SOPHIA DOI 10.1007/s11841-017-0596-7

Moral Transformation and Duties of Beneficence Alex Rajczi 1

# Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2017

Abstract Some ideas are at the heart of the world’s great ethical and religious traditions, yet they play little or no role within certain debates in modern philosophical ethics. One such idea is that most of us have unreliable moral intuitions and we must transform ourselves into better people before we can reliably judge how to behave. This paper explores that idea by focusing on a transformative experience that I will call the moral experience. In the paper’s initial sections, I describe the moral experience and explain why it constitutes a genuine transformation in ethical outlook. I then argue that the moral experience could thereby affect our views on certain contemporary ethical debates, illustrating those points with a discussion of the debate about global poverty. Keywords Benevolence . Beneficence . Transformation . Global poverty . Moral experience Curiously, some ideas are at the heart of the world’s great ethical and religious traditions, yet they play little or no role within certain debates in modern philosophical ethics. One such idea is that most of us have unreliable moral intuitions and we must change or transform ourselves into better people before we can reliably judge how to behave. This paper explores that idea by focusing on a transformative experience that I will call the moral experience. When we have the moral experience, we fully conceptualize others’ mental lives—their joys, pains, sorrows, etc.—then realize we have stronger obligations of beneficence than we previously thought. In the paper’s initial sections, I describe the moral experience in detail and explain why it constitutes a genuine transformation in ethical outlook. I then argue that the existence of the moral experience should affect some contemporary philosophical debates, illustrating my points with a discussion of the contemporary debate about global poverty.

* Alex Rajczi [email protected]

1

Claremont McKenna College, 850 Columbia Ave, Claremont, CA 91711, USA

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The Moral Experience in Ordinary Terms Since ordinary people have the moral experience, let me risk imprecision and start with a folksy description. In our daily lives, we often have to decide how much we should do for others. We have to decide whether to give to charities, whether to attend a long speech by an acquaintance who would like to see friendly faces in the audience, and whether to politely excuse ourselves from a tedious conversation with a lonely person who clearly wants to keep talking. We have all made our own decisions about how much to do for others in these and other situations, and those judgments can seem like sound weighings of our own interests against theirs. However, at times, we become aware of others’ lives in a way that we normally are not. Perhaps we come face to face with a homeless person, seeing a vivid manifestation of his suffering in his eyes and his expression. Perhaps we finally follow our parents’ instruction and truly consider ‘How would I feel if someone did that to me?’ Or perhaps folk wisdom inspires us to deeper reflection. ‘Be kinder than necessary,’ one saying says, ‘for everyone you meet is fighting some secret battle.’ At such times, we vividly contemplate what it would be like to be one of the poor or to feel the nervous need for friends in the audience or to be truly lonely. For some of us, but not all, the result is more than just increased knowledge of what it is like to be that other person. Many of us feel a change in our moral outlook. It seems that we have lived our lives too selfishly and that we should do more for others. We come to a new and more demanding understanding of what it is to be a good person. Sometimes this new understanding feels like a matter of having the right perspective, in an almost visual sense. To paint with proper perspective is to represent things as being the size they are, and after this moral transformation, we realize that we spend much of our day caught up in relentless, narcissistic thinking about ourselves, and yet now, we see that we are only one important creature among so many and that our obligations are greater than we thought they were. For some of us, this whole experience can seem like a spiritual or moral revelation.

The Beginning of the Moral Experience: Contemplation of Others’ Suffering So much for informality; I will now describe this experience more precisely. My thinking about the moral experience was inspired by reading Josiah Royce and his thoughts on what he calls ‘the moral insight.’ 1 I will quote Royce a few times here, but since my thoughts diverge from Royce’s in substantial ways, I will not attribute my conception of the moral experience to him, and references to his work will be largely confined to footnotes.2 Later, we will see that phenomena like the moral experience are discussed in 1

See ch. 6 of The Religious Aspect of Philosophy. Many thanks to a reviewer and knowledgeable scholar of Royce who helpfully pointed out various places to learn more about Royce’s own views. If we want to know more about what Royce means by ‘insight,’ a good source is The Sources of Religious Insight, pp. 5–6, as well as the commentary in part 1 of Peter Fuss’ (1965) book The Moral Philosophy of Josiah Royce. Royce (1894) writes about the reconciliation of conflicts between people’s desires through their work in communities in The Religious Aspect of Philosophy, esp. pp. 215–216. For information on the phenomenology of the moral insight, see chapters 3–7 and the last two sections of chapter 12 of The Religious Aspect of Philosophy, as well as lectures 6–7 of The Philosophy of Loyalty. For Royce’s views on intuition, see volume 2 of The Problem of Christianity, as well as his encyclopedia article ‘Mind.’

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other places as well, including much Buddhist literature and, though less explicitly, in Christian literature as well. The moral experience is a transformation, so we can begin by describing our situation before that transformation. Borrowing a term from Royce, we can say that during our everyday lives, we often fail to fully ‘realize’ other people—that is, during our own thinking, we do not correctly conceptualize others’ internal mental states, such as their pains, sorrows, and so on. This imperfect realization can take many forms. Sometimes our thinking takes no account of others’ inner lives at all, treating other people with as little concern as we might treat inanimate objects.3 That is probably rare, though, and more often, we fail to fully realize others by letting their inner lives enter into our thinking in some partial way. One form of partial realization is considering only some parts of people’s mental lives but not others, especially by leaving out those parts that are unrelated to our own interests. For instance, we might want to know whether others are making sarcastic remarks about us (which requires us to think about their intentions), but not think about the pains and troubles that have led them to this perhaps uncharacteristically bad behavior.4 Another form of partial realization involves misconceiving those parts of their mental lives that we do consider, especially by thinking that their suffering, pain, and related negative experiences are somehow less painful to them than they actually are. Royce puts this idea nicely, I think, saying that we sometimes do not treat another: …as real, even as thou thyself art real. He seems to thee a little less living than thou. His life is dim, it is cold, it is a pale fire beside thy own burning desires.5 And

