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Oxford Studies
in Metaethics
Volume 9
Edited by
RUSS SHAFER-L ANDAU
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List of Contributors vi
Introduction vii
Index 245
List of Contributors
case, those that regulate updating intentions, rather than beliefs. She is cau-
tiously optimistic about this new route. Focusing on the concept of ought
to Φ, she argues that we can validly get from premises about the condi-
tions of possessing this concept to the conclusion that updating intentions
enkratically is rationally permissible. She then shows how the argument can
generalize to apply to other normative concepts, and to be extended so as to
generate rational requirements as well as permissions.
In just the past six or seven years, a minor cottage industry has grown up
around the question of whether the evolutionary origins of our moral senti-
ments and judgment-forming faculties have skeptical implications. Most
authors agree that the problem is most acute for the moral realist. In a
happy pairing of chapters, Katia Vavova first seeks to debunk the debunkers,
while Matthew Bedke seeks to formulate and defend the sharpest debunk-
ing argument designed to make trouble for the realist.
Vavova presents two central anti-realist debunking arguments and claims
that each one fails, though for a different reason. The first of these claims
that we cannot rationally maintain our evaluative beliefs if we have no good
independent reason for thinking them true. Evolutionary considerations are
meant to show that we indeed lack any such reason. But proceeding in this
way, argues Vavova, will lead to a global skepticism that is both implausible
in its own right, and contrary to the aims of the anti-realist debunkers, who
sought to identify a special problem for evaluative beliefs. Alternatively,
debunkers might rely on the claim that if we have good reason to suspect
error on the part of our beliefs, then we cannot rationally maintain them,
and then proceed to argue that evolutionary considerations do provide such
reason when it comes to our evaluative beliefs, though not to (most of ) our
non-evaluative ones. Vavova here accepts the general epistemic principle,
but identifies problems when it comes to applying it as debunkers would
like. She considers debunking efforts that aim at all of our evaluative beliefs,
just our moral beliefs, and, finally, only our deontological ones. She finds
distinct flaws with each of these debunking efforts.
Bedke pursues the thought that, if moral realism were true, then the
truth of our moral beliefs would be so coincidental as to undermine any
presumptive justification they enjoy. He takes it as a striking fact about the
ongoing discussion of the topic that both realists and anti-realists agree on
the central premises of the best debunking argument, yet disagree about
their epistemic implications. Much of the value of Bedke’s discussion lies in
its careful attention to making precise the nature of the putative defeater,
which he identifies as a kind of insensitivity that he calls “the obliviousness
of normative belief to non-natural fact.”
Our next two authors also do their best to make trouble for the moral
realist. Brian Leiter enlists some ideas and passages from Nietzsche’s work to
Introduction ix
she calls “relaxed realists.” Such moral realists—among whom are numbered
Ronald Dworkin, Thomas Nagel, Derek Parfit, and T. M. Scanlon—accept
a non-naturalistic interpretation of morality, but argue that the standard
metaphysical and epistemological costs associated with non-naturalist real-
ism can be easily jettisoned, so long as we adopt a “non-metaphysical”
understanding of moral reality. In defending such a view, much is often
made of certain parallels between mathematics and morality. McGrath
lays these similarities out quite carefully and then proceeds to argue that
such parallels will not support the sort of relaxed realism that is lately com-
ing into fashion. She concludes her essay with an extended discussion of
Dworkin’s realism, arguing that it fails in ways that indicate the poverty of
the relaxed approach to moral realism generally. If moral realism is to be
vindicated, it will have to be along more “robust” lines that take on more
substantive metaphysical commitments.
Justin D’Arms and Daniel Jacobson wrap up this edition with a new
take on a problem that has occupied the attention of metaethicists for a
couple of decades now. The problem besets analyses that understand nor-
mative concepts or properties in terms of reasons for having attitudes. So,
for instance, one might think that something’s goodness can be understood
as, or in terms of, a reason to favor it, love it, be attracted to it, etc. The
problem—now known as the Wrong Kind of Reasons (WKR) problem—is
that there can be (typically pragmatic) reasons to have these attitudes, even
when those reasons fail to indicate the presence of the analysandum. If, in a
far-fetched scenario typical of those presented in the literature, we were told
that the only way to avert disaster is to love someone we know to be despic-
able, then there would be a reason (intuitively of the wrong sort) to develop
such affection even though there was nothing lovable, admirable, etc. about
the person. D’Arms and Jacobson draw our attention to a new set of WKRs
whose normative force is opaque. In such cases, it is quite clear that some
consideration bears on whether or not to feel (e.g.) shame, pity, or amuse-
ment, but unclear just how it does so—specifically, whether the considera-
tion helps to make the object of the attitude shameful, pitiable, or funny.
D’Arms and Jacobson argue that this phenomenon is much more wide-
spread than has been recognized. It occurs in many real-life examples, and
has hitherto unappreciated implications for many other areas of philosophy.
If they are right, then the discussion of WKRs has thus far been focused far
too narrowly. Following their lead will mean expanding the scope of such
discussions, as existing solutions to the WKR problem have failed to attend
to the opacity of normative force.
All of the chapters included in this volume are based on talks given at
the ninth annual Wisconsin Metaethics Workshop, held in Madison in
September 2012. I’d like to acknowledge the work of the event’s program
Introduction xi
If I had to answer this question I suppose that my answer would be yes. But
it seems to me that the question is better avoided. Those who ask it tend to
start from the idea that belief is the conclusion of theoretical reasoning, and
they then wonder whether reasoning that starts in the same sort of place,
from premises, could result in action in the same sort of way that it results
in belief. To this question the answer is probably no. But all that this shows
is that there is something wrong with the question, and indeed with the
picture of theoretical reasoning that tends to accompany it.
In fact we often see the distinction between theoretical and practical
reasoning defined in these terms: theoretical reasoning is reasoning whose
proper conclusion is belief; practical reasoning, if there were any such thing,
would be reasoning whose proper conclusion is action. But what does it
mean to say that belief is the conclusion of theoretical reasoning? Consider
the grid.
2 Jonathan Dancy
Belief p
Belief If p then q
Belief q
believing of it can’t, and vice versa. For instance, the believing occurs in time
but the thing believed probably doesn’t. The believing is done by someone
but the thing believed is not—and so on. It is not at all so easy to find such
differences between the doing and the thing done. If the doing takes time,
the thing done does too. If the doing is done by someone, so is the thing
done (I say more on this in Dancy 2008).
So there are all these tangles, which seem to me to be worth avoiding if
we can—and indeed we can. When someone comes to believe that q as a
consequence of reasoning, their so believing stands in some relation to the
considerations adduced in the reasoning that preceded it, and to which it is
a response. We do not need to specify that relation in order to ask the ques-
tion whether an action can stand in just that relation to the considerations
adduced in the reasoning that preceded it, that led to it, and to which it is
a response. This question seems to me to be in good health, and it avoids
entirely all the difficulties we had in making sense of the question whether
a belief can stand as the conclusion of theoretical reasoning—difficulties
which are only mirrored in the question whether an action can stand as the
conclusion of practical reasoning. These latter questions should be avoided
rather than answered in their present form. Or if we cannot avoid them, we
retain the option of saying that action cannot be the conclusion of practical
reasoning, but that belief cannot be the conclusion of theoretical reasoning
either, so that little is lost, and the possibility of practical reasoning not
impugned by any contrast with theoretical reasoning.
Now in putting matters in this way, I have ignored two facts. The first of
these is that what is favoured by the considerations adduced is not a particu-
lar action, but acting in a certain way. Reasoning and deliberation can do
no more than offer a sort of blueprint that informs the way in which we act
when we act in its light. So it is not really true that the deliberator looks for
‘that response or course of action which is most favoured by the situation’;
it would be better to say that the deliberator looks for a way of responding
that best fits the nature of the situation. And when he does respond, his
response will be of the sort favoured by the relevant considerations, though
of course it will be of many other sorts as well, about which the relevant
reasons have nothing direct to say (e.g. which foot to start off from). I will,
however, sometimes ignore this delicacy in what follows.
Some people think that the mere fact that practical reasoning takes us,
not to particular acts, but only to types of action, is already sufficient to
reveal a rift between practical and theoretical reasoning. They suppose that
theoretical reasoning takes us to particular beliefs, not to beliefs of some
type, and in this they are presuming that belief is, as it were, particularized
by its content. The content is not usefully thought of as a type, since there
is no relevant distinction between different contents of that type. But to
allow the particularity of the content of belief does nothing to show that
what is favoured by the relevant considerations in theoretical reasoning is
itself particular in any sense that distinguishes the practical from the theo-
retical. What is favoured in theoretical reasoning is not the thing believed,
nor the proposition that is (sometimes thought of as) the content of that
believing, but the believing of that thing believed. And since such believings
are themselves particulars, different believings of the same thing believed
can differ in all sorts of ways that are not relevant to the question whether
this or that believing is of the sort favoured by the considerations adduced.
Believing is something that can start at a certain time, and can be more or
less committed or tentative, but the considerations adduced in the reason-
ing say nothing about when or how enthusiastically one should accept the
relevant ‘thing to believe’. It seems to me, therefore, that at the end of the
day both practical and theoretical deliberation take us to types rather than
to tokens, and no relevant distinction emerges from considerations to do
with the distinction between type and token.
The second thing I ignored is the fact that people often deliberate from
misconceptions. Things are not always as they suppose. But it does not fol-
low from this that what they are deliberating from are propositions rather
than states of affairs. They take the considerations that they bring to bear
to be the case, to be states of affairs, and deliberate accordingly. If they are
wrong about this, what they are deliberating from are supposed states of
affairs, not real ones. But a supposed but non-actual state of affairs is not
6 Jonathan Dancy
In this way it emerges that action and belief are on a par as far as the
force of reasoning is concerned. That force (if it is worth calling it a force at
all, something that could be disputed) is the force of the favouring relation.
Practical reasoning has the same sort of force as does theoretical reasoning.
There is no such thing as a sort of logical force that we can find on one side
and not on the other.
There is more to be said here. For there is an explanatory connection
between our two relations, the relation between propositions and the rela-
tion between considerations and response. It is the former relation that
explains the latter relation in the toy example we have been using. The
explanation of the fact that the complex state of affairs that p and that if p
then q favours believing that q is given by the relation between the three
propositions, that if the first two are true the third must be true as well.
This fact explains why believing that q is the (or a) proper response to the
complex state of affairs represented by the premises. And similar explana-
tions will be available for all cases of formally valid deductive reasoning.
There will be logical necessity in these cases, but there is no such thing as
logical force. The only force available is the normative force of the favour-
ing relation. (What we are to say about non-deductive theoretical reasoning
remains to be seen.)
No such explanation is available in the practical case. If that it is a fine
sunny day after a lot of rain favours getting out and about, the explanation
of this is not to be given by finding some relation between propositions.
(How then is it to be given? This is a good question, but it is one that
I am not going to try to answer here.) The important point is that, despite
the differences in the ways the various favourings are explained, what is
explained is the same sort of thing both times. The belief and the action are
both favoured by the considerations rehearsed in the reasoning, and the rea-
soner comes so to believe, or so to act, in response to those considerations,
taking them to be matters of fact. In this respect the analogy is perfect.
There are no doubt all sorts of differences between belief and action, but
those differences don’t seem to matter for our purposes here.
We can bring all these things together by thinking about moral reason-
ing. Moral reasoning is theoretical reasoning, reasoning to a moral belief,
the belief that some course of action is right, wrong, permissible, and so
on. There will be considerations that favour that belief. Take a case where
the belief is that one ought to give the money back immediately. The con-
siderations that favour so believing are, let us say, that the person who lent
us the money has an immediate need for it, and that we have the money
easily available. But these considerations also favour acting in a certain way,
namely giving the money back immediately. They favour both belief and
action. We might then ask what explains these favourings. The favouring
8 Jonathan Dancy
to try to close the temporal gap by saying that practical reasoning leads
immediately to the formation of intention, and only mediately to action;
but I deal with attempts to insert intention in this sort of way in a later
section.)
The metaphysical gap is overblown. Action is more than physical move-
ment (see the fourth gap below) and belief is not abstract rather than con-
crete; if I believe that Kate is currently in Paris, the object of my belief, what
I believe, is as particular as one could wish, and so is my believing of it.
What I believe is what is the case, and what is the case is not abstract rather
than concrete.
The volitional gap does indeed exist. The agent may decide not to do
the action favoured by the considerations adduced, even when he correctly
identifies that action. He may decide to do some other action instead. But
I would suppose that the same thing can apply to belief. If so, this gap does
not undermine the analogy. I return to this point below.
Finally, the worldly gap is overblown. Action can only be held to take
place ‘outside’ rather than ‘inside’ if we think of action as mere locomotion.
But action is not mere locomotion, nor even locomotion with a special sort
of cause. To act (I here assert, ignoring swathes of complications) is to cause
a change. When one moves, the sort of change that one causes is a motion
of one’s body, locomotion. The action is the causing of that locomotion,
not the locomotion caused, and the relevant sort of causing is not ‘outside’
rather than ‘inside’.
But even if we allow ourselves to be persuaded that these supposed gaps
are not obstacles, there remain rather different considerations which will
be much harder to dispose of (even if on occasion the supposed gaps will
reappear).
Joseph Raz is of the view that nothing else than belief can stand in the
sort of relation to considerations adduced in reasoning that belief can stand
in (Raz 2011: ch. 7, esp. section 2). Practical reasoning, if it is genuinely
reasoning, can therefore be nothing more than theoretical reasoning with
a practical conclusion. By ‘practical conclusion’ here I mean that practical
reasoning is reasoning to such conclusions as that I have most reason, or
ought, now to V. These conclusions are practical, I suppose, but only in a
weak sense. The crucial point is that V-ing itself cannot stand in that sort of
relation to considerations adduced in reasoning.
10 Jonathan Dancy
then we decide whether to do it. But this picture is not obligatory, and it
seems a rather heavy-handed picture of deliberation, which is after all a
pretty commonplace affair. My own view is that I can adduce considera-
tions, deliberate, and act accordingly without needing to form an interme-
diate conclusion that this or that course of action is the one I have most
reason to pursue. The notion of a reason need not appear explicitly in my
thought, because to respond to something as a reason is not, and does not
require, believing it to be a reason. (Just as to respond to someone as an
authority does not require believing her to be an authority.) That belief is an
extra stage, which need not occur.
There are two ways to move from the considerations adduced, because
those considerations favour two things at once. They favour acting in this
way rather than that, and they favour believing that this way of acting
is the one for which we have most reason. Nothing in this tells us that
the only rationally appropriate passage is to the action favoured via the
belief favoured; nor are we told that the passage to the belief favoured
should pass through another belief to the effect that this belief is indeed
favoured. (Regress lies this way—but one might wonder what stops the
regress-generating move.) So Raz’s picture, which has reasoning as passing
always through (and for him, stopping at) the theoretical conclusion, is less
than obligatory.
Raz could perhaps retreat at this point and claim only that reasoning to
action is tighter if it passes through belief. That is to say that someone who
selects a course of action in the light of the considerations he adduces in
deliberation would be proceeding more rationally if he were first to recog-
nize that this course of action is the one most favoured, and then to select it
for implementation. But even if one were to allow this, which I would not,
it would do little to tell us that action cannot stand to the considerations
adduced in the sort of relation that belief can.
Returning then to the simple idea that there are two things favoured
by the considerations adduced, the relevant action and the belief that that
action is most favoured by those considerations, let us ask about the proper
relation between these. Both of them are favoured by the relevant consid-
erations. So those considerations favour acting and they favour believing
that they are reasons to act. Which of these, if either, is the primary rela-
tion? I suggest that, if anything, the theoretical relation is secondary; it is
itself explained by the practical relation. That is, these things are reasons
to believe that one ought to act in such and such a way because they are
reasons to act in that way. We distort the focus of our reasons if we suppose
that the considerations adduced are primarily reasons to believe that they are
reasons to act, and only secondarily reasons to do the actions. Going down
the theoretical path, though not inappropriate, is not somehow required by
12 Jonathan Dancy
the nature of the reasons to which we are responding. Nor should we say
that in going down the theoretical path we are really only making explicit
what is implicit in the direct move from reasons to action. I am not a master
of the distinction between explicit and implicit, but I would hope that not
everything to which we are somehow rationally committed (as in respond-
ing to certain considerations as favouring this course of action we may be
said to be committed to their having the status of reasons) is something that
we are already doing, even if only implicitly.
So far then I see nothing that stands in the way of supposing that action
and belief stand in much the same relations to the considerations adduced
in reasoning. But Raz is also influenced by another phenomenon, one that
has much exercised him in the past, which is the fact that practical reason-
ing can throw up several courses of action as equally favoured by the rel-
evant considerations. We can, that is, conclude that we have equally good
reason to do any of three things, and at that point reasoning has given out,
leaving us with a simple choice. The course of action we select is certainly
favoured by the reasoning, but so were the other options.
Michael Bratman suggested to me that Raz’s point is far more damaging
than Raz himself recognizes. Raz supposes that reasoning does often enough
serve up one option as the one most favoured by the relevant considerations;
it is merely that on occasions it does not succeed in doing that. Bratman
suggests that, since the particular act to be done is always underspecified
by the reasoning, and we are given only a blueprint to which any eventual
action must conform, all the actions that would so conform are equally
recommended by our reasoning. So the phenomenon of underdetermina-
tion is ubiquitous. And if that is so, Raz has no need for a further argument
to the effect that what we are to say about the special cases of underdeter-
mination should apply also to cases of determination. And it would be no
response to him to argue that any such further argument is going to be
defective. One might, for instance, hope to limit the damage caused by
underdetermination by suggesting (as is often suggested in discussions of
the argument from illusion) that we should not allow our account of the
bad case to infect what we say about the good cases. But if Bratman is right,
no such response is available because there are no good cases.
But Bratman is not right. The sort of underdetermination that Raz is
thinking about is just a different phenomenon from the sort that impresses
Bratman. For Raz can allow that deliberation only produces a blueprint;
his point is that on occasion it produces two blueprints, when what we
were hoping for is just one. The fact that any blueprint needs to be, as
one might put it, fleshed out as we move from plan to action is not of any
moment. The relation between blueprint and action done is indeed worth
calling underdetermination; but if it is, we should not also use that term
From Thought to Action 13
for the case where there are two blueprints. For if there are two blueprints,
neither of them determines, even partly, what is to be done. The sort of
partial determination that is all that a blueprint can achieve is something
that no blueprint achieves if there is a second, different blueprint compet-
ing with the first. For where there is competition of this sort, nothing is yet
determined.
This returns us to underdetermination in Raz’s sense. The question is
what we can learn from this phenomenon. It is true that in this case reason-
ing does not succeed in taking us to the action done. It stops at something
that looks theoretical, the belief that there are multiple equally acceptable
courses open to us. But this is because the normal route, from considera-
tions to action, is stymied. There is not one course of action that is most
favoured by the considerations, but there is one belief that is most favoured.
So we believe that, and this is as far as reasoning can take us; all that then
remains for us to do is to select one of the options left in play. And that sort
of selection is not normally necessary, because in the normal case the selec-
tion is done for us by our reasoning, or perhaps I should say that we have
already done it in that reasoning. As far as I can see, there is nothing here
that should unsettle the thought that, where the considerations adduced
favour one course of action over all others, that action stands in the same
sort of relation to those considerations as does, or would, the belief that
things are so.
John Broome is of the opinion that we can reason to a belief and reason to
an intention, but we cannot reason to an action. The nearest that reasoning
can get us to action is by leading us to form an intention. Whether we then
go on to act accordingly is just another issue. So for Broome (2002) the
formation of an intention can stand in the same relation as does belief to the
considerations adduced in reasoning, but that is as far as reasoning can go.
One thing that is influencing Broome here is the thought that we can-
not be rationally required to do what we may fail to do through no rational
fault of our own. Action, therefore, cannot be rationally required because
although every reason speaks in favour of V-ing, I may fail to V because you
lock me up and prevent me. Broome presumes that this argument does not
also apply to the formation of intention. Suppose that reasoning requires
me at least to form the intention to V, but that you distract me so that
I don’t get round to doing that before it is time to knock off for the day,
or prevent me from doing it by playing very loud music so that the only
14 Jonathan Dancy
thing I can think about is getting away from here as soon as possible, and
by the time I have done that it is too late for the action anyway. There was
no rational fault in me, it seems, but still I failed to form the intention
that I was rationally required to form. There is an assumption, then, that
somehow intention is not subject to the sort of interference that can pre-
vent action, and I don’t see that this should be so. The idea that intention is
something we can always achieve if we set ourselves to do so seems odd to
me; it is as if forming intentions is terribly easy, somehow.
Consider the moral analogy of the thought that is influencing Broome.
I can be morally required to do something tomorrow which I will fail to do
through no moral fault of my own. Perhaps I will die tonight in my sleep.
Perhaps I will try to do it but fail despite my best efforts. Does this sort of
thing show that I was really only morally required to try, not to succeed?
Even if we allow that I can only be rationally required to do things that
I cannot fail to do without rational fault, we can question whether delibera-
tion always throws up its conclusion as rationally required of us. Could not
deliberation recommend a course of action without requiring it? To some
extent our answer to this question will depend on whether we think that
we are under a general requirement to do whatever we have most reason to
do. My own view about this is that it is too heavy-handed. It is especially
heavy-handed if the requirement concerned is a rational requirement. Why
should the failure to do what one accepts one has most reason to do always
be a rational failure (that is, one that is a sign of partial irrationality) rather
than some other sort of failure? Someone who fails to do what they accept
they ought to do may be morally weak without being rationally weak. And
what if I knew, really, that my velvet jacket doesn’t go with these trousers,
and that I should be wearing something else, but just thought I would try
something new for a change? This seems to be evidence of a sartorial lapse
rather than a rational one.
I think that the driving thought on the other side is that if we are deal-
ing with deliberation, and deliberation is just practical reasoning, failure to
carry through on our deliberation has just got to be rational failure, because
reasoning is a rational practice. My response to this is that moral reasoning is
expressive of our rationality, but it is also expressive of our moral character,
and a failure of moral reasoning (special pleading, perhaps) is often much
more a moral failing than a rational one. That is to say, if asked whether
someone caught out in special pleading has shown defects of rationality or
of morality, I would prefer the latter if I had to choose.
I now return to the suggestion that forming an intention is something
we can always do if we decide to do it. This at least is entirely up to us, so
that if we fail to do it, we are liable to charges of a certain sort whatever the
cause of our failure. My own view about this, as I said above, is that it is
From Thought to Action 15
exaggerated. What if I have done my reasoning, and just before I form the
relevant intention someone distracts me until it is too late, or something
turns up that is more important and needs my immediate attention? This,
it seems to me, is a case where I fail to form the relevant intention through
no rational fault of my own—indeed I am not at fault rationally at all. (The
same, of course, applies to belief.)
There is an idea that, even if you cannot bring yourself to do the action,
you can at least always bring yourself to form the intention to do it, the
weakness being left for later when you fail to carry through with that inten-
tion. And this might tempt some to say that rationality can only require
the formation of intention. There may be difficulties about actually doing
the thing intended, which we have to allow; so we restrict the demands of
rationality to that which those difficulties do not threaten. This train of
thought seems to me no stronger than the familiar thought that one can
only be morally required to do what one cannot fail to do through no moral
fault of one’s own. The standard conclusion from this is that we can only
be morally required to try, not to succeed. Success, after all, is not up to
us—at least not normally—but trying is. Myself, I doubt this last. Michael
Smith has reported to me that there are certain moments in brain surgery
(for which the patient has to be awake) in which patients report, not just
that they cannot move their hand (say), but that they have lost the ability
even to try to move it. But leaving that aside, there is another way of coping
with the phenomena here, which is to say that what is morally required of
one is not to try to do it but rather to do it if one can. This seems to me to
be much more realistic. It is true that the logical form of this requirement is
interesting, and not entirely clear. But it is certainly distinct from a require-
ment to do it which you are only under if you can do it; the conditionality
is within the scope of the requirement. And we cannot say that you are mor-
ally required to do everything that you cannot do. But whatever the require-
ment to do it if you can does in fact mean, it is distinct from a requirement
to try to do it, and it seems to me to be a much more promising tool for
understanding the relevant phenomena.
Finally, in this section, I turn to the implied contrast between intention
and action. Broome’s position implies this contrast because he supposes,
as we used to put it, that reasoning can take us to an intention but not to
an action. Now this distinction seems to me to derive from concentrating
on the notion of a prior intention—from thinking, that is, about inten-
tion that one forms some time before the action intended is to be done,
and which may not eventually be successfully implemented. That, rather
than the action intended, is the sort of thing that deliberation can require
of us, apparently. And I have to admit that, if this scenario is the right one
to press, it does seem hard to suppose that deliberation, having taken us to
16 Jonathan Dancy
the formation of the relevant intention, has not somehow been used up,
so that the eventual performance of the action lies beyond its reach. But
what if we think of the matter not in terms of prior intentions, but in terms
of intentional action, of the intention that is in the action when one acts
as one intends (rather than simply as one intended)? Take any case where
the action is to be done now. In such cases, it is much harder to separate
the intention from the action. The one seems to begin and end where the
other begins and ends. What sense would there be in these cases of insist-
ing that deliberation can only take us to the intentional side of the inten-
tional action? What on earth could that mean? And if one separates out the
intentional side of the intentional action, what is then left to be the action
that remains, the residue? Myself, I doubt that anything much remains at
all—or if it does, it will be mere bodily movement, or motion, which is to
say movednesses rather than movings. But this is not the sort of thing we
should be contrasting with intention; these are not actions at all, but mere
events. The action intended is not in this sense a mere bodily motion; it
is a full-scale action, shot through with purpose, and not metaphysically
distinct from the intending of it. So the idea that reasoning might take one
to intention and not to action seems to require, in this sort of case, a most
peculiar distinction between intention and action.
With these remarks I am working round to the suggestion that the idea
that reasoning can only take us to prior intention, not to action, is an unsat-
isfactory half-way house between Raz’s view that reasoning can only take
us to belief, and my view that it can take us to action. (We should bear in
mind all the while the official formulations of these points in terms of the
sorts of relations in which belief, intention, and action can stand to the
considerations rehearsed in the reasoning.) Where the sort of intention we
are dealing with is that involved in intentional action, in acting with an
intention, there seems to be no half-way house position available at all. In
such cases, we really have only the belief, on one side, and the action on the
other to choose between.
And once we see this point for the case where action succeeds delib-
eration immediately, what room remains for us to say that, in the cases
where it doesn’t, deliberation can only take us to the intention and not
all the way out to the action? It is true that the prior intention can exist
in full glory though the poor action never gets to be done at all. But the
fact that when the deliberation is done the time for action is not yet come
should not be allowed to alter the focus of the deliberation, which is not
on intention-forming but on the action to be intended. (I am not talking
here about elaborate planning, but about the simpler case where I form
the intention to go shopping tomorrow after my visit to the dentist.) The
focus of deliberation is the action to be done, and the prior intention is
From Thought to Action 17
little more than a staging post for cases where delay is inevitable for one
reason or another. This point is the same as one that we saw in discus-
sion of Raz’s views. There is an order of explanation here: the intention
is required because the action is. The reasons we consider in delibera-
tion favour the action, primarily, and favour forming the intention to do
that action only derivatively. They are reasons to intend to act because
they are reasons to act. This is the primacy of the practical again. And
we should not suppose that our reasons to intend to act are, as it were,
rational reasons, or that they are reasons that we ignore on pain of irra-
tionality, while the reasons to act are practical reasons (e.g. moral ones).
Things cannot be carved up in this sort of way. It is not as if rationality
calls on us to intend to act and morality (or something else) calls on us to
do the action intended. If we are required to intend to act, this is because
we are morally required to act (if we can), and the time for action has
not yet come.
6. Conclusion
References
Broome, J. 2002. ‘Practical Reasoning’, in J. Bermúdez and A. Millar
(eds), Reason and Nature: Essays in the Theory of Rationality, 85–111.
Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Dancy, J. 1995. ‘Arguments from Illusion’, Philosophical Quarterly, 45(181)
(Oct.): 421–38.
Dancy, J. 2008. ‘Action in Moral Metaphysics’, in C. Sandis (ed.), New Essays on the
Explanation of Action, 398–417. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Raz, J. 2011. ‘Practical Reasoning’, in his From Normativity to Responsibility, ch. 7
(esp. sect. 2). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
White, A. R. 1972. ‘What We Believe’, in N. Rescher (ed.), Studies in the Philosophy
of Mind, 69–84. APQ monograph series, 6. Oxford: Blackwell.
2
Cognitivism about Practical Rationality
John Brunero
1
These requirements are wide-scope requirements in that the scope of “requires”
ranges over a conditional. See Broome (1999).
Cognitivism about Practical Rationality 19
2
See Harman (1976, 1986), Velleman (1989, 2007), Wallace (2006), and Setiya
(2007). See Bratman (1987, 2009a, 2009b).
3
The instrumental belief refers to an intention thought to be necessary for achieving
an end. Note that Means-Ends Coherence should not be understood to apply to every
believed necessary condition for achieving an end. For instance, consider expected side
effects. Suppose I intend to grade fairly, but believe I’ll do so only if I hurt the feelings
of some students. Surely I’m not rationally required to intend to hurt their feelings (or
revise my other attitudes). But I am rationally required to form those intentions I think
necessary for my grading fairly. Suppose I think I’ll grade fairly only if I intend to blind
the papers. In that case, it does seem that I’m required to intend to blind the papers (or
revise my other attitudes).
20 John Brunero
buy an airplane ticket, but don’t intend to do this. According to the Strong
Belief Thesis, I believe
(1) I will travel to New York this afternoon.
If we pair this belief with my instrumental belief
(2) I will travel to New York this afternoon only if I intend to buy an air-
plane ticket, and apply the theoretical rational requirement
Closure: Rationality requires that [if one believes that P, and that if P then Q,
then one believes that Q]
then rationality requires that our instrumentally incoherent agent either
give up his belief (1), which, by the Strong Belief Thesis, would involve his
not intending to travel to New York this afternoon, and so would involve his
escaping instrumental incoherence, or give up his belief (2), which would
also constitute an escape from instrumental incoherence, or come to believe
(3) I intend to buy an airplane ticket.
This gets us quite close to a cognitivist explanation of Means-Ends
Coherence, but not all the way there, since it seems possible for one to
believe one intends to do something without actually intending to do it.
But if one can close this gap by showing how it is independently theoreti-
cally irrational to have false beliefs about one’s intentions in this context,
then one would have a cognitivist explanation of Means-Ends Coherence
in terms of Closure and the theoretical requirement not to have false beliefs
about one’s intentions in this context.7 However, this cognitivist explana-
tion will only be as plausible as the Strong Belief Thesis. The remainder of
this section will be devoted to the question of whether that thesis is true.
7
For an attempt to close this gap, see Setiya (2007: 670–1). For arguments that the
gap remains open, see Bratman (2009a: §4), and Brunero (2009: §1).
8
See Harman (1986: 92).
22 John Brunero
However, one might still worry that the Strong Belief Thesis is vulnerable
to counterexamples. Critics of the thesis usually present cases involving an
agent intending to do something difficult, where, it is alleged, the agent
intends to X, but doesn’t believe that she will X. Some examples include
a golfer intending to sink a difficult putt, an amateur basketball player
intending to make a half-court shot, and someone intending to leap across
a wide gap. Defenders of the Strong Belief Thesis aren’t persuaded by these
alleged counterexamples, and they usually reply by denying that these really
are cases in which one intends to sink the putt, make the shot, leap across
the gap, and so forth.9 Since the Strong Belief Thesis has been discussed
for many years now, with some very capable philosophers being convinced
by these alleged counterexamples, and other equally capable philosophers
not being convinced by them, we might get the impression that the cogni-
tivist wouldn’t face significant costs in proceeding on the assumption that
the Strong Belief Thesis is true.10 I think this impression is mistaken. I’ll
argue that those argumentative maneuvers needed to save the Strong Belief
Thesis from these counterexamples, if successful, undermine the cognitiv-
ist’s broader explanatory project. I’ll argue that the cognitivist employing
the Strong Belief Thesis thus faces a dilemma: she must either concede that
the Strong Belief Thesis is false or maintain that it’s true but unable to play
the explanatory role that the cognitivist needs it to play. Either way, cogni-
tivist explanations employing the Strong Belief Thesis fail. If this is right,
the prospects for cognitivism with the Strong Belief Thesis are not as good
as they might initially appear.
So, let’s now turn to some alleged counterexamples. First, let’s consider
the case of someone who intends to lift a heavy log that has fallen onto his
9
One way to proceed would be to consider our linguistic intuitions about agential
expressions of an intention (or lack of an intention) in such cases. Suppose the golfer
makes the difficult putt. On the one hand, if she were to say, “I intended to make that,”
she comes across as bragging (Harman 1986: 91). However, this might merely be a fea-
ture of Gricean conversational pragmatics; notice that the implicature of overconfidence
can be canceled by, for instance, her saying, “I intended to make that, but really didn’t
think I would.” And there’s also some linguistic evidence pointing in the other direc-
tion: it would sound odd for the golfer to say, “I had no intention of making it” (Adams
2007: 151–2). In this chapter, we can avoid putting much weight on such arguments.
Our question is more manageable: can the Strong Belief Thesis be true in a way that lends
support to the cognitivist explanation of Means-Ends Coherence? I think we can answer
this question in the negative without having to rely on linguistic intuitions of this sort.
10
For instance, the Strong Belief Thesis is endorsed by Hampshire and Hart (1958),
Grice (1971), Harman (1976, 1986), Velleman (1989, 2007), and Davis (1984). But it
is opposed by Audi (1973), Davidson (2001), and Mele (1992); Bratman (1987) also
expresses skepticism about the thesis, and develops an account of intention that doesn’t
rely on it. For a very helpful overview of possible views of the intention–belief connec-
tion, see Adams (2007: esp. 143–7). Adams also opposes the Strong Belief Thesis.
Cognitivism about Practical Rationality 23
front porch. Plausibly, he intends to lift the log but doesn’t believe that he
will. It’s not that he believes he won’t; he’s simply agnostic about whether
he will. Second, let’s consider Bratman’s famous case of an absent-minded
cyclist who intends to stop by the bookstore on the way home, but, aware
of his tendency to go on “autopilot” once on his bike, doesn’t believe that
he will. Again, he’s agnostic about whether he’ll succeed in doing what he
intends to do.11 (While the first example involves one having doubts about
whether one’s actions will produce the intended result, the second involves
one having doubts about whether one will perform the requisite actions at
the appropriate time.)
One way to defend the Strong Belief Thesis against such counterexam-
ples, suggested by Gilbert Harman, is to argue that the alleged counterex-
amples don’t involve intentions to do the act believed to be difficult, but
only intentions to try to do the act.12 For instance, on Harman’s suggestion,
the man intends to try to lift the heavy log, and the absent-minded cyclist
intends to try to stop by the bookstore. We need to be careful about what’s
being claimed here. It’s plausible to think that when a speaker says, “I intend
to try to X,” she’s expressing the thought that she intends to X, and the “try
to” is there to express her doubts about success. But this view, of course,
would be of no help to the Strong Belief Thesis, since this view concedes
that the Strong Belief Thesis is false. For Harman’s suggestion to save the
Strong Belief Thesis, it must be the case that in the alleged counterexamples
what one intends is to try to X—and, moreover, one has this intention to try
to X without also intending to X.
Harman’s move saves the Strong Belief Thesis, but it’s of little help to the
cognitivist attempting to explain Means-Ends Coherence. Let’s suppose we
follow Harman in thinking that the man really only intends to try to lift the
log. Intuitively, if this man were to believe that he’ll lift the log only if he
bends his knees when he lifts, and were to fail to intend to bend his knees
when he lifts, he would be criticizable as means-ends incoherent. But he
might think that bending one’s knees, while necessary for lifting the log,
isn’t necessary for trying to lift the log. After all, we could suppose that the
last time he didn’t bend his knees, he tried and failed to lift the log, but
didn’t fail to try to lift the log. So, if his intention is merely to try to lift the
log, he is no longer criticizable as means-ends incoherent in failing to intend
to bend his knees. He’s no longer failing to intend means believed necessary
for achieving his end. But, intuitively, this is the wrong thing to say; surely
he is criticizable for being means-ends incoherent here.
11
Bratman (1987: 32).
12
Harman (1986: 90–4).
24 John Brunero
The same point could be made about Bratman’s cyclist. He may believe
that intending, at the relevant time, to turn left on Bookstore Lane is a
necessary means to stopping by the bookstore, but not believe it’s a necessary
means to trying to stop by the bookstore. After all, he may know that the last
time he tried to stop by the bookstore, he failed to stop by precisely because
he didn’t intend, at the relevant time, to turn left on Bookstore Lane. But
he didn’t fail to try to stop by the bookstore.13 Since intending to turn down
Bookstore Lane isn’t believed by him to be a necessary means to carrying
out his intention to try to stop by the bookstore, he isn’t means-ends inco-
herent in failing to form that intention. But that’s the wrong result, since
surely he is means-ends incoherent in failing to form that intention.
The problem here is that there is, intuitively, a requirement of means-ends
coherence that applies to the cyclist and the log-lifter. If the Strong Belief
Thesis is false, the cognitivist can’t account for this requirement in the
standard way (as in the sample explanation of Means-Ends Coherence given
above). But if we save the Strong Belief Thesis by saying that these cases
involve only intentions to try, we still are unable to explain this require-
ment, since the agent, while believing that forming certain intentions (to
bend at the knees; to turn down Bookstore Lane) is necessary for achieving
an end, might not believe that forming these intentions is necessary for try-
ing to achieve those ends. And so what should count as a case of criticizable
means-ends incoherence isn’t so counted by the cognitivist.
Another way to save the Strong Belief Thesis from these counterex-
amples, originally suggested by Harman but developed by Velleman in
Practical Reflection, is to argue that “intend” is ambiguous, and the Strong
Belief Thesis holds for only one sense of “intend.” Velleman writes:
The words ‘intention’ and ‘intend’ are thus ambiguous. They are used to denote,
on the one hand, the agent’s attitude toward outcomes that are settled, from his
perspective, at the close of deliberation and, on the other hand, his attitude toward
outcomes whose pursuit is the topic of his deliberation but whose attainment is
not thereby settled. In other words, they are used to denote both plan-states and
goal-states of the agent.14
On this view, the log-lifter would have the goal of, but not plan on, lifting
the log, since the outcome isn’t “settled from his perspective.” But since the
Strong Belief Thesis is restricted to the sense of “intend” denoting “plan-
states,” such examples are not counterexamples to the thesis.
13
In this case, he doesn’t go to the bookstore because of his own forgetfulness, rather
than because of any external impediment. But we don’t want to say that if the relevant
failure is “internal” then one doesn’t make an attempt. That would rule out the possibility
of one’s trying to, say, solve a math problem in one’s head, or remember an anniversary.
14
Velleman (1989: 112). See also Harman (1986: 93–4).
Cognitivism about Practical Rationality 25
But this is of little help to the cognitivist, since Means-Ends Coherence gov-
erns intentions in both senses—that is, in both the “plan-state” and “goal-state”
senses of “intend.” For instance, the log-lifter would be instrumentally inco-
herent in intending (in the “goal-state” sense) to lift the log, believing that he’ll
lift the log only if he intends to bend his knees, and not intending to bend
his knees. The cognitivist saves the Strong Belief Thesis, but at the cost of no
longer being able to explain why Means-Ends Coherence applies in every case
in which it does.
15
Velleman (2007: 206–7).
26 John Brunero
if this less confident assertion is paired with one’s asserting, “But I don’t believe
that I will.”16
Let’s now turn to a second argument from Velleman—one central to
our concerns here—which holds that the Strong Belief Thesis is needed to
explain Means-Ends Coherence. Velleman writes:
Why, for example, should an agent be rationally obliged to arrange means of car-
rying out an intention, if he is agnostic about whether he will in fact carry it out?
Suppose that I form an intention to fly to Chicago next Tuesday, well knowing
that I often forget to take trips that I have planned. (I am even more forgetful than
Bratman.) Buying a ticket for my flight to Chicago will turn out to have been a
waste of money if I forget to take the trip. . . . But why should I be categorically
required to invest in means whose benefits I am not yet prepared to believe in? If
I am still entertaining the possibility that a ticket will go to waste, why shouldn’t
I weigh its expected benefits against those of alternative investments?17
The idea here seems to be that if we think one could intend to fly to Chicago
without believing one will do so, then we have no explanation for why there
would be a rational requirement to intend the means of buying a ticket, for
doing so should be viewed by the agent as a potential waste of money given
his agnosticism about whether he’ll go.
Velleman might be right that there would be no categorical requirement
for the agnostic traveler to intend to buy the ticket. But it doesn’t follow
from this that Means-Ends Coherence doesn’t apply to the agnostic traveler.
Means-Ends Coherence is a wide-scope requirement; what it requires is that
one either intend the means, or abandon the end, or give up one’s instru-
mental belief. It doesn’t follow from one’s not being required to intend the
means that this disjunctive requirement isn’t in place.
