Does consequentialism make too many demands, or none at all?

Ethics

Volumn 116, Issue 4, 2006, Pages 680-706

  Hurley, Paul E ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 33749163392     PISSN: 00141704     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/504620     Document Type: Review

References (86)

1. For a recent example of the partners in guilt strategy, see Elizabeth Ashford, "The Demandingness of Scanlon's Contractualism," Ethics 113 (2003): 273-302, 273.
2. Her strategy is to allow that consequentialism comes across as "unreasonably demanding" but chat "contractualist moral obligations . . . are just as demanding as utilitarian obligations" (Elizabeth Ashford, Ethics ibid., 273).
3. For three quite different arguments that consequentialism, properly understood, is less extreme than it may initially appear, see Liam Murphy's Moral Demands in Nonideal Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000);
4. Peter Railton's "Alienation, Consequentialism, and the Demands of Morality," in Consequentialism and Its Critics, ed. Samuel Scheffler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988);
5. and Ian Mulgan's The Demands of Consequentialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
6. For an unapologetic example of the bullet-biting strategy, see Shelly Kagan's argument that although a consequentialist view "strikes us as outrageously extreme in its demands . . . it is nonetheless true" (The Limits of Morality [Oxford: Clarendon, 1989], 2).
7. Murphy, Moral Demands in Nonideal Theory, 6.
8. Kagan, The Limits of Morality, 2.
9. See, e.g., David Gauthier's contemporary Hobbesian account in Morals by Agreement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986);
10. and discussions of Hobbes's own moral theory by Stephen Darwall (Philosophical Ethics [Boulder, CO: Westview, 1998], chap. 10)
11. and Christine Korsgaard (The Sources of Normativity [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996], 21-27).
12. I use the qualifier "traditional" here to distinguish such accounts from more recent "neo-Kantian" alternatives that avoid the adoption of central aspects of Kant's account of practical reason. Such neo-Kantian alternatives will be discussed in Sec. III. Developments of various aspects of such traditional Kantian accounts can be found in Barbara Herman, The Practice of Moral Judgment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993);
13. and Onora O'Neill, Constructions of Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
14. Thus Mill characterizes utilitarian consequentialism as the view that "actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness; wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness" (Utilitarianism [Indianapolis: Hackett, 2001], 7).
15. J. J. C. Smart characterizes it as the view that "the lightness or wrongness of an action depends only on the goodness or badness of its consequences" (Utilitarianism: For and Against [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973], 4).
16. Alan Donagan and Peter Railton characterize consequentialism respectively as the theory that "actions are right if and only if their consequences are better than those of any other actions that could be done instead" (Donagan, The Theory of Morality [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977], 189)
17. and that assesses "lightness in terms of contribution to the good" (Railton, "Alienation, Consequentialism, and the Demands of Morality," 108). In each case consequentialism is presented as the theory that endorses a distinctive relationship between standards for the lightness of action and standards for the evaluation of overall consequences.
18. Derek Parfit, "What We Could Rationally Will," in The Tanner Lectures on Human Values (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2004), 285-369, 355.
19. Such a restriction to "outcome-given" considerations, however, leaves important questions at the margins unresolved. For John Rawls a view upon which distributive considerations are held to be relevant is not a consequentialist view (A Theory of Justice [Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971], 25).
20. For Parfit it can be ("What We Could Rationally Will," 358-59). I take this to indicate a substantive disagreement concerning whether such distributional considerations can properly be understood as among the impartial outcome-given considerations to which a consequentialist account of moral standards is typically taken to be restricted.
21. (For an exception, see Amartya Sen, "Evaluator Relativity and Consequential Evaluation," Philosophy & Public Affairs 12 [1983]: 113-32.) Rawls takes it to be the case that such distributional considerations are properly understood as appeals to impartial considerations which, like standard appeals to rights, are not in the relevant sense outcome-given. Parfit holds that such distributional concerns can be among the relevant outcome-given impartial considerations.
22. See, in addition, Shelly Kagan's discussion of distributional considerations in Normative Ethics (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1998), chap. 2.
23. For a criticism of this use of 'impersonality', see F. M. Kamm, Morality, Mortality, vol. 2, Rights, Duties, and Status (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 225.
24. Kagan follows general practice in adopting the term but finds its use unfortunate (Normative Ethics, 42-43). The term does succeed, however, in capturing one central feature of the consequentialist's outcome-given considerations, i.e., that from the standpoint of such considerations a harm that a person himself will do is viewed merely as one among other harms that will be done by persons. The moral relevance of the person's own harm is exhausted by viewing it as but another among the harms that will happen. It seems natural to characterize such a standpoint as one that factors out the apparent distinctive personal relevance of the agent's own harm, a standpoint that "depersonalizes" the harm, or views it "impersonally."
