Abstract
Agent-relative restrictions prohibit minimizing violations: that is, they require us not to minimize the total number of their violations by violating them ourselves. Frances Kamm has explained this prohibition in terms of the moral worth of persons, which, in turn, she explains in terms of persons’ high moral status as inviolable beings. I press the following criticism of this account: even if minimizing violations are permissible, we need not have a lower moral status provided other determinants thereof boost it. Thus, Kamm’s account is incomplete at best. And when, to address this incompleteness, it is insisted that our moral worth derives from specific moral statuses, the inviolability account comes to seem deficient because it begs the question against those who are not initially persuaded that minimizing violations are impermissible.
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Notes
The account offered in Intricate Ethics builds on Kamm’s previous work, notably (Kamm 1989, 1992a, 1995; 1996, pp. 259–289). Nagel (1995, p. 85) cautiously endorses the inviolability account. Quinn (1993, pp. 167–174) proposes an account of the precedence of negative over positive rights with clear affinities to Kamm’s inviolability account. One important alternative to the victim-focused account of the impermissibility of MVs is an agent-focused account, according to which an agent’s own victims have greater moral salience from this agent’s perspective than the victims of other agents. Kamm argues convincingly that agent-focused accounts are unable to accommodate the time-relative character of deontological restrictions (e.g. it is impermissible for me to treat someone now in a way that violates an agent-relative restriction even if my so doing would prevent past actions of mine from turning into a greater number of equally serious violations involving other people).
Because Kamm thinks that works of art possess generic inviolability even though they cannot be harmed, I prefer to define inviolability with the broad notion of negative treatment. The impermissibility of treating others in positive ways does not in general count towards greater inviolability or higher moral status: see the closing paragraph of Kahane (2007). (I say ‘in general’ because prima facie one can imagine that the impermissibility of our helping God-like individuals would be a mark of their having a higher moral status than us.)
Commonsense morality does not require one to minimize violations where non-human animals are concerned. If I find it unbearable to torture a rabbit myself, it is morally permissible for me not to prevent the greater number of violations.
It would seem that individuals are inviolable in virtue of the properties that make them persons. This suggestion fits well with some of the passages in which Kamm addresses the present issue. For instance, she suggests that agent-relative restrictions (and agent-prerogatives) ‘stem from the same source… the fact that persons, that is, rational beings, who are capable of a personal point of view, are not to be always used as mere tools to the greater good if they do not choose that as their goal’ (Kamm 1996, p. 262).
Presumably, the notion of high moral status is essentially comparative, i.e. a being has it because, and only because, there are many other beings that have a lesser status. So persons have a high moral status because their status is higher than that of foetuses, mice, works of art, rocks, and so on.
This claim presupposes that it is possible, in principle, to identify a defensible metric of inviolability and then rank moral theories in terms of it: see (Lippert-Rasmussen 1996, p. 336, n10). In what follows, I continue to assume that some such metric exists. The unavailability of such a metric would represent a serious problem for the inviolability account.
The availability of this line of argument is one reason why Kamm’s violability account in Intricate Ethics constitutes an improvement over the inviolability account offered in her previous work, where she simply appealed to inviolability in the generic sense.
This raises the question whether there are, or could be, individuals with higher moral status than persons; see Otsuka (1997, pp. 204–205). In what follows I use ‘inviolability’ as shorthand for individualized inviolability.
Other sources of our not possessing maximum inviolability are: the permissibility of harming those posing innocent threats and bystanders; the permissibility of self-defence against, and punishment of, guilty aggressors; the permissibility of harming an innocent person to prevent equally serious harm to a great number of other people; and the permissibility of forcibly causing voluntary agreements to be broken where this serves to prevent others from suffering greater losses. This list is non-exhaustive.
Kamm does not say much in elucidation of her concept of moral worth. One thing she does say is that fundamental human rights express the worth of persons protected by them, i.e. their nature as beings whose interests ought to be protected (Kamm 2007, p. 271). Presumably, the interests of persons ought to be protected to a greater extent than the interests of non-persons, and the relevant notion of worth at stake in the argument under scrutiny is a threshold notion such that it is only the interests of persons—and possibly individuals with an even higher status than ordinary persons, e.g. God—that ought to be protected to such an extent that they can be said to have moral worth in the threshold sense of the notion.
Kamm has compared her attention to moral intuitions about complicated thought experiments to the Princess and the Pea fairytale (Kamm 1992b, p. 9).
I thank an anonymous reviewer of this journal for pressing me on this matter.
Just for the record: I think no philosopher surpasses Kamm in terms of uncovering intricate moral intuitions.
There is a deep problem here, though: what should one say about inviolability and human beings who are not persons? If we say that personhood is what renders us inviolable, it follows that MVs involving new-born infants, who are not yet rational beings with a personal point of view, are not impermissible. So suppose that to prevent five torturers from torturing five parentless, new-born infants (one infant being tortured by each torturer) you yourself must torture a parentless, new-born infant. Commonsense morality does not condone an MV in this case, and it is therefore unclear that the property in virtue of which one possesses inviolability is personhood. The reply that what matters here is potential personhood will not do. Even if we assume that, due to some genetic defect, none of the six new-born infants has the potential to achieve personhood it remains unclear whether commonsense morality condones an MV. We might retract to the position that one possesses inviolability in virtue of being a ‘failed [member] of a type whose norm it is to rational’ [Kamm, expounding Scanlon’s view, in Kamm (2007, p. 233)]. However, it has been argued forcefully that such a view embodies an indefensible speciesist bias. What to say about human beings, who are not persons and who may not even have the potential for personhood, remains a thorny issue for the inviolability account. In fairness it should be noted that this problem is not specific to the inviolability account: see McMahan (2002, pp. 203–232) and Singer (1975). Also, it would be possible to endorse Kamm’s inviolability account and restrict its scope to persons only, such that not all human beings possess inviolability. To extend inviolability to non-human animals would be to move directly against Kamm’s view that inviolability reflects our higher moral status.
Presumably, the kind of unignorability that matters is not generic unignorability, but a species of unignorability that corresponds to individualized inviolability.
I thank an anonymous referee of this journal for presenting this challenge.
More radically, of course, our interlocutor may question whether we have any distinctive high moral status.
The first problem highlights the significance of the second. Since within a moral framework that allows MVs one can hold moral status constant and allow for some kind of inviolability, friends of Kamm’s argument must accept (3″) and (4″). However, their doing so is problematic, because it begs the question against someone who is not already drawn to agent-relative constraints and the inviolability account.
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Acknowledgements
A previous version of this paper was presented at a Frances Kamm seminar in Oslo, August 27, 2007, sponsored by Etikkprogrammet at Oslo University. I thank Jakob Elster, Paul Robinson, Jens Saugstad, and the Editors and two anonymous reviewers of this journal for very helpful comments.
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Lippert-Rasmussen, K. Kamm on Inviolability and Agent-Relative Restrictions. Res Publica 15, 165–178 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11158-009-9085-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11158-009-9085-3