What I'm doing for the Pio Scholar project
I need to explain this in a 3-minute presentation to my peers, so here’s some practise. You’re my peers. Pretend I’m saying this to you aloud. And that it takes three minutes.
During my project I will be trying to answer an ethical question, namely, “What is the extent of our obligations to strangers?” After reading a variety of theories moral thinkers have proposed, I’ll form an opinion of my own and present it in a paper that I will submit to undergraduate philosophical journals such as the Sewanee Review or Stanford University’s The Dualist, as well as presenting it at the Wisconsin Philosophical Association’s annual meeting. Not only will I have to explain how I came to the answer I did, I’ll also have to defend it against objections based in alternative theories, including the ones I read to form it!
For example, there are views-most famously Ayn Rand’s, though hers aren’t even the most extreme-that say we have no obligations whatsoever to strangers, that they have no reason to rely on us and that you have no claim on me to help you if you’re in trouble. In a vivid example from Jeffrie Murphy, you could drown in a swimming pool while I sat on the deck beside you, reading a book, and if I chose not to rescue you because that would get the pages of my book wet, I wouldn’t have violated any of your rights. You’d be dead of course, and that would be unfortunate, but Murphy doesn’t view any “right to be rescued” as existing.
On the other hand, there are views that say we should do all we can to help those in need-and they mean all we possibly can. Is it morally right for you to buy a $2000 dollar laptop when that money, through a donation to UNICEF, can save the lives of ten children-not hypothetical children, but real children who would recieve simple procedures that are guarenteed to save their lives? Or what about Peter Unger, who argues in complete seriousness that mutual fund managers would be more moral if they took the money their clients entrusted them with and used it all to buy food for famine victims across the world? Yes, the managers have betrayed the trust of their clients, but they have also saved lives.
The view I’ll come up with will (probably) be somewhere in the middle-I think we certainly do have obligations to help people when they’re in severe need and we clearly have the ability to help, but I also think we have other duties than to help everyone we possibly can, including prior obligations to others (as the fund manager has to his clients) and our own interests and well-being. Learning to form, express, and defend a theory will increase my understanding of how philosophy works and build on skills and knowledge I’ve developed as a PPE (Philosophy, Politics, and Economics) major.