Introduction
Section 1 - Direct Considerations
1.1 Kantian Constructivism
As said, I will start by motivating the view I currently am sympathetic to, which is Kantian Constructivism. First, I will need to explain the view. It is divided into two views, one metaethical, the other normative ethical. Those being metaethical constructivism and Kantian ethics. There are many ways of understanding metaethical constructivism, most notably, there is Rawls' view, and Korsgaards' view. I take Korsgaards' view. I think Sharon Street offers the best characterization of the constructivism I favor (Street 2010).
When a creature values something – or, as I will also put it, when he or she takes or judges this, that
or the other thing to be valuable – he or she occupies what we may call for convenience the practical point of view. More broadly, we may say, the practical point of view is the point of view occupied by any creature who takes at least some things in the world to be good or bad, better or worse, required or optional, worthy or worthless, and so on – the standpoint of a being who judges, whether at a reflective or unreflective level, that some things call for, demand, or provide reasons for others. The claim is that we have an understanding of this attitude even if we do not yet understand what value itself is. In addition to having an understanding of the attitude of valuing and the associated idea of the practical point of view, we also have an understanding of the idea of entailment from within the standpoint of any given set of values. Quite apart from whether we think a given set of values is correct, in other words – indeed, even if we aren’t clear yet on what it is for a set of values to be correct – we can nevertheless think about and discuss what follows, as a purely logical and instrumental matter, from a given set of values in combination with the non-normative facts.
Street calls this the "Practical Standpoint characterization of constructivism". But, this alone is not enough to capture my view, since such a characterization is equally consistent with Humean constructivism and Kantian constructivism. The difference between these two views, is their views on practical rationality. As Hume famously stated, "It is not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the world to the scratching of my finger". A Humean constructivist will hold that there are no irrational ends, no common ends entailed by the practical standpoint of all agents or valuers. Whereas a Kantian constructivist will demur, and believes there are irrational ends, and certain ends entailed from the practical standpoint of all rational agents. The Kantian will say that it is constitutive of agency that our ends our worth-bestowing in virtue of our rational nature, thus making rational nature the source of all normativity. We will next get into the motivation for this.
As said, I will start by motivating the view I currently am sympathetic to, which is Kantian Constructivism. First, I will need to explain the view. It is divided into two views, one metaethical, the other normative ethical. Those being metaethical constructivism and Kantian ethics. There are many ways of understanding metaethical constructivism, most notably, there is Rawls' view, and Korsgaards' view. I take Korsgaards' view. I think Sharon Street offers the best characterization of the constructivism I favor (Street 2010).
When a creature values something – or, as I will also put it, when he or she takes or judges this, that or the other thing to be valuable – he or she occupies what we may call for convenience the practical point of view. More broadly, we may say, the practical point of view is the point of view occupied by any creature who takes at least some things in the world to be good or bad, better or worse, required or optional, worthy or worthless, and so on – the standpoint of a being who judges, whether at a reflective or unreflective level, that some things call for, demand, or provide reasons for others. The claim is that we have an understanding of this attitude even if we do not yet understand what value itself is. In addition to having an understanding of the attitude of valuing and the associated idea of the practical point of view, we also have an understanding of the idea of entailment from within the standpoint of any given set of values. Quite apart from whether we think a given set of values is correct, in other words – indeed, even if we aren’t clear yet on what it is for a set of values to be correct – we can nevertheless think about and discuss what follows, as a purely logical and instrumental matter, from a given set of values in combination with the non-normative facts.
Street calls this the "Practical Standpoint characterization of constructivism". But, this alone is not enough to capture my view, since such a characterization is equally consistent with Humean constructivism and Kantian constructivism. The difference between these two views, is their views on practical rationality. As Hume famously stated, "It is not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the world to the scratching of my finger". A Humean constructivist will hold that there are no irrational ends, no common ends entailed by the practical standpoint of all agents or valuers. Whereas a Kantian constructivist will demur, and believes there are irrational ends, and certain ends entailed from the practical standpoint of all rational agents. The Kantian will say that it is constitutive of agency that our ends our worth-bestowing in virtue of our rational nature, thus making rational nature the source of all normativity. We will next get into the motivation for this.
1.2 The Normative Question
The first motivation for Kantian Constructivism, is that the Kantian Constructivist has the most satisfying answer to what Korsgaard calls "The Normative Question" (Korsgaard 1999). The question of why moral considerations have the authority to guide our conduct, and give laws that we all have reason to follow. The question of, what justifies the claims morality makes upon us. Following Korsgaard, there seem to be 3 conditions a satisfying answer to the Normative question must meet.
1. It must succeed in addressing an agent in the first-person position who demands justification for the claims morality makes on them.
2. When the agent comes to know what justifies their action as required, they come to the belief that their action is justified and makes sense.
3. It must appeal, to a deep sense of who we are, our identity.
The second follows from the first, the third condition is perhaps not a necessary condition for a successful answer, but is plausible in light of the fact that there are plausibly cases where morality demands us to sacrifice our life. What can be worse than death, other then something equivalent to it, such as losing our own sense of who we are? It seems to be our practical conception of ourselves that matters most, that gives rise to unconditional obligations. They are those obligations which, if violated, we lose our identity, and are no longer able to think of ourselves as being 'under the description under which we see ourselves as valuable and our goals as worth pursuing'. Which is no better, perhaps worse, than being dead. If a theory can satisfy condition 3, and others can't, then that is, at the very least an impressive explanatory virtue of the theory indeed.
The main competitor to constructivism in answering the normative question is Moral Realism, which Matthew himself is committed to. There is also voluntarism, and eliminativism about normativity, but I'll put these aside for our purposes. The realist believes, rather than normativity being imposed on us by an authority, or contract, that normativity, obligation etc. is an irreducible notion. Some actions just intrinsically instantiate the property of being right, and there is no further explanation or reason to appeal to. The problem here is simple, this doesn't answer the normative question, in fact, it doesn't meet any of the conditions. What the realist has done, is merely relocate the problem. Since there cannot be obligations unless there are actions which we necessarily have reason to do, the realist simply put the necessity where he desired to find it - those moral duties which we already thought were obligatory. But the normative question is asking if there really is anything we necessarily have reason to do, and if so, which things and why them? To put the problem another way, belief in the existence of irreducible intrinsically normative properties must be sustained by our confidence that we do, in fact, have binding obligations. So, appealing to the existence of these properties cannot be used to support our confidence. Yet, the normative question is precisely about what justifies our confidence, and it arises when said confidence is rattled. Thus, it's extremely hard to see how realism can answer it.
