PEA Soup

A Puzzle about 'Right' and 'Wrong'

Intuitively, it's clear that 'wrong' entails 'ought not'; and the term 'right' seems simply to be the contradictory of 'wrong' (after all, 'It's not right' seems at first glance to entail 'It's wrong', and obviously nothing can be both right and wrong). But then it follows that 'right' cannot entail anything stronger than 'it is not the case that ... ought not...'. I.e., 'right' cannot mean anything stronger than 'permissible'.

Intuitively, however, 'right' seems stronger than 'permissible'. If I say, "You're quite right to F", I seem to be expressing a much stronger sort of approval of your F-ing than if I merely said "It is quite permissible for you to F".  It's natural to talk about "the right thing to do", but decidedly odd to talk about "a right thing to do" (whereas it's perfectly natural to talk about "a permissible thing to do"). So, what does 'right' mean -- does it just mean 'permissible' or does it mean something stronger?

Setiya’s “Reasons”: The Diagnosis

Why is Setiya’s principle vulnerable to the problems that I listed in my previous post? What exactly is the diagnosis?

I suggest that the diagnosis is that there are in fact two sorts of reasons. These two sorts of reasons do not always coincide; and Setiya is implicitly conflating these two sorts of reasons here.

Problems for Setiya’s “Reasons”

I’m supposed to be writing a review of Kieran Setiya’s  book, Reasons without Rationalism (Harvard UP, 2007). Even though I disagreed with a lot of what he says (well, I'm an opinionated philosopher, so I would, wouldn't I?), I found it a wonderful and fascinating book.

In this post, I want to raise some problems for a central principle that lies behind much of Setiya’s argument. (I’m sure that PEA Soupers’ comments will help me with my review.) This is the principle that he calls Reasons (p. 12):

Reasons: The fact that p is a reason for A to φ just in case A has a collection of psychological states, C, such that the disposition to be moved to φ by C-and-the-belief-that-p is a good disposition of practical thought, and C contains no false beliefs.

I think this principle has the following problems:

Beliefs are not necessary for motivation

Many philosophers think that whenever we are motivated to act, our motivation always involves a belief. E.g. according to the version of the Humean Theory of Motivation that is defended by Michael Smith, your motivation for action always consists of a desire and a "means-end belief" (see The Moral Problem, p. 92).

I think this is false. There are cases in which for no further reason, you simply form an intention to perform a certain basic action right now. Then I think that this intention can motivate you to act, without the need for any "means-end belief" at all.

States of affairs are all you need

Some philosophers opposed to consequentialism think that one of the basic mistakes that consequentialists make is to think that all value is located in states of affairs. (E.g., there are remarks to this effect in T. M. Scanlon's What We Owe to Each Other; in R. M. Adams's Finite and Infinite Goods; in Philippa Foot's "Utilitarianism and the Virtues"; in Bernard Williams's Utilitarianism: For and Against; and so on.)

Now, I am no friend of consequentialism (au contraire, in fact ...), but this attack on the idea that the locus of value is states of affairs seems to me a hopeless manoeuvre for the opponents of consequentialism to make. As I shall argue below the fold, locating all the values that one proposes to talk about in states of affairs is a completely harmless "housekeeping" move which makes no substantive difference to one's overall ethical theory.

As I intend to argue on another occasion, the crucial issue that really divides consequentialists and their opponents is whether the only appropriate response to values is to promote them, or whether other responses are sometimes more important -- such as honouring or respecting values, not harming them, acting in a way that expresses one's cherishing of them, and so on.

Why so little deontic logic?

There's a debate rumbling away on Brian Leiter's Legal Philosophy blog about whether or not American legal philosophers are remiss for paying so little attention to deontic logic.

This reminded me of something that bugs me about contemporary metaethics -- viz., that so few contemporary metaethicists pay any attention to deontic logic -- and so inspired me to post a slightly inflammatory post on Leiter's blog. Since my post had much more to do with metaethics than with legal philosophy, I decided to cross-post it here (after the fold):

Why maximize the expected value? (II)

Suppose that what ultimately matters is the objective goodness of what you do – where the objective goodness of an action is determined by the action’s actual outcome, not merely by the expected outcome. But suppose that you usually don’t know for certain what degree of objective goodness any of the available options will have. You must make your choices by following a rule that determines which options are eligible purely on the basis of the probabilities that you assign to various hypotheses about the degree of objective goodness that each of these available options will have. What reason could there be for you to have a policy of always choosing an option that has a maximal expected degree of objective goodness?

Why maximize the expected value? (I)

Classical decision theory is built around a central "representation theorem": so long as an agent's preferences meet certain basic conditions of coherence, we can construct a function that represents the agent's preferences -- in the sense that the agent prefers one prospect X over a second prospect Y if and only if the value that this function assigns to X is greater than the value that the function assigns to Y; and moreover, this function has a fundamentally expectational structure, in the sense that the value that this function assigns to an uncertain prospect is the weighted sum of the values that the function assigns to all the possible outcomes of that prospect -- where the value of each of these possible outcomes is weighted by the probability that that prospect will have that outcome.

So for classical decision theory, everything flows from these basic conditions on coherent preferences. In turn, these coherence conditions are typically defended by means of "Dutch book" arguments, which seek to show that someone whose preferences violate these conditions of coherence would be willing to take out a set of bets that would guarantee a certain loss, no matter what happened.

My problem is, I like the general idea that when we're not certain what situation we're in, we should be guided by probabilities. (As Joseph Butler, one of my philosophical heroes, put it, "To us, probability is the very guide of life.") And intuitively, the most rational way of being guided by probabilities in making our choices or decisions is by making choices that  have maximal expected value (using probabilities to define the concept of the "expected" value of a function in the normal way).  But for various reasons, I can't accept the classical decision theorist's explanation of why we should maximize expected value.

Trolley problems come in degrees

Like many other philosophers, I reject consequentialism in favour of a more deontological approach to ethics. That is, I favour a moral theory that implies that in certain cases, one ought to refrain from harming people in certain ways – even if, from an impartial agent-neutral perspective, the world as a whole would be a better place if one did harm those people in those ways. The notorious “trolley problem” is one good way to try to understand just what principles underlie these agent-relative, deontological restrictions:

Five people are trapped on the railway track, and a runaway railway trolley is hurtling towards them. In this case, it seems permissible to divert the trolley away from the main track (where it will crush five people), onto a side track where it will crush only one person. On the other hand, it does not seem permissible to push an innocent bystander onto the railway track so that after smashing into him, the trolley will grind to a halt before it can reach the five people who are trapped further down the track.

Against the “reasons” program

Many philosophers today are pursuing a program according to which the notion of a “normative reason” is the most fundamental normative notion. Thus, these philosophers aim to analyse such notions as ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, the notions of the various sorts of “value”, and so on, in terms of the kinds of attitudes that we have “normative reason” to have, or the kinds of actions that we have “normative reason” to perform. 

In my view, this program suffers from a serious flaw: it fails to recognize quite how profoundly context-sensitive the term ‘reason’ is. In consequence, this program is doomed to waste a lot of time debating various pseudo-problems, which arise from failing to recognize that in different contexts, the term ‘reason’  expresses different concepts.