and talks and,
most recently, in my book, The Case for Animal Rights.
I believe the major conclusions I reach in the book are
I regard myself as an advocate of animal rights— as a
part of the animal rights movement. That movement,
as I conceive it, is committed to a number of goals,
including:
• the total abolition of the use of animals in science;
• the total dissolution of commercial animal agri-
culture;
• the total elimination of commercial and sport
hunting and trapping.
There are, I know, people who profess to believe in
animal rights but do not avow these goals. Factory
farming, they say, is wrong— it violates animals’
rights— but traditional animal agriculture is all right.
Toxicity tests of cosmetics on animals violates their
rights, but important medical research— cancer
research, for example— does not. The clubbing of baby
seals is abhorrent, but not the harvesting of adult seals.
I used to think I understood this reasoning. Not any
more. You don’t change unjust institutions by tidying
them up.
What’s wrong— fundamentally wrong— with the
way animals are treated isn’t the details that vary from
case to case. It’s the whole system. The forlornness of
the veal calf is pathetic, heart wrenching; the pulsing
pain of the chimp with electrodes planted deep in her
brain is repulsive; the slow, tortuous death of the rac-
coon caught in the leg- hold trap is agonizing. But what
is wrong isn’t the pain, isn’t the suffering, isn’t the depri-
vation. These compound what’s wrong. Sometimes—
often— they make it much, much worse. But they are
not the fundamental wrong.
The fundamental wrong is the system that allows
us to view animals as our resources, here for us— to be
eaten, or surgically manipulated, or exploited for sport
or money. Once we accept this view of animals— as
Tom Regan, “The Case for Animal Rights” from In Defense of Ani-
mals, edited by Peter Singer (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985), 13–26.
Copyright © 1985 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Reproduced with
permission of John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

CHAPTER 12: AnImAL WELfARE Á 395
true because they are supported by the weight of the
best arguments. I believe the idea of animal rights has
reason, not just emotion, on its side.
In the space I have at my disposal here I can only
sketch, in the barest outline, some of the main features
of the book. [Its] main themes— and we should not be
surprised by this— involve asking and answering deep,
foundational moral questions about what morality
is, how it should be understood and what is the best
moral theory, all considered. I hope I can convey
something of the shape I think this theory takes. The
attempt to do this will be (to use a word a friendly critic
once used to describe my work) cerebral, perhaps too
cerebral. But this is misleading. My feelings about how
animals are sometimes treated run just as deep and
just as strong as those of my more volatile compatriots.
Philosophers do— to use the jargon of the day— have a
right side to their brains. If it’s the left side we contrib-
ute (or mainly should), that’s because what talents we
have reside there.
How to proceed? We begin by asking how the
moral status of animals has been understood by think-
ers who deny that animals have rights. Then we test
the mettle of their ideas by seeing how well they stand
up under the heat of fair criticism. If we start our think-
ing in this way, we soon find that some people believe
that we have no duties directly to animals, that we owe
nothing to them, that we can do nothing that wrongs
them. Rather, we can do wrong acts that involve ani-
mals, and so we have duties regarding them, though
none to them. Such views may be called indirect duty
views. By way of illustration: suppose your neighbour
kicks your dog. Then your neighbour has done some-
thing wrong. But not to your dog. The wrong that has
been done is a wrong to you. After all, it is wrong to
upset people, and your neighbour’s kicking your dog
upsets you. So you are the one who is wronged, not
your dog. Or again: by kicking your dog your neigh-
bour damages your property. And since it is wrong to
damage another person’s property, your neighbour
has done something wrong— to you, of course, not to
your dog. Your neighbour no more wrongs your dog
than your car would be wronged if the windshield
were smashed. Your neighbour’s duties involving your
dog are indirect duties to you. More generally, all of
our duties regarding animals are indirect duties to one
another— to humanity.
How could someone try to justify such a view?
Someone might say that your dog doesn’t feel anything
and so isn’t hurt by your neighbour’s kick, doesn’t
care about the pain since none is felt, is as unaware of
anything as is your windshield. Someone might say
this, but no rational person will, since, among other
considerations, such a view will commit anyone who
holds it to the position that no human being feels pain
either— that human beings also don’t care about what
happens to them. A second possibility is that though
both humans and your dog are hurt when kicked, it is
only human pain that matters. But, again, no rational
person can believe this. Pain is pain wherever it occurs.
If your neighbour’s causing you pain is wrong because
of the pain that is caused, we cannot rationally ignore
or dismiss the moral relevance of the pain that your
dog feels.
Philosophers who hold indirect duty views—
and many still do— have come to understand that
they must avoid the two defects just noted: that is,
both the view that animals don’t feel anything as
well as the idea that only human pain can be mor-
ally relevant. Among such thinkers the sort of view
now favoured is one or other form of what is called
contractarianism.
Here, very crudely, is the root idea: morality con-
sists of a set of rules that individuals voluntarily agree
to abide by, as we do when we sign a contract (hence
the name contractrarianism). Those who understand
and accept the terms of the contract are covered
directly; they have rights created and recognized by,
and protected in, the contract. And these contractors
can also have protection spelled out for others who,
though they lack the ability to understand morality
and so cannot sign the contract themselves, are loved
or cherished by those who can. Thus young children,
for example, are unable to sign contracts and lack
rights. But they are protected by the contract none
the less because of the sentimental interests of others,
most notably their parents. So we have, then, duties
involving these children, duties regarding them, but
no duties to them. Our duties in their case are indirect
duties to other human beings, usually their parents.

396 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
breath away . . . as if, for example, there would be noth-
ing wrong with apartheid in South Africa if few white
South Africans were upset by it. A theory with so little
to recommend it at the level of the ethics of our treat-
ment of our fellow humans cannot have anything
more to recommend it when it comes to the ethics of
how we treat our fellow animals.
The version of contractarianism just examined is,
as I have noted, a crude variety, and in fairness to those
of a contractarian persuasion it must be noted that
much more refined, subtle and ingenious varieties are
possible. For example, John Rawls, in his A Theory of
Justice, sets forth a version of contractarianism that
forces contractors to ignore the accidental features
of being a human being— for example, whether one
is white or black, male or female, a genius or of mod-
est intellect. Only by ignoring such features, Rawls
believes, can we ensure that the principles of justice
that contractors would agree upon are not based on
bias or prejudice. Despite the improvement a view such
as Rawls’s represents over the cruder forms of contrac-
tarianism, it remains deficient: it systematically denies
that we have direct duties to those human beings who
do not have a sense of justice— young children, for
instance, and many mentally retarded humans. And
yet it seems reasonably certain that, were we to torture
a young child or a retarded elder, we would be doing
something that wronged him or her, not something
that would be wrong if (and only if) other humans
with a sense of justice were upset. And since this is
true in the case of these humans, we cannot rationally
deny the same in the case of animals.
Indirect duty views, then, including the best
among them, fail to command our rational assent.
Whatever ethical theory we should accept rationally,
therefore, it must at least recognize that we have some
duties directly to animals, just as we have some duties
directly to each other. The next two theories I’ll sketch
attempt to meet this requirement.
The first I call the cruelty- kindness view. Simply
stated, this says that we have a direct duty to be kind
to animals and a direct duty not to be cruel to them.
Despite the familiar, reassuring ring of these ideas, I do
not believe that this view offers an adequate theory.
To make this clearer, consider kindness. A kind person
As for animals, since they cannot understand
contracts, they obviously cannot sign; and since they
cannot sign, they have no rights. Like children, how-
ever, some animals are the objects of the sentimental
interest of others. You, for example, love your dog or
cat. So those animals that enough people care about
(companion animals, whales, baby seals, the Ameri-
can bald eagle), though they lack rights themselves,
will be protected because of the sentimental interests
of people. I have, then, according to contractarian-
ism, no duty directly to your dog or any other animal,
not even the duty not to cause them pain or suffer-
ing; my duty not to hurt them is a duty I have to those
people who care about what happens to them. As for
other animals, where no or little sentimental interest
is present— in the case of farm animals, for example,
or laboratory rats— what duties we have grow weaker
and weaker, perhaps to vanishing point. The pain and
death they endure, though real, are not wrong if no
one cares about them.
When it comes to the moral status of animals’
contractarianism could be a hard view to refute if it
were an adequate theoretical approach to the moral
status of human beings. It is not adequate in this latter
respect, however, which makes the question of its ade-
quacy in the former case, regarding animals, utterly
moot. For consider: morality, according to the (crude)
contractarian position before us, consists of rules that
people agree to abide by. What people? Well, enough
to make a difference— enough, that is, collectively to
have the power to enforce the rules that are drawn up
in the contract. That is very well and good for the sig-
natories but not so good for anyone who is not asked
to sign. And there is nothing in contractarianism of
the sort we are discussing that guarantees or requires
that everyone will have a chance to participate equally
in framing the rules of morality. The result is that this
approach to ethics could sanction the most blatant
forms of social, economic, moral and political injus-
tice, ranging from a repressive caste system to system-
atic racial or sexual discrimination. Might, according
to this theory, does make right. Let those who are the
victims of injustice suffer as they will. It matters not
so long as no one else— no contractor, or too few of
them— cares about it. Such a theory takes one’s moral

CHAPTER 12: AnImAL WELfARE Á 397
be affected, and where the best results are most likely
to lie— which option, in other words, is most likely to
bring about the best results, the best balance between
satisfaction and frustration. That option, whatever it
may be, is the one I ought to choose. That is where my
moral duty lies.
The great appeal of utilitarianism rests with its
uncompromising egalitarianism: everyone’s interests
count and count as much as the like interests of every-
one else. The kind of odious discrimination that some
forms of contractarianism can justify— discrimination
based on race or sex, for example— seems disallowed in
principle by utilitarianism, as is speciesism, systematic
discrimination based on species membership.
The equality we find in utilitarianism, however,
is not the sort an advocate of animal or human rights
should have in mind. Utilitarianism has no room for
the equal moral rights of different individuals because
it has no room for their equal inherent value or worth.
What has value for the utilitarian is the satisfaction
of an individual’s interests, not the individual whose
interests they are. A universe in which you satisfy your
desire for water, food and warmth is, other things
being equal, better than a universe in which these
desires are frustrated. And the same is true in the case
of an animal with similar desires. But neither you nor
the animal have any value in your own right. Only
your feelings do.
Here is an analogy to help make the philosophical
point clearer: a cup contains different liquids, some-
times sweet, sometimes bitter, sometimes a mix of the
two. What has value are the liquids: the sweeter the
better, the bitterer the worse. The cup, the container,
has no value. It is what goes into it, not what they go
into, that has value. For the utilitarian you and I are
like the cup; we have no value as individuals and thus
no equal value. What has value is what goes into us,
what we serve as receptacles for; our feelings of satis-
faction have positive value, our feelings of frustration
negative value.
Serious problems arise for utilitarianism when
we remind ourselves that it enjoins us to bring about
the best consequences. What does this mean? It
doesn’t mean the best consequences for me alone, or
for my family or friends, or any other person taken
acts from a certain kind of motive— compassion or
concern, for example. And that is a virtue. But there
is no guarantee that a kind act is a right act. If I am a
generous racist, for example, I will be inclined to act
kindly towards members of my own race, favouring
their interests above those of others. My kindness
would be real and, so far as it goes, good. But I trust
it is too obvious to require argument that my kind
acts may not be above moral reproach— may, in fact,
be positively wrong because rooted in injustice. So
kindness, notwithstanding its status as a virtue to be
encouraged, simply will not carry the weight of a the-
ory of right action.
Cruelty fares no better. People or their acts are
cruel if they display either a lack of sympathy for or,
worse, the presence of enjoyment in another’s suf-
fering. Cruelty in all its guises is a bad thing, a tragic
human failing. But just as a person’s being moti-
vated by kindness does not guarantee that he or she
does what is right, so the absence of cruelty does not
ensure that he or she avoids doing what is wrong.
Many people who perform abortions, for example, are
not cruel, sadistic people. But that fact alone does not
settle the terribly difficult question of the morality of
abortion. The case is no different when we examine
the ethics of our treatment of animals. So, yes, let us be
for kindness and against cruelty. But let us not suppose
that being for the one and against the other answers
questions about moral right and wrong.
Some people think that the theory we are looking
for is utilitarianism. A utilitarian accepts two moral
principles. The first is that of equality: everyone’s
interests count, and similar interests must be counted
as having similar weight or importance. White or
black, American or Iranian, human or animal—
everyone’s pain or frustration matter, and matter just
as much as the equivalent pain or frustration of any-
one else. The second principle a utilitarian accepts is
that of utility: do the act that will bring about the best
balance between satisfaction and frustration for every-
one affected by the outcome.
As a utilitarian, then, here is how I am to approach
the task of deciding what I morally ought to do: I must
ask who will be affected if I choose to do one thing
rather than another, how much each individual will

398 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
wrong? Anything immoral? One would have thought
that I had. Not according to utilitarianism. Since
what I have done has brought about the best bal-
ance between totalled satisfaction and frustration for
all those affected by the outcome, my action is not
wrong. Indeed, in killing Aunt Bea the physician and
I did what duty required.
This same kind of argument can be repeated in
all sorts of cases, illustrating, time after time, how the
utilitarian’s position leads to results that impartial
people find morally callous. It is wrong to kill my Aunt
Bea in the name of bringing about the best results for
others. A good end does not justify an evil means. Any
adequate moral theory will have to explain why this is
so. Utilitarianism fails in this respect and so cannot be
the theory we seek.
What to do? Where to begin anew? The place
to begin, I think, is with the utilitarian’s view of
the value of the individual— or, rather, lack of value.
In its place, suppose we consider that you and I, for
example, do have value as individuals— what we’ll
call inherent value. To say we have such value is to
say that we are something more than, something
different from, mere receptacles. Moreover, to ensure
that we do not pave the way for such injustices as
slavery or sexual discrimination, we must believe
that all who have inherent value have it equally,
regardless of their sex, race, religion, birthplace
and so on. Similarly to be discarded as irrelevant
are one’s talents or skills, intelligence and wealth,
personality or pathology, whether one is loved and
admired or despised and loathed. The genius and
the retarded child, the prince and the pauper, the
brain surgeon and the fruit vendor, Mother Teresa
and the most unscrupulous used- car salesman— all
have inherent value, all possess it equally, and all
have an equal right to be treated with respect, to
be treated in ways that do not reduce them to the
status of things, as if they existed as resources for
others. My value as an individual is independent
of my usefulness to you. Yours is not dependent on
your usefulness to me. For either of us to treat the
other in ways that fail to show respect for the other’s
independent value is to act immorally, to violate the
individual’s rights.
individually. No, what we must do is, roughly, as fol-
lows: we must add up (somehow!) the separate satisfac-
tions and frustrations of everyone likely to be affected
by our choice, the satisfactions in one column, the
frustrations in the other. We must total each column
for each of the options before us. That is what it means
to say the theory is aggregative. And then we must
choose that option which is most likely to bring about
the best balance of totalled satisfactions over totalled
frustrations. Whatever act would lead to this outcome
is the one we ought morally to perform— it is where
our moral duty lies. And that act quite clearly might
not be the same one that would bring about the best
results for me personally, or for my family or friends,
or for a lab animal. The best aggregated consequences
for everyone concerned are not necessarily the best for
each individual.
That utilitarianism is an aggregative theory—
different individuals’ satisfactions or frustrations are
added, or summed, or totalled— is the key objection to
their theory. My Aunt Bea is old, inactive, a cranky, sour
person, though not physically ill. She prefers to go on
living. She is also rather rich. I could make a fortune if I
could get my hands on her money, money she intends
to give me in any event, after she dies, but which she
refuses to give me now. In order to avoid a huge tax bite,
I plan to donate a handsome sum of my profits to a local
children’s hospital. Many, many children will benefit
from my generosity, and much joy will be brought to
their parents, relatives and friends. If I don’t get the
money rather soon, all these ambitions will come to
naught. The once- in- a- lifetime opportunity to make a
real killing will be gone. Why, then, not kill my Aunt
Bea? Oh, of course I might get caught. But I’m no fool
and besides, her doctor can be counted on to co- operate
(he has an eye for the same investment and I happen
to know a good deal about his shady past). The deed
can be done . . . professionally, shall we say. There is
very little chance of getting caught. And as for my con-
science being guilt- ridden, I am a resourceful sort of
fellow and will take more than sufficient comfort— as I
lie on the beach at Acapulco— in contemplating the joy
and health I have brought to so many others.
Suppose Aunt Bea is killed and the rest of the
story comes out as told. Would I have done anything

CHAPTER 12: AnImAL WELfARE Á 399
individuals. As the same is true of those animals that
concern us (the ones that are eaten and trapped, for
example), they too must be viewed as the experienc-
ing subjects of a life, with inherent value of their own.
Some there are who resist the idea that animals
have inherent value. ‘Only humans have such value,’
they profess. How might this narrow view be defended?
Shall we say that only humans have the requisite intel-
ligence, or autonomy, or reason? But there are many,
many humans who fail to meet these standards and
yet are reasonably viewed as having value above and
beyond their usefulness to others. Shall we claim that
only humans belong to the right species, the species
Homo sapiens? But this is blatant speciesism. Will it be
said, then, that all— and only— humans have immor-
tal souls? Then our opponents have their work cut out
for them. I am myself not ill- disposed to the proposi-
tion that there are immortal souls. Personally, I pro-
foundly hope I have one. But I would not want to rest
my position on a controversial ethical issue on the even
more controversial question about who or what has an
immortal soul. That is to dig one’s hole deeper, not to
climb out. Rationally, it is better to resolve moral issues
without making more controversial assumptions than
are needed. The question of who has inherent value is
such a question, one that is resolved more rationally
without the introduction of the idea of immortal souls
than by its use.
Well, perhaps some will say that animals have some
inherent value, only less than we have. Once again,
however, attempts to defend this view can be shown to
lack rational justification. What could be the basis of
our having more inherent value than animals? Their
lack of reason, or autonomy, or intellect? Only if we
are willing to make the same judgement in the case of
humans who are similarly deficient. But it is not true
that such humans— the retarded child, for example, or
the mentally deranged— have less inherent value than
you or I. Neither, then, can we rationally sustain the
view that animals like them in being the experiencing
subjects of a life have less inherent value. All who have
inherent value have it equally, whether they be human
animals or not.
Inherent value, then, belongs equally to those
who are the experiencing subjects of a life. Whether
Some of the rational virtues of this view— what
I call the rights view— should be evident. Unlike (crude)
contractarianism, for example, the rights view in prin-
ciple denies the moral tolerability of any and all forms
of racial, sexual or social discrimination; and unlike
utilitarianism, this view in principle denies that we can
justify good results by using evil means that violate an
individual’s rights— denies, for example, that it could
be moral to kill my Aunt Bea to harvest beneficial con-
sequences for others. That would be to sanction the
disrespectful treatment of the individual in the name
of the social good, something the rights view will not—
categorically will not— ever allow.
The rights view, I believe, is rationally the most sat-
isfactory moral theory. It surpasses all other theories
in the degree to which it illuminates and explains the
foundation of our duties to one another— the domain
of human morality. On this score it has the best rea-
sons, the best arguments, on its side. Of course, if it
were possible to show that only human beings are
included within its scope, then a person like myself,
who believes in animal rights, would be obliged to
look elsewhere.
But attempts to limit its scope to humans only can
be shown to be rationally defective. Animals, it is true,
lack many of the abilities humans possess. They can’t
read, do higher mathematics, build a bookcase or make
baba ghanoush. Neither can many human beings, how-
ever, and yet we don’t (and shouldn’t) say that they
(these humans) therefore have less inherent value,
less of a right to be treated with respect, than do oth-
ers. It is the similarities between those human beings
who most clearly, most non- controversially have such
value (the people reading this, for example), not our
differences, that matter most. And the really crucial,
the basic similarity is simply this: we are each of us
the experiencing subject of a life, a conscious creature
having an individual welfare that has importance to
us whatever our usefulness to others. We want and
prefer things, believe and feel things, recall and expect
things. And all these dimensions of our life, including
our pleasure and pain, our enjoyment and suffering,
our satisfaction and frustration, our continued exis-
tence or our untimely death— all make a difference to
the quality of our life as lived, as experienced, by us as

400 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
systematically as if their value were reducible to their
usefulness to others, they are routinely, systematically
treated with a lack of respect, and thus are their rights
routinely, systematically violated. This is just as true
when they are used in trivial, duplicative, unnecessary
or unwise research as it is when they are used in studies
that hold out real promise of human benefits. We can’t
justify harming or killing a human being (my Aunt
Bea, for example) just for these sorts of reason. Neither
can we do so even in the case of so lowly a creature as
a laboratory rat. It is not just refinement or reduction
that is called for, not just larger, cleaner cages, not just
more generous use of anaesthetic or the elimination
of multiple surgery, not just tidying up the system. It
is complete replacement. The best we can do when it
comes to using animals in science is— not to use them.
That is where our duty lies, according to the rights
view.
As for commercial animal agriculture, the rights
view takes a similar abolitionist position. The funda-
mental moral wrong here is not that animals are kept
in stressful close confinement or in isolation, or that
their pain and suffering, their needs and preferences
are ignored or discounted. All these are wrong, of
course, but they are not fundamentally wrong. They
are symptoms and effects of the deeper, systematic
wrong that allows these animals to be viewed and
treated as lacking independent value, as resources for
us— as, indeed, a renewable resource. Giving farm ani-
mals more space, more natural environments, more
companions does not right the fundamental wrong,
any more than giving lab animals more anaesthesia
or bigger, cleaner cages would right the fundamental
wrong in their case. Nothing less than the total disso-
lution of commercial animal agriculture will do this,
just as, for similar reasons I won’t develop at length
here, morality requires nothing less than the total
elimination of hunting and trapping for commercial
and sporting ends. The rights view’s implications,
then, as I have said, are clear and uncompromising.
My last two points are about philosophy, my pro-
fession. It is, most obviously, no substitute for politi-
cal action. The words I have written here and in other
places by themselves don’t change a thing. It is what
we do with the thoughts that the words express— our
it belongs to others— to rocks and rivers, trees and gla-
ciers, for example— we do not know and may never
know. But neither do we need to know, if we are to
make the case for animal rights. We do not need
to know, for example, how many people are eligible
to vote in the next presidential election before we can
know whether I am. Similarly, we do not need to know
how many individuals have inherent value before we
can know that some do. When it comes to the case for
animal rights, then, what we need to know is whether
the animals that, in our culture, are routinely eaten,
hunted and used in our laboratories, for example,
are like us in being subjects of a life. And we do know
this. We do know that many— literally, billions and
billions— of these animals are the subjects of a life in
the sense explained and so have inherent value if we
do. And since, in order to arrive at the best theory of
our duties to one another, we must recognize our equal
inherent value as individuals, reason— not sentiment,
not emotion— reason compels us to recognize the
equal inherent value of these animals and, with this,
their equal right to be treated with respect.
That, very roughly, is the shape and feel of the case
for animal rights. Most of the details of the support-
ing argument are missing. They are to be found in the
book to which I alluded earlier. Here, the details go
begging, and I must, in closing, limit myself to four
final points.
The first is how the theory that underlies the case
for animal rights shows that the animal rights move-
ment is a part of, not antagonistic to, the human rights
movement. The theory that rationally grounds the
rights of animals also grounds the rights of humans.
Thus those involved in the animal rights movement
are partners in the struggle to secure respect for
human rights— the rights of women, for example, or
minorities, or workers. The animal rights movement is
cut from the same moral cloth as these.
Second, having set out the broad outlines of the
rights view, I can now say why its implications for
farming and science, among other fields, are both clear
and uncompromising. In the case of the use of animals
in science, the rights view is categorically abolition-
ist. Lab animals are not our tasters; we are not their
kings. Because these animals are treated routinely,

CHAPTER 12: AnImAL WELfARE Á 401
disciplined passion. Of the discipline enough has been
seen. As for the passion: there are times, and these not
infrequent, when tears come to my eyes when I see, or
read, or hear of the wretched plight of animals in the
hands of humans. Their pain, their suffering, their
loneliness, their innocence, their death. Anger. Rage.
Pity. Sorrow. Disgust. The whole creation groans under
the weight of the evil we humans visit upon these mute,
powerless creatures. It is our hearts, not just our heads,
that call for an end to it all, that demand of us that
we overcome, for them, the habits and forces behind
their systematic oppression. All great movements, it is
written, go through three stages: ridicule, discussion,
adoption. It is the realization of this third stage, adop-
tion, that requires both our passion and our discipline,
our hearts and our heads. The fate of animals is in our
hands. God grant we are equal to the task.
acts, our deeds— that changes things. All that philoso-
phy can do, and all I have attempted, is to offer a vision
of what our deeds should aim at. And the why. But not
the how.
Finally, I am reminded of my thoughtful critic, the
one I mentioned earlier, who chastised me for being
too cerebral. Well, cerebral I have been: indirect duty
views, utilitarianism, contractarianism— hardly the
stuff deep passions are made of. I am also reminded,
however, of the image another friend once set before
me— the image of the ballerina as expressive of disci-
plined passion. Long hours of sweat and toil, of loneli-
ness and practice, of doubt and fatigue: those are the
discipline of her craft. But the passion is there too, the
fierce drive to excel, to speak through her body, to do
it right, to pierce our minds. That is the image of phi-
losophy I would leave with you, not ‘too cerebral’ but
Difficulties with the Strong Animal Rights Position
Mary Anne Warren
the scope of the rights claim to include all sentient
animals, that is, all those capable of having experi-
ences, including experiences of pleasure or satisfac-
tion and pain, suffering, or frustration.2 However, I do
not think that the moral rights of most non- human
animals are identical in strength to those of persons.3
The rights of most non- human animals may be over-
ridden in circumstances which would not justify over-
riding the rights of persons. There are, for instance,
compelling realities which sometimes require that we
kill animals for reasons which could not justify the
killing of persons. I will call this view “the weak ani-
mal rights” position, even though it ascribes rights to
a wider range of animals than does the strong animal
rights position.
I will begin by summarizing Regan’s case for the
strong animal rights position and noting two prob-
lems with it. Next, I will explore some consequences
of the strong animal rights position which I think are
unacceptable. Finally, I will outline the case for the
weak animal rights position.
Tom Regan has produced what is perhaps the defini-
tive defense of the view that the basic moral rights of
at least some non- human animals are in no way infe-
rior to our own. In The Case for Animal Rights, he argues
that all normal mammals over a year of age have the
same basic moral rights.1 Non- human mammals have
essentially the same right not to be harmed or killed as
we do. I shall call this “the strong animal rights posi-
tion,” although it is weaker than the claims made by
some animal liberationists in that it ascribes rights to
only some sentient animals.
I will argue that Regan’s case for the strong ani-
mal rights position is unpersuasive and that this posi-
tion entails consequences which a reasonable person
cannot accept. I do not deny that some non- human
animals have moral rights; indeed, I would extend
Mary Anne Warren, “A Critique of Regan’s Animal Rights Theory,”
Between the Species Vol. 2, No. 4 (Fall 1987): 433–441. Reprinted
with permission from Between the Species.

402 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
In the third phase of the argument, Regan uses the
thesis of equal inherent value to derive strong moral
rights for all subjects- of- a- life. This thesis underlies
the Respect Principle, which forbids us to treat beings
who have inherent value as mere receptacles, i.e., mere
means to the production of the greatest overall good.
This principle, in turn, underlies the Harm Principle,
which says that we have a direct prima facie duty not to
harm beings who have inherent value. Together, these
principles give rise to moral rights. Rights are defined
as valid claims, claims to certain goods and against cer-
tain beings, i.e., moral agents. Moral rights generate
duties not only to refrain from inflicting harm upon
beings with inherent value but also to come to their
aid when they are threatened by other moral agents.
Rights are not absolute but may be overridden in cer-
tain circumstances. Just what these circumstances are
we will consider later. But first, let’s look at some dif-
ficulties in the theory as thus far presented.
THE MYSTERY OF INHERENT VALUE
Inherent value is a key concept in Regan’s theory. It
is the bridge between the plausible claim that all nor-
mal, mature mammals— human or otherwise— are
subjects- of- a- life and the more debatable claim that
they all have basic moral rights of the same strength.
But it is a highly obscure concept, and its obscurity
makes it ill- suited to play this crucial role.
Inherent value is defined almost entirely in nega-
tive terms. It is not dependent upon the value which
either the inherently valuable individual or anyone
else may place upon that individual’s life or experi-
ences. It is not (necessarily) a function of sentience or
any other mental capacity, because, Regan says, some
entities which are not sentient (e.g., trees, rivers, or
rocks) may, nevertheless, have inherent value (p. 246).
It cannot attach to anything other than an individual;
species, eco- systems, and the like cannot have inher-
ent value.
These are some of the things which inherent value
is not. But what is it? Unfortunately, we are not told.
Inherent value appears as a mysterious non- natural
property which we must take on faith. Regan says that
it is a postulate that subjects- of- a- life have inherent
REGAN’S CASE
Regan’s argument moves through three stages. First,
he argues that normal, mature mammals are not only
sentient but have other mental capacities as well.
These include the capacities for emotion, memory,
belief, desire, the use of general concepts, intentional
action, a sense of the future, and some degree of self-
awareness. Creatures with such capacities are said to
be subjects- of- a- life. They are not only alive in the
biological sense but have a psychological identity over
time and an existence which can go better or worse for
them. Thus, they can be harmed or benefited. These
are plausible claims, and well defended. One of the
strongest parts of the book is the rebuttal of philoso-
phers, such as R. G. Frey, who object to the application
of such mentalistic terms to creatures that do not use a
human- style language. The second and third stages of
the argument are more problematic.
In the second stage, Regan argues that subjects-
of- a- life have inherent value. His concept of inherent
value grows out of his opposition to utilitarianism.
Utilitarian moral theory, he says, treats individuals
as “mere receptacles” for morally significant value, in
that harm to one individual may be justified by the
production of a greater net benefit to other individu-
als. In opposition to this, he holds that subjects- of- a-
life have a value independent of both the value they
may place upon their lives or experiences and the
value others may place upon them.
Inherent value, Regan argues, does not come in
degrees. To hold that some individuals have more
inherent value than others is to adopt a “perfection-
ist” theory, i.e., one which assigns different moral
worth to individuals according to how well they are
thought to exemplify some virtue(s), such as intel-
ligence or moral autonomy. Perfectionist theories
have been used, at least since the time of Aristotle, to
rationalize such injustices as slavery and male domi-
nation, as well as the unrestrained exploitation of ani-
mals. Regan argues that if we reject these injustices,
then we must also reject perfectionism and conclude
that all subjects- of- a- life have equal inherent value.
Moral agents have no more inherent value than moral
patients, i.e., subjects- of- a- life who are not morally
responsible for their actions.

CHAPTER 12: AnImAL WELfARE Á 403
Regan’s theory requires us to divide all living things
into two categories: those which have the same inher-
ent value and the same basic moral rights that we do,
and those which have no inherent value and presum-
ably no moral rights. But wherever we try to draw the
line, such a sharp division is implausible.
It would surely be arbitrary to draw such a sharp
line between normal, mature mammals and all other
living things. Some birds (e.g., crows, magpies, parrots,
mynahs) appear to be just as mentally sophisticated as
most mammals and thus are equally strong candidates
for inclusion under the subject- of- a- life criterion.
Regan is not in fact advocating that we draw the line
here. His claim is only that normal mature mammals
are clear cases, while other cases are less clear. Yet, on
his theory, there must be such a sharp line somewhere,
since there are no degrees of inherent value. But why
should we believe that there is a sharp line between
creatures that are subjects- of- a- life and creatures that
are not? Isn’t it more likely that “subjecthood” comes
in degrees, that some creatures have only a little self-
awareness, and only a little capacity to anticipate the
future, while some have a little more, and some a good
deal more?
Should we, for instance, regard fish, amphibians,
and reptiles as subjects- of- a- life? A simple yes- or- no
answer seems inadequate. On the one hand, some
of their behavior is difficult to explain without the
assumption that they have sensations, beliefs, desires,
emotions, and memories; on the other hand, they do
not seem to exhibit very much self- awareness or very
much conscious anticipation of future events. Do
they have enough mental sophistication to count as
subjects- of- a- life? Exactly how much is enough?
It is still more unclear what we should say about
insects, spiders, octopi, and other invertebrate ani-
mals which have brains and sensory organs but whose
minds (if they have minds) are even more alien to us
than those of fish or reptiles. Such creatures are prob-
ably sentient. Some people doubt that they can feel
pain, since they lack certain neurological structures
which are crucial to the processing of pain impulses
in vertebrate animals. But this argument is inconclusive,
since their nervous systems might process pain in ways
different from ours. When injured, they sometimes
value, a postulate justified by the fact that it avoids
certain absurdities which he thinks follow from a
purely utilitarian theory (p. 247). But why is the pos-
tulate that subjects- of- a- life have inherent value? If the
inherent value of a being is completely independent of
the value that it or anyone else places upon its experi-
ences, then why does the fact that it has certain sorts
of experiences constitute evidence that it has inherent
value? If the reason is that subjects- of- a- life have an
existence which can go better or worse for them, then
why isn’t the appropriate conclusion that all sentient
beings have inherent value, since they would all seem
to meet that condition? Sentient but mentally unso-
phisticated beings may have a less extensive range of
possible satisfactions and frustrations, but why should
it follow that they have— or may have— no inherent
value at all?
In the absence of a positive account of inher-
ent value, it is also difficult to grasp the connection
between being inherently valuable and having moral
rights. Intuitively, it seems that value is one thing,
and rights are another. It does not seem incoherent
to say that some things (e.g., mountains, rivers, red-
wood trees) are inherently valuable and yet are not the
sorts of things which can have moral rights. Nor does
it seem incoherent to ascribe inherent value to some
things which are not individuals, e.g., plant or animal
species, though it may well be incoherent to ascribe
moral rights to such things.
In short, the concept of inherent value seems to
create at least as many problems as it solves. If inherent
value is based on some natural property, then why not
try to identify that property and explain its moral sig-
nificance, without appealing to inherent value? And
if it is not based on any natural property, then why
should we believe in it? That it may enable us to avoid
some of the problems faced by the utilitarian is not a
sufficient reason, if it creates other problems which are
just as serious.
IS THERE A SHARP LINE?
Perhaps the most serious problems are those that arise
when we try to apply the strong animal rights posi-
tion to animals other than normal, mature mammals.

404 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
the continuum of life forms— this time, a line demar-
cating the limits of the benefit of the doubt principle.
The weak animal rights theory provides a more
plausible way of dealing with this range of cases, in
that it allows the rights of animals of different kinds to
vary in strength. . . .
* * *
WHY ARE ANIMAL RIGHTS WEAKER THAN
HUMAN RIGHTS?
How can we justify regarding the rights of persons as
generally stronger than those of sentient beings which
are not persons? There are a plethora of bad justifica-
tions, based on religious premises or false or unprov-
able claims about the differences between human and
non- human nature. But there is one difference which
has a clear moral relevance: people are at least some-
times capable of being moved to action or inaction
by the force of reasoned argument. Rationality rests
upon other mental capacities, notably those which
Regan cites as criteria for being a subject- of- a- life. We
share these capacities with many other animals. But
it is not just because we are subjects- of- a- life that we
are both able and morally compelled to recognize one
another as beings with equal basic moral rights. It is
also because we are able to “listen to reason” in order
to settle our conflicts and cooperate in shared projects.
This capacity, unlike the others, may require some-
thing like a human language.
Why is rationality morally relevant? It does not
make us “better” than other animals or more “per-
fect.” It does not even automatically make us more
intelligent. (Bad reasoning reduces our effective intel-
ligence rather than increasing it.) But it is morally
relevant insofar as it provides greater possibilities
for cooperation and for the nonviolent resolution of
problems. It also makes us more dangerous than non-
rational beings can ever be. Because we are potentially
more dangerous and less predictable than wolves, we
need an articulated system of morality to regulate our
conduct. Any human morality, to be workable in the
long run, must recognize the equal moral status of
all persons, whether through the postulate of equal
act as if they are in pain. On evolutionary grounds,
it seems unlikely that highly mobile creatures with
complex sensory systems would not have developed a
capacity for pain (and pleasure), since such a capacity
has obvious survival value. It must, however, be admit-
ted that we do not know whether spiders can feel pain
(or something very like it), let alone whether they have
emotions, memories, beliefs, desires, self- awareness,
or a sense of the future.
Even more mysterious are the mental capacities (if
any) of mobile microfauna. The brisk and efficient way
that paramecia move about in their incessant search
for food might indicate some kind of sentience, in spite
of their lack of eyes, ears, brains, and other organs asso-
ciated with sentience in more complex organisms. It is
conceivable— though not very probable— that they,
too, are subjects- of- a- life.
The existence of a few unclear cases need not
pose a serious problem for a moral theory, but in
this case, the unclear cases constitute most of those
with which an adequate theory of animal rights
would need to deal. The subject- of- a- life criterion
can provide us with little or no moral guidance in
our interactions with the vast majority of animals.
That might be acceptable if it could be supplemented
with additional principles which would provide such
guidance. However, the radical dualism of the theory
precludes supplementing it in this way. We are forced
to say that either a spider has the same right to life as
you and I do, or it has no right to life whatever— and
that only the gods know which of these alternatives
is true.
Regan’s suggestion for dealing with such unclear
cases is to apply the “benefit of the doubt” principle.
That is, when dealing with beings that may or may
not be subjects- of- a- life, we should act as if they are.
But if we try to apply this principle to the entire range
of doubtful cases, we will find ourselves with moral
obligations which we cannot possibly fulfill. In many
climates, it is virtually impossible to live without swat-
ting mosquitoes and exterminating cockroaches,
and not all of us can afford to hire someone to sweep
the path before we walk, in order to make sure that
we do not step on ants. Thus, we are still faced with the
daunting task of drawing a sharp line somewhere on

CHAPTER 12: AnImAL WELfARE Á 405
theory of the sort Aristotle endorsed. There is no
excuse for refusing to recognize the moral equality of
some people on the grounds that we don’t regard them
as quite as rational as we are, since it is perfectly clear
that most people can reason well enough to determine
how to act so as to respect the basic rights of others (if
they choose to), and that is enough for moral equality.
But what about people who are clearly not ratio-
nal? It is often argued that sophisticated mental
capacities such as rationality cannot be essential for
the possession of equal basic moral rights, since nearly
everyone agrees that human infants and mentally
incompetent persons have such rights, even though
they may lack those sophisticated mental capacities.
But this argument is inconclusive, because there are
powerful practical and emotional reasons for pro-
tecting non- rational human beings, reasons which
are absent in the case of most non- human animals.
Infancy and mental incompetence are human condi-
tions which all of us either have experienced or are
likely to experience at some time. We also protect
babies and mentally incompetent people because we
care for them. We don’t normally care for animals in
the same way, and when we do— e.g., in the case of
much- loved pets— we may regard them as having spe-
cial rights by virtue of their relationship to us. We pro-
tect them not only for their sake but also for our own,
lest we be hurt by harm done to them. Regan holds
that such “ side- effects” are irrelevant to moral rights,
and perhaps they are. But in ordinary usage, there is
no sharp line between moral rights and those moral
protections which are not rights. The extension of
strong moral protections to infants and the mentally
impaired in no way proves that non- human animals
have the same basic moral rights as people.
WHY SPEAK OF “ANIMAL RIGHTS” AT ALL?
If, as I have argued, reality precludes our treating
all animals as our moral equals, then why should
we still ascribe rights to them? Everyone agrees
that animals are entitled to some protection against
human abuse, but why speak of animal rights if we
are not prepared to accept most animals as our moral
equals? The weak animal rights position may seem
basic moral rights or in some other way. The recog-
nition of the moral equality of other persons is the
price we must each pay for their recognition of our
moral equality. Without this mutual recognition of
moral equality, human society can exist only in a state
of chronic and bitter conflict. The war between the
sexes will persist so long as there is sexism and male
domination; racial conflict will never be eliminated so
long as there are racist laws and practices. But to the
extent that we achieve a mutual recognition of equal-
ity, we can hope to live together, perhaps as peacefully
as wolves, achieving (in part) through explicit moral
principles what they do not seem to need explicit
moral principles to achieve.
Why not extend this recognition of moral equal-
ity to other creatures, even though they cannot do the
same for us? The answer is that we cannot. Because
we cannot reason with most non- human animals,
we cannot always solve the problems which they
may cause without harming them— although we are
always obligated to try. We cannot negotiate a treaty
with the feral cats and foxes, requiring them to stop
preying on endangered native species in return for
suitable concessions on our part.
if rats invade our houses . . . we cannot reason with
them, hoping to persuade them of the injustice they do
us. We can only attempt to get rid of them.4
Aristotle was not wrong in claiming that the capac-
ity to alter one’s behavior on the basis of reasoned
argument is relevant to the full moral status which he
accorded to free men. Of course, he was wrong in his
other premise, that women and slaves by their nature
cannot reason well enough to function as autonomous
moral agents. Had that premise been true, so would
his conclusion that women and slaves are not quite
the moral equals of free men. In the case of most non-
human animals, the corresponding premise is true. If,
on the other hand, there are animals with whom we
can (learn to) reason, then we are obligated to do this
and to regard them as our moral equals.
Thus, to distinguish between the rights of persons
and those of most other animals on the grounds that
only people can alter their behavior on the basis of rea-
soned argument does not commit us to a perfectionist

406 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
nearly all significant moral claims tend to be expressed
in terms of rights. Thus, the denial that animals have
rights, however carefully qualified, is likely to be taken
to mean that we may do whatever we like to them, pro-
vided that we do not violate any human rights. In such
a context, speaking of the rights of animals may be the
only way to persuade many people to take seriously
protests against the abuse of animals.
Why not extend this line of argument and speak
of the rights of trees, mountains, oceans, or anything
else which we may wish to see protected from destruc-
tion? Some environmentalists have not hesitated to
speak in this way, and, given the importance of pro-
tecting such elements of the natural world, they can-
not be blamed for using this rhetorical device. But,
I would argue that moral rights can meaningfully be
ascribed only to entities which have some capacity
for sentience. This is because moral rights are protec-
tions designed to protect rights holders from harms or
to provide them with benefits which matter to them.
Only beings capable of sentience can be harmed or
benefited in ways which matter to them, for only such
beings can like or dislike what happened to them or
prefer some conditions to others. Thus, sentient ani-
mals, unlike mountains, rivers, or species, are at least
logically possible candidates for moral rights. This
fact, together with the need to end current abuses
of animals— e.g., in scientific research . . . provides a
plausible case for speaking of animal rights.
CONCLUSION
I have argued that Regan’s case for ascribing strong
moral rights to all normal, mature mammals is unper-
suasive because (1) it rests upon the obscure concept
of inherent value, which is defined only in nega-
tive terms, and (2) it seems to preclude any plausible
answer to questions about the moral status of the vast
majority of sentient animals. . . .
The weak animal rights theory asserts that (1) any
creature whose natural mode of life includes the pur-
suit of certain satisfactions has the right not to be
forced to exist without the opportunity to pursue
those satisfactions; (2) that any creature which is
capable of pain, suffering, or frustration has the right
an unstable compromise between the bold claim
that animals have the same basic moral rights that
we do and the more common view that animals have
no rights at all.
It is probably impossible to either prove or disprove
the thesis that animals have moral rights by producing
an analysis of the concept of a moral right and check-
ing to see if some or all animals satisfy the conditions
for having rights. The concept of a moral right is com-
plex, and it is not clear which of its strands are essen-
tial. Paradigm rights holders, i.e., mature and mentally
competent persons, are both rational and morally
autonomous beings and sentient subjects- of- a- life.
Opponents of animal rights claim that rationality
and moral autonomy are essential for the possession
of rights, while defenders of animal rights claim that
they are not. The ordinary concept of a moral right is
probably not precise enough to enable us to determine
who is right on purely definitional grounds.
If logical analysis will not answer the question of
whether animals have moral rights, practical consid-
erations may, nevertheless, incline us to say that they
do. The most plausible alternative to the view that ani-
mals have moral rights is that, while they do not have
rights, we are, nevertheless, obligated not to be cruel
to them. Regan argues persuasively that the injunc-
tion to avoid being cruel to animals is inadequate to
express our obligations towards animals, because it
focuses on the mental states of those who cause ani-
mal suffering, rather than on the harm done to the
animals themselves (p. 158). Cruelty is inflicting pain
or suffering and either taking pleasure in that pain or
suffering or being more or less indifferent to it. Thus,
to express the demand for the decent treatment of ani-
mals in terms of the rejection of cruelty is to invite the
too easy response that those who subject animals to
suffering are not being cruel because they regret the
suffering they cause but sincerely believe that what
they do is justified. The injunction to avoid cruelty is
also inadequate in that it does not preclude the killing
of animals— for any reason, however trivial— so long
as it is done relatively painlessly.
The inadequacy of the anti- cruelty view provides
one practical reason for speaking of animal rights.
Another practical reason is that this is an age in which

CHAPTER 12: AnImAL WELfARE Á 407
2. The capacity for sentience, like all of the mental capacities
mentioned in what follows, is a disposition. Dispositions do
not disappear whenever they are not currently manifested.
Thus, sleeping or temporarily unconscious persons or non-
human animals are still sentient in the relevant sense (i.e.,
still capable of sentience), so long as they still have the
neurological mechanisms necessary for the occurrence of
experiences.
3. It is possible, perhaps probable, that some non- human
animals— such as cetaceans and anthropoid apes— should
be regarded as persons. If so, then the weak animal rights
position holds that these animals have the same basic moral
rights as human persons.
4. Bonnie Steinbock, “Speciesism and the Idea of Equality,”
Philosophy 53 (1978): 253.
that such experiences not be deliberately inflicted
upon it without some compelling reason; and (3) that
no sentient being should be killed without good rea-
son. However, moral rights are not an all- or- nothing
affair. The strength of the reasons required to override
the rights of a non- human organism varies, depend-
ing upon— among other things— the probability that
it is sentient and (if it is clearly sentient) its probable
degree of mental sophistication.
NOTES
1. Tom Regan, The Case for Animal Rights (Berkeley: Univer-
sity of California Press, 1983). All page references are to this
edition.
The Case for the Use of Animals in Biomedical Research
Carl Cohen
and so on. To comprehend any genuine right fully,
therefore, we must know who holds the right, against
whom it is held, and to what it is a right.
Alternative sources of rights add complexity. Some
rights are grounded in constitution and law (e.g.,
the right of an accused to trial by jury); some rights are
moral but give no legal claims (e.g., my right to your
keeping the promise you gave me); and some rights
(e.g., against theft or assault) are rooted both in morals
and in law.
The differing targets, contents, and sources of
rights, and their inevitable conflict, together weave a
tangled web. Notwithstanding all such complications,
this much is clear about rights in general: they are in
every case claims, or potential claims, within a com-
munity of moral agents. Rights arise, and can be intel-
ligibly defended, only among beings who actually do,
or can, make moral claims against one another. What-
ever else rights may be, therefore, they are necessarily
human; their possessors are persons, human beings.
The attributes of human beings from which this
moral capability arises have been described vari-
ously by philosophers, both ancient and modern: the
Using animals as research subjects in medical inves-
tigations is widely condemned on two grounds: first,
because it wrongly violates the rights of animals,1
and second, because it wrongly imposes on sentient
creatures much avoidable suffering.2 Neither of these
arguments is sound. The first relies on a mistaken
understanding of rights; the second relies on a mis-
taken calculation of consequences. Both deserve
definitive dismissal.
WHY ANIMALS HAVE NO RIGHTS
A right, properly understood, is a claim, or potential
claim, that one party may exercise against another.
The target against whom such a claim may be regis-
tered can be a single person, a group, a community, or
(perhaps) all humankind. The content of rights claims
also varies greatly: repayment of loans, nondiscrimi-
nation by employers, noninterference by the state,
Carl Cohen, “The Case for the Use of Animals in Biomedical
Research,” the New England Journal of Medicine 315 (October 2,
1986): 865–70. Copyright © 1986 Massachusetts Medical Society.
Reprinted with permission from Massachusetts Medical Society.

408 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
because they are alive and have interests, also possess
the “right to life”10 is an abuse of that phrase, and
wholly without warrant.
It does not follow from this, however, that we
are morally free to do anything we please to animals.
Certainly not. In our dealings with animals, as in our
dealings with other human beings, we have obliga-
tions that do not arise from claims against us based
on rights. Rights entail obligations, but many of the
things one ought to do are in no way tied to another’s
entitlement. Rights and obligations are not reciprocals
of one another, and it is a serious mistake to suppose
that they are.
Illustrations are helpful. Obligations may arise
from internal commitments made: physicians have
obligations to their patients not grounded merely
in their patients’ rights. Teachers have such obliga-
tions to their students, shepherds to their dogs, and
cowboys to their horses. Obligations may arise from
differences of status: adults owe special care when
playing with young children, and children owe spe-
cial care when playing with young pets. Obligations
may arise from special relationships: the payment
of my son’s college tuition is something to which he
may have no right, although it may be my obligation
to bear the burden if I reasonably can; my dog has no
right to daily exercise and veterinary care, but I do
have the obligation to provide these things for her.
Obligations may arise from particular acts or circum-
stances: one may be obliged to another for a special
kindness done, or obliged to put an animal out of its
misery in view of its condition— although neither the
human benefactor nor the dying animal may have
had a claim of right.
Plainly, the grounds of our obligations to humans
and to animals are manifold and cannot be formu-
lated simply. Some hold that there is a general obli-
gation to do no gratuitous harm to sentient creatures
(the principle of nonmaleficence); some hold that
there is a general obligation to do good to sentient
creatures when that is reasonably within one’s power
(the principle of beneficence). In our dealings with
animals, few will deny that we are at least obliged to
act humanely— that is, to treat them with the decency
and concern that we owe, as sensitive human beings,
inner consciousness of a free will (Saint Augustine3);
the grasp, by human reason, of the binding charac-
ter of moral law (Saint Thomas4); the self- conscious
participation of human beings in an objective ethi-
cal order (Hegel5); human membership in an organic
moral community (Bradley6); the development of the
human self through the consciousness of other moral
selves (Mead7); and the underivative, intuitive cogni-
tion of the rightness of an action (Prichard8). Most
influential has been Immanuel Kant’s emphasis on the
universal human possession of a uniquely moral will
and the autonomy its use entails.9 Humans confront
choices that are purely moral; humans— but certainly
not dogs or mice— lay down moral laws, for others and
for themselves. Human beings are self- legislative, mor-
ally auto- nomous.
Animals (that is, nonhuman animals, the ordi-
nary sense of that word) lack this capacity for free
moral judgment. They are not beings of a kind capable
of exercising or responding to moral claims. Animals
therefore have no rights, and they can have none. This
is the core of the argument about the alleged rights of
animals. The holders of rights must have the capac-
ity to comprehend rules of duty, governing all includ-
ing themselves. In applying such rules, the holders
of rights must recognize possible conflicts between
what is in their own interest and what is just. Only
in a community of beings capable of self- restricting
moral judgments can the concept of a right be cor-
rectly invoked.
Humans have such moral capacities. They are in
this sense self- legislative, are members of communities
governed by moral rules, and do possess rights. Ani-
mals do not have such moral capacities. They are not
morally self- legislative, cannot possibly be members of
a truly moral community, and therefore cannot pos-
sess rights. In conducting research on animal subjects,
therefore, we do not violate their rights, because they
have none to violate.
To animate life, even in its simplest forms, we
give a certain natural reverence. But the possession
of rights presupposes a moral status not attained by
the vast majority of living things. We must not infer,
therefore, that a live being has, simply in being alive,
a “right” to its life. The assertion that all animals, only

CHAPTER 12: AnImAL WELfARE Á 409
families and those of monkeys, or between human
communities and those of wolves, and the like, are
entirely beside the point. Patterns of conduct are
not at issue. Animals do indeed exhibit remarkable
behavior at times. Conditioning, fear, instinct, and
intelligence all contribute to species survival. Mem-
bership in a community of moral agents nevertheless
remains impossible for them. Actors subject to moral
judgment must be capable of grasping the generality
of an ethical premise in a practical syllogism. Humans
act immorally often enough, but only they— never
wolves or monkeys— can discern, by applying some
moral rule to the facts of a case, that a given act ought
or ought not to be performed. The moral restraints
imposed by humans on themselves are thus highly
abstract and are often in conflict with the self- interest
of the agent. Communal behavior among animals,
even when most intelligent and most endearing, does
not approach autonomous morality in this funda-
mental sense.
Genuinely moral acts have an internal as well as
an external dimension. Thus, in law, an act can be
criminal only when the guilty deed, the actus reus,
is done with a guilty mind, mens rea. No animal can
ever commit a crime; bringing animals to criminal
trial is the mark of primitive ignorance. The claims of
moral right are similarly inapplicable to them. Does a
lion have a right to eat a baby zebra? Does a baby zebra
have a right not to be eaten? Such questions, mistak-
enly invoking the concept of right where it does not
belong, do not make good sense. Those who condemn
biomedical research because it violates “animal rights”
commit the same blunder.
IN DEFENSE OF “SPECIESISM”
Abandoning reliance on animal rights, some critics
resort instead to animal sentience— their feelings of
pain and distress. We ought to desist from the imposi-
tion of pain insofar as we can. Since all or nearly all
experimentation on animals does impose pain and
could be readily forgone, say these critics, it should be
stopped. The ends sought may be worthy, but those
ends do not justify imposing agonies on humans, and
by animals the agonies are felt no less. The laboratory
to other sentient creatures. To treat animals humanely,
however, is not to treat them as humans or as the hold-
ers of rights.
A common objection, which deserves a response,
may be paraphrased as follows:
If having rights requires being able to make moral claims,
to grasp and apply moral laws, then many humans—
the brain- damaged, the comatose, the senile— who
plainly lack those capacities must be without rights.
But that is absurd. This proves [the critic concludes]
that rights do not depend on the presence of moral
capacities.1,10
This objection fails; it mistakenly treats an essen-
tial feature of humanity as though it were a screen for
sorting humans. The capacity for moral judgment that
distinguishes humans from animals is not a test to be
administered to human beings one by one. Persons
who are unable, because of some disability, to perform
the full moral functions natural to human beings are
certainly not for that reason ejected from the moral
community. The issue is one of kind. Humans are of
such a kind that they may be the subject of experi-
ments only with their voluntary consent. The choices
they make freely must be respected. Animals are of
such a kind that it is impossible for them, in princi-
ple, to give or withhold voluntary consent or to make
a moral choice. What humans retain when disabled,
animals have never had.
A second objection, also often made, may be para-
phrased as follows:
Capacities will not succeed in distinguishing humans
from the other animals. Animals also reason; ani-
mals also communicate with one another; animals
also care passionately for their young; animals also
exhibit desires and preferences.11,12 Features of moral
relevance— rationality, interdependence, and love—
are not exhibited uniquely by human beings. Therefore
[this critic concludes], there can be no solid moral dis-
tinction between humans and other animals.10
This criticism misses the central point. It is not
the ability to communicate or to reason, or depen-
dence on one another, or care for the young, or the
exhibition of preference, or any such behavior that
marks the critical divide. Analogies between human

410 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
such differences has led to outright horror. The same
is true of the sexes, neither sex being entitled by right
to greater respect or concern than the other. No dis-
pute here.
Between species of animate life, however—
between (for example) humans on the one hand and
cats or rats on the other— the morally relevant differ-
ences are enormous, and almost universally appreci-
ated. Humans engage in moral reflection; humans
are morally autonomous; humans are members of
moral communities, recognizing just claims against
their own interest. Human beings do have rights;
theirs is a moral status very different from that of
cats or rats.
I am a speciesist. Speciesism is not merely plausi-
ble: it is essential for right conduct, because those who
will not make the morally relevant distinctions among
species are almost certain, in consequence, to misap-
prehend their true obligations. The analogy between
speciesism and racism is insidious. Every sensitive
moral judgment requires that the differing natures of
the beings to whom obligations are owed be consid-
ered. If all forms of animate life— or vertebrate animal
life?—must be treated equally, and if therefore in eval-
uating a research program the pains of a rodent count
equally with the pains of a human, we are forced to
conclude (1) that neither humans nor rodents possess
rights, or (2) that rodents possess all the rights that
humans possess. Both alternatives are absurd. Yet one
or the other must be swallowed if the moral equality of
all species is to be defended.
Humans owe to other humans a degree of
moral regard that cannot be owed to animals. Some
humans take on the obligation to support and heal
others, both humans and animals, as a principal
duty in their lives; the fulfillment of that duty may
require the sacrifice of many animals. If biomedical
investigators abandon the effective pursuit of their
professional objectives because they are convinced
that they may not do to animals what the service
of humans requires, they will fail, objectively, to do
their duty. Refusing to recognize the moral differ-
ences among species is a sure path to calamity. (The
largest animal rights group in the country is People
for the Ethical Treatment of Animals; its codirector,
use of animals (these critics conclude) must therefore
be ended— or at least very sharply curtailed.
Argument of this variety is essentially utilitarian,
often expressly so13; it is based on the calculation of
the net product, in pains and pleasures, resulting from
experiments on animals. Jeremy Bentham, comparing
horses and dogs with other sentient creatures, is thus
commonly quoted: “The question is not, Can they rea-
son? nor Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?” 14
Animals certainly can suffer and surely ought
not to be made to suffer needlessly. But in inferring,
from these uncontroversial premises, that biomedical
research causing animal distress is largely (or wholly)
wrong, the critic commits two serious errors.
The first error is the assumption, often explic-
itly defended, that all sentient animals have equal
moral standing. Between a dog and a human being,
according to this view, there is no moral difference;
hence the pains suffered by dogs must be weighed
no differently from the pains suffered by humans.
To deny such equality, according to this critic, is to
give unjust preference to one species over another;
it is “speciesism.” The most influential statement
of this moral equality of species was made by Peter
Singer:
The racist violates the principle of equality by giving
greater weight to the interests of members of his own
race when there is a clash between their interests and
the interests of those of another race. The sexist vio-
lates the principle of equality by favoring the interests
of his own sex. Similarly the speciesist allows the inter-
ests of his own species to override the greater interests
of members of other species. The pattern is identical in
each case.2
This argument is worse than unsound; it is atro-
cious. It draws an offensive moral conclusion from a
deliberately devised verbal parallelism that is utterly
specious. Racism has no rational ground whatever.
Differing degrees of respect or concern for humans for
no other reason than that they are members of differ-
ent races is an injustice totally without foundation in
the nature of the races themselves. Racists, even if act-
ing on the basis of mistaken factual beliefs, do grave
moral wrong precisely because there is no morally rel-
evant distinction among the races. The supposition of

CHAPTER 12: AnImAL WELfARE Á 411
achievable in the future but that will not be achieved if
the decision is made now to desist from such research
or to curtail it.
Medical investigators are seldom insensitive to the
distress their work may cause animal subjects. Oppo-
nents of research using animals are frequently insensi-
tive to the cruelty of the results of the restrictions they
would impose.2 Untold numbers of human beings—
real persons, although not now identifiable— would
suffer grievously as the consequence of this well-
meaning but shortsighted tenderness. If the morally
relevant differences between humans and animals are
borne in mind, and if all relevant considerations are
weighed, the calculation of long- term consequences
must give overwhelming support for biomedical
research using animals.
CONCLUDING REMARKS
Substitution
The humane treatment of animals requires that we
desist from experimenting on them if we can accom-
plish the same result using alternative methods— in
vitro experimentation, computer simulation, or others.
Critics of some experiments using animals rightly
make this point.
It would be a serious error to suppose, however,
that alternative techniques could soon be used in
most research now using live animal subjects. No
other methods now on the horizon— or perhaps
ever to be available— can fully replace the testing of
a drug, a procedure, or a vaccine, in live organisms.
The flood of new medical possibilities being opened
by the successes of recombinant DNA technology
will turn to a trickle if testing on live animals is for-
bidden. When initial trials entail great risks, there
may be no forward movement whatever without the
use of live animal subjects. In seeking knowledge that
may prove critical in later clinical applications, the
unavailability of animals for inquiry may spell com-
plete stymie. In the United States, federal regulations
require the testing of new drugs and other products
on animals, for efficacy and safety, before human
beings are exposed to them.16,17 We would not want
it otherwise.
Ingrid Newkirk, calls research using animal subjects
“fascism” and “supremacism.” “Animal liberation-
ists do not separate out the human animal,” she says,
“so there is no rational basis for saying that a human
being has special rights. A rat is a pig is a dog is a boy.
They’re all mammals.”15)
Those who claim to base their objection to the use
of animals in biomedical research on their reckoning
of the net pleasures and pains produced make a sec-
ond error, equally grave. Even if it were true— as it is
surely not— that the pains of all animate beings must
be counted equally, a cogent utilitarian calculation
requires that we weigh all the consequences of the use,
and of the nonuse, of animals in laboratory research.
Critics relying (however mistakenly) on animal rights
may claim to ignore the beneficial results of such
research, rights being trump cards to which interest
and advantage must give way. But an argument that is
explicitly framed in terms of interest and benefit for all
over the long run must attend also to the disadvanta-
geous consequences of not using animals in research,
and to all the achievements attained and attainable
only through their use. The sum of the benefits of
their use is utterly beyond quantification. The elimi-
nation of horrible disease, the increase of longevity,
the avoidance of great pain, the saving of lives, and the
improvement of the quality of lives (for humans and
for animals) achieved through research using animals
is so incalculably great that the argument of these crit-
ics, systematically pursued, establishes not their con-
clusion but its reverse: to refrain from using animals in
biomedical research is, on utilitarian grounds, morally
wrong.
When balancing the pleasures and pains result-
ing from the use of animals in research, we must not
fail to place on the scales the terrible pains that would
have resulted, would be suffered now, and would long
continue had animals not been used. Every disease
eliminated, every vaccine developed, every method of
pain relief devised, every surgical procedure invented,
every prosthetic device implanted— indeed, virtually
every modern medical therapy is due, in part or in
whole, to experimentation using animals. Nor may we
ignore, in the balancing process, the predictable gains
in human (and animal) well- being that are probably

412 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
whereas access to appropriate animal subjects may
be awkward, costly, and burdened with red tape.
Physician- investigators have often had more expe-
rience working with human beings and know pre-
cisely where the needed pool of subjects is to be
found and how they may be enlisted. Animals, and
the procedures for their use, are often less familiar to
these investigators. Moreover, the use of animals in
place of humans is now more likely to be the target
of zealous protests from without. The upshot is that
humans are sometimes subjected to risks that ani-
mals could have borne, and should have borne, in
their place. To maximize the protection of human
subjects, I conclude, the wide and imaginative use
of live animal subjects should be encouraged rather
than discouraged. This enlargement in the use of
animals is our obligation.
Consistency
Finally, inconsistency between the profession and
the practice of many who oppose research using ani-
mals deserves comment. This frankly ad hominem
observation aims chiefly to show that a coherent posi-
tion rejecting the use of animals in medical research
imposes costs so high as to be intolerable even to the
critics themselves.
One cannot coherently object to the killing of ani-
mals in biomedical investigations while continuing
to eat them. Anesthetics and thoughtful animal hus-
bandry render the level of actual animal distress in the
laboratory generally lower than that in the abattoir. So
long as death and discomfort do not substantially dif-
fer in the two contexts, the consistent objector must
not only refrain from all eating of animals but also
protest as vehemently against others eating them as
against others experimenting on them. No less vigor-
ously must the critic object to the wearing of animal
hides in coats and shoes, to employment in any indus-
trial enterprise that uses animal parts, and to any com-
mercial development that will cause death or distress
to animals.
Killing animals to meet human needs for food,
clothing, and shelter is judged entirely reasonable
by most persons. The ubiquity of these uses and the
Every advance in medicine— every new drug,
new operation, new therapy of any kind— must
sooner or later be tried on a living being for the first
time. That trial, controlled or uncontrolled, will be
an experiment. The subject of that experiment, if it
is not an animal, will be a human being. Prohibit-
ing the use of live animals in biomedical research,
therefore, or sharply restricting it, must result either
in the blockage of much valuable research or in the
replacement of animal subjects with human sub-
jects. These are the consequences— unacceptable to
most reasonable persons— of not using animals in
research.
Reduction
Should we not at least reduce the use of animals in bio-
medical research? No, we should increase it, to avoid
when feasible the use of humans as experimental sub-
jects. Medical investigations putting human subjects
at some risk are numerous and greatly varied. The risks
run in such experiments are usually unavoidable, and
(thanks to earlier experiments on animals) most such
risks are minimal or moderate. But some experimental
risks are substantial.
When an experimental protocol that entails sub-
stantial risk to humans comes before an institutional
review board, what response is appropriate? The inves-
tigation, we may suppose, is promising and deserves
support, so long as its human subjects are protected
against unnecessary dangers. May not the investiga-
tors be fairly asked, Have you done all that you can to
eliminate risk to humans by the extensive testing of
that drug, that procedure, or that device on animals?
To achieve maximal safety for humans we are right to
require thorough experimentation on animal subjects
before humans are involved.
Opportunities to increase human safety in this
way are commonly missed; trials in which risks
may be shifted from humans to animals are often
not devised, sometimes not even considered. Why?
For the investigator, the use of animals as sub-
jects is often more expensive, in money and time,
than the use of human subjects. Access to suitable
human subjects is often quick and convenient,

CHAPTER 12: AnImAL WELfARE Á 413
must not assume the moral equality of all animate
species.
NOTES
1. Regan T. The case for animal rights. Berkeley, Calif.: Univer-
sity of California Press, 1983.
2. Singer P. Animal liberation. New York: Avon Books, 1977.
3. St. Augustine. Confessions. Book Seven, 397 A.D. New York:
Pocket- books, 1957: 104–26.
4. St. Thomas Aquinas. Summa theologica. 127, A.D. Philo-
sophic texts. New York: Oxford University Press, 1960:353–66.
5. Hegel GWF. Philosophy of right. 1821. London: Oxford
University Press, 1952:105–10.
6. Bradley FH. Why should I be moral? 1876. In: Melden Al. ed.
Ethical theories. New York: Prentice- Hall, 1950:345–59.
7. Mead GH. The genesis of the self and social control. 1925.
In: Reck AJ. ed. Selected writings. Indianapolis: Bobbs- Merrill,
1964:264–93.
8. Prichard HA. Does moral philosophy rest on a mistake?
1912. In: Cellars W. Hospers J.eds. Readings in ethical theory.
New York: Appleton- Century- Crofts, 1952:149–63.
9. Kant I. Fundamental principles of the metaphysic of mor-
als. 1785. New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1949.
10. Rollin BE. Animal rights and human morality. New York:
Prometheus Books, 1981.
11. Hoff C. Immoral and moral uses of animals. N Engl J Med
1980; 302:115–8.
12. Jamieson D. Killing persons and other beings. In:
Miller HB. Williams WH, eds. Ethics and animals. Clif-
ton, N.J.: Humana Press, 1983:135–46.
13. Singer P. Ten years of animal liberation. New York Review
of Books, 1985: 31:46–52.
14. Bentham J. Introduction to the principles of morals and
legislation. London: Athlone Press, 1970.
15. McCabe K. Who will live, who will die? Washingtonian
Magazine, August 1986:115.
16. U.S. Code of Federal Regulations, Title 21, Sect. 505(i).
Food, drug, and cosmetic regulations.
17. U.S. Code of Federal Regulations. Title 16, Sect. 1500. 40–2.
Consumer product regulations.
virtual universality of moral support for them con-
front the opponent of research using animals with an
inescapable difficulty. How can the many common
uses of animals be judged morally worthy, while their
use in scientific investigation is judged unworthy?
The number of animals used in research is but
the tiniest fraction of the total used to satisfy assorted
human appetites. That these appetites, often base
and satisfiable in other ways, morally justify the far
larger consumption of animals, whereas the quest for
improved human health and understanding cannot
justify the far smaller, is wholly implausible. Aside
from the numbers of animals involved, the distinction
in terms of worthiness of use, drawn with regard to
any single animal, is not defensible. A given sheep is
surely not more justifiably used to put lamb chops on
the supermarket counter than to serve in testing a new
contraceptive or a new prosthetic device. The need-
less killing of animals is wrong; if the common killing
of them for our food or convenience is right, the less
common but more humane uses of animals in the ser-
vice of medical science are certainly not less right.
Scrupulous vegetarianism, in matters of food,
clothing, shelter, commerce, and recreation, and in all
other spheres, is the only fully coherent position the
critic may adopt. At great human cost, the lives of fish
and crustaceans must also be protected, with equal
vigor, if speciesism has been forsworn. A very few
consistent critics adopt this position. It is the reduc-
tio ad absurdum of the rejection of moral distinctions
between animals and human beings.
Opposition to the use of animals in research is based
on arguments of two different kinds— those relying on
the alleged rights of animals and those relying on the
consequences for animals. I have argued that argu-
ments of both kinds must fail. We surely do have obliga-
tions to animals, but they have, and can have, no rights
against us on which research can infringe. In calculating
the consequences of animal research, we must weigh
all the long- term benefits of the results achieved— to
animals and to humans— and in that calculation we

414 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
How to Argue for (and Against) Ethical Veganism
Tristram McPherson
3. If it is wrong to kill animals, then it is wrong to
eat meat
C. It is wrong to eat meat.
This argument is valid. This means that the conclusion
must be true if all of the premises are true. I will defend
each of these premises in turn.
First, why think that it is wrong to make animals
suffer? To begin, think about why it is wrong to make
another person suffer. Part of the most plausible expla-
nation is that because suffering is awful to experience,
it is wrong to inflict suffering. Because an animal’s suf-
fering is awful for it, this explanation entails that it is
wrong to make an animal suffer.
This premise of my argument assumes that ani-
mals can suffer, which is mildly controversial. For
example, René Descartes suggested that animals are
just complicated machines with no inner lives (1991
[1640], 148). However, Descartes’ views are scientifi-
cally indefensible (see Allen and Trestman 2014, §7.1),
so I set them aside.
You might object to my case for my first premise
that it is only wrong to make a creature suffer if that
creature is an ethical agent: the sort of being who can
be morally responsible for its actions. But this is false.
It is wrong to make babies suffer, and they are not ethi-
cal agents. You might object that it is only wrong to
make human beings suffer. This is implausible for sev-
eral reasons. First, think about torturing a baby: what
is wrong with this is surely the nature of the suffer-
ing inflicted, not the fact that the baby has a human
genetic code. Second, imagine a non- human animal
with a miraculous mutation, which has the ability to
speak, reason, and feel as much as you or I do. Surely
the mere fact that such an animal is not genetically
human does not make it okay to torture it (compare
Peter Singer’s argument against such “speciesism”
in his 1977). And, finally, think again about the case
I began this essay with: it is wrong to torture a puppy.
But surely the central explanation here is just the same
as with a human victim: torture will inflict horrible
This paper has two goals. The first is to offer a carefully
reasoned argument for ethical veganism: the view that it
is (at least typically) wrong to eat or otherwise use ani-
mal products. The second goal is to give you, the reader,
some important tools for developing, evaluating, and
replying to reasoned arguments for ethical conclusions.
I begin by offering you a brief essay, arguing that it is
wrong to eat meat. This essay both introduces central
elements of my case for veganism, and serves as one
helpful model of a short ethics essay. In the remainder
of this paper, I use the model essay as a target, to illus-
trate important strategies for developing objections to
ethical arguments. I will also illustrate a range of impor-
tant ways for the vegan to reply to these objections. You
can use the models and skills I illustrate here in your
own essays, and in your reasoned evaluation of ethical
arguments. I conclude that the arguments and replies
offered in this paper add up to a powerful reasoned case
for ethical veganism. You can practice the skills I illus-
trate here to deciding for yourself— in a reasoned way—
whether my conclusion is correct.
I begin with the promised model essay:
IT IS WRONG TO EAT MEAT
Most of us think that it would be wrong to adopt a
puppy from a shelter, in order to take it home and
torture it until it dies. However, we do not think it
is wrong to eat a steak for dinner. In this essay, I will
argue that these views are hard to square with each
other, and that the second view is false: it is wrong to
eat meat. My argument has the following structure:
1. It is wrong to make animals suffer
2. If it is wrong to make animals suffer, then it is
wrong to kill animals
Tristam McPherson, “How to Argue for (and Against) Ethical Veg-
anism,” in Anne Barnhill, Mark Budolfson, and Tyler Doggett, ed.,
Food, Ethics, and Ethical Veganism (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2016). Reprinted by permission of the author.

CHAPTER 12: AnImAL WELfARE Á 415
not the same thing: in our economically specialized
society, many meat- eaters never even see the animals
they eat alive, let alone make them suffer or kill them.
However, this doesn’t mean that eating meat is okay.
To see why, consider an analogy.
There is a new restaurant in town: the food is sen-
sational, and the prices are very low. How do they do
it? Here’s how: the owner kidnaps world- class chefs,
and enslaves them at the restaurant. Suppose that
the owner is connected with the mob, and going to
the police would just get you killed. Your patroniz-
ing the restaurant does not enslave anyone, but it still
seems wrong. The explanation for why it is wrong is
roughly that by patronizing the restaurant, you would
be complicit in wrongdoing: you would be benefiting
from a wrongful act (enslavement), while economi-
cally supporting the wrongdoer (the slaver).
Making animals suffer may be less awful than
enslaving another human being. But the same form of
explanation applies to eating meat. The raising of ani-
mals for food causes those animals a horrifying amount
of suffering, and early death (see Mason and Singer 1990
for some of the literally grisly details). If it is wrong to kill
animals and to cause them to suffer, then the industry
that produces our meat acts wrongly on a massive scale.
It is wrong to eat meat because in doing so you are com-
plicit with that massive and systematic wrongdoing.
In this essay I have argued that it is wrong to eat
meat. One clarification of this conclusion is in order:
like many ethical claims, it should be read as a claim
about what is typically true. It is typically wrong for you
to break all of my fingers, but if doing so is the only way
to prevent nuclear catastrophe, break away! Similarly,
there may be unusual circumstances in which it is per-
missible or even required to eat meat. Nonetheless, if
my argument is sound, each of us does wrong almost
every time we sit down to a meal that contains meat.
I have written “It is Wrong to Eat Meat” as a model
short philosophy essay. Unless your professor tells you
otherwise, you would do well to emulate several of the
stylistic features of this essay:
• The introduction offers a brief clear motive for the
question addressed, states the essay’s thesis, and
previews the argument to come;
suffering on the puppy, and it is wrong to inflict such
suffering.
Some authors, like Carl Cohen (1986, 867), insist
that all suffering is not equal: human suffering is much
more ethically important than animal suffering. My
argument is compatible with this thesis. I am not argu-
ing that torturing a puppy is just as bad as torturing a
human being. I think the latter is typically much worse.
My claim is only that making the puppy suffer is wrong,
and that the pleasure a human being might take from
torturing it does not justify inflicting that suffering.
Next, I argue that if it is wrong to make animals suf-
fer, it is wrong to kill them. Some people find the idea
that it is wrong to kill animals much less intuitive than
the idea that it is wrong to make them suffer. However,
an example shows that this combination of views—
that it is wrong to make animals suffer, but not to kill
them— is difficult to defend. Suppose that there is a
cow that has a disease that will be fatal unless treated by
giving the cow a painful medical operation. If the cow
would go on to have a long and pleasant life after the
operation, performing this operation seems good, not
wrong. This shows that an ordinarily wrongful act—
inflicting suffering on a cow— can be permissible if it is
necessary to save the cow’s life. But if saving an animal’s
life can justify inflicting suffering that would otherwise
be wrong, it is hard to understand how taking that ani-
mal’s life could be a matter of ethical indifference.
We can bolster this initial argument by combining
it with a plausible explanation of why it is wrong to
kill animals. One important reason why killing a per-
son is typically wrong is that killing typically deprives
the victim of an objectively valuable future. That is,
killing someone deprives them of the valuable expe-
riences activities, projects, etc. that they would oth-
erwise have had (compare Marquis 1989, §II; I do not
claim, with Marquis, that this is the “primary” thing
wrong with killing). This principle applies to animals
as well: just as suffering can make an animal’s life go
badly, pleasant experiences can make it go well. So,
just as with humans, it is plausible that it is (typically)
wrong to kill animals because doing so deprives them
of a valuable future.
Finally, I argue that if it is wrong to kill animals, it
is wrong to eat meat. Killing and eating are, obviously,

416 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
accept its conclusion? The model argument appears
to be valid: the truth of its premises would logically
ensure the truth of the conclusion. When you object
to a valid argument, you should focus on objecting to
its premises, not the conclusion. This is because the
argument purports to offer you reasons to accept its
conclusion, and if you cannot explain why you should
reject those reasons, you aren’t providing a compelling
reply to the argument.1 On the other hand, if you can
identify a good reason to reject one of the premises of
an argument, you have made an important and con-
structive contribution, by explaining why a reason-
able person should not be persuaded by the argument.
This is why it is important to learn how to offer rea-
soned objections to the premises of an argument.
Developing reasoned objections is in part a creative
task, and there is no recipe for doing it well. However,
there are several useful general strategies for finding
good objections. Taking the model essay as a target,
I will introduce some of these strategies, and illustrate
them with exemplary objections to the model essay.
Another important philosophical skill is to assess the
import of potential objections. Because of this, when
I consider each objection I will discuss whether the
objections can be answered, whether it calls for some
amendment to the model essay’s argument, or whether
it constitutes a promising line of objection to the overall
strategy of the model argument. The point of carefully
exploring objections and replies is to arrive ultimately
at the best arguments that can be made on each side of
an ethical issue, like the issue of whether it is wrong to
eat meat. Because objections should target the premises
of an argument (as I have emphasized), I will organize
my discussion by focusing on each premise in turn.
PREMISE ONE: INFLICTING SUFFERING
Premise One of the model argument says:
1. It is wrong to make animals suffer
In this section, I consider objections to this principle
that are instances of three general strategies for identi-
fying objections: looking to extreme cases, appealing
to an obscured distinction, and appealing to a compet-
ing ethical principle.
• The argument of the paper is summarized in valid
premise/conclusion form;
• The essay does not waste words: every sentence
is dedicated to developing the central argument,
explaining a concept, introducing an objection
or replying to it, or doing other important work.
Even the conclusion does important work, intro-
ducing a crucial clarification of the argument.
• The essay does not use lengthy quotes from its
sources: instead, it cites those sources after stat-
ing (in my own words) key claims that I take from
them.
The argument of this essay is also an excellent target
for reasoned objections. I now discuss how to offer
such objections.
First, let’s back up a bit and think about the activ-
ity that we are engaged in. We are seeking to make
and to evaluate reasoned arguments about ethics. For
example, the model essay did not just disagree with
the claim that it is okay to eat meat; it offered reasons
for thinking that claim is incorrect, and it organized
those reasons into an argument. Making an argument
does not simply aim to persuade your reader. I know,
for example, that no reasoned argument is as likely
to change eating habits as grisly video footage of life
inside the animal factories that produce our meat. If
philosophers aimed simply to persuade, we would
write clever advertising, rather than carefully argued
essays. Instead, my aim as a philosopher is to seek
the truth together with my audience, in a way that
respects the ability of each person involved to find the
truth herself, using her own ability to reason. My aim
now is to offer you some tools to enable you to skill-
fully engage in this sort of respectful argumentation.
For many of you, the conclusion of the model
essay is a challenge to your ethical views. You may be
tempted to reply to this sort of challenge by simply
disagreeing with the conclusion. Resist this tempta-
tion: if an author offers you an argument, and you
ignore the argument, and you ignore the argument
and simply reject their conclusion, it is very difficult
to seek the truth together with you. So, when you are
presented with an argument, your central question
should be: does this argument give me good reason to

CHAPTER 12: AnImAL WELfARE Á 417
the model argument should be restricted to apply only
to eating animals that can suffer.
This in turn raises a further question: which ani-
mals, exactly, can suffer? Here there are formidable
methodological barriers to investigation (Allen and
Trestman 2014, §4). The core problem is that we have
no direct access to animals’ experiential states, so we
must reason about their inner lives on the basis of
behavioral, functional, neurobiological and evolu-
tionary considerations. Unsurprisingly, the strongest
case for suffering can be made for mammals, where
the evolutionary and neurobiological parallels with
humans are closest. However, we should not assume
that only mammals can experience pain; some have
argued that there is evidence for pain experience in all
vertebrates (Varner 2003), and in many cases we may
simply lack adequate empirical knowledge to be able
to assess the issue. Especially hard cases include ceph-
alopods such as squid, which are behaviorally very
sophisticated but evolutionarily distant from us. My
approach to this issue invokes a modest sort of precau-
tionary principle: Because we are not in a position to be
confident about whether birds, fish, and cephalopods
can suffer, we are not in a position to know whether
we act wrongly when we eat them. Indifference to the
possibility that we act wrongly is a vice, and we should
avoid eating these animals on that basis.
A second powerful way to find objections to a
premise is to identify an important distinction that
the argument for that premise ignores. For example,
one could argue that Premise One of the model essay
becomes less plausible once we make the distinction
between being in pain and suffering. Some philoso-
phers grant that many animals can be in pain. How-
ever, they suggest that suffering requires something
in addition to being in pain that most non- human
animals lack. For example, perhaps it requires a con-
scious belief: that I am having this pain (for discussion,
see Akhtar 2011, 496–499). An objector might argue
that it is suffering in this sense— and not merely being
in pain— that is ethically significant. If this were true,
then my argument would at very least be incomplete:
I would need to discuss the nature of suffering more
carefully, and then explore which animals can expe-
rience it.
One excellent way to find objections to ethi-
cal principles is to look to extreme cases (Hájek
forthcoming- b, §4; this and Hájek forthcoming- a are
excellent sources of heuristics for doing philosophy,
although they are most suited for somewhat advanced
philosophy students). There are several relevant types
of extreme cases. One type of extreme case involves
raising the stakes. Suppose, for example, that some
generic supervillain will incinerate the earth unless
you torture this puppy. It is surely required (and not
wrong) to torture the puppy in that case. So it is not
always wrong to cause animals to suffer.
It is not enough to find an objection: you should
also think about how someone sympathetic to the
argument that you are objecting to should reply to
your objection. In this case, there is a decisive reply
to this objection: the conclusion of the model essay
already granted that it is only typically wrong to
eat meat. Because scenarios involving comic- book
supervillains are extremely atypical, this is not an
effective objection to the argument of the model essay.
There is an important lesson here: make sure that you
interpret the argument you are objecting to accurately
and fairly. Failure to do this is so common it has its
own name: the straw man fallacy.
A different sort of extreme case is more potent.
If we arranged animals on a continuum of cognitive
sophistication, we would notice that puppies (which
featured in the model argument) are relatively close to
us on that continuum. So: what happens to the model
argument as we move to animals farther away from us
on that continuum? Here is one salient example: oys-
ters and other bivalves lack brains, and so are almost
certainly incapable of suffering. Because one cannot
make an oyster suffer, it cannot be wrong to eat an
oyster for the reasons suggested in the model essay.2
Because there is nothing atypical about eating oysters,
this case is an important objection to the argument in
the model essay.
One important way to reply to an objection is to
concede that it requires one to modify one’s argu-
ment. This objection to the model argument is power-
ful, and the best reply is thus concessive. I grant that
the model argument does not explain why it is wrong
to eat oysters, and so I conclude that the conclusion of

418 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
animals (1998, 177–84). Further, Scanlon is clear that
we have strong reasons that are not based in the con-
tractual principle, so his view is compatible with the
idea that we might have such reasons not to harm
animals. Other philosophers have been more ambi-
tious, offering contractualist arguments on behalf of
animals (Rowlands 2002, Ch. 3; Talbert 2006).
Of course, there are some contractualist theories
that have the implications that Carruthers suggests.
But these are controversial views among contractual-
ists, and contractualism itself is only one of a number of
controversial and competing general ethical theories.
Because of this controversy, however, it is unlikely that
we should be confident in the truth of these contractu-
alist theories. Without such confidence, however, it is
hard to see how these theories could give us good rea-
sons to reject Premise One. Further, the case of animals
is exactly one where these theories appear implausible.
Because it is obviously wrong for me to torture pup-
pies just for fun, it counts against a moral theory that
implies otherwise. This sort of case is part of a deep and
more general challenge. As Martha Nussbaum (2006)
and others have argued, many of our most important
moral concerns address the interests of distinctively
vulnerable parties (such as children, the severely men-
tally handicapped, and animals), and not simply the
interactions between equally capable adult humans.
A contractualism that ignores these interests is indefen-
sible. In light of these considerations, it will be very dif-
ficult to mount a compelling case against Premise One
of my argument that appeals to contractualism.
In this section I have considered three kinds of
objections to Premise One of my argument. An impor-
tant part of my reply has been concessive, refining
the premise that I want to defend: so refined, the the-
sis states that it is typically wrong to inflict pain on a
range of animals, including at least all mammals. So
refined, I have suggested that it is very difficult to rea-
sonably reject this premise.
PREMISE TWO: KILLING ANIMALS
Premise Two of the model argument says:
2. If it is wrong to make animals suffer, then it is
wrong to kill animals
The best reply to this objection begins by emphasiz-
ing that the important issue here is not how we should
use the word suffering (in philosophy you should usu-
ally avoid fighting about how to use words). It is rather
whether conscious belief (or something like it) is required
for pain to be ethically significant. If we are clear on this
point, another extreme case shows why this objection
fails. The most intense pains tend to fully occupy us:
one is unlikely to be thinking anything— let alone this
pain is happening to me— when in utter agony. But surely
it is wrong to inflict utter agony on someone, because
of how awful it feels (compare Rachels 2011, 898). This
shows that it can be wrong to inflict pain that does not
count as suffering in the objector’s stipulated sense. If
this is true of agonizing pains, it should be true of less
intense pains. And if it is true for our own case, it should
be true for animals as well. I thus conclude that this
objection fails.
A third way to object to an ethical premise is to
identify and defend an independently plausible ethical
principle that conflicts with it. You may have encoun-
tered such a principle in your previous study of eth-
ics, or you might be able to develop one yourself. One
example of this strategy is to argue against Premise One
of the model argument by appealing to contractual-
ism, which is one of the most influential contempo-
rary approaches to ethics and political philosophy. The
basic idea of contractualism is that moral (or politi-
cal) principles are principles that reasonable persons
would agree to as rules to govern their lives together.
So understood, contractualism can seem to cast seri-
ous doubt on the ethical significance of animals. As
Peter Carruthers notes, according to the contractualist,
“Morality is viewed as constructed by human beings,
in order to facilitate interactions between human
beings . . .” (1992, 102, emphasis his). Because it is hard
to see how a principle like Premise One would help to
facilitate such interactions, contractualism may seem
to give us good reasons to reject this premise.
I have two interlocking replies to this objection.
First, the most plausible forms of contractualism do
not have the implications that the objector claims.
Exemplary here is T.M. Scanlon’s extremely influen-
tial contractualist ethical theory. Scanlon is careful
to argue that his theory can be extended to protect

CHAPTER 12: AnImAL WELfARE Á 419
non- human agency, such as chimpanzees), this com-
peting explanation suggests that Premise Two is false.
To see why this objection is not promising, notice
that the autonomy- violation explanation also clearly
fails in some cases. Because you are an autonomous
agent, I should not force you to go to bed at a certain
time, even if it is good for you to do so. By contrast,
I act rightly when I paternalistically force my three-
year- old son to go to bed at an appropriate time. This
is because he is not an autonomous agent. It would
obviously be very wrong to kill my son, but since he is
not an autonomous agent, this cannot be explained in
terms of autonomy violation.
You might think that this leaves us at an impasse:
we have two candidate explanations of the wrong-
ness of killing (valuable future- deprivation and
autonomy- violation) and counter- examples to each.
Does this show that both must be bad explanations?
No. A better diagnosis is that each of these accounts
provides a typically sufficient but not necessary explana-
tion of the wrongness of killing. That is: killing can be
wrong either because it violates autonomy, or because
it deprives the victim of a valuable future (or both). On
this account, one of the reasons why it is uncontrover-
sial that it is wrong to kill an adult human in a range
of ordinary circumstances is that there are several dif-
ferent things wrong with such killing. Because Prem-
ise Two of the model argument requires only that the
valuable future- deprivation explanation is typically
sufficient, this reply vindicates that premise.
Another important way to object to an ethical
principle or explanation is to argue that it is incomplete.
Whenever someone offers a principle or explanation,
it is always a good idea to ask: is that all that is doing
the important explanatory work here? Or have I only
been given a part of the best ethical principle that
applies to this sort of case? For example, one might
think that a future’s merely being valuable is not suf-
ficient to explain why we must not eliminate it. Sup-
pose that my wife and I were debating whether to have
another child. If we did, that child would almost cer-
tainly have a valuable future. But it seems clear that I do
no wrong simply by preventing that future: my having
had a vasectomy does not make me akin to a murderer.
Michael Tooley (1972) proposes an explanation of this
This premise is conditional. In order to successfully
object to a conditional, one would need to find a rea-
sonable way to accept the antecedent (i.e. the first part)
of the conditional, while rejecting the consequent (i.e.
the second part). Here, this would mean granting that
it is wrong to make animals suffer, and arguing that
it is nonetheless okay to kill them. I will consider
three strategies for objecting to this premise. These
strategies all target my explanation of why we should
accept this premise. This was the idea that the wrong-
ness of killing is well- explained by the fact that killing
deprives the victim of a valuable future. The first strat-
egy appeals to a competing explanation, the second
strategy objects that my explanation is incomplete,
and the third objects that my explanation has a false
presupposition.
Just as a promising objection can be based in a
competing ethical principle, so we can base an objec-
tion in a competing ethical explanation. In arguing
for Premise Two, I offered a general explanation of the
wrongness of killing: that killing can be wrong because
it deprives the victim of a valuable future. One seem-
ingly competing explanation is that killing you would
be wrong because it would violate your autonomy.
Violation here includes two important and separable
ideas. First, killing you would interfere with your exer-
cise of your autonomy. You cannot live your life in the
way you choose if you are dead. Second, killing you
would be a way of failing to respect your autonomy: if
I take myself to be licensed to kill you, I take myself to
have the right to ride roughshod over your own view
of how your life should go.
In certain cases, this explanation of the wrongness
of killing may seem markedly superior to the “valuable
future” explanation offered in the model essay. For
example, suppose that Alice is near death and in pain,
but wishes to continue living. If I inject her with a
lethal does of morphine, I wrongly kill her. (Notice
that this is another instance of using an extreme case
to make a point.) The best explanation here is that
I have wrongly failed to respect her right to autono-
mously determine whether she continues to live. By
contrast, it is not clear that I deprive her of a valuable
future at all. Because most non- human animals are not
autonomous agents (there may be borderline cases of

420 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
of killing animals is that if I refrain from killing a cow
today, there is a single moral patient— the cow— that
will enjoy various pleasant cow experiences in the
future. The objector suggests that we have reason to
doubt this, if we think carefully about the conditions
for the continued existence of a given moral patient.
The objection can be initially motivated by
another extreme case: suppose that a mad scientist
was able to map the neural structure of our brains,
and then swap those structures: your brain is “wiped”
and then rebuilt in accordance with the map of my
brain, so that your body is now the home of beliefs,
desires, and “memories” near identical to mine ( pre-
operation), and vice- versa. Suppose that the mad sci-
entist performs this swap shortly after I injected my
own heart with a slow- acting but lethal poison. Argu-
ably, thanks to the mad scientist’s intervention, I will
have survived, and succeeded in killing you, rather
than myself.
Some philosophers use cases like these to argue
that psychological continuity is required for personal
identity or ethically significant survival. In the case
above, the idea is that I survive the operation because
the surviving body houses a psychology that is contin-
uous with my pre- operation psychology. This sort of
case matters to my argument for the following reason.
Suppose that the psychological connections across the
life of a cow are not very rich. Then, in killing the cow
now, I may be depriving it of only an inconsequential
amount of valuable future. I will also be preventing a
series of future “cows” from coming into existence and
enjoying life. But as we saw from the nonexistent child
case, it appears not to be wrong to refrain from bring-
ing into existence beings with valuable futures.
This leads us to the central issue: do animals have
rich enough psychological connections to under-
write the intuitive thought that a given cow (e.g.) is
the same moral patient over time? I am cautiously
optimistic that they do, in at least many cases. For
example, many animals appear capable of various
forms of memory (Allen and Trestman 2014, §7.4).
However, as with questions about animal pain and
suffering, answers here are likely to vary substantially
across species in ways that require careful empirical
work to tease out.
fact: in order for it to be wrong to deprive an entity of
a valuable future, that entity needs to have the capac-
ity to care about its own continued existence. Because
the child I do not conceive does not currently exist, it
cannot care about its future existence, and hence I do
not wrong it by preventing its future, on Tooley’s view.
One might appeal to Tooley’s view to argue that it is
not wrong to kill most animals because they are not
cognitively sophisticated enough to care about their
continued existence.
It is not obvious whether some animals can care
about their futures in the relevant way. However, I set
this aside, and instead focus on arguing against Tool-
ey’s explanatory claim (notice that I do so by appeal-
ing to extreme cases reasoning). Suppose that artificial
intelligence research advances to the point that we
are capable of creating intelligent and autonomous
androids, capable of almost everything humans are:
sophisticated reasoning, love, physical and emotional
pain, etc. Suppose this type of android is programmed
to be simply incapable of caring about its own contin-
ued existence, although it can and typically does care
deeply about particular others. In light of this pro-
gramming, such androids would be predictably prone
to certain tragic behavior: they would sometimes lay
down their lives to save others from inconsequen-
tial harms. It would be obviously wrong to kill such
an android— even with its consent— to save yourself
from a splinter. The android’s inability to care about
its future is a rational imperfection, but not one that
licenses killing it.
We can square our judgments about the nonex-
istent child and the android if we suggest that the
android is (imagined to be) an ethically significant
being that now exists, while the non- existent child is a
merely possible entity. We can then amend our ethical
explanation as follows: it is wrong to deprive existing
creatures of valuable futures, but it is not wrong to pre-
vent non- existing entities from coming into existence.
This explanation implies that it is wrong to kill exist-
ing animals, and so supports Premise Two.
A third way to object to an explanation is to argue
that it has a false presupposition. That is: it works only
by implicitly assuming some false claim. One crucial
presupposition of my explanation of the wrongness

CHAPTER 12: AnImAL WELfARE Á 421
to Premise Three. Suppose Alice is driving carefully on
a country road, when a deer jumps in front of her truck
without warning. The deer is killed instantly, and Alice
moves its carcass to the side of the road and leaves. Zoe,
who lives nearby, sees all of this. Zoe knows how to
dress a deer carcass and has a taste for venison. She takes
the carcass home, dresses it, cooks some, and eats it
(compare Bruckner 2016 for further discussion of cases
like this one). In this scenario, Zoe knowingly prepared
and ate meat. But in doing so, Zoe is not complicit in
any wrongdoing: Alice’s killing of the deer was neither
malicious nor negligent, so it is hard to see how it could
be wrong. This is a case where eating meat is not com-
plicit in wrongful killing, so it is a case where Premise
Three fails to hold, even if the principle I offer is true.
I am happy to grant the objector this case. Recall
that my conclusion is that eating meat is typically
wrong. This case helpfully brings out another atypi-
cal exception. The objection lacks more general force
exactly because in the overwhelming majority of cases,
the meat that we eat is wrongfully produced (at least if
the arguments for Premises One and Two are sound).
We saw in the previous section that a good strat-
egy for finding objections to an explanation is to chal-
lenge its completeness. The same is true for ethical
principles like my complicity principle. We can chal-
lenge the completeness of my principle by arguing
that complicity with the wrongful treatment of ani-
mals could only be wrong if it tended to make a differ-
ence to how much wrongful treatment there was (see
Appiah 1986–7 for a version of this view about com-
plicity). I will call this the efficacy objection. This objec-
tion has significant force: one might wonder what the
point of avoiding complicity is, if it makes no differ-
ence to how much animal suffering occurs.
Because I take this to be the single most important
challenge to the argument of the model paper, I will
offer three potentially complementary replies. (Please
note that I offer multiple replies to help illustrate the
issues here. In general you should focus on developing
the single strongest reply to an objection as clearly as
you can, rather than offering multiple replies.)
The first reply accepts the objection, and claims
that it is wrong to eat meat because doing so does tend
to make a difference to the amount of mistreatment of
It is worth making two further points. First, theories
of personal identity— and related claims about the per-
sistence of a given moral patient— are extremely difficult
to assess. The view that psychological continuity is the
criterion of ethically significant survival is controversial.
And on many competing views— on which organism
continuity, or brain continuity can underwrite ethically
significant survival, for example— the objection will
fail immediately. Second, the precautionary approach
to practical ethics that I advocated in the preceding
section is again relevant here. This objection certainly
reveals deep complexities ignored by the argument of
the model essay. However, we should only be content to
reject that argument if these complexities lead us to be
confident that it is not wrong to kill animals.
In this section I have argued that the appeal to
autonomy- violation complements— rather than com-
petes with— the valuable future- deprivation account
of the wrongness of killing. I also argued that it can be
wrong to kill a being that is incapable of caring about
its own continued existence. In discussing this issue,
I amended the ethical principle I endorse to claim
that it is wrong to deprive an existing moral patient of
the valuable future that it would otherwise have. And
I argued that many animals are probably the same
moral patient across time (although I granted that the
issues here are quite complex).
PREMISE THREE: USING ANIMAL PRODUCTS
Premise Three of the model argument is the claim that:
3. If it is wrong to kill animals, then it is wrong to eat
meat
I argued for this claim by defending another ethical prin-
ciple: that it is wrong to be complicit in wrongdoing: to
benefit from that wrongdoing, and to support it. Here we
can ask two questions: should we accept this principle,
and does it really support Premise Three? In this section I
begin by considering an objection to the idea that this
principle supports Premise Three, before considering
whether this principle is objectionably incomplete.
It is always wise to consider whether an ethical
principle really supports the conclusion it is intended
to. Consider a case that illustrates this sort of objection

422 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
assumptions (see Budolfson forthcoming for an impor-
tant reply). In light of this, I will explore alternative
ways of replying to the efficacy objection.
Singer’s argument illustrates two important ideas
worth keeping in mind in your ethical reasoning. First,
sometimes the expected effects of your actions are ethi-
cally significant, and not just their actual effects. (In
this case, the alleged expected effect of being a vegetar-
ian is sparing ten chickens a year from short and awful
lives, even if for most vegetarians, there is no actual
effect on chicken well- being.) Second, in thinking
about the effects of an action, it is sometimes impor-
tant to step back from focusing on the particular act,
and think about how that act fits into overall patterns.
A second response to the efficacy objection
appeals to these patterns in another way, by focusing
on the ethical significance of what groups of people do
together. One advantage of this approach is that it is
uncontroversial that meat- eaters as a group do make a
difference to the amount of animal suffering: if there
were no omnivores there would be no factory farms.
I will introduce the key idea with another example.
Suppose that there are two small cities, Upstream and
Downstream, along the same river. The river is the
only available source of water for the households in
each city draws its water from the river as the river
comes into the city, and dumps its sewage in the river
as it flows out of the city. The sewage dumped in the
river in Upstream flows down the river and pollutes
the drinking water drawn from the river in Down-
stream. As a result, the people in Downstream are
constantly getting seriously ill and dying. Suppose
that each household in Upstream could, at small cost,
bury their sewage instead of dumping it in the river. If
everyone in Upstream did this, it would end the health
catastrophe in Downstream. However, given the num-
ber of other households that are actually polluting, a
single person in Upstream burying his sewage would
not save anyone in Downstream from illness or death.
It seems plausible that the sewage- dumpers in
Upstream together wrongfully cause massive amounts
of suffering and death in Downstream. Anyone in
Upstream who dumps her sewage in the river is thus
part of a group that acts wrongly. It is easy to cease to
be part of that group, however: one need only bury
animals. This might seem absurd: by the time I buy a
chicken at the store (for example) it is already dead. And
the idea that every chicken bought will cause another
one to be raised, made to suffer, and then killed, is
plainly false. Peter Singer (1980, 335–6, and following
him, Norcross 2004, Kagan 2011, and Rachels 2011) has
replied to this challenge in the following way: There
must be some change in demand for chicken that the
market would notice. For example, Singer imagines
that for every 10,000 vegetarians, there would be one
fewer 20,000-bird broiler factory, harming and kill-
ing 100,000 chickens a year. He imagines further that
if we were just below the threshold— if, for example,
1,009,999 people were vegetarians— the last 9,999 veg-
etarians would save no chickens, because demand for
chicken would be just above the threshold that trig-
gers a change in supply. Given these assumptions, and
given that we do not know exactly how many other
vegetarians there are, someone becoming vegetarian
has only a 1/10,000 chance of making any difference
to the number of chickens made to suffer and die.
That sounds depressing. But Singer argues that we
should pay attention to the other numbers: if one is
that 1/10,000, one will save 100,000 chickens a year. In
light of this, the expected effect of becoming vegetarian
is the effect you would have if you make a difference
divided by your chance of making that difference; in
the example, saving 100,000/10,000 = 10 chickens a
year from short but awful lives. Of course, these pre-
cise numbers are merely illustrative; Singer grants
that we do not know where exactly the thresholds are.
But he suggests that the structure of probable effects
will be similar on any reasonable hypothesis about
these thresholds. So, according to Singer, while any
reduction or increase in one’s meat consumption has
a tiny chance of making a difference to the amount of
wrongful animal suffering and death, the difference
you will make if you do make a difference will be cor-
respondingly huge. And this, it might be claimed, is
what makes it wrong to eat meat. If Singer’s reasoning
is sound, it answers the efficacy objection: complicity
is wrong in part because it has an ethically significant
chance of making an ethically significant difference.
While Singer’s reply is promising, his argument is
somewhat complex, and relies on some controversial

CHAPTER 12: AnImAL WELfARE Á 423
When introducing a principle, it is often useful to
briefly explain each of the elements of that principle.
I now do this for Anti- Complicity. My talk of “plans”
here should not be taken to apply only to patterns of
explicit reasoning; rather it should include the pat-
tern of goals that explain an individual’s or institu-
tion’s behavior. If my unconscious desire to humiliate
my rival explains all of my behavior, humiliating my
rival counts as my plan, even if I would never con-
sciously admit this is what I am up to. My talk of “ben-
efit” should similarly be read in an expansive way:
smoking does more harm than good, but if one seeks
the enjoyment of a cigarette, one is aiming at benefit
in the sense I am interested in. We should understand
“cooperating” in the following way: our plans often
call for others to act in certain ways. For example, if
I make widgets for sale, my plan includes others’ buy-
ing those widgets. Of course, it is not crucial that any
particular person buys my widgets. So anyone who
buys a widget counts as cooperating with my plan.
Finally plans can be disjunctive: someone can plan
to read the newspaper, buy some tools at the store,
and then use the tools to torture a puppy. The clearly
wrongful part here is the puppy torturing. Buying the
tools is instrumental to the wrongful behavior, and
is arguably wrongful for that reason, and reading the
newspaper is not a wrongful part of the plan. It is most
clear that we should not cooperate with the wrongful
part of the plan.
Anti- Complicity is plausible in part because it
can explain the wrongness of certain acts that cannot
be explained by either the group or individual efficacy
explanations. Return to the example in the model
essay: the restaurant that kidnaps and enslaves chefs
to make its food. Suppose the restaurant is demand-
insensitive: it’s partly a money- laundering operation,
and so it will remain in business even if no one ever
patronizes it. This means that neither an individual,
nor the whole group of patrons, have any chance of
reducing the amount of slavery in the restaurant by
refusing to patronize it. Still, it seems wrong to go to
the restaurant and enjoy the fruits of the slave chefs’
unwilling labors. Anti- Complicity can explain why,
while principles that demand that the individual or
group make a difference cannot.
one’s sewage. It seems plausible that one should bury
one’s sewage in this situation, rather than dump it
into the river. We could explain this by appealing to
the following ethical principle: if one can avoid being
part of a group that together does serious wrong, then
one acts wrongly by continuing to be a member of that
group. This principle applies neatly to eating meat.
Together, the meat- eaters make a tremendous differ-
ence: without their demand for meat, no one would
cause animals to suffer and die in order to produce
it. So the meat- eaters together make vast amounts of
wrongful pain and death happen to animals. So, by
the ethical principle just proposed, one acts wrongly
by continuing to be a member of that group.
This reply answers the efficacy objection by appeal-
ing to group efficacy. However, the issue of when
exactly it is wrong to remain a part of an ethically
objectionable group is very complicated. (Sometimes,
for example, it is only by being part of such a group that
one can mitigate the bad things the group does.) So I
will explore another alternative response to the effi-
cacy objection, which is the one I find most promising.
This response directly rejects the efficacy objection,
and defends the claim that complicity with wrongdo-
ing can be a sufficient explanation for wrongdoing,
even if it has no expected bad effects. I will defend
this response in three ways: by appealing to a plausi-
bly analogous ethical principle, by clarifying the anti-
complicity principle, and by appealing to a variant on
an earlier case that helps to distinctively motivate it.
The first thing to notice is that there are other
plausible ethical principles that require us to act
even when our doing so will not make a difference.
For example, the duty of fair play requires that one
not benefit from successful cooperative institutions
without making a fair contribution to them; i.e., that
one not freeride (see e.g. Klosko 2004). Consider, as an
example, sneaking onto a public bus without paying
the fare.
Second, it may be useful to more precisely state
the principle that I endorse (see McPherson 2016-b for
more detailed discussion):
Anti- Complicity It is typically wrong to aim to
benefit by cooperating with the wrongful elements of
others’ plans

424 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
veganism: the view that it is (at least typically) wrong
to eat or otherwise use animal products. However, the
model argument concludes only that it is wrong to eat
meat. The model argument itself thus fails to establish
ethical veganism. I grant this objection. However, the
argument I have developed in this paper naturally
extends to support ethical veganism.
The first point to notice is that it is possible to
imagine farming with animals in a way that does not
involve shortening their lives or making them suf-
fer. My argument does not suggest any objection to
using animal products made on such farms. However,
when we turn from possible to actual animal farm-
ing, we find that my case against killing animals and
making them suffer applies to almost all of the institu-
tions that produce animal products (with the excep-
tions of some shellfish farms). The reasons lie in the
interaction between biology and economics. Consider
a single example: even the most humane dairy farm
will typically produce as many male calves as female,
and almost all of the males will be killed early, so as
not to be an economic burden. That means that the
central plan of almost any economically viable dairy
farming operation involves raising cows to be killed
(or to be sold to another operation, knowing the latter
operation will kill them), a practice that I have argued
above is typically wrong. And this in turn means that
the overall argument I have proposed applies here: the
core plan of economically viable dairy farms involves
systematic wrongdoing, and I have argued that it is
wrong to be complicit with such wrongdoing. But
one would be complicit with such wrongdoing if one
were to buy and consume the milk (e.g.) produced on
such farms, and hence buying and consuming such
milk would be wrong. This example generalizes to
the institutions that produce almost all of our animal
products: eggs, cheese, leather, etc. And for this reason
I think that my argument supports ethical veganism
as opposed to a requirement to be a vegetarian who
merely refrains from eating meat.
A second worry about my overall argument is that
the initial simple statement of the argument in prem-
ise and conclusion from in the model essay is mis-
leading. In the preceding sections, I have emphasized
various ways that this argument should be refined, but
If the arguments earlier in the paper are correct,
the meat industry has a wrongful plan: to produce
meat in a way that involves egregious amounts of pain
and early death, and then to sell that meat. They do
not, of course, typically sell it directly to consumers.
But consumers buying meat is clearly part of their
plan: for if consumers do not buy, then wholesalers
will not either, and the meat industry’s plan would not
be economically viable. (This is why meat- industry
groups sometimes advertise directly to consumers: to
increase consumer- level demand for their goods.) So,
in buying meat, one is cooperating with their wrong-
ful plan. And Anti- Complicity suggests that doing so
is typically wrong.
Of the three explanations that I have discussed
here (individual efficacy, group efficacy, and Anti-
Complicity), I prefer the last. However, it is worth
emphasizing that, as with explanation of the wrong-
ness of killing, it is not clear that these explanations
compete. Rather, if each is sound, they could be com-
plementary explanations of the wrongness of eating
meat. This means that the objector has her work cut
out for her. For each of the three explanations that
I have discussed, she must either debunk the relevant
explanatory principle, or argue that the principle does
not entail that it is wrong to eat meat. For example,
one might insist that individual efficacy is required for
wrongdoing in these cases, and then argue against the
Singer- style reasoning. I take this to be the most prom-
ising way to reject the argument, but to nonetheless be
a very difficult task.
THE IMPLICATIONS OF THE ARGUMENT:
VEGANISM
In the previous three sections, I have considered
several objections to each of the three premises of
the model argument, and refined that argument in
light of those objections. I now want to consider the
broader implications of the argument, as refined. I will
begin by considering two objections to the argument
that target gaps between the premises and my overall
thesis: ethical veganism.
An obvious but important objection at this stage
notes that my aim in this paper is to argue for ethical

CHAPTER 12: AnImAL WELfARE Á 425
In light of this, my argument at least suggests that
the most central and pressing human interests should
typically take priority over the welfare of non- human
animals. For example, my conclusion is compatible
with the idea that we should typically harm or kill a
non- human animal if doing so is needed to prevent
suffering or death to a human being. This is practically
relevant: in various times and places, animal products
have been an essential element of the only feasible
nutritionally adequate human diets. For example,
in many parts of the world, owning a cow— or even
a handful of chickens— can offer crucial protection
against certain forms of malnutrition. I take it to be a
virtue of my argument that it is compatible with cases
like these counting as legitimate exceptions to the
vegan principle.
At this point, however, one may wonder whether
the case for veganism has any practical bite at all. After
all, becoming a vegan involves a non- trivial sacrifice
of real goods. Consider three sorts of examples. First,
there is a sea of delicious animal- involving food, so
as a vegan one sacrifices access to a range of interest-
ing aesthetic goods. Second, food is deeply meaning-
ful to many people, and animal products are centrally
involved in many important cultural traditions and
occasions. To be a vegan is thus to complicate one’s
relationship to those traditions and meanings. Finally,
because shared values are central to many personal
and professional relationships, veganism could be an
impediment to such relationships, especially in cul-
tural contexts where veganism is seen as threatening.
If the fact that veganism required one to sacri-
fice goods like these typically rendered omnivorism
permissible, then veganism would not typically be
ethically required, as I claim. Instead, it would be an
admirable but non- obligatory ideal. However, I do not
think that the sorts of sacrifices just mentioned suf-
fice to make omnivorism permissible. The core issue
here is how weighty the considerations in favor of
veganism that I have developed in this paper are. The
issue is complex, but I think that a reasonable heuristic
can be derived from the initial example in the model
paper: some circumstances would warrant torturing the
stray puppy imagined in that example. But those cir-
cumstances would be comparatively dire. I contend
there is a general worry that should be explored. The
conclusion of the model argument emphasized that it
is only typically wrong to eat meat. And as I explained
in my initial discussion of Premise One, this qualifier
should be read back into the premises. So the argu-
ment should look like this:
1. It is typically wrong to make animals suffer
2. If it is typically wrong to make animals suffer, then
it is typically wrong to kill animals
3. If it is typically wrong to kill animals, then it is
typically wrong to eat meat
C. It is typically wrong to eat meat.
The first thing to do is to verify that this statement of
the argument, like the statement in the model essay,
is valid. It is: the addition of the word “typically” does
not alter the logical form of the argument, which is:
P, if P then Q, if Q then R, so R, which is a slightly more
complex variant of the classic modus ponens argument
form. However, there are two connected worries about
the argument as given. First, the reference to typicality
points us at a range of ordinary cases, but every sort
of exception that we have identified for each premise
is an exception that must hold for the argument as a
whole. The discussion has identified a raft of “atypi-
cal” exception cases: cases of making animals suffer to
avoid ethically awful alternatives, cases of eating oys-
ters and other animals incapable of experiencing pain,
and cases of eating meat (like some roadkill) that was
not wrongfully produced.
These cases do not exhaust the set of potential
exceptions that the argument permits. And one
might worry that as a result, the argument might be
far too weak to support anything resembling vegan-
ism. To begin to see the force of this worry, notice
that I have granted that human suffering and death
may tend to be substantially more ethically signifi-
cant than the suffering and death of non- human
animals. This is because, as we saw above, killing you
or making you suffer would be wrong for multiple
reasons: some have to do with the awfulness of suf-
fering, and the deprivation of your future, and oth-
ers have to do with the ethical significance of your
autonomy.

426 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
example, showing that the argument contains some
fallacious reasoning. Or you might challenge the ethi-
cal claims the argument makes about specific cases: for
example, you could try to argue that there is nothing
wrong with torturing puppies. (But I dearly hope you
don’t do that!) It is far more common for it to be useful
to challenge the general principles and explanations
offered in an argument. I have discussed several impor-
tant ways of executing these challenges. First, it can be
useful to look to extreme cases, to see if principles are
really generally applicable. For example, the model
argument appeals to suffering to explain why it is
wrong to eat meat. But some animals (such as oysters)
cannot suffer. So the model argument cannot explain
why it is wrong to eat them. Second, it can be useful
to see if an argument only works because it obscures
an ethically important distinction. I discussed this
issue using the example of the contrast between being
in pain and suffering. Third, it is always a good idea
to ask if there is a superior competitor to the general
principle or ethical explanation offered in an argu-
ment. Examples of this strategy discussed above were
the objection from contractualism, and the objection
that autonomy violation is the best explanation of
why killing is typically wrong. Fourth, a very natural
objection to an explanation or principle is that it is
incomplete. For example, I considered the idea that it is
only wrong to deprive a creature of its valuable future
if that creature is capable of caring about that future.
And I discussed the idea that complicity with wrong-
doing is only morally objectionable if such complicity
can make a difference to the extent of the underlying
wrongdoing. Fifth, another important type of objec-
tion to some explanations is that those explanations
rest on false presuppositions. For example, I considered
the possibility that most animals do not have valuable
futures in the ethically relevant sense, because most
animals lack rich enough psychological connections
to remain the same moral patient from one day to the
next. Finally, another important way to challenge an
argument is to show that there is a gap between an
explanation offered in support of an ethical principle,
and the principle itself. For example, the case of eat-
ing blamelessly produced roadkill suggests that there
is a gap between its being wrong to kill animals, and its
that only similarly dire circumstances would warrant
ordering the sirloin steak for dinner. And the sacrifices
typically involved in becoming vegan, while signifi-
cant, fall well below this threshold.
Challenging this heuristic would be yet another
natural way to object to the argument of this paper.
However, I think the heuristic is basically sound. And
if it is, the argument of the paper suggests that we
ought to eschew almost all animal products in almost
all ordinary circumstances. We ought, in other words,
to be vegan.
PEDAGOGICAL CODA
I conclude this paper by returning to my pedagogical
aims: to aid you in thinking about how to make (and
critically examine) philosophical arguments in ethics.
In order to do so, I will review the basic elements of
philosophical argument that I have sought to explain
and illustrate in this paper.
The argument of the model essay began with a
vivid example: the claim that it would be wrong to tor-
ture a puppy in a specific scenario. This case supported
a general principle: that it is wrong to make animals suf-
fer. The case supported the principle in part because
the case seems representative of the principle. It does not
seem that there is some unique feature of puppies that
explains why it is wrong to torture them, for example.
This principle was also supported by an underlying
ethical explanation: it is wrong to cause animals to suffer,
because of how awful it is to experience suffering. Although
general principles themselves appear explanatorily
illuminating, explanations and general principles can
be different. One way to see this is to notice that there
can be multiple good explanations of a single ethical
principle, as in the case of the future- deprivation and
autonomy- violation explanations of the wrongness of
killing. In making arguments, cases, general principles,
and explanations are likely to be the most important
elements to develop. These elements should fit together
in a rationally compelling way, and one good way to do
that is to put these elements together into a valid argu-
ment, as I again did in the model essay.
In critically examining an argument, you might in
principle target the structure of the argument itself: for

CHAPTER 12: AnImAL WELfARE Á 427
terman, to audiences at Rhodes College, Bowling Green
State University, Charles Sturt University, and Virginia Com-
monwealth University, and to many of my students for dis-
cussion. I am also indebted to Liz Harman, whose talk about
ethical vegetarianism first started me thinking systemati-
cally about it. Parts of this paper draw significantly on my
2014, and especially my 2016–b.
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Allen, Colin, and Michael Trestman. “Animal Conscious-
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Appiah, Kwame Anthony. “Racism and Moral Pollution.”
Philosophical Forum 18.2–3 (1986). 185–202.
Bruckner, Donald W. “Strict Vegetarianism is Immoral”
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Budolfson, Mark. “The Inefficacy Objection and the
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——. “Philosophical Heuristics and Philosophical Meth-
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being wrong to eat meat, because some meat does not
come from animals that were wrongfully killed.
I take these to be some of the most important
tools for critically analyzing philosophical arguments.
However, there are many more to be discovered. One
very good habit to get into when reading philosophi-
cal papers is to ask: what kind of argument is this? How
is this author objecting to that argument? If you do
that consistently, you will soon have a very rich rep-
ertoire of tools for evaluating others’ arguments, and
making your own. One final note about how to use
these tools. Probably the most important place to use
the tools I have discussed in this paper is in revising
your own paper. Once you have a draft of your paper
in hand, you should be merciless in carefully reading
through it, asking: how compelling is this argument?
How could someone reasonably object to it? Are their
objections sound? In my view, it is most important to
use these tools to examine arguments for the conclu-
sions that you most care about. Only by doing so can
you determine whether these conclusions are reason-
able, or whether you are guilty of wishful thinking,
only accepting them because you care about them.3
NOTES
1. This paragraph simplifies in several ways. First, in some
arguments the premises (even if true) simply fail to support
the conclusion, even given a charitable interpretation. Clearly
demonstrating that fact can be a powerful way of objecting to
such an argument. Second, some philosophers have argued
that it can be legitimate to object to certain arguments as a
whole, without criticizing either specific premises or the logi-
cal structure of the argument. For discussion relevant to our
topic, see McPherson 2014 and 2016–a.
2. There might, however, be other arguments that count
against eating animals that cannot suffer: for example, one
could offer environmental objections to how some such ani-
mals are raised or harvested, or appeal to the idea that simply
being a fellow animal is morally significant.
3. One final bit of guidance: you should always recognize
help you have received in writing a paper! I am indebted to
many people for helpful comments and discussion of ideas
related to this paper. These include Mark Budolfson, David
Plunkett, Tyler Doggett, Andrew Chignell, Sean Walsh,
Derek Baker, Tom Dougherty, Gideon Rosen, and Katie Bat-

http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2014/entries/consciousness-animal/

428 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
Nussbaum, Martha. Frontiers of Justice. Harvard: Belknap,
2006.
Rachels, Stuart. “Vegetarianism.” Oxford Handbook of Ani-
mal Ethics. Eds. Tom Beauchamp and R. G. Frey. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2011. 877–905.
Rowlands, Mark. Animals Like Us. Verso: 2002.
Scanlon, T. M. What We Owe to Each Other. Cambridge,
MA: Belknap: 1998.
Singer, Peter. Animal Liberation. New York: Avon, 1977.
——. “Utilitarianism and Vegetarianism.” Philosophy and
Public Affairs. 9.4 (Summer 1980), 325–337.
Talbert, Matthew. “Contractualism and Our Duties to
Nonhuman Animals.” Environmental Ethics 28 (Summer
2006). 202–215.
Tooley, Michael. “Abortion and Infanticide.” Philosophy
and Public Affairs 2.1 (August 1972). 37–65.
Varner, Gary. In Nature’s Interests. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1998.
Kagan, Shelly. “Do I Make a Difference?” Philosophy and
Public Affairs 39.2 (2011). 105–141.
Klosko, George. The Principle of Fairness and Political Obli-
gation (New Edition). Rowman and Littlefield, 2004.
McPherson, Tristram. “A Case for Ethical Veganism.”
Journal of Moral Philosophy 11(6), 2014. 677–703.
——. “A Moorean Defense of the Omnivore?” in The
Moral Complexities of Eating Meat, Eds. Robert Fischer and
Ben Bramble. Oxford University Press: 2016. 118–134.
Cited as 2016–a.
——. “Why I am a Vegan (and You Should be One Too).”
in Philosophy Comes to Dinner, Eds. Andrew Chignell,
Terence Cuneo, and Matthew Halterman. Routledge:
2016. 73–91. Cited as 2016–b.
Marquis, Don. “Why Abortion is Immoral.” Journal of
Philosophy 86.4, April 1989. 183–202.
Mason, Jim and Peter Singer. Animal Factories Revised and
Updated Edition. Harmony: 1990.
Norcross, Alasdair. “Puppies, Pigs, and People: Eating
Meat and Marginal Cases.” Philosophical Perspectives 18
(Ethics), 2004. 229–245.

429
C H A P T E R 1 3
‘’
Environmental Ethics
For most of its history, Western ethics has focused
on the moral values, rights, and obligations of
humans. The relevant questions have been, What
is the good for humans? What value should we
place on a human life or person? What obligations
or duties do we have to our fellow humans? What
moral rights, if any, do humans have? In large part,
the rest of the planet seems to have been left out of
our moral equations. The nonhuman animals, the
plants, the waters, the land— these have mattered,
if at all, largely because they affect the well- being of
humankind.
But the planet is not what it used to be. The
world’s natural resources are being depleted. Human
technology, culture, and avarice are devour ing for-
ests and meadows, poisoning water and air, wip-
ing out ecosystems and species— and threatening
the interests of the very beings who have wielded
so much technological and cultural power. Some
observers predict doom. They say that humans have
gone too far and that the world as we know it will
end not with a bang or a whimper, but a gasp: a gasp
for uncontaminated air, water, or food. But whether
the situation is or is not this dire, the profound envi-
ronmental changes that humans have produced on
earth have inspired many to see the proper purview
of ethics as encompassing not just humans but the
whole natural world. Consequently a new set of
ethical questions is demanding our attention: Is the
environment valuable in its own right, regardless
of its usefulness for people? Do animals or plants
have moral rights? Are they somehow intrinsi-
cally valuable? If they are intrinsically valuable or
worthy of moral consideration, what makes them
so? Does a dolphin have more moral value than a
rat? or a rat more than a redwood? or an individual
mongoose more than its species? What obliga-
tions, if any, do humans have to the natural world?
Should the interests of people take precedence
over the interests or needs of the environment?
Is it morally permissible, for example, to halt the
construction of a dam that will bring prosperity
to thousands of poor people but will also destroy a
species of crayfish?
Then there are the questions that arise from the
largest, most calamitous, most intractable environ-
mental threat of all: climate change. It is the one
environmental problem that is entangled with all the
others, the one that humans are causing globally
while suffering from it locally. The science behind
it, at least in broad outlines, is well understood:
Greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide (CO2)
absorb heat (infrared radiation) emitted from Earth’s
surface. Increases in the atmospheric concentra-
tions of these gases cause Earth to warm by trapping
more of this heat. Human activities— especially the
burning of fossil fuels since the start of the Indus-
trial Revolution— have increased atmospheric CO2
concentrations by about 40%, with more than half
the increase occurring since 1970. Since 1900, the
global average surface temperature has increased
by about 0.8°C (1.4°F). This has been accompanied
by warming of the ocean, a rise in sea level, a strong
decline in Arctic sea ice, and many other associ-
ated climate effects. Much of this warming has
occurred in the last four decades. Detailed analyses
have shown that the warming during this period
is mainly a result of the increased concentrations
of CO2 and other greenhouse gases. Continued
emissions of these gases will cause further climate
429

430 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
As you would expect, serious disputes about
environmental issues involve both the nonmoral
and the moral— nonmoral facts (often scientific or
technical) and moral principles or judgments. More
often than not, there is substantial agreement on
the former but serious divergence on the latter. All
parties may agree, for instance, that building a road
through a forest would help a struggling town pros-
per and that the project would wipe out a rare spe-
cies of butterfly, but the debate rages over whether
prosperity is more valuable than the butterfly.
Moral arguments in environmental ethics de –
pend heavily on notions of value and moral status.
The distinction between instrumental and intrinsic
value is especially important. Recall that something
with instrumental (or extrinsic) value is valuable as
a means to something else; something with intrin-
sic value is valuable in itself, for its own sake. For
many people, nature possesses instrumental value
(some think it has instrumental value only). They
may therefore believe that a forest has value because
of its economic worth, because it provides the raw
materials for making houses, furniture, and paper.
Or because it helps make the environment livable
for humans by cleaning the air as it absorbs carbon
dioxide and releases oxygen. Or because it adds to
the quality of human life simply by being beauti-
ful, inspiring, or impressive. Or because it provides
a home to many animal and plant species that are
themselves instrumentally valuable to humans. In
all these cases, the value of the forest is measured
by its positive effects on human well- being. The for-
est is good because it is good for human beings. On
the other hand, for many other people, nature has
intrinsic value— it is valuable regardless of its use-
fulness to humanity. (Keep in mind that nature or
objects in nature can have both instrumental and
intrinsic value.) So they might say that the forest
should be cherished for what it is, for its own sake,
regardless of whether it can contribute to the wel-
fare or happiness of humankind. The forest has
intrinsic value because of its aesthetic qualities,
its organizational complexity, its status as a living
change, including substantial increases in global
average surface temperature and important changes
in regional climate.1
Scientists say the worldwide consequences of
this process are alarming and ominous: a global
rise in sea level, ocean warming, the retreat of gla-
ciers everywhere, severe droughts, coastal flooding,
the receding of Arctic ice, increased acidity in the
oceans, frequent heat waves, heavy rainfalls, and
increased species extinction.
Given this runaway train of global warming, the
moral questions hit home hard: What is an indi-
vidual morally obligated to do about it? What are
countries duty- bound to do about it? Should we
do something even if our efforts cause widespread
economic hardship, loss of jobs, social upheaval,
and the demise of whole industries? Should we do
something now even though the only people who
will benefit from our sacrifices will be future genera-
tions? What, after all, do we owe the future? Do we
have a moral obligation not to act in ways that might
contribute, even slightly, to global warming? For
example, are we obligated not to drive a gas guzzler,
use an inefficient heating system, run the air condi-
tioner nonstop, avoid recycling, or waste water?
Trying to answer such questions through criti-
cal reasoning is the main business of environmental
ethics, a branch of applied ethics. Let us explore
how these questions arise, determine whether tra-
ditional moral theories can shed any light on them,
and evaluate arguments that are frequently used to
address important environmental issues.
ISSUE FILE: BACKGROUND
Environmental issues can emerge from a variety
of real- world challenges besides climate change:
endangered species, pollution, wilderness preser-
vation, treatment of animals, ecosystem protec-
tion, waste disposal, global population, resource
allocation, energy use, economics, food produc-
tion, world hunger, social justice, and the welfare
of future generations.

CHAPTER 13: EnvIRonmEnTAL ETHICS Á 431
any individual of a species? As we will soon see,
many people, on various grounds, give priority to
one or more species over others, some think all
living things equal, and some rank species over
individuals.
In light of these considerations, we should not
be surprised that a central question in environmen-
tal ethics is, What entities have moral status and to
what degree do they have it? The answer that has
been assumed in the Western world for much of
its history is known as anthropocentrism, the
notion that only humans have moral standing.
By anthropocentric ( human- centered) lights, the
rest of nature has only instrumental value— that
is, nonhuman animals, plants, mountains, and
streams have value only because they are valuable
in some way to humans. An anthropocentrist
sees animals, plants, and ecosystems as means to
enhance the well- being of humankind, to serve the
ends of human beings. This stance, however, does
not imply a disregard for the environment. He may
be genuinely concerned about the destruction of
rain forests, the extinction of species, river and lake
pollution, the destruction of wetlands, animal cru-
elty, and global warming— but only because these
calamities might lead to a less livable environment
for humans, or their loss of enjoyable aesthetic or
spiritual experiences of nature, or their feelings of
distress at the thought of animal suffering, or dra-
matic climate changes that could endanger human
lives. On what grounds should humans be granted
this exclusive moral status? The traditional justifi-
cation has been along Kantian lines: that humans
are moral agents or persons— they are capable of
making free, rational moral choices.
Another influential answer to our question is
what could be called zoocentrism, the notion that
animals— both human and nonhuman— have moral
status. As we saw in the previous chapter, advocates
for animal rights, notably the philosophers Peter
Singer and Tom Regan, take this view, insisting
that human and nonhuman animals are equally
deserving of moral considerability or respect. Singer
thing, or some other value- granting property. Even
without utility, it can have great intrinsic worth.
Many debates in environmental ethics revolve
around the concept of moral status, or moral consid-
erability. As we saw in the previous chapter, some-
thing has moral status if it is a suitable candidate
for moral concern or respect in its own right. Every-
one agrees that humans have moral status; many
believe that nonhuman animals also have moral
status; some insist that all living things have moral
status (including plants and even one- celled crea-
tures); some think that the natural environment
generally— mountains, oceans, rivers, and all—
has moral status; and a few believe Planet Earth
as a whole has moral status. A fundamental issue
in environmental ethics is precisely what sorts of
entities have moral status— and why.
Many things can have instrumental or intrinsic
value yet have no moral status— that is, they may
not deserve our direct moral concern. A bicycle can
have instrumental value as a mode of transporta-
tion, but it is not the kind of thing that can have
moral status. Michelangelo’s magnificent sculp-
ture David is generally thought to have intrinsic
aesthetic value, but few philosophers would think
that it has moral status. Some theorists draw such
a distinction as follows: “We can have obligations
regarding a painting, but not to a painting. We ought
to treat beautiful paintings with respect, but not
because we have obligations to the paintings. We
ought to respect them because they are beautiful
(or because their owners have rights), not because
they have rights.”2
Often the question at issue in environmen-
tal debates is not whether something has moral
status, but whether it has greater or lesser moral
status than something else. Does an ape have the
same moral status as a domestic cow? Do animals
(human and nonhuman) deserve the same level of
moral concern as plants? Do humans and nonhu-
man animals have the same moral status? Is a cat
as morally important as a cabbage? Does a species
have a stronger claim on our moral concern than

432 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
’
If global warming and climate change are actu-
ally happening (and have been happening), then
humans are faced with a dreadful moral decision:
to take action now to help save the future, or to
do nothing and suffer through an uncertain pres-
ent. But deciding rationally requires knowing the
facts— knowing whether climate change is real.
Ninety- seven percent of all climate scientists and
most of the world’s leading scientific organizations
affirm that it is. But how do they know this? Here’s
the answer from NASA, one of the world’s leading
climate research agencies.
The overwhelming majority of climate scientists
agree that human activities, especially the burn-
ing of fossil fuels (coal, oil, and gas), are responsi-
ble for most of the climate change currently being
observed.
But how has this conclusion been reached?
Climate science, like all science, is a process of
collective learning that relies on the careful gath-
ering and analyses of data, the formulation of
hypotheses, the development of models to study
key processes and make testable predictions, and
the combined use of observations and models to
test scientific understanding. Scientific knowl-
edge builds over time as new observations and
data become available. . . . In the case of climate
change, scientists have understood for more than
a century that emissions from the burning of fossil
fuels could lead to increases in the Earth’s average
surface temperature. Decades of research have
confirmed and extended this understanding.
How do we know that Earth has warmed?
Scientists have been taking widespread measure-
ments of Earth’s surface temperature since around
1880. These data have steadily improved and,
today, temperatures are recorded by thermom-
eters at many thousands of locations, both on
the land and over the oceans. Different research
groups, including the NASA Goddard Institute for
Space Studies, Britain’s Hadley Centre for Climate
Change, the Japan Meteorological Agency, and
NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center have used
these raw measurements to produce records of
long- term global surface temperature change.
These groups work carefully to make sure the
data aren’t skewed by such things as changes in
the instruments taking the measurements or by
other factors that affect local temperature, such
as additional heat that has come from the gradual
growth of cities.
These analyses all show that Earth’s average
surface temperature has increased by more than
1.4°F (0.8°C) over the past 100 years, with much of
this increase taking place over the past 35 years.
A temperature change of 1.4°F may not seem like
much if you’re thinking about a daily or seasonal
fluctuation, but it is a significant change when
you think about a permanent increase averaged
across the entire planet. . . .
How do we know that greenhouse gases lead to
warming?
As early as the 1820s, scientists began to appreci-
ate the importance of certain gases in regulating
the temperature of the Earth. Greenhouse gases—
which include carbon dioxide (CO2), methane,
nitrous oxide, and water vapor— act like a blan-
ket in the atmosphere, keeping heat in the lower
atmosphere. Although greenhouse gases com-
prise only a tiny fraction of Earth’s atmosphere,
they are critical for keeping the planet warm
enough to support life as we know it.
Here’s how the “greenhouse effect” works: as
the Sun’s energy hits Earth, some of it is reflected
back to space, but most of it is absorbed by the
land and oceans. This absorbed energy is then
radiated upward from Earth’s surface in the form
of heat. In the absence of greenhouse gases, this
heat would simply escape to space, and the plan-
et’s average surface temperature would be well
below freezing. But greenhouse gases absorb and
CLIMATE CHANGE: How We Know It’s Real

CHAPTER 13: EnvIRonmEnTAL ETHICS Á 433
’redirect some of this energy downward, keeping heat near Earth’s surface. As concentrations of
heat- trapping greenhouse gases increase in the
atmosphere, Earth’s natural greenhouse effect
is enhanced (like a thicker blanket), causing sur-
face temperatures to rise. Reducing the levels of
greenhouse gases in the atmosphere would cause
a decrease in surface temperatures.
How do we know that humans are causing
greenhouse gas concentrations to increase?
[O]nce humans began digging up long- buried
forms of carbon such as coal and oil and burn-
ing them for energy, additional CO2 began to be
released into the atmosphere much more rapidly
than in the natural carbon cycle. Other human
activities, such as cement production and cutting
down and burning of forests (deforestation), also
add CO2 to the atmosphere. . . .
To determine how CO2 concentrations var-
ied prior to such modern measurements, scien-
tists have studied the composition of air bubbles
trapped in ice cores extracted from Greenland
and Antarctica. These data show that, for at least
2,000 years before the Industrial Revolution,
atmospheric CO2 concentrations were steady and
then began to rise sharply beginning in the late
1800s. Today, atmospheric CO2 concentrations
exceed 390 parts per million— nearly 40% higher
than preindustrial levels, and, according to ice
core data, higher than at any point in the past
800,000 years.
Human activities have increased the atmo-
spheric concentrations of other important green-
house gases as well. Methane, which is produced
by the burning of fossil fuels, the raising of live-
stock, the decay of landfill wastes, the production
and transport of natural gas, and other activities,
increased sharply through the 1980s before start-
ing to level off at about two- and- a- half times its
preindustrial level. Nitrous oxide has increased
by roughly 15% since 1750, mainly as a result of
agricultural fertilizer use, but also from fossil fuel
burning and certain industrial processes. Certain
industrial chemicals, such as chlorofluorocarbons
(CFCs), act as potent greenhouse gases and are
long- lived in the atmosphere. Because CFCs do not
have natural sources, their increases can be attrib-
uted unambiguously to human activities. . . .
In addition to direct measurements of CO2
concentrations in the atmosphere, scientists have
amassed detailed records of how much coal, oil,
and natural gas is burned each year. They also esti-
mate how much CO2 is being absorbed, on aver-
age, by the oceans and the land surface. These
analyses show that about 45% of the CO2 emitted
by human activities remains in the atmosphere.
Just as a sink will fill up if water is entering it
faster than it can drain, human production of CO2
is outstripping Earth’s natural ability to remove it
from the air. As a result, atmospheric CO2 levels
are increasing and will remain elevated for many
centuries. Furthermore, a forensic- style analysis of
the CO2 in the atmosphere reveals the chemical
“fingerprint” of carbon from fossil fuels. Together,
these lines of evidence prove conclusively that the
elevated CO2 concentration in the atmosphere is
the result of human activities.*
*NASA Science, Climate Change: How Do We Know?,
January 2, 2018, https://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/.
contends that moral status is justified for nonhu-
man animals when they, like humans, possess the
psychological property of sentience. Sentient non-
human animals can experience pain and pleasure,
just as humans can; therefore, he says, they are enti-
tled to the same level of moral respect. Some critics,
however, object to this kind of animal egalitarianism,
affirming that all sentient animals do have moral sta-
tus but that humans have greater moral considerabil-
ity than nonhuman animals.
Some theorists want to expand the sphere of
moral status to include more than just animals.

https://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/

434 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
considering our moral obligations to the environ-
ment, the good of the whole will always outweigh
the good of an individual. An elk, for example,
may be killed to preserve a species of plant or to
ensure the health of its ecosystem. As one theorist
expressed it, “A thing is right when it tends to pre-
serve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic
community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.”3
What properties might confer moral considerabil-
ity on the biotic community or an ecosystem? A
holist might say that such an environmental whole
deserves our respect because it is a unity of beauti-
fully integrated parts, or it is a self- regulating sys-
tem, or its destruction would diminish the world’s
genetic possibilities.
MORAL THEORIES
On environmental issues, some traditional moral
theories have been strongly anthropocentric. Kant’s
theory is a good example, mandating duties to
people because they are ends in themselves but
establishing no direct duties to animals. For Kant,
animals have instrumental value only. As he puts
it, “Animals . . . are there merely as means to an
end. That end is man.”4 Thomas Aquinas, author
of the most famous version of natural law theory,
also thinks animals are tools to be employed at the
discretion of humans. In addition, the Bible has
seemed to many to suggest an anthropocentric
attitude toward nature, commanding that humans
“subdue” the earth and “have dominion over the
fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over
every living thing that moves upon the earth”
(Genesis 1:28). But traditional theories can also
be— and have been— construed in various ways to
support nonanthropocentric approaches to envi-
ronmental ethics.
As we have seen, some theorists adopt a non-
consequentialist or Kantian perspective on nature.
They reject instrumentalist views in favor of the
notion that the environment or its constituents
have intrinsic value, just as persons are thought to
They hold to biocentrism, or life- centered eth-
ics, the view that all living entities have moral
status, whether sentient or not. People, cats, trees,
weeds, algae, amoebas, germs— all these are worthy
of some sort of moral concern simply because they
are alive. This moral concern, many biocentrists
say, is justified by the teleological nature of liv-
ing things (telos is Greek for “goal”). Living things
are goal- directed, striving consciously or uncon-
sciously toward some good. They therefore have
moral status. But biocentrists differ on how much
respect to grant living things. Some assert that all
living things have equal moral status: exactly the
same moral considerability is accorded to human
beings, dogs, redwood trees, and amoebas. These
biocentrists are therefore species egalitarians.
Other biocentrists, species nonegalitarians,
think that not all living beings are created equal—
some have more moral worth than others. A none-
galitarian might argue that a human deserves more
respect than an elk, an elk more than a rat, and a rat
more than a cactus.
In either form, biocentrism implies that in our
moral deliberations we cannot ignore how our
actions might affect both sentient and nonsentient
living beings, as some forms of anthropocentrism
might have us do. If we want to build a shopping
mall on wetlands, we must consider all the plants
and animals that the project would destroy— and
judge whether their deaths would outweigh any
benefits that the mall would provide to humans
and other living things.
In both zoocentrism and biocentrism, the
fundamental unit of moral consideration is the
individual— the individual animal or plant. Only
individuals have moral status. This perspective,
then, is individualistic, its advocates being called
ecological individualists. In contrast, some
theorists say that the proper focus of moral concern
is not the individual but the entire biosphere and
its ecosystems— what has been called the “biotic
community.” This view, then, is holistic; its propo-
nents are ecological holists. It implies that in

CHAPTER 13: EnvIRonmEnTAL ETHICS Á 435
animals would be the eradication of factory farm-
ing, animal experimentation, and hunting.
Utilitarianism has also been put to use in
defense of nonhuman animals. Following the lead
of the philosopher Jeremy Bentham, utilitarian-
ism’s founder, Peter Singer maintains that in calcu-
lating which action will produce the greatest overall
satisfaction of interests (for example, an interest in
avoiding pain), we must include the interests of
all sentient creatures and give their interests equal
weight. The pain suffered by a human is no more
important than that experienced by a nonhuman
animal. This view seems to imply that any factory
farming in which animals suffer greatly before
being slaughtered is wrong. But it also seems to
suggest that if the animals could be raised without
such suffering, factory farming may be morally per-
missible, even if they are killed in the end.
Our moral obligations regarding climate change
can be derived from any of the moral theories just
mentioned. A nonconsequentialist, for example,
might argue that we have a duty to protect or save
the earth because the planet as a whole has intrin-
sic value. A utilitarian could make a strong case that
we should try to reverse climate change because the
consequences of not doing so would be apocalyptic.
MORAL ARGUMENTS
Serious environmental issues and the arguments
that surround them are numerous, varied, and com-
plex, so for the purposes of evaluation, let us focus
on arguments pertaining to the one question that
has concerned us most throughout this chapter:
When, if ever, do environmental entities or beings have
moral status? As we have seen, environmental phi-
losophers and other thinkers have argued for and
against different kinds of entities having moral con-
siderability and for and against various justifications
for that status. The entities thought to be worthy of
such moral concern include human beings exclu-
sively (anthropocentrism), human and nonhuman
animals (zoocentrism), living things (biocentrism),
’ QUICK REVIEW
anthropocentrism— The notion that only humans
have moral status.
zoocentrism— The notion that both human and
nonhuman animals have moral status.
biocentrism— The view that all living entities
have moral status, whether sentient or not.
species egalitarian— One who believes that all
living things have equal moral status.
species nonegalitarian— One who believes that
some living things have greater moral status
than others.
ecological individualist— One who believes that
the fundamental unit of moral consideration in
environmental ethics is the individual.
ecological holist— One who believes that the
fundamental unit of moral consideration in
environmental ethics is the biosphere and its
ecosystems.
be intrinsically valuable. Probably the most overtly
Kantian theorist is the philosopher Paul Taylor, a
biocentrist who argues that “it is the good ( well-
being, welfare) of individual organisms, considered
as entities having inherent worth, that determines
our moral relations with the Earth’s wild commu-
nities of life” and that “[their] well- being, as well
as human well- being, is something to be realized
as an end in itself.”5 Some zoocentrists also have a
Kantian bent. For example, Tom Regan argues that
sentient animals, human and nonhuman, possess
equal intrinsic worth and therefore have an equal
moral right not to be treated as mere things.6 In
this account, just as there are certain things that we
should not do to humans regardless of the result-
ing utilitarian benefits, so there are ways of treating
nonhuman animals that are wrong regardless of
the advantages to humans. According to Regan, the
result of applying this outlook to the treatment of

436 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
2. Old- growth forests are natural entities.
3. Therefore, old- growth forests have moral status.
We can see right away that this is a valid
argument, but— as is so often the case in moral
arguments— the moral premise (Premise 1) is not
obviously true (though the other premise definitely
is). What reasons might someone give to support
the statement that objects in nature deserve our
respect just because their properties are due solely
to natural processes?
One reason that could be put forth is that Prem-
ise 1 is supported by our moral intuitions (our
and collections or systems of living things such
as species or ecosystems (ecological holism). The
properties that are supposed to validate their claim
to moral worth range across a broad spectrum of
possibilities— from moral agency or sentience to
complexity to self- regulation to beauty.
To begin, let us examine a simple argument con-
taining a premise that offers a common answer to
our question— the answer that entities in the envi-
ronment have moral status because they are natural
(lacking human interference or contrivance).
1. All natural entities have moral status (intrinsic
value or rights, for example).
’
Some of the most controversial disputes in environ-
mental ethics involve conflicts between concern for
endangered species and the economic needs and
demands of humans. Here is just one of many
recent examples:
(China Daily)—The more than 100 wild giant pan-
das in Northwest China’s Gansu Province are now
stepping onto the verge of extinction because of
a decline in their ability to reproduce, according
to Xinhua reports.
Researchers from the Gansu Baishuijiang Giant
Panda Nature Reserve said the giant pandas in the
province now live in five separate habitats, mak-
ing mating among the groups almost impossible.
According to basic principles of genetics and the
pandas’ reproduction habits, a group of less than
50 giant pandas are predicted to become extinct
at some point as a result of a weakening repro-
ductive ability caused by inbreeding.
Wang Hao, a giant panda expert of Peking Uni-
versity, said the fragmentation of wild pandas’
habitats had become the biggest threat to the
survival of the species.
Wang said that the construction of highways
is cutting large panda habitats into smaller and
smaller ones, increasing the risk of degeneration
of the species. . . .
Wang estimated that the annual cost to pro-
tect one wild panda exceeds 5 million yuan
(US$617,000).*
Which should be given more moral weight— the
people or the pandas? What are your reasons for
preferring one over the other? If you agree that
we should try to save endangered species like
the panda, how much should we be willing to
pay to do so? Is $617,000 per panda an accept-
able price? How about $1 million? Suppose saving
one panda would put one thousand people out
of a job, forcing scores of families into poverty.
Would saving the pandas be worth that cost?
Why or why not? What moral principle would
you devise to help you answer these questions
(and similar questions regarding any endangered
species)?
*Guo Nei, reprinted with permission of SydiGate
Media Inc. from “Road Construction Segregates Giant
Pandas’ Habitats in Gansu,” China Daily, December 5,
2006; permission conveyed through Copyright Clear-
ance Center, Inc.
CRITICAL THOUGHT: Should Pandas Pay the Price?

CHAPTER 13: EnvIRonmEnTAL ETHICS Á 437
A detractor could cast doubt on this line by
pointing out that there seem to be instances
in which we do in fact value the artificial more
than the natural. For example, Niagara Falls on
the American side of the border with Canada is
undeniably beautiful and majestic, exemplifying
the ideal waterfall in its natural state. But oddly
enough, the majestic, “natural” state of the falls
is largely a product of human ingenuity. Because
of natural erosion, the falls deteriorate over time
and— without human intervention— would suffer
so much damage that they would no longer look
much like the falls people have come to expect.
Through reconstruction and control of water flow,
engineers have saved Niagara Falls, a now largely
artificial phenomenon that people would almost
certainly prefer over the natural but less impressive
version.10
Let us now consider a “ higher- level” sort of
argument, one that tries to establish the truth of a
particular environmental theory, in this case bio-
centric egalitarianism. Recall that this doctrine
asserts that all living things possess equal moral
status— no being is superior to any other in moral
considerability. Humans, then, are not entitled to
more respect than apes or redwoods or elk. Here
is how the philosopher Paul Taylor argues for this
position:11
1. Humans are members of earth’s community of
life in exactly the same way that all other living
things are members.
2. Human beings and all other living things con-
stitute a dynamic system of interlinked and
interdependent parts.
3. Each living thing is a “teleological center of life,
pursuing its own good in its own way.”
4. Human beings are not superior to other species.
5. Therefore, all living things have equal moral
status.
This argument is complex and deserves far more
close analysis than we can provide here. But we can
home in on a few interesting elements.
considered moral judgments, for example). To test
this idea, mull over this thought experiment:
Imagine that a certain mine requires the destruc-
tion of a group of trees on a rocky outcrop and of
the outcrop itself. Environmentalists protest that
such destruction involves an uncompensated loss
of value. The mining company promises to recon-
struct the outcrop from synthetic parts and to
replace the trees with plastic models. This bit of
artificial environment will be indistinguishable,
except by laboratory analysis, from what was origi-
nally there. It will be exactly as appealing to look at,
no animals will be harmed as a consequence, and
no ecosystem will be disrupted.7
What, if anything, would be wrong with replac-
ing these natural entities with synthetic ones?
A few trees would be destroyed, and thus there is a
loss of living things, but let us mentally discount
the loss. Would this substitution of nonnatural
for natural make a moral difference? Would the
mining company be guilty of wrongdoing? If this
scenario suggests to us that the property of natu-
ralness does confer some kind of moral standing
on objects, then perhaps our moral intuitions do
support Premise 1.
The obvious move for a critic is to assert that
it is not at all clear whether moral intuitions offer
such support. Perhaps we are merely confused,
actually worrying not about unnaturalness but
about harm to ecosystems or extermination of
wildlife.8
A defender of Premise 1 could try another tack.
She could attempt to take our moral intuitions in a
different direction, declaring that just as fake works
of art seem to have less value for us than the origi-
nals, so synthetic objects in the environment have
less intrinsic value than their natural counterparts
or originals. We simply do not appreciate replicas of
fine sculptures as much as we do the originals, and
we do not respect artificial trees as much as we do
natural ones. The property of being natural, then,
appears to confer some value on objects— and thus
some level of moral standing.9

438 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
CHAPTER REVIEW
SUMMARY
Environmental ethics, a branch of applied ethics,
explores questions about the value of nature and its
constituents, the relationship between the environ-
ment and humans, and the moral obligations that
humans have toward the environment. Logical argu-
ments in the field rely on several key concepts, includ-
ing instrumental value, intrinsic value, and moral
status or considerability. Something with instrumen-
tal value is valuable as a means to something else;
something with intrinsic value is valuable in itself. An
entity has moral status if it is a suitable candidate for
moral concern or respect in its own right.
Several positions have been staked out regarding
the proper attitude of humans toward nature. Anthro-
pocentrism is the view that only humans have moral
standing; zoocentrism, that animals do; and biocen-
trism, that all living things do. Species egalitarians
believe that all living things have equal moral status;
species nonegalitarians, that they do not. Ecological
individualists think that only individuals have moral
status; ecological holists, that only the biosphere and
its ecosystems do.
Some theorists have adopted a Kantian perspective
on the environment. Paul Taylor insists that organ-
isms have inherent worth and should not be treated
merely as means to ends. Tom Regan asserts that sen-
tient beings possess equal intrinsic worth and should
not be considered mere things. A utilitarian stance is
also possible, as Peter Singer has demonstrated in his
position on animal rights.
KEY TERMS
anthropocentrism (p. 431)
zoocentrism (p. 431)
biocentrism (p. 434)
species egalitarian (p. 434)
species nonegalitarian (p. 434)
ecological individualist (p. 434)
ecological holist (p. 434)
Consider Premise 4. At the outset, note that the
argument is not valid: the conclusion does not fol-
low from the first four premises. Taylor acknowl-
edges this fact but suggests that if we accept
Premises 1–4, then it would at least be more rea-
sonable than not to accept the conclusion. He says
the same thing about Premise 4: if we accept Prem-
ises 1–3, it would not be unreasonable to accept
the fourth premise. But some argue that Premise
4 does not follow from Premises 1–3. More to the
point, it could be argued that even if we accept that
humans are part of an interdependent community
of life in which all members are teleological centers
pursuing their own good, we are not necessarily
being unreasonable if we then reject the idea that
humans are on a par with all other species. Even if
Premises 1–3 are true, we are not obliged to accept
Premise 4.
Some philosophers have argued directly against
Taylor’s conclusion (Statement 5) by drawing out
its implications. If all species are morally equal,
what would that imply about how we treat various
species? One critic gives this answer:
What seems far more problematic for species egali-
tarianism is that it seems to suggest that it makes no
difference what we kill. Vegetarians typically think
it worse to kill a cow than to kill a carrot. Are they
wrong? Yes they are, according to species egalitari-
anism. In this respect, species egalitarianism can-
not be right. I believe we have reason to respect
nature. But we fail to give nature due respect if we
say we should have no more respect for a cow than
for a potato.12
This counterargument is, of course, another
appeal to our moral intuitions. We are asked to
reflect on whether it would be morally permissible
to treat a cow as if it had the same moral status as a
potato. If they do deserve the same level of respect,
then if we must kill one of them, we should not care
which. They are moral equals. But if we think that
it does matter which one we kill, we have reason to
reject the notion that they are moral equals— and
thus deny biocentric egalitarianism.

CHAPTER 13: EnvIRonmEnTAL ETHICS Á 439
FURTHER READING
Jeffrey Bennett, A Global Warming Primer (Boulder, CO:
Big Kid Science, 2016).
Andrew Brennan and Yeuk- Sze Lo, “Environmental
Ethics,” in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Summer
2002 ed., ed. Edward N. Zalta, http://plato.stanford
.edu/archives/sum2002/entries /ethics-environmental
/ (March 1, 2015).
J. Baird Callicott, “The Search for an Environmental
Ethic,” in Matters of Life and Death: New Introductory
Essays in Moral Philosophy, ed. Tom Regan, 2nd ed.
(New York: Random House, 1986).
Andrew Dessler, Introduction to Climate Change (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).
Robert Elliot, “Environmental Ethics,” in A Companion
to Ethics, ed. Peter Singer, corr. ed. (Oxford: Blackwell,
1993).
Garrett Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Science
162 (December 13, 1968): 1243–48.
Robert Heilbroner, “What Has Posterity Ever Done
for Me?” New York Times Magazine, January 19, 1975,
14–15.
Aldo Leopold, “The Land Ethic,” in A Sand County
Almanac: And Sketches Here and There (1949; reprint,
New York: Oxford University Press, 1981).
Jennifer Marohasy, ed., Climate Change: The Facts 2017
(Melbourne, VIC: Connor Court, 2017).
Arne Naess, “The Shallow and the Deep: Long- Range
Ecological Movement,” Inquir y 16 (Spring 1973):
95–100.
Holmes Rolston III, “Values in and Duties to the Natural
World,” in Ecology, Economics, Ethics: The Broken Circle,
ed. F. Herbert Bormann and Stephen R. Kellert (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1991).
Albert Schweitzer, “Reverence for Life,” in Civilization and
Ethics, trans. John Naish (London: Black, 1923).
Walter Sinnot- Armstrong and Richard B. Howarth, ed., Per-
spectives on Climate Change: Science, Economics, Politics,
Ethics (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2005).
Christopher D. Stone, “Should Trees Have Standing?
Toward Legal Rights for Natural Objects” in Should Trees
Have Standing? Toward Legal Rights for Natural Objects
(Los Altos, CA: William Kaufman, 1974).
Lynn White Jr., “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological
Crisis,” Science 155 (March 1967): 1203–7.
EXERCISES
Review Questions
1. What is moral status? (p. 431)
2. What is anthropocentrism? (p. 431)
3. Define zoocentrism and biocentrism. (p. 431, 434)
4. What is a species egalitarian? (p. 434)
5. What is the difference between instrumental
and intrinsic value? (p. 430)
6. On what grounds might someone believe that
nature has intrinsic value? (p. 430)
7. What is the difference between species
egalitarianism and species nonegalitarianism?
(p. 434)
8. What is an ecological holist? An ecological
individualist? (p. 434)
9. What was Kant’s attitude toward animals?
(p. 434)
10. What pieces of evidence have convinced
scientists that climate change is happening?
(p. 432–433)
Discussion Questions
1. Who or what has moral status— humans,
nonhuman animals, trees? Explain.
2. Do you believe that all living things have equal
moral status? Why or why not?
3. Are you an anthropocentrist? Are you a
zoocentrist?
4. Do you think that humans and animals have
equal moral status? Why or why not?
5. Does a human baby have the same moral status
as a dog or horse? Explain.
6. Do you think Kant was wrong about animals
having only instrumental value? Why or why
not?
7. Do entities in the environment have moral
status because they are natural? Explain.
8. Critique Paul Taylor’s argument for biocentric
egalitarianism.
9. Critique the claim that climate change is not a
real phenomenon.
10. Do you believe that you have a moral obligation to
try to help counteract global warming? Explain.

http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2002/entries/ethics-environmental/

440 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
E T H I C A L D I L E m m A S
1. The Moral Dilemma of Climate Change
Climate change presents us with a moral dilemma that we cannot escape. The problem
presented by climate change and our attempts to solve it will affect not only us but
also our children and grandchildren. Climate change is no ordinary puzzle: it’s a serious
intergenerational challenge. Here’s one way of expressing it:
It boils down to this: We benefit mightily from burning cheap coal and will shoulder
most of the expense associated with switching the global economy to low- carbon
fuel sources. But our grandchildren and great- grandchildren will pay the price for
our profligate energy ways and will reap the majority of the benefit of our shift to
cleaner- burning fuels.*
Should we pay now to try to rein in global warming and its awful effects, or should we
let our kids pay? Do we have moral obligations to future generations, to people who
don’t yet exist? If we do have obligations to them, how much should we sacrifice now
to do our duty?
*Nicole Heller and Douglas Fischer, “Ethical Dilemma Profoundly Sways Economics of Climate Change,”
Climate Central, January 27, 2011, http://www.climatecentral.org/news/ ethical- dilemma- profoundly
-sways-economics-of-climate-change.
2. Saving the Glaciers
The glaciers have been disappearing from Glacier National Park in Montana and adjoining
Waterton National Park in Canada. In 1850, Glacier is said to have had 150 glaciers; in
2006, there were 27. In response to this trend, various organizations petitioned for the
parks to be designated endangered by being placed on the danger list of the World
Heritage Committee. As one report says,
Endangered status would require the World Heritage Committee to find ways to
mitigate how climate change affects the park, [the law professor who wrote the
petition] said. . . Better fuel efficiency for automobiles and stronger energy efficiency
standards for buildings and appliances are among the ways to reduce greenhouse
pollution that contributes to warming, the petition [said].
But some denounced the petition as unnecessary and unsupported by scientific
data, while one group of scientists estimated that if climate trends continue, Glacier
Park’s glaciers will disappear completely by 2030.†
Suppose the glaciers’ melting would have no
appreciable effect on the environment except that
they would no longer exist. Would conservation-
ists still be justified in trying to save the glaciers?

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CHAPTER 13: EnvIRonmEnTAL ETHICS Á 441
If so, how could they justify their efforts? If not,
why not? Suppose the glaciers could be saved only
if the government spends $10 billion on pollution
controls— money that would have to be taken away
from social programs. Would this cost be worth it?
Why or why not? Justify your answers.
†Associated Press, “Endangered Status for Glacier National Park?” NBCNEWS.com, February 16, 2006,
http://www.nbcnews.com/id/11389665/ns/us_ news- environment/t/endangered-status-glacier-national
-park/#.VOj_I1PF9RY (February 21, 2015).
3. Ivory- Billed Woodpecker v. Irrigation
While ornithologists continue to debate whether the ivory- billed woodpecker still lingers
in the bayous of Arkansas, the rare bird, once presumed extinct, is now being used by
conservationists in their fight against a federally funded and potentially devastating
irrigation project.
A Little Rock federal court will hear a case against the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’
Grand Prairie Area Demonstration Project. Plaintiffs ask that all work be halted on the
project until appropriate environmental studies can be performed to evaluate its effect
on the woodpecker.
Lisa Swann of the National Wildlife Federation states that the Grand Prairie project
would be “a recipe for disaster” for the near extinct bird, though the U.S. Army Corps
maintains that the $319 million project, which would replenish exhausted groundwater
aquifers in a 242,000-acre agricultural region, is completely safe.
The corps biologist, Ed Lambert, argues that their “biological assessment” perfor-
med last spring has proven that the Grand Prairie project will bring no harm to the
woodpecker.
Plans for Grand Prairie have been underway since the 1980s, when studies found
that the groundwater aquifers of east- central Arkansas were in danger of depletion by
rice growers. The corps has been working with area farmers to build reservoirs that will
eventually be filled with water pumped from the White River.
According to the corps, Grand Prairie will not only aid farmers, but also create new
wetland habitat for waterfowl and shorebirds. The water piped in from the White River
could also replenish the slowly shrinking hardwood forests of Arkansas and reintroduce
thousands of acres of native grassland.
However, Swann’s group and other environmentalists see the project differently. They
argue that the project will waste huge amounts of tax dollars and benefit only farmers.
The National Wildlife Federation stated in one publication that the “mammoth sucking
machine” will damage wetlands and pollute the water, threatening ducks, mussels, and a
variety of other species in the region that rely on clean and safe water.
The celebrity among these species is the ivory- billed woodpecker, long believed to be
extinct. Sightings since the 1940s were given little credit by experts, as the smaller pileated
woodpecker, which has similar coloring, is commonly mistaken for the ivory- bill.

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442 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
One expert, however, began to investigate these sightings. Tim Gallagher, of the
Cornell Lab of Ornithology and editor of Living Bird magazine, began to study the
mysterious ivory- bill in the 1970s. Eventually, his research led him to Gene Sparling,
who claimed to have seen a red- crested male while kayaking in the wetlands of
eastern Arkansas.
During the winter of 2004, Gallagher set out to catch a glimpse of the elusive bird
himself, accompanied by Sparling and a fellow birder, and on February 27, Gallagher
succeeded in spotting a male ivory- bill. Further expeditions ensued, and on April 28,
2005, an article in Science was published proclaiming that the ivory- bill was no longer
extinct.‡
Assume that the woodpecker does exist and that
the water project would wipe it out. Should the
project proceed or be cancelled? Why? How might
a species egalitarian (biocentrist) answer this?
A species nonegalitarian? An ecological holist?
‡Based on Mike Stuckey, “New Star of the Bird World Stars in Lawsuit, Too,” MSNBC.com, January 25, 2006,
www.nbcnews.com/id/10929337/ (January 20, 2012).
I start with the modest proposition that, in dealing
with pollution, or indeed with any problem, it is help-
ful to know what one is attempting to accomplish.
Agreement on how and whether to pursue a particu-
lar objective, such as pollution control, is not possible
unless some more general objective has been identified
and stated with reasonable precision. We talk loosely
of having clean air and clean water, of preserving our
wilderness areas, and so forth. But none of these is a
sufficiently general objective: each is more accurately
viewed as a means rather than as an end.
With regard to clean air, for example, one may ask,
“how clean?” and “what does clean mean?” It is even
reasonable to ask, “why have clean air?” Each of these
questions is an implicit demand that a more general
community goal be stated— a goal sufficiently general
in its scope and enjoying sufficiently general assent
among the community of actors that such “why”
questions no longer seem admissible with respect to
that goal.
If, for example, one states as a goal the proposition
that “every person should be free to do whatever he
wishes in contexts where his actions do not interfere
with the interests of other human beings,” the speaker
is unlikely to be met with a response of “why.” The
goal may be criticized as uncertain in its implications
or difficult to implement, but it is so basic a tenet of
our civilization— it reflects a cultural value so broadly
R E A D I n G S
People or Penguins
William F. Baxter
William F. Baxter, “A ‘Good’ Environment: Just One of the Set of
Human Objectives,” from People or Penguins: The Case for Opti-
mal Pollution (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974), 1–13.
Copyright © 1974 Columbia University Press. Reprinted with per-
mission of the publisher.

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CHAPTER 13: EnvIRonmEnTAL ETHICS Á 443
4. Both the incentive and the opportunity to improve
his share of satisfactions should be preserved to
every individual. Preservation of incentive is dic-
tated by the “ no- waste” criterion and enjoins
against the continuous, totally egalitarian redis-
tribution of satisfactions, or wealth; but subject to
that constraint, everyone should receive, by con-
tinuous redistribution if necessary, some minimal
share of aggregate wealth so as to avoid a level of
privation from which the opportunity to improve
his situation becomes illusory.
The relationship of these highly general goals to
the more specific environmental issues at hand may
not be readily apparent, and I am not yet ready to
demonstrate their pervasive implications. But let me
give one indication of their implications. Recently
scientists have informed us that use of DDT in food
production is causing damage to the penguin popula-
tion. For the present purposes let us accept that asser-
tion as an indisputable scientific fact. The scientific
fact is often asserted as if the correct implication—
that we must stop agricultural use of DDT— followed
from the mere statement of the fact of penguin dam-
age. But plainly it does not follow if my criteria are
employed.
My criteria are oriented to people, not penguins.
Damage to penguins, or sugar pines, or geological mar-
vels is, without more, simply irrelevant. One must go
further, by my criteria, and say: Penguins are impor-
tant because people enjoy seeing them walk about
rocks; and furthermore, the well- being of people
would be less impaired by halting use of DDT than by
giving up penguins. In short, my observations about
environmental problems will be people- oriented, as
are my criteria. I have no interest in preserving pen-
guins for their own sake.
It may be said by way of objection to this position,
that it is very selfish of people to act as if each person
represented one unit of importance and nothing else
was of any importance. It is undeniably selfish. Nev-
ertheless I think it is the only tenable starting place
for analysis for several reasons. First, no other position
corresponds to the way most people really think and
act— i.e., corresponds to reality.
shared, at least in the abstract— that the question
“why” is seen as impertinent or imponderable or both.
I do not mean to suggest that everyone would agree
with the “spheres of freedom” objective just stated.
Still less do I mean to suggest that a society could sub-
scribe to four or five such general objectives that would
be adequate in their coverage to serve as testing criteria
by which all other disagreements might be measured.
One difficulty in the attempt to construct such a list is
that each new goal added will conflict, in certain appli-
cations, with each prior goal listed; and thus each goal
serves as a limited qualification on prior goals.
Without any expectation of obtaining unanimous
consent to them, let me set forth four goals that I gen-
erally use as ultimate testing criteria in attempting to
frame solutions to problems of human organization.
My position regarding pollution stems from these
four criteria. If the criteria appeal to you and any part
of what appears hereafter does not, our disagreement
will have a helpful focus: which of us is correct, ana-
lytically, in supposing that his position on pollution
would better serve these general goals. If the criteria
do not seem acceptable to you, then it is to be expected
that our more particular judgments will differ, and the
task will then be yours to identify the basic set of crite-
ria upon which your particular judgments rest.
My criteria are as follows:
1. The spheres of freedom criterion stated above.
2. Waste is a bad thing. The dominant feature
of human existence is scarcity— our available
resources, our aggregate labors, and our skill in
employing both have always been, and will con-
tinue for some time to be, inadequate to yield to
every man all the tangible and intangible satisfac-
tions he would like to have. Hence, none of those
resources, or labors, or skills, should be wasted—
that is, employed so as to yield less than they
might yield in human satisfactions.
3. Every human being should be regarded as an end
rather than as a means to be used for the better-
ment of another. Each should be afforded dignity
and regarded as having an absolute claim to an
evenhanded application of such rules as the com-
munity may adopt for its governance.

444 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
know how those proxy- holders are to be selected: self-
appointment does not seem workable to me.
Sixth, and by way of summary of all the foregoing,
let me point out that the set of environmental issues
under discussion— although they raise very complex
technical questions of how to achieve any objective—
ultimately raise a normative question: what ought we
to do. Questions of ought are unique to the human
mind and world— they are meaningless as applied to a
nonhuman situation.
I reject the proposition that we ought to respect the
“balance of nature” or to “preserve the environment”
unless the reason for doing so, express or implied, is
the benefit of man.
I reject the idea that there is a “right” or “morally
correct” state of nature to which we should return.
The word “nature” has no normative connotation.
Was it “right” or “wrong” for the earth’s crust to heave
in contortion and create mountains and seas? Was it
“right” for the first amphibian to crawl up out of the pri-
mordial ooze? Was it “wrong” for plants to reproduce
themselves and alter the atmospheric composition in
favor of oxygen? For animals to alter the atmosphere in
favor of carbon dioxide both by breathing oxygen and
eating plants? No answers can be given to these ques-
tions because they are meaningless questions.
All this may seem obvious to the point of being
tedious, but much of the present controversy over
environment and pollution rests on tacit normative
assumptions about just such nonnormative phenom-
ena: that it is “wrong” to impair penguins with DDT,
but not to slaughter cattle for prime rib roasts. That it
is wrong to kill stands of sugar pines with industrial
fumes, but not to cut sugar pines and build housing
for the poor. Every man is entitled to his own preferred
definition of Walden Pond, but there is no definition
that has any moral superiority over another, except by
reference to the selfish needs of the human race.
From the fact that there is no normative definition
of the natural state, it follows that there is no norma-
tive definition of clean air or pure water— hence no
definition of polluted air— or of pollution— except by
reference to the needs of man. The “right” composi-
tion of the atmosphere is one which has some dust
in it and some lead in it and some hydrogen sulfide
Second, this attitude does not portend any massive
destruction of nonhuman flora and fauna, for people
depend on them in many obvious ways, and they will
be preserved because and to the degree that humans
do depend on them.
Third, what is good for humans is, in many
respects, good for penguins and pine trees— clean air
for example. So that humans are, in these respects, sur-
rogates for plant and animal life.
Fourth, I do not know how we could administer
any other system. Our decisions are either private or
collective. Insofar as Mr. Jones is free to act privately, he
may give such preferences as he wishes to other forms
of life: he may feed birds in winter and do with less
himself, and he may even decline to resist an advanc-
ing polar bear on the ground that the bear’s appetite
is more important than those portions of himself that
the bear may choose to eat. In short my basic premise
does not rule out private altruism to competing life-
forms. It does rule out, however, Mr. Jones’s inclina-
tion to feed Mr. Smith to the bear, however hungry the
bear, however despicable Mr. Smith.
Insofar as we act collectively on the other hand,
only humans can be afforded an opportunity to par-
ticipate in the collective decisions. Penguins cannot
vote now and are unlikely subjects for the franchise—
pine trees more unlikely still. Again each individual
is free to cast his vote so as to benefit sugar pines if
that is his inclination. But many of the more extreme
assertions that one hears from some conservation-
ists amount to tacit assertions that they are specially
appointed representatives of sugar pines, and hence
that their preferences should be weighted more heav-
ily than the preferences of other humans who do not
enjoy equal rapport with “nature.” The simplistic
assertion that agricultural use of DDT must stop at
once because it is harmful to penguins is of that type.
Fifth, if polar bears or pine trees or penguins, like
men, are to be regarded as ends rather than means,
if they are to count in our calculus of social organi-
zation, someone must tell me how much each one
counts, and someone must tell me how these life-
forms are to be permitted to express their preferences,
for I do not know either answer. If the answer is that
certain people are to hold their proxies, then I want to

CHAPTER 13: EnvIRonmEnTAL ETHICS Á 445
openers. That is the meaningful sense in which the
dam is costly.
Quite apart from the very important question of
how wisely we can combine our resources to produce
goods and services, is the very different question of
how they get distributed— who gets how many goods?
Dollars constitute the claim checks which are distrib-
uted among people and which control their share of
national output. Dollars are nearly valueless pieces
of paper except to the extent that they do represent
claim checks to some fraction of the output of goods
and services. Viewed as claim checks, all the dollars
outstanding during any period of time are worth, in
the aggregate, the goods and services that are available
to be claimed with them during that period— neither
more nor less.
It is far easier to increase the supply of dollars than
to increase the production of goods and services—
printing dollars is easy. But printing more dollars
doesn’t help because each dollar then simply becomes
a claim to fewer goods, i.e., becomes worth less.
The point is this: many people fall into error
upon hearing the statement that the decision to build
a dam, or to clean up a river, will cost $X million. It
is regrettably easy to say: “It’s only money. This is a
wealthy country, and we have lots of money.” But you
cannot build a dam or clean a river with $X million—
unless you also have a match, you can’t even make a
fire. One builds a dam or cleans a river by diverting
labor and steel and trucks and factories from mak-
ing one kind of goods to making another. The cost in
dollars is merely a shorthand way of describing the
extent of the diversion necessary. If we build a dam for
$X million, then we must recognize that we will have
$X million less housing and food and medical care and
electric can openers as a result.
Similarly, the costs of controlling pollution are
best expressed in terms of the other goods we will
have to give up to do the job. This is not to say the job
should not be done. Badly as we need more housing,
more medical care, and more can openers, and more
symphony orchestras, we could do with somewhat
less of them, in my judgment at least, in exchange
for somewhat cleaner air and rivers. But that is the
nature of the trade- off, and analysis of the problem
in it— just those amounts that attend a sensibly orga-
nized society thoughtfully and knowledgeably pur-
suing the greatest possible satisfaction for its human
members.
The first and most fundamental step toward solu-
tion of our environmental problems is a clear recog-
nition that our objective is not pure air or water but
rather some optimal state of pollution. That step
immediately suggests the question: How do we define
and attain the level of pollution that will yield the
maximum possible amount of human satisfaction?
Low levels of pollution contribute to human
satisfaction but so do food and shelter and education
and music. To attain ever lower levels of pollution, we
must pay the cost of having less of these other things.
I contrast that view of the cost of pollution control
with the more popular statement that pollution con-
trol will “cost” very large numbers of dollars. The pop-
ular statement is true in some senses, false in others;
sorting out the true and false senses is of some impor-
tance. The first step in that sorting process is to achieve
a clear understanding of the difference between dol-
lars and resources. Resources are the wealth of our
nation; dollars are merely claim checks upon those
resources. Resources are of vital importance; dollars
are comparatively trivial.
Four categories of resources are sufficient for our
purposes: At any given time a nation, or a planet if you
prefer, has a stock of labor, of technological skill, of
capital goods, and of natural resources (such as min-
eral deposits, timber, water, land, etc.). These resources
can be used in various combinations to yield goods
and services of all kinds— in some limited quantity.
The quantity will be larger if they are combined effi-
ciently, smaller if combined inefficiently. But in either
event the resource stock is limited, the goods and ser-
vices that they can be made to yield are limited; even
the most efficient use of them will yield less than our
population, in the aggregate, would like to have.
If one considers building a new dam, it is appro-
priate to say that it will be costly in the sense that it
will require x hours of labor, y tons of steel and con-
crete, and z amount of capital goods. If these resources
are devoted to the dam, then they cannot be used to
build hospitals, fishing rods, schools, or electric can

446 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
quieter, more pastoral nation up to— and no further
than— the point at which we value more highly the
next washing machine or hospital that we would have
to do without than we value the next unit of envi-
ronmental improvement that the diverted resources
would create.
Now this proposition seems to me unassailable
but so general and abstract as to be unhelpful— at
least unadministerable in the form stated. It assumes
we can measure in some way the incremental units of
human satisfaction yielded by very different types of
goods. The proposition must remain a pious abstrac-
tion until I can explain how this measurement process
can occur. . . . But I insist that the proposition stated
describes the result for which we should be striving—
and again, that it is always useful to know what your
target is even if your weapons are too crude to score a
bull’s eye.
is advanced if that unpleasant reality is kept in mind.
Once the trade- off relationship is clearly perceived, it
is possible to state in a very general way what the opti-
mal level of pollution is. I would state it as follows:
People enjoy watching penguins. They enjoy
relatively clean air and smog- free vistas. Their health
is improved by relatively clean water and air. Each of
these benefits is a type of good or service. As a soci-
ety we would be well advised to give up one washing
machine if the resources that would have gone into
that washing machine can yield greater human sat-
isfaction when diverted into pollution control. We
should give up one hospital if the resources thereby
freed would yield more human satisfaction when
devoted to elimination of noise in our cities. And so
on, trade- off by trade- off, we should divert our pro-
ductive capacities from the production of existing
goods and services to the production of a cleaner,
It’s Not My Fault: Global Warming and Individual Moral Obligations
Walter Sinnott- Armstrong
roughly accurate, but none is certain, and I will not try
to justify them here. Instead, I will simply take them
for granted for the sake of argument.
First, global warming has begun and is likely to
increase over the next century. We cannot be sure
exactly how much or how fast, but hot times are coming.
Second, a significant amount of global warming
is due to human activities. The main culprit is fossil
fuels.
Third, global warming will create serious problems
for many people over the long term by causing climate
changes, including violent storms, floods from sea
level rises, droughts, heat waves, and so on. Millions
of people will probably be displaced or die.
Fourth, the poor will be hurt most of all. The rich
countries are causing most of the global warming, but
they will be able to adapt to climate changes more
easily. Poor countries that are close to sea level might
be devastated.
Previous [essays] have focused on scientific research,
economic projections, and government policies. How-
ever, even if scientists establish that global warming
is occurring, even if economists confirm that its costs
will be staggering, and even if political theorists agree
that governments must do something about it, it is
still not clear what moral obligations regarding global
warming devolve upon individuals like you and me.
That is the question to be addressed in this essay.
1. ASSUMPTIONS
To make the issue stark, let us begin with a few assump-
tions. I believe that these assumptions are probably
Walter Sinnott- Armstrong, “It’s Not My Fault: Global Warming
and Individual Moral Obligations” in Perspectives on Climate
Change: Science, Economics, Politics, Ethics, ed. Walter Sinnott-
Armstrong and Richard B. Howarth (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2005),
285–307. © 2005 Emerald Publishing Limited. All rights reserved.
Reprinted with permission.

CHAPTER 13: EnvIRonmEnTAL ETHICS Á 447
I want to bring out some of its complications.
It should be clear from the start that “individual”
moral obligations do not always follow directly from
“collective” moral obligations. The fact that your gov-
ernment morally ought to do something does not
prove that “you” ought to do it, even if your govern-
ment fails. Suppose that a bridge is dangerous because
so much traffic has gone over it and continues to go
over it. The government has a moral obligation to
make the bridge safe. If the government fails to do its
duty, it does not follow that I personally have a moral
obligation to fix the bridge. It does not even follow
that I have a moral obligation to fill in one crack in
the bridge, even if the bridge would be fixed if every-
one filled in one crack, even if I drove over the bridge
many times, and even if I still drive over it every day.
Fixing the bridge is the government’s job, not mine.
While I ought to encourage the government to fulfill
its obligations, I do not have to take on those obliga-
tions myself.
All that this shows is that government obligations
do not “always” imply parallel individual obligations.
Still, maybe “sometimes” they do. My government has
a moral obligation to teach arithmetic to the children
in my town, including my own children. If the govern-
ment fails in this obligation, then I do take on a moral
obligation to teach arithmetic to my children. Thus,
when the government fails in its obligations, some-
times I have to fill in, and sometimes I do not.
What about global warming? If the government
fails to do anything about global warming, what am
I supposed to do about it? There are lots of ways for
me as an individual to fight global warming. I can
protest against bad government policies and vote
for candidates who will make the government fulfill
its moral obligations. I can support private organi-
zations that fight global warming, such as the Pew
Foundation, or boycott companies that contribute
too much to global warming, such as most oil com-
panies. Each of these cases is interesting, but they all
differ. To simplify our discussion, we need to pick one
act as our focus.
My example will be wasteful driving. Some people
drive to their jobs or to the store because they have no
other reasonable way to work and eat. I want to avoid
Fifth, governments, especially the biggest and
richest ones, are able to mitigate global warming. They
can impose limits on emissions. They can require or
give incentives for increased energy efficiency. They
can stop deforestation and fund reforestation. They
can develop ways to sequester carbon dioxide in
oceans or underground. These steps will help, but the
only long- run solution lies in alternatives to fossil
fuels. These alternatives can be found soon if govern-
ments start massive research projects now.
Sixth, it is too late to stop global warming. Because
there is so much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere
already, because carbon dioxide remains in the atmo-
sphere for so long, and because we will remain depen-
dent on fossil fuels in the near future, governments
can slow down global warming or reduce its severity,
but they cannot prevent it. Hence, governments need
to adapt. They need to build seawalls. They need to
reinforce houses that cannot withstand storms. They
need to move populations from low- lying areas.
Seventh, these steps will be costly. Increased energy
efficiency can reduce expenses, adaptation will create
some jobs, and money will be made in the research
and production of alternatives to fossil fuels. Still, any
steps that mitigate or adapt to global warming will slow
down our economies, at least in the short run. That will
hurt many people, especially many poor people.
Eighth, despite these costs, the major govern-
ments throughout the world still morally ought to
take some of these steps. The clearest moral obliga-
tion falls on the United States. The United States
caused and continues to cause more of the problem
than any other country. The United States can spend
more resources on a solution without sacrificing basic
necessities. This country has the scientific expertise to
solve technical problems. Other countries follow its
lead (sometimes!). So the United States has a special
moral obligation to help mitigate and adapt to global
warming.
2. THE PROBLEM
Even assuming all of this, it is still not clear what I as
an individual morally ought to do about global warm-
ing. That issue is not as simple as many people assume.

448 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
Still, I do not feel confident in this judgment. I know
that other people disagree (even though they are also
concerned about the environment). I would probably
have different moral intuitions about this case if I had
been raised differently or if I now lived in a different cul-
ture. My moral intuition might be distorted by overgen-
eralization from the other cases where I think that other
entities (large governments) do have moral obligations
to fight global warming. I also worry that my moral intu-
ition might be distorted by my desire to avoid conflicts
with my environmentalist friends. The issue of global
warming generates strong emotions because of its politi-
cal implications and because of how scary its effects are.
It is also a peculiarly modern case, especially because it
operates on a much grander scale than my moral intu-
itions evolved to handle long ago when acts did not have
such long- term effects on future generations (or at least
people were not aware of such effects). In such circum-
stances, I doubt that we are justified in trusting our moral
intuitions alone. We need some kind of confirmation.
One way to confirm the truth of my moral intu-
itions would be to derive them from a general moral
principle. A principle could tell us why wasteful driv-
ing is morally wrong, so we would not have to depend
on bare assertion. And a principle might be supported
by more trustworthy moral beliefs. The problem is
“which” principle?
3. ACTUAL ACT PRINCIPLES
One plausible principle refers to causing harm. If one
person had to inhale all of the exhaust from my car,
this would harm him and give me a moral obligation
not to drive my car just for fun. Such cases suggest:
The harm principle: We have a moral obligation not to
perform an act that causes harm to others.
This principle implies that I have a moral obliga-
tion not to drive my gas- guzzler just for fun “if” such
driving causes harm.
The problem is that such driving does “not” cause
harm in normal cases. If one person were in a posi-
tion to inhale all of my exhaust, then he would get
sick if I did drive, and he would not get sick if I did
not drive (under normal circumstances). In contrast,
issues about whether these goals justify driving, so I will
focus on a case where nothing so important is gained.
I will consider driving for fun on a beautiful Sunday
afternoon. My drive is not necessary to cure depression
or calm aggressive impulses. All that is gained is plea-
sure: Ah, the feel of wind in your hair! The views! How
spectacular! Of course, you could drive a fuel- efficient
hybrid car. But fuel- efficient cars have less “get up and
go.” So let us consider a gas- guzzling sport utility vehicle.
Ah, the feeling of power! The excitement! Maybe you do
not like to go for drives in sport utility vehicles on sunny
Sunday afternoons, but many people do.
Do we have a moral obligation not to drive in such
circumstances? This question concerns driving, not
“buying” cars. To make this clear, let us assume that
I borrow the gas- guzzler from a friend. This question
is also not about “legal” obligations. So let us assume
that it is perfectly legal to go for such drives. Perhaps
it ought to be illegal, but it is not. Note also that my
question is not about what would be “best.” Maybe
it would be better, even morally better, for me not to
drive a gas- guzzler just for fun. But that is not the issue
I want to address here. My question is whether I have
a “moral” obligation not to drive a gas- guzzler just for
fun on this particular sunny Sunday afternoon.
One final complication must be removed. I am
interested in global warming, but there might be other
moral reasons not to drive unnecessarily. I risk caus-
ing an accident, since I am not a perfect driver. I also
will likely spew exhaust into the breathing space of
pedestrians, bicyclists, or animals on the side of the
road as I drive by. Perhaps these harms and risks give
me a moral obligation not to go for my joyride. That
is not clear. After all, these reasons also apply if I drive
the most efficient car available, and even if I am driv-
ing to work with no other way to keep my job. Indeed,
I might scare or injure bystanders even if my car gave
off no greenhouse gases or pollution. In any case,
I want to focus on global warming. So my real question
is whether the facts about global warming give me any
moral obligation not to drive a gas- guzzler just for fun
on this sunny Sunday afternoon.
I admit that I am “inclined” to answer, “Yes.” To
me, global warming does “seem” to make such waste-
ful driving morally wrong.

CHAPTER 13: EnvIRonmEnTAL ETHICS Á 449
worst offenders to get better. The most efficient and
effective way to do this is to reserve our condemnation
for those who are well below average. This means that
we should not hold people responsible for harms by
calling their acts causes of harms when their acts are
not at all unusual, assuming that they did not intend
the harm.
The application to global warming should be clear.
It is not unusual to go for joyrides. Such drivers do not
intend any harm. Hence, we should not see my act
of driving on a sunny Sunday afternoon as a cause of
global warming or its harms.
Another argument leads to the same conclusion:
the harms of global warming result from the massive
quantities of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
Greenhouse gases (such as carbon dioxide and water
vapor) are perfectly fine in small quantities. They help
plants grow. The problem emerges only when there is
too much of them. But my joyride by itself does not
cause the massive quantities that are harmful.
Contrast someone who pours cyanide poison into
a river. Later someone drinking from the river down-
stream ingests some molecules of the poison. Those
molecules cause the person to get ill and die. This is
very different from the causal chain in global warm-
ing, because no particular molecules from my car
cause global warming in the direct way that particular
molecules of the poison do cause the drinker’s death.
Global warming is more like a river that is going to
flood downstream because of torrential rains. I pour
a quart of water into the river upstream (maybe just
because I do not want to carry it). My act of pouring
the quart into the river is not a cause of the flood.
Analogously, my act of driving for fun is not a cause of
global warming.
Contrast also another large- scale moral problem:
famine relief. Some people say that I have no moral
obligation to contribute to famine relief because the
famine will continue and people will die whether or
not I donate my money to a relief agency. However,
I could help a certain individual if I gave my donation
directly to that individual. In contrast, if I refrain from
driving for fun on this one Sunday, there is no indi-
vidual who will be helped in the least. I cannot help
anyone by depriving myself of this joyride.
global warming will still occur even if I do not drive
just for fun. Moreover, even if I do drive a gas- guzzler
just for fun for a long time, global warming will not
occur unless lots of other people also expel greenhouse
gases. So my individual act is neither necessary nor
sufficient for global warming.
There are, admittedly, special circumstances in
which an act causes harm without being either neces-
sary or sufficient for that harm. Imagine that it takes
three people to push a car off a cliff with a passenger
locked inside, and five people are already pushing. If
I join and help them push, then my act of pushing is
neither necessary nor sufficient to make the car go off
the cliff. Nonetheless, my act of pushing is a cause (or
part of the cause) of the harm to the passenger. Why?
Because I intend to cause harm to the passenger, and
because my act is unusual. When I intend a harm to
occur, my intention provides a reason to pick my act
out of all the other background circumstances and
identify it as a cause. Similarly, when my act is unusual
in the sense that most people would not act that way,
that also provides a reason to pick out my act and call
it a cause.
Why does it matter what is usual? Compare
matches. For a match to light up, we need to strike it
so as to create friction. There also has to be oxygen.
We do not call the oxygen the cause of the fire, since
oxygen is usually present. Instead, we say that the fric-
tion causes the match to light, since it is unusual for
that friction to occur. It happens only once in the life
of each match. Thus, what is usual affects ascriptions
of causation even in purely physical cases.
In moral cases, there are additional reasons not
to call something a cause when it is usual. Labeling
an act a cause of harm and, on this basis, holding its
agent responsible for that harm by blaming the agent
or condemning his act is normally counterproduc-
tive when that agent is acting no worse than most
other people. If people who are doing “no” worse
than average are condemned, then people who are
doing “much” worse than average will suspect that
they will still be subject to condemnation even if they
start doing better, and even if they improve enough to
bring themselves up to the average. We should distrib-
ute blame (and praise) so as to give incentives for the

450 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
influential than they really are. On a realistic view,
however, it is unlikely that anyone would drive waste-
fully if I did and would not if I did not. Moreover, waste-
ful driving is not that habit forming. My act of driving
this Sunday does not make me drive next Sunday. I do
not get addicted. Driving the next Sunday is a separate
decision. And my wasteful driving will not undermine
my devotion to environmentalism. If my argument in
this chapter is correct, then my belief that the govern-
ment has a moral obligation to fight global warming is
perfectly compatible with a belief that I as an individ-
ual have no moral obligation not to drive a gas- guzzler
for fun. If I keep this compatibility in mind, then my
driving my gas- guzzler for fun will not undermine my
devotion to the cause of getting the government to do
something about global warming.
Besides, the indirect harm principle is misleading.
To see why, consider David. David is no environmen-
talist. He already has a habit of driving his gas- guzzler
for fun on Sundays. Nobody likes him, so nobody
follows his example. But David still has a moral obli-
gation not to drive his gas- guzzler just for fun this
Sunday, and his obligation has the same basis as mine,
if I have one. So my moral obligation cannot depend
on the factors cited by the indirect harm principle.
The most important problem for supposed indirect
harms is the same as for direct harms: even if I create
a bad habit and undermine my personal environmen-
talism and set a bad example that others follow, all of
this would still not be enough to cause climate change
if other people stopped expelling greenhouse gases.
So, as long as I neither intend harm nor do anything
unusual, my act cannot cause climate change even if
I do create bad habits and followers. The scale of cli-
mate change is just too big for me to cause it, even
“with a little help from my friends.”
Of course, even if I do not cause climate change,
I still might seem to contribute to climate change in
the sense that I make it worse. If so, another principle
applies:
The contribution principle: We have a moral obligation
not to make problems worse.
This principle applies if climate change will be
worse if I drive than it will be if I do not drive.
The point becomes clearer if we distinguish global
warming from climate change. You might think that
my driving on Sunday raises the temperature of the
globe by an infinitesimal amount. I doubt that, but,
even if it does, my exhaust on that Sunday does not
cause any climate change at all. No storms or floods
or droughts or heat waves can be traced to my indi-
vidual act of driving. It is these climate changes that
cause harms to people. Global warming by itself causes
no harm without climate change. Hence, since my
individual act of driving on that one Sunday does not
cause any climate change, it causes no harm to anyone.
The point is not that harms do not occur from
global warming. I have already admitted that they do.
The point is also not that my exhaust is overkill, like poi-
soning someone who is already dying from poison. My
exhaust is not sufficient for the harms of global warm-
ing, and I do not intend those harms. Nor is it the point
that the harms from global warming occur much later
in time. If I place a time bomb in a building, I can cause
harm many years later. And the point is not that the
harm I cause is imperceptible. I admit that some harms
can be imperceptible because they are too small or for
other reasons. Instead, the point is simply that my indi-
vidual joyride does not cause global warming, climate
change, or any of their resulting harms, at least directly.
Admittedly, my acts can lead to other acts by me
or by other people. Maybe one case of wasteful driving
creates a bad habit that will lead me to do it again and
again. Or maybe a lot of other people look up to me and
would follow my example of wasteful driving. Or maybe
my wasteful driving will undermine my commitment
to environmentalism and lead me to stop supporting
important green causes or to harm the environment in
more serious ways. If so, we could apply:
The indirect harm principle: We have a moral obligation
not to perform an act that causes harm to others indi-
rectly by causing someone to carry out acts that cause
harm to others.
This principle would explain why it is morally
wrong to drive a gas- guzzler just for fun if this act led
to other harmful acts.
One problem here is that my acts are not that
influential. People like to see themselves as more

CHAPTER 13: EnvIRonmEnTAL ETHICS Á 451
Maybe the reason is risk. It is sometimes morally
wrong to create a risk of a harm even if that harm
does not occur. I grant that drunk driving is immoral,
because it risks harm to others, even if the drunk
driver gets home safely without hurting anyone. Thus,
we get another principle:
The risk principle: We have a moral obligation not to
increase the risk of harms to other people.
The problem here is that global warming is not
like drunk driving. When drunk driving causes harm,
it is easy to identify the victim of this particular drunk
driver. There is no way to identify any particular vic-
tim of my wasteful driving in normal circumstances.
In addition, my earlier point applies here again.
If the risk principle were true, it would be unbeliev-
ably restrictive. Exercising and boiling water also expel
greenhouse gases, so they also increase the risk of global
warming if my driving does. This principle implies that
almost everything we do violates a moral obligation.
Defenders of such principles sometimes respond
by distinguishing significant from insignificant risks or
increases in risks. That distinction is problematic, at least
here. A risk is called significant when it is “too” much. But
then we need to ask what makes this risk too much when
other risks are not too much. The reasons for counting a
risk as significant are then the real reasons for thinking
that there is a moral obligation not to drive wastefully. So
we need to specify those reasons directly instead of hid-
ing them under a waffle- term like “significant.”
4. INTERNAL PRINCIPLES
None of the principles discussed so far is both defen-
sible and strong enough to yield a moral obligation
not to drive a gas- guzzler just for fun. Maybe we can do
better by looking inward.
Kantians claim that the moral status of acts
depends on their agents’ maxims or “subjective princi-
ples of volition”—roughly what we would call motives
or intentions or plans. This internal focus is evident in
Kant’s first formulation of the categorical imperative:
The universalizability principle: We have a moral obliga-
tion not to act on any maxim that we cannot will to be
a universal law.
The problem with this argument is that my act of
driving does not even make climate change worse. Cli-
mate change would be just as bad if I did not drive. The
reason is that climate change becomes worse only if
more people (and animals) are hurt or if they are hurt
worse. There is nothing bad about global warming or
climate change in itself if no people (or animals) are
harmed. But there is no individual person or animal
who will be worse off if I drive than if I do not drive
my gas- guzzler just for fun. Global warming and cli-
mate change occur on such a massive scale that my
individual driving makes no difference to the welfare
of anyone.
Some might complain that this is not what they
mean by “contribute.” All it takes for me to contrib-
ute to global warming in their view is for me to expel
greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. I do “that”
when I drive, so we can apply:
The gas principle: We have a moral obligation not to
expel greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
If this principle were true, it would explain why
I have a moral obligation not to drive my gas- guzzler
just for fun.
Unfortunately, it is hard to see any reason to accept
this principle. There is nothing immoral about green-
house gases in themselves when they cause no harm.
Greenhouse gases include carbon dioxide and water
vapor, which occur naturally and help plants grow.
The problem of global warming occurs because of
the high quantities of greenhouse gases, not because
of anything bad about smaller quantities of the same
gases. So it is hard to see why I would have a moral
obligation not to expel harmless quantities of green-
house gases. And that is all I do by myself.
Furthermore, if the gas principle were true, it
would be unbelievably restrictive. It implies that
I have a moral obligation not to boil water (since water
vapor is a greenhouse gas) or to exercise (since I expel
carbon dioxide when I breathe heavily). When you
think it through, an amazing array of seemingly mor-
ally acceptable activities would be ruled out by the gas
principle. These implications suggest that we had bet-
ter look elsewhere for a reason why I have a moral obli-
gation not to drive a gas- guzzler just for fun.

452 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
Another inner- directed theory is virtue ethics.
This approach focuses on general character traits
rather than particular acts or intentions. It is not clear
how to derive a principle regarding obligations from
virtue ethics, but here is a common attempt:
The virtue principle: We have a moral obligation not to
perform an act that expresses a vice or is contrary to
virtue.
This principle solves our problem if driving a gas-
guzzler expresses a vice, or if no virtuous person would
drive a gas- guzzler just for fun.
How can we tell whether this principle applies?
How can we tell whether driving a gas- guzzler for
fun “expresses a vice”? On the face of it, it expresses a
desire for fun. There is nothing vicious about having
fun. Having fun becomes vicious only if it is harmful
or risky. But I have already responded to the principles
of harm and risk. Moreover, driving a gas- guzzler for
fun does not always express a vice. If other people did
not produce so much greenhouse gas, I could drive my
gas- guzzler just for fun without anyone being harmed
by global warming. Then I could do it without being
vicious. This situation is not realistic, but it does show
that wasteful driving is not essentially vicious or con-
trary to virtue.
Some will disagree. Maybe your notions of virtue
and vice make it essentially vicious to drive waste-
fully. But why? To apply this principle, we need some
antecedent test of when an act expresses a vice. You
cannot just say, “I know vice when I see it,” because
other people look at the same act and do not see vice,
just fun. It begs the question to appeal to what you
see when others do not see it, and you have no reason
to believe that your vision is any clearer than theirs.
But that means that this virtue principle cannot be
applied without begging the question. We need to
find some reason why such driving is vicious. Once we
have this reason, we can appeal to it directly as a rea-
son why I have a moral obligation not to drive waste-
fully. The side step through virtue does not help and
only obscures the issue.
Some virtue theorists might respond that life
would be better if more people were to focus on gen-
eral character traits, including green virtues, such as
The idea is not that universally acting on that maxim
would have bad consequences. (We will consider that
kind of principle below.) Instead, the claim is that some
maxims “cannot even be thought as a universal law of
nature without contradiction.” However, my maxim
when I drive a gas- guzzler just for fun on this sunny
Sunday afternoon is simply to have harmless fun. There
is no way to derive a contradiction from a universal law
that people do or may have harmless fun. Kantians might
respond that my maxim is, instead, to expel greenhouse
gases. I still see no way to derive a literal contradiction
from a universal law that people do or may expel green-
house gases. There would be bad consequences, but that
is not a contradiction, as Kant requires. In any case, my
maxim (or intention or motive) is not to expel green-
house gases. My goals would be reached completely if
I went for my drive and had my fun without expelling
any greenhouse gases. This leaves no ground for claim-
ing that my driving violates Kant’s first formula of the
categorical imperative.
Kant does supply a second formulation, which is
really a different principle:
The means principle: We have a moral obligation not to
treat any other person as a means only.
It is not clear exactly how to understand this formu-
lation, but the most natural interpretation is that for me
to treat someone as a means implies my using harm to
that person as part of my plan to achieve my goals. Driv-
ing for fun does not do that. I would have just as much
fun if nobody were ever harmed by global warming.
Harm to others is no part of my plans. So Kant’s prin-
ciple cannot explain why I have a moral obligation not
to drive just for fun on this sunny Sunday afternoon.
A similar point applies to a traditional principle
that focuses on intention:
The doctrine of double effect: We have a moral obligation
not to harm anyone intentionally (either as an end or
as a means).
This principle fails to apply to my Sunday driv-
ing both because my driving does not cause harm to
anyone and because I do not intend harm to anyone.
I would succeed in doing everything I intended to do
if I enjoyed my drive but magically my car gave off no
greenhouse gases and no global warming occurred.

CHAPTER 13: EnvIRonmEnTAL ETHICS Á 453
principle cannot yield a moral obligation not to drive
a gas- guzzler now.
Moreover, the connection between law and
morality cannot be so simple. Suppose that the gov-
ernment morally ought to raise taxes on fossil fuels in
order to reduce usage and to help pay for adaptation
to global warming. It still seems morally permissible
for me and for you not to pay that tax now. We do not
have any moral obligation to send a check to the gov-
ernment for the amount that we would have to pay if
taxes were raised to the ideal level. One reason is that
our checks would not help to solve the problem, since
others would continue to conduct business as usual.
What would help to solve the problem is for the taxes
to be increased. Maybe we all have moral obligations
to try to get the taxes increased. Still, until they are
increased, we as individuals have no moral obliga-
tions to abide by the ideal tax law instead of the
actual tax law.
Analogously, it is actually legal to buy and drive
gas- guzzlers. Maybe these vehicles should be illegal.
I am not sure. If gas- guzzlers morally ought to be
illegal, then maybe we morally ought to work to get
them outlawed. But that still would not show that
now, while they are legal, we have a moral obliga-
tion not to drive them just for fun on a sunny Sunday
afternoon.
Which laws are best depends on side effects of for-
mal institutions, such as enforcement costs and loss of
freedom (resulting from the coercion of laws). Maybe
we can do better by looking at informal groups.
Different groups involve different relations between
members. Orchestras and political parties, for example,
plan to do what they do and adjust their actions to other
members of the group in order to achieve a common
goal. Such groups can be held responsible for their joint
acts, even when no individual alone performs those
acts. However, gas- guzzler drivers do not form this kind
of group. Gas- guzzler drivers do not share goals, do not
make plans together, and do not adjust their acts to
each other (at least usually).
There is an abstract set of gas- guzzler drivers, but
membership in a set is too arbitrary to create moral
responsibility. I am also in a set of all terrorists plus me,
but my membership in that abstract set does not make
me responsible for the harms that terrorists cause.
moderation and love of nature. One reason is that
it is so hard to determine obligations in particular
cases. Another reason is that focusing on particular
obligations leaves no way to escape problems like
global warming. This might be correct. Maybe we
should spend more time thinking about whether
we have green virtues rather than about whether
we have specific obligations. But that does not show
that we do have a moral obligation not to drive gas-
guzzlers just for fun. Changing our focus will not
bring any moral obligation into existence. There are
other important moral issues besides moral obliga-
tion, but this does not show that moral obligations
are not important as well.
5. COLLECTIVE PRINCIPLES
Maybe our mistake is to focus on individual persons.
We could instead, focus on institutions. One institu-
tion is the legal system, so we might adopt:
The ideal law principle: We have a moral obligation not
to perform an action if it ought to be illegal.
I already said that the government ought to fight
global warming. One way to do so is to make it ille-
gal to drive wastefully or to buy (or sell) inefficient
gas- guzzlers. If the government ought to pass such
laws, then, even before such laws are passed, I have a
moral obligation not to drive a gas- guzzler just for fun,
according to the ideal law principle.
The first weakness in this argument lies in its
assumption that wasteful driving or gas- guzzlers
ought to be illegal. That is dubious. The enforcement
costs of a law against joyrides would be enormous.
A law against gas- guzzlers would be easier to enforce,
but inducements to efficiency (such as higher taxes
on gas and gas- guzzlers, or tax breaks for buying fuel-
efficient cars) might accomplish the same goals with
less loss of individual freedom. Governments ought
to accomplish their goals with less loss of freedom,
if they can. Note the “if.” I do not claim that these
other laws would work as well as an outright prohibi-
tion of gas- guzzlers. I do not know. Still, the point is
that such alternative laws would not make it illegal
(only expensive) to drive a gas- guzzler for fun. If those
alternative laws are better than outright prohibitions
(because they allow more freedom), then the ideal law

454 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
moral obligation not to join the group by cashing your
check, since you cannot change what the group does.
It might be morally good or ideal to protest by tearing
up your check, but it does not seem morally obligatory.
Thus, the group principle fails. Perhaps it might be
saved by adding some kind of qualification, but I do
not see how.
6. COUNTERFACTUAL PRINCIPLES
Maybe our mistake is to focus on actual circumstances.
So let us try some counterfactuals about what would
happen in possible worlds that are not actual. Differ-
ent counterfactuals are used by different versions of
rule- consequentialism.
One counterfactual is built into the common
question, “What would happen if everybody did
that?” This question suggests a principle:
The general action principle: I have a moral obligation
not to perform an act when it would be worse for
everyone to perform an act of the same kind.
It does seem likely that, if everyone in the world
drove a gas- guzzler often enough, global warming
would increase intolerably. We would also quickly run
out of fossil fuels. The general action principle is, thus,
supposed to explain why it is morally wrong to drive a
gas- guzzler.
Unfortunately, that popular principle is indefen-
sible. It would be disastrous if every human had no
children. But that does not make it morally wrong for
a particular individual to choose to have no children.
There is no moral obligation to have at least one child.
The reason is that so few people “want” to remain
childless. Most people would not go without children
even if they were allowed to. This suggests a different
principle:
The general permission principle: I have a moral obligation
not to perform an act whenever it would be worse for
everyone to be permitted to perform an act of that kind.
This principle seems better because it would not
be disastrous for everyone to be permitted to remain
childless. This principle is supposed to be able to
explain why it is morally wrong to steal (or lie, cheat,
rape, or murder), because it would be disastrous for
The only feature that holds together the group
of people who drive gas- guzzlers is simply that they all
perform the same kind of act. The fact that so many
people carry out acts of that kind does create or worsen
global warming. That collective bad effect is supposed
to make it morally wrong to perform any act of that
kind, according to the following:
The group principle: We have a moral obligation not to
perform an action if this action makes us a member of
a group whose actions together cause harm.
Why? It begs the question here merely to assume
that, if it is bad for everyone in a group to perform acts
of a kind, then it is morally wrong for an individual
to perform an act of that kind. Besides, this principle
is implausible or at least questionable in many cases.
Suppose that everyone in an airport is talking loudly.
If only a few people were talking, there would be no
problem. But the collective effect of so many people
talking makes it hard to hear announcements, so
some people miss their flights. Suppose, in these cir-
cumstances, I say loudly (but not too loudly), “I wish
everyone would be quiet.” My speech does not seem
immoral, since it alone does not harm anyone. Maybe
there should be a rule (or law) against such loud
speech in this setting (as in a library), but if there is
not (as I am assuming), then it does not seem immoral
to do what others do, as long as they are going to do it
anyway, so the harm is going to occur anyway.
Again, suppose that the president sends everyone
(or at least most taxpayers) a check for $600. If all recipi-
ents cash their checks, the government deficit will
grow, government programs will have to be slashed,
and severe economic and social problems will result.
You know that enough other people will cash their
checks to make these results to a great degree inevita-
ble. You also know that it is perfectly legal to cash your
check, although you think it should be illegal, because
the checks should not have been issued in the first
place. In these circumstances, is it morally wrong for
you to cash your check? I doubt it. Your act of cashing
your check causes no harm by itself, and you have no
intention to cause harm. Your act of cashing your check
does make you a member of a group that collectively
causes harm, but that still does not seem to give you a

CHAPTER 13: EnvIRonmEnTAL ETHICS Á 455
always morally wrong when it would (counterfactu-
ally) be disastrous for everyone to know that everyone
is allowed to do it.
The lesson of this example applies directly to my
case of driving a gas- guzzler. Disaster occurs in the
airplane case when too many people do what is harm-
less by itself. Similarly, disaster occurs when too many
people burn too much fossil fuel. But that does not
make it wrong in either case for one individual to per-
form an individual act that is harmless by itself. It only
creates an obligation on the part of the government
(or airline) to pass regulations to keep too many people
from acting that way.
Another example brings out another weakness
in the public permission principle. Consider open
marriage. Max and Minnie get married because each
loves the other and values the other person’s love.
Still, they think of sexual intercourse as a fun activ-
ity that they separate from love. After careful discus-
sion before they got married, each happily agreed that
each may have sex after marriage with whomever he
or she wants. They value honesty, so they did add one
condition: every sexual encounter must be reported
to the other spouse. As long as they keep no secrets
from each other and still love each other, they see
no problem with their having sex with other people.
They do not broadcast this feature of their marriage,
but they do know (after years of experience) that it
works for them.
Nonetheless, the society in which Max and Min-
nie live might be filled with people who are very dif-
ferent from them. If everyone knew that everyone
is permitted to have sex during marriage with other
people as long as the other spouse is informed and
agreed to the arrangement, then various problems
would arise. Merely asking a spouse whether he or
she would be willing to enter into such an agreement
would be enough to create suspicions and doubts
in the other spouse’s mind that would undermine
many marriages or keep many couples from getting
married, when they would have gotten or remained
happily married if they had not been offered such
an agreement. As a result, the society will have less
love, fewer stable marriages, and more unhappy
children of unnecessary divorce. Things would be
everyone to be permitted to steal (or lie, cheat, rape, or
murder) whenever (if ever) they wanted to.
Not quite. An agent is permitted or allowed in the
relevant sense when she will not be liable to punish-
ment, condemnation (by others), or feelings of guilt
for carrying out the act. It is possible for someone to
be permitted in this sense without knowing that she
is permitted and, indeed, without anyone knowing
that she is permitted. But it would not be disastrous for
everyone to be permitted to steal if nobody knew that
they were permitted to steal, since then they would
still be deterred by fear of punishment, condemna-
tion, or guilt. Similarly for lying, rape, and so on. So
the general permission principle cannot quite explain
why such acts are morally wrong.
Still, it would be disastrous if everyone knew that
they were permitted to steal (or lie, rape, etc.). So we
simply need to add one qualification:
The public permission principle: I have a moral obliga-
tion not to perform an act whenever it would be worse
for everyone to know that everyone is permitted to
perform an act of that kind.
Now this principle seems to explain the moral
wrongness of many of the acts we take to be morally
wrong, since it would be disastrous if everyone knew
that everyone was permitted to steal, lie, cheat, and
so on.
Unfortunately, this revised principle runs into
trouble in other cases. Imagine that 1000 people want
to take Flight 38 to Amsterdam on October 13, 2003,
but the plane is not large enough to carry that many
people. If all 1,000 took that particular flight, then it
would crash. But these people are all stupid and stub-
born enough that, if they knew that they were all
allowed to take the flight, they all would pack them-
selves in, despite warnings, and the flight would crash.
Luckily, this counterfactual does not reflect what
actually happens. In the actual world, the airline is
not stupid. Since the plane can safely carry only 300
people, the airline sells only 300 tickets and does not
allow anyone on the flight without a ticket. If I have
a ticket for that flight, then there is nothing morally
wrong with me taking the flight along with the other
299 who have tickets. This shows that an act is not

456 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
spouse, even if the spouse knows and consents. It
might seem that Max and Minnie could not reason-
ably reject this rule as a public social rule, because
they want to avoid problems for their own society.
If so, Scanlon’s principle leads to the same question-
able results as the public permission principle. If
Scanlon replies that Max and Minnie “can” reason-
ably reject the anti- adultery rule, then why? The
most plausible answer is that it is their own business
how they have fun as long as they do not hurt any-
body. But this answer is available also to people who
drive gas- guzzlers just for fun. So this principle can-
not explain why that act is morally wrong.
More generally, the test of what can be rejected
“reasonably” depends on moral intuitions. Envi-
ronmentalists might think it unreasonable to reject
a principle that prohibits me from driving my gas-
guzzler just for fun, but others will think it reasonable
to reject such a principle, because it restricts my free-
dom to perform an act that harms nobody. The appeal
to reasonable rejection itself begs the question in the
absence of an account of why such rejection is unrea-
sonable. Environmentalists might be able to specify
reasons why it is unreasonable, but then it is those rea-
sons that explain why this act is morally wrong. The
framework of reasonable rejection becomes a distract-
ing and unnecessary side step.
7. WHAT IS LEFT?
We are left with no defensible principle to support
the claim that I have a moral obligation not to drive a
gas- guzzler just for fun. Does this result show that this
claim is false? Not necessarily.
Some audiences have suggested that my journey
through various principles teaches us that we should
not look for general moral principles to back up our
moral intuitions. They see my arguments as a “reduc-
tio ad absurdum” of principlism, which is the view
that moral obligations (or our beliefs in them) depend
on principles. Principles are unavailable, so we should
focus instead on particular cases, according to the
opposing view called particularism.
However, the fact that we cannot find any
principle does not show that we do not need one.
much better if everyone believed that such agree-
ments were not permitted in the first place, so they
condemned them and felt guilty for even consider-
ing them. I think that this result is not unrealistic,
but here I am merely postulating these facts in my
example.
The point is that, even if other people are like this,
so that it would be worse for everyone to know that
everyone is permitted to have sex outside of marriage
with spousal knowledge and consent, Max and Min-
nie are not like this, and they know that they are not
like this, so it is hard to believe that they as individuals
have a moral obligation to abide by a restriction that
is justified by other people’s dispositions. If Max and
Minnie have a joint agreement that works for them,
but they keep it secret from others, then there is noth-
ing immoral about them having sex outside of their
marriage (whether or not this counts as adultery). If
this is correct, then the general permission principle
fails again.
As before, the lesson of this example applies
directly to my case of driving a gas- guzzler. The rea-
son why Max and Minnie are not immoral is that
they have a right to their own private relationship as
long as they do not harm others (such as by spread-
ing disease or discord). But I have already argued that
my driving a gas- guzzler on this Sunday afternoon
does not cause harm. I seem to have a right to have
fun in the way I want as long as I do not hurt anybody
else, just like Max and Minnie. So the public permis-
sion principle cannot explain why it is morally wrong
to drive a gas- guzzler for fun on this sunny Sunday
afternoon.
One final counterfactual approach is contractu-
alism, whose most forceful recent proponent is Tim
Scanlon. Scanlon proposes:
The contractualist principle: I have a moral obligation
not to perform an act whenever it violates a general
rule that nobody could reasonably reject as a public
rule for governing action in society.
Let us try to apply this principle to the case of
Max and Minnie. Consider a general rule against
adultery, that is, against voluntary sex between a
married person and someone other than his or her

CHAPTER 13: EnvIRonmEnTAL ETHICS Á 457
who drive wastefully should feel guilty for their acts
and ashamed of themselves, at least if they perform
such acts regularly; and we should bring up our chil-
dren so that they will feel these emotions. All of these
reactions are available even if we cannot truthfully
say that such driving violates a moral “obligation.”
And these approaches might be more constructive
in the long run than accusing someone of violating a
moral obligation.
Moreover, even if individuals have no moral obli-
gations not to waste gas by taking unnecessary Sun-
day drives just for fun, governments still have moral
obligations to fight global warming, because they can
make a difference. My fundamental point has been
that global warming is such a large problem that it
is not individuals who cause it or who need to fix it.
Instead, governments need to fix it, and quickly. Find-
ing and implementing a real solution is the task of
governments. Environmentalists should focus their
efforts on those who are not doing their job rather
than on those who take Sunday afternoon drives just
for fun.
This focus will also avoid a common mistake.
Some environmentalists keep their hands clean by
withdrawing into a simple life where they use very
little fossil fuels. That is great. I encourage it. But
some of these escapees then think that they have
done their duty, so they rarely come down out of
the hills to work for political candidates who could
and would change government policies. This atti-
tude helps nobody. We should not think that we
can do enough simply by buying fuel- efficient cars,
insulating our houses, and setting up a windmill to
make our own electricity. That is all wonderful, but
it neither does little or nothing to stop global warm-
ing, nor does this focus fulfill our real moral obliga-
tions, which are to get governments to do their job to
prevent the disaster of excessive global warming. It is
better to enjoy your Sunday driving while working to
change the law so as to make it illegal for you to enjoy
your Sunday driving.
I already gave my reasons why we need a moral
principle to back up our intuitions in this case. This
case is controversial, emotional, peculiarly modern,
and likely to be distorted by overgeneralization and
partiality. These factors suggest that we need confir-
mation for our moral intuitions at least in this case,
even if we do not need any confirmation in other
cases.
For such reasons, we seem to need a moral prin-
ciple, but we have none. This fact still does not show
that such wasteful driving is not morally wrong. It
only shows that we do not “know” whether it is mor-
ally wrong. Our ignorance might be temporary. If
someone comes up with a defensible principle that
does rule out wasteful driving, then I will be happy
to listen and happy if it works. However, until some
such principle is found, we cannot claim to know
that it is morally wrong to drive a gas- guzzler just
for fun.
The demand for a principle in this case does not
lead to general moral skepticism. We still might know
that acts and omissions that cause harm are morally
wrong because of the harm principle. Still, since that
principle and others do not apply to my wasteful driv-
ing, and since moral intuitions are unreliable in cases
like this, we cannot know that my wasteful driving is
morally wrong.
This conclusion will still upset many environ-
mentalists. They think that they know that wasteful
driving is immoral. They want to be able to condemn
those who drive gas- guzzlers just for fun on sunny
Sunday afternoons.
My conclusion should not be so disappointing.
Even if individuals have no such moral obligations,
it is still morally better or morally ideal for individu-
als not to waste gas. We can and should praise those
who save fuel. We can express our personal dislike for
wasting gas and for people who do it. We might even
be justified in publicly condemning wasteful driving
and drivers who waste a lot, in circumstances where
such public rebuke is appropriate. Perhaps people

458 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
Are All Species Equal?
David Schmidtz
(b) The belief that the human species, along with all
other species, are integral elements in a system of
interdependence.
(c) The belief that all organisms are teleological cen-
tres of life in the sense that each is a unique indi-
vidual pursuing its own good in its own way.
(d) The belief that humans are not inherently superior
to other living beings.
Taylor concludes, ‘Rejecting the notion of human
superiority entails its positive counterpart: the doc-
trine of species impartiality. One who accepts that
doctrine regards all living things as possessing inher-
ent worth— the same inherent worth, since no one
species has been shown to be either higher or lower
than any other.’3
Taylor does not claim that this is a valid argument,
but he thinks that if we concede (a), (b), and (c), it
would be unreasonable not to move to (d), and then
to his egalitarian conclusion. Is he right? For those
who accept Taylor’s three premises (and who thus
interpret those premises in terms innocuous enough
to render them acceptable), there are two responses.
First, we may go on to accept (d), following Taylor, but
then still deny that there is any warrant for moving
from there to Taylor’s egalitarian conclusion. Having
accepted that our form of life is not superior, we might
choose instead to regard it as inferior. More plausibly,
we might view our form of life as noncomparable. We
simply do not have the same kind of value as nonhu-
mans. The question of how we compare to nonhu-
mans has a simple answer: we do not compare to them.
Alternatively, we may reject (d) and say humans
are indeed inherently superior but our superiority is a
moot point. Whether we are inherently superior (that
is, superior as a form of life) does not matter much.
Even if we are superior, the fact remains that within
the web of ecological interdependence mentioned in
premises (a) and (b), it would be a mistake to ignore
the needs and the telos of the other species referred
to in premise (c). Thus, there are two ways of rejecting
I. RESPECT FOR NATURE
Species egalitarianism is the view that all species have
equal moral standing.1 To have moral standing is, at
a minimum, to command respect, to be something
more than a mere thing. Is there any reason to believe
that all species have moral standing in even this most
minimal sense? If so— that is, if all species command
respect— is there any reason to believe they all com-
mand equal respect?
The following sections summarise critical res-
ponses to the most famous philosophical argument for
species egalitarianism. I then try to explain why other
species command our respect but also why they do not
command equal respect. The intuition that we should
have respect for nature is part of what motivates people
to embrace species egalitarianism, but one need not
be a species egalitarian to have respect for nature. I close
by questioning whether species egalitarianism is even
compatible with respect for nature.
II. THE GROUNDING OF SPECIES
EGALITARIANISM
According to Paul Taylor, anthropocentrism ‘gives
either exclusive or primary consideration to human
interests above the good of other species.’2 The alter-
native to anthropocentrism is biocentrism, and it is
biocentrism that, in Taylor’s view, grounds species
egalitarianism:
The beliefs that form the core of the biocentric
outlook are four in number:
(a) The belief that humans are members of the Earth’s
Community of life in the same sense and on the
same terms in which other living things are mem-
bers of that community.
David Schmidtz, “Are All Species Equal?” from Journal of Applied
Philosophy 15(1): 57–66. Copyright © 1998 Blackwell Publishing
Ltd. Reproduced with permission of John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

CHAPTER 13: EnvIRonmEnTAL ETHICS Á 459
that we must kill in order to eat, though, for there is
no avoiding that. Species egalitarianism is compatible
with our having a limited license to kill.
What seems far more problematic for species egali-
tarianism is that it seems to suggest that it makes no
difference what we kill. Vegetarians typically think
it is worse to kill a cow than to kill a potato. Are they
wrong? Yes they are, according to species egalitarian-
ism. In this respect, species egalitarianism cannot be
right. I do believe we have reason to respect nature. But
we fail to give nature due respect if we say we should
have no more respect for a cow than for a potato.
IV. IS SPECIES EGALITARIANISM ARBITRARY?
Suppose interspecies comparisons are possible. Sup-
pose the capacities of different species, and whatever
else gives species moral standing, are commensurable.
In that case, it could turn out that all species are equal,
but that would be quite a fluke.
Taylor says a being has intrinsic worth if and only
if it has a good of its own. Anderson does not disagree,
but he points out that if we accept Taylor’s idea of a
thing having a good of its own, then that licenses us
to notice differences among the various kinds of ‘good
of its own.’ (We can notice differences without being
committed to ranking them.) For example, we can dis-
tinguish, along Aristotelian lines, vegetative, animal,
and cognitive goods of one’s own. To have a vegetative
nature is to be what Taylor, in premise (c), calls a teleo-
logical centre of life. A being with an animal nature
is a teleological centre of life, and more. A being with
a cognitive as well as animal nature is a teleological
centre of life, and more still. Cognitive nature may be
something we share with whales, dolphins, and higher
primates. It is an empirical question. Anderson’s view
is that so long as we do not assume away this possibil-
ity, valuing cognitive capacity is not anthropocentric.
The question is what would make any species superior
to another (p. 348).
As mentioned earlier, Taylor defines anthropo-
centrism as giving exclusive or primary consideration
to human interests above the good of other species.
So, when we acknowledge that cognitive capacity is
one valuable capacity among others, are we giving
Taylor’s argument for species egalitarianism. Each, on
its face, is compatible with the respect for nature that
motivates Taylor’s egalitarianism in the first place.
Taylor’s critics, such as James Anderson and Wil-
liam French, have taken the second route. They reject
(d). After discussing their arguments, and building on
some while rejecting others, I explore some of our rea-
sons to have respect for nature and ask whether they
translate into reasons to be species egalitarians.
III. IS SPECIES EGALITARIANISM
HYPOCRITICAL?
Paul Taylor and Arne Naess are among the most
intransigent of species egalitarians, yet they allow that
human needs override the needs of nonhumans.4 Wil-
liam C. French argues that they cannot have it both
ways.5 French perceives a contradiction between the
egalitarian principles that Taylor and Naess officially
endorse and the unofficial principles they offer as
the real principles by which we should live. Having
proclaimed that we are all equal, French asks, what
licenses Taylor and Naess to say that, in cases of con-
flict, nonhuman interests can legitimately be sacri-
ficed to vital human interests?
French has a point. James C. Anderson makes a
similar point.6 Yet, somehow the inconsistency of
Taylor and Naess is too obvious. Perhaps their posi-
tion is not as blatantly inconsistent as it appears. Let
me suggest how Taylor and Naess could respond to
French. Suppose I find myself in a situation of mor-
tal combat with an enemy soldier. If I kill my enemy
to save my life, that does not entail that I regard my
enemy as inherently inferior (i.e., as an inferior form
of life). Likewise, if I kill a bear to save my life, that does
not entail that I regard the bear as inherently inferior.
Therefore, Taylor and Naess can, without hypocrisy,
deny that species egalitarianism requires a radically
self- effacing pacifism.
What, then, does species egalitarianism require? It
requires us to avoid mortal combat whenever we can,
not just with other humans but with living things
in general. On this view, we ought to regret finding
ourselves in kill- or- be- killed situations that we could
have avoided. There is no point in regretting the fact

460 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
turn, humans (and possibly dolphins, apes, and so on)
have an animal’s capacities plus more. The comparison
between Socrates and swine therefore is less a matter
of comparing swine to non- swine and more a matter
of comparing swine to ‘ swine- plus’ (Anderson, p. 361).
Crucially, Anderson’s argument for the superiority of
Socrates over swine does not presume that one capac-
ity is higher than another. We do not need to make any
assumptions about the respective merits of animal or
vegetative versus cognitive capacities in order to con-
clude that the capacities of ‘ swine- plus’ are superior to
those of swine.
We may of course conclude that one of the grounds
of our moral standing (i.e., our vegetative natures) is
something we share with all living things. Beyond
that, nothing about equality even suggests itself. In
particular, it begs no questions to notice that there are
grounds for moral standing that we do not share with
all living things.
VI. IN PRAISE OF SPECIESISM
William French invites us to see species rankings not
‘as an assessment of some inherent superiority, but
rather as a considered moral recognition of the fact
that greater ranges of vulnerability are generated by
broader ranges of complexity and capacities’ (p. 56).
One species outranks another not because it is a supe-
rior form of life but rather because it is a more vulner-
able form of life. French, if I understand correctly,
interprets vulnerability as a matter of having more
to lose. This interpretation is problematic. It implies
that a millionaire, having more to lose than a pau-
per, is by that fact more vulnerable than the pauper.
Perhaps this interpretation is forced upon French,
though. If French had instead chosen a more natural
interpretation— if he had chosen to interpret vulner-
ability as a matter of probability of loss— then a ranking
by vulnerability would not be correlated to complex
capacities in the way he wants. Ranking by probabil-
ity of loss would change on a daily basis, and the top-
ranked species often would be an amphibian.
If we set aside questions about how to interpret vul-
nerability, there remains a problem with French’s pro-
posal. If having complex capacities is not itself morally
exclusive or primary considerations to human inter-
ests? Anderson thinks not, and surely he is right. Put
it this way: if biocentrism involves resolving to ignore
the fact that cognitive capacity is something we
value— if biocentrism amounts to a resolution to value
only those capacities that all living things share—
then biocentrism is at least as arbitrary and question-
begging as anthropocentrism.
It will not do to defend species egalitarianism by sin-
gling out a property that all species possess, arguing that
this property is morally important, and then concluding
that all species are therefore of equal moral importance.
The problem with this sort of argument is that, where
there is one property that provides a basis for moral stand-
ing, there might be others. Other properties might be
possessed by some but not all species, and might provide
bases for different kinds or degrees of moral standing.
V. THE MULTIPLE BASES OF MORAL STANDING
Taylor is aware of the Aristotelian classification
scheme, but considers its hierarchy of capacities to be
question- begging. Taylor himself assumes that human
rationality is on a par with a cheetah’s foot- speed. In
this case, though, perhaps it is Taylor who begs the
question. It hardly seems unreasonable to see the dif-
ference between the foot- speed of chimpanzees and
cheetahs as a difference of degree, while seeing the
difference between the sentience of a chimpanzee and
the nonsentience of a tree as a difference in kind.
Anthropocentrists might argue that the good asso-
ciated with cognitive capacity is superior to the good
associated with vegetative capacity. Could they be
wrong? Let us suppose they are wrong. For argument’s
sake, let us suppose vegetative capacity is the superior
good. Even so, the exact nature of the good associated
with an organism’s vegetative capacity will depend
upon the organism’s other capacities. For example,
Anderson (p. 358) points out that even if health in a
human and health in a tree are instances of the same
thing, they need not have the same moral standing.
Why not? Because health in a human has an instru-
mental value that health in a tree lacks. John Stuart
Mill’s swine can take pleasure in its health but trees
cannot. Animals have a plant’s capacities plus more. In

CHAPTER 13: EnvIRonmEnTAL ETHICS Á 461
level without thereby taking any position on whether
rationality makes a moral difference at the token level.
A speciesist could say humanity’s characteristic ratio-
nality mandates respect for humanity, not merely for
particular humans who exemplify human rationality.
Similarly, once we note that chimpanzees have charac-
teristic cognitive capacities that mice lack, we do not
need to compare individual chimpanzees and mice on
a case by case basis in order to have a moral justifica-
tion for planning to use a mouse rather than a chim-
panzee in an experiment.
Of course, some chimpanzees lack the character-
istic features in virtue of which chimpanzees com-
mand respect as a species, just as some humans lack
the characteristic features in virtue of which humans
command respect as a species. It is equally obvious
that some chimpanzees have cognitive capacities (for
example) that are superior to the cognitive capacities
of some humans. But whether every human being is
superior to every chimpanzee is beside the point. The
point is that we can, we do, and we should make deci-
sions on the basis of our recognition that mice, chim-
panzees, and humans are relevantly different types.
We can have it both ways after all. Or so a speciesist
could argue.
VII. EQUALITY AND TRANSCENDENCE
Even if speciesists are right to see a nonarbitrary dis-
tinction between humans and other species, though,
the fact remains that, as Anderson (p. 362) points out,
claims of superiority do not easily translate into justi-
fications of domination. We can have reasons to treat
nonhuman species with respect, regardless of whether
we consider them to be on a moral par with homo [sic]
sapiens.
What kind of reasons do we have for treating other
species with respect? We might have respect for chim-
panzees or even mice on the grounds that they are sen-
tient. Even mice have a rudimentary point of view and
rudimentary hopes and dreams, and we might well
respect them for that. But what about plants? Plants,
unlike mice and chimpanzees, do not care what hap-
pens to them. It is literally true that they could not
care less. So, why should we care? Is it even possible for
important, then being in danger of losing them is not
morally important either. Vulnerability, on any inter-
pretation, is essentially of derivative importance; any
role it could play in ranking species must already be
played by the capacities themselves.
Yet, although I reject French’s argument, I do not
reject his inegalitarian conclusion. The conclusion
that mice are the moral equals of chimpanzees is about
as insupportable as a conclusion can be. Suppose that,
for some reason, we take an interest in how chimpan-
zees rank compared to mice. Perhaps we wonder what
we would do in an emergency where we could save a
drowning chimpanzee or a drowning mouse but not
both. More realistically, we might wonder whether,
other things equal, we have any reason to use mice in
our medical experiments rather than chimpanzees.
Species egalitarianism seems to say not.
Suppose we decide upon reflection that, from our
human perspective, chimpanzees are superior to mice
and humans are superior to chimpanzees. Would the
perceived superiority of our form of life give us reason
to think we have no obligations whatsoever to mice,
or to chimpanzees? Those who believe we have fewer
obligations to inferior species might be pressed to say
whether they also would allow that we have fewer
obligations to inferior human beings. Lawrence John-
son, for example, rhetorically asks whether it is worse
to cause a person pain if the person is a Nobel Prize
winner.7 Well, why not? Echoing Peter Singer, John-
son argues that if medical researchers had to choose
between harvesting the organs of a chimpanzee or a
brain- damaged human baby, ‘one thing we cannot
justify is trying to have it both ways. If rationality is
what makes the basic moral difference, then we can-
not maintain that the brain- damaged infant ought
to be exempt from utilisation just because it is human
while at the same time allowing that the animal can be
used if utility warrants’ (p. 52).
Does this seem obvious? It should not. Johnson
presumes that rationality is relevant to justification
at the token level when speciesists (i.e., those who
believe some species, the human species in particu-
lar, are superior to others) presumably would invoke
rationality as a justification at the type level. One can
say rationality makes a moral difference at the type

462 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
light of our sensibilities, knowledge, and cultural/per-
sonal histories. . . . The limits of moral regard are set
only by the limitations of one’s own (or one’s species’
or one’s community’s) ability to respond in a caring
manner.’9 Should we believe Cheney’s rather startling
proposal that moral regard is appropriate whenever we
can manage it? One reason to take it very seriously is
that exercising our capacity for moral regard is a way of
expressing respect for that capacity. Developing that
capacity is a form of self- realization.
Put it this way. I am arguing that the attitude we
take toward gazelles (for example) raises issues of self-
respect insofar as we see ourselves as relevantly like
gazelles. My reading of Cheney suggests a different
and complementary way of looking at the issue. Con-
sider that lions owe nothing to gazelles. Therefore,
if we owe it to gazelles not to hunt them, it must be
because we are unlike lions, not (or not only) because
we are like gazelles.
Unlike lions, we have a choice about whether to
hunt gazelles, and we are capable of deliberating about
that choice in a reflective way. We are capable of car-
ing about the gazelle’s pain, the gazelle’s beauty, the
gazelle’s hopes and dreams (such as they are), and so
forth. And if we do care, then in a more or less literal
way, something is wrong with us— we are less than
fully human— if we cannot adjust our behaviour in
the light of what we care about. If we do not care, then
we are missing something. For a human being, to lack
a broad respect for living things and beautiful things
and well- functioning things is to be stunted in a way.
Our coming to see other species as command-
ing respect is itself a way of transcending our animal
natures. It is ennobling. It is part of our animal natures
unthinkingly to see ourselves as superior, and to try to
dominate accordingly; our capacity to see ourselves
as equal is one of the things that makes us different.
Thus, our capacity to see ourselves as equal may be one
of the things that makes us superior. Coming to see all
species as equal may not be the best way of transcend-
ing our animal natures— it does not work for me— but
it is one way. Another way of transcending our animal
natures and expressing due respect for nature is simply
to not worry so much about ranking species. This lat-
ter way is, I think, better. It is more respectful of our
us to have any good reason, other than a purely instru-
mental reason, to care what happens to plants?
When we are alone in a forest wondering whether
it would be fine to chop down a tree for fun, our per-
spective on what happens to the tree is, so far as we
know, the only perspective there is. The tree does not
have its own. Thus, explaining why we have reason to
care about trees requires us to explain caring from our
point of view, since that (we are supposing) is all there
is. In that case, we do not have to satisfy trees that we
are treating them properly; rather, we have to satisfy
ourselves. So, again, can we have noninstrumental rea-
sons for caring about trees— for treating them with
respect?
One reason to care (not the only one) is that gratu-
itous destruction is a failure of self- respect. It is a repu-
diation of the kind of self- awareness and self- respect
that we can achieve by repudiating wantonness. So far
as I know, no one finds anything puzzling in the idea
that we have reason to treat our lawns or living rooms
with respect. Lawns and living rooms have instrumen-
tal value, but there is more to it than that. Most of us
have the sense that taking reasonable care of our lawns
and living rooms is somehow a matter of self- respect,
not merely a matter of preserving their instrumental
value. Do we have similar reasons to treat forests with
respect? I think we do. There is an aesthetic involved,
the repudiation of which would be a failure of self-
respect. (Obviously, not everyone feels the same way
about forests. Not everyone feels the same way about
lawns and living rooms, either. But the point here is
to make sense of respect for nature, not to argue that
respect for nature is in fact universal or that failing to
respect nature is irrational.)8 If and when we identify
with a Redwood, in the sense of being inspired by it,
having respect for its size and age and so on, then as a
psychological fact, we really do face moral questions
about how we ought to treat it. If and when we come
to see a Redwood in that light, subsequently turning
our backs on it becomes a kind of self- effacement. The
values that we thereby fail to take seriously are our val-
ues, not the tree’s.
A related way of grounding respect for nature is
suggested by Jim Cheney’s remark that ‘moral regard
is appropriate wherever we are able to manage it— in

CHAPTER 13: EnvIRonmEnTAL ETHICS Á 463
to me, which suggests the burden of proof lies with
those who claim we should have respect for other
species.
I would not say, though, that this burden is unbear-
able. One reason to have regard for other species has to
do with self- respect. (As I said earlier, when we mistreat
a tree that we admire, the values we fail to respect are
our values, not the tree’s.) A second reason has to do
with self- realisation. (As I said, exercising our capacity
for moral regard is a form of self- realisation.) Finally,
at least some species seem to share with human beings
precisely those cognitive and affective characteristics
that lead us to see human life as especially worthy
of esteem. Johnson describes experiments in which
rhesus monkeys show extreme reluctance to obtain
food by means that would subject monkeys in neigh-
bouring cages to electric shock (p. 64n). He describes
the case of Washoe, a chimpanzee who learned sign
language. Anyone who has tried to learn a foreign
language ought to be able to appreciate how astonish-
ing an intellectual feat it is that an essentially nonlin-
guistic creature could learn a language— a language
that is not merely foreign but the language of another
species.
Johnson believes Washoe has moral standing
(pp. 27–31), but he does not believe that the moral
standing of chimpanzees, and indeed of all living
creatures, implies that we must resolve never to kill
(p. 136). Thus, Johnson supports killing introduced
animal species (feral dogs, rabbits, and so forth) to pre-
vent the extermination of Australia’s native species,
including native plant species (p. 174).
Is Johnson guilty of advocating the speciesist
equivalent of ethnic cleansing? Has he shown himself
to be no better than a racist? I think not. Johnson is
right to want to take drastic measures to protect Aus-
tralia’s native flora, and the idea of respecting trees is
intelligible. Certainly one thing I feel in the presence
of Redwoods is something like a feeling of respect. But
I doubt that what underlies Johnson’s willingness to kill
feral dogs is mere respect for Australia’s native plants.
I suspect that his approval of such killings turns on the
needs and aesthetic sensibilities of human beings, not
just the interests of plants.10 For example, if the endan-
gered native species happened to be a malaria- carrying
own reflective natures. It does not dwell on rankings. It
does not insist on seeing equality where a more reflec-
tive being simply would see what is there to be seen
and would not shy away from respecting the differ-
ences as well as the commonalities. The whole idea of
ranking species, even as equals, sometimes seems like
a child’s game. It seems beneath us.
VIII. RESPECT FOR EVERYTHING
Thus, a broad respect for living or beautiful or well-
functioning things need not translate into equal
respect. It need not translate into universal respect,
either. I can appreciate mosquitoes to a degree. My
wife (a biochemist who studies mosquito immune
systems) even finds them beautiful, or so she says. My
own appreciation, by contrast, is thin and grudging
and purely intellectual. In neither degree nor kind is
it anything like the appreciation I have for my wife,
or for human beings in general, or even for the rab-
bits I sometimes find eating my flowers in the morn-
ing. Part of our responsibility as moral agents is to be
somewhat choosy about what we respect and how we
respect it. I can see why people shy away from openly
accepting that responsibility, but they still have it.
Johnson says speciesism is as arbitrary as racism
unless we can show that the differences are morally
relevant (p. 51). This is, to be sure, a popular sentiment
among radical environmentalists and animal libera-
tionists. But are we really like racists when we think it is
worse to kill a dolphin than to kill a tuna? The person
who says there is a relevant similarity between specie-
sism and racism has the burden of proof: go ahead and
identify the similarity. Is seeing moral significance in
biological differences between chimpanzees and pota-
toes anything like seeing moral significance in biologi-
cal differences between races? I think not.
Is it true that we need good reason to exclude
plants and animals from the realm of things we regard
as commanding respect? Or do we need reason to
include them? Should we be trying to identify prop-
erties in virtue of which a thing forfeits presumptive
moral standing? Or does it make more sense to be try-
ing to identify properties in virtue of which a thing
commands respect? The latter seems more natural

464 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
Equating these three projects has important rami-
fications. Suppose for the sake of argument that what
makes us morally important is that we are capable of
suffering. If what makes us morally important is neces-
sarily the same property that constitutes our essence,
then our essence is that we are capable of suffering.
And if our essence necessarily is what makes us dif-
ferent from all other species, then we can deduce that
dogs are not capable of suffering.
Likewise with rationality. If rationality is our
essence, then rationality is what makes us morally
important and also what makes us unique. Therefore, we
can deduce that chimpanzees are not rational. Alter-
natively, if some other animal becomes rational,
does that mean our essence will change? Is that why
some people find Washoe, the talking chimpanzee,
threatening?
The three projects, needless to say, should not be
conflated in the way philosophy seems historically to
have conflated them, but we can reject species equal-
ity without conflating them. If we like, we can select
a property with respect to which all species are the
same, then argue that that property confers moral
standing, then say all species have moral standing. To
infer that all species have the same standing, though,
would be to ignore the possibility that there are other
morally important properties with respect to which
not all species are equal.
There is room to wonder whether species egali-
tarianism is even compatible with respect for nature.
Is it true that we should have no more regard for dol-
phins than for tuna? Is it true that the moral standing
of chimpanzees is no higher than that of mosquitoes?
I worry that these things are not only untrue, but also
disrespectful. Dolphins and chimpanzees command
more respect than species egalitarianism allows.
There is no denying that it demeans us to destroy
species we find beautiful or otherwise beneficial.
What about species in which we find neither beauty
nor benefit? It is, upon reflection, obviously in our
interest to enrich our lives by finding them beautiful
or beneficial, if we can. By and large, we must agree
with Leopold that it is too late for conquering the
biotic community. Our most pressing task now is to
find ways of fitting in. Species egalitarianism is one
mosquito, I doubt that Johnson would advocate wip-
ing out an exotic but minimally intrusive species of
amphibian in order to save the mosquitoes.
Aldo Leopold urged us to see ourselves as plain
citizens of, rather than conquerors of the biotic com-
munity, but there are some species with whom we can
never be fellow citizens.11 The rabbits eating my flow-
ers in the back yard are neighbours, and I cherish their
company, minor frictions notwithstanding. I feel no
sense of community with mosquitoes, though, and
not merely because they are not warm and furry. Some
mosquito species are so adapted to making human
beings miserable that moral combat is not accidental;
rather, combat is a natural state. It is how such creatures
live. Recall Cheney’s remark that the limits of moral
regard are set by the limits of our ability to respond in
a caring manner. I think it is fair to say human beings
are not able to respond to malaria- carrying mosqui-
toes in a caring manner. At very least, most of us would
think less of a person who did respond to them in a
caring manner. We would regard the person’s caring
as a parody of respect for nature.
The conclusion that all species have moral stand-
ing is unmotivated. For human beings, viewing apes as
having moral standing is a form of self- respect. View-
ing viruses as having moral standing is not. It is good
to have a sense of how amazing living things are, but
being able to marvel at living things is not the same as
thinking all species have moral standing. Life as such
commands respect only in the limited but nonetheless
important sense that for self- aware and reflective crea-
tures who want to act in ways that make sense, delib-
erately killing something is an act that does not make
sense unless we have good reason to do it. Destroying
something for no good reason is (at best) the moral
equivalent of vandalism.
IX. THE HISTORY OF THE DEBATE
There is an odd project in the history of philosophy
that equates what seem to be three distinct projects:
1. determining our essence;
2. specifying how we are different from all other
species;
3. specifying what makes us morally important.

