Kieran Oberman (LSE) at the PPE Colloquium

Nature vs Murder

Should we prioritise saving people from injustice over saving people from mere misfortune? If someone is the victim of injustice, they are wronged. If someone is the victim of misfortune, they are merely unlucky. Call the view that we should prioritise injustice over misfortune “Priority”. Philosophers argue that Priority, if true, would have significant practical implications. For instance, Göran Duus-Otterström and Edward A. Page argue that Priority could “change how we think of a range of moral and political debates such as international aid, humanitarian intervention, environmental protection, and health policy”.But is Priority true? Philosophers are sceptical. In their view, Priority is vulnerable to counterexamples. These counterexamples seek to model a choice between saving a group of victims from misfortune or saving another group from an injustice, e.g. saving 101 from a lightning fire or 100 from arson. In such examples, it does not seem obvious that we should save the victims of injustice. I shall term these examples “simple conflict cases”. 

The philosophical literature thus makes two claims:

(1) Priority, if true, would have significant practical implications for such real-world issues as humanitarian intervention and refugee policy.

(2) Simple conflict cases show that Priority is either false or extremely weak.

This article refutes (2) and complicates (1). Simple conflict cases fail as counterexamples to Priority because they fail to model the injustice vs. misfortune conflict they are supposed to model. The failure of these counterexamples, moreover, reveals that the truth of Priority is of less practical significance than philosophers have claimed.

We will also go for drinks and dinner afterwards. If you would like to join us for dinner (self-paying), please email Andreas Schmidt (a.t.schmidt rug.nl).