Thou has regarded his thought, his feeling, as somehow different in sort from thine. Thou hast said: ‘A pain in him is not like a pain in me, but something far easier to bear.’ Thou has made of him a ghost, as the imprudent man makes of his future self a ghost…. So, dimly and by instinct, thou has lived with thy neighbor, and hast known him not, being blind. Thou hast even desired his pain, but thou hast not fully realized the pain that thou gavest….6 Royce’s descriptions ring true. We all know, abstractly and propositionally, that others have mental lives no different from our own, and yet we also regularly fail to correctly conceptualize others’ mental lives, and we make decisions that do not properly take into account the effects of our decisions on others. For instance, we might be considering whether it is okay to skip a friend’s musical performance. Our minds are vividly aware of the costs that attending bring to us, but we do not fully imagine our friend’s disappointment when we do not show up. 3 On this, compare Royce (1894), The Religious Aspect of Philosophy, p. 150. Cf. Royce, The Religious Aspect of Philosophy, p. 157. 4 Compare here some of Royce’s remarks about the train conductor in Royce (1894), The Religious Aspect of Philosophy, p. 150. 5 Royce (1894), The Religious Aspect of Philosophy, p. 158. 6 Royce (1894), The Religious Aspect of Philosophy, p. 159.

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The contrast to these incomplete realizations is, of course, a complete one: we think about all the aspects of others’ mental lives, and we keep in mind that their pains, sorrows, and so on are just as intense as our own. Many things can spur such realizations. We might simply notice that we are incompletely realizing others’ mental lives, and we might take steps to do better, either in this particular instance or by training a new set of habits. Earlier, I noted other things that can spur full realization too, including incidents where we witness vivid manifestations of others’ suffering. There are interesting questions to explore about the pre-requisites for full realization, though for space reasons, I can only note a few of the debates here. Consider some points discussed in Nussbaum’s Upheavals of Thought, which raises issues somewhat similar to those raised here. One of Nussbaum’s main concerns is to identify the circumstances in which we feel compassion, and she points out that compassion seems to require the belief that a person is suffering undeservedly.7 One might think that this belief is also at least generally required if the plight of another is to spur us to full realization, as I have defined it, since as a psychological matter of fact, it certainly seems that we are more likely to fully realize the plight of a homeless person or a lonely friend if we feel that they do not deserve to suffer as they do. Another interesting complexity concerns the relationship between full realization and empathetic feeling, the latter defined as the imaginative reconstruction of another person’s experience. 8 When discussing an Aristotelian view of compassion, Nussbaum points out that one element of compassion seems to be a belief that another is undergoing serious suffering.9 It seems as though that one can acquire this belief without empathetically feeling another’s suffering, just as it would seem that one could fully realize another, as I have defined that term, without empathetically feeling the other’s suffering. And yet Nussbaum points out, rightly in my view, that empathy does seem to be a primary way in which humans do in fact gain a proper understanding of the magnitude of others’ suffering.10 As I said, space constraints prevent me from exploring these issues further, because so far, we have only discussed the full realization of others’ suffering, and full realization is just the beginning of the complete phenomenon that I am calling the moral experience. During the moral experience, this realization leads to a change in moral outlook. Let us now ask how that can happen.

From Full Realization to a Change in Moral Judgment There are, I think, two obvious ways in which a full realization of others’ inner lives can change the moral judgments that we make.11 I will lay them out below, but as we will see, neither seems to involve a deep or meaningful change in overall moral 7

Nussbaum (2003), Upheavals of Thought, p. 311ff. Nussbaum (2003), Upheavals of Thought, p. 302. 9 Nussbaum (2003), Upheavals of Thought, p. 306. 10 Nussbaum (2003), Upheavals of Thought, p. 331 ff. 11 The discussion here leaves aside the role that full realization might play in moral motivation rather than moral judgment. On motivation, it is interesting to compare Nussbaum’s view that compassion ‘…is a needed complement to respect, without which…benevolence will be lacking in energy….’ (Upheavals of Thought, p. 399, and see chapter seven as a whole for more on motivation). 8

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outlook. Having seen why that is the case, I will then set aside these two phenomena and argue that full realization of others can produce deeper, more interesting changes to our moral framework and in particular to our views about our positive duties of beneficence. Beginning with the obvious, though, we can see that full realization of others provides us with factual information that we did not previously have, with the result that we change our judgments about our duties of beneficence. For instance, suppose that I am deciding whether I must send my niece a Christmas present every year, but I fall victim to imagining her as ‘unreal’—I imagine that she would not suffer very much if she does not get the gift. In such a case, I might judge that I am not under any obligation to send her a present. However, if I later realize her more fully, understanding that not receiving the present will be very hurtful, even though I am an uncle that she does not know very well, I might well make a different judgment. More generally, if we change our understanding of the factual situation of a case, our judgments about beneficence might change as well. I suspect that all readers are familiar with this phenomenon, though for completeness’ sake, we can ask why a person’s judgments might change in ways like this in response to a changing factual understanding of a case. The answer, in part, is that in ordinary life, we often make judgments about our obligations of beneficence intuitively. Intuitions are non-inferential judgments about what one ought to do. They can be about specific acts, like whether to give one’s niece a present, but also about act types or about very general moral ideas such as ‘it’s bad to harm sentient beings’. (Notably, intuitions are often elicited by considering an actual or hypothetical situation where a moral issue arises. For instance, one can imagine someone being seriously harmed for no apparent reason, then ask whether the aggressor has pro tanto reason not to harm the victim.) Moreover, intuitions are not random responses unguided by the particular features of the situation. Instead, they are responses to specific features that we regard as morally salient. And when judging whether we have an obligation of beneficence, two things we find morally salient are the cost of the sacrifice to us and the benefit to the recipient, and our intuitions about situations are partly a function of the relationship between the two. For instance, it often seems that if we can do great good for someone at little expense, we are pro tanto obligated to do so, but that once the sacrifices become too great compared with the benefits, we no longer have the obligation. And if costs and benefits are salient features that we respond to, then it is not surprising that after fully realizing others’ mental lives, and in particular after we have a better understanding of the extent of others’ suffering, our intuitions about a situation might change. Moreover, we can easily see that if people put any credence in intuition at all, they might reasonably come to believe that their new moral intuition, after full realization, is more reliable than the one before it. Suppose that for whatever reason, a person has decided to ask ‘what seems like the right thing to do in this situation?’ He has an intuition, but then he more fully realizes others’ mental lives, and as a consequence, he recognizes that he was not eliciting intuitions about this situation at all, but rather an alternative situation in which his actions had a different effect on the mental lives of others. After this, he focuses on a more accurate picture of the situation and his intuitions change. Naturally, if the person reasonably regards intuition as having evidentiary or probative value, then he can plausibly regard this new intuition as more reliable than the original one, since the new one is at least an intuition about the real situation that he meant to be considering.