25. See, e.g., the version of utilitarianism articulated by John Harsanyi in "Ethics in Terms of Hypothetical Imperatives," in his Essays on Ethics, Social Behavior, and Scientific Explanation (London: D. Reidel, 1976), 24-36;
26. and Amartya Sen's characterization of such a version of act utilitarianism in "Well-Being, Agency, and Freedom," Journal of Philosophy 82 (1985): 169-221, 175.
27. It will become apparent, however, that the difficulty I am raising for consequentialist moral theory is not avoided by a demonstration that its standards are less exacting than might be thought. A consequentialist theory with less exacting standards must still be augmented in order for the result to be a theory that makes demands upon rational agents to conform their actions to its (less exacting) standards.
28. Even when it is reasonable to conform to impersonal moral standards on such an account, morality need not be in the relevant sense demanding and alienating. In such cases the standards set by morality and the action that will maximize the agent's utility may simply coincide. The agent, in pursuing his own utility, is conforming to moral standards.
29. Happiness, Mill argues, is both "the end of human action" and "the standard of morality" (Utilitarianism, 12). But it is an agent's own happiness that is the end of human action, and the general happiness that sets the standard of morality. The chapter 3 argument on sanctions, in turn, attempts to establish that properly trained agents in an advanced society will typically have reasons to conform their actions to utilitarian moral standards.
30. See Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity, 78-84;
31. and Elijah Millgram, "Mill's Proof of the Principle of Utility," Ethics 110 (2000): 282-310, for quite different readings of Mill's argument that nonetheless share these general features.
32. Henry Sidgwick rejects this aspect of Mill's argument in The Methods of Ethics (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1981), 499-501.
33. Shelly Kagan allows that if rationality aims at my own happiness or well-being, "it seems much more plausible to deny that the rational point of view and the moral point of view must coincide" (Normative Ethics, 42).
34. For a detailed criticism of Mill's attempt to demonstrate that agents in a culture such as ours will typically have good reasons, as he understands them, to conform their actions to utilitarian moral standards, see Millgram, "Mill's Proof of the Principle of Utility," esp. sees. 7-9.
35. Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics, 404 n. 1 and final chapter.
36. See also discussions of Sidgwick's account by Derek Parfit (Reasons and Persons [Oxford: Clarendon, 1984], 461-63)
37. and David Phillips ("Sidgwick, Dualism, and Indeterminacy in Practical Reason," History of Philosophy Quarterly 15 [1998]: 57-78). I am grateful to David Phillips for help clarifying my discussion of Sidgwick's views at various points.
38. The externalism/intemalism distinction that I invoke here turns on the acceptance or rejection of what has been characterized by Stephen Darwall as judgment internalism (The British Moralists and the Internal Ought, 1640-1740 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995], 40)
39. and by Michael Smith as the "practicality requirement" (The Moral Problem [Oxford: Blackwell, 1994], 61).
40. Roughly, this is the view that there is a (perhaps defeasible) conceptual ("internal") connection between moral judgment and motivation to act such that an agent who sincerely makes such a judgment will, if rational, be motivated to act accordingly. Although most consequentialists reject internalism, the theory does not require such a rejection. Indeed, R. M. Hare (Moral Thinking [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981])
41. and David Cummiskey (Kantian Consequmtialism [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996], 162ff.) are avowed consequentialists who also embrace forms of internalism.
42. Darwall, Philosophical Ethics, chap. 10.
43. I am indebted to David Cummiskey for assistance in clarifying the central issues at stake in the arguments of this section.
44. For examples of the standard concession by both consequentialists and their critics that permissions and restrictions are intuitively plausible, see Samuel Scheffler and F. M. Kamm concerning restrictions (Scheffler, The Rejection of Consequentialism [Oxford: Clarendon, 1982], 105-4;
45. Kamm, Rights, Duties, and Status, 143)
46. and Shelly Kagan's discussion of permissions (The Limits of Morality, chap. 1).
47. F. M. Kamm (Rights, Duties, and Status, esp. chaps. 8-10)
48. and T. M. Scanion (What We Owe to Each Other [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998]) offer theories of moral standards that provide rationales for the intuitive restrictions and permissions that are central features of ordinary morality. Notice that a consequentialist could conceivably take such an approach as well, appealing to indirect strategies, e.g., to support the claim that consequentialist moral standards coincide with, hence are not after all more exacting than, the standards of ordinary morality (including agent-centered permissions and restrictions). Such a consequentialist would earn the appeal to the intuitive link between ordinary moral standards and decisive reasons by collapsing consequentialist moral standards into ordinary moral standards and rejecting the widely held assumption that consequentialist moral standards require extraordinary moral sacrifices, sacrifices beyond those required by ordinary morality.