Why is Means-Ends Coherence formulated this way? One reason is that
it often happens that we recognize an end of ours as imprudent, immoral,
or otherwise unreasonable. In such cases, it seems perfectly rational for an
agent to give up his end. But if we understood Means-Ends Coherence as a
narrow-scope requirement—a categorical requirement to intend the means,
as Velleman puts it—we would have to concede that one who abandons an
end instead of intending the means violates this rational requirement. But
that seems to be the wrong result; abandoning the end instead could involve
no irrationality whatsoever. And Velleman’s example seems to be precisely
16
As an anonymous referee correctly observed, the defender of the Strong Belief
Thesis could deny that one intends to X in such cases, and insist that one only intends to
try to X—a strategy we’ve already rejected as unhelpful to the cognitivist—and then insist
that it’s still the case that the natural expression of an intention to X is “I am going to
X.” However, this shows that the argument from Anscombe’s remark will be convincing
only to those who already accept a controversial response to the alleged counterexamples.
17
Velleman (2007: 205).
Cognitivism about Practical Rationality 27
the kind of case that motivates the wide-scope formulation in this way. In
being agnostic about one’s success in getting to Chicago, and seeing the sig-
nificant expense involved in buying the ticket, the agent would be perfectly
rational in giving up the end instead of intending the means.
There are two points to make about Velleman’s argument. First, even in
cases where one isn’t agnostic, but instead believes one will carry out what
one intends, it could be rational for one to abandon one’s end instead. For
instance, one could realize that the expense involved in intending the means
is so great that, even if one achieves one’s end, it isn’t worth it. In such cases,
it would be false to say that there’s a categorical requirement to intend the
means. So, insisting on the Strong Belief Thesis won’t be enough to block
this allegedly bad result.
Secondly, and more importantly, this allegedly bad result isn’t actually
a bad result. There’s no cost in our having to say that, in Velleman’s exam-
ple, there’s no narrow-scope requirement to intend the means. There would
be a cost in saying that there’s no applicable requirement of Means-Ends
Coherence. But it doesn’t follow from there being no narrow-scope require-
ment to intend the means that no wide-scope requirement of Means-Ends
Coherence is in place.18
Velleman offers a third argument for the Strong Belief Thesis: if the
Strong Belief Thesis were not true, then we would be unable to explain how
intentions function so as to coordinate behavior. Velleman writes:
When an intention coordinates behavior, the agent and his associates proceed on
the assumption of its being executed—which would be an odd way to proceed if
the agent himself were agnostic on the question. If I am agnostic as to whether
I will be in Chicago, why should anyone plan or act on the assumption of my being
there. And why should anyone hesitate to plan or act in ways inconsistent with that
eventuality.19
In short, Velleman argues that, since we already believe that intentions play
a role in coordinating behavior, and the Strong Belief Thesis is necessary to
18
Bratman (2009b: §8) also observes Velleman’s mistake of understanding
Means-Ends Coherence as a narrow-scope requirement to intend the means. In reply-
ing to Velleman’s argument, Bratman goes on to develop the idea that intentions have a
distinctive aim, in much the same way that belief is sometimes thought, by Velleman and
others, to have a distinctive aim. In particular, Bratman suggests that “intentions aim at
the coordinated control of action that achieves what is intended” and this explains why
Means-Ends Coherence is a rational requirement. Exploring this would take us too far
afield. And we need not do so to show that Velleman’s argument doesn’t succeed. Rather,
we can simply note that a crucial premise of Velleman’s argument—namely, that if there’s
no requirement to intend the means, then Means-Ends Coherence does not apply—is
false and so this argument for the Strong Belief Thesis is unsound.
19
Velleman (2007: 206).
28 John Brunero
explain how intentions play that role, we should believe in the Strong Belief
Thesis as well.
Velleman’s argument identifies two specific coordinating roles for inten-
tions: intentions coordinate the behavior of both the agent herself and the
behavior of her associates. However, it’s not clear how this latter coordinat-
ing role provides support for the Strong Belief Thesis, since what matters for
such coordination is what the associates believe, not what the intending agent
herself believes, about whether the intention will be successfully executed.
But the Strong Belief Thesis is a thesis about what the intending agent her-
self believes.
Putting aside this worry for a moment, it’s not clear that when an inten-
tion coordinates behavior, one’s associates always “proceed on the assump-
tion of its being executed,” though they may sometimes do. Suppose we are
teammates on a basketball team and you intend to make a shot, and, aware
of your intention, I position myself for a rebound. I’m clearly not proceed-
ing on the assumption that you’ll execute your intention. Had I proceeded
on that assumption, I would have hurried back down the court to set up
on defense. Or suppose I’m in the stands watching the game, and someone
offers me a bet on whether you’ll make the shot. I’d be irrational to pro-
ceed on the assumption you’ll successfully execute your intention. I should
instead consider the probability of your doing so and calculate the expected
utility of accepting the bet. And much the same goes for the agent herself.
When one coordinates behavior with one’s own intentions, one need not
proceed on the assumption that one’s intention will be successfully exe-
cuted. The shooter might position herself for a rebound. And she might not
bet the farm on making the shot.
So, it’s a mistake to characterize the coordinating role of intentions
merely in terms of how agents (the actor herself or her associates) plan on
the assumption that the intention will be successfully executed. Sometimes
we do this. But sometimes we don’t, and we instead consider the probability
that the intention will be successfully executed. So, with this in mind, we
should return to our question: is the Strong Belief Thesis needed to explain
the coordinating role of intentions?
Now it seems as though some weaker thesis about the intention–belief
connection might actually do a better job of explaining the coordinat-
ing role. Consider, for instance, Robert Audi’s view of intention. Audi
doesn’t accept the Strong Belief Thesis, but thinks that intending to X
involves believing that X is more likely than not.20 (According to Audi’s
view, both Shaquille O’Neal and Wilt Chamberlain intended to make free
throws—barely—whereas Ben Wallace hoped, but did not intend, to make
20
Audi (1973).
Cognitivism about Practical Rationality 29
21
Wallace shot 42% from the line for his career, whereas Wilt shot 51% and Shaq
53%. Mele (1992) uses the example of a free throw shooter to argue against Audi’s view.
See esp. pp. 131–2, 136–7. If we look at certain commonly accepted functions of inten-
tions—specifically, the functions of initiating and guiding an agent’s actions, coordinat-
ing behavior, terminating practical reasoning, etc.—then we won’t notice a difference
between, say, O’Neal and Wallace shooting a free throw. So, it seems odd to say that one
intends and one doesn’t.
22
Holton (2008) makes the related point that an appeal to partial, as opposed to
all-out, belief would allow for a response to Velleman’s coordination argument for the
Strong Belief Thesis. (Audi’s view is that intention involves an all-out belief that success
is more likely than not, not a partial belief in success.) Holton argues that intentions,
coupled with partial beliefs in success, can play a role in coordinating the behavior of self
and others. (As Holton correctly observes, one’s informing others of one’s uncertainty of
success facilitates that coordination.)
30 John Brunero
23
Velleman (2007: 206).
24
Of course, one wouldn’t want to invite others to dinner without telling them this is
just a contingency plan—that would risk rudeness.
Cognitivism about Practical Rationality 31
among their contents, suggesting that the normative force of the instrumental principle
can be traced to independent rational constraints on your beliefs—in particular, to
constraints on certain combinations of beliefs . . .25
This cognitivist explanation of Means-Ends Coherence doesn’t require the
Strong Belief Thesis.
However, one might have worries about this weaker thesis as well. Couldn’t
one intend to X while being agnostic about whether one can X? Suppose
I intend to go shopping this evening, but I’m not sure whether the only shop-
ping mall in town is open, and so I’m agnostic about whether I can go shop-
ping. It’s not that I believe I can’t go shopping; I just don’t believe I can.26 It
might be poor planning on my part to form that intention before finding out
whether the mall is indeed open, but it seems possible to do so.
Additionally, one might have some doubts about the logical form of the
instrumental belief in (5), which may not be obvious. Perhaps what one
believes is that the combination of traveling to New York and not intending
to buy a ticket is not possible, so that the logical form would be:
~◇ (N & ~T)
where “N” is “I travel to New York” and “T” is “I intend to buy a ticket.” On
Wallace’s view, the inconsistency of the beliefs is “a straightforward function
of the logical relationship among their contents” which he takes to be:
(4′) ◇ N
(5′) ◇ N → T
(6′) ~T
But if the logical relationship among their contents were instead
(4′) ◇ N
(5″) ~◇ (N & ~T)
(6′) ~T
then the contents of the involved beliefs wouldn’t be inconsistent. (To see
that there’s no inconsistency here, consider another example: one might
consistently believe Hank isn’t going to Nashville, isn’t going to Tennessee,
can go to Nashville, can go to Tennessee, but can’t go to Nashville and not
go to Tennessee.27)
25
Wallace (2006: 106).
26
An anonymous referee has suggested, plausibly, that to intend to go shopping, one
must have at least some evidence that one can go shopping. But that still falls short of
saying one must believe one can go shopping.
27
Note that it won’t help Wallace to claim intending to travel to New York this after-
noon involves believing (4″) ◇ (N & ~T). That would indeed generate an inconsistency
34 John Brunero
Here’s a reason for thinking Wallace has misidentified the logical form
of the instrumental belief. Suppose he is right that the logical form of the
instrumental belief is ◇N → T, the contrapositive of which is ~T → ~◇N.
Possibility and necessity are defined in terms of one another, such that ~◇N
→ □~N, and so it follows from these two claims that ~T → □~N. But this
seems wrong. This reading licenses us to detach the claim that □~N via
modus ponens from ~T. But my not traveling to New York this afternoon
is surely believed to be a contingent matter, not a necessary one. What
I should conclude is that I’m not traveling to New York this afternoon,
not that it’s necessary that I’m not traveling to New York this afternoon.
I don’t take my not traveling to New York this afternoon to be necessary;
rather, I only take it to be necessary that it’s not the case that I both travel
to New York this afternoon and not buy a ticket. So, it seems better to
understand the logical form of one’s instrumental belief as □ (~T → ~N),
instead of ~T → □~N.28
Perhaps there’s a way to defend some specific conception of possibility
that allows us to avoid these two objections to Wallace’s account.29 But it
might be easier to develop a version of cognitivism that preserves the central
insights of Wallace’s approach, but avoids the difficulties that come with
talk of possibility. I’ll here outline such an account, and then defend its
in belief with (5″), ~◇ (N & ~T), but that would make one’s belief (6′) irrelevant to
the inconsistency in belief. One’s not intending the means, and so believing one doesn’t
intend the means, wouldn’t matter—you’ve got an inconsistency regardless. But, if we’re
trying to explain Means-Ends Coherence, whether one intends the means should matter.
28
See Hughes and Cresswell (1996: 14–16).
29
Perhaps we should understand the possibility involved here as epistemic possibility,
so that our subject believes, for instance, in (4), that for all he knows, it’s possible that
he travels to New York. (Thanks to Mike Titelbaum for this suggestion.) Since it seems
mere belief, not knowledge, is relevant to the alleged inconsistency in (4)–(6), the relevant
sense of possibility would be doxastic possibility, which Chalmers helpfully defines as
follows: “A scenario [a ‘maximally specific way the world might be’] is doxastically pos-
sible for a subject if and only if it is not doxastically ruled out by any of the subject’s
beliefs” (2011: 62–3). This might circumvent our two objections. First, it’s plausible
that our agent believes that going shopping isn’t doxastically ruled out by any of his
beliefs. Second, the detachment of □~N isn’t as worrisome, since this should be under-
stood as stating that N is ruled out by some of the subject’s beliefs. However, one might
worry that, once we establish this as the relevant sense of “possibility” at work, we should
worry about Wallace’s intention–belief thesis. Is it true that one can intend to X only if
one believes X is doxastically possible? Perhaps not. Indeed, cases when one is aware of
one’s own instrumental irrationality—specifically, when one is aware that one doesn’t,
but must, intend the means, if one is to X—might be cases where a subject doesn’t believe
X-ing isn’t ruled out by any of his beliefs. Wallace’s thesis now appears false. Moreover,
if Wallace’s thesis were true, we’d have to say that the subject doesn’t really intend to X,
and so there is no instrumental irrationality for him to be aware of. That’s implausible.
(But for further discussion of the notion of possibility at work in Wallace’s account, see
Wallace 2006: 114–17.)
Cognitivism about Practical Rationality 35
30
This account is a slight variation on the account that’s presented in §3.4.3 of
Kolodny and Brunero (2013).
36 John Brunero
she intends the means? Such a person, it appears, wouldn’t violate any theo-
retical requirements of rationality, but would be instrumentally incoherent
in not intending the means. I’ll first provide some defense of the Very Weak
Belief Thesis, and then turn to that objection.
31
Anscombe (1957: 94).
32
I here disagree with Holton (2008), who is convinced by these examples.
Cognitivism about Practical Rationality 37
33
See Bratman (1987: 2).
38 John Brunero
34
See Bratman (1987: 3).
35
See Schwitzgebel (2010) for an overview of some of the psychological evidence and
philosophical arguments concerning the possibility of mistaken beliefs about our own
psychology.
Cognitivism about Practical Rationality 39
ignorant of, or having false beliefs about, the necessary means to our ends.
Additionally, precise formulations of the requirement will aim to take into
account rational self-trust.36 It’s not irrational not to intend the means to
one’s ends when one trusts one will intend the means in the future. For
instance, suppose I intend to buy a house next year, and believe that to do
so, I must intend to fill out some legal paperwork. I don’t currently intend
to fill out that paperwork, but I trust that I will when the time comes. It
doesn’t seem right to accuse me of irrationality. To get off the hook, as far
as the charge of instrumental irrationality goes, I can form some (perhaps
false) beliefs about my future intentions. But, if we allow that false beliefs
about one’s future intentions get one off the hook, why not also allow that
false beliefs about one’s current intentions can get one off the hook as well?
Perhaps this response to the objection isn’t convincing. If it isn’t, I don’t
think it poses any threat to the thesis being defended here: that this cog-
nitivist account of Means-Ends Coherence is better than any other avail-
able cognitivist account, especially accounts that employ the Strong Belief
Thesis, since those accounts will also face a version of this same objection.
Recall the account from §1. Couldn’t I come to believe (3)—that I intend
to M—without intending to M? This objection is just as much an objection
to the account of Means-Ends Coherence based on the Strong Belief Thesis.
And so it doesn’t challenge my contention that the account sketched in §2.1
is the best available cognitivist account of Means-Ends Coherence.
But I don’t think the best available cognitivist account is good enough. It
might be true that whenever one is means-ends incoherent, one also has
beliefs that violate requirements of theoretical rationality. But cognitivism
makes a further claim: those theoretical requirements explain the practical
ones. However, one might doubt this explanatory claim. One might think
that, even though every violation of Means-Ends Coherence involves a vio-
lation of requirements of theoretical rationality, the latter requirements don’t
explain the former. I’ll give two reasons for doubting the explanatory claim.
First, note that cognitivism seems to be unpromising for explaining
practical rationality in general. For instance, cognitivism doesn’t seem to
be a plausible strategy for accounting for the consistency requirement on
intentions once we reject the Strong Belief Thesis. Weaker views about
the intention–belief connection seem unable to do the trick. For instance,
36
See, for instance, Setiya (2007: 668).
40 John Brunero
37
See Bratman (2009b: §3) and Ross (2009: 245).
Cognitivism about Practical Rationality 41
response. Let’s assume that P→Q is a fixed background belief. If one thinks
there are really strong reasons for believing P, and relatively weak reasons for
not believing Q, then one should escape this irrational state by coming to
believe Q. However, if one thinks there are strong reasons not to believe Q,
and relatively weak reasons for believing P, one should revise one’s beliefs
in the modus tollens direction instead, and cease to believe P. In short, one’s
assessment of the relevant reasons for belief determines the appropriate
direction of revision.38
But now consider our means-ends incoherent agent who, on our cog-
nitivist account, believes he doesn’t intend to buy an airplane ticket, and
believes he certainly will not travel to New York if he doesn’t intend to buy
an airplane ticket, but does not believe that he certainly will not travel to
New York. Let’s suppose that he considers the relevant reasons for belief.
Presumably, the evidence that he doesn’t intend to buy an airplane ticket
will be rather strong. Introspection isn’t foolproof, but it will normally pro-
vide very strong evidence that he doesn’t intend to buy an airplane ticket—
and there doesn’t seem to be any evidence on the other side. Taking into
account the requirements of theoretical rationality governing the direction
of revision, it seems that in all but the most unusual cases, revision should
proceed in only one direction: coming to believe he certainly will not travel
to New York (thereby ceasing to intend to travel to New York). Cognitivism
thus predicts an asymmetry in the direction of response.39
But, as Means-Ends Coherence is usually understood, there is no such
asymmetry. (Indeed, if there’s any temptation toward thinking there’s an
asymmetry, it would be toward proceeding in the other direction: coming
to intend the means.) Rather, one could escape a state of means-ends inco-
herence by either abandoning the end, or by coming to intend the means.
This symmetrical feature of Means-Ends Coherence is unexplained by the
cognitivist account, and so the cognitivist account is inadequate.
38
I’ll here avoid the complicated task of specifying the principles of rationality gov-
erning such revision. But I do think such principles are principles of rationality, not prin-
ciples of reason. One’s assessment of the reasons could be mistaken. For instance, it could
be that a person who thinks there are strong reasons to believe P is mistaken, and there
are really strong reasons to believe ~Q instead. Here, rationality requires him to revise his
attitudes in such a way that he comes to have a belief not well-supported by reasons. (A
similar point could be made for the practical case.)
39
Consideration of such asymmetries have played an important role in arguments
against the wide-scope formulation of some rational requirements, including, most not
ably, the Enkratic Requirement. See esp. Schroeder (2004) and Kolodny (2005). It is
argued that such asymmetries put pressure on us to construe the Enkratic Requirement
as a narrow-scope requirement to intend to do what we believe we ought to do. If cogni-
tivism is true, we should expect to feel the same pressure toward construing Means-Ends
Coherence as a narrow-scope requirement (to abandon the end). That we don’t feel such
pressure is a reason to think cognitivism is false.
42 John Brunero
4. Conclusion
In this chapter, I’ve considered the merits of some possible ways of develop-
ing a cognitivist account of Means-Ends Coherence. I’ve argued that we
should reject accounts that rely on the Strong Belief Thesis, since that thesis
is either false or unable to do the explanatory work the cognitivist needs
it to do, and the arguments for that thesis aren’t convincing. I’ve argued
that the cognitivist would do better to work with an account modeled on
Wallace’s account, but which employs a weaker belief thesis, avoids talk
of possibility and necessity, and employs Closure instead of a consistency
requirement. However, in the end, I’ve argued that there is much about
practical rationality that cognitivism can’t explain, and the explanation it
gives of Means-Ends Coherence appears to work only because it considers
some theoretical requirements in abstraction from others.40
40
Work on this chapter developed out of research for the SEP entry on instrumental
rationality, co-authored with Niko Kolodny, and no doubt benefited much from Niko’s
contributions to that project. Thanks also to Waldemar Rohloff, Dana Tulodziecki,
Eric Wiland, and two anonymous referees for helpful comments on this chapter. And
thanks to audiences at the University of Missouri, and, especially, the 2012 Wisconsin
Metaethics Workshop.
Cognitivism about Practical Rationality 43
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(eds), Rationality and the Good, 143–62. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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Bratman, M. 2009a. “Intention, Belief, and Instrumental Rationality,” in D.
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(ed.), Spheres of Reason, 29–62. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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MA: MIT Press.
Holton, R. 2008. “Partial Belief, Partial Intention,” Mind, 117(1): 27–58.
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London: Routledge.
Kolodny, N. 2005. “Why be Rational?” Mind, 114(455): 507–63.
Kolodny, N., and Brunero, J. 2013. “Instrumental Rationality,” in Edward N. Zalta
(ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Stanford, CA: Stanford University
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Mele, A. 1992. “Intention, Belief, and Intentional Action,” in Springs of Action,
128–53. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Ross, J. 2009. “How to Be a Cognitivist about Practical Reason,” in R. Shafer-Landau
(ed.), Oxford Studies in Metaethics, iv. 243–82. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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18: 337–64.
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Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, fall 2010 edn.
44 John Brunero
Some ways of updating belief have more epistemic merit than others.
Paul Boghossian (2000, 2001, 2003) and Christopher Peacocke (2000,
2004) have defended varieties of the view that the epistemic merit of cer-
tain ways of updating belief is explained by facts about the conditions of
possessing certain concepts. In particular, they argue that if it is a condi-
tion of possessing a concept C that one must be “willing,” in a sense to be
explored, to update one’s beliefs in accord with a putative norm N, then
beliefs updated in accord with N are (defeasibly) epistemically warranted
in virtue of this fact.1 Let us say that a norm N is a “legitimate” epistemic
norm when updating beliefs in accord with N has the relevant sort of epis-
temic merit: it leads to defeasibly warranted belief. Let us say that a strategy
for explaining the legitimacy of a putative norm N is a strategy for “vindi-
cating” N. And following Peacocke, let us call strategies of vindicating N
by appeal to conditions of concept-possession “metasemantic.”2 Might a
parallel metasemantic approach be made to work in vindicating practical
norms, norms for updating intentions?
After rejecting some blind alleys, this chapter argues for a qualified “yes.”
I argue that there is a valid metasemantic route from premises about the con-
ditions of concept-possession to conclusions about which putative norms
for updating intentions are legitimate. The sense in which metasemanti-
cally vindicated practical norms are “legitimate” is, in the first instance, that
updating intentions in accord with such norms is rationally permissible. It
follows that there cannot be rational requirements not to update intentions
1
For the language of “willingness,” see Boghossian (2003: 280) and Peacocke
(2000: 265, 267).
2
Peacocke (1993, 2004: 172). The literature often glides between talk of condi-
tions of semantic understanding and conditions of concept-possession. See Williamson
(2003: 272) for a brief defense of this practice in the context of metasemantic arguments.
I will only talk in terms of concept-possession.
46 Hille Paakkunainen
3
The notion of a rational permission is thus different from Boghossian’s “defeasible
warrant.” See §1. I discuss the relevant notions of rational requirement and permission
in some detail there.
4
See e.g. Gibbard (2003: esp. Introduction and pp. 152–8 of ch. 7). For a different
development of the idea, see Wedgwood (2007: esp. chs 1, 4, and 7). For resistance, and
many more references, see Schroeter (2005). I use small caps for concepts throughout.
5
For the qualification about defeasibility, see Boghossian (2003: 281).
Vindicating Practical Norms 47
6
See e.g. 2003: 279–80; 2001: 258.
7
2003: 279; 2001: 258. Boghossian thinks that other logical connectives are
analogous.
8
Further, the disposition may be sensitive to conditions, if any, in which a conclusion
of the form q does not follow from premises of the form p, p→q. So one cannot dis-
miss Boghossian’s claim about the conditions of possessing conditional by pointing to
the possibility that someone like Vann McGee might sincerely deny the general validity
MPP as a truth about implication. (See Williamson 2003: 251–2 on this as a proposed
counterexample.) I will continue to ignore the distinction between truths about implica-
tion and rules of inference, assuming with the literature that, while the two are distinct,
we can easily formulate inference rules that roughly correspond to truths about logical
implication.
48 Hille Paakkunainen
11
I do not presuppose that any particular goal is the primary epistemic goal. The state-
ment in the text is just to give a very general characterization of one worthwhile topic one
might mean to refer to by “epistemic rationality.”
12
It is of course a difficult question what it is to be disposed to update intentions
“in accord” with such a principle. Does it involve the disposition to believe that one has
certain kinds of reasons to intend, when one has them? Or is it the disposition to intend
the necessary means to one’s ends, indiscriminately? I put these questions aside here. As
I explain below, my focus will be on rational permissions and requirements of a differ-
ent sort, not reasons-transfer principles. I raise reasons-transfer principles here because
they are the closest analogue to Boghossian’s concern with warrant-transfer, and are thus
helpful for starting to see how the metasemantic idea might apply in the practical case.
13
If the times of both X and Y are the same, the requirement is synchronic. If the
times are different, the requirement is diachronic. See Kolodny (2007: 373) for a detailed
example of how even a putative diachronic requirement might be formulated as having
wide scope.
50 Hille Paakkunainen
ENR(wide) Rationality requires that [If you believe that you ought
to Φ, then you intend to Φ].14
M/E(wide) Rationality requires that [If you intend to Ψ, and you
believe that you can Ψ only by Φ-ing, then you intend to Φ].
These requirements have “wide scope” in the sense that they govern combi-
nations of attitudes. Someone who believes that she ought to Φ can come
to conform to ENR(wide) either by adopting the intention or by giving up
the belief. In contrast, putative “narrow-scope” requirements of rationality,
of form “If you X, then you are rationally required to Y,” cannot be. Here
is a putative narrow-scope enkratic requirement, and a parallel means/ends
requirement:
ENR(narrow) If you believe that you ought to Φ, then you are
rationally required to intend to Φ.
M/E(narrow) If you intend to Ψ, and you believe that you can Ψ
only by Φ-ing, then you are rationally required to intend to Φ.
In addition, some ways of updating intentions might be rationally permit-
ted but not required. Here is a putative narrow-scope enkratic permission:
ENP(narrow) If you believe that you ought to Φ, then you are
rationally permitted to intend to Φ.
Part of what is in question in the theory of practical rationality is what
the different facets of well-functioning practical psychologies are, and how
they relate to each other.15 The metasemantic idea is to try to derive at least
some of the content of a theory of practical rationality from premises about
what it takes to possess certain concepts. For instance, if a disposition to
update intentions in accord with ENR(narrow) is a condition of possessing
ought to Φ, then according to the metasemanticist, one is either genu-
inely permitted or required to update intentions in this way. This would
vindicate the disposition to follow ENR(narrow) as part of being practi-
cally rational.16 Our question is how the inference from premises about the
14
See e.g. Broome (2007). Time constraints are relevant to more precisely formulat-
ing which requirement is at issue, but this will do for illustration.
15
e.g. there is a lot of literature on whether rational requirements correspond to, or
provide, normative reasons. See e.g. Kolodny (2005), Broome (2008).
16
Notice that talk of “updating intentions in accord with” ENR(narrow) is most
naturally heard as being about a diachronic process, and so the relevant version of
ENR(narrow) is most naturally read as a diachronic requirement. But the metaseman-
ticist might also try to vindicate ENR(narrow) read as a synchronic requirement, by
arguing that if the disposition to bring oneself to conform to this synchronic requirement
is constitutive of possessing ought to Φ, then conforming to the synchronic require-
ment is part of being practically rational. I will not track these different possibilities in
the text, and will often speak of “inferential dispositions” as concept-constituting, along
with the literature, even though this language may not easily fit the idea that dispositions
Vindicating Practical Norms 51
20
Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for putting this objection to me.
21
See n. 4.
22
Much of the discussion in this section is in terms of epistemic warrant-transfer since
this is Boghossian’s focus. But I draw connections to the case of rational permissions or
requirements for updating intentions where appropriate.
Vindicating Practical Norms 53
23
2003: 268.
24
2003: 268–70.
25
Boghossian (2003: 270).
26
Boghossian (2003: 270). I have modified Boghossian’s statement of the simple
internalist view slightly.
27
Boghossian further presses Carroll-style regress worries against simple
internalism: 2003: 273–6.
54 Hille Paakkunainen
28
Though at 2003: 278, Boghossian explicitly leaves it open that truth-preservation
may be necessary for warrant-transfer. Notice that MEC is also compatible with thinking
that only truth-preserving inferences could be concept-constituting. Truth-preservation
might thus come back through the back door to constrain epistemic entitlement. This is
Peacocke’s (1993) view; but Boghossian rejects it at 2003: 281.
29
For blamelessness as “non-culpability” and as meeting reasonable expectations, see
Pryor (2001: 114–15).
Vindicating Practical Norms 55
30
Likewise it is possible to reason irresponsibly or carelessly in accord with “good”
standards. For instance, one might reason carelessly in accord with MPP, from premises
of the form p, p→q to q*, where q* is very close to q but different enough to not be
supported by p and p→q. It is of course a difficult question what distinguishes incorrect
reasoning in accord with MPP, caused by e.g. recklessness or inattention to the task, from
correct reasoning in accord with some subtly different rule, MPP*. Still, there seems to
be such a distinction.
31
It is somewhat harder to see what the analogy to truth-preservation might be in
the practical case. One answer is: truth-preservation. If intentions constitutively involve
beliefs, then requirements for updating intentions might be, at bottom, requirements
governing belief. This is the view of “cognitivists” about practical reason; see e.g. Ross
(2009), Setiya (2007).
56 Hille Paakkunainen
32
Cf. Williamson (2003: 255–6).
33
For Wedgwood on “rational disposition,” see 2007: 161–5.
Vindicating Practical Norms 57
34
MEC looks to state a metaphysical dependence claim, to the effect that if
there are any inferential transitions that are concept-constituting, then those transi-
tions are entitling and not just brutely so: rather, they are entitling in virtue of being
concept-constituting. (Cf. Boghossian 2003: 278.) Thus understood, the fundamental
task for an argument for MEC is to spell out how this metaphysical dependence of the
normative property of entitlement on the seemingly non-normative property of being
concept-constituting goes. However, if Wedgwood’s larger project were sound, would
this mean that there is no metaphysical dependence of the normative on facts about
concept-possession? No: Wedgwood’s claim is that there is interdependence (175). Such
interdependence is consistent with the thought that particular dispositions are rational
because of being concept-constituting. It is just that this would not be a reduction of these
dispositions’ property of being rational to their property of being concept-constituting,
since one would in turn need to appeal to the dispositions’ rationality in order to explain
their being concept-constituting; and such circular explanations are not reductive. For
Wedgwood on “reduction,” and on why not all constitutive accounts that are genuinely
explanatory of the nature of a thing need to be reductive, see 2007: 136–7. I continue to
assume in the text that, unlike Wedgwood, the metasemanticist is interested in giving a
non-circular explanation of the rationality of concept-constituting dispositions.
35
What might an explanation of the concept-constitutingness of a particular disposi-
tion look like, if it did not make any assumptions about the rationality of the disposition?
See e.g. Gibbard (2003).
58 Hille Paakkunainen
36
Wedgwood also assumes that a disposition to update one’s intentions enkratically
is a rational disposition (2007: 25). And he says that the enkratic disposition “might” be
essential to possessing the concept ought to Φ (2007: 170).
Vindicating Practical Norms 59
In response, one might suggest that it is not that the perfectly rational
being must be omniscient, but rather just that it is odd to think that perfect
rationality could, in and of itself, bar a thinker from knowing certain facts.
In particular, if perfect rationality consists, in part, in having all the epis-
temically rational dispositions, then shouldn’t such thinkers be in a better
position to know any fact than would be an imperfectly rational thinker
who has some epistemically irrational dispositions? Yet the supposition that
a concept C requires an epistemically irrational disposition to possess it
would make facts knowable only by means of an employment of C—if
there are any—unknowable for perfectly rational epistemic agents.
Perhaps something similar can be said to explain why concept-constituting
inferential dispositions cannot be practically irrational. Since a perfectly
rational being lacks all practically irrational dispositions, she lacks any con-
cept C that it takes a practically irrational disposition to possess. But then
if there are any facts that are knowable only by means of an employment
of such a concept C—a big if, to be sure—then the perfectly rational being
cannot know those facts, either. Her practical rationality deprives her of
the possibility of knowing certain facts—in this case, facts that a practically
irrational person could presumably know, if she were at least epistemically
rational. And this, again, would be rather odd.
I think this argument may be getting at something right. But it is unsat-
isfying as it stands. Why think that, for any concept C that it takes an irra-
tional disposition to possess, there might be some facts that are knowable
only through an application of C? Further, why should perfectly rational
beings, just as such, be in a position to know every fact, even if they have all
the epistemically rational dispositions? Knowing some facts might require
too long a process of reasoning for the knowledge to be achievable in the
perfectly rational being’s lifetime.37 Knowing others might require ability to
fly like a hawk. (“This is what it is like to fly like a hawk.”) Being perfectly
rational does not guarantee having all the resources and abilities required to
know all the facts. Why then should it guarantee access to all the concepts?
After all, it takes a contingent sensory modality to have e.g. the demonstra-
tive concept this shade, for some particular shade of red in front of one.
Why should the nature of being perfectly rational guarantee access to such
contingent conceptual resources?
37
Cf. McGrath (2010). Unless, of course, we assume that the perfectly rational being
also lives for an infinitely long time, or perhaps is outside of time altogether. But again, it
is unclear why we should assume this. Wedgwood does not claim that he is appealing to
the notion of some sort of a supernatural deity. Indeed, such an appeal would introduce
its own problems. Why think that such a deity needs dispositions of reasoning at all,
instead of knowing everything intuitively?
60 Hille Paakkunainen
One might retort that it is one thing to say that some perfectly rational
being might contingently lack the resources to know certain facts. It is another
to say that being perfectly rational would in and of itself necessitate lacking
certain concepts, and thus would necessitate lacking the knowledge of facts,
if any, that are knowable only by means of those concepts. And the latter is
what is at issue if some concepts can only be possessed by having irrational
dispositions. But it is still unclear why it should be worrisome if some facts
are necessarily unknowable for a perfectly rational being, if it is not worri-
some that some facts are contingently unknowable for such a being.
Wedgwood does make a further remark that might seem helpful. He says
that possessing a concept is a “cognitive power or ability—not a cognitive
defect or liability” (2007: 169). I think there is something right about this.
But the remark is cryptic. Wedgwood does not explain why, even if having
a concept is a cognitive “power or ability” along one dimension, it cannot be
a cognitive defect or liability along another. Suppose that a concept makes it
possible for one to entertain new thoughts one could not have entertained
before. Suppose the concept even makes it possible for one to know new
facts. We have still not explained why it cannot at the same time be a liabil-
ity along another dimension, in that it disposes one to reason badly.
I think Wedgwood’s argument is getting at something important. But
if the foregoing is right, it does not quite show that concept-constituting
inferential dispositions must be rational ones. Recall, too, that it does not
tell us whether the “rational” dispositions at issue are dispositions to infer
in ways that are rationally required, or in ways that are merely rationally
permitted. The arguments of §§4–6 hope to do better.
38
Recall n. 16: I formulate my argument in a way that is most naturally read as
concerning diachronic enkratic permissions. But I think essentially the same argument
would work, with minor modifications, for synchronic enkratic permissions.
39
We can bracket for now the question what such a disposition would look like, and
how it would differ from e.g. a disposition to update one’s intentions in accord with
ENR(narrow) (from §1). I address this briefly in §6.
40
I am assuming that the metasemanticist will not want to argue from the
concept-constituting status of D[ENP(narrow)] to the rational permissibility of some
other way of updating intentions.
62 Hille Paakkunainen
Opposing Rule is schematic, Φ-ing could be anything. And since there are
lots of intentions we all constantly fail to have, attributing the Opposing
Rule disposition to people would be far too easy.) Instead, to attribute the
disposition, we need some evidence that, even given beliefs to the effect
that one ought to Φ, for any Φ, one still tends to lack the intention to
Φ.41 Compare: ending up with beliefs that q is no evidence on its own of
a disposition to engage in MPP-ish reasoning. What is evidence of such a
disposition are the output beliefs one ends up with when one has the input
beliefs p, p→q.
Of course, it is possible for dispositions to be masked, so that their mani-
festation is prevented. Certainly we shouldn’t count each failure to be in the
output state given the input state as evidence against having the disposition.
It may even be that some dispositions can always be masked, so that they are
never manifested; though this is more contentious. But when a disposition
is masked, its input states don’t produce the output state they would regu-
larly—if unmasked—produce. This doesn’t get us away from the fact that,
to attribute a disposition to a person, we must be able to attribute to her the
relevant input states. In particular, to attribute the D[OR] disposition to an
agent, that agent must have had, and be in a position to have again, beliefs
to the effect that she ought to Φ.
But now consider what having, or being in a position to have, the input
beliefs requires. In the case of the disposition to engage in MPP-ish reason-
ing, having the input beliefs requires having the concept conditional. In
the case of D[OR], having the input beliefs requires having ought to Φ.
So having D[OR] requires having ought to Φ.42
We are now ready to complete our reductio. Recall the metasemanti-
cist’s starting assumption that to possess ought to Φ, one must have the
disposition D[ENP(narrow)]. Under our assumptions, this means that in
order to possess ought to Φ, one must have an irrational disposition. Yet
41
Notice that the Opposing Rule is, in effect, a rule prescribing akrasia.
42
One might object that it is possible to lose the concept ought to Φ in between
having instances of belief that one ought to Φ; and yet retain the disposition D[OR]
all along. If so, then one can have D[OR] while lacking ought to Φ. But this seems
extremely implausible. In any case, if one does lose the concept, then one is not at that
moment in a position to have the input beliefs, for having those beliefs requires having
the concept. So it is unclear why we shouldn’t say that losing the concept means losing
the disposition whose input beliefs are in question. (Notice that the reverse needn’t be
true: losing D[OR] needn’t mean losing ought to Φ. For there might be other disposi-
tions that allow one to have ought to Φ, or perhaps one can have ought to Φ without
having any particular disposition at all. It is only if a disposition is constitutive of hav-
ing ought to Φ, as we are supposing D[ENP(narrow)] to be, that losing the disposi-
tion would entail losing the concept. The present point, however, is just that losing the
concept would mean losing all dispositions whose input states require one to have the
concept.)
64 Hille Paakkunainen
43
Although it might of course happen to issue requirements that come into practical
conflict with the original permissions.
Vindicating Practical Norms 65
Response
If the putative requirement “Don’t intend to Φ!” is supposed to range over
all actions Φ, then it seems absurd. It would amount to a requirement to
not intend anything, not a requirement governing what to intend or how
to update one’s intentions. (In contrast, the Opposing Rule “If you believe
that you ought to Φ, then you are rationally required to not intend to Φ”
leaves one free to intend to do whatever one doesn’t believe one ought to
do. The rule merely constrains one’s intentions, telling one to give up inten-
tions to do things that one comes to believe one ought to do.) On the other
hand, suppose that “Φ” in “Don’t intend to Φ!” stands for a particular type
of action. It certainly seems possible that intending some types of action is
strictly prohibited, just as such. But what sort of prohibition is supposed to
be in question?
One option is that the proposed requirement states that one always has
decisive normative reasons to not intend to Φ; so that one ought not to so
intend. However, it is a substantive and disputed question whether rational
requirements governing combinations or sequences of attitudes correspond
in any clear way to normative reasons for action or intention.45 I mean to leave
open here the possibility that one might have decisive reasons not to intend
something that one is rationally permitted, or even rationally required, to
intend. To be relevant, then, the putative requirement “Don’t intend to Φ!”
had better be a putative rational requirement in this restricted sense, not
the claim that there are decisive normative reasons to not intend to Φ. But
44
Thanks to Owen King and an anonymous reviewer for raising versions of this
objection.
45
See n. 15.
66 Hille Paakkunainen
Objection 2
ENP(narrow) could be false even if concept-constituting, because one
might be required to give up the concept ought to Φ altogether, or to
not have it in the first place. This is not an opposing rational requirement
governing the same combinations of attitudes that ENP(narrow) governs.
Rather, it is a demand to give up or not have the concept ought to Φ, and
thus to give up having, or not have, any attitudes that deploy that concept.
Notice that the objection is not that one might be rationally required to
not manifest a disposition that one has. That is the worry that has been
with us all along, and that the reductio above is supposed to counter (by
showing that concept-constituting dispositions must be rational ones, in
the sense of being dispositions to update intentions in rationally permissible
ways). Rather, the present objector admits that if I have the concept, and so
the disposition, then I am rationally permitted to update intentions in the
46
Cf. the discussion in §1 of the exact contours of the MPP-ish inferential disposition
supposedly required for possessing conditional (p. 47 and n. 8).
47
A further possibility is that one is under a rational requirement to not intend to Φ
whenever one, say, desires to Φ; and one either happens or tends to desire to Φ whenever
one believes that one ought to Φ. But this route to opposition with ENP(narrow) would
likewise require beliefs that one ought to Φ; and so, would require having ought to Φ.
Vindicating Practical Norms 67
ways I am disposed to do. If I have the disposition, then I am permitted to
manifest it. What the objector denies is that I am thereby (unconditionally)
rationally permitted to update my intentions in the relevant ways, for she
denies that I am rationally permitted to have the concept.48
Response
The idea of being rationally required to lack a concept is odd. It is hard to
see how the idea of such a requirement relates to the sense of “rationality” in
play with requirements governing combinations or sequences of attitudes.
In any case, if there were rational requirements to lack concepts, it is hard
to see how one might non-accidentally comply with them, even if one is
perfectly rational. Suppose A is perfectly rational, and has never in fact had
the concept C that she should avoid. It is hard see how A might make sure
to avoid learning C, when she does not yet know what C is. Nor can A even
believe that she is to avoid acquiring concept C: this belief would require
having C. But if even a perfectly rational being can only accidentally avoid
violating a putative rational requirement to not acquire C, then this is not
really a rational requirement.
