Sources and References

These notes synthesize and expand upon the following course readings and scholarly sources:

• Peter Singer, “Famine, Affluence, and Morality,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 1, no. 3 (1972): 229–243.
• John Kekes, “On the Supposed Obligation to Relieve Famine,” Philosophy 77, no. 4 (2002): 503–517.
• Iris Marion Young, “Responsibility and Global Justice: A Social Connection Model,” Social Philosophy and Policy 23, no. 1 (2006): 102–130.
• Stephen Battersby, “Can Humankind Escape the Tragedy of the Commons?” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 114, no. 1 (2017): 7–10.
• John Broome, “The Public and Private Morality of Climate Change,” Tanner Lectures on Human Values (2012).
• Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, “It’s Not My Fault: Global Warming and Individual Moral Obligations,” in Perspectives on Climate Change (Elsevier, 2005).
• Christian Baatz, “Climate Change and Individual Duties to Reduce GHG Emissions,” Ethics, Policy & Environment 17, no. 1 (2014): 1–19.
• Sally Haslanger, “Oppressions: Racial and Other,” in Racism in Mind, ed. Michael Levine and Tamas Pataki (Cornell, 2004).
• Ann Cudd, “Oppression by Choice,” Journal of Social Philosophy 25, no. s1 (1994): 22–44.
• Amia Srinivasan, “Does Anyone Have the Right to Sex?” London Review of Books 40, no. 6 (2018).
• C. Thi Nguyen, “Echo Chambers and Epistemic Bubbles,” Episteme 17, no. 2 (2020): 141–161.
• Amy Berg, “Is There a Duty to Read the News?” Journal of Moral Philosophy (2022).
• Douglas Campbell, “Not Just a Tool: Why Social-Media Use Is Bad and Bad for Us, and The Duty to Quit,” Journal of Global Ethics 20, no. 1 (2024).
• Jean Mercier, Wayne Sumner, and Daniel Weinstock, “The Ethical Bases of Medical Aid in Dying,” Impact Ethics (2014).
• Esther Braun, Matthias Scholten, and Jochen Vollmann, “Assisted Suicide and the Discrimination Argument,” Bioethics 38 (2024): 120–129.
• Patrick Craine, “Questioning the Ethics of Assisted Dying for the Mentally Ill.”
• Government of Canada, “Medical Assistance in Dying in Canada: An Overview.”
• Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Final Report (selections).
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entries on consequentialism, moral responsibility, structural injustice, and applied ethics.
• Carter v. Canada (Attorney General), 2015 SCC 5.

Chapter 1: Thinking About Moral Issues

Why Study Moral Philosophy?

Moral questions surround us. Should wealthy nations do more for people living in extreme poverty? Is it wrong to drive a gas-guzzling car for fun on a Sunday afternoon? Can social media platforms harm us in ways we do not fully recognize? These questions are not merely academic exercises; they concern how we live, how we treat one another, and what kind of society we build together.

Moral philosophy (道德哲学), also called ethics (伦理学), is the branch of philosophy that investigates questions about right and wrong, good and bad, duty and virtue. It does not simply catalogue what people believe is right or wrong—that is the domain of descriptive ethics. Instead, moral philosophy asks what we ought to believe and do, and why.

The Tools of Moral Reasoning

To think clearly about moral issues, we need a set of conceptual tools. Several are especially important throughout this course.

Arguments (论证) are the basic currency of philosophical reasoning. An argument consists of a set of premises (前提)—statements offered as reasons—and a conclusion (结论) that the premises are supposed to support. A good moral argument must have premises that are true (or at least plausible) and reasoning that is logically valid.

Major Ethical Frameworks

Throughout this course, several ethical frameworks recur. Understanding them in advance will make the specific debates more intelligible.

Consequentialism (后果主义) holds that the moral status of an action depends entirely on its consequences. The most well-known form is utilitarianism (功利主义), which holds that the right action is the one that produces the greatest overall well-being or happiness. Classical utilitarianism traces to Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill.

Deontology (义务论), associated especially with Immanuel Kant, holds that certain actions are intrinsically right or wrong, regardless of their consequences. Moral agents have duties (义务) that must be fulfilled. Kant’s Categorical Imperative (绝对命令) demands that we act only according to maxims we could will to be universal laws, and that we always treat humanity as an end in itself, never merely as a means.

Virtue ethics (美德伦理学), rooted in Aristotle, focuses not on rules or consequences but on the character of the moral agent. The central question is not “what should I do?” but “what kind of person should I be?” A virtuous person possesses traits such as courage, justice, temperance, and practical wisdom.