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So that, in sum, is why it is not surprising that when I fully realize, say, my niece’s disappointment, I might come to a new conclusion about my duties of beneficence. But having described the situation in detail, we can now also see why someone might think that full realization of my niece, or anyone else, has only changed the moral judgments that I make and not my moral outlook. My basic views about beneficence seem unchanged. I have merely seen a different relationship between benefits and burdens because I have a new factual understanding of the situation I am in. Similar things might be said about a second way in which full realization of others can affect our moral judgment. There are times when people make decisions about the extent of their obligations of beneficence using what we can call operative principles of beneficence. That is, instead of using intuition to decide what to do, they make their decisions by applying rules like ‘I owe nothing to the global poor’ or ‘I must give a dollar but no more to every homeless person I see on the street.’ How, if at all, does full realization affect the application of these principles and the subsequent judgments that result? To start, it might seem that full realization is wholly unrelated to these principles and the way that we apply them, because the rules themselves do not seem to take the state of the potential beneficiary as an ‘input.’ The rule that I owe nothing to the global poor, for instance, can be applied without knowing how much the potential beneficiary suffers. Thus, it might seem as though full realization of others’ lives cannot affect the way that such rules are applied. But that picture is oversimplified. I cannot rule out the possibility that some people believe that these operative principles are literally true, but I suspect that most people who espouse them think of them as heuristics and that in fact they embrace more complicated conceptions of their duties. For instance, most people who say they ‘owe nothing to the global poor’ would probably think that if they could sacrifice a penny and save a million of the global poor, they ought to, revealing that at some level, their principles of beneficence do ultimately weigh costs and benefits. In fact, it seems likely that what is really going on is that they have a certain pre-conceived notion of how much the global poor suffer in typical situations, of how much it would cost to help them, as well as many other things, and they have concluded on that basis that they ‘owe nothing to the global poor’ in the current situation as they suppose it to be. I suspect that similar things are true of the person who feels that she owes a dollar but no more to the homeless. If that is right, then full realization of others can lead people to change their operative principles of beneficence by showing people that their understanding of their typical situation is wrong—wrong in particular about the benefits that they can give to others and about how much others will suffer without help—and thus that the operative generalizations that they have made about it are also incorrect. Indeed, I think that these kinds of changes are familiar. A person who believes that they owe nothing to the global poor might be asked—perhaps in a philosophy class—to think more thoroughly and accurately about global poverty and charitable donations. That person is not psychologically locked into simply applying their existing operative rule. Instead, they can come to better understand the factual situation and then assess, intuitively, what they should do. The intuitions might or might not accord with the operative rule, and when the two do not accord, a person might reasonably revise their operative rule. They do so because their operative rule was intended to be a generalization about their intuitive reactions to some common set of situations, but now they have seen that the generalization is inaccurate.

Moral Transformation and Duties of Beneficence

Note that revising one’s operative conception in this way might happen even if we think that we have already tried to match our operative conception to our intuitions. For instance, imagine a philosopher who first started thinking seriously about global poverty when she began doing philosophy. She thought about hypothetical and real examples involving the global poor, examined her intuitions about those examples, and then used those intuitions (along with other techniques) to formulate views on global poverty, which she then summarized in an operative conception. Such a person might realize later on that she initially failed to vividly imagine the suffering of the global poor—she treated them as unreal. When she realizes this, she might effectively start over, re-imagining the situation of the global poor and asking what her intuitions tell her about their situation. Since she is now imagining the plight of the global poor differently, she might have different intuitive reactions than she previously had. This in turn can lead her to see that her operative conception is incorrect. Having seen that full realization can affect judgments made on the basis of operative principles, we should note again that it seems to do so only by providing new factual information and not by leading to any deep change in the person’s moral viewpoint. True, the operative principles do change. But those were only intended to be a summary of one’s deeper views about beneficence, and the revisions to the operative principles only bring them into line with those deeper views. It does not revise the deeper views themselves. So far, we have seen two cases where full realization does not affect one’s deepest moral outlook, and now we can ask whether full realization ever does lead one to revise one’s deepest guiding ideas about beneficence. I do not know of any empirical information that would settle this, and I suspect that introspection will lead different readers in different directions, since all the test cases seem to admit of multiple descriptions. Many readers can probably remember a time when, for instance, a documentary or news article made them more fully and vividly aware of the suffering of the homeless, and then, at least for that moment, they felt that they had greater duties to the homeless than they ordinarily imagine. In such situations, were you already aware that you should do something for a homeless person suffering to degree X if you could do something about it at cost Y, and full realization merely helped you apply the rule more accurately by informing you about how much the homeless suffer? Or, at that moment, did you come to understand that your underlying conception of beneficence toward the homeless was too stingy? Here, I would not try to answer empirical questions like these. However, I can note that at least some of us feel that after contemplating the richness of others’ mental lives, we come to believe a new and more demanding set of moral principles, and— here is the philosophical part—such a transformation is compatible with, and even suggested by, certain very plausible understandings of moral judgment and moral intuition. For instance, consider Scanlon’s remarks on philosophical methodology, which he makes while discussing reflective equilibrium. 12 While addressing general questions about moral justification, he points out that certain objects of study, such as those in mathematics and ethics, are not spatiotemporal objects, and because of this, one can easily become skeptical of how one gets ‘in touch’ with them. Scanlon answers that

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The following paraphrases Scanlon (2014), Being Realistic About Reasons, p. 70ff.