In counter-response, one might suggest that it is possible to know or
justifiedly believe that one should avoid acquiring a particular concept, if
someone reliable tells one to avoid something in the vicinity. For instance,
this reliable helper to maintaining one’s rationality might say: “Don’t asso-
ciate with those people,” or more to the point, “Don’t try to understand
what they’re saying,” or “Try not to understand what they’re saying.”49 But
it is hard to see how one might ensure that one won’t understand, or won’t
come to understand via a different route. Perhaps a perfectly rational being
can ask the reliable helper to tie her to the mast, making sure to keep bad
influences out. But it seems that a perfectly rational being’s tendency to
non-accidentally comply with rational requirements shouldn’t depend on
the contingent availability of such highly informed helpers. If it’s in the
nature of being perfectly rational to non-accidentally comply with rational
requirements—as per No Accident—then a perfectly rational being’s
rational dispositions should on their own equip her to non-accidentally
comply with rational requirements.50
48
Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for raising this objection.
49
Thanks to Kris McDaniel, Jamie Dreier, and Shyam Nair for raising versions of
this objection.
50
Of course, even a perfectly rational being’s dispositions might not always ensure
compliance: dispositions can fail to be manifested. But the point is that, in the good cases
when obstacles to manifestation are not present, the rational dispositions will suffice for
compliance on their own.
68 Hille Paakkunainen
This still leaves open the possibility that one might be rationally required
to relinquish having the concept C, if one does have it. However, it is not
clear how this coheres with the claim, which the present objector was sup-
posed to grant, that if one does have the concept, then one is rationally
permitted to manifest the concept-constituting disposition. (Manifesting
that disposition involves having C.) In any case, the idea of a rational
requirement to relinquish a concept is as odd as the idea of a requirement
to avoid acquiring it. If I were under a requirement to relinquish a concept,
I would not know how to begin satisfying this requirement. I might acci-
dentally forget C. But this is not to the point: again, rational requirements
are supposed to be such that it is in principle possible to comply with them
non-accidentally. I might consciously and quite purposely renounce a con-
cept: I might consider its way of carving up the world to be misleading or
objectionable in some way, and resolve not to think in its terms. Pejorative
concepts like boche are plausibly like this. But renouncing a concept as
objectionable need not mean—and plausibly doesn’t mean—losing the
concept. Even after renouncing the concept as objectionable, I can still
understand xenophobes’ objectionable thoughts that employ the concept.
Indeed, it is because I continue to understand xenophobes’ thoughts that
I can continue to knowledgeably view them as objectionable, and continue
to knowledgeably renounce the concept. If renouncing pejorative con-
cepts had to result in losing those concepts, then one couldn’t continue to
knowledgeably renounce them. Rather, having renounced them, one would
cease to understand them. This seems false to the phenomena. I conclude
that renouncing a concept isn’t relinquishing it.51 It is still unclear how one
might non-accidentally comply with this alleged rational requirement to
relinquish a concept.52
A final suggestion is that a perfectly rational being would simply be dis-
posed to relinquish any concept that she is required to relinquish: that is how
she non-accidentally relinquishes it, however the disposition works exactly.
Of course, unlearning the concept would put her at risk of accidentally
learning it again. But were she to accidentally relearn the concept, her dispo-
sition to relinquish it would soon ensure that she unlearns it. However, this
would trap the perfectly rational being in an odd see-saw loop of unlearning
and accidental relearning. It seems better to think of rational requirements,
51
Thanks to Guy Fletcher for very helpful discussion of pejorative concepts.
52
Perhaps one could go to a very specialized neurosurgeon who could zap the
circuits that sustain this specific concept. But a perfectly rational being’s ability to
non-accidentally comply with rational requirements shouldn’t depend on the contingent
availability of such specialized neurosurgeons. (And how expensive would these surgeons
be? Could only the rich be rational? Or would the state help one be rational?)
Vindicating Practical Norms 69
if we can, in terms that don’t trap perfectly rational beings—the beings best
placed to comply with rational requirements—in such see-saw loops.53
Objection 3
The argument of §4 goes wrong in assuming that a perfectly rational being
must non-accidentally comply with the Opposing Rule requirement. It is
true that, as No Accident claims, a perfectly rational being non-accidentally
complies with all the rational requirements that apply to her. But the
Opposing Rule requirement need not apply to every perfectly rational
being. In particular, it does not apply to a perfectly rational being who
lacks the concept ought to Φ. For if one lacks this concept, then one
is not yet in a position to have the types of attitude that the Opposing
Rule requirement governs. And surely this means that the Opposing Rule
requirement does not even apply to one. You might protest that perfectly
rational beings can’t lack concepts. But surely they can. Just as one can
be perfectly rational while contingently lacking the demonstrative concept
this shade, for some particular shade of red, likewise one can be perfectly
rational while lacking the concept ought to Φ. In effect, then, one can
continue to be perfectly rational so long as one has neither the disposition
D[OR] nor D[ENP(narrow)].
Response
Consider first the claim about application. Suppose a young child lacks
the concept ought to Φ. She could not, then, have beliefs to the effect
that she ought to Φ until she acquired this concept. Does this mean that
requirements governing how to update intentions in the light of such beliefs
don’t apply to her? It is not clear that it does. Compare: I am not now in
a position to violate traffic laws in Syracuse. I am sitting in my office, not
53
There is another, different objection in the area that is separate from our present
concerns. According to this different objection, just as one can possess pejorative con-
cepts while renouncing thinking in their terms, one can likewise continue to possess
the concept ought to Φ while renouncing thinking in its terms; and if the renouncing
is effective, this results in losing ought-beliefs, and might thereby also result in losing
the allegedly concept-constituting enkratic disposition. This would be an objection to
the metasemanticist’s premise about the conditions of possessing ought to Φ. And it
is not my aim here to assess that premise. For what it’s worth, I think that it is not
plausible that xenophobic dispositions are required for grasping xenophobic concepts,
for reasons closely related to the reasons why it seems possible to renounce xenophobic
concepts while possessing them. If the metasemanticist thinks that ought to Φ is differ-
ent in this regard, or that it can’t be renounced, then this is something that her theory of
concept-possession had better explain.
70 Hille Paakkunainen
doing the sort of thing that those traffic laws govern. Still, they apply to me.
And they would apply to me even if, by contingent coincidence, I could not
right now engage in the activities they govern. (Perhaps I have no idea how
to drive, though I could learn.) What is true is that neither traffic laws nor
rational requirements apply to non-rational beings, such as lampposts. But
these rules do seem to apply to beings of the sort who are in general capable
of engaging in the activities that the rules govern.54 I don’t have to wait to
actually get into a car and learn how to drive in order for the laws about how
to drive to apply to me. Rather, the laws do apply, and if I don’t get into a
car, I conform to the laws governing driver behavior by default. Likewise,
it seems, I don’t have to wait to actually have ought-beliefs in order for
requirements governing ought-beliefs to apply to me. Rather, as long as
I don’t have any ought-beliefs, I conform to the requirements by default.
Of course, my conformity to the rules here is merely external, not the
manifestation of a disposition to follow the relevant rules. I cannot have dis-
positions to update intentions in relation to ought-beliefs until I learn the
concept ought to Φ, just like I cannot have dispositions to drive a certain
way until I learn at least the rudiments of driving. Still, I don’t see why this
should mean that the relevant requirements don’t apply to me before I learn
to drive, or learn the concept.
Still, there is the question whether perfectly rational beings must
non-accidentally conform to rational requirements that apply to them, via
dispositions to follow those requirements. That is an important claim in the
argument of §4, since it is what led us to say that the perfectly rational being
needs to have the concept ought to Φ, if the Opposing Rule requirement
applies to her. And the present objector says that perfectly rational beings
can lack concepts, thus lacking the associated dispositions; and still remain
perfectly rational.
However, we must be careful about which intuitions lead us to think
that a perfectly rational being might lack certain concepts. Consider again
the young child who lacks the concept ought to Φ. As before, she is not
in a position to have ought-beliefs. Certainly we don’t want to say that
she is violating, or disposed to violate, any rational requirements governing
ought-beliefs. She is not irrational in this sense. Rather, she is conform-
ing to the requirements by default. If she lacks irrational dispositions, then
we might say that she is, in one sense, “perfectly rational.” However, this
does not mean that she is “perfectly rational” in a different, fuller sense.
54
One might put the point by saying that the relevant rules quantify over everyone in
a certain relatively wide class—the class of beings of the sort that are capable of the sorts
of activities that the rules govern. The rules apply to everyone in that class in the sense
that the rules address themselves to everyone in the domain of quantification. Thanks to
Kim Frost for helpful discussion here.
Vindicating Practical Norms 71
In this fuller sense, lacking perfect rationality need not consist in having
an irrational disposition: it can also consist in lacking a rational one—for
instance, a disposition to conform to rational requirements that apply to
one. And the child lacks a rational disposition: the disposition to update
intentions in accord with the Opposing Rule. She lacks this disposition at
least until she gains the concepts requisite to have the attitude-types that
the requirement governs. In this fuller sense of perfect rationality, one can-
not be perfectly rational—one cannot have all the dispositions to comply
with rational requirements that apply to one—without having the concepts
requisite for having these dispositions.
With this distinction between senses of “perfect rationality” to hand, let
us stipulate that No Accident concerns perfect rationality in the fuller sense.
(This is plausible in any case.) Let us also stipulate that No Irrationality
concerns perfect rationality in the fuller sense. (Though it also concerns
perfect rationality in the more modest sense of merely lacking irrational dis-
positions.) With these stipulations, the argument of §4 still goes through.
Not only does the Opposing Rule requirement apply to the (fully) per-
fectly rational being; but that being must also be disposed to comply with
the Opposing Rule. And this entails, again, that she must have the con-
cept ought to Φ. So, as before, No Irrationality and No Accident cannot
both be true, if the concept-constituting disposition D[ENP(narrow)] is an
irrational one.
(Notice that this still leaves it open that there are some concepts that per-
fectly rational beings, even in the fuller sense, can lack. It is just that those
concepts had better not be needed for having dispositions to comply with
the rational requirements that apply to one.)
These seem to me to be the worst objections facing the argument of
§4. If my responses stand, that argument looks to be on fairly strong foot-
ing. But that argument only purported to show that any permissive rules,
whether of narrow or wide scope, must be true if concept-constituting.
What about rules stating rational requirements? Must these also be true if
concept-constituting?
55
The general strategy of individuating putatively rational dispositions here is similar
to Michael Smith’s (2003) strategy for individuating ways of falling short of rationality,
by means of differential responsiveness.
56
Thanks to Brad Cokelet for suggesting this third case. You might think there is a
fourth case: ENR(narrow) is false because there are no rational requirements. However,
my argument is not an existence proof that there must be rational requirements if there
are facts about concept-constitution. Instead, it is an account of what the content of the
domain of rational permissions and requirements must be on the assumption that certain
claims about concept-possession are true, if there is such a domain.
Vindicating Practical Norms 73
7. Conclusion
I have been arguing that starting from suitable inferentialist premises about
what it takes to possess concepts, we can validly derive rational permissions
and, more tentatively, rational requirements. Recall that I have not argued
for any such inferentialist premises. As I noted, e.g. Allan Gibbard and
Ralph Wedgwood have both defended such premises about ought to Φ
in different ways. There is at least some plausibility to such premises. If my
argument here stands, it is these premises about concept-possession that
we must attack in order to resist metasemantic vindications of practical
norms.57
There is a different strand of thinking about the relationship between
ought to Φ and intentions to Φ that the above argument does not
address. Adapted to our present concerns, so-called “moderate internalism”
57
Notice that nothing in my argument depends on whether judgments that one
ought to Φ are cognitive or non-cognitive states. To get the argument going, it is enough
that such judgments involve deploying the concept ought to Φ. Thanks to an anony-
mous reviewer for a helpful remark on this.
74 Hille Paakkunainen
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New Essays on the A Priori, 229–54. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Boghossian, P. 2001. “How are Objective Epistemic Reasons Possible?” Reprinted
in P. Boghossian, Content and Justification: Philosophical Papers, 235–66.
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2008.
Boghossian, P. 2003. “Blind Reasoning.” Reprinted in P. Boghossian, Content and
Justification: Philosophical Papers, 267–87. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2008.
Broome, J. 2007. “Wide or Narrow Scope?” Mind, 116: 359–70.
Broome, J. 2008. “Is Rationality Normative?” Disputatio, 11: 153–71.
Gibbard, A. 2003. Thinking How to Live. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Horwich, P. 2005. “Meaning Constitution and Epistemic Rationality,” in P. Horwich
(ed.), Reflections on Meaning, 134–73. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kavka, G. 1983. “The Toxin Puzzle,” Analysis, 43: 33–6.
Kolodny, N. 2005. “Why Be Rational?” Mind, 114: 509–63.
Kolodny, N. 2007. “State or Process Requirements?” Mind, 116: 371–85.
McGrath, S. 2010. “Moral Realism without Convergence,” Philosophical Topics,
38: 59–90.
Parfit, D. 2011. On What Matters. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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58
See van Roojen (2010: 499–500) for a recent formulation of this idea.
59
I am very grateful to the audience at the Madison Metaethics Workshop for chal-
lenging discussion, and especially to Jamie Dreier, Jennifer Morton, Shyam Nair, and
Andrew Sepielli for questions that by increments prompted large changes in my argu-
ment. Guy Fletcher, Kim Frost, André Gallois, Owen King, Kris McDaniel, and two
anonymous reviewers for Oxford Studies in Metaethics each deserve huge thanks for read-
ing and commenting on previous drafts. Special thanks to Owen King, whose careful
questioning helped me tremendously in clarifying my argument. I would also like to
thank Kieran Setiya for extensive feedback on early incarnations of the central ideas in
this chapter, and Kathryn Lindeman for helpful discussion of related issues.
Vindicating Practical Norms 75
Worries about the compatibility of evolution and morality are not new—
even Darwin had them. A number of recent arguments revive these con-
cerns. These evolutionary debunking arguments take the following form: you
just believe what you do because you evolved to, therefore you’re not justi-
fied in believing what you do. They typically target evaluative realism: the
view that evaluative facts are attitude-independent—that what is valuable is
valuable whether or not we happen to value it.1
The worry is that just as evolutionary forces shaped our eyes and ears,
so they shaped our evaluative attitudes. But, the debunker argues, we have
no reason to think that these forces would track the attitude-independent
evaluative truths that the realist posits.2 Worse yet, we seem to have a good
reason to think that they wouldn’t: evolution selects for characteristics
that increase genetic fitness—not ones that correlate with evaluative truth.
Plausibly, the attitudes and judgments that increase a creature’s fitness come
apart from the true evaluative beliefs. If this is so, then it seems that evolu-
tionary forces have had a distorting effect on our evaluative attitudes. The
1
This understanding of realism follows the evolutionary debunking literature. Similar
definitions can be found in metaethics more generally (see Shafer-Landau 2005: 15
on “stance-independence”). For present purposes, evaluative propositions are of the
form: that X is a normative reason to Y, that one should or ought to X, that X is good,
valuable, or worthwhile, that X is morally right or wrong, and so on. Evaluative attitudes
include (conscious or unconscious) beliefs in evaluative propositions, as well “as desires,
attitudes of approval and disapproval, unreflective . . . tendencies such as the tendency to
experience X as counting in favor of or demanding Y,” etc. (Street 2006: 110).
2
From here on I’ll drop the “attitude-independent” qualifier on evaluative attitudes
or truths.
Debunking Evolutionary Debunking 77
3
Street doesn’t say that we cannot rationally maintain belief, but rather that
we “should suspend belief ” (forthcoming: 2). I think we mean the same thing here.
78 Katia Vavova
9
There are two relevant ways of understanding “mistaken” here. On the first, a belief
is mistaken just in case it is false. On the second, a belief is mistaken just in case it is not
supported by the believer’s evidence. What sort of mistake does the debunker point to?
That’s for her to say. I will follow much of the literature and focus on the first. This mostly
won’t matter for my purposes, but I will make a note when it does.
10
I agree, though I’ll soon argue that this principle doesn’t capture these differences.
Debunking Evolutionary Debunking 81
the independent normative truths. Pain is bad, and we do have strong rea-
sons to promote the survival and well-being of ourselves and our children”
(2011: 533). Discussing an analogous case, Dworkin wonders what the fuss
is about. Why shouldn’t we, he writes, “count it as a piece of luck—a special
example of what Bernard Williams has called moral luck [that our adaptive
beliefs and the true ones] here coincide?” (Dworkin 1996: 125).
Other defenses of realism begin with similarly substantive moral assump-
tions: that pain is bad, that survival is good, that we have rights, and so on.11
Street argues, however, that such assumptions are illegitimate in this context.
To presuppose the truth of particular evaluative judgments is to presuppose
exactly what the evolutionary story is meant to bring under scrutiny. This is
“trivially question-begging,” Street argues. Our reasons for thinking that our
judgments are true cannot simply assume “the very thing called into ques-
tion,” namely the truth of those judgments (Street MS: 15–16).
Whatever we think of the best version of this response, we should grant
that there is something prima facie fishy about it. This is most evident in
Dworkin. He begins by granting that evolution has been a suspicious, epis-
temically no-good influence on our evaluative beliefs. He then insists that
we happened to have gotten things right. After all, we believe we have rea-
son to take care of our kids, and we are right in so believing. How lucky that
the adaptive beliefs and the evaluative truth here coincide!
If the onus is on us to demonstrate that we are not mistaken, we cannot
simply insist that our beliefs are true and count ourselves lucky. We would
be like the dogmatist who reasons that since he knows that p, any evidence
he gets against p must be misleading, so he can ignore it.12 We cannot safe-
guard our beliefs from defeating evidence like this. Nor can we dismiss the
debunker’s challenge so easily.
We can now see what the debunker thinks we need if we are to avoid
her challenge: a reason to think that we are not mistaken in our evaluative
beliefs that doesn’t simply presuppose the truth of those beliefs. This reason
is, in some sense, independent of what is called into question.13
11
Wielenberg’s (2010) response assumes that we have rights. Enoch’s (2010) assumes
that “survival or reproductive success (or whatever else evolution ‘aims’ at) is at least
somewhat good” (2010: 18). Dworkin repeatedly insists that we can just count ourselves
lucky (1996, 2011). Parfit earlier claims that moral beliefs can be justified by their intrin-
sic credibility (see his 2011: 490). I won’t say more about these here. I take them up in
my MS b.
12
Cf. Harman (1973: 148) and Kripke (2011: 49).
13
This independence requirement is crucial to the debunker’s argument, and yet has
no defense in the debunking literature. Elga (2007), Christensen (2007), and others
explicitly endorse similar independence requirements for disagreement. White ques-
tions them (2010: 588–9). More must be said about what counts as independent, how
to set aside what is not, and how to characterize this “setting aside” formally. These
82 Katia Vavova
This explains why the debunker asks us to bracket our evaluative beliefs—
even those that we know or rationally believe—and to focus only on the
origin story. If we do not do this, we stack the deck in our own favor. The
danger, of course, is that if we do, then we may well lack reason to think our
beliefs aren’t mistaken.
questions have been little addressed in the literature and I won’t be remedying that here.
Though rough, the characterization here suffices. I think independence requirements are
plausible, though I won’t argue for this here. See my MS a and MS b.
Debunking Evolutionary Debunking 83
if we set aside all that is in question, we must set aside all beliefs gained by
perception. This includes all scientific beliefs, like the belief that evolution-
ary theory is true. Without those, we cannot evaluate the rationality of
beliefs formed by perception. We can test the reliability of a particular sense
modality by granting the reliability of others. We can test our eyes against
our ears, and so on. But if we cannot rely on any of our senses, we have
nothing with which to evaluate reliability. We have set aside too much.
This might just be what the skeptic aims to demonstrate: that our jus-
tifications eventually run out and our beliefs ultimately rest on nothing.
This, however, was never the debunker’s point. She aimed to undermine
a particular, limited set of our beliefs using good scientific evidence that
they are mistaken. no good commits her to much more. If this argument
works, it undermines all that we believe and the evolutionary premise drops
out. Worse yet, if we aren’t justified in believing anything, then everything is
awful, but there is no special problem for the evaluative realist.
Some have argued that the evolutionary story is not essential to the argu-
ment. This is only true in an uninteresting sense: any suspect influence
could do the job. It needn’t be evolution. But an empirical claim of some
sort is essential—this is the distinctive feature of such arguments.14
This isn’t always made clear. Elsewhere Street begins by pointing to the
phenomenally low “odds that among all the possible coherent normative
systems, one’s own is the right one” (MS: 21). Since there are infinitely many
possible coherent normative systems, she argues, it would be a “striking
coincidence” if one’s own normative system happened to be the correct one
(MS: 21).15 Given that “one has no non-trivially-question-begging evidence
that one’s own system is the right one,” it is unreasonable to conclude that it
is (MS: 21). Street thus concludes that we have no good reason to think that
our evaluative beliefs are roughly on-track, for we have no reason that does
not assume the very thing called into question: the truth of those beliefs.
This version of the debunker’s challenge brings nothing new to the table.
It demands that we demonstrate that we aren’t massively mistaken about
morality. Legitimate or not, this is not the debunker’s demand.16 It is just an
instance of a general skeptical worry, suspiciously similar to this one:
Possibility of Error. Some possible states of belief are coherent and
stable—they look fine “from the inside”—and yet are mistaken. There
14
Cf. Bedke (MS: 3) and Street (2006: 155).
15
Bedke presents the challenge this way: as that of explaining this striking coinci-
dence. He does think an empirical premise is necessary, however, so it isn’t obvious which
way he goes.
16
I argue for this in my MS b, first presenting the explanatory demand and then
distinguishing it from the debunker’s.
84 Katia Vavova
are infinitely many of these and just one that is right. Furthermore,
we have no good reason to think we’re not in such a state. So it would
be unreasonable for us to be confident that we’re not in such a state.17
This challenge doesn’t and needn’t rely on empirical claims. You are asked
to justify your entire body of belief—and, on the relevant understanding of
“good reason,” you must do it without presupposing the truth of any of the
beliefs that have been called into question. But all of your beliefs have been
called into question, so the skeptic asks you to put them all aside. She then
asks: have you one good reason to think that your beliefs are true? You do
not, of course. And it isn’t because you have some reasons, but they aren’t
any good. The problem is that once you put aside all that you believe, you
don’t have any reasons left.18 You do not even have beliefs, so how could
you have reasons?19
This challenge can be raised against any subject matter. It isn’t peculiar to
the evaluative, it isn’t uniquely a problem for realism, and it can be raised
without empirical premises. If the debunker accepts no good, she commits
herself to the legitimacy of this reasoning. She thus ends up with the con-
clusion that we should all—regardless of our metaethics—suspend judg-
ment about everything. But that was never her goal.
Focusing on the many coherent evaluative states that we might be in is
thus misleading. That there are many such states, and that we have no good
reason to think we are in one of the good ones may be a problem, but it isn’t
the debunker’s problem. Her aim is to show, I will now argue, that we have
good reason to think that we are in one of the bad states.
What is the epistemic significance of the evolutionary story for our evalua-
tive beliefs? I argued that it couldn’t be that it leaves us with no good reason
to think we are not massively mistaken about the evaluative. If we under-
stand a “good reason” as we must, to avoid begging any questions, then
17
Elga (MS: 7).
18
Do you have anything left with which to even comprehend the skeptic’s question?
That is another difficulty. There is a more general anti-skeptical strategy in this spirit,
most commonly attributed to Wittgenstein (1969). Wright (2004) develops a view in
the same spirit. My goal is not so ambitious. It is simply to distinguish skeptics from
debunkers.
19
Of course, there is a sense of “reason” on which I can have one even if I do not
or cannot believe I have one. For the record, here and throughout, I will use “having a
reason” and “believing you have a reason” interchangeably.
Debunking Evolutionary Debunking 85
we certainly lack such reason. But we lack it for our entire body of beliefs.
While that may be a problem, it isn’t the debunker’s problem. So her point
cannot be that we lack good reason to think we’re right.
What is her point? It has something to do with the epistemically unflat-
tering picture the evolutionary story paints. What is epistemically unflatter-
ing, however, isn’t that we cannot independently establish that these beliefs
are right. Rather, it is that in learning this story about the origin of our
evaluative beliefs, we get good reason to think that our beliefs are wrong.
Since evolutionary forces select for adaptive beliefs—and not true ones—
evolution is a bad, potentially distorting influence on our evaluative beliefs.
On this alternative line of thought, the problem is not that we cannot dis-
miss the possibility of error—it is that good scientific evidence makes this
possibility more probable.
This version of the debunker’s argument is distinct from traditional skep-
tical arguments since it rests on an empirical claim. It is more selective than
traditional skeptical arguments because it targets all and only the suspi-
ciously influenced beliefs. The epistemic principle it relies on is:
good. If you have good reason to think that your belief is mistaken,
then you cannot rationally maintain it.20
The difference between good and no good is subtle but crucial. Roughly,
it is the difference between taking our beliefs to be innocent until proven
guilty and taking them to be guilty until proven innocent. no good requires
you to launch a defense on behalf of your belief; good requires you to hear
out the prosecution. Both of these principles can be used to formulate a
valid debunking argument, but the debunker should accept good only.
The debunker’s point is that evidence of evolutionary influence is evi-
dence of error. When we get such evidence, we must accommodate it with
appropriate revision. This is exactly what good expresses. It rightly shifts
20
The caveat from n. 9 is relevant here. I use “mistaken” to mean “false” here, but
these principles could be formulated in terms of rationality, justification, or evidential
support. e.g.
good*. If you have good reason to think that your belief is not supported by your evi-
dence, then you cannot rationally maintain it.
This is more controversial. Christensen (2011), Elga (2007), and Vavova (MS a)
defend principles along these lines. Kelly (2005) and Weatherson (MS) reject them.
They argue that “higher-order” evidence about p—evidence about your evidence for p—
should not affect your “first-order” attitude about p. There might be nothing wrong, on
their views, in believing both that p and that your evidence does not support p. So they
would reject good*. They could still accept good, however, for that commits them to
something weaker and more plausible: that you cannot rationally believe both that p and
that p is false.
86 Katia Vavova
21
There is some evidence for this reading (cf. n. 5). See esp. Street (2006) where
she often talks of the “distorting” Darwinian forces having led us off-track, or “having
pushed us in evaluative directions that have nothing whatsoever to do with the evalua-
tive truth” (121). I do not think anyone is consistent on which way to understand the
evolutionary debunker’s challenge: like this or as a more general skeptical challenge. My
MS b more thoroughly defends this interpretation of the dialectic.
22
Cf. Street (MS) where she argues that the particular normative assumptions in ques-
tion are not needed for either raising or responding to the challenge.
Debunking Evolutionary Debunking 87
23
Cf. Street (2009).
88 Katia Vavova
have eaten us. But why did we evolve to take frequency facts like [tigers]
as reasons to believe facts like [next tiger]?24 Is it because grasping this
attitude-independent normative truth was itself adaptive? Unlikely, Street
argues: natural selection favored a tendency to take considerations of truth
to bear on what to believe “not because it constituted a perception of an
independent fact about reasons, but rather simply because it guided the
formation of creatures’ beliefs in ways that turned out to be advantageous
for the purposes of survival and reproduction—in particular, because it got
them to believe things that turned out to be true, or at least roughly true,
about tigers and much else” (Forthcoming: 17).
In other words, we wouldn’t believe that [tigers] is a reason for believ-
ing [next tiger] if concluding [next tiger] on the basis of [tigers]
weren’t to our evolutionary benefit. Since evolution has no interest in the
attitude-independent epistemic truth, the beliefs it influences are likely to
be mistaken. Insofar as we are realist, the debunker argues, and continue to
maintain that what is epistemically valuable is valuable whether or not we
value it, we seem pushed to skepticism.
This argument rests on the claim that the same kinds of considerations
meant to undermine beliefs like we have reason to take care of our children
would also undermine beliefs such as we have reason to believe this rather
than that on this evidence. Even as she launches a formidable defense of this
claim, arguing both that evolutionary forces influenced our beliefs and that
this should worry us, Street admits that this case is much harder to make.
Grant her the first bit again (namely, influence) and ask: if evolution
had shaped our beliefs about epistemic reasons, would this give us a good
epistemic reason to worry about those beliefs? I will argue that it does not
and it cannot, for there is a deep structural problem with an argument this
ambitious.
The debunker aims to give us good reason to believe that we cannot
trust our beliefs about reasons for belief. But this itself—what the debunker
wants to give us—is a reason for belief. So we cannot trust it. We are there-
fore not permitted to take for granted the very thing we need to call our
evaluative beliefs into question. This is because, recall, the debunker must
give us good independent reason that is, by our own lights, reason to think
we are mistaken. But on this version, what we are supposed to be mis-
taken about includes, crucially, epistemic principles about how to revise our
beliefs in light of evidence. We need to take for granted the truth of good
and mistaken. Both of these claims, however, are about what we have rea-
son to believe, which is exactly what we’re supposed to be mistaken about.
24
I assume here a view on which taking [tigers] to be a reason to believe [next
tiger] is something more than merely having the disposition to infer one from the other.
Debunking Evolutionary Debunking 89
The debunker thus faces a dilemma. She may relax her standards for
what counts as a “good” reason, or she may maintain them. If she maintains
them, then she cannot give us good reason to think we are mistaken about
the evaluative. In short, this is because to evaluate we must rely on the eval-
uative. But in aiming to debunk all of our evaluative beliefs, the debunker
leaves us with nothing with which to evaluate whether those beliefs have
been debunked.
If instead the debunker relaxes her understanding of “good reason,” then
good is back. But so are our other beliefs about epistemic reasons, like the
belief that [tigers] really does give us reason to believe [next tiger], and
so on. And if we are allowed these assumptions, then the question-begging
response Street blocked is open again.
There is a natural response available to the debunker here. She could
reply that her point is dialectical, not skeptical. Though some debunkers
are skeptics or nihilists, others, like Street, are not. They do not really aim
to debunk our evaluative beliefs—they think those are true. Instead, they
aim to debunk realism. The skeptical conclusion is only for the purposes
of reductio, for these debunkers. It follows from realism and science, they
argue, and it is absurd. We cannot give up science, so realism must go.
Unfortunately, this response won’t do. Even if the debunker does not
ultimately endorse the skeptical conclusion, she must still show that it fol-
lows from realism and the evolutionary story. It is only if she can dem-
onstrate this that she has what she needs for her reductio. To do so, the
debunker must give us realists good reason to think we are mistaken, if
evolutionary theory is true. I have argued that the debunker is in principle
incapable of providing evidence of such global error. The reductio thus can-
not go through. mistaken is false. We do not have good reason to think we
are mistaken. The evolutionary story, at least, hasn’t given us any.
Such is the fate of the debunker who attacks evaluative realism wholesale.
Perhaps it isn’t surprising that this most ambitious debunker failed in just
this way. There are well-known puzzles about whether we can revise, or
even be anything short of certain of, our most fundamental principles of
belief revision.25 But perhaps the debunker can sidestep these difficulties
and avoid such a fate, if she can narrow her target.
There is more hope for the debunker who aims only at moral realism. Since
she does not target our beliefs about epistemic reasons, both good and
25
See Field (MS a, MS b), and Lewis (1971).
90 Katia Vavova
mistaken are potentially in play. The question is whether she can actually
establish the latter—whether she can use her evolutionary story to give us
good reason to think we are mistaken about morality. There are two impedi-
ments in her way.
The first is that the debunker must show that evolution causes trouble for
our moral beliefs only—that there is some disanalogy between this argu-
ment and the previous one. But the two arguments are presented as exactly
analogous (Street 2009). If the debunker cannot narrow down her target in
a principled way, this less ambitious argument collapses into the previous,
thereby sharing its fate.
The second is that even an appropriately narrowed challenge calls too
much into question. Since it targets all of our moral beliefs, we are left
knowing nothing about morality. But how can we tell if we are likely to be
mistaken about morality, if we know nothing about it? This concern will
occupy the rest of this section. To see it more clearly we need to zoom in to
the first inference of the argument.26
So far, we have either granted or glossed over the move from influence
to mistaken. Now we must look closer, for mistaken simply doesn’t follow
without, at least, reason to be suspicious of the purported influence. As
Street puts it:
genealogical information by itself implies nothing one way or another about
whether we should continue to hold a given belief. Rather, in order validly to draw
any conclusions about whether or how to adjust one’s belief that p, one must assess
the rational significance of the genealogical information, locating it in the context
of a larger set of premises about what counts as a good reason for the belief that
p. (Forthcoming: 2)
Kahane (2011) suggests, as a possible supplementary premise, that evolu-
tion is an “off-track” process since, by hypothesis, it doesn’t track the atti-
tude-independent evaluative truths.27 So long as we think that the adaptive
beliefs come apart from true beliefs, we can accept this premise. Expanding
the argument thus we get:
1. Evolutionary forces select for creatures with characteristics that increase
fitness.
26
In fact, the previous debunker faces an exactly analogous problem: if we know
nothing about the evaluative, how can we tell we are likely to be mistaken about it?
27
Bedke rightly warns that a process being off-track “is ambiguous between the claim
that the process has been shown to be unreliable and the claim that explanations for the
process do not aver to the target facts” (MS: 4–5). I think the debunker should be claim-
ing something more like the former. The latter claim is more akin to the aforementioned
explanatory demand, which I take up and distinguish from the debunker’s in my MS b.
Debunking Evolutionary Debunking 91
reason to avoid pain—that morality is about what is good for us, and that
needlessly throwing ourselves off of cliffs just isn’t that sort of thing. These
assumptions aren’t appropriately independent. Taking them for granted
threatens to stack the deck against the debunker. I will now argue, how-
ever, that taking these assumptions off the table threatens to undermine the
debunker’s argument.
Recall that we are meant to be getting good reason to think that we
are mistaken about morality. But we cannot determine if we are likely to
be mistaken about morality if we can make no assumptions at all about
what morality is like. I argued that the debunker’s challenge threatens any-
one who holds that the attitude-independent moral truths do not, in any
helpful way, coincide with the evolutionarily advantageous beliefs—anyone
who accepts P2. But even to make this crucial judgment, that these two
sets do not have the same contents, we need to know something about the
contents of those sets—what they are or what they are like.
Compare: I cannot demonstrate that I am not hopeless at interacting
with external objects in my manifest surroundings without knowing some-
thing about what those objects and surroundings are like. Likewise, I can-
not show that I am not hopeless at understanding right and wrong without
being allowed to make some assumptions about what is right and wrong.
If we can make no moral assumptions, then we cannot get P2: the claim
that the true evaluative beliefs and the adaptive evaluative beliefs come
apart. Now, I think P2 is plausible, and probably you do too. Certainly any
realist should believe it. However, we find P2 plausible against the back-
ground of our substantive moral beliefs. For example, we believe it is wrong
to discriminate against someone on the basis of race. At the same time,
there are evolutionary explanations of racism, on which it is adaptive to be
suspicious of those who do not look like you. In this case, then, the adap-
tive belief and the true moral belief come apart. Thus, to believe P2, one
must also believe that the evaluative beliefs are such-and-such, while the
evaluative truths are this-and-that. But if we cannot take for granted any of
our beliefs about the evaluative truths, then we cannot infer that they come
apart from the adaptive beliefs.
Again the debunker faces a dilemma. She may relax her standards for
what counts as a “good” reason, or she may maintain them. If she relaxes
them, she cannot give us good reason to think we are mistaken. Worse yet,
if we are permitted to assume that pain is bad, etc., then we can give her
good reason to think we are not mistaken and her purportedly undermining
story vindicates our evaluative beliefs.
If, instead, the debunker maintains her standards, she blocks such
responses. But she also blocks herself. If we cannot make any moral
assumptions—not even that pain is bad—then morality could be about
Debunking Evolutionary Debunking 93
anything.28 To hold that the moral truths do not coincide with the adap-
tive judgments, we must assume something about what those moral truths
are, or are like. If we may assume nothing about morality, then morality
could be about anything. And if morality could be about anything, then
we have no idea what morality is about. So we have no reason to think that
the attitude-independent truths and the adaptive beliefs don’t overlap. But
without that, we have no sense of what the chances are that we are mistaken.
Therefore, we cannot get to the conclusion that we probably are mistaken.29
Not, at least, via an evolutionary story.
The third debunking argument aims to undermine neither realism nor our
entire body of moral beliefs. It targets a restricted class of those beliefs: those
based on deontological intuitions.30 This should be the most promising
argument yet. Leaving intact most of our belief system gives this debunker
an abundance of resources with which to construct her challenge.
Unfortunately, this debunker’s evolutionary story is either idle or too
strong. On the first point: worries about the targeted intuitions arise inde-
pendently and are not worsened when supplemented with an origin story.
On the second point: even if we lack other reason to worry, we should be
reluctant to rely on an evolutionary story. It just isn’t selective enough.
But first, the argument. It begins with a sociological observation: most
think it permissible to divert a trolley away from five people toward one,
but impermissible to push one in front of a trolley to save five. Why the
discrepancy? We are killing one person in both cases, after all. The answer,
of course, is evolutionary. Pushing the one, rather than diverting the trol-
ley onto the one involves “up close and personal” violence of the sort that,
unlike button pushing or lever pulling, has been around for a long time
(Greene 2008: 43). Evolution selects for negative responses to this direct
way of killing; it doesn’t select for similarly negative responses to more indi-
rect ways of killing. But the fact that “I have killed someone in a way that
28
You might worry here that we are even talking about morality any more. The
debunker assumes that morality really could be about anything—it is conceptually poss
ible that morality is about throwing ourselves off of cliffs and causing each other pain. I’m
not so sure about this. Cuneo and Shafer-Landau (MS) argue that some of the very basic
moral claims (like that pain is bad) are conceptual truths: if we don’t have them we don’t
have our concept of “morality.” This seems right to me, but I won’t explore it further here.
29
I expand on this discussion in my MS b.
30
Here I follow Greene: deontological judgments are those “in favor of character-
istically deontological conclusions (e.g. ‘It’s wrong despite the benefits’),” and mutatis
mutandis for consequentialist judgments (2008: 39).
94 Katia Vavova
was possible a million years ago, rather than in a way that became possible
only two hundred years ago” is morally irrelevant (Singer 2005: 348). If
our deontological intuitions have this suspect origin, then we should worry
about the beliefs we rest upon them. They are likely to be mistaken. The
debunker concludes that we can only trust our utilitarian judgments, which
come from our uncontaminated “rational intuition” (Singer 2005: 350–1).
Two questions arise for this debunker. First, did we need an evolution-
ary story to make us worry about these particular intuitions? Second, why
should we think that our consequentialist intuitions are less suspect?
On the first point. It is true that we feel a greater pull to help the nearby
needy than the distant needy. Greene says: “the only reason that faraway
children fail to push our emotional buttons is that we evolved in an envi-
ronment in which it was impossible to interact with faraway individuals”
(2008: 76). This should make us uncomfortable, he argues, if we think
we are justified in ignoring the distant needy. For it was just an accident
of evolution that we are “emotionally insensitive to their plight” (Greene
2008: 76).
Recognizing that we are emotionally responsive to only nearby suffering
should worry us, but for more familiar reasons.31 What, after all, is the moral
difference between the drowning child in front of you and the starving child
across the world? Our intuitive judgment that we may be selectively altru-
istic in these ways is already under pressure in the same way our judgments
about trolley cases are under pressure. Try as we might, we can’t seem to
find satisfying reasons for these diverging judgments. But this problem is a
distinctly moral one. We can recognize it from the armchair—no empirical
origin story is necessary.
Likewise with the intuition that it is impermissible to push one person
off of a bridge to save five. Many of us feel this quite strongly. Many of us
also believe that there is no morally significant difference between killing
by lever-pulling and killing by person-pushing. Recognizing that we are
making a distinction without a difference should already make us quite
confident that we are making a mistake. Furthermore, we are rightly more
confident in this judgment than we are in any origin story. Learning, then,
that we evolved to make this distinction without a difference shouldn’t fur-
ther increase our confidence that we are making a mistake: it is already
maxed out. The evolutionary story is thus, at best, an idle premise in this
argument.32
Why doesn’t this just mean that this debunker is lucky—that the under-
mining of our deontological beliefs is overdetermined? This is where the
31
Singer (1972).
32
Some of these considerations reinforce similar points made by Berker (2009).
Debunking Evolutionary Debunking 95
second point comes in. Suppose we lack this other reason to worry, so the
full weight of the conclusion falls on the evolutionary story. Wouldn’t we
then have good, evolution given, reason to worry about our deontological
beliefs? Only if the evolutionary story could be employed selectively against
only our deontological intuitions, and it cannot.
First, there isn’t an uncontroversial evolutionary explanation of our altru-
istic tendencies.33 Without one we cannot accept this debunker’s influence
claim. Second, if we had such an explanation, it should debunk more than
our belief in selective altruism: “if a disposition to partial altruism was itself
selected by evolution, then the epistemic status of its reasoned extension
[impartial altruism of the sort utilitarians promote] should also be suspect”
(Kahane 2011: 119). This echoes a claim Street (2006) makes for a differ-
ent purpose: that rational reflection cannot correct for evolution’s unsavory
influence. If our most basic moral intuitions are infected, and they are the
starting points for our moral reasoning, then any result of that reasoning
will also be infected. Even Greene recognizes this point, succinctly putting
it thus: “garbage in, garbage out” (2008: 116). Why, then, isn’t he worried?
