Objective Consequentialism and the Rationales of ‘ “Ought” Implies “Can” ’

This paper argues that objective consequentialism is incompatible with the rationales of ‘ “ought” implies “can” ’ – with the considerations, that is, that explain or justify this principle. Objective consequentialism is the moral doctrine that an act is right if and only if there is no alternative with a better outcome, and wrong otherwise. An act is obligatory if and only if it is wrong not to perform it. According to ‘ “ought” implies “can” ’, a person is morally obligated to φ only if the person can φ. The rationales of ‘ “ought” implies “can” ’ include considerations related to intuitive plausibility, action‐guidance, blameworthiness and fairness, and the nature of practical reasons. 1     

Impossible obligations and the non-identity problem

In a common example of the non-identity problem (NIP), a person (call her Wilma) deliberately conceives a child (call her Pebbles) who she knows will have incurable blindness but a life well worth living. Although Wilma’s decision seems wrong, it is difficult to say why. This paper develops and defends a version of the “indirect strategy” for solving the NIP. This strategy rests on the idea that it is wrong to deliberately make it impossible to fulfill an obligation; consequently, it is wrong for Wilma to create Pebbles because doing so makes it impossible to fulfill her obligation to protect her child from harms like blindness. A challenge for the indirect strategy is the well-known “rights waiver problem”: Since Pebbles’s very existence depends on Wilma’s having made herself unable to fulfill an obligation to Pebbles, Pebbles is likely to waive that obligation. I address this problem by recasting the indirect strategy in terms of a non-grievance evil. I argue that deliberately making it impossible to fulfill a moral obligation manifests a defective attitude toward morality—an attitude which sees moral obligations as things to be dodged whenever they are inconvenient. Next, I argue that acting on this attitude is a wrong-making feature that is independent of any wrong that might be done to Pebbles. I conclude that Wilma’s decision remains wrong even if Pebbles waives any objection to it.

     

Does morality demand our very best? On moral prescriptions and the line of duty

It is widely accepted that morality does not demand that we do our very best, but our most significant moral traditions do not easily accommodate this intuition. I will argue that the underlying problem is not specific to any particular tradition. Rather, it will be difficult for any moral theory to account for binary moral concepts like permissible/impermissible while also accounting for scalar moral concepts like better/worse. If only the best is considered permissible, morality will seem either unreasonably demanding or implausibly minimal. But if we draw a line of duty below the optimal, then we must explain how the act that is worse is nonetheless permissible. Some have tried to explain this by appealing to non-moral considerations, and others have appealed to agent-relative moral considerations. I argue that no such approach will work. We should instead exploit the distinction between reasons for performing an act and reasons for holding someone accountable for an act’s performance. This approach will also help to clear up a confusion regarding the notion of a moral demand.     

Intentions,Permissibility, and Choice

T. M. Scanlon has argued that the intentions with which one acts, or more specifically, one’s reasons for acting, are non-derivatively irrelevant to the moral permissibility of one’s actions. According to one of his arguments in favor of that thesis, it can be permissible to act for one reason rather than another only if one can choose to act for a reason but, since that choice is impossible since believing as will is impossible, one can be permitted to act but one cannot be permitted to act for a reason. This paper aims to show that that argument is unsound. It first argues that the assumption that choosing an action is necessary for it being an object of a moral duty or permission cannot be made consistent with Scanlon’s idea that the same does not hold for an action being an object of blame. It then argues that even if direct control over forming beliefs is impossible, it is not impossible to choose one’s reason for action and, therefore, to be permitted or forbidden to act for it.     

