When are we morally required to use our time and resources to help strangers, and when may we permissibly do nothing? Pummer’s excellent book offers us a systematic non-consequentialist answer to this pertinent question, one that draws a sharp distinction between two kinds of moral reasons. Requiring reasons serve to make acts required, whereas permitting reasons serve to make acts permissible but without independently making acts required. While requiring reasons aggregate and balance against one another, permitting reasons function as ‘defeaters’ and block the balance of requiring reason from rendering an act wrong. Within this framework, Pummer argues that we have ubiquitous requiring reasons to help strangers – reasons that don’t diminish with distance, salience, uncertainty and other seemingly difference-making factors – but we also have a set of cost-based and autonomy-based permitting reasons that can defeat the requirement to rescue in many cases.
The theoretical framework is developed through Chapters 1 to 4 using stylized emergency-rescue cases. In Chapter 2, Pummer discusses cases involving different numbers of victims and defends partial aggregation. Chapter 3 tackles the absurd conclusion that morality may sometimes require a rescuer to let a stranger die rather than save them. Here, Pummer introduces the idea of conditional permissibility to explain how saving one stranger can be conditionally permissible once better alternatives have been excluded, while remaining non-conditionally wrong. In Chapter 4, he argues that wrongness and overall blameworthiness can come apart: an act may be wrong even though the agent who performs it is overall praiseworthy, either because their sacrifice earns them enough credit to outweigh acting beneath the call of duty, or because of the motivations that put limits on discrediting those acting wrongly in conflict cases.
The remainder of the book is dedicated to applying this theoretical framework to real-world choices that are about helping distant strangers. In Chapter 5 Pummer argues that many features that appear to distinguish charity cases from stylized pond-rescue cases, including distance, salience, uniqueness, social injustice and most types of diffusion, fail to make the relevant moral difference. Chapter 6 tackles a pressing worry: unlike emergency rescues, opportunities to help distant strangers are not rare but constant, meaning that our lives might be consumed with helping others all the time. Pummer’s response is that lifetime altruistic sacrifices amplify permitting reasons, such that those who reasonably expect to have done enough may permissibly ‘switch off’ from helping strangers and attend to their own personal projects. Chapter 7 extends this account to special connections, and Chapter 8 draws out a practical lesson for (aspiring) effective altruists: many affluent agents are required either to devote at least 10% of lifetime resources cost-effectively, or to provide no less help by giving more at lower cost-effectiveness.
In this short review I focus on Pummer’s treatment of the demandingness of helping others in cases where opportunities to help are frequent. Imagine that, for the rest of your life, your phone alerts you every minute of a stranger about to be crushed by a boulder. By standing on a button for a minute, at a cost of a minute of your life and $3000, you can give that stranger a near-certain chance of being saved. Considered in isolation, each opportunity seems to generate a requiring reason to rescue, while the permitting reason to do nothing is too weak to defeat it. The implication is that you must spend essentially your whole life saving strangers, a verdict that many of us would find intolerable.
Pummer wants to reject this demanding verdict without denying that there’s a strong requiring reason to save each stranger. That reason is no weaker for the hundred-thousandth stranger whom you might rescue than for the very first, so his suggestion is to focus instead on permitting reasons. Pummer argues that permitting reasons not to save strangers at a cost amplify as one incurs a greater and greater lifetime cost in the course of saving more and more. Accumulated lifetime costs yield a permitting reason strong enough to defeat the requiring reason to save the next stranger, even when it is less costly. On Pummer’s preferred interpretation of the lifetime view, the present permission to refuse a particular rescue demand is amplified by the total cost the agent reasonably expects to incur in helping strangers over their lifetime. Well before one would have to save everyone, one is permitted to walk away if one ‘will’ve done enough’ (p. 143).
Yet, to know whether one may permissibly refrain from helping a stranger now, one must first form a reasonable expectation about how much one will have sacrificed across one’s entire life, a judgment few of us are equipped to make at any given moment of choice. A young and committed effective altruist deciding whether to decline a substantial donation on the basis that she will give enough over her lifetime requires her to make projections about her decades of future earnings, career stability, her health, family obligations and the persistence of her own future altruistic motivation. These projections, however, often involve substantial uncertainty and epistemic costs, especially for those living and working under precarious conditions. And forming ‘genuine and well-founded plans’ (p. 141) of the kind Pummer recommends often relies on information to which many of us have little reliable epistemic access at the moment of choice. It is unclear, then, how the lifetime view is supposed to provide guidance to those agents who perhaps need it the most.
