Teleology, agent-relative value, and 'good'

Ethics

Volumn 117, Issue 2, 2007, Pages 265-295

  Schroeder, Mark ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 33947644771     PISSN: 00141704     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/511662     Document Type: Article

References (62)

1. Bernard Williams, Utilitarianism: For and Against (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973).
2. Especially Samuel Scheffler, The Rejection of Consequentialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983).
3. hyphenate "good-relative-to" to make clear that it is a technical term that I use stipulatively to pick out the relation that is appealed to by Agent-Relative Teleology. It is a substantive question that will be of importance for this article whether this relation, the good-relative-to relation, has anything to do with 'good'.
4. One notable exception is Donald Regan, "Against Agent-Relativity: A Reply to Sen," Philosophy & Public Affairs 12 (1983): 93-112.
5. This is known as Dreier's Conjecture, after James Dreier, "The Structure of Normative Theories," Monist 76 (1993): 22-40.
6. Others accepting this view include Michael Smith, "Neutral and Relative Value after Moore," Ethics 113 (2003): 576-98;
7. Jennie Louise, "Relativity of Value and the Consequentialist Umbrella," Philosophical Quarterly 54 (2004): 518-36;
8. and Campbell Brown, "Consequentialise This" (unpublished manuscript, University of Edinburgh, 2004), but at least one prominent ART-ist demurs (Douglas Portmore, "Consequentializing Moral Theories," forthcoming in Pacific Philosophical Quarterly).
9. That is, even if there are no absolute side-constraints.
10. More complicated versions of consequentialism may do this indirectly, by using the ordering on possible states of affairs to induce an ordering on "profiles" of states of affairs (cf. Frank Jackson, "Decision-Theoretic Consequentialism and the Nearest and Dearest Objection," Ethics 101 [1991]: 461-82)
11. or on trees of possible outcomes given future choices of the agent (cf. Fred Feldman, "World Utilitarianism," in Analysis and Metaphysics, ed. Keith Lehrer [Dordrecht: Reidel, 1975], 255-71), and then using this ordering to induce an ordering on actions available to the agent. These are side issues, for our purposes.
12. do not mean to be saying that the better than relation does not have any additional structure. For example, perhaps it is attributive and requires a kind as a further argument (Peter Geach, "Good and Evil," Analysis 17 [1956]: 33-42). And plausibly good, like tall and fast, requires yet a further argument over and above this - a comparison class. I take all such further details to be held fixed by the issues under consideration here, and assume that we can safely ignore them.
13. Smith, "Neutral and Relative Value," 584.
14. Krister Bykvist, "Utilitarian Deontologies? On Preference Utilitarianism and Agent-Relative Value," Theoria 62 (1996): 124-43, 127.
15. Douglas Portmore, "Combining Teleological Ethics with Evaluator Relativism: A Promising Result," Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 86 (2005): 95-113, 97.
16. Amartya Sen, "Evaluator Relativity and Consequential Evaluation," Philosophy & Public Affairs 12 (1983): 113-32, 118.
17. If you think this is a little bit much, Jennie Louise and Michael Smith advocate also relativizing to times. See Louise, "Relativity of Value"; Michael Smith, "Two Kinds of Consequentialism" (unpublished manuscript, Princeton University, 2006).
18. See also Richard Brook, "Agency and Morality," Journal of Philosophy 88 (1991): 190-212;
19. Frances Kamm, "Harming Some to Save Others," Philosophical Studies 57 (1989): 227-60.
20. Brown, "Consequentialise This," 26.
21. I mean no more by "pretheoretical grasp" than this. It doesn't follow from the argument that we must pretheoretically understand anything about the good-relative-to relation; just that it cannot be a purely theoretical relation. It must be one we are able to have intuitions about.
22. Diane Jeske and Richard Fumerton, "Relatives and Relativism," Philosophical Studies 87 (1997): 143-57, 144.
23. Compare, e.g., John Broome, Weighing Goods (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 6-16;
24. Shelly Kagan, "The Structure of Normative Ethics," Philosophical Perspectives 6 (1992): 223-42, 234;
25. Dreier, "The Structure of Normative Theories," 25-29;
26. Smith, "Neutral and Relative Value," 578-85;
27. and Portmore, "Combining," 97.
28. G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica (1903), rev. ed., ed. Thomas Baldwin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), secs. 59-60. Moore claimed not to be able to even make sense of something being good for someone without being good.
29. Let me be perfectly clear that I am not ruling out the possibility that someone might try to account for constraints and special obligations by appealing to the good for relation and claiming that apparent sacrifices required for special obligations are really only illusory, because the well-being of the person to whom you have made a promise really is intrinsically good for you. I've only claimed that (1) such assumptions about what is good for whom are highly implausible, if not bizarre, and (2) such a view is not really appealing to a kind of agent-relative value, because 'good for' is not relative only to agents - things can be good for trees or even for the ozone layer. So it should be clear that this is not the research program that is actually being advanced, however misleadingly its proponents may be prone to state their views. It is a different view, worth being discussed on a different occasion.
30. Brown, "Consequentialise This," 21.
