suppose that a person I see through my long-distance vision is truly striking, dressed in vibrant colors, and dramatically exhibiting his need. He stands out from a few other equally needy people. Further, his need should be salient and would be salient to a normal or ideal observer. It is so. I do not intuitively believe that I have a greater obligation to this person than to the others at a distance, even if I feel under more psychological pressure to aid (p. 357).

As with Mark, I’m not sure that Kamm is appealing to what you call ‘higher order intuitions’ here. I don’t exactly know what those are.

However, even if Kamm’s argument works against salience in this case, it need not follow that salience has no moral significance. Similarly to what Kamm has said regarding distance, someone who believes that salience is morally important need not claim that salience is always and everywhere morally important; salience need only to be morally important sometimes in some cases.

John, I think it is important to note that the Pond Case and the Overseas Case are Singer’s and not Kamm’s, and that Singer accepts that in the Overseas Case, most people have the intuition that one is not obligated to save the starving child overseas. Kamm’s point here against Singer, which, I think, is just a methodological and not a substantive one, is that these two cases are not properly equalized. Kamm proposes for example that the Near Alone Case and the Far Alone Case are more properly equalized than Singer’s Cases. Singer and other consequentialists can accept this methodological point and still reject the substantive view that distance matters morally.

1. You say:

You were…worried about whether the salience that matters is salience for the agent or the judge. I’m not sure that there’s an issue that is obscured here. Salience is on the ‘same level’ as distance and ‘taking John to have a duty.’ Of course there are various ways of understanding what we are doing when we are thinking about what John ought to do, but in each of these the question concerns the way in which our taking John to have a duty is connected to distance and, here, the salience of Jane’s need.

Perhaps I have not understood your response, but It still seems to me that there are two different things that my intuitions about whether John ought to aid Jane might be tracking: the salience of Jane’s need for John, or the salience of Jane’s need for me. With distance, Kamm is obviously interested (in this chapter) in the distance of the victim from the agent, not from the judge. I presume she is also interested salience of the victim’s need for the agent. But there seems to be a further and interesting question about whether my intuitions about what John should do are tracking the salience of Jane’s need for me.

2. I suggested that, in her strikingly-dressed-person case, Kamm might have been relying on higher order intuitions about whether strikingness of appearance is the sort of thing that could be morally relevant. You note that:

[I]n order to determine whether being strikingly dressed matters morally we should consider equalised cases that differ only in this respect. It seems likely to me that the result of this process will suggest that being strikingly dressed is not morally relevant.

You’re probably right. Nevertheless, it seems to me that Kamm should acknowledge that higher order intuitions (about whether being strikingly dressed is the sort of thing that could be morally relevant) may be playing a role in generating our intuitive judgments about such cases. This seems to me to be true both for cases involving strikingness of appearance and those involving distance.

3. Regarding your concerns about Kamm’s classification of different types of salience: I like your distinction between normative and non-normative salience, and agree that it is probably more natural that Kamm’s distinction between objective and subjective salience. But it’s not clear to me where to place what Kamm calls ‘objective salience due to non-moral factors’ in your classification. Need would, I think, be salient in this sense when it would be subjectively salient to a normal observer, but not to an ideal one (so that it’s not the case that it ought to be salient for people).

4. You characterise Kamm’s main question in the section on salience as follows: “The question…is whether it is salience or distance that is doing the work in the ‘distance-related’ cases – which of these two features could be the ground of the obligations that we intuitively take ourselves to have”. I agree, provided that by ‘ground of the obligations…’ you mean ‘what motivates our intuition that we have an obligation’ rather than ‘what justifies that intuition’ or ‘what actually creates the obligation’. Kamm seems to accept that, having identified what our intuitions are tracking, there is a further question about whether they are tracking the moral truth.

You then draw attention to the various ways in which salience might play a role in our intuitive responses. You raise some interesting issues here. But I’m not quite sure about your formulation of the first complication that Kamm’s question faces. You say:

[W]hen we become aware of our being in a situation in which we have an obligation and that we have an obligation, both the feature of the situation that is the ground of the obligation and the obligation itself are salient to us along with (in the normal case) other features of the situation. This is a complication because it means that whatever feature grounds our intuition about our obligations will come to us as salient.

