Given plausible assumptions about the long-run impact of our everyday actions, we show that standard non-consequentialist constraints on doing harm entail that we should try to do as little as possible in our lives. We call this the Paralysis Argument. After laying out the argument, we consider and respond to a number of objections. We then suggest what we believe is the most promising response: to accept, in practice, a highly demanding morality of beneficence with a long-term focus. 1. Some effects of our actions are immediate and predictable. Many more are delayed and unpredictable. It’s plausible that the long-run moral importance of anything you do is determined primarily by these indirect effects: far more people are harmed or benefited in ways you can’t possibly foresee than are helped or hindered foreseeably as a result of what you do. Lenman (2000) argues that this poses a significant problem for consequentialism, because we are left clueless about the value of our actions. In this article, we argue that the problem for non-consequentialists is greater still. Our argument is as follows. Let’s assume, as above, that any one of your actions will generate many knock-on effects, spreading onward through time and magnifying in significance as history unfolds. You can’t foresee the ways in which harm might arise indirectly as a result of doing one thing as opposed to another. Nor can you foresee the ways in which behaving this way as opposed to that might unexpectedly benefit people later on. According to most non-consequentialists, reasons against doing harm are weightier than reasons to benefit. Since you have no greater reason to expect that benefits as opposed to harms will predominate among the indirect effects of any action you perform, it therefore
© 2021 Jessica Tizzard This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License. F ew issues reveal more about Immanuel Kant’s moral psychology than his take on human frailty or weakness.1 Interpreters differ widely on the topic, for it gets to the heart of a fundamental and controversial subject for Kant’s philosophical system. To give a reading of Kant’s view of weakness, one must delve deeply into the question of how our rational and sensible capacities relate to one another. For example, is all human action, even weak action, expressive of our capacity to reason and adopt practical principles for ourselves? Or do moments of weakness show that sense-based desire can interrupt our practical lives and direct our behavior? However Kant’s reader answers such questions, they become immediately committed to a general understanding of how our most fundamental human activities, sensing and knowing, relate to and inform one another. Their stance will inform a basic conception of human moral psychology and the structure of motivation. It will even fix a conception of how we as humans relate to other sensing creatures and a non-sensing purely rational being like God.2 In short, we cannot understand Kant’s view of weakness without saying a lot about human nature and its place in the universe.
