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...

Suppose that it is also true in this case that if the paedophile did not rape the girl, he would torture her to death, whereas if he did rape her, he would not subject her to any additional torture, and would not kill her. So, presumably, the paedophile’s conduct would be at least somewhat better if he raped her than if he didn’t. Hence actualists must say that the paedophile ought to rape the girl. This seems to me a reductio ad absurdum of the actualist view.

The alternative to this actualist view is, in my opinion, vastly more plausible. Jackson’s appeal to counterfactual or subjunctive conditionals does not yield acceptable results if it is applied to thin and unspecific act-types (like ‘not raping the girl’); it yields acceptable results only when applied to much thicker or more detailed act-types (like ‘not raping the girl, or harming her in any way, but returning her to her parents immediately and turning oneself in to the police’).

In particular, I suggest, such counterfactual conditionals only yield acceptable results when applied to act-types that are evaluatively maximally specific, in the following sense. A is a maximally specific act-type (in relation to the situation of the agent at the relevant time) if and only if none of the different possible ways in which the agent can do A in that situation differs from any of the other ways in any evaluatively or normatively significant respect. Then we can say that, out of these maximally specific act-types, the agent ought to do an act-type that is such that, if the agent did it, his conduct would be no worse than if he did any of the other act-types.

Then I would recommend extending this picture to the thinner and more unspecific act-types in the following way: If in the circumstances, the agent’s doing B is in the appropriate way entailed by his doing A (or in other words, if his doing B is an essential part of his doing A), then if the agent ought to do A, he also ought to do B.

Jackson and Pargetter’s well-known example of Professor Procrastinate seems to me to be clearly a case of a “second-best” or conditional ‘ought’:

1. Given that Professor Procrastinate is not going to write the review, he should decline the invitation to write it.

This is true, but only in the exactly the same way as other familiar examples of the second-best conditional ‘ought’:

2. Given that you’re not going to stop shooting up heroin, you ought at least to shoot up with clean needles.

Admittedly, the positive proposals that I have made here are controversial. However, it should not be controversial, in my opinion, that Jackson’s and Pargetter’s actualist view has consequences that are, at least prima facie, quite grotesquely implausible.

Comments

[Steve Finlay]

Scott,
I agree that a subjective view can be flexible. But I think that what you say here isn't really compatible with the view. If 'I ought to do A' means something like, 'A is the best thing to do given my evidence', then how can 'I don't know whether A is what I ought to do' mean 'I don't know whether A is what is really best'?

Note too that if 'I ought to do A' means 'A is the best thing to do given my evidence', then the right thing to say in your airport example would not be 'I don't know enough to be able to tell what I ought to do' but rather 'I ought to seek more information'. (To be clear, I'm not denying that the second statement is ok, only that subjectivism can account for the former, which is also ok).

[Scott Forschler]

Steve, I wouldn't take "I don't know whether A is what I ought to do" quite literally, or attempt to preserve its apparent conceptual structure, which I think is just slightly confused, though in practice people often enough derive correct implications from it, namely that one should think harder or gather information (if there's time for this). You are correct about the second two claims; I didn't say that the airport situation gave me insufficient info to commit to any action, but to "some", by which I meant some specific action, i.e. leaving at time X. I do have enough information to commit to information-gathering action.

However you may also be making the point that "I don't know what to do" doesn't always mean "I ought to gather more information." This is true; sometimes when one must choose between X, Y, etc. it is unclear whether it would be more useful to gather more information, think harder about the information you have, or just commit to X or Y etc. and hope for the best. I don't want to rule out ambiguity, but I think that to the extent that one's evidence about what is best is truly ambiguous (we're not just pretending it is out of self-serving convenience or laziness), then the ambiguously-matched options really are approximately equally right, and we ought, then, to choose between them. One of them may later turn out to have been truly leading to the best consequences, but given what we knew at the time, there was no truth of the matter as to which one option out of those evenly matched in subjective evidence of their goodness was the one we ought to have chosen.