Can Parfit’s Appeal to Incommensurabilities Block the Continuum Argument for the Repugnant Conclusion?

Blocking the Continuum Argument for the Repugnant Conclusion by an appeal to incommensurabilities in value, as suggested in Parfit (2016), is an attractive option. But incommensurabilities (‘imprecise equalities’ in Parfit’s terminology) that need to be posited to achieve this result have to be very thoroughgoing – ‘persistent’ in the sense to be explained. While this persistency is highly atypical, it can be explained if incommensurability is interpreted on the lines of the fitting-attitudes analysis of value, as permissibility of divergent attitudes towards the items that are being compared. More precisely, it can be interpreted as parity – as the permissibility of opposing preferences with respect to the compared items. This account makes room for the persistency phenomena. Nevertheless, some of Parfit’s substantive value assumptions must be given up, to avoid implausible implications. In particular, his Simple View regarding the marginal value of added lives cannot be retained.

The Logical Consequence of Fitting Attitudes

Any fitting-attitude (FA) analysis which understands value ultimately in terms of reasons and pro- and con-attitudes will have limited wiggle room if it is to respect the kind of radical division between good and good-for that earlier chapters have outlined. Essentially, its proponents can either introduce two different normative notions, one relating to good and the other to good-for, or distinguish two kinds of attitude, one corresponding to the analysis of good and the other corresponding to the analysis of good-for. ‘The Logical Consequence of Fitting Attitudes’ outlines why the latter, ‘attitudinal’ approach is preferable. Unfortunately, the attitudinal approach faces a challenging problem: the logical consequence argument. According to it, the attitudinal approach has the unwelcome consequence that whatever is good for someone is also, necessarily, non-relationally good. That is bad news—especially if you are a value dualist. The next chapter (Chap. 8) is devoted to resolving this issue.

Fitting Attitudes and Forgiveness

In philosophical discussions of wrongdoing, it is common to find people saying things such as, “If a person has been wronged, she should resent the wrongdoer.” Writers don’t always say why, but, if one wished to defend the claim, a promising place to turn would be to fitting attitude theories of value: One should feel anger or resentment, because that is the fitting (or accurate) response to wrongdoing. Fitting attitude theory can also help explain why some reasons for forgiving strike us as the wrong kinds of reasons. However, in spite of its attractions, I argue that fitting attitude theory fails to support the claim that those who have been wronged should be angry or resentful rather than forgiving. The argument highlights gaps that must be filled by any theory that attempts to move from judgments of fittingness to full-blown moral judgments.

Fittingness Objections to Consequentialism

New work in the foundations of ethics—extending the fitting attitudes analysis of value to yield a broader notion of normative fittingness as a fundamental normative concept—provides us with the resources to clarify and renew the force of traditional character-based objections to consequentialism. According to these revamped fittingness objections, a moral theory (e.g., consequentialism) has implications for what will qualify as fitting attitudes, and as a morally fitting psychology more broadly. If a theory’s implications regarding the fittingness facts are implausible, then this can be taken to cast doubt on the truth of the theory. After clarifying the general structure of fittingness objections, and clearly establishing how they can make character-based concerns relevant to our assessment of the truth of a moral theory like consequentialism, the chapter surveys some paradigmatic fittingness objections, showing how consequentialism can be defended against them.

Goodness-Fixing Isn’t Good Enough: A Reply to McHugh and Way

According to McHugh and Way, reasoning is a person-level attitude revision that is regulated by its constitutive aim of getting fitting attitudes. They claim that this account offers an explanation of what is wrong with reasoning in ways one believes to be bad, and that this explanation is an alternative to an explanation that appeals to the so-called Taking Condition. I argue that their explanation is unsatisfying.

The Good Society

This chapter discusses how considerations of the good, both the human good and the impersonal good, can inform accounts of distributive justice for modern political societies. Starting with the assumption that just political societies will aim to promote the good of their members, it argues that considerations about good human lives are integral to determining the content of justice. This chapter also argues that, while just political societies must promote the good of their members, a good society realizes goods beyond the good of justice. In particular, a good society supports impersonal goods and promotes fitting attitudes toward them. The point of justice is the human good, but a just society is perfected by its concern for the impersonal good.