Surely he should be. For if these considerations are right, then Greene’s
argument targets utilitarian beliefs too. It thus collapses into the previous,
more ambitious argument. This is bad for two reasons. First, it is no longer
an argument against our deontological beliefs only, as it was intended to be.
Second, as an argument against all of our moral beliefs, it suffers from the
same trouble as the previous one.
This debunker thus faces a different dilemma. She either relies on an evo-
lutionary claim or she doesn’t. If she doesn’t, she accomplishes nothing new
philosophically. She merely reiterates one side of the same old debates about
drowning children and runaway trolleys. If the debunker instead decides to
rely on an evolutionary claim, she presents a new argument, but it isn’t a
good one. The considerations she cites undermine more than she intended,
and the argument collapses into the more ambitious and less promising
one. This is why the evolutionary bit is, at best, idle, and at worst, too pow-
erful, for this debunker’s purposes.
I argued that we have reason to worry about each of the available evolution-
ary debunking arguments. This doesn’t show that evidence of an off-track
influence could never give us good reason to think we are mistaken. On the
contrary, I think it often can.34 What the foregoing shows is the limits of
such arguments, and so, more generally, the limits of our ability to get evi-
dence of our own error. These limits are not of our cognitive architecture.
Our ability to acquire evidence of our own error is not limited because we
are, say, bad at recognizing such evidence. These limits arise out of the way
that such evidence works. Let me explain by extracting two lessons from
the above: one about debunking arguments and one about undermining
evidence more generally.
See my MS a.
34
The upshot here is that both of these more modest debunkers are better
off without the evolutionary bit of their arguments. This will be typical
for evolutionary debunkers. Their stories just cannot provide an appropri-
ately selective argument that targets all and only the intended beliefs. This
might not be surprising. It can seem as if an evolutionary story can be told
about any of our beliefs. Advances in the relatively young field of evolution-
ary psychology might change this. Currently, however, things do not look
promising for the evolutionary debunker. She is better off dropping the
evolutionary story altogether.
8.2 On Undermining
I have argued that all three debunking arguments fail to give us reason to
worry about our beliefs. This assumes, of course, that the burden is on the
debunker to give us such a reason to revise our beliefs. It also assumes that
rational belief revision works a certain way. I should make this background
picture explicit, though it is not controversial. Two minimal assumptions
guide the foregoing thoughts:
A1. A reason is a reason, and evidence is evidence, only against a backdrop
of beliefs we take for granted.
Consider: the sound of water drops on my office window is typically evi-
dence that it is raining. Suppose, however, I believe that the college gardener
is out to get me, so he regularly aims the garden hose at my window in the
hope of flooding my office. Water drops on my window, relative to these
background beliefs, is not evidence of rain. It is evidence that the gardener
is at it again.
The second assumption is this:
A2. The undermining power of a reason or a piece of evidence is not
all-or-nothing.
Hearing a trusted colleague say that the gardener is in the shed is a good
reason to think that the gardener is in the shed. But seeing him there, with
my own eyes, putting the hose away, may be a better reason to think so.
Just as you can get various strengths of reasons for thinking that the
gardener is out in the shed, you can get varying strengths of reasons for
thinking that you are mistaken about some p. The stronger your reason
for thinking that you are mistaken, the more substantial revision you will
probably have to make. The strength of this reason will depend on what
you have to go on. This ties in with the first assumption: the more substan-
tial the body of beliefs you can take for granted, the more potential you’ll
have for getting a good reason. If, for example, you cannot take for granted
98 Katia Vavova
many beliefs it calls into question, but whether it calls the right sorts of
beliefs into question, namely: those necessary for evaluating the relevant
evidence.
This rule of thumb thus issues in the following prediction. The most
ambitious debunker, she who aims to undermine all we believe, has the
lowest chance of success. The evidence she aims to give has no undermin-
ing potential. This is because, by calling all of our beliefs into question, she
leaves us nothing with which to question.
A moderately ambitious debunking argument may be able to cast some
doubt on the targeted beliefs. The extent to which it succeeds depends on
what exactly is called into question, and thus how substantive are the rel-
evant independent grounds. The debunker who aims to debunk your most
fundamental beliefs, those on which everything else you believe rests and
with which you judge what to believe—she is out of luck. Her challenge
just is the ambitious one in disguise. If she aims at a fairly superficial set of
your beliefs, she has a decent chance of undermining them.
The most modest debunker thus has the best prospects. She aims low,
but she may score high. This result makes sense. A comparison might help
show this.
Consider three disagreements. You disagree with Anne about the permis-
sibility of abortion. You agree on other moral and political matters. You
disagree with Beth about the permissibility of abortion, but also about a
myriad of other moral and political matters. You disagree with Clarisse
about the permissibility of abortion. But you also disagree about every other
moral matter. Clarisse is a psychopath.
Your disagreement with Anne has the most undermining potential; your
disagreement with Clarisse the least. Generally, the more common ground
you share with someone, the more significant their disagreement may be.
This is because the more common ground you share, the more independent
ground you have from which to get evidence of your error. You have much
independent ground on which to evaluate your disagreement with Anne;
you have none with Clarisse.
Since evidence of a suspect belief influence is also evidence of error,
we should expect the same pattern: evidence of a more pervasive belief
influence should be less worrying. This may seem counterintuitive, but
it is a good result. It makes sense that the most modest, targeted sort
of debunking argument should be the most effective, if it works. That
sort of argument provides me with good reason to think I am wrong
about some p. This good reason is good by my own lights: it follows from
my other beliefs about reasons and evidence. This is the kind of reason
the debunker must provide. It is also, I have argued, the kind that the
100 Katia Vavova
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5
No Coincidence?*
Matthew Bedke
1. Introduction
*
Thanks to the audience at the Wisconsin Metaethics Workshop for helpful com-
ments. Special thanks to Justin Clarke-Doane, David Silver, Chris Stephens, Terence
Cuneo, and David Copp for helping the project along.
1
This is meant to preclude non-cognitivist treatments of the discourse. Whether it
includes “non-metaphysicalist” views like Parfit’s is trickier. I think that it does so long as
quietism is not a veiled form of non-cognitivism.
2
The “because” clauses are causal-explanatory. The justifying grounds I have in mind
are intuitions and the beliefs that feed into reflective equilibrium, though the Argument
is not wedded to this epistemology. Whatever we base our normative beliefs on (in virtue
of which they are meant to be justified), the explanations for why we have those bases do
not aver to the truths of the normative beliefs they putatively support. Also, this premise
basically grants that one horn of Street’s Darwinian Dilemma is least desirable, namely,
the one that holds that evolutionary forces pushed us toward certain normative beliefs
because those beliefs are true. Non-naturalists should be with me on this.
No Coincidence? 103
(4) In relatively few of the possibilities in (3) do our normative beliefs rep-
resent normative facts (if such there be).3 (Rare Alignment)
(5) If (1), (2), (3), and (4), it would be an epistemic coincidence were we
caused to form normative beliefs that represent the normative facts.
(Conditional Coincidence)
(6) It would be an epistemic coincidence were we caused to form norma-
tive beliefs that represent the normative facts. (Coincidence)
The epistemic upshot is meant to be this: when the Coincidence
Argument is seen to apply to some set of our normative beliefs,
Coincidence defeats any justification antecedently enjoyed by those
beliefs. I take the Argument to roughly capture what exercised me in my
(2009) and to perhaps more roughly capture the worries that Gibbard
(2003: ch. 13), Joyce (2001, 2006, forthcoming), Ruse (1986), Street
(2006, 2008), and others are keen to push, and Enoch (2011: ch. 7),
Fitzpatrick (forthcoming a, b), Huemer (2005: 214–19), Kahane (2010),
Schafer (2010), Shafer-Landau (2012), Skarsaune (2011), Wielenberg
(2010), and others are keen to resist.
Of course, premises (1)–(4) are open to debate. But it is striking that
those who accept these premises do not agree on whether a defeater
threatens. Both sides try to make their case largely through metaphor and
analogy, where skeptics suggest partners in crime with clear cases of epis-
temic defeat, and non-skeptics suggest innocence by association with clear
cases of epistemic acquittal. My aspiration is to sort this out. This chapter
is an extended attempt to see clearly what might be epistemically troubling
about (1)–(4).
Let me proceed as follows. First, I will comment on the Argument and
how it is related to similar arguments in the vicinity. Second, I will con-
sider various attempts to bring the threat of epistemic defeat into sharper
relief. Most of those attempts will be found wanting. In section 4, however,
I articulate a principle—obliviousness—that does a better job. The problem
with (1)–(4) is that they make normative beliefs oblivious to the normative
facts (if such there be), where obliviousness is something like insensitivity
of belief, justification, and explanation to fact.
3
This basic idea has been put in terms of belief-forming processes failing to be reli-
able, beliefs failing to track the truth, or sheer coincidence of belief and fact, but all of
these rely on some range of alternatives against which the evaluations of reliability, track-
ing, and coincidence are made.
104 Matthew Bedke
4
See Parfit (2011: 534–42). He thinks that the belief that P’s likely truth is a reason to
believe that P is no more advantageous than the belief that P is likely true, for the latter
suffices to produce the belief that P. He also thinks it was not advantageous to believe that
we have reasons to promote the survival and hedonic well-being of ourselves and our children,
to avoid agony, etc., for we are sufficiently motivated to do these things without the aid
of beliefs about reasons for them. Regarding the Golden Rule, he thinks it is hard to see
how evolutionary forces helped to instill belief in it. Parfit is probably not considering all
the relevant selective pressures. Be that as it may, the more general cosmic coincidence
worry is immune to such controversies.
No Coincidence? 105
5
See also Copp (2008: 194–6).
106 Matthew Bedke
relief, then others are free to craft analogous arguments for these other
meta-normative positions. I am skeptical that the sort of defeater at play
for non-naturalists extends to other meta-normative views. But my main
concern is with non-naturalism as a test case.
One last remark on the Argument. I have stated its epistemic significance
in a way that is friendly to epistemic internalism, which we can gloss as
the view that the justificatory status of S’s belief that P strongly supervenes
on S’s mental states. More specifically, I will be talking about an epistemic
assessment of how well one proceeds in making up one’s mind based on
the information to hand.6 We are all trying to make up our minds about
normative matters, and meta-normative matters, and there are certain con-
siderations we have to go on. If there is something about the world that
is in no way accessible to us as we make up our minds, we should let the
external chips fall where they may. We can still get our houses in order. If,
on the other hand, using information accessible to us we can show that
our normative beliefs are at best coincidentally true, or unlikely to track
the non-natural facts, or at best inexplicably track them, or some such,
we could only make up our minds in a procedurally justified manner by
revising some of the beliefs that generate the difficulty. The possibility that
procedurally unjustified beliefs might enjoy some other kind of justifica-
tion is cold comfort. So what follows focuses on this kind of internalist,
procedural justification, though perhaps similar worries can be cashed out
in more externalism-friendly ways.
With all this in mind, let me turn to explore some opening moves in the
debate.
3. Opening Moves
I think we can put the initial worry this way. Causal forces would push us
toward the same normative beliefs, and would push us toward having the
same justifying grounds for those beliefs, regardless of what the normative
facts turn out to be. If so, it would be coincidental should those forces hap-
pen to push us toward accurate representation of whichever normative facts
turn out to be actual. Just this much gets me worried.
Others try to ease my distress by appealing to some normative facts.
They argue that, given that the normative facts are thus and such, it is no
6
I won’t comment on the tricky issues surrounding internalism here. Clearly, mental
states are often about things external to the mind, and the information we go on is often
information about things external to the mind. So it is not so easy to draw a line between
internal items relevant to justification and external items that are not.
No Coincidence? 107
coincidence that some of our beliefs represent them. The salve is roughly
this: Why talk about what the normative facts could be, and the number of
conceptually possible arrangements, when we have justified beliefs about
what they are? David Enoch says that, given that survival and reproduc-
tive success are good, we can explain why beliefs that they are good would
non-coincidentally correlate with the facts, for it looks like evolution-
ary forces would have pushed us in the direction of having such beliefs
(2011: 168–75). Erik Wielenberg says that if people with certain cognitive
processes have rights, we can explain why we know we have such rights, for
evolutionary forces would have pushed us in the direction of having the cog-
nitive processes needed to be rights-bearers, and such processes would have
led us to believe that we have rights (2010: 447–52). And Knut Skarsaune
says that, if pleasure is good, we can explain why belief that it is good is
truth conducive, for evolutionary forces would have influenced us to have
this true belief (2011: 233–6). (Actually, he relies on a dilemmatic structure
to either save the realist in the above fashion, or to concede to the skeptic.)
In each case, certain normative facts would help to explain why beliefs
about those facts are not merely coincidentally correct. Enoch emphasizes
that no particular explanation given need be the one that discharges the
burden. So long as some explanation is available for the non-coincidental
correctness of normative beliefs the problem is (re)solved (2011: 171).
Ideally, there are several such explanations yielding a decent stock of justi-
fied normative beliefs, enough to ascend from there via rational inferences
to an even bigger set of justified normative beliefs and perhaps even norma-
tive theories.
It is at this point that you might wonder whether we are entitled to
rely on beliefs about what the normative facts are to get the relevant expla-
nations for non-coincidentality. It helps me to think through a familiar
analogy outside of normative theory. If we wonder whether our experiences
as of an external world are largely correct what we do is rely on experience,
and experience-based beliefs, to assuage our fears. We do think that evo-
lutionary forces, inter alia, have pushed us toward representation of facts
of the external world; we think that a large swath of such beliefs reliably
track truth. But these assurances are all built on the back of experience, and
experience-based beliefs. That is OK so long as we are prima facie justified
in relying on experience out of the starting gate, as it were. It can then play
a role in vindicating its deliverances, and there is nothing question-begging
about that vindication. Turning back to normativity, experience as of an
external world alone does not vindicate the thought that normative beliefs
adequately represent the normative facts. But do not some normative beliefs
enjoy prima facie justification just as some beliefs about the external world
do? If so, we can also rely on them out of the gate, just as we can rely
108 Matthew Bedke
7
Street (2008: 216–17) grants this, but wishes to draw a distinction between good
and no good accounts of reliability. I am puzzled by her ensuing discussion. It seems
like good normative theory will help sort out which starting points are likely true, and
which belief-forming processes are reliable. I have already cited Greene and Singer as
examples of people who start with prima facie justified normative beliefs and evolution-
ary theory to identify kinds of normative beliefs (deontology-friendly) as likely false, and
the processes that produce them as unreliable, while identifying other kinds of normative
beliefs (consequentialism-friendly) as likely true, and the processes that produce them as
reliable. I don’t mean to agree with their assessment, but just to point out a project that
parallels the partial vindication of experience by relying on experience.
No Coincidence? 109
one into a conclusion that is meant to count as a defeater for said prima
facie justification. Not a classical kind of circularity, but one that assumes
lack of justification to show lack of justification.8
Unfortunately, some realists seem to mischaracterize the nature of their
burden, and that gives the skeptics a false sense of security. Enoch suggests
that he is providing a defeater for a defeater by offering explanations of
non-coincidence that rely on normative premises (2011: 170 n. 41). But
you cannot defeat a defeater by relying on the defeated belief. That would
be like acknowledging that you are not justified in believing a wall is red
after learning it is bathed in red light half the time, but then enlisting your
belief that the wall is red, justified by how red it looks, to defeat the defeater.
We should not think of the replies on behalf of realists above and else-
where as attempts to defeat a defeater or reinstate justification. Instead, they
should be cast as expressions of incredulity that there is a defeater in the first
place. Unless realists can be made to see the defeater they are well justified
in relying on their (still) justified normative beliefs to account for various
ways in which their beliefs are non-coincidentally true. The response is not
to charge them with begging the question, but to show that there is indeed
a defeater there.9
Until that is done, realists might reasonably see the Coincidence
Argument as turning a blind eye to prima facie justification, as a prema-
ture refusal to let justified normative beliefs pare down possibility space,
as smuggling in suppressed and unjustified premises about randomness or
general unreliability, or as a recipe for generic skepticism. It is no wonder
they are not yet worried.
8
Cf. Schafer (2010).
9
Another form of begging the question is purely dialectical and is not at issue. It is
the sort you get when you use premises your opponent does not justifiably share in an
attempt to convince him of some conclusion. As far as the Coincidence Argument is con-
cerned, the background project is for the realist to make up her mind about normative
non-naturalism and belief in particular normative propositions. The Argument is meant
to offer up some considerations that should make her retract her views in the face of
prima facie justification. When making up her mind she can use premises she is justified
in believing even if others do not share those views. (But, really, if we cleanly separate out
the first-order normative beliefs from the second-order metaphysical interpretation of
their contents and focus on the former, who thinks they lack prima facie justification for
some relevant normative proposition to which the realist is helping herself?)
No Coincidence? 113
10
Regarding mathematical Platonism, Field has a similar worry that “how our beliefs
about . . . remote entities can so well reflect the facts about them” is in principle inexplic
able (Field 2005; cf. Clarke-Doane forthcoming).
11
Even if an explanation of reliability is needed, it is not clear how robust the reli-
ability has to be. In the case of experience of the external world, it is not literally the case
that we would reliably track truths whatever they turn out to be (hence the parenthetical
about reasonable variation). Given that, it is not clear to me that we do not get analo-
gous reliability across reasonable variation in the normative case, especially once we are
allowed prima facie justified normative beliefs to help settle how the normative facts vary
with variations in the non-normative facts.
114 Matthew Bedke
12
It is not clear to me whether we need (iii) to get defeat. In classic cases of defeat,
like the red wall case discussed below, (i) and (ii) seem to suffice. But the addition of (iii)
makes the case for defeat for normative non-naturalism that much better.
No Coincidence? 115
are met, it will bring the case for defeat into sharper relief. Admittedly, it is
difficult to explain why fundamental normative statuses are as they are, so
it is difficult to explain further why recognized obliviousness is a defeater.13
Nevertheless, it does seem on its face to capture an epistemic concern, and
it nicely categorizes and explains not only the above cases, but also classical
cases of defeat. Consider again that case of a red light illuminating a wall.
Initially you believe a red-looking wall is red. When you realize the wall is
illuminated with red light, what seems to make that a defeater is oblivious-
ness, or something very similar to it.
The main source of resistance in the normative case, I suspect, concerns
the necessity of the fundamental normative truths. How can we consider
what would be the case were pain not bad when we justifiably believe (a)
that pain is bad, (b) that if pain is bad, then necessarily it is bad, and so (c)
that necessarily pain is bad? However, we should not be glib about appeals
to necessitation. Whether they block application of obliviousness depends
on what kind of necessitation we are talking about and how we interpret
the subjunctives.
13
How obliviousness applies to beliefs about the future and beliefs based on enumera-
tive induction is a tricky matter. For some such beliefs, obliviousness will be a concern.
(Not for all. Consider: What would I believe, and what would be my justification for
believing it (and what explains both), were the sun not to rise tomorrow? Well, the near-
est possibility where that happens is one where the laws of nature differ, or where there
has been good evidence that sun will not rise. If so, my belief that it will rise is not oblivi-
ous.) But these will be special cases in epistemology generally, where we think that there
are grounds for justified belief—e.g. some uniformity of nature thesis—despite forms
of insensitivity. Non-naturalist realists have offered no reason for grouping normative
facts with facts about the future and the unenumerated so as to enjoy those justificatory
grounds.
No Coincidence? 117
sunk the eight ball, she wouldn’t have believed that he did, and would have
lacked justification for believing it. Maybe he would have set her up for an
easy win. In any event, her belief is not oblivious.
Or consider Claire, who sells glacier water. She justifiably believes that
water is H2O. Moreover, she has read enough philosophy to justifiably
believe that if water is H2O, then necessarily it is H2O. So she thinks that
necessarily water is H2O. As we like to say, there is no metaphysically pos-
sible world where water is not H2O. Can Claire still intelligibly wonder
what would be the case if water were not H2O? This is a trickier case. It is
easy to hear the question along the following lines: What would be the case
if this stuff (splash it around for emphasis) were not this stuff (again, splash
it around for emphasis)? That seems unintelligible. In other words, if we
think of this necessity as secured by a special kind of reference enjoyed by
these terms, where they pick out the same referent directly and rigidly, then
perhaps the question is not really intelligible.
Suppose so. Still, non-naturalists should not take comfort in the exam-
ple. For they eschew theories of co-reference that would make our norma-
tive subjunctives as problematic as the one above about water. They think
that “bad” refers to a different property than any natural one. If they are
right, then when we ask what would be the case were pain not bad we are
not asking about what would be the case were something not itself. We are
asking about what would be the case if pain had a different normative prop-
erty than the one we take it to have, or no normative property whatsoever.
Unlike the case of water, there is no threat that the meaningfulness of the
subjunctive is ruled out by a special kind of referential relationship.
To aid discussion, it helps to distinguish two ways one might justifiably
believe the necessity of substantive normative truths. One way is derivative
and parasitic on justified beliefs in actual substantive normative truths. In
that case, one’s justified belief about which substantive normative truths
are the necessary ones is derived from (a) the general belief that norma-
tive truths are necessary, and (b) beliefs in actual, substantive normative
propositions, where the justification for (a) does not depend on having jus-
tified beliefs of type (b). For example, one might justifiably believe that
some supervenience principle holds a priori because it is analytic:14 neces-
sarily, if some object O has normative status S, necessarily any object that
is identical to O in all non-normative respects has normative status S. That
would be a general, non-substantive normative belief. If one also justifiably
believes that some episode of pain is bad, one can then infer that, necessar-
ily, anything identical to that episode of pain in all non-normative respects
14
Though how we are justified in believing the necessities is not relevant, so long as
their justification is separate from the justification of the normative statuses of things.
118 Matthew Bedke
is bad. That is the sense in which this episode of pain is necessarily bad.15
Alternatively, one might justifiably believe that basic normative principles
are necessarily true, justifiably believe that an actual basic moral principle is
an action is right iff and because it maximizes happiness, and infer that, neces-
sarily, an action is right iff and because it maximizes happiness.
However general beliefs about the necessity of truths in a domain are
justified, the necessity of the truths does not insulate the particular beliefs
in that domain from sensitivity-type tests. To see this, set to one side the
justified general belief that normative truths are necessary and focus on
non-modal beliefs about what the normative facts are. Let us rehearse the
example about pain being bad. If pain were not bad—consider this coun-
terfactually if you like—would we still believe it to be bad, and would we
have the same justification for so believing, and would the same explanation
for why we have that belief and that justification hold? Unfortunately, the
answers are all “yes”. So that belief is oblivious, as are the stronger modal
beliefs derived from it and some general necessitarian thesis.
Let us craft an eight-ball case that features similarly oblivious beliefs,
just to convince ourselves. Imagine that Sally learns that she took a pill that
would cause her to hallucinate sinking eight balls. She now thinks the belief
that Dropout sunk the eight ball oblivious. She cannot block obliviousness
by noting that events that did take place are nomologically necessitated,
as though there is a problem even considering the obliviousness questions
because they take us to counter-possible worlds. Obliviousness of the belief
about the actual event ensures that she cannot justifiably locate herself in
the right space of nomic possibilities, so she does not know if she is asking
after counter-possibilities or genuine possibilities. To know that she must
first settle what the actual world is like, and she lacks justification for beliefs
about it insofar as they are recognizably oblivious.
Now, replace sinking the eight ball with the badness of pain, nomic
necessity with normative necessity, and the pill with premises (1)–(4) of
the Coincidence Argument, and you have an analogous problem on your
hands. The realist cannot block obliviousness by noting that normative sta-
tuses are necessitated, as though there is a problem even considering the
sensitivity-type questions because they take us to normatively impossible
15
Some views about a posteriori knowable identities would be structurally similar. We
might know a priori that water is the stuff that meets some set of criteria associated with
the concept of water, and then discover a posteriori the nature of the stuff that actually
meets those criteria. We would then be able to infer the substantive necessity that water is
that stuff. Those who endorse this view of things should have no problem testing for the
obliviousness of the beliefs about the nature of the stuff that meets the relevant criteria.
Obliviousness of those beliefs would ensure that one cannot justifiably locate oneself in
the right space of metaphysical possibilities.
No Coincidence? 119
worlds. Obliviousness of the belief about badness ensures that she cannot
justifiably locate herself in the right space of normative possibilities. What
is possible and what is impossible depends on what the actual world is like,
and we lack justification for beliefs about it insofar as they are recognizably
oblivious.
So far I have only discussed one way of justifiably believing in the neces-
sity of substantive normative truths. The second way of being justified is
more direct—it is not via inference with a premise concerning actual sub-
stantive normative propositions. Perhaps, for example, one is more directly
justified in thinking that necessarily pain (or an episode of pain like that)
is bad. Maybe I know directly the modal status of this synthetic claim, or
synthetic moral principles. Would that make it harder to intelligibly apply
the subjunctives that test for obliviousness?
It might seem so. For it looks like our counterfactuals have built-in
counter-possibility. But this is a pretty cheap way for a justified belief to
gain immunity from the threat of obliviousness. The necessity is still part of
the content of the belief, so it should be possible to show a belief with that
content—or any content—is oblivious or not.
To handle the situation, we can think of the obliviousness subjunctives
as asking after allodoxic possibilities, not counterfactuals. Allodoxic pos
sibilities are false belief possibilities—they are those we can assume to obtain
contrary to what we actually believe and our justifying bases for believing
it.16 Assuming our actual beliefs are false and justifying bases misleading, we
can then emphasize the third component of obliviousness: How much of
our explanatory picture of the world would have to change to explain how
our beliefs and justifications get things so wrong?
To see how this works, consider the belief that water is H2O and all our
justification for believing it. To consider the allodoxic possibility that it is
not H2O we assume for the sake of further inquiry that it is not H2O (and
never has been), and then examine what adjustments to our explanatory
picture of the world would have to change to explain why we nevertheless
have all this justification/evidence/reason in favor of the false belief that it is
H2O. There is a lot of explaining to do, of course. Have the chemists been
lying to us? What of the chemistry I think I know that explains why water
has some of the interesting properties it has, like the fact that it expands
when it freezes? We can see that the belief that water is H2O does not meet
the obliviousness criteria, interpreted in terms of an allodoxic possibility.
16
I prefer this way of thinking about the questions over near cousins (e.g. counter-
factuals and various ways of separating two dimensions of intension). Those alternatives
either get at slightly different questions, or get at the same questions in more confusing
ways. Also, it seems natural to ask after allodoxic possibilities with the subjective mood.
But if it bothers you, try indicatives.
120 Matthew Bedke
Neither would the modal belief that, necessarily, water is H2O. Assuming
that is false for the sake of argument, we would have a lot of explaining to
do for why we have the false belief and the misleading evidence we have.17
Now, assume it is not the case that, necessarily, pain is bad, as part of an
allodoxic possibility. Let us hold fixed the non-normative ways of the world
(as we justifiably believe them to be). Focusing on the third part of the
obliviousness criteria, what of our explanatory picture of the world needs to
change to explain how we nevertheless have all this justification/evidence/
reason in favor of the false belief that, necessarily, pain is bad? For example,
what of our causal-explanatory picture must change to explain why we have
the intuition that it is bad? Well, nothing. In the assumed scenario, there
is no additional or different explanation for why we (ex ante) justifiably
believe pain is necessarily bad. If some evolutionary explanation explains
why we think pain is necessarily bad, and explains why we have the justify-
ing bases for so believing, that same explanation holds under the allodoxic
possibility that pain is not necessarily bad. This belief is oblivious.
We avoid this result if we deny that these allodoxic possibilities are con-
ceptual possibilities, or hold that our justifications constitutively depend
on the normative facts of the matter (no facts, no justifications). I do not
see how the former can be squared with non-naturalist realism, whereby
basic, substantive normative beliefs are about stance-independent facts that
cannot be known merely by reflection on concepts. And the latter cannot
be squared with procedural justification and causal closure of the natural
world, for when making up our minds about normative matters we do not
have the non-natural facts to go on, and if we did the natural world would
not be causally closed. I see no other way of avoiding the defeat.
17
Similarly, if you wonder about being envatted as the actual state of things, you
have a lot of explaining to do. A good deal of your beliefs and justifications regarding the
external world would be explained not via interaction with the external world, but by
interaction with some systematically deceptive device.
No Coincidence? 121
18
Things are complicated by Parfit’s “non-metaphysicalism.” I think we can safely
put this in the non-naturalist camp so long as it is not a veiled form of non-cognitivism.
19
See also Bedke (2009: 205).
No Coincidence? 123
6. Conclusion
I have tried to sort through some of the key moves in the coincidence litera-
ture. To my mind, the skeptical case is best expressed in terms of oblivious-
ness, and we have seen that the modal status of the target domain offers no
absolution.
One thing I have not addressed is how the points might generalize to,
say, mathematical Platonism. I think that extensions of the argument are
problematic. We can intelligibly wonder what would be the case were pain
not bad. A meta-normative theory then steps in to inform the subjunctive.
Under non-naturalism we may interpret the subjunctive one way, where
we consider counterfactuals or allodoxic possibilities about properties and
facts entirely distinct from any natural ones (though supervenient upon
them). Naturalism would have us interpret the subjunctive differently, as
References
Bedke, M. 2009. “Intuitive Non-Naturalism Meets Cosmic Coincidence,” Pacific
Philosophical Quarterly, 90(2): 188–209.
Bedke, M. Forthcoming. “A Menagerie of Duties? Normative Judgments are Not
Beliefs about Non-Natural Properties,” American Philosophical Quarterly.
Clarke-Doane, J. 2012. “Morality and Mathematics: The Evolutionary Challenge,”
Ethics, 122: 313–40.
Clarke-Doane, J. Forthcoming. “Moral Epistemology: The Mathematics
Analogy,” Noûs.
Copp, D. 2008. “Darwinian Skepticism about Moral Realism,” Philosophical Issues,
18(1): 186–206.
21
Cf. Clarke-Doane (2012).
22
Even if there is parity with the mathematical case, I think a similar resilience of
mathematical belief in the face of the defeater can be brought to bear as some evidence
that those beliefs are not about Platonic objects after all.
No Coincidence? 125
1
In Leiter (2000) I critique earlier efforts to show that Nietzsche’s putative doctrine
of the will to power grounds a kind of Nietzschean value realism.
2
I will bracket here semantics, though I continue to believe (cf. Leiter 2000) that it
is anachronistic to saddle Nietzsche with a semantic view, as e.g. Hussain’s interesting
fictionalist reading does (Hussain 2007). Hussain (2013) appears to come around to my
view on this issue.
3
I take that to be the real lesson to emerge from those Clark calls “the Stanford
school” (meaning Anderson 1998 and Hussain 2004), who call attention to the influence
of strands in 19th-cent. neo-Kantianism and positivism on Nietzsche, though without
drawing the conclusion that seems most warranted, namely, that Nietzsche’s amateur
reflections on questions of general metaphysics and epistemology probably betray more
confusion than insight in the end.
Moral Skepticism in Nietzsche 127
hypothesis that Nietzsche accepts the same view. Indeed, as Railton notes,
“realism with respect to non-moral [or what I am calling prudential] good-
ness . . . [is] a notion that perfect moral skeptics can admit” (1986b: 185).
And Nietzsche is, indeed, a “perfect” moral skeptic, or so I shall argue,
since he clearly holds that moral value (valuations of what is good or bad
simpliciter or non-relationally) is not objective. So, for example, while the
judgment that MPS is bad for higher human beings might be objectively
true, the judgment that MPS is disvaluable simpliciter or should be defeated
because it is bad for higher human beings is not.
It now seems to me, however, that Nietzsche’s position does not even
require the objectivity of judgments of prudential value. It does, to be sure,
have to be objectively true that MPS values prevent nascent Goethes from
becoming Goethes, but that causal claim need entail no evaluative assess-
ment about whether that is a good or bad outcome. Nietzsche presumably
expects the readers “suited” to his insights to view this outcome as bad for
Goethe, but all he needs for the force of his critique is the truth of the
causal claim that MPS values have certain kinds of effects. That judgments
of prudential value need not be objective is fortunate given the argument
from disagreement for value skepticism discussed below.
What, then, is involved for Nietzsche in denying the “objectivity” of what
is morally right and wrong, morally good and bad? I have been purposely
vague so far about whether the issues are semantic, metaphysical, and/or
epistemological; indeed, as I have argued elsewhere (Leiter 2000), Nietzsche
has no discernible semantic view at all. Here we will concentrate on the
metaphysical and epistemological issues. On the reading I will defend,
Nietzsche is a moral skeptic in the precise sense of affirming the metaphysi-
cal thesis that there do not exist any objective moral properties or facts (I
will refer to this hereafter as simply “skepticism about moral facts”).4 From
this it will, of course, follow that there is also no moral knowledge, but it is
the argument for the metaphysical thesis that is crucial for Nietzsche.
Now it seems obvious that some of Nietzsche’s skepticism about moral
facts is simply skepticism about a kind of Platonism about value. Plato, to
4
I would like what follows to be compatible with a number of different theses about
what the metaphysical objectivity of moral facts would consist in, and, in any case, do not
want to derail the discussion in the text into a characterization of objectivity. (For some
discussion, see Leiter 2007: 258–61.) Briefly, we may say that moral facts are metaphysi-
cally objective if their existence and character does not depend on what persons believe,
have reason to believe, or (perhaps) would have reason to believe under ideal conditions
about them. (Alex Silk suggests to me that perhaps Nietzsche thinks moral facts are
attitude-dependent facts, and I suspect much of the argument that follows is compatible
with that possibility, with the caveat that, as an empirical matter, Nietzsche thinks the
relevant attitudes vary significantly among persons. But I am skeptical that, in the end,
this will turn out to be a correct way of rendering Nietzsche’s view.)
Moral Skepticism in Nietzsche 129
be sure, does not think there is a special problem about the objectivity of
value, since he thinks values are objective in the same way all Forms are.5
A Form, says Plato, “is eternal, and neither comes into being nor perishes,
neither waxes nor wanes” (Symposium 211a). In the Phaedo, he calls them
“constant and invariable” (78d) while in The Republic he refers to them
as “the very things themselves . . . ever remaining the same and unchanged”
(479e). Forms are, in the words of the Symposium, “pure, clear, unmixed—
not infected with human flesh and color, and a lot of other mortal non-
sense” (211a).
Many of Nietzsche’s skeptical-sounding passages appear to involve denials
of this kind of Platonism about value. So, for example, Zarathustra declares:
Verily, men gave themselves all their good and evil. Verily, they did not take it, they
did not find it, nor did it come to them as a voice from heaven. Only man placed
values (Werte) in things to preserve himself—he alone created a meaning for things,
a human meaning. Thus he calls himself “man,” which means: the esteemer (der
Schätzende).
To esteem is to create (Schätzen ist Schaffen): hear this, you creators! . . . Through
esteeming alone is there value (Wert): and without esteeming the nut of existence
would be hollow. . . . (Z i.15)
Similarly, writing in his own voice in The Gay Science, Nietzsche observes
that, “Whatever has value in our world now does not have value in itself,
according to its nature—nature is always value-less, but has been given value
at some time, as a present—and it was we who gave and bestowed it” (GS
301). Of course, many realists about value might be happy to acknowledge
that “without esteeming, the nut of existence would be hollow”; as Railton,
for example, puts it, “In a universe without subjectivity [i.e., without crea-
tures for whom things matter], there is no value either” (1986a: 18). Yet
Nietzsche goes further than this when he suggests that it is we who give
things their value, though even on this score there are arguably some “real-
ist” views, such as the sensibility theories of McDowell and Wiggins, com-
patible with this projectivist rhetoric. In any case, if Nietzsche’s only target
were the metaphysics of Platonism about value, Nietzsche’s skepticism
might not worry a lot of contemporary philosophers—though it is perhaps
worth emphasizing that a kind of Platonism about value appears to remain
central to most cultural and religious traditions, so his skepticism on this
score is hardly trivial.
In a range of other passages, Nietzsche emphasizes that moral judgment
involves a kind of projective error, and here it is especially important to note
that the emphasis is not on value simpliciter, but on moral value. So, for
5
I here confine attention to the theory of Forms of the middle books.
130 Brian Leiter
example, in Daybreak, he notes that just as we now recognize that it was “an
enormous error” “when man gave all things a sex” but still believed “not that
he was playing, but that he had gained a profound insight,” so, too, man
“has ascribed to all that exists a connection with morality (Moral) and laid
an ethical significance (ethische Bedeutung) on the world’s back,” which will
“one day” be viewed as meaningful as talk about “the masculinity or femin-
ity of the sun” (3). So, too, in Human-All-Too-Human, Nietzsche compares
religious, moral, and aesthetic judgment with astrology:
It is probable that the objects of the religious, moral (moralisch) and aesthetic experi-
ences (Empfinden) belong only to the surface of things, while man likes to believe
that here at least he is in touch with the heart of the world (das Herz der Welt); the
reason he deludes himself is that these things produce in him such profound hap-
piness and unhappiness, and thus he exhibits here the same pride as in the case of
astrology. For astrology believes the heavenly stars revolve around the fate of man;
the moral man (moralische Mensch), however, supposes that what he has essentially
at heart must also constitute the essence (Wesen) and heart of things. (4)
Just as the astrologist thinks that there are astrological facts (about man’s
future) supervening on the astronomical facts about the stars—when, in fact,
there are only the stars themselves, obeying their laws of motion—so too the
“moral man” thinks his moral experiences are responsive to moral proper-
ties that are part of the essence of things, when, like the astrological facts,
they are simply causal products of something else, namely our feelings. As
Nietzsche puts it, moral judgments are “images” and “fantasies,” the mere
effects of psychological and physiological attributes of the people making
those judgments, attributes of which they are largely unaware (D 119).
As I argued in Leiter (2002: 148–9), these kinds of remarks suggest a
“best explanation” argument for anti-realism about moral value: the best
explanation for our moral experiences is not that they pick out objective
moral features of phenomena, but rather that they are caused by facts about
our psychological make-up: for example, ressentiment or what Sinhababu
(2007) has recently dubbed “vengeful thinking” to describe the mechanism
by which “slavish” types come to believe strength, nobility, and wealth con-
stitute what is “evil.” If the best explanation of our moral judgments appeals
only to psychological facts about us, and need make no reference to objec-
tive moral facts, then we have reason to be skeptical about the existence of
moral facts.
Whether or not that argument is successful—interpretively or philosoph-
ically—is an issue I propose to bracket here. It now seems to me that there
is another set of considerations that underwrite Nietzsche’s moral skepti-
cism, and that these considerations are of independent philosophical inter-
est. Nietzsche does, on this account, rely on explanatory considerations, but
Moral Skepticism in Nietzsche 131
not with respect to our moral experiences per se but rather with regard to
the phenomenon of moral disagreement. Moral disagreement has long been
a data point invoked by skeptics about morality, but Nietzsche’s approach
is a bit different.6 For what he calls attention to is not “ordinary” or “folk”
moral disagreement, but rather what seems to me the single most important
and embarrassing fact about the history of moral theorizing by philosophers
over the last two millennia: namely, that no rational consensus has been
secured on any substantive, foundational proposition about morality.7 By
a “foundational” moral proposition about morality, I am thinking of, for
example, deontological or utilitarian theories which specify the criteria in
virtue of which concrete or particular moral judgments are thought war-
ranted: so e.g. “it is wrong to break this promise” is a concrete moral judg-
ment, while “the wrong-making feature of an action is its effect on utility” is
a foundational proposition. With regard to such foundational propositions,
the history of moral philosophy is the history of intractable disagreement. Is
the criterion of right action the reasons for which it is performed or the con-
sequences it brings about? If the former, is it a matter of the reasons being
universalizable, or that they arise from respect for duty, or something else?
If the latter, is it the utility it produces or the perfection it makes possible?
If the former, is utility a matter of preference satisfaction (as the economists
almost uniformly believe) or preference satisfaction under idealized circum-
stances—or is it, rather, unconnected to the preferences of agents, actual or
idealized, but instead a matter of realizing the human essence or enjoying
some “objective” goods? And perhaps a criterion of right action isn’t even
the issue, perhaps the issue is cultivating dispositions of character conducive
to living a good life. And here, of course, I have merely canvassed just some
of the disagreements that plague Western academic moral theory, not even
6
Loeb (1998) comes closest, and I have benefited from and will reference his discus-
sion in what follows.
7
Parfit (2011a) is the most notable recent attempt to show otherwise, though (with
the exception of Nietzsche) he really only canvasses the views of “friends of Derek,” and
tries to show that, in fact, they all agree. Discussing Parfit would constitute a separate
paper, but for pertinent doubts, see Schroeder (2011). Notable for our purposes is that
Parfit shares Nietzsche’s intuition that failiure to converge on moral truths would under-
mine the purported objectivity of moral thought (2011b: 571), and he correctly recog-
nizes the need to explain away his apparent disagreement with Nietzsche, “since he is the
most influential and admired moral philosopher of the last two centuries” (2011b: 571).