CHAPTER 13: EnvIRonmEnTAL ETHICS Á 465
7. Lawrence Johnson (1991) A Morally Deep World (New York, Cam-
bridge University Press), p. 52.
8. Thus, the objective is to explain how a rational agent could have
respect for trees, not to argue that a rational agent could not fail
to have respect. In utilitarian terms, a person whose utility func-
tion leaves no room to derive pleasure from respecting trees is
not irrational for failing to respect trees, but people whose utility
functions include a potential for deriving pleasure from respect-
ing trees have reason (other things equal) to enrich their lives by
realising that potential.
9. Jim Cheney (1987) Eco- feminism and deep ecology, Environmen-
tal Ethics 9: 115–45, here p. 144.
10. Johnson believes ecosystems as such have moral standing
and that, consequently, ‘we should always stop short of entirely
destroying or irreparably degrading any ecosystem’ (p. 276).
‘Chopping some trees is one thing, then, but destroying a forest
is something else’ (p. 276). But this is impossible to square with
his remark that there ‘is an ecosystem in a tiny puddle of water
in a rotting stump’ (p. 265). Thus, when Johnson says ecosystems
should never be destroyed, he does not mean ecosystems per se.
Rather he means forests, deserts, marshes, and so on— ecosystems
that are recognisable as habitat either for humans or for species
that humans care about.
11. Aldo Leopold (1966, first published in 1949) Sand County Alma-
nac (New York, Oxford University Press) p. 240.
way of trying to understand how we fit in. In the
end, it is not an acceptable way. Having respect for
nature and being a species egalitarian are two differ-
ent things.
NOTES
1. A species egalitarian may or may not believe that individual
living things all have equal moral standing. A species egalitarian
may think a given whooping crane matters more than a given
bald eagle because the cranes are endangered, despite believing
that the differences between the two species qua species are not
morally important.
2. Paul W. Taylor (1983) In defense of biocentrism, Environmental
Ethics, 5: 237–43, here p. 240.
3. Taylor (1994), [Respect for Nature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni-
versity Press)], p. 35.
4. Arne Naess (1973) The shallow and the deep, long- range ecol-
ogy movement: a summary, Inquiry, 16: 95–100.
5. William C. French (1995) Against biospherical egalitarianism,
Environmental Ethics, 17: 39–57, here pp. 44ff.
6. James C. Anderson (1993) Species equality and the foundations
of moral theory, Environmental Values, 2: 347–65, here p. 350.
From The Land Ethic
Aldo Leopold
structure of that day covered wives, but had not yet
been extended to human chattels. During the three
thousand years which have since elapsed, ethical cri-
teria have been extended to many fields of conduct,
with corresponding shrinkages in those judged by
expediency only.
This extension of ethics, so far studied only by
philosophers, is actually a process in ecological evolu-
tion. Its sequences may be described in ecological as
well as in philosophical terms. An ethic, ecologically,
is a limitation on freedom of action in the struggle for
existence. An ethic, philosophically, is a differentia-
tion of social from anti- social conduct. These are two
definitions of one thing. The thing has its origin in the
tendency of interdependent individuals or groups to
When god- like Odysseus returned from the wars in
Troy, he hanged all on one rope a dozen slave- girls
of his household whom he suspected of misbehavior
during his absence.
This hanging involved no question of propriety. The
girls were property. The disposal of property was then,
as now, a matter of expediency, not of right and wrong.
Concepts of right and wrong were not lacking
from Odysseus’ Greece: witness the fidelity of his wife
through the long years before at last his black- prowed
galleys clove the wine- dark seas for home. The ethical
Aldo Leopold, “The Land Ethic” from A Sand County Almanac,
2nd Edition, pp. 201–226. Copyright © 1949, 1977 by Oxford Uni-
versity Press, Inc. By permission of Oxford University Press, Inc.

466 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
compete for his place in the community, but his ethics
prompt him also to co- operate (perhaps in order that
there may be a place to compete for).
The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of
the community to include soils, waters, plants, and
animals, or collectively: the land.
This sounds simple: do we not already sing our love
for and obligation to the land of the free and the home
of the brave? Yes, but just what and whom do we love?
Certainly not the soil, which we are sending helter-
skelter downriver. Certainly not the waters, which we
assume have no function except to turn turbines, float
barges, and carry off sewage. Certainly not the plants,
of which we exterminate whole communities without
batting an eye. Certainly not the animals, of which
we have already extirpated many of the largest and
most beautiful species. A land ethic of course cannot
prevent the alteration, management, and use of these
‘resources,’ but it does affirm their right to continued
existence, and, at least in spots, their continued exis-
tence in a natural state.
In short, a land ethic changes the role of Homo
sapiens from conquerer of the land- community to
plain member and citizen of it. It implies respect for
his fellow- members, and also respect for the commu-
nity as such.
In human history, we have learned (I hope) that
the conquerer role is eventually self- defeating. Why?
Because it is implicit in such a role that the conqueror
knows, ex cathedra, just what makes the community
clock tick, and just what and who is valuable, and what
and who is worthless, in community life. It always
turns out that he knows neither, and this is why his
conquests eventually defeat themselves.
In the biotic community, a parallel situation exists.
Abraham knew exactly what the land was for: it was to
drop milk and honey into Abraham’s mouth. At the
present moment, the assurance with which we regard
this assumption is inverse to the degree of our education.
The ordinary citizen today assumes that science
knows what makes the community clock tick; the sci-
entist is equally sure that he does not. He knows that
the biotic mechanism is so complex that its workings
may never be fully understood.
* * *
evolve modes of co- operation. The ecologist calls these
symbioses. Politics and economics are advanced sym-
bioses in which the original free- for- all competition
has been replaced, in part, by co- operative mecha-
nisms with an ethical content.
The complexity of co- operative mechanisms has
increased with population density, and with the effi-
ciency of tools. It was simpler, for example, to define
the anti- social uses of sticks and stones in the days of
the mastodons than of bullets and billboards in the
age of motors.
The first ethics dealt with the relation between
individuals; the Mosaic Decalogue is an example.
Later accretions dealt with the relation between the
individual and society. The Golden Rule tries to inte-
grate the individual to society; democracy to integrate
social organization to the individual.
There is as yet no ethic dealing with man’s rela-
tion to land and to the animals and plants which grow
upon it. Land, like Odysseus’ slave- girls, is still prop-
erty. The land- relation is still strictly economic, entail-
ing privileges but not obligations.
The extension of ethics to this third element in
human environment is, if I read the evidence correctly,
an evolutionary possibility and an ecological neces-
sity. It is the third step in a sequence. The first two have
already been taken. Individual thinkers since the days
of Ezekiel and Isaiah have asserted that the despolia-
tion of land is not only inexpedient but wrong. Soci-
ety, however, has not yet affirmed their belief. I regard
the present conservation movement as the embryo of
such an affirmation.
An ethic may be regarded as a mode of guidance
for meeting ecological situations so new or intricate,
or involving such deferred reactions, that the path
of social expediency is not discernible to the average
individual. Animal instincts are modes of guidance for
the individual in meeting such situations. Ethics are
possibly a kind of community instinct in- the- making.
THE COMMUNITY CONCEPT
All ethics so far evolved rest upon a single premise:
that the individual is a member of a community of
interdependent parts. His instincts prompt him to

CHAPTER 13: EnvIRonmEnTAL ETHICS Á 467
of Congress, the Conservation Bureaus, and many
state legislatures.
Some species of trees have been ‘read out of the
party’ by economics- minded foresters because they
grow too slowly, or have too low a sale value to pay as
timber crops: white cedar, tamarack, cypress, beech,
and hemlock are examples. In Europe, where forestry
is ecologically more advanced, the non- commercial
tree species are recognized as members of the native
forest community, to be preserved as such, within rea-
son. Moreover some (like beech) have been found to
have a valuable function in building up soil fertility.
The interdependence of the forest and its constitu-
ent tree species, ground flora, and fauna is taken for
granted.
Lack of economic value is sometimes a charac-
ter not only of species or groups, but of entire biotic
communities: marshes, bogs, dunes, and ‘deserts’ are
examples. Our formula in such cases is to relegate
their conservation to government as refuges, monu-
ments, or parks. The difficulty is that these commu-
nities are usually interspersed with more valuable
private lands; the government cannot possibly own
or control such scattered parcels. The net effect is
that we have relegated some of them to ultimate
extinction over large areas. If the private owner were
ecologically minded, he would be proud to be the
custodian of a reasonable proportion of such areas,
which add diversity and beauty to his farm and to his
community.
* * *
To sum up: a system of conservation based solely
on economic self- interest is hopelessly lopsided. It
tends to ignore, and thus eventually to eliminate,
many elements in the land community that lack com-
mercial value, but that are (as far as we know) essential
to its healthy functioning. It assumes, falsely, I think,
that the economic parts of the biotic clock will func-
tion without the uneconomic parts. It tends to rel-
egate to government many functions eventually too
large, too complex, or too widely dispersed to be per-
formed by government.
* * *
SUBSTITUTES FOR A LAND ETHIC
When the logic of history hungers for bread and we
hand out a stone, we are at pains to explain how much
the stone resembles bread. I now describe some of the
stones which serve in lieu of a land ethic.
One basic weakness in a conservation system
based wholly on economic motives is that most
members of the land community have no economic
value. Wildflowers and songbirds are examples. Of the
22,000 higher plants and animals native to Wiscon-
sin, it is doubtful whether more than 5 per cent can be
sold, fed, eaten, or otherwise put to economic use. Yet
these creatures are members of the biotic community,
and if (as I believe) its stability depends on its integrity,
they are entitled to continuance.
When one of these non- economic categories is
threatened, and if we happen to love it, we invent
subterfuges to give it economic importance. At the
beginning of the century songbirds were supposed
to be disappearing. Ornithologists jumped to the res-
cue with some distinctly shaky evidence to the effect
that insects would eat us up if birds failed to control
them. The evidence had to be economic in order to
be valid.
It is painful to read these circumlocutions
today. We have no land ethic yet, but we have at
least drawn nearer the point of admitting that birds
should continue as a matter of biotic right, regard-
less of the presence or absence of economic advan-
tage to us.
A parallel situation exists in respect of predatory
mammals, raptorial birds, and fish- eating birds. Time
was when biologists somewhat overworked the evi-
dence that these creatures preserve the health of game
by killing weaklings, or that they control rodents for
the farmer, or that they prey only on ‘worthless’ spe-
cies. Here again, the evidence had to be economic
in order to be valid. It is only in recent years that we
hear the more honest argument that predators are
members of the community, and that no special inter-
est has the right to exterminate them for the sake of
a benefit, real or fancied, to itself. Unfortunately this
enlightened view is still in the talk stage. In the field
the determination of predators goes merrily on: wit-
ness the impending erasure of the timber wolf by fiat

468 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
depends on the co- operation and competition of its
diverse parts.
In the beginning, the pyramid of life was low
and squat; the food chains short and simple. Evolu-
tion has added layer after layer, link after link. Man
is one of thousands of accretions to the height and
complexity of the pyramid. Science has given us
many doubts, but it has given us at least one cer-
tainty: the trend of evolution is to elaborate and
diversify the biota.
Land, then, is not merely soil; it is a fountain of
energy flowing through a circuit of soils, plants, and
animals. Food chains are the living channels which
conduct energy upward; death and decay return it to
the soil. The circuit is not closed; some energy is dis-
sipated in decay, some is added by absorption from the
air, some is stored in soils, peats, and long- lived forests;
but it is a sustained circuit, like a slowly augmented
revolving fund of life. There is always a net loss by
downhill wash, but this is normally small and offset
by the decay of rocks. It is deposited in the ocean and,
in the course of geological time, raised to form new
lands and new pyramids.
The velocity and character of the upward flow of
energy depend on the complex structure of the plant
and animal community, much as the upward flow of
sap in a tree depends on its complex cellular organi-
zation. Without this complexity, normal circulation
would presumably not occur. Structure means the
characteristic numbers, as well as the characteristic
kinds and functions, of the component species. This
interdependence between the complex structure of
the land and its smooth functioning as an energy unit
is one of its basic attributes.
When a change occurs in one part of the circuit,
many other parts must adjust themselves to it. Change
does not necessarily obstruct or divert the flow of energy;
evolution is a long series of self- induced changes,
the net result of which has been to elaborate the flow
mechanism and to lengthen the circuit. Evolutionary
changes, however, are usually slow and local. Man’s
invention of tools has enabled him to make changes of
unprecedented violence, rapidity, and scope.
* * *
THE LAND PYRAMID
An ethic to supplement and guide the economic
relation to land presupposes the existence of some
mental image of land as a biotic mechanism. We can
be ethical only in relation in something we can see,
feel, understand, love, or otherwise have faith in.
The image commonly employed in conservation
education is ‘the balance of nature.’ For reasons too
lengthy to detail here, this figure of speech fails to
describe accurately what little we know about the land
mechanism. A much truer image is the one employed
in ecology: the biotic pyramid.
* * *
Plants absorb energy from the sun. This energy
flows through a circuit called the biota, which may be
represented by a pyramid consisting of layers. The bot-
tom layer is the soil. A plant layer rests on the soil, an
insect layer on the plants, a bird and rodent layer on the
insects, and so on up through various animal groups to
the apex layer, which consists of the larger carnivores.
The species of a layer are alike not in where they
came from, or in what they look like, but rather in
what they eat. Each successive layer depends on
those below it for food and often for other services,
and each in turn furnishes food and services to
those above. Proceeding upward, each successive
layer decreases in numerical abundance. Thus, for
every carnivore there are hundreds of his prey, thou-
sands of their prey, millions of insects, uncountable
plants. The pyramidal form of the system reflects this
numerical progression from apex to base. Man shares
an intermediate layer with the bears, raccoons, and
squirrels which eat both meat and vegetables.
The lines of dependency for food and other ser-
vices are called food chains. Thus soil- oak- deer- Indian
is a chain that has now been largely converted to soil-
corn- cow- farmer. Each species, including ourselves, is
a link in many chains. The deer eats a hundred plants
other than oak, and the cow a hundred plants other
than corn. Both, then, are links in a hundred chains.
The pyramid is a tangle of chains so complex as to
seem disorderly, yet the stability of the system proves
it to be a highly organized structure. Its functioning

CHAPTER 13: EnvIRonmEnTAL ETHICS Á 469
all land relations hinges on investments of time, fore-
thought, skill, and faith rather than on investments of
cash. As a land- user thinketh, so is he.
I have purposely presented the land ethic as a
product of social evolution because nothing so impor-
tant as an ethic is ever ‘written.’ Only the most super-
ficial student of history supposes that Moses ‘wrote’
the Decalogue; it evolved in the minds of a thinking
community, and Moses wrote a tentative summary
of it for a ‘seminar.’ I say tentative because evolution
never stops.
The evolution of a land ethic is an intellectual as
well as emotional process. Conservation is paved with
good intentions which prove to be futile, or even dan-
gerous, because they are devoid of critical understand-
ing either of the land, or of economic land- use. I think
it is a truism that as the ethical frontier advances from
the individual to the community, its intellectual con-
tent increases.
The mechanism of operation is the same for any
ethic: social approbation for right actions: social dis-
approval for wrong actions.
By and large, our present problem is one of attitudes
and implements. We are remodeling the Alhambra
with a steam- shovel, and we are proud of our yardage.
We shall hardly relinquish the shovel, which after all
has many good points, but we are in need of gentler
and more objective criteria for its successful use.
THE OUTLOOK
It is inconceivable to me that an ethical relation to
land can exist without love, respect, and admiration
for land, and a high regard for its value. By value, I
of course mean something far broader than mere
economic value; I mean value in the philosophical
sense.
* * *
The ‘ key- log’ which must be moved to release the
evolutionary process for an ethic is simply this: quit
thinking about decent land- use as solely an economic
problem. Examine each question in terms of what
is ethically and esthetically right, as well as what is
economically expedient. A thing is right when it
tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty
of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends
otherwise.
It of course goes without saying that economic
feasibility limits the tether of what can or cannot be
done for land. It always has and it always will. The fal-
lacy the economic determinists have tied around our
collective neck, and which we now need to cast off, is
the belief that economics determines all land use. This
is simply not true. An innumerable host of actions
and attitudes, comprising perhaps the bulk of all land
relations, is determined by the land- users’ tastes and
predilections, rather than by his purse. The bulk of

470
C H A P T E R 1 4
‘’
Racism, Equality, and Discrimination
On Friday night, August 11, 2017, in Charlottes-
ville, Virginia— beloved city of Thomas Jefferson,
site of the university he founded, and bastion of
the Confederacy— white supremacists marched on
the campus of the University of Virginia, carrying
torches and chanting Nazi slogans. On Saturday they
rallied again in Charlottesville, yelling racial slurs
and displaying swastikas, Confederate flags, and
Ku Klux Klan symbols. They were accompanied by
militiamen toting assault rifles. The ostensible pur-
pose of the gathering was to protest the removal of
a statue dedicated to the memory of Robert E. Lee,
the famous Confederate general. Counterprotestors
shouted progressive slogans, carried anti- racist signs,
and sang civil rights– era songs. Skirmishes broke out
between the two sides, and a woman was killed and
several others injured when a 20- year- old man from
Ohio drove his car into a crowd of counterprotestors.
Two Virginia State Police troopers who had been
monitoring the conflict also died when their heli-
copter crashed near Charlottesville.
These heartrending events are among the lat-
est in America’s long history of racial conflict and
prejudice. Such incidents seem all the more painful
because they afflict a nation whose professed ideals
include liberty, justice, and equality. If because of
these ideals, the United States has been a shining
city on a hill, beaming hope to the world, the light
seems to many to have dimmed. From the Charlot-
tesville tragedy (and other contemporary episodes of
racial conflict), scholars can trace a clear line of race-
related tragedies and racist violence back through
colonial and U.S. history. Here are a few of the most
notable moments:
• 1619 English colonists bring the first African
slaves to the colony of Jamestown.
• 1660s “Slave codes” are enacted to outlaw
interracial marriage and the freeing of slaves by
their masters (manumission). Slavery becomes
a life sentence.
• Late 1700s The United States’ founding doc-
ument, the Constitution, establishes a new
nation but grants no rights to slaves. Almost
half of the men who craft the Constitution own
slaves. Thomas Jefferson insists that Africans
and their descendants are less than human.
• 1863 President Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865)
delivers the Emancipation Proclamation, which
declares that slaves in the states of the Confed-
eracy shall be free. Two years later, after the Civil
War, slavery is officially abolished, but racist
doctrines that justify slavery and the lower status
of blacks are widespread.
• 1866–1870s The Ku Klux Klan, a terrorist orga-
nization known as “The Invisible Empire of the
South,” beats, tortures, and hangs black Ameri-
cans for asserting their rights or for simply
being black. The Klan has thousands of mem-
bers and survives well into the twenty-first
century.
• 1870 The 15th Amendment is adopted into the
U.S. Constitution, granting the right to vote to
African American men (but not women).
• 1880s Former Confederacy states enact Jim
Crow laws— legislation designed to deny black

CHAPTER 14: RACism, EquAliTy, AnD DisCRiminATion Á 471
ISSUE FILE: BACKGROUND
What is race? Who is a racist? For many people,
these questions seem to pose no conceptual diffi-
culties at all. They think it is perfectly obvious what
race is, for they can point to people who seem to
belong to one race, and they can point to others
who seem to belong to a different race. And even
though there is less agreement about what racism
or racist means, many believe they know a racist
when they see one. At the same time, unless they
are resolute bigots, most people want never to be
guilty of racism, however it’s defined, and never
to be called a racist, whether or not they are guilty
of the charge. But after a hundred years of study-
ing race and racism, scholars (mostly sociologists
and philosophers) have concluded that our under-
standing of these ideas may be simplistic or even
morally suspect.
The core idea of race— that is, the notion of
discrete groups of people who share distinct bio-
logical and cultural traits— is actually relatively
new, arising in different forms over time begin-
ning around the sixteenth century and changing in
the Americas and Europe in response to colonization
and slavery. As Europeans subjugated and enslaved
Africans and native peoples in the Americas, the
idea of superior and inferior races took hold and
was used to justify inhumane treatment of whole
cultures. But in ancient times, no one thought to
categorize humans into exclusive racial groups. To
the ancients, cultures might differ in various ways,
but dividing the world into races the way you might
sort jellybeans into separate piles by color was not
done. For example, the philosopher Lawrence Blum
says that
[I]n the ancient Greco- Roman world, Africans were
identified primarily by skin color, nose shape and
hair texture. . . . The Greeks were quite interested in
the dark skin of Ethiopians, which they attributed
to climatic conditions; but they did not homog-
enize all darker- skinned persons into a single
social grouping. They were clearly aware of distinct
shades of dark skin.
citizens the right to vote and to ensure unequal
segregation in virtually every area of public
life. Jim Crow laws do not exist in Northern
states, but widespread racial discrimination
does.
• 1896 The Supreme Court’s ruling in Plessy v.
Ferguson permits increased segregation and Jim
Crow practices.
• 1875–1950 Over 4,000 black men, women,
and children are murdered in racial terror
lynchings. They are hanged, burned alive, and
hacked to death.
• 1955 Rosa Parks is arrested for not relinquish-
ing her bus seat to a white man, helping to
launch the Montgomery bus boycott.
• 1958 Twenty- four states throughout the coun-
try have laws that ban marriage between people
of different races. Some people are arrested and
jailed for violating the prohibitions. Intermar-
riage laws stand until 1967, when the Supreme
Court rules them unconstitutional.
• 1960s Blacks are discriminated against in res-
taurants, restrooms, classrooms, lunch counters,
hospitals, theaters, train cars, at cemeteries, and
on buses. Killings and beatings of peaceful black
protestors and their white supporters shock the
nation with their brutality and frequency.
• 1965 The Voting Rights Act passes, allowing
the federal government to intervene to help
blacks vote.
• 1968 In Memphis, James Earl Ray assassinates
Martin Luther King Jr., the leader of the civil
rights movement and a tireless advocate of
change through nonviolence.
To make sense of the issues that have emerged
from this history, we have to start at the begin-
ning with an understanding of the moral impli-
cations of race and racism and our responses to
them.

472 Á PART 4: ETHiCAl issuEs
The Greeks were respectful of dark- skinned Afri-
cans, whom they encountered in war, as both allies
and adversaries, and in commerce. Nubia, an African
civilization south of Egypt inhabited by persons of
“Negroid” features, was respected as a military power.
Dark- skinned Africans were identified generally as
“human beings with the capacity for freedom and
justice, piety, and wisdom.”1
In the late eighteenth century, science was
establishing itself as a relatively new way of acquir-
ing reliable knowledge about the world. In the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, several
thinkers tried to apply its principles to the study of
race. The result was what is now known as scientific
racism. Several scientifically minded investigators
examined the physical characteristics of people
from different cultures and parts of the world and
concluded that (1) humanity can indeed be divided
into separate and distinct races, (2) race enables us
to explain the most basic differences among people,
and (3) some races are superior to others— and the
white European race is superior to all. Using sus-
pect assumptions, skull and brain measurements,
“intelligence” tests, and travel accounts, these
men argued that white European men were more
biologically advanced and more intelligent than
any other racial group— and that this superior-
ity explained their dominance in the world. Later
scientists, however, uncovered a host of errors and
biases in this research and debunked the claim of
European superiority.
In the twenty- first century, science still has
not firmly established that there are such things as
races that differ in certain essential, inherent char-
acteristics. The traditional idea is that race con-
sists of heritable biological features common to all
members of a racial group, features that explain the
character and cultural traits of those members. But
the consensus among scientists and philosophers
is that this view is false. As the sociologist Tanya
Maria Golash- Boza explains:
Race is a social construction, an idea we endow
with meaning through daily interactions. It has
no biological basis. This might seem odd to read,
as the physical differences between a Kenyan, a
Swede, and a Han Chinese, for example, are obvi-
ous. However, these physical differences do not
necessarily mean that the world can be divided
into discrete racial groups. If you were to walk from
Kenya to Sweden to China, you would note incre-
mental gradations in physical differences between
people across space, and it would be difficult to
decide where to draw the line between Africa and
Europe and between Europe and Asia. There may be
genetic differences between Kenyans and Swedes,
but the genetic variations within the Kenyan pop-
ulation are actually greater than those between
Swedes and Kenyans. Although race is a social, as
opposed to a biological, construction, it has a wide
range of consequences in our society, especially
when used as a sorting and stratifying mechanism.2
According to Blum, popular thinking about
race generally dispenses with the biological com-
ponent, but not with the idea of inherency— the
notion that “certain traits of mind, character,
and temperament are inescapably part of a racial
group’s ‘nature’ and hence define its racial fate.”3
A group’s nature is thought to be fixed and unal-
terable. This view of race says that whites are natu-
rally this way; Asians are naturally that way; blacks
have this inherent character trait; Jews exhibit this
inherent disposition.
Some philosophers, known as race skeptics,
who accept that race has no physical scientific basis
argue that the concept of race should be discarded
entirely. Blum maintains that
the contemporary American conception of race
contains certain morally troubling features inde-
pendent of its use in specifically racist contexts:
exaggerated difference and moral distance between
those of different races, which discourages an
experienced sense of common humanity; an over-
drawn and falsely grounded sense of commonality
among members of the same race; a notion of being
trapped in one’s racial fate; encouragement of ste-
reotyping racial others rather than seeing them as
individuals; and an implication that, because of
their racial membership, some persons have greater
worth or ability than others.4

CHAPTER 14: RACism, EquAliTy, AnD DisCRiminATion Á 473
Though race- based antipathy is less related to
the original concept of “racism,” today the term
unequivocally encompasses racial bigotry, hostil-
ity, and hatred. Indeed, the racial bigot is many
people’s paradigm image of a “racist.”. . .
Historical systems of racism did of course
inevitably involve racial antipathy as well as infe-
riorization. Hatred of Jews was central to Nazi
philosophy; and it is impossible to understand
American racism without seeing hostility to blacks
and Native Americans as integral to the nexus of
attitudes and emotions that shored up slavery and
segregation.7
Blum hopes that an understanding of racism
as defined by these two concepts will help stanch
what has been called the “conceptual inflation” of
the words racist and racism. He and other scholars
see the terms losing their moral import and abil-
ity to shame because they are overused and misap-
plied. People, words, symbols, policies, practices,
institutions— such things are clearly racist if they
involve inferiorization and antipathy directed at
racial groups. But many other things labeled racist,
according to the definition above, are not racist. As
Blum says,
Some feel that the word [racist] is thrown around so
much that anything involving “race” that someone
does not like is liable to castigation as “racist.”. . .
A local newspaper called certain blacks “racist” for
criticizing other blacks who supported a white over
a black candidate for mayor. A white girl in Virginia
said that it was “racist” for an African American
teacher in her school to wear African attire. . . .
Merely mentioning someone’s race (or racial des-
ignation), using the word “Oriental” for Asians
without recognizing its origins and its capacity for
insult, or socializing only with members of one’s
own racial group are called “racist.”. . .
Not every instance of racial conflict, insensitivity,
discomfort, miscommunication, exclusion, injustice,
or ignorance should be called “racist.” Not all racial
incidents are racist incidents. We need a more varied
and nuanced moral vocabulary for talking about the
domain of race. . . . All forms of racial ills should elicit
concern from responsible individuals. If someone
displays racial insensitivity, but not racism, people
should be able to see that for what it is.8
But other philosophers, called race construc-
tivists, agree that biological race is a myth but are
reluctant to jettison the social construct. As the
political scientist Michael James explains:
Race constructivists accept the skeptics’ dismissal
of biological race but argue that the term still
meaningfully refers to the widespread grouping
of individuals into certain categories by society,
indeed often by the very members of such racial
ascriptions. Normatively, race constructivists argue
that since society labels people according to racial
categories, and since such labeling often leads to
race- based differences in resources, opportunities,
and well- being, the concept of race must be con-
served, in order to facilitate race- based social move-
ments or policies, such as affirmative action, that
compensate for socially constructed but socially
relevant racial differences.5
The view of many researchers and scholars is
that races (in the biological sense) don’t exist, but
“racialized groups”—groups that people believe are
discrete and immutable races and treat as such—
do. Throughout American history, people have
believed (and still believe) that there are identifi-
able races called “whites” and “blacks,” and society
has treated these groups accordingly.6
In any case, a commitment to either the tradi-
tional (biological) or the inherency view of race is
a presupposition of racism. Racism is based on the
belief that distinct races exist and that significant
differences (such as moral, intellectual, or cultural
differences) among races can be distinguished.
What pushes this view about race into racism is
the additional belief that some races are inferior in
these significant respects or otherwise deserving of
dislike or hostility.
The key concepts in this definition are what
Blum calls inferiorization and antipathy. He suggests
that all forms of racism can be related to these two
themes:
Inferiorization is linked to historical racist doc-
trine and racist social systems. Slavery, segregation,
imperialism, apartheid, and Nazism all treated cer-
tain groups as inferior to other groups . . .

474 Á PART 4: ETHiCAl issuEs
that indirect or veiled racism and inequality are
more serious than we might imagine. Here’s a
sketch of a few of the more egregious problems,
We should not, however, infer from any of
this that the magnitude of racism and inequality
in society has been exaggerated. In fact, it’s likely
’
What is white privilege, and what does it have
to do with racism? White privilege refers to the
advantages or benefits that whites enjoy simply
because they are white. The philosopher Lawrence
Blum says that there are two distinct forms of
white privilege:
One is simply that of being spared racial dis-
crimination, stigmatizing, indignities, stereotyp-
ing, and other race- based wrongs. . . . A second,
however, consists in material benefits accruing
to whites because of discrimination against racial
minorities. When a black is denied a job because
of discrimination, there is one more job avail-
able to a non- black (usually a white). When poor
schooling leaves many blacks and Latinos inade-
quately prepared for higher education or the job
market, jobs and places in colleges become more
available to whites (and to others, such as some
Asian groups, positioned to take advantage of
these opportunities).*
To whites, racial privilege can seem almost
invisible. Tanya Maria Golash- Boza explains:
If you are white, it can be difficult to notice that you
are not being followed around the store [by secu-
rity]; that people are smiling at you on the street
instead of clutching their purses; that no one asks
you if you speak English; that you are not asked
for identification when paying with a credit card.
Instead, you are likely to think that these things are
normal— that this is simply how things are.†
Some define racism as a system of privilege and
believe that being part of such a system makes you
a racist, which of course makes all whites racist. But
Blum thinks it’s a mistake to conflate white privi-
lege with personal racism:
The whole point of the idea of white privilege
is that it does not depend on the attitudes of its
beneficiaries toward disadvantaged racial groups;
nonracists still partake of white privilege. . . .
What is so disturbing about white privilege is that
you need not be in any way personally blamewor-
thy for having it, but it is still unfair that you do. It
is not personally racist to have white privilege. . . .
[W]hite privilege is a different sort of racial ill
than personal racism. But it is morally wrong to be
complacent about or accepting of racial privileges
once one knows one possesses them; one is (often)
thereby being complicit with injustice.‡
The eminent philosopher of race Naomi Zack
argues that white privilege is real and pervasive,
but that how we talk about white privilege is prob-
lematic:
[White privilege discourse] goes too far in blam-
ing all whites for all forms of racism and it does
not go far enough in directly addressing injus-
tice against nonwhites. . . . [W]hite privilege dis-
course may miss the importance of racial injustice
and degenerate into just another display of the
advantages that white people have of not being
required to respond to racial injustice against
their racial group. . . . Yes, whites are privileged,
but no amount of exhortation to “check” their
privilege or confessional discourse in response will
correct the legal injustice of police homicide based
on racial profiling.**
*Lawrence Blum, I’m Not a Racist But (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 2002), 72.
†Tanya Maria Golash- Boza, Race and Racisms (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 52.
‡Blum, 73, 76.
**Naomi Zack, “Uses and Abuses of the Discourse of
White Privilege,” Philosopher (blog), June 24, 2016,
https://politicalphilosopher.net/2016/06/24/featured-
philosopher-naomi-zack/. Reprinted with permission.
CRITICAL THOUGHT: White Privilege

https://politicalphilosopher.net/2016/06/24/featured-philosopher-naomi-zack/.

CHAPTER 14: RACism, EquAliTy, AnD DisCRiminATion Á 475
institutional or structural racism, unequal
treatment that arises from the way organizations,
institutions, and social systems operate. The people
who work within such systems may or may not be
racially prejudiced, but the systems themselves
cause racial discrimination and inequality. Consider
this example:
Another practice . . . is employers’ recruiting by
word of mouth among current workers in the com-
pany rather than advertising in job listings. There is
a nonracial business rationale for doing so: it saves
publicity costs, and it garners job applicants for
whom a reliable worker has vouched, thus saving
on the costs of assessing job suitability in a larger
group of unknown applicants. Nevertheless, such
recruiting has a disparate racial impact . . . in many
occupations blacks and Latinos constitute a smaller
proportion of the workforce than their percentage
in the population, and workers’ networks are gen-
erally race- specific. Thus word- of- mouth recruiting
perpetuates racial injustice and sustains the legacy
of racial discrimination. . . . Hence, in the service
of racial justice, [ word- of- mouth recruiting] should
generally be abandoned; employers should seek
qualified black and Latino applicants, or at least
not employ practices that discourage them.10
Many race scholars (and many whites of all pro-
fessions) believe that individual racism and discrim-
ination have declined markedly since the 1960s.
And the more obvious signs of racism have indeed
diminished, which is perhaps why most whites
believe that racism is no longer a significant prob-
lem. Other social scientists, however, argue that rac-
ism in less overt forms is widespread. Bonilla- Silva
explains:
Nowadays, except for members of white suprema-
cist organizations, few whites in the United States
claim to be “racist.” Most whites assert they “don’t
see any color, just people”; that although the ugly
face of discrimination is still with us, it is no lon-
ger the central factor determining minorities’ life
chances; and, finally, that, like Dr. Martin Luther
King Jr., they aspire to live in a society where “people
are judged by the content of their character, not
by the color of their skin.” More poignantly, most
from the social scientist and race scholar Eduardo
Bonilla- Silva:
Blacks and dark- skinned racial minorities lag well
behind whites in virtually every area of social
life; they are about three times more likely to be
poor than whites, earn about 40 percent less than
whites, and have about an eighth of the net worth
that whites have. They also receive an inferior edu-
cation compared to whites, even when they attend
integrated institutions. In terms of housing, black-
owned units comparable to white- owned ones
are valued at 35 percent less. Blacks and Latinos
also have less access to the entire housing market
because whites, through a variety of exclusion-
ary practices by white realtors and homeowners,
have been successful in effectively limiting their
entrance into many neighborhoods. Blacks receive
impolite treatment in stores, in restaurants, and in
a host of other commercial transactions. Research-
ers have also documented that blacks pay more
for goods such as cars and houses than do whites.
Finally, blacks and dark- skinned Latinos are the
targets of racial profiling by the police, which,
combined with the highly racialized criminal court
system, guarantees their overrepresentation among
those arrested, prosecuted, incarcerated, and if
charged for a capital crime, executed. Racial profil-
ing on the highways has become such a prevalent
phenomenon that a term has emerged to describe
it: driving while black. In short, blacks and most
minorities are “at the bottom of the well.”9
Racism often involves racial prejudice—
racially biased opinions based on incomplete or erro-
neous information. Racial prejudice can be either
the result of racism or a pretext for it. Racial dis-
crimination is unfavorable treatment of people
because of their race. Prejudice and discrimination
can be directed at traits other than race, including
sexual orientation, age, gender, ethnicity, religion,
and national origins. Discrimination based on any
of these can be a violation of law or policy. Many
people probably think that racism is essentially
individual racism, person- to- person acts of intol-
erance or discrimination. But as Bonilla- Silva points
out, a prevalent, almost invisible kind of racism is

476 Á PART 4: ETHiCAl issuEs
whites insist that minorities (especially blacks)
are the ones responsible for what “race problem”
we have in this country. . . . Most whites believe
that if blacks and other minorities would just stop
thinking about the past, work hard, and complain
less (particularly about racial discrimination), then
Americans of all hues could “all get along.”11
If whites do see contemporary racial inequal-
ity, says Bonilla- Silva, they are likely to blame it on
nonracial factors:
[W]hites rationalize minorities’ contemporary sta-
tus as the product of market dynamics, naturally
occurring phenomena, and blacks’ imputed cul-
tural limitations. For instance, whites can attribute
Latinos’ high poverty rate to a relaxed work ethic
(“the Hispanics are manana, manana, manana—
tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow”) or residential
segregation as the result of natural tendencies
among groups (“Does a cat and dog mix? I can’t see
it. You can’t drink milk and scotch. Certain mixes
don’t mix.”).12
Like many other scholars, Bonilla- Silva also
maintains that today the forces that create racial
inequality are often nearly invisible:
[C]ontemporary racial inequality is reproduced
through “new racism” practices that are subtle,
institutional, and apparently nonracial. In contrast
to the Jim Crow era, where racial inequality was
enforced through overt means (e.g., signs saying
“No Niggers Welcomed Here” or shotgun diplo-
macy at the voting booth), today racial practices
operate in a “now you see it, now you don’t” fash-
ion. For example, residential segregation, which
is almost as high today as it was in the past, is no
longer accomplished through overtly discrimina-
tory practices. Instead, covert behaviors such as not
showing all the available units, steering minorities
and whites into certain neighborhoods, quoting
higher rents or prices to minority applicants, or not
advertising units at all are the weapons of choice to
maintain separate communities. In the economic
field, “smiling face” discrimination (“We don’t
have jobs now, but please check later”), advertis-
ing job openings in mostly white networks and
ethnic newspapers, and steering highly educated
people of color into poorly remunerated jobs or
jobs with limited opportunities for mobility are
the new ways of keeping minorities in a secondary
position. Politically, although the civil rights strug-
gles have helped remove many of the obstacles
for the electoral participation of people of color,
racial gerrymandering, multimember legislative
districts, election runoffs, annexation of predomi-
nately white areas, at- large district elections, and
anti- single- shot devices (disallowing concentrating
votes [on] one or two candidates in cities using at-
large elections) have become standard practices to
disenfranchise people of color.13
All these indirect, institutional, covert means of
creating racial inequality are what Bonilla- Silva calls
“racism without racists.” With this form of racism,
blacks and other minorities can be disadvantaged
while the individuals responsible for the injustice
may be difficult to identify— or may not exist at all.
The most elementary moral question we can
ask about racism and discrimination is, Why are
they wrong? To the consequentialist, the answer is
easy: they are wrong because they hurt people. It is
difficult to imagine a racist belief or action resulting
in a favorable balance of good over bad. The non-
consequentialist answer is also straightforward. It
is likely to appeal to two fundamental moral prin-
ciples: respect for persons and justice. The principle
of respect for persons is the cornerstone of Kantian
ethics and several other moral theories. It says that
each person has equal inherent value, regardless
of social status, power, prestige, and racial or eth-
nic identity. We fail to respect persons if we inhibit
their freedom of choice, speech, or action; violate
their rights; coerce or enslave them; disadvan-
tage or harm them; discriminate against them; or
use them to achieve an end that is not their own.
The principle of justice says that equals must be
treated equally and fairly; that is, persons must be
treated the same unless there is a morally relevant
difference between them, and they must get what
is due them. Racial discrimination is contrary to
justice because it treats one group differently than
it does another, even though no morally relevant
differences exist between them.

CHAPTER 14: RACism, EquAliTy, AnD DisCRiminATion Á 477
equality, desert, opportunity, and social utility.
Little wonder, then, that disagreements flare where
agreement would be expected, and that people
often presumed to have different perspectives on
the issue— liberals and conservatives, blacks and
whites, men and women— may be just as likely to
take the same side.
Affirmative action is notorious for touching
off strong feelings that evoke simplistic, knee-
jerk answers— precisely the kind of answers we
want to avoid here. Only reflective, well- reasoned
responses will do for moral questions like these: Are
quota systems such as the one cited in the Bakke
case morally permissible? Should people be given
preference in college admissions or employment
because they are members of a particular minor-
ity group? Should members of a minority group
that was discriminated against in the past be given
preferential treatment as compensation for that
earlier discrimination? Is preferential treatment for
minorities and women permissible even though
it deprives white males of equal opportunities?
Can affirmative action help create a more just and
diverse society— or does it lead to a less just one,
divided by race and culture?
The ideal that spawned affirmative action is
that all persons deserve equal respect and equal
opportunity in employment and education. It is
an expression of the principle of justice that equals
should be treated equally.
Affirmative action in the United States evolved
over the past half century from several ground-
breaking laws, executive orders, and court cases.
Most notable among these is the Civil Rights Act
of 1964, enacted at a time when racial discrimina-
tion in the United States was a deeply implanted
infection— painful, injurious, and widespread.
Discrimination against minorities and women
was rampant in the workplace, in college admis-
sions offices, in government contracting, and in
countless places of business, from barbershops to
factories. Amounting to a direct assault on unequal
treatment, the act outlawed discrimination in
A painful and divisive issue that illustrates the
many conflicts about race, racism (especially insti-
tutional racism), and discrimination that can arise
is affirmative action. Affirmative action is a way
of making amends for, or eradicating, discrimina-
tion based on race, ethnicity, and gender. It takes
the form of policies and programs (usually man-
dated by government) designed to bring about
the necessary changes in businesses, colleges, and
other organizations. Consider this famous case:
A white man named Alan Bakke applies for admis-
sion to the School of Medicine at the University
of California, Davis. Only one hundred slots are
available, and there are many other applicants.
His grades and admissions test scores, however,
are good. The medical school denies him admis-
sion anyway— and grants admission to several oth-
ers whose grades and scores are lower than his. As
it turns out, the school has reserved sixteen of the
available slots for minority students, and many of
the students who fill those slots have lower grades
and test scores than Bakke. He sues, claiming that
he has been denied admission solely because of his
race. His case goes all the way to the U.S. Supreme
Court, which is strongly divided but eventually
decides in his favor. The majority opinion says that
preferring members of a group solely on account of
their race or ethnic origin is a clear- cut instance of
discrimination. The court finds that quota systems
like the one used at the School of Medicine at UC
Davis are unconstitutional, but that in some situ-
ations the use of race or minority status in admis-
sions decisions may be permissible.
This famous Supreme Court case— Regents of
the University of California v. Bakke (1978)—is one
of many to grapple with the issue of affirmative
action, a social policy that is still being ferociously
debated almost forty years after the Bakke decision
was handed down. It illustrates why this issue is so
explosive, so complicated, and so important: dis-
putes over affirmative action invariably involve
complex collisions of beliefs and values about rac-
ism, sexism, discrimination, civil rights, justice,

478 Á PART 4: ETHiCAl issuEs
public accommodations (such as restaurants and
hotels), public schools and universities, and busi-
ness organizations of all kinds. Regarding the latter,
the act declares:
It shall be an unlawful employment practice for an
employer—
(1) to fail or refuse to hire or discharge any individ-
ual or otherwise to discriminate against any indi-
vidual with respect to his compensation, terms,
conditions, or privileges of employment, because
of such individual’s race, color, religion, sex, or
national origin; or
(2) to limit, segregate, or classify his employees
or applicants for employment in any way which
would deprive or tend to deprive any individual of
employment opportunities or otherwise adversely
affect his status as an employee, because of such
individual’s race, color, religion, sex, or national
origin.14
Later, as the executive branch and the courts
tried to interpret or implement antidiscrimina-
tion policies, affirmative action took on a broader
meaning. Many U.S. companies and universities
have gone beyond simply banning discrimina-
tory practices. With prompting from the federal
government, they have tried to institute equal
opportunity (“to level the playing field”) by ensur-
ing that minority groups and women are repre-
sented in fair numbers (that is, numbers reflecting
the proportion of such individuals in the whole
community or the total workforce). But achiev-
ing fair or proportional representation has often
required preferential treatment for the desig-
nated groups. Through the use of quotas or other
means, members of the preferred groups have
been favored over nonmembers, who are typically
white males.
Thus we can say that there are actually two
kinds of affirmative action— weak and strong.15
Weak affirmative action is the use of policies
and procedures to end discriminatory practices
and ensure equal opportunity. It hews close to the
spirit and the letter of the Civil Rights Act of 1964,
which decrees in Title VI that “[no] person in the
United States shall, on the ground of race, color,
or national origin, be excluded from participation
in, denied the benefits of, or be subjected to dis-
crimination under any program or activity receiv-
ing Federal financial assistance.” Weak affirmative
action can involve many strategies for expanding
equal opportunity, but it stops short of preferen-
tial treatment. As the philosopher Louis P. Pojman
explains it,
[Weak affirmative action] includes such things
as dismantling of segregated institutions, wide-
spread advertisement to groups not previously
represented in certain privileged positions, special
scholarships for the disadvantaged classes (e.g., the
poor, regardless of race or gender), and even using
diversity or under- representation of groups with a
history of past discrimination as a tie breaker when
candidates for these goods and offices are relatively
equal. The goal of Weak Affirmative Action is equal
opportunity to compete, not equal results. We seek
to provide each citizen regardless of race or gender a
fair chance to the most favored positions in society.
There is no more moral requirement to guarantee
that 12% of professors are Black than to guarantee
that 85% of the players in the National Basketball
Association are White.16
Weak affirmative action, then, is hardly con-
troversial. Probably few people nowadays would
object to efforts to end discrimination against
minorities and women and to give people an equal
chance to get ahead. But strong affirmative action
is a different matter.
Strong affirmative action is the use of poli-
cies and procedures to favor particular individuals
because of their race, gender, or ethnic background.
It is a kind of preferential treatment that is usually
implemented through favoring plans, quota sys-
tems, or other approaches. The point of a quota
system is to ensure that an organization has a pre-
determined number or percentage of minority or
women members. Typically, a proportion of avail-
able positions or slots are reserved for the preferred

CHAPTER 14: RACism, EquAliTy, AnD DisCRiminATion Á 479
through antidiscrimination laws and preferential
policies.”17
Another argument is that strong affirma-
tive action is necessary to foster diversity in a
population— diversity of race, ethnicity, gender,
culture, and outlook. Diversity is rightly thought
to be an extremely valuable commodity for any
free society. It promotes understanding of cultures
and viewpoints different from one’s own, which in
turn encourages tolerance and cooperation in an
increasingly heterogeneous world. Some think it
valuable enough to use strong affirmative action to
achieve it.
As you would expect, diversity is thought to
be critical to education— especially in universities,
where the issue of promoting diversity through
admission preferences has been vigorously
debated. Many universities have tested the use of
preferences for diversity’s sake, encouraged by the
majority opinion in the Bakke case, which states
people, as was the arrangement at the School of
Medicine at UC Davis in the Bakke case. Sometimes
the result of using a quota system is that less quali-
fied people are hired or accepted while equally or
more qualified people are not— with the difference
being only that the preferred ones are women or
members of a minority group.
Defenders of strong affirmative action have
offered several justifications for it. A leading argu-
ment is that because in generations past minori-
ties were treated cruelly and unjustly, they now
deserve compensation for those terrible wrongs.
Giving minorities preferential treatment in
employment and education is the best way to
make amends. As one philosopher puts it, “Rac-
ism was directed against Blacks whether they were
talented, average, or mediocre, and attenuating
the effects of racism requires distributing remedies
similarly. Affirmative action policies compensate
for the harms of racism (overt and institutional)
’
Take a look at this excerpt from a report on college
“legacy” admissions published in the Christian
Science Monitor:
WASHINGTON, D.C.—At Penn, they “take it very
seriously.” At Michigan, it “gets you extra points.”
At Harvard, it “is not ignored,” and at Notre
Dame, they are “very open” to it. “It” is “legacy”:
an admissions designation used by most private
and some public universities for applicants whose
relatives attended the school, and who, as such,
get some degree of preferential treatment. It’s
a practice as old as colleges themselves, and is
intended to boost alumni support and donations
and foster a sense of community.
It’s also racist, argue its critics.
Following fast on the footsteps of last year’s
Supreme Court entry into the delicate area of
affirmative- action admissions, lawmakers are tak-
ing a hard look at this so- called reverse affirmative
action, which gives an edge to those whose parents
and grandparents went to selective colleges at a
time when most minorities there were few and far
between[.]*
Are legacies indeed racist? If you think so, what
are your reasons? If you think not, what argument
would you put forth to support your belief? If you
were the president of a state college, what policy
toward legacies would you try to establish? Do
legacies violate the Civil Rights Act of 1964? Why
or why not?
*Danna Harman, “Family Ties: An Unfair Advantage?”
Christian Science Monitor, February 6, 2004. © 2004
Christian Science Monitor. All rights reserved. Used by
permission and protected by the Copyright Laws of
the United States. The printing, copying, redistribu-
tion, or retransmission of this content without express
written permission is prohibited.
CRITICAL THOUGHT: Are Legacy Admissions Racist?

480 Á PART 4: ETHiCAl issuEs
that preferential policies can have great social
utility by creating role models for minorities and
women whose self- esteem and hopes for success
have been dimmed by generations of discrimina-
tion. They assert that role models are essential for
demonstrating to young people that significant
achievement is possible. Finally, some think the
best argument is that strong affirmative action
may be able to eradicate racism and transform our
race- conscious society. A proponent of this view
outlines the argument as follows:
[Affirmative action programs] rest on two judg-
ments. The first is a judgment of social theory:
that the United States will continue to be per-
vaded by racial divisions as long as the most lucra-
tive, satisfying, and important careers remain
mainly the prerogative of members of the white
race, while others feel themselves systematically
excluded from a professional and social elite. The
second is a calculation of strategy: that increas-
ing the number of blacks who are at work in
the professions will, in the long run, reduce the
sense of frustration and injustice and racial self-
consciousness in the black community to the
point at which blacks may begin to think of them-
selves as individuals who can succeed like others
through talent and initiative. At that future point
the consequences of nonracial admissions pro-
grams, whatever these consequences might be,
could be accepted with no sense of racial barriers
or injustice.20
Many opponents of strong affirmative action
also make utilitarian appeals. Their most straight-
forward counterargument is that those who favor
race or gender preferences are simply wrong
about the consequences of the policies: the con-
sequences either are not as beneficial as sup-
posed or are actually injurious. Opponents try to
undermine the diversity argument by insisting
that racial and ethnic diversity does not neces-
sarily result in diversity of ideas or outlooks, that
no scientific evidence supports the notion that
diversity policies yield benefits in education or
learning, and that giving priority to racial or
that “[t]he atmosphere of ‘speculation, experiment
and creation’—so essential to the quality of higher
education— is widely believed to be promoted by a
diverse student body.”18
But strong affirmative action is strongly op po-
sed by many who see it as reverse discrimination—
unequal, preferential treatment of some people
(mostly white males) to advance the interests of
others (minorities and women). The main charge
is that preferential treatment on the basis of race,
gender, or minority status is always wrong. It is
just as immoral when used against white males as
it is when used against blacks or women. Speaking
specifically of racial preferences, the philosopher
Carl Cohen provides a succinct statement of this
claim:
It uses categories that must not be used to distinguish
among persons with respect to their entitlements
in the community. Blacks and whites are equals, as
blondes and brunettes are equals, as Catholics and
Jews are equals, as Americans of every ancestry are
equal. No matter who the beneficiaries may be or
who the victims, preference on the basis of race is
morally wrong. It was wrong in the distant past and
in the recent past; it is wrong now; and it will always
be wrong. Race preference violates the principle of
human equality.19
MORAL THEORIES
In the debates over strong affirmative action,
those who oppose it as well as those who endorse
it appeal to conventional moral theories— both
consequentialist and nonconsequentialist. Many
who support strong affirmative action make the
utilitarian argument that these policies can have
enormous benefits for minorities and women
as well as for society as a whole. They contend,
as suggested earlier, that preferential programs
can increase racial and cultural diversity, which
helps promote tolerance, mutual understanding,
and better use of people’s talents, and— in higher
education— enhances learning. They also argue

CHAPTER 14: RACism, EquAliTy, AnD DisCRiminATion Á 481
society. In fact, they argue that racial preferences
can often have the opposite effect:
Preference puts distinguished minority achieve-
ment under a cloud. It imposes upon every member
of the preferred minority the demeaning burden of
presumed inferiority. Preference creates that bur-
den; it makes a stigma of the race of those who are
preferred by race. An ethnic group given special
favor by the community is marked as needing spe-
cial favor— and the mark is borne prominently by
every one of its members. Nasty racial stereotypes
are reinforced, and the malicious imputation of
gender diversity in the workplace would severely
undermine competence and efficiency, which
are highly valued by society. They reject the role
model argument on the grounds that role mod-
els selected by race or gender are not necessarily
the role models we need. The best role models in
education, they say, are people who are the best—
the most competent, knowledgeable, inspiring,
and decent— whatever the color of their skin, their
background, or their gender. Many opposed to
racial preferences doubt that such treatment can
help eliminate racism and promote a color- blind
’
Keeping in mind what you’ve read about weak and
strong affirmative action in this chapter, consider
the following news item:
(CNN)—A whites- only scholarship to be awarded
Wednesday by a student Republican organiza-
tion at Roger Williams University in Bristol, Rhode
Island, has drawn both controversy and support.
“It all began two weeks ago as a way for the
college Republican groups to express their opposi-
tion and tell people they are against race- based
scholarships and affirmative action,” June Speak-
man, faculty adviser for the College Republicans
told CNN. “We never expected such an overwhelm-
ing response of e- mails and media attention.”
The scholarship is for $250, but College
Republicans president Jason Mattera said he has
received donations and pledges totaling $4,000
for future whites- only scholarships.
Mattera is of Puerto Rican descent and was
awarded a $5,000 scholarship from the Hispanic Col-
lege Fund. He said he believes being eligible for such
scholarships gives him “an inherent advantage over
my white peers.” He wants the university to award
scholarships based on merit and not ethnicity.
Applicants for the College Republicans’ schol-
arship must be of Caucasian descent, have high
honors, write an essay, and show an impressive list
of accomplishments, Mattera said. Sixteen people
applied.
Roger Williams University does not sponsor
or endorse the scholarship, university spokesman
Rick Goff told CNN.
“The scholarship is entirely initiated by the
College Republicans at the university,” he said. . . .
The state Republican Party has criticized the
scholarship as having racist overtones.*
Is this whites- only scholarship an example of
weak or strong affirmative action— or neither? Is it
racist or discriminatory? If so, are blacks- only schol-
arships in the same category? If not, what distin-
guishes the one type of scholarship from the other?
That is, what are your reasons for thinking that one
is unjust while the other is not? Is there an implicit
argument in the student organization’s offering a
whites- only scholarship? If so, what is it?
*Jennifer Styles, “ Whites- Only Scholarship Generates
Controversy,” CNN.com, February 20, 2004, www
.cnn.com/2004/EDUCATION/02/18/whites.only.scholars
(February 27, 2015). © 2004 Turner Broadcast Systems.
All rights reserved. Used by permission and protected by
the Copyright Laws of the United States. The printing,
copying, redistribution, or retransmission of this con-
tent without express written permission is prohibited.
CRITICAL THOUGHT: Are Whites- Only Scholarships Unjust?

http://www.cnn.com/2004/EDUCATION/02/18/whites.only.scholars

http://www.CNN.com

482 Á PART 4: ETHiCAl issuEs
members of those minorities now be compen-
sated for that past mistreatment; racial preferences
in employment and education are appropriate
compensation; therefore, racial preferences are
morally permissible. As you might guess, many
who wish to counter this argument also appeal
to justice. They argue that compensation is just
only (1) if it is given in proper measure to spe-
cific persons who have been harmed, and (2) if
the specific persons who caused the harm do the
compensating. But with racial preferences, this
direct connection that morality seems to require
is missing. The result, they contend, is that often
the nonminority person who suffers because of
compensatory justice (because he is well quali-
fied but denied admission, for example) has had
nothing to do with past racism, and the per-
son who benefits from compensatory justice
has suffered very little from racism (because, for
example, he or she is well educated with above-
average income). They conclude that racial pref-
erences are unjust.
MORAL ARGUMENTS
Let us look a little more closely at the argument
from compensatory justice, giving particular atten-
tion to how a supporter of strong affirmative action
might articulate and defend it. Consider this ver-
sion of the argument, narrowly focused on com-
pensatory claims that blacks might have against
whites for historical discrimination:
1. In the past, blacks have been cruelly and sys-
tematically discriminated against by whites.
2. Blacks thus are owed just compensation for this
ill treatment.
3. Strong affirmative action in the form of racial
preferences is the most morally appropriate
form of such compensation.
4. Therefore, racial preferences (in employment
and education) should be used to compensate
blacks for past discrimination.
inferiority is inescapable because it is tied to the
color of the skin.21
As noted earlier, a common nonconsequen-
tialist argument for strong affirmative action is
based on the notion of compensatory justice: his-
torically, minorities (blacks, Native Americans,
Hispanics, and others) were the victims of rac-
ism by the white majority; justice requires that
’ QUICK REVIEW
racism— The belief that distinct races exist, that
significant differences (such as moral, intellec-
tual, or cultural differences) among races can
be distinguished, and that some races are infe-
rior in these significant respects or otherwise
deserving of dislike or hostility.
racial prejudice— Racially biased opinions based
on incomplete or erroneous information.
racial discrimination— Unfavorable treatment
of people because of their race. Prejudice and
discrimination can be directed at traits other
than race, including sexual traits.
individual racism— Person- to- person acts of
intolerance or discrimination.
institutional or structural racism— Unequal treat-
ment that arises from the way organizations,
institutions, and social systems operate.
affirmative action— A way of making amends
for, or eradicating, discrimination based on
race, ethnicity, and gender.
weak affirmative action— The use of policies and
procedures to end discriminatory practices and
ensure equal opportunity.
strong affirmative action— The use of policies
and procedures to favor particular individu-
als because of their race, gender, or ethnic
background.

CHAPTER 14: RACism, EquAliTy, AnD DisCRiminATion Á 483
States, military veterans receive preferential treat-
ment when they apply for civil service jobs. Their
applications are automatically given extra weight,
which means that sometimes veterans may land
jobs even when nonveteran applicants are equally
qualified. The notion behind this policy is that
a grateful nation owes veterans something for
their service. The policy assumes that all veter-
ans are owed preferential treatment even though
some of them have served longer and more cou-
rageously than others. So, the advocate of pref-
erences asks, why should not blacks be treated
according to a similar policy? Why should not all
blacks be owed preferential treatment because of
past discrimination— and owed it in equal mea-
sure even though some blacks have been wronged
more than others?
Another kind of attack on Premise 2 focuses not
on the people compensated, but on those penalized
so that the debt can be paid. The claim is that racial
preferences are unjust because they punish people
who have done nothing to merit punishment. When
blacks get preferential treatment in employment,
the argument goes, some white males end up losing
out— even though these whites had no part in past
racism and may have never discriminated against
anyone. Clearly, penalizing people for wrongdo-
ing that they did not— and could not— commit is
unjust; therefore, racial preferences are unjust.
A frequent reply to this argument is that the
white males thought to be innocent victims of
reverse discrimination are not as innocent as we
might think. According to this response, white
males are the recipients of advantages and privileges
that have been unjustly extracted from blacks for
generations— therefore, strong affirmative action
does not take from white males anything that is
rightfully theirs. The philosopher Judith Jarvis
Thomson, an advocate of racial preferences, makes
the point in the following way:
No doubt few, if any, [young white male applicants]
have themselves, individually, done any wrongs
to blacks and women. But they have profited from
First, note that this argument is valid and that
Premise 1 is true. Both those for and those against
racial preferences would be likely to accept this
premise, a statement of historical fact that few
thoughtful people would dispute. Premises 2 and
3, on the other hand, are very contentious claims.
The most common way to support Premise 2 is
to appeal to our moral intuitions about the justice of
compensating people who have been wronged. We
tend to think that people who have been wronged
do in fact deserve reparations, that valid grievances
warrant redress. Many argue that blacks have been
mistreated and discriminated against for so many
generations that today they still suffer the linger-
ing effects— they are disadvantaged before they
even begin to compete for jobs, school admissions,
and grades. Racial preferences help give them the
edge that they need— and that they justly deserve
as repayment for cruelties suffered in the past.
Those who reject Premise 2 counter that the prin-
ciple of just compensation is certainly legitimate,
but compensation in the form of racial preferences
is not just. Compensation, they argue, should go to
the particular persons who have been wronged, and
the compensation should be paid by the specific
persons who wronged them. But with racial prefer-
ences, they contend, the blacks who benefit are not
all equally deserving of redress. The ancestors of con-
temporary blacks were almost certainly not equally
wronged, not all wronged in the same fashion, and
not all wronged more than some poor white males
were wronged. As Carl Cohen says,
[M]any of Hispanic ancestry now enjoy here, and
have long enjoyed, circumstances as decent and
as well protected as those enjoyed by Americans
of all other ethnicities. The same is true of African
Americans, some of whom are impoverished and
some of whom are rich and powerful. Rewards dis-
tributed on the basis of ethnic membership assume
that the damages suffered by some were suffered by
all— an assumption that we know to be false.22
Advocates of racial preferences can counter
this criticism with an analogy. In the United

484 Á PART 4: ETHiCAl issuEs
positions are at stake. There are three reasons for
this: (1) treating people according to their merits
respects them as persons, as ends in themselves,
rather than as means to social ends (if we believe
that individuals possess a dignity that deserves to be
respected, then we ought to treat that individual on
the basis of his or her merits, not as a mere instru-
ment for social policy); (2) society has given people
expectations that if they attain certain levels of
excellence they will be awarded appropriately; and
(3) filling the most important positions with the
best qualified is the best way to ensure efficiency in
job- related areas and in society in general.26
CHAPTER REVIEW
SUMMARY
The core idea of race— that is, the notion of discrete
groups of people who share distinct biological and
cultural traits— is relatively new, arising in differ-
ent forms over time beginning around the sixteenth
century and changing in the Americas and Europe in
response to colonization and slavery.
In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
several thinkers tried to apply scientific principles to
the study of race. The result was what is now known as
scientific racism. Later scientists discredited this body
of research.
In the twenty- first century, science still has not
firmly established that there are such things as races
that differ in certain essential, inherent characteris-
tics. The traditional idea is that race consists of heri-
table biological features common to all members of
a racial group that explain the character and cultural
traits of those members. But the consensus among sci-
entists and philosophers is that this view is false.
Racism is based on the belief that distinct races
exist and that significant differences (such as moral,
intellectual, or cultural differences) among races can
be distinguished. What pushes this view about race
into racism is the additional belief that some races
the wrongs the community did. Many may actu-
ally have been direct beneficiaries of policies which
excluded or downgraded blacks and women—
perhaps in school admissions, perhaps in access to
financial aid, perhaps elsewhere; and even those
who did not directly benefit in this way had, at any
rate, the advantage in the competition which comes
of confidence in one’s full membership, and of one’s
rights being recognized as a matter of course.23
Critics have tried to rebut this argument by
questioning its underlying assumption— the notion
that, as one philosopher puts it, “if someone gains
from an unjust practice for which he is not respon-
sible and even opposes, the gain is not really his and
can be taken from him without injustice.”24 This
rebuttal relies on the commonsense moral principle
that a person who wrongs others is morally obli-
gated to compensate them for that wrong, but the
wrongdoer’s descendants are not. The sins of the
parents cannot be transferred to the children.
Premise 3—that racial preferences are just
and appropriate moral compensation for past
discrimination— is defended by many, but probably
most ably by Thomson:
[In] fact the nature of the wrongs done is such as to
make jobs the best and most suitable form of com-
pensation. What blacks and women were denied
was full membership in the community; and noth-
ing can more appropriately make amends for that
wrong than precisely what will make them feel they
now finally have it. And that means jobs. Financial
compensation (the cost of which could be shared
equally) slips through the fingers; having a job, and
discovering you do it well, yield— perhaps better
than anything else— that very self- respect which
blacks and women have had to do without.25
Though several arguments can be tried against
Premise 3, one in particular goes to the heart of the
debate on racial preferences. It says that preferen-
tial treatment is not fitting compensation because
it ignores the true standard by which jobs and posi-
tions should be awarded— competence:
[T]he normal criterion of competence is a strong
prima facie consideration when the most important

CHAPTER 14: RACism, EquAliTy, AnD DisCRiminATion Á 485
discrimination, unequal treatment that penalizes
white males to give advantages to blacks and women.
These critics generally reject all forms of preferential
treatment whether they favor white males or not.
Arguments for and against strong affirmative
action can appeal to both consequentialist and non-
consequentialist theories. Some argue that preferential
treatment is justified because it has positive conse-
quences for minorities and for society as a whole. Oth-
ers argue that such policies do not work as advertised
and actually harm the people they are meant to help.
Nonconsequentialist arguments appeal to justice,
asserting that affirmative action programs are just
(doing compensatory justice, for example) or unjust
(distorting compensatory justice).
KEY TERMS
racism (p. 473)
racial prejudice (p. 475)
racial discrimination (p. 475)
individual racism (p. 475)
institutional or structural racism (p. 475)
affirmative action (p. 477)
weak affirmative action (p. 478)
strong affirmative action (p. 478)
EXERCISES
Review Questions
1. Is racism part of humankind’s nature? That is,
have people always sorted one another into
racial groups and then considered some groups
inferior or deserving of malice? (p. 471)
2. What is scientific racism? Has science definitely
established that there are such discrete things as
races? (p. 472)
3. What is inherency? (p. 472)
4. What is racism? What two key elements does
Blum say are contained in the concept of
racism? (p. 473)
5. Why does Blum say that not every instance
of racial conflict, insensitivity, ignorance, or
miscommunication should be called racist?
(p. 473)
are inferior in these significant respects or otherwise
deserving of dislike or hostility.
Racism often involves racial prejudice— racially
biased opinions based on incomplete or erroneous
information. Racial prejudice can be either the result
of racism or a pretext for it. Racial discrimination is
unfavorable treatment of people because of their race.
Prejudice and discrimination can be directed at traits
other than race, including sexual orientation, age, gen-
der, ethnicity, religion, and national origins. Discrimi-
nation based on any of these traits can be a violation of
law or policy. Individual racism consists of person- to-
person acts of intolerance or discrimination, whereas
the prevalent, almost invisible kind of racism known
as institutional or structural racism consists of unequal
treatment that arises from the way organizations, insti-
tutions, and social systems operate.
From a nonconsequentialist perspective, racism is
wrong because it violates two important moral prin-
ciples: respect for persons and justice. The principle
of respect for persons says that each person has equal
inherent value, regardless of social status, power, pres-
tige, or racial or ethnic identity. The principle of jus-
tice says that equals must be treated equally and fairly.
Affirmative action is meant to make up for or
eliminate minority and gender discrimination, which
is a form of unwarranted mistreatment. Affirmative
action seeks to realize the ideal of equal respect and
opportunity for all in employment and education.
Weak affirmative action is generally not controversial
because it uses policies and procedures to ensure equal
opportunity without demanding that one group be
preferred over another. Strong affirmative action, on
the other hand, is controversial because it makes use
of minority and gender preferences.
Those who defend strong affirmative action argue
that it is needed to compensate certain groups for
mistreatment and discrimination of the past. It is also
thought to level the playing field— to give minori-
ties and women an edge in the competition for jobs
and educational admissions. Some also contend that
such preferences are justified because they help pro-
mote cultural, ethnic, and intellectual diversity, a
beneficial force in free societies. Strong affirmative
action is opposed by many who think it is reverse

486 Á PART 4: ETHiCAl issuEs
9. Is weak affirmative action morally preferable to
strong affirmative action? Why or why not?
10. Are there such things as distinct races, and can
significant moral and intellectual differences be
distinguished among them?
FURTHER READING
Andrew Altman, “Discrimination,” in Stanford Encyclope-
dia of Philosophy, Winter 2016 ed., ed. Edward N. Zalta,
https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2016/entries
/discrimination/.
Kwame Anthony Appiah, “Racisms,” in Anatomy of Racism,
ed. David Theo Goldberg (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1990).
Lawrence Blum, “I’m Not a Racist But . . .” : The Moral Quan-
dary of Race (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002).
Eduardo Bonilla- Silva, Racism without Racists, 5th ed.
(Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2018).
Tanya Maria Golash- Boza, Racism and Racisms: A Critical
Approach (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).
David Theo Goldberg, ed., Anatomy of Racism (Minneapo-
lis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1990).
Ali Rattansi, Racism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2007).
Naomi Zack, The Ethics and Mores of Race: Equality after
the History of Philosophy (Lanham, MD: Rowman and
Littlefield, 2011).
Naomi Zack, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and
Race (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017).
Naomi Zack, White Privilege and Black Rights: The Injustice
of U.S. Police Racial Profiling and Homicide (Lanham, MD:
Rowman and Littlefield, 2015).
6. What is racial prejudice? What is racial
discrimination? (p. 475)
7. What is institutional racism? Is it always easy to
detect? Why or why not? (pp. 475-476)
8. What is white privilege? (p. 474)
9. What is weak affirmative action? What is strong
affirmative action? (p. 478)
10. What are racialized groups? (p. 473)
Discussion Questions
1. Name three of the more egregious examples
of inequality and racism that Bonilla- Silva
mentions. Do you agree that they are racist?
Why or why not?
2. What does Bonilla- Silva mean by the phrase
“racism without racists”?
3. Why does Naomi Zack think that white
privilege discourse is problematic?
4. Do you believe, as Bonilla- Silva does, that covert
forms of racism are widespread? Why or why
not?
5. Do you believe that strong affirmative action is
morally acceptable? Why or why not?
6. Is a white person who benefits from white
privilege a racist? Is he a racist if he denies that
white privilege exists? Explain.
7. What arguments can be lodged against strong
affirmative action?
8. According to Bonilla- Silva, how can racial
inequality and its effects be nearly invisible?
E T H i C A l D i l E m m A s
1. Does Race Matter?
Rachel Dolezal, the white woman who for 10 years pretended she was black before
being publicly outed, has called for racial fluidity to be recognised in the same way as
transgenderism.
The former National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)
leader said race is “less biological than gender” and believes the term “transracial” is a
useful term to describe how race should be considered in the future.

https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2016/entries/discrimination/

CHAPTER 14: RACism, EquAliTy, AnD DisCRiminATion Á 487
Ms. Dolezal also claimed “race is a lie, so how can you lie about a lie?” in response
to her public shaming in 2015 when she was outed by her parents as “biologically
Caucasian.”
“Gender is understood— we have progressed, we have evolved into understanding
gender is not binary, it is not even biological but what strikes me as so odd is that race
is not biological either and actually race has been to some extent less biological than
gender,” she told Newsnight’s Emily Maitlis.
The former civil rights activist claims she can no longer work because of the
controversy and is “ostracised” in Spokane, Washington, where she is forced to remain
due to a custody arrangement with her son’s father.
“As a result of me being discredited, called a liar and a fraud, a con— and not
just distrusting my work but everything I did, including my resume, was called into
question,” she said. . . .
“The thing that hurt the worst was from the black community because I still feel
like that is home for me and even if I get evicted or get pushed to the fringe or some
people don’t see me as part of that group, it is still where I feel like I fit and where I
feel at home,” she said. . . .
Ms. Dolezal was fired as head of the Spokane chapter of the NAACP and kicked off
a police ombudsman commission when she was outed. She also lost her job teaching
African studies at Eastern Washington University in nearby Cheney and has been accused
of cultural appropriation by both the white and black community.*
Is Ms. Dolezal right— is race a lie? Is it “less biologi-
cal than gender”? Whether race is or isn’t biologi-
cal, did she do anything wrong in assuming a black
identity? If so, what is her transgression? Was it
pretending to be something she’s not— or was it
that she challenged society’s assumptions about
what race is?
*Lucy Pasha- Robinson, “Rachel Dolezal: White Woman Who Identifies as Black Calls for ‘Racial Fluidity’ to Be
Accepted,” The Independent, March 2017, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/ rachel- dolezal- white-
woman- black- racial-fluidity-accepted-transracial-naacp-a7653131.html. Reprinted by permission of ESI Media.
2. Racial Preferences for Whites?
Affirmative action is most often thought of as a racial preference for marginalized
peoples— a way to ensure that those who are often discriminated against have places
in schools and in the workforce. But some insist that the roots of affirmative action are
firmly grounded in a racial preference for whites.
One commentator argues that the abolition of white indentured servitude perfectly
encapsulates white racial preference, for though white slavery was no longer legal in
the United States as of the nineteenth century, black and indigenous workers remained
in bondage. Racial preference for whites was the guiding principle behind the 1790
Naturalization Act, which granted U.S. citizenship to almost any immigrant of European
ancestry, but excluded blacks, Asians, and American Indians. Asian exclusion laws,

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/rachel-dolezal-white-woman-black-racial-fluidity-accepted-transracial-naacp-a7653131.html

488 Á PART 4: ETHiCAl issuEs
segregation, and the concept of manifest destiny, which led to the annexation of half of
Mexico, are also products of affirmative action for whites.
He points out that as recently as the 1960s, the Federal Housing Administration
provided loans almost exclusively to white families. From the 1930s to the 1960s,
approximately 15 million whites were able to obtain homes with FHA loans, while
people of color received no such aid.
He concludes that the group that has benefited most through affirmative action
programs is white America. The laws and public policies of the United States have been
shaped and molded by white racial preference, and many of the social and economic
inequalities we face today are the result of years of affirmative action for whites.†
Do you agree with this commentator that racial
preferences for whites have always been a major
part of U.S. history? If so, do you think that
the U.S. government should make amends for
such past inequalities? Why or why not? If racial
preferences for whites have indeed always been
widespread, were they always unjust as well?
Suppose they were unjust. Would racial prefer-
ences in favor of nonwhites now be just? Why or
why not?
†Based on Tim Wise, “The Mother of All Racial Preferences,” Znet, May 24, 2003, https://zcomm.org
/zcommentary/ the- mother- of- all-racial-preferences-by-tim-wise/. Originally appeared as a ZNet commentary at
www.zmag.org.
3. Are Racial Preferences Harmful?
Over the past few years, researchers have begun to produce large datasets that make it
possible to compare the fortunes of minority students who attend universities that use
varying levels of admissions preferences. In many contexts, scholars find that students
perform better, both in the short- term and the long- term, when students’ credentials
are closer to those of their classmates. When students are surrounded by peers who have
much higher credentials, they often have more trouble persisting in a difficult major,
graduating from college or getting a good job.
This phenomenon is known as the “mismatch effect,” and last month I published
a study in the Stanford Law Review, trying to determine whether the mismatch effect
operates in law schools. . . . My study focused on black law students and compared black
and white outcomes.
I found that law schools almost universally use very large preferences for blacks
to achieve something very close to racial proportionality. The credentials gap
between white and black students is about 30 times larger than it would be in a race-
blind regime.
Starting a highly competitive curriculum with a large academic disadvantage, blacks
wind up clustered in the bottom tenth of the class at nearly all law schools. I estimate
the mismatch effect increases the number of black dropouts from law school by 40%,
and increases the number of blacks failing their first bar exam by 80%.

http://www.zmag.org

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CHAPTER 14: RACism, EquAliTy, AnD DisCRiminATion Á 489
The mismatch effect appears to operate in the job market as well. Law firms— once
thought to be single- minded in their determination to recruit lawyers from the most
elite schools possible— turn out to weigh law school grades more heavily than school
prestige. The typical black law graduate, I estimate, loses about $10,000 in annual
earnings because large preferences induce her to make a bad trade- off between law
school prestige and law school grades.‡
Sander’s study is controversial, but suppose it
shows what he says it does. Would you then favor
dismantling preferences for black law students?
Would you favor maintaining law school prefer-
ence systems if they helped black students rather
than harmed them? Why or why not? Some people
advocate using preferences in higher education to
redress the wrongs of past discrimination. To be
logically consistent, should they disregard evi-
dence suggesting that preferences hurt blacks?
‡ Richard Sander, “Preferences Hurt Black Law Students,” UCLA Today, Vol. 25, No. 10 (February 2005). Used by
permission of the author.
If the people I talk to and the newspapers I read are rep-
resentative and reliable, there is a good deal of racism
about. People and policies in the United States, in Eastern
and Western Europe, in Asia and Africa and Latin Amer-
ica are regularly described as “racist.” Australia had, until
recently, a racist immigration policy; Britain still has
one; racism is on the rise in France; many Israelis support
Meir Kahane, an anti- Arab racist; many Arabs, according
to a leading authority, are anti- Semitic racists;1 and the
movement to establish English as the “official language”
of the United States is motivated by racism. Or, at least,
so many of the people I talk to and many of the journal-
ists with the newspapers I read believe.
But visitors from Mars—or from Malawi—unfamiliar
with the Western concept of racism could be excused if
they had some difficulty in identifying what exactly rac-
ism was. We see it everywhere, but rarely does anyone
stop to say what it is, or to explain what is wrong with
it. Our visitors from Mars would soon grasp that it had
become at least conventional in recent years to express
abhorrence for racism. They might even notice that those
most often accused of it—members of the South African
Nationalist party, for example—may officially abhor it
also. But if they sought in the popular media of our day—
in newspapers and magazines, on television or radio, in
novels or films—for an explicit definition of this thing
“we” all abhor, they would very likely be disappointed.
Now, of course, this would be true of many of our
most familiar concepts. Sister, chair, tomato—none of
these gets defined in the course of our daily business.
But the concept of racism is in worse shape than these.
For much of what we say about it is, on the face of it,
inconsistent.
It is, for example, held by many to be racist to
refuse entry to a university to an otherwise qualified
R E A D i n G s
Racisms
Kwame Anthony Appiah
Kwame Anthony Appiah, “Racisms,” in Anatomy of Racism, ed.
David Theo Goldberg (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1970), 3–17. © 1990 University of Minnesota Press.
Reprinted by permission of University of Minnesota Press.

490 Á PART 4: ETHiCAl issuEs
rationally articulated: and they are worth articulating
rationally in order that we can rationally say what we
object to in them.
RACIST PROPOSITIONS
There are at least three distinct doctrines that might
be held to express the theoretical content of what
we call “racism.” One is the view—which I shall call
racialism2—that there are heritable characteristics,
possessed by members of our species, that allow us to
divide them into a small set of races, in such a way that
all the members of these races share certain traits and
tendencies with each other that they do not share with
members of any other race. These traits and tendencies
characteristic of a race constitute, on the racialist view,
a sort of racial essence; and it is part of the content of
racialism that the essential heritable characteristics of
what the nineteenth century called the “Races of Man”
account for more than the visible morphological char-
acteristics—skin color, hair type, facial features—on
the basis of which we make our informal classifica-
tions. Racialism is at the heart of nineteenth- century
Western attempts to develop a science of racial differ-
ence; but it appears to have been believed by others—
for example, Hegel, before then, and many in other
parts of the non- Western world since—who have had
no interest in developing scientific theories.
Racialism is not, in itself, a doctrine that must
be dangerous, even if the racial essence is thought
to entail moral and intellectual dispositions. Pro-
vided positive moral qualities are distributed across
the races, each can be respected, can have its “sepa-
rate but equal” place. Unlike most Western- educated
people, I believe—and I have argued elsewhere3—that
racialism is false; but by itself, it seems to be a cogni-
tive rather than a moral problem. The issue is how the
world is, not how we would want it to be.
Racialism is, however, a presupposition of other
doctrines that have been called “racism,” and these
other doctrines have been, in the last few centuries,
the basis of a great deal of human suffering and the
source of a great deal of moral error.
One such doctrine we might call “extrinsic racism”:
extrinsic racists make moral distinctions between
“Negro” candidate, but not to be so to refuse entry to
an equally qualified “Caucasian” one. But “Negro”
and “Caucasian” are both alleged to be names of races,
and invidious discrimination on the basis of race is
usually held to be a paradigm case of racism. Or, to
take another example, it is widely believed to be evi-
dence of an unacceptable racism to exclude people
from clubs on the basis of race; yet most people, even
those who think of “Jewish” as a racial term, seem to
think that there is nothing wrong with Jewish clubs,
whose members do not share any particular religious
beliefs, or Afro- American societies, whose members
share the juridical characteristic of American citizen-
ship and the “racial” characteristic of being black.
I say that these are inconsistencies “on the face of
it,” because, for example, affirmative action in univer-
sity admissions is importantly different from the ear-
lier refusal to admit blacks or Jews (or other “Others”)
that it is meant, in part, to correct. Deep enough analy-
sis may reveal it to be quite consistent with the abhor-
rence of racism; even a shallow analysis suggests that
it is intended to be so. Similarly, justifications can be
offered for “racial” associations in a plural society that
are not available for the racial exclusivism of the coun-
try club. But if we take racism seriously we ought to be
concerned about the adequacy of these justifications.
In this essay, then, I propose to take our ordinary
ways of thinking about race and racism and point up
some of their presuppositions. And since popular con-
cepts are, of course, usually fairly fuzzily and untheo-
retically conceived, much of what I have to say will
seem to be both more theoretically and more precisely
committed than the talk of racism and racists in our
newspapers and on television. My claim is that these
theoretical claims are required to make sense of racism
as the practice of reasoning human beings. If anyone
were to suggest that much, perhaps most, of what goes
under the name “racism” in our world cannot be given
such a rationalized foundation, I should not disagree:
but to the extent that a practice cannot be rationally
reconstructed it ought, surely, to be given up by rea-
sonable people. The right tactic with racism, if you
really want to oppose it, is to object to it rationally in
the form in which it stands the best chance of meet-
ing objections. The doctrines I want to discuss can be

CHAPTER 14: RACism, EquAliTy, AnD DisCRiminATion Á 491
There are interesting possibilities for complicating
these distinctions: some racists, for example, claim,
as the Mormons once did, that they discriminate
between people because they believe that God requires
them to do so. Is this an extrinsic racism, predicated
on the combination of God’s being an intrinsic racist
and the belief that it is right to do what God wills? Or is
it intrinsic racism because it is based on the belief that
God requires these discriminations because they are
right? (Is an act pious because the gods love it, or do
they love it because it is pious?) Nevertheless, the dis-
tinctions between racialism and racism and between
two potentially overlapping kinds of racism provide
us with the skeleton of an anatomy of the proposi-
tional contents of racial attitudes.
RACIST DISPOSITIONS
Most people will want to object already that this dis-
cussion of the propositional content of racist moral
and factual beliefs misses something absolutely crucial
to the character of the psychological and sociological
reality of racism, something I touched on when I men-
tioned that extrinsic racist utterances are often made
by people who suffer from what I called a “cognitive
incapacity.” Part of the standard force of accusations of
racism is that their objects are in some way irrational.
The objection to Professor Shockley’s claims about the
intelligence of blacks is not just that they are false; it is
rather that Professor Shockley seems, like many people
we call “racist,” to be unable to see that the evidence
does not support his factual claims and that the con-
nection between his factual claims and his policy pre-
scriptions involves a series of non sequiturs.
What makes these cognitive incapacities espe-
cially troubling—something we should respond to
with more than a recommendation that the individ-
ual, Professor Shockley, be offered psychotherapy—is
that they conform to a certain pattern: namely, that it
is especially where beliefs and policies that are to the
disadvantage of nonwhite people that he shows the
sorts of disturbing failure that have made his views
both notorious and notoriously unrealiable. Indeed,
Professor Shockley’s reasoning works extremely well
in some other areas: that he is a Nobel Laureate in
members of different races because they believe that
the racial essence entails certain morally relevant
qualities. The basis for the extrinsic racists’ discrimi-
nation between people is their belief that members of
different races differ in respects that warrant the differ-
ential treatment, respects—such as honesty or cour-
age or intelligence—that are uncontroversially held
(at least in most contemporary cultures) to be accept-
able as a basis for treating people differently. Evidence
that there are no such differences in morally relevant
characteristics—that Negroes do not necessarily lack
intellectual capacities, that Jews are not especially
avaricious—should thus lead people out of their rac-
ism if it is purely extrinsic. As we know, such evidence
often fails to change an extrinsic racist’s attitudes
substantially, for some of the extrinsic racist’s best
friends have always been Jewish. But at this point—if
the racist is sincere—what we have is no longer a false
doctrine but a cognitive incapacity, one whose signifi-
cance I shall discuss later in this essay.
I say that the sincere extrinsic racist may suffer
from a cognitive incapacity. But some who espouse
extrinsic racist doctrines are simply insincere intrinsic
racists. For intrinsic racists, on my definition, are peo-
ple who differentiate morally between members of dif-
ferent races because they believe that each race has a
different moral status, quite independent of the moral
characterstics entailed by its racial essence. Just as, for
example, many people assume that the fact that they
are biologically related to another person—a brother,
an aunt, a cousin—gives them a moral interest in that
person,4 so an intrinsic racist holds that the bare fact
of being of the same race is a reason for preferring one
person to another. (I shall return to this parallel later
as well.)
For an intrinsic racist, no amount of evidence that
a member of another race is capable of great moral,
intellectual, or cultural achievements, or has charac-
teristics that, in members of one’s own race, would
make them admirable or attractive, offers any ground
for treating that person as he or she would treat simi-
larly endowed members of his or her own race. Just so,
some sexists are “intrinsic sexists,” holding that the
bare fact that someone is a woman (or man) is a reason
for treating her (or him) in certain ways.

492 Á PART 4: ETHiCAl issuEs
who fail, by virtue of their ideological attachments, to
recognize what is in their own best interests at all.
My business here is not with the psychological
or social processes by which these forms of ideologi-
cal resistance operate, but it is important, I think, to
see the refusal on the part of some extrinsic racists to
accept evidence against the beliefs as an instance of
a widespread phenomenon in human affairs. It is a
plain fact, to which theories of ideology must address
themselves, that our species is prone both morally
and intellectually to such distortions of judgment, in
particular to distortions of judgment that reflect par-
tiality. An inability to change your mind in the face
of appropriate5 evidence is a cognitive incapacity; but
it is one that all of us surely suffer from in some areas
of belief; especially in areas where our own interests or
self- images are (or seem to be) at stake.
It is not, however, as some have held, a tendency
that we are powerless to resist. No one, no doubt, can
be impartial about everything—even about every-
thing to which the notion of partiality applies; but
there is no subject matter about which most sane peo-
ple cannot, in the end, be persuaded to avoid partiality
in judgment. And it may help to shake the convictions
of those whose incapacity derives from this sort of ide-
ological defense if we show them how their reaction
fits into this general pattern. It is, indeed, because it
generally does fit this pattern that we call such views
“racism”—the suffix “-ism” indicating that what we
have in mind is not simply a theory but an ideology. It
would be odd to call someone brought up in a remote
corner of the world with false and demeaning views
about white people a “racist” if that person gave up
these beliefs quite easily in the face of appropriate
evidence.
Real live racists, then, exhibit a systematically dis-
torted rationality, the kind of systematically distorted
rationality that we are likely to call “ideological.” And
it is a distortion that is especially striking in the cogni-
tive domain: extrinsic racists, as I said earlier, however
intelligent or otherwise well informed, often fail to
treat evidence against the theoretical propositions of
extrinsic racism dispassionately. Like extrinsic racism,
intrinsic racism can also often be seen as ideological;
but since scientific evidence is not going to settle the
physics is part of what makes him so interesting an
example.
This cognitive incapacity is not, of course, a rare
one. Many of us are unable to give up beliefs that play
a part in justifying the special advantages we gain (or
hope to gain) from our positions in the social order—
in particular, beliefs about the positive characters of
the class of people who share that position. Many peo-
ple who express extrinsic racist beliefs—many white
South Africans, for example—are beneficiaries of
social orders that deliver advantages to them by virtue
of their “race,” so that their disinclination to accept
evidence that would deprive them of a justification
for those advantages is just an instance of this general
phenomenon.
So too, evidence that access to higher education is
as largely determined by the quality of our earlier edu-
cations as by our own innate talents, does not, on the
whole, undermine the confidence of college entrants
from private schools in England or the United States
or Ghana. Many of them continue to believe in the
face of this evidence that their acceptance at “good”
universities shows them to be intellectually better
endowed (and not just better prepared) than those
who are rejected. It is facts such as these that give sense
to the notion of false consciousness, the idea that an
ideology can prevent us from acknowledging facts
that would threaten our position.
The most interesting cases of this sort of ideologi-
cal resistance to the truth are not, perhaps, the ones
I have just mentioned. On the whole, it is less surprising,
once we accept the admittedly problematic notion
of self- deception, that people who think that certain
attitudes or beliefs advantage them or those they care
about should be able, as we say, to “persuade” them-
selves to ignore evidence that undermines those beliefs
or attitudes. What is more interesting is the existence
of people who resist the truth of a proposition while
thinking that its wider acceptance would in no way
disadvantage them or those individuals about whom
they care—this might be thought to describe Profes-
sor Shockley; or who resist the truth when they rec-
ognize that its acceptance would actually advantage
them—this might be the case with some black people
who have internalized negative racist stereotypes; or

CHAPTER 14: RACism, EquAliTy, AnD DisCRiminATion Á 493
prejudice generally, may threaten an agent’s auton-
omy, making it appropriate to treat or train rather
than to reason with them.
But once someone has been offered evidence both
(1) that their reasoning in a certain domain is distorted
by prejudice, and (2) that the distortions conform to a
pattern that suggests a lack of impartiality, they ought
to take special care in articulating views and proposing
policies in that domain. They ought to do so because,
as I have already said, the phenomenon of partiality
in judgment is well attested in human affairs. Even if
you are not immediately persuaded that you are your-
self a victim of such a distorted rationality in a certain
domain, you should keep in mind always that this is
the usual position of those who suffer from such prej-
udices. To the extent that this line of thought is not
one that itself falls within the domain in question, one
can be held responsible for not subjecting judgments
that are within that domain to an especially extended
scrutiny; and this is a fortiori true if the policies one is
recommending are plainly of enormous consequence.
If it is clear that racial prejudice is regrettable, it is
also clear in the nature of the case that providing even
a superabundance of reasons and evidence will often
not be a successful way of removing it. Nevertheless,
the racist’s prejudice will be articulated through the
sorts of theoretical propositions I dubbed extrinsic
and intrinsic racism. And we should certainly be able
to say something reasonable about why these theoreti-
cal propositions should be rejected.
Part of the reason that this is worth doing is pre-
cisely the fact that many of those who assent to the
propositional content of racism do not suffer from
racial prejudice. In a country like the United States,
where racist propositions were once part of the
national ideology, there will be many who assent to
racist propositions simply because they were raised to
do so. Rational objection to racist propositions has a
fair chance of changing such people’s beliefs.
EXTRINSIC AND INTRINSIC RACISM
It is not always clear whether someone’s theoretical
racism is intrinsic or extrinsic, and there is certainly
no reason why we should expect to be able to settle
issue, a failure to see that it is wrong represents a cog-
nitive incapacity only on controversially realist views
about morality. What makes intrinsic racism similarly
ideological is not so much the failure of inductive or
deductive rationality that is so striking in someone
like Professor Shockley but rather the connection that
it, like extrinsic racism, has with the interests—real or
perceived—of the dominant group.6 Shockley’s racism
is in a certain sense directed against nonwhite people:
many believe that his views would, if accepted, oper-
ate against their objective interests, and he certainly
presents the black “race” in a less than flattering light.
I propose to use the old- fashioned term “racial
prejudice” in the rest of this essay to refer to the defor-
mation of rationality in judgment that characterizes
those whose racism is more than a theoretical attach-
ment to certain propositions about race.
RACIAL PREJUDICE
It is hardly necessary to raise objections to what I am
calling “racial prejudice”; someone who exhibits such
deformations of rationality is plainly in trouble. But
it is important to remember that propositional racists
in a racist culture have false moral beliefs but may not
suffer from racial prejudice. Once we show them how
society has enforced extrinsic racist stereotypes, once
we ask them whether they really believe that race in
itself, independently of those extrinsic racist beliefs,
justifies differential treatment, many will come to give
up racist propositions, although we must remember
how powerful a weight of authority our arguments
have to overcome. Reasonable people may insist on
substantial evidence if they are to give up beliefs that
are central to their cultures.
Still, in the end, many will resist such reasoning;
and to the extent that their prejudices are really not
subject to any kind of rational control, we may won-
der whether it is right to treat such people as morally
responsible for the acts their racial prejudice moti-
vates, or morally reprehensible for holding the views
to which their prejudice leads them. It is a bad thing
that such people exist; they are, in a certain sense, bad
people. But it is not clear to me that they are responsi-
ble for the fact that they are bad. Racial prejudice, like

494 Á PART 4: ETHiCAl issuEs
Indeed, it seems to me that there is a significant pat-
tern in the modern rhethoric of race, such that the dis-
course of racial solidarity is usually expressed through
the language of intrinsic racism, while those who have
used race as the basis for oppression and hatred have
appealed to extrinsic racist ideas. This point is impor-
tant for understanding the character of contemporary
racial attitudes.
The two major uses of race as a basis for moral
solidarity that are most familiar in the West are vari-
eties of Pan- Africanism and Zionism. In each case it
is presupposed that a “people,” Negroes or Jews, has
the basis for shared political life in the fact of being
of the same race. There are varieties of each form of
“nationalism” that make the basis lie in shared tradi-
tions; but however plausible this may be in the case
of Zionism, which has in Judaism, the religion, a real-
istic candidate for a common and nonracial focus for
nationality, the peoples of Africa have a good deal less
in common culturally than is usually assumed. I dis-
cuss this issue at length in In My Father’s House: Essays
in the Philosophy of African Culture, but let me say here
that I believe the central fact is this: what blacks in the
West, like secularized Jews, have mostly in common
is that they are perceived—both by themselves and by
others—as belonging to the same race, and that this
common race is used by others as the basis for dis-
criminating against them. “If you ever forget you’re
a Jew, a goy will remind you.” The Black National-
ists, like some Zionists, responded to their experience
of racial discrimination by accepting the racialism it
presupposed.7
Although race is indeed at the heart of Black
Nationalism, however, it seems that it is the fact of a
shared race, not the fact of a shared racial character,
that provides the basis for solidarity. Where racism
is implicated in the basis for national solidarity, it
is intrinsic, not (or not only) extrinsic. It is this that
makes the idea of fraternity one that is naturally
applied in nationalist discourse. For, as I have already
observed, the moral status of close family members is
not normally thought of in most cultures as depend-
ing on qualities of character; we are supposed to love
our brothers and sisters in spite of their faults and not
because of their virtues. Alexander Crummell, one of
the question. Since the issue probably never occurs to
most people in these terms, we cannot suppose that
they must have an answer. In fact, given the definition
of the terms I offered, there is nothing barring some-
one from being both an intrinsic and an extrinsic rac-
ist, holding both that the bare fact of race provides a
basis for treating members of his or her own race dif-
ferently from others and that there are morally rel-
evant characteristics that are differentially distributed
among the races. Indeed, for reasons I shall discuss in
a moment, most intrinsic racists are likely to express
extrinsic racist beliefs, so that we should not be sur-
prised that many people seem, in fact, to be commit-
ted to both forms of racism.
The Holocaust made unreservedly clear threat that
racism poses to human decency. But it also blurred our
thinking because in focusing our attention on the rac-
ist character of the Nazi atrocities, it obscured their
character as atrocities. What is appalling about Nazi
racism is not just that it presupposes, as all racism does,
false (racialist) beliefs—not simply that it involves a
moral incapacity (the inability to extend our moral
sentiments to all our fellow creatures) and a moral fail-
ing (the making of moral distinctions without moral
differences)—but that it leads, first, to oppression and
then to mass slaughter. In recent years, South African
racism has had a similar distorting effect. For although
South African racism has not led to killings on the scale
of the Holocaust—even if it has both left South Afri-
can judicially executing more (mostly black) people
per head of population than most other countries and
led to massive differences between the life chances of
white and nonwhite South Africans—it has led to the
systematic oppression and economic exploitation of
people who are not classified as “white,” and to the
infliction of suffering on citizens of all racial classifica-
tions, not least by the police state that is required to
maintain that exploitation and oppression.
Part of our resistance, therefore, to calling the
racial ideas of those, such as the Black Nationalists of
the 1960s, who advocate racial solidarity, by the same
term that we use to describe the attitudes of Nazis or
of members of the South African Nationalist party,
surely resides in the fact that they largely did not
contemplate using race as a basis for inflicting harm.

CHAPTER 14: RACism, EquAliTy, AnD DisCRiminATion Á 495
the founding fathers of Black Nationalism, literalizes
the metaphor of family in these startling words:
Races, like families, are the organisms and ordinances
of God; and race feeling, like family feeling, is of divine
origin. The extinction of race feeling is just as possible
as the extinction of family feeling. Indeed, a race is a
family.8
It is the assimilation of “race feeling” to “family
feeling” that makes intrinsic racism seem so much
less objectionable than extrinsic racism. For this meta-
phorical identification reflects the fact that, in the
modern world (unlike the nineteenth century), intrin-
sic racism is acknowledged almost exclusively as the
basis of feelings of community. We can surely, then,
share a sense of what Crummell’s friend and co- worker
Edward Blyden called “the poetry of politics,” that is,
“the feeling of race,” the feeling of “people with whom
we are connected.”9 The racism here is the basis of acts
of supererogation, the treatment of others better than
we otherwise might, better than moral duty demands
of us.
This is a contingent fact. There is no logical impos-
sibility in the idea of racialists whose moral beliefs lead
them to feelings of hatred for other races while leaving
no room for love of members of their own. Neverthe-
less most racial hatred is in fact expressed through
extrinsic racism: most people who have used race as
the basis for causing harm to others have felt the need
to see the others as independently morally flawed. It is
one thing to espouse fraternity without claiming that
your brothers and sisters have any special qualities that
deserve recognition, and another to espouse hatred of
others who have done nothing to deserve it.10
Many Afrikaners—like many in the American
South until recently—have a long list of extrinsic racist
answers to the question why blacks should not have full
civil rights. Extrinsic racism has usually been the basis
for treating people worse than we otherwise might, for
giving them less than their humanity entitles them to.
But this too is a contingent fact. Indeed, Crummell’s
guarded respect for white people derived from a belief
in the superior moral qualities of the Anglo- Saxon race.
Intrinsic racism is, in my view, a moral error. Even
if racialism were correct, the bare fact that someone
was of another race would be no reason to treat them
worse—or better—than someone of my race. In our
public lives, people are owed treatment indepen-
dently of their biological characters: if they are to be
differently treated there must be some morally rele-
vant difference between them. In our private lives, we
are morally free to have aesthetic preferences between
people, but once our treatment of people raises moral
issues, we may not make arbitrary distinctions. Using
race in itself as a morally relevant distinction strikes
most of us as obviously arbitrary. Without associated
moral characteristics, why should race provide a better
basis than hair color or height or timbre of voice? And
if two people share all the properties morally relevant
to some action we ought to do, it will be an error—a
failure to apply the Kantian injunction to universalize
our moral judgments—to use the bare facts of race as
the basis for treating them differently. No one should
deny that a common ancestry might, in particular
cases, account for similarities in moral character. But
then it would be the moral similarities that justified
the different treatment.
It is presumably because most people—outside
the South African Nationalist party and the Ku Klux
Klan—share the sense that intrinsic racism requires
arbitrary distinctions that they are largely unwilling to
express it in situations that invite moral criticism. But
I do not know how I would argue with someone who
was willing to announce an intrinsic racism as a basic
moral idea; the best one can do, perhaps, is to provide
objections to possible lines of defense of it.
DE GUSTIBUS
It might be thought that intrinsic racism should be
regarded not so much as an adherence to a (moral)
proposition as the expression of a taste, analogous,
say, to the food prejudice that makes most English
people unwilling to eat horse meat, and most West-
erners unwilling to eat the insect grubs that the !Kung
people find so appetizing. The analogy does at least
this much for us, namely, to provide a model of the
way that extrinsic racist propositions can be a reflec-
tion of an underlying prejudice. For, of course, in
most cultures food prejudices are rationalized: we say

496 Á PART 4: ETHiCAl issuEs
the prospects of a philosophical defense of intrinsic
racism. This is because such a defense of the family
involves—like intrinsic racism—a denial of the basic
claim, expressed so clearly by Kant, that from the per-
spective of morality, it is as rational agents simpliciter
that we are to assess and be assessed. For anyone who
follows Kant in this, what matters, as we might say,
is not who you are but how you try to live. Intrinsic
racism denies this fundamental claim also. And, in so
doing, as I have argued elsewhere, it runs against the
mainstream of the history of Western moral theory.11
The importance of drawing attention to the simi-
larities between the defense of the family and the
defense of the race, then, is not merely that the met-
aphor of family is often invoked by racism: it is that
each of them offers the same general challenge to the
Kantian stream of our moral thought. And the paral-
lel with the defense of the family should be especially
appealing to an intrinsic racist, since many of us who
have little time for racism would hope that the family
is susceptible to some such defense.
The problem in generalizing the defense of the
family, however, is that such defense standardly begin
at a point that makes the argument for intrinsic racism
immediately implausible: namely, with the family as
the unit through which we live what is most intimate,
as the center of private life. If we distinguish, with Ber-
nard Williams, between ethical thought, which takes
seriously “the demands, needs, claims, desires, and
generally, the lives of other people,”12 and morality,
which focuses more narrowly on obligation, it may
well be that private life matters to us precisely because
it is altogether unsuited to the universalizing tenden-
cies of morality.
The functioning family unit has contracted sub-
stantially with industrialization, the disappearance of
the family as the unit of production, and the increas-
ing mobility of labor, but there remains that irreduc-
ible minimum: the parent or parents with the child or
children. In this “nuclear” family, there is, of course,
a substantial body of shared experience, shared atti-
tudes, shared knowledge and beliefs; and the mutual
psychological investment that exists within this group
is, for most of us, one of the things that gives meaning
to our lives. It is a natural enough confusion—which
insects are unhygienic and cats taste horrible. Yet a
cooked insect is no more health- threatening than a
cooked carrot, and the unpleasant taste of cat meat,
far from justifying our prejudice against it, probably
derives from that prejudice.
But there the usefulness of the analogy ends. For
intrinsic racism, as I have defined it, is not simply a
taste for the company of one’s “own kind,” but a moral
doctrine, one that is supposed to underlie differences
in the treatment of people in contexts where moral
evaluation is appropriate. And for moral distinctions
we cannot accept that “de gustibus non est disputan-
dum.” We do not need the full apparatus of Kantian
ethics to require that public morality be constrained
by reason.
A proper analogy would be with someone who
thought that we could continue to kill cattle for beef,
even if cattle exercised all the complex cultural skills
of human beings. I think it is obvious that creatures
that shared our capacity for understanding as well
as our capacity for pain should not be treated the way
we actually treat cattle—that “intrinsic speciesism”
would be as wrong as racism. And the fact that most
people think it is worse to be cruel to chimpanzees
than to frogs suggests that they may agree with me.
The distinction in attitudes surely reflects a belief in
the greater richness of the mental life of chimps. Still,
I do not know how I would argue against someone who
could not see this; someone who continued to act on
the contrary belief might, in the end, simply have to
be locked up.
THE FAMILY MODEL
I have suggested that intrinsic racism is, at least some-
times, a metaphorical extension of the moral priority
of one’s family; it might, therefore, be suggested that
a defense of intrinsic racism could proceed along the
same lines as a defense of the family as a center of moral
interest. The possibility of a defense of family relations
as morally relevant—or, more precisely, of the claim
that one may be morally entitled (or even obliged)
to make distinctions between two otherwise morally
indistinguishable people because one is related to one
and not to the other—is theoretically important for

CHAPTER 14: RACism, EquAliTy, AnD DisCRiminATion Á 497
I need hardly say that rational defense of intrin-
sic racism along the lines I have been considering are
not easily found. In the absence of detailed defenses
to consider, I can only offer these general reasons for
doubting that they can succeed: the generally Kantian
tenor of much of our moral thought threatens the
project from the start; and the essentially unintimate
nature of relations within “races” suggests that there is
little prospect that the defense of the family—which
seems an attractive and plausible project that extends
ethical life beyond the narrow range of a universaliz-
ing morality—can be applied to a defense of races.
CONCLUSIONS
I have suggested that what we call “racism” involves
both propositions and dispositions.
The propositions were, first, that there are races
(this was racialism) and, second, that these races are
morally significant either (a) because they are con-
tingently correlated with morally relevant proper-
ties (this was extrinsic racism) or (b) because they are
intrinsically morally significant (this was intrinsic
racism).
The disposition was a tendency to assent to false
propositions, both moral and theoretical, about
races—propositions that support policies or beliefs
that are to the disadvantage of some race (or races) as
opposed to others, and to do so even in the face of evi-
dence and argument that should appropriately lead to
giving those propositions up. This disposition I called
“racial prejudice.”
I suggested that intrinsic racism had tended in
our own time to be the natural expression of feelings
of community, and this is, of course, one of the rea-
sons why we are not inclined to call it racist. For, to
the extent that a theoretical position is not associated
with irrationally held beliefs that tend to the disadvan-
tage of some group, it fails to display the directedness
of the distortions of rationality characteristic of racial
prejudice. Intrinsic racism may be as irrationally held
as any other view, but it does not have to be directed
against anyone.
So far as theory is concerned I believe racialism
to be false: since theoretical racism of both kinds
we find again and again in discussions of adoption in
the popular media—that identifies the relevant group
with the biological unit of genitor, genetrix, and off-
spring rather than with the social unit of those who
share a common domestic life.
The relations of parents and their biological
children are of moral importance, of course, in part
because children are standardly the product of behav-
ior voluntarily undertaken by their biological parents.
But the moral relations between biological siblings
and half- siblings cannot, as I have already pointed
out, be accounted for in such terms. A rational defense
of the family ought to appeal to the causal responsibil-
ity of the biological parent and the common life of the
domestic unit, and not to the brute fact of biological
relatedness, even if the former pair of considerations
defines groups that are often coextensive with the
groups generated by the latter. For brute biological
relatedness bears no necessary connection to the sorts
of human purposes that seem likely to be relevant at
the most basic level of ethical thought.
An argument that such a central group is bound to
be crucially important in the lives of most human beings
in societies like ours is not, of course, an argument for
any specific mode of organization of the “family”: femi-
nism and the gay liberation movement have offered
candidate groups that could (and sometimes do) occupy
the same sort of role in the lives of those whose sexu-
alities or whose dispositions otherwise make the nuclear
family uncongenial; and these candidates have been
offered specifically in the course of defenses of a move
toward societies that are agreeably beyond patriarchy
and homophobia. The central thought of these feminist
and gay critiques of the nuclear family is that we cannot
continue to view any one organization of private life as
“natural,” once we have seen even the broadest outlines
of the archaeology of the family concept.
If that is right, then the argument for the family
must be an argument for a mode of organization of life
and feeling that subserves certain positive functions;
and however the details of such an argument would
proceed it is highly unlikely that the same functions
could be served by groups on the scale of races, simply
because, as I say, the family is attractive in part exactly
for reasons of its personal scale.

498 Á PART 4: ETHiCAl issuEs
tion. In mid- nineteenth- century America, in New England
quite as much as in the heart of Dixie, the pervasiveness of
the institutional support for the prevailing system of racist
belief—the fact that it was reinforced by religion and state,
and defended by people in the universities and colleges, who
had the greatest cognitive authority—meant that it would
have been appropriate to insist on a substantial body of evi-
dence and argument before giving up assent to racist propo-
sitions. In California in the 1980s, of course, matters stand
rather differently. To acknowledge this is not to admit to a
cognitive relativism; rather, it is to hold that, at least in some
domains, the fact that a belief is widely held—and especially
by people in positions of cognitive authority—may be a
good prima facie reason for believing it.
6. Ideologies, as most theorists of ideology have admitted,
standardly outlive the period in which they conform to the
objective interests of the dominant group in a society; so even
someone who thinks that the dominant group in our society
no longer needs racism to buttress its position can see rac-
ism as the persisting ideology of an earlier phase of society. (I
say “group” to keep the claim appropriately general; it seems
to me a substantial further claim that the dominant group
whose interests an ideology serves is always a class.) I have
argued, however, in “The Conservation of ‘Race’ ” that rac-
ism continues to serve the interests of the ruling classes in
the West; in Black American Literature Forum, 23 (Spring 1989),
pp. 37–60.
7. As I argued in “The Uncompleted Argument: Du Bois and the
Illusion of Race.” The reactive (or dialectical) character of this
move explains why Sartre calls its manifestations in Négritude
an “antiracist racism”; see “Orphée Noir,” his preface to Seng-
hor’s Anthologie de la nonvelle poésie négre et malagache de langue
francaise (Paris: PUF, 1948). Sartre believed, of course, that the
synthesis of this dialectic would be the transcendence of rac-
ism; and it was his view of it as a stage—the antithesis—in that
process that allowed him to see it as a positive advance over the
original “thesis” of European racism. I suspect that the reactive
character of antiracist racism accounts for the tolerance that is
regularly extended to it in liberal circles; but this tolerance is
surely hard to justify unless one shares Sartre’s optimistic inter-
pretation of it as a stage in a process that leads to the end of all
racisms. (And unless your view of this dialectic is deterministic,
you should in any case want to play an argumentative role in
moving to this next stage.)
For a similar Zionist response see Horace Kallen’s “The Ethics
of Zionism,” Maccabaean, August 1906.
8. “The Race Problem in America,” in Brotz’s Negro Social and
Political Thought (New York: Basic Books, 1966), p. 184.
presupposes racialism, I could not logically support
racism of either variety. But even if racialism were true,
both forms of theoretical racism would be incorrect.
Extrinsic racism is false because the genes that account
for the gross morphological differences that underlie
our standard racial categories are not linked to those
genes that determine, to whatever degree such mat-
ters are determined genetically, our moral and intel-
lectual characters. Intrinsic racism is mistaken because
it breaches the Kantian imperative to make moral dis-
tinctions only on morally relevant grounds—granted
that there is no reason to believe that race, in se, is mor-
ally relevant, and also no reason to suppose that races
are like families in providing a sphere of ethical life
that legitimately escapes the demands of a universal-
izing morality.
NOTES
1. Bernard Lewis, Semites and Anti- Semites (New York: Norton,
1986).
2. I shall be using the words “racism” and “racialism” with the
meanings I stipulate: in some dialects of English they are syn-
onyms, and in most dialects their definition is less than pre-
cise. For discussion of recent biological evidence see M. Nei and
A. K. Roychoudhury, “Genetic Relationship and Evolution of
Human Races,” Evolutionary Biology, vol. 14 (New York: Plenum,
1983), pp. 1–59; for useful background see also M. Nei and A. K.
Roychoudhury, “Gene Differences between Caucasian, Negro,
and Japanese Populations, ” Science, 177 (August 1972), pp.
434–35.
3. See my “The Uncompleted Argument: Du Bois and the Illu-
sion of Race,” Critical Inquiry, 12 (Autumn 1985); reprinted in
Henry Louis Gates (eds.), “Race,” Writing, and Difference (Chi-
cago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), pp. 21–37.
4. This fact shows up most obviously in the assumption that
adopted children intelligibly make claims against their natu-
ral siblings: natural parents are, of course, causally respon-
sible for their child’s existence and that could be the basis of
moral claims, without any sense that biological relatedness
entailed rights or responsibilities. But no such basis exists
for an interest in natural siblings; my sisters are not causally
responsible for my existence. See “The Family Model,” later
in this essay.
5. Obviously what evidence should appropriately change your
beliefs is not independent of your social or historical situa-

CHAPTER 14: RACism, EquAliTy, AnD DisCRiminATion Á 499
11. See my “Racism and Moral Pollution,” Philosophical Forum,
18 ( Winter- Spring 1986–87), pp. 185–202.
12. Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass: Har-
vard University Press, 1985), p. 12. I do not, as is obvious, share
William’s skepticism about morality.
9. Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race (1887; reprinted Edin-
burgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1967), p. 197.
10. This is in part a reflection of an important asymmetry:
loathing, unlike love, needs justifying; and this, I would
argue, is because loathing usually leads to acts that are in se
undesirable, whereas love leads to acts that are largely in se
desirable—indeed, supererogatorily so.
We in the United States are notoriously poor at com-
municating about racial matters. David Shipler, in his
informative and insightful book A Nation of Strangers,
rightly says, “Blacks and Whites do not listen well to
each other (Shipler, 1997, p. 447). Native Americans,
Latinos, Chicanos, and Asian- Americans are not all
that much better. We find honest discussion about
race across racial lines especially difficult. Ironically,
race is the subject of scores of books and articles. And
one often hears impatience expressed about race.
“Race is talked to death,” it is said.
There may be a lot of words written about race.
But there is a good deal less honest, open, and pro-
ductive conversation about it among persons of
different races than there needs to be. For the past
several years I have taught courses on race and rac-
ism to undergraduates, graduate students in educa-
tion, and high school students. Most of my classes
are quite racially and ethnically diverse. In my expe-
rience a range of reasons accounts for the lack of
productive conversation. People are afraid of giving
offense. They are afraid of revealing prejudices they
know are not socially acceptable. They are afraid of
appearing prejudiced, even if they are actually not.
They feel ignorant of groups other than their own
and are afraid to risk revealing their ignorance and
trying to remedy it. The whole idea of “race” just
carries unpleasant associations with them, and they
would rather avoid it. They may think we should all
be “ color- blind,” that it is somehow wrong even to
take notice of or make reference to other people’s
racial identity. This idea of color- blindness is both
particularly strong, yet also particularly misplaced,
among teachers, especially at the pre- college level.
Teachers can not serve their students fully unless
they are aware of the full range of factors affecting
their lives, and race is very likely to be one of those
factors (Schofield, 1989).
Some reasons for reluctance to engage in race
discussions are more race- specific. Blacks, and to a
lesser extent other people of color, may want to avoid
what they assume will be offensive or at least annoy-
ing remarks from others. Or they might not want to
have to be in a position of correcting others’ (espe-
cially whites’) ignorance. Latinos, Native Americans,
and Asian- Americans may not be certain how to insert
themselves into a discourse which seems to them
dominated by “black/white” issues, or they may feel
resentful of this dominance, and assume their specific
concerns will not be adequately attended to. Notwith-
standing these obstacles, I have also found a great deal
of good will among students, and an anxious desire
for their teachers to create contexts that facilitate con-
structive interracial interchange.
Each of the cited obstacles is deserving of further
attention. However, I wish in this lecture to focus on
a different obstacle, though one that bears on sev-
eral of those just mentioned. It is the idea of “racism”
itself. There is a great deal of confusion surrounding
Racism: What It Is and What It Isn’t
Lawrence Blum
Lawrence Blum, reprinted by permission from Springer Nature:
Studies in Philosophy and Education, “Racism: What it is and What
it isn’t,” Vol. 21 (2002), pp. 203–218, Copyright © 2002.

500 Á PART 4: ETHiCAl issuEs
or they might simply fail to recognize the harm caused
by their actions. Similarly, no one admits to being rac-
ist. Those who are, or are thought to be, might say their
remarks were just a joke; they did not intend any harm;
people are just being oversensitive; it was a personal,
not a racial, thing; and the like. One expects people
who are accused of being racist to deny it and new-
spapers should stop regarding this as newsworthy.
OVERUSING “RACISM”
Yet the widely- shared reproach carried by “racist” is
threatened by a current tendency to overuse the term.
Some feel that the word is thrown around so much that
anything involving “race” that someone does not like
is liable to castigation as “racist”—for example, merely
mentioning someone’s race (or racial designation),1
using the word “Oriental” for Asians without recog-
nizing its origins and its capacity for insult, or social-
izing only with members of one’s own racial group.
Many people would not agree, or would not be sure,
that any of the four examples in the paragraph before
the previous one constitute “racism.” A few observers
go even further and suspect that the word has lost all
significant meaning. “Racism is . . . what black activists
define it to be. . . . When words lose coherent meaning,
they also lose the power to shame. ‘Racism,’ ‘sexism,’
and ‘homophobia’ have become such words. Labels
that should horrify are simply shrugged off” (Nuech-
terlein, 1996, p. B9). Time columnist Lance Morrow
sees social damage in this same development: “The
words ‘racism’ and ‘racist’ are a feckless indulgence,
corrosive to blacks and whites alike and to relations
between them” (Morrow, 1996, p. 18).
A major reason for what Robert Miles calls the “con-
ceptual inflation” (Miles, 1989, pp. 41–68), to which
the idea of “racism” has been subject is its having
become the central or even only notion used to mark
morally suspect behavior, attitude, and social practice
regarding race. The result—either something is racist,
or it is morally in the clear. In Boston a white police
officer, as a bizarre joke and apparently with no malice
intended, placed a hangman’s noose on the motorcycle
of a black police officer. “Police probe sees no racism in
the meaning of “racism” and “racist.” Yet one thing
is clear—few people wish to be, or to be thought of as,
“racists.” Fear of being thought racist, together with a
good deal of confusion as to “what” being racist con-
sists in, is a potent formula for inhibition regarding
discussion racial matters, most especially for whites
who are, understandably, in most danger of being
thought to be, and indeed of actually being, racists.
Clarifying meanings is the professional task of
the philosopher, and I think that if we become clearer
about what “racism” actually consists in, and what
lies outside of the scope of racism yet may still be mor-
ally problematic, we will be better equipped to engage
in productive discussions about race. Of course I have
no illusions that merely clarifying meanings will bring
about either racial justice or racial harmony, or even the
more minimal goal of producing helpful conversations
about these matters. But it seems an essential first step.
The words “racism” and “racist” have become
deeply entrenched in the moral vocabulary of the
United States and Western Europe. “Is television a
racist institution?” asks an article concerning the
NAACP’s criticizing the fall 1999 prime- time network
shows for having no “minority” actors in lead roles
in twenty- seven new series (Weinraub, 1999, pp. A1,
A14). Blacks who criticized other blacks for supporting
a white over a black candidate in a mayoral race were
called racist. A white girl in Virginia said that it was
racist for an African- American teacher in her school
to wear African attire (Shipler, p. 92). The Milton,
Wisconsin, school board voted to retire its “Redmen”
name and logo depicting a Native American wearing
a headdress, because they have been criticized as rac-
ist. “Racist” has become the standard way to condemn
and deplore people, actions, policies, symbols, and
institutions for malfeasance in the racial domain.
In serving as a term of moral reproach, “racism”
has joined more time- honored vices such as “dishon-
esty,” “cruelty,” “cowardice,” and “hypocrisy.” Apart
from a small number of avowed white supremacists,
most Americans wish very much to avoid being called
“racist.” In this regard, “racist” operates similarly to
“cruel.” Few admit to being cruel. Persons who are
cruel might say the target of their cruelty deserved it,

CHAPTER 14: RACism, EquAliTy, AnD DisCRiminATion Á 501
propensity toward lactose intolerance; but no untow-
ard motives, or failures of sensitivity, need have
prompted the original policies favoring milk for them
to be of concern. Similarly, it is troubling if prime-
time TV fails adequately to reflect its viewers’, and the
society’s, ethnoracial diversity; but it is not necessarily
“racist.”3 Someone who exhibits a culpable ignorance
about racial matters bearing on an interaction with
an acquaintance or co- worker should feel a degree of
shame about this, and be motivated to correct that
ignorance—without her having to think she has been
“racist.” We should not be faced with the choice of
“racism or nothing.”
“Racism’s” conceptual inflation and moral over-
load can arise from a another source as well—designat-
ing as “racism” any prejudice, injustice, domination,
inferiorizing, bigotry, and the like, against human
groups defined in any manner, for example, by gender,
disability, nationality. In The Decent Society, Avishai
Margalit, an Israeli philosopher, defines racism as the
denying of dignity to any human group, and uses as a
particular test case “retarded” persons (Margalit, 1996,
pp. 80–83). This inflated use of racism pays indirect
tribute to the centrality of racism as a form of oppres-
sion and denial of dignity in contemporary Western
consciousness. That centrality is reflected also in later
coinages, such as “sexism,” “ableism” (discrimina-
tion against the disabled). “racism,” and “heterosex-
ism”—all consciously modeled on “racism,” and
attempting to draw on racism’s moral opprobrium
to condemn other phenomena seen as in important
ways analogous to racism.4 This “racism”-influenced
proliferation of other “isms” at least avoids the confu-
sion wrought by Margalit’s conflating all of them with
“racism” itself. At least it encourages us to explore the
similarities between discrimination, exploitation, and
denials of dignity based on race, and those based on
other human attributes, such as gender, sexual orien-
tation, disability, national membership, and the like,
thereby allowing the possibility of significant disanal-
ogies. Margalit’s subsuming all these moral ills under
“racism” cuts off that inquiry at the starting line, and,
in so doing, contributes to a counterproductive infla-
tion of the term “racism.”
noose prank,” says the headline of an article reporting
the findings of an investigation into the incident. Per-
haps the white officer was not “a racist,” nor operating
from racist motives; but, as the victim in the incident
said, “You cannot hang a noose like that near any black
man who knows his history and say it does not have
tremendous significance” (Boston Globe, p. B1).2 If our
only choices are to label an act “racist” or “nothing to
get too upset about,” those who seek to garner moral
attention to some racial malfeasance will be tempted to
call it “racist.” That overuse in turn feeds a diminishing
of “racism’s” moral force, and thus contributes to weak-
ened concern about racism and other racial ills.
Not all racial incidents are racist incidents. Not
every instance of racial conflict, insensitivity, dis-
comfort, miscommunication, exclusion, injustice, or
ignorance should be called “racist.” This more varied
and nuanced moral vocabulary needs to be more fully
utilized, complementing “racist” and “racism.” All
forms of racial ills should elicit concern from respon-
sible citizens. If someone displays racial insensitiv-
ity, but not racism, people should be able to see that
straightforwardly as a matter of moral concern. In a
soccer game, a nine- year- old white boy said “Boy, pass
the ball over here” to one of his black teammates, and
“was virtually accused of being a racist by the father
of one of his teammates,” says an article on the inci-
dent. (That description may itself reflect the loss of an
evaluative vocabulary other than “racist” and “rac-
ism,” rather than what the black boy’s father actually
said.) In any case, the white boy was almost surely not
“a racist” and the article itself goes on to express more
accurately the racial ill involved in his remark: “The
word ‘boy’ is a tripwire attached to so much charged
racial baggage that it is no longer safely used as a term
for a prepubescent male.”
If a policy has a racially unjust effect, or unequally
affects already unequally placed racial groups, this
too should be reason for concern, even if there is no
suggestion that it arises from racist motives, or is part
of the sort of entrenched pattern strongly rooted in
historical racism. For example, school lunch pro-
grams have been criticized for relying too strongly on
milk, in light of the African- Americans’ substantial

502 Á PART 4: ETHiCAl issuEs
American warrior attire and wielded tomahawks. A
second, again a fraternity, involved staging a mock
slave auction. In both cases, members of the fraterni-
ties in question defended themselves by saying that
they did not mean to offend anyone. But the moral
shortcoming in both cases did not lie in setting out to
deliberately demean Native Americans and African-
Americans. It lay in their failing to realize that what
they were doing was demeaning to Native Americans
and African- Americans, whether they intended this or
not. It is not even clear that ignorance of the affront
would be morally more acceptable than an intention
to affront.
Still, engaging in racist humor does not make one
a racist. More generally, clarity and racial understand-
ing would be advanced if people attempted to take
greater care in locating the racism they allege in a situ-
ation. Is it a practice are racist that is racist, whether
the persons who participate in the practice are racist or
not? Is it the motive of an act that is racist? Is it an atti-
tude taken to be expressed in a remark, or the remark
itself? Is it a person about whom one knows enough to
say that he or she is “a racist?”
To help us avoid the first form of confusion
about racism—conceptual inflation—I will suggest
a core meaning rooted in the history of its use, that
confines “racism” to phenomena deserving of the
severest moral condemnation (within the appropri-
ately located type, that is, act, statement, joke, per-
son, and so on). Fixing on such a definition should
encourage us to make use of the considerable other
resources our language affords us for describing and
evaluating race- related ills that do not characteristi-
cally rise to the level of racism—racial insensitivity,
racial conflict, racial injustice, racial ignorance, racial
discomfort, and others. Such an agreed- upon mean-
ing for “racism” should facilitate interracial commu-
nication, at least in diminishing a free- floating and
pervasive fear of the dreaded charge of “racism”—by
making clearer what is and what is not to be counted
as racism—while at the same time encouraging a
wider scope of moral concern to race- related phe-
nomena. In doing so, my suggested definition of
racism should stanch the creeping loss of moral
cachet of the term “racism” itself, with its attendant
RACIST JOKES AND RACIST PERSONS
A different source of confusion and moral overload
regarding racism concerns what one might call rac-
ism’s location. Many different kinds of entity can be
racist—actions, institutions, practices, symbols, state-
ments, jokes, persons, to name a few. The moral sig-
nificance of an attribution of racism differs depending
on its location. Take racist jokes for instance. A person
who tells a racist joke is not necessarily “a racist,” in the
sense of a person who harbors pervasive racial animos-
ity or inferiorizing attitudes toward a racially defined
group. He may tell the joke without sharing the racist
sentiments the jokes expresses. People often tell jokes
as a way of trying to win acceptance; they might tell
whatever they think will bring a laugh. Imagine, for
example, someone telling a joke that makes fun of
Asian- Americans in a particularly demeaning man-
ner, in order to gain acceptance in a group. (The group
could consist of any ethnoracial group, except Asian-
Americans. I am not assuming that only whites tell
racist jokes [or are racists, for that matter].)5 This indi-
vidual does not necessarily hold racist views of Asians
or Asian- Americans. The joke is racist, but the teller of
the joke is not.
Of course, this does not mean that, as long as one
does not share the racist views a joke expresses, it is
perfectly fine to tell such a joke. To think that it is all
right is to reason in precisely the all- or- nothing man-
ner I have been criticizing. It is a very bad thing to tell
a racist joke. One often hears public figures who have
been caught out telling a racist joke or making a racist
remark defending themselves by saying that did not
intend any offense to the group in question, that they
are not racist. Often this defense is quite disingenu-
ous, and the individual in fact does hold the racist atti-
tudes implied in the joke. But even when it is not, this
is a feeble defense from a moral point of view. It is bad
to tell a racist joke, whether one means to offend, or
holds racist attitudes, or not.
Jokes, and humor more generally, raise a com-
mon locational issue about racism—the difference
between intention and effect—illustrated in two
examples of racist humor that came to public atten-
tion in the late 1990s. One was a fraternity party, in
which the fraternity members dressed up in Native

CHAPTER 14: RACism, EquAliTy, AnD DisCRiminATion Á 503
in the tribe’s youth. The hunt was permitted by the
government, and the tribe killed a whale in May of
that year. Many non- Native American Washington
residents were outraged by this act. Amidst arguably
reasonable objections to the whale hunting were
expressions of outright antipathy racism toward the
Makah, and toward Native Americans more gener-
ally. One letter to the Seattle Times, for example, said,
“I have a very real hatred for Native Americans now.
It’s embarrassing, but I would be lying if I said it wasn’t
the truth” (Tizon, 1999).
Inferiorizing and antipathy racism are distinct.
Some superiority racists do not hate the target of their
beliefs. They may have a paternalistic concern and
feelings of kindness for persons they regard as their
human inferiors. This form of racism was prevalent
among slave owners, and characterized many whites’
views of blacks during the segregation era in the
United States. The concern and kindness are misdi-
rected, and demeaning, because the other is not seen
as an equal, or even as a full human being; it is a racist
from of concern. Nevertheless such attitudes are dis-
tinct from antipathy and hatred.
On the other side, not every race hater regards the
target of her hatred as inferior. In the U.S. antipathy
toward Asians and Jews often accompanies, and is in
part driven by a kind of resentment of those seen as in
some ways superior (e.g. more successful). And some
whites who hate blacks do not really regard blacks as
inferior; they may fear and be hostile to them, but
fear and hostility are not the same as contempt and
other forms of inferiorizing. (Again, antipathy and
contempt may accompany one another). Survey
research suggests that pure superiority racism toward
blacks has substantially decreased since segregation,
more so than hostility- based racism (Schuman et al.,
pp. 156–157). Nevertheless, the great and persistent
racial inequalities in our society provide a standing
encouragement to advantaged groups to see disadvan-
taged groups as somehow deserving their lower status.
However, antipathy and inferiorizing racism are
not entirely separate either. The paternalistic inferioriz-
ing racist (e.g., a white segregationist) often hates those
members of the racial group who do not accept the infe-
rior social position he regards as appropriate to their
undermining of moral concern toward racism and
other race- related ills.
DEFINING “RACISM”
In proffering a definition of racism, it would be folly
to claim that one was doing no more than articulating
“our concept” of racism. Even apart from inflationary
usages, it is not likely that all employments of that
concept cohere in an overall, self- consistent whole.
Nevertheless, especially in light of the history of this
concept, I hope my proposal can reasonably be viewed
as a plausible candidate for a core meaning.
“Racism” was first used by German social scientists
in the 1930s to refer to the ideology of race superior-
ity central to Nazism, and its core historical meaning
broadened out to other systems of racial domination
and oppression, such as segregation, South African
apartheid, and European colonialism. In this light,
I want to suggest that all forms of racism can be related
to either of two general “themes”—inferiorization, and
antipathy. Inferiorizing is treating the racial other as
inferior or lesser value and, secondarily, viewing the
racial other as inferior. Racial antipathy is simply a
strong dislike, often tinged with hostility, toward
individuals or groups because of their race. Of the two
modes, inferiorization is more obviously linked to
historical racist doctrines and social systems. Slavery,
segregation, imperialism, apartheid, and Nazism all
involved certain groups being regarded as and treated
as inferior to other groups.
But race- based hatred was also central to the ideo-
logical and attitudinal components of Nazism, and,
for whatever reason, racial bigotry, hostility, and
hatred are now securely linked to the contemporary
idea of “racism” in both Europe and the United States.
Indeed, the racial bigot is many people’s paradigm
image of “a racist,” and few would now deny appli-
cation of the appellation “racist” to such persons.
A disturbing but illuminating example of appellation
“racist” to such persons. A disturbing but illuminating
example of contemporary antipathy racism occurred
in Washington state in 1999. The Makah tribe of the
Olympic Peninsula announced its intention to hunt
for whales as a way of instilling pride and tradition

504 Á PART 4: ETHiCAl issuEs
historical resonance would not be. Other stereotypes
lacking such historical resonance are, for example,
Asians as poor drivers, blacks as poor swimmers, and
whites as not being able to jump. All are objectionable,
racial ( race- based) stereotypes. But it is moral overload
to call them racist stereotypes, and to do so contrib-
utes to a cheapening of the moral force of the idea of
“racism.”
RACIAL DISCOMFORT OR ANXIETY
Another application of the definition of racism is the
difference between racial antipathy and what I will
call “racial discomfort” or “racial anxiety.” Consider
the following example.
Ms. Verano is a white fourth grade teacher. She
feels comfortable with all the children in her very
racially- mixed class. She holds all students to equally
high standards of performance. But, though she has
never admitted this to herself, she is not really com-
fortable with most of the black parents. She does not
dislike blacks, nor does she think they are inferior.
However, she is not particularity familiar with African-
American culture, knows very few blacks other than
her students, and is not confident about her ability
to communicate with blacks other than her students,
and is not confident about her ability to communicate
with black adults. As a result Ms. Verano is somewhat
defensive when speaking with black parents in parent
conferences, and is not able to listen to their concerns
and viewpoints about their children as well as she
does with parents in other racial groups. Because she
does not glean as much information from the black
parents about their children as she does from the
other parents, she is not able to serve these children
as well as the other children in her class. Ms. Verano
does not have antipathy or inferiorizing attitudes
toward blacks. To call her a “racist” would be concep-
tual inflation. She bears no antipathy towards blacks.
I have built this feature into the example. Nor does she
regard blacks as inferior.
Ms. Verano’s situation is best described by
saying that she is uncomfortable with black adults
(not children). She has “racial discomfort” or “racial
anxiety.”
inferior natures—for example, blacks who do not engage
in the deference behavior the paternalistic racist expects.
Emmett Till was lynched in 1955 out of hatred directed
toward a young black man who had transgressed the
rules of racial deference and constraint defining him as
an inferior being. In addition, many racist both hate and
regard as inferior members of a particular racial group
(and not only a particular subcategory of such members,
such as those who do not “stay in their place”).
RACIAL AND RACIST STEREOTYPES
If we confine racism to manifestations or representa-
tions of racial antipathy or racial inferiorizing, we can
see that many things can go wrong in the area of race
without being racist. Consider two objectionable ste-
reotypes of blacks, for instance—blacks as intellectu-
ally deficient, and blacks as good dancers. The first is
a straightforwardly racist stereotype; it portrays blacks
as inferior in regard to a fundamental human attribute.
The second, however, is not racist, on my account. It
attributes a positive rather than a negative quality. It is
a far less objectionable stereotype than the inferiority
stereotype.
Nevertheless, the stereotype of blacks as good
dancers is still an objectionable one. Like any stereo-
type, it wildly overgeneralizes about a group; it blinds
us to the internal diversity of the group—some blacks
are bad dancers, some are good, some are so- so (and
this is so of every racial group). Also, all stereotyping
discourages recognizing the individuality of members
of the group.
The stereotype of blacks as good dancers is also
objectionable in a more specific, historically contex-
tual sense, which can be recognized in the more var-
iegated moral vocabulary revealed by loosening our
fixation on “racism” and “racist.” This stereotype
hearkens back to the slave era, when viewing blacks as
good dancers was bound up with their being seen as
mentally inferior. While this direct implication is no
longer clearly attached to the “good dancer” stereo-
type, stereotypes must be viewed historically as well
as contemporarily, and a given stereotype’s resonance
with a much more distinctly racist stereotype renders
it objectionable in a way that stereotypes without such

CHAPTER 14: RACism, EquAliTy, AnD DisCRiminATion Á 505
individuality of members of the group. It feeds into (in
addition to drawing on) the homogenizing of racial
groups that is a typical pitfall in the racial arena.
Racial discomfort is also inimical to the devel-
opment of interracial community and other forms
of productive interracial relationship. It inhibits a
sense of identification across racial lines, and rein-
forces a sense (particularly found among high school
and some college students) that it is somehow more
“natural” to socialize with members of one’s own
racial group than of other groups. We should strive
for a society in which people feel as comfortable as
possible interacting in all public and private venues
with members of ethnic and racial groups other than
their own. Such comfort would not only make social
existence more pleasant, varied, and interesting for
members of all groups, but would serve the purpose
of civic attachment and civic engagement as well.
Teachers in a position to do so would do well to make
an effort to decrease racial discomfort and anxiety
in their classes, for example by forming interracial
groups for various tasks, encouraging interracial com-
munication, explicitly discussing its importance and
pitfalls, and the like.6 Individuals are well advised to
look for signs of racial discomfort in themselves and,
if they discover them, do what they can to relieve this
discomfort, for example by reaching out to persons
of other racial groups or by becoming more familiar
with and knowledgeable about the modes of life of
those groups.
Furthermore, the fact that it is generally difficult
to tell whether reluctance to engage with racial oth-
ers is a product of antipathy or mere discomfort itself
takes a toll on racial minorities who have to worry
and wonder about the source of some troubling racial
interaction. “In waiting rooms or lobbies . . . I’ve tried
to initiate a conversation [with whites], and I could
tell they don’t want to talk,’ says Sharon Walter, an
African- American. ‘But when a white person walks
in, conversation begins. I don’t want to think it’s rac-
ism . . . The better part of me wants to think otherwise’ ”
(Shipler, p. 448). Merely having such thoughts is itself
a psychic cost.
In summary, then, racial anxiety or discomfort is
not, in itself, racist (although it can be a manifestation
Racial anxiety is quite common in the United
States, especially, I believe, among whites, although
it can be found in any racial group. Racial anxiety can
stem from different sources, and one of them can be
anxiety that one’s racist prejudices be revealed. In this
case racial anxiety would be a manifestation of racism.
However, racial anxiety is not always racist in its gen-
esis. We can realize that a group of persons in different
from us in some socially important way, and we can
feel that we are just not knowledgeable enough about
this group to feel comfortable in the presence of its
members. We can be anxious that we will embarrass
ourselves by saying or doing the “wrong thing.” We
may worry that the group will dislike or reject us if we
attempt to approach it. This social anxiety is perfectly
familiar regarding cultural differences; the individual
is anxious approaching a culture about which she lacks
knowledge. Members of different racial groups are
also often quite ignorant of one anothers’ modes of life
(sometimes but not always because cultural and racial
differences correspond), even if they interact in schools
and workplaces. In a sense racial anxiety is even more
likely than mere cultural anxiety, since differences in
“race” are more socially charged than are cultural dif-
ferences. If one is equally ignorant of the other group,
there is more reason to be anxious that one will violate
some unforeseen norm with regard to a racially differ-
ent group than a culturally different one.
In itself, racial anxiety or discomfort is not racism.
Nor is racial discomfort the sort of thing for which its
possessor is subject to moral criticism. It is not mor-
ally bad to be racially anxious, as it is morally bad to
be racially prejudiced. However, racial discomfort is
still a bad thing, and an individual who recognizes
her racial anxiety should not rest content with it just
because it is not a moral blot on her character. This
is so, in part, because, as in Ms. Verano’s case, it can
lead to acts of a discriminatory character; Ms. Verano
is unlikely to be able to educate her black pupils to
the same degree as she does her other students, since
she will lack information pertinent to them.
In addition racial anxiety reinforces a sense of sep-
arateness and “otherness” concerning those of other
racial groups. It makes it difficult to recognize inter-
nal diversity in such groups, and to appreciate the

506 Á PART 4: ETHiCAl issuEs
The two officers had ordered the male friend to
drop his gun, which he did, and they then turned
to Officer Young and ordered him to do so as well.
It is not clear whether Young heard the order, but
in any case he did not comply, and the two officers,
who were white, shot and killed him. It emerged that,
despite the officers’ failing to recognize Officer Young,
one of the officers had been a police academy class-
mate of Young’s, and both had graduated in the same
class three years earlier.
The killing sparked community outrage and
anguish. Charges of racism were made. It was said that
the killing was “racially motivated.” Eventually a fed-
eral civil rights investigation took place, and the two
officers were cleared of having intended to deprive
Officer Young of his civil rights, or of acting out of
racial animosity.
It is impossible to know whether the two officers
were racially biased against blacks. However, their
behavior is perfectly consistent with their lacking any
form of racial prejudice or racial motivation. It is not
likely that they shot at Young because they disliked
black people. Some people, recognizing this, then felt
some relief. The incident turned from one involving
racism to a (mere) “tragic accident.”
But this response oversimplifies. Racism may be
absent in motivations and attitudes but be present
elsewhere. In this situation, it is much more plausible
to think that it lay in the stereotypes that the officers
carried in their minds about blacks. That is why, or
part of why, they reacted to a black man with a gun in
plainclothes as if he were a perpetrator, even though
they actually knew him as a fellow officer. In another
widely- reported case around the same time, four white
officers in New York City killed an innocent black man
whom they wrongly took to be reaching for a gun.
Treating blackness as if it were an indicator of suspi-
ciousness or criminality is referred to as “racial profil-
ing” and has come in for a good deal of public criticism
as a result of these and similar incidents, not only ones
involving fatalities.
The white officers who killed Officer Young
were apparently genuinely remorseful and upset
by their having unwittingly killed a fellow officer.
But this does not mean they were not prey to racial
of underlying racism). Yet it is still a bad thing, destruc-
tive to interracial relationships.
RACE, IDENTITY, AND RECOGNITION
Another race- related ill distinct from racism is illus-
trated in the following example. A Haitian- American
girl is one of two black students in her class. When a
race- related issue arises in discussion, the teacher turns
to her and asks her what “the black point of view” is on
the question at hand.
There seem several distinct though related wrongs
this teacher has committed. He has failed to recognize
Haitian- Americans as a distinct ethnic group within
the larger “black” umbrella. He has treated a racial
group in an overly homogeneous manner, implying
that there could be something that could coherently
be called “the black point of view” on an issue. Finally,
he has failed to recognize the student as an individual,
with her own individual views.
These three related forms of misrecognition are
directed toward an individual or a group of which the
individual is a member. The latter two—racial homog-
enization, and not acknowledging individuality—are
particularly serious failings in a teacher. However, that
is not to say that they are “racist.” The teacher’s behav-
ior need not imply that he harbors animus toward
blacks, or regards them as inferior.
RACIAL MOTIVES AND RACIAL STEREOTYPES
Confusion about both the location and the meaning
of racism infected public understanding of a particu-
larly tragic event that took place in Providence, Rhode
Island, in January, 2000. Several women were fighting
in a late- night diner. The night manager threw the
patrons out of the diner, at which point some male
friends got involved, one of whom drew a gun. Inside
the diner, an off- duty patrolman, Cornel Young, Jr.,
an African- American, was waiting for a take- out order.
Meanwhile, the police had been called to the scene
outside. Officer Young, after warning the patrons
to get down, rushed outside to help the two officers
on the scene, his gun drawn. (Providence police are
required to carry their firearms when off duty.)

CHAPTER 14: RACism, EquAliTy, AnD DisCRiminATion Á 507
social segregation might have contributed to the racial
homogenization that in turn contributed to his failing
to recognize Officer Young.
CONCLUSION
Gaining some clarity about what “racism” means will
help us engage in productive conversations about
racial matters—conversations that are too infrequent,
both inside and outside classroom settings. We have
seen three ways by which we might gain that clar-
ity. First, within a given category (actions, jokes, ste-
reotypes, remarks, stereotypes, persons), we should
confine “racism” to especially egregious wrongs in
that category. Not every stereotype is racist. Not every
remark that is racially offensive is racist. Not every
racially insensitive action is a racist action. I have sug-
gested that the distinct opprobrium attaching to “rac-
ism” and “racist” can be retained and protected if we
recognize that racism refers to racial inferiorization
or racial antipathy, and that the different categorical
forms of racism can all be related to either of those two
definitions.
Second, we should not confuse racism in one cat-
egory with racism in another. A person who is prey to
a racist stereotype is not necessarily “a racist;” nor does
she necessarily operate from racist motives. A remark
can be unquestionably racist without the person mak-
ing the remark being a racist, or making the remark for
a racist reason, or motive.
Finally, in endeavoring to protect the distinct moral
opprobrium of the accusation of “racism” from con-
ceptual inflation and moral overload, as well as from
categorical drift and confusion, we must at the same
time recognize that “racism” by no means captures all
of what can go wrong in the domain of race. There is
a much larger terrain of moral ills in the racial domain
than racism itself, and we should draw on our manifold
linguistic resources—racial insensitivity, failure to rec-
ognize racial identity, racial ignorance, racial anxiety,
racial injustice, racial homogenization, and so on—to
express and describe moral disvalue in this domain.
Moral concern is appropriately directed toward this
wider domain, and should not be confined to racism
appropriately so called.
stereotypes linking blackness to criminality. Officer
Young’s mother was surely correct when she said that
her son would be unlikely to have been shot had he
been white. But it is important to be careful about
what we mean if we say that he was killed “because
he was black.” If does not necessarily mean “out of
hostility or animosity toward black persons.” It could
mean “because he was seen in the moment as a dan-
gerous person and this was so in part because he was
black.” I believe it is also plausible to refer to this
racial stereotype as “racist.” But my point here is not
so much to defend that position as to encourage clar-
ity as to the location of what is, or was, racially objec-
tionable in the situation. It was in the stereotype, not
in the motives of the white officers. And it shows the
tremendous danger that can accompany racist ste-
reotypes even in the absence of racial antipathy; they
can be life threatening.
I have given a stripped down version of this com-
plex racial situation, and want to mention only two
other points. First, some members of the community
placed some of the blame on the Providence police
department’s failure to educate its police force about
the dangers and wrong of racial stereotyping and
racial profiling. That is, they have seen the fault in a
kind of institutional irresponsibility regarding race,
in the context of a recognition that antiblack stereo-
types are particularly troubling in a police force that
is meant to be protectors of their community.
The second race- related matter is more speculative
on my part. Even though the white officers, and espe-
cially the one who graduated from the police academy
with Office Young, knew him, it is possible that a form
of racial homogenization was involved in their failure
to recognize him. Perhaps the officer in some sense
still saw all blacks, or black men, as “looking alike.”
Perhaps in the heat of the moment the image of black-
ness blocked his seeing Officer Young as an individual
person. Racial thinking does, in general, inhibit the
perception of others as individuals; the case of the
teacher asking the black student for “the black point of
view” would be another version of this same homoge-
nization. Perhaps—again I am speculating—although
the white officer did know Officer Young, whites and
blacks did not interact much on or off the job; if so this

508 Á PART 4: ETHiCAl issuEs
REFERENCES
Black, White Officers Cited in Noose Incident, Boston Globe,
April 29, 1999, B1.
Blum, L. (2002). I’m not a racist, but . . . The moral quandary of
race. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Margalit, A. (1996). The decent society. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press.
Miles, R. (1989). Racism. London: Routledge.
Morrow, L. (1994). Time, b[12/5/94] cited in Extra!, vol. 9, #2,
March/April 1996.
Nuechterlein, J., in First things, August- September, 1996, from
Chronicle of Higher Education, September 6.
Schofield, J.W. (1989). Black and white in school: Trust, tension,
or tolerance? New York: Teachers College Press.
Schuman, H., Steeh, C., Bobo, L. & Krysan, M. (1997). Racial
attitudes in America: Trends and interpretation, revised edn.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Shipler, D.K. (1997). A country of strangers: Blacks and whites in
America. New York: Vintage Books.
Stephan, W. (1999). Reducing prejudice and stereotyping in
schools. New York: Teachers College Press.
Tizon, A., Whale killing uncovers anti- Indian hatred, Boston
Globe, May 30, 1999.
Weinraub, B., Stung by criticism of fall shows, TV Networks
add minority roles, New York Times, 1999.
NOTES
1. I do not believe that there are races in the sense in which
“races” is generally understood in popular discourse,
so I regard it as misleading to say that someone “is of a
certain race.” It is more accurate to say that someone has,
or has been assigned, a racial designation, or that she is a
member of a racial group; I will generally use the latter
expression.
2. The black officer seemed clearly to be referring to lynching.
3. It is noteworthy that it was the newspaper article, rather
than the NAACP itself, that called the networks “racist,”
or framed the issue as one of racism. Kweisi Mfume, the
president of the NAACP, said only that the program-
ming was “a virtual whitewash.” New York Times, Sept 20,
1999, A1.
4. Of these listed, only “sexism” has fully succeeded in
attaching moral condemnation to its referent—discrimina-
tion against, or the denial of dignity to, women, or discrimi-
nation on the basis of sex in general—in popular thought
and speech.
5. In “I’m Not a Racist, But . . . ” I argue that members of any
group can be racist. For instance, I counter the view that only
whites can be racist because only whites hold power as a racial
group.
6. Stephan 1999 provides a wealth of information about how
to improve intergroup relations in schools.
Dear White America
George Yancy
that? You may have missed it. I repeat: I want you to
listen with love. Well, at least try.
We don’t talk much about the urgency of love
these days, especially within the public sphere. Much
of our discourses these days is about revenge, name
calling, hate, and divisiveness. I have yet to hear it
from our presidential hopefuls, or our political pun-
dits. I don’t mean the Hollywood type of love, but the
scary kind, the kind that risks not being reciprocated,
the kind that refuses to flee in the face of danger. To
make it a bit easier for you, I’ve decided to model, as
I have a weighty request. As you read this letter, I want
you to listen with love, a sort of love that demands
that you look at parts of yourself that might cause pain
and terror, as James Baldwin would say. Did you hear
George Yancy, “Dear White America,” New York Times, December
24, 2015. © 2015 The New York Times. All rights reserved. Used
by permission and protected by the Copyright Laws of the
United States. The printing, copying, redistribution, or retrans-
mission of this content without express written permission is
prohibited.

CHAPTER 14: RACism, EquAliTy, AnD DisCRiminATion Á 509
best as I can, what I’m asking of you. Let me demon-
strate the vulnerability that I wish you to show. As
a child of Socrates, James Baldwin and Audre Lorde,
let me speak the truth, refuse to err on the side of
caution.
This letter is a gift for you. Bear in mind, though
that some gifts can be heavy to bear. You don’t have to
accept it; there is no obligation. I give it freely, believ-
ing that many of you will throw the gift back in my
face, saying that I wrongly accuse you, that I am too
sensitive, that I’m race hustler, and that I blame white
people (you) for everything.
I have read many of your comments. I have even
received some hate mail. In this letter, I ask you to
look deep, to look into your souls with silence, to
quiet that voice that will speak to you of your white
“innocence.” So, as you read this letter, take a deep
breath. Make a space for my voice in the deepest part
of your psyche. Try to listen, to practice being silent.
There are times when you must quiet your own voice
to hear from or about those who suffer in ways that
you do not.
What if I told you that I’m sexist? Well, I am. Yes.
I said it and I mean just that. I have watched my male
students squirm in their seats when I’ve asked them
to identify and talk about their sexism. There are few
men, I suspect, who would say that they are sexists,
and even fewer would admit that their sexism actually
oppresses women. Certainly not publicly, as I’ve just
done. No taking it back now.
To make things worse, I’m an academic, a phi-
losopher. I’m supposed to be one of the “enlightened”
ones. Surely, we are beyond being sexists. Some, who
may genuinely care about my career, will say that
I’m being too risky, that I am jeopardizing my aca-
demic livelihood. Some might even say that as a black
male, who has already been stereotyped as a “ crotch-
grabbing, sexual fiend,” that I’m at risk of reinforcing
that stereotype. (Let’s be real, that racist stereotype has
been around for centuries; it is already part of white
America’s imaginary landscape.)
Yet, I refuse to remain a prisoner of the lies that
we men like to tell ourselves—that we are beyond
the messiness of sexism and male patriarchy, that we
don’t oppress women. Let me clarify. This doesn’t
mean that I intentionally hate women or that I
desire to oppress them. It means that despite my best
intentions, I perpetuate sexism every day of my life.
Please don’t take this as a confession for which I’m
seeking forgiveness. Confessions can be easy, espe-
cially when we know that forgiveness is immediately
forthcoming.
As a sexist, I have failed women. I have failed to
speak out when I should have. I have failed to engage
critically and extensively their pain and suffering
in my writing. I have failed to transcend the rigidity
of gender roles in my own life. I have failed to chal-
lenge those poisonous assumptions that women are
“inferior” to men or to speak out loudly in the com-
pany of male philosophers who believe that feminist
philosophy is just a nonphilosophical fad. I have been
complicit with, and have allowed myself to be seduced
by, a country that makes billions of dollars from sexu-
ally objectifying women, from pornography, com-
mercials, video games, to Hollywood movies. I am not
innocent.
I have been fed a poisonous diet of images that
fragment women into mere body parts. I have also
been complicit with a dominant male narrative that
says that women enjoy being treated like sexual
toys. In our collective male imagination, women are
“things” to be used for our visual and physical titil-
lation. And even as I know how poisonous and false
these sexist assumptions are, I am often ambushed
by my own hidden sexism. I continue to see women
through the male gaze that belies my best inten-
tions not to sexually objectify them. Our collective
male erotic feelings and fantasies are complicit in
the degradation of women. And we must be mindful
that not all women endure sexual degradation in the
same way.
I recognize how my being a sexist has a differential
impact on black women and women of color who are
not only victims of racism, but also sexism, my sexism.
For example, black women and women of color not
only suffer from sexual objectification, but the ways
in which they are objectified is linked to how they
are racially depicted, some as “exotic” and others as

510 Á PART 4: ETHiCAl issuEs
me that I’m blaming whites for everything. To do
so is to hide yet again. You may have never used the
N- word in your life, you may hate the K.K.K., but that
does not mean that you don’t harbor racism and ben-
efit from racism. After all, you are part of a system that
allows you to walk into stores where you are not fol-
lowed, where you get to go for a bank loan and your
skin does not count against you, where you don’t need
to engage in “the talk” that black people and people
of color must tell their children when they are con-
fronted by white police officers.
As you reap comfort from being white, we suffer
for being black and people of color. But your comforts
is linked to our pain and suffering. Just as my comfort
in being male is linked to the suffering of women,
which makes me sexist, so, too, you are racist. That is
the gift that I want you to accept, to embrace. It is a
form of knowledge that is taboo. Imagine the impact
that the acceptance of this gift might have on you and
the world.
Take another deep breath. I know that there are
those who will write to me in the comment section
with boiling anger, sarcasm, disbelief, denial. There are
those who will say, “Yancy is just an angry black man.”
There are others who will say, “Why isn’t Yancy telling
black people to be honest about the violence in their
own black neighborhoods?” Or, “How can Yancy say
that all white people are racists?” If you are saying these
things, then you’ve already failed to listen. I come with
a gift. You’re already rejecting the gift that I have to
offer. This letter is about you. Don’t change the conver-
sation. I assure you that so many black people suffering
from poverty and joblessness, which is linked to high
levels of crime, are painfully aware of the existential toll
that they have had to face because they are black and, as
Baldwin adds, “for no other reason.”
Some of your white brothers and sisters have made
this leap. The legal scholar Stephanie M. Wildman,
has written, “I simply believe that no matter how
hard I work at not being racist, I still am. Because part
of racism is systemic, I benefit from the privilege that
I am struggling to see.” And the journalism professor
Robert Jensen: “I like to think I have changed, even
though I routinely trip over the lingering effects of that
“ hyper- sexual.” You see, the complicity, the responsi-
bility, the pain that I cause runs deep. And, get this.
I refuse to seek shelter; I refuse to live a lie. So, every
day of my life I fight against the dominant male nar-
rative, choosing to see women as subjects, not objects.
But even as I fight, there are moments of failure. Just
because I fight against sexism does not give me clean
hands, as it were, at the end of the day; I continue to
falter, and I continue to oppress. And even though the
ways in which I oppress women is unintentional, this
does not free me of being responsible.
If you are white, and you are reading this letter,
I ask that you don’t run to seek shelter from your own
racism. Don’t hide from your responsibility. Rather,
begin, right now, to practice being vulnerable. Being
neither a “good” white person nor a liberal white per-
son will get you off the proverbial hook. I consider
myself to be a decent human being. Yet, I’m sexist.
Take another deep breath. I ask that you try to be “ un-
sutured.” If that term brings to mind a state of pain,
open flesh, it is meant to do so. After all, it is painful
to let go of your “White innocence,” to use this let-
ter as a mirror, one that refuses to show you what you
want to see, one that demands that you look at the lies
that you tell yourself so that you don’t feel the weight
of responsibility for those who live under the yoke of
whiteness, your whiteness.
I can see your anger. I can see that this letter is
being misunderstood. This letter is not asking you
to feel bad about yourself, to wallow in guilt. That is
too easy. I’m asking for you to tarry, to linger, with
the ways in which you perpetuate a racist society, the
ways in which you are racist. I’m now daring you to
face a racist history which, paraphrasing Baldwin, has
placed you where you are and that has formed your
own racism. Again, in the sprit of Baldwin, I am asking
you to enter into battle with your white self. I’m ask-
ing that you open yourself up; to speak to, to admit to,
the racist poison that is inside of you.
Again, take a deep breath. Don’t tell me about how
many black friends you have. Don’t tell me that you
are married to someone of color. Don’t tell me that
you voted for Obama. Don’t tell me that I’m the rac-
ist. Don’t tell me that you don’t see color. Don’t tell

CHAPTER 14: RACism, EquAliTy, AnD DisCRiminATion Á 511
power, your white privilege? Are you prepared to
show me a white self that love has unmasked? I’m
asking for love in return for a gift; in fact, I’m hoping
that this gift might help you to see yourself in ways
that you have not seen before. Of course, the history
of white supremacy in American belies this gesture
of black gift-giving, this gesture of non- sentimental
love. Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered even as he
loved.
Perhaps the language of this letter will encourage
a split—not a split between black and white, but a fis-
sure in your understanding, a space for loving a Tray-
von Martin, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Aiyana Jones,
Sandra Bland, Laquan McDonald and others. I’m sug-
gesting a form of love that enables you to see the role
that you play (even despite your anti- racist actions)
in a system that continues to value black lives on the
cheap.
Take one more deep breath. I have another gift.
If you have young children, before you fall off to
sleep tonight, I want you to hold your child. Touch
your child’s face. Smell your child’s hair. Count the
fingers on your child’s hand. See the miracle that is
your child. And then, with as much vision as you
can muster, I want you to imagine that your child is
black.
In peace,
George Yancy
internalized racism and the institutional racism around
me. Every time I walk into a store at the same times as
a black man and the security guard follows him and
leaves me alone to shop, I am benefiting from white
privilege.”
What I’m asking is that you first accept the rac-
ism within yourself, accept all of the truth about what
it means for you to be white in a society that was cre-
ated for you. I’m asking for you to trace the blinds that
tie you to forms of domination that you would rather
not see. When you walk into the world, you can walk
with assurance; you have already signed a contract, so
to speak, that guarantees you a certain form of social
safety.
Baldwin argues for a form of love that is “a state of
being, or state of grace– not in the infantile American
sense of being made happy but in the tough and uni-
versal sense of quest and daring and growth.” Most of
my days, I’m engaged in a personal and society battle
against sexism. So many times, I fail. And so many
times, I’m complicit. But I refuse to hide behind that
mirror that lies to me about my “ non- sexist nobil-
ity.” Baldwin says, “Love takes off the masks that we
fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live
within.” In my heart, I’m done with the mask of sex-
ism, though I’m tempted every day to wear it. And,
there are times when it still gets the better of me.
White America, are you prepared to be at war
with yourself, your white identity, your white
Uses and Abuses of the Discourse of White Privilege
Naomi Zack
an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions,
maps, passports, codebooks, visas, clothes, tools and
blank checks.” The idea lives on in exhortations to
Check your privilege! on college campuses and through
broader public and social media. But the discourse of
white privilege is problematic from two angles— it
goes too far in blaming all whites for all forms of rac-
ism and it does not go far enough in directly addressing
White privilege in real life is something real that exists.
White privilege discourse is thought, talk, and writing
about white privilege—it is not the thing itself.
Our present idea of white privilege was introduced
by Peggy McIntosh in 1989: “White privilege is like
Naomi Zack, “Uses and Abuses of the Discourse of White Privilege,”
Philosopher (blog), June 24, 2016, politicalphi losopher.net.
Reprinted with permission.

http://www.politicalphilosopher.net

512 Á PART 4: ETHiCAl issuEs
injustice against nonwhites. Both perspectives are
worth consideration but the second is more important
because it involves violations of fundamental human
rights.
Whites cannot call or email or log onto a Bureau
of White Privilege to check their white accounts, draw
on their white assets, withdraw white funds, or use
white credits to make purchases. But whites are gen-
erally better off than nonwhites— in health, wealth,
freedom, education, longevity, and a host of other
human goods. That is, although overt oppression
expressed by an official ideology of white supremacy is
largely past in our post- civil rights era of formal equal-
ity, racist historical effects persist. White (European
and American) “privileges” endure. White privilege is
a network of dispositions in society whereby individu-
als behave differently, that is, better to whites than
nonwhites, solely because whites are white. Attitudes,
beliefs, and emotions are the internal psychic compo-
nent of white privilege and they include freedom from
worrying about or suffering from racism.
However, not all whites, all of the time, enjoy privi-
leges compared to nonwhites or are responsible for the
comparative disadvantages of nonwhites. And even
though some whites may be complicit with the racism
of others, their expressed non- racist views and cultural
contributions should not be dismissed solely on the
grounds of their race. That is, to shut down speech just
because it is uttered by a white person would be unfair
and when racial ad hominem is robustly denounced
on behalf of people of color, the fallacy should be rec-
ognized in an even- handed way. (We continue to be
shocked by Kant’s, “This fellow was quite black . . . a
clear proof that what he said was stupid.”) Still, “Check
your privilege!” or white privilege discourse has more
serious pitfalls than such insults to white people. The
discourse seems to be incapable of addressing injustice
against people of color.
In progressive, left- liberal society, it is virtuous
not to exaggerate one’s disadvantage or ignore unfair
or unearned advantage. The motivation for white
privilege discourse is that the person being asked
or told to check her privilege will be ashamed after
recognizing that she has unfair or unearned advan-
tages solely due to being white— and that insight
will serve social justice. It’s as though the discourse
of foodies about their abundant culinary choices and
self- indulgent practices could correct the problems of
world hunger!
White privilege discourse is largely about the
facts of white racial advantage and what white people
think and feel about that. Building awareness of racial
imbalances is progressive. But as a leading response to
contemporary injustice, white privilege discourse may
miss the importance of racial injustice and degenerate
into just another display of the advantages that white
people have of not being required to respond to racial
injustice against their racial group. After all, and for
the most part, whites are treated justly, in wealthy,
democratic, capitalistic societies.
Awareness by whites of their privilege, in an
ongoing discourse that whites conduct, is neither
cognitively nor rhetorically adequate for addressing
injustice. If black people can be killed or executed by
police officers, without trial or even the appearance
of criminal action, while white people are left alone,
this is not wholly or solely a matter of white privilege.
Yes, white people are better off, but to confine resis-
tance to the injustice done to nonwhites to discourse
about how whites are privileged in being left alone
(i.e., to only talk about white privilege), minimizes
or trivializes the injustice against nonwhites. This
injustice could only be wholly or solely a matter of
white privilege if we lived in and accepted the norms
of a maximally repressive totalitarian society where
it was customary for government officials to execute
anyone without trial or even the appearance of crim-
inal action. Against that background, we could say
that those who were not treated that way were privi-
leged. They would be privileged in enjoying that perk
of exceptional leniency. But we do not live in such a
system or accept a normative totalitarian description
of the system we do live in. We live in a system where
everyone, regardless of race is supposed to have the
same basic rights. That nonwhites are not recognized
as having these rights is not a privilege of whites, but
a violation of the rights of nonwhites.
Nevertheless, human rights have only an ideal
status. Philosophically they are only posits and mor-
ally those who are outraged by the injustice of rights

CHAPTER 14: RACism, EquAliTy, AnD DisCRiminATion Á 513
dismantling affirmative action. Yes, whites are privi-
leged, but no amount of exhortation to “check ” their
privilege or confessional discourse in response, will
correct the legal injustice of police homicide based on
racial profiling.
Police racial profiling and is attendant violence is
not the only form of rights violation that corresponds
to nonwhite race in the United States and is neglected
by white privilege discourse. Unequal educational
resources in materials and teacher skills have persisted
after Brown v. Board of Education called for integrated
education “with all deliberate speed” in 1954. But
K- 12 schools are funded by local property taxes that
are directly related to real estate values. It’s been
widely publicized since the 1970s that the differ-
ences in tax- based educational resources per child are
as much as 1000 percent between mainly black and
brown neighborhoods, as residential racial segrega-
tion has persisted due to differences in wealth and
income, along with social preferences regarding the
race of neighbors. All modern democracies uphold
public education as a fundamental right at this time,
but that right cannot be fully implemented in the
United States given the disparities in opportunities
for children that result from ongoing residential
segregation. No amount of positive descriptions of
the privileges of white middle class school children
mitigates the deprivations of poor nonwhite chil-
dren who do not have comparable learning oppor-
tunities. Needed is egalitarian educational reform to
enlarge those opportunities. No amount or intensity
of discourse about the privilege of white children a
few blocks away could fill in for what poor nonwhite
children lack. And again, if equal adequate educa-
tion is a right, a structure in which nonwhite children
are deprived of that right is a problem of injustice in
and of itself. And that problem is not addressed by
talking about the fact that white children enjoy the
right! (That there are structural inequalities that per-
petuate rights violations of nonwhites underscores
the importance of resistance that attends to rights
instead of privileges.)
violation have little power. But, the basis for outrage
concerning the recent high profile cases of summary
execution of unarmed young black men by police offi-
cers is a legal issue, a matter of positive law in U.S. juris-
dictions. U.S. citizens are constitutionally protected
by certain rights that most, especially whites, still
correctly assume are in force for them: the right to
privacy from unjustified government search and sei-
zure (where death is a form of seizure); the right to due
process; the right to equal protection by government
officials.
The Fourth Amendment states that “the people”
have a right “to be secure in their persons, houses,
papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches
and seizures. . . but upon probable cause.” The Four-
teenth Amendment reads in part that that no state
shall “deny to any person within its jurisdiction the
equal protection of the laws.” Police racial profil-
ing followed by summary execution violates both
amendments. However, these constitutional rights
have been steadily eroded by the U.S. Supreme Court
in recent decades. In Graham v. Connor in 1989, the
Justices ruled that claims that police have used exces-
sive force must be analyzed under an “objective rea-
sonableness” standard referring to officer behavior,
rather than rules of due process or probable cause. In
Plumhoff et al. v. Richard (2012), the Court ruled that
Fourth Amendment rights must be balanced against
the “qualified immunity” of officers. These rulings
and similar ones come to bear in cases like the shoot-
ing of Michael Brown, where all an officer need do
to avoid indictment or conviction for manslaughter
or murder is claim that he believed his life was in
danger.
To protect the rights of minorities against police—
really everyone’s rights, but the recent killings of
unarmed young men concern minorities— it will likely
be necessary to revisit at least Graham and Plumhoff.
The civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s were
led by impassioned and brilliant lawyers, constantly
bringing cases before the courts. These days, the legal
cases that get the most attention are those aimed at

514 Á PART 4: ETHiCAl issuEs
The Case Against Affirmative Action
Louis P. Pojman
Women have their own peculiar history of being
treated unequally in relevant ways. What is the answer
to this national problem? Is it increased welfare? More
job training? More support for education? Required
licensing of parents to have children? Negative income
tax? More support for families or for mothers with
small children? All of these have merit and should be
part of the national debate. But, my thesis is, however
tragic the situation may be (and we may disagree on just
how tragic it is), one policy is not a legitimate part of the
solution and that is reverse, unjust discrimination against
young white males. Strong Affirmative Action, which
implicitly advocates reverse discrimination, while no
doubt well intentioned, is morally heinous, asserting,
by implication, that two wrongs make a right.
The Two Wrongs Make a Right Thesis goes like this:
Because some Whites once enslaved some Blacks, the
descendants of those slaves (some of whom may now
enjoy high incomes and social status) have a right to
opportunities and offices over better qualified Whites
who had nothing to do with either slavery or the
oppression of Blacks (and who may even have suffered
hardship comparable to that of poor Blacks). In addi-
tion, Strong Affirmative Action creates a new Hierar-
chy of the Oppressed: Blacks get primary preferential
treatment, women second, Native Americans third,
Hispanics fourth, Handicapped fifth, and Asians sixth
and so on until White males, no matter how needy or
well qualified, must accept the leftovers. Naturally,
combinations of oppressed classes (e.g., a one- eyed,
Black Hispanic female) trump all single classifications.
The equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amend-
ment becomes reinterpreted as “Equal protection
for all equals, but some equals are more equal than
others.”
Before analyzing arguments concerning Affirma-
tive Action, I must define my terms.
By Weak Affirmative Action I mean policies that will
increase the opportunities of disadvantaged people to
attain social goods and offices. It includes such things
as dismantling of segregated institutions, widespread
Hardly a week goes by but that the subject of Affirma-
tive Action does not come up. Whether in the form
of preferential hiring, nontraditional casting, quotas,
“goals and time tables,” minority scholarships, race-
norming, reverse discrimination, or employment of
members of underutilized groups, the issue confronts
us as a terribly perplexing problem. Affirmative action
was one of the issues that divided the Democratic
and Republican parties during the 1996 election,
the Democrats supporting it (“Mend it don’t end it”)
and the Republicans opposing it (“affirmative action
is reverse racism”). During the last general election
(November 7, 1996) California voters by a 55% to 45%
vote approved Proposition 209 (called the “California
Civil Rights Initiative”) which made it illegal to dis-
criminate on the basis of race or gender, hence ending
Affirmative Action in public institutions in Califor-
nia. The Supreme Court recently refused to rule on
the appeal, thus leaving it to the individual states to
decide how they will deal with this issue. Both sides
have recorganized for a renewed battle. Meanwhile,
on Nov. 11, 1977, the European Union’s High Court
of Justice in Luxembourg approved Affirmative Action
programs giving women preferential treatment in the
15 European Union countries.
Let us agree that despite the evidences of a boom-
ing economy, the poor are suffering grievously, with
children being born into desperate material and psy-
chological poverty; for them the ideal of “equal oppor-
tunity for all” is a cruel joke. Many feel that the federal
government has abandoned its guarantee to provide
the minimum necessities for each American, so that
the pace of this tragedy seems to be worsening daily.
In addition to this, African- Americans have a legacy
of slavery and unjust discrimination to contend with,
and other minorities have also suffered from injustice.
Louis Pojman, “The Case Against Affirmative Action” from Interna-
tional Journal of Applied Philosophy, 1998, Vol. 12, No.1, pp. 97–115.
Reprinted by permission of Philosophy Documentation Center.

CHAPTER 14: RACism, EquAliTy, AnD DisCRiminATion Á 515
strive for excellence by emulating our heroes and “our
kind of people” who have succeeded.
In the first place it’s not clear that role mod-
els of one’s own racial or sexual type are necessary
(let alone sufficient) for success. One of my heroes
was Gandhi, an Indian Hindu, another was my grade
school science teacher, Miss DeVoe, and another
Martin Luther King, behind whom I marched in Civil
Rights demonstrations. More important than having
role models of one’s “own type” is having genuinely
good people, of whatever race or gender, to emulate.
Our common humanity should be a sufficient basis
for us to see the possibility of success in people of
virtue and merit. To yield to the demand, however
tempting it may be, for “ role- models- just- like- us” is
to treat people like means not ends. It is to elevate
morally irrelevant particularity over relevant traits,
such as ability and integrity. We don’t need people
exactly like us to find inspiration. As Steve Allen
once quipped, “If I had to follow a role model exactly,
I would have become a nun.”
Furthermore, even if it is of some help to people
with low self- esteem to gain encouragement from see-
ing others of their particular kind in successful posi-
tions, it is doubtful whether this is a sufficient reason
to justify preferential hiring or reverse discrimination.
What good is a role model who is inferior to other pro-
fessors or physicians or business personnel? The best
way to create role models is to promote people because
they are the best qualified for the job. It is the viola-
tion of this fact that is largely responsible for the
widespread whisper in the medical field (at least in
New York), “Never go to a Black physician under 40”
(referring to the fact that AA has affected the medical
system during the past twenty years). Fight the feeling
how I will, I cannot help wondering on seeing a Black
or woman in a position of honor, “Is she in this posi-
tion because she merits it or because of Affirmative
Action?” Where Affirmative Action is the policy, the
“figment of pigment” creates a stigma of undeserved-
ness, whether or not it is deserved.1
Finally, entertain this thought experiment. Sup-
pose we discovered that tall handsome white males
somehow made the best role models for the most peo-
ple, especially poor people. Suppose even large numbers
advertisement to groups not previously represented
in certain privileged positions, special scholarships
for the disadvantaged classes (e.g., the poor, regard-
less of race or gender), and even using diversity or
under- representation of groups with a history of past
discrimination as a tie breaker when candidates for
these goods and offices are relatively equal. The goal of
Weak Affirmative Action is equal opportunity to com-
pete, not equal results. We seek to provide each citizen
regardless of race or gender a fair chance to the most
favored positions in society. There is no more moral
requirement to guarantee that 12% of professors are
Black than to guarantee that 85% of the players in the
National Basketball Association are White.
By Strong Affirmative Action I mean preferential
treatment on the basis of race, ethnicity or gender (or
some other morally irrelevant criterion), discriminat-
ing in favor of underrepresented groups against over-
represented groups, aiming at roughly equal results.
Strong Affirmative Action is reverse discrimination. It says
it is right to do wrong to correct a wrong. This is the
policy currently being promoted under the name of
Affirmative Action, so I will use that term or “AA” for
short throughout this essay to stand for this version
of affirmative action. I will not argue for or against the
principle of Weak Affirmative Action. Indeed, I think it
has some moral weight. Strong Affirmative Action has
none, or so I will argue.
This essay concentrates on AA policies with regard
to race, but the arguments can be extended to cover
ethnicity and gender. I think that if a case for Affir-
mative Action can be made it will be as a corrective
to racial oppression. I will examine [nine] arguments
regarding AA. The first six will be negative, attempting
to show that the best arguments for Affirmative Action
fail. The last three will be positive arguments for poli-
cies opposing Affirmative Action.
I. A CRITIQUE OF ARGUMENTS FOR
AFFIRMATIVE ACTION
A. The Need for Role Models
This argument is straightforward. We all have need
of role models, and it helps to know that others like
us can be successful. We learn and are encouraged to

516 Á PART 4: ETHiCAl issuEs
giving a high level job to someone unqualified or only
minimally qualified, who, speculatively, might have
been better qualified had he not been subject to racial
discrimination. If John is the star tailback of our col-
lege team with a promising professional future, and
I accidentally (but culpably) drive my pickup truck
over his legs, and so cripple him, John may be due
compensation, but he is not due the tailback spot on
the football team.
Still, there may be something intuitively compel-
ling about compensating members of an oppressed
group who are minimally qualified. Suppose that the
Hatfields and the McCoys are enemy clans and some
youths from the Hatfields go over and steal diamonds
and gold from the McCoys, distributing it within
the Hatfield economy. Even though we do not know
which Hatfield youths did the stealing, we would want
to restore the wealth, as far as possible, to the McCoys.
One way might be to tax the Hatfields, but another
might be to give preferential treatment in terms of
scholarships and training programs and hiring to the
McCoys.
This is perhaps the strongest argument for Affirma-
tive Action, and it may well justify some weaker ver-
sions of AA, but it is doubtful whether it is sufficient to
justify strong versions with quotas and goals and time
tables in skilled positions. There are at least two rea-
sons for this. First, we have no way of knowing how
many people of any given group would have achieved
some given level of competence had the world been
different. This is especially relevant if my objections
to the Equal Results Argument (below) are correct. Sec-
ondly, the normal criterion of competence is a strong
prima facie consideration when the most important
positions are at stake. There are three reasons for this:
(1) treating people according to their merits respects
them as persons, as ends in them- selves, rather than
as means to social ends (if we believe that individu-
als possess a dignity which deserves to be respected,
then we ought to treat that individual on the basis of
his or her merits, not as a mere instrument for social
policy); (2) society has given people expectations that
if they attain certain levels of excellence they will be
awarded appropriately; and (3) filling the most impor-
tant positions with the best qualified is the best way
of minority people somehow found inspiration in
their sight. Would we be justified in hiring tall hand-
some white males over better qualified short Hispanic
women, who were deemed less role- model worthy?
B. The Compensation Argument
The argument goes like this: blacks have been wronged
and severely harmed by whites. Therefore white soci-
ety should compensate blacks for the injury caused
them. Reverse discrimination in terms of preferential
hiring, contracts, and scholarships is a fitting way to
compensate for the past wrongs.
This argument actually involves a distorted notion
of compensation. Normally, we think of compensa-
tion as owed by a specific person A to another person B
whom A has wronged in a specific way C. For example,
if I have made $5,000 and only have $10,000 in assets,
it would not be possible for you to collect $20,000 in
damages—even though that is the amount of loss you
have incurred.
Sometimes compensation is extended to groups of
people who have been unjustly harmed by the greater
society. For example, the United States government
has compensated the Japanese- Americans who were
interred during the Second World War, and the West
German government has paid reparations to the sur-
vivors of Nazi concentration camps. But here a specific
people have been identified who were wronged in an
identifiable way by the government of the nation in
question.
On the face of it, demands by blacks for compensa-
tion do not fit the usual pattern. Southern States with
Jim Crow laws could be accused of unjustly harming
blacks, but it is hard to see that the United States gov-
ernment was involved in doing so. Much of the harm
done to blacks was the result of private discrimina-
tion, not state action. So the Germany/US analogy
doesn’t hold. Furthermore, it is not clear that all blacks
were harmed in the same way or whether some were
unjustly harmed or harmed more than poor whites and
others (e.g., short people). Finally, even if identifiable
blacks were harmed by identifiable social practices, it
is not clear that most forms of Affirmative Action are
appropriate to restore the situation. The usual practice
of a financial payment seems more appropriate than

CHAPTER 14: RACism, EquAliTy, AnD DisCRiminATion Á 517
Suppose my parents, divining that I would grow
up to have an unsurpassable desire to be a basketball
player, bought an expensive growth hormone for
me. Unfortunately, a neighbor stole it and gave it to
little Michael, who gained the extra 13 inches—my
13 inches—and shot up to an enviable 6 feet 6 inches.
Michael, better known as Michael Jordan, would have
been a runt like me but for his luck. As it is he prof-
ited from the injustice, and excelled in basketball, as
I would have done had I had my proper dose.
Do I have a right to the millions of dollars that
Jordan made as a professional basketball player—the
unjustly innocent beneficiary of my growth hor-
mone? I have a right to something from the neighbor
who stole the hormone and it might be kind of Jordan
to give me free tickets to the [Bulls] basketball games,
and remember me in his will. As far as I can see, how-
ever, he does not owe me anything, either legally or
morally.
Suppose further that Michael Jordan and I are in
high school together and we are both qualified to play
basketball, only he is far better than I. Do I deserve to
start in his position because I would have been as good
as he is had someone not cheated me as a child? Again,
I think not. But if being the lucky beneficiary of wrong-
doing does not entail that Jordan (or the coach) owes
me anything in regards to basketball, why should it be a
reason to engage in preferential hiring in academic posi-
tions or highly coveted jobs? If minimal qualifications
are not adequate to override excellence in basketball,
even when the minimality is a consequence of wrongdo-
ing, why should they be adequate in other areas?
D. The Diversity Argument
It is important that we learn to live in a pluralistic
world, learning to get along with those of other races,
conditions, and cultures, so we should have schools
and employment situations as fully integrated as
possible. In a shrinking world we need to appreciate
each other’s culture and specific way of looking at
life. Diversity is an important symbol and educative
device. Thus, proponents of AA argue, preferential
treatment is warranted to perform this role in society.
Once again, there is some truth in these concerns.
Diversity of ideas challenges us to scrutinize our own
to ensure efficiency in job- related areas and in society
in general. These reasons are not absolutes. They can
be over- ridden.2 But there is a strong presumption in
their favor, so that a burden of proof rests with those
who would override them.
At this point we get into the problem of whether
innocent non- blacks should have to pay a penalty in
terms of preferential hiring of blacks. We turn to that
argument.
C. The Argument for Compensation from Those
Who Innocently Benefitted from Past Injustice
Young White males as innocent beneficiaries of unjust
discrimination against blacks and women have no
grounds for complaint when society seeks to level
the tilted field. They may be innocent of oppressing
blacks, other minorities, and women, but they have
unjustly benefitted from that oppression or discrimi-
nation. So it is perfectly proper that less qualified
women and blacks be hired before them.
The operative principle is: He who knowingly and
willingly benefits from a wrong must help pay for the
wrong. Judith Jarvis Thomson puts it this way. “Many
[white males] have been direct beneficiaries of policies
which have downgraded blacks and women . . . and
even those who did not directly benefit . . . had, at any
rate, the advantage in the competition which comes
of the confidence in one’s full membership [in the
community], and of one’s right being recognized as a
matter of course.”3 That is, white males obtain advan-
tages in self- respect and self- confidence deriving from
a racist/sexist system which denies these to blacks and
women.
Here is my response to this argument: As I noted in
the previous section, compensation is normally indi-
vidual and specific. If A harms B regarding x, B has a
right to compensation from A in regards to x. If A steals
B’s car and wrecks it, A has an obligation to compen-
sate B for the stolen car, but A’s son has no obligation
to compensate B. Furthermore, if A dies or disappears,
B has no moral right to claim that society compensate
him for the stolen car—though if he has insurance,
he can make such a claim to the insurance company.
Sometimes a wrong cannot be compensated, and we
just have to make the best of an imperfect world.

518 Á PART 4: ETHiCAl issuEs
really is able to do better job in the Black community, this
might constitute a case of merit, not Affirmative Action.
As Stephen Kershnar points out, this is similar to the legiti-
macy of hiring Chinese men to act as undercover agents in
Chinatown.4
E. The Equal Results Argument
Some philosophers and social scientists hold that
human nature is roughly identical, so that on a fair
playing field the same proportion from every race and
ethnic group and both genders would attain to the
highest positions in every area of endeavor. It would
follow that any inequality of results itself is evidence
for inequality of opportunity.
History is important when considering governmen-
tal rules like Test 21 because low scores by blacks can
be traced in large measure to the legacy of slavery
and racism: segregation, poor schooling, exclusion
from trade unions, malnutrition, and poverty have
all played their roles. Unless one assumes that blacks
are naturally less able to pass the test, the conclusion
must be that the results are themselves socially and
legally constructed, not a mere given for which law
and society can claim no responsibility.
The conclusion seems to be that genuine equality
eventually requires equal results. Obviously blacks
have been treated unequally throughout US history,
and just as obviously the economic and psychological
effects of that inequality linger to this day, showing
up in lower income and poorer performance in school
and on tests than whites achieve. Since we have no rea-
son to believe that differences in performance can be
explained by factors other than history, equal results
are a good benchmark by which to measure progress
made toward genuine equality. (John Arthur, The
Unfinished Constitution [Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Pub-
lishing Co, 1990], p. 238)
Sterling Harwood seems to support a similar the-
ory when he writes, “When will [AA] end? When will
affirmative action stop compensating blacks? As soon
as the unfair advantage is gone, affirmative action will
stop. The elimination of the unfair advantage can be
determined by showing that the percentage of blacks
hired and admitted at least roughly equaled the per-
centage of blacks in the population.”5
values and beliefs, and diverse customs have aesthetic
and moral value, helping us to appreciate the novelty
and beauty in life. Diversity may expand our moral
horizons. But, again, while we can admit the value
of diversity, it hardly seems adequate to over- ride the
moral requirement to treat each person with equal
respect. Diversity for diversity’s sake is moral promiscuity,
since it obfuscates rational distinctions, undermines
treating individuals as ends, treating them, instead,
as mere means (to the goals of social engineering),
and, furthermore, unless those hired are highly quali-
fied, the diversity factor threatens to become a fetish.
At least at the higher levels of business and the pro-
fessions, competence far outweighs considerations of
diversity. I do not care whether the group of surgeons
operating on me reflect racial or gender balance, but
I do care that they are highly qualified. Neither do
most football or basketball fans care whether their
team reflects ethnic and gender diversity, but demand
the best combination of players available. And like-
wise with airplane pilots, military leaders, business
executives, and, may I say it, teachers and university
professors. One need not be a white male to teach, let
alone appreciate, Shakespeare, nor need one be Black
to teach, let alone appreciate, Alice Walker’s Color
Purple.
There may be times when diversity may be seem to
be “crucial” to the well- being of a diverse community,
such as for a police force. Suppose that White police-
men tend to overreact to young Black males and the
latter group distrust white policemen. Hiring more
less qualified Black policemen, who would relate bet-
ter to these youth, may have overall utilitarian value.
But such a move, while we might take it as a lesser
evil, could have serious consequences in allowing
the demographic prejudices to dictate social policy.
A better strategy would be to hire the best police, that
is, those who can perform in disciplined, intelligent
manner, regardless of their race. A White policeman
must be able to arrest a Black burglar, even as a Black
policeman must be able to arrest a White rapist. The
quality of the police man or woman, not their race or
gender is what counts.
On the other hand, if a Black policeman, though lack-
ing some of the formal skills of the White policeman,

CHAPTER 14: RACism, EquAliTy, AnD DisCRiminATion Á 519
and systematically discriminated against White and
Asian basketball players who make up less than 20%
of the NBA players. You reply that you and the other
owners are just responding to individual merit, we
respond that the discrimination is a function of deep
prejudice against White athletes, especially basket-
ball players, who are discouraged in every way from
competing on fair terms with Blacks who dominate
the NBA. You would probably wish that the matter of
unequal results was not brought up in the first place,
but once it has been, would you not be in your rights
to defend yourself by producing evidence, showing
that average physiological differences exist between
Blacks and Whites and Asians, so that we should not
presume unjust discrimination?
Similarly, the proponents of the Doctrine of Equal
Results open the door to a debate over average ability
in ethnic, racial and gender groups. The proponent of
equal or fair opportunity would just as soon downplay
this feature in favor of judging people as individuals
by their merit (hard though that may be). But if the
proponent of AA insists on the Equal Results Thesis,
we are obliged to examine the Equal Results Thesis, we
are obliged to examine the Equal Abilities Thesis, on
which it is based—the thesis that various ethnic and
gender groups all have the same distribution of talent
on the relevant characteristic. With regard to cognitive
skills we must consult the best evidence we have on
average group differences. We need to compare aver-
age IQ scores, SAT scores, standard personality testing,
success in academic and professional areas and the
like. If the evidence shows that group differences are
nonexistent, the AA proponent may win, but if the evi-
dence turns out to be against the Equal Abilities Thesis,
the AA proponent loses. Consider for a start that the
average white and Asian scores 195 points higher on
the SAT tests and that on virtually all IQ tests for the
past seven or eight decades the average Black IQ is 85 as
opposed to the average White and Asian IQ at over 100,
or that males and females differ significantly on cog-
nitive ability tests. Females outperform males in read-
ing comprehension, perceptual speed, and associative
memory (ratios of 1.4 to 2.2), but males typically out-
number females among high scoring individuals in
mathematics, science and social science (by a ratio
Albert G. Mosley develops a similar argument.
“Establishing Blacks’ presence at a level commensu-
rate with their proportion in the relevant labor market
need not be seen as an attempt to actualize some valid
prediction. Rather, given the impossibility of deter-
mining what level of representation Blacks would
have achieved were it not for racial discrimination,
the assumption of proportional representation is the
only fair assumption to make. This is not to argue that
Blacks should be maintained in such positions, but
their contrived exclusion merits equally contrived
rectification.“6 The result of a just society should be
equal numbers in proportion to each group in the
work force.
However, Arthur, Mosley, and Harwood fail even
to consider studies that suggest that there are innate
differences between races, sexes, and groups. If there
are genetic differences in intelligence, temperament,
and other qualities within families, why should we
not expect such differences between racial groups and
the two genders? Why should the evidence for this be
completely discounted?
Mosley’s reasoning is as follows: Since we don’t
know for certain whether groups proportionately dif-
fer in talent, we should presume that they are equal
in every respect. So we should presume that if we
were living in a just society, there would be roughly
proportionate representation in every field (e.g.,
equal representation of doctors, lawyers, professors,
carpenters, airplane pilots, basketball players, and
criminals). Hence, it is only fair—productive of jus-
tice—to aim at proportionate representation in these
fields.
But the logic is flawed. Under a situation of igno-
rance we should not presume equality or inequality
of representation—but conclude that we don’t know
what the results would be in a just society. Ignorance
doesn’t favor equal group representation any more
than it favors unequal representation. It is neutral
between them.
Consider this analogy. Suppose that you were
the owner of a National Basketball Association team.
Suppose that I and other frustrated White basketball
players bring a class- action suit against you and all
the other team owners, claiming that you have subtly

520 Á PART 4: ETHiCAl issuEs
children, to spend all their resources on them, and to
give them the best possible education. The two Green
kids respond well and end up with achievement test
scores in the 99th percentile. The Blues fail to prac-
tice family planning and have 15 children. They can
only afford 2 children, but lack of ability or whatever
prevents them from keeping their family size down.
Now they need help for their large family. Why does
society have to step in and help them? Society did
not force them to have 15 children. Suppose that the
achievement test scores of the 15 children fall below
the 25th percentile. They cannot compete with the
Greens. But now enters AA. It says that it is society’s
fault that the Blue children are not as able as the
Greens and that the Greens must pay extra taxes to
enable the Blues to compete. No restraints are put on
the Blues regarding family size. This seems unfair to
the Greens. Should the Green children be made to
bear responsibility for the consequences of the Blue’s
voluntary behavior?
My point is simply that philosophers like Arthur,
Harwood, and Mosley need to cast their net wider
and recognize that demographics and childbearing
and -rearing practices are crucial factors in achieve-
ment. People have to take some responsibility for their
actions. The equal results argument (or axiom) misses
a greater part of the picture.
F. THE “NO ONE DESERVES HIS TALENTS”
ARGUMENT AGAINST MERITOCRACY
According to this argument, the competent do not
deserve their intelligence, their superior charac-
ter, their industriousness, or their discipline; there-
fore they have no right to the best positions in society;
therefore it is not unjust to give these positions to less
(but still minimally) qualified blacks and women.
In one form this argument holds that since no one
deserves anything, society may use any critertia it
pleases to distribute goods. The criterion most often
designated is social utility. Versions of this argument
are found in the writings of John Arthur, John Rawls,
Bernard Boxill, Michael Kinsley, Ronald Dworkin, and
Richard Wasserstrom. Rawls writes, “No one deserves
his place in the distribution of native endowments,
of 7.0 in the top 1% of overall mathematics distribu-
tion).7 The results of average GRE, LSAT, MCAT scores
show similar patterns or significant average racial dif-
ference. The Black scholar Glenn Loury notes, “In 1990
black high school seniors from families with annual
incomes of $70,000 or more scored an average of 855
on the SAT, compared with average scores of 855 and
879 respectively for Asian- American and white seniors
whose families had incomes between $10,000 and
20,000 per year.”8 Note, we are speaking about statisti-
cal averages. There are brilliant and retarded people in
each group.
When such statistics are discussed many people
feel uncomfortable and want to drop the subject. Per-
haps these statistics are misleading, but then we need
to look carefully at the total evidence. The proponent
of equal opportunity urges us to get beyond racial and
gender criteria in assignment of offices and opportuni-
ties and treat each person, not as an average White or
Black or female or male, but as a person judged on his
or her own merits.
Furthermore, on the logic of Mosley and com-
pany, we should take aggressive AA against Asians and
Jews since they are overrepresented in science, tech-
nology, and medicine, and we should presume that
Asians and Jews are no more talented than average.
So that each group receives its fair share, we should
ensure that 12% of the philosophers in the United
States are Black, reduce the percentage of Jews from
an estimated 15% to 2%—thus firing about 1,300 Jew-
ish philosophers. The fact that Asians are producing
50% of Ph.D.s in science and math in this country
and blacks less than 1% clearly shows, on this reason-
ing, that we are providing special secret advantages to
Asians. By this logic, we should reduce the quota of
Blacks in the NBA to 12%.
But why does society have to enter into this results
game in the first place? Why do we have to decide
whether all difference is environmental or genetic?
Perhaps we should simply admit that we lack suffi-
cient evidence to pronounce on these issues with any
certainty—but if so, should we not be more modest
in insisting on equal results? Here’s a thought experi-
ment. Take two families of different racial groups,
Green and Blue. The Greens decide to have only two

CHAPTER 14: RACism, EquAliTy, AnD DisCRiminATion Á 521
qualified person from an “underutilized” group gets a
professorship ahead of an eminently better qualified
white male. Sufficiency and underutilization together
outweigh excellence.
My response: Premise 4 is false. To see this, reflect
that just because I do not deserve the money that
I have been given as a gift (for instance) does not mean
that I am not entitled to what I get with that money. If
you and I both get a gift of $100 and I bury mine in the
sand for 5 years while you invest yours wisely and dou-
ble its value at the end of five years, I cannot complain
that you should split the increase 50/50 since neither
of us deserved the original gift. If we accept the notion
of responsibility at all, we must hold that persons
deserve the fruits of their labor and conscious choices.
Of course, we might want to distinguish moral from
legal desert and argue that, morally speaking, effort
is more important than outcome, whereas, legally
speaking, outcome may be more important. Never-
theless, there are good reasons in terms of efficiency,
motivation, and rough justice for holding a strong
prima facie principle of giving scarce high positions to
those most competent.
The attack on moral desert is perhaps the most
radical move that egalitarians like Rawls and company
have made against meritocracy, and the ramifications
of their attack are far reaching. Here are some impli-
cations: Since I do not deserve my two good eyes or
two good kidneys, the social engineers may take one
of each from me to give to those needing an eye or a
kidney—even if they have damaged their organs by
their own voluntary actions. Since no one deserves
anything, we do not deserve pay for our labors or
praise for a job well done or first prize in the race we
win. The notion of moral responsibility vanishes in a
system of levelling.
But there is no good reason to accept the argu-
ment against desert. We do act freely and, as such, we
are responsible for our actions. We deserve the fruits of
our labor, reward for our noble feats and punishment
for our misbehavior.
We have considered six arguments for Affirmative
Action and have found no compelling case for Strong
AA and only one plausible argument (a version of the
compensation argument) for Weak AA. We must now
any more than one deserves one’s initial starting place
in society. The assertion that a man deserves the supe-
rior character that enables him to make the effort to
cultivate his abilities is equally problematic; for his
character depends in large part upon fortunate fam-
ily and social circumstances for which he can claim
no credit. The notion of desert seems not to apply to
these cases.”9 Michael Kinsley is even more adamant.
Opponents of affirmative action are hung up on a
distinction that seems more profoundly irrelevant:
treating individuals versus treating groups. What is
the moral difference between dispensing favors to
people on their “merits” as individuals and passing out
society’s benefits on the basis of group identification?
Group identifications like race and sex are, of course,
immutable. They have nothing to do with a person’s
moral worth. But the same is true of most of what
comes under the label “merit.” The tools you need for
getting ahead in a meritocratic society—not all of them
but most: talent, education, instilled cultural values
such as ambition—are distributed just as arbitrarily as
skin color. They are fate. The notion that people some-
how “deserve” the advantages of these characteristics
in a way they don’t “deserve” the advantage of their
race is powerful, but illogical.10
It will help to put the argument in outline form.
1. Society may award jobs and positions as it sees
fit as long as individuals have no claim to these
positions.
2. To have a claim to something means that one has
earned it or deserves it.
3. But no one has earned or deserves his intelligence,
talent, education or cultural values which produce
superior qualifications.
4. If a person does not deserve what produces some-
thing, he does not deserve its products.
5. Therefore better qualified people do not deserve
their qualifications.
6. Therefore, society may override their qualifications
in awarding jobs and positions as it sees fit (for
social utility or to compensate for previous wrongs).
So it is permissible if a minimally qualified black or
woman is admitted to law or medical school ahead
of a white male with excellent credentials or if a less

522 Á PART 4: ETHiCAl issuEs
At the end of his essay supporting Affirmative
Action, Albert Mosley points out that other groups
besides Blacks have been benefitted by AA, “women,
the disabled, the elderly.”11 He’s correct in including
the elderly, for through powerful lobbies, such as the
AARP, they do get special benefits, including Medi-
care, and may sue on the grounds of being discrimi-
nated against due to Agism, prejudice against older
people. Might this not be a reason to reconsider Affir-
mative Action? Consider the sheer rough percentages
of those who qualify for AA programs.
GROUP PERCENTAGE in population
1. Women 52%
2. Blacks 12%
3. Hispanics 9%
4. Native Americans 2%
5. Asians 4%
6. Physically & Mentally 10%
Disabled
7. Welfare recipients 6%
8. The Elderly 25% (est. Adults over 60)
9. Italians 3% (in New York City)
Totals 123%
The elderly can sue on the grounds of Agism, receive
entitlements in terms of Social Security and Medicare,
and have the AARP lobbying on their behalf. Recently,
it has been proposed that homosexuals be included
in oppressed groups deserving Affirmative Action.
At Northeastern University in 1996 the faculty gov-
erning body voted to grant homosexuals Affirmative
Action status at this university. How many more per-
centage points would this add? Several authors have
advocated putting all poor people on the list. And if
we took handicaps seriously would we not add ugly
people, obese people, and, especially, short people,
for which there is ample evidence of discrimination?
How about left- handed people (about 9% of the popu-
lation)—they can’t play short- stop or third base and
have to put up with a right- handedly biased world.
The only group not on the list is that of White males.
Are they, especially healthy, middle class young White
turn to the arguments against Affirmative Action to
see whether they fare any better.
II. ARGUMENTS AGAINST AFFIRMATIVE
ACTION
A. Affirmative Action Requires Discrimination
Against a Different Group
Weak AA weakly discriminates against new minori-
ties, mostly innocent young white males, and Strong
Affirmative Action strongly discriminates against
these new minorities. As I argued in I. C, this discrimi-
nation is unwarranted, since, even if some compen-
sation to blacks were indicated, it would be unfair to
make innocent white males bear the whole brunt of
the payments. Recently I had this experience. I knew
a brilliant philosopher, with outstanding publications
in first level journals, who was having difficulty get-
ting a tenure- track position. For the first time in my
life i offered to make a phone call on his behalf to a
university to which he had applied. When I got the
Chair of the Search Committee, he offered that the
committee was under instructions from the Adminis-
tration to hire a woman or a Black. They had one of
each on their short- list, so they weren’t even consider-
ing the applications of White males. At my urging he
retrieved my friend’s file, and said, “This fellow looks
far superior to the two candidates we’re interview-
ing, but there’s nothing I can do about it.” Cases like
this come to my attention regularly. In fact, it is poor
white youth who become the new pariahs on the job
market. The children of the wealthy have little trouble
getting into the best private grammar schools and,
on the basis of superior early education, into the best
universities, graduate schools, managerial and pro-
fessional positions. Affirmative Action simply shifts
injustice, setting Blacks, Hispanics, Native Americans,
Asians and women against young white males, espe-
cially ethnic and poor white males. It makes no more
sense to discriminate in favor of a rich Black or female
who had the opportunity of the best family and edu-
cation available against a poor White, then it does to
discriminate in favor of White males against Blacks or
women. It does little to rectify the goal of providing
equal opportunity to all.

