Abstract
Whether an action is morally right depends upon the alternative acts available to the agent. Actualists hold that what an agent would actually do determines her moral obligations. Possibilists hold that what an agent could possibly do determines her moral obligations. Both views face compelling criticisms. Despite the fact that actualist and possibilist assumptions are at the heart of seminal arguments in business ethics, there has been no explicit discussion of actualism and possibilism in the business ethics literature. This paper has two primary goals. First, it aims to rectify this omission by bringing to light the importance of the actualism/possibilism debate for business ethics through questions about the ethics of sweatshops. Second, it aims to make some progress in the sweatshop debate by examining and defending an alternative view, hybridism, and describing the moral and practical implications of hybridism for the sweatshop debate.
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Notes
For the purposes of the debate, it doesn’t matter why Eddie would close the factory after 6 months so long as he could keep it open. To keep things simple, we’ve just stipulated that he does it because he doesn’t want to sacrifice profit. But the example could be amended to have him close it in response to market forces, acquiring different entrepreneurial interests, fatigue or anything else.
There may be a variety of reasons that it’s worse for people to receive a high pay for 6 months and then become unemployed than to not receive the job in the first place. Let’s suppose that being temporarily lifted out of extreme poverty would result in them incurring other financial commitments they’ll be unable to meet once they’re unemployed again, and that this will leave them worse off than before.
This case is structurally similar to an example proposed by Goldman (now Holly Smith) (1978, pp. 185–186). Variations of this example appear throughout the literature, including in Jackson and Pargetter (1986, p. 235), Carlson (1995, p. 124), Vorobej (2000, pp. 131–132), Portmore (2011, p. 180; 2019, chap. 5), Timmerman (2015, p. 1512), Timmerman and Cohen (2016, pp. 673–674), and Cariani (2016, p. 400).
As is standard in the literature, we formulate actualism and possibilism in terms of one’s objective, rather than one’s subjective, obligations. Roughly, an objective obligation is what an agent should do if she were aware of all of the normatively relevant facts. Subjective obligations, by contrast, are determined by the agent’s epistemic state (such as her beliefs, or beliefs that would be supported by her evidence) concerning the normatively relevant facts (cf. Portmore 2011, pp. 12–23; Zimmerman 1996, pp. 10–20). To keep the dialectic as simple as possible, unless we state otherwise, we’ll assume that the agents in the cases we give know all of the normatively relevant facts. This means that the agent’s subjective and objective obligations are identical in such cases. But nothing important, for the purposes of our argument, hangs on this assumption. Since agents never have full knowledge of how they would act in various counterfactual situations, the real life application of these views requires agents to act in light of the best evidence they have about how they would freely act in such situations.
The actualism/possibilism debate concerns the relationship between agents’ free actions and their moral obligations at either the group or the individual level. For the sake of simplicity, our discussion will focus on the debate at the level of individual obligations. So, we’ll proceed as if individual agents, rather than group agents, are responsible for the creation and conditions of sweatshops. However, nothing important for the purposes of our argument hangs on our describing the problems in these terms. Everything we write about individual obligations applies, mutatis mutandis, at the level of group obligations as well.
To avoid assuming impartial consequentialism, this sense of better may be understood to be tracking deontic value instead of intrinsic value.
At t, a maximally specific act-set that an agent can perform is one that extends from t to the last moment of time at which the agent can perform an act.
Unlike this formulation of actualism, early formulations did not build in a control condition. See Sobel (1976) and Jackson and Pargetter (1986). Here is one such formulation. Actualism: At t an agent S is obligated to φ at t' iff S can φ at t' and what would happen if S were to φ at t' is better than what would happen if S were to ~ φ at t'. These versions of actualism are subject to devastating problems. Most notably, they violate the principle of normative inheritance (Portmore 2019, chap. 4) and they generate conflicting obligations without saying which obligation takes priority. See Cohen and Timmerman (2016, pp. 11–12), Kiesewetter (2015, pp. 929–934), and Portmore (2011, pp. 181–183). Subsequent versions of actualism built in a control condition to avoid this problem. See, for instance, Goldman (1978, p. 202), Bykvist (2002, pp. 61–64), and Jackson (2014). Given this definition, Douglas Portmore’s (2011) and Ross’s (2013) securitist views also count as versions of actualism.
After all, by stipulation, Eddie can now decide to <pay his employees a high wage>. If he does this, then by stipulation, 6 months down the road, he can decide to <keep the factory open as long as it’s profitable>. If an agent can <A> and if they can <B> if they first <A>, then the agent can <A & B>. So, to be clear, actualists and possibilists may agree with one another about which act-sets agents can perform in any given case. Their disagreement concerns which acts, from among the acts the agent can perform, are normatively relevant options for the agent.
See, for instance, Maitland (1996).
For discussion, see Faraci (2019).
Such arguments generally appeal what’s called the non-worseness claim, which will be discussed in the next section. Zwolinski (2008, p. 2007) has done the most to defend this sort of argument. See also Powell and Zwolinksi (2012) and Ferguson (2016). Though, it’s worth explicitly noting that Zwolinksi’s concern is that external market factors will undermine the viability of the sweatshop, not that the owner of the sweatshop will decide to close their business because it’s not maximizing profits. For some criticisms of this style of argument, see Malmqvist (2017, 2013) and Barnes (2013).
Possibilists then assume a principle of deontic logic known as “ought distributes through conjunction.” This principle holds that if an agent S ought to do both A and B, then S ought to do A and S ought to do B. This principle is represented in the standard deontic logic system as follows: O(A & B) → O(A) & O(B). Versions of actualism that build in a control condition are consistent with this principle, while versions of actualism that don’t are inconsistent with this principle.
