Hormio, Säde | 2024
Working Paper 2024:6
Part of preprint Studies in the Ethics of Coordination and Climate Change
Moral theories struggle to give a reason why individuals should or should not contribute to a collective outcome when the contribution is small enough to make no relevant difference to it. This is problematic if most contributions that make up a normatively important outcome share this feature. Although the literature on the problem of small contributions has focused on momentary token choice situations, I will argue that the central question should instead be individual behaviour over time and contributions to certain types of outcomes. Because most real-life cases are about collective outcomes that aggregate over time, the crucial question is not about contributions to a harm (or failing to help) on some specific one-off occasion. Instead, what matters more is if we regularly perform, or try to avoid, that type of contribution. I argue that in many cases, the correct unit of moral analysis is not the individual act, but the coherence of the moral life of a person. Failing to act according to our individual values in collective settings compromises our integrity as moral agents. If one attempts to separate the individual and the collective domains starkly in moral matters, it can lead to a lack of coherence between one’s values and contributions.
