What Is the Point of a Duty of Beneficence? Reevaluating Taurek

Abstract This paper reevaluates the importance of John Taurek’s article “Should the Numbers Count?” putting his arguments in the context of work on the role of love in ethics. We can fruitfully read Taurek as attempting to ground a duty of beneficence in love. Taurek’s article should be read as having three distinct strands of thought. It articulates beneficence as responding to a value that is non-aggregative, criticizes the aggregation of human value as such, and assumes that beneficence has a very wide scope – from ordinary helping actions to disaster cases. What critics overlook is that even if there is some aggregative account of human value, Taurek gives powerful reasons for thinking that it is patently not the value typically taken to underlie our duty of beneficence. This leaves us, however, with difficult questions about the scope and limits of the duty of beneficence – and so of love – in ethics.