Particular reasons

Ethics

Volumn 118, Issue 1, 2007, Pages 109-139

  Berker, Selim ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 38949159631     PISSN: 00141704     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/521586     Document Type: Article

References (80)

1. Note my use of the word 'seems' in this sentence: I take no stand in this article on whether monist theories really are committed to a judgment-free moral algorithm.
2. David McNaughton, "An Unconnected Heap of Duties?" Philosophical Quarterly 46 (1996): 433-47.
3. See Jonathan Dancy, "On Moral Properties," Mind 90 (1981): 367-85,
4. "Ethical Particularism and Morally Relevant Properties," Mind 92 (1983): 530-47,
5. Moral Reasons (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993),
6. "The Particularist's Progress," in Moral Particularism, ed. Brad Hooker and Margaret Little (Oxford: Clarendon, 2000), 130-56,
7. and Ethics without Principles (Oxford: Clarendon, 2004);
8. Ulrik Kihlbom, Ethical Particularism: An Essay on Moral Reasons (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 2002);
9. Mark Lance and Margaret Olivia Little, "Defeasibility and the Normative Grasp of Context," Erkenntnis 61 (2004): 435-55,
10. "Defending Moral Particularism," in Contemporary Debates in Moral Theory, ed. James Dreier (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 305-21,
11. and "Particularism and Antitheory," in The Oxford Handbook of Ethical Theory, ed. David Copp (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 567-94;
12. Margaret Olivia Little, "Moral Generalities Revisited," in Hooker and Little, Moral Particularism, 276-304,
13. "On Knowing the 'Why': Particularism, and Moral Theory," Hastings Center Report 31 (2001): 32-40,
14. and "Wittgensteinian Lessons on Moral Particularism," in Slow Cures and Bad Philosophers: Essays on Wittgenstein, Medicine, and Bioethics, ed. Carl Elliott (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 161-80;
15. David McNaughton, Moral Vision (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988);
16. and David McNaughton and Piers Rawling, "Unprincipled Ethics," in Hooker and Little, Moral Particularism, 256-75.
17. The possibility of such a position was first pointed out and given the name 'particularism' in R. M. Hare, Freedom and Reason (Oxford: Clarendon, 1963), 18.
18. For example, this is how the various portions of the particularist program are argued for by Dancy, Kihlbom, Lance, and Little in the works cited in n. 3.
19. In this section I have characterized particularists as endorsing the view that there does not exist - or, at least, that we do not have good reason to believe that there exists-a finite set of true, finite, and exceptionless principles that can fully cover the moral terrain. More recently, at least one particularist-namely, Jonathan Dancy-has backed off from, this claim and instead formulated his position on principles as follows: "The possibility of moral thought and judgment does not depend on the provision of a suitable supply of moral principles" (Ethics without Principles, 7). However, this formulation is multiply ambiguous, and it is difficult to interpret Dancy's new position in such a way that it is not (a) obviously false, (b) equivalent to the formulation denying the existence of a sufficient number of true, finite, exceptionless principles, or (c) so weak a claim that it can be accepted by nearly every monist and pluralist.
20. For discussion, see Joseph Raz, "The Trouble with Particularism (Dancy's Version)," Mind 115 (2006): 99-120, 113-16;
21. Sean McKeever and Michael Ridge, Principled Ethics: Generalism as a Regulative Ideal (Oxford: Clarendon, 2006), 19-20;
22. and Michael Ridge and Sean McKeever, review of Ethics without Principles, by Jonathan Dancy, Philosophical Review 116 (2007): 124-28. Moreover, as my chief focus in this article will be on the issue of whether particularists can establish their claims about reasons, issues about how best to formulate their claims about principles will not be of direct concern to us.
23. See John Broome, "Reasons," in Reason and Value: Themes from the Moral Philosophy of Joseph Raz, ed. R. Jay Wallace, Philip Pettit, Samuel Scheffler, and Michael Smith (Oxford: Clarendon, 2004), 28-55, sec. 3,
24. and John Horty, "Reasons as Defaults," Philosophers' Imprint 7 (2007), http://www.philosophersimprint.org/007003, sec. 1, for similar accounts of the general framework assumed by particularists (and others) in their discussions of reasons for action.
25. Following the particularists, I will be using the terms 'situation', 'circumstance', and 'context' interchangeably. The notion they are after is just the commonsense notion of a situation: one situation is the one I faced when I woke up this morning, another situation is the one you face right now as you read this sentence, and so on.
