Anderson on Reason and Value

Ethics

Volumn 106, Issue 3, 1996, Pages 509-524

  Sturgeon, Nicholas L ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0346616748     PISSN: 00141704     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/233644     Document Type: Review

References (12)

1. Elizabeth Anderson, Value in Ethics and Economics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993). Parenthetical page references are all to this book.
2. For Conly's published defense of some of her views, see "Utilitarianism and Integrity," Monist 66 (1983): 298-311, and "The Objectivity of Morals and the Subjectivity of Agents," American Philosophical Quarterly 22 (1985): 275-86.
3. For Conly's published defense of some of her views, see "Utilitarianism and Integrity," Monist 66 (1983): 298-311, and "The Objectivity of Morals and the Subjectivity of Agents," American Philosophical Quarterly 22 (1985): 275-86.
4. Richard Brandt, A Theory of the Good and the Right (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), esp. chap. 1; R. M. Hare, Moral Thinking (Oxford: Clarendon, 1981).
5. Richard Brandt, A Theory of the Good and the Right (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), esp. chap. 1; R. M. Hare, Moral Thinking (Oxford: Clarendon, 1981).
6. R. M. Hare, Freedom and Reason (Oxford: Clarendon, 1963), pp. 132-35.
7. Even if states of affairs are intrinsically interesting, and so in that respect intrinsically valuable, that doesn't mean that on Anderson's theory they should be promoted. What follows on her view, rather, is that we ought to act so as adequately to express our interest in them, and that seems likely to require studying or thinking about them more than it does promoting them.
8. That is, to make the point fully explicit: she denies, in the passage I quoted above, that any "adequate interpretation of a way of valuing something can reduce its motivational component to a desire or preference that some states of affairs occur" (p. 30). However, it appears that, on her view, the motivational component in any way I have of valuing something always can be represented as a desire that that way of valuing be adequately expressed in my actions.
9. Anderson suggested this generalization - to what we might call "action-centered" as opposed to merely agent-centered restrictions - in discussion when this article was presented. This idea goes beyond anything she defends in her book, for she there argues only for restrictions that an agent "not intentionally violate a principle or duty, even if doing so could prevent more violations of exactly the same kind from being committed by others" (p. 73; my emphasis). (Indeed, in her discussion of agent-centered restrictions, the very possibility of an agent-relative consequentialism, on which she has earlier insisted, seems to have disappeared from view, for she several times [e.g., at pp. 74, 75] characterizes consequentialism as committed entirely to agent-neutral principles.) So the generalization certainly requires separate defense. The difficulty in finding realistic cases to think about can be illustrated as follows. It is unfortunately not pure science fiction to suppose that I might confront a case in which, unless I kill one innocent person, other agents will kill more. We do seem to have to resort to fantasy, however, to imagine a case in which, unless I deliberately kill one innocent person now, I make it inevitable that I will deliberately kill two tomorrow. How can this be? Perhaps I am supposed to be possessed of a thirst for innocent blood, known to grow steadily in its demands if left unsated, but also to disappear forever once satisfied. Also, although apparently enough in control to make it worth my worrying conscientiously about how to cope with this unwelcome intruder into my psyche, I am somehow debarred from the option of disabling myself - by depriving myself of weapons, turning myself over to the authorities, or whatever. So the case is hard to imagine. To the extent that I can imagine it, however, I also find it far from obvious that the correct decision, when I am just choosing among deliberate actions of my own, is to wait and kill more rather than just to kill the one to minimize the horror. At any rate, the view that I should choose deliberately to kill more rather than just kill one has nothing like the plausibility of the view Anderson and others favor in the interpersonal case, that I should choose to let others kill more rather than kill one myself. The problem for Anderson's generalization, if I am right about its plausibility in this and similar cases, is obvious. The problem created by the fantastic character of the examples is different. It is that, even if Anderson is right about what we should choose in such cases, this will make no difference in practice if choices of this structure never arise in practice, so her principle would provide no reason for thinking that someone who accepts it would in the actual world choose any differently from a rational expression maximizer.
10. Although she does attribute intrinsic value to a few other states of affairs, these states of affairs do not on that account call for promotion. See n. 5 above.
11. Of course, in saying that an Andersonian life would be full of rational attitude expression, I do not mean that it would necessarily be dominated by an obsession with this goal. As has been noted by both defenders of consequentialism and its critics (including Anderson), many worthwhile goals have the property that they are best promoted by people who don't pursue them too single-mindedly. If I want to express my love for you, I will often do better to focus on you and your needs rather than just on the question of how I am doing at expressing my concern. Still, on Anderson's view, the question I will have to ask when I review my life in a cool hour, to see whether I have done what is worth doing, is just whether I have succeeded overall in this task of attitude expression. So the similarity to familiar consequentialist theories is again remarkable.
12. Bernard Williams, "A Critique of Utilitarianism," in Utilitarianism: For and Against, by J. J. C. Smart and Bernard Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), pp. 83-89.