CHAPTER 14: RACism, EquAliTy, AnD DisCRiminATion Á 523
Regional HEW13 demanded an explanation of why
there were no women or minority students in the
Graduate Department of Religious Studies. They were
told that a reading knowledge of Hebrew and Greek
was presupposed. Whereupon the representatives
of HEW advised orally: ‘Then end those old fash-
ioned programs that require irrelevant languages.
And start up programs on relevant things which
minority group students can study without learning
languages.’”14
Nicholas Capaldi notes that the staff of HEW
itself was one- half women, three- fifths members of
minorities, and one- half black—a clear case of racial
over representation.
In 1972 officials at Stanford University discovered
a proposal for the government to monitor curriculum
in higher education: the “Summary Statement . . . Sex
Discrimination Proposed HEW Regulation to Effectu-
ate Title IX of the Education Amendment of 1972” to
“establish and use internal procedure for reviewing
curricula, designed both to ensure that they do not
reflect discrimination on the basis of sex and to resolve
complaints concerning allegations of such discrimi-
nation, pursuant to procedural standards to be pre-
scribed by the Director of the office of Civil Rights.”
Fortunately, Secretary of HEW Caspar Weinberger dis-
covered the intrusion and assured Stanford University
that he would never approve of it.
Government programs of enforced preferential
treatment tend to appeal to the lowest possible com-
mon denominator. Witness the 1974 HEW Revised
Order No. 14 on Affirmative Action expectations for
preferential hiring: “Neither minorities nor female
employees should be required to possess higher
qualifications than those of the lowest qualified
incumbents.”
Furthermore, no test may be given to candidates
unless it is proved to be relevant to the job.
No standard or criteria which have, by intent or effect,
worked to exclude women or minorities as a class can
be utilized, unless the institution can demonstrate the
necessity of such standard to the performance of the
job in question.
Whenever a validity study is called for . . . the user
should include . . . an investigation of suitable alterna-
males, becoming the new “oppressed class”? Should
we add them to our list?
Respect for persons entails that we treat each per-
sons as an end in him or herself, not simply as a means
to be used for social purposes. What is wrong about
discrimination against Blacks is that it fails to treat
Black people as individuals, judging them instead by
their skin color, not their merit. What is wrong about
discrimination against women is that it fails to treat
them as individuals, judging them by their gender,
not their merit. What is equally wrong about Affirma-
tive Action is that it fails to treat White males with dig-
nity as individuals, judging them by both their race and
gender, instead of their merit. Current Strong Affirmative
Action is both racist and sexist.
B. Affirmative Action Encourages Mediocrity and
Incompetence
A few years ago Rev. Jesse Jackson joined protesters
at Harvard Law School in demanding that the Law
School faculty hire black women. Jackson dismissed
Dean of the Law School, Robert C. Clark’s standard of
choosing the best qualified person for the job as “Cul-
tural anemia.” “We cannot just define who is qualified
in the most narrow vertical academic terms,” he said
“Most people in the world are yellow, brown, black,
poor, non- Christian and don’t speak English, and
they can’t wait for some white males with archaic rules
to appraise them.”12 It might be noted that if Jackson
is correct about the depth of cultural decadence at Har-
vard, blacks might be well advised to form and support
their own more vital law schools and leave places like
Harvard to their archaism.
At several universities, the administration has
forced departments to hire members of minorities
even when far superior candidates were available.
Shortly after obtaining my PhD in the late 70s I was
mistakenly identified as a black philosopher (I had a
civil rights record and was once a black studies major)
and was flown to a major university, only to be rejected
for a more qualified candidate when it discovered that
I was white.
Stories of the bad effects of Affirmative Action
abound. The philosopher Sidney Hook writes that
“At one Ivy League university, representatives of the

524 Á PART 4: ETHiCAl issuEs
the best qualified candidate to win the political
office, the most brilliant and competent scientist to
be chosen for the most challenging research project,
the best qualified pilots to become commercial pilots,
only the best soldiers to become generals. Only when
little is at stake do we weaken the standards and con-
tent our- selves with sufficiency (rather than excel-
lence)—there are plenty of jobs where “sufficiency”
rather than excellence is required. Perhaps we have
even come to feel that medicine or law or university
professorships are so routine that they can be per-
formed by minimally qualified people—in which
case AA has a place.
Note! no one is calling for quotas or proportional
representation of underutilized groups in the National
Basketball Association where blacks make up 80% of
the players. But, surely, if merit and merit alone reigns
in sports, should it not be valued at least as much in
education and industry?
The case for meritocracy has two pillars. One
pillar is a deontological argument which holds that
we ought to treat people as ends and not merely
means. By giving people what they deserve as indi-
viduals, rather than as members of groups we show
respect for their inherent worth. If you and I take a
test, and you get 95% of the answers correct, and I
only get 50% correct, it would be unfair to you for
both of us to receive the same grade, say an A, and
even more unfair to give me a higher grade A+ than
your B+. Although I have heard cases where teach-
ers have been instructed to “race norm” in grading
(giving Blacks and Hispanics higher grades for the
same numerical scores), most proponents of AA stop
short of advocating such a practice. But, I would ask
them, what’s really the difference between taking
the overall average of a White and a Black and “race
norming” it? If teachers shouldn’t do it, why should
administrators?
The second pillar for meritocracy is utilitarian.
In the end, we will be better off by honoring excel-
lence. We want the best leaders, teachers, policemen,
physicians, generals, lawyers, and airplane pilots that
we can possibly produce in society. So our program
should be to promote equal opportunity, as much as is
tive methods of using the selection procedure which
have as little adverse impact as possible . . . Whenever
the user is shown an alternative selection procedure
with evidence of less adverse impact and substantial
evidence of validity for the same job in similar circum-
stances, the user should investigate it to determine the
appropriateness of using or validating it in accord with
these guidelines.15
At the same time Americans are wondering why stan-
dards in our country are falling and the Japanese and
Koreans are getting ahead. Affirmative Action with its
twin idols, Sufficiency of Qualification and Diversity,
is the enemy of excellence. I will develop this thought
in the next section.
C. An Argument from the Principle of Merit
Traditionally, we have believed that the highest
positions in society should be awarded to those who
are best qualified. The Koran states that “A ruler who
appoints any man to an office, when there is in his
dominion another man better qualified for it, sins
against God and against the State.” Rewarding excel-
lence both seems just to the individuals in the compe-
tition and makes for efficiency. Note that one of the
most successful acts of racial integration, the Brooklyn
Dodgers’ recruitment of Jackie Robinson in the late
40s, was done in just this way, according to merit. If
Robinson had been brought into the major league as a
mediocre player or had batted .200 he would have been
scorned and sent back to the minors where he belonged.
As mentioned earlier, merit is not an absolute
value, but there are strong prima facie reasons for
awarding positions on that basis, and it should enjoy a
weighty presumption in our social practices.
In a celebrated article Ronald Dworkin says that
“Bakke had no case” because society did not owe
Bakke anything. That may be, but then why does it
owe anyone anything? Dworkin puts the matter in
Utility terms, but if that is the case, society may owe
Bakke a place at the University of California/Davis,
for it seems a reasonable rule- utilitarian principle
that achievement should be awarded in society. We
generally want the best to have the best positions,

CHAPTER 14: RACism, EquAliTy, AnD DisCRiminATion Á 525
Martin Luther said that humanity is like a man
mounting a horse who always tends to fall off on the
other side of the horse. This seems to be the case with
Affirmative Action. Attempting to redress the discrimi-
natory iniquities of our history, our well- intentioned
social engineers now engage in new forms of discrimi-
natory iniquity and thereby think that they have suc-
cessfully mounted the horse of racial harmony. They
have only fallen off on the other side of the issue.
NOTES
1. This argument is related to The Need of Breaking Stereotypes
Argument. Society may simply need to know that there are
talented Blacks and women, so that it does not automatically
assign them lesser respect or status. The right response is that
hiring less qualified people is neither fair to those better quali-
fied who are passed over nor an effective way to remove inaccu-
rate stereotypes. If high competence is accepted as the criterion
for hiring, then it is unjust to override it for purposes of social
engineering. Furthermore, if Blacks and women are known to
hold high positions simply because of reverse discrimination,
they will still lack the respect due to those of their rank.
2. Merit sometimes may be justifiably overridden by need,
as when parents choose to spend extra earnings on special
education for their disabled child rather than for their gifted
child. Sometimes we may override merit for utilitarian pur-
poses. E.g., suppose you are the best short stop on a baseball
team but are also the best catcher. You’d rather play short
stop, but the manager decides to put you at catcher because,
while your friend can do an adequate job at short, no one else
is adequate at catcher. It’s permissible for you to be assigned
the job of catcher. Probably, some expression of appreciation
would be due you.
3. Judith Jarvis Thomson, “Preferential Hiring,” in Marshall
Cohen, Thomas Nagel and Thomas Scanlon, eds., Equality
and Preferential Treatment (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1977).
4. Stephen Kershnar pointed this out in written comments
(December 22, 1997).
5. Sterling Harwood, “The Justice of Affirmative Action,” in
Yearger Hudson and C. Peden, eds., The Bill of Rights: Bicenten-
nial Reflections (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen).
6. Albert G. Mosley in his and Nicholas Capaldi’s Affirmative
Action: Social Justice or Unfair Preference? (Rowman and Little-
field, 1996), p. 28.
feasible in a free market economy, and reward people
according to their individual merit.
CONCLUSION
Let me sum up my discussion. The goal of the Civil
Rights movement and of moral people everywhere
has been justice for all, including equal opportunity.
The question is: how best to get there. Civil Rights
legislation removed the unjust legal barriers, open-
ing the way towards equal opportunity, but it did
not tackle the deeper causes that produce differential
results. Weak Affirmative Action aims at encouraging
minorities to strive for excellence in all areas of life,
without unduly jeopardizing the rights of majori-
ties. The problem of Weak Affirmative Action is that
it easily slides into Strong Affirmative Action where
quotas, goals and timetables,” “equal results”—in a
word—reverse discrimination—prevail and are forced
onto groups, thus promoting mediocrity, inefficiency,
and resentment. Furthermore, AA aims at the higher
levels of society—universities and skilled jobs, but if
we want to improve our society, the best way to do it is
to concentrate on families, children, early education,
and the like, so all are prepared to avail themselves of
opportunity. Affirmative Action, on the one hand, is
too much, too soon and on the other hand, too little,
too late.
In addition to the arguments I have offered, Affir-
mative Action, rather than unite people of good will
in the common cause of justice, tends to balkanize
us into segregation- thinking. Professor Derrick Bell
of Harvard Law School recently said that the African
American Supreme Court Judge Clarence Thomas, in
his opposition to Affirmative Action “doesn’t think
black.” Does Bell really claim that there is a standard
and proper “Black” (and presumably a White) way of
thinking? Ideologues like Bell, whether radical Blacks
like himself, or Nazis who advocate “think Aryan,”
both represent the same thing: cynicism about ratio-
nal debate, the very antithesis of the quest for impar-
tial truth and justice. People who believe in reason to
resolve our differences will oppose this kind of bal-
kanization of the races.

526 Á PART 4: ETHiCAl issuEs
11. Albert Mosley, op. cit., p. 53.
12. New York Times, May 10, 1990.
13. HEW stands for the Federal Department of “Health, Edu-
cation & Welfare.”
14. Quoted by Nicholas Capaldi, Out of Order: Affirmative
Action and the Crisis of Doctrinaire Liberalism (Buffalo, NY: Pro-
metheus, 1985).
15. Capaldi, op. cit., p. 95
7. Larry Hedges and Amy Nowell, “Sex Differences in Mental
Test Scores, Variability, and Numbers of High- Scoring Indi-
viduals,” Science 269 (July 1995), pp. 41–45.
8. Glen Loury, “‘Getting Involved’: An Appeal for Greater
Community Participation in the Public Schools,” Washington
Post Education Review (August 6, 1995).
9. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Harvard University Press,
1971), p. 104.
10. Michael Kinsley, “Equal Lack of Opportunity,” Harper’s
(June 1983).
From In Defense of Affirmative Action
Tom L. Beauchamp
justifies preferential treatment for the group’s current
members. Critics of group preferential policies hold
that compensating individuals for unfair discrimi-
nation can alone be justified, but it is controversial
whether individuals can be harmed merely by virtue of
a group membership.2
Most who support affirmative action and those
who oppose it both seek the best means to the same
end: a color- blind, sex- blind society. Their goals do not
differ. Nor do they entirely disagree over the means. If
a color- blind, sex- blind society can be achieved and
maintained by legal guarantees of equal opportunities
to all, both parties agree that social policies should be
restricted to this means. Here agreement ends. Those
who support affirmative action do not believe such
guarantees can be fairly and efficiently achieved other
than by affirmative action policies. Those who seek
an end to affirmative action believe that the goals can
be achieved in other ways and that affirmative action
policies themselves unjustifiably discriminate. I will
be supporting affirmative action policies against this
counterposition.
TWO PIVOTAL CONCEPTS
Like virtually all problems in practical ethics, the
meaning of a few central terms can powerfully
affect one’s moral viewpoint. The terms “affirmative
Affirmative action policies have had their strongest
appeal when discrimination that barred groups from
desirable institutions persisted although forbidden
by law. Policies that establish target goals, timeta-
bles, and quotas were initiated to ensure more equi-
table opportunities by counterbalancing apparently
intractable prejudice and systemic favoritism. The
policies that were initiated with such lofty ambitions
are now commonly criticized on grounds that they
establish quotas that unjustifiably elevate the oppor-
tunities of members of targeted groups, discriminate
against equally qualified or even more qualified
members of majorities, and perpetuate racial and
sexual paternalism.
Affirmative action policies favoring groups have
been controversial since former United States President
Lyndon Johnson’s 1965 executive order that required
federal contractors to develop affirmative action poli-
cies.1 Everyone now agrees that individuals who have
been injured by past discrimination should be made
whole for the inquiry, but it remains controversial
whether and how past discrimination against groups
Tom L. Beauchamp, reprinted by permission from Springer
Nature: Journal of Ethics, “In Defense of Affirmative Action,”
Vol. 2, No. 2 (1998), pp. 143–158. Copyright © 1998, Kluwer
Academic Publishers.

CHAPTER 14: RACism, EquAliTy, AnD DisCRiminATion Á 527
jobs in the Defense Department to be filled by women
and minorities,”5 he was using a quota. Likewise, uni-
versities sometimes use quotas when the subtleties of
faculty and staff hiring and promotion and student
admission make no mention of them. For example, if
the chair of a department says the department should
hire 2 to 3 women in the next 5 available positions,
the formula constitutes a quota, or at least a numerical
target.
Reasons typically offered in defense of targeted
affirmative action, with or without quotas, are the fol-
lowing: “We have many women students who need
and do not have an ample number of role models and
mentors.” “The provost has offered a group of special
fellowships to bring more minorities to the univer-
sity.” “More diversity is much needed in this depart-
ment.” “The goals and mission of this university
strongly suggest a need for increased representation of
women and minorities.” In pursuing these objectives,
members of departments and committees commonly
act in ways that suggest they willingly endorse what
either is or has a strong family resemblance to a spe-
cific target.
THE PREVALENCE OF DISCRIMINATION AS
THE RATIONALE FOR AFFIRMATIVE ACTION
The moral problem of affirmative action is primarily
whether specific targets, including quotas in the broad
sense, can legitimately be used. To support affirmative
action as a weapon against discrimination is not nec-
essarily to endorse it in all institutions. Racial, sexual,
and religious forms of discrimination affecting admis-
sion, hiring, and promotion have been substantially
reduced in various sectors of US society, and perhaps
even completely eliminated in some. The problem is
that in other social sectors it is common to encounter
discrimination in favor of a favored group or discrimi-
nation against disliked, distrusted, unattractive, or
neglected groups. The pervasive attitudes underlying
these phenomena are the most important background
conditions of the debate over affirmative action, and
we need to understand these pockets of discrimina-
tion in order to appreciate the attractions of affirma-
tive action.
action” and “quotas” have proved particularly trou-
blesome, because they have been defined in both
minimal and maximal ways. The original meaning
of “affirmative action” was minimalist. It referred
to plans to safeguard equal opportunity, to pro-
tect against discrimination, to advertise positions
openly, and to create scholarship programs to ensure
recruitment from specific groups.3 Few now oppose
open advertisement and the like, and if this were all
that were meant by “affirmative action,” few would
oppose it. However, “affirmative action” has assumed
new and expanded meanings. Today it is typically
associated with quotas and preferential policies that
target specific groups, especially women or minority
members.
I will not favor either the minimalist or the maxi-
malist sense of “affirmative action.” I will use the
term to refer to positive steps taken to hire persons
from groups previously and presently discriminated
against, leaving open what will count as a “positive
step” to remove discrimination. I thus adopt a broad
meaning.
A number of controversies have also centered on
the language of quotas.4 A “quota,” as I use the term,
does not mean that fixed numbers of a group must
be admitted, hired, or promoted— even to the point
of including less qualified persons if they are the
only available members of a targeted groups. Quotas
are target numbers or percentages that an employer,
admissions office, recruitment committee, and the
like sincerely attempt to meet. Less qualified persons
are occasionally hired or promoted under a policy
that incorporates quotas; but it is no part of affirma-
tive action or the meaning of “quotas” to hire persons
who lack basic qualifications. Quotas are numerically
expressible goals pursued in good faith and with due
diligence.
The language of “quotas” can be toned down by
speaking of hopes, objectives, and guidelines; but
cosmetic changes of wording only thinly obscure a
policy established to recruit from groups in which
the goals are made explicitly by numbers. Thus, when
John Sununu— presumably a strong opponent of
quotas— told Secretary of Defense Richard Cheney
that he “wanted 30 percent of the remaining 42 top

528 Á PART 4: ETHiCAl issuEs
Jobs
A similar pattern is found in employment. In 1985
the Grier Partnership and the Urban League produced
independent studies that reveal striking disparities
in the employment levels of college- trained African-
Americans and whites in Washington, DC, one of
the best markets for African- Americans. Both studies
found that college- trained African- Americans have
much more difficulty than their white counterparts in
securing employment. Both cite discrimination as the
major underlying factor.8
In a 1991 study by the Urban Institute, employ-
ment practices in Washington, DC and Chicago were
examined. Equally qualified, identically dressed white
and African- American applicants for jobs were used
to test for basis in the job market, as presented by
newspaper- advertised positions. Whites and African-
Americans were matched identically for speech pat-
terns, age, work experience, personal characteristics,
and physical build. Investigators found repeated
discrimination against African- American male appli-
cants. The higher the position, the higher the level
of discrimination. The white men received job offers
three times more often than the equally qualified
African- Americans who interviewed for the same posi-
tion. The authors of the study concluded that discrim-
ination against African- American men is “widespread
and entrenched.”9
These statistics and empirical studies help frame
racial discrimination in the US. Anyone who believes
that only a narrow slice of surface discrimination exists
will be unlikely to agree with what I have been and will
be arguing, at least if my proposals entail strong affir-
mative action measures. By contrast, one who believes
that discrimination is securely and almost invisibly
entrenched in many sectors of society will be more
likely to endorse or at least tolerate resolute affirma-
tive action policies.
Although racism and sexism are commonly
envisioned as intentional forms of favoritism and
exclusion, intent to discriminate is not a necessary
condition of discrimination. Institutional networks
can unintentionally hold back or exclude persons.
Hiring by personal friendships and word of mouth
Statistics
Statistics constituting at least prima facie evidence of
discrimination in society are readily available. These
data indicate that in sizable parts of US society white
males continue to receive the highest entry- level sal-
aries when compared to all other social groups; that
women with similar credentials and experience to
those of men are commonly hired at lower positions
or earn lower starting salaries than men and are pro-
moted at one- half the rate of their male counterparts,
with the consequence that the gap between salaries
and promotion rates is still growing at an increasing
rate; that 70% or more of white- collar positions are
held by women, although they hold only about 10%
of management positions; that three out of seven US
employees occupy white- collar positions, whereas
the ratio is but one of seven of African- Americans;
and, finally, that a significant racial gap in unemploy-
ment statistics is a consistent pattern in the US, with
the gap now greatest for college- educated, African-
American males.6 Whether these statistics demon-
strate invidious discrimination is controversial, but
additional data drawn from empirical studies rein-
force the judgment that racial and sexual discrimina-
tion are reasons for and perhaps the best explanation
of these statistics.
Housing
For example, studies of real estate rentals, housing
sales, and home mortgage lending show a disparity
in rejection rates— for example, loan rejection rates
between white applicants and minority applicants.
Wide disparities exist even after statistics are adjusted
for economic differences; minority applicants are
over 50% more likely to be denied a loan than white
applicants of equivalent economic status. Other
studies indicate that discrimination in sales of houses
is prevalent in the US. Race appears to be as impor-
tant as socioeconomic status in failing to secure both
houses and loans, and studies also show that the
approval rate for African- Americans increase in lend-
ing institutions with an increase in the proportion of
minority employees in that institution.7

CHAPTER 14: RACism, EquAliTy, AnD DisCRiminATion Á 529
manifest imbalance in traditionally segregated job
categories (even if the particular workers drawn from
minorities were not victims of past discrimination).
In Local 28 v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commis-
sion, a minority hiring goal of 29.23 percent had been
established. The Court held that such specific numbers
are justified when dealing with persistent or egregious
discrimination. The Court found that the history of
Local 28 was one of complete “ foot- dragging resis-
tance” to the idea of hiring without discrimination in
their apprenticeship training programs from minor-
ity groups. The Court argued that “affirmative race-
conscious relief” may be the only reasonable means to
the end of assuring equality of employment opportuni-
ties and to eliminate deeply ingrained discriminatory
practices.13
In a 1989 opinion, by contrast, the US Supreme
Court held in City of Richmond v. J. A. Croson that Rich-
mond, Virginia, officials could not require contractors
to set aside 30 percent of their budget for subcontrac-
tors who owned “minority business enterprises.” This
particular plan was not written to remedy the effects
of prior or present discrimination. The Court found
that this way of fixing a percentage based on race, in
the absence of evidence of identified discrimination,
denied citizens an equal opportunity to compete for
subcontracts. Parts of the reasoning in this case were
reaffirmed in the 1995 case of Adarand Constructors Inc.
v. Pena.
Some writers have interpreted Croson, Adarand,
and the 1997 decision of a three- judge panel of the
9th US Circuit Court of Appeals to the effect that
California’s voter- approved ban on affirmative action
(Proposition 209) is constitutional as the dismantling
of affirmative action plans that use numerical goals.
Perhaps this prediction will turn out to be correct, but
the US Supreme Court has consistently adhered to a
balancing strategy that I believe captures the fitting
way to frame issues of affirmative action.14 It allows us
to use race and sex as relevant bases of policies if and
only if it is essential to do so in order to achieve a larger
and justified social purpose.
These reasons for using race and sex in policies
are far distant from the role of these properties in
are common instances, as are seniority systems.
Numerical targets are important remedies for these
camouflaged areas, where it is particularly difficult to
shatter patterns of discrimination and reconfigure the
environment.10
The US Supreme Court has rightly upheld affirma-
tive action programs with numerically expressed hir-
ing formulas when intended to quash the effects of
both intentional and unintentional discrimination.11
The Court has also maintained that such formulas
have sometimes been structured so that they unjus-
tifiably exceed proper limits.12 The particulars of the
cases will determine how we are to balance different
interests and considerations.
THE JUSTIFICATION OF AFFIRMATIVE ACTION
This balancing strategy is warranted. Numerical goals
or quotas are justified if and only if they are necessary
to overcome the discriminatory effects that could not
otherwise be eliminated with reasonable efficiency. It
is the intractable and often deeply hurtful character of
racism and sexism that justified aggressive policies to
remove their damaging effects. The history of affirma-
tive action in the US, though short, is an impressive
history of fulfilling once- failed promises, displacing
disillusion, and protecting the most vulnerable mem-
bers of US society against demeaning abuse. It has
delivered the US from what was little more than a caste
system and a companion of apartheid.
We have learned in the process that numerical for-
mulas are sometimes essential tools, sometimes exces-
sive tools, and sometimes permissible but optional
tools— depending on the subtleties of the case. We can
expect each case to be different, and for this reason we
should be cautious about general pronouncements
regarding the justifiability of numerical formulas— as
well as the merit of merit- based systems and blinded
systems. The better perspective is that until the facts
of particular cases have been carefully assessed, we are
not positioned to support or oppose any particular
affirmative action policy or its abandonment.
The US Supreme Court has allowed these numeri-
cal formulas in plans that are intended to combat a

530 Á PART 4: ETHiCAl issuEs
by affirmative action may be warranted by the promo-
tion of social ideals of equal treatment for groups that
were severely mistreated in the past.
In assessing the disadvantages that might be caused
to members of majorities (primarily white males), we
should remember that there are disadvantages to
other parties that operate in the current system, many
of which will not be affected by affirmative action or
by its absence. For example, just as young white males
may now be paying a penalty for wrongs committed
by older white males (who will likely never be penal-
ized), so the older members of minority groups and
older women who have been most disadvantaged in
the past are the least likely to gain an advantage from
affirmative action policies. Paradoxically, the younger
minority members and women who have suffered
least from discrimination now stand to gain the most
from affirmative action. Despite these unfairnesses,
there is no clear way to remedy them.
Policies of affirmative action may have many
other shortcomings as well. For example, they confer
economic advantages upon some who do not deserve
them and generate court battles, jockeying for favored
position by a multiple array of minorities, a lowering
of admission and work standards in some institutions,
heightened racial hostility, and continued suspicion
that well- placed women and minority group members
received their positions purely on the basis of quotas,
thereby damaging their self- respect and the respect
of their colleagues. Affirmative action is not a perfect
social tool, but it is the best tool yet created as a way of
preventing a recurrence of the far worse imperfections
of our past policies of segregation and exclusion.
JUDGING THE PAST AND THE PRESENT
Looking back at this deplorable history and at the
unprecedented development of affirmative action
policies over the past thirty years in the US, what
moral judgments can we reach about persons who
either initiated these policies or those who failed to
initiate such programs? Can we say that anyone has
engaged in moral wrongdoing in implementing these
policies, or exhibited moral failure in not implement-
ing them? Addressing these questions should help us
better judge the present in light of the past.
invidious discrimination. Racial discrimination and
sexual discrimination typically spring from feelings
of superiority and a sense that other groups deserve
lower social status. Affirmative action entails no such
attitude or intent. Its purpose is to restore to persons
a status they have been unjustifiably denied, to help
them escape stigmatization, and to foster relation-
ships of interconnectedness in society.15
Affirmative action in pockets of the most vicious
and visceral racism will likely be needed for another
generation in the US, after which the US should have
reached its goals of fair opportunity and equal con-
sideration. Once these goals are achieved, affirmative
action will no longer be justified and should be aban-
doned in the US. The goal to be reached at that point
is not proportional representation, which has occa-
sionally been used as a basis for fixing target numbers
in affirmative action policies, but as such is merely a
means to the end of discrimination, not an end to be
pursed for its own sake. The goal is simply fair oppor-
tunity and equal consideration.
* * *
TOLERATING REVERSE DISCRIMINATION
It has often been said that reverse discrimination is
caused by affirmative action policies and that this
discrimination is no better than the racial or sexual
discrimination that affirmative actions allegedly
frustrates.16 Some instances of such discriminatory
exclusion do occur, of course, and compensation or
rectification for an injured party is sometimes the
appropriate response. However, some of these setbacks
to the interests of those excluded by a policy may be
no more objectionable than various burdens produced
by social policies that advantage some members of
society and disadvantage others. Inheritance laws, for
example, favor certain members of society over oth-
ers, whereas policies of eminent domain disadvantage
persons who wish to retain what is legitimately their
property in order to advance the public good. Such
laws and outcomes are warranted by a larger public
benefit and by justice- based considerations that con-
flict with the interests of the disadvantaged parties.
The point is that disadvantages to majorities produced

CHAPTER 14: RACism, EquAliTy, AnD DisCRiminATion Á 531
seniority. This condition applied only to promotions,
not to layoffs and rehiring, where seniority continued
to prevail.
As was inevitable under this arrangement, reverse
discrimination cases emerged. The well known
McAleer case came before Judge Gerhard A. Gesell,
who held in 1976 that McAleer was a faultless
employee who became an innocent victim through an
unfortunate who became an innocent victim through
an unfortunate but justifiable use of the affirmative
action process.18 Judge Gersell ruled that McAleer was
entitled to monetary compensation (as damages), but
not entitled to the promotion to which he thought he
was entitled because the discrimination the Consent
Decree had been designed to eliminate might be
perpetuated if a qualified woman were not given the
promotion.19
This AT&T case history, like many affirmative
action cases, is a story of changed expectations and
changing moral viewpoints. At the core of any frame-
work for the evaluation of such cases is a distinction
between wrongdoing and culpability, which derives
from the need to evaluate the moral quality of actions
by contrast to agents. For example, we might want to
say that AT&T’s hiring practices were wrong and that
many employees were wronged by them, without
judging anyone culpable for the wrongs done.
Virtually everyone is now agreed, including AT&T
officials, that AT&T’s hiring and promotion prac-
tices did involve unjustified discrimination and seri-
ous wrongdoing. Even basic moral principles were
violated— for example, that one ought to treat per-
sons with equal consideration and respect, that racial
and sexual discrimination are impermissible, and the
like. Less clear is whether the agents involved should
be blamed. Several factors place limits on our abil-
ity to make judgments about the blameworthiness
of agents— or at least the fairness of doing so. These
factors include culturally induced moral ignorance, a
changing circumstance in the specification of moral
principles, and indeterminacy in an organization’s
division of labor and designation of responsibility. All
were present to some degree in the AT&T case.
Judgments of exculpation depend, at least to
some extent, on whether proper moral standards were
I will examine these questions through the classic
AT&T affirmative action agreement in the 1970s. The
salient facts of this case are as follows: The US Equal
Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) had
investigated AT&T in the 1960s on grounds of alleged
discriminatory practices in hiring and promotion.
In 1970 the EEOC stated that the firm engaged in
“pervasive, system- wide, and blatantly unlawful dis-
crimination in employment against women, African-
Americans, Spanish- surnamed Americans, and other
minorities.”17 The EEOC argued that the employment
practices of AT&T violated several civil rights laws
and had excluded women from all job classifications
except low paying clerical and operator positions.
AT&T denied all charges and produced a mas-
sive array of statistics about women and minorities
in the workforce. However, these statistics tended to
undermine the corporation’s own case. They showed
that half the company’s 700,000 employees were
female, but that the women were all either secretar-
ies or operators. It became apparent that the company
categorized virtually all of its jobs in terms of men’s
work and women’s work. The federal government was
determined to obliterate this aspect of corporate cul-
ture in the belief that no other strategy would break
the grip of this form of sexism. Eventually AT&T threw
in the towel and entered a Consent Decree, which was
accepted by a Philadelphia court in 1973. This agree-
ment resulted in payments of $15 million in back
wages to 13,000 women and 2,000 minority- group
men and $23 million in raises to 36,000 employees
who had been harmed by previous policies.
Out of this settlement came a companywide
“model affirmative action plan” that radically changed
the character of AT&T hiring and its promotion prac-
tices. The company agreed to create an “employee
profile” in its job classifications to be achieved faster
than would normally occur. It established racial and
gender goals and intermediate targets in 15 job cat-
egories to be met in quarterly increments. The goals
were determined by statistics regarding representative
numbers of workers in the relevant labor market. The
decree required that under conditions of a target fail-
ure, a less qualified (but qualified) person could take
precedence over a more qualified person with greater

532 Á PART 4: ETHiCAl issuEs
McAleer and others were wronged in the implementa-
tion of the policy, it does not follow that the agents
were culpable for their support of the policy.
Today, many corporate programs similar to the
AT&T policy are in place. We can and should ask both
whether persons are wronged by these policies and
whether those who use the policies are culpable. The
answer seems to me the same in the 1990s as it was in
the 1970s: As long as there is persistent, intractable
discrimination in society, the policies will be justified
and the agents nonculpable, even if some persons are
harmed and even wronged by the policies. To say that
we should right wrongs done by the policies is not to
say that we should abandon the policies themselves.
Indeed, I defend a stronger view: Affirmative
action was a noble struggle against a crippling social ill
in the 1960s and 1970s, and those who took part in the
struggle deserve acknowledgement for their courage
and foresight. Those who failed to seize the opportu-
nity to enact affirmative action policies or some func-
tional equivalent such as company- wide enforcement
of equal opportunity are culpable for what, in many
cases, were truly serious moral failures.
There is no reason to believe that, in this respect,
the situation is changed today from the 1970s. Today
persons in corporations, universities, and government
agencies who are aware or should be aware that a high
level of racism or sexism exists are culpable if they fail
to move to counteract its invidious effects by affirma-
tive policies or similarly serious interventions such as
meaningful enforcement of fair opportunity. To say
that we should judge the officers of these institutions
culpable for their moral failures is not to say that there
are no mitigating conditions for their failures, such as
the mixed messages they have received over the past
fifteen years from federal officials and the general cul-
tural climate of moral indifference to the problem. At
the same time, the mitigating conditions are weaker
today than in the 1970s because the excuse of cultur-
ally induced moral ignorance is weaker. In general,
there are now fewer excuses available for not taking an
aggressive posture to combat discrimination than ever
before.
All of this is not to say that we are never culpable
for the way we formulate or implement affirmative
acknowledged in which the events transpired— for
example, in the professional ethics of the period. If
we had possessed clear standards regarding the jus-
tice of hiring and promotion in the 1950s and 1960s,
it would be easier to find AT&T officials culpable. The
absence of such standards is a factor in our reflections
about culpability and exculpation, but need not be
part of our reflection on the wronging that occurred.
The fact of culturally induced moral ignorance
does not by itself entail exculpation or a lack of
accountability for states of ignorance. The issue is the
degree to which persons are accountable for holding
and even perpetuating or disseminating the beliefs
that they hold when an opportunity to remedy or
modify the beliefs exists. If such opportunities are
unavailable, a person may have a valid excuse; but
the greater the opportunity to eliminate ignorance
the less is exculpation appropriate. Persons who per-
mit their culturally induced moral ignorance to persist
through a series of opportunities to correct the beliefs
thereby increase their culpability.
The more persons are obstinate in not facing
issues, and the more they fail to perceive the plight
of other persons who may be negatively affected by
their failure to act, the more likely are we to find their
actions or inactions inexcusable. No doubt culturally
induced moral ignorance was a mitigating factor in
the 1960s and early 1970s, but I believe US history also
shows that it was mixed with a resolute failure to face
moral problems when it was widely appreciated that
they were serious problems and were being faced by
other institutions.
The central issue for my purposes is not whether
discriminatory attitudes should be judged harshly
in the pre- affirmative action situation at AT&T, but
whether the affirmative action policy that was adopted
itself involved wrongdoing or constituted, then or
now, an activity for which we would blame persons
who establish such policies. I do not see how agents
could be blamed for maintaining and enforcing this
program, despite its toughness. Given AT&T’s history
as well as the desperate situation of discrimination in
US society, under what conditions could agents be
culpable even if McAleer- type cases of reverse discrim-
ination occasionally resulted? Even if we assume that

CHAPTER 14: RACism, EquAliTy, AnD DisCRiminATion Á 533
CONCLUSION
During the course of the last thirty years, the wide-
spread acceptance of racial segregation and sexual
dominance in the US has surrendered to a more polite
culture that accepts racial integration and sexual
equality. This discernible change of attitude and insti-
tutional policy has led to an imposing public opposi-
tion to preferential treatment on the basis of race and
sex in general. In this climate what should happen to
affirmative action?
As long as our choices are formulated in terms
of the false dilemma of either special preference for
groups or individual merit, affirmative action is virtu-
ally certain to be overthrown. US citizens are now wary
and weary of all forms of group preference, other than
the liberty to choose one’s preferred groups. I would
be pleased to witness the defeat of affirmative action
were the choice the simple one of group preference or
individual merit. But it is not. Despite the vast changes
of attitudes in thirty years of US culture, the underly-
ing realities are naggingly familiar. Perhaps in another
thirty years we can rid ourselves of the perils of affir-
mative action. But at present the public good and our
sense of ourselves as a nation will be well served by
retaining what would in other circumstances be odi-
ous policies. They merit preservation as long as we can
say that, on balance, they serve us better than they
disserve us.
NOTES
1. Executive Order 11246. C.F.R. 339 (1964–65).
2. See J. Angelo Corlett, “Racism and Affirmative Action,”
Journal of Social Philosophy 24 (1993), pp. 163–175; and
Cass R. Sunstein, “The Limits of Compensatory Justice,” in
John Chapman (ed.), Nomos XXXIII: Compensatory Justice
(New York: New York University Press, 1991), pp. 281–310.
3. See Thomas Nagel, “A Defense of Affirmative Action,” Tes-
timony before the Subcommittee on the Constitution of the
Senate Judiciary Committee, June 18, 1981; and Louis Poj-
man, “The moral Status of Affirmative Action,” Public Affairs
Quarterly 6 (1992), pp. 181–206.
4. See the analyses in Gertrude Ezorsky, Racism and Justice
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991); and Robert Full-
inwider, The Reverse Discrimination Controversy (Totowa, NJ:
Rowman and Allanheld, 1980).
action policies. One aspect of these policies for which
we likely will be harshly judged in the future is a fail-
ure of truthfulness in publicly disclosing and advertis-
ing the commitments of the policies—for example,
in advertising for new positions.20 Once it has been
determined that a woman or a minority group mem-
ber will most likely be hired, institutions now typi-
cally place advertisements that include lines such as
the following:
Women and minority- group candidates are especially
encouraged to apply. The University of X is an equal
opportunity, affirmative action employer.
Advertisements and public statements rarely con-
tain more information about an institution’s affirma-
tive action objectives, although often more information
might be disclosed that would be of material relevance
to applicants. The following are examples of facts or
objectives that might be disclosed: A department may
have reserved its position for a woman or minority;
the chances may be overwhelming that only a minor-
ity; group member will be hired; the interview team
may have decided in advance that only women will be
interviewed; the advertised position may be the result
of a university policy that offers an explicit incentive
(perhaps a new position) to a department if a minority
representative is appointed, etc. Incompleteness in dis-
closure and advertising sometimes stems from fear of
legal liability, but more often from fear of departmen-
tal embarrassment and harm either to reputation or to
future recruiting efforts.
The greater moral embarrassment, however, is
our ambivalence and weak conceptions of what we
are doing. Many, including academics, fear making
public what they believe to be morally commendable
in their recruiting efforts. There is something deeply
unsatisfactory about a reluctance to disclose one’s real
position. This situation is striking, because the justifi-
cation for the position is presumably that it is a morally
praiseworthy endeavor. Here we have a circumstance
in which the actions taken may not be wrong, but
the agents are culpable for a failure to clearly articu-
late the basis of their actions and to allow those bases
to be openly debated so that their true merits can be
assessed by all affected parties.

534 Á PART 4: ETHiCAl issuEs
1988), pp. A16; John R. Walter, “The Fair Lending Laws and
their Enforcement,” Economic Quarterly 81 (1995), pp. 61–77;
Stanley D. Longhofer, “Discrimination in Mortgage lend-
ing: What have We Learned?” Economic Commentary [Federal
Reserve Bank of Cleveland] (August 15, 1996), pp. 1–4.
8. As reported by Rudolf A. Pyatt, Jr., “Significant Job Studies,”
The Washington Post (April 30, 1985), pp. D1–D2. See also Paul
Burstein, Discrimination, Jobs and Politics (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1985); Bureau of Labor Statistics, Employment and
Earnings (Washington: US Dept. of Labor, Jan. 1989); A Common
Destiny, op. cit., pp. 16–18, 84–88.
9. See Margery Austin Turner, Michael Fix, and Raymond
Struyk, Opportunities Denied, Opportunities Diminished: Dis-
crimination in Hiring (Washington, DC: The Urban Institute,
1991).
10. See Laura Purdy, “Why Do We Need Affirmative Action?”
Journal of Social Philosophy 25 (1994), pp. 133–143; Farrell Bloch,
Antidiscrimination Law and Minority Employment: Recruitment
Practices and Regulatory Constraints (Chicago: University of Chi-
cago Press, 1994); Joseph Sartorelli, “Gay Rights and Affirma-
tive Action” in Gay Ethics, ed. Timothy F. Murphy (New York:
Haworth Press, 1994); Taylor, Affirmative Action at Work.
11. Fullilove v. Klutznick, 448 U.S. 448 (1980); United Steel-
workers v. Weber, 443 U.S. 193 (1979); United States v. Para-
dise, 480 U.S. 149 (1987); Johnson v. Transportation Agency,
480 U.S. 616 (1987); Alexander v. Choate, 469 U.S. 287, at 295.
12. Firefighters v. Stotts, 467 U.S. 561 (1984); City of Richmond
v. J. A. Croson Co., 109 S.Ct. 706 (1989); Adarand Constructors
Inc. v. Federico Pena, 63 LW 4523 (1995); Wygant v. Jackson Bd.
of Education, 476 U.S. 267 (1986); Wards Cove Packing v. Atonio,
490 U.S. 642.
13. In 1964 the New York Commission for Human Rights inves-
tigated the union and concluded that it excluded nonwhites
through an impenetrable barrier of hiring by discriminatory
selection. The state Supreme Court concurred and issued a
“cease and desist” order. The union ignored it. Eventually, in
a 1975 trial, the US District Court found a record “replete with
instances of bad faith” and ordered a “remedial racial goal of
29% nonwhite membership” (based on the percentage of non-
white in the local labor pool). Another court then found that
the union had “consistently and egregiously violated” the law
of the land (Title 7, in particular). In 1982 and 1983 court fines
and civil contempt proceeding were issued. In the early 1980s
virtually nothing had been done to modify the discriminatory
hiring practices after 22 years of struggle.
14. For a very different view, stressing inconsistency, see
Young S. Lee, “Affirmative Action and Judicial Standards of
5. Bob Woodward, The Commanders (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1991), p. 72.
6. Bron Taylor, Affirmative Action at work: Law, Politics, and
Ethics (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1991); Mor-
ley Gunderson, “ Male- Female Wage Differentials and Policy
Responses,“ Journal of Economic Literature 27 (1989), and Mor-
ley Gunderson, “Pay and Employment Equity in the United
States and Canada,” International Journal of Manpower 15
(1994), pp. 26–43; Patricia Gaynor and Garey Durden, “Mea-
suring the Extent of Earnings Discrimination: An Update,”
Applied Economics 27 (1995), pp. 669–767; Marjorie L. Bald-
win and William G. Johnson, “The Employment Effects of
Wage Discrimination Against Black Men,” Industrial & Labor
Relations Review 49 (1996), pp. 302–316; Franklin D. Wilson,
Marta Tienda, and Lawrence Wu, “Race and Unemploy-
ment: Labor Market Experiences of Black and White Men,
1968–1988,” Work & Occupations 22 (1995), pp. 245–270;
National Center for Educational Statistics, Faculty in Higher
Education Institutions, 1988, Contractor Survey Report,, com-
plied Susan H. Russell et al. (Washington: US Dept. of Edu-
cation, 1990), pp. 5–13; Betty M. Vetter, ed., Professional
Women and Minorities: A Manpower Data Resource Service,
8th ed. (Washington: Commission on Science and Technol-
ogy, 1989); (anonymous) “Less Discrimination for women
but Poorer Prospect at Work than Men,” Management Services
40 (1996), p. 6; Cynthia D. Anderson and Donald Tomaskovic-
Devey, “Patriarchal Pressures: An Exploration of Organiza-
tional Processes that Exacerbate and Erode Gender Earnings
Inequality,” Work & Occupations 22 (1995), pp. 328–356;
Thomas J. Bergman and G. E. Martin, “Tests for Compliance
with Phases Plans to Equalize Discriminate Wages,” Journal of
Applied Business Research 11 (1994/1995), pp. 136–143.
7. Brent W. Ambrose, William T. Hughes, Jr., and Patrick
Simmons, “Policy Issues concerning Racial and Ethnic Dif-
ferences in Home Loan Rejection Rates,” Journal of Housing
Research 6 (1995), pp. 115–135; A Common Destiny; Blacks
and American Society, ed. Gerald D. Jaynes and Robin M. Wil-
liams, Jr., Committee on the Status of Black Americans, Com-
mission on Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education,
National Research Council (Washington: NAS Press, 1989),
pp. 12–13, 138–148; Sunwoong Kim, Gregory D. Squire,
“Lender Characteristics and Racial Disparities in Mortgage
Lending,” Journal of Housing Research 6 (1995), pp. 99–113;
Glenn B. Canner and Wayne Passmore, “Home Purchase
Leading in Low- Income Neighborhoods and to Low- Income
Borrowers,” Federal Reserve Bulletin 81 (1995), pp. 71–103;
Constance L. Hays, “Study Says Prejudice in Suburbs Is
Aimed Mostly at Blacks,” The New York Times (November 23,

CHAPTER 14: RACism, EquAliTy, AnD DisCRiminATion Á 535
Hearings on AT&T Revised Tariff Schedule (December 10,
1970), p. 1.
18. McAleer v. American Telephone and Telegraph Company,
416 F. Supp. 435 (1976); “AT&T Denies Job Discrimination
Charges, Claims Firm Is Equal Employment Leader,” The Wall
Street Journal (December 14, 1970), p.6; Richard M. Hodgetts,
“AT&T versus the Equal Employment Opportunity Com-
mission,” in The Business Enterprise: Social Challenge, Social
Response (Philadelphia, W. B. Saunders Company, 1977),
pp. 176–182.
19. According to a representative of the legal staff in AT&T’s
Washington Office (phone conversation on March 10, 1982).
20. See Steven M. Cahn, “Colleges Should be Explicit about
Who Will be Considered for Jobs,” The Chronicle of Higher Edu-
cation (April 5, 1989), p. B3.
Review: A Search for the Elusive Consensus,” Review of Public
Personnel Administration 12 (1991), pp. 47–69.
15. See Robert Ladenson, “Ethics in the American Work-
place,” Business and Professional Ethics Journal 14 (1995),
pp. 17–31; Ezorsky, Racism and Justice: The Case for Affirmative
Action, op. cit.; Thomas E. Hill, Jr., “The Message of Affirma-
tive Action,” Social Philosophy and policy 8 (1991), pp. 108–129;
Jorge L. Garcia, “The Heart of Racism,” Journal of Social Phi-
losophy 27 (1996), pp. 5–46.
16. See Robert Fullinwider, The Reverse Discrimination Con-
troversy, op. cit.; Nicholas Capaldi, Out of Order (Buffalo, NY,
1985); F. R. Lynch, Invisible Victims: White Males and the Crisis
of Affirmative Action (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1989);
Barry R. Gross, eds., Reverse Discrimination (Buffalo: Pro-
metheus Books, 1977).
17. US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, “Peti-
tion to Intervene,” Federal Communications Commission

C H A P T E R 1 5
‘’
Sexual Morality
People generally give one of three answers: (1) sex
is permissible only in a marriage between a man
and a woman; (2) sex is permissible between
informed, consenting adults; and (3) sex is permis-
sible between informed, consenting adults who are
bound by love or commitment.
The first answer is the conventional view:
sex is morally acceptable only between one man
and one woman who are married to each other by
legal authority. Sex involving the unmarried or sex
in adulterous relationships is impermissible— that
is, premarital sex and extramarital sex are wrong.
In a religious strain of the conventional view, some
sex acts performed by married partners— acts that
are incompatible with procreation— are also pro-
hibited. These acts include masturbation, oral sex,
anal sex, and sex using contraceptives.
The conventional attitude has been championed
by Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, and has been
vigorously defended in the natural law teachings of
the Roman Catholic Church. For a long time it was
the dominant view of sexual ethics in the West, but
since the 1960s its influence has faded. In a 2014
public opinion poll, 66 percent of respondents said
they believe it morally acceptable for a man and
woman to have sex before marriage.1 And whatever
people say they believe about the subject, their actual
behavior is a far cry from the conventional standard.
Research shows that sex before marriage is almost
universal among Americans. By age forty- four, 95
percent have had premarital sexual relations.2
The second answer is the liberal view (not
to be confused with the political outlook with the
same name). Directly counter to the conventional
Sex has probably always been controversial, a vola-
tile subject that triggers intense emotions, social
angst, and legal and religious sanctions. Fortu-
nately, it has also attracted the interest of moral phi-
losophers who have tried to shed light on its ethical
uncertainties. Typically, the moral issues involved
are of two kinds: (1) those that focus on the moral-
ity of specific types of sexual acts and the context of
those acts, and (2) those that concern an individual’s
free consent to such acts. Regarding the first group
of issues, many people commend or condemn oral
sex, anal sex, masturbation, homosexual sex, group
sex, pre marital sex, promiscuous sex, transgender-
ism, prostitution, contraception, pornography, and
whatever is labeled “sexual perversion.” The sec-
ond group of issues involve consent to sexual acts
and violations of consent, or sexual assault, now a
source of excruciating and passionate conflicts on
college and university campuses. Transgender per-
sons do not fit easily into either group, since to some
people, their very existence is a moral issue.
Unfortunately, people’s positions on these ques-
tions usually have more to do with their upbring-
ing, religious traditions, or cultural background
than with plausible moral arguments. So let’s see
what critical thinking can tell us about the ethics
of sexuality.
ISSUE FILE: BACKGROUND
Sexual Behavior
The central question in the morality of sexual
behavior is, What kind of sexual behavior is mor-
ally permissible, and under what circumstances?
536

CHAPTER 15: SExuAl MoRAliTy Á 537
love, affection, or mutual caring; for others it’s a
commitment to sustaining the relationship. Pro-
vided that the necessary element is present, both
premarital and extramarital sex could be per-
mitted, but promiscuous sex would probably be
disallowed.
As you would expect, the conventionalist and
the liberal take opposing views on the rightness of
homosexuality (sexual relations between people
of the same sex). The conventionalist denounces it
as abnormal, unnatural, harmful, or dangerous. It
is always and everywhere wrong. The liberal sees
no morally relevant difference between hetero-
sexual and homosexual sex. The behavior is mor-
ally permissible if it conforms to legitimate moral
standards and involves consenting adults.
stance, it says that as long as basic moral stan-
dards are respected (for example, no one is harmed
or coerced), any sexual activity engaged in by
informed, consenting adults is permissible. Pro-
vided that people adhere to the relevant moral
principles, all kinds of sexual behavior condemned
by the conventionalist would be morally accept-
able, including premarital sex, extramarital sex,
group sex, masturbation, and homosexuality.
The third answer is the moderate view,
which says that sex is permissible, whether in
marriage or not, if the consenting partners have a
serious emotional connection. Moral sex does not
require marriage, but it does entail more than just
the informed, freely given consent of the people
involved. For some, this needed connection is
’
• By age 20, 77 percent of adults have had sex, and
75 percent have had premarital sex.
• By age 44, 94 percent of women and 96 percent
of men have had premarital sex.
• Among adults aged 25–44, 98 percent of women
and 97 percent of men have had vaginal inter-
course; 89 percent of women and 90 percent of
men have had oral sex with an opposite-sex part-
ner; and 36 percent of women and 44 percent
of men have had anal sex with an opposite-sex
partner.
• Half or more of women ages 18 to 39 report giv-
ing or receiving oral sex in the past 90 days.
• The sexual repertoires of U.S. adults vary dramat-
ically, with more than 40 combinations of sexual
activity described at adults’ most recent sexual
event. Adult men and women rarely engage in
just one sex act when they have sex.
• 46 percent of high school students report hav-
ing sexual intercourse; 14 percent report sexual
intercourse with four or more persons.
• Among teenagers and young adults (age 15–21),
11 percent of women and 4 percent of men
have reported a same- sex sexual experience.
• On average, men experience first intercourse at
16.9 years; women at 17.4.
VITAL STATS: Sexual Behavior
Statistic from CBS/New York Times Poll, January 11–15,
2009, N = 1,112 adults nationwide, MoE ± 3; The Alan
Guttmacher Institute, published and unpublished
data, 2002, 2011, www.guttmacher.org (May 3, 2012);
Lawrence B. Finer, “Trends in Premarital Sex in the
United States, 1954–2003,” Public Health Reports,
122 ( January– February 2007), www.publichealthre-
ports.org/issueopen.cfm?articleID=1784 (February 16,
2015); National Health Statistics Reports, “Sexual
Behavior, Sexual Attraction, and Sexual Identity in
the United States (2006–2008),” number 36, March 3,
2011; Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,
“Trends in the Prevalence of Sexual Behaviors,”
National YRBS, 1991–2009; compiled data from The
Kinsey Institute.

http://www.guttmacher.org

http://www.publichealthre-ports.org/issueopen.cfm?articleID=1784

538 Á PART 4: ETHiCAl iSSuES
This level of violence against women has engen-
dered both moral indignation and fervent action.
As the author and sociologist Alison E. Hatch says,
Sexual assault on college campuses is not a new phe-
nomenon. And unfortunately, statistics indicate it
happens with alarming frequency. The privilege of
attending an institution of higher learning should
not, but regrettably does, come with a 1 in 5 chance
a woman, or 1 in 20 chance a man, will be sexually
assaulted while in pursuit of a degree. Naturally, in
light of such statistics, many people are outraged.
Contemporary student activists, taking a page out
of history from antirape activists in the 1970[s] and
1980s, are fighting for change. They are educating
others on the reality of campus sexual assault and
rape culture, they are fighting for their schools to
be held accountable for their all- too- often poor
treatment of survivors, and they are fighting for
their schools to take sexual assault seriously and
hold perpetrators responsible for their actions.
Some contemporary politicians have entered
the dialogue, fighting for tougher legislation and
demanding that schools cease to turn a blind eye to
the assaults occurring on their campuses.4
There is also a growing awareness that sexual
assault can have serious psychological and physical
affects. In addition to physical injuries caused by
forcible rape, sexual assault can lead to PTSD (post-
traumatic strees disorder), depression, and thoughts
of suicide. Incapacitated rape— rape while the victim
is unconscious or intoxicated— can induce the same
kind of psychological harm.
Part of the difficulty of grappling with this topic
is that the terms sexual assault and rape are fre-
quently misunderstood, and sometimes equated.
They are distinct. Rape is the penetration of the
vagina or anus with any body part or object, or
the penetration of the mouth by the sex organ
of another person, without the consent (verbal
or nonverbal) of the victim. Legally and morally,
consent cannot be given when the victim is forced,
harmed, threatened, or tricked; neither can con-
sent be assumed when the victim is silent, uncon-
scious, drunk, drugged, underage, or mentally or
All these diverse views are related to issues
involving the sale and use of pornography:
sexually explicit images or text meant to cause
sexual excitement or arousal. Many who take a
conventional view of sexual morality are likely to
favor censorship of pornographic material on the
grounds that it encourages the very behavior they
oppose— premarital sex, extramarital sex, and
unacceptable sexual behavior. They may oppose
pornography because they believe it is bad for
people and institutions. Personal and institutional
immorality, lowering of moral standards, decay of
religious values and traditions, the undermining of
personal virtue, the debasement and subordination
of women, increases in crime and social disorder,
psychological damage— these and other ills are said
to be the possible results of producing or using por-
nography. Those who adopt a liberal view of sexual
morality are likely to condone the use of pornogra-
phy (but oppose child pornography and underage
exposure to pornography). They may reject claims
about the harm that pornography causes, pointing
to a lack of supporting evidence for them. Many
who argue against censorship may also appeal to a
principle of individual liberty. They may hold that
the only legitimate reason for limiting liberty is the
prevention of harm to others. We are free to think,
believe, say, desire, and choose as we see fit— as
long as we do not harm our fellow citizens.
Campus Sexual Assault
Sociologists, psychologists, and journalists who
study sexual violence have uncovered an unset-
tling fact that has for years been hidden in plain
sight: sexual assault against college and university
women on campus is shockingly common, and
often responses to it by both government officials
and school administrators have been remarkably
ill- informed, naïve, even callous. A statistic that
has been regularly misunderstood or misused, but
well supported by research is that one in five female
undergraduates will be sexually assaulted while
attending college.3

CHAPTER 15: SExuAl MoRAliTy Á 539
messiness of romantic commitments. One worry is
that hookups naturally seem to involve alcohol, and
alcohol is a risk factor for sexual assault. And some
are concerned that hookup culture dilutes a sense
of personal responsibility for any negative ramifica-
tions of sex and shields perpetrators of assault from
blame for the harm they cause. On the other hand,
campus sexual assaults have been happening for
decades without the help of hookup culture.
Research shows that the perpetrators of sexual
assault are almost all male, whether the gender of
their victims is male or female. As Hatch says,
The vast majority, approximately 90 percent, of
campus sexual assaults are perpetrated by someone
a victim knows. Typically, assailants are boyfriends,
exboyfriends, classmates, acquaintances, cowork-
ers, or friends. For some survivors, knowing their
perpetrator complicates their decisions to report
the assault to officials and likely plays a role in the
overall low report rates. Other possible risk factors
for assailants include men who hold negative atti-
tudes toward women, accept rape myths, consume
violent/degrading pornography, are controlling,
lack empathy, and/or perceive a lack of sanctions
for abusive behavior.7
Aside from the activities of activists and sur-
vivors, the single most powerful influence on
how sexual assault is handled at U.S. colleges and
universities has been Title IX, a federal law that
forbids discrimination based on gender in any
educational institution receiving federal funds. If a
school violates Title IX, it could lose that funding.
Sexual assault is considered a form of discrimina-
tion that interferes with the victim’s equal right
to an education, so Title IX applies. The statute, as
interpreted by the U.S. Department of Education,
requires schools to stop campus sexual assault, pre-
vent future occurrences, adjudicate the competing
claims of supposed victim and assailant, and mete
out justice for both.
Under this system, survivors of sexual assault
who think their school’s response is inadequate or
unjust can file a complaint with the U.S. Department
physically disabled. Sexual intercourse with an
unconscious victim is rape.
Sexual assault is a broader term, which includes
rape as well as nonpenetrative sexual acts such
as attempted rape, forced kissing, and unwanted
groping of sexual parts. Sexual assault, then, is not
a synonym for rape, although some people assume
that it is.
Research has identified many of the factors
associated with college life that increase the likeli-
hood of sexual assault. The journalist Vanessa Grig-
oriadis says that the chief cause is college life itself:
We’re better off focusing on what is largely causing
sexual assault: the number of times that one comes
into contact with acquaintances or, in particular,
what sociologists call “ in- network strangers,” often
at a party or at an off- campus apartment. An in-
network stranger is the friend of a friend from the
next dorm over, someone’s brother visiting for the
weekend, a guy who strikes up a conversation with
you in the library stacks. . . . [A]t college, although
students perceive themselves as being among peers,
they are actually surrounded by strangers. The risk
is college itself, as defined in the popular imagi-
nation, those heavenly expanses of pretty quads,
homecoming games, and rowdy frats.5
One part of college life that is strongly linked to
sexual assault is partying. As Grigoriadis explains,
A small cohort of students used to spend their col-
lege years in a YOLO haze; sociologists now think
many undergrads do so. Given this environment,
the term acquaintance rape, which replaced date rape
in colloquial language long ago— date rape sounded
too romantic— has been shifted to the side by some
experts by another, more specific phrase: party rape.
This means the assault comes after a social, sexual-
ized atmosphere, even if it doesn’t happen between
a girl and a guy she likes.6
Some observers think that a lot of the blame
for the sexual assault phenomenon should be laid
on campus hookup culture. Today’s college stu-
dents seldom have traditional dates as their parents
did; instead, they hookup— they have no- strings-
attached sexual encounters disconnected from the

540 Á PART 4: ETHiCAl iSSuES
Moral questions surface at every turn in these
cases, but mostly concern (1) whether and how
justice is served after a sexual assault occurs and
(2) whether the requirement of consent is met in
any kind of sexual encounter. The first concern
focuses on how the college or university handles
an allegation of assault and how it treats the per-
son claiming assault as well as the accused. One
flash point here is how the evidence for assault
is weighed, a question that often arises in an
atmosphere in which complainants demand to
be believed and defendants charge that proce-
dures are biased against them (see the box Critical
Thought: Proving Sexual Assault.)
The second concern is crucial because without
clear consent by both individuals, a hookup is, by
definition, sexual assault. The requirement of con-
sent is that in sexual activity, mutual consent (per-
mission to engage in sex) must be clear and freely
granted (without coercion, violence, or threats) by
of Education’s Office of Civil Rights (OCR), which
then must investigate the school’s handling of the
allegations. An alternative is to sue their school
under Title IX.
But there is considerable skepticism among
survivors and activists about the ability of colleges
and universities to deal effectively with charges of
sexual assault. As Hatch says,
Many campus sexual assault survivors believe that
their college or university failed to take their sexual
assault seriously. Survivors have reported all kinds
of institutional mismanagement, at a range of dif-
ferent colleges and universities across the nation,
including experiencing the following from campus
officials: callousness, disbelief, defamation, retri-
bution for reporting, failure to provide support and
protection, failure to hold perpetrators responsible,
and efforts to cover up allegations. . . .
The existing research on school responses largely
supports the criticisms that universities and col-
leges are not holding perpetrators accountable.8
’
Sexual assault is maddeningly difficult to prove. Most
campus sexual assaults are not reported; when they
are, few of the accused are judged guilty (respon-
sible); and of the few judged guilty, even fewer
are ever punished. A victim’s suffering is often com-
pounded because she believes she has been denied
justice. But many of the accused make the same
claim; they, too, think they have been treated
unjustly. They believe that at least part of this injus-
tice stems from the rules of evidence that the OCR
has required schools to follow. The rules are based
on a “preponderance of evidence” standard. By
this criterion, a school hearing or panel can find the
accused responsible even if it is only slightly more
likely than not that he has committed a wrongful
act— that is, a likelihood of only 50.1 percent. The
alternative standard, one used in many court cases
and formerly at some schools, is the “clear and
con vincing” rule, which requires a much higher
likelihood (perhaps as high as 70 percent) that the
accused did in fact commit sexual assault. Critics
argue that the preponderance standard introduces
con siderable doubt about the verdict and den-
ies the accused a fair and just hearing. Many victims
believe that the higher standard would allow only
a tiny percentage of guilty verdicts. (Recently, the
Department of Education has sought to weaken the
requirement to use the preponderance standard.)
Which standard of evidence is more just in
campus sexual assault cases? Why? Does the pre-
ponderance of evidence standard presume that
false allegations are rare? Does the fact that sexual
assault is hard to prove justify the use of the pre-
ponderance standard?
CRITICAL THOUGHT: Proving Sexual Assault

CHAPTER 15: SExuAl MoRAliTy Á 541
forbidden. Sexual intercourse between a man and
a woman is the supreme act of procreation, and
marriage provides the necessary stable context to
nurture the fruits of procreation— children. Thus,
only sex between a man and a woman joined by
marriage can be morally legitimate. The Vatican
declares:
Experience teaches us that love must find its safe-
guard in the stability of marriage, if sexual inter-
course is truly to respond to the requirements of
its own finality and to those of human dignity.
These requirements call for a conjugal contract
sanctioned and guaranteed by society— a contract
which establishes a state of life of capital impor-
tance both for the exclusive union of the man and
the woman and for the good of their family and of
the human community.9
Premarital sex is, therefore, proscribed, as is
contraception and sexual activity not directed at
procreation, such as oral sex, masturbation, and
homosexuality.
Although Immanuel Kant favored a conven-
tional approach to sex and marriage, some thinkers
have derived from his theory a liberal view of sexual
ethics. Recall Kant’s dictum that we must always
treat people as ends in themselves, never merely
as a means to an end. Thomas Mappes says that to
treat someone merely, or solely, as a means is to
use that person, to treat that person without the
respect that she deserves. He defines using another
person as violating the requirement that interac-
tions with that person be based on her voluntary
informed consent. This implies that “using another
person (in the morally significant sense) can arise
in at least two ways: via coercion, which is antitheti-
cal to voluntary consent, and via deception, which
undermines the informed character of voluntary
consent.”10
According to these guidelines, any sexual activ-
ity in which one person deceives or coerces another
is wrong. But when the principle of voluntary
informed consent is respected, a broad range of
sexual practices is permissible.
individuals capable of giving consent (not drunk,
drugged, or underage, for example).
The long- standing policy on college campuses
regarding consent has been “no means no,” which
says essentially that sexual activity can proceed
until one partner says no. Sexual activity that takes
place beyond that point is assault. The problem
with this standard is that silence alone or lack of
resistance does not necessarily mean yes, and when
people are intimidated, fearful, or threatened, they
may feel that they cannot say no. A better standard,
some experts say, is “yes means yes,” or what is
called “affirmative consent.” In this approach, sex-
ual activity must begin with a crystal- clear verbal
yes or an equally unambiguous nonverbal yes (such
as sounds of pleasure or removal of clothing). This
yes must precede each phase of action, from kissing
to fondling to penetration and beyond. Some inter-
pret affirmative consent as a series of awkward
interruptions and step- by- step formalities, but
others think it can be practiced in a smoother, less
burdensome way. In any case, affirmative consent
is now standard policy in hundreds of schools, and
it has been signed into law in New York, California,
and Illinois.
“Yes means yes,” however, does have critics.
They object to what some regard as its mood- killing
awkwardness, and they worry about the inherent
fuzziness of nonverbal cues; the risk of misinter-
pretation is high. They must admit, though, that
there is more clarity in “yes means yes” than “no
means no.”
MORAL THEORIES
Major moral theories have important implications
for the morality of sexual behavior. As we have seen
(in Chapter 6), natural law theory holds that right
actions are those directed toward the aims revealed
in nature. According to the Roman Catholic account
of the theory, because procreation is foremost
among these aims, actions consistent with it are
permissible and actions incompatible with it are

542 Á PART 4: ETHiCAl iSSuES
Catholic view, for example, is that homosexuality,
masturbation, and oral or anal sex are not aimed
at the prescribed goal of procreation and are there-
fore immoral or perverted. Goldman, however,
rejects this goal- directed (or, as he says, “ means-
end”) analysis of sex. He maintains instead that
sex is not a means to some other goal— sex is just
“plain sex.” Sexual desire, he says, is “desire for
contact with another person’s body and for the
pleasure which such contact produces. . . .”
The desire for physical contact with another person
is a minimal criterion for (normal) sexual desire, but
is both necessary and sufficient to qualify normal
desire as sexual. Of course, we may want to express
other feelings through sexual acts in various con-
texts; but without the desire for the physical con-
tact in and for itself, or when it is sought for other
reasons, activities in which contact is involved are
not predominantly sexual. Furthermore, the desire
for physical contact in itself, without the wish to
express affection or other feelings through it, is
sufficient to render sexual the activity of the agent
which fulfills it.12
Sexual pleasure, he says, is what is most valuable
about sex, and pleasure is intrinsically valuable. So
sex does not need to be assigned some larger goal or
purpose. On this point, Igor Primoratz agrees:
We have no reason to believe that there is only one
morally acceptable aim or purpose of human sexual
experience and behavior, whether prescribed by
nature or enjoined by society…Sex has no special
moral significance; it is morally neutral. No act is
either morally good or bad, right or wrong, merely
in virtue of being a sexual act….Accordingly, there
is neither need nor room for a set of moral consid-
erations that apply only to sex and constitute sexual
morality in the strict sense of the terms. What does
apply to choices, acts, and practices in the field of sex
are the same moral rules and principles that apply in
nonsexual matters.13
Goldman and Primoratz do not affirm that
sexual behavior can never be immoral, only that
it cannot be immoral merely because it is sexual.
If sexual behavior is immoral, it is so because it
A utilitarian is likely to sanction many kinds of
sexual activity on the grounds that they produce
the greatest overall happiness or good for all con-
cerned. Sexual behavior that results in the great-
est net good (the greatest utility) is morally right
regardless of whether it is unconventional, “unnat-
ural,” deviant, marital, extramarital, procreative, or
recreational.
Maximizing utility in sexual matters, how-
ever, requires weighing many possible harms and
benefits. Those involved in a sexual relationship
may risk sexually transmitted disease, pregnancy,
emotional distress (such as humiliation, disap-
pointment, or guilt), disruptions in family life (as a
result of adultery, for example), and social or legal
censure. But they may also experience a great deal
of sexual pleasure, attain a sense of well- being and
psychological satisfaction, and forge strong bonds
of affection and mutual caring.
On the issue of sexual assault, it’s easy to see
how both consequentialist and nonconsequen-
tialist theories would condemn any such act. By
virtually any calculation of utility, sexual vio-
lence would be counted as an instance of seriously
immoral action. And as an action against a person
without his or her consent, sexual assault is, on
almost any nonconsequentialist view, a violation of
the rights of personhood.
MORAL ARGUMENTS
The key difference between the conventional and
the liberal view of sexuality is that the former
insists that sexual behavior has a morally signifi-
cant goal, and the latter assumes that sex has no
goal at all. This, anyway, is the central premise
in an argument for sexual liberalism put forth by
Alan Goldman. He says that several faulty theories
of sexuality are based on the idea that sex’s rightful
goal is procreation, communication, or the expres-
sion of love and that “sex which does not fit one
of these models or fulfill one of these functions is
in some way deviant or incomplete.”11 The Roman

CHAPTER 15: SExuAl MoRAliTy Á 543
implications of homosexuality and naturalness may
be, it is false that homosexuality is immoral because it
does not exist amongst animals.15
For many who denounce homosexuality, unnat-
ural means “out of the norm,” “a deviation from
the usual pattern,” and this unnaturalness is reason
enough to call homosexual behavior immoral. A
common counterargument is that it does not fol-
low from an action’s statistical abnormality that
it is immoral. Many acts are statistically out of
the norm— skydiving, composing operas, eating
snails— but we do not necessarily think them mor-
ally wrong.
While acknowledging the weaknesses of the
foregoing definitions, some conventionalists offer
more sophisticated abnormality arguments. Con-
sider this line of reasoning:
This paper defends the view that homosexuality is
abnormal and hence undesirable— not because it is
immoral or sinful, or because it weakens society or
hampers evolutionary development, but for a purely
mechanical reason. It is a misuse of bodily parts.
Clear empirical sense attaches to the idea of the use
of such bodily parts as genitals, the idea that they
are for something, and consequently to the idea of
their misuse. I argue on grounds involving natural
selection that misuse of bodily parts can with high
probability be connected to unhappiness. . . . I . . .
draw a seemingly evident corollary from my view
that homosexuality is abnormal and likely to lead to
unhappiness.16
The argument here is that homosexuality is
a misuse of a bodily part— specifically, the penis,
which is for injecting sperm into the vagina, not for
the abnormal functions that gay men prefer. This
misuse leads to unhappiness because it frustrates
“an innately rewarding desire.” Society has an
interest in promoting happiness; and since homo-
sexuality makes for unhappiness, society ought to
discourage it by not legalizing it.
A typical rejoinder to this argument is that
evolutionary adaptations, whatever their form,
tell us nothing about how people ought to behave.
violates moral principles or rules that apply to any
other kinds of actions. “Our first conclusion regard-
ing morality and sex,” Goldman says, “is therefore
that no conduct otherwise immoral should be
excused because it is sexual conduct, and nothing
in sex is immoral unless condemned by rules which
apply elsewhere as well.”14
According to Goldman, the views that posit a
proper goal for sex (the means- end analyses) inevi-
tably fall into inconsistency. For example, the sex-
as- procreation theory condemns oral- genital sex
(because it is not a reproductive function) yet fails
to denounce kissing or handholding, which are
also sexual but not reproductive.
As you would expect, those who champion
conventional sexual morality reject “plain sex”
arguments. They hold that sexual encounters have
a deeper, more significant meaning than sexual lib-
erals would admit. Sexual experiences are not just
physical events; they involve the commingling of
persons’ spiritual and moral selves. As such, they
express and affirm moral values, and the right kind
of sex expresses and affirms the right kind of val-
ues (specifically, the conventional values of mutual
commitment through marriage). Sex that is devoid
of these values is morally deficient or perverse.
One of the more contentious— and divisive—
issues in sexual ethics is homosexuality. The most
heated arguments concern whether homosexual
behavior is immoral, and many of these arguments
center around the charge that homosexuality is
unnatural or abnormal.
Some people take unnatural to mean something
like “not commonly done by animals.” If homo-
sexual behavior is not found among animals in
nature, then it is unnatural and, therefore, morally
unacceptable. But biologists and others dispute this
contention. For example:
We know that in species after species, right through
the animal kingdom, students of animal behavior
report unambiguous evidence of homosexual attach-
ments and behavior— in insects, fish, birds, and
lower and higher mammals. . . . Whatever the moral

544 Á PART 4: ETHiCAl iSSuES
and (2) those that concern an individual’s free con-
sent to such acts. Regarding the first kind of issue,
the key question is, What kind of sexual behavior is
morally permissible, and under what circumstances?
The most common answers are: (1) sex is permissible
only in a marriage between a man and a woman (the
conventional view); (2) sex is permissible between
informed, consenting adults (the liberal view); and
(3) sex is permissible between informed, consenting
adults who are bound by love or commitment (the
moderate view).
Natural law theory offers a conventional account
of sexual morality, exemplified by Roman Catholic
teachings on the subject. Premarital and extramarital
sex are forbidden, as well as contraception, oral and
anal sex, masturbation, and homosexuality. A liberal
view of sexual ethics can be derived from Kantian
theory; this view says that any sexual activity in which
one person deceives or coerces another is wrong, but
when the principle of voluntary informed consent is
respected, a broad range of sexual practices is permis-
sible. Utilitarianism is likely to endorse many kinds
of sexual activity on the grounds that they maximize
utility.
Some philosophers reject the idea that sex’s right-
ful goal is procreation, communication, or the expres-
sion of love. This goal- oriented view implies that sex
that does not aim at one of these objectives is deviant
or incomplete. But for many sexual liberals, sex does
not have a lofty goal; its value is simply the sexual
pleasure that comes from physical contact. Pleasure is
intrinsically valuable, so a further goal for sexual acts
is not needed.
A common charge against homosexuality is that
it is unnatural or abnormal. People rebut these claims
by trying to show that they are unfounded or con-
fused, or by arguing that abnormality does not imply
immorality.
The second kind of moral issue involves con-
sent to sexual acts and violations of consent, or sex-
ual assault, a topic of major interest on college and
university campuses. Rape is the penetration of the
vagina or anus with any body part or object, or the
penetration of the mouth by the sex organ of another
Just because blind accidents of nature have shaped
humans in a particular way, that doesn’t mean
people are obligated to stay as they are. As one phi-
losopher puts it, “Human beings are completely at
liberty to dispose of their work, their behavior, and
even such things as their anatomy and physiology
as they see fit.”17 Contrary to natural law theory,
knowing how nature is tells us nothing about how
we ought to be.
CHAPTER REVIEW
SUMMARY
The moral issues relating to sexuality are of two
kinds: (1) those that focus on the morality of specific
types of sexual acts and the context of those acts,
’ QUICK REVIEW
conventional view (of sexuality)—The idea that
sex is morally acceptable only between a man
and a woman who are legally married to each
other.
liberal view (of sexuality)—The idea that as long
as basic moral standards are respected, any sex-
ual activity engaged in by informed, consent-
ing adults is permissible.
moderate view (of sexuality)—The idea that sex is
permissible, whether in marriage or not, if the
consenting partners have a serious emotional
connection.
homosexuality— Sexual relations between people
of the same sex.
pornography— Sexually explicit images or text
meant to cause sexual excitement or arousal.

CHAPTER 15: SExuAl MoRAliTy Á 545
9. What is the argument that Goldman offers against
the goal- directed view of sex? (pp. 542–543)
10. What are the arguments for and against the
claim that homosexuality is unnatural and
therefore immoral? (p. 543)
Discussion Questions
1. What is the difference between the
conventional and the moderate view of
sexual behavior? Which approach seems more
plausible?
2. On what grounds would a utilitarian sanction or
condemn particular kinds of sexual activity? Do
you ever use the utilitarian perspective to assess
the morality of sexual acts? If so, how?
3. What is goal- directed sexual activity? Why do
Goldman and Primoratz reject this view of sex?
4. On the conventional view of sex, sexual
behavior has a morally significant goal. What
does this statement mean? Do you agree? Why
or why not?
5. Which view of sexual behavior (conventional,
liberal, or moderate) comes closest to your
own perspective? What are your reasons for
favoring it?
6. What does consent have to do with
determining whether sexual assault has
occurred?
7. What factors do you think most influence the
incidence of sexual assault on campus? Do you
think hookup or partying culture has an effect?
Explain.
8. How has Title IX influenced the way colleges
and universities deal with sexual assault?
9. Research shows that most campus sexual
assaults happen early in the first year of college.
Does this fact suggest any particular precautions
or behavior changes that freshmen should take
into account?
10. Do you think that the “yes means yes” standard
for ensuring consensual sex is reasonable? Does
following this standard make sex awkward or
less enjoyable? Is it superior to the “no means
no” approach?
person, without the consent (verbal or nonverbal) of
the victim. Sexual assault is a broader term, which
includes rape as well as nonpenetrative sexual acts
such as attempted rape, forced kissing, and unwanted
groping of sexual parts.
The moral questions mostly concern (1) whether
and how justice is served after a sexual assault occurs
and (2) whether the requirement of consent is met
in any kind of sexual encounter. The first question
applies to how a college or university handles an alle-
gation of assault and how it treats the person claim-
ing assault as well as the accused. One flash point here
is how the evidence for assault is weighed, a question
that often arises in an atmosphere in which complain-
ants demand to be believed and defendants charge
that procedures are biased against them.
KEY TERMS
conventional view (of sexuality) (p. 536)
liberal view (of sexuality) (p. 536)
moderate view (of sexuality) (p. 537)
homosexuality (p. 537)
pornography (p. 538)
EXERCISES
Review Questions
1. What is the conventional moral view of sex?
(p. 536)
2. What is the difference between the liberal view
and the moderate view of sexual behavior?
(pp. 536–537)
3. What is homosexuality, and what is the
conventionalist view of it? (p. 537)
4. What is sexual assault? What is rape? (pp. 538–539)
5. Is campus sexual assault a rare occurrence or a
common one? (p. 538)
6. Typically, what are the characteristics of a
perpetrator of campus sexual assault? (p. 539)
7. What is the campus policy known as “yes means
yes”? (p. 541)
8. What is the view of sexuality according to the
Catholic version of natural law theory? (p. 541)

546 Á PART 4: ETHiCAl iSSuES
Alison E. Hatch, Campus Sexual Assault (Santa Barbara,
CA: ABC- CLIO, 2017).
Catherine Kaukinen, Michelle Hughes Miller, and
Rachael A. Powers, ed., Addressing Violence against
Women on College Campuses (Philadelphia: Temple Uni-
versity Press, 2017).
R. Mairuo, ed., Perspectives on College Sexual Assault (New
York: Springer Publishing, 2015).
FURTHER READING
C. Bohmer, Sexual Assault on Campus: The Problem and the
Solution (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 1993).
A. Clark and A. Pino, We Believe You: Survivors of Campus
Sexual Assault Speak Out (New York: Henry Holt and
Company, 2016).
K. Dick and A. Ziering, The Hunting Ground: The Inside
Story of Sexual Assault on American College Campuses
(New York: Skyhorse, 2016).
Vanessa Grigoriadis, Blurred Lines: Rethinking Sex, Power,
and Consent (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2017).
E T H i C A l D i l E M M A S
1. Avoiding Morality in Sex Lessons
London (The Sunday Times)—Parents should avoid trying to convince their teenage
children of the difference between right and wrong when talking to them about
sex, a new government leaflet is to advise.
Instead, any discussion of values should be kept “light” to encourage teenagers
to form their own views, according to the brochure, which one critic has called
“amoral.”
“Talking to Your Teenager About Sex and Relationships” will be distributed in
pharmacies from next month as part of an initiative led by Beverley Hughes, the
children’s minister.
The leaflet comes in the wake of the case of Alfie Patten, the 13- year- old boy
from East Sussex who fathered a child with a 15- year- old girl and sparked a debate
about how to cut rates of teenage parenthood.
It advises: “Discussing your values with your teenagers will help them to form
their own. Remember, though, that trying to convince them of what’s right and
wrong may discourage them from being open.”*
Should parents keep issues of right and wrong
out of discussions about sex with their children?
Should parents convey the idea that right and
wrong has nothing to do with sex? Why or why
not? In school sex education, should discussions of
ethics be forbidden? Is ethics irrelevant to contem-
porary sexual behavior?
*Jack Grimston, “Parents Told: Avoid Morality in Sex Lessons,” Times Online, February 22, 2009. Reprinted
by permission of News Licensing.

CHAPTER 15: SExuAl MoRAliTy Á 547
2. Premarital Abstinence Pledges
(Washington Post)—Teenagers who pledge to remain virgins until marriage are just
as likely to have premarital sex as those who do not promise abstinence and are
significantly less likely to use condoms and other forms of birth control when they
do, according to a study released today.
The new analysis of data from a large federal survey found that more than half
of youths became sexually active before marriage regardless of whether they had
taken a “virginity pledge,” but that the percentage who took precautions against
pregnancy or sexually transmitted diseases was 10 points lower for pledgers than
for non- pledgers.
“Taking a pledge doesn’t seem to make any difference at all in any sexual
behavior,” said Janet E. Rosenbaum of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of
Public Health, whose report appears in the January issue of the journal Pediatrics.
“But it does seem to make a difference in condom use and other forms of birth
control that is quite striking.”
The study is the latest in a series that have raised questions about programs that
focus on encouraging abstinence until marriage, including those that specifically
ask students to publicly declare their intention to remain virgins. The new analysis,
however, goes beyond earlier analyses by focusing on teens who had similar values
about sex and other issues before they took a virginity pledge.†
Suppose, as this report suggests, abstinence pledges
are ineffective and can reduce condom use and
increase the risk of teen pregnancy. Would it be
immoral to promote the pledges among teens?
Should the effectiveness of the pledges in reducing
teen pregnancy or STDs have any bearing on the
morality of promoting the pledges? Is premarital
sex among teens morally wrong regardless of its
physical and social risks? Give reasons for your
answers.
†Rob Stein, “Premarital Abstinence Pledges Ineffective, Study Finds,” from The Washington Post, Decem-
ber 29, 2008. Copyright © 2008 Washington Post Company. All rights reserved. Used by permission and
protected by the Copyright Laws of the United States. The printing, copying, redistribution, or retrans-
mission of this Content without express written permission is prohibited. www.washingtonpost.com
3. Evidence of Sexual Assault
An intense debate is under way about what level of evidence should be required in
campus adjudication hearings to find a student guilty of campus sexual assault. Putative
victims of sexual assault want a minimal standard (a “preponderance of evidence”) that
requires only slightly more than 50 percent likelihood of guilt. Because sexual assault
is so hard to prove, they argue, the lower standard is the most reasonable and just;
otherwise, very few alleged rapists would ever be found guilty. But the secretary of
the U.S. Department of Education wants a higher standard—“clear and convincing”
evidence, which amounts to approximately 70 percent likelihood of guilt.

http://www.washingtonpost.com

548 Á PART 4: ETHiCAl iSSuES
(New York Times)—Education Secretary Betsy DeVos on Friday scrapped a key part
of government policy on campus sexual assault, saying she was giving colleges more
freedom to balance the rights of accused students with the need to crack down on
serious misconduct.
The move, which involved rescinding two sets of guidelines several years old, was
part of one of the fiercest battles in higher education today, over whether the
Obama administration, in trying to get colleges to take sexual assault more seriously,
had gone too far and created a system that treated the accused unfairly.
The most controversial portion of the Obama- era guidelines had demanded colleges
use the lowest standard of proof, “preponderance of the evidence,” in deciding whether
a student is responsible for sexual assault, a verdict that can lead to discipline and even
expulsion. On Friday, the Education Department said colleges were free to abandon that
standard and raise it to a higher standard known as “clear and convincing evidence.”
In announcing the change, the latest in a widespread rollback of Obama- era
rules by the Trump administration, the department issued a statement saying that
the old rules “lacked basic elements of fairness.”‡
If the lower standard of evidence makes it eas-
ier to prove the culpability of accused students,
would it also implicate many blameless students?
If the higher standard is more just or fair, would it
also allow many blameworthy students to escape
blame? Which approach is fairer? Are they both
bad? Explain.
‡Stephanie Saul and Kate Taylor, “Betsy DeVos Reverses Obama- Era Policy on Campus Sexual Assault Inves-
tigations,” September 22, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/22/us/devos-colleges-sex-assault.html.
© 2017 The New York Times. All rights reserved. Used by permission and protected by the Copyright Laws
of the United States. The printing, copying, redistribution, or retransmission of this content without express
written permission is prohibited.
I
* * *
I shall suggest here that sex continues to be misrep-
resented in recent writings, at least in philosophical
writings, and I shall criticize the predominant form
of analysis which I term “ means- end analysis.” Such
conceptions attribute a necessary external goal or pur-
pose to sexual activity, whether it be reproduction,
the expression of love, simple communication, or
interpersonal awareness. They analyze sexual activity
as a means to one of these ends, implying that sexual
desire is a desire to reproduce, to love or be loved, or to
communicate with others. All definitions of this type
suggest false views of the relation of sex to perversion
and morality by implying that sex which does not fit
one of these models or fulfill one of these functions is
in some way deviant or incomplete.
R E A D i N G S
From Plain Sex
Alan H. Goldman
Alan H. Goldman, “Plain Sex” from Philosophy and Public Affairs
6(3): 268–75 and 278–87. Copyright © 1977 Blackwell Publishing
Ltd. Reproduced with permission of Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

CHAPTER 15: SExuAl MoRAliTy Á 549
for physical contact in itself, without the wish to
express affection or other feelings through it, is suffi-
cient to render sexual the activity of the agent which
fulfills it. Various activities with this goal alone, such
as kissing and caressing in certain contexts, qualify as
sexual even without the presence of genital symptoms
of sexual excitement. The latter are not therefore nec-
essary criteria for sexual activity.
This initial analysis may seem to some either
over- or underinclusive. It might seem too broad
in leading us to interpret physical contact as sexual
desire in activities such as football and other contact
sports. In these cases, however, the desire is not for
contact with another body per se, it is not directed
toward a particular person for that purpose, and it is
not the goal of the activity— the goal is winning or
exercising or knocking someone down or displaying
one’s prowess. If the desire is purely for contact with
another specific person’s body, then to interpret it as
sexual does not seem an exaggeration. A slightly more
difficult case is that of a baby’s desire to be cuddled
and our natural response in wanting to cuddle it. In
the case of the baby, the desire may be simply for the
physical contact, for the pleasure of the caresses. If so,
we may characterize this desire, especially in keeping
with Freudian theory, as sexual or protosexual. It will
differ nevertheless from full- fledged sexual desire in
being more amorphous, not directed outward toward
another specific person’s body. It may also be that
what the infant unconsciously desires is not physi-
cal contact per se but signs of affection, tenderness, or
security, in which case we have further reason for hesi-
tating to characterize its wants as clearly sexual. The
intent of our response to the baby is often the showing
of affection, not the pure physical contact, so that our
definition in terms of action which fulfils sexual desire
on the part of the agent does not capture such actions,
whatever we say of the baby. (If it is intuitive to char-
acterize our response as sexual as well, there is clearly
no problem here for my analysis.) The same can be
said of signs of affection (or in some cultures polite
greeting) among men or women: these certainly need
not be homosexual when the intent is only to show
friendship, something extrinsic to plain sex although
valuable when added to it.
The alternative, simpler analysis with which I will
begin is that sexual desire is desire for contact with
another person’s body and for the pleasure which such
contact produces; sexual activity is activity which
tends to fulfill such desire of the agent. Whereas Aris-
totle and Butler were correct in holding that pleasure is
normally a byproduct rather than a goal of purposeful
action, in the case of sex this is not so clear. The desire
for another’s body is, principally among other things,
the desire for the pleasure that physical contact brings.
On the other hand, it is not a desire for a particular sen-
sation detachable from its causal context, a sensation
which can be derived in other ways. This definition in
terms of the general goal of sexual desire appears pref-
erable to an attempt to more explicitly list or define
specific sexual activities, for many activities such as
kissing, embracing, massaging, or holding hands may
or may not be sexual, depending upon the context
and more specifically upon the purposes, needs, or
desires into which such activities fit. The generality
of the definition also represents a refusal (common in
recent psychological texts) to overemphasize orgasm
as the goal of sexual desire or genital sex as the only
norm of sexual activity (this will be hedged slightly in
the discussion of perversion below).
Central to the definition is the fact that the goal
of sexual desire and activity is the physical contact
itself, rather than something else which this contact
might express. By contrast, what I term “ means- end
analyses” posit ends which I take to be extraneous to
plain sex, and they view sex as a means to these ends.
Their fault lies not in defining sex in terms of its gen-
eral goal, but in seeing plain sex as merely a means to
other separable ends. I term these “ means- end analy-
ses” for convenience, although “ means- separable- end
analyses,” while too cumbersome, might be more
fully explanatory. The desire for physical contact with
another person is a minimal criterion for (normal)
sexual desire, but is both necessary and sufficient to
qualify normal desire as sexual. Of course, we may
want to express other feelings through sexual acts in
various contexts; but without the desire for the physi-
cal contact in and for itself, or when it is sought for
other reasons, activities in which contact is involved
are not predominantly sexual. Furthermore, the desire

550 Á PART 4: ETHiCAl iSSuES
II
We may turn then to what sex is not, to the arguments
regarding supposed conceptual connections between
sex and other activities which it is necessary to con-
ceptually distinguish. The more comprehensible
attempt to build an extraneous purpose into the sex
act identifies that purpose as reproduction, its primary
biological function. While this may be “nature’s” pur-
pose, it certainly need not be ours (the analogy with
eating, while sometimes overworked, is pertinent
here). While this identification may once have had a
rational basis which also grounded the identification
of the value and morality of sex with that applicable
to reproduction and childrearing, the development of
contraception rendered the connection weak. Meth-
ods of contraception are by now so familiar and so
widely used that it is not necessary to dwell upon the
changes wrought by these developments in the con-
cept of sex itself and in a rational sexual ethic depen-
dent upon that concept. In the past, the ever present
possibility of children rendered the concepts of sex
and sexual morality different from those required at
present. There may be good reasons, if the presence
and care of both mother and father are beneficial to
children, for restricting reproduction to marriage.
Insofar as society has a legitimate role in protecting
children’s interests, it may be justified in giving mar-
riage a legal status, although this question is compli-
cated by the fact (among others) that children born to
single mothers deserve no penalties. In any case, the
point here is simply that these questions are irrelevant
at the present time to those regarding the morality of
sex and its potential social regulation. . . .
It is obvious that the desire for sex is not necessar-
ily a desire to reproduce, that the psychological mani-
festation has become, if it were not always, distinct
from its biological roots. There are many parallels, as
previously mentioned, with other natural functions.
The pleasures of eating and exercising are to a large
extent independent of their roles in nourishment or
health (as the junk- food industry discovered with a
vengeance). Despite the obvious parallel with sex,
there is still a tendency for many to think that sex acts
which can be reproductive are, if not more moral or
less immoral, at least more natural. These categories of
Our definition of sex in terms of the desire for
physical contact may appear too narrow in that a per-
son’s personality, not merely her or his body, may be
sexually attractive to another, and in that looking or
conversing in a certain way can be sexual in a given
context without bodily contact. Nevertheless, it is not
the contents of one’s thoughts per se that are sexu-
ally appealing, but one’s personality as embodied in
certain manners of behavior. Furthermore, if a per-
son is sexually attracted by another’s personality, he
or she will desire not just further conversation, but
actual sexual contact. While looking at or conversing
with someone can be interpreted as sexual in given
contexts it is so when intended as preliminary to, and
hence parasitic upon, elemental sexual interest. Voy-
eurism or viewing a pornographic movie qualifies as
a sexual activity, but only as an imaginative substi-
tute for the real thing (otherwise a deviation from the
norm as expressed in our definition). The same is true
of masturbation as a sexual activity without a partner.
That the initial definition indicates at least an
ingredient of sexual desire and activity is too obvious
to argue. We all know what sex is, at least in obvious
cases, and do not need philosophers to tell us. My
preliminary analysis is meant to serve as a contrast to
what sex is not, at least, not necessarily. I concentrate
upon the physically manifested desire for another’s
body, and I take as central the immersion in the physi-
cal aspect of one’s own existence and attention to the
physical embodiment of the other. One may derive
pleasure in a sex act from expressing certain feelings
to one’s partner or from awareness of the attitude of
one’s partner, but sexual desire is essentially desire
for physical contact itself: it is a bodily desire for the
body of another that dominates our mental life for
more or less brief periods. Traditional writings were
correct to emphasize the purely physical or animal
aspect of sex; they were wrong only in condemning it.
This characterization of sex as an intensely pleasurable
physical activity and acute physical desire may seem to
some to capture only its barest level. But it is worth
distinguishing and focusing upon this least common
denominator in order to avoid the false views of sexual
morality and perversion which emerge from thinking
that sex is essentially something else.

CHAPTER 15: SExuAl MoRAliTy Á 551
permanent, at least in intent, and more or less exclu-
sive. A normal person cannot deeply love more than
a few individuals even in a lifetime. We may be suspi-
cious that those who attempt or claim to love many
love them weakly if at all. Yet, fleeting sexual desire
can arise in relation to a variety of other individuals
one finds sexually attractive. It may even be, as some
have claimed, that sexual desire in humans naturally
seeks variety, while this is obviously false of love.
For this reason, monogamous sex, even if justified,
almost always represents a sacrifice or the exercise of
self- control on the part of the spouses, while monoga-
mous love generally does not. There is no such thing
as casual love in the sense in which I intend the term
“love.” It may occasionally happen that a spouse falls
deeply in love with someone else (especially when sex
is conceived in terms of love), but this is relatively rare
in comparison to passing sexual desires for others; and
while the former often indicates a weakness or fault in
the marriage relation, the latter does not.
If love is indeed more exclusive in its objects than
is sexual desire, this explains why those who view sex
as essentially an expression of love would again tend
to hold a repressive or restrictive sexual ethic. As in
the case of reproduction, there may be good reasons
for reserving the total commitment of deep love to
the context of marriage and family— the normal
personality may not withstand additional divisions
of ultimate commitment and allegiance. There is no
question that marriage itself is best sustained by a
deep relation of love and affection; and even if love
is not naturally monogamous, the benefits of family
units to children provide additional reason to avoid
serious commitments elsewhere which weaken fam-
ily ties. It can be argued similarly that monogamous
sex strengthens families by restricting and at the
same time guaranteeing an outlet for sexual desire
in marriage. But there is more force to the argument
that recognition of a clear distinction between sex
and love in society would help avoid disastrous mar-
riages which result from adolescent confusion of the
two when sexual desire is mistaken for permanent
love, and would weaken damaging jealousies which
arise in marriages in relation to passing sexual desires.
The love and affection of a sound marriage certainly
morality and “naturalness,” or normality, are not to
be identified with each other, as will be argued below,
and neither is applicable to sex by virtue of its connec-
tion to reproduction. The tendency to identify repro-
duction as the conceptually connected end of sex is
most prevalent now in the pronouncements of the
Catholic church. There the assumed analysis is clearly
tied to a restrictive sexual morality according to which
acts become immoral and unnatural when they are
not oriented towards reproduction, a morality which
has independent roots in the Christian sexual ethic as
it derives from Paul. However, the means- end analysis
fails to generate a consistent sexual ethic: homosexual
and oral- genital sex is condemned while kissing or
caressing, acts equally unlikely to lead in themselves
to fertilization, even when properly characterized as
sexual according to our definition, are not.
III
Before discussing further relations of means- end
analyses to false or inconsistent sexual ethics and con-
cepts of perversion, I turn to other examples of these
analyses. One common position views sex as essen-
tially an expression of love or affection between the
partners. It is generally recognized that there are other
types of love besides sexual, but sex itself is taken as an
expression of one type, sometimes termed “romantic”
love.1 Various factors again ought to weaken this iden-
tification. First, there are other types of love besides
that which it is appropriate to express sexually, and
“romantic” love itself can be expressed in many other
ways. I am not denying that sex can take on height-
ened value and meaning when it becomes a vehicle
for the expression of feelings of love or tenderness, but
so can many other usually mundane activities such as
getting up early to make breakfast on Sunday, clean-
ing the house, and so on. Second, sex itself can be used
to communicate many other emotions besides love,
and, as I will argue below, can communicate nothing
in particular and still be good sex.
On a deeper level, an internal tension is bound
to result from an identification of sex, which I have
described as a physical- psychological desire, with love
as a long- term, deep emotional relationship between
two individuals. As this type of relationship, love is

552 Á PART 4: ETHiCAl iSSuES
V
I have now criticized various types of analysis sharing
or suggesting a common means- end form. I have sug-
gested that analyses of this form relate to attempts to
limit moral or natural sex to that which fulfills some
purpose or function extraneous to basic sexual desire.
The attempts to brand forms of sex outside the ideal-
ized models as immoral or perverted fail to achieve
consistency with intuitions that they themselves do
not directly question. The reproductive model brands
oral- genital sex a deviation, but cannot account for
kissing or holding hands; the communication account
holds voyeurism to be perverted but cannot accom-
modate sex acts without much conscious thought or
seductive nonphysical foreplay; the sex- love model
makes most sexual desire seem degrading or base. The
first and last condemn extramarital sex on the sound
but irrelevant grounds that reproduction and deep
commitment are best confined to family contexts. The
romanticization of sex and the confusion of sexual
desire with love operate in both directions: sex outside
the context of romantic love is repressed; once it is
repressed, partners become more difficult to find and
sex becomes romanticized further, out of proportion
to its real value for the individual.
What all these analyses share in addition to a com-
mon form is accordance with and perhaps derivation
from the Platonic- Christian moral tradition, accord-
ing to which the animal or purely physical element of
humans is the source of immorality, and plain sex in
the sense I defined it is an expression of this element,
hence in itself to be condemned. All the analyses exam-
ined seem to seek a distance from sexual desire itself in
attempting to extend it conceptually beyond the physi-
cal. The love and communications analyses seek refine-
ment or intellectualization of the desire; plain physical
sex becomes vulgar, and too straightforward sexual
encounters without an aura of respectable cerebral com-
municative content are to be avoided. [Robert] Solomon
explicitly argues that sex cannot be a “mere” appetite,
his argument being that if it were, subway exhibition-
ism and other vulgar forms would be pleasing.2 This
fails to recognize that sexual desire can be focused or
selective at the same time as being physical. Lower ani-
mals are not attracted by every other member of their
differs from the adolescent romantic variety, which
is often a mere substitute for sex in the context of a
repressive sexual ethic.
In fact, the restrictive sexual ethic tied to the
means- end analysis in terms of love again has failed
to be consistent. At least, it has not been applied con-
sistently, but forms part of the double standard which
has curtailed the freedom of women. It is predict-
able in light of this history that some women would
now advocate using sex as another kind of means,
as a political weapon or as a way to increase unjustly
denied power and freedom. The inconsistency in the
sexual ethic typically attached to the sex- love analysis,
according to which it has generally been taken with a
grain of salt when applied to men, is simply another
example of the impossibility of tailoring a plausible
moral theory in this area to a conception of sex which
builds in conceptually extraneous factors.
I am not suggesting here that sex ought never to
be connected with love or that it is not a more signifi-
cant and valuable activity when it is. Nor am I denying
that individuals need love as much as sex and perhaps
emotionally need at least one complete relationship
which encompasses both. Just as sex can express love
and take on heightened significance when it does,
so love is often naturally accompanied by an inter-
mittent desire for sex. But again love is accompanied
appropriately by desires for other shared activities as
well. What makes the desire for sex seem more inti-
mately connected with love is the intimacy which is
seen to be a natural feature of mutual sex acts. Like
love, sex is held to lay one bare psychologically as
well as physically. Sex is unquestionably intimate,
but beyond that the psychological toll often attached
may be a function of the restrictive sexual ethic itself,
rather than a legitimate apology for it. The intimacy
involved in love is psychologically consuming in a
generally healthy way, while the psychological tolls of
sexual relations, often including embarrassment as a
correlate of intimacy, are too often the result of arti-
ficial sexual ethics and taboos. The intimacy involved
in both love and sex is insufficient in any case in light
of previous points to render a means- end analysis in
these terms appropriate.
* * *

CHAPTER 15: SExuAl MoRAliTy Á 553
become deranged, and the fact that they are sexual has
no bearing in itself on the moral character, whether
negative or exculpatory, of the actions deriving from
them. Whatever might be true of war, it is certainly
not the case that all’s fair in love or sex.
Our first conclusion regarding morality and sex is
therefore that no conduct otherwise immoral should
be excused because it is sexual conduct, and nothing
in sex is immoral unless condemned by rules which
apply elsewhere as well. The last clause requires fur-
ther clarification. Sexual conduct can be governed by
particular rules relating only to sex itself. But these
precepts must be implied by general moral rules when
these are applied to specific sexual relations or types of
conduct. The same is true of rules of fair business, ethi-
cal medicine, or courtesy in driving a car. In the latter
case, particular acts on the road may be reprehensible,
such as tailgating or passing on the right, which seem
to bear no resemblance as actions to any outside the
context of highway safety. Nevertheless their immo-
rality derives from the fact that they place others in
danger, a circumstance which, when avoidable, is to
be condemned in any context. This structure of gen-
eral and specifically applicable rules describes a rea-
sonable sexual ethic as well. To take an extreme case,
rape is always a sexual act and it is always immoral. A
rule against rape can therefore be considered an obvi-
ous part of sexual morality which has no bearing on
nonsexual conduct. But the immorality of rape derives
from its being an extreme violation of a person’s body,
of the right not to be humiliated, and of the general
moral prohibition against using other persons against
their wills, not from the fact that it is a sexual act.
The application elsewhere of general moral rules
to sexual conduct is further complicated by the fact
that it will be relative to the particular desires and pref-
erences of one’s partner (these may be influenced by
and hence in some sense include misguided beliefs
about sexual morality itself). This means that there will
be fewer specific rules in the area of sexual ethics than
in other areas of conduct, such as driving cars, where
the relativity of preference is irrelevant to the prohibi-
tion of objectively dangerous conduct. More reliance
will have to be placed upon the general moral rule,
which in this area holds simply that the preferences,
species, either. Rancid food forced down one’s throat is
not pleasing, but that certainly fails to show that hun-
ger is not a physical appetite. Sexual desire lets us know
that we are physical beings and, indeed, animals; this is
why traditional Platonic morality is so thorough in its
condemnation. Means- end analyses continue to reflect
this tradition, sometimes unwittingly. They show that
in conceptualizing sex it is still difficult, despite years of
so- called revolution in this area, to free ourselves from
the lingering suspicion that plain sex as physical desire
is an expression of our “lower selves,” that yielding to
our animal natures is subhuman or vulgar.
VI
Having criticized these analyses for the sexual ethics
and concepts of perversion they imply, it remains to
contrast my account along these lines. To the question
of what morality might be implied by my analysis, the
answer is that there are no moral implications what-
ever. Any analysis of sex which imputes a moral char-
acter to sex acts in themselves is wrong for that reason.
There is no morality intrinsic to sex, although general
moral rules apply to the treatment of others in sex acts
as they apply to all human relations. We can speak
of a sexual ethic as we can speak of a business ethic,
without implying that business in itself is either moral
or immoral or that special rules are required to judge
business practice which are not derived from rules
that apply elsewhere as well. Sex is not in itself a moral
category, although like business it invariably places
us into relations with others in which moral rules
apply. It gives us opportunity to do what is otherwise
recognized as wrong, to harm others, deceive them or
manipulate them against their wills. Just as the fact
that an act is sexual in itself never renders it wrong or
adds to its wrongness if it is wrong on other grounds
(sexual acts towards minors are wrong on other
grounds, as will be argued below), so no wrong act is
to be excused because done from a sexual motive. If a
“crime of passion” is to be excused, it would have to be
on grounds of temporary insanity rather than sexual
context (whether insanity does constitute a legitimate
excuse for certain actions is too big a topic to argue
here). Sexual motives are among others which may

554 Á PART 4: ETHiCAl iSSuES
It may appear from this alternative Kantian view-
point that sexual acts must be at least prima facie
wrong in themselves. This is because they invariably
involve at different stages the manipulation of one’s
partner for one’s own pleasure, which might appear to
be prohibited on the formulation of Kant’s principle
which holds that one ought not to treat another as a
means to such private ends. A more realistic rendering
of this formulation, however, one which recognizes
its intended equivalence to the first universalizabil-
ity principle, admits no such absolute prohibition.
Many human relations, most economic transactions
for example, involve using other individuals for per-
sonal benefit. These relations are immoral only when
they are one- sided, when the benefits are not mutual,
or when the transactions are not freely and rationally
endorsed by all parties. The same holds true of sexual
acts. The central principle governing them is the Kan-
tian demand for reciprocity in sexual relations. In
order to comply with the second formulation of the
categorical imperative, one must recognize the subjec-
tivity of one’s partner (not merely by being aroused by
her or his desire, as [Thomas] Nagel describes). Even
in an act which by its nature “objectifies” the other,
one recognizes a partner as a subject with demands
and desires by yielding to those desires, by allowing
oneself to be a sexual object as well, by giving pleasure
or ensuring that the pleasures of the acts are mutual.
It is this kind of reciprocity which forms the basis for
morality in sex, which distinguishes right acts from
wrong in this area as in others. (Of course, prior to
sex acts one must gauge their effects upon potential
partners and take these longer range interests into
account.)
VII
I suggested earlier that in addition to generating
confusion regarding the rightness or wrongness of
sex acts, false conceptual analyses of the means- end
form cause confusion about the value of sex to the
individual. My account recognizes the satisfaction of
desire and the pleasure this brings as the central psy-
chological function of the sex act for the individual.
Sex affords us a paradigm of pleasure, but not a corner-
stone of value. For most of us it is not only a needed
desires, and interests of one’s partner or potential
partner ought to be taken into account. This rule is
certainly not specifically formulated to govern sexual
relations; it is a form of the central principle of moral-
ity itself. But when applied to sex, it prohibits certain
actions, such as molestation of children, which can-
not be categorized as violations of the rule without at
the same time being classified as sexual. I believe this
last case is the closest we can come to an action which
is wrong because it is sexual, but even here its wrong-
ness is better characterized as deriving from the det-
rimental effects such behavior can have on the future
emotional and sexual life of the naive victims, and
from the fact that such behavior therefore involves
manipulation of innocent persons without regard for
their interests. Hence, this case also involves violation
of a general moral rule which applies elsewhere as well.
Aside from faulty conceptual analyses of sex and
the influence of the Platonic moral tradition, there are
two more plausible reasons for thinking that there are
moral dimensions intrinsic to sex acts per se. The first
is that such acts are normally intensely pleasurable.
According to a hedonistic, utilitarian moral theory
they therefore should be at least prima facie morally
right, rather than morally neutral in themselves. To
me this seems incorrect and reflects unfavorably on
the ethical theory in question. The pleasure intrinsic
to sex acts is a good, but not, it seems to me, a good
with much positive moral significance. Certainly I
can have no duty to pursue such pleasure myself, and
while it may be nice to give pleasure of any form to
others, there is no ethical requirement to do so, given
my right over my own body. The exception relates to
the context of sex acts themselves, when one partner
derives pleasure from the other and ought to return
the favor. This duty to reciprocate takes us out of the
domain of hedonistic utilitarianism, however, and
into a Kantian moral framework, the central principles
of which call for just such reciprocity in human rela-
tions. Since independent moral judgments regarding
sexual activities constitute one area in which ethical
theories are to be tested, these observations indicate
here, as I believe others indicate elsewhere, the fertility
of the Kantian, as opposed to the utilitarian, principles
in reconstructing reasoned moral consciousness.

CHAPTER 15: SExuAl MoRAliTy Á 555
(or kissing would be perverted), from a loving rela-
tionship (or most sexual desire and many hetero-
sexual acts would be perverted), or from efficiency in
communicating (or unsuccessful seduction attempts
would be perverted). It is a deviation from a norm, but
the norm in question is merely statistical. Of course,
not all sexual acts that are statistically unusual are
perverted— a three- hour continuous sexual act would
be unusual but not necessarily abnormal in the requi-
site sense. The abnormality in question must relate to
the form of the desire itself in order to constitute sexual
perversion; for example, desire, not for contact with
another, but for merely looking, for harming or being
harmed, for contact with items of clothing. This con-
cept of sexual abnormality is that suggested by my
definition of normal sex in terms of its typical desire.
However not all unusual desires qualify either, only
those with the typical physical sexual effects upon
the individual who satisfies them. These effects, such
as erection in males, were not built into the original
definition of sex in terms of sexual desire, for they do
not always occur in activities that are properly charac-
terized as sexual, say, kissing for the pleasure of it. But
they do seem to bear a closer relation to the definition
of activities as perverted. (For those who consider only
genital sex sexual, we could build such symptoms into
a narrower definition, then speaking of sex in a broad
sense as well as “proper” sex.)
Solomon and Nagel disagree with this statistical
notion of perversion. For them the concept is evalua-
tive rather than statistical. I do not deny that the term
“perverted” is often used evaluatively (and purely
emotively for that matter), or that it has a negative
connotation for the average speaker. I do deny that we
can find a norm, other than that of statistically usual
desire, against which all and only activities that prop-
erly count as sexual perversions can be contrasted.
Perverted sex is simply abnormal sex, and if the norm
is not to be an idealized or romanticized extrane-
ous end or purpose, it must express the way human
sexual desires usually manifest themselves. Of course
not all norms in other areas of discourse need be sta-
tistical in this way. Physical health is an example of a
relatively clear norm which does not seem to depend
upon the numbers of healthy people. But the concept
outlet for desire but also the most enjoyable form of
recreation we know. Its value is nevertheless easily
mistaken by being confused with that of love, when
it is taken as essentially an expression of that emotion.
Although intense, the pleasures of sex are brief and
repetitive rather than cumulative. They give value to
the specific acts which generate them, but not the last-
ing kind of value which enhances one’s whole life. The
briefness of these pleasures contributes to their inten-
sity (or perhaps their intensity makes them necessar-
ily brief), but it also relegates them to the periphery of
most rational plans for the good life.
By contrast, love typically develops over a long
term relation; while its pleasures may be less intense
and physical, they are of more cumulative value.
The importance of love to the individual may well
be central in a rational system of value. And it has
perhaps an even deeper moral significance relating
to the identification with the interests of another
person, which broadens one’s possible relationships
with others as well. Marriage is again important in
preserving this relation between adults and children,
which seems as important to the adults as it is to the
children in broadening concerns which have a ten-
dency to become selfish. Sexual desire, by contrast,
is desire for another which is nevertheless essentially
self- regarding. Sexual pleasure is certainly a good for
the individual, and for many it may be necessary in
order for them to function in a reasonably cheerful
way. But it bears little relation to those other values
just discussed, to which some analyses falsely suggest
a conceptual connection.
VIII
While my initial analysis lacks moral implications in
itself, as it should, it does suggest by contrast a concept
of sexual perversion. Since the concept of perversion is
itself a sexual concept, it will always be defined relative
to some definition of normal sex; and any conception
of the norm will imply a contrary notion of perverse
forms. The concept suggested by my account again
differs sharply from those implied by the means- end
analyses examined above. Perversion does not rep-
resent a deviation from the reproductive function

556 Á PART 4: ETHiCAl iSSuES
of an act does not vary with its degree of perversion.
If not harmful, common acts previously considered
abnormal might continue to be called perverted for
a time by the moralistic minority; but the term when
applied to such cases would retain only its emotive
negative connotation without consistent logical cri-
teria for application. It would represent merely preju-
diced moral judgments.
To adequately explain why there is a tendency
to so deeply condemn perverted acts would require a
treatise in psychology beyond the scope of this paper.
Part of the reason undoubtedly relates to the tradition
of repressive sexual ethics and false conceptions of
sex; another part to the fact that all abnormality seems
to disturb and fascinate us at the same time. The for-
mer explains why sexual perversion is more abhorrent
to many than other forms of abnormality; the latter
indicates why we tend to have an emotive and evalua-
tive reaction to perversion in the first place. It may be,
as has been suggested according to a Freudian line,4
that our uneasiness derives from latent desires we are
loathe to admit, but this thesis takes us into psycho-
logical issues I am not competent to judge. Whatever
the psychological explanation, it suffices to point out
here that the conceptual connection between perver-
sion and genuine or consistent moral evaluation is
spurious and again suggested by misleading means-
end idealizations of the concept of sex.
The position I have taken in this paper against
those concepts is not totally new. Something similar
to it is found in Freud’s view of sex, which of course
was genuinely revolutionary, and in the body of writ-
ings deriving from Freud to the present time. But in
his revolt against romanticized and repressive con-
ceptions, Freud went too far— from a refusal to view
sex as merely a means to a view of it as the end of all
human behavior, although sometimes an elaborately
disguised end. This pansexualism led to the thesis
(among others) that repression was indeed an inevi-
table and necessary part of social regulation of any
form, a strange consequence of a position that began
by opposing the repressive aspects of the means- end
view. Perhaps the time finally has arrived when we
can achieve a reasonable middle ground in this area,
at least in philosophy if not in society.
in this case achieves its clarity through the connection
of physical health with other clearly desirable physi-
cal functions and characteristics, for example, living
longer. In the case of sex, that which is statistically
abnormal is not necessarily incapacitating in other
ways, and yet these abnormal desires with sexual
effects upon their subject do count as perverted to the
degree to which their objects deviate from usual ones.
The connotations of the concept of perversion beyond
those connected with abnormality or statistical devia-
tion derive more from the attitudes of those likely to
call certain acts perverted than from specifiable fea-
tures of the acts themselves. These connotations add
to the concept of abnormality that of subnormality,
but there is no norm against which the latter can be
measured intelligibly in accord with all and only acts
intuitively called perverted.
The only proper evaluative norms relating to
sex involve degrees of pleasure in the acts and moral
norms, but neither of these scales coincides with sta-
tistical degrees of abnormality, according to which
perversion is to be measured. The three parameters
operate independently (this was implied for the first
two when it was held above that the pleasure of sex is a
good, but not necessarily a moral good). Perverted sex
may be more or less enjoyable to particular individuals
than normal sex, and more or less moral, depending
upon the particular relations involved. Raping a sheep
may be more perverted than raping a woman, but cer-
tainly not more condemnable morally.3 It is neverthe-
less true that the evaluative connotations attaching to
the term “perverted” derive partly from the fact that
most people consider perverted sex highly immoral.
Many such acts are forbidden by long standing taboos,
and it is sometimes difficult to distinguish what is for-
bidden from what is immoral. Others, such as sadis-
tic acts, are genuinely immoral, but again not at all
because of their connection with sex or abnormal-
ity. The principles which condemn these acts would
condemn them equally if they were common and
nonsexual. It is not true that we properly could con-
tinue to consider acts perverted which were found to
be very common practice across societies. Such acts, if
harmful, might continue to be condemned properly
as immoral, but it was just shown that the immorality

CHAPTER 15: SExuAl MoRAliTy Á 557
2. [Robert] Solomon, “Sex and Perversion,” Philosophy and
Sex, ed. R. Baker and F. Elliston (Buffalo: Prometheus,
1975), p. 285.
3. The example is like one from Sara Ruddick, “Better Sex,”
Philosophy and Sex, p. 96.
4. See Michael Slote, “Inapplicable Concepts and Sexual
Perversion,” Philosophy and Sex.
NOTES
1. Even Bertrand Russell, whose writing in this area was
a model of rationality, at least for its period, tends to
make this identification and to condemn plain sex in the
absence of love: “sex intercourse apart from love has little
value, and is to be regarded primarily as experimentation
with a view to love.” Marriage and Morals (New York: Ban-
tam, 1959), p. 87.
From Sexual Morality
Roger Scruton
erotic love in particular, is a virtue. . . . [E]rotic love
involves an element of mutual self- enhancement; it
generates a sense of the irreplaceable value, both of the
other and of the self, and of the activities which bind
them. To receive and to give this love is to achieve
something of incomparable value in the process of self-
fulfilment. It is to gain the most powerful of all inter-
personal guarantees; in erotic love the subject becomes
conscious of the full reality of his personal existence,
not only in his own eyes, but in the eyes of another.
Everything that he is and values gains sustenance from
his love, and every project receives a meaning beyond
the moment. All that exists for us as mere hope and
hypothesis— the attachment to life and to the body—
achieves under the rule of erōs the aspect of a radiant
certainty. Unlike the cold glances of approval, admira-
tion and pride, the glance of love sees value precisely
in that which is the course of anxiety and doubt: in the
merely contingent, merely ‘empirical’, existence of
the flesh, the existence which we did not choose, but
to which we are condemned. It is the answer to man’s
fallen condition— to his Geworfenheit.
To receive erotic love, however, a person must be
able to give it: or if he cannot, the love of others will
be a torment to him, seeking from him that which he
cannot provide, and directing against him the fury of a
disappointed right. It is therefore unquestionable that
we have reason to acquire the capacity for erotic love,
and, if this means bending our sexual impulses in a
* * *
We must now attempt to apply the Aristotelian strat-
egy to the subject- matter of this book, and ask whether
there is such a thing as sexual virtue, and, if so, what is
it, and how is it acquired? Clearly, sexual desire, which
is an interpersonal attitude with the most far- reaching
consequences for those who are joined by it, cannot
be morally neutral. On the contrary, it is in the expe-
rience of sexual desire that we are most vividly con-
scious of the distinction between virtuous and vicious
impulses, and most vividly aware that, in the choice
between them, our happiness is at stake.
The Aristotelian strategy enjoins us to ignore the
actual conditions of any particular person’s life, and
to look only at the permanent features of human
nature. We know that people feel sexual desire; that
they feel erotic love, which may grow from desire; that
they may avoid both these feelings, by dissipation or
self- restraint. Is there anything to be said about desire,
other than that it falls within the general scope of the
virtue of temperance, which enjoins us to desire only
what reason approves?
The first, and most important, observation to be
made is that the capacity for love in general, and for
Roger Scruton, excerpts from Sexual Desire: A Moral Philosophy of the
Erotic. Copyright © 1986 by Roger Scruton. Reprinted by permission
of Continuum, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc and with
the permission of Free Press, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

558 Á PART 4: ETHiCAl iSSuES
before all else— for how can I flourish according to my
nature as a rational agent if I am not at least rational?
In like manner, it is not the particular personal
tragedy but the generality of the human condition
that determines the basis of sexual morality. Tragedy
and loss are the rare but necessary outcomes of a pro-
cess which we all have reason to undergo. (Indeed, it
is part of the point of tragedy that it divorces in our
imagination the right and the good from the merely
prudential: that it sets the value of life against the
value of mere survival.) We wish to know, in advance
of any particular experience, which dispositions a per-
son must have if he is successfully to express himself
in sexual desire and to be fulfilled in his sexual endeav-
ours. Love is the fulfilment of desire, and therefore
love is its telos. A life of celibacy may also be fulfilled;
but, assuming the general truth that most of us have
a powerful, and perhaps overwhelming, urge to make
love, it is in our interests to ensure that love— and not
some other thing— is made.
Love, I have argued, is prone to jealousy, and the
object of jealousy is defined by the thought of the
beloved’s desire. Because jealousy is one of the greatest
of psychical catastrophes, involving the possible ruin
of both partners, a morality based in the need for erotic
love must forestall and eliminate jealousy. It is in the
deepest human interest, therefore, that we form the
habit of fidelity. This habit is natural and normal; but
it is also easily broken, and the temptation to break it
is contained in desire itself— in the element of gener-
ality which tempts us always to experiment, to verify,
to detach ourselves from that which is too familiar in
the interest of excitement and risk. Virtuous desire is
faithful; but virtuous desire is also an artefact, made
possible by a process of moral education which we do
not, in truth, understand in its complexity.
If that observation is correct, a whole section of
traditional sexual morality must be upheld. The ful-
filment of sexual desire defines the nature of desire:
to telos phuseis estin. And the nature of desire gives us
our standard of normality. There are enormous variet-
ies of human sexual conduct, and of ‘ common- sense’
morality: some societies permit or encourage polyg-
amy, others look with indifference upon premarital
intercourse, or regard marriage itself as no more than
certain direction, that will be the direction of sexual vir-
tue. Indeed, . . . the development of the sexual impulse
towards love may be impeded: there are sexual habits
which are vicious, precisely in neutralising the capac-
ity for love. The first thing that can be said, therefore,
is that we all have reason to avoid those habits and to
educate our children not to possess them.
Here it may be objected that not every love is
happy, that there are many— Anna Karenina, for
example, or Phaedra— whose capacity for love was
the cause of their downfall. But we must remind our-
selves of the Aristotelian strategy. In establishing that
courage or wisdom is a virtue, the Aristotelian does
not argue that the possession of these virtues is in
every particular circumstance bound to be advanta-
geous. A parable of Derek Parfit’s, adapted from T. C.
Schelling, adequately shows what is a stake: Suppose a
man breaks into my house and commands me to open
the safe for him, saying that, if I do not comply, he
will begin to shoot my children. He has heard me tele-
phone the police, and knows that, if he leaves any of
us alive, we will be able to give information sufficient
to arrest him if he takes what the safe contains. Clearly
it is irrational in these circumstances to open the safe—
since that will not protect any of us— and also not to
open it, since that would cause the robber to kill my
children one by one in order to persuade me of his sin-
cerity. Suppose, however, I possess a drug that causes
me to become completely irrational. I swallow the pill,
and cry out: ‘I love my children, therefore kill them’;
the man tortures me and I beg him to continue; and
so on. In these changed circumstances, my assailant
is powerless to obtain what he wants and can only flee
before the police arrive. In other words, in such a case,
it is actually in the interests of the subject to be irratio-
nal: he has overwhelming circumstantial reason to be
irrational, just as Anna Karenina had an overwhelm-
ing circumstantial reason to be without the capac-
ity for love. Clearly, however, it would be absurd, on
these grounds, to inculcate a habit of irrationality in
our children; indeed no reason could be given, in the
absence of detailed knowledge of a person’s future, for
acquiring such a habit. In so far as reasons can be given
now, for the cultivation of this or that state of char-
acter, they must justify the cultivation of rationality

CHAPTER 15: SExuAl MoRAliTy Á 559
order to see the power of the idea that underlies and
justifies it.
The most important feature of traditional sexual
education is summarised in anthropological lan-
guage as the ‘ethic of pollution and taboo’. The child
was taught to regard his body as sacred, and as sub-
ject to pollution by misperception or misuse. The
sense of pollution is by no means a trivial side- effect
of the ‘bad sexual encounter’: it may involve a pen-
etrating disgust, at oneself, one’s body and one’s sit-
uation, such as is experienced by the victim of rape.
Those sentiments— which arise from our ‘fear of the
obscene’—express the tension contained within the
experience of embodiment. At any moment we can
become ‘mere body’, the self driven from its incarna-
tion, and its habitation ransacked. The most impor-
tant root idea of personal morality is that I am in my
body, not (to borrow Descartes’ image) as a pilot in a
ship, but as an incarnate self. My body is identical with
me, and sexual purity is the precious guarantee of this.
Sexual purity does not forbid desire: it simply
ensures the status of desire as an interpersonal feel-
ing. The child who learns ‘dirty habits’ detaches his
sex from himself, sets it outside himself as something
curious and alien. His fascinated enslavement to the
body is also a withering of desire, a scattering of erotic
energy and a loss of union with the other. Sexual
purity sustains the subject of desire, making him pres-
ent as a self in the very act which overcomes him.
The extraordinary spiritual significance accorded
to sexual ‘purity’ has, of course, its sociobiological and
its psychoanalytical explanations. But what, exactly,
is its meaning, and have people been right to value it?
In Wagner’s Parsifal, the ‘pure fool’ is uniquely cred-
ited with the power to heal the terrible wound which
is the physical sign of Amfortas’s sexual ‘pollution’. He
alone can redeem Kundry, the ‘fallen’ woman, whose
sexual licence is so resistant to her penitent personal-
ity, that it must be confined to another world, of which
she retains only a dim and horrified consciousness.
That other world is a world of pleasure and opportu-
nity, a world of the ‘permitted’. It is governed, how-
ever, by the impure eunuch Klingsor, whose rule is a
kind of slavery. Wagner finds the meaning of Christian
redemption in the fool’s chastity, which leads him to
an episode in a relation that pre- exists and perhaps
survives it. But no society, and no ‘ common- sense’
morality— not even, it seems, the morality of Samoa—
looks with favour upon promiscuity or infidelity,
unless influenced by a doctrine of ‘emancipation’ or
‘liberation’ which is dependent for its sense upon the
very conventions which it defies. Whatever the insti-
tutional forms of human sexual union, and whatever
the range of permitted partners, sexual desire is itself
inherently ‘nuptial’: it involves concentration upon
the embodied existence of the other, leading through
tenderness to the ‘vow’ of erotic love. It is a telling
observation that the civilisation which has most tol-
erated the institution of polygamy— the Islamic— has
also, in its erotic literature, produced what are per-
haps the intensest and most poignant celebrations
of monogamous love, precisely through the attempt
to capture, not the institution of marriage, but the
human datum of desire.
The nuptiality of desire suggests, in its turn, a
natural history of desire: a principle of development
which defines the ‘normal course’ of sexual education.
‘Sexual maturity’ involves incorporating the sexual
impulse into the personality, and so making sexual
desire into an expression of the subject himself, even
though it is, in the heat of action, a force which also
overcomes him. If the Aristotetlian approach to these
things is as plausible as I think it is, the virtuous habit
will also have the character of a ‘mean’: it will involve
the disposition to desire what is desirable, despite
the competing impulses of animal lust (in which the
intentionality of desire may be demolished) and timo-
rous frigidity (in which the sexual impulse is impeded
altogether). Education is directed towards the special
kind of temperance which shows itself, sometimes
as chastity, sometimes as fidelity, sometimes as pas-
sionate desire, according to the ‘right judgement’ of
the subject. In wanting what is judged to be desirable,
the virtuous person wants what may also be loved,
and what may therefore be obtained without hurt or
humiliation.
Virtue is a matter of degree, rarely attained in its
completion, but always admired. Because traditional
sexual education has pursued sexual virtue, it is worth-
while summarising its most important features, in

560 Á PART 4: ETHiCAl iSSuES
contemplation of the trivialities of progenerative man
are in one sense a sigh from the genetic depth: the spe-
cies is alive in this sigh, just as the individual dies in
it. In another sense, however, his melancholy is the
supreme affirmation of the reality of others’ joys: the
recognition that desire must be silenced, in order that
others may thrive in their desire.
The child was traditionally brought up to achieve
sexual fulfilment only through chastity, which is the
condition which surrounds him on his first entering
the adult world— the world of commitments and obli-
gations. At the same time, he was encouraged to pon-
der certain ‘ideal objects’ of desire. These, presented to
him under the aspect of an idealised physical beauty,
were never merely beautiful, but also endowed with
the moral attributes that fitted them for love. This
dual inculcation of ‘pure’ habits and ‘ideal’ love might
seem, on the face of it, to be unworthy of the name of
education. Is it not, rather, like the mere training of a
horse or a dog, which arbitrarily forbids some things
and fosters others, without offering the first hint of a
reason why? And is it not the distinguishing mark of
education that it engages with the rational nature of
its recipient, and does not merely mould him indiffer-
ently to his own understanding of the process? Why,
in short, is this moral education, rather than a trans-
ference into the sexual sphere— as Freud would have
it— of those same processes of interdiction that train us
to defecate, not in our nappies, but in a porcelain pot?
The answer is clear. The cult of innocence is an
attempt to generate rational conduct, by incorporat-
ing the sexual impulse into the self- activity of the
subject. It is an attempt to impede the impulse, until
such a time as it may attach itself to the interpersonal
project that leads to its fulfilment: the project of union
with another person, who is wanted not merely for his
body, but for the person who is this body. Innocence is
the disposition to avoid sexual encounter, except with
the person whom one may fully desire. Children who
have lost their innocence have acquired the habit of
gratification through the body alone, in a state of par-
tial or truncated desire. Their gratification is detached
from the conditions of personal fulfilment and wan-
ders from object to object with no settled tendency to
attach itself to any, pursued all the while by a sense
renounce the rewards of an impure desire for the sake
of another’s salvation. Parsifal releases Amfortas from
the hold of ‘magic’, from the ‘charm’ which tempts
Szymanowski’s King Roger towards a vain apotheo-
sis. Parsifal is the harbinger of peace and freedom, in
a world that has been enslaved by the magic of desire.
The haunting symbols of this opera owe their
power to feelings that are too deep to be lightly dis-
missed as aesthetic artefacts. But what is their mean-
ing for people who live unsheltered by religion? The
answer is to be found, not in religious, but in sexual,
feeling. The purely human redemption which is
offered to us in love is dependent, in the last analy-
sis, upon public recognition of the value of chastity,
and of the sacrilege involved in a sexual impulse that
wanders free from the controlling impulse of respect.
The ‘pollution’ of the prostitute is not that she gives
herself for money, but that she gives herself to those
whom she hates or despises. This is the ‘wound’ of
unchastity, which cannot be healed in solitude by the
one who suffers it, but only by his acceptance into a
social order which confines the sexual impulse to the
realm of intimate relations. The chaste person sustains
the ideal of sexual innocence, by giving honourable
form to chastity as a way of life. Through his exam-
ple, it becomes not foolish but admirable to ignore
the promptings of a desire that brings no intimacy or
fulfilment. Chastity is not a private policy, followed
by one individual alone for the sake of his peace of
mind. It has a wider and more generous significance:
it attempts to draw others into complicity, and to sus-
tain a social order that confines the sexual impulse to
the personal sphere.
Chastity exists in two forms: as a publicly declared
and publicly recognised role or policy (the chastity
of the monk, priest or nun); or as a private resolu-
tion, a recognition of the morality that lies dormant
in desire. Thus Hans Sachs, in Die Meistersinger, who
has the opportunity to fulfil his desire, chooses rather
to renounce it, knowing that it will not be recipro-
cated. Sachs is loved and admired for the irreproach-
able aloneness which makes him the property of all.
He is the buttress of Nuremberg, whose satisfactions
are public satisfactions, precisely because his own
seed has not been sown. His melancholy and bookish

CHAPTER 15: SExuAl MoRAliTy Á 561
obscene perception of his body. Perversion is narcis-
sistic, often solipsistic, involving strategies of replace-
ment which are intrinsically destructive of personal
feeling. Perversion therefore prepares us for a life with-
out personal fulfilment, in which no human relation
achieves foundation in the acceptance of the other, as
this acceptance is provided by desire.
Lust may be defined as a genuine sexual desire,
from which the goal of erotic love has been excluded,
and in which whatever tends towards that goal—
tenderness, intimacy, fidelity, dependence— is curtailed
or obstructed. There need be nothing perverted in this.
Indeed the special case of lust which I have discussed
under the title of Don Juanism, in which the project of
intimacy is constantly abbreviated by the flight towards
another sexual object, provides one of our paradigms
of desire. Nevertheless, the traditional condemnation
of lust is far from arbitrary, and the associated contrast
between lust and love far from a matter of convention.
Lust is also a habit, involving the disposition to give way
to desire, without regard to any personal relation with
the object. (Thus perversions are all forms of lust even
though lust is not in itself a perversion.) Naturally, we all
feel the promptings of lust, but the rapidity with which
sexual acts become sexual habits, and the catastrophic
effect of a sexual act which cannot be remembered
without shame or humiliation, give us strong reasons to
resist them, reasons that Shakespeare captured in these
words:
Th’expence of Spirit in a waste of shame
Is lust in action, and till action, lust
Is perjur’d, murdrous, blouddy, full of blame,
Savage, extreame, rude, cruell, not to trust,
Injoyd no sooner but dispised straight,
Past reason hunted, and no sooner had,
Past reason hated as a swollowed bayt,
On purpose layd to make the taker mad:
Mad in pursuit and in possession so,
Had, having, and in quest to have, extreame,
A blisse in proofe, and prov’d, a very woe,
Before a joy proposd, behind, a dreame,
All this the world well knowes, yet none knowes
well
To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.
of the body’s obscene dominion. ‘Debauching of the
innocent’ was traditionally regarded as a most seri-
ous offence, and one that offered genuine harm to the
victim. The harm in question was not physical, but
moral: the undermining of the process which prepares
the child to enter the world of erōs. (Thus Nabokov’s
Lolita, who passes with such rapidity from childish
provocativeness to a knowing interest in the sexual
act, finds, in the end, a marriage devoid of passion,
and dies without knowledge of desire.)
The personal and the sexual can become divorced
in many ways. The task of sexual morality is to unite
them, to sustain thereby the intentionality of desire,
and to prepare the individual for erotic love. Sexual
morality is the morality of embodiment: the posture
which strives to unite us with our bodies, precisely in
those situations when our bodies are foremost in our
thoughts. Without such a morality the human world
is subject to a dangerous divide, a gulf between self and
body, at the verge of which all our attempts at personal
union falter and withdraw. Hence the prime focus of
sexual morality is not the attitude to others, but the
attitude to one’s own body and its uses. Its aim is to
safeguard the integrity of our embodiment. Only on
that condition, it is thought, can we inculcate either
innocence in the young or fidelity in the adult. Such
habits are, however, only one part of sexual virtue.
Traditional morality has combined its praise of them
with a condemnation of other things— in particular of
the habits of lust and perversion. And it is not hard to
find the reason for these condemnations.
Perversion consists precisely in a diverting of the
sexual impulse from its interpersonal goal, or towards
some act that is intrinsically destructive of personal
relations and of the values that we find in them. The
‘dissolution’ of the flesh, which the Marquis de Sade
regarded as so important an element in the sexual
aim, is in fact that dissolution of the soul; the perver-
sions described by de Sade are not so much attempts to
destroy the flesh of the victim as to rid his flesh of its
personal meaning, to wring out, with the blood, the
rival perspective. That is true in one way or another of
all perversion, which can be simply described as the
habit of finding a sexual release that avoids or abol-
ishes the other, obliterating his embodiment with the

562 Á PART 4: ETHiCAl iSSuES
pleasure. For the fantasist, the ideal partner is indeed
the prostitute, who, because she can be purchased,
solves at once the moral problem presented by the
presence of another at the scene of sexual release.
The connection between fantasy and prostitution
is deep and important. The effect of fantasy is to ‘com-
modify’ the object of desire, and to replace the law of
sexual relationship between people with the law of
the market. Sex itself can then be seen as a commod-
ity: something that we pursue and obtain in quantifi-
able form, and which comes in a variety of packages:
in the form of a woman or a man; in the form of a film
or a dream; in the form of a fetish or an animal. In so
far as the sexual act is seen in this way, it seems mor-
ally neutral— or, at best, impersonal. Such criticism as
may be offered will concern merely the dangers for the
individual and his partner of this or that sexual pack-
age: for some bring diseases and discomforts of which
others are free. The most harmless and hygienic act of
all, on this view, is the act of masturbation, stimulated
by whatever works of pornography are necessary to
prompt the desire for it in the unimaginative. This jus-
tification for pornography has, indeed, recently been
offered.
As I have already argued, however, fantasy does
not exist comfortably with reality. It has a natural ten-
dency to realise itself: to remake the world in its own
image. The harmless wanker with the video- machine
can at any moment turn into the desperate rapist with
a gun. The ‘reality principle’ by which the normal sex-
ual act is regulated is a principle of personal encoun-
ter, which enjoins us to respect the other person, and
to respect, also, the sanctity of his body, as the tangible
expression of another self. The world of fantasy obeys
no such rule, and is governed by monstrous myths and
illusions which are at war with the human world— the
illusions, for example, that women wish to be raped,
that children have only to be awakened in order to
give and receive the intensest sexual pleasure, that
violence is not an affront but an affirmation of a natu-
ral right. All such myths, nurtured in fantasy, threaten
not merely the consciousness of the man who lives by
them, but also the moral structure of his surrounding
world. They render the world unsafe for self and other,
and cause the subject to look on everyone, not as an
In addition to the condemnation of lust and
perversion, however, some part of traditional sex-
ual education can be seen as a kind of sustained war
against fantasy. It is undeniable that fantasy can
play an important part in all our sexual doings, and
even the most passionate and faithful lover may, in
the act of love, rehearse to himself other scenes of
sexual abandon than the one in which he is engaged.
Nevertheless, there is truth in the contrast (familiar,
in one version, from the writings of Freud) between
fantasy and reality, and in the sense that the first
is in some way destructive of the second. Fantasy
replaces the real, resistant, objective world with a
pliant substitute— and that, indeed, is its purpose.
Life in the actual world is difficult and embarrass-
ing. Most of all it is difficult and embarrassing in our
confrontation with other people, who, by their very
existence, make demands that we may be unable or
unwilling to meet. It requires a great force, such as
the force of sexual desire, to overcome the embarrass-
ment and self- protection that shield us from the most
intimate encounters. It is tempting to take refuge in
substitutes, which neither embarrass us nor resist
the impulse of our spontaneous cravings. The habit
grows, in masturbation, of creating a compliant world
of desire, in which unreal objects become the focus of
real emotions, and the emotions themselves are ren-
dered incompetent to participate in the building of
personal relations. The fantasy blocks the passage to
reality, which becomes inaccessible to the will.
Even if the fantasy can be overcome so far as to
engage in the act of love with another, a peculiar dan-
ger remains. The other becomes veiled in substitutes;
he is never fully himself in the act of love; it is never
clearly him that I desire, or him that I possess, but
always rather a composite object, a universal body,
of which he is but one among a potential infinity of
instances. Fantasy fills our thoughts with a sense of
the obscene, and the orgasm becomes, not the pos-
session of another, but the expenditure of energy on
his depersonalised body. Fantasies are private prop-
erty, which I can dispose according to my will, with
no answerability to the other whom I abuse through
them. He, indeed, is of no intrinsic interest to me, and
serves merely as my opportunity for self- regarding

CHAPTER 15: SExuAl MoRAliTy Á 563
homosexuality is conveniently summarised in this
passage from a Quaker pamphlet:
We see no reason why the physical nature of the sex-
ual act should be the criterion by which the question
whether it is moral should be decided. An act which
(for example) expresses true affection between two
individuals and gives pleasure to them both, does
not seem to us to be sinful by reason alone of the
fact that it is homosexual. The same criteria seem
to apply whether a relationship is heterosexual or
homosexual.
Such sentiments are the standard offering of the lib-
eral and utilitarian moralities of our time. However
much we may sympathise with their conclusions, it
is not possible to accept the shallow reasoning that
leads up to them, and which bypasses the great meta-
physical conundrum to which all sexual morality is
addressed: the conundrum of embodiment. [D. H.]
Lawrence asserts that ‘sex is you’, and offers some bad
but revealing lines on the subject:
And don’t, with the nasty, prying mind, drag it
out from its deeps
And finger it and force it, and shatter the rhythm it
keeps
When it is left alone, as it stirs and rouses and sleeps.
If anything justifies Lawrence’s condemnation of the
‘nasty, prying mind’, it is the opposite of what he sup-
poses. Sex ‘sleeps’ in the soul precisely because, and to
the extent that, it is buried there by education. If sex
is you, it is because you are the product of that educa-
tion, and not just its victim. It has endowed you with
what I have called ‘sexual integrity’: the ability to be in
your body, in the very moment of desire.
The reader may be reluctant to follow me in believ-
ing that traditional morality is largely justified by the
ideal of sexual integrity. But if he accepts the main
tenor of my argument, he must surely realise that the
ethic of ‘liberation’, far from promising the release of
the self from hostile bondage, in fact heralds the dis-
sipation of the self in loveless fantasy: th’expence of
Spirit, in a waste of shame.
end in himself, but as a possible means to his private
pleasure. In his world, the sexual encounter has been
‘fetishised’, to use the apt Marxian term, and every
other human reality has been poisoned by the sense of
the expendability and replaceability of the other.
It is a small step from the preoccupation with sex-
ual virtue, to a condemnation of obscenity and por-
nography (which is its published form). Obscenity is a
direct assault on the sentiment of desire, and therefore
on the social order that is based on desire and which
has personal love as its goal and fulfilment. There is no
doubt that the normal conscience cannot remain neu-
tral towards obscenity, any more than it can remain
neutral towards paedophilia and rape (which is not to
say that obscenity must also be treated as a crime). It
is therefore unsurprising that traditional moral edu-
cation has involved censorship of obscene material,
and a severe emphasis on ‘purity in thought, word and
deed’—an emphasis which is now greeted with irony
or ridicule.
Traditional sexual education was, despite its exag-
gerations and imbecilities, truer to human nature
than the libertarian culture which has succeeded it.
Through considering its wisdom and its shortcom-
ings, we may understand how to resuscitate an idea
of sexual virtue, in accordance with the broad require-
ments of the Aristotelian argument that I have . . . been
presenting. The ideal of virtue remains one of ‘sexual
integrity’; of a sexuality that is entirely integrated into
the life of personal affection, and in which the self and
its responsibility are centrally involved and indissolu-
bly linked to the pleasures and passions of the body.
Traditional sexual morality has therefore been the
morality of the body. Libertarian morality, by con-
trast, has relied almost entirely on a Kantian view of
the human subject, as related to his body by no coher-
ent moral tie. Focussing as he does on an idea of purely
personal respect, and assigning no distinctive place to
the body in our moral endeavour, the Kantian inevi-
tably tends towards permissive morality. No sexual
act can be wrong merely by virtue of its physical char-
acter, and the ideas of obscenity, pollution and per-
version have no obvious application. His attitude to

564 Á PART 4: ETHiCAl iSSuES
Why Shouldn’t Tommy and Jim Have Sex?
A Defense of Homosexuality
John Corvino
HOMOSEXUAL SEX IS “UNNATURAL”
Many contend that homosexual sex is “unnatural.”
But what does that mean? Many things that people
value— clothing, houses, medicine, and government,
for example— are unnatural in some sense. On the
other hand, many things that people detest— disease,
suffering, and death, for example— are “natural” in
the sense that they occur “in nature.” If the unnatural-
ness charge is to be more than empty rhetorical flour-
ish, those who levy it must specify what they mean.
Borrowing from Burton Leiser, I will examine several
possible meanings of “unnatural.”
What Is Unusual or Abnormal Is Unnatural
One meaning of “unnatural” refers to that which devi-
ates from the norm, that is, from what most people do.
Obviously, most people engage in heterosexual rela-
tionships. But does it follow that it is wrong to engage
in homosexual relationships? Relatively few people
read Sanskrit, pilot ships, play the mandolin, breed
goats, or write with both hands, yet none of these
activities is immoral simply because it is unusual. As
the Ramsey Colloquium, a group of Jewish and Chris-
tian scholars who oppose homosexuality, writes, “The
statistical frequency of an act does not determine
its moral status.” So while homosexuality might be
unnatural in the sense of being unusual, that fact is
morally irrelevant.
What Is Not Practiced by Other Animals Is
Unnatural
Some people argue, “Even animals know better than
to behave homosexually: homosexuality must be
wrong.” This argument is doubly flawed. First, it
rests on a false premise. Numerous studies— including
Anne Perkins’s study of “gay” sheep and George and
Molly Hunt’s study of “lesbian” sea gulls— have shown
Tommy and Jim are a homosexual couple I know.
Tommy is an accountant; Jim is a botany professor.
They are in their forties and have been together four-
teen years, the last five of which they’ve lived in a Vic-
torian house that they’ve lovingly restored. Although
their relationship has had its challenges, each has
made sacrifices for the sake of the other’s happiness
and the relationship’s long- term success.
I assume that Tommy and Jim have sex with each
other (although I’ve never bothered to ask). Further-
more, I contend that they probably should have sex
with each other. For one thing, sex is pleasurable. But
it is also much more than that: a sexual relationship
can unite two people in a way that virtually nothing
else can. It can be an avenue of growth, of communi-
cation, and of lasting interpersonal fulfillment. These
are reasons why most heterosexual couples have sex
even if they don’t want children, don’t want children
yet, or don’t want additional children. And if these rea-
sons are good enough for most heterosexual couples,
then they should be good enough for Tommy and Jim.
Of course, having a reason to do something does
not preclude there being an even better reason for not
doing it. Tommy might have a good reason for drink-
ing orange juice (it’s tasty and nutritious) but an even
better reason for not doing so (he’s allergic). The point
is that one would need a pretty good reason for deny-
ing a sexual relationship to Tommy and Jim, given
the intense benefits widely associated with such rela-
tionships. The question I shall consider in this paper
is thus quite simple: Why shouldn’t Tommy and Jim
have sex?
John Corvino, “Why Shouldn’t Tommy and Jim Have Sex?” in
Same Sex, ed. John Corvino, (Lanham, MD; Rowman & Littlefield,
1997), 3–16. Copyright © 1997. Used by permission of Rowman &
Littlefield Publishing Group. All rights reserved.

CHAPTER 15: SExuAl MoRAliTy Á 565
least not in any direct or obvious way. (Do you? Think
about it.) Rather, they find certain people attractive
and certain activities arousing, whether they “decide”
to or not. Indeed, most people at some point in
their lives wish that they could control their feelings
more— for example, in situations of unrequited love—
and find it frustrating that they cannot. What they can
control to a considerable degree is how and when they
act upon those feelings. In that sense, both homosexu-
ality and heterosexuality involve lifestyle choices. But
in either case, determining the origin of the feelings
will not determine whether it is moral to act on them.
What Violates an Organ’s Principal Purpose
Is Unnatural
Perhaps when people claim that homosexual sex is
unnatural they mean that it cannot result in procre-
ation. The idea behind the argument is that human
organs have various natural purposes: eyes are for see-
ing, ears are for hearing, genitals are for procreating.
According to this argument, it is immoral to use an
organ in a way that violates its particular purpose.
Many of our organs, however, have multiple
purposes. Tommy can use his mouth for talking, eat-
ing, breathing, licking stamps, chewing gum, kissing
women, or kissing Jim; and it seems rather arbitrary to
claim that all but the last use are “natural.” (And if we
say that some of the other uses are “unnatural, but not
immoral,” we have failed to specify a morally relevant
sense of the term “natural.”)
Just because people can and do use their sexual
organs to procreate, it does not follow that they
should not use them for other purposes. Sexual
organs seem very well suited for expressing love, for
giving and receiving pleasure, and for celebrating,
replenishing, and enhancing a relationship— even
when procreation is not a factor. Unless opponents
of homosexuality are prepared to condemn hetero-
sexual couples who use contraception or individuals
who masturbate, they must abandon this version of
the unnaturalness argument. Indeed, even the Roman
Catholic Church, which forbids contraception and
masturbation, approves of sex for sterile couples and
of sex during pregnancy, neither of which can lead to
that some animals do form homosexual pair- bonds.
Second, even if animals did not behave homosexu-
ally, that fact would not prove that homosexuality
is immoral. After all, animals don’t cook their food,
brush their teeth, participate in religious worship, or
attend college; human beings do all of these without
moral censure. Indeed, the idea that animals could
provide us with our standards— especially our sexual
standards— is simply amusing.
What Does Not Proceed from Innate Desires
Is Unnatural
Recent studies suggesting a biological basis for homo-
sexuality have resulted in two popular positions. One
side proposes that homosexual people are “born that
way” and that it is therefore natural (and thus good)
for them to form homosexual relationships. The other
side maintains that homosexuality is a lifestyle choice,
which is therefore unnatural (and thus wrong). Both
sides assume a connection between the origin of
homosexual orientation, on the one hand, and the
moral value of homosexual activity, on the other. And
insofar as they share that assumption, both sides are
wrong.
Consider first the pro- homosexual side: “They are
born that way; therefore it’s natural and good.” This
inference assumes that all innate desires are good
ones (i.e., that they should be acted upon). But that
assumption is clearly false. Research suggests that
some people are born with a predis position toward
violence, but such people have no more right to stran-
gle their neighbors than anyone else. So while people
like Tommy and Jim may be born with homosexual
tendencies, it doesn’t follow that they ought to act on
them. Nor does it follow that they ought not to act on
them, even if the tendencies are not innate. I probably
do not have any innate tendency to write with my left
hand (since I, like everyone else in my family, have
always been right- handed), but it doesn’t follow that it
would be immoral for me to do so. So simply asserting
that homosexuality is a lifestyle choice will not show
that it is an immoral lifestyle choice.
Do people “choose” to be homosexual? People
certainly don’t seem to choose their sexual feelings, at

566 Á PART 4: ETHiCAl iSSuES
HOMOSEXUAL SEX IS HARMFUL
One might instead argue that homosexuality is harm-
ful. The Ramsey Colloquium, for instance, argues that
homosexuality leads to the breakdown of the fam-
ily and, ultimately, of human society, and it points to
the “alarming rates of sexual promiscuity, depression,
and suicide and the ominous presence of AIDS within
the homosexual subculture.” Thomas Schmidt mar-
shals copious statistics to show that homosexual activ-
ity undermines physical and psychological health.
Such charges, if correct, would seem to provide strong
evidence against homosexuality. But are the charges
correct? And do they prove what they purport to prove?
One obvious (and obviously problematic) way to
answer the first question is to ask people like Tommy
and Jim. It would appear that no one is in a better
position to judge the homosexual lifestyle than those
who know it firsthand. Yet it is unlikely that critics
would trust their testimony. Indeed, the more homo-
sexual people try to explain their lives, the more critics
accuse them of deceitfully promoting an agenda. (It’s
like trying to prove that you’re not crazy. The more
you object, the more people think, “That’s exactly
what a crazy person would say.”)
One might instead turn to statistics. An obvious
problem with this tack is that both sides of the debate
bring forth extensive statistics and “expert” testi-
mony, leaving the average observer confused. There is
a more subtle problem as well. Because of widespread
antigay sentiment, many homosexual people won’t
acknowledge their romantic feelings to themselves,
much less to researchers. I have known a number of
gay men who did not “come out” until their forties
and fifties, and no amount of professional compe-
tence on the part of interviewers would have been
likely to open their closets sooner. Such problems
compound the usual difficulties of finding represen-
tative population samples for statistical study.
Yet even if the statistical claims of gay rights oppo-
nents were true, they would not prove what they pur-
port to prove, for several reasons. First, as any good
statistician realizes, correlation does not equal cause.
Even if homosexual people were more likely to com-
mit suicide, be promiscuous, or contract AIDS than
procreation. The Church concedes here that intimacy
and pleasure are morally legitimate purposes for sex,
even in cases where procreation is impossible. But
since homosexual sex can achieve these purposes as
well, it is inconsistent for the Church to condemn it
on the grounds that it is not procreative.
One might object that sterile heterosexual cou-
ples do not intentionally turn away from procreation,
whereas homosexual couples do. But this distinction
doesn’t hold. It is no more possible for Tommy to pro-
create with a woman whose uterus has been removed
than it is for him to procreate with Jim. By having sex
with either one, he is intentionally engaging in a non-
procreative sexual act.
Yet one might press the objection further and
insist that Tommy and the woman could produce chil-
dren if the woman were fertile: whereas homosexual
relationships are essentially infertile, heterosexual
relationships are only incidentally so. But what does
that prove? Granted, it might require less of a miracle
for a woman without a uterus to become pregnant
than for Jim to become pregnant, but it would require
a miracle nonetheless. Thus it seems that the real dif-
ference here is not that one couple is fertile and the
other not, nor that one couple “could” be fertile (with
the help of a miracle) and the other not, but rather that
one couple is male- female and the other male- male. In
other words, sex between Tommy and Jim is wrong
because it’s male- male— i.e., because it’s homosexual.
But that, of course, is no argument at all.
What Is Disgusting or Offensive Is Unnatural
It often seems that when people call homosexu-
ality “unnatural” they really just mean that it’s
disgusting. But plenty of morally neutral activities—
handling snakes, eating snails, performing autop-
sies, clean ing toilets, and so on— disgust people.
Indeed, for centuries, most people found interracial
relationships dis gusting, yet that feeling— which has
by no means disappeared— hardly proves that such
relationships are wrong. In sum, the charge that
homosexuality is unnatural, at least in its most com-
mon forms, is longer on rhetorical flourish than on
philosophical cogency. At best it expresses an aes-
thetic judgment, not a moral judgment.

CHAPTER 15: SExuAl MoRAliTy Á 567
like New York and San Francisco should exhibit fewer
such problems than their small- town counterparts;
yet statistics do not seem to bear this out. This objec-
tion underestimates the extent of antigay sentiment
in our society. By the time many gay and lesbian
people move to urban centers, they have already been
exposed to (and may have internalized) considerable
hostility toward homosexuality. Moreover, the visibil-
ity of homosexuality in urban centers makes gay and
lesbian people there more vulnerable to attack (and
thus more likely to exhibit certain difficulties). Finally,
note that urbanites in general (not just homosexual
urbanites) tend to exhibit higher rates of promiscuity,
depression, and sexually transmitted disease than the
rest of the population.
But what about AIDS? Opponents of homosexu-
ality sometimes claim that even if homosexual sex is
not, strictly speaking, immoral, it is still a bad idea,
since it puts people at risk for AIDS and other sexu-
ally transmitted diseases. But that claim is mislead-
ing: it is infinitely more risky for Tommy to have sex
with a woman who is HIV- positive than with Jim, who
is HIV- negative. Obviously, it’s not homosexuality
that’s harmful, it’s the virus; and the virus may be car-
ried by both heterosexual and homosexual people.
Now it may be true (in the United States, at least)
that homosexual males are statistically more likely to
carry the virus than heterosexual females and thus
that homosexual sex is statistically more risky than
heterosexual sex (in cases where the partner’s HIV
status is unknown). But opponents of homosexuality
need something stronger than this statistical claim.
For if it is wrong for men to have sex with men because
their doing so puts them at a higher AIDS risk than
heterosexual sex, then it is also wrong for women to
have sex with men because their doing so puts them at
a higher AIDS risk than homosexual sex (lesbians as a
group have the lowest incidence of AIDS). Purely from
the standpoint of AIDS risk, women ought to prefer
lesbian sex.
If this response seems silly, it is because there is
obviously more to choosing a romantic or sexual part-
ner than determining AIDS risk. And a major part of
the decision, one that opponents of homosexuality
consistently overlook, is considering whether one
the general population, it would not follow that their
homosexuality causes them to do these things. An
alternative— and very plausible— explanation is that
these phenomena, like the disproportionately high
crime rates among African Americans, are at least
partly a function of society’s treatment of the group in
question. Suppose you were told from a very early age
that the romantic feelings that you experienced were
sick, unnatural, and disgusting. Suppose further that
expressing these feelings put you at risk of social ostra-
cism or, worse yet, physical violence. Is it not plausi-
ble that you would, for instance, be more inclined to
depression than you would be without such obstacles?
And that such depression could, in its extreme forms,
lead to suicide or other self- destructive behaviors? (It
is indeed remarkable that couples like Tommy and Jim
continue to flourish in the face of such obstacles.)
A similar explanation can be given for the alleged
promiscuity of homosexuals. The denial of legal mar-
riage, the pressure to remain in the closet, and the
overt hostility toward homosexual relationships are
all more conducive to transient, clandestine encoun-
ters than they are to long- term unions. As a result,
that which is challenging enough for heterosexual
couples— settling down and building a life together—
becomes far more challenging for homosexual couples.
Indeed, there is an interesting tension in the crit-
ics’ position here. Opponents of homosexuality com-
monly claim that “marriage and the family . . . are
fragile institutions in need of careful and continuing
support.” And they point to the increasing prevalence
of divorce and premarital sex among heterosexuals
as evidence that such support is declining. Yet they
refuse to concede that the complete absence of similar
support for homosexual relationships might explain
many of the alleged problems of homosexuals. The
critics can’t have it both ways: if heterosexual mar-
riages are in trouble despite the various social, eco-
nomic, and legal incentives for keeping them together,
society should be little surprised that homosexual
relationships— which not only lack such supports, but
face overt hostility— are difficult to maintain.
One might object that if social ostracism were
the main cause of homosexual people’s problems,
then homosexual people in more “tolerant” cities

568 Á PART 4: ETHiCAl iSSuES
relationships and celibacy. What the critics need to
show, therefore, is that no matter how loving, commit-
ted, mutual, generous, and fulfilling the relationship
may be, Tommy and Jim would flourish more if they
were celibate. Given the evidence of their lives (and of
others like them), this is a formidable task indeed.
Thus far I have focused on the allegation that
homosexuality harms those who engage in it. But
what about the allegation that homosexuality harms
other, nonconsenting parties? Here I will briefly con-
sider two claims: that homosexuality threatens chil-
dren and that it threatens society.
Those who argue that homosexuality threatens
children may mean one of two things. First, they
may mean that homosexual people are child molest-
ers. Statistically, the vast majority of reported cases
of child sexual abuse involve young girls and their
fathers, stepfathers, or other familiar (and presum-
ably heterosexual) adult males. But opponents of
homosexuality argue that when one adjusts for rela-
tive percentage in the population, homosexual males
appear more likely than heterosexual males to be
child molesters. As I argued above, the problems with
obtaining reliable statistics on homosexuality render
such calculations difficult. Fortunately, they are also
unnecessary.
Child abuse is a terrible thing. But when a het-
erosexual male molests a child (or rapes a woman or
commits assault), the act does not reflect upon all
heterosexuals. Similarly, when a homosexual male
molests a child, there is no reason why that act should
reflect upon all homosexuals. Sex with adults of the
same sex is one thing; sex with children of the same
sex is quite another. Conflating the two not only
slanders innocent people, it also misdirects resources
intended to protect children. Furthermore, many
men convicted of molesting young boys are sexually
attracted to adult women and report no attraction to
adult men. To call such men “homosexual,” or even
“bisexual,” is probably to stretch such terms too far.
Alternatively, those who charge that homosexual-
ity threatens children might mean that the increasing
visibility of homosexual relationships makes children
more likely to become homosexual. The argument for
this view is patently circular. One cannot prove that
can have a mutually fulfilling relationship with the
partner. For many people like Tommy and Jim, such
fulfillment— which most heterosexuals recognize to
be an important component of human flourishing— is
only possible with members of the same sex.
Of course, the foregoing argument hinges on
the claim that homosexual sex can only cause harm
indirectly. Some would object that there are certain
activities— anal sex, for instance— that for anatomi-
cal reasons are intrinsically harmful. But an argument
against anal intercourse is by no means tantamount to
an argument against homosexuality: neither all nor
only homosexuals engage in anal sex. There are plenty
of other things for both gay men and lesbians to do in
bed. Indeed, for women, it appears that the most com-
mon forms of homosexual activity may be less risky
than penile- vaginal intercourse, since the latter has
been linked to cervical cancer.
In sum, there is nothing inherently risky about
sex between persons of the same gender. It is only
risky under certain conditions: for instance, if they
exchange diseased bodily fluids or if they engage in
certain “rough” forms of sex that could cause tear-
ing of delicate tissue. Heterosexual sex is equally risky
under such conditions. Thus, even if statistical claims
like those of Schmidt and the Ramsey Colloquium
were true, they would not prove that homosexuality is
immoral. At best, they would prove that homosexual
people— like everyone else— ought to take great care
when deciding to become sexually active.
Of course, there’s more to a flourishing life than
avoiding harm. One might argue that even if Tommy
and Jim are not harming each other by their relation-
ship, they are still failing to achieve the higher level
of fulfillment possible in a heterosexual relationship,
which is rooted in the complementarity of male and
female. But this argument just ignores the facts: Tommy
and Jim are homosexual precisely because they find
relationships with men (and, in particular, with each
other) more fulfilling than relationships with women.
Even evangelicals (who have long advocated “faith
healing” for homosexuals) are beginning to acknowl-
edge that the choice for most homosexual people is
not between homosexual relationships and hetero-
sexual relationships, but rather between homosexual

CHAPTER 15: SExuAl MoRAliTy Á 569
more generous than they would otherwise be. In short,
their relationship— including its sexual component—
provides the same kinds of benefits that infertile het-
erosexual relationships provide (and perhaps other
benefits as well). Nor should we fear that accepting
their relationship and others like it will cause people
to flee in droves from the institution of heterosexual
marriage. After all, as Thomas Williams points out, the
usual response to a gay person is not “How come he
gets to be gay and I don’t?”
HOMOSEXUALITY VIOLATES BIBLICAL
TEACHING
At this point in the discussion, many people turn to
religion. “If the secular arguments fail to prove that
homosexuality is wrong,” they say, “so much the
worse for secular ethics. This failure only proves that
we need God for morality.” Since people often justify
their moral beliefs by appeal to religion, I will briefly
consider the biblical position.
At first glance, the Bible’s condemnation of homo-
sexual activity seems unequivocal. Consider, for
example, the following two passages, one from the
“Old” Testament and one from the “New”:
You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an
abomination. (Lev. 18:22)
For this reason God gave them up to degrading pas-
sions. Their women exchanged natural intercourse for
unnatural, and in the same way also the men, giving up
natural intercourse with women, were consumed with
passion for one another. Men committed shameless
acts with men and received in their own persons the
due penalty for their error. (Rom. 1:26–27)
Note, however, that these passages are surrounded
by other passages that relatively few people consider
binding. For example, Leviticus also declares,
The pig . . . is unclean for you. Of their flesh you shall
not eat, and their carcasses you shall not touch; they
are unclean for you. (11:7–8)
Taken literally, this passage not only prohibits eating
pork, but also playing football, since footballs are made
of pigskin. (Can you believe that the University of Notre
Dame so flagrantly violates Levitical teaching?)
doing X is bad by arguing that it causes other people to
do X, which is bad. One must first establish indepen-
dently that X is bad. That said, there is not a shred of
evidence to demonstrate that exposure to homosexu-
ality leads children to become homosexual.
But doesn’t homosexuality threaten society? A
Roman Catholic priest once put the argument to me
as follows: “Of course homosexuality is bad for soci-
ety. If everyone were homosexual, there would be no
society.” Perhaps it is true that if everyone were homo-
sexual, there would be no society. But if everyone were
a celibate priest, society would collapse just as surely,
and my friend the priest didn’t seem to think that he
was doing anything wrong simply by failing to procre-
ate. Jeremy Bentham made the point somewhat more
acerbically roughly 200 years ago: “If then merely out
of regard to population it were right that [homosexuals]
should be burnt alive, monks ought to be roasted alive
by a slow fire.”
From the fact that the continuation of society
requires procreation, it does not follow that everyone must
procreate. Moreover, even if such an obligation existed,
it would not preclude homosexuality. At best, it would
preclude exclusive homosexuality: homosexual people
who occasionally have heterosexual sex can procreate
just fine. And given artificial insemination, even those
who are exclusively homosexual can procreate. In short,
the priest’s claim— if everyone were homosexual, there
would be no society— is false; and even if it were true, it
would not establish that homosexuality is immoral.
The Ramsey Colloquium commits a similar fallacy.
Noting (correctly) that heterosexual marriage promotes
the continuation of human life, it then infers that
homosexuality is immoral because it fails to accomplish
the same. But from the fact that procreation is good, it
does not follow that childlessness is bad— a point that
the members of the colloquium, several of whom are
Roman Catholic priests, should readily concede.
I have argued that Tommy and Jim’s sexual rela-
tionship harms neither them nor society. On the
contrary, it benefits both. It benefits them because
it makes them happier— not merely in a short- term,
hedonistic sense, but in a long- term, “big picture” sort
of way. And, in turn, it benefits society, since it makes
Tommy and Jim more stable, more productive, and

570 Á PART 4: ETHiCAl iSSuES
they typically involved older men and younger boys. If
those are the kinds of features that the biblical authors
had in mind when they issued their condemnations,
and such features are no longer typical, then the biblical
condemnations no longer apply. As with usury, substantial
changes in cultural context have altered the meaning
and consequences— and thus the moral value— of the
practice in question. Put another way, using the Bible’s
condemnations of homosexuality against contempo-
rary homosexuality is like using its condemnations of
usury against contemporary banking.
Let me be clear about what I am not claiming here.
First, I am not claiming that the Bible has been wrong
before and therefore may be wrong this time. The
Bible may indeed be wrong on some matters, but for
the purpose of this argument I am assuming its infal-
libility. Nor am I claiming that the Bible’s age ren-
ders it entirely inapplicable to today’s issues. Rather,
I am claiming that when we do apply it, we must pay
attention to morally relevant cultural differences between
biblical times and today. Such attention will help us
distinguish between specific time- bound prohibitions
(for example, laws against usury or homosexual rela-
tions) and the enduring moral values they represent
(for example, generosity or respect for persons). And
as the above argument shows, my claim is not very
controversial. Indeed, to deny it is to commit oneself
to some rather strange views on slavery, usury, wom-
en’s roles, astronomy, evolution, and the like.
Here, one might also make an appeal to religious
pluralism. Given the wide variety of religious beliefs
(e.g., the Muslim belief that women should cover their
faces, the Orthodox Jewish belief against working on
Saturday, the Hindu belief that cows are sacred and
should not be eaten), each of us inevitably violates
the religious belief of others. But we normally don’t
view such violations as occasions for moral censure,
since we distinguish between beliefs that depend on
particular revelations and beliefs that can be justified
independently (e.g., that stealing is wrong). Without
an independent justification for condemning homo-
sexuality, the best one can say is, “My religion says
so.” But in a society that cherishes religious freedom,
that reason alone does not normally provide grounds
for moral or legal sanctions. That people still fall back
Similarly, St. Paul, author of the Romans passage,
also writes, “Slaves, obey your earthly masters with
fear and trembling, in singleness of heart, as you obey
Christ” (Eph. 6:5)—morally problematic advice if
there ever were any. Should we interpret this passage
(as Southern plantation owners once did) as implying
that it is immoral for slaves to escape? After all, God
himself says in Leviticus,
[Y]ou may acquire male and female slaves . . . from
among the aliens residing with you, and from their
families that are with you, who have been born in your
land; and they may be your property. You may keep
them as a possession for your children after you, for
them to inherit as property. (25:44–46)
How can people maintain the inerrancy of the Bible
in light of such passages? The answer, I think, is that
they learn to interpret the passages in their historical
context.
Consider the Bible’s position on usury, the lend-
ing of money for interest (for any interest, not just
excessive interest). The Bible condemns this practicle
in no uncertain terms. In Exodus God says that “if you
lend money to my people, to the poor among you, you
shall not exact interest from them” (22:25). Psalm 15
says that those who lend at interest may not abide in
the Lord’s tent or dwell on his holy hill (1–5). Ezekiel
calls usury “abominable”; compares it to adultery,
robbery, idolatry, and bribery; and states that any-
one who “takes advanced or accrued interest . . . shall
surely die; his blood shall be upon himself” (18:13).
Should believers therefore close their savings
accounts? Not necessarily. According to orthodox
Christian teaching, the biblical prohibition against
usury no longer applies. The reason is that economic
conditions have changed substantially since biblical
times, such that usury no longer has the same nega-
tive consequences it had when the prohibitions were
issued. Thus, the practice that was condemned by the
Bible differs from contemporary interest banking in
morally relevant ways.
Yet are we not in a similar position regarding homo-
sexuality? Virtually all scholars agree that homosexual
relations during biblical times were vastly different from
relationships like Tommy and Jim’s. Often such rela-
tions were integral to pagan practices. In Greek society,

CHAPTER 15: SExuAl MoRAliTy Á 571
connection between homosexuality, on the one hand,
and incest, polygamy, and bestiality, on the other:
Why, then, do critics continue to push this objec-
tion? Perhaps it’s because accepting homosexuality
requires them to give up one of their favorite argu-
ments: “It’s wrong because we’ve always been taught
that it’s wrong.” This argument— call it the argument
from tradition— has an obvious appeal: people reason-
ably favor tried- and- true ideas over unfamiliar ones,
and they recognize the foolishness of trying to invent
morality from scratch. But the argument from tradi-
tion is also a dangerous argument, as any honest look
at history will reveal.
I conclude that Tommy and Jim’s relationship,
far from being a moral abomination, is exactly what
it appears to be to those who know them: a morally
positive influence on their lives and on others. Accept-
ing this conclusion takes courage, since it entails that
our moral traditions are fallible. But when these tradi-
tions interfere with people’s happiness for no sound
reason, they defeat what is arguably the very point of
morality: promoting individual and communal well-
being. To put the argument simply, Tommy and Jim’s
relationship makes them better people. And that’s not
just good for Tommy and Jim: that’s good for everyone.
on that reason in discussions of homosexuality sug-
gests that they may not have much of a case otherwise.
CONCLUSION
As a last resort, opponents of homosexuality typically
change the subject: “But what about incest, polyg-
amy, and bestiality? If we accept Tommy and Jim’s
sexual relationship, why shouldn’t we accept those as
well?” Opponents of interracial marriage used a simi-
lar slippery- slope argument in the 1960s when the
Supreme Court struck down antimiscegenation laws. It
was a bad argument then, and it is a bad argument now.
Just because there are no good reasons to oppose
interracial or homosexual relationships, it does not
follow that there are no good reasons to oppose inces-
tuous, polygamous, or bestial relationships. One
might argue, for instance, that incestuous relation-
ships threaten delicate familial bonds, or that polyga-
mous relationships result in unhealthy jealousies (and
sexism), or that bestial relationships— do I need to say
it?—aren’t really “relationships’ at all, at least not in
the sense we’ve been discussing. Perhaps even better
arguments could be offered (given much more space
than I have here). The point is that there is no logical
From Seduction, Rape, and Coercion
Sarah Conly
physical violence. Of course words alone can result
in rape, if the words threaten physical violence. The
issue here is distinct. Proponents of an expansion of
our definition of rape argue that, just as physical force
is a form of coercion which invalidates consent so that
ensuing sex is rape, it is “verbal coercion” if a person
agrees to have sex because of the use of words which
cause or threaten to cause (only) emotional duress.
* * *
The question is whether such pressure, if it results
in a person having sex who would not otherwise have
wanted to, is indeed coercive; that is, whether it is truly
* * *
If physical force or the threat of physical force is used
to get a woman to agree to have sex, that is rape. If psy-
chological force is used, can that also be rape?
1. VERBAL COERCION
What is at issue here? The question is about what
is sometimes called verbal coercion, but the issue is
not merely about the use of words rather than actual
From Sarah Conly, “Seduction, Rape, and Coercion,” Ethics 115
(October 2004): 96–121. © 2004 by The University of Chicago.
Reprinted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.

572 Á PART 4: ETHiCAl iSSuES
tired and/or to some degree inebriated) the pursuit of
the sexual goal in the face of opposition has seemed
to some to constitute a force which, while not violent,
nullifies consent in the same way physical force does.1
Proponents of such changes, and corresponding
changes in the law, worry about the susceptibility
of one person to certain sorts of psychological force
brought to bear by another. The psychological forces
brought to bear may be various and may be used sin-
gly, or . . . conjointly. The aggressor may implore and
wheedle until the other feels guilt; he may tease her
with jealousy, berate her for her coldness and imma-
turity, chastise her for the harm she does him, refute
her reasoning when she tries to articulate her position,
and subject her to a barrage of angry words. Ultimately
she may find herself in a state of psychological exhaus-
tion, feeling unable to resist in the face of what seems
an implacable will. In these cases, it is argued, the
woman has been forced against her will as surely as if
the aggressor had used physical violence.
To some, then, the recognition of the potency of
some sorts of speech, of the psychological pressure
it can convey, is a long- delayed recognition of the
true dynamics of (some, many, or all, depending on
whom you talk to) sexual encounters. To others this
sort of interpretation of a sexual encounter repre-
sents a deviation from good sense. It may be unjust
in that it castigates as rapists those who simply are
persuasive at getting what they want. It may also
be harmful to those who concede to such pressure,
in particular to women, since they are most often
thought of as the victims of such verbal coercion. If
we accept that (some) women are unable to withstand
the psychological force brought to bear upon them,
this makes them seem like less than autonomous
agents. If these women had sex when they didn’t
want to, why then did they have sex?2 Physical force
or the threat of it makes sense of having sex against
one’s will, it is thought, but absent physical force, how
are we to make sense of someone who does something
she really doesn’t want to do? For some, accepting
that psychological pressure could be a means to rape
wrongly suggests that women are weak minded, prone
to collapse under “emotional pressure” and to con-
cede to the desires of the stronger- minded male.3 . . .
sufficiently harmful and sufficiently wrongful that we
may say that the person who changes her mind as a
result of such pressure has been raped. What if the
motivation to have sex comes not from fear of physi-
cal violence but from fear of emotional harm? What
if the force used to overcome a woman’s resistance is
not physical force but emotional pressure? Can this be
rape? The answer, I think, is that it may or may not
be. Infliction of emotional harm can invalidate con-
sent, and sex that arises as a result of this can thus be
rape. Other emotional harms (even if perhaps more
painful) can be consistent with valid consent. What
we need to do is differentiate between the different
circumstances of harm to understand when consent is
and is not valid.
* * *
[T]here is controversy about what (if any) kind
of emotional pressure should count as coercive.
Campus behavior codes, freed from the evidentiary
requirements of a court of law (and freed from the
responsibility of sending the perpetrator to prison),
have recently seen more prosecutions for what once
would have been considered consensual sex, precisely
because some have adopted standards of assault which
include overbearing of the other’s will through emo-
tional pressure. In such cases, the charge of rape seems
to stem from the fact that, while the victims were not
physically constrained to have sex, they were in some
sense browbeaten into having intercourse they would
not otherwise have chosen to have. Thus, it is argued,
the sex was not truly voluntary. Even the widely
accepted admonition that “No Means No” has been
the subject of controversy for this reason: what fol-
lows from a woman’s saying “no” to sex? To proceed
immediately to penetration would clearly be wrong,
but what about trying to talk her into sex, to press
with blandishments or tears, to harangue; in short, to
refuse to give up? Opinion is divided: some feel that
“no” means simply that you should not advance phys-
ically on someone who has told you to stop, but oth-
ers feel that spirit of the rule is violated by continuing
to verbally press the issue after one person has stated
her desire. Especially in the conditions in which such
pressure is likely to occur (when it is late and we are

CHAPTER 15: SExuAl MoRAliTy Á 573
sex— she’s afraid of sexually transmitted diseases, she
has contrary religious convictions, and so forth. Say-
ing that she wanted to have sex in some ways does not
determine whether the ensuing sex is consensual.
What seems to determine the question, then, is
not simply whether or not the person had some desire
to have or not have sex, or even whether the desire to
have sex is a function of another person’s antecedent
desire, but whether the motivation which decides her
to have sex is a result of coercive pressure. If she weighs
the religious conviction against her physical arousal
and decides that all things considered, she prefers to
have sex, she has not been raped. If she weighs her
desire not to have sex against the threat of violence
by a knife- wielding rapist and decides that, given the
choice of sex or death, she, all things considered, pre-
fers to have sex, she has been raped. If her desire to
have sex is a result of coercive pressure, then the fact
that she did what she wanted to do is neither here
nor there, because the options from which she had to
choose were illegitimately narrow. The question here,
then, is when is psychological pressure coercive?
II. BUT WHAT IS COERCION?
We need to examine when the criteria we generally
feel are required for coercion to be present are also
present in cases of psychological pressure. None of
these is seen as sufficient for coercion, but all are seen
as necessary, and when psychological pressure doesn’t
meet these criteria, it is not coercive.
Intent. One requirement for coercion is that the
coercer is doing what he does intentionally. Acciden-
tally doing something which causes another to decide
to have sex with you can’t be considered coercive.
The question of mens rea has long played a role in the
legal determination of rape. While our discussion is
not of what constitutes legal rape but of what consti-
tutes rape from the moral perspective, it may still be
held that there can be no wrongdoing unless there is a
perpetrator who has acted with a blameworthy frame
of mind. In the case of legal rape, the idea is that the
perpetrator either knows that the woman has given no
valid consent, or should have known, in that he would
have known with a reasonable amount of perspicacity
This is a dilemma. It seems intuitively right to
many (and certainly to me) that we should hold the
delinquent fathers and foster fathers who threatened
their children into sex responsible for being rapists
and that the man who had intercourse with the eight-
year- old girl was clearly forcing himself upon an inno-
cent victim, whether or not he threatened to hit her if
she wouldn’t have sex. Yet, it seems implausible to say
that whenever someone gives into irrational suasion
to have sex, or has sex only out of fear of displeasing
someone she cares for, or out of a desire to please, a
rape has occurred.
Deciding to Have Sex
The differing notions of choice and rape turn in part
on different accounts of the psychology involved—
on how the decision about having sex is made. One
central issue seems to be whether or not the woman
wanted to do what she did, but this is a complex ques-
tion. What is it not to want to have sex? We are seldom
univocal as to reasons for doing anything. A woman
may want to have sex to express love, even if she is not
physically aroused. Perhaps she is tired, but her hus-
band is leaving for a two- week trip, and she wants to
have sex to feel closer to him. Perhaps she even wants
to do it just because he wants to do it. He has read a
lot of feminist literature, however, and is a sensitive
guy and won’t sulk or become angry if she doesn’t
have sex; he just won’t feel as happy as he would if she
did. She loves him, however, and wants him to feel
loved. Even in the latter case, where his attitude con-
tributes to her decision— where indeed, were it not for
his desire she wouldn’t want to have sex— her having
sex doesn’t plausibly seem to be rape, any more than
my buying Girl Scout cookies only to avoid hurting
the feelings of the little girl selling them means I’ve
been robbed. Having a reason to oppose having sex
as well as positive reasons to have sex doesn’t mean
that when she does have sex at another’s behest it
must be rape. Similarly, however, we cannot say that
if a woman had some positive motivation to have sex
that means any ensuing sex must have been consen-
sual. Anyone might have a desire to have sex (she was
physically aroused, she wants to please the man she
is in love with) and have lots of reasons not to have

574 Á PART 4: ETHiCAl iSSuES
an armed rapist may yield to the mere threat of force,
without our saying she consented to have sex. There
is a sense, no doubt, in which she chooses to have sex
when she chooses to have sex rather than to be beaten
or killed. She was nonetheless raped because the choice
is not free, and to say that the choice is not free is to
say that she is placed under coercive pressure and made
to choose between illegitimate options.4 Choice under
psychological pressure might, then, be equally unfree:
the mere ability to choose the better of two alterna-
tives doesn’t mean that there was insufficient force for
sex to count as rape. That she can choose whether or
not to have sex or suffer psychological harm does not
in itself mean she has not been raped, any more than
the fact that a woman might choose to have sex rather
than be violently abused means she hasn’t been raped.
Harm. For a choice to be coerced, however, it is
necessary that the person doing the choosing has no
reasonable choice between doing what the coercer
wants and the bad option which the coercer has intro-
duced.5 Not every threat constitutes coercion, because
some threats don’t introduce harms great enough to
affect my decision procedure. My neighbor can’t say
he was coerced into supporting my bid for election
because I told him I would make terribly unfriendly
faces at him if he didn’t do so; while I shouldn’t be
making faces at people who don’t support me, it’s not
so bad that he can claim that he had no other option
than to vote my way. Can psychological pain be suf-
ficient to say that the person subjected to threats of
psychological harm has no reasonable choice but to
succumb to the will of the coercer?
Why not? Clearly, psychological pain can be
ex treme. A person might recover more quickly from a
physical beating than an emotional breakup; indeed,
it may be the emotional component of a beating that
makes it so bad— the same amount of harm suffered
from falling down the stairs would be far less trau-
matic. The picture the critic has here seems to be of
someone who agrees to have sex to avoid some slight
loss, say, so her boyfriend won’t break a date with her
in order to go watch football, and such critics think
not having a date just doesn’t seem so awful an option
as to constrain a person’s choice. This is true: one may
agree to have sex for foolish reasons, like wanting to
or concern. Can the person who has placed psycho-
logical pressure be in a sufficiently culpable frame of
mind to be held a rapist when he has sex with some-
one who, without threat of violence, has said that she
would, given the circumstances, prefer to have sex?
It seems possible. The culpable frame of mind
required for the legal designation of rape is not one
where the perpetrator recognizes that he is morally
or legally in the wrong. Rather, the perpetrator has
simply to know that the victim did not consent or to
be in a situation where he should have known. The
fact that he may sincerely believe himself to be in the
right (because the woman owed him sex, or whatever)
does not excuse him. Similarly, while the person who
places psychological pressure may believe himself to
be in the right in having achieved the other’s consent
by threatening (mere) psychological pain, this does
not suffice to excuse him from the charge of rape. If
he knows that the other’s consent was obtained only
through the pressure he has brought to bear, he is
aware of the relevant facts. The question is whether
what he has done invalidates consent in the way phys-
ical force does, so that the ensuing sex is rape.
Choice. Some may argue that psychological pres-
sure cannot be properly coercive because in typical
cases of psychological pressure one has a choice of
whether or not to yield, whereas in cases of physical
force no such decision is possible. It is possible that,
in some cases of psychological pressure, the victim of
pressure is so demoralized as to literally lose the abil-
ity to choose— and this may be true [of young incest
victims]— but we cannot assume that this is typical, at
least among adults. More normally, in the case of psy-
chological pressure, the victim is not forced to have
sex, but rather chooses to have sex in order to prevent
losing a relationship, to avoid an angry confrontation,
or to avoid other pain. In cases of physical force, it is
argued, no such choice is possible.
This looks like a distinction initially, but it does
not reflect our modern beliefs about rape. While at
one point in time it was true that, both culturally and
legally, sex was only considered rape if the woman was
literally physically overwhelmed such that she could
not stop the assailant in any way, this narrow con-
cept of rape is outmoded. A woman confronted with

CHAPTER 15: SExuAl MoRAliTy Á 575
where I have no right of control. I have a right of
sanction, but only in certain ways and only on cer-
tain grounds. There are ways we can bend others to
our will and ways we can’t, and what these are seem
to be determined by the nature of the specific rela-
tionship. Is it legitimate to pressure someone to have
sex? This will depend on the kind of pressure brought
to bear and the legitimate parameters of the relation-
ship in which it is brought to bear.
Clearly, in some relationships it is not legitimate
to pressure someone to have sex. The cases of [fathers
and daughters] are ones where the authority of father-
hood does not extend into the realm of sex, and
using it is clearly an abuse. Demands for sex in such
relationships are illegitimate. In the realm of merely
social relationships, though, where there is no per-
sonal or institutional authority being extended to a
use beyond its justified parameters, the issue is not
so clear. Can a person legitimately threaten to break
off with someone if she refuses to have sex, intending
that this threat will make her have sex where normally
she would choose not to? Can he legitimately do this
knowing that her pain at his prospective departure
will be the determining factor in her decision to have
sex with him? There are two cases: he threatens to
break off because that is his sincere intent if no sex is
included in the relationship and he feels he should let
her know this. Or, he may threaten to break off, sin-
cerely intending to leave this unsatisfactory relation-
ship but also hoping that his threat will motivate her
to have sex, even if her other desires not to have sex
remain in place. That is, in the second case he hopes to
manipulate her into doing what he wants. Reflection
shows that, while the second of these may be less than
admirable, neither case constitutes rape.
Clearly, as the boss may fire the employee, one
person may break up with another. Clearly, as the
boss may threaten the employee with firing in order
to improve his performance, one may threaten the
other person in a relationship with a break- up if things
don’t improve. Can the specific area of improvement
be sexual? It is not that a romantic partner has a duty,
explicit or implicit, to provide sex, in the way that an
employee does have a duty to do the work associated
with the job. At the same time, the absence of this duty
brag to friends that her boyfriend has never left her
alone on Saturday night. To say the choice to have sex
for such slight goods should not count as coerced does
not, however, show that psychological pressure gen-
erally can’t be coercive. The same slippery slope can
occur with physical force. What if someone threatens
that he will pinch the woman if she does not have sex
with him? If she agrees, has she been coerced? Assum-
ing that the woman has the normal capacity for pain,
has no peculiar traumas associated with pinching,
and so forth, then the threat of a slight pain would
probably not count as coercive, whatever the intent
of the threatener, because being pinched is a reason-
able option to choose over having sex with someone
you don’t want to have sex with. If she concedes to his
wishes, we will probably think she didn’t really mind
having sex to begin with, even given the uncouthness
of his advance. We won’t think she was raped.
The point is that, with both physical and psycho-
logical threats, there will be greater and lesser pains.
Precisely what degree of pain constitutes coercive force
will be difficult to say, but there is no reason to think
that psychological pain cannot be awful, so awful that
it makes unwanted sex the more reasonable option.6
Legitimacy. For an offer to be coercive, however,
it must do more than constrain the options of the
chooser. It must do this illegitimately.7 Whether or
not I coerce my son in telling him he cannot go to
the Rollerworld dance unless he does his homework
depends on whether I have the right to control his
activities in this particular way.8 Sometimes a pres-
sure may be brought to bear to make someone do
something that he or she doesn’t want to do and that
pressure is entirely within the rights of the individual
doing the pressuring. If I tell an employee I will fire
him if he doesn’t do a better job, I may cause him
great distress and overbear his will to play computer
games at work, but I haven’t done anything wrong.
If, on the other hand, I tell him that I will shoot him
or even that I will ridicule his appearance around the
office, then I have proffered a sanction which is not
legitimate, even though my goal may be a reason-
able one. Or, if I threaten to fire him, not because
he is doing a bad job but because he refuses to enter
the basketball pool, I extend my control into realms

576 Á PART 4: ETHiCAl iSSuES
should have reasonable bearing on the health of the
relationship, and should not be inherently immoral,
and sanctions offered for failure to meet even reason-
able demands are limited. I am assuming, however,
that engaging in sex, all things being equal, is not
immoral and has reasonable bearing on the relation-
ship is, as argued above, a justified response.9
So, it does seem within a person’s rights to want
sex to be a part of a romantic relationship and also
within that person’s rights to tell the partner that, if
there is no sex, he will decamp. This does amount to
a demand, indeed a threat, insofar as the fear of los-
ing the relationship is an incentive to have sex and
the one intends this fear to motivate the other to have
sex, just as the wife who says she’ll divorce if her hus-
band is unfaithful again intends this fear to motivate
him to change his ways. When you enter into a rela-
tionship, however, you lay yourself open to the pos-
sibility of being hurt in various ways. One is that the
other person may tell you you’ll be dumped if you
don’t change, and that may place you in a painful
dilemma, that is, doing something you don’t want to
do or losing the relationship. This can be true if you
are asked to be faithful, and it can be true if you are
asked to have sex. Just as the one person has the right
to ask, the other has the right to decide not to do any
of the things she is asked. But no one has the right to
insist that a relationship cause no pain, and no one
can claim to have been coerced just because the pros-
pect of pain changes behavior.
III. DECIDING TO HAVE SEX, REDUX
Not every case of deciding to have sex is so clear, how-
ever. It would be nice if every person who decided to
have sex weighed all the advantages and disadvan-
tages of doing so, decided correctly which consider-
ations have the most weight for her or him, and acted
accordingly. In such cases we may say the person did
what he or she wanted to do. What do we say, though,
when we confront an agent whose actions do not
accurately reflect her strongest desire? Many persons
engage in sex in a way which they later regret, not just
because of unforeseen consequences but because the
act was, even at that time, contrary to their overall
in a romantic relationship is a function of the fact
that such relationships are open ended. Just as being
in a relationship does not, per se, give one any duties,
it is also the case that one can, without stepping out
of bounds, make the relationship dependent on vari-
ous conditions that suit one’s own needs. Often the
things which are asked are those we are so familiar
with we may think of them as simply constitutive of
there being a relationship, but they may in fact be
conditions set by one partner for another. Person A
may say she wants Person B to communicate more if
they are to stay together. Person B may insist that Per-
son A remain faithful and that, without this condition
being met, person B will leave. We don’t look upon
these demands as being coercive, but rather as the
sorts of conditions most people set on relationships,
as a legitimate attempt to craft the relationship they
want, even if that requires finding a different part-
ner. This may be manipulative, in that the intent is to
make someone do something she wouldn’t otherwise
want, but it seems manipulative in a way which we
accept in dealing with others, where introducing sys-
tems of rewards and sanctions to get others to do what
you want, in this less than ideal world, is sometimes
necessary and often goes by the name of compromise.
We may say that, if you will do the dishes, I will do
the cooking; if you won’t do the dishes, I won’t do the
cooking. It would be much nicer if we didn’t pressure
one another to change behaviors, as it would be nicer
if we never even wanted the other to change. In the
real world, though, this happens, and we recognize
that this sort of trade- off is an unfortunate need when
people of different desires try to stay together. Rela-
tionships are founded on odd precepts, and if one of
the partners is unilaterally responsible for making the
continuance of the relationship conditional on the
relationship including some particular activity, that is
in itself legitimate.
* * *
Are such conditions always legitimate? No. As with
employer- employee relationships, there are limits to
what you may demand and limits to what sanctions
you may threaten if even your legitimate demands
are not met. Demands placed within a relationship

CHAPTER 15: SExuAl MoRAliTy Á 577
but rather undercut it. The seducer does not allow
the other time to collect herself, to think about what
it really would be best to do. Thus, the circumstances
may be as relevant as the content of the appeal in deter-
mining whether or not this is seduction: what in mid-
afternoon over coffee in the student union might be
a rational discussion about the desirability of includ-
ing sex in the relationship may well be productive of
an emotional maelstrom at 2:00 a.m. in the dark of
his room. Were she in control of herself, she might
resist, or she might, upon reflection, have a change of
heart and decide that, if having sex is the only way to
continue the relationship, then that is worth it. But in
this circumstance reflection is not an option, and no
exertion of self- control is forthcoming. She gives in,
unable to resist the pressure of the moment, unable
to act on the decision she would make if the circum-
stances of his demands did not induce weakness.
Weakness and positive temptation. If a man con-
sciously tries to undercut a woman’s decision- making
process by arousing emotion and is successful in this,
is the ensuing sex rape? Consider, first, an analogous
case, where the seduced is already attracted to what-
ever it is that she is trying to resist and where the
seducer increase her desires while trying to undercut
her appreciation of the reasons to resist. You go into
a store, where your eye is caught by the attractive but
expensive item you’ve always wanted but know to be
a luxury you can’t afford. As you stand contemplating
it, you are approached by the High Pressure Salesman,
who is paid by commission and who is not going to
be dissuaded from trying to sell you this piece by con-
siderations of your welfare. It’s him against you, and
he does everything he can to overcome your defenses.
Well, not everything he can— he doesn’t pull a gun
and threaten you with death if you don’t buy the item;
he doesn’t tell you that your safety or the security of
your children is at stake. He doesn’t use violence as a
threat in any sense nor induce terror. Rather, he tries
to subvert your reasoning process. When you tell him,
weakening, that you can’t afford the a. but e. item, he
tells you that in the long run the item isn’t really that
expensive; if, for example, you calculate how much
you will be paying per hour, the amount is negligible.
He argues that, in certain cases, the item may even be
motivational structure; it was in some sense not what
they truly wanted at the time. Some people have sex
out of weakness of will
* * *
Not surprisingly, this happens frequently in the
realm of sexuality, where on the one hand there is a
strong motivation to engage in sexual activity and
on the other hand there are many desires and values
which mitigate against it. This in itself, however, may
have nothing to do with coercion. Two people can
weakly and mutually succumb to the lure of romance
(or whatever) without their roles being that of victim
and villain. While weakness is no doubt morally prob-
lematic in terms of each person’s assessment of his
or her own character, neither has anything to blame
the other for, any more than the dieter can blame the
whipped cream. The problem arises when one feels
that one’s weakness has somehow been induced by
another.
A. Seduction
Weakness induced by another is what we’ve come to
know as seduction. In seduction, a person does not
simply act weakly because she finds the prospect of
sex overwhelmingly tempting; she is brought to this
weakness by the interference of someone else. There
are two ways this can happen: the victim of seduction
can be brought to do something that she in many way
likes but which she is trying to resist. She can be led to
succumb to temptation so that desire overcomes con-
viction. Or, she may be importuned to do something
that she is not attracted to, and distracted by grief or
fear, she may give in, without fully rational consider-
ation. It is this which might lead one to see seduction
as a species of rape, because pressure is brought to bear
on the woman to act in a way that runs counter not
just to what she would not want without that pres-
sure but also to what she really wants even given that
pressure. . . .
The proximity of the lure causes her to see it most
vividly and to feel its attractions most poignantly, and
this causes her to choose weakly, to give in to tempta-
tion. The important thing is that these appeals do not
contribute to any rational decision- making process,

578 Á PART 4: ETHiCAl iSSuES
guilty of rape. If he touches you when you have told
him to stop, he is guilty of assault, but if you don’t try
to stop him from touching you and you let him talk
to you about why it is okay to have sex, changing
your mind is ultimately a decision for which you are
responsible.
Weakness and negative sanctions. What if you
are led to act weakly, though, not because of a posi-
tive attraction but because of a threat of emotional
pain? And what if the other has induced this emo-
tional pain just in order to subvert your thinking
processes and get you to do what they want? This
is not so much temptation as anxiety and as such it
looks much more like coercion. Again, let us take a
(putative) analogy which has been defused by avoid-
ing sexual content. Let us imagine your sleazy Cousin
Beau. Beau is a charming ne’er do well. He’s always
had a kind word for you, his little cousin, and when
you were young, he would take you for piggy- back
rides when your more sober relatives engaged in bor-
ing conversations and imitate their irritable admo-
nitions at the dinner table. Now, though, you are a
young adult, with a good job and a disposable income,
and Beau approaches you with dollar signs in his eyes.
His proposition is vague but urgent— that you should
invest your savings in a business opportunity directed
by Beau himself. You are not so blinded by affection
as to think that this looks like a golden opportunity,
but you don’t know how to handle the situation. Beau
has always been so funny and kind, and he looks so
sincere, and the imagined prospect of your refusal
seems to cut him, a member of your own family with
whom you’ve enjoyed so many youthful hours, to the
quick. If you had time you could think more clearly,
but giving you time to think is just what he doesn’t
want. He stresses his own suffering, hearkens back to
the many times he’s helped you, and suggests that he
can’t possibly feel the same in the future if you won’t
do this little thing, which can’t possibly hurt you and
which could help him so much. You feel guilty, you
feel sorry, you feel Beau may turn against you if you
fail him, and, most of all, you feel confused. The more
Beau sees this, the harder he pushes. And, suppose that
he is joined in the pursuit of your money by Cousin Flo.
Flo has never been a buddy. She has spent both your
construed as saving you money— you’ll be using the a.
but e. item so much that you won’t spend on all those
other less attractive items and, anyway, when it’s time
for resale you might well get rid of the a. but e. item for
more than you paid for it. He astutely perceives whom
you are likely to admire and tells you that this is the
sort of item Michael Jordan/Hillary Rodham Clinton/
Eminem is bound to have around the house. And most
of all, whatever he says, he doesn’t let you think. He
looks for a point of vulnerability, a weakness through
which he can corrupt the solid reasoning process with
which you came in and convince you that what he
wants is really what you want.
Would this work? It depends, of course, on the
person. For one thing, you’ve got to be tempted by
the a. but e. item to begin with and to have a suf-
ficiently ingenuous character not to recognize that
this is essentially an adversarial relationship. As with
seduction, only some people are vulnerable to the
pressure. But, as with seduction, some people are vul-
nerable, and they give in, only to rue an action which
was expressive neither of their heartfelt desires nor
their considered principles. This is bad. We look down
on high pressure salesmen as being manipulative and
self- interested. But while this is true, such a sales tech-
nique is not assault. The salesman does not rob you.
He does not even misrepresent issues of fact. He aids
you to pursue something you want by increasing your
desire for it and decreasing your recognition of the rea-
sons against it. This is like a person who wants you off
your diet and wafts fresh bread under your nose while
telling you that just this once won’t hurt. It wouldn’t
work if you weren’t enticed by the smell of fresh bread.
It might not work if they weren’t also talking to you
to reduce your resistance. Combining the two things,
though, sometimes does work. In the realm of sexual-
ity, it is like someone who increases the other’s already
existing desire to have sex, perhaps by touch, perhaps
by words, while trying to dispose of their reasons not
to have sex.
Such a person is not admirable, but just as the high
pressure salesman is not a robber and the bread- wafter
is not guilty of assault by force- feeding, the seducer
who persuades you to do something you are attracted
to but might otherwise have been able to resist is not

CHAPTER 15: SExuAl MoRAliTy Á 579
seduction and rape is the same as finagled money loss
and robbery. The seducer tries to suborn the person’s
thought process just the way Cousin Beau does. The
thief and the rapist don’t try to undercut the vic-
tim’s ability to decide what she should do: they don’t
need to, because they present her with a choice— her
money or her life, sex or being beaten— that she can
make quite rationally.
The question, then, is not so much whether a per-
son is acting weakly or fully in accordance with her
own judgment, or whether she is acting in a way she
would not were it not for the pressures of another,
rather than acting uniquely on her own desires. The
question is whether these pressures placed on her, and
which may make her decide against her own most
considered desires, are placed on her appropriately.
But, one might ask, can it ever be proper to place
pressure on adults to do what they really don’t want
to do, either by increasing a desire they are trying to
fight or by diminishing or outweighing a desire which
is really in accord with their overall motivational
structure?
* * *
When it comes to sex, there is no doubt that, in
some cases, the lover who tries to sell sex to his reluc-
tant partner truly thinks that she will be better off once
she sees how great sex with him is. In others, the effort
is surely not so disinterested, but it is again within the
normal scope of relationships that we try to persuade
others to do what we want and that that persuasion
is not purely rational. We need perhaps a more gen-
eral recognition of the fact that, when it comes to sex,
the two parties involved may have a conflict of inter-
ests and that cultural stereotypes and ideologies have
been invented which try to hide this fact.11 We cannot
assume that even the most romantic of encounters is
not at heart adversarial. But adversarial interests may
not make an action immoral. It is often fair enough
that we want different things and that we try to get the
other person to do what we want.
And where such actions are immoral, where
we go beyond the normal degree of dishonesty or
manipulation implicit in human relationships, the
resulting intercourse may not be rape. It is not rape
youths making you feel inferior for your poor sense of
fashion, your inability to attract boyfriends, your ugly
nose. As such things often happen, instead of reject-
ing Flo as unworthy of your attention, you tried all the
harder to live up to her standards— after all, she was
older, prettier, and obviously cooler. The one thing
you want to do is avoid that sneer. When Cousin Flo
castigates you for once again failing to make the grade
by investing in this great opportunity, when she says
she’d hoped that you would finally have caught up
to her in taste and acumen and would thus take the
cousins up on this proposition, you quail. You’ve been
worn down by a youth of inferiority, and it’s as hard to
muster the strength to withstand her judgment now
as it was then.
Cousin Beau is a sleaze. Cousin Flo has a despi-
cable character. But for all this, I don’t think we can
say that they are thieves, nor even that they are extor-
tionists. It isn’t that you haven’t reasonable alter-
natives to giving them money. It is rather that you
don’t, as Beau gazes at you appealingly, or as Flo curls
her lip, see your way clearly as to what your choice
should be. The cousins have placed pressure of a sort
an honorable person wouldn’t, and we evaluate their
character accordingly, but they have not forced your
compliance. . . .
Are these analogous to seduction? They have in
common that they feature people who coax, cajole,
wheedle, importune, harangue, berate, and brow-
beat another into doing their bidding. Certainly
there are differences. Strangely, women may be more
vulnerable when it comes to giving up their bodies
than to giving up money. On the one hand, we rec-
ognize the body to be the locus of autonomy, not to
be interfered with, but on the other hand we roman-
ticize a man’s pursuit of a hesitant woman in a way
that may make a woman feel unnaturally cold, infe-
rior, and guilty if she doesn’t yield to his passion.10
Furthermore, the use of the body by another can
be much more of a loss than the loss of money; few
things hit as close to home as having one’s very body
taken over by another. But the fact that seduction is
worse than having money wormed out of you, just
as rape is worse than theft, doesn’t mean the analogy
is not apt. The point is that the difference between

580 Á PART 4: ETHiCAl iSSuES
are none of these yet may nonetheless be regrettable
for their repercussions. What we need to understand is
that sex is at least as complex as other areas of human
interaction and has just as many varieties of wrong as
well as of good, and as we have been accustomed to
differentiate within other areas of human interaction
so should we here.
To subsume all areas of sexual wrong under the
heading of rape does a disservice to all concerned. It
hurts those whose laudable goal is just to show that
sex can be dark and hurtful; they lose credibility when
they are perceived as exaggerating, and their perfectly
appropriate criticisms of sexual practice may be dis-
missed. It is bad for those who are the aggressors in
any sexual situation, who may feel that, as long as
they have not committed rape, their actions are mor-
ally neutral: they need to learn that actions outside
of rape can be despicable and to cultivate awareness
as to which are and which are not morally acceptable
forms of suasion. To call all sexual wrongdoing rape
also does a disservice to those who have suffered the
absolute terror of violent assault and whose suffering
can’t, I think, be compared to that of the person who
has reluctantly agreed to have sex to avoid emotional
distress. This may be a case where analytical philoso-
phy, with its conceptual distinctions and semantic
precision, can indeed explain something to our sense
of order and can actually be useful.
NOTES
1. One well- known example of a college sexual offense
policy which deviates greatly from the law is the Antioch
College Sexual Offense policy. While the Antioch policy
does not specifically address verbal coercion, it articu-
lates two common concerns: first, it says that rape can
occur even where there is no physical force or threat of
physical force; second, it introduces a far more stringent
standard of what real consent is than that in use in rape
law. At Bates College, where I was teaching when writing
this article, the description of rape in the sexual offense
policy includes acts of intercourse which have been con-
sented to because of emotional pressure. When asked, an
administrator gave as an example of emotional pressure a
person repeatedly telling his girlfriend he would break up
if the person asking for sex stays within what he has
a right to ask for. This is not to say that there are con-
ditions where one has a right to have sex even if the
other person does not consent: there aren’t. Rather,
one has a right to ask for the other’s consent and to
try to persuade the other to give consent as long as
one does this within legitimate parameters: the other
should be a competent adult, capable of making a
decision; sanctions should only be those one has
a right to impose, like ending the relationship, not
violence; there should be no use of authority derived
from extraneous positions (as father, employer, etc.).
No one has a right to control our bodies or to touch us
when we do not want to be touched, but it is a part of
our lives as moral agents that people close to us have
the right to talk to us about things we may not want
to hear, even when that means they are being down-
right nasty. We can go away if we want and not see
the person any more but, if we want to be involved
in a relationship, we cannot reasonably insist that we
never hear anything we don’t want to hear. It is part
of our life as moral agents that we need to learn to
negotiate through others’ desires.
* * *
CONCLUSION
We need to expand our conceptual framework and
our terminology so that we can capture greater differ-
ences than we typically do. There is a cultural tradition
which has divided sexual intercourse into either mor-
ally unacceptable rape or morally acceptable nonrape.
The truth is that there are many finer distinctions
which we need to recognize and to which we need to
develop a sensitivity. We do this in other areas, where
we recognize actions of deceit, hurtfulness, and dam-
age which are not the worst of transgressions and yet
which are not morally neutral. We know generally
that there is a difference between actions which (a)
infringe others’ rights (say, stealing), (b) don’t infringe
others’ rights but are nonetheless wrong (like failing
to give to someone in need), (c) are not wrong but
which nonetheless evince bad character (giving to the
needy but only to feel your own superiority), and (d)

CHAPTER 15: SExuAl MoRAliTy Á 581
term can look at the question I address as whether coer-
cion in the case of sex is legitimate.
5. Again, I am following Wertheimer.
6. The degree of harm required to make the choice of sex
the only reasonable one open to the victim is naturally
an issue of debate. If a boss threatens to fire an employee
if she does not have sex, some will argue that, while the
use of power is clearly illegitimate here, the harm is not
sufficient to say the woman has no reasonable choice.
Those who agree with such a low estimate of harm will
argue that this is rather merely sexual harassment. In the
case of the young daughters threatened with the anger
of their parent, I think such a harm is sufficiently great
to make the pressure to have sex genuinely coercive, and
the ensuing sex rape. It may also be that, in the case of
children and parents, the children have less than a com-
plete ability to judge the degree of harm the parent may
be able to do them, since the parent’s authority interferes
with their own ability to use their judgment. In such a
case the pressure to have sex may be seen as not only
coercive but also as what I call seductive, in that it inter-
feres with the reasoning process of the victim. I discuss
seduction in Sec. III.
7. This follows Wertheimer’s account.
8. We may assume here that not going to the dance would
cause my son great pain.
9. Marcia Baron has influenced my views here on the
parameters of demands that may be made within rela-
tionships.
10. Remember what an insult it has been for a woman to be
called “frigid.”
11. Just as culture has veiled the conflict of interest which
may rise within romantic encounters, it has perhaps
exaggerated the danger to women from strangers. The
idea that predators lie in wait for women has been
used to convince women that they need protectors,
which, in turn, may make them more vulnerable to
the men whom they see as close to them: boyfriends,
family members, even dates. See Susan Griffin’s semi-
nal “Rape: The All American Crime,” first published in
Ramparts (10 [September 1971]: 23–36), and Claudia
Card’s “Rape as a Terrorist Institution,” in Violence, Ter-
rorism, and Justice, ed. R. G. Frey and Christopher W.
Morris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991),
pp. 296–319.
with her if she would not have sex. See also an interest-
ing exchange on the use of Pineau’s article “Date Rape: A
Feminist Analysis” in the training of the student judicial
board at Pomona College in its student paper, The Student
Life, October 12 and November 2, 2001.
2. Of course, some will immediately answer this question
by pointing to the inculcation of cultural mores, specifi-
cally those which make women feel they have an obli-
gation to have sex, as mentioned earlier in this article.
Some of those who propose holding women entirely
responsible for their choices in these conditions, how-
ever, seem to believe that pointing to the acceptance of
cultural mores in explaining these actions again deni-
grates these women’s claim to autonomy. Perhaps the
idea is that a truly autonomous being should be able to
rise above cultural influence when it comes to decisions
about sex.
3. See Katie Roiphe’s popular The Morning After: Sex, Fear,
and Feminism on Campus (New York: Little, Brown, 1993).
A more balanced assessment of widening the scope of
what is considered rape may be found in Linda Lem-
oncheck’s “When Good Sex Turns Bad: Rethinking a
Continuum Model of Sexual Violence against Women,”
in A Most Detestable Crime, ed. Keith Burgess-Jackson
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 159–82.
4. Here, and generally, I am following Alan Wertheimer’s
account of coercion, as presented in Coercion (Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987). Wertheimer expli-
cates and defends what he calls a two- pronged account of
coercion, where for A’s threat to be coercive (1) A leaves B
with no reasonable choice and (2) A’s proposal is wrong-
ful, where the wrongfulness relies on more than just the
fact that A leaves B no reasonable choice (pp. 30–31 ff.).
One way in which A’s proposal can be wrongful is that it
may be a proposal A has no right to make. Naturally, not
everyone accepts this account of coercion. In particular,
there are those who think coercion is a morally neutral
term, so that to say an act is coercive is not to say that it is
(even prima facie) morally wrong. Samuel Dubois Cook
in “Coercion and Social Change,” in Coercion, ed. Roland
Pennock and John Chapman (Chicago: Aldine Atherton,
1972), pp. 107–43, argues, e.g., that a legitimate govern-
ment can rightfully coerce its citizens in some cases. For
my purposes, this difference is simply one of word use.
Those who think coercion is in itself a morally neutral

582 Á PART 4: ETHiCAl iSSuES
Sex under Pressure: Jerks, Boorish Behavior, and Gender Hierarchy
Scott A. Anderson
draw upon advantages conferred by male dominance
within a gender hierarchy. If we fail to attend to such
contextual features of gender relations, it will be dif-
ficult to see why ordinary sexual pressuring (“seduc-
tion”) by men is ethically more serious than many
other ways one might be a jerk; conversely, attending
to this context may indicate ways to undercut these
advantages, and thereby to promote women’s auton-
omy and satisfaction in their sexual relationships
with men.
CONSENT TO SEX UNDER PRESSURE
Our laws, social norms, religious views, and personal
values give us numerous, sometimes conflicting direc-
tions for what is good or bad, permissible or imper-
missible, in the pursuit of sexual relationships with
others. Some methods are ruled out entirely, while
others are at least ethically suspect. Philosophers have
taken to investigating the relationship between sex
and laws, norms and values in part because we want to
protect the autonomy of people in making decisions
about whom to have sex with, when, how, and so on.
Among the suspect methods of starting or furthering
a sexual relationship is the use of psychological pres-
sure aimed to overcome the hesitation or resistance of
a prospective sexual partner. The difficulty in evaluat-
ing the use of pressure techniques can be brought out
by comparing them to rape or sexual assault. These
latter violations are accomplished by direct physical
force or by using the threat of such force, or by use of
disabling drugs, or when someone is physically unable
to consent. These uses of power against a person allow
an aggressor to proceed to have sex with his victim
regardless of what she wants, thus manifesting com-
plete disregard for her consent, and undercutting her
autonomy. We have no difficulty, we may presume, in
agreeing that any such conduct is wrong and should
be illegal. Using pressure techniques to achieve a
seduction, however, seems trivial by comparison.4
Seduction is not always a matter of charms, flatter-
ies, and sparks; sometimes it is less like runaway pas-
sion and more like sexual assault. But even when it
is not criminal, it can be ethically suspect. Seducers
often use plain and not- so- plain pressure to get the
objects of their desires to acquiesce to sexual propos-
als. Further problems stem from the way background
forces and injustices—systematic gender hierarchy,
for instance—empower some seducers and weaken
their targets. How are we to evaluate the ethics of
such pressuring? And in particular, how useful is it to
ask whether such pressure amounts to a kind of coer-
cion, or to ask whether the person seduced consents
under such pressure? . . .
A recent essay by Sarah Conly throws a useful light
on this question.1 She explores the issues in sexual pres-
suring by investigating the ethics of similar techniques
as they are used in non- sexual contexts. Although
Conly’s approach manifests good sense . . . there are
problems with some of its central insights. We can-
not fully appraise the pressures seducers use without
attending to the wider context in which they occur.
This context includes our hierarchical gender sys-
tem, as well as the many other sources of pressure to
have (or sometimes not to have) sex that come from
friends, peers, parents, and the social organization of
many spheres of (especially young) adulthood.
One might suppose that as long as the pressures
involved in seduction do not undermine or disregard
the target’s consent, then such pressures are ethically
unexceptional.2 But a proper appreciation of the place
of consent requires us to attend to certain structural
aspects of human interaction, especially sexual inter-
action, which may affect consent’s value. I will argue
that Conly, like some others who have recently
tackled the topic, overlooks these deeper structural
matters.3 Male seducers, unlike women, are able to
From Scott A. Anderson, reprinted by permission from Springer
Nature: Res Publice, “Sex under Pressure: Jerks, Boorish Behavior
and Gender Hierarchy,” Vol. 11 (2005). © 2005.

CHAPTER 15: SExuAl MoRAliTy Á 583
pressure is non- coercive, and its use to obtain sexual
favors is, if not benign, at least of lesser moral con-
cern than rape or the extreme forms of seduction from
which Conly begins.5
Conly argues that less egregious forms of sexual
pressuring are non- coercive, and thus lack the legal
and moral implications that rape or sexual assault
have. She notes, “it seems implausible to say that
whenever someone gives into irrational suasion to
have sex, or has sex only out of fear of displeasing
someone she cares for, or out of a desire to please, a
rape has occurred.” Although the boorish behavior of
a seducer may be problematic, within the context of a
romantic relationship, the use of emotional pressures
is not, she thinks, illegitimate. . . .
Conly then turns to the question of whether play-
ing on the weaknesses or emotions of one’s desired
partner makes one’s use of pressure illegitimate. She
stacks such cases up against ones in which salespeo-
ple or relatives use similar techniques to close a sale
or to cajole someone into investing in their schemes.
However unpleasant or inappropriate such measures
are, they fall short of criminal: if you submit to the
high- pressure salesman’s pitch, or invest in a good-
for- nothing relative’s scheme, you have nonetheless
not been robbed. Similarly, she holds, if one suc-
cumbs to the temptations, badgering, or guilt- trips of
a ( would- be) lover, one cannot reasonably accuse him
or her of rape:
It is not rape if the person asking for sex stays within
what he has a right to ask for. . . . We can go away if we
want and not see the person any more but, if we want
to be involved in a relationship, we cannot reason-
ably insist that we never hear anything we don’t want
to hear. It is part of our life as moral agents that we need
to learn to negotiate through others’ desires. 6
Based on these considerations, Conly . . . reason-
ably opposes dichotomizing sexual intercourse into
either rape or nonrape. “The truth is that there are
many finer distinctions which we need to recog-
nize and to which we need to develop a sensitiv-
ity”. She further denies that all uses of pressure to
have sex are on a par; for instance, she holds that
it is illegitimate for employers to use their economic
Hence there is an opening and use for a dedicated phil-
osophical account of the ethics of pressuring someone
into having sex.
In Conly’s essay we find . . . guidance on a vari-
ety of cases where one person uses various forms of
psychological pressure or manipulation in order to
get another to acquiesce to sex. . . . Conly focuses the
heart of her essay on less extreme cases of seduction
involving ordinary, competent adults. She analyzes
common seduction as a kind of intentionally induced
“weakness of the will.” The seduced party is brought
to engage in or consent to activity that she would
reject if allowed a cool moment and time to reflect.
The seduced party yields because the seducer has
applied various forms of pressure to her that breaks
down or circumvents her ability to follow her best
interests, rightly viewed. The pressures of interest here
are limited to those of ordinary, if not laudable, social
or familial interaction—e.g., wheedling, whining,
emotional manipulation, mild intimidation, petty
deceits, and threats to alter or end one’s relationship
with someone who refuses to bend to one’s will. (I will
refer to the lot of these as “pressures” or “boorishness”
where these terms will then exclude more objection-
able means. Those who engage in such activities I will
call “jerks.”) Seducers intentionally use these pres-
sure techniques precisely because they tend to induce
people to acquiesce to the wishes of seducers, even
though doing so is against what the seduced person
(at least initially) regarded as her best interests.
There are a number of ways one might evaluate
the ethics of pressure techniques in sexual pursuits,
but any such evaluation must be wary of condemn-
ing activity which, even if not ideal, is in the interests
of the parties involved, and carries no serious exter-
nal costs. Conly holds that the key issue in evaluat-
ing a jerk’s use of pressure is whether the jerk coerces
the target of attention into sexual activity the target
does not want . . . [T]he critical elements of the test for
coercion are whether a particular threatened sanction
is sufficiently harmful or painful to leave the target
“no choice” but to avoid it; and whether the threat-
ener acts illegitimately in threatening to impose such
a sanction. When a use of pressure satisfies both of
these conditions, it counts as coercive; otherwise, the

584 Á PART 4: ETHiCAl iSSuES
Regarding the criminality of the conduct involved,
Conly may be correct; but insofar as she is drawing a
deeper lesson about how these behaviors compare as
social ills, her analysis misses the deep difference that
context makes in these disparate fields of ethical con-
cern. While robberies and finagling may both point
up the evils of greed and the importance we attach to
money, robbing and finagling are not connected in
the way that raping and pressuring into sex are. The
fact that there are robbers about, and that one must
take precautions against them does not greatly affect
the viability of finagling or the harm involved in it.
Nor do finaglers exacerbate the damages caused by
robbers. By contrast, the existence and pervasiveness
of violence used as a means to obtain sex is integrally
connected to the hierachical structure of gender rela-
tions. This structure in turn greatly alters the viability
of a man’s pressuring a woman into sex, and the harm
such pressuring causes—even if she does not relent,
and especially if she does.
Conly’s analysis leaves no room for these contextual
matters, in that it treats seduction as strictly a matter of
one individual’s questionable ethical conduct impact-
ing another individual who is potentially afflicted by
weakness of the will. Both of these characters suffer from
what amount to internal defects of character, which
apparently have nothing to do with each other.
* * *
So, if one limits one’s evaluations of sex under
pressure to a choice between consensual versus coerced,
one is left with little to say about what is wrong or
problematic with the behavior of men who pressure
women into having sex with them. In this light, we
may regard those feminists who have linked such
pressuring to rape as attempting to bring into view the
problematic role that gender hierarchy plays in fram-
ing the situation faced by a woman targeted by a male
seducer. Despite denying this connection, Conly does
apparently think there is something problematic about
the pressuring conduct of jerks, and not just in the
cases where it oversteps the line between boorishness
and assault. The question is how to explain the nature
of this problem.
* * *
leverage to pressure employees into having sex, or for
parents and teachers to use their authority to seduce. . . .
CONSENT TO SEX IN CONTEXT
It is uncontroversial that coercing someone into sex is
condemnable, and thus that all permissible means of
inducing another to have sex must be non- coercive.
Our question is whether and how to draw ethical dis-
tinctions among the various non- coercive means, and
what then to do with those distinctions. One might,
for instance, see Conly’s aim as limited to expounding
the proper limits of the definition of rape in criminal
law, and denying that boorishness in the pursuit of
sexual relations is at all comparable to rape. With this
conclusion I have no complaints. . . . Some, however,
have linked seduction with rape, not so much to urge
that the law treat seducers and rapists alike, but rather to
point out the similarity of the powers and impositions
frequently manifested in both. Conly appears to object
equally to this linkage, seeing it as a sort of exaggeration
of the wrongs involved in pressuring into sex.7 My aim
here is not so much to defend the rhetoric connecting
seduction to rape, but to argue that there is something
valuable in looking for connections here. This value is
easily overlooked by an account of seduction like Con-
ly’s, which analyzes it in terms of coercion, understood
pressures on the will, and consent. Her account, I will
suggest, fails to make sense of the reasons that have led
feminists to try to forge this connection. By narrow-
ing our analysis of seduction to the individual’s use of
pressure and its effects on the seducee’s will, she tends
to ignore background factors that are crucial to under-
standing the ethics of the seducer’s behavior and the
problems of seduction for the seduced.
We can see reason to worry about this in the
generic way Conly treats ethical judgments about
sex, which is insensitive to the special context of sex
and sexuality that give sexual pressuring its particular
urgency. She writes, for instance, that,
[T]he fact that seduction is worse than having money
wormed out of you, just as rape is worse than theft,
doesn’t mean the analogy is not apt. The point is that
the difference between seduction and rape is the same
as finagled money loss and robbery.