Morality, Charity, and Duty

One recurring tension in applied ethics is the distinction between duty (义务) and charity (慈善). Traditional morality draws a sharp line: duties are things we must do (and can be blamed for failing to do), whereas charity is praiseworthy but optional—supererogatory (超义务的), in philosophical parlance. As we shall see, several thinkers in this course challenge precisely this distinction.

Structural vs. Individual Approaches

Another recurring theme is the tension between individual and structural explanations of moral problems. Some philosophers focus on what individuals ought to do; others argue that moral problems are fundamentally structural (结构性的)—they arise from the way institutions, laws, markets, and social norms are organized, and individual action alone cannot solve them.

Chapter 2: Global Poverty and Our Obligations

The Scale of the Problem

Billions of people live in conditions of severe deprivation. According to the World Bank, hundreds of millions lack access to clean water, adequate nutrition, and basic healthcare. Meanwhile, citizens of wealthy nations spend enormous sums on luxuries. This disparity raises a fundamental moral question: do those of us living in affluence have an obligation to help?

Peter Singer: Famine, Affluence, and Morality

The Drowning Child

Peter Singer’s 1972 essay “Famine, Affluence, and Morality” is one of the most influential works in contemporary applied ethics. Written during the Bangladesh famine that accompanied the Liberation War of 1971, the essay advances a deceptively simple argument with radical implications.

Singer begins with a thought experiment that has become iconic. Imagine you are walking past a shallow pond and notice a small child drowning. You could easily wade in and save the child, though doing so would ruin your expensive clothes. Almost everyone agrees that you are morally obligated to save the child; the cost of ruined clothing is trivially small compared to a child’s life.

Singer then asks: why should geographical distance make a moral difference? If you can prevent something very bad from happening—a child’s death from starvation in another country—without sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, are you not equally obligated to do so?

The Core Principle

Singer’s argument rests on a principle he states in two versions:

Even the weak version, Singer argues, has radical consequences. It implies that the traditional distinction between duty and charity collapses. What we ordinarily consider generous charitable giving is, in fact, a moral duty. Failing to give to famine relief when one could afford to do so is not merely a lack of generosity—it is morally wrong.

Implications

Singer’s principle implies that affluent individuals ought to give away a substantial portion of their income until they reach a point where giving more would cause them or their dependents to suffer something approaching the hardship of those they are trying to help. This is far more demanding than any conventional moral code requires. Singer acknowledges this but insists that the demands of morality are simply more stringent than most people assume.

Objections Singer Considers

Singer addresses several objections. One is that because millions of others could also help, no single individual bears the full burden. Singer replies that the existence of other potential helpers does not diminish your obligation: if everyone reasoning this way fails to act, the child still drowns.

Another objection is that giving to distant strangers is charity, not duty. Singer rejects this as a mere reflection of self-serving moral conventions, not a defensible philosophical distinction.

John Kekes: Against the Obligation to Relieve Famine

The Charge of Moral Bullying

John Kekes offers one of the sharpest critiques of Singer’s position in “On the Supposed Obligation to Relieve Famine” (2002). Kekes accuses Singer of “rationally indefensible rampant moralism” that substitutes emotional bullying for careful philosophical argument.

Kekes’s Key Arguments

The prevention principle is not absolute. Singer treats the obligation to prevent suffering as if it were the only relevant moral principle, or at least the overriding one. Kekes argues that preventing harm is merely one ethical principle among many. Other legitimate moral considerations—such as personal projects, relationships, and self-improvement—can outweigh the demands of famine relief in particular cases.

Responsibility for one’s own situation. Kekes controversially argues that some degree of responsibility for poverty lies with those who experience it, particularly in cases involving foreseeable consequences of population growth. This argument has been widely criticized as insensitive to the structural causes of poverty, but it raises the philosophical question of how responsibility should be distributed.

The distinction between killing and letting die. Kekes challenges Singer’s implicit equation of allowing people to die with actively killing them. He argues that failing to donate to famine relief is, at worst, a venal sin—a failure of generosity—rather than a mortal sin equivalent to murder. The moral gravity of omission is categorically different from the moral gravity of commission.

Evaluating the Debate

The Singer-Kekes debate brings to the surface fundamental disagreements about the demandingness of morality. Singer’s view is highly demanding: it requires affluent individuals to sacrifice far beyond what convention asks. Kekes and similar critics argue that a morality so demanding that it leaves no room for personal pursuits and projects is itself problematic—it fails to respect the integrity of individual lives.

