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.

Subjective Utilitarianism: What is it good for? – Absolutely Nothing

Suppose that a subject, S, is in some less-than-ideal epistemic position with respect to both the relevant normative facts and the relevant non-normative facts – that is, assume that S faces both normative uncertainty (i.e., uncertainty about the relevant normative facts) and non-normative uncertainty (i.e., uncertainty about the relevant non-normative facts). Yet S must still choose which of the mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive act alternatives available to her to perform. Call this S’s choice situation.

Theories about what S ought to do in her choice situation fall into one of the following three categories:

Virtue Ethics and the Analysis of Right and Wrong Action

Five years ago I was up-to-date on virtue ethics.  I've been ignoring it for a few years, so please forgive me if what I'm about to say is old news.

Rosalind Hursthouse argues: "An action is right iff it is what a virtuous agent would characteristically do in the circumstances, except for in tragic dilemmas, in which a decision is right if it is what the agent would choose, but the action decided upon may be too terrible to be deemed right or good."

One traditional worry with this is a variation of the Euthyphro problem: Does the virtuous agent perform the action because it's right or is it right because the virtuous agent would do it.  Hursthouse takes the first horn of the dilemma and tries to argue that this is not a problem for virtue ethics.

However, I think that the analysis of right action is mistaken.  There are (I think) counterexamples.

Non-Consequentialism and Strength of Obligation

Walter Sinnott-Armstrong has given us a new argument for consequentialism (“How strong is this obligation?  An argument for consequentialism from concomitant variation,” Analysis 69 (2009): 438-442).  The datum: other things kept equal, the obligation to keep a promise to take a friend to the airport is stronger than the obligation to keep a promise to meet a friend for lunch—overriding the latter obligation takes less than overriding the former.  The best account of the source of this relative strength is that (in normal circumstances) the consequences of breaking the first promise are more harmful than the results of breaking the second.  If we generalize, it appears that the relative strength of all obligations depends on the level of harmful consequences that would result from violating the obligation.  Thus consequentialism seems to best account for strength of obligation.

Sinnott-Armstrong [WSA] recognizes that this argument “assumes that (i) the strength of the moral obligation does not explain the degree of harm…, (ii) no third factor can explain the strength, the harm, and their correlation…, and (iii) the correlation is not accidental…” (440).  I think that assumption (ii) is not well-founded.  More basically, we should question WSA’s ultimate assessment, that in order to respond to his argument, “deontologists need to explain why some moral obligations are stronger than others without invoking the harmful consequences of violating those moral obligations” (442).  There is another response available for deontologists, one that does invoke harm, and it undermines assumption (ii).  

UPDATE: The murderer at the door: What Kant might have said

UPDATE, June 26, 2009: Anyone interested in how I ended up developing this argument should check out the paper just published in PPR.

One of the more difficult issues for Kantian moral theorists is how, if at all, our moral obligations should be sensitive to others' wrongdoing. It seems fairly obvious that what we are morally required to do can change in response to others' immoral conduct. A clear example is promise keeping: If A and B agree to a mutually beneficial promise, but A doesn't fulfill the terms of their promise, B is presumably not obligated to fulfill them either. So A's wrongdoing influences B's moral obligations. Another example is punishment: Since punishment is the infliction of harm, suffering, or deprivation (which is typically wrong), it must be the case that the wrongdoer's wrongdoing justifies inflicting otherwise wrongful harm, suffering, or deprivation on her. This issue is acute for Kantians because Kantianism has long been seen as somehow more "principled" than consequentialism. The challenge for Kantians is to offer an explanation of how our moral obligations should be sensitive to others' wrongdoing that invokes key Kantian values or principles (rational autonomy, the categorical imperative, etc.) without becoming so sensitive to others' wrongdoing that Kantianism becomes indistinguishable from outright consequentialism.

The example that has of course stimulated much of the discussion surrounding this problem is Kant's treatment of 'the murderer at the door' in his essay "On a Supposed Right to Lie." There Kant seems to say that lying to a would-be murderer about the whereabouts of the innocent victim he intends to kill would be morally wrong. Most Kantians (and most reasonable people in general) find this conclusion troubling if not absurd: If ever there were a situation in which lying is not only morally permitted, but even morally required, that would be it!

