Theron Pummer is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of St Andrews. He works on issues in ethics and metaphysics and has published on topics related to effective altruism, obligation, and rescue. His first book The Rules of Rescue: Cost, Distance, and Effective Altruism (Oxford University Press, 2023) addresses questions surrounding the ethics of assistance from a non-consequentialist approach. This book is available Open Access and can be freely downloaded here. In this interview, he discusses the implications of this work, its relevance to everyday life, and his next book project on evaluative hypersensitivity.
What is your work about?
The Rules of Rescue deals with a host of classic questions in the ethics of assistance. What costs are we morally required to incur to rescue strangers? Is failing to aid distant people in need morally like letting nearby people drown? When do the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few? I defend a novel picture of the moral reasons and requirements to use time, money, and other resources to help others the most. It’s a non-consequentialist picture according to which there are significant prerogatives not to spend your life helping, as well as robust constraints against helping when it involves harming, lying, or stealing. Requirements to help are grounded not in the promotion of goodness per se, but in the prevention of serious harm to imperiled individuals, whether near or far.
How do you relate your work to other well-known philosophies?
According to standard consequentialism, you are always morally required to do whichever available act has the impartially best outcome. I reject this view, and instead accept non-consequentialism. Non-consequentialism isn’t the view that outcomes do not matter morally. It’s just the view that outcomes are not all that matter—other factors, like constraints and prerogatives, matter too. The non-consequentialist picture I defend in the book is theoretically minimal. It’s compatible with many different forms of non-consequentialism, from contractualism to virtue ethics.
That said, I am drawn toward something like Rossian pluralism, according to which there are multiple basic moral reasons or pro tanto duties—to help others, to keep your promises, not to do harm, and so on. Often these reasons conflict and must be weighed against each other. In addition, there are prerogatives. While reasons (with “requiring strength”) serve to ground requirements, prerogatives serve to prevent reasons from grounding requirements. It is permissible to refrain from saving a stranger’s life at the cost of losing your legs: while there is a weighty reason to save the stranger, there is a sufficiently strong prerogative not to.
Which of your insights or conclusions do you find most exciting?
One of the book’s key insights is that a prerogative not to sacrifice for others on a given occasion can be “amplified” by earlier or later altruistic sacrifices. Suppose you face a very long sequence of opportunities to rescue strangers: every hour on the hour, you can save a different stranger by sacrificing another hour of your time. The prerogative to have an hour to yourself doesn’t seem strong enough to make it permissible to let someone die. The reasons and prerogatives present at each time, considered on their own, would suggest that you are required to help on each occasion. But it seems you are not morally required to do this. The overall cost over time would be enormous. In chapter 6, I argue that while the reasons to rescue strangers remain just as strong regardless of how many you’ve already rescued, prerogatives not to make further sacrifices for strangers can get amplified as a function of the altruistic sacrifices you make over the course of your life. The prerogative not to incur even a relatively small cost can eventually get amplified enough to make it permissible not to save a life at that cost. It may be vague when this point is reached.
Moreover, it’s not only past altruistic sacrifices that can serve to amplify prerogatives not to incur further costs. I argue that amplification is a function of the altruistic sacrifices you reasonably expect you will have made over time, both past and future. It can be permissible not to incur costs now if you reasonably expect you’ll have done enough. At least, under these conditions you needn’t sacrifice now to act as a morally conscientious person would. On my view, you’re allowed to get your altruistic sacrifices out of the way earlier, save them for later, or spread them out in various ways. The view captures a plausible sense in which beneficence is an imperfect duty, even though on each occasion there is a reason or pro tanto duty to help.
How is your work relevant to everyday life?
Throughout chapters 5-8, I argue that the “rules of rescue” that hold for idealized emergency rescue cases carry over to a significant range of real-world cases of using time and money to help distant strangers. You can be required to incur substantial costs to save nearby drowning strangers; so too can you be required to incur substantial costs to prevent distant strangers from dying of malaria. In a range of cases, it’s wrong to save a lesser number of people over a greater number of different people (even when it’s permissible not to save either group); likewise, in a range of cases, it’s wrong to donate to a less cost-effective charity over a more cost-effective charity (even when it’s permissible not to donate to either). There are many differences between idealized rescue cases and real-world cases of aiding distant strangers by giving to charity—in the latter cases, those you can help are not only physically distant, but you can’t see them, plenty of other people could also help them, and their plights are at least in part the result of social injustice. I argue that such differences don’t stop the rules of rescue from carrying over to a significant extent.