Moral Realism and Faultless Disagreement

Is moral realism compatible with the existence of moral disagreements? Since moral realism requires that if two persons are in disagreement over some moral question (that has a determinate answer) at least one must be objectively mistaken, it seems difficult to uphold that there can be moral disagreements without fault. Alison Hills argued that moral realism can accommodate such disagreements. Her strategy is to argue that moral reasoners can be faultless in making an objectively false moral judgement if they followed the relevant epistemic norm, i.e. follow your conscience, when making their judgement. I will argue that Hills' strategy does not work. The putative epistemic norm follow your conscience does not trump moral truth, because believing something wrong for the wrong reasons is worse than believing something right for the wrong reasons. 1 1 I would like to thank Alexander Davies, Toomas Lott, Francesco Orsi, the reviewers for Ratio, and the audience at my presentation of an earlier version of this paper at ECAP9 in Bucharest for helpful comments. The research for this paper was supported by the grants IUT20‐5 and ETF9083 of the Estonian Research Council.
     

Telling Others to Do What You Believe Is Morally Wrong: The Case of Confucius and Zai Wo

Can it ever be morally justifiable to tell others to do what we ourselves believe is morally wrong to do? The common sense answer is no. It seems that we should never tell others to do something if we think it is morally wrong to do that act. My first goal is to argue that in Analects 17.21, Confucius tells his disciple not to observe a ritual even though Confucius himself believes that it is morally wrong that one does not observe the ritual. My second goal is to argue against the common sense answer and explain how Confucius can be justified in telling his disciple to do what Confucius thought was wrong. The first justification has to do with telling someone to do what is second best when the person cannot do what is morally best. The second justification has to do with the role of a moral advisor.     

Punishment,Consent and Value

In this paper I take another look at the view, defended by C. Nino, that we may punish criminals because, by knowingly breaking a law, they have consented to becoming liable to the prescribed punishment. I will first rebut the criticisms usually aimed at this view in the literature, aiming to show that they are inconclusive. They are all efforts to show that criminal offenders in fact do not consent to becoming liable to punishment simply by committing crimes. I then turn to a different line of criticism, which I find more promising. I argue that the moral power of effecting normative changes by consenting reflects the power holder’s value as a person, and show how this idea makes sense of how refusal to recognize that power wrongs a person. I then argue that the “power” of consenting to punishability does not fit that model, and is better explained as reflecting the value of other people, whom the offender has wronged. Hence the power of consenting is not involved in typical cases of wrongdoing.     

Scalar Properties, Binary Judgments

In the moral realm, our deontic judgments are usually (always?) binary. An act (or omission) is either morally forbidden or morally permissible. ¹ 1 I realize that I appear to be omitting the category of ‘morally required’ here. But that category does not affect my analysis in part because we can always substitute for a morally required act a morally forbidden omission to act. The question would then be whether the omission to act is permissible or forbidden. In any event, my focus is on deontic boundaries, and it is immaterial how many there are. Thus, I shall continue to speak of acts being morally forbidden or permissible.
Yet the determination of an act's deontic status frequently turns on the existence of properties that are matters of degree. In what follows I shall give several examples of binary moral judgments that turn on scalar properties, and I shall claim that these examples should puzzle us. How can the existence of a property to a specific degree demarcate a boundary between an act's being morally forbidden and its not being morally forbidden? Why aren't our moral judgments of acts scalar in the way that the properties on which those judgments are based are scalar, so that acts, like states of affairs, can be morally better or worse rather than right or wrong? I conceive of this inquiry as operating primarily within the realm of normative theory. Presumably it will give aid and comfort to consequentialists, who have no trouble mapping their binary categories onto scalar properties. For example, a straightforward act utilitarian, for whom one act out of all possible acts is morally required (and hence permissible) and all others morally forbidden, can, in theory at least, provide an answer to every one of the puzzles I raise. And, in theory, so can all other types of act and rule consequentialists. They will find nothing of interest here beyond embarrassment for their deontological adversaries. The deontologists, however, must meet the challenges of these puzzles. And for them, the puzzles may raise not just normative questions, but questions of moral epistemology and moral ontology. Just how do we know that the act consequentialist's way of, say, trading off lives against lives is wrong? For example, do we merely intuit that taking one innocent, uninvolved person's life to save two others is wrong? Can our method of reflective equilibrium work if we have no theory by which to rationalize our intuitions? And what things in the world make it true, if it is true, that one may not make the act consequentialist's tradeoff? I do not provide any answers to these questions any more than I provide answers to the normative ones. But they surely lurk in the background.     

