Sebastien Bishop

This comment discusses the relation between Samuel Scheffler’s ‘attachment-sensitive conception’ – as introduced in _One Life to Lead_ – and morality more generally. It discusses whether the attachment-sensitive conception implies a dichotomy between personal and impersonal reasons and assesses whether positing the attachment-sensitive conception may be compatible with affirming a detached consequentialist theory for the impersonal, moral realm. Finally, it suggests – very tentatively – that the notions of valuing and deference that, following Scheffler, underpin our personal reasons, could also be what underpins our impersonal reasons: Both personal and impersonal reasons may have their normative source in what it means to value and defer to those around us – loved ones and strangers alike.

Common-sense morality seems to tell us that a rescuer who can save either one individual or five other individuals from death has a duty to save the greater number. But contractualism, a moral theory on which principles must be justifiable to individuals, seems to imply that it is permissible to save the one. This is because a commitment to individual justification blocks the possibility of appealing to the aggregate amount of lives saved. Does contractualism really have this implication? If so, should we side with the common-sense approach, or is there any reason to side with the contractualist? In this paper, I first examine a new argument from Jay Wallace which claims to reconcile contractualism with a duty to save the greater number. I find the argument to be unsuccessful. I then suggest that common-sense morality doesn't support a duty to save the greater number as straightforwardly as it might initially seem as it might initially seem. I introduce two mundane cases in which the permissibility of saving either the lesser or greater number is intuitively plausible, and I offer some reasons to think that the permissibility of saving the lesser number coheres with our value judgements more generally.