I don’t think it’s true that whatever grounds (motivates) our intuitions will come to us as salient. Our intuitions about obligation might come about through some subconscious mechanism without our even being consciously aware of the feature of the situation that is ultimately motivating our intuition. This seems especially plausible when there is more than one feature of a case that is driving our intuition. For example, Kamm thinks that our intuitions are driven in part by both (the perception of) need and (the perception of) nearness. On your view, as I understand it, if this were true then both the need and the nearness would be salient to the agent. But I think that Kamm could be right about what is driving our intuition without nearness being salient to the agent. Indeed, I don’t think nearness is salient in any of the cases that she mentions – only need is salient.

I think it is quite possible that I have completely misunderstood your point here however.

You continue:

The second complication is that we sometimes hold people (ourselves included) responsible for not noticing or failing to recognise that (say) such and such needed help. Relatedly, and as Kamm points out, we sometimes think that taking steps to avoid noticing or to ignore features of a situation, including those that are grounds for our obligations, is permissible and in others impermissible. This is a complication because it means that salience looks to be something about which we can have obligations. That is, there are situations in which we ought (other things being equal) to notice certain features.

I think I agree with this, though I note that the same complication arises with nearness, since nearness is also something about which we have obligations (i.e. we can have obligations to make ourselves near to someone who needs our help).

5. Kamm says (p358):

If I intuitively thought that such salience obligated, I would think that I’m not permitted to change it to avoid being obligated, as I believe that I am not permitted to change nearness, once it is in place, to farness merely in order to avoid being obligated.

You suggest that the problem with the argument here is that “the cases where it is permissible to change the salience look like cases where there isn’t really an obligation to aid”. (I think we could add those cases in which there is an obligation to aid, but reducing salience won’t make us any less likely to satisfy that obligation). I’m not sure that this is a problem on its own, since it is consistent with Kamm’s view that it is only impermissible to change salience when (a) there is an obligation to aid that does not derive from salience, and (b) reducing salience will make the agent less likely to satisfy this obligation. This is exactly what one would expect if we thought that salience could not ground obligations. However, I think there are at least two other problems with the argument (here, I’m just repeating my initial post I’m afraid). First, I think that the cases in which “I am not permitted to change nearness, once it is in place” are all cases in which I have an obligation to aid that derives from something other than my nearness to the victim, but which will only be fulfilled if I remain near to the victim. That is, they are just like the cases in which I am not permitted to change salience. Second, whether “I intuitively thought that such salience obligated” seems to me to be a different question than whether my intuitions actually track salience, since my intuitive judgments about obligations might track salience without my believing that salience actually grounds obligations. So even if Kamm has succeeded in showing that we don’t intuitively think that salience obligates, it might still be that our intuitions do track salience.

6. In my original post, I introduced the following Scenario:

(Scenario A) Ann is in a position to aid Ben, whose need is subjectively salient for Ann. Ann has no obligation to aid Ben except perhaps one that arises from the subjective salience of his need. Ann can take steps to diminish the subjective salience of Ben’s need, however doing so will reduce her tendency to help him.

Though I didn’t make this very clear, I was trying here to capture the case that Kamm has in mind when she says (on p357) that:

If we do not think that there is some other reason besides [subjective salience] for why we have a duty to aid, we should believe intuitively that we may eliminate [subjective salience] even if this interferes with our aiding.

You question whether the second sentence in Scenario A should be there, noting that, as you understand it “Ann, by assumption, does have an obligation and the question to be determined is from what this obligation arises”. But if Ann has an obligation to aid, this may be a non-salience-based obligation. And if she has such an obligation then (as Kamm admits) its not intuitively the case that she may reduce salience if this will make her less likely to aid. So I think Kamm needs to assume something like the second sentence to get the intuitive answer that she wants.

You continue: “It is not at all clear to me why we would be permitted to diminish salience in a case where we have an obligation and it arises from that salience.” I agree. It seems to me that the only case in which we would be permitted to reduce salience is where there is no obligation at all, or where diminishing salience does not diminish our tendency to fulfil the obligation. But I don’ think that this is, on its own, a problem for Kamm (see my point 5 above).

