The Role(s) of Rules in Consequentialist Ethics

After preliminaries concerning different accounts of the good and the distinction between actual-consequence consequentialism and expected-value consequentialism, this paper explains why consequentialists should prescribe a moral decision procedure dominated by rules. However, act consequentialists deny rules have a role in the criterion of moral rightness. But prescribing a decision procedure dominated by rules and then denying rules a role in the criterion of moral rightness seems problematic. Rule consequentialism gives rules roles first in the decision procedure agents should use and second in the criterion of moral rightness. But giving rules this second role has attracted objections, some of which are outlined and answered here. The final section of the paper considers some recent developments.

Failures of Stability

This chapter argues against the Universal Disagreement thesis. Some possible communities use moral language, but do not have substantive disagreements with others who use their moral language differently. These are cases where the parties both use their terms with a moral role, but instead of differing over which substantive theory they follow when applying their moral terms (as in the original Moral Twin Earth cases), they differ in which additional roles they use these terms with. This is consistent with intuitions about Moral Twin Earth cases, but shows that they can lead to overgeneralizations about the semantic effects of a moral role. Instead, what needs to be explained by a meta-semantics for moral language is a more limited claim. Realists will have to show that moral terms are highly stable, but that it is possible to use a term such as ‘right’ with a moral role without referring to moral rightness.

Magnetism and Practical Terms

Reference magnetism is an appealing meta-semantic theory for moral realists, since it applies to properties that are metaphysically elite, and the idea that moral properties are among the elite properties is an attractive one for realists. They can also appeal to it to explain both the scope and limits of the stability of moral terms. Moral terms are highly stable, because users of moral language who don’t apply their word ‘right’ to moral rightness will still refer to it, rather than non-elite properties that fit their use better. However, this does not imply that all users of moral language refer to moral rightness. If there are other morally relevant properties besides rightness that are also primitively elite, then it is possible for some users to refer to these. Realists can use reference magnetism to explain why moral terms are highly stable, without committing themselves to the Universal Disagreement thesis. These insights can also be implemented within a contextualist semantics for practical language.

Kant and Some Critics

Kant argues that an understanding of the relation between morality and rational agency reveals the nature of moral rightness. Moral principles give us reasons for acting apart from our feeling or preferences. They give us reasons that apply to all rational agents alike. Principles that embody such reasons conform to a categorical imperative that states a universal law for all rational agents. Against critics who contend that this universal law is too general to tell us anything useful about right and wrong, Kant argues that it requires us to treat rational agents as ends in themselves, not to be sacrificed simply for the sake of other people’s goals. This attitude of mutual respect among rational agents is the basis for a moral and social order that realizes human freedom.

Voluntarism, Naturalism, and Moral Realism

Pufendorf criticizes Hobbes from a voluntarist point of view. He argues that if there were no divine commands, Hobbes would be right to derive morality from self-interest. Divine commands introduce the element of morality that goes beyond self-interest. Suarez is wrong, therefore, to believe in objective morality without divine commands. Shaftesbury attacks both egoists and voluntarists as ‘nominal moralists’ who overlook the objective reality of moral rightness and wrongness. Cudworth defends this position, arguing that any attempt to derive genuine morality from commands leads to a vicious regress. Clarke argues, from a position similar to Cudworth’s, that Hobbes cannot consistently maintain his view that nothing is morally right or wrong without enforcement by an organized state.

Scotus and Ockham

Scotus and Ockham reject the Aristotelian outlook, as Aquinas presents it, and develop a voluntarist account of the will and of morality. In their view, determination by practical reason does not ensure free will; a free will must be wholly undetermined by reason. Nor can it be determined by the desire for one’s ultimate good; the impulse towards the right is separate from the impulse towards happiness. If we apply these principles to the freedom of the divine will, we find that God could not be free if the nature of right and wrong were independent of the divine will. We must infer that moral rightness and wrongness are ultimately constituted by divine commands.