His discussion of Nietzsche is problematic in several respects, but that is a topic for a dif-
ferent occasion. More surprisingly, in discussing moral disagreement, Parfit dismisses dis-
agreement about foundational questions out of hand, saying only that “we would expect
there to be more disagreement about” this, and that it is enough that theories agree about
“which acts are wrong” (2011b: 554). It is hard, though, to see how disagreement about
why an act is wrong is not a very serious kind of moral disagreement, especially since such
disagreements typically explain disagreements about other particular cases. See n. 12.
132 Brian Leiter
Standard “best explanation” arguments for moral skepticism focus on the fact of
moral judgment, and claim that the best explanation of such judgments is not
the objective moral features of the situation to which the moral agent putatively
responds, but rather psychological and sociological factors that cause the agent
to give expression to the particular moral judgment. In the version of this argu-
ment I have defended (Leiter 2001), the central problem with explanations of
our moral judgments that appeal to the existence of objective moral facts is that
they fail to satisfy demands of consilience and simplicity that we expect from
successful explanatory theories. Moral explanations fail along the dimension of
consilience because they posit facts—“moral” facts—that are too neatly tailored
to the explanadum (they are, as I shall say, explanatorily “narrow”), and that
don’t effect the kind of unification of disparate phenomena we look for in suc-
cessful explanations. They fail along the dimension of simplicity because they
complicate our ontology without any corresponding gain in explanatory power
or scope.9 The latter claim is, of course, crucial to the anti-realist argument. For
8
Justin Clarke-Doane has pressed on me the possibility that disagreement in math-
ematics is also deep and perhaps intractable; for some discussion see Clarke-Doane
(forthcoming). I am not sufficiently expert in the mathematics to properly evaluate this
intriguing thesis, though it does seem in tension with all the sociological evidence about
mathematics, i.e. the cross-cultural and apparently progressive convergence on a host of
fundamental propositions of mathematics, including in set theory, one of Clarke-Doane’s
primary examples. See Jech (2002).
9
Some moral realists claim that moral properties are just identical with or super-
venient upon the non-moral natural properties that figure in the alternative explanations
of moral judgments. But a claim of identity or supervenience cannot—in isolation—save
moral realism against the explanatory argument, for we must earn our right to such claims
by both (a) vindicating the identity/supervenience thesis on non-explanatory grounds;
Moral Skepticism in Nietzsche 133
if it were true that without moral facts we would suffer some kind of explana-
tory loss, then moral explanations (and moral realism) would be in the same
metaphysical boat as the postulates of any of the special sciences: physics can’t,
after all, do the explanatory work of biology, which is why, by “best explanation”
criteria, we can admit biological facts into our ontology.10
Needless to say, no a priori considerations can demonstrate that there
will never be an explanatory loss from eliminating moral facts from our best
account of the world. Two sorts of considerations, however, may make us
skeptical of the realist’s claim. First, outside the contemporary philosophi-
cal debate, we do not find scholars in other disciplines actually concerned
with explanatory questions trying to do any explanatory work with moral
facts. Philosophers should perhaps remember that while, for example, there
are Marxist historians using broadly “economic” facts to explain historical
events, there is no school of “Moral Historians” using moral facts to do any
significant explanatory work.
A second ground for skepticism about moral explanations is more spe-
cific: namely, that the actual candidates proferred in the literature are, by
and large, not very promising. Some moral explanations are just patently
vacuous—think of Sturgeon’s well-known claim that, if asked to explain
Hitler’s behavior, we might appeal to his moral depravity, which sounds to
me more like a repetition of the question than an explanation—but even
more ambitious moral explanations (like those put forward e.g. by David
Brink, Joshua Cohen, and Geoffrey Sayre-McCord) do not withstand scru-
tiny, as I have argued in detail elsewhere (see Leiter 2001).11
Now the skeptical argument that concerns us will differ along three key
dimensions from the more familiar kinds of “best explanation” arguments
for moral skepticism just noted. First, what is at issue is not what we might
call “raw” moral judgments, as in Harman’s famous flaming pussycat case,
where someone witnesses young hoodlums dousing a cat and setting it on
and (b) vindicating the added theoretical complexity involved in these theses by dem-
onstrating that they produce a gain in consilience or some cognate epistemic virtue (e.g.
explanatory unification). I have argued (Leiter 2001) that they do not.
10
More precisely, non-reductive moral realists want to defend moral explanations in
a way akin to Jerry Fodor’s famous defense of the autonomy of the special sciences: they
want to claim that there are distinctive “groupings” and generalizations in moral explana-
tions that cannot be captured by a more “basic” explanatory scheme or science. Just as
nothing in physics captures the distinctive categories and generalizations of economics
and psychology, so too biology and psychology are supposed to miss the distinctive gen-
eralizations of moral theory.
11
Peter Railton’s work (e.g. 1986b) invokes a much richer form of historical explana-
tion, but involves both a controversial reforming definition (itself defeasible on simplicity
grounds) and a controversial set of Marxian theses about the mechanisms of historical
change. His version of the best explanation story would require separate attention.
134 Brian Leiter
fire and reacts by judging the act morally wrong or reprehensible. Instead,
our data points consist of philosophical theories about morality that purport
to license particular judgments by answering foundational questions. A philo-
sophical theory, for purposes here, is a systematic account of the foundations
of correct moral judgment and action based on reasons and evidence that pur-
ports to be acceptable to (some or all) rational agents (depending on the under-
lying view of rationality). Second, the explanatory question concerns not any
particular philosophical theory, but rather the fact that there exist incompatible
philosophical theories purporting to answer foundational questions. And they
are not simply incompatible philosophical theories: the disagreements of moral
philosophers are amazingly intractable. Nowhere do we find lifelong Kantians
suddenly (or even gradually) converting to Benthamite utilitarianism, or vice
versa. So the “best explanation” argument asks: what is the best explanation for
the fact that philosophical theories, in the sense just noted, reach different and
quite intractable conclusions about foundational matters? Nietzsche’s skepti-
cal answer will be that the best explanation is that the psychological needs of
philosophers lead them to find compelling dialectical justifications for very dif-
ferent basic moral claims, and there are no objective moral facts to stand in the
way of satisfying those psychological needs. (We will set out this position more
systematically shortly.) Third, consilience and simplicity are again theoreti-
cal desiderata to be weighed in comparing explanations, but their interaction
with moral realism is different: the claim at issue will be that skepticism about
morality is part of a more consilient and simpler explanation for the existence
of incompatible philosophical theories of morality than is the assumption that
there are objective facts about fundamental moral propositions, but that com-
peting philosophical theories of morality fail to converge upon them.
In short, what makes Nietzsche’s argument from moral disagree-
ment especially interesting is that, unlike most familiar varieties, it does
not purport to exploit anthropological reports about the moral views of
exotic cultures, or even garden-variety conflicting moral intuitions about
concrete cases (such as abortion or the death penalty). Instead, Nietzsche
locates disagreement at the heart of the most sophisticated moral philoso-
phies of the West, among philosophers who very often share lots of beliefs
and practices and who, especially, in the last century, often share many of
the same judgments about concrete cases.12 Yet what we find is that these
12
It is important to see that convergence on concrete cases (which is almost always cet-
eris paribus) does not defeat the argument. I suppose no one would think that Mussolini
and Roosevelt really converge on the same moral truths just because they both agree
about the concrete question that normally the trains should run on time. Moral philoso-
phers—at least the conventional kind who subscribe to the propositions in question—are
surely less far apart than Mussolini and Roosevelt, but that does not alter the fact that
Moral Skepticism in Nietzsche 135
their apparent agreement on suitably general and hedged “concrete” moral propositions
belies real disagreements, which come out as soon as we press on the concrete cases.
13
It may be useful to distinguish the argument at issue here from some related
skeptical-sounding arguments based on the phenomenon of disagreement. One is
“the so-called pessimistic induction on the history of science,” as Philip Kitcher calls it
(1993: 136) (or the skeptical meta-induction as Putnam earlier dubbed the same phe-
nomenon). Here is Kitcher’s statement of the skeptical position:
Here one surveys the discarded theories of the past; points out that these were once
accepted on the basis of the same kind of evidence that we now employ to support our
own accepted theories, notes that those theories are, nevertheless, now regarded as false;
and concludes that our own accepted theories are very probably false. (1993: 136)
This basic argumentative strategy might, indeed, seem to have some force against theories
of morality. After all—so the argument would go—many earlier claims about moral-
ity were based on the same kinds of evidence about what is “intuitively obvious” that
underlie contemporary Kantian and utilitarian theories. Yet we now regard intuitions
about e.g. the obvious moral inferiority of certain classes of people as social or cultural or
economic artifacts, not data on which we might base a moral theory. Is it not possible—
especially with the often surprising results about diversity of intuitions being adduced by
experimental philosophers—that the intuitions undergirding our current moral theories
will also turn out to seem equally unreliable, and so our moral theories false?
This strategy of skeptical argument is easily rebutted, however. To start, many of the
racist and sexist claims of earlier moral theories were based not on intuitions, but on
putatively empirical claims: Aristotle’s views about “natural” slaves, for whom slavery
was supposed to be in their non-moral interest, or Kant’s disparaging remarks about
Africans, depended on armchair psychological and sociological hypotheses that are not
factually accurate. Indeed, the kind of response to the skeptical induction that Kitcher
develops on behalf of the scientific realist would seem to help the moral realist as well.
For Kitcher says that, in fact, “more and more of the posits of theoretical science endure
within contemporary science” (1993: 136), and, indeed, that our earlier mistakes (which
we now recognize as such) fall into a recognizable pattern, so that we can see where and
why we are likely to have gone wrong in the past, and thus be more confident that we are
not replicating those mistakes in our current theories.
So, too, the moral realist might claim that the mistakes made by earlier moral theo-
rists also fall into a discernible pattern, typically consisting in failing to include within
the moral community—the community of persons with moral standing—people who
belonged there because of false assumptions about those persons that admit of straight-
forward historical, sociological, and economic explanations. Thus, on this story, what
we learn from the history of failures in past moral theories is precisely that we should be
especially skeptical about excluding some persons (or, not to prejudge the issue, some
sentient creatures!) from the category of beings with moral standing. Of course, as every-
one knows, the criteria of moral standing remain hotly contested, a fact to be exploited
by the skeptical argument I will attribute to Nietzsche.
136 Brian Leiter
There are a set of remarks about moral philosophy and moral philoso-
phers in Nietzsche about which scholars rarely comment, but which bear
directly on the argument for moral skepticism at issue here. This passage is
representative:
It is a very remarkable moment: the Sophists verge upon the first critique of moral-
ity (Moral ), the first insight into morality:—they juxtapose the multiplicity (the
geographical relativity) of the moral value judgments (Moralischen Werthurtheile);—
they let it be known that every morality (Moral) can be dialectically justified; i.e.,
they divine that all attempts to give reasons for morality (Moral) are necessarily
sophistical—a proposition later proved on the grand scale by the ancient philoso-
phers, from Plato onwards (down to Kant);—they postulate the first truth that a
“morality-in-itself ” (eine Moral an sich), a “good-in-itself ” do not exist, that it is a
swindle to talk of “truth” in this field. (WP 428; KSA xiii. 14[116]).
This is a Nachlass passage, but it has many analogues in the published cor-
pus and is of a piece with a general picture Nietzsche has of the discursive
pretensions of philosophers. Consider his derisive comment in Beyond Good
and Evil about Kant’s moral philosophy, which he describes as “[t]he . . . stiff
and decorous Tartuffery of the old Kant, as he lures us on the dialecti-
cal bypaths that lead to his ‘categorical imperative’—really lead astray and
seduce” (BGE 5). Kant’s “Tartuffery” and Spinoza’s “hocus-pocus of math-
ematical form” in his Ethics are simply, Nietzsche says, “the subtle tricks
Now in the context of scientific realism, Kitcher wants to draw a stronger conclusion
against the skeptic, namely, that we are actually entitled to a kind of “optimistic induc-
tion” from the fact that since every successor theory “appears closer to the truth than” the
theory it displaced “from the perspective of our current theory,” to the conclusion that
“our theories will appear to our successors to be closer to the truth than our predecessors”
(1993: 137). But the moral theorist cannot avail himself of a similar “optimistic induc-
tion,” and for a reason that will be important to the skeptical argument here: namely, that
it is not the case that e.g. later deontological theories view earlier utilitarian theories as
getting closer to the moral truth than their utilitarian ancestors, and vice versa.
More recently, there has been a lively debate among philosophers about the episte-
mological implications of disagreement among what are usually called “epistemic peers.”
What is standardly at issue in this literature is whether or not the fact of such disa-
greement should lead us to adjust the degree of credence an agent assigns to his own
beliefs (see e.g. Christensen 2007 and Kelly 2005 for contrasting views). By contrast,
the skeptical argument at issue here aims for a metaphysical conclusion via an abductive
inference: namely, that the fact of disagreement about X is best explained by there not
being any objective fact of the matter about X. As I read it, the disagreement literature
to date does not weigh the epistemic import of a successful abductive inference for this
kind of skepticism.
Moral Skepticism in Nietzsche 137
14
In fact, Nietzsche thinks this last point applies quite generally, not only to moral
philosophers. He frequently describes (see e.g. D book 1 or GS 335) moral judgments
as caused by certain feelings, learnt through a combination of customary practices and
parental influence, while the moral concepts and reasons people offer for these judgments
are merely post-hoc (cf. D 34).
138 Brian Leiter
premises are false.15 But, then, what is the force of the claim that “every
morality can be dialectically justified”? It must obviously be that every
morality can have the appearance of being dialectically justified, either
because its logical invalidity is not apparent or, more likely in this instance,
because its premises, while apparently acceptable, are not true.
Yet Nietzsche goes further when he asserts that the second claim—namely,
that “all attempts to give reasons for morality are necessarily sophistical”—is
established (“proved” (beweisen) he says) by the work of the philosophers
from Plato through to Kant (though he would presumably add, as the other
passages make clear, Schopenhauer to the list of evidence). But in what
sense do the moral philosophies of Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, Hutcheson,
Mill, Kant, and Schopenhauer et al. establish or “prove” that “all attempts
to give reasons for morality are necessarily sophistical”? Nietzsche’s thought
must be that all these philosophers appear to provide “dialectical justifica-
tions” for moral propositions, but that all these justifications actually fail.
But that still does not answer the question of how the fact of there being all
these different moral philosophies proves that they are sophistical, i.e. that
they do not, in fact, justify certain fundamental moral propositions?
The best explanation argument sketched earlier would supply Nietzsche
an answer. The best explanation for the existence of incompatible moral phi-
losophies providing dialectical justifications for conflicting moral truths is
that (1) it is possible to construct apparent dialectical justifications for such
moral truths, because (2) given the diversity of psychological needs of per-
sons (including philosophers), it is always possible to find people for whom
the premises of these dialectical justifications seem plausible and attractive,
and (3) there are no objective moral facts offering an obstacle to the philoso-
pher satisfying his psychological needs in this way.
The alternative, “moral realist” explanation for the data—the data
being the existence of intractable disagreement between incompat-
ible philosophical theories about morality—is both less simple and less
consilient. First, of course, it posits the existence of moral facts which,
according to the more familiar best explanation argument noted earlier
(cf. Leiter 2001), are not part of the best explanation of other phenom-
ena. Second, the moral realist must suppose that this class of explanator
ily narrow moral facts is undetected by a large number of philosophers
who are otherwise deemed to be rational and epistemically informed.
Third, the moral realist must explain why there is a failure of convergence
15
Whether or not Nietzsche is thinking of this issue in Aristotelian terms is not
clear, though it might seem the natural candidate point of reference for a classicist like
Nietzsche, but I have found, in any case, the discussion in Smith (2007) helpful in fram-
ing the possibilities at issue.
Moral Skepticism in Nietzsche 139
Moral realists—which, for purposes here, will just mean those who deny
skepticism about objective moral facts—have developed a variety of “defus-
ing explanations” (Doris and Plakias 2008: 311, 320–1; cf. Loeb 1998 for
a useful survey and rebuttal of various strategies) to block the abductive
inference from apparently intractable moral disagreement to skepticism
about moral facts. Moral disagreement is, after all, an epistemic phenom-
enon, from which we propose to draw a metaphysical conclusion. The
“defusing” explanations of moral disagreement propose to exploit that fact,
by suggesting alternate epistemic explanations for the disagreement, expla-
nations that are compatible with the existence of objective moral facts.
We may summarize the “defusing” objections to the skeptical argument as
follows: (1) moral disagreements about concrete cases are not really intrac-
table, they merely reflect factual disagreements or ignorance, and thus
belie agreement on basic moral principles; (2) even if moral disagreements
are about basic moral principles, they are not really intractable but rather
resolvable in principle; (3) even if there are real and intractable moral dis
agreements about foundational moral principles, these are best explained
by cognitive defects or the fact that they occur under conditions that are
not epistemically ideal: e.g. conditions of informational ignorance, irra-
tionality, or partiality; and (4) even if there are real and intractable moral
disagreements about foundational moral principles that cannot be chalked
up to cognitive defects or non-ideal epistemic conditions, they are still best
explained in terms of differences in “background theory.” Let us consider
these in turn.
140 Brian Leiter
1. Moral disagreements about concrete cases are not really intractable, they
merely reflect factual disagreements or ignorance, and thus belie agreement on
basic moral principles. Although this was an important worry in, for example,
the response of Boyd (1988) and Brink (1989) to Mackie’s original version
(1977) of the argument from moral disagreement, it is obviously irrelevant
to Nietzsche’s version of the argument for moral skepticism, which appeals
precisely to disagreement about foundational moral principles, as exempli-
fied, for example, by the dispute between Kantians and utilitarians, among
many others. So we may set this earlier defusing explanation to one side.
2. Even if moral disagreements are about basic moral principles, they are
not really intractable but rather are resolvable in principle. This has been the
standard optimistic refrain from philosophers ever since “moral realism”
was revived as a serious philosophical position in Anglophone philosophy
in the 1980s. With respect to very particularized moral disagreements—e.g.
about questions of economic or social policy—which often trade on obvious
factual ignorance or disagreement about complicated empirical questions,
this seems a plausible retort. But for over two hundred years, Kantians and
utilitarians have been developing increasingly systematic versions of their
respective positions. The Aristotelian tradition in moral philosophy has an
even longer history. Utilitarians have become particularly adept at explain-
ing how they can accommodate Kantian and Aristotelian intuitions about
particular cases and issues, though in ways that are usually found to be
systematically unpersuasive to the competing traditions and which, in any
case, do nothing to dissolve the disagreement about the underlying moral
criteria and categories. Philosophers in each tradition increasingly talk only
to each other, without even trying to convince those in the other tradi-
tions. And while there may well be “progress” within traditions—e.g. most
utilitarians regard Mill as an improvement on Bentham—there does not
appear to be any progress in moral theory, in the sense of a consensus that
particular fundamental theories of right action and the good life are deemed
better than their predecessors. What we find now are simply the compet-
ing traditions—Kantian, Humean, Millian, Aristotelian, Thomist, perhaps
now even Nietzschean—who often view their competitors as unintelligible
or morally obtuse, but don’t have any actual arguments against the foun-
dational principles of their competitors. There is, in short, no sign—I can
think of none—that we are heading towards any epistemic rapprochement
between these competing moral traditions. So why exactly are we supposed
to be optimistic?
As grounds for optimism, many philosophers appeal to the thought (due
to Derek Parfit) that secular “moral theory” is a young field, so of course
it has not made much progress. This strikes me as implausible for a variety
Moral Skepticism in Nietzsche 141
of reasons. First, most fields with factual subject matters have usually man-
aged to make progress, as measured by convergence among researchers,
over the course of a century—and especially the last century, with the rise
of research universities. Moral theory is, again, the odd man out, when
compared to physics, chemistry, biology, or mathematics. Even psychol-
ogy, the most epistemically robust of the “human” sciences, managed to
make progress: e.g. the repudiation of behaviorism, and the cognitive turn
in psychology in just the last fifty years. Second, Spinzoa, Hume, Mill, and
Sidgwick (among many others) may not have advertised their secularism,
but the idea that their moral theories are for that reason discontinuous with
the work of the past hundred years does obvious intellectual violence to the
chains of influence of ideas and arguments. Third, and relatedly, so-called
“secular” moral theory regularly conceives itself in relation to a history that
stretches back in time (sometimes back to the Greeks)—contrast that with
the relative youth of modern physics!—so that it becomes unclear why the
bogeyman of the deity was supposed to have constituted the insuperable
obstacle weighing down intellectual progress. Most contemporary deontol-
ogists may be atheists, for example, but it is not obvious that their atheism
enabled them to make stunning intellectual progress beyond Kant.16
If there is a reason for optimism, it will have to be sought in the next
argument.
3. Even if there are real and intractable moral disagreements about founda-
tional moral principles, these are best explained by cognitive defects or the fact
that they occur under conditions that are not epistemically ideal: e.g. conditions
of informational ignorance, irrationality, or partiality. This is, again, a famil-
iar move in the metaethical literature responding to the argument from
moral disagreement, but one must appreciate how strange it is in response
to the Nietzschean argument appealing to disagreement among moral phi-
losophers across millennia. Are we really to believe that hyper-rational and
reflective moral philosophers, whose lives, in most cases, are devoted to
systematic reflection on philosophical questions, many of whom (histori-
cally) were independently wealthy (or indifferent to material success) and
so immune to crass considerations of livelihood and material self-interest,
and most of whom, in the modern era, spend professional careers refining
16
Alistair Norcross suggests to me that the real problem is that ethics requires reliance
on “intuitions,” and our intuitions are still strongly tainted by our religious traditions.
That seems a more plausible point, though it is unclear what criteria we are going to
appeal to in order to sort the “tainted” from “untainted” intuitions. As Nietzsche would
be the first to point out, the utilitarian obsession with sentience and suffering is, itself,
indebted to Christianity—an ironic fact, given the centrality of the wrongness of suffer-
ing to Parfit’s own moral philosophy (e.g. 2011b: 565 ff.).
142 Brian Leiter
17
Of course, Nietzsche himself does deny that philosophers, at least great ones, are
impartial—as he puts it, they are “all advocates who don’t want to be called by that name”
and “wily spokesmen for their prejudices which they baptize ‘truths’ ” (BGE 5). If moral
philosophers were to cede this point to Nietzsche, then, of course, they would have for-
feited their claim to justified moral knowledge.
Moral Skepticism in Nietzsche 143
18
I realize, of course, that “Kantians,” from Kant to Gewirth to Korsgaard, purport
to have arguments showing such positions to be irrational, but the voluminous literature
attacking their positions perhaps encourages the skeptical thought that something has
gone awry.
19
One might observe, of course, that most philosophers do accept the egalitarian
premise, but they interpret it in ways that yield very divergent conclusions. And even
the fact that they converge on this point admits of anti-realist explanations, as I argue in
Leiter (2013).
20
David Enoch suggests to me that perhaps philosophical tools are not the right
way of achieving knowledge of moral truths. The alternatives—e.g. reading the Bible or
intuition—are notoriously unreliable epistemic methods, however, that generate even
more disagreement than the traditional discursive methods of philosophy. In any case,
Parfittian optimism about secular, rational moral philosophy has been the default posi-
tion for philosophers, which is why it is important to make it the target here.
144 Brian Leiter
particular moral judgments. Against the familiar fact that people’s moral
intuitions about particular problems are often quite different, it is easy to
reply, as Loeb puts it, that since “all observation is theory laden . . . theo-
retical considerations will play a role in moral observations, just as they
do in any others,” and thus “differences of belief among moral reasoners
should be expected because the same information will be observed differ-
ently depending on what background theories are present” (1998: 288).
The skeptical argument from moral disagreement among systematic
moral philosophies, as Loeb himself discusses, presents two discrete chal-
lenges to this defusing explanation. First, it is quite possible for Kantians
and utilitarians to agree about the right action in particular cases, while
disagreeing about the reasons the action is right, reflecting their disagree-
ment about fundamental moral facts.21 In these cases, the disagreement we
are trying to explain is precisely the disagreement in the “background the-
ory,” and it is the surprising resilience of such disagreements, so the skeptic
argues, that calls out for skepticism about moral facts. Second, where the
disagreement about particular cases stems from differing background theo-
ries, that hardly defuses an argument from skepticism appealing to intract
able differences about background theories. As Doris and Plakias remark, in
considering a more extreme case: “if our disagreement with the Nazis about
the merits of genocide is a function of a disagreement about the plausibility
of constructing our world in terms of pan-Aryan destiny, does it look more
superficial for that?” (2008: 321). Of course, in the Nazi case, we might
think the Nazi background theory vulnerable on other grounds (e.g. of fac-
tual error or partiality), but, as we have already noted, it is not at all obvious
how a disagreement informed by differing moral theories—say, Kantian
and utilitarian—is in any way defused by noting that the disputants dis
agree not only about the particular case, but about the foundational moral
propositions which bear on the evaluation of the case.22
21
Clarke-Doane has posed to me the question: why isn’t agreement on particular cases
enough? After all, we don’t let disagreement among philosophers of physics undermine
our confidence in the objectivity of physics, as manifest in the massive agreement among
scientists about particular propositions of physical theory. Of course, the “folk” do not
converge in their moral opinions the way the physicists do in theirs—that, of course, was
why defenders of moral realism first urged moving to the theoretical level where, it was sug-
gested, disagreement would evaporate. But having moved to that level, we notice, as I con-
cede in the text, that philosophers often agree on particular cases but disagree at the level of
the foundational principles. The difficulty, though, is that such agreements appear to mask
disagreement in principles, and the disagreement in principles actually does translate into
differences about particular cases, even if it is compatible with convergence on many others.
22
A more promising suggestion, which I owe to an anonymous referee, would be to
appeal to differing background theories of rationality. This raises several issues, however.
First, it is unlikely that such disagreements suffice to defuse all moral disagreements (not
Moral Skepticism in Nietzsche 145
all utilitarians e.g. are committed only to instrumental theories of rationality). Second,
one can worry that in some cases the disagreements about rationality really constitute
part of the foundational moral disagreement, rather than standing apart from it as a
free-standing bit of the background theory.
146 Brian Leiter
23
Nietzsche’s thesis was explicitly about the “great philosophies”—like Kant and
Spinoza—and not those “philosophical laborers” and “scholars” who possess “some small,
independent clockwork that, once well wound, works on vigorously without any essential
participation from all the other drives of the scholar” (Beyond Good and Evil, 6). Many
professional philosophers may, indeed, be laboring away at problems in a “disinterested”
way. Still, as the recent survey by David Bourget and David Chalmers (see <http://phil-
papers.org/surveys/results.pl>) brought out, there are striking, and surely not accidental,
correlations between philosophical views across different areas: e.g. theism and moral
realism and libertarianism about free will. Even the “philosophical laborers” are not
wholly disinterested inquirers!
Moral Skepticism in Nietzsche 147
24
See e.g. Leiter 2007: 162–4, including n. 42.
25
A simple version of the argument featured at the start of MacIntyre (1981), but was
largely neglected in subsequent scholarly discussion. Three decades of moral philosophy
later, the skeptical case is even stronger.
26
Obviously Pyhrronian skeptics have mounted challenges of this form for a very
long time, but they are not specific to ethics and they do not offer them to support
an abductive inference to a metaphysical conclusion, as Loeb and I do. Jessica Berry
(2011) argues that Nietzsche’s point is, in fact, the Pyhrronian one—namely, to elicit a
suspension of belief—though I think this is hard to square with his rhetoric. I am also
148 Brian Leiter
6. Conclusion
skeptical that “the passages in which Nietzsche does embrace caution, ephexis, and suspi-
cion . . . far and away outnumber those in which he sounds adamant and dogmatic” about
the non-existence of moral facts (Berry 2011: 190). She offers her alternative, Pyhrronian
reading of the disagreement passages in Nietzsche at (2011: 184–208).
Moral Skepticism in Nietzsche 149
References to Nietzsche
I have drawn on English translations by Walter Kaufmann, R. J. Hollingdale, or
Maudemarie Clark and Alan Swensen, and then made modifications based on
Friedrich Nietzsche, Sämtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe in 15 Bänden, ed.
G. Colli and M. Montinari (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1980); where there is no exist-
ing English edn, the translation is my own. Nietzsche’s works are cited as fol-
lows, unless otherwise noted: roman numerals refer to major parts or chapters in
Nietzsche’s works; Arabic numerals refer to sections, not pages. I use the standard
Anglophone abbreviations for Nietzsche’s works, as follows: The Antichrist (A);
Beyond Good and Evil (BGE); The Birth of Tragedy (BT); Daybreak (D); Ecce Homo
(EH); The Gay Science (GS); Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Z); Twilight of the Idols (TI);
The Will to Power (WP).
27
I am grateful to John Doris and Don Loeb for extremely helpful comments on the
earliest version of this chapter. A later version benefited from presentation and discussion
at the annual History of Modern Philosophy conference at New York University in Nov.
2008; I should acknowledge, in particular, my commentator on that occasion, R. Lanier
Anderson, as well as important questions from Anja Jauernig and Ernest Sosa. I am also
grateful to Justin Clarke-Doane for very helpful written feedback on that version. The
current version benefited from discussion at the Moral Sciences Club at Cambridge
University and the Practical Philosophy Workshop at Northwestern University, as well
as philosophy workshops at McMaster University, University of Colorado at Boulder,
Georgetown University, Queen’s University in Canada, and the Graduate Center of the
City University of New York; from many instructive comments on a shorter version at
the “On the Human” blog of the National Humanities Center (I should single out espe-
cially Ralph Wedgwood, Michael Ridge, and, again, Don Loeb); and from a lively discus-
sion at the 9th Annual Metaethics Workshop at the University of Wisconsin, Madison
in Sept. 2012.
150 Brian Leiter
Other References
Anderson, R. Lanier. 1998. “Truth and Objectivity in Perspectivism,” Synthese,
115: 1–32.
Berry, Jessica. 2011. Nietzsche and the Ancient Skeptical Tradition. New York: Oxford
University Press.
Bloomfield, Paul. 2004. Moral Reality. New York: Oxford University Press.
Boyd, Richard. 1988. “How to be a Moral Realist,” in G. Sayre-McCord (ed.), Essays
on Moral Realism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Brink, David. 1989. Moral Realism and the Foundations of Ethics.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Christensen, David. 2007. “The Epistemology of Disagreement: the Good News,”
Philosophical Review, 116: 187–217.
Clark, Maudemarie. 1990. Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Clark, Maudemarie. 1998. “On Knowledge, Truth and Value,” in C. Janaway (ed.),
Willingness and Nothingness: Schopenhauer as Nietzsche’s Educator. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Clarke-Doane, Justin. Forthcoming. “Moral Epistemology: The Mathematics
Analogy,” Noûs.
Doris, John M., and Plakias, Alexandra. 2008. “How to Argue about
Disagreement: Evaluative Diversity and Moral Realism,” in W. Sinnott-Armstrong
(ed.), Moral Psychology, ii. The Cognitive Science of Morality: Intuition and Diversity.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Hussain, Nadeem. 2004. “Nietzsche’s Positivism,” European Journal of Philosophy,
12: 326–68.
Hussain, Nadeem. 2007. “Honest Illusion: Valuing for Nietzsche’s Free Spirits,”
in B. Leiter and N. Sinhababu (eds), Nietzsche and Morality. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Hussain, Nadeem. 2013. “Nietzsche’s Metaethics,” in K. Gemes and J. Richardson
(eds), The Oxford Handbook of Nietzsche. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Janaway, Christopher. 2007. Beyond Selflessness: Reading Nietzsche’s Genealogy.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Jech, Thomas. 2002. “Set Theory.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: <http://plato.
stanford.edu/entries/set-theory>.
Kaplow, Louis, and Shavell, Steven. 2002. Fairness versus Welfare. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Kelly, Thomas. 2005. “The Epistemic Significance of Disagreement,” in J. Hawthorne
and T. G. Szabo (eds), Oxford Studies in Epistemology, i. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Kitcher, Philip. 1993. The Advancement of Science. New York: Oxford University Press.
Leiter, Brian. 1994. “Perspectivism in Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals,” in
R. Schacht (ed.), Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality. Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press.
Moral Skepticism in Nietzsche 151
1
Ambivalence, as I use it here, is thus a form of inner disagreement, where the speaker
is pulled in opposite directions. We often express this by saying things like “I’m con-
flicted,” “I’m torn,” or “I’m in two minds about it.”
2
See Hurley (1992); Parfit (2011: ii. 559–62); Railton (1992); Shafer-Landau (1994);
Sosa (2001); Vasile (2010); Wolf (1992).
3
See in particular Shafer-Landau (1995).
154 Cristian Constantinescu
For simplicity, I shall use the label “non-naturalism” for the brand of realism
championed by Shafer-Landau.4 I take the following to be key tenets of this
view, which will be relevant to my argument:
4
I focus on Shafer-Landau because he most explicitly upholds both non-naturalism
and the vagueness defence. Parfit, as we have seen, is also a good example of a
non-naturalist who appeals to moral vagueness, but the extent to which he would assent
to all of the seven theses I discuss here remains slightly unclear (see n. 5). More widely,
non-naturalism seems to have enjoyed a vigorous revival recently, as many of the current
leading metaethicists have embraced its main tenets in one form or another: see e.g. Audi
(2004); Crisp (2006); Cuneo (2007); Dancy (2006); Enoch (2011); FitzPatrick (2008);
Huemer (2005); Wedgwood (2007).
Moral Vagueness 155
5
Parfit sometimes seems to adopt this strategy too in his (2011). Though he seems quite
happy to countenance talk of non-natural, irreducibly normative properties at various
points throughout the book, in §112 he puts forward a view he terms “non-metaphysical
cognitivism,” according to which: “There are some claims that are irreducibly normative
in the reason-involving sense, and are in the strongest sense true. But these truths have
no ontological implications. For such claims to be true, these reason-involving proper-
ties need not exist either as natural properties in the spatio-temporal world, or in some
non-spatio-temporal part of reality” (2011: ii. 486). Parfit’s “non-metaphysical” view
relies on distinguishing between an ontological reading of “exist” (on which the claim
that normative properties exist comes out false), and a non-ontological reading (on which
the claim is true). I’m not sure a view that appeals to a notion of “non-ontological exist-
ence” is properly characterized as “non-metaphysical,” so much as “super-metaphysical.”
Perhaps the best way to understand Parfit’s suggestion is as a kind of quietism about
metaphysical matters. But then it becomes difficult to understand how any substan-
tive debate between naturalism and non-naturalism, of the kind Parfit himself happily
engages in, can even be had. If, as Parfit appears to suggest at times, non-naturalism is
to be characterized simply as the claim that there are irreducibly normative truths and
concepts, then his view becomes indistinguishable from the non-analytical naturalism
defended by philosophers like Gibbard (2006), according to which, although there are
irreducibly normative claims, there are no irreducibly normative facts, because normative
concepts and natural concepts signify properties of the same kind. Since Parfit opposes
Gibbard’s non-analytical naturalism, he must think that not just moral claims, but moral
properties too, are irreducibly normative. To then pull a Meinongian stunt and add that
156 Cristian Constantinescu
individuals can instantiate (as opposed to being just sets of individuals, for
instance), and which, while “resulting from,”6 “being realised by,” or “being
constituted by”7 natural properties, are nevertheless neither identical nor
reducible to natural properties.
I am going to present my argument against this type of earnest
non-naturalism in the form of a dilemma. According to the non-naturalist,
there are sui generis, irreducible moral properties. But if such properties
exist, then given the vagueness of many of our moral predicates, either
Horn 1: vague moral predicates pick out vague moral properties,
or
Horn 2: vague moral predicates pick out sharp moral properties, and
vagueness arises from a different source.
I will argue that by taking Horn 1 of this dilemma, the non-naturalist ends
up with moral properties that are either mind-dependent or reducible, in
ways that are incompatible with either Objectivism, Supervenience, or
Non-reductivism above. On the other hand, by taking Horn 2 the non-
naturalist can avoid mind-dependence and reducibility, but only by counte-
nancing instead an ontology of perfectly sharp, strongly unknowable moral
properties, which I shall claim ultimately undercuts his commitment to
either Rationalism or Supervenience. Either way, I will conclude, the non-
naturalist cannot accommodate moral vagueness without giving up some of
his key commitments.
So far, I have simply assumed without argument that moral predicates are
vague. While I find this claim absolutely intuitive, some philosophers don’t.8
Although my argument targets non-naturalists who, like Shafer-Landau,
such properties exist only in a non-ontological sense appears to me to nullify the whole
debate. The moral of the story is that the earnest non-naturalist must take moral prop-
erties seriously, as of course Shafer-Landau and the other non-naturalists listed in n. 4
all do.
6
See Dancy (1981). Dancy takes his notion of “resultance” from Ross (1930), but
significantly sharpens it. I should note that Dancy’s view at this early stage wasn’t decid-
edly non-naturalist, as he allowed the compatibility of resultance with a relation of
token-identity between normative and natural properties.
7
See Shafer-Landau (2003: 72–9).
8
Dworkin e.g. has long argued that every legal question must have a perfectly deter-
minate answer (Dworkin 1977), and has recently extended this view to the ethical
domain (Dworkin 2011: ch. 5).
Moral Vagueness 157
believe in moral vagueness, I also hope to convince those who, like Dworkin,
find this idea doubtful. My aim in doing this, of course, is to weaken the
non-naturalist position more widely: my dilemma, I submit, applies not
just to non-naturalists who are already committed to moral vagueness, but
to all non-naturalists, since we are all committed to moral vagueness. I shall
therefore give five interrelated reasons for thinking that at least some (and
probably most) of our moral predicates are vague. Due to their interrelat-
edness, these reasons can be expressed as a single claim: moral predicates
display all the standard symptoms of vagueness: (a) imprecise gradability;
(b) boundarilessness; (c) borderlineness; (d) tolerance; (e) soriticality.
(a) Imprecise gradability. Like vague predicates from other domains of
discourse, moral predicates are imprecisely gradable. Their gradabil-
ity means that they admit of degrees: one person can be very honest,
another slightly cruel, a third not too courageous. Furthermore, one per-
son can be more just than another, and often by much. But, pace Socrates,
it seems impossible to tell precisely by how much. The reason for this
is that justice, honesty, cruelty, courage, and all the other moral values,
simply do not appear to be the kinds of properties that could come in
discrete, cardinally quantifiable units. I must stress that the focus here
is on imprecise gradability, rather than simply impreciseness or gradabil-
ity taken separately. Famously, impreciseness is insufficient for vague-
ness: “natural number between 1 and 100” is imprecise, but not vague.
And where a property is precisely gradable, vagueness can, but does not
necessarily, arise: both “tall” and “between 100 and 200 cm high” pick
out properties which are precisely gradable (heights), but the former is
vague while the latter is not. This raises an interesting point about the
properties denoted by vague predicates: in many cases, these properties
supervene upon properties which are precisely gradable, but are not
themselves precisely gradable. Consider the predicate “bald.” Baldness
supervenes on the property of having x hairs on one’s scalp, which is
precisely gradable. But baldness itself is not precisely gradable: even if
we know precisely how many more hairs Abe has on his scalp than Ben,
it doesn’t follow that we thereby can tell how much balder Ben is (if for
no other reason then at least because other factors, like the distribution
of hair on one’s scalp, contribute to our ascriptions of baldness, thereby
making gradability imprecise). Similarly for moral properties: honesty
supervenes on the number of lies one tells. But it doesn’t follow that if
we know how many lies Abe and Ben have told so far in their lives, we
can thereby know how much more honest the one is than the other.
(b) Boundarilessness. Imprecise gradability leads to imprecise boundaries.
Because honesty does not come in precise degrees, there cannot be a
158 Cristian Constantinescu
intense pain isn’t cruel either; but applying tolerance a sufficient number of
times would yield the absurd conclusion that causing agonizing pain isn’t
cruel. If watching hard porn isn’t harmful to Ben today, as he turns 40,
then watching hard porn wasn’t harmful yesterday; apply tolerance over
and over again, and eventually you get the conclusion that watching hard
porn wouldn’t have been harmful to Ben when he was 7.9 And lest one
should think that only thick moral concepts can be vague, consider the case
of “wrong” in the following scenario (borrowed from Sorensen 1990): it’s
definitely wrong to draw 5,000 millilitres of blood from a person for blood
tests; if so, then it’s also wrong to draw 4,999 millilitres of blood; apply this
enough times, and you get the absurd conclusion that it’s wrong to draw 1
millilitre of blood. Finally, think of “ought” in this scenario: I ought to give
£10 to charity every month; if so, then I also ought to give £10.01; but if
I apply tolerance enough times, I get the absurd conclusion that I ought to
give all my money to charity.10
9
Of course, in a case like this, the law does set an arbitrary cut-off point at the age of
18. But no one seriously thinks that this removes the vagueness of “harmful”: if watching
hard porn one second before midnight on the day of his 18th birthday is harmful to Ben,
so is watching hard porn one second later (despite the latter act being legally permitted,
and the former not).