26. The type of reasons under consideration are sometimes called 'contributory reasons' or 'pro tanto reasons' to represent the fact that they need not be decisive reasons for a given course of action. (A slightly older term for the same notion is 'prima facie reason' - a term that was misleading since the entities in question are not merely "at first glance" reasons but retain their normative force even if outweighed.) For brevity I will usually omit the 'contributory' or 'pro tanto' qualifier. Some authors make a distinction between peremptory (or requiring) reasons, which count toward the tightness of an action, and enticing reasons, which make an option attractive without having a bearing on its lightness; see Joseph Raz, "Explaining Normativity: Reason and the Will," in his Engaging Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 90-117,
27. and Jonathan Dancy, "Enticing Reasons," in Wallace et al., Reason and Value, 91-118. If this distinction is tenable (I have my doubts), then every occurrence of 'reason' in the body of this article should be replaced with 'peremptory reason'. Finally, a note about the ontology of reasons: throughout I talk about the 'features' of an action as 'providing' (or 'giving rise to') reasons for or against performing that action and about the 'fact' that an action would have a given feature as 'being' a reason for or against performing that action. By taking reasons to be facts, I am regimenting our moral terminology in a way that not all theorists might endorse. However, nothing of consequence hangs on the particular regimentation I have settled on, and one can easily translate my talk of reasons as facts into a terminology adverting to one's ontological category of choice.
28. My discussion here concentrates on the overall moral status of actions, but the generalized weighing model is often applied more generally to the overall normative status of an action, such as its being what one ought (all things considered) to do or its being what it is most in one's interests to do. Particularists usually intend their claims to extend to these normative categories as well.
29. The two contemporary works most responsible, I believe, for making the generalized weighing model of deliberation as widely accepted, as it currently is are Kurt Baier, The Moral Point of View: A Rational Basis of Ethics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1958),
30. and Thomas Nagel, The Possibility of Altruism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970), both of which quite explicitly endorse the model: see chap. 3 of the former and chap. 7 of the latter.
31. A more recent endorsement of essentially the same model can be found in T. M. Scanlon, What We Owe to Each Other (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 65-66;
32. and Derek Parfit, Climbing the Mountain (forthcoming).
33. In this article I assume that the underlying level consists of facts about the non-normative properties of the actions available to an agent. However, McNaughton and Rawling (in their "Unprincipled Ethics") defend a theory according to which the facts at the underlying level that, give rise to reasons for and against action at the contributory level are facts about the thick moral properties of actions. This complicates the picture but does not change anything important in the article's dialectic since presumably the thick moral properties themselves obtain in virtue of the nonnormative properties of the available actions.
34. Note that this talk of normative facts obtaining is all unabashedly realist sounding; indeed, I take it to be a basic assumption of the debate about particularism that moral realism holds. (Sometimes particularists insist that their talk of normative facts and properties can be construed minimalistically if one has antirealist persuasions, but whether this is really so is open to debate.)
35. At least since the publication of J. O. Urmson, "A Defense of Intuitionism," Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 75 (1975): 111-19, if not earlier, it has been common to reinterpret Ross's theory of prima facie duties as a theory of (contributory or pro tanto) reasons for action.
36. See W. D. Ross, The Right and the Good (Oxford: Clarendon, 1930), 21, for the original list of Ross's seven prima facie duties.
37. Ibid., 46.
38. Ibid., 19, 41.
39. I have mentioned two theories that can be easily fit into the generalized weighing framework, but it is worth noting that not all moral theories can be so easily fit into the framework. In particular, it is far from clear how to formulate Kantian ethical theories within the generalized weighing framework without doing major damage to both the content and intent of those theories.
40. Dancy, "Particularist's Progress," 132.
41. Some might find the use of the label 'holism' here a bit odd since the position in question is quite different from the other sorts of holisms that one finds in philosophy. However, by now the name "holism about reasons for action" (originally coined by Dancy) is too firmly entrenched in the philosophical lexicon to resist.
42. This formulation of holism about reasons for action may need to be qualified in two ways. First, in order to avoid certain cheap counterexamples in which one builds a complete description of a given context into the property being considered (e.g., the property of being a telling of a the in such and such a situation, where the "such and such" provides an exhaustive description of some particular situation), particularists may need to restrict the holist thesis so that it pertains only to nonnormative features that can be specified "in finite or helpful propositional form." (The latter phrase is Little's; see "Moral Generalities Revisited," 280.)
43. Second, even when the formulation has been qualified in this way, the word 'every' may need to be replaced with 'nearly every': recently Dancy has conceded, that he might be forced to admit the existence of a "privileged few" reasons whose valence is not sensitive to context, "including probably the intentional inflicting of undeserved pain" (Dancy, "Particularist's Progress," 131;
44. see also his Ethics without Principles, 77-78).