This is a nice summary with lots of interesting points. I thought that the salience stuff was most interesting in the chapter and in your remarks so I’ll say most about them. First though a couple of smaller comments about some of your bracketed remarks:

You’re worried about the Standard View and the Standard Claim. As I understood it, the Standard View is the standard view of the problem (of distance in morality) and the Standard Claim is the standard response to the standard view. Kamm thinks that both are mistaken. I understood Chapter 11 to be concerned primarily with correcting the Standard View – that is, beginning to show why the usual way of conceiving of the problem of distance in morality is mistaken. The chapter is then primarily methodological.

You were also worried about whether the salience that matters is salience for the agent or the judge. I’m not sure that there’s an issue that is obscured here. Salience is on the ‘same level’ as distance and ‘taking John to have a duty.’ Of course there are various ways of understanding what we are doing when we are thinking about what John ought to do, but in each of these the question concerns the way in which our taking John to have a duty is connected to distance and, here, the salience of Jane’s need.

Finally, you were wondering about Kamm’s intuitions about someone who is ‘strikingly dressed’: I would have thought that the methodological considerations applied to the distance case apply here also. That is, in order to determine whether being strikingly dressed matters morally we should consider equalised cases that differ only in this respect. It seems likely to me that the result of this process will suggest that being strikingly dressed is not morally relevant. I’m not sure what to say about the higher order intuitions that you mention. I guess I’m a bit worried about whether they can be intuitions at all. Perhaps they are something like proto-theoretic generalisations or, as the reference to the next chapter suggests, justifications or explanations of (first-order) intuitions.

On to salience… There is a whole nest of issues in this part of the chapter that I don’t want to get too involved in. I have to say that I would have liked Kamm to have said a bit more on the nature of salience. In particular, I’m not sure that the two senses of salience are best called ‘subjective’ and ‘objective.’ Suppose that something is salient to an individual when they notice it. ‘Being noticed’ I think captures and includes the various ways in which Kamm explains subjective salience (including Unger’s – though it need not be as forceful as Unger’s case). This is contrasted with the second ‘sense’ of salience: what should be noticed (i.e. “what should attract and hold one’s attention”). This second sense is normative in a way that the first sense is not. Moreover the normative sense of salience can only be called objective if the appropriate work had been done to establish the objectivity of the normative claim – I.e. if I really ought to have noticed such and such. I would have thought normative and descriptive (or non-normative) kinds of salience would have been a more natural set of terms. [Further, there may be a case for saying that the second sense is not really a sense of salience at all, but as above, an assessment of our obligations to be aware or to notice certain features of our circumstances.]

Here’s how I see the more general issues: Kamm is interested in what grounds (‘generates’ in your and perhaps her terms) our obligations and specifically here whether being near (or distance generally) can be the ground of an obligation. Intuitions are, in a certain way, indicators or evidence of obligations but in order to isolate the genuine ground of the obligation we need to isolate the appropriate feature. The method of equalisation of cases and the elimination test are two methods for determining when a feature of a situation is playing the role in our intuitions that could make it the ground of the obligation. The question here then is whether it is salience or distance that is doing the work in the ‘distance-related’ cases – which of these two features could be the ground of the obligations that we intuitively take ourselves to have.

I think this specific case is complicated by two facts. First, when we become aware of our being in a situation in which we have an obligation and that we have an obligation, both the feature of the situation that is the ground of the obligation and the obligation itself are salient to us along with (in the normal case) other features of the situation. This is a complication because it means that whatever feature grounds our intuition about our obligations will come to us as salient.

The second complication is that we sometimes hold people (ourselves included) responsible for not noticing or failing to recognise that (say) such and such needed help. Relatedly, and as Kamm points out, we sometimes think that taking steps to avoid noticing or to ignore features of a situation, including those that are grounds for our obligations, is permissible and in others impermissible. This is a complication because it means that salience looks to be something about which we can have obligations. That is, there are situations in which we ought (other things being equal) to notice certain features.

The second complication links back to the definitions of objective and subjective salience. I suspect that if we were to understand objective salience as something like ‘normative salience’ and confine our discussion to ‘subjective’ or ‘descriptive’ salience we could avoid the complication without any other ill effects. We can do this, I think, because our obligations to be aware, to notice or to ignore can, without too much trouble, be separated from our obligations to aid. So I might have failed to do as I ought because I did not notice something important. But, it is a further question whether I ought to have noticed what I failed to notice.

If this is OK, the main question is how to pull salience and distance apart. The “key point” on p.357 is indeed the key point here but it is tricky to say the least. To my mind the central point is given in the third sentence:

“…[salience] alone is not generating the intuition that we have an obligation to aid, for if we believed that [salience] gave rise to an obligation, we would think it wrong to alter the salience if this reduced our tendency to help.”