Iris Marion Young: The Social Connection Model

Beyond Individual Blame

Iris Marion Young approaches the question of global poverty from a fundamentally different angle. Rather than asking how much individuals ought to donate, she asks how we should understand our responsibility for the structural processes that produce and sustain injustice.

The Liability Model and Its Limits

The traditional liability model (归责模型) of responsibility identifies specific agents who have caused a harm, establishes a direct causal connection between the agent’s action and the harm, and assigns blame or demands compensation. Young argues that while the liability model works well for discrete, identifiable wrongs, it fails to capture the nature of structural injustice (结构性不正义).

The Social Connection Model

Young proposes an alternative: the social connection model (社会联系模型) of responsibility. This model holds that all agents who contribute by their actions to the structural processes that produce injustice share responsibility for working to remedy those injustices.

The social connection model has five distinctive features:

1. Not isolating: Unlike the liability model, it does not seek to single out specific blameworthy individuals. Instead, responsibility is shared among all participants in unjust structures.
2. Judging background conditions: It challenges the assumption that existing norms, rules, and institutional arrangements are morally neutral or acceptable.
3. Forward-looking: Rather than assigning blame for past wrongs, it focuses on what we ought to do going forward to change unjust structures.
4. Shared responsibility: Responsibility belongs to all who participate in the relevant structures, though the degree may vary.
5. Discharged through collective action: Structural injustice cannot be remedied by individual action alone; it requires coordinated, collective efforts such as political organizing, institutional reform, and community engagement.

Application: The Global Garment Industry

Young illustrates her model with the example of transnational garment production. Workers in developing countries sew clothing under exploitative conditions—low wages, long hours, unsafe factories. Consumers in wealthy countries purchase these garments, often at low prices that are possible only because of the exploitation. Retailers, brand owners, factory managers, and governments all play roles in sustaining this system.

Under the liability model, it is difficult to assign blame to any single actor: the consumer did not set the wages, the retailer did not build the factory, and the government may have limited enforcement capacity. Yet the system as a whole produces grave injustice. The social connection model says that all participants—consumers, corporations, governments, and workers’ organizations—share responsibility for reforming these structures, even if none of them individually “caused” the injustice.

Comparing the Three Approaches

Singer, Kekes, and Young offer three quite different perspectives on global poverty. Singer focuses on individual obligation grounded in a universal moral principle. Kekes challenges the demandingness of that obligation. Young shifts the question from individual charity to structural transformation. Together, they illuminate the full complexity of the moral landscape surrounding global inequality.

Chapter 3: Climate Change and Individual Moral Responsibility

Climate Change as a Moral Problem

Climate change is not only a scientific and political challenge; it is a deeply moral one. Human activities—burning fossil fuels, industrial agriculture, deforestation—release greenhouse gases that cause global warming, leading to rising sea levels, extreme weather events, ecosystem destruction, and disproportionate harm to the world’s poorest populations. The moral dimensions of climate change concern questions of justice, responsibility, and obligation across generations and nations.

The Tragedy of the Commons

Garrett Hardin’s Framework

Stephen Battersby’s article “Can Humankind Escape the Tragedy of the Commons?” introduces a foundational concept for understanding environmental ethics. The tragedy of the commons (公地悲剧), originally articulated by Garrett Hardin in 1968, describes a situation in which individuals, each acting in their own rational self-interest, collectively deplete a shared resource, even though it is in no one’s long-term interest for the resource to be depleted.

Climate change is perhaps the most significant contemporary instance of this tragedy. The atmosphere functions as a global commons: each nation and individual benefits from emitting greenhouse gases (through industrial production, transportation, and consumption), but the costs—warming, sea-level rise, extreme weather—are borne by everyone, especially future generations and vulnerable populations.

Beyond Inevitability

Battersby’s article also conveys a more hopeful message. Later research, particularly the work of Elinor Ostrom, showed that the tragedy of the commons is not inevitable. Communities often develop institutions, norms, and governance mechanisms to manage shared resources successfully. The challenge for climate change is to develop such mechanisms at a global scale—a task that requires both political will and moral commitment.

John Broome: The Public and Private Morality of Climate Change

Two Dimensions of Moral Duty

John Broome distinguishes between the public morality and the private morality of climate change—that is, between what governments ought to do and what individuals ought to do.