10
I thank an anonymous reviewer for pressing me on the need to refine my examples
of moral vagueness.
160 Cristian Constantinescu
11
From here on I adopt the convention of using small capitals to signify properties.
Moral Vagueness 161
12
This is indeed Shafer-Landau’s strategy: in his (1994) he argues for the “worldly”
indeterminacy of moral properties, and against semantic and epistemic accounts.
162 Cristian Constantinescu
13
Thus, it may be indeterminate whether a particular cloud weighs 1 billion kilograms
not because of any vagueness in the property weighs 1,000,000,000 kg, but because the
cloud itself lacks sharp boundaries.
14
As Williamson points out in a similar connection, this is no more valid than the
fallacious move from “It is contingent whether the number of planets is even” to “Of the
number of planets, it is contingent whether it is even” (see Williamson 2003: 701–2).
Moral Vagueness 163
number,” competent speakers will be able to decide, of any object they are
presented with, whether or not that object is a natural number. A determi-
nate predicate individuates a determinate property: thus, the property of
being a natural number is sharp. On the other hand, there are also cases
where conversational scores may remain silent: the conversationalists’ previ-
ous word-use practices have not established conventions that completely
determine any future applications of such predicates. The predicate “bald”
is a typical example. We can safely assume that the linguistic conventions
governing the application of this predicate have not settled criteria of cor-
rect application for every conceivable configuration of hair on a human
being’s scalp. Therefore, there will be unclear cases, over which competent
speakers might disagree. There will also be cases about which they will feel
ambivalent: one and the same speaker may classify me as “bald” in a context
where the standard of hirsuteness is set in relation to Jimi Hendrix, and as
“not bald” in a context where I’m standing next to Billy Corgan. All of this
is, of course, very familiar. The point is that, on this account, properties are
individuated by the semantic criteria governing the use of predicates denot-
ing them, which are in turn fixed by conventions made by speakers.15
This rough characterization should suffice to suggest that the contex-
tualist approach to vague properties is not an appealing option for the
non-naturalist who wants to account for moral vagueness by appealing to
vague moral properties. On Shapiro’s account, vague properties turn out
to be judgment-dependent in a deep sense: not only are they responsive to
certain linguistic/psychological facts about the competent speakers—they
are actually constituted by such facts. The analogue of this in the moral
realm would be a form of constructivism, grounding moral properties in the
practices of rational agents negotiating rules for mutual behaviour. But on
this view, speakers confronted with borderline instances of moral predicates
cannot be assumed to track an independent realm of properties in their
judgments: the direction of fit is Euthyphronic (from speakers to proper-
ties) rather than Socratic (from properties to speakers). Adopting such an
account of vague properties would therefore seem to be incompatible with
the thesis of Objectivism.
But perhaps we’ve gone too fast. There is an obvious rejoinder to the
preceding line of argument: while it may be true that vague properties are in
15
This approach to vague properties may be supplemented with a psychological
account (in the manner of Schiffer 2000). After all, as Shapiro himself acknowledges
(2006: 24ff.), the picture of communicators keeping conversational scores appears to
leave one important question unanswered: what makes it the case that individual ambiva-
lence or collective disagreement are sometimes appropriate attitudes for the conversation-
alists to display? Schiffer’s account may offer the key, by explaining vagueness in terms
of belief-degrees.
164 Cristian Constantinescu
one sense judgment-dependent, this may only be the case within their bor-
derline areas. Determinate instances, on the other hand, could be regarded
as mind-independent. This is actually Shapiro’s view:
If Shapiro’s remarks here are correct, perhaps the non-naturalist can embrace
the preceding account of vague properties after all.
To see whether this will work, let us first translate Shapiro’s talk of
vague predicates in this passage into talk of vague properties. Take “bald,”
which Shapiro uses as an example of a predicate with both a Socratic and
a Euthyphronic region. Presumably this means that the property baldness
denoted by this predicate also has such “regions”: a mind-independent core,
determined entirely by objective factors, and a mind-dependent penum-
bra, determined at least in part by speakers’ conventions. The first image
that comes to mind is that of a fuzzy set of bald individuals, with differ-
ent degrees of membership: some individuals are determinately bald and
therefore full members, while others are indeterminately bald and therefore
members to lesser degrees. For the former kind of individuals, objective
factors fix their membership status, whereas for the latter it is up to speak-
ers to decide in each case whether it is appropriate or not to count them as
members of the set. Clearly, this isn’t an understanding of vague properties
that the non-naturalist can readily embrace and apply to moral properties.
For the non-naturalist, the vague property of permissibility, for instance, is
more than just a set of actions, for there is nothing metaphysically sui generis
or intrinsically reason-giving about sets.
An alternative is to think of the different “regions” of a vague property
more literally, i.e. mereologically. Thus, a vague property could be more like
a cloud than a set. A cloud is made up of a core of particles definitely within it,
and a looser, marginal region of particles of which it’s indeterminate whether
they are parts of the cloud. At first blush, this model seems more compatible
with Shafer-Landau’s conception of moral properties as being “constituted
by,” though not identical to, natural properties (Shafer-Landau 2003: 72–9).
permissibility, for instance, could be a non-natural type-property made up
of various token-properties (permissibility-instantiations, or tropes), each
Moral Vagueness 165
16
This is in line with Ridge’s reconstruction of Shafer-Landau’s conception of consti-
tution (Ridge 2007: 340ff.)
166 Cristian Constantinescu
17
See Rosen and Smith (2004). The following paragraphs are based (at times only
loosely) on their approach, adding qualifications drawn from Sanford, who offered simi-
lar suggestions much earlier (Sanford 1966, 2013).
18
Though of course there may well be, in the sense of there being at least one particle
x such that x is neither determinately inside Bill, nor determinately not inside Bill.
Moral Vagueness 167
Rosen and Smith distinguish between vague and sharp properties by gen-
eralizing this idea. On their account, vagueness turns essentially on issues
of specificity. Properties are sharp if they are maximally specific—much
like determinate point-sized regions in the colour solid, or point-sized
units along a continuum of heights. For this reason, Rosen and Smith also
refer to sharp properties as “point-properties.” Vague properties, on the
other hand, lack specificity. Rather, they cover ranges of specific proper-
ties—much like “blue,” which covers a range of different shades, or “tall,”
which covers a range of different heights. For this reason, we may call them
“range-properties.”19
The distinction looks neat, but it does require an important qualifica-
tion. Rosen and Smith appear to overlook the fact that there are properties
which are sharp, but not maximally specific (i.e. not point-properties): e.g.
the properties denoted by “taller than 186 cm,” or “taller than 186 cm but
not taller than 189 cm.” These are imprecise, but sharp (i.e. not vague).
That some range-properties turn out to be sharp may seem to throw
some doubt on the usefulness of Rosen and Smith’s distinction. But the
issue can easily be fixed, by noting a common characteristic of such sharp
range-properties: they cover precisely bound ranges. This enables us to revise
the above characterization of vague properties, so that it now reads: vague
properties are properties that cover indeterminate or unbound ranges of
point properties.
There are good reasons to think that moral properties are vague in
the sense just specified. Like colour terms, moral predicates are general
enough to apply not just to singular instances, but to entire ranges of cases.
Moreover, these ranges are never precisely bound: there are no minimal or
maximal values of courage, kindness, permissibility, etc., as shown in §2
above. And importantly, from a metaphysical point of view this structural
account of vague properties seems less threatening than the semantic view
examined in §3.1.1, since it doesn’t rely on facts about speakers’ conven-
tions which could introduce an element of subjectivity. It might seem as if
this ontic view of vague properties could be much more promising for the
non-naturalist seeking an account of moral vagueness.
Under closer scrutiny, however, things appear more problematic. On
the present account, the lack of specificity displayed by vague properties
means that they are somehow composite, or structured: as we have seen,
they cover fuzzy ranges, and as such are comprised of maximally specific
19
This could also be paraphrased in terms of a distinction between determin
ables and determinates: range-properties are determinates and determinables, whereas
point-properties are perfect determinates (i.e. determinates but not determinables). For
more on this, see Sanford (2013).
168 Cristian Constantinescu
point-properties. This encourages the view that they are somehow conceptu-
ally derivative: i.e. capable of being broken down and understood in terms
of sharp ones. For notice that corresponding to any vague property P there
will be a set of properties {Q1, Q2, . . .} such that each Qi belonging to that
set will be (i) perfectly sharp, and (ii) necessarily sufficient for P. But then
it follows that the disjunction of all these sharp properties, Q1 V Q2 V . . . ,
will be necessarily coextensive with P. This seems intuitive: when I say that a
is blue, I locate a within a fuzzy region on the colour spectrum, while leav-
ing it open which particular shade of blue a may be; thus, my claim can be
equated to “a is B-1 or B-2 or . . . B-17 or . . . ”20
The upshot is that vague properties are essentially disjunctive: more spe-
cifically, they can always be resolved into disjunctions of sharp properties.
This is apt to spell trouble for the moral naturalist contemplating an ontol-
ogy of irreducible moral properties. For one thing, the very notion of a “dis-
junctive property” has seemed incoherent to many philosophers (e.g. Lewis
1986b; Armstrong 1978). Here’s how Armstrong puts the issue:
Disjunctive properties offend against the principle that a genuine property is identi-
cal in its different particulars. Suppose a has a property P but lacks Q, while b has
Q but lacks P. It seems laughable to conclude from these premisses that a and b are
identical in some respect. Yet both have the “property”, P or Q. (1978: 20)
But perhaps not all disjunctive properties are as gerrymandered as Armstrong
supposes they must be. There is a difference, for instance, between the fol-
lowing (putative) properties: pale yellow or bright yellow; pale yellow
or dark green; yellow or angry (Sanford 1970, 2013). While the last
of these definitely falls prey to Armstrong’s criticism, it may seem doubtful
whether the second does, and quite certain that the first doesn’t. The issue,
it may be thought, turns on resemblance. At least the first of these proper-
ties can be regarded as a real, genuinely disjunctive property, because there
are deep similarities between its disjuncts: if a is pale yellow and b is bright
yellow, then a and b are indeed “identical in some respect,” and therefore
can be properly said to satisfy the predicate “pale yellow or bright yellow.”
This may seem to provide a satisfactory response to Armstrong’s attack.
After all, most of the vague predicates in our language (“red,” “tall,” “bald,”
but also “generous,” “honest,” “just,” “courageous,” etc.) appear to “carve
nature at its joints” rather than just being artificially gerrymandered dis-
junctions (in other words, they are more like “pale yellow or bright yel-
low” than like “yellow or angry”). “Red,” for instance, is equivalent to
20
Not in the sense that I must mean or intend that disjunction when I ascribe blue-
ness to a, of course. The claim concerns the extensions of vague properties, not their
intensions.
Moral Vagueness 169
21
I owe thanks to David Copp for suggesting this move to me.
Moral Vagueness 171
like that person at ti” or “morally wrong precisely like my action at tj.”22
As a general strategy, we might try using Kaplan’s “dthat” operator, to yield
something along the lines of “dthat [token of M]” where M would be a term
for the kind of property to which the particular trope belongs (“courage,”
“kindness,” etc.). But the sense in which such tropes can be said to belong
to general kinds, as well as the criteria for grouping them together, remains
unclear. One obvious option, as we have seen, is to appeal to a relationship
of resemblance or similarity between tropes, based on which we could classify
them as belonging to the same kind. The non-naturalist might then argue
that, along with moral tropes—to which we must have access via direct
acquaintance or some form of intuition23—our moral experience also deliv-
ers basic facts about resemblance. So, for instance, when witnessing Carrie’s
act of saving a baby from drowning at great risk to herself, my experience
delivers not just the particular moral characteristics of the situation (the
moral tropes), but also an objective resemblance to other acts I witnessed in
the past (e.g. Dana defending a friend against aggressors), based on which
I classify all such acts as instances of “courage.”
But the plausibility of this proposal dissolves under scrutiny. As we
saw, resemblances between moral tropes belonging to the same kind (e.g.
courage-tropes) could not be resemblances between the natural tropes
constituting them. For, just like “red” in Mellor’s example, “courageous,”
“cruel,” “kind,” “right,” “good,” etc. can be instantiated by different peo-
ple or actions in virtue of a myriad of different natural properties. But if
moral-trope-resemblance isn’t natural-trope-resemblance, what can it be?
The only other option is to appeal to a primitive notion of qualitative resem-
blance between the moral tropes themselves, over and above any differences
and similarities between the natural tropes constituting them. But notice that
resemblance is never a simple, all-or-nothing affair: a could resemble b in
some respects but not in others. When two things are similar, it seems natural
to assume that they are so because they have certain qualities in common. But
once we introduce this idea, the non-realist’s appeal to primitive tropes starts
to unravel: how are we to even begin to spell out the putatively non-natural
qualities grounding the resemblance between tropes like those exemplified by
Carrie’s saving a baby and Dana’s defending a friend, other than by saying that
they are both instances of courage? In fact, the very attempt to individuate
them qua moral tropes seems to require an appeal to the general kind they
belong to: “courageous exactly like Carrie’s action at tj,” “courageous exactly
like Dana’s action at ti.” But in that case, it turns out after all that the general
I assume that since tropes are perfectly simple and unrepeatable, they could not be
23
24
There is, of course, far more to be said here, on both sides of the argument.
Dismissing trope-theory isn’t something one can do in a quick move like this. But I hope
I’ve done enough to at least raise some doubts about the use of this theory in tandem
with moral non-naturalism to yield what I have called a “pointilist moral ontology.”
The non-naturalist may have more to say about the relations between moral tropes and
properties, and could perhaps use recent work on determinates/determinables, such as
Gillett and Rives (2005), to articulate a more robust view. Until such work is completed,
however, the doubts I raise are, I think, justified.
25
Thanks to Antti Kauppinen, Tom Dougherty, and an anonymous referee for saving
me from a few significant errors I had made in my discussion of supervaluationism in
an earlier draft.
26
For a formal explanation of why properties cannot be vague on a supervaluationist
account, see Williamson (2003: §5). Keefe (2000: 160) disagrees, but not because she
thinks anything significant hangs on whether supervaluationists take properties to be
vague or sharp. Quite to the contrary, Keefe believes that, on the extensional view of
properties embraced by supervaluationists, it makes no difference whether one says that a
predicate “P” indeterminately picks out a sharp property, or rather that “P” determinately
picks out a vague property.
174 Cristian Constantinescu
27
The story, of course, will have to be much more elaborate. But the main ingredients
exist: Blackburn does appeal to this kind of ambivalence or open-mindedness (leaving
the door open for more than one set of values, or ways of life) in his (1984: 201), though
not directly in relation to vagueness.
Moral Vagueness 175
28
Shafer-Landau explicitly rejects epistemicism as a plausible explanation of moral
vagueness in his (1994), and opts instead for an ontic account. Nevertheless, the view
may look independently plausible to other moral realists. Dworkin (2011), for instance,
explains apparent instances of moral indeterminacy in terms of ignorance or uncertainty,
and insists that there’s always a fact of the matter about what we should do. It seems
natural to interpret such claims along the lines of epistemicism. And Tim Williamson,
who has been one of the most prominent champions of epistemicism, has indicated (in
personal correspondence) that he takes a robustly realist stance on morality. It is therefore
worth considering the view’s metaethical implications in detail.
176 Cristian Constantinescu
29
Among those who find the idea of unknowable obligations objectionable along
such lines are Williams (1981); Sider (1995); Thomson (2008); Kramer (2009). Sorensen
defends unknowable obligations in his (1995).
30
Shafer-Landau makes this point repeatedly in his (2003), esp. in ch. 10. On the
other hand, in his earlier (1994) he distances himself from the epistemicist’s unknowable
truths when he says: “As a metaphysical realist, I can countenance some unknowable
truths. But the number of such truths required by [epistemicists] is so great as to cast
doubt on the plausibility of their view.”
Moral Vagueness 177
we could say: not merely in accordance with, but from duty). But acting from
duty involves being in a certain state of mind: knowing the contents of our
fact-given obligations. Recently, Dougherty writes in a similar vein:
[O]ne might hold that if it is a fact that you must take a taxi that costs less than $35.41
in order to keep a promise to meet someone at a particular time, then you must be able
to decide to take a $35.41 taxi on the basis of this fact. That is, arguably, the weakest link
one could find between ethical facts and motivation. But friends of epistemic explana-
tions of ethical vagueness should deny that even this link obtains. This is because ethical
facts that are unknowable could not guide action. (Dougherty 2013: 10)
The non-naturalist seeking to adopt an epistemic theory of vagueness is not
likely to be very impressed by such objections, though. For one thing, the
scope of unknowable facts should not be overstated: that there are some
unknowable truths within a grey area of radical ignorance doesn’t impugn on
the whole realm of moral facts outside that area. But even focusing on facts
in the grey area itself, the non-naturalist can bite Dougherty’s bullet and sim-
ply deny any link between moral facts and motivation: after all, if moral facts
aren’t supposed to be projected, or constructed, from facts about our moti-
vational states, then why expect them to always be responsive to such states?
Call Dougherty’s taxi-involving moral fact “M.” According to Dougherty,
one might expect that if M obtains, one should be able to decide to act as M
requires on the basis of M itself. But why should that be a valid expectation?
Presumably, by “deciding on the basis of a fact” Dougherty means “deciding
on the basis of one’s knowledge of that fact.” That, although ideal, is hardly
a requirement: often, we are forced to decide solely on the basis of our beliefs
about the facts. And deciding to act as M requires based on one’s belief that
M is certainly possible in Dougherty’s scenario.
The difficulty, I believe, comes from focusing on motivation. One way
in which moral facts can be action-guiding is by producing corresponding
motives to act. But aside from motivation, action-guidingness can also mean
providing a justification, and by focusing on justification we can uncover,
I believe, a deeper problem with the notion of unknowable moral facts. The
problem is, roughly, that it is much harder to drive a wedge between moral
facts and justification than it is to separate facts from motivation.
The distinction between justification and motivation corresponds to
that between normative reasons and motivating reasons. Normative rea-
sons are justifying considerations. When we have such reasons, and act for
them, they become our motivating reasons.31 Call these “n-reasons” and
“m-reasons,” respectively. Now, according to the thesis of Rationalism, as
embraced by Shafer-Landau, Parfit, and others, moral facts are intrinsically
32
I draw quite substantive inspiration here from Lillehammer (2002), which provides
one of the most forceful arguments I know for taking reasons to be essentially tied to the
exercise of our deliberative capacities.
Moral Vagueness 179
seems almost vacuous. I shall express this upshot in the form of the follow-
ing epistemic constraint on normative reasons:
Epistemic constraint on reasons: If R is an n-reason for X to Φ, then R
can feature in a rational justification of the claim that X ought to Φ,
a justification which X knows or could come to know if X’s reasoning
abilities were maximally improved.
Non-naturalists can, and often do, acknowledge this conceptual link
between reasons and our maximally improved reasoning abilities. Thus,
Parfit defends an objectivist view of reasons according to which “when it
is true that we have decisive reasons to act in some way, this fact makes it
true that if we were fully informed and both procedurally and substantively
rational, we would choose to act in this way” (2011: i. 63). Similarly, in
the course of defending the notion of unknowable moral facts (though not
in the context of vagueness), Shafer-Landau concedes that “realists are not
committed to the idea that moral truths are inaccessible to absolutely ideal
epistemic agents at the Piercean limit of enquiry. Epistemically ideal agents
who have reached this limit will be fully informed. This means that they will
know all facts. Moral realists believe that some of these facts are moral ones;
so a genuinely ideal epistemic judge will know all moral facts” (2003: 17).
Now, on an epistemic account which takes vagueness to be just ignorance
concerning the sharp extensions of our moral concepts, this ignorance is
irremediable: no improvement in our rational abilities could remove this
uncertainty, due to the margin-for-error constraints attaching to knowl-
edge. So there are radically unknowable moral facts which not even agents
with maximally improved rational capacities can come to know. If that is so,
then either those facts fail to generate n-reasons, in which case Rationalism
is false, or else there are reasons which cannot feature in an intelligible jus-
tification for anyone, violating the epistemic constraint on reasons above.
There is a reply here on behalf of the non-naturalist, which relies on
questioning the notion of a “maximally improved rationality” that I have
been using so far.33 Why assume that an ideal agent, who took every oppor-
tunity of improving and refining her reasoning abilities (both instrumental
and substantive) and knows all the facts, would still be ignorant about the
boundaries of our moral concepts? In the case of vague concepts whose
application depends on perceptual criteria (“red,” “tall,” “heap,” etc.), it
makes sense to think that even someone possessed of a perfect capacity for
reasoning would still remain ignorant about the relevant sharp boundaries,
33
Thanks to Jen Hornsby, Michael Garnett, and Sarah McGrath for independently
alerting me to this possibility.
180 Cristian Constantinescu
According to the sort of ethical non-naturalism that I favour, a moral fact super-
venes on a particular concatenation of descriptive facts just because these facts real-
ize the moral property in question. Moral facts necessarily covary with descriptive
ones because moral properties are always realized exclusively by descriptive ones. Just
as facts about a pencil’s qualities are fixed by facts about its material constitution, or
facts about subjective feelings by neurophysiological (and perhaps intentional) ones,
moral facts are fixed and constituted by their descriptive constituents. (2003: 77)
4. Conclusions
I have argued in this paper that the moral non-naturalist seeking to counte-
nance moral vagueness in an attempt to explain moral disagreement faces a
dilemma. Non-naturalism I have described as commitment to seven the-
ses: Cognitivism, Correspondence, Atomism, Objectivism, Supervenience,
Non-reductivism, and Rationalism. On either horn of the dilemma, serious
problems arise for some of these theses: in various ways, vague properties seem
to threaten Objectivism, Supervenience, and Non-reductivism; on the other
hand, sharp properties raise problems for Supervenience and Rationalism. The
difficulties on each horn of the dilemma are real, and while they may not be
insuperable, they do, at the very least, drastically limit the things non-naturalists
can consistently say about moral properties, facts, and reasons. Non-naturalism
may in the end survive my dilemma, but if it does it will be a doctrine consider-
ably different from what some of its leading proponents take it to be.34
34
I am indebted to Maike Albertzart, Tom Dougherty, Antti Kauppinen, Laura Vasile,
and two anonymous reviewers for Oxford University Press for extremely helpful com-
ments on earlier drafts of this chapter. Previous versions of the material were presented
Moral Vagueness 183
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Dougherty, T. 2013. “Vague Value,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (pub-
lished online first, DOI: 10.1111/phpr.12026).
Dworkin, R. 1977. “No Right Answer?” in P. Hacker and J. Raz (eds), Law, Morality,
and Society, 58–84. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Dworkin, R. 2011. Justice for Hedgehogs. Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard
University Press.
Enoch, D. 2011. Taking Morality Seriously: A Defense of Robust Realism.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Fine, K. 1975. “Vagueness, Truth and Logic,” Synthese, 30: 265–300.
FitzPatrick, W. 2008. “Robust Ethical Realism, Non-Naturalism, and Normativity,”
in R. Shafer-Landau (ed.), Oxford Studies in Metaethics, iii. 159–205.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Gibbard, A. 2006. “Normative Properties,” in T. Horgan and M. Timmons (eds),
Metaethics After Moore, 319–38. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Gillett, C., and Rives, B. 2005. “The Non-Existence of Determinables: Or, a World
of Absolute Determinates as Default Hypothesis,” Noûs, 39: 483–504.
Huemer, M. 2005. Ethical Intuitionism. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Hurley, S. 1992. Natural Reasons: Personality and Polity. Oxford: Oxford
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Jackson, F. 1998. From Metaphysics to Ethics: A Defence of Conceptual Analysis.
Oxford: Clarendon Press.
1. Introduction
Nagel (1997).
188 Sarah McGrath
3
See e.g. Scanlon’s (2014) extended discussion of the epistemology of set theory in
the fourth of his Locke Lectures, a lecture devoted to addressing epistemological con-
cerns about irreducibly normative facts about reasons. A similar tack is taken by Parfit
(2011: 488–510). Like Scanlon, Parfit proceeds by considering the case of mathematics,
which, he assumes, is a domain in which we have knowledge of non-natural, causally
inefficacious properties and truths. Having sketched a rough account of how we manage
to attain mathematical knowledge, he proceeds to argue that a parallel story might very
well account for our ability to acquire knowledge of irreducibly normative truths.
Relax? Don’t Do It! 189
chamber. In the second case, you judge “that’s wrong” in response to see-
ing a group of children set a cat on fire. Harman claimed that, while the
best explanation of the scientist’s judging as he does invokes a proton’s hav-
ing passed by, the best explanation of your judging that the children acted
wrongly does not invoke the wrongness of their act. Rather, we can explain
your making that moral judgment in the circumstances simply by invok-
ing facts about your psychology. A common interpretation of Harman’s
discussion is that it proposes a kind of explanatory test, a test that morality
fails to pass. According to this line of thought, we have reason to believe in
the existence of things of a certain kind only if they play a role in the best
explanation of our observations of the world, but moral facts never play
such a role.
As noted, relaxed realists sometimes allow that the explanatory require-
ment associated with Harman is an appropriate one so long as it is applied
to the natural world. But they argue that it is not appropriately applied to
other domains, including the moral and normative domains. In this con-
text, mathematics is often cited—alongside the contested cases of morality
and the normative—as a paradigm of a domain for which the test is clearly
inappropriate. Here, for example, is Scanlon:
In the domain of natural science . . . Harman’s explanatory requirement makes good
sense in this form: we have reason to be committed to the existence of things of a
certain sort only if they play a role in explaining what happens in the natural world
(including our experience of it). But this maxim is specific to the domain of natural
science. It does not apply, as Harman’s explanatory requirement is often held to
apply, to every domain, for example to the normative domain, or to mathematics.
(2014: 26)
why each stick ended up in a certain position into one long story, a story
that amounts to a sufficient condition for the obtaining of the explanan-
dum fact. But for reasons that are familiar from the general theory of expla-
nation, it’s a mistake to think that this conjunctive physical explanation is as
good as the geometrical explanation. In particular, to treat the conjunctive
physical explanation as the best explanation in this context is in effect to
treat the explanandum fact as much more fragile and contingent than it
really is. For even if the physical facts had been quite different than they
actually were, the explanandum fact would still have obtained, and this is
something that can be understood in terms of the geometrical explanation
but not in terms of the hypothesized physical explanation.4
The best explanation of the fact that the sticks end up arranged in the
way that they do is a geometrical explanation. From there, it’s a short step to
the conclusion that geometrical facts can play a role in explaining why one
believes as one does. For if one carefully observes the stick experiment, one’s
belief that the sticks are oriented in the way that they are will be explained
by the fact that sticks are arranged in that way. Given that the geometrical
facts explain the latter fact, they will also appear in a sufficiently compre-
hensive account of why one ends up in the relevant psychological state. So
there are cases in which mathematical facts figure in the best explanations
of our observational beliefs.5
It is worth noting the following points: (1) One can agree that math-
ematical facts sometimes play an indispensable role in the best explanations
of our observations even if one does not think that mathematical facts ever
cause anything to happen. Notably, although Lipton thinks that the best
explanation of why the sticks end up arranged as they do is a geometrical
explanation, he explicitly denies that this is a causal explanation, since, he
assumes, geometrical facts cannot be causes (1991: 34).6 (2) Similarly, one
4
In the words of Alan Garfinkel, good explanations should be “invariant under small
perturbations of the initial assumptions” (quoted in Putnam 1975: 301; see Garfinkel
1981 for an extended defense of the idea).
5
There are non-geometrical examples as well. Consider the way in which evolution-
ary biologists account for the highly unusual life cycle of the North American cicada.
Adult cicadas emerge either every 13 or 17 years, depending on their geographical
region; remarkably, this emergence is synchronized across all of the cicadas in a given
area. Among evolutionary biologists, there are two competing hypotheses about what
accounts for these patterns, one that emphasizes the avoidance of predators, the other of
which emphasizes the avoidance of hybridization with similar subspecies. Significantly,
both of these hypotheses make essential reference to the fact that 13 and 17 are prime
numbers, and appeal to the properties of primes as described by number theory. The case
is discussed at length by Baker (2005) who defends the claim that the number-theoretic
truths are essential to the proposed hypotheses.
6
Indeed, Lipton employs the example in an attempt to show that not all explanations
of events or contingently obtaining states of affairs are causal explanations, pace Lewis
192 Sarah McGrath
might agree with the claim that the best explanation of why the sticks end
up arranged as they do is a geometrical explanation even if one does not
believe that one’s observing the sticks does anything to confirm or supply
evidence for the relevant mathematical facts. In short, even if we do not
presuppose the truth of a Quinean epistemology of mathematics, we should
agree that, in at least some cases, mathematical truths feature in the best
explanations of both (i) why physical objects are arranged in the ways that
they are, and (ii) why we end up holding the empirical beliefs that we do.
Insofar as one holds, as the relaxed realist does, that moral truths never play
a role in explaining either (i) or (ii), this is a significant disanalogy between
mathematical truths and moral truths.
Perceptual Accessibility
Another way in which relaxed realists think that irreducibly normative
truths differ from purely descriptive truths is in their lack of accessibil-
ity to perception. On their view, while we can have direct observational
knowledge of (many) purely descriptive truths about the world, we never
recognize irreducibly normative or moral truths on the basis of direct obser-
vation. This is another respect in which the comparison with mathematics
might seem helpful, inasmuch as we do not seem to arrive at our math-
ematical knowledge by direct observation either.7 (Notice that in Lipton’s
example, although the geometrical facts play an indispensable role in a suf-
ficiently comprehensive explanation of why we observe what we do, we do
not actually perceive the geometrical facts appealed to in the explanation
upon observing the scene.) So the example of mathematical properties and
truths might seem to be useful in dispelling suspicions about non-natural
normative properties and truths arising from their putative inaccessibility
to sense perception.
But here too, I think that there is less to the mathematics comparison
than initially meets the eye. In fact, I believe that when we look closely at the
case of mathematics, we do not find the kind of perceptual inaccessibility
(1986) and others. Baker (2005: 234) also denies that mathematical explanations are
causal explanations.
7
Note that even the Quinean empiricist about mathematics does not think that we
perceive particular mathematical truths by observing them; rather, on her view, the justi-
fication that is afforded to our mathematical beliefs by observation is taken to be highly
indirect. That is, for the Quinean, the empirical justification that we have for believing
truths about numbers is much like our justification for believing high level theoretical
claims about subatomic particles: in neither case do we have any direct observational
contact with the entities in question.
Relax? Don’t Do It! 193
that the relaxed realist thinks is characteristic of the moral and normative
domains.
Consider the following mathematical relation:
X is equinumerous with Y.
One might agree with what Kim says here, while denying that it detracts
from the usefulness of the mathematics comparison given the relaxed real-
ist’s purposes. Of course we can directly perceive states of affairs that con-
sist of physical objects instantiating mathematical and relational properties.
But what is not perceptually accessible are the abstract mathematical truths
themselves. For example, even if we can see that there are four cookies on the
table when there are two cookies on my son’s plate and two cookies on my
daughter’s plate, what we do not directly observe are the numbers 2 or 4, or
the abstract arithmetical truth that 2+2=4. And this, it might be objected,
is what a philosopher who appeals to mathematics in order to allay doubt
about the putative perceptual inaccessibility of the normative domain has
in mind.
Let’s grant for the sake of argument that we do not have direct perceptual
knowledge of any abstract mathematical truths, and that in this respect, our
knowledge of such truths resembles the knowledge that the relaxed real-
ist takes us to have of non-natural, irreducibly normative truths. Even so,
194 Sarah McGrath
Causal Efficacy
Consider finally the claim that mathematical properties lack causal efficacy
and at least in this respect provide “companions in guilt” for irreducibly
normative properties as the latter are understood by relaxed realists. As was
just argued, we can (and frequently do) perceive exemplifications of many
mathematical properties, on those occasions when they are instantiated
by concrete particulars. Given that perception is a causal process, it fol-
lows immediately that mathematical properties are causally efficacious in
the relevant sense: we can be causally affected by states of affairs (events,
facts) that consist in the obtaining of mathematical relations and properties.
Here again is Kim, stating what I take to be the correct view of things with
respect to the case of mathematics:
Human perception is a causal process involving the features of the object or situ-
ation perceived and the states of our sense organs and nervous system. Just as the
character of our perceptual experience of there being a green dot is causally deter-
mined in part by the state of affairs of there being a green dot, so our perceptual
experience of there being three dots out there, or that there are more green dots than
red ones, is causally determined by there being three green dots, or there being more
green dots than red ones . . . Like any other concrete states of affairs these states of
affairs involving numerical properties are links in the pervasive causal network of the
world. In this respect there is no difference between mathematical properties instan-
tiated in physical situations on the one hand and the so-called physical properties on
the other . . . mathematical properties . . . are no worse off than such sundry physical
properties as color, mass, and volume, in respect of causal efficacy. (1981: 346–7)
But it is the contention of the relaxed realist that non-natural, irreducibly
normative properties are not causally efficacious in the way that physical
properties such as color, mass, and volume are.
Let’s recap the conclusions of this section. If what I have argued is cor-
rect, then the comparison between mathematics and morality as under-
stood by the relaxed realist stands as shown in the table.
196 Sarah McGrath
8
To be clear, that conclusion is perfectly consistent with the claim that the exam-
ple of mathematics strongly bolsters the position of the moral realist in the dialectic
between moral realism and anti-realism. For many moral realists are not relaxed realists
and reject the characterization of moral properties and truths that has been assumed in
this discussion.
Relax? Don’t Do It! 197
that opinion. Although this more radical view has sometimes been defended,
it is clear that it is not Dworkin’s own:
people’s beliefs about the physical world are often caused directly or indirectly by the
truth of what they believe, and when they are, that fact confirms the truth of their
belief. The best explanation of why I believe that it rained earlier today includes the
fact that it did rain. (2011: 71)
Moreover, Dworkin holds that, when it comes to ordinary empirical beliefs,
the lack of any possible explanatory connection between a belief and the
state of affairs that it purports to represent undermines the credibility of
that belief:
Suppose that though you believe it rained in France today, no rain in France could
possibly figure in any explanation of why you believe that . . . You would then have
no reason at all to think it had rained there. (71)
Given that Dworkin is a passionate defender of the view that moral
beliefs, like beliefs about the physical world, can be objectively true, it is
natural to expect him to tell a parallel story about the moral domain: that
in at least some favorable cases, the fact that a moral opinion is true fig-
ures in the best explanation of why it is held, and that in cases in which
there is no possible explanatory connection between the truth of a moral
opinion and its being held, that tends to undermine the credibility of
the opinion. However, Dworkin emphatically denies that the domains
are parallel in these respects. Rather, his view is that it is a deep confu-
sion to think that the truth of a moral opinion could ever figure in the
best explanation of why it is held, but that morality is none the worse
off for that.
Why should what holds for our beliefs about the physical world not
also hold for our moral beliefs? In both Justice for Hedgehogs and his earlier
paper “Objectivity and Truth: You’d Better Believe it,” Dworkin appeals to
the following idea: things are asymmetrical between our beliefs about the
physical world and our moral beliefs because the former beliefs, but not
the latter, are ones for which it makes sense to ask a certain kind of coun-
terfactual question. Specifically, it makes sense to ask of beliefs about the
physical world whether they would still be held even if the facts that they
purport to represent had been otherwise, but it makes no sense to ask the
same question of our moral beliefs. Here is a statement of this idea from
the earlier paper:
Consider Gilbert Harman’s suggestion that we cannot regard any belief as reliable
unless we think that the best causal explanation of why we hold it refers to the state
of affairs it describes. In some form, this test does seem appropriate to beliefs about
198 Sarah McGrath
the physical world. . . . But nothing in the content of moral (or aesthetic or math-
ematical or philosophical) opinions invites or justifies such a test. On the contrary,
the content of these domains excludes it, because an adequate causal explanation of
a belief includes showing that the belief would not have occurred if the alleged cause
had not been present, and we cannot understand or test that counterfactual claim
with respect to moral or aesthetic beliefs because we cannot imagine a world that is
exactly like this one except that in that world slavery is just or The Marriage of Figaro
is trash. (1996: 119)
He offers the same line of argument in Justice for Hedgehogs.9
Here the idea seems to be something like the following. The reason why
the best explanation of one’s belief that it rained earlier today might very well
invoke the fact that it rained earlier today is that we can both make sense of
and investigate the truth of the following counterfactual:
If it had not rained earlier today, then one would not now believe that
it rained earlier today.
In contrast, because we “cannot imagine a world that is exactly like this one
except that in that world slavery is just,” we cannot understand or investi-
gate the truth of the following counterfactual:
If slavery had not been unjust, then one would not believe that it is
unjust.
And according to Dworkin, our being able to understand and evaluate this
counterfactual is an (unfulfillable) necessary condition for the fact that slav-
ery is unjust to figure in the best explanation of one’s believing that slavery
is unjust.
This is a bad argument. In general, even if we cannot imagine a world
that is exactly like ours except that p is false, it does not follow that p can-
not be a part of the best explanation of why someone believes that p is true.
In order to see this, consider another case that Dworkin mentions in the
passage above: the case of mathematics. Imagine a mathematician who ini-
tially has no opinion about whether some mathematical conjecture is true
or false. Suppose that she subsequently succeeds in proving the conjecture
and thus comes to believe the relevant proposition on the basis of the proof.
In this case, the explanation of why the mathematician currently believes
the proposition is that she succeeded in proving the theorem. But of course,
that explanation entails that the relevant proposition is true. So it is essential
to the best explanation of why the mathematician believes the proposition
that the proposition is true; one could not offer an equally good explanation
9
See his discussion of the “crucial counterfactual question” (2011: 73–4).
Relax? Don’t Do It! 199
of why the mathematician holds the belief that is neutral with respect to the
truth of her belief.10
In short, (1) might be every bit as good of an explanation as (2):
(1) The mathematician believes that p because she proved that p is true.
(2) The mathematician believes that it rained earlier today because she
observed that it rained earlier today.
Of course, given that p is a mathematical truth, we will not be able to
imagine a world that is exactly like ours except for the fact that in that
world p is false. Because of this, the counterfactual “If p had been false,
then the mathematician would not have believed p” will strike us as unin-
telligible, in the way that counterfactuals whose antecedents consist in the
negation of mathematical truths generally strike us as unintelligible. (“If
2+2 had not equaled 4, then . . .”) But that has no tendency to cast doubt
on the truth-invoking explanation of the mathematician’s belief. Indeed,
our inability to evaluate or understand the relevant counterfactual does not
even mean that we cannot investigate or acquire evidence that bears on
the truth-invoking hypothesis as an explanation of why the mathematician
believes as she does. (For example, if we learn from the mathematician’s
diary that she first became convinced of the relevant proposition years ear-
lier, on the basis of a sheer hunch, and that she has believed it unwaver-
ingly ever since, that discovery might very well cast doubt on whether the
truth-invoking hypothesis is really the best explanation of her belief.)
The same point holds for another of Dworkin’s comparisons, one which
is in some respects more closely analogous to the moral case: the case of
the aesthetic. Given that aesthetic properties supervene on non-aesthetic
properties, Dworkin is surely right that we cannot imagine a world which
is exactly like our own except for the fact that The Marriage of Figaro is a
piece of trash. Still, given that we think that it is true that The Marriage of
Figaro is beautiful (as Dworkin does), it certainly seems as though we can
10
Objection: But can’t we explain why the mathematician believes the proposition by
citing the fact that she takes herself to have proved it? One can take oneself to have proved
a proposition even if one has not actually proved it, and indeed, even if the relevant
proposition is false. So we can explain why the mathematician believes the proposition in
a way that is neutral with respect to whether the proposition is true after all, by citing the
fact that she takes herself to have proved it. Reply: It is a mistake to think that nothing has
been lost by substituting in this weaker, less committal explanation. For we can ask the
following question: what explains why the mathematician takes herself to have proved
the proposition? In a given case, the explanation for why she takes herself to have proved
the proposition might be the fact that she proved the proposition. (Given her mathemati-
cal competence, she would not take herself to have proved the theorem unless she had
actually done so.) So in a sufficiently comprehensive explanation of why she currently
believes the proposition, the fact that she successfully proved the theorem will still appear.
200 Sarah McGrath
ask whether the best explanation of why a particular person believes that it
is beautiful includes her appreciation of its beauty (a truth-invoking expla-
nation), or rather, because certain psychological mechanisms guarantee that
she will end up believing that something is beautiful just in case her friends
think that it is beautiful, regardless of its actual aesthetic merits. In any case,
whether it is ultimately defensible to think that someone’s belief could be
best explained in this way, no reason for doubting that it could is supplied
by the fact that “we cannot imagine a world that is exactly like this one
except that . . . The Marriage of Figaro is trash.”
More generally: nothing about whether some truth could be part of the
best explanation of someone’s believing that truth follows from its modal
status. But this observation shows that Dworkin’s counterfactual criterion
cannot be right, because the unintelligibility of the relevant counterfactu-
als arises from the fact that their antecedents consist in the negations of
necessary truths. In fact, notice that if the orthodox Kripkean view about
metaphysical necessity is correct, then Dworkin’s own account of what
distinguishes the types of beliefs that can be explained by truth-invoking
explanations, and the types of beliefs that cannot, does not even yield con-
sistent results. On the one hand, the belief that water is H2O is a belief about
the physical world, and thus seems eligible to be explained by citing the fact
that water is H2O, together with a story about how scientists recognized this
fact.11 On the other hand, given that water is H2O in our world, we cannot
coherently imagine a world that is exactly like this one except for the fact
that water is not H2O.