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It seems we can discover normative truths and mathematical truths simply by thinking about these subjects in the right way…we need to describe these Bways of thinking^ in a way that makes plausible the claim that they are ways of arriving at knowledge about the subject matters in question.13 Scanlon then points out that some mathematical truths, such as certain truths of set theory, are not conceptual truths about the concept of a set. Instead, they are things which B[seem] obviously true^ once we think clearly about the nature of sets under conditions which would seem favorable for knowing the truth about that subject matter. 14 He writes: …a set is understood as a collection of objects, and has no properties other than having these members. So the axiom of extensionality, which says that no two distinct sets can have exactly the same members, seems to follow from our understanding of what a set is. Most axioms are not of this character, however, even ones that seem entirely unproblematic. For example the axiom of pairing says that if a and b are sets, then there is a set c whose members are just a and b. This may not be a conceptual truth—something that is Bincluded in the very concept of a set.^ But it seems obviously true—something that anyone who understands the concept of a set could hardly deny—because the way in which c is defined in terms of, or constructed out of, a and b is so clear and apparently unproblematic.15 What interests me in this picture is the idea that when we contemplate a certain subject matter, such as facts about the nature or definition of a set, certain other things also seem true to us, such as certain axioms of set theory, even though the latter do not ‘follow’ from the former. The same thing seems to happen to at least some of us when we contemplate certain purely factual descriptions of other human begins or of our actual or possible behavior toward them. At these moments, certain normative truths seem correct to us, such as the basic idea that it is bad to harm these creatures or that we have reason to help them flourish. Nor does having these reflections, or lending them credence, violate any alleged is/ought gap. The claim is not that one can deduce moral truths from a factual description of human beings or a factual description of a possible or actual interaction with them. Instead, the claim is first and foremost psychological: when we think about the factual descriptions, there are certain moral truths that also strike us as rather obviously correct. We think about burning a baby with a cigarette, and this strikes us as wrong. We think about the fact that other human beings have hopes and dreams just like ours, and it may strike us that we have reason to help them achieve those goals. If this picture is right, then it is perfectly possible that a more thorough factual understanding of a subject matter can lead to a change in one’s most basic moral outlook about it. For instance, if a person had only a vague and incomplete understanding of what a set was—they read the definition quickly in a single textbook, for 13

Scanlon (2014), Being Realistic About Reasons, p. 70. Scanlon (2014), Being Realistic About Reasons, p. 73. 15 Scanlon (2014), Being Realistic About Reasons, p. 73. 14

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instance—and was then asked which truths of set theory ‘seemed obvious’, they might give one answer. But if they had a thorough understanding of what a set was, then perhaps other truths would seem obvious. Likewise, it is perfectly possible that when contemplating others in an unreal way, certain basic principles of morality, including basic principles of beneficence, strike us as correct. However, once we contemplate others in a fuller and more vivid way, other principles might strike us as correct. This need not be the result of having the same deep conception of beneficence in both situations but applying it more accurately in the second, any more than the math student needs to somehow have had the same deep thoughts about mathematics but applied them more accurately in the second. Instead, it is possible that the person’s deepest thoughts about beneficence are being revised when they more fully and vividly contemplate the inner lives of others. To that extent, some thinking about philosophical methodology vindicates the feeling, shared by many of us, that full realization of others leads to a transformation in our moral outlook.

The Moral Experience: Additional Elements I have now described the core of the moral experience, but there are a few more elements to add. The first is that a full moral experience involves recognizing that we have a habit of regularly, though perhaps not universally, underestimating the extent of others’ suffering and/or the benefits that they would receive from our beneficent action. Second, a new or renewed awareness of the nature of others’ mental lives strikes one as, and indeed is, the understanding of a truth—namely, the truth about the extent to which others actually suffer, feel pain, and so on. Third, I have already argued that, insofar as we place credence in intuition, it is reasonable for people to think that their post-moral-experience intuitions are more reliable than their old ones.16 Fourth, and consequently, people who have had the moral experience repeatedly might not only conclude that they have the bad habit of misunderstanding others’ mental lives, but that this is a moral flaw, and thus that they suffer from a vice. This vice sometimes amounts to discounting others’ suffering and thus treating them as if they were not our moral equals. It is also a form of selfishness, because by thinking of others as if they suffer less than they do, our own well-being receives unjustified weight when compared to the well-being of others. This explains why many people might feel that the moral experience reveals a serious ethical weakness in their own character. Fifth, the moral experience has a typical though not universal phenomenology, and it involves emotional as well as cognitive components. The emotions are varied and cannot all be detailed here, but one worth noting is that the moral experience is often accompanied by feelings of love, caring, and compassion. The emotion itself is not the same thing as the cognitive insight into others’ lives. 17 The emotion is more like what Martha Nussbaum called an ‘upheaval of thought,’ that is, an ‘intelligent [response] to the perception of value.'18 16

Compare here Royce’s remarks about illusions in The Religious Aspect of Philosophy, p. 160. Royce (1894), The Religious Aspect of Philosophy, p. 148. 18 Nussbaum (2003), Upheavals of Thought, p. 1. 17

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Finally, inspired by Royce, we should emphasize that in a certain respect, the moral insight and its subsequent effects on our judgments of beneficence do not ‘stick’:

We see the reality of our neighbor…. But then we go back to daily action, and we feel the heat of hereditary passions, and we straightway forget what we have seen. Our neighbor becomes obscured. We are again deluded and selfish. This conflict goes on and will go on as long as we live after the manner of men. Moments of insight, with their accompanying resolutions; long stretches of delusion and selfishness; That is our life.19 Remarks like these raise many questions. What parts of the moral experience do not stick? Do we go back to imagining others as partly or wholly unreal? Or do we also go back to trusting the intuitions and operative principles that we form in our reverted state, even though we have recognized that such intuitions and principles are unreliable? If the latter, how does that happen—how can we come to a new moral understanding and then seemingly lose it? And regarding all these questions, are the answers the same for everyone? I am reluctant to enter into these debates because they broach questions that are clearly empirical and non-philosophical. For the purposes of what is to come, I hope the following subjective and phenomenological observations will suffice. First, it is obviously true that even if one has fully and vividly imagined others’ mental lives at a certain point in time, one can regularly fail to do so in the future. This is unsurprising. We very easily know or imagine our own sufferings, but it takes real effort to fully and vividly conceptualize the sufferings of others, and we do not acquire that difficult habit merely by deciding that we should. Second, when we go back to treating others as unreal, we frequently revert to our old intuitions about beneficence, the ones that require less of us. This too is unsurprising. Moral intuitions are non-inferential judgments about what seems right or wrong to us, and they are elicited when we contemplate a given subject matter. In light of that, it is unsurprising that they are affected by the way that we conceptualize that subject matter. If we begin thinking of people as unreal—e.g., as suffering less than they do—and then ask what seems morally obvious to us at those times, it is unsurprising that we can feel the pull of our less-demanding intuitions. Perhaps, in the vein of Scanlon, some mathematical comparisons will help illustrate this point, even if they are imperfect. Most readers can probably recall a time when they first learned the numerical concept of infinity, and they can also recall feeling, very strongly, that ∞ + 1 must be greater than ∞, and more precisely that it was absurd for anyone to think—as our teachers seemingly did—that ∞ + 1 could equal ∞. It took a focused and sophisticated understanding of infinity to realize why one was wrong. And yet, many of us can probably recreate in our minds that partial, incomplete understanding of infinity and once again feel the pull of the idea that ∞ + 1 is greater than ∞, an occurrence made possible in no small part because ∞ is a difficult concept to grasp and we can easily fall back into an imperfect understanding. A second and more sophisticated comparison is with the concept of multiple sizes of infinity, a concept that many 19

Royce (1894), The Religious Aspect of Philosophy, p. 155/6.