And further, on p.358:

“If I intuitively thought that such salience obligated, I would think that I’m not permitted to change it to avoid being obligated, as I believe that I am not permitted to change nearness, once it is in place, to farness merely in order to avoid being obligated.”

The second part of this sentence looks fine – once I am next to the drowning person I am not permitted to move away so as to avoid the obligation. However in order to make the disanalogy stick, we need a case where there is an obligation to aid, there is salience of need and where it is permissible for me to change the salience (say, ignore the need or take a pill) to avoid the obligation. The problem seems to be that the cases where it is permissible to change the salience look like cases where there isn’t really an obligation to aid. [I suspect that this is a result of what I called the first complication above.]

Kamm makes one other suggestion that is of use here. A little further down on p.358 she writes:

“For it is not because a need ought not to be forgotten that we should aid; we should aid because such a need has another property (e.g. pain and suffering of a near victim) in virtue of which it ought not to be forgotten.”

The important point from this is the suggestion that we might distinguish between the kinds of features of situations that are capable of being the grounds of obligation and those that are not. But we need to know more about what it takes to be the ground of an obligation in order to properly assess this route.

If all this is correct (and I’m far from sure that it is), then Tom, I think your objections to Kamm’s argument slightly miss the mark. First, our intuitions are explained by salience but it is not the right kind of explanation – I have the intuition that I ought to help because of what was salient to me, namely that Ben needed help and I was near enough and able to provide it. In this sense our intuitions could be said to track salience but this tracking is not at issue. Kamm’s arguments are intended to show that salience is not the ground of the (intuition about our) obligation.

Second, I’m not sure that Scenario A is quite right.

“(Scenario A) Ann is in a position to aid Ben, whose need is subjectively salient for Ann. Ann has no obligation to aid Ben except perhaps one that arises from the subjective salience of his need. Ann can take steps to diminish the subjective salience of Ben’s need, however doing so will reduce her tendency to help him.”

I don’t think that the second sentence should be there. As I understand it Ann, by assumption, does have an obligation and the question to be determined is from what this obligation arises. It is not at all clear to me why we would be permitted to diminish salience in a case where we have an obligation and it arises from that salience. A similar point can be made about Scenario B’ – if Ann has an obligation to aid Ben, even if it arises from her nearness to him, then she ought not to move away. This arises from the fact of the obligation rather than from how it arises. The problem here is that neither of these cases actually tests what they are supposed to. But then, as I mentioned above, I’m not sure that there is a case that does test this.

I am not sure that the accident/non-accident distinction applies to the ‘pond’ or ‘overseas’ cases (or for that matter ‘sedan’ or ‘envelop’ cases). Granting that one can say that the baby being the pond is the result of an accident (although one might suggest that it was thrown into the pond to kill it) why should we simply assume that the starving child is not? It might be argued that the child is starving as a result of where she was born which would make her starving in that time and place an accident of birth.

I agree with your comment regarding the possibility that one’s intuitions may be polluted by one’s theoretical perspective. Both consequentialist and deontologist should be aware of this possibility. But this ‘pollution’ may well happen when one is making distinctions to try and demonstrate that cases are not equalized. The problem with drawing distinctions is that one often uses as a criterion for making such distinction, the very point that is controversial. Granting that Kamm is arguing against consequentialism and developing a deontological theory, I would suggest that she is using her deontological perspective to provide warrant for these distinctions. From my perspective as a consequentialist this is begging the very question that is being disputed. I think that a better approach for Kamm would be to demonstrate that consequentialism is self-defeating and then move on to develop a deontological alternative. She may be attempting to do this by arguing for the distinctions that she is arguing for, but this argument is weak if it requires that the deontological perspective she is trying to defend warrants it. I would still argue that the ‘pond’ and the ‘overseas’ (and possible the ‘sedan’ and envelope’ case) are in fact equalized if we recognize that the underlying issue is simply the elimination of (unnecessary and avoidable) harm versus the cost of doing so.