I conclude then, that if it is true that the injustice of slavery can play no
role in explaining why people think that it is unjust, this has nothing to do
with the fact that we cannot imagine a world exactly like ours except for the
fact that slavery is not unjust.
11
Dworkin himself explicitly cites our beliefs about chemistry as paradigms of beliefs
that can be explained by hypotheses that cite their truth (2011: 69).
Relax? Don’t Do It! 201
could intelligibly cite truth as their parent. That requirement is particularly clear
when you offer to explain someone else’s moral opinions. You think that affirma-
tive action is unfair but your friend thinks it perfectly fair. You cannot think that
his belief is caused by the truth; if you want to explain his belief you must compose
a personal-history explanation. You find one that you think complete and persua-
sive: you cite his education in a knee-jerk liberal family. But now you change your
own mind: you are suddenly convinced by his arguments that affirmative action is
fair. You now think that what your friend believes is true, but you have discovered
nothing that could impeach your earlier explanation of why he believes it. If the
personal-history explanation was adequate before, it remains adequate now. You
may be tempted now to say that, after all, the truth did play a role in the causal story
of how he came to think what he does. But that shows only that [the appeal to truth]
is never more than a fifth, spinning wheel in any explanation. (2011: 74)
Consider first the claim that, in attempting to justify a moral belief, it is
unhelpful to appeal to its truth. There is an obvious sense in which this
is correct. If you and I disagree about whether affirmative action is fair,
then it would of course be ridiculous for me to attempt to justify my belief
to you by citing its (putative) truth. However, there is no difference here
between our moral beliefs and our scientific beliefs. If the scientific com-
munity is divided about whether some chemical hypothesis is true, then it
would obviously be pointless for those who are already convinced of the
hypothesis to attempt to justify their belief by citing the (alleged) fact that
it is true. But this uncontroversial point about justification has no tendency
to show that (e.g.) the best explanation of why chemists believe that water
is H2O does not invoke the fact that water is H2O. The same point holds in
the moral domain. When William Wilberforce took to the floor of parlia-
ment to attempt to justify his belief that slavery is unjust, it would obvi-
ously have been pointless for him to cite the fact that slavery is unjust. But
this uncontroversial point about justification does nothing to show that
the injustice of slavery plays no role in the explanation of why some people
believe that it is unjust.
Consider next Dworkin’s discussion of your attempts to explain your
friend’s belief that affirmative action is fair. In Dworkin’s example, you orig-
inally accept a “personal-history explanation” of your friend’s belief, accord-
ing to which
(H1) My friend believes that affirmative action is fair only12 because
he grew up in a knee-jerk liberal family.
12
Recall that in Dworkin’s example, you originally regard this as a “complete” expla-
nation of your friend’s belief.
202 Sarah McGrath
Dworkin seems to think, there is nothing in the passage quoted above that
bears on the possibility of successfully executing this project.
Appreciating the way in which the credibility of an explanatory hypothesis
can vary depending on which alternatives are considered live options puts us
in a position to answer a question that is made salient by Dworkin’s discus-
sion. The question is this: given that (as we have admitted) one could never
justify a moral belief by citing its truth, why should a moral realist care whether
the truth of a moral belief could ever play a role in explaining why it is held?
Here is a natural answer to this question. Presumably, something explains why
we hold the moral views that we do: the fact that one holds a moral belief is
never simply a brute fact. If there is some general reason for thinking that
the truth of a moral belief could never figure in the best explanation of why
it is held, then for any particular moral belief, any truth-invoking hypothesis
should not be considered a live option. And it might very well be that, once
all truth-invoking hypotheses are removed from the field, the most credible
remaining hypothesis about why one believes as one does is an explanation
which has the following property: if accepted, it would give one a reason to
abandon the moral belief that it explains.
Compare the empirical case: if an oracle informed us that the correct
explanation of why many scientists believe that global warming is occurring
has nothing to do with the occurrence of global warming, thus eliminating
any truth-invoking explanation as a live option, it might be that the next
best explanation (the one that it would then be reasonable for us to accept)
would be one that undermines the rationality of continuing to believe in
global warming. Thus, the reason why a moral realist who acknowledges
that one could never justify a moral belief by citing its truth might never-
theless care about whether moral truth is the kind of thing that could play
an explanatory role is simply this: if all of the truth-invoking-hypotheses are
eliminated from consideration, it might very well be that the explanations
of her moral beliefs that it would then be reasonable for her to accept are
ones that undermine the rationality of her continuing to hold those beliefs.
More generally, the elimination of all-truth-invoking hypotheses might
leave debunking explanations as the most reasonable explanations of our
moral beliefs left standing.
I take it that this is a natural line of thought. Dworkin, however, would
regard it as resting on a fundamental confusion about the vulnerability of
our moral beliefs. For Dworkin holds that our moral views are not suscept
ible to being undermined by purely psychological hypotheses about why we
hold them. The same view has been advanced by Thomas Nagel in The Last
Word.13 This is the final issue that I will take up.
13
This is a central claim of ch. 6 of that work.
204 Sarah McGrath
14
Dworkin helpfully locates himself in dialectical space by noting that the first view
is one that he shares with a certain kind of “external skeptic” about morality, but that he
and the skeptic part ways with respect to the second view (2011: 70).
15
“[A]ny argument that either supports or undermines a moral claim must include or
presuppose further moral claims or assumptions” (2011: 100). This is a major theme of
both Dworkin’s (1996) and part I of his (2011). But for applications particularly relevant
to the following discussion, see esp. 1996: 123–9 (arguing that even if one learnt that
one’s views about distributive justice are inevitably determined by one’s self-interest, that
would not give one a reason to doubt those views) and 2011: 77–9 (arguing that, even if
one learnt that one’s view about the fairness of affirmative action is due to the side effects
of a brain scan, that would not give one a reason to doubt that view). I discuss the latter
case below.
Relax? Don’t Do It! 205
moral beliefs is on the list, this discovery does not similarly undermine its
credibility. For anything that could undermine the credibility of my moral
conviction would itself have to be or include a moral consideration, and the
fact that I hold this belief because I have been hypnotized is not a moral
consideration but rather a fact about my psychology.
Consider also traditional “debunking” explanations of our moral beliefs,
of the kind offered by Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud.16 These accounts of why
we hold the moral beliefs that we do are not themselves moral or normative
or evaluative claims; rather, they purport to be purely descriptive, natu-
ralistic, causal-explanatory accounts of why we end up holding the moral
convictions that we do. One might think that these causal-explanatory
hypotheses are implausible, or that we lack good evidence that they are
true. However, if it’s true that our moral views are not susceptible to being
undermined by the provision of purely non-moral information, then even
if we knew with certainty that one of these accounts was correct, this would
have no tendency to undermine the credibility of our moral convictions.
Perhaps there are other possible explanations of our moral convictions
that, if known to be true, would seem to cast those convictions in an even
worse light than the stories offered by Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud. But if
Dworkin is correct, then we have a kind of a priori guarantee that nothing
that we discover empirically could count as a good reason to lose confidence
in our moral convictions, so long as what is discovered is not itself a moral
consideration.
Why does Dworkin think that our moral convictions could not be
rationally undermined by empirical discoveries? Ironically, Dworkin thinks
that the relative immunity of our moral beliefs is underwritten by the truth
of (what he calls) Hume’s principle, according to which “no amount of
empirical discovery about the state of the world . . . can entail any conclu-
sion about what ought to be without a further premise about what ought to
be” (2011: 17). As Dworkin notes, Hume’s principle has traditionally been
thought to bolster the case for moral skepticism, but he contends that in
fact, it undermines the case for moral skepticism.17 His thought seems to be
something like this: rationally undermining a moral conviction requires an
argument that targets that conviction, but Hume’s principle guarantees that
the content of moral and non-moral claims is sufficiently distinct that any
such argument whose premises consist of non-moral claims will inevitably
fail to make contact with its intended target. Therefore, the discovery of
16
For an overview, see Leiter (2004).
17
On Hume’s principle and its anti-skeptical thrust, see esp. Dworkin (2011: 44–6). For
an excellent discussion of Dworkin’s use of Hume’s principle, see Shafer-Landau (2010).
Smith (2010) provides a useful critique of Dworkin’s conception of moral skepticism.
206 Sarah McGrath
Until a year ago you thought affirmative action patently unfair. Then you had occa-
sion to think about the matter again and were convinced, by arguments that sud-
denly seemed compelling, that it is not unfair. One Tuesday morning you read, in
the Science section of your newspaper, of an astounding discovery. Everyone in the
world who has had a scalotopic brain scan (don’t ask) thinks that affirmative action
is fair, whatever opinion he held before the scan. The evidence is vast and conclu-
sive: there is no possibility of coincidence. You had a scalotopic scan shortly before
you rethought and changed your views, and you are left in no doubt that you would
not have changed them if you had not had the scan. (2011: 77)
consider the belief in light of other things that you believe about related
matters. You expect to find conflict, but instead find that your other beliefs
support your newfound conviction. In fact, it is your old opinion, that
affirmative action is not fair, that now fits poorly with the rest of what you
believe. You attribute this to the following:
The effect of the scan, you now assume, was more general and pervasive than you
had thought: it affected widespread shifts throughout the full range of your moral
convictions so that all your convictions are now thoroughly integrated with your
new views about affirmative action. No matter how you test them, they all seem
right to you. (2011: 78)
That is, you should be no less confident of your belief that affirmative action
is fair after finding out about the brain scan and its effects on your thinking
than you were before. Central to Dworkin’s case for this uncompromising
verdict is his account of how you should view the effects of the brain scan
on your thinking, as someone who currently believes that affirmative action
is fair.
. . . you cannot regret having had the scan, at least not for this reason [i.e. a con-
cern that the process has replaced a true belief about affirmative action with a false
one]. You have no reason whatever to think you were right before . . . Before the scan
you would have had a very strong reason not to have the scan if its results could
have been predicted. But now you have the same reason for not regretting the scan;
indeed, for thinking yourself fortunate to have had it.
Do you have less reason to suppose your new views correct than you had to think
your old ones correct before the scan? No; on the contrary, you now think you
have more reason than you had then because you now think your earlier reasons
were unsound. Should you now doubt your ability to form any responsible judg-
ment at all on the question of affirmative action? No, because you cannot reject the
hypothesis that the brain scan improved your ability to reason about morality. On
the contrary, you have some evidence that it did so: you were in error about many
moral matters before the scan but are now reasoning better, or so you cannot help
but think. (2011: 78–9)
assess the costs and benefits of this second procedure from your current
perspective, as someone who firmly believes that affirmative action is fair,
you will view it as something that will leave you worse off epistemically. But
these unfortunate epistemic side effects seem like a small price to pay, given
the severity of the medical condition that makes this unusual line of treat-
ment necessary in the first place.
Of course, after you have had the second brain scan, everything will look
quite different, given what you will then believe about affirmative action
and related topics. Employing the kind of reasoning endorsed by Dworkin,
you will be in a position to conclude that it was actually the second scan that
was the epistemically fortuitous procedure, and the first that was epistemi-
cally harmful. You will be able to subject your recently recovered belief that
affirmative action is unfair to the same kinds of tests as those mentioned
above, tests which the belief will pass with flying colors. If Dworkin is right
to think that sufficiently extensive scrutiny of the relevant kind is sufficient
to justify maintaining a moral conviction with undiminished confidence,
then you will be justified in maintaining your new belief in this way, not-
withstanding your knowledge that you would be in exactly the opposite
position if you had not consented to the most recent scan.
We can even imagine a series of such scans: perhaps every morning you
have the scan which results in people’s believing that affirmative action is
unfair, and every afternoon you have the scan which leads people to believe
the opposite. At any point in time, you can subject what you then believe
about affirmative action to the kind of critical examination suggested by
Dworkin, thoroughly scrutinizing it against your other moral convictions
in order to make sure that it coheres well with them. (It always does.) Of
course, you know full well that a few hours ago your slightly earlier self
thought otherwise, and that a few hours from now your slightly later self
will also vehemently disagree with your current verdict. But why should you
be troubled by what either of them think, given how benighted their views
about affirmative action and related topics really are? Not only are your
slightly later and slightly earlier selves not your epistemic peers; the fact that
they think as they do gives you no reason at all to be any less confident of
what you now think. You thus retain your current view with undiminished
confidence, for the same reasons that Dworkin thinks that your knowledge
of the first scan should make no difference to your confidence that affirma-
tive action is fair.
But that would be absurd. If you actually found yourself holding a belief
about affirmative action in these circumstances, then the rational thing for
you to do would be to abandon that belief. If you were unable to abandon
it, then you should regard your inability to do so as a failure of rationality,
and not make use of the belief in your practical or theoretical reasoning.
210 Sarah McGrath
(For example, you should not use it to reason about which scans were epis-
temically fortuitous and which were epistemically beneficial.) Of course,
you should not regard this information about the causal etiology of your
current belief as a reason to adopt the opposite belief about affirmative
action. Rather, the rational stance is to hold no view about the fairness of
affirmative action, on the grounds that it is not something about which you
are in a position to have a reliable opinion.
The fact that your knowledge of the causal etiology of the belief does
not give you a reason to adopt the opposite belief is significant, for it sug-
gests that this knowledge serves as an undercutting as opposed to a rebutting
defeater for your current belief.18 Intuitively, a rebutting defeater for one’s
belief that p undermines one’s justification for believing p by providing a
reason to believe not-p. In contrast, an undercutting defeater undermines
one’s justification for believing p without providing a reason to believe
not-p.19 I believe that this observation generalizes: debunking explanations
of our moral beliefs are best interpreted as attempts to provide undercut-
ting, rather than rebutting defeaters. For example, someone who suggests
that once we fully understand the evolutionary explanation for why our
moral beliefs strike us as correct, we will have good reason to abandon those
beliefs, is not suggesting that we should come to hold the opposite moral
beliefs. Rather, she is suggesting that we should hold no moral beliefs at all.
Recall Dworkin’s idea that Hume’s principle ensures that our moral beliefs
could not be undermined by purely non-moral discoveries. Once we take
on board the distinction between rebutting and undercutting defeaters,
we are in a position to appreciate why Hume’s principle, even assuming
for the sake of argument that it is true, has at best limited anti-skeptical
import. For Hume’s principle is relevant only if we are concerned with chal-
lenges to our moral beliefs that purport to provide rebutting as opposed to
undercutting defeaters for those beliefs. If I initially believe that affirmative
action is unfair, then one way you can undermine my belief is by giving me
compelling reason to believe that affirmative action is fair; if you succeed
in doing this, then you have succeeded in providing me with a rebutting
defeater for my original belief. Plausibly, you can only provide me with
compelling reason to believe that affirmative action is fair by appealing to
18
On undercutting vs. rebutting defeaters, see especially Pollock and Cruz (1999).
19
A stock example that epistemologists use to illustrate the distinction: you are in
a house that has some red walls and some white walls. You see a wall that looks red to
you, and the fact that it has this appearance justifies you in believing that it’s red. You
subsequently learn that the wall has a red light shining on it. This new information is
an undercutting defeater for your justified belief that the wall is red, since you are not
in a position to rule out that the wall is really white. But the new information is not a
rebutting defeater, since it does not give you a reason to believe that the wall is not red.
Relax? Don’t Do It! 211
20
For example, suppose that I perform some non-trivial mathematical calculation
and arrive at a particular number for an answer. Because I know that I am generally
competent when it comes to calculations of the relevant kind, I am rationally confident
in believing a certain mathematical proposition. I then learn that while performing the
calculation I was under the influence of a drug that interferes with my ability to think
coherently, albeit in imperceptible ways. The information that I performed the calculation
under the influence of a mind-altering drug undermines my belief in the relevant math-
ematical proposition, although it is not itself a mathematical proposition.
The possibility of such cases shows what is wrong with Nagel’s remark that “some-
one who abandons or qualifies his basic methods of moral reasoning on historical or
anthropological grounds alone is nearly as irrational as someone who abandons a math-
ematical belief on other than mathematical grounds” (1997: 105). One can have good
non-mathematical grounds for abandoning a mathematical belief, and the way in which
this is possible is suggestive of how historical or anthropological findings could in princi-
ple give one a reason to abandon or qualify one’s methods of moral reasoning.
212 Sarah McGrath
4. Conclusion
Relaxed realists hold that there are deep differences between moral truths
and the truths studied by the empirical sciences, but they deny that these
differences raise troubling metaphysical or epistemological questions about
moral truths. On this view, although features such as causal inefficacy,
perceptual inaccessibility, and failure to figure in any of the best explana-
tions of our empirical beliefs would raise pressing skeptical concerns were
they claimed to characterize some aspect of physical reality, the fact that
these features characterize the normative domain is not a good reason to
have skeptical doubts about it. To suppose otherwise is in effect to apply
standards and criteria of evaluation that are appropriate for one domain
to another, quite different domain. From this perspective, a great deal of
the metaphysical and epistemological theorizing that drives contemporary
metaethics—for example, the project of “locating” ethics with respect to a
scientific account of the world (cf. Jackson 1998)—can look like a kind of
category mistake, one that arises from looking upon the normative domain
as though it were a kind of extension of the physical world.21
My main goal in this chapter has been to put pressure on this picture.
Relaxed realists often compare morality and mathematics, but I have argued
that, when judged by the criteria of causal efficacy, perceptual accessibility,
and indispensability in explaining what we observe, mathematical proper-
ties as a class pass all three tests. To the extent that morality resembles math-
ematics in relevant respects, we should expect (some) moral properties to be
causally efficacious, perceptually accessible, and indispensable in explaining
what we observe as well. If it is claimed that no moral properties have such
features, then the analogy breaks down, and mathematics becomes unavail-
able as a useful example for fending off skeptical worries about the moral
realm. Moreover, the fact that some mathematical properties have these
features refutes the idea that questions about causal efficacy, explanatory
indispensability, and perceptual accessibility are only properly posed when
we are dealing with natural or broadly physical properties.
Consideration of Dworkin’s arguments revealed other ways in which it
is reasonable for us to expect moral truths to resemble ordinary empirical
21
Cf. Scanlon’s critique (2014: 16–30) of the idea that Mackie-style concerns about
objective values as things “utterly different from anything else in the universe” succeed
in raising a genuine ontological issue about what there is. Dworkin dismisses both “the
project of reconciling the moral and the natural worlds” and “the project of aligning the
‘practical’ perspective we take when living our lives with the theoretical perspective from
which we study ourselves as part of nature” as “entirely bogus philosophical projects”
(2011: 9).
Relax? Don’t Do It! 213
22
Readiness to concede in advance that the best explanation will make no reference
to the injustice of slavery seems particularly inappropriate when there is as of yet no
informative, generally agreed upon account of the factors that make one explanation
“better” than another among theorists of explanation.
23
For example, in an endnote (2011: 443), Dworkin rejects the claim that the correct
explanation of someone’s believing that 7+5=12 could invoke the truth of that belief on
the grounds that “seven and five do not cause people to think that together they make
twelve.”
24
Earlier versions of this chapter were presented at Fordham University, SUNY
Buffalo, meetings of both the Young Ethicists’ Network and Paper Tigers at Princeton
214 Sarah McGrath
References
Baker, Alan. 2005. “Are there Genuine Mathematical Explanations of Physical
Phenomena?” Mind, 114(454): 223–38.
Dworkin, Ronald. 1996. “Objectivity and Truth: You’d Better Believe it,” Philosophy
and Public Affairs, 25(2): 87–139.
Dworkin, Ronald. 2011. Justice for Hedgehogs. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Garfinkel, Alan. 1981. Forms of Explanation. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Harman, Gilbert. 1977. The Nature of Morality. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Jackson, Frank. 1998. From Metaphysics to Ethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kim, Jaegwon. 1981. “The Role of Perception in A Priori Knowledge,” Philosophical
Studies, 40(3): 339–54.
Leiter, Brian. 2004. “The Hermeneutics of Suspicion: Recovering Marx,
Nietzsche, and Freud,” in B. Leiter (ed.), The Future for Philosophy, 74–105.
Oxford: Clarendon Press.
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Oxford University Press.
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Nagel, Thomas. 1997. The Last Word. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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University, and at the 9th Annual Wisconsin Metaethics Workshop; I am grateful to the
audiences present on those occasions for their feedback. Special thanks to Niko Kolodny
and Tamar Schapiro for serving as my commentators in Princeton, and to Jamie Dreier,
Billy Dunaway, Elizabeth Harman, Frank Jackson, Mark Johnston, Thomas Kelly, and
two anonymous referees for Oxford Studies in Metaethics.
9
Wrong Kinds of Reason and the Opacity
of Normative Force
Justin D’Arms and Daniel Jacobson
1
This is rough because a given consideration can have both kinds of normative force,
so strictly this is true of mere WKRs. We will hereafter drop the “or against” qualifier,
except when needed for clarity, but all our claims are meant to apply to both positive and
negative cases.
2
As we’ll see, this claim proves contentious but not in a way that calls into question
the goodness of certain WKRs. Rather, what is contentious is whether wrong kinds of
reason are really reasons to desire or admire (etc.), or rather reasons to want or try to have
such states. Though we will continue to speak of WKRs, our argument is consistent with
such WKR skepticism, mutatis mutandis. We discuss this reason redescription program
in more detail in §3.
216 Justin D’Arms and Daniel Jacobson
wrong kind is orthogonal to the distinction between good and bad reasons.
If Giuseppe admired Mussolini for abolishing all the political parties in Italy
save the Fascists, then Giuseppe was mistaken about what makes people
admirable (according to us and, we presume, to you). But that is not to
say that he was taken in by a wrong kind of reason, by his own lights or by
ours. We can suppose that Mussolini’s decisiveness in pursuit of his political
aims was a right kind of reason (RKR) by Giuseppe’s lights, in that the role
it played in his psychology was to make Mussolini seem admirable to him.
To the rest of us, this is no reason at all for admiring Mussolini; it’s not a
wrong kind of reason, which would be a (putatively) good reason to admire
him that does not bear on his admirability.3
It should be obvious that demonic incentives can only function as WKRs,
and that Mussolini’s decisive action functions as an RKR for Giuseppe even
though it is a substantively bad reason. However, in other cases it is harder to
tell what kind of reason a consideration affords. Take the fact that some trait
of yours—your lame leg, for instance—is something that you are stuck with
through no fault of your own. This seems to count in some way against feel-
ing ashamed of it. But is this an RKR against shame, which demonstrates that
the trait is not really shameful? One might think so: that because you are not
responsible for the occurrence or persistence of your impairment, it cannot
reflect badly on you in the way it would need to in order to be shameful. But
most accounts of shame suggest otherwise: it is often claimed to be a crucial
difference between guilt and shame that only the former must impute respon-
sibility or blameworthiness.4 Certainly shame is very commonly felt at physi-
cal and mental incapacities, especially conspicuous ones, that make a person
unable to do what others can. This is some ground for thinking that shame-
fulness does indeed attach to such inabilities, and not only to traits for which
people are somehow responsible—even if decent people try to avoid saying so.5
Nevertheless, there are some good reasons not to be ashamed of traits
that you did not cause and cannot change, even if all this is true. Such
shame seems to be painful and useless. Perhaps the best way to respond to
3
Some subjectivists may wish to say that it was a good reason for Giuseppe to admire
him. Some of what we say in what follows can be accepted by subjectivists, but perhaps
not all of it; the relationship between subjectivism and fitting attitude theories of value
is complicated but tangential to our main purpose, and we will not address it here. See
Blackman (MS).
4
See e.g. Baumeister et al. (1994, 1995); Gibbard (1990); Taylor (1985): esp. pp. 61,
91), although we disagree with Taylor about the details of how responsibility figures in
guilt but not shame.
5
Indeed, we expect some readers to balk at our mere use of the word lame—which,
they will feel, is insensitive even when literally accurate. We use it nonetheless, because
that understandable impulse illustrates one of the themes of this chapter: that some legiti-
mate moral qualms do not call into question the truth of a predication.
Wrong Kinds of Reason 217
impairments over which we lack any control is to accept them with seren-
ity, and to focus our self-regarding emotions on things we either like or can
change about ourselves.6 This way of thinking treats the fact that you did not
cause and cannot alter your lameness as a WKR: a reason why it would be
better not to be ashamed, rather than a reason why the trait is not shameful.
These reflections are not intended to settle what sort of reason is provided
by the fact that your lame leg is no fault of your own. To the contrary, our
point is that the answer to that question is far from obvious, and the ques-
tion of what relevance this sort of consideration has to shame turns out
to be controversial. In certain cases, the very same consideration will be
thought a WKR by some and an RKR by others.7 But the claim that this is
a good reason not to be ashamed seems much less controversial. Someone
who advances such a consideration may be confident of its importance
while uncertain or even confused about just what kind of normative force to
assign it. We suspect that this is common. While it is easy to think that this
consideration counts against shame, few people will have thought carefully
about whether (and why) it counts against shamefulness as well.
The relevance of fault to shame is just one example of a widespread phe-
nomenon. It is one thing to recognize that some consideration bears on
the justification of an evaluative attitude. It is another thing to understand
how it so bears: just what kind of reason it is. This phenomenon we will
refer to as the opacity of normative force, the phrase we’ll use for a range
of cases where an agent takes some consideration to count in favor of an
evaluative attitude while being unsure, or somehow mistaken, about how
the consideration justifies the attitude. The central goal of this chapter is to
explicate some important problems arising from the opacity of normative
force, which are not considered in the WKR literature.
There is now an extensive philosophical literature on right and wrong
kinds of reason. This literature was originally focused on solving a tech-
nical problem for Fitting Attitude (FA) theories of value, which became
known as the wrong kind of reason problem.8 The problem, in short, is how
6
Although it has become clichéd, the Serenity Prayer was written not by a Hallmark
copywriter but the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr; and its popularity speaks to its wide-
spread appeal. It begins: “God, give me grace to accept with serenity the things that can-
not be changed . . .” Surely shame is incompatible with such serenity.
7
It is immaterial for present purposes what we think about this case, but our silence
on it can be misinterpreted as agnosticism or just coyness. We hold that the fact that
something is not your fault does not generically, or even typically, lessen its shamefulness.
But when you are ashamed of something you’ve done that you take to reveal something
about your will, then the fact that it was not your fault does count against its shamefulness.
8
The problem for FA theories is mooted in D’Arms and Jacobson (2000b) and
Rabinowicz and Rønnow-Rasmussen (2004). Darwall (2006) finds precursors in
Strawson (1968). Attempts to solve this problem include Olson (2004), Stratton-Lake
218 Justin D’Arms and Daniel Jacobson
to distinguish reasons of the right kind from those of the wrong kind with-
out circularity. In one sense the distinction is easily drawn. A WKR is a
consideration that does not bear on whether x is Φ (where Φ is some value
term such as admirable, shameful, or desirable) despite providing reason to
have some associated attitude F (respectively admiration, shame, or desire)
at x.9 Thus all and only those considerations in favor of F(x) that do bear on
whether x is Φ count as RKRs with respect to the Φ. But this is no real solu-
tion to the problem because it cannot be adopted by an FA theory, which
seeks to explicate value in terms of fitting attitudes. The terms “fittingness”
and “merit” are commonly used to describe the endorsement of an evaluative
attitude as correct, in contrast with its endorsement as prudent or virtuous.
Recent versions of FA theory typically interpret the claim that an attitude
is fitting in terms of reasons, so that for x to be admirable is for there to be
(sufficient) reason to admire x. The existence of WKRs shows that defend-
ers of FA theories need to refine their view. They must hold that for x to be
admirable, shameful, or desirable is for there to be sufficient reason of the
right kind for admiring, being ashamed of, or desiring x. But in that case,
FA theory cannot explicate the notion of a reason of the right kind, with
respect to some value Φ, as those considerations in favor of F(x) that bear
on whether x is Φ. It seems viciously circular for the theory to analyze the
shameful as whatever provides reasons of the right kind to be ashamed, and
then to say that reasons to be ashamed are of the right kind just in case they
bear on whether something is shameful.10 FA theories thus require a charac-
terization of the distinction between RKRs and WKRs that does not appeal
to whatever values the theory aspires to capture. This is the technical wrong
kind of reason problem that most of the WKR literature attempts to solve.
We will not be attempting to solve that problem here, though our dis-
cussion will identify some challenges for the extant proposals. Here we are
concerned with broader motivations for trying to distinguish right from
wrong kinds of reason, which are not specific to FA theory. Our motiva-
tions are broader because one need not hold any particular theory of value
in order to be committed to distinguishing fitting from unfitting emotions,
and right from wrong kinds of reason. Some things, such as rampaging
grizzly bears, merit fear. Other things, such as garter snakes, do not—even
(2005), Danielson and Olson (2007), and Skorupski (2007), among others. For some
other important approaches to WKRs, see n. 11. See also Jacobson (2011, 2013).
9
More strictly speaking, this is how we characterize objective WKRs. We draw the
distinction between the objective and subjective aspects of WKRs in §2.
10
In a subsequent paper, Rabinowicz and Rønnow-Rasmussen (2006) suggest that
the analysis can still illuminate something about the nature of value even if rendered
circular in this way, but most philosophers take FA theory to have greater ambitions.
Wrong Kinds of Reason 219
though they cause unfitting fear in many people. And some good reasons
not to be afraid, such as that fear increases the chances of being attacked by
the grizzly, are not considerations of fittingness. These ordinary cases show
not only that all philosophers need to distinguish those reasons for fear that
bear on the dangerous, whether or not they hold an FA theory, but that
everyone draws such distinctions in ordinary thought.
The literature on wrong kinds of reasons for evaluative attitudes has
largely proceeded on the assumption that these reasons pose only a theoreti-
cal problem (for FA) rather than a practical problem, because it is obvious
which considerations are of the right kind and which of the wrong kind; the
only difficulty is to say what each have in common without circularity.11 We
argue that these are mistakes, albeit mistakes encouraged by the canonical
examples. No one would confuse a demonic incentive to admire for a rea-
son why something is admirable. (That is of course the point of such cases;
we are not disparaging them in the context of the technical problem for
which they were intended.) But the phenomenon of opacity of normative
force will demonstrate that the question of which considerations in favor of
F(x) bear on whether x is Φ proves difficult to answer once one considers
a richer array of cases. Moreover, WKRs give rise to errors and confusions
that have nothing to do with any specific theory of value.
In this chapter we will argue that, in addition to the obvious wrong kinds
of reason on which the literature focuses, there are also more interesting
wrong kinds of reason that do not in any straightforward way advert to
advantages of being in the state. Whereas the paradigm cases in the lit-
erature involve incentives that are impossible to mistake as bearing on the
value of the relevant object, our paradigms of interesting WKRs involve
considerations about the object that bear on the propriety of having vari-
ous evaluative attitudes toward it. We will begin by showing the extensive
breadth of WKRs: they are common in realistic contexts, and they arise
across a broad range of evaluative attitudes and emotions. We then go on to
argue that the normative force of some such reasons can be opaque, as with
fault and shame. As a result, certain philosophical positions and debates can
be seen as misguided.
11
There is another significant strand in the literature, however. Hieronymi (2005) and
Schroeder (2010, 2012) argue that the notions of right and wrong kinds of reason are
more general, applying not only to reasons for evaluative attitudes but also to reasons for
intention and belief, and in Schroeder’s case even further. And they conceive the WKR
problem as a matter of how to characterize these general notions in a way that explains
what they have in common across domains; and how, generically, to sort right from
wrong kinds of reason for any attitude (or activity). But Hieronymi’s and Schroeder’s
proposals would not solve the problem of the opacity of normative force that we develop
here either.
220 Justin D’Arms and Daniel Jacobson
Due to the narrow focus of the WKR literature, not all of the different
ways in which reasons can be of the wrong kind have been widely appreci-
ated. In addition to exogenous incentives (like the demon’s threat), and the
inherent hedonic tone of an emotion (painful or pleasurable), they can also
appeal to ethical considerations (whether deontic or aretaic) about what to
feel.12 Consider three problematic examples of reasons to adopt or forgo
some evaluative attitude, all of which are drawn from recent philosophical
literature—though, tellingly, only the first comes from the WKR literature
itself. These are Crisp’s demon, Bittner’s argument against regret, and Gaut’s
immoral comedy.
Roger Crisp (2000) imagines a demon who threatens to punish you
unless you desire (to drink) a cup of mud. If the threat is credible and
the punishment severe, this demonic incentive seems to constitute
a conclusive reason to want the mud. Even so, the demonic incen-
tive clearly does not make this garden-variety mud desirable (that
is, good).
12
One might balk at deontic assessments of emotional response on the grounds that
in order for it to be wrong to feel an emotion, you must be able to control what you feel,
and emotions are not voluntary. But even if emotions are thoroughly beyond volitional
control (which seems an overstatement), people are still subject to aretaic assessment of
their emotional dispositions as virtuous or vicious.
Wrong Kinds of Reason 221
By contrast, were this peculiarly delicious mud, then that fact would count
toward its goodness; were it unhealthy, then that would count against it.
These conflicting reasons could be weighed against each other in determin-
ing the respects in which the mud was good or bad, much like we weigh the
pros and cons of a cup of coffee. But the demonic incentive is a different
kind of reason to desire mud than these, precisely because it does not bear
on the mud’s value. It is the quintessential WKR.
A similar phenomenon arises with emotions as with desire. The next case
does not require demons or other exogenous incentives, since it trades on
the inherent hedonic tone of regret: its painfulness.
Rüdiger Bittner (1992) argues that regret is always irrational. To regret
something involves thinking it a mistake, painfully, and it motivates
change of policy. For example, suppose that, after a close call in the
trees, one comes to regret skiing without a helmet. Then one will
be motivated—though perhaps not sufficiently motivated—to wear
a helmet when skiing in the future. Bittner’s argument for the irra-
tionality of regret does not deny that skiing without a helmet merits
regret: it is regrettable. Yet he claims that we can gain all regret’s advan-
tages without paying its hedonic cost. We do so simply by realizing
that skiing without a helmet is a mistake and deciding to correct our
behavior. Why then add the pain of regret to the error of recklessness?
If regret were indeed useless—which we very much doubt—then Bittner
would have a powerful argument that there is decisive reason not to regret
anything (insofar as you can avoid it).
Yet this reason not to regret our mistakes differs fundamentally from the
reasons that make them regrettable. They can both be decisive, albeit in
answering different questions: whether some action was regrettable, versus
whether to regret it. Were Bittner right, the fitting emotion would diverge
from what there is most reason to feel, all things considered. The pain of
regret and the pleasure of amusement do not bear on whether anything
is regrettable or funny, though they provide a sort of standing reason not
to regret anything and to be amused by everything. Hence these consid-
erations too are (obvious) WKRs, like demonic incentives but realistic and
ubiquitous.
Finally, consider an argument concerning the demands that morality
places on what sort of feelings to have.
Berys Gaut (2007: 241) writes, “Imagine a comedy full of hilarious
jokes, all of which were so vicious and cruel that audiences watched
in stony silence, without being amused at all, since they correctly
thought that it would be wrong to feel amusement.” Gaut’s imagined
audience takes moral considerations to determine what they ought
222 Justin D’Arms and Daniel Jacobson
to feel, even when these considerations are in tension with the comic
value of the jokes (which are stipulated to be hilarious).
Gaut’s immoral but hilarious comedy raises considerations that are neither
strategic nor hedonic: these are ethical reasons to have or not to have an
emotion. Whereas Crisp’s and Bittner’s WKRs both trade on the prospect
of pain, Gaut’s case instead trades on the claim that it would be wrong or
vicious to be amused by such cruel jokes.
Considerations about the morality of feeling some way, like considera-
tions about the painfulness of that feeling, are always WKRs: they con-
cern what is good to feel, not whether the object of that feeling is funny,
shameful, and so on.13 What is less obvious, however, is what to say about
the cruelty of these jokes, and other such moral defects of the objects of
our sentiments. Gaut holds that such moral defects always make jokes
less funny: they always provide an RKR against amusement. We deny this
sweeping generalization. We claim that sometimes the cruelty of a joke is
merely a WKR: a reason it would be wrong to be amused, but not one
that diminishes the funniness of the joke. The cruelty of jokes is our first
example of how the opacity of normative force can lead to philosophical
confusion and error.
Before continuing, we need to clarify a couple of tricky points about our
cases of putative WKRs whose normative force can be opaque. Suppose
someone asks, of some consideration c, whether it is an RKR or a WKR
(for having some response F to an object x, with respect to the question
of whether x has the evaluative property Φ). There are two different ques-
tions one might be asking in asking what kind of normative force c has
(and hence what kind of reason it provides): a subjective and an objective
question.
The subjective question is about how c functions in some agent’s psy-
chology: in a right or wrong-kinded way. Is the best understanding of the
agent—which may or may not be the way he understands himself—as tak-
ing c to bear on whether x is Φ, or on whether it is somehow good or right
to feel F(x)? Since some considerations can function differently for different
agents, in these cases there will be no answer to this question independent
of the details of a particular agent’s moral psychology. If c led him to F(x)
13
This is the leading thought of D’Arms and Jacobson (2000a), which discusses sev-
eral cases that illustrate the point in detail. But this is not to deny that norms of virtu-
ous feeling can take into account considerations of fit. Sometimes what is vicious about
getting angry at someone is precisely that he is not responsible for the transgression that
angers you. Don’t blame the messenger, as it is said—because people have the tendency
to do just that. Even in such cases, however, the fact that it is wrong to be angry at the
messenger is not itself a reason why the anger is unfitting. Rather, the fact that the anger
is unfitting is (part of ) the reason why it is vicious.
Wrong Kinds of Reason 223
by way of some internalized ethical norm about what sort of person to be,
or through some kind of appreciation of the advantages of feeling F(x),
then it functioned as a WKR for him on that occasion, regardless of his
self-understanding. If instead it led to F(x) because of his emotional sensi-
bility about the Φ—his sense of humor, in the case of the funny—then it
counts as an RKR by his lights, regardless of its substantive goodness as a
reason. The kind of positive light in which this consideration cast the object
was evaluative in the relevant way. These are not exclusive, as c might func-
tion in both ways for an agent.
The subjective question arises because, when it comes to the questions
raised by our cases, people’s evaluative sensibilities can differ in respects that
make a difference to the normative force of c. Someone who thinks that the
only way in which a trait can reflect badly on you is by reflecting badly on
your character may think that the only shameful traits are vices, and that
something counts as a vice—rather than a disease, perhaps—only if you are
responsible for its possession. Such a person will take the consideration that
his obesity is not his fault to undermine its shamefulness, whereas someone
who embraces the Serenity Prayer, and has come to the conclusion that she
cannot change being obese, simply thinks it better not to be ashamed. The
phenomenon of opacity arises in the subjective case because it is not always
obvious to others, or transparent to oneself, how a consideration figures in
someone’s moral psychology.
The objective question is whether c in fact supports the evaluative judg-
ment that x is Φ, or if it merely supports feeling F(x) on other grounds.
This is the question a person is normally asking when, for instance, he asks
whether his lack of responsibility for some trait is a reason of the right kind
not to be ashamed of it. He is not asking about his own perspective but
about the evaluative truth (though this talk of truth, fact, and objectivity
can be understood in familiar quasi-realist ways). When we suggest that
the fact that you are not responsible for your conspicuous impairment is
a WKR against being ashamed of it, or that the cruelty of a joke can be
merely a WKR against amusement, we are talking in the first place about
the objective question. This is what needs to be settled in order to sort out
what things are shameful, funny, and so forth. The opacity of normative
force arises in the objective case because one can think that some considera-
tion bears on whether to have some evaluative attitude without being sure
just how it bears.
These questions can hardly come up about demonic incentives and other
obvious WKRs because the nature of their force is very clear, and they do
not pose any problems due to differences between people’s evaluative sensi-
bilities. No one’s taste is such as to make the demon’s threat render the mud
more desirable to her. But our cases are different. Because the phenomenon
224 Justin D’Arms and Daniel Jacobson
14
Although Gaut calls his view ethicism rather than moralism, we find this taxonomy
more perspicuous. The crucial point is that he claims that moral defects of jokes and
comedies are always pro tanto comic defects, which render them less funny.
15
See D’Arms and Jacobson (2000a). See Jacobson (1997, 2008) for development of
the thesis known as immoralism: that moral defects sometimes count as comic or aesthetic
merits in jokes and artworks.
16
Despite this claim, Gaut sometimes retreats to the weaker thesis that, although such
jokes are always rendered less funny by such flaws, they might still be funny. The question
then becomes: less funny than what? The obvious answer is: less funny than it would be
if it did not offend against morality or good taste. Gaut acknowledges that this claim is
highly implausible, to say the least, and rejects it. Nevertheless, he insists that even these
ineradicable flaws always make a comedy less funny. But what can this mean? This seems
like an ad hoc maneuver designed to save the theory from rampant counterexamples.
