Article

Exiting The Consequentialist Circle: Two Senses of Bringing It About

Authors:
To read the full-text of this research, you can request a copy directly from the author.

No full-text available

Request Full-text Paper PDF

To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the author.

... 79 So, if our reasoning starts in the "consequentialist circle," to borrow Paul Hurley's term, we are drawn to engage responsibilities and duties as responses to states of affairs. 80 This is a problem because many of the important moral considerations that underlie and shape the regulation of private relations are not about large-scale states of affairs but about what we owe to each other as private agents in relative isolation from political factors. It can be said, without going too deeply into the debate about the limits of consequentialism in terms of the accommodation of relational reasons, 81 that consequentialism is not a neutral form of reasoning: that redescribing relational reasons for regulation in consequentialist terms comes at the cost that valuable moral data is lost. ...
Article
Despite the growing influence of constitutional rights over the regulation of horizontal (private) relations, many aspects of this trend remain under-theorized. This article criticizes four ideal-typical constitutional horizontality models for failing to accommodate moral reasons that must shape this regulatory practice: the state action model ignores basic consequentialist aspects of political morality; the direct application model ignores basic relational aspects of interpersonal morality; the strong indirect model recognizes both but subordinates the latter to the former; and the partitioned indirect model recognizes both but separates them too strongly. This article claims that a composite indirect model, which reflects basic features of the common law, can better realize constitutional rights through private law in conditions of moral pluralism: it can expose private law to constitutional rights-based and reform-oriented scrutiny without ignoring, eroding, or distorting the unique normativity of private relations and practices or their underlying values.
Chapter
Intuitively, it is wrong to kill even to prevent two other people from killing. Consequentialists have argued that reflection on such moral restrictions engenders an air of paradox: how can it be morally wrong to lie or kill if by doing so I prevent more lyings and killings? The air of paradox arises because the persisting intuitive appeal of such restrictions is called into question by the attempt to explain their deep intuitive appeal. The threat of paradox can be dissipated by demonstrating either that the intuitive appeal of such restrictions dissipates on reflection, or by showing that there is after all a plausible theoretical explanation for them. Both consequentialists and their opponents have recently offered theoretical explanations supporting such restrictions. Consequentialist strategies propose either shifting the focal point of evaluations away from actions to rules or motives, or refining the standpoints from which the outcomes to be promoted are ranked. Their critics argue that there are perfectly good, nonparadoxical explanations of such restrictions through appeal to value, but that such explanations are elided from view by the assumption, built into the case for paradox, that any such appeal to the value must be an appeal to the value of outcomes to be promoted. Reject the consequentialist's outcome‐centered constraint on value, they argue, and plausible explanations are readily available for why it is much worse to violate such a restriction even though the outcome of doing so would in some sense be better.
Article
Full-text available
I challenge the common picture of the “Standard Story” of Action as a neutral account of action within which debates in normative ethics can take place. I unpack three commitments that are implicit in the Standard Story, and demonstrate that these commitments together entail a teleological conception of reasons, upon which all reasons to act are reasons to bring about states of affairs. Such a conception of reasons, in turn, supports a consequentialist framework for the evaluation of action, upon which the normative status of actions is properly determined through appeal to rankings of states of affairs as better and worse. This covert support for consequentialism from the theory of action, I argue, has had a distorting effect on debates in normative ethics. I then present challenges to each of these three commitments, a challenge to the first commitment by T.M. Scanlon, a challenge to the second by recent interpreters of Anscombe, and a new challenge to the third commitment that requires only minimal and prima facie plausible modifications to the Standard Story. The success of any one of the challenges, I demonstrate, is sufficient to block support from the theory of action for the teleological conception of reasons and the consequentialist evaluative framework. I close by demonstrating the pivotal role that such arguments grounded in the theory of action play in the current debate between evaluator-relative consequentialists and their critics.
