Normative strength and the balance of reasons

Philosophical Review

Volumn 116, Issue 4, 2007, Pages 533-562

  Gert, Joshua ^a  

^a FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 35649025886     PISSN: 00318108     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/00318108-2007-013     Document Type: Article

References (61)

1. The notion is central to Michael Smith's The Moral Problem (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1994)
2. and to Thomas Scanlon's What We Owe to Each Other (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).
3. A huge literature has also grown up around Bernard Williams's controversial claim that practical reasons depend in a constitutive way on the antecedent motivations of the agent. See Bernard Williams, "Internal and External Reasons," in his Moral Luck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 101-13.
4. For a presentation of some of the problems with Williams's view and proposed solutions, see Robert Johnson, "Internal Reasons and the Conditional Fallacy," Philosophical Quarterly 49 (1999): 53-71;
5. and Christine Korsgaard, "Skepticism about Practical Reason," in her Creating the Kingdom of Ends (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 311-34.
6. See also the essays collected in Ethics and Practical Reason, ed. G. Cullity and B. Gaut (New York: Clarendon, 1997).
7. For example, Stephen Darwall writes that "It is part of the very idea of the [rationally normative system] that its norms are finally authoritative in settling questions of what to do." Allan Gibbard's notion of rationality "settles what to do ... what to believe, and ... how to feel." And Michael Smith claims that it is all and only reasons that spring from the norms of rationality that make actions desirable. See Stephen Darwall, Impartial Reason (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983), 215-16;
8. Allan Gibbard, Wise Choices, Apt Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 49;
9. Smith, The Moral Problem, 150ff.
10. The first of these formal answers is Thomas Scanlon's, from What We Owe to Each Other, 17, 50.
11. The second is John Broome's, from "Normative Requirements," Ratio 12 (1999): 398-419.
12. See also Darwall, Impartial Reason, 19.
13. See Broome, "Normative Requirements," 412.
14. See Allan Gibbard, Wise Choices, 160;
15. and Derek Parfit, "Reasons and Motivation," Aristotelian Society Suppl. 71 (1997): 99-131, at 99.
16. But see Joshua Gert, "Breaking the Law of Desire," Erkenntnis 62 (2005): 295-319,
17. and Brute Rationality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), chap. 6.
18. Joseph Raz, Practical Reason and Norms (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 43.
19. This is not Raz's current position: he now advocates widespread reasons incommensurability. See his Engaging Reason (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), chap. 5.
20. Elsewhere I argue that the phenomena that Raz takes to support incommensurability is better accounted for by the view advocated in this essay. See Joshua Gert, "Requiring and Justifying: Two Dimensions of Normative Strength," Erkenntnis 59 (2003): 5-36. Even when Raz originally expressed the universal comparability view, he knew it yielded strange consequences. To eliminate these consequences, he introduced second-order exclusionary reasons and permissions. But a recognition of the two dimensions of normative strength renders these expedients unnecessary and unmotivated.
21. Of course this depends to some degree on how much I will enjoy the coffee. The reader should therefore assume that the pleasure I get from the coffee is within the normal range. Also, the term 'irrational', as it is being used in this essay, is meant to include actions that we would ordinarily not describe with this word since it connotes a certain degree of severity. As the term is being used here, the silly, the stupid, the wrongheaded, and the insane are all subtypes of the irrational, as long as they are taken to indicate a status conferred by the relevant reasons.
22. "Rationally permissible" of course includes "rationally required" but is wider since it also includes "rationally optional." Also note the importance of the phrase "that would otherwise be irrational." Justification is always relative to some opposed reason or reasons that put an action in need of justification in the first place. Some actions may not be irrational to perform, not because they are justified by reasons, but because there is no reason why one should not perform them: whistling while one walks, for example.
23. Moral justification is therefore to be understood as formally identical to rational justification: the difference is only with regard to the normative domain within which a negative assessment is mitigated. Moral excuses should be distinguished from moral justifications for acting against moral rules. Moral excuses seem best understood as considerations that undermine the normal presuppositions that are in the background when we make moral assessments: that the agent knew what he or she was doing, was rational, and so on. As a result of considerations that go beyond the scope of this essay, I do not find a formal parallel to moral excuses in the domain of practical rationality.
24. It may well be that many or even most philosophers who make use of such maximizing phrases would deny that they are using them literally. But such philosophers must then tell us what they think the strength of a reason amounts to if not a value that it contributes to a total. For they do not seem to be speaking metaphorically when they talk about reasons coming with strength values, and, as will be argued in section 5, to assign a strength value, or even to claim that one reason is stronger than another, is to commit oneself to a certain kind of structure within which reasons contribute systematically to overall rational status. If one is unwilling to commit oneself to such a structure, then one ought to leave off talking about the strengths of reasons at all.
