PEA Soup

Commonsense Consequentialism: A Bleg for Comments

Currently, I’m working on a book entitled Commonsense Consequentialism: Wherein Morality Meets Rationality. (Click on the link to be taken to a web site where you can download individual chapters.) The book is on morality, rationality, and the interconnections between the two. In it, I defend a version of consequentialism that both comports with our commonsense moral intuitions and shares with other consequentialist theories the same compelling teleological conception of practical reasons. I have a complete draft of the book finished, but I’m still in the process of revising it. I have promised to submit it by the end of this coming January. I would be very grateful, then, to those who have the time to read it (or any portion of it) and give me comments before then, as this would be of tremendous help to me in revising it. Comments, questions, and/or criticisms can be posted here or sent to me at douglas.portmore@asu.edu. Below the fold, I include the table of comments followed by a brief synopsis of each chapter.

Moral discourse, speech acts, and the "by" relation

Jamie and Mark have already had some very helpful things to say about this in email correspondence. I wanted to open up the discussion and see what others think.

The proposal is to understand moral utterances along the following lines, what we might call the "layered speech-act model" of moral discourse. There are at least two versions of it:

• (V1) When you say 'X is good', you assert that X is good by approving (or: expressing approval) of X.
• (V2) When you say 'X is good', you express approval of X by asserting that X is good.

You perform one speech act by performing another.

Details remain to be worked out, but the initial hope is two-fold. First, that by layering assertion and approval this way, it integrates the intuitive truth-aptness and motivational dimension of moral discourse. Second, that it avoids embedding problems, because it can rely on the logical properties of the propositions asserted.

Any such proposal faces at least three serious questions initially.

• (Q1) Is it ad hoc?
• (Q2) Does it reinvent the wheel?
• (Q3) Can it deliver on the anticipated benefits?

I think the answer to Q1 is clearly 'no'. Elsewhere the "by" relation does indeed layer speech acts as posited here. Answering Q3 will require actually filling in the details, making it clear how either V1 or V2 (or some other layered pair) delivers the goods. I've only indicated in the sketchiest terms how that might go. As for Q2, as best I can tell, no one has explicitly framed matters the way I have here. But perhaps it's appropriate to interpret others as saying basically the same thing in other words.

Anyway, I'd be very pleased to hear what you think about any of the proposals or questions.

Arguments from Disagreement

There is a powerful argument that is frequently used in metaethics (and elsewhere). It’s based on the idea that disagreement requires shared concepts. Thus, by looking at who we can intuitively disagree with we can determine who we share our concepts with. And, in when it comes to morality, it seems we can disagree with people who classify very different things under moral terms. As a result, it is argued, ethical terms cannot have ‘descriptive content’. I used to think that this great argument works. Today I’m feeling less certain about this and I’d like to hear about your thoughts. Here is why.

Against Actualism

In “Oughts, Options, and Actualism” (Philosophical Review 1986), Frank Jackson and Robert Pargetter defended the “actualist” view that, for every act-type A, you ought to do A if and only if your conduct would be (in the relevant way) better if you did A than if you did not.

In my opinion, this is a deeply objectionable view. It makes the truth about whether or not you ought to do A dependent on the brute non-moral facts about what you would do if you did A (and about what you would do if you did not do A) – even if these brute non-moral facts reflect only your utter wickedness and depravity. In this sense, this “actualist” view gives an agent’s wickedness the power to effect a radical transformation in the obligations that the agent has.

For example, imagine a wicked paedophile, who has just abducted a 10-year-old girl and imprisoned her in his secret cellar. Suppose that it is still possible – though unfortunately quite unlikely – that the paedophile will repent of his evil plans, and return the girl unharmed to her parents. Surely, if anything is clear about this case, it is clear that it is not true that the paedophile ought to rape the girl.

But (shockingly, as it seems to me) actualists like Jackson and Pargetter may well disagree...