Against Pogge's ‘Cosmopolitanism’

Thomas Pogge labels the idea that each person owes each other person equal respect and concern ‘ethical cosmopolitanism’ and correctly states that it is a ‘non‐starter’. He offers as an allegedly more convincing cosmopolitan alternative his ‘social justice cosmopolitanism’. I shall argue that this alternative fails for pretty much the same reasons that ‘ethical cosmopolitanism’ fails. In addition, I will show that Pogge's definition of cosmopolitanism is misleading, since it actually applies to ethical cosmopolitanism and not to social justice cosmopolitanism. This means that cosmopolitanism as defined by Pogge is wrong in the light of his own arguments and that Pogge is not even a cosmopolitan in the sense of his own definition. I will further show that he is also not a cosmopolitan if cosmopolitanism is defined as a philosophical position involving the claim that state borders have no fundamental moral significance.     

Contractualism,Person-Affecting Wrongness and the Non-identity Problem

A number of theorists have argued that Scanlon's contractualist theory both "gets around" and "solves" the non-identity problem. They argue that it gets around the problem because hypothetical deliberation on general moral principles excludes the considerations that lead to the problem. They argue that it solves the problem because violating a contractualist moral principle in one's treatment of another wrongs that particular other, grounding a person-affecting moral claim. In this paper, I agree with the first claim but note that all it shows is that the act is impersonally wrong. I then dispute the second claim. On Scanlon's contractualist view, one wrongs a particular other if one treats the other in a way that is unjustifiable to that other on reasons she could not reasonably reject. We should think of person-affecting wronging in terms of the reasons had by the actual agent and the actual person affected by the agent's action. In non-identity cases, interpersonal justifiability is therefore shaped both by the reason to reject the treatment provided by the bad suffered and the reason to affirm the treatment provided by the goods had as a result of existing. I argue it would be reasonable for the actual person to find the treatment justifiable, and so I conclude that Scanlon's contractualist metaethics does not provide a narrow person-affecting solution to the non-identity problem on its own terms. I conclude that the two claims represent a tension within Scanlon's contractualist theory itself.     

Taking human life

Alan Donagan's position regarding the morality of taking innocent human life, that it is impermissible regardless of the wishes of the victim, is criticized by Brock who argues for a rights-based alternative. His argument appeals to the nature of persons' actual interest in life and gives them an additional element of control which they lack if a nonwaivable moral duty not to kill prevails. The author rejects Donagan's view that stopping a life-sustaining treatment, even when a competent patient has consented, is morally wrong and that there is no moral difference between killing and allowing to die. A rights-based position permits stopping treatment of incompetent patients based on what the patient would have wanted or what is in his or her best interest, and allows the withholding of treatment from a terminally ill person, with the patient's consent and for a benevolent motive, to be evaluated as morally different from killing that patient.     

Bribery: the concept

The aim of this paper is to clarify the concept of bribery, and to do this in a way that reveals its underlying normative features. Bribery, like lying is not a value neutral concept. It has a negative connotation and is regarded by most as generally, although not necessarily universally, wrong. At the very least, those who resort to bribery bear a burden of justification for what they do. This is no small point, as no such burden must be borne for the vast majority of human activities, such as engaging in conversation or taking a walk, which normally do not. As Sissela Bok says of lying, we might say that a negative moral weight attaches to every act of bribery; it may be possible to counter this negative weight in some instances, but not without an argument (the provision of good reasons).¹ Why should a negative moral weight be attached to every act of bribery? It might be thought that, even if most instances of bribery are morally objectionable, the concept of bribery itself is morally neutral.² However, enticing people to violate what they take to be their positional duties does seem to call for some sort of moral justification. This seems to be so even in extreme cases, for example, when bribing a Nazi guard to allow concentration camp prisoners to escape. The ready availability of a moral justification in such circumstances does not eliminate the need for one.     