What follows is my own (admittedly long-ish) attempt to answer the 'murderer at the door' problem in Kantian terms. Whether my attempt is of value in addressing the larger theoretical problem of how our moral obligations should be sensitive to others' wrongdoing, I'm not sure, but here goes:

Paying People Not to Do Good: A Puzzle about Superogation

First, thanks to Doug and the other editors for the invitation!  I'm happy to be here.

For my first post, I wanted to share an issue that has been puzzling me.  Ultimately, this relates back to issues in voting ethics, but I want to submit the problem in the abstract.  I'm not sure what to say about it. I'm curious what others think (and if there's relevant published work on it.)

Suppose Alf plans to do X.  X is supererogatory--it's nice of him to do, but he isn't morally required to do it.  Betty doesn't want Alf to do X, so she offers to pay him not to do so, because she doesn't want him to do something supererogatory.  (Suppose also that it's legal for him to accept money not to X.)  My question: Is Betty doing something morally wrong?

Note: I'm not asking about what making the offer reveals about Betty's character.  That is, I'm not asking whether Betty's offering to pay Alf not to do something supererogatory shows that she has vicious character.  

Note also that there are cases where it's morally right to pay something to do Y, even though this foreseeably might prevent them from doing some supererogatory action X.  So, for instance, it's not wrong for our various universities to pay us our salaries, even though our working as philosophers prevents us from devoting our lives to charity work in the poverty-stricken regions.  [EDIT: Our employers are paying us to teach, not paying us not to do supererogatory volunteer work.]

Sometimes, Betty's actions seem wrong to me.  But other times, it seems like she's doing something permissible, though she has bad character.  After all, since X is supererogatory, it's morally permissible for Alf to refrain from X-ing, even for morally frivolous or vicious reasons.  (His reasons for refraining bear on his character, but generally not on the deontic status of the act.)  If so, why wouldn't it be morally permissible for Betty (for morally frivolous or vicious reasons) to pay Alf not to X?  [EDIT: Let's assume for the sake of argument that Alf is permitted to accept money not to X.]  

What do you think?

Arguments for the DDE

I apologise for this but I want to return to the Doctrine of Double Effect. One thing that Tim Scanlon said in the comments was that his motivation for arguing against the DDE is, quote: ‘I see no plausible theoretical defense for it’. I wanted to ask about whether there really is no theoretical justification for the DDE. What are the best possible positive arguments for the DDE? What arguments have been presented in the literature so far? I also want to present a virtue-ethicist argument which I think works the best. It’s not very original (Alison Hills uses a similar one) but I ‘ll formulate it slightly differently.

A Request for Help Regarding Imperfect Duties

At the moment, I’m interested in imperfect duties and, in particular, the duty of beneficence, and I need some help tracking down the relevant literature with regard to two particular aspects of this duty. First, it seems to me that the duty of beneficence is not a duty to do x amount of good for others (where x is some percentage of the total amount of good that one could possibly do for others), but is instead a duty to dedicate y percent of one’s time and/or resources to helping others. If it were the former as opposed to the latter, then, a person who donates only to NPR (National Public Radio) would have to donate twenty times as much as a relevantly similar person who instead donates only to Oxfam if Oxfam does twenty times as much good for others as NPR does with the same quantity of donated monies. Now, surely, someone has made this point, but since I don’t know the literature that well, could you tell me who and where.

Supererogation and Imperfect Duties

Suppose that S has the following imperfect duty: an imperfect duty to perform at least one of x, y, and z (where these are three distinct act-tokens). And assume that S does not have a perfect duty to perform x, nor a perfect duty to perform y, nor a perfect duty to perform z. Furthermore, assume that S performs both x and y.

Did S do anything supererogatory (that is, did S do anything that went beyond what duty required), and, if so, what?

Should we say both (1) that S’s performing x was supererogatory in that it went beyond what S’s perfect duty required and (2) that S’s performing y was supererogatory in that it went beyond what S’s perfect duty required? Or should we say (3) that S’s performing both x and y was supererogatory in that this went beyond what S’s imperfect duty required, but neither (1) nor (2)? Or should we say all of (1), (2), and (3)? Something else?

Constraints: Agent-Focused or Victim-Focused – Part II

As I noted in an earlier post, there are at least two competing rationales for constraints: the victim-focused rationale (VFR) and the agent-focused rationale (AFR). One worry that I have about VFR is that it seems to have a tough time accounting for the intuition that I and many others have in the Promise Case. Another worry that I have is that it doesn’t seem to be able to account for the intuition that I and many others have in Case C.