45. As nothing I say about holism turns on whether it is qualified in these two ways, I ignore these complications in what follows. (An anonymous referee suggested to me a third possible qualification that might be needed to properly formulate holism: perhaps, following Dancy, Ethics without Principles, 77,
46. and Pekka Väyrynen, "Moral Generalism: Enjoy in Moderation," Ethics 116 [2006]: 707-41, 712, holism about reasons for action is best, formulated not as the thesis that all reasons for action can vary in valence but rather as the thesis that all reasons for action are variable qua reasons, even if some reasons for action happen to be invariant due to their particular content. However, even if we ignore the obscurities involved in this distinction between a reason's varying in valence due to its particular content and its varying in valence due to its nature as a reason, I find this formulation of holism to be unsatisfactory. In particular, it would allow that someone who endorses the utilitarian, theory of reasons for action glossed in Sec. II could count as a holist about reasons for action, as long as that person thinks that, qua reasons, reasons for action are variable, though it. just happens to turn out that, due to their content, all reasons for action are invariant.)
47. Little, "On Knowing the 'Why,'" 34.
48. Shelly Kagan uses the expression "governing function" for much the same notion in "The Additive Fallacy," Ethics 99 (1988): 5-31, 14, and then goes on to argue that this function is not additive.
49. Nagel (in Possibility of Altruism) prefers the term 'combinatorial principle', but there is a worry that this choice of terminology begs the question against the particularist by assuming that the combinatorial function can be represented as a finitely expressible principle.
50. Note my talk of 'the' combinatorial function, as opposed to 'a' combinatorial function: since I am using the term, 'function' in the mathematical sense, there is only one combinatorial function, which holds for all contexts. Suppose I ask you to think of two natural numbers and either add the numbers together if they're both even or multiply them if at least, one is odd. Have I just defined one function or two functions that change depending on which numbers you choose? In the mathematical sense, there is only one function here - only one mapping from the set of pairs of numbers you might choose to the set of numbers you might end up with after you have done what I tell you to do. One way of representing this function is as follows: f(x, y) = {x + y if x and y are even, x × y otherwise. Similarly, I intend there to be only one combinatorial function. Even if, intuitively, reasons combine one way in some contexts and combine a different way in other contexts, this can always be represented by a single function from the morally relevant factors in any given possible context to the lightness and wrongness of the actions available in that context.
51. In addition to the passage already quoted from Dancy ("The way in which the reasons here present combine with each other is not necessarily determinable in any simply additive way"; "Particularist's Progress," 132),
52. Dancy denies that "once one has assessed, the separate weight of each element, evaluative judgment consists of adding up the pros and cons to see which side is weightier" (Ethics without Principles, 190),
53. and Little rejects a view according to which each, moral reason "goes in the hopper to be weighed against whatever other independent factors happen to be present." ("Moral Generalities Revisited," 280).
54. See also Dancy, Ethics without Principles, 15, 105-6, 127, 143.
55. Little, "Moral. Generalities Revisited," 279 n. 3: "I'm reserving the 'particularist' label for those who deny codification at both levels [i.e., at both the contributory and the overall level]," and "Wittgensteinian Lessons on Moral Particularism," 166-67: "The particularist begins by rejecting attempts to codify relations between nonmoral and moral properties. The resultant picture also leads to a rejection of efforts to systematize relations among moral properties." Dancy's discussion in Ethics without Principles of Kagan's "
56. The Additive Fallacy" makes it clear that he too intends to deny that there is a finitely expressible combinatorial function: "For the particularist, it is going to be variability all the way down" (Ethics without Principles, 10).
57. See also McNaughton and Rawling, "Unprincipled Ethics," 260 n. 12, where they claim that "the relation between an agent's reasons and her obligations is, we think, complex" and insist that there is "no weighing algorithm" for reasons.
58. It is important to notice that the type of context dependence at issue here is very different from the sort of context dependence at issue in debates about epistemic contextualism. Unlike contextualists in epistemology, particularists are not making a semantic claim about how a given word such as 'knowledge' or 'reason' picks out a different relation in different contexts; rather, the context in question is the context of the subject, not the context of utterance.
59. 2 is the mass of particle 2, r is the distance between the two particles, and G is the universal gravitational constant.
60. Some particularists might try to deny that the particularistic Newtonian model just described, is really analogous to a particularistic theory of reasons for action. However, all parties should agree that a nonparticularistic theory of reasons for action is analogous to the nonparticularistic Newtonian model. Moreover, I put forward that the ways in which a particularistic theory of reasons for action deviates from a nonparticularistic one are exactly analogous to the ways in which the particularistic Newtonian model deviates from a nonparticularistic one. It follows that particularists must concede that their theory of reasons is analogous to the particularistic Newtonian model.