Private morality and the duty of justice. Broome argues that individuals have a duty of justice (正义义务) not to harm others without their consent. When you emit greenhouse gases—by driving, flying, or consuming energy—you contribute to harm suffered by others, including people in distant countries and future generations. You do so for your own benefit and without compensating those who are harmed. This, Broome argues, constitutes an injustice.

The practical implication is straightforward: individuals have a duty to ensure that their activities do not contribute to climate change. Broome suggests that carbon offsetting (碳补偿)—paying for emissions reductions elsewhere to compensate for your own emissions—is a morally permissible way to discharge this duty. Offsetting, he argues, is relatively inexpensive and does not require dramatic lifestyle changes.

Public morality and the duty of goodness. Governments, Broome argues, have a different kind of obligation. Because greenhouse gas emissions represent an externality (外部性) that creates economic inefficiency, it is possible in principle to respond to climate change through policies that make everyone better off (a Pareto improvement / 帕累托改进). Governments have a duty of goodness (善的义务)—though not strictly a duty of justice—to implement such policies, particularly carbon pricing and international agreements.

The Asymmetry

Broome’s framework produces an interesting asymmetry: individuals bear a duty of justice (which is strict and non-negotiable), while governments bear a duty of goodness (which is weighty but involves more discretion about means). This challenges the common intuition that climate change is primarily a matter for government action, not individual responsibility.

Sinnott-Armstrong: It’s Not My Fault

The Sunday Drive

Walter Sinnott-Armstrong takes the opposite position from Broome on individual moral obligations. He asks a deliberately provocative question: is it morally wrong for an individual to take a leisurely Sunday drive in a gas-guzzling SUV, just for fun?

Surveying Moral Principles

Sinnott-Armstrong systematically considers a range of moral principles that might ground an individual obligation to reduce emissions:

• The harm principle: My individual Sunday drive does not, by itself, cause any identifiable harm to any identifiable person. The contribution of any single drive to global warming is infinitesimally small.
• The consequentialist principle: Whether or not I take the drive makes no measurable difference to total emissions or to the climate.
• The deontological principle: There is no clear duty being violated, since the harm (if any) is too diffuse and the causal chain too attenuated.
• The virtue ethics principle: While it may display better character to refrain, this does not establish a strict moral obligation.

Sinnott-Armstrong concludes that no defensible moral principle shows that individuals have an obligation to reduce their personal greenhouse gas emissions. The Sunday drive is not morally wrong, even if it would be morally better or more ideal to refrain.

The Role of Government

Crucially, Sinnott-Armstrong does not conclude that nothing should be done about climate change. He argues that governments have a clear moral obligation to address the problem, precisely because only governments are in a position to implement the systemic changes (carbon taxes, regulations, international treaties) that can actually make a difference. Individuals ought to encourage their governments to act, but the primary moral obligation lies at the collective, institutional level.

Christian Baatz: The Fair Share Argument

Reclaiming Individual Duty

Christian Baatz offers a middle path between Broome’s strict individual duty and Sinnott-Armstrong’s denial of individual obligation. Baatz develops what he calls the fair share argument (公平份额论证).

Three Types of Duty

Baatz identifies three complementary individual duties:

1. Duties to comply with institutions: When just institutions exist (e.g., a carbon tax), individuals have a duty to comply with them.
2. Duties to promote institutions: When just institutions do not yet exist, individuals have a duty to advocate for their creation—for example, by supporting political candidates who favor climate policy.
3. Individual behavioral duties: Individuals have a duty not to exceed their fair share (公平份额) of emission entitlements. What counts as a fair share is determined by principles of distributive justice, taking into account historical emissions, current capacity, and basic needs.

An Imperfect Duty

Drawing on Kantian ethics, Baatz frames individual emission reduction as an imperfect duty (不完全义务)—a duty that requires action but allows latitude in how and when it is fulfilled. Individuals should reduce emissions “as far as can reasonably be demanded of them,” recognizing that many people depend on carbon-intensive infrastructure they did not choose and cannot easily abandon.

Chapter 4: Structural Oppression

What Is Oppression?

Oppression (压迫) is a central concept in social and political philosophy. In everyday language, oppression often connotes dramatic acts of tyranny—conquest, slavery, authoritarian rule. In contemporary philosophy, however, oppression has a broader and more structural meaning.

Oppression in this sense need not involve any single oppressor acting with malicious intent. It can arise from the cumulative effects of norms, policies, economic arrangements, and cultural practices that disadvantage some groups while advantaging others.