25. I do not mean to suggest that there will always be determinate answers to such questions. Surely any account of normative strength will make room for a realistic degree of vagueness.
26. Patricia Greenspan, "Asymmetrical Practical Reasons," in Experience and Analysis: Proceedings of the 27th International Wittgenstein Symposium, ed. J. C. Marek and M. E. Reicher (Vienna: ÕBV and HPT, 2005), 387-94.
27. Jonathan Dancy, Ethics without Principles (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 93.
28. Greenspan actually expresses doubts that a failure to act on adequate positive reasons need be the basis for any criticism. See her "Adequate Reasons," www.philosophy.umd.edu/Faculty/PGrecnspan/ (file called ADREAS.doc accessed July 18, 2004). In holding this view, she differs from Dancy, for whom a failure to act on one's greatest positive reasons will count at least as "silly."
29. See his "Enticing Reasons," in Reason and Value. Themes from the Moral Philosophy of Joseph Raz, ed. R. Wallace, P. Pettit, S. Scheffler, and M. Smith (Oxford: Clarendon, 2004), 91-118.
30. Of course there are many criticisms of particularism that hold that there must be a stable core of invariant reasons in order for variant ones to exist. See, for example, David McNaughton, "An Unconnected Heap of Duties?" Philosophical Quarterly 46 (1996): 433-47;
31. and David McNaughton and Piers Rawling, "Unprincipled Ethics," in Moral Particularism, ed. B. Hooker and M. Little (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 256-75. But in these arguments variance and invariance are taken merely to be matters of valence and not of strength values. A different and, it seems to me, much stronger argument is available once one realizes that invariable valence alone is completely inadequate for those who wish to think of rational status as a function of reasons.
32. See Gert, Brute Rationality, especially chaps. 2-4. Principle P is based on a definition of rational action that plays a central role in Bernard Gert's moral theory. It was discussions of this principle that first suggested to me the possibility of distinguishing the justifying and requiring dimensions of normative strength. One should read P as having the following logical form (without details about the question of the adequacy of the benefits): ∼ Rational ≡ (Harm to agent & ∼ Benefit to someone). This is equivalent to Rational ≡ (∼Harm to agent v Benefit to someone). The first of these forms makes it easy to see why it is only harm to the agent that plays the requiring role, while the second form makes it easy to see why benefits for others can nevertheless play the justifying role.
33. I say "by itself" since adding an altruistic reason, in real-life circumstances, will typically add other self-interested reasons. For example, if an action will kill someone or hurt them very badly, it will also probably bring personal dangers to the agent who performs it. Also, the phrase "changing the status of an action" should be understood as a convenient shorthand for "explaining why an action to which the same reasons were relevant - with the exception of the reason at issue - would have a different status."
34. Although I hope it will be conceded that the idea that the self/other distinction is relevant to practical rationality is prima facie quite plausible. It is, after all, basic to most moral theories.
35. See Gert, Brute Rationality.
36. See Ruth Chang, Incommensurability, Incomparability, and Practical Reason (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997);
37. Raz, Engaging Reason, chap. 5.
38. See Darwall, Impartial Reason, 208;
39. Gibbard, Wise Choices, 160;
40. Parfit, "Reasons and Motivation," 99.
41. Scanlon, What We Owe, 30, defines ideal rationality in these terms.
42. See also Barbara Herman, The Practice of Moral Judgment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 166-68.
43. There Herman indicates the common nature of this view by explaining an interesting way in which it might be argued that Kant does not hold it. Some philosophers do distinguish rationality from what there is most reason to do, but nevertheless define the former in terms of the latter. See David Sobel, "Subjective Accounts of Reasons for Action," Ethics 111 (2001): 461-92.
44. Satisficing accounts do not avoid essentially the same criticism since such accounts also make essential use of the notion of "the action supported by the best reasons" even though they do not define 'rational action' by simply equating it with such action. A similar point goes for Thomas Scanlon's views.
45. This latter response, as Anscombe has pointed out, does not offer a reason at all, but is a denial that there was a reason, or that one was called for. See G. E. M. Anscombe, Intention (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1958), sec. 17.
46. See Scanlon, What We Owe, 30.
47. Compare Margaret Little's "Moral Generalities Revisited," in Hooker and Little, Moral Particularism, 276-304, at 299-300. There Little's point is that the explanation of the moral status of a particular action - something that particularists are committed to saying that reasons can provide - requires that the considerations doing the explaining fall into some sort of pattern. Little plausibly takes her point to be compatible with particularism. My point in what follows, however, is that when the explanation is of a certain sort - one that appeals to strength values - then the required patterns are no longer consistent with particularism.