Naturalism Workshop in Leeds

Workshop: "Naturalism: Ethical and Metaphysical"
University of Leeds
September 18-19, 2009

This workshop brings together researchers interested in issues
concerning naturalism in moral philosophy and in metaphysics and
epistemology. Registration for the workshop is now open. More details
about the workshop and registration can be found at:
http://naturalism09.wordpress.com/.

The workshop begins at 2pm on Friday, 18 September, and ends at 4:15pm
on Saturday, 19 September. The speakers are:

Ted Sider (NYU): “Fundamentality and Evaluative Anti-Realism”
Ralph Wedgwood (Oxford): TBA
Jonas Olson (Stockholm): “In Defence of Moral Error Theory”
Carrie Jenkins (Nottingham): “Naturalism and the A Priori”
David Copp (UC Davis): “Toward a Pluralist and Teleological Theory of
Normativity”

Metaethics, Semantics, and Metasemantics

One thing I’ve become much more aware of in Leeds is the distinction between semantics and metasemantics. There is a worry that ignoring this distinction is creating some confusion. Metaethicists have traditionally claimed to be doing moral semantics whereas in fact they have mainly been doing metasemantics. Today, there is a new debate in which people also say that they are doing semantics. This time this claim is actually true. However, as a consequence, the new debate is not at the same metasemantic level as the previous debates. I know this is a bit confusing but let me try to elaborate a bit.

 

Nietzschean Expressivist Semantics

One of the more serious attempts to provide an expressivist semantics for moral terms (broadly construed) is Gibbard’s.  The basic idea is that they express plans.  “I should pack” expresses my plan to pack; “You should pack” expresses a contingency plan for the (unlikely) case that I am you.  “Journal editors should move papers along faster” expresses a plan for being a journal editor.  And  so on.  Call this view the Gibbard Semantics, or GS.

It seems to me that there are other possible semantics along this line.  Consider plans for what I would have someone do, if I were in control.  For example, if I were in control of the government, I would have the government give philosophy professors large cash subsidies.  If I were in control of journal editors, I would have the editors accept all my manuscripts without revision.  Etc.  Perhaps I could express these plans somehow.  Perhaps like this:  “The government should give philosophy professors large cash subsidies; editors should accept all my manuscripts without revision.”  In the normal case, I am in control of myself, so “I should…” sentences would express normal plans.  Call this the Nietzsche Semantics for moral terms, or NS.

2009 Mad Meta: Program announced

Russ has released the program for the 2009 Madison Metaethics Workshop. Needless to say, it looks good.

Flexible Contextualism about 'Ought's

Thanks to everyone for sharing their intuitions about the cases in my previous post. Here I’m going to back up and say something about my interest in the cases. Among linguists, the canonical view about modal expressions like “might”, “may” and “must” is that they are quantifiers over possibilities where the domains of quantification are contextually restricted. The view is an extremely powerful one; if correct, it provides a simple, highly unified explanation of a wide variety of language use. Recently, the canon’s neat story has come under attack on two fronts, in its treatment of bare epistemic modals (BEMs) and bare normative modals (BNMs). (A bare modal statement is a modal statement that doesn’t contain a restrictor phrase like “in view of my evidence” or “in view of what the law requires”.) I’ve got a manuscript defending a general, flexible contextualist account of bare modal statements and an application of that account to BEMs. (Here: http://www.unl.edu/philosop/people/faculty/dowell/dowell.shtml) Now I’m working on defending an application of that account to BNMs. (NB: My apologies in advance; this post is both long and oversimplified.) 

Korsgaard on Moral Realism

I’ve just been reading Christine Korsgaard’s new book Self-Constitution – Agency, Identity, and Integrity. It’s a marvelous book, one of the best I’ve read in long time. It presents an appealing picture of actions, agency, practical deliberation, normativity, morality, and interpersonal relations, it draws from the history of philosophy in a rich way (not just from Kant, but also from Plato, Aristotle, Hume, and many others), and it’s wonderfully written. I do have a problem though. I don’t understand her argument against standard moral realism (which she calls dogmatic rationalism). I would be very thankful if someone could help me with this. It doesn’t matter if you haven’t read the book yet, I’ll try to give the argument in full.