My deeper worry, however, concerns the way in which the lifetime view characterizes the real-world cases to which it is meant to apply. The view relies on how incredibly frequent rescue opportunities are. At every minute of one’s life there is a ubiquity of opportunities to help, generating a ubiquity of requiring reasons. One observation here is that the view treats the frequency of rescue opportunities as a fixed background feature of the world. The individual agent is supposed to decide how much sacrifice they can be required to bear across a lifetime of encountering successive opportunities to engage in charitable rescues and calibrate their personal moral ledger accordingly.
But the ubiquity of opportunities to rescue is not simply a brute, value-neutral fact. In many of the real-world cases, including global poverty, famine, displacement, unsafe labour conditions, and climate-related disasters, the ubiquity is itself in part the result of exploitative institutional arrangements, unjust economic practices, and political choices that produce and sustain the very need the rescuer confronts minute after minute. Once this is recognized, it becomes less plausible to evaluate demandingness only by asking how much cost has accumulated in the life of a single rescuer. We must also ask why there are so many people in need of rescue in the first place. Given this, perhaps ‘doing enough’ is better understood as bearing one’s fair share of collective responsibility rather than as reaching the limit of one’s personal lifetime burden.
This suggestion is worth considering because, on the lifetime view, frequency helps generate permissions to refrain from helping. The more frequently an agent encounters opportunities to rescue, the greater the cumulative cost of always responding, and so the stronger the permission to do nothing. But in real-world cases, rescue opportunities are not randomly distributed. They confront affluent agents more frequently partly because those agents are situated within, and often benefit from, an existing global order that helps create and sustain those rescue needs. The danger, then, is that on the lifetime view the affluent individuals who are most exposed to a greater number or more frequent opportunities to help, and those who often have the greatest capacity to help, are precisely those for whom the permission to do nothing is most readily amplified. In other words, the view risks allowing the affluent to treat an abundance of opportunities to help produced by unjust arrangements as a reason why they may permissibly withdraw from responding to them.
This reframing has consequences for other claims the book defends. Consider, for instance, the claim that lifetime features make it permissible to ‘switch off’ from helping distant strangers and instead turn one’s attention and time to one’s own personal projects and plans (p. 181). Once the moral situation is understood keeping the structural features in mind, it is less clear what it would mean to switch off from something in which one is implicated. Pummer treats the psychological freedom from the awareness of distant suffering as a good that a lifetime of rescuing can purchase. But when appropriately reassessed, it may simply be the kind of inattention that the affluent agent’s social position already affords her. The affluent agent is not simply someone who is overwhelmed by the demands of morality; she is also someone whose social position within broader institutional arrangements often makes distant suffering easy to ignore, normalize, or characterize as a mere sequence of repetitive charitable opportunities. The struggle, then, is not simply to switch off from an intolerable ubiquity of rescue demands, but to ‘switch in’ against social and political forces that make those demands less visible.
A related concern arises from Pummer’s distinction between responsibly and non-responsibly acquired special connections (p. 204). The former can expand the lifetime cost one is required to incur in helping strangers, whereas the latter may affect how one allocates an existing budget but cannot increase its overall size. Yet, one relation that seems central to real-world cases is the relation affluent agents bear to the global poor: a relation often constituted by being born into an affluent country, inheriting the benefits of unequal economic and political arrangements, and participating in institutions whose effects travel across borders. This relation is rarely responsibly acquired in Pummer’s sense, and yet, it would be striking if this meant that the relation could not affect the extent, shape, or the demandingness of the affluent’s obligations towards the poor.
There is much to learn from Pummer’s careful and intriguing book. It forces us to rethink not only when rescue is required, but also how costs, autonomy, and personal projects shape the moral landscape of helping strangers. An important question it leaves us with is whether the urgent needs of the world’s worst off are best understood through the lens of the individual rescuer’s lifetime burden, or through a broader account of how duties of rescue should be distributed among differently positioned agents, including effective altruists, within the socio-political structures that generate a constant need for rescue.
