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Living High and Letting Die

1999; Wiley; Volume: 59; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/2653467

1933-1592

Peter Singer, Peter Unger,

Ethics in medical practice

Living High and Letting Die is notable for two quite different achievements. The first is a substantive ethical argument for a practical conclusion about our obligation not to let people die. Starting with the fact that relatively modest amounts of money, donated to overseas aid agencies like UNICEF and Oxfam, can save the lives of people in developing countries who would otherwise die from preventable diseases, Unger contends that not giving (at least) these relatively modest amounts of money is seriously wrong. It is, he convincingly argues, no less wrong than other acts which we all intuitively regard as very bad indeed-for example, allowing a runaway train to kill a child rather than diverting it to a siding where no lives would be lost, but your cherished and valuable vintage Bugatti would be destroyed. This practical conclusion is, clearly, of the utmost importance. If Living High and Letting Die succeeds in persuading people to change their behavior, it will save many lives. The second achievement is quite different. In the course of arguing for the conclusion already mentioned, Unger confronts us with a wide variety of examples, designed to elicit our intuitive responses about the morality of different options open to the agent in each situation. After we have considered many of these examples, Unger offers explanations for the intuitive responses that most people have to them. These explanations undermine any view of morality that takes as decisive intuitive responses of the kind we have been considering. In other words, if Unger is right, ethicists should not take our intuitive responses to specific situations as determinative of right and wrong in these situations. While in many ordinary situations our intuitions will be sound, they will have been shown not to be a reliable guide to what we ought to do. In this brief note I focus on the second of these achievements, not because I think it more important than the first-obviously, in practical terms, it isn't-but because it is of considerable theoretical significance for ethics, and has received less attention in reviews of the book than the practical argument.