Elizabeth Ashford
Elizabeth Ashford joined the Department of Moral Philosophy in 2001. She did her MA at UNC Chapel Hill and her BA and DPhil at Oxford University, and was awarded her DPhil in 2002. Her main research interests are in moral and political philosophy. She has recently finished a contribution to UNESCO Volume I, Freedom from Poverty as a Human Right (OUP forthcoming), and her current research project is to develop a book on utilitarian and Kantian conceptions of impartiality and of rights. During the academic year 2005-6 she was a Visiting Faculty Fellow in Ethics at the Harvard University Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, and the following summer she was an H.L.A. Hart Visiting Fellow at the Oxford University Centre for Ethics and the Philosophy of Law. She will be away on maternity leave for the first semester of 2006.
e-mail address: ea10@st-andrews.ac.uk
phone: (+44) 01334 462415
Teaching:
Philosophy and Public Affairs (PY4818): Global Justice
Publications:
Utilitarianism, Integrity
and Partiality
The Journal of
Philosophy XCVII(8), August 2000, pp.
421-439
I discuss Bernard Williams's
integrity objection to utilitarianism, and argue that it is in fact a
strength of utilitarianism that it acknowledges the extent to which
our integrity is currently compromised. The threat to integrity
arises from the fact that the current state of the world is a
constant emergency situation, as a result of which agents are
continually engaged in tragic trade-offs between pursuit of their
personal projects and helping others' even more urgent interests.
I then argue that if the state of the world were different,
utilitarian moral obligations would not conflict with agents' pursuit
of their personal projects.
A response to Clay Splawn
Utilitas, 13(3), November,
2001
Clay Splawn's paper is a
critique of Theodore Sider's article "Asymmetry and
Self-Sacrifice" (Philosophical studies 70, 1993, pp.
117-132). Sider seeks to incorporate within a theory that is
true to the spirit of utilitarianism the common sense intuition that
it is not morally wrong for an agent to fail to promote his own
welfare. I argue that Splawn's paper rightly identifies ways in
which any version of utilitarianism, including Sider's, will fail to
capture core common sense intuitions about what count as selfish and
selfless actions, but I offer a different analysis of the source of
the problem, which, I claim, goes to the heart of the utilitarian
conception of impartiality.
The Demandingness of Scanlon's
Contractualism
Ethics 113,
January 2003, pp. 273-302
One of the
reasons why contractualism has been seen as an appealing alternative
to utilitarianism is that it seems to be able to avoid
utilitarianism's extreme demandingness, while retaining a fully
impartial moral point of view. I argue that contractualist
obligations to help those in need are, in the current state of the
world, just as demanding as utilitarian obligations. I also argue
that while a plausible version of utilitarianism would be
considerably less demanding if the state of the world were different,
a central aspect of contractualism means that it would remain
exceedingly demanding in any practically realisable state of the
world.
Individual Responsibility and Global
Consequences; in Symposium on Samuel Scheffler's Boundaries and
Allegiances
Philosophical
Books, 44:2, April 2003
I discuss
Scheffler's important and incisive arguments concerning the radical
implications for our traditional paradigm conception of modern
responsibility posed by the global consequences of our behaviour and
the extremely complex causal chains in which it is implicated.
Utilitarianism
with a Humean Face
Hume
Studies, 31.1, June 2006
Many
contemporary Humeans have contrasted the subtlety and psychological
plausibility of Hume's moral theory with what they take to
utilitarianism's failure to capture the complexity of morality and to
be suited to the nature of human beings. I argue that Hume's moral
theory, whilst being highly psychologically plausible and sensitive
to the complexities of our moral thinking, in fact also adheres to
the fundamental tenets of utilitarianism. I conclude that it is
a prototype of a particularly plausible version of utilitarianism,
which avoids many of the problems faced by overly technical modern
formulations of the theory. In particular, I argue firstly that
his account of the moral point of view combines being fully impartial
with being non-utopian and acknowledging the force of partiality.