CHAPTER 15: SExuAl MoRAliTy Á 585
In other contexts (say, strangers passing on the street),
the use of pressure to alter personal choices is not just
unexpected and culturally inappropriate, it is also fairly
easy to dismiss without loss. One can walk away, and
the pressurer usually has no useful avenue by which to
continue or increase his pressuring.
Thus the ability of one person to pressure another
into unwanted sex needs to be explained by reference
to the factors that make such pressure relevant to one’s
ends, predictably effective in altering behavior, and
socially viable (i.e., not quickly and strongly discour-
aged).9 My suggestion is that an investigation into the
workings of pressuring into sex will reveal real differ-
ences in its significance when used by men as opposed
to when used by women. So, for example, when a fra-
ternity man pressures a sorority woman into sex, we
would do well to notice how institutional, social, and
relational factors combine to make such pressure via-
ble. On the (relatively) more benign side are included
factors such as the interest sorority women have in fit-
ting in with their sisters and in finding dates for social
functions. More problematically, there are pressures
associated with proving one’s physical attractiveness,
attracting a steady boyfriend as a protector/shield
against unwanted aggression, and in avoiding an esca-
lation of aggression that could lead to rape . . . .
Furthermore, men pressuring women into having
sex takes place against a background in which men
and women differ in their ability to use or to resist
violent attack. . . . Thus, we should not divorce our
analysis of pressuring techniques in intimate encoun-
ters from the wider range of techniques a party has at
his or her disposal. While men and women may be
equally likely to resort to boorish behavior to achieve
their sexual ends, men are known to turn sometimes
to much more potent and dangerous techniques
than women typically are, and men are generally able
to fend off the relatively few women who might be
inclined to use such techniques themselves. Hence
the ability to apply pressure to have unwanted sex
may differ markedly between men and women on
average. Men are able to pressure women more effec-
tively because their pressure is backed by their much
greater ability to escalate that pressure into the range
of the very dangerous.
EVALUATING SEXUAL PRESSURE IN
A CONTEXT OF SEXUAL INEQUALITY
In explaining why a woman submits to sex with a man,
it will often suffice to say that he threatened her with
violence if she refused. We rarely feel we need to press
further and ask why she assumed that he was capable
of violence, why she assumed the threat was in ear-
nest, or why she assumed that if she denied him that
he would have gone ahead, against his own interests,
and executed his threat. Even if he is a relative stranger
to her, we do not usually press for answers to such
questions. Why? Because we know what men, or at
least some men, are like. That is, we know such things
as that it is not uncommon for men to harm women
awfully, that men often do so even against their own
best interests, and that demonstrating an inclination
to do so can alter the ground- rules for their interac-
tions with women to their advantage. In other words,
our understanding of how men can coerce women
into unwanted sex depends upon our understanding
of the kinds of powers men possess over women, when
they are likely to use them, and so forth.
To understand the ethical significance of pressur-
ing into sex, we need to have a similar understanding of
how and why such pressure works. It is not wholly obvi-
ous why pressuring someone to have sex is at all likely
to succeed, or work better than thoughtfulness and
charm, say, or why using pressure appears to some a
reasonable strategy with respect to their ends. The idea
that one person could put pressure on another to do
something antecedently unwanted is straightforward
enough; in some sense, just asking another to do some-
thing is a form of pressure. Yet this does not explain
why anyone would yield to such pressure. It is help-
ful here to bear in mind that all pressurings, whether
towards sex or any other end, take place in a particular
context that likely provides us with various facilities
and obstacles concerning our ability to resist external
pressure. In some contexts (say, parent- child relations),
the use of pressure works largely because children have
no choice but to rely on their parents. Such pressure is
also entirely expected and reasonable because of the
need to sway the behaviors and values of people not yet
fully formed or competent to judge independently.8

586 Á PART 4: ETHiCAl iSSuES
such sex. In the context of gender hierarchy enforced
by violence (among other forms of power), the ethi-
cal defects in a man’s pressuring a woman to have
sex reach beyond its boorishness, and may encom-
pass a kind of unfair advantage- taking, among other
things. As the microcosm of undergraduate Greek life
in the U.S. suggests, a wide range of pressures fall on
individuals making decisions about sex, and many
of these pressures derive from the hierarchical (and
heterosexist) nature of contemporary gender rela-
tions.13 When a man goes ahead and violates such
norms as exist to protect women’s sexual autonomy,
he may at the same time be availing himself of the
disparity in power between men and women more
generally. Hence, whether or not we should deny the
possibility of a woman’s consenting to sex in such con-
ditions, we can certainly criticize the boorishness of a
male jerk’s sexual conduct for reasons that may not
apply to analogous conduct in non- sexual matters, or
even to women’s sexual boorishness, for that matter.
As for positive suggestions arising from this analysis,
we can agree with Conly’s reluctance to equate sexual
pressuring and rape, either ethically or legally, but we
need not suppose that such equations exhaust the range
of our potential ethical responses. It may be an advance
simply to be able to say why pressuring someone to have
sex she does not want is bad: for instance, by pointing
out how such pressure frequently relies on a background
of violence and inequality, or how such pressure tends
to ally with other pressures which additively may give
women many fewer opportunities for social or other
fulfillment than they might have otherwise. It may also
be the case that some institutions, such as fraternities,
sororities, and the like, and the campuses that house
them, may be in a position to develop codes or norms
of sexual conduct that give individuals defenses against
unwanted sexual pressure, short of charging someone
with rape or assault. Given that these places are cur-
rently the sites of norms that add to the pressures to
have sex, perhaps they can instead develop norms that
work to neutralize at least some pressures to have sex.
Taking away at least some of the advantages that male
jerks employ in pressuring women to have unwanted
sex would almost certainly add to women’s overall hap-
piness and autonomy with respect to sex.
Of course, when a man pressures a woman to have
sex with him, he may well be unwilling to engage in
such escalation; that is, he may be willing to pressure
or manipulate her, but not to lay a hand without con-
sent. But once he demonstrates that he is willing to
violate norms of proper respect for his intended in the
first way, it may be much harder for her to tell that he
is not willing to resort to more potent means. Whether
he likes it or not, his ability to apply pressure is aug-
mented by the background common knowledge that
men have the ability and a non- trivial likelihood to
use force and violence against women. Unless, that is,
he makes special provisions to defeat this augmenta-
tion. To do so, he would have to indicate that even
though he is willing to violate certain lesser ethi-
cal norms, he would refuse to violate the more vital
ones . . . . [I]t is a rather tricky matter to communicate
such principles, and it would also work against one’s
advantage to do so. So a man might need to be subtle,
unfussy and explicit—all at once—to employ boorish
means to pressure a woman to have sex, while refrain-
ing from drawing upon the strength conferred by his
access to more deeply unethical ones.
* * *
The advantages that male jerks have compared to
female jerks might also help explain the fact that the
reported effects of being subjected to such techniques
appear to differ significantly along gender lines. Some
researchers have reported that sexual aggressiveness
by women against men is more acceptable than anal-
ogous aggression by men against women would be.
When women are aggressive, it is often reconceived
as “romance” or “expressing her sexuality” or being
“seductive.”10 Some studies have also found that
men’s reactions to being aggressed against by a woman
differ markedly depending upon the attractiveness of
the aggressor.11 By contrast, women frequently report
much more negative responses to being subjected to
sexual pressure from men. . . .12
[T]his understanding of how pressuring into unwa-
nted sex works, and the context in which it occurs,
suggests our question is more complex than choos-
ing between allowing women the right to have sex
with jerks vs. denying the validity of their consent to

CHAPTER 15: SExuAl MoRAliTy Á 587
in which sexual fulfillment is part of the point of the
relationship. If so, then one might sometimes reason-
ably negotiate with another about what sort of relation-
ship (if any) they wish to be part of, and what part sex
will play in it. Just as one person cannot rightly impose
participation in a sexual relationship on another, so
one party cannot unilaterally impose a non- sexual
relationship on another (especially if the relationship
were originally a sexual one) without allowing the other
some say about this. That is, unless one accepts that
sex must be confined to something like the traditional
Roman Catholic institution of marriage, which would
not dissolve just because one partner stopped agree-
ing to sex within it. Barring this sort of restriction on
acceptable sexual relationships, there will be a need to
reach mutual agreement over the part that sex will play
in relationships in which sex is a permissible or even
constitutive part, and these terms will in some respects
always be open for renegotiation.
7. “To subsume all areas of sexual wrong under the heading
of rape does a disservice to all concerned. It hurts those
whose laudable goal is just to show that sex can be dark
and hurtful; they lose credibility when they are perceived
as exaggerating, and their perfectly appropriate criti-
cisms of sexual practice may be dismissed”.
8. Given the whole of the dynamic between parent and
child, it can be very difficult to dismiss such pressure,
even long after the aspect of dependency has lapsed or
even reversed.
9. I should also mention that the viability of using pressure
will depend also on the particular psychological charac-
teristics of the people involved, but it is important not to
overemphasize their role: while some are better able or
more willing to use pressure than others, and some more
susceptible to it, discovering these facts about oneself
or others requires experience and practice in contexts
where such pressures are (likely) already a feature of how
some people interact with others.
10. The authors discussing this research note that equiva-
lent conduct by a man could be criminally prosecuted.
See C. Struckman- Johnson and P. B. Anderson, “Men Do
and Women Don’t”: Difficulties in Researching Sexually
Aggressive Women,” in P. B. Anderson and C. Struckman-
Johnson, 1998, 9-18, pp. 14–15.
11. C. Struckman- Johnson and D. Struckman- Johnson,
“The Dynamics and Impact of Sexual Coercion of
Men by Women”, in P. B. Anderson and C. Struckman-
Johnson, 121–143; and C. Struckman- Johnson
and D. Struckman- Johnson, “Men’s Reactions to
NOTES
1. S. Conly, “Seduction, Rape, and Coercion”, Ethics 115/1
(2004), 96–121.
2. The topic of consent, especially regarding sexual rela-
tions, has been much discussed in the philosophical and
legal literature. The most important books include S.
Schulhofer, Unwanted Sex (Cambridge: Harvard, 1998);
D. Archard, Sexual Consent (Oxford: Westview, 1998);
and A. Wertheimer, Consent to Sexual Relations (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Also of inter-
est are the essays published in two special issues of Legal
Theory, 2/2 and 2/3 (1996).
3. In particular, I mean to demonstrate a problem that
affects, e.g., Wertheimer’s Consent and his work on
coercion more generally (e.g., A. Wertheimer, Coercion
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987)), from
which Conly takes her guidance on coercion. Conly’s
deep reliance on Wertheimer is one example of the
profound influence his work has had. There is much to
like and respect in his work, and its influence is justi-
fied by his careful scholarship. But his failure to attend
to the power relations between coercer and coercee, or
between (male) sexual aggressor and (female) sexual
object, weakens his analysis in the same ways that the
difficulties in Conly’s paper exhibit.
4. This claim must be understood in a modern context;
historically, matters of “seduction” were extremely seri-
ous ones for women, since it often amounted to both
rape and the ruination of her prospects for a decent mar-
riage. . . . For a useful overview of the legal history of the
sexual predation called seduction, see L. VanderVelde,
“The Legal Ways of Seduction”, Stanford Law Review 48/4
(1996), 817–901.
5. Conly actually parses Wertheimer’s “ two- pronged” test
into four separate conditions: the coercer’s intent, the
coercee’s constrained choice, the harm imposed on
the coercee, and the illegitimacy of the coercer’s offer.
“Choice” and “legitimacy” become the key factors since
Conly would admit, it seems, that jerks use pressure with
intent, and that the harms they cause are at least some-
times non- trivial.
6. One might be bothered here . . . about Conly’s framing
the issues in the passages here and above in terms of
rights. Indeed it sounds strange to speak about a “right
to want sex to be a part of a romantic relationship.” Still,
Conly’s point here seems reasonable enough, I think,
even if one is wary of rights talk. Her claim might be
restated as holding simply that there are some kinds of
relationships of which sex is a constitutive activity and

588 Á PART 4: ETHiCAl iSSuES
12. See, e.g., the essays by C. Struckman- Johnson and
P. B. Anderson; C. L. Muehlenhard; E. S. Byers and L. F.
O’Sullivan; and W. Stock, in P. B. Anderson and C. Struck-
man- Johnson, Sexually Aggressive Women.
13. Several readers of this paper . . . have expressed the view
that the sexual playing field for women may be getting
more even, at least in Europe, perhaps in the West more
generally. While this may be so, and we can hope so, I
see no evidence that any large society has truly reached
parity in social power between men and women.
Hypothetical Forceful Sexual Advances from Women:
The Role of Sexual Standards, Relationship Availability,
and the Beauty Bias”, Sex Roles 37/5-6 (1997), 319–333.
At a recent talk, this sentence generated an understand-
able laugh from the audience. But the serious underly-
ing point is that if the perceived “attractiveness” of the
aggressor is the main concern of the aggressed- upon,
then it is likely that the aggression itself constitutes a
different sort of worry for men so targeted than it does
for women.

589
C H A P T E R 1 6
‘’
Free Speech on Campus
In 2017, at Middlebury College in Vermont, stu-
dent protesters disrupted a speech by a contro-
versial scholar, shouting him down, turning their
backs to him, shoving him, pulling fire alarms,
and injuring a faculty member in the melee. The
speaker was Charles Murray, the author of The Bell
Curve and Coming Apart, who argues that race and
intelligence determine social and economic status.
Many have charged him with racism, and scholars
have denounced his work as pseudoscience and
bigotry. A conservative student group had invited
Murray to Middlebury, but hundreds of students
and alumni opposed the invitation. The protesters
chanted, “Racist, sexist, anti- gay, Charles Murray
go away!”
Earlier in the year, an even more violent pro-
test against an invited speaker occurred at the
University of California, Berkeley. A group of stu-
dent Republicans had invited the right- wing pro-
vocateur and writer Milo Yiannopoulos to speak
on campus. They billed the speech as a way to rattle
the liberal campus with a seldom- heard conserva-
tive viewpoint. But the speech was canceled when
a large group of student protesters gathered and
activists exploded fireworks, hurled bricks, set fires,
and smashed windows.
The same kind of scenario has played out at
other institutions of higher learning across the
United States. Speakers have been disinvited or pre-
vented from speaking by loud or violent protests.
In most cases, protesting students were objecting to
speech that they thought demeaned, subordinated,
or marginalized vulnerable groups such as African
Americans, women, and the LGBTQ community.
In their view, free speech must not be used as an
excuse to harm already disadvantaged groups.
In many other instances, speech on campus has
been censored or punished because it was deemed
harmful or offensive. For example:
[S]ome students in the United States [have been
motivated] to demand that universities sanction
people for writing “I’m with Trump” or “Build That
Wall” in chalk on college campuses, to force uni-
versity administrators to cancel an appearance by
the conservative writer Ben Shapiro (who was to
speak on how diversity initiatives can hamper free
speech), to demand the resignation of a student
leader who posted an “All Lives Matter” Twitter
message in the wake of the assassination of five
police officers in Dallas, or to demand a federal
investigation after professor Laura Kipnis wrote a
scholarly essay questioning campus attitudes about
sexual relations.1
In all such cases, students believe that the moral
evil to be avoided or defeated is hate speech,
spoken or written words used to insult, disparage,
or attack people based on their social or ethnic
group. Hate speech, they insist, should be banned,
censored, or punished because it harms those who
are its victims. It can harm people, some say, by
causing emotional and physical distress, insulting
the dignity of individuals, subordinating members
of minority groups, and “assaulting” vulnerable
groups through offensive speech that many con-
sider a form of violence.
The response of many colleges and universities
to hate speech has been to enact speech codes,
campus regulations that ban the use of language or
symbols thought to embody hate speech. The free

590 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
Some see a middle path between these opposing
positions where both values can be accommodated.
The author and education scholar Sigal R. Ben-
Porath, for example, argues for what she calls
inclusive freedom— an approach to free speech on
campus that takes into account the necessity of
protecting free speech in order to protect democ-
racy and the pursuit of knowledge while recogniz-
ing the equal necessity of making sure that all are
included in the ensuing conversation.3
Part of the difficulty in reaching well- reasoned
conclusions about free speech is the lack of under-
standing of what free speech is, what the U.S. Con-
stitution and the U.S. Supreme Court say about
protected (allowed) and unprotected speech, what
the historical connection has been between free
speech and struggles for social justice, and what
reasons people have for their views on free speech.
There is no remedy for such misunderstandings
other than solid moral reasoning and a good grasp
of the nonmoral facts. This chapter should help on
both counts.
ISSUE FILE: BACKGROUND
Free speech— the right to express your opinions or
ideas without burdensome restraints from govern-
ment or society— is both a moral and a legal/politi-
cal value. It is enshrined in the U.S. Constitution’s
First Amendment, which guarantees freedom of
expression by barring Congress from restricting
what the press can disseminate and what individu-
als can say. Under the First Amendment, a vast
range of speech— most of the speech we encounter
every day— is protected. Most liberal democracies
recognize their citizens’ right to free expression,
and several international bodies have declared free-
dom of expression a human right. Here, “speech”
or “expression” refers to a variety of actions, not
just speaking, but writing, yelling, acting, painting,
burning flags, carrying signs, singing, and more.
The first point to understand about free speech
is that it is not an absolute right. Every society
speech scholars Erwin Chemerinsky and Howard
Gillman provide this illustration:
One of the most prominent examples involved
the University of Michigan, which was motivated
to devise a hate speech code after some truly hor-
rendous events on campus. In 1987, flyers were
distributed that declared “open season” on blacks.
Blacks were referred to as “saucer lips,” “porch
monkeys,” and “jigaboos.” A student disc jockey
allowed racist jokes to be broadcast on the campus
radio station, and student demonstrations were
interrupted by the display of a KKK uniform from
a nearby dorm window. Another flyer proclaimed,
“Niggers get off campus” and “Darkies don’t belong
in classrooms— they belong hanging from trees.”
The university had to respond to such horrific
expression.2
The perceived harm of offensive speech has
also prompted calls for “trigger warnings” on
course materials that are considered demeaning or
traumatic; the resignations of editors after campus
newspapers publish provocative articles; the dis-
missal of administrators when their views contra-
dict those held by some campus organizations; and
“safe spaces” for students who wish to retreat from
exposure to offensive or unwelcome speech.
The central conflict in campus free speech con-
troversies is between two moral goods that are cru-
cial to higher education: (1) free speech that enables
the expression of all ideas and the unfettered search
for truth, and (2) a campus environment that pro-
tects and respects the learning experiences of all
students. Many who are caught up in free speech
debates seem to accept that there is no way to
accommodate both moral ideals. A large number
of students believe that offensive speech, especially
hate speech, should be suppressed or punished.
Protecting minorities from verbal harm, they insist,
is more important than freedom of speech. Oth-
ers favor the unimpeded exercise of free speech—
regardless of its effects on others. Their view is that
for the sake of democracy and the search for knowl-
edge, speech— even if offensive, racist, politically
incorrect, or divisive— must not be restricted.

CHAPTER 16: FREE SPEECH on CAmPUS Á 591
knowledge is to grow, people must be free to put
forth ideas and theories they deem worthy of con-
sideration, and others must be left equally free to
criticize them. Even false ideas should be protected,
Mill argued, so that the truth will not become mere
dogma, unchallenged and little understood. “How-
ever true [an opinion] may be,” he wrote, “if it is
not fully, frequently, and fearlessly discussed, it
will be held as a dead dogma, not a living truth.”. . .
Free speech is also an essential feature of demo-
cratic government. Fair, democratic elections can-
not occur unless candidates are free to debate and
criticize each other’s policies, nor can government
be run efficiently unless corruption and abuses can
be exposed by a free press. . . .
A third value, individual autonomy, is also
served by free speech. In chapter III of On Liberty,
“Of Individuality, as One of the Elements of Well
Being,” Mill writes that “He who lets the world,
or his own portion of it, choose his plan of life for
him, has no need of any other faculty than the ape-
like one of imitation.” . . . Mill’s suggestion is that
the best life does not result from being forced to live
a certain way, but instead is freely chosen without
places limits on free speech; speech must be lim-
ited when it conflicts with other values that society
holds dear. Under U.S. law, the reasons for limiting
speech are few and narrowly defined, and prohib-
ited speech includes such things as libel, threats,
and obscenity.
Much of American history is the story of free
speech— how the Founders wove it into the fabric
of our democratic ideals, how it was challenged and
strengthened through the years, how it gave dis-
senters and reformers the means to fight for social
justice, how the courts came to see it as the funda-
mental right that supported all the others, and how
it made social and intellectual progress possible.
The protections that the United States affords free
speech are the strongest in the world.
Many free speech historians remind citizens
of how much depends on their right to speak and
write freely. John Arthur explains:
First, as J. S. Mill argued long ago, free and unfet-
tered debate is vital for the pursuit of truth. If
’
Why can’t white people use the n- word? Black
people use it, rap songs use it, movies use it. This
is an uncomfortable question that seems to flare
up in private and public discussions (or arguments)
every day. One of the clearer answers has been
offered by the author and commentator on African
American issues Ta- Nehisi Coates. During a panel
discussion, he said the words we use depend on
context, and it’s normal in our culture to restrict
our use of specific words to some contexts with
certain people. So even though his wife calls him
“honey,” it would not be appropriate for a strange
woman to call him that. And even though his
dad was called Billy by his family, it would not be
acceptable for his son to call him that. Coates said
a white friend had a cabin in upstate New York and
referred to it as “the white trash cabin.” But Coates
insisted, “I would never refer to that cabin” like
that. “I would never tell him, ‘I’m coming to your
white trash cabin.’”
Coates declared, “The question one must ask is
why so many white people have difficulty extend-
ing things that are basic laws of how human beings
interact to black people.”*
Is Coates right that white people should not
use the n- word? Why or why not? Is his reason
for thinking such use is impermissible plausible?
Explain.
*German Lopez, “ Ta- Nehisi Coates Has an Incredibly
Clear Explanation for Why White People Shouldn’t Use
the N- word,” Vox, November 9, 2017, https://www.vox
.com/identities/2017/11/9/16627900/ta-nehisi-coates-n
-word.
CRITICAL THOUGHT: Who Can Say the N- word?

https://www.vox.com/identities/2017/11/9/16627900/ta-nehisi-coates-n-word

592 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
people uncomfortable, was a good and necessary
thing. We have an instinctive distrust of efforts by
authorities to suppress speech.6
In the twentieth century, especially during the
1950s and 1960s, the Supreme Court gradually, case
by case, extended First Amendment protection to a
wider range of controversial, offensive, and dissent-
ing speech. Court rulings made it clear, for example,
that the speech of civil rights protesters could not
be banned or punished just because segregationists
(and others) found their dissenting words deeply
offensive. The court also ruled that protected speech
includes anti- war protests, anti- government rhetoric,
blasphemy, (some) obscene speech, and “offensive
utterances” of all kinds. In fact, the court has con-
cluded that the government cannot forbid or punish
any speech unless it is an instance of libel, incite-
ment to lawlessness, obscenity, harassment, seri-
ous threats, or “fighting words” (epithets or insults
spoken face to face and likely to injure or provoke an
immediate, violent action). The upshot is that, as far
as the court is concerned, offensive speech and hate
speech are protected speech.
It should not be surprising, then, that over
the years, the courts have repeatedly ruled against
speech codes at colleges and universities. (State
schools are bound by the First Amendment; private
schools are not, but generally try to honor it in prac-
tice anyway.) Hundreds of schools have adopted
such codes, many of which have been challenged
in court— and all of the challenged codes have
been ruled unconstitutional. Despite the schools’
laudable motive of ridding their campuses of foul
racist slurs and hateful stigmatizing messages, their
efforts to craft codes that would condemn offensive
speech while not infringing on protected speech
seem to have failed. Often the courts found that
the codes were too vague to be useful and so broad
that they identified obviously protected speech as
banned speech. Worse, in too many instances, the
codes were used not to punish hate speech, but to
criticize opinions and political views that people
disliked.
coercion from outside. But if Mill is right, then
freedom of speech as well as action are important
to achieve a worthwhile life. Free and open discus-
sion helps people exercise their capacity of reason-
ing and judgment, capacities that are essential for
autonomous and informed choices.4
But what of offensive speech, racist speech, hate
speech? Should they be censored— or given First
Amendment protection? A 2015 survey suggests
that the current generation of students would opt
for censorship. It showed that almost three- quarters
of students favor disciplinary action for “any stu-
dent or faculty member on campus who uses lan-
guage that is considered racist, sexist, homophobic
or otherwise offensive.”5
Chemerinsky and Gillman offer a plausible
explanation for this attitude:
This generation [of students] has a strong and persistent
urge to protect others against hateful, discriminatory, or
intolerant speech, especially in educational settings.
This is the first generation of students educated,
from a young age, not to bully. For as long as they
can remember, their schools have organized “toler-
ance weeks.” Our students often told stories of how
bullying at school and on social media had affected
people they cared about. They are deeply sensitized
to the psychological harm associated with hateful
or intolerant speech. . . .
Arguments about the social value of freedom of
speech are very abstract to them, because they did not
grow up at a time when the act of punishing speech was
associated with undermining other worthwhile values.
Our students knew little about the history of
free speech in the United States and had no aware-
ness of how important free speech had been to vul-
nerable political minorities. The two of us grew up
in the time of the civil rights movement and anti-
Vietnam War protests. We saw first hand how offi-
cials attempted to stifle or punish protestors in the
name of defending values or protecting the public
peace. We also saw how free speech assisted the
drive for desegregation, the push to end the war,
and the efforts of historically marginalized people
to challenge convention and express their identi-
ties in new ways. In our experience, speech that
was sometimes considered offensive, or that made

CHAPTER 16: FREE SPEECH on CAmPUS Á 593
’
Examining free speech issues will eventually bring
you to the idea of microaggression. Microag-
gressions are defined as commonplace slights or
insults conveyed intentionally or unintentionally
by words or actions to disadvantaged groups.
Each instance of microaggression may by itself
amount to only a minor irritation, but cumula-
tively, such occurrences can be seriously detri-
mental to those affected. Microaggressions can
be subtle, ambiguous, hardly noticed— but injuri-
ous over time. White people are said to be guilty
of microaggression, for example, when they ask
an Asian American classmate in what country he
was born. Or when they ask an African Ameri-
can what the black view of rap music is. Or when
they say “You’re really pretty for a dark- skinned
girl.” Or they ask a black friend why she sounds
white. Some even contend that people are guilty
of microaggression whey they claim to be color-
blind, claim to favor affirmative action, or use the
term “politically correct.”
But critics representing a variety of racial and
social backgrounds have found fault with the con-
cept. While acknowledging that cumulative slights
or insults can be harmful, and that even subtle
forms of prejudice should be addressed, they ar-
gue that using the concept of microaggression can
itself be harmful and counterproductive.
Conor Friedersdorf, for example, says that the
term “microaggression” is inapt:
To be sure, there are minor, objectionable,
cumulatively burdensome actions that can accu-
rately be called “aggressive.” Catcalling is a
familiar example. A man who crowds alongside
a woman for a half- block while trying to get her
phone number is behaving aggressively. . . . But
a well- intentioned white or black student ask-
ing an Asian American classmate, “What coun-
try are you from?” is unfortunate even as it is
unaggressive.
Aggression is “hostility” or “violent behavior”
or “the forceful pursuit of one’s interests.” If there’s
going to be a term for behavior that is burdensome
partly because the often well- intentioned people
who do it are blind to its wrongness and cumulative
effect, baking “aggression” into that term is hugely
confusing. What’s more, the confusion seems likely
to needlessly increase the tension between the per-
son experiencing the grievance and the person who
is ostensibly responsible.*
Nick Haslam also questions the usefulness
of viewing social bias or hostility through the
“microaggression” lens:
The challenge in responding to criticisms of the
microaggression concept is not to throw the baby
out with the bathwater. Subtle prejudice and
unconscious bias are real and consequential. It
is also beyond question that the general decline
in overt expressions of bigotry in recent decades
does not signal the end of prejudice. People who
claim to be free of it may harbour troubling atti-
tudes and behave in discriminating ways.
However, “microaggression” is not the best
way to think about subtle prejudice. Its definition
is amorphous and elastic. It fails to appreciate the
ambiguity of social interaction, relies too exclu-
sively on subjective perceptions, and too readily
ascribes hostile intent. By doing so, the idea of
microaggression contributes to a punitive and
accusatory environment that is more likely to cre-
ate backlash than social progress.†
*Conor Friedersdorf, “Why Critics of the ‘Microaggres-
sion’ Framework Are Skeptical,” Atlantic, September
14, 2015, https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/
2015/09/ why- critics- of-the-microaggressions-framework
-are-skeptical/405106/.
†Nick Haslam, “The Trouble with ‘Microaggressions,’” The
Conversation, January 16, 2017, https://theconversation
.com/the-trouble-with-microaggressions-71364.
Microagg ressions

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/09/why-critics-of-the-microaggressions-framework-are-skeptical/405106/

https://theconversation.com/the-trouble-with-microaggressions-71364

594 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
often end up punishing people for their political
views, that the codes punish people other than
their intended targets, and that speech codes ines-
capably “ban the expression of unpopular ideas
and views, which never is tolerable in colleges and
universities.”8
Some critics of speech codes insist that it’s
possible to have unfettered free speech on campus
while protecting students from hate and bigotry.
According to Ben- Porath:
Both those committed to pure free speech and
those favoring the protection of vulnerable groups
often assume that one needs to choose, that there is
an inherent tension between the two principles. . . .
But in fact this tension can be alleviated by an
ongoing, clear commitment by college leadership
and members to create and sustain an environ-
ment conducive to open expression. While such an
environment must operate within the boundaries
of legal requirements, a more nuanced, responsive,
and relational approach can often accomplish what
a hundred regulations cannot.9
Chemerinsky and Gillman concur:
[Campuses] cannot and should not punish speech
because it is offensive. But certain speech can be
punished: true threats, harassment, destruction
of property, and disruptions of classes and cam-
pus activities. Campuses can create time, place,
and manner restrictions that protect the learning
environment while also protecting free expression.
Moreover— and this is too often forgotten— campus
leaders can engage in more speech, proclaiming
the type of community they seek and condemning
speech that is inconsistent with it.10
MORAL THEORIES
A nonconsequentialist could take a strong stand for
free speech, arguing that to respect people’s right
of free speech is, as Kant would say, to treat them
as ends in themselves rather than merely as means
to ends. A nonconsequentialist perspective on
free speech is embedded in the First Amendment:
free speech is a moral right that is not justified by
The courts may have more or less agreed that
speech codes are unconstitutional or unwork-
able, but the bigger question is whether the codes
are morally acceptable. Should colleges and uni-
versities use them to stamp out verbal harm to
minorities?
Many on both sides of this debate agree that
hate speech can indeed cause harm. Richard Del-
gado and Jean Stefancic argue that hate speech can
do damage to targeted groups in several ways:
Hate speech is not merely unpleasant or offensive.
It may leave physical impacts on those it visits,
particularly when uttered in one- on- one situations
accompanied by at least an implicit threat. . . .
The immediate, short- term harms of hate
speech include rapid breathing, headaches, raised
blood pressure, dizziness, rapid pulse rate, drug-
taking, risk- taking behavior, and even suicide. The
stresses of repeated racial abuse may have long- term
consequences, including damaged self- esteem, lower
aspiration level, and depression. . . .
In addition to the immediate physical harms . . .
hate speech can cause mental and psychological effects.
These include fear, nightmares, and withdrawal from
society. . . .
The harms of hate speech go beyond damage
to the psyches and bodies of its victims. It can also
affect their pecuniary prospects and life chances.7
To these harms, some would add another: the
damage done when hate speech increases hatred
(racial or otherwise) in others, which can lead to
violence and discrimination.
Thus the most frequently heard arguments
about campus free speech concern whether hate
speech should be regulated to prevent harm to vul-
nerable groups. Those who support speech regula-
tion maintain that the harms caused by hate speech
are substantial, that this fact is reason enough to
ban it, and that any harms caused by speech codes
are minimal. On the other side, those who reject
speech regulation maintain that speech codes
cause far more harm than they prevent. Chemer-
insky and Gillman argue that speech codes are so
inherently vague and overly broad that the codes

CHAPTER 16: FREE SPEECH on CAmPUS Á 595
against competing values such as justice, equality,
security, and the right to privacy.
If free speech is viewed as a universal, noncon-
sequentialist right, then certain norms follow. First,
the right of free speech is so central to morality that
its good consequences (even though the Founders
did recognize the power of free speech to under-
gird a young democracy). This does not mean,
however, that the right of free speech is necessarily
absolute. Typically, free speech must be balanced
’
Hate speech can cause psychological and physio-
logical distress in some who hear it (or read it), and
some speech, such as serious threats and “fighting
words,” can provoke violence. But can speech be
violence? Can words be equivalent to physically
violent acts?
Many have thought so, and some have used this
belief as a pretext for committing violence against
those who utter offensive speech. Speaking of
the uproar over Milo Yiannopoulos at UC Berkeley,
one woman said, “His words are violent, or a form
of violence.”
Several commentators have echoed this speech-
equals- violence view, but many others disagree.
Catherine Rampell, a columnist for the Washington
Post, says,
Here’s the problem with suggesting that upset-
ting speech warrants “safe spaces,” or otherwise
conflating mere words with physical assault: If
speech is violence, then violence becomes a justifi-
able response to speech.
Just ask college students. A fifth of under-
grads now say it’s acceptable to use physical force
to silence a speaker who makes “offensive and
hurtful statements.”*
According to Suzanne Nossel, executive direc-
tor of PEN America, an international organization
that defends free expression,
It’s true that insults or slurs or incitement can
lead to confrontation. (Hutu broadcasts during
the 1994 Rwanda genocide and Hitler’s entreat-
ies to German national pride, for instance, coaxed
violence on a mass scale.) But while there is a
continuum of acceptable speech, language and
violence should not be confused. The way to pre-
serve our freedom of expression is to insist that
speech, no matter how offensive, cannot justify
violent reprisal. Otherwise we risk becoming like
China, Turkey, Iran and other autocracies, where
brutality against journalists and draconian punish-
ments for dissenting ideas are normal. . . .
[T]he power that speech holds to visit serious
harm does not make it, in itself, violent. It is risky
even to make this comparison, because it helps
give cover to the idea that noxious speech may be
answered with brute force.†
Is violence ever a justified response to offensive
speech? If so, in what circumstances? If you use
violence against someone who demeans a racial
group, is he then justified in using violence against
you if he considers your speech offensive? How do
you think society would change if violence were
widely considered an appropriate response to any
speech perceived to be offensive or harmful?
*Catherine Rampell, “A Chilling Study Shows How
Hostile Students Are toward Free Speech,” Washington
Post, September 18, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.
com/opinions/ a- chilling- study- shows- how- hostile- college
-students-are-toward-free-speech/2017/09/18/cbb1a234
-9ca8-11e7-9083-fbfddf6804c2_story.html?utm_term=
.ea6296c00091.
†Suzanne Nossel, “No, Speech Is Not the Same Thing as
Violence,” Washington Post, June 22, 2017, https://www
.washingtonpost.com/outlook/ no- hateful- speech- is
– not- the- same-thing-as-violence/2017/06/22/63c2c07a
-5137-11e7-be25-3a519335381c_story.html?utm_term
=.ae80288dc545.
CRITICAL THOUGHT: Is Hate Speech Violence?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/a-chilling-study-shows-how-hostile-college-students-are-toward-free-speech/2017/09/18/cbb1a234-9ca8-11e7-9083-fbfddf6804c2_story.html?utm_term=.ea6296c00091

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/no-hateful-speech-is-not-the-same-thing-as-violence/2017/06/22/63c2c07a-5137-11e7-be25-3a519335381c_story.html?utm_term=.ae80288dc545

596 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
Both those who seek to restrict free speech and
those who reject restrictions argue from a conse-
quentialist perspective. Delgado and Stefancic argue
for the banning of hate speech on the grounds that
it causes great harm (which is not counterbalanced
by the possible benefits):
The harms of hate speech include its adverse
impacts— sometimes devastating ones— on the vic-
tim, the speaker, and society at large. The harms vary,
of course, according to the type of hate speech. The
more diffuse kind— for example, “All n*****s are infe-
rior and should go back to Africa”—is apt to be more
harmful to society in general. The more targeted
very strong reasons (such as conflicts with other
important rights) are required to overrule it. Sec-
ond, the right of free speech does not allow exercis-
ing that right if doing so interferes with someone
else’s free speech rights. Free speech rights cannot
justify shouting down or physically attacking a
speaker because his views are deemed offensive
or upsetting. If free speech can be banned simply
because someone is offended, any speech can be
banned, and the right of free speech is no right
at all. Third, it is wrong to censor or punish some
speakers and not others based solely on the views
or ideas expressed.
’
A new study reveals trends that free speech advo-
cates might find alarming. Almost 20 percent of
undergraduates at U.S. colleges and universities
say that using violence to silence a controversial
speaker is acceptable. Four in ten think (incor-
rectly) that hate speech is not protected by the First
Amendment. And a majority of undergraduates
agree that shouting down controversial speakers
so they can’t be heard would be appropriate. Here
are more details:*
Does the First Amendment protect hate speech?
Yes No Don’t Know
All 39% 44% 16%
Female 31% 49% 21%
Male 51% 38% 11%
A student group opposed to the speaker disrupts
the speech by loudly and repeatedly shouting so
that the audience cannot hear the speaker. Do you
agree or disagree that the student group’s actions
are acceptable?
Agree Disagree
All 51% 49%
Democrat 62% 38%
Republican 39% 61%
Independent 45% 55%
A student group opposed to the speaker uses
violence to prevent the speaker from speaking.
Do you agree or disagree that the student group’s
actions are acceptable?
Agree Disagree
All 19% 81%
Democrat 20% 80%
Republican 22% 78%
Independent 16% 84%
Male 30% 70%
Female 10% 90%
*John Villasenor, Brookings Institute, “Views Among
College Students Regarding the First Amendment:
Results from a New Survey”; national survey, 1500 cur-
rent undergraduates, September 18, 2017, https://www
.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2017/09/18/ views- among
– college- students- regarding- the- first- amendment-results
-from-a-new-survey/.
College Students and Free Speech

https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2017/09/18/views-among-college-students-regarding-the-first-amendment-results-from-a-new-survey/

CHAPTER 16: FREE SPEECH on CAmPUS Á 597
2. Speech codes do harm (by impeding the search
for knowledge, undermining democracy, ban-
ning the expression of unpopular ideas and
views, and hampering free and open dialogue).
3. Speech codes may do good by preventing some
harm to vulnerable groups, but the good does
not outweigh the harm the codes cause.
4. Therefore, speech codes should be eliminated.
This is a valid argument, so we must focus on the
truth of the premises. Premise 1 would be accepted
by many on both sides of the debate. It is the least
controversial premise. Premises 2 and 3 are the
heart of the argument. What evidence or reasoning
supports Premise 2? The history of speech codes
shows that they have indeed been used to censor
political views, unwelcome opinions, protected
speech, and ideas expressed by people other than
those for whom the codes were intended.
Premise 3 is likewise open to question. Those
who reject speech codes accept it; those who favor
them tend to deny it. The disagreement is about the
extent of harm and good involved. The pro- code
side contends that the damage done to vulnerable
groups by hate speech is immense and that this
kind of harm is much more serious than any caused
by censorship. The anti- code side maintains that,
while the harm caused by censorship is clear, there
is no evidence that speech codes have lessened hate
speech on campus.
CHAPTER REVIEW
SUMMARY
Recently, speech on college campuses has been cen-
sored or punished, and invited speakers have been
disinvited or shouted down. Many students believe
these actions are needed to curtail hate speech: spo-
ken or written words used to insult or disparage people
because of their social or racial group. Hate speech,
variety—“You goddamn n*****, go back to Africa”—
harms society as well, particularly cumulatively, but
its principal impact is felt by the individual victim.11
Some have argued that speech critical of an
identity group or speech that upsets people in such
a group is in fact a form of violence. If so, they con-
tend, such speech is definitely harmful (and has no
counterweight of sufficient benefits) and, on those
grounds, should be banned.
As we have seen, some who reject censorship
recognize the harms of hate speech but argue that
censoring it causes even more harm, and that the
benefits of free speech outweigh by far any supposed
disadvantages. As Chemerinsky and Gillman say,
[P]rotecting hate speech is necessary because the
alternative— granting governments the power to
punish speakers they don’t like— creates even more
harm. The argument in favor of hate speech laws
is essentially an argument for granting people in
authority the power to censor or punish individu-
als who insult, stigmatize, or demean others, and
it is inevitable that such vague and broad authority
will be abused or used in ways that were not con-
templated by censorship advocates.12
MORAL ARGUMENTS
One way to argue against speech codes is to try to
show that they do more harm than good.
1. If, on balance, speech codes do more harm than
good, they should be eliminated.
’ QUICK REVIEWhate speech— Spoken or written words used to
insult, disparage, or attack people based on
their social or ethnic group.
speech codes— Campus regulations that ban
the use of language or symbols thought to
embody hate speech.

598 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
5. Why is the right of free speech not absolute?
(pp. 590–591)
6. According to John Arthur, what are three
important benefits of having the right to speak
and write freely? (p. 591)
7. What are four kinds of speech that the First
Amendment does not protect? (p. 591)
8. What has been the courts’ prevailing
attitude toward speech codes at colleges and
universities? (p. 592)
9. How can hate speech harm a member of a
minority group? (p. 594)
10. What argument could a nonconsequentialist
make for free speech? (pp. 594–596)
Discussion Questions
1. Do you believe that shouting down a controversial
speaker so he or she can’t be heard is morally
permissible? Why or why not? If your silencing a
controversial speaker is morally permissible, would
it be morally permissible for others to shout down
a speaker you like but they disdain?
2. Do you think hate speech should be banned?
Why or why not?
3. Is free speech (including the right to use hate
speech) necessary for the search for knowledge?
Explain.
4. How could speech codes be used not to ban hate
speech but to censor political views that are
unpopular or unwelcome?
5. What criticisms have been lodged against the
concept of microaggression? Do you agree with
them? Why or why not?
6. Why does Friedersdorf say that calling certain
behavior a “microaggression” is “hugely
confusing”?
7. The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that hate
speech is protected speech. Do you agree with
this decision? Explain.
8. Why does Catherine Rampell say that equating
speech with violence is a problem? Do you agree?
9. Suzanne Nossel says that the way to preserve
our freedom of expression is to insist that
speech, no matter how offensive, cannot justify
they contend, can harm people by causing emotional
and physical distress, insulting the dignity of indi-
viduals, subordinating minorities, and “assaulting”
vulnerable groups through offensive language. In
response to what they consider hate speech, colleges
and universities have enacted speech codes, campus
regulations that ban the use of symbols or language
thought to embody hate speech.
The central conflict in campus free speech contro-
versies is between two moral goods crucial to higher
education: (1) free speech that enables the expression
of all ideas and the unfettered search for truth, and
(2) a campus environment that protects and respects
the learning experiences of all students. Some free
speech scholars believe that both these values can be
accommodated, while many students think they can-
not be.
Under the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment, a
vast range of speech is protected, including offensive
language or ideas and hate speech. Unprotected speech
includes serious threats, libel, and “fighting words.”
The most frequently heard arguments about cam-
pus free speech concern whether hate speech should be
regulated to prevent harm to minorities and other vul-
nerable groups. Those against speech codes argue that
they undermine democracy and the search for knowl-
edge and that they violate free speech rights. Those who
favor speech codes insist that they are needed to protect
blacks and other minorities from harmful speech.
KEY TERMS
hate speech (p. 589)
speech codes (p. 589)
EXERCISES
Review Questions
1. What is hate speech? What are speech codes?
(pp. 589–590)
2. What is the central conflict in campus free
speech controversies? (p. 590)
3. What are the reasons free speech advocates give
for not censoring offensive speech? (p. 591)
4. Does the First Amendment protect hate speech?
(p. 592)

CHAPTER 16: FREE SPEECH on CAmPUS Á 599
Erwin Chemerinsky and Howard Gillman, Free Speech on
Campus (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017).
Stanley Fish, There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech . . . and
It’s a Good Thing Too (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1994).
David van Mill, “Freedom of Speech,” in Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Summer 2017 ed., ed.
Edward N. Zalta, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives
/sum2017/entries/freedom-speech/.
Tom Slater, ed., Unsafe Space: The Crisis of Free Speech on
Campus (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).
Jeremy Waldron, The Harm in Hate Speech (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 2012).
violent reprisal. How could you argue against
this view? How could you argue for it?
10. In what ways can a college or university
foster tole rance and an inclusive learning
environment— without banning offensive speech?
FURTHER READING
American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), https://www
.aclu.org/.
Sigal R. Ben- Porath, Free Speech on Campus (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017).
E T H I C A L D I L E m m A S
1. Free Speech and the Hangman’s Noose
One way to express hatred and bias toward blacks and other minorities is to display
objects that represent such attitudes. Consider this report from the Southern Poverty Law
Center about nooses found on academic campuses:
Since the day after the 2016 presidential election through March 31, the Southern
Poverty Law Center has documented 1,863 bias incidents. Of these, 292, or 15.67%,
were anti- black motivated incidents. One of the most pervasive manifestations of
these happenings is the display of nooses.
Several examples have surfaced on academic campuses in the past month. In
May, bananas with odious messages were found hanging from nooses on American
University’s campus in Washington, D.C. Just over a week later, two Maryland men
were arrested for hanging a noose outside Crofton Middle School. Similarly, four
students were recently identified as being involved with hanging a black teddy bear
from a noose at Wakefield High School in North Carolina.*
Displaying certain recognizable symbols in public
or private space is thought to be a form of speech.
To blacks, nooses are offensive symbols that repre-
sent the crime of lynching and the horrific history
of lynchings during and after the Jim Crow era.
Should students have the right to display nooses
on campus? That is, should such displays be allowed
on the grounds of free speech? Serious threats are
not protected by law. Can the display of a noose on
campus be construed as a threat and therefore be
banned and punished?
*Southern Poverty Law Center, “Frequency of Noose Hate Crime Incidents Surges,” by Hatewatch Staff, Hatewatch
Blog. June 5, 2017, https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2017/06/05/ frequency-noose-hate-crime-incidents-
surges. Reprinted with permission.

https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2017/06/05/frequency-noose-hate-crime-incidents-surges

Home

https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2017/06/05/frequency-noose-hate-crime-incidents-surges

https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2017/entries/freedom-speech/

600 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
2. Hate Speech Online
(The Guardian)—Matthew Prince had the power to kill the white supremacist
hate site the Daily Stormer for years, but he didn’t choose to pull the trigger until
16 August. That’s when the chief executive of website security company Cloudflare
“woke up . . . in a bad mood and decided to kick them off the Internet”, as he
told his employees in an internal email. Without Cloudflare’s protection, the Daily
Stormer was forced to retreat to the darknet, where it is inaccessible to the majority
of internet users.
Cloudflare is just one of many internet companies that cleaned house amid a
wave of public outrage following a deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville.
Critics charge that technology platforms have enabled a disparate network of racist
extremists to seek one another out, raise funds, and plan and execute such rallies. But
unlike consumer facing companies such as Facebook, YouTube, PayPal and Discord,
and even as liberal voices—including the Guardian editorial board— applaud it,
Cloudflare won’t defend its actions.†
Should hate speech websites be allowed to freely
spread their offensive white supremacist message
online? Why or why not? If internet companies
shut them down, is that a violation of their free
speech rights? If hate websites are to be regulated,
who should do the regulating? The government?
Internet companies?
†Julia Carrie Wong, “The Far Right Is Losing Its Ability to Speak Freely Online. Should the Left Defend It?” The
Guardian, August 28, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/aug/28/ daily-stormer-alt-right
-cloudflare-breitbart.
3. Offensive Speech and Racial Violence
Is uttering a racial slur— even in an attempt to explain its use in literature— an act of
racial violence or discrimination? Consider this example:
(HuffPost)—Colleges and universities have long been considered places where one
can challenge dominant ideas in order to provoke a robust intellectual discussion.
But with what some say is a growing push for political correctness, critics contend
academia has lost the ability to have a free- flowing scholarly discourse.
Lawyer and author Wendy Kaminer found herself at the center of that heated
debate this year when she joined a free speech panel discussion at Smith College
and used a racial slur while discussing its use in literature and academia. Kaminer
joined HuffPost Live on Wednesday and explained what transpired on the panel.
“I was accused of committing an explicit act of racial violence because
I questioned our growing list of words we can only know by their initials,” Kaminer
said. “I questioned the value and the uses of euphemisms and in doing so, I uttered

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/aug/28/daily-stormer-alt-right-cloudflare-breitbart

CHAPTER 16: FREE SPEECH on CAmPUS Á 601
a few forbidden words, including a racially charged word. And by doing so, I was
accused of committing an act of racial violence.”
Kaminer, whose position on the issue has been critiqued, took issue with the
idea that “offensive words” could be considered “the same as discrimination.” In her
conversation with HuffPost Live’s Marc Lamont Hill, a Morehouse College professor,
she defended her use of the word in the context of the discussion and spoke out
against the so- called “censorship” to which academics have been subjected.‡
Do you think that even in an academic setting,
using a racial slur to explain its function in litera-
ture is an instance of racial violence? If so, would
using the term to explain its offensiveness and
hurtfulness also be unacceptable? If not, why not?
‡Rahel Gebreyes, “Author Wendy Kaminer Defends Her Use of a Racial Slur During a Free Speech Panel,” HuffPost,
June 5, 2015, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/ wendy-kaminer-racial-slur-free-speech_n_7521858.html.
© 2015 Oath Inc. All rights reserved. Used by permission and protected by the Copyright Laws of the United States. The
printing, copying, redistribution, or retransmission of this content without express written permission is prohibited.
Of all the ideas percolating on college campuses these
days, the most dangerous one might be that speech is
sometimes violence. We’re not talking about verbal
threats of violence, which are used to coerce and intim-
idate, and which are illegal and not protected by the
First Amendment. We’re talking about speech that is
deemed by members of an identity group to be critical
of the group, or speech that is otherwise upsetting to
members of the group. This is the kind of speech that
many students today refer to as a form of violence. If
Milo Yiannopoulos speaks on the University of Califor-
nia, Berkeley, campus, is that an act of violence?
Recently, the psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett, a
highly respected emotion researcher at Northeastern
University, published an essay in The New York Times
titled, “When is speech violence?” She offered support
from neuroscience and health- psychology research
Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff, “Why It’s a Bad Idea to Tell
Students Words Are Violence,” The Atlantic, July 18, 2017. © 2017
The Atlantic Media Co., as first published in The Atlantic Magazine.
All rights reserved. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
for students who want to use the word “violence” in
this expansive way. The essay made two points that we
think are valid and important, but it drew two infer-
ences from those points that we think are invalid.
First valid point: Chronic stress can cause physical
damage. Feldman Barrett cited research on the ways
that chronic (not short- term) stressors “can make you
sick, alter your brain— even kill neurons— and shorten
your life.” The research here is indeed clear.
First invalid inference: Feldman Barrett used these
empirical findings to advance a syllogism: “If words can
cause stress, and if prolonged stress can cause physical
harm, then it seems that speech— at least certain types
of speech— can be a form of violence.” It is logically
true that if A can cause B and B can cause C, then A can
cause C. But following this logic, the resulting inference
should be merely that words can cause physical harm,
not that words are violence. If you’re not convinced,
just re- run the syllogism starting with “gossiping about
a rival,” for example, or “giving one’s students a lot of
homework.” Both practices can cause prolonged stress to
others, but that doesn’t turn them into forms of violence.
R E A D I n G S
Why It’s a Bad Idea to Tell Students Words Are Violence
Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/wendy-kaminer-racial-slur-free-speech_n_7521858.html

602 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
Yiannopoulos to speak at your school. He is part of
something noxious, a campaign of abuse. There is
nothing to be gained from debating him, for debate is
not what he is offering.
But wait, wasn’t Feldman Barrett’s key point the
contrast between short- and long- term stressors? What
would have happened had Yiannopoulos been allowed
to speak at Berkeley? He would have faced a gigantic
crowd of peaceful protesters, inside and outside the
venue. The event would have been over in two hours.
Any students who thought his words would cause
them trauma could have avoided the talk and left the
protesting to others. Anyone who joined the protests
would have left with a strong sense of campus solidar-
ity. And most importantly, all Berkeley students would
have learned an essential lesson for life in 2017: How to
encounter a troll without losing one’s cool. (The goal
of a troll, after all, is to make people lose their cool.)
Feldman Barrett’s argument only makes sense if
Yiannopoulos’s speech is interpreted as one brief epi-
sode in a long stretch of “simmering stress” on cam-
pus. The argument works only if Berkeley students
experience their school as a “harsh environment,” a
“culture of constant, casual brutality” in which they
are chronically “worrying about [their] safety.” Maybe
that is the perception of some students. But if so, is
the solution to change the school or to change the
perception?
Aggressive and even violent protests have erupted
at some of the country’s most progressive schools,
such as Berkeley, Middlebury College, and Evergreen
State College. Are these schools brutal and toxic envi-
ronments for members of various identity groups?
Or has a set of new ideas on campus taught students
to see oppression and violence wherever they look?
If students are repeatedly told that numerical dispari-
ties are proof of systemic discrimination, and a clumsy or
insensitive question is an act of aggression (a “microag-
gression”), and words are sometimes acts of violence that
will shorten your life, then it begins to make sense that
they would worry about their safety, chronically, even
within some of America’s most welcoming and protec-
tive institutions.
We are not denying that college students encoun-
ter racism and other forms of discrimination on
Feldman Barrett’s second valid point lies in her
argument that young people are antifragile— they
grow from facing and overcoming adversity:
Offensiveness is not bad for your body and brain. Your
nervous system evolved to withstand periodic bouts
of stress, such as fleeing from a tiger, taking a punch
or encountering an odious idea in a university lecture.
Entertaining someone else’s distasteful perspective
can be educational. . . . When you’re forced to engage
a position you strongly disagree with, you learn some-
thing about the other perspective as well as your own.
The process feels unpleasant, but it’s a good kind of
stress— temporary and not harmful to your body— and
you reap the longer- term benefits of learning.
Feldman Barrett could have gone a step further: This
“good kind of stress” isn’t just “not harmful,” it also
sometimes makes an individual stronger and more
resilient. The next time that person faces a similar
situation, she’ll experience a milder stress response
because it is no longer novel, and because her coping
repertoire has grown. This was the argument at the
heart of our 2015 essay in The Atlantic, “The Coddling
of the American Mind.” We worried that colleges were
making students more fragile— more easily harmed—
by trying to protect them from the sorts of small and
brief offensive experiences that Feldman Barrett is
talking about.
Feldman Barrett then contrasted brief experiences
of offensiveness with chronic stressors:
What’s bad for your nervous system, in contrast, are
long stretches of simmering stress. If you spend a lot
of time in a harsh environment worrying about your
safety, that’s the kind of stress that brings on illness
and remodels your brain. That’s also true of a political
climate in which groups of people endlessly hurl hate-
ful words at one another, and of rampant bullying in
school or on social media. A culture of constant, casual
brutality is toxic to the body, and we suffer for it.
We agree. But what, then, are the implications for col-
lege campuses?
In Feldman Barrett’s second invalid inference, she
writes:
That’s why it’s reasonable, scientifically speaking,
not to allow a provocateur and hatemonger like Milo

CHAPTER 16: FREE SPEECH on CAmPUS Á 603
“safe” on campus than they did in 2015, because
they may increase the number of offenses perceived
while heightening feelings of identity- based division
and victimization. Some evidence also suggests that
diversity training, when not carefully and sensitively
implemented, can create a backlash, which amplifies
tensions.
Second, we wrote our article at a time that saw
hints of a mental- health crisis on campuses, but no
conclusive survey evidence. Two years later, the evi-
dence is overwhelming. The social psychologist Jean
Twenge has just written a book, titled iGen (which is
short for “internet generation”), in which she ana-
lyzes four large national datasets that track the men-
tal health of teenagers and college students. When
the book is released in August, Americans will likely
be stunned by her findings. Graph after graph shows
the same pattern: Lines drift mildly up or down across
the decades as baby boomers are followed by Gen- X,
which is followed by the millennials. But as soon as
the data includes iGen— those born after roughly
1994—the rates of anxiety, depression, loneliness, and
suicide spike upward.
Is iGen so different from the millennials because
the former faces more chronic, long- term stress? Have
the country’s colleges suddenly become brutal, toxic
places, increasingly hostile to members of various
identity groups? Some would argue, as Twenge does,
that social media changed the nature of iGen’s social
interactions. But if social media is the biggest cause
of the mental- health crisis then the solution lies in
changing the nature or availability of social media for
teenagers. Making the offline world “safer” by ban-
ning the occasional stress- inducing speaker will not
help.
We think the mental- health crisis on campus is
better understood as a crisis of resilience. Since 2012,
when members of iGen first began entering college,
growing numbers of college students have become less
able to cope with the challenges of campus life, includ-
ing offensive ideas, insensitive professors, and rude or
even racist and sexist peers. Previous generations of
college students learned to live with such challenges
in preparation for success in the far more offense- filled
world beyond the college gates. As Van Jones put it in
campus, from individuals or from institutional sys-
tems. We are, rather, pointing out a fact that is crucial
in any discussion of stress and its effects: People do
not react to the world as it is; they react to the world as
they interpret it, and those interpretations are major
determinants of success and failure in life. As we said
in our Atlantic article:
Rather than trying to protect students from words
and ideas that they will inevitably encounter, colleges
should do all they can to equip students to thrive in a
world full of words and ideas that they cannot control.
One of the great truths taught by Buddhism (and Sto-
icism, Hinduism, and many other traditions) is that
you can never achieve happiness by making the world
conform to your desires. But you can master your
desires and habits of thought. This, of course, is the
goal of cognitive behavioral therapy.
We wrote those words in early 2015. We were
responding to stories from across the country about
new demands that students were making for protec-
tion from the kinds of offensiveness that Feldman
Barrett says are “not bad for your body or brain.” We
explained why we thought that widespread adoption
of trigger warnings, safe spaces, and microaggression
training would backfire. Rather than keeping students
safe from harm, a culture of “safety” teaches students
to engage in some of the same cognitive distortions that
cognitive- behavioral therapy tries to eliminate. Dis-
tortions such as “emotional reasoning,” “catastroph-
izing,” and “dichotomous thinking,” we noted, are
associated with anxiety, depression, and difficulty
coping. We think our argument is much stronger
today, for two reasons.
First, our article was published in August of 2015,
a few months before a wave of campus protests began
at Missouri, Yale, and dozens of other schools. Those
protesters usually demanded that their universities
implement an array of policies designed to keep stu-
dents “safer” from offense— policies such as micro-
aggression training supplemented by the creation of
systems for reporting and punishing microaggressors,
along with the creation of more ethnic- or identity-
based centers. We expect that these policies— whose
effectiveness is not supported by empirical evidence—
will, in the long run, lead students to feel even less

604 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
Science include: No argument is ever truly over, any-
one can participate in the debate, and no one gets to
claim special authority to end a question once and for
all. Central to this idea is the role of evidence, debate,
discussion, and persuasion. Rauch contrasts Liberal
Science with the system that dominated before it— the
“Fundamentalist” system— in which kings, priests,
oligarchs, and others with power decide what is true,
and then get to enforce orthodoxy using violence.
Liberal Science led to the radical social invention
of a strong distinction between words and actions,
and though some on campus question that distinc-
tion today, it has been one of the most valuable inven-
tions in the service of peace, progress, and innovation
that human civilization ever came up with. Freedom
of speech is the eternally radical idea that individuals
will try to settle their differences through debate and
discussion, through evidence and attempts at per-
suasion, rather than through the coercive power of
administrative authorities— or violence.
To be clear, when we refer to “free speech,” we are
not talking about things like threats, intimidation,
and incitement. The First Amendment provides cat-
egorical exceptions for those because such words are
linked to actual physical violence. The First Amend-
ment also excludes harassment— when words are used
in a directed pattern of discriminatory behavior.
But the extraordinary body of legal reasoning that
has developed around the First Amendment also recog-
nizes that universities are different from other settings.
In a 2010 decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the
Ninth Circuit— Rodriguez v. Maricopa County Commu-
nity College District— Chief Judge Alex Kozinski noted
“ . . . the urge to censor is greatest where debate is most
disquieting and orthodoxy most entrenched . . .” then
explained the special nature of universities, using
terms that illustrate Rauch’s Liberal Science:
The right to provoke, offend, and shock lies at the core
of the First Amendment. This is particularly so on col-
lege campuses. Intellectual advancement has tradi-
tionally progressed through discord and dissent, as a
diversity of views ensures that ideas survive because
they are correct, not because they are popular. Col-
leges and universities— sheltered from the currents of
popular opinion by tradition, geography, tenure and
response to a question by David Axelrod about how
progressive students should react to ideologically
offensive speakers on campus:
I don’t want you to be safe, ideologically. I don’t want
you to be safe, emotionally. I want you to be strong.
That’s different. I’m not going to pave the jungle for
you. Put on some boots, and learn how to deal with
adversity. I’m not going to take all the weights out of
the gym; that’s the whole point of the gym. This is the
gym.
This is why the idea that speech is violence is so
dangerous. It tells the members of a generation already
beset by anxiety and depression that the world is a far
more violent and threatening place than it really is. It
tells them that words, ideas, and speakers can literally
kill them. Even worse: At a time of rapidly rising politi-
cal polarization in America, it helps a small subset of
that generation justify political violence. A few days
after the riot that shut down Yiannopoulos’s talk at
Berkeley, in which many people were punched, beaten,
and pepper sprayed by masked protesters, the main
campus newspaper ran five op- ed essays by students
and recent alumni under the series title “Violence as
self defense.” One excerpt: “Asking people to maintain
peaceful dialogue with those who legitimately do not
think their lives matter is a violent act.”
The implication of this expansive use of the
word “violence” is that “we” are justified in punch-
ing and pepper- spraying “them,” even if all they did
was say words. We’re just defending ourselves against
their “violence.” But if this way of thinking leads to
actual violence, and if that violence triggers counter-
violence from the other side (as happened a few weeks
later at Berkeley), then where does it end? In the coun-
try’s polarized democracy, telling young people that
“words are violence” may in fact lead to a rise in real,
physical violence.
Free speech, properly understood, is not violence.
It is a cure for violence.
In his 1993 book Kindly Inquisitors, the author
Jonathan Rauch explains that freedom of speech is
part of a system he calls “Liberal Science”—an intel-
lectual system that arose with the Enlightenment and
made the movement so successful. The rules of Liberal

CHAPTER 16: FREE SPEECH on CAmPUS Á 605
climate that separates true ideas from popular but
fallacious ones.
The conflation of words with violence is not a new
or progressive idea invented on college campuses in
the last two years. It is an ancient and regressive idea.
Americans should all be troubled that it is becoming
popular again— especially on college campuses, where
it least belongs.
monetary endowments— have historically fostered that
exchange. But that role in our society will not survive if
certain points of view may be declared beyond the pale.
In sum, it was a radical enlightenment idea to tol-
erate the existence of dissenters, and an even more
radical idea to actually engage with them. Universities
are— or should be— the preeminent centers of Liberal
Science. They have a duty to foster an intellectual
Restoring Free Speech on Campus
Geoffrey R. Stone and Will Creeley
Laws. The Regents of the University of California
are considering adopting a “Statement of Principles
Against Intolerance” that would ban “derogatory
language reflecting stereotypes or prejudice.” Other
institutions are considering banning so- called “micro-
aggressions” or requiring “trigger warnings” to protect
students from having to confront potentially upset-
ting ideas and subjects. Still others have withdrawn
invitations to speakers who have taken positions
that some members of the community find unpleas-
ant, offensive or wrong- headed—a practice President
Obama criticized this month, saying that leaving stu-
dents “coddled and protected from different points of
view” is “not the way we learn.”
Restrictions on free expression on college cam-
puses are incompatible with the fundamental values
of higher education. At public institutions, they vio-
late the First Amendment; at most private institutions,
they break faith with stated commitments to aca-
demic freedom. And these restrictions are widespread:
The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education’s
most recent survey of college and university policies
found that more than 55 percent of institutions main-
tain illiberal speech codes that prohibit what should
be protected speech. For students and faculty, the mes-
sage is clear: Speaking your mind means putting your
education or your career at risk.
Enough is enough. Our colleges and universities
should redeem the promise of the new academic year by
reaffirming their commitments to freedom of expression.
Censorship in the academic community is common-
place. Students and faculty are increasingly being
investigated and punished for controversial, dissent-
ing or simply discomforting speech. It is time for col-
leges and universities to take a deep breath, remember
who they are and reaffirm their fundamental commit-
ment to freedom of expression.
The past academic year offers a depressing number
of examples of institutions of higher education fail-
ing to live up to their core mission. At Northwestern
University, for example, Professor Laura Kipnis endured
a months- long Title IX investigation for publishing an
essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education in which
she discussed a high- profile sexual assault case. Just a
few months later, her fellow professor, Alice Dreger,
courageously resigned in protest over Northwestern’s
censorship of a faculty- edited medical journal.
In a similar vein, Louisiana State University fired
Professor Teresa Buchanan after nearly two decades
of service for her occasional use of profanity, which
the university suddenly deemed “sexual harassment,”
and Chicago State University enacted a new cyberbul-
lying policy to silence a blog that was critical of uni-
versity leadership.
At Iowa State University, administrators censored
T- shirts created by the university’s student chapter of
the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana
Geoffrey R. Stone and Will Creeley, “Restoring Free Speech on
Campus,” Washington Post, September 25, 2015. Reprinted by
permission of the author.

606 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
Encouragingly, Princeton University, Ameri-
can University and Purdue University have already
adopted the core of the Chicago statement as their
own. If colleges and universities nationwide were to
follow their example—either by adopting the Chicago
statement or forging one of their own— academic cen-
sorship would face a powerful new challenge.
Backed by a strong commitment to freedom of
expression and academic freedom, faculty could chal-
lenge one another, their students and the public to
consider new possibilities, without fear of reprisal.
Students would no longer face punishment for exer-
cising their right to speak out freely about the issues
most important to them. Instead of learning that voic-
ing one’s opinions invites silencing, students would
be taught that spirited debate is a vital necessity for
the advancement of knowledge. And they would be
taught that the proper response to ideas they oppose
is not censorship, but argument on the merits. That,
after all, is what a university is for.
Free speech and academic freedom will not protect
themselves. With public reaffirmation of the neces-
sity of free speech on campus, the current wave of
censorship that threatens the continuing excellence
of U.S. higher education can be repudiated, as it should
be, as a transitory moment of weakness that disrespects
what our institutions of higher learning must represent.
Last year, the University of Chicago convened a
Committee on Freedom of Expression to do exactly
that. The committee issued a statement identifying the
principles that must guide institutions committed to
attaining knowledge through free and open discourse.
Guaranteeing members of the academic community
“the broadest possible latitude to speak, write, listen,
challenge, and learn,” the statement guarantees stu-
dents and faculty the right “to discuss any problem
that presents itself.”
How should students and scholars respond when
challenged by speech with which they disagree, or that
they even loathe? The Chicago statement sets forth the
answer: “by openly and vigorously contesting the ideas
that they oppose.” Anticipating the push and pull of
passionate debate, the statement sets forth important
ground rules: “Debate or deliberation may not be sup-
pressed because the ideas put forth are thought by some
or even by most members of the University community
to be offensive, unwise, immoral, or wrong- headed.”
Perhaps most important, the Chicago statement
makes clear that “it is not the proper role of the Uni-
versity to attempt to shield individuals from ideas
and opinions they find unwelcome, disagreeable, or
even deeply offensive.” Laura Kipnis, Alice Dreger
and Teresa Buchanan would have benefited from this
frank and necessary recognition.
Speech Codes and Expressive Harm
Andrew Altman
and sexist incidents on campuses across the nation
had led to the adoption of these ‘speech codes’.1 For
example, at the University of Michigan, someone had
written on a blackboard “A mind is a terrible thing to
waste—especially on a nigger.” (Lawrence, 1993: 55).
The bigotry exhibited in such incidents was widely
condemned. Yet, the codes designed to respond to this
bigotry generated considerable controversy.
Critics argued that the codes violated the prin-
ciple of free speech. They did not claim that all rules
regulating speech on campus would be objectionable.
Rules against rallies or demonstrations in the library
I INTRODUCTION
During the 1980s and early 1990s, many American col-
leges and universities adopted rules prohibiting speech
that denigrates individuals on the basis of race, gen-
der, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation and similar
categories of social identity. An apparent rash of racist
Andrew Altman, “Speech Codes and Expressive Harm,” in Ethics
in Practice, ed. Hugh La Follatte, (Oxford: Blockwell, 2007), 411–20.
Copyright © 2007 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Reproduced with
permission of John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

CHAPTER 16: FREE SPEECH on CAmPUS Á 607
speech. But I think that there is another type of harm
to consider, what has been called “expressive harm”
(Pildes and Niemi, 1993; Anderson and Pildes, 2000).
Expressive harm is not a causal consequence of hate
speech. Rather, it is a harm that derives from the kind
of attitude expressed in the very act of hate speech,
and it is independent of the causal effects of such a
speech act.
In the next section, I explain why the causally
harmful results of hate speech provide an insuffi-
cient basis on which to justify speech codes. Section
III then gives an account of the nature of expressive
harm, focusing on how symbolic speech by public
officials can do expressive harm to an individual’s
right to be treated by government with equal respect
and consideration. Section IV compares and contrasts
private individuals with public officials when it comes
to speech that does expressive harm. That section also
formulates two main obstacles to justifying speech
codes. In Sections V and VI, I seek to surmount those
obstacles and present the case for speech codes. Sec-
tion VII examines several campus speech policies,
arguing for the superiority of a certain type of speech
code.
II CAUSAL HARM
In an influential essay, Mari Matsuda writes: “When
racist propaganda appears on campus, target- group
students experience debilitated access to the full uni-
versity experience. This is so even when it is directed
at groups rather than at individuals” (1993, p. 45).
And to those speech- code skeptics inclined to dis-
miss the harm of hate speech as merely psychological,
Charles Lawrence points out: “Psychic injury is no less
an injury than being struck in the face, and it often is
far more severe. Racial epithets and harassment often
cause deep emotional scarring and feeling of anxiety
and fear that pervade every aspect of a victim’s life”
(1993, p. 74).
There is little doubt that hate speech can have
psychologically debilitating effects and those effects
in turn can interfere with a student’s opportunities
to enjoy the educational and social benefits of cam-
pus life. Black students who walk into a classroom
would be unobjectionable. The aim of such rules
would simply be to allow all students to use the library
facilities without disruption, and no particular politi-
cal beliefs or social attitudes would be singled out for
suppression. But speech codes were entirely different,
as the critics saw it: the codes aimed to suppress the
expression of certain beliefs and attitudes. And such
an aim, the critics argued, was incompatible with any
adequate understanding of free speech.
Advocates of the codes pointed to the harm caused
to those targeted by “hate speech”: generalized psy-
chic distress, feelings of anger and alienation, a sense
of physical insecurity, and the various academic and
social difficulties that naturally flow from such psy-
chological disturbances. Treating the interests of all
students with equal consideration, argued the advo-
cates, required rules punishing hate speech. Code
advocates also argued that restrictions on campus hate
speech could help combat bigoted attitudes and prac-
tices in society at large.
American courts have uniformly sided with
the critics of campus speech codes (Shiell, 1998,
pp. 73–97). In a series of cases, courts struck down a
variety of codes as unconstitutional. It might seem
that these legal rulings would have put the controversy
to rest. But that has not happened. Discussion and
debate over the legitimacy of speech codes continues.
Because the US Supreme Court has not taken up a
speech code case, there is some room to argue that the
legal door has not been shut entirely on the question
of the constitutionality of the codes. But the continu-
ation of the controversy does not depend on expecta-
tions about future court action. It continues because
the codes raise crucial ethical and political questions
in a society committed both to freedom of speech
and to equality under the law. What is the best way
to understand the principle of free speech? Are there
special aspects of the university context that must be
taken into account by that understanding? Are there
special aspects of American history and society that
make a difference to the speech code debate? Legal
cases can help shed light on such questions, but no
court ruling can decisively settle them.2
In my view, it is difficult to justify speech codes
solely on the basis of the harmful causal effects of hate

608 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
the claim that the codes seek to suppress the expres-
sion of certain viewpoints places a substantial bur-
den of argument on those who contend that they are
justifiable. That burden is only increased by the avail-
ability of other ways of combating the causal harms of
hate speech.
The arguments that we have canvassed thus far
have little chance of meeting that burden because
they appear to license restrictions on speech that
sweep too broadly. The arguments would not only
license speech codes banning the use of racial epi-
thets and slurs. Philosophical, literary, religious,
and scientific works conveying racist, sexist or het-
erosexist ideas would be subject to prohibition. As
Martin Golding says in his critique of speech codes,
racist and anti- Semitic beliefs that are “sanitized”
and presented in the form of scholarly work [are]
potentially more harmful that the slurs and epithets
that students may hurl at one another (2000, p. 54).
Such sanitized bigotry, e.g., the notorious anti-
Semitic tract, “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” has
the appearance of a work of scholarship and so may
well have a greater psychological and reputational
impact on the group it targets than the vulgar racist
rant of a student.
Yet, a university is precisely where any work that
purports to have objective validity should be avail-
able for critical assessment. As Golding has argued, the
university is “a form of institutionalized rationality”
that subjects knowledge- claims to the test of “criti-
cal examination . . . by competent inquirers” (2000,
pp. 18, 22). The function of the university requires
“communal discussion” and “the organized pursuit of
knowledge,” and it would be seriously compromised
by the prohibition of works that convey bigoted ideas
and views (Golding, 2000, pp. 17–18).
Moreover, there is a body of literature that is
not the fraudulent work of vicious bigots but is
regarded as racist by many and would be subject to
prohibition under the arguments of Lawrence and
Matsuda. Consider the work on race of the psycholo-
gist J.P. Rushton, who summarizes it this way:
In new studies and reviews of the world literature,
I consistently find that East Asians and their descen-
dants average a larger brain size, greater intelligence,
in which the blackboard has written on it a vicious
racial epithet directed against them will likely—and
reasonably—respond with anger and even rage. More-
over, additional psychological injury is certainly
possible: the students may come to think that they are
unwelcome and even unsafe on campus. As Matsuda
notes, hate speech often uses symbols, such as a burn-
ing crosses and swastikas, which are associated with
violence against minorities.
Advocates of speech codes also argue that hate
speech reinforces and perpetuates bigoted attitudes
and practices in society at large. Thus Lawrence
writes that “racist speech . . . distorts the marketplace of
ideas by muting or devaluing the speech of Blacks and
other despised minorities” (1993, p. 78). He contends
that racist speech defames Blacks as a group: it causes
a reputational injury to all Blacks, not simply to the
immediate targets. Delgado and Stefancic also point
to the general social effects of hate speech: “the rac-
ist insult remains one of the most pervasive channels
through which discriminatory attitudes are imparted”
(1997, p. 4).
The harms cited by the advocates of speech codes
are real and serious. Undoubtedly, the members of
society have a moral obligation to combat those
harms. The issue is whether university speech codes
are a justifiable way to proceed.
Some critics of speech codes argue that other
means of combating the harms of hate speech should
be pursued. Such means include “counterspeech,”
i.e., speaking out against the bigoted attitudes of hate
speakers. Also included are educational programs
aimed at promoting equality and highlighting the
harm caused by bigotry. Thomas Simon doubts that
speech codes or educational programs make any sig-
nificant impact on racism but suggests that universi-
ties can exert some substantial leverage in society’s
fight for racial equality by “carefully examining their
employment practices, investment decisions, and
community service” (1994, p. 186).
Advocates of speech codes claim that the remedies
suggested by Simon and others should be pursued in
addition to speech codes, not in place of them. But that
claim is persuasive only if speech codes are a justifiable
way to regulate speech. The prima facie plausibility of

CHAPTER 16: FREE SPEECH on CAmPUS Á 609
the Civil War. But in the wake of protests, state legisla-
tors voted to take the flag down.
What was the harm of flying the flag over state
capitols? In NAACP v. Hunt (1990), a federal appeals
court rejected the claim that Alabama was violat-
ing the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth
Amendment by flying the Confederate flag over its
capitol. The court reasoned that the only harm done
by the flying of the flag was the emotional distress
of the plaintiffs and that such harm did not amount
to a violation of the constitutional principle of
equality.
However, the court’s reasoning was flawed by its
failure to see that there is another form of harm done
by the flying of the flag, which did violate the equality
principle. The flying of the flag did expressive harm to
Blacks: aside from its causal consequences, the act of
flying the flag was the expression of a racist attitude
hostile, or at least grossly indifferent, to the interests
of Blacks (Forman, 1991, p. 508). The official expres-
sion of such an attitude constituted a violation of the
right to be treated by government with equal respect
and consideration.
There are undoubtedly well- meaning individu-
als who take pride in the display of the Confederate
flag. But they fail to realize that the nation is not suf-
ficiently removed from its history of racial oppression
for the flag to be a benign cultural symbol. The debili-
tating effects of past racism still severely hamper the
life chances of Blacks, and current racism aggravates
the wounds left by this history (Bobo, 1997). The
meaning of the flag is still freighted with the history
and legacy of racial oppression.
In such a context, flying the flag over the seat of
government is, at best, an expression of a callous indif-
ference toward the state’s racial minorities and counts
as an expressive harm to them. As Anderson and Pildes
explain it, “a person suffers expressive harm when she
is treated according to principles that express negative
or inappropriate attitudes toward her” (2000, p. 1528).
And Alabama was treating its Black citizens in exactly
that way.
Another example of expressive harm is found
in Amar’s hypothetical variation of the Hunt case:
suppose that Alabama adopted as its official motto
more sexual restraint, slower rates of maturation, and
greater law abidingness and social organization than do
Europeans and their descendants who average higher
scores on these dimensions than do Africans and their
descendants. I proposed a gene- based evolutionary
origin for this pattern. (2000)
Rushton’s views have the potential to cause much
more reputational damage to Blacks than an under-
graduate’s drunken utterance of a racial slur. More-
over, regardless of Rushton’s intent, it is reasonable to
think that his views would reinforce the bigoted atti-
tudes of those inclined to treat Blacks as moral infe-
riors. And the views would obviously provoke anger
among Black students.
Yet, Rushton’s work may not be legitimately
banned from libraries, classrooms, and other campus
forums by a speech code. The institutional rationality
of the university demands that the work be available
for the critical analysis of scholarly experts and for the
study of interested students.
The university’s role as a testing ground for claims
to knowledge makes it difficult for advocates of speech
codes to meet their burden of justification solely
by pointing to the harmful causal consequences of
hate speech. But this does not necessarily doom all
efforts to justify the codes. There is another form of
harm associated with hate speech—expressive harm.
A justification that takes account of both causal and
expressive harm has better prospects for success. Let us
turn to some examples to illustrate the existence and
nature of expressive harm.
III EXPRESSIVE HARM: PUBLIC ACTORS
In the recent past, there was considerable controversy
sparked by southern states that flew the Confeder-
ate flag over their capitols. On July 1, 2000, South
Carolina became the last state to remove the flag from
its site over the seat of the state government. Blacks
and many others take the flag to be a symbol of slavery
and racism, and they construed the display of the flag
to be an expression of racist attitudes. Some southern
whites rejected that interpretation and argued that the
flag was a legitimate expression of reverence for the
valor of their ancestors who suffered and died during

610 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
hostility to racial equality, but it should be not subject
to legal sanction.
Private hate speakers thus have a free- speech
shield that protects them from liability for the expres-
sive harm they may do, just as that same shield usu-
ally protects them from liability for the harmful causal
effects of their speech. So it may seem that we have not
really advanced the argument for speech codes. More-
over, one can claim that the argument has been made
even more difficult by the difference between official
and private speech.
When a university punishes a student for a
speech code violation, it seems to be committing
an expressive harm against him. Aside from any
bad causal effects the punishment may have on the
student, it is an expression of the emphatic moral
condemnation of his social attitudes. And critics of
restrictions on hate speech might contend that such
condemnation by government violates the rights
of hate speakers to equal consideration. Everyone
should be permitted to express their views, without
discrimination on the basis of what those views are
(Dworkin, 1995, pp. 200–1). Accordingly, we appear
to have two strong reasons against speech codes. The
campus hate speaker may do expressive harm, but
that form of harm is no less protected by free speech
principles that the causal harm he may do. And the
university’s punitive response to the hate speaker is
a form of official moral condemnation that expres-
sively harms the speaker. The challenge of justify-
ing speech codes depends upon a cogent response
to these two reasons. The next two sections seek to
develop such a response.
V MORAL CONTEMPT
The expressive harm of hate speech plays two related
roles in the justification of speech codes. First, it helps
explain why certain forms of hate speech should be
regarded as “low value” speech in the university con-
text. Second, it serves to distinguish those forms of
hate speech that ought to be subject to official restric-
tion from those that ought to be protected against
such restriction. Let us begin with a look at how the
the slogan “The White Supremacy State” (1998,
254). It would be strained to argue that non- White
plaintiffs seeking a ruling that the state had vio-
lated the Equal Protection Clause would need to
prove that the adoption of the motto had causal
effects harmful to racial equality. Indeed, under
certain scenarios, the motto might produce politi-
cal backlash promoting equality. The fact is that the
very adoption of the motto, apart from its causal
consequences, is a harm to racial minorities. It is an
expressive harm.
IV EXPRESSIVE HARM: PRIVATE ACTORS
In the Confederate flag and state motto cases, public
officials were the ones whose actions did expressive
harm. Their status as officials made the harms ascrib-
able to the state and so—the circuit court’s ruling
notwithstanding—a constitutional violation. But the
expressive harm they did was independent of their
official status. State officials can typically exert much
more casual power in the world than private citizens.
And what they express through their acts might well
have much more widespread causal effects than the
expressive activities of a private individual. Those
causal effects may result in harms that most private
individuals simply do not have the causal capacity to
produce, for example, widespread loss of employment
opportunities. But the private individual is capable
of doing expressive harm. Just as a state official can
express callous indifference or hostility to racial
minorities, so can a private citizen. And expression of
such an attitude can amount to a harm in both sorts
of cases.
On the other hand, there is a big difference
between the expressive harm to racial equality com-
mitted by a state official and the same sort of harm
done by a private individual. When the expressive
harm is done by the communicative act of a private
individual, it is protected by free speech principles. It
is unjustifiable for the law to allow state officials to fly
the Confederate Flag above their capitols, but the law
should protect private individuals who wish to display
the flag outside their homes or on their car anten-
nas. Such private actions can express indifference or

CHAPTER 16: FREE SPEECH on CAmPUS Á 611
the scrutiny, challenge and refutation of those
operating within the institutional rationality of the
university. As Golding has stressed, that rational-
ity requires protection even for speech that claims
or suggests some groups of humans are inherently
inferior to others.
In contrast, speech using racist epithets and simi-
larly abusive terms is “low value” speech in the univer-
sity context because it contributes virtually nothing to
the operation of the institutional rationality of the
university at the same time that it is used to degrade
members of the university community. The exercise
of that rationality involves the critical assessment of
claims to objective validity. It is difficult to see what
role is played in that process by the use of epithets to
express contempt for and degrade persons who are
members of the university community on the basis
of their race, gender, and other categories of social
identity.
My argument might be rejected on the basis of the
reasoning in the case of Cohen v. California. Writing
for the Court, Justice Harlan said that the words on
the jacket Cohen wore into a courthouse, “Fuck the
Draft,” conveyed a message in which the emotional
and cognitive elements were inseparable. Protecting
Cohen’s message against the Vietnam War draft meant
protecting the expletive in terms of which the message
was expressed. And the Court held that the message
must be protected as the expression of Cohen’s politi-
cal viewpoint.
It may be argued that Harlan’s reasoning applies
to the use of racist or sexist epithets. Such epithets
convey a message in which emotional and cogni-
tive elements are mixed and the message must be
protected as the expression of certain viewpoint.
However, there is an important difference between
campus hate- speech cases and Cohen’s case: the cam-
pus cases—but not Cohen’s—are closely analogous
to cases of verbal racial harassment in the workplace.
And restrictions on such harassment at work are
unobjectionable.
Cohen was not acting in an employment context
but rather as a member of the general public, express-
ing his views in a building open to the public. And he
caused no disturbance in courthouse operations. But
meaning and use of racial epithets can be understood
in terms of the idea of expressive harm.
Racial epithets and similar terms of abuse are
communicative tools for expressing an extreme
form of moral contempt.3 Such contempt involves
the attitude that the person targeted by the epithet
belongs to a group whose members have a lower
moral status than those in the group to which the
speaker belongs. For those who think in such terms,
it is appropriate to express such contempt when
members of the morally subordinate groups seek
to be treated as equals. The expression of extreme
contempt is thought to be fitting because those who
are moral inferiors are trying to act as equals: they
are impostors who need to be treated as such. Racial
epithets and similar terms of abuse are words whose
use is to treat someone in a morally degrading way
by expressing a certain form of moral contempt
toward them. Racist or sexist speech in the form of
scientific or philosophical discourse might also con-
vey contempt, but that is not the principal purpose
of those forms of discourse. Rather, the vocabulary
of such discourse is for formulating and express-
ing ideas that claim to have objective validity. Any
such validity- claim is subject to critical scrutiny
and challenge by anyone who can raise such a chal-
lenge, even by those persons whom the claim might
assert to be moral inferiors to the speaker. “Scientific
racism” might explicitly assert that a certain racial
group is inherently less intelligent or more prone to
crime than other racial groups, but in making such
claims it implicitly invites anyone to produce argu-
ments and evidence to refute them.
It is true that the use of epithets can be part of asser-
tions that claim objective validity. Anti– Semites can
say “Kikes are all thieves.” But hate speech couched in
scientific or philosophical discourse does not employ
such epithets because the discourse is meant to convey
objective claims unadorned by the subjective feelings
of the speaker. In contrast, the point of epithets is pre-
cisely to express the feelings of the speaker.
The contrast explains why hate speech couched
in the discourse of science, philosophy, theology or
other scholarly vocabularies should be protected.
The claims that such speech makes are subject to

612 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
the same objection as a policy that takes account of
the causal harm of statements that claim objective
validity.
VI OFFICIAL CONDEMNATION
Let us now turn to the matter of whether a speech code
treats hate speakers with less than equal consider-
ation. After all, such a code makes them liable to puni-
tive measures for the expression of their social and
political attitudes, and “the significance of punish-
ment is moral condemnation” (Kahan, 1996, p. 598).
There is no circumventing the fact that a speech policy
that employs punishment to express such condem-
nation seeks to suppress speech for the viewpoint
it expresses. And in so doing, the policy violates the
equal expressive rights of those who hold the disfa-
vored viewpoints.
Any viewpoint- biased speech restriction should
be troubling to those who value strong protections
for freedom of speech. But it is important to place
the speech code debate in its broader social and
historical context in order to understand how a
limited departure from viewpoint neutrality can be
justifiable.
Consider again the Confederate flag dispute.
Blacks and many others reasonably took the flag as
symbolic of the state’s indifference, or even antag-
onism, to racial equality. Removal of the flag was
reasonably construed as an expressive affirmation
of that value. The removal was hardly viewpoint-
neutral and could not have been in the situation.
But the expressive affirmation of racial equality
was justifiable, and even mandatory, under the
circumstances.
The flag was reasonably construed as standing
for a set of values associated with the Confederacy,
including white supremacy. In theory, the flag can
stand for such virtues as courage and honor without
the taint of the white supremacist regime those vir-
tues in fact served. But in contemporary American
society the display of the flag cannot be purified of
such a taint. There is no way for a state to display
the flag over its capitol without it being reasonably
imagine that he were an employee at a business with
Black employees and that he wore a jacket in the work-
place saying “Fuck niggers.” Such expression could be
justifiably prohibited on grounds of equal employ-
ment opportunity.
Campus speech cases are more like such an
employment case than they are like the actual Cohen
case. Students are not employees. But they do have a
defined role within the university, and they should
not be materially disadvantaged in their role on
account of their race, gender, or sexual orientation.
The use of racial epithets and similar terms of abuse in
the campus context is reasonably thought to interfere
with equal educational opportunity, just as the use
of such terms can interfere with equal employment
opportunity in the workplace.
It is also true that the principle of equal educa-
tional opportunity must be construed in a way that
is responsive to the special role of the university
in critically examining all ideas claiming objective
validity. Hate speech in the mode of scientific or
philosophical discourse can cause psychological dis-
tress sufficient to interfere with a student’s ability to
enjoy the opportunities of campus life. But in that
case, it is the ideas expressed that are the grounds
for the distress. And, unlike other institutions, the
role of the university in critically assessing ideas
requires that distress caused by the assertion of ideas
be excluded as a reason for adopting a speech policy.
However, that role does not require the university
to ignore the causal effects of racist epithets on the
student.
Sadurski has claimed that “insensitivity to many
psychic harms is the price of a broadened scope for
individual autonomy” (1999, 224). It is also true that
a certain degree of such insensitivity is the price of a
university’s commitment to the free expression and
critical testing of ideas claiming objective validity.
But the causal harm of racial epithets is not the result
of putting forth propositions that claim objective
validity. Rather, the causal harm is the product of the
extreme moral contempt that the epithets express.
Thus, a university speech policy that takes account
of the causal harms of such epithets is not subject to

CHAPTER 16: FREE SPEECH on CAmPUS Á 613
It may be true that speech codes are not indis-
pensable for providing equal educational oppor-
tunity: counterspeech that condemns instances of
campus bigotry and other alternatives might work.
But it is not unreasonable for a school to judge that
a speech code would be of sufficient value to war-
rant its adoption. The question is how to formulate
a code that serves equal opportunity while respect-
ing the centrality of free expression to the role of the
university.
VII SPEECH CODES
Some advocates of speech codes defend bans on
hate speech that sweep more broadly than the use of
epithets (Matsuda, 1993, pp. 44–5; Lawrence, 1993,
p. 70). Such broad codes would prohibit hate speech
formulated in scientific, philosophical, or theological
terms. It should be clear that my analysis rejects codes
of that kind as inconsistent with the central place
that free speech must play in the life of the university.
A speech code must be narrowly drawn in order to be
justifiable (Weinstein, 1999, pp. 52, 127; Cohen, 1996,
pp. 212–14).
A typical version of a narrow code prohibits hate
speech only when (a) it uses racial epithets or analo-
gously abusive terms based on sex, sexual orienta-
tion, and similar categories of social identity, (b) the
speaker intends to degrade persons through his use of
such terms, and (c) the terms are addressed directly to
a specific person or small group of persons.
In criticizing narrow speech codes, some legal the-
orists have suggested that general rules against verbal
harassment would be preferable to codes formulated
in terms of race, gender, and so on (Golding, 2000,
p. 60). Such general rules would not select out particu-
lar categories of verbal harassment, but would rather
prohibit any verbal abuse that materially interfered
with a (reasonable) student’s ability to learn and enjoy
the other benefits of campus life and that was intended
to cause such interference. General harassment rules
certainly have much to be said for them as an alterna-
tive to narrow speech codes. A student’s opportunities
to take advantage of the benefits of the university should
interpreted as callous indifference to interests of its
black citizens.
Many advocates of speech codes appear to see
the code controversy in similar terms: adopting
a speech code is a way of symbolically affirming
the value of racial equality but not adopting one
amounts to the expressive repudiation of that value
(Shiffrin, 1999, pp. 78–80). But the analogy is not
quite right. The failure to have a code is not analo-
gous to displaying a symbol whose meaning is still
inextricably intertwined with racism. For that rea-
son, it is wrong to think that it is morally, even if
not legally, mandatory for any university to have a
speech code. But having such a code still may be a
justifiable option.
A speech code is an expressive affirmation of
racial equality. So are other aspects of university
life, such as the observance of the Martin Luther
King holiday. Hate speakers may object to the holi-
day as a departure from viewpoint neutrality and a
denigration of their right to equality. They don’t get
to have an official holiday for their favorite oppo-
nent of the civil rights movement. But the nation’s
commitment to racial equality means that hate
speakers and advocates of racial equality simply are
not treated in an absolutely evenhanded way, nor
should they be. The history of racial injustice is so
egregious, and its lingering effects still so trouble-
some, that some tilt away from strict expressive
neutrality and in the direction of racial equality is
entirely justifiable. The question is the degree and
nature of the tilt.
Critics of speech codes may concede that sym-
bolically affirming racial equality and condemning
bigotry through official holidays is fine but then
argue that it is an entirely different matter when it
comes to using punitive measures for strictly sym-
bolic purposes. But speech codes can be reasonably
understood as more than a strictly symbolic gesture.
Their condemnation of bigotry sends a strong edu-
cational message to the university community and
arguably deters forms of verbal degradation that
interfere with a student’s opportunity to enjoy ben-
efits of campus life.

614 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
of protecting equal opportunity than general rules
against verbal harassment that failed to be respon-
sive to expressive harm of hate speech. And the
policy could also do a better job than speech codes
limited to the prohibition of verbal abuse based on
race, gender, sexual orientation, and similar catego-
ries of social identity. Taking account of the expres-
sive power of racial epithets and analogous terms of
abuse involves some departure from the principle
that restrictions on speech should be viewpoint-
neutral. But the departure is relatively minor and the
value served—equal educational opportunity in our
institutions of higher education—is an important
one.
REFERENCES
Amar, Akhil (1998). The Bill of Rights. New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press.
Anderson, Elizabeth and Richard Pildes (2000). “Expressive
Theories of Law: A General Restatement,” University of
Pennsylvania Law Review 148: 1503–75.
Bobo, Lawrence (1997). “ Laissez- Faire Racism: The Crystalli-
zation of a Kinder, Gentler, Antiblack Ideology.” In Ste-
ven Tuch and Jack Martin (eds.), Racial Attitudes in the
1990s. Westport: Praeger.
Cohen v. California. 1971. 403 U.S. 15.
Cohen, Joshua (1996). “Freedom of Expression.” In David
Heyd (ed.), Toleration. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univer-
sity Press, pp. 173–225.
Delgado, Richard and Jean Stefancic (1997). Must We Defend
Nazis? New York: New York University Press.
Dworkin, Ronald (1995). Freedom’s Law. Cambridge, MA: Har-
vard University Press.
Forman, James (1991). “Driving Dixie Down: Removing the
Confederate Flag from Southern State Capitols,” Yale Lam
Journal 101: 505–26.
Golding, Martin (2000). Free Speech on Campus. Lanham, MD:
Rowman and Littlefield.
Kahan, Daniel, (1996) “What Do Alternative Sanctions
Mean?” University of Chicago Lam Reviem 62: 591–653.
Lawrence, Charles (1993). “If He Hollers Let Him Go: Regu-
lating Racist Speech on Campus.” In Mari Masuda
not be materially interfered with by any form of verbal
harassment. And if the speech policy of a university
were restricted to racial epithets and the like, then stu-
dents who were harassed for other reasons, e.g., their
political affiliation, could rightly complain that the
university was not adequately protecting their inter-
est in equal educational opportunity. Accordingly, it is
reasonable to think that general rules against all forms
of verbal harassment would be preferable to a speech
code limited to categories such as race and gender.
Nonetheless, it is possible to give due recognition to
the special expressive and causal harm of racial epi-
thets within a set of general rules prohibiting any ver-
bal harassment that interferes with a student’s equal
educational opportunity.
The capacity of racial epithets to express extreme
moral contempt gives them an unusual power to
interfere with a student’s efforts to take advantage
of her educational opportunities. General rules
against verbal harassment can be interpreted and
applied in a way that takes account of that fact.
For instance, the use of anti- Semitic epithets could
be judged a violation of the rules even in the case
of just a single incident, while other forms of abu-
sive speech, e.g., those targeting a person’s political
affiliation, would need to involve repeated episodes
before they would rise to the level of a violation. Or
the use of a racist epithet might be judged a violation
when it is reasonably foreseeable that an individual
in the targeted group would be exposed to the abu-
sive term, even if the epithet were not specifically
directed at her.4 For other forms of verbal harass-
ment, directly addressing the targeted individual
might be required.
The basic standard for a violation would be the
same in all cases of verbal harassment: Did the abusive
speech materially interfere with a student’s opportu-
nity to take advantage of the benefits of campus life?5
But in the interpretation and application of that stan-
dard, the distinctive expressive power of racist epi-
thets and similar terms of abuse would be taken into
account.6
A campus speech policy that took account of
that special expressive power could do a better job

CHAPTER 16: FREE SPEECH on CAmPUS Á 615
2. Under US constitutional law, there is an important dis-
tinction between state and private universities: the former,
but not the latter, are subject to the free speech clause of the
Constitution. For this essay, I will assume that most, if not all,
private institutions of higher education place a high value on
free speech and desire to respect free- speech principles.
3. My analysis of epithets is meant to capture a standard use of
such terms. There are other uses.
4. Consider the case from the University of Michigan, cited
in section I.
5. There should also be requirements that the speech inten-
tionally interfere with the student’s opportunities and that
the response of the affected student be reasonable.
6. Delgado and Stefancic (1997) propose general rules against
verbal harassment combined with provisions for extra pun-
ishment in cases where the harassment is based on race, gen-
der, and the like. They point out that their proposal appears
to be consistent with the Supreme Court ruling in Wisconsin
v. Mitchell (1993), which permitted a state to enhance crimi-
nal penalties for crimes committed from racially discrimina-
tory motives. It is unclear, though, whether the Court would
extend that ruling to cases where the underlying “crime” is
a speech offense. My proposal is not that extra punishment
be given for hate speech, but rather that the expressive harm
of such speech be factored into the question of whether an
incident rises to the level of an offense. The two propos-
als are not incompatible, although I think that, aside from
truly egregious cases, a university’s punitive response to
hate speech episodes should be relatively mild and mainly
s ymbolic.
et al. (eds.), Words that Wound. Boulder. CO: Westview,
pp. 53–88.
Matsuda, Mari (1993). “Public Response to Hate Speech: Con-
sidering The Victim’s Story.” In Mari Matsuda et al. (eds.),
Words that Wound. Boulder, CO: Westview, pp. 17–51.
NAACP v. Hunt. 1990. 891 F.2d 1555 (11th Cir). Pildes, Richard
and Richard Niemi (1993). “Expressive Harms, ‘Bizarre
Districts’ and Voting Rights,” Michigan Law Review 92:
483–587.
Rushton, J. P. (2000). http://www.sscl.uwo.cal psychology/fac-
ulty/rushton.html
Sadurski, Wojcieck (1999). Freedom of Expression and Its Limits.
Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Shiell, Timothy (1998). Campus Hate Speech on Trial. Law-
rence: University Press of Kansas.
Shiffrin, Steven (1999). Dissent, Injustice, and the Meanings of
America. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press.
Simon, Thomas (1994) “Fighting Racism: Hate Speech
Detours.” In M. N. S. Sellers (ed.), An Ethical Education.
Providence, RI: Berg, pp. 171–86.
Weinstein, James (1999) Hate Speech, Pornography, and the Rad-
ical Attack on Free Speech Doctrine. Boulder, CO: Westview.
Wisconsin v. Mitchell. 1993. 113 S.Ct. 2194.
NOTES
1. In this essay, I use the term “speech code” to refer to rules
that punish individuals for speech that degrades or demeans
others on the basis of race or the other listed features.
What “Snowflakes” Get Right About Free Speech
Ulrich Baer
audience, a woman who identified herself as a Holo-
caust survivor. Lanzmann listened politely as the
woman recounted her harrowing personal account
of the Holocaust to make the point that the film
failed to fully represent the recollections of survivors.
When she finished, Lanzmann waited a bit, and then
said, “Madame, you are an experience, but not an
argument.”
At one of the premieres of his landmark Holocaust
documentary, “Shoah” (1985), the filmmaker Claude
Lanzmann was challenged by a member of the
Ulrich Baer, “What ‘Snowflakes’ Get Right About Free Speech,”
New York Times, Apr. 24, 2017. © 2017 The New York Times. All
rights reserved. Used by permission and protected by the Copy-
right Laws of the United States. The printing, copying, redistribu-
tion, or retransmission of this content without express written
permission is prohibited.

http://www.sscl.uwo.calpsychology/faculty/rushton.html

616 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
Instead of defining freedom of expression as
guaranteeing the robust debate from which the truth
emerges, Lyotard focused on the asymmetry of dif-
ferent positions when personal experience is chal-
lenged by abstract arguments. His extreme example
was Holocaust denial, where invidious but often
well- publicized cranks confronted survivors with the
absurd challenge to produce incontrovertible eye-
witness evidence of their experience of the killing
machines set up by the Nazis to exterminate the Jews
of Europe. Not only was such evidence unavailable,
but it also challenged the Jewish survivors to produce
evidence of their own legitimacy in a discourse that
had systematically denied their humanity.
Lyotard shifted attention away from the con-
tent of free speech to the way certain topics restrict
speech as a public good. Some things are unmen-
tionable and undebatable, but not because they
offend the sensibilities of the sheltered young.
Some topics, such as claims that some human
beings are by definition inferior to others, or ille-
gal or unworthy of legal standing, are not open to
debate because such people cannot debate them on
the same terms.
The recent student demonstrations at Auburn
against Spencer’s visit—as well as protests on other
campuses against Charles Murray, Milo Yiannopou-
los and others—should be understood as an attempt
to ensure the conditions of free speech for a greater
group of people, rather than censorship. Liberal free-
speech advocates rush to point out that the views of
these individuals must be heard first to be rejected.
But this is not the case. Universities invite speakers
not chiefly to present otherwise unavailable discover-
ies, but to present to the public views they have pre-
sented elsewhere. When those views invalidate the
humanity of some people, they restrict speech as a
public good.
In such cases there is no inherent value to be gained
from debating them in public. In today’s age, we also
have a simple solution that should appease all those
concerned that students are insufficiently exposed to
controversial views. It is called the internet, where all
kinds of offensive expression flourish unfettered on a
vast platform available to nearly all.
This exchange, conveyed to me by the Russian lit-
erature scholar Victor Erlich some years ago, has stayed
with me, and it has taken on renewed significance
as the struggles on American campuses to negotiate
issues of free speech have intensified—most recently
in protests at Auburn University against a visit by the
white nationalist Richard Spencer.
Lanzmann’s blunt reply favored reasoned analy-
sis over personal memory. In light of his painstaking
research into the Holocaust, his comment must have
seemed insensitive but necessary at the time. Ironi-
cally, “Shoah” eventually helped usher in an era of tes-
timony that elevated stories of trauma to a new level
of importance, especially in cultural production and
universities.
During the 1980s and ’90s, a shift occurred in
American culture; personal experience and testimony,
especially of suffering and oppression, began to chal-
lenge the primacy of argument. Freedom of expression
became a flash point in this shift. Then as now, both
liberals and conservatives were wary of the privileging
of personal experience, with its powerful emotional
impact, over reason and argument, which some fear
will bring an end to civilization, or at least to freedom
of speech.
My view (and, like all the views expressed here,
it does not represent the views or policies of my
employer, New York University) is that we should
resist the temptation to rehash these debates. Doing
so would overlook the fact that a thorough genera-
tional shift has occurred. Widespread caricatures of
students as overly sensitive, vulnerable and entitled
“snowflakes” fail to acknowledge the philosophical
work that was carried out, especially in the 1980s and
’90s, to legitimate experience—especially traumatic
experience—which had been dismissed for decades
as unreliable, untrustworthy and inaccessible to
understanding.
The philosopher Jean- François Lyotard, best known
for his prescient analysis in “The Postmodern Condi-
tion” of how public discourse discards the categories
of true/false and just/unjust in favor of valuing the
mere fact that something is being communicated,
examined the tension between experience and argu-
ment in a different way.

CHAPTER 16: FREE SPEECH on CAmPUS Á 617
to speech hark back to another telling moment. In
1963, Yale University had rescinded an invitation to
Alabama’s segregationist governor, George C. Wal-
lace. In 1974, after unruly protests prevented Wil-
liam Shockley from debating his recommendation
for voluntary sterilization of people with low I.Q.s,
and other related incidents, Yale issued a report on
how best to uphold the value of free speech on cam-
pus that remains the gold standard for many other
institutions.
Unlike today’s somewhat reflexive defenders of
free speech, the Yale report situated the issue of free
speech on campus within the context of an increas-
ingly inclusive university and the changing demo-
graphics of society at large. While Yale bemoaned
the occasional “paranoid intolerance” of student
protesters, the university also criticized the “arrogant
insensitivity” of free speech advocates who failed to
acknowledge that requiring of someone in public
debate to defend their human worth conflicts with
the community’s obligation to assure all of its mem-
bers equal access to public speech.
It is perhaps telling that in the 1980s and ’90s,
while I was also a doctoral student there, Yale ulti-
mately became the hotbed of philosophical thinking
that acknowledged the claims of people who had not
been granted full participation in public discourse.
Their accounts, previously dismissed as “unspeak-
able” or “unimaginable,” now gained legitimacy in
redefining the rules of what counts as public speech.
Lyotard taught at Yale in early 1990s, and his and
others’ thoughts on how to resolve the asymmetry in
discussions between perpetrators and victims of sys-
temic or personal violence, without curtailing speech
too much, seeped into other disciplines.
Lyotard and others were interested in expanding
the frames of discourse, as they had been before, when
married women were granted full legal status after
centuries of having their very being legally suspended
upon marriage.
When Yale issued its guidelines about free
speech, it did so to account for a new reality, in the
early 1970s, when increasing numbers of minority
students and women enrolled at elite college cam-
puses. We live in a new reality as well. We should
The great value and importance of freedom of
expression, for higher education and for democracy,
is hard to overestimate. But it has been regrettably
easy for commentators to create a simple dichotomy
between a younger generation’s oversensitivity and
free speech as an absolute good that leads to the truth.
We would do better to focus on a more sophisticated
understanding, such as the one provided by Lyotard,
of the necessary conditions for speech to be a com-
mon, public good. This requires the realization that
in politics, the parameters of public speech must be
continually redrawn to accommodate those who pre-
viously had no standing.
The rights of transgender people for legal equality
and protection against discrimination are a current
example in a long history of such redefinitions. It is
only when trans people are recognized as fully human,
rather than as men and women in disguise, as Ben
Carson, the current secretary of housing and urban
development claims, that their rights can be fully rec-
ognized in policy decisions.
The idea of freedom of speech does not mean a
blanket permission to say anything anybody thinks.
It means balancing the inherent value of a given view
with the obligation to ensure that other members of a
given community can participate in discourse as fully
recognized members of that community. Free- speech
protections—not only but especially in universities,
which aim to educate students in how to belong to
various communities—should not mean that some-
one’s humanity, or their right to participate in politi-
cal speech as political agents, can be freely attacked,
demeaned or questioned.
The student activism that has roiled campuses—at
Auburn, Missouri, Yale, Berkeley, Middlebury and
elsewhere—is an opportunity to take stock of free
speech issues in a changed world. It is also an oppor-
tunity to take into account the past few decades of
scholarship that has honed our understanding of
the rights to expression in higher education, which
maintains particularly high standards of what is wor-
thy of debate.
The recent controversies over the conflict between
freedom of expression and granting everyone access

618 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
media as the “enemies of the American people,” his
insults are meant to discredit and delegitimize whole
groups as less worthy of participation in the public
exchange of ideas.
As a college professor and university administrator
with over two decades of direct experience of campus
politics, I am not overly worried that even the shrill-
est heckler’s vetoes will end free speech in America. As
a scholar of literature, history and politics, I am espe-
cially attuned to the next generation’s demands to
revise existing definitions of free speech to accommo-
date previously delegitimized experiences. Freedom
of expression is not an unchanging absolute. When
its proponents forget that it requires the vigilant and
continuing examination of its parameters, and instead
invoke a pure model of free speech that has never
existed, the dangers to our democracy are clear and
present.
We should thank the student protestors, the
activists in Black Lives Matter and other “overly sen-
sitive” souls for keeping watch over the soul of our
republic.
recognize that the current generation of students,
roundly ridiculed by an unholy alliance of so-
called alt- right demagogues and campus liberals as
coddled snowflakes, realized something important
about this country before the pundits and professors
figured it out.
What is under severe attack, in the name of an
absolute notion of free speech, are the rights, both
legal and cultural, of minorities to participate in pub-
lic discourse.
The snowflakes sensed, a good year before the elec-
tion of President Trump, that insults and direct threats
could once again become sanctioned by the most
powerful office in the land. They grasped that racial
and sexual equality is not so deep in the DNA of the
American public that even some of its legal safeguards
could not be undone.
The issues to which the students are so sensitive
might be benign when they occur within the ivory
tower. Coming from the campaign trail and now the
White House, the threats are not meant to merely
offend. Like President Trump’s attacks on the liberal
The Progressive Ideas behind the Lack of Free Speech on Campus
Wendy Kaminer
Smith President Kathleen McCartney had joked,
“We’re just wild and crazy, aren’t we?” In the tran-
script, “crazy” was replaced by the notation: “[ableist
slur].”
One of my fellow panelists mentioned that the State
Department had for a time banned the words “jihad,”
“Islamist” and “caliphate”—which the transcript
flagged as “ anti- Muslim/Islamophobic language.”
I described the case of a Brandeis professor dis-
ciplined for saying “wetback” while explaining its
use as a pejorative. The word was replaced in the
transcript by “[ anti- Latin@/ anti- immigrant slur].”
Discussing the teaching of “Huckleberry Finn,”
I questioned the use of euphemisms such as “the
n- word” and, in doing so, uttered that forbidden
Is an academic discussion of free speech potentially
traumatic? A recent panel for Smith College alumnae
aimed at “challenging the ideological echo chamber”
elicited this ominous “trigger/content warning” when
a transcript appeared in the campus newspaper: “Rac-
ism/racial slurs, ableist slurs, antisemitic language,
anti- Muslim/Islamophobic language, anti- immigrant
language, sexist/misogynistic slurs, references to race-
based violence, references to antisemitic violence.”
No one on this panel, in which I participated, traf-
ficked in slurs. So what prompted the warning?
Wendy Kaminer, “The Progressive Ideas behind the Lack of
Free Speech on Campus,” Washington Post, February 20, 2015.
Copyright Wendy Kaminer. Reprinted by permission.

CHAPTER 16: FREE SPEECH on CAmPUS Á 619
In the 1980s, law professor Catharine MacK-
innon and writer Andrea Dworkin showed the
way, popularizing a view of free speech as a bar-
rier to equality. These two impassioned feminists
framed pornography—its production, distribution
and consumption—as an assault on women. They
devised a novel definition of pornography as a vio-
lation of women’s civil rights, and championed a
model anti- porn ordinance that would authorize
civil actions by any woman “aggrieved” by pornog-
raphy. In 1984, the city of Indianapolis adopted
the measure, defining pornography as a “discrimi-
natory practice,” but it was quickly struck down
in federal court as unconstitutional. “Indianapolis
justifies the ordinance on the ground that pornog-
raphy affects thoughts,” the court noted. “This is
thought control.”
So MacKinnnon and Dworkin lost that battle,
but their successors are winning the war. Their view
of allegedly offensive or demeaning speech as a civil
rights violation, and their conflation of words and
actions, have helped shape campus speech and harass-
ment codes and nurtured progressive hostility toward
free speech.
The recovery movement, which flourished
in the late ’80s and early ’90s, adopted a similarly
dire view of unwelcome speech. Words wound,
anti- porn feminists and recovering co- dependents
agreed. Self- appointed recovery experts, such as
the best- selling author John Bradshaw, promoted
the belief that most of us are victims of abuse, in
one form or another. They broadened the defini-
tion of abuse to include a range of common, normal
childhood experiences, including being chastised
or ignored by your parents on occasion. From this
perspective, we are all fragile and easily damaged by
presumptively hurtful speech, and censorship looks
like a moral necessity.
These ideas were readily absorbed on college cam-
puses embarking on a commendable drive for diver-
sity. Multiculturalists sought to protect historically
disadvantaged students from speech considered racist,
sexist, homophobic or otherwise discriminatory. Like
abuse, oppression was defined broadly. I remember
the first time, in the early ’90s, that I heard a Harvard
word. I described what I thought was the obvious
difference between quoting a word in the context
of discussing language, literature or prejudice and
hurling it as an epithet.
Two of the panelists challenged me. The audi-
ence of 300 to 400 people listened to our spir-
ited, friendly debate—and didn’t appear angry or
shocked. But back on campus, I was quickly branded
a racist, and I was charged in the Huffington Post
with committing “an explicit act of racial violence.”
McCartney subsequently apologized that “some
students and faculty were hurt” and made to “feel
unsafe” by my remarks.
Unsafe? These days, when students talk about
threats to their safety and demand access to “safe
spaces,” they’re often talking about the threat of
unwelcome speech and demanding protection from
the emotional disturbances sparked by unsettling
ideas. It’s not just rape that some women on campus
fear: It’s discussions of rape. At Brown University, a
scheduled debate between two feminists about rape
culture was criticized for, as the Brown Daily Herald
put it, undermining “the University’s mission to cre-
ate a safe and supportive environment for survivors.”
In a school- wide e- mail, Brown President Christina
Paxon emphasized her belief in the existence of rape
culture and invited students to an alternative lecture,
to be given at the same time as the debate. And the
Daily Herald reported that students who feared being
“attacked by the viewpoints” offered at the debate
could instead “find a safe space” among “sexual
assault peer educators, women peer counselors and
staff” during the same time slot. Presumably they all
shared the same viewpoints and could be trusted not
to “attack” anyone with their ideas.
How did we get here? How did a verbal defense of
free speech become tantamount to a hate crime and
offensive words become the equivalent of physical
assaults?
You can credit—or blame—progressives for this
enthusiastic embrace of censorship. It reflects, in part,
the influence of three popular movements dating back
decades: the feminist anti- porn crusades, the pop-
psychology recovery movement and the emergence of
multiculturalism on college campuses.

620 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
liberty. The tendency to take subjective allegations
of victimization at face value—instrumental in con-
temporary censorship campaigns—also leads to the
presumption of guilt and disregard for due process in
the progressive approach to alleged sexual assaults on
campus.
This is a dangerously misguided approach to jus-
tice. “Feeling realities” belong in a therapist’s office.
Incorporated into laws and regulations, they lead
to the soft authoritarianism that now governs many
American campuses. Instead of advancing equality,
it’s teaching future generations of leaders the “virtues”
of autocracy.
student describe herself as oppressed, as a woman
of color. She hadn’t been systematically deprived of
fundamental rights and liberties. After all, she’d been
admitted to Harvard. But she had been offended and
unsettled by certain attitudes and remarks. Did she
have good reason to take offense? That was an irrel-
evant question. Popular therapeutic culture defined
verbal “assaults” and other forms of discrimination by
the subjective, emotional responses of self- proclaimed
victims.
This reliance on subjectivity, in the interest of
equality, is a recipe for arbitrary, discriminatory enforce-
ment practices, with far- reaching effects on individual

621
C H A P T E R 1 7
‘’
Drugs, Guns, and Personal Liberty
In our personal lives, in society, and in morality
itself, few values are counted more precious than
individual liberty, our right of self-governance
or self-determination. Countless moral conflicts
that cause both personal anguish and social strife
begin with perceived threats to individual freedom.
Often the heart of the matter is someone’s claim-
ing a right to exercise personal freedom by doing
something—using drugs, owning a gun, having an
abortion, marrying a same-sex partner—while oth-
ers declare that no such right exists. No such right
exists, the argument usually goes, because exercis-
ing it causes harm to persons or society at large.
Debates about drug use and gun ownership thus
have much in common. They also seem to be blaz-
ing as hot as ever on social media, in the news, and
anywhere ethics and arguments are taken seriously.
ISSUE FILE: BACKGROUND
Drugs: Social Harms versus Personal
Freedom
No matter how drug use and its accompanying
harms are measured, the conclusion to be drawn is
the same: the damage to society’s institutions and
people’s lives has been both pervasive and tragic. In
2016, over 64,000 Americans died from overdoses
of illicit drugs and prescription opioids. Between
2006 and 2010, excessive alcohol use led to 88,000
deaths. Cigarette smoking and exposure to tobacco
smoke cause almost a half million deaths per year.
In 2015, over 27 million Americans (aged twelve
and older) were users of illegal drugs. That’s 12.5
percent of males in this age group, and 7.9 percent
of females.1 Marijuana was the illicit drug most com-
monly used (19.8 million users), followed by the
nonmedical use of prescription drugs (4.5 million),
cocaine (1.5 million), hallucinogens (1.3 million),
inhalants (496,000), and heroin (289,000).2 The
resulting injury to the heart, liver, kidneys, lungs,
brain, and many other systems is well documented,
and annual drug-related deaths number in the tens
of thousands. The National Institute on Drug Abuse
sums up the effects of drug abuse like this:
Drug-related deaths have more than doubled since
the early 1980s. There are more deaths, illnesses,
and disabilities from substance abuse than from any
other preventable health condition. Today, one in
four deaths is attributable to alcohol, tobacco, and
illicit drug use.3
Some commentators say the war on drugs has
caused more misery than the actual use of drugs.
Violence has always accompanied drug trafficking
by dealers and cartels, and death and injury are
unavoidable in efforts to enforce drug laws. Thou-
sands have been killed in drug-related violence,
including many innocents who had nothing to do
with illegal drugs. In 2016, there were 1,572,579
arrests for violating drug laws. The great majority
of these were for possession; only 15.3 percent were
for selling or producing drugs.4
State and federal prisons have been filled to
capacity with people arrested for drug violations,
many of them sentenced to long prison terms for pos-
sessing small amounts of marijuana. Thousands of
lengthy prison terms for breaking drug laws have been
handed down because many statutes—often enacted
as part of zero-tolerance drug policies—require

622 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
the word drugs, they mean substances designed
to treat or prevent disease. In this category are all
prescription drugs and nonfood over-the-counter
(OTC) medicines (not including vitamins, which
are considered food substances). Drug abuse and
drug habit usually refer to the nonmedical, pro-
scribed use of psychotropic (mind-altering) sub-
stances. Marijuana, prescription medicines (used
nonmedically), alcohol, nicotine, and cocaine are
all drugs in this sense.
Several terms prominent in discussions of drugs
are important but are often misused and misunder-
stood. Drug addiction, like drug, is a term whose
definition is debated by experts and nonexperts
alike. An authoritative medical manual says that
drug addiction is
an intense craving for the drug and compulsive,
uncontrolled use of the drug despite harm done to
the user or other people. People who are addicted
spend more and more time obtaining the drug,
using the drug, or recovering from its effects. Thus,
addiction usually interferes with the ability to work,
study, or interact normally with family and friends.7
Drug dependence is a condition in which dis-
continuing the use of a drug is extremely difficult,
involving psychological or physical symptoms. In
physical dependence, discontinuing the drug leads to
mandatory minimum sentences. Some states, how-
ever, have repealed laws that mandate tough sen-
tences for nonviolent drug offenses, and two-thirds
of Americans agree with these changes.5
In the United States, attitudes toward drug use
and drug law enforcement are changing. Two-
thirds of Americans now think the government
should pay more attention to treatment for users
of hard drugs (cocaine and heroin, for example)
than to prosecution of these users. Some states are
abandoning mandatory prison sentences for those
guilty of nonviolent drug offenses. In 2001, only 47
percent thought such a move was a good idea; in
2014, 63 percent thought so.
The legalization of marijuana is receiving much
more support from the public than it did a few
years ago. In 2004, 60 percent of Americans were
against legalization; 32 percent were for it. In 2016,
only 37 percent were against legalization; 57 percent
were for legalization.6
The term drug has been surprisingly difficult
to define to everyone’s satisfaction. A general defi-
nition that can aid our discussions is “a nonfood
chemical substance that can affect the functions or
makeup of the body.” Thus, cocaine and marijuana
are drugs, but so are nicotine, alcohol, and caffeine.
When doctors, nurses, and medical researchers use
’
Between 1999 and 2006, ten states legalized medi-
cal marijuana: Alaska, California, Colorado, Hawaii,
Maine, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, Vermont, and
Washington. How did these changes affect recre-
ational marijuana use among teenagers? Existing
data show that during this period there was no
statistically significant rise in teen marijuana use in
any of these states. There was, however, a statisti-
cally significant drop in four of the states: Alaska,
California, Hawaii, and Montana.*
What do these data suggest about teen mari-
juana use? Do they show that marijuana use is
harmless? Do they prove that medical marijuana
should be legalized in every state? What claim
about medical marijuana do they disprove?
*Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Admin-
istration (SAMHSA), National Household Surveys on
Drug Abuse (NHSDA), 1999–2006; Statistical Assess-
ment Service (STATS).
CRITICAL THOUGHT: Does Legalizing Medical Marijuana
Encourage Use among Teenagers?

CHAPTER 17: DRUGS, GUnS, AnD PERSonAL LIbERTy Á 623
decreasing the number of users or the quantity
of available drugs in society, but on reducing the
harm that arises from drugs and drug laws. Douglas
Husak explains this option:
Many sensible and enlightened commentators pro-
pose that the best drug policy is whatever will mini-
mize harm. Their basic insight is that current drug
policy initiatives are almost always evaluated by a
criterion we should reject: the test of use-reduction (or
prevalence-reduction). In other words, at the present
time, no suggestion about how to improve our pol-
icy will be accepted unless it offers the potential to
reduce the numbers of persons who use drugs. Theo-
rists who favor a standard of harm-reduction point
out that the total amount of harm that drugs cause in
our society might actually decrease, even though the
number of drug users would increase. If the average
harm caused per user were reduced, total social harm
might go down while the number of users went up.
The most promising harm-reduction programs
are needle exchange programs for heroin addicts
and medical programs for patients whose symp-
toms are alleviated by smoking marijuana. Both of
these ideas can effectively reduce harm in society.9
uncomfortable physical symptoms of withdrawal—
symptoms that can be physically painful, even life
threatening. In psychological dependence, there is
both a strong craving (an acute desire to repeat tak-
ing the drug) and an unpleasant experience of with-
drawal (an intense distress when not taking the drug).
The intense desire and compulsion to use a drug lead
to using it in larger amounts, more frequently, or over
a longer period than at first intended. People who are
psychologically dependent on a drug give up social
and other activities because of drug use. They also
continue to use the drug even though they know that
the drug is physically harmful or interferes with other
aspects of their life, including family and work.8
Debates about the morality of producing, selling,
or using illicit drugs are often muddied by misunder-
standings of the terms legalization, criminalization,
and decriminalization. Legalization is the making
of the production and sale of drugs legal—that is,
making their sale and production no longer a pun-
ishable crime. Drugs could be legalized by giving
the government the exclusive right to regulate and
sell them to the public, much as states now regulate
and sell alcohol. Or they could be legalized by allow-
ing individuals to freely buy and sell them without
incurring criminal punishment. Criminalization
is making the use (and possession) of drugs a crimi-
nal offense. Under a criminalized system, merely
possessing drugs in a specified amount can be pun-
ished by fines or prison. Decriminalization is
allowing people to use drugs without being liable to
criminal prosecution and punishment.
How different states apply these policies can vary.
They can criminalize the use of particular drugs or
virtually all of them. They can punish the produc-
tion and sale of drugs while decriminalizing their use.
(Even in full decriminalization, drug use under partic-
ular circumstances—while driving a car or flying an
airplane, for example—would likely remain a crime.)
Or they can opt for a strict zero-tolerance policy and
outlaw their use, production, and sale.
A much-debated alternative to punishing peo-
ple for drug offenses is what experts call harm
reduction. The idea is to concentrate not on
’ DIVERSE VIEWS ON LEGALIZING MARIJUANA
Percentage of U.S. adults saying use of marijuana
should be . . .
Legal (%) Illegal (%)
Total 57 37
Men 60 34
Women 55 40
White 59 36
Black 59 37
Millennial (18–35) 71 25
Generation X (36–51) 57 38
Baby Boomer (52–70) 56 40
Republican 41 55
Democrat 66 30
Independent 63 33
Pew Research Center, survey conducted August 23–
September 2, 2016, http://www.pewresearch.org
/fact-tank/2016/10/12/support-for-marijuana-
legalization-continues-to-rise/.

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/10/12/support-for-marijuana-legalization-continues-to-rise/

624 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
with troubling histories that suggest a degree of dan-
gerousness. Eligible buyers include persons convicted
of violent misdemeanors (except domestic violence),
individuals with substantial records of alcohol abuse,
and many people who have significant psychiatric
problems but have not been hospitalized for them:
stalkers under temporary restraining orders are not
required to surrender firearms they already own.13
Debates about gun control may seem intracta-
ble, in part because each side appeals implicitly to
different basic moral values and fails to appreciate
the other side’s moral commitment. Lester H. Hunt
describes an aspect of this conflict:
One side focuses on the [Western] liberal value of
empathy for injury and suffering, while the other
emphasizes the equally liberal ideas of dignity and
autonomy. I am tempted to call the former tradition
“compassion-based,” but for the fact that both are
based on compassion of a sort. What each has compas-
sion for is somewhat different, though. For the former,
what is important is rescuing human beings from
pain, while the latter places importance on repair-
ing individual dignity and self-respect. I, personally,
have a good deal of sympathy for the dignity and self-
respect side of this divide, but for the moment that is
not my point. Rather, I urge the reader to understand
that the gun debate is separated by contrasting ethical
ideas, and that unless we keep this in mind we are apt
to seriously miss the point of the debate.14
Gun control refers to laws and policies designed
to restrict the possession, use, and availability of fire-
arms.15 Gun control supporters stake out a range
of positions, from an absolute ban on all firearms
(except those used by the police and military) to
a variety of restrictions that are generally tougher
than what exists now. Pro-gun (gun rights) advo-
cates are committed to opposing almost all restric-
tions on the ownership and use of guns. Existing
federal gun laws limit the government’s role in fire-
arm control to licensing and inspecting gun deal-
ers, regulating the sale and transfer of guns across
state and international borders, preventing the
ownership of guns by high-risk groups (such as fel-
ons), and limiting the availability of machine guns
and armor-piercing bullets. States and cities have
From whatever perspective we wish to view the
issue of drug use and abuse, there are moral questions
that demand our attention. These questions fall into
two broad categories: (1) the moral permissibility of
using drugs; and (2) the morality of legal and social
policies that address the use of drugs. Questions of
the first type are concerned with personal autonomy,
individual liberty, moral and legal rights, harm to
oneself, and harm to others. Questions of the second
type are about the ethics of drug laws and policies,
and the prosecution and punishment of drug users.
Gun Ownership: Security versus Individual
Rights
Stubborn realities make debates about guns and gun
control in the United States disconcertingly complex,
uninformative, and exasperating. Gun violence in
the nation is shockingly prevalent, more so than in
any other developed country. In 2014, there were
33,736 firearm deaths (suicides, homicides, and acci-
dental shootings). This is a death rate of 10.6 deaths
per 100,000 population; the country with the next
highest rate is Finland with 3.6 deaths; the United
Kingdom’s rate is 0.2.10 And the rate of gun owner-
ship in the United States is among the highest in
the world—in 2007, the U.S. rate was 89 guns per
100 people. Yemen had the next highest, at 55 guns
per 100 people. It’s estimated that there is a gun in
35 percent of American households.11 About 8 million
people have a license or permit to carry a concealed
handgun, and an unknown number of people carry
concealed handguns without legal permission.12
Another factor is that in the United States,
obtaining a gun is not difficult. Weak or non-
existent gun regulations make it so. As firearms
scholar David Degrazia points out,
High ownership rates are presumably related, in part,
to gun regulations that make it very easy to purchase
and possess firearms in this country. American adults
who lack any specific disqualifying criminal or psy-
chiatric history are eligible buyers. While state laws
vary, federal exclusionary criteria—such as having
a felony conviction or having been committed to a
psychiatric institution—leave eligible many people

CHAPTER 17: DRUGS, GUnS, AnD PERSonAL LIbERTy Á 625
4. Laws should stipulate that only properly licensed
adults may use a gun, and that one may not use
someone else’s gun except in a life-threatening
emergency calling for forceful defense.
5. Guns should be acquirable only from federally
licensed dealers while private sales and the gift-
ing of guns should be illegal.
6. Federally licensed dealers should be permitted
to sell a firearm to a given individual only after
completing a criminal and psychiatric back-
ground check (no exceptions).16
Probably very few extended debates about guns
proceed without at least a mention of the Second
Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Pro-gun
advocates consider it the lynchpin of their case for
the right to own and use firearms. It reads: “A well
their own regulations, which may reinforce or aug-
ment federal laws.
Degrazia says the United States currently has a
“very minimal level of gun control” and should enact
more rigorous measures—what he calls a “moder-
ately extensive set of gun regulations.” His list of
policy recommendations includes the following:
1. Purchase of a gun should be legally permitted
only upon obtaining a license, and the first step
in acquiring a license should be demonstration
of special need for a firearm.
2. Those who demonstrate special need for a firearm
should have to pass a rigorous training course on
firearm use and safety before obtaining a license.
3. No one should be legally permitted to purchase,
own, or use a gun prior to age twenty-one.
’
• In 2014, there were 33,736 firearm deaths (sui-
cides, homicides, and accidental shootings),
which is a death rate of 10.6 deaths per 100,000
population, the highest rate in the world. The
death rate for the United Kingdom is 0.2 per
100,000.
• The United States has six times as many gun
homicides as Canada, and almost sixteen times
as many as Germany.
• Since the Sandy Hook Elementary School shoot-
ing (in which twenty children and six adults were
killed), over 1,500 mass shootings have occurred.
(A mass shooting is defined as an incident in
which four or more people are shot, not includ-
ing the shooter.)
• In 2007, the U.S. rate of gun ownership was
among the highest in the world—89 guns per
100 people.
• Americans own almost half of the world’s
650 million privately owned guns.
• 22 percent of Americans own one or more
guns.
• About 8 million people have a license or permit
to carry a concealed handgun, and an unknown
number of people carry concealed handguns
without legal permission.
• Three-quarters of teenage homicides are related
to the use of firearms.
• In 2010, emergency rooms treated 73,505 non-
fatal gunshot injuries.*
*National Center for Health Statistics, “Suicide and Self-
Inflicted Injury,” “Assault or Homicide,” 2013, https://
www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/suicide.htm (December 31,
2017); National Center for Health Statistics, “All Inju-
ries,” 2014, https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/injury.htm
(December 31, 2017); American Journal of Medicine,
March 2016, vol. 129, iss. 3, 266–73; Philip J. Cook and
Kristina A. Goss, The Gun Debate: What Everyone Needs
to Know (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 22;
American Academy of Pediatrics, “Firearms and Ado-
lescents,” Pediatrics 89 (April 1992), 784–87; Congres-
sional Research Service 2012, “Small Arms Survey,”
2007; UNODC, “Small Arms Survey,” 2012; Gun Violence
Archive, 2013–2017.
VITAL STATS: Guns in the United States

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/suicide.htm

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/injury.htm

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/suicide.htm

626 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
individual vs. collective rights. Early rulings on the
matter suggested that the right to keep and bear
arms was a collective right connected to militia ser-
vice. But in 2008, in the case of District of Columbia v.
Heller, the court overturned Washington, DC’s 1976
ban on individual handgun possession. The ruling
affirmed an individual’s right to keep and bear arms
for self-defense. Heller and a similar ruling issued
two years later in McDonald v. City of Chicago did not
invalidate all gun control laws, but they did crush
the old gun control dream of banning all handguns.
No matter what interpretation of the Second
Amendment we prefer, the moral questions about
gun rights and gun control remain, and we must
seek answers through moral philosophy. The central
moral questions are: Is there a moral right to own
firearms, and do individuals have a moral right to
use them in self-defense? The law cannot provide
answers here, but we have a good chance of finding
some through moral theories and moral arguments.
MORAL THEORIES
Traditional moral theories have interesting impli-
cations for drug use. A utilitarian would judge the
moral permissibility of using illicit drugs by how
well that choice maximizes happiness, everyone
considered. So she might reason like this: On the pos-
itive side, using drugs (nonmedically or recreation-
ally) could provide the user with pleasure, euphoria,
a respite from stress, a break from the mundane, or
some other desirable experience. She might then
balance these benefits with several alleged negatives
(depending on the kind of drug): addiction, depen-
dence, withdrawal, physical disability, psychologi-
cal impairment, loss of employment, damage done
to personal relationships, and harm to other people.
On the list of negatives she must also include the
legal ramifications of drug use: the possibility of
arrest, prosecution, imprisonment, and having a
criminal record. She would have to make a judgment
about the extent and likelihood of all these legal
and nonlegal problems, difficult calculations about
’ SURVEY: VIEWS OF U.S. ADULTS ON GUN POLICY
View Percentage of
U.S. adults
Gun laws should be more strict. 52
Gun laws are about right. 30
Gun laws should be less strict. 18
Strongly favor preventing people
with mental illnesses from 73
purchasing guns.
Strongly favor creating a federal
government database to track all 50
gun sales.
Strongly favor allowing people 19
to carry concealed guns in more
places.
Strongly favor banning assault style
weapons. 53
Strongly favor barring gun purchases
by people on no-fly or watch lists. 66
Pew Research Center, “America’s Complex Relation-
ship with Guns,” Survey of U.S. Adults conducted
March 13–17 and April 4–18, 2017.
regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of
a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear
Arms, shall not be infringed.” As generations of legal
scholars and judges have pointed out, and as con-
temporary disputants in gun control debates have
discovered, this wording is peculiar and ambigu-
ous, and disagreements about its meaning abound.
As firearms scholars Glenn H. Utter and Robert J.
Spitzer, however, point out:
Although the issues arising over the interpretation
of the Amendment have been many, two tend to
predominate. First, does it protect a collective (in
other words, state) right related to militia service,
or an individual right, and second, assuming that it
does in fact protect the right of individuals to keep
and bear arms, does it apply to the states as well as
the national government?17
In past decades, the U.S. Supreme Court has
weighed in only occasionally on the issue of

CHAPTER 17: DRUGS, GUnS, AnD PERSonAL LIbERTy Á 627
Historically, the moral implications of gun con-
trol have been explored using both consequential-
ist and nonconsequentialist theories. But for many
people, the most straightforward way to argue for
or against guns is through some form of utilitarian-
ism: judging a gun policy by its balance of good and
bad effects, everyone considered. A gun control
advocate might point to a long list of possible tragic
consequences of not having appropriate gun laws
in place and conclude that the argument against
guns (and for gun control) is extremely strong.
Here’s one way to make this case:
Gun control supporters offer empirical evidence of
a positive correlation between murder rates and the
availability of guns (especially handguns). Availability
of guns is also positively correlated with suicide and
accident rates. This empirical evidence is best under-
stood against the background of the following arm-
chair argument: (1) Guns (and especially handguns)
are the easiest way to kill others or oneself. People
can stand at a relatively safe distance and pull the
trigger. (2) When people are angry, they act in ways
they do not normally act. They may strike out at oth-
ers. If they have a gun, they are more likely to use that
gun. Although they could resort to a knife or a base-
ball bat, they are less likely to do so, and, even if they
do, those weapons are less likely to cause a serious or
fatal injury. (3) When people are depressed, they act
in ways they would not act normally. If they have a
gun close to hand, they are more likely to kill them-
selves. Although they might slit their wrists or take
pills, they are less likely to do so, and, even if they do,
they are less likely to kill themselves. (4) When people
handle guns, even for a legitimate purpose, the prob-
ability of serious or fatal injury to themselves or others
increases. When children have access to guns, the like-
lihood of an accident increases still more.
The conclusion of the armchair argument is
clear: the more widely available guns are, the more
people will be murdered, will commit suicide, and
will die of accidents.18
A gun rights advocate could argue in similar
fashion:
Gun control laws do not deter crime; gun owner-
ship deters crime. A Nov. 26, 2013 study found that,
which experts disagree. She might finally conclude
that the cost of using a particular drug far outweighs
the benefits. Or she might assess the evidence differ-
ently and decide that the negatives for all concerned
are not as bad as some people suggest.
These considerations of course pertain to the
morality of personal drug use, but our utilitarian
could also make a similar calculation about drug
laws and policy generally. For example, based on
her assessment of the overall effects of an antidrug
law, she might conclude that enforcement of the
law causes more unhappiness than the drug itself
does, or that using the drug does more harm to
more people than the law does.
Kantian ethics is likely to condemn the use of
illicit drugs on the grounds that it violates a ver-
sion of the categorical imperative: never use persons
merely as a means to an end but always as an end in
themselves. Kant would have us include ourselves
in this formula. When we use illicit drugs, he might
say, we use ourselves merely as a means to the end of
drug-induced pleasure, stress reduction, or altered
consciousness. What’s more, we impair the very
thing that constitutes our personhood—our auton-
omy, our capacity for reasoned self-determination.
Some commentators argue that in full-blown drug
addiction, our autonomy is destroyed altogether. In
addiction, they say, the addict’s freedom to choose
is lost, for he is a slave to his chemical master. Others
contend, however, that free will is not diminished
as much as some critics say, especially if the drug
addict freely chooses to use drugs in the first place.
It’s hard to see how natural law theory could ever
condone hard drug use. Recall that in this theory,
the morally right action is one that follows the dic-
tates of nature. Whatever people do, they must fulfill
their God-given, natural purpose. Lying is immoral,
for example, because it goes against human nature,
which naturally inclines toward social living where
truth contributes to peaceful coexistence. Using mind-
altering drugs, however, can lead to addiction, which
forces the mind into an unnatural state in which
autonomy is weakened and the moral law is obscured.

628 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
query is, Under what circumstances is the govern-
ment justified in preventing or stopping people
from using drugs recreationally? The answers, or
justifications, are usually derived from three prin-
ciples: (1) the harm principle; (2) the paternalism
principle; or (3) the legal moralism principle. When
people try to explain their reasons for advocating
a “war on drugs” or any other kind of interference
with drug use, they almost always appeal to one or
more of these fundamental ideas.
The harm principle says that authorities are
justified in restricting some people’s freedom to
prevent harm to others. The government claims for
itself the right to arrest, subdue, punish, or quar-
antine anyone if doing so will prevent harm to the
public. Numerous civil laws, criminal laws, and
judicial rulings rest firmly on the harm principle.
The great utilitarian John Stuart Mill articulated
this principle best when he said, “The only purpose
for which power can be rightfully exercised over
any member of a civilized community, against his
will, is to prevent harm to others.”20
Many who are opposed to recreational drug use
assert that drug users hurt plenty of people. Users,
they say, are more likely to neglect their children,
abuse their spouses, cheat their employers by doing
poor work, steal to support their drug habit, and hurt
other people through accidents and negligence. In
addition, drug users burden society with the costs of
drug-law enforcement, drug treatment, legal prosecu-
tion, and imprisonment. As James Q. Wilson says,
“The notion that abusing drugs such as cocaine is a
‘victimless crime’ is not only absurd but dangerous.”21
Proponents of decriminalization counter that
the harms of illicit drug use are exaggerated, are
based on worst-case scenarios, and lack supporting
evidence. Furthermore, they maintain that most
of the harms that accompany drug use are not the
direct result of drug use but of antidrug laws and
policies. Douglas Husak itemizes some of these
alleged harms:
In the first place, prohibition [of drugs and
drug use] has always been aimed—or selectively
between 1980 and 2009, “assault weapons bans did
not significantly affect murder rates at the state
level” and “states with restrictions on the carrying
of concealed weapons had higher gun-related mur-
ders.” While gun ownership doubled in the twenti-
eth century, the murder rate decreased. John R. Lott,
Jr., PhD, author of More Guns, Less Crime: Understand-
ing Crime and Gun Control Laws, stated, “States with
the largest increases in gun ownership also have
the largest drops in violent crimes . . . The effect on
‘shall-issue’ [concealed gun] laws on these crimes
[where two or more people were killed] has been dra-
matic. When states passed these laws, the number of
multiple-victim shootings declined by 84 percent.
Deaths from these shootings plummeted on average
by 90 percent and injuries by 82 percent.” A Dec. 10,
2014 Pew survey found that 57% of people believe
that owning a gun protects them from being victim-
ized. Journalist John Stossel explained, “Criminals
don’t obey the law . . . Without the fear of retaliation
from victims who might be packing heat, criminals
in possession of these [illegal] weapons now have a
much easier job . . . As the saying goes, ‘If guns are
outlawed, only outlaws will have guns.’ ”19
As with any utilitarian argument, much depends
on the empirical support for the premises. In the gun
control debate, the nonmoral facts aren’t always
clear. One reason for this is that solid evidence for
various claims is often lacking because of the diffi-
culty of establishing cause and effect relationships.
(Does the availability of guns cause more crime or
diminish it? Does carrying concealed guns deter
crime?) Another reason is that partisans in the ver-
bal conflicts are susceptible to the usual biases that
plague arguments in any emotionally charged
debate—and disputes about gun control can be
especially vehement. In the supercharged atmo-
sphere, evidence is frequently ignored, downplayed,
misconstrued, and exaggerated.
MORAL ARGUMENTS
Some of the more compelling arguments for and
against drug use involve questions of the second
type, those concerning the morality of legal restric-
tions or bans on the use of drugs. The essential

CHAPTER 17: DRUGS, GUnS, AnD PERSonAL LIbERTy Á 629
him. One paternalistic argument concludes that
people must be protected from freely and know-
ingly choosing to take addictive drugs that can
undermine their autonomy.
Peter de Marneffe takes a paternalistic view. He
declares that there is only one good reason for drug
prohibition—that some people will be worse off if
drugs are legalized. He argues:
Drug prohibition is justified, in my view, as reduc-
ing the independent harms of drug abuse [harms
besides those caused by drug-law enforcement].
But it is commonly objected that drug laws “don’t
work.” If so, it is no argument for drug legalization.
In this sense laws against murder and theft do not
work either, but this does not mean that we should
abolish them.23
As you might expect, those who condemn
paternalistic drug laws usually base their arguments
on the supreme value of autonomy. Whatever the
form of such laws, they say, they are still unaccept-
able assaults on individual liberty, even if they are
intended to somehow protect autonomy.
The legal moralism principle is the doctrine
that the government is justified in curbing people’s
freedom in order to force them to obey moral rules.
For the legal moralist, if an act is immoral, that’s
reason enough to make it a crime and prosecute
those who violate the law. Estimations of harm
need not be involved. The principle of course can
be applied not just to drug use but to any action
thought to breach moral standards. Wilson’s atti-
tude toward antidrug laws is decidedly moralistic:
Even now, when the dangers of drug use are well-
understood, many educated people still discuss the
drug problem in almost every way except the right
way. They talk about the “costs” of drug use and the
“socioeconomic factors” that shape that use. They
rarely speak plainly—drug use is wrong because it is
immoral and it is immoral because it enslaves the
mind and destroys the soul.24
A common reply to the doctrine of legal mor-
alism is that it conflicts with other commonsense
moral beliefs or policies we have. Decriminalization
enforced—against minorities. . . . In addition, drug
prohibition is destructive of public health. Since the
vast majority of illicit drugs taken for recreational
purposes are purchased on the street from unlicensed
sellers, consumers can have no confidence about
what they are buying. . . . Street drugs may contain
deadly impurities, and unknown potencies can con-
tribute to deaths from overdose. . . . Truth is among
the foremost casualties of our misguided drug policy.
The demonization of illicit drugs is so pervasive that
frank and honest discourse is all but impossible. . . .
There may be no greater threat to the rule of law than
corruption and abuse of authority among govern-
ment officials. Prohibition and the huge amounts
of money in the illicit drug trade create irresistible
temptations for law-enforcement agents to place
themselves above the law. . . . Our punitive drug
policies cost exorbitant amounts of money. . . . Most
of this money has been wasted. If we stopped pun-
ishing drug users, taxpayers would reap enormous
savings.22
For some who favor decriminalization, trying
to judge the issue by some utilitarian standard—
that is, by weighing harms and benefits—is
entirely wrongheaded. The real issue, they say,
is not harms but justice. The decision to punish
someone for breaching a law should be decided
according to what is just. If Jones commits a
crime, we don’t decide his fate by balancing the
good and bad effects of his actions. The utilitar-
ian calculus is useless here. We try instead to
determine what a just treatment of him would
be, what his rights are, and what he deserves.
Underlying this view is the idea that people are
rational, autonomous beings whose freedom to
choose and act should not be constrained with-
out strong justification.
The paternalism principle asserts that
authorities are sometimes justified in limiting
people’s freedom to prevent them from harming
themselves. To act paternally is to curtail a person’s
liberty for her own good, regardless of what her
preferences are. A paternalistic drug law would, say,
criminalize a drug user’s actions to prevent him
from doing something that might injure or impair

630 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
moralists have yet to explain this inconsistency, so
the doctrine of legal moralism is an inadequate jus-
tification for making drug use illegal.
A common pro-gun argument appeals not to
consequences but to rights. The idea is that the
right to own a gun derives from a more funda-
mental right: the right of self-defense. The Second
Amendment scholar Nelson Lund says, “The right
to self-defense and to the means of defending one-
self is a basic natural right that grows out of the
right to life,” and that “many [gun control laws]
interfere with the ability of law-abiding citizens to
defend themselves against violent criminals.”25
David Degrazia, an advocate for moderate gun
control, lays out what he believes is a plausible self-
defense argument for gun ownership and then cri-
tiques it. Here’s a shortened version of the argument:
1. People have a basic right to physical security.
2. This right is violated by (unjustified) assaults
and is threatened by burglaries.
3. People have a moral right to take necessary
measures to prevent their basic rights from
being violated.
4. The right to take such measures supports a
moral right to self-defense.
5. The right to self-defense includes the freedom
to use adequate means to defend oneself.
6. In present-day circumstances in the United States,
adequate self-defense requires that competent
adults have the option of gun ownership.
7. Thus, competent adults in the United States
today have a moral right to gun ownership.26
Degrazia finds fault with several parts of the
argument, but focuses mostly on Premise 6. He asks,
“Does the option of owning firearms enable more
adequate self-defense and physical security than
would be possible if this option were unavailable?”
His answer is “no”:
An even-handed examination of available evidence
suggests that, in the United States today, possession
of guns does not, generally speaking, enable more
’ QUICK REVIEW
drug—A nonfood chemical substance that can
affect the functions and makeup of the body.
drug addiction—An intense craving for a drug
and compulsive, uncontrolled use of the drug
despite harm done to the user or other people.
drug dependence—A condition in which discon-
tinuing the use of a drug is extremely difficult,
involving psychological or physical symptoms.
legalization—Making the production and sale of
drugs legal.
criminalization—Making the use (and possession)
of drugs a criminal offense.
decriminalization—Allowing the use of drugs
without criminal penalties.
harm reduction—A drug policy aimed at reducing
the harm that arises from drugs and drug laws.
gun control—Laws and policies designed to restrict
the possession, use, and availability of firearms.
harm principle—The view that authorities are
justified in restricting some people’s freedom
to prevent harm to others.
paternalism principle—The view that authorities
are sometimes justified in limiting people’s free-
dom to prevent them from harming themselves.
legal moralism—The doctrine that the govern-
ment is justified in curbing people’s freedom in
order to force them to obey moral rules.
supporters ask why drug use, and not other kinds
of behavior, should be outlawed simply because it
is deemed immoral. Many actions are thought to
be immoral—cheating at golf, plagiarizing, lying
to a spouse, breaking a solemn vow, betraying a
confidence—but few think these actions should
be regarded as crimes and prosecuted as such.
Critics of legal moralism say that legal moralists
must explain why drug use should be a crime just
because it’s immoral, but not other presumably
immoral acts like betraying a confidence. Why is
drug use a crime and not cheating at golf or lying to
a spouse? Decriminalization proponents say legal

CHAPTER 17: DRUGS, GUnS, AnD PERSonAL LIbERTy Á 631
interference with drug use, they almost always appeal
to one or more of these fundamental ideas.
Gun control refers to laws and policies designed
to restrict the possession, use, and availability of fire-
arms. Gun control supporters stake out a range of
positions, from an absolute ban on all firearms (except
those used by the police and military) to a variety of
restrictions that are generally tougher than what exists
now. Pro-gun (gun rights) advocates are committed to
opposing almost all restrictions on the ownership and
use of guns. Existing federal gun laws limit the govern-
ment’s role in firearm control to licensing and inspect-
ing gun dealers, regulating the sale and transfer of
guns across state and international borders, prevent-
ing the ownership of guns by high-risk groups (such as
felons), and limiting the availability of machine guns
and armor-piercing bullets.
Pro-gun advocates consider the Second Amend-
ment the lynchpin of their case for the right to own
and use firearms. But its wording is ambiguous, and
disagreements about its meaning abound. The cen-
tral moral questions in gun control are: Is there a
moral right to own firearms, and do individuals have
a moral right to use them in self-defense?
KEY TERMS
drug (p. 622)
drug addiction (p. 622)
drug dependence (p. 622)
legalization (p. 623)
criminalization (p. 623)
decriminalization (p. 623)
harm reduction (p. 623)
gun control (p. 624)
harm principle (p. 628)
paternalism principle (p. 629)
legal moralism (p. 629)
EXERCISES
Review Questions
1. What is the difference between drug addiction
and drug dependence? (p. 622)
2. What is the difference between legalization and
criminalization? (p. 623)
adequate self-defense and physical security. First, the
evidence suggests that owning guns tends to be self-
defeating in the sense of making household members,
on balance, less safe than they would be if the house
were free of firearms. Second, the evidence casts doubt
on the proposition that, in the event of a break-in
while one is at home, having a gun, on balance, pro-
motes the goal of self-defense.27
CHAPTER REVIEW
SUMMARY
A drug is a nonfood chemical substance that can affect
the functions or makeup of the body. Drug addiction
is “an intense craving for the drug and compulsive,
uncontrolled use of the drug despite harm done to the
user or other people.” Drug dependence is a condition
in which discontinuing the use of a drug is extremely
difficult, involving psychological or physical symp-
toms. Drug legalization refers to making the produc-
tion and sale of drugs legal—that is, making their sale
and production no longer a punishable crime. Crimi-
nalization makes the use (and possession) of drugs a
criminal offense. Decriminalization allows people to use
drugs without being liable to criminal prosecution and
punishment.
A utilitarian would judge the moral permissi-
bility of using illicit drugs by how well that choice
maximizes happiness, everyone considered. Kantian
ethics is likely to condemn the use of illicit drugs on
the grounds that it violates a version of the categori-
cal imperative: never use persons merely as a means
to an end but always as an end in themselves. Nat-
ural law theorists condemn hard drug use on the
grounds that mind-altering drugs can lead to addic-
tion, which forces the mind into an unnatural state
in which autonomy is weakened and the moral law
is obscured.
Arguments against decriminalization are often
derived from three principles: (1) the harm principle;
(2) the paternalism principle; or (3) the legal moralism
principle. When people try to explain their reasons
for advocating a “war on drugs” or any other kind of

632 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
9. Should there be an absolute legal ban on all
guns? Why or why not?
10. Evaluate the self-defense argument that Degrazia
sets forth. Is it sound? Are its premises true?
FURTHER READING
Jonathan P. Caulkins, Angela Hawken, Beau Kilmer, and
Mark Kleiman, Marijuana Legalization: What Everyone
Needs to Know (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).
Philip J. Cook and Kristina A. Goss, The Gun Debate: What
Everyone Needs to Know (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2014).
David Degrazia and Lester H. Hunt, Debating Gun Control:
How Much Regulation Do We Need? (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2016).
Douglas Husak and Peter de Marneffe, The Legalization of
Drugs: For and Against (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 2005).
National Institute of Drug Abuse, “Medical Consequences
of Drug Abuse,” December 2012, http://www.drugabuse
.gov/related-topics/medical-consequences-drug-abuse
/mortality.
Pew Research Center, “America’s New Drug Policy Land-
scape,” April 2, 2014, http://www.people-press.org /2014
/04/02/.
Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Adminis-
tration, Center for Behavioral Health Statistics and
Quality, September 4, 2014, “The NSDUH Report: Sub-
stance Use and Mental Health Estimates from the 2013
National Survey on Drug Use and Health: Overview of
Findings,” Rockville, MD.
Glen H. Utter and Robert J. Spitzer, The Gun Debate: An
Encyclopedia of Gun Rights & Gun Control in the United
States (Amenia, NY: Grey House, 2016).
James Q. Wilson, “Against the Legalization of Drugs,”
Commentary, February 1990.
3. What is the drug policy known as harm
reduction? (p. 623)
4. What is the harm principle? How is the
harm principle used to justify government
interference with drug use? (p. 628)
5. What is the paternalism principle? (p. 629)
6. What is legal moralism? (p. 629)
7. What is gun control? (p. 624)
8. What is the Second Amendment? How is it related
to debates about gun control? (pp. 625–626)
9. What is the rate of gun ownership in the United
States? (p. 625)
10. How many firearms deaths occurred in 2014?
How does this death rate compare to that of
other developed countries? (p. 625)
Discussion Questions
1. Is legal moralism ever justified? Why or why not?
2. How might a utilitarian argue for or against
drug criminalization?
3. Should hard drugs like cocaine be legalized?
Give reasons for your answer.
4. Is harm reduction a better response to drug use
than criminalization? Why or why not?
5. In general, are paternalistic drug laws justified?
That is, is it ever morally permissible to curtail
people’s freedom to prevent them from harming
themselves?
6. How can gun ownership be justified by an
appeal to a right of self-defense?
7. Should gun control laws be stricter than they
are now? Why or why not?
8. Should gun purchases be allowed only after
purchasers obtain a license? Explain.
E T H I C A L D I L E M M A S
1. Mass Shootings and Gun Laws
Politico.com—A majority of Americans support passing new gun control legislation,
according to a new Gallup poll released on Thursday—marking the first time a majority
of those surveyed has expressed such a view since Gallup started tracking the issue in
2000.

http://www.people-press.org/2014/04/02/

http://www.drugabuse.gov/related-topics/medical-consequences-drug-abuse/mortality

http://www.people-press.org/2014/04/02/

http://www.Politico.com

CHAPTER 17: DRUGS, GUnS, AnD PERSonAL LIbERTy Á 633
The poll—taken in the month between the deadly mass shootings in Las Vegas
on Oct. 1 and in Sutherland Springs, Texas, on Nov. 5—found that 51 percent of
Americans were in favor of increased gun legislation.*
Mass shootings often increase support for gun control laws to deter such violence. But
how likely is it that gun regulations will prevent mass shootings? Is the government
morally obligated to find out what policies can and cannot prevent these shootings? Do
citizens have a duty to press the government for action?
*Christiano Lima, “Gallup Poll: Majority of Americans Now Favor More Gun Laws,” Politico, November 9, 2017,
https://www.politico.com/story/2017/11/09/gun-control-gallup-poll-244759.
2. Against Legalization or Decriminalization of Drugs
Position Statement from Drug Watch International: The legalization or decriminalization
of drugs would make harmful, psychoactive, and addictive substances affordable,
available, convenient, and marketable. It would expand the use of drugs. It would
remove the social stigma attached to illicit drug use, and would send a message of
tolerance for drug use, especially to youth. . . .
The use of illicit drugs is illegal because of their intoxicating effects on the brain,
damaging impact on the body, adverse impact on behavior, and potential for abuse.
Their use threatens the health, welfare, and safety of all people, of users and non-users
alike.†
Do you agree with this position statement?
Is the description of the effects of drug use
accurate or exaggerated? Does legalization or
decriminalization imply that the government
approves of drug use? Explain your answers.
†Drug Watch International, “Position Statement,” August 1, 1994, http://www.drugwatch.org/resources/publica
tions/position-statements-and-resolutions/ (February 15, 2015).
3. Is Marijuana Medicine?
The marijuana plant contains several chemicals that may prove useful for treating a
range of illnesses or symptoms, leading many people to argue that it should be made
legally available for medical purposes. In fact, a growing number of states (29 as of
March 2018) have legalized marijuana’s use for certain medical conditions.
The term “medical marijuana” is generally used to refer to the whole unprocessed
marijuana plant or its crude extracts, which are not recognized or approved as
medicine by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). But scientific study of the
active chemicals in marijuana, called cannabinoids, has led to the development of
two FDA-approved medications already, and is leading to the development of new

http://www.drugwatch.org/resources/publications/position-statements-and-resolutions/

https://www.politico.com/story/2017/11/09/gun-control-gallup-poll-244759

http://www.drugwatch.org/resources/publications/position-statements-and-resolutions/

634 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
pharmaceuticals that harness the therapeutic benefits of cannabinoids while minimizing
or eliminating the harmful side effects (including the “high”) produced by eating or
smoking marijuana leaves.‡
Should marijuana be made available to people
for medical reasons? It is not legal in most states;
should it stay that way, or should all states legal-
ize it? Why or why not? Suppose you think using
marijuana for medical or recreational purposes is
immoral or harmful to society. Would you change
your mind about its use if it were found to be a cure
for hard-to-treat cancers? Explain.
‡National Institute on Drug Abuse, “DrugFacts: Is Marijuana Medicine?” December 2014, http://www.drugabuse.gov/publications
/drugfacts/marijuana-medicine (February 15, 2015).
Lest we take for granted that we know what drug
addiction is, let us begin with some definitions.
According to the World Health Organization’s
Expert Committee on Drugs Liable to Produce
Addiction,
Drug addiction is a state of periodic or chronic intoxi-
cation detrimental to the individual and to society,
produced by the repeated consumption of a drug
(natural or synthetic). Its characteristics include: (1) an
overpowering desire or need (compulsion) to continue
taking the drug and to obtain it by any means, (2) a
tendency to increase the dosage, and (3) a psychic (psy-
chological) and sometimes physical dependence on
the effects of the drug.1
Since this definition hinges on the harm done to
the individual and to society by the consumption of
the drug, it is clearly an ethical one. Moreover, by not
specifying what is “detrimental” or who shall ascer-
tain it and on what grounds, this definition immedi-
ately assimilates the problem of addiction with other
Thomas Szasz, “The Ethics of Addiction,” from The Theology of
Medicine (1977). Reprinted with permission from the Estate of
Thomas Szasz.
psychiatric problems in which psychiatrists define the
patient’s dangerousness to himself and others. Actu-
ally, physicians regard as detrimental what people
do to themselves but not what they do to people. For
example, when college students smoke marijuana,
that is detrimental; but when psychiatrists administer
psychotropic drugs to involuntary mental patients,
that is not detrimental.
The rest of the definition proposed by the World
Health Organization is of even more dubious value.
It speaks of an “overpowering desire” or “compul-
sion” to take the drug and of efforts to obtain it “by
any means.” Here again, we sink into the conceptual
and semantic morass of psychiatric jargon. What is an
“overpowering desire” if not simply a desire by which
we choose to let ourselves be overpowered? And what
is a “compulsion” if not simply an unresisted incli-
nation to do something, and keep on doing it, even
though someone thinks we should not be doing it?
Next, we come to the effort to obtain the addic-
tive substance “by any means.” That suggests that
the substance is prohibited, or is very expensive for
some other reason, and is hence difficult to obtain
for the ordinary person rather than that the person
who wants it has an inordinate craving for it. If there
R E A D I n G S
The Ethics of Addiction
Thomas Szasz

http://www.drugabuse.gov/publications/drugfacts/marijuana-medicine

CHAPTER 17: DRUGS, GUnS, AnD PERSonAL LIbERTy Á 635
Until recently, masturbation—or self-abuse, as it was
called—was professionally declared and popularly
accepted as both the cause and the symptom of a vari-
ety of illnesses.2
To be sure, it is now virtually impossible to cite a
contemporary American (or foreign) medical author-
ity to support the concept of self-abuse. Medical opin-
ion now holds that there is simply no such thing, that
whether a person masturbates or not is medically irrel-
evant, and that engaging in the practice or refraining
from it is a matter of personal morals or life-style. On
the other hand, it is now virtually impossible to cite a
contemporary American (or foreign) medical author-
ity to oppose the concept of drug abuse. Medical
opinion now holds that drug abuse is a major medi-
cal, psychiatric, and public-health problem; that drug
addiction is a disease similar to diabetes, requiring
prolonged (or lifelong) and carefully supervised medi-
cal treatment; and that taking or not taking drugs is
primarily, if not solely, a matter of medical concern
and responsibility.
Like any social policy, our drug laws may be exam-
ined from two entirely different points of view—
technical and moral. Our present inclination is
either to ignore the moral perspective or to mistake
the technical for the moral.
An example of our misplaced overreliance on a
technical approach to the so-called drug problem is
the professionalized mendacity about the dangerous-
ness of certain types of drugs. Since most of the pro-
pagandists against drug abuse seek to justify certain
repressive policies by appeals to the alleged danger-
ousness of various drugs, they often falsify the facts
about the true pharmacological properties of the
drugs they seek to prohibit. They do so for two rea-
sons: first, because many substances in daily use are
just as harmful as the substances they want to pro-
hibit; second, because they realize that dangerous-
ness alone is never a sufficiently persuasive argument
to justify the prohibition of any drug, substance, or
artifact. Accordingly, the more the “addiction-mon-
gers” ignore the moral dimensions of the problem,
the more they must escalate their fraudulent claims
about the dangers of drugs.
were an abundant and inexpensive supply of what
the “addict” wants, there would be no reason for him
to go to “any means” to obtain it. Does the World
Health Organization’s definition mean that one can be
addicted only to a substance that is illegal or otherwise
difficult to obtain? If so—and there is obviously some
truth to the view that forbidden fruit tastes sweeter,
although it cannot be denied that some things are
sweet regardless of how the law treats them—then
that surely removes the problem of addiction from the
sphere of medicine and psychiatry and puts it squarely
into that of morals and law.
The definition of addiction offered in Webster’s
Third New International Dictionary of the English
Language, Unabridged exhibits the same difficulties. It
defines addiction as “the compulsory uncontrolled
use of habit-forming drugs beyond the period of medi-
cal need or under conditions harmful to society.” This
definition imputes lack of self-control to the addict
over his taking or not taking a drug, a dubious propo-
sition at best; at the same time, by qualifying an act
as an addiction depending on whether or not it harms
society, it offers a moral definition of an ostensibly
medical condition.
Likewise, the currently popular term drug abuse
places this behavior squarely in the category of ethics.
For it is ethics that deals with the right and wrong uses
of man’s powers and possessions.
Clearly, drug addiction and drug abuse cannot be
defined without specifying the proper and improper
uses of certain pharmacologically active agents. The
regular administration of morphine by a physician to a
patient dying of cancer is the paradigm of the proper use
of a narcotic, whereas even its occasional self-adminis-
tration by a physically healthy person for the purpose of
pharmacological pleasure is the paradigm of drug abuse.
I submit that these judgments have nothing what-
ever to do with medicine, pharmacology, or psychia-
try. They are moral judgments. Indeed, our present
views on addiction are astonishingly similar to some
of our former views on sex. Intercourse in marriage
with the aim of procreation used to be the paradigm
of the proper use of one’s sexual organs, whereas inter-
course outside of marriage with the aim of carnal plea-
sure used to be the paradigm of their improper use.

636 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
some drugs—notably heroin, the amphetamines, and
LSD among those now in vogue—may have undesir-
able personal or social consequences, I favor free trade
in drugs for the same reason the Founding Fathers
favored free trade in ideas: in an open society, it is
none of the government’s business what idea a man
puts into his mind; likewise, it should be none of the
government’s business what drug he puts into his
body.
It is a fundamental characteristic of human
beings that they get used to things: one becomes
habituated, or addicted, not only to narcotics, but to
cigarettes, cocktails before dinner, orange juice for
breakfast, comic strips, sex, and so forth. It is similarly
a fundamental characteristic of living organisms that
they acquire increasing tolerance to various chemi-
cal agents and physical stimuli: the first cigarette may
cause nothing but nausea and headache; a year later,
smoking three packs a day may be pure joy. Both alco-
hol and opiates are addictive, then, in the sense that
the more regularly they are used, the more the user
craves them and the greater his tolerance for them
becomes. However, there is no mysterious process of
“getting hooked” involved in any of this. It is simply
an aspect of the universal biological propensity for
learning, which is especially well-developed in man.
The opiate habit, like the cigarette habit or the food
habit, can be broken—usually without any medical
assistance—provided the person wants to break it.
Often he doesn’t. And why indeed should he if he has
nothing better to do with his life? Or as happens to be
the case with morphine, if he can live an essentially
normal life while under its influence? That, of course,
sounds completely unbelievable, or worse—testimony
to our “addiction” to half a century of systematic offi-
cial mendacity about opiates, which we can break only
by suffering the intellectual withdrawal symptoms
that go with giving up treasured falsehoods.
Actually, opium is much less toxic than alcohol.
Moreover, just as it is possible to be an alcoholic and
work and be productive, so it is (or rather, it used to
be) possible to be an opium addict and work and be
productive. Thomas De Quincey and Samuel Taylor
Coleridge were both opium takers, and “Kubla
Khan,” considered one of the most beautiful poems
To be sure, some drugs are more dangerous than
others. It is easier to kill oneself with heroin than with
aspirin. But it is also easier to kill oneself by jumping
off a high building than a low one. In the case of drugs,
we regard their potentiality for self-injury as justifica-
tion for their prohibition; in the case of buildings, we
do not.
Furthermore, we systematically blur and confuse
the two quite different ways in which narcotics may
cause death—by a deliberate act of suicide and by acci-
dental overdosage.
As I have suggested elsewhere, we ought to con-
sider suicide a basic human right. If so, it is absurd to
deprive an adult of a drug (or of anything else) because
he might use it to kill himself. To do so is to treat every-
one the way institutional psychiatrists treat the so-
called suicidal mental patient: they not only imprison
such a person but take everything away from him—
shoelaces, belts, razor blades, eating utensils, and so
forth—until the “patient” lies naked on a mattress
in a padded cell, lest he kill himself. The result is the
most degrading tyrannization in the annals of human
history.
Death by accidental overdose is an altogether dif-
ferent matter. But can anyone doubt that this danger
now looms so large precisely because the sale of nar-
cotics and many other drugs is illegal? People who buy
illicit drugs cannot be sure what drug they are getting
or how much of it. Free trade in drugs, with govern-
mental action limited to safeguarding the purity of the
product and the veracity of the labeling, would reduce
the risk of accidental overdose with “dangerous drugs”
to the same levels that prevail, and that we find accept-
able, with respect to other chemical agents and physi-
cal artifacts that abound in our complex technological
society.
Although this essay is not intended as an exposi-
tion on the pharmacological properties of narcotics
and other mind-affecting drugs, it might be well to
say something more about the medical and social dan-
gers they pose. Before proceeding to that task, I want
to make clear, however, that in my view, regardless
of their dangerousness, all drugs should be legalized
(a misleading term I employ reluctantly as a conces-
sion to common usage). Although I recognize that

CHAPTER 17: DRUGS, GUnS, AnD PERSonAL LIbERTy Á 637
males who are, in principle at least, capable of work-
ing and supporting themselves. But they refuse: they
drop out, adopting a life-style in which not working,
not supporting oneself, not being useful to others, are
positive values. These people challenge some of the
most basic values of our society. It is hardly surpris-
ing, then, that society wants to retaliate, to strike back.
Even though it would be cheaper to support addicts
on welfare than to “treat” them, doing so would be
legitimizing their life-style. That, “normal” society
refuses to do. Instead, the majority acts as if it felt that,
so long as it is going to spend its money on addicts, it
is going to get something out of it. What society gets
out of its war on addiction is what every persecutory
movement provides for the persecutors: by defining a
minority as evil (or sick), the majority confirms itself
as good (or healthy). (If that can be done for the vic-
tim’s own good, so much the better.) In short, the war
on addiction is a part of that vast modern enterprise
which I have named the “manufacture of madness.”
It is indeed a therapeutic enterprise, but with this gro-
tesque twist: its beneficiaries are the therapists, and its
victims are the patients.
Most of all perhaps, the idea of free trade in nar-
cotics frightens people because they believe that vast
masses of our population would spend their days and
nights smoking opium or mainlining heroin instead
of working and shouldering their responsibilities as
citizens. But that is a bugaboo that does not deserve
to be taken seriously. Habits of work and idleness are
deep-seated cultural patterns; I doubt that free trade in
drugs would convert industrious people from hustlers
into hippies at the stroke of a legislative pen.
The other side of the economic coin regarding
drugs and drug controls is actually far more impor-
tant. The government is now spending millions of
dollars—the hard-earned wages of hard-working
Americans—to support a vast and astronomically
expensive bureaucracy whose efforts not only drain
our economic resources and damage our civil liberties
but create ever more addicts and, indirectly, the crime
associated with the traffic in illicit drugs. Although my
argument about drug taking is moral and political and
does not depend upon showing that free trade in drugs
would also have fiscal advantages over our present
in the English language, was written while Coleridge
was under the influence of opium.3 According to a
definitive study by Light and others published by the
American Medical Association in 1929, “morphine
addiction is not characterized by physical deteriora-
tion or impairment of physical fitness. . . . There is no
evidence of change in the circulatory, hepatic, renal,
or endocrine functions. When it is considered that
these subjects had been addicted for at least five years,
some of them as long as twenty years, these negative
observations are highly significant.”4 In a 1928 study,
Lawrence Kolb, an assistant surgeon general of the
United States Public Health Service, found that of 119
persons addicted to opiates through medical practice,
90 had good industrial records and only 29 had poor
ones. . . .
I am not citing this evidence to recommend the
opium habit. The point is that we must, in plain hon-
esty, distinguish between pharmacological effects
and personal inclinations. Some people take drugs to
cope—to help them function and conform to social
expectations. Others take them to cop out—to ritualize
their refusal to function and conform to social expec-
tations. Much of the drug abuse we now witness—
perhaps nearly all of it—is of the second type. But
instead of acknowledging that addicts are unable or
unfit or unwilling to work and be normal, we prefer to
believe that they act as they do because certain drugs—
especially heroin, LSD, and the amphetamines—make
them sick. If only we could get them well, so runs this
comfortable and comforting view, they would become
productive and useful citizens. To believe that is like
believing that if an illiterate cigarette smoker would
only stop smoking, he would become an Einstein.
With a falsehood like that, one can go far. No wonder
that politicians and psychiatrists love it.
The idea of free trade in drugs runs counter to
another cherished notion of ours—namely, that
everyone must work and that idleness is acceptable
only under special conditions. In general, the obliga-
tion to work is greatest for healthy adult white males.
We tolerate idleness on the part of children, women,
blacks, the aged, and the sick, and we even accept the
responsibility of supporting them. But the new wave
of drug abuse affects mainly young adults, often white

638 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
strongly that civil liberties are precious. At the same
time, it is not possible in the United States to walk
into a store and walk out with a bottle of barbiturates,
codeine, or other drugs. We are now deprived of that
right because we have come to value medical paternal-
ism more highly than the right to obtain and use drugs
without recourse to medical intermediaries.
I submit, therefore, that our so-called drug-abuse
problem is an integral part of our present social ethic,
which accepts “protections” and repressions justi-
fied by appeals to health similar to those that medi-
eval societies accepted when they were justified by
appeals to faith.8 Drug abuse (as we now know it) is
one of the inevitable consequences of the medical
monopoly over drugs—a monopoly whose value is
daily acclaimed by science and law, state and church,
the professions and the laity. As the Church formerly
regulated man’s relations to God, so Medicine now
regulates his relations to his body. Deviation from the
rules set forth by the Church was then considered to
be heresy and was punished by appropriate theologi-
cal sanctions, called penance; deviation from the rules
set forth by Medicine is now considered to be drug
abuse (or some sort of mental illness) and is punished
by appropriate medical sanctions, called treatment.
The problem of drug abuse will thus be with us so
long as we live under medical tutelage. This is not to
say that if all access to drugs were free, some people
would not medicate themselves in ways that might
upset us or harm them. That of course is precisely what
happened when religious practices became free.
What I am suggesting is that although addiction is
ostensibly a medical and pharmacological problem,
actually it is a moral and political problem. We talk
as if we were trying to ascertain which drugs are toxic,
but we act as if we were trying to decide which drugs
ought to be prohibited.
We ought to know, however, that there is no nec-
essary connection between facts and values, between
what is and what ought to be. Thus, objectively quite
harmful acts, objects, or persons may be accepted
and tolerated—by minimizing their dangerousness.
Conversely, objectively quite harmless acts, objects,
or persons may be prohibited and persecuted—by
policies, let me indicate briefly some of the economic
aspects of the drug-control problem.
On April 1, 1967, New York State’s narcotics addic-
tion-control program, hailed as “the most massive ever
tried in the nation,” went into effect. “The program,
which may cost up to $400 million in three years,”
reported The New York Times, “was hailed by Gover-
nor Rockefeller as ‘the start of an unending war.’ ”5
Three years later, it was conservatively estimated that
the number of addicts in the state had tripled or qua-
drupled. New York State Senator John Hughes reported
that the cost of caring for each addict during that
time was $12,000 per year (as against $4,000 per year
for patients in state mental hospitals).6 It was a great
time, though, for some of the ex-addicts themselves.
In New York City’s Addiction Services Agency, one ex-
addict started at $6,500 a year on November 27, 1967,
and was making $16,000 seven months later. Another
started at $6,500 on September 12, 1967, and went up
to $18,100 by July 1, 1969.7 The salaries of the medi-
cal bureaucrats in charge of the programs are similarly
attractive. In short, the detection and rehabilitation of
addicts is good business; and so was, in former days, the
detection and rehabilitation of witches. We now know
that the spread of witchcraft in the late Middle Ages
was due more to the work of witchmongers than to the
lure of witchcraft. Is it not possible that, similarly, the
spread of addiction in our day is due more to the work
of addictmongers than to the lure of narcotics?. . .
* * *
Clearly, the argument that marijuana—or heroin, or
methadone, or morphine—is prohibited because it is
addictive or dangerous cannot be supported by facts.
For one thing, there are many drugs—from insulin
to penicillin—that are neither addictive nor danger-
ous but are nevertheless also prohibited—they can
be obtained only through a physician’s prescription.
For another, there are many things—from dynamite
to guns—that are much more dangerous than nar-
cotics (especially to others) but are not prohibited. As
everyone knows, it is still possible in the United States
to walk into a store and walk out with a shotgun. We
enjoy that right not because we do not believe that
guns are dangerous, but because we believe even more

CHAPTER 17: DRUGS, GUnS, AnD PERSonAL LIbERTy Á 639
That is why we applaud the systematic medical use
of methadone and call it “treatment for heroin addic-
tion,” but decry the occasional nonmedical use of
marijuana and call it “dangerous drug abuse.”
Our present concept of drug abuse thus articulates
and symbolizes a fundamental policy of scientific
medicine—namely, that a layman should not medi-
cate his own body but should place its medical care
under the supervision of a duly accredited physician.
Before the Reformation, the practice of true Christian-
ity rested on a similar policy—namely, that a layman
should not himself commune with God but should
place his spiritual care under the supervision of a duly
accredited priest. The self-interests of the Church
and of Medicine in such policies are obvious enough.
What might be less obvious is the interest of the laity
in them: by delegating responsibility for the spiritual
and medical welfare of the people to a class of authori-
tatively accredited specialists, those policies—and
the practices they ensure—relieve individuals from
assuming the burdens of those responsibilities for
themselves. As I see it, our present problems with drug
use and drug abuse are just one of the consequences of
our pervasive ambivalence about personal autonomy
and responsibility.
* * *
I propose a medical reformation analogous to
the Protestant Reformation—specifically, a “protest”
against the systematic mystification of man’s rela-
tionship to his body and his professionalized separa-
tion from it. The immediate aim of the reform would
be to remove the physician as intermediary between
man and his body and to give the layman direct access
to the language and contents of the pharmacopoeia.
It is significant that until recently physicians wrote
prescriptions in Latin and that medical diagnoses
and treatments are still couched in a jargon whose
chief aim is to awe and mystify the laity. If man had
unencumbered access to his own body and the means
of chemically altering it, it would spell the end of
Medicine, at least as we now know it. That is why, with
faith in Medicine so strong, there is little interest in
this kind of medical reform: physicians fear the loss of
their privileges; laymen, the loss of their protections.
exaggerating their dangerousness. It is always neces-
sary to distinguish—and especially so when dealing
with social policy—between description and prescrip-
tion, fact and rhetoric, truth and falsehood.
To command adherence, social policy must be
respected; and to be respected, it must be considered
legitimate. In our society, there are two principal
methods of legitimizing policy—social tradition and
scientific judgment. More than anything else, time is
the supreme ethical arbiter. Whatever a social practice
might be, if people engage in it generation after gen-
eration, then that practice becomes acceptable.
Many opponents of illegal drugs admit that nico-
tine may be more harmful to health than marijuana;
nevertheless, they argue that smoking cigarettes
should be legal but smoking marijuana should not be,
because the former habit is socially accepted while the
latter is not. That is a perfectly reasonable argument.
But let us understand it for what it is—a plea for legiti-
mizing old and accepted practices and illegitimizing
novel and unaccepted ones. It is a justification that
rests on precedence, not on evidence.
The other method of legitimizing policy, increas-
ingly more important in the modern world, is through
the authority of science. In matters of health, a vast
and increasingly elastic category, physicians thus play
important roles as legitimizers and illegitimizers. One
result is that, regardless of the pharmacological effects
of a drug on the person who takes it, if he obtains it
through a physician and uses it under medical supervi-
sion, that use is, ipso facto, legitimate and proper; but if
he obtains it through nonmedical channels and uses it
without medical supervision (and especially if the drug
is illegal and the individual uses it solely for the pur-
pose of altering his mental state), then that use is, ipso
facto, illegitimate and improper. In short, being medi-
cated by a doctor is drug use, while self-medication
(especially with certain classes of drugs) is drug abuse.
That too is a perfectly reasonable arrangement.
But let us understand it for what it is—a plea for legiti-
mizing what doctors do, because they do it with good,
therapeutic intent; and for illegitimizing what laymen
do, because they do it with bad, self-abusive (mas-
turbatory) intent. It is a justification that rests on the
principles of professionalism, not of pharmacology.

640 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
The same principle applies to sexual conduct. Sex-
ual intercourse, especially between husband and wife,
is surely a right. But it is a right that must be exercised
at home or at some other appropriate location; it is
not a right in a public park or on a downtown street.
It makes sense that what is a right in one place may
become, by virtue of its disruptive or disturbing effect
on others, an offense somewhere else.
The right to self-medication should be hedged in
by similar limits. Public intoxication, not only with
alcohol but with any drug, should be an offense pun-
ishable by the criminal law. Furthermore, acts that
may injure others—such as driving a car—should,
when carried out in a drug-intoxicated state, be pun-
ished especially strictly and severely. The habitual
use of certain drugs, such as alcohol and opiates, may
also harm others indirectly by rendering the subject
unmotivated for working and thus unemployed. In a
society that supports the unemployed, such a person
would, as a consequence of his own conduct, place
a burden on the shoulders of his working neighbors.
How society might best guard itself against that sort
of hazard I cannot discuss here. However, it is obvious
that prohibiting the use of habit-forming drugs offers
no protection against that risk, but only adds to the tax
burdens laid upon the productive members of society.
The right to self-medication must thus entail
unqualified responsibility for the effects of one’s drug-
intoxicated behavior on others. For unless we are will-
ing to hold ourselves responsible for our own behavior
and hold others responsible for theirs, the liberty to
ingest or inject drugs degenerates into a license to
injure others. But here is the catch: we are exceedingly
reluctant to hold people responsible for their misbe-
havior. That is why we prefer diminishing rights to
increasing responsibilities. The former requires only
the passing of laws, which can then be more or less
freely violated or circumvented; whereas the latter
requires prosecuting and punishing offenders, which
can be accomplished only by just laws justly enforced.
The upshot is that we increasingly substitute tender-
hearted tyranny for tough-spirited liberty.
Such then would be the situation of adults were we
to regard the freedom to take drugs as a fundamental
right similar to the freedom to read and to worship.
Our present policies with respect to drug use and
drug abuse thus constitute a covert plea for legitimiz-
ing certain privileges on the part of physicians and
illegitimizing certain practices on the part of everyone
else. The upshot is that we act as if we believed that
only doctors should be allowed to dispense narcotics,
just as we used to believe that only priests should be
allowed to dispense holy water.
Finally, since luckily we still do not live in
the utopian perfection of one world, our techni-
cal approach to the drug problem has led, and will
un doubtedly continue to lead, to some curious
attempts to combat it.
* * *
I believe that just as we regard freedom of speech
and religion as fundamental rights, so we should also
regard freedom of self-medication as a fundamental
right; and that instead of mendaciously opposing or
mindlessly promoting illicit drugs, we should, para-
phrasing Voltaire, make this maxim our rule: I disap-
prove of what you take, but I will defend to the death
your right to take it!
To be sure, like most rights, the right of self-
medication should apply only to adults; and it should
not be an unqualified right. Since these are important
qualifications, it is necessary to specify their precise
range.
John Stuart Mill said (approximately) that a per-
son’s right to swing his arm ends where his neighbor’s
nose begins. Similarly, the limiting condition with
respect to self-medication should be the inflicting of
actual (as against symbolic) harm on others.
Our present practices with respect to alcohol
embody and reflect this individualistic ethic. We
have the right to buy, possess, and consume alcoholic
beverages. Regardless of how offensive drunkenness
might be to a person, he cannot interfere with another
person’s right to become inebriated so long as that per-
son drinks in the privacy of his own home or at some
other appropriate location and so long as he conducts
himself in an otherwise law-abiding manner. In short,
we have a right to be intoxicated—in private. Public
intoxication is considered to be an offense against oth-
ers and is therefore a violation of the criminal law.

CHAPTER 17: DRUGS, GUnS, AnD PERSonAL LIbERTy Á 641
drinking alcohol, or smoking marijuana, or ingesting
amphetamines?
The Constitution and the Bill of Rights are silent
on the subject of drugs. Their silence would seem to
imply that the adult citizen has, or ought to have, the
right to medicate his own body as he sees fit. Were that
not the case, why should there have been a need for
a constitutional amendment to outlaw drinking? But
if ingesting alcohol was, and is now again, a constitu-
tional right, is ingesting opium, or heroin, or barbi-
turates, or anything else not also such a right? If it is,
then the Harrison Narcotic Act is not only a bad law
but unconstitutional as well, because it prescribes in a
legislative act what ought to be promulgated in a con-
stitutional amendment.
The nagging questions remain. As American
citizens, do we and should we have the right to take
narcotics or other drugs? Further, if we take drugs
and conduct ourselves as responsible and law-abiding
citizens, do we and should we have a right to remain
unmolested by the government? Lastly, if we take
drugs and break the law, do we and should we have a
right to be treated as persons accused of a crime rather
than as patients accused of being mentally ill?
These are fundamental questions that are conspic-
uous by their absence from all contemporary discus-
sions of problems of drug addiction and drug abuse.
In this area as in so many others, we have allowed a
moral problem to be disguised as a medical question
and have then engaged in shadowboxing with meta-
phorical diseases and medical attempts, ranging from
the absurd to the appalling, to combat them.
The result is that instead of debating the use of
drugs in moral and political terms, we define our task as
the ostensibly narrow technical problem of protecting
people from poisoning themselves with substances for
whose use they cannot possibly assume responsibility.
That, I think, best explains the frightening national
consensus against personal responsibility for taking
drugs and for one’s conduct while under their influ-
ence. In 1965, for example, when President Johnson
sought a bill imposing tight federal controls over “pep
pills” and “goof balls,” the bill cleared the House by a
unanimous vote, 402 to 0.
* * *
What would be the situation of children? Since many
people who are now said to be drug addicts or drug
abusers are minors, it is especially important that we
think clearly about this aspect of the problem.
I do not believe, and I do not advocate, that chil-
dren should have a right to ingest, inject, or otherwise
use any drug or substance they want. Children do not
have the right to drive, drink, vote, marry, or make
binding contracts. They acquire those rights at vari-
ous ages, coming into their full possession at maturity,
usually between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one.
The right to self-medication should similarly be with-
held until maturity.
* * *
In short, I suggest that “dangerous” drugs be
treated more or less as alcohol and tobacco are treated
now. (That does not mean that I believe the state
should make their use a source of tax revenue.) Nei-
ther the use of narcotics nor their possession should
be prohibited, but only their sale to minors. Of course,
that would result in the ready availability of all kinds
of drugs among minors—though perhaps their avail-
ability would be no greater than it is now but only
more visible and hence more easily subject to proper
controls. That arrangement would place responsibility
for the use of all drugs by children where it belongs:
on parents and their children. That is where the major
responsibility rests for the use of alcohol and tobacco.
It is a tragic symptom of our refusal to take personal
liberty and responsibility seriously that there appears
to be no public desire to assume a similar stance toward
other dangerous drugs.
* * *
Sooner or later, we shall have to confront the basic
moral dilemma underlying our drug problem: does a
person have the right to take a drug—any drug—not
because he needs it to cure an illness, but because he
wants to take it?
The Declaration of Independence speaks of our
inalienable right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of
happiness.” How are we to interpret that phrase? By
asserting that we ought to be free to pursue happi-
ness by playing golf or watching television but not by

642 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
The other way out of it lies through confronta-
tion: by recognizing the problem for what it is, we can
choose to maximize the sphere of action of the state
at the expense of the individual or of the individual at
the expense of the state. In other words, we can com-
mit ourselves to the view that the state, the represen-
tative of many, is more important than the individual
and that it therefore has the right, indeed the duty, to
regulate the life of the individual in the best interests
of the group. Or we can commit ourselves to the view
that individual dignity and liberty are the supreme
values of life and that the foremost duty of the state is
to protect and promote those values.
In short, we must choose between the ethic of
collectivism and the ethic of individualism and pay
the price of either—or of both.
NOTES
1. Quoted in L. C. Kolb, Noyes’ Modern Clinical Psychiatry, 7th
ed. (Philadelphia: Saunders, 1968), p. 516.
2. See my The Manufacture of Madness: A Comparative Study of the
Inquisition and the Mental Health Movement (New York: Harper &
Row, 1970), pp. 180–206.
3. A. Montagu, “The Long Search for Euphoria,” Reflections 1
(May–June 1966): 65.
4. A. B. Light et al., Opium Addiction (Chicago: American Medi-
cal Association, 1929), p. 115; quoted in Alfred R. Lindesmith,
Addiction and Opiates (Chicago: Aldine, 1968), p. 40.
5. The New York Times, April 1, 1967.
6. Editorial, “About Narcotics,” Syracuse Herald- Journal,
March 6, 1969.
7. The New York Times, June 29, 1970.
8. See my Ideology and Insanity: Essays on the Psychiatric Dehu-
manization of Man (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Anchor
Press, 1970).
9. J. S. Mill, On Liberty (Chicago: Regnery, 1955), p. 13.
Finally, those repeated unanimous votes on far-
reaching measures to combat drug abuse are bitter
reminders that when the chips are really down, that
is, when democratic lawmakers can preserve their
intellectual and moral integrity only by going against
certain popular myths, they prove to be either mind-
less or spineless. They prefer running with the herd to
courting unpopularity and risking reelection.
After all is said and done—after millions of words
are written, thousands of laws are enacted, and
countless numbers of people are “treated” for “drug
abuse”—it all comes down to whether we accept or
reject the ethical principle John Stuart Mill so clearly
enunciated in 1859:
The only purpose for which power can be rightfully
exercised over any member of a civilized community,
against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own
good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient war-
rant. He cannot rightfully be compelled to do or fore-
bear because it will make him happier, because, in the
opinions of others, to do so would be wise, or even
right. . . . In the part [of his conduct] which merely con-
cerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute.
Over himself, over his own body and mind, the indi-
vidual is sovereign.9
The basic issue underlying the problem of
addiction—and many other problems, such as sexual
activity between consenting adults, pornography,
contraception, gambling, and suicide—is simple but
vexing: in a conflict between the individual and the
state, where should the former’s autonomy end and
the latter’s right to intervene begin?
One way out of the dilemma lies through conceal-
ment: by disguising the moral and political question
as a medical and therapeutic problem, we can, to pro-
tect the physical and mental health of patients, exalt
the state, oppress the individual, and claim benefits
for both.

CHAPTER 17: DRUGS, GUnS, AnD PERSonAL LIbERTy Á 643
Against the Legalization of Drugs
James Q. Wilson
few new recruits. In 1976 the average age of heroin
users who appeared in hospital emergency rooms was
about twenty-seven; ten years later it was thirty-two.
More than two-thirds of all heroin users appearing in
emergency rooms are now over the age of thirty. Back
in the early 1970’s, when heroin got onto the national
political agenda, the typical heroin addict was much
younger, often a teenager. Household surveys show
the same thing—the rate of opiate use (which includes
heroin) has been flat for the better part of two decades.
More fine-grained studies of inner-city neighborhoods
confirm this. John Boyle and Ann Brunswick found
that the percentage of young blacks in Harlem who
used heroin fell from 8 percent in 1970–71 to about
3 percent in 1975–76.
Why did heroin lose its appeal for young people?
When the young blacks in Harlem were asked why
they stopped, more than half mentioned “trouble
with the law” or “high cost” (and high cost is, of
course, directly the result of law enforcement). Two-
thirds said that heroin hurt their health; nearly all
said they had had a bad experience with it. We need
not rely, however, simply on what they said. In New
York City in 1973–75, the street price of heroin rose
dramatically and its purity sharply declined, probably
as a result of the heroin shortage caused by the suc-
cess of the Turkish government in reducing the sup-
ply of opium base and of the French government in
closing down heroin-processing laboratories located
in and around Marseilles. These were short-lived gains
for, just as Friedman predicted, alternative sources
of supply—mostly in Mexico—quickly emerged. But
the three-year heroin shortage interrupted the easy
recruitment of new users.
Health and related problems were no doubt part of
the reason for the reduced flow of recruits. Over the
preceding years, Harlem youth had watched as more
and more heroin users died of overdoses, were poi-
soned by adulterated doses, or acquired hepatitis from
dirty needles. The word got around: heroin can kill
you. By 1974 new hepatitis cases and drug-overdose
In 1972, the President appointed me chairman of the
National Advisory Council for Drug Abuse Preven-
tion. Created by Congress, the Council was charged
with providing guidance on how best to coordinate
the national war on drugs. (Yes, we called it a war
then, too.) In those days, the drug we were chiefly con-
cerned with was heroin. When I took office, heroin use
had been increasing dramatically. Everybody was wor-
ried that this increase would continue. Such phrases as
“heroin epidemic” were commonplace.
That same year, the eminent economist Milton
Friedman published an essay in Newsweek in which
he called for legalizing heroin. His argument was on
two grounds: as a matter of ethics, the government has
no right to tell people not to use heroin (or to drink or
to commit suicide); as a matter of economics, the pro-
hibition of drug use imposes costs on society that far
exceed the benefits. Others, such as the psychoanalyst
Thomas Szasz, made the same argument.
We did not take Friedman’s advice. (Government
commissions rarely do.) I do not recall that we even
discussed legalizing heroin, though we did discuss (but
did not take action on) legalizing a drug, cocaine, that
many people then argued was benign. Our marching
orders were to figure out how to win the war on her-
oin, not to run up the white flag of surrender.
That was 1972. Today, we have the same number
of heroin addicts that we had then—half a million,
give or take a few thousand. Having that many her-
oin addicts is no trivial matter; these people deserve
our attention. But not having had an increase in that
number for over fifteen years is also something that
deserves our attention. What happened to the “heroin
epidemic” that many people once thought would
overwhelm us?
The facts are clear: a more or less stable pool of
heroin addicts has been getting older, with relatively
James Q. Wilson, “Against the Legalization of Drugs.” Reprinted
from Commentary, February 1990, by permission; copyright ©
2018 by Commentary, Inc.

644 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
have been readily available at the neighborhood drug-
store, probably at the same counter where the heroin
was sold. No need to travel to big cities or unfamiliar
neighborhoods—heroin could have been purchased
anywhere, perhaps by mail order.
There would no longer have been any financial or
medical reason to avoid heroin use. Anybody could
have afforded it. We might have tried to prevent chil-
dren from buying it, but as we have learned from our
efforts to prevent minors from buying alcohol and
tobacco, young people have a way of penetrating mar-
kets theoretically reserved for adults. Returning Viet-
nam veterans would have discovered that Omaha and
Raleigh had been converted into the pharmaceutical
equivalent of Saigon.
Under these circumstances, can we doubt for a
moment that heroin use would have grown expo-
nentially? Or that a vastly larger supply of new users
would have been recruited? Professor Friedman is a
Nobel Prize-winning economist whose understanding
of market forces is profound. What did he think would
happen to consumption under his legalized regime?
Here are his words: “Legalizing drugs might increase
the number of addicts, but it is not clear that it would.
Forbidden fruit is attractive, particularly to the young.”
Really? I suppose that we should expect no increase
in Porsche sales if we cut the price by 95 percent, no
increase in whiskey sales if we cut the price by a com-
parable amount—because young people only want
fast cars and strong liquor when they are “forbidden.”
Perhaps Friedman’s uncharacteristic lapse from the
obvious implications of price theory can be explained
by a misunderstanding of how drug users are recruited.
In his 1972 essay he said that “drug addicts are deliber-
ately made by pushers, who give likely prospects their
first few doses free.” If drugs were legal it would not
pay anybody to produce addicts, because everybody
would buy from the cheapest source. But as every drug
expert knows, pushers do not produce addicts. Friends
or acquaintances do. In fact, pushers are usually reluc-
tant to deal with non-users because a non-user could
be an undercover cop. Drug use spreads in the same
way any fad or fashion spreads: somebody who is
already a user urges his friends to try, or simply shows
already-eager friends how to do it.
deaths had dropped to a fraction of what they had
been in 1970.
Alas, treatment did not seem to explain much of
the cessation in drug use. Treatment programs can
and do help heroin addicts, but treatment did not
explain the drop in the number of new users (who
by definition had never been in treatment) nor even
much of the reduction in the number of experi-
enced users.
No one knows how much of the decline to attribute
to personal observation as opposed to high prices or
reduced supply. But other evidence suggests strongly
that price and supply played a large role. In 1972 the
National Advisory Council was especially worried by
the prospect that U.S. servicemen returning to this
country from Vietnam would bring their heroin habits
with them. Fortunately, a brilliant study by Lee Robins of
Washington University in St. Louis put that fear to rest.
She measured drug use of Vietnam veterans shortly after
they had returned home. Though many had used her-
oin regularly while in Southeast Asia, most gave up the
habit when back in the United States. The reason: here,
heroin was less available and sanctions on its use were
more pronounced. Of course, if a veteran had been will-
ing to pay enough—which might have meant travel-
ing to another city and would certainly have meant
making an illegal contact with a disreputable dealer in
a threatening neighborhood in order to acquire a (possi-
bly) dangerous dose—he could have sustained his drug
habit. Most veterans were unwilling to pay this price,
and so their drug use declined or disappeared.
RELIVING THE PAST
Suppose we had taken Friedman’s advice in 1972. What
would have happened? We cannot be entirely certain,
but at a minimum we would have placed the young
heroin addicts (and, above all, the prospective addicts)
in a very different position from the one in which they
actually found themselves. Heroin would have been
legal. Its price would have been reduced by 95 percent
(minus whatever we chose to recover in taxes.) Now
that it could be sold by the same people who make aspi-
rin, its quality would have been assured—no poisons,
no adulterants. Sterile hypodermic needles would

CHAPTER 17: DRUGS, GUnS, AnD PERSonAL LIbERTy Á 645
Compared to the United States, the numbers were
small. In 1960 there were 68 heroin addicts known
to the British government; by 1968 there were 2,000
in treatment and many more who refused treatment.
(They would refuse in part because they did not want
to get methadone at a clinic if they could get heroin on
the street.) Richard Hartnoll estimates that the actual
number of addicts in England is five times the num-
ber officially registered. At a minimum, the number of
British addicts increased by thirtyfold in ten years; the
actual increase may have been much larger.
In the early 1980’s the numbers began to rise again,
and this time nobody doubted that a real epidemic was
at hand. The increase was estimated to be 40 percent a
year. By 1982 there were thought to be 20,000 heroin
users in London alone. Geoffrey Pearson reports that
many cities—Glasgow, Liverpool, Manchester, and
Sheffield among them—were now experiencing a drug
problem that once had been largely confined to Lon-
don. The problem, again, was supply. The country was
being flooded with cheap, high-quality heroin, first
from Iran and then from Southeast Asia.
The United States began the 1960’s with a much
larger number of heroin addicts and probably a bigger
at-risk population than was the case in Great Britain.
Even though it would be foolhardy to suppose that the
British system, if installed here, would have worked the
same way or with the same results, it would be equally
foolhardy to suppose that a combination of heroin
available from leaky clinics and from street dealers
who faced only minimal law-enforcement risks would
not have produced a much greater increase in heroin
use than we actually experienced. My guess is that if
we had allowed either doctors or clinics to prescribe
heroin, we would have had far worse results than were
produced in Britain, if for no other reason than the
vastly larger number of addicts with which we began.
We would have had to find some way to police thou-
sands (not scores) of physicians and hundreds (not
dozens) of clinics. If the British civil service found it
difficult to keep heroin in the hands of addicts and out
of the hands of recruits when it was dealing with a few
hundred people, how well would the American civil
service have accomplished the same tasks when deal-
ing with tens of thousands of people?
But we need not rely on speculation, however
plausible, that lowered prices and more abundant sup-
plies would have increased heroin usage. Great Britain
once followed such a policy and with almost exactly
those results. Until the mid-1960’s, British physicians
were allowed to prescribe heroin to certain classes of
addicts. (Possessing these drugs without a doctor’s pre-
scription remained a criminal offense.) For many years
this policy worked well enough because the addict
patients were typically middle-class people who had
become dependent on opiate painkillers while under-
going hospital treatment. There was no drug culture.
The British system worked for many years, not because
it prevented drug abuse, but because there was no
problem of drug abuse that would test the system.
All that changed in the 1960’s. A few unscrupu-
lous doctors began passing out heroin in wholesale
amounts. One doctor prescribed almost 600,000 her-
oin tablets—that is, over thirteen pounds—in just one
year. A youthful drug culture emerged with a demand
for drugs far different from that of the older addicts.
As a result, the British government required doctors to
refer users to government-run clinics to receive their
heroin.
But the shift to clinics did not curtail the growth
in heroin use. Throughout the 1960’s the number of
addicts increased—the late John Kaplan of Stanford
estimated by fivefold—in part as a result of the diver-
sion of heroin from clinic patients to new users on the
streets. An addict would bargain with the clinic doc-
tor over how big a dose he would receive. The patient
wanted as much as he could get, the doctor wanted to
give as little as was needed. The patient had an advan-
tage in this conflict because the doctor could not be
certain how much was really needed. Many patients
would use some of their “maintenance” dose and sell
the remaining part to friends, thereby recruiting new
addicts. As the clinics learned of this, they began to
shift their treatment away from heroin and toward
methadone, an addictive drug that, when taken
orally, does not produce a “high” but will block the
withdrawal pains associated with heroin abstinence.
Whether what happened in England in the 1960’s
was a mini-epidemic or an epidemic depends on
whether one looks at numbers or at rates of change.

646 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
mood disorders. Besharov estimates that about 30,000
to 50,000 such babies are born every year, about
7,000 in New York City alone. There may be ways to
treat such infants, but from everything we now know
the treatment will be long, difficult, and expensive.
Worse, the mothers who are most likely to produce
crack babies are precisely the ones who, because of
poverty or temperament, are least able and willing
to obtain such treatment. In fact, anecdotal evidence
suggests that crack mothers are likely to abuse their
infants.
The notion that abusing drugs such as cocaine is a
“victimless crime” is not only absurd but dangerous.
Even ignoring the fetal drug syndrome, crack-depen-
dent people are, like heroin addicts, individuals who
regularly victimize their children by neglect, their
spouses by improvidence, their employers by lethargy,
and their co-workers by carelessness. Society is not
and could never be a collection of autonomous indi-
viduals. We all have a stake in ensuring that each of us
displays a minimal level of dignity, responsibility, and
empathy. We cannot, of course, coerce people into
goodness, but we can and should insist that some stan-
dards must be met if society itself—on which the very
existence of the human personality depends—is to
persist. Drawing the line that defines those standards
is difficult and contentious, but if crack and heroin use
do not fall below it, what does?
The advocates of legalization will respond by sug-
gesting that my picture is overdrawn. Ethan Nadel-
mann of Princeton argues that the risk of legalization
is less than most people suppose. Over 20 million
Americans between the ages of eighteen and twenty-
five have tried cocaine (according to a government
survey), but only a quarter million use it daily. From
this Nadelmann concludes that at most 3 percent of all
young people who try cocaine develop a problem with
it. The implication is clear: make the drug legal and we
only have to worry about 3 percent of our youth.
The implication rests on a logical fallacy and a fac-
tual error. The fallacy is this: the percentage of occa-
sional cocaine users who become binge users when the
drug is illegal (and thus expensive and hard to find)
tells us nothing about the percentage who will become
dependent when the drug is legal (and thus cheap and
BACK TO THE FUTURE
Now cocaine, especially in its potent form, crack, is
the focus of attention. Now as in 1972 the government
is trying to reduce its use. Now as then some people are
advocating legalization. Is there any more reason to
yield to those arguments today than there was almost
two decades ago?
I think not. If we had yielded in 1972 we almost
certainly would have had today a permanent popula-
tion of several million, not several hundred thousand,
heroin addicts. If we yield now we will have a far more
serious problem with cocaine.
Crack is worse than heroin by almost any mea-
sure. Heroin produces a pleasant drowsiness and, if
hygienically administered, has only the physical side
effects of constipation and sexual impotence. Regular
heroin use incapacitates many users, especially poor
ones, for any productive work or social responsibil-
ity. They will sit nodding on a street corner, helpless
but at least harmless. By contrast, regular cocaine use
leaves the user neither helpless nor harmless. When
smoked (as with crack) or injected, cocaine produces
instant, intense, and short-lived euphoria. The expe-
rience generates a powerful desire to repeat it. If the
drug is readily available, repeat use will occur. Those
people who progress to “bingeing” on cocaine become
devoted to the drug and its effects to the exclusion of
almost all other considerations—job, family, children,
sleep, food, even sex. Dr. Frank Gawin at Yale and Dr.
Everett Ellinwood at Duke report that a substantial
percentage of all high-dose, binge users become unin-
hibited, impulsive, hypersexual, compulsive, irritable,
and hyperactive. Their moods vacillate dramatically,
leading at times to violence and homicide.
Women are much more likely to use crack than
heroin, and if they are pregnant, the effects on their
babies are tragic. Douglas Besharov, who has been fol-
lowing the effects of drugs on infants for twenty years,
writes that nothing he learned about heroin prepared
him for the devastation of cocaine. Cocaine harms the
fetus and can lead to physical deformities or neuro-
logical damage. Some crack babies have for all practi-
cal purposes suffered a disabling stroke while still in
the womb. The long-term consequences of this brain
damage are lowered cognitive ability and the onset of

CHAPTER 17: DRUGS, GUnS, AnD PERSonAL LIbERTy Á 647
What the nation accomplished then was what most
efforts to save people from themselves accomplish:
the problem was contained and the number of victims
minimized, all at a considerable cost in law enforce-
ment and increased crime. Was the cost worth it?
I think so, but others may disagree. What are the lives
of would-be addicts worth? I recall some people saying
to me then, “Let them kill themselves.” I was appalled.
Happily, such views did not prevail.
Have we lost today? Not at all. High-rate cocaine
use is not commonplace. The National Institute of
Drug Abuse (NIDA) reports that less than 5 percent
of high-school seniors used cocaine within the last
thirty days. Of course this survey misses young people
who have dropped out of school and miscounts those
who lie on the questionnaire, but even if we inflate
the NIDA estimate by some plausible percentage, it
is still not much above 5 percent. Medical examiners
reported in 1987 that about 1,500 died from cocaine
use; hospital emergency rooms reported about 30,000
admissions related to cocaine abuse.
These are not small numbers, but neither are they
evidence of a nationwide plague that threatens to
engulf us all. Moreover, cities vary greatly in the pro-
portion of people who are involved with cocaine. To
get city-level data we need to turn to drug tests carried
out on arrested persons, who obviously are more likely
to be drug users than the average citizen. The National
Institute of Justice, through its Drug Use Forecasting
(DUF) project, collects urinalysis data on arrestees
in 22 cities. As we have already seen, opiate (chiefly
heroin) use has been flat or declining in most of these
cities over the last decade. Cocaine use has gone up
sharply, but with great variation among cities. New
York, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C., all report
that two-thirds or more of their arrestees tested posi-
tive for cocaine, but in Portland, San Antonio, and
Indianapolis the percentage was one-third or less.
In some neighborhoods, of course, matters have
reached crisis proportions. Gangs control the streets,
shootings terrorize residents, and drug-dealing occurs
in plain view. The police seem barely able to contain
matters. But in these neighborhoods—unlike at Palo
Alto cocktail parties—the people are not calling for
legalization, they are calling for help. And often not
abundant). Drs. Gawin and Ellinwood report, in com-
mon with several other researchers, that controlled
or occasional use of cocaine changes to compulsive
and frequent use “when access to the drug increases”
or when the user switches from snorting to smoking.
More cocaine more potently administered alters, per-
haps sharply, the proportion of “controlled” users
who become heavy users.
The factual error is this: the federal survey Nadel-
mann quotes was done in 1985, before crack had
become common. Thus the probability of becoming
dependent on cocaine was derived from the responses
of users who snorted the drug. The speed and potency
of cocaine’s action increases dramatically when it is
smoked. We do not yet know how greatly the advent
of crack increases the risk of dependency, but all the
clinical evidence suggests that the increase is likely to
be large.
It is possible that some people will not become
heavy users even when the drug is readily available
in its most potent form. So far there are no scientific
grounds for predicting who will and who will not
become dependent. Neither socioeconomic back-
ground nor personality traits differentiate between
casual and intensive users. Thus, the only way to settle
the question of who is correct about the effect of easy
availability on drug use, Nadelmann or Gawin and
Ellinwood, is to try it and see. But that social experi-
ment is so risky as to be no experiment at all, for if
cocaine is legalized and if the rate of its abusive use
increases dramatically, there is no way to put the genie
back in the bottle, and it is not a kindly genie.
HAVE WE LOST?
Many people who agree that there are risks in legaliz-
ing cocaine or heroin still favor it because, they think,
we have lost the war on drugs. “Nothing we have
done has worked” and the current federal policy is
just “more of the same.” Whatever the costs of greater
drug use, surely they would be less than the costs of
our present, failed efforts.
That is exactly what I was told in 1972—and her-
oin is not quite as bad a drug as cocaine. We did not
surrender and we did not lose. We did not win, either.

648 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
To obtain this fiscal dividend, however, legal-
ization’s supporters must first solve an economic
dilemma. If they want to raise a lot of money to pay
for welfare and treatment, the tax rate on the drugs
will have to be quite high. Even if they themselves
do not want a high rate, the politicians’ love of “sin
taxes” would probably guarantee that it would be
high anyway. But the higher the tax, the higher the
price of the drug, and the higher the price the greater
the likelihood that addicts will turn to crime to find
the money for it and that criminal organizations will
be formed to sell tax-free drugs at below-market rates.
If we managed to keep taxes (and thus prices) low, we
would get that much less money to pay for welfare and
treatment and more people could afford to become
addicts. There may be an optimal tax rate for drugs
that maximizes revenue while minimizing crime,
bootlegging, and the recruitment of new addicts, but
our experience with alcohol does not suggest that we
know how to find it.
THE BENEFITS OF ILLEGALITY
The advocates of legalization find nothing to be said
in favor of the current system except, possibly, that
it keeps the number of addicts smaller than it would
otherwise be. In fact, the benefits are more substantial
than that.
First, treatment. All the talk about providing “treat-
ment on demand” implies that there is a demand for
treatment. That is not quite right. There are some drug-
dependent people who genuinely want treatment and
will remain in it if offered; they should receive it. But
there are far more who want only short-term help after a
bad crash; once stabilized and bathed, they are back on
the street again, hustling. And even many of the addicts
who enroll in a program honestly wanting help drop
out after a short while when they discover that help
takes time and commitment. Drug-dependent people
have very short time horizons and a weak capacity for
commitment. These two groups—those looking for
a quick fix and those unable to stick with a long-term
fix—are not easily helped. Even if we increase the num-
ber of treatment slots—as we should—we would have
to do something to make treatment more effective.
much help has come. Many cities are willing to do
almost anything about the drug problem except spend
more money on it. The federal government cannot
change that; only local voters and politicians can. It is
not clear that they will.
It took about ten years to contain heroin. We have
had experience with crack for only about three or
four years. Each year we spend perhaps $11 billion on
law enforcement (and some of that goes to deal with
marijuana) and perhaps $2 billion on treatment. Large
sums, but not sums that should lead anyone to say,
“We just can’t afford this any more.”
The illegality of drugs increases crime, partly
because some users turn to crime to pay for their hab-
its, partly because some users are stimulated by cer-
tain drugs (such as crack or PCP) to act more violently
or ruthlessly than they otherwise would, and partly
because criminal organizations seeking to control
drug supplies use force to manage their markets. These
also are serious costs, but no one knows how much
they would be reduced if drugs were legalized. Addicts
would no longer steal to pay black-market prices for
drugs, a real gain. But some, perhaps a great deal, of
that gain would be offset by the great increase in the
number of addicts. These people, nodding on heroin
or living in the delusion-ridden high of cocaine, would
hardly be ideal employees. Many would steal simply to
support themselves, since snatch-and-grab, opportu-
nistic crime can be manged [sic] even by people unable
to hold a regular job or plan an elaborate crime. Those
British addicts who get their supplies from government
clinics are not models of law-abiding decency. Most
are in crime, and though their per-capita rate of crimi-
nality may be lower thanks to the cheapness of their
drugs, the total volume of crime they produce may be
quite large. Of course, society could decide to support
all unemployable addicts on welfare, but that would
mean that gains from lowered rates of crime would
have to be offset by large increases in welfare budgets.
Proponents of legalization claim that the costs of
having more addicts around would be largely if not
entirely offset by having more money available with
which to treat and care for them. The money would
come from taxes levied on the sale of heroin and
cocaine.

CHAPTER 17: DRUGS, GUnS, AnD PERSonAL LIbERTy Á 649
fundamental moral significance attaches to either. But
if we believe—as I do—that dependency on certain
mind-altering drugs is a moral issue and that their ille-
gality rests in part on their immorality, then legalizing
them undercuts, if it does not eliminate altogether,
the moral message.
That message is at the root of the distinction we
now make between nicotine and cocaine. Both are
highly addictive; both have harmful physical effects.
But we treat the two drugs differently, not simply
because nicotine is so widely used as to be beyond the
reach of effective prohibition, but because its use does
not destroy the user’s essential humanity. Tobacco
shortens one’s life, cocaine debases it. Nicotine alters
one’s habits, cocaine alters one’s soul. The heavy use
of crack, unlike the heavy use of tobacco, corrodes
those natural sentiments of sympathy and duty that
constitute our human nature and make possible our
social life. To say, as does Nadelmann, that distin-
guishing morally between tobacco and cocaine is “lit-
tle more than a transient prejudice” is close to saying
that morality itself is but a prejudice.
THE ALCOHOL PROBLEM
Now we have arrived where many arguments about
legalizing drugs begin: is there any reason to treat
heroin and cocaine differently from the way we treat
alcohol?
There is no easy answer to that question because,
as with so many human problems, one cannot decide
simply on the basis either of moral principles or of
individual consequences; one has to temper any pol-
icy by a common-sense judgment of what is possible.
Alcohol, like heroin, cocaine, PCP, and marijuana,
is a drug—that is, a mood-altering substance—and
consumed to excess it certainly has harmful conse-
quences: auto accidents, barroom fights, bedroom
shootings. It is also, for some people, addictive. We
cannot confidently compare the addictive powers of
these drugs, but the best evidence suggests that crack
and heroin are much more addictive than alcohol.
Many people, Nadelmann included, argue that
since the health and financial costs of alcohol abuse
are so much higher than those of cocaine or heroin
One thing that can often make it more effective
is compulsion. Douglas Anglin of UCLA, in common
with many other researchers, has found that the lon-
ger one stays in a treatment program, the better the
chances of a reduction in drug dependency. But he,
again like most other researchers, has found that drop-
out rates are high. He has also found, however, that
patients who enter treatment under legal compulsion
stay in the program longer than those not subject to
such pressure. His research on the California civil-
commitment program, for example, found that heroin
users involved with its required drug-testing program
had over the long term a lower rate of heroin use than
similar addicts who were free of such constraints. If
for many addicts compulsion is a useful component
of treatment, it is not clear how compulsion could be
achieved in a society in which purchasing, possessing,
and using the drug were legal. It could be managed,
I suppose, but I would not want to have to answer the
challenge from the American Civil Liberties Union
that it is wrong to compel a person to undergo treat-
ment for consuming a legal commodity.
Next, education. We are now investing substan-
tially in drug-education programs in the schools.
Though we do not yet know for certain what will
work, there are some promising leads. But I wonder
how credible such programs would be if they were
aimed at dissuading children from doing something
perfectly legal. We could, of course, treat drug educa-
tion like smoking education: inhaling crack and inhal-
ing tobacco are both legal, but you should not do it
because it is bad for you. That tobacco is bad for you
is easily shown; the Surgeon General has seen to that.
But what do we say about crack? It is pleasurable, but
devoting yourself to so much pleasure is not a good
idea (though perfectly legal)? Unlike tobacco, cocaine
will not give you cancer or emphysema, but it will lead
you to neglect your duties to family, job, and neigh-
borhood? Everybody is doing cocaine, but you should
not?
Again, it might be possible under a legalized
regime to have effective drug-prevention programs,
but their effectiveness would depend heavily, I think,
on first having decided that cocaine use, like tobacco
use, is purely a matter of practical consequences; no

650 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
for changing it—living in drug-free therapeutic com-
munities, becoming faithful members of Alcoholics
Anonymous or Narcotics Anonymous—require great
personal commitment, a quality that is, alas, in short
supply among the very persons—young people, dis-
advantaged people—who are often most at risk for
addiction.
Suppose that today we had, not 15 million alcohol
abusers, but half a million. Suppose that we already
knew what we have learned from our long experience
with the widespread use of alcohol. Would we make
whiskey legal? I do not know, but I suspect there would
be a lively debate. The Surgeon General would remind
us of the risks alcohol poses to pregnant women.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administra-
tion would point to the likelihood of more highway
fatalities caused by drunk drivers. The Food and Drug
Administration might find that there is a nontrivial
increase in cancer associated with alcohol consump-
tion. At the same time the police would report great
difficulty in keeping illegal whiskey out of our cities,
officers being corrupted by bootleggers, and alcohol
addicts often resorting to crime to feed their habit. Lib-
ertarians, for their part, would argue that every citizen
has a right to drink anything he wishes and that drink-
ing is, in any event, a “victimless crime.”
However the debate might turn out, the central
fact would be that the problem was still, at that point,
a small one. The government cannot legislate away
the addictive tendencies in all of us, nor can it remove
completely even the most dangerous addictive sub-
stances. But it can cope with harms when the harms
are still manageable.
SCIENCE AND ADDICTION
One advantage of containing a problem while it is still
containable is that it buys time for science to learn
more about it and perhaps to discover a cure. Almost
unnoticed in the current debate over legalizing drugs
is that basic science has made rapid strides in identify-
ing the underlying neurological processes involved in
some forms of addiction. Stimulants such as cocaine
and amphetamines alter the way certain brain cells
communicate with one another. That alteration is
abuse, it is hypocritical folly to devote our efforts to
preventing cocaine or drug use. But as Mark Kleiman
of Harvard has pointed out, this comparison is quite
misleading. What Nadelmann is doing is showing that
a legalized drug (alcohol) produces greater social harm
than illegal ones (cocaine and heroin). But of course.
Suppose that in the 1920’s we had made heroin and
cocaine legal and alcohol illegal. Can anyone doubt
that Nadelmann would now be writing that it is folly
to continue our ban on alcohol because cocaine and
heroin are so much more harmful?
And let there be no doubt about it—widespread
heroin and cocaine use are associated with all manner
of ills. Thomas Bewley found that the mortality rate of
British heroin addicts in 1968 was 28 times as high as
the death rate of the same age group of non-addicts,
even though in England at the time an addict could
obtain free or low-cost heroin and clean needles from
British clinics. Perform the following mental experi-
ment: suppose we legalized heroin and cocaine in this
country. In what proportion of auto fatalities would
the state police report that the driver was nodding off
on heroin or recklessly driving on a coke high? In what
proportion of spouse-assault and child-abuse cases
would the local police report that crack was involved?
In what proportion of industrial accidents would
safety investigators report that the forklift or drill-
press operator was in a drug-induced stupor or frenzy?
We do not know exactly what the proportion would
be, but anyone who asserts that it would not be much
higher than it is now would have to believe that these
drugs have little appeal except when they are illegal.
And that is nonsense.
An advocate of legalization might concede that
social harm—perhaps harm equivalent to that already
produced by alcohol—would follow from making
cocaine and heroin generally available. But at least,
he might add, we would have the problem “out in the
open” where it could be treated as a matter of “pub-
lic health.” That is well and good, if we knew how to
treat—that is, cure—heroin and cocaine abuse. But we
do not know how to do it for all the people who would
need such help. We are having only limited success in
coping with chronic alcoholics. Addictive behavior is
immensely difficult to change, and the best methods

CHAPTER 17: DRUGS, GUnS, AnD PERSonAL LIbERTy Á 651
at a reasonable cost will be much greater than if the
problem is a few million chronic users of legal sub-
stances. Once a drug is legal, not only will its use
increase but many of those who then use it will prefer
the drug to the treatment: they will want the pleasure,
whatever the cost to themselves or their families, and
they will resist—probably successfully—any effort
to wean them away from experiencing the high that
comes from inhaling a legal substance.
IF I AM WRONG . . .
No one can know what our society would be like if we
changed the law to make access to cocaine, heroin,
and PCP easier. I believe, for reasons given, that the
result would be a sharp increase in use, a more wide-
spread degradation of the human personality, and a
greater rate of accidents and violence.
I may be wrong. If I am, then we will needlessly
have incurred heavy costs in law enforcement and
some forms of criminality. But if I am right, and the
legalizers prevail anyway, then we will have consigned
millions of people, hundreds of thousands of infants,
and hundreds of neighborhoods to a life of oblivion
and disease. To the lives and families destroyed by
alcohol we will have added countless more destroyed
by cocaine, heroin, PCP, and whatever else a basement
scientist can invent.
Human character is formed by society; indeed,
human character is inconceivable without society,
and good character is less likely in a bad society. Will
we, in the name of an abstract doctrine of radical
individualism, and with the false comfort of suspect
predictions, decide to take the chance that somehow
individual decency can survive amid a more general
level of degradation?
I think not. The American people are too wise for
that, whatever the academic essayists and cocktail-
party pundits may say. But if Americans today are less
wise than I suppose, then Americans at some future
time will look back on us now and wonder, what kind
of people were they that they could have done such a
thing?
complex and not entirely understood, but in simpli-
fied form it involves modifying the way in which a
neurotransmitter called dopamine sends signals from
one cell to another.
When dopamine crosses the synapse between two
cells, it is in effect carrying a message from the first cell
to activate the second one. In certain parts of the brain
that message is experienced as pleasure. After the mes-
sage is delivered, the dopamine returns to the first cell.
Cocaine apparently blocks this return, or “reuptake,”
so that the excited cell and others nearby continue to
send pleasure messages. When the exaggerated high
produced by cocaine-influenced dopamine finally
ends, the brain cells may (in ways that are still a matter
of dispute) suffer from an extreme lack of dopamine,
thereby making the individual unable to experience
any pleasure at all. This would explain why cocaine
users often feel so depressed after enjoying the drug.
Stimulants may also affect the way in which other
neurotransmitters, such as serotonin and noradrena-
line, operate.
Whatever the exact mechanism may be, once it
is identified it becomes possible to use drugs to block
either the effect of cocaine or its tendency to produce
dependency. There have already been experiments
using desipramine, imipramine, bromocriptine, car-
bamazepine, and other chemicals. There are some
promising results.
Tragically, we spend very little on such research,
and the agencies funding it have not in the past
occupied very influential or visible posts in the fed-
eral bureaucracy. If there is one aspect of the “war on
drugs” metaphor that I dislike, it is its tendency to
focus attention almost exclusively on the troops in the
trenches, whether engaged in enforcement or treat-
ment, and away from the research-and-development
efforts back on the home front where the war may ulti-
mately be decided.
I believe that the prospects of scientists in control-
ling addiction will be strongly influenced by the size
and character of the problem they face. If the problem
is a few hundred thousand chronic, high-dose users of
an illegal product, the chances of making a difference

652 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
Gun Control
Hugh LaFollette
and offer the broad outline of an appropriate solution.
To simplify discussion, I adopt the following locutions:
those opposed to most abolition and most restrictions
advocate a “serious right to bear arms,” while those
supporting more widespread abolition and more sub-
stantial restrictions are “gun control advocates.” This
simplification, of course, masks significant disagree-
ments among advocates of each position.
I. JUSTIFYING PRIVATE OWNERSHIP OF GUNS
A. A Moral Question
Do citizens have a “serious right to bear arms”? This is
a moral question, not a constitutional one. For even if
the Constitution did grant this right, we should deter-
mine if there are sufficiently compelling arguments
against private gun ownership to warrant changing
the Constitution. By contrast, if this were not a consti-
tutional right, we should determine if there are strong
reasons why the state should not ban or control guns
and if these reasons are sufficiently compelling to
make this a constitutional right. Most defenders
of private gun ownership claim we do have a moral
right—as well as a constitutional one—and that this
right is not an ordinary right but a fundamental one.
1. A fundamental right.—If they are correct, they
would have the justificatory upper hand. Were this a
fundamental right, it would not be enough to show
that society would benefit from controlling access
to guns.1 The arguments for gun control would have
to be overwhelming. Yet there is also a hefty cost in
claiming that this is a fundamental right: the evidence
for the right must meet especially rigorous standards.
What makes a right fundamental? A fundamental
right is a non-derivative right protecting a fundamental
interest. Not every interest we individually cherish is
fundamental. Since most interests are prized by some-
one, such a notion of “fundamental interest” would be
anemic, serving no special justificatory role. Fundamen-
tal interests are special; they are integrally related to a
Many of us assume that we must either oppose or
support gun control. Not so. We have a range of alter-
natives. Even this way of speaking oversimplifies our
choices since there are two distinct scales on which to
place alternatives. One scale concerns the degree (if at
all) to which guns should be abolished. This scale moves
from those who want no abolition (NA) of any guns,
through those who want moderate abolition (MA)—
that is, to forbid access to some subclasses of guns—to
those who want absolute abolition (AA). The second
scale concerns the restrictions (if any) on those guns that
are available to private citizens. This scale moves from
those who want absolute restrictions (AR) through those
who want moderate restrictions (MR) to those who
want no restrictions (NR) at all. Restrictions vary not
only in strength but also in content. We could restrict
who owns guns, how they obtain them, where and how
they store them, and where and how they carry them.
Our options are further complicated by the union
of these scales. On one extreme no private citizen can
own any guns (AA, which is functionally equivalent
to AR), while at the other extreme, every private citi-
zen can own any gun with no restrictions (NA+NR).
But once we leave those extremes, which few people
hold, the options are defined by a pair of coordinates
along these distinct scales. While most people embrace
positions on the “same” end of both scales, others
embrace more exotic mixtures: some will want few
weapons available to private citizens but virtually no
restrictions on those guns that are available (MA+NR),
while others may prefer making most guns available
but want to seriously restrict them (NA+MR).
So our choice is not merely to support or oppose gun
control but to decide who can own which guns under
what conditions. Although I cannot pretend to provide
a definitive account here, I can isolate the central issues
Hugh LaFollette, “Gun Control,” Ethics 110 (January 2000): 263–
81, © 2000 by The University of Chicago. Reprinted by permission
of The University of Chicago Press.

