In Defense of Stakes-Sensitivity

TL;DR: Stakes-sensitive beneficence is compatible with individually-directed concern (even for future individuals—see fn 2). Also, we can have reasons to optimize that are decisive for good practical reasoning even if we do not call the resulting act a matter of “duty”. Good people are concerned to act well, not just to discharge their duties.

In ‘The Case for Strong Longtermism’, Greaves & MacAskill appeal to what we may call the Stakes-Sensitivity Principle (SSP): “When the axiological stakes are very high, there are no serious side-constraints, and the personal prerogatives are comparatively minor, one ought to choose a near-best option.”

This is an extremely modest principle. Consider that moderate deontology allows that even the most serious side-constraints can be overridden when the stakes are sufficiently high. SSP does not even claim so much. It is compatible with outright absolutism.

Even so, Charlotte Unruh’s ‘Against a Moral Duty to Make the Future Go Best’ disputes this modest principle, which she characterizes as “constrained utilitarianism” (I prefer the term “beneficentrism”, as the idea’s appeal is by no means limited to utilitarians). Unruh writes:

On this view, demands of beneficence always generate moral duties to aid, unless these duties are outweighed by a prerogative.

Deontologists can reject this characterization of beneficence. They can hold, against [SSP], that we have no general duty to make things go best from an impartial perspective. The deontological duty of beneficence is limited in principle, or, as Wiggins puts it, ‘by its true nature’.1

Wiggins, in ‘The Right and the Good and W. D. Ross’s Criticism of Consequentialism’, argues that Ross’s conception of beneficence as a general duty to promote intrinsic value (all else equal) is in tension with Ross’s own insight that “the essential defect of the ‘ideal utilitarian’ theory is that it ignores, or at least does not do full justice to, the highly personal character of duty.” Wiggins suggests, plausibly enough, that it is not just the other Rossian prima facie duties but beneficence too that should be understood as “personal” in character:

The beneficent person is one who helps X, or rescues Y, or promotes this or that cause and does so because each of those thing is in its own way an important and benevolent end. His acts are not directed at simply increasing the net quantity of intrinsic good in the world.

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