Sally Haslanger: Oppressions, Racial and Other

Structural Accounts of Oppression

Sally Haslanger develops a structural account of oppression that draws on feminist theory and critical race theory. Her central claim is that oppression does not require bad intentions, hatred, or prejudice on the part of individual oppressors. Oppression is structural: it is embedded in the way institutions and social practices are organized.

The Problem of Overlapping Oppressions

If oppression is structural rather than intentional, a philosophical puzzle arises: how do we distinguish different forms of oppression that overlap in practice? In the contemporary United States, for example, racial disadvantage and class disadvantage are closely correlated. If a Black family in a poor neighborhood suffers from both racism and poverty, how do we determine which structure is responsible for which disadvantage?

Haslanger addresses this by arguing that different forms of oppression have distinct causal histories and mechanisms, even when their effects overlap. Drawing on Dorothy Roberts’s research on the child welfare system in Chicago, Haslanger shows how racial oppression operates through specific mechanisms (e.g., racial profiling in child protective services) that are distinct from class-based mechanisms, even though both contribute to the disadvantage of the same families.

Implications for Canada: The TRC Report

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada documented the systematic oppression of Indigenous peoples through the residential school system, forced assimilation policies, and ongoing structural inequalities. Haslanger’s framework helps us understand these injustices as structural rather than merely the product of individual prejudice. The harms inflicted by residential schools were not accidental or isolated; they were embedded in a system designed to eliminate Indigenous cultures and identities.

Ann Cudd: Oppression by Choice

The Puzzle of Voluntary Oppression

Ann Cudd addresses a deeply puzzling feature of oppression: the oppressed sometimes appear to choose the very arrangements that disadvantage them. Women, for example, may choose to stay home rather than pursue careers, or to enter low-paying occupations. If these choices are genuinely voluntary, can the resulting disadvantage count as oppression?

Coerced Rational Choice

Cudd’s answer is that the choices of the oppressed are often rationally coerced (理性强迫的). They are rational in the sense that, given the constraints the oppressed face, the chosen option is the best available. But they are coerced in the sense that the constraints themselves are unjust.

Indirect Forces

Cudd identifies several mechanisms through which oppression co-opts the choices of the oppressed:

• Direct force: Physical violence, threats, or legal coercion.
• Economic forces: Wage discrimination, occupational segregation, and unequal access to capital create incentive structures that channel the oppressed into disadvantageous positions.
• Psychological forces: Internalized stereotypes, low self-esteem, and adaptive preferences lead the oppressed to accept or even embrace their subordinate position.

Among these, Cudd argues that economic forces are among the most insidious because they operate through the oppressed person’s own rational decision-making. The oppressed are, in effect, recruited into perpetuating their own oppression.

Why This Matters

Cudd’s analysis has important implications for how we evaluate freedom and responsibility. If a choice is made under conditions of structural injustice, we cannot simply point to the fact that it was “chosen” as evidence that it was free. Genuine freedom requires not only the absence of direct coercion but also fair background conditions. This insight is relevant to debates about everything from gender inequality in the workplace to poverty and social mobility.

Amia Srinivasan: Does Anyone Have the Right to Sex?

The Politics of Desire

Amia Srinivasan’s essay “Does Anyone Have the Right to Sex?” begins with the 2014 Isla Vista massacre committed by Elliot Rodger, a self-identified incel (非自愿独身者, short for “involuntary celibate”) who blamed women for denying him sex. Rodger and the incel subculture claim that men have a natural right to sex, and that women who refuse them are committing an injustice.

Rejecting the Right to Sex

Srinivasan emphatically rejects this claim. No one has a right to sex with any particular person. Sexual autonomy—the right to choose one’s sexual partners—is fundamental and non-negotiable. The incel ideology is not only morally repugnant but philosophically incoherent: rights to sex from a specific person would negate that person’s bodily autonomy.

Complicating the Picture

However, Srinivasan does not stop there. She argues that a feminist response to the incel movement that merely affirms sexual autonomy is incomplete. The deeper question is: what shapes our desires in the first place?

Srinivasan contends that sexual desire is not a purely private, pre-political phenomenon. It is shaped by structures of race (种族), gender (性别), class (阶级), and ability (能力). Cultural norms, media representations, and social hierarchies influence which bodies are considered desirable and which are not. Racism, ableism, fatphobia, and transphobia all leave their marks on the landscape of desire.

Political Critique, Not Coercion

Crucially, Srinivasan does not argue that anyone should be compelled to change their desires. The point is not to tell individuals whom they should find attractive. Rather, it is to subject the political formation of desire to critical scrutiny—to ask how structures of power shape what we want, and to remain open to the possibility that some of our desires reflect and reinforce unjust hierarchies.

