Small Impacts and Imperceptible Effects: Causing Harm with Others

Abstract

Forthcoming in Midwest Studies in Philosophy XXXVIII (2014) conclusively settled thirty years after Derek Parfit's (1984) seminal discussion in Reasons and Persons.I propose to take the imperceptibility challenge seriously: our perception can be minimal change insensitive so that very small changes are impossible to perceive.And if the normatively relevant consequences of an action, holding all other actions fixed, cannot be perceived, then we are challenged to explain what makes the action wrong.My tentative answer is that an action cannot only be wrong because of its immediate effects, it can also be wrong because it can possibly cause an effect together with other actions.To avoid such wrong actions, an agent has to engage in forward-looking considerations as to how her actions, together with other actions that are possibly performed, can be harmful.The paper proceeds by specifying the decision situations of interest.Section 3 states four prima facie attractive propositions about problems of imperceptible effects and shows that these four propositions are mutually inconsistent.Sections 4-7 discuss four attempts to avoid the inconsistency by relaxing different propositions.I sketch my preferred solution in section 8 and conclude in section 9. Zooming in on the ProblemWhen many people make a small contribution to a large problem, we can distinguish between two schematic ways how these contributions lead to harm.Either the contributions are harmless until the overall contribution reaches a tipping point at which great harm is caused.Or the contributions gradually increase the level of harm, without any critical thresholds.In this paper, the focus is exclusively on the latter case.Many hands problems are particularly challenging when the individual consequences of actions cannot easily be associated with harm because the changes brought about by each individual are so miniscule that they do not register as harm (I will flesh out this thought in much greater detail below).Some collectively caused harms may appear to have that structure, but, under closer inspection, we can rule out some of them.For instance, jointly causing climate change is often seen as a paradigmatic example (see Sinnott-Armstrong, 2005).When looking at the implications of individual acts of emissions, however, it turns out that they are often quite significant.The typical personal lifetime emissions in a developed country are

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