CHAPTER 17: DRUGS, GUnS, AnD PERSonAL LIbERTy Á 653
a significant social payoff—although most fundamen-
tal rights do. Still, we minimally assume fundamental
rights (right types) do not harm society.
This provides a framework for evaluating people’s
claims that a right is fundamental. Advocates must
show that and how granting the right protects individu-
als’ fundamental interests, and they must be prepared to
respond to objections that granting that right type will
harm society. These are serious obstacles for gun advo-
cates. It is difficult to see that a serious right to bear arms
satisfies either of these requirements, let alone both.
First, I see no compelling reason to think that own-
ing a gun is a fundamental interest. Other fundamental
interests are necessary to one’s flourishing no matter
what her particular desires, interests, and beliefs. It
is difficult to see how this is true of guns. Moreover,
the interests protected by paradigmatic fundamental
rights—our interests in unfettered speech, freedom of
religion, and freedom of association—are not merely
means to my flourishing, they are elements constitut-
ing it. By contrast, having a gun in my bed stand, in
my closet, or on my person might be a means for me
to achieve my ends, but they are not constitutive ele-
ments of my flourishing. Hence, owning guns is not a
fundamental interest.
Wheeler disagrees. He argues that the right to
bear arms is fundamental since guns are the best way
to protect our fundamental interest in self-defense.4
However, on his view, guns are not inherently valu-
able; they are valuable only as a means of self-defense.5
I fail to see how this could make the right to bear arms
fundamental. Not every means to a fundamental inter-
est is a fundamental right. That would arguably make
most actions protected by fundamental rights. None-
theless, the connection between owning guns and self-
defense is an important issue that I address later.
Others might claim that gun ownership is an essen-
tial element for the flourishing of a proper citizen.
A proper citizen, on this view, is one capable of provid-
ing for and defending his family. Although each citizen
can (generally) fend for himself, citizens come together
to form a limited government to provide those few
needs they cannot easily satisfy on their own. However,
this vision of the citizen is very controversial, more con-
troversial than the interest in gun ownership it seeks to
person’s chance of living a good life, whatever her particu-
lar interests, desires, and beliefs happen to be. For example,
living in a society that protects speech creates an envi-
ronment within which each of us can pursue our partic-
ular interests, goals, needs, and development, whatever
our interests happen to be. Is the purported right to bear
arms like this paradigmatic fundamental right?
Even if it were, that would not establish straight-
forwardly that it is impermissible to abolish or restrict
private ownership of guns. After all, fundamental
rights standardly have conditions, boundaries, or
restrictions on them. Some rights, like the right to
vote, are conditional upon reaching a specified age,
and they can be forfeited by emigrants and imprisoned
felons. In addition, most right tokens can be restricted
or overridden when the exercise of that right harms
others. For example, my right to free religious expres-
sion gives me wide discretion in how I exercise my
religion. I can remove my kids from high school and
exclude them from selected school activities (Wiscon-
sin v. Yoder, 406 U.S. 205 [1972]; Moody v. Cronin, 484
F. Supp. 270 [1979]). I can sacrifice animals (Church of
the Lukumi Babalu Aye v. City of Hialeah, 508 U.S. 520
[1993]). Nonetheless, it does not permit me to sacri-
fice humans. Nor does my right to free speech permit
me to slander someone or to preach outside her win-
dow at 2:00 a.m. Tokens of fundamental rights may be
restricted to protect others from serious harms arising
from the exercise of those rights.
Of course rights would not be worth much if they
were subject straightforwardly to the wishes of the
majority. We fiercely defend fundamental right types
although their tokens sometimes undercut society’s
interests. We cannot restrict or put conditions on fun-
damental rights except for compelling reasons, and
individuals cannot forfeit their fundamental rights (if
they can forfeit them at all) except for overwhelming
reasons. Still, although tokens of a right sometimes run
counter to the majority’s wishes, we should not infer
that rights standardly undermine the public interest.2
Fundamental rights (freedom of speech, freedom of
association, etc.) benefit society as well as individu-
als. Permitting free speech, religion, and association
is the best—and arguably the only—way for society to
uncover the truth.3 Of course, not every right has such

654 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
risky to others, the state can legitimately restrict drink-
ing while driving. Whether privately owning guns is
similarly risky is something we must discover.
B. Bad Public Policy
If private gun ownership were not a derivative right,
it might still be bad policy to substantially restrict or
abolish guns. There are always costs of enforcing a
law. Sometimes these costs are prohibitive, especially
when the public does not support that law. If the pub-
lic will not voluntarily comply with the law, then the
state must try to force compliance. In their efforts to
do so, they invariably employ excessively intrusive
methods. Such methods never entirely succeed, and,
to the extent that they do, they undermine public con-
fidence in and support for all law. Consider America’s
experience with Prohibition. Although one of Prohi-
bition’s aims—to protect innocents from harm caused
by those under the influence—was laudable, the law
was unenforceable and excessively costly. Conse-
quently, less than two decades after Prohibition was
passed via constitutional amendment, it was repealed.
The cost of enforcing any law—and especially an
unpopular law—weighs against making any behavior
illegal unless we have solid evidence that the behavior
is seriously harmful. If we adopt a weaker standard—if
we criminalize every action type whose tokens occa-
sionally lead to some harm—then we would criminal-
ize most behavior. As a result, even if there were no
right to bear arms, we should still not seek to substan-
tially limit private ownership of guns unless we had
good reason to think that would prevent serious harm.
C. Summing Up: Justifying the Private Ownership
of Guns
The preceding analysis isolates three questions we must
answer in deciding whether people should be permit-
ted to own guns: (1) How important is owning a gun
to some people? (2) What are the consequences of pri-
vate gun ownership? and (3) Is abolishing or restricting
private ownership of guns bad policy? Although gun
ownership is not a fundamental interest, many people
want to own guns and think they have good reason to
do so. That is sufficient to show that serious gun control
justify. It assumes each of us has far more control over
our lives than we arguably do have. Furthermore, even
if this conception were defensible, it would not estab-
lish a fundamental right to bear arms since guns are
mere means to independent citizenship. They are not
constitutive of that citizenship. Hence, it is doubtful
that the purported right to bear arms satisfies the first
requirement of a fundamental right.
Second, we have evidence that granting this right
type does harm society. If this evidence is at all cred-
ible, then granting this purported right would not
satisfy the second requirement either. But this does
not resolve the issue. Although people do not have a
fundamental right to own guns, gun control might be
wrong because it violates some derivative right or sim-
ply because it is bad public policy.
2. A derivative right.—Suppose we determined that
the right to bear arms is not a fundamental right but a
derivative right. This would still be a significant find-
ing since derivative rights, like fundamental ones, can-
not be restricted without good evidence. Prima facie,
I think we have such a derivative right. Each of us has
a fundamental right of noninterference: we should be
allowed to live our lives as we wish so long as we do not
thereby harm others. This is a right each of us needs no
matter what our particular interests. That general right
derivatively protects personally important activities.
For instance, I would be furious if the state forbade
me from sharing a pint with a friend. Nonetheless,
although consuming alcohol is a particular inter-
est and enjoyment I have, it is not a constitutive ele-
ment of the good life in the way that the freedoms
of speech, religion, and association are. That is why
I do not have a fundamental right to consume alco-
hol. Consequently, the conditions under which my
consumption of alcohol can be legitimately restricted
are more lax than they would be if the activity were a
fundamental interest.
Nonetheless, since I have a prima facie derivative
right to consume alcohol, the state can legitimately
abolish or restrict alcohol consumption only if it can
show that doing so is an effective means of protecting
the public from harm. They can do that in some cases:
people who consume substantial amounts of alcohol are
dangerous drivers. Since this behavior is unacceptably

CHAPTER 17: DRUGS, GUnS, AnD PERSonAL LIbERTy Á 655
is such that we can confidently predict they will cause
harm. The two questions are intricately related since
inherently dangerous objects are more likely to cause
serious harm. Yet they are separable because some dan-
gerous objects are not inherently so. Automobiles, alco-
hol, and cigarettes were not designed to cause harm,
but all are causally implicated in many people’s deaths.
Other things being equal, we are more prone to control
inherently dangerous objects than objects that merely
have harm as an unwanted side effect.
Guns, unlike autos, are inherently dangerous.
Guns were invented for the military; they were
designed to cause (and threaten) harm.6 The same
aims determine the ways in which guns are rede-
signed: they are changed to make them more effi-
cient at causing harm. In contrast, a significant aim
of redesigning automobiles is to make them less dan-
gerous. To some extent these efforts have succeeded.
Although the absolute number of annual traffic fatali-
ties has not noticeably declined, the number of fatali-
ties per mile traveled has declined 75 percent since the
1950s.7 We have enhanced the auto’s original aim of
efficient transportation while lessening harmful side
effects. That is why we can sensibly say that the auto-
mobile is not inherently dangerous despite the fact
that it causes harm. We cannot say the same for guns.
The literature of gun advocates supports my con-
tention that guns are inherently dangerous. They advo-
cate the private ownership of guns to prevent crime
and to arm the militia. Guns can serve these purposes
only because they are an effective means of inflicting
and threatening harm. Even guns normally not used
to harm humans have purposes that ride piggyback
on this fundamental purpose. Shotguns are used to
kill animals, and target guns are designed to be espe-
cially accurate. Taken together, this evidence supports
the common view that guns are inherently dangerous.
That is why we have special reasons to regulate them.
Although inherently dangerous, guns are far less
dangerous than weapons of mass destruction, and
they do have seemingly legitimate uses. That is why
we must show just how risky they are before we can
legitimately abolish or seriously restrict them. We
must also determine if they have sufficient benefits
such that we should permit them, even if risky.
would undermine gun owners’ interests. Moreover,
there is some reason to think that serious gun control
in countries with a strong tradition of gun ownership
would be bad policy. Therefore, we should certainly
not abolish, and arguably should not restrict, private
ownership of guns without good reason. Are there good
reasons? To answer this question, we must determine
the effects of private gun ownership: (a) How likely is it
that private gun ownership seriously harms others? and
(b) Are there substantial benefits of gun ownership that
might counterbalance any harm?
II. HARM, DANGER, AND RISK
We must be careful when we say that guns cause harm.
Guns kill people because agents use them to kill people
(or misuse them in ways that cause people to be killed).
As the National Rifle Association (NRA) puts it: “Guns
don’t kill people, people do.” In one sense their claim is
uncontroversial: murder is the act of an agent, and guns
are not agents. In another way, their claim is irrelevant.
No gun control advocate claims, hints, or suggests that
guns are moral agents. Guns are objects, and objects do
no evil. But not all objects are created equal. Imagine the
NNWA (National Nuclear Weapons Association) claim-
ing that “tactical nuclear weapons don’t kill people,
people do.” While in one sense their claim would be
true, in a more profound way, it would be ludicrous.
Of course guns are not nuclear weapons. Guns are
not as dangerous as nuclear weapons, and some guns
have seemingly legitimate uses. The question is whether
the character of guns makes them especially harmful.
We know that some objects—tactical nuclear weapons,
biochemical weapons, live grenades, and so forth, are
much more dangerous than feathers, ice cream, and
butter knives. Where do guns fall along this continuum?
There are two distinct but related questions: (1) Are
guns inherently dangerous? and (2) What is the empiri-
cal probability that guns cause serious harm? “Inher-
ently dangerous” objects are those whose nature or
design is sufficient to justify our prediction that they
will cause harm independent of any empirical evi-
dence. We do not need double-blind empirical studies
to know that nuclear weapons are inherently danger-
ous: they were designed to cause harm, and their nature

656 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
we think Roger (an adult) stupidly engages in a danger-
ous activity (sky diving or boxing or racing), we might
think Roger’s autonomy requires that we permit it.
Our commitment to individual liberty weighs against
the government’s abolishing or restricting the private
ownership of guns as a way of limiting harm.8 Sec-
ond, some actions (smoking in public places) that are
acceptably risky to Roger might be unacceptably risky
to others. Are guns also unacceptably risky to others?
Put differently, gun control does not concern
what private individuals should do but what govern-
ments should allow private individuals to do. We must
determine the risk of permitting the private ownership
of guns, constrained by these complicating consider-
ations. To illustrate how this might work, consider the
following example. We have evidence that a number
of wrecks are caused by drivers using cellular phones.
Roger wants to use his cellular phone while commut-
ing to work. He decides the inconvenience of not using
the cellular phone is worse than the small probability
of personal harm. He might overestimate the incon-
venience of not being able to use his cellular phone
or insufficiently appreciate the seriousness of the
risk. However, since he is an adult, we might think we
should not interfere with his decision to use a cellular
phone while driving. That is what autonomy requires.
Yet Roger is not the only person at risk. Passengers in
his or other cars may also be harmed. The seriousness
of harm to them must also be considered in deciding to
permit or restrict drivers’ use of cellular phones.
These judgments of risk must be further tem-
pered by the costs of enforcement mentioned earlier.
Although we know that using cellular phones while
driving may lead to accidents, we also know other activ-
ities may do the same—drinking coffee while driving,
eating a donut, looking at a map, talking to a passenger,
driving more than two hours without stopping, driv-
ing on less than six hours of sleep, driving home after
a bad day at the office, and so forth. We can reasonably
presume that we should not make all these activities
illegal. The probabilities of serious harm are small, and
enforcing such laws would require far-reaching intru-
sions into everyone’s life. When the risks of an activity’s
causing grave harm to many others are small and the
costs of interference are significant, then we should not
criminalize the action. But as the probability of grave
A. An Intermediate Conclusion
We have shown that owning guns is not a fundamen-
tal interest and that guns are inherently dangerous.
That is why we cannot categorically dismiss all forms
of gun control. However, this is a weak conclusion. For
although guns are inherently dangerous, they may
not be so dangerous as to justify more than a system
of minimal registration. What seems clear is that their
inherent dangerousness precludes the idea that guns
cannot be subject to governmental control. Some
form of gun control cannot be categorically dismissed.
Before determining the actual danger that guns pres-
ent, we should first determine how risky an action
must be before we can justifiably restrict it.
B. Risk
Humans are notoriously bad at judging risk. Often we
are unaware of, or are inattentive to, the seriousness of
risks. For instance, we may drive while inebriated. At
other times we overestimate the risks. For instance, we
may refuse to fly because we think it is too dangerous.
A proper determination of risk would be based on a
careful accounting of the action’s costs and benefits. We
should determine (1) the probability of harm, (2) the
seriousness of harm (the product of the gravity and
extent of the harm), (3) the probability of achieving the
benefits, (4) the significance of the benefits (the product
of the importance and extent of the benefit), and then
act accordingly. Of course even if we reach the same
determination to the above questions, we might still
disagree about whether to act: we might disagree about
what risks are worth which benefits. Nonetheless, we
can all agree that (a) as the likelihood and seriousness
of harm increase, we have increased reason to refrain
from acting, while (b) as the likelihood and importance
of the benefits increase, we have increased reasons to
act. We can import these lessons into the law.
C. Legal Rules
But not straightforwardly. The issue is not whether we
should own guns if they are legal, although that is a
fascinating question. The question is whether the state
should curtail private gun ownership. The foregoing
considerations are relevant but not decisive. The deci-
sion to permit private ownership of guns is shaped by
two factors pulling in opposite directions. First, even if

CHAPTER 17: DRUGS, GUnS, AnD PERSonAL LIbERTy Á 657
are inherently dangerous but because—if gun-control
advocates are right—permitting private ownership of
guns is very risky.
III. WHAT WE NEED TO KNOW
We can now specify what we must know in order to
intelligently decide whether to prohibit or restrict gun
ownership (or any other risky action): (1) Is there a
statistically significant correlation between the action
(private ownership of guns) and harm (homicides,
accidental deaths, suicides, armed robbery, etc.)?
(2) Do we have good reason to think this correlation
indicates that the purportedly risky action causes the
harm? (3) How serious are these resultant harms? and
(4) How important is the activity that the state wishes to
control (a) to the individual agent and (b) to the society?
In deciding whether to restrict the behavior, we
must balance these considerations using the follow-
ing general guidelines: (1) If we have evidence that
the behavior causes harm, then we have some reason
to limit the behavior. As the evidence increases, the
reasons for prohibiting the behavior increase. As the
probability that the behavior will lead to serious harm
(the product of the gravity and extent of the harm)
approaches certainty, then the reasons for forbidding
the behavior become very strong. (2) The more grave
and widespread the potential harm, the more reason
we have to constrain the behavior. If the gravity and
extent of the harm are substantial, we might constrain
the behavior even if our evidence that the behavior
causes the harm is moderate. (3) The higher the prob-
ability that allowing the action will have important
benefits, the stronger the reason to permit it. The
greater the benefits, the greater the reason to permit it.
Libertarians might claim that individuals’ rights are
so strong that the state cannot justifiably intervene even
to constrain those who put others at extreme risk. The
state should not proscribe risky actions, although they
can intervene after harm has occurred. This use of “risk”
is misleading. If on one occasion I drive while inebri-
ated, I engage in a risky action: there is some probability
that I and others will be harmed. However, permitting
people to drive while inebriated will definitely cause
harm, although we cannot specify in advance who will
be harmed. A personal decision to own a gun is risky in
and widespread harm increases, then, other things
being equal, we should criminalize the action.
For instance, when people are released from prison
(and not just on parole) they have “paid their debt to soci-
ety.” Yet we do not permit them to own a gun. We judge
that they are more likely to harm others. Of course not all
of them—and likely not a majority of them—would harm
others if they were permitted to own a gun. They are pre-
vented from owning guns because they are members of
a group statistically more likely to cause harm: we judge
that allowing former felons to own guns is unacceptably
risky. The NRA and most other gun advocates agree.
Someone might counter, though, that we deny fel-
ons the right to own guns not because we judge that
permitting them to own guns is risky but that they, by
their actions, have forfeited the right to own guns. But
that is not the best justification for our action. Why
should felons forfeit their right after they have served
their time and are free of all obligations to the state? For
instance, while imprisoned in the United States, felons
do forfeit their right against unlawful searches and
seizures. But once they are released from prison (and
are no longer on parole or probation), a former felon
has an unconditional right against unlawful searches
and seizures—the same as every other United States
resident.
At first glance, there is some reason to think that fel-
ons who use guns in the commission of a crime could
forfeit their right to own a gun in the same way that
drunk drivers lose their licenses. However, drunk drivers
do not lose their license forever, while in most jurisdic-
tions felons are never permitted to own guns. Moreover,
the prohibition against former felons’ owning guns is
not limited to those who use guns in the commission
of a crime. Hence, it is more plausible to think that we
can prevent released felons from owning guns because
we judge that they are more likely to commit crimes with
guns.
This is our rationale for all laws proscribing risky
actions. Every drunk driver does not cause an accident.
Most do not. Yet we do not flinch at laws forbidding
drunk driving. For it is not merely that drunk drivers
are statistically more likely to cause harm; they are more
likely to cause harm because they are inebriated. We can
arguably use the same rationale to justify restricting
access to guns. We restrict access not only because guns

658 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
would be more likely to use that gun. Although they
could resort to a knife or a baseball bat, they would be
less likely to do so, and, even if they did, those weapons
are less likely to cause a serious or fatal injury. (3) When
people are depressed, they can act in ways they would
not act normally. If they had a gun close to hand, they
would be more likely to kill themselves. Although they
might slit their wrists or take pills, they would be less
likely to do so, and, even if they did, they would be less
likely to kill themselves. (4) When people handle guns,
even for a legitimate purpose, the probability of serious
or fatal injury to themselves or others increases. When
children have access to guns, the likelihood of an acci-
dent increases still more.
The conclusion of the armchair argument is clear:
the more widely available guns are, the more people
will be murdered, will commit suicide, and will die
of accidents. This is a plausible armchair prediction.
Perhaps it is wrong. Maybe it is reasonable but overin-
flated. Or it might be that the prediction is well founded
but that the widespread availability of guns is nonethe-
less justified. What is apparent is that the claim that
widespread availability of guns increases the number
of homicides, suicides, and accidental deaths is highly
plausible. It is difficult to imagine that it is false.
2. Availability of guns prevents or stops crimes.—Gun
advocates offer empirical evidence supporting the
claim that guns prevent crime; their armchair argu-
ments undergird and explain those studies. The moti-
vating idea is simple: most criminals want to minimize
their risks when committing a crime. If they know that
someone in a house is armed, they will be less likely to
enter that house, at least when the person is home and
awake. Potential criminals are also less likely to assault or
rob someone whom they believe is carrying a weapon.
Finally, when criminals try to rob or assault an armed per-
son, the person is more likely to foil the crime. This, too,
is a plausible armchair prediction. Perhaps it is wrong.
Maybe the claim is overinflated. Perhaps guns have these
benefits, but there are other effects of owning guns—for
example, those mentioned above—which outweigh
them. What is apparent is that the claim that the wide-
spread availability of guns would prevent or thwart some
crimes is highly plausible. It is difficult to imagine that
it is false. Of course we cannot stop with these armchair
arguments. We must assess the empirical evidence.
the former sense. A decision to permit citizens to pri-
vately own guns is—depending on the evidence—risky
in the latter sense. If gun control advocates are right
about the evidence, then we have good grounds to con-
strain private gun use. The question is, are they right?
IV. ASSESSING THE EVIDENCE
A. Armchair Arguments
Debates over gun control typically begin, and some-
times end, with armchair arguments. Both sides offer
armchair explanations of why (and how) the presence
(or absence) of guns will increase (or decrease) violent
crime. It is tempting to categorically dismiss armchair
arguments since they seem to be poor substitutes for
empirical evidence. However, it would be a mistake
to assume we could devise sound empirical studies or
understand their results without armchair arguments.
In a study to discover if widespread availability of guns
increases the number of homicides or decreases crime,
we need armchair arguments to tell us which vari-
ables we should control.9 Without them we would not
know that we should control for the extent of poverty,
the incidence of drug use, increases in the number of
police officers, or the introduction of tougher (or more
lax) penalties. Without them we would not know that
we do not need to control for the price of mayonnaise,
the criminal’s eye color, or who won the World Series.
Armchair arguments also take center stage in eval-
uating empirical studies, in criticizing experimental
design, and in reinterpreting the reported findings.10
So before I discuss the empirical evidence, I summa-
rize some significant armchair arguments employed
by gun advocates and gun-control advocates.
1. More weapons, more violence.—Gun control sup-
porters offer empirical evidence of a positive correlation
between murder rates and the availability of guns (espe-
cially handguns). Availability of guns is also positively
correlated with suicide and accident rates. This empiri-
cal evidence is best understood against the background
of the following armchair arguments. (1) Guns (and
especially handguns) are the easiest way to kill others
or oneself. People can stand at a relatively safe distance
and pull the trigger. (2) When people are angry, they
can act in ways they would not act normally. They may
strike out at others. If they had a gun close to hand, they

CHAPTER 17: DRUGS, GUnS, AnD PERSonAL LIbERTy Á 659
regulate guns as tightly as most European countries, our
murder rates arguably would fall, but they would not
plummet immediately to European levels.
We might settle the issue if we could conduct
controlled experiments, randomly dividing our popu-
lation in half, giving half of them guns, removing all
the guns from the other half, and then monitoring the
murder rate. Of course, that would be morally unac-
ceptable, politically unrealistic, and probably even sci-
entifically unachievable. Before we had enough time to
exclude all possible intervening causes, sufficient time
might have elapsed so that new intervening causes
could have emerged. But we are not left in the dark. We
have empirical evidence that helps adjudicate between
competing explanations of the correlation.
First, we have empirical evidence, bolstered by arm-
chair arguments, that guns are more lethal than other
weapons. Some claim the ratio is 5:1; no estimates are
lower than 2:1.12 This partly explains the strong cor-
relation between guns and homicides. If people get
angry the same number of times, those using the most
lethal weapons are more likely to kill their victims.
Second, the nature of secondary gun markets
helps explain how the widespread availability of guns
increases crime in general and homicides in particu-
lar. Various opponents of gun control claim that “If we
outlaw guns, only outlaws will have guns.” Armchair
arguments suggest why this is a silly claim. Where,
one might ask, do criminals get their guns? They often
steal them or buy them from those who purchased
them legally. Even guns obtained from other criminals
are usually traceable to people who purchased them
legally. Empirical evidence supports this armchair
supposition. Most criminals report having stolen their
guns, received them from a friend or family member,
or purchased them from someone who had stolen it.
At least half a million guns are stolen each year, and
these swell the numbers of guns available illegally.13
Not only does the primary (legal) market affect the
availability of guns on secondary markets, it also affects
the price of guns on those markets, much “like the
analogous markets for motor vehicles or prescription
drugs.”14 As we restrict the availability of guns in the pri-
mary market, the supply of guns in the secondary mar-
kets decreases and their cost increases.15 This increase in
cost will diminish teenagers’ ability to obtain guns since
B. The Data
The empirical evidence is difficult to assess, and, to
the extent that we can, it does not univocally support
either side. You might not know this from listening
to the public policy debate. Some gun-control advo-
cates imply that strict gun laws would all but eliminate
murder, while some gun advocates imply that having
a gun in every home would virtually end crime. Both
claims are unfounded. Gun control will not virtually
eliminate murder. Arming all citizens will not virtu-
ally eliminate crime. About that we can be confident.
The problem is determining the precise effects of per-
mitting or restricting guns. The available evidence is
less than compelling But we must make a judgment
based on the best evidence we have.
1. The connection between availability of guns and
murder.—Perhaps the most well-established statistic is
this: the more widely available guns (especially hand-
guns) are, the more people are murdered. The figures
are duplicated time and again in country after coun-
try. Here is the bottom line: “The correlation between
any gun-prevalence and the overall murder rate is .67,
while it is .84 between handgun prevalence and overall
murder rate.”11 These figures are significant to the .01
level; that is, the chance that these correlations could
occur merely by chance is less than one out of 100. This
correlation meets the statisticians’ gold standard.
But this does not resolve the issue, for it does not
establish what gun control advocates claim it shows,
namely, that gun control is an effective way of sub-
stantially lessening the murder rate. First, a statisti-
cal correlation shows that two things are linked, but
it does not tell us if the first caused the second, the
second caused the first, or if there is some third factor
which caused both. Second, even if the items are caus-
ally related, we do not know that changing the cause
will straightforwardly change the effect since another
factor might intervene to sustain the effect.
Gun advocates proffer their own armchair explana-
tion for the correlations: these correlations reflect the
character of the respective social and political systems.
The European countries where murder rates are lower
have more social solidarity and are more heterogeneous
than the United States. Whether these social factors
explain all of the correlation is debatable, but I am con-
fident they explain some of it. Were the United States to

660 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
those who have saved their lives by having a gun, can-
not be cavalierly dismissed by gun control advocates.
However, these figures are inflated, likely dramati-
cally so. First, Kleck’s methodology is flawed. Surveys
have an inherent tendency to overestimate rare events.
Kleck made his estimates based on phone interviews
with people in 5,000 dwelling units. One percent of those
units claimed to have used a gun defensively in the past
year. Kleck inferred from these responses that there are
2.5 million defensive handgun uses per year. However,
since this inference is based on an affirmative answer by
one person out of a hundred, that means that for every
chance for a false negative (someone who falsely denies
using a gun defensively) there are ninety-nine chances
for a false positive (someone who falsely claims to have
used a gun defensively).20 The probability that this or
some other bias skews the findings is substantial.
Second, Kleck’s findings are inconsistent with find-
ings by the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS),
which interviewed far more people and interviewed
them more regularly.21 Kleck’s estimates even clash with
the findings of the NCVS on the incidence and circum-
stances of robberies (which seems less subject to report-
ing bias). If Kleck’s figures were correct, then “Kleck asks
us to believe that burglary victims in gun owning house-
holds use their guns in self-defense more than 100% of
the time, even though most were initially asleep.”22
Finally, if there were 2.5 million defensive gun
uses each year, how many of those were necessary?
Given the negative results of private gun ownership,
gun advocates should show not only that guns deter
crime but that they are the best way of doing so. Some
people plausibly claim that owning a dog is an effec-
tive deterrent. If true, then a not insignificant percent-
age of those who used a gun defensively could have
achieved the same results without the accompanying
danger. In summary, there is no doubt that guns deter
some crime and stop the completion of other crimes,
just not in the numbers that Kleck claims.
John Lott supplements Kleck’s argument by claim-
ing that the widespread use of concealed weapons
would decrease the annual number of homicides by
1,400; rapes by 4,200; aggravated assaults by 60,000; and
robberies by 12,000.23 If true, and if there were no coun-
tervailing costs, this would be a powerful reason not
only to permit guns but to encourage people to have and
they are least able to afford hefty prices. Since teenagers
commit most deadly crimes, decreasing the availability
of legal guns will thereby decrease the number of homi-
cides. The converse is true as well: having huge numbers
of legally available guns increases the number of guns
on secondary markets and typically lowers their price.
This makes it easier for prospective criminals, including
teenagers, to obtain guns.
Third, having a gun around the house (or on
the person)—even for self-protection—apparently
increases the chance that someone in the family
will kill themselves with the gun or will be the vic-
tim of a homicide or an accident. One study found
that “for every time a gun in the home was involved
in a self-protection homicide, they noted 1.3 unin-
tentional deaths, 4.5 criminal homicides, and 37
firearm suicides.”16 This implies that for every case
where someone in a gun-owning household uses a gun
to successfully stop a life-threatening attack, nearly
forty-three people in similar households will die from
a gunshot. Taken together the evidence does not
prove that widespread availability of guns increases
the number of homicides. However, that empirical
evidence, bolstered by earlier armchair arguments,
makes the claim highly plausible.
2. The use of guns to prevent crime.—The biggest
“gun” in the anti-gun-control lobby is the claim that
having (and perhaps carrying) a gun prevents crime. As
I noted earlier, this is a sensible armchair claim. Some-
one contemplating a robbery is more likely to proceed
if they think they can succeed with little risk to them-
selves. So if a prospective robber believes the tenants are
at home and have a gun they know how to use, then he
likely will seek another target. Two surveys support this
belief. According to one survey, 4 percent of all Ameri-
cans have used a handgun in the past five years to avert
a crime. Given those figures, researchers estimate that
there are at least 600,000 defensive uses of guns per year.
Kleck uses these results, in conjunction with another
survey, to claim that the number might be as high as
2.5 million.17 Given the number of violent crimes using
guns, “the best evidence indicates that guns are used
about as often for defensive purposes as for criminal
purposes.”18 If true, that is a powerful reason to resist
attempts to limit availability of guns.19 Such statistics,
particularly when bolstered by moving anecdotes of

CHAPTER 17: DRUGS, GUnS, AnD PERSonAL LIbERTy Á 661
it is not only that fewer guns would directly cause
some decline in violent crimes—which it should. It is
also likely to reshape the cultural values which, along
with the ready availability of deadly weapons, led to
such an extraordinarily high murder rate in America.
However, the statistical evidence that guns prevent
or thwart crimes is suggestive and cannot be ignored
despite its identified weaknesses. In summary, the over-
all statistical evidence tilts in favor of gun control advo-
cates, although the evidence is disputable. But we should
not expect nor do we need indisputable evidence. We
can act on the best evidence we have while being open
to new evidence. If widespread availability of guns
were responsible for even one-fourth of the increase
in the number of murders, that would be a significant
harm that the state should prevent if it could do so in a
relatively unintrusive and morally acceptable way.
There is little doubt that we could do that, at least
to some degree. If nothing else, we could control some
types of guns and ammunition. To take one obvious
example, teflon-coated bullets are designed to pierce
protective vests. People do not use these bullets to
pierce the vests on a deer or a squirrel, on a target or
a clay pigeon. They use them to pierce the vests on
people, usually law-enforcement officers. This ammu-
nition has no purpose except to cause harm. Hence, we
are justified in abolishing teflon bullets and in estab-
lishing severe criminal penalties for those possessing
them. This would not save large numbers of lives. But,
assuming the enforcement of this ban is not impracti-
cal, then, if it saved even a few lives, that would be a
compelling reason to outlaw such bullets.
Some guns, however, have a much wider use, even
if they occasionally are used for ill. People have seem-
ingly legitimate uses for shotguns and single-shot rifles.
Consequently, barring strong evidence to the contrary,
we should not abolish them. We should, however, study
their contributory role in causing harm and explore ways
we might reduce this harm in a relatively unintrusive way.
The central debate concerns handguns. The evidence
we have shows that handguns are disproportionately
used in homicides and in robberies. Although “there are
approximately three times as many long guns as hand-
guns in the US, more than 80 percent of gun homicides
and 90 percent of gun robberies involve handguns.”26
The experience in Canada suggests that criminals will
carry them. However, Lott’s conclusions have also come
under severe criticism: “The central problem is that crime
moves in waves, yet Lott’s analysis does not include vari-
ables that can explain these cycles. For example, he used
no variables on gangs, on drug consumption, or commu-
nity policing. As a result, many of Lott’s findings make
no sense. He finds for instance, that both increasing the
rate of unemployment and reducing income reduces the
rate of violent crimes.”24 Perhaps the most compelling
critique comes from Jens Ludwig, who compares the rate
of violent crime toward youths and adults in states that
passed shall-issue carrying permits. Most of these states
issue gun permits only to people over twenty-one. Arm-
chair considerations predict that younger people, who
cannot legally carry, will not receive the full benefits
from the purported deterrent effect of shall-issue laws.
Thus, those under twenty-one years of age are a natural
control group to track general swings in crime. Once we
include this factor, we find that shall-issue laws lead to
higher—not lower— homicide and robbery rates.25
I also have an overarching worry about Lott’s
conclusions. The one correlation in the gun control
debate that seemingly is beyond dispute is the high
correlation between the presence of guns—especially
handguns—and homicide rates. Gun advocates offer
explanations for the correlation, but no one I have
seen seriously challenges it. I find it difficult to square
this correlation with Kleck’s and Lott’s claims that hav-
ing more guns—and toting them—will lower crime.
C. An Overall Assessment of the Empirical Evidence
The strong correlation between the presence of guns
and a higher murder rate is compelling. Since the cor-
relation is statistically significant to a .01 level, it is dif-
ficult to believe that limiting private gun ownership
will not have a noticeable effect on the numbers of
murders. Gun advocates disagree: they claim that cul-
tural factors explain the correlation. Although I think
they are partly correct, they draw the wrong inference.
For one crucial difference between European and
American cultures is the widespread presence of guns.
Each culture is the way it is, at least in part, because of
the role guns (or their absence) played in its creation
and maintenance. Therefore, curtailing the private
possession of guns might well change the American
culture so that it would be less violent. Consequently,

662 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
kills someone while robbing them, then Jones will
owe the victim compensatory damages. And if Jones
were negligent in the storing of the gun, he could be
subject to punitive damages as well. Perhaps if he were
grossly negligent in storing the gun (he left it lying in
his front yard, next to a school playground), we might
even bring criminal charges against him.
This procedure is justified since guns are inher-
ently dangerous, and it is only reasonable to expect
people to take responsibility for their risky actions.
The benefits are notable: many people would be disin-
clined to own guns, while those owning guns would
likely take greater care in storing, handling, and using
them. This arguably could achieve the central aims of
gun control without direct government intervention.
Doubtless that means that some people will be forced
to pay for the misdeeds or mistakes of others in ways
we might dislike. However, that is a more attractive
policy than continuing the current scheme in which
guns are easily obtained in the United States or com-
pletely denying individuals’ interest in owning guns.
To make this option more palatable, we could let
gun owners purchase liability insurance to cover poten-
tial losses. We might even require them to purchase
insurance. After all, most states require drivers to have
automobile insurance. This insurance-based system of
strict liability would make people take more care with
any guns they own while providing financial remuner-
ation to those harmed by the use of those guns.
Perhaps this will not work. Other proposals might
work better. What seems clear to me is that we need to
do something: we cannot continue with the status quo.
NOTES
1. Todd C. Hughes and Lester H. Hunt, “The Liberal Basis of
the Right to Bear Arms,” Public Affairs Quarterly (in press).
2. R. Dworkin, Taking Rights Seriously (London: Duckworth,
1977).
3. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1978).
4. Samual C. Wheeler, Jr., “Self-Defense: Rights and Coerced
Risk Acceptance,” Public Affairs Quarterly 11 (1997): 431–43.
5. Ibid., pp. 433–38.
6. Charles Singer, E. J. Holmyard, A. R. Hall, and Treavor Wil-
liams, A History of Technology, 7 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1956), vol. 2, p. 367.
not switch to long guns if handguns are unavailable.
Given the special role handguns play in causing harm,
we have compelling reasons to extensively control, or
perhaps even abolish, handguns. But policy consider-
ations, mentioned earlier, should give us pause.
V. A THIRD WAY
In the past we not only assumed that we must either
support or oppose gun control, we assumed that the
only way to control guns is to legally proscribe access
to them. We should consider other options. Although
I find the idea of a world without handguns immensely
appealing, there are reasons to seek alternatives, espe-
cially in countries like the United States with a deeply
entrenched gun culture. In the present political cli-
mate, the abolition or serious control of guns in the
United States is unlikely to work and unlikely to hap-
pen. There are far too many people who desperately
want guns. There are far too many people who own
guns. Any attempt to disarm the society would be beset
with problems like those that plagued Prohibition. We
have other possibilities.
We could employ elements of a policy that we use
to control another inherently dangerous object: dyna-
mite. Dynamite has many beneficial uses. That is why
we permit people to own it under specifiable condi-
tions, for example, to build a road. But it is also inher-
ently dangerous. That is why we heavily restrict its
purchase, storage, and use. I cannot own dynamite for
recreation (I like the flash), for hunting (I am a lousy
shot), or for protection (I would not hear an intruder).
Owning dynamite is rarely a significant interest and
never a fundamental one. More important to the pres-
ent point, even when we do permit people to own
dynamite, we subject them to strict legal liability. The
owner is financially liable for any harm caused by his
dynamite, even if he was not negligent.
I propose we make handgun owners (and perhaps
ultimately all gun owners) strictly liable for harm
caused by the use of their guns. If Jones’s child takes
his gun and kills someone while committing a crime,
then Jones will be financially responsible to those
harmed. If Jones’s child accidentally kills a neigh-
bor’s child, Jones will be financially responsible to
the child’s family. If someone steals Jones’s gun and

CHAPTER 17: DRUGS, GUnS, AnD PERSonAL LIbERTy Á 663
13. Cook, Mollinoni, and Cole, p. 81.
14. Ibid., p. 71.
15. Ibid., p. 73.
16. Reiss and Roth, eds., p. 267.
17. Gary Kleck, Point Blank: Guns and Violence in America (New
York: Aldine De Gruyter, 1991), pp. 105–6.
18. Ibid., p. 107.
19. Gary Kleck, Targeting Guns: Firearms and Their Control (New
York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1997).
20. David Hemenway, “Survey Research and Self-Defense Gun
Use: An Explanation of Extreme Overestimates,” Journal of
Criminal Law and Criminology 87 (1997): 1430–45.
21. U.S. Department of Justice, Criminal Victimization in the
United States, 1993: A National Crime Victimization Survey
(Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1996).
22. Hemenway, “Survey Research and Self-Defense Gun Use:
An Explanation of Extreme Overestimates,” p. 1442.
23. Lott, p. 54.
24. Hemenway, “Review of More Guns, Less Crime,” p. 2029.
25. Jens Ludwig, “Concealed Gun-Carrying Laws and Violent
Crime: Evidence from State Panel Data,” International Review
of Law and Economics 18 (1998): 239–54.
26. Hemenway, “Guns, Public Health, and Public Safety,” p. 60.
7. David Hemenway, “Guns, Public Health, and Public Safety,”
in Guns and the Constitution, ed. Dennis A. Henigan, E. Bruce
Nicholson, and David Hemenway (Northampton, Mass.: Ale-
theia Press, 1995), pp. 49–82, p. 52.
8. Hughes and Hunt.
9. John R. Lott, More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime
and Gun-Control Laws (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1998), pp. 21–24.
10. Dan Black and Daniel Nagin, “Do Right-to-Carry Laws Deter
Violent Crime?” Journal of Legal Studies 27 (1998): 209–20; Philip
J. Cook, Stephanie Mollinoni, and Thomas B. Cole, “Regulating
Gun Markets,” Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 86 (1995):
59–92; Phillip J. Cook, Jens Ludwig, and David Hemenway, “The
Gun Debate’s New Mythical Number: How Many Defensive Uses
Per Year?” Journal of Policy Analysis and Management 16 (1997):
463–69; David Hemenway, “The Myth of Millions of Annual
Self-Defense Gun Uses: A Case Study of Survey Overestimates of
Rare Events,” Chance 10 (1997): 6–10, “Review of More Guns, Less
Crime,” New England Journal of Medicine 339 (1998): 2029–30;
Lott; Wheeler.
11. Gregg Lee Carter, The Gun Control Movement (New York:
Twayne Publishers, 1997), p. 3.
12. Albert J. Reiss, Jr., and Jeffrey A. Roth, eds., Understanding
and Preventing Violence (Washington, D.C.: National Academy
Press, 1993), p. 260.
Political Philosophy and the Gun Control Debate:
What Would Bentham, Mills, and Nozick Have to Say?
Stacey Nguyen
checks and keeping dangerous firearms out of the
wrong hands.” After this press release, several parties
proceeded to criticize Pelosi’s comments.
For example, CNS News pointed out that Pelosi’s
oath does not include the phrase “to protect and defend
the Constitution,” which is found in the President’s
oath. Part of her oath reads: “I do solemnly swear that I
will support and defend the Constitution of the United
States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.”
Moreover, Erich Pratt, director of communica-
tions for Gun Owners of America, claimed that the
American constitution makes no allowances for gun
Last Monday, in a press release that marked the one-
year anniversary of the shooting at Aurora, House
Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D) said: “We must
uphold our oath to ‘protect and defend’ the Consti-
tution and all Americans by expanding background
Stacey Nguyen, “Political Philosophy and the Gun Con-
trol Debate: What Would Bentham, Mills, and Nozick Have
to Say?” Berkeley Political Review, August 5, 2013, https://bpr
.berkeley.edu/2013/08/05/political-philosophy-and-the-gun
-control-debatewhat-would-bentham-mills-and-nozick-have
-to-say/. Reprinted with permission.

https://bpr.berkeley.edu/2013/08/05/political-philosophy-and-the-gun-control-debatewhat-would-bentham-mills-and-nozick-have-to-say/

664 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
control. “If Pelosi really wants to apply the lessons
from Aurora, Colorado in order to save lives,” Pratt
said, “she will work to repeal gun laws that discourage
good people from carrying firearms.”
These trivial arguments lead one to wonder how use-
ful rhetorical and philosophical approaches are for public
policy—or in this case, toothless nitpicking. While gun
rights advocates claim that we just need to better enforce
current laws, it is the loopholes and weak policies, cou-
pled with gun lobbying, that make it more difficult to do
so and much easier to illegally acquire guns. In April, new
gun measures considered by the Senate failed miserably,
with only two out of nine amendments passing. Some of
the measures that failed included comprehensive back-
ground checks, bans and limits on assault weapons, and
crackdown strategies on gun trafficking. With recent
mass shootings and the tens of thousands of gun-related
deaths that occur each year in the United States, the lack
of gun regulation is absolutely unacceptable.
But while I can’t argue against policy being more
tangible than philosophizing, I believe that there is
value in understanding the micro-foundations of legal
policies. Through understanding and applying differ-
ent philosophical approaches to justice, we can expand
our appreciation for the significance and complexity of
political issues. And more importantly, we can learn to
rigorously question our fundamental beliefs and stray
a bit further from the traditional left-right dichotomy.
First, let’s talk about the contentious document
itself—the one and only, Second Amendment. Many
politicians and scholars have argued over the philoso-
phy of the Second Amendment, imposing a historical
analysis of the Constitution and regarding it as either an
original, inviolable piece or a living document. In 2008,
the Supreme Court decided in District of Columbia vs.
Heller that the Second Amendment provides an indi-
vidual right to bear arms independent of any collective
right. So while people cannot have tanks or missiles, they
have an individual right to handguns, because as Justice
Scalia puts it, “handguns are the most popular weapon
chosen by Americans for self-defense in the home, and a
complete prohibition of their use is invalid.”
The originalist argument is self-explanatory—the
Constitution was set in stone when it was ratified in 1787
and it is not an evolving document. On the other hand,
the “living document” approach finds that the Second
Amendment was written in a different context. Firstly,
people still used guns to hunt for food and ward off fre-
quent foreign invasions two hundred years ago. Back
then, guns were also used to suppress slave rebellions
and fight Native Americans. This is not to say that gun
rights advocates are racists, but rather that the Founders’
intents were geared towards state protection, not indi-
vidual rights. Moreover, major advances in gun technol-
ogy mean that semi-automatic weapons with enhanced
magazine capacities are more lethal. Today’ semi-auto-
matic weapons, like the Colt AR-15, resemble military-
style firearms and are a far cry from colonial-era muskets
and rifles. Advanced technology calls for advanced safety
precautions. In short, gun policies should not reflect a
blind adherence to the Constitution, but instead grow
with human and technological advancements.
Now, I would like to argue for the necessity for gun
legislation on the grounds of social welfare and individ-
ual liberty, using the two political philosophies of utili-
tarianism and possessive libertarianism. Ultimately,
there’s no correct way to approach this complex and
contentious issue, but exploring different philosophi-
cal approaches invites greater insight. I don’t claim to
have a complete analysis or even the solutions to the
problem—at most, just some food for thought.
BENTHAMITE AND MILLIAN UTILITARIANISM
Many arguments for gun control are grounded in
utilitarian thought. Jeremy Bentham, the founder
of modern utilitarian thought, held that the moral-
ity of an action was determined by its contribution
to overall happiness—an act should be done if it pro-
duces the greatest amount of happiness over unhap-
piness. Articulated by J. S. Mill, the Harm Principle,
one of the tenets of modern utilitarianism, states that
individuals are free to do as they please unless their
actions harm other individuals. Applying the Harm
Principle, the general stance is that guns produce
more harm than happiness or social utility. First,
and foremost, guns cost lives. Two out of three homi-
cides, half of all suicides, and a third of all robberies
are committed with guns. In the United States, the
total number of handgun deaths from 1980 to 2006

CHAPTER 17: DRUGS, GUnS, AnD PERSonAL LIbERTy Á 665
But for the same reasons, libertarian philoso-
phy can be used to support the necessity for gun
control. Firstly, the idea that individuals should be
held accountable for their actions complements
libertarian philosophy. As Dr. Jack Russell, profes-
sor of philosophy at the University of North Dakota
School of Law, puts it: “Nothing is more consistent
with the libertarian point of view than registering
guns and including serial numbers on every bullet. It
is only when a person’s property is traceable, when
we can figure out who shot whom, that we can live
in a libertarian world.” Members of the NRA them-
selves care about the responsibility that comes with
gun ownership—roughly 75% of the NRA believes
in background checks, that concealed carry permits
shouldn’t be granted to individuals with violent
misdemeanors or assaults under their belts, that per-
mits should only be granted to those who have gone
through gun safety training, and that being arrested
for domestic violence disqualifies individuals from
gun ownership. Moreover, government interference
with gun acquisition reflects not a hoarding of power,
but rather a responsibility for protecting its citizens’
negative rights. All in all, it appears that stronger gun
regulation is consistent with libertarian philosophy.
Utilitarianism and possessive libertarianism are two
fundamental philosophies of justice, but neither is right
nor wrong. This particular interpretation of both theo-
ries reflects a strong need for more rigorous gun policies
and constructive conversations on the basis of individ-
ual responsibility and greater social concerns. Undoubt-
edly, there remain many more philosophical questions
to ponder. Should there be borders for gun control? Is
bearing arms even a fundamental human right like the
freedom of speech or the right to assembly?
Ultimately, the problem is not whether the individ-
ual is an end or a means to an end; the problem is simply
gun violence, which hurts both society and the individ-
ual. The solution is not simple, and will also have to take
into consideration structural issues of poverty, educa-
tion, and health care. But the solution, in any case, will
have to start with stronger federal gun policies and more
effective leadership from our elected representatives.
exceeds 32,000 per year, according to UPenn’s Health
System. Additionally, the fiscal costs of gun inju-
ries are disadvantageous in the utilitarian calculus.
According to the CDC, firearm related deaths cost
the United States health care system $37 billion, and
nonfatal gunshot wounds cost another $3.7 billion
in 2005 alone. This means that the taxpayer money
that has gone toward healthcare for firearm injuries
could have been invested in more socially beneficial
causes, such as education and mental health care.
One might say that having less gun regulation is
more utilitarian, because having access to guns may
save lives. The research reflects otherwise. Firstly, the
Harvard Injury Control Research Center (HICRC)
showed that across states and high-income nations,
more guns mean more homicides. Secondly, research
shows that guns are used more often for intimida-
tion than as weapons of self-defense. For example, a
survey found that nearly 1% of Americans reported
using guns to defend themselves or their property
while 50% used guns in an aggressive manner, such
as in escalating an argument. Additionally, another
survey found that if an assault victim is carrying a
gun, they are 4.5 times more likely to be shot and
4.2 times more likely to be killed. The self-defense
argument may ostensibly appear utilitarian, but it is
not backed up by the evidence at hand.
POSSESSIVE LIBERTARIANISM
In contrast to utilitarianism, possessive libertarian-
ism is the main philosophical approach for reducing
gun regulation. In Anarchy, State, and Utopia, politi-
cal philosopher Robert Nozick fleshed out the base-
line for modern American libertarian thought. A
proponent of the inviolability of individuals, Nozick
supported a minimal state that would only protect
negative rights like individuals’ right to privacy
and right to not be killed, but not promote positive
rights such as social welfare programs or education.
A Nozickian thinker would supposedly be opposed to
gun control because of choice-based liberty and indi-
vidual autonomy.

666
C H A P T E R 1 8
‘’
Capital Punishment
Few moral issues provoke the kind of fiery emo-
tions and fervent debate that capital punishment
does. In some circles, the very mention of the
words death penalty is enough to set off a cross fire
of opinions from all sides of the subject— as well
as an onslaught of zealotry and moral confusion.
At the center of all the commotion is a clash of
fundamental moral values, a conflict heightened
by the realization that weighing in the balance
is, ultimately and tragically, the life or death of a
human being.
In this controversy, the abolitionists (those
who wish to abolish capital punishment) most
often appeal to basic moral principles such as “Do
not kill,” “Honor the sanctity of life,” or “Respect
human dignity.” The retentionists (those who
wish to retain the death penalty) are likely to appeal
to other principles: “Punish the guilty,” “Give mur-
derers the punishment they deserve,” “A life for a
life,” or “Deter the ultimate crime (murder) with
the ultimate punishment.” On the most general
and fundamental of these principles— not kill-
ing, respecting human dignity, and punishing the
guilty— almost all parties to the dispute agree. But
retentionists and abolitionists are usually at odds
over how these principles should be interpreted.
Retentionists like to remind us of murderers
whose crimes are so horrific that the death penalty
may seem the only fitting punishment. Thus they
bring up such moral monsters as Timothy McVeigh
(who used a bomb to kill 168 men, women, and
children), Ted Bundy (who murdered, by his own
count, more than 100 women), John Wayne Gacy
(who raped and murdered 33 boys and men), and
Adolf Eichmann (who facilitated the murder of
millions during the Holocaust). Abolitionists, on
the other hand, tell of the horrors that often accom-
pany the death penalty: innocent people who are
wrongly convicted and executed, executions that
go wrong and cause excruciating pain to those
executed, and the suspiciously high percentage of
poor and minority people who are executed in the
United States. Commonplace in the capital punish-
ment debate, such facts may move us to anger, pity,
disgust, or sadness, and they may inform our think-
ing in important ways. But we should not allow our
emotional reaction to them to interfere with the
vital task that we begin in this chapter— the care-
ful evaluation of arguments for and against capital
punishment.
ISSUE FILE: BACKGROUND
In the legal sense, punishment is the deliberate
and authorized causing of pain or harm to some-
one thought to have broken a law. It is a legal
sanction imposed by society on offenders for vio-
lating society’s official norms. The justification
for punishment— the reason why society uses it—
generally takes one of two forms. As we will see later,
many believe that the sole reason we should pun-
ish the wrongdoer is because he morally deserves
punishment. His desert is the only justification
required, and meting out punishment to those who
deserve it is morally obligatory and a morally good
thing. Others believe that the only proper justifica-
tion is the good consequences for society that the
punishment of offenders will bring— most notably,

CHAPTER 18: CAPiTAl PunisHmEnT Á 667
from 1 in 1977 to 98 in 1999. Since this high
point, another downward trend has set in, with the
number of executions in 2004 dropping to 59, and
in 2013 to 39.3 The gradual decrease in executions
has coincided with significant public support for
the death penalty for convicted murderers. Gallup
polls show that between 1994 and 2014, the per-
centage of American adults in favor of capital pun-
ishment for murder has fluctuated annually but
always stayed within the 60 to 80 percent range. In
the last seven years, however, the range has been
60 to 64 percent. These numbers decreased signifi-
cantly when people were asked to consider life in
prison without parole as an option.4
Most other countries have officially abolished
the death penalty or simply stopped using it. One
hundred four nations— including Canada, Mexico,
and all the Western European countries— are in
this category. In 2016, twenty- three countries
carried out executions. Most executions took place
in China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Pakistan.
Not counting China, 87 percent of executions took
place in just four countries— Iran, Saudi Arabia,
Iraq, and Pakistan.5
The use of capital punishment in the United
States has been shaped by several landmark
Supreme Court decisions. In 1972, in Furman v.
Georgia, the court ruled that capital punishment
as it was then being applied in certain states was
unconstitutional. The ruling put a halt to execu-
tions across the country. Yet the court did not
declare that the death penalty itself was unconsti-
tutional. The majority on the court thought that
its usual administration— which allowed juries to
impose the death penalty arbitrarily without any
legal guidance— constituted “cruel and unusual
punishment,” a violation of the Eighth Amend-
ment of the Constitution.
Many states then promptly rewrote their death
penalty statutes to try to minimize administrative
arbitrariness. A few states passed laws decreeing
that the death penalty would be mandatory for
particular capital crimes. But in Woodson v. North
the prevention of future crimes and the mainte-
nance of an orderly society.
Capital punishment is punishment by exe-
cution of someone officially judged to have com-
mitted a serious, or capital, crime. For thousands of
years, this extreme sanction has been used count-
less times in the Western world for a variety of
offenses— rape, murder, horse theft, kidnapping,
treason, sodomy, spying, blasphemy, witchcraft,
and many others. A wide assortment of execution
methods have also been employed, ranging from
the ancient and medieval (crucifixion, drawing and
quartering, burning alive, impalement, etc.) to the
handful of standard techniques of the past two cen-
turies (hanging, firing squad, lethal gas, electrocu-
tion, and lethal injection). In twenty- first- century
America, most death penalty states ( thirty- one in
2016) reserve capital punishment for the crime of
murder, and lethal injection is authorized in all
of them. Seventeen states authorize other modes of
execution, including lethal gas, hanging, and firing
squad.1
As of April 2017, there were 2,843 prisoners
on death row in the United States, and in 2016, five
states carried out a total of twenty executions. In
2017, 42 percent of death row inmates were white,
42 percent were black, and 13 percent were Latino.
In 2016, Georgia executed nine inmates, more than
any other state, and Texas executed seven. Alabama
executed two, and Florida and Missouri executed
one inmate each. By mid- 2017, nineteen states and
the District of Columbia were without the death
penalty: Alaska, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illi-
nois, Iowa, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michi-
gan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York,
North Dakota, Rhode Island, Vermont, West Vir-
ginia, and Wisconsin.2
The trend in executions in the United States
has varied over the past few decades. The num-
ber of executions carried out each year between
the mid- 1930s and the 1970s gradually declined,
from a high of 200 down to 0 in 1976. But from
1977 to 1999, the annual toll ramped up again,

668 Á PART 4: ETHiCAl issuEs
another in “the heat of passion” or by driving
drunk. Usually, only first- degree murder makes a
defendant eligible for the death penalty.
MORAL THEORIES
Both retentionists and abolitionists appeal to con-
sequentialist and nonconsequentialist moral theo-
ries. Retentionist arguments are often thoroughly
utilitarian, contending that use of capital punish-
ment can create a favorable balance of happiness
over unhappiness for society. One common argu-
ment is that the death penalty achieves such util-
ity through prevention— by preventing the criminal
from striking again. Better than any other form of
punishment, the retentionist says, the death pen-
alty protects society from repeat criminals, those
violent and dangerous offenders who cannot be
reformed. The retentionist claims that life in prison
without parole— the usual alternative to the death
penalty— is an inadequate substitute. Violent lifers
can kill other inmates and prison guards, or they
can escape to terrorize society again. By also appeal-
ing to utility, the abolitionist may object to this
line of argument by insisting that the retentionist
produce empirical evidence showing that execut-
ing violent criminals does indeed protect society
better than the use of life sentences. After all, such
premises about deterrence are empirical claims,
and empirical claims require supporting evidence.
A related retentionist argument asserts that the
death penalty, more than any other form of pun-
ishment (including life in prison), can achieve great
overall utility through deterrence— the dissuading of
possible offenders from committing capital crimes.
This utilitarian argument is thought by many to be
the retentionists’ strongest. The utilitarian philoso-
pher John Stuart Mill claims that for a particular
kind of would- be criminal, capital punishment is
the most effective deterrent of all:
But the influence of punishment is not to be esti-
mated by its effect on hardened criminals. Those
whose habitual way of life keeps them, so to speak,
Carolina (1976), the Supreme Court declared man-
datory death sentences unconstitutional. Some
states instituted sentencing guidelines to provide
standards for the judge or jury deliberating about
whether to impose the death penalty. In Gregg v.
Georgia (1976), the court ruled that such death
penalty laws prescribing proper guidelines were
constitutional, at least in cases of murder. This rul-
ing in effect reinstated capital punishment in the
country, and executions resumed in the following
year. Since 1976, few state statutes have allowed the
death penalty for anything but homicide cases.
More recently the court has banned the use of
the death penalty for particular kinds of offend-
ers. In Atkins v. Virginia (2002), the court held
that the execution of mentally disabled persons
is cruel and unusual punishment and is therefore
unconstitutional. In Roper v. Simmons (2005), the
court held that executing those who were under
the age of eighteen when they committed their
crimes is also a violation of Eighth Amendment
protection against cruel and unusual punishment.
Before Roper, seven states had no minimum age
for execution, and fifteen states had set the mini-
mum at between fourteen and seventeen years
old. In Kennedy v. Louisiana (2008), the court ruled
a Louisiana statute unconstitutional. The law per-
mitted the death penalty for child rape in cases in
which the child did not die.
An important tradition in law that bears on
capital punishment is the distinction between types
of punishable killing: namely, between first- degree
murder, second- degree murder, and manslaughter.
Statutes vary by jurisdiction, but generally first-
degree murder is killing (1) with premeditation;
(2) while performing a major crime (felony) such as
armed robbery, kidnapping, or rape; or (3) involv-
ing particular egregious circumstances such as the
deaths of several people or of a child or police offi-
cer. Second- degree murder is killing without pre-
meditation but with some degree of intent (“malice
aforethought”). Manslaughter is killing without
premeditation or intent, as when one person kills

CHAPTER 18: CAPiTAl PunisHmEnT Á 669
influence, availability of lethal weapons, incidence
of illegal drug use, history of violence, income level,
and on and on. No two jurisdictions are exactly
alike, and many differences (both known and
unknown) could contribute to the rise or fall of seri-
ous crime rates.
Despite these research problems, many reten-
tionists still consider the case for deterrence strong.
They argue that even if science does not yet offer
unequivocal support for the death penalty’s power
to deter capital crimes, common sense does. The
philosopher Louis Pojman takes this tack. He con-
tends that it is obvious that most people want to
avoid jail and that long sentences will deter most
potential criminals better than short ones— and
that there are good reasons to believe that the death
penalty deters better still. One reason, he says, is
that a large proportion of crimes are committed
by criminals who weigh the risks and benefits of
their criminal activity and become more attracted
to particular crimes the milder the punishments
are. And there are good indications that the death
penalty would exert maximum deterrence in these
cases: “The fact that those who are condemned to
death do everything in their power to get their sen-
tences postponed or reduced to long- term prison
sentences, in the way lifers do not, shows that they
fear death more than life in prison.”7
The abolitionist can offer a couple of responses
to this argument from common sense. First, even
if the death penalty is a more severe punishment
than life in prison, it does not follow that the death
penalty deters murderers better. The prospect of
life in prison may very well deter future murderers
just as effectively as the death penalty can. Second,
it is possible that the threat of capital punishment
motivates potential killers not to avoid killing but
to try harder not to get caught.
Recognizing the uncertainties in trying to assess
levels of deterrence, some retentionists argue that
despite the unknowns, our wisest and most morally
responsible move is to bet that capital punishment
does deter murderers. The reasoning that leads to
at all times within sight of the gallows, do grow to
care less about it; as, to compare good things with
bad, an old soldier is not much affected by the
chance of dying in battle. I can afford to admit all
that is often said about the indifference of the pro-
fessional criminals to the gallows. Though of that
indifference one- third is probably bravado and
another third confidence that they shall have the
luck to escape, it is quite probable that the remain-
ing third is real. But the efficacy of a punishment
which acts principally through the imagination, is
chiefly to be measured by the impression it makes
on those who are still innocent; by the horror
with which it surrounds the first promptings of
guilt; the restraining influence it exercises over
the beginning of the thought which, if indulged,
would become a temptation; the check which
it exerts over the graded declension towards the
state— never suddenly attained— in which crime
no longer revolts, and punishment no longer
terrifies.6
Like the prevention appeal, the deterrence argu-
ment requires supporting evidence— specifically,
evidence showing that the execution of criminals
really does deter serious criminal behavior better
than lesser punishments such as imprisonment.
Abolitionists, however, are quick to question any
such evidence. In fact, even many retentionists
agree that the relevant scientific studies on the
deterrence question are conflicting or otherwise
inconclusive.
The central difficulty in conducting these studies
is the number of variables that must be controlled
to get reliable results. A social scientist, for example,
could select two very similar jurisdictions, one with
the death penalty and one without, and compare the
murder rates in each. Presumably, if capital punish-
ment deters murderers, then the jurisdiction using
the death penalty should have a lower murder rate
than the jurisdiction without it. But it is virtually
impossible to rule out the influence of extraneous
factors on the study results. Besides being influenced
by the penal system, murder rates may be affected
by many variables— unemployment, cultural con-
ventions, moral beliefs, political climate, media

670 Á PART 4: ETHiCAl issuEs
penalty. “I believe we have no right to risk addi-
tional future victims of murder for the sake of spar-
ing convicted murderers,” van den Haag asserts,
“on the contrary, our moral obligation is to risk the
possible ineffectiveness of executions.”8
A common abolitionist reply to this argument
is that the utilitarian calculation is incomplete. The
assessment of net happiness, says the abolitionist,
fails to take into account the possibility that the
death penalty could encourage violent crime instead
of just deterring it. How? Some argue that vio-
lent criminals who know they are likely to get the
death penalty may commit murder to avoid being
this conclusion is essentially a utilitarian calcula-
tion. The philosopher Ernest van den Haag was the
first to articulate this argument. The choice we are
faced with, he says, is either to use the death pen-
alty or not to use it— and we must choose while not
knowing for sure whether it is a superior deterrent.
If we use the penalty, we risk killing convicted mur-
derers (and saving innocent lives). If we abolish the
penalty, we risk bringing about the deaths of inno-
cent victims (and saving the lives of murderers). If
we must risk something, he says, it is better to risk
the lives of convicted murderers than those of inno-
cent people. Thus, our best bet is to retain the death
’
In recent years, controversy has surrounded execu-
tions by lethal injection because in a disconcerting
number of cases, the executions have gone horri-
bly wrong. In 2014, for example, in at least three
executions, instead of dying within ten or fifteen
minutes, the prisoners writhed or gasped for much
longer, up to nearly two hours in one instance.
Consider this more recent report on the problem:
WASHINGTON–A deeply divided U.S. Supreme
Court upheld the use of a controversial drug in
lethal- injection executions Monday, even as two
dissenting justices said for the first time they
think it’s “highly likely” the death penalty itself is
unconstitutional.
The justices voted 5–4 in a case from the state of
Oklahoma that the sedative midazolam can be used
in executions without violating a constitutional pro-
hibition on cruel and unusual punishment.
The drug that was used in executions in Ari-
zona, Ohio and Oklahoma in 2014 took longer
than usual and raised concerns that it did not per-
form its intended task of putting inmates into a
coma- like sleep.
In Oklahoma, state officials tried to halt the
lethal injection after the inmate writhed on the
gurney and moaned. He died 43 minutes after
the process began.
Executions have been on hold in Ohio since
a troubling 26-minute execution in 2014 during
which a prisoner getting a first- ever two- drug
combo repeatedly gasped and snorted. In Arizona,
officials were cleared of any wrongdoing in an
execution that lasted nearly two hours, but they
nevertheless changed the drugs they use to put
inmates to death.*
Do you think botched executions like these con-
stitute “cruel and unusual punishment” that is
prohibited by the Constitution? Are executions
morally permissible (or impermissible) regardless
of their cruelty? Why or why not? Do you believe
botched executions offer good reasons to do away
with the death penalty? Or do they merely suggest
there should be a ban on lethal injections but not
other forms of execution? Why or why not?
*Mark Sherman, “U.S. Court Oks Use of Drug Implicated
in Botched Executions,” Associated Press, June 29, 2015,
http://globalnews.ca/news/2081474/ u- s- court- oks- use-
of-drug-implicated-in-botched-executions/ (August 22,
2015). © The Associated Press. Reprinted by permission.
CRITICAL THOUGHT: The Morality Of Botched Executions

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CHAPTER 18: CAPiTAl PunisHmEnT Á 671
dignity of human life. For them, regardless of its
social utility, the death penalty is wrong because
it violates these principles. For example, they may
argue that everyone has a right to life (a basic moral
principle), even hardened criminals, and that the
death penalty is a violation of this right— therefore,
executing criminals is wrong. To this argument,
retentionists usually reply along these lines: people
do indeed have a right to life, but this right is not
absolute. That is, a person’s right to life can some-
times be overridden for good reasons. For example,
if your life is being threatened, it is morally permis-
sible to kill an attacker in self- defense. So the right to
life does not hold in every situation no matter what.
It may be morally permissible, then, to sometimes
set this right aside.
To make their case, abolitionists often appeal to
notions of fairness or justice. One prevalent argu-
ment is based on the assertion that our penal system
is inherently unjust, sometimes executing innocent
people (numerous cases have come to light in which
people who had been executed or who were on
death row were later found to be innocent). Because
the death penalty is irrevocable— that is, there is no
way to “undo” an execution or to compensate the
executed— the execution of the innocent is an espe-
cially egregious miscarriage of justice. Therefore, we
should get rid of the death penalty, since abolition
is the only way to avoid such tragedies. Retention-
ists are generally unmoved by this argument, offer-
ing counterarguments like this one:
Miscarriages of justice result in innocent people
being sentenced to death and executed, even in
criminal- law systems in which greatest care is
taken to ensure that it never comes to that. But
this does not stem from the intrinsic nature of the
institution of capital punishment; it results from
deficiencies, limitations, and imperfections of the
criminal law procedures in which this punishment
is meted out. Errors of justice do not demonstrate
the need to do away with capital punishment; they
simply make it incumbent on us to do everything
possible to improve even further procedures of
meting it out.10
captured. In addition, some abolitionists maintain
that capital punishment has a brutalizing effect on
society— it makes killing human beings seem more
morally and psychologically acceptable. If so, exe-
cuting people could cause more harm than good
and be a very poor bet for society.
On utilitarian grounds, abolitionists can attack
capital punishment directly (as opposed to simply
countering retentionist arguments). In perhaps the
most common of such approaches, the abolitionist
argues that more net happiness is created in soci-
ety by sentencing murderers to life in prison with-
out parole than by executing them. Life sentences
promote the welfare of society by preventing mur-
derers from killing again— and they do so without
generating the disadvantages and pain inherent in
a system of capital punishment.
Another utilitarian argument against the death
penalty is that this form of punishment is simply
too costly:
The death penalty is much more expensive than
its closest alternative— life imprisonment with no
parole. Capital trials are longer and more expen-
sive at every step than other murder trials. Pre-
trial motions, expert witness investigations, jury
selection, and the necessity for two trials— one on
guilt and one on sentencing— make capital cases
extremely costly, even before the appeals process
begins. Guilty pleas are almost unheard of when the
punishment is death. In addition, many of these tri-
als result in a life sentence rather than the death pen-
alty, so the state pays the cost of life imprisonment
on top of the expensive trial.9
Retentionists often respond to this argument by
questioning whether the costs have been calculated
accurately and fairly. Perhaps more often, they offer
a nonconsequentialist reply: if the death penalty
is a just punishment, then the costs involved are
irrelevant.
In the death penalty debate, appeals to noncon-
sequentialist theories are common on both sides
of the issue. Abolitionists devise arguments against
capital punishment using what they take to be fun-
damental moral principles regarding the value or

672 Á PART 4: ETHiCAl issuEs
innocent person, says the retributivist, is so hei-
nous a crime, such an intolerable evil, that it merits
the ultimate punishment— the death of the mur-
derer. So when the killer takes a life, she must forfeit
her own. As Kant says,
Even if a civil society resolved to dissolve itself with
the consent of all its members . . . the last murderer
lying in prison ought to be executed before the res-
olution was carried out. This ought to be done in
order that every one may realize the desert of his
deeds, and that blood- guiltiness may not remain on
the people; for otherwise they will all be regarded as
participants in the murder as a public violation of
justice.12
Perhaps surprisingly, often the retributivist also
appeals to the dignity and worth of the murderer.
As Kant notes, treating persons with respect means
treating them as rational agents who make free
choices and are responsible for their actions. To justly
punish persons— to give them what they deserve—
is to acknowledge their status as responsible agents
deserving of respect. He asserts, then, that executing
’ QUICK REVIEW
abolitionist— One who wishes to abolish capital
punishment.
retentionst— One who wishes to retain the death
penalty.
punishment— The deliberate and authorized caus-
ing of pain or harm to someone though to have
broken a law.
capital punishment— Punishment by execution of
someone officially judged to have committed a
serious, or capital, crime.
retributivism— The view that offenders deserve
to be punished, or ‘‘paid back,’’ for their crimes
and to be punished in proportion to the sever-
ity of their offenses.
The main nonconsequentialist argument
for the death penalty is based on the theory of
punishment known as retributivism— the view
that offenders deserve to be punished, or “paid
back,” for their crimes and to be punished in pro-
portion to the severity of their offenses. Retribu-
tivism says that offenders should be punished
because they deserve to be punished. Punishment is
a matter of justice, not social utility. If offenders
are not punished, justice is not done. Kant, prob-
ably the most influential retributivist, declares
that there is only one reason to punish someone
for his offenses:
Juridical punishment can never be administered
merely as a means for promoting another good
either with regard to the criminal himself or to
civil society, but must in all cases be imposed only
because the individual on whom it is inflicted has
committed a crime.11
We can distinguish two kinds of retributiv-
ism according to the nature of the penal payback
required. Kant accepts retributivism based on the
doctrine of lex talionis— the idea that the punish-
ment should match the crime in kind, that justice
demands “an eye for an eye, a life for a life.” He
thinks that whatever harm the criminal does to
the innocent, that same kind of harm should be
done to the criminal. Thus, the only just punish-
ment for a man who wrongfully and deliberately
takes someone’s life is the taking of his life. Other
retributivists are uncomfortable with the notion
of punishing in kind (should rapists be raped?
should torturers be tortured?). They favor propor
tional retributivism, in which punishment reflects
the seriousness of the crime but does not neces-
sarily resemble the crime. For these retributivists,
murder is the worst possible crime and deserves
the worst possible punishment— the death of the
offender.
Underpinning many retributive views of capital
punishment is a Kantian emphasis on respect for
persons. Persons have dignity and inherent worth
and are ends in themselves. Deliberately killing an

CHAPTER 18: CAPiTAl PunisHmEnT Á 673
for example, that blacks convicted of murder are
more likely to be sentenced to death than whites
convicted of murder. How is this claim supported?
Here is one way:
[T]he Reverend Jesse Jackson, in his book Legal Lynch
ing, argues that “[n]umerous researchers have shown
conclusively that African American defendants are
far more likely to receive the death penalty than are
white defendants charged with the same crime.” The
support for this claim is said to be the undisputed
fact that when compared to their percentage in the
overall population African Americans are overrepre-
sented on death row. For example, while 12 percent
of the population is African American, about 43
percent of death row inmates are African American,
and 38 percent of prisoners executed since 1977 are
African American.13
But such statistical comparisons can be mis-
leading, say some retentionists:
The relevant population for comparison is not the
general population, but rather the population of
murderers. If the death penalty is administered
without regard to race, the percentage of African
American death row inmates found at the end of the
process should not exceed the percentage of African
American defendants charged with murder at the
beginning. The available statistics indicate that is
precisely what happens. The Department of Justice
found that while African Americans constituted 48
percent of adults charged with homicide, they were
only 41 percent of those admitted to prison under
sentence of death. In other words, once arrested for
murder, blacks are actually less likely to receive a cap-
ital sentence than are whites.14
Needless to say, Premise 3 (in the form exam-
ined here and in several other variations) is con-
troversial. That does not mean, of course, that its
truth or falsity is unknowable. New research or
conscientious examination of existing research
may provide the support that Premise 3 requires.
In any event, the support must come in the
form of solid statistical data carefully interpreted.
Anecdotal evidence— for example, news stories
a murderer is not an affront to human dignity but a
recognition of it.
A frequent reaction to the retributivist view is
that penal retribution is not justice but revenge.
The retributivist replies that this charge is mud-
dled: vengeance refers to making the offender suffer
because of one’s sense of outrage, grief, or frustra-
tion toward her and her crime; retribution involves
moral deliberation about an offender’s just deserts.
MORAL ARGUMENTS
Is the death penalty a morally permissible form
of punishment? As you know by now, many argu-
ments have been put forth on both sides of this
issue— too many for any single book to tackle, let
alone a single chapter. But we can dissect one of the
more widely used (and interesting) examples. Let
us begin with a popular argument against the death
penalty:
1. If the death penalty discriminates against blacks,
it is unjust.
2. If the death penalty is unjust, it should be
abolished.
3. The death penalty discriminates against blacks.
4. Therefore, the death penalty should be
abolished.
This argument is valid, so our evaluation of it
should focus on the truth of the premises. Premises 1
and 2 are moral statements; Premise 3 is an empirical
statement about the use of the death penalty against
African Americans. (Arguments like this are used
with equal force when focusing on other minority
groups as well as the poor and uneducated; for sim-
plicity’s sake we focus on blacks, who make up the
largest segment of minority death row inmates.)
Let us examine the empirical claim first: is Prem-
ise 3 true? We can give it more precision by recast-
ing it like this: The administration of the death
penalty is biased against blacks. Many abolitionists
insist that this claim is indeed accurate. They say,

674 Á PART 4: ETHiCAl issuEs
it is administered. In the real world, there is only the
death- penalty- as- actually- applied, which is ines-
capably unfair.
A common reply to the abolitionist under-
standing of Premise 1 is that it misses an impor-
tant distinction: the unjust administration of a
punishment does not entail the injustice of the
punishment itself. As one retentionist says,
[This charge of unfairness] is not an argument, either
against the death penalty or against any other form
of punishment. It is an argument against unjust and
inequitable distribution of penalties. If the trials of
wealthy men are less likely to result in convictions
than those of poor men, then something must be
done to reform the procedure in criminal courts. . . .
But the maldistribution of penalties is no argument
against any particular form of penalty.15
It seems that we cannot decide the truth of
Premise 1 without a much more thorough exami-
nation of the arguments for and against it, a task
of apparent unequal treatment of whites and
blacks— cannot help us much.
As we did with Premise 3, we can restate Prem-
ise 1 to make it more specific: If the administration
of the death penalty is biased against blacks, it is
unjust. On a straightforward reading, this assertion
would seem to be acceptable to both retentionists
and abolitionists. Few would deny that applying
the death penalty in a discriminatory fashion is
unjust, for equals must be treated equally. On this
reading, the premise is almost certainly true. But
many abolitionists would interpret the statement
differently. They would contend that if the admin-
istration of the death penalty is biased against
blacks, then the death penalty itself is unjust. Some
abolitionists accept this view because they believe
there is no way to apply the death penalty fairly;
the administration of capital punishment is inher-
ently unjust. Others would say that there is no way
to separate the “death penalty itself” from the way
’
Consider the contrasts in the description of two
men executed on the same day for a capital crime:
One is Troy Davis, a black man who was convicted
of killing a white off- duty police officer in Savan-
nah, Georgia, in 1989. The other is Lawrence
Brewer, a white man who in 1998 participated in
the grisly murder of James Byrd Jr., a black man
whom Brewer and two other men attacked.*
Davis said to the last that he was innocent, no
physical evidence or weapon tied him to the crime,
and many witnesses against him at the trial later re-
canted their testimony. Millions of people, includ-
ing the pope, pleaded for mercy for Davis. Brewer
admitted his crime, in which he and two other men
chained a black man to a pickup truck and dragged
him until his body was torn into pieces. Later, in
letters he wrote in jail, Brewer bragged about the
murder and touted the thrill it gave him. Few asked
for mercy for Brewer.
What do these very different cases suggest
about the system of capital punishment in the Unit-
ed States? Despite the contrast between these two
men— one despicable and clearly guilty, the other a
sympathetic character whose guilt was in doubt—
they were both executed by the state. Does this
outcome suggest that an injustice was perpetrated?
Should the nature of the crime, the character of the
accused, or the degree of certainty about guilt affect
the penalty for a crime? Based on the information
given here, would you say that justice was done?
*Trymaine Lee, “Troy Davis and Lawrence Brewer, a
Tale of Two Executions,” Huffington Post, September
21, 2011, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/21
/troy-davis-and-lawrence-b_n_974293.html.
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CHAPTER 18: CAPiTAl PunisHmEnT Á 675
of the death penalty discriminates against blacks,
that this biased treatment is unconscionable and
unjust, and that such a discriminatory system
should be reformed or abolished— and still consis-
tently believe that it can be morally permissible for
the state to put a convicted murderer to death.
CHAPTER REVIEW
SUMMARY
Capital punishment is a form of legal punishment—
execution— reserved for someone convicted of
committing a capital crime, usually some form of
murder. Abolitionists wish to abolish capital pun-
ishment; retentionists want to retain it. In several
decisions, the U.S. Supreme court has sanctioned
and circumscribed the use of the death penalty. In
Gregg v. Georgia, the court ruled that administration
of the death penalty— if used according to proper
guidelines— is constitutional in cases of murder.
Other rulings banned the execution of disabled per-
sons and of those who were under eighteen when
they committed their crimes.
Both retentionists and abolitionists appeal to
utilitarianism and nonconsequentialist moral theo-
ries to make their case. Retentionists often argue
that the death penalty maximizes the welfare of soci-
ety by preventing repeat crimes or deterring future
crimes. Retributivists argue on nonconsequentialist
grounds that capital punishment is morally permis-
sible because it accords with the demands of justice.
Abolitionists, on the other hand, often contend that
the death penalty does more harm than good to soci-
ety and that life in prison without parole results in
more net happiness than executions do. Many abo-
litionists also take the nonconsequentialist route by
insisting that the death penalty violates some funda-
mental moral principles— the right to life, the dignity
of human beings, and the injustice of executing the
innocent.
beyond the scope of this discussion. So let us move
to our revised Premise 2: If the administration of
the death penalty is unjust, it should be abolished.
As you can see, this premise has the same kind of
ambiguity that we see in Premise 1. Again the abo-
litionist reading is that an unjust application of
the death penalty is an indictment against capital
punishment itself, so capital punishment should
be abolished. Thus the same arguments and
counterarguments surrounding Premise 1 also
apply here.
At this point, we have not determined whether
this abolitionist argument is a good one. But we
have gained insight into this part of the capital
punishment debate. Look again at the argument in
its revised form:
1. If the administration of the death penalty is
biased against blacks, it is unjust.
2. If the administration of the death penalty is
unjust, it should be abolished.
3. The administration of the death penalty is
biased against blacks.
4. Therefore, the death penalty should be
abolished.
We have seen how difficult it can be to make
this argument work. If any one of the premises is
false, the conclusion is not supported and the argu-
ment fails. (Also, the argument is now valid only
on the reading preferred by abolitionists.) But we
have also found that the lynchpin of the argument
is the abolitionist view that injustice in the system
of capital punishment is the same as injustice in
capital punishment itself. If abolitionists can estab-
lish this equivalence, the argument is much more
likely to succeed. The other links in the chain of
reasoning— the injustice of discrimination and the
need to abolish unjust punishments— are generally
accepted by all parties to the dispute.
We have also learned something about the
retentionist position. We have discovered how
retentionists can readily agree that the application

676 Á PART 4: ETHiCAl issuEs
strong? What counterargument can the
abolitionist make?
5. The abolitionist argues that more net happiness
is created in society by sentencing murderers to
life in prison without parole than by executing
them. How would you counter this argument?
6. How does Pojman frame the deterrence argument?
Is his argument sound or strong? Explain.
7. What is van den Haag’s retention argument?
How would you respond to it?
8. What is the lex talionis doctrine of retributivism?
Do you accept it? Why or why not?
9. How can a Kantian respect for persons underpin
a retributive view of capital punishment?
10. Is capital punishment ever a just punishment
for murder? Why or why not?
FURTHER READING
Hugo Adam Bedau, “Capital Punishment and Social
Defense,” in Matters of Life and Death: New Introductory
Essays in Moral Philosophy, ed. Tom Regan, 2nd ed. (New
York: Random House, 1986).
Hugo Adam Bedau and Paul Cassell, eds., Debating the
Death Penalty: Should America Have Capital Punishment?
The Experts on Both Sides Make Their Best Case (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2004).
Gregg v. Georgia, 428 U.S. 153, 153–207 (1976). Justice
Potter Stewart et al., Opinion of the Court.
Gregg v. Georgia, 428 U.S. 153, 231–41 (1976). Justice
Thurgood Marshall, Dissenting Opinion.
Sidney Hook, “The Death Sentence,” New Leader, April 3,
1961.
Alex Kozinski, “Tinkering with Death,” New Yorker,
February 10, 1997, 48–52.
Burton Leiser, “The Death Penalty Is Permissible,” in
Liberty, Justice and Morals: Contemporary Value Conflicts,
3rd ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1986).
John Stuart Mill, “Speech in Favor of Capital Punish-
ment,” 1868, http://ethics.sandiego.edu/books/Mill
/Punishment/ (March 1, 2015).
Stephen Nathanson, “An Eye for an Eye?” in An Eye for
an Eye? The Morality of Punishing by Death (Totowa, NJ:
Rowman and Littlefield, 1987).
Louis P. Pojman, “Why the Death Penalty Is Morally
Permissible,” in Debating the Death Penalty: Should
America Have Capital Punishment? The Experts on Both
Sides Make Their Best Case, eds. Hugo Bedau and Paul
Cassell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
KEY TERMS
abolitionist (p. 666)
retentionist (p. 666)
punishment (p. 666)
capital punishment (p. 667)
retributivism (p. 672)
EXERCISES
Review Questions
1. What is an abolitionist? A retentionist? (p. 666)
2. What moral principles do abolitionists generally
appeal to? (p. 666)
3. What moral principles do retentionists appeal
to? (p. 666)
4. What fundamental moral principles do both
abolitionists and retentionists accept? (p. 666)
5. For what crime is the death penalty usually
reserved? (p. 666)
6. How many states now use capital punishment
in their criminal justice system? (p. 667)
7. In 1972, what Supreme Court case temporarily
halted executions in the United States? (p. 667)
8. For what kinds of offenders has the Supreme
Court banned the use of the death penalty?
(p. 668)
9. What is the deterrence argument against capital
punishment? (pp. 668–669)
10. What is the difference between first- degree
murder, second- degree murder, and
manslaughter? (p. 668)
Discussion Questions
1. What consequentialist arguments can
retentionists use to support their case? Do you
accept any of these arguments? Why or why
not?
2. What is the retentionist’s main non-
consequentialist argument? Do you accept it?
3. What moral theories can the abolitionist
appeal to? Which one do you think provides
the strongest reasons for abolishing capital
punishment?
4. What evidence is needed to shore up the
deterrence argument? Is this evidence obviously

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CHAPTER 18: CAPiTAl PunisHmEnT Á 677
Ernest van den Haag, “On Deterrence and the Death
Penalty,” Journal of Criminal Law, Criminology, and Police
Science 60, no. 2 (1969): 141–47.
William H. Shaw, “Punishment and the Criminal Justice
System,” in Contemporary Ethics: Taking Account of Utili
tarianism (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1999).
E T H i C A l D i l E m m A s
1. Redemption and Capital Punishment
In 2005, 51- year- old Stanley Tookie Williams, convicted murderer and Crips gang
co- founder, was executed by the State of California. His many supporters— including
celebrities such as Jamie Foxx and Snoop Dogg— denounced the execution as unjust
because while in prison he had sought and found redemption. As one report says,
The case became the state’s highest- profile execution in decades. Hollywood stars
and capital punishment foes argued that Williams’ sentence should be commuted
to life in prison because he had made amends by writing children’s books about the
dangers of gangs and violence.
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger rejected Williams’ plea for clemency on the grounds
that Williams was not genuinely remorseful about the Crips’ killings. Williams was
convicted of murdering four people— a 26- year- old store clerk and a couple and their
43- year- old daughter. At the trial, witnesses said he bragged and laughed about the
murders.
The Associated Press quoted Williams saying, “There is no part of me that existed
then that exists now.”*
Suppose Williams was guilty of the murders for
which he was convicted, and suppose he had a
genuine change of heart and performed many
commendable deeds while in prison. Should
Williams’s sentence then have been commuted
to life in prison? Why or why not? Is redemption
compatible with justice? If a murderer mends his
ways, should this change have an effect on his
punishment? Is mercy (giving someone a break)
compatible with justice (giving someone what he
deserves)?
*“Tookie Williams Is Executed,” CBSNews.com, 13 December 2005, http://www.cbsnews.com/news/tookie-wil
liams-is-executed-13-12-2005/ (January 27, 2015).
2. Poor Representation
Delma Banks, Jr. was charged in the 1980 murder of Richard Whitehead of Texas. The
only evidence against Banks was the testimony of an informant who in exchange for his
testimony received $200 and the dismissal of an arson charge that could have resulted

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678 Á PART 4: ETHiCAl issuEs
in his [sic] life sentence as a habitual offender. Banks’ lawyer did not vigorously cross-
examine the informant, nor did he investigate the case. Had he done so, he would have
learned of strong evidence that Banks was in another city at the time of the crime. Banks
received such poor representation that former FBI director and United States District
Court Judge William Sessions weighed in to urge the Supreme Court to temporarily stay
his execution. On April 21, 2003 the U.S. Supreme Court accepted Banks’ case for review.†
Do you think Banks should have gotten a new trial?
Assuming capital punishment is morally permissi-
ble, would it ever be right to put someone to death
who had not received adequate legal representa-
tion? Why or why not? What do you think would
constitute adequate legal representation? Suppose
someone who is duly sentenced to die got excellent
legal representation except for one minor point—
her lawyer dozed off for fifteen seconds during her
trial. Should this small lapse be a good enough
reason to throw out her conviction and demand a
new trial?
†American Civil Liberties Union, “Inadequate Representation,” from ACLU.org, October 8, 2003. Copyright
© 2003 American Civil Liberties Union, www.aclu.org/capital-punishment/inadequate-representation. Reprinted
with permission.
3. The Morality of Criminal Exonerations
How many are sentenced to death in the United States for crimes they did not commit?
A new study believes the figure is 1 in every 25—or 4.1 percent.
The study, released Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
“tells you that a surprising number of innocent people are sentenced to death,” Samuel
R. Gross, the lead author, said in an interview with Newsweek. “It tells you that a lot of
them haven’t been exonerated. Some of them no doubt have been executed.”
Since 1973, 144 people on death row have been exonerated. As a percentage of all
death sentences, that’s just 1.6 percent. But if the innocence rate is 4.1 percent, more
than twice the rate of exoneration, the study suggests what most people assumed
but dreaded: An untold number of innocent people have been executed. Further, the
majority of those wrongfully sentenced to death are likely to languish in prison and
never be freed.
“I’m a little surprised it’s this high,” said Richard Dieter, executive director of the
Death Penalty Information Center, a nonprofit that works to educate the public about
capital punishment. “I did not think the number would point to more than twice as
high” as the number of cases that end in exonerations.
In all, the study, “Rate of False Conviction of Criminal Defendants Who Are
Sentenced to Death,” shows that more than half of the innocent people sentenced to
death in the past 41 years are unaccounted for. . . .
The study seeks to put to rest the conventional wisdom that wrongful criminal
convictions are extremely rare. “[T]here is no shortage of lawyers and judges who
assert confidently that the number of wrongful convictions is negligible,” the authors
write. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, for example, quoted a New York Times

http://www.aclu.org/capital-punishment/inadequate-representation

http://www.ACLU.org

CHAPTER 18: CAPiTAl PunisHmEnT Á 679
op- ed in a 2006 concurring opinion to claim that felony convictions have an “error rate
.027 percent— or, to put it another way, a success rate of 99.973 percent.”‡
If a significant number of innocent people are
being sentenced to death, and many of these
people are wrongly executed, is this an argument
against capital punishment? That is, if there is a
real possibility of mistakenly executing the inno-
cent, should the death penalty be abolished? Why
or why not? Does the possibility of fatal errors in
our system of justice suggest that the whole system
should be scrapped? If we decide to retain capital
punishment, shouldn’t we at the same time try
hard to eliminate mistakes? How hard? To what
lengths should we go to ensure a just system of
punishment?
‡Pema Levy, “One in 25 Sentenced to Death in the U.S. Is Innocent, Study Claims,” Newsweek, April 28, 2014,
http://www.newsweek.com/ one- 25- executed-us-innocent-study-claims-248889 (August 22, 2017). © 2014 News-
week Media Group. All rights reserved. Used by permission and protected by the Copyright Laws of the United
States. The printing, copying, redistribution, or retransmission of this content without express written permis-
sion is prohibited.
In an average year about 20,000 homicides occur in
the United States. Fewer than 300 convicted murder-
ers are sentenced to death. But because no more than
thirty murderers have been executed in any recent
year, most convicts sentenced to death are likely to
die of old age.1 Nonetheless, the death penalty looms
large in discussions: it raises important moral ques-
tions independent of the number of executions.2
The death penalty is our harshest punishment.3 It
is irrevocable: it ends the existence of those punished,
instead of temporarily imprisoning them. Further,
although not intended to cause physical pain, execu-
tion is the only corporal punishment still applied
to adults. These singular characteristics contribute to
the perennial, impassioned controversy about capital
punishment.
I. DISTRIBUTION
Consideration of the justice, morality, or usefulness,
of capital punishment is often conflated with objec-
tions to its alleged discriminatory or capricious dis-
tribution among the guilty. Wrongly so. If capital
punishment is immoral in se, no distribution among
the guilty could make it moral. If capital punishment
is moral, no distribution would make it immoral.
Improper distribution cannot affect the quality of
what is distributed, be it punishment or rewards. Dis-
criminatory or capricious distribution thus could not
justify abolition of the death penalty. Further, mal-
distribution inheres no more in capital punishment
than in any other punishment.
Maldistribution between the guilty and the inno-
cent is, by definition, unjust. But the injustice does
not lie in the nature of the punishment. Because of the
finality of the death penalty, the most grievous maldis-
tribution occurs when it is imposed upon the innocent.
However, the frequent allegations of discrimination
and capriciousness refer to maldistribution among the
guilty and not to the punishment of the innocent.
R E A D i n G s
The Ultimate Punishment: A Defense
Ernest van den Haag
Ernest van den Haag, republished with permission of Harvard Law
Review Association, from “The Ultimate Punishment: A Defense,”
Harvard Law Review 99: 1662–69. Copyright © 1986 by Harvard
Law Review Association.

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680 Á PART 4: ETHiCAl issuEs
has eliminated a major source of racial discrimina-
tion. Concededly, some discrimination based on the
race of murder victims may exist; yet, this discrimina-
tion affects criminal victimizers in an unexpected way.
Murderers of whites are thought more likely to be exe-
cuted than murderers of blacks. Black victims, then,
are less fully vindicated than white ones. However,
because most black murderers kill blacks, black mur-
derers are spared the death penalty more often than
are white murderers. They fare better than most white
murderers.6 The motivation behind unequal distribu-
tion of the death penalty may well have been to dis-
criminate against blacks, but the result has favored
them. Maldistribution is thus a straw man for empiri-
cal as well as analytical reasons.
II. MISCARRIAGES OF JUSTICE
In a recent survey Professors Hugo Adam Bedau and
Michael Radelet found that 7000 persons were exe-
cuted in the United States between 1900 and 1985 and
that 25 were innocent of capital crimes.7 Among the
innocents they list Sacco and Vanzetti as well as Ethel
and Julius Rosenberg. Although their data may be
questionable, I do not doubt that, over a long enough
period, miscarriages of justice will occur even in capi-
tal cases.
Despite precautions, nearly all human activities,
such as trucking, lighting, or construction, cost the
lives of some innocent bystanders. We do not give
up these activities, because the advantages, moral or
material, outweigh the unintended losses.8 Analo-
gously, for those who think the death penalty just,
miscarriages of justice are offset by the moral benefits
and the usefulness of doing justice. For those who
think the death penalty unjust even when it does not
miscarry, miscarriages can hardly be decisive.
III. DETERRENCE
Despite much recent work, there has been no conclu-
sive statistical demonstration that the death penalty
is a better deterrent than are alternative punishments.
However, deterrence is less than decisive for either
side. Most abolitionists acknowledge that they would
continue to favor abolition even if the death penalty
Maldistribution of any punishment among those
who deserve it is irrelevant to its justice or morality.
Even if poor or black convicts guilty of capital offenses
suffer capital punishment, and other convicts equally
guilty of the same crimes do not, a more equal dis-
tribution, however desirable, would merely be more
equal. It would not be more just to the convicts under
sentence of death.
Punishments are imposed on persons, not on
racial or economic groups. Guilt is personal. The only
relevant question is: does the person to be executed
deserve the punishment? Whether or not others who
deserved the same punishment, whatever their eco-
nomic or racial group, have avoided execution is irrel-
evant. If they have, the guilt of the executed convicts
would not be diminished, nor would their punish-
ment be less deserved. To put the issue starkly, if the
death penalty were imposed on guilty blacks, but not
on guilty whites, or, if it were imposed by a lottery
among the guilty, this irrationally discriminatory or
capricious distribution would neither make the pen-
alty unjust, nor cause anyone to be unjustly punished,
despite the undue impunity bestowed on others.
Equality, in short, seems morally less impor-
tant than justice. And justice is independent of dis-
tributional inequalities. The ideal of equal justice
demands that justice be equally distributed, not that
it be replaced by equality. Justice requires that as many
of the guilty as possible be punished, regardless of
whether others have avoided punishment. To let these
others escape the deserved punishment does not do
justice to them, or to society. But it is not unjust to
those who could not escape.
These moral considerations are not meant to deny
that irrational discrimination, or capriciousness,
would be inconsistent with constitutional require-
ments. But I am satisfied that the Supreme Court has
in fact provided for adherence to the constitutional
requirement of equality as much as is possible. Some
inequality is indeed unavoidable as a practical matter
in any system.4 But, ultra posse nemo obligatur. (Nobody
is bound beyond ability.)
Recent data reveal little direct racial discrimina-
tion in the sentencing of those arrested and convicted
of murder.5 The abrogation of death penalty for rape

CHAPTER 18: CAPiTAl PunisHmEnT Á 681
comparisons of the cost of life imprisonment with the
cost of execution, apart from their dubious relevance,
are flawed at least by the implied assumption that life
prisoners will generate no judicial costs during their
imprisonment. At any rate, the actual monetary costs
are trumped by the importance of doing justice.
Others insist that a person sentenced to death
suffers more than his victim suffered, and that this
(excess) suffering is undue according to the lex talio
nis (rule of retaliation). We cannot know whether the
murderer on death row suffers more than his victim
suffered; however, unlike the murderer, the victim
deserved none of the suffering inflicted. Further, the
limitations of the lex talionis were meant to restrain
private vengeance, not the social retribution that
has taken its place. Punishment— regardless of the
motivation— is not intended to revenge, offset, or
compensate for the victim’s suffering, or to be mea-
sured by it. Punishment is to vindicate the law and the
social order undermined by the crime. This is why a
kidnapper’s penal confinement is not limited to the
period for which he imprisoned his victim; nor is a
burglar’s confinement meant merely to offset the suf-
fering or the harm he caused his victim; nor is it meant
only to offset the advantage he gained.13
Another argument heard . . . is that, by killing a
murderer, we encourage, endorse, or legitimize unlaw-
ful killing. Yet, although all punishments are meant to
be unpleasant, it is seldom argued that they legitimize
the unlawful imposition of identical unpleasantness.
Imprisonment is not thought to legitimize kidnap-
ping; neither are fines thought to legitimize robbery.
The difference between murder and execution, or
between kidnapping and imprisonment, is that the
first is unlawful and undeserved, the second a lawful
and deserved punishment for an unlawful act. The
physical similarities of the punishment to the crime
are irrelevant. The relevant difference is not physical,
but social.14
V. JUSTICE, EXCESS, DEGRADATION
We threaten punishments in order to deter crime. We
impose them not only to make the threats credible
but also as retribution (justice) for the crimes that
were shown to deter more murders than alternatives
could deter.9 Abolitionists appear to value the life of
a convicted murderer or, at least, his non- execution,
more highly than they value the lives of the innocent
victims who might be spared by deterring prospective
murderers.
Deterrence is not altogether decisive for me
either. I would favor retention of the death penalty
as retribution even if it were shown that the threat of
execution could not deter prospective murderers not
already deterred by the threat of imprisonment.10
Still, I believe the death penalty, because of its final-
ity, is more feared than imprisonment, and deters
some prospective murderers not deterred by the threat
of imprisonment. Sparing the lives of even a few pro-
spective victims by deterring their murderers is more
important than preserving the lives of convicted
murderers because of the possibility, or even the prob-
ability, that executing them would not deter others.
Whereas the lives of the victims who might be saved
are valuable, that of the murderer has only negative
value, because of his crime. Surely the criminal law is
meant to protect the lives of potential victims in pref-
erence to those of actual murderers.
Murder rates are determined by many factors; nei-
ther the severity nor the probability of the threatened
sanction is always decisive. However, for the long run,
I share the view of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen: “Some
men, probably, abstain from murder because they fear
that if they committed murder they would be hanged.
Hundreds of thousands abstain from it because they
regard it with horror. One great reason why they regard
it with horror is that murderers are hanged.”11 Penal
sanctions are useful in the long run for the forma-
tion of the internal restraints so necessary to control
crime. The severity and finality of the death penalty
is appropriate to the seriousness and the finality of
murder.12
IV. INCIDENTAL ISSUES: COST, RELATIVE
SUFFERING, BRUTALIZATION
Many nondecisive issues are associated with capital
punishment. Some believe that the monetary cost
of appealing a capital sentence is excessive. Yet most

682 Á PART 4: ETHiCAl issuEs
philosophers, such as Immanuel Kant and G. W. F.
Hegel, have insisted that, when deserved, execution,
far from degrading the executed convict, affirms his
humanity by affirming his rationality and his respon-
sibility for his actions. They thought that execution,
when deserved, is required for the sake of the convict’s
dignity. (Does not life imprisonment violate human
dignity more than execution, by keeping alive a pris-
oner deprived of all autonomy?)
Common sense indicates that it cannot be
death— our common fate— that is inhuman. There-
fore, Justice Brennan must mean that death degrades
when it comes not as a natural or accidental event,
but as a deliberate social imposition. The murderer
learns through his punishment that his fellow men
have found him unworthy of living; that because he
has murdered, he is being expelled from the commu-
nity of the living. This degradation is self- inflicted.
By murdering, the murderer has so dehumanized
himself that he cannot remain among the living.
The social recognition of his self- degradation is the
punitive essence of execution. To believe, as Justice
Brennan appears to, that the degradation is inflicted
by the execution reverses the direction of causality.
Execution of those who have committed heinous
murders may deter only one murder per year. If it does,
it seems quite warranted. It is also the only fitting
retribution for murder I can think of.
NOTES
1. Death row as a semipermanent residence is cruel, because
convicts are denied the normal amenities of prison life. Thus,
unless death row residents are integrated into the prison pop-
ulation, the continuing accumulation of convicts on death
row should lead us to accelerate either the rate of executions
or the rate of communications. I find little objection to inte-
gration.
2. The debate about the insanity defense is important for
analogous reasons.
3. Some writers, for example, Cesare Bonesana, Marchese
di Beccaria, have thought that life imprisonment is more
severe. However, the overwhelming majority of both abo-
litionists and of convicts under death sentence prefer life
imprisonment to execution.
were not deterred. Threats and punishments are nec-
essary to deter and deterrence is a sufficient practical
justification for them. Retribution is an indepen-
dent moral justification. Although penalties can be
unwise, repulsive, or inappropriate, and those pun-
ished can be pitiable, in a sense the infliction of legal
punishment on a guilty person cannot be unjust.
By committing the crime, the criminal volunteered
to assume the risk of receiving a legal punishment
that he could have avoided by not committing the
crime. The punishment he suffers is the punishment
he voluntarily risked suffering and, therefore, it is no
more unjust to him than any other event for which
one knowingly volunteers to assume the risk. Thus,
the death penalty cannot be unjust to the guilty
criminal.15
There remain, however, two moral objections. The
penalty may be regarded as always excessive as retri-
bution and always morally degrading. To regard the
death penalty as always excessive, one must believe
that no crime— no matter how heinous— could pos-
sibly justify capital punishment. Such a belief can be
neither corroborated nor refuted; it is an article of
faith.
Alternatively, or concurrently, one may believe
that everybody, the murderer no less than the victim,
has an imprescriptible (natural?) right to life. The law
therefore should not deprive anyone of life. I share
Jeremy Bentham’s view that any such “natural and
imprescriptible rights” are “nonsense upon stilts.”16
Justice Brennan has insisted that the death pen-
alty is “uncivilized,” “inhuman,” inconsistent with
“human dignity” and with “the sanctity of life,” that
it “treats members of the human race as nonhumans,
as objects to be toyed with and discarded,” that it is
“uniquely degrading to human dignity” and “by its
very nature, [involves] a denial of the executed per-
son’s humanity.” Justice Brennan does not say why
he thinks execution “uncivilized.” Hitherto most civi-
lizations have had the death penalty, although it has
been discarded in Western Europe, where it is currently
unfashionable probably because of its abuse by totali-
tarian regimes.
By “degrading,” Justice Brennan seems to mean
that execution degrades the executed convicts. Yet

CHAPTER 18: CAPiTAl PunisHmEnT Á 683
range of punishments be narrower than the range of crimes—
but not so narrow as to exclude the death penalty.
13. Thus restitution (a civil liability) cannot satisfy the puni-
tive purpose of penal sanctions, whether the purpose be
retributive or deterrent.
14. Some abolitionists challenge: if the death penalty is just
and serves as a deterrent, why not televise executions? The
answer is simple. The death even of a murderer, however
well- deserved, should not serve as public entertainment. It
so served in earlier centuries. But in this respect our sensibil-
ity has changed for the better, I believe. Further, television
unavoidably would trivialize executions, wedged in, as they
would be, between game shows, situation comedies and
the like. Finally, because televised executions would focus
on the physical aspects of the punishment, rather than
the nature of the crime and the suffering of the victim, a
televised execution would present the murderer as the vic-
tim of the state. Far from communicating the moral sig-
nificance of the execution, television would shift the focus
to the pitiable fear of the murderer. We no longer place in
cages those sentenced to imprisonment to expose them to
public view. Why should we so expose those sentenced to
execution?
15. An explicit threat of punitive action is necessary to
the justification of any legal punishment: nulla poena sine
lege (no punishment without [preexisting] law). To be suf-
ficiently justified, the threat must in turn have a rational
and legitimate purpose. “Your money or your life” does not
qualify; nor does the threat of an unjust law; nor, finally,
does a threat that is altogether disproportionate to the
importance of its purpose. In short, preannouncement
legitimizes the threatened punishment only if the threat
is warranted. But this leaves a very wide range of justified
threats. Furthermore, the punished person is aware of the
penalty for his actions and thus volunteers to take the risk
even of an unjust punishment. His victim, however, did not
volunteer to risk anything. The question whether any self-
inflicted injury— such as a legal punishment— ever can be
unjust to a person who knowingly risked it is a matter that
requires more analysis than is possible here.
16. The Works of Jeremy Bentham 105 (J. Bowring ed.
1972).
4. The ideal of equality, unlike the ideal of retributive justice
(which can be approximated separately in each instance), is
clearly unattainable unless all guilty persons are apprehended,
and therefore tried, convicted and sentenced by the same court,
at the same time. Unequal justice is the best we can do; it is still
better than the injustice, equal or unequal, which occurs if, for
the sake of equality, we deliberately allow some who could be
punished to escape.
5. See Bureau of Justice Statistics, U.S. Dep’t of Justice,
Bulletin No. NJC- 98,399, Capital Punishment 1984, at 9
(1985); Johnson, The Executioner’s Bias, Nat’l Rev., Nov. 15,
1985, at 44.
6. It barely need be said that any discrimination against (for
example, black murderers of whites) must also be discrimina-
tion for (for example, black murderers of blacks).
7. Bedau & Radelet, Miscarriages of Justice in Potentially Capital
Cases (1st draft, Oct. 1985) (on file at Harvard Law School
Library).
8. An excessive number of trucking accidents or of miscar-
riages of justice could offset the benefits gained by trucking
or the practice of doing justice. We are, however, far from this
situation.
9. For most abolitionists, the discrimination argument, see
supra pp. 1662–64, is similarly nondecisive: they would favor
abolition even if there could be no racial discrimination.
10. If executions were shown to increase the murder rate in
the long run, I would favor abolition. Sparing the innocent
victims who would be spared by the nonexecution of mur-
derers would be more important to me than the execution,
however just, of murderers. But although there is a lively dis-
cussion of the subject, no serious evidence exists to support
the hypothesis that executions produce a higher murder
rate.
11. H. Gross, A Theory of Criminal Justice 489 (1979)
(attributing this passage to Sir James Fitzjames Stephen).
12. Weems v. United States, 217 U.S. 349 (1910), suggests that
penalties be proportionate to the seriousness of the crime—
a common theme of the criminal law. Murder, therefore,
demands more than life imprisonment, if, as I believe, it is a
more serious crime than other crimes punished by life impris-
onment. In modern times, our sensibility requires that the

684 Á PART 4: ETHiCAl issuEs
From Justice, Civilization, and the Death Penalty: Answering van den Haag
Jeffrey H. Reiman
that injury equivalent to that he imposed is what the
offender deserves.2 But the lex talionis is not the only
version of retributivism. Another, which I shall call
“proportional retributivism,” holds that what retribu-
tion requires is not equality of injury between crimes
and punishments, but “fit” or proportionality, such
that the worst crime is punished with the society’s
worst penalty, and so on, though the society’s worst
punishment need not duplicate the injury of the worst
crime.3 Later, I shall try to show how a form of propor-
tional retributivism is compatible with acknowledg-
ing the justice of the lex talionis. Indeed, since I shall
defend the justice of the lex talionis, I take such com-
patibility as a necessary condition of the validity of
any form of retributivism.
There is nothing self- evident about the justice of
the lex talionis nor, for that matter, of retributivism.
The standard problem confronting those who would
justify retributivism is that of overcoming the suspi-
cion that it does no more than sanctify the victim’s
desire to hurt the offender back. Since serving that
desire amounts to hurting the offender simply for the
satisfaction that the victim derives from seeing the
offender suffer, and since deriving satisfaction from
the suffering of others seems primitive, the policy
of imposing suffering on the offender for no other
purpose than giving satisfaction to his victim seems
primitive as well. Consequently, defending retribu-
tivism requires showing that the suffering imposed
on the wrongdoer has some worthy point beyond
the satisfaction of victims. In what follows, I shall try
to identify a proposition— which I call the retributiv
ist principle— that I take to be the nerve of retributiv-
ism. I think this principle accounts for the justice of
the lex talionis and indicates the point of the suffering
demanded by retributivism. Not to do too much of the
work of the death penalty advocate, I shall make no
extended argument for the principle beyond suggest-
ing the considerations that make it plausible. I shall
identify these considerations by drawing, with con-
siderable license, on Hegel and Kant.
Jeffrey H. Reiman, excerpts from “Justice, Civilization, and the
Death Penalty.” Philosophy & Public Affairs 14(2): 115–42. Copy-
right © 1985 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Reproduced with permis-
sion of Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
On the issue of capital punishment, there is as clear a
clash of moral intuitions as we are likely to see. Some
(now a majority of Americans) feel deeply that justice
requires payment in kind and thus that murderers
should die; and others (once, but no longer, nearly a
majority of Americans) feel deeply that the state ought
not be in the business of putting people to death.1
Arguments for either side that do not do justice to the
intuitions of the other are unlikely to persuade anyone
not already convinced. And, since, as I shall suggest,
there is truth on both sides, such arguments are eas-
ily refutable, leaving us with nothing but conflicting
intuitions and no guidance from reason in distin-
guishing the better from the worse. In this context, I
shall try to make an argument for the abolition of the
death penalty that does justice to the intuitions on
both sides. I shall sketch out a conception of retribu-
tive justice that accounts for the justice of executing
murderers, and then I shall argue that though the death
penalty is a just punishment for murder, abolition of the
death penalty is part of the civilizing mission of mod-
ern states.
* * *
[I.] JUST DESERTS AND JUST PUNISHMENTS
In my view, the death penalty is a just punishment
for murder because the lex talionis, an eye for an eye,
and so on, is just, although, as I shall suggest at the
end of this section, it can only be rightly applied when
its implied preconditions are satisfied. The lex talionis
is a version of retributivism. Retributivism— as the
word itself suggests— is the doctrine that the offender
should be paid back with suffering he deserves because
of the evil he has done, and the lex talionis asserts

CHAPTER 18: CAPiTAl PunisHmEnT Á 685
point. Rather, equality of concern for people’s hap-
piness would lead us to impose as little suffering on
the wrongdoer as was compatible with maintaining
the happiness of others. This is enough to show that
retributivism (at least in this “Hegelian” form) reflects
a conception of morality quite different from that
envisioned by utilitarianism. Instead of seeing moral-
ity as administering doses of happiness to individual
recipients, the retributivist envisions morality as
maintaining the relations appropriate to equally sov-
ereign individuals. A crime, rather than representing
a unit of suffering added to the already considerable
suffering in the world, is an assault on the sovereignty
of an individual that temporarily places one person
(the criminal) in a position of illegitimate sovereignty
over another (the victim). The victim (or his represen-
tative, the state) then has the right to rectify this loss
of standing relative to the criminal by meting out a
punishment that reduces the criminal’s sovereignty in
the degree to which he vaunted it above his victim’s.
It might be thought that this is a duty, not just a right,
but that is surely too much. The victim has the right to
forgive the violator without punishment, which sug-
gests that it is by virtue of having the right to punish
the violator (rather than the duty), that the victim’s
equality with the violator is restored.
I call the second approach “Kantian” since Kant
held (roughly) that, since reason (like justice) is no
respecter of the sheer difference between individu-
als, when a rational being decides to act in a certain
way toward his fellows, he implicitly authorizes simi-
lar action by his fellows toward him.5 A version of the
golden rule, then, is a requirement of reason: acting
rationally, one always acts as he would have others act
toward him. Consequently, to act toward a person as
he has acted toward others is to treat him as a rational
being, that is, as if his act were the product of a rational
decision. From this, it may be concluded that we have
a duty to do to offenders what they have done, since
this amounts to according them the respect due ratio-
nal beings.6 Here too, however, the assertion of a duty
to punish seems excessive, since, if this duty arises
because doing to people what they have done to oth-
ers is necessary to accord them the respect due rational
beings, then we would have a duty to do to all rational
I think that we can see the justice of the lex talio
nis by focusing on the striking affinity between it and
the golden rule. The golden rule mandates “Do unto
others as you would have others do unto you,” while
the lex talionis counsels “Do unto others as they have
done unto you.” It would not be too far- fetched to say
that the lex talionis is the law enforcement arm of the
golden rule, at least in the sense that if people were
actually treated as they treated others, then every-
one would necessarily follow the golden rule because
then people could only willingly act toward others
as they were willing to have others act toward them.
This is not to suggest that the lex talionis follows from
the golden rule, but rather that the two share a com-
mon moral inspiration: the equality of persons. Treat-
ing others as you would have them treat you means
treating others as equal to you, because adopting the
golden rule as one’s guiding principle implies that one
counts the suffering of others to be as great a calam-
ity as one’s own suffering, that one counts one’s right
to impose suffering on others as no greater than their
right to impose suffering on one, and so on. This leads
to the lex talionis by two approaches that start from
different points and converge.
I call the first approach “Hegelian” because Hegel
held (roughly) that crime upsets the equality between
persons and retributive punishment restores that
equality by “annulling” the crime.4 As we have seen,
acting according to the golden rule implies treating
others as your equals. Conversely, violating the golden
rule implies the reverse: Doing to another what you
would not have that other do to you violates the equal-
ity of persons by asserting a right toward the other that
the other does not possess toward you. Doing back to
you what you did “annuls” your violation by reassert-
ing that the other has the same right toward you that
you assert toward him. Punishment according to the
lex talionis cannot heal the injury that the other has
suffered at your hands, rather it rectifies the indignity
he has suffered, by restoring him to equality with you.
“Equality of persons” here does not mean equality
of concern for their happiness, as it might for a utilitar-
ian. On such a (roughly) utilitarian understanding of
equality, imposing suffering on the wrongdoer equiv-
alent to the suffering he has imposed would have little

686 Á PART 4: ETHiCAl issuEs
our shared moral environment that none can ignore
in justifying their actions to one another.
* * *
The truth of the retributivist principle estab-
lishes the justice of the lex talionis, but, since it estab-
lishes this as a right of the victim rather than a duty,
it does not settle the question of whether or to what
extent the victim or the state should exercise this
right and exact the lex talionis. This is a separate moral
question because strict adherence to the lex talionis
amounts to allowing criminals, even the most barbaric
of them, to dictate our punishing behavior. It seems
certain that there are at least some crimes, such as rape
or torture, that we ought not try to match. And this is
not merely a matter of imposing an alternative punish-
ment that produces an equivalent amount of suffering,
as, say, some number of years in prison that might “add
up” to the harm caused by a rapist or a torturer. Even if
no amount of time in prison would add up to the harm
caused by a torturer, it still seems that we ought not tor-
ture him even if this were the only way of making him
suffer as much as he has made his victim suffer. Or, con-
sider someone who has committed several murders in
cold blood. On the lex talionis, it would seem that such
a criminal might justly be brought to within an inch
of death and then revived (or to within a moment of
execution and then reprieved) as many times as he has
killed (minus one), and then finally executed. But surely
this is a degree of cruelty that would be monstrous.
Since the retributivist principle establishes the lex
talionis as the victim’s right, it might seem that the
question of how far this right should be exercised is
“up to the victim.” And indeed, this would be the case
in the state of nature. But once, for all the good reasons
familiar to readers of John Locke, the state comes into
existence, public punishment replaces private, and
the victim’s right to punish reposes in the state. With
this, the decision as to how far to exercise this right
goes to the state as well. To be sure, since (at least with
respect to retributive punishment) the victim’s right is
the source of the state’s right to punish, the state must
exercise its right in ways that are faithful to the vic-
tim’s right. Later, when I try to spell out the upper and
persons everything— good, bad, or indifferent— that
they do to others. The point rather is that, by his acts,
a rational being authorizes others to do the same to
him, he doesn’t compel them to. Here too, then, the
argument leads to a right, rather than a duty, to exact
the lex talionis. And this is supported by the fact that
we can conclude from Kant’s argument that a rational
being cannot validly complain of being treated in the
way he has treated others, and where there is no valid
complaint, there is no injustice, and where there is
no injustice, others have acted within their rights.7 It
should be clear that the Kantian argument also rests
on the equality of persons, because a rational agent
only implicitly authorizes having done to him action
similar to what he has done to another, if he and the
other are similar in the relevant ways.
The “Hegelian” and “Kantian” approaches arrive
at the same destination from opposite sides. The
“Hegelian” approach starts from the victim’s equality
with the criminal, and infers from it the victim’s right
to do to the criminal what the criminal has done to
the victim. The “Kantian” approach starts from the
criminal’s rationality, and infers from it the criminal’s
authorization of the victim’s right to do to the crimi-
nal what the criminal has done to the victim. Taken
together, these approaches support the following
proposition: The equality and rationality of persons
implies that an offender deserves and his victim has
the right to impose suffering on the offender equal
to that which he imposed on the victim. This is the
proposition I call the retributivist principle, and I shall
assume henceforth that it is true. This principle pro-
vides that the lex talionis is the criminal’s just desert
and the victim’s (or as his representative, the state’s)
right. Moreover, the principle also indicates the
point of retributive punishment, namely, it affirms
the equality and rationality of persons, victims and
offenders alike. And the point of this affirmation is,
like any moral affirmation, to make a statement, to the
criminal, to impress upon him his equality with his
victim (which earns him a like fate) and his rationality
(by which his actions are held to authorize his fate),
and to the society, so that recognition of the equality
and rationality of persons becomes a visible part of

CHAPTER 18: CAPiTAl PunisHmEnT Á 687
be understood as translating the offender’s just desert
into its nearest equivalent in the society’s table of mor-
ally acceptable punishments. Then the two versions of
retributivism (lex talionis and proportional) are related
in that the first states what just punishment would be
if nothing but the offender’s just desert mattered, and
the second locates just punishment at the meeting
point of the offender’s just deserts and the society’s
moral scruples. And since this second version only
modifies the requirements of the lex talionis in light
of other moral considerations, it is compatible with
believing that the lex talionis spells out the offender’s
just deserts, much in the way that modifying the obli-
gations of promisers in light of other moral consid-
erations is compatible with believing in the binding
nature of promises.
* * *
[II.] CIVILIZATION, PAIN, AND JUSTICE
As I have already suggested, from the fact that some-
thing is justly deserved, it does not automatically fol-
low that it should be done, since there may be other
moral reasons for not doing it such that, all told, the
weight of moral reasons swings the balance against pro-
ceeding. The same argument that I have given for the
justice of the death penalty for murderers proves the
justice of beating assaulters, raping rapists, and tortur-
ing torturers. Nonetheless, I believe, and suspect that
most would agree, that it would not be right for us to
beat assaulters, rape rapists, or torture torturers, even
though it were their just deserts— and even if this were
the only way to make them suffer as much as they had
made their victims suffer. Calling for the abolition of
the death penalty, though it be just, then, amounts to
urging that as a society we place execution in the same
category of sanction as beating, raping, and torturing,
and treat it as something it would also not be right for
us to do to offenders, even if it were their just deserts.
To argue for placing execution in this category,
I must show what would be gained therefrom; and to
show that, I shall indicate what we gain from placing
torture in this category and argue that a similar gain
is to be had from doing the same with execution.
lower limits of just punishment, these may be taken as
indicating the range within which the state can pun-
ish and remain faithful to the victim’s right.
I suspect that it will be widely agreed that the
state ought not administer punishments of the sort
described above even if required by the letter of the
lex talionis, and thus, even granting the justice of
lex talionis, there are occasions on which it is mor-
ally appropriate to diverge from its requirements.
We must, of course, distinguish such morally based
divergence from that which is based on practicality.
Like any moral principle, the lex talionis is subject
to “ought implies can.” It will usually be impossible
to do to an offender exactly what he has done— for
example, his offense will normally have had an ele-
ment of surprise that is not possible for a judicially
imposed punishment, but this fact can hardly free
him from having to bear the suffering he has imposed
on another. Thus, for reasons of practicality, the lex
talionis must necessarily be qualified to call for doing
to the offender as nearly as possible what he has done
to his victim. When, however, we refrain from rap-
ing rapists or torturing torturers, we do so for rea-
sons of morality, not of practicality. And, given the
justice of the lex talionis, these moral reasons cannot
amount to claiming that it would be unjust to rape
rapists or torture torturers. Rather the claim must be
that, even though it would be just to rape rapists and
torture torturers, other moral considerations weigh
against doing so.
* * *
This way of understanding just punishment
enables us to formulate proportional retributivism so
that it is compatible with acknowledging the justice
of the lex talionis: If we take the lex talionis as spell-
ing out the offender’s just deserts, and if other moral
considerations require us to refrain from matching the
injury caused by the offender while still allowing us to
punish justly, then surely we impose just punishment
if we impose the closest morally acceptable approxi-
mation to the lex talionis. Proportional retributivism,
then, in requiring that the worst crime be punished
by the society’s worst punishment and so on, could

688 Á PART 4: ETHiCAl issuEs
torture. Torture is to be avoided not only because of
what it says about what we are willing to do to our fel-
lows, but also because of what it says about us who are
willing to do it. To torture someone is an awful specta-
cle not only because of the intensity of pain imposed,
but because of what is required to be able to impose
such pain on one’s fellows. The tortured body cringes,
using its full exertion to escape the pain imposed upon
it— it literally begs for relief with its muscles as it does
with its cries. To torture someone is to demonstrate a
capacity to resist this begging, and that in turn dem-
onstrates a kind of hardheartedness that a society
ought not parade.
And this is true not only of torture, but of all severe
corporal punishment. Indeed, I think this constitutes
part of the answer to the puzzling question of why we
refrain from punishments like whipping, even when
the alternative (some months in jail versus some
lashes) seems more costly to the offender. Imprison-
ment is painful to be sure, but it is a reflective pain,
one that comes with comparing what is to what might
have been, and that can be temporarily ignored by
thinking about other things. But physical pain has an
urgency that holds body and mind in a fierce grip. Of
physical pain, as Orwell’s Winston Smith recognized,
“you could only wish one thing: that it should stop.”9
Refraining from torture in particular and corporal
punishment in general, we both refuse to put a fellow
human being in this grip and refuse to show our ability
to resist this wish. The death penalty is the last corpo-
ral punishment used officially in the modern world.
And it is corporal not only because administered via
the body, but because the pain of foreseen, humanly
administered death strikes us with the urgency that
characterizes intense physical pain, causing grown
men to cry, faint, and lose control of their bodily func-
tions. There is something to be gained by refusing to
endorse the hardness of heart necessary to impose
such a fate.
By placing execution alongside torture in the
category of things we will not do to our fellow human
beings even when they deserve them, we broadcast
the message that totally subjugating a person to the
power of others and confronting him with the advent
of his own humanly administered demise is too
I select torture because I think the reasons for placing
it in this category are, due to the extremity of torture,
most easily seen— but what I say here applies with
appropriate modification to other severe physical pun-
ishments, such as beating and raping. First, and most
evidently, placing torture in this category broadcasts
the message that we as a society judge torturing so
horrible a thing to do to a person that we refuse to do
it even when it is deserved. Note that such a judgment
does not commit us to an absolute prohibition on tor-
turing. No matter how horrible we judge something to
be, we may still be justified in doing it if it is necessary
to prevent something even worse. Leaving this aside
for the moment, what is gained by broadcasting the
public judgment that torture is too horrible to inflict
even if deserved?
I think the answer to this lies in what we under-
stand as civilization. In The Genealogy of Morals,
Nietzsche says that in early times “pain did not hurt
as much as it does today.”8 The truth in this puzzling
remark is that progress in civilization is character-
ized by a lower tolerance for one’s own pain and that
suffered by others. And this is appropriate, since, via
growth in knowledge, civilization brings increased
power to prevent or reduce pain and, via growth in the
ability to communicate and interact with more and
more people, civilization extends the circle of people
with whom we empathize. If civilization is character-
ized by lower tolerance for our own pain and that of
others, then publicly refusing to do horrible things
to our fellows both signals the level of our civilization
and, by our example, continues the work of civilizing. And
this gesture is all the more powerful if we refuse to do
horrible things to those who deserve them. I contend
then that the more things we are able to include in
this category, the more civilized we are and the more
civilizing. Thus we gain from including torture in this
category, and if execution is especially horrible, we
gain still more by including it.
* * *
Thus far, by analogy with torture, I have argued
that execution should be avoided because of how
horrible it is to the one executed. But there are rea-
sons of another sort that follow from the analogy with

CHAPTER 18: CAPiTAl PunisHmEnT Á 689
enough from the thief so that what he is left with is less than
what he had before the offense is retribution, since this is just
what he did to his victim.
3. “The most extreme form of retributivism is the law of retali-
ation: ‘an eye for an eye’” (Stanley I. Benn, “Punishment,”
The Encyclopedia of Philosophy 7, ed. Paul Edwards [New York:
Macmillan, 1967], p. 32). Hugo Bedau writes: “retributive jus-
tice need not be thought to consist of lex talionis. One may
reject that principle as too crude and still embrace the retribu-
tive principle that the severity of punishments should be
graded according to the gravity of the offense” (Hugo Bedau,
“Capital Punishment,” in Matters of Life and Death, ed. Tom
Regan [New York: Random House, 1980], p. 177).
4. Hegel writes that “The sole positive existence which the
injury [i.e., the crime] possesses is that it is the particular will
of the criminal [i.e., it is the criminal’s intention that distin-
guishes criminal injury from, say, injury due to an accident].
Hence to injure (or penalize) this particular will as a will
determinately existent is to annul the crime, which otherwise
would have been held valid, and to restore the right” (G. W.
F. Hegel, The Philosophy of Right, trans. by T. M. Knox [Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1962; originally published in German in
1821], p. 69, see also p. 331n). I take this to mean that the
right is a certain equality of sovereignty between the wills of
individuals, crime disrupts that equality by placing one will
above others, and punishment restores the equality by annul-
ling the illegitimate ascendance. On these grounds, as I shall
suggest below, the desire for revenge (strictly limited to the
desire “to even the score”) is more respectable than philoso-
phers have generally allowed. And so Hegel writes that “The
annulling of crime in this sphere where right is immediate
[i.e., the condition prior to conscious morality] is principally
revenge, which is just in its content in so far as it is retribu-
tive” (ibid., p. 73).
5. Kant writes that “any undeserved evil that you inflict on
someone else among the people is one that you do to yourself.
If you vilify him, you vilify yourself; if you steal from him, you
steal from yourself; if you kill him, you kill yourself.” Since
Kant holds that “If what happens to someone is also willed by
him, it cannot be a punishment,” he takes pains to distance
himself from the view that the offender wills his punishment.
“The chief error contained in this sophistry,” Kant writes,
“consists in the confusion of the criminal’s [that is, the mur-
derer’s] own judgment (which one must necessarily attribute
to his reason) that he must forfeit his life with a resolution of
the will to take his own life” (Immanuel Kant, The Metaphy
sical Elements of Justice, Part I of The Metaphysics of Morals,
trans. by J. Ladd [Indianapolis: Bobbs- Merrill, 1965; originally
horrible to be done by civilized human beings to their
fellows even when they have earned it: too horrible
to do, and too horrible to be capable of doing. And
I contend that broadcasting this message loud and
clear would in the long run contribute to the general
detestation of murder and be, to the extent to which
it worked itself into the hearts and minds of the popu-
lace, a deterrent. In short, refusing to execute murder-
ers though they deserve it both reflects and continues
the taming of the human species that we call civiliza-
tion. Thus, I take it that the abolition of the death pen-
alty, though it is a just punishment for murder, is part
of the civilizing mission of modern states.
* * *
NOTES
1. Asked, in a 1981 Gallup Poll, “Are you in favor of the death
penalty for persons convicted of murder?” 66.25% were in
favor, 25% were opposed, and 8.75% had no opinion. Asked
the same question in 1966, 47.5% were opposed, 41.25% were
in favor, and 11.25% had no opinion (Timothy J. Flanagan,
David J. van Alstyne, and Michael R. Gottfredson, eds., Source
book of Criminal Justice Statistics— 1981, U.S. Department of
Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics [Washington, D.C.: U.S.
Government Printing Office, 1982], p. 209).
2. I shall speak throughout of retribution as paying back for
“harm caused,” but this is shorthand for “harm intention-
ally attempted or caused”; likewise when I speak of the death
penalty as punishment for murder, I have in mind premedi-
tated, first- degree murder. Note also that the harm caused
by an offender, for which he is to be paid back, is not neces-
sarily limited to the harm done to his immediate victim. It
may include as well the suffering of the victim’s relatives or
the fear produced in the general populace, and the like. For
simplicity’s sake, however, I shall continue to speak as if the
harm for which retributivism would have us pay the offender
back is the harm (intentionally attempted or done) to his
immediate victim. Also, retribution is not to be confused
with restitution. Restitution involves restoring the status quo
ante, the condition prior to the offense. Since it was in this
condition that the criminal’s offense was committed, it is this
condition that constitutes the baseline against which retribu-
tion is exacted. Thus retribution involves imposing a loss on
the offender measured from the status quo ante. For example,
returning a thief’s loot to his victim so that thief and victim
now own what they did before the offense is restitution. Taking

690 Á PART 4: ETHiCAl issuEs
complained that he was getting too much [punishment]
and therefore was being treated unjustly; everyone would
laugh in his face if he were to make such a statement” (Kant,
Metaphysical Elements of Justice, p. 104; see also p. 133).
8. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and The Genealogy
of Morals, trans. Francis Golffing (New York: Doubleday,
1956), pp. 199–200.
9. George Orwell, 1984 (New York: New American Library,
1983; originally published in 1949), p. 197.
published in 1797], pp. 101, 105–106). I have tried to capture
this notion of attributing a judgment to the offender rather
than a resolution of his will with the term ‘authorizes.’
6. “Even if a civil society were to dissolve itself by common
agreement of all its members. . . , the last murderer remain-
ing in prison must first be executed, so that everyone will duly
receive what his actions are worth” (Kant, ibid., p. 102).
7. “It may also be pointed out that no one has ever heard
of anyone condemned to death on account of murder who
The Case Against the Death Penalty
Hugo Adam Bedau
on another, then it is hard to see how morality could
require the victim to acquiesce in the attempt by
another to do so, even if resistance involves risks or
injury to the assailant.
The foregoing account assumes that the person
acting in self- defense is innocent of any provocation
of the assailant. It also assumes that there is no alter-
native to victimization except resistance. In actual life,
both assumptions— especially the second— are often
false, because there may be a third alternative: escape,
or removing oneself from the scene of imminent
aggression. Hence, the law imposes on us the “duty
to retreat.” Before we use violence to resist aggression,
we must try to get out of the way, lest unnecessary
violence be used to resist aggression. Now suppose
that unjust aggression is imminent, and there is no
path open for escape. How much violence may justi-
fiably be used to ward off aggression? The answer is:
No more violence than is necessary to prevent the
aggressive assault. Violence beyond that is unneces-
sary and therefore unjustified. We may restate the
principle governing the use of violence in self- defense
by reference to the concept of “deadly force” by the
police in the discharge of their duties. The rule is this:
Use of deadly force is justified only to prevent loss of
life in immediate jeopardy where a lesser use of force
cannot reasonably be expected to save the life that is
threatened.
CAPITAL PUNISHMENT AND SOCIAL DEFENSE
The Analogy with Self- Defense
Capital punishment, it is sometimes said, is to the
body politic what self- defense is to the individual. If
the latter is not morally wrong, how can the former
be? To assess the strength of this analogy, we need first
to inspect the morality of self- defense.
Except for absolute pacifists, who believe it is
morally wrong to use violence even to defend them-
selves or others from undeserved aggression, most of
us believe that it is not morally wrong and may even
be our moral duty to use violence to prevent aggres-
sion directed against either ourselves or innocent
third parties. The law has long granted persons the
right to defend themselves against the unjust aggres-
sions of others, even to the extent of using lethal force
to kill an assailant. It is very difficult to think of any
convincing argument that would show it is never
rational to risk the death of another to prevent death
or grave injury to oneself. Certainly self- interest dic-
tates the legitimacy of self- defense. So does concern
for the well- being of others. So also does justice. If it
is unfair for one person to inflict undeserved violence
From Hugo Adam Bedau, “Capital Punishment,” in Matters of
Life and Death, ed. Tom Regan (New York: McGraw- Hill, 1993),
177–79, 181–91. Copyright © 1993 McGraw-Hill Education.
Reprinted by permission.

CHAPTER 18: CAPiTAl PunisHmEnT Á 691
shot at by an aroused householder who does not know
whether the burglar is armed, and prudence may seem
to dictate the assumption that he or she is. Even so,
although the burglar has no right to commit a felony
against a person or a person’s property, the attempt
does not give the victims the right to respond in
whatever way they please, and then to excuse or jus-
tify such conduct on the ground that they were “only
acting in self- defense.” In these ways the law shows a
tacit regard for the life even of a felon and discourages
the use of unnecessary violence even by the innocent;
morality can hardly do less.
* * *
The Death Penalty and Deterrence
Determining whether the death penalty is an effec-
tive deterrent is even more difficult than determin-
ing its effectiveness as a crime preventive. In general,
our knowledge about how penalties deter crimes and
whether in fact they do— whom they deter, from which
crimes, and under what conditions— is distressingly
inexact. Most people nevertheless are convinced that
punishments do deter, and that the more severe a pun-
ishment is the better it will deter. For half a century,
social scientists have studied the questions whether
the death penalty is a deterrent and whether it is a
better deterrent than the alternative of imprisonment.
Their verdict, while not unanimous, is nearly so. What-
ever may be true about the deterrence of lesser crimes
by other penalties, the deterrence achieved by the
death penalty for murder is not measurably any greater
than the deterrence achieved by long- term imprison-
ment. In the nature of the case, the evidence is quite
indirect. No one can identify for certain any crimes
that did not occur because the would- be offender was
deterred by the threat of the death penalty and could
not have been deterred by a less severe threat. Likewise,
no one can identify any crimes that did occur because
the offender was not deterred by the threat of prison
even though he or she could have been deterred by
the threat of death. Nevertheless, such evidence as we
have fails to show that the more severe penalty (death)
is really a better deterrent than the less severe penalty
(imprisonment) for such crimes as murder.
In real life, violence in self- defense in excess of
the minimum necessary to prevent aggression, even
though it is not justifiable, is often excusable. One can-
not always tell what will suffice to deter an aggressor
and avoid becoming a victim; thus the law looks with
a certain tolerance upon the frightened and innocent
would- be victim who in self- protection turns upon a
vicious assailant and inflicts a fatal injury even though
a lesser injury would have been sufficient. What is not
justified is deliberately using more violence than is nec-
essary to avoid becoming a victim. It is the deliberate,
not the impulsive or the unintentional, use of violence
that is relevant to the death- penalty controversy, since
the death penalty is enacted into law and carried out
in each case deliberately— with ample time to weigh
alternatives. Notice that we are assuming that the act
of self- defense is to protect oneself or a third party. The
reasoning outlined here does not extend to the defense
of one’s property. Shooting a thief to prevent one’s auto-
mobile from being stolen cannot be excused or justified
in the way that shooting an assailant charging with a
knife pointed at one’s face can be. Our criterion must
be that deadly force is never justified to prevent crimes
against property or other violent crimes not immedi-
ately threatening the life of an innocent person.
The rationale for self- defense as set out above illus-
trates two moral principles of great importance to our
discussion. . . . One is that if a life is to be risked, then
it is better that it be the life of someone who is guilty
(in this context, the initial assailant) rather than the
life of someone who is not (the innocent potential vic-
tim). It is not fair to expect the innocent prospective
victim to run the added risk of severe injury or death
in order to avoid using violence in self- defense to the
extent of possibly killing his or her assailant. Rather,
fairness dictates that the guilty aggressor ought to be
the one to run the risk.
The other principle is that taking life deliberately
is not justified so long as there is any feasible alterna-
tive. One does not expect miracles, of course, but in
theory, if shooting a burglar through the foot will
stop the burglary and enable one to call the police for
help, then there is no reason to shoot to kill. Likewise,
if the burglar is unarmed, there is no reason to shoot
at all. In actual life, of course, a burglar is likely to be

692 Á PART 4: ETHiCAl issuEs
incited murders become part of its social cost. Impris-
onment, however, has not been known to incite any
murders or other crimes of violence in a comparable
fashion. (A possible exception might be found in the
imprisonment of terrorists, which has inspired other
terrorists to take hostages as part of a scheme to force
the authorities to release their imprisoned comrades.)
The risks of executing the innocent are also part of the
social cost. The historical record is replete with inno-
cent persons arrested, indicted, convicted, sentenced,
and occasionally legally executed for crimes they did
not commit. This is quite apart from the guilty persons
unfairly convicted, sentenced to death, and executed
on the strength of perjured testimony, fraudulent evi-
dence, subornation of jurors, and other violations of
the civil rights and liberties of the accused. Nor is this
all. The high costs of a capital trial and of the inevita-
ble appeals, the costly methods of custody most pris-
ons adopt for convicts on “death row,” are among the
straightforward economic costs that the death pen-
alty incurs. Conducting a valid cost/benefit analysis
of capital punishment would be extremely difficult;
nevertheless, on the basis of the evidence we have, it is
quite possible that such a study would show that aboli-
tion of all death penalties is much less costly than their
retention.
What If Executions Did Deter?
From the moral point of view, it is quite important to
determine what one should think about capital punish-
ment if the evidence were clearly to show that the death
penalty is a distinctly superior method of social defense
by comparison with less severe alternatives. Kantian
moralists, as we have seen, . . . would have no use for
such knowledge, because their entire case for the moral-
ity of the death penalty rests on the way it is thought
to provide just retribution, not on the way it is thought
to provide superior social defense. For a utilitarian,
however, such knowledge would be conclusive. Those
who follow Locke’s reasoning would also be gratified,
because they defend the morality of the death penalty
both on the ground that it is retributively just and on
the ground that it provides needed social defense.
What about the opponents of the death penalty,
however? To oppose the death penalty in the face of
If the death penalty and long- term imprisonment
are equally effective (or ineffective) as deterrents to
murder, then the argument for the death penalty on
grounds of deterrence is seriously weakened. One
of the moral principles identified earlier now comes
into play: Unless there is a good reason for choos-
ing a more rather than a less severe punishment for a
crime, the less severe penalty is to be preferred. This
principle obviously commends itself to anyone who
values human life and who concedes that, all other
things being equal, less pain and suffering is always
better than more. Human life is valued in part to the
degree that it is free of such experiences when they
serve no known purpose. If the death penalty is not a
more effective deterrent than imprisonment, then its
greater severity amounts to nothing less than gratu-
itous suffering and deprivation. Accordingly, we must
reject it in favor of some less severe alternative, unless
we can identify some more weighty moral principle
that the death penalty serves better and that any less
severe mode of punishment ignores. Whether there is
any such principle is unclear.
A Cost/Benefit Analysis of the Death Penalty
A full study of the costs and benefits involved in the
practice of capital punishment would not be confined
solely to the question of whether it is a better deterrent
or preventive of murder than imprisonment. Any thor-
oughgoing utilitarian approach to the death- penalty
controversy would need to examine carefully other
costs and benefits as well, because maximizing the bal-
ance of all the social benefits over all the social costs is
the sole criterion of right and wrong according to utili-
tarianism. . . . Let us consider, therefore, some of the
other costs and benefits to be calculated. Clinical psy-
chologists have presented evidence to suggest that the
death penalty actually incites some persons of unstable
mind to murder others, either because they are afraid to
take their own lives and hope that society will punish
them for murder by putting them to death, or because
they fancy that they, too, are killing with justification
analogously to the lawful and presumably justified kill-
ing involved in capital punishment. If such evidence
is sound, capital punishment can serve as a counter-
preventive or even an incitement to murder; such

CHAPTER 18: CAPiTAl PunisHmEnT Á 693
the execution of those who are found guilty by an
imperfect system of criminal justice. These hypotheti-
cal factual assumptions illustrate the contingencies
upon which the morality of opposition to the death
penalty rests. And not only the morality of opposition;
the morality of any defense of the death penalty rests
on the same contingencies. This should help us under-
stand why, in resolving the morality of capital punish-
ment one way or the other, it is so important to know,
as well as we can, whether the death penalty really does
prevent or incite crime, whether the innocent really
are ever executed, and how likely is the occurrence of
these things in the future.
How Many Guilty Lives Is One Innocent Life Worth?
The great unanswered question that utilitarians must
face concerns the level of social defense that executions
should be expected to achieve before it is justifiable
to carry them out. Consider three possible situations:
(1) At the level of a hundred executions per year, each
additional execution of a convicted murderer reduces
the number of murder victims by ten. (2) Executing
every convicted murderer reduces the number of mur-
ders to 5,000 victims annually, whereas executing only
one out of ten reduces the number to 5,001. (3) Execut-
ing every convicted murderer reduces the murder rate
no more than does executing one in a hundred and no
more than does a random pattern of executions.
Many people contemplating situation (1) would
regard this as a reasonable trade- off: The execution
of each additional guilty person saves the lives of ten
innocent ones. (In fact, situation (1) or something like
it may be taken as a description of what most of those
who defend the death penalty on grounds of social
defense believe is true.) But suppose that, instead of
saving 10 lives, the number dropped to 0.5, i.e., one
victim avoided for each two additional executions.
Would that be a reasonable price to pay? We are on
the road toward the situation described in (2), where a
drastic 90 percent reduction in the number of persons
executed causes the level of social defense to drop by
only 0.0002 percent. Would it be worth it to execute so
many more murderers to obtain such a slight increase
in social defense? How many guilty lives is one inno-
cent life worth? (Only those who think that guilty
incontestable evidence that it is an effective method of
social defense violates the moral principle that where
grave risks are to be run, it is better that they be run
by the guilty than by the innocent. Consider in this
connection an imaginary world in which executing
the murderer would invariably restore the murder vic-
tim to life, whole and intact, as though no murder had
ever occurred. In such a miraculous world, it is hard
to see how anyone could oppose the death penalty on
moral grounds. Why shouldn’t a murderer die if that
will infallibly bring the innocent victim back to life?
What could possibly be morally wrong with taking the
murderer’s life under such conditions? The death pen-
alty would be an instrument of perfect restitution, and
it would give a new and better meaning to lex talionis,
“a life for a life.” The whole idea is fanciful, of course,
but it shows as nothing else can how opposition to
the death penalty cannot be both moral and wholly
unconditional. If opposition to the death penalty is to
be morally responsible, then it must be conceded that
there are conditions (however unlikely) under which
that opposition should cease.
But even if the death penalty were known to be a
uniquely effective social defense, we could still imag-
ine conditions under which it would be reasonable to
oppose it. Suppose that in addition to being a slightly
better preventive and deterrent than imprisonment,
executions also have a slight incitive effect (so that for
every ten murders an execution prevented or deterred,
another murder was incited). Suppose also that the
administration of criminal justice in capital cases was
inefficient and unequal, and tended to secure convic-
tions and death sentences only for murderers who
least “deserved” to be sentenced to death (including
some death sentences and a few executions of the
innocent). Under such conditions, it would be reason-
able to oppose the death penalty, because on the facts
supposed more (or not fewer) innocent lives would be
threatened and lost by using the death penalty than
would be risked by abolishing it. It is important to
remember throughout our evaluation of the deterrence
controversy that we cannot ever apply the principle . . .
that advises us to risk the lives of the guilty to save the
lives of the innocent. Instead, we must rely on a weaker
principle: Weigh the risk for the general public against

694 Á PART 4: ETHiCAl issuEs
other than social defense; on that basis alone, the two
policies are equivalent and therefore equally acceptable.
CAPITAL PUNISHMENT
AND RETRIBUTIVE JUSTICE
No discussion of the morality of punishment would
be complete without taking into account the two
leading principles of retributive justice relevant to
the capital punishment controversy. One is the prin-
ciple that crimes ought to be punished. The other is
the principle that the severity of a punishment ought
to be proportional to the gravity of the offense. These
are moral principles of recognized weight. Leaving aside
all questions of social defense, how strong a case for
capital punishment can be made on their basis? How
reliable and persuasive are these principles themselves?
Crime Must Be Punished
Given the general rationale for punishment sketched
earlier, . . . there cannot be any dispute over the prin-
ciple that crime ought to be punished. In embracing
it, of course, we are not automatically making a fetish
of “law and order,” in the sense that we would be if
we thought that the most important single thing to
do with social resources is to punish crimes. Fortu-
nately, this principle need not be in dispute between
proponents and opponents of the death penalty.
Even defenders of the death penalty must admit that
putting a convicted murderer in prison for years is
a punishment of that criminal. The principle that
crime must be punished is neutral to our controversy,
because both sides acknowledge it.
The other principle of retributive justice is the
one that seems to be decisive. Under lex talionis, it
must always have seemed that murderers ought to be
put to death. Proponents of the death penalty, with
rare exceptions, have insisted on this point, and even
opponents of the death penalty must give grudging
assent to the seeming fittingness of demanding capital
punishment for murder. The strategy for opponents
of the death penalty is to argue either that (1) this
principle is not really a principle of justice after all,
or that (2) to the extent it is, it does not require death
for murderers, or that (3) in any case it is not the only
lives are worthless— or of worth equal to that of the
innocent— can avoid facing this problem.) In situation
(3), of course, there is no basis for executing all con-
victed murderers, since there is no gain in social defense
to show for each additional execution after the first out
of each hundred has been executed. How, then, should
we determine which out of each hundred convicted
murderers is the unlucky one to be put to death?
If a complete and thoroughgoing cost/benefit
analysis of the death penalty were possible, we might
be able to answer such questions. But an appeal merely
to the moral principle that if lives are to be risked then
let it be the lives of the guilty rather than of the inno-
cent will not suffice. (We have already noticed . . .
that this abstract principle is of little use in the actual
administration of criminal justice, because the police
and the courts do not deal with the guilty as such but
only with those judged guilty.) Nor will it suffice to
agree that society deserves all the crime prevention
and deterrence it can get as a result of inflicting severe
punishments. These principles are consistent with
too many different policies. They are too vague by
themselves to resolve the choice on grounds of social
defense when one is confronted with hypothetical
situations like those proposed above.
Since no adequate cost/benefit analysis of the death
penalty exists, there is no way to resolve these questions
from that standpoint at this time. Moreover, it can be
argued that we cannot have such an analysis without
already establishing in some way or other the relative
value of innocent lives versus guilty lives. Far from being
a product of cost/benefit analysis, a comparative evalu-
ation of lives would have to be available to us before
we undertook any such analysis. Without it, no cost/
benefit analysis of this problem can get off the ground.
Finally, it must be noted that our knowledge at present
does not indicate that we are in anything like the situa-
tion described above in (1). On the contrary, from the
evidence we do have it seems we achieve about the same
deterrent and preventive effects whether we punish
murder by death or by imprisonment. . . . Something
like the situation in (2) or in (3) may therefore be correct.
If so, this shows that the choice between the two poli-
cies of capital punishment and life imprisonment for
murder will probably have to be made on some basis

CHAPTER 18: CAPiTAl PunisHmEnT Á 695
dead owing to manslaughter, or to any kind of unin-
tentional, accidental, unpremeditated, unavoidable,
unmalicious killing are just as dead as the victims of
the most ghastly murder. Both the law in practice and
moral reflection show how difficult it is to identify all
and only the criminal homicides that are appropri-
ately punished by death (assuming that any are). Indi-
vidual judges and juries differ in the conclusions they
reach. The history of capital punishment for homi-
cides reveals continual efforts, uniformly unsuccess-
ful, to specify the criteria defining those homicides
for which the slayer should die. Sixty years ago, Jus-
tice Benjamin Cardozo of the United States Supreme
Court said of the distinction between degrees of mur-
der that it was
. . . so obscure that no jury hearing it for the first time
can fairly be expected to assimilate and understand it.
I am not at all sure that I understand it myself after try-
ing to apply it for many years and after diligent study
of what has been written in the books. Upon the basis
of this fine distinction with its obscure and mystifying
psychology, scores of men have gone to their death.2
Similar skepticism has been expressed on the reliabil-
ity and rationality of death- penalty statutes that give
the trial court the discretion to sentence to prison or to
death. As Justice John Marshall Harlan of the Supreme
Court observed some two decades ago,
Those who have come to grips with the hard task of
actually attempting to draft means of channeling capi-
tal sentencing discretion have confirmed the lesson
taught by history. . . . To identify before the fact those
characteristics of criminal homicide and their perpe-
trators which call for the death penalty, and to express
these characteristics in language which can be fairly
understood and applied by the sentencing authority,
appear to be tasks which are beyond present human
ability.3
The abstract principle that the punishment of death
best fits the crime of murder turns out to be extremely
difficult to interpret and apply.
If we look at the matter from the standpoint of the
actual practice of criminal justice, we can only con-
clude that “a life for a life” plays little or no role what-
ever. Plea bargaining (in which a person charged with
principle of punitive justice. As we shall see, all these
objections have merit.
Is Murder Alone to Be Punished by Death?
Let us recall, first, that not even the biblical world lim-
ited the death penalty to the punishment of murder.
Many other nonhomicidal crimes also carried this
penalty (e.g., kidnapping, witchcraft, cursing one’s
parents). In our own nation’s recent history, persons
have been executed for aggravated assault, rape, kid-
napping, armed robbery, sabotage, and espionage. It is
not possible to defend any of these executions (not to
mention some of the more bizarre capital statutes, like
the one in Georgia that used to provide an optional
death penalty for desecration of a grave) on grounds of
just retribution. Either such executions are not justi-
fied or they are justified on some ground other than
retribution. In actual practice, few if any defenders of
the death penalty have ever been willing to rest their
case entirely on the moral principle of just retribution
as formulated in terms of “a life for a life.” (Kant was a
conspicuous exception.) Most defenders of the death
penalty have implied by their willingness to use execu-
tions to defend not only life but limb and property as
well, that they did not place much value on the lives of
criminals when compared with the value of both lives
and things belonging to innocent citizens.
Are All Murders to Be Punished by Death?
European civilization for several centuries has tended
to limit the variety of criminal homicides punishable
by death. Even Kant took a casual attitude toward a
mother’s killing of her illegitimate child. (“A child
born into the world outside marriage is outside the
law . . . , and consequently it is also outside the pro-
tection of the law.”1) In the United States, the devel-
opment two hundred years ago of the distinction
between first- and second- degree murder was an
attempt to narrow the class of criminal homicides
deserving the death penalty. ( First- degree murder has
been variously defined. Typically it consists of (a) any
willful, deliberate, premeditated homicide or (b) any
homicide during the commission of another felony,
e.g., armed robbery, rape, burglary. Second- degree
murder is any other intentional homicide.) Yet those

696 Á PART 4: ETHiCAl issuEs
anger or with an insane or unbalanced mind. Moral
constraints, in short, prohibit us from trying to make
executions perfectly retributive. Once we grant that
such constraints are proper, it is unreasonable to insist
that the principle of “a life for a life” nevertheless by
itself justifies the execution of murderers.
Other considerations take us in a different direction.
Few murders, outside television and movie scripts,
involve anything like an execution. An execution, after
all, begins with a solemn pronouncement of the death
sentence from a judge; this is followed by detention of
the convicted person in maximum security awaiting
the date of execution, during which various complex
and protracted appeals will be pursued; after this there
is a clemency hearing before the governor, and then
“the last mile” to the execution chamber itself. As the
French writer Albert Camus once remarked,
For there to be an equivalence, the death penalty would
have to punish a criminal who had warned his victim
of the date at which he would inflict a horrible death
on him and who, from that moment onward, had con-
fined him at his mercy for months. Such a monster is
not encountered in private life.4
Differential Severity Does Not Require Executions
What, then, emerges from our examination of retribu-
tive justice and the death penalty? If retributive justice
is thought to consist in lex talionis, all one can say is
that this principle has never exercised more than a
crude and indirect effect on the actual punishments
meted out by society. Other moral principles interfere
with a literal and single- minded application of this
one. Some homicides seem improperly punished by
death at all; others would require methods of execu-
tion too horrible to inflict. In any case, proponents of
the death penalty rarely confine themselves to reli-
ance on nothing but this principle of just retribution,
since they rarely confine themselves to supporting the
death penalty only for murder.
But retributive justice need not be identified with
lex talionis. One may reject that principle as too crude
and still embrace the retributive principle that the
severity of punishments should be graded accord-
ing to the gravity of the offense. Even though one
need not claim that life imprisonment (or any kind of
a crime pleads guilty in exchange for a less severe sen-
tence than he might have received if his case went to
trial and he was found guilty), even where murder is
concerned, is widespread. Studies of criminal justice
reveal that what the courts (trial or appellate) in a given
jurisdiction decide on a given day is first- degree mur-
der suitably punished by death could just as well have
been decided in a neighboring jurisdiction on another
day either as second- degree murder or as first- degree
murder but without the death penalty. The factors that
influence prosecutors in determining the charge under
which they will prosecute go far beyond the simple
principle of “a life for a life.” Cynics, of course, will
say that these facts show that our society does not care
about justice. One might also reply that either justice
in punishment does not consist of retribution, because
there are other principles of justice; or there are other
moral considerations besides justice that must be hon-
ored; or retributive justice is not adequately expressed
in the idea of “a life for a life”; or justice in the criminal
justice system is beyond our reach.
Is Death Sufficiently Retributive?
Those who advocate capital punishment for murder
on retributive grounds must face the objection that,
on their own principles, the death penalty in some
cases is morally inadequate. How could death in the
electric chair or the gas chamber or before a firing
squad or by lethal injection suffice as just retribution,
given the savage, brutal, wanton character of so many
murders? How can retributive justice be served by any-
thing less than equally savage methods of execution?
From a retributive point of view, the oft- heard excla-
mation, “Death is too good for him!,” has a certain
truth. Are defenders of the death penalty willing to
embrace this consequence of their own doctrine?
If they were, they would be stooping to the squalor
of the murderer. Where the quality of the crime sets
the limits of just methods of punishment, as it will if
we attempt to give exact and literal implementation
to lex talionis, society will find itself descending to the
cruelties and savagery that criminals employ. What is
worse, society would be deliberately authorizing such
acts, in the cool light of reason, and not (as is usually
true of vicious criminals) impulsively or in hatred and

CHAPTER 18: CAPiTAl PunisHmEnT Á 697
facts cited above, would deny even this.) There is an
adequate remedy— execute more whites, women, and
affluent murderers.
Presumably, both proponents and opponents of
capital punishment would concede that it is a funda-
mental dictate of justice that a punishment should
not be unfairly— inequitably or unevenly— enforced
and applied. They should also be able to agree that
when the punishment in question is the extremely
severe one of death, then the requirement to be fair
in using such a punishment becomes even more strin-
gent. There should be no dispute in the death penalty
controversy over these principles of justice. The dis-
pute should begin only when one attempts to connect
the principles with the actual use of this punishment.
In this country, many critics of the death pen-
alty have argued, we would long ago have got rid of it
entirely if equal and fair application had been a con-
dition of its use. In the words of the attorneys who
argued against the death penalty before the Supreme
Court during 1972, “It is a freakish aberration, a ran-
dom extreme act of violence, visibly arbitrary and
discriminatory— a penalty reserved for unusual appli-
cation because, if it were usually used, it would affront
universally shared standards of public decency.”6 It is
difficult to dispute this judgment, when one considers
that there have been in the United States during the
past fifty years about half a million criminal homi-
cides, about a third of a million persons arrested for
these crimes, but fewer than four thousand executions
(all but three dozen of which were of men).
We can look at these statistics in another way to
illustrate the same point. If we could be assured that
the nearly four thousand persons executed were the
worst of the bad, repeated offenders impossible to
incarcerate safely (much less to rehabilitate), the most
dangerous murderers in captivity— the ones who had
killed more than once and were likely to kill again,
and the least likely to be confined in prison without
chronic danger to other inmates and the staff— then
one might accept half a million murders and a few
thousand executions with a sense that rough justice
had been done. But the truth is otherwise. Persons
are sentenced to death and executed not because
they have been found to be uncontrollably violent or
punishment other than death) “fits” the crime of mur-
der, one can claim that this punishment is the proper
one for murder. To do this, the schedule of punish-
ments accepted by society must be arranged so that
this mode of imprisonment is the most severe penalty
used. Opponents of the death penalty can embrace
this principle of retributive justice, even though they
must reject a literal lex talionis.
Equal Justice and Capital Punishment
During the past generation, the strongest practical
objection to the death penalty has been the inequity
with which it has been applied. As the late Supreme
Court Justice William O. Douglas once observed,
“One searches our chronicles in vain for the execution
of any member of the affluent strain of the society.5 One
does not search our chronicles in vain for the crime of
murder committed by the affluent. All the sociologi-
cal evidence points to the conclusion that the death
penalty is the poor man’s justice; hence the slogan,
“Those without the capital get the punishment.” The
death penalty is also racially sensitive. Every study
of the death penalty for rape (unconstitutional only
since 1977) has confirmed that black rapists (especially
where the victim is white) are far more likely to be sen-
tenced to death and executed than white rapists. Con-
victed black murderers are more likely to end up on
“death row” than are others, and the killers of whites
(whether white or nonwhite) are more likely to be sen-
tenced to death than are the killers of nonwhites.
Let us suppose that the factual basis for such a crit-
icism is sound. What follows for the morality of capi-
tal punishment? Many defenders of the death penalty
have been quick to point out that since there is noth-
ing intrinsic about the crime of murder or rape dictat-
ing that only the poor or only racial- minority males
will commit it, and since there is nothing overtly rac-
ist about the statutes that authorize the death penalty
for murder or rape, capital punishment itself is hardly
at fault if in practice it falls with unfair impact on the
poor and the black. There is, in short, nothing in the
death penalty that requires it to be applied unfairly
and with arbitrary or discriminatory results. At worst
such results stem from defects in the system of admin-
istering criminal justice. (Some, who dispute the

698 Á PART 4: ETHiCAl issuEs
crimes. It tends only to add new injuries of its own to
the catalogue of human brutality.
* * *
NOTES
1. Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysical Elements of Justice (1797),
Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs- Merrill (1965), translated by John
Ladd, p. 106.
2. Benjamin Cardozo, “What Medicine Can Do for Law”
(1928), reprinted in Margaret E. Hall, ed., Selected Writings of
Benjamin Nathan Cardozo. New York: Fallon, 1947, p. 384.
3. McGautha v. California, 402 U.S. 183 (1971), at p. 204.
4. Albert Camus, Resistance, Rebellion, and Death. New York:
Knopf, 1961, p. 199.
5. Furman v. Georgia, 408 U.S. 238 (1972), at pp. 251–252.
6. NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Brief for Peti-
tioner in Aikens v. California, O.T. 1971, No. 68-5027, reprinted
in Philip English Mackey, ed., Voices Against Death: American
Opposition to Capital Punishment, 1787–1975. New York: Burt
Franklin, 1976, p. 288.
hopelessly poor risks for safe confinement and release.
Instead, they are executed because at trial they had a
poor defense (inexperienced or overworked counsel);
they had no funds to bring sympathetic witnesses to
court; they are transients or strangers in the commu-
nity where they are tried; the prosecuting attorney
wanted the publicity that goes with “sending a killer
to the chair”; there were no funds for an appeal or
for a transcript of the trial record; they are members
of a despised racial or political minority. In short,
the actual study of why particular persons have been
sentenced to death and executed does not show any
careful winnowing of the worst from the bad. It shows
that those executed were usually the unlucky victims
of prejudice and discrimination, the losers in an arbi-
trary lottery that could just as well have spared them,
the victims of the disadvantages that almost always
go with poverty. A system like this does not enhance
human life; it cheapens and degrades it. However hei-
nous murder and other crimes are, the system of capi-
tal punishment does not compensate for or erase those
According to the retributive theory, consequences
of punishment, however important from the practi-
cal point of view, are irrelevant when it comes to its
justification; the moral consideration is its justice.
Punishment is morally justified insofar as it is meted
out as retribution for the offense committed. When
someone has committed an offense, he deserves to
be punished: it is just, and consequently justified,
that he be punished. The offense is the sole ground
of the state’s right and duty to punish. It is also the
measure of legitimate punishment: the two ought
to be proportionate. So the issue of capital punish-
ment within the retributive approach comes down
to the question, Is this punishment ever proportion-
ate retribution for the offense committed, and thus
deserved, just, and justified?
The classic representatives of retributivism
believed that it was, and that it was the only propor-
tionate and hence appropriate punishment, if the
offense was murder— that is, criminal homicide per-
petrated voluntarily and intentionally. In other cases,
the demand for proportionality between offense and
punishment can be satisfied by fines or prison terms;
the crime of murder, however, is an exception in this
respect, and calls for the literal interpretation of the lex
talionis. The uniqueness of this crime has to do with
the uniqueness of the value which has been deliber-
ately destroyed. We come across this idea as early as
the original formulation of the retributive view— the
biblical teaching on punishment: “You shall accept
no ransom for the life of a murderer who is guilty of
A Life for a Life
Igor Primoratz
Igor Primoratz, “A Life for a Life,” in Justifying Legal Punishment
(Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1989), 158–67. Copy-
right © 1997 by Igor Primoratz. All rights reserved. Used with per-
mission of the publisher. www.prometheusbooks.com

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CHAPTER 18: CAPiTAl PunisHmEnT Á 699
death; but he shall be put to death.”1 The rationale
of this command— one that clearly distinguishes the
biblical conception of the criminal law from contem-
poraneous criminal law systems in the Middle East— is
that man was not only created by God, like every other
creature, but also, alone among all the creatures, in the
image of God:
That man was made in the image of God . . . is expres-
sive of the peculiar and supreme worth of man. Of
all creatures, Genesis 1 relates, he alone possesses this
attribute, bringing him into closer relation to God
than all the rest and conferring upon him the highest
value. . . . This view of the uniqueness and supremacy
of human life . . . places life beyond the reach of other
values. The idea that life may be measured in terms of
money or other property . . . is excluded. Compensa-
tion of any kind is ruled out. The guilt of the murderer
is infinite because the murdered life is invaluable; the
kinsmen of the slain man are not competent to say
when he has been paid for. An absolute wrong has been
committed, a sin against God which is not subject to
human discussion. . . . Because human life is invalu-
able, to take it entails the death penalty.2
This view that the value of human life is not com-
mensurable with other values, and that consequently
there is only truly equivalent punishment for murder,
namely death, does not necessarily presuppose a the-
istic outlook. It can be claimed that, simply because
we have to be alive if we are to experience and realize
any other value at all, there is nothing equivalent to
the murderous destruction of a human life except the
destruction of the life of the murderer. Any other ret-
ribution, no matter how severe, would still be less than
what is proportionate, deserved, and just. As long as the
murderer is alive, no matter how bad the conditions of
his life may be, there are always at least some values he
can experience and realize. This provides a plausible
interpretation of what the classical representatives of
retributivism as a philosophical theory of punishment,
such as Kant and Hegel, had to say on the subject.3
It seems to me that this is essentially correct. With
respect to the larger question of the justification of
punishment in general, it is the retributive theory that
gives the right answer. Accordingly, capital punish ment
ought to be retained where it obtains, and reintroduced
in those jurisdictions that have abolished it, although
we have no reason to believe that, as a means of deter-
rence, it is any better than a very long prison term. It
ought to be retained, or reintroduced, for one simple
reason: that justice be done in cases of murder, that
murderers be punished according to their deserts.
There are a number of arguments that have been
advanced against this rationale of capital punishment.
Two of these arguments have to do, in differ-
ent ways, with the idea of the right to life. The first is
the famous argument of Beccaria that the state can-
not have the right to take away the life of its citizen,
because its rights in relation to him are based on the
social contract, and it cannot be assumed that he has
transferred his right to life to the state and consented
to be executed.
By what right can men presume to slaughter their fel-
lows? Certainly not that right which is the foundation
of sovereignty and the laws. For these are nothing but
the sum of the smallest portions of each man’s own
freedom; they represent the general will which is the
aggregate of the individual wills. Who has ever will-
ingly given up to others the authority to kill him? How
on earth can the minimum sacrifice of each individual’s
freedom involve handing over the greatest of all goods,
life itself? And even if that were so, how can it be recon-
ciled with the other principle which denies that a man
is free to commit suicide, which he must be, if he is able
to transfer that right to others or to society as a whole?4
The most obvious way of attacking Beccaria’s argu-
ment would be to call into question its philosophical
basis, the social contract theory of political obligation.
This is what Hegel does, for instance; he conceives of
the nature and grounds of political obligation in a
completely different manner, so he can do away with
Beccaria with a single sentence: “The state is not a con-
tract at all.”5 I shall not argue along these lines, how-
ever. This is not the place to take up the problem of
political obligation and to assess the social contract
theory as a solution to it. What Beccaria is saying here
can in any case be refuted even within the framework
of that theory.
Both steps in his argument are wrong, and for the
same reason. The act of consenting to be executed if
one commits murder is presented as a kind of suicide.

700 Á PART 4: ETHiCAl issuEs
I do not believe that the right to life (nor, for that
matter, any other right) is absolute. I have no general
theory of rights to fall back upon here; instead, let me
pose a question. Would we take seriously the claim to
an absolute, sacred, inviolable right to life— coming
from the mouth of a confessed murderer? I submit that
we would not, for the obvious reason that it is being
put forward by the person who confessedly denied
another human being this very right. But if the mur-
derer cannot plausibly claim such a right for himself,
neither can anyone else do that in his behalf. This sug-
gests that there is an element of reciprocity in our
general rights, such as the right to life or property. I
can convincingly claim these rights only so long as
I acknowledge and respect the same rights of others.
If I violate the rights of others, I thereby lose the same
rights. If I am a murderer, I have no right to live.
Some opponents of capital punishment claim that
a criminal law system which includes this punish-
ment is contradictory: “It seems absurd to me,” says
Beccaria, “that the laws, which are the expression of
the public will, and which hate and punish murder,
should themselves commit one, and that to deter
citizens from murder, they should decree a public
murder.”8
This seems to be one of the more popular argu-
ments against the death penalty, but it is not a good
one. If it were valid, it would prove too much. Exactly
the same might be claimed of other kinds of punish-
ment: of prison terms, that they are “contradictory”
to the legal protection of liberty; of fines, that they
are “contradictory” to the legal protection of prop-
erty. Fortunately enough, it is not valid, for it begs
the question at issue. In order to be able to talk of the
state as “murdering” the person it executes, one has to
use the word “murder” in the very same sense— that is,
in the usual sense, which implies the idea of the wrong
ful taking the life of another— both when speaking of
what the murderer has done to the victim and of what
the state is doing to him by way of punishment. But
this is precisely the question at issue: whether capital
punishment is “murder,” whether it is wrongful or
morally justified and right.
The next two arguments attack the retributive
rationale of capital punishment by questioning the
Against the background of this conflation, it seems
convincing to claim that it would be utterly unreason-
able to do that, and the case appears to be strengthened
even further by the appeal to the moral prohibition
of suicide. This latter prohibition is, of course, rather
controversial, to say the least; it was controversial in
Beccaria’s time as well. But his argument fails even if
we grant him this point. For by consenting to be exe-
cuted if I murder someone, I do not commit a kind of
suicide— I do not “sacrifice the greatest of all goods”
I have, my own life. My consent could be described in
these terms if it were unconditional, if it implied that
others were entitled to do with my life whatever they
chose, quite independently of my own choices and
actions. In order to show that capital punishment is
legitimate from the standpoint of the contract theory
of political obligation, however, we need not assume
that citizens have agreed to that. All that is needed
is the assumption of a conditional consent— consent
to be executed if one commits murder; and it is, of
course, up to everyone to choose whether to commit
such a crime or not. To agree to this, obviously, is not
the same as to sacrifice one’s life, to commit a suicide
of sorts. And it is not so unreasonable to assume that
citizens have agreed to this if, against the background
of the social contract theory, we grant, first, that the
laws, including criminal laws, ought to be just, and
second, that the only proportionate and hence just
punishment for murder is capital punishment.6
The second abolitionist argument makes use of
the idea of a right to life in a more straightforward
manner: it simply says that capital punishment is ille-
gitimate because it violates the right to life, which is a
fundamental, absolute, sacred right belonging to each
and every human being, and therefore ought to be
respected even in a murderer.7
If any rights are fundamental, the right to life
is certainly one of them; but to claim that it is abso-
lute, inviolable under any circumstances and for any
reason, is a different matter. If an abolitionist wants
to argue her case by asserting an absolute right to life,
she will also have to deny moral legitimacy to taking
human life in war, revolution, and self- defense. This
kind of pacifism is a consistent but farfetched and
hence implausible position.

CHAPTER 18: CAPiTAl PunisHmEnT Á 701
be able to demand that property, physical and per-
sonal integrity, and all other rights and interests of
individuals be given equal consideration in courts of
law either— that is, we shall have to accept systematic
discrimination between individuals on the basis of
the same criteria across the whole field. I do not think
anyone would seriously contemplate an overhaul of
the whole legal system along these lines.
The second argument having to do with the issue
of proportionality between murder and capital pun-
ishment draws our attention to the fact that the law
normally provides for a certain period of time to elapse
between the passing of a death sentence and its execu-
tion. It is a period of several weeks or months; in some
cases it extends to years. This period is bound to be one
of constant mental anguish for the condemned. And
thus, all things considered, what is inflicted on him is
disproportionately hard and hence unjust. It would be
proportionate and just only in the case of “a criminal
who had warned his victim of the date at which he
would inflict a horrible death on him and who, from
that moment onward, had confined him at his mercy
for months.”10
The first thing to note about this argument is that
it does not support a full- fledged abolitionist stand; if
it were valid, it would not show that capital punish-
ment is never proportionate and just, but only that it
is very rarely so. Consequently, the conclusion would
not be that it ought to be abolished outright, but
only that it ought to be restricted to those cases that
would satisfy the condition cited above. Such cases
do happen, although, to be sure, not very often; the
murder of Aldo Moro, for instance, was of this kind.
But this is not the main point. The main point is that
the argument actually does not hit at capital punish-
ment itself, although it is presented with that aim
in view. It hits at something else: a particular way
of carrying out this punishment, which is widely
adopted in our time. Some hundred years ago and
more, in the Wild West, they frequently hanged the
man convicted to die almost immediately after pro-
nouncing the sentence. I am not arguing here that
we should follow this example today; I mention this
piece of historical fact only in order to show that the
interval between sentencing someone to death and
claim that it is only this punishment that satisfies
the demand for proportion between offense and pun-
ishment in the case of murder. The first points out
that any two human lives are different in many impor-
tant respects, such as age, health, physical and men-
tal capability, so that it does not make much sense to
consider them equally valuable. What if the murdered
person was very old, practically at the very end of her
natural life, while the murderer is young, with most of
his life still ahead of him, for instance? Or if the vic-
tim was gravely and incurably ill, and thus doomed
to live her life in suffering and hopelessness, without
being able to experience almost anything that makes a
human life worth living, while the murderer is in every
respect capable of experiencing and enjoying things
life has to offer? Or the other way round? Would not
the death penalty in such cases amount either to tak-
ing a more valuable life as a punishment for destroying
a less valuable one, or vice versa? Would it not be either
too much, or too little, and in both cases dispropor-
tionate, and thus unjust and wrong, from the stand-
point of the retributive theory itself?9
Any plausibility this argument might appear
to have is the result of a conflation of differences
between, and value of, human lives. No doubt, any
two human lives are different in innumerable ways,
but this does not entail that they are not equally
valuable. I have no worked- out general theory of
equality to refer to here, but I do not think that one
is necessary in order to do away with this argument.
The modern humanistic and democratic tradition in
ethical, social, and political thought is based on the
idea that all human beings are equal. This finds its
legal expression in the principle of equality of people
under the law. If we are not willing to give up this
principle, we have to stick to the assumption that,
all differences notwithstanding, any two human
lives, qua human lives, are equally valuable. If, on the
other hand, we allow that, on the basis of such crite-
ria as age, health, or mental or physical ability, it can
be claimed that the life of one person is more or less
valuable than the life of another, and we admit such
claims in the sphere of law, including criminal law,
we shall thereby give up the principle of equality of
people under the law. In all consistency, we shall not

702 Á PART 4: ETHiCAl issuEs
not be more frequent than those others, but they do
happen. Why not retain the death penalty at least for
them?
Actually, this argument, just as the preceding
one, does not tell against capital punishment itself,
but against the existing procedures for trying capi-
tal cases. Miscarriages of justice result in innocent
people being sentenced to death and executed, even
in the criminal- law systems in which the greatest care
is taken to ensure that it never comes to that. But this
does not stem from the intrinsic nature of the institu-
tion of capital punishment; it results from deficien-
cies, limitations, and imperfections of the criminal
law procedures in which this punishment is meted
out. Errors of justice do not demonstrate the need to
do away with capital punishment; they simply make it
incumbent on us to do everything possible to improve
even further procedures of meting it out.
To be sure, this conclusion will not find favor with
a diehard abolitionist. “I shall ask for the abolition
of Capital Punishment until I have the infallibility
of human judgement demonstrated to me,” that is,
as long as there is even the slightest possibility that
innocent people may be executed because of judicial
errors, Lafayette said in his day.12 Many an opponent
of this kind of punishment will say the same today.
The demand to do away with capital punishment alto-
gether, so as to eliminate even the smallest chance of
that ever happening— the chance which, admittedly,
would remain even after everything humanly possible
has been done to perfect the procedure, although then
it would be very slight indeed— is actually a demand
to give a privileged position to murderers as against all
other offenders, big and small. For if we acted on this
demand, we would bring about a situation in which
proportionate penalties would be meted out for all
offenses, except for murder. Murderers would not be
receiving the only punishment truly proportionate
to their crimes, the punishment of death, but some
other, lighter, and thus disproportionate penalty. All
other offenders would be punished according to their
deserts; only murderers would be receiving less than
they deserve. In all other cases justice would be done
in full; only in cases of the gravest of offenses, the
crime of murder, justice would not be carried out in
carrying out the sentence is not a part of capital pun-
ishment itself. However unpalatable we might find
those Wild West hangings, whatever objections we
might want to voice against the speed with which
they followed the sentencing, surely we shall not
deny them the description of “executions.” So the
implication of the argument is not that we ought
to do away with capital punishment altogether, nor
that we ought to restrict it to those cases of murder
where the murderer had warned the victim weeks
or months in advance of what he was going to do to
her, but that we ought to reexamine the procedure of
carrying out this kind of punishment. We ought to
weigh the reasons for having this interval between
the sentencing and executing, against the moral and
human significance of the repercussions such an
interval inevitably carries with it.
These reasons, in part, have to do with the pos-
sibility of miscarriages of justice and the need to rec-
tify them. Thus we come to the argument against
capital punishment which, historically, has been the
most effective of all: many advances of the abolition-
ist movement have been connected with discoveries
of cases of judicial errors. Judges and jurors are only
human, and consequently some of their beliefs and
decisions are bound to be mistaken. Some of their mis-
takes can be corrected upon discovery; but precisely
those with most disastrous repercussions— those
which result in innocent people being executed— can
never be rectified. In all other cases of mistaken sen-
tencing we can revoke the punishment, either com-
pletely or in part, or at least extend compensation. In
addition, by exonerating the accused we give moral
satisfaction. None of this is possible after an inno-
cent person has been executed; capital punishment is
essentially different from all other penalties by being
completely irrevocable and irreparable.11 Therefore, it
ought to be abolished.
A part of my reply to this argument goes along the
same lines as what I had to say on the previous one.
It is not so far- reaching as abolitionists assume; for it
would be quite implausible, even fanciful, to claim
that there have never been cases of murder which left
no room whatever for reasonable doubt as to the guilt
and full responsibility of the accused. Such cases may

CHAPTER 18: CAPiTAl PunisHmEnT Á 703
in criminal courts. If those who have money and stand-
ing in the community are less likely to be charged with
serious offenses than their less affluent fellow citizens,
then there should be a major overhaul of the entire sys-
tem of criminal justice . . . But the maldistribution of
penalties is no argument against any particular form of
penalty.14
There is, finally, the argument that the moral
illegitimacy of capital punishment is obvious from
the widespread contempt for those who carry it out:
“Logically, if the Death Penalty were morally justified,
the executioner’s calling would be considered an hon-
ourable one. The fact that even its keenest supporters
shrink from such a man with loathing and exclude
him from their circle, is in itself an indication that
capital Punishment stands morally condemned.”15
This is also a poor argument, for several rea-
sons. The contempt for the executioner and the
accompanying social ostracism is by no means a uni-
versal phenomenon in history; on the contrary, it is
a comparatively modern one. In earlier ages, the per-
son who carried out capital punishment— whether
the professional executioner or, before this became
an occupation in its own right, the judge, or some
other high- ranking official, sometimes even the ruler
himself, or a relative of the murdered person— was
always regarded with respect.16 Quite apart from this,
the so- called common moral consciousness to which
the argument appeals is not to be seen as some kind
of supreme tribunal in moral matters. Among reasons
of general nature for this is that it would be an unreli-
able, inconsistent, confused, and confusing tribunal.
On the one hand, when viewed historically, it hardly
seems a very good guide to the moral status of various
occupations, for in earlier ages it used to condemn very
resolutely and strongly the merchant, the banker, the
actor, which no one would think of disparaging today,
abolitionists included. On the other hand, it has proved
itself quite inconsistent on the issue of the moral basis
of punishment in general, voicing incompatible views,
now retributive, now utilitarian.17 It is not at all sur-
prising that both advocates and opponents of capital
punishment have claimed its support for their views.18
But if it supports both sides in this more restricted dis-
pute as well, then it actually supports neither.
full measure. It is a great and tragic miscarriage of jus-
tice when an innocent person is mistakenly sentenced
to death and executed, but systematically giving mur-
derers advantage over all other offenders would also
be a grave injustice. Is the fact that, as long as capi-
tal punishment is retained, there is a possibility that
over a number of years, or even decades, an injustice
of the first kind may be committed, unintentionally
and unconsciously, reason enough to abolish it alto-
gether, and thus end up with a system of punishments
in which injustices of the second kind are perpetrated
daily, consciously, and inevitably?13
There is still another abolitionist argument that
actually does not tell against capital punishment itself,
but against something else. Figures are sometimes
quoted which show that this punishment is much
more often meted out to the uneducated and poor
than to the educated, rich, and influential people;
in the United States, much more often to African
Americans than to whites. These figures are adduced
as a proof of the inherent injustice of this kind of pun-
ishment. On account of them, it is claimed that capi-
tal punishment is not a way of doing justice by meting
out deserved punishment to murderers, but rather a
means of social discrimination and perpetuation of
social injustice.
I shall not question these findings, which are quite
convincing, and anyway, there is no need to do that in
order to defend the institution of capital punishment.
For there seems to be a certain amount of discrimi-
nation and injustice not only in sentencing people
to death and executing them, but also in meting out
other penalties. The social structure of the death rows
in American prisons, for instance, does not seem to be
basically different from the general social structure of
American penitentiaries. If this argument were valid,
it would call not only for abolition of the penalty of
death, but for doing away with other penalties as well.
But it is not valid; as Burton Leiser has pointed out,
this is not an argument, either against the death pen-
alty or against any other form of punishment. It is an
argument against the unjust and inequitable distribu-
tion of penalties. If the trials of wealthy men are less
likely to result in convictions than those of poor men,
then something must be done to reform the procedure

704 Á PART 4: ETHiCAl issuEs
4. C. Beccaria, On Crimes and Punishments, trans. R. Davies,
ed. R. Bellamy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1995), p. 66.
5. G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, p. 71.
6. For critical comments on my analysis and refutation of
Beccaria’s argument, developed in the paper on “Kant and
Beccaria,” Kant Studien 69 (1978) and summarized here in the
briefest way possible, see M. A. Cattaneo, Beccaria e Kant. Il
valore dell’uomo nel diritto penale (Sassari: Università di Sassari,
1981), pp. 20–30.
7. For an example of this view, see L.N. Tolstoy, Smertnaya kazn
i hristianstvo (Berlin: I.P. Ladizhnikov, n.d.), pp. 40–41.
8. C. Beccaria, Crimes and Punishments, p. 70.
9. Cf. W. Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, 4th
ed., ed. J. DeWitt Andrews (Chicago: Callaghan & Co., 1899),
p. 1224.
10. A. Camus, “Reflections on the Guillotine,” Resistance, Rebel
lion and Death, trans. J. O’Brien (London: Hamish Hamilton,
1961), p. 143.
11. For an interesting critical discussion of this point, see M.
Davis, “Is the Death Penalty Irrevocable?,” Social Theory and
Practice 10 (1984).
12. Quoted in E.R. Calvert, Capital Punishment in the Twentieth
Century (London: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1927), p. 132.
13. For a criticism of this argument, see L. Sebba, “On Capi-
tal Punishment— A Comment,” Israel Law Review 17 (1982),
pp. 392–395.
14. B.M. Leiser, Liberty, Justice and Morals: Contemporary Value
Conflicts (New York: Macmillan, 1973), p. 225.
15. E.R. Calvert, Capital Punishment, p. 172.
16. For a good review of the relevant historical data, see A.F.
Kistyakovsky, Izsledovanie o smertnoy kazni, 2nd ed. (St. Peters-
burg: L.F. Panteleev, 1896), pp. 260–267.
17. See supra, pp. 55–56.
18. Cf. I. Kant, “Metaphysics of Morals,” p. 157, and C.
Beccaria, Crimes and Punishments, p. 50.
There is still another facet of this illogical,
irratio nal streak inherent to the common moral
consciousness that comes to the fore in connec-
tion with this dispute. If the contempt for the exe-
cutioner is really rooted in the belief that what he
carries out is morally reprehensible, then it is surely
heaped upon the wrong person. For he merely car-
ries out decisions on which he has no say what-
soever. Those who are responsible are, in the first
instance, the judge and members of the jury. They,
on their part, act as they do against the background
of criminal laws for which responsibility lies at a fur-
ther remove still— with the legislators. These, again,
legislate in the name of the people, if the political
system is a representative one. But for some reason
the common moral consciousness has never evinced
contempt of any of these.
NOTES
1. Numbers 35.31 (R.S.V.).
2. M. Greenberg, “Some Postulates of Biblical Criminal Law,”
in J. Goldin (ed.), The Jewish Expression (New York: Bantam,
1970), pp. 25–26. ( Post- biblical Jewish law evolved toward the
virtual abolition of the death penalty, but that is of no con-
cern here.)
3. “There is no parallel between death and even the most
miserable life, so that there is no equality of crime and ret-
ribution [in the case of murder] unless the perpetrator is
judicially put to death” (I. Kant, “The Metaphysics of Mor-
als,” Kant’s Political Writings, ed. H. Reiss, trans. H.B. Nisbet
[Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970], p. 156).
“Since life is the full compass of a man’s existence, the pun-
ishment [for murder] cannot simply consist in a ‘value’, for
none is great enough, but can consist only in taking away
a second life” (G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, trans. T.M.
Knox [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965], p. 247).

705
C H A P T E R 1 9
‘’
Political Violence: War, Terrorism, and Torture
When has Homo sapiens ever been nonviolent?
Probably never. The evolution of humans parallels
the evolution of their instruments for killing each
other. Violence seems as much a part of human
life as it ever was, except that the efficiency of our
violent methods has improved. Spears can dispatch
one person at a time, but smart bombs can kill by
the dozens, and nuclear weapons can eliminate the
human race altogether.
Fortunately, while human beings have been
inflicting violence, they have also been raising moral
questions about its use. The central concern is this:
When, if ever, are we morally justified in resorting
to it? Is every use of violence wrong, as Buddhist
and Christian doctrines have insisted? To just about
everyone, violence is inherently bad, an evil in itself.
If so, how can perpetrating it ever be morally permis-
sible? If we condemn an aggressor for his assault on
the innocent, what should we say when the inno-
cent rise up and kill him in self- defense? Should
we condemn them too? Is violence ever justified to
protect something less valuable than your life— your
property, your rights, your reputation, your income?
All these questions apply with double force to
political violence, the resort to violence for political
ends. War, terrorism, torture, revolution, assassina-
tion, civil war, and violent demonstrations— these
are all paradigm cases of violence with political
aims. Unlike personal violence (for example, mug-
gings, shootings, and rapes), political violence is
large in its scale and its effects. A war can involve
millions; terrorism can terrify thousands.
In recent years, philosophers have paid a lot of
attention to the morality of violence, especially to
issues arising from political violence in the form
of war, terrorism, and torture. They have clarified
concepts, sharpened the focus of moral debate, and
arrived at some well- argued answers to the major
questions. In this chapter, we examine some of this
important philosophical work.
ISSUE FILE: BACKGROUND
We all know what violence is. Or do we? In fact,
the term violence in common usage has multiple
meanings and is difficult to pin down. Consider:
we often refer to the violence of a storm, or to a
violent mood, or to the violence of social injus-
tice, or to the violence done by anything we dis-
approve of (as in “censorship is violence against
the human spirit” or “your remarks are violent
acts against minorities”). But if we are to make
sense of moral arguments regarding violence, we
must be clear about the meaning of the term. For
the purposes of this discussion, we can define
violence (against people) as some philosophers
have: the physical or psychological attack on, or
the vigorous abuse of, persons, causing their suf-
fering, injury, or death. (Violence can also involve
the destroying or damaging of property.) By this
definition, striking, shoving, stabbing, raping,
and shooting someone are clear instances of vio-
lence, and so are political acts such as wars, terror-
ism, torture, and the like. We would also count as
violence the severe harming of a person psycho-
logically through verbal abuse or humiliation.
Denying people the right to vote, perpetuating
social inequalities, and defaming a person may

706 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527) and Thomas
Hobbes (1588–1679); modern realists include Rein-
hold Niebuhr and Henry Kissinger, former U.S. secre-
tary of state for the Nixon administration.
Realists may argue that morality has no part
to play in warfare because all moral statements
are meaningless or unknowable or because moral
norms do not apply to states, just to persons. The
former claim denies that there can be appeals to
any moral standards at all and is therefore vulnera-
ble to the usual arguments that philosophers make
against such moral skepticism (see Chapter 2).
To the latter view, some nonrealists may reply that
there is no good reason to think that states are
exempt from moral judgments. Nonrealists may
also insist that despite the seemingly unrestrained
brutality of war, common sense suggests that some-
times moral norms do apply to warfare. According
to this position, even when people favor a war of
extreme, indeed savage, measures, they tend to
believe that there are at least some moral limits to
what can be done. Most would probably balk at the
use of nuclear weapons, or the deliberate killing
of children, or the mass rape of all noncombatant
women.
Pacifism is the view that war is never morally
permissible. (The term is also often used to refer
to the broader idea that all violence is wrong or
that all killing is wrong.) Pacifists in this sense are
opposed to all wars regardless of the reasons behind
them. They may or may not, however, be against
all uses of personal violence, or violence between
individuals. They may believe, for example, that
personal violence in self- defense or in law enforce-
ment may be justified. To make their case, pacifists
may argue in a consequentialist vein that war is
never justified, because it always produces more
bad than good. The catastrophic loss of life and
the widespread destruction of war can never offset
whatever political or material gains are achieved;
riches, land, oil, or power cannot outweigh the car-
nage. Pacifists may also rely on a nonconsequen-
tialist argument like this: War is always wrong,
be immoral or illegal, but these actions are not
examples of violence as just defined.
Most people hold that because violence is inher-
ently bad, it should be used only if there is strong
moral justification for it. In other words, violence
is prima facie wrong— wrong unless there are good
reasons for thinking it morally permissible. Thus
people often speak of war and other modes of vio-
lence as things to be resorted to, actions to be taken
only after other options are exhausted.
But why is violence wrong? One answer often
given is that it constitutes a violation of people’s
rights— their right to life, self- determination, respect
as a person, or immunity from harm. Another view
is that violence is prima facie wrong because it runs
afoul of the moral principles of justice, freedom, and
utility (human welfare). Some argue that the wrong-
ness of violence arises from its detrimental effects
on society: it’s wrong because it makes society worse
off than if no violence were present. This is one way
to articulate a consequentialist notion of violence,
but there are others, all based on the premise that
violence is (generally) wrong because its bad conse-
quences (usually) outweigh the good.
The most destructive, horrifying violence known
to humans is practiced in war. War is a form of politi-
cal violence because its essence is violent conflict
between political communities, usually for the pur-
pose of deciding who gets to effect political changes.
Ever since philosophers began examining the eth-
ics of war over two millennia ago, the main moral
questions have been (1) How— if at all— can war be
justified? and (2) Assuming it can be justified, how
should it be conducted? Most serious responses to
these questions have fallen into three major catego-
ries, traditionally labeled realism, pacifism, and just
war theory.
Realism (as applied to warfare) is the view that
moral standards are not applicable to war, which
must be judged only on prudence, on how well
war serves state interests. War cannot be immoral,
only more or less advantageous for the state. Emi-
nent realists of the past include the philosophers

CHAPTER 19: PoLITICAL VIoLEnCE: WAR, TERRoRISm, And ToRTURE Á 707
and (2) the moral permissibility of acts in war
(jus in bello, or “justice in war”).
Theorists have addressed jus ad bellum by
specifying that going to war can be morally per-
missible only if certain requirements are met.
Aquinas urged the first three requirements in the
following list, and later thinkers embraced them
and added several more. According to the theory,
only if all the requirements are met can a war be
considered just.
1. The cause must be just. War is such a horrify-
ing business that only a just cause— a morally legit-
imate reason— can justify going to war. The most
commonly cited just cause is self- defense against
attack. The usual thinking is that precisely as indi-
viduals are entitled to use violence to defend them-
selves against violent personal attacks, so states
have the right to defend against unjust attacks from
another state. The implication here is that states
have no right to instigate a war.
Many theorists define a just cause broadly: a
just cause is resistance to substantial aggression,
which has been defined as “the type of aggression
that violates people’s most fundamental rights.”2
This resistance includes self- defense against exter-
nal threat, of course. But it also may encompass
defending the innocent from deadly attack (as
in genocide or “ethnic cleansing,” for example),
defending people whose basic human rights are
being violated by a brutal regime, or defending
other states from unjust external attack. Some early
theorists thought that wars could be justifiably
fought to convert or punish those of a different
religion— a view now rejected by Western philoso-
phers and theologians but still strongly supported
in some parts of the world.
Some people argue that war in self- defense
is justified only in response to an actual attack;
others maintain that an attack need not be
actual but only feared— that is, a “preventive
war” may be justified. But many contend that to
start a war on such grounds is to act on a mere
fear of the unknown and to invite other states to
because in the deliberate killing of human beings
it violates a fundamental right— the right to life.
This right— which may have either a religious or a
secular basis— is absolute, admitting no exceptions.
The usual objection to the consequentialist
approach is that though war is horrific and often
(perhaps usually) produces more bad than good, at
least sometimes the results may be good overall. It
is possible, this argument goes, that waging a war
could save the lives of many more people than
are killed in the conflict or that fighting one small
war could prevent a much larger one. A common
objection to the pacifist’s nonconsequentialist line
is that even though a person has a right to life, we
may be morally justified in killing him or her in
self- defense if there is no other way to save our own
lives. Thus sometimes killing in war is regrettable
but necessary— and therefore morally permissible.
Just war theory is the doctrine that war may
be morally permissible under stipulated conditions.
It is a centuries- old attempt to understand how
war— an enduring form of systematic killing— can
be reconciled with our moral presumptions against
killing. It specifies when resorting to war may be
morally justified and how armed conflict should be
conducted to meet the minimal demands of moral-
ity. Thomas Aquinas produced the most influential
discourse on the doctrine, which has been evolv-
ing ever since as both religious and secular think-
ers have tried to improve it. Just war theory has
become the most widely used lens through which
the ethics of war is viewed these days. As one theo-
rist points out,
To be sure, this tradition has often found expres-
sion in church law and theological reflection; yet it
also appears in codifications and theories of inter-
national law, in military manuals on how rightly to
conduct war, and— as Michael Walzer has shown in
Just and Unjust Wars— in the judgments and reac-
tions of common people.1
Just war theory is concerned with two main issues:
(1) the justification for resorting to war (tradition-
ally labeled jus ad bellum, or “the justice of war”)

708 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
rightful government. As Aquinas says, a just war
requires “the authority of the sovereign by whose
command the war is to be waged. For it is not the
business of a private individual to declare war.”3
3. The war should be fought with the right inten-
tions. Wars must be waged for the sake of the just
cause, not moved by some illegitimate motive such
as bloodlust, greed, empire expansion, or ethnic
hatred. Aquinas continues,
[I]t is necessary that the belligerents should have a
rightful intention, so that they intend the advance-
ment of good, or the avoidance of evil. . . . For it may
happen that the war is declared by the legitimate
authority, and for a just cause, and yet be rendered
unlawful through a wicked intention.
launch attacks for no good reason (or for ulterior
motives). In response to this worry, a number of
theorists maintain that a war is justified only if
the threat of attack from another state is “imme-
diate and imminent,” which means something
like “clearly about to happen.” Such a war is prop-
erly called preemptive. Much of the debate about
the United States’ launching a preemptive strike
against Iraq in 2003 has been about whether this
“immediate and imminent” standard was met as
well as about whether the standard is relevant
when there might be a danger from weapons of
mass destruction.
2. The war must be sanctioned by proper author-
ity. The resort to war must be approved by a state’s
’
According to most forms of just war theory, a
preemptive attack against a state is justified only
if that state presents a substantial danger that is
“immediate and imminent.” As some commenta-
tors on just war theory explain, “To establish this
condition [of immediate and imminent threat],
evidence of planning that is virtually completed
needs to be shown.”* Now consider this descrip-
tion of the run- up to the U.S. preemptive strike on
Iraq in 2003.
[President George W. Bush] claimed that he was
justified [in going to war with Iraq] so as to pre-
vent (really to preempt) Iraq from attacking
the United States. But such talk of prevention is
imprecise, for it may refer either to a necessary
preemption of an impending attack or merely to
an unjustified fear as a pretext for war based on
other motivations. In his 2003 State of the Union
speech, Bush said that “The British government
has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought
significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”
Such a claim was meant to show that Iraq posed
an imminent, not merely a speculative threat to
the United States. In addition, Bush said that he
was not required to wait for the United States to
be attacked, or even to wait for all of the evidence
needed to show that Iraq might attack.†
Assume this passage is an accurate depiction of the
pre- war situation and is the only relevant informa-
tion available to you. Would you judge the threat
from Iraq to be “immediate and imminent”? Why
or why not? Based on what you have learned about
just war theory in this chapter, do you think a
fair- minded just war theorist would say the attack
on Iraq was justified or unjustified? Why? Do you
believe that starting the war was just? What are
your reasons?
CRITICAL THOUGHT: Preemptive War on Iraq
*Larry May, Eric Rovie, and Steven Viner, introduction
to The Morality of War: Classical and Contemporary
Readings, eds. May, Rovie, and Viner (Upper Saddle
River, NJ: Pearson/Prentice Hall, 2006), xi.
†Ibid.

CHAPTER 19: PoLITICAL VIoLEnCE: WAR, TERRoRISm, And ToRTURE Á 709
never deliberately targeting the latter. People who
should not be intentionally attacked are said to
have noncombatant immunity, a status tradi-
tionally reserved for women, children, the elderly,
and the sick and injured. Though some noncom-
batants are almost certain to be killed or harmed in
any war, such tragedies are supposed to be unavoid-
able or unintended and therefore pardonable.
The distinction between combatant and non-
combatant is often not very clear, especially when
a conflict involves fighters wearing civilian clothes
and operating among peaceful inhabitants. Michael
Walzer offers a helpful distinction by saying that
noncombatants are those who are not “engaged in
harm.” But some thinkers have tended to blur the
line between people usually thought to have immu-
nity and those who do not. They ask, Should people
be given immunity if they cheer on their combat-
ants, give them food, and shelter them? Are they
really to be regarded as “innocent civilians”?
In any case, the prohibition against intentionally
attacking noncombatants is enshrined in interna-
tional law and widely regarded as the most funda-
mental “rule of war.”
2. Proportionality. The use of force should be
proportional to the rightful aims of the war—
“overkill” is disallowed. Even in bitter conflict,
combatants should not kill or destroy more than
necessary to achieve the just ends for which the
war is waged.
3. No evil means. Many just war theorists main-
tain that certain tactics and weapons in war are
“evil in themselves” and thus should never be used
regardless of a war’s aims. Such evil means are said
to include genocide, biological or chemical warfare
(use of anthrax and nerve gas, for example), nuclear
attack, and rape.
4. Benevolent quarantine. Soldiers who surrender
to their enemies have rights and should be treated
accordingly. They must be given “benevolent quar-
antine” as prisoners of war (POWs)—humane cap-
tivity in safe confines removed from the battlefield.
In that environment they must not be subjected
4. Armed conflict should be a last resort. For a war
to be just, all peaceful means of sorting out differ-
ences between adversaries should be tried first.
Diplomacy, economic pressure, world opinion—
all these avenues and others should be exhausted
before employing guns and bombs.
5. The good resulting from war must be proportional
to the bad. The good expected to come from fighting
for a just cause must be weighed against the tremen-
dous evils that will inevitably accompany war—
death, destruction, pain, and loss on a mass scale.
6. There must be a reasonable chance of success.
Futile wars should not be waged. Mass killing with
no likelihood of achieving anything is unjust. So
only if success is reasonably probable should a state
resort to war.
Just war theorists believe that it is possible for
a resort to war to be morally permissible while the
conduct of that war is morally abhorrent. They
therefore are concerned not only with jus ad bellum
but also with jus in bello, right action during the
meting out of the violence. They explicitly reject
the popular notion that once war commences,
there are no moral restraints whatsoever on what
can be done to anyone or anything during the con-
flict. Michael Walzer, the leading contemporary
advocate for just war theory, asserts that the popu-
lar view is “profoundly wrong”:
War is indeed ugly, but there are degrees of ugliness
and humane men must, as always, be concerned
with degrees. . . . Surely there is a point at which the
means employed for the sake of this or that political
goal come into conflict with a more general human
purpose: the maintenance of moral standards and
the survival of some sort of international society. At
that point, political arguments against the use of such
means are overshadowed, or ought to be, by moral
arguments. At that point, war is not merely ugly but
criminal.4
Traditionally, requirements for jus in bello— the
so- called rules of war— have included the following:
1. Discrimination. Those fighting a war must dis-
tinguish between combatants and noncombatants,

710 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
executing thousands of mostly ordinary citizens.
In the nineteenth century, anarchists aimed to
inspire the masses to revolution with terrifying
deeds against established regimes. They achieved
worldwide attention and spread public alarm— but
no revolution— by assassinating several state lead-
ers, including President William McKinley in the
United States and Tsar Alexander II in Russia.
The twentieth century had a shockingly large
share of terrorism, in both old and new forms
driven by familiar and unfamiliar motives. Ter-
rorism in the first half of the century was mostly
nationalist (as were terrorist groups in Ireland, Pal-
estine, Algeria, and the Balkans), state- sponsored
(by, for example, the Serbian and Bulgarian gov-
ernments), and state- administered (as in Nazi
Germany, Stalinist Russia, and several South Ameri-
can dictatorships). Its preferred form was assassina-
tion and mass killing. The second half witnessed
more state- sponsored terrorism as well as the pre-
dominance of terrorism, which was ideological or
religious. Terrorism in this period was distinguished
by its heavy reliance on the horrors of airline
hijackings, kidnappings, and suicide bombings.
According to the Center for Defense Information,
Through the 1960s and 1970s, the numbers of
those groups that might be described as terror-
ist swelled to include not only nationalists, but
those motivated by ethnic and ideological consid-
erations. The former included groups such as the
Palestinian Liberation Organization (and its many
affiliates), the Basque ETA, and the Provisional
Irish Republican Army, while the latter comprised
organizations such as the Red Army Faction (in
what was then West Germany) and the Italian Red
Brigades. As with the emergence of modern terror-
ism almost a century earlier, the United States was
not immune from this latest wave, although there
the identity- crisis- driven motivations of the white
middle- class Weathermen starkly contrasted with
the ghetto- bred malcontent [sic] of the Black Pan-
ther movement.7
Since around the mid- 1990s, the threat of reli-
giously inspired terrorism has expanded dramati –
to execution, torture, starvation, or other forms of
serious abuse.
Blood brother to war is the grisly phenomenon of
terrorism, an old scourge that has persisted into the
twenty- first century. The ethical questions it evokes
are thornier than they might seem at first glance:
What is terrorism? Is terrorism ever justified? Who
commits terrorist acts? Can states commit terror-
ist acts? Is the United States or any other country
guilty of terrorism? For example, was the Allied
bombing of German cities in World War II (in
which hundreds of thousands of civilians died) a
case of state terrorism? How should we treat terror-
ists? How should we respond to terrorist violence?
How much, if at all, should we curtail civil liberties
to protect ourselves against terrorism? Can we eval-
uate the morality of terrorism in the same way we
assess the morality of war (by using, for example,
just war theory)?
Most people probably think they know what
terrorism is, yet it is notoriously difficult to define.
One of the main challenges is to differentiate ter-
rorism from acts of war and violent crimes. In the
definition adopted by the U.S. Department of State,
terrorism is “premeditated, politically motivated
violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets
by subnational groups or clandestine agents, usually
intended to influence an audience.”5 According to
a 1974 British government definition, terrorism is
“the use of violence for political ends, and includes
any use of violence for the purpose of putting
the public, or any section of the public, in fear.”6 For
our discussion we can use a definition that comprises
key elements in common usage or philosophical
writing: terrorism is violence against noncomba-
tants for political, religious, or ideological ends.
Some think terrorism is a recent phenomenon.
But scholars who define terrorism broadly main-
tain that its history is long and bloody. The term
terrorism sprang from the French Revolution’s Reign
of Terror, in which the new state sanctioned the
use of terror against its enemies, real or imagined,

CHAPTER 19: PoLITICAL VIoLEnCE: WAR, TERRoRISm, And ToRTURE Á 711
Saudi and French security forces retook the shrine
after an intense battle in which some 250 people were
killed and 600 wounded.
Pan Am 103 Bombing, December 21, 1988: Pan
American Airlines Flight 103 was blown up over
Lockerbie, Scotland, by a bomb believed to have been
placed on the aircraft by Libyan terrorists in Frankfurt,
West Germany. All 259 people on board were killed.
World Trade Center Bombing, February 26, 1993:
The World Trade Center in New York City was badly
damaged when a car bomb planted by Islamic ter-
rorists exploded in an underground garage. The
bomb left 6 people dead and 1,000 injured. The
men carrying out the attack were followers of Umar
Abd al- Rahman, an Egyptian cleric who preached
in the New York City area.
Bombing of the Federal Building in Oklahoma
City, April 19, 1995: Right- wing extremists Timothy
McVeigh and Terry Nichols destroyed the Federal
Building in Oklahoma City with a massive truck
bomb that killed 166 and injured hundreds more in
what was up to then the largest terrorist attack on
American soil.
Terrorist Attacks on U.S. Homeland, September 11,
2001: Two hijacked airliners crashed into the twin
towers of the World Trade Center. Soon thereafter,
the Pentagon was struck by a third hijacked plane.
A fourth hijacked plane, suspected to be bound for
a high- profile target in Washington, crashed into a
field in southern Pennsylvania. The attacks killed
3,025 U.S. citizens and other nationals. President
Bush and Cabinet officials indicated that Osama
bin Laden was the prime suspect and that they
considered the United States in a state of war with
international terrorism. . . .
Car Bomb Explosion in Bali, October 12, 2002:
A car bomb exploded outside the Sari Club Disco-
theque in Denpasar, Bali, Indonesia, killing 202
persons and wounding 300 more. Most of the casu-
alties, including 88 of the dead, were Australian
tourists. Seven Americans were among the dead.
Al- Qaeda claimed responsibility. Two suspects were
later arrested and convicted. Iman Samudra, who
had trained in Afghanistan with al- Qaeda and was
suspected of belonging to Jemaah Islamiya, was
sentenced to death on September 10, 2003.11
To this list we could add many more incidents,
and probably most shocking among them would
cally. In 1998, there were 37 incidents of religious
terrorism worldwide resulting in 758 deaths. In
2001, there were 99 incidents and 3,275 deaths,
most of which occurred in the September 11
attacks on the United States. In 2005, religious ter-
rorists killed 2,061 people throughout the world in
606 incidents.8 In 2009, there were nearly 15,000
deaths from terrorist attacks of all kinds; 9,280 of
these were caused by Sunni Islamic extremists,
while 1,052 were committed by Christian extrem-
ists.9 As the Council on Foreign Affairs reported,
Religious terrorists seek to use violence to further
what they see as divinely commanded purposes,
often targeting broad categories of foes in an
attempt to bring about sweeping changes. Reli-
gious terrorists come from many faiths, as well as
from small cults. . . . Because religious terrorists are
concerned not with rallying a constituency of fel-
low nationalists or ideologues but with pursuing
their own vision of divine will, they lack one of the
major constraints that historically has limited the
scope of terror attacks, experts say. As [the terrorism
expert Bruce] Hoffman puts it, the most extreme
religious terrorists can sanction “almost limitless
violence against a virtually open- ended category of
targets: that is, anyone who is not a member of the
terrorists’ religion or religious sect.”10
Among the more infamous terrorist incidents
of the past forty- plus years are the following, as
described by the U.S. Department of State:
Munich Olympic Massacre, September 5, 1972: Eight
Palestinian “Black September” terrorists seized eleven
Israeli athletes in the Olympic Village in Munich,
West Germany. In a bungled rescue attempt by West
German authorities, nine of the hostages and five ter-
rorists were killed.
Iran Hostage Crisis, November 4, 1979: After
President Carter agreed to admit the Shah of Iran
into the United States, Iranian radicals seized the
U.S. Embassy in Tehran and took 66 American
diplomats hostage. Thirteen hostages were soon
released, but the remaining 53 were held until their
release on January 20, 1981.
Grand Mosque Seizure, November 20, 1979: 200
Islamic terrorists seized the Grand Mosque in Mecca,
Saudi Arabia, taking hundreds of pilgrims hostage.

712 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
the ability to inspire followers around the world.
In the West, several individuals acting alone have
launched terrorist attacks in the name of ISIS, kill-
ing dozens of innocent people.
The question that all terrorism provokes is,
What should be our moral response to it? Many
argue that a violent response is the wrong response,
that a “war on terror” is misguided and morally
impermissible. The proper response, they say, is dia-
logue with aggressors, a criminal justice approach
instead of military force, and the eradication of the
true causes of terrorism— poverty, oppression, suf-
fering, and injustice. As one observer has said,
In my view, the most effective counterterrorism
approach would arise from a foreign policy that
took the sufferings of people in other countries
seriously. A progressive orientation would stand in
contrast to today’s official counterterrorism, which
views suffering as irrelevant, or even as a reason to
inflate the terrorist danger.13
The opposing view is that violence may in
fact be a morally justified reaction to terrorism—
that is, morally justified by the lights of just
war theory. As noted earlier, just war theory is
the timeworn doctrine that war may be morally
permissible if particular requirements are met.
It lays out the conditions under which resorting
to war would be morally justified and specifies
the criteria for judging the morality of how it is
fought. Some contend that all the criteria can
sometimes be met, justifying a carefully measured
military response to terrorist attacks. Thus one
observer argues that
according to just war theory, defending against this
sort of terrorism is a just cause; that within signifi-
cant constraints sovereign political authorities can
have authority to undertake military actions for the
sake of this just cause, notwithstanding the nature
of organization of the terrorists; and that a political
community can pursue such a cause with right inten-
tion, even though in the world as it is military efforts
to defend against terrorism may well not meet this
condition.14
be the March 11, 2004, attacks in Madrid and the
July 7, 2005, bombings in London. In Madrid a
coordinated series of bombs exploded on four
commuter trains, killing 191 people and injur-
ing more than 1,500. Investigators blamed Islamic
militants connected to cells in Europe. In London,
four jihadists set off bombs almost simultaneously
on a double- decker bus and three subway trains,
killing themselves and fifty- two other people and
injuring hundreds. In 2008, in Mumbai, India,
Pakistan- based militants killed 174 people in a
shooting rampage. And in 2011, a man described as
a Christian right- wing extremist set off a large bomb
in Oslo, Norway, killing 8 people, then systemati-
cally murdered 69 others at an island youth camp.
The most recent events in global terrorism are
also the most frightening. In 2014, large swaths
of Iraqi and Syrian territory were taken over by a
group known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria
(ISIS). It is made up of thousands of Islamist mili-
tants drawn from the Syrian civil war, jihadist ele-
ments in Iraq, and volunteers from Europe, the
United States, and elsewhere. ISIS aspires to be a
caliphate, an Islamic nation, calling itself the Islamic
State, but its methods are terrorist on a mass scale:
The stories, the videos, the acts of unfathomable
brutality have become a defining aspect of ISIS,
which controls a nation- size tract of land and has
now pushed Iraq to the precipice of dissolution.
Its adherents kill with such abandon that even the
leader of al- Qaeda has disavowed them. . . .
[I]n terms of impact, the acts of terror have been
wildly successful. From beheadings to summary
executions to amputations to crucifixions, the ter-
rorist group has become the most feared organi-
zation in the Middle East. That fear, evidenced in
fleeing Iraqi soldiers and 500,000 Mosul residents,
has played a vital role in the group’s march toward
Baghdad. In many cases, police and soldiers liter-
ally ran, shedding their uniforms as they went,
abandoning large caches of weapons.12
ISIS as an occupying power in Iraq and Syria
has now been crushed by the United States and its
allies. But it is still a transnational movement with

CHAPTER 19: PoLITICAL VIoLEnCE: WAR, TERRoRISm, And ToRTURE Á 713
indiscriminate attack on the innocent. He thinks
that a terrorist attack is worse than rape or murder
because these crimes are at least directed at specific
persons for particular reasons, even if those rea-
sons are perverse. But terrorist violence is aimed at
no one in particular for no purpose that could be
linked to a specific person. For the terrorist, any
innocent person who happens to fit into a broad
category is as good a target as any other. “Terrorists
are like killers on a rampage,” says Walzer, “except
that their rampage is not just expressive of rage or
madness; the rage is purposeful and programmatic.
It aims at a general vulnerability: Kill these people
in order to terrify those.”16
Not everyone agrees, however. A few thinkers,
while deploring terrorist violence, argue that in
some cases terrorism may be morally permissible.
In fact, some maintain that particular instances of
terrorism can even meet the requirements of just
war theory and can therefore be justified in the
same way that acts of war are justified. For example,
one proponent of this view argues that when a
stateless group has its right of self- determination
thwarted, it may have a just cause— and an orga-
nization representing the group can be “a morally
legitimate authority to carry out violence as a last
resort to defend the group’s rights.”17
Disputes about the moral permissibility of ter-
rorist actions can quickly bring us back to arguments
about a plausible definition of terrorism. Suppose,
for instance, that the preferred definition of ter-
rorism is a variation on the one proposed earlier:
deliberate use of violence against noncombatants
for political or ideological purposes. This definition
would apply to many acts that seem to be unam-
biguous examples of terrorism— the September 11
attacks, the Munich Olympics massacre, the Bali
car bombing of October 2002, and many others.
But what about the following cases in which non-
combatants were also deliberately killed for politi-
cal reasons: the Allied bombings of Dresden and
other German cities in World War II and the atomic
obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? According
Others say that government antiterrorism
activities and policies (what has been called the
“war on terror”) have gone too far by undermining
civil liberties in the name of security. A prime con-
cern is that some overreaching antiterrorism laws
meant to be temporary can easily become perma-
nent. Critics have also charged that repressive gov-
ernments have used the war on terror as an excuse
to violate the human rights and civil liberties of
innocent people deemed undesirable by the state.
A more fundamental— and controversial— moral
issue is whether terrorist actions can ever be mor-
ally justified. Many argue on various grounds that
terrorism is never morally permissible, regardless of
the merits of the terrorists’ cause. The philosopher
Haig Khatchadourian, for example, argues that
acts of terrorism are always wrong because (1) they
violate basic principles of just war theory and
(2), except in rare cases in which other overriding
moral principles apply, they violate their victims’
right to be treated as moral persons. Regarding
reason (1), Khatchadourian claims that terror-
ism in all forms violates the just war principles of
discrimination and proportionality. Concerning
reason (2), he says that
[t]reating people as moral persons means treating
them with consideration in two closely related
ways. First, it means respecting their autonomy as
individuals with their own desires and interests,
plans and projects, commitments and goals. That
autonomy is clearly violated if they are humili-
ated, coerced and terrorized, taken hostage or
kidnapped, and above all, killed. Second, consider-
ation . . . includes sensitivity to and consideration
of their feelings and desires, aspirations, projects,
and goals. That in turn is an integral part of treat-
ing their life as a whole— including their relation-
ships and memories— as a thing of value. Finally,
it includes respecting their “culture or ethnic, reli-
gious or racial identity or heritage.” These things
are the very antithesis of what terrorism does to its
victims and the victimized.15
Similarly, the just war theorist Michael Walzer
asserts that terrorism is wrong because it is an

714 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
For generations the United States officially
opposed torture and prosecuted both American
soldiers and the nation’s enemies for using harsh
methods against captives. But the administration
of President George W. Bush was accused of autho-
rizing and employing interrogation tactics that had
long been regarded as torture. The subjects were
suspected terrorists, and the purpose of the severe
approach was to wrest from them some informa-
tion that might help authorities crush terrorist
groups or prevent future terrorist attacks. Reports
show that “waterboarding” (simulated drowning)
and other extreme techniques were used against
detainees in U.S.-run facilities overseas.
Three issues dominate the debates over the
morality of torture: (1) Does torture work? (2) Is tor-
ture ever morally acceptable? and (3) What should
be the state’s policy regarding the use of torture?
As usually understood, question 1 is about
whether torture is effective in getting reliable infor-
mation from suspects. Science has yet to defini-
tively answer this question, and the views of expert
interrogators conflict. Many intelligence officers
claim that torture rarely, if ever, yields useful infor-
mation; other experts assert that torture occasion-
ally produces valuable data. People in both camps
worry about the indirect effect of using harsh meth-
ods: the damage to American prestige and influ-
ence, the increased likelihood of our enemies using
torture against us, and the slide down the slippery
slope toward the wider use of more brutal means.
For many nonconsequentialists, the answer
to question 2 is an absolutist “no”— torture is the
use of a person merely as a means, a clear instance
of a lack of respect for a human being. Torture is
therefore always wrong. But most people are prob-
ably not absolutists; they think that in rare cases
there could be exceptions to a no- torture rule. (We
consider a popular argument for this view in the
“Moral Arguments” section.)
Question 3 is a separate issue entirely. Whether
or not we believe that torture would be morally jus-
tified in a particular instance, we might take a very
to our revised definition, aren’t these also terrorist
acts? And if so, could not the United States and Brit-
ain be classified as terrorist states?
Some are willing to accept such implications
of our definition (or similar ones). They think that
deliberately targeting noncombatants for political or
ideological purposes is never morally acceptable—
no matter who does the targeting. So for them, the
World War II city bombings were indeed instances
of terrorism, and the states doing the bombing
were acting as terrorists. Others avoid these repug-
nant implications by working from a definition that
confines terrorism to nonstate actors— that is, to
individuals or groups that are not sovereign states.
(Recall the definition of terrorism offered by the
U.S. Department of State—“premeditated, politically
motivated violence perpetrated against noncomba-
tant targets by subnational groups or clandestine
agents[.]”) Terrorism then would be the killing of
innocents by al- Qaeda or the Red Brigades, but not
by a sovereign polity like the United States. Walzer,
however, takes the line that terrorism is never mor-
ally justified, but that some of the city bombings in
World War II were justified (and therefore were not
terrorism) because they were done in a “supreme
emergency”—circumstances in which civilization
itself is threatened with imminent destruction.
Often where there is war or terrorism, there is
also torture. As with other forms of political vio-
lence, the vexing question is whether torture is ever
morally justified. And the most challenging version
of this question is whether it is permissible to use
torture to prevent terrorist carnage.
Torture is the intentional inflicting of severe
pain or suffering on people to punish or intimidate
them or to extract information from them. It has
been used by both secular and religious authorities
for centuries and continues to this day to be applied
to hapless victims throughout the world— despite
worldwide condemnation of the practice and its
absolute prohibition in international law, includ-
ing by United Nations treaties and the Geneva
Conventions.