Berkeley, Expressivism, and Pragmatism

There is a long‑standing dispute among scholars concerning Berkeley’s supposed commitment to an emotivist theory of meaning as the very first (and an early modern) instance of non‑cognitivism. According to this position, the domains of religious and moral language do not refer to facts about the world, but rather express the emotional attitudes of religious or moral language users. Some scholars involved in the dispute argue for taking Berkeley to be an emotivist (non‑cognitivist), while others hold that we should not do so. This paper puts forward an interpretation that lends support to the non‑cognitivist reading of his stance, but in expressivist rather than emotivist terms. It argues that the label “expressivism” does more justice to the textual evidence concerning his understanding of moral language, as what is distinctive where this philosopher is concerned is his interest in explaining the nature of our practice of employing moral language (i.e. how we come to formulate moral statements as expressions of our non‑referential attitudes, and the meta‑level considerations pertaining to morality associated with this), rather than whether morality is just a matter of our emotions or feelings (i.e. such first‑order considerations about morality as whether moral rightness and wrongness correspond merely to our emotional states).

We Can Have Our Buck and Pass It, Too

Chapter 8 argues against the view that the moral rightness of an act is not a reason to perform it, and our reasons are instead the features that make the act right. Philosophers typically defend this view by noting that it seems redundant to take rightness to be an additional reason, once it has been acknowledged that the right-making features are already reasons. The author shows that this argument dramatically overgeneralizes, ruling out all cases in which two or more reasons are arranged in relationships of metaphysical constitution. She then proposes an alternative way of thinking about these metaphysical hierarchies: Rather than assuming that at most one of the facts in each hierarchy is the “real” reason, bearing all the normative weight, it should be accepted that these facts can all be genuine reasons, whose normative weight is shared in virtue of the metaphysical relationships between them. Some tests are offered that can be used to determine which facts occur in metaphysical hierarchies with shared weight, and it is argued that the fact that an act is morally right passes the tests. The author then explains what she takes to be some kernels of truth underlying the redundancy argument, arguing that these phenomena are pragmatic, not metaphysical.

Lyric, Rhythm, and Non-alignment in the Second Verse of Kendrick Lamar’s “Momma”

After twenty years of published analyses on rap lyrics and flow, a divide between music-oriented and literature-oriented writing remains. It is only slightly hyperbolic to suggest that the former analyzes rap music as music without text while the latter analyzes it as text without music. This article begins bridging that divide by relating details of Kendrick Lamar’s rhythmic delivery to the meaning of his lyrics, focusing on the second verse of “Momma” from To Pimp a Butterfly (2015). In particular, I present methods for measuring and visualizing the alignment of syllable onsets (i.e., the flow) with events in the accompanying instrumental streams (i.e., the beat). Subsequently, in examining three lines of the verse, I document an analogy between flow-beat alignment and topics of vitality, moral rightness, and knowledge in the lyrics. In demonstrating one way in which rhythmic delivery can affirm the expressive meaning of lyrics, I hope to provide tools that enable hip hop scholars interested in rhythm, rhyme, and meaning to sometimes talk to each other rather than past each other.

What’s wrong with an epistocratic council?

Epistemic justifications of democracy affirm the comparative quality of democracies’ decisions. The challenge faced by those who endorse such views is to explain why we should prefer standard democratic institutions to some sort of epistocracy or rule of the wisest. This article takes up this challenge by assessing the epistemic potential of an epistocratic council, as imagined by Jason Brennan. Members of such council would be selected through competency exams, the required competencies being defined by the whole population. The argument defended in this article is that the potential gain in instrumental rationality that such an institution could offer under certain questionable conditions would be outweighed by the increased risks of misrule and involuntary biases if such council has decision-making or veto power. In comparison with the existing literature, this argument stresses the importance of moral rightness, here defined as impartiality, in the epistemic assessment of democracy and its alternatives. The article then ends with a qualified assessment of purely epistemic justifications of democratic inclusion, which could be insufficient to reject implausible but imaginable forms of epistemically justifiable disenfranchisement.