Abstract: Our moral sensibility has evolved in societies where the impact of our actions has been restricted. Today many people feel that the kind of sensibility we have developed in this kind of settings is inadequate. Our actions have a very different import in a modern society, and this import must be taken into moral account. We sometimes cause serious harm, not because of what individually we do, but because of what we do together with other people. And sometimes we cause serious harm, not in any noticeable way, but perhaps still in a morally important way, since many people are each being affected negatively (in a not noticeable way) by what we do. And in some other cases, we have a combination of this. We cause a not noticeable harm to some person, and so do many other persons. Together the harm we all cause to this person is considerable. We may want to take all these kinds of effects into moral account. It is tempting to want to solve all these problems with one theoretical move: the wrongness of what we do is determined by our share of the total harm done. We divide it up equally among the persons who together do the harm in question. But this is not satisfactory. It is true that, sometimes, many people together cause serious harm, but what each does is of no harm at all. In those cases we should say that, while together we do harm, individually we act rightly. The wrongness of what we do collectively does not spill over to what each of us do. I have discussed this elsewhere and say no more about collective responsibility in this context. 2 And where we do cause serious harm together with other persons, but where our own action is not of negligible importance, even though the effects of it are not noticeable, we want to know exactly how bad our own contribution to the evil produced is. This is of importance if, by producing this harm, we also produce something good. Perhaps we ought to go on producing this harm because of the good we do at the same time. This question is of most obvious importance in the cases where, individually, we cause a little harm to a great many people. Even if they do not notice this, the harm produced may be considerable, and it should be given its due in our moral mathematics. Or so I will argue, at any rate.
Publication Year: 2000
Publication Date: 2000-01-01
Language: en
Type: book-chapter
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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