From Teleosemantics to Normative Ethics

The morally wrong actions, it seems, are the actions that are worthy of moral disapproval. Hence, one way to approach normative ethics is to ask the following question: Toward what kinds of action is moral disapproval fitting or correct? Chapter 13 argues that we can answer this question by adopting a teleosemantic framework. The chapter proceeds in three stages. It begins by proposing and defending a teleological theory of the contents of attitudes in general. The account proposed implies that the content of an attitude depends on its functional role. Accordingly, the second part of the paper defends an account of the functional role of moral disapproval. Then the third part combines the results of the first two parts in order to determine the content, and hence the correctness conditions, of moral disapproval. The chapter concludes with some remarks about the normative implications of the resulting view. In particular, it argues for a form of moral relativism.

Fitting Love and Reasons for Loving

The “quality view” claims that what makes love fitting are the lovable qualities of the beloved. Although natural, this view seems to face a battery of embarrassing difficulties. It predicts, for example, that if someone is more lovable than your beloved, then it’s fitting for you to love that person more than, or instead of, your beloved (the problem of trading up); and that if your beloved loses his lovable qualities, it would no longer be fitting to love him (the problem of inconstancy). Chapter 6 offers a new defense of the quality view. It argues that, by supplementing the view with a plausible pluralism about normative reasons for love, quality theorists can easily answer all of the problems that putatively plague them.

Persons as Things

Persons are things. We are biological creatures, things of flesh and blood, whose behavior is governed by the same principles that govern the behavior of any other social mammals, plus or minus the complications that come from the recursive possibilities of access to natural language. That much is fact. But to be treated as a thing amounts to a deep insult. To be treated as a thing is to be minimized, rather than engaged with, predicted and controlled rather than reasoned with, written off as the product of our environment rather than appreciated for our unique contributions. Chapter 5 explores what it means to be treated as a thing in a morally problematic way, and argues that the answer must be tempered by the fact that persons are also a kind of thing.

Discretionary Moral Duties

The topic of Chapter 3 is the idea that there are discretionary moral duties, i.e., duties that cede to the agent who stands under them wide latitude in determining the actions that count as satisfying them. The chapter offers a general framework for thinking about moral obligations, which construes such obligations in essentially relational terms. It then draws on this conception of moral obligation to understand two classes of obligations that are intuitively understood to exhibit wide agential discretion: duties of gratitude and of mutual aid. It argues that the wide agential discretion apparent in these cases makes sense against the background of an understanding of morality as a set of directed obligations that we owe to each other, as individuals. A further important theme is the standing of morality as a source of requirements that make it possible for agents to relate to each other on a basis of autonomy and equality.

Deontological Decision Theory and the Grounds of Subjective Permissibility

If we had perfect information, then we could say, for any given objectively permissible act, what makes it objectively permissible. But when we have imperfect information, when we must decide under risk and uncertainty, what then makes an act subjectively permissible or impermissible? There are two salient possibilities. The first is the “verdicts” approach. It grounds judgments of subjective permissibility in probabilistically discounted judgments of objective permissibility. The principle “minimize expected objective wrongness” takes this approach. The second is the “reasons” approach. It grounds subjective permissibility in probabilistically discounted objective reasons. “Maximize expected utility” is one example. Chapter 10 considers whether the verdicts approach or the reasons approach to grounding judgments of subjective permissibility is better suited for deontological decision-making with imperfect information. Perhaps surprisingly, the reasons approach comes out on top.

The Normative Structure of Request

Joseph Raz holds that, whereas a commander in issuing her command intends to impose an obligation on the commandee, a requester in making her request purports to create a pro tanto reason for the requestee through her act of request. Chapter 2 uses a series of examples to develop a set of “formal constraints on the concept of request” and then uses these constraints to argue that Raz’s account of request does justice to neither the relation between requester and requestee nor to that between a requester and her own request. The chapter then marshals elements from Kant’s ethics and Elizabeth Anscombe’s work on testimony in order to articulate an alternative conception of the normative structure of request, one according to which request should be understood in terms of a principle obligating requester and requestee to jointly harmonize their ends.

Agent-Relative Prerogatives and Suboptimal Beneficence

The first part of Chapter 11 uses considerations of sequential choice to argue that suboptimal beneficence is impermissible. The second part shows how the prohibition on suboptimal beneficence follows from an agent-relative theory that understands permissible actions in terms of a dominance principle defined over both the agent-relative and the agent-neutral ordering. This theory incorporates agent-relative prerogatives that ensure that agents are not required to do what is impartially best, yet rules out suboptimal beneficence. The third part shows that the prohibition on suboptimal beneficence is in tension with dynamic consistency, since it leads to violations of expansion consistency condition BETA. If an agent makes use of myopic choice principles (which are purely forward-looking) or sophisticated choice principles (that make use of backwards induction), then there can be cases in which he can, by means of a sequence of permissible choices, bring about an outcome that is deemed to be impermissible from the outset. This problem is addressed by developing global choice principles that ensure dynamic consistency.

From Duty for the Right Reasons

An action has moral worth when it’s a morally right action and when it is motivated in such a way that its being right is not accidental. When an action is, in this way, non-accidentally right, the agent is morally praiseworthy for doing the right thing. According to the Right Reasons View, an agent performs an action with moral worth, or is praiseworthy for doing the right thing, roughly to the extent that she does the right thing for reasons that make it right to act in this way (e.g., Arpaly, Markovits). According to another kind of view, actions with moral worth spring from the ‘motive of duty,’ or are based on the agent’s justified belief or knowledge that she ought to act in the relevant way (e.g., Sliwa, Johnson King). These are both attractive ideas. But given certain plausible assumptions, these ideas are in tension with each other. Chapter 9 suggests that the extent to which this is so depends on how the nature of moral thought is to be understood, and that certain forms of expressivism—relational expressivism, in particular—allow the pursuit of a reconciliatory approach.

“But I Voted for Him for Other Reasons!”

Many people presume that you can permissibly support the good features of a symbol, person, activity, or work of art while simultaneously denouncing its bad features. Chapter 7 refines and assesses this commonsense (but undertheorized) moral justification for supporting problematic people, projects, and political symbols, and proposes an analogue of the Doctrine of Double Effect called the Doctrine of Double Endorsement (DDN). DDN proposes that when certain conditions are met, it is morally permissible to directly endorse some object in virtue of its positive properties while standing against its negative properties, even though it would be morally impermissible to directly endorse those negative properties themselves. These conditions include separability (the good and bad features must not be inextricably linked), proportionality (the positive value of the good features must be significantly greater than the negative value of the bad features), and constrained choice (there must not be other things that the agent could endorse instead that share the same positive features but are not saddled with the negative ones). The chapter applies these constraints to a number of practical issues, including (among others) voting for morally troubling candidates, supporting Confederate monuments, and consuming sexist art.

Being Prepared

It is often said that neither moral wrongness nor acting as duty requires can depend on motive because we cannot choose our motives. Those who hold this view tend to conflate impermissibility and moral wrongness and accept an account of motive we have good reason to reject. Examining an often neglected class of duties—the duties of due care—we find they require a value-directed motive responsive to the content of a primary duty. Extrapolating, it is argued that we cannot manage complex moral contexts if we are not responsive to what a duty is for. This calls for a system agency model of motive, something that functions more like instinct than desire. If the capacity to track value is a function of motive, then it must be available to any subject of a duty. The chapter concludes by arguing that motive-involved wrongdoing occurs when an action that is of a type that is not impermissible has its source in a motive that involves a mismatch between the value of a governing moral requirement and the value the agent’s actual motive tracks.