Lifetime Justifications and Doing Harm

Abstract

Our everyday lives are filled with constant opportunities to help anonymous strangers, by giving to charity, volunteering, and so on. They are also filled with constant opportunities to reduce the harm we do to anonymous strangers, via our carbon emissions, diets, shopping choices, or what have you. It would be very costly to respond maximally to the many opportunities to help you will face over your life. The same is true of fully minimizing the (risk of) harm you do. Either task would involve major demands of your time, attention, and money, as well as a major restructuring of your personal projects. While it would be very morally good of you to make such sacrifices to maximize help and minimize harm, you are not required to go so far. In this paper, I defend a novel view (the ‘lifetime justifications view’) that explains why you are permitted not to help all the time; §1 provides necessary setup and §2 presents and defends the view. In §3, I argue that this view applies to doing harm: it also explains why you are permitted to harm in certain ways some of the time. I argue that harming on a given occasion can be made permissible by your past or future altruistic sacrifices. There are limits on what harms can be made permissible in this way. For example, past or future costs incurred for the sake of others are incapable of making it permissible to kill someone to avoid a small cost to yourself. Nonetheless, in §4, I suggest that one practically important implication of my view is that donating more to charity can in a range of cases make it permissible to take more Sunday drives or engage in other activities with a similar carbon footprint, even when the charities donated to don’t do anything like offset carbon emissions.