Chapter 5: Media Ethics — Echo Chambers, News, and Social Media

The Epistemic Dimension of Moral Life

Moral agency requires not only good values but also accurate information. To act well, we need to know what is happening in the world, to understand the perspectives of others, and to subject our beliefs to critical scrutiny. The rise of digital media has profoundly transformed the epistemic landscape, creating new opportunities for information but also new threats to our ability to reason well about moral issues.

C. Thi Nguyen: Echo Chambers and Epistemic Bubbles

A Crucial Distinction

C. Thi Nguyen argues that public discourse has blurred two very different phenomena: epistemic bubbles (认知气泡) and echo chambers (回音室). Although these terms are often used interchangeably, they describe distinct structures with different causes, different effects, and different remedies.

Why the Distinction Matters

The difference is not merely academic; it has profound practical implications. Epistemic bubbles are relatively easy to burst: simply exposing someone to new information or alternative perspectives can shatter the bubble. Epistemic bubbles are “ramshackle”—they arise easily but collapse just as easily.

Echo chambers, by contrast, are far more robust and dangerous. Because members have been taught to distrust all outside sources, exposure to contrary evidence may actually reinforce the echo chamber. When a member encounters criticism from outside the chamber, they interpret it as confirmation that outsiders are biased, hostile, or manipulative—exactly as the echo chamber’s internal narrative predicted.

Escaping Echo Chambers

Nguyen argues that escaping an echo chamber is extraordinarily difficult. It may require not just exposure to new evidence but a “radical reboot” of one’s entire belief system—a willingness to question not just particular beliefs but the very framework of trust and credibility one has built up. This process is slow, painful, and often requires personal relationships with people outside the chamber who can gradually rebuild trust.

Implications for Moral Reasoning

Nguyen’s analysis has direct implications for moral reasoning. If our moral beliefs are formed within an echo chamber, we may be systematically unable to recognize the perspectives of those affected by our moral choices. Echo chambers do not merely distort our factual beliefs; they distort our moral vision.

Amy Berg: Is There a Duty to Read the News?

The Intuition

Many of us feel that there is something wrong with people who refuse to pay attention to the news—who remain willfully ignorant of wars, famines, and injustices happening around the world. Amy Berg takes this intuition seriously and asks whether it can be philosophically justified.

Rejected Justifications

Berg considers and rejects several possible grounds for a duty to read the news:

• Consequentialist justification: Reading the news might lead to better outcomes (e.g., better-informed voting, donations to effective causes). But the causal connection between any individual’s news consumption and improved outcomes is tenuous and indirect.
• Democratic citizenship: In a democracy, citizens need to be informed to vote responsibly. But this justification is too narrow: it only applies to matters directly relevant to one’s political decisions and does not explain why we feel obligated to follow international news or stories that do not affect our voting.
• Self-regarding duty: Staying informed might be part of living a good life. But this seems too weak to explain the sense that ignoring the news is a moral failing, not merely an imprudent one.

The Duty of Respect

Berg’s own proposal is that we have an imperfect duty of respect (尊重的不完全义务) for strangers. Even when our actions cannot affect people in distant places, we owe them a basic form of moral recognition. Paying attention to their lives, struggles, and suffering is one of the ways—sometimes the only way—we can extend this respect.

Limitations

Berg acknowledges limitations of this duty. News consumption can cause psychological harm (anxiety, compassion fatigue), and the news media may not always be reliable or fair. The duty to read the news does not override duties of self-care, nor does it require uncritical acceptance of whatever the media presents.

Douglas Campbell: Not Just a Tool

Social Media as an Agent

Douglas Campbell challenges the common claim that social media platforms are morally neutral tools whose effects depend entirely on how individuals use them. Campbell argues that social media technologies are, for practical purposes, a kind of agent (行为体): they actively shape user behavior through deliberate design choices.

The Nudge Problem

Social media platforms employ sophisticated techniques to keep users engaged: algorithmic content curation, infinite scrolling, notification systems, and variable-reward mechanisms. These constitute nudges (助推)—design features that predictably alter behavior without forbidding any options or significantly changing economic incentives.

Campbell argues that while nudging is not inherently wrong in principle, the specific nudges employed by social media platforms are morally problematic because they steer users toward outcomes that are bad for them: addiction, anxiety, decreased attention spans, and erosion of authentic social bonds.

