How to deal with evil demons: Comment on Rabinowicz and Rønnow-Rasmussen

Ethics

Volumn 115, Issue 4, 2005, Pages 788-798

  Stratton Lake, Philip ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 24944453179     PISSN: 00141704     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/430491     Document Type: Review

References (15)

1. Thanks to Roger Crisp for pointing this out to me.
2. Wlodek Rabinowicz and Toni Rønnow-Rasmussen, "The Strike of the Demon: On Fitting Pro-attitudes and Value," Ethics 114 (2004): 391-423. All unattributed references are to this article.
3. Roger Crisp, review of Value ⋯ and What Follows,
4. by Joel Kupperman, Philosophy 75 (2000): 458-62, 459.
5. They offer a variation of ED3 on 416, n. 74, but I ignore this variation, as it adds nothing new to the other variants of the evil demon example.
6. According to Rabinowicz and Rønnow-Rasmussen, final value is value for its own sake or value as an end (though they have some reservations about this second formulation). See Wlodek Rabinowicz and Toni Rønnow- Rasmussen, "A Distinction in Value: Intrinsic and for Its Own Sake," Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 100 (2000): 33-49.
7. Rabinowicz and Rønnow-Rasmussen assume that intuitively a reason is given by a fact about the desire, i.e., that it will shield me from pain. But this is compatible with the intuition that the demon's threat provides a reason.
8. By "internal property" Rabinowicz and Rønnow-Rasmussen mean an intrinsic property. So properties that involve relations to other things will not count as internal properties, though relations among the parts of the thing will count as internal (see "A Distinction in Value").
9. I think that ED1 does not depend on this distinction, as I think that intuitively what gives us reason to desire the saucer of mud is not a fact about the desire but a fact about the demon. But this does not affect the point. If the distinction between state-given and object-given reasons can be defended, then a distinction between reasons given by facts about one object (facts about the saucer of mud) and those given by facts about a different object (facts about the demon) can be defended.
10. Parfit's distinction is stated in terms of facts, rather than properties, but this shouldn't introduce any special difficulty. Derek Parfit, "Rationality and Reasons," in Exploring Practical Philosophy: From Action to Values, ed. Dan Egonsson, Björn Petersson, Jonas Josefsson, and Toni Rønnow-Rasmussen, 17-41 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), 21ff. Rabinowicz and Rønnow-Rasmussen later attribute to Parfit the view that state-given reasons to have some desire are really object-given reasons to want to have that desire (412). This is not, however, Parfit's view. Parfit denies that a state-given reason to have some desire could make it rational for us to have that desire: he does not deny that we would have a state-given reason to have that desire.
11. They might be understood as claiming merely that there is one property - the property of the desire - that may be described in two ways. But if they are understood in this way, then what they say casts no doubt on the distinction between properties of attitudes and properties of the objects of those attitudes. The fact that a property of an attitude can be described in a way that makes it sound as though it is a property of its object does nothing to undermine the distinction between properties of states and properties of their objects and so does nothing to undermine the distinction between state-given and object-given reasons. I could describe the property that the grass has of being green by saying that the garden fence is such that the grass is green. My ability to describe this color property in this way does not leave me in doubt about whether it is a property of the grass or of the garden fence.
12. This is not to deny that if admiring the demon will avoid extreme pain, then there will also be a state-given reason to admire the demon. For my having this pro-attitude toward him will avoid extreme pain, and this fact about my admiration gives me reason to have this attitude. So the buck-passing account will imply that my admiration has instrumental value. This additional reason does not, therefore, cause a problem for BPV.
13. Thanks to Valerio Salvi and Jussi Suikkanen for helping me to get clear on this.
14. Jonas Olson has recently argued that the right sort of reasons must make no reference to the attitudes they justify in the justifying explanation of them (Jonas Olson, "Buck-Passing and the Wrong Sort of Reasons," Philosophical Quarterly 54 [2004]: 295-300). Olson seems to think that Broome's account of reasons is needed to make this point, though it is not. All one needs is the distinction between what justifies/warrants and what is justified/warranted. The idea would then be that the attitude justified should not figure as part of what justifies. Olson does not offer an alternative buck-passing account of final value.
15. There are other cases that cause problems for BPV's biconditional linking reasons with value. I deal with some of these in Philip Stratton-Lake and Brad Hooker, "Scanlon versus Moore on Value," in Metaethics after Moore, ed. Terry Horgan and Mark Timmons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).