Wrong Kinds of Reason 225
17
Even if one thinks that the use of “transgressive” as an honorific in art (and comedy)
is clichéd, and that contemporary art too often mistakes banal transgression for original-
ity and courage—as we are inclined to grant—this point is still deeply problematic for
aesthetic and comic moralism.
18
Although Gaut puts this example into the mouth of what he calls the comic auton-
omist, he too is committed to the possibility of hilarious jokes at which it is wrong to be
amused. He takes on this commitment in order to avoid counterexamples from the many
cruel but funny jokes, by expressly denying that moral flawed jokes cannot be funny.
226 Justin D’Arms and Daniel Jacobson
Clearly not, he answers: “we value art in part because of the quality of the
responses it properly calls forth, and ex hypothesi the audience of this play
is morally cut off from responding to it. That looks like a serious defect
in the play” (2007: 241). Let us grant that the moral inaccessibility of a
comedy’s humor is some sort of defect in it. Nevertheless, it can hardly
be a comic defect—if that is understood as a defect in the funniness of the
play—since by stipulation its jokes are nonetheless hilarious. Indeed, even
obvious WKRs such as demonic incentives can make the comic value of
a joke or play morally inaccessible to a virtuous audience. By taking such
inaccessibility to be a comic defect, Gaut’s argument mistakes paradigmatic
WKRs about the propriety of amusement for RKRs. This is some evidence
that Gaut has been confused by opacity, in a way we think common.
The common mistake rests on the fact that people tend to accord a
defeasible presumption of warrant to their actual emotional response to an
object, such as not being amused by a joke. This presumption is defeasible,
and it is possible to judge contrary to one’s emotions; but when people
find themselves feeling some way and take a consideration to justify their
response (or lack of response), they often do not consider whether it justi-
fies in a right or wrong-kinded way. Even when they do consider the ques-
tion, they do not always answer it in the way that makes the best sense of
their evaluative perspectives. One way in which the normative force of an
interesting WKR can be opaque is that it can create a diversionary response.
It seems plausible that features of jokes can provide reasons to have one
or more negative responses, such as indignation or disgust, even though the
joke is also funny. In such cases, a morally sensitive person will sometimes
be indignant or disgusted. Perhaps he will also feel some amusement, or
perhaps not. If he is amused, he may reasonably be bothered by his own
response, finding it unseemly to be amused by cruelty. But there may be
no amusement because indignation about the cruelty of a joke, let alone
disgust at it, can prevent one from being amused by what is funny in the
joke.19 This does not show that the joke isn’t funny, however, even by the
morally sensitive person’s lights! For all we’ve said, it may be that the joke
would amuse him if it were not for the interference of his moral sensibility,
which prevents it, perhaps virtuously, from getting a hearing from his sense
of humor. Compare another case of emotional diversion. When a daunt-
ing bully insults you, you might not become angry simply because you are
terrified instead; your emotional response is to the threat rather than the
19
Although people are capable of some degree of emotional ambivalence, it is a famil-
iar fact about the emotions that they can sometimes be mutually incompatible. These
incompatibilities may sometimes be due to different physiological responses that are part
of the syndrome of distinct sentiments—the bodily responses characteristic of anger or
disgust may simply inhibit amusement, for instance.
Wrong Kinds of Reason 227
transgression. That does not show that there was no transgression, merely
that your fear diverted the insult from angering you.
The comic moralist may be in a similar position: indignant or disgusted
rather than amused. This is the most realistic way to understand Gaut’s
imagined audience, which is not amused by jokes stipulated to be hilarious,
because they think it would be wrong. While it is possible for someone
to be self-aware about this complex evaluative and psychological situation,
it is not obtuse to be led into some confused judgments under such cir-
cumstances. Most of us normally make our judgments about funniness on
the basis of what amuses us—at least under normal conditions, when we
have no apparent reason to mistrust our responses. So a person who is not
amused by a cruel joke, specifically because it is cruel, might easily be led to
suppose that the joke is not funny for that reason. Which is just to say that
he may be best understood as mistaking the normative force of the consid-
eration that the jokes are cruel, by taking it to be an RKR when it is really
a WKR. Whether or not this is true of Gaut, we hope to have made it per-
suasive that this sort of thing happens: the normative force of an interesting
WKR can be opaque even to the person whose reason it is.
If this argument is convincing, it goes a long way toward establishing
some of our central claims. But the argument against comic moralism is
only one example of what we claim to be a general phenomenon, and every
example can be questioned. We suspect that some readers will be skeptical
of whether good sense can be made over disagreements about what is funny,
and others may not be persuaded by the substance of our argument against
moralism. Hence in §4 we will offer an argument for opacity that does not
require us to land a substantive claim in the theory of value. There we con-
sider another debate drawn from outside the WKR literature, concerning
reasons for and against pity, where we argue that no matter which position
one finds most congenial, it proves compelling to understand the opposing
view as trading unwittingly in WKRs whose normative force is opaque.
The phenomena of opacity raise a novel and important problem posed by
certain WKRs, which is obscured by the focus of the literature on obvious
cases. Yet various solutions to the technical WKR problem have been offered
that might help with these issues, since they offer criteria for differentiating
WKRs from RKRs. Moreover, one of the most popular positions amounts
to skepticism about WKRs. If there are no real WKRs, only reasons of the
right kind for some other attitude, then there can be no interesting WKRs
whose normative force is opaque. In §3, we address this challenge and show
that the proposed solutions to the technical problem will not illuminate the
phenomenon of opacity.
Readers whose interests lie primarily in issues of moral psychology, and
who want more evidence of the pervasiveness of opacity and its application
228 Justin D’Arms and Daniel Jacobson
20
See Gibbard (1990), Hieronymi (2005), Parfit (2011), Skorupski (2007), and Way
(2012) who calls this view WKR skepticism and offers a novel defense of it.
Wrong Kinds of Reason 229
incentives to desire are not reasons to want, and incentives for having an emo-
tion are not reasons to feel. According to this reason redescription program,
such considerations are better described as reasons to want to have these atti-
tudes, or to try to bring them about.
John Skorupski argues that reason redescription solves the technical
WKR problem. He claims that it provides a general method for deter-
mining the normative force of any given consideration: just ask what sort
of action or response the consideration is best understood to be a reason
for. Once you ask that question, you will see that WKRs are reasons to do
something: take steps to bring about the evaluative attitude. By contrast,
RKRs are what he calls reasons to feel—for instance to admire, desire, or
be ashamed. Concerning his variation on the demonic incentive, in which
the demon punishes you unless you admire a weak violin performance,
Skorupski (2007: 10–11) writes:
[T]he response [to the WKR problem] is an automatic consequence of identifying
the exact reason relation we are discussing. In the case of the violin performance, the
fact that the evil demon has his evil plans is a sufficient reason for me to do some-
thing—namely, bring it about that I admire the performance, if I can.
The trouble with Skorupski’s suggestion is that his general method, which
involves simply asking whether a consideration provides a reason to do
something or to feel something, becomes inadequate when one moves from
demonic incentives to more realistic and interesting cases. If one is uncer-
tain whether lack of responsibility constitutes an RKR not to be ashamed
or only a WKR (and similarly for our other examples), then no help is given
by reframing the question as suggested. Any confusion or uncertainty about
the normative force of the consideration will not be resolved, but merely
relocated, by this method.
The reason redescription program may ultimately be correct, but to settle
that question would require a general account of reasons. However that may
be, it offers no help with interesting WKRs like the ones we’ve been consid-
ering. In these hard cases where normative force is opaque, it is exactly as
difficult to determine whether a consideration is a reason to feel or a reason
to act, as to decide whether that consideration is an RKR or a WKR. We
think the same is true of the other solutions to the traditional problem: even
if true and important, they do not help determine normative force in dif-
ficult cases. Rather, they supply a potentially insightful description of these
considerations that can be utilized once their normative force has been set-
tled. Thus none of these ideas help answer the problems to which opacity
gives rise.
The second influential idea in the literature seizes upon an obvious dif-
ference between most WKRs, especially those on which the literature has
230 Justin D’Arms and Daniel Jacobson
focused, and RKRs. Roughly speaking, RKRs are about features of some
object held to be relevant to evaluative judgment, whereas WKRs are about
normative assessments of having an evaluative attitude toward that object.
This characterization seems to explain what is right about the RKRs and
wrong about the WKRs, specifically with respect to evaluative judgment.
The fact that the violinist’s performance is off-key is an RKR against admi-
ration because it concerns the object of the value judgment: the perfor-
mance. The demonic incentive is a WKR because it concerns the cost or
benefit of the relevant evaluative attitude: admiration (of the performance).
The latter is what Derek Parfit (2011) calls a state-given reason, since it is a
respect in which it is good or bad to have the relevant state.
The idea that the distinction between right and wrong kinds of reason cor-
responds to the distinction between object-given and state-given reasons is
attractive, but it proves more difficult to formulate clearly than first appears.
The sharpest formulation comes from Jonas Olson (2004), who calls certain
reasons A-referential because they refer to the very attitude A that they are
held to be reasons for having. Olson proposes A-referentiality as the mark
of WKRs. Thus the facts that you will be punished unless you desire some
mud and that regret is painful are both determined to be WKRs by Olson’s
test, because they refer to the very attitudes that they purport to justify,
and some less obvious cases seem amenable to this treatment as well.21 But
Olson’s proposal has been shown to face difficulties from cases where rea-
sons that are clearly A-referential nonetheless seem capable of functioning
as RKRs.22
Our cases are different. They are apparently object-given, but their nor-
mative force may not be of the right kind. The consideration you fix on
(that your lame leg is not your fault, or that the joke is cruel), which both
explains your reaction and justifies it to you, is about the object of your
attitude (your lame leg, the joke), not about the attitude itself. Similarly, we
21
Olson’s formulation is motivated by examples like our (2000a) case of the rich but
touchy friend who will cut off his largesse if he suspects that you envy him. Here his
touchiness consists precisely in an attitude toward your state of mind. Olson tries to rule
out such cases through a restriction against state-given considerations “in the guise” of a
property of the object, as he puts it. This seems right: in order to understand the reason as
any sort of consideration against envying, one needs to adduce the fact that he is touchy
specifically about being envied. So this consideration is covertly A-referential.
22
In particular, the case given by Hieronymi (2005: 447) and Rabinowicz and
Rønnow-Rasmussen (2006: 118) of the reciprocal lover is problematic for this view.
This is someone who will respond to your loving her by loving you back, which is an
A-referential consideration that could coherently be thought to be an RKR that makes
her loveable. Note that this can be true even if the trait also justifies loving her in a
wrong-kinded way, by constituting an incentive for loving her. But whether one takes
reciprocality as a right or wrong kind of reason for love, or both, there will likely be no
confusion about either rationale.
Wrong Kinds of Reason 231
suggest that such object-given considerations as the fact that your daughter
won runner-up in the elementary school spelling bee (an extremely modest
achievement), or the fact that the person who won the award you coveted is
your friend, are best understood as WKRs despite being object-given. That
is because they count as reasons for pride and against envy because of how
they bear on what kind of a person you would be to feel certain ways. They do
not show their objects to be respectively more prideworthy or not enviable;
rather, they make it good to be proud and bad to envious. All these con-
siderations can function as WKRs, and are typically better taken that way,
objectively speaking. Hence it does not suffice to establish that a considera-
tion is object-given, on its face, in order to establish its normative force.
It may be objected that, when we explain how these considerations can be
WKRs, we end up saying something that sounds A-referential: we mention
respects in which they make it in some way good or right (bad or vicious) to
have the attitude. This can be taken to suggest that, insofar as our cases are
understood to be WKRs, they are state-given. When the cruelty of a joke
is a WKR, for instance, the full description of the reason is something like
this: the joke is cruel so it would be wrong to be amused by it. In a sense,
we grant this point. The important insight behind the object/state distinc-
tion, we think, is just that wrong-kinded normative force has to do with
ways in which it would be in some way good or bad to have the attitude,
whereas right-kinded force has to do with ways in which the object is good
or bad. But this insight does not provide a way of assessing the normative
force of interesting WKRs. The considerations that agents fix on are often
simple truths about the object: the joke is cruel, the lame leg is not my fault.
Once we have decided that the reason provided is of the wrong kind (in
fact or by his lights), then we can say that its normative force is state-given
(or that it functions that way for the agent). That is, we can then interpret
him as having been moved by this feature of the object because of some
implication it has for why the attitude would be good or bad to feel. But the
state-givenness of the rationale need not be a feature of the consideration
that he found persuasive; it is rather an explanation of how that considera-
tion is best understood as functioning in his psychology. So the object/state
distinction does not settle the normative force of interesting WKRs; it offers
an illuminating description of that force, once it is identified.
The final suggestion we wish to consider dovetails nicely with the reason
redescription program. We have been working with a conception of reasons
that follows Scanlon’s (1998: 67) characterization of a reason as “a consid-
eration that counts in favor of some judgment-sensitive attitude”—which
seems inevitably to include WKRs. But Parfit (2011: 51) adds another
requirement by stating that “[r]easons are things to which at least some
people might be able to respond.” This matters because various authors note
232 Justin D’Arms and Daniel Jacobson
that there is an asymmetry between RKRs and WKRs with respect to how
people respond to them. Consider the case of belief, where this is clearest.
It seems that non-epistemic considerations in favor of some belief can be
followed—that is, responded to directly as reasons—only by wanting or try-
ing to have the belief. One cannot adopt a belief because it would be good
to have it. If you are convinced by Pascal’s wager, for instance, then you will
find yourself wanting to believe in God—but not yet believing. It seems
that the only reasons for which one can form beliefs are considerations that
one takes to bear on the truth of the proposition believed. Similar claims
have been made about intentions and evaluative attitudes: that the only
reasons for which one can intend are considerations that (one takes to) bear
on whether to perform the intended action, and the only reasons for which
one can admire are considerations that bear on admirability.
In this view, incentives can function as reasons to want or try to have
attitudes but not as reasons to have them. Although it is seldom noted,
this general point can be applied to ethical reasons concerning attitudes as
well. The consideration that one morally ought to feel some way or believe
something will typically be incapable of being an agent’s reason for those
attitudes, though it might be his reason for wanting to have them, and for
feeling guilty if he fails. If so then this asymmetry in the rational role that
various considerations can play lends principled support to the reason rede-
scription program. It also suggests a general test for whether reasons are of
the right kind, which one might try to use to determine the normative force
of a given consideration.
According to this proposal, the only considerations that can function as
an agent’s reason for having some evaluative attitude are considerations of
fittingness by his lights: those that he takes to bear on whether the object
of the attitude has the relevant evaluative property. More concisely, the fol-
lowability thesis states:
If an agent S can follow some consideration c directly to F(x) or to
not-F(x), then c is an RKR by S’s lights.
Although this is our own construction, one can find similar ideas through-
out the literature.23 Raz (2009: 40) speaks of following a consideration
directly, which he explicates as a matter of coming to the attitude for some
reason c, where this does not require any effort or extra step in reasoning.
Other authors express the thought a little differently, but they are clearly
sympathetic to something like the followability thesis as characterized here.
23
It is endorsed more or less explicitly by Hieronymi (2005), Raz (2009), and
Skorupski (2010). See also related claims in Parfit (2011) and Kolodny (2005).
Wrong Kinds of Reason 233
But we contend that followability does not provide a device for deter-
mining the normative force of a given consideration for an agent, because
in the cases we have been considering, it is possible for an agent to follow
a consideration that is a WKR by his own lights to an evaluative attitude.
At least, that can be true for all that the agent himself or an astute observer
can tell, since it is possible to respond to interesting WKRs effortlessly and
without any extra step in reasoning. You can sometimes feel proud of your
child’s very modest success or not envy your friend’s triumph, and do this
directly and without effort, even though you do not take the crucial con-
siderations to merit your responses. Someone may think that it is bad for
him that his friend won a coveted award, in just the way that makes envy
fitting, but he might be a sufficiently good friend that he isn’t envious of
her—though he would envy anyone else who had won it. He has a concep-
tion of what kind of person it is best to be that calls for pleasure at a friend’s
deserved successes, and on this occasion at least he feels in accordance with
it. Then the fact that she is his friend is his reason not to be envious, but it
is a WKR by his own lights.
Similarly, a parent can be proud of his child for performances that do
not really merit pride, in his view. Because good parenting sometimes calls
for such responses, many parents muster them directly and unreflectively
without any conscious effort, at least after a while. They need not be deluded
about the relevant standards of performance in order to be proud of their
child; they can simply have inculcated a disposition to respond unreflectively
with pride to his “accomplishments,” in part because they emulate other sup-
portive parents. Moreover, the fact that one focused on a consideration, took
it to justify or undermine an attitude, and then acquired or shed the attitude
effortlessly, without any further step in reasoning, does not ensure that the
consideration was of the right kind. Hence the followability of a considera-
tion does not supply a test for determining its normative force for an agent.
These claims are contestable, and we only claim to have made a prima
facie case for them here. But it is important to note that, since the authors
who champion the followability thesis only consider obvious WKRs, not
the ethical considerations on which we’ve focused, they offer no argument
that interesting WKRs cannot be followed. Instead, they argue for a claim
that may well be true: that people are incapable of following incentives to
believe, desire, and feel. Once we expand our focus beyond incentives, how-
ever, the claim that a person can only follow considerations that bear on
the Φ by his lights is much less plausible. We grant that aretaic ideals about
what kind of person to be, and ethical prohibitions against certain sorts of
responses, are limited in their ability to regulate human psychology. But we
see no grounds for insisting that, contrary to appearances, they can never
be successfully internalized in ways like those we have been imagining here.
234 Justin D’Arms and Daniel Jacobson
24
Pamela Hieronymi has suggested this line of reply to us in discussion. Parfit deploys
a parallel line of thought in the belief case, but he supposes that our psychologies would
have to be different in order for it even to be possible to believe effortlessly on the basis
of WKRs.
Wrong Kinds of Reason 235
Philosophers differ about the fittingness conditions for pity and, hence, about
what count as RKRs for pitying someone. In this section we consider two the-
ories of pity, contrasting a familiar Christian view suggested by Robert Roberts
with a motivated revision of Martha Nussbaum’s Aristotelian account. Our
aim is not to defend either of these views, both of which we find implausibly
simple and extreme, nor is it to put forward our own account of when pity is
fitting. We instead aim to show that, although considerations about fault and
blame clearly seem relevant to whether and how much to pity someone, their
normative force is opaque. Moreover, we will suggest that some of the strong-
est considerations about what to pity are better understood as reasons of the
wrong kind rather than as determining what is pitiable.25 These considerations
lead both Nussbaum and Roberts to commitments about the pitiable that we
find implausible. Although we may be unable to persuade partisans of either
account to give up their theories, we hope to persuade each side—as well as
philosophers with no theoretical stake in the matter—that the opposition is
best understood as trading illicitly in WKRs.
The discussion of pity will serve as a case study for our more general
thesis. The phenomenon of opacity matters because, in order to have views
about what is pitiable, shameful, funny, and so forth that reflect one’s evalu-
ative perspectives, and to engage in normative discourse about these claims,
one must distinguish RKRs from WKRs. But that task can be quite dif-
ficult, and the need for it too often goes unnoticed in realistic cases of the
sort we are discussing. This is especially true when one judges on the basis
of one’s actual emotional response (or lack thereof ), and the considerations
that one takes to justify them. If some of these responses are best under-
stood as being justified by WKRs, as we will suggest, then they do not sup-
port the evaluative judgments that they often entice people to make.
Consider the emotion sometimes referred to as compassion but more
commonly called pity.26 All sides agree that pity involves being pained, or
at any rate bothered, by another person’s suffering or misfortune.27 Robert
25
By ‘pitiable’ we mean fittingly pitied, not able to be pitied or normally pitied.
26
As both Roberts and Nussbaum note, “pity” sometimes has connotations of conde-
scension, which is why they opt for the term “compassion.” But all parties to this discus-
sion take themselves to be talking about a robust and familiar emotion kind, which is the
same emotion whether called pity or compassion.
27
Nussbaum refers both to misfortune and suffering, and Roberts to distress; but one
can pity misfortune that is not painful. We will focus here on suffering, both for simplic-
ity and coherence with the literature.
236 Justin D’Arms and Daniel Jacobson
Roberts endorses the recognizably Christian view that all suffering merits
pity. “When compassion is an emotion rather than a character trait,” he
writes (2003: 295)—that is, when it is pity—“it is a construal of some
person or other sentient being as in distress.” This view seems to imply that
all suffering merits pity, even when the victim has brought it upon himself
through his malfeasance. But according to the Aristotelian view defended
by Martha Nussbaum (2001: 301; emphasis added), “compassion [i.e. pity]
is a painful emotion occasioned by the awareness of another person’s unde-
served misfortune.”
Although Nussbaum follows Aristotle in referring to deserved misfortune
and suffering, this seems a misleading expression of her view. She expressly
includes both prudential error (when someone brings misfortune on him-
self, for instance through foolishness) and moral error (when the misfortune
arises from the agent’s wrongdoing) as ways in which someone can deserve
misfortune, for the purpose of ruling out pity. But because it would take
an especially harsh retributivist to hold that the foolish deserve to suffer,
we think it more perspicuous to differentiate these errors by distinguishing
between suffering for which one is prudentially at fault and suffering for
which one is morally to blame. We will call both kinds of suffering criticiz-
able rather than deserved. Thus we stipulate that the reckless skier is at fault
for his self-inflicted injury, whereas the feckless criminal is to blame for her
incarceration. In each case the agent brought his suffering on himself in
some criticizable way, which according to Nussbaum (2001: 311) suffices
to ensure that one does not pity him:
Insofar as we believe that a person has come to grief through his or her own fault, we
will blame and reproach, rather than having [pity]. Insofar as we do feel [pity], it is
either because we believe the person to be without blame for her plight or because,
though there is an element of fault, we believe that her suffering is out of proportion
to the fault. [Pity] then addresses itself to the nonblameworthy increment.
Although this claim gestures at something true and important, it is much
too strong as it stands. Nussbaum’s official theory of emotion commits her
to holding that it is impossible to pity someone’s suffering insofar as one
judges it his own fault. But this cannot be right, unless it is a stipulation
about what she will count as pity—which is not what she intends. To the
contrary, Nussbaum (2001: 301) intends to address a “ubiquitous human
phenomenon” that plays a central role in other cultures and even other
primate species, and that is the same emotion discussed by Aristotle and
Rousseau.28 Surely people can and sometimes—we think often—do have
28
Note that Rousseau (1987: 53) characterizes pity simply as “an innate repugnance
to see [one’s] fellow suffer.” One can agree that normal humans have such an innate
repugnance (as we do) without granting that all suffering merits pity (which we deny).
Wrong Kinds of Reason 237
the pitiable. Michael Weber (2004) argues, to the contrary, that fitting pity
is not restricted to suffering that is faultless or even blameless.29 It is fitting
to pity someone who ends up in a wheelchair because he falls asleep at the
wheel of his car, Weber claims, even though his injury is largely his own
fault. Weber also argues, in our view persuasively, against the attempt to
understand this pity as being directed only at the “nonblameworthy incre-
ment” of the suffering. As Weber notes, it is hard to draw a general distinc-
tion between a blameworthy element and a non-blameworthy increment of
suffering. In the case of the sleepy driver, this requires arguing that his severe
injury is out of proportion to his mistake, even though it is just the sort of
thing that can be expected to happen when people fall asleep at the wheel,
which is precisely why the driver should have pulled over.
We find it telling that Nussbaum seems to have difficulty embrac-
ing the consequences of her own theory. She writes unsympathetically of
Americans who supposedly judge that a sexual assault is not pitiable because
“the woman ‘brought it on herself ’—by walking alone in a dangerous place,
for example” (2004: 213–14). But it seems as though even the improved
Aristotelian view must side with these Americans against Nussbaum here. If
the assault is a (foreseeable) consequence of the criticizable decision to walk
alone in the dangerous place, then the Aristotelian considers pity for the
victim unfitting. Since both the assault victim and the sleepy driver made
risky choices and got horribly but foreseeably unlucky, both are criticizable
in ways that supposedly vitiate the fittingness of pity.
Nevertheless, there may be good reasons to pity the victim, of which
Nussbaum could avail herself. It is widely held that there are bad social
consequences of “blaming the victim” in cases of sexual assault; indeed,
this was precisely what Nussbaum was complaining about when criticiz-
ing Americans for doing something very like what her theory forces upon
her. But while these moral considerations about what to feel may be good
reasons to pity the victim, they are WKRs. Considerations about the social
consequences of pitying are not about what merits pity but about a different
question, namely what good pitying can do—they are a form of incentive.
To be clear, in our opinion the imagined victim’s suffering really is piti-
able, in part because she is merely at (prudential) fault rather than (moral)
blame; but that is just to deny the central commitment of the Aristotelian
view. The best position available to Nussbaum, compatible both with her
theoretical commitments and her intuition that one should pity the assault
victim, is to hold that pity for the victim is defensible, indeed mandatory,
but for reasons that are of the wrong kind with respect to pity. When she
29
The distinction between fault and blame is ours rather than Weber’s, though we
suspect that he would agree with it. We are translating some of his claims into our terms.
Wrong Kinds of Reason 239
finds herself feeling pity toward the victim of sexual assault and angry at the
callousness of those who do not, she cannot see her pity as an expression
of her view about what it is correct to pity, without giving up her theory.30
But it is open to her to see it as a reflection of a moral sensibility that is
concerned with other values as well. In other words, her pity for the assault
victim might be responsive to a good WKR.
There is another way to resolve the tension between Nussbaum’s theory
and her intuition about the assault victim, which also appeals to opacity.
This is to jettison the least plausible aspect of the Aristotelian view: its
claim that anyone who suffers through prudential error does not merit pity
(except for the uncriticizable increment of his suffering). What is the appeal
of that claim to the Aristotelian? Suppose that you find yourself criticizing
and reproaching the person who suffers due to his own mistake, as we some-
times do—and as Nussbaum claims is inevitable. Then it may be difficult
to pity him, especially if you feel a conflicting emotion such as irritation
or amusement (via ridicule). Moreover, there are considerations that you
might take to justify your lack of pity. In some cases one might justifiably
criticize the sufferer rather than pitying him in order to help him learn from
his mistake, since to mollycoddle someone who came to grief through his
own bad decisions could discourage learning from them. Furthermore, one
inevitably has limited emotional resources, and there is so much suffering
in the world that one cannot respond even to all the genuinely pitiable suf-
fering. Perhaps then one should save one’s pity for those who did nothing
to bring about their suffering. These are good reasons not to pity suffering
that was brought about by prudential error, but they concern issues about
respects in which it is for the best not to pity: they are WKRs.
Now consider the Christian view mooted by Roberts, on which all suf-
fering merits pity. We will suggest a similar conclusion about this claim: it
would be improved by acknowledging that in some cases the good reasons
for pity are of the wrong kind. Note first that this view too is in tension
with most people’s emotional dispositions, in that we all tend to pity some
suffering more than others, for various reasons not limited to its intensity.
Of course not all the ways people do feel need be ratified as fitting. Most
people endorse some differentiation in pity, though, or would do so if they
reflected on it. Take a case of clearly blameworthy suffering, such as that of
30
In fact, Nussbaum’s overt view, in contrast to the improved Aristotelian view we are
attributing to her, cannot even allow that it is possible to pity the victim insofar as one
acknowledges the (stipulated) truth that he acted recklessly and is therefore criticizable
for his plight. While Nussbaum could say that it is not genuine pity but some other emo-
tion that one can feel toward the victim, this would be ad hoc, undermine her claim to
speak about the familiar emotion discussed by Aristotle and Rousseau, and commit the
No True Scotsman fallacy.
240 Justin D’Arms and Daniel Jacobson
31
This case is (obviously, for now) drawn from the recent bombing of the Boston
Marathon, but it is realistic enough that we expect it to resonate after the details of the
incident are forgotten. The description and quotation are drawn from newspaper reports.
What follows about the death sentence and the nun is wholly fictional.
32
Buddhism and Stoicism are problematic in this regard, because their therapeutic
advice often conflates claims about fittingness (that your child’s death is a matter of indif-
ference) with clearly ethical, purely forward-looking considerations (that the water of
your tears won’t grow a new son).
Wrong Kinds of Reason 241
person would feel. That is, they must differentiate right from wrong
kinds of reason. Having done so, they need not disagree with the com-
monsense position, grounded in normal patterns of emotional response
that may well include their own, which denies that all suffering equally
merits pity, without regard to blameworthiness. They can instead inter-
pret the pull of their distinctively Christian intuitions, whose normative
force is initially opaque, as expressing norms of virtue rather than stand-
ards of fittingness.
We expect some readers to demur from this suggestion, as perhaps Roberts
would, and insist that they take all suffering to merit pity. We need not
convince them in order to make our central point. The more you are con-
vinced of this view of when pity is fitting, the more bizarre the Aristotelian
account must seem, on which no suffering that can be aptly criticized merits
pity, whether it is blameworthy or merely due to fault. Rather than see-
ing Nussbaum and others who are attracted to the Aristotelian position as
being simply wrong, however, one can take them to be responsive to WKRs.
Perhaps the most compelling such consideration is that this world is filled
with suffering, and we all have limited emotional resources, so we should
try to direct our pity at those who are least responsible for their suffering
(except perhaps when a more pressing social norm overrides). Analogously,
those who favor the Aristotelian view can think Roberts and his follow-
ers not simply to be feeling pity groundlessly, but to be responding to the
Christian injunction, another WKR. Those who reject both theories, as we
do, may conclude that both should be seen as being sensitive to good rea-
sons, albeit reasons of the wrong kind.
The general point of this section is to illustrate a philosophical debate
from outside the WKR literature whose participants are arguably seizing on
considerations that are good reasons to pity, but better understood as func-
tioning as WKRs with respect to the merit of pity.33 The normative force
of these considerations can be opaque to those who are confident that they
provide good reasons to have some evaluative attitude. Of course it is open
to philosophers to insist that they are putting them forward as considera-
tions of fittingness—that is, as RKRs. The question then becomes how they
think it most charitable to understand their opponents: as putting forward
a deeply misguided view of what merits pity, or as mistaking a good WKR
for an RKR.
33
In general, we suspect that if a consideration is a good WKR then those who are
moved by it are probably taking it in a wrong-kinded way. While this presumption is
defeasible, we doubt that it is defeated by the fact that the subject holds a philosophical
theory to the contrary.
242 Justin D’Arms and Daniel Jacobson
The problem of opacity holds not just for partisans of fitting attitude
theories of value, if our diagnosis is correct, but for all those who want to
distinguish fitting from unfitting emotions—which includes almost every-
one. Neither Roberts nor Nussbaum defends an FA theory, but until they
attend to the different kinds of reasons to favor or oppose pity in various
cases, it is not even clear that they really disagree about the pitiable, their
philosophical commitments to the contrary notwithstanding.
This chapter has tried to demonstrate that wrong kinds of reasons are an
unrecognized source of error in evaluative thinking. The argument to that
conclusion has been complex, and it is worth summarizing some of its main
elements. In the first place, we claim that WKRs are a broader category than
they are often thought to be, encompassing not only incentives but other
considerations in virtue of which it is good or right, or alternatively bad or
wrong, to have some response to an object. The fact that regret is painful
makes it (prudentially) bad to regret your foolish mistake, and the fact that
the person who won the award you wanted was your friend makes it (mor-
ally) bad to envy him. But the foolish action is regrettable and the award
enviable nonetheless.
Unlike incentives for being in a state, the normative force of some WKRs
is not obvious, partly because they refer to features of objects. It can be clear
that some seemingly object-given consideration provides good reason for
or against pity or shame, for instance, without it being at all clear whether
it supports the evaluative judgment that someone’s suffering merits pity, or
that someone’s social disability is not shameful. It may instead only support
the ethical judgments that it is better to pity those people and not to be
ashamed of such things. Moreover, sometimes a person can suppose that
the consideration supports an evaluative conclusion when his own sensibil-
ity is best understood to be taking it as a WKR. This sort of confusion is
especially likely because some WKRs can be followed; unlike incentives,
they are considerations that can sometimes enable people to have or with-
hold various responses effortlessly, though they do not support the evalua-
tive verdicts those responses are normally taken to justify. Hence the most
widespread and pressing problem with WKRs is that, in various realistic
scenarios, people can fix on what they take to be a good reason to pity, or
not to be amused or ashamed, without recognizing whether it bears on what
is pitiable, funny, or shameful.34
34
We are indebted to audiences at the Wisconsin Metaethics Workshop 2012, the
OSU/Maribor/Rijeka Philosophy Conference 2011, University of Sydney 2009, and
SPAWN 2007; Geoff Sayre-McCord; and an anonymous referee for their helpful com-
ments. This chapter was supported by a grant from the John Templeton Foundation.
Wrong Kinds of Reason 243
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Index
abortion 99, 134 Berry, J.
Adams, F. Pyrrhonian argument 147–8 n26
intentions 22 nn9, 10 Bertrand, M. and Mullainathan, S.
Strong Belief Thesis 22 n10 stereotyping 96 n35
Anderson, R. Lanier. 149 n27 Bittner, R.
Stanford school 126 n3 regret 220–2
Anscombe, E. Blackman, R.
natural expression of subjectivism 216 n3
intentions 25, 26 n16 Bloomfield, P.
Very Weak Belief Thesis 36–7 companions in guilt 146
anthropology 211 n20 Boghossian, P.
Aristotle blamelessness 52–6
emotion 236, 239 n30 concept-constitution 53, 57
misfortune and suffering 236 concept-possession ix
moral philosophical tradition 140 epistemic merit 45
moral philosophy 138 meaning-entitlement
moral values 152 connection 46–9, 52–6
Nicomachean Ethics 152–3 pejoratives 51 n19
Nietzsche, influence on 138 n15 warrant-transfer 49 n12, 52–6
practical syllogism 17 willingness, language of 45 n1
slavery, “natural” 135 n13 Bourget, D.
WKR problem 235–9, 241 philosophical views, survey of 146 n23
Armstrong, D. M. Boyd, R.
disjunctive properties 168 moral disagreement 140
Audi, R. Bratman, M.
intention 28–9, 31, 40 cognitivism, criticism of 19, 21 n7
non-naturalism 154 n4 deliberation 37 n33
Strong Belief Thesis 22 intention and belief 27 n18, 38
n34, 40
Baker, A. means-end coherence 23–4,
number theory 191 n5, 192 n6 26, 27 n18
Baumeister, R. F. et al. reasoning 12
responsibility 216 n4 Strong Belief Thesis 22 n10
Bedke, M. Brink, D.
Coincidence Argument 102–24 moral disagreement 140
debunking argument x. 90 n27 moral explanations 133
evolution 83 n14 Broome, J.
moral realism x means-end coherence 20 n4
non-naturalism 78 n4, 122 n19, 123 rationality 50 nn14, 15
non-reductivism 78 n4 reasoning to an intention 13–15
normative systems 83 n15 wide-scope requirements 18 n1
process of being "off-track" 90 n27 Brunero, J.
Beethoven, L. van 127, 143 cognitivism about practical
Bentham, J. 134 rationality ix, 18–42
Berker, S. means-end coherence ix, 21 n7
evolution 94 n32 Buddhism 240 n32
246 Index
Chalmers, D. J. perception 108
doxastic possibility 34 n29 posteriori knowable identities 118 n15
philosophical views, survey of 146 n23 random or unreliable
Christensen, D. 100 n36 analogies 109–10
disagreement 136 n13 reliability 113
evidence for p 85 n20 sensitivity requirement 114–15,
independence requirement 81 n13 118, 120–1
Christianity 239–41 skepticism and 122
Clark, M. 149 n skeptics vs. realists 108
Nietzsche, interpretation of 126 subjunctives 119, 123–4
Stanford school 126 n3 supervenience 117
Clarke-Doane, J. 102 n, 149 n27 truth-tracking 105
disagreement in mathematics 132 n8, Constantinescu, C.
144 n21 moral vagueness xi, 152–82
mathematical Platonism 113 n10, Copp, D. 102 n, 183 n34
124 n21 moral language 172 n22
cognitivism truth 105 n5
about practical rationality 18–42 vague properties 170 n21
belief consistency 18–19 Cornell realism 169
explanatory claim, problems for Crisp, R.
39–42 demon’s threat 220, 222
intention consistency 18, 25 non-naturalism 154 n4
Means-End Coherence (MEC) ix, Cuneo, T. 100 n36, 102 n, 183 n34
18–27, 32–5, 38–42 non-naturalism 154 n4
Strong Belief Thesis and 18–32 Cuneo, T., and Shafer-Landau, R.
arguments for 25–32 moral claims 93 n28
cognitivism with 20–5
definition 18–19 Dancy , J.
unknown failures to intend 38–9 action and practical reasoning 1–17
Very Weak Belief Thesis 36–8 belief 3
Cohen, J. deliberation 6
moral depravity 133 non-naturalism 154 n4
Coincidence Argument (CA) 102–24 resultance 156 n6
allodoxic possibilities 119–20 Danielson, S. and Olson, J.
coincidence arguments and 104–6 Fitting Attitude (FA) theories 218 n8
conditions 102–3 D'Arms, J. and Jacobson, D.
counterpossibilities 105 feeling 222 n13
defeat 114 Fitting Attitude (FA) theories 217 n8
epistemic internalism 106 immoralism 224 n15
evolutionary debunking and 121–2 WKR problem xii, 215–42
generic skepticism 110–11 Darwall, S.
happiness 118, 122 Fitting Attitude (FA) theories 217 n8
inexplicable alignment 112–14 Darwin, C.
justification of normative Darwinian Dilemma 102 n2, 105
beliefs 111–14 evolutionary dilemma 76–7, 86 n21
modal truths 120–1 Davidson, D.
Moorean reply to 121–3 Strong Belief Thesis 22 n10
non-coincidence 107–8 Davis, W.
non-metaphysicalism 122 n18 Strong Belief Thesis 22 n10
non-naturalism and 105–6, 111, 114, death penalty 134
116 n13, 120, 122–4 debunking see evolutionary debunking
normative facts 106–9 Doris, J. M. 149 n27
obliviousness 114–16 Doris, J. M. and Plakias, A.
to necessary truths 116–20 moral disagreement 139, 144
Index 247
Dougherty, T. 100 n36, 173 n25, Finnis, J. 147
182 n34 Fitting Attitude (FA) Theory, see Wrong
facts 177 Kind of Reason (WKR) Problem
Dworkin, R. FitzPatrick, W.
as moral realist xii Coincidence Argument 103
Hume's principle, use of 205, 210 evolutionary debunking 79 n7
Justice for Hedgehogs 187, 196–8, 206 non-naturalism 154 n4
legal and ethical questions 156 n8 Fodor, J.
mathematics 198–9 autonomy of sciences 133 n10
moral belief 81, 189, 196–213 Freud, S. 205
moral facts and properties 155
moral indeterminacy 175 n28 Garfinkel, A.
moral luck 81 explanations 191 n4
moral skepticism 205 n17 Gaut, B.
moral vagueness 156–7 immoral comedy 220–7
Gewirth, A. 143 n18
Elga, A. 100 n36 Gibbard, A.
good 85 n20 Coincidence Argument 103, 113
independence requirement 81 n13 concept-constitutingness 57 n35
possibility of error 83 n17 moral vagueness 174
Enoch, D. nonanalytical naturalism 155 n5, 170
Coincidence Argument 103, 107, 112 normative facts 113, 155 n5
evolution 81 n11, 107 ought, concept of 46 n4, 73
moral truth 143 n20 responsibility 216 n4
non-naturalism 154 n4 WKR skepticism 228 n20
evolutionary debunking 76–100 Gillett, C. and Rives, B.
abortion 99 determinates/determinables 173
altruism 94–5 Goethe, J. W. von 127, 142–3
challenge of 76–7 Greene, J.
Coincidence Argument and 121–2 deontological judgments 93 n30
debunker's argument 77–8 emotion 94
deontology 93–5 moral intuition 95
evaluative judgments 79–82 violence 93
evaluative realism 87–9 Greene, J. D. et al.
evidence of error 98 deontological judgments 104, 108 n7
evolution as problematic 96–7 Grice, P.
good reason, principle of 82–7, 98 conversational pragmatics 22 n9
independent ground 98–9 Strong Belief Thesis 22 n10
Inverse Rule of Debunking 98–9
mistaken-ness 80 n9, 90–1 Hampshire, S. and Hart, H. L. A.
moral realism 89–93 Strong Belief Thesis 22 n10
off-track processes 90–1 Harman, G.
perception 82–3 bragging 22 n9
possibility of error 83–4 cognitivist approach 19
racism 92 evidence for p 81 n12
skepticism and 80 explanatory indispensability test 186,
undermining 97–100 188–92, 197–8
utilitarianism 94–5 flaming pussycat case 133–4
violence 93–4 Strong Belief Thesis 21, 22 n10,
23–4
Field, H. Hieronymi, P.
debunking evaluative realism 89 n25 reciprocal lover 230 n22
mathematical Platonism 113 n10 RKR problem 230 n22, 232 n23
248 Index