The Duty to Quit

Campbell goes further, arguing that users have a moral duty to quit social media platforms. This duty arises from two sources:

1. Self-regarding duties: Users have duties to protect their own well-being, and continued social media use demonstrably harms well-being.
2. Other-regarding duties: By remaining on platforms, users serve as test subjects for developers who are refining increasingly effective manipulative techniques. Quitting deprives these companies of the data and engagement they need to develop more potent nudges that will harm future users.

Chapter 6: Medical Assistance in Dying — Ethics and Policy

Introduction

Medical Assistance in Dying (医疗辅助死亡), or MAiD, refers to the practice in which a physician or nurse practitioner provides assistance to a patient in ending their life, either by administering a lethal substance (euthanasia) or by prescribing a substance that the patient self-administers (assisted suicide). Canada legalized MAiD in 2016 following the landmark Supreme Court decision in Carter v. Canada (Attorney General), making it one of the few countries in the world with a comprehensive legal framework for assisted dying.

The ethical questions surrounding MAiD are among the most difficult in applied ethics. They engage fundamental values—autonomy, compassion, the sanctity of life, equality, and the duty to protect vulnerable populations—that often pull in different directions.

The Legal Background: Carter v. Canada

The Case

Kay Carter suffered from degenerative spinal stenosis, and Gloria Taylor suffered from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). Both sought the legal right to receive medical assistance in dying. The criminal prohibition on assisted suicide, they argued, violated their rights under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (加拿大权利与自由宪章), specifically the right to life, liberty, and security of the person (Section 7).

The Decision

In a unanimous 2015 decision, the Supreme Court of Canada agreed. The Court held that the blanket prohibition on medical assistance in dying was unconstitutional. The prohibition forced individuals to choose between taking their own lives prematurely (while they were still physically capable) and enduring intolerable suffering until natural death. This cruel dilemma, the Court found, violated the right to life and security of the person.

Legislative Response

Parliament responded with Bill C-14 (2016), which amended the Criminal Code to permit MAiD under specific conditions. The original eligibility criteria required that the patient’s natural death be “reasonably foreseeable.” Bill C-7 (2021) expanded access by removing this requirement, allowing MAiD for individuals whose death was not reasonably foreseeable, subject to additional safeguards.

The Ethical Bases of MAiD

Autonomy and Compassion

Mercier, Sumner, and Weinstock identify two core ethical principles supporting MAiD:

Respect for autonomy (尊重自主权): A competent adult has the right to make fundamental decisions about their own life, including decisions about how and when to die. Prohibiting MAiD denies individuals this most personal and consequential of choices. In a liberal democratic society, the state should not impose its views about the value of life on individuals who have reached a different, considered judgment about their own situation.

Compassion (同情): When a person is suffering intolerably from a grievous and irremediable condition, compassion demands that we offer them relief. If the only effective relief is assistance in dying, then compassion supports providing it.

Arguments Against MAiD

The Sanctity of Life

Some opponents argue that human life has intrinsic value that must never be deliberately ended, whether by the person themselves or by others. This view, often grounded in religious tradition, holds that life is a gift or a sacred trust, and that deliberately ending it—even to relieve suffering—violates a fundamental moral norm.

Proponents of MAiD respond that respecting the sanctity of life is compatible with allowing individuals to determine when their suffering has rendered continued life intolerable. A life of unrelenting pain, loss of dignity, and complete dependence may not be one that the person values, and forcing them to continue living may itself be a violation of their dignity.

The Slippery Slope

A common objection to MAiD is the slippery slope argument (滑坡论证): once society permits assisted dying for terminally ill, competent adults, the criteria will inevitably expand to include more vulnerable populations—the elderly, the disabled, those with mental illness, and eventually those who are not suffering but simply “tired of life.” Critics point to Canada’s successive expansions of MAiD eligibility as evidence that this slide is already occurring.

Defenders of MAiD respond that the slippery slope argument conflates different types of expansion. Expanding access to MAiD for individuals with non-terminal but grievous and irremediable conditions (as Bill C-7 did) is a principled extension of the autonomy and compassion framework, not an unprincipled slide. Each expansion can and should be evaluated on its own merits, with appropriate safeguards.

The Discrimination Argument

Braun, Scholten, and Vollmann examine the discrimination argument (歧视论证) in the context of extending MAiD to people with mental illness (精神疾病). The argument runs as follows: if MAiD is available to people with somatic (physical) illnesses, then categorically excluding people with mental illness is discriminatory. It treats mental illness as fundamentally different from physical illness in a way that stigmatizes people with mental health conditions.

