The ethics of emergencies
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The ethics of emergencies Aksel Braanen Sterri1
•
Ole Martin Moen1,2
Accepted: 29 September 2020 Ó The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Do we have stronger duties to assist in emergencies than in nonemergencies? According to Peter Singer and Peter Unger, we do not. Emergency situations, they suggest, merely serve to make more salient the very extensive duties to assist that we always have. This view, while theoretically simple, appears to imply that we must radically revise common-sense emergency norms. Resisting that implication, theorists like Frances Kamm, Jeremy Waldron, and Larry Temkin suggest that emergencies are indeed normatively exceptional. While their approach is more in line with common-sense, however, it is theoretically less simple, and it is has proven difficult to justify the exception. In this paper we propose a model of emergencies that we call the Informal-Insurance Model, and explain how this can be used to combine theoretical simplicity with common-sense emergency norms. Keywords Charity Consequentialism Duties of assistance Effective altruism Emergencies Insurance
1 Introduction Emergencies have become the bread and butter of practical ethics. In journals and seminar rooms, we are discussing whether it would be right to divert a runaway trolley to kill one instead of five, how much we must sacrifice to save a child & Ole Martin Moen [email protected] Aksel Braanen Sterri [email protected] 1
Department of Philosophy, Classics, History of Art and Ideas, University of Oslo, Box 1020, Blindern, 0315 Oslo, Norway
2
Faculty of Health Sciences, Oslo Metropolitan University, Box 4, St. Olavs plass , 0130 Oslo, Norway
123
A. B. Sterri, O. M. Moen
drowning in a shallow pond, and whether it would be right to torture a terrorist in order to save thousands from a ticking bomb.1 Presumably, we want to figure out how it is right to act in such situations not because we think it is important to be prepared for the unlikely event that we will ever find ourselves in one of them, but because we believe that we can gain more general insights from considering emergency cases. Emergency cases, we think, put our principles to the test. On the face of it, however, it seems problematic to use emergency cases to test our general ethical principles, since emergencies, perhaps even by definition, are cases out of the ordinary. Emergencies are exceptional circumstances in which special rules and norms apply. On the one hand, more is permissible in the case of emergencies: we may, for example, rightfully break the speed limit in order to rush someone to the hospital. On the other hand, more is mandatory: we might have a duty to help someone who is drowning in a pond right next to us, even at a substantial cost and risk to ourselves.2 In this paper we are concerned with our duties to assist in emergencies. Do special normative principles kick into place when an emergency arises? Some theorists, such as Peter Singer (1972) and Peter Unger (1996), argue that emergencies are, in principle, just like non
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