There are reasons—pro tanto duties—to aid distant strangers by giving to charity, and to give to more cost-effective charities over much less cost-effective ones. The ubiquity of these reasons threatens to consume our lives. Nonetheless, I argue that, as long as you reasonably expect you’ll have done enough for others, your prerogatives can be amplified enough to make it permissible for you to take significant breaks from helping strangers, turning your attention to your own personal projects and plans instead.
In chapter 8, I suggest that a significant proportion of us are required to spend at least 10 percent of our lifetime resources helping others. Even so, I argue we are often permitted not to be effective altruists. Suppose that a cancer charity saves on average one life per $X donated, whereas a malaria charity saves on average five lives per $X donated. Further suppose that you have a significant prerogative to give to the cancer charity over the malaria charity, based on a special personal connection or project. I argue that, instead of giving 10 percent of your lifetime resources to the malaria charity, you could permissibly give 50 percent to the cancer charity, at least if this would provide as much help (if this would save the same number of lives). Since your altruism is insufficiently cost-effective from an impartial point of view, you’d not qualify as an effective altruist. But other things equal, you’d still be required to give to more cost-effective cancer charities over much less cost-effective ones.
You suggest that a significant proportion of us are required to spend at least 10 percent of our lifetime resources helping others. This is an amount that has also been adopted by the effective altruism movement as their minimum recommended donation amount—why this number and what is the reason for the amount being a percent of total income, rather than some other measure (such as a percent of the difference in an individual’s income and the standard cost of living of their area)?
Great question. My view is that lifetime requirements to aid are ultimately a function of reasons to aid and prerogatives based on well-being and autonomy. If giving away half your resources didn’t involve any sacrifice of well-being or autonomy, you’d lack a significant prerogative not to give them away to aid others. In the book, I suggest a lifetime requirement in terms of resources because resources like income are easier to measure than well-being and autonomy. I mention 10 percent partly because it’s a simple figure, and the concept of tithing is familiar. Even though 10 percent is a substantial figure, my hunch is that, for a fair number of typical people living in affluent countries, giving away 10 percent of lifetime resources will involve only a relatively small sacrifice of well-being and autonomy, so that the prerogative not to make this sacrifice isn’t sufficiently strong next to the weighty reasons to aid others. How much a given person is required to give away over the course of their life will depend on individual circumstances. What’s their income? What’s their cost of living? Do they have expensive needs or disadvantaged relatives? Even holding all these factors fixed, it may be unclear or vague how much one is required to sacrifice. But while the line separating giving too little and going beyond the call of duty may be blurry, there are clear cases on either side.
Do you see any connections between your professional work and personal life?
In 2001, there was a shooting at my high school. I witnessed horrible things, and I had to run for my life. Shortly after the shooting, the principal arranged a blood drive on campus for hospitalized victims. I donated blood that day and went on to give regularly at the San Diego Blood Bank for over a decade. In 2002, I read Singer’s influential article “Famine, Affluence, and Morality” which convinced me that I morally ought to help people living in extreme poverty. So, I started giving to charities like Oxfam. Reading philosophy, together with the experience of the shooting, moved me as a young adult to make altruism a significant part of my life.
In 2010, I discovered Giving What We Can. This organization provides cost-effectiveness estimates for global health interventions, like distributing malaria nets or deworming pills. The fact that, with the same amount of money, I could save one person’s life or instead save ten or even a hundred others, made cost-effectiveness stand out to me as an especially important consideration when giving. In 2011, I took the Giving What We Can pledge to give 10 percent of my lifetime earnings to whatever causes I believe will help others the most. Around the same time, I co-founded a local chapter of Giving What We Can at UC San Diego and helped organize several events and fundraisers. By 2013, I was giving public philosophy talks at these events, with titles like “Effective Giving and Drowning Child Analogies.” These talks inspired a blog post for Oxford’s Practical Ethics blog (2014), which in turn developed into an article titled “Whether and Where to Give” (2016). My book The Rules of Rescue was the next step along this path, as a more systematic elaboration and defense of the core ideas presented in the article. In this way, effective altruism was part of my personal life first, but gradually became a major focus of my professional work too.
