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The Rules of Rescue: Cost, Distance, and Effective Altruism
This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.
When do you have to sacrifice life and limb, time and money, to prevent harm to others? When must you save more people rather than fewer? These questions might arise in emergencies involving strangers drowning or trapped in burning buildings, but they also arise in our everyday lives, in which we confront opportunities to donate time or money to help distant strangers in need of food, shelter, or medical care. With the resources available, we can provide more help--or less.
In The Rules of Rescue, Theron Pummer argues that we are often morally required to engage in effective altruism, directing altruistic efforts in ways that help the most. Even when the personal sacrifice involved makes it morally permissible not to help at all, he contends, it often remains wrong to provide less help rather than more. Using carefully crafted examples, he defends the view that helping distant strangers is more morally akin to rescuing nearby strangers than most of us realize. The ubiquity of opportunities to help distant strangers threatens to make morality extremely demanding, and Pummer argues that it is only thanks to adequate permissions grounded in considerations of cost and autonomy that we may pursue our own plans and projects. He ultimately concludes that many of us are required to provide no less help over our lives than we would have done if we were effective altruists.
When do you have to sacrifice life and limb, time and money, to prevent harm to others? When must you save more people rather than fewer? These questions might arise in emergencies involving strangers drowning or trapped in burning buildings, but they also arise in our everyday lives, in which we confront opportunities to donate time or money to help distant strangers in need of food, shelter, or medical care. With the resources available, we can provide more help--or less.
In The Rules of Rescue, Theron Pummer argues that we are often morally required to engage in effective altruism, directing altruistic efforts in ways that help the most. Even when the personal sacrifice involved makes it morally permissible not to help at all, he contends, it often remains wrong to provide less help rather than more. Using carefully crafted examples, he defends the view that helping distant strangers is more morally akin to rescuing nearby strangers than most of us realize. The ubiquity of opportunities to help distant strangers threatens to make morality extremely demanding, and Pummer argues that it is only thanks to adequate permissions grounded in considerations of cost and autonomy that we may pursue our own plans and projects. He ultimately concludes that many of us are required to provide no less help over our lives than we would have done if we were effective altruists.
- GenresPhilosophy
264 pages, Hardcover
Published December 16, 2022
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
January 7, 2025
With the methodology and thought process throughout this book is clear, one can't help but question how useful this angle is in supporting the conclusion made, namely that most people living in relatively affluent countries are morally required to engage in effective altruism, directing altruistic efforts in ways that help the most. While I certainly agree with conclusion, and I appreciate his elucidation of just how analogous helping distant strangers is to rescuing nearby strangers, his non-consequentialist approach that renders certain (in)actions that do no good to be 'morally permissible', but acts that do some good but not the 'most good' to be morally wrong, creates unnecessary confusion in how best to think about how we and others should live our lives.
The intuitions like he relies on to denigrate consequentialism, particularly act consequentialism, seem to be very surface level and under-investigated. It is clear that Pummer has the wherewithall to meticulously use thought experiments to to explore other prima facie intuitions, regarding biases based on distance, personal connections to beneficiaries, etc., he seems surprisingly content accepting something like the 'organ harvesting' thought experiment as a serious critique of consequentialism.
This book is perhaps useful for a niche audience, and at the very least serves as a great example of how carefully crafted thought experiments can lead to persons overcoming their immediate, surface-level intuitions. However, it came across to me as more a book composition that was easy pulled together based off of a chapter or two of a PhD thesis (I'm not sure if this is actually the case), which made it a bit less exciting and feeling less relevant than I thought a book of this title would be to the broader public.
The intuitions like he relies on to denigrate consequentialism, particularly act consequentialism, seem to be very surface level and under-investigated. It is clear that Pummer has the wherewithall to meticulously use thought experiments to to explore other prima facie intuitions, regarding biases based on distance, personal connections to beneficiaries, etc., he seems surprisingly content accepting something like the 'organ harvesting' thought experiment as a serious critique of consequentialism.
This book is perhaps useful for a niche audience, and at the very least serves as a great example of how carefully crafted thought experiments can lead to persons overcoming their immediate, surface-level intuitions. However, it came across to me as more a book composition that was easy pulled together based off of a chapter or two of a PhD thesis (I'm not sure if this is actually the case), which made it a bit less exciting and feeling less relevant than I thought a book of this title would be to the broader public.
December 1, 2024
Having just finished reading this, I really feel that Pummer accommodates all our intuitions with his theory of the demands of beneficence involving ‘requiring reasons’ and ‘permitting reasons,’ whilst also providing an account for these intuitions. Just brilliant.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews