Semi-global Consequentialism and Blameless Wrongdoing: Reply to Brown

Utilitas

Volumn 17, Issue 2, 2005, Pages 226-230

  Streumer, Bart ^a  

^a FITZWILLIAM COLLEGE   (United Kingdom)

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EID: 85008536877     PISSN: 09538208     EISSN: 17416183     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0953820805001548     Document Type: Article

References (15)

1. See section III of my 'Can Consequentialism Cover Everything?', Utilitas 15 (2003), pp. 237-47.
2. For this example, see Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford, 1984), p. 32.
3. Throughout this article, I use 'ought' as an overall or all things considered term, and 'reason' as a pro tanto term.
4. Campbell Brown, 'Blameless Wrongdoing and Agglomeration: A Response to Streumer', Utilitas, this issue. As Brown notes, the principle of agglomeration applies only to claims about what an agent ought overall or all things considered to do, and not to claims about what there is a reason for an agent to do (or, in Brown's terminology, what an agent ought prima facie to do).
5. Moreover, even if semi-global consequentialists could rescue their view simply by rejecting the principle of agglomeration, there are reasons not to reject this principle.
6. See Paul M. Pietroski, 'Prima Facie Obligations, Ceteris Paribus Laws in Moral Theory', Ethics 103 (1993), pp. 489-515 (see pp. 503-4)
7. Michael Zimmerman, The Concept of Moral Obligation (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 213-14.
8. Note, as before, that this principle applies only to claims about what an agent ought overall or all things considered to do, and not to claims about what there is a reason for an agent to do.
9. Or, at least, any consequentialist who adopts the straightforward theory of the right would claim this (see Streumer, 'Can Consequentialism Cover Everything?', p. 238). I assume here that semi-global consequentialists adopt this theory of the right.
10. It may be thought that consequentialists instead accept something like the following claim: A thing would maximize the good if and only if this thing is part of a set of things that, of the sets of things that agents can bring about, would produce most good. However, if that were so, semi-global consequentialism would be equivalent to semi-global combination consequentialism (see below).
11. More generally, for almost any agent A and almost any time t, there will be an enormous number of things about which the following claims are true: (19) agent A can bring about any one of these things at time t; (20) it would produce some good if agent A brought about any one of these things at time t; (21) agent A cannot bring about more than one of these things at time t. Given the claim about maximization that consequentialists accept, and given how consequentialism uses the term 'right', semiglobal consequentialism will have to claim of each of these things that (22) agent A ought to bring this thing about at time t. Given that claim (22) is about what agent A ought all things considered to do, that makes semi-global consequentialism very implausible.
12. It may be thought that semi-global consequentialists could instead accept something like the following claim: A thing would maximize the good if and only if, of the things that agents can bring about, this thing would produce most good. However, that would be very implausible, since accepting this claim would prevent semi-global consequentialists from making both claim (8) and claim (9) about Fred (see above).
13. See Streumer, 'Can Consequentialism Cover Everything?', p. 244.
14. 'Blameless wrongdoing' is actually a misleading name for the cases that Parfit and Brown have in mind. If we adopt a consequentialist criterion for the attribution of blame, there will be many cases of blameless wrongdoing in which an agent performs a wrong action without being blamed for performing this action, because blaming the agent in this case would fail to maximize the good. Such cases are different from the case of Clare, since what Clare does is not merely supposed to be both wrong and blameless, but is also supposed to be both wrong and right. It would therefore be more accurate to call Clare's case a case of 'right wrongdoing', which would make it analogous to what Parfit calls 'rational irrationality' (Reasons and Persons, p. 13).
15. I would like to thank Jonathan Dancy for helpful comments.