More on Cullity's Argument Against The Extreme Demand

In this post I examined an argument recently put forth by Garrett Cullity against the view that morality requires us to live what he calls "altruistically-focused lives." After several helpful discussions of this issue, I'm now convinced that my argument there did not properly address certain aspects of Cullity's argument.

The claim of Cullity's that I argued against in the earlier post is:

When your interest in having (or doing) a certain thing is an interest in having (or doing) what it would be wrong for you to have (or do), that interest cannot be a good reason for morally requiring me to help you to get (or do) it.

I suggested what at the time I took to be a potential counterexample to this claim, in which by helping someone get into a prestigious music school I could ensure that someone else would pursue a career in aid work that would benefit the world's worst off people. The problem with this example is that it is not the potential music school student's interest in pursuing a music career that provides me with the morally compelling reason to help her. Helping her is required, according to my description of the case, only because doing so will, given all of the relevant circumstances, promote the interests of other people.

But Cullity can accept this. He does not consider cases of the sort that I described, but does say that one can be morally required to provide someone with a piece of information that he requires in order to pursue his aim of humiliating someone, so long as she has promised him that she would provide the information. In this case one is required to help someone get something that he needs in order to do something wrong. But the reason that one is required to do so is not the other's interest in doing what is wrong, but the fact that one promised. The person's interest in humiliating someone, on the other hand, cannot itself be a morally compelling reason for requiring me to help him do so.

So Cullity's claim is not that we can never be required to help someone get what it is wrong for her to have. It is only that one's interest in getting what it is wrong for her to have can never, in itself, provide one with a morally compelling reason to help her get it.

But since Cullity thinks that it's obvious that others' interests in achieving the fulfillments of a non-altruistically focused life can provide us with morally compelling reasons to help them obtain those fulfillments, he concludes that it must not be wrong to obtain them. That is, it must not be wrong to live a non-altruistically focused life.

It's important to get clear on precisely what sort of case Cullity must have in mind in which the interests of another themselves provide one with morally compelling reasons to help her pursue those interests. He says, for example,

...suppose that, by making some small effort - passing on a piece of information, say - you could reunite [a long-parted] family, and there was nothing to be said morally against doing so. Or suppose some small effort of yours would determine whether a gifted student is able to pursue a music career, and there was nothing to be said morally against doing so. It would clearly be wrong not to do these things. Clearly, the moral requirements of beneficence extend not just to saving people's lives, but to responding to their interests in the fulfillments that life can contain...The morally compelling reason [you] have for helping does not disappear if [you] know that the lives of the family members, or the music student, are not altruistically focused.

In these cases it is the interests of the family members in being reunited (and in the associated fulfilling relationships that they can (re)establish upon being reunited) and of the aspiring musician in achieving a fulfilling career, respectively, that are supposed to ground the moral requirement to help. We must assume that there are no other reasons, such as benefits to others that would result from helping, or any special relationship that the potential benefactor might have to the family members or musician, that ground the requirement. Even once we make clear that there are no reasons of these sorts, Cullity's thought that we are morally required to help in these kinds of situations seems compelling.

While I accept Cullity's claim that we can be morally required to help in situations like those he describes, it is important to note that someone who accepts both Cullity's view that we cannot have morally compelling reasons to help others get what it is wrong for them to have and the Extreme Demand might claim that he has unfairly built into his description of the cases that there is nothing to be said morally against helping the family and the potential musician. Such a person might claim that since it is wrong to pursue the things that the family members would pursue were they to be reunited, and since it is wrong for the aspiring musician to pursue a music career, there is something to be said morally against helping them, namely that it would be wrong for them to have the things that ground their interests in getting help. Still, so long as there is no question of helping others obtain what it is not wrong for them to have (or some other morally worthy alternative) instead of helping the family or the musician, it is simply not plausible to claim that we cannot be morally required to help them, even if we grant (which I don't necessarily think we should) that there is something to be said morally against helping.

So the way to challenge Cullity's argument is not to claim that, despite our intuitions, we are not morally required to help the family or the musician. Those intuitions are, it seems to me, clearly correct. But I do think that Cullity's argument is subject to two related responses. First, we might simply deny that we cannot have morally compelling reasons to help others get what it is wrong for them to have. If we think, quite plausibly, that it would wrong (or even if we just think it a practical impossibility) to force others to live altruistically focused lives, then to refuse to act so as to promote their interests in achieving the genuinely valuable fulfillments of their chosen non-altruistically focused lives when we could easily do so would seem pointless from a moral perspective. If the only relevant options are making some people better off or making no one better off, it's not clear why, morally speaking, we should care whether the people we can make better off would, if they were doing everything that they ought to do, choose to forgo the benefits that we are in position to help them obtain in order to help others whom we are not ourselves in a position to help. To think that we should care is to reject the following seemingly plausible (if not obvious) principle:

If at little cost to ourselves we can help make some people's lives significantly better, without thereby making anyone's life worse, we have a morally compelling reason to do so.

This principle seems to me almost undeniable. But it is important to note that it is incompatible with Cullity's principle that we cannot have a morally compelling reason to help others get what it would be wrong for them to have (unless one thinks that one's life cannot be made better by having what it is wrong for one to have). So if we accept the principle that I've suggested, we have good reason to reject Cullity's principle, and his argument that it must not be wrong to live a non-altruistically focused life is blocked (this does not, of course, show that it is wrong to live such a life).

The other way in which Cullity's argument can be challenged is by considering what other reasons (besides the interests of the family members and the potential musician in obtaining the fulfillments they would derive from being helped) might ground an obligation to help in the cases Cullity describes. We might think, for example, that it is not the interests of those whom we might help, but rather the interest that we all have in living in a society in which people act so as to promote others' interests when they can do so at little cost to themselves, that grounds our obligations in cases such as Cullity's. It would surely be an undesirable state of affairs if everyone were inclined to, for example, ask a person who requests directions to the center of town whether he is going there to aid the homeless or to eat at one of the many upscale restaurants in the area, and to refuse to provide the directions if the response is the latter (I thank Jay Wallace for providing the general structure of this example). But we might think that in cases such as this it is not (or not only) the individual's interest in eating a fine meal that grounds our obligation to help him.

It seems to me that in many cases the reasons that ground our obligations to help others will not be (or not be only) the interests that those individuals have in being helped. If this is right, then we may be able to account for such obligations without claiming that an interest in having what it is wrong to have is what grounds them, just as Cullity accounted for the obligation to provide the information that would be used to humiliate someone. I also think that in some cases it is not problematic to think that we are obligated to help someone obtain what it is wrong for her to have, given the plausibility of the principle that I outlined above. If I'm right about these matters, then Cullity's argument against the Extreme Demand is significantly weakened.