As far as methodology is concerned, sooner or later, those who use intuitions as having some epistemic force in explaining and justifying what one is doing are going to have to defend their use of these intuitions. The problem with using intuitions is that we are simply reporting the psychological state of the person who has it. Simply having an intuition x is not the same as arguing that x is epistemically important and justified as an explanation and/or justification for how we act. Singer certainly does not rest content with intuitions. He uses a thought experiment to elicite a particular intuition, but then he argues for the intuition as a conclusion without using that intuition as a premise. I do not see this happening with Kamm, but this may simply be my inability to follow her where she is going. However, if the polls so far conducted by Liao demonstrate anything it is that there are no clearly preferable intuitions that can help us to determine what we should do in the various scenarios investigated. We have different intuitions as to what is permissible that lead to contradictory actions. If we think that we should utilize our intuitions as explaining and justifying what we do, then I think we are falling into an extreme form of relativism, where, to borrow another phrase, ‘nothing is true, all things are permitted.’ This is certainly not what Kamm (or Singer for that matter) wants.

My last comment (for the time being) is that the consistency or inconsistency between a set of statements is not, in itself, that epistemically interesting. I agree that statements 1-3 (in your response) are not inconsistent, but neither is the set that results if we change 2 to read, “the agent needs to bear the cost of $500.00 to save a life in overseas.” The problem is which one is the morally preferable one? I am not sure that Kamm has provided any reason for choosing one over the other that does not beg the question by relying on intuitions that have not been shown to be epistemically warranted.

John, thanks for your comments. You raise some very interesting points.

I agree with your interpretation of Singer’s purpose in discussing Pond and Overseas. Many people will, I think, find the following three (apparently inconsistent) claims plausible.
(1) the agent must bear a cost of $500 to save a life in Pond
(2) the agent need not bear a cost of $500 to save a life in Overseas
(3) distance cannot make a difference to our duties to aid.
I think that Singer is, as you suggest, using the intuitive plausibility of (1) and (3) to argue against (2). (He also has other arguments against (2).) But Kamm notes that someone who found (2) highly plausible might combine that with (1) to undermine (3). Similarly, one might combine (2) with (3) to undermine (1).

Kamm’s purpose in noting the various disanalogies between Pond and Overseas is, I think, to show that none of these arguments can succeed since (1)-(3) are not, in fact, inconsistent. One can accept that the agent in Pond must aid, and the agent in Overseas need not, without committing oneself to the moral relevance of distance. Instead, the intuitive difference between Pond and Overseas can be explained by appealing to the moral relevance of one of the other disanalogies that Kamm mentions (side-effect vs means, accident versus non-accident etc.).

You suggest that a consequentialist would not think that any of these other disanalogies are morally relevant either, being interested only in the consequences of aiding or not. I’m not sure about this. Consequentialists generally deem the consequences of an act to include the act itself and they might also (in theory) accept, say, that acts of aiding accident victims are intrinsically better than acts of aiding non-accident-victims. In any case, I suspect Kamm would respond to your point by (a) asking why we should allow consequentialist theory (rather than intuition) to determine which disanalogies are relevant and which are not, or (b) claiming that, since she is attempting to develop a version of nonconsequentialism, she is entitled to assume that consequentialism is false. The consequentialist could reply to (a) by claiming that, intuitively, none of the Kamm’s disanalogies between Pond and Overseas are morally relevant. It would be interesting to know how Kamm would incorporate such intuitions into her theory if she shared them, but I suspect she does not.

Regarding your second point, I also found that many of Kamm’s examples in this chapter stretched my ability to conjure up intuitions to breaking point. An obvious way to avoid having to resort to such intuitionless cases while maintaining a intuition-based approach would be to appeal to higher order intuitions (such as intuitions about whether distance is the sort of thing that could be morally relevant) and I find it strange that Kamm does not appeal to such intuitions more often. One problem with appealing to those intuitions might, I suppose, be that they may be heavily polluted by theoretical commitments. Thus, when a consequentialist intuits that distance cannot be morally relevant, perhaps this intuition is driven by her commitment to consequentialist theory. If so, it presumably could not be adduced in favour of consequentialism. It’s not clear to me, though, that first order intuitions are any less polluted by such commitments.

