The Moral Status of Helping and the Identified Victim Effect
Choose format
RIS BIB ENDNOTEThe Moral Status of Helping and the Identified Victim Effect
Publication date: 19.12.2018
Principia, 2018, Volume 65, pp. 49-68
https://doi.org/10.4467/20843887PI.18.002.9885Authors
The Moral Status of Helping and the Identified Victim Effect
Psychologists have noticed an interesting regularity consisting in the fact that people are more willing to help so-called identified victims than so-called statistical victims (this regularity has been called ‘the identifiable victim effect’). One of the controversial problems connected with this effect is a normative one, viz. can preferring identified victims be morally justified in the contexts of private decisions (i.e., made by ‘private’ citizens rather than public institutions)? The goal of this article is to defend three claims: (1) that the answer to the above normative question depends on two factors: the strength of the identified victims effect and the assumed view (utilitarian or non-utilitarian) on the normative status of helping; (2) that the proper view is one of the variants of the non-utilitarian approach (called in the paper ‘negative morality’ with elements of positive-partial morality); (3) that (with the exception of the strong variant of the identified victim effect) preferring identified victims is not morally improper.
Chisholm, Roderick M. 1963. “Supererogation and Offence: A Conceptual Scheme for Ethics.” Ratio 5: 1–14.
Cohen, I. Glenn, Norman Daniels, and Nir Eyal, eds. 2015. Individual versus Statistical Lives: An Interdisciplinary Perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Daniels, Norman. 2012. “Reasonable disagreement about identified vs. statistical victims.” Hastings Center Report 42 (1): 35–45.
Frick, Johann. 2015. “Contractualism and Social Risk.” Philosophy & Public Affairs 43 (3): 175–223.
Hare, Caspar. 2012. “Obligations to Merely Statistical People.” Journal of Philosophy 109 (5/6): 378–390.
Horton, Joe. 2017. “The All or Nothing Problem.” The Journal of Philosophy 114 (2): 94–104.
Jenni, Karen E., and George Loewenstein. 1997. “Explaining the ‘Identifiable Victim Effect’.” Journal of Risk and Uncertainty 14: 235–257.
Kant, Immanuel. 1964. Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. Translated by H.J. Paton. New York: Harper Torchbooks.
Kant, Immanuel. 1996. The Metaphysics of Morals. Translated by M.J. Gregor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kogut, Tehila, and Ilana Ritov. 2005. “The ‘Identified Victim’ Effect: An Identified Group, or Just a Single Individual?” Journal of Behavioral Decision Making 18 (3): 157–167.
Paton, Herbert J. 1946. The Categorical Imperative. A Study in Kant’s Moral Philosophy. London: Hutchinson University Library. Pummer,
Theron. 2016. “Whether and Where to Give.” Philosophy & Public Affairs 44: 77–95.
Scheffler, Samuel. 2000. The Rejection of Consequentialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Schelling, Thomas. 1968. “The life you save may be your own.” In Problems in Public Expenditure Analysis, edited by Samuel Chase, 127–176. Washington: Brookings Institution.
Slote, Michael. 1985. Common-sense Morality and Consequential- ism. London: Routledge Kegan and Paul.
Small, Deborah. A. 2015. “On the Psychology of the Identified Victim Effect.” In Identified vs. Statistical Persons: An Interdisciplinary Perspective, edited by I. Glenn Cohen, Norman Daniels, and Nir Eyal, 13–23. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Small, Deborah A., and George Loewenstein. 2003. “Helping a Victim or Helping the Victim: Altrusim and Identifiability.” Journal of Risk and Uncertainty 26 (1): 5–16.
Smits, Jan M. 2000. The Good Samaritan in European Private Law; On the Perils of Principles without a Programme and a Programme for the Future. Bepress. http://works.bepress.com/jan_ smits/8/.
Stocker, Michael. 1976. “The Schizophrenia of Modern Ethical Theories.” Journal of Philosophy 73 (14): 453–466.
Urmson, James. 1958. “Saints and Heroes.” In Essays in Moral Philosophy, edited by A.I. Melden, 198–216. Seattle: University of Washington Press.
Williams, Bernard. 1977. “A Critique of Utilitarianism.” In Utilitarianism: For and Against, edited by John J.C. Smart, and Bernard Williams, 77–150. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Załuski, Wojciech. 2012. “On the Asymmetry of Values and Duties and Its Implications for Law.” Rivista di scienze giuridiche, scienze cognitive, ed intelligenza artificiale 16: 153–171.
Żuradzki, Tomasz. 2018. “The Normative Significance of Identifiability.” Ethics and Information Technology, 1–11. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10676-018-9487-z.
Information: Principia, 2018, Volume 65, pp. 49-68
Article type: Original article
Titles:
The Moral Status of Helping and the Identified Victim Effect
Faculty of Law and Administration, Jagiellonian University in Krakow
Published at: 19.12.2018
Article status: Open
Licence: CC BY-NC-ND
Article financing:
Percentage share of authors:
Article corrections:
-Publication languages:
EnglishView count: 1938
Number of downloads: 1110