CHAPTER 19: PoLITICAL VIoLEnCE: WAR, TERRoRISm, And ToRTURE Á 715
grounds— the consequences of refusing to go to war
will never be as bad as the war itself would be, even
if atrocities were not committed. Or in a more sophis-
ticated vein it might be claimed that a uniform policy
of never resorting to military force would do less harm
in the long run, if followed consistently, than a policy
of deciding each case on utilitarian grounds (even
though on occasion particular applications of the
pacifist policy might have worse results than a specific
utilitarian decision).18
Whether good consequences produced by a
pacifist stance would always in fact outweigh the
bad of war making is, of course, a question of non-
moral fact— and some utilitarians assert that the
facts do not help the pacifist’s case. These critics say
there is no evidence to support the notion that a
policy of pacifism always results in less death and
suffering. As one philosopher says,
[I]t is worthwhile to point out that the general history
of the human race certainly offers no support for the
supposition that turning the other cheek always pro-
duces good effects on the aggressor. Some aggressors,
such as the Nazis, were apparently “egged on” by the
“pacifist” attitude of their victims.19
Utilitarians can push this kind of argument even
further and say that resorting to war is sometimes
justified because it results in a better balance of good
over bad, everyone considered, than not going to
war. (Obviously, they too would need to back up such
an empirical claim.) To be consistent, they would also
want to base the moral rightness of military actions
in war (jus in bello) on utilitarian considerations.
As we saw earlier, utilitarian elements are built
into just war theory, which is a coherent system
of both consequentialist and nonconsequentialist
requirements. In our previous list of jus ad bellum
conditions, the last three requirements are usually
taken as consequentialist: (4) last resort, (5) good
proportional to the bad, and (6) reasonable chance
of success. And the jus in bello conditions of dis-
crimination and proportionality are often viewed
as rules for maximizing the good for both combat-
ants and noncombatants.
different view about legalizing or institutionalizing
it. On this matter, there are three main positions:
(1) torture should be illegal and never sanctioned in
any circumstances; (2) torture should be illegal and
officially condemned but unofficially (and secretly)
used when necessary; and (3) torture should be a
legal instrument of the state, although adminis-
tered under strict guidelines and oversight.
Those taking the first approach insist that legal-
izing torture would have devastating consequences.
It would corrupt democratic institutions, diminish
our moral authority in the world, cause torture to
become routine and widespread in society, and
arouse worldwide resentment and anger toward us.
Those who prefer the second approach believe
that torture may sometimes be necessary, but that
acknowledging its use could cause many of the prob-
lems that worry those in the first group. Their critics
accuse them of hypocrisy, but they see no good alter-
native to this clandestine, “under the radar” strategy.
The third approach is preferred by many who
deplore the hypocrisy of the second group but are
convinced that the use of torture is inevitable. They
hold that if torture is legalized, its use can be better
controlled than in any unofficial arrangement, and
its abuses and proliferation can be limited. Alan Der-
showitz advocates this third way, recommending a
system in which official interrogators may use tor-
ture only after they acquire permission—“torture
warrants”—from a judge.
MORAL THEORIES
Both consequentialist and nonconsequentialist per-
spectives have been given major roles in the ethics of
war and peace. On the consequentialist side, utilitar-
ianism has been used both to support and to under-
mine pacifism. Some have argued, for example,
that by utilitarian lights, antiwar pacifism must be
true. The philosopher Thomas Nagel provides some
examples of such pacifist arguments:
It may even be argued that war involves violence on
such a scale that it is never justified on utilitarian

716 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
the best overall results in a situation— and “best
overall results” is the overriding factor here. But a
utilitarian could not consistently condone terrorist
actions that served only the interests of a particular
group, for the theory demands that right actions
produce the greatest overall happiness, everyone
considered. Many (or perhaps most) acts of terrorism
are clearly meant to exclusively favor a specific seg-
ment of a population; everyone is deliberately not
considered.
Some writers contend that even though conse-
quentialist moral theories can justify terrorism, the
theories can do so “only under conditions that ter-
rorists in the flesh will find it difficult to satisfy.”21
Consider: Consequentialism would demand that
the terrorist acts be effective and efficient and that
there be no nonterrorist actions likely to yield
better or equal results. Such theories would require
that the aim to be achieved be worth the horrific
damage that a terrorist act can produce.
Terrorists themselves sometimes justify their
actions on consequentialist grounds: they assert
that only terrorism can help them achieve their
objectives. But many observers are skeptical of ter-
rorism’s power to attain any political ends, espe-
cially the goal of liberation from an oppressive
regime. Walzer observes, “I doubt that terrorism has
ever achieved national liberation— no nation that
I know of owes its freedom to a campaign of ran-
dom murder.”22 Certainly terrorism can frighten
the public and increase the terrorists’ notoriety, but
winning a political struggle is a much rougher road.
If terrorism is indeed an ineffective strategy, then
this fact could form the backbone of a consequen-
tialist argument against terrorist acts.
Nonconsequentialist moral theories (or non-
consequentialist moral principles) often yield con-
demnations of terrorism in all forms. A traditional
natural law theorist would insist that terrorism is
always wrong because it violates the prohibition
against intentionally killing the innocent. Natural
law’s doctrine of double effect— which disallows
intentional bad actions even if they achieve good
When justifying views on the resort to war,
both pacifists and nonpacifists may take a non-
consequentialist approach, appealing to funda-
mental moral principles rather than to the results
of actions. As we have seen, pacifists typically rest
their case on the right to life; nonpacifists, on the
right of self- defense or the defense of basic human
rights generally. The former regard their moral
principle as absolute— it allows no exceptions— but
the latter may not.
As you would expect, there can be stark dif-
ferences on many critical matters between the
consequentialist and nonconsequentialist. One
such issue is the treatment of noncombatants.
Absolutist nonconsequentialists maintain that
the intentional killing of noncombatants is always
morally wrong regardless of the circumstances, but
consequentialists insist that sometimes there are
exceptions:
Regarding the absolute prohibition on intentional
killing of noncombatants, absolutists have been
termed “immunity theorists.” Immunity theo-
rists hold that it is always morally impermissible
to intentionally kill noncombatants in war. Non-
combatants are “innocent” and thus immune from
attack. . . .
. . . Consequentialists believe that actions in
war can be morally justified depending on the
end or aim of the action. If it is morally suffi-
cient, the end can justify the means. . . . From this
perspective, consequentialists, unlike absolutists,
can morally justify the intentional killing of non-
combatants or “innocents” in war. A controversial
example addressed in this debate is the bombing
of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in World War II. Con-
sequentialists can morally justify these bombings.
Absolutists, however, contend that these bombings
were immoral because these bombings targeted
noncombatants.20
How would traditional moral theories have us
view the moral justification of terrorism? It seems
that act- utilitarianism would have to sanction at
least some terrorist attacks. The act- utilitarian must
admit that it is possible for a terrorist action to yield

CHAPTER 19: PoLITICAL VIoLEnCE: WAR, TERRoRISm, And ToRTURE Á 717
Violence is inherently wrong; there are no good rea-
sons to suppose that it is ever justified; therefore, vio-
lence (including political violence) is always wrong.
This argument puts the burden of proof on those
who allege that sometimes violence is permissible.
But the problem for anyone who relies on this
line is that many people have been happy to take up
this burden, arguing in the case of war, terrorism,
or torture that there are indeed strong reasons why
violence is occasionally justified. Likewise, many
who insist on nonviolence have not been content
to rest their case on this burden- of- proof argument.
They have tried to show that strong arguments can
independently support their position.
As we have seen, it’s possible to argue for and
against the resort to war using either a consequen-
tialist or nonconsequentialist tack. Just war theory
is a mix of both these approaches, and it has prob-
ably been the focus of most of the philosophical
disputes concerning war and peace.
One set of arguments about war that contin-
ues to provoke intense debate is humanitarian
intervention. The conventional model of a jus-
tified resort to war is one sovereign state defend-
ing itself against another’s aggression. A state’s
self- defense is thought to be just cause for unleash-
ing the dogs of war. But humanitarian intervention
is a different sort of scenario, for it involves a state
(or states) going to war to defend people of another
state against the murderous aggression of their own
regime. The aggression may appear in the form of
genocide, ethnic cleansing, forced starvation, and
mass imprisonment or slavery— the kinds of atroci-
ties that occurred forty years ago in Cambodia and
Uganda, and more recently in Somalia, East Timor,
Kosovo, Rwanda, and Libya. The situations that are
said to cry out for humanitarian intervention are
both compelling and alien to early just war theory:
The standard cases have a standard form: a govern-
ment, an army, a police force, tyrannically con-
trolled, attacks its own people or some subset of its
own people, a vulnerable minority, say, territorially
based or dispersed throughout the country. . . . The
results— would lead to this conclusion (assum-
ing the definition of terrorism given earlier).
Some people, of course, could try to counter this
view by rejecting the doctrine of double effect or
by questioning the concept of moral innocence.
A Kantian theorist or other nonconsequentialist
could argue that terrorism is not morally permissible
because it violates innocent persons’ human rights,
their right to life, or their autonomy or because
terrorism uses people merely as a means to an end.
Many philosophers view terrorism from the
perspective of just war theory. Some of them argue
that terrorism is wrong because it violates key con-
ditions of just war theory— in particular, discrimi-
nation, proportionality (both jus ad bellum and
jus in bello), last resort, and just cause. As we saw
earlier, some reject this claim and maintain that
just war theory, rightly interpreted, shows that in
some instances terrorism may be justified because
it meets all the conditions.
A nonconsequentialist is likely to consider tor-
ture wrong in all circumstances— wrong because it
violates the rights of persons, primarily by severely
diminishing their autonomy as individuals. A con-
sequentialist could either accept or reject the use of
torture, depending on her assessment of the likely
effects. She could decide that torture is justified in
rare cases in which it could prevent a massive terror-
ist attack or lead to the destruction of a terrorist cell
involved in the killing of hundreds or thousands
of people. She could also argue that when all the
consequences of torturing someone are carefully
weighed, torture is never the best option. Its nega-
tive ramifications always outweigh the positive.
MORAL ARGUMENTS
Perhaps the simplest argument against political
violence is based on the commonsense presump-
tion that violence of any kind is inherently (prima
facie) wrong and therefore requires very strong rea-
sons for believing that in a particular case it is jus-
tified. One form this argument could take is this:

718 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
within the state’s borders. But nonintervention-
ists might claim that the argument is weak because
the personal and national circumstances are dif-
ferent in important respects. One difference is the
well- established doctrine of international conduct
that one sovereign state may not meddle in the
internal affairs of another. This noninterference
principle, says the noninterventionist, seems much
stronger than any analogous rule on the personal
level. Even interfering in a family conflict in which
one family member is being brutally assaulted by
the others may seem morally permissible some-
times, while analogous interference in a state’s
internal conflicts seems less morally clear cut.
There is much more that can be said both for
and against Premise 2, but let us turn to another
interventionist argument:
1. All persons have certain supremely important,
basic rights— for example, rights to life, to self-
determination, and to freedom from harm—
rights that must not be violated by either people
or states.
2. People who have these basic rights violated are
entitled to use force to defend them, and it is
morally permissible for other people or states to
use force to help in that defense (humanitarian
intervention).
3. People or states that violate others’ basic rights
forfeit their own right not to have force used
against them.
4. Therefore, humanitarian intervention in
defense of basic rights is morally permissible.
Interventionists are likely to get very little dis-
agreement about either Premise 1 or Premise 3. For
a majority of moral philosophers, the concepts of
moral rights and their forfeiture are plausible ele-
ments in most of the major moral traditions. But
Premise 2 is controversial. The idea of people using
force in self- defense (to protect their lives or prop-
erty, for example) is part of commonsense moral-
ity, but noninterventionists have questioned the
defense of others’ rights that involves crossing
attack takes place within the country’s borders;
it doesn’t require any boundary crossings; it is an
exercise of sovereign power. There is no aggression,
no invading army to resist and beat back. Instead,
the rescuing forces are the invaders; they are the
ones who, in the strict sense of international law,
begin the war. But they come into a situation where
the moral stakes are clear: the oppressors or, better,
the state agents of oppression are readily identifi-
able; their victims are plain to see.23
To get to the heart of these matters, we want
to ask, Is humanitarian intervention ever mor-
ally permissible? Those who say yes— the inter-
ventionists— might offer an argument like this:
1. An individual has a duty to try to stop an unjust
and potentially fatal attack against someone (to
intervene), even if defending the victim requires
using violence against the attacker (assuming
that the defender is capable of acting without
too much personal risk, and there is no other
way to stop the attack).
2. Humanitarian intervention by a state (or states) is
exactly analogous to this type of personal inter-
vention on behalf of seriously threatened victims.
3. Therefore, states have a duty of humanitarian
intervention (under the right circumstances).
This argument is, of course, inductive— an
argument by analogy. Probably few people would
balk at Premise 1: it is a simple moral principle
drawn from commonsense morality. Some might
insist that a principle declaring that we have a duty
to intervene is too strong— better to say that in the
right circumstances, intervening is morally permis-
sible, not obligatory. Though this complaint may
have merit, let us stay with the original wording for
simplicity’s sake.
Premise 2 is the weak link here. For an argument
by analogy to be strong, the two things being com-
pared must be sufficiently similar in relevant ways.
In this case, the intervention of an individual to
halt an attack on another person must be relevantly
similar to an intervention by sovereign states to
stop aggression by another state against people

CHAPTER 19: PoLITICAL VIoLEnCE: WAR, TERRoRISm, And ToRTURE Á 719
2. The killing of innocents is sometimes morally
permissible in war.
3. Therefore, the killing of innocents is sometimes
morally permissible in terrorism.
This conclusion asserts that we cannot con-
demn all acts of terrorism out of hand, for some
may be morally justified. The argument is that, as
most people believe, killing innocents in wartime is
sometimes permissible. Noncombatants are usually
killed and maimed in war because combat so often
happens near or among them. Still, most people
are willing to accept this “collateral damage” as
the inevitable— but regrettable— consequence of
waging war. Some civilian deaths are unavoidable
but morally permissible. Yet if they are morally
acceptable in war, they must be morally acceptable
aspects of terrorism. After all, both kinds of vio-
lence involve the death of innocents during hostili-
ties directed at political ends.
Many critics of this argument would accept
Premise 2 but reject Premise 1, insisting that there
is a morally significant difference between the
killing of innocents in war and in terrorist attacks.
They would say that the killing of noncombatants
in war is morally permissible because it is unin-
tended; noncombatant deaths happen inadver-
tently as combatants are targeted. Terrorist killings,
however, are wrong because they are intentional.
The deliberate slaughter of innocents is never
morally acceptable. Obviously, this response is an
appeal to the doctrine of double effect.
But some would not accept this appeal, reason-
ing along the following lines:
While the principle of double effect is plausible in
some cases, it is severely defective. To see this, suppose
that the September 11 attackers had only intended to
destroy the Pentagon and the World Trade Center and
had no desire to kill anyone. Suppose that they knew,
however, that thousands would die in the attack on
the buildings. And suppose, following the attack,
they said “We are not murderers. We did not mean to
kill these people.”
What would be our reaction? I very much doubt
that we would think them less culpable. They could
borders and violating state sovereignty. A critical
problem, they would argue, is that the principle
embodied in Premise 2 would have us ignore the
rights of sovereign states to defend human rights—
yet state sovereignty is itself a well- established
principle of international relations. So we have a
conflict of moral principles. In a utilitarian vein,
noninterventionists may also argue that a policy
of humanitarian intervention that ignores state
sovereignty and attends to the countless violations
of rights by a state could lead to perpetual wars
everywhere. Some noninterventionists allow that
intervention may indeed be necessary in certain
extraordinary cases involving genocide, massacres,
and other extreme horrors. But they think that
intervention should be reserved for these horrors;
otherwise, perpetual war will in fact be the norm.
In this era of the “war on terror” and the world-
wide threat of terrorist acts, moral arguments
on terrorism are both extremely important and
often controversial. Probably the liveliest— and,
to some, the most disturbing— disputes have to do
with the moral permissibility of terrorist acts. Con-
sider the tragic events of September 11, 2001. Many
people the world over assume without question
that those who caused that horrific loss of life com-
mitted acts of terrorism that were morally wrong
and monstrously evil. And many careful think-
ers have come to the same conclusions, albeit by a
more reflective, reasoned route. Plenty of people in
both groups believe that terrorism is always morally
wrong. But some equally reflective observers who are
just as horrified by September 11 argue that terror-
ism may sometimes be permissible (and that many
who disagree are being inconsistent, perhaps even
hypocritical). We may even hear arguments for the
permissibility of terrorism from people sympathetic
to certain terrorist causes. Let us look more closely at
some of these disputes. First, consider this argument:
1. If the killing of innocents is sometimes morally
permissible in war, then it is morally permissi-
ble in terrorism (defined here as the intentional
killing of innocents for political purposes).

720 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
The precise distinction between innocents and
noninnocents (or combatants and noncombatants)
in war is controversial among philosophers. But
most of these thinkers do acknowledge a clear dif-
ference between the two concepts, and many reject
the sort of blurring of the distinctions common
among those who wish to justify terrorism. A typi-
cal argument against such justifications is that if
the distinctions are discarded, then anyone and
everyone could be deemed guilty and therefore a
legitimate target of terrorism. For example, if ordi-
nary individuals who buy bananas and thereby
contribute to an economy run by a bloodthirsty
dictatorship somehow share the blame for the
regime’s crimes, then any man, woman, or child
could share the guilt— and deserve the terrorist’s
justice. Attributing guilt to people because of such
remote connections to wrongdoing, critics say,
seems to reduce the notions of guilt and innocence
to absurdity.
Probably the strongest— and most controver-
sial—argument for the political use of torture is
based on the so- called ticking- bomb scenario. Sup-
pose a bomb will soon detonate in a major Ameri-
can city, killing a hundred thousand innocent
people. The only way to prevent this massive loss of
life is to torture the terrorist who planted the bomb
until he reveals its location. Would it be morally
permissible to waterboard or electrocute him until
he talks? (Note that this is a separate question from
torture’s legality.) Many think the obvious answer
is yes and that there is strong moral justification
for using torture in this case. What considerations
could lead to this conclusion? Here is one philoso-
pher’s answer (referring to a similar version of the
ticking- bomb situation):
Consider the following points: (1) The police reason-
ably believe that torturing the terrorist will probably
save thousands of lives; (2) the police know that there
is no other way to save those lives; (3) the threat to
life is more or less imminent; (4) the thousands about
to be murdered are innocent—the terrorist has no
good, let alone decisive, justificatory moral reason
for murdering them; (5) the terrorist is known to be
not successfully justify or excuse their actions by
saying that although they foresaw the deaths of
many people, these deaths were not part of their
aim. We would certainly reject this defense. But if
we would reject the appeal to double effect in this
case, then we should do so in others.24
Not everyone would agree with this reasoning,
but let us move on to a related argument:
1. Deliberately killing innocents for political or
ideological reasons is morally wrong.
2. Deliberately killing noninnocents for such rea-
sons may be morally permissible (as in war or
revolution, for example).
3. Some people commonly thought to be inno-
cents are actually noninnocents (they are
pseudo- innocents).
4. Therefore, deliberately killing pseudo- innocents
for political or ideological reasons may in some
cases be morally permissible.
This argument states formally what is often
alleged more casually: that some actions usually
condemned as instances of terrorism (involving the
deliberate killing of innocents) are not terrorist acts
at all because the “innocents” are not really inno-
cent. This claim (common in some cultures and
often uttered by terrorists themselves) is that some
people should be judged noninnocents if they, for
example, indirectly aid or sympathize with a hated
regime, or happen to belong to the same race or
religion as those presumed guilty of committing
some acts of injustice or oppression, or are simply
part of a system or enterprise that adversely affects
a favored group. Such an attitude has been held by
many, most infamously by Osama bin Laden:
The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies—
civilian and military— is an individual duty for
every Muslim who can do it in any country in
which it is possible to do, in order to liberate the Al
Aksa Mosque and the holy mosque from their grip,
and in order for their families to move out of all the
lands of Islam, defeated and unable to threaten any
Muslim.25

CHAPTER 19: PoLITICAL VIoLEnCE: WAR, TERRoRISm, And ToRTURE Á 721
Some take a deontological approach to this
issue and declare that torture is always wrong in
all circumstances (a common absolutist position).
Critics of this view say that it is suspect because
torturing people usually seems to be morally not as
bad as killing them. If so, it would be implausible to
assert that torturing the terrorist is absolutely for-
bidden but that not torturing him and letting thou-
sands die would be morally permissible.
Others who are opposed to torture believe that
ticking- bomb scenarios are too contrived to be
taken seriously; such states of affairs simply don’t
happen in the real world. The usual response to
this is that in light of what we know about terror-
ist tactics and aims (and about police cases that
resemble ticking- bomb scenarios), we have good
reasons to believe the opposite— ticking- bomb situ-
ations are indeed possible.
CHAPTER REVIEW
SUMMARY
Political violence is the resort to violence for political
ends. War, terrorism, torture, revolution, assassina-
tion, civil war, and violent demonstrations are exam-
ples. Violence is the physical or psychological attack
on, or the vigorous abuse of, persons, causing their
suffering, injury, or death. (Violence can also involve
the destroying or damaging of property.) Violence is
considered prima facie wrong— wrong unless there are
good reasons for thinking it morally permissible. Thus
people often speak of war and other modes of violence
as things to be resorted to, actions to be taken only after
other options are exhausted.
Violence is thought to be wrong for several reasons.
Some argue that violence constitutes a violation of
people’s rights— their right to life, self- determination,
respect as a person, or immunity from harm. Another
view is that violence is wrong because it runs afoul of
the moral principles of justice, freedom, and utility
(human welfare). The consequentialist position is that
’ QUICK REVIEW
realism (as applied to warfare)—The view that
moral standards are not applicable to war, and
that war instead must be judged on how well it
serves state interests.
pacifism— The view that war is never morally
permissible.
just war theory— The doctrine that war may be
morally permissible under stipulated conditions.
jus ad bellum— The justification for resorting to
war; the justice of war.
jus in bello— The moral permissibility of acts in
war; justice in war.
noncombatant immunity— The status of a person
who should not be intentionally attacked in war.
terrorism (as defined in this chapter)—Violence
against noncombatants for political, religious,
or ideological ends.
terrorism (the definition preferred by the U.S.
Department of State)—Premeditated, politically
motivated violence perpetrated against non-
combatant targets by subnational groups or clan-
destine agents, usually intended to influence an
audience.
nonstate actors— Individuals or groups that are
not sovereign states.
torture— The intentional inflicting of severe pain
or suffering on people to punish or intimidate
them or extract information from them.
humanitarian intervention— The act of a state
(or states) going to war to defend people of
another state against the murderous aggres-
sion of their own regime.
(jointly with other terrorists) morally responsible
for planning, transporting, and arming the nuclear
device and, if it explodes, he will be (jointly with
other terrorists) morally responsible for the murder of
thousands.26

722 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
and (3) What should be the state’s policy regarding the
use of torture?
KEY TERMS
realism (as applied to warfare) (p. 706)
pacifism (p. 706)
just war theory (p. 707)
jus ad bellum (p. 707)
jus in bello (p.707)
noncombatant immunity (p. 709)
terrorism (as defined in this chapter) (p. 710)
terrorism (the definition preferred by the U.S.
Department of State) (p. 710)
nonstate actors (p. 714)
torture (p. 714)
humanitarian intervention (p. 717)
EXERCISES
Review Questions
1. What is violence, as some philosophers have
defined it? (p. 705)
2. What is realism as it applies to warfare? (p. 706)
3. What is pacifism? (p. 706)
4. What is just war theory? (p. 707)
5. What are the two main moral issues addressed
in just war theory? (p. 707)
6. Identify three requirements in just war theory
that must be met to justify war. (pp. 707–709)
7. What are the jus in bello requirements for moral
conduct in war? (p. 709)
8. What is noncombatant immunity? (p. 709)
9. How is terrorism defined in this text? How does
the U.S. Department of State define it? (p. 710)
10. What is torture? What reasons have torturers given
to explain or justify their use of torture? (p. 714)
Discussion Questions
1. If violence is wrong, why is it wrong? Is it that
violence is a violation of people’s rights? Or is
there some other reason?
2. Are you a realist regarding war? Are there any
moral restraints on the use of political violence?
3. Can war ever be morally justified? If so, how? If
not, why not?
violence is (generally) wrong because its bad conse-
quences (usually) outweigh the good.
The main ethical questions regarding war and
peace are (1) how— if at all— the resort to war can be
justified, and (2) assuming it can be justified, how it
should be conducted. Most serious answers to such
questions come from three distinct perspectives. Real-
ism is the view that moral standards are not appli-
cable to war, though considerations of prudence are.
Pacifism is the view that war is never morally permis-
sible. Just war theory is the doctrine that war may be
morally permissible under stipulated conditions.
Depending on how they judge the empirical evi-
dence, utilitarians may with logical consistency take
either a pacifist or a nonpacifist stance on war. Non-
consequentialists may also consistently support or
reject pacifism. Pacifists typically rest their case on
the nonconsequentialist principle of the right to life.
Nonpacifists may back their case with the nonconse-
quentialist principles of the right to self- defense or of
human rights generally.
Terrorism is violence against noncombatants
for political, religious, or ideological ends. The key
question that terrorism provokes is what our moral
response to it should be. Should it always and every-
where be condemned? Or is terrorism sometimes jus-
tified? One way to grapple with terrorism is to try to
apply the requirements of just war theory to terrorist
acts. Many philosophers argue that by the lights of
just war theory, terrorism is never morally permissible.
Others contend that it is possible for terrorism to meet
just war criteria and thereby prove itself justified. Even
without reference to just war theory, some argue that
terrorism is always wrong because it violates the vic-
tims’ right to be treated as moral persons, or because it
is an indiscriminate attack on the innocent.
A consequentialist moral theory would probably
condone terrorism if it maximized happiness or wel-
fare for all concerned, but in actual cases this require-
ment may make terrorism very difficult to justify.
Torture is the intentional inflicting of severe pain
or suffering on people to punish or intimidate them or
to extract information from them. Three issues domi-
nate the debates over the morality of torture: (1) Does
torture work? (2) Is torture ever morally acceptable?

CHAPTER 19: PoLITICAL VIoLEnCE: WAR, TERRoRISm, And ToRTURE Á 723
Robert Fullinwider, “Terrorism, Innocence, and War,” in
War After September 11, ed. Verna V. Gehring (Lanham,
MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003).
David Luban, “The War on Terrorism and the End of
Human Rights,” Philosophy & Public Policy Quarterly 22,
no. 3 (Summer 2002): 9–14.
Larry May, Eric Rovie, and Steve Viner, eds., The Moral-
ity of War: Classical and Contemporary Readings (Upper
Saddle River, NJ: Pearson/Prentice Hall, 2006).
Thomas Nagel, “War and Massacre,” Philosophy & Public
Affairs 1, no. 2 (Winter 1972): 123–43.
Jan Narveson, “Pacifism: A Philosophical Analysis,” Ethics
75, no. 4 (1965): 259–71.
Brian Orend, “War,” in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philoso-
phy, Winter 2005 ed., ed. Edward N. Zalta, http://plato
.stanford.edu/archives/win2005/entries /war/ (March 1,
2015).
Louis P. Pojman, “The Moral Response to Terrorism and
the Cosmopolitan Imperative,” in Terrorism and Inter-
national Justice, ed. James P. Sterba (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2003).
Henry Shue, “War,” in The Oxford Handbook of Practical
Ethics, ed. Hugh LaFollette (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2003).
Charles Townshend, Terrorism: A Very Short Introduction
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).
Andrew Valls, “Can Terrorism Be Justified?” in Ethics in
International Affairs, ed. Valls (Lanham, MD: Rowman
and Littlefield, 2000).
Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument
with Historical Illustrations, 2nd ed. (New York: Basic
Books, 1992).
John Howard Yoder, When War Is Unjust: Being Honest
in Just- War Thinking, 2nd ed. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis
Books, 1996).
4. Do you believe there are circumstances in
which torturing a suspected terrorist is morally
permissible? Explain.
5. How might someone use just war theory to
justify the Allied participation in World War II?
6. Can terrorism ever be morally justified? Why or
why not?
7. Was the atomic obliteration of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki in World War II an act of terrorism?
Explain.
8. How might pacifists (who argue that all wars
are wrong) justify their position? How might
someone argue against it?
9. What is the difference between a preventive and
a preemptive war? Can a preventive war ever be
justified? Why or why not?
10. Is a pacifist being consistent if she opposes all
wars but condones personal violence used in self-
defense or in law enforcement? Why or why not?
FURTHER READING
G. E. M. Anscombe, “War and Murder,” in Nuclear Weap-
ons: A Catholic Response, ed. Walter Stein (New York:
Sheed and Ward, 1961).
Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Second Part of the
Second Part, Questions 40, 64, and 69.
Joseph M. Boyle Jr., “Just War Doctrine and the Military
Response to Terrorism,” Journal of Political Philosophy
11, no. 2 (2003): 153–70.
R. G. Frey and Christopher W. Morris, eds., Violence,
Terrorism, and Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1991).
E T H I C A L d I L E m m A S
1. Intervention to Stop ISIS
In 2014, President Barack Obama authorized U.S. air strikes against a group of militant
Islamists known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) to prevent them from possibly
committing genocide against members of the Yezidi sect, a religious minority trapped on a
mountaintop in northwest Iraq. In a speech, the president sought to justify the intervention:
[A]t the request of the Iraqi government— we’ve begun operations to help save
Iraqi civilians stranded on the mountain. As ISIL [ISIS] has marched across Iraq, it has

http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2005/entries

724 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
waged a ruthless campaign against innocent Iraqis. And these terrorists have been
especially barbaric towards religious minorities, including Christian and Yezidis, a
small and ancient religious sect. Countless Iraqis have been displaced. And chilling
reports describe ISIL militants rounding up families, conducting mass executions,
and enslaving Yezidi women.
In recent days, Yezidi women, men and children from the area of Sinjar have
fled for their lives. And thousands— perhaps tens of thousands— are now hiding
high up on the mountain, with little but the clothes on their backs. They’re without
food, they’re without water. People are starving. And children are dying of thirst.
Meanwhile, ISIL forces below have called for the systematic destruction of the entire
Yezidi people, which would constitute genocide. So these innocent families are faced
with a horrible choice: descend the mountain and be slaughtered, or stay and slowly
die of thirst and hunger.
I’ve said before, the United States cannot and should not intervene every time
there’s a crisis in the world. So let me be clear about why we must act, and act now.
When we face a situation like we do on that mountain— with innocent people facing
the prospect of violence on a horrific scale, when we have a mandate to help— in
this case, a request from the Iraqi government— and when we have the unique
capabilities to help avert a massacre, then I believe the United States of America
cannot turn a blind eye. We can act, carefully and responsibly, to prevent a potential
act of genocide. That’s what we’re doing on that mountain.*
Was President Obama justified in ordering the
armed intervention? What if the Iraqi govern-
ment had not requested military action from the
United States? Would the intervention be justified
then? Why or why not? How would just war theory
apply? How might a utilitarian evaluate the per-
missibility of the United States’ military action?
What might a nonconsequentialist say about it?
*Barack Obama, “Statement by the President,” August 7, 2014, http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-of
fice/2014/08/07/statement-president (February 27, 2015).
2. War in Afghanistan
Consider this time line detailing the run- up to the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2001.
September 11—Hijacked airliners are flown into the twin towers of the World Trade
Center in New York and the Pentagon, outside Washington DC. A fourth plane crashes
in Pennsylvania. In an address to the nation, President Bush describes the attacks as
“deliberate and deadly terrorist acts.” He says he has directed the U.S. intelligence and
law enforcement communities “to find those responsible and bring them to justice,”
adding that the U.S.“will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed
these acts and those who harbor them.”

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CHAPTER 19: PoLITICAL VIoLEnCE: WAR, TERRoRISm, And ToRTURE Á 725
September 12—President Bush declares that the attacks were “acts of war.” The
United Nations Security Council passes Resolution 1368, recognizing “the inherent right
of individual and collective self- defense” and calling on all states to work together to
bring the perpetrators of the attacks to justice. The North Atlantic Council for the first
time invokes Article 5 of NATO’s founding treaty, stating that an armed attack against
any member state shall be considered as an attack against all.
September 18—Congress passes a resolution giving the President authorization
for the use of force “against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines
planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on
September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons.”
September 20—In an address to a joint session of Congress, President Bush says all
the evidence suggests al- Qaeda was responsible for the attacks, and warns the Taliban
regime that they must “hand over the terrorists, or they will share in their fate.” The
Department of Justice issues an Interim Rule stating that non- citizens can be detained
for 48 hours without charge, or in the event of an “emergency or other extraordinary
circumstance” for “an additional reasonable period of time.”. . .
October 4—The British government issues a statement saying it is confident that
Osama bin Laden and the al- Qaeda network “planned and carried out the atrocities of
11 September,” and setting out the evidence for their conclusion.
October 7—U.S. military forces launch ‘Operation Enduring Freedom’ against Taliban
and al- Qaeda facilities in Afghanistan. In a televised address, President Bush says U.S.
actions “are designed to disrupt the use of Afghanistan as a terrorist base of operations,
and to attack the military capability of the Taliban regime.”†
Was the U.S. response to the September 11 attacks
a legitimate act of self- defense? Why or why not?
According to just war theory, was the U.S. invasion
of Afghanistan justified? If so, how does the resort
to warfare square with each of the just war condi-
tions? If not, why not? How does the decision to go
to war fail any just war requirements?
†Anthony Dworkin and Ariel Meyerstein, “A Defining Moment— International Law Since September 11: A Timeline,”
Crimes of War Project, February 18, 2006. Reprinted with permission of the Crimes of War Project and the authors.
3. Terrorism and Torture
WASHINGTON— Most Americans and a majority of people in Britain, France and South
Korea say torturing terrorism suspects is justified at least in rare instances, according to
AP- Ipsos polling.
The United States has drawn criticism from human rights groups and many
governments, especially in Europe, for its treatment of terror suspects. President
Bush and other top officials have said the U.S. does not torture, but some suspects in
American custody have alleged they were victims of severe mistreatment.

726 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
The polling, in the United States and eight of its closest allies, found that in Canada,
Mexico and Germany people are divided on whether torture is ever justified. Most people
opposed torture under any circumstances in Spain and Italy.
“I don’t think we should go out and string everybody up by their thumbs until
somebody talks. But if there is definitely a good reason to get an answer, we should do
whatever it takes,” said Billy Adams, a retiree from Tomball, Texas.
In America, 61 percent of those surveyed agreed torture is justified at least on rare
occasions. Almost nine in 10 in South Korea and just over half in France and Britain felt
that way.‡
Do you agree with most Americans that the use of
torture is sometimes morally permissible in fight-
ing terrorism? If so, what circumstances do you
think would justify torture? If not, why not? How
might a utilitarian justify (or oppose) torture? How
might a Kantian theorist argue against torturing
suspected terrorists?
‡Associated Press, “Poll Finds Broad Approval of Terrorist Torture,” published on MSNBC.com, December 9, 2005.
© The Associated Press. Reprinted by permission.
Traditionally pacifism and just war theory have rep-
resented radically opposed responses to aggression.
Pacifism has been interpreted to rule out any use of
violence in response to aggression. Just war theory has
been interpreted to permit a measured use of violence
in response to aggression. It has been thought that the
two views might sometimes agree in particular cases—
for example, that pacifists and just war theorists might
unconditionally oppose nuclear war, but beyond that
it has been generally held that the two views lead to
radically opposed recommendations. In this paper,
I hope to show that this is not the case. I will argue that
pacifism and just war theory, in their most morally
defensible interpretations, can be substantially recon-
ciled both in theory and practice.
In traditional just war theory there are two basic
elements: an account of just cause and an account of
just means. Just cause is usually specified as follows:
1) There must be substantial aggression;
2) Nonbelligerent correctives must be either hopeless
or too costly; and
3) Belligerent correctives must be neither hopeless
nor too costly.
Needless to say, the notion of substantial aggression
is a bit fuzzy, but it is generally understood to be the
type of aggression that violates people’s most fun-
damental rights. To suggest some specific examples
of what is and is not substantial aggression, usu-
ally the taking of hostages is regarded as substantial
James P. Sterba, excerpts from “Reconciling Pacifists and Just War
Theorists,” Social Theory and Practice Vol. 18, No. 1 (Spring 1992):
21–38. Reprinted with permission of Social Theory and Practice.
R E A d I n G S
Reconciling Pacifists and Just War Theorists
James P. Sterba

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CHAPTER 19: PoLITICAL VIoLEnCE: WAR, TERRoRISm, And ToRTURE Á 727
because it recognizes a right to life yet rules out any use
of force in defense of that right.1 The view is incoher-
ent, Narveson claims, because having a right entails
the legitimacy of using force in defense of that right at
least on some occasions.
Given the cogency of objections of this sort, some
have opted for a form of pacifism that does not rule out
all violence but only lethal violence. We can call this
view “nonlethal pacifism.” It maintains that
Any lethal use of force against other human beings is
morally prohibited.
In defense of nonlethal pacifism, Cheyney Ryan has
argued that there is a substantial issue between the
pacifist and the nonpacifist concerning whether we
can or should create the necessary distance between
ourselves and other human beings in order to make
the act of killing possible.2 To illustrate, Ryan cites
George Orwell’s reluctance to shoot at an enemy sol-
dier who jumped out of a trench and ran along the
top of a parapet half- dressed and holding up his trou-
sers with both hands. Ryan contends that what kept
Orwell from shooting was that he couldn’t think of the
soldier as a thing rather than a fellow human being.
However, it is not clear that Orwell’s encounter
supports nonlethal pacifism. For it may be that what
kept Orwell from shooting the enemy soldier was not
his inability to think of the soldier as a thing rather
than a fellow human being but rather his inability to
think of the soldier who was holding up his trousers
with both hands as a threat or a combatant. Under
this interpretation, Orwell’s decision not to shoot
would accord well with the requirements of just war
theory.
Let us suppose, however, that someone is attempt-
ing to take your life. Why does that permit you, the
defender of nonlethal pacifism might ask, to kill
the person making the attempt? The most cogent
response, it seems to me, is that killing in such a case
is not evil, or at least not morally evil, because any-
one who is wrongfully engaged in an attempt upon
your life has already forfeited his or her right to life by
engaging in such aggression.3 So, provided that you
are reasonably certain that the aggressor is wrongfully
engaged in an attempt upon your life, you would be
aggression while the nationalization of particular
firms owned by foreigners is not so regarded. But even
when substantial aggression occurs, frequently non-
belligerent correctives are neither hopeless nor too
costly. And even when nonbelligerent correctives are
either hopeless or too costly, in order for there to be
a just cause, belligerent correctives must be neither
hopeless nor too costly.
Traditional just war theory assumes, however, that
there are just causes and goes on to specify just means
as imposing two requirements:
1) Harm to innocents should not be directly
intended as an end or a means.
2) The harm resulting from the belligerent means
should not be disproportionate to the particular
defensive objective to be attained.
While the just means conditions apply to each defen-
sive action, the just cause conditions must be met by
the conflict as a whole.
It is important to note that these requirements
of just cause and just means are not essentially about
war at all. Essentially, they constitute a theory of
just defense that can apply to war but can also apply
to a wide range of defensive actions short of war.
Of course, what needs to be determined is whether
these requirements can be justified. Since just war
theory is usually opposed to pacifism, to secure a
non- question- begging justification for the theory
and its requirements we need to proceed as much as
possible from premises that are common to pacifists
and just war theorists alike. The difficulty here is that
there is not just one form of pacifism but many. So
we need to determine which form of pacifism is most
morally defensible.
Now when most people think of pacifism they
tend to identify it with a theory of nonviolence. We
can call this view “nonviolent pacifism.” It maintains
that:
Any use of violence against other human beings is
morally prohibited.
It has been plausibly argued, however, that this form
of pacifism is incoherent. In a well- known article, Jan
Narveson rejects nonviolent pacifism as incoherent

728 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
elements of an action is the Counterfactual Test.
According to this test, two questions are relevant:
1) Would you have performed the action if only the
good consequences would have resulted and not
the evil consequences?
2) Would you have performed the action if only the
evil consequences resulted and not the good con-
sequences?
If an agent answers “Yes” to the first question and
“No” to the second, some would conclude that
(1) the action is an intended means to the good
consequences; (2) the good consequences are an
intended end; and (3) the evil consequences are
merely foreseen.
But how well does this Counterfactual Test work?
Douglas Lackey has argued that the test gives the
wrong result in any case where the “act that produces
an evil effect produces a larger good effect.”4 Lackey
cites the bombing of Hiroshima as an example. That
bombing is generally thought to have had two effects:
the killing of Japanese civilians and the shortening
of the war. Now suppose we were to ask:
1) Would Truman have dropped the bomb if only
the shortening of the war would have resulted but
not the killing of the Japanese civilians?
2) Would Truman have dropped the bomb if only
the Japanese civilians would have been killed and
the war not shortened?
And suppose that the answer to the first question
is that Truman would have dropped the bomb if only
the shortening of the war would have resulted but not
the killing of the Japanese civilians, and the answer
to the second question is that Truman would not
have dropped the bomb if only the Japanese civilians
would have been killed and the war not shortened.
Lackey concludes from this that the killing of civil-
ians at Hiroshima, self- evidently a means for short-
ening the war, is by the Counterfactual Test classified
not as a means but as a mere foreseen consequence.
On these grounds, Lackey rejects the Counterfactual
Test as an effective device for distinguishing between
the foreseen and the intended consequences of an
action.
morally justified in killing, assuming that it is the only
way of saving your own life.
There is, however, a form of pacifism that remains
untouched by the criticisms I have raised against
both nonviolent pacifism and nonlethal pacifism.
This form of pacifism neither prohibits all violence
nor even all uses of lethal force. We can call the view
“ anti- war pacifism” because it holds that
Any participation in the massive use of lethal force in
warfare is morally prohibited.
In defense of anti- war pacifism, it is undeniable that
wars have brought enormous amounts of death and
destruction in their wake and that many of those who
have perished in them are noncombatants or inno-
cents. In fact, the tendency of modern wars has been
to produce higher and higher proportions of non-
combatant casualties, making it more and more diffi-
cult to justify participation in such wars. At the same
time, strategies for nonbelligerent conflict resolution
are rarely intensively developed and explored before
nations choose to go to war, making it all but impos-
sible to justify participation in such wars.
To determine whether the requirements of just
war theory can be reconciled with those of anti- war
pacifism, however, we need to consider whether
we should distinguish between harm intentionally
inflicted upon innocents and harm whose infliction
on innocents is merely foreseen. On the one hand,
we could favor a uniform restriction against the
infliction of harm upon innocents that ignores the
intended/foreseen distinction. On the other hand,
we could favor a differential restriction which is more
severe against the intentional infliction of harm
upon innocents but is less severe against the inflic-
tion of harm that is merely foreseen. What needs
to be determined, therefore, is whether there is any
rationale for favoring this differential restriction on
harm over a uniform restriction. But this presupposes
that we can, in practice, distinguish between what is
foreseen and what is intended, and some have chal-
lenged whether this can be done. So first we need to
address this challenge.
Now the practical test that is frequently appealed to
in order to distinguish between foreseen and intended

CHAPTER 19: PoLITICAL VIoLEnCE: WAR, TERRoRISm, And ToRTURE Á 729
intended means to the good consequences of short-
ening the war.
Assuming then that we can distinguish in prac-
tice between harm intentionally inflicted upon inno-
cents and harm whose infliction on innocents is
merely foreseen, we need to determine whether there
is any rationale for favoring a differential restriction
that is more severe against the intentional infliction
of harm upon innocents but is less severe against
the infliction of harm that is merely foreseen over
a uniform restriction against the infliction of harm
upon innocents that ignores the intended/foreseen
distinction.
Let us first examine the question from the perspec-
tive of those suffering the harm. Initially, it might
appear to matter little whether the harm would be
intended or just foreseen by those who cause it. From
the perspective of those suffering harm, it might
appear that what matters is simply that the overall
amount of harm be restricted irrespective of whether
it is foreseen or intended. But consider— don’t those
who suffer harm have more reason to protest when
the harm is done to them by agents who are directly
engaged in causing harm to them than when the
harm is done incidentally by agents whose ends and
means are good? Don’t we have more reason to protest
when we are being used by others than when we are
affected by them only incidentally?
Moreover, if we examine the question from the
perspective of those causing harm, additional support
for this line of reasoning can be found. For it would
seem that we have more reason to protest a restriction
against foreseen harm than we have reason to pro-
test a comparable restriction against intended harm.
This is because a restriction against foreseen harm
limits our actions when our ends and means are good
whereas a restriction against intended harm only
limits our actions when our ends or means are evil or
harmful, and it would seem that we have greater
grounds for acting when both our ends and means are
good than when they are not. Consequently, because
we have more reason to protest when we are being used
by others than when we are being affected by them
only incidentally, and because we have more reason to
act when both our ends and means are good than when
Unfortunately, this is to reject the Counterfactual
Test only because one expects too much from it. It is to
expect the test to determine all of the following:
1) Whether the action is an intended means to the
good consequences;
2) Whether the good consequences are an intended
end of the action; and
3) Whether the evil consequences are simply fore-
seen consequences.
In fact, this test is only capable of meeting the first two
of these expectations. And the test clearly succeeds in
doing this for Lackey’s own example, where the test
shows the bombing of Hiroshima to be an intended
means to shortening the war, and shortening the war
an intended consequence of the action.
To determine whether the evil consequences are
simply foreseen consequences, however, an additional
test is needed, which I shall call the Nonexplanation
Test. According to this test, the relevant question is:
Does the bringing about of the evil consequences help
explain why the agent undertook the action as a means
to the good consequences?
If the answer is “No,” that is, if the bringing about of
the evil consequences does not help explain why the
agent undertook the action as a means to the good
consequences, the evil consequences are merely fore-
seen. But if the answer is “Yes,” the evil consequences
are an intended means to the good consequences.
Of course, there is no guaranteed procedure for
arriving at an answer to the Nonexplanation Test.
Nevertheless, when we are in doubt concerning
whether the evil consequences of an act are simply
foreseen, seeking an answer to the Nonexplanation
Test will tend to be the best way of reasonably resolv-
ing that doubt. For example, applied to Lackey’s
example, the Nonexplanation Test comes up with a
“Yes,” since the evil consequences in this example
do help explain why the bombing was undertaken to
shorten the war. For according to the usual account,
Truman ordered the bombing to bring about the
civilian deaths which by their impact upon Japanese
morale were expected to shorten the war. So, by the
Nonexplanation Test, the civilian deaths were an

730 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
So far, I have argued that there are grounds for
favoring a differential restriction on harm to inno-
cents that is more severe against intended harm and
less severe against foreseen harm. I have further argued
that this restriction is not absolute so that when the
evil intended is trivial, easily repairable or greatly
outweighed by the consequences, intentional harm
to innocents can be justified. Moreover, there is no
reason to think that anti- war pacifists would reject
either of these conclusions. Anti- war pacifists are
opposed to any participation in the massive use of
lethal force in warfare, yet this need not conflict with
the commitment of just war theorists to a differential
but non absolute restriction on harm to innocents as
a requirement of just means.5 Where just war theory
goes wrong, according to anti- war pacifists, is not in its
restriction on harming innocents but rather in its fail-
ure to adequately determine when belligerent correc-
tives are too costly to constitute a just cause or lacking
in the proportionality required by just means. Accord-
ing to anti- war pacifists, just war theory provides insuf-
ficient restraint in both of these areas. Now to evaluate
this criticism, we need to consider a wide range of
cases where killing or inflicting serious harm on oth-
ers in defense of oneself or others might be thought to
be justified, beginning with the easiest cases to assess
from the perspectives of anti- war pacifism and the just
war theory and then moving on to cases that are more
difficult to assess from those perspectives.
Case 1 where only the intentional or foreseen killing of
an unjust aggressor would prevent one’s own death.6 This
case clearly presents no problems. In the first place,
anti- war pacifists adopted their view because they
were convinced that there were instances of justified
killing. And, in this case, the only person killed is an
unjust aggressor. So surely anti- war pacifists would
have to agree with just war theorists that one justifi-
ably kill an unjust aggressor if it is the only way to save
one’s life.
Case 2 where only the intentional or foreseen killing of
an unjust aggressor and the foreseen killing of one innocent
bystander would prevent one’s own death and that of five
other innocent people.7 In this case, we have the fore-
seen killing of an innocent person as well as the killing
of the unjust aggressor, but since it is the only way to
they are not, we should favor the foreseen/intended dis-
tinction that is incorporated into just means.
It might be objected, however, that at least some-
times we could produce greater good overall by violat-
ing the foreseen/intended distinction of just means
and acting with the evil means of intentionally harm-
ing innocents. On this account, it might be argued
that it should be permissible at least sometimes to
intentionally harm innocents in order to achieve
greater good overall.
Now it seems to me that this objection is well-
taken in so far as it is directed against an absolute
restriction upon intentional harm to innocents.
It seems clear that there are expectations to such a
restriction when intentional harm to innocents is
1) trivial (for example, as in the case of stepping on
someone’s foot to get out of a crowded subway);
2) easily repairable (for example, as in the case of
lying to a temporarily depressed friend to keep
him from committing suicide); or
3) greatly outweighed by the consequences of the
action, especially to innocent people (for example,
as in the case of shooting one of two hundred civil-
ian hostages to prevent in the only way possible
the execution of all two hundred).
Yet while we need to recognize these executions to an
absolute restriction upon intentional harm to inno-
cents, there is good reason not to permit simply maxi-
mizing good consequences overall because that would
place unacceptable burdens upon particular individu-
als. More specifically, it would be an unacceptable
burden on innocents to allow them to be intention-
ally harmed in cases other than the exceptions we
have just enumerated. And, allowing for these excep-
tions, we would still have reason to favor a differential
restriction against harming innocents that is more
severe against the intentional infliction of harm upon
innocents but is less severe against the infliction of
harm upon innocents that is merely foreseen. Again,
the main grounds for this preference is that we would
have more reason to protest when we are being used
by others than when we are being affected by them
only incidentally, and more reason to act when both
our ends and means are good than when they are not.

CHAPTER 19: PoLITICAL VIoLEnCE: WAR, TERRoRISm, And ToRTURE Á 731
and five other innocent people. Since in this case the
intentional or foreseen killing of the unjust aggressor
is the only way of preventing serious injury to one-
self and five other innocent people, then, by analogy
with Cases 1–3, both anti- war pacifists and just war
theorists alike would have reason to affirm its moral
permissibility. Of course, if there were any other way
of stopping unjust aggressors in such cases short of
killing them, that course of action would clearly be
required. Yet if there is no alternative, the intentional
or foreseen killing of the unjust aggressor to prevent
serious injury to oneself and/or five other innocent
people would be justified.
In such cases, the serious injury could be bodily
injury, as when an aggressor threatens to break one’s
limbs, or it could be serious psychological injury, as
when an aggressor threatens to inject mind- altering
drugs, or it could be a serious threat to property. Of
course, in most cases where serious injury is threat-
ened, there will be ways of stopping aggressors short
of killing them. Unfortunately, this is not always
possible.
In still other kinds of cases, stopping an unjust
aggressor would require indirectly inflicting serious
harm, but not death, upon innocent bystanders.
Consider the following cases.
Case 6 where only the intentional or foreseen infliction
of serious harm upon an unjust aggressor and the foreseen
infliction of serious harm upon one innocent bystander
would prevent serious harm to oneself and five other inno-
cent people.
Case 7 where only the intentional or foreseen infliction
of serious harm upon an unjust aggressor and the foreseen
infliction of serious harm upon one innocent bystander
would prevent serious harm to five other innocent people.
In both of these cases, serious harm is indirectly
inflicted upon one innocent bystander in order to
prevent greater harm from being inflicted by an
unjust aggressor upon other innocent people. In
Case 6, we also have the justification of self- defense,
which is lacking in Case 7. Nevertheless, with regard
to both cases, anti- war pacifists and just war theorists
should agree that preventing serious injury to five or
six innocent people in the only way possible renders
it morally permissible to inflict serious injury upon
save one’s own life and the lives of five other innocent
people, anti- war pacifists and just war theorists alike
would have reason to judge it morally permissible. In
this case, the intended life- saving benefits to six inno-
cent people is judged to outweigh the foreseen death
of one innocent person and the intended or foreseen
death of the unjust aggressor.
Case 3 where only the intentional or foreseen killing
of an unjust aggressor and the foreseen killing of one inno-
cent bystander would prevent the death of five other inno-
cent people. In this case, despite the fact that we lack
the justification of self- defense, saving the lives of five
innocent people in the only way possible should still
provide anti- war pacifists and just war theorists with
sufficient grounds for granting the moral permissibil-
ity of killing an unjust aggressor, even when the killing
of an innocent bystander is a foreseen consequence. In
this case, the intended lifesaving benefits to five inno-
cent people would still outweigh the foreseen death
of one innocent person and the intended or foreseen
death of the unjust aggressor.
Case 4 where only the intentional or foreseen kill-
ing of an unjust aggressor and the foreseen killing of five
innocent people would prevent the death of two innocent
people. In this case, neither anti- war pacifists nor just
war theorists would find the cost and proportionality
requirements of just war theory to be met. Too many
innocent people would have to be killed to save too
few. Here the fact that the deaths of the innocents
would be merely foreseen does not outweigh the fact
that we would have to accept the deaths of five inno-
cents and the death of the unjust aggressor in order to
be able to save two innocents.
Notice that up to this point in interpreting these
cases, we have simply been counting the number of
innocent deaths involved in each case and opting for
whichever solution minimized the loss of innocent
lives that would result. Suppose, however, that an
unjust aggressor is not threatening the lives of inno-
cents but only their welfare or property. Would the
taking of the unjust aggressor’s life in defense of the
welfare and property of innocents be judged propor-
tionate? Consider the following case.
Case 5 where only the intentional or foreseen killing of
an unjust aggressor would prevent serious injury to oneself

732 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
reason to think that a trade- off that is unacceptable in
standard police practice would be acceptable in larger
scale conflicts. Thus, for example, even if the Baltic
republics could have effectively freed themselves from
the Soviet Union by infiltrating into Moscow several
bands of saboteurs who would then attack several
military and government installations in Moscow,
causing an enormous loss of innocent lives, such
trade- offs would not have been justified. Accordingly,
it follows that if the proportionality requirement of
just war theory is to be met, we must save more inno-
cent lives than we cause to be lost, we must prevent
more injuries than we bring about, and we must not
kill innocents, even indirectly, simply to prevent seri-
ous injuries to ourselves and others.
Of course, sometimes our lives and well- being are
threatened together. Or better, if we are unwilling to
sacrifice our well- being then our lives are threatened
as well. Nevertheless, if we are justified in our use of
lethal force to defend ourselves in cases where we will
indirectly kill innocents, it is because our lives are also
threatened, not simply our well- being. And the same
holds for when we are defending others.
What this shows is that the constraints imposed
by just war theory on the use of belligerent correctives
are actually much more severe than anti- war pacifists
have tended to recognize. In determining when bel-
ligerent correctives are too costly to constitute a just
cause or lacking in the proportionality required by just
means, just war theory under its most morally defen-
sible interpretation
1) allows the use of belligerent means against unjust
aggressors only when such means minimize the
loss and injury to innocent lives overall;
2) allows the use of belligerent means against unjust
aggressors to indirectly threaten innocent lives
only to prevent the loss of innocent lives, not sim-
ply to prevent injury to innocents; and
3) allows the use of belligerent means to directly or
indirectly threaten or even take the lives of unjust
aggressors when it is the only way to prevent seri-
ous injury to innocents.
Now it might be objected that all that I have shown
through the analysis of the above eight cases is that
an unjust aggressor, even when the serious injury of
one innocent person is a foreseen consequence. In
these cases, by analogy with Cases 2 and 3, the fore-
seen serious injury of one innocent person and the
intended or foreseen injury of the unjust aggressor
should be judged proportionate given the intended
injury- preventing benefits to five or six other innocent
people.
Up to this point there has been the basis for gen-
eral agreement among anti- war pacifists and just war
theorists as to how to interpret the proportionality
requirement of just means, but in the following case
this no longer obtains.
Case 8 where only the intentional or foreseen killing of
an unjust aggressor and the foreseen killing of one innocent
bystander would prevent serious injuries to the members of
a much larger group of people.
The interpretation of this case is crucial. In this
case, we are asked to sanction the loss of an innocent
life in order to prevent serious injuries to the mem-
bers of a much larger group of people. Unfortunately,
neither anti- war pacifists nor just war theorists have
explicitly considered this case. Both anti- war pacifists
and just war theorists agree that we can inflict seri-
ous injury upon an unjust aggressor and an innocent
bystander to prevent greater injury to other innocent
people, as in Cases 6 and 7, and that one can even
intentionally or indirectly kill an unjust aggressor to
prevent serious injury to oneself or other innocent
people as in Case 5. Yet neither anti- war pacifists nor
just war theorists have explicitly addressed the ques-
tion of whether we can indirectly kill an innocent
bystander in order to prevent serious injuries to the
members of a much larger group of innocent people.
Rather they have tended to confuse Case 8 with Case
5 where it is agreed that one can justifiably kill an
unjust aggressor in order to prevent serious injury to
oneself or five other innocent people. In Case 8, how-
ever, one is doing something quite different: one is
killing an innocent bystander in order to prevent seri-
ous injury to oneself and five other innocent people.
Now this kind of trade- off is not accepted in
standard police practice. Police officers are regularly
instructed not to risk innocent lives simply to prevent
serious injury to other innocents. Nor is there any

CHAPTER 19: PoLITICAL VIoLEnCE: WAR, TERRoRISm, And ToRTURE Á 733
give them one dollar, I think, and I would hope that
you would also think, that each of you now has an
obligation to give the thugs one dollar when before
you had no such obligation. Likewise, I think that
the actions of unjust aggressors can put us into situa-
tions where it is morally permissible or even morally
required for us to seriously harm or kill when before
it was not.
Now it might be contended that anti- war pacifists
would concede the moral permissibility of Cases 1–3
and 5–7 but still maintain that any participation in
the massive use of lethal force in warfare is morally
prohibited. The scale of the conflict, anti- war pacifists
might contend, makes all the difference. Of course, if
this simply means that many large- scale conflicts will
have effects that bear no resemblance to Cases 1–3
or 5–7, this can hardly be denied. Still, it is possible
for some large- scale conflicts to bear a proportionate
resemblance to the above cases. For example, it can be
argued plausibly that India’s military action against
Pakistan in Bangladesh and the Tanzanian incursion
into Uganda during the rule of Idi Amin resemble
Cases 3, 5, or 7 in their effects upon innocents.8
What this shows is that anti- war pacifists are not jus-
tified in regarding every participation in the massive
use of lethal force in warfare as morally prohibited.
Instead, anti- war pacifists must allow that at least in
some real- life cases, wars and other large- scale mili-
tary operations both have been and will be morally
permissible.
This concession from anti- war pacifists, however,
needs to be matched by a comparable concession from
just war theorists themselves, because too frequently
they have interpreted their theory in morally inde-
fensible ways. When just war theory is given a mor-
ally defensible interpretation, I have argued that the
theory favors a strong just means prohibition against
intentionally harming innocents. I have also argued
that the theory favors the use of belligerent means
only when such means 1) minimize the loss and
injury to innocent lives overall; 2) threaten innocent
lives only to prevent the loss of innocent lives, not
simply to prevent injury to innocents; and 3) threaten
or even take the lives of unjust aggressors when it is
the only way to prevent serious injury to innocents.
killing in defense of oneself or others is morally per-
missible, not that it is morally required or morally
obligatory. That is true. I have not established any
obligation to respond to aggression with lethal force
in these cases, but only that it is morally permissible to
do so. For one thing, it is difficult to ground an obliga-
tion to use lethal force on self- defense alone, as would
be required in Case 1 or in one version of Case 5. Obli-
gations to oneself appear to have an optional quality
that is absent from obligations to others. In Cases 2–3
and 5–7, however, the use of force would prevent seri-
ous harm or death to innocents, and here I contend it
would be morally obligatory if either the proposed use
of force required only a relatively small personal sacri-
fice from us or if we were fairly bound by convention
or a mutual defense agreement to come to the aid of
others. In such cases, I think we can justifiably speak of
a moral obligation to kill or seriously harm in defense
of others.
Another aspect of Cases 1–3 and 5–7 to which
someone might object is that it is the wrongful actions
of others that put us into situations where I am claim-
ing that we are morally justified in seriously harm-
ing or killing others. But for the actions of unjust
aggressors, we would not be in situations where I am
claiming that we are morally permitted or required to
seriously harm or kill.
Yet doesn’t something like this happen in a wide
range of cases when wrongful actions are performed?
Suppose I am on the way to the bank to deposit
money from a fund- raiser, and someone accosts me
and threatens to shoot me if I don’t hand over the
money. If I do hand over the money, I would be forced
to do something I don’t want to do, something that
involves a loss to myself and others. But surely it is
morally permissible for me to hand over the money
in this case. And it may even be morally required for
me to do so if resistance would lead to the shooting of
others in addition to myself. So it does seem that bad
people, by altering the consequences of our actions,
can alter our obligations as well. What our obligations
are under nonideal conditions are different from
what they would be under ideal conditions. If a group
of thugs comes into this room and make it very clear
that they intend to shoot me if each of you doesn’t

734 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
5. This is because the just means restrictions protect inno-
cents quite well against the infliction of intentional harm.
6. By an “unjust aggressor” I mean someone who the defender
is reasonably certain is wrongfully engaged in an attempt
upon her life or the lives of other innocent people.
7. What is relevant in this case is that the foreseen deaths are
a relatively small number (one in this case) compared to the
number of innocents whose lives are saved (six in this case).
The primary reason for using particular numbers in this case
and those that follow is to make it clear that at this stage of
the argument no attempt is being made to justify the large-
scale killing that occurs in warfare.
8. Although there is a strong case for India’s military action
against Pakistan in Bangladesh and the Tanzanian incursion
into Uganda during the rule of Idi Amin, there are questions
that can be raised about the behavior of Indian troops in
Bangladesh following the defeat of the Pakistanian forces and
about the regime Tanzania put in power in Uganda.
9. The just cause provision was violated because the
extremely effective economic sanctions were not given
enough time to work. It was estimated that when compared
to past economic blockades, the blockade against Iraq had
a near 100% chance of success if given about a year to work.
(See The New York Times, January 14, 1991.) The just means
provision was violated because the number of combatant
and noncombatant deaths was disproportionate. As many
as 120,000 Iraqi soldiers were killed, according to U.S. intel-
ligence sources.
10. Of course, anti- war pacifists are right to point out that vir-
tually all wars that have been fought have led to unforeseen
harms and have been fought with less and less discrimination
as the wars progressed. Obviously, these are considerations
that in just war theory must weigh heavily against going to
war.
11. Of course, more needs to be done to specify the require-
ments of just war pacifism. One fruitful way to further
specify these requirements is to appeal to a hypothetical
social contract decision procedure as has been done with
respect to other practical problems. Here I have simply tried
to establish the defensibility of just war pacifism without
appealing to any such procedure. Yet once the defensibility
of just war pacifism has been established, such a decision
procedure will prove quite useful in working out its particu-
lar requirements.
Obviously, just war theory, so understood, is going
to place severe restrictions on the use of belligerent
means in warfare. In fact, most of the actual uses of
belligerent means in warfare that have occurred turn
out to be unjustified. For example, the U.S. involve-
ment in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Panama, Soviet
involvement in Afghanistan, Israeli involvement in
the West Bank and the Gaza Strip all violate the just
cause and just means provisions of just war theory
as I have defended them. Even the recent U.S.-led
war against Iraq violated both the just cause and just
means provisions of just war theory.9 In fact, one
strains to find examples of justified applications of
just war theory in recent history. Two examples I have
already referred to are India’s military action against
Pakistan in Bangladesh and the Tanzanian incursion
into Uganda during the rule of Idi Amin. But after
mentioning these two examples it is difficult to go
on. What this shows is that when just war theory and
anti- war pacifism are given their most morally defen-
sible interpretations, both views can be reconciled. In
this reconciliation, the few wars and large- scale con-
flicts that meet the stringent requirements of just war
theory are the only wars and large- scale conflicts to
which anti- war pacifists cannot justifiably object.10
We can call the view that emerges from this reconcili-
ation “just war pacifism.” It is the view which claims
that due to the stringent requirements of just war
theory, only very rarely will participation in a massive
use of lethal force in warfare be morally justified. It is
the view on which I rest my case for the reconciliation
of pacifism and just war theory.11
NOTES
1. Jan Narveson, “Pacifism: A Philosophical Analysis,” Ethics
75 (1965): 259–71.
2. Cheyney Ryan, “ Self- Defense, Pacifism and the Possibility
of Killing,” Ethics 93 (1983): 514–24.
3. Alternatively, one might concede that even in this case
killing is morally evil, but still contend that it is morally jus-
tified because it is the lesser of two evils.
4. Douglas P. Lackey, “The Moral Irrelevance of the Counterforce/
Countervalue Distinction,” The Monist 70 (1987): 255–76.

CHAPTER 19: PoLITICAL VIoLEnCE: WAR, TERRoRISm, And ToRTURE Á 735
Drones, Ethics, and the Armchair Soldier
John Kaag
action. I know that effective military operations have
traditionally been based on the chain of command
and that this looks a little like the command and con-
trol structure of robots. When someone is shooting at
you, I can only imagine that you need to follow orders
mechanically. The heat of battle is neither the time
nor the place for cool ethical reflection.
Warfare, unlike philosophy, could never be con-
ducted from an armchair. Until now. For the first time
in history, some soldiers have this in common with
philosophers: they can do their jobs sitting down.
They now have what I’ve always enjoyed, namely “lei-
sure,” in the Hobbesian sense of the word, meaning
they are not constantly afraid of being killed. Hobbes
thought that there are certain not- so- obvious perks to
leisure (not being killed is the obvious one). For one,
you get to think. This is what he means when he says
that “leisure is the mother of philosophy.” I tend to
agree with Hobbes: only those who enjoy a certain
amount of leisure can be philosophers.
Ethics has long been taught— at least in passing—
to officer candidates and battlefield soldiers. But this
new breed of remote control soldier will have the time
and the space to think through unprecedentedly com-
plex moral quandaries, like the question of using a
drone to kill an unarmed human being who may be
in the early planning stages of a terrorist attack. A 2011
Pentagon study (which anticipated the results of the
psychological examination of pilots earlier this year)
showed that nearly 30 percent of drone pilots expe-
rience what the military calls “burnout,” defined by
what the military describes, in unusually sophisti-
cated language, as “an existential crisis.”
You might be under the impression that philoso-
phy is in the business of causing rather than allevi-
ating existential crises. And so you may think that
acquainting soldiers with the Gordian knots of phi-
losophy will do little to increase their job satisfaction.
But this is only partially correct.
Working one’s way through the complexities of
“just war” and moral theory makes it perfectly clear
Ten years ago, I watched the Iraq invasion unfold on
TV. It was for me, like most Americans, a remote- control
event, the type that you tuned into occasionally to
see how it was going before changing the channel, like
the Olympics. And, as often happens in the Olympics,
we crushed the opposition. But we Americans at home
were not the only ones with remote controls. Many of
our soldiers also had them, and used them to direct one
of the most devastating military assaults in the history
of modern warfare. The technological superiority of the
United States—its ability to strike with precision from a
distance— produced something like the “shock and awe”
the media had relentlessly advertised. And it inspired a
similar reaction in moral and legal theorists who were
concerned about the relationship between advanced
military technologies and the legitimation of warfare.
Ten years later, I’m a philosopher writing a book
about the ethics of drone warfare. Some days I fear that
I will have either to give up the book or to give up phi-
losophy. I worry that I can’t have both. Some of my col-
leagues would like me to provide decision procedures for
military planners and soldiers, the type that could guide
them, automatically, unthinkingly, mechanically, to the
right decision about drone use. I try to tell them that this
is not how ethics, or philosophy, or humans, work.
I try to tell them that the difference between
humans and robots is precisely the ability to think
and reflect, in Immanuel Kant’s words, to set and pur-
sue ends for themselves. And these ends cannot be set
beforehand in some hard and fast way— even if Kant
sometimes thought they could.
What disturbs me is the idea that a book about
the moral hazard of military technologies should be
written as if it was going to be read by robots: input
decision procedure, output decision and correlated
John Kaag, “Drones, Ethics, and the Armchair Soldier,” New York
Times, March 17, 2013. © 2013 The New York Times. All rights
reserved. Used by permission and protected by the Copyright
Laws of the United States. The printing, copying, redistribution,
or retransmission of this content without express written permis-
sion is prohibited.

736 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
in several important ways. He suggested that the
tenets of a revised theory apply not only to govern-
ments, traditionally represented by commanders and
heads of state, but also to individual soldiers. This is
a significant revision since it broadens the scope of
responsibility for warfare beyond political institu-
tions to include the men and women who engage in
combat. This has always been the case with the prin-
ciples of jus in bello (the conventions or rules that
govern military conduct) but McMahan intends indi-
viduals to be held responsible for the additional stan-
dards of jus ad bellum, those guidelines that describe
the permissibility of initiating military operations.
Specifically, McMahan believes that individuals are
to bear at least some responsibility in upholding “just
cause” requirements. McMahan expects more of sol-
diers and, in this age of drones and leisure, he is right
to do so.
I suspect many armchair soldiers would welcome
some new intellectual tools to handle this newfound
responsibility. As it turns out, some of these “new”
tools have been around since Plato and Augustine
(fathers of Western moral theory and the just war tra-
dition, respectively), but some are in fact new, or at
least newer, and have yet to be introduced in the train-
ing of armchair soldiers. Warfare, until this point, had
been too brutal, too immediate, too threatening, for
soldiers to spend much time on the theoretical mat-
ters of ethics. But as technology makes warfare more
leisurely it has, for the first time, the chance to be
genuinely— and complexly— philosophical. My point
here is not that these new armchair soldiers are to be
criticized for failing in their moral responsibilities. My
point is rather that while drones are to be applauded
for keeping these soldiers out of harm’s way physi-
cally, we would do well to remember that they do not
keep them out of harm’s way morally or psychologi-
cally. The high rates of “burnout” should drive this
home. Supporting our troops requires ensuring that
they are provided not just with training and physical
armor, but with the intellectual tools to navigate these
new difficulties.
To be sure, the question of what new responsibili-
ties soldiers have is not the only, nor even the most
important, ethical question concerning the use of
that ethics is not about arriving easily at a single
right answer, but rather coming to understand the
profound difficulty of doing so. Experiencing this
difficulty is what philosophers call existential respon-
sibility. One of the jobs of philosophy, at least as
I understand it, is neither to help people to avoid these
difficulties nor to exaggerate them, but rather to face
them in resolute and creative ways. In short, the job
of philosophy is not to create existential crises, but to
handle or work through existential responsibility.
In the past, the leaders and military strategists
who initiated and oversaw military operations were
supposed to shoulder the brunt of existential responsi-
bility. This was appropriate, since they did so from the
relative safety of their fortified bunkers or, at the very
least, from behind a row of protective ground troops.
These ground troops, unfortunately, had more press-
ing concerns than existential responsibility. They did
not have leisure, unlike their commanders, who also
often had the philosophical training to think through
the complexities of their jobs.
Here we could think about President Obama’s
being schooled in Aquinas and Augustine or, even bet-
ter, Alexander the Great’s studying under Aristotle.
This training was not simply a degree requirement at
Officer Candidate School or one of the United States
military academies, but a sustained, ongoing, and
rigorous engagement with a philosophical tradition.
Alexander lived with Aristotle. This type of training,
I would like to think, helped commanders face the
challenge of moral responsibility (if it did not nec-
essarily lead them to the right moral choice). To be
clear, studying philosophy does not hard- wire a stu-
dent to be moral or to always do the right thing. Once
again, this is the way that robots, not humans, work.
Humans cannot be fully hard- wired. But it does give a
student some practice at shouldering the responsibil-
ity of being a moral agent. And if we give our soldiers
the tools to make informed moral decisions, then we
should think about giving them the freedom to do
so by making more legal space for selective consci-
entious objection or for disobeying orders on moral
grounds.
In a recent post in The Stone, Jeff McMahan argued
that traditional “just war theory” should be reworked

CHAPTER 19: PoLITICAL VIoLEnCE: WAR, TERRoRISm, And ToRTURE Á 737
10 years ago, the most important questions we should
be asking should not be directed to armchair soldiers
but to those of us in armchairs at home: What wars are
being fought in our name? On what grounds are they
being fought?
drones. Hannah Arendt claimed, in her analysis of
World War II, that “in general, the degree of respon-
sibility increases as we draw further away from the
man who uses the fatal instrument with his own
hands.” Just as was the case in the invasion of Iraq
Can Terrorism Be Morally Justified?
Stephen Nathanson
indistinguishable from other acts that are branded
with this negative label. On other occasions, moral
judgments of terrorism rest on biased, uneven applica-
tions of moral principles to the actions of friends and
foes. Principles that are cited to condemn the actions
of foes are ignored when similar actions are commit-
ted by friends.
We need to ask then: Can people who believe that
war is sometimes morally permissible consistently
condemn terrorist violence? Or are such condemna-
tions necessarily hypocritical and self- serving?
If we are to avoid hypocrisy, then we need both
(a) a definition of terrorism that is neutral with respect
to who commits the actions, and (b) moral judg-
ments of terrorism that derive from the consistent,
even- handed applications of moral criteria.
This paper aims to achieve both of these things.
First, I begin with a definition of terrorism and then
discuss why terrorism is always wrong. In addition,
I want to show that the condemnation of terror-
ism does not come without other costs. A consistent
approach to terrorism requires us to revise some com-
mon judgments about historical events and forces us to
reconsider actions in which civilians are killed as “col-
lateral damage” (i.e., side effects) of military attacks.
My aim, then, is to criticize both terrorist actions
and a cluster of widespread moral views about violence
and war. This cluster includes the following beliefs:
1. Terrorism is always immoral.
2. The Allied bombing of cities in World War II was
morally justified because of the importance of
defeating Nazi Germany and Japan.
Can terrorism be morally justified?
Even asking this question can seem like an insult—
both to victims of terrorist actions and to moral com-
mon sense. One wants to say: if the murder of innocent
people by terrorists is not clearly wrong, what is?
But the question is more complicated than it
looks. We can see this by broadening our focus and
considering some of the other beliefs held by people
who condemn terrorism. Very few of us accept the
pacifist view that all violence is wrong. Most of us
believe that some acts of killing and injuring people
are morally justified. Indeed, most of us think that war
is sometimes justified, even though it involves orga-
nized, large- scale killing, injuring, and destruction
and even though innocent civilians are usually among
the victims of war. So, most of us believe that even the
killing of innocent people is sometimes morally justi-
fied. It is this fact that makes the condemnation of ter-
rorism morally problematic. We pick out terrorism for
special condemnation because its victims are civilian
noncombatants rather than military or governmen-
tal officials, but we also believe that such killings are
sometimes morally permissible.
Seen in a broader context, moral judgments of
terrorism often seem hypocritical. They often presup-
pose self- serving definitions of “terrorism” that allow
people to avoid labeling actions that they approve as
instances of terrorism, even though these actions are
Stephen Nathanson, from “Can Terrorism Be Morally Justified?”
in Morality in Practice, ed. James P. Sterba, 7th ed. (Belmont, CA:
Wadsworth/Thomson, 2004), 602–10. Reprinted with permission
from Stephen Nathanson.

738 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
legitimate way to promote them. Condition 3 is fre-
quently met by permissible actions, as when we punish
some criminals to deter other people from committing
crimes. Condition 4 seems closer to what is essentially
wrong with terrorism. If terrorism is always immoral,
it is because it kills and injures innocent people.
As I have already noted, however, morally consci-
entious people sometimes want to justify acts that kill
innocent people. If a blanket condemnation of terror-
ism is to be sustained, then we must either condemn
all killings of innocent people, or we must find morally
relevant differences between the killing of innocents
by terrorists and the killing of innocents by others
whose actions we find morally acceptable.
TERRORISM AND CITY BOMBING:
THE SAME OR DIFFERENT?
Many people who condemn terrorism believe that
city bombing in the war against Nazism was justified,
even though the World War II bombing campaigns
intentionally targeted cities and their inhabitants.
This view is defended by some philosophical theorists,
including Michael Walzer, in his book Just and Unjust
Wars, and G. Wallace in “Terrorism and the Argument
from Analogy.”1 By considering these theorists, we
can see if there are relevant differences that allow us to
say that terrorism is always wrong but that the World
War II bombings were morally justified.
One of the central aims of Michael Walzer’s Just
and Unjust Wars is to defend what he calls the “war con-
vention,” the principles that prohibit attacks on civil-
ians in wartime. Walzer strongly affirms the principle
of noncombatant immunity, calling it a “fundamental
principle [that] underlies and shapes the judgments we
make of wartime conduct.” He writes:
A legitimate act of war is one that does not violate the
rights of the people against whom it is directed. . . .
[N]o one can be threatened with war or warred against,
unless through some act of his own he has surrendered
or lost his rights.2
Unlike members of the military, civilians have not sur-
rendered their rights in any way, and therefore, Walzer
says, they may not be attacked.
3. It is morally permissible to kill civilians in war if
these killings are not intended.
The trouble with this cluster is that the first belief
expresses an absolute prohibition of acts that kill
innocent people while the last two are rather permis-
sive. If we are to avoid inconsistency and hypocrisy,
we must revise our views either (a) by accepting that
terrorism is sometimes morally permissible, or (b)
by judging that city bombings and many collateral
damage killings are morally wrong. I will defend the
second of these options.
DEFINING TERRORISM
I offer the following definition of terrorism to launch
my discussion of the moral issues. Terrorist acts have
the following features:
1. They are acts of serious, deliberate violence or
destruction.
2. They are generally committed by groups as part of
a campaign to promote a political or social agenda.
3. They generally target limited numbers of people
but aim to influence a larger group and/or the
leaders who make decisions for the group.
4. They either kill or injure innocent people or pose a
serious threat of such harms to them.
This definition helps in a number of ways. First, it
helps us to distinguish acts of terrorism from other
acts of violence. Nonviolent acts are not terrorist acts;
nor are violent actions that are unrelated to a politi-
cal or social agenda. Ironically, some terrible kinds of
actions are not terrorist because they are too destruc-
tive. As condition 3 tells us, terrorism generally tar-
gets limited numbers of people in order to influence
a larger group. Acts of genocide that aim to destroy a
whole group are not acts of terrorism, but the reason
why makes them only worse, not better.
Second, the definition helps us to identify the
moral crux of the problem with terrorism. Condi-
tion 1 is not the problem because most of us believe
that some acts of violence are morally justified.
Condition 2 can’t be the problem because anyone
who believes in just causes of war must accept that
some causes are so important that violence may be a

CHAPTER 19: PoLITICAL VIoLEnCE: WAR, TERRoRISm, And ToRTURE Á 739
While Walzer’s discussion begins with the spe-
cial threat posed by Nazism, he believes that supreme
emergencies can exist in more ordinary situations. In
the end, he supports the view that if a single nation
is faced by “a threat of enslavement or extermina-
tion[,]” then its “soldiers and statesmen [may] over-
ride the rights of innocent people for the sake of their
own political community. . . .”5 While he expresses
this view with “hesitation and worry,” he neverthe-
less broadens the reach of the concept of “supreme
emergency” to include circumstances that arise in
many wars.
The problem for Walzer is that his acceptance of
the broad “supreme emergency” exception threat-
ens to completely undermine the principle of non-
combatant immunity that lies at the heart of his own
view of the ethics of warfare. How can the principle
of noncombatant immunity be fundamental if it can
be overridden in some cases? Moreover, his condem-
nation of terrorism is weakened because it seems to
be possible that people might resort to terrorism in
cases that qualify as supreme emergencies, as when
their own people are threatened by extermination
or enslavement. Walzer’s defense of the bombing of
cities, then, seems to be inconsistent with his sweep-
ing denunciation of terrorism.
WALLACE’S ARGUMENT FROM ANALOGY
While Walzer does not directly address the tension
between the two parts of his view, G. Wallace explic-
itly tries to defend the view that terrorism is wrong
and that the bombing of cities was justified. Accord-
ing to Wallace, the bombing campaign was justified
because it satisfied all four of the following criteria:
1. It was a measure of last resort.
2. It was an act of collective self- defense.
3. It was a reply in kind against a genocidal, racist
aggressor.
4. It had some chances of success.
He then asks whether acts of terrorism might be justi-
fied by appeal to these very same criteria.
Wallace’s answer is that the [acts of] terrorism can-
not meet these criteria. Or, more specifically, he says
Given Walzer’s strong support for noncomba-
tant immunity and his definition of terrorism as the
“method of random murder of innocent people,” it is
no surprise that he condemns terrorism. At one point,
after describing a terrorist attack on an Algerian milk
bar frequented by teenagers, he writes:
Certainly, there are historical moments when armed
struggle is necessary for the sake of human freedom.
But if dignity and self- respect are to be the outcomes
of that struggle, it cannot consist of terrorist attacks
against children.3
Here and elsewhere, Walzer denounces terrorism
because it targets innocent people.
Nonetheless, he claims that the aerial attacks on
civilians by the British early in World War II were jus-
tified. In order to show why, he develops the concept
of a “supreme emergency.” Nazi Germany, he tells us,
was no ordinary enemy; it was an “ultimate threat to
everything decent in our lives.”4 Moreover, in 1940,
the Nazi threat to Britain was imminent. German
armies dominated Europe and sought to control the
seas. Britain feared an imminent invasion by a country
that threatened the basic values of civilization.
According to Walzer, the combination of the enor-
mity and the imminence of the threat posed by Nazi
Germany produced a supreme emergency, a situation
in which the rules prohibiting attacks on civilians no
longer held. If killing innocents was the only way to
ward off this dreadful threat, then it was permissible.
Since air attacks on German cities were the only means
Britain had for inflicting harm on Germany, it was
morally permissible for them to launch these attacks.
Walzer does not approve all of the city bombing
that occurred in World War II. The emergency lasted,
he thinks, only through 1942. After that, the threat
diminished, and the constraints of the war conven-
tion should once again have been honored. In fact,
the bombing of cities continued throughout the war,
climaxing in massive attacks that killed hundreds of
thousands of civilians: the bombing of Dresden, the
fire bombings of Japanese cities by the United States,
and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
According to Walzer, none of these later attacks were
justified because the supreme emergency had passed.

740 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
faces our own society. We condemn terrorists for
intentionally killing innocent people while we think
it was right to use tactics in our own wars that did the
same. Either we must accept the view that terrorism
can sometimes be justified, or we must come to see our
own bombings of cities as violations of the prohibi-
tions on killing civilians in wartime.
TERRORISM, COLLATERAL DAMAGE, AND
THE PRINCIPLE OF DOUBLE EFFECT
Many of us believe that wars are sometimes justified,
but we also know that even if civilians are not inten-
tionally killed, the deaths of civilians is a common
feature of warfare. Indeed, during the twentieth cen-
tury, civilian deaths became a larger and larger propor-
tion of the total deaths caused by war. A person who
believes that wars may be justified but that terrorism
cannot be must explain how this can be.
One common approach focuses on the difference
between intentionally killing civilians, as terrorists
do, and unintentionally killing civilians, as some-
times happens in what we regard as legitimate acts of
war. According to this approach, terrorism is wrong
because it is intentional while so- called “collateral
damage” killings and injuries are morally permissible
because they are not intended.
This type of view is developed by Igor Primoratz in
“The Morality of Terrorism.”7 Primoratz attempts to
show why terrorism is morally wrong and how it dif-
fers from other acts of wartime killing that are morally
permissible.
First, he makes it clear that, by definition, terror-
ism always involves the intentional killing of innocent
people. He then offers a number of arguments to show
why such killings are wrong. The first two have to do
with the idea that persons are moral agents who are
due a high level of respect and concern. He writes:
[E]very human being is an individual, a person sepa-
rate from other persons, with a unique, irreproducible
thread of life and a value that is not commensurate
with anything else.8
Given the incommensurable value of individual
persons, it is wrong to try to calculate the worth of
that while any one of the criteria might be met by a
terrorist act, all four of them cannot be satisfied. Why
not? The problem is not with criteria 2 and 3; a com-
munity might well be oppressed by a brutal regime and
might well be acting in its own defense. In these respects,
its situation would be like that of Britain in 1940.
But, Wallace claims, conditions 1 and 4 cannot
both be satisfied in this case. If the community has a
good chance of success through the use of terrorism
(thus satisfying condition 4), then other means of
opposition might work as well, and terrorism will fail
to be a last resort. Hence it will not meet condition 1.
At the same time, if terrorist tactics are a last resort
because all other means of opposition will fail, then
the terrorist tactics are also likely to fail, in which case
condition 4 is not met.
What Wallace has tried to show is that there are
morally relevant differences between terrorism and the
city bombings by Britain. Even if some of the criteria
for justified attacks on civilians can be met by would- be
terrorists, all of them cannot be. He concludes that
“[E]ven if we allow that conditions (1) and (4) can be
met separately, their joint satisfaction is impossible.”6
Unfortunately, this comforting conclusion— that
the British city bombing was justified but that terror-
ism cannot be— is extremely implausible. Both terror-
ism and city bombing involve the intentional killing
of innocent human beings in order to promote an
important political goal. Wallace acknowledges this
but claims that the set of circumstances that justified
city bombing could not possibly occur again so as to
justify terrorism.
There is no basis for this claim, however. Wallace
accepts that the right circumstances occurred in the
past, and so he should acknowledge that it is at least
possible for them to occur in the future. His conclu-
sion ought to be that if city bombing was justifiable,
then terrorism is in principle justifiable as well. For
these reasons, I believe that Wallace, like Walzer, is
logically committed to acknowledging the possibility
of morally justified terrorism.
This is not a problem simply for these two authors.
Since the historical memory of city bombing in the
United States and Britain sees [such tactics] as justifi-
able means of war, the dilemma facing these authors

CHAPTER 19: PoLITICAL VIoLEnCE: WAR, TERRoRISm, And ToRTURE Á 741
some acts of war that kill innocent people. While he
acknowledges that the “suffering of civilians . . . is
surely inevitable not only in modern, but in almost all
wars,” Primoratz stresses that the moral evaluation of
acts of killing requires that we “attend not only to the
suffering inflicted, but also to the way it is inflicted.”10
By this, he means that we need, among other things,
to see what the person who did the act intended.
To illustrate his point, he contrasts two cases of
artillery attacks on a village. In the first case, the artil-
lery attack is launched with the explicit goal of killing
the civilian inhabitants of the village. The civilians are
the target of the attack. This attack is the equivalent
of terrorism since both intentionally target innocent
people, and just like terrorism, it is immoral.
In a second case, the artillery attack is aimed at
“soldiers stationed in the village.” While the soldiers
know that innocent people will be killed, that is not
their aim.
Had it been possible to attack the enemy unit with-
out endangering the civilians in any way, they would
certainly have done so. This was not possible, so they
attacked although they knew that the attack would
cause civilian casualties too; but they did their best to
reduce those inevitable, but undesired consequences as
much as possible.11
In this second case, the civilian deaths and injuries
are collateral damage produced by an attack on a
legitimate military target. That is the key difference
between terrorism and legitimate acts of war. Terror-
ism is intentionally directed at civilians, while legiti-
mate acts of war do not aim to kill or injure civilians,
even when this is their effect.
Primoratz concludes that Trotsky and other
defenders of terrorism are wrong when they equate
war and terrorism. No doubt, the intentional killing
of civilians does occur in war, and when it does Pri-
moratz would condemn it for the same reason he con-
demns terrorism. But if soldiers avoid the intentional
killing of civilians, then their actions can be morally
justified, even when civilians die as a result of what
they do. As long as soldiers and revolutionaries avoid
the intentional killing of innocent people, they will
not be guilty of terrorist acts.
some hoped- for goal by comparison with the lives
and deaths of individual people. This kind of calcula-
tion violates the ideal of giving individual lives our
utmost respect and concern. Terrorists ignore this
central moral ideal. They treat innocent people as
political pawns, ignoring their individual worth and
seeing their deaths simply as means toward achieving
their goals.
In addition, Primoratz argues, terrorists ignore the
moral relevance of guilt and innocence in their treat-
ment of individuals. They attack people who have
no responsibility for the alleged evils that the terror-
ists oppose and thus violate the principle that people
should be treated in accord with what they deserve.
Terrorists, Pirmoratz tells us, also forsake the ideal
of moral dialogue amongst equals. They not only
decide who will live and who will die, but they feel no
burden to justify their actions in ways that the victims
might understand and accept. People who take moral
ideas seriously engage in open discussion in order
to justify their actions. They engage others in moral
debate. Ideally, according to Primoratz, a moral person
who harms others should try to act on reasons that are
so compelling that they could be acknowledged by
their victims. Terrorist acts cannot be justified to their
victims, and terrorists are not even interested in trying
to do so.
Though these ideas are sketched out rather than
fully developed, Primoratz successfully expresses some
important moral values. Drawing on these values, he
concludes that terrorism is incompatible with “some
of the most basic moral beliefs many of us hold.”9
Primoratz vs. Trotsky
Having tried to show why terrorism is wrong,
Primoratz considers an objection put forward by
Leon Trotsky, who defended terrorism as a revolution-
ary tactic. Trotsky claims that people who approve
traditional war but condemn revolutionary violence
are in a weak position because the differences between
these are morally arbitrary. If wars that kill innocent
people can be justified, Trotsky claims, then so can
revolutions that kill innocent people.
Primoratz replies by arguing that there is an
important moral difference between terrorism and

742 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
damage killings and if the distinction between these
killings and terrorism cannot rest solely on whether
the killings are intentional, then the criteria that he
uses may justify at least some terrorist acts. Like the
soldiers in his example, the terrorists may believe that
the need for a particular attack is “so strong and urgent
that it prevailed over the prohibition of killing or
maiming a comparatively small number of civilians.”
Consistency would require Primoratz to agree that the
terrorist act was justified in this case.
Recall, too, Primoratz’s claim that actions need
to be capable of being justified to the victims them-
selves. Would the victims of the artillery attack accept
the claim that the military urgency justified “killing
or maiming a comparatively small number of civil-
ians?”12 Why should they accept the sacrifice of their
own lives on the basis of this reasoning?
In the end, then, Primoratz does not succeed in
showing why terrorism is immoral while collateral
damage killing can be morally justified. Like Wallace
and Walzer, he has trouble squaring the principles
that he uses to condemn terrorism with his own
approval of attacks that produce foreseeable collateral
damage deaths.
The problem revealed here is not merely a prob-
lem for a particular author. The view that collateral
damage killings are permissible because they are unin-
tended is a very widespread view. It is the view that
United States officials appealed to when our bombings
in Afghanistan produced thousands of civilian casual-
ties. Our government asserted that we did not intend
these deaths to occur, that we were aiming at legiti-
mate targets, and that the civilian deaths were merely
collateral damage. Similar excuses are offered when
civilians are killed by cluster bombs and land mines,
weapons whose delayed detonations injure and kill
people indiscriminately, often long after a particular
attack is over.
There are many cases in which people are mor-
ally responsible for harms that they do not intend
to bring about, but if these harms can be foreseen,
their claims that they “did not mean to do it” are not
taken seriously. We use labels like “reckless disregard”
for human life or “gross negligence” to signify that
wrongs have been done, even though they were not
Problems with Primoratz’s View
Primoratz’s view has several attractive features. None-
theless, it has serious weaknesses.
In stressing the role of intentions, Primoratz
appeals to the same ideas expressed by what is
called the “principle of double effect.” According to
this principle, we should evaluate actions by their
intended goals rather than their actual consequences.
An act that produces collateral damage deaths is an
unintentional killing and hence is not wrong in the
way that the same act would be if the civilians’ deaths
were intended.
While the principle of double effects is plausible
in some cases, it is actually severely defective. To see
this, suppose that the September 11 attackers had only
intended to destroy the Pentagon and the World Trade
Center and had no desire to kill anyone. Suppose that
they knew, however, that thousands would die in the
attack on the buildings. And suppose, following the
attack, they said “We are not murderers. We did not
mean to kill these people.”
What would be our reaction? I very much doubt
that we would think them less culpable. They could
not successfully justify or excuse their actions by say-
ing that although they foresaw the deaths of many
people, these deaths were not part of their aim. We
would certainly reject this defense. But if we would
reject the appeal to double effect in this case, then we
should do so in others.
In Primoratz’s example, the artillery gunners
attack the village with full knowledge of the high
probability of civilian deaths. The artillery gunners
know they will kill innocent people, perhaps even
in large numbers, and they go ahead with the attack
anyway. If it would not be enough for my imagined
September 11 attackers to say that they did not intend
to kill people, then it is not enough for Primoratz’s
imagined soldiers to say that they did not mean to kill
the villagers when they knew full well that this would
result from their actions.
If we accept Primoratz’s defense of collateral dam-
age killings, his argument against terrorism is in dan-
ger of collapsing because terrorists can use Primoratz’s
language to show that their actions, too, may be justi-
fiable. If Primoratz succeeds in justifying the collateral

CHAPTER 19: PoLITICAL VIoLEnCE: WAR, TERRoRISm, And ToRTURE Á 743
specifics might have to be amended, but the key point
is that serious efforts must be made to avoid harm to
civilians. Not intending harm is not enough. In addi-
tion, military planners must really exert themselves.
They must, as we say, bend over backwards to avoid
harm to civilians. For example, they must:
1. Target attacks as narrowly as possible on military
resources;
2. Avoid targets where civilian deaths are extremely
likely;
3. Avoid the use of inherently indiscriminate weap-
ons (such as land mines and cluster bombs) and
inherently indiscriminate strategies (such as
high- altitude bombing of areas containing both
civilian enclaves and military targets); and
4. Accept that when there are choices between dam-
age to civilian lives and damage to military per-
sonnel, priority should be given to saving civilian
lives.
If a group has a just cause for being at war and adheres
to principles like these, then it could be said to be
acknowledging the humanity and value of those who
are harmed by its actions. While its attacks might
expose innocent people to danger, its adherence to
these principles would show that it was not indifferent
to their well- being. In this way, it would show that its
actions lack the features that make terrorism morally
objectionable.
Why is this? Because the group is combining its
legitimate effort to defend itself or others with seri-
ous efforts to avoid civilian casualties. The spirit of
their effort is captured in the phrase I have already
used: “bending over backwards.” The “bend over
backwards” ideal is superior to the principle of
double effect in many ways. First, it goes beyond the
weak rule of merely requiring that one not intend to
kill civilians. Second, while the double effect rule’s
distinction between intended and unintended results
permits all sorts of fudges and verbal tricks, the
“bend over backwards” rule can be applied in a more
objective and realistic way. It would be less likely to
approve sham compliance than is the doctrine of
double effect.
deliberate. When such actions lead to serious injury
and death, we condemn such actions from a moral
point of view, just as we condemn terrorism. The
principle of double effect does not show that these
condemnations are mistaken. If we want to differenti-
ate collateral damage killings from terrorism so as to
be consistent in our moral judgments, we will need
something better than the principle of double effect
and the distinction between intended and unin-
tended effects.
A SKETCH OF A DEFENSE
I want to conclude by sketching a better rationale for
the view that terrorist attacks on civilians are always
wrong but that some attacks that cause civilian deaths
and injuries as unintended consequences are morally
justified.
I have argued that a central problem with stan-
dard defenses of collateral damage killings is that they
lean too heavily on the distinction between what is
intended and what is foreseen. This distinction, when
used with the doctrine of double effect, is too slippery
and too permissive. As I noted above, it might provide
an excuse for the September 11 attacks if (contrary to
fact) the attacks were only targeting the World Trade
Center building and the Pentagon building and did not
actually aim to kill innocent civilians.
Michael Walzer makes a similar criticism of the
double effect principle. “Simply not to intend the
death of civilians is too easy,” he writes. “What we
look for in such cases is some sign of a positive com-
mitment to save civilian lives.”13 Walzer calls his
revised version the principle of “double intention.” It
requires military planners and soldiers to take positive
steps to avoid or minimize these evils, even if these
precautions increase the danger to military forces.
Walzer’s rule is a step in the right direction, but we
need to emphasize that the positive steps must be sig-
nificant. They cannot be pro forma or minimal efforts.
In order to show a proper respect for the victims of
these attacks, serious efforts must be made to avoid
death and injury to them. I suggest the following set
of requirements for just, discriminate fighting, offer-
ing them as a sketch rather than a full account. The

744 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
would include actions that cause civilian casualties
but that adhere to the “bend over backwards” principle.
I believe that this sort of approach achieves what
nonpacifist critics of terrorism want to achieve. I pro-
vide a principled basis for condemning terrorism, no
matter who it is carried out by, and a principled justi-
fication of warfare that is genuinely defensive. More-
over, the perspective is unified in a desirable way.
Terrorist actions cannot be morally justified because
the intentional targeting of civilians is the most obvi-
ous kind of violation of the “bend over backwards”
rule.
At the same time that these principles allow for
the condemnation of terrorism, they are immune to
charges of hypocrisy because they provide a basis for
criticizing not only terrorist acts but also the acts of
any group that violates the “bend over backwards”
rule, either by attacking civilians directly or by failing
to take steps to avoid civilian deaths.
CONCLUSION
Can terrorism be morally justified? Of course not.
But if condemnations of terrorism are to have moral
credibility, they must rest on principles that constrain
our own actions and determine our judgments of
what we ourselves do and have done. To have moral
credibility, opponents of terrorism must stand by the
principles underlying their condemnations, apply
their principles in an evenhanded way, and bend over
backwards to avoid unintended harms to civilians.
Only in this way can we begin inching back to a world
in which those at war honor the moral rules that pro-
hibit the taking of innocent human lives. As long as
condemnations of terrorism are tainted by hypocrisy,
moral judgments will only serve to inflame people’s
hostilities rather than reminding them to limit and
avoid serious harms to one another.
NOTES
1. Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars (New York: Basic
Books, 1977); Gerry Wallace, “Terrorism and the Argument
from Analogy,” Journal of Moral and Social Studies, vol. 6
(1991), 149–160.
The “bend over backwards” rule might even sat-
isfy Primoratz’s requirement that acts of violence be
justifiable to their victims. Of course, no actual victim
is likely to look favorably on attacks by others that
will result in the victim’s death or serious injury. But
suppose we could present the following situation to
people who might be victims of an attack (a condi-
tion that most of us inhabit) and have them consider
it from something like Rawls’s veil of ignorance. We
would ask them to consider the following situation:
• Group A is facing an attack by group B; if success-
ful, the attack will lead to death or the severest
oppression of group A.
• The only way that group A can defend itself is by
using means that will cause death and injury to
innocent members of group B.
• You are a member of one of the groups, but you do
not know which one.
Would you approve of means of self- defense that will
kill and injure innocent members of B in order to
defend group A?
In this situation, people would not know whether
they would be victims or beneficiaries of whatever
policy is adopted. In this circumstance, I believe that
they would reject a rule permitting either intentional
or indiscriminate attacks on civilians. Thus, they
would reject terrorism as a legitimate tactic, just as
they would reject indiscriminate attacks that kill and
injure civilians.
At the same time, I believe that they would
approve a rule that combined a right of countries to
defend themselves against aggression with the restric-
tions on means of fighting contained in the “bend
over backwards” rule. This would have the follow-
ing benefits. If one were a member of a group that
had been attacked, one’s group would have a right of
self- defense. At the same time, if one were an innocent
citizen in the aggressor country, the defenders would
be required to take serious steps to avoid injury or
death to you and other civilians.
If people generally could accept such a rule, then
actions that adhere to that rule would be justifiable
to potential victims as well as potential attackers. This

CHAPTER 19: PoLITICAL VIoLEnCE: WAR, TERRoRISm, And ToRTURE Á 745
8. Primoratz, 224.
9. Primoratz, 225.
10. Primoratz, 227.
11. Primoratz, 227.
12. Primoratz, 228.
13. Walzer, 155–156.
2. Walzer, 135.
3. Walzer, 205.
4. Walzer, 253.
5. Walzer, 254.
6. Wallace, 155–156.
7. Igor Primoratz, “The Morality of Terrorism?” Journal of
Applied Philosophy, vol. 14 (1997), 222.
The Case for Torturing the Ticking Bomb Terrorist
Alan M. Dershowitz
If the torture of one guilty person would be
justified to prevent the torture of a hundred inno-
cent persons, it would seem to follow— certainly to
Bentham— that it would also be justified to prevent
the murder of thousands of civilians in the ticking
bomb case. Consider two hypothetical situations that
are not, unfortunately, beyond the realm of possibil-
ity. In fact, they are both extrapolations on actual situ-
ations we have faced.
Several weeks before September 11, 2001, the Immi-
gration and Naturalization Service detained Zacarias
Moussaoui after flight instructors reported suspicious
statements he had made while taking flying lessons
and paying for them with large amounts of cash. The
government decided not to seek a warrant to search
his computer. Now imagine that they had, and that
they discovered he was part of a plan to destroy large
occupied buildings, but without any further details.
They interrogated him, gave him immunity from pros-
ecution, and offered him large cash rewards and a new
identity. He refused to talk. They then threatened him,
tried to trick him, and employed every lawful tech-
nique available. He still refused. They even injected
him with sodium [pentothal] and other truth serums,
but to no avail. The attack now appeared to be immi-
nent, but the FBI still had no idea what the target was
or what means would be used to attack it. We could
not simply evacuate all buildings indefinitely. An FBI
agent proposes the use of nonlethal torture— say, a
The arguments in favor of using torture as a last resort
to prevent a ticking bomb from exploding and kill-
ing many people are both simple and simple- minded.
Bentham constructed a compelling hypothetical case
to support his utilitarian argument against an absolute
prohibition on torture:
Suppose an occasion were to arise, in which a suspi-
cion is entertained, as strong as that which would be
received as a sufficient ground for arrest and commit-
ment as for felony— a suspicion that at this very time a
considerable number of individuals are actually suffer-
ing, by illegal violence inflictions equal in intensity to
those which if inflicted by the hand of justice, would
universally be spoken of under the name of torture.
For the purpose of rescuing from torture these hun-
dred innocents, should any scruple be made of apply-
ing equal or superior torture, to extract the requisite
information from the mouth of one criminal, who
having it in his power to make known the place where
at this time the enormity was practising or about to
be practised, should refuse to do so? To say nothing of
wisdom, could any pretence be made so much as to the
praise of blind and vulgar humanity, by the man who
to save one criminal, should determine to abandon 100
innocent persons to the same fate?
Alan M. Dershowitz, “The Case for Torturing the Ticking Bomb
Terrorist” in Why Terrorism Works (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2002). Copyright © 2002 by Alan M. Dershowitz. Reprinted
with permission from Yale University Press.

746 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
P. E. Twining, have argued that torture is unaccept-
able even if it is restricted to an extremely limited cat-
egory of cases:
There is at least one good practical reason for drawing
a distinction between justifying an isolated act of tor-
ture in an extreme emergency of the kind postulated
above and justifying the institutionalisation of torture as
a regular practice. The circumstances are so extreme in
which most of us would be prepared to justify resort to
torture, if at all, the conditions we would impose would
be so stringent, the practical problems of devising and
enforcing adequate safeguards so difficult and the risks
of abuse so great that it would be unwise and dangerous
to entrust any government, however enlightened, with
such a power. Even an out- and- out utilitarian can sup-
port an absolute prohibition against institutionalised
torture on the ground that no government in the world
can be trusted not to abuse the power and to satisfy in
practice the conditions he would impose.
Bentham’s own justification was based on case or
act utilitarianism— a demonstration that in a particu-
lar case, the benefits that would flow from the limited
use of torture would outweigh its costs. The argu-
ment against any use of torture would derive from
rule utilitarianism— which considers the implications
of establishing a precedent that would inevitably be
extended beyond its limited case utilitarian justifica-
tion to other possible evils of lesser magnitude. Even
terrorism itself could be justified by a case utilitarian
approach. Surely one could come up with a singular
situation in which the targeting of a small number of
civilians— blowing up a German kindergarten by the
relatives of inmates in a Nazi death camp, for example,
and threatening to repeat the targeting of German
children unless the death camps were shut down.
The reason this kind of single- case utilitarian jus-
tification is simple- minded is that it has no inherent
limiting principle. If nonlethal torture of one person
is justified to prevent the killing of many important
people, then what if it were necessary to use lethal
torture— or at least torture that posed a substantial
risk of death? What if it were necessary to torture the
suspect’s mother or children to get him to divulge
the information? What if it took threatening to kill
his family, his friends, his entire village? Under a
sterilized needle inserted under the fingernails to pro-
duce unbearable pain without any threat to health or
life, or the method used in the film Marathon Man, a
dental drill through an unanesthetized tooth.
The simple cost- benefit analysis for employing
such nonlethal torture seems overwhelming: it is
surely better to inflict nonlethal pain on one guilty
terrorist who is illegally withholding information
needed to prevent an act of terrorism than to permit
a large number of innocent victims to die. Pain is a
lesser and more remediable harm than death; and the
lives of a thousand innocent people should be valued
more than the bodily integrity of one guilty person. If
the variation on the Moussaoui case is not sufficiently
compelling to make this point, we can always raise
the stakes. Several weeks after September 11, our gov-
ernment received reports that a ten- kiloton nuclear
weapon may have been stolen from Russia and was
on its way to New York City, where it would be deto-
nated and kill hundreds of thousands of people. The
reliability of the source, code named Dragonfire, was
uncertain, but assume for purposes of this hypotheti-
cal extension of the actual case that the source was a
captured terrorist— like the one tortured by the Philip-
pine authorities— who knew precisely how and where
the weapon was being brought into New York and was
to be detonated. Again, everything short of torture is
tried, but to no avail. It is not absolutely certain torture
will work, but it is our last, best hope for preventing a
cataclysmic nuclear devastation in a city too large to
evacuate in time. Should nonlethal torture be tried?
Bentham would certainly have said yes.
The strongest argument against any resort to tor-
ture, even in the ticking bomb case, also derives from
Bentham’s utilitarian calculus. Experience has shown
that if torture, which has been deemed illegitimate
by the civilized world for more than a century, were
now to be legitimated— even for limited use in one
extraordinary type of situation— such legitimation
would constitute an important symbolic setback in
the worldwide campaign against human rights abuses.
Inevitably, the legitimation of torture by the world’s
leading democracy would provide a welcome justi-
fication for its more widespread use in other parts of
the world. Two Bentham scholars, W. L. Twining and

CHAPTER 19: PoLITICAL VIoLEnCE: WAR, TERRoRISm, And ToRTURE Á 747
break. For example, if nonlethal torture were legally
limited to convicted terrorists who had knowledge
of future massive terrorist acts, were given immunity,
and still refused to provide the information, there
might still be objections to the use of torture, but they
would have to go beyond the slippery slope argument.
The case utilitarian argument for torturing a tick-
ing bomb terrorist is bolstered by an argument from
analogy— an a fortiori argument. What moral principle
could justify the death penalty for past individual mur-
ders and at the same time condemn nonlethal torture
to prevent future mass murders? Bentham posed this
rhetorical question as support for his argument. The
death penalty is, of course, reserved for convicted mur-
derers. But again, what if torture was limited to con-
victed terrorists who refused to divulge information
about future terrorism? Consider as well the analogy
to the use of deadly force against suspects fleeing from
arrest for dangerous felonies of which they have not
yet been convicted. Or military retaliations that pro-
duce the predictable and inevitable collateral killing
of some innocent civilians. The case against torture, if
made by a Quaker who opposes the death penalty, war,
self- defense, and the use of lethal force against fleeing
felons, is understandable. But for anyone who justifies
killing on the basis of a cost- benefit analysis, the case
against the use of nonlethal torture to save multiple
lives is more difficult to make. In the end, absolute
opposition to torture— even nonlethal torture in the
ticking bomb case— may rest more on historical and
aesthetic considerations than on moral or logical ones.
In debating the issue of torture, the first question
I am often asked is, “Do you want to take us back to the
Middle Ages?” The association between any form of
torture and gruesome death is powerful in the minds
of most people knowledgeable of the history of its
abuses. This understandable association makes it diffi-
cult for many people to think about nonlethal torture
as a technique for saving lives.
The second question I am asked is, “What kind
of torture do you have in mind?” When I respond by
describing the sterilized needle being shoved under
the fingernails, the reaction is visceral and often
visible— a shudder coupled with a facial gesture of
disgust. Discussions of the death penalty on the other
simple- minded quantitative case utilitarianism, any-
thing goes as long as the number of people tortured
or killed does not exceed the number that would
be saved. This is morality by numbers, unless there
are other constraints on what we can properly do.
These other constraints can come from rule utilitari-
anisms or other principles of morality, such as the pro-
hibition against deliberately punishing the innocent.
Unless we are prepared to impose some limits on the
use of torture or other barbaric tactics that might be
of some use in preventing terrorism, we risk hurtling
down a slippery slope into the abyss of amorality and
ultimately tyranny. Dostoevsky captured the com-
plexity of this dilemma in The Brothers Karamazov
when he had Ivan pose the following question to Alyo-
sha: “Imagine that you are creating a fabric of human
destiny with the object of making men happy in the
end, giving them peace at least, but that it was essen-
tial and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny
creature— that baby beating its breast with its fist, for
instance— and to found that edifice on its unavenged
tears, would you consent to be the architect on those
conditions? Tell me the truth.”
A willingness to kill an innocent child suggests
a willingness to do anything to achieve a necessary
result. Hence the slippery slope.
It does not necessarily follow from this under-
standable fear of the slippery slope that we can never
consider the use of nonlethal infliction of pain, if
its use were to be limited by acceptable principles of
morality. After all, imprisoning a witness who refuses
to testify after being given immunity is designed to be
punitive— that is painful. Such imprisonment can, on
occasion, produce more pain and greater risk of death
than nonlethal torture. Yet we continue to threaten
and use the pain of imprisonment to loosen the
tongues of reluctant witnesses.
It is commonplace for police and prosecutors to
threaten recalcitrant suspects with prison rape. As one
prosecutor put it: “You’re going to be the boyfriend of
a very bad man.” The slippery slope is an argument
of caution, not a debate stopper, since virtually every
compromise with an absolutist approach to rights
carries the risk of slipping further. An appropriate
response to the slippery slope is to build in a principled

748 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
using nonlethal torture in the ticking bomb situation.
In the late 1980s the Israeli government appointed a
commission headed by a retired Supreme Court jus-
tice to look into precisely that situation. The commis-
sion concluded that there are “three ways for solving
this grave dilemma between the vital need to preserve
the very existence of the state and its citizens, and
maintain its character as a law- abiding state.” The first
is to allow the security service to continue to fight ter-
rorism in “a twilight zone which is outside the realm
of law.” The second is “the way of the hypocrites: they
declare that they abide by the rule of law, but turn a
blind eye to what goes on beneath the surface.” And
the third, “the truthful road of the rule of law,” is that
the “law itself must insure a proper framework for the
activity” of the security services in seeking to prevent
terrorist acts.
There is of course a fourth road: namely to forgo
any use of torture and simply allow the prevent-
able terrorist act to occur. After the Supreme Court
of Israel outlawed the use of physical pressure, the
Israeli security services claimed that, as a result
of the Supreme Court’s decision, at least one pre-
ventable act of terrorism had been allowed to take
place, one that killed several people when a bus
was bombed. Whether this claim is true, false, or
somewhere in between is difficult to assess. But it is
clear that if the preventable act of terrorism was of
the magnitude of the attacks of September 11, there
would be a great outcry in any democracy that had
deliberately refused to take available preventive
action, even if it required the use of torture. During
numerous public appearances since September 11,
2001, I have asked audiences for a show of hands as
to how many would support the use of nonlethal
torture in a ticking bomb case. Virtually every hand
is raised. The few that remain down go up when I ask
how many believe that torture would actually be
used in such a case.
Law enforcement personnel give similar responses.
This can be seen in reports of physical abuse directed
against some suspects that have been detained follow-
ing September 11, reports that have been taken quite
seriously by at least one federal judge. It is confirmed
by the willingness of U.S. law enforcement officials
hand can be conducted without these kinds of reac-
tions, especially now that we literally put the con-
demned prisoner “to sleep” by laying him out on a
gurney and injecting a lethal substance into his body.
There is no breaking of the neck, burning of the brain,
bursting of internal organs, or gasping for breath that
used to accompany hanging, electrocution, shooting,
and gassing. The executioner has been replaced by a
paramedical technician, as the aesthetics of death
have become more acceptable. All this tends to cover
up the reality that death is forever while nonlethal
pain is temporary. In our modern age death is under-
rated, while pain is overrated.
I observed a similar phenomenon several years
ago during the debate over corporal punishment that
was generated by the decision of a court in Singapore
to sentence a young American to medically super-
vised lashing with a cane. Americans who support the
death penalty and who express little concern about
inner- city prison conditions were outraged by the
specter of a few welts on the buttocks of an American.
It was an utterly irrational display of hypocrisy and
double standards. Given a choice between a medically
administered whipping and one month in a typical
state lockup or prison, any rational and knowledgeable
person would choose the lash. No one dies of welts or
pain, but many inmates are raped, beaten, knifed, and
otherwise mutilated and tortured in American pris-
ons. The difference is that we don’t see— and we don’t
want to see— what goes on behind their high walls.
Nor do we want to think about it. Raising the issue of
torture makes Americans think about a brutalizing
and unaesthetic phenomenon that has been out of
our consciousness for many years.
THE THREE— OR FOUR— WAYS
The debate over the use of torture goes back many
years, with Bentham supporting it in a limited cate-
gory of cases, Kant opposing it as part of his categorical
imperative against improperly using people as means
for achieving noble ends, and Voltaire’s views on the
matter being “hopelessly confused.” The modern
resort to terrorism has renewed the debate over how a
rights- based society should respond to the prospect of

CHAPTER 19: PoLITICAL VIoLEnCE: WAR, TERRoRISm, And ToRTURE Á 749
which they are unaware. We have learned the lesson of
history that off- the- book actions can produce terrible
consequences. Richard Nixon’s creation of a group
of “plumbers” led to Watergate, and Ronald Reagan’s
authorization of an off- the- books foreign policy in
Central America led to the Iran- Contra scandal. And
these are only the ones we know about!
Perhaps the most extreme example of such a hypo-
critical approach to torture comes— not surprisingly—
from the French experience in Algeria. The French
army used torture extensively in seeking to prevent
terrorism during a brutal colonial war from 1955 to
1957. An officer who supervised this torture, General
Paul Aussaresses, wrote a book recounting what he
had done and seen, including the torture of dozens of
Algerians. “The best way to make a terrorist talk when
he refused to say what he knew was to torture him,”
he boasted. Although the book was published decades
after the war was over, the general was prosecuted—
but not for what he had done to the Algerians. Instead,
he was prosecuted for revealing what he had done, and
seeking to justify it.
In a democracy governed by the rule of law, we
should never want our soldiers or our president to take
any action that we deem wrong or illegal. A good test
of whether an action should or should not be done is
whether we are prepared to have it disclosed— perhaps
not immediately, but certainly after some time has
passed. No legal system operating under the rule of
law should ever tolerate an “ off- the- books” approach
to necessity. Even the defense of necessity must be jus-
tified lawfully. The road to tyranny has always been
paved with claims of necessity made by those respon-
sible for the security of a nation. Our system of checks
and balances requires that all presidential actions, like
all legislative or military actions, be consistent with
governing law. If it is necessary to torture in the tick-
ing bomb case, then our governing laws must accom-
modate this practice. If we refuse to change our law to
accommodate any particular action, then our govern-
ment should not take that action.
Only in a democracy committed to civil liber-
ties would a triangular conflict of this kind exist.
Totalitarian and authoritarian regimes experience
no such conflict, because they subscribe to neither
to facilitate the torture of terrorist suspects by repres-
sive regimes allied with our intelligence agencies. As
one former CIA operative with thirty years of experi-
ence reported: “A lot of people are saying we need some-
one at the agency who can pull fingernails out. Others
are saying, ‘Let others use interrogation methods that
we don’t use.’ The only question then is, do you want
to have CIA people in the room?” The real issue, there-
fore, is not whether some torture would or would not be
used in the ticking bomb case— it would. The question
is whether it would be done openly, pursuant to a previ-
ously established legal procedure, or whether it would
be done secretly, in violation of existing law.
Several important values are pitted against each
other in this conflict. The first is the safety and security
of a nation’s citizens. Under the ticking bomb scenario
this value may require the use of torture, if that is the
only way to prevent the bomb from exploding and
killing large numbers of civilians. The second value is
the preservation of civil liberties and human rights.
This value requires that we not accept torture as a
legitimate part of our legal system. In my debates with
two prominent civil libertarians, Floyd Abrams and
Harvey Silverglate, both have acknowledged that they
would want nonlethal torture to be used if it could
prevent thousands of deaths, but they did not want
torture to be officially recognized by our legal system.
As Abrams put it: “In a democracy sometimes it is nec-
essary to do things off the books and below the radar
screen.” Former presidential candidate Alan Keyes
took the position that although torture might be nec-
essary in a given situation it could never be right. He
suggested that a president should authorize the tortur-
ing of a ticking bomb terrorist, but that this act should
not be legitimated by the courts or incorporated into
our legal system. He argued that wrongful and indeed
unlawful acts might sometimes be necessary to pre-
serve the nation, but that no aura of legitimacy should
be placed on these actions by judicial imprimatur.
This understandable approach is in conflict with
the third important value: namely, open account-
ability and visibility in a democracy. “ Off- the- book
actions below the radar screen” are antithetical to
the theory and practice of democracy. Citizens can-
not approve or disapprove of governmental actions of

750 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
is unlikely they will succeed in time. Or say we have no
communication with the jet and all we know is that it
is off course and heading toward Washington, D.C., or
some other densely populated city. Under these more
questionable circumstances, the question becomes
who should make this life and death choice between
evils— a decision that may turn out tragically wrong?
No reasonable person would allocate this decision
to a fighter jet pilot who happened to be in the area or
to a local airbase commander— unless of course there
was no time for the matter to be passed up the chain of
command to the president or the secretary of defense.
A decision of this kind should be made at the highest
level possible, with visibility and accountability.
Why is this not also true of the decision to torture
a ticking bomb terrorist? Why should that choice of
evils be relegated to a local policeman, FBI agent, or
CIA operative, rather than to a judge, the attorney
general, or the president?
There are, of course, important differences between
the decision to shoot down the plane and the decision
to torture the ticking bomb terrorist. Having to shoot
down an airplane, though tragic, is not likely to be a
recurring issue. There is no slope down which to slip.
Moreover, the jet to be shot down is filled with our
fellow citizens— people with whom we can identify.
The suspected terrorist we may choose to torture is a
“they”—an enemy with whom we do not identify but
with whose potential victims we do identify. The risk
of making the wrong decision, or of overdoing the
torture, is far greater, since we do not care as much
what happens to “them” as to “us.” Finally, there is
something different about torture— even nonlethal
torture— that sets it apart from a quick death. In addi-
tion to the horrible history associated with torture,
there is also the aesthetic of torture. The very idea
of deliberately subjecting a captive human being to
excruciating pain violates our sense of what is accept-
able. On a purely rational basis, it is far worse to shoot
a fleeing felon in the back and kill him, yet every civi-
lized society authorizes shooting such a suspect who
poses dangers of committing violent crimes against the
police or others. In the United States we execute con-
victed murderers, despite compelling evidence of the
unfairness and ineffectiveness of capital punishment.
the civil libertarian nor the democratic values that
come in conflict with the value of security. The hard
question is: which value is to be preferred when an
inevitable clash occurs? One or more of these values
must inevitably be compromised in making the tragic
choice presented by the ticking bomb case. If we do
not torture, we compromise the security and safety of
our citizens. If we tolerate torture, but keep it off the
books and below the radar screen, we compromise
principles of democratic accountability. If we create a
legal structure for limiting and controlling torture, we
compromise our principled opposition to torture in all
circumstances and create a potentially dangerous and
expandable situation.
In 1678, the French writer François de La Roche-
foucauld said that “hypocrisy is the homage that vice
renders to virtue.” In this case we have two vices:
terrorism and torture. We also have two virtues:
civil liberties and democratic accountability. Most
civil libertarians I know prefer hypocrisy, precisely
because it appears to avoid the conflict between
security and civil liberties, but by choosing the way
of the hypocrite these civil libertarians compro-
mise the value of democratic accountability. Such
is the nature of tragic choices in a complex world.
As Bentham put it more than two centuries ago:
“Government throughout is but a choice of evils.” In
a democracy, such choices must be made, whenever
possible, with openness and democratic accountabil-
ity, and subject to the rule of law.
Consider another terrible choice of evils that
could easily have been presented on September 11,
2001—and may well be presented in the future: a
hijacked passenger jet is on a collision course with a
densely occupied office building; the only way to pre-
vent the destruction of the building and the killing of
its occupants is to shoot down the jet, thereby killing
its innocent passengers. This choice now seems easy,
because the passengers are certain to die anyway and
their somewhat earlier deaths will save numerous
lives. The passenger jet must be shot down. But what
if it were only probable, not certain, that the jet would
crash into the building? Say, for example, we know
from cell phone transmissions that passengers are
struggling to regain control of the hijacked jet, but it

CHAPTER 19: PoLITICAL VIoLEnCE: WAR, TERRoRISm, And ToRTURE Á 751
alone, could not be used to convict, but it was used to
obtain a torture warrant. That torture warrant was in
turn used to obtain a confession, which then had to
be independently corroborated— at least in most cases
(witchcraft and other such cases were exempted from
the requirement of corroboration).
Torture was also used against persons already con-
victed of capital crimes, such as high treason, who
were thought to have information necessary to pre-
vent attacks on the state.
Langbein studied eighty- one torture warrants,
issued between 1540 and 1640, and found that in
many of them, especially in “the higher cases of
treasons, torture is used for discovery, and not for evi-
dence.” Torture was “used to protect the state”: and
“mostly that meant preventive torture to identify and
forestall plots and plotters.” It was only when the legal
system loosened its requirement of proof (or intro-
duced the “black box” of the jury system) and when
perceived threats against the state diminished that
torture was no longer deemed necessary to convict
guilty defendants against whom there had previously
been insufficient evidence, or to secure preventive
information.
The ancient Jewish system of jurisprudence came
up with yet another solution to the conundrum of
convicting the guilty and preventing harms to the
community in the face of difficult evidentiary bar-
riers. Jewish law required two witnesses and a spe-
cific advance warning before a guilty person could
be convicted. Because confessions were disfavored,
torture was not an available option. Instead, the
defendant who had been seen killing by one reliable
witness, or whose guilt was obvious from the circum-
stantial evidence, was formally acquitted, but he was
then taken to a secure location and fed a concoction of
barley and water until his stomach burst and he died.
Moreover, Jewish law permitted more flexible forms of
self- help against those who were believed to endanger
the community.
Every society has insisted on the incapacitation
of dangerous criminals regardless of strictures in the
formal legal rules. Some use torture, others use infor-
mal sanctions, while yet others create the black box
of a jury, which need not explain its commonsense
Yet many of us recoil at the prospect of shoving a steril-
ized needle under the finger of a suspect who is refus-
ing to divulge information that might prevent multiple
deaths. Despite the irrationality of these distinctions,
they are understandable, especially in light of the sor-
did history of torture.
We associate torture with the Inquisition, the
Gestapo, the Stalinist purges, and the Argentine colo-
nels responsible for the “dirty war.” We recall it as a
prelude to death, an integral part of a regime of gratu-
itous pain leading to a painful demise. We find it dif-
ficult to imagine a benign use of nonlethal torture to
save lives.
Yet there was a time in the history of Anglo- Saxon
law when torture was used to save life, rather than to
take it, and when the limited administration of nonle-
thal torture was supervised by judges, including some
who are well remembered in history. This fascinating
story has been recounted by Professor John Langbein
of Yale Law School, and it is worth summarizing here
because it helps inform the debate over whether, if
torture would in fact be used in a ticking bomb case,
it would be worse to make it part of the legal system,
or worse to have it done off the books and below the
radar screen.
In his book on legalized torture during the six-
teenth and seventeenth centuries, Torture and the
Law of Proof, Langbein demonstrates the trade- off
between torture and other important values. Torture
was employed for several purposes. First, it was used to
secure the evidence necessary to obtain a guilty ver-
dict under the rigorous criteria for conviction required
at the time— either the testimony of two eyewitnesses
or the confession of the accused himself. Circumstan-
tial evidence, no matter how compelling, would not
do. As Langbein concludes, “no society will long toler-
ate a legal system in which there is no prospect in con-
victing unrepentant persons who commit clandestine
crimes. Something had to be done to extend the sys-
tem to those cases. The two- eyewitness rule was hard
to compromise or evade, but the confession invited
‘subterfuge.’” The subterfuge that was adopted per-
mitted the use of torture to obtain confessions from
suspects against whom there was compelling circum-
stantial evidence of guilt. The circumstantial evidence,

752 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
believe that most judges would require compelling
evidence before they would authorize so extraordi-
nary a departure from our constitutional norms, and
law enforcement officials would be reluctant to seek a
warrant unless they had compelling evidence that the
suspect had information needed to prevent an immi-
nent terrorist attack. A record would be kept of every
warrant granted, and although it is certainly possible
that some individual agents might torture without a
warrant, they would have no excuse, since a warrant
procedure would be available. They could not claim
“necessity,” because the decision as to whether the
torture is indeed necessary has been taken out of their
hands and placed in the hands of a judge. In addition,
even if torture were deemed totally illegal without
any exception, it would still occur, though the public
would be less aware of its existence.
I also believe that the rights of the suspect would
be better protected with a warrant requirement. He
would be granted immunity, told that he was now com-
pelled to testify, threatened with imprisonment if he
refused to do so, and given the option of providing the
requested information. Only if he refused to do what he
was legally compelled to do— provide necessary infor-
mation, which could not incriminate him because of
the immunity— would he be threatened with torture.
Knowing that such a threat was authorized by the
law, he might well provide the information. If he still
refused to, he would be subjected to judicially moni-
tored physical measures designed to cause excruciating
pain without leaving any lasting damage.
Let me cite two examples to demonstrate why
I think there would be less torture with a warrant
requirement than without one. Recall the case of
the alleged national security wiretap placed on the
phones of Martin Luther King by the Kennedy admin-
istration in the early 1960s. This was in the days when
the attorney general could authorize a national secu-
rity wiretap without a warrant. Today no judge would
issue a warrant in a case as flimsy as that one. When
Zacarias Moussaoui was detained after raising suspi-
cions while trying to learn how to fly an airplane, the
government did not seek a national security wiretap
because its lawyers believed that a judge would not
have granted one. If Moussaoui’s computer could have
verdicts. Similarly, every society insists that, if there
are steps that can be taken to prevent effective acts of
terrorism, these steps should be taken, even if they
require some compromise with other important
principles.
In deciding whether the ticking bomb terror-
ist should be tortured, one important question is
whether there would be less torture if it were done
as part of the legal system, as it was in sixteenth- and
seventeenth- century England, or off the books, as it
is in many countries today. The Langbein study does
not definitively answer this question, but it does pro-
vide some suggestive insights. The English system
of torture was more visible and thus more subject to
public accountability, and it is likely that torture was
employed less frequently in England than in France.
“During these years when it appears that torture
might have become routinized in English criminal
procedure, the Privy Council kept the torture power
under careful control and never allowed it to fall into
the hands of the regular law enforcement officers,”
as it had in France. In England “no law enforcement
officer . . . acquired the power to use torture without
special warrant.” Moreover, when torture warrants
were abolished, “the English experiment with tor-
ture left no traces.” Because it was under centralized
control, it was easier to abolish than it was in France,
where it persisted for many years.
It is always difficult to extrapolate from history,
but it seems logical that a formal, visible, account-
able, and centralized system is somewhat easier
to control than an ad hoc, off- the- books, and
under- the- radar- screen nonsystem. I believe, though
I certainly cannot prove, that a formal requirement
of a judicial warrant as a prerequisite to nonlethal
torture would decrease the amount of physical vio-
lence directed against suspects. At the most obvious
level, a double check is always more protective than
a single check. In every instance in which a warrant
is requested, a field officer has already decided that
torture is justified and, in the absence of a warrant
requirement, would simply proceed with the torture.
Requiring that decision to be approved by a judicial
officer will result in fewer instances of torture even
if the judge rarely turns down a request. Moreover, I

CHAPTER 19: PoLITICAL VIoLEnCE: WAR, TERRoRISm, And ToRTURE Á 753
Much is said of the danger to liberty from the Army pro-
gram for deporting and detaining these citizens of Japa-
nese extraction. But a judicial construction of the due
process clause that will sustain this order is a far more
subtle blow to liberty than the promulgation of the
order itself. A military order, however unconstitutional,
is not apt to last longer than the military emergency.
Even during that period a succeeding commander may
revoke it all. But once a judicial opinion rationalizes such
an order to show that it conforms to the Constitution,
or rather rationalizes the Constitution to show that the
Constitution sanctions such an order, the Court for all
time has validated the principle of racial discrimina-
tion in criminal procedure and of transplanting Ameri-
can citizens. The principle then lies about like a loaded
weapon ready for the hand of any authority that can
bring forward a plausible claim of an urgent need. Every
repetition imbeds that principle more deeply in our law
and thinking and expands it to new purposes. All who
observe the work of courts are familiar with what Judge
Cardozo described as “the tendency of a principle to
expand itself to the limit of its logic.” A military com-
mander may overstep the bounds of constitutionality,
and it is an incident. But if we review and approve, that
passing incident becomes the doctrine of the Constitu-
tion. There it has a generative power of its own, and all
that it creates will be in its own image.
A similar argument can be made regarding tor-
ture: if an agent tortures, that is “an incident,” but if
the courts authorize it, it becomes a precedent. There is,
however, an important difference between the deten-
tion of Japanese- American citizens and torture. The
detentions were done openly and with presidential
accountability; torture would be done secretly, with
official deniability. Tolerating an off- the- book system of
secret torture can also establish a dangerous precedent.
A variation on this “legitimation” argument
would postpone consideration of the choice between
authorizing torture and forgoing a possible tactic
necessary to prevent an imminent act of terrorism
until after the choice— presumably the choice to
torture— has been made. In that way, the discussion
would not, in itself, encourage the use of torture. If
it were employed, then we could decide whether it
was justified, excusable, condemnable, or something
in between. The problem with that argument is that
been searched without a warrant, it almost certainly
would have been.
It should be recalled that in the context of
searches, our Supreme Court opted for a judicial
check on the discretion of the police, by requiring a
search warrant in most cases. The Court has explained
the reason for the warrant requirement as follows:
“The informed and deliberate determinations of
magistrates . . . are to be preferred over the hurried
action of officers.” Justice Robert Jackson elaborated:
The point of the Fourth Amendment, which often is
not grasped by zealous officers, is not that it denies law
enforcement the support of the usual inferences which
reasonable men draw from evidence. Its protection
consists in requiring that those inferences be drawn
by a neutral and detached magistrate instead of being
judged by the officer engaged in the often competitive
enterprise of ferreting out crime. Any assumption that
evidence sufficient to support a magistrate’s disinter-
ested determination to issue a search warrant will jus-
tify the officers in making a search without a warrant
would reduce the Amendment to nullity and leave the
people’s homes secure only in the discretion of police
officers.
Although torture is very different from a search, the
policies underlying the warrant requirement are rele-
vant to the question whether there is likely to be more
torture or less if the decision is left entirely to field offi-
cers, or if a judicial officer has to approve a request for
a torture warrant. As Abraham Maslow once observed,
to a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
If the man with the hammer must get judicial approval
before he can use it, he will probably use it less often
and more carefully.
There are other, somewhat more subtle, consid-
erations that should be factored into any decision
regarding torture. There are some who see silence
as a virtue when it comes to the choice among such
horrible evils as torture and terrorism. It is far better,
they argue, not to discuss or write about issues of this
sort, lest they become legitimated. And legitimation is
an appropriate concern. Justice Jackson, in his opin-
ion in one of the cases concerning the detention of
Japanese- Americans during World War II, made the
following relevant observation:

754 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
Even if government officials decline to discuss
such issues, academics have a duty to raise them and
submit them to the marketplace of ideas. There may
be danger in open discussion, but there is far greater
danger in actions based on secret discussion, or no dis-
cussion at all.
Whatever option our nation eventually adopts—
no torture even to prevent massive terrorism, no tor-
ture except with a warrant authorizing nonlethal
torture, or no “officially” approved torture but its
selective use beneath the radar screen— the choice is
ours to make in a democracy. We do have a choice, and
we should make it— before local FBI agents make it for
us on the basis of a false assumption that we do not
really “have a choice.”
* * *
no FBI agent who tortured a suspect into disclosing
information that prevented an act of mass terrorism
would be prosecuted— as the policemen who tortured
the kidnapper into disclosing the whereabouts of his
victim were not prosecuted. In the absence of a prose-
cution, there would be no occasion to judge the appro-
priateness of the torture.
I disagree with these more passive approaches and
believe that in a democracy it is always preferable to
decide controversial issues in advance, rather than
in the heat of battle. I would apply this rule to other
tragic choices as well, including the possible use of a
nuclear first strike, or retaliatory strikes— so long as
the discussion was sufficiently general to avoid giving
our potential enemies a strategic advantage by their
knowledge of our policy.
My Tortured Decision
Ali Soufan
agent, and with several C.I.A. officers present, I ques-
tioned him from March to June 2002, before the harsh
techniques were introduced later in August. Under tra-
ditional interrogation methods, he provided us with
important actionable intelligence.
We discovered, for example, that Khalid Shaikh
Mohammed was the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks.
Abu Zubaydah also told us about Jose Padilla, the
so- called dirty bomber. This experience fit what I had
found throughout my counterterrorism career: tradi-
tional interrogation techniques are successful in iden-
tifying operatives, uncovering plots and saving lives.
There was no actionable intelligence gained from
using enhanced interrogation techniques on Abu
Zubaydah that wasn’t, or couldn’t have been, gained
from regular tactics. In addition, I saw that using these
alternative methods on other terrorists backfired on
more than a few occasions— all of which are still clas-
sified. The short sightedness behind the use of these
techniques ignored the unreliability of the methods,
the nature of the threat, the mentality and modus
operandi of the terrorists, and due process.
For seven years I have remained silent about the false
claims magnifying the effectiveness of the so- called
enhanced interrogation techniques like waterboard-
ing. I have spoken only in closed government hear-
ings, as these matters were classified. But the release
last week of four Justice Department memos on inter-
rogations allows me to shed light on the story, and on
some of the lessons to be learned.
One of the most striking parts of the memos is
the false premises on which they are based. The first,
dated August 2002, grants authorization to use harsh
interrogation techniques on a high- ranking terrorist,
Abu Zubaydah, on the grounds that previous methods
hadn’t been working. The next three memos cite the
successes of those methods as a justification for their
continued use.
It is inaccurate, however, to say that Abu Zubaydah
had been uncooperative. Along with another F.B.I.
Ali Soufan, excerpt from “My Tortured Decision,” New York Times,
April 22, 2009. Copyright © 2009 Ali Soufan, used by permission
of The Wylie Agency LLC.

CHAPTER 19: PoLITICAL VIoLEnCE: WAR, TERRoRISm, And ToRTURE Á 755
That would be a mistake. Almost all the agency offi-
cials I worked with on these issues were good people
who felt as I did about the use of enhanced tech-
niques: it is un-American, ineffective and harmful to
our national security.
Fortunately for me, after I objected to the enhanced
techniques, the message came through from Pat
D’Amuro, an F.B.I. assistant director, that “we don’t do
that,” and I was pulled out of the interrogations by the
F.B.I. director, Robert Mueller (this was documented in
the report released last year by the Justice Department’s
inspector general).
My C.I.A. colleagues who balked at the techniques,
on the other hand, were instructed to continue. (It’s
worth nothing that when reading between the lines of
the newly released memos, it seems clear that it was
contractors, not C.I.A. officers, who requested the use
of these techniques.)
As we move forward, it’s important to not
allow the torture issue to harm the reputation, and
thus the effectiveness, of the C.I.A. The agency is
essential to our national security. We must ensure
that the mistakes behind the use of these techniques
are never repeated. We’re making a good start: Presi-
dent Obama has limited interrogation techniques
to the guidelines set in the Army Field Manual, and
Leon Panetta, the C.I.A. director, says he has banned
the use of contractors and secret overseas prisons for
terrorism suspects (the so- called black sites). Just as
important, we need to ensure that no new mistakes
are made in the process of moving forward— a real
danger right now.
Defenders of these techniques have claimed that
they got Abu Zubaydah to give up information lead-
ing to the capture of Ramzi bin al- Shibh, a top aide
to Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, and Mr. Padilla. This
is false. The information that led to Mr. Shibh’s cap-
ture came primarily from a different terrorist operative
who was interviewed using traditional methods. As for
Mr. Padilla, the dates just don’t add up: the harsh tech-
niques were approved in the memo of August 2002,
Mr. Padilla had been arrested that May.
One of the worst consequences of the use of
these harsh techniques was that it reintroduced
the so- called Chinese wall between the C.I.A. and
F.B.I., similar to the communications obstacles that
prevented us from working together to stop the 9/11
attacks. Because the bureau would not employ these
problematic techniques, our agents who knew the
most about the terrorists could have no part in
the investigation. An F.B.I. colleague of mine who
knew more about Khalid Shaikh Mohammed than
anyone in the government was not allowed to speak
to him.
It was the right decision to release these memos,
as we need the truth to come out. This should not be
a partisan matter, because it is in our national security
interest to regain our position as the world’s foremost
defenders of human rights. Just as important, releas-
ing these memos enables us to begin the tricky process
of finally bringing these terrorists to justice.
The debate after the release of these memos has
centered on whether C.I.A. officials should be prose-
cuted for their role in harsh interrogation techniques.

756
C H A P T E R 2 0
‘’
The Ethics of Immigration
The history of U.S. immigration is long; the
nation’s immigration policy has always been
controversial (and variable); and debates about
the morality of immigration have been rumbling
since its founding. The moral issues are many and
complex: Are nations morally obligated to accept
all immigrants (to have more or less open bor-
ders)? Do nations have the moral right to reject
all immigrants (to have more or less closed bor-
ders)? If a nation admits immigrants, what are the
selection criteria it can use to decide which immi-
grants to accept? Is it morally right, for example,
to accept all white Christians but turn away all
dark- skinned Pakistanis? Do rich nations have a
moral obligation to accept refugees— the poor,
oppressed, or persecuted? What rights, if any,
do undocumented (“illegal” or “unauthorized”)
immigrants have? Are countries obligated to
grant citizenship to undocumented immigrants
who have for years lived peacefully within their
borders, paid taxes, contributed to the economy,
supported their community, and never broken
a law?
As with any moral questions, intelligent
answers about immigration must rest on moral
principles or reasons and nonmoral facts. The
moral reasoning involved is straightforward, and
the moral principles appealed to are familiar. The
nonmoral facts, however, have too often been
hard to come by. It is likely that a great deal of
what you think you know about immigration is
false. Perhaps this chapter can remedy some of
this confusion.
ISSUE FILE: BACKGROUND
From the beginning of the republic, Americans have
often viewed immigrants with suspicion or fear,
even while admiring the contributions they made to
the nation. And immigration policies have reflected
this ambivalence. In 1790, a law was passed to spell
out who could be naturalized (made a citizen). The
applicant had to be a resident for two years, a per-
son of “good moral character,” and a “free white
person.” From 1875 to 1917, new restrictions lim-
ited or banned immigration from many parts of the
world, especially Asia. Immigrants with contagious
diseases were banned, as were criminals, “lunatics,”
epileptics, polygamists, anarchists, political extrem-
ists, beggars, and others. In the early 1920s, laws
were passed to limit the number of immigrants from
southern and eastern Europe (who were thought
to be detrimental to American society) and to favor
immigrants from northern and western Europe.
Throughout U.S. history, anti- immigration feel-
ings have always run strong, even though America
itself is a land of immigrants. For example,
Benjamin Franklin warned about the damaging
effects of the Germans on U.S. society (1753). Dur-
ing the Civil War General Ulysses S. Grant issued
an expulsion order for all Jews within the parts of
the territory he controlled (1862). The largest single
mass lynching in U.S. history took place in New
Orleans in 1891 when 11 Sicilians (who had been
accused of murder but had been found not guilty)
were attacked by an angry mob of 10,000 people.
New immigrants from many racial or ethnic groups
often struggled to make a place for themselves in

CHAPTER 20: THE ETHICs of ImmIgRATIon Á 757
Each year, about a million immigrants enter
the United States, while over a million immigrants
become lawful permanent residents— that is, they
get a green card, which means they are on their way
to becoming full- fledged citizens. In general, green-
card immigrants can apply for citizenship after liv-
ing continuously in the country for five years. Most
of them are sponsored by family members who are
already U.S. citizens.6
As immigrants are entering the United States,
others are leaving via deportation, defined by the
U.S. government as the formal removal of a foreign
national from the United States for violating an
immigration law. About 344,000 immigrants were
deported in 2016. Between 2001 and 2008, the Bush
administration deported 2 million immigrants;
between 2009 and 2016, the Obama administration
deported about 3 million. Most deportees are not
criminals, but are deported for other reasons.7
The federal government defines a refugee
as “someone who has fled from his or her home
country and cannot return because he or she has a
well- founded fear of persecution based on religion,
race, nationality, political opinion or membership
in a particular social group.” From 1975 to 2017,
the United States resettled about 3 million refu-
gees within its borders. In 2016 alone, the United
States resettled almost 85,000 refugees, most of
them from the Democratic Republic of the Congo,
but also many from Syria, Myanmar, Iraq, and
Somalia. Nearly 39,000 of them were Muslims, and
over 37,000 were Christians.8 Refugees are allowed
to remain indefinitely in the United States as legal
permanent residents, although they may apply for
citizenship after being a resident for five years.
Americans have several worrying misconcep-
tions about immigration. Here’s a sketch of some
of them.
• In a few years, Hispanics will be the
major ity in the United States, and whites
will be a minority. This assumption is false.
America amid public sentiment that portrayed
them as dirty, criminally inclined, unhealthy, or
otherwise undesirable.1
In 1965, Congress passed the Immigration and
Nationality Act, which radically changed immi-
gration policy. Before that time, immigration had
been driven by a quota system that gave preference
to immigrants from Western Europe. But the new
policy favored skilled immigrants and those who,
by immigrating, could help reunite families. Since
the law took effect, most immigrants have arrived
from Latin America, South Asia, and East Asia,
while a smaller number have come from Western
Europe. In 2015, 27 percent of immigrants living
in the United States came from Mexico; 27 percent
from Asia (mostly China and India); 14 percent
from Europe and Canada; and 4 percent from the
Middle East.2
In 2015, the number of foreign- born individu-
als in the United States (both legal and unau-
thorized) rose to 43.2 million, or 13.4 percent of
the total population. This percentage of immi-
grants is actually much lower than that of many
other developed nations, including Canada (21.8
percent), Switzerland (29.4 percent), and Australia
(28.2 percent). (The immigrant portion of the
overall U.S. population was actually larger in
1890, when it was 14.8 percent, the highest in U.S.
history.3) Americans tend to overestimate immi-
grants’ share of the population, believing that it is
over twice as large (33 percent) as it actually is (less
than 14 percent).4
Many people— including many politicians and
commentators— also overestimate the number of
unauthorized immigrants living in the United
States. In 2015, the number was about 11 million,
making up one- quarter of all immigrants and 3.4
percent of the country’s overall population. The
other immigrants were lawful residents (tempo-
rary or permanent) and naturalized citizens—
nearly 34 million.5

758 Á PART 4: ETHICAL IssUEs
any of the federal or state benefits that their tax
dollars help to fund. As a result, undocumented
immigrants provide an enormous subsidy to
the Social Security system in particular. Each
year, Social Security taxes are withheld from
billions of dollars in wages earned by workers
whose names and Social Security numbers do
not match the records of the Social Security
Administration (SSA). According to the SSA,
undocumented immigrants paid $13 billion in
payroll taxes into the Social Security Trust Funds
in 2010 alone.”
• Immigration harms the economy. Many
people insist that immigration has an adverse
effect on the U.S. economy, but if it does, the
impact is minimal. Most research on the sub-
ject shows that immigration generally benefits
the economy. As the economic writer Eduardo
Porter says, “[T]he proposition that immi-
gration weighs on productivity is in tension
with many studies that show that immigra-
tion tends to raise productivity and increase
economic output, mostly by multiplying the
earnings of immigrants themselves. Immi-
gration to the United States increases inno-
vation, slows the aging of the work force and
opens new opportunities for some domestic
workers.”12
• Unauthorized immigration is getting
worse. Despite widespread belief in this claim,
there are plenty of reasons to doubt it. Unau-
thorized immigration (which includes both
illegal border crossings and people who over-
stay their visas) has been generally declining
since 2007, when the total unauthorized popu-
lation was 12.2 million. There has also been a
decrease in the number of arrests of unauthor-
ized immigrants, an upsurge in the number of
U.S. Border Patrol agents, and a rise in the num-
ber of immigrants leaving the United States to
go back to their home countries.13
Political opposition to granting undocumented
immigrants amnesty or a “path to citizenship” is
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, no popu-
lation group is projected to be in the majority
(more than 50 percent of the whole population)
in 2044 or even in 2060. Non- Hispanic whites
will still be the largest population group.9
• Immigrants commit more crimes than
native- born people do. Experts reject this
claim. Immigration scholar and author Cari
Lee Skogberg Eastman summarizes the evidence:
“Scholarship on the topic spanning decades has
overwhelmingly found that immigrants actu-
ally show less propensity toward crime than
native- born citizens and that immigration can
even be considered a factor in the decrease of
violent crime in the United States.”10
• Immigrants are taking jobs away from
American citizens. Available evidence sug-
gests that this assertion is unfounded. As East-
man says, “There are specific segments of the
U.S. labor force in which unauthorized immi-
grants may compete with native labor pools, but
because employment is not a zero- sum game,
most immigrants don’t compete directly with
U.S. citizens for jobs. Research shows that immi-
gration actually helps create jobs and sometimes
boosts wages for native workers, and that immi-
grant labor is particularly necessary for STEM
(science, technology, engineering, mathemat-
ics) jobs because there are not enough U.S.-born
applicants to fill those positions.”11
• Undocumented immigrants pay no taxes.
Evidence from a variety of sources shows that
undocumented immigrants do in fact pay
taxes. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce explains:
“Undocumented immigrants pay sales taxes,
just like every other consumer in the United
States. Undocumented immigrants also pay
property taxes— even if they rent housing. More
than half of undocumented immigrants have
federal and state income, Social Security, and
Medicare taxes automatically deducted from
their paychecks. However, undocumented immi-
grants working ‘on the books’ are not eligible for

CHAPTER 20: THE ETHICs of ImmIgRATIon Á 759
which should be distinguished from political or
economic cosmopolitanism.) Cosmopolitanism,
then, inclines toward open borders.
Anticosmopolitanism is the contrary posi-
tion: wealthy nations able to ease the suffering of
the world’s poor and oppressed have a moral obli-
gation to do so, but they also have moral obliga-
tions to their own citizens that may be weightier
than those concerning foreigners. According to
anticosmopolitanism, closed borders can be justi-
fied. Stephen Macedo sums up his brand of anticos-
mopolitanism like this:
I argue that if high levels of immigration have
detrimental impact on our least well- off citizens,
that is a reason to limit immigration, even if those
who seek admission seem to be poorer than our
own poor whose condition is worsened by their
entry.16
Thinkers have made their case for cosmopoli-
tanism in different ways. Those who appeal to
equality and freedom (cosmopolitan egalitarians)
contend that everyone— both compatriots and
noncitizens— is entitled to equal moral rights and
consideration and that allowing open borders is
the key to eliminating the vast economic inequali-
ties in the world. A libertarian perspective appeals
to property rights and a person’s right to freedom
of movement. Libertarians argue that restricted
immigration (1) interferes with citizens’ right to
allow foreigners to enter their property and (2)
impedes foreigners’ right to freedom of movement.
Those who appeal to utilitarian considerations
argue that restricting immigration has adverse con-
sequences, especially economically. Closed borders
restrict trade, waste talents, and impede prosperity.
The reasons given for restricting immigration
are varied— and usually controversial:
• Security. Nations are obligated to protect their
citizens from external threats (such as terror-
ism), and many people regard limitations on
immigration as an obvious way to do this. But
there is substantial disagreement over whether
immigration limitations would be effective.
often expressed like this: “Why don’t they just get
in line and wait their turn?” The answer, as immi-
gration experts point out, is “There is no line.”
As the America Immigration Council puts it,
Immigration to the United States on a temporary
or permanent basis is generally limited to three dif-
ferent routes: employment, family reunification, or
humanitarian protection. While the U.S. immigra-
tion system is generous, each of these possibilities
is highly regulated and subject to numerical limita-
tions and eligibility requirements. Most unauthor-
ized immigrants do not have the necessary family
or employment relationships and often cannot
access humanitarian protection, such as refugee or
asylum status.14
Eastman says:
[M]ost of the unauthorized persons currently liv-
ing in the United States would not qualify to come
legally under [U.S. immigration laws]. Many do
not have family members already living legally in
the United States. Even for those who do, the visa
backlogs for certain categories of family members
(especially siblings or children of U.S. citizens) can
be decades long. In November 2015, the wait time
to bring a sibling from the Philippines was 23 years;
for Mexico it was 17 years. On top of that, annual
caps are established for most visa categories, and
there is a 7 percent per- county limit on the number
of visas issued. Overwhelmingly, demand exceeds
supply in the majority of those categories. In 2015,
for example, the per- country visa limit was 25,900,
but there were 1,323,978 applicants from Mexico
alone. . . . Legal immigration to the United States
today is a very complicated process that requires
specific resources or requirements for eligible appli-
cants. For many of the poor or disadvantaged who
come seeking economic opportunities, there sim-
ply is no legal way to enter the United States.15
Two general perspectives on the morality of
immigration dominate serious debate. Cosmo-
politanism is the view that wealthy nations
able to ease the suffering of the world’s poor and
oppressed have a moral obligation to do so, and
that this obligation is as strong concerning a
nation’s own citizens as it is concerning foreigners.
(This outlook is a kind of moral cosmopolitanism,

760 Á PART 4: ETHICAL IssUEs
• Culture. Many favor closed borders to preserve
what they perceive as their nation’s distinc-
tive culture. Critics, however, ask whether the
empirical assumptions about cultural iden-
tity and change are actually true, and whether
citizens have a moral right either to resist or to
impose changes to their culture.
• Economy. A very common assumption is that
allowing immigrants into a country will wreck
its economy. Critics often reject this view,
admitting that open borders may harm certain
workers but benefit many other workers and
the economy as a whole. If this is the case, they
ask— if a minority of workers want to maintain
closed borders while the majority would benefit
greatly from opening them— is it morally per-
missible to keep things as they are for the sake
of the minority?
• Welfare. Some argue that a wealthy nation
that offers substantial welfare benefits to its
citizens (such as Sweden and other Scandina-
vian countries) cannot afford to have open
’ QUICK REVIEW
deportation— The formal removal of a foreign
national from a country for violating an immi-
gration law.
refugee— Someone who has fled from his or her
home country and cannot return because he or
she has a well- founded fear of persecution based
on religion, race, nationality, political opinion or
membership in a particular social group.
cosmopolitanism— The view that wealthy nations
able to ease the suffering of the world’s poor and
oppressed have a moral obligation to do so and
that this obligation is as strong concerning a
nation’s own citizens as it is concerning foreigners.
anticosmopolitanism— The view that wealthy
nations able to ease the suffering of the world’s
poor and oppressed have a moral obligation to
do so, but they also have moral obligations to
their own citizens that may be weightier than
those concerning foreigners.
’
WASHINGTON— President Trump on Tuesday
ordered an end to the Obama- era program
that shields young undocumented immigrants
from deportation, calling it an “ amnesty- first
approach” and urging Congress to pass a replace-
ment before he begins phasing out its protections
in six months.
As early as March, officials said, some of the
800,000 young adults brought to the United
States illegally as children who qualify for the
program, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals
[DACA], will become eligible for deportation. The
five- year- old policy allows them to remain with-
out fear of immediate removal from the country
and gives them the right to work legally.*
The children protected by the DACA program were
not responsible for their immigration into the
United States and for their being undocumented.
Should they still be deported? Should they be per-
mitted to stay and work? Does this situation seem
like punishing children for the actions of their
parents? What would be a just resolution of this
predicament?
*Michael D. Shear and Julie Hirschfeld Davis, “Trump
Moves to End DACA and Calls on Congress to Act,”
New York Times, September 5, 2017.
CRITICAL THOUGHT: Deporting Children

CHAPTER 20: THE ETHICs of ImmIgRATIon Á 761
vein, pointing out that open borders would have
objectionable consequences. They contend, for
example, that immigration must be limited or
halted to protect the nation’s distinctive culture.
Allowing immigrants to pour in through open
borders, they argue, will irrevocably alter the cul-
ture or destroy it altogether. This nonmoral asser-
tion would have to be supported by empirical
facts, and they may or may not be at hand. Cul-
tural change— whether caused by immigration or
by internal factors— is often difficult to predict,
and identifying objectively the features of a cul-
ture worth preserving can be tricky. Citizens can
also argue that borders should be closed for other
utilitarian reasons: because immigration will dis-
rupt the economy, break the welfare system, turn
control of the country over to foreigners, or unac-
ceptably change the nature of the political system.
These claims, of course, would also require empiri-
cal support.
borders. If such a welfare state placed no limits
on immigration, it would be inundated by poor
and needy people from impoverished countries
seeking benefits. The welfare system would
collapse, and the nation would no longer be a
welfare state. Some argue, however, that this
predicament of the welfare state does not pro-
vide a justification for closing borders. There
may be ways to distribute benefits, they say,
while keeping borders open— by, for example,
delaying welfare benefits to new immigrants
until after a few years of residency.
MORAL THEORIES
Both consequentialist and nonconsequentialist
theories have been used to formulate arguments
and claims about immigration. Those who think
nations should restrict or forbid immigration (that
is, anticosmopolitans) often argue in a utilitarian
’
Consider how U.S. policy regarding refugees is
changing:
Since World War II, the United States has been the
world’s leader in resettling refugees. Most refugees
never got the chance to come to a new country and
start a new life, but if they did, there was a substan-
tial chance— even a 50 percent chance— that the
country that welcomed them was the United States.
After less than a year in office, Donald Trump
has not only officially drawn the era of global refu-
gee leadership to a close. He’s withdrawn the US
from the global community for refugee protection.
Domestically, the Trump administration has
declared that it will allow no more than 45,000
refugees into the US during the current fiscal
year (which began on October 1 and continues
through September 30, 2018). That number is less
than half the total of the last years of the Obama
administration, when the government set its refu-
gee “ceiling” to at least 100,000 refugees in the
last two years. The Trump administration’s newly
announced levels are, in fact, the most restrictive
limit the United States has set in the 70-year his-
tory of refugee resettlement.*
Does the United States have a moral obligation to
resettle refugees? If so, why? If not, why not? If the
United States has such an obligation, what proportion
of the world’s refugees must the country resettle?
What would constitute a legitimate reason for turn-
ing away some refugees and accepting others?
*Dara Lind, “The Trump Administration Doesn’t
Believe in the Global Refugee Crisis,” Vox, December 4,
2017, https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017
/10/3/16379016/trump-refugees.
CRITICAL THOUGHT: Accepting or Rejecting Refugees

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/10/3/16379016/trump-refugees

762 Á PART 4: ETHICAL IssUEs
some ways that the comparative standing of citizens
and noncitizens does not. . . . I argue against what is
sometimes characterized as a “cosmopolitan” posi-
tion with respect to distributive justice and defend
the idea that distributive justice is an obligation that
holds among citizens . . . What is the basis of these
special obligations among citizens? I argue that it is as
members or co- participants in self- governing politi-
cal communities that we have special obligations to
our fellow members.19
Macedo says that in aiding our fellow citizens,
we should give priority to those compatriots who
need our help the most:
We must consider the justifiability of policies from
the standpoint of the least well- off among our citi-
zens. John Rawls’s theory of justice stands for the
proposition that the political equality of citizens
requires this sort of “distributive” justification
among citizens: it is not reasonable to expect our
less- well- off fellow citizens to accede to a policy
on the grounds that it makes those with the luck
of superior endowment by nature and birth even
better off. Immigration policy— as part of the basic
structure of social institutions— ought to be answer-
able to the interests of the poorest Americans.
Here’s one way of using Macedo’s justice prin-
ciple in a simple argument:
1. If high levels of immigration by low- skilled
workers make it unlikely that we will fulfill
our moral obligations to the poorest Ameri-
cans, then we should reduce or stop such
immigration.
2. Currently high levels of immigration by low-
skilled workers do make it unlikely that we
will fulfill our moral obligations to the poorest
Americans.
3. Therefore, we should reduce or stop high levels
of immigration by low- skilled workers.
This is a valid argument. Premise 1 is a moral
statement derived from Macedo’s distributive jus-
tice principle, which he defends at length. Premise
2 is a nonmoral statement that must be supported
by empirical evidence.
Some arguments for and against immigration
are based not on utility, but on one or more
moral principles. Christopher Heath Wellman, for
example, argues that nations have a right to close
their borders, a right derived from the more funda-
mental right to freedom of association. People, he
says, clearly have a right to associate with particular
individuals and to disassociate from others. As he
puts it,
we take for granted that each individual has a right to
choose his or her marital partner and the associates
with whom he or she practices his or her religion. . . .
[ J]ust as an individual has a right to determine whom
(if anyone) he or she would like to marry, a group
of fellow- citizens has a right to determine whom (if
anyone) it would like to invite into its political com-
munity. And just as an individual’s freedom of asso-
ciation entitles one to remain single, a state’s freedom
of association entitles it to exclude all foreigners from
its political community.17
MORAL ARGUMENTS
It’s not possible here to examine all the arguments
that have been marshaled in the battles over
immigration, but we can look closely at one of
them. Stephen Macedo argues for his position
in a nonconsequentialist vein— specifically, he
appeals to a particular concept of justice. He asks,
“How should we think about the apparent ethical
conflict between, on the one hand, the cosmopoli-
tan humanitarian impulse to admit less well- off
persons from abroad who wish to immigrate to
the United States and, on the other hand, the spe-
cial obligation we have to less well- off Americans,
including or especially African Americans?”18 His
answer is that seeing to the needs of one’s own
citizens is generally a weightier obligation than
helping noncitizens:
Citizens have special obligations to one another: we
have special reasons to be concerned with the distri-
bution of wealth and opportunities among citizens.
The comparative standing of citizens matters in

CHAPTER 20: THE ETHICs of ImmIgRATIon Á 763
4. Have immigrants coming to America always
been welcomed with open arms? (To answer
this question, provide examples.) (pp. 756–757)
5. In 2015, how many foreign- born individuals
were living in the United States? (p. 757)
6. In 2015, what percentage of the entire U.S.
population was foreign- born? (p. 757)
7. How many immigrants were deported during
the George W. Bush presidency? The Obama
presidency? (p. 757)
8. Do immigrants commit more crimes than
native- born people do? (p. 758)
9. Is it true that immigrants pay no taxes?
(p. 758)
10. Why don’t all immigrants “get in line” to
wait their turn to become citizens instead of
entering the country illegally? (p. 759)
Discussion Questions
1. Which view makes the most sense to you—
cosmopolitanism or anticosmopolitanism?
Why?
2. Should children brought into a country illegally
ever be deported? Why or why not?
3. Is “preserving the culture” a good reason to
restrict immigration? Why or why not?
4. Does the United States have a moral obligation
to resettle refugees? Under what circumstances
would the country not have such an
obligation?
5. Does a country have the right to close its borders?
Explain.
6. Is seeing to the needs of one’s own citizens
generally a weightier obligation than helping
noncitizens? Why or why not?
7. How does Macedo justify his anticosmopolitanism?
8. What is Wellman’s justification for his view that
nations have a right to close their borders?
9. Is there anything wrong in offering
unauthorized immigrants “a path to
citizenship”? Explain.
10. Would it ever be just to ban the immigration
of people because they profess a particular
religion? Is so, why? If not, why not?
CHAPTER REVIEW
SUMMARY
Immigration policies have changed repeatedly through-
out American history and have often embodied anti-
immigrant outlooks. The immigration system for the
past several decades has favored skilled workers and
family reunification. Misconceptions that Americans
have about immigration include the notions that immi-
grants commit more crimes than native- born people do,
that undocumented immigrants pay no taxes, and that
immigrants are taking jobs away from American citizens.
Two general perspectives dominate serious debate
about immigration. Cosmopolitanism is the view
that wealthy nations able to ease the suffering of the
world’s poor and oppressed have a moral obligation
to do so and that this obligation is as strong con-
cerning foreigners as it is concerning a nation’s own
citizens. Anticosmopolitanism is the contrary posi-
tion: wealthy nations able to ease the suffering of the
world’s poor and oppressed have a moral obligation
to do so, but they also have moral obligations to their
own citizens that may be weightier than those con-
cerning foreigners. Both consequentialist and non-
consequentialist theories have been used to formulate
arguments and claims about immigration.
KEY TERMS
deportation (p. 757)
refugee (p. 757)
cosmopolitanism (p. 759)
anticosmopolitanism (p. 759)
EXERCISES
Review Questions
1. What is a refugee? What is deportation? (p. 757)
2. What is cosmopolitanism? Is cosmopolitanism
now the immigration policy of the United
States? (p. 759)
3. What is anticosmopolitanism? How does it
differ from cosmopolitanism? (p. 759)

764 Á PART 4: ETHICAL IssUEs
Pew Research Center, “Immigration,” http://www.pewre
search.org/topics/immigration/ (November 29, 2017).
Alex Sager, ed., The Ethics and Politics of Immigration
(London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2016).
Peter Singer, Practical Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1993).
Christopher Heath Wellman, “Immigration,” in Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Summer 2015 ed., ed. Edward
N. Zalta, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/immigra
tion/ (March 23, 2015).
FURTHER READING
G. Brock, Global Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2009).
Joseph H. Carens, The Ethics of Immigration (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2013).
Phillip Cole and C. Wellman, Debating the Ethics of Immi-
gration: Is There a Right to Exclude? (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2011).
Cari Lee Skogberg Eastman, Immigration: Examining the
Facts (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC- CLIO, 2017).
C. Kukathas, “Immigration,” in The Oxford Handbook of
Practical Ethics (New York: Oxford University Press,
2002), 567–90.
E T H I C A L D I L E m m A s
1. Rejecting Jewish Refugees
The modern refugee policy of the United States was shaped partly in response to the
nation’s callous treatment of refugees during Nazi rule in Europe. As one observer says,
The US (and other countries in the Western Hemisphere) could have saved thousands
of Jews from the Nazis. They didn’t. At one point, the US literally turned away a
ship of 900 German Jews. Shortly afterward, it rejected a proposal to allow 20,000
Jewish children to come to the US for safety.*
The name of the ship was the St. Louis, which set sail from Hamburg, Germany, in
May 1939. It eventually ended up in waters off the coast of Miami, Florida, waiting for
permission to land. But the United States, which could have easily accommodated the
passengers, wouldn’t allow it. The St. Louis was forced to sail back across the Atlantic,
and most of the passengers were divvied up among a handful of European countries,
all of which were eventually taken over by the Nazis. Out of the original 900 passengers,
254 perished in the Holocaust.
Was the United States morally obligated to take
in the refugees from Nazi- dominated Europe? If
so, what moral principle or principles could have
justified that action? If not, why not?
*Dara Lind, “How America’s Rejection of Jews Fleeing Nazi Germany Haunts Our Refugee Policy Today,” Vox,
January 27, 2017, https://www.vox.com/ policy-and-politics/2017/1/27/14412082/refugees-history-holocaust.

http://www.pewresearch.org/topics/immigration/

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/1/27/14412082/refugees-history-holocaust

http://www.pewresearch.org/topics/immigration/

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/immigration/

CHAPTER 20: THE ETHICs of ImmIgRATIon Á 765
2. The “White Australia” Policy
Consider the history of Australia’s former immigration law, known as the “white
Australia” policy:
In the last decades of the nineteenth century, concern was growing in the Australian
colonies about the level of “coloured” immigration to Australia, particularly from
China, and many colonies passed restrictive immigration legislation. Following
Federation in 1901, one of the first pieces of Commonwealth legislation passed was
the Immigration Restriction Act 1901, based on the earlier colonial legislation. The
overall aim of this and other related legislation was to limit non- white immigration
to Australia, particularly Asian immigration, and thereby preserve the predominance
of the British within Australia.†
Is an immigration policy that accepts only white Europeans morally acceptable? Is any
immigration policy that selects immigrants according to race, color, religion, or country
of origin morally acceptable? Why or why not?
†National Archives of Australia, “Immigration Restriction Act 1901 (commonly known as the White Australia
Policy),” 2017, http://www.naa.gov.au/collection/a-z/immigration-restriction-act.aspx. © Commonwealth of
Australia (National Archives of Australia) 2018. CC by 3.0.
3. Ideological Tests
Washington Post— Donald Trump called Monday for a Cold War- style mobilization
against “radical Islamic terror,” repeating and repackaging calls for strict immigration
controls— including a new ideological litmus test for Muslim visitors and migrants—
and blaming the current level of worldwide terrorist attacks on President Obama
and Hillary Clinton. . . .
The principal new initiative was what Trump called “extreme vetting” for “any
hostile attitude towards our country or its principles, or who believed sharia law
should supplant American law.‡
Trump’s proposed ideological test for immigrants was short on specifics, although
it seemed to entail more than the loyalty statement currently required under U.S.
naturalization law, which asks for adherence to “the principles of the Constitution.”
Critics feared that Trump’s test (ostensibly designed to identify terrorists) would be used
to discriminate against Muslims. But what about a universal ideological test used to weed
out dangerous extremists generally? Would you, for example, think it morally acceptable
to use a test asking all applicants if they approved of (1) suicide bombings against
people of other religions, (2) laws severely restricting the rights of women, or (3) making
homosexuality a capital crime? Why or why not?
‡Karen DeYoung, “Trump Proposes Ideological Test for Muslim Immigrants and Visitors to the U.S.” Washington
Post, August 15, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/trump-to-propose-ideological
-testfor-muslim-immigrants-and-visitors-to-the-us/2016/08/15/3192fdba-62fc-11e6-be4e-23fc4d4d12b4_story
.html?utm_term=.a3dd8fdc95be.

http://www.naa.gov.au/collection/a-z/immigration-restriction-act.aspx

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/trump-to-propose-ideological-testfor-muslim-immigrants-and-visitors-to-the-us/2016/08/15/3192fdba-62fc-11e6-be4e-23fc4d4d12b4_story.html?utm_term=.a3dd8fdc95be

766 Á PART 4: ETHICAL IssUEs
In announcing the Department of Homeland Security’s
policy directive on June 15 stating that undocumented
migrant youths who meet certain conditions would no
longer be deported, President Obama said that “It was
the right thing to do.” What he did not say was whether
he meant “the right thing” legally or morally.
Obviously, he considered the action to be legal, even
though this invocation of his administration’s power
drew strong criticism from many, including Supreme
Court Justice Antonin Scalia. But the president’s
grounds for believing it moral were much less clear.
This should come as no surprise: the morality
and politics of migration are among the most divisive
issues in much of the world. In the United States, dis-
cussions of immigration flow seamlessly into matters
of national security, employment levels, the health of
the American economy, and threats to a presumptive
American national identity and way of life. Much the
same is true in Europe. Not a week goes by without a
story of refugees from Africa or Asia perishing while
trying to arrive at the shores of the European Union.
Nor are such developments restricted to the
resource- rich countries of the Northern Hemisphere.
The United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Singapore, Israel and
Jordan are countries with the highest percentage share
of migrants among their total population, while the
United States, the Russian Federation, Germany, Saudi
Arabia, Canada and France lead in the actual number
of international migrants. Migrations are now global,
challenging many societies in many parts of the world.
Whereas from 1910 to 2012, the world’s popu-
lation increased slightly more than fourfold, from
1.6 billion to more than 7 billion, the number of
people living in countries other than their own as
migrants increased nearly sevenfold, from roughly
33 million to more than 200 million.
Migrations pit two moral and legal principles,
foundational to the modern state system, against each
other. On one hand, the human right of individuals to
move across borders whether for economic, personal
or professional reasons or to seek asylum and refuge is
guaranteed by Articles 13 and 14 of the 1948 Univer-
sal Declaration of Human Rights. On the other hand,
Article 21 of the declaration recognizes a basic right
to self- government, stipulating that “the will of the
people shall be the basis of the authority of govern-
ment.” Under the current regime of states, that fun-
damental right includes control over borders as well
as determining who is to be a citizen as distinguished
from a resident or an alien.
The international system straddles these dual
principles but it has not been able to reconcile them.
The irony of global developments is that while state
sovereignty in economic, military, and technological
domains is eroded and national borders have become
more porous, they are still policed to keep out aliens
and intruders. The migrant’s body has become the
symbolic site upon which such contradictions are
enacted.
Why not advocate a “world without borders”
then? From a moral point of view, no child deserves to
be born on one side of the border rather than another,
and it is deeply antithetical to our moral principles to
punish individuals for what they cannot help being
or doing. Punishment implies responsibility and
accountability for one’s actions and choices; clearly,
children who through their parents’ choices end up
on one side of the border rather than another cannot
be penalized for these choices.
A strong advocate of the right to self- government
might retort that rewarding certain children for the
wrongs committed by their parents, in this case illegal
immigration, by legalizing undocumented youths is
R E A D I n g s
The Morality of Migration
Seyla Benhabib
Seyla Benhabib, “The Morality of Migration,” New York Times,
July 29, 2012. © 2012 The New York Times. All rights reserved. Used
by permission and protected by the Copyright Laws of the United
States. The printing, copying, redistribution, or retransmission of
this content without express written permission is prohibited.

CHAPTER 20: THE ETHICs of ImmIgRATIon Á 767
in nation- centric terms, always have transnational
causes and consequences. It is impossible to address
Mexican migration into the United States, for example,
without considering the decades- long dependency
of the rich California agricultural fields upon the
often undocumented and unorganized labor of Mexi-
can workers, some of whose children have now grown
up to become “Dreamers” (so named after the Devel-
opment, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors Act
introduced to Congress in 2001). Among the three
million students who graduate from United States
high schools, 65,000 are undocumented.
The United States owes these young people a spe-
cial duty of hospitality, not only because we, as a
society, have benefited from the circumstances under
which their parents entered this country, but also
because they have formed strong affiliations with
this society through being our friends, students,
neighbors and coworkers. In a liberal- democratic
society the path to citizenship must follow along
these associative ties through which an individual
shows him or herself to be capable and worthy of
citizenship.
Migratory movements are sites of imperfect jus-
tice in that they bring into play the individual right
to freedom of movement, the universal right to hos-
pitality and the right of collectives to self- government
as well as specific associative moral obligations. These
rights cannot always be easily reconciled. Further-
more, international law does not as yet recognize a
“human right to citizenship” for migrants, and con-
siders this a sovereign prerogative of individual states.
Nonetheless, the responsible politician is the one
who acts with a lucid understanding of the necessity
to balance these principles rather than giving in to a
punitive rigorism that would deny, in Thomas Jeffer-
son’s words, “the right which nature has given to all
men of departing from [and I would add, from join-
ing with] the country in which chance, not choice has
placed them” (1774).
Whether or not President Obama considered all
these moral aspects of the matter, his handling of
this issue shows that he acted as a “responsible politi-
cian,” and not opportunistically as some of his critics
charged. It was “the right thing to do.”
illogical as well as immoral and that “the right thing to
do” would be to deport all undocumented migrants—
parents and children alike. Apart from the sheer
impracticality of this solution, its advocates seem to
consider undocumented “original entry” into a coun-
try as the analog of “original sin” that no amount of
subsequent behavior and atonement can alter.
But such punitive rigor unfairly conflates the
messy and often inadvertent reasons that lead one to
become an undocumented migrant with no criminal
intent to break the law.
If conditions in a person’s native country so
endanger his life and well- being [that] he becomes
willing to risk illegality in order to survive, his right
to survival, from a moral point of view, carries as
much weight as does the new country’s claim to con-
trol borders against migrants. Immanuel Kant, there-
fore, called the moral claim to seek refuge or respite
in the lands of another, a “universal right of hospi-
tality,” provided that the intentions of the foreigner
upon arriving on foreign lands were peaceful. Such
a right, he argued, belonged to each human being
placed on this planet who had to share the earth
with others.
Even though morally the right to hospitality is
an individual right, the socioeconomic and cultural
causes of migrations are for the most part collective.
Migrations occur because of economic, environmen-
tal, cultural and historical “push” and “pull” factors.
“We are here,” say migrants, “because in effect you
were there.” “We did not cross the border; the border
crossed us.”
We do have special obligations to our neighbors,
as opposed to moral obligations to humanity at large,
if, for example, our economy has devastated theirs; if
our industrial output has led to environmental harm
or if our drug dependency has encouraged the forma-
tion of transnational drug cartels.
These claims of interdependence require a third
moral principle— in addition to the right of univer-
sal hospitality and the right to self- government— to
be brought into consideration: associative obligations
among peoples arising through historical factors.
States cannot ignore such associative obligations.
Migration policies, though they are often couched

768 Á PART 4: ETHICAL IssUEs
The Moral Dilemma of U.S. Immigration Policy Revisited:
Open Borders vs. Social Justice?
Stephen Macedo
support for distributive justice within our political
community— necessarily go together.
These are vexing questions in politics as much
as in political theory and moral philosophy. Recent
events have made them even more central. President
Donald Trump has revived the isolationist slogan
“America first,” and linked immigration to the loss of
well- paying American jobs. His anti- immigration mes-
sage is crude and cruel but he also speaks to real griev-
ances. His message has resonated with millions of
working- class Americans— especially white working-
class men without a college degree— who have in
many ways borne the brunt of globalization.
We have not paid sufficient attention to the
domestic distributive impact of immigration (as well
as globalized trade). High levels of immigration by low-
skilled workers make fulfilling our moral obligations
to the poorest Americans more costly and less likely.
If that is true, does it mean that the borders should be
closed and immigration by the poor restricted? That
conclusion would be hasty: the moral terrain and the
policy options are complex.
If high levels of immigration have a detrimental
impact on our least well- off fellow citizens that is a rea-
son to limit immigration, even if those who seek admis-
sion are poorer than our own poor whose condition
is worsened. Citizens have special obligations to one
another: we have special reasons to be concerned with
the distribution of wealth and opportunities among cit-
izens. The relative standing of citizens matters in ways
that the relative standing of citizens and non- citizens
does not. In this respect, I argue against “cosmopoli-
tanism” with respect to the principles of social justice,
and join Michael Walzer, John Rawls, David Miller, and
Michael I. Blake, among others, in defending the idea
that distributive justice holds among citizens.
What is the basis of these special obligations
among citizens? I argue that it is as members and co-
participants in self- governing political communities
that we have special obligations to our fellow members.
IMMIGRATION POLICY AS A MORAL DILEMMA
How should we think about U.S. immigration policy
from the standpoint of basic justice, especially dis-
tributive justice which encompasses our obligations to
the less well- off? Does a justifiable immigration policy
take its bearings from the acknowledgment that we
have special obligations to “our own” poor, that is, our
least well- off fellow citizens? Or, on the other hand,
do our moral duties simply argue for attending to the
interests of the least well- off persons in the world, giv-
ing no special weight to the interests of the least well-
off Americans?
There are reasons to believe that recent Ameri-
can immigration policy has had a deleterious impact
on the distribution of income among American citi-
zens. According to influential arguments— associated
with George Borjas and others— by admitting large
numbers of relatively poorly educated and low- skilled
workers we have increased competition for low- skilled
jobs, lowering the wages of the poor and increasing
the gap between rich and poor Americans. In addition
to the effects on labor markets, there are other ways in
which high levels of immigration may have lessened
support for social welfare policies.
How should we think about the apparent ethical
conflict between, on the one hand, the cosmopolitan
humanitarian impulse to admit less well- off persons
from abroad who wish to immigrate to the U.S. and,
on the other hand, the special obligations we have
to less well- off Americans, including or especially
African Americans? Those with liberal sensibilities
need to consider whether everything that they might
favor— humanitarian concern for the world’s poor,
an openness to an ever- widening social diversity, and
From Stephen Macedo, “The Moral Dilemma of U.S. Immigra-
tion Policy Revisited: Open Borders vs. Social Justice?” in Debating
Immigration, 2nd Edition, ed. Carol A. Swain. © Cambridge Univer-
sity Press 2018. Reproduced with permission.

CHAPTER 20: THE ETHICs of ImmIgRATIon Á 769
among citizens. Even those who believe that “equal-
ity of opportunity” mandates only a modest level of
educational and other social services may still think
that the mandate holds among fellow citizens and not
all of humanity. The general thrust of my argument
should, therefore, be of relevance to those who do not
accept the specific prescriptions of Rawls and Walzer.
THE CONTOURS OF THE IMMIGRATION
DILEMMA
Over the past half- century, American immigration
policies and practices became, in some important
respects, more accommodating to the less well- off
abroad. Some argue that this “generosity” has exacted
a significant cost in terms of social justice at home.
The basic facts are striking. Immigration to the
U.S. has trended upward since the end of World War
II. Between 2001 and 2016, about one million foreign
nationals per year became long- term permanent resi-
dents in the U.S. (including both new arrivals and
adjustments to visa status). Whereas in 1970, less
than 5 percent of the general population was foreign
born, that percentage rose to 14 percent— or 45 mil-
lion people— in 2015 (just under the historic record
of 15 percent around the beginning of the twenti-
eth century). Twenty- six percent of the current U.S.
population— or 85 million people— are either immi-
grants or the children of immigrants. Over half the
U.S. population growth since 1965 is due to immigra-
tion and were it not for immigration, it is estimated
that the current population of the U.S. would be 252
rather than 324 million.
Patterns of immigration to the U.S. were shaped
deeply by amendments to the Immigration and
Nationality Act passed in 1965, emphasizing the prin-
ciple of family reunification. The exact formulas are
complicated, but “immediate relatives” of U.S. citi-
zens (spouses, parents, and unmarried children under
21 years of age) can enter without numerical limit
(and often number nearly half a million per year). An
additional 226,000 annual admission priorities are
extended to adult children and adult siblings of U.S.
citizens, and spouses and children of legal permanent
residents (“green card” holders). In 2010, family- based
Distributive justice is a weighty moral consider-
ation that bears on immigration policy, but it is not
the only one. We also have significant moral duties
and obligations to poor people (and others) abroad;
these are different in content from what we owe to
fellow citizens and they may take priority. The large
external effects of our policies may dominate smaller
negative effects on distributive justice.
This chapter proceeds as follows. The first part
describes the reasonable grounds for thinking that we
face a dilemma in shaping U.S. immigration policy. I
feature claims advanced by George Borjas and others in
order to raise important moral questions while allow-
ing that there is serious disagreement about the effects
of immigration. In section two I consider the debate
between “cosmopolitans”—who argue against the
moral significance of shared citizenship and in favor
of universal obligations of distributive justice— and
those who argue for the existence of special obligations
of justice among citizens. I seek to clarify the moral
grounds for regarding shared membership in a politi-
cal community as morally significant, but also empha-
size that we have significant cosmopolitan duties. In
the final section I return to the moral dilemma of U.S.
immigration policy and offer some reflections on pol-
icy choices. It may be that on balance we should accept
and manage ongoing high levels of movement back
and forth across the U.S.–Mexico border.
One point is worth making before moving on. The
perspective adopted and defended here is politically
liberal. John Rawls and Michael Walzer (whose ideas
I treat in some detail) are philosophers of the left in
American politics. It might be thought that this lim-
its the relevance of my argument, but this is not so.
For one thing, the vast majority of Americans profess
a belief in some liberal principles, such as equality of
opportunity. While Americans are less supportive than
Europeans of measures designed directly to reduce
income disparities between the wealthy and poor,
they overwhelmingly affirm that institutions such as
public education should insure that every child has
a good start in life, irrespective of accidents of birth.
The question of whether we have special obligations to
our fellow citizens is important independently of the
details of one’s convictions about what justice requires

770 Á PART 4: ETHICAL IssUEs
has argued that nearly half of this widening wage gap
between high school dropouts and others may be due
to the increase in the low- skilled labor pool caused by
immigration.
Of course, all Americans have benefited from
cheaper fruits, vegetables, and the many other prod-
ucts and services that immigrants (including undoc-
umented workers) help produce. Firms have also
benefited from cheap labor. Wealthier Americans have
also benefited from increased access to cheap labor to
perform service work— as nannies, gardeners, etc. By
decreasing the cost of childcare and housekeeping,
immigration has helped highly educated women par-
ticipate in the labor force. However, Borjas argues that
native- born African American and Hispanic workers
have suffered disproportionately because they are dis-
proportionately low- skilled and own few firms, and
often compete directly with low- skilled immigrants.
Borjas also observes that nations with notably
more progressive domestic policies often have immi-
gration policies that are quite different from the U.S.
While U.S. immigration policy since 1965 has empha-
sized family ties rather than desirable skills, Canada
pioneered a system in the late 1960s that gives greater
weight to educational background, occupation, and
language proficiency. Canada’s policy favors better-
educated and high- skilled workers and this seems
likely to have distributive effects that are the opposite
of U.S. policy. By increasing the pool of skilled work-
ers relative to the unskilled, Canadian policy tends to
lower the wages of the better off and to raise the rela-
tive level of the worse off. Australia, New Zealand, and
other countries have followed Canada’s lead and Presi-
dent Trump has argued that the U.S. should also move
in that direction.
It seems quite possible that Canada’s policy of
favoring more educated immigrants helps lessen
domestic income disparities, while seeming less gen-
erous from the position of poor people abroad. U.S.
policy, by admitting predominantly low- skilled and
low education immigrants looks generous to poor per-
sons abroad but may worsen the relative standing of
the American poor. As is now obvious, were the U.S. to
follow Canada and impose an education test on immi-
gration this would have a substantial impact on the
ethnic and racial composition and national origins of
preferences accounted for 66 percent of annual immi-
gration to the U.S.
U.S. policy also favors some migrants based on
employment qualifications and skills (14 percent of
the total in 2010) and others based on humanitarian
grounds, as refugees and asylum seekers (13 percent
of the total in 2010). There are also shorter- term skills-
based green card programs, including the H- IB visa
program.
The composition of the growing immigrant pool
changed markedly after 1965, with the skills level and
earnings of immigrants declining relative to the native
U.S. population. Whereas in 1960, the average immi-
grant man living in the U.S. earned 4 percent more
than the average native- born American, by 1998 the
average immigrant earned 23 percent less. Most of the
growth in immigration since 1960 has been among
people entering at the bottom 20 percent of the
income scale. This is partly because, as George Borjas
observes, “Since the immigration reforms of 1965, U.S.
immigration law has encouraged family reunification
and discouraged the arrival of skilled immigrants.”
The ethnic and racial makeup of immigration
has also changed with the percentage arriving from
Europe and Canada falling sharply and the percentage
from Latin America and Asia rising.
On Borjas’s influential if controversial analysis,
recent decades of high immigration have tended to
lower wages overall by increasing the labor supply,
with the biggest negative impact being felt by the least
well- off. Immigration from 1980 to 1995 increased the
pool of high school dropouts in the U.S. by 21 per-
cent, while increasing the pool of college graduates
by only 4 percent. By 2013, half of U.S. workers with
less than a high school degree were foreign born. This,
argues Borjas, contributed to a substantial decline in
the wages of high school dropouts and to a widening
of the wage gap based on education. He argues that
immigration between 1980 and 2000 had the effect of
lowering the wages of the average native worker by 3.2
percent, while lowering wages among those without a
high school diploma (roughly the bottom 10 percent
of wage earners) by 9 percent. To put it another way,
it is widely agreed that in the U.S. in the 1980s and
1990s there was a substantial widening of the wage
gap between more and less educated workers. Borjas

CHAPTER 20: THE ETHICs of ImmIgRATIon Á 771
voters” who decide close elections. Immigration to
the U.S. has made the median voter better off relative
to the median resident, and this as decreased median
voters’ likelihood of supporting redistribution.
Immigration may have, thus, both worsened the
relative standing of the least- well- off Americans and
also made it less likely that crucial “swing voters”
would support redistributive programs. McCarty,
Poole and Rosenthal point out that countries with
smaller portions of non- citizens among the poorest—
such as France, Japan, and Sweden— have not seen the
sort of sharp increases in the proportion of national
wealth going to people in the top 1 percent as in the
United States.
This median voter argument suggests that recent
patterns of immigration to the U.S. may not only
worsen the relative lot of the least well- off Americans
but also make it harder to enact redistributive policies.
Excluding immigrants from social welfare services is
one way to counteract these effects, but immigrants—
including illegal immigrants in many places— will still
be provided with a variety of social services, including
education.
Consider next an additional possible impact of
immigration on social justice. Feelings of solidarity
and mutual identification that help support social
justice may be undermined, at least in the short to
medium term, by the increased racial and ethnic het-
erogeneity associated with immigration. Robert Put-
nam surveys a range of different forms of evidence
suggesting that, “in ethnically diverse neighborhoods
residents of all races tend to ‘hunker down.’ Trust
(even of one’s own race) is lower, altruism and com-
munity cooperation rarer, friends fewer.” The fact that
immigrant groups typically have higher fertility rates
than natives amplifies the effect. Putnam and others
thus argue that immigration- induced increases in eth-
nic and racial diversity can reduce social solidarity and
undermine support for the provision of public goods,
including programs aimed at helping the poor.
On the basis of their survey of the evidence, Stu-
art Soroka, Keith Banting, and Richard Johnston
argue, “International migration does seem to matter
for the size of the welfare state. Although no welfare
state has actually shrunk in the face of accelerating
international movement of people, its rate of growth
immigrants to the U.S. It would, in short, substantially
and disproportionately reduce immigration from
Mexico and the rest of Latin America.
We should emphasize that Borjas’s arguments are
controversial, and many economists argue that he
exaggerates the negative effects of immigration while
downplaying the positive side. Economist David Card
argues that “immigration exerts a modestly positive
effect on the labor market outcomes of most natives,”
but not all, and not the least well- educated.
The labor market argument advanced by Borjas
(and others including Steven A. Camarota and Karen
Zeigler in this volume) describes one possible way in
which recent decades of immigration to the U.S. may
worsen distributive justice in the United States. There
are several other pathways— political, cultural, and
economic— by which recent high rates of immigration
may harm the relative standing of poorer Americans. I
will mention these briefly.
One response to the forgoing argument is that if
immigration increases our collective wealth while
worsening income disparities across rich and poor,
why not welcome immigration and redistribute the
surplus via tax and spending policies? Redistributive
policies could compensate for the malign distributive
effects of immigration, but immigration may under-
mine political support for social welfare and redistrib-
utive programs.
Nolan McCarty, Keith T. Poole, and Howard Rosen-
thal argue that recent patterns of immigration help
explain why increasing inequality since the 1980s has
come about in the U.S. without an increase in political
pressure for redistribution. Since 1972, the percentage
of non- citizens has risen and their income relative to
other Americans has fallen. “From 1972 to 2000, the
median family income of non- citizens fell from 82%
of the median income of voters to 65% while the frac-
tion of the population that is non- citizen rose from
2.6% to 7.7%.” Meanwhile, a “large segment of the
truly poor does not have the right to vote. Whereas
in 2010, noncitizens were 9.2 percent of the general
population,” they were 13 percent of families with
incomes below $7,500 per year. McCarty, Poole, and
Rosenthal argue that the increasing proportion of
non- citizens among the poor has shifted the position
of the median voter— the voters likely to be the “swing

772 Á PART 4: ETHICAL IssUEs
immigration policy may be hard or impossible to
defend from the standpoint of domestic distributive
justice.
Of course, the question of how we should respond
to this— if it is true— is not straightforward. It does
not follow that the most morally defensible policy—
all things considered— is to enact more restrictive
immigration policies. It might well be morally prefer-
able to change the other laws and policies that allow
the immigration of low- skilled workers to generate
adverse effects on native- born poor. The inegalitarian
distributive effects of immigration could be offset via
publicly funded income support for low- wage workers,
improved education and training for the unemployed,
and other social welfare benefits for the less well- off.
And yet, high levels of low- skilled immigration may
also tend to lower public support for social welfare pro-
vision. This sharpens the dilemma.
We should not underestimate the complexity of
the questions that surround policy choice in this area.
Distributive justice is important, but other moral val-
ues are also in play, including humanitarian concern
for all humans who are very badly off. Aside from the
moral considerations that might help us rank various
options, there is also the question of what package of
policies might be politically saleable. This chapter can
only scratch the surface of these issues.
COSMOPOLITAN VS. CIVIC OBLIGATIONS?
Let us step back and consider some framing moral
issues. If the better- off have moral obligations to help
the least well- off, why shouldn’t those obligations
focus on the least well- off of the world? Can we justify
special obligations to our own poor, even if they are
less poor than many others in the world?
Consider two ways in which we might care about
the condition of the poor and seek to do something
about it. We might care only about their absolute level
of poverty or deprivation, or we might care about rela-
tive deprivation: the gap between the lives of the poor-
est and those of the richest. In response to the first
concern we would engage in humanitarian assistance
and seek to establish a floor of material well- being: a
standard of decency below which no one should fall.
is smaller the more open a society is to immigration.”
They further argue that, “The typical industrial society
might spend 16 or 17 percent more than it does now
on social services if it kept its foreign- born percentage
where it was in 1970.
All of these empirical claims are controversial and
the impact of immigration on a society’s capacity to
sustain redistributive programs is bound to be complex.
Just how immigration and increased ethnic and racial
diversity inhibit social spending is unclear: the rise of
New Right political parties in Europe is associated with
controversies over immigration, and mainstream par-
ties may need to shift to the right in response.
Consider, finally, the argument advanced by John
Skrentny in his contribution to this volume. He joins
those who think that the direct economic impact of
immigration on wages is likely small. Yet he argues
that native white and black workers, in particular, may
be disadvantaged in local labor markets by popular
stereotypes that associate Latino and Asian workers—
especially immigrants— with hard work and greater
reliability. The availability of Latino and Asian immi-
grants in a labor pool may, therefore, put white and
especially African American workers at a disadvantage.
To sum up. There are reasons to believe that the
specific contours of American immigration policy
over the last 40 years may have lowered wages at the
bottom, by increasing competition for low- wage jobs,
while also reducing political support for more gener-
ous social provision targeted at low- wage workers and
the poor generally. The greater ethnic and racial diver-
sity associated with immigration may also have low-
ered trust among groups and support for public goods
provision. And, finally, pro- immigrant workplace ste-
reotypes may disadvantage native workers, especially
whites and African Americans. Vexed empirical issues
surround all of these claims.
The questions before us include the following:
if U.S. immigration policies appear to be liberal and
generous to the less well- off abroad (or at least some
of them), does this generosity involve injustice toward
poorer Native Americans, including— or perhaps,
especially— African Americans? If we have special
obligations to our poorer fellow citizens— obligations
that are sufficiently urgent and weighty— then U.S.

CHAPTER 20: THE ETHICs of ImmIgRATIon Á 773
to poorer fellow citizens, and that obligations of dis-
tributive justice in particular apply only among citi-
zens. The first position is often referred to as a form of
“cosmopolitanism”: the idea that we are, in effect, citi-
zens of the world. The latter position— which I argue
for— goes under various names and I’ll refer to it as the
civic view.
The civic view holds that we have special obliga-
tions of mutual justification to our fellow citizens,
and that the fullest obligations of distributive justice
have special force among fellow citizens. With respect
to people in the rest of world, our duties and obliga-
tions are different, though still quite important: fair
dealing— including curbs on the exploitive poten-
tial of our corporations, and doing our fair share to
address common problems (such as environmental
dangers like global warming); more specific projects of
historical rectification and redress in response to par-
ticular past acts of injustice; and humanitarian assis-
tance to help lift other societies (insofar as we can) out
of poverty.
Michael Walzer strikingly asserts that: “Distribu-
tive justice begins with membership; it must vindicate
at one and the same time the limited right of closure,
without which there could be no communities at all,
and the political inclusiveness of existing communi-
ties.” It seems to me that Walzer is on the right track
here, though he is unclear about the moral grounds.
He famously argues that moral arguments in politics
should take the form of interpreting “shared social
meanings.” Principles of justice are justified in light
of “the particularism of history, culture, and member-
ship.” Social goods should be distributed according to
criteria internal to their social meanings, and these
shared social meanings are located within particular
political communities.
Given this account of the nature of moral argu-
ment and distributive justice, it is not surprising that
Walzer would argue that distributive justice applies
within ongoing political communities which are the
natural homes of shared meanings. “[T]he political
community is probably the closest we can come to a
world of common meanings. Language, history, and
culture come together (come more closely together
here than anywhere else) to produce a collective
In response to the latter concern we would articulate
and enforce principles of social or distributive justice:
standards to regulate the major institutions of taxa-
tion, inheritance, social provision, wage policies,
education, etc., which help determine over time the
relative levels of income, wealth, and opportunity
available to different groups.
Most people seem to accept that wealthy societies
owe the first sort of concern to human beings gener-
ally. Via humanitarian assistance, wealthier societies
should pool their efforts and seek to lift poorer coun-
tries up at least to a level of basic decency; exactly what
level is adequate or morally required is an important
question. This sort of cosmopolitan moral concern
has been likened to the duty we all have to be “Good
Samaritans” when we can save people in distress with-
out undue cost to ourselves.
The latter species of concern— social or distribu-
tive justice— requires the establishment of institutions
to regulate market inequalities: systems of progressive
taxation, inheritance taxes, and the provision of social
services. As noted, most Americans profess a belief that
every child born in America should have a fair chance
to attain good jobs— to compete based on his or her
talents and effort— and this requires that governments
raise taxes in order to provide good schools for all. Vir-
tually everyone accepts some degree of progressivity in
the tax structure so efforts to promote fair equality of
opportunity are typically redistributive and constitute
part of a system of distributive justice. Opportunity
is one of the things we distribute by building pub-
lic institutions— including tax- supported schools—
alongside market institutions. As we have seen,
immigration policies may also have an impact on the
distribution of opportunities and rewards in society.
Do we have special moral obligations to our fellow
citizens, especially obligations falling under the rubric
of distributive justice? Do national borders matter
with respect to our fundamental moral obligations to
one another?
There are, roughly speaking, two opposed lines of
thought. One emphasizes the moral arbitrariness of
borders and the universality of our obligations to the
less well- off. The other position holds that borders are
morally significant, that we have special obligations

774 Á PART 4: ETHICAL IssUEs
justice remains an important goal in divided soci-
eties. Some societies, such as Canada, seem able to
generate impressive levels of support for social justice
even amidst great diversity, partly by adopting effec-
tive multicultural policies. Social scientists have more
work to do to understand the relationships among
heterogeneity, social capital, and social justice.
Particular political societies— at least when they
are well- ordered rather than tyrannical, oppressive,
very deeply divided, or desperately poor— will tend
to generate roughly common understandings among
members including standards for how disputes and
disagreements should be resolved. They may generate
disagreements and conflicts galore, but these will be
manageable if the society has working standards and
practices for how disagreements should be dealt with
and a reserve of rough agreement on the most impor-
tant matters sufficient to sustain a common willing-
ness to share a political order.
In his The Law of Peoples, John Rawls argues that
the political community— or “people”—is the appro-
priate site of distributive justice: there are no obliga-
tions of distributive justice among human beings
simply. We have humanitarian duties to relieve those
in distress— as mentioned above— but we have no
obligations across borders to regulate the relative well-
being of better and worse off people (or to create insti-
tutions capable of doing so).
Many have found this puzzling. Rawls does not
as a general matter share Walzer’s emphasis on the
authority of shared social meanings. Moreover, Raw-
ls’s general approach to justice encourages us to tran-
scend morally arbitrary accidents of birth. There is a
puzzle here.
When formulating principles of justice, Rawls’s
guiding thought is that we should put aside claims
based on morally arbitrary differences and accidents of
fate. We put aside claims to unequal rewards based on
advantages flowing from accidents of birth: including
the good fortune of being born into a well- off family,
or with a superior genetic endowment. We regard these
advantages as arbitrary when justifying to one another
principles of justice to regulate the basic structure of
society, which includes the system of property and
market exchanges, incomes and inheritance taxation,
and public institutions and policies of all kinds. We
consciousness . . . . the sharing of sensibilities and
intuitions among the members of a historical commu-
nity is a fact of life.” For Walzer, the rejection of cosmo-
politan obligations of distributive justice goes hand in
hand with the claim that common understandings of
values are shared within particular political communi-
ties but not across them.
Walzer’s argument contains part of the truth,
but it is also puzzling. Achieving shared and well-
justified principles of justice is surely a worthy aspira-
tion within political communities. But while shared
meanings are an important goal of public argument,
an achievement to be worked toward, the extent of
shared meanings is not the proper ground for circum-
scribing claims of social justice.
Shared social meanings— common understand-
ings, shared assumptions of various sorts— are
important for sustaining a political system based on
discussion and mutual justification, but they are not
the basic thing when it comes to demarcating the
range of those to whom we owe justice. The range of
those with whom we should seek to establish com-
mon and publicly justified principles of justice are
those with whom we share a comprehensive system of
binding laws. Publicly justified “common meanings”
are not the basis of political obligations but rather the
goal of public argument and deliberation within our
political community.
Walzer lays too much emphasis on consensus
and shared meanings in another way as well: what we
should want is a justified consensus that is the result of
criticism and testing. Critical argumentation is essen-
tial to public justification because what we should work
toward are common understandings that are sound,
and their soundness is essential to their authoritative-
ness. The mere fact of agreement, the mere existence
of shared conventions, is not enough.
David Miller has argued eloquently for the advan-
tages to political communities of a shared national
culture and a common language, for these can help
support a collective identity and bonds of mutual sym-
pathy and understanding, “Social justice will always
be easier to achieve in states with strong national
identities and without internal communal divisions.”
That again seems right, as far as it goes: social justice
may be harder to achieve in very diverse societies. But

CHAPTER 20: THE ETHICs of ImmIgRATIon Á 775
of well- ordered peoples than it is within one society
alone.” Some have supposed that this invocation of
diversity signals a retreat in Rawls’s later writings with
respect to his ambitions regarding justice. I think this
interpretation is wrong, and, in any event, we should
seek a better one if we can find it.
The diversity- based argument for limiting obliga-
tions of distributive justice to particular political com-
munities is a non- moral account of why justice’s sails
need trimming: a matter of bowing before unfortu-
nate necessities, a pragmatic or prudential concession
rather than a full moral justification. I believe there is
a moral justification for confining obligations of dis-
tributive justice to co- participants in particular politi-
cal communities. But what is it?
THE MORAL SIGNIFICANCE OF COLLECTIVE
SELF- GOVERNANCE
Borders are morally significant because they bound
systems of collective self- governance. The arbitrari-
ness of the location of borders does not stop them
from being of great moral significance once a col-
lectively self- governing people creates a common
life within them, as Michael I. Blake, Anna Stilz, and
others have emphasized. Citizens of self- governing
political communities— together making and being
subject to the law— share a morally significant special
relationship. As members of a political community we
are joined in a collective enterprise across generations
through which we construct and sustain a compre-
hensive system of laws and institutions that regulate
and shape all other associations, including religious
communities and families. We are born into political
communities and are formed by them. From cradle to
grave (and beyond) our interests, identities, relation-
ships, and opportunities are pervasively shaped by
the political system and the laws that we collectively
create, coercively impose, and live within. The basic
values and choices of our political order pervasively
shape the lives of those who reside within it.
The governments of self- governing political
communities— at least so long as they are legitimate—
are recognized by members to be capable of authorita-
tively resolving conflicts, and of taking decisions that
bind us as members of the political community: our
instead regard one another as free and equal persons,
and imagine ourselves in an “original position” behind
a “veil of ignorance”: we ask which principles of social
justice we would choose if we did not know the social
position we would occupy. This helps us consider
which principles of justice for regulating the design
of the basic structure are fair to all, and so capable of
being freely accepted by reasonable people whichever
position they occupy in society. To affirm mutually jus-
tified principles to regulate basic social institutions is
to affirm that we regard one another as moral equals.
The upshot of Rawls’s thought experiment is his
argument that two basic principles of justice would be
chosen by citizens of modern pluralistic democracies:
1. Each person has an equal claim to a fully adequate
scheme of equal basic rights and liberties, which
scheme is compatible with the same scheme for
all; and in this scheme the equal political liberties,
and only those liberties, are to be guaranteed their
fair value.
2. Social and economic inequalities are to satisfy two
conditions: (a) They are to be attached to posi-
tions and offices open to all under conditions of
fair equality of opportunity; and (b), they are to
be to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged
members of society.
Principle 2 (b) is also known as the “difference
principle.”
What is the relevance of all this to obligations
across borders? If being born into a well- off family or
with especially advantageous genes are to be regarded
as morally arbitrary when thinking about justice,
surely it seems equally arbitrary whether one is born
in New Mexico or Mexico. One’s place of birth with
respect to nationality or political community seems
quintessentially arbitrary. And yet, Rawls follows Wal-
zer in arguing that obligations of distributive justice
(such as the difference principle and the principle of
fair equality of opportunity) apply only within the
borders of political community, and only among co-
participants in a shared political order. What can jus-
tify this?
Like Walzer, Rawls mentions the fact of greater
diversity on the international scale: the fact of rea-
sonable pluralism “is more evident within a society

776 Á PART 4: ETHICAL IssUEs
to sever ongoing responsibilities for the provision of
health, welfare, and education from responsibilities
for governance with respect to these matters.
Federations or unions of states such as Europe
may voluntarily enter into increasing cooperative
relations, but we understand European peoples to be
doing this as a matter of mutual advantage and choice,
not as an obligation of fundamental justice. It may be
good for them but it is also up to them, as the people of
the United Kingdom have recently affirmed.
To argue that membership in a political collectiv-
ity is morally significant in the ways I have begun to
describe raises the further question: which political
collectivities qualify? Does every political commu-
nity have equal moral standing, or if not, which ones?
Respect for basic human rights is one crucial thresh-
old condition of legitimacy and international respect-
ability. Liberal democracies qualify for full respect,
but so do certain not- fully liberal and democratic
regimes, which Rawls calls “decent” peoples. We need
not go into the details here, but suffice it to say that
the theory of legitimacy at work here is the following:
we ought to fully respect states that effectively protect citi-
zens basic interests and provide working legal and political
arrangements and within which (a) basic human rights
are respected and (b) there are effective processes for giving
everyone a say, for insuring that all groups within society
are listened to, responded to, and effectively included in col-
lective self- rule. To respect such political societies is to
respect distinctive forms of collective self- rule, forms
of collective self- rule that may deviate from some of
the features that we understand to be aspects of lib-
eral democracy, but which nevertheless observe basic
rights and take all members interests seriously into
account, and thereby make legitimate law. If by our
lights such communities go wrong in some respects
we can nevertheless say that the mistake is theirs to
make. Such political communities can be regarded as
the fit custodians of the interests of their own citizens.
WHAT DO WE OWE TO NON- MEMBERS?
Space does not permit an extensive discussion of
what the civic view might say about obligations
to non- members, but it may be helpful to round
government as our agent enters into treaties, makes
alliances, declares war, and conducts various undertak-
ings in our name. Legitimate governments are capable
of putting citizens under new duties, and this is an awe-
some moral power. We can be held collectively liable as
citizens for the actions of our government, recognized
by us and others to be our collective agent.
Americans take responsibility— and should take
responsibility— for what happens in North Dakota
and Mississippi in a way they do not for what hap-
pens in Chihuahua and Ontario. Citizens look to one
another to jointly establish collective programs con-
cerning health and welfare: they view themselves as
jointly responsible in perpetuity for their health and
welfare, culture, and territory.
Citizens have powerful obligations of mutual
concern and respect, and mutual justification, to
one another because they are joined together— as
constituent members of a sovereign people— in cre-
ating binding political institutions which determine
patterns of opportunities and rewards for all. A self-
governing political society is a hugely significant joint
venture, and we understand it as such. We have strong
common obligations as fellow citizens because we col-
lectively govern one another: we collectively make
hugely consequential decisions. This could not simul-
taneously be true of the international society, and it
is not. Membership in international bodies does not
have the same significance because that membership
is mediated by membership in primary political units,
namely the “Member States” of the UN or its peoples:
individuals are not governed directly by multilateral
institutions. International institutions deal with a
limited range of subjects.
Cosmopolitan distributive justice (as opposed to a
duty to assist other peoples to become self- governing
and well- ordered) makes no sense absent a cosmopoli-
tan state and a cosmopolitan political community,
which hardly anyone seriously argues for, and which
we are not obliged to bring into being; though there are
good reasons for strengthening international institu-
tions. It is, moreover, hard to understand the reason-
ableness of making people responsible for the welfare
of others without also making them responsible for
their governance. It would be strange and unreasonable

CHAPTER 20: THE ETHICs of ImmIgRATIon Á 777
that generate refugees then we have special obliga-
tions to address their plight. In the absence of specific
connections and special responsibilities, we still have
general duties to do our part along with others: to bear
some significant cost to relieve suffering abroad.
Crucially, however, members of wealthier societ-
ies do not owe to all the people of the world precisely
the same consideration that they owe to fellow citi-
zens. Full justice holds within political communities
because of the special moral relation that citizens
share: as the ultimate controllers and subjects of
extensive institutions of shared governance.
U.S. IMMIGRATION POLICY AND
DISTRIBUTIVE JUSTICE
As we have seen, it is not implausible to think that
America’s immigration policy has contributed to ris-
ing inequality and distributive injustice in the U.S.
over the last half century. Poor immigrants are better
off for having been allowed to immigrate, but many
have competed for jobs with less- well- off Ameri-
cans, and social programs to address inequality may
have been made less politically popular. What, from
an egalitarian perspective at least, could possibly be
wrong in the U.S. being more like Canada, by reducing
overall levels of immigration and giving greater prior-
ity to immigration by the better educated and higher
skilled?
Howard Chang rightly observes that the civic, or
“liberal nationalist,” policy on immigration seems
anomalous,
If the welfare of all incumbent residents determines
admissions policies, however, and we anticipate
the fiscal burden that the immigration of the poor
would impose, then our welfare criterion would
preclude the admission of unskilled workers in the
first place. Thus, our commitment to treat these
workers as equals once admitted would cut against
their admission and make them worse off than they
would be if we agreed never to treat them as equals.
A liberal can avoid this anomaly by adopting a cos-
mopolitan perspective that extends equal concern
to all individuals, including aliens, which suggests
liberal immigration policies for unskilled workers.
out the account before returning to the problem of
immigration.
First, societies have general duties of (a) fair deal-
ing with one another, and this would include non-
exploitation, the avoidance of force and fraud, and
the duty to curb the capacity of one’s citizens or cor-
porations to harm or exploit others. This general duty
of fair dealing includes doing our share to address
common problems (avoidance of free- riding), includ-
ing environmental problems such as global warming,
disaster relief, and humanitarian assistance.
Second, they have specific obligations to other
countries or groups growing out of particular relations
of exploitation, oppression, or domination, which
give rise to specific obligations of rectification and
redress. (b) If we have exploited or oppressed poorer
and weaker societies, or if we have allowed our cor-
porations to do so, then we have debts to these other
societies which require some sort of recompense.
I should emphasize that these first two catego-
ries almost certainly generate strong demands to
strengthen international institutions and for reform
in the way that countries like the U.S. conduct them-
selves in the world.
Finally, it seems right to say that well- off societies
have (c) general humanitarian duties to relieve those in
destitution or distress and to respond to gross and sys-
tematic violations of human rights. Our duty is to do
what we can to relieve distress, to end suffering, to stop
gross violations of human rights, and to get a society
on its feet so that it can look after its own affairs. These
duties may involve substantial resource commitments,
and they would require rich countries like the U.S. to
spend more than they currently do on assistance, if it
could be shown that such assistance is effective (which
it very often is not). The proper target of aid is helping
societies to develop their own effective and legitimate
political institutions which can secure the basic inter-
ests of all citizens.
Our general humanitarian duties include doing
our fair share to provide safe harbor for refugees, whose
basic needs are not being met in their home countries
and who have no prospect for having them met as a
consequence of well- founded fears of persecution. If
we have contributed to the creation of the conditions

778 Á PART 4: ETHICAL IssUEs
during that time. Patterns of migration and return
are self- reinforcing: migration prepares the way for
more migration as language, labor market skills, and
personal contacts are acquired. Heightened border
security in the late 1980s and 1990s had the perverse
consequence that illegal migrants chose to remain in
the U.S. far longer than they did when it was easier to
leave and re- enter.
Over three million Mexicans enter the U.S. yearly
on non- immigrant visas and there are well over
200 million short- term border crossings. The U.S.
and Mexico (along with other Western Hemisphere
nations) are committed to policies of open markets
and free trade. Economic growth in Mexico has nar-
rowed the wage gap between the U.S. and Mexico:
GDP in Mexico is now over $17,500 per capita, making
it a middle- income country. The birth rate in Mexico
has also declined.
Remittances from the U.S. undoubtedly contrib-
uted considerably to economic growth in Mexico,
and Mexican migration to the U.S. has been falling
since the early 2000s. In 2013, China and India sur-
passed Mexico as the largest senders of migrants to the
U.S., though other Caribbean and Central American
countries— including Cuba, the Dominican Republic,
El Salvador, and Guatemala— continue to send large
numbers of migrants.
What is the most ethically defensible way of
responding to concerns about immigration, includ-
ing concerns stemming from social justice within the
U.S.? We must consider the humanitarian costs of
attempts to massively alter longstanding patterns of
movement across our long and long- porous borders
with Mexico and other Central American countries.
The approach long favored by some on the right,
and now being implemented at least in part, is to try
to limit legal migration and stop illegal immigration
by more vigorously controlling the southern bor-
der, by constructing a security fence, and by other
means, including increased arrests and deportations
of undocumented persons.
Will this be effective? Policy changes in the U.S.
seem to be having some effect. As this book goes to
press, it appears that migration to the U.S. from Cen-
tral American countries in general is down signifi-
cantly: U.S. Customs and Border Protection reports
Chang allows, of course, that the morally justified
cosmopolitan immigration policy may be politi-
cally infeasible because Americans seem unwilling to
embrace the right sort of cosmopolitan moral attitude.
I have argued, however, that there are good rea-
sons for believing that we have special responsibili-
ties for our fellow citizens, obligations arising from
membership in a self- governing community. In shap-
ing immigration policies, concerns about distributive
justice are relevant and urgent, and these concerns are
inward- looking rather than cosmopolitan, empha-
sizing the special obligations we have to our poorer
fellow citizens. If the U.S. were to move toward a
more Canadian- style immigration policy this could
improve the lot of less- well- off American workers.
Considerations of distributive justice— taken in the
abstract— argue for the superiority of the Canadian
system: this would mean limiting immigration based
on family re- unification (perhaps limiting that prefer-
ence to spouses and minor children), placing greater
weight on priorities for education and other skills, and
curbing undocumented or illegal immigration.
However, sound policy recommendations in this
vexed area of policy need to take into account a wider
set of moral considerations and a great deal more of the
relevant context, including geography and the heavy
residue of historical patterns and practice. So far as the
context is concerned, the United States is not Canada,
and the costs of pursuing a Canadian- style immigra-
tion policy in the U.S. could be prohibitive. Empirical
description, and careful analysis and prediction, must
be combined with moral judgment. I can only sketch a
few of the relevant considerations in concluding, and
it should also be noted that patterns of migration to
the U.S. are shifting rapidly.
The U.S. shares a 2,000-mile long border with
Mexico, and that border has marked large differences
in development, income, and wealth. For decades,
there have been high levels of migration from Mexico
to the U.S., and the U.S. has frequently welcomed
massive influxes of migrant workers. In the period
from 1965 to 1986, 1.3 million Mexicans entered the
U.S. legally along with 46,000 contract workers, but
28 million entered as undocumented migrants. The
vast majority subsequently returned to Mexico, yield-
ing a net migration to the U.S. of around five million

CHAPTER 20: THE ETHICs of ImmIgRATIon Á 779
hundreds of millions of dollars a year that could be
passed along to states and localities with high concen-
trations of migrants, to offset the costs of some local
services. Finally, Massey and his colleagues would
curtail the priorities that are now provided to family
members of those who become naturalized Ameri-
cans: they would eliminate the priority given to adult
siblings of naturalized citizens and legal permanent
residents, and they recommend making it easier for
relatives of U.S. citizens to get tourist visas, so they can
visit and return home more easily.
It may be that the guest worker program compo-
nent is most controversial. It has the advantage of
directly addressing some of the underlying forces gen-
erating migration to the U.S. from Central America
and elsewhere: poverty and the need for economic
and social development. Massey and his colleagues
emphasize that immigration is part of the develop-
ment process and it is temporary. The poorest nations
do not send out migrants. Developing countries typi-
cally send out immigrants for eight or nine decades,
until growth at home relieves the pressures to leave. As
we have seen, migration from Mexico has indeed been
falling as predicted. Facilitating short- term migration
and return would help promote growth elsewhere.
While government- to- government foreign aid has
a very poor track record, remittances sent home by
migrant workers contribute considerably to economic
development.
One moral problem with this approach is that it
regularizes a system that would seem to impose some
downward pressure on low- wage jobs in the U.S. It
takes seriously the interests of poor people abroad
and it benefits American employers, American con-
sumers, and better- off Americans, but it does not fully
address the special obligations we have to our poorest
fellow citizens. The distributive justice problem could
be dealt with by explicitly coupling these reforms
with measures designed to improve the conditions
of poorer and less well- educated Americans, whose
economic prospects have deteriorated considerably
in recent decades of globalized trade while elites have
prospered. This would be appropriate and overdue in
any case. While high levels of immigration by low-
income people may make transfer payments less polit-
ically popular, a guest worker program, by excluding
that apprehensions of undocumented persons along
the Southwest Border are down 64 percent from May
2016 to May 2017.
But this has been partly at the cost of imposing tre-
mendous burdens on the 11 million undocumented
persons living and working in the U.S. It is estimated that
60 percent of these people have been living in the U.S.
for over a decade, and a third of those have American-
born children who are therefore citizens. It may be that
many or most of these people had no right to come here
in the first place, but they came mainly for honorable
and decent reasons: to help their families cope with
often desperate poverty. The costs of disruption for
those who have been here for any considerable amount
of time, as law- abiding citizens, makes it immoral to not
provide a path to regularized status.
Another way of curtailing illegal migration by
poor workers would focus on stemming the demand
for migrant workers in the U.S. We might institute a
national identification card, increase penalties for
forging identification papers, and vigorously punish
employers who hire undocumented people. Obvi-
ously, if such policies were implemented effectively,
the cost of low- skilled labor would increase consider-
ably in many areas, especially in agriculture, but that
would appear to be good insofar as wages rise at the
bottom of the income scale. It is often said that illegal
migrants do work that Americans are unwilling to do,
but of course they are unwilling at the prevailing low
wage, and that is just the problem from the standpoint
of distributive justice. Suppose the wages were dou-
bled and the work conditions improved significantly?
An alternative approach would be to accept
and regularize the flow of migrant labor, as Massey,
Durand, and Malone recommend. Such proposals
include increasing the annual quota of legal entry
visas from Mexico, and perhaps other Central Ameri-
can countries. In addition, instituting a temporary
two- year work visa, which would be renewable once.
Massey, Durand, and Malone have proposed making
available 300,000 such visas per year. This would regu-
larize and re- channel the flow of illegal migrants into a
legal flow. The work visas would be awarded to workers
not employers, so that workers would be free to quit.
Fees for these visas plus savings in the Immigration
and Naturalization Services budget could generate

780 Á PART 4: ETHICAL IssUEs
we have also seen, the costs of “ tightening- up” the
border have been high: border security efforts have
imposed great hardships and expense on migrant
workers. Employer sanctions could be a more humane
enforcement mechanism, but Americans have not had
the political will to impose such measures.
I have argued that U.S. immigration policy pres-
ents us with the necessity of grappling with the ten-
sion between two important moral demands: justice to
our fellow citizens vs. humanitarian concern with the
plight of poor persons abroad. We have urgent reasons
to shape major public policies and institutions with an
eye to the distributive impact. Justice demands that we
craft policies that are justifiable not simply from the
standpoint of aggregate welfare— or the greatest good
of the greatest number. We must consider the justifi-
ability of policies from the standpoint of the least well-
off among our fellow citizens. Immigration policy— as
part of the basic structure of social institutions— ought
to be answerable to the interests of the poorest Ameri-
cans. An immigration policy cannot be considered
morally acceptable in justice unless its distributive
impact is defensible from the standpoint of disadvan-
taged Americans.
And yet, we must also consider the collateral costs
of tight curbs on immigration. While domestic distrib-
utive justice is an urgent moral concern it does not, I
would argue, take absolute or lexical priority over
broader humanitarian concerns. Fostering develop-
ment in very poor countries is a humanitarian impera-
tive. If we can make significant contributions to this
while bearing only small and uncertain costs in terms
of domestic distributive justice, it seems likely that we
should do so.
The proposals by Massey and his colleagues hold
out the prospect of doing some real good for hundreds
of thousands of migrant workers, their families, and
countries of origin. It is possible that the best combi-
nation of policies would be something like the Massey
proposals involving guest workers, coupled with more
generous aid to poorer Americans.
This discussion has only meant to suggest the
shape of certain moral considerations relevant to any
defensible immigration policy.
guest workers from many public benefits, could help
address this problem.
A problem with this policy is the intrinsic status
of guest workers. Adequate protections must be built
into any guest worker program so that workers are not
exploited and oppressed. A regulated guest worker pro-
gram ought to be coupled with measures to require
decent wages and work conditions, basic healthcare,
protection from poisoning by pesticides, etc. However,
if a guest worker in the U.S. becomes seriously ill the
program might be designed so that he or she is entitled
to a trip to the emergency room and then a one- way
ticket home. Such provisions seem likely to be part of
the price of getting Americans to accept a guest worker
program, and they seem legitimate so long as work con-
ditions, wages, and protections are such that we can
regard the conditions of work as humane and reason-
able. (If such provisions led to workers concealing and
postponing treatment serious illnesses then we would
need to re- think the acceptability of the provision.)
An additional track of immigration reform can
only be mentioned here: greater emphasis on skills-
based migration. Such policies have spread from Can-
ada to many countries around the world. They may be
advantageous for developed countries and have some
specific advantages from the standpoint of domestic
distributive justice, as discussed above. But there are
serious questions concerning whether skills- based
migration policies are causing a “brain drain” for
sending countries. The benefits of remittances, and
the likelihood that many migrants will return home,
may outweigh the costs, but these issues deserve more
attention than I can give them here.
CONCLUSION
There is reason to believe that current patterns of
immigration do raise serious issues from the stand-
point of social justice: high levels of immigration by
poor and low- skilled workers from Mexico and else-
where in Central America may worsen the relative
and absolute positions of poorer American citizens.
Furthermore, such immigration may lessen political
support for redistributive programs. Nevertheless, as

CHAPTER 20: THE ETHICs of ImmIgRATIon Á 781
Selecting Immigrants
David Miller
immigrate: the simple fact of being refused entry by a
state does not, in itself, violate anyone’s human rights.5
The second is that democratic states can legitimately
shape their immigration policies in the light of their
overall national goals and priorities, whether these are
economic, cultural, environmental, humanitarian etc.
An important aspect of national self- determination is
deciding who is going to form part of the ‘self’ in future.
The third is that this right of self- determination is nev-
ertheless limited by what I call ‘the weak cosmopoli-
tan premise’, according to which all human beings are
equally entitled to moral consideration when agents
(whether states or individual people) decide how to act
towards them. This means in particular that a prospec-
tive migrant seeking to enter must have her claim con-
sidered, and if it is denied she must be presented with
reasonable grounds for refusal.6
Selecting between potential immigrants is jus-
tifiable, therefore, but how should it be done? There
are two dimensions that we need to consider: the
first is the inherent nature of the claim to enter that
the immigrant is making; the second is the nature
of the connection (if any) that already exists between
the immigrant and the receiving state. On one dimen-
sion, we have the familiar distinction between refu-
gees and economic migrants, where refugees are those
whose claim is based on the threat to their human
rights created by remaining in their current state of
residence, and economic migrants are all those who
have an interest in moving to a new society, whether
to study, to find work, or to pursue some personal proj-
ect, but who cannot cite a threat to their human rights
as grounds for admission. On the second dimension,
there are those who qualify as what I call ‘particularity
claimants’ and those who do not. Particularity claim-
ants are people who assert that one particular state
owes them admission by virtue of what has happened
in the past. A clear case would be one in which a group
of people have been led to believe that they had a
In the developed liberal democracies today, the immi-
gration issue has become intractable as a result of
three conflicting pressures. The first is the increasing
number of people from developing countries who
wish to enter, whether to escape poverty or civil war or
simply to improve their material prospects. Polling by
Gallup, for example, suggests that 38% of those living
in Sub- Saharan Africa and 21% of those living in the
Middle East and North Africa would prefer to migrate
permanently.1 The second is the increasing reluctance
of citizens within those societies to accept large num-
bers of incoming migrants. In the UK, for example, an
opinion poll in late 2013 found that 80% of those who
were asked thought that current levels of net inward
migration were too high, 85% thought that immi-
gration was putting too much pressure on public ser-
vices such as schools, hospitals and housing, and 64%
thought that over the last decade immigration had
not been good for British society as a whole.2 Broadly
the same picture holds across Europe.3 The third is the
diminished capacity of governments to control immi-
gration flows by means that are judged acceptable by
international law and opinion. Even setting aside the
special case of the EU with its principle of internal
free movement, the prevailing human rights culture
stays the hand of governments who seek peremptorily
either to prevent unwanted immigrants from entering
or to deport them once they have gained a foothold
inside.
Under these circumstances, developing a defen-
sible policy for selecting which immigrants to admit,
and on what terms, becomes a priority. In sketching
the outlines of such a policy, I make three assumptions,
which I shall not defend here (though I have done so
elsewhere4). The first is that there is no human right to
David Miller, “Selecting Immigrants,” CSSJ Working Paper Series,
SJ034, April 2015. Reprinted by permission of the author.