Article
Full-text available
Recently, a number of philosophers have argued that we can and should “consequentialize” non-consequentialist moral theories, putting them into a consequentialist framework. I argue that these philosophers, usually treated as a group, in fact offer three separate arguments, two of which are incompatible. I show that none represent significant threats to a committed non-consequentialist, and that the literature has suffered due to a failure to distinguish these arguments. I conclude by showing that the failure of the consequentializers’ arguments has implications for disciplines, such as economics, logic, decision theory, and linguistics, which sometimes use a consequentialist structure to represent non-consequentialist ethical theories.
Article
Full-text available
Morality seems important, in the sense that there are practical reasons — at least for most of us, most of the time — to be moral. A central theoretical motivation for consequentialism is that it appears clear that there are practical reasons to promote good outcomes, but mysterious why we should care about non-consequentialist moral considerations or how they could be genuine reasons to act. In this paper we argue that this theoretical motivation is mistaken, and that because many arguments for consequentialism rely upon it, the mistake substantially weakens the overall case for consequentialism. We argue that there is indeed a theoretical connection between good states and reasons to act, because good states are those it is fitting to desire and there is a conceptual connection between the fittingness of a motive and reasons to perform the acts it motivates. But while some of our motives are directed at states, others are directed at acts themselves. We contend that just as the fittingness of desires for states generates reasons to promote the good, the fittingness of these act-directed motives generates reasons to do other things. Moreover, we argue that an act’s moral status consists in the fittingness of act-directed feelings of obligation to perform or avoid performing it, so the connection between fitting motives and reasons to act explains reasons to be moral whether or not morality directs us to promote the good. This, we contend, de-mystifies how there could be non-consequentialist reasons that are both moral and practical.
Article
This series aims to provide, on an annual basis, some of the best contemporary work in the field of normative ethical theory. Each volume features new chapters that contribute to an understanding of a wide range of issues and positions in normative ethical theory, and represents a sampling of recent developments in this field. This twelfth volume brings together thirteen new essays, each by a different contributor, that collectively cover a range of fundamental topics in the field. The topics are: the vices of greed and arrogance, harmless wronging, Kantian ethical theory and partialist reasons, moral contractualism, explaining value comparisons in cases of parity, weighing reasons for action, the burdens of trust, attributive silencing, forgiveness, offsetting harm, paternalism and interpreting others, consequentializing moral theories, and the nature of moral worth.
Article
Does the real difference between consequential and non-consequentialist theories lie in their approach to value? Non-consequentialist theories are thought either to allow a different kind of value (namely, agent-relative value) or to advocate a different response to value ('honouring' rather than promoting'). One objection to this idea implies that all normative theories are describable as consequentialist. But then the distinction between honouring and promoting collapses into the distinction between relative and neutral value. A proper description of non-consequentialist theories can only be achieved by including a distinction between temporal relativity and neutrality in addition to the distinction between agent-relativity and neutrality.
Article
This book is a collection of ten papers on practical reason and moral psychology. Part 1 defends the view that the principles of practical reason are constitutive principles of action. By governing our actions in accordance with Kant's categorical imperative and the principle of instrumental reason we take control of our own movements and so render ourselves active, self-determining beings. Part II takes up the question of the role of our passive or receptive faculties - our emotions and responses - in constituting our agency. It offers a reading of the Nicomachean Ethics based on the idea that our emotions are perceptions of good and evil, and argues that Aristotle and Kant share a distinctive view about the locus of moral value and the nature of human choice. Part III takes up the question how we come to view one another as moral agents in Hume's philosophy, and examines the possible clash between the agency of the state and that of the individual that led to Kant's paradoxical views about revolution. And finally, the book discusses methodology in an account of what it means to be a constructivist moral philosopher.
