Abstract
I challenge the common picture of the “Standard Story” of Action as a neutral account of action within which debates in normative ethics can take place. I unpack three commitments that are implicit in the Standard Story, and demonstrate that these commitments together entail a teleological conception of reasons, upon which all reasons to act are reasons to bring about states of affairs. Such a conception of reasons, in turn, supports a consequentialist framework for the evaluation of action, upon which the normative status of actions is properly determined through appeal to rankings of states of affairs as better and worse. This covert support for consequentialism from the theory of action, I argue, has had a distorting effect on debates in normative ethics. I then present challenges to each of these three commitments, a challenge to the first commitment by T.M. Scanlon, a challenge to the second by recent interpreters of Anscombe, and a new challenge to the third commitment that requires only minimal and prima facie plausible modifications to the Standard Story. The success of any one of the challenges, I demonstrate, is sufficient to block support from the theory of action for the teleological conception of reasons and the consequentialist evaluative framework. I close by demonstrating the pivotal role that such arguments grounded in the theory of action play in the current debate between evaluator-relative consequentialists and their critics.
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Notes
A related case for such a skewing of the debate has been made by Brewer (2009: 14).
Anscombe’s claim, more specifically, is that an intentional action is an action ‘to which a certain sense of the question “Why?” is given application; the sense…in which the answer, if positive, gives a reason for acting’ (2000: 9).
What is taken to be ‘attractive about consequentialism,’ Mark Schroder writes, is that ‘it explains facts about what people ought to do in terms of facts about what is good’ (2007: 287). The consequentialist framework for the evaluation of action establishes this explanatory priority of the evaluation of states of affairs to the evaluation of actions. See also Portmore’s case (2011: 111–116) for the centrality of such an explanatory commitment to any substantive consequentialist moral theory, and Colyvan, Cox, and Steele’s useful contrast between such an explanatory theory and a merely descriptive model (2010: 35–39). For an argument that challenges the importance of this explanatory commitment to consequentialism, see Dreier (2011).
Michael Smith formulates the question this way: ‘What makes it the case that in (say) moving his finger, an agent acts, as opposed to merely being involved in something’s happening?’ (2012: 387).
See also Harry Frankfurt’s characterization of the Standard Story as maintaining that intentional actions are ‘movements whose causes are desires and beliefs by which they are rationalized’ (1978: 157).
David Velleman, for example, emphasizes that on such an account of action ‘these attitudes also justify the behavior that they cause, that behavior eventuates not only from causes but for reasons.’ (2000: 5) and that this is the element of the story that Velleman challenges, see Section IV.
See also Portmore’s characterization of the teleological conception as maintaining that what the agent “has most reason to do” is to bring about the state of affairs that she “has most reason to want to be actual” (2011: 56).
Thus Portmore (2011: 66–67) and other consequentialists can consistently allow that things other than states of affairs can be fundamental sources of value, while maintaining that within the context of the standard form of the Standard Story such sources of value will always be manifested in the ranking of states of affairs that agents have reasons to promote, such that agents have more reason to promote the higher ranked, and in this sense better, state of affairs.
Nye, Plunkett, and Ku highlight this distinction between our motives “that are state-directed, or motives to bring about certain states of affairs,” and motives “that are act-directed…motives simply to do certain things” (2015: 5). Much of my argument complements their defense of such reasons to do things that are not reasons to bring about against the charge that they are theoretically ‘mysterious’ (2015: 4). See also Kolodny’s arguments both that states of affairs are not the only thing of value, and that it is simply a “mistake…to think that things of value are sources of reasons only in the sense that, when we are able to bring about something of value, we have reasons to do so” (2011: 68).
I elaborate upon this claim in the concluding section.
Thus Elizabeth Anderson points out that on rational choice theory “the rational act is the act that maximally satisfies the agent’s individual preferences” (2001: 21).
For example, ‘their paradoxical flavor tempts one to think that the whole thing is a kind of moral illusion’ (1986: 179).
David Velleman raises a distinctive challenge that also blocks the presumption in favor of the consequentialist framework. He grants Claims 1–3 in some form, the “traditional account of how desire and belief motivate behavior,” but argues that they only provide an account of the motivation of behavior, not of reasons justifying actions (2000: 197). Such belief-desire motivation cannot provide the agent’s justifying reasons, he argues, because it does not yet account for the role of the agent in action (2000: 198). The agential role requires, in addition, a desire to act in accordance with reasons that ‘produces behavior, in our name, by adding its motivational force to that of whichever motives appear to provide the strongest reasons for acting’ (2000: 141). It is our reasons for acting, a ‘rational influence distinct from the motivational influence of the desire that it’s about’ (2000: 199), that we take to justify our actions. Even desire-based reasons, on such an account, derive their influence qua reasons ‘from something other than the desires upon which they are based.’ But the account also allows for other reasons for acting ‘that aren’t based on desires at all’ (2000: 199). Because the reasons that justify actions are not, and need not be based upon, the propositional attitudes that motivate actions, there is no presumption in favor of the teleological conception, upon which all such reasons are reasons to bring about the states of affairs that are the objects of such desires, hence no presumption in favor of the consequentialist evaluative framework and its claim that all reasons to act are determined through appeal to antecedent rankings of states of affairs.
