The ethics of inefficacy, online seminar with Chrisoula Andreou (Utah) and Nikhil Venkatesh (King’s College London), June 13 2025, 9AM-11AM Eastern Time / 15:00-17:00 Central European Time

Many significant outcomes arise from the combined actions of multiple individuals, even though no single action is pivotal to the result. Examples include addressing climate change, preventing overfishing, tackling injustices in the global garment industry, and divesting from unethical companies. While most agree that individuals have moral reasons to act in such scenarios, this raises a normative challenge – the “Inefficacy Problem”: When and why do individuals have reasons to act, even when their actions seem to make no discernible difference?

Since Parfit’s influential Reasons and Persons (1984), this question has sparked extensive philosophical inquiry. Recently, interest in the Inefficacy Problem has surged, generating lively debate among philosophers and beyond.

Speakers:

“Benevolence, Free-Riding, and Efficacy”

Chrisoula Andreou, University of Utah

“Collective Impact and the Problem of Mixed Optimality”

Nikhil Venkatesh, King’s College London

Abstracts:

“Benevolence, Free-Riding, and Efficacy”

Chrisoula Andreou, University of Utah

It can be discouraging when, given large-scale serious issues (e.g., climate change), it’s clear that, even if one really wants to make a difference, there may not be anything one can do that will have anything more than a trivial impact on whether things will go well or badly. It’s easy to feel like any effort on one’s part is futile and so contrary to reason; after all, one’s efforts involve costs to oneself and sometimes to others (e.g., one’s dependents), which are, it seems, rationally incurred only if they are not pointless. Of course, if thoughts along these lines prompt general complacency, then things are sure to go badly. What are we to say about such situations? Do you, for example, have reason to invest your time, energy, or other resources toward addressing large-scale issues even if any such investment available to you is (by all appearances) trivial, being dispensable if the valued outcome is ultimately realized, a wasted effort if it is not, and ineffective either way?

This question captures the inefficacy problem, which revolves around the fact that there are cases in which the achievement of a certain valued outcome requires actions that are (1) individually trivial in terms of achieving the outcome, and (2) individually burdensome, but (3) not burdensome enough, considering the costs and benefits of the collection of actions as a whole, to undermine the all-things considered value of achieving the outcome. In such cases, the question arises as to what reason there is to perform any particular individually trivial contributory action. In this paper, I focus on what I see as the most interesting form of the inefficacy problem, namely the form involving impartially benevolent free riding, and argue that an agent’s reasons for action in cases of the relevant sort are based on her role in a dictatorially adoptable coordinated solution to the challenge at hand.

“Collective Impact and the Problem of Mixed Optimality”

Nikhil Venkatesh, King’s College London

The problem of collective impact arises when our voluntary actions collectively and predictably cause seriously suboptimal outcomes, but no individual action makes the outcomeworse. To solve the problem is to explain why some agent in such cases hasmost reason to do otherwise.This paper examines three attempts to solve the problem of collective impact byderiving reasons for individual agents from the value of outcomes. Each runs up against ‘the problem of mixed optimality’: in some collective impact cases, the best outcome is not one in which all agents co-operate, but one in which some co-operate whilst others defect. Proposals which attempt to solve the problem of collective impact through assigning reasons to groups can avoid the problem of mixed optimality, and so appear more promising in light of these findings.

Location: virtual

Format: pre-read

Contact:

Please contact Rutger van Oeveren at rutgervanoeveren [at] gmail.com if you wish to attend for the zoom link and for the papers.

This seminar is related to the following conference and edited volume on the Ethics of Inefficacy: https://www.gu.se/en/event/the-ethics-of-inefficacy, https://philevents.org/event/show/123182.