Article
The virtue ethics movement in recent philosophical ethics can usefully be divided into two quite separate streams of thought. Some have turned to the texts of Plato and Aristotle for new answers to established questions in philosophical ethics, while others have sought a vantage point from which the basic questions of the field could themselves be put in question. The aim of this book is to elaborate and defend a version of the second, more radical sort of virtue ethics. The book begins with a fundamental reconsideration of the way in which thought makes itself practical in temporally extended activities and lives. This reconsideration yields an alternative picture of the self - a picture with recognizably Aristotelian and Platonic elements - and puts that picture to work in retrieving an unfamiliar conception of the proper task of philosophical ethics, one that provides a suitable home for retrieving the virtue concepts. The critical bite of the book is directed in the first instance at ideas that are prevalent among philosophers. Yet there is reason to think that these philosophical ideas express a conception of the self that shapes contemporary Western culture, and that hinders our capacity to make full sense of our activities, passions, and lives, or to attain full articulacy about the values to which we might hope to answer. The book argues that the rise of the fact/value distinction and of the characteristically modern distinction between person-relative and impersonal goods are best understood as a story of encroaching confusion and not as the story of progressive discovery that they are often taken to be. The book culminates in an attempt to show that the ethical and epistemic virtues conduce to a single, monistic sort of goodness that fosters intimate relationships as well as healthy political community, and that overcomes the putative opposition between self-interest and morality.
Chapter
The chapter is a defense of the thesis that rational agents must desire and act sub specie boni or under the guise of the good. Our thought is that what underlies the guise of the good thesis is a more general point about the explanation of any self-movement, a point that applies, in different forms, to the explanation of behavior in nonrational animals, and even to the explanation of the nutrition, growth, and reproduction of nonsentient living things. What these various kinds of explanation have in common, we suggest, is that they all have a teleological structure; and we argue that, in general, this sort of explanation works by connecting what a creature is doing with what is good for creatures of its kind. The special feature of the application of this explanatory structure to rational creatures is that such creatures belong to a kind in which this connection between action and goodness becomes self-conscious: They are creatures whose action is expressive of and explained by their conception of their own good. This, we argue, is why rational self movers must act under the guise of the good.
Chapter
What is it to value something? This paper critically examines proposals based on the ideas of Harry Frankfurt, David Lewis, Michael Smith, and Charles Taylor. It discusses the relations between valuing and believing valuable, valuing and caring, and valuing and having second-order desires. It then develops a general account according to which valuing is to be seen as a complex syndrome of interrelated dispositions and attitudes, including certain characteristic types of belief, dispositions to treat certain kinds of consideration as reasons for action, and susceptibility to a wide range of emotions. Although this account differs in a number of significant respects from the account of valuing that Scanlon proposes in What We Owe to Each Other, it also has a good deal in common with that account and it is compatible with Scanlon's "buck-passing account" of value.
Chapter
According to common wisdom in moral theory, some moral views are consequentialist and some are not. Since 'consequentialism' is a term of art, there is no correct way to define it, but this paper assumes that a view is consequentialist iff the deontic status it assigns an act is an increasing function of the goodness it assigns the consequences. The main point of the paper is to defend an equivalence thesis: each plausible moral view has a consequentialist equivalent. The paper is in effect a defense of an equivalence thesis against some recent objections. The thesis has two parts: Extensional Equivalence says that each plausible moral view has a consequentialist counterpart that agrees with it on the deontic status of every act; Extensionality says that nothing but extension matters in a moral view. Together these entail that every plausible moral view is a mere notational variant of a consequentialist view.
Article
Commonsense Consequentialism is a book about morality, rationality, and the interconnections between the two. In it, Douglas W. Portmore defends 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. Broadly construed, consequentialism is the view that an act's deontic status is determined by how its outcome ranks relative to those of the available alternatives on some evaluative ranking. Portmore argues that outcomes should be ranked, not according to their impersonal value, but according to how much reason the agent has to desire that each outcome obtains and that, when outcomes are ranked in this way, we arrive at a version of consequentialism that can better account for our commonsense moral intuitions than even many forms of deontology can. What's more, Portmore argues that we should accept this version of consequentialism, because we should accept both that an agent can be morally required to do only what she has most reason to do and that what she has most reason to do is to perform the act that would produce the outcome that she has most reason to want to obtain. Although the primary aim of the book is to defend a particular consequentialist theory (viz., commonsense consequentialism), Portmore defends this theory as part of a coherent whole concerning our commonsense views about the nature and substance of both morality and rationality. Thus, it will be of interest not only to those working in normative ethics, but also to those working in metaethics.