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of us encountered much later in life. Probably most of us can remember feeling that it was absurd for anyone to say—as mathematicians did—that one infinite set could be larger than another. It took concentration and sophisticated understanding to see why some infinities are in fact larger than others. And yet, most of us can easily slide back into our incomplete understanding of the notion of infinity and feel the pull of the old idea that nothing can be larger than the (familiar, countable) infinity. Recognizing that we can still feel the pull of our pre-moral-experience intuitions brings us to a third, very difficult question. Suppose someone has had the moral experience and has concluded that their post-experience intuitions are more reliable than their pre-experience intuitions. When they revert to what I have called ‘feeling the pull’ of their pre-experience intuitions, why, if at all, would someone not only feel their familiar pull, but also believe in or act upon them? I see at least two kinds of situations where this clearly happens. Consider first the obvious fact that our knowledge, including our knowledge about ourselves and our own reasoning patterns, does not always enter into our practical reasoning as it should. For instance, in a calm moment, we may conclude that when we get into disagreements with our spouses, we often become locked in our own way of seeing things and do not adequately consider the merits of the spouse’s point of view. We might hope that this insight will lead us to behave more reasonably in the future, and yet we know that in the heat of the next marital argument, it often does not: the metaknowledge is simply not operative in the way that it should be, either because we do not focus on it when we should or because we remain aware of it but rationalize it away—‘I know I often overlook her good points, but darn it, this time she is clearly wrong!’ Something similar can go on after the moral experience. During the moral experience, we come to intuitions about beneficence that we ourselves deem to be more reliable than our usual ones. Perhaps we even know that later we will return to seeing people as unreal, and we have concluded that we should not rely on those (reverted) intuitions. And yet that piece of meta-knowledge might not enter into our thinking in the way that it should on a day-to-day basis, and for rather familiar reasons: there is no social pressure keeping it at the forefront of our consciousness, we want the less demanding principles to be correct and so we conveniently ignore our meta-knowledge, and so on. Moreover, a second reason why we might act on our pre-experience intuitions is simple akrasia. We might be aware that we should act on our post-experience intuitions but simply not do so, perhaps because being beneficent is costly to us. This brings us to the end of our description of the moral experience. In sum, the moral experience is not a philosopher’s invention but rather an experience which some people have in their own lives. It typically involves heightened awareness of what others go through and brings about an accompanying change in moral outlook, particularly with respect to duties of beneficence. The moral experience involves full conceptualization of others’ mental lives, and this in turn can change our understanding of our moral duties of beneficence.

The Extent of the Moral Experience Having described the moral experience, our next major question is whether and how analytic ethics should engage with it, and surely that depends in part on whether any

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significant number of people have the moral experience. Some readers will have had the moral experience themselves, and so it will be obvious that it is a real occurrence for at least some people. Others might want evidence of its possibility or extensiveness, but since (to my knowledge) no scientific studies exist about the frequency of the moral experience as I have defined it, I suspect that the best evidence that we have comes from the records of the world’s moral and religious traditions, in which something like the moral experience is often held up as part of a moral ideal. On the assumption that these traditions have not spent centuries touting a completely unreachable transformation, but rather one that adherents at least sometimes experience, suggests that the moral experience has occurred in a substantial number of people. Consider, for instance, many forms of Buddhism. These Buddhisms often center their ethical outlooks, in no small part, on the idea that a truly moral person would embrace a very demanding conception of our duties to others. The moral person partakes of the four ‘divine abodes’ or ‘divine immeasurables,’ which are usually translated as loving-kindness, compassion, empathetic joy, and equanimity. Compassion in particular is often interpreted to involve a strong kind of impartiality—though perhaps not complete impartiality—that mandates extensive duties to others. In addition, some Buddhisms encourage meditative practices intended to increase these virtues and attitudes, and those practices look strikingly like attempts to elicit the moral experience. For instance, practitioners are sometimes asked to vividly imagine the lives of others and to bring forward compassion and visualize themselves extending it to all people. These meditative recommendations often build on explicit religious doctrine, which asserts that human beings are normally locked into patterns of selfcenteredness that affect their thoughts and lead them to make immoral judgments and decisions. Consider, for instance, this description given by the Dalai Lama:20

So let us meditate on compassion. Begin by visualizing a person who is acutely suffering, someone who is in pain or is in a very unfortunate situation. For the first three minutes of the meditation, reflect on that individual’s suffering in a more analytical way—think about their intense suffering and the unfortunate state of that person’s existence. After thinking about that person’s suffering for a few minutes, next, try to relate to that yourself, thinking, ‘that individual has the same capacity for experiencing pain, suffering, joy, happiness, and suffering that I do.’ Then try to allow your natural response to arise—a natural feeling of compassion toward that person. Try to arrive at a conclusion: thinking how strongly you wish for that person to be free from suffering. And resolve that you will help that person to be relieved from their suffering. Finally, place your mind single-pointedly on that kind of conclusion or resolution, and for the last few minutes of the meditation try simply to generate your mind in a compassionate or loving state. Buddhism is fairly explicit that human beings are overly self-centered and that they need to transform their personalities before they can reliably judge and act rightly. I believe that Christian ethics has a similar theme, even if it is less explicit. Note first that Christian ethics puts forward demanding requirements of beneficence, urging us to help 20