By contrast, we have the constructivist answer to the normative question, by taking the view that morality is grounded in human nature, or more precisely, our identity as rational agents. Moral properties are projections of human dispositions put to a test of reflective endorsement. We as humans are subject to practical constraints such as those from our own interests, and the interests of others. These claims arise from one's practical identity which, as stated above, is a description under which you value yourself and see your ends as worthy of pursuit. Some examples; your identity as a man or a woman, a lover, or friend, or family member, and each of these identities give rise to a set of reasons and commitments, those reasons and commitments being constitutive of those identities . The normativity is 'built into' these roles. In this case, we are interested in your practical identity qua rational agent, qua 'citizen of the Kingdom of ends'. The three conditions for answering the normative question, therefore, seem to be satisfied, it addresses any agent who asks it from the first person, because these constraints, ex hypothesi, are constitutive of the practical point of view of all rational agents, to deny such reasons would be for a rational agent to deny oneself as a rational agent which would be incoherent. It answers the third by appealing to our practical identity, our deep sense of who we are. The remaining threat implicit in the normative question then, is that the various constraints our nature imposes on us may be incongruent. The normative question would then be fully answered by showing that they are not, in fact, incongruent. That meeting the constraints made from one point of view will not entail violating the constraints imposed by another. Perhaps it may have occurred to you that there may be cases wherein the reasons conferred on you by your other practical identities. Such as parent, worker, romantic lover etc. may conflict with reasons conferred on you by virtue of your identity as a rational agent. However, your identity as a rational agent is unique in that it makes your other identities possible, it is a more fundamental aspect of your identity making it, also more normatively fundamental. Other practical identities derive their importance and normativity from our rational nature. If humanity is not treated as normative then neither can our other identities be normative. Because of this, our rational nature governs and confers value on our other identities, so that conceptions of our identity that do not accord with the value of humanity/rational nature cannot be rationally acceptable. Perhaps then, there might be a tension between self-interested reasons as a rational agent, and other-regarding reasons as a rational agent. I don't think this is right. Suppose you take yourself as having self-interested reasons to violate rational nature. You take those reasons as worth-pursuing in virtue of selecting them as your ends with your rational capacities. But if those reasons entail violating rational nature, then you are violating the very thing which made those reasons worth-pursuing in the first place. So, by reductio, you cannot intelligibly have reasons which entail violating rational nature.
Another way of seeing that a Kantian constructivist view like mine is in a better position to answer the normative question would be a consideration regarding the regress of one's values. Suppose you wanted to eat ice-cream. The fact that you desire to eat ice-cream isn't a reason (by this I mean a reason sufficient to justify action) to eat the ice-cream. You can ask the normative question "why ought I act according to this desire?". You can weigh it against other desires, such as your desire to lose weight and ask "which of these desires is a better reason to act?". Notice, for any given impression or inclination with the content of some desirable outcome, you again, can ask the normative question. The same point applies to facts external to your will, such as natural properties e.g "do I have a reason to act in accord with this natural property?". For any heteronomous fact, it seems the normative question will keep coming back. Since it will always be possible for the normative question to rear it's ugly head for heteronomous facts, the idea is, for it to be answered, value must be prior to heteronomy. In this sense, reasons are wholly contingent upon one's autonomous rational will, which, I take to be one's reflective capacity to pick out which of one's inclinations, impressions, and aims is a better reason to act. One's rational autonomous will is therefore the source of all reasons, values and normativity. This is the Kantian view.
One worry the realist may have is, this only gets us extrinsic normativity, when what we really want is intrinsic normativity. On the contrary, the test of reflective endorsement shows that human nature is intrinsically normative. To quote Korsgaard;
Within human nature, morality can coherently
be challenged from the point of view of self-interest, and self-interest from the point of view of morality. Outside of human nature,
there is no normative point of view from which morality can be
challenged. But morality can meet the internal challenge that is
made from the point of view of self-interest, and it also approves of
itself. It is human nature to be governed by morality, and from every
point of view, including its own, morality earns its right to govern
us. We have therefore no reason to reject our nature, and can allow
it to be a law to us. Human nature, moral government included, is
therefore normative, and has authority for us.
There is much, much more that can be said here, much more objections that can be made on both sides, I haven't nearly done justice to the case. Note that none of the arguments made in this section are at all original to me, for more, read Korsgaard's Sources of Normativity, and some of her other works.
1. It must succeed in addressing an agent in the first-person position who demands justification for the claims morality makes on them.
2. When the agent comes to know what justifies their action as required, they come to the belief that their action is justified and makes sense.
3. It must appeal, to a deep sense of who we are, our identity.
The second follows from the first, the third condition is perhaps not a necessary condition for a successful answer, but is plausible in light of the fact that there are plausibly cases where morality demands us to sacrifice our life. What can be worse than death, other then something equivalent to it, such as losing our own sense of who we are? It seems to be our practical conception of ourselves that matters most, that gives rise to unconditional obligations. They are those obligations which, if violated, we lose our identity, and are no longer able to think of ourselves as being 'under the description under which we see ourselves as valuable and our goals as worth pursuing'. Which is no better, perhaps worse, than being dead. If a theory can satisfy condition 3, and others can't, then that is, at the very least an impressive explanatory virtue of the theory indeed.
The main competitor to constructivism in answering the normative question is Moral Realism, which Matthew himself is committed to. There is also voluntarism, and eliminativism about normativity, but I'll put these aside for our purposes. The realist believes, rather than normativity being imposed on us by an authority, or contract, that normativity, obligation etc. is an irreducible notion. Some actions just intrinsically instantiate the property of being right, and there is no further explanation or reason to appeal to. The problem here is simple, this doesn't answer the normative question, in fact, it doesn't meet any of the conditions. What the realist has done, is merely relocate the problem. Since there cannot be obligations unless there are actions which we necessarily have reason to do, the realist simply put the necessity where he desired to find it - those moral duties which we already thought were obligatory. But the normative question is asking if there really is anything we necessarily have reason to do, and if so, which things and why them? To put the problem another way, belief in the existence of irreducible intrinsically normative properties must be sustained by our confidence that we do, in fact, have binding obligations. So, appealing to the existence of these properties cannot be used to support our confidence. Yet, the normative question is precisely about what justifies our confidence, and it arises when said confidence is rattled. Thus, it's extremely hard to see how realism can answer it.
By contrast, we have the constructivist answer to the normative question, by taking the view that morality is grounded in human nature, or more precisely, our identity as rational agents. Moral properties are projections of human dispositions put to a test of reflective endorsement. We as humans are subject to practical constraints such as those from our own interests, and the interests of others. These claims arise from one's practical identity which, as stated above, is a description under which you value yourself and see your ends as worthy of pursuit. Some examples; your identity as a man or a woman, a lover, or friend, or family member, and each of these identities give rise to a set of reasons and commitments, those reasons and commitments being constitutive of those identities . The normativity is 'built into' these roles. In this case, we are interested in your practical identity qua rational agent, qua 'citizen of the Kingdom of ends'. The three conditions for answering the normative question, therefore, seem to be satisfied, it addresses any agent who asks it from the first person, because these constraints, ex hypothesi, are constitutive of the practical point of view of all rational agents, to deny such reasons would be for a rational agent to deny oneself as a rational agent which would be incoherent. It answers the third by appealing to our practical identity, our deep sense of who we are. The remaining threat implicit in the normative question then, is that the various constraints our nature imposes on us may be incongruent. The normative question would then be fully answered by showing that they are not, in fact, incongruent. That meeting the constraints made from one point of view will not entail violating the constraints imposed by another. Perhaps it may have occurred to you that there may be cases wherein the reasons conferred on you by your other practical identities. Such as parent, worker, romantic lover etc. may conflict with reasons conferred on you by virtue of your identity as a rational agent. However, your identity as a rational agent is unique in that it makes your other identities possible, it is a more fundamental aspect of your identity making it, also more normatively fundamental. Other practical identities derive their importance and normativity from our rational nature. If humanity is not treated as normative then neither can our other identities be normative. Because of this, our rational nature governs and confers value on our other identities, so that conceptions of our identity that do not accord with the value of humanity/rational nature cannot be rationally acceptable. Perhaps then, there might be a tension between self-interested reasons as a rational agent, and other-regarding reasons as a rational agent. I don't think this is right. Suppose you take yourself as having self-interested reasons to violate rational nature. You take those reasons as worth-pursuing in virtue of selecting them as your ends with your rational capacities. But if those reasons entail violating rational nature, then you are violating the very thing which made those reasons worth-pursuing in the first place. So, by reductio, you cannot intelligibly have reasons which entail violating rational nature.
Another way of seeing that a Kantian constructivist view like mine is in a better position to answer the normative question would be a consideration regarding the regress of one's values. Suppose you wanted to eat ice-cream. The fact that you desire to eat ice-cream isn't a reason (by this I mean a reason sufficient to justify action) to eat the ice-cream. You can ask the normative question "why ought I act according to this desire?". You can weigh it against other desires, such as your desire to lose weight and ask "which of these desires is a better reason to act?". Notice, for any given impression or inclination with the content of some desirable outcome, you again, can ask the normative question. The same point applies to facts external to your will, such as natural properties e.g "do I have a reason to act in accord with this natural property?". For any heteronomous fact, it seems the normative question will keep coming back. Since it will always be possible for the normative question to rear it's ugly head for heteronomous facts, the idea is, for it to be answered, value must be prior to heteronomy. In this sense, reasons are wholly contingent upon one's autonomous rational will, which, I take to be one's reflective capacity to pick out which of one's inclinations, impressions, and aims is a better reason to act. One's rational autonomous will is therefore the source of all reasons, values and normativity. This is the Kantian view.
One worry the realist may have is, this only gets us extrinsic normativity, when what we really want is intrinsic normativity. On the contrary, the test of reflective endorsement shows that human nature is intrinsically normative. To quote Korsgaard;
Within human nature, morality can coherently be challenged from the point of view of self-interest, and self-interest from the point of view of morality. Outside of human nature, there is no normative point of view from which morality can be challenged. But morality can meet the internal challenge that is made from the point of view of self-interest, and it also approves of itself. It is human nature to be governed by morality, and from every point of view, including its own, morality earns its right to govern us. We have therefore no reason to reject our nature, and can allow it to be a law to us. Human nature, moral government included, is therefore normative, and has authority for us.
There is much, much more that can be said here, much more objections that can be made on both sides, I haven't nearly done justice to the case. Note that none of the arguments made in this section are at all original to me, for more, read Korsgaard's Sources of Normativity, and some of her other works.
1.3 The Kantian Argument
Next I'll present the a priori argument for Kantianism and briefly address a couple objections. Here is a good formulation of the argument from Julia Markovits' Moral Reason (Markovits 2014).
1) I value the ends I rationally set myself, and take myself to havereason to pursue them.(2) But I recognize that their value is only conditional: if I did not setthem as my ends, I would have no reason to pursue them.(3) So I must see myself as having a worth-bestowing status.(4) So I must see myself as having an unconditional value—as beingan end in myself and the condition of the value of my chosenends—in virtue of my capacity to bestow worth on my ends byrationally choosing them.(5) I must similarly accord any other rational being the same unconditional value I accord myself.(6) So I should act in a manner that respects this unconditionalvalue: I should use humanity (that is, rational nature), whetherin my own person or in the person of any other, always at the sametime as an end, never merely as means.
(1) is true almost definitionally, we might say it's just constitutive of being a rational agent. (2) is where moral realists will demur (at-lest non-Kantian moral realists), I've already argued, borrowing arguments from Korsgaard, that realism fails to answer the normative question, so we should accept (2). I will provide more reasons in the next section to favor Kantian Constructivism to realism. (3) and (4), when properly understood, are just entailments of the previous premises. (5) is where the Humean and the anti-realist will demur. My goal here is mostly just to show my view is more palatable than Matthew's, not battle the Humean or the anti-realist. So I'll make this quick, a Humean will respond to the argument by saying there is no irrationality in valuing their own rational nature, and their own ends, and not valuing other beings with rational nature. They value it simply because it's theirs. The problem is this is, it seems to me, at worst inconsistent, and at best, intolerably arbitrary. For, it is not your rational nature that is the precondition for you valuing anything, or setting your ends and viewing them as worth-pursuing it is rational nature as such. Any principled reason you can provide, it seems, for valuing your rational capacities would be a reason that would apply, mutatis mutandis, to other beings with rational capacities. There is nothing special about your rational nature, it is rational nature in general that is the source of normativity. We can continue going back and forth in this dialectic, but as said, that isn't my purpose here so I'll just move on.
1.4 Kantian Constructivism is theoretically virtuous
(1) is true almost definitionally, we might say it's just constitutive of being a rational agent. (2) is where moral realists will demur (at-lest non-Kantian moral realists), I've already argued, borrowing arguments from Korsgaard, that realism fails to answer the normative question, so we should accept (2). I will provide more reasons in the next section to favor Kantian Constructivism to realism. (3) and (4), when properly understood, are just entailments of the previous premises. (5) is where the Humean and the anti-realist will demur. My goal here is mostly just to show my view is more palatable than Matthew's, not battle the Humean or the anti-realist. So I'll make this quick, a Humean will respond to the argument by saying there is no irrationality in valuing their own rational nature, and their own ends, and not valuing other beings with rational nature. They value it simply because it's theirs. The problem is this is, it seems to me, at worst inconsistent, and at best, intolerably arbitrary. For, it is not your rational nature that is the precondition for you valuing anything, or setting your ends and viewing them as worth-pursuing it is rational nature as such. Any principled reason you can provide, it seems, for valuing your rational capacities would be a reason that would apply, mutatis mutandis, to other beings with rational capacities. There is nothing special about your rational nature, it is rational nature in general that is the source of normativity. We can continue going back and forth in this dialectic, but as said, that isn't my purpose here so I'll just move on.
I will finish off the case for Kantian Constructivism by arguing that Kantian constructivism is theoretically virtuous. I have already, in part, made the case by arguing for it's explanatory power in answering the normative question. I'll list off some further ways in which Kantian constructivism or Kantianism broadly scores highly on theoretical virtues.
1. Through the Kantian argument and the categorical imperative test, we have an a priori way of testing the correctness or incorrectness of some maxim, thus a firmer ground for moral epistemology and discovering moral truths, as well as a guide for ethical decision-making, couldn't be asked for. Something which, as we'll get to later, is not afforded to the consequentialist. All you need to do is ask whether some maxim or action X involves using rational agents as a mere means, or cannot be rationally endorsed, if universalized. If it fails the first test or both tests X is impermissible, if it fails the second test it is a bad maxim so avoid doing X and you are not permitted to make a principle of doing X.2. Kantian constructivism is reason internalist, connecting moral reasons to our motivational set, thus explaining why they are something we deeply care about, whereas it is a bit more mysterious why we would or should care about external reason-giving properties. Also, making the theory fit better with our background knowledge since we already posit internal reasons such as desires, beliefs, goals etc. Despite this, it also has a boost in explanatory power relative to other anti-realist views since it accounts for many peoples, and most philosophers intuition that there are categorical reasons binding all rational agents including those imperatives that command us not to murder, rape etc.3. There are also potential further problems with reason externalism. One immediate concern might be about the intelligibility of stance-independent external reasons. Lance Bush has made this point in a number of places, reasons seem to be relational properties, conceptually tied to goals, desires or other such internal motivations, as well as consistency relations therein. The concept of non-relational external reasons would then be, no less confused then non-relational tallness, or non-indexical northness. While I believe this is much too strong, and I do at-least have the concept of non-relational external reasons, I'll agree at least that there is something odd about it that makes it hard to wrap ones head around. This is something my view avoids entirely, as reasons are internal, and relational to the practical standpoint of an agent. A similar point would be, following Jonas Olson (Olson 2014), external reasons are very queer to the point that we are better off rejecting them. To briefly present the case, the realist posits that there is a counts-in-favor of relation, that is a relation which gives us reason to perform one action rather than another, I'll call it the C-relation (X counts in favor of Y). Realism is committed to the C-relation obtaining independent of the agent's psychology. The problem is, it's difficult to understand what the truth-maker for the C-relation obtaining would be, if it's not the fact that, given X, the agent has some motivation to Y. The conjunction of there being a C-relation, and it's obtaining not in virtue of any motivational factor seems to be extremely queer, difficult to parse, does not accord with our ordinary experience, and is unlike anything else we know. Maybe you don't buy these arguments, but these are potential issues which internalism side-steps.4. Even if you, for whatever reason, find reasons externalism plausible, there are plenty of realist accounts of Kantian ethics to accommodate such a view, most notably in the works of Allen Wood, Paul Guyer, and Peter Railton.
5. Kantian constructivism is less ontologically profligate. It does not involve positing additional ontological commitments such as non-natural, irreducibly normative facts. The same can be said about moral naturalisms, but naturalist realisms seem to have hard problems of normativity. There is quite alot I can say about moral naturalism, but for now I'll just cite these sources which argue against it (Fitzpatrick 2014) (Parfit 2011) (Dancy 2006) (Enoch 2011).
6. To expand on (5), positing these non-natural irreducibly normative properties, or even natural normative properties does not seem to yield sufficient explanatory benefits so as to off-set it's lack of ontological parsimony. Indeed, Gilbert Harman (Harman 1977) has argued that moral facts are explanatorily impotent. But even if they aren't totally impotent, there's still a question of whether theories invoking moral facts exhibit the requisite explanatory virtues. However, explanations which posit moral facts lack predictive novelty, they do not unify disparate pieces of data under one theoretical framework, and as (Wright 1992) points out, while perhaps being able to explain cognitive effects, fail to explain sensuous effects, interactive effects, and brute physical effects. Making them extremely unimpressive explanations.
7. Kantian ethics has good explanatory power for accounting for our intuitions about human rights, human dignity, what makes us valuable e.g our rational natures, and accurately diagnoses what makes promise-breaking, rape, callousness, and racial and sexual discrimination wrong. Where many other views, including my opponents, fail.
8. Finally, Kantian constructivism is better equipped to address evolutionary debunking concerns. The debunker wants to argue that the evaluative attitudes, and the content of our moral beliefs are formed through unguided evolutionary pressures, because they promote survival and reproduction not because they are truth-tracking. It would be an extraordinary coincidence, if the content of our beliefs and attitudes was formed both by evolutionary pressure's and by objective moral truths'. The Kantian Constructivist does not have to affirm the crazy coincidence, as the realist must, that the content of our beliefs and evaluative attitudes happen to align with independent moral truths. The constructivism I lean towards, holds that evaluative truth is a function of that which is entailed from an agents/valuers practical point of view which includes our evaluative attitudes and beliefs, the content of which, we can happily grant, happened to be shaped by non-truth-tracking evolutionary pressures. While natural selection caused the set of evaluative attitudes and beliefs we started with, we can accurately reason about what is entailed from these beliefs and attitudes, and our broader practical point of view as an agent. As a Kantian, I would make the case that what is entailed through reflective endorsement is that, since all our values, and ends are set via choosing them with our rational capacities, it is constitutive of our practical standpoint as a rational agent that rational nature is the source of all our values, of all our reasons for action. Of course the debunker can then levy the charge that our ability to do such practical and theoretical reasoning to arrive at evaluative truth, is also marred by evolutionary, non-truth-tracking process's but I think it is at the very least, a much harder case to make that accurate practical and theoretical reasoning ability does not correlate with survival benefits.
I will finish off the case for Kantian Constructivism by arguing that Kantian constructivism is theoretically virtuous. I have already, in part, made the case by arguing for it's explanatory power in answering the normative question. I'll list off some further ways in which Kantian constructivism or Kantianism broadly scores highly on theoretical virtues.
5. Kantian constructivism is less ontologically profligate. It does not involve positing additional ontological commitments such as non-natural, irreducibly normative facts. The same can be said about moral naturalisms, but naturalist realisms seem to have hard problems of normativity. There is quite alot I can say about moral naturalism, but for now I'll just cite these sources which argue against it (Fitzpatrick 2014) (Parfit 2011) (Dancy 2006) (Enoch 2011).
6. To expand on (5), positing these non-natural irreducibly normative properties, or even natural normative properties does not seem to yield sufficient explanatory benefits so as to off-set it's lack of ontological parsimony. Indeed, Gilbert Harman (Harman 1977) has argued that moral facts are explanatorily impotent. But even if they aren't totally impotent, there's still a question of whether theories invoking moral facts exhibit the requisite explanatory virtues. However, explanations which posit moral facts lack predictive novelty, they do not unify disparate pieces of data under one theoretical framework, and as (Wright 1992) points out, while perhaps being able to explain cognitive effects, fail to explain sensuous effects, interactive effects, and brute physical effects. Making them extremely unimpressive explanations.
7. Kantian ethics has good explanatory power for accounting for our intuitions about human rights, human dignity, what makes us valuable e.g our rational natures, and accurately diagnoses what makes promise-breaking, rape, callousness, and racial and sexual discrimination wrong. Where many other views, including my opponents, fail.
8. Finally, Kantian constructivism is better equipped to address evolutionary debunking concerns. The debunker wants to argue that the evaluative attitudes, and the content of our moral beliefs are formed through unguided evolutionary pressures, because they promote survival and reproduction not because they are truth-tracking. It would be an extraordinary coincidence, if the content of our beliefs and attitudes was formed both by evolutionary pressure's and by objective moral truths'. The Kantian Constructivist does not have to affirm the crazy coincidence, as the realist must, that the content of our beliefs and evaluative attitudes happen to align with independent moral truths. The constructivism I lean towards, holds that evaluative truth is a function of that which is entailed from an agents/valuers practical point of view which includes our evaluative attitudes and beliefs, the content of which, we can happily grant, happened to be shaped by non-truth-tracking evolutionary pressures. While natural selection caused the set of evaluative attitudes and beliefs we started with, we can accurately reason about what is entailed from these beliefs and attitudes, and our broader practical point of view as an agent. As a Kantian, I would make the case that what is entailed through reflective endorsement is that, since all our values, and ends are set via choosing them with our rational capacities, it is constitutive of our practical standpoint as a rational agent that rational nature is the source of all our values, of all our reasons for action. Of course the debunker can then levy the charge that our ability to do such practical and theoretical reasoning to arrive at evaluative truth, is also marred by evolutionary, non-truth-tracking process's but I think it is at the very least, a much harder case to make that accurate practical and theoretical reasoning ability does not correlate with survival benefits.
Section 2 - Indirect Considerations
2.1 The Epistemic Objection
The first objection I will levy against consequentialism is one I think sits among the most powerful. For this sub-section, I will be taking my cues from the excellent paper 'Consequentialism and Cluelessness' (Lenman 2000). The basic idea being that Consequentialism implies we are hopeless judges of right and wrong. If consequentialism is right, then the right and wrong-making features of actions is the total goodness of their consequences. Yet, it is not possible to really know what the future holds, and in particular the many unforeseen outcomes which will determine whether the given act was right or wrong to perform. You're betting on total outcomes, over periods of time you couldn't possibly know enough about to make informed decisions. Thus, making consequentialism unusable as a practical guide for action, and ultimately lead to moral skepticism. James Lenman gives the following example;Imagine we are in what is now southern Germany a hundred years before the birth of Jesus. A certain bandit, Richard, quite lost to history, has raided a village and killed all its inhabitants bar one. This final survivor, a pregnant woman named Angie, he finds hiding in a house about to be burned. On a whim of compassion, he orders that her life be spared. But perhaps, by consequentialist standards, he should not have done so. For let us suppose Angie was a great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great(..) mother of Adolf Hitler. The millions of Hitler's victims were thus also victims of Richard's sparing of Angie. It must be stressed that there is nothing unlikely about this story. Let us bear in mind that in Hitler's family tree there are 2^100 slots for grandparents of this order. Because that is a number astronomically larger than the then available population of the world, there must be many people occupying more than one such slot. Nonetheless, it is very likely that there were back then large areas, of Europe at least, where a high percentage of the population were ancestors of Hitler (very possibly all those whose bloodlines endured into the twentieth century). Anyone who saved the lives of any of these people or any of their intermediate descendants or who missed some opportunity to kill them before they fathered or mothered the relevant child shares in Richard's wrongdoing.