48. In this case, one might also want to know why the line is stronger: what it is that makes it stronger. And the answer here might have something to do with electron bonding, or with the area of the cross section of the line. But despite the fact that one might seek such an explanation, it remains true that one can answer the question "Why did this line hold, while the others did not?" by saying "Because it is a 20-pound line, and the others are 15 and 10 pound lines."
49. Although this last claim is at odds with the kind of moralistic outlook that is often found in rationalist moral philosophers, it seems true. That is, although it seems irrational not to agree immediately to spend quite a bit of money to save one's little finger, it is not plausible to regard it as irrational to refuse to donate a similar quantity to charity, even if one is quite sure that it will save a life. There is a difference between being irrational and being selfish.
50. One takes the domains of morality and practical rationality to be distinct if one holds, as I do, that people who act immorally are not necessarily acting irrationally. Although this position seems to me commonsensical, it is admittedly controversial. I provide some considerations in favor of it in "Korsgaard's Private-Reasons Argument," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 64 (2002): 303-24,
51. and in Brute Rationality, chaps. 1, 4, and 7.
52. Dancy gives a very nice example. The blue appearance of an object is typically a reason to believe it is blue. But if I know I am experiencing a temporary color inversion, then its blue appearance may be a reason to believe it is not blue. See Dancy, Ethics without Principles, 74.
53. See ibid., 74, 132, 191. G. F. Schucler defends the idea that the notion of a reason for belief is very closely linked to the notion of a reason for action in his Reasons and Purposes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 97-105. On his view, reasons for belief are a species of practical reason since believing is a thing we do. I would want to distinguish more sharply than Schueler does reasons for the belief that p from reasons for believing that p.
54. At least, once various relevant considerations that are not themselves reasons have done their work of enabling or disabling, intensifying or weakening the considerations that are in fact reasons. See note 34 below.
55. See, for example, McNaughton and Rawling, "Unprincipled Ethics," 260. McNaughton and Rawling acknowledge the complexity of the relation between reasons and ought-judgments, but the primary source of this complexity comes from an epistemic filter. And in any case, they certainly think that the phrase "the most reasons" makes univocal sense. Jonathan Dancy, in his Ethics without Principles, also makes liberal use of phrases such as "more reason to do this or that" and "most reason to do some third thing." He also seems committed to the idea that "the value of the whole is identical to the sum of the values of the contributing parts" (181). Given the very strong link he maintains between values and reasons, this suggests a fairly literal interpretation ought to be given to "most reason."
56. See Dancy, Ethics without Principles, chap. 2. Dancy (105) opposes what he calls the "kitchen scales" model of balancing reasons, which might suggest that he is not committed to the picture I am here ascribing to him. But the only motivated deviation from the kitchen scales model that Dancy's particularism makes is that it allows many considerations that are not themselves reasons to disable, intensify, or weaken a reason in a given context. After eliminating the disabled reasons and modifying the enabled ones in the ways dictated by the relevant intensifiers and weakeners, it seems that Dancy's picture resembles the kitchen scales model in its essentials.
57. Appeal to the "felt pressure" at the surface of the object does not help unless we have independent reasons for associating this felt pressure with the truth of various counterfactuals.
58. Interestingly, Dancy - a defender of one of the strongest formulations of particularism - makes a similar criticism of views that focus on only one relevant "force." See Dancy, Moral Reasons (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 98.
59. Ross would call them "underived reasons." See McNaughton, "An Unconnected Heap of Duties?" It seems to me very likely that Dancy's denial of the plausibility of conditional analyses of the notion of the strength of a reason is the result of a conflation of (a) real-life reason-giving considerations, which are derived and cannot be altered counterfactually without complex effects on the normative landscape, and (b) the reasons that those considerations give, which are underived and can be used to specify the relevant counterfactuals much less problematically. But to argue for this claim would take us too far afield.
60. See Dancy, Ethics without Principles, 29, where he admits that his appeal to an unanalyzed notion of favoring is "terribly uninformative" and where he associates himself with Scanlon as a partner in the crime of stopping the analysis of the normative at this level. I criticize Scanlon's failure to provide any analysis of the basic notion of a normative reason in "A Functional Role Analysis of Reasons," Philosophical Studies 124 (2005): 353-78, in which I also provide a conditional analysis of the strength of a reason that (I think) avoids the criticisms that Dancy levels at similar accounts.
61. This formulation emerged from a series of pressing questions from Janice Dowell.