Rescue and personal involvement : a response to Woollard
Date
16/09/2019Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
Fiona Woollard argues that when one is personally involved in an emergency, one has a moral requirement to make substantial sacrifices to aid others that one would not otherwise have. She holds that there are three ways in which one could be personally involved in an emergency: by being physically proximate to the victims of the emergency; by being the only person who can help the victims; or by having a personal encounter with the victims. Each of these factors is claimed to be defeasibly sufficient to ground personal involvement, and thus a requirement of substantial sacrifice to aid. Woollard defends this view on the basis of a number of cases. We show that Woollard's cases contain various confounding factors. In view of the more precisely drawn cases offered here, it is clear that neither proximity nor uniqueness nor personal encounter is intuitively defeasibly sufficient in the way Woollard claims.
Citation
Pummer , T G & Crisp , R 2019 , ' Rescue and personal involvement : a response to Woollard ' , Analysis , vol. Advance articles , anz052 . https://doi.org/10.1093/analys/anz052
Publication
Analysis
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
0003-2638Type
Journal article
Rights
© The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Analysis Trust. This work has been made available online in accordance with publisher policies or with permission. Permission for further reuse of this content should be sought from the publisher or the rights holder. This is the author created accepted manuscript following peer review and may differ slightly from the final published version. The final published version of this work is available at: https://doi.org/10.1093/analys/anz052
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