However, the discrimination argument faces a challenge. Eligibility for MAiD typically requires that the patient meet criteria related to autonomy (自主权)—they must be competent to make the decision—and beneficence (善行)—the condition must be irremediable and the suffering intolerable. The question is whether people with mental illness can reliably fulfill these criteria.

Braun, Scholten, and Vollmann examine two approaches:

1. The joint approach (autonomy + beneficence): MAiD is justified when it alleviates severe and irremediable suffering in a patient who autonomously requests it. Under this framework, some people with mental illness may be unable to meet the autonomy criterion (e.g., if their illness impairs decision-making capacity) or the beneficence criterion (e.g., if their condition is potentially remediable).

2. The autonomy-based approach: MAiD is justified whenever a patient makes an autonomous request, regardless of other considerations. Under this framework, the exclusion of people with mental illness is harder to justify, since many people with mental illness are fully capable of autonomous decision-making.

Questioning MAiD for Mental Illness

Patrick Craine raises further concerns about extending MAiD to people whose sole condition is mental illness. The worry is that mental illness can distort a person’s perception of their own suffering, their future prospects, and their capacity for autonomous choice. Depression, for example, characteristically causes feelings of hopelessness and worthlessness that may be symptoms of the illness rather than accurate assessments of the patient’s situation. Providing MAiD in such cases might mean helping someone die based on a distorted assessment of their own condition—an assessment that might change with effective treatment.

Safeguards and Ongoing Debates

Canada’s MAiD legislation includes a range of safeguards designed to protect vulnerable individuals:

• The patient must be a competent adult who provides informed consent.
• Two independent medical practitioners must confirm eligibility.
• There are mandatory reflection periods (varying depending on whether death is reasonably foreseeable).
• The patient may withdraw consent at any time.

Despite these safeguards, debates continue. Critics argue that economic deprivation, inadequate palliative care, and social isolation may lead some individuals to request MAiD not because they genuinely wish to die, but because they see no other option. This concern is especially acute for people with disabilities, Indigenous communities, and other marginalized populations who may already face barriers to adequate healthcare and social support.

Defenders argue that denying MAiD to protect vulnerable populations is itself paternalistic—it overrides the autonomous choices of competent adults in the name of protecting others who might be vulnerable. The solution, they contend, is not to restrict access to MAiD but to address the underlying social determinants that create vulnerability: poverty, inadequate healthcare, social isolation, and discrimination.

Conclusion: Navigating Moral Complexity

The moral issues explored in this course—global poverty, climate change, structural oppression, media ethics, and medical assistance in dying—share several common features. Each involves genuine moral complexity: reasonable people disagree, values conflict, and the facts are often uncertain or contested. Each involves a tension between individual responsibility and structural forces. And each demands that we move beyond simple intuitions and engage in careful, rigorous moral reasoning.

Several themes recur across the chapters:

The limits of individual action. In every topic, we have encountered the question of whether moral responsibility lies primarily with individuals or with institutions and structures. Singer demands individual sacrifice; Sinnott-Armstrong places responsibility on governments; Young argues for structural transformation; Campbell asks individuals to quit social media. There is no single, universal answer; the appropriate distribution of moral responsibility depends on the specific issue, the available options, and the structural context.

The demandingness of morality. How much can morality demand of us? Singer’s principle, taken seriously, would require radical changes to the lifestyle of every affluent person. Broome’s duty of justice regarding emissions is more modest but still demanding. Berg argues for a duty of attentiveness that, while imperfect, requires ongoing effort. The question of how demanding morality can be—without ceasing to be a livable moral framework—is one of the deepest in moral philosophy.

The structural formation of choice. Cudd, Srinivasan, Nguyen, and Campbell all argue, in different ways, that our choices are shaped by structures we do not fully see or control. Oppressive social structures constrain rational choice; patriarchal norms shape desire; echo chambers distort belief; social media platforms manipulate behavior. Recognizing these structural forces does not eliminate individual responsibility, but it does complicate our understanding of what genuine freedom and autonomy require.

The importance of epistemic humility. Moral philosophy does not typically yield certainty. The goal is not to arrive at the one correct answer to every moral question but to develop the skills, concepts, and habits of mind needed to think more carefully, more honestly, and more responsibly about the moral challenges we face. This requires a willingness to consider perspectives that challenge our assumptions, to revise our views in light of new arguments and evidence, and to recognize that people who disagree with us may have something important to teach us.