Now, there are of course, responses consequentialists have to this line of argument. None of them, I believe, work but I will only address a few and leave Matthew to provide his own way of resisting the argument.
The first objection I will look at goes something like; Perhaps there is a small chance of a unforeseen disaster that will result from your act, but equally, there might be unforeseen great benefits that result from the act. Since we have no antecedent reason to favor one over the other, these possibilities will 'cancel each-other out' when deliberating which action you should do, leaving the known consequences to break the tie. This is Shelly Kagan's response to the worry, and as compelling as it seems at first blush, unfortunately, I'm going to have to agree with Lenman that it doesn't work. First off, this response doesn't seem to take seriously enough how likely it is for a given action to have disastrous consequences, this is made more clear when we look at the example I quoted above. It appears stronger than some bare epistemic possibility that for-all-we-know might be true. Second, it doesn't take nearly seriously enough the extreme limitations of our knowledge when it comes to ultimate consequences and their moral value. Suppose we did have complete knowledge of the future, what we'd have to do is look at, at least, two alternatives and possible future histories, (almost certainly much more than 2, but I'm making this assumption to be generous to the consequentialist) where you perform (or fail to perform) some action or other. You'd then calculate the total value of both complete futures and pick the one that is more on-balance optimific. Were this possible, it would require incomprehensibly vast knowledge that isn't available to us, complete propositional knowledge about a endless, or at least astronomically long future which is many orders of magnitude greater than the futures we will live or that our human brain could even begin to comprehend, super complex reasoning from historical counterfactuals and their massive and inscrutable-to-us causal ramifications, as well as knowledge of goods and evils, and entailments and causal relations therein, as well as what weights they should be assigned relative to other goods and evils which could have been instead instantiated had your choice been different. As such, when considering the epistemic distance between what we would do given complete knowledge, and their inscrutability relative to our epistemic situation and how much we do not know, it looks like the knowledge we get from the foreseen consequences of our actions should, by the consequentialists own lights be nigh weightless in comparison.
The next objection, is a possible expansion of the last. Perhaps the consequentialist can use the principle of indifference to avoid running afoul of the epistemic objection and to lend weight to Kagan's response, The principle of indifference goes as follows;
"If we have no evidence favoring any of n set of mutually exclusive jointly exhaustive possibilities, assign each possibility a probability of 1/n"
Using this principle we can justify the canceling-out response stated above. Since we have no evidence favoring any of the n mutually exclusive jointly exhaustive future outcomes, assign each outcome a probability of 1/n and let the foreseen outcomes break the tie. There are problems with this. For one, the unrestricted principle of indifference is false and is known to have paradoxical implications, see Bertrand's Paradox. For two, while perhaps there are restricted principle's of indifference which avoid the paradox, by e.g limiting it to cases where we already know the full range of mutually exclusive, jointly exhaustive possibilities in question. This does not seem to be the case for our knowledge of possible future outcomes. In fact, it's unclear how at all we would partition the possibilities that our actions might lead to, it seems nigh inscrutable given our epistemic situation what the possibility space even could be. Finally, even if we could appeal to the principle of indifference here, you should still be in doubt about what actions you should do, suppose we assume, (Again, extremely generously, as if there are more than two then we should assign a lower probability a-priori to each possibility, according to the principle of indifference) that you are only picking from two alternatives, A and ~A, and you assign the a-priori probability of each complete future being more optimific on the whole a 1/2 chance. Then you factor in the foreseen consequences, which we'll stipulate are optimific if you do A, which we'll call F. So, Pr(A&F > ~A&F) > Pr(~A&F > A&F), in other words the probability that A&F is as a whole optimific is very slightly higher then the probability that ~A&F is as a whole optimific. Perhaps the consequentialist will consider this a victory, but I cannot overstate how slight the probability advantage here is. Since the complete futures and their value properties that stem from A & ~A are, for reasons explicated before, astronomically large, it is therefore astronomically improbable, that F makes any difference whatsoever as to whether A or ~A are as-a-whole optimific. So, while F would give some reason to do A rather than ~A, it would be an extremely weak reason, and again, this is even granting the super generous assumptions the consequentialist can make use of, which we shouldn't.
The last objection I'll look at is the tu quoque objection. The objection, also from Kagan, is that if the Epistemic argument is sound, it attacks not only consequentialism but other normative views which have any plausibility. This is so, because every sane normative view holds that consequences are relevant to the moral status of actions, so we too should be in the dark about what actions we should do. Whether this claim is true, depends on what is meant. It is certainly true that every sane view, mine included, holds that at-least some consequences are minimally morally relevant to which actions are better to do. What is not shared however, is that all consequences, including those which are long-term, indirect and unintended, even in part, determine the right or wrongness of actions. But it is the latter claim that is needed in order to mount the tu quoque objection. I may well hold that at least some consequences are morally relevant, but this does not entail that I think all consequences, especially ones which could not be anticipated, factor into the moral equation when deliberating what one should do, and it certainly does not entail that I view consequences as determining what makes an action right and wrong. That would be other things, such as rights-based concerns, a good will, the maxims the agent acted on, or the prima facie duties which are violated. Insofar as consequences factor into our moral decisions, it is the visible consequences which matter, a difference which is morally irrelevant by the consequentialists lights.
Of course, it may be pointed out that the epistemic objection is not a knockdown defeater for consequentialism. Consequentialism may be true, and we truly are hopeless judges of right or wrong. That's true, that is indeed possible, but for most of us who seek practical guidance for actions, and find moral skepticism unattractive, the epistemic objection shows consequentialism simply isn't a live option. At the very least, knowledge of right and wrong, is a feature of the moral landscape we take for granted, but is one consequentialism is powerless to account for.
2.2 The Moral Demandingness Objection
This next objection against consequentialism is a common one, which I'll dub the "Moral Demandingness" objection. It is as it sounds, the objection being that consequentialism (for simplicities sake I'll just look at hedonic act utilitarianism which is Adelstein's view) is too demanding. There are two versions of this claim. The first is the stronger claim that utilitarianism is so demanding that, similar to the epistemic objection, it is virtually useless as a guide for action. The second, is the weaker claim that utilitarianism is so demanding that it just fails to track our ordinary moral practice and beliefs. I think both claims are right, but I only need the second for the objection to form part of my abductive case against consequentialism. Consider how much more you could be doing right now to increase well-being, instead of reading this blogpost, you could be working and studying to become a doctor and move to a country where there is a shortage of doctors, or an epidemic of illness or injury, you could be constantly working to promote broader political change either by aiming towards becoming a UN member or a domestic politician, or doing activist work and starting fundraising orgs, among a plethora of other things. Relevant to this, is Peter Singer's famous argument (Singer 1997), if we see a child drowning in a shallow pond, we would immediately feel ourselves to have a moral obligation to save them. The excuses that someone else could do it, and that it is a minor inconvenience are unacceptable. So, since it is not morally relevant how far away the child is, equally we should feel ourselves obligated, to donate items or support charity. Indeed, every-time you purchase luxuries, such as going to a night-out at a restaurant, going to the movies, buying a game. That decision can be weighed against what you could have done, the lives you could have possibly saved, and the well-being of the world you could increase using that money. Since you could be doing these things, and these things would increase well-being much more than your current course of action, utilitarianism finds you blameworthy for not doing them. Yet, in our ordinary moral practice and our beliefs we do not find them blameworthy. We take it that charity, while good and praiseworthy, is not obligatory, and we are permitted to spend our resources on personal projects, luxuries, and loved ones. Once again, we might even endorse the stronger claim that, since all of our individual actions are such that we could have done more to maximize well-being, and utilitarianism demands this of us, utilitarianism cannot be a practical guide for human decision-making. It demands too much to be a useful guide.