As quoted in Flanagan (2011), The Bodhisattva’s Brain, p. 195

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others more than we might be ‘intuitively’ inclined to do. For instance, the Parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:29–37) makes this point. After the lawyer asks Jesus what he should do to obtain eternal life, Jesus tells him to love God with all his heart and also to love his neighbor as he loves himself. When the lawyer asks who his ‘neighbor’ is, Jesus replies with the parable, wherein the victim of a robbery is helped by a Samaritan. These characters are picked for a deliberate reason. In Jesus’s day, the Samaritans and the Jews were enemies, and the parable reveals that we should help even those who are our enemies. Another striking passage is Matthew 25:34–40. On the Mount of Olives, Jesus delivers this message to his followers:

When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on the throne of his glory. All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats, and he will put the sheep at his right hand and the goats at the left. And after discussing the lucky right handers, Jesus says: Then he will say to those at his left hand, BYou that are accursed, depart from me into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels; for I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not give me clothing, sick and in prison and you did not visit me.^ Then they also will answer, BLord, when was it that we saw you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not take care of you?^ Then he will answer them, BTruly I tell you, just as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.^ And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life. Finally, while it is not a statement in any given passage, Jesus’s life itself, with his focus on the poor and dispossessed, seems to teach a demanding conception of our duties to others.21 Moreover, it is notable that the New Testament not only presents a very demanding conception of our duties to others, but also urges people toward something akin to the moral experience. The moral experience involves fully contemplating the inner lives of others and thereby overcoming the narcissism that is natural to human beings. That same attitude is urged in passages which explicitly ask people to treat others’ suffering as equivalent to their own. For instance, in Mark 12:31, Jesus says ‘…You shall love your neighbor as yourself,’ a statement repeated in Matthew 22:39 and Luke 10:27. Likewise, at John 15:17, Jesus tells others to love each other as he has loved them, having indicated earlier that he loves them with the all-encompassing love that God has for Jesus (John 15:9). Naturally, none of these passages lays out a description of the 21

Although the New Testament occasionally alludes to the difference between moral obligation and supererogation (e.g., Matthew 19:21), these recommendations to love others as we love ourselves are often phrased as obligations (Cf. Quinn (2000), ‘Divine Command Theory’).

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moral experience as a philosopher would—there are no explicit calls to ‘vividly imagine the suffering of others’, for instance. But the Bible’s repeated statements of (something like) the golden rule do that implicitly, and this is, I think, something that has been overlooked by overly-literal philosophical readings which try to treat the golden rule as a formula in ethical theory. When we are told to love others as we love ourselves, or to do unto others as we would have them do unto us, one point of that command—perhaps the main point—is to get us to think vividly about what others are going through.22 These religious traditions and texts are not, of course, anything near definitive evidence that many people have had the moral experience or that those who have had them have felt a transformation in their conception of beneficence. Readers will probably feel the weight of the evidence differently, and rather than digress on this point any further, I will simply move forward on the assumption that many people do have the moral experience and that as a result, they reasonably believe they have been led to a more accurate conception of beneficence. The next question is about the implications of this assumption for philosophical practice in contemporary analytic ethics.

Consequences for Analytic Ethics: Changing Arguments about Obligations of Beneficence Some might feel that the moral experience, or something like it, appears in at least some major debates and schools of thought within analytic ethics,23 while others might think that the moral experience has been generally neglected. Here I cannot try to survey the terrain and determine the extent to which phenomena like the moral experience have or have not been overlooked in contemporary analytic ethics. Instead, I will focus on one particular case where I suspect that it has been neglected, the debate about global poverty that was inspired by Singer’s ‘Famine, Affluence, and Morality’ and which has continued ever since. My hope is to illustrate how acknowledgement of the moral experience might alter a major debate so that readers can ask questions about other debates that they encounter. If we were trying to find a theory of beneficence which would tell us whether we were obligated to give to the global poor, we might use the method of wide reflective equilibrium. Roughly speaking, when we employ wide reflective equilibrium, we 22

In addition, though more briefly, we should note that Christianity seems to echo some of the other aspects of the moral experience as we have described it earlier. The moral experience feels like a revelation of a new and better moral understanding, while simultaneously revealing that one’s character has been, until then, flawed, and many forms of Christianity teach, first, about the narcissistic and flawed nature of the human personality and also that acceptance of Christianity’s moral code makes one a better person. The moral experience also typically involves an emotional component, increased love, caring, and compassion. This too is at the center of Christian ethics, as exemplified in the previous passages, which focus on loving others as oneself. Finally, note that the moral experience frequently does not ‘stick’; we backslide into our old and incorrect ways of seeing the world. This too is a teaching of many forms of Christianity, which emphasize that people are forever backsliding into error. 23 The moral experience, as I describe it, has many components, and discussion of some of those components has figured into prominent work in analytic ethics. Examples include Nussbaum’s Upheavals of Thought and The Therapy of Desire, Kittay’s Love’s Labor, and Halwani’s Virtuous Liaisons, just to name a few. It is worth noting that while some authors discuss certain parts of the moral experience, few explicitly argue for my thesis that full realization can change one’s basic intuitions about a fundamental moral concept like beneficence.

