Abstract

Murphy’s book is concerned with what he calls the “puzzle of beneficence”: that, while there are many moral issues on which people tend to agree, there is not only no consensus about the extent of the obligation to promote the wellbeing of strangers, but in fact a contentedness about the uncertainty of our obligation in this regard. Although there are some famous philosophical suggestions concerning the reasons for this puzzle, Murphy claims that what is most important is our tendency to view beneficence in terms of collective responsibility. The question of collective responsibility raises particularly the issue of “non-ideal theory”—“what a given person is required to do in circumstances where at least some others are not doing what they are required to do.” Murphy’s chief aims are first to explain the absurdity of the demands of the utilitarians’ “optimizing principle of beneficence”—that we must keep benefiting others until the point where further efforts would burden us as much as they would help the others—and to suggest instead a more plausible principle of beneficence. His suggestion—a “collective principle of beneficence”— involves a “compliance condition”: that the demands on a complying person should not exceed what they would be under full compliance with the principle. Murphy argues at some length that the apparent absurdity of the optimizing principle of beneficence is due not to a problem of “overdemandingness” in general, but rather to a failure to take into consideration nonideal situations where there is only partial compliance. Although his more technical formulations of the correcting “collective” principle of beneficence are admittedly “cumbersome,” the “basic idea,” as he represents it, is that “a person need never sacrifice so much that he would end up less well-off than he would be under full compliance from now on, but within that constraint he must do as much good as possible”. The argument for this position has some intuitive appeal when it is applied, for example, in situations where the fairness of imposing extreme demands is clearly in question. Murphy uses the following example: if everyone else including me would die from a nuclear explosion that I can prevent by exposing myself to a lethal does of radiation, I am required under his principle to do so. Murphy has to give a more complicated response to a less intuitively appealing apparent consequence of his principle—that, when used to consider issues like poverty, it would not seem to require many people in our actual world to sacrifice. He admits that his principle cannot be a stand-alone basis for ethics—for one thing, the concern of his argument is specifically with the difficulties of principles of beneficence, which make a requirement on us that it would be wrong not to perform; voluntary or supererogatory acts are thereby left aside. There are, as well, some familiar further problems which may in the end, however, be no more difficult for Murphy’s principle than for the principle of optimizing beneficence.—Allen Speight, Boston University.