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Notes
Compare Holly Smith’s “Twin Towers” case (in Smith 2010).
Andric suggests that this case reveals that the “everyday notion of rightness” is ambiguous: in one sense, it means that an act maximizes expected value, and in another, it means that it maximizes actual value. I’m not sure there is sufficient evidence of such an ambiguity, but I agree that the case reveals, at least, our tendency to think of moral obligation both as evidentially constrained and as not so constrained.
Whether you accept such a constraint on moral obligation may depend on your views of the nature of evidence and of evidential norms. I’ll have more to say on this important matter at the end of this section.
Subjectivism is endorsed by Sidgwick 1907, Prichard 1949, among others. It’s important to note a distinction between the view that one’s moral obligations are are grounded solely in facts about one’s evidential situation, and the view that there’s a substantive evidential constraint on moral obligation, in virtue of which our obligations are grounded predominantly in facts about our evidential situation. Graham (2010) understands the distinction between subjectivism and objectivism in this sense; thus, as an objectivist, he allows that some epistemic facts play a role in determining moral obligations. However, as I’ll understand these terms, what is at issue is whether our obligations are grounded predominantly in our evidential situation. Since Graham denies that they are, he still counts as an objectivist in my sense. The subjectivist view, or some variants of it, are sometimes labelled ‘perspectivism’. Kiesewetter (2018), for instance, uses the term to denote the view that “the epistemic circumstances of an agent are relevant for what the agent ought to do.” (It should be noted that Kiesewetter is concerned with the general ‘ought’ of deliberation, rather than the moral ‘ought’. However, as he notes, deliberative conclusions about what one morally ought to do have implications for deliberative conclusions about what one ought to do all things considered; so it’s natural to think that if one’s epistemic circumstances are relevant to one they’ll be relevant to the other.) Yet another term that has been used to refer to a version of subjectivism is ‘prospectivism.’ (See Zimmerman 2008, Zimmerman 2014; Smith 2011.)
Objectivism is endorsed by Moore 1903, Ross 1930, Feldman 1986, and Thomson 1990, among others. Note that the above characterization may suggest that the disagreement between subjectivists and objectivists arises only on the assumption that some form of consequentialism is true. In Mistaken, for instance, it may seem it’s presupposed that either actual or expected results consequentialism is correct. However, even if we suppose that some form of deontology is correct, we can still draw a distinction between subjectivist and objectivist views of obligation. For instance, whether someone has the obligation to \(\phi\) may or may not be seen as depending on whether their evidence suggests that \(\phi\)-ing would be universalizable (regardless of whether it actually is universalizable).
Jackson 1991.
Graham 2021.
Cf. Kiesewetter (Kiesewetter 2018, p. 19): “Once we accept that the fact that C is the cure as a reason to give C, we cannot at the same time take the fact that there is a risk that C is not the cure as a reason not to give C.”
Graham 2021, p. 108.
Graham 2021, p. 107.
Graham’s argument appeals to variants of Transplant, in order to show that although Kim would be taking just as much of a risk of (e.g.) unconsented-to harm as she would be in taking option A or B in Transplant, it would not be inconsistent with moral conscientiousness to do so. For example:
Transplant 3. Everything is as it is in [Transplant], except that Kim is informed by an orderly that the unconscious colonoscopy patient is the villain who villainously poisoned her liver-failure patient, thereby causing the very liver failure that threatens his life.
I will use the term ‘standard subjectivism’ to refer to subjectivist accounts according to which both the content and the strength of our moral obligations are grounded predominantly in our epistemic circumstances.
Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for pressing this point and prompting me to explain how subjectivism can accommodate it.
Cf. Andric, who notes (p. 563), “It is strange not to call an action right, at least in some sense, if one ought ...to perform it for moral considerations.”
—though not always (see section 3.2).
Zimmerman may misconstrue Graham on this point when he says that, according to Graham’s account, moral conscientiousness “dictates giving drug B.” (See Zimmerman 2014, p. 44.) The claim that moral conscientiousness “dictates” giving B suggests that moral conscientiousness is normative for action, but the aim of Graham’s account seems to be to avoid appeal to such normativity. That is, Graham aims to give a non-normative account of why the morally conscientious individual will give B, rather than an account of why giving B is, in a normative sense, required.
Graham 2010, p. 98.
An anonymous reviewer suggests this may miss Graham’s point that an option that would best fulfill one’s goals as a moral, or rational, agent may not be one that is consistent with moral conscientiousness, or with rationality, for one to take. Consider the following analogy. A purely self-interested agent can choose between doing nothing and pressing one of two buttons, A or B. He knows that pressing one of A and B will result in his receiving an intensely pleasurable massage for one hour and pressing the other will cause him to be instantly killed. Suppose pressing A would result in his getting the massage. As a purely self-interested agent, pressing A is the option that would best fulfill his goals; but it is not consistent with rational self-interest. Similarly, an option might best fulfill one’s goals as a morally conscientious agent without being consistent with moral conscientiousness. But the point is that if the claim that \(\phi\)-ing is inconsistent with moral conscientiousness is going to be plausible it had better be that a morally conscientious person at least has reason to think there’s a significant chance that \(\phi\)-ing wouldn’t fulfill her goals (even if knowledge that \(\phi\)-ing wouldn’t fulfill those goals isn’t required). In that case it is difficult to see why a morally conscientious person would not be obliged not to \(\phi\). (Although it’s not inconsistent to deny this, it seems unmotivated; the objectivist’s denial of it thus seems ad hoc.) Compare the massage case: If your rational credence that pressing button A will instantly kill you is .5, then even if A will in fact cause the massage (and thus will best fulfill your goals as a purely self-interested agent), you are rationally required not to press A.
Compare this example borrowed from Silk 2014: If you want to torture people like they did in medieval times, then you ought to use thumbscrews..