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survey the arguments for various moral theories as well as our considered judgments about abstract ethical principles and particular ethical situations. We ‘work back and forth’ (to use Rawls’s phrase), modifying the theory and/or our considered judgments until we bring them into accord. A full reflective equilibrium procedure would survey all the relevant arguments and considered judgments and arrive at principles of maximal generality. More often, as in the global poverty debate, philosophers engage in a partial reflective equilibrium process by looking only at the considered judgments and theories that seem relevant to a particular issue and arriving at principles that settle that issue in particular. Reflective equilibrium can be used solipsistically, as a tool each of us uses to figure out what principles we should adopt. But one can also employ reflective equilibrium when making arguments aimed at some target audience. The goal is to argue that after a thorough reflective equilibrium process, the audience would arrive at a certain principle or theory. That principle in turn might imply concrete conclusions about issues like global poverty. Singer’s arguments about global poverty are naturally seen as a deployment of the method of reflective equilibrium.24 Singer asks us to consider a situation where we can save a drowning child at the cost of ruining our clothes and incurring a modest financial loss, as well as other situations where we can save the life of another with only modest sacrifice. Our considered judgment is that we should. What principle best and most naturally explains those considered judgments? It might seem to be something like Singer’s principle that ‘If it is in your power to prevent something bad from happening, without sacrificing anything nearly as important, it is wrong not to do so.’25 Furthermore, Singer argues that this principle aligns with other considered judgments about ethics, including abstract ideas about the equality of all people, and that a supporting rationale can be given for it. Once we justify the principle using reflective equilibrium, we then deploy it to the case of global poverty. Singer has what I will call moderate critics who argue that he has substantially overstated our duties to the global poor. Those moderate critics sometimes try to show that there is another principle which better fits with our considered judgments, which There is some unclarity about Singer’s (2005) exact methodology, because in ‘Ethics and Intuitions,’ Singer criticizes certain elements of the method of reflective equilibrium. His main point seems to be that some intuitions should not be taken as ‘inputs’ into the reflective equilibrium process, even though he does accept that ethical reasoning must begin from something akin to intuition. To that extent, he does not appear to be rejecting all uses of reflective equilibrium, only those that take certain intuitions as starting points. For an interpretation that seems to attribute reflective equilibrium to Singer, see, e.g., Arthur (2002), ‘Famine Relief and the Ideal Moral Code.’ Even if Singer were to reject the use of reflective equilibrium entirely, it is clear that he is in some way relying on intuition, and all that is needed for my critique in the following is the claim that Singer and others rely in some significant way on intuition during their arguments. For authors who interpret Singer as appealing to the intuition in some way, see, e.g., Cullity (2006), The Moral Demands of Affluence, esp. ch. 1; Arneson (2009), ‘What Do We Owe to Distant Needy Strangers?’; Kuper (2002), ‘More Than Charity: Cosmopolitan Alternatives to the BSinger Solution^’; and Miller, ‘Beneficence, Duty, and Distance.’ Singer’s writing seems to clearly back this interpretation. For example, in The Life You Can Save, he begins his main argument by laying out some standard rescue cases and eliciting intuitions about them. These are never rejected as philosophical starting points. Rather Singer says that ‘…our moral intuitions are not always reliable, as we can see from variations in what people in different times and places find intuitively acceptable or objectionable. The case for helping those in extreme poverty will be stronger if it does not rest solely on our intuitions…’ (p. 15). He goes on from there to offer theoretical considerations in favor of his conclusion. 25 Singer (2009), The Life You Can Save, p. 15 24

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has a sensible supporting rationale, and which implies that we have fewer (or no) duties to the global poor. Take as an example, Richard Miller, whose work is some of the finest written in response to Singer. Miller argues against Singer’s principle and for what he calls the principle of sympathy, which he states in the following way:

One’s underlying disposition to respond to neediness as such ought to be sufficiently demanding that giving which would express greater underlying concern would impose a significant risk of worsening one’s life, if one fulfilled all further responsibilities; and it need not be any more demanding than this.26 Miller adds that

Someone’s choices or a pattern of choices on his part violate this principle if he would not so act if he had the attitude it dictates and were relevantly well-informed.27 What kind of giving carries a significant risk of worsening one’s life? According to Miller,28 it is not enough that the giving would make it more difficult to satisfy worthwhile goals—e.g., by requiring you to eat in fancy restaurants less often, even if your goal is esthetically interesting eating. Instead, one’s life is worsened by ‘the inability to pursue, enjoyably and well, the range of worthwhile goals with which one intelligently identifies, or could readily intelligently identify, as giving point and order to one’s choices’.29 For example, one’s life has been significantly worsened if one is hardly ever able to eat at a restaurant serving interesting and delicious meals (without sacrificing some other worthwhile goal) or if one is unable to purchase the occasional ‘luxury or frill’30 such as stylish clothing or fancy stereo equipment. Why does Miller think that we should believe this principle? His work is complex and I will not attempt to survey it all here. The main argument, though, seems to employ reflective equilibrium. Miller thinks that all acceptable principles must, in some way, display equal respect for all persons,31 and after noting that many principles are compatible with equal respect, he adds that ‘a morally responsible person will seek specific principles of obligation that satisfy demands imposed by the best interpretation of the general precepts [e.g., of equal respect], the one that best fits the most secure specific judgments.’32 He then gives specific examples and elicits our considered judgments about them, arguing that our considered judgments align better with his principle than with Singer’s.33

Miller (2004), ‘Beneficence, Duty and Distance,’ p. p. 359. Miller (2004), ‘Beneficence, Duty and Distance,’ p. 359. 28 Miller (2008), ‘Moral Closeness and World Community,’ p. 519. 29 Miller (2008), ‘Moral Closeness and World Community,’ p. 519. 30 Miller (2004), ‘Beneficence, Duty and Distance,’ p. 361 31 Miller (2004), ‘Beneficence, Duty and Distance,’ p. 366 32 Miller (2004), ‘Beneficence, Duty and Distance,’ p. 366/7. 33 It is worth noting that Miller considers the objection that his principle of sympathy would lead to the counterintuitive result that we need not save a child drowning in a puddle on certain occasions, and he responds by arguing for a principle of limited rescue which requires us to save the child but not to donate large sums to the global poor. 26 27

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My own view is that the arguments of moderates like Miller are enough to cast serious doubt on Singer’s principle. That is, if some of the inputs into our reflective equilibrium procedure are our considered judgments as writers like Singer and Miller understand them, then the case for some moderate principle is quite strong, and the case for Singer’s principle is, at the very least, somewhat uncertain. But this is where the moral experience complicates things. If moderates like Miller aim to convince those of us who have had the moral experience, then they must appeal to our considered judgments. Now of course, it is possible that even after the moral experience, people’s considered judgments will align with those of Miller. But I have argued earlier that the moral experience seems to lead a notable number of people to considered judgments that are not ‘moderate’ in Miller’s sense. In fact, those who have had the moral experience often reject the very intuitions that Miller cites—e.g., that it is acceptable to spend on fancy clothes or food while so many die of starvation and curable disease—feeling instead that they have very strong duties to the poor. In that case, Miller’s principle will be at variance with their considered judgments rather than aligning with them.34 The point, in essence, is that moderates in the debate about our duties to the global poor, and other debates about benevolent action, face an obstacle that they have not recognized. They often write as if most people have moderate considered judgments, even if Singer and a few like him do not. Given that both sides have well-developed and impressive theoretical outlooks, the moderates think that they can break the tie and win the debate with Singer so long as they can come up with a principle that accords with those moderate considered judgments without having the strong implications of Singer’s principle. However, that strategy is misguided from the start if the goal is to convince those people who have the moral experience. Their considered judgments align more closely with principles like Singer’s. For that target audience, the moderate argument from reflective equilibrium does not get off the ground. There is a general lesson here. In my view, philosophical debates about our duties to help others often overlook the fact that many people—perhaps those who are often more spiritually or religiously minded than academic philosophers typically are—do not have the considered judgments that we suppose they do. As a result, we academics who take part in this debate are systematically overestimating the merits of some moderate arguments and underestimating the merits of more demanding arguments like Singer’s. This is not just a flaw in some particular argument but in our whole approach to debates about beneficence. Moreover, examination of the moral experience teaches us something about what we could call ‘best practices’ in philosophical argument. Philosophers regularly ask each other and our students about their intuitions. But such questions might produce misleading results, depending on how they are phrased. If you ask people whether 34