I will just consider two responses for now. The first is the tu quoque response. Every plausible ethic runs afoul of Singer's argument, because every plausible ethic would agree that you should save the child in the shallow pond. This is true, as far as it goes. What is not true however, is that on every plausible ethic, there is no relevant difference between saving the drowning child and constantly weighing everyday decisions you make against what you could be doing to save lives and increase well-being. Kantian ethics is, or can be, more lax and flexible when it comes to positive duties. You have a perfect duty to treat rational agents as ends in themselves, never as mere means, that is non-negotiable. You also have imperfect duties to help people when in need, and cultivate your capacities so that you have a virtuous disposition. But the thing with imperfect duties, is there is no specific pre-defined set of rules on how to follow them, such that if you fail, you would be violating your moral duties. Constantly donating to charity would be one way you can fulfill your imperfect duties, but it is not the only way. While, it would be impermissible to make a principle of not donating to charity, there is no particular time T such that you are obligated to donate to charity. I believe a Rossian intuitionist can help themselves to a similar response, as can other non-consequentialist views e.g virtue ethics. What about the drowning child case? In that case, you are directly observing a rational agent, (or potential rational agent) drown. This difference is indeed relevant on Kantian ethics, and most other non-consequentialist views, since one of the most important parts of these views is the intentional component. In not donating to charity, it does not follow that you are intending to permit children to squalor, starve, and languish. In the drowning case, it's plausible that, by failing to save them, you must judge them as not worthy of saving, thus not respecting their autonomy as an end in itself which is impermissible. At least, you would have to cultivate very bad dispositions and character traits to actively not care enough about saving the child that is within your vision, which is plausibly impermissible.
The next objection, is to accommodate human psychological limitations. Since ought implies can, and perhaps we can't always maximize well-being, utilitarianism will not demand this. Maybe if we do too much and sacrifice too much of our resources, this will make ourselves less happy and healthy and thus lessens our ability to do good in the long-term, leading to worse outcomes. I worry this doesn't seem to really engage with the objection. The question we are interested in here, is which individual actions when assessing a set of options, you are obligated to do. If you have two possible actions, and action1 will maximize well-being & minimize suffering, and action2 will not (at-least relative to action1), act utilitarianism implies we are obligated to do action1, always. Yes, you can also weigh concerns such as those regarding your own health, and happiness, and that of your families, but those concerns are surely miniscule when compared to the quality of life you can (indeed, it is the case that you can) increase for those living in squalor, any time you deliberate between whether you should help yourself to luxuries such as the newest video game, or donate resources or said money to starving children in Africa. It is surely the case, if any fact about the consequences of our actions is obvious, that the well-being gained both short-term and long-term is greater if you donate. As for the concern that it will weaken your ability to do good, insofar as that is talking about your own personal motivation, it's plausible that act utilitarianism should find you blameworthy for having such a weak motivation that is not sufficiently responsive to moral concerns. It doesn't seem plausible that we shouldn't find weak motivations blameworthy, our judgement of whether an action is right or wrong should be independent of that. Suppose we cede ground to this response and admit that always maximizing utility is not psychologically possible, and spending some resources on ourselves is necessary for us to be of benefit to others. It is still undeniable, that virtually everyone, including utilitarian's themselves, could be doing far more than they are, and are thus failing to meet their obligations, thus utilitarianism remains more demanding then our ordinary practice and beliefs.
I will just consider two responses for now. The first is the tu quoque response. Every plausible ethic runs afoul of Singer's argument, because every plausible ethic would agree that you should save the child in the shallow pond. This is true, as far as it goes. What is not true however, is that on every plausible ethic, there is no relevant difference between saving the drowning child and constantly weighing everyday decisions you make against what you could be doing to save lives and increase well-being. Kantian ethics is, or can be, more lax and flexible when it comes to positive duties. You have a perfect duty to treat rational agents as ends in themselves, never as mere means, that is non-negotiable. You also have imperfect duties to help people when in need, and cultivate your capacities so that you have a virtuous disposition. But the thing with imperfect duties, is there is no specific pre-defined set of rules on how to follow them, such that if you fail, you would be violating your moral duties. Constantly donating to charity would be one way you can fulfill your imperfect duties, but it is not the only way. While, it would be impermissible to make a principle of not donating to charity, there is no particular time T such that you are obligated to donate to charity. I believe a Rossian intuitionist can help themselves to a similar response, as can other non-consequentialist views e.g virtue ethics. What about the drowning child case? In that case, you are directly observing a rational agent, (or potential rational agent) drown. This difference is indeed relevant on Kantian ethics, and most other non-consequentialist views, since one of the most important parts of these views is the intentional component. In not donating to charity, it does not follow that you are intending to permit children to squalor, starve, and languish. In the drowning case, it's plausible that, by failing to save them, you must judge them as not worthy of saving, thus not respecting their autonomy as an end in itself which is impermissible. At least, you would have to cultivate very bad dispositions and character traits to actively not care enough about saving the child that is within your vision, which is plausibly impermissible.
The next objection, is to accommodate human psychological limitations. Since ought implies can, and perhaps we can't always maximize well-being, utilitarianism will not demand this. Maybe if we do too much and sacrifice too much of our resources, this will make ourselves less happy and healthy and thus lessens our ability to do good in the long-term, leading to worse outcomes. I worry this doesn't seem to really engage with the objection. The question we are interested in here, is which individual actions when assessing a set of options, you are obligated to do. If you have two possible actions, and action1 will maximize well-being & minimize suffering, and action2 will not (at-least relative to action1), act utilitarianism implies we are obligated to do action1, always. Yes, you can also weigh concerns such as those regarding your own health, and happiness, and that of your families, but those concerns are surely miniscule when compared to the quality of life you can (indeed, it is the case that you can) increase for those living in squalor, any time you deliberate between whether you should help yourself to luxuries such as the newest video game, or donate resources or said money to starving children in Africa. It is surely the case, if any fact about the consequences of our actions is obvious, that the well-being gained both short-term and long-term is greater if you donate. As for the concern that it will weaken your ability to do good, insofar as that is talking about your own personal motivation, it's plausible that act utilitarianism should find you blameworthy for having such a weak motivation that is not sufficiently responsive to moral concerns. It doesn't seem plausible that we shouldn't find weak motivations blameworthy, our judgement of whether an action is right or wrong should be independent of that. Suppose we cede ground to this response and admit that always maximizing utility is not psychologically possible, and spending some resources on ourselves is necessary for us to be of benefit to others. It is still undeniable, that virtually everyone, including utilitarian's themselves, could be doing far more than they are, and are thus failing to meet their obligations, thus utilitarianism remains more demanding then our ordinary practice and beliefs.