More accurately, she must deny this, provided she maintains that a morally conscientious person would (e.g.) avoid giving drug C, and that she’s nevertheless morally obliged to give C. In Sect. 3.2, I consider an argument that the objectivist is not committed to its being obliged to give C.
Graham 2010, p. 103.
Moreover, as Zimmerman points out (Zimmerman 2014, p. 46), the relevant normative requirement (whether moral or merely pragmatic) is not one that seems to be contingent on the person’s having the goals of a morally conscientious person. That is, it seems to hold independently of her having those goals.
Graham 2010, p. 103.
What about an “ideal evidential pragmatic ‘ought’,” according to which S ought to \(\phi\) in case, roughly, doing so it the output that results from inputting into whatever the correct decision theory happens to be the agent’s preference, and evidential probability, functions? Could the objectivist maintain that Jill ought not to give C in this sense of ‘ought’? Perhaps Jill ought not to give C in this ideal-evidential-pragmatic sense. But it’s hard to see how the ideal evidential-pragmatic ought might diverge from the moral ‘ought’; and so, I suggest, it’s not clear that what we’re appealing to here isn’t just the moral ‘ought’. Even if they’re conceptually distinct, it might be that they’re necessarily coextensive; if so, then provided Jill ought not to give C in the ideal evidential-pragmatic sense, then she ought, morally, not to give C.
While it is not crucial for my purposes, I assume that it’s rationally or morally required for Jill to choose to give A iff it’s rationally or morally required, for her to give A. Persson (2008) however distinguishes between choosing to \(\phi\) and \(\phi\)-ing, and argues that while Jill ought to give C, she ought to choose to give A. I will not discuss this view of obligation here. (For discussion and criticism of it, see Zimmerman 2014; see also Andric 2013).
Bykvist says that choosing drug A “is what is rational to do, given the morally conscientious agent’s beliefs about the situation, and his moral preferences....” (Bykvist 2018, pp. 392-3)
Bykvist 2018, p. 393.
An anonymous reviewer offers the following case in support of the view that the rational and the moral can diverge even if it’s certain that subjectivism is true:
Suppose Jill has only two drugs, A and B, and it’s 100% certain that giving A will partially cure the patient and it is 99.9% that B will completely cure and .01% that B will kill the patient. Suppose Jill is uncertain between two subjectivist moral theories. M1 says that in this situation it’s seriously morally wrong to give B. M2 says it’s only slightly wrong to give A and permissible, thus obligatory to give B. Suppose M2 is correct.
In this case, the rational thing for Jill to do, it may seem, is give A—even though doing so is in fact morally wrong. The right response for the subjectivist, I suggest, is to reject the idea that the correct theory might, for all Jill knows, be either M1 or M2 and that the her evidence might leave open which it is. That is, the subjectivist should maintain that if it’s compatible with one’s (total) evidence that choosing B would be seriously morally wrong, then it cannot be that choosing B is in fact morally obligatory. (This would be a case where (the content of) one’s obligations may be inaccessible – which is not consistent with the semi-subjectivist view I sketch in Sect. 4. To countenance such obligations would be to deny that moral obligation is evidentially constrained.) If it’s not rational to choose B in this situation, then one’s evidence does not indicate that B is obliged; if B is obliged nevertheless, then obligation is not evidentially constrained.
Hicks 2022a, p. 3
For more on the notion of an agency-undermining event, see Hicks 2022a, p. 5.
Quoted in Slinglerland 2003, p. 113.
Vranas 2009, Vranas 2005. Vranas argues (in part by appealing to empirical evidence from experiments in social psychology, including Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiments, in which most participants administered what they believed to be electric shocks to a screaming confederate) that people are typically “fragmented” in the sense that they would behave deplorably in many situations and admirably in many others. Even if this is not correct and if judgments of determinate moral character are typically justified, I suggest that as long as such judgments are sometimes unjustified this presents a problem for the OIAC strategy. For in those cases where such judgments aren’t justified, neither is the judgment that the agent is definitely unable to do what s/he reasonably suspects is, or has a significant risk of being, morally wrong. Vranas argues further that being fragmented entails being indeterminate (neither good nor bad nor intermediate). While indeterminacy of character is relevant to the issue at hand, arguably it’s fragmentation that is really important, since being fragmented consists in being disposed to act in certain ways in an open list of actual and counterfactual situations. If most people are fragmented, this is sufficient to establish the possibility of agentially possible but subjectively impermissible acts.
Hicks acknowledges (p. 8) the possibility of acting out of character while retaining the character of one’s agency.
Hicks notes that an axiological ranking of an agent’s possible actions might be determined on the basis of some relation that the actions bear to moral values (e.g., the promotion relation); or it might be determined on other bases, depending on the structure of the moral theory. In any case, such a ranking allows the theory to prescribe “second-best” actions to agents who aren’t agentially able to do better. (p. 6) The theory thus prescribes the agentially possible action that’s highest in the ranking.
Gibbons 2001.
Note the strength of some of Kim’s obligations do seem to be accessible to her. In particular, it seems the strength of her obligation to refrain from transplanting from either A or B is known, because the risk of transplanting is known.
In these examples, the intended sense of ‘might’ is epistemic. However it’s worth noting that the coherence of asserting both pairs of statements doesn’t depend on this. The claim that long-term effects of climate change will be harmful is of course consistent with the claim that there’s a metaphysical or physical possibility of their being catastrophic.
Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for raising this objection.
See, e.g., Rosen’s critique of Zimmerman’s “prospectivist” view of moral obligation (Rosen 20).
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Gilbertson, E. Risky Transplants and Partial Cures: Against the Objectivist View of Moral Obligation. J Value Inquiry (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-023-09958-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-023-09958-1