31. Also, "there may well be a variety of ways in which we could conceive of the property of being good as a relational property of the required kind. However, my own view is that the best way of doing so is by giving a detailed statement and defense of a particular version of the dispositional theory of value" (Smith, "Neutral and Relative Value," 591).
32. See also Amartya Sen, "Well-Being, Agency, and Freedom: The Dewey Lectures 1984," Journal of Philosophy 82 (1985): 169-221, 206-8;
33. and Portmore, "Combining," 97.
34. Hurka refers to the "concept of agent-relative goodness, or what is good from a person's point of view and so gives her (and perhaps only her) reason to pursue it" (Thomas Hurka, "Moore in the Middle," Ethics 113 [2003]: 599-628, 611).
35. "I would like to explore the possibility that [moral valuations] are coherently interpretable as 'positional' statements, reflecting the view of the state from the point of view of the evaluator" (Amartya Sen, "Rights and Agency," Philosophy & Public Affairs 11 [1982]: 3-39, 35).
36. 1 from the agent's position" (Portmore, "Combining," 97).
37. Smith, "Neutral and Relative Value," 584.
38. Thomas Nagel, The Possibility of Altruism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970), 90-96.
39. This is pointed out by David McNaughton and Piers Rawling, "Agent-Relativity and the Doing-Happening Distinction," Philosophical Studies 63 (1991): 167-85.
40. Moreover, it is easy to see that things that are good are not necessarily good for everyone. For example, a tax policy might be good but not good for Dick Cheney's pals.
41. Portmore, "Combining."
42. Smith, "Neutral and Relative Value"; Brown, "Consequentialise This."
43. Dreier, "The Structure of Normative Theories"; Portmore, "Combining."
44. Portmore, "Combining," 98-99.
45. Dreier, "The Structure of Normative Theories," 24-25.
46. Smith, "Neutral and Relative Value."
47. See Mark Schroeder, "Realism and Reduction: The Quest for Robustness," Philosophers' Imprint 5 (2005): 1-18 (www.philosophersimprint.org/005001/) for further discussion.
48. Louise, "Relativity of Value"; Brown, "Consequentialise This"; Smith, "Neutral and Relative Value," and "Two Kinds of Consequentialism."
49. Smith, "Neutral and Relative Value," 591-92.
50. There is also strong further evidence that this is the best interpretation of the view espoused in Smith, "Neutral and Relative Value"; it is the best interpretation, e.g., of why he thinks that his view is subject to a potential problem about disagreement.
51. See Mark Schroeder, "Expression for Expressivists," forthcoming in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, for further discussion.
52. I've pointed out this much in Mark Schroeder, "Not So Promising After All: Evaluator Relativism and Common-Sense Morality," Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 87 (2006): 348-56.
53. The reason for this is simple. An adequate semantics for 'best' must do more than tell us how 'best' works in this particular sentence. It must generate a prediction about how 'best' works in this particular sentence, on the basis of a general account of how 'best' works in all sentences - including ones in which there is no quantifier to bind the agent who something is being said to be best-relative-to. For example, it must deal with the sentence, "It would be best if Franz didn't murder." If 'best' picks out best-relative- to, then there must be some mechanism by which an agent is supplied so that we can interpret this sentence - it could be Franz, it could be the speaker, it could be any contextually salient person - it doesn't matter. Whatever mechanism allows for this will also potentially be at work in the sentence, "It is always permissible for everyone to do what will have the best results." So at best, this sentence will receive two readings, only one of which is the one ART-ists want.
54. Although the independent plausibility of requisite assumptions about what is orange in order to get plausible results will certainly be enough to decide between these two views. My point is just that theoretical elegance and simplicity don't decide this.
55. Samuel Clarke, A Discourse concerning the Unchangeable Obligations of Natural Religion, and the Truth and Certainty of the Christian Revelation, selections reprinted in D. D. Raphael, ed., British Moralists 1650-1800 (1969; repr., Indianapolis: Hackett, 1991), 191-225.
56. Also, W. D. Ross, The Right and the Good, ed. Philip Stratton-Lake (1931; repr., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).
57. Sen, "Well-Being, Agency, and Freedom," 214.
58. Henry Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics, 7th ed. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1907).
59. Doug Portmore and Tom Hurka have both insisted on this in correspondence, and Portmore, "Consequentializing Moral Theories," takes up the idea further.
60. Portmore, "Consequentializing Moral Theories."
61. Hurka, "Moore in the Middle"; Smith, "Two Kinds of Consequentialism"; and J. L. A. Garcia, "Agent-Relativity and the Theory of Value," Mind 95 (1986): 242-45.
62. For example, one important worry about the fitting-attitudes response on behalf of ART is that fitting attitudes are subject to constraints, just as ordinary actions are. Suppose that A is better than B, but that by preferring B to A, Franz can prevent Hans and Jens from preferring B to A, ensuring that they prefer A to B, instead. Does it follow that it is fitting for Franz to prefer B to A? Obviously not, if the fitting attitudes analysis is supposed to work. But if there is nothing puzzling about these constraints on which attitudes are fitting, such that it needs to be explained by positing some agent-relative kind of value, then why should there have been something puzzling about ordinary constraints on action, such that we needed to posit agent-relative value in order to explain them?