Chapter
Along with many other contemporary philosophers, T.M. Scanlon argues that our present attitudes (such as beliefs, desires, or intentions) do not give us reasons. At the core of this position, I suggest, is the denial that attitudes can provide reasons in some way different from the way in which things of value characteristically provide reasons. I then try to answer a challenge to this position, which Scanlon himself raises: that sometimes (especially when one's reasons underdetermine a choice among aims) having an aim seems to affect one's reasons without affecting one's value-provided reasons. If "having an aim" is understood as having an intention, I suggest, then having an aim usually will affect one's value-provided reasons. In large part, this is because of what Scanlon calls the "predictive significance" of intention: the fact that forming an intention changes what the future is likely to bring. If "having an aim" is understood instead as an aim's "mattering" or "being important" to one, then having an aim can also affect one's valueprovided reasons, but in a different way: by constituting a special kind of value.
Article
Dependence, mediacy, and complexity are abstract concepts, as are their complementary opposites, independence, immediacy, and simplicity. The determinate conception we have to do with here is of an instrumentally or teleologically basic action: very roughly, an action is basic in this sense when no means are taken in its execution, or equally, when it is not the end of any other action. The concept figures in the description of the structure of getting something done, specifically of getting something done on purpose or intentionally, and thus also in the description of the agent's point of view on the structure of his own efficacy. The agent so depicted understands himself as doing whatever he does through the performance of basic actions, with all the rest derived from these. Means-end rationality expands our sphere of influence and massively extends our reach—there are flags on the moon and at the bottom of the sea!—but it is precisely at the inner limit of this teleological order that a rational agent's power to make a dent in things is genuinely displayed. Where means-end rationality comes to a close, efficacy genuinely begins: this is where the conceptual rubber is supposed to hit the material road, in the things one does without thought about how they get done. Sometimes it is said there is a spark of the divine in this. My own view is the opposite, that there is at best only a shadow of the brute.2
Article
Article
To ‘consequentialize’ is to take a putatively nonconsequentialist moral theory and show that it is actually just another form of consequentialism. Some have speculated that every moral theory can be consequentialized. If this were so, then consequentialism would be empty; it would have no substantive content. As I argue here, however, this is not so. Beginning with the core consequentialist commitment to ‘maximizing the good’, I formulate a precise definition of consequentialism and demonstrate that, given this definition, several sorts of moral theory resist consequentialization. My strategy is to decompose consequentialism into three conditions, which I call ‘agent neutrality’, ‘no moral dilemmas’, and ‘dominance’, and then to exhibit some moral theories which violate each of these.
Article
Moral Rationalism is the view that if an act is morally required then it is what there is most reason to do. It is often assumed that the truth of Moral Rationalism is dependent on some version of The Overridingness Thesis, the view that moral reasons override nonmoral reasons. However, as Douglas Portmore has pointed out, the two can come apart; we can accept Moral Rationalism without accepting any version of The Overridingness Thesis. Nevertheless, The Overridingness Thesis serves as one of two possible explanations for Moral Rationalism. In this paper I will investigate which of these two explanations a moral rationalist should accept. I will argue that when we properly attend to the form of Moral Rationalism supported by the intuitions that motivate the view, we are left with no reason to accept The Overridingness Thesis.