782 Á PART 4: ETHICAL IssUEs
only be redeemed if he is provided with the opportu-
nities that come with being allowed into Britain.
In presenting this case as a test of our moral intu-
itions, I have already assumed that the obligation to
accept refugees is not unlimited, and therefore that
there may justifiably be selection among those who
are claiming refugee status. First, it is a responsibility
that falls upon all states able to provide the necessary
refuge, and each state, therefore, is only required to
discharge its fair share of that responsibility. Ideally
this would be done by entering into an international
scheme for placing refugees according to each state’s
capacity to absorb them.9 In the absence of such a
scheme, it is permissible for states to enter into bilat-
eral or multilateral agreements whereby states who
receive more asylum applications that they are obliged
to accept can pass asylum- seekers on to other places
willing to take them in, provided always that their
human rights will be adequately safeguarded in those
places. Second, the obligation is an obligation to
provide temporary sanctuary, and it only becomes
an obligation to grant permanent residence in cases
where it becomes clear that the refugee has no realistic
prospect of returning safely to her own society within
a reasonable space of time.
On these assumptions, receiving states may have
to select, among those who can prove their claim to
refugee status, people they will take in themselves and
others who they will pass on under one of the arrange-
ments outlined above. So what grounds for selection
are permissible? Consider four possibilities: 1) The
refugee’s need for permanent settlement; 2) The causal
role played by the receiving state in creating the situa-
tion from which the refugee is escaping; 3) The likely
economic contribution of the refugee to the receiving
society; 4) The degree of cultural affinity between refu-
gee and host political community.
1) This seems a relevant consideration. Although
the places to which refugees are transferred must be
human rights compliant, and this means that they
provide all the opportunities that are needed to live
a decent human life and not just food, shelter and
the other immediate necessities, under the kind of
arrangement envisaged (realistically one in which
rich developed states pass on a proportion of those
right to immigrate should their circumstances require
it.7 Another example would be people who have per-
formed some service for the state, and claim now that
being allowed to immigrate is the appropriate form
of recompense.8 Particularity claimants might also
be refugees or economic migrants, but what distin-
guishes them (and justifies the rather awkward label
I am applying to them) is that their claim is held
against one particular state, whereas refugees and eco-
nomic migrants, although they have chosen to apply
in one place, might in many cases find that their rights
or interests were equally well served by being admitted
elsewhere.
The distinctions I have drawn suggest two prior-
ity rules that states should follow in selecting immi-
grants: 1. Refugees as a category should have priority over
economic migrants; 2. Within each category, particularity
claimants should have priority over others. The rationale
for the first rule is that states have an obligation to
admit refugees (the nature and extent of which will
be explored shortly) whereas they have no such obli-
gation to admit economic migrants. The rationale
for the second rule is that a state has more reason to
acknowledge a claim that stems from an existing rela-
tionship with the immigrant than one that is general
in nature. This, however, does not yet settle whether
a refugee without a particularity claim should always
get precedence over an economic migrant who has
one. Consider the following case: suppose the UK
Border Agency has (for some reason) to make a choice
between two applicants for admission: a refugee from
South Sudan, who can credibly show that her life is in
danger because she has been an outspoken critic of the
regime, but who has no previous connection to the
UK, and a young man from Iraq who worked as a trans-
lator for the British Army during the Gulf War, but
who can no longer find work (so he is poor but not yet
in desperate straits). Who should be taken first? Well,
perhaps the Sudanese, since time is of the essence and
she needs immediate help. But maybe she can claim
less than the Iraqi eventually: if the Agency has made
an arrangement for refugees from Sudan to be accom-
modated in neighbouring Kenya, that may offer suffi-
cient protection for her human rights. The Iraqi man,
on the other hand, may have a desert claim that can

CHAPTER 20: THE ETHICs of ImmIgRATIon Á 783
state is offering something more than asylum to the
refugee— when it is offering permanent resettlement
to someone who does not automatically qualify for
it. States are surely permitted to do this, in the same
way that they can offer resettlement to refugees who
have been granted asylum elsewhere, and when they
do so it is reasonable to take account of the refugee’s
prospective contribution.12
4) Can states select in favour of their cultural kin
when deciding who to admit as refugees? The ratio-
nale for this is set out clearly by Carens, though it is
not so clear whether he accepts it himself:
As an empirical matter, it is almost certainly the
case that a state’s willingness to take in refugees will
depend in part on the extent to which the current
population identifies with the refugees and their
plight. Moreover, other things being equal, it will
be easier for the refugees themselves to adapt to the
new society and for the receiving society to include
them, the more the refugees resemble the existing
population with respect to language, culture, religion,
history, and so on.13
To take a concrete example, the wars in Syria and
Iraq in 2014 led to calls in some quarters for tradition-
ally Christian countries such as the UK to give priority
to Christian refugees escaping from these countries.
This was in justified in part on the grounds that Chris-
tian families were undergoing particularly severe per-
secution, but also on the grounds that Christian states
had special obligations to people who shared their
national religion. The first part of this claim is clearly
relevant, but what about the second?
Such an argument from common culture seems
hard to defend, unless it can be presented as a way of
dividing responsibilities between states. In the Iraq/
Syria case it was claimed that Muslim refugees would
be more likely to be offered sanctuary by neighbour-
ing Islamic states such as Jordan. Assuming this is true,
and that states more generally are inclined to give pre-
cedence to those who share their citizens’ cultural or
religious values, then it would be justifiable for each
state to take this into account. But without such a
background, and considering the nature of the obliga-
tion towards refugees, cultural selection does not seem
defensible.
who apply for asylum to less developed countries)
there will inevitably be less assurance that the same
opportunities will continue to be available far into
the future. This matters less if the stay is only going to
be temporary.
2) Consider next situations in which the state
to which the asylum- seeker applies is at least in part
responsible for making her into a refugee. These
will typically be cases in which it has intervened in
her country of origin, creating conflicts between
national or ethnic groups that expose her to threats of
persecution— for example the position of some Iraqi
Kurds after the Iraq war. The granting of asylum may
then be viewed as a form of reparation.10 This makes
the refugee into a particularity claimant, and provides
grounds why she should be admitted to the state in
question rather than to some other place— her repara-
tive claim is a claim against that state in particular, and
may not be satisfied by a promise of refuge somewhere
else (this will depend on the extent of her loss). As
Souter argues, refugees’ choices about where to claim
asylum gain additional significance in these circum-
stances: ‘after causing or contributing to their dis-
placement, heeding refugees’ wishes is the least that
responsible states can do’.11 Indeed they may be able to
claim not just temporary asylum but permanent resi-
dence on reparative grounds.
3) Many states choose which immigrants to
accept by examining whether they bring special
skills that will contribute to the economy. But can
this criterion also be used, legitimately, when decid-
ing which asylum- seekers to admit? Keeping in mind
that the refugee’s claim is based on the threat to his
human rights, not on his potential contribution, it
might seem arbitrary to give him any kind of prior-
ity on this basis. Certainly it would be unacceptable
if the asylum claim itself were to be assessed more
generously in the case of those who were seen as hav-
ing valuable skills. But assume that the latter claim
is assessed strictly on the grounds of the seriousness
of the threat to the asylum- seeker’s human rights,
could productive skill nevertheless count at the sec-
ond stage, when deciding whether asylum is offered
in the state of first entry or somewhere else? I believe
this would be legitimate only in cases where the

784 Á PART 4: ETHICAL IssUEs
homogeneous and whose members wished it to
remain so.16 Notice also that the argument hinges
upon the injustice that is done to existing citizens
whose status is lowered by the discriminatory pol-
icy, not on any wrong that is done specifically to the
excluded candidates for admission, and this seems to
put the emphasis in the wrong place.
Although an economic migrant cannot assert a
right to be admitted, she does typically have a strong
claim, based on how her interests will be advanced by
moving— for example through working in a differ-
ent kind of job, or for a much higher wage, than she
could hope to obtain at home. According to the weak
cosmopolitan premise stipulated above, to turn down
such a claim without giving relevant reasons for the
refusal is to show disrespect for the person making it.
It is to treat her as though she were of no moral signifi-
cance. This extends also to the selection of immigrants
from the pool of applicants. It is not sufficient merely
to put forward the general reasons in favour of immi-
gration controls. If John is going to be granted entry
while Jaime is turned away, the latter must be offered
relevant reasons for his unequal treatment.
This appeal to weak cosmopolitanism explains
why the state is not entitled to use merely arbitrary
methods in choosing which immigrants to admit,
but it does not yet settle which reasons should count
in making the selection, and so far, therefore, does
not explain what is wrong about using race, ethnic-
ity, and other such criteria. One way to narrow down
the list is to say that the reasons must be ones that
the immigrants themselves can accept. It is obvious
enough that no immigrant will regard her own skin
colour as legitimate grounds for exclusion. But a prob-
lem then arises in cases where the receiving state and
the prospective immigrant hold different views about
what should count as relevant. Suppose, for example,
that a state decides to admit only high- skilled immi-
grants on the grounds that it has a greater economic
need for these than for low- skilled workers. An immi-
grant without the relevant skills might reject this on
the grounds that he (and others like him) deserves a
chance to improve his condition. So it is asking too
much to say that the reasons the state gives must
also be ones that the immigrants can accept (if ‘can
I turn now to selection criteria for immigrants
who make no claim to refugee status—‘economic
migrants’ in the broad sense. Since states have dis-
cretion over whether to admit such immigrants in
the first place, it might seem that they have carte
blanche as to whom they select, even if this means
choosing on grounds of race or national origin
(such as occurred with the notorious ‘White Aus-
tralia’ policy of the 1920s and 1930s). How can we
show that this does not follow? It might appear to
be ruled out by the human right against discrimi-
nation. But on closer inspection this turns out to be
too weak an instrument, since there are contexts in
which it seems perfectly permissible to discriminate
on grounds, for example, of gender, language, or reli-
gion. It isn’t a breach of human rights if a political
party decides to draw up an all- women short list to
select its candidate in a particular constituency, if a
public broadcaster chooses only among those able to
read the news in Welsh, or a church confines mem-
bership to those who belong to its own faith. So the
human right against discrimination must be inter-
preted as prohibiting discrimination on grounds
that are irrelevant to the right or benefit being allocated.
Those who in the past defended selecting immigrants
by race or national origin thought that they could
justify using these criteria by appeal to the need to
preserve the ‘character’ or ‘moral health’ of their
societies. To defeat these arguments requires show-
ing that such claims are either false, or irrelevant, for
substantive reasons.
An initially more promising avenue is to argue
that selecting immigrants on grounds such as race
or religion is an injustice to some existing citizens,
namely those who belong to the group or groups that
the immigration policy disfavours.14 By discriminat-
ing in this way, the state appears to be labelling these
people as second- class citizens. As Michael Blake
has put the point, ‘the state making a statement of
racial preference in immigration necessarily makes a
statement of racial preference domestically as well’.15
This will often provide states with strong reasons not
to pursue discriminatory admissions policies, but a
limitation of this approach is that it would not apply
to a state that was already religiously or ethnically

CHAPTER 20: THE ETHICs of ImmIgRATIon Á 785
The argument that can be made for cultural selec-
tion raises different questions. We are contemplating
here immigrant groups whose cultural affiliations
are different from those of the majority of existing
citizens— though we should also distinguish between
cases where the existing state is already multicultural
and has enacted multicultural policies (e.g. Canada),
and cases in which it is more culturally homogeneous
(e.g. Japan): the issue becomes more pressing in the lat-
ter circumstances. Immigrants who speak a different
language, practise a different religion, or have a differ-
ent lifestyle from the majority may pose two kinds of
problem. The first is simply the cost of incorporating
them into the host society on terms of equality. There
will, for example, be the cost of translating public doc-
uments into a new language or of providing transla-
tors in courts and social service agencies; or if religion
is the source of the division, the cost of accommodat-
ing religious practices where these impose different
requirements on believers outside of the mainstream.
Some of these costs can be passed to the immigrants
themselves, but others will be borne by the state, and
indirectly, therefore, by citizens at large.
There are of course likely to be compensating ben-
efits that come with increasing cultural diversity. The
point is simply that if we look at (economic) immigra-
tion as a practice that is governed by the logic of mutual
advantage, both costs and benefits need to be factored
in when considering selection policy. Some of the costs
may only be apparent with hindsight, as it becomes clear
what the equal treatment of minority cultures actually
requires. This also applies to the second potential prob-
lem. Culture is not only a matter of belief or of prac-
tice, but also of personal identity. This raises a concern
about the way in which culture can come to constitute
a line of fracture within a political community, possibly
leading to the formation of ‘parallel societies’, whose
members have very little contact with those beyond
their own community; and also a concern about the
effects of cultural diversity on social trust, and through
that on people’s willingness to support welfare states
and other instruments of social justice. These are by
no means inevitable consequences of admitting immi-
grants with cultural backgrounds different from those
of the majority, but they are possible consequences, and
accept’ means ‘will in fact accept once these reasons
are explained’). Instead the relevant condition is that
the reasons the state gives for its selective admissions
policy must be good reasons, reasons that the immi-
grants ought to accept given the general aims of the
policy.17
A more difficult question is whether it can be
justifiable to select in favour of those who already have
the political or cultural attributes that will enable them
to fit more easily into the society they are joining. Con-
sider political attributes first: can liberal democracies
choose immigrants who have already demonstrated
their democratic credentials as opposed to those who
espouse other political values, assuming that this can
be reliably established? Most commentators, includ-
ing strong liberals such as Carens, agree that states
may exclude people who pose a threat to national
security by virtue of the beliefs that they hold, such
as those liable to engage in terrorist acts.18 But in such
cases it is the disposition to act, rather than the beliefs
themselves, that forms the reason for exclusion. What
about those whose political beliefs are such that they
do not acknowledge the authority of the state they
wish to join, even though they have no intention of
sabotaging it by violent or other means? All states, not
least liberal states, depend on their members comply-
ing voluntarily with their laws most of the time, and
presumably a belief in the state’s legitimacy is one of
the main sources of compliance. Someone who lacks
that belief may keep the law for other reasons (pru-
dence, respect for the rights of others) but is likely to
be less reliable in carrying out her duties as a citizen. So
there is some reason for favouring already committed
democrats when choosing immigrants. On the other
hand, liberal democracies do not require all of their
existing citizens to sign up personally to their found-
ing principles: they are prepared to tolerate anarchists,
fascists and others, leaving them free to express their
beliefs and to attempt to persuade others of their
correctness within the limits of the law. On balance,
then, selection on political grounds would be justifi-
able only in cases where illiberal or anti- democratic
immigrants were applying in sufficient numbers that
their presence would create social conflicts or disrupt
the working of democratic institutions.19

786 Á PART 4: ETHICAL IssUEs
Debates in Applied Ethics (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005); D. Miller,
‘Is there a Human Right to Immigrate?’ in S. Fine and L. Ypi
(eds.), Migration in Political Theory: The Ethics of Movement and
Membership (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). My most
complete treatment is D. Miller, Strangers in Our Midst: The
Political Philosophy of Immigration (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2016).
5. In some cases, however, it might lead to a violation of that
person’s human rights: the distinction is important.
6. Someone might ask why, if there is no human right to
immigrate, states have to justify their refusal to those they
exclude. But compare applicants for a job: no- one has a right
to that job, but they are nonetheless entitled to be selected by
a fair procedure, and to be given reasons for why they were
not chosen.
7. For example the Ugandan Asians who held British passports
but whose right to immigrate was abruptly removed by the
Immigration Act of 1971. When Idi Amin came to power and
threatened to expel them at short notice, the British Govern-
ment recognized its obligation and allowed them to enter. The
episode is described in R. Winder, Bloody Foreigners: The Story
of Immigration to Britain (London: Little Brown, 2004), ch. 22.
8. Consider the case of the Nepalese Ghurkhas who, after
serving in the British Army, have sought the right to reside
in Britain after retiring. This right was granted to them by a
High Court decision in 2008. According to the actress Joanna
Lumley who spearheaded their campaign, ‘The whole cam-
paign has been based on the belief that those who have fought
and been prepared to die for our country should have the right
to live in our country’ (http://www.gurkhajustice.org.uk/).
9. There is a substantial literature on refugee burden- sharing
schemes, and the criteria that might be used to judge each
state’s quota. For a helpful review, see T. Kritzman- Amir, ‘Not
in My Backyard: On the Morality of Responsibility Sharing in
Refugee Law’, Brooklyn Journal of International Law, 34 (2009),
Part III.
10. See J. Souter, ‘Towards a Theory of Asylum as Reparation
for Past Injustice’, Political Studies, 62 (2014), 326–42 who
provides a detailed analysis of the conditions under which
asylum claims of this kind are valid.
11. Souter, ‘Asylum as Reparation for Past Injustice’,
pp. 335–36.
12. Could those who are moved elsewhere under a burden-
sharing arrangement complain about the unequal treatment
they are receiving? I do not think so. The important point is
that they are treated equally at the point at which their claim
to asylum is assessed, and thereafter in ways that respect their
avoiding them may again prove to be somewhat costly,
this time in the form of support for active integration
programmes. This is the point at which the state’s exist-
ing cultural character becomes important: a state that
is already well- equipped with multicultural policies can
more easily tackle these problems than one that is not.
There is, however, no independent requirement that a
state should embrace multiculturalism prior to decid-
ing upon its admission policy. Democracies are entitled
to decide how far they wish to protect their inherited
national cultures, and how far to encourage cultural
diversity within their borders.
To sum up, selective immigration requires that
states give reasons for the policies they apply, and
these reasons must relate to the legitimate purposes
of the state itself, as manifested in its other policy
decisions. Selection on economic grounds is the least
controversial example, but other forms of positive dis-
crimination cannot be ruled out: if a society wants to
enhance its sporting reputation, for example, I can-
not see why it should not seek to attract immigrants
who will later qualify for the national teams. Giving
reasons of this kind shows sufficient respect for those
who are refused entry, disappointed though they
may be. Recall that the later part of the discussion
relates only to economic migrants. Where refugees are
concerned, there is much less scope for selecting on
grounds other than the refugee’s own need for sanctu-
ary and the opportunity for a decent life.
NOTES
1. N. Esipova, J. Ray, and R. Srinivasan, The World’s Potential
Migrants: Who They Are, Where They Want to Go, and Why It
Matters (Gallup Inc., 2010–2011). Overall, 40% of those living
in the poorest quartile of countries have expressed a wish to
migrate— see P. Collier, Exodus: Immigration and Multicultural-
ism in the 21st Century (London: Allen Lane, 2013) p. 167.
2. See http://www.harrisinteractive.com/vault/HI_UK_News
_Daily_Mail_Poll-Nov13 .
3. See E. Iversflaten, ‘Threatened by diversity: Why restrictive
asylum and immigration policies appeal to western Europe-
ans’, Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties, 15 (2005),
21–45.
4. For shorter defences, see D. Miller, ‘Immigration: the case
for limits’ in A. Cohen and C. Wellman (eds.), Contemporary

http://www.gurkhajustice.org.uk/

http://www.harrisinteractive.com/vault/HI_UK_News_Daily_Mail_Poll-Nov13

CHAPTER 20: THE ETHICs of ImmIgRATIon Á 787
15. M. Blake, ‘Discretionary Immigration’, p. 284.
16. This is conceded by Blake in Blake, ‘Discretionary Immi-
gration’, p. 285. See also M. Walzer, Spheres of Justice (Oxford:
Martin Robertson, 1983, pp. 35–51) and the discussion in
Blake, ‘Immigration’.
17. A rather similar position is taken in Blake, ‘Immigration and
Political Equality’, where it is formulated in the language of
‘reasons that immigrants could not reasonably reject’ (p. 971).
18. Carens, The Ethics of Immigration, ch. 9.
19. As Carens puts it ‘the problem is not with any single immi-
grant’s views, but with the collective effect of ideas hostile to
democracy’ (Carens, The Ethics of Immigration, p. 176).
human rights. That the state does more for some refugees
than it is obliged to do is not an injustice to the others.
13. J. Carens, The Ethics of Immigration (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2013), p. 214.
14. It is followed in J. Carens, ‘Who Should Get In? The Ethics
of Immigration Admissions’, Ethics and International Affairs,
17 (2003), 95–110, and at greater length in M. Blake, ‘Dis-
cretionary Immigration’, Philosophical Topics 30 (2002),
273–89, and M. Blake, ‘Immigration’, in R. Frey and C. Well-
man (eds.), A Companion to Applied Ethics (Oxford: Blackwell,
2003). I also used the argument in an earlier discussion: D.
Miller, National Responsibility and Global Justice (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2007), ch. 8.
Immigration and Freedom of Association
Christopher Heath Wellman
I. THE CASE FOR THE RIGHT TO CLOSED
BORDERS
To appreciate the presumptive case in favor of a state’s
right to control its borders that can be built upon
the right to freedom of association, notice both that
(1) freedom of association is widely thought to be
important and that (2) it includes the right not to asso-
ciate and even, in many cases, the right to disassociate.
That freedom of association is highly valued is
evident from our views on marriage and religion. In
the past, it was thought appropriate for one’s father to
select one’s marital partner or for one’s state to deter-
mine the religion one practiced, but, thankfully, those
times have (largely) passed. Today, virtually everyone
agrees that we are entitled to marital and religious
freedom of association; we take it for granted that each
individual has a right to choose his or her marital part-
ner and the associates with whom he or she practices
his or her religion. Put plainly, among our most firmly
settled convictions is the belief that each of us enjoys a
morally privileged position of dominion over our self-
regarding affairs, a position which entitles us to free-
dom of association in the marital and religious realms.
In this article I appeal to freedom of association to
defend a state’s right to control immigration over its
territorial borders. Without denying that those of us
in wealthy societies may have extremely demand-
ing duties of global distributive justice, I ultimately
reach the stark conclusion that every legitimate state
has the right to close its doors to all potential immi-
grants, even refugees desperately seeking asylum
from incompetent or corrupt political regimes that
are either unable or unwilling to protect their citi-
zens’ basic moral rights.
This article is divided into four sections. First,
I argue for a presumptive case in favor of a state’s right
to limit immigration as an instance of its more gen-
eral right to freedom of association. In the second and
third sections, I respond to egalitarian and libertarian
cases for open borders. Finally, in the fourth section,
I consider the permissibility of screening immigrants
based upon their race, ethnicity or religion.
Christopher Heath Wellman, “Immigration and Freedom of
Association,” Ethics 119 (October 2008), 109–41. © 2008 by The
University of Chicago. Reprinted by permission of The University
of Chicago Press.

788 Á PART 4: ETHICAL IssUEs
however. First, presumably there are morally relevant
differences between individuals and groups, and these
differences might explain why only individuals can
have a right to self- determination. Second, even if it
is possible for groups to have rights, presumably the
interests a group of citizens might have in control-
ling immigration are nowhere near as important as an
individual’s interest in having a decisive say regarding
who he or she marries. Let us consider these two issues
in turn.
In response to concerns about the differences
between individuals and groups, let me begin by high-
lighting some commonly held convictions which
illustrate that we typically posit at least a presump-
tive group right to freedom of association. Think,
for instance, of the controversy that has surrounded
groups like the Boy Scouts of America or the Augusta
National Golf Club, both of which have faced con-
siderable public pressure and even legal challenges
regarding their rights to freedom of association.
In particular, some have contested the Boy Scouts’
right to exclude homosexuals and atheists, while
others have criticized Augusta National’s exclusion of
women.3 These cases raise a number of thorny issues.
We need not adjudicate either of these conflicts here,
however, because the requisite point for our purposes
is a minimal one. Specifically, notice that even those
who insist that the Boy Scouts should be legally forced
to include gays and atheists or that Augusta National
cannot justify their continued exclusion of women
typically concede that there are weighty reasons in
favor of allowing these groups to determine their own
membership. That is, even activists lobbying for inter-
vention usually acknowledge that there are reasons to
respect these groups’ rights to autonomy; the activists
claim only that the prima facie case in favor of group
self- determination is liable to be outweighed in suffi-
ciently compelling instances (e.g., when society as a
whole discriminates against women or privileges the-
ism and heterosexuality over atheism and homosexu-
ality). The key point, of course, is that questioning
Augusta National’s group right to determine its own
membership does not require one to deny that groups
have a presumptive right to freedom of association
because one could simply assert that this presumptive
Second, notice that freedom of association includes
a right to reject a potential association and (often) a
right to disassociate. As Stuart White explains: “Free-
dom of association is widely seen as one of those basic
freedoms which is fundamental to a genuinely free
society. With the freedom to associate, however, there
comes the freedom to refuse association. When a group
of people get together to form an association of some
kind (e.g., a religious association, a trade union, a sports
club), they will frequently wish to exclude some people
from joining their association. What makes it their asso-
ciation, serving their purposes, is that they can exercise
this ‘right to exclude.’ ”1
In the case of matrimony, for instance, this free-
dom involves more than merely having the right to
get married. One fully enjoys freedom of association
only if one may choose whether or not to marry a
second party who would have one as a partner. Thus,
one must not only be permitted to marry a willing
partner whom one accepts; one must also have the dis-
cretion to reject the proposal of any given suitor and
even to remain single indefinitely if one so chooses.
As David Gauthier puts it, “I may have the right to
choose the woman of my choice who also chooses
me, but not the woman of my choice who rejects
me.”2 We understand religious self- determination
similarly: whether, how, and with whom I attend to
my humanity is up to me as an individual. If I elect
to explore my religious nature in community with
others, I have no duty to do so with anyone in par-
ticular, and I have no right to force others to allow me
to join them in worship.
In light of our views on marriage and religious
self- determination, the case for a state’s right to con-
trol immigration might seem straight- forward: just as
an individual has a right to determine whom (if any-
one) he or she would like to marry, a group of fellow-
citizens has a right to determine whom (if anyone) it
would like to invite into its political community. And
just as an individual’s freedom of association entitles
one to remain single, a state’s freedom of association
entitles it to exclude all foreigners from its political
community. There are at least two reasons that this
inference from an individual’s to a state’s right to free-
dom of association might strike some as problematic,

CHAPTER 20: THE ETHICs of ImmIgRATIon Á 789
an equally high proportion of Canadians preferred to
maintain their independence. Would it be permis-
sible for the United States to forcibly annex Canada?
I assume without argument that, even if the United
States could execute this unilateral merger without
disrupting the peace or violating the individual rights
of any Canadians, this hostile takeover would be
impermissible. The crucial point for our purposes is
that one cannot explain the wrongness of unilateral
annexations like this unless one supposes that coun-
tries like Canada enjoy a right to autonomy, a right
which accords Canadians the freedom to associate
with others as they see fit.5
If the analysis to this point has been sound, then
there is no reason to doubt that groups, even politi-
cal states, can have rights to autonomy analogous to
those enjoyed by individuals. Even if one agrees that
legitimate states can have rights to self- determination,
though, one might still question the argument
sketched above on the grounds that the intimacy of
marriage makes freedom of association immeasurably
more important in the marital context than in the
political realm. After all, in the vast majority of cases,
fellow citizens will never even meet one another. On
this point, consider Stuart White’s contention that
“if the formation of a specific association is essential
to the individual’s ability to exercise properly his/
her liberties of conscience and expression, or to his/
her ability to form and enjoy intimate attachments, then
exclusion rules which are genuinely necessary to
protect the association’s primary purposes have an
especially strong presumption of legitimacy.”6 Trans-
posing White’s reasoning, one might insist that, since
there is no intimacy among compatriots, it is not at all
clear why we need to respect freedom of association
for groups of citizens.7
I concede that freedom of association is much
more important for individuals in the marital con-
text than for groups of citizens in the political realm,
but my argument does not rely upon these two types
of freedom of association being equally important.
Notice, for instance, that being able to choose the
associates with whom one worships is also less impor-
tant than having discretion over one’s marital part-
ner, but no one concludes from this that we need not
right is vulnerable to being overridden. And because
I seek at this stage to defend only a presumptive case
in favor of a state’s right to control its own borders, it
is enough to note how uncontroversial it is to posit a
group’s right to freedom of association.
There is still room to question my slide from an
individual’s to a state’s right to freedom of association,
however, because, unlike the Boy Scouts and the
Augusta National Golf Club, political states do not
owe their membership to the autonomous choices
of their constituents. The nonvoluntary nature of
political states can raise complex problems for those
who would defend a state’s right to political self-
determination (problems I address at length else-
where), but here I would like merely to highlight
some of the unpalatable implications that follow
from denying a country’s right to freedom of associa-
tion.4 In particular, consider the moral dynamics of
regional associations like the North American Free
Trade Agreement (NAFTA) or the European Union (EU).
If legitimate states did not enjoy a right to freedom of
association— a right which entitles them to decline
invitations to associate with others— then they would
not be in a position to either accept or reject the terms
of these regional associations. Think of Canada’s
choice to join NAFTA, or Slovenia’s decision to enter
the EU, for instance. No one believes that it would be
permissible to force Canada into NAFTA or to coerce
Slovenia to join the EU. (Of course, nor may Canada
or Slovenia unilaterally insert themselves into these
associations!) And the reason it is wrong to forcibly
include these countries is because Canada’s and Slove-
nia’s rights to self- determination entitle them to asso-
ciate (or not) with other countries as they see fit. Put
plainly, if one denies that legitimate states like Canada
and Slovenia have a right to freedom of association,
one could not explain why they would be righteously
aggrieved at being forced into these mergers.
Indeed, there would be even more awkward impli-
cations because, without positing a right to freedom
of association, we could not satisfactorily explain
what is wrong with one country forcibly annexing
another. Imagine, for instance, that a series of plebi-
scites revealed both that an overwhelming majority
of Americans wanted to merge with Canada and that

790 Á PART 4: ETHICAL IssUEs
is organized and the new members have a say in how
the club is organized. Some members might want to
dramatically increase the number of members, for
instance, because the increased numbers will mean
that each individual is required to pay less. Other
members might oppose expanding the membership
because of concerns about the difficulty of securing
desirable tee times, the wear and tear on the course,
and the increased time it takes to play a round if there
are more people on the course at any given time.
And if there is nothing mysterious about people
caring about who are (or could become) members of
their golf clubs, there is certainly nothing irrational
about people being heavily invested in their country’s
immigration policy. Again, to note the lack of intimacy
among compatriots is to miss an important part of the
story. It is no good to tell citizens that they need not
personally (let alone intimately) associate with any
fellow citizens they happen to dislike because fellow
citizens nonetheless remain political associates; the
country’s course will be charted by the members of
this civic association. The point is that people rightly
care very deeply about their countries, and, as a con-
sequence, they rightly care about those policies which
will effect how these political communities evolve. And
since a country’s immigration policy affects who will
share in controlling the country’s future, it is a matter
of considerable importance.
These examples of the golf club and the political
state point toward a more general lesson that is worth
emphasizing: because the members of a group can
change, an important part of group self- determination
is having control over what the “self” is. In other
words, unlike individual self- determination, a signifi-
cant component of group self- determination is having
control over the group which in turn gets to be self-
determining. It stands to reason, then, that if there is
any group whose self- determination we care about, we
should be concerned about its rules for membership.
This explains why freedom of association is such an
integral part of the self- determination to which some
groups (including legitimate states) are entitled. If so,
then anyone who denies that we should care about the
freedom of association of nonintimate groups would
seem to be committed to the more sweeping claim
respect freedom of association in the religious realm.
It is important to recognize that I seek at this stage to
establish only that there is a prima facie case in favor
of each legitimate state’s right to control immigration
(it will be the burden of the remainder of this article
to show that competing considerations are not as
weighty as one might think). Nonetheless, let me say a
bit more about this presumptive case.
In my view, autonomous individuals and legiti-
mate states both have rights to autonomy. This means
that they occupy morally privileged positions of
dominion over their self- regarding affairs. Such a posi-
tion can be outweighed by sufficiently compelling con-
siderations, of course, but in general people and states
have a right to order their own affairs as they please.
Freedom of association is not something that requires
an elaborate justification, then, since it is simply one
component of the self- determination which is owed to
all autonomous individuals and legitimate states. As a
consequence, I think that there is a very natural and
straightforward case to be made in favor of freedom of
association in all realms. Just as one need not explain
how playing golf is inextricably related to the devel-
opment of one’s moral personality, say, in order to
justify one’s right to play golf, neither must one show
that one’s membership in a golf club is crucial to one’s
basic interests to establish the club members’ right
to freedom of association. And if no one doubts that
golf clubs have a presumptive right to exclude others,
then there seems no reason to suspect that a group of
citizens cannot also have the right to freedom of asso-
ciation, even if control over membership in a country
is not nearly as significant as control regarding one’s
potential spouse.
What is more, for several reasons it seems clear
that control over membership in one’s state is
extremely important. To see this, think about why
people might care about the membership rules for
their golf club. It is tempting to think that club mem-
bers would be irrational to care about who else are (or
could become) members; after all, they are not forced
to actually play golf with those members they dislike.
But this perspective misses something important.
Members of golf clubs typically care about the mem-
bership rules because they care about how the club

CHAPTER 20: THE ETHICs of ImmIgRATIon Á 791
significance. If so, then neither the observation that
(1) individual persons are importantly disanalogous
to political states nor the fact that (2) freedom of asso-
ciation is much more important for individuals in
the marital context than for groups of citizens in the
political realm should lead us to abandon our initial
comparison between marriage and immigration. As a
consequence, we have no reason to abandon the claim
that, like autonomous individuals, legitimate political
regimes are entitled to a degree of self- determination,
one important component of which is freedom of
association. In sum, the conclusion initially offered
only tentatively can now be endorsed with greater
conviction: just as an individual has a right to deter-
mine whom (if anyone) he or she would like to marry,
a group of fellow- citizens has a right to determine
whom (if anyone) it would like to invite into its politi-
cal community. And just as an individual’s freedom of
association entitles him or her to remain single, a state’s
freedom of association entitles it to exclude all foreign-
ers from its political community.
Before turning to the case against political
freedom of association, I would like to highlight
two features of the view I am advancing here: (1) I
defend a deontological right to limit immigration
rather than a consequential account of what would
be best, and (2) my view might be dubbed “univer-
salist” rather than “particularist” insofar as it nei-
ther suggests nor implies that only distinct nations,
cultures, or other “communities of character” are
entitled to limit immigration. Consider each of
these points in turn.
First, let me stress that I seek to defend a deonto-
logical conclusion about how legitimate states are enti-
tled to act, not a consequential prescription for how to
maximize happiness or a practical recipe for how states
might best promote their own interests. I understand
that groups can have weighty reasons to limit immigra-
tion in certain circumstances, but what the best policy
would be for any given state’s constituents (and/or
for those foreigners affected) will presumably depend
upon a variety of empirical matters, matters about
which others are more knowledgeable. Thus, I doubt
that any one- size- fits- all immigration policy exists,
and I, qua philosopher, have no special qualification
that we should not care about the self- determination
of any nonintimate groups. But, unless one implausi-
bly believes that we should care only about intimate
groups, then why should we suppose that only the
self- determination of intimate groups matters? Thus,
people rightly care deeply about their political states,
despite these states being large, anonymous, and
multicultural, and, as a consequence, people rightly
care about the rules for gaining membership in these
states. Or, put another way, the very same reason-
ing which understandably leads people to jealously
guard their state’s sovereignty also motivates them
to keep an eye on who can gain membership in this
sovereign state.
A second, less obvious, reason to care about immi-
gration policy has to do with one’s duties of distribu-
tive justice. As I will argue in the next section, it seems
reasonable to think that we have special distributive
responsibilities to our fellow citizens. If this is right,
then in the same way that one might be reluctant
to form intimate relationships because of the moral
freight attached, one might want to limit the number
of people with whom one shares a morally significant
political relationship. Thus, just as golf club members
can disagree about the costs and benefits of adding
new members, some citizens might want to open the
doors to new immigrants (e.g., in order to expand the
labor force), while others would much rather forgo
these advantages than incur special obligations to a
greater number of people.
Finally, rather than continue to list reasons why
citizens ought to care about issues of political member-
ship, let me merely point out that citizens today obvi-
ously do care passionately about immigration. I do not
insist that the current fervor over political member-
ship is entirely rational, but it is worth nothing that
anyone who submits that freedom of association in
this context is of no real importance is committed to
labeling all those who care about this issue as patently
irrational. Thus, even though the relationship among
citizens does not involve the morally relevant intimacy
of that between marital partners, the considerations
quickly canvassed above, as well as the behavior of
actual citizens, indicate that we need not conclude
that control over immigration is therefore of negligible

792 Á PART 4: ETHICAL IssUEs
and under what circumstances a party’s right to free-
dom of association would be defeated. In the end,
then, I see nothing contradictory about conceiving
of freedom of association as a deontological consid-
eration (and thus of speaking of a right to choose
one’s associates) and simultaneously conceding that
the case in favor of freedom of association is merely
presumptive.
The second aspect of my account worth high-
lighting is that my defense of freedom of associa-
tion makes no mention of a political community’s
distinctive character or culture. I emphasize this to
distinguish myself from those who argue that ethnic,
cultural, or national groups have a right to limit
immigration in order to preserve their distinctive
characters. In particular, the most compelling treat-
ments of the morality of immigration with which
I am familiar are Michael Walzer’s seminal discussion
of membership in Spheres of Justice and David Miller’s
recent article, “Immigration: The Case for Limits.”8
Other ways in which my account diverges from
theirs will become apparent in due course; for now,
notice that Walzer and Miller both emphasize the
importance of preserving culture. As Walzer puts it:
“Admission and exclusion are at the core of commu-
nal independence. They suggest the deepest meaning
of self- determination. Without them, there could
not be communities of character, historically stable,
ongoing associations of men and women with some
special commitment to one another and some special
sense of their common life.”9
In a similar vein, Miller suggests that “the pub-
lic culture of their country is something that people
have an interest in controlling: they want to be able
to shape the way that their nation develops, including
the values that are contained in the public culture.”10
He is especially interested in political groups being
able to preserve their distinctive identities because he
believes that states must maintain a decent level of
social solidarity in order to secure social justice. Unless
compatriots sufficiently identify with one another,
Miller argues, it is unlikely that the political climate
will engender mutual trust or fellow feeling, elements
liberal democratic states need if they are to inspire
their constituents to make the sacrifices necessary to
to comment on the empirical information that would
be relevant to fashioning the best policy for any given
state. However, if anything, I am personally inclined
toward more open borders. My parents were born and
raised in different countries, so I would not even be
here to write this article if people were not free to cross
political borders. What is more, my family and I have
profited enormously from having lived and worked in
several different countries, so it should come as no sur-
prise that I believe that, just as few individuals flourish
in personal isolation, open borders are typically (and
within limits) best for political communities and their
constituents. Still, just as one might defend the right to
divorce without believing that many couples should
in fact separate, I defend a legitimate state’s right to
control its borders without suggesting that strict lim-
its on immigration would necessarily maximize the
interests of either the state’s constituents or humanity
as a whole. My aim is merely to show that whatever
deontological reasons there are to respect freedom of
association count in favor of allowing political com-
munities to set their own immigration policy.
I hasten to emphasize, however, that, while
I conceive of freedom of association in deontological
terms, I do not thereby suppose that it is necessarily
absolute. I consider freedom of association a deon-
tological matter because it is something to which a
party can be entitled (it is something to which people
can have a moral right), and I do not believe that mat-
ters of entitlement can be adequately cashed out in
exclusively consequential terms. In saying this, how-
ever, I do not thereby commit myself to the view that
such a right must be perfectly general and absolute.
A right can be independent of, and largely immune
from, consequential calculus without being entirely
invulnerable to being out- weighed by all competing
considerations. (Prince William has a right to marry
anyone who will have him, for instance. And while
this right gives him the discretion to marry any num-
ber of people, presumably it would be defeated if his
marrying a particular person would set off a chain of
events leading to World War III.) In this regard, my
views tend to resemble those of W.D. Ross more than
those of Immanuel Kant. Moreover, like Ross, I know
of no algorithm for determining in advance when

CHAPTER 20: THE ETHICs of ImmIgRATIon Á 793
consideration in favor of a state’s right to limit immi-
gration, it is obviously not the only value of impor-
tance. Thus, even if my reasoning to this point has
been sound, the case in favor of a state’s dominion is
only presumptive and may be outweighed by com-
peting considerations. With this in mind, let us now
review the arguments in favor of open borders to see if
they defeat a state’s right to limit immigration.
II. THE EGALITARIAN CASE FOR OPEN
BORDERS
Egalitarians survey the vast inequalities among states
and then allege that it is horribly unjust that people
should have such dramatically different life prospects
simply because they are born in different countries.
The force of this view is not difficult to appreciate.
Given that one’s country of birth is a function of brute
luck, it seems grossly unfair that one’s place of birth
would so profoundly affect one’s life prospects. Some
believe that the solution is clear: political borders
must be opened, so that no one is denied access to the
benefits of wealthy societies. Although he couches his
argument in terms of a principle of humanity rather
than equality, Chandran Kukathas makes this point
particularly forcefully: “A principle of humanity sug-
gests that very good reasons must be offered to jus-
tify turning the disadvantaged away. It would be bad
enough to meet such people with indifference and to
deny them positive assistance. It would be even worse
to deny them the opportunity to help themselves.
To go to the length of denying one’s fellow citizens
the right to help those who are badly off, whether by
employing them or by simply taking them in, seems
even more difficult to justify— if, indeed, it is not
entirely perverse.”11
For several reasons, this case for open borders
presents an especially imposing obstacle to the prima
facie case for the right to restrict immigration outlined
above. For starters, both its moral and empirical prem-
ises appear unexceptionable. How could one plausibly
deny either that all humans are in some fundamen-
tal sense equally deserving of moral consideration or
that the staggering inequalities across the globe dra-
matically affect people’s prospects for living a decent
sustain a healthy democracy and an equitable welfare
state.
In contrast to authors like Walzer and Miller, my
account emphasizes that anyone is entitled to free-
dom of association. Thus, just as few would suggest
that individuals have a right to marry only people of
their own ethnicity, culture, nationality, or character,
I do not believe that a group’s right to limit immigra-
tion depends upon its members sharing any distinc-
tive ethnic/cultural/national characteristics.
Now, I could certainly see why distinct cultural
groups might in certain circumstances be more inter-
ested in or more inclined to exclude others, but I deny
that they alone have the right to do so, since I believe
that everyone— not just members of distinct nations—
is entitled to freedom of association. To see why, think
again of groups like the Boy Scouts or the Augusta
National Golf Club. I presume that no one would
suggest that the Boy Scouts are entitled to freedom
of association only because they are all heterosexual
theists or that Augusta National’s claim to group
autonomy depends upon their membership being
all male. Indeed, if anything, it is just the opposite:
the group autonomy of the Boy Scouts and Augusta
National is challenged precisely because the former
explicitly exclude gays and atheists and the latter has
no female members. And since more diverse groups of
scouts or golf club members would be at least equally
entitled to freedom of association, there seems no rea-
son to believe that only groups whose members share
a distinctive characteristic are entitled to freedom of
association. If so, then we need not suppose that only
populations with distinct characters are entitled to
limit immigration into their territories. To reiterate:
even if it is true that countries whose populations
understand themselves to be importantly distinct
from (most) foreigners exhibit the greatest interest in
excluding nonnatives, we should not infer from this
that only these groups are entitled to control their ter-
ritorial borders.
In sum, the commonly prized value of freedom
of association provides the basic normative building
blocks for a presumptive case in favor of each legiti-
mate state’s right to exclude others from its territory.
But, while freedom of association provides a weighty

794 Á PART 4: ETHICAL IssUEs
recognize, though, that luck egalitarianism is not the
only game in town. In Political Philosophy, for instance,
Jean Hampton recommends an approach she ascribes
to Aristotle: “We want, he says, a society in which
people treat each other as equals (no one should be
allowed to be the master of another or the slave of
another) and in which these equals treat each other as
partners— or ‘civic friends.’ The way to get that is to
pursue not exact equality of resources but sufficient
equality to ensure that no one is able to use his greater
wealth to gain political advantage over others in a way
that damages their partnership.”13
Now, one might be struck by Hampton’s sugges-
tion that we need not pursue “exact” equality, but
I want to call attention to another, related feature of
her view: its relational nature. As Hampton empha-
sizes, Aristotle is concerned with equality because he
sees it as necessary to sustain the desired relationships
among fellow citizens. We need not concern ourselves
with securing exact equality, then, because (political)
relationships are not undermined by slight disparities
in wealth; clearly, compatriots can interact as political
equals even if some have more than others, regardless of
whether or not their unequal resources are deserved.
Others share Hampton’s preference for relational
theories of equality, but no one, to my knowledge, has
better motivated this approach than Elizabeth Ander-
son.14 Key to Anderson’s defense of relational equality
is the question: “What is the point of equality?” In her
view, answering this question reveals most clearly why
relational theories are preferable to those which fix-
ate on luck. The crucial point is that we should care
about inequality principally to the extent that subor-
dinates are dominated in oppressive relationships. For
this reason, Anderson insists that we should be “fun-
damentally concerned with the relationships within
which the goods are distributed, not only the distribu-
tion of goods themselves.”15
To appreciate the force of this point, compare two
possible inequalities. The first exists between two soci-
eties, A and B. Assume that everyone in A is equally
well off; everyone in B is doing equally poorly; and
no one in either A or B knows anything of the other
society’s existence, since they are on opposite sides of
the earth and have never had any contact. The second
life? Indeed, looked at from this perspective, sorting
humans according to the countries in which they
were born appears tantamount to a geographical caste
system. As Joseph Carens famously argues: “Citizen-
ship in Western liberal democracies is the modern
equivalent to feudal privilege— an inherited status
that greatly enhances one’s life chances. Like feudal
birthright privileges, restrictive citizenship is hard to
justify when one thinks about it closely.”12 What is
more, notice that advocating this position does not
require one to deny the importance of freedom of
association: an egalitarian who presses this objection
can agree that we should generally be free to choose
our associates, as long as the resulting associations do
not lead to unjust arrangements. Thus, allowing states
to limit immigration is regarded as problematic on this
view only because countries cannot enjoy this form of
freedom of association without people’s life prospects
being seriously affected by morally irrelevant matters,
that is, factors entirely beyond their control.
Despite the intuitive appeal of this line of reason-
ing, I will counter this objection with two arguments.
First, I suggest that the most compelling understand-
ing of equality does not require us to guarantee that
no one’s life prospects are affected by matters of luck;
more minimally, equality demands that we address
those inequalities that render people vulnerable to
oppressive relationships. If this is correct, then the
particular theory of equality required to motivate the
egalitarian case for open borders is suspect and should
be rejected in favor of a theory of relational equality.
Second, even if luck egalitarianism is the best theory
of equality, it would not generate a duty to leave bor-
ders open, because a wealthy state’s redistributive
responsibilities can be discharged without including
the recipients in the union. Consider each of these
responses in turn.
I should begin by acknowledging the obvious
appeal of luck egalitarianism. After all, it does seem
unfair that some people’s life prospects are dramati-
cally worse than others when neither the poorly off
nor the well off did anything to deserve their ini-
tial starting points. And it is hard to deny that the
world would be better if everyone enjoyed roughly
equal prospects for a rewarding life. It is important to

CHAPTER 20: THE ETHICs of ImmIgRATIon Á 795
with no inequality between the As and the Bs, elimi-
nating this inequality is not important enough to jus-
tify limiting the As’ right to freedom of association. In
short, given that the moral importance of any particu-
lar inequality is a function of the relationship in which
the goods are distributed, the lack of a robust rela-
tionship between the constituents of a wealthy state
and the citizens of a poorer country implies that this
admittedly lamentable inequality does not generate
sufficient moral reasons to obligate the wealthy state
to open its borders, even if nothing but luck explains
why those living outside of the territorial borders have
dramatically worse prospects of living a rewarding life.
Here two potential objections present themselves.
First, although it is not false to say that the citizens of
some countries are relatively well off while the con-
stituents of others are relatively poorly off (as I do in
my example of the As and Bs), this cryptic description
is nonetheless misleading insofar as it fails to capture
that, in the real world, those in the developed coun-
tries are staggeringly wealthy in comparison to the
masses who are imperiled (when not outright killed)
by eviscerating poverty. In short, given the radical
inequality and objective plight that make Carens’s ref-
erence to “feudal privilege” apt, it is not so easy to dis-
miss global inequality merely because it does not exist
between compatriots. Second, because of the history
of colonization, as well as the current levels of inter-
national trade (among other things), it is simply not
the case that the world’s wealthy and poor are uncon-
nected and unaware of each other (as I stipulate in my
example of the As and Bs). On the contrary, one con-
sequence of the emerging global basic structure is that
virtually all of the world’s people now share some type
of relationship, so presumably even relational egali-
tarians cannot dismiss the moral significance of global
inequality. I think there are important truths in both
of these objections, so I will consider each in turn.
To begin, the twin facts that the world’s poor are
so desperately needy and the world’s wealthy are so
spectacularly well off that they could effectively help
the impoverished without sacrificing anything of real
consequence is unquestionably morally significant,
but in my mind these facts indicate that the real issue
is not about equality. Rather than being exercised
inequality mirrors the disparity between the As and Bs,
except that it exists within a single society C. And
because the Cs share a single political community, not
only are they aware that others are faring considerably
better/worse but also their relationships are affected
by these inequalities. I take it as uncontroversial that
the inequality among the Cs is much more worrisome
than the same inequality between the As and Bs. In
other words, whether or not we should care about the
inequality between the As and Bs, clearly we should
be much more concerned to eliminate the inequality
among the Cs. Based in part upon reasoning like this,
Anderson concludes: “Negatively, people are entitled
to whatever capabilities are necessary to enable
them to avoid or escape entanglement in oppressive
relationships. Positively, they are entitled to the capa-
bilities necessary for functioning as an equal citizen in
a democratic state.”16
Arguments like Anderson’s convince me that we
should be keenly aware of the relationships within
which the goods are distributed, but I stop short of
concluding that relational equality is the one correct
theory of equality. In my view, luck equality matters,
but it matters considerably less than relational equal-
ity. In other words, although I would not hesitate
to eliminate the inequality between the As and Bs if
I could do so by waving a magic wand, this inequal-
ity is not sufficiently worrisome that I would neces-
sarily interfere in the internal affairs of the As in order
to eliminate the inequality between them and the Bs.
However, because I am much more concerned about
the inequality among the Cs, I would be correspond-
ingly less reluctant to demand that the wealthy Cs
take measures to ensure that the less well off Cs are not
entangled in oppressive relationships.
As a consequence, while I do not think that
there is nothing of moral consequence to be gained
from realizing luck equality, I do accept a more mod-
est claim: even if achieving relational equality is
important enough to trump other values like free-
dom of association, realizing luck equality is not
important enough to deny people their rights to self-
determination. And this more modest conclusion has
important implications for the morality of immigra-
tion. Most obviously, even if we would prefer a world

796 Á PART 4: ETHICAL IssUEs
relationship shared among compatriots is relevant
when assessing the inequalities among two people,
I would never allege that no relationships within a
state are morally relevant. Because familial relations
are particularly liable to oppression, for instance, we
might worry about the inequalities between wife and
husband, between the parents and children, or among
the children in a way that we would not among com-
patriots who are not members of the same family. For
example, we would likely be less comfortable with a
scenario in which a family paid for the sons but not the
daughters to go to college than one in which one set
of parents paid for the children’s college expenses and
another set of parents did not. Thus, there is nothing
about my insistence on the moral relevance of the rela-
tionship among compatriots that forces me to deny
the possibility of other relationships within the states
which are significant for the purposes of inequality.
And if I can acknowledge important relationships
within a state, there seems no reason why I cannot
accept that citizens of separate states can stand in
relationships which matter from the point of equal-
ity. Most important, notice that conceding this last
point does not undermine my response to the egalitar-
ian case for open borders, because I can still insist that
(whatever other relationships there are which mat-
ter from the standpoint of equality) the relationship
between fellow citizens is one particularly important
relationship which explains why we need not neces-
sarily restrict the liberty of the better- off citizens in
one country merely because nothing but luck explains
why they are faring so much better than the citizens
of a foreign state.
Finally, a persistent critic might counter that,
even if the case based on luck egalitarianism fails,
both samaritanism and the morally relevant relation-
ships among foreigners explain why we have duties to
those outside of our borders. In response, I suggest that
these duties, even if stringent, can be fully satisfied
without necessarily allowing those to whom we are
duty bound entry to our country. That this is so will
become apparent shortly when I explain why, even if
luck egalitarianism is correct, it cannot shoulder the
argumentative burden required of it by the case for
open borders.
merely because some are relatively worse off through
no fault of their own, we are (or at least should be) con-
cerned simply because others are suffering in objec-
tively horrible circumstances.17 What is more, the
reason that we may have a duty to help is not because
mere luck explains why we are doing better than
they (presumably we would be obligated to relieve
their suffering even if our relative standing was fully
attributable to morally relevant factors like our hard
work). Instead, our duty to help stems most straight-
forwardly from samaritanism: one has a natural duty
to assist others when they are sufficiently imperiled
and one can help them at no unreasonable cost to one-
self.18 As a result, I am inclined to respond to the first
objection in disjunctive fashion: if the less well off Bs
are not doing terribly badly in objective terms, then
the inequality between the As and Bs does not gener-
ate a duty on the part of the As to help the Bs. If the Bs
are clearly suffering in absolute poverty, on the other
hand, then the As may indeed have stringent duties to
help, but these duties spring from a samaritan source
rather than from the mere fact that the As are (for
morally arbitrary reasons) doing better than the Bs.19
If this is right, then even the previously unfathomable
inequalities we now see in the real world do not suf-
ficiently buttress the luck egalitarian’s case for open
borders.
Regarding the second objection, I am inclined to
agree that the emerging global infrastructure entails
that virtually all of us have increasingly substantial
relationships with people all over the world. And as
a relational egalitarian, it seems to follow that the
more robust these relationships become, the more
concerned we should be about the inequalities within
them. But I can concede all of this without jettisoning
my response to the egalitarian case for open borders
because my account has never relied upon the claim
that being fellow citizens of a country is the only
morally relevant relationship.20 On the contrary, my
account requires only that the less ambitious (and
more plausible) claim that the relationship among
compatriots is one relationship with morally relevant
implications for inequality. To see the significance of
this point, notice what I would say about inequalities
within a particular state. Even though I think that the

CHAPTER 20: THE ETHICs of ImmIgRATIon Á 797
In light of Walzer’s analysis, we are now in a posi-
tion to conclude the first prong of our critique of the
egalitarian case for open borders with two points. First,
this case depends upon a particular theory of equal-
ity, luck egalitarianism, which leading theorists have
rejected on grounds that have nothing to do with
immigration. Second, without explicitly weighing in
on this topic, one of the most prominent and sophis-
ticated discussions of immigration implicitly endorses
relational equality by staking out positions which pre-
suppose that the moral importance of any inequality
is a function not only of its magnitude but also of the
relationship in which the goods are distributed. For
the sake of argument, however, let us assume that I am
wrong to criticize luck egalitarianism. Suppose that
luck egalitarianism is the best theory of equality, or that
securing luck equality is as least as important as secur-
ing relational equality, or at the very least that realizing
luck equality is sufficiently important to justify restrict-
ing people’s rights to freedom of association. Even if we
grant one of these assumptions, it would still not fol-
low that legitimate states are therefore not entitled to
freedom of association. To see why, consider how mari-
tal freedom of association is typically combined with
the demands of domestic distributive justice.
Even the most zealous critics of inequality typi-
cally recommend neither that we must abolish mar-
riage nor that wealthy couples must literally open
up their marriages to the less well off. Instead, it is
standard to keep separate our rights to freedom of
association and our duties of distributive justice, so
that wealthy people are able to marry whomever they
choose and then are required to transfer a portion
of their wealth to others no matter whom (or even
whether) they marry. Admittedly, history includes
radical movements like the Khmer Rouge, who abol-
ished marriage because it was thought to be incon-
sistent with their quest for complete equality, but
most egalitarians rightly shy away from this degree of
fanaticism.22 Indeed, consider this: despite the enor-
mous disagreement about what type of responsibili-
ties the likes of Bill Gates and Warren Buffet have in
virtue of their staggering wealth, no one alleges that,
unlike the rest of us, these billionaires are required
to marry poor spouses. And just as our domestic
Before turning to this argument, though, it is
worth nothing that, while he does not use the luck/
relational equality terminology, Walzer implicitly
endorses the position on equality for which I am lob-
bying here. This occurs most clearly in his important
discussion of Germany’s bringing in “guest work-
ers” from countries like Turkey. Here Walzer argues
that, while Germans are not morally obligated to
admit these workers, they nonetheless may not bring
the workers in as political subordinates. He writes:
“Democratic citizens, then, have a choice: if they
want to bring in new workers, they must be prepared
to enlarge their own membership; if they are unwill-
ing to accept new members, they must find ways
within the limits of the domestic labor market to get
socially necessary work done. And those are their
only choices.”21
Now at first glance Walzer’s position seems curi-
ous. After all, if prospective immigrants have no right
to entry, how can they have a conditional right to
equality if admitted? (By comparison, if Miriam has
no right that Patrick sell her his gently used copy of
Spheres of Justice, presumably Miriam would thereby
also lack the conditional right to a cheap price if Pat-
rick chose to sell it to her.) One would think that the
right to equal treatment either gives the prospective
workers a right to equal treatment either gives the pro-
spective workers a right to equal citizenship within
Germany or it does not, but it could not generate a
conditional right which depends upon the choice of
the Germans. Reflecting upon the distinction between
luck and relational theories of equality shows why
this is not so, however. Walzer’s positing a conditional
right to equality- if- admitted makes perfect sense if he
is implicitly presuming a relational theory of equal-
ity (as I believe he is), because such a theory implies
that the same inequalities which would clearly be
pernicious among compatriots might well be benign
when present between foreigners. Thus, there is noth-
ing inconsistent about Walzer’s voicing no objection
to an inequality between Germans and Turks, on the
one hand, and objecting to this same inequality when
it exists between two people (whatever their national-
ity) subject to the same political community within
Germany, on the other hand.

798 Á PART 4: ETHICAL IssUEs
Even if legitimate states have no duty to open
their borders to the world’s poor, however, surely it
would be unconscionable for a state to slam its doors
on people desperately fleeing unjust regimes. After
all, even authors like Walzer, who are in general pre-
pared to defend a state’s right to control its mem-
bership, make an exception for refugees.25 The core
idea behind this exception is that, unlike those who
merely lack exportable resources, some asylum seek-
ers are actively threatened by their states, and thus
they cannot be helped by an international transfer of
goods; their only escape from peril is to be granted
asylum.
As implausible as it might initially seem, I suggest
that, even in cases of asylum seekers desperately in
need of a political safe haven, a state is not required
to take them in. I adopt this stance not because I am
unmoved by the plight of asylum seekers but because
I am not convinced that the only way to help victims
of political injustice is by sheltering them in one’s
political territory. In my view, these people might
also be helped in something like the fashion in which
wealthy societies could choose to assist impoverished
foreigners: by, as it were, exporting justice. Admit-
tedly, one cannot ship justice in a box, but one can
intervene, militarily if necessary, in an unjust political
environment to ensure that those currently vulnerable
to the state are made safe in their homelands.26 Let me
be clear: I am not suggesting that this is always easy
or even advisable, nor do I assert that states are nec-
essarily obligated to take this course of action. I claim
instead that where asylum seekers are genuinely left
vulnerable because their government is either unable
or unwilling to protect their basic rights, then their
government is illegitimate, it has no claim to political
self- determination, and thus it stands in no position
to protest if a third party were to intervene on behalf
of (some of) its constituents. Think, for instance, of
the Kurds in Iraq. One way to help them is to allow
them to emigrate en masse. Another option, though,
is to use military force to create a safe haven and no-
fly zone in Northern Iraq. And since the Iraqi govern-
ment was the party threatening the Kurds, it had no
right to object to this interference with its sovereignty.
I suspect that Walzer stops short of this conclusion
redistribution of wealth among individuals has not
led us to prohibit marriage, global redistribution does
not require us to open all political borders. Instead,
even if we presume that wealthy societies have exten-
sive distributive duties, these duties are distinct and
can be kept separate from the societies’ rights to free-
dom of association. To reiterate: if wealthy couples
need not open up their marriages to those less well
off, why think that wealthy countries must open
their borders to less fortunate immigrants? Just as
relatively wealthy families are required merely to
transfer some of their wealth to others, why cannot
wealthy countries fully discharge their global distrib-
utive duties without including the recipients in their
political union, simply by transferring the required
level of funds abroad?23
Thus, no matter how substantial their duties of
distributive justice, wealthier countries need not
open their borders. At most, affluent societies are duty
bound to choose between allowing needy foreigners to
enter their society or sending some of their wealth to
those less fortunate. In fact, David Miller has pressed
this point even further, suggesting that it would be
better if wealthier countries sent resources abroad. He
puts it as follows:
People everywhere have a right to a decent life. But
before jumping to the conclusion that the way to
respond to global injustice is to encourage people
whose lives are less than decent to migrate elsewhere,
we should consider the fact that this policy will do
little to help the very poor, who are unlikely to have
the resources to move to a richer country. Indeed, a
policy of open migration may make such people worse
off still, if it allows doctors, engineers, and other pro-
fessionals to move from economically undeveloped to
economically developed societies in search of higher
incomes, thereby depriving their countries of origin
of vital skills. Equalizing opportunity for the few may
diminish opportunities for the many.24
If Miller is right about this, then the ardent egalitarian
not only may be in no position to demand that afflu-
ent societies open their borders but she also may be
forced to insist that states not do so, since sending aid
abroad is a better way to rescue those most imperiled
by poverty.

CHAPTER 20: THE ETHICs of ImmIgRATIon Á 799
discharge their distributive responsibilities in other
manners.
III. THE LIBERTARIAN CASE
FOR OPEN BORDERS
To motivate the libertarian case for open borders,
Carens imagines the following scenario. “Suppose a
farmer from the United States wanted to hire workers
from Mexico. The government would have no right
to prohibit him from doing this. To prevent the Mexi-
cans from coming would violate the rights of both the
American farmer and the Mexican workers to engage
in voluntary transactions.”29 As this example illus-
trates, libertarian arguments against restricting immi-
gration can take either of two forms, depending upon
whether they focus on property rights or rights to free
movement. The former emphasizes the rights of those
within the state and contends that limiting immi-
gration violates individual property owners’ right to
invite foreigners to visit their private property. The lat-
ter stresses the rights of foreigners, claiming that clos-
ing territorial borders wrongly restricts an individual’s
right to freedom of movement.
According to the first type of argument, states
may not limit immigration because doing so wrongly
restricts their constituents’ rights to private property.
The appeal of this idea is apparent: if a farmer owns
a piece of property, then she occupies a position of
moral dominion over that land which gives her the
discretion to determine who may and who may not
enter that land. If the farmer’s government denies
foreigners access to its political territory, however,
then it thereby effectively denies the farmer the right
to invite foreigners onto her land. Thus, since a state
cannot limit immigration to its territory without also
limiting its constituents’ property rights, political
communities clearly are not morally entitled to con-
trol who crosses their borders.
It is worth nothing that this argument is not skep-
tical of the moral importance of freedom of associa-
tion; it merely questions why the state should get to
enjoy this right when its doing so necessarily limits
the ability of its individual constituents to do so. In a
conflict between an individual’s right versus a state’s
only because he wrongly, I think, respects the politi-
cal self- determination of virtually all states, even those
persecuting asylum seekers.27
Walzer and I diverge on this point, then, not
because I am less impressed than he by the plight
of asylum seekers but because he is more impressed
than I by the claims to political self- determination of
failed and rogue states, those regimes either unable or
unwilling to secure their citizens’ basic moral rights.
Thus, I once again conclude that affluent societies
have a duty to help but that it is a disjunctive duty:
just as global poverty requires wealthy states to either
export aid or import unfortunate people, the presence
of those desperately seeking political asylum renders
those of us in just political communities duty bound
either to grant asylum or to ensure that these refugees
no longer need fear their domestic regimes. Miller
seems to me to get it just right when he suggests: “The
lesson for other states, confronted with people whose
lives are less than decent, is that they have a choice:
they must either ensure that the basic rights of such
people are protected in the places where they live— by
aid, by intervention, or by some other means— or they
must help them to move to other communities where
their lives will go better. Simply shutting one’s borders
and doing nothing else is not a morally defensible
option here.”28
Before turning to what might be called the “liber-
tarian” case for open borders, I would like to empha-
size that nothing in the preceding critique of the
egalitarian case for open borders is intended as a
rejection of egalitarianism or as a defense of the sta-
tus quo. On the contrary, I believe that most of us in
affluent societies have pressing restitutive, samari-
tan, and egalitarian duties to do considerably more
to help the masses of people in the world tragically
imperiled by poverty, and I even think that one good
way to provide this assistance is to allow more immi-
grants from poorer countries. If sound, the arguments
of this section establish merely that egalitarian con-
siderations do not by themselves generate a moral
duty which requires wealthy countries to open their
borders, in part because the egalitarian case for open
borders depends upon a suspect theory of equality, but
also because wealthy countries have the discretion to

800 Á PART 4: ETHICAL IssUEs
designed specifically to show why the individual should
take precedence over the group in matters of freedom
of association. We should not presume in advance that
such an argument could not be furnished, but there are
several reasons to be skeptical of this approach.
To begin, notice that, in matters unrelated to
immigration, we take it for granted that the group as a
whole has a right to freedom of association. Consider
again, for instance, Canada’s participation in NAFTA
or Slovenia’s membership in the European Union. In
these cases, everyone acknowledges that Canadians
as a whole must determine whether they would like
to join NAFTA and that Slovenians as a group should
decide whether or not Slovenia will enter the EU. If
each individual’s right to freedom of association must
always take precedence over the group’s, on the other
hand, then it follows that every single Canadian had
the right to veto Canada’s involvement in NAFTA or a
single Slovenian citizen would be entitled unilaterally
to block Slovenia’s membership in the EU. I presume
without argument that this position is untenable. And
if no one thinks that individuals have the right to veto
their county’s entrance into associations like NAFTA
or the EU, then we seem similarly committed to deny-
ing that individuals have a right to veto their country’s
immigration policy.31
At this point one might answer that a country’s
limiting immigration is in principle distinct from
joining NAFTA, the EU, or even the merger between
East and West Germany because the latter three are all
acts of association, whereas restricting immigration
is a refusal to associate. The idea is that, of course an
individual may not appeal to the value of freedom of
association to criticize any of these mergers because
each expands her possibilities for association. But
this carries no implications for whether an individual
might rightfully object to her state’s restricting immi-
gration, which limits the people with whom one may
associate.
The distinction between expanding and limiting
association is a real one, but I nonetheless doubt that
it will do the necessary work. To see why, consider an
uncontested secession like Norway’s break from Sweden
in 1905. In this case, more than 99 percent of the Nor-
wegians voted in favor of political divorce and Sweden
right, a libertarian will typically argue that the indi-
vidual’s right should take precedence. When the state
as a whole gets to limit immigration, however, its
doing so effectively curtails the rights of its citizens
to unilaterally invite foreigners onto their land. And
because inviting others to join one on one’s privately
owned land is one type of freedom of association, it is
impossible to grant a state the right to control its bor-
ders without stripping property owners of their rights
to freedom of association. So if either party should
have priority in claiming the right to freedom of asso-
ciation, it is the individual, not the state.
In response, I concede that there is a conflict
between a state’s sovereignty over its territory and an
individual property owner’s dominion over her land,
but in this case I am inclined to favor the claims of a
(duly limited) state. I am a staunch defender of indi-
vidual self- determination, but the crucial point here
is that one cannot consistently insist that property
rights are totally unlimited without committing one-
self to anarchism. This is because political states are
functionally incompatible with extending unlimited
dominion to their constituents. States must be suf-
ficiently territorially contiguous in order to perform
their requisite functions, and achieving contiguity
requires them to nonconsensually coerce all those
within their territorial borders.30 Thus, while it is per-
fectly intelligible to claim that individual dominion
should always take precedence over state sovereignty,
one cannot maintain this position without implicitly
endorsing anarchism. To reiterate, effective political
society would not be possible unless some crucial deci-
sions were made by the group as a whole, and (as this
example of the conflict between a state’s controlling
its territory and an individual controlling her land
indicates) all areas of group sovereignty imply a corre-
sponding lack of individual dominion. In light of this,
I suggest that, in the choice between unlimited prop-
erty rights and the anarchy it entails versus limited
property rights and the statism it allows, one should
favor the latter.
Of course, one might eschew anarchism and still
suggest that individual property rights take prece-
dence over a state’s right to control its borders, but
this position would require an additional argument

CHAPTER 20: THE ETHICs of ImmIgRATIon Á 801
of one’s fellow citizens to share the benefits of equal
political standing with this new member of the politi-
cal community. And because the costs of extending the
benefits of political membership can be substantial, it
makes sense that each individual should not have the
right unilaterally to invite in as many foreigners as she
would like. It is only appropriate that the group as a
whole should decide with whom the benefits of mem-
bership should be shared.34
Although I think the preceding considerations
show why the libertarian is wrong to assume that the
state’s right to freedom of association must give way
to individual property rights, I do think there is room
for an intermediate position that accommodates in a
principled way both associational and property rights,
giving each right its due. And this is important because
a state should not restrict individual dominion any
more than is necessary. In particular, while I am skep-
tical that an individual has the right to invite foreign-
ers to live on her land indefinitely, I do not see why
property owners may not invite outsiders to visit for
limited periods. In fact, one need not even object to
a guest worker arrangement, as long as the worker
does not stay too long.35 Indeed, this strikes me as an
appealing compromise, because allowing for these
sponsored visits gives property owners greater domin-
ion over their land than the status quo without creat-
ing any additional imposition upon their compatriots
(since citizens are not obligated to extend the benefits
of political membership to those foreigners visiting
for a limited amount of time). What is more, this solu-
tion enables us to avoid the standard practical prob-
lem of foreigners entering the country on a limited
visa and then staying indefinitely, because the state
could require the property owner to be responsible
(putting up collateral, perhaps) for all those she invites
to visit. In the end, then, I am inclined to conclude
that a property owner’s dominion over her land might
well entitle her to invite foreigners to visit her land but
that it would not justify a more sweeping curtailment
of a state’s right to control immigration into its terri-
tory. And once we make room for this additional right
for property owners, one gets a better sense of why the
remaining restrictions upon their dominion over their
property is rarely terribly onerous.
as a country did not resist the separation.32 Whatever
one thinks about the justifiability of state- breaking,
this seems like a paradigmatic case of permissible seces-
sion. If each individual’s right to freedom of association
trumps the state’s right to self- determination in those
cases in which the group as a whole seeks to disassoci-
ate from others, however, then Norway’s secession was
unjustified; it was impermissible because every last Nor-
wegian (if not also each Swede) had the right unilater-
ally to veto the political divorce and the plebiscite in
favor of separation did not garner unanimous consent.
Again, I presume without argument that this position is
implausible. And if an individual’s claim to freedom of
association does not trump her state’s right in the case
of secession, there seems good reason to believe that
an individual’s right would be equally impotent in the
realm of immigration.
A second reason to doubt that an individual’s
dominion over her private property takes precedence
over the state’s control of its territorial borders stems
from the twin facts that (1) an inability to invite for-
eigners onto one’s land is typically not an onerous
imposition and (2) bringing outsiders into the political
community has real consequences for one’s compa-
triots. I will explain below why being unable to invite
foreigners onto one’s land is in most cases not a huge
limitation of one’s dominion over one’s property. To
appreciate why inviting foreigners to live permanently
on one’s property has consequences for others, one
need only reflect upon the implications of the rela-
tional theory of equality outlined above. In particular,
recall Walzer’s conclusion that affluent societies have
no obligation to invite guest workers into their territory
but that they are obligated to treat as political equals
all those they do admit. The idea here is that once an
individual enters the territory and becomes subject to
the dictates of the state, she becomes more vulnerable
than outsiders to political oppression.33 Thus, Walzer
rightly concludes that all those who enter the territory
for an indefinite period must be welcomed as equal
members of the political community. If so, however,
this explains why a person’s inviting foreigners onto
her land has important moral implications for all of the
state’s citizens. This invitation does not merely entitle
the invitee to stay on one’s land; it morally requires all

802 Á PART 4: ETHICAL IssUEs
ing the state (and perhaps aiding her in that endeavor
by, say, providing a passport). But it does not entail
an obligation on any other state to let that person in.
Obviously if no state were ever to grant entry rights to
people who were not already its citizens, the right of
exit would have no value. But suppose that states are
generally willing to consider entry applications from
people who might want to migrate, and that most
people would get offers from at least one such state:
then the position as far as the right of exit goes is pret-
ty much the same as with the right to marry, where
by no means everyone is able to wed the partner they
would ideally like to have, but most have the opportu-
nity to marry someone.38
What is more, there is no inconsistency in insist-
ing upon freedom of emigration and internal migra-
tion, on the one hand, and allowing states to restrict
immigration, on the other hand. First and most
important, distinguishing between immigration and
emigration makes perfect sense given that freedom of
association includes the option not to associate; one
may unilaterally emigrate because one is never forced
to associate with others, but one may not unilater-
ally immigrate because neither are others required to
associate with you. Second, as we have seen above,
immigration is importantly different because, unlike
either emigration or internal migration, it can involve
costs to those who must include you as an equal in
their political community.39 Third, a state that denies
emigration (or perhaps even one that denies internal
migration, for that matter) treats its citizens as tanta-
mount to political property insofar as it forces them
to remain in the union, regardless of their preferences.
As unpleasant as it might be to be denied the right to
enter a country, on the other hand, this rejection no
more treats one like property than does a romantic
partner who declines one’s marriage proposal. Thus,
there appears to be nothing inconsistent about requir-
ing states to permit open emigration while simultane-
ously allowing them to limit immigration.
Notice, though, the following: just as I earlier
suggested amending the status quo to give greater
dominion to property owners, here we might explore
ways to create more room for those interested in enter-
ing foreign countries. In particular, given that the
At this stage a libertarian might concede all that
I have argued so far and still insist that states may not
restrict immigration, not because doing so unjustifiably
limits the property rights of its citizens but because it
violates foreigners’ rights to freedom of movement.
Surely each of us has a right to migrate as we please; if
not, then states would be justified prohibiting emigra-
tion or even free migration within the country. And just
as our rights to freedom of movement allow us to leave
or travel within our country, they entitle us to enter
other countries as well. As Carens emphasizes: “No lib-
eral state restricts internal mobility. Those states that
do restrict internal mobility are criticized for denying
basic human freedoms. If freedom of movement within
the state is so basic that it overrides the claims of local
political communities, on what grounds can we restrict
freedom of movement across states?”36 Thus, unless
one is prepared to accept a state’s right to deny either
emigration or internal migration, consistency appears
to demand that states not limit immigration either.37
My response to this second prong of the libertar-
ian case for open borders is analogous to my argu-
ments above: I concede that there is a right to freedom
of movement, and I certainly believe that states must
take great care not to violate the individual rights of
either constituents or foreigners, but I do not think
that the right to free movement is perfectly general
and absolute. My right to freedom of movement
does not entitle me to enter your house without
your permission, for instance, so why think that this
right gives me a valid claim to enter a foreign coun-
try without that country’s permission? Some might
counter that this response essentially denies the right
in question, but this is not so. No one says that I am
denied my right to marriage merely because I cannot
unilaterally choose to marry you against your will. So,
just as my freedom of association in the marital realm
remains intact despite your right to not associate with
me, there seems no reason why my right to freedom
of movement does not similarly remain intact despite
foreign states’ retaining the right to exclude me. David
Miller captures this point nicely:
The right of exit is a right held against a person’s cur-
rent state of residence not to prevent her from leav-

CHAPTER 20: THE ETHICs of ImmIgRATIon Á 803
proposal raises a difficult and important question,
a question to which Walzer and Miller give two dis-
tinct answers, neither of which I find fully satisfying.
Assuming that states have the right to control who, if
anyone, may enter their territories, does it follow that
a country may adopt a policy that explicitly excludes
people based upon their race, religion or ethnicity?
What if a country wanted to admit only whites, for
instance?41 This question is especially difficult, I think,
because, if the state is genuinely at liberty to exclude
everyone, how could an applicant righteously com-
plain about not being admitted? On the other hand,
most take it for granted that, even if a business is not
required to hire anyone, it may not adopt a policy
to hire only whites. And if a company cannot select
employees in this way, presumably a state may not
screen potential immigrants according to this type of
criterion.
Walzer explores this question in terms of “White
Australia,” Australia’s erstwhile policy to admit only
whites. Walzer concludes that Australians would in
fact be permitted to admit only whites, but only if
they ceded a portion of their territory to those who
needed it to survive. He writes: “Assuming, then,
that there actually is superfluous land, the claim of
necessity would force a political community like that
of White Australia to confront a radical choice. Its
members could yield land for the sake of homogene-
ity, or they could give up homogeneity (agree to the
creation of a multiracial society) for the sake of the
land. And those would be their only choices. White
Australia could survive only as Little Australia.”42
Thus, Walzer appears to believe that, while Australia
was not at liberty to simply turn its back upon needy
nonwhites, there is nothing inherently unjust about
an immigration policy that discriminates based upon
race.
Miller diverges from Walzer on this question, argu-
ing that, even if the state is at liberty to exclude every-
one, it wrongs potential applicants for admission by
excluding them based on a category like race. As he
puts it:
I have tried to hold a balance between the interest that
migrants have in entering the country they want to live
pivotal issue involves the twin facts that (1) coun-
tries may not dmit people for indefinite periods
without extending them equal membership rights
and (2) groups of citizens have the right to control
membership in their political communities, this
suggests that even legitimate states do not neces-
sarily have the right to bar foreigners from visiting
for a duly limited period. The host countries might
have a valid concern about huge numbers of visitors
illegally staying beyond the terms of their visa, but,
again, it is not clear that this worry could not be sat-
isfactorily addressed by some mechanism such as the
visitor putting up sufficient collateral. If so, then the
arguments for limiting immigration offered in this
article would leave much more room for freedom
of movement than the status quo, since it would
allow most people to travel freely around the world
(as tourists, to family or doctors, or even to study
or work) as long as they did not stay indefinitely in
some place without the permission of the host polit-
ical community.
Despite this important qualification, I am no
more impressed by the second prong of the libertar-
ian case for open borders than by the first. In both
instances, the libertarian gestures toward an impor-
tant right, but the existence of this right could defeat
the presumptive case for a state’s claim to control
its borders only if the right is wrongly presumed to
be perfectly general and absolute. In the end, then,
neither the egalitarian nor the libertarian case for
open borders undermines the case that can be made
on behalf of a legitimate state’s right to restrict
immigration.
IV. A QUESTION OF CRITERIA
In Who Are We? Samuel Huntington worries not
only about the raw number of immigrants entering
the United States but is especially concerned that so
many are from Mexico.40 He views the United States
as defined not just in terms of its distinctive American
creed but also by its Anglo- Protestant culture. Thus,
unless it more stringently limits the flow of Mexican
immigrants, America will forever lose its distinctive—
and distinctly valuable— character. This provocative

804 Á PART 4: ETHICAL IssUEs
it makes sense to presume that we may have responsi-
bilities to our compatriots that we do not equally owe
to foreigners.45 In particular, we have a special duty
to respect our fellow citizens as equal partners in the
political cooperative. With this in mind, I suggest
that a country may not institute an immigration pol-
icy which excludes entry to members of a given race
because such a policy would wrongly disrespect those
citizens in the dispreferred category.
Even if we assume that there is a special respon-
sibility not to treat one’s compatriots as less than
equal partners, someone might still question how an
immigration policy (which cannot evict any current
citizens) could possibly affect any of a state’s constitu-
ents. To see how such a policy might disrespect exist-
ing citizens, consider the analogous situation from
the familial context. Rather than focusing upon rac-
ists who are unwilling to marry outside of their race,
imagine a family of two white parents with two chil-
dren, one white and another black. (For the purposes
of this thought- experiment, imagine that white par-
ents sometimes gave birth to black children, and vice
versa.) Now, imagine the parents announcing that, as
much as they would love to have a third child, they
have decided against it for fear that she might be black.
I take it as obvious how hurtful this announcement
could be to the existing black child, even though the
decision not to have any additional children obviously
does not threaten his or her chances of coming into
existence. In light of this analogy, it is not difficult to
see how black Australians, for instance, might feel dis-
respected by an immigration policy banning entry to
nonwhites. Even though this policy in and of itself in
no way threatens blacks with expulsion, it sends a clear
message that, qua blacks, they are not equally valued
as partners in the political union. As Blake comments:
“Even if a hypothetical pure society could close the bor-
ders to preserve itself, a modern multi- ethnic democ-
racy could not do so without implicitly treating some
individuals already present within the society as sec-
ond class citizens. Seeking to eliminate the presence of
a given group from your society by selective immigra-
tion is insulting to the members of that group already
present.”46 Thus, unless Australia were already com-
posed exclusively of white constituents (and no state
in, and the interest that political communities having
(sic) in determining their own character. Although the
first of these interests is not strong enough to justify
a right of migration, it is still substantial, and so the
immigrants who are refused entry are owed an expla-
nation. To be told that they belong to the wrong race
or sex (or have the wrong color) is insulting, given that
these features do not connect to anything of real sig-
nificance to the society they want to join. Even tennis
clubs are not entitled to discriminate among applicants
on grounds such as these.43
I must admit to being torn between these two
views. I am tempted by Walzer’s position because, as
much as I abhor racism, I believe that racist individu-
als cannot permissibly be forced to marry someone (or
adopt a child) outside of their race. And if the impor-
tance of freedom of association entitles racist indi-
viduals to marry exclusively within their race, why
does it not similarly entitle racist citizens to exclude
immigrants based upon race? At the very least, one
must explain why the immigration case is dissimilar to
the marital one. In the end, though, I reject Walzer’s
position because I think that such an explanation can
be furnished. Yet I am also not entirely persuaded by
Miller’s explanation.
As noted above, Miller suggests that a state may
not exclude immigrants based upon a category like
race because doing so wrongly insults applicants
of the rejected race. I am not sure that this account
suffices, though. I do not doubt that the rejected
applicants might feel horribly insulted, but I am not
convinced that they have a right not to be insulted in
this way. By analogy, I would expect a black person
to be insulted by a racist white who would never con-
sider marrying someone who is black, but I would not
say that this black person has a right not to be insulted
in this way. Because of these concerns, I would like to
suggest an alternative explanation as to why states
may not limit immigration according to racist cri-
teria.44 In doing so, I will focus upon the rights of
those already within the political community rather
than the rights of those who might want to enter.
I shift the emphasis from foreign immigrants to citi-
zens of the state whose policy is in question because,
given the relational theory of equality detailed above,

CHAPTER 20: THE ETHICs of ImmIgRATIon Á 805
racial, ethnic, or religious constituency, such a state is
not exempt from the requirement to treat all of its sub-
jects as equal citizens. So if I am right that restricting
immigration according to racial, ethnic, or religious cri-
teria wrongs the current subjects in the banned groups,
then only a state completely devoid of people in the
banned category could permissibly institute this type
of immigration policy. As a result, Australia is not free
to reject potential immigrants based upon their race,
and even Israel is not free to exclude non- Jews simply
because they are not Jewish.
CONCLUSION
In this article I have tried first to construct a presump-
tive case in favor of a state’s right to set its own immi-
gration policy and then to defend this prima facie
case against the formidable arguments that have been
made on behalf of open borders. If my arguments are
sound, then we should conclude that, even if egalitar-
ians are right that those of us in wealthy societies have
demanding duties of global distributive justice and
even if libertarians are correct that individuals have
rights both to freedom of movement and to control
their private property, legitimate states are entitled to
reject all potential immigrants, even those desperately
seeking asylum from corrupt governments.
NOTES
1. Stuart White, “Freedom of Association and the Right to
Exclude,” Journal of Political Philosophy 5 (1997): 373–91, 373.
2. David Gauthier, “Breaking Up: An Essay on Secession,”
Canadian Journal of Philosophy 24 (1994): 357–92, 360–61.
3. Some also object to the Boy Scouts’ refusal to admit girls.
4. For an extended discussion of some of the issues associated
with group autonomy, see chap. 3 of my book A Theory of
Secession (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
5. Here one might be tempted to object that Canada’s right to
independence is more straightforwardly accounted for in terms
of its right to self- determination. But, as I shall argue below,
it is misleading to contrast freedom of association with self-
determination because freedom of association is actually a cen-
tral component of the more general right to self- determination.
In the case of political states, for instance, a state cannot fully
is completely homogenous), it would be impermissible
to institute immigration policies designed to approxi-
mate a “White Australia,” not because such policies
might insult potential black immigrants (though no
doubt it would) but because they would fail to treat
nonwhite Australians as equals. And because no state
is completely without minorities who would be dis-
respected by an immigration policy which invoked
racial/ethnic/religious categories, no state may exclude
potential immigrants on these types of criteria.
A possible exception to this rule might be a reli-
gious state like Israel. When a country is designed as
a state for Jews, it might be thought entirely appro-
priate to deny non- Jews entry. I am not so sure about
this conclusion, however, because I do not see why a
state’s being designed to cater especially to a specific
group should license it to disrespect those subjects not
in the favored group. Thus, assuming that I am right
that barring all but Jewish immigrants would treat the
current non- Jewish citizens as less than equal mem-
bers of the political community, only a state that was
completely Jewish could permissibly adopt such an
anti- non- Semitic immigration policy.
Of course, in the case of Israel, the moral horror of
the holocaust makes it tempting to accept an immi-
gration policy that excludes non- Semites. After all, as
Hannah Arendt famously emphasized, an early but
crucial step toward rendering the Jews vulnerable to
inhumane treatment was stripping them of their citi-
zenship. Against the backdrop of this tragic history,
the idea of a state prepared to act as a safe haven for
all and only Jews might seem unobjectionable. In my
view, however, while this type of consideration could
well justify Israel’s controversial Law of Return (which
automatically grants admission to all Jews), it would
not justify Israel’s admitting all and only Jews.47 An
immigration policy that summarily rejected all non-
Jews might be acceptable for a state which included no
non- Jewish subjects, but because roughly 20 percent
of Israel’s population is not Jewish, it may not adopt
such an immigration policy. Even a wrong that follows
on the heels of the utterly horrific wrong of the holo-
caust (like all second wrongs) does not make a right. To
emphasize: whether or not we are sympathetic to the
idea of a state designed especially to serve a specific

806 Á PART 4: ETHICAL IssUEs
18. Incidentally, this point both explains, and is confirmed
by, the fact that Chandran Kukathas’s quote listed earlier is
offered under the banner of a principle of “humanity” rather
than one of equality.
19. I do not claim that Michael Blake would follow me in put-
ting this point in terms of samaritanism, but in some impor-
tant respects the position I outline here squares well with what
he says about international distributive justice in his excellent
article “Distributive Justice, State Coercion, and Autonomy,”
Philosophy & Public Affairs 30 (2001): 257–96.
20. This appears to be another respect in which my views diverge
from those which Blake develops in “Distributive Justice, State
Coercion, and Autonomy.” According to Blake, the relationship
among compatriots is singled out because the state’s coercion is
key to determining when relative equality is important.
21. Walzer, Spheres of Justice, 61.
22. As Jonathan Glover explains in his book Humanity (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001): “The idea of the
family was attacked. People who were allowed to stay in their
villages had to share everything, down to pots and pans. Com-
munal meals for hundreds of families together were compul-
sory. Many families were split up, with men and women being
forced to sleep in segregated communal dormitories” (303).
23. Here one might reassert the objection to my analogy
between immigration and marriage. In particular, because
political unions are not nearly as intimate as marriages, an egal-
itarian might consistently protect freedom of association in the
marital realm without being similarly impressed with a state’s
right to craft its own immigration policy. I agree that it would
be more of an imposition to restrict one’s discretion to select
one’s spouse, but this concession does not trouble me because
I need not press the marriage analogy as far as this objection
presumes. My limited hope is that our family held and famil-
iar views on marriage will confirm my contention about a
state’s right to control its territorial borders need not conflict
with its duties of distributive justice, even when the latter are
cashed out in starkly luck egalitarian terms. If this is right,
then arguments like Peter Singer’s (which compares refugees to
people desperately clamoring for shelter from the fallout of a
nuclear bomb) are fallacious because, unlike those exposed to
the fallout (whose only hope is to be admitted to the shelter),
potential immigrants can be effectively helped without being
admitted into one’s country. See Peter Singer, “Insiders and
Outsiders,” Practical Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1993), 247–63.
24. Miller, “Immigration: The Case for Limits,” 198–99.
Thomas Pogge and Eric Cavallero have offered similar
enjoy the right to political self- determination unless its rights
to freedom of association are respected.
6. White, “Freedom of Association and the Right to Exclude,”
381 (emphasis added).
7. It should be noted White is not necessarily committed to this
line of argument because his analysis is explicitly restricted to
“secondary” groups (which I take to be groups within states)
which adopt “categorical” exclusion (i.e., exclusion based
upon an individual’s race, gender, sexuality, or religion).
8. See Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice (New York: Basic
Books, 1983), 31–63; and David Miller, “Immigration: The
Case for Limits,” in Contemporary Debates in Applied Ethics, ed.
Andrew I. Cohen and Christopher Heath Wellman (Malden,
MA: Blackwell, 2005), 193–206. In Toward a Theory of Immigra-
tion (New York: Palgrave, 2001), the only monograph I know
of which defends a state’s right to craft its own immigration
policy, Peter Meilander takes a similar tack, arguing that legit-
imate national identities have a right to defend themselves
against the threat posed by immigration.
9. Walzer, Spheres of Justice, 62.
10. Miller, “Immigration: The Case for Limits,” 200. Miller
also stresses the role that limiting immigration can play in
curbing population growth, but his flagship argument fea-
tures the importance of preserving culture.
11. Chandran Kukathas, “The Case for Open Immigration,” in
Cohen and Wellman, Contemporary Debates in Applied Ethics,
207–20, 211.
12. Joseph H. Carens, “Aliens and Citizens: The Case for Open
Borders,” Review of Politics 49 (1987): 251–73, 252.
13. Jean Hampton, Political Philosophy (Boulder, CO: West-
view, 1996), 158.
14. Other prominent defenses include David Miller, “What
Kind of Equality Should the Left Pursue?” in Equality, ed. Jane
Franklin (London: Institute for Public Policy Research, 1997),
83–99; Jonathan Wolff, “Fairness, Respect, and the Egalitar-
ian Ethos,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 27 (1998): 97–122;
Andrew Mason, “Equality, Personal Responsibility, and
Gender Socialisation,” Proceedings of Aristotelian Society 100
(1999–2000): 227–46; and Samuel Scheffler, “What Is Egali-
tarianism?” Philosophy & Public Affairs 31 (2003): 5–39.
15. Elizabeth S. Anderson, “What Is the Point of Equality?”
Ethics 109 (1999), 287–337, 314.
16. Anderson, “What Is the Point of Equality?” 316.
17. Harry Frankfurt makes a similar point in “Equality as a
Moral Ideal,” Ethics 98 (1987): 21–43.

CHAPTER 20: THE ETHICs of ImmIgRATIon Á 807
33. Walzer (Spheres of Justice, 59) characterizes the situation of
guest workers as follows: “These guests experience the state as
a pervasive and frightening power that shapes their lives and
regulates their every move— and never asks for their opinion.
Departure is only a formal option; deportation, a continu-
ous practical threat. As a group, they constitute a disenfran-
chised class. They are typically an exploited or oppressed class
as well, and they are exploited or oppressed at least in part
because they are disenfranchised, incapable of organizing
effectively for self- defense.”
34. One might object that this argument presumes a relational
theory of equality, which a libertarian might reject. I do not
worry about this argument’s reliance upon the relational
theory of equality, however, both because those drawn to
libertarianism are likely to be much less uncomfortable with
relational egalitarianism than with luck egalitarianism and
because one cannot summarily dismiss all concerns regarding
inequality on the grounds that they require some type of posi-
tive rights unless one is willing to embrace anarchism (since
statism also requires the existence of positive rights).
35. I suspect that Walzer himself would not even object to
this, since presumably a key factor triggering his concern
about the Turkish guest workers in Germany was the extended
duration of their stays.
36. Carens, “Aliens and Citizens: The Case for Open
Borders,” 267.
37. As Phillip Cole puts it, “one cannot consistently assert
that there is a fundamental human right to emigration
but no such right to immigration; the liberal asymmetry
position is not merely ethically, but also conceptually, inco-
herent” (Philosophies of Exclusion: Liberal Political Theory
and Immigration [Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press,
2000], 46).
38. Miller, “Immigration: The Case for Limits,” 197.
39. I should acknowledge that, when the level of welfare ben-
efits varies considerably from province to province, the stakes
of internal migration can also be much higher.
40. Samuel Huntington, Who Are We? (New York: Simon &
Schuster, 2004).
41. Although this is less clear, it may be that a country which
de facto discriminates according to these types of criteria may
be just as blameworthy as one which has a de jure policy to
do so. See, e.g., Dummett’s discussion of British immigration
practices in On Immigration and Refugees.
42. Walzer, Spheres of Justice, 47.
43. Miller, “Immigration: The Case for Limits,” 204.
arguments. See Pogge’s “Migration and Poverty,” in Citizen-
ship and Exclusion, ed. Veit M. Bader (Houndmills: Macmil-
lan, 1997), 12–27; and Cavallero’s “An Immigration- Pressure
Model of Global Distributive Justice,” Politics, Philosophy and
Economics 5 (2006): 97–127.
25. It is important to note, though, that those who make an
exception for refugees (as defined by international law) appar-
ently cannot do so on principled grounds. As theorists like
Andrew Shacknove and Michael Dummett have pointed out,
restricting the status of refugees to those who have crossed an
international border because of a well- founded fear of perse-
cution is morally arbitrary. See Andrew Shacknove, “Who Is a
Refugee?” Ethics 95 (1985): 274–84; and Michael Dummett, On
Immigration and Refugees (New York: Routledge, 2001).
26. Of course, interventions will typically take time, and in
these cases the intervening state should not return the refu-
gees to their home state (at least without protecting them)
until the intervention is successfully completed.
27. For more on the permissibility of armed humanitarian
intervention (as well as a more expanded critique of Walzer’s
position), see Andrew Altman and Christopher Heath Well-
man, “From Humanitarian Intervention to Assassination,”
Ethics 118 (2008): 228–57.
28. Miller, “Immigration: The Case for Limits,” 198.
29. Carens, “Aliens and Citizens: The Case for Open
Borders,” 253.
30. This inference from libertarianism to anarchism is admit-
tedly very quick. I defend this claim at greater length in my
essay “Liberalism, Samaritanism and Political Legitimacy,”
Philosophy & Public Affairs 25 (1996): 211–37. Very briefly,
though, notice that even the most minimal state must non-
consensually force all constituents within the territory to do
at least two things: (1) defer to the state’s judgments regard-
ing criminal punishments (e.g., individuals must refrain
from vigilante justice) and (2) pay taxes so that the state has
enough money to maintain its monopolistic coercive power
over the criminal law.
31. A thorough- going libertarian might well deny that states
are entitled to determine the terms of international trade,
but of course this is not because there is anything distinctive
about international trade. Such a libertarian will deny that a
state has any moral dominion which each individual has not
voluntarily surrendered. And since no state has garnered the
morally valid consent of all of its constituents, staunch (and
consistent) libertarians must reject all forms of statism.
32. In a referendum in August of 1905, 368,392 Norwegians
voted in favor of political divorce and only 184 voted against.

808 Á PART 4: ETHICAL IssUEs
nity, it does not follow that these categories may not be used
when deciding who should get in to this community.
46. Blake, “Immigration,” 233.
47. Defenders of Israel’s Law of Return often cite the Conven-
tion on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination
Article I (3), which allows states to give a group preferential
treatment in immigration (as long as no group is discriminated
against). More important, in my view, is the historical context
in which the Law of Return was enacted. Given how many
Jews were massacred for lack of a political safe haven, it is alto-
gether understandable that Israel would decide, with the Knes-
set’s first law, to open its doors to Jewish people everywhere.
(Here we might invoke the Convention on the Elimination of
All Forms of Racial Discrimination Article I (4), which permits
preferential treatment as a remedy for past discrimination.)
44. The view I advance here is similar to that which Michael
Blake develops in “Immigration,” in A Companion to Applied
Ethics, ed. R.G. Frey and Christopher Heath Wellman
(Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003), 224–37.
45. My favoring the relational theory of equality also
explains why I do not accept Carens’s rejection of Walzer’s
view. Carens invokes the distinction between the private
and public spheres to explain why, while you “can pick your
friends on the basis of whatever criteria you want,” you may
not invoke categories like race to discriminate among appli-
cants for immigration (“Aliens and Citizens: The Case for
Open Borders,” 267). For reasons that the relational theory
of equality helps illuminate, though, even if one should not
use racial categories to discriminate among applicants (for
positions within the public sphere) within a given commu-
Freedom of Association Is Not the Answer
Sarah Fine
case for the state’s right to exclude would- be immi-
grants.2 As Wellman points out, we must not over-
look the potentially exclusionary implications of the
liberal commitment to freedom of association. There
is a widespread and apparently uncontroversial view
of the relationship between freedom of association
and exclusion: few would argue with Amy Gutmann’s
statement that “the freedom to associate . . . entails
the freedom to exclude.”3 Thus, if Wellman can estab-
lish that states— like individuals— should enjoy the
freedom to associate and that this includes a right to
exclude prospective members, then we would have
clear foundations at least for the state’s prima facie
right to exclude.
In fact, Wellman’s position appears to be doubly
contentious; not only does he make a liberal case for
a right to exclude voluntary immigrants, but he also
maintains that states actually have the right to “close
[their] doors to all potential immigrants, even refu-
gees desperately seeking asylum from incompetent
or corrupt political regimes that are either unable or
unwilling to protect their citizens’ basic moral rights”
(109). In this respect he seems to go further than other
Cosmopolitan liberals have long argued that, contrary
to prevailing practices and assumptions, there is a ten-
sion between liberal principles, on the one hand, and
the coercively enforced borders and exclusive mem-
bership practices that are familiar features of nation
states, on the other hand.1 In that vein, it has become
common to emphasize the liberal commitments to
universalism and moral equality and to highlight the
moral arbitrariness of birth place in order to question
the relevance of borders in relation to a person’s rights
and opportunities. It is notable, too, that liberal prin-
ciples are often regarded as the universalist antidote
to the more particularist or exclusionary tendencies
of the other features (sovereignty, nationality, democ-
racy) that make up the modern state.
This is one of the reasons why Christopher Heath
Wellman’s article “Immigration and Freedom of
Association” is so novel and interesting: Wellman
puts forward what appears to be a distinctly liberal
Sarah Fine, “Freedom of Association Is Not the Answer,” Ethics
120, January 2010, 338–56. © 2010 by The University of Chicago.
Reprinted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.

CHAPTER 20: THE ETHICs of ImmIgRATIon Á 809
progressive political philosophers who have offered
more qualified defenses of immigration restrictions.4
In short, this is a bold argument, which makes a sig-
nificant contribution to a most topical debate.
I outline the key points of Wellman’s two- stage
argument in Section I. In Sections II and III, I develop
an internal critique of Wellman’s position. The main
target of my response is his central claim that “the
commonly prized value of freedom of association
provides the basic normative building blocks for a pre-
sumptive case in favor of each legitimate state’s right
to exclude others from its territory” (119). I highlight
the way in which exclusion has the potential to harm
the interests of would- be immigrants, and I point out
some crucial distinctions between the state and asso-
ciations in civil society.5 In Section IV, I contend that,
beyond the issues of external harm and the distinc-
tiveness of the state, a successful defense of the state’s
right to exclude others from its territory could not rest
on the appeal to freedom of association alone: it also
would require a justification of the state’s territorial
rights, something that is conspicuous by its absence
from Wellman’s argument. The search for the nor-
mative foundations of the state’s purported right to
exclude would- be immigrants continues: freedom of
association is not the answer.
I
There are two main steps on Wellman’s path to the
conclusion that states have the right to exclude all
prospective immigrants. First, he seeks to establish
that there is a prima facie case for the state’s right to
exclude; second, he aims to illustrate that the pre-
sumption in favor of a right to exclude is not out-
weighed by potentially competing “egalitarian” and
“libertarian” considerations.6
Wellman’s case for a presumptive right to exclude
is quite straightforward. He begins with the claim
that everybody seems to think freedom of associa-
tion is important. Taking marriage and religion as his
central examples, Wellman draws attention to the
widespread agreement that people should be free to
choose their own (willing) marital partners and their
own (willing) religious associates. This, he suggests,
is indicative of a common conviction “that each of
us enjoys a morally privileged position of dominion
over our self- regarding affairs,” or, in short, a com-
mitment to individual self- determination (110). The
freedom to associate is part of what it means to be
self- determining.
And what does a commitment to freedom of asso-
ciation imply? Wellman contends that it includes “the
right not to associate and even, in many cases, the
right to associate and even, in many cases, the right to
disassociate” (109). Freedom of marital association, for
example, comprises a right to marry a willing partner
but also the right not to marry a given suitor and even
not to marry anyone. Freedom of religious association
similarly means a right to associate with consenting
others for religious purposes, as well as the right not to
associate with anyone in particular or indeed anyone
at all. Neither marital nor religious associational free-
dom includes a right to associate with nonconsenting
others (110).
From these apparently uncontroversial liberal
premises, Wellman reaches the following somewhat
more controversial conclusion: “Just as an individual
has a right to determine whom (if anyone) he or she
would like to marry, a group of fellow- citizens has a right
to determine whom (if anyone) it would like to invite
into its political community. And just as an individual’s
freedom of association entitles one to remain single, a
state’s freedom of association entitles it to exclude all
foreigners from its political community” (110–11).
Wellman then responds to a number of potential
objections to his move from premises to conclusion.
None of these objections deters him from confidently
contending that he has established at least a prima
facie case for a state’s right to exclude all would- be
immigrants (119). If the first part of Wellman’s argu-
ment is correct, then, all other things being equal, we
should favor states’ rights to exclude over would- be
immigrants’ claims to be admitted.
The prima facie case, he acknowledges, could be
outweighed by competing claims. First, the presump-
tion in favor of a state’s right to restrict immigra-
tion might be trumped by what Wellman calls “the
egalitarian case for open borders.” Wellman accepts
that individuals and states have significant duties to

810 Á PART 4: ETHICAL IssUEs
even those desperately seeking asylum from corrupt
governments” (141).
Wellman’s defense of the state’s right to exclude
rests on two debatable claims. The first is that the
state has a right to freedom of association, which is
a component of its right to self- determination. All
liberals are familiar with the claim that individuals
have associational rights, and many would accept
that groups formed by consenting individuals also
can have associational rights. However, Wellman
does not elaborate on the precise sense in which the
state has a right to freedom of association. He does
not explain whether we should understand the state
as the right- holder or whether the state exercises the
right on behalf of its citizens. At times he refers to
“the citizens’ right,” at others he refers to the “state’s
right.” If the state acts on behalf of its citizens as a col-
lective body, then presumably the state has no right
to exclude those with whom the citizens collectively
choose to associate. He also does not reveal exactly
how this purported collective right relates to the indi-
vidual right to freedom of association. The citizens’
(or the state’s) right to freedom of association does not
emerge from the citizens exercising their individual
rights and choosing to associate together as a group
in the first place; as Wellman acknowledges, ordinar-
ily membership of the political community is nonvol-
untary (112). Moreover, as he points out, the citizens’
collective right to refuse to associate with outsiders
may conflict with the associative rights of those indi-
vidual citizens who wish to associate with the excluded
outsiders (131). In lieu of a response to these questions
about the nature of the state’s right to freedom of asso-
ciation, Wellman simply suggests that there are some
unpalatable consequences of denying that states have
such a right. For example, without positing that right,
he argues, we would be unable to identify the wrong
that occurs when one state forcibly annexes another
state (112–13). Despite the lack of clarification, let us
accept for the sake of argument that the state may
have a right to freedom of association.
The second controversial claim is that the state’s
freedom to associate includes a right to exclude would-
be immigrants. In order to understand the basis of that
claim, it is useful to distinguish between a state’s right
outsiders living in abject poverty, and, in line with
his relational view of equality, he maintains that, as
relationships between insiders and outsiders become
more “robust,” the inequalities between them are a
greater cause for concern (120–30). He argues, how-
ever, that states may choose to “export justice” rather
than open their borders to immigrants.7 Export options
include, in Wellman’s view, the transfer of aid to poor
countries in place of admitting immigrants who are
fleeing poverty, and, rather more contentiously, mili-
tary intervention to protect those whose governments
are “unable or unwilling to secure their . . . basic moral
rights” instead of admitting refugees of corrupt or inept
regimes (129).
Next, Wellman critically appraises “the libertar-
ian case for open borders.” Opponents might contend
that the state’s right to exclude illegitimately restricts
the citizens’ freedom to invite outsiders onto their
property and/or the would- be immigrants’ freedom
of movement. Wellman argues that the state’s “sov-
ereignty over its territory” must take precedence over
the individual citizen’s right to invite others onto
her property and, anyway, inviting people into the
state for indefinite periods of time actually has far-
reaching, costly consequences for one’s fellowcitizens,
which means that this sort of decision should not be
made unilaterally. Furthermore, the right to freedom
of movement is not absolute: I have no right to enter
your house without permission, so why should I have
a right to enter another country without its consent
(130–36)? Yet he claims that states should not inter-
fere with self- determining individuals “any more than
is necessary” (134). Hence, states can have no reason-
able objection to individuals inviting outsiders onto
their property or to foreigners entering the territory
provided that these visits are for “duly limited” peri-
ods (136–37).
Despite these apparent concessions, Wellman
does not shy away from his stark conclusion that
“even if egalitarians are right that those of us in
wealthy societies have stringent duties of global dis-
tributive justice, and even if libertarians are correct
that individuals have rights both to freedom of move-
ment and to control their private property, legitimate
states are entitled to reject all potential immigrants,

CHAPTER 20: THE ETHICs of ImmIgRATIon Á 811
society, where they remain free to choose to associate,
or not to associate, with newcomers and with other
citizens in their private lives. In addition, it seems to
be compatible with the collective right of citizens, as
a group, to associate or not to associate with others in
their political community.
The issue of movement across territorial borders
and subsequent settlement (as opposed to full mem-
bership) only enters Wellman’s argument insofar as
he agrees with Michael Walzer that all long- term resi-
dents of a state should have the option of acquiring
equal rights of membership to protect them against
political oppression. For states to function effectively,
Wellman contends, they must “nonconsensually
coerce all those within their territorial borders” (131).
The state, then, is both a nonvoluntary, coercive, ter-
ritorial institution and the site (and representative?) of
a self- determining political community. The require-
ment to offer citizenship status to long- term residents
is a democratic one; in the absence of that guarantee,
resident noncitizens are subject to the state’s coercive
authority without any say over the state’s actions and
they are comparable to “ live- in servants,” governed by
a “band of citizen tyrants.”11 In other words, a demo-
cratic state is not entitled permanently to withhold
citizenship status from those residing (for indefinite
periods) within its territory. The citizens’ collective
freedom to associate (and to refuse association) does
not extend to excluding long- term residents of the
state from the political community.
Thus, while Wellman cannot defend the right to
exclude outsiders from the state’s territory by direct
appeal to the citizens’ individual or collective rights
to freedom of association, because their mere pres-
ence within the state’s territorial boundaries is not a
problem from that perspective, the democratic state’s
right to exclude would- be immigrants from settling
indefinitely in the territory indirectly becomes a nec-
essary extension of the right to exclude them from
full membership of the political community. The
citizens’ collective freedom to choose their political
associates (their fellow citizens) relies on their free-
dom to exclude would- be long- term residents at the
territorial borders. Wellman’s defense of a right to
exclude would- be immigrants by appeal to freedom
to exclude outsiders from its territory (from simply
crossing its borders), its right to exclude them from
settling within that territory, and its right to exclude
them from membership of the political community
(from acquiring citizenship status). Although Well-
man obscures these distinctions by writing, inter-
changeably, of a state’s right to “control immigration
over its territorial borders,” “close its doors,” and “set
its own immigration policy,” it transpires that the
central focus of his freedom of association position is
actually the state’s right to exclude would- be immi-
grants from obtaining citizenship status. Wellman’s
argument is that the citizens together ought to enjoy
a collective right to determine the membership rules
for their political community, and so it is the free-
dom of the citizens, as a group, to choose their fellow
political associates that is at stake. Access to citizen-
ship matters because “the country’s course will be
charted by the members of this civic association”—
that is how Wellman connects the citizens’ collective
right to self- determination and their right to freedom
of association (114–15). In short, Wellman is primar-
ily concerned with the state’s control of its “civic”
boundaries, “which regulate membership.”8
How does Wellman move from the contention
that the state should have control of its civic bound-
aries to the argument that the state should have con-
trol of its “territorial” boundaries, “which regulate
movement?”9 At first it might appear as though the
attempt to defend the state’s right to exclude would- be
immigrants from its territory by appeal to freedom of
association is something of a nonstarter. David Miller,
for example, swiftly dismisses this line of argument.
According to him, it depends on the notion that “we
have a deep interest in not being forced into associa-
tion with others against our wishes,” a notion that has
little force in the context of the modern liberal state
since it is implausible to claim that the “mere pres-
ence” of immigrants within the state’s territory harms
the (associational) interests of the citizens.10 In that
respect, Miller must be correct. The mere presence of
immigrants within the state’s borders cannot be a seri-
ous problem with regard to the associational rights of
individual citizens— it is certainly compatible with
their individual rights to associate freely within civil

812 Á PART 4: ETHICAL IssUEs
others obstructs his path to the conclusion that the
state enjoys a right to exclude.
To explain, there is no denying that Wellman’s
claim about the importance of individual self-
determination has a good liberal pedigree. We are
familiar with this as an argument in favor of allowing
people the freedom “to be the authors of their own
lives.”15 It is a “let them be” position and one that
makes perfect sense with reference to the beliefs or
actions of an individual. “You do not like the way that
Ali chooses to live her life? If she is not harming any-
one then you have no say in the matter. Let her be!”
In Wellman’s words, “it is her life.”16 The presumptive
case lies with Ali.
From Wellman’s conception of individual self-
determination, we might extrapolate a comparable
notion of group self- determination: groups enjoy a
morally privileged position of dominion over their
self- regarding affairs and should be allowed to choose
freely when their behavior is not harmful to others.
Matters become more complicated here because of
the clear potential for groups illegitimately to restrict
the autonomy of their own members. One common
liberal response is to “let groups be” on the condi-
tion that the members of the group enjoy a right of
exit.17 The individual right of exit represents a form
of safeguard against the group’s potential to abuse its
power.18
Yet the actions of groups affect not only the auton-
omy of their members; just like the actions of individu-
als, they may (directly or indirectly) affect third parties
as well. When a private club in a residential area regu-
larly arranges noisy late- night gatherings, the group’s
actions have spill- over effects for the local residents. In
that way, while seemingly going about its own busi-
ness, the private club has the potential to harm the
interests of nonmembers. And, whereas a right of exit
might go some way toward protecting the individual
autonomy of the members, outsiders often are unwill-
ingly exposed to the effects of a group’s decisions. In
such instances, where the nonmembers do not seek
to interfere in the affairs of others for paternalist rea-
sons, “let them be” is not an appropriate response
to their appeals. Clearly, it is not the case that every
action with potentially harmful effects ought to be
of association therefore depends both on the assump-
tion that states have a right to freedom of association
and on the validity of the claim that all long- term resi-
dents must be offered the option of acquiring the com-
plete rights of full membership; if the latter claim is
without substance, then Wellman’s argument would
fail because the citizens could control access to mem-
bership of the political community and enjoy the
collective right to freedom of association without con-
trolling access to the state’s territory.12 Furthermore,
the citizens’ collective claim to freedom of associa-
tion must be weighty enough to override not only the
would- be immigrants’ claims to become members of
the political community but also their claims to settle
in the state’s territory.
Even if we do not challenge these two foundations
of Wellman’s position, the argument that the state has
a right to exclude would- be immigrants by virtue of
its right to freedom of association still fails on its own
terms. In what follows, I raise three objections, focus-
ing on harm to others, the distinctiveness of the state,
and the absence of a justification for the state’s territo-
rial rights.
II
The first central problem emerges on closer inspection
of Wellman’s conception of self- determination. As
indicated in Section I, Wellman describes the individ-
ual right to self- determination in the following terms:
“Each of us enjoys a morally privileged position of
dominion over our self- regarding affairs,” and this is a
position “which entitles us to freedom of association”
(110). Although he does not elaborate on the idea of
self- determination in the immigration discussion, in
a previous article he notes that “it is not always clear
when any given action is purely self- regarding,” but
“many people believe that we should be allowed to
choose freely when our behavior is not harmful to
others.”13 Behavior that is harmful to others wrongly
causes them to be worse off than they would be oth-
erwise (where “worse off” means that their interests
are set back or thwarted).14 Wellman’s omission of the
harm clause in the immigration piece is significant
because, as I will show, the potential to cause harm to

CHAPTER 20: THE ETHICs of ImmIgRATIon Á 813
we might distinguish between those who are unable
to live a minimally decent life in their present coun-
try and those whose basic needs are currently met
but who wish to settle elsewhere in order to further
their (various) interests. We know that emigration is
generally accompanied by significant costs, including
separation from family and friends, from a wider com-
munity, and from familiar surroundings, and often
involves moving to somewhere unfamiliar, some-
where in which one is a stranger. It seems reasonable
to assume, therefore, that those who are willing (or
are forced) to incur such costs have substantial inter-
ests in living in another state and that thwarting their
pursuit of those interests may be detrimental to the
well- being of the excluded. This is particularly true
if, as Wellman contends, in order to control access to
membership of the political community, states must
also enjoy a right to exclude outsiders from settling
indefinitely within their territorial borders, because it
means that those who are excluded from membership
of the political community are unable to further any of
their interests in long- term residence within the state
(just as teachers who are excluded from the teaching
union are unable to further their career interests).
Those who cannot live a minimally decent life in
their country have an interest in meeting their basic
needs. Wellman maintains that states must not ignore
that interest but are free to “export justice” to them
instead of granting them access to the state’s territory
and political community. Even if this were a plausible
and legitimate option, it could not fully resolve the
question of harm to would- be immigrants.21 In a world
where all the adverse political and economic (and,
we might add, ecological and social) causes of forced
migration had been eliminated, as Joseph Carens has
emphasized, “people might have powerful reasons to
want to migrate from one state to another.”22 Most
importantly for our purposes, the interests in living in
state A are not always interchangeable with the inter-
ests in living in state B or state C. Prohibiting outsiders
from settling in and becoming members of a particu-
lar state hinders or prevents their pursuit of all the
many familial, social, religious, cultural, political, or
economic interests tied to residence and citizenship in
that state, despite the fact that some, if not all, of their
prohibited, but, once the potential for harm to oth-
ers enters the picture, the presumption in favor of the
group members’ freedom to do as they please is called
into question, as is implied by Wellman’s claim that
“we should be allowed to choose freely when our behav-
ior is not harmful to others.”19 In fact, the potential for
harm represents a good, if not a conclusive, reason for
intervening in the group’s affairs in order to prevent
the harm.
There is also another way in which the actions
of groups, unlike those of individuals, necessarily
affect and even potentially harm third parties. As
Wellman explains, “an important part of group self-
determination is having control of what the ‘self’ is,”
and this is why he is so concerned with the citizens’
freedom to select their political associates (115). Having
control of that “self” means choosing “who is in and
who is out,” which, in turn, means including some
people and excluding others.20 The very act of exclud-
ing people may thwart their interests, either making
them worse off than they are at present, or making
them worse off than they would be otherwise, if they
were left to act on their own plans and the group did
not act to exclude them. For example, when a patch of
green land, open to the general public, is purchased by
a private group which plans to reserve the land for the
use of members only, then current users of the land
who are excluded from the group are made worse off.
In another case, if a necessary condition of securing
work in the teaching profession is membership of a
national teachers’ trade union, then qualified teach-
ers excluded from the union are made worse off than
they would be otherwise— exclusion bars them from
pursuing their chosen career. Again, though not every
action with potentially harmful effects can or should
be prohibited, sometimes the interests in question are
so substantial, and thwarting them is so detrimental
to the well- being of the excluded, that exclusion itself
becomes a cause for concern.
The potential to cause harm to others has impor-
tant implications for Wellman’s argument regarding
the state’s right to exclude. Would- be immigrants seek
to leave one state and to enter another for a variety of
reasons. Some effectively have no choice but to leave
their state of origin, while others elect to move. Here

814 Á PART 4: ETHICAL IssUEs
Amy Gutmann and Stuart White, for example, that
there is a particularly compelling case for freedom of
association, and by extension exclusion, in intimate
or expressive contexts.24 According to White’s view,
as quoted by Wellman himself, “if the formation of a
specific association is essential to the individual’s abil-
ity to exercise properly his/her liberties of conscience
and expression, or to his/her ability to form and enjoy
intimate attachments, then exclusion rules which are
genuinely necessary to protect the association’s pri-
mary purposes have an especially strong presumption
of legitimacy.”25 The idea is that it would be objection-
able to compel individuals to form or maintain inti-
mate attachments against their will or to betray their
own consciences. Does the modern liberal state enjoy
a privileged status on a similar basis?
Although the liberal state obviously cannot be
viewed as an intimate association, perhaps it has more
of a claim to be viewed primarily as an expressive asso-
ciation, certainly not in the sense that it subscribes to
a particular religious doctrine but at least insofar as it
is (supposedly) committed to a set of principles that
represent its liberal character. While there is a great
deal of debate between liberals about how compre-
hensive or perfectionist those principles may be, and
liberals of various stripes will disagree about the basic
list and ranking, it is uncontroversial to claim that a
liberal state is committed, in some way, to toleration,
equality before the law, and individual liberty, for
example. However, the liberal state’s adherence to a
basic set of common principles is not sufficient to sug-
gest that it constitutes an expressive association. The
label ‘expressive association’ implies, as Gutmann
notes, “that the primary purpose of an association is
expression of a point of view.”26 The members of lib-
eral states are a diverse bunch, many of whom do not
see themselves as making any sort of principled state-
ment by remaining resident within the borders of a
particular state. Citizens in a liberal state may endorse
a variety of liberal principles, or may be indifferent to
them, or may reject them altogether. Freedom of asso-
ciation within a liberal state is supposed to facilitate
the citizens’ freedom to express various points of view,
including views antithetical to liberalism. When gov-
ernments mistake the state itself for something akin
basic needs could be met elsewhere. Once more, this
potential for harm to others represents a good, though
not conclusive, reason against permitting the group to
exclude some or all would- be members.
Therefore, while we may grant that there is a
strong presumption in favor of individuals enjoying
“dominion over their self- regarding affairs,” group
rights to self- determination are, by definition, always
more troublesome, because groups consist of indi-
viduals who may be harmed by their group’s actions
and because the very act determining the group “self”
is necessarily exclusionary, possibly at significant cost,
even harm, to the excluded would- be members. Well-
man thinks he establishes that there is a presump-
tion in favor of the state’s right to exclude prospective
immigrants because he does not pause to consider
the possibility that the act of exclusion is potentially
harmful to them insofar as it thwarts the interests
that they have in long- term settlement or in acquiring
membership. And, as I have sought to illustrate, when
the acts of a self- determining group are accompanied
by potential harm to others, there does not appear
to be a clear presumption on the group’s side— the
potential for harm represents a parallel reason to inter-
fere with the group’s actions.
III
In response, Wellman might wish to invoke the exam-
ples of marriage and religion again to illustrate that
the refusal of a marriage proposal or exclusion from
a religious group both may “damage the interests of
others” and cause “pain or loss” in some sense, and yet
everyone appears to assume that there is a clear pre-
sumption in favor of the refuser and the excluder in
those cases.23 However, this only serves to highlight
why Wellman’s inference from the examples of mar-
riage and religion to the example of a state is prob-
lematic in the first place. While liberals are likely to
accept that the presumption lies with the excluder in
the marriage and religion cases despite the potential
for causing “pain or loss” to the excluded, for many
of them this is because there is something special
about certain forms of association, which gives them
a privileged status. They might argue, in line with

CHAPTER 20: THE ETHICs of ImmIgRATIon Á 815
This suggests that there might well be a presump-
tion in favor of a group’s right to exclude would- be
members in two quite different cases. The first case,
as in the examples of marital and religious freedom
of association, is when the associational freedom and
accompanying exclusion are intricately connected
to intimate attachments or expressive purposes. The
second case, as in the golf club example, is when asso-
ciations are not intimate or expressive but exclusion
is generally fairly innocuous. Although Wellman
invokes both sorts of case in his attempt to support
the state’s presumptive right to exclude, neither is
relevantly comparable to that of the state, and so the
examples do very little to help his cause. Interestingly
enough, however, when particular clubs or associa-
tions start to look a bit more like states in the sense
that outsiders have significant interests in becoming
members and exclusion brings with it high costs to
the nonmembers without serving clear expressive or
intimate purposes, the argument in favor of exclu-
sion seems weaker. That certainly appears to have
been the view of the U.S. Supreme Court in the case
of Roberts v. United States, 1984. The Court ruled that
it was not unconstitutional to deny the U.S. Junior
Chamber ( Jaycees)—a nonintimate, nonexpressive,
and formerly all- male association, which was under-
stood to have clear career- enhancing advantages for
its members— a right to exclude its regional chap-
ters that chose to admit women as full members.28
As Gutmann puts it, with reference to nonintimate,
nonexpressive associations within civil society, there
is no obvious presumption in favor of the excluders:
“We cannot claim a presumption in favor of a right
to exclude or a presumption in favor of a right not to
be discriminated against without begging the ques-
tion: which side carries the weight of argument in
cases of conflict between the values of free associa-
tion and those of nondiscrimination?”29 With refer-
ence to the state and prospective members, we might
rephrase Gutmann’s statement and argue that we
cannot claim a presumption in favor of the state’s
right to exclude or a presumption in favor of the
would- be immigrant’s interests in cases of conflict
between the importance of free association and not
harming others.
to an expressive association with a single, compre-
hensive point of view, the result is often distinctly and
disturbingly illiberal, as in the case of the American
government’s clampdown on communist views in the
McCarthy era or the suppression of political opposi-
tion in the former Soviet Union. Hence, since the lib-
eral state cannot claim to be primarily an intimate or
expressive association, the initial case for exclusion
then must be weaker than in the examples of marriage
and religion.
Wellman acknowledges that freedom of associa-
tion is “much more important for individuals” in the
examples of marriage and religion, but he denies that
this imperils his position regarding a presumptive
right to exclude because he believes that “there is a
very natural and straightforward case to be made in
favor of freedom of association in all realms” (114). He
points out that freedom of association for members
of a golf club is obviously not as important as marital
and religious freedom of association, and yet, “if no
one doubts that golf clubs have a presumptive right to
exclude others, then there seems no reason to suspect
that a group of citizens cannot also have the right to
freedom of association, even if control over member-
ship in a country is not nearly as significant as control
regarding one’s potential spouse” (114).
The freedom of association principle, Wellman
maintains, applies collectively to citizens of a state,
just as it applies to members of a golf club. This argu-
ment by analogy is awkward again, though, because
one might be reluctant to accept that a state has a
presumptive right to exclude precisely because of the
ways in which a state differs dramatically from a golf
club. As a number of theorists have emphasized over
the years, states are not like clubs.27 For one thing, it
is not possible today for would- be immigrants to get
together and set up a state of their own. Moreover, it
is generally fair to assume that exclusion from a golf
club is unlikely to have a devastating impact on the
life of the would- be member, whereas exclusion from
a particular state— as the bearer of an enormous range
of resources and options, many of which are not inter-
changeable with those on offer in other states and are
not accessible to nonresidents and noncitizens— may
have exactly that effect.

816 Á PART 4: ETHICAL IssUEs
obligation to extend the full rights of membership to
temporary visitors, their presence within the state does
not pose a problem for the citizens’ collective right to
self- determination and freedom of association. Hence,
he stresses that his argument “would leave much more
room for freedom of movement than the status quo,
since it would allow most people to travel freely around
the world (as tourists, to family or doctors, or even to
study or work) as long as they did not stay indefinitely
in some place without the permission of the host
political community” (137). Nevertheless, again, this
response does not serve to mitigate the harms that may
accompany exclusion from permanent residence and
citizenship. People who are not free to settle within a
state are not at liberty to form or maintain long- term
intimate relationships with citizens; to take advantage
of the political, religious, and social options in that
state; or, generally, to make a stable life for themselves
there. The opportunity to travel “freely around the
world” surely is of little comfort to those whose inter-
ests in settlement and membership are thwarted.
IV
Wellman does not deliver a conclusive case in favor
of the citizens’ position— that would require him to
explain why the citizens’ claim to self- determination
is sufficiently strong to outweigh the harm to would-
be immigrants. I will add that the argument in favor
of preventing harm to the would- be immigrants
seems more appealing once we recognize that we are
not being asked to make a stark choice between self-
determination and the interests of outsiders: while
“having control of what the ‘self’ is” may be one ele-
ment of group self- determination, it is not the only,
or even a necessary, component. In the absence of full
control over access to membership, a group still can be
self- determining to the extent that it is free to set its
own internal policy agenda without external interfer-
ence. That freedom might be limited by the lack of con-
trol over membership rules, but liberal and democratic
principles already constrain the extent of the citizens’
discretion to control the membership of their political
community. Wellman accepts the democratic require-
ment that long- term residents are offered citizenship
rights, and presumably that same requirement extends
In summary, then, without denying that citizens
have an interest in setting the rules of membership for
their political community in order to maintain some
control over the policy direction of their state, I have
illustrated that, contra Wellman, the appeal to self-
determination and freedom of association does not
deliver a presumptive case in favor of a state’s right
to exclude would- be immigrants from settling within
its borders and obtaining citizenship status. Exclud-
ing would- be immigrants from a state clearly has the
potential to harm their interests to a significant degree,
and this potential for harm also represents a good rea-
son for challenging the citizens’ right to exclude them.
Groups may enjoy a presumptive right to exclude out-
siders when the associations in question are intimate
or primarily expressive or when exclusion is ordinarily
reasonably “harmless,” but the state does not meet the
criteria necessary to qualify for that presumption.
Furthermore, once it becomes clear that the poten-
tial for harming the would- be immigrants’ interests
negates the case for the state’s presumptive right to
exclude based on the citizens’ collective right to free-
dom of association, it is also apparent that Wellman’s
response to the “egalitarian” objection to the state’s
right to exclude is insufficient. Even if the state is able
and willing to fulfill its duties to outsiders living in pov-
erty or the victims of incompetent or brutal regimes
by “exporting justice” abroad, excluding people who
wish to pursue interests specific to that particular state
is still potentially harmful, and that potential for harm
remains an important challenge to Wellman’s position.
Wellman might argue that he does directly con-
front that potential for harm to outsiders since he con-
siders whether the citizens’ right to exclude, grounded
in their collective right to freedom of association, con-
flicts with the would- be immigrants’ right to freedom
of movement. In a sense, this is something of a red her-
ring; as I emphasized at the outset, the citizens’ collec-
tive right to freedom of association could not support
a right to prevent outsiders crossing the state’s borders
anyway because their mere presence has no bearing
on the citizens’ individual or collective associational
freedoms. Thus, it is not a surprise when Wellman con-
cludes that the right to exclude is compatible with the
rights of outsiders to enter the state’s territory, provided
that their visits are temporary. As the state is under no

CHAPTER 20: THE ETHICs of ImmIgRATIon Á 817
Ali’s right to freedom of movement does not entitle her
to enter Ben’s house without Ben’s permission is that
one assumes Ben is the legitimate owner of the house
and that this grants him a set of rights over that prop-
erty, including a right to exclude unwanted visitors. If
states are the legitimate owners of their territory, then
we would have good additional grounds for concluding
that they enjoy a right to exclude outsiders from that
territory. Yet, ultimately, Wellman does not appear to
conceive of the state’s relationship to its territory as one
of ownership since, as we have seen, he contends that
“even legitimate states,” presumably unlike the owners
of private property, “do not necessarily have the right
to bar foreigners from visiting for a duly limited period”
(136). And if, as is implied by Wellman’s claims about
visitors, the state’s relationship to its territory is not one
of ownership, in what sense does the state enjoy territo-
rial rights?31
Wellman does refer to the specifically territorial
requirements of states when he claims that, in order
for states to fulfill their functional imperatives, they
must be “sufficiently territorially contiguous” and
this, in turn, means that states must (nonconsensu-
ally) coerce those within their borders (131). Else-
where Wellman explains why he considers that it
is legitimate for states to coerce their citizens in this
way despite the value that he attaches to individual
self- determination: “The reason that I have no moral
right to be free from political coercion . . . is that,
even if I would rather forego the benefits of political
society, my state may permissibly coerce me in order
to secure political stability for my fellow citizens.”32
States, he asserts, are necessary for people to enjoy
the benefits of political stability and states must be
territorial in order to fulfill those functions. Wellman
employs the territorial contiguity point against Hillel
Steiner’s argument that individual citizens of a state
should enjoy the freedom to associate with those not
resident within that state and that the state’s right to
exclude illegitimately restricts that freedom.33 How-
ever, although the purported territorial requirement
might support the state’s claim to coerce those within
its borders, and thus may offer something of a general,
consequentialist justification for a state’s authority
over territory (though not for any particular state’s
claims to its particular territory), it does not bear on
to prohibiting the arbitrary expulsion of existing mem-
bers. Moreover, as Walzer argues, in theory, states also
could control membership by regulating birth rates
and selectively awarding the right to give birth, choos-
ing between different ethnic groups, or setting “class or
intelligence quotas.” This, he contends, “would require
very high, and surely unacceptable, levels of coercion:
the dominance of political power over kinship and
love.”30 Therefore, since denying a group full control
over membership rules is not an automatic denial of its
right to self- determination, the citizens are not forced
to sacrifice all control over their common life in order
to prevent significant harm to others.
Nonetheless, aside from the issue that Wellman’s
argument about controlling the rules of membership
is inconclusive, there is an additional difficulty for
Wellman’s defense of the right to exclude based on a
commitment to freedom of association. As Wellman
contends that citizens must enjoy not only a right to
exclude would- be members from the political com-
munity but also would- be residents from the state’s
territory, his position calls for a further justification of
the state’s purported rights over that particular terri-
tory. To see why the freedom of association argument
is insufficient here, consider the example of a private
club. The club members might enjoy the right to
exclude outsiders from membership and from using
the club’s property and resources, provided that they
have rights of ownership over the premises. How-
ever, while a yoga group that meets in Central Park
might be free to reject prospective members, it is not
entitled to bar them from making use of Central Park
itself because the park is not the members’ property.
In other words, Wellman’s position begs the question
whether citizens and/or their states have the relevant
rights over the territory from which they wish to
exclude others and thus whether they are within their
rights not just to control the rules of membership but
also to control settlement within that territory.
Perhaps a territorial argument is to be found lurking
behind Wellman’s claim that freedom of movement is
not absolute: “My right to freedom of movement does
not entitle me to enter your house without your permis-
sion . . . , so why think this right gives me a valid claim
to enter a foreign country without that country’s per-
mission?” (135). The reason why one might agree that

818 Á PART 4: ETHICAL IssUEs
to exclude would- be immigrants from entering and
settling within a state: absent a further argument in
support of states’ rights over the territory they claim
for themselves, we are left wondering whether states
are entitled to control access to their territory at all.
NOTES
1. See, e.g., Joseph H. Carens, “Aliens and Citizens: The Case for
Open Borders,” Review of Politics 49 (1987): 251–73; and Phillip
Cole, Philosophies of Exclusion: Liberal Political Theory and Immi-
gration (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000).
2. Christopher Heath Wellman, “Immigration and Freedom
of Association,” Ethics 119 (2008): 109–41. Page numbers in
the main text refer to this article.
3. Amy Gutmann, “Freedom of Association: An Introductory
Essay,” in Freedom of Association, ed. Amy Gutmann (Princ-
eton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 3–32, 11.
4. See, e.g., Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice: A Defense of
Pluralism and Equality (New York: Basic Books, 1983), chap. 2; and
David Miller, “Immigration: The Case for Limits,” in Contempo-
rary Debates in Applied Ethics, ed. Andrew I. Cohen and Christo-
pher Heath Wellman (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 193–206.
5. This is an internal critique insofar as it seeks to illustrate that
Wellman’s freedom of association argument in defense of a right
to exclude does not succeed on its own terms. Given the pur-
poses of this article and the limits of space here, I do not develop
an important external line of criticism recently advanced by
Arash Abizadeh. To summarize very briefly, Abizadeh argues
that state border control regimes subject would- be immigrants
to coercion and democratic theory demands that coercion is jus-
tified to all those subject to it, where justification means rights
of democratic participation. This simultaneously challenges any
appeal to collective self- determination as the normative core of
the state’s right to exclude would- be immigrants: if those subject
to coercion are entitled to participate in the relevant decision-
making process, and coercion extends beyond the boundaries of
the state, then the “self” is not simply equivalent to “all residents
of the state” or “all members of the political community.” For
the full argument, see Arash Abizadeh, “Democratic Theory and
Border Coercion: No Right to Unilaterally Control Your Own
Borders,” Political Theory 36 (2008): 37–65. I also make the case
that democratic principles do not support a unilateral right to
exclude in Sarah Fine, “Immigration and the Right to Exclude”
(DPhil diss., University of Oxford, 2009).
6. In the final part of his article, Wellman explores the ques-
tion of whether it is permissible for states to exclude would- be
the state’s right to exclude would- be immigrants from
settling in a territory. Once individuals are within
the state’s borders, they become subject to the state’s
authority. It will coerce them, as it coerces all other
residents— excluding them is not a necessary condi-
tion for maintaining the state’s territorial contiguity.
Offering all long- term residents the option of becom-
ing full members of the state may be “costly” for the
existing citizens, as Wellman proposes, but that argu-
ment is not enough to support the state’s right to
exclude outsiders from settling in its territory either:
just as the yoga group in Central Park is not entitled
to prohibit nonmembers from making use of the park
despite its control over its own membership rules, so
the citizens of a state are not entitled to stop nonciti-
zens from settling there, despite their claim to control
access to membership, without a further entitlement
to control access to the territory in the first place.
Wellman must engage with this question if he is to
establish that states have a right to exclude outsiders
from settling within their territorial borders.
V
Wellman maintains that it is possible to defend
a state’s presumptive right to exclude would- be
immigrants by appeal to the liberal commitment to
freedom of association. He draws attention to the
widespread conviction that individuals “should be
allowed to choose freely when [their] behavior is not
harmful to others,” but I have argued that there is
no clear presumption in favor of the state’s position
based upon the freedom to associate since exclu-
sion from the state obviously has the potential to
harm the interests of others— interests that would
not disappear even if wealthy liberal states did, to
use Wellman’s words, “export justice” and thereby
fulfill some of their duties to outsiders (128–29).
The potential for exclusion to result in harm must
be taken seriously, in line with Wellman’s own argu-
ment, and more must be said about why the freedom
of citizens takes precedence over the interests of the
would- be immigrants, especially since states are nei-
ther intimate nor expressive associations. Moreover,
freedom of association alone cannot deliver a right

CHAPTER 20: THE ETHICs of ImmIgRATIon Á 819
against the “larger society.” See Will Kymlicka, Multicultural
Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1995), 35, cited in Wellman, “Liberalism,
Communitarianism and Group Rights,” 14 n. 4.
19. Wellman, “The Paradox of Group Autonomy,” 265,
emphasis added.
20. Michael Walzer, “Exclusion, Injustice, and the Demo-
cratic State,” Dissent 40 (1993): 55–64, 55.
21. Not to mention the various cases in which there is no appar-
ent “export” alternative, as in the example of people who wish
to emigrate to escape specific violent individuals.
22. Carens, “Aliens and Citizens,” 258.
23. Mill, “On Liberty,” 94–95.
24. See Gutmann, “Freedom of Association,” 7–13; Stuart
White, “Freedom of Association and the Right to Exclude,”
Journal of Political Philosophy 5 (1997): 373–91.
25. White, “Freedom of Association and the Right to Exclude,”
381, cited in Wellman, “Immigration and Freedom of Associa-
tion,” 113.
26. Gutmann, “Freedom of Association,” 11.
27. See, e.g., Cole, Philosophies of Exclusion, esp. 70–73;
Carens, “Aliens and Citizens,” 267–68; Melissa Lane, “A Phil-
osophical View on States and Immigration,” in Globalizing
Migration Regimes: New Challenges to Transnational Coopera-
tion, ed. Kristof Tamas and Joakim Palme (Aldershot: Ash-
gate, 2006), 131–43; and Jonathan Seglow, “The Ethics of
Immigration,” Political Studies Review 3 (2005): 317–34, 322.
28. For further discussion, see Gutmann, “Freedom of Asso-
ciation,” esp. 8–9.
29. Ibid., 11.
30. Walzer, Spheres of Justice, 34–35.
31. For a selection of different arguments concerning the nor-
mative grounds for territorial rights, see Tamar Meisels, Territo-
rial Rights (Dordrecht: Springer, 2005); Cara Nine, “A Lockean
Theory of Territory,” Political Studies 56 (2008): 148–65; Avery
Kolers, Land, Conflict, and Justice: A Political Theory of Territory
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); and Anna
Stilz, “Why Do States Have Territorial Rights?” International
Theory 1 (2009): 185–213.
32. Wellman, A Theory of Secession, 16–17, author’s emphasis.
33. Hillel Steiner, “Hard Borders, Compensation, and Classical
Liberalism,” in Boundaries and Justice: Diverse Ethical Perspec-
tives, ed. David Miller and Sohail H. Hashmi (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2001), 79–88.
immigrants primarily on the basis of their race, ethnicity, or
religion, but I do not assess that aspect of his argument here.
7. Indeed, egalitarians may be committed to the conclusion
that states have a duty to export justice rather than open their
borders to “unfortunate people” if it is true that aid is a more
effective response to poverty. See Wellman, “Immigration
and Freedom of Association,” 127–28.
8. Abizadeh, “Democratic Theory and Border Coercion,” 38.
9. Ibid.
10. David Miller, National Responsibility and Global Justice
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 210–11.
11. See Walzer, Spheres of Justice, chap. 2.
12. For a challenge to Walzer’s (and thus also to Wellman’s)
“bundling” of membership and residence claims, see Ryan
Pevnick, “Social Trust and the Ethics of Immigration Policy,”
Journal of Political Philosophy 17 (2009): 146–67.
13. Christopher Heath Wellman, “The Paradox of Group
Autonomy,” Social Policy and Philosophy 20 (2003): 265–85, 265.
14. Christopher Heath Wellman, A Theory of Secession: The
Case for Political Self- Determination (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2005), 11 n. 7, 12 n. 9. Wellman is following
Joel Feinberg’s analysis of the harm principle. For a full discus-
sion, see Joel Feinberg, The Moral Limits of Criminal Law, vol. 1,
Harm to Others (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).
15. Wellman, A Theory of Secession, 2.
16. Wellman, “The Paradox of Group Autonomy,” 266,
author’s emphasis.
17. See, e.g., John Stuart Mill, “On Liberty,” in On Liberty and Other
Writings, ed. Stefan Collini (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1989), 91–92, where Mill considers the example of Mor-
mons; and Chandran Kukathas, Liberal Archipelago: A Theory of
Diversity and Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003),
95–96. It worth noting that this response is not considered suf-
ficient by many (liberals and nonliberals alike), owing, e.g., to the
possibility of crippling costs imposed on leavers— as in the case
of “shunning.”
18. Wellman is alert to the possibility that groups might ille-
gitimately restrict the autonomy of their members; on that
basis, he has argued that liberal principles point to a presump-
tion (though not a conclusive case) against the sort of group
rights that grant groups control over their own members. See
Christopher Heath Wellman, “Liberalism, Communitarian-
ism and Group Rights,” Law and Philosophy 18 (1999): 13–40,
esp. 33. Will Kymlicka refers to these as “internal restrictions,”
in contrast to “external protections” that defend the group

820
C H A P T E R 2 1
‘’
Global Economic Justice
A plain fact of the moral life is that in ethical mat-
ters small and large, personal and abstract, we
wrestle with issues of justice. Whatever our moral
outlook, we must sometimes ask, What is just?
Justice is about persons getting what is fair or
what is their due. In the name of justice, we con-
demn racial discrimination, unequal pay for equal
work, and judicial punishment based on a judge’s
prejudice. For justice’s sake, we strive to treat
people the same unless there is a morally relevant
reason for treating them differently— that is, we
try to treat equals equally. For reasons of justice,
we act— or feel obliged to act— to change the way
things are, to try to make the world or ourselves
more just.
Among the more vexing questions of justice
are those that emerge when we become aware of
people in dire need of something we have, some-
thing we could easily supply. Then the questions
are, Do we have a duty to give to the needy in order
to somehow ease their misery? Do they have a right
to some of what we have? If so, how much should
we relinquish to them? Would we be justified in
refusing to give? Such queries trouble us on two
levels— locally (pertaining to needy people nearby:
in our neighborhood, community, or country) and
globally (regarding the poor and hungry in other
countries). The former has always been a concern.
The latter presses us harder than ever because,
thanks to our technology and wealth, we now
know a great deal about the suffering of people in
distant lands and we have the wherewithal to do
something about it. In this chapter, we explore the
global question, What are our obligations to the
impoverished, hungry, dying strangers who are
half a world away and whom we will never meet?
ISSUE FILE: BACKGROUND
For many people, this moral issue is compelling
because the wretchedness of the world’s poor is
profound and the economic gap between rich and
poor is wide. According to the latest estimates,
1.2 billion people are living in extreme poverty, and
about one in five persons in the developing world
lives on less than $1.25 a day. About 99 million
children under the age of five are under weight for
their age— a sign of severe malnutrition. In devel-
oping countries, the mortality rate for children
under five is forty- eight deaths per thousand live
births, mostly from preventable causes.1
Economic inequality across the globe has
always been with us, but now its scale is larger than
most people realize. The eighty- five richest people
on the planet now own as much as the entire poor-
est half of the world’s population. People in the
poorest half of the world’s population possess only
about 0.7 percent of the world’s wealth. The richest
1 percent of people own almost half of all wealth—
which amounts to $110 trillion. Perhaps it is not
surprising that in 2005 the wealthiest 20 percent
of the world’s people consumed over 75 percent
of its goods, whereas the poorest consumed only
1.5 percent.2
Most careful thinkers agree on such facts and
react with dismay and sympathy, but they disagree
on the proper moral response to the massive suf-
fering. The disagreements hinge on which moral

CHAPTER 21: GlobAl EConomiC JusTiCE Á 821
lives. They may, out of a sense of charity, give to
the destitute, but they are not morally required to
give anything. Others argue that people have both
negative and positive rights and that we are there-
fore obligated to aid the less fortunate, including
the poor and hungry of the world. They may con-
tend that everyone has a right to the necessities of
life and that the affluent are, therefore, duty bound
to provide them. The have- nots possess a right to
the resources of the haves. Exactly how much the
have- nots are entitled to, however, is a matter of
debate.
Some argue that we must aid the needy of other
lands because we have a duty of beneficence, a
moral obligation to benefit others. The impover-
ished may not have a right to our resources, but we
nevertheless should give what we can to them. If we
can help the poor without sacrificing too much of
what we have, the argument goes, we should do so.
For a few conscientious people, beneficence
seems to require extraordinary sacrifice— they feel
obliged to give until their own standard of living
is jeopardized. Others accept a duty of beneficence
toward the distant needy but try to balance it
against other duties, including those to their fami-
lies and to themselves.
People in this latter group often appeal to a
common distinction in morality— that between
obligatory and supererogatory actions. Obligatory
actions are what duty requires; supererogatory
actions are above and beyond the demands of
duty. Supererogatory conduct is not required, but
it is praiseworthy. Some think their duty of benefi-
cence is limited and that giving more than required
is supererogatory— commendable but optional.
Others (many utilitarians, for example) do not
recognize supererogatory actions. To them, duty
demands that we benefit others as much as possible
all the time. If maximum moral effort is required
of all our actions, then no actions are supereroga-
tory. On this view, we should give until it hurts,
perhaps to the point of greatly reducing our own
wealth.
theory is accepted and on how certain elements of
morality are interpreted.
One factor is our distance from those who need
help. Suppose you come upon a child drowning in
a stream. With very little inconvenience to yourself
you could easily save her, and you are the only per-
son in a position to do so. If you walk away, no one
will be the wiser. Would you save her? Most people
probably would, and many would think they had
a duty to save her. That is, not to save her would be
wrong.
But imagine that the child is not 20 feet away
from you but 1 mile or 100 miles or 5,000 miles
away. If you somehow had the power to rescue
her despite the distance involved, would you
be obligated to do so? Most of us assume that we
have duties to help those close to us— our family,
friends, neighbors, or fellow citizens. After all, we
have relationships with these people, and we are
often in a good position to aid them. But many
believe we have no duty at all to help distant
peoples, strangers with whom we have no social
or emotional connection. Distance changes our
moral obligations; charity begins at home. Others
argue that distance is irrelevant. As one philoso-
pher says, “It makes no moral difference whether
the person I can help is a neighbor’s child ten yards
from me or a Bengali whose name I shall never
know, ten thousand miles away.”3
Another important element in debates over aid
to the needy is the notion of rights. A right is a per-
son’s claim or entitlement to something, a moral
demand that obligates others to act accordingly.
Someone’s negative right obligates others not to
interfere with that person’s obtaining something.
Someone’s positive right obligates others to help
that person obtain something.
Many insist that people possess only nega-
tive rights— that is, persons are entitled to be free
of coercion or harm or improper restraint. Those
who take this line maintain that they have no
duty to help the needy, whether near or far. Their
obligation is to refrain from interfering in others’

822 Á PART 4: ETHiCAl issuEs
not obligated to share our resources with those less
fortunate. If we aid the needy, we do so as an act of
charity, not because duty commands.
Critics of the libertarian doctrine say that it
conflicts with commonsense morality. In strictly
libertarian terms, we have no duty to save a drown-
ing child even though we could do so with mini-
mal trouble. But surely when saving her life costs
us so little, the critics say, we have a strong duty of
beneficence to pull her from the water. The notion
that saving her is not morally obligatory but merely
optional seems implausible.
Consequentialist or utilitarian theories have
been marshaled both to commend the aiding of
MORAL THEORIES
Concerns about justice emerge in different regions
of the moral life. As we saw in earlier chapters, they
appear in deliberations about fair punishment for
wrongdoing, an issue known as retributive jus-
tice. Questions regarding the fair distribution
of society’s goods (income, rights, welfare aid,
etc.) are topics of distributive justice. The lat-
ter applies not only to justice within a society but
also to justice among societies— for example, to the
global distribution of wealth and resources among
rich and poor countries and among rich and poor
individuals.
Theories of distributive justice try to explain
what makes a particular allocation of economic
goods fair or just. They may be part of a broader
moral theory such as Kantian ethics or utilitarian-
ism, or they may stand alone as distinct conceptions
of justice. Either way, they often have something
interesting to say about the morality of helping or
not helping impoverished people of distant lands.
Libertarian theories of justice emphasize
individual liberties and negative rights. Exempli-
fied in the writings of Robert Nozick, John Hospers,
and others, these perspectives reject positive rights
as a violation of personal freedom, because such
rights force people to contribute to the welfare of
others. The central point is that people have a right
not to be interfered with and to do whatever they
want with their own property as long as they do not
violate the liberty rights of others. John Hospers
expresses the view like this:
The political philosophy that is called libertari-
anism . . . is the doctrine that every person is the
owner of his own life, and that no one is the owner
of anyone else’s life; and that consequently every
human being has the right to act in accordance
with his own choices, unless those actions infringe
on the equal liberty of other human beings to act in
accordance with their choices.4
The libertarian asserts that we have no duty
to help the poor and hungry of the world; we are
’ VITAL STATS: The Planet’s Poor and Hung r y
• In 2010, 1.2 billion people lived in extreme
poverty.
• Every day, 18,000 children under age five die
from preventable causes.
• From 2011 to 2013, 842 million people suffered
from chronic hunger.
• About 805 million people continue to go hungry.
• In 2012, 748 million people relied on unsafe
drinking water.
• An estimated 801,000 children under five years
of age die each year from diarrhea, mostly from
unsafe drinking water and unsanitary conditions.
Data from United Nations, “Millennium Development
Report 2014,” http://w w w.un.org/millenniumgoals
/reports.shtml (March 1, 2015); International Food Policy
Research Institute, 2014 Global Hunger Index, http://
www.ifpri.org/publication/2014-global-hun ger-index
(March 1, 2015); Oxfam International, “Working for the
Few,” 2014, http://www.oxfam.org/en/research/working-
few (March 1, 2015); Centers for Disease Control and Pre-
vention, “Global Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene,” 2012,
http://www.cdc.gov/healthywater/global/assessing.html
(March 1, 2015).

http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/reports.shtml

http://www.ifpri.org/publication/2014-global-hunger-index

http://www.oxfam.org/en/research/working-few

http://www.cdc.gov/healthywater/global/assessing.html

CHAPTER 21: GlobAl EConomiC JusTiCE Á 823
goods such as food and medical care. Others claim
that only a truly equal share of everything is just.
Since all persons have equal value and deserve
equal respect, they have equal rights to the world’s
resources. The world’s food, for example, should
be shared equally by everyone on the planet. This
global equality is the supreme value, even though
it requires taking goods from the better- off to give
to the needy, thus curtailing the personal liberties
of some for the betterment of others.
This latter point provokes considerable criti-
cism from those who believe that individual
liberties should take precedence over economic
equality— libertarians, for example. They think
ensuring that people can use their own legiti-
mately acquired resources as they see fit is more
important than guaranteeing that everyone’s
needs are met.
MORAL ARGUMENTS
Among the more influential arguments on obliga-
tions to the world’s needy is Peter Singer’s utilitar-
ian case for making major personal sacrifices to aid
impoverished, starving people. His argument is
straightforward:
1. “[S]uffering and death from lack of food, shel-
ter, and medical care are bad.”5
2. “[I]f it is in our power to prevent something bad
from happening, without thereby sacrificing
anything of comparable moral importance, we
ought, morally, to do it.”6
3. Therefore, we are morally obligated to prevent
suffering caused by the lack of these necessities.
Singer asserts that our moral duty applies to
needy people regardless of their distance from
us. “If we accept any principle of impartiality,
universalizability, equality, or whatever,” he says,
“we cannot discriminate against someone merely
because he is far away from us (or we are far away
from him).”7
distant peoples and to deplore it. Taking a utilitarian
tack, Peter Singer argues that we can increase the
overall good, or utility, in the world if the affluent
give large portions of their wealth to the needy in
other countries. He thinks his approach would dra-
matically lower the standard of living for the rich
and drastically reduce the suffering of the poor,
resulting in a general decrease in misery, starvation,
and death. He tries to show that transferring our
surplus of goods to those who have little or nothing
is not a supererogatory gesture but an inescapable
moral obligation.
Others who argue in a consequentialist vein
have ended up opposing aid to the world’s starving
millions. In their view, uncontrolled population
growth is the cause of global poverty and starva-
tion. They contend that in developing countries,
population growth is usually unrestrained, so pop-
ulation increases over time, inevitably outstripping
available food supplies. Famine soon follows, and
many die; but then the balance between popula-
tion and available food is restored. Giving the starv-
ing people food to avert famine would temporarily
prevent mass starvation and allow the population
to increase again— but that would only postpone
the inevitable famine. When this catastrophe does
come, many more people will suffer and die than
if food were never donated. Thus, on consequen-
tialist grounds, these critics of food aid argue that
feeding the hungry in countries where population
is unchecked will just lead to greater tragedy. Our
moral duty, they say, is not to feed the hungry.
Critics question nearly every assumption behind
this argument. They dispute the notions that popu-
lation growth is the primary cause of famine, that
giving food aid is the only option for preventing
starvation, and that rich nations bear no respon-
sibility for the plight of the poor in developing
countries.
Egalitarian theories of justice hold that
justice requires equal distribution of goods among
all persons. Some egalitarians insist that everyone
be allotted a certain minimum amount of vital

824 Á PART 4: ETHiCAl issuEs
in dire need. Each of us could help others by giv-
ing away a kidney or an eye— we could save a life or
restore sight to a blind person, and our loss would
not be comparable to the terrible loss experienced
by someone who will die or be blind for lack of our
help. But this much sacrifice is not obligatory:
If anything is clear, however, it is that our [moral]
code does not require such heroism; you are entitled
to keep your second eye and kidney. . . . The reason
for this is often expressed in terms of rights; it’s
your body, you have a right to it, and that weighs
against whatever duty you have to help. To sacrifice
a kidney to a stranger is to do more than is required,
it’s heroic.12
Singer’s critics hold that desert is another factor
we must weigh when deciding whether to give food
to the hungry. As Arthur says,
Suppose, for example, an industrious farmer man-
ages through hard work to produce a surplus of
food for the winter while a lazy neighbor spends his
summer fishing. Must our industrious farmer ignore
his hard work and give the surplus away because his
neighbor or his family will suffer? What again seems
clear is that we have more than one factor to weigh.
Not only should we compare the consequences of
his keeping it with his giving it away; we also should
weigh the fact that one farmer deserves the food,
he earned it through his hard work.13
Others who question Singer’s view concede
that we have an obligation to aid distant people but
maintain that we also have a duty to help those
with whom we have a special relationship. As one
philosopher explains,
I may have a duty to give of my surplus to help save
drowning children in a distant land, but I have a
stronger duty to help those with whom I have inti-
mate or contractual ties.14
Like Singer, Garrett Hardin takes a consequen-
tialist approach to the morality of aiding the needy,
but he arrives at a very different conclusion. He
argues that the rich should not aid the poor and
hungry because doing so will only invite catastro-
phe for rich and poor alike.
The argument shows, Singer says, that giving
money to famine relief is not an act of charity—a
supererogatory gesture— but a moral duty:
Because giving money is regarded as an act of char-
ity, it is not thought that there is anything wrong
with not giving. . . . On the contrary, we ought to
give the money away, and it is wrong not to do so.8
But how much should we give? The second
premise requires a drastic change in conven-
tional moral attitudes toward the extent of our
obligations:
[W]e ought to give until we reach the level of mar-
ginal utility— that is, the level at which, by giving
more, I would cause as much suffering to myself or
my dependents as I would relieve by my gift. This
would mean, of course, that one would reduce one-
self to very near the material circumstances of a
Bengali refugee.9
Singer offers a weaker version of the second
premise, even though he thinks the stronger one is
closer to the truth: we are duty bound to prevent
something bad from happening as long as we can
prevent it without “sacrificing anything morally
significant.”10 This principle would require us to
contribute to famine relief when doing so would
not cost us anything of real importance. If by aid-
ing the poor we would have to forgo buying new
clothes or a fancier car, so be it.
Even if we all adopted only the weaker principle,
Singer says, society would likely be transformed:
Even if we accepted the principle only in its moder-
ate form, however, it should be clear that we would
have to give away enough to ensure that the con-
sumer society, dependent as it is on people spend-
ing on trivia rather than giving to famine relief,
would slow down and perhaps disappear entirely.11
Critics of Singer’s strong premise charge that
it disregards essential features of the moral life.
We may have a duty to help those in need, but we
also have obligations involving rights. John Arthur
contends, for example, that each person has rights
that should not be relinquished even to help others

CHAPTER 21: GlobAl EConomiC JusTiCE Á 825
The lifeboat metaphor suggests that supplies
are fixed, but critics protest that the reality is far
different:
In the real world, the quantity has strict limits,
but these are far from having been reached. . . .
Nor are we forced to devote fixed proportions of our
efforts and energy to automobile travel, pet food,
packaging, advertising, corn- fed beef, “defense,” and
other diversions, many of which cost far more than
foreign aid does. The fact is that enough food is now
produced to feed the world’s population adequately.
That people are malnourished is due to distribution
and to economics, not to agricultural limits.16
His argument proceeds by way of metaphors, the
best known being the lifeboat. Rich countries are
lifeboats carrying the affluent people of the world
in an ocean swarming with the drowning poor, who
are desperately trying to scramble into the boats or
grasp some of the food on board. Like a country,
each lifeboat is limited in the number of people it
can sustain, and to maintain a margin of safety it
should carry fewer passengers than its maximum
capacity. If a boat takes on any more passengers or
throws vital supplies to the unfortunates swim-
ming nearby, everyone— rich and poor— will per-
ish. Either the boat will capsize, or those on board
will slowly starve. Thus, the only reasonable option
is to refuse to help the drowning people. Sadly, mil-
lions will be lost, but those already on board will be
saved. The conclusion to be drawn, Hardin says, is
that the moral duty of affluent countries is not to
give aid to the starving, overpopulated ones.
Many take issue with Hardin’s argument (and
metaphors). A chief complaint is that the lifeboat
argument is simplistic, that it ignores some hard
facts about rich and poor nations. For instance, Har-
din implies that the lifeboats of the rich have no inter-
action with the poor. But many deny this, asserting
that for years rich countries have been taking advan-
tage of poor ones and, therefore, bear some respon-
sibility for the wretched plight of the impoverished:
Haven’t colonization and commercial arrangements
worked to increase the disparity between the rich
and the poor nations of the earth? We extract
cheap raw materials from poor nations and sell
those nations expensive manufactured goods (for
example, radios, cars, computers, and weapons)
instead of appropriate agricultural goods and train-
ing. The structure of tariffs and internal subsidies
discriminates selectively against underdeveloped
nations. Multinational corporations place strong
inducements on poor countries to produce cash
crops such as coffee and cocoa instead of food crops
needed to feed their own people. . . . Hardin’s life-
boat metaphor grimly obscures the fact that we
have profited and are profiting from the economic
conditions in the third world.15
’ QUICK REVIEW justice— The morality of persons getting what is
fair or what is their due.
right— A claim or entitlement to something; a
moral demand that obligates others to honor it.
negative right— A person’s right that obligates
others not to interfere with that person’s
obtaining something.
positive right— A person’s right that obligates
others to help that person obtain something.
duty of beneficence— A moral obligation to bene fit
others.
supererogatory actions— Conduct that is above and
beyond duty; not required, but praiseworthy.
retributive justice— Justice concerning the fair
use of punishment for wrongdoing.
distributive justice— Justice concerning the fair
distribution of society’s goods.
libertarian theory of justice— A doctrine empha-
sizing individual liberties and negative rights,
and rejecting positive rights as a violation of
personal freedom.
egalitarian theory of justice— A doctrine hold-
ing that justice requires equal distribution of
goods and social benefits among all persons.

826 Á PART 4: ETHiCAl issuEs
duty of beneficence (p. 821)
supererogatory actions (p. 821)
retributive justice (p. 822)
distributive justice (p. 822)
libertarian theory of justice (p. 822)
egalitarian theory of justice (p. 823)
EXERCISES
Review Questions
1. What is justice? How is the concept of justice
related to issues such as racial discrimination
and unequal pay for equal work? (p. 820)
2. To what does the phrase “economic gap between
the world’s rich and poor” refer? (p. 820)
3. What is a right? What is the difference between
a negative and a positive right? (p. 821)
4. What is the duty of beneficence? (p. 821)
5. Give two examples of positive rights and two
examples of negative rights. (p. 821)
6. What are supererogatory actions? (p. 821)
7. What is distributive justice? What is retributive
justice? (p. 822)
8. What characterizes libertarian theories of
distributive justice? (p. 822)
9. What characterizes egalitarian theories of
distributive justice? (p. 823)
10. On what grounds do libertarians reject positive
rights? (p. 822)
Discussion Questions
1. Do we have a duty to give to the needy to
help ease their suffering? If so, under what
circumstances do we have such a duty?
2. Would you have a moral duty to save a
drowning child if you could easily do so with
very little inconvenience to yourself? Why or
why not?
3. Do you believe in positive rights— that is, rights
that obligate others to help someone obtain
something?
4. Are you a (distributive justice) libertarian? Why
or why not?
The gist of these counterarguments is that the
survival of rich countries is not really at stake and
that feeding the hungry will not necessarily capsize
any boats. The critics conclude that Hardin offers
no good reason for our not aiding the needy.
CHAPTER REVIEW
SUMMARY
Justice is about persons getting what is fair or what is
their due. Distributive justice pertains to the fair distri-
bution of society’s goods and applies to both national
and international issues. A central justice issue in
global economics is, What is the moral duty of the
affluent to the needy of the world?
In answering this question, libertarian theories—
which emphasize negative rights— say that we have no
duties to the poor. The poor have only negative rights
of noninterference; they have no positive rights to be
aided by others. Consequentialist theories have been
used both to advocate helping the poor and to refrain
from helping them, their proponents arguing that the
overall benefits and harms of aid are the deciding fac-
tor. Egalitarian theories maintain that justice requires
equal distributions of goods among all persons.
Peter Singer argues that we should make huge
sacrifices to aid the impoverished of the world: if it
is in our power to prevent something bad from hap-
pening without sacrificing anything of comparable
moral importance, we should do it. Garrett Hardin
contends that we have an opposite duty— not to help
the needy. Both Singer and Hardin argue that their
preferred course of action results in the overall best
consequences.
KEY TERMS
justice (p. 820)
right (p. 821)
negative right (p. 821)
positive right (p. 821)

CHAPTER 21: GlobAl EConomiC JusTiCE Á 827
FURTHER READING
William Aiken and Hugh LaFollette, eds. World Hunger and
Morality, 2nd ed. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice- Hall,
1996).
Lester R. Brown, Tough Choices: Facing the Challenge of Food
Scarcity (New York: Norton, 1996).
Joel E. Cohen, How Many People Can the Earth Support?
(New York: Norton, 1995).
Nigel Dower, “World Poverty,” in A Companion to Ethics,
ed. Peter Singer (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1993).
Steven Luper- Foy, ed., Problems of International Justice
(Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1988).
William W. Murdoch and Allan Oaten, “Population and
Food: Metaphors and the Reality,” BioScience 25 (1975):
561–67.
Onora O’Neill, Faces of Hunger: An Essay on Poverty, Justice,
and Development (London: Allen & Unwin, 1986).
Thomas Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights: Cosmo-
politan Responsibilities and Reforms, 2nd ed. (Cambridge:
Polity Press, 2008).
Louis P. Pojman, “World Hunger and Population,” in Life
and Death: Grappling with the Moral Dilemmas of Our
Time, rev. 2nd ed. (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2000).
Michael J. Sandel, ed., Justice: A Reader (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2007).
Robert N. Van Wyk, “Perspectives on World Hunger
and the Extent of Our Positive Duties,” Public Affairs
Quarterly 2, no. 2 (April 1988): 75–90.
5. What aspects of libertarian theories do you find
most appealing? What aspects do you find most
unattractive? What do you think is most plausible
and implausible about egalitarian theories?
6. How do libertarians and egalitarians differ in
their views about personal liberty?
7. Suppose you could transform society into a
system of distributive justice based strictly
on libertarian principles. What would be the
real- world implications of such a change? What
changes would we see in welfare, health care,
poverty relief, and other programs based on
positive rights? Who would be helped or hurt in
this libertarian world?
8. How might the strict application of an egalitarian
theory of justice change society? Who would
likely be helped or hurt in such a system?
9. How strong is your duty of beneficence? Should
you give to the needy only if you have resources
to spare? Should you give until your own
standard of living is reduced? Explain.
10. You may have a duty of beneficence to your
immediate family, but do you have a similar
duty to needy people in your neighborhood? To
starving people in a faraway land? If you help your
family live comfortably but refuse to aid anyone
else, are you morally blameworthy? Explain.
E T H i C A l D i l E m m A s
1. Averting Famine
For years the small nation of Malawi in southern Africa remained on the verge of
famine, with high rates of acute child hunger, begging for emergency food aid from
richer countries. But now the tables have turned, and Malawi is growing enough
food to feed its people and sell much of the surplus to other nations. Rates of child
hunger have dropped dramatically.
Why the change? With the soil in Malawi overfarmed and depleted, it was
impossible for the country to feed itself. The situation improved only when Malawi
began to ignore the advice of the World Bank and rich countries, which advised
Malawi to get rid of fertilizer subsidies and to rely on the workings of free markets.
After the disastrous harvest of 2005, Malawi reversed the trend and subsidized
farmers’ use of fertilizer— just as many Western countries do for their own farmers.

828 Á PART 4: ETHiCAl issuEs
Malawi’s success has prompted reappraisals of the capacity of agriculture to
eliminate poverty and of a government’s ability to spur self- sufficiency and growth
through investments in agricultural production and know- how.*
If, as this story suggests, the World Bank and rich
nations offered bad advice to Malawi, do they
bear some responsibility for the subsequent food
shortages? Does this story seem to support or
undermine Garrett Hardin’s views on helping the
needy?
*Based on Celia W. Dugger, “Ending Famine, Simply by Ignoring the Experts,” New York Times, December 2, 2007,
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/02/world/africa/02malawi.html?scp=1&sq=ending+famine+simply +by+igno
ring+the+experts&st=nyt&_r=0 (March 1, 2015).
2. Developed Countries Failing the Poor
UNITED NATIONS— In criticism aimed primarily at the United States, Japan and the
European Union, a U.N. report said rich donor nations have failed to deliver on promises
to help the world’s poorest countries and must increase aid by $18 billion a year.
The report released Thursday also criticized the failure of rich and poor nations
to reach a trade pact in seven years of negotiations that would expand global trade
opportunities for developing countries to reduce poverty. It called for redoubled efforts
to conclude negotiations.
The report was issued ahead of a Sept. 25 meeting of world leaders at U.N.
headquarters to step up efforts to achieve the Millennium Development Goals, adopted
by world leaders at a summit in 2000. The goals include cutting extreme poverty by
half, ensuring universal primary school education and starting to reverse the HIV/AIDS
pandemic, all by 2015. . . .
U.N. Secretary- General Ban Ki- moon told a press conference that the report “sounds
a strong alarm.”
“The main message is that while there has been progress on several counts, delivery
on commitments made by member states has been deficient, and has fallen behind
schedule,” he said. “We are already in the second half of our contest against poverty.
We are running out of time.”. . .
Ban noted that total aid from the world’s major donor nations amounts to
only 0.25% of their combined national income, far below the U.N. target of 0.7%.
The only countries to reach or exceed that target were Denmark, Luxembourg, the
Netherlands, Norway and Sweden.†
Is the failure of rich nations to aid the world’s
poorest countries morally wrong? Is the giving
of aid a moral obligation for rich nations— or a
supererogatory act? What conclusion do you draw
from the United States’ failure to contribute its
promised share of aid?
†Associated Press, “U.N. Report: Developed Countries Failing Poor,” published on USAToday.com, September 4,
2008. © The Associated Press. Reprinted by permission.

http://www.USAToday.com

CHAPTER 21: GlobAl EConomiC JusTiCE Á 829
3. Singer or Hardin?
CBC News— The Church World Service aid agency is warning that “immediate,
massive intervention and assistance” are needed to prevent mass starvation in Kenya.
A team from the humanitarian agency reported recently that many fields are
barren and cracked, dried out by the drought that is threatening a third of the east
African country’s population, or about 10 million people.
What was once among the most fertile land in Africa can now only support a
few struggling plants suitable only for grazing cattle.
“We don’t have any food,” farmer Lizy Bimba, a Kwale resident, said in Swahili.
In one area, a local official reported that 85 per cent of 5,600 people are facing
starvation, the Church World Service team said.
Other farmers have left the land to find what work they can.
“We have been forced to do this so that we get money to buy food,” Musa Charo
said in Swahili as he broke rocks to earn money to feed his 10 children.
The government declared the food shortage a national disaster on Jan. 16, the
UN is appealing for international help and aid agencies warn that the problem will
only get worse.‡
What would be the proper moral response of rich
nations to this impending tragedy? Do you favor
Garrett Hardin’s approach in which rich countries
would not send food aid? Or Peter Singer’s path in
which affluent individuals would be obligated to
give much of their wealth to feed the hungry? Or
a middle way in which the rich would have a duty
to give some aid but would also have obligations
to themselves and to their family and friends?
Explain.
‡CBC News Staff, “Kenya Facing Mass Starvation: Aid Group.” CBC News, January 31, 2009. Reprinted by
permission of Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
As I write this, in November 1971, people are dying
in East Bengal from lack of food, shelter, and medi-
cal care. The suffering and death that are occurring
there now are not inevitable, not unavoidable in
Peter Singer, excerpts from “Famine, Affluence, and Morality.”
Philosophy and Public Affairs 1(3): 229–36, 238, and 240–43. Copy-
right © 1972 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Reproduced with permis-
sion of Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
any fatalistic sense of the term. Constant poverty, a
cyclone, and a civil war have turned at least nine mil-
lion people into destitute refugees; nevertheless, it is
not beyond the capacity of the richer nations to give
enough assistance to reduce any further suffering to
very small proportions. The decisions and actions
of human beings can prevent this kind of suffering.
Unfortunately, human beings have not made the
R E A D i n G s
From Famine, Affluence, and Morality
Peter Singer

830 Á PART 4: ETHiCAl issuEs
I take Bengal as my example only because it is the
present concern, and because the size of the problem
has ensured that it has been given adequate public-
ity. Neither individuals nor governments can claim to
be unaware of what is happening there.
What are the moral implications of a situation
like this? In what follows, I shall argue that the way
people in relatively affluent countries react to a situ-
ation like that in Bengal cannot be justified; indeed,
the whole way we look at moral issues— our moral
conceptual scheme— needs to be altered, and with it,
the way of life that has come to be taken for granted
in our society.
In arguing for this conclusion I will not, of course,
claim to be morally neutral. I shall, however, try to
argue for the moral position that I take, so that anyone
who accepts certain assumptions, to be made explicit,
will, I hope, accept my conclusion.
I begin with the assumption that suffering and
death from lack of food, shelter, and medical care
are bad. I think most people will agree about this,
although one may reach the same view by differ-
ent routes. I shall not argue for this view. People can
hold all sorts of eccentric positions, and perhaps from
some of them it would not follow that death by star-
vation is in itself bad. It is difficult, perhaps impos-
sible, to refute such positions, and so for brevity I will
henceforth take this assumption as accepted. Those
who disagree need read no further.
My next point is this: if it is in our power to pre-
vent something bad from happening, without thereby
sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance,
we ought, morally, to do it. By “without sacrificing
anything of comparable moral importance” I mean
without causing anything else comparably bad to
happen, or doing something that is wrong in itself,
or failing to promote some moral good, comparable
in significance to the bad thing that we can prevent.
This principle seems almost as uncontroversial as the
last one. It requires us only to prevent what is bad, and
not to promote what is good, and it requires this of us
only when we can do it without sacrificing anything
that is, from the moral point of view, comparably
important. I could even, as far as the application of
my argument to the Bengal emergency is concerned,
necessary decisions. At the individual level, people
have, with very few exceptions, not responded to the
situation in any significant way. Generally speaking,
people have not given large sums to relief funds; they
have not written to their parliamentary representatives
demanding increased government assistance; they
have not demonstrated in the streets, held symbolic
fasts, or done anything else directed toward providing
the refugees with the means to satisfy their essential
needs. At the government level, no government has
given the sort of massive aid that would enable the ref-
ugees to survive for more than a few days. Britain, for
instance, has given rather more than most countries.
It has, to date, given £14,750,000. For comparative
purposes, Britain’s share of the nonrecoverable devel-
opment costs of the Anglo- French Concorde project
is already in excess of £275,000,000, and on present
estimates will reach £440,000,000. The implication
is that the British government values a supersonic
transport more than thirty times as highly as it val-
ues the lives of the nine million refugees. Australia is
another country which, on a per capita basis, is well up
in the “aid to Bengal” table. Australia’s aid, however,
amounts to less than one- twelfth of the cost of Syd-
ney’s new opera house. The total amount given, from
all sources, now stands at about £65,000,000. The esti-
mated cost of keeping the refugees alive for one year is
£464,000,000. Most of the refugees have now been in
the camps for more than six months. The World Bank
has said that India needs a minimum of £300,000,000
in assistance from other countries before the end of
the year. It seems obvious that assistance on this scale
will not be forthcoming. India will be forced to choose
between letting the refugees starve or diverting funds
from her own development program, which will mean
that more of her own people will starve in the future.1
These are the essential facts about the present situ-
ation in Bengal. So far as it concerns us here, there is
nothing unique about this situation except its mag-
nitude. The Bengal emergency is just the latest and
most acute of a series of major emergencies in vari-
ous parts of the world, arising both from natural and
from man- made causes. There are also many parts of
the world in which people die from malnutrition and
lack of food independent of any special emergency.

CHAPTER 21: GlobAl EConomiC JusTiCE Á 831
still unrecognized, difference to our moral situation.
Expert observers and supervisors, sent out by fam-
ine relief organizations or permanently stationed in
famine- prone areas, can direct our aid to a refugee in
Bengal almost as effectively as we could get it to some-
one in our own block. There would seem, therefore, to
be no possible justification for discriminating on geo-
graphical grounds.
There may be a greater need to defend the sec-
ond implication of my principle— that the fact that
there are millions of other people in the same posi-
tion, in respect to the Bengali refugees, as I am, does
not make the situation significantly different from a
situation in which I am the only person who can pre-
vent something very bad from occurring. Again, of
course, I admit that there is a psychological difference
between the cases; one feels less guilty about doing
nothing if one can point to others, similarly placed,
who have also done nothing. Yet this can make no real
difference to our moral obligations.2 Should I consider
that I am less obliged to pull the drowning child out
of the pond if on looking around I see other people,
no further away than I am, who have also noticed the
child but are doing nothing? One has only to ask this
question to see the absurdity of the view that numbers
lessen obligation. It is a view that is an ideal excuse for
inactivity; unfortunately most of the major evils—
poverty, overpopulation, pollution— are problems in
which everyone is almost equally involved.
The view that numbers do make a difference can
be made plausible if stated in this way: if everyone in
circumstances like mine gave £5 to the Bengal Relief
Fund, there would be enough to provide food, shelter,
and medical care for the refugees; there is no reason
why I should give more than anyone else in the same
circumstances as I am; therefore I have no obligation
to give more than £5. Each premise in this argument is
true, and the argument looks sound. It may convince
us, unless we notice that it is based on a hypothetical
premise, although the conclusion is not stated hypo-
thetically. The argument would be sound if the con-
clusion were: if everyone in circumstances like mine
were to give £5, I would have no obligation to give
more than £5. If the conclusion were so stated, how-
ever, it would be obvious that the argument has no
qualify the point so as to make it: if it is in our power to
prevent something very bad from happening, without
thereby sacrificing anything morally significant, we
ought, morally, to do it. An application of this prin-
ciple would be as follows: if I am walking past a shal-
low pond and see a child drowning in it, I ought to
wade in and pull the child out. This will mean getting
my clothes muddy, but this is insignificant, while the
death of the child would presumably be a very bad
thing.
The uncontroversial appearance of the principle
just stated is deceptive. If it were acted upon, even in
its qualified form, our lives, our society, and our world
would be fundamentally changed. For the principle
takes, firstly, no account of proximity or distance. It
makes no moral difference whether the person I can
help is a neighbor’s child ten yards from me or a Ben-
gali whose name I shall never know, ten thousand
miles away. Secondly, the principle makes no distinc-
tion between cases in which I am the only person who
could possibly do anything and cases in which I am
just one among millions in the same position.
I do not think I need to say much in defense of the
refusal to take proximity and distance into account.
The fact that a person is physically near to us, so that
we have personal contact with him, may make it more
likely that we shall assist him, but this does not show
that we ought to help him rather than another who
happens to be further away. If we accept any principle
of impartiality, universalizability, equality, or what-
ever, we cannot discriminate against someone merely
because he is far away from us (or we are far away from
him). Admittedly, it is possible that we are in a bet-
ter position to judge what needs to be done to help
a person near to us than one far away, and perhaps
also to provide the assistance we judge to be necessary.
If this were the case, it would be a reason for helping
those near to us first. This may once have been a jus-
tification for being more concerned with the poor in
one’s own town than with famine victims in India.
Unfortunately for those who like to keep their moral
responsibilities limited, instant communication and
swift transportation have changed the situation. From
the moral point of view, the development of the world
into a “global village” has made an important, though

832 Á PART 4: ETHiCAl issuEs
when others are. The result of everyone doing what he
really ought to do cannot be worse than the result of
everyone doing less than he ought to do, although the
result of everyone doing what he reasonably believes
he ought to do could be.
If my argument so far has been sound, neither
our distance from a preventable evil nor the number
of other people who, in respect to that evil, are in the
same situation as we are, lessens our obligation to miti-
gate or prevent that evil. I shall therefore take as estab-
lished the principle I asserted earlier. As I have already
said, I need to assert it only in its qualified form: if it
is in our power to prevent something very bad from
happening, without thereby sacrificing anything else
morally significant, we ought, morally, to do it.
The outcome of this argument is that our tradi-
tional moral categories are upset. The traditional dis-
tinction between duty and charity cannot be drawn,
or at least, not in the place we normally draw it. Giv-
ing money to the Bengal Relief Fund is regarded as an
act of charity in our society. The bodies which collect
money are known as “charities.” These organizations
see themselves in this way— if you send them a check,
you will be thanked for your “generosity.” Because
giving money is regarded as an act of charity, it is not
thought that there is anything wrong with not giv-
ing. The charitable man may be praised, but the man
who is not charitable is not condemned. People do
not feel in any way ashamed or guilty about spending
money on new clothes or a new car instead of giving
it to famine relief. (Indeed, the alternative does not
occur to them.) This way of looking at the matter can-
not be justified. When we buy new clothes not to keep
ourselves warm but to look “ well- dressed” we are not
providing for any important need. We would not be
sacrificing anything significant if we were to continue
to wear our old clothes, and give the money to famine
relief. By doing so, we would be preventing another
person from starving. It follows from what I have said
earlier that we ought to give money away, rather than
spend it on clothes which we do not need to keep us
warm. To do so is not charitable, or generous. Nor is
it the kind of act which philosophers and theolo-
gians have called “supererogatory”—an act which it
would be good to do, but not wrong not to do. On the
bearing on a situation in which it is not the case that
everyone else gives £5. This, of course, is the actual
situation. It is more or less certain that not everyone in
circumstances like mine will give £5. So there will not
be enough to provide the needed food, shelter, and
medical care. Therefore by giving more than £5 I will
prevent more suffering than I would if I gave just £5.
It might be thought that this argument has an
absurd consequence. Since the situation appears to
be that very few people are likely to give substantial
amounts, it follows that I and everyone else in similar
circumstances ought to give as much as possible, that
is, at least up to the point at which by giving more one
would begin to cause serious suffering for oneself and
one’s dependents— perhaps even beyond this point to
the point of marginal utility, at which by giving more
one would cause oneself and one’s dependents as
much suffering as one would prevent in Bengal. If
everyone does this, however, there will be more than
can be used for the benefit of the refugees, and some of
the sacrifice will have been unnecessary. Thus, if every-
one does what he ought to do, the result will not be as
good as it would be if everyone did a little less than he
ought to do, or if only some do all that they ought to do.
The paradox here arises only if we assume that
the actions in question— sending money to the relief
funds— are performed more or less simultaneously,
and are also unexpected. For if it is to be expected that
everyone is going to contribute something, then clearly
each is not obliged to give as much as he would have
been obliged to had others not been giving too. And
if everyone is not acting more or less simultaneously,
then those giving later will know how much more is
needed, and will have no obligation to give more than
is necessary to reach this amount. To say this is not to
deny the principle that people in the same circum-
stances have the same obligations, but to point out that
the fact that others have given, or may be expected to
give, is a relevant circumstance: those giving after it has
become known that many others are giving and those
giving before are not in the same circumstances. So the
seemingly absurd consequence of the principle I have
put forward can occur only if people are in error about
the actual circumstances— that is, if they think they are
giving when others are not, but in fact they are giving

CHAPTER 21: GlobAl EConomiC JusTiCE Á 833
from time to time been made against utilitarianism. It
follows from some forms of utilitarian theory that we
all ought, morally, to be working full time to increase
the balance of happiness over misery. The position I
have taken here would not lead to this conclusion in
all circumstances, for if there were no bad occurrences
that we could prevent without sacrificing something
of comparable moral importance, my argument
would have no application. Given the present condi-
tions in many parts of the world, however, it does fol-
low from my argument that we ought, morally, to be
working full time to relieve great suffering of the sort
that occurs as a result of famine or other disasters. Of
course, mitigating circumstances can be adduced— for
instance, that if we wear ourselves out through over-
work, we shall be less effective than we would other-
wise have been. Nevertheless, when all considerations
of this sort have been taken into account, the conclu-
sion remains: we ought to be preventing as much suf-
fering as we can without sacrificing something else
of comparable moral importance. This conclusion is
one which we may be reluctant to face. I cannot see,
though, why it should be regarded as a criticism of
the position for which I have argued, rather than a
criticism of our ordinary standards of behavior. Since
most people are self- interested to some degree, very
few of us are likely to do everything that we ought to
do. It would, however, hardly be honest to take this as
evidence that it is not the case that we ought to do it.
* * *
[Another] point raised by the conclusion reached
earlier relates to the question of just how much we all
ought to be giving away. One possibility, which has
already been mentioned, is that we ought to give until
we reach the level of marginal utility— that is, the level
at which, by giving more, I would cause as much suf-
fering to myself or my dependents as I would relieve by
my gift. This would mean, of course, that one would
reduce oneself to very near the material circumstances
of a Bengali refugee. It will be recalled that earlier I put
forward both a strong and a moderate version of the
principle of preventing bad occurrences. The strong
version, which required us to prevent bad things from
happening unless in doing so we would be sacrificing
contrary, we ought to give the money away, and it is
wrong not to do so.
I am not maintaining that there are no acts which
are charitable, or that there are no acts which it would
be good to do but not wrong not to do. It may be
possible to redraw the distinction between duty and
charity in some other place. All I am arguing here is
that the present way of drawing the distinction, which
makes it an act of charity for a man living at the level
of affluence which most people in the “developed
nations” enjoy to give money to save someone else
from starvation, cannot be supported. It is beyond the
scope of my argument to consider whether the distinc-
tion should be redrawn or abolished altogether. There
would be many other possible ways of drawing the
distinction— for instance, one might decide that it is
good to make other people as happy as possible, but
not wrong not to do so.
Despite the limited nature of the revision in our
moral conceptual scheme which I am proposing, the
revision would, given the extent of both affluence and
famine in the world today, have radical implications.
These implications may lead to further objections,
distinct from those I have already considered. I shall
discuss two of these.
One objection to the position I have taken might
be simply that it is too drastic a revision of our moral
scheme. People do not ordinarily judge in the way
I have suggested they should. Most people reserve
their moral condemnation for those who violate some
moral norm, such as the norm against taking another
person’s property. They do not condemn those who
indulge in luxury instead of giving to famine relief. But
given that I did not set out to present a morally neutral
description of the way people make moral judgments,
the way people do in fact judge has nothing to do
with the validity of my conclusion. My conclusion
follows from the principle which I advanced earlier,
and unless that principle is rejected, or the arguments
shown to be unsound, I think the conclusion must
stand, however strange it appears.
* * *
The second objection to my attack on the present
distinction between duty and charity is one which has

834 Á PART 4: ETHiCAl issuEs
It is sometimes said, though less often now than
it used to be, that philosophers have no special role to
play in public affairs, since most public issues depend
primarily on an assessment of facts. On questions of
fact, it is said, philosophers as such have no special
expertise, and so it has been possible to engage in
philosophy without committing oneself to any posi-
tion on major public issues. No doubt there are some
issues of social policy and foreign policy about which
it can truly be said that a really expert assessment
of the facts is required before taking sides or acting,
but the issue of famine is surely not one of these. The
facts about the existence of suffering are beyond dis-
pute. Nor, I think, is it disputed that we can do some-
thing about it, either through orthodox methods of
famine relief or through population control or both.
This is therefore an issue on which philosophers are
competent to take a position. The issue is one which
faces everyone who has more money than he needs
to support himself and his dependents, or who is in
a position to take some sort of political action. These
categories must include practically every teacher and
student of philosophy in the universities of the West-
ern world. If philosophy is to deal with matters that
are relevant to both teachers and students, this is an
issue that philosophers should discuss.
Discussion, though, is not enough. What is the
point of relating philosophy to public (and personal)
affairs if we do not take our conclusions seriously? In
this instance, taking our conclusion seriously means
acting upon it. The philosopher will not find it any
easier than anyone else to alter his attitudes and way of
life to the extent that, if I am right, is involved in doing
everything that we ought to be doing. At the very least,
though, one can make a start. The philosopher who
does so will have to sacrifice some of the benefits of the
consumer society, but he can find compensation in the
satisfaction of a way of life in which theory and prac-
tice, if not yet in harmony, are at least coming together.
NOTES
1. There was also a third possibility: that India would go to
war to enable the refugees to return to their lands. Since
I wrote this paper, India has taken this way out. The situation
something of comparable moral significance, does
seem to require reducing ourselves to the level of mar-
ginal utility. I should also say that the strong version
seems to me to be the correct one. I proposed the more
moderate version— that we should prevent bad occur-
rences unless, to do so, we had to sacrifice something
morally significant— only in order to show that even on
this surely undeniable principle a great change in our
way of life is required. On the more moderate principle,
it may not follow that we ought to reduce ourselves to
the level of marginal utility, for one might hold that to
reduce oneself and one’s family to this level is to cause
something significantly bad to happen. Whether this
is so I shall not discuss, since, as I have said, I can see
no good reason for holding the moderate version of
the principle rather than the strong version. Even if we
accepted the principle only in its moderate form, how-
ever, it should be clear that we would have to give away
enough to ensure that the consumer society, depen-
dent as it is on people spending on trivia rather than
giving to famine relief, would slow down and perhaps
disappear entirely. There are several reasons why this
would be desirable in itself. The value and necessity
of economic growth are now being questioned not
only by conservationists, but by economists as well.
There is no doubt, too, that the consumer society has
had a distorting effect on the goals and purposes of its
members. Yet looking at the matter purely from the
point of view of overseas aid, there must be a limit to
the extent to which we should deliberately slow down
our economy; for it might be the case that if we gave
away, say, forty percent of our Gross National Prod-
uct, we would slow down the economy so much that
in absolute terms we would be giving less than if we
gave twenty- five percent of the much larger GNP that
we would have if we limited our contribution to this
smaller percentage.
I mention this only as an indication of the sort
of factor that one would have to take into account in
working out an ideal. Since Western societies generally
consider one percent of the GNP an acceptable level for
overseas aid, the matter is entirely academic. Nor does it
affect the question of how much an individual should
give in a society in which very few are giving substantial
amounts.

CHAPTER 21: GlobAl EConomiC JusTiCE Á 835
given up by the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary: “the
general verb to express duty or obligation.” I do not think
any issue of substance hangs on the way the term is used;
sentences in which I use “obligation” could all be rewrit-
ten, although somewhat clumsily, as sentences in which a
clause containing “ought” replaces the term “obligation.”
is no longer that described above, but this does not affect my
argument, as the next paragraph indicates.
2. In view of the special sense philosophers often give to
the term, I should say that I use “obligation” simply as the
abstract noun derived from “ought,” so that “I have an obli-
gation to” means no more, and no less, than “I ought to.”
This usage is in accordance with the definition of “ought”
From Lifeboat Ethics
Garrett Hardin
been living on “capital”—stored petroleum and coal—
and soon we must live on income alone.
Let us look at only one lifeboat— ours. The ethical
problem is the same for all, and is as follows. Here we
sit, say 50 people in a lifeboat. To be generous, let us
assume our boat has a capacity of 10 more, making 60.
(This, however, is to violate the engineering principle
of the “safety factor.” A new plant disease or a bad
change in the weather may decimate our population
if we don’t preserve some excess capacity as a safety
factor.)
The 50 of us in the lifeboat see 100 others swim-
ming in the water outside, asking for admission to the
boat, or for handouts. How shall we respond to their
calls? There are several possibilities.
One. We may be tempted to try to live by the
Christian ideal of being “our brother’s keeper,” or by
the Marxian ideal (Marx 1875) of “from each accord-
ing to his abilities, to each according to his needs.”
Since the needs of all are the same, we take all the
needy into our boat, making a total of 150 in a boat
with a capacity of 60. The boat is swamped, and every-
one drowns. Complete justice, complete catastrophe.
Two. Since the boat has an unused excess capacity
of 10, we admit just 10 more to it. This has the disad-
vantage of getting rid of the safety factor, for which
action we will sooner or later pay dearly. Moreover,
which 10 do we let in? “First come, first served?” The
best 10? The neediest 10? How do we discriminate? And
what do we say to the 90 who are excluded?
* * *
Before taking up certain substantive issues let us look
at an alternative metaphor, that of a lifeboat. In devel-
oping some relevant examples the following numeri-
cal values are assumed. Approximately two- thirds of
the world is desperately poor, and only one- third is
comparatively rich. The people in poor countries have
an average per capita GNP (Gross National Product)
of about $200 per year; the rich, of about $3,000. (For
the United States it is nearly $5,000 per year.) Meta-
phorically, each rich nation amounts to a lifeboat full
of comparatively rich people. The poor of the world
are in other, much more crowded lifeboats. Continu-
ously, so to speak, the poor fall out of their lifeboats
and swim for a while in the water outside, hoping to
be admitted to a rich lifeboat, or in some other way to
benefit from the “goodies” on board. What should the
passengers on a rich lifeboat do? This is the central
problem of “the ethics of a lifeboat.”
First we must acknowledge that each lifeboat
is effectively limited in capacity. The land of every
nation has a limited carrying capacity. The exact limit
is a matter for argument, but the energy crunch is con-
vincing more people every day that we have already
exceeded the carrying capacity of the land. We have
Garrett Hardin, excerpt from “Lifeboat Ethics,” Psychology Today,
September 1974. Copyright © 1980 Sussex Publishers, LLC.
Reprinted with permission from Psychology Today Magazine.

836 Á PART 4: ETHiCAl issuEs
Suppose that all these countries, and the United
States, agreed to live by the Marxian ideal, “to each
according to his needs,” the ideal of most Chris-
tians as well. Needs, of course, are determined by
population size, which is affected by reproduction.
Every nation regards its rate of reproduction as a
sovereign right. If our lifeboat were big enough in the
beginning it might be possible to live for a while by
Christian- Marxian ideals. Might.
Initially, in the model given, the ratio of non-
Americans to Americans would be one to one. But
consider what the ratio would be 87 years later. By this
time Americans would have doubled to a population of
420 million. The other group (doubling every 21 years)
would now have swollen to 3,540 million. Each Ameri-
can would have more than eight people to share with.
How could the lifeboat possibly keep afloat?
All this involves extrapolation of current trends
into the future, and is consequently suspect. Trends
may change. Granted: but the change will not nec-
essarily be favorable. If— as seems likely— the rate of
population increase falls faster in the ethnic group
presently inside the lifeboat than it does among those
now outside, the future will turn out to be even worse
than mathematics predicts, and sharing will be even
more suicidal.
RUIN IN THE COMMONS
The fundamental error of the sharing ethics is that it
leads to the tragedy of the commons. Under a system
of private property the men who own property recog-
nize their responsibility to care for it, for if they don’t
they will eventually suffer. A farmer, for instance, if
he is intelligent, will allow no more cattle in a pasture
than its carrying capacity justifies. If he overloads the
pasture, weeds take over, erosion sets in, and the owner
loses in the long run.
But if a pasture is run as a commons open to all,
the right of each to use it is not matched by an oper-
ational responsibility to take care of it. It is no use
asking independent herdsmen in a commons to act
responsibly, for they dare not. The considerate herds-
man who refrains from overloading the commons
suffers more than a selfish one who says his needs are
Three. Admit no more to the boat and preserve the
small safety factor. Survival of the people in the life-
boat is then possible (though we shall have to be on
our guard against boarding parties).
The last solution is abhorrent to many people. It is
unjust, they say. Let us grant that it is.
“I feel guilty about my good luck,” say some. The
reply to this is simple: Get out and yield your place to
others. Such a selfless action might satisfy the con-
science of those who are addicted to guilt but it would
not change the ethics of the lifeboat. The needy per-
son to whom a guilt- addict yields his place will not
himself feel guilty about his sudden good luck. (If
he did he would not climb aboard.) The net result
of conscience- stricken people relinquishing their
unjustly held positions is the elimination of their kind
of conscience from the lifeboat. The lifeboat, as it were,
purifies itself of guilt. The ethics of the lifeboat persist,
unchanged by such momentary aberrations.
This then is the basic metaphor within which we
must work out our solutions. Let us enrich the image
step by step with substantive additions from the real
world.
REPRODUCTION
The harsh characteristics of lifeboat ethics are height-
ened by reproduction, particularly by reproductive dif-
ferences. The people inside the lifeboats of the wealthy
nations are doubling in numbers every 87 years; those
outside are doubling every 35 years, on the average. And
the relative difference in prosperity is becoming greater.
Let us, for a while, think primarily of the U.S. life-
boat. As of 1973 the United States had a population of
210 million people, who were increasing by 0.8% per
year, that is, doubling in number every 87 years.
Although the citizens of rich nations are outnum-
bered two to one by the poor, let us imagine an equal
number of poor people outside our lifeboat— a mere
210 million poor people reproducing at a quite differ-
ent rate. If we imagine these to be the combined popu-
lations of Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Morocco,
Thailand, Pakistan, and the Philippines, the average
rate of increase of the people “outside” is 3.3% per
year. The doubling time of this population is 21 years.

CHAPTER 21: GlobAl EConomiC JusTiCE Á 837
Nobel laureate Norman Borlaug has lent the prestige
of his name to this proposal.
A world food bank appeals powerfully to our
humanitarian impulses. We remember John Donne’s
celebrated line, “Any man’s death diminishes me.” But
before we rush out to see for whom the bell tolls let us
recognize where the greatest political push for interna-
tional granaries comes from, lest we be disillusioned
later. Our experience with Public Law 480 clearly reveals
the answer. This was the law that moved billions of dol-
lars worth of U.S. grain to food- short, population- long
countries during the past two decades. When P.L. 480
first came into being, a headline in the business maga-
zine Forbes (Paddock and Paddock 1970) revealed the
power behind it: “Feeding the World’s Hungry Millions:
How it will mean billions for U.S. business.”
And indeed it did. In the years 1960 to 1970 a total
of $7.9 billion was spent on the “Food for Peace” pro-
gram, as P.L. 480 was called. During the years 1948
to 1970 an additional $49.9 billion were extracted
from American taxpayers to pay for other economic
aid programs, some of which went for food and
food-producing machinery. (This figure does not
include military aid.) That P.L. 480 was a give- away pro-
gram was concealed. Recipient countries went through
the motions of paying for P.L. 480 foods— with IOU’s.
In December 1973 the charade was brought to an end
as far as India was concerned when the United States
“forgave” India’s $3.2 billion debt (Anonymous 1974).
Public announcement of the cancellation of the debt
was delayed for two months: one wonders why.
“ Famine—[1975]!” (Paddock and Paddock 1970) is
one of the few publications that points out the com-
mercial roots of this humanitarian attempt. Though
all U.S. taxpayers lost by P.L. 480, special interest groups
gained handsomely. Farmers benefited because they
were not asked to contribute the grain— it was bought
from them by the taxpayers. Besides the direct benefit
there was the indirect effect of increasing demand and
thus raising prices of farm products generally. The man-
ufacturers of farm machinery, fertilizers, and pesticides
benefited by the farmers’ extra efforts to grow more
food. Grain elevators profited from storing the grain for
varying lengths of time. Railroads made money haul-
ing it to port, and shipping lines by carrying it overseas.
greater. (As Leo Durocher says, “Nice guys finish last.”)
Christian- Marxian idealism is counterproductive.
That it sounds nice is no excuse. With distribution sys-
tems, as with individual morality, good intentions are
no substitute for good performance.
A social system is stable only if it is insensitive
to errors. To the Christian- Marxian idealist a selfish
person is a sort of “error.” Prosperity in the system of
the commons cannot survive errors. If everyone would
only restrain himself, all would be well; but it takes
only one less than everyone to ruin a system of volun-
tary restraint. In a crowded world of less than perfect
human beings— and we will never know any other—
mutual ruin is inevitable in the commons. This is the
core of the tragedy of the commons.
One of the major tasks of education today is to cre-
ate such an awareness of the dangers of the commons
that people will be able to recognize its many varieties,
however disguised. There is pollution of the air and
water because these media are treated as commons.
Further growth of population and growth in the per
capita conversion of natural resources into pollutants
require that the system of the commons be modified
or abandoned in the disposal of “externalities.”
The fish populations of the oceans are exploited
as commons, and ruin lies ahead. No technological
invention can prevent this fate: in fact, all improve-
ments in the art of fishing merely hasten the day of
complete ruin. Only the replacement of the system of
the commons with a responsible system can save oce-
anic fisheries.
The management of western range lands, though
nominally rational, is in fact (under the steady pres-
sure of cattle ranchers) often merely a government-
sanctioned system of the commons, drifting toward
ultimate ruin for both the rangelands and the residual
enterprisers.
WORLD FOOD BANKS
In the international arena we have recently heard a
proposal to create a new commons, namely an inter-
national depository of food reserves to which nations
will contribute according to their abilities, and from
which nations may draw according to their needs.

838 Á PART 4: ETHiCAl issuEs
of the governments of the world today have no such
policy. They lack either the wisdom or the competence,
or both. Far more difficult than the transfer of wealth
from one country to another is the transfer of wisdom
between sovereign powers or between generations.
“But it isn’t their fault! How can we blame the poor
people who are caught in an emergency? Why must
we punish them?” The concepts of blame and pun-
ishment are irrelevant. The question is, what are the
operational consequences of establishing a world food
bank? If it is open to every country every time a need
develops, slovenly rulers will not be motivated to take
Joseph’s advice. Why should they? Others will bail
them out whenever they are in trouble.
Some countries will make deposits in the
world food bank and others will withdraw from
it: there will be almost no overlap. Calling such a
depository- transfer unit a “bank” is stretching the
metaphor of bank beyond its elastic limits. The pro-
posers, of course, never call attention to the meta-
phorical nature of the word they use.
THE RATCHET EFFECT
An “international food bank” is really, then, not a true
bank but a disguised one- way transfer device for mov-
ing wealth from rich countries to poor. In the absence
of such a bank, in a world inhabited by individually
responsible sovereign nations, the population of each
nation would repeatedly go through a cycle of the sort
shown in Figure 1. P2 is greater than P1, either in abso-
lute numbers or because a deterioration of the food
supply has removed the safety factor and produced a
dangerously low ratio of resources to population. P2
may be said to represent a state of overpopulation,
which becomes obvious upon the appearance of an
“accident,” e.g., a crop failure. If the “emergency” is
not met by outside help, the population drops back
to the “normal” level— the “carrying capacity” of
the environment— or even below. In the absence of
population control by a sovereign, sooner or later the
population grows to P2 again and the cycle repeats.
The long- term population curve (Hardin 1966) is an
irregularly fluctuating one, equilibrating more or less
about the carrying capacity.
Moreover, once the machinery for P.L. 480 was estab-
lished an immense bureaucracy had a vested interest in
its continuance regardless of its merits.
Very little was ever heard of these selfish interests
when P.L. 480 was defended in public. The emphasis
was always on its humanitarian effects. The combina-
tion of multiple and relatively silent selfish interests
with highly vocal humanitarian apologists constitutes
a powerful lobby for extracting money from taxpayers.
Foreign aid has become a habit that can apparently sur-
vive in the absence of any known justification. A news
commentator in a weekly magazine (Lansner 1974),
after exhaustively going over all the conventional argu-
ments for foreign aid— self- interest, social justice, polit-
ical advantage, and charity— and concluding that none
of the known arguments really held water, concluded:
“So the search continues for some logically compelling
reasons for giving aid. . .” In other words, Act now, Justify
later— if ever. (Apparently a quarter of a century is too
short a time to find the justification for expending sev-
eral billion dollars yearly.)
The search for a rational justification can be
short- circuited by interjecting the word “emergency.”
Borlaug uses this word. We need to look sharply at it.
What is an “emergency”? It is surely something like an
accident, which is correctly defined as an event that is
certain to happen, though with a low frequency (Hardin
1972a). A well- run organization prepares for every-
thing that is certain, including accidents and emergen-
cies. It budgets for them. It saves for them. It expects
them— and mature decision- makers do not waste time
complaining about accidents when they occur.
What happens if some organizations budget for
emergencies and others do not? If each organization is
solely responsible for its own well- being, poorly man-
aged ones will suffer. But they should be able to learn
from experience. They have a chance to mend their ways
and learn to budget for infrequent but certain emergen-
cies. The weather, for instance, always varies and peri-
odic crop failures are certain. A wise and competent
government saves out of the production of the good
years in anticipation of bad years that are sure to come.
This is not a new idea. The Bible tells us that Joseph
taught this policy to Pharaoh in Egypt more than 2,000
years ago. Yet it is literally true that the vast majority

CHAPTER 21: GlobAl EConomiC JusTiCE Á 839
from retracing its steps to a lower level. Reproduction
pushes the population upward, inputs from the world
bank prevent its moving downward. Population size
escalates, as does the absolute magnitude of “accidents”
and “emergencies.” The process is brought to an end
only by the total collapse of the whole system, produc-
ing a catastrophe of scarcely imaginable proportions.
Such are the implications of the well- meant shar-
ing of food in a world of irresponsible reproduction.
I think we need a new word for systems like this.
The adjective “melioristic” is applied to systems that
produce continual improvement; the English word is
derived from the Latin meliorare, to become or make
better. Parallel with this it would be useful to bring in
the word pejoristic (from the Latin pejorare, to become
or make worse). This word can be applied to those sys-
tems which, by their very nature, can be relied upon to
make matters worse. A world food bank coupled with
sovereign state irresponsibility in reproduction is an
example of a pejoristic system.
This pejoristic system creates an unacknowledged
commons. People have more motivation to draw
from than to add to the common store. The license to
make such withdrawals diminishes whatever motiva-
tion poor countries might otherwise have to control
their populations. Under the guidance of this ratchet,
wealth can be steadily moved in one direction only,
from the slowly- breeding rich to the rapidly- breeding
poor, the process finally coming to a halt only when
all countries are equally and miserably poor.
A demographic cycle of this sort obviously
involves great suffering in the restrictive phase, but
such a cycle is normal to any independent country with
inadequate population control. The third- century
theologian Tertullian (Hardin 1969a) expressed what
must have been the recognition of many wise men
when he wrote: “The scourges of pestilence, famine,
wars, and earthquakes have come to be regarded as a
blessing to overcrowded nations, since they serve to
prune away the luxuriant growth of the human race.”
Only under a strong and farsighted sovereign—
which theoretically could be the people themselves,
democratically organized— can a population equili-
brate at some set point below the carrying capacity, thus
avoiding the pains normally caused by periodic and
unavoidable disasters. For this happy state to be achieved
it is necessary that those in power be able to contemplate
with equanimity the “waste” of surplus food in times
of bountiful harvests. It is essential that those in power
resist the temptation to convert extra food into extra
babies. On the public relations level it is necessary that
the phrase “surplus food” be replaced by “safety factor.”
But wise sovereigns seem not to exist in the poor
world today. The most anguishing problems are created
by poor countries that are governed by rulers insuffi-
ciently wise and powerful. If such countries can draw on
a world food bank in times of “emergency,” the popula-
tion cycle of Figure 1 will be replaced by the population
escalator of Figure 2. The input of food from a food bank
acts as the pawl of a ratchet, preventing the population
Fig. 1. The population cycle of a nation that has no effective, conscious population control, and which receives no aid from the
outside. P2 is greater than P1.
“emergency”P2 “overpopulation”: safety
factor exhausted
P1 at “carrying capacity”:
with safety factor

840 Á PART 4: ETHiCAl issuEs
Those who believe in the benign demographic tran-
sition dismiss the pejoristic mechanism of Figure 2 in
the belief that each input of food from the world outside
fosters development within a poor country thus result-
ing in a drop in the rate of population increase. Foreign
aid has proceeded on this assumption for more than two
decades. Unfortunately it has produced no indubitable
instance of the asserted effect. It has, however, produced
a library of excuses. The air is filled with plaintive calls
for more massive foreign aid appropriations so that the
hypothetical melioristic process can get started.
* * *
REFERENCES
Anonymous. 1974. Wall Street Journal 19 Feb.
Borlaug, N. 1973. Civilization’s future: a call for international
granaries. Bull. At. Sci. 29: 7–15.
Boulding, K. 1966. The economics of the coming Space-
ship earth. In H. Jarrett, ed. Environmental Quality in a
Growing Economy. Johns Hopkins Press, Baltimore.
All this is terribly obvious once we are acutely
aware of the pervasiveness and danger of the com-
mons. But many people still lack this awareness, and
the euphoria of the “benign demographic transition”
(Hardin 1973) interferes with the realistic appraisal of
pejoristic mechanisms. As concerns public policy, the
deductions drawn from the benign demographic tran-
sition are these:
1) If the per capita GNP rises the birth rate will
fall; hence, the rate of population increase will
fall, ultimately producing ZPG (Zero Population
Growth).
2) The long- term trend all over the world (including
the poor countries) is of a rising per capita GNP
(for which no limit is seen).
3) Therefore, all political interference in population
matters is unnecessary; all we need to do is foster
economic “development”—note the metaphor—
and population problems will solve themselves.
Fig. 2. The population escalator. Note that input from a world food bank acts like the pawl of a ratchet, preventing the normal
population cycle shown in Figure 1 from being completed. Pn + 1 is greater than Pn, and the absolute magnitude of the “emergen-
cies” escalates. Ultimately the entire system crashes. The crash is not shown, and few can imagine it.
“emergency”
(and so on…)
(input from
world food bank)
P4
“emergency”
(input from
world food bank)
P3
“emergency”
(input from
world food bank)
P2
P1

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Marx, K. 1875. Critique of the Gotha program. Page 388
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Hardin, G. 1966. Chap. 9 in Biology: Its Principles and Impli-
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———. 1968. The tragedy of the commons. Science 162:
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———. 1969b. The economics of wilderness. Nat. Hist. 78(6):
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A Critique of Lifeboat Ethics
William W. Murdoch and Allan Oaten
As a result an apparently powerful argument
against aid is increasingly heard. Its premise is sim-
ply stated. “More food means more babies” (Hardin
1969). Our benevolence leads to a spiral that can
result only in disaster: aid leads to increased popula-
tions, which require more aid, which leads. . . . This
premise mandates a radically new policy: rich coun-
tries can perhaps provide contraceptives to poor coun-
tries, but they should not provide food, help increase
food production, or help combat poverty or disease.
This policy would result in the agonizing deaths,
by starvation and disease, of millions of people. Con-
sequently, one expects its advocates to have arrived at
it reluctantly, forced to suppress their humanitarian
feelings by inexorable logic and the sheer weight of
evidence. Its apparent brutality seems a sure guarantee
of its realism and rationality.
We believe that this allegedly realistic “nonhelp” pol-
icy is in fact mistaken as well as callous; that the premise
From William W. Murdoch and Allan Oaten, “Population and
Food: Metaphors and the Reality” BioScience, vol. 25, no. 9 (1975),
561–67. © 1975 American Institute of Biological Science. Reprinted
by permission of Oxford University Press.
Should rich countries provide food, fertilizers, tech-
nical assistance, and other aid to poor countries? The
obvious answer is “yes.” It is natural to want to fight
poverty, starvation, and disease, to help raise living
standards and eliminate suffering.
Yet, after 25 years of aid, diets and living standards
in many poor countries have improved little, owing
partly to the population explosion that occurred
during these same years. Death rates in poor coun-
tries dropped sharply in the 1940’s and 1950’s, to
around 14/1,000 at present, while their birth rates
declined very little, remaining near 40/1,000. Some
populations are now growing faster than their food
supply.

842 Á PART 4: ETHiCAl issuEs
Green Revolution. Hardin argues that we should with-
hold such resources from poor nations on the grounds
that they help to maintain high rates of population
increase, thereby making the problem worse. He fore-
sees the continued supplying and increasing produc-
tion of food as a process that will be “brought to an
end only by the total collapse of the whole system,
producing a catastrophe of scarcely imaginable pro-
portions” (p. 564).
Turning to one particular mechanism for distrib-
uting these resources, Hardin claims that a world food
bank is a commons— people have more motivation to
draw from it than to add to it; it will have a ratchet or
escalator effect on population because inputs from it
will prevent population declines in overpopulated
countries. Thus “wealth can be steadily moved in one
direction only, from the slowly- breeding rich to the
rapidly- breeding poor, the process finally coming to
a halt only when all countries are equally and miser-
ably poor” (p. 565). Thus our help will not only bring
ultimate disaster to poor countries, but it will also be
suicidal for us.
As for the “benign demographic transition” to
low birth rates, which some aid supporters have pre-
dicted, Hardin states flatly that the weight of evidence
is against this possibility.
Finally, Hardin claims that the plight of poor
nations is partly their own fault: “wise sovereigns
seem not to exist in the poor world today. The most
anguishing problems are created by poor countries
that are governed by rulers insufficiently wise and
powerful.” Establishing a world food bank will exac-
erbate this problem: “slovenly rulers” will escape the
consequences of their incompetence—“Others will
bail them out whenever they are in trouble”; “Far
more difficult than the transfer of wealth from one
country to another is the transfer of wisdom between
sovereign powers or between generations” (p. 563).
What arguments does Hardin present in support
of these opinions? Many involve metaphors: lifeboat,
commons, and ratchet or escalator. These metaphors
are crucial to his thesis, and it is, therefore, important
for us to examine them critically.
The lifeboat is the major metaphor. It seems
attractively simple, but it is in fact simplistic and
on which it is based is at best a half- truth; and that the
arguments adduced in its support are not only erroneous,
but often exhibit indifference to both the complexities
of the problem and much of the available data. We also
believe that the evidence shows better living standards
and lower population growth rates to be complementary,
not contradictory; that aid programs carefully designed
to benefit the poorest people can help to achieve both of
these ends; and that such programs, though difficult to
devise and carry out, are not beyond either the resources
or the ingenuity of the rich countries.
In the next two sections, we analyze some of the
standard arguments in support of nonhelp poli-
cies, by focusing first on the article “Living on a Life-
boat” (Hardin 1974) and then on “The Tragedy of
the Commons” (Hardin 1968). We will consider the
long- term effects of nonhelp policies and some possible
reasons for their widespread appeal. Then we will sum-
marize some of the evidence about birth rates that is
available and seems relevant. This evidence suggests
that if we are serious about halting the food- population
spiral and minimizing deaths from starvation and dis-
ease (in the long- term as well as the short), then it may
be more rational to help than to stand back and watch.
Finally, we will estimate the costs of some aid and dis-
cuss some difficulties in achieving reduced birth rates.
MISLEADING METAPHORS
The “lifeboat” article actually has two messages. The
first is that our immigration policy is too generous.
This will not concern us here. The second, and more
important, is that by helping poor nations we will
bring disaster to rich and poor alike:
Metaphorically, each rich nation amounts to a lifeboat
full of comparatively rich people. The poor of the world
are in other, much more crowded lifeboats. Continu-
ously, so to speak, the poor fall out of their lifeboats
and swim for a while in the water outside, hoping to be
admitted to a rich lifeboat, or in some other way to ben-
efit from the “goodies” on board. What should the pas-
sengers on a rich lifeboat do? This is the central problem
of “the ethics of a lifeboat.” (Hardin 1974, p. 561)
Among these so- called “goodies” are food sup-
plies and technical aid such as that which led to the

CHAPTER 21: GlobAl EConomiC JusTiCE Á 843
wisdom gap between poor leaders and our own, and the
difficulty of filling it, appear as a grim joke: our response
to leaders with the power and wisdom Hardin yearns
for has often been to try to replace them or their poli-
cies as soon as possible. Selective giving and withhold-
ing of both military and nonmilitary aid has been an
important ingredient of our efforts to maintain political
leaders we like and to remove those we do not. Brown
(1974b), after nothing that the withholding of U.S. food
aid in 1973 contributed to the downfall of the Allende
government in Chile, comments that “although Ameri-
cans decry the use of petroleum as a political weapon,
calling it ‘political blackmail,’ the United States has been
using food aid for political purposes for twenty years—
and describing this as ‘enlightened diplomacy.’ ”
• Both the quantity and the nature of the supplies
on a lifeboat are fixed. In the real world, the quan-
tity has strict limits, but these are far from having
been reached (University of California Food Task
Force 1974). Nor are we forced to devote fixed pro-
portions of our efforts and energy to automobile
travel, pet food, packaging, advertising, corn- fed
beef, “defense,” and other diversions, many of
which cost far more than foreign aid does. The fact
is that enough food is now produced to feed the
world’s population adequately. That people are
malnourished is due to distribution and to eco-
nomics, not to agricultural limits (United Nations
Economic and Social Council 1974).
• Hardin’s lifeboats are divided merely into rich and
poor, and it is difficult to talk about birth rates on
either. In the real world, however, there are strik-
ing differences among the birth rates of the poor
countries and even among the birth rates of dif-
ferent parts of single countries. These differences
appear to be related to social conditions (also
absent from lifeboats) and may guide us to effec-
tive aid policies.
• Hardin’s lifeboat metaphor not only conceals
facts, but misleads about the effects of his propos-
als. The rich lifeboat can raise the ladder and sail
away. But in real life, the problem will not neces-
sarily go away just because it is ignored. In the
real world, there are armies, raw materials in poor
nations, and even outraged domestic dissidents
obscures important issues. As soon as we try to use it to
compare various policies, we find that most relevant
details of the actual situation are either missing or
distorted in the lifeboat metaphor. Let us list some of
these details.
• Most important, perhaps, Hardin’s lifeboats barely
interact. The rich lifeboats may drop some handouts
over the side and perhaps repel a boarding party
now and then, but generally they live their own
lives. In the real world, nations interact a great deal,
in ways that affect food supply and population size
and growth, and the effect of rich nations on poor
nations has been strong and not always benevolent.
First, by colonization and actual wars of commerce,
and through the international marketplace, rich
nations have arranged an exchange of goods that has
maintained and even increased the economic imbal-
ance between rich and poor nations. Until recently we
have taken or otherwise obtained cheap raw material
from poor nations and sold them expensive manufac-
tured goods that they cannot make themselves. In the
United States, the structure of tariffs and internal sub-
sidies discriminates selectively against poor nations.
In poor countries, the concentration on cash crops
rather than on food crops, a legacy of colonial times,
is now actively encouraged by western multinational
corporations (Barraclough 1975). Indeed, it is claimed
that in famine- stricken Sahelian Africa, multinational
agribusiness has recently taken land out of food pro-
duction for cash crops (Transnational Institute 1974).
Although we often self- righteously take the “blame”
for lowering the death rates of poor nations during the
1940’s and 1950’s, we are less inclined to accept respon-
sibility for the effects of actions that help maintain
poverty and hunger. Yet poverty directly contributes to
the high birth rates that Hardin views with such alarm.
Second, U.S. foreign policy, including foreign aid
programs, has favored “ pro- Western” regimes, many
of which govern in the interests of a wealthy elite and
some of which are savagely repressive. Thus, it has often
subsidized a gross maldistribution of income and has
supported political leaders who have opposed most of
the social changes that can lead to reduced birth rates.
In this light, Hardin’s pronouncements on the alleged

844 Á PART 4: ETHiCAl issuEs
They bring in an annual income of $1.00 per sheep.
Fred, a herdsman, owns only one sheep. He decides
to add another. But 101 is too many: the commons is
overgrazed and produces less food. The sheep lose qual-
ity and income drops to 90¢ per sheep. Total income is
now $90.90 instead of $100.00. Adding the sheep has
brought an overall loss. But Fred has gained: his income
is $1.80 instead of $1.00. The gain from the additional
sheep, which is his alone, outweighs the loss from over-
grazing, which he shares. Thus he promotes his interest
at the expense of the community.
This is the problem of the commons, which seems
on the way to becoming an archetype. Hardin, in par-
ticular, is not inclined to underrate its importance:
“One of the major tasks of education today is to cre-
ate such an awareness of the dangers of the commons
that people will be able to recognize its many variet-
ies, however disguised” (Hardin 1974, p. 562) and “All
this is terribly obvious once we are acutely aware of the
pervasiveness and danger of the commons. But many
people still lack this awareness. . . ” (p. 565).
The “commons” affords a handy way of classify-
ing problems: the lifeboat article reveals that sharing,
a generous immigration policy, world food banks, air,
water, the fish populations of the ocean, and the west-
ern range lands are, or produce, a commons. It is also
handy to be able to dispose of policies one does not
like as “only a particular instance of a class of policies
that are in error because they lead to the tragedy of the
commons” (p. 561).
But no metaphor, even one as useful as this,
should be treated with such awe. Such shorthand
can be useful, but it can also mislead by discouraging
thought and obscuring important detail. To dismiss
a proposal by suggesting that “all you need to know
about this proposal is that it institutes a commons
and is, therefore, bad” is to assert that the proposed
commons is worse than the original problem. This
might be so if the problem of the commons were,
indeed, a tragedy— that is, if it were insoluble. But it
is not.
Hardin favors private ownership as the solution
(either through private property or the selling of pol-
lution rights). But, of course, there are solutions other
than private ownership; and private ownership itself
is no guarantee of carefully husbanded resources.
prepared to sacrifice their own and others’ lives to
oppose policies they regard as immoral.
No doubt there are other objections. But even
this list shows the lifeboat metaphor to be danger-
ously inappropriate for serious policy making because
it obscures far more than it reveals. Lifeboats and
“lifeboat ethics” may be useful topics for those who
are shipwrecked; we believe they are worthless—
indeed detrimental—in discussions of food-popula-
tion questions.
The ratchet metaphor is equally flawed. It, too,
ignores complex interactions between birth rates and
social conditions (including diets), implying as it does
that more food will simply mean more babies. Also,
it obscures the fact that the decrease in death rates
has been caused at least as much by developments such
as DDT, improved sanitation, and medical advances, as
by increased food supplies, so that cutting out food aid
will not necessarily lead to population declines.
The lifeboat article is strangely inadequate in
other ways. For example, it shows an astonishing
disregard for recent literature. The claim that we can
expect no “benign demographic transition” is based
on a review written more than a decade ago (Davis
1963). Yet, events and attitudes are changing rapidly
in poor countries: for the first time in history, most
poor people live in countries with birth control pro-
grams; with few exceptions, poor nations are some-
where on the demographic transition to lower birth
rates (Demeny 1974); the population- food squeeze
is now widely recognized, and governments of poor
nations are aware of the relationship. Again, there is a
considerable amount of evidence that birth rates can
fall rapidly in poor countries given the proper social
conditions (as we will discuss later); consequently,
crude projections of current population growth rates
are quite inadequate for policy making.
THE TRAGEDY OF THE COMMONS
Throughout the lifeboat article, Hardin bolsters his
assertions by reference to the “commons” (Hardin
1968). The thesis of the commons, therefore, needs
critical evaluation.
Suppose several privately owned flocks, comprising
100 sheep altogether, are grazing on a public commons.

CHAPTER 21: GlobAl EConomiC JusTiCE Á 845
Nonhelp policies would have several effects not
clearly described in “Lifeboat” (Hardin 1974). First, it is
not true that people in poor countries “convert extra
food into extra babies” (p. 564). They convert it into
longer lives. Denying them food will not lower birth
rates; it will increase death rates.
These increases might not take effect immediately
after the withdrawal of aid. Increases in local food pro-
duction and improvements in sanitation and medi-
cine would probably allow populations to continue
growing for some time. (Death rates would need to
increase almost three- fold to stabilize them.) Thus,
in the future we could expect much larger popula-
tions in poor countries, living in greater misery than
today. The negative relation between well- being and
family size could easily lead to even higher birth rates.
A “solution” that puts us back to prewar birth and
death rates, at even higher population levels, is cer-
tainly not a satisfactory permanent solution.
Second, the rich countries cannot remain indif-
ferent to events in poor countries. A poor country or
a group of poor countries that controls supplies of a
vital raw material, for example, may well want to use
this leverage to its advantage; it may be very uncom-
promising about it, especially if its need is desper-
ate and its attitude resentful, as would be likely. Just
how intolerable this situation would be to the rich
countries can be guessed at by recent hints of war
being an acceptable means for the United States to
ensure itself adequate supplies of oil at a “reason-
able” price.
War is an option open to poor countries, too.
China and India have nuclear weapons; others can be
expected to follow. With Hardin’s policies, they may
feel they have little to lose, and the rich countries have
a great deal to lose.
Thus we could look forward to continuing, and
probably increasing, interference in and manipula-
tion of the increasingly miserable poor countries by
the rich countries. We do not believe this is a stable
situation. One or more poor countries will surely
want to disrupt it; recent events show that our ability
to prevent this is limited. Alternatively, in the future,
one or more of the rich countries may decide to help
poor countries reduce their birth rates, but will then
be faced with an even greater problem than we face
One alternative to private ownership of the com-
mons is communal ownership of the sheep— or, in
general, of the mechanisms and industries that exploit
the resource— combined with communal planning for
management. (Note, again, how the metaphor favors
one solution: perhaps the “tragedy” lay not in the com-
mons but in the sheep. “The Tragedy of the Privately
Owned Sheep” lacks zing, unfortunately.) Public own-
ership of a commons has been tried in Peru to the bene-
fit of the previously privately owned anchoveta fishery
(Gulland 1975). The communally owned agriculture of
China does not seem to have suffered any greater over-
exploitation than that of other Asian nations.
Another alternative is cooperation combined with
regulation. For example, Gulland (1975) has shown
that Antarctic whale stocks (perhaps the epitome of a
commons since they are internationally exploited and
no one owns them) are now being properly managed,
and stocks are increasing. This has been achieved
through cooperation in the International Whaling
Commission, which has by agreement set limits to the
catch of each nation.
In passing, Hardin’s private ownership argument
is not generally applicable to nonrenewable resources.
Given discount rates, technology substitutes, and no
more than an average regard for posterity, privately
owned nonrenewable resources, like oil, coal and min-
erals, are mined at rates that produce maximum prof-
its, rather than at those rates that preserve them for
future generations.
Thus, we must reject the temptation to use the
commons metaphor as a substitute for analysis. Not
all commons are the same: they differ in their origin,
their nature, the type and seriousness of the prob-
lems they cause, the solutions that are appropriate
for them, and the difficulty of implementing those
solutions. In particular, we cannot rule out a proposal
just because someone calls it a commons; a “solved”
or benign commons may be the correct approach to
some problems.
ON MALIGN NEGLECT
Hardin implies that nonhelp policies offer a solution
to the world population- food problem. But what sort
of solution would in fact occur?