Secondly, I argue that his account of the sympathetic spectator is a
considerably more appealing model of the utilitarian moral point of
view than is the version that has come to be prevalent, and that it
grounds an account of the general good that is concerned with the way
in which individuals participate in the distribution of welfare, and
that strikingly resembles some key passages in Bentham.
The Inadequacy of our Traditional
Conception of the Duties Imposed by Human Rights
Canadian
Journal of Law and Jurisprudence, 19.2, July 2006, pp. 217-235
According to our traditional conception of human rights, they impose primarily negative and perfect duties, and these duties are held to be specific prohibitions on certain kinds of actions (duties not to kill, assault, and so on). Allocating responsibility for a human right violation is seen as a matter of identifying the perpetrator(s) of that violation, where the perpetrator(s) is taken to be the agent or agents who violated such a prohibition and as such can be singled out as solely or primarily responsible for a specific harm suffered by a particular victim. I argue that this conception is outmoded and unable to address many of the most serious and widespread contemporary harm, which increasingly result from extremely complex complex causal chains involving the behaviour of a huge number of agents, few or none of whom can be singled out as responsible for a serious harm to any specific victim. I argue that these harms may clearly constitute human rights violations, and suggest an alternative account of the nature of many of the negative duties imposed by human rights. Against Onora O'Neill's influential critique of welfare rights I argue that in fact the distinction between imperfect and perfect obligations may not map onto the distinction between positive and negative obligations.
The Duties Imposed by the Human Right to
Basic Necessities
UNESCO Volume I: Freedom from Poverty as
a Human Right, Thomas Pogge ed. (OUP forthcoming)
Although
the human right to basic necessities has been widely internationally
ratified, there has been very little agreement about what obligations
it entails. I argue that on any plausible account of human
rights, the human right to basic necessities entails both negative
and positive obligations towards compatriots and foreigners, and that
the responsibility for fulfilling both kinds of obligations
ultimately lies with every agent who is able to do so.
Contractualism (in preparation),
co-authored with Rahul Kumar and Tim Mulgan
Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Abstract of a book in preparation:
According to the theory that has come to be
known (wrongly in my view) as "Classical utilitarianism",
the right action or policy is the one that maximises the conglomerate
sum total of weflare. I argue that this conception of the general
good is in fact incompatible with a plausible conception of the first
two tenets of utiltiarianism, welfarism and impartiality, and the
conception that that its key original proponents, Bentham and Mill,
together with many subsequent utilitarians, had in mind. In short, I
argue that the "classical utilitarian"account of the
interpersonal aggregation of welfare relies on an impersonal
conception of the moral importance of welfare, according to which it
is viewed for its moral significance in abstraction from its
instantiation in particular persons' lives. Likewise, its account of
impartiality licenses any amount of inequality in its actual
treatment of individuals. However, the most plausible understanding
of welfarism and impartiality takes them both to be grounded on the
moral importance of persons, and this leads to an account of the
moral point of view that is omnipersonal rather than impersonal. The
omnipersonal moral point of view consists in individualised concern
for the interests of all. This contrasts both with that of "classical
utilitarianism"(which is impersonal) and that of Kantian
contractualism (which is based on the perspective of single
individuals, considered one by one, and is concernd with the
interests of each seriatim rather than of all). On this onipersonal
moral point of view, our concern is directed at how persons fare -
that is, at their overall welfare levels. Equal moral weight is
assigned to equal overall welfare levels, rather than to equal
quantities of welfare regardless of how they are packaged into lives.
Knowing how persons fare requires knowing how they each participate
in the distribution of welfare. On this view, then, concern for the
distribution of welfare is built into the principle of utility
itself. I then argue that on this conception of utilitarianism it
provides a particularly forceful account both of justice and human
rights and of the demandingess of morality, which is an appealing
mid-position between so-called "classical utilitarianism"
and Kantian contractualism. Finally, I argue that once we understand
utilitarianism onimpersonally rather than impersonally, it is much
more closely allied to its main impartial rival, Kantian
contractualism, than it has often been taken to be. I explore a way
of integrating the two theories into a pluralist view, and examine
the strengths of an integrated uilitarian and Kantian account of
moral obligations of benevolence and of justice.
Last modified: August, 2006