Article
This volume collects Davidson's seminal contributions to the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of action. Its overarching thesis is that the ordinary concept of causality we employ to render physical processes intelligible should also be employed in describing and explaining human action. In the first of three subsections into which the papers are thematically organized, Davidson uses causality to give novel analyses of acting for a reason, of intending, weakness of will, and freedom of will. The second section provides the formal and ontological framework for those analyses. In particular, the logical form and attending ontology of action sentences and causal statements is explored. To uphold the analyses, Davidson urges us to accept the existence of non‐recurrent particulars, events, along with that of persons and other objects. The final section employs this ontology of events to provide an anti‐reductionist answer to the mind/matter debate that Davidson labels ‘anomalous monism’. Events enter causal relations regardless of how we describe them but can, for the sake of different explanatory purposes, be subsumed under mutually irreducible descriptions, claims Davidson. Events qualify as mental if caused and rationalized by reasons, but can be so described only if we subsume them under considerations that are not amenable to codification into strict laws. We abandon those considerations, collectively labelled the ‘constitutive ideal of rationality’, if we want to explain the physical occurrence of those very same events; in which case we have to describe them as governed by strict laws. The impossibility of intertranslating the two idioms by means of psychophysical laws blocks any analytically reductive relation between them. The mental and the physical would thus disintegrate were it not for causality, which is operative in both realms through a shared ontology of events.
Article
I will begin by stating three theses which I present in this paper. The first is that it is not profitable for us at present to do moral philosophy; that should be laid aside at any rate until we have an adequate philosophy of psychology, in which we are conspicuously lacking. The second is that the concepts of obligation, and duty—moral obligation and moral duty, that is to say—and of what is morally right and wrong, and of the moral sense of “ought,” ought to be jettisoned if this is psychologically possible; because they are survivals, or derivatives from survivals, from an earlier conception of ethics which no longer generally survives, and are only harmful without it. My third thesis is that the differences between the wellknown English writers on moral philosophy from Sidgwick to the present day are of little importance.
Article
Consequentialism is an agent-neutral teleological theory, and deontology is an agent-relative non-teleological theory. I argue that a certain hybrid of the two – namely, non-egoistic agent-relative teleological ethics (NATE) – is quite promising. This hybrid takes what is best from both consequentialism and deontology while leaving behind the problems associated with each. Like consequentialism and unlike deontology, NATE can accommodate the compelling idea that it is always permissible to bring about the best available state of affairs. Yet unlike consequentialism and like deontology, NATE accords well with our commonsense moral intuitions.
Article
Does the real difference between non-consequentialist and consequentialist theories lie in their approach to value? Non-consequentialist theories are thought either to allow a different kind of value (namely, agent-relative value) or to advocate a different response to value (‘honouring’ rather than ‘promoting’). One objection to this idea implies that all normative theories are describable as consequentialist. But then the distinction between honouring and promoting collapses into the distinction between relative and neutral value. A proper description of non-consequentialist theories can only be achieved by including a distinction between temporal relativity and neutrality in addition to the distinction between agent-relativity and agent-neutrality.
Article
Mesurant la valeur de l'action a son impact sur le monde, l'A. distingue trois conceptions morales de l'action comme production, affirmation et participation, qui s'inscrivent respectivement dans le cadre de l'utilitarisme, de l'intuitionnisme rationnel et du constructivisme kantien.
Article
To consequentialize a non-consequentialist theory, take whatever considerations that the non-consequentialist theory holds to be relevant to determining the deontic statuses of actions and insist that those considerations are relevant to determining the proper ranking of outcomes. In this way, the consequentialist can produce an ordering of outcomes that when combined with her criterion of rightness yields the same set of deontic verdicts that the non-consequentialist theory yields. In this paper, I argue that any plausible non-consequentialist theory can be consequentialized. I explain the motivation for the consequentializing project and defend it against recent criticisms by Mark Schroeder and others.
Book
Moral philosophers agree that welfare matters. But they do not agree about what it is, or how much it matters. Wayne Sumner presents an original theory of welfare, investigating its nature and discussing its importance. He considers and rejects all notable rival theories of welfare, both objective and subjective, including hedonism and theories founded on desire or preference. His own theory connects welfare closely with happiness or life satisfaction. Professor Sumner then proceeds to defend welfarism, that is, to argue (against the value pluralism that currently dominates moral philosophy) that welfare is the only basic ethical value, the only thing which we have a moral reason to promote for its own sake. He concludes by discussing the implications of this thesis for ethical and political theory.