846 Á PART 4: ETHiCAl issuEs
appropriate conditions than by doing nothing and
trusting to “natural population cycles.”
These conditions are: parental confidence about
the future, an improved status of women, and literacy.
They require low infant mortality rates, widely avail-
able rudimentary health care, increased income and
employment, and an adequate diet above subsistence
levels. Expenditure on schools (especially elementary
schools), appropriate health services (especially rural
paramedical services), and agricultural reform (espe-
cially aid to small farmers) will be needed, and foreign
aid can help here. It is essential that these improve-
ments be spread across the population; aid can help
here, too, by concentrating on the poor nations’ poor-
est people, encouraging necessary institutional and
social reforms, and making it easier for poor nations
to use their own resources and initiative to help them-
selves. It is not necessary that per capita GNP be very
high, certainly not as high as that of the rich countries
during their gradual demographic transition. In other
words, low birth rates in poor countries are achievable
long before the conditions exist that were present in the
rich countries in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Twenty or thirty years is not long to discover and
assess the factors affecting birth rates, but a body of
evidence is now accumulating in favor of this hypoth-
esis. Rich (1973) and Brown (1974a) show that at least
10 developing countries have managed to reduce their
birth rates by an average of more than one birth per
1,000 population per year for periods of 5 to 16 years.
A reduction of one birth per 1,000 per year would
bring birth rates in poor countries to a rough replace-
ment level of about 16/1,000 by the turn of the cen-
tury, though age distribution effects would prevent a
smooth population decline. . . . [T]hese countries, . . .
together with three other nations, including China,
are poor and yet have brought their birth rates down
to 30 or less, presumably from rates of over 40 a decade
or so ago.
These data show that rapid reduction in birth rates
is possible in the developing world. No doubt it can be
argued that each of these cases is in some way special.
Hong Kong and Singapore are relatively rich; they,
Barbados, and Mauritius are also tiny. China is able to
exert great social pressure on its citizens; but China is
today. In sum, malign neglect of poor nations is not
likely to cause the problem to go away.
If Hardin’s proposals are so defective, why are they
attractive to so many people? We have already dis-
cussed Hardin’s use of oversimplified metaphors, but
there are other temptations.
An obvious one is the presentation of false choices:
either we continue what we are doing, or we do
nothing. Aid is either effective or ineffective; much
of our aid has been ineffective, so all aid is, and it
always will be. Such absolute positions are tempting
because they save thought, justify inaction, never
need reconsideration, and convey an impression of
sophisticated cynicism. But they do not conform to
the facts. Intelligent and effective aid, though diffi-
cult, is possible.
The apparent callousness of Hardin’s proposals is
itself a temptation. There is an implication that these
policies are so brutal that they would not be proposed
without good reasons. Conversely, those who argue
for increased aid can be dismissed as “highly vocal
humanitarian apologists” or “guilt addicts” (Hardin
1974, pp. 563 and 562). The implication is that these
views could arise from unreasoning emotion, so there-
fore they must arise this way. Proposals for increased
aid are then “plaintive cries” produced by guilt, bad
conscience, anxiety, and misplaced Christian or
Marxist idealism. But such argument by association
is plainly misleading. Benign policies can also be the
most rational; callous policies can be foolish.
BIRTH RATES: AN ALTERNATIVE VIEW
Is the food- population spiral inevitable? A more opti-
mistic, if less comfortable, hypothesis, presented by
Rich (1973) and Brown (1974a), is increasingly tenable:
contrary to the “ratchet” projection, population
growth rates are affected by many complex condi-
tions beside food supply. In particular, a set of socio-
economic conditions can be identified that motivate
parents to have fewer children; under these condi-
tions, birth rates can fall quite rapidly, sometimes even
before birth control technology is available. Thus,
population growth can be controlled more effectively
by intelligent human intervention that sets up the

CHAPTER 21: GlobAl EConomiC JusTiCE Á 847
the reduction of birth rates as a viable alternative to
nonhelp.
A useful evaluation of the demographic transi-
tion hypothesis is provided by Beaver (1975), whose
book became available only after we had completed
the final revision of this article. Beaver restates the
hypothesis as a set of assumptions, yielding specific
predictions that can be tested against recent popu-
lation data. These assumptions are similar to those
given here, with some additional details and empha-
ses. In particular, Beaver stresses the importance of a
time lag of about 10 to 15 years before factors which
tend to reduce birth rates can take effect. For example,
both mortality decline and economic development
reduce birth rates in the long run by raising expec-
tations and confidence in the future, but both can
increase birth rates in the short run by simply making
it possible, physically and economically, for parents
to have more children. The demographic transition
hypothesis receives “strong empirical support” from a
variety of statistical tests using recent Latin American
data. Furthermore, the recent declines in natality in
Latin America have been much more rapid than the
declines in Europe during its demographic transition
(see also Teitelbaum 1975).
COSTS, GAINS, AND DIFFICULTIES
We have neither the space nor the expertise to propose
detailed food- population policies. Our main concern
has been to help set the stage for serious discussion
by disposing of simplistic proposals and irrelevant
arguments, outlining some of the complexities of the
problem, and indicating the existence of a large quan-
tity of available data.
However, some kind of positive statement seems
called for, if only to provide a target for others. We
approach this task with trepidation. A full discussion
of aid possibilities would require detailed consider-
ation of political, social, and cultural complexities in a
wide variety of recipient and donor countries. A thor-
ough cost accounting would require detailed, quan-
titative knowledge about the relation between social
conditions and the motivation for smaller families.
Here we merely list some forms of aid, crudely estimate
particularly significant. It is enormous; its per capita
GNP is almost as low as India’s; and it started out in
1949 with a terrible health system. Also, Egypt, Chile,
Taiwan, Cuba, South Korea, and Sri Lanka are quite
large, and they are poor or very poor. In fact, these
examples represent an enormous range of religion,
political systems, and geography and suggest that such
rates of decline in the birth rate can be achieved when-
ever the appropriate conditions are met. “The com-
mon factor in these countries is that the majority of
the population has shared in the economic and social
benefits of significant national progress. . . . [M]aking
health, education and jobs more broadly available to
lower income groups in poor countries contribute[s]
significantly toward the motivation for smaller fami-
lies that is the prerequisite of a major reduction in
birth rates” (Rich 1973).
The converse is also true. In Latin America, Cuba
(annual per capita income $530), Chile ($720), Uru-
guay ($820), and Argentina ($1,160) have moderate
to truly equitable distribution of goods and services
and relatively low birth rates (27, 26, 23 and 22,
respectively). In contrast, Brazil ($420), Mexico
($670), and Venezuela ($980) have very unequal dis-
tribution of goods and services and high birth rates
(38, 42, and 41, respectively). Fertility rates in poor
and relatively poor nations seem unlikely to fall as
long as the bulk of the population does not share in
increased benefits.
We have tried briefly to bring the major evidence
before the reader. However, there is a large literature,
well summarized by Rich, and the details of the evi-
dence are well worth reading in their entirety.
This evidence is certainly not overwhelming. Its
accuracy varies. There are many unmeasured vari-
ables. Some measured variables, like income and lit-
eracy, are highly interrelated. We have no evidence
that we can extrapolate to other countries or to still
lower birth rates. By the standards of scientific exper-
iment, these data are not conclusive. But policy deci-
sions such as those discussed here are always based
on uncertainty, and this evidence is at least as con-
vincing as simple projections of average birth and
death rates now prevailing in poor nations. Certainly
the evidence is good enough that we need to treat

848 Á PART 4: ETHiCAl issuEs
and future consumption of goods and services in the
United States by slightly more than 1% (because the cost
of government accounts for about 25% of the GNP). It
could result in a slight lowering of the value of the dollar
abroad, unless other rich nations were also contributing
proportionately. The most noticeable effects within the
United States would be on the relative prices of goods
and services and, as a consequence, on the poor in this
country. Those items most in demand by poor countries
would increase in price relative to “luxury” goods, so
that the poor in the United States would be hurt more
than the rich unless countermeasures were taken.
In short, although we must take care that the bur-
den is equitably borne, the additional aid could be
provided with only minor effects on the well- being of
the U.S. population. Such a reduction in living standard
is hardly “suicidal” or a matter of “human survival” in
the United States, to use Hardin’s terms. It is not a ques-
tion of “them or us,” as the lifeboat metaphor implies.
This simpleminded dichotomy may account for the
appeal of Hardin’s views, but it bears no relation to
reality.
The six measures suggested above should encour-
age economic growth as well as lower birth rates in
poor countries. Adequate diet and health care improve
work performance and reduce medical costs and lost
work days. There is evidence (Owens and Shaw 1972)
that agricultural improvements made available to
small farmers can lead not only to improved diets and
increased employment but also to greater productiv-
ity per hectare than occurs on large, capital intensive
farms, and that the poor can save at very high rates
provided they own or rent their economic facilities
(e.g., farms) and are integrated into the national econ-
omy through a network of financial institutions. Since
small farms are labor- intensive, agricultural improve-
ments that concentrate on them are not only well
suited to poor countries but make them less vulner-
able to fluctuations in energy supplies and costs.
Improved living conditions probably would
first decrease the death rate. Does this mean that the
decrease in the birth rate must be very great just to
compensate? Infant mortality is the major part of the
death rate that can still be decreased easily in poor
countries. Suppose a poor country has a birth rate of
40/1,000 per population and an infant mortality rate
their costs, indicate some of their benefits and briefly
discuss their feasibility.
Brown (1974a) estimates that $5 billion per year
could provide:
• family planning services to the poor nations
(excluding China, which already provides them);
the cost includes training personnel and provid-
ing transportation facilities and contraceptives;
• literacy for all adults and children (a five- year
program); and
• a health care program for mothers and infants
(again excluding China).
To this we could add the following:
• 10 million metric tons of grain at an annual cost
of $2 billion;
• 1.5 million metric tons of fertilizer, which is the
estimated amount of the “shortfall” last year in
the poor countries (U.N. 1974); the cost, including
transportation, is roughly $1 billion; and
• half of the estimated annual cost of providing
“adequate” increases in the area of irrigated and
cultivated land in the poor countries (U.N. 1974),
about $2 billion.
These costs may well be too low, although, accord-
ing to Abelson (1975), the annual cost of an “effective”
global food reserve is only $550 million to $800 mil-
lion, compared with the $2 billion cited above. The
estimates do suggest that aid on this scale, properly
designed and properly used in the recipient nations, could
make a sizeable improvement in social well- being.
The total cost is $10 billion. Still, these estimates
are very crude. Let us suppose the real cost is $20 bil-
lion. Other wealthy countries could (and should) pro-
vide at least half of this. This leaves about $10 billion
to be provided by the United States. Can the United
States afford it?
In the past, U.S. aid has not normally been free.
Indeed, India is now a net exporter of capital to the
United States because it pays back more interest and
principal on previous aid loans than it receives in aid.
However, even giving away $10 billion is likely to have
only minor effects on the U.S. economy and standard
of living. It is about 1% of the GNP, about 10% of cur-
rent military expenditure. It would decrease present

CHAPTER 21: GlobAl EConomiC JusTiCE Á 849
require not only aid that is designed specifically to
benefit the rural poor, but also important institutional
changes such as decentralization of decision making
and the development of greater autonomy and stron-
ger links to regional and national markets for local
groups and industries, such as cooperative farms.
Thus, two things are being asked of rich nations
and of the United States in particular: to increase
nonmilitary foreign aid, including food aid, and to
give it in ways, and to governments, that will deliver
it to the poorest people and will improve their access
to national economic institutions. These are not
easy tasks, particularly the second, and there is no
guarantee that birth rates will come down quickly in
all countries. Still, many poor countries have, in vary-
ing degrees, begun the process of reform, and recent
evidence suggests that aid and reform together can do
much to solve the twin problems of high birth rates
and economic underdevelopment. The tasks are far
from impossible. Based on the evidence, the policies
dictated by a sense of decency are also the most realis-
tic and rational.
REFERENCES
Abelson, P. H. 1975. The world’s disparate food supplies.
Science 187:218.
Barraclough, G. 1975. The great world crisis I. The N. Y. Rev.
Books 21: 20–29.
Beaver, S. E. 1975. Demographic Transition Theory Reinter-
preted. Lexington Books, Lexington, Mass. 177 pp.
Brown, L. R. 1974a. In the Human Interest. W. W. Norton &
Co., Inc., New York. 190 pp.
——1974b. By Bread Alone. Praeger, New York. 272 pp.
Davis, K. 1963. Population. Sci. Amer. 209(3): 62–71.
Demeny, P. 1974. The populations of the underdeveloped
countries. Sci. Amer. 231(3): 149–159.
Gulland, J. 1975. The harvest of the sea. Pages 167–189
in W. W. Murdoch, ed. Environment: Resources, Pollution
and Society, 2nd ed. Sinauer Assoc., Sunderland, Mass.
Hardin, G. 1968. The tragedy of the commons. Science 162:
1243–1248.
——1969. Not peace, but ecology. In Diversity and Stability in
Ecological Systems. Brookhaven Symp. Biol. 22: 151–161.
——1974. Living on a lifeboat. BioScience 24(10): 561–568.
Owens, E., and R. Shaw. 1972. Development Reconsid-
ered. D. C. Heath & Co., Lexington, Mass. 190 pp.
Rich, W. 1973. Smaller families through social and economic
progress. Overseas Development Council, Monograph
#7, Washington, D.C. 73 pp.
of 150/1,000 live births; India is close to this. These six
dead infants (15% of 40) help motivate parents to have
many babies. Suppose, in the next decade, conditions
improve so much that infant mortality drops to zero—
a ludicrous hope. This decrease would be exactly
balanced if the birth rate dropped from 40/1,000 to
34/1,000. All 10 of the countries [mentioned above]
dropped this many points (and greater percentages)
in five years or less. Further, once mortality rates are
very low, every reduction in the birth rate reduces
population growth. These calculations are oversimpli-
fied, but they illustrate that even a great decrease in
poverty- related deaths can be balanced by a modest
decrease in births.
We can gauge the effect of lowered birth rates
upon the food- population ratio. [Consider] currently
projected rates of population growth and food pro-
duction for the major areas of the world (U.N. 1974).
These projections assume continued improvement in
food production at previous rates; they do not assume
increased success in programs against high birth rates.
For the next decade, the annual percentage increase of
population would be 0.2 to 0.4 greater than that of
food supply in Africa, noncommunist Asia, and Latin
America (although for the world in general food grows
faster than population). A successful program that
reduced births by 0.5/1,000 or more per year would
quickly remove the projected imbalance between food
and population, even allowing for increased survival.
This effect would accelerate as gains in survival gradu-
ally declined, thus vastly reducing the amount of aid
that would be needed.
Will the aid in fact be used in ways that help
reduce birth rates? As a disillusioning quarter- century
of aid giving has shown, the obstacles to getting aid to
those segments of the population most in need of it
are enormous. Aid has typically benefitted a small rich
segment of society, partly because of the way aid pro-
grams have been designed but also because of human
and institutional factors in the poor nations them-
selves (Owens and Shaw 1972). With some notable
exceptions, the distribution of income and services
in poor nations is extremely skewed— much more
uneven than in rich countries. Indeed, much of the
population is essentially outside the economic system.
Breaking this pattern will be extremely difficult. It will

850 Á PART 4: ETHiCAl issuEs
of hunger and malnutrition in the world. E/Conf. 65/
Prep/6, 8 May 1974.
University of California Food Task Force. 1974. A hungry
world: the challenge to agriculture. University of
California, Division of Agricultural Sciences. 303 pp.
Teitelbaum, M. S. 1975. Relevance of demographic transition
theory for developing countries. Science 188: 420–425.
Transnational Institute. 1974. World Hunger: Causes and
Remedies. Institute for Policy Studies, 1520 New Hamp-
shire Ave., NW, Washington, D.C.
United Nations Economic and Social Council. 1974. Assess-
ment present food situation and dimensions and causes
The Case for Aid
Jeffrey Sachs
Professor William Easterly of New York University
has long been a vocal opponent of aid, and recently
declared that the aid debate was “over,” claiming vic-
tory for his theory that large- scale aid projects are
doomed to fail. This blanket claim flies in the face
of recent experience. Prof. Easterly has been proven
wrong in both diagnosis and prescription.
During the past 13 years, the greatest break-
throughs in aid quantity and quality came from the
field of public health (unlike other social sectors, such
as education and sanitation, where aid increases were
far less notable). As a result, the outcomes in public
health in poor countries have also advanced mark-
edly. Not only did aid quantities for public health
improve; new public health institutions, such as the
Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria
and the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immuniza-
tion, were created to promote the effective delivery of
the increased aid.
The approach of increased aid that is well targeted
through innovative institutions has been enormously
successful in improving public health in low- income
countries. One could cite many examples ranging from
the scale- up of vaccine coverage (largely through GAVI
and UNICEF) to increased treatment coverage for HIV/
AIDS and expanded tuberculosis control (through
the Global Fund and the U.S. PEPFAR program), but
I will focus specifically on malaria control, since Prof.
Easterly was particularly pointed in his opposition to
the mass scale- up of malaria control that has proved
I have long believed in foreign aid as one tool of eco-
nomic development. This is not an easy position to
maintain, especially in the United States, where public
misunderstanding, politics, and ideology all tend to
keep aid an object of contempt for many people. Yet
the recent evidence shows that development aid, when
properly designed and delivered, works, saving the lives
of the poor and helping to promote economic growth.
Indeed, based on this evidence, Bill and Melinda Gates
released a powerful letter to the public today also under-
scoring the importance and efficacy of foreign aid.
As experience demonstrates, it is possible to use
our reason, management know- how, technology,
and learning by doing to design highly effective
aid programs that save lives and promote develop-
ment. This should be done in global collaboration
with national and local communities, taking local
circumstances into account. The evidence bears out
this approach.
Of course, I do not believe that aid is the sole or
main driver of economic development. I do not believe
that aid is automatically effective. Nor should we con-
done bad governance in Africa— or in Washington,
for that matter. Aid is one development tool among
several; it works best in conjunction with sound eco-
nomic policies, transparency, good governance, and
the effective deployment of new technologies.
Jeffrey Sachs, “The Case for Aid,” Foreign Policy, January 21, 2014.
© 2014 The Slate Group. Reprinted by permission.

CHAPTER 21: GlobAl EConomiC JusTiCE Á 851
way that high vaccine coverage protects even unvac-
cinated people because the disease stops spreading
when fewer people are susceptible to infection. This
mass- action phenomenon of course strongly argued
for a malaria control strategy that would lead to a high
level of bed net coverage.
There was one more detail of great policy signifi-
cance: Not all bed nets are equal. The high- quality
bed nets work not only mechanically (by covering the
body) but also chemically, by a treatment with insec-
ticide that repels or kills mosquitoes that land on the
bed net. A bed net without insecticide treatment is far
less effective than a treated net. Until the early 2000s,
bed nets required frequent retreatment with insecti-
cide (e.g. by bathing the nets in tubs filled with insec-
ticide) in order to remain effective. Then, Sumitomo
Chemical developed long- lasting insecticide- treated
nets (LLINs) that were specially engineered to keep the
insecticide intact even when the nets were repeatedly
washed. The new nets could therefore remain effective
for around five years or even more. Other companies,
such as Vestergaard and BASF, also developed their
own varieties of LLINs. This was a great breakthrough,
but the new nets were more expensive to manufacture
than the preceding generation of simpler nets.
All of these developments— new nets, new medi-
cines, improved diagnostics, and a surging epidemic—
were crucial to developing a successful malaria control
policy after the year 2000. Taken together, they moti-
vated the case for increased donor aid to support the
mass free- distribution of LLINs and free access to
the new generation of artemisinin- based medicines
and rapid diagnostic tools. Without financial sup-
port, poor people could not afford either the LLINs
or the new medicines. Attempts to sell the nets at a
discount, known as social marketing, had very little
take up, since many poor families simply lacked any
cash income at all. The prospect of achieving “mass
action” protection through social marketing was very
small. Moreover, impoverished households would
often scrape together the needed money only to buy
the cheaper but ineffective nets, rather than the more
expensive but more effective LLINs.
Governments of low- income African countries
needed donor support for the scale- up effort since their
to be so successful. Fortunately, the global community
did not heed Easterly’s erroneous advice, and followed
a path that the public health community strongly
advocated.
At the turn of the new century, malaria was front
and center of the global aid debate. Research by myself
and others, and evidence garnered in the report of
the World Health Organization (WHO) Commission
on Macroeconomics and Health that I had the honor
to chair, showed that in addition to being a health
catastrophe, malaria imposes a significant economic
burden, particularly in sub- Saharan Africa. Luckily,
though, the world was starting to take notice. In 2000,
the U.N. Millennium Declaration, The African Sum-
mit on Malaria, and the G8 Declaration all addressed
the burden of malaria and committed the world to
action. The debate soon turned to the issue of policy:
how could the malaria burden be reduced?
Here we must look at some key details in order
to keep aid in careful perspective. Starting in the
late 1990s, malariologists at WHO, in academia, and
in various government agencies around the world,
described how malaria control could be made highly
effective. The malariologists emphasized the ability
of insecticide- treated bed nets to reduce the trans-
mission of the disease. They also emphasized the
urgency of shifting to a new generation of first- line
medicines, notably those using artemisinin (a power-
ful anti- malaria drug developed by Chinese scientists)
in combination with other medicines, because the
old- line medicines (mainly chloroquine) were losing
efficacy to growing drug resistance. The combination
of bed nets and effective medicines (known in the
jargon as “vector control” and “case management”
respectively), supported by rapid diagnosis of infec-
tions, makes for a powerful one- two punch in saving
lives and reducing malaria transmission.
Indeed, epidemiological theory and practical
experience strongly suggested that if bed net cover-
age could be raised to a sufficiently high rate (typically
around three- quarters, depending on local condi-
tions), the transmission of malaria would be sharply
reduced even for those not directly protected by their
own bed nets. The “spillover” of protection to the
non- users is called a mass- action effect, similar to the

852 Á PART 4: ETHiCAl issuEs
Ban Ki- moon established the mass free distribution
of bed nets as policy for all U.N. agencies, and called
on the world’s governments and NGOs to support
the scale- up effort. Ban’s leadership tipped the global
scales decisively. Close to 300 million bed nets were
freely distributed from 2008–2010, with the Global
Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria and
the U.S. President’s Malaria Initiative program paying
for a substantial share of the scale- up.
The evidence is overwhelming that malaria decl-
ined precipitously as a result of these bold measures.
WHO’s latest report finds a stunning 51 percent drop
in malaria deaths of African children under the age of
five between the years 2000 and 2012. These results are
historic. Roughly a half- million children, if not more,
are being saved each year that otherwise would have
succumbed to malaria. Even more success is possible,
but only if development aid continues to back the
effective control of malaria. The Global Fund is strug-
gling to fill its request for $5 billion per year of fund-
ing, essential to supplement the health budgets of
poor countries. Prof. Easterly’s continued denuncia-
tions of aid, and his declarations that large- scale aid
has failed, are injurious to the public support needed
for the replenishment.
Across the board, the post- 2000 improvements
in public health in sub- Saharan Africa have been
dramatic, strongly supported by scaled- up aid. Up to
10 million HIV- infected individuals are now receiving
life- saving, anti- retroviral medicines thanks at least
in part to aid programs. Tuberculosis (TB) patients are
being treated and cured, with a global TB mortality
rate drop of 45 percent since 1990, and an estimated
22 million people alive due to TB care and control
from 1995–2012, thanks to Global Fund support,
which provides the lion’s share of donor financing
to fight TB. With increased donor support, antenatal
health visits, institutional deliveries, and access to
emergency obstetrical care are all on the increase, con-
tributing to a decline in sub- Saharan Africa’s maternal
mortality rate (the annual number of female deaths
per 100,000 live births) from 850 in 1990 to 740 in
2000 to 500 in 2010. Deaths of children under five
worldwide have declined from 12.6 million a year in
1990 and 10.8 million in 2000 to 6.5 million in 2012.
own domestic tax revenues, even when amply allocated
to public health, could not cover the costs of a basic
primary health system including scaled- up malaria
control. The financial calculations, laid out by the Com-
mission on Macroeconomics and Health, showed that
an impoverished country with a GDP of around $500
per capita, typical for a poor country in Africa, may be
able to muster around $15 per person per year out of
domestic revenues for primary health (directing 15 per-
cent of domestic revenues to health, as the Abuja target
for health spending recommends), while the costs of a
basic public health system (measured in 2014 dollars)
would be around $50–$60 per person per year.
Prof. Easterly would have none of it. He took spe-
cial and early aim at these recommendations in his
2006 book The White Man’s Burden, claiming that free
nets “are often diverted to the black market, become
out of stock in health clinics, or wind up being used
as fishing nets or wedding veils.” After this specious
claim, he then went on to write that “a study of a pro-
gram to hand out free [malaria bed] nets in Zambia to
people . . . found that 70 percent of the recipients
didn’t use the nets.” Yet this particular study, which
was conducted by the American Red Cross and CORE,
actually showed the program was a success, with high
rates of net adoption. Prof. Easterly’s claim miscon-
strued this and other evidence being developed by the
ARC and others about the mass distribution of nets,
which had found that the free distribution of malaria
bed nets was achieving high coverage and adoption
rates.
Prof. Easterly’s arguments added to a highly visible
narrative against the needed global action on malaria
control. Yet despite this anti- aid narrative, a global
turning point finally came in 2007–08. This turning
point was helped by the early success of Kenya. Kenya’s
Minister of Health at the time, Charity Ngilu, led a
government effort during 2006–7 to scale up mass
bed net distribution based, in part, on the example
of free LLIN distribution in the Sauri Millennium
Village. Kenya’s policies led to a sharp drop of malaria
nationwide.
Next, WHO swung its powerful weight behind
the mass free distributions of bed nets throughout
sub- Saharan Africa. Soon after, U.N. Secretary- General

CHAPTER 21: GlobAl EConomiC JusTiCE Á 853
to 48.4 percent in 2010) and the region’s economic
growth is now around 5 percent per year, making it the
region with the second fastest growth (following Asia).
Of course, aid didn’t cause this success by itself,
as there are many factors in play. But aid has helped.
Research distinguishing the types and timing of aid has
shown that development aid raises economic growth,
though the effects will differ across countries and depend
on the quality of aid. The malaria example is one of the
clearest and most dramatic examples, but across the con-
tinent, aid has helped with improvements in education,
agriculture, sanitation, infrastructure, and more.
In The White Man’s Burden, Prof. Easterly declared,
“You just have to do whatever you discover works with
your modest resources to make a difference in the lives
of poor people.” Prof. Easterly’s emphasis on “mod-
est resources” mischaracterizes our real global situa-
tion. We are living in a world of great wealth. We need
not accept the fallacy perpetuated by the rich that
global resources available are quite so “modest,” when
total aid to sub- Saharan Africa in 2012 amounted to
roughly 0.1 percent of the GDP of the donor coun-
tries (around $45 billion per year). We can and should
mobilize more support. Just fractions of 1 percent of
GDP of the rich countries can make a profound dif-
ference to ending extreme poverty throughout the
world. Of course, we should also certainly agree to
focus on what works, and take effective programs to
large scale. The positive evidence since 2000 shows
that well- designed aid has made a tremendous impact.
The issue is not “yes” or “no” to aid. Aid is needed,
and can be highly successful. The issue is how to deliver
high- quality aid to the world’s poorest and most vulner-
able people.
These successes demonstrate a key lesson: that
well- designed aid programs with sound operating
principles, including clear goals, metrics, milestones,
deliverables, and financing streams, can make an enor-
mous difference, and that such programs should be
devised and applied on a large scale in order to benefit
as many people as possible. Such quality design needs
to be based on the details of best practices, such as the
combination of medicines, bed nets, and diagnostics
used in cutting- edge, community- based malaria con-
trol. The economics profession needs to do a much
better job working with experts in other fields, such
as public health, in order to design effective aid inter-
ventions that reflect the nitty- gritty of high- quality
systems delivery. While Prof. Easterly begrudgingly
admits that some health aid programs have worked,
for him this contradiction seems to make no difference
to his overarching claim that aid is doomed to fail, for
reasons that are hard to explain. All the evidence and
all the exceptions have not mattered to his rhetoric, or
for that matter, to his harsh attacks on me personally.
The aid successes of the past decade have saved
millions of lives, a worthy use of money (which has
totaled just a tiny fraction of rich world income) on
its own. Yet aid has delivered more than lives saved
and improved. Various kinds of aid, including public
health outlays, debt cancellation under the IMF and
World Bank’s Heavily Indebted Poor Countries ini-
tiative (providing debt relief and cancellation for the
poorest countries), and other programmatic and bud-
get support, have helped to put sub- Saharan Africa on
a path of much higher economic growth and develop-
ment. For the first time in decades, Africa’s poverty
rate has come down notably (from 58 percent in 1999

G-1
abolitionist— One who wishes to abolish capital pun-
ishment. (Ch. 18)
abortion— The deliberate termination of a pregnancy by
surgical or medical means. (Ch. 9)
act- egoism— The theory that to determine right action,
you must apply the egoistic principle to individual acts.
(Ch. 5)
active euthanasia— Euthanasia performed by taking
a direct action to cause someone’s death; “mercy kill-
ing.” (Ch. 10)
act- utilitarianism— A utilitarian theory asserting
that the morally right action is the one that directly
produces the most favorable balance of good over evil,
everyone considered. (Ch. 4)
advance directive— A legal document allowing physi-
cians to withhold or withdraw treatments if a patient
becomes terminally ill and unable to express his or her
wishes. (Ch. 10)
affirmative action— A way of making amends for, or
eradicating, discrimination based on race, ethnicity,
and gender. (Ch. 14)
animal rights— Possession by animals of (1) moral sta-
tus; (2) strong moral considerability that cannot be eas-
ily overridden. (Ch. 12)
anthropocentrism— The notion that only humans
have moral status. (Ch. 13)
anticosmopolitanism— The view that wealthy nations
able to ease the suffering of the world’s poor and
oppressed have a moral obligation to do so, but they also
have moral obligations to their own citizens that may be
weightier than those concerning foreigners. (Ch. 20)
appeal to authority— The fallacy of relying on the
opinion of someone thought to be an expert who is
not. (Ch. 3)
appeal to ignorance— The fallacy of arguing that the
absence of evidence entitles us to believe a claim. (Ch. 3)
appeal to the person— The fallacy (also known as ad
hominem) of arguing that a claim should be rejected
solely because of the characteristics of the person who
makes it. (Ch. 3)
applied ethics— The application of moral norms to spe-
cific moral issues or cases, particularly those in a profes-
sion such as medicine or law. (Ch. 1)
argument— A group of statements, one of which is sup-
posed to be supported by the rest. (Ch. 3)
begging the question— The fallacy of arguing in a
circle— that is, trying to use a statement as both a prem-
ise in an argument and the conclusion of that argu-
ment. Such an argument says, in effect, p is true because
p is true. (Ch. 3)
biocentrism— The view that all living entities have
moral status, whether sentient or not. (Ch. 13)
capital punishment— Punishment by execution of
someone officially judged to have committed a serious,
or capital, crime. (Ch. 18)
categorical imperative— An imperative that we
should follow regardless of our particular wants and
needs; also, the principle that defines Kant’s theory.
(Ch. 4, 6)
cogent argument— A strong argument with true prem-
ises. (Ch. 3)
conception— The merging of a sperm cell and an ovum
into a single cell; also called fertilization. (Ch. 9)
conclusion— The statement supported in an argument.
(Ch. 3)
consequentialist theory— A theory asserting that
what makes an action right is its consequences. (Ch. 4)
considered moral judgment— A moral assessment
that is as free from bias and distorting passions as
possible. We generally trust such a judgment unless
there is a reason to doubt it. (Ch. 4)
conventional view (of sexuality)—The idea that sex is
morally acceptable only between a man and a woman
who are legally married to each other. (Ch. 15)
cosmopolitanism— The view that wealthy nations
able to ease the suffering of the world’s poor and
oppressed have a moral obligation to do so and that
this obligation is as strong concerning foreigners as it
is concerning a nation’s own citizens. (Ch. 20)
criminalization— Making the use (and possession) of
drugs a criminal of defense. (Ch. 17)
cultural relativism— The view that an action is mor-
ally right if one’s culture approves of it. (Ch. 2)
decriminalization— Allowing people to use drugs
without being liable to criminal prosecution and pun-
ishment. (Ch. 17)
G L O S S A R Y
‘’

G-2 Á GLOSSARY
deductive argument— An argument that is supposed to
give logically conclusive support to its conclusion. (Ch. 3)
deportation— The formal removal of a foreign national
from a country for violating an immigration law.
(Ch. 20)
descriptive ethics— The scientific study of moral beliefs
and practices. (Ch. 1)
direct moral consideration— Moral consideration for
a being’s own sake, rather than because of its relation-
ship to others. (Ch. 12)
distributive justice— Justice concerning the fair distri-
bution of society’s benefits and costs (such as income,
taxes, jobs, and public service). (Ch. 4, 21)
divine command theory— A theory asserting that the
morally right action is the one that God commands.
(Ch. 4)
doctrine of double effect— The principle that per-
forming a good action may be permissible even if it has
bad effects, but performing a bad action for the purpose
of achieving good effects is never permissible; any bad
effects must be unintended. (Ch. 6)
drug— A nonfood chemical substance that can affect the
functions or makeup of the body. (Ch. 17)
drug addiction— An intense craving for a drug and
compulsive, uncontrolled use of the drug despite harm
done to the user or other people. (Ch. 17)
drug dependence— A condition in which discontinu-
ing the use of a drug is extremely difficult, involving
psychological or physical symptoms. (Ch. 17)
duty of beneficence— A moral obligation to benefit
others. (Ch. 21)
ecological holist— One who believes that the funda-
mental unit of moral consideration in environmental
ethics is the biosphere and its ecosystems. (Ch. 13)
ecological individualist— One who believes that the
fundamental unit of moral consideration in environ-
mental ethics is the individual. (Ch. 13)
egalitarian theory of justice— A theory of justice
holding that justice requires equal distribution of
goods and social benefits among all persons. (Ch. 21)
emotivism— The view that moral utterances are neither
true nor false but are expressions of emotions or atti-
tudes. (Ch. 2)
equivocation— The fallacy of assigning two different
meanings to the same term in an argument. (Ch. 3)
ethical egoism— A theory asserting that the morally
right action is the one that produces the most favorable
balance of good over evil for oneself. (Ch. 4)
ethics (or moral philosophy)—The philosophical
study of morality. (Ch. 1)
ethics of care— A perspective on moral issues that
emphasizes close personal relationships and moral vir-
tues such as compassion, faithfulness, kindness, love,
and sympathy. (Ch. 8)
eudaimonia— Happiness, or flourishing. (Ch. 7)
euthanasia— Directly or indirectly bringing about the
death of another person for that person’s sake. (Ch. 10)
extrinsically valuable— See instrumentally valuable.
(Ch. 1)
faulty analogy— The use of a flawed analogy to argue
for a conclusion. (Ch. 3)
feminist ethics— An alternative way of looking at the
concepts and concerns of the moral life; an approach
focused on women’s interests and experiences and
devoted to supporting the moral equality of women
and men. (Ch. 8)
fertilization— See conception. (Ch. 9)
Golden Mean— Aristotle’s notion of a virtue as a balance
between two behavioral extremes. (Ch. 7)
greatest happiness principle— Mill’s principle that
“holds that actions are right in proportion as they tend
to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce
the reverse of happiness.” (Ch. 5)
gun control— Laws and policies designed to restrict the
possession, use, and availability of firearms. (Ch. 17)
harm principle— The view that authorities are justified
in restricting some people’s freedom to prevent harm
to others. (Ch. 17)
harm reduction— A drug policy aimed at reduc-
ing the harm that arises from drugs and drug laws.
(Ch. 17)
hasty generalization— The fallacy of drawing a con-
clusion about an entire group of people or things based
on an undersized sample of the group. (Ch. 3)
hate speech— Spoken or written words used to insult,
disparage, or attack people based on their social or eth-
nic group. (Ch. 16)
homosexuality— Sexual relations between people of
the same sex. (Ch. 15)
humanitarian intervention— The act of a state (or
states) going to war to defend people of another state
against the murderous aggression of their own regime.
(Ch. 19)
hypothetical imperative— An imperative that tells us
what we should do if we have certain desires. (Ch. 6)
imperfect duty— A duty that has exceptions. (Ch. 6)

GLOSSARY Á G-3
indicator words— Terms that often appear in argu-
ments to signal the presence of a premise or conclu-
sion, or to indicate that an argument is deductive or
inductive. (Ch. 3)
indirect moral consideration— Moral consider-
ation on account of a being’s relationship to others.
(Ch. 12)
individual racism— Person- to- person acts of intoler-
ance or discrimination. (Ch. 14)
inductive argument— An argument that is supposed
to offer probable support to its conclusion. (Ch. 3)
institutional or structural racism— Unequal treat-
ment that arises from the way organizations, institu-
tions, and social systems operate. (Ch. 14)
instrumentally (or extrinsically) valuable—Val uable
as a means to something else. (Ch. 1)
intrinsically valuable— Valuable in itself, for its own
sake. (Ch. 1)
invalid argument— A deductive argument that does
not offer logically conclusive support for the conclu-
sion. (Ch. 3)
involuntary euthanasia— Euthanasia performed on a
person against his or her wishes. (Ch. 10)
jus ad bellum— The justification for resorting to war;
the justice of war. (Ch. 19)
jus in bello— The moral permissibility of acts in war;
justice in war. (Ch. 19)
justice— The morality of persons getting what is fair or
what is their due. (Ch. 21)
just war theory— The doctrine that war may be morally
permissible under stipulated conditions. (Ch. 19)
Kant’s theory— A theory asserting that the morally
right action is the one done in accordance with the
categorical imperative. (Ch. 4)
legalization— Making the production and sale of drugs
legal— that is, making their sale and production no
longer a punishable crime. (Ch. 17)
legal moralism— The doctrine that the government is
justified in curbing people’s freedom to force them to
obey moral rules. (Ch. 17)
liberal view (of sexuality)—The idea that as long as
basic moral standards are respected, any sexual activity
engaged in by informed, consenting adults is permis-
sible. (Ch. 15)
libertarian theory of justice— A theory of justice that
emphasizes individual liberties and negative rights and
rejects positive rights as a violation of personal free-
dom. (Ch. 21)
managed care— A type of health insurance in which
providers contract with a managed care plan to offer
health care to a particular group of patients (members
of the plan) at discounted costs. (Ch. 11)
means- ends principle— The rule that we must always
treat people (including ourselves) as ends in them-
selves, never merely as a means. (Ch. 6)
Medicaid— A health insurance program supported
jointly by the U.S. federal government and the states,
with the former providing matching funds to the latter.
It covers some low- income families, pregnant women,
and people with disabilities. (Ch. 11)
Medicare— A federally funded U.S. health insurance
program that covers people 65 and older, some adults
under 65 with disabilities, and people with end- stage
kidney disease. (Ch. 11)
metaethics— The study of the meaning and logical
structure of moral beliefs. (Ch. 1)
moderate view (of sexuality)—The idea that sex is
permissible, whether in marriage or not, if the con-
senting partners have a serious emotional connection.
(Ch. 15)
morality— Beliefs concerning right and wrong, good
and bad; they can include judgments, rules, values,
principles, and theories. (Ch. 1)
moral philosophy— See ethics. (Ch. 1)
moral statement— A statement affirming that an action
is right or wrong or that a person (or one’s motive or
character) is good or bad. (Ch. 3)
moral status (or moral considerability)—The prop-
erty of being a suitable candidate for direct moral con-
cern or respect. (Ch. 12)
moral theory— An explanation of what makes an action
right or what makes a person or thing good. (Ch. 4)
natural law theory— A theory asserting that the mor-
ally right action is the one that follows the dictates of
nature. (Ch. 4)
negative right— A person’s right that obligates others
not to interfere with that person’s obtaining some-
thing. (Ch. 4, 21)
noncombatant immunity— The status of a person who
should not be intentionally attacked in war. (Ch. 19)
nonconsequentialist theory— A theory asserting that
the rightness of an action does not depend on its con-
sequences. (Ch. 4)
nonmoral statement— A statement that does not
affirm that an action is right or wrong or that a person
(or one’s motive or character) is good or bad. (Ch. 3)

G-4 Á GLOSSARY
nonstate actors— Individuals or groups that are not
sovereign states. (Ch. 19)
nonvoluntary euthanasia— Euthanasia performed
on a person who is not competent to decide the issue
and has left no instructions regarding end- of- life pref-
erences. In such cases, family or physicians usually
make the decision. (Ch. 10)
normative ethics— The study of the principles, rules, or
theories that guide our actions and judgments. (Ch. 1)
objectivism— The theory that moral truths exist and
that they do so independently of what individuals or
societies think of them . (Ch. 2)
pacifism— The view that war is never morally permis-
sible. (Ch. 19)
passive euthanasia— Euthanasia performed by with-
holding or withdrawing measures necessary for sus-
taining life. (Ch. 10)
paternalism principle— The view that authorities are
sometimes justified in limiting people’s freedom to pre-
vent them from harming themselves. (Ch. 17)
perfect duty— A duty that has no exceptions. (Ch. 6)
person— An entity with full moral rights. (Ch. 9)
physician- assisted suicide— The killing of a person
by the person’s own hand with the help of a physician.
(Ch. 10)
pornography— Sexually explicit images or text meant
to cause sexual excitement or arousal. (Ch. 15)
positive right— A person’s right that obligates others to
help that person obtain something. (Ch. 4, 21)
premise— A supporting statement in an argument.
(Ch. 3)
prima facie principle— A principle that applies in a
situation unless exceptions are justified. (Ch. 4)
principle of utility— Bentham’s “principle which
approves or disapproves of every action whatsoever,
according to the tendency which it appears to have to
augment or diminish the happiness of the party whose
interest is in question.” (Ch. 5)
psychological egoism— The view that the motive for
all our actions is self- interest. (Ch. 5)
punishment— The deliberate and authorized causing of
pain or harm to someone thought to have broken a law.
(Ch. 18)
quickening— The point in fetal development when the
mother can feel the fetus moving (at about sixteen to
twenty weeks). (Ch. 9)
racial discrimination— Unfavorable treatment of
people because of their race. Discrimination and preju-
dice can be directed at traits other than race, including
sexual traits. (Ch. 14)
racial prejudice— Racially biased opinions based on
incomplete or erroneous information. (Ch. 14)
racism— The belief that distinct races exist, that signifi-
cant differences (such as moral, intellectual, or cultural
differences) among races can be distinguished, and that
some races are inferior in these significant respects or
otherwise deserving of dislike or hostility. (Ch. 14)
realism (as applied to warfare)—The view that moral
standards are not applicable to war, which must
be judged instead on how well it serves state interests.
(Ch. 19)
refugee— Someone who has fled from his or her home
country and cannot return because he or she has a
well- founded fear of persecution based on religion,
race, nationality, political opinion or membership in a
particular social group. (Ch. 20)
retentionist— One who wishes to retain the death pen-
alty. (Ch. 18)
retributive justice— Justice concerning the fair use of
punishment for wrongdoing. (Ch. 4, 21)
retributivism— The view that offenders deserve to be
punished, or “paid back,” for their crimes and to be
punished in proportion to the severity of their offenses.
(Ch. 18)
right— A claim or entitlement to something; a moral
demand that obligates others to honor it. (Ch. 21)
rule- egoism— The theory that to determine right action,
you must see if an act falls under a rule that if consis-
tently followed would maximize your self- interest.
(Ch. 5)
rule- utilitarianism— A utilitarian theory asserting
that the morally right action is the one covered by a
rule that if generally followed would produce the most
favorable balance of good over evil, everyone consid-
ered. (Ch. 4)
self- evident statement— An assertion that a person is
justified in believing merely by understanding it, such
as “No bachelors are married.” (Ch. 4)
slippery slope— The fallacy of using dubious premises
to argue that doing a particular action will inevitably
lead to other actions that will result in disaster, so that
first action should not be done. (Ch. 3)
social contract theory— The theory that morality
arises from a social contract that self- interested and
rational people abide by in order to secure a degree of
peace, prosperity, and safety. (Ch. 5)

GLOSSARY Á G-5
sound argument— A valid argument with true prem-
ises. (Ch. 3)
species egalitarian— One who believes that all living
things have equal moral status. (Ch. 13)
speciesism— Discrimination against nonhuman ani-
mals just because of their species. (Ch. 12)
species nonegalitarian— One who believes that some
living things have greater moral status than others.
(Ch. 13)
speech codes— Campus regulations that ban the use of
language or symbols thought to embody hate speech.
(Ch. 16)
statement— An assertion that something is or is not the
case. (Ch. 3)
straw man— The fallacy of misrepresenting someone’s
claim or argument so it can be more easily refuted.
(Ch. 3)
strong affirmative action— The use of policies and
procedures to favor particular individuals because of
their race, gender, or ethnic background. (Ch. 14)
strong argument— An inductive argument that does
in fact provide probable support for its conclusion.
(Ch. 3)
structural racism— See institutional racism. (Ch. 14)
subjective relativism— The view that an action is mor-
ally right if one approves of it. (Ch. 2)
supererogatory actions— Conduct that is “above
and beyond” duty; not required, but praiseworthy.
(Ch. 21)
terrorism (as defined in Chapter 19)—Violence against
noncombatants for political, religious, or ideological
ends. (Ch. 19)
terrorism (the definition preferred by the U.S. Depart-
ment of State)—Premeditated, politically motivated
violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets
by subnational groups or clandestine agents, usually
intended to influence an audience. (Ch. 19)
therapeutic abortion— An abortion performed to pro-
tect the life or health of the mother. (Ch. 9)
torture— The intentional inflicting of severe pain or
suffering on people to punish or intimidate them or
extract information from them. (Ch. 19)
utilitarianism— A theory asserting that the morally
right action is the one that produces the most favor-
able balance of good over evil, everyone considered.
(Ch. 4)
valid argument— A deductive argument that does in
fact provide logically conclusive support for its conclu-
sion. (Ch. 3)
viability— The stage of fetal development at which the
fetus is able to survive outside the uterus. (Ch. 9)
virtue— A stable disposition to act and feel according to
some ideal or model of excellence. (Ch. 7)
virtue ethics— A theory of morality that makes virtue
the central concern. (Ch. 7)
voluntary euthanasia— Euthanasia performed on a
person with his or her permission. (Ch. 10)
weak affirmative action— The use of policies and
procedures to end discriminatory practices and ensure
equal opportunity. (Ch. 14)
weak argument— An inductive argument that does not
give probable support to the conclusion. (Ch. 3)
zoocentrism— The notion that both human and non-
human animals have moral status. (Ch. 13)

A-1
A N S W E R S T O A R G U M E N T E X E R C I S E S ( C H A P T E R 3 )
‘’
1. If John works out at the gym daily, he will be
healthier. He is working out at the gym daily.
So he will be healthier.
3
1 + 2
3. Ghosts do not exist. There is no reliable evi dence
showing that any disembodied persons exist
anywhere.
2
1
5. The mayor is soft on crime. He cut back on
misdemeanor enforcement and told the police
department to be more lenient on traffic
violators.
1
2 3
7. The president is either dishonest or incom
petent. He’s not incompetent, though, because
he’s an expert at getting self serving legislation
through Congress. I guess he’s just dishonest.
3
1 + 2
9. Can people without strong religious beliefs be
moral? Countless people have been nonbe
lievers or nontheists and still behaved according
to lofty moral principles. For example: the
Buddhists of Asia and the Confucianists of
China. Consider also the great secular philoso
phers from the ancient Greeks to the likes of
David Hume and Bertrand Russell. So it’s not
true that those without strong religious beliefs
cannot be moral.
5
2 3 4
11. We shouldn’t pay the lawnmower guy so much
money because he never completes the work,
and he will probably just gamble the money
away because he has no self control.
2
1
4
3

N O T E S A N D R E F E R E N C E S
‘’
CHAPTER 1: Ethics and the Examined Life
1. Paul W. Taylor, Principles of Ethics: An Introduction
(Encino, CA: Dickenson, 1975), 9–10.
2. G. W. von Leibniz, “Discourse on Metaphysics,” in
Selections, ed. Philip P. Wiener (New York: Scribner,
1951), 292.
3. James Rachels, The Elements of Moral Philosophy,
4th ed. (Boston: McGraw- Hill, 2003), 51.
4. Jonathan Berg, “How Could Ethics Depend on Reli-
gion?” in A Companion to Ethics, ed. Peter Singer,
corr. ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 525–33.
CHAPTER 2: Subjectivism, Relativism, and
Emotivism
1. Walter T. Stace, The Concept of Morals (1937; reprint,
New York: Macmillan, 1965), 8–58.
2. Phillip Montague, “Are There Objective and Abso-
lute Moral Standards?” in Reason and Responsibility:
Readings in Some Basic Problems in Philosophy, ed. Joel
Feinberg, 5th ed. (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1978),
490–91.
3. Solomon Asch, Social Psychology (Englewood Cliffs,
NJ: Prentice Hall, 1952), 378–79.
4. See, for example, Clyde Kluckhohn, “Ethical Relativ-
ity: Sic et Non,” Journal of Philosophy 52 (1955):
663–77, and E. O. Wilson, On Human Nature (1978;
reprint, New York: Bantam, 1979).
5. A. J. Ayer, “Critique of Ethics and Theology,” in
Language, Truth and Logic (1936; reprint, New York:
Dover, 1952), 107.
6. Ayer, 112.
7. This scenario is inspired by some of Brand Blan-
shard’s examples from “Emotivism,” in Reason and
Goodness (1961; reprint, New York: G. Allen and
Unwin, 1978).
8. Blanshard, 204–5.
CHAPTER 4: The Power of Moral Theories
1. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, rev. ed. (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press, 1999).
2. Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysic of
Morals, trans. H. J. Paton (1948; reprint, New York:
Harper & Row, 1964), 88.
3. W. D. Ross, The Right and the Good (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1930).
4. See, for example, Robert Audi, Moral Knowledge and
Ethical Character (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1997); and Russ Shafer-Landau, Moral Realism: A
Defence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).
CHAPTER 5: Consequentialist Theories: Maxi-
mize the Good
1. Joel Feinberg, “Psychological Egoism,” in Moral Phi-
losophy: Selected Readings, ed. George Sher (San Diego:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987), 11–12.
2. Jeremy Bentham, “Of the Principle of Utility,” in An
Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation
(1789; reprint, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1879), 1–7.
3. John Stuart Mill, “What Utilitarianism Is,” Chapter 2
in Utilitarianism, 7th ed. (London: Longmans, Green,
1879).
4. Mill, Chapter 2 .
5. Mill, Chapter 2.
6. Judith Jarvis Thomson, “The Trolley Problem,” in
Rights, Restitution, and Risk: Essays in Moral Theory,
ed. William Parent (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Uni-
versity Press, 1986), 95.
7. This case is based on one devised by W. D. Ross in
The Right and the Good (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1930), 34–35.
8. Paul W. Taylor, Principles of Ethics: An Introduction
(Encino, CA: Dickenson, 1975), 77–78.
9. The points in this and the preceding paragraph were
inspired by James Rachels, The Elements of Moral
Philosophy, 4th ed. (Boston: McGraw- Hill, 2003),
111–12.
10. J. C. Smart, Utilitarianism: For and Against (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1973), 68.
11. Fred Feldman, Introductory Ethics (Englewood Cliffs,
NJ: Prentice Hall, 1978), 77–78.
N-1

N-2 Á NOTES
12. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, 1651.
13. Hobbes, Leviathan.
14. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, rev. ed. (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 10.
CHAPTER 6: Nonconsequentialist Theories: Do
Your Duty
1. Immanuel Kant, Fundamental Principles of the Meta-
physic of Morals, trans. Thomas K. Abbott, 2nd ed.
(London: Longmans, Green, 1879), 1–2.
2. Kant, Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of
Morals, 52.
3. Kant, Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of
Morals, 55.
4. Kant, Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of
Morals, 66–67.
5. I owe this point to James Rachels, The Elements of
Moral Philosophy, 4th ed. (Boston: McGraw- Hill,
2003), 126.
6. C. D. Broad, Five Types of Ethical Theory
(1930; reprint, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul,
1956), 132.
7. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, in Basic Writ-
ings of Saint Thomas Aquinas, ed. and annotated by
Anton C. Pegis (New York: Random House, 1945),
First Part of the Second Part, Question 94, Article 2.
CHAPTER 7: Virtue Ethics: Be a Good Person
1. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. W. D. Ross,
book II, chapter 1 (eBooks@Adelaide, 2004).
2. Louis P. Pojman, Ethics: Discovering Right and Wrong,
4th ed. (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2002), 165.
3. Rosalind Hursthouse, “Virtue Ethics,” in Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Fall 2003 ed., ed. Edward
N. Zalta, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2003/
entries/ethics-virtue/ ( January 9, 2015).
4. William K. Frankena, Ethics, 2nd ed. (Englewood
Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1973), 65.
CHAPTER 8: Feminist Ethics and the Ethics of
Care
1. Alison M. Jaggar, “Feminist Ethics,” in Encyclopedia
of Ethics, ed. Lawrence C. Becker and Charlotte B.
Becker (New York: Garland, 1992), 364.
2. Alison M. Jaggar, “Feminist Ethics,” 363–64.
3. Sarah Clark Miller, “Feminist Ethics,” in Kantianism,
Liberalism, and Feminism: Resisting Oppression, ed.
Carol Hay (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013),
204–205.
4. Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological
Theory and Women’s Development (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1982).
5. Annette C. Baier, “The Need for More Than Justice,”
Canadian Journal of Philosophy, supplementary vol. 13
(1988): 41–56.
6. Virginia Held, “The Ethics of Care as Moral Theory,”
in The Ethics of Care (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2006), 10.
CHAPTER 9: Abortion
1. Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113, 164–65 (1973).
2. Roe, 158, 162.
3. Mary Anne Warren, “Abortion,” in A Companion to
Ethics, ed. Peter Singer, corr. ed. (Cambridge, MA:
Blackwell, 1993), 304.
4. John T. Noonan Jr., “An Almost Absolute Value in
History,” in The Morality of Abortion: Legal and His-
torical Perspectives, ed. John T. Noonan Jr. (Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970), 56–57.
5. Warren, 312.
6. Mary Anne Warren, “On the Moral and Legal Status
of Abortion,” The Monist 57, no. 4 (1973): 56.
7. Judith Jarvis Thomson, “A Defense of Abortion,”
Philosophy & Public Affairs 1, no. 1 (1971): 48–49.
8. Thomson, 66.
CHAPTER 10: Euthanasia and Physician- Assisted
Suicide
1. Larry Copeland and Laura Parker, “Terri Schiavo’s
Case Doesn’t End with Her Passing,” USAToday,
March 31, 2005, www.usatoday.com/news/nation
/2005-03-31-schiavo_x.htm (January 13, 2012).
2. I owe the notion of a good death “for the sake” of the
person dying to Philippa Foot (in “Euthanasia,”
Philosophy & Public Affairs 6, no. 2 [1977]: 85–112);
and to Helga Kuhse (in “Euthanasia,” in Companion
to Ethics, ed. Peter Singer, corr. ed. [Oxford: Black-
well, 1993], 294–302).

http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2003/entries/ethics-virtue/

http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2005-03-31-schiavo_x.htm

NOTES Á N-3
3. Issued June 1994 based on the reports “Decisions
Near the End of Life,” adopted June 1991, and
“ Physician- Assisted Suicide,” adopted December 1993
( JAMA); updated June 1996.
4. Immanuel Kant, “Suicide,” in Lectures on Ethics,
trans. Louis Infield (New York: Harper & Row, 1963),
147–54.
5. Ronald Munson, Intervention and Reflection: Basic
Issues in Medical Ethics, ed. Ronald Munson, 7th ed.
(Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2004), 696–97.
6. Dan W. Brock, “Voluntary Active Euthanasia,” Hast-
ings Center Report 22, no. 2 (March/April 1992): 11.
7. I owe this point to Thomas F. Wall, Thinking Critically
about Moral Problems (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth,
2003), 176.
8. James Rachels, “Active and Passive Euthanasia,”
New England Journal of Medicine 292, no. 2 ( January 9,
1975): 79.
9. Winston Nesbitt, “Is Killing No Worse Than Letting
Die?” Journal of Applied Philosophy 12, no. 1 (1995): 101–5.
10. J. Gay- Williams, “The Wrongfulness of Euthanasia,”
in Intervention and Reflection: Basic Issues in Medical Ethics,
[selected by] Ronald Munson, 7th ed. (Belmont, CA:
Wadsworth, 2004), 710–11.
11. Brock, 20.
CHAPTER 11: Delivering Health Care
1. Kaiser Family Foundation analysis of the 2013 and
2016 National Health Interview Survey, https://
w w w.k ff.org/uninsured/report/the-uninsured-a
-primer-key-facts-about-health-insurance-and-the
-uninsured-under-the-affordable-care-act
/(December 17, 2017).
2. A. P. Wilper et al., “Health Insurance and Mortality
in U.S. Adults,” American Journal of Public Health
99:2289–95.
3. Michelle Long et al., “Trends in Employer- Sponsored
Insurance Offer and Coverage Rates,” Kaiser Family
Foundation, March 21, 2016, https://www.kff.org/
private-insurance/issue-brief/trends-in-employer-
sponsored-insurance-offer-and-coverage-rates-1999-
2014/.
4. OECD.org, OECD Data, “Health Spending,” 2016,
https://data.oecd.org/healthres/health-spending.htm;
Melissa Etehad and Kyle Kim, “The U.S. Spends More
on Healthcare Than Any Other Country—but Not
with Better Health Outcomes,” Los Angeles Times,
July 18, 2017.
5. OECD, “Health at a Glance 2017: OECD Indicators”
November 10, 2017).
6. Kaiser Family Foundation, “US Improving in Health
Care Quality, But Still Lagging Behind Other Coun-
tries, New Analysis Finds,” September 10, 2016,
https://www.kff.org/health-costs/press-release/us
-improving-in-health-care-quality-but-still-lagging-
behind-other-countries-new-analysis-finds/.
7. Commonwealth Fund, “US Health System Ranks
Last Among Eleven Countries on Measures of Access
Equity, Quality, Efficiency, and Healthy Lives,” June
16, 2014, http://www.commonwealthfund.org/pub
lications/pressreleases/ 2014/jun/us-health-system
-ranks-last.
8. National Conference of State Legislatures, “Affordable
Care Act: A Brief Summary,” March 2011, http://www
.ncsl.org/portals/1/documents/health/hraca .
Reprinted by permission.
9. Tami Luhby, “Will Obamacare Survive the Tax Bill?”
CNNMoney, December 15, 2017, http://money.cnn
.com/2017/12/15/news/economy/obamacare
-individual-mandate-tax/index.html.
10. The Economist (editorial), “Libertarians, Health Insur-
ance, and Rights,” September 2, 2009.
11. Norman Daniels, “Is There a Right to Health Care
and, If So, What Does It Encompass?” in A Compan-
ion to Bioethics, ed. Helga Kuhse and Peter Singer
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1998, 2001), 317.
12. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, rev. ed. (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).
13. Norman Daniels, 319.
14. Norman Daniels, 323.
CHAPTER 12: Animal Welfare
1. Peter Singer, Animal Liberation, 2nd ed. (New York:
New York Review of Books, 1990), i.
2. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, from Basic Writ-
ings of Saint Thomas Aquinas, ed. and annotated by
Anton C. Pegis (New York: Random House, 1945), Sec-
ond Part of the Second Part, Question 64, Article 1.

http://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/pressreleases/2014/jun/us-health-system-ranks-last

https://www.kff.org/uninsured/report/the-uninsured-a-primer-key-facts-about-health-insurance-and-the-uninsured-under-the-affordable-care-act/

Trends in Employer-Sponsored Insurance Offer and Coverage Rates, 1999-2014

US Improving in Health Care Quality, But Still Lagging Behind Other Countries, New Analysis Finds

http://www.ncsl.org/portals/1/documents/health/hraca

http://money.cnn.com/2017/12/15/news/economy/obamacare-individual-mandate-tax/index.html

https://www.kff.org/uninsured/report/the-uninsured-a-primer-key-facts-about-health-insurance-and-the-uninsured-under-the-affordable-care-act/

http://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/pressreleases/2014/jun/us-health-system-ranks-last

https://data.oecd.org/healthres/health-spending.htm

http://www.OECD.org

N-4 Á NOTES
3. U.S. Department of Agriculture, National Agricul-
tural Statistical Services, Livestock Slaughter: 2016
Summary; USDA, NASS, Poultry Slaughter: 2016
Summary.
4. Tadlock Cowan, “Humane Treatment of Farm
Animals: Overview and Issues,” Congressional
Research Service Report RS21978, May 9, 2011, www
.nationa laglawcenter.org/assets/crs/RS21978
(August 20, 2017); People for the Ethical Treatment
of Animals, “Petition for Agency Action to Fully
Comply with the Mandates of Humane Methods of
Livestock Slaughter Act,” December 11, 2001,
www.peta.org/feat/usda/petition.html (December
3, 2006).
5. Lori Gruen, “The Moral Status of Animals,” in Stan-
ford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Fall 2003 ed., ed.
Edward N. Zalta, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries
/moral-animal/ (February 23, 2015).
6. Jeremy Bentham, An Introduction to Principles of
Morals and Legislation (1789; reprint, New York:
Hafner, 1948), 311.
7. Peter Singer, “All Animals Are Equal,” Philosophic
Exchange 1 (1974): 106, 107–8.
8. Singer, “All Animals Are Equal,” 109.
9. Singer, Animal Liberation, 77–78.
10. Tom Regan, “The Case for Animal Rights,” in In
Defense of Animals, ed. Peter Singer (Oxford: Black-
well, 1985), 21.
11. Regan, “The Case for Animal Rights,” 22.
12. Regan, “The Case for Animal Rights,” 24.
13. Mary Anne Warren, “The Rights of the Nonhuman
World,” in Environmental Philosophy: A Collection of
Readings, ed. Robert Elliot and Arran Gare (University
Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1983), 116.
14. Regan, “The Case for Animal Rights,” 23.
CHAPTER 13: Environmental Ethics
1. National Academy of Sciences and the Royal Society,
Climate Change: Evidence and Causes, “Summary,”
February 26, 2014, http://dels.nas.edu/resources/ static
– assets/ exec-office-other/climate-change-full .
2. David Schmidtz and Elizabeth Willott, “Introduc-
tion,” in Environmental Ethics: What Really Matters,
What Really Works (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2002), xvii.
3. Aldo Leopold, “The Land Ethic,” in A Sand Country
Almanac (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981),
237–65.
4. Immanuel Kant, Lectures on Ethics, trans. Louis
Infield (New York: Harper and Row, 1963), 239–40.
5. Paul W. Taylor, “The Ethics of Respect for Nature,”
Environmental Ethics 3, no. 3 (1981): 198.
6. Tom Regan, “Animal Rights, Human Wrongs,” Envi-
ronmental Ethics 2, no. 2 (Summer 1980): 99–120.
7. Robert Elliot, “Environmental Ethics,” in A Compan-
ion to Ethics, ed. Peter Singer, corr. ed. (Oxford: Black-
well, 1993), 291.
8. Elliot, 292.
9. This argument is a vastly oversimplified rendering
of Robert Elliot’s argument in “Faking Nature,”
Inquiry 25, no. 1 (1982): 81–93.
10. This example is adapted from Martin H. Krieger,
“What’s Wrong with Plastic Trees?” Science 179
(1973): 446–55.
11. Taylor, 207.
12. David Schmidtz, “Are All Species Equal?” Journal of
Applied Philosophy 15, no. 1 (1998): 59.
CHAPTER 14: Racism, Equality, and Discrimi-
nation
1. Lawrence Blum, “I’m Not a Racist But …”: The Moral
Quandary of Race (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 2002), 110. Copyright © 2002 by Cornell Uni-
versity. Used by permission of the publisher, Cornell
University Press.
2. Tanya Maria Golash-Boza, Race and Racisms: A Critical
Approach (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 3.
3. Blum, 133.
4. Blum, 131.
5. Michael James, “Race,” in Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy, Spring 2017 ed., ed. Edward N. Zalta,
https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2017/entries
/race/.
6. Blum, 147–64.
7. Blum, 8–9.
8. Blum, 1–2.
9. Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Racism without Racists (Lan-
ham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2018), 2. Copyright
© 2014. Used by permission of Rowan & Littlefield Pub-
lishing Group. All rights reserved.

http://www.peta.org/feat/usda/petition.html

http://dels.nas.edu/resources/static-assets/exec-office-other/climate-change-full

http://www.nationalaglawcenter.org/assets/crs/RS21978

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-animal/

http://dels.nas.edu/resources/static-assets/exec-office-other/climate-change-full

https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2017/entries/race/

NOTES Á N-5
10. Blum, 23–24.
11. Bonilla-Silva, 1.
12. Bonilla-Silva, 2.
13. Bonilla-Silva, 3.
14. Civil Rights Act of 1964, Section 601 of Title VI.
15. Terms used by Louis P. Pojman in “The Case against
Affirmative Action,” International Journal of Applied
Philosophy 12 (1998): 97–115 (reprinted in Philosophy:
The Quest for Truth, ed. Louis P. Pojman and Lewis
Vaughn. 6th ed. [New York: Oxford University Press,
2006], 632–45). I attach very roughly the same
meanings to them that Pojman does.
16. Pojman, “The Case against Affirmative Action,” 98.
17. Albert Mosley, “The Case for Affirmative Action,” in
Philosophy: The Quest for Truth, ed. Louis P. Pojman
and Lewis Vaughn, 6th ed. (New York: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 2006), 630.
18. Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, 438 U.S.
265, 312 (1978).
19. Carl Cohen, in Affirmative Action and Racial Prefer-
ence: A Debate, by Carl Cohen and James P. Sterba
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 25.
20. Ronald Dworkin, “Bakke’s Case: Are Quotas Unfair?”
in A Matter of Principle (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1985), 294.
21. Cohen, Affirmative Action, 110.
22. Cohen, Affirmative Action, 27–28.
23. Judith Jarvis Thomson, “Preferential Hiring,” Philo-
sophy & Public Affairs 2, no. 4 (Summer 1973): 383–84.
24. Robert Simon, “Preferential Hiring: A Reply to Judith
Jarvis Thomson,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 3, no. 3
(Spring 1974): 318.
25. Thomson, “Preferential Hiring,” 382–83.
26. Pojman, “The Case against Affirmative Action,” 101.
CHAPTER 15: Sexual Morality
1. Gallup Poll, “Marriage,” May 8–11, 2014, gallup.com
/poll/117328/marriage.aspx (February 16, 2015).
2. Lawrence B. Finer, “Trends in Premarital Sex in the
United States, 1954–2003,” Public Health Reports 122
( January– February 2007), www.publichealthreports
.org/issueopen.cfm?articleID=1784 (February 16, 2015).
3. Catherine Kaukinen, et al, ed., Addressing Violence
against Women on College Campuses (Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, 2017), 18–30.
4. Alison E. Hatch, Campus Sexual Assault (Santa
Barbara, CA: ABC- CLIO, 2017), 3–4.
5. Vanessa Grigoriadis, Blurred Lines: Rethinking Sex,
Power, and Consent on Campus (Boston: Houghton
Mifflin Harcourt, 2017), xix.
6. Grigoriadis, xx.
7. Hatch, 16.
8. Hatch, 51.
9. Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith,
“Persona Humana: Declaration on Certain Questions
Concerning Sexual Ethics” (December 29, 1975).
10. Thomas A. Mappes, “Sexual Morality and the
Concept of Using Another Person,” in Social Ethics:
Morality and Social Policy, ed. Thomas A. Mappes
and Jane S. Zembaty, 7th ed. (New York: McGraw-
Hill, 2007), 171.
11. Alan H. Goldman, “Plain Sex,” Philosophy and Public
Affairs 6, no. 3 (Spring 1977): 267–87.
12. Goldman, 269.
13. Igor Primoratz, Ethics and Sex (London: Routledge,
1999), 173.
14. Goldman, 280.
15. Michael Ruse, “Is Homosexuality Bad Sexuality?” in
Homosexuality: A Philosophical Inquiry (Oxford: Black-
well, 1988), 179–192.
16. Michael Levin, “Why Homosexuality Is Abnormal,”
The Monist (April 1984).
17. Timothy F. Murphy, “Homosexuality and Nature:
Happiness and the Law at Stake,” Journal of Applied
Philosophy 4, no. 2 (1987).
CHAPTER 16: Free Speech on Campus
1. Erwin Chemerinsky and Howard Gillman, Free Speech
on Campus (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
2017), 73. Copyright © 2017 by Erwin Chemerinsky
and Howard Gillman. Reprinted by permission of
Yale University Press.
2. Chemerinsky and Gillman, 98.
3. Sigal R. Ben- Porath, Free Speech on Campus (Philadel-
phia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), 12.
4. John Arthur, “Sticks and Stones,” in Ethics in Prac-
tice: An Anthology, ed. Hugh LaFollette (Oxford:
Blackwell, 2007), 399.
5. Survey: Half of U.S. College Students “Intimidated”
When Sharing Views, William F. Buckley, Jr. Program

http://www.publichealthreports.org/issueopen.cfm?articleID=1784

http://www.gallup.com/poll/117328/marriage.aspx

N-6 Á NOTES
4. “Crime in the United States 2016—Arrests,” FBI
Uniform Crime Report (Washington, DC: US Dept.
of Justice, September 2017), p. 2; Table 18, Estimated
Number of Arrests, United States 2016; Table 21A,
Arrests by Race and Ethnicity 2016; and email cor-
respondence between the editor and Stephen G.
Fischer Jr., Chief— Multimedia Productions, FBI—
CJIS Division.
5. Pew Research Center, “America’s New Drug Policy
Landscape,” April 2, 2014, http://www. people- press
.org/2014/04/02/americas-new-drug-policy-land-
scape/(February 15, 2015).
6. Pew Research Center, “America’s New Drug Policy
Landscape”; Abigail Geiger, Pew Research Center,
“Support for Marijuana Legalization Continues to
Rise,” October 12, 2016, http://www.pewresearch
.org/ fact- tank/2016/10/12/ support- for-marijuana
-legalization-continues-to-rise/.
7. The Merck Manual (Home Edition), “Overview of
Drug Abuse,” January 2009, http://merckmanuals
.com/home/special_subjects/drug_use_and_abuse
/overview_of_drug _abuse.html?qt=%22Overview
%20of%20Drug%20Abuse%22&alt=sh (Feburary 15,
2015).
8. The Merck Manual (Home Edition), “Overview of Drug
Abuse.”
9. Douglas Husak and Peter de Marneffe, The Legaliza-
tion of Drugs: For and Against (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2005), 34–35.
10. National Center for Health Statistics, “Suicide
and Self- Inflicted Injury,” “Assault or Homicide,”
2013, https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/suicide
.htm (December 31, 2017); National Center for
Health Statistics, “All Injuries,” 2014, https://www
.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/injury.htm (December 31,
2017); American Journal of Medicine, March 2016,
vol. 129, iss. 3, 266–73.
11. David Degrazia and Lester H. Hunt, Debating Gun
Control: How Much Regulation Do We Need? (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 121.
12. Philip J. Cook and Kristina A. Goss, The Gun Debate:
What Everyone Needs to Know (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2014), 22.
13. Degrazia and Hunt, 121–22.
14. Degrazia and Hunt, 12.
at Yale (October 26, 2015), http://mclaughlinonline
.com/2015/10/26/ the- william- f- buckley- jr- program
– at- ya le- a lmost- ha lf- 49 – of- u- s- college- st udents-
intimidated- by- professors- when- sharing- differing-
beliefs- survey/ (September 24, 2017).
6. Chemerinsky and Gillman, 10–11.
7. Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, Understanding
Words that Wound (New York: Westview Press, 2004).
8. Chemerinsky and Gillman, 103–110.
9. Ben- Porath, 27-28.
10. Chemerinsky and Gillman, 20.
11. Delgado and Stefancic.
12. Chemerinsky and Gillman, 108.
CHAPTER 17: Drugs, Guns, and Personal Liberty
1. National Institute on Drug Abuse, “Overdose Death
Rates,” September 2017, https://www.drugabuse.gov
/ related- topics/trends-statistics/overdose-death-rates
(December 29, 2017); Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention (CDC). Alcohol- Related Disease Impact
(ARDI), Atlanta, GA: CDC (December 29, 2017);
M. Stahre, J. Roeber, D. Kanny, R. D. Brewer, and
X. Zhang, “Contribution of Excessive Alcohol
Consumption to Deaths and Years of Potential
Life Lost in the United States, Prev. Chronic Dis.
2014;11:130293 (December 29, 2017); Substance
Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration
(SAMHSA), “Tobacco” (December 29, 2017); SAM-
HSA, Center for Behavioral Health Statistics and
Quality, “National Survey on Drug Use and Health,”
2014 and 2015 (December 29, 2017).
2. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Admin-
istration, Center for Behavioral Health Statistics and
Quality, September 4, 2014, “The NSDUH Report:
Substance Use and Mental Health Estimates from the
2013 National Survey on Drug Use and Health: Over-
view of Findings,” available at http://jpo.wrlc.org
/bitstream/handle/11204/3782/2013%20
Subst%20Use%20and%20Ment%20Hlth%20
Ests.SAMHSA ?sequence=1 (February 15, 2015).
3. National Institutes of Health, National Institute of
Drug Abuse, “Medical Consequences of Drug Abuse,”
December 2012, http://www.drugabuse.gov/related
-topics/medical-consequences-drug-abuse/mortality
(February 15, 2015).

http://www.people-press.org/2014/04/02/americas-new-drug-policy-landscape

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/10/12/support-for-marijuana-legalization-continues-to-rise/

http://merckmanuals.com/home/special_subjects/drug_use_and_abuse/overview_of_drug_abuse.html?qt=%22Overview%20of%20Drug%20Abuse%22&alt=sh

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/suicide.htm

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/injury.htm

https://www.drugabuse.gov/related-topics/trends-statistics/overdose-death-rates

http://jpo.wrlc.org/bitstream/handle/11204/3782/2013%20Subst%20Use%20and%20Ment%20Hlth%20Ests.SAMHSA ?sequence=1

http://www.drugabuse.gov/related-topics/medical-consequences-drug-abuse/mortality

The William F. Buckley, Jr. Program at Yale: ALMOST HALF (49%) OF U.S. COLLEGE STUDENTS “INTIMIDATED” BY PROFESSORS WHEN SHARING DIFFERING BELIEFS: SURVEY

https://www.drugabuse.gov/related-topics/trends-statistics/overdose-death-rates

http://jpo.wrlc.org/bitstream/handle/11204/3782/2013%20Subst%20Use%20and%20Ment%20Hlth%20Ests.SAMHSA ?sequence=1

http://www.people-press.org/2014/04/02/americas-new-drug-policy-landscape

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/10/12/support-for-marijuana-legalization-continues-to-rise/

NOTES Á N-7
research; NAACP Legal Defense Fund, “Death
Row USA.”
3. “Facts about the Death Penalty,” Death Penalty Infor-
mation Center, www.deathpenaltyinfo.org (August 21,
2017); Bureau of Justice Statistics Bulletin, Capital Pun-
ishment, 2003 (November 2004), 10; Bureau of Justice
Statistics: “Capital Punishment, 2013— Statistical
Tables,” http://www.bjs.gov/cp13st .
4. Gallup, “Death Penalty,” http://www.gallup.com/poll
/1606/death-penalty.aspx; “Facts about the Death
Penalty,” Death Penalty Information Center, www
.deathpenaltyinfo.org (August 21, 2017).
5. Amnesty International, “The Death Penalty in
2016,” April 11, 2017, https://www.amnesty.org/en
/latest/news/2017/04/ death- penalty- 2016-facts-and
-figures/ (August 21, 2017).
6. John Stuart Mill, “Speech in Favor of Capital Punish-
ment,” to the English Parliament, 1868, http://ethics
.sandiego.edu/books/Mill/Punishment/ ( January
26, 2015).
7. Louis P. Pojman, “Why the Death Penalty Is Morally
Permissible,” in Debating the Death Penalty: Should
American Have Capital Punishment? The Experts on
Both Sides Make Their Best Case, eds. Hugo Adam
Bedau and Paul G. Cassell (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2004), 60–61.
8. Ernest van den Haag, “On Deterrence and the Death
Penalty,” Journal of Criminal Law, Criminology, and
Police Science 60, no. 2. (1969).
9. Richard C. Dieter, “Millions Misspent: What Politi-
cians Don’t Say about the High Cost of the Death
Penalty,” Fall 1994, www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/node
/599 ( January 26, 2015).
10. Igor Primoratz, Justifying Legal Punishment (Atlantic
Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1989),
165.
11. Immaneul Kant, The Philosophy of Law, trans.
W. Hastie (Edinburgh: Clark, 1887), 195.
12. Kant, 198.
13. Paul G. Cassell, “In Defense of the Death Penalty,” in
Bedau and Cassell, eds., Debating the Death Penalty,
201.
14. Cassell, 201.
15. B. M. Leiser, Liberty, Justice and Morals: Contemporary
Value Conflicts (New York: Macmillan, 1973), 225.
15. This definition is based on one given by Degrazia.
16. Degrazia and Hunt, 247–48.
17. Glen H. Utter and Robert J. Spitzer, The Gun Debate:
An Encyclopedia of Gun Rights & Gun Control in the
United States (Amenia, NY: Grey House, 2016), 274.
18. Hugh LaFollette, “Gun Control,” Ethics 110 (2000).
19. ProCon.org, “Should More Gun Control Laws Be
Enacted?” https://gun-control.procon.org/.
20. Jon Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1859).
21. James Q. Wilson, “Against the Legalization of Drugs,”
Commentary, February 1990, https://www.commen
tarymagazine.com/article/against-the-legalization
-of-drugs/ (Feburary 15, 2015).
22. Husak, The Legalization of Drugs: For and Against, 92–95.
23. De Marneffe, The Legalization of Drugs: For and Against,
110.
24. John Q. Wilson, quoted in Body Count: Moral
Poverty . . . and How to Win America’s War on Drugs, by
William J. Bennett, John DiIulio, Jr., and John
Walters (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 140–41.
25. Nelson Lund, “The Second Amendment and the
Inalienable Right to Self- Defense,” www.heritage.org,
April 17, 2014.
26. Degrazia and Hunt, 149–50.
27. Degrazia and Hunt, 157–58.
CHAPTER 18: Capital Punishment
1. Death Penalty Information Center, “States With
and Without the Death Penalty,” 2016, https://death
penaltyinfo.org/ states- and-without-death-penalty;
“Methods of Execution,” 2016, https://deathpenal
tyinfo.org/methods-execution (August 21, 2017);
Death Penalty Information Center, “Facts about the
Death Penalty,” https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/docu
ments/FactSheet ; Death Row Population Figures
from NAACP- LDF “Death Row USA ( July 1, 2014),”
http://w w w.deathpenaltyinfo.org/death-row-usa
/DRUSAFall2014 ; Bureau of Justice Statistics:
“Capital Punishment, 2013—Statistical Tables,”
http://www.bjs.gov/cp13st .
2. Facts about the Death Penalty,” Death Penalty Infor-
mation Center, www.deathpenaltyinfo.org (August
21, 2017); Bureau of Justice Statistics: “Capital Pun-
ishment, 2013,” 2014–2016 figure from DPIC

http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org

http://www.bjs.gov/cp13st

https://www.commentarymagazine.com/article/against-the-legalization-of-drugs/

http://www.heritage.org

http://www.bjs.gov/cp13st

http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org

http://www.gallup.com/poll/1606/death-penalty.aspx

http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org

The Death penalty in 2016: Facts and figures

http://ethics.sandiego.edu/books/Mill/Punishment/

http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/node/599

http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/death-row-usa/DRUSAFall2014

The Death penalty in 2016: Facts and figures

https://www.commentarymagazine.com/article/against-the-legalization-of-drugs/

https://gun-control.procon.org/

https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/states-and-without-death-penalty

https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/methods-execution

https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/documents/FactSheet

http://www.ProCon.org

N-8 Á NOTES
http://w w w.washingtonpost.com/news/ morning
– mix/wp/2014/06/13/ isis- beheading- and-the-success-
of-horrifying-violence/ (October 31, 2014).
13. Richard Falk, “Thinking about Terrorism,” The Nation,
June 28, 1986; note that this view was expressed long
before the events of September 11, 2001.
14. Joseph M. Boyle Jr., “Just War Doctrine and the
Military Response to Terrorism,” Journal of Political
Philosophy 11, no. 22 (2003): 157–70.
15. Haig Khatchadourian, The Morality of Terrorism
(New York: Peter Lang, 1998), 31–32.
16. Michael Walzer, “Terrorism: A Critique of Excuses,”
in Problems of International Justice, ed. Steve Luper-
Foy (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1988), 238.
17. Andrew Valls, “Can Terrorism Be Justified?” in Ethics
in International Affairs: Theories and Cases, ed. Valls
(Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000),
65–79.
18. Thomas Nagel, “War and Massacre,” Philosophy &
Public Affairs 1, no. 2 (Winter 1972): 123–43.
19. Jan Narveson, “Pacifism: A Philosophical Analysis,”
Ethics 75, no. 4 (1965): 623–24.
20. Larry May, Eric Rovie, and Steve Viner, in The Moral-
ity of War: Classical and Contemporary Readings, eds.
May, Rovie, and Viner (Upper Saddle River, NJ:
Pearson/Prentice Hall, 2006), 200.
21. R. G. Frey and Christopher W. Morris, “Terrorism,” in
Violence, Terrorism, and Justice, eds. Frey and Morris
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 1–11.
22. Walzer, “Terrorism,” 240.
23. Michael Walzer, “The Argument about Humanitar-
ian Intervention,” Dissent 49, no. 1 (Winter 2002),
http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/the-argument
-about-humanitarian-intervention (February 26,
2015).
24. Stephen Nathanson, “Can Terrorism Be Morally Justi-
fied?” in Morality in Practice, ed. James P. Sterba, 7th ed.
(Belmont, CA: Wadsworth/Thomson, 2004), 607.
25. From Jeffrey Goldberg, “Inside Jihad U.: The Educa-
tion of a Holy Warrior,” New York Times Magazine,
June 2000; quoted in Louis P. Pojman, “The Moral
Response to Terrorism and the Cosmopolitan
Imperative,” in Terrorism and International Justice, ed.
James P. Sterba (New York: Oxford University Press,
2003).
CHAPTER 19: Political Violence: War, Terror-
ism, and Torture
1. James Turner Johnson, “Threats, Values, and Defense:
Does the Defense of Values by Force Remain a Moral
Possibility?” Parameters 15, no. 1 (Spring 1985).
2. James P. Sterba, “Reconciling Pacifists and Just War
Theorists,” Social Theory and Practice 18, no. 1 (Spring
1992): 21.
3. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, in Basic Writings
of Saint Thomas Aquinas, ed. and annotated Anton C.
Pegis (New York: Random House, 1945), Second Part
of the Second Part, Question 40, Article 1.
4. Michael Walzer, “Moral Judgment in Time of War,”
Dissent 14, no. 3 ( May– June 1967): 284.
5. U.S. Department of State, Patterns of Global Terrorism
2003 (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of State
2004), xii.
6. International Encyclopedia of Terrorism, 1997 ed., s.v.
“The Official View”; quoted in A Military Guide to
Terrorism in the Twenty- first Century, U.S. Army Train-
ing and Doctrine Command, August 15, 2005, ver-
sion 3.0, available at www.fas.org/irp/threat/terrorism
/index (December 4, 2006), 1–3.
7. Mark Burgess, “A Brief History of Terrorism,” Center for
Defense Information, July 2, 2003, http://www.pogo
.org/ our- work/ straus- militar y- reform- project/ cdi
– archive/ a- brief- history- of- terrorism.html
(February 24, 2015).
8. National Memorial Institute for the Prevention of
Terrorism (MIPT), Terrorism Knowledge Base, www
.tkb.org/Home.jsp ( January 27, 2006).
9. National Counterterrorism Center, 2009 Report on
Terrorism, April 30, 2010, http://www.riskintel.com
/w p-content/uploads/downloads/2011/10/20 09
_report_on_terrorism (February 24, 2015).
10. Council on Foreign Relations, “Types of Terrorism,”
Council on Foreign Affairs, http://cfrterrorism.org
/terrorism/types.html ( January 27, 2006).
11. U.S. Department of State, Office of the Historian,
Bureau of Public Affairs, “Significant Terrorist Inci-
dents, 1961–2003: A Brief Chronology,” March 2004,
http://fas.org/irp/threat/terror_chron.html (Feburary
24, 2015).
12. Terrence McCoy, “ISIS, Beheadings and the Success of
Horrifying Violence,” Washington Post, June 13, 2014,

http://fas.org/irp/threat/terror_chron.html

The Argument about Humanitarian Intervention

http://www.fas.org/irp/threat/terrorism/index

http://www.pogo.org/our-work/straus-military-reform-project/cdi-archive/a-brief-history-of-terrorism.html

http://www.tkb.org/Home.jsp

http://www.riskintel.com/wp-content/uploads/downloads/2011/10/2009_report_on_terrorism

http://cfrterrorism.org/terrorism/types.html

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/06/13/isis-beheading-and-the-successof-horrifying-violence/

http://www.pogo.org/our-work/straus-military-reform-project/cdi-archive/a-brief-history-of-terrorism.html

NOTES Á N-9
illegalimmigration-in-the-u-s/; Cari Lee Skog berg
Eastman, Immigration, 79–85.
14. American Immigration Council, “Fact Sheet: Why
Don’t They Just Get in Line?” August 12, 2016, https:
//www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/research/
why- don’t-they-just-get-line.
15. Cari Lee Skogberg Eastman, Immigration, 22–24.
16. Stephen Macedo, “The Moral Dilemma of U.S.
Immigration Policy: Open Borders versus Social
Justice?” in Debating Immigration, ed. Carol M. Swain
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 64.
17. Christopher Heath Wellman, “Immigration and
Freedom of Association,” Ethics 119 (2008): 109–41.
18. Stephen Macedo, “The Moral Dilemma,” 64.
19. Stephen Macedo, “The Moral Dilemma,” 64
CHAPTER 21: Global Economic Justice
1. World Bank, “Poverty Overview,” October 8,
2014, http://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/poverty
/overview (February 28, 2015); United Nations,
Department of Economic and Social Affairs, “The
Millennium Development Goals Report, 2014,”
July 30, 2014, http://www.un.org/millennium-
goals/2014%20MDG%20report/MDG%202014%20
English%20web (February 28, 2015); UNICEF,
“The State of the World’s Children 2014 in Numbers,”
January 2014, http://www.unicef.org/sowc2014
/numbers/ (February 28, 2015).
2. Oxfam International, “Working for the Few,” 2014,
http://w w w.oxfam.org/en/research/work ing-few
(February 28, 2015); United Nations Development
Programme (UNDP), “Human Development Report
1998: Consumption for Human Development”
(New York, 1998), http://hdr.undp.org/sites/default
/files/reports/259/hdr_1998_en_complete_nostats
(February 28, 2015).
3. Peter Singer, “Famine, Affluence, and Morality,”
Philosophy and Public Affairs 1, no. 1 (Spring 1972),
23–32.
4. John Hospers, “What Libertarianism Is,” in The
Libertarian Alternative, ed. Tibor R. Machan (Chicago:
Nelson- Hall, 1974), 3.
5. Singer, “Famine, Affluence, and Morality,” 231.
6. Singer, 231.
26. Seumas Miller, “Torture,” in Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy, Summer 2017 ed., ed. Edward N. Zalta,
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/torture/ (February
26, 2015).
CHAPTER 20: The Ethics of Immigration
1. Cari Lee Skogberg Eastman, Immigration: Examining
the Facts (Santa Barbara: ABC- CLIO, 2017), 16.
2. Pew Research Center, “Key Findings about U.S. Immi-
grants,” May 3, 2017, http://www.pewresearch
.org/topics/search/?query=key findings immigration.
3. Pew Research Center, “Key Findings.”
4. Ipsos Survey, “The Perils of Perception: Americans’
Estimates of Number of Immigrants, Atheists, and
Those Living Rurally Radically Out of Step with Real-
ity,” December 1, 2015, https://www.ipsos.com/ en
– us/ perilsperceptions- americans- estimates- number
– immigrants-atheists-and-those-living-rurally.
5. Pew Research Center, “Key Findings.”; “5 Key Facts
about U.S. Lawful Immigrants,” August 3, 2017, http://
www.pewresearch.org/ fact- tank/2017/08/03/5- key
– facts-about-u-s-lawful-immigrants/.
6. Pew Research Center, “Key Findings.”
7. USA.gov, “Deportation,” https://w w w.usa.gov
/deportation; Pew Research Center, “Key Findings.”
8. U.S. Department of State, “Refugee Admissions,”
https://www.state.gov/j/prm/ra/, (December 4, 2017);
https://www.state.gov/j/prm/ra/; Pew Research Center,
“Key Findings.”
9. U.S. Census Bureau, “New Census Bureau Report
Analyzes U.S. Population Projections,” March 3, 2015,
https://w w w.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases
/2015/cb15-tps16.html.
10. Cari Lee Skogberg Eastman, Immigration, 121.
11. Cari Lee Skogberg Eastman, Immigration, 38.
12. Eduardo Porter, “Can Immigration Hurt the Econ-
omy? An Old Prejudice Returns,” New York Times,
February 14, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017
/02/14/business/economy/immigration-productivity-
economists.html.
13. Jens Manuel Krogstad, Jeffrey S. Passel, and D’Vera
Cohn, “5 Facts about Illegal Immigration in the U.S.,”
Pew Research Center, April 27, 2017, http://www.
pewresearch.org/ fact- tank/2017/04/27/5- facts- about-

http://www.unicef.org/sowc2014/numbers/

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/torture/

https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/perilsperceptions-americans-estimates-number-immigrants-atheists-and-those-living-rurally

https://www.state.gov/j/prm/ra/

http://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/poverty/overview

http://www.un.org/millennium-goals/2014%20MDG%20report/MDG%202014%20English%20web

http://www.oxfam.org/en/research/working-few

http://hdr.undp.org/sites/default/files/reports/259/hdr_1998_en_complete_nostats

http://www.pewresearch.org/topics/search/?query=key

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/08/03/5-key-facts-about-u-s-lawful-immigrants/

https://www.usa.gov/deportation

https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2015/cb15-tps16.html

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/04/27/5-facts-about-illegalimmigration-in-the-u-s/

https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/perilsperceptions-americans-estimates-number-immigrants-atheists-and-those-living-rurally

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/08/03/5-key-facts-about-u-s-lawful-immigrants/

https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/research/why-don%E2%80%99t-they-just-get-line

http://www.un.org/millennium-goals/2014%20MDG%20report/MDG%202014%20English%20web

http://www.unicef.org/sowc2014/numbers/

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/04/27/5-facts-about-illegalimmigration-in-the-u-s/

https://www.usa.gov

N-10 Á NOTES
13. Arthur, 677.
14. Louis P. Pojman, ed., Life and Death: A Reader in Moral
Problems, 2nd ed. (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2000),
180.
15. Pojman, 175.
16. William W. Murdoch and Allan Oaten, “Population
and Food: Metaphors and the Reality,” BioScience 25,
no. 9 (September 1975): 561.
7. Singer 232.
8. Singer, 235.
9. Singer, 241.
10. Singer, 231.
11. Singer, 241.
12. John Arthur, “Equality, Entitlements, and the Dis-
tribution of Income,” Philosophy for the 21st Century,
ed. Steven M. Cohn (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2003), 677.

and health of mother, 237, 239–41,
247n1, 249–51, 271
illegal, 274
as immoral, 256–67
induced, 221
and inherent evil of death, 272,
273n5
insurance coverage for, 229
and killing of innocent human
beings, 227, 228, 230,
239–40, 243, 248, 252, 256n3
liberal position on, 230–32
medical (medication), 222, 223
methods of, 222, 233–34
moderate position on, 232–33
moral and legal status of, 247–56
moral arguments for and against,
227–33, 234
moral right to, 268, 273n2
moral theories and, 224–27, 234
parental notification of, 229, 236
and parenthood, 271–72
“ partial- birth,” 229, 236
and personhood, 224, 225–27,
228–32, 237–38, 246,
252–54, 258–60, 279
and pregnancy vs other physical
conditions, 269–70, 273n4
pro- choice strategy on, 257–59
after quickening, 232
rape and, 243–44, 250, 256n2
readings on, 237–84
reasons for, 223, 224, 275
and responsibility, 246, 250–51
restrictions on, 224, 225, 229, 234
and rights of fetus, 242–44
and right to life, 238–39, 241–43
fetal development and, 254–55
potential personhood and,
255–56, 262
risks of, 222, 223, 256n7
Roe v. Wade (1973) on, 224, 225,
234
and Scriptures, 226
and sentience, 232, 265–66
A
Abd al- Rehman, Umar, 711
Abizadeh, Arash, 818n5
abnormality and anthropology,
35–38
abolitionist arguments against
capital punishment, 666,
667, 669, 670–71, 672, 673
abortion, 221–84
access to, 280–81, 283n14
by adolescents, 223, 236
anti- abortionist strategy on, 257–59
background of, 221–24
and conflict between rights of fetus
and rights of woman, 249–50
conservative position on, 227–30
and contraception, 266–67,
276–77, 282n6
and cultural relativism, 25
defense of, 237–47
defined, 221, 227, 247
and definition of “human,”
251–52, 256n5
on demand, 281, 283nn17–18
desire account and, 263–64
discontinuation account and, 263,
264
ethical dilemmas on, 235–37
exercises on, 234–35
fact- checking claims about, 231
facts and figures on, 223
and familiar biological facts,
269–70
federal rulings on, 224, 225, 234
and feminist ethics, 274–84
feminist politics and, 280–82
fetal development and, 222,
254–55, 270
financial and social pressures for,
281
first- trimester, 222, 223, 224
and Good vs Minimally Decent
Samaritan, 245–46, 249–50
grief over, 270–71
guilt and remorse over, 272
sex- selective, 235–36
and sexual domination, 276,
281–82, 282n5, 283n20
spontaneous, 221
state laws on, 224, 225, 229
and status of fetus, 268–69
therapeutic, 221–22, 227
value of a future- like- ours account
and, 262–65
after viability, 224, 232
and victimizability, 265–66
virtue theory and, 268–73
waiting period for, 229
women and, 274–77, 282nn2–4
and women’s rights, 268, 272–73
and wrongness of killing,
260–63
“Abortion Through a Feminist Ethics
Lens” (Sherwin), 274–83
Abrams, Floyd, 749
absolutism, 20, 76
in natural law theory, 140, 143
ACA. See Affordable Care Act (ACA,
2014)
acquisition, justice in, 123, 130n1
act- egoism, 85–87, 91
“Active and Passive Euthanasia”
(Rachels), 300–304
actual act principles in
environmental ethics,
448–51
act- utilitarianism
on abortion, 224–25
application of, 95–99
defined, 68, 69
described, 92–94
and euthanasia, 288
and terrorism, 716
Adams, Billy, 726
Adarand Constructors Inc. v. Pena
(1995), 529
ad hominem, 59, 60
adolescents, abortion by, 223, 236
advance directive, 286, 289
adventitious needs, 345
I N D E X
‘’
I – 1

I-2 Á INDEX
affirmative action
arguments against, 522–25
case against, 514–26
critique of arguments for, 515–22
defense of, 526–35
defined, 477, 482
described, 477–79, 485
justification of, 529–30
numerical formulas in, 529–30
original meaning of, 527
strong, 478–79, 482, 485, 515
weak, 478, 482, 485, 514–15
affirming the antecedent, 46
affirming the consequent, 46
Affordable Care Act (ACA, 2014)
background of, 334–35, 340, 341
and health care for undocumented
immigrants, 342–43
major provisions of, 336–38
Afghanistan War, 724–25
“Against the Legalization of Drugs”
(Wilson), 643–51
ageism, 522
al- Assad, Bashar, 29–30
alcohol, vs drug legalization, 640,
649–50
alcohol abuse
vs drug abuse, 649–50
statistics on, 621
Alexander, Leo, 315
Alexander II, 710
ALF (Animal Liberation Front), 381
Algeria and France, 749
“All Animals Are Equal” (Singer),
384–93
Allen, Steve, 515
Allende, Salvador, 843
all- natural theory, 73
al- Qaeda, 725
alternative views in writing and
speaking about moral issues,
61–62
Altman, Andrew, 606–15
altruism, 88, 107–10
and evolution, 109–10
Ayn Rand on, 107
American Immigration Council, 759
American University, free speech at,
599, 606
Amin, Idi, 734, 734n8, 786n7
analogy, faulty, 58, 60
Anderson, Elizabeth, 794–95
Anderson, James C., 459, 460, 461
Anderson, Scott A., 582–88
Anglin, Douglas, 649
Animal Liberation, 385
Animal Liberation (Singer), 371, 375
Animal Liberation Front (ALF), 381
animal rights, 371–428
and animals as food, 371–72,
376–77, 387–88, 393n3, 394,
400, 414–18
and animals as property, 395
and animals as resources, 371, 379,
387–88, 394
and autonomy- violation
explanation, 419
background of, 372–74
and beneficence, 408
case for, 394–401
and complicity, 415, 421–24
and consistency, 412–13
and consumer product testing, 374,
388–89, 394
and contractarianism, 395–97
and contractualism, 418
and cruelty- kindness view, 372,
396–97, 406
defined, 373, 378
and definition of “right,” 407
efficacy objection to, 421–23
and egalitarianism, 397
environmental arguments for,
427n2
and equal consideration, 376, 387,
392–93
and equality, 384–93
ethical dilemmas on, 381–83
and ethical veganism, 414–28
exercises on, 380
and experiencing subjects ( subjects-
of- a- life), 378, 399, 402–4
and extreme cases, 416–17, 420, 426
false presuppositions on, 420, 426
and family relationships, 373–74
and gap between explanation and
principle, 426–27
and harm principle, 402
and human dignity, 391
and human rights, 400
human species argument against,
374, 379, 390–91
incomplete explanations and,
419–20, 426
and infants and young children,
377, 389, 395, 405, 414
inherent value and, 377, 378, 398,
399–400, 402–3
and language, 373, 374
and liberation movements, 384
and medical research, 372, 376,
377, 381–82, 388, 394,
407–13
and mental incompetence, 405,
409
and mentally ill humans, 379
and mental retardation, 379,
392–93, 396
and moral agency, 374–75, 409
moral arguments for and against,
378–79
and moral autonomy, 406,
407–8
and moral equality, 386–87
and moral status (moral
considerability), 372–73,
378, 379, 395–97
moral theories on, 375–77
and nonconsequentialism, 376–77,
380
and nonmaleficence, 408
and obligations, 408–9
and obscuring of ethically
important distinction, 426
and personhood, 374–75, 407n3
and psychological continuity,
420–21
and psychological experiments,
389
and racism, 371, 384, 385–86, 387,
396, 410
and raising the stakes, 417
and rationality, 392–93, 399,
404–5, 406
readings on, 384–428
and reduction, 412
and respect principle, 402
rights view of, 399
and right to freedom, 379
and right to life, 379, 408
and seal hunting, 382–83, 394
and sentience, 372, 402, 406,
407n2, 409, 410

INDEX Á I-3
and sexism (women’s rights),
384–86
and souls, 373
and speciesism, 376, 378, 387,
389–90, 393n4, 397, 399,
409–11, 414–15
strong vs weak position on, 378–79,
401–7
and substitution, 411–12
and suffering, 371–72, 375, 376,
387, 388, 407, 410, 414–18,
425
and superior competitor to general
principle, 426
utilitarianism and, 95, 375–76,
379–80, 386–87, 397–98, 410
and vegetarianism, 376, 413,
422–23
where to draw line for, 403–4, 417
and wrongness of inflicting pain,
262–63
and wrongness of killing, 415,
418–21
and zoos, 383
anthropocentrism, 431, 435, 458,
459–60
anthropology and abnormality,
35–38
“Anthropology and the Abnormal”
(Benedict), 32–35
anticosmopolitanism, 759, 760, 763
antipathy and racism, 473, 495,
499n10, 503–4
appeal to authority, 57, 60
appeal to emotion, 57
appeal to ignorance, 58–59, 60
appeal to the person, 59, 60
Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 489–99
applied ethics, 5–6, 7
Aquinas, Mary, 300
Aquinas, Thomas
on animal welfare, 371
on divine command theory, 10
on environmental ethics, 434
on natural law theory, 139,
155–65
on political violence, 706–9
Ardrcy, Robert, 109
“Are All Species Equal?” (Schmidtz),
458–65
Arendt, Hannah, 737
argument(s)
circular, 56–57
diagramming of, 48–51
logical, 6–7
moral. See moral arguments
argumentation vs persuasion, 43
Aristotle
on animal welfare, 371, 405
and immigration, 794
on sexual morality, 549
on virtue ethics, 172–73, 179–87
Arthur, John, 518, 519, 520, 591–92,
824
Asch, Solomon, 25
Asians, racism and, 487
Assisted Suicide: The Musical, 332
assurance problem and right to decent
minimum of health care, 359
Atkins v. Virginia (2002), 668
Atlas Shrugged (Rand), 107
AT&T affirmative action agreement,
531–32
attitudes, emotivism and, 29
Auburn University, free speech at,
616
Aussaresses, Paul, 749
Australia, “white,” 765, 784, 803,
804–5
authority, appeal to, 57, 60
autonomy
and gun rights, 656
and health care, 344–49
“Autonomy, Equality and a Just
Health Care System”
(Nielsen), 344–49
autonomy- violation explanation of
animal rights, 419
Axelrod, David, 604
Ayer, A. J., 28
Aziz, Tipu, 381
B
Baer, Ulrich, 615–18
Baier, Annette C., 188–95, 199, 211,
213
Bakke, Alan, 477, 479, 524
balance of nature, 468
Baldwin, James, 508, 510, 511
Bali, car bomb explosion in, 711
Bangladesh, India and, 734, 734n8
Ban Ki- moon, 828, 852
Banks, Delma, Jr., 677–78
Banting, Keith, 771–72
Baron, Marcia, 581n9
Barry, Brian, 212
basic needs and right to health care,
345–46, 347
Bassen, Paul, 265–66
Baxter, William F., 442–46
Baxter v. State of Montana (2009), 288
Beauchamp, Tom L., 526–35
Beaver, S. E., 847
Bedau, Hugo Adam, 680, 689n3,
690–98
begging the question, 56–57, 60
Bell, Derrick, 525
Benedict, Ruth, 32–35
beneficence, 77, 78–79
and animal rights, 408
and euthanasia, 291–93
and global economic justice, 821,
825
in Kant’s theory, 147
and right to decent minimum of
health care, 357–62
Bengal emergency, 829–30,
834–35n1
Benhabib, Seyla, 766–67
Benn, Stanley, 392–93
Ben- Porath, Sigal R., 590, 594
Bentham, Jeremy
on animal welfare, 386–87, 410
on capital punishment, 682
and environmental ethics, 435
and gun control, 664
and sexual morality, 569
on torture, 745, 746, 747, 748, 750
on utilitarianism, 92–93, 96
berdache, 33
Berg, Jonathan, 11
Besharov, Douglas, 646
Bewley, Thomas, 650
Bible
and abortion, 226
and animal rights, 371
on homosexuality, 569–71
bigotry, racial, 503
Bimba, Lizy, 829
bin al- Shibh, Ramzi, 755
bin Laden, Osama, 711, 720, 725
biocentrism, 433–34, 435, 458
biotic pyramid, 468

I-4 Á INDEX
black Americans. See racism
“Blackfish” (movie), 383
Blackmun, Harry, 225
Black Nationalism, 494–95
Blake, Michael I., 768, 775, 784,
804–5, 806nn19–20
Blakemore, Colin, 381
Blanshard, Brand, 30
blastocyst, 222
Blum, Lawrence, 471–72, 473, 474,
499–508
Blyden, Edward, 495
Bonesana, Cesare (Marchese di
Beccaria), 682n3, 699, 700
Bonilla- Silva, Eduardo, 475–76
Borjas, George, 768, 769, 770, 771
Borlaug, Norman, 837, 838
Boyle, John, 643
Bradshaw, John, 619
brain death, 288–89
Brandeis, free speech at, 618–19
Braybrooke, David, 345, 346
Brennan, William J., Jr., 682
Brewer, Lawrence, 674
Broad, C. D., 138
Brock, Dan W., 292
Brooks, Mo, 343
The Brothers Karamazov (Dostoevsky),
10, 747
Broughton, Mel, 381
Brown, L. R., 843, 846, 848
Brown University, free speech at, 619
Brown v. Board of Education (1954),
513
Brunswick, Ann, 643
Bubeck, Diemut, 214, 217
Buchanan, Teresa, 605, 606
Bundy, Ted, 666
bus boycott and racism, 471
Bush, George W.
and euthanasia, 285
on immigrants, 757
and political violence, 708, 711,
714, 724–25
Butler, Joseph, 319, 549
Byrd, James, Jr., 674
C
California Civil Rights Initiative, 514
Callahan, Daniel, 329–31
Camarota, Steve A., 771
campus free speech. See free speech
on campus
campus sexual assaults, 538–41
Camus, Albert, 696
Canada
euthanasia in, 332
health care in, 337
immigration policy of, 770, 778
cannabinoids, 633–34
“Can Terrorism Be Morally Justified?”
(Nathanson), 737–45
Can’t We Make Moral Judgments
(Midgley), 22
Capaldi, Nicholas, 523
capital punishment, 666–704
abolitionist arguments against, 666,
667, 669, 670–71, 672, 673
for all vs some murders, 668,
695–96
American views on, 684, 689n1
background of, 666–68
and botched executions, 670
case against, 690–98
of children, 668
civilization and, 687–89
consequentialism and, 668
cost of, 671, 681, 692, 693–94
court rulings on, 667–68
vs death row, 679, 682n1, 682n3
defense of, 679–83
defined, 667, 672, 675
and degradation, 682
as deterrence, 668–70, 680–81, 682,
683n10, 683n15, 691–93
and dignity, 671, 672–73, 682
and doctrine of lex talionis (life for
a life, retaliation), 672, 681,
684–89, 689nn2–3, 694–95,
698–704
and equality, 680, 683n4, 685, 701
and equal justice, 680, 683n4,
697–98
ethical dilemmas on, 677–79
excessiveness of, 682
exercises on, 676
and exonerations, 678–79
and golden rule, 685
Hegelian approach to, 685, 686,
689n4
and insanity defense, 682n2
justice and, 671, 681–82, 684–90
Kantian approach to, 685–86,
689–90nn5–7, 692, 695
and maldistribution of
punishment, 673–75,
679–80, 683n6, 683n9, 703
of mentally disabled persons, 668
and miscarriage of justice, 671,
678–79, 680, 683n8, 693–94,
702–3
moral arguments for and against,
673–75
moral illegitimacy of, 703–4
moral theories and, 668–73
for murder vs other crimes, 683n12,
695
nonconsequentialism and, 668,
671–72, 675
poor representation and, 677–78
as prevention, 668
readings on, 679–704
redemption and, 677
and restitution, 681, 683n13,
689nn2–3
retentionist arguments for, 666,
668–70, 671, 672, 675
and retributivism, 672, 681–82,
684–89, 689n2, 694–704
proportional, 672, 687, 698,
701–2
and right to life, 682, 691, 699–700
savagery of, 696
and self- defense, 690–91
and social contract theory of
political obligation, 699–700
and social defense, 690–94
statistics on, 667
and suffering, 681, 687–89
televising of, 683n14
and torture, 688–89
utilitarianism and, 670–71, 675
and value of human life, 698–99,
700–701, 704n3
carbon dioxide (CO2), 429
Card, David, 771
Cardozo, Benjamin, 695, 753
care, ethics of. see ethics of care
Carens, Joseph, 794, 795, 799, 802,
808n45, 813
Carruthers, Peter, 418
Carson, Ben, 617
Carter, Jimmy, 711

INDEX Á I-5
“The Case Against Affirmative
Action” (Pojman), 514–26
“The Case Against the Death
Penalty” (Bedau), 690–98
“The Case for Aid” (Sachs), 850–53
The Case for Animal Rights (Regan),
401
“The Case for Torturing the
Ticking Bomb Terrorist”
(Dershowitz), 745–54
catalepsy and cultural relativism,
33, 35
categorical imperative, 68, 69,
132–35, 138, 141, 150–51
Catholicism. See Roman Catholicism
causal harm, speech codes and,
607–9
censorship, 592, 597, 605, 616
Chang, Howard, 777–78
character in Kant’s theory, 132, 146
character traits in virtue ethics, 173,
175
charity
and euthanasia, 321–22, 323, 326,
329n9
vs moral duty, 824, 832–33
Charlottesville, Va., white
supremacists in, 470, 600
Charo, Musa, 829
chastity, 559–61
Chemerinsky, Erwin, 590, 592, 594,
597
Cheney, Jim, 462, 464
Cheney, Richard, 527
Chicago State University, free speech
at, 605
children
and animal rights, 377, 389, 395,
405, 414
capital punishment of, 668
and drug legalization, 641
molestation of, 554, 568–69, 585,
587n8
wrongness of killing, 261
Chodorow, Nancy, 189
Christians, vs heathens, 23
Christian scriptures and abortion,
226
cigarette smoking, 621, 649
circular argument, 56–57
city bombing against Nazism, 738–40
City of Richmond v. J. A. Croson (1989),
529
civic obligation and immigrants,
772–75
civilization, capital punishment and,
687–89
civil liberties and torture, 749–50
Civil Rights Act (1964), 477–78
Civil War, 470
claim(s)
and arguments, 41–43
in writing and speaking about
moral issues, 61
claim- rights and euthanasia, 321, 322
Clark, Robert C., 523
“clear and convincing” rule, 540,
547–48
Clifford, W. K., 44
climate change, 429–30, 432–33,
440–41, 446–57
Clinton, Hillary, on immigration,
765
Cloudflare, 600
CO2 (carbon dioxide), 429
Coates, Ta- Nehisi, 591
cocaine
vs alcohol, 649–50
legalization of, 643, 646–47
mechanism of addiction to, 651
vs nicotine, 649
statistics on, 621, 647
coercion, 541
and child molestation, 585, 587n8
and choice, 574, 581n4, 583
vs conflict of interest, 579–80,
581n11
and consent, 572, 580–81n1
and cultural mores, 572, 581n2
defined, 573–76
and gender hierarchy, 582–86,
587–88nn9–11, 587n3,
588n13
and harm, 574–75, 581n6
and intent, 573–74
and legitimacy, 575–76, 581nn8–9
and negative sanctions, 578–79,
581n10
vs negotiation, 583, 587n6
vs rape, 579–80, 582–84, 587nn5–7
and seduction, 577–80, 582–86,
587n4
and temptations, 577–78
verbal, 571–82
and weakness of will, 576–80, 583
cogent argument, 45, 47
cognitive incapacity and racism,
491–93, 498n5
cognitivism, 28
Cohen, Carl, 407–13, 415, 480, 483
Cohen, Perrin S., 389
Cohen v. California, 611–12
coherence of moral theory, 70–71
Cole, Phillip, 807n37
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 636–37
collateral damage, terrorism and,
740–43
collective principles in
environmental ethics,
453–54
color- blindness, 499
The Color Purple (Walker), 518
commandments, 8, 9
“the commons,” 836–37, 842,
844–45
common sense
moral, 74–75
and Socratic method, 13–14
community concept and
environmental ethics, 466
compensatory justice, racism and,
482–84, 516–17
competing duties, 76–77
complicity and animal rights, 415,
421–24
conception, 222, 227
“The Concept of Social Justice”
(Frankena), 390–91
conceptual inflation of racism, 473,
502
conclusion, 42, 43, 44, 47
conditional argument, 45–46
conditional premise, 45–46
Confederate Flag, 609, 610, 612–13
Confederate monuments, 470
congenital defects and euthanasia,
301–2, 327–28, 329n12
Conly, Sarah, 571–81, 582–84, 586,
587n3, 587nn5–6
consent
affirmative, 541
in campus sexual assault, 538–39,
540–41, 544–45

I-6 Á INDEX
consent (Continued)
and coercion, 572, 580–81n1,
582–84
in context, 584
implicit, 103
and views of sexual behavior, 537
consequentialist theories, 67–68,
85–131
and capital punishment, 668
defined, 67, 69
and entitlement theory of justice,
122–31
ethical egoism as, 68, 69, 85–91,
104, 107–10
exercises on, 105–6
and free speech on campus, 596–97
and global economic justice, 822,
823, 824
and immigrant, 761
readings on, 107–31
social contract, 96, 100–104, 105
and terrorism, 716
and theory of justice, 115–21
utilitarianism as, 67–68, 69,
91–100, 101, 104–5, 111–15
and war, 706–7, 715, 716
conservation movement, 466
conservatism, 71
considered moral judgments, 66–67,
69, 71–72, 75
consumer product testing and animal
rights, 374, 388–89, 394
contraception, 266–67, 276–77,
282n6
contractarianism. See social contract
theory
contract theory, 202
social. See social contract theory
contractualism and animal rights,
418
contractualist principle in
environmental ethics, 456
contrary opinions in writing and
speaking about moral issues,
61–62
contribution principle in
environmental ethics,
450–51
Cook, Samuel Dubois, 581n4
Corvino, John, 564–71
cosmopolitan egalitarians, 759
cosmopolitanism, 759, 760, 763
vs civic obligation, 772–75
cost- benefit analysis, 217
counterexample method, 47, 54
counterfactual principles in
environmental ethics,
454–56
counterintuitive consequences
argument against ethical
egoism, 109
course- of- life needs, 345
crack cocaine, 643, 646–47
Creeley, Will, 605–6
crimes committed by immigrants,
758
criminalization of drug use, 623, 630,
631
critical reasoning, 5, 6–7, 41
critical thinking, morality of, 44
“A Critique of Lifeboat Ethics”
(Murdoch & Oaten), 841–50
Critique of Practical Reason (Kant), 169
cross- species transplants and
utilitarianism, 101
crude opinions, 36
cruelty- kindness view and animal
rights, 372, 396–97, 406
Crummell, Alexander, 494–95
Cruzan, Nancy, 288
Cruzan v. Director, Missouri
Department of Health (1990),
288
cultural appropriation, 486–87
culturally induced moral ignorance
and racism, 532
cultural relativism, 23–28, 30
arguments for, 24–26
belonging to several societies and,
28
defined, 20, 21
and disagreements within society,
26–27
examples of, 23
exercises on, 31–32
female circumcision and, 24
and moral infallibility, 26
vs moral objectivism, 23, 27
and moral progress, 27
and nonmoral beliefs, 25
and outside criticism, 27
readings on, 32–38
and social reform, 26
and tolerance, 26
culture and immigrants, 760, 774,
792–93
current time- slice principles in
entitlement theory of justice,
123–24
D
DACA (Deferred Action for
Childhood Arrivals), 760,
767
Daily Stormer, 600
D’Amuro, Pat, 755
danger and gun control, 655–57, 664
Daniels, Norman, 339, 341, 354–56
darknet, 600
Davis, Troy, 674
Dawkins, Richard, 109
DDT and penguins, 442–46
“Dear White America” (Yancy),
508–11
death
euthanasia and concept of, 287–89,
295
quick vs prolonged, 310
whole- brain vs higher brain,
288–89
death penalty. See capital
punishment
Death Penalty Information Center,
678
The Decent Society (Margalit), 501
deception and sexual morality, 541
“Deciding Who Is Human”
(Noonan), 252
decriminalization of drug use, 623,
630, 631
deductive arguments, 44–47, 62
“A Defense of Abortion” (Thomson),
237–47
Deferred Action for Childhood
Arrivals (DACA), 760, 767
degradation, capital punishment
and, 682
Degrazia, David, 624, 625, 630–31
de La Rochefoucauld, François, 750
Delgado, Richard, 594, 596
de Marneffe, Peter, 629
denying the antecedent, 46
denying the consequent, 46

INDEX Á I-7
deontological theories, 67, 68–70,
132
Department of Homeland Security,
766
deportation
of children, 760, 766–67
defined, 757, 760
statistics on, 757
De Quincey, Thomas, 636
derivative right, 654
Dershowitz, Alan, 715, 745–54
Descartes, René, 207–8, 371, 372,
414, 559
descriptive ethics, 5, 7
detachment of infants, 189
deterrence, capital punishment
as, 668–70, 680–81, 682,
683n10, 683n15, 691–93
Development, Relief, and Education
for Alien Minors Act (2001),
760, 767
developmental aid and immigrants,
779, 780
DeVos, Betsy, 548
Die Meistersinger (opera), 560
Dieter, Richard, 678
difference principle, 130–31n5
and immigrants, 775
dignity, capital punishment and,
671, 672–73, 682
dilation and evacuation, 222
dilation and suction curettage, 222
direct moral consideration, 372, 378,
395–97
disability, effective treatment of, 367
disabled people, euthanasia for, 319,
328, 332–33
discrimination, racial, 471, 475,
477–78, 482, 485, 527–30
disease, effective treatment of, 367
distributive justice, 70, 78, 122–31
and global economic justice, 822,
825, 826
and immigration, 762
and freedom of association, 791
vs open border, 768–80
U.S. immigration policy and, 768,
777–80
and right to health care, 338–39
District of Columbia v. Heller (2008),
626, 664
diversity, racism and, 479–82, 501,
517–18, 527
divine command theory, 10–11, 70
divine law
need for, 157–58
single, 158–59
doctrine of double effect, 140, 141,
142
in environmental ethics, 452
and terrorism, 717, 719–20,
740–43
Dolezal, Rachel, 486–87
Don Juanism, 561
Donne, John, 837
Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 10, 747
double effect, doctrine of. See
doctrine of double effect
double intention, principle of, 743
Douglas, William O., 697
Down syndrome and euthanasia,
301–2, 319, 327
“Dr. Death,” 291
“Dreamers,” 760, 767
Dreger, Alice, 605, 606
Dresden, Allied bombings of, 713
“Drones, Ethics, and the Armchair
Soldier” (Kaag), 735–37
drone warfare, 735–37
drug(s)
criminalization of, 623, 630, 631
dangers of, 638–39
decriminalization of, 623,
630, 631
defined, 622, 630, 631
harm reduction policy for, 623–24,
630
medical monopoly over, 638–40
war on, 638, 643, 647
drug abuse
and availability, 643–45
defined, 622, 635
recruitment to, 644
statistics on, 621
technical approach to, 635–36
and tolerance, 636
drug addiction, 634–42
defined, 622, 630, 631, 634–35
effects of, 636–37
mechanism of, 650–51
reasons for, 637
science and, 650–51
drug dependence, 622–23,
630, 631
drug education, 649
drug habit, 622
drug illegality, benefits of, 648–49
drug legalization
vs alcohol, 640, 649–50
arguments against, 633, 643–52
background of, 621–24
and children, 641
defined, 623, 630, 631
exercises on, 631–32
fiscal advantages of, 637–38
and freedom of self- medication,
640–42
in Great Britain, 645
and harm principle, 628–29, 630,
631, 638–39
individual freedom and, 636
Kant’s theory and, 627, 631
and legal moralism, 629–30, 631
of marijuana, 622, 623, 633–34
moral arguments on, 628–30
moral theories and, 626–27, 631
natural law theory and, 627, 631
and paternalism principle, 629,
630, 631
readings on, 634–51
social tradition and, 639
and tax rate on drugs, 648
utilitarianism and, 626–27, 631
drug overdose, accidental vs suicidal,
636
drug- related violence, 621
drug treatment, compulsory, 649
Drug Use Forecasting (DUF) project,
647
drug violations, imprisonment for,
621–22
drug withdrawal, 623
Dummett, Michael, 807n25
Durand, Jorge, 779
duties
competing, 76–77, 137
perfect vs imperfect, 133, 141,
152–53
prima facie, 77–80
of rescue, 79
toward self vs others, 153–54
Dworkin, Andrea, 619
Dworkin, Ronald, 524

I-8 Á INDEX
E
earnings, taxation of, 127–28,
131nn6–7
Easterly, William, 850–53
Eastman, Cari Lee, 758, 759
ecological holists, 434, 435
ecological individualists, 434, 435
economic inequalities, 120, 121
economic value and environmental
ethics, 467, 469
economy and immigration, 758, 760,
768, 770, 772
education
and immigration, 770–71
racism in, 476, 477, 479–80, 481,
488–89, 492, 513, 523, 524
EEOC (Equal Employment
Opportunity Commissions),
531–32
effective treatment
rights and limits on, 367–68
in right to health care, 367
efficacy objection to animal rights,
421–23
egalitarian(s) and egalitarianism
and animal rights, 397
cosmopolitan, 759
and global economic justice, 823,
825, 826
and immigration, 793–99
on right to health care, 339, 341
“Egalitarianism and Equal
Consideration of Interests”
(Benn), 392
egoism
act-, 85–87, 91
and altruism, 107–10
ethical. See ethical egoism
paradox of, 108
psychological, 87–89
rule-, 85–86, 91
Eichmann, Adolf, 666
Eishtain, Jean Bethke, 22
elderly, euthanasia of, 319–20, 327,
328
elenchus, 14
Ellinwood, Everett, 646, 647
Emancipation Proclamation, 470
embodiment
in feminist ethics, 207–8
and sexual morality, 561, 563
embryo, 222
emotion(s)
appeal to, 57
in ethics of care, 210, 211
in feminist ethics, 198, 202
emotivism, 28–30, 31
and attitudes, 29
vs cognitivism, 28
defined, 28–30, 31
exercises on, 31–32
and feelings, 28, 30
and good vs evil, 29–30
and influence, 28, 29
and moral disagreements, 29
and moral facts, 29
and moral reasons, 29
employer sanctions and
immigration, 780
employment, racism in, 475, 523–24,
528–29, 531–33, 534n13
endangered species, 463–64
end- result principles in entitlement
theory of justice, 123–24
enforced beneficence arguments for
right to decent minimum of
health care, 357–62
enhanced interrogation techniques,
754–55
Enlightenment moral theory vs
feminist ethics, 207–9
entitlements, system- related, 366
entitlement theory of justice, 122–31
description of, 122–23
historical vs end- results principles
in, 123–24
patterning in, 124–25, 130n3
how liberty upsets, 125–26
principles of justice in holdings in,
122–23
redistribution and property rights
in, 127–30
“The Entitlement Theory of Justice”
(Nozick), 122–31
environmental ethics, 429–69
actual act principles in, 448–51
and animal rights, 427n2
and anthropocentrism, 431, 435,
458, 459–60
background of, 430–34
and balance of nature, 468
and biocentrism, 433–34, 435, 458
and climate change, 429–30,
432–33, 440–41, 446–57
collective principles in, 453–54
and community concept, 466
contractualist principle in, 456
contribution principle in, 450–51
counterfactual principles in,
454–56
doctrine of double effect in, 452
and ecological individualists vs
holists, 434, 435
and economic value, 467, 469
and endangered species, 463–64
and equality, 461–63
ethical dilemmas on, 440–42
exercises on, 439
general action principle in, 454
general permission principle in,
454–55
group principle in, 454
harm principle in, 448–50
and humans as end rather than
means, 443
ideal law principle in, 453–54
indirect harm principle in, 450
and instrumental value, 430
internal principles in, 451–53
and intrinsic value, 430–31, 459
Kant’s theory and, 451, 452
land ethic in, 465–69
and land pyramid, 468
means principle in, 452
moral arguments for and against,
435–38
and moral status (moral
considerability), 430, 431,
460, 4463
moral theories and, 434–35
and natural state, 444–45
overview of, 429–30
and predators, 467
and preservation of incentive,
443
proxies in, 444
public permission principle in,
455–56
questions related to, 429
readings on, 442–69
and respect, 461–64
risk principle in, 451
and self- respect, 464

INDEX Á I-9
and species egalitarians vs
nonegalitarians, 434, 435,
458–65
and speciesism, 460–61
and spheres of freedom, 442–43
and trade- offs between resources,
445–46
universalizability principle in,
451–52
virtue principle in, 452–53
and vulnerability, 460–61
and waste as bad, 443
and zoocentrism, 431–33, 435
Epicurus, 86, 111
epistemology, 5
equal abilities thesis and racism, 519
equal consideration and animal
rights, 376, 387, 392–93
equal educational opportunity and
free speech on campus, 612
Equal Employment Opportunity
Commissions (EEOC),
531–32
equality, 7–8
and animal rights, 384–93
capital punishment and, 680,
683n4, 685, 701
and environmental ethics, 461–63
and health care, 344–49, 368–69
equality of opportunity
and immigration, 773
and right to decent minimum of
health care, 354–56
equal justice, capital punishment
and, 680, 683n4, 697–98
equal opportunity
and racism, 478
and right to health care, 365–66
Equal Protection Clause, 609, 610
equal results argument, 516,
518–20
equivocation, 57, 60
Erlich, Victor, 616
eternal law, 155–56
ethical egoism, 85–91
act- vs rule-, 85–87, 91
advocacy for, 89
applying, 86–87
arguments against, 89–91
and considered moral judgments,
90
counterintuitive consequences
argument against, 109
criticisms of, 108–9
defined, 68, 69, 85
described, 68, 85–86, 104
evaluating, 87–91
inconsistent outcomes argument
against, 108
and moral criteria of adequacy,
89–91
and moral experiences, 90
and paradox of egoism, 108
psychological egoism in,
87–89
publicity argument against, 108
reading on, 107–10
self- interest in, 85–86, 87–89
usefulness in moral problem
solving of, 90–91
ethical landscape, 5–6
ethics, 3–19
applied, 5–6, 7
defined, 3, 7
descriptive, 5, 7
doing, 3
elements of, 6–8
exercises on, 12–13
importance of, 3–5
landscape of, 5–6
meta-, 5, 7
vs morality and religion, 3, 8–11
normative, 5, 7
readings on, 13–19
religion and, 8–9
trying not to do, 4
and values, 3
“The Ethics of Addiction” (Szasz),
634–42
ethics of care, 198–99
conception of persons as relational
in, 212–13
and critique of liberal
individualism, 212–13
defined, 199
described, 198–99
emotions in, 210, 211
exercises on, 199–200
features of, 209–12
history of, 198–99
impartiality in, 210–11
justice in, 198, 213–15
meeting needs of particular others
in, 210
as moral theory, 209–17
personal relationships in, 211
public vs private sphere in, 212
readings on, 188–95, 209–17
societal implications of, 215–16
and virtue ethics, 216–17
“The Ethics of Care as Moral Theory”
(Held), 209–17
ethics of justice, 198, 213–15
eudaimonia, 172, 177, 271
European Union (EU), 789, 800
euthanasia, 285–333
abuses of, 295, 313–14, 328
active, 286, 287, 289, 295
vs passive, 300–304, 323–27
active nonvoluntary, 287
active voluntary, 287
good vs bad consequences of,
308–14
moral arguments against, 294–95,
296
moral arguments for, 291–94,
296, 307–8
reading on, 307–15
role of physicians in, 314–15
and advance directive, 286, 289
and allowable interference, 323–24
argument from nature against, 305
argument from practical effects
against, 306–7
argument from self- interest against,
305–6
availability of alternatives to, 309
background of, 286–89
beneficence and, 291–93
and “burden on society,” 327
in Canada, 332
and charity, 321–22, 323, 326,
329n9
and claim- rights, 321, 322
and concept of beneficial, 317, 319,
329n6
congenital defects and, 301–2,
327–28, 329n12
and connection between life and
good, 317–21
defined, 286, 289, 295, 315
and definition of death, 287–89,
295

I-10 Á INDEX
euthanasia (Continued)
for disabled people, 319, 328,
332–33
and Down syndrome, 301–2, 319,
327
of elderly, 319–20, 327, 328
ethical dilemmas on, 297–300
exercises on, 296
individual well- being and, 307–8
involuntary, 286, 289
and justice, 321–22, 323, 329n9
and killing vs letting die, 293–94,
329–31
kinds of, 286–87
landmark court rulings on, 285–86,
288
and liberty, 321–22
medical perspective on, 331
for mental defects, 301–2, 319, 327,
328
metaphysical perspective on, 330
moral arguments for and against,
291–95, 296
and morally permissible killing, 293
moral perspective on, 330–31
moral theories and, 289–91, 295–96
in Nazi Germany, 315–17, 327, 328
in Netherlands, 332
for newborns, 298–99, 301–2, 327,
328
nonvoluntary, 286, 289, 295,
324–25
vs pain control, 309–10
passive, 286–87, 289, 295
vs active, 300–304, 323–27
nonvoluntary, 287
voluntary, 287
vs physician- assisted suicide,
287–89, 291, 297–98, 332–33
and physicians as healers, 310–11,
331
present practices of, 327
procedural safeguards for, 314
and prohibition of homicide,
312–13
and psychological suffering, 310
public opinion and, 293
and quick vs prolonged death, 310
and Karen Ann Quinlan case, 286
readings on, 300–333
reassurance of access to, 309
and removal of life- sustaining
treatment, 331
and right to life, 322–23, 325–26,
328
and right to refuse treatment,
311–12
and right to services, 324
and Terry Schiavo case, 285–86
self- determination and, 291–93,
307.309
slippery slope argument against,
294–95, 296, 299, 306, 313
and society’s commitment to
provide optimal care for
dying patients, 311
subtle pressure to request, 312
and suffering of patient, 293, 296,
301, 309, 324
and suicide pact, 299–300
voluntary, 286, 289, 295
wrongfulness of, 304–7
“Euthanasia” (Foot), 315–29
“Euthanasia for Disabled People”
(Carr), 332–33
Euthhyphro (Plato), 10–11, 16–19
evolution and altruism, 109–10
exceptions, 7–8, 76–77
execution. See capital punishment
exonerations, 678–79
experiencing subjects and animal
rights, 378, 399, 402–4
experimental subjects, rights of,
35–38, 79
expressive harm, speech codes and,
606–15
extreme cases and animal rights,
416–17, 420, 426
extrinsic value, 6, 7
F
fair dealing and immigration, 777
fairness, justice as, 117–20
fallacies in moral reasoning, 56–60
family model of racism, 495, 496–97,
498n4
family relationships and animal
rights, 373–74
family reunification and
immigration, 769–70, 779
“Famine, Affluence, and Morality”
(Singer), 829–35
fantasy and sexual morality, 562–63
faulty analogy, 58, 60
Federal Building, Oklahoma City,
bombing, 711
Federal Housing Administration
(FHA), 488
feelings, 7
emotivism and, 28, 30
Feinberg, Joel, 88, 258–59
Feldman Barrett, Lisa, 601–3
female circumcision, 24
female genital cutting (FGC), 24
female genital mutilation, 24
“feminine values,” 204
feminist criticisms of western ethics,
203–4
feminist ethics, 196–217
and abortion, 274–84
common misconstruals of, 204–6
current concerns in, 207–9
defined, 196, 199
described, 197–98
development of contemporary,
201–3
embodiment in, 207–8
emotions in, 198, 202
vs Enlightenment moral theory,
207–9
ethics of care as, 188–95, 198–99,
209–17
exercises on, 199–200
and feminist criticisms of western
ethics, 203–4
in history, 197
impartiality in, 198, 202
minimum conditions of adequacy
for, 206–7
moral principles in, 197, 202, 208–9
nonidealized view in, 198
personal relationships in, 197, 202
psychological propensities in, 208
rationale for, 196
reading on, 201–9
“Feminist Ethics” (Jaggar), 201–9
feminist politics and abortion,
280–82
Feminists Doing Ethics, 216
Ferguson, Adam, 194
fertilization, 222
fetal development and abortion, 222,
254–55, 278–79

INDEX Á I-11
fetus
defined, 222
feminist view of, 278–80
non- feminist view of, 277–78
personhood of, 224–32, 237–38,
246, 252–54, 258–60, 279
relationships of, 280, 283n13
FGC (female genital cutting), 24
FHA (Federal Housing
Administration), 488
fidelity, 77
Fine, Sarah, 808–19
First Amendment, 590, 592, 594–95,
596, 598, 604, 605
Fletcher, George, 324
Flower, Linda W., 236
food chains, 468
Foot, Philippa, 165–71, 315–29
fossil fuels, 429
Foundation for Individual Rights in
Education, 605
The Foundations of the Metaphysics of
Morals (Kant), 166, 360
Fourteenth Amendment, 513, 609
Fourth Amendment, 513
Franken, Al, 89
Frankena, William, 390–91
Franklin, Benjamin, 756
freedom
and Socratic method, 15
spheres of, and environmental
ethics, 442–43
freedom of association
argument against, 808–19
argument for, 762, 787–809
and coercion, 818n5
and culture, 792–93
and distributive justice, 791
and exporting justice, 810, 813–14,
819n7, 819n21
and expressive association,
814–15
and granting of citizenship status,
811–12
and harm to others, 812–13
for individuals vs groups, 788–93,
806n7, 809–10, 819n7
and presumptive right to exclude,
809–18
and right of exit, 812, 819n18
and right to exclude, 791, 809–12
vs self- determination, 789,
805–6n5, 810, 812–14,
819nn17–18
territorial argument for, 817–18
“Freedom of Association Is Not the
Answer” (Fine), 808–19
freedom of movement, rights to, and
immigrants, 802
free speech on campus, 589–620
background of, 590–94
and censorship, 592, 597, 605, 616
consequentialism and, 596–97
court rulings on, 592, 604–5, 607
and equal educational opportunity,
612
and Equal Protection Clause, 609
ethical dilemmas on, 599–601
exercises on, 598–99
and First Amendment, 590, 592,
594–95, 596, 598, 604, 605
and hate speech, 589, 597–98
defined, 589, 597
harm caused by, 594, 596–97,
606–15
means of combating, 608
moral arguments against, 597–98
and moral contempt, 610–12
online, 600
by private individuals vs public
officials, 607, 609–10,
611–12
symbols and objects used in, 599,
608
as violence, 595, 596, 600–605
history of, 589
importance of, 591–92
and Liberal Science, 604–5
limits of, 592, 594, 598, 601, 604
and mental- health crisis, 603
and microaggressions, 593, 603, 605
moral arguments on, 597
moral theories and, 594–97
and multiculturalism, 619–20
nonconsequentialism and, 594–96
and pornography, 619
progressive ideas behind lack of,
618–20
and racial epithets, 591, 600–601,
611, 613–14
readings on, 601–20
and recovery movement, 619
restoring, 605–6
and role of university, 606, 608–9
and safe spaces, 590, 595, 603, 619
and “snowflakes,” 615–18
and social media, 603
and speech codes, 592–94, 598
advocates of, 607
broad vs narrow, 613–14
and causal harm, 607–9
court rulings on, 592, 607
critics of, 606–7
defined, 589–90, 597, 615n1
and expressive harm, 606–15
vs general harassment rules,
613–14
harm caused by, 594, 597
as official condemnation, 612–13
and racial epithets, 613–14
and sanitizing of scholarly work,
608–9, 611, 619
and trigger warnings, 590, 603, 605
French, William, 459, 460–61
Freud, Sigmund, 556, 560, 562
Frey, R. G., 402
Friedersdorf, Conor, 593
Friedman, Milton, 643, 644
fruitfulness, 71
Fundamental Principles of the
Metaphysic of Morals (Kant),
146–55
fundamental right, 652–54
Furman v. Georgia (1972), 667
G
Gacy, John Wayne, 666
Gallagher, Tim, 442
Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand,
515
Gates, Bill, 850
Gates, Melinda, 850
Gauthier, David, 788
Gawin, Frank, 646, 647
Gay- Williams, J., 304–7
gender differences in personality, 189
gene(s), 109–10
general action principle in
environmental ethics, 454
generalization, hasty, 59–60
general permission principle in
environmental ethics,
454–55

I-12 Á INDEX
genocide, 724
Genovese, Kitty, 245
Germany, health care in, 337
Gesell, Gerhard A., 531
gifts of fortune in Kant’s theory, 132,
146
Gilligan, Carol, 188–95, 198, 213
Gillman, Howard, 590, 592, 594, 597
global economic justice, 820–53
background of, 820–21
and Bengal emergency, 829–30,
834–35n1
charity vs moral duty in, 824,
832–33
concept of “the commons” in,
836–37, 842, 844–45
consequentialism and, 822, 823, 824
costs of, 847–48
and definition of justice, 820, 825,
826
distance and, 821, 823, 831
and distributive justice, 822, 825,
826
and duty of beneficence, 821, 825
and egalitarian theories of justice,
823, 825, 826
ethical dilemmas on, 827–29
exercises on, 826–27
and failure of developed countries
to deliver on promises, 828
and fertilizer subsidies in Malawi,
827–28
and individual moral obligation,
830–34, 835n2
and libertarian theories of justice,
822, 825, 826
lifeboat metaphor for, 825–26,
835–41
critique of, 841–50
and malaria control, 850–53
and malign neglect, 845–46
marginal utility in, 824, 832,
833–34
and mass starvation in Kenya, 829
moral arguments on, 823–26
moral theories and, 822–23
obligatory vs supererogatory
actions in, 821, 825, 832–33
population growth and, 823, 836,
841, 843, 846–47
measures to reduce, 848–49
questions related to, 820
and ratchet effect, 838–40, 842, 844
readings on, 829–53
and relief of suffering, 830–31, 832
and retributive justice, 822, 825
and rights, 821, 824, 825
negative vs positive, 821, 825, 826
statistics on, 820, 822
utilitarianism and, 822–24
and world food banks, 837–38, 842
global warming, 429–30, 432–33,
440–41, 446–57
Glover, Jonathan, 806n22
God and divine command theory,
10–11, 70
Goff, Rick, 481
Golash- Boza, Tanya Maria, 472,
474
Golden Mean, 173, 177
Golden Rule, 134
capital punishment and, 685
Golding, Martin, 608, 611
Goldman, Alan, 542–43, 548–77
Gonzales v. Oregon (2006), 288
good effect in natural law theory, 139
Good Samaritan, 109, 245–46
good vs evil, emotivism and, 29–30
good will, 132–33, 146–47
Gotlin, Daniel J., 297
grading, “race norm” in, 524
Graham v. Connor (1989), 513
Grand Mosque seizure, 711
Grant, Ulysses S., 756
gratitude, 77
greatest happiness principle, 92–93,
96, 111, 113
green card, 757, 769
greenhouse gases, 429–30, 449, 451
Gregg v. Georgia (1976), 668, 675
Grier Partnership, 528
Grigoriadis, Vanessa, 539
Groningen Protocol, 298
grooming, mutual, 109–10
Gross, Samuel R., 678
group principle in environmental
ethics, 454
guest worker program, 779–80
Gulland, J., 845
gun(s), statistics on, 625
gun control
armchair arguments for, 658
assessment of empirical evidence
for, 661–62
background of, 624–26
as bad public policy, 654
data supporting, 659–60
defined, 624, 630, 631
exercises on, 632
of handguns, 661–62
harm, danger, and risk argument
for, 655–57, 664
legislation on, 664
mass shootings and, 632–33
minimal, 625, 665
moderate, 625, 630
moral arguments on, 630–31
moral theories and, 627–28
political philosophy and, 663–65
possessive libertarianism and,
657–58, 665
readings on, 652–65
utilitarianism and, 627, 664–65
“Gun Control” (LaFollette),
652–63
gun ownership
background of, 624–26, 631
and crime prevention, 658–59,
660–61
justification of, 652–55
and secondary gun markets, 659
statistics on, 624
and violence, 658, 659–60, 661
gun policy, view of U.S. adults on,
626
gun rights
armchair arguments for, 658
assessment of empirical evidence
for, 661–62
autonomy and, 656
background of, 624–26, 631
court rulings on, 626
data supporting, 660–61
as derivative right, 654
as fundamental right, 652–54
individual vs collective, 626
justification of, 652–55
and liability insurance, 662
libertarians and, 657–58, 665
moral arguments on, 630–31
as moral question, 652–54
and Second Amendment, 625–26,
630, 631, 664

INDEX Á I-13
and self- defense, 630–31, 653–54
utilitarianism and, 627–28
gun violence, statistics on, 624, 625
Gutmann, Amy, 808, 814, 815
H
Haidt, Jonathan, 601–5
hallucinogens, 621
Hampton, Jean, 794
happiness
defined, 93
greatest, 92–93, 96, 111, 113
as intrinsic good, 92
in Kant’s theory, 132–33, 146
pursuit of, 88–89
quantity vs quality of, 93, 111–12
units of, 66, 93
in virtue ethics, 172, 181–82
Hardin, Garrett, 824–26, 828, 829,
835–41, 842–46, 848
Harlan, John Marshall, 611, 695
harm
danger, and risk argument for gun
control, 655–57, 664
prohibition against doing, 79
harm prevention argument for right
to decent minimum of
health care, 357
harm principle
and animal rights, 402
and drug legalization, 628–29, 630,
631, 638–39
in environmental ethics, 448–50
and gun control, 655–57, 664
harm reduction policy, for drug use,
623–24, 630
Harrison Narcotic Act, 641
Hartnoll, Richard, 645
Harvard Injury Control Research
Center (HICRC), 665
Harwood, Sterling, 518, 519, 520
Haslam, Nick, 593
hasty generalization, 59–60
Hatch, Alison E., 538, 539, 540
hate speech, 589, 597–98
defined, 589, 597
harm caused by, 594, 596–97,
606–15
means of combating, 608
moral arguments against, 597–98
and moral contempt, 610–12
online, 600
by private individuals vs public
officials, 607, 609–10,
611–12
symbols and objects used in, 599,
608
as violence, 595, 596, 600–605
health, decent minimum of, 350
health care, 334–70
background of, 334–38
defined, 334
ethical dilemmas on, 342–44
exercises on, 341–42
health insurance for, 334–35,
336–38
and liberty, 348–49
managed, 336, 340
preventative, 348
in private vs public sector, 347–48
readings on, 344–70
right to
autonomy and, 344–49
basic needs and, 345–46, 347
effective treatment of disease and
disability in, 367
equality and, 344–49, 368–69
equal opportunity and, 365–66
inclusion in, 366–69
justice and, 334, 338–39, 344,
352, 364–65
legal vs moral, 363
libertarians on, 338, 341, 356,
364
limits on effective treatments in,
367–68
moral arguments for and against,
339–40, 341
moral theories on, 338–39, 341
positive vs negative, 363–64
system- relative entitlements in,
366
utilitarians on, 352–53, 364–65
right to decent minimum of, 340,
350–63
arguments for, 352–62
assumption of, 350
assurance problem and, 359
attraction of idea of, 351–52
clarification of concept of, 350–51
enforced beneficence arguments
for, 357–62
equality of opportunity argument
for, 354–56
harm prevention argument for,
357
ideal contract theory and, 353–54
need for supporting theory for,
352
objections and replies to
arguments for, 359–62
prudential arguments for, 357
public goods argument for,
358–59
special rights arguments for, 356
strong equal access principle and,
351–52
role of nurses and paramedics in,
348
for “undeserving sick,” 343
for undocumented immigrants,
342–43
in U.S. vs other countries, 335–38,
341
when people can’t afford, 343–44
health insurance, 334–35, 336–38
heathens vs Christians, 23
hedonic calculus, 92–93
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 490,
684, 685, 686, 689n4, 699
Hegelian approach to capital
punishment, 685, 686,
689n4
Held, Virginia, 199, 209–17
heroin
vs alcohol, 649–50
legalization of, 643–45
statistics on, 621
HICRC (Harvard Injury Control
Research Center), 665
higher- brain death, 289
Hill, Marc Lamont, 601
Hiroshima, atomic bombing of, 713,
716, 728
Hispanic immigrants, 757–58
historical principles in entitlement
theory of justice, 123–24
Hitler, Adoph
and cultural relativism, 27
and euthanasia, 315–17, 327, 328
and subjective relativism, 22
Hobbes, Thomas, 101–2, 103, 706,
735

I-14 Á INDEX
Hoffman, Bruce, 711
holdings
original acquisition of, 122
rectification of injustice in, 123,
130n2
transfer of, 122
Holmquist, Sabrina, 236
Holocaust
and free speech, 615, 616
racism and, 473, 494
homogenization, racial, 506, 507
homosexuality
and AIDS, 567
and biblical teaching, 569–71
biological basis for, 565
and celibacy, 568
and child molestation, 568–69
and cultural relativism, 33, 35
defined, 537, 544
as harmful, 566–69
libertarian view on, 563
as lifestyle choice, 565
reading on, 564–71
sex- as- procreation argument
against, 565–66, 569
slippery- slope argument against,
571
as “unnatural,” 564–66
honor killing, 20–21
Hook, Sidney, 523
hookup culture, 539
Hospers, John, 822
hospitality, right of universal, 767
housing, racism in, 475, 488, 528
Hughes, Beverley, 546
Hughes, John, 638
“human,” definition of, 251–52,
256n5
human dignity and animal rights,
391
humanitarian assistance and
immigrants, 772–73, 777,
796, 806nn18–19
humanitarian intervention and war,
707, 717–19, 721
human law, 157
human rights
and animal rights, 400
and immigrants, 766, 781,
786n5
and torture, 749–50
human rights violations and war,
707, 716
human species argument against
animal rights, 374, 379,
390–91
Hume, David, 194, 321
humor, racist, 502–3, 508n5
Hunt, George, 564
Hunt, Lester H., 624
Hunt, Molly, 564
Huntington, Samuel, 803
Hursthouse, Rosalind, 175–76,
268–73
Husak, Douglas, 623, 628–29
Hussein, Saddam, 708
hypothetical imperative(s)
in Kant’s theory, 132, 141, 150, 151
morality as system of, 165–71
hypothetical syllogism, 46
I
ideal contract view and right to
decent minimum of health
care, 353–54
idealization in feminist ethics, 198
ideal law principle in environmental
ethics, 453–54
identity, racial, 486–87, 506
ideological resistance and racism, 492
ideological tests for immigrants, 765
ignorance, appeal to, 58–59, 60
immigrants and immigration,
756–819
anticosmopolitanism about, 759,
760, 763
to Canada, 770, 778
closed borders for
and anticosmopolitanism, 759
case for right to, 787–93
reasons given for, 759–61
consequentialism and, 761
cosmopolitanism about, 759, 760,
763
vs civic obligation, 772–75
crimes committed by, 758
and culture, 760, 774, 792–93
deportation of
of children, 760, 766–67
defined, 757, 760
statistics on, 757
and developmental aid, 779, 780
and difference principle, 775
and distributive justice, 762
and freedom of association, 791
vs open border, 768–80
U.S. immigration policy and, 768,
777–80
and economy, 758, 760, 768, 770,
772
and education, 770–71
egalitarianism and, 793–99
and employer sanctions, 780
and equality of opportunity, 773
ethical dilemmas on, 764–65
exercises on, 763
and fair dealing, 777
and family reunification, 769–70,
779
and freedom of association
argument against, 808–19
argument for, 762, 787–809
and coercion, 818n5
and culture, 792–93
and distributive justice, 791
and exporting justice, 810,
813–14, 819n7, 819n21
and expressive association,
814–15
and granting of citizenship status,
811–12
and harm to others, 812–13
for individuals vs groups, 788–93,
806n7, 809–10, 819n7
and presumptive right to exclude,
809–18
and right of exit, 812, 819n18
and right to exclude, 791,
809–12
vs self- determination, 789,
805–6n5, 810, 812–14,
819nn17–18
territorial argument for, 817–18
green card for, 757, 769
and guest worker program, 779–80
Hispanic, 757–58
history of, 756–61, 763
and humanitarian assistance,
772–73, 777, 796,
806nn18–19
and human rights, 766, 781, 786n5
ideological tests for, 765
jobs for, 758

INDEX Á I-15
and job skills, 770, 777–78, 779, 780
labor market argument on, 771
and language proficiency, 770, 774
legislation on, 757, 769
libertarian view of, 759, 799–803
limiting number of, 756, 759
median voter argument on, 771
Mexican, 767, 771, 778
and migrant workers, 778–80
misconceptions about, 757–58, 763
moral arguments on, 762
moral dilemma of, 768–72
moral theories and, 761–62
Muslim, 765
nonconsequentialism and, 761, 762
and obligations
associative, 767
civic, 772–75
to own citizens, 759, 762, 768–80
open borders for
and cosmopolitanism, 759
egalitarian case for, 793–99,
806–7nn18–26, 809–10
libertarian case for, 799–803,
807nn30–39, 810
vs social justice, 768–80
path to citizenship for, 758–59
readings on, 766–819
and rectification and redress, 777
refugees as
accepting or rejecting, 761, 764
defined, 757, 760
history of, 757, 761
Jewish, 764
statistics on, 757
and relational equality, 794,
796–98, 806n20–23, 808n45
and right of universal hospitality,
767
and rights to freedom of
movement, 802
and right to self- governance,
766–67, 775–76
and right to survival, 767
and security, 759
selection of, 781–87, 803–5
conflicting pressures in, 781
cultural affinity in, 783, 785–86
and discrimination, 784
and national self- determination,
781
for particularity claimants,
781–82, 783, 786nn7–8
on political grounds, 785
possible grounds for, 782–83
racial or religious preference in,
784, 803–4, 805n47, 807n41,
808n45, 818–19n6
and reasonable grounds for
refusal, 781, 784–85, 786n6
and refugee burden- sharing
schemes, 782, 786–87n12,
786n9
for refugees vs economic
migrants, 781–86
skill- based, 783
and social justice, 768–80
and social services, 772
and social solidarity, 771, 774
statistics on, 757, 766
taxes paid by, 758
unauthorized (undocumented,
illegal)
health care for, 342–43
routes to citizenship for, 758–59
statistics on, 757, 758
U.S policy on
dilemma of, 769–72
and distributive justice, 777–80
utilitarianism and, 759, 761
and welfare, 760–61
and what we owe to non- members,
776–77
and “white Australia” policy, 765,
784, 803, 804–5
and work visas, 779
“Immigration and Freedom of
Association” (Wellman),
787–808
Immigration and Nationality Act
(1965), 757, 768
Immigration Restriction Act (1901,
Australia), 765
impartiality
in ethics of care, 210–11
in feminist ethics, 198, 202
in Kant’s theory, 138
principle of, 7–8
of utilitarianism, 100
imperative(s)
categorical, 68, 69, 132–35, 138,
141, 150–51
hypothetical
in Kant’s theory, 133, 141, 150,
151
morality as system of, 165–71
imperfect duties, 133, 141, 152–53
implantation, 222
implicit consent, 103
implied premises, 47–48, 55
In a Different Voice (Gilligam), 188
income distribution, 120, 121
inconsistent outcomes argument
against ethical egoism, 108
“In Defense of Affirmative Action”
(Beauchamp), 526–35
India and Pakistan, 734, 734n8
indicator words, 43, 44–45, 47
indirect harm principle in
environmental ethics, 450
indirect moral consideration, 372,
378, 395–97
individualism, liberal, 212–13
individual mandate, 337
inductive arguments, 44, 45, 47, 62
infallibility, moral, 22
and cultural relativism, 26
infant(s)
and animal rights, 377, 389, 395,
405, 414
detachment or isolation of, 189
powerlessness of, 189
wrongness of killing, 261
infanticide, 299–99
inferiorization and racism, 473,
503–4
influence, emotivism and, 28, 29
inherency and racism, 472
inherent value, animal rights and,
377, 378, 398, 399–400,
402–3
In My Father’s House: Essays in the
Philosophy of African Culture
(Appiah), 494
insanity defense and capital
punishment, 682n2
instrumental value, 6, 7
and environmental ethics, 430
insurance exchanges, 337, 341
intellectual moral growth, 4
intellectual virtues, 172, 182
interconnexion, 190
intermarriage, 471

I-16 Á INDEX
internal principles in environmental
ethics, 451–53
interventionist argument on war,
718–19
intrinsic value, 6, 7, 135
and environmental ethics, 430–31,
459
intrinsic worth of people, 135
Inuit, seal hunting and fate of,
382–83
invalid argument, 44, 46, 47, 62
Iowa State University, free speech
at, 605
Iran hostage crisis, 711
Iraq War, 176, 708, 735
Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS),
712, 723–24
isolationism, moral, 35–38
isolation of infants, 189
Israel
Law of Return in, 805, 808n47
use of torture in, 748
“Is There a Right to Health Care,
and, If So, What Does It
Encompass?” (Daniels),
363–70
“It’s Not My Fault: Global Warming
and Individual Moral
Obligations” ( Sinnott-
Armstrong), 446–57
J
Jackson, Jesse, 523, 673
Jackson, Robert, 753
Jaggar, Alison M., 201–9
James, Daniel, 332
James, Michael, 473
Japanese- American internment
camps, 516, 753
Jefferson, Thomas, 470, 767
Jensen, Robert, 510–11
Jesus on moral judgments, 22
Jew(s)
and Law of Return, 805, 808n47
and racism, 473
Jewish scriptures and abortion, 226
Jim Crow laws, 470–71, 516, 599
jobs for immigrants, 758
job skills and immigrants, 770,
777–78, 779, 780
Johnson, Lawrence, 461, 463–64
Johnson, Lyndon, 526, 641
Johnston, Richard, 771–72
jokes, racist, 502–3, 508n5
Jones, Van, 603–4
“Judge Not?” (Eishtain), 22
jus ad bellum, 707, 709, 715, 721
jus in bello, 707, 709–10, 715,
721
Just and Unjust Wars (Walzer), 738
just cause and war, 707–8, 726–27
justice
in acquisition, 123, 130n1
and capital punishment, 671,
681–82, 684–90
defined, 820, 825, 826
distributive. See distributive justice
ethics of, 198, 213–15
and ethics of care, 213–15
and euthanasia, 321–22, 323,
329n9
as fairness, 117–20
in holding, 122–23
need for more than, 188–95
primacy of, 115–16
as prima facie principle, 77, 78
racism and, 476, 485
retributive, 70, 78
and global economic justice, 822,
825
and right to health care, 334,
338–39, 344, 352, 364–65
role of, 115–17
theory of, 115–21
entitlement, 122–31
main idea of, 117–20
in transfer, 123
two principles of, 120–21
of war, 707, 709, 715, 721
“Justice, Civilization, and the Death
Penalty: Answering van den
Haag” (Reiman), 684–90
justice perspective, 189
just war theory, 715
background of, 707–10
benevolent quarantine (prisoners
of war) in, 709–10
defined, 707, 721, 722
and drone warfare, 735–37
good vs bad results in, 709
intentions in, 708
just cause in, 707–8
justice of war (jus ad bellum) in, 707,
709, 715, 721
main issues in, 707–10
no evil means in, 709
noncombatant immunity in,
709–10
and pacifism, 726–34
proportional use of force in, 709
reasonable chance of success in,
709
rules of war (jus in bello) in, 707,
709–10, 715, 721
sanctioning of war in, 708
war as last resort in, 709
K
Kaag, John, 735–37
Kahane, Meir, 489
Kalin, Jesse, 108
Kaminer, Wendy, 600, 601, 618–20
Kant, Immanuel
on animal welfare, 371, 408
on capital punishment, 672–73,
682, 684–86, 689–90n5, 695,
699
and environmental ethics, 434
on free speech, 594
and immigration, 792
nonconsequentialist theory of,
68–69, 76, 132, 146–55
on political violence, 735, 748
and racism, 496, 512
on sexual morality, 541
Kant’s theory, 68–69, 132–39
and abortion, 225–27
applying, 135–36
and capital punishment, 685–86,
689–90nn5–7, 692, 695
categorical imperative in, 68, 69,
132–35, 138, 141, 150–51
defined, 69
described, 68–69, 76, 132–35, 144
and drug legalization, 627, 631
environmental ethics and, 451, 452
and euthanasia, 289
evaluating, 136–38
exercises on, 144–46
and Golden Rule, 134
good will in, 132–33, 146–47
hypothetical imperative in, 133,
141, 150, 151

INDEX Á I-17
learning from, 138–39
maxim in, 133–34
and means- ends principle, 135,
141, 153
on necessary duties toward self vs
others, 153–54
perfect vs imperfect duties in, 133,
141, 152–53
on personal rights, 137
and racism, 476
readings on, 146–55, 165–71
respect in, 137, 138
and sexual morality, 543, 554,
563
and terrorism, 717
on will of every rational being,
154–55
Kaplan, John, 645
Kennedy, John F., 752
Kennedy v. Louisiana (2008), 668
Kenya, mass starvation in, 829
Kerry, John, 176
Kershnar, Stephen, 518
Kevorkian, Jack, 291
Keyes, Alan, 749
Khatchadourian, Haig, 713
Kierkegaard, Søren, 15
killing
vs allowing to die, 293–94,
329–31
morally permissible, 293
wrongness of, and animal rights,
415, 418–21
“Killing and Allowing to Die”
(Callahan), 329–31
Kindly Inquisitors (Rauch), 605
King, Martin Luther, Jr., 471, 475,
511, 515, 752
Kinsley, Michael, 521
Kipling, Rudyard, 109
Kipnis, Laura, 589, 605, 606
Kissinger, Henry, 706
Kittay, Eva, 213
Kleck, Gary, 660, 661
Kleiman, Mark, 650
Kohlberg, Lawrence, 189
Kolb, Lawrence, 637
Kozinski, Alex, 605
Kukathas, Chandran, 793, 806n18
Ku Klux Klan, 470, 495
Kymlicka, Will, 819n18
L
labor, taxation of earnings on,
127–28, 131nn6–7
labor market argument on
immigrants, 771
Lackey, Douglas, 728, 729
LaFollette, Hugh, 651–63
Lambert, Ed, 441
land ethic, 465–69
“The Land Ethic” (Leopold), 465–69
land pyramid, 468
Langbein, John, 751–52
Lange, Lisa, 383
language and animal rights, 373, 374
language proficiency and
immigrants, 770, 774
Lanzmann, Claude, 615, 616
law
divine
need for, 157–58
single, 158–59
eternal, 155–56
human, 157
natural. See natural law
various kinds of, 155–59
Law of Return in Israel, 805, 808n47
Lawrence, Charles, 607, 608
Lawrence, D. H., 563
Lee, Robert E., 470
legacy admissions and racism, 479
legal moralism and drug legalization,
629–30, 631
Leibniz, Gottfried, 10, 11
Leiser, Burton, 564
Leopold, Aldo, 464, 465–69
Lerner, Gerda, 282n3
Lester, Burton, 703
lethal dose 50 (LD50), 374, 389
Leviathan (Hobbes), 102
lex talionis, 672, 681, 684–89,
689nn2–3, 694–95, 698–704
liability insurance, gun rights and,
662
liberal individualism, 212–13
Liberal Science, 604–5
liberation movements and animal
rights, 384
libertarians
and global economic justice, 822,
825, 826
and gun rights, 657–58, 665
on immigrants, 759, 799–803
on right to health care, 338, 341,
356, 364
liberty(ies)
basic, 120
and euthanasia, 321–22
and patterning, 125–26, 130n4
“Lifeboat Ethics” (Hardin), 835–41
lifeboat metaphor for global
economic justice, 825–26,
835–41
critique of, 841–50
life for a life, 672, 681, 684–89,
689nn2–3, 694–95, 698–704
“A Life for a Life” (Primoratz),
698–704
Lincoln, Abraham, 470
Living Will, 328
Local 28 v. Equal Employment
Opportunity Commission
(1964), 529
Locke, John, 686, 692
Locker, Jeffrey, 298
logic, 5
logical argument, 6–7
London, terrorism in, 712
Lorenz, Konrad, 109
Lott, John R., 628, 660–61
Louisiana State University, free
speech at, 605
Loury, Glenn, 520
love, sex and, 551–52, 554–55,
557n1, 558
Ludwig, Jens, 661
Lukianoff, Greg, 601–5
Lumley, Joanna, 786n8
Lund, Nelson, 630
lust, 561
Luther, Martin, 110, 525
lying, Kant’s theory on, 136
lynchings, 471, 501, 504, 508n2, 599,
756
Lyotard, Jean- François, 616, 617
M
Macedo, Stephen, 759, 762, 768–80
Machiavelli, Niccolò, 706
Mackie, J. L., 110
Madrid, terrorism in, 712
Maitlis, Emily, 487
malaria control, 850–53

I-18 Á INDEX
Malawi, fertilizer subsidies in, 827–28
Malone, Nolan J., 779
managed care, 336, 340
manipulation and sexual morality,
554, 576
manslaughter, 668
manual vacuum aspiration, 222
manumission, 470
Mappes, Thomas, 541
Margalit, Avishai, 501
marginal utility in global economic
justice, 824, 832, 833–34
marijuana
legalization of, 622, 623, 633–34
statistics on, 621
Marquis, Don, 256–67
Marquis de Sade, 561
Massey, Douglas C., 779, 780
mass shootings, 632–33
masturbation, 562
Matsuda, Mari, 607, 608
Mattera, Jason, 481
maxim, 133–34
McAleer case, 531
McCain, John, 176
McCartney, Kathleen, 618, 619
McCarty, Nolan, 771
McCloskey, H. J., 97
McDonald v. City of Chicago (2010),
626
McDonnell, Kathleen, 274
McIntosh, Peggy, 511
McKinley, William, 710
McMahan, Jeff, 736
McPherson, Tristram, 414–28
McVeigh, Timothy, 666, 711
means- end analysis of sexual
morality, 541, 548–57
means- ends principle, 135, 141, 153
means principle in environmental
ethics, 452
Meck, Paul, 173
median voter argument on
immigrants, 771
Medicaid, 334–35, 337, 340, 341
medical research and animal rights,
372, 376, 377, 381–82, 388,
394, 407–13
Medicare, 335, 340–41
Medlin, Brian, 108
menstrual aspiration, 222
mental- health crisis, and free speech
on campus, 603
mental incompetence and animal
rights, 405, 409
mentally disabled persons
and animal rights, 379, 392–93, 396
capital punishment of, 668
euthanasia for, 301–2, 319, 327,
328
mentally ill humans and animal
rights, 379
“mercy killing,” 286, 291
meritocracy, 520–21, 524–25, 525n2
metaethics, 5, 7
metaphysics, 5
Metaphysics of Morals (Kant), 169
methadone, 645
Mexican immigrants, 767, 771, 778
microaggressions, 593, 603, 605
Middlebury College, free speech at,
589
Midgley, Mary, 22, 35–38
migrant workers, 778–80
Miles, Robert, 500
Mill, John Stuart
and campus free speech, 591–92
on capital punishment, 668–69
and drug addiction, 640, 642
and environmental ethics, 460
and gun control, 664
and immigration, 819n17
on utilitarianism, 92, 93, 96,
111–15
Millennium Development Goals, 828
Miller, David, 768, 774, 781–87,
792–93, 798, 799, 803–4, 811
Miller, Sarah Clark, 198
Minor, Kenneth, 297–98
miscarriage, 221
mismatch effect, 488–89
modus ponens, 46
and euthanasia, 295
modus tollens, 46
Mohammed, Khalid Shaikh, 754, 755
Montaigne, Michel de, 15
moral agency
and animal rights, 374–75, 409
of women, 204
moral arguments, 41–64
for and against abortion, 227–33,
234
assessing nonmoral premises of,
55–56
avoiding bad, 56–60
claims and, 41–43
cogent, 45, 47
components of, 426
conclusions of, 42, 43, 44, 47
conditional, 45–46
and critical thought, 44
deconstruction of, 48–51
deductive vs inductive, 44–47, 62
defined, 42, 47
evaluation of, 45–47, 62
exercises on, 63–64
forms of, 45–47
good vs bad, 43–47
indicator words in, 43, 44–45, 47
moral statements and, 41–43,
51–53
and moral theories, 66
vs nonargumentative prose,
42–43
objections to, 416–26, 427n1
premises of
analyzing, 45–46
conditional, 45–46
defined, 42, 47
implied, 47–48
moral and nonmoral, 51–53, 62
testing of, 54–55
sound, 45, 47
strong vs weak, 45, 47
valid vs invalid, 44, 45–46, 47, 62
and writing and speaking about
moral issues, 60–62
in writing and speaking about
moral issues, 61
moral autonomy and animal rights,
406, 407–8
moral codes
vs moral theories, 66
religious, 8, 9
moral common sense in devising
moral theory, 74–75
moral community and abortion,
252–54
moral considerability
and animal rights, 372–73, 378,
379, 395–97
and environmental ethics, 430,
431, 460, 4463

INDEX Á I-19
moral consideration, direct vs
indirect, 372, 378, 395–97
“The Moral Dilemma
of U.S. Immigration Policy
Revisited: Open Borders vs.
Social Justice?” (Macedo),
768–80
moral disagreements
emotivism and, 29
and subjective relativism, 22–23
moral equality
and animal rights, 386–87
and health care, 344–49
moral experience(s)
consistency of moral theory with,
72–73
of women, 204
moral facts, emotivism and, 29
moral infallibility, 22
and cultural relativism, 26
moral isolationism, 35–38
moral issues, writing and speaking
about, 60–62
morality
defined, 3, 7
vs ethics, 3
and religion, 8–11
“Morality as a System of Hypothetical
Imperatives” (Foot), 165–71
“The Morality of Migration”
(Benhabib), 766–67
moral judgments
considered, 66–67, 69, 71–72, 75
Jesus on, 22
and moral principles, 65
and reason, 168
moral law, 8
moral norms, dominance of, 8
moral objectivism, 20, 21
cultural relativism vs, 23, 27
moral philosophy, 3, 5, 7
moral premises, 51–53, 55–56
moral principles
in feminist ethics, 197, 202, 208–9
and moral judgments, 65
moral problem solving, usefulness of
moral theory for, 73–74
moral progress and cultural
relativism, 27
moral reasoning, 6, 41
emotivism and, 29
fallacies in, 56–60
and religion, 9
moral statements
and arguments, 51–53
defined, 51, 55
moral status
and animal rights, 372–73, 378,
379, 395–97
and environmental ethics, 430,
431, 460, 4463
moral theories, 65–82
building of, 75–76
consequentialist, 67–68, 85–131
defined, 67, 69
and entitlement theory of justice,
122–31
ethical egoism as, 68, 69, 85–91,
104, 107–10
exercises on, 105–6
readings on, 107–31
social contract, 100–104, 105
and theory of justice, 115–21
utilitarianism as, 67–68, 69,
91–100, 101, 104–5, 111–15
and considered moral judgments,
66–67, 69, 71–72, 75
default, 65
defined, 65, 69
devising, 74–81
beneficence in, 78–79
building methods for, 75–76
justice in, 78
moral common sense in, 74–75
prima facie principles in, 76–77
respect in, 77–78
rights in, 78
self- evidence in, 80–81
three rules for, 77–80
evaluating, 70–74
coherence in, 70–71
conservatism in, 71
consistency with considered
moral judgments in, 71–72
consistency with our moral
experiences in, 72–73
fruitfulness in, 71
moral criteria of adequacy in, 70,
74
usefulness in moral problem
solving in, 73–74
exercises on, 81–82
major, 67–70
and moral arguments, 66
vs moral codes, 66
nonconsequentialist, 68–70,
132–71
defined, 67, 69
exercises on, 144–46
Kant’s, 68–69, 76, 132–39, 144,
146–55, 165–71
natural law, 69–70, 139–44,
155–65
readings on, 146–71
overview of, 65–67
and reflective equilibrium, 67, 72
simple, 66
value of, 66
moral values, 3, 6
moral virtues, 172–73, 182
Moro, Aldo, 701
Morrow, Lance, 500
Mosaic Decalogue, 466
Mosley, Albert G., 519, 520, 522
Moussaoui, Zacarias, 745–46, 752–53
Mueller, Robert, 755
multiculturalism and free speech on
campus, 619–20
Mumbai, India, terrorism in, 712
Munich Olympic massacre, 711
Munson, Ronald, 290
murder
capital punishment for. See capital
punishment
first- degree, 668, 696
second- degree, 668, 696
Murdoch, William W., 841–50
Murray, Charles, 589, 616
Murtha, John, 176
Muslim immigrants, 765
mutual grooming, 109–10
“My Tortured Decision” (Soufan),
754–55
N
NAACP (National Association for the
Advancement of Colored
People), 486–87
NAACP v. Hunt (1990), 609
Nabokov, Vladimir, 561
Nadelmann, Ethan, 646, 647, 649,
650
Naess, Arne, 459

I-20 Á INDEX
NAFTA (North American Free Trade
Agreement), 789, 800
Nagasaki, atomic bombing of, 713,
716
Nagel, Thomas, 317, 554, 555, 715
Narveson, Jan, 727
Nathanson, Stephen, 737–45
National Advisory Council for Drug
Abuse Prevention, 643, 644
National Association for the
Advancement of Colored
People (NAACP), 486–87
National Crime Victimization Survey
(NCVS), 660
National Institute of Drug Abuse
(NIDA), 647
National Institute of Justice, 647
National Rifle Association (NRA),
655
A Nation of Strangers (Shipler), 499
Native Americans and racism, 473,
503
Naturalization Act (1790), 487–88
natural law
abolished from heart of man,
164–65
acts of virtue prescribed by, 162
changing of, 163–64
existence of, 156–57
as habit, 160
sameness in all men of, 162–63
several precepts vs one precept in,
160–61
natural law theory, 69–70, 139–44
and abortion, 227
absolutism in, 140, 143
applying, 141–42
defined, 70
described, 69–70, 139–40
doctrine of double effect in, 140,
141, 142
and drug legalization, 627, 631
and euthanasia, 289–90
evaluating, 142–43
exercises on, 144–46
good effect in, 139
learning from, 143–44
reading on, 155–65
reason in, 140
and sexual morality, 541, 543–44
and terrorism, 716–17
natural state and environmental
ethics, 444–45
Nazi Germany
city bombing in, 738–40
euthanasia in, 315–17, 327, 328
racism in, 473, 494, 503, 516
NCVS (National Crime Victimization
Survey), 660
NDY (Not Dead Yet), 332
“The Need for More Than Justice”
(Baier), 188–95
need of breaking stereotypes
argument, 525n1
needs
adventitious vs course- of- life, 345
basic, and right to health care,
345–46, 347
negative rights
defined, 70
and global economic justice, 821,
825, 826
in health care, 363–64
and nonconsequentialism, 137
Nelson, Leonard, 15
Netherlands, euthanasia in, 332
newborns, euthanasia for, 298–99,
301–2, 327–28
Newkirk, Ingrid, 411
Ngilu, Charity, 852
Nguyen, Stacey, 663–65
Nichols, Terry, 711
Nicomachean Ethics (Aristotle),
179–87
NIDA (National Institute of Drug
Abuse), 647
Niebuhr, Reinhold, 706
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 688
Nimitz, Chester W., 299
Nimitz, Chester W., Jr., 299–300
Nixon, Richard, 749
“no means no,” 541, 572
nonargumentative prose, 42–43
noncognitivism, 28
noncombatants
and city bombings in Nazi
Germany, 738–40
in just war theory, 709–10
targeting by terrorists of, 714, 719,
720
nonconsequentialist theories, 68–70,
132–71
and animal rights, 376–77, 380
and capital punishment, 668,
671–72, 675
defined, 67, 69
exercises on, 144–46
free speech on campus and, 594–96
and immigrants, 761, 762
Kant’s, 68–69, 132–39
applying, 135–36
categorical imperative in, 68, 69,
132–35, 138, 141, 150–51
defined, 69
described, 68–69, 76, 132–35, 144
evaluating, 136–38
exercises on, 144–46
and Golden Rule, 134
good will in, 132–33, 146–47
hypothetical imperative in, 133,
141, 150, 151
learning from, 138–39
maxim in, 133–34
and means- ends principle, 135,
141, 153
perfect vs imperfect duties in, 133,
141, 152–53
on personal rights, 137
readings on, 146–55, 165–71
respect in, 137, 138
natural law, 69–70, 139–44
absolutism in, 143, 1140
applying, 141–42
defined, 70
described, 69–70, 139–40
doctrine of double effect in, 140,
141, 142
evaluating, 142–43
exercises on, 144–46
learning from, 143–44
reading on, 155–65
reason in, 140
and racism, 482, 485
readings on, 146–71
and terrorism, 716–17
and torture, 717
and war, 706–7, 715, 716
noninterference principle and war,
718
noninterventionist argument on war,
718, 719
nonmaleficence, 77
and animal rights, 408

INDEX Á I-21
nonmoral beliefs and cultural
relativism, 25
nonmoral premises, assessing, 55–56,
62
nonmoral statements, 51–53, 55
nonmoral value, 6
nonpersons vs persons, 95
nonstate actors, 714, 721
Noonan, John, 252
nooses, free speech and, 599
no- rest problem, 99
norm(s), moral, dominance of, 8
normality and anthropology, 35–38
normal opportunity range and right
to decent minimum of
health care, 354–56
normative ethics, 5, 7
North American Free Trade
Agreement (NAFTA), 789,
800
North Atlantic Council, 725
Northwestern University, free speech
at, 605
Nossel, Suzanne, 595
Not Dead Yet (NDY), 332
Nozick, Robert, 122–31, 665, 822
NRA (National Rifle Association),
655
Nussbaum, Martha, 212, 418
O
Oaten, Allan, 841–50
Obama, Barack
and free speech, 605
on immigration, 757, 761, 765,
766, 767
and political violence, 723–24, 736,
755
“Obamacare.” See Affordable Care Act
(ACA, 2014)
objections in writing and speaking
about moral issues, 61–62
objectivism, moral, 20, 21
cultural relativism vs, 23, 27
obligation(s)
and animal rights, 408–9
theories of, 65
values vs, 6
obscenity, 563
OCR (Office of Civil Rights), 540
Office of Civil Rights (OCR), 540
“On the Moral and Legal Status of
Abortion” (Warren), 247–56
‘Operation Enduring Freedom,’ 725
opiates, 636–37
opinions, crude, 36
opportunity range and right to
decent minimum of health
care
maximization of, 355
normal, 354–56
oppression, hierarchy of, 514
Oration on the Dignity of Man (Pico
della Mirandola), 391
Orwell, George, 688, 727
Oslo, Norway, terrorism in, 712
“ought” in Kant’s theory, 150, 166,
167
P
pacifism
anti- war, 728–30, 734n10
background of, 706–7, 722
defined, 706, 721
just- war, 734, 734n11
and just war theory, 726–34
in Bangladesh and Uganda, 733,
734n8
Counterfactual Test for, 728–29
and greater good, 730
and intentional infliction of harm
on innocents, 728–30, 734n5
and Iraq War, 734, 734n9
and just cause provision, 734n9
and just means provision, 734n9
and limits on use of belligerent
correctives, 732, 734
and moral permissibility vs
obligation, 733
Nonexplanation Test for, 729
reconciling, 734, 734nn10–11
scenarios of various trade- offs in,
730–32, 734n6
unjust aggressors in, 730–33,
734n6
nonlethal, 727
nonviolent, 727
reading on, 726–34
Padilla, Jose, 754, 755
pain control vs euthanasia, 309–10
Pakistan, India and, 734, 734n8
Pan- Africanism, 494
Pan Am 103 bombing, 711
Panetta, Leon, 755
Panin, Dmitri, 317, 320
parental notification of abortion,
229, 236
Parfit, Derek, 558
Parks, Rosa, 471
Parsifal (opera), 559–60
particularism, 456
paternalism principle and drug
legalization, 629, 630, 631
Patten, Alfie, 546
patterning in entitlement theory of
justice, 124–25, 130n3
how liberty upsets, 125–26, 130n4
Paxon, Christina, 619
peace, ethics of care and, 215–16
Pearson, Geoffrey, 645
Pelosi, Nancy, 663, 664
penguins, DDT and, 442–46
People for the Ethical Treatment of
Animals (PETA), 383, 410–11
“People or Penguins” (Baxter),
442–46
perfect duties, 133, 141, 152–53
Perkins, Anne, 564
person(s)
appeal to the, 59, 60
defined, 224, 227
vs nonpersons, 95
personal freedom, 4
personality, gender differences in,
189
personal relationships
in ethics of care, 211
in feminist ethics, 197, 202
personal rights, Kant on, 137
personhood
and abortion, 224–32, 237–38, 246,
252–54, 258–60, 279
and animal rights, 374–75, 407n3
potential, 230, 255–56, 262
persuasion vs argumentation, 43
perversion, 555–56, 561
PETA (People for the Ethical
Treatment of Animals), 383,
410–11
Pew Foundation, 447
Phillips, Christopher, 13–15
philosophy, 5
moral, 3, 5, 7

I-22 Á INDEX
physical dependence, 623
physician- assisted suicide, 287–89,
291, 297–98, 332–33
Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni, 391
“Plain Sex” (Goldman), 548–57
Plato, 10–11, 16–19, 33
pleasures, lower vs higher, 93,
112–13
Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), 471
Plumhoff et al. v. Richard (2012), 513
Pojman, Louis P.
on affirmative action, 478, 514–26
on capital punishment, 669
on egoism and altruism, 107–10
on virtue ethics, 174
police, racial profiling by, 513
“Political Philosophy and the Gun
Control Debate: What
Would Bentham, Mill,
and Nozick Have to Say?”
(Nguyen), 663–65
political violence, 705–55
background of, 705–15
defined, 721
ethical dilemmas on, 723–26
exercises on, 722–23
moral arguments for and against,
717–21
moral questions on, 705
moral theories and, 715–17
readings on, 726–55
terrorism as
act- utilitarianism and, 716
background of, 710–14
vs city bombing, 738–40
and collateral damage, 740–43
consequentialism and, 716
defined, 710, 713, 721, 722, 738
and doctrine of double effect, 717,
719–20, 740–43
history of, 710–12
and ISIS, 711, 723–24
and just war theory, 712–13, 717
Kant’s theory and, 717
moral arguments for and against,
719–20
moral justification of, 711–14
moral theories on, 716–17
natural law theory and, 716–17
nonconsequentialism and,
716–17
by nonstate actors, 714, 721
and principle of double intention,
743
and pseudo- innocents, 720
religious, 710–11, 724
as revolutionary tactic, 741
state- sponsored, 710
targeting of noncombatants by,
714, 719, 720
ticking- time- bomb, 720–21,
745–54
and torture, 725–26, 745–54
vs war, 710
war on, 711–12, 719
torture as
aesthetic of, 750–51
background of, 714–15
and civil liberties and human
rights, 749–50
cost- benefit analysis of, 746, 747
defined, 714, 721, 722
effectiveness of, 714, 754–55
in enhanced interrogation
techniques, 754–55
legitimation of, 753–54
moral acceptability of, 714
moral arguments for and against,
720–21
moral theories on, 717
nonconsequentialism and, 717
nonlethal, 746, 747–48
“ off- the- book,” 748–50, 752
policy on use of, 714–15
slippery slope argument against,
746–47
terrorism and, 725–26, 745–54
ticking- bomb scenario and,
720–21, 745–54
U.S. position on, 714
utilitarianism and, 746–47
warrants for, 751, 752–53
war as
in Afghanistan, 724–25
background of, 706–10
“bend over backwards” rule of,
743–44
benevolent quarantine in, 709–10
consequentialism and, 706–7,
715, 716
drones in, 735–37
evil means in, 709
futile, 709
good vs bad resulting from, 709
and humanitarian intervention,
707, 717–19, 721
and human rights violations, 707,
716
intentions of, 708
interventionist argument on,
718–19
just cause and, 707–8, 726–27
justice of (jus ad bellum), 707, 709,
715, 721
just war theory of, 707–10, 715,
721, 722, 726–34, 735–37
as last resort, 709, 743–44
moral arguments for and against,
717–19
moral theories on, 715–16
noncombatant immunity in, 709,
716, 721, 738–40
nonconsequentialism and, 706–7,
715, 716
and noninterference principle, 718
noninterventionist argument on,
718, 719
pacifism and, 706–7, 721, 722,
726–34
preemptive, 708
preventive, 707–8
prisoners of, 709–10
proportional use of force in, 709,
727
realism and, 706, 721, 722
religious, 707
and right to life, 716
rules of (jus in bello), 707, 709–10,
715, 721
sanctioning of, 708
as self- defense, 707, 716, 718
and state sovereignty, 718–19
and substantial aggression,
726–28, 734n3
vs terrorism, 710
utilitarianism and, 715, 716, 719
politics, racial inequality in, 475
Pol Pot and subjective relativism, 22
Poole, Keith T., 771
population growth, 823, 836, 841,
843, 846–47
measures to reduce, 848–49
pornography, 538, 544, 562, 563

INDEX Á I-23
and free speech on campus, 619
Porter, Eduardo, 758
positive rights
defined, 70
and global economic justice, 821,
825, 826
in health care, 363–64
and nonconsequentialism, 137
possessive libertarianism and gun
control, 657–58, 665
powerlessness of infants, 189
POWs (prisoners of war), 709–10
Pratt, Erich, 663–64
predators and environmental ethics,
467
preferences, maximizing, 93–94, 112
preferential treatment, 478–84, 515
of groups vs individuals, 526
harmfulness of, 488–89
for whites, 487–88
pregnancy, flower pot picture of, 277,
282n9
prejudice, racial, 475, 482, 485, 493
premarital abstinence pledges, 547
premises
analyzing, 45–46
conditional, 45–46
defined, 42, 47
implied, 47–48, 55
moral and nonmoral, 51–53, 55–56
testing of, 54–55
“preponderance of evidence”
standard, 540, 547–48
preservation of incentive and
environmental ethics, 443
prevalence- reduction, 623
prevention, capital punishment as,
668
prima facie duties, 77–80
prima facie principles, 70, 76–77
Primoratz, Igor, 542–43, 698–704,
740–43, 744
Prince, Matthew, 600
Princeton University, free speech at,
606
principle of transfer, 130n3
principle of utility, 92, 96
principlism, 456
prisoners of war (POWs), 709–10
private sphere in ethics of care, 212
procreation, sex and, 542–43, 550–51
profiling, racial, 475, 506, 513
“The Progressive Ideas behind the
Lack of Free Speech on
Campus” (Kaminer), 618–20
promise keeping, Kant’s theory on,
136–37
property rights in entitlement theory
of justice, 128–29
Proposition 209, 514, 529
prostitution, 560, 562
Pro- Test, 381
“Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” 608
proxies in environmental ethics, 444
prudential arguments for right to
decent minimum of health
care, 357
pseudo- innocents, 720
psychological continuity and animal
rights, 420–21
psychological dependence, 623
psychological egoism, 87–89
psychological experiments and
animal rights, 389
psychological propensities in
feminist ethics, 208
psychological suffering, euthanasia
and, 310
public goods argument and right to
decent minimum of health
care, 358–59
publicity argument against ethical
egoism, 108
public permission principle in
environmental ethics,
455–56
public sphere in ethics of care, 212
punishment
capital. See capital punishment
defined, 666, 672
justification for, 666–67
Purdue University, free speech at, 606
pursuit of happiness, 88–89
Putnam, Robert, 771
Q
question, begging the, 56–57, 60
quickening, 222, 227
abortion after, 232
Quinlan, Karen Ann, 259, 286, 288,
304, 316, 328
quota system, 477, 478–79, 526, 527
R
race(s)
core idea of, 471–72, 484
as social construction, 472
superior and inferior, 471–72
race constructivists, 473
“race norm” in grading, 524
race skeptics, 472, 484, 508n1
Rachels, James, 226, 300–304, 323,
324
racial anxiety, 504–6
racial bigotry, 503
racial discomfort, 504–6
racial discrimination, 471, 475,
477–78, 482, 485, 527–30
racial epithets, 591, 600–601, 611,
613–14
racial homogenization, 506, 507
racial identity, 486–87, 506
racial incidents, 501
racial inequality, 476
racial insensitivity, 501, 502
racialism, 490, 494, 497, 498n2,
498n7
racialized groups, 473
racial motives, 506–7
racial preference, immigrant
selection based on, 784,
803–4, 805n47, 807n41,
808n45, 818–19n6
racial prejudice, 475, 482, 485, 493
racial profiling, 475, 506, 513
racial solidarity, 494
racial stereotypes, 504, 506–7, 509,
525n1
racism, 470–535
admitting to, 508–11
and affirmative action, 477–79,
482, 485
arguments against, 522–25
case against, 514–26
critique of arguments for,
515–22
defense of, 526–35
justification of, 529–30
numerical formulas in, 529–30
original meaning of, 527
strong, 478–79, 482, 485, 515
weak, 478, 482, 485, 514–15
and animal rights, 371, 384,
385–86, 387, 396, 410

I-24 Á INDEX
racism (Continued)
antipathy and, 473, 495, 499n10,
503–4
antiracist, 498n7
background of, 471–80
and bus boycott, 471
and Civil Rights Act (1964), 477–78
and cognitive incapacity, 491–93,
498n5
and color- blindness, 499
and compensatory justice, 482–84,
516–17
concept of, 489–90, 499–500
conceptual inflation of, 473, 502
and Confederate monuments, 470
core idea of race and, 471–72, 484
and cultural appropriation, 486–87
and culturally induced moral
ignorance, 532
defined, 473, 482, 503–4
and diversity, 479–82, 501, 517–18,
527
in education, 476, 477, 479–80,
481, 488–89, 492, 513, 523,
524
in employment, 475, 523–24,
528–29, 531–33, 534n13
and equal abilities thesis, 519
and equal opportunity, 478
and equal results argument, 516,
518–20
ethical dilemmas on, 486–89
exercises on, 485–86
as expression of taste, 495–96, 497
extrinsic, 490–91, 492, 493–95, 497,
498
family model of, 495, 496–97,
498n4
and hierarchy of oppression, 514
history of, 470–71, 503
in housing, 475, 488, 528
and ideological resistance, 492
individual, 475, 482, 485
inferiorization and, 473, 503–4
inherency and, 472
institutional (structural), 475, 482,
485
intention vs effect in, 502
and interests of dominant group,
398n6, 493
and intermarriage, 471
intrinsic, 492–95, 496, 497, 498,
499
and Jim Crow laws, 470–71, 516
and justice, 476, 485
Kant’s theory and, 476
key concepts of, 473–74, 484–85
and Ku Klux Klan, 470, 495
and legacy admissions, 479
legal rulings on, 477
location of, 502–3
and lynchings, 471, 501, 504,
508n2
and meritocracy, 520–21, 524–25,
525n2
moral arguments for and against,
482–84
moral theories and, 480–82
and nonconsequentialism, 482, 485
overuse of term, 500–501
in politics, 475
and preferential treatment, 478–80,
481–84, 515
of groups vs individuals, 526
harmfulness of, 488–89
for whites, 487–88
and quota system, 477, 478–79,
526, 527
race constructivists and, 473
race skeptics and, 472, 484, 508n1
and racial bigotry, 503
and racial discomfort or anxiety,
504–6
and racial discrimination, 471, 475,
477–78, 482, 485, 527–30
and racial homogenization, 506,
507
and racial identity, 486–87, 506
and racial incidents, 501
and racial inequality, 476
and racial insensitivity, 501, 502
and racialism, 490, 494, 497,
498n2, 498n7
racialized groups and, 473
racial motives and, 506–7
and racial prejudice, 475, 482, 485,
493
and racial profiling, 475, 506, 513
and racial solidarity, 494
and racial stereotypes, 504, 506–7,
509, 525n1
and racist dispositions, 491–93, 497
and racist jokes, 502–3, 508n5
and racist propositions, 490–91,
497
without racists, 476
readings on, 489–535
and respect, 476, 485
and reverse discrimination, 480,
483–84, 485, 514, 522–23,
526
and role models, 480, 481, 515–16,
527
scientific, 472, 484, 611
and sexism, 501, 508n4, 509–10
and slavery, 470
statistics on, 528
on television, 501, 508n3
and utilitarianism, 480, 524–25
and voting rights, 470, 471
white privilege and, 474
discourse of, 511–13
and white supremacists, 470
and wrongdoing vs culpability,
531–32
“Racism: What It Is and What It
Isn’t,” 499–508
“Racisms” (Appiah), 489–99
racist dispositions, 491–93, 497
racist jokes, 502–3, 508n5
racist propositions, 490–91, 497
Radelet, Michael, 680
raising the stakes and animal rights,
417
Rampell, Catherine, 595
Ramsey Colloquium, 564, 566, 568,
569
Rand, Ayn, 107
rape, 538–39, 553
and abortion, 243–44, 250, 256n2
acquaintance, 539
date, 539
defined, 538, 539
party, 539
sexual assault vs, 538–39
and verbal coercion, 571–82
ratchet effect, 838–40, 842, 844
rational beings, will of, 154–55
rationality and animal rights,
392–93, 399, 404–5, 406
Rauch, Jonathan, 605–6
Rawls, John
and animal rights, 396

INDEX Á I-25
on immigration, 762, 768, 769,
774–75, 776
and political violence, 744
on racism, 520–21
on reflective equilibrium, 72
and right to decent minimum of
health care, 339, 353–54
on social contract theory, 103–4
on theory of justice, 115–21
on virtue ethics, 188, 189
Ray, James Earl, 471
Reagan, Ronald, 749
realism and war, 706, 721, 722
reason(s)
emotivism and, 29
in Kant’s theory, 149–50
moral judgments and, 168
in natural law theory, 140
preeminence of, 6–7
reasoning
critical, 5, 6–7, 41
moral, 6, 41
and religion, 9
as moral issue, 44
“Reconciling Pacifists and Just War
Theorists” (Sterba), 726–34
recovery movement and free speech
on campus, 619
redemption and capital punishment,
677
redistribution in entitlement theory
of justice, 127–28
Reeve, C. D. C., 14
reflective equilibrium, 67, 72
refugees
accepting or rejecting, 761, 764
defined, 757, 760
history of, 757, 761
Jewish, 764
statistics on, 757
Regan, Tom
on animal welfare, 376–77, 378,
379, 380, 394–407
and environmental ethics, 431,
435, 438
Reiman, Jeffrey H., 684–90
relational equality and immigrants,
794, 796–98, 806n20–23,
808n45
relativism
cultural, 23–28, 30
arguments for, 24–26
belonging to several societies
and, 28
defined, 20, 21
and disagreements within society,
26–27
examples of, 23
exercises on, 31–32
female circumcision and, 24
and moral infallibility, 26
vs moral objectivism, 23, 27
and moral progress, 27
and nonmoral beliefs, 25
and outside criticism, 27
readings on, 32–38
and social reform, 26
and tolerance, 26
subjective, 21–23, 30
defined, 20, 21
vs doing ethics, 4
exercises on, 31–32
religion
and ethics, 8–9
and morality, 8–11
religious moral codes, 8, 9
religious preference, immigrant
selection based on, 784,
803–4, 805n47, 807n41,
808n45, 818–19n6
religious terrorism, 710–11, 724
religious war, 707
reparation, 77
The Reproduction of Mothering
(Chodorow), 189
Republic (Plato), 33
rescue, duty of, 79
resources, trade- offs between,
445–46
respect, 77–78
and environmental ethics,
461–64
in Kant’s theory, 137, 138
respect principle and animal rights,
402
restitution, capital punishment and,
681, 683n13, 689nn2–3
“Restoring Free Speech on Campus”
(Stone & Creeley), 605–6
retaliation and capital punishment,
672, 681, 684–89, 689nn2–3,
694–95, 698–704
retentionist arguments for capital
punishment, 666, 668–70,
671, 672, 675
retributive justice, 70, 78
and global economic justice, 822,
825
retributivism, capital punishment
and, 672, 681–82, 684–89,
689n2, 694–704
proportional, 672, 687, 698, 701–2
Rich, W., 846, 847
right(s)
concept of, 350, 407
enforceability of, 350–51
and global economic justice, 821,
824, 825
negative vs positive
defined, 70
and global economic justice, 821,
825, 826
in health care, 363–64
and nonconsequentialism, 137
and obligations, 408–9
right and wrong, theories of, 65–67
“The Right to a Decent Minimum of
Health Care” (Buchanan),
350–63
right to die, 288
right to freedom and animal rights,
379
right to life
and abortion, 238–39, 241–43
fetal development and, 254–55
potential personhood and,
255–56, 262
and animal rights, 379, 408
and capital punishment, 682, 691,
699–700
and euthanasia, 322–23, 325–26, 328
and violence, 707
and war, 716
risk principle
in environmental ethics, 451
and gun control, 655–57, 664
Roberts v. United States (1984), 815
Robins, Lee, 644
Robinson, Jackie, 524
Rockefeller, Nelson, 638
Rodriguez v. Maricopa County
Community College District
(2010), 604

I-26 Á INDEX
Roe v. Wade (1973), 224, 225, 234
Roman Catholicism
on abortion, 222, 227
on homosexuality, 565–66
on sexual morality, 536, 541, 542,
544, 551
Roper v. Simmons (2005), 668
Rosenbaum, Janet E., 547
Rosenberg, Ethel, 680
Rosenberg, Julius, 680
Rosenthal, Howard, 771
Ross, W. D., 77, 792
Ruddick, Sara, 214, 215
rule- egoism, 85–86, 91
rule- utilitarianism
on abortion, 225
defined, 68, 69
described, 94, 96, 99–100
and euthanasia, 288–89
Rushton, J. P., 608–9
Russell, Bertrand, 557n1
Russell, Jack, 665
Rwanda genocide and cultural
relativism, 27
Ryan, Cheyney, 727
S
Sacco, Nicola, 680
Sachs, Jeffrey, 850–53
safe spaces, 590, 595, 603, 619
saline injection for abortion, 222
Samudra, Imam, 711
sanctity- of- human- life theories, 261
Sandel, Michael, 212
Sandy Hook Elementary School
shooting, 625
Santayana, George, 14
Sartre, Jean- Paul, 10, 498n7
savagery of capital punishment, 696
Scalia, Antonin, 664, 678–79, 766
Scanlon, Tim, 418, 456
Schelling, T. C., 558
Schiavo, Michael, 285
Schiavo, Terri, 285
Schick, Theodore, Jr., 89
Schmidt, Thomas, 566, 568
Schmidtz, David, 458–65
scholarships, whites- only, 481
Schwarzenegger, Arnold, 677
scientific method, 14
Scriptures, abortion and, 226
Scruton, Roger, 557–63
seal hunting, 382–83, 394
SeaWorld, 383
Second Amendment, 625–26, 630,
631, 664
security and immigrants, 759
sedation, terminal, 289
seduction, 571–88
“Seduction, Rape, and Coercion”
(Conly), 571–81
“Selecting Immigrants” (Miller),
781–87
self- defense
and capital punishment, 690–91
and gun rights, 630–31, 653–54
war as, 707, 716, 718
self- determination
and euthanasia, 291–93, 307.309
vs freedom of association, 789,
805–6n5, 810, 812–14,
819nn17–18
self- evident statement, 70, 80–81
self- governance, right to, and
immigrants, 766–67, 775–76
self- improvement, 77
self- interest, 85–86, 87–89
selfishness, Ayn Rand on, 107
self- respect and environmental
ethics, 464
sentience
abortion and, 232, 265–66
and animal rights, 372, 402, 406,
407n2, 409, 410
September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks,
711, 719, 745–46, 748–49,
750
Sessions, William, 678
sexism and animal rights, 384–86
sexual assaults
campus, 538–41
defined, 539
evidence of, 540, 547–48
vs rape, 538–39
sexual behavior
morally permissible, 536–38
statistics on, 537
sexual morality, 536–88
background of, 536–41
and chastity, 559–61
and child molestation, 554, 568–69,
585, 587n8
and coercion, 541
and child molestation, 585,
587n8
and choice, 574, 581n4, 583
vs conflict of interest, 579–80,
581n11
and consent, 572, 580–81n1
and cultural mores, 572, 581n2
defined, 573–76
and gender hierarchy, 582–86,
587–88nn9–11, 587n3,
588n13
and harm, 574–75, 581n6
and intent, 573–74
and legitimacy, 575–76,
581nn8–9
and negative sanctions, 578–79,
581n10
vs negotiation, 583, 587n6
vs rape, 579–80, 582–84,
587nn5–7
and seduction, 577–80, 582–86,
587n4
and temptations, 577–78
verbal, 571–82
and weakness of will, 576–80, 583
communication account and, 552
and consent
affirmative, 541
in campus sexual assault, 538–39,
540–41, 544–45
and coercion, 572, 580–81n1,
582–84
in context, 584
and views of sexual behavior, 537
and conventional view of sexuality,
536, 544
and deception, 541
and embodiment, 561, 563
ethical dilemmas on, 546–48
exercises on, 545
and fantasy, 562–63
goal- oriented view of, 542, 544
and homosexuality, 537, 544,
564–71
and AIDS, 567
and biblical teaching, 569–71
biological basis for, 565
and celibacy, 568
and child molestation, 568–69
defined, 537, 543

INDEX Á I-27
as harmful, 566–69
libertarian view on, 563
as lifestyle choice, 565
sex- as- procreation argument
against, 565–66, 569
slippery- slope argument against,
571
as “unnatural,” 564–66
Kant’s theory and, 543, 554, 563
kinds of issues in, 536
and liberal view of sexuality,
536–37, 544
and lust, 561
and manipulation, 554, 576
and masturbation, 562
means- end analysis of, 541, 548–57
and moderate view of sexuality,
537, 544
moral arguments and, 542–44
moral theories and, 541–42
natural law theory and, 541,
543–44
and nuptiality of desire, 559
and obscenity, 563
and perversion, 555–56, 561
and pornography, 538, 544, 562,
563
and premarital abstinence pledges,
547
and prostitution, 560, 562
and rape, 538–39, 553
and verbal coercion, 571–82
readings on, 548–88
and reciprocity, 554
and seduction, 571–88
and sex as not innately immoral,
553–54
sex- as- procreation and, 542–43,
550–51
and sex education, 546
sex- love model in, 551–52, 554–55,
557n1, 558
and sexual assaults
campus, 538–41
defined, 539
evidence of, 540, 547–48
vs rape, 538–39
and sexual behavior
morally permissible, 536–38
statistics on, 537
and sexual virtue, 557–63
and sex under pressure, 571–88
utilitarianism and, 542, 543
and value of sex, 554–55
“Sexual Morality” (Scruton), 557–63
sexual virtue, 557–63
“Sex Under Pressure: Jerks, Boorish
Behavior, and Gender
Hierarchy” (Anderson),
582–88
Shacknove, Andrew, 807n25
Shakespeare, William, 561
“shall” in Kant’s theory, 150
Shapiro, Ben, 589
Shaw, Anthony, 301
Sherwin, Susan, 274–83
Shipler, David, 499
“Shoah” (movie), 615, 616
Shockley, William, 491–93, 617
“should,” Kant’s use of, 166–68
Sidgwick, Henry, 386
Silvergate, Harvey, 749
Simon, Thomas, 608
Singer, Peter
on animal welfare, 371, 375–77,
379–80, 384–93, 410,
414–15, 422
and environmental ethics, 431–33,
435, 438, 460
on global economic justice, 823–24,
829–35
on utilitarianism, 95
Sinnott- Armstrong, Walter, 446–57
Skrentny, John, 772
slippery slope argument against
torture, 746–47
slippery slope fallacy, 58, 60
Slote, Michael, 216, 217
Smith, J. Maynard, 109
Smith College, free speech at, 618, 619
“snowflakes,” 615–18
social anthropology and
abnormality, 35–38
social contract theory, 100–104
and animal rights, 395–97
defined, 96, 101
described, 100–101, 105
evaluating, 102–4
of Hobbes, 101–2
Social Darwinism, 109
social defense and capital
punishment, 690–94
social inequalities, 120, 121
social justice and immigrants,
768–80
social media and free speech on
campus, 603
social reform and cultural relativism,
26
social services and immigrants, 772
social solidarity and immigrants,
771, 774
sociobiology, 109
Socrates
and divine command theory,
10–11
in Euthyphro, 10–11, 16–19
Socratic method, 13–15
Solomon, Robert, 552, 555
Soroka, Stuart, 771–72
Soufan, Ali, 754–55
souls and animal rights, 373
sound argument, 45, 47
South Africa, racism in, 494, 495
Southern Poverty Law Center, 599
Sparling, Gene, 442
Speak (animal rights group), 381
speaking about moral issues, 60–62
Speakman, June, 481
special rights arguments for right to
decent minimum of health
care, 356
species egalitarians and
environmental ethics, 434,
435, 458–65
speciesism
and animal rights, 376, 378, 387,
389–90, 393n4, 397, 399,
409–11, 414–15
and environmental ethics, 460–61
species nonegalitarians and
environmental ethics, 434,
435
speech, free. See free speech on
campus
speech codes, 592–94, 598
advocates of, 607
broad vs narrow, 613–14
and causal harm, 607–9
court rulings on, 592, 607
critics of, 606–7
defined, 589–90, 597, 615n1
and expressive harm, 606–15

I-28 Á INDEX
speech codes (Continued)
vs general harassment rules, 613–14
harm caused by, 594, 597
as official condemnation, 612–13
and racial epithets, 613–14
and sanitizing of scholarly work,
608–9, 611, 619
“Speech Codes and Expressive Harm”
(Altman), 606–15
Spencer, Richard, 616
spheres of freedom and
environmental ethics, 442–43
spina bifida and euthanasia, 327,
329n12
Spitzer, Robert J., 626
Stace, Walter T., 23–24
statements
and arguments, 41–43, 51–53
defined, 47
moral vs nonmoral, 51–53, 55
self- evident, 70, 80–81
“state of nature,” 102
state sovereignty and war, 718–19
state- sponsored terrorism, 710
Stefancic, Jean, 594, 596
Steiner, Hillel, 817
Stephen, James Fitzjames, 681
Sterba, James, 726–34
stereotypes, racial, 504, 506–7, 509,
525n1
Stevens, John C., 265
Stilz, Anna, 775
Stone, Geoffrey R., 605–6
Stossel, John, 628
straw man fallacy, 59, 60
strong argument, 45, 47
strong equal access principle and
right to decent minimum of
health care, 351–52
subjective relativism, 21–23, 30
defined, 20, 21
vs doing ethics, 4
exercises on, 31–32
subjectivism, 4
subjects- of- a- life and animal rights,
378, 399, 402–4
suction curettage, 222
suffering
and animal rights, 371–72, 375,
376, 387, 388, 407, 410,
414–18, 425
and capital punishment, 681,
687–89
suicide, 299–300
physician- assisted, 287–89, 291,
297–98, 332–33
Summa Theologica (Aquinas), 155–65
Sununu, John, 527
supererogatory actions, 821, 825,
832–33
supporting statements, 41–43
survival, right to, and immigrants,
767
Swann, Lisa, 441
syllogism, hypothetical, 46
symbioses, 466
system- related entitlements in right
to health care, 366
Szaz, Thomas, 634–42, 643
T
Taliban, 725
Tanzania and Uganda, 734, 734n8
taxation of earnings, 127–28, 131n6
taxes paid by immigrants, 758
Taylor, Paul, 4, 435, 437–38, 458–60
Taylor, Thomas, 384–85
terminal sedation, 289
terrorism
act- utilitarianism and, 716
background of, 710–14
vs city bombing, 738–40
and collateral damage, 740–43
consequentialism and, 716
defined, 710, 713, 721, 722, 738
and doctrine of double effect, 717,
719–20, 740–43
history of, 710–12
and ISIS, 711, 723–24
and just war theory, 712–13, 717
Kant’s theory and, 717
moral arguments for and against,
719–20
moral justification of, 711–14
moral theories on, 716–17
natural law theory and, 716–17
nonconsequentialism and, 716–17
by nonstate actors, 714, 721
and principle of double intention,
743
and pseudo- innocents, 720
religious, 710–11, 724
as revolutionary tactic, 741
state- sponsored, 710
targeting of noncombatants by,
714, 719, 720
ticking- time- bomb, 720–21, 745–54
and torture, 725–26, 745–54
vs war, 710
war on, 711–12, 719
Tertullian, 839
theories of obligation, 65
theories of value, 65
A Theory of Justice (Rawls), 115–21,
339, 396
Thomas, Clarence, 525
Thomas, Laurence, 195
Thomson, Judith Jarvis
on abortion, 232–33, 237–47,
248–51, 268
on racism, 483–84, 517
ticking- bomb scenario and torture,
720–21, 745–54
Till, Emmett, 504
Title IX, 539–40, 605
tolerance and cultural relativism, 26
Tong, Rosemary, 197
Tooley, Michael, 265, 419–20
torture
aesthetic of, 750–51
background of, 714–15
and capital punishment, 688–89
and civil liberties and human
rights, 749–50
cost- benefit analysis of, 746, 747
defined, 714, 721, 722
effectiveness of, 714, 754–55
in enhanced interrogation
techniques, 754–55
legitimation of, 753–54
moral acceptability of, 714
moral arguments for and against,
720–21
moral theories on, 717
nonconsequentialism and, 717
nonlethal, 746, 747–48
“ off- the- book,” 748–50, 752
policy on use of, 714–15
slippery slope argument against,
746–47
terrorism and, 725–26, 745–54
ticking- bomb scenario and, 720–21,
745–54

INDEX Á I-29
U.S. position on, 714
utilitarianism and, 746–47
warrants for, 751, 752–53
Torture and the Law of Proof
(Langbein), 751
trance and cultural relativism, 33, 35
transfer
justice in, 123
principle of, 130n3
trigger warnings, 590, 603, 605
Trivers, Robert, 109
“trolley problem,” double effect and,
142
Tronto, Joan, 216
Trotsky, Leon, 741
Truman, Harry S., 728
Trump, Donald
and free speech, 618
on immigration, 760, 761, 765,
768, 770
Trumpcare, 343
“Trying Out One’s New Sword”
(Midgley), 35–38
Twenge, Jean, 603
Twining, P. E., 746
Twining, W. L., 746
Two Wrongs Make a Right thesis, 514
Tysiac, Alicja, 237
U
Uganda and Tanzania, 734, 734n8
“The Ultimate Punishment: A
Defense” (van den Haag),
679–83
United Kingdom, health care in,
337
United States
abortion in, 223, 230, 234
animal welfare in, 371, 374, 382,
389, 411
capital punishment in, 666, 667,
674, 678, 679, 680, 695, 697,
703
drug abuse and drug legalization in,
622, 637, 638, 644, 645
environmental ethics in, 447
euthanasia in, 287, 301, 309, 314
free speech in, 589, 591, 592
and global economic justice, 828,
835, 836, 837, 843, 845, 848,
850
gun control and gun rights in, 624,
625, 630, 657, 659, 662–65
health care in, 335–38, 341
homosexuality in, 567
and immigration, 757–62, 764, 766,
767, 771, 778, 803
racism in, 470, 475, 477, 480, 487,
489, 493, 499, 500, 503, 505,
513, 516
and terrorism, 710, 711, 712, 742
and torture, 714, 726, 727, 750
and war, 708, 724, 735, 739, 740
units of happiness, 66, 93
universality, categorical imperative
and, 138
universalizability principle, 7
in environmental ethics, 451–52
universal perspective, 7
University of California, free speech
at, 605
University of California, Berkeley,
free speech at, 589, 595, 602,
604
University of Chicago, free speech
at, 606
University of Michigan, free speech
at, 590
University of Virginia, white
supremacists at, 470
Urban Institute, 528
Urban League, 528
usefulness of moral theory, 73–74
use- reduction, 623
“Uses and Abuses of the Discourse
of White Privilege” (Zack),
511–13
utilitarianism, 91–100
on abortion, 224–25
act-
on abortion, 224–25
application of, 95–99
defined, 68, 69
described, 92–94
and euthanasia, 288
and terrorism, 716
animal rights and, 95, 375–76,
379–80, 386–87, 397–98, 410
appeal of, 91–92
applying, 94–96
and capital punishment, 670–71,
675
classic, 66, 92
and cross- species transplants, 101
defined, 69
definition of happiness in, 93
described, 67–68, 91–92, 104–5
and drug legalization, 626–27, 631
and euthanasia, 289–90
evaluating, 96–100
example of, 91
and global economic justice,
822–24
greatest happiness principle in,
92–93, 96
and gun control, 627, 664–65
and gun rights, 627–28
hedonic calculus in, 92–93
and immigrants, 759, 761
impartiality of, 100
vs Kant’s theory, 69
learning from, 100
maximizing preferences in, 93–94,
112
and moral criteria of adequacy,
96–100
and no- rest problem, 99
principle of utility in, 92, 96
reading on, 111–15
and right to decent minimum of
health care, 352–53
on right to health care, 352–53,
364–65
rule-
on abortion, 225
defined, 68, 69
described, 94, 96, 99–100
and euthanasia, 288–89
and sexual morality, 542, 543
Peter Singer and, 95
and social reform, 92
and torture, 746–47
and war, 715, 716, 719
Utilitarianism (Mill), 111–15
utility, principle of, 92, 96
Utter, Glenn H., 626
V
Vacco v. Quill (1997), 288
valid argument, 44, 45–46, 47, 62
value(s), 3, 6
extrinsic, 6, 7
moral vs nonmoral, 3, 6

I-30 Á INDEX
value(s) (Continued)
vs obligations, 6
theories of, 65
value of a future- like- ours account,
262–65
value of human life and capital
punishment, 698–99,
700–701, 704n3
Vance, Cyrus R., Jr., 298
van den Haag, Ernest, 670, 679–83
Vanzetti, Bartolomeo, 680
veganism, ethical, 414–28
vegetarianism and animal rights,
376, 413, 422–23
Velleman, David, 312
Vervoort, Marieke, 332
viability, 222, 227
abortion after, 224, 232
victimizability, abortion and, 265–66
Vindication of the Rights of Brutes
(Taylor), 384–85
Vindication of the Rights of Women
(Wollstonecraft), 384–85
violence
defined, 705–6
gun ownership and, 658, 659–60,
661
political. See political violence
as prima facie wrong, 706, 717
and right to life, 707
“virginity pledge,” 547
virtue(s)
apparent conflicts between, 176
defined, 172, 177
intellectual vs moral, 172, 173, 182
learned in classroom, 173
virtue ethics, 172–95
and abortion, 268–73
in action, 174
character traits in, 173, 175
defined, 172, 177
described, 172–74
and environmental ethics, 452–53
ethics of care and, 216–17
eudaimonia in, 172, 177
evaluating, 174–76
exercises on, 178–79
Golden Mean in, 173, 177
history of, 172
and Iraq war, 176
learning from, 177
modern- day, 173–74, 188–95
readings on, 179–95
and wisdom, 269, 273n3
The Virtue of Selfishness (Rand), 107
“Virtue Theory and Abortion”
(Hursthouse), 175–76,
268–73
vivisection, 377, 389
Vlastos, Gregory, 13–14
Voltaire, 748
“Voluntary Active Euthanasia”
(Brock), 307–15
Voting Rights Act (1965), 471
vulnerability and environmental
ethics, 460–61
W
Wagner, Richard, 559–60
Walker, Alice, 518
Walker, Margaret, 211
Wallace, G., 738, 739–40
Wallace, George C., 617
Walter, Sharon, 505
Walzer, Michael
on immigration, 768–69, 773–74,
792, 797–99, 801, 803, 804,
807n33, 807n35, 808n45,
811, 817
on political violence, 709, 713, 716,
738–39, 743
Wang Hao, 436
war
in Afghanistan, 724–25
background of, 706–10
“bend over backwards” rule of,
743–44
benevolent quarantine in, 709–10
consequentialism and, 706–7, 715,
716
drones in, 735–37
on drugs, 638, 643, 647
evil means in, 709
futile, 709
good vs bad resulting from, 709
and humanitarian intervention,
707, 717–19, 721
and human rights violations, 707,
716
intentions of, 708
interventionist argument on,
718–19
just cause and, 707–8, 726–27
justice of (jus ad bellum), 707, 709,
715, 721
just war theory of, 707–10, 715,
721, 722, 726–34, 735–37
as last resort, 709, 743–44
moral arguments for and against,
717–19
moral theories on, 715–16
noncombatant immunity in, 709,
716, 721, 738–40
nonconsequentialism and, 706–7,
715, 716
and noninterference principle, 718
noninterventionist argument on,
718, 719
pacifism and, 706–7, 721, 722,
726–34
preemptive, 708
preventive, 707–8
prisoners of, 709–10
proportional use of force in, 709,
727
realism and, 706, 721, 722
religious, 707
and right to life, 716
rules of (jus in bello), 707, 709–10,
715, 721
sanctioning of, 708
as self- defense, 707, 716, 718
and state sovereignty, 718–19
and substantial aggression, 726–28,
734n3
vs terrorism, 710
utilitarianism and, 715, 716, 719
Ward, Laura A., 297
Warren, Mary Anne, 224, 230–32,
247–56, 378–79, 401–7
Washington v. Glucksberg (1997), 288
Washoe (chimpanzee), 463
waste and environmental ethics, 443
“waterboarding,” 714, 754
weak argument, 45, 47
wealth, distribution of, 120, 121
Webb, Robin, 381
Weinberger, Caspar, 523
welfare and immigrants, 760–61
Wellman, Christopher Heath, 762,
787–818, 818–19n6, 819n18
Wertheimer, Alan, 581n4, 587n3,
587n5

INDEX Á I-31
western ethics, feminist criticisms of,
203–4
Whatelly, Richard, 134
What Is the Socratic Method? (Phillips),
13–15
“What ‘Snowflakes’ Get Right About
Free Speech” (Baer), 615–18
Wheeler, Samual C., Jr., 653
White, Stuart, 788, 789, 806n7, 814
white Americans. See racism
“white Australia” policy, 765, 784,
803, 804–5
Whitehead, Richard, 677
white nationalists, 616
whites- only scholarships, 481
white supremacists, 470, 600
whole- brain death, 288–89
“Why Abortion Is Immoral”
(Marquis), 256–67
“Why It’s a Bad Idea to Tell Students
Words Are Violence”
(Haidt & Lukianoff), 601–5
“Why Shouldn’t Tommy and Jim
Have Sex?” (Corvino),
564–71
Wildman, Stephanie M., 510
will, of rational beings, 154–55
Williams, Bernard, 496
Williams, Nancy, 197
Williams, Stanley Tookie, 677
Williams, Thomas, 569
Roger Williams University, 481
Wilson, E. O., 109
Wilson, James Q., 628, 643–51
Wollstonecraft, Mary, 384–85
“womanist,” 203
women. See also feminist ethics
and abortion, 274–77, 282nn2–4
as “fetal containers,” 277, 278,
282–83n11, 282n9
moral agency of, 204
moral experience of, 204
oppression of, 274, 282n1
women’s interests, 203
“women’s issues,” 203–4, 205
Women’s Liberation, 385
women’s rights and animal rights,
384–86
Woodson v. North Carolina (1976),
667–68
work visas, 779
world food banks, 837–38, 842
World Trade Center bombing, 711
writing about moral issues, 60–62
“The Wrongfulness of Euthanasia”
( Gay- Williams), 304–7
Y
Yale University, free speech at,
617–18
Yancy, George, 508–11
Yiannopoulos, Milo, 589, 595, 601,
602, 604, 616
Yones, Abdulla, 20
Yones, Heshu, 20
Young, Cornel, Jr., 506–7
Z
Zack, Naomi, 474, 511–13
Zeigler, Karen, 771
Zionism, 494
zoo(s), 383
zoocentrism, 431–33, 435
Zubaydah, Abu, 754
zygote, 222

Cover (Doing Ethics: Moral Reasoning and Contemporary Issues)
Front Matter
Title Page��
Copyright��
Contents��
Preface��
Part 1 – Fundamentals��
Chapter 1 – Ethics and the Examined Life��
The Ethical Landscape��
The Elements of Ethics��
Religion and Morality��
Chapter 2 – Subjectivism, Relativism, and Emotivism��
Subjective Relativism��
Cultural Relativism��
Emotivism��

Part 2 – Moral Reasoning��
Chapter 3 – Evaluating Moral Arguments��
Claims and Arguments��
Arguments Good and Bad��
Implied Premises��
Deconstructing Arguments��
Moral Statements and Arguments��
Testing Moral Premises��
Assessing Nonmoral Premises��
Avoiding Bad Arguments��
Writing and Speaking About Moral Issues��
Chapter 4 – The Power of Moral Theories��
Theories of Right and Wrong��
Major Theories��
Evaluating Theories��
Devising a Coherent Moral Theory

Part 3 – Theories of Morality��
Chapter 5 – Consequentialist Theories: Maximize the Good��
Ethical Egoism��
Utilitarianism��
Learning from Utilitarianism��
Social Contract Theory��
Chapter 6 – Nonconsequentialist Theories: Do Your Duty��
Kant’s Ethics��
Learning from Kant’s Theory��
Natural Law Theory��
Learning from Natural Law
Chapter 7 – Virtue Ethics: Be a Good Person��
The Ethics of Virtue��
Virtue in Action
Evaluating Virtue Ethics��
Learning from Virtue Ethics
Chapter 8 – Feminist Ethics and the Ethics of Care��
Feminist Ethics��
The Ethics of Care��

Part 4 – Ethical Issues��
Chapter 9 – Abortion��
Issue File: Background��
Moral Theories��
Moral Arguments��
Chapter 10 – Euthanasia and Physician-Assisted Suicide
Issue File: Background��
Moral Theories��
Moral Arguments��
Chapter 11 – Delivering Health Care��
Issue File: Background��
Moral Theories��
Moral Arguments��
Chapter 12 – Animal Welfare��
Issue File: Background��
Moral Theories��
Moral Arguments��
Chapter 13 – Environmental Ethics��
Issue File: Background��
Moral Theories��
Moral Arguments��
Chapter 14 – Racism, Equality, and Discrimination��
Issue File: Background��
Moral Theories��
Moral Arguments��
Chapter 15 – Sexual Morality��
Issue File: Background��
Moral Theories��
Moral Arguments��
Chapter 16 – Free Speech on Campus��
Issue File: Background��
Moral Theories��
Moral Arguments��
Chapter 17 – Drugs, Guns, and Personal Liberty��
Issue File: Background��
Moral Theories��
Moral Arguments��
Chapter 18 – Capital Punishment��
Issue File: Background��
Moral Theories��
Moral Arguments��
Chapter 19 – Political Violence: War, Terrorism, and Torture��
Issue File: Background��
Moral Theories��
Moral Arguments��
Chapter 20 – The Ethics of Immigration��
Issue File: Background��
Moral Theories��
Moral Arguments��
Chapter 21 – Global Economic Justice��
Issue File: Background��
Moral Theories��
Moral Arguments��

Glossary
Answers to Argument Exercises
Notes
Index

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