The Nonworseness Claim and the Moral Permissibility of Better-Than-Permissible Acts

Abstract

Grounded in what Alan Wertheimer terms the "nonworseness claim," it is thought by some philosophers that what will be referred to herein as "better-thanpermissible acts"-acts that, if undertaken, would make another or others better off than they would be were an alternative but morally permissible act to be undertaken-are necessarily morally permissible. What, other than a bout of irrationality, it may be thought, would lead one to hold that an act (such as outsourcing production to a "sweatshop" in a developing country) that produces more benefits for others than an act that is itself morally permissible (such as not doing business in the developing country at all) with respect to those same others, is not morally permissible? In this article, I argue that each of the two groups of philosophers that are most likely to accept the nonworseness claim-consequentialists and non-consequentialists-have reason to reject it, and thereby also have reason to reject the belief that better-thanpermissible acts are necessarily morally permissible.

Exploitation and effective altruism

“…2 Horton's problem is linked to the "nonworseness claim" that a consensual, mutually beneficial action cannot be morally worse than doing nothing. This claim has been much-discussed in the literature on sweatshop labor and exploitation (Wertheimer 1996: 289-93;Zwolinski 2009;Bailey 2011;Powell & Zwolinski 2012;Arneson 2013: 393-94;Ferguson 2016;Rulli & Worsnip 2016: 213-15;Malmqvist 2017;Zwolinski & Wertheimer 2017: Section 3;Berkey 2019;Faraci 2019;Ferguson & Köhler 2019: Section 3.1). 3 The All or Nothing Problem is completely original to Horton.…”

“… 2. Horton’s problem is linked to the ‘nonworseness claim’ that a consensual, mutually beneficial action cannot be morally worse than doing nothing. This claim has been much-discussed in the literature on sweatshop labor and exploitation (Arneson, 2013: 393–394; Bailey, 2011; Berkey, 2019; Faraci, 2019; Ferguson, 2016; Ferguson and Köhler, 2019: §3.1; Malmqvist, 2017; Powell and Zwolinski, 2012; Rulli and Worsnip, 2016: 213–215; Wertheimer, 1996: 289–293; Zwolinski, 2009; Zwolinski and Wertheimer, 2017: §3). …”

“…This is not a trivial task. As Bailey puts it: "It is one thing to believe that some things are intrinsically wrong, and another to show that practices such as contracting for sweatshop labor or price gouging fall into this category" (2011: 249).…”

Wage Exploitation and the Nonworseness Claim: Allowing the Wrong, To Do More Good

“…4.Much of my argument can be read as an expansion upon Wertheimer’s own reasons for rejecting the nonworseness claim. More recent critics of the nonworseness claim include Arneson (2013), Bailey (2010), Barnes (2013), Malmqvist (2017), and Preiss (2014). …”

“…However, Brown defines consequentialism in terms of “maximizing the good.” This is too narrow for our purposes, given that all relevant parties accept that Owner is not obligated to hire Employee even if doing so would maximize the good. (The one exception of which I am aware is Bailey [2010], who argues that consequentialists should reject the nonworseness claim because it violates consequentialism’s commitment to maximizing the good; but this suggests to me only that Bailey has an overly narrow conception of consequentialism, since few contemporary consequentialists in- or outside the wage exploitation literature deny the existence of the supererogatory.) In section 3, I take consequentialism to include any theory whose deontic commitments are entailed by its evaluative commitments, where value supervenes on features of (sets of) states of affairs.…”