Facing Up to Scarcity

Abstract

Abstract The essays collected in this book take stock of the nonconsequentialist project over the past fifty years, in two key areas. The first part focuses on the moral “duty not to harm” others. Under a suitably broad definition of harm, that duty encompasses most of the restrictions imposed on individual conduct in the secular, liberal state. It examines how that duty has been cashed out in ostensibly nonaggregative terms in the principal strains of nonconsequentialist thought: tragic choices (trolleyology), libertarian property rights, corrective justice in tort law, and Scanlonian contractualism. Nonconsequentialists have not only failed to articulate a viable alternative to aggregation in this domain; they are doomed to fail, because in a world of scarcity (in the broadest sense) and epistemic uncertainty, everything we do poses some risk of harm to others’ fundamental interests, a conflict that can be resolved only through aggregation. The second part examines the treatment of distributive justice in nonconsequentialist political theory over the past fifty years, focusing on Nozickian libertarianism, Rawlsianism, left-libertarianism, and social contractarianism. It argues that whatever the moral attractiveness of the various distributive schemes proposed, none is logically entailed by the normative premises from which it is ostensibly derived. Unlike the argument in the first part, this is not an argument for consequentialism by logical elimination. Societal wealth need not be, and almost never is, distributed to optimize consequences. Rather, it underscores the relatively weak justifications that have been offered for some very strong conclusions.