49. Scheffler, e.g., argues that there is no plausible rationale for restrictions (The Rejection of Consequentialism, chap. 4);
50. Kagan doubts that there are plausible rationales for either restrictions or permissions, but the bulk of his arguments are directed against purported rationales for permissions (The Limits of Morality, esp. chaps. 1 and 5).
51. See Scheffler's The Rejection of Consequentialism for his characterization of the personal point of view as having independent moral significance. Scheffler may seem to deflect the threat to a consequentialist theory of moral reasons outlined here by outlining a theory of moral standards that reincorporates nonimpersonal consideration of the agent's plans, projects, commitments, and interests. This alternative theory of moral standards is made possible by the presentation of a rationale for recognizing the independent moral significance of the personal point of view. Such a proposal does avoid one set of cases in which, intuitively, consequentialist moral standards fail to provide decisive reasons simpliciter. But it does so, as Scheffler himself recognizes, by rejecting the consequentialist theory of moral standards itself, i.e., by rejecting the consequentialist account of the relationship between right actions and overall consequences. The resulting moral standards are less exacting than consequentialist moral standards. I have argued elsewhere that Scheffler's rationale for the independent moral significance of the personal point of view, consistently applied, undermines his own independence thesis. In particular, I argue that if this rationale successfully generates moral permissions not to bring about the best consequences, it also generates moral restrictions upon acting in certain ways to bring about the best consequences. Recognizing my own independent moral significance gencrates permissions, but recognizing the independent moral significance of each other person generates moral restrictions upon how I can treat them in the pursuit of either impersonal or personal ends (Paul E. Hurley, "Scheffler's Argument for Deontology," Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 74 [1993]: 118-34).
52. Kagan, Normative Ethics, 10.
53. Kagan, Normative Ethics, Ibid., 11.
54. See also Kagan, The Limits of Morality, 66. One could of course challenge the legitimacy of this question of the degree to which reasons that are decisive only relative to various standpoints provide agents with nonrelative reasons. In particular, one could maintain that the only reasons agents have are reasons relative to such standpoints.
55. (See David Copp's "The Ring of Gyges: Overridingness and the Unity of Reason," in Self-Interest, ed. Ellen Frankel Paul, Fred Dycus Miller, and Jeffrey Paul [New York: Cambridge University Press], 86-106, for a defense of such a view.) Whatever the merits of such a view of practical reason, augmentation of the consequentialist theory of moral standards by such a view seems unlikely to establish that such exacting standards make extreme rational demands upon agents. Such a view can allow that standpoint-relative consequentialistmoral standards are extremely exacting - the agent has decisive moral reasons to act in ways that she would experience as extremely demanding and confining (far more demanding and confining than ordinary morality). But the view also allows that agents have decisive reasons relative to other standpoints, e.g., the prudential, economic, and patriotic standpoints. These will often provide agents with decisive standpoint-relative reasons to perform actions they have decisive moral reasons not to perform. (Indeed, Copp's account presupposes that there are such conflicting standpoint-relative decisive reasons [87].) The agent will in such cases have decisive standpoint-relative reasons to undertake multiple and conflicting courses of action, including morally prohibited courses of action. There would simply be no answer on such an account concerning which of these courses of action an agent has decisive reasons simpliciter to undertake or avoid.
56. Kagan, The Limits of Morality, 66.
57. Kagan, The Limits of Morality, Ibid., 67.
58. Kagan rightly points out, in his discussion of subjective reasons (Kagan, The Limits of Morality, ibid., 335 n. 1), that to give such priority to plans and projects when they conflict with morally decisive reasons is to act in a way that is morally forbidden, and that agents are taken to have decisive reasons not to do what is morally forbidden upon more moderate theories. My point, however, is that the consequentialist cannot help himself to this aspect of moderate morality. Although moderate moral standards do, intuitively, provide decisive reasons to avoid wrongdoing, the consequentialist swaps out this moderate morality for an alternative, and there is no intuition that agents have decisive reasons to avoid the actions it identifies as wrong - indeed, quite the contrary: we often appear to have justification to do what consequentialist morality "forbids."
59. Liam Murphy, in Moral Demands in Nonideal Theory, 26
60. citing Samuel Scheffler, Human Morality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 98, characterizes a theory as confining "to the extent that it narrows the range of permissible options for action."
61. For development of these arguments concerning confinement, see Paul E. Hurley, "Fairness and Beneficence," Ethics 113 (2003): 841-64.
62. Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics, 498ff.