How you can help,without making a difference

There are many cases in which people collectively cause some morally significant outcome (such as a harmful or beneficial outcome) but no individual act seems to make a difference. The problem in such cases is that it seems each person can argue, ‘it makes no difference whether or not I do X, so I have no reason to do it.’ The challenge is to say where this argument goes wrong. My approach begins from the observation that underlying the problem and motivating the typical responses to it is a standard, intuitive assumption. The assumption is that if an act will not make a difference with respect to an outcome, then it cannot play a significant, non-superfluous role in bringing that outcome about. In other words, helping to bring about an outcome requires making a difference. I argue that the key to solving the problem is to reject this assumption. I develop an account of what it is to help to bring about an outcome, where this does not require making a difference, and I use this explain our reasons for action in the problem cases. This account also yields an error theory that explains why the standard assumption is so tempting, even though it is mistaken.     

Reasons Explanation: Further Defense of a Non-causal Account

If moral responsibility requires uncaused action, as I believe, and if a reasons explanation of an action must be a causal explanation, as many philosophers of action suppose, then it follows that our responsible actions are ones we do for no reason, which is preposterous. In previous work I have argued against the second premise of this deduction, claiming that the statement that a person did A in order to satisfy their desire D will be true if the person, while doing A, intended of that action that it contribute to satisfying their desire D, a condition that does not entail any causal connection between the explaining desire and the explained action. This claim has received trenchant criticism from Randolph Clarke. The main part of the present paper responds to Clarke’s latest objections. The rest of the paper addresses another worry about my account (not raised by Clarke): does my non-causal sufficient condition hold as widely as it needs to if responsible, uncaused actions are as widespread as we would like to think?     

The Normative Core Of Paternalism

The philosophical debate on paternalism is conducted as if the property of being paternalistic should be attributed to actions. Actions are typically deemed to be paternalistic if they amount to some kind of interference with a person and if the rationale for the action is the good of the person interfered with. This focus on actions obscures the normative issues involved. In particular, it makes it hard to provide an analysis of the traditional liberal resistance to paternalism. Given the fact that actions most often have mixed rationales, it is not clear how we should categorize and evaluate interfering actions for which only part of the rationale is the good of the person. The preferable solution is to attribute the property of being paternalistic not to actions, but to compounds of reasons and actions. The framework of action–reasons provides the tools for distinguishing where exactly paternalism lies in the complex web of reasons and actions.     

Autonomy and moral deference

The idea that a person might have a duty to defer to the moral judgments of others is typically something that arouses our suspicion, in ways that other kinds of deference do not. One explanation for this is the value of autonomy. According to this explanation, people have a duty to be autonomous, and any act of deferring to another person’s moral judgement is not an autonomous action. Call this “the Autonomy Argument” against moral deference. In this article, I criticise the Autonomy Argument. I argue that, even if we accept that an act of moral deference can never be autonomous, those who believe that people have a duty to be autonomous must accept that acts of moral deference are morally necessary. This is because some people are incapable of becoming autonomous by themselves, and deferring to a moral expert is the only way they might ever become autonomous.     

Gender,Steroids, and Fairness in Sport

This article examines and defends the claim that whether or not to cheat can be a genuine moral dilemma within the ethics of team sports. That is, although there is always something morally wrong in cheating there may also be moral reasons in its favour and thus some (and perhaps an overriding) duty to cheat. This is based on the duty that players have of not letting down their teammates by failing to make sufficient effort to achieve victory. In considering the normative limits to such efforts, it is argued that players could reasonably be morally criticised for not cheating where this is of a kind commonly practised in their sport. Evidence is found in the attitudes to cheating of those connected with sport to suggest that some of it is regarded as part of the game, though in a sense that does not undermine its status as genuine cheating. In conclusion a brief consideration is given to the implications for the education, training and character of players, given a belief in there being moral reasons for cheating.