Abstract
This chapter returns to the central question – to what extent do contemporary ethical approaches to the duty of assistance offer ways to resolve the tensions faced by those engaged in the current practice of assistance? Through an examination of the approaches offered by Onora O’Neill and Amartya Sen, it argues that both deontological and consequentialist frameworks can provide ways to resolve the tensions faced by those engaged in the practice of assistance. Both accounts are potentially disruptive in that they prompt questioning, critical reflection, and enable dynamic approaches to aid that stretch considerably beyond simple and determinate prescriptive actions. They clarify the basis of the duty of assistance as an imperfect duty that is wide in reach, and is open and unspecified in its requirements. Both approaches construct robust accounts of active situated agents engaging in a process of practical reasoning that supports agents to figure out how to specify the requirements of this duty in particular, concrete circumstances. Both accounts also point to additional considerations for those supporting such practices, and in particular, how agents might navigate issues related to harm and the matter of responsibility for the outcomes of action.
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Notes
- 1.
That is, one that can be used to support agents in judging and appraising specific contexts and that can guide agents in responding to these contexts.
- 2.
Here I borrow this term and classification from Daniel Statman (1996) as the closest description of the definition of imperfect duties that O’Neill works upon. According to this account, neither the act type nor the reason for action differs between perfect and imperfect duties: ‘viewing perfect and imperfect duties as expressing similar types of reasons for action helps us to see that there is no clear-cut demarcation between them but that instead we are faced with a continuum of moral reasons of varying weights’ (Statman 1996: 220). Therefore he suggests that all duties generate reasons for action that must sufficiently outweigh personal concerns or reasons not to act, and therefore, both perfect and imperfect duties compel an agent to perform certain acts.
- 3.
Perfect duties, as discussed in Chap. 2, as duties of law or right, are of strict and narrow application, that is, that they must be applied in all circumstances regardless of costs or other agent-relative considerations.
- 4.
For example, John Rawls’s enormously influential work A Theory of Justice (1971), and his later work Political Liberalism (1991) develop principles of justice that apply to the basic institutions of the state and provide a minimalist account of the duties and character of agents.
- 5.
O’Neill is also critical of contemporary theories of virtue that exclude consideration of conceptions of justice.
- 6.
Again I borrow here from Barry’s description of right-based and goal-based duties (Brian Barry 1991).
- 7.
A small anecdote that might provide some indication of the reach of Sen’s work lies, I think, in the preface to John Rawls’s Theory of Justice (1971) where Rawls thanks Sen for his comments on earlier drafts of his text, but also acknowledges Sen’s philosophical skills when he comments upon Sen’s Collective Choice and Social Welfare (1970). Rawls claims that ‘his book will prove indispensable to philosophers who wish to study the more formal theory of social choice as economists think of it. At the same time, the philosophical problems receive careful treatment’ (Rawls 1971: xi).
- 8.
It seems Sen is not comfortable with the label ‘consequentialism’ which he suggests can ‘be sensibly bequeathed to anyone who wants to take it away’ (2000a: 478). However, he concedes that his account is not in conflict with at least one standard definition of consequentialism – that developed by Philip Pettit “roughly speaking consequentialism is the theory that the way to tell whether a particular choice is the right choice for an agent to have made is to look at the relevant consequences of the decision; to look at the relevant effects of the decision on the world” (cited in Sen 2000a: 478; Pettit Consequentialism 1993: xiii).
- 9.
- 10.
Sen is aware of the range of criticisms that O’Neill’s account holds against his. Their opposing positions are clearly outlined in O’Neill (2004a) ‘Dark Side of Human Rights’ and Sen’s ‘Elements of a Theory of Human Rights’ (2004). Sen also addresses O’Neill’s objections and defends his position in his later work The idea of justice (2009: Chapter Five).
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Murphy, S.P. (2016). The ‘Terrible Beauty’ of Imperfect Duties – Onora O’Neill and Amartya Sen on the Duty of Assistance. In: Responsibility in an Interconnected World. Studies in Global Justice, vol 13. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-31445-7_4
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