PHIL 100 Lecture Notes - Supererogation
17 Sep 2013
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If it is in someone"s power to prevent something bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything, then she morally ought to do it. If it is in someone"s power to prevent some very bad things from happening without thereby sacrificing anything morally significant then she morally ought to do it. Singer notes that people don"t seem to act even in accordance with the weak principle. If they did, he notes, our lives would be radically different from how they actually are. Two important points about sp and wp: they do not take distance or proximity into account, they do not take into account whether there are other people who could likewise prevent the bad things that we can prevent. X is morally significant if and only if the having of x (the lacking of x) in one"s life makes one"s life to a significant degree better (worse) than one"s life would be if it lacked (had) x.