What writing practices, methods, or routines do you use, and which have been the most helpful?
I get up at 5am or earlier most days and try to write until my kids come downstairs at around 7am. I’m not always productive during these morning blocks, but they usually at least get me thinking about the next steps I need to take on a given writing project. I’ll continue thinking throughout the rest of the day while doing various other tasks, like chores or admin work. When ideas pop into my head, I email them to myself on my phone. Depending on how inspired I’m feeling, I will either block off more time later in the day for concentrated writing, or not. Sooner or later, things start to flow, and I’ll get really obsessed with some new case or argument. When that happens, I’ll start blocking off more chunks of time in my calendar and make sure that I have plenty of coffee and snacks standing by. Whether or not I’m on a roll with writing, I have to break up work with exercise. I get grumpy on days I don’t run or go to the gym.
I find it very helpful to exchange comments with others, whether one-on-one or in a small workshop setting. I’m lucky to have several friends working in ethics who regularly read my work in progress, and who tolerate my compulsive redrafting. One of the best things for the development of The Rules of Rescue was a series of online workshops where participants read a full manuscript and discussed it with me over multiple sessions. Many followed up with detailed written comments. In addition, I’ve found co-authoring incredibly illuminating. It’s a great way to see how others think, write, and work.
What’s next for you?
My next project is a book called Hypersensitive Ethics: Much Ado About Nearly Nothing (under contract with Oxford University Press). The book is about evaluative hypersensitivity, which occurs when an extreme evaluative difference depends wholly on a slight non-evaluative difference. I argue such hypersensitivity doesn’t exist. For example, if two long pains are exactly similar but for the fact that one is slightly more intense for just a second, neither is vastly worse than the other. And if one pain were much longer, it would be worse than the other even if it were momentarily slightly less intense. I argue that the rejection of hypersensitivity supports aggregation between things that are separated by a series of slight non-evaluative differences (when these things have non-diminishing evaluative significance). For example, it supports aggregation between intense pain and mild pain in the sense that for any amount of intense pain, there is some amount of mild pain that is worse. The scope of such aggregation interacts with the metaphysical question of which non-evaluative differences are matters of slight degrees. Is being a person a matter of degree? What about doing harm rather than merely allowing harm? The rejection of hypersensitivity has serious implications for our views about well-being, distributive ethics, population ethics, non-consequentialist constraints and prerogatives, and other central topics in ethics. The picture I defend remains a pluralist one, but one that places surprisingly few limits on tradeoffs between different morally or evaluatively relevant factors.
What are some of the issues/questions in ethics and metaphysics that currently interest you most?
Ever since reading Part Three of Parfit’s Reasons and Persons in graduate school, I’ve been fascinated by a host of issues at the intersection of ethics, personal identity, and indeterminacy. I have written on ethical puzzles of personal fission and fusion, and I remain puzzled. Lately, I’ve been thinking about what the “separateness of persons” involves in connection with Hypersensitive Ethics. I hope part of the book will shed light on Parfit’s somewhat cryptic argument that if reductionism about personal identity is true, then the boundaries between persons are less metaphysically deep, and therefore less morally important. This argument strikes me as clearer and more compelling when interpreted in terms of evaluative hypersensitivity. Roughly: on reductionism, the non-evaluative difference between one life and another can be slight, and slight non-evaluative differences cannot themselves make extreme evaluative differences (the picture is more complicated when we take account of indeterminacy). This argument would have powerful ethical implications. For example, it would rule out the procreation asymmetry, according to which creating lives with net positive welfare doesn’t make things better but creating lives with net negative welfare does make things worse. The procreation asymmetry implies that whether suffering falls within one life or another can make an extreme evaluative difference, when the non-evaluative difference between these situations is itself slight.
Theron Pummer
Theron Pummer is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of St Andrews. He works on issues in ethics and metaphysics. His book The Rules of Rescue: Cost, Distance, and Effective Altruism (Oxford University Press, 2023) is Open Access and can be freely downloaded here.
Maryellen Stohlman-Vanderveen is the APA Blog's Diversity and Inclusion Editor and Research Editor. She graduated from the London School of Economics with an MSc in Philosophy and Public Policy in 2023 and currently works in strategic communications. Her philosophical interests include conceptual engineering, normative ethics, philosophy of technology, and how to live a good life.