Another common objection to utilitarianism is that it entails unintuitive ethical beliefs, and poorly accounts for our intuitions in a number of ways. There are famous thought experiments which tease-out unintuitive implications of utilitarianism, the most well-known ones are from Nozick, and those are the utility monster and the Experience machine. While, I think these have some force, and I do certainly share the anti-utilitarian intuitions in these cases, as do most, these cases are also very abstract and strange and perhaps we have good reason to distrust our intuitions in these strange hypothetical cases. There are also, strange, abstract hypotheticals one could come up with where deontology appears to get it wrong according to the intuitions of most people, so were we to play this game, it would be, roughly, a wash.
Another response might also be to appeal to rule consequentialism. Rather than doing actions which maximize utility, you should follow rules which are justified in virtue of maximizing utility. Raping coma patients violates a rule. It occurs to me that the consequentialist might make use of this to respond to the epistemic and demandingness objection to some extent as well. Problem; rule utilitarianism collapses into act utilitarianism or is non-consequentialist. Suppose you have a rule, "Do not lie", this rule is justified because it generally maximizes utility, but then you have a case where there is a Nazi at the door looking for Jews. Why would I not break the rule in this case? If the motivation for the rule in the first place, was that following it generally maximizes utility, why follow it in the instances where it doesn't? Perhaps the rule utilitarian could argue, that if breaking the rule in this case maximizes utility, then rule utilitarianism wouldn't have in the first place, picked this rule but a different one. This won't work. If on rule consequentialism, the reason you pick one rule rather than another is because it maximizes utility/is overall optimific, then, for any rule you have, if there is a case where violating it maximizes utility, you amend it and have a better rule such that, the action which maximizes utility does not violate it. If you have a rule where following it maximizes utility 80% of the time, surely you can have a better rule, one where following it maximizes utility 100% of the time. So, you keep amending the rule, until it covers every circumstance where the act utilitarian would lie, steal, kill, and rape thus making the views extensionally equivalent. Otherwise, you do not adjust the rule to accommodate cases where violating it maximizes utility, but in that case the view looks pretty non-consequentialist. You'd just be following a set of rules even in cases where doing so is not optimific, and the motivation for not breaking the rules in those cases is undercut by the very same motivation for having those rules in the first place. There is more that can be said here, but I will not say it yet, unless Matthew pushes back..
Here's another one. The act of gang-raping and painlessly killing a homeless woman is an action that plausibly can, or at the very least we can reasonably stipulate will, maximize total well-being. The gang rape will cause pain for one person, and generate pleasure for multiple people and the woman will not experience immense trauma after-words since she will be painlessly killed. Painlessly killing her will also prevent the miserable life she can reasonably be expected to have even had you not done the gang-rape. We can also stipulate, and as well it can be reasonably inferred given her predicament, that she does not have family or loved ones who will greatly suffer for her having been killed. While it is plausible that the disutility of the woman being raped is higher than the pleasure each rapist gets, it's far from obvious that the total known utility gained from the act is such that it does not outweigh the disutility. The utilitarian should at-least be in doubt that the act as currently stated is immoral, and in the case where I stipulate that the good outcomes of the act outweigh the bad outcomes the utilitarian should judge it as good. The utilitarian can make the same responses to this as the previous example, and I would levy the same responses to those responses.
Here's another. You aren't permitted to sacrifice yourself to save a friend with poorer life conditions than you on utilitarianism. Normally we would think it is supererogatory to sacrifice your life to save a friend who will live a slightly less happy life than yours. On utilitarianism, it's forbidden since you are actually minimizing utility. I'll just point out that this one also isn't an abstract vacuum scenario, it's surely not someone no-one ever has or will encounter and totally alien to human life.
Here's another. Suppose a thief tries to steal grandma's purse but in the process of doing so, pulls her away and saves her from being hit by a car. On consequentialism, since it's only the consequences of an action that matter, the action of the thief was good, intuitively, it was not a good action since the thief's intentions were wrong.
Here's another; You have a rich friend who is on his death bed and his dying wish is for you to make sure his fortune goes to his son. It is overall more optimific to lie and say his wish was for his fortune to go to charity. On utilitarianism, you therefore should lie. This is unintuitive.
Finally, a classic. On utilitarianism, it's not impermissible, in fact it's probably obligatory, for a doctor to kidnap someone off the street to harvest their organs and save 5 others.
I could go on, but instead of continuing with utilitarianisms' unintuitive answers to specific ethical questions, I'll end this sub-section by listing 4 general ways in which utilitarianism seems unintuitive.
1. Utilitarianism fails to sufficiently account for human dignity and reduces ethics to a numbers game. Either by doing arithmetic to save the most lives, or calculating "units of utility" where if some threshold is crossed, it's ok to murder someone. By most people's intuitions, mine included, this seems to miss the point of ethics.
2. Utilitarianism is not egalitarian, nor does it entail justice or fairness. The utility monster thought experiment reveals this to some extent, showing we should privilege the experiences of a being who can feel much higher pleasures, even over all of humanity assuming the difference is so great. A less abstract scenario would be, suppose we pass a legislation which directly and intentionally is racist and greatly reduces the living conditions for black people, but at the same time greatly increases the living conditions for both rich and white people, so that more utility is gained on net. On utilitarianism, such a legislation would be good.
3. Utilitarianism fails to accurately diagnose what makes actions wrong. There seems to be something that makes breaking promises, discriminating on the basis of race and sex, violating bodily autonomy, cruelty, and lack of sensitivity to the plights of others wrong, that is not reducible to consequences.
4. Utilitarianism does not sufficiently account for intentions when it comes to judging moral actions.
The utilitarian's claim to theoretical simplicity is not indubitable and can be questioned. Perhaps we might say, while the utilitarian can help themselves to some initial description under which their theory appears simple, it might be highly complex when we investigate exactly what such a description actually implies. Utilitarianism states that we ought to maximize utility, but for this to have content, we need to specify what utility it is we are maximizing so we need to posit further concepts, most notably the phenomenal state of pleasure and the claim that it has moral value, and we also need a way of understanding what it is to maximize it, so we need to specify a standard by which we measure it. Then we specify what it is for there to be disutility which requires invoking yet more concepts, the phenomenal state pain and it's having moral disvalue, and a standard by which we can weigh the utility of pleasures against the disutility of pains so that we can figure out which action is right and wrong. This gets yet more complex when we reason about how we apply these concepts and calculations to calculate the total value of long term outcomes. Additionally while it seems simple to claim only one thing, pleasure, is coextensive with goodness, there is a sense in which that claim is unmodest since it involves being committed to the falsity of a massive set of propositions that state any property P is the good rather than, or in addition to pleasure. I'm not going to make the claim that utilitarianism is less simple. The upshot here is just that assessing theoretical content is very complicated, and it is therefore extremely non-obvious that utilitarianism comes out as the most theoretically simple theory overall.
I can even grant that utilitarianism is more simple in terms of it's theoretical content, even so this consideration is far from a game-changer. Even if utilitarianism wins on theoretical simplicity, it probably loses relative to my view, on ontological parsimony, since presumably we'd need to posit some strange irreducible external property of stance-independent badness that is conferred on pains, and stance-independent goodness conferred on pleasure. This is both ontologically uneconomical, and very metaphysically strange such that many people, myself included, have a hard time understanding what is even being said or picked out. Kantian constructivism, on the other hand, does not require these strange ontological commitments. The utilitarian can perhaps weaken the force of this point by being a moral naturalist, but as stated in section 1, moral naturalism has problems of normativity. Furthermore, the most plausible form of moral naturalism, which I would say is Neo-Aristotelianism, is hostile to utilitarian commitments. Finally, even granting utilitarianism theoretical simplicity, this does not off-set it's poor explanatory power when it comes to our intuitions and the other objections I laid out.