61. Dancy, Ethics without Principles, 20.
62. Little makes the same point: "If we accept the doctrine of holism, the implication of changing one variable is influenced, in ways that defy codification, by differences in the other variables' values. We cannot isolate the implication of switching from truth-telling to lying by holding other variables constant, for it matters what the substantive content, of those variables was in the first place" ("Moral Generalities Revisited," 290).
63. See also Jonathan Dancy, "Defending Particularism," Metaphilosophy 30 (1999): 25-31, 31.
64. j, C)], wrong otherwise.
65. Kagan makes much the same point when he notes that without what he calls the "additive assumption" (in effect, the assumption that there is an additive combinatorial function), any talk of "contributions" made by individual morally relevant factors seems out of place ("Additive Fallacy," 17).
66. n. However, this precise a formulation of quasi-additivity comes at the cost of some fairly substantial - and controversial - assumptions about the nature of the combinatorial function. (It is interesting to note that, given this formulation of what it takes for the combinatorial function to be quasi-additive, the requirement that the combinatorial function be quasi-additive is equivalent to the requirement that reasons for action satisfy the removal conception.)
67. This point is only bolstered if we do not assume, as I did in the examples of the past few paragraphs, that the weight of a given reason can be represented by a real number.
68. 2(X, C) otherwise. Therefore, patching together several quasi-additive combinatorial functions does not always yield a quasi-additive combinatorial function, and so the objection fails.
69. After all, recall (n. 33) how difficult it was to even characterize quasi-additivity. If it. is not. even clear how to precisely formulate quasi-additivity without making contentious assumptions about the nature of the combinatorial function, how could we possibly derive analytic platitudes merely from the meaning of the term 'quasi-additive'?
70. Of course, we can prove similar things about, some numbers (e.g., π and ) that have infinite, nonrepeating decimal expansions, but in those cases there is always some way of expressing the number in question in a finite formula.
71. Note that I am not claiming that it is at all plausible that a principle of impartiality is an analytic truth; rather, what I am claiming is that if such a principle were an analytic truth, then it would be odd if there were no other analytic moral truths of that sort.
72. Joseph Raz, Practical Reason and Norms, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 186: "The reasons for an action are considerations which count in favor of that action";
73. Scanlon, What We Owe to Each Other, 17: "Any attempt to explain what it is to be a reason for something seems to me to lead back to the same idea: a consideration that counts in favor."
74. Dancy, Ethics without Principles, 22-23. Dancy later makes it clear (78-79) that he intends there to be an analogous difference between the favoring relation and the right-making relation. This idea that there is a distinctive type of practical reasoning whose conclusion is an action, though Aristotelian in origin, has its modern roots in G. E. M. Anscombe, Intention (Oxford: Blackwell, 1957);
75. for criticism of the idea, see Judith Jarvis (Thomson), "Practical Reasoning," Philosophical. Quarterly 12 (1962): 316-28.
76. Does the argument just given assume that one must be able to give a reductive account of reasons for action? No, it does not. I was intentionally silent about whether the proposed conceptions involved reducing reasons to more fundamental notions or whether they allowed for the possibility that some of the terms in the account of a reason might not be definable except in terms of a reason. Thus, even if, following Scanlon, one endorses the favoring conception of a reason but insists that the favoring relation can be cashed out only in terms of the being-a-reason-for relation (so that one is a primitivist about both reasons and the favoring relation), it still follows that one is not entitled to adhere to the favoring conception unless the combinatorial function is quasi-additive, and that is all I needed in order to argue that particularists cannot hold the favoring conception.
77. One way of strengthening this objection would involve pointing out that we can distinguish between two forms of holism: valence holism, according to which the nonnormative features that give rise to reasons of one valence in one context also give rise to reasons of a different valence in other contexts, and weight holism, according to which the nonnormative features that give rise to reasons of one weight in one context also give rise to reasons of differing weights in other contexts. Then one could insist that, as long as they endorse both valence holism and weight holism, particularists have no need to accept noncombinatorialism. However, even when the objection has been strengthened in this way, my reply is the same since valence and weight holism, bodi only concern how the contributory level depends on the underlying level.
78. On maximizing versus satisficing versions of consequentialism, see Michael Slote, Common-Sense Morality and Consequentialism (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1.985), chap. 3.
79. On absolute-level versus comparative satisficing, see Thomas Hurka, "Two Kinds of Satisficing," Philosophical Studies 59 (1990): 107-11.
80. On the worry that a maximizing version of consequentialism might make morality too demanding, see Shelly Kagan, The Limits of Morality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).