“If my booking a flight does not make a difference to the plane taking off and to climate change, what reason is there for me not to fly? If my small donation does not make a difference to what Doctors Without Borders can achieve, why should I donate? If my purchase of a factory-farmed chicken does not make a difference to how many chickens suffer and die, why not just buy it?”
These questions will be familiar to anyone who tries to live ethically in the modern world. Philosophers call the issue they embody ‘the inefficacy problem’. The first ever edited collection dedicated to the inefficacy problem has been published today, edited by Mattias Gunnemyr, Rutger van Oeveren and Jan Willem Wieland.
I contributed a chapter to the book, in which I argued that certain solutions to the inefficacy problem – those suggested by Julia Nefsky, Christopher Woodard and Mattias Gunnemyr and Caroline Toubourg – face a different problem, which I call ‘the problem of mixed optimality’. The next task is to come up with a theory that solves both problems, which I hope to do.
The book is published open access, which means you can read it for free online. This is thanks in part to my funders, the Leverhulme Trust. Thanks too to all the other contributors and especially the three editors who put the collection together.
