@Jacob | Created: May 11, 2025 | Last edited: May 11, 2025
Our moral requirements are not confined to the domain of mere non-maleficence. By this, I mean that we are not just required to refrain from performing (certain) bad actions (like hitting a stranger unprovoked), but to perform (certain) good ones, too. To see this, consider Peter Singer’s famous Drowning Child:
On your way to work, you pass a small pond. On hot days, children sometimes play in the pond, which is only about knee-deep. The weather’s cool today, though, and the hour is early, so you are surprised to see a child splashing about in the pond. As you get closer, you see that it is a very young child, just a toddler, who is flailing about, unable to stay upright or walk out of the pond. You look for the parents or babysitter, but there is no one else around. The child is unable to keep his head above the water for more than a few seconds at a time. If you don’t wade in and pull him out, he seems likely to drown. Wading in is easy and safe, but you will ruin the new shoes you bought only a few days ago, and get your suit wet and muddy. By the time you hand the child over to someone responsible for him, and change your clothes, you’ll be late for work. (Singer, 2009: 3)
Clearly, you are required to save the child, and this demonstrates that our moral requirements include acts of beneficence – we are required to benefit people, as well as refrain from harming them. A plausible moral theory will therefore include a ‘principle of beneficence,’ according to which we are (sometimes) required to perform good acts, and it is an important question what that principle should demand. What are the demands of beneficence? (Murphy, 1993: esp. 267)
Commonsense moral intuition tells us that there are demands of beneficence, but that these are quite limited in scope – especially outside the context of rare/extreme cases of potential rescue like that just depicted. Compare Drowning Child to the following actual case (Charity):
There are malaria charities operating in areas of extreme poverty that save on average one life for every $3000 they receive. You can donate to such a charity right now by visiting a website and entering your card details. (Pummer, 2023: 100-1)
Regardless of whether we are required to give to charity, we tend to think we are not required to give large sums, forgoing luxuries like Starbucks and television in order to direct the money we save to charity. Yet so giving (to these malaria charities or similarly efficacious ones) would clearly save lives. We tend to think that giving large sums (within reason) is indeed morally good/commendable, but not required: we would not necessarily be doing anything morally wrong simply by failing to do this. Dominant moral theory has tended to struggle accommodating the existence of optional, morally good acts of beneficence such as this and, as a result, has failed to adequately capture a prominent feature of common moral thinking.
Nevertheless, I believe it is possible to reconcile (to some extent) moral theory with this aspect of commonsense morality, and it is part of the project of this dissertation to illustrate how this may be done. I defend what I call the ‘Psychological Difficulty Thesis’ (PDT). This is the view that sufficient psychological difficulty renders otherwise required actions not-required, and so the demands of beneficence are limited to actions which are sufficiently psychologically easy to perform. This philosophically defensible thesis can help us maintain our intuitions in cases like Drowning Child, and some of those in cases like Charity, under a plausible principle of beneficence.
In §1 I further expound where PDT is situated in discourse on the demands of beneficence. In §2, feeding on the findings of §1, I motivate PDT, outlining its benefits for a principle of beneficence and its (independent) intuitive grounding. Finally, in §3, I outline the (arguable) most serious worry for PDT, before defending PDT in its face. By the end of the dissertation, I will have provided principled reasons for accepting PDT, and a rigorous response to one of the biggest worries relating to it, and so given a strong argument for accepting and keeping to PDT as a means of helping us ascertain the demands of beneficence.
As expounded above, PDT emerges in discourse on the question, “What are the demands of beneficence?” Yet PDT has only garnered more serious attention quite recently in the literature. It will therefore be helpful to summarise the relevant literature on the demands of beneficence leading up to the presentation of PDT.
In ‘Famine, Affluence, and Morality,’ Singer offers what has come to be one of the most prominent but controversial principles of beneficence. According to Singer, cases like Drowning Child show the demands of beneficence are very extensive indeed. In it, you are required to sacrifice your expensive shoes and suit, and punctual arrival at work, in order to save the drowning child. Consequently, Singer argues, we have good reason to think that we are always required to sacrifice things of comparatively minimal moral importance in order to prevent something bad from happening (Singer, 1972: 231-3; Singer, 2009: 15-6). Singer calls this the ‘principle of preventing bad occurrences’ (PPBO). (1972: 231, 241)
PPBO is a highly demanding principle of beneficence; it asks a lot of people who want to meet their moral requirements (hopefully, most of us). Although, in his work, Singer deploys this principle only to support his thesis that globally affluent people ought to be doing much more than they are to help those in need of food, shelter, and medical care (the ‘global poor,’ if you will), its implications are significantly more far-reaching. Indeed, it would seem that ‘Singer[‘s argument implies] that moderately affluent individuals are obliged to forgo all luxuries and give up almost all their spare time and money to helping strangers in desperate need.’ (McElwee, 2023: 922) This is because most ‘luxuries,’ and most alternative pastimes, are of comparatively minimal moral importance to the ‘desperate need’ of these strangers.
In light of this high demandingness of PPBO, many have objected that it is over-demanding. This means that the demands of this principle of beneficence are too extensive for it to be plausible. But Singer and others see over-demandingness objections as weak or not real objections; something like a mere reaction to an admittedly radical conclusion that there is nevertheless strong philosophical evidence for (c.f. Beauchamp, 2019: sec. 4). For this reason, I turn to some of the strongest philosophical grounding for over-demandingness objections against a principle of beneficence.
In 1958, J. O. Urmson published what has come to be considered the foundational text on ‘supererogation.’ In it, Urmson argues that moral theories which categorise actions exclusively as required, forbidden, or morally neutral (most dominant theories) fail to account for a fourth category – the supererogatory – which are neither required nor forbidden (optional), nor morally neutral (as they are morally good).[1], [2] Take Classical Utilitarianism (CU), for example, which states that one is always required to perform the action which promotes the most moral good (c.f. Sinnott-Armstrong, 2023: sec. 1). On such a theory, there is no room for actions that are good but optional. Nevertheless, Urmson presses, there are surely supererogatory actions. He famously gives the example of a soldier who covers a detonating grenade with his body to save his squad (Urmson, 1958: 19; cited in Heyd, 1982: 2). This is a morally good thing to do, but it would be absurd to say it was required (and perhaps even more so to say it is forbidden).
Regardless of whether there is supererogation (my focus is upon requirement), Urmson’s example illustrates that a principle of beneficence can be over-demanding. This is because jumping on a grenade is an act of beneficence[3], and any principle of beneficence requiring anyone finding themselves in this soldier’s position to act as he did (as might CU), would be one which demands too much.[4]