There are exceptions, however. Actualism might require certain agents to make demanding sacrifices now (e.g. doing something unpleasant to develop a more altruistic character) in order to ensure that they do more good in the future. Possibilism, by contrast, wouldn’t require such sacrifices. For discussion on the demandingness of actualism versus possibilism, see Timmerman (2019) and Timmerman and Swenson (2019).
Here harm should be understood to pick out the counterfactual comparative account of all things considered harm, which is the account of harm that seems to be assumed in the literature. For a discussion of this type of harm, see Timmerman (2016).
Some arguments are also, in a sense, underspecified and not committed to one view in the actualist/possibilist debate. However, in order to provide a fully robust defense of their view, they would have to take a stance on the debate.
Snyder (2008, 2010) also considers Kantian exploitation of using others as a mere means. For other heavily Kantian-esque critiques, see Bowie (1999), Hill (2002), Herman (2007), and Radin and Calkins (2006). We don’t focus on Kantian critiques (or the Kantian aspects of the exploitation arguments) cited in this paper. Instead, our primary focus is on the broader, more theoretically neutral, exploitation arguments against sweatshops.
One complication is that paying a high wage can result in a loss of market share and can sometimes ultimately cause the company to go out of business, only to be replaced by other companies that would be even more exploitative. This shows that questions about the ethics of sweatshops don’t only hinge on answers to questions about the actualism/possibilism debate, but also on questions about collective action problems. For discussion of this issue in other contexts, see Kagan (2011) and Nefsky (2011) for a reply. The structural and collective action problems in markets can make the discretionary action of individual agents or companies ineffective or at worst detrimental (Mayer 2007).
Along similar lines, some have argued that companies may even be morally justified in breaking the law if doing so is more attractive than any other available option (Powell and Zwolinski 2012).
For a very detailed overview of all of the important objections to actualism and possibilism, ones that go beyond the scope of this paper, see Timmerman and Cohen (2019, Sects. 2.5, 3.4, and 3.5).
Take whatever the minimally morally acceptable wage is and suppose that its one cent less than that. If the boundaries for a morally acceptable wage are vague, then suppose it is one cent less than the smallest wage that is indeterminately neither acceptable nor unacceptable.
Every paper we’ve cited that discusses the non-worseness claims make this assumption.
This is not strictly entailed by actualism, but it is entailed by actualism coupled with widely accepted axioms about moral blameworthiness. For more on this, see Timmerman and Swenson (2019).
This case is structurally identical to the Bobby Knight example given in Norcross (2005, pp. 65–168).
For ease of exposition, we will use the term hybridism to refer specifically to single obligation hybridism throughout the paper.
The terminology of a “moral practical ought” is a bit tricky, in part, because the phrase “practical ought” is used in different ways in the literature and, in part, because we are identifying a unique kind of moral practical ought. So, we want to take care to specify exactly how we are using the term. Both oughts in hybridism are moral oughts, and so both concern what an agent morally ought to do. The possibilist ought tells the agent which action is morally required of them at the time(s) in question. The actualist ought tells the agent which action will, at the time(s) in question, result in the least amount of moral wrongdoing over the course of their lives. Since these are both moral oughts, they are in the same domain as one another, and in a different domain what whatever non-moral oughts there are. Hybridism takes no stance about how to weigh the oughts in various domains, or in the role that these moral oughts play in determining what one has most reason, all things considered, to do.
We are using the term obligation narrowly as shorthand for moral obligation and the term ought broadly to refer to any claim about how one should act within any normative domain. So, a moral obligation is one type of moral ought, while a practical moral ought is another type of moral ought. We could also speak of what one prudentially ought to do, what one legally ought to do, and so on. This formulation of SOH is a simplified version of the one given in Timmerman and Cohen (2016, pp. 682–683). The simpler version of SOH suffices for the purposes of this paper, however, since none of our arguments hinge on the issues addressed in the more complex definition.
We are not claiming that this is the sense of ought that actualists had in mind when formulating their view. They were indeed referring to the ought of moral obligation. Rather, we are only claiming that there is (defeasible) reason to accept the two oughts of hybridism, as we’ve formulated it, over either actualism or possibilism. Accepting hybridism avoids the three problems we’ve identified for other views, while retaining the elements that seem plausible about both actualism and possibilism, or so we argue.
We wish to note that hybridism does not assume the truth or falsity of moral rationalism, viz.—the view that if one is morally obligated to φ, then they are rationally required to φ. If moral rationalism is true, and if one’s practical moral ought conflicts with the ought of moral obligation, then it follows that acting in accordance with one’s practical moral obligation will entail that one is doing something irrational. At the same time, in cases with this structure, the true counterfactuals of freedom will guarantee that acting in accordance with one’s moral obligation will also entail that one will eventually acts irrationally. They need not act irrationally, but the true counterfactuals of freedom entail that they will freely choose to do so at some point. One of us is sympathetic to such a view for reasons given in Timmerman and Swenson (2019, § VII), but hybridism explicitly remains neutral with respect to this question. It is consistent with views that do, and don’t, allow that doing what we morally ought to do can be irrational. We take this to be a feature, not a bug, of hybridism.
For very helpful written and verbal feedback on earlier versions of this paper, we would like to thank Daniel Palmer, Geoffrey Sayre-McCord, Kenneth Silver, and participants at the 2019 Philosophy, Politics, and Economics conference.
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Timmerman, T., Zakhem, A. Sweatshops and Free Action: The Stakes of the Actualism/Possibilism Debate for Business Ethics. J Bus Ethics 171, 683–694 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-020-04464-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-020-04464-x