Some moderates aim to show that their moderate principles can explain considered judgments other than those about giving itself, and if their principles do that better than Singer’s, then it is possible that they should be accepted even by those whose intuitions about giving line up with the demands of Singer’s principle. On this, see, e.g., Michael Slote’s ‘Famine, Affluence, and Empathy,’ where he proposes a principle that can allegedly explain such diverse phenomena as (1) why we have a greater obligation to (born) children than to animals and fetuses, (2) why we have a greater obligation to victims in need of rescue who are near to us than to those who are far, (3) why we have an obligation to save trapped miners even though the same amount of money could be used to install safety equipment that would save more miners in the future, and (4) more generally, why morality is partialist rather than impartialist.

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they feel the moderate intuitions that, say, Miller cites, many people would say they do. That would include people who have had the moral experience, since people who have had the moral experience routinely backslide into seeing people as unreal, and as we noted earlier, in such circumstances they can easily feel the pull of the intuitions that moderate philosophers are fishing for. A more precise question might yield a different answer, though. If philosophers asked whether some people in our target audience have had a moral experience where the extent of others’ suffering and mental lives came vividly into focus, whether at such times they felt that they should be doing more for others, and whether at such times these (morally demanding) intuitions seemed deeply right, we might find that many people would say yes. That brings out a more complicated picture of our intuitions than philosophers presently address.

Consequences for Analytic Ethics: Changing Self-Reflection So far, I have focused on the way that we might have to adjust our philosophical arguments if those arguments are aimed at others who have had the moral experience. But our discussion of the moral experience also has implications for how each of us should develop our own moral views, even if we have never had the moral experience. Ethical arguments must start from somewhere, and if we generalized greatly (but not, I think, harmfully), we could say that most philosophers believe that among our starting points must be our moral intuitions. It is also widely agreed that not just any intuitions will do as starting points. For instance, when Rawls described the method of reflective equilibrium, he said that during a reflective equilibrium process, we must rely only on …those judgments in which our moral capacities are most likely to be displayed without distortion. Thus in deciding which of our judgments to take into account we may reasonably select some and exclude others. For example, we can discard those judgments made with hesitation, or in which we have little confidence… those given when we are upset or frightened, or when we stand to gain one way or the other…. All these judgments are likely to be erroneous or to be influenced by excessive attention to our own interests. Considered judgments are simply those rendered under conditions favorable to the exercise of the sense of justice, and therefore in circumstances where the more common excuses and explanations for making a mistake do not obtain.35 Rawls may or may not have been right about exactly how to narrow down the set of acceptable starting points, but the basic idea that we need to do so—that we need to focus on our considered judgments—seems both correct and widely accepted. Notice, though, that implicit in Rawls’s discussion and contemporary philosophical practice is the assumption that once we properly filter our existing intuitions, it is reasonable to rely on them. But the existence of the moral experience—even if it has never happened to us, but only to other people—casts doubt on this. We know that other people have produced in themselves transformative experiences which changed 35

Rawls (1999), A Theory of Justice, p. 42.

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their moral intuitions about beneficence, and that afterward they believed that their new intuitions were more reliable. We have reason to think that such transformation might be possible for us as well. Moreover, we have reason to think that our subsequent (new) intuitions would be more reasonable or reliable starting points than our existing intuitions. Recall that the moral experience occurs after people more fully contemplate the nature of others’ experience. As a result, their subsequent intuitions about beneficence seem better founded, because those intuitions are a response to a fuller picture of the facts. Moreover, the fact that (reliable, trustworthy) other people report the moral experience in this way gives the rest of us some reason to think that if we could have the moral experience, we too would think, rightly, that our new intuitions were a more reasonable starting point for moral exploration. The upshot, then, is that perhaps analytic ethics should not so readily assume that our current considered judgments are the most reliable or reasonable starting points. Instead, perhaps we should consider the possibility that we will need to explore the many transformative practices that might eliminate our current intuitions and replace them with better ones.

References Arneson, R. (2009). What do we owe to distant needy strangers? In J. A. Schaler (Ed.), Peter Singer under fire: the moral iconoclast faces his critics (pp. 267–293). Chicago and LaSalle: Open Court. Arthur, J. (2002). Famine relief and the ideal moral code. In H. LaFollette (Ed.), Ethics in practice: an anthology (pp. 582–590). Malden, MA: Blackwell. Cullity, G. (2006). The moral demands of affluence. New York: Oxford University Press. Flanagan, O. (2011). The Bodhisattva’s brain. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Fuss, P. (1965). The moral philosophy of Josiah Royce. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kuper, A. (2002). More than charity: cosmopolitan alternatives to the Singer solution. Ethics & International Affairs, 16(2), 107–120. Miller, R. (2004). Beneficence, duty and distance. Philosophy & Public Affairs, 32(3), 357–383. Miller, R. (2008). Moral closeness and world community. In Pogge and Horton (Ed.), Global ethics: seminal essays (Vol. II, pp. 506–530). St. Paul: Paragon House. Nussbaum, M. (2003). Upheavals of thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Quinn, P. L. (2000). Divine command theory. In LaFolette (Ed.), The Blackwell guide to ethical theory (pp. 53–73). Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Rawls, J. (1999). A Theory of Justice, revised edition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Royce, J. (1894). The religious aspect of philosophy. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company. Scanlon, T. M. (2014). Being realistic about reasons. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Singer, P. (2005). Ethics and intuitions. The Journal of Ethics, 9, 331–352. Singer, P. (2009). The life you can save. New York: Random House.