63. Derek Parfit labels such a view "rationalist utilitarianism" ("What We Could Rationally Will," 310).
64. Parfit, Reasons and Persons, 129.
65. Thomas Nagel, Equality and Partiality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 15.
66. Thomas Nagel, Equality and Partiality (1991), 15. Ibid.
67. It may be thought that Nagel himself inadvertently provides the outlines of such an account of rational requirements and of the relationships of the personal and impersonal standpoints to reason. Nagel points out that we can abstract away from our own personal points of view to an impersonal point of view and that we come to realize, in so doing, that some things have impersonal value (Thomas Nagel, Equality and Partiality ibid., 10-20).
68. But these aspects of Nagel's account can be endorsed upon most moral theories, including Kantian moral theories. Support for consequentialism as a theory of extreme demands is only forthcoming if it is established, in addition, both that impersonal value exhausts moral value and that this moral requirement to promote overall value effectively functions as a categorical requirement of reason simpliciter, properly understood. Nagel himself certainly takes such additional claims to be indefensible (Thomas Nagel, Equality and Partiality ibid., 14-17).
69. For his more recent (and very different) arguments against such claims, see Thomas Nagel, "Personal Rights and Public Space," in his Concealment and Exposure (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 31-52.
70. For discussions of such a "consequentialism of rights" strategy, see Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books), 28ff.;
71. Scheffler, The Rejection of Consequentialism, chap. 4;
72. Kagan, The Limits of Morality, 24-32;
73. Cummiskey, Kantian Consequentialism, chaps. 5, 6;
74. Kamm, Rights, Duties, and Status, chaps. 9, 10;
75. Paul E. Hurley, "Agent-Centered Restrictions: Clearing the Air of Paradox," Ethics 107 (1997): 120-46;
76. and Jeffrey Brand-Ballard, "Contractualism and Deontic Restrictions," Ethics 14 (2004): 269-300.
77. Here I am indebted to Kamm's discussion of rights, and in particular to her distinction between "ordinary rights," e.g., "not to be killed to save other lives," and "super rights," which include in addition a "strengthening component" which "prohibits killing to prevent violations of the same or a less significant right" (Rights, Duties, and Status, 263).
78. Stephen Danvall, "Agent-Centered Restrictions from the Inside Out," Philosophical Studies 69 (1986): 291-319.
79. See Cummiskey's Kantian Consequentialism for one attempt to provide such a rationale.
80. See Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. W. Kaufman (New York: Vintage, 1967);
81. and Bernard Williams's Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), chap. 10. The characterization of morality as a "peculiar institution" is taken from Williams.
82. But not all consequentialists will consider this victory empty. Alastair Norcross has recently argued ("Reasons without Demands: Rethinking Rightness," in Blackwell Contemporary Debates in Moral Theory, ed. James Dreier [Oxford: Blackwell, forthcoming])
83. in an essay building upon earlier work with Frances Howard-Snyder ("A Consequentialist Case for Rejecting the Right," Journal of Philosophical Research 18 [1993]: 109-25), that the standard approach, upon which consequentialism is put forward not just as providing an account of moral reason but as providing an account of "the significance each of us gives to such moral reasons relative to other reasons," amounts to a misinterpretation by consequentialists of their own theory. He grants that agents have better moral reasons to do what it is morally better to do and that it is morally better to do what brings about a better overall outcome. His Consequentialist, like Kagan's, can recognize that she always has decisive moral reasons to bring about the best overall consequences. But whereas Kagan takes it to be the case that agents have decisive reasons to do what they have such decisive moral reasons to do, Norcross is skeptical that this is the case, and skeptical that it is the business of Consequentialist moral theory, properly understood, even to inquire into the extent to which this is or is not the case. Consequentialism is only a theory of moral standards, of what agents have decisive moral reasons to do, and should be judged as such. The question of what demands such moral reasons make upon us relative to other reasons "is not something which can be settled by a moral theory." Acting as we have decisive consequentialist moral reasons to act would be extremely demanding and confining. But whereas Hobbesian and Kantian alternatives are theories of the decisive reasons agents have to conform to their less exacting moral standards, consequentialism is not a theory of decisive reasons to conform to its exacting standards. Its reputation for extreme demandingness, he suggests, comes from a failure to appreciate this fact by both its advocates and its critics.
84. John Rawls (A Theory of Justice, sees. 27-29)
85. and T. M. Scanion ("Contractualism and Utilitarianism," in Utilitarianism and Beyond, ed. Amartya Sen and Bernard Williams [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982], 103-28, sees. 3 and 4) both entertain and ultimately reject such arguments for the adoption of consequentialist normative principles within their contractarian/contractualist frameworks.
86. But Derek Parfit has offered a version of just such an argument that draws upon foundational elements from both Sidgwick and Kant ("What We Could Rationally Will," 285-369).