1. Phenomenal introspection is the only reliable way of forming moral beliefs.2. Phenomenal introspection informs us of only hedonismTherefore, hedonism is true — pleasure is the only good. Phenomenal introspection involves reflecting on experiences and forming beliefs about what they’re like (e.g. I conclude that my yellow wall is bright and that itching is uncomfortable). Premise 2 is true — when we reflect on pleasure we conclude that it’s good and that pain is bad. Premise 1 is also true — other moral beliefs are arrived at through intuitions, but those are unreliable given that many people’s intuitions throughout history have supported slavery and genocide — and people’s moral intuitions lead to totally different disagreement. If some method of forming beliefs constantly contradicts itself and concludes genocide is good, then it’s unreliable, especially when we have no evolutionary reason to think that it’s reliable. However, phenomenal introspection is reliable; beings who can form reliable beliefs about their mental states are fitter than ones who can’t.
I'll make this brief. Premise 1 is extremely dubious for two reasons. For one, a friend of mine on his blog, has argued, succinctly I believe, that phenomenal introspection does not get you to moral beliefs about the stance-independent badness of pain and goodness of pleasure, the very notion that it does, is confused. The belief is formed on the basis of a second-order judgement about one's phenomenology which requires referencing a certain representational, most likely inferential process of forming the attitude and the folk psychological framework the attitude is embedded in as well as presumably, a set of background beliefs. Insofar as these further assumptions are invoked, contra Matthew, there is no immunity to debunking considerations. Check out my friends article, and his second response to Matthew for more detail and Lance Bush makes a similar point here.
For two, even if phenomenal introspection is a reliable process for forming true moral beliefs, it's implausible that it's the only reliable process. It is strange that Matthew, a phenomenal conservative would argue that moral intuition is unreliable for forming moral beliefs. Regardless, my case for Kantian constructivism does not rest on intuition, and Kantian constructivism implies certain moral beliefs. I've already provided an a priori argument for Kantian ethics, as well as abductive considerations, and while there is disagreement on the arguments' respective soundness and cogency, surely a priori arguments and abductive arguments are a reliable guide to truth.
The last argument is that there are irrational desires, and we have powerful intuitions that desires for well-being/pleasure are inherently worth pursuing, and failing to pursue well-being is irrational.
This is typically motivated by an appeal to certain examples or thought experiments. I'll once again just quote Matthew.
A person doesn’t care what happens to them on a future Tuesday. When Tuesday rolls around, they care a great deal about what happens to them; they’re just indifferent to happenings on a future Tuesday. This person is given the following gamble — they can either get a pinprick on Monday or endure the fires of hell on Tuesday. If they endure the fires of hell on Tuesday, this will not merely affect what happens this Tuesday — every Tuesday until the sun burns out shall be accompanied by unfathomable misery — the likes of which can’t be imagined, next to which the collective misery of history’s worst atrocities is but a paltry, vanishing scintilla.
Another example.
Suppose a person hates picking grass -- they derive no enjoyment from it and it causes them a good deal of suffering. Suppose on top of this that they are terribly allergic to grass -- picking it causes them to develop painful ulcers that itch and hurt. However, despite this, and despite never enjoying it, they spend hours a day picking grass.
Last one.
A person is indifferent to suffering that’s on the left side of their body. They still feel suffering on the left side of their body just as vividly and intensely as it would be on the right side of their body. Indeed, we can even imagine that they feel it a hundred times more vividly and intensely — it wouldn’t matter. However, they do not care about the left side suffering.
I'll note that it's not argued for, or explained why these desires are irrational. We are just supposed to share the intuition that they are irrational. The idea then is since on hedonic utilitarianism pleasure is all that is good, and all that is bad is pain, utilitarianism has tremendous explanatory power for explaining why these cases are irrational, it is because maximizing well-being is the only goal worthy of rational pursuit.
I'll make a couple points in response. Firstly, I simply do not share the intuition that these cases are irrational. It is certainly true that they all involve very bizarre desires for a rational agent to possess, but this does not entail that they are making a mistake. I do not know what Matthew means by irrationality, but I take it that irrationality is a means-end incoherence from one's practical point of view, or inconsistency relations between one's beliefs, desire's, goals etc. There is no inconsistency here, just strangeness. Even if they are being irrational, it's quite unclear to me what the truth-maker for that claim would be if there is no incoherence.
Secondly, it is precisely because these scenario's are so strange that we should not trust our intuition that they are irrational. These cases are so strange that it is impossible to imagine what it is like to be in the brain states of such weird agents. Who's to say they cannot be so constituted that, were you in their perspective, you would not judge them of making any error.
As a general point, it's not clear to me how hendonism/utilitarianism actually gets a boost in explanatory power here relative to my view. It only explains these cases in the sense that, given the truth of hedonism, they would be irrational. But it's not actually explaining what makes them irrational, if the answer is just "because well-being is necessarily worth-pursuing" that seems to me to just reassert the content of hedonism. Whereas my view explains why certain actions are irrational by drawing out an inconsistency from the practical standpoint of the agent.
Conclusion
To summarize the case, Kantian constructivism offers the most satisfying answer to the normative question, there is an a priori argument for Kantian ethics, and Kantian constructivism is theoretically virtuous as it explains our intuitions, it accounts for moral knowledge, it is in a better position to avoid debunking considerations, while being less ontologically committing, and not taking a strange view like externalism about reasons. Utilitarianism runs afoul of the epistemic objection, which is not only disastrous for moral epistemology but implies we are hopeless judges of right and wrong, it is too demanding, it fails to properly account for our intuitions in many ways, and it's motivations are manifestly insufficient to off-set the costs. I conclude that we should be Kantian constructivists and reject utilitarianism. I look forward to Matthew's rejoinder.
To summarize the case, Kantian constructivism offers the most satisfying answer to the normative question, there is an a priori argument for Kantian ethics, and Kantian constructivism is theoretically virtuous as it explains our intuitions, it accounts for moral knowledge, it is in a better position to avoid debunking considerations, while being less ontologically committing, and not taking a strange view like externalism about reasons. Utilitarianism runs afoul of the epistemic objection, which is not only disastrous for moral epistemology but implies we are hopeless judges of right and wrong, it is too demanding, it fails to properly account for our intuitions in many ways, and it's motivations are manifestly insufficient to off-set the costs. I conclude that we should be Kantian constructivists and reject utilitarianism. I look forward to Matthew's rejoinder.
Nice post -- looking forward to the full dialogue!
ReplyDeleteA quick question: why do you take the conclusion of the "a priori Kantian argument" to be distinctively Kantian? Utilitarians agree you should value everyone as ends, and none as mere means (i.e. counting for zero in themselves). Kantians have a distinctive interpretation of what it takes to treat someone as an end in themselves, but there's nothing in the argument you gave that supports that particular interpretation (over utilitarian alternatives). It's an argument against egoism, not an argument for Kantianism over utilitarianism. Cf. https://www.utilitarianism.net/objections-to-utilitarianism/mere-means
hanks for the comment, professor. Apologies for the delayed response.
DeleteI think the Kantian argument is certainly hostile to utilitarianism. I take the Kantian argument to entail that rational nature is the only thing that has unconditional value (and is the source of all value). So, as an ex. not even pleasure or maximizing utility, has unconditional value, it only has value given that you choose to set it as your end. So, if you violate rational nature for the sake of maximizing utility you'd be violating the source that confers value on that end in the first place.
Ends-in-themselves in the sense being used, I don't believe just means 'they don't count for zero'; I agree that on utilitarianism no-one counts for zero and everyone's interests are calculated equally and impartially. But I think the argument concludes that we are ends-in-themselves, understood in a way that accords unconditional value, such that violating it for any heteronomous end can't be permitted.