I must admit that I have a great deal of difficulty understanding the importance of many of the examples (cases) that Kamm raises in order to make points that seem to me to be wrong. Obviously she is arguing against consequentialism and for some version of deontology. However, her arguments against consequentialism do not seem to be very convincing, at least to me (of course, I tend towards utilitarian consequentialism). Hence, I feel the need to defend the utilitarian consequentialist. First of all, a consequentialist would not accept the following observation as being at all relevant to understanding our obligations: “ For example, in Pond, we assume the child has been involved in an accident, in Overseas we do not; in Pond, the ruining of the suit is a side effect of the aiding, whereas in Overseas the monetary loss is the means of aiding.” The consequentialist is not concerned with how the situation arises, etc., only in the consequences of our acting or not acting within those situations. I understand Singer to be trying to elicite an intuition from the reader as to what ought to be done in the ‘pond’ case and extend that intuition to the ‘overseas’ case. The intuition is that we ought to eliminate suffering (harm) if we are in a position to do so and the cost of doing so does not impose an unreasonable burden on us. Singer wants us to intuitively understand that the $500.00 suit that is ruined in saving a child’s life is not an unreasonable cost for a person to bear to save a life. (Obviously, he does go beyond the intuition to argue for his position, but we need not address his arguments here. Like many philosopher, including Kamm, he relies on intuitions as a starting point.) Now, the question is, does the same intuition arise in the ‘overseas’ case. Some informal studies that I have conducted in my classes indicate that it does not. Most of my students will intuitively accept the results of the ‘pond’ case, or some version thereof, but will not accept the idea that we our obligated to send $500.00 to save the live of a distant child. Now, the question is why because from a strictly consequentialist point of view it seems that the intuition should arise. Hence we have the start of an argument that attempts to explain why we should send the $500.00 to save the life of a child, all things being equal. (Now the fact that they are poor college students may explain why they resist the conclusion in the ‘overseas’ case, but that is another issue.) If we are focusing on outcomes, as a consequentialist would maintain that we should, then what are the morally relevant differences between the two cases. There does not seem to be any. In both cases we have the option to save a life at some cost to us. If we can save the live of a child and the cost is not a burden to us, then it seems that we ought to do so because from a strictly consequential point of view the saving of the life relative to the cost is the only important normative issue. If sending $500.00 is not an unreasonable burden to us, then we should do so. From a consequentialist point of view there is no difference between ruining a $500.00 suit and sending $500.00 if ruining a suit and sending the money does not present us with an unreasonable burden. They are both a cost. Singer would argue, correctly I think, that distance is not a morally relevant issue, all things being equal.

I want to conclude by commenting on some of the examples that Kamm raises in order to make distinctions/points. Many of examples used by Kamm seem to me to be problematically esoteric—that is, they deviate too much from our common ethical experiences. In fact, I think that provided that they deviate so much from our more garden-variety ethical scenarios that some justification for utilizing them needs to be presented. For example, in chapter 11 she gives the example of putting $500.00 into a machine the will mechanically save a child. This example, and others, are so far fetched that it does not have any normative value for me—I simply don’t have the relevant intuitions at this stage because I cannot relate to these types of examples. I can relate to ruining a suit or sending some money to save a life. Many of Kamm’s examples are like so many thought experiments that philosophers find interesting, but the important question is how will the general public react to them. It seems to me that if the study of ethics is to be of value it ought to help us to live better lives from a defensible moral point of view. If this is correct then the examples used should reflect the lives that people are actually living and the options/ choices that are really available to us. The problem with more esoteric thought-experiments is that they serve only to make philosophers and philosophy seem to be ‘in the clouds’ to borrow a famous metaphor. This type of doing philosophy seems to me to create a serious disconnect between philosophy/philosophers and the actual lives people are living which we should be serving. If we are engaged in doing ethics then I think we need to be able to demonstrate how what we are doing is applicable and relevant to the average reasonably intelligent person’s ethical deliberations. How can what we are doing positively impact lives actually being lived? We should all remember that as we are reading this people are dying of preventable diseases and starvation, women and children are being raped and abused, and people are dying in wars that seem to be unjust, etc. The type of doing philosophy exhibited by Kamm (and others) may play well in professional academic circles, but please explain to me how you think it will play to the reasonably intelligent prson trying to find out what it means to live a moral life? Here is my challenge: how can we make our ideas clear so that they resonate with people of average intelligence and understanding? Do we not have an obligation, as philosophers, to try and make our theories and arguments accessible to the reasonably intelligent person? I am sure that Kamm has important points to make, but they are obscured by the way they are presented. Am I the only person who feels this way?