Univerzita Pardubice Fakulta filozofická

Univerzita Pardubice

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Publikace detail

The Role of Distance in What Matters Morally

Autoři: Rozen David

Rok: 2022

Druh publikace: ostatní - konference, koncert

Strana od-do: nestránkováno

Tituly:

Jazyk	Název	Abstrakt	Klíčová slova
eng	The Role of Distance in What Matters Morally	The role of distance in our value judgments has often been neglected. E.g. Singer, in his famous pamphlet, after suggesting that not giving all you have to charity for people starving in Bengali is basically the same as letting die a child you see drowning in a lake because you don’t want to get your clothes muddy, slacks off this very fundamental issue by the following statement: “I do not think I need to say much in defense of the refusal to take proximity and distance into account.” (Singer 1972). I, on the contrary, claim that there has to be said much about it, and in my contribution to the conference, I will focus on clarifying the role of distance in our evaluations from various perspectives. First of all, it is necessary to distinguish at least a few ways of possible distance; moral phenomena can be distant to our (1) geological location, (2) time location, (3) understanding, and (4) interest. And in my presentation, I will show through several relevant examples how these ways of distance influence what really matters to us. Think about, e.g., the religious conflict in Afghanistan, the war in Syria, the war in Ukraine, the meat industry, and especially climate change, which usually combines all four ways of distance and therefore, it is incredibly complicated for us to approach it morally. Generally, I will aim to describe our moral psychology concerning various ways of distance. But I will end my contribution with a normative consideration of the problem of distance in our ethical thinking, and I will present the key questions that are difficult to answer in this context. On the descriptive level, distance obviously matters to us, but the normative question of whether it should matter to us is profoundly difficult; my initial hypothesis is that, at least in some cases (especially concerning distance in time), it should.