Kieran Setiya also denies Commitment 1, albeit on different grounds. What rationalizes an action, he argues, is not a belief-desire pair, but a ‘desire-like belief’ (2007: 51), a single state that is both ‘motivational and cognitive’ (2007: 40). Contra (1), intentional actions, for Setiya, need not be rationalized by beliefs and desires with contrasting directions of fit; rather, it is the belief that I am acting for a reason, e.g., that I am going for a walk because the weather is fine, that motivates action in his paradigm case. The state is like a desire, in that it has ‘the power to cause or motivate the action it depicts, and to cause it to be done for the reason in question’ (2007: 40). But unlike the role of desire in the Standard Story, the desire-like belief in Setiya’s account need not provide a reason to bring about some state of affairs. The weather, in his example, is a reason for him to go for a walk, not to bring it about that he does. Any presumption to adopt the consequentialist evaluative framework, or a consequentialist moral theory, is eliminated by these modifications to the standard form of the Standard Story.
See also the case developed by Moran and Stone (2011: 50–55) that this is Anscombe’s own view of action, and Fernandez’s similar claims on behalf of Aristotle’s account of action, particularly his claim that in contrast with a mere movement, ‘an intentional action is internally constituted through practical reasoning’ (2016: 890).
Moran and Stone demonstrate that for Anscombe ‘the basic psychological item must be: X-ing to do something. That is, X-ing, whatever it is, must inherit through its object (a performance), just the distinctive structure characteristic of intention action’ (2011: 74). See also Thompson’s accounts of naïve rationalization of actions by other actions and of sophisticated rationalization by performative practical attitudes. (2008: Ch. 8).
Although the distinction to which I appeal in what follows is Brewer’s (2009: 21), the position that I harness it to argue for is not.
The contrasting directions of fit of theoretical and practical attitudes might also seem to provide support for Strong Propositionalism. In particular, the contrast is taken to establish that practical attitudes are distinguished by their contrasting directions of fit towards the same objects—states of affairs. But this direction of fit contrast need only be understood by the Weak Propositionalist as mandating contrasting directions of fit towards the states of affairs that are the contents of such attitudes in their propositional forms. Even if the object of a desire is an action, it will be true that successfully realizing this object will make the world fit the state of affairs that is captured in its propositional form. Such an understanding of this direction of fit contrast dovetails with Anscombe’s arguments that there is a relevant contrast between the objects of wants/intentions (actions) and beliefs (states of affairs) that is reflected in the very different mistakes to which attitudes with such contrasting objects are susceptible (Anscombe 2000: 56; Moran and Stone 2011: 67–69).
Weak Propositionalism also accounts for why desires have both a proposition form (desire that X) and a performative form (desire to X), suggesting that the performative (desire to X) form often captures the object of the desire, while the propositional (desire that X) form captures a necessary condition for the attainment of the desire’s object.
There is, I believe, space for a rapprochement between this more conservative modification and those proposed by many Anscombeans. Such Anscombeans insist that the relevant desires have a performative form, and that the action captured by this form is the object of the desire. The Weak Propositionalist can readily agree that such desires have a performative form, i.e., that the relevant desire is a desire to keep my promise, and that the action captured by this form is the object of the desire. But they deny that such a performative form precludes appropriately capturing such desires as well in a propositional form, a form that captures the state of affairs the occurrence of which is a necessary condition for the realization of the desire’s object. Some Anscombeans appear to argue that the performative form of desire precludes a propositional form (Thompson 2008: 122–138). But other Anscombeans do not deny that desires are capturable as well in propositional form; indeed, Anscombe herself often invokes cases of wanting that have as their objects states of affairs (2000: 70–72 and 91).
The demand to consequentialize is a demand to adopt the consequentialist framework, a demand that whatever is relevant “to determining deontic statuses of actions” is ‘relevant to determining the proper ranking of outcomes’ (Portmore 2007: 39), coupled with the claim that it is the facts about the ranking of outcomes that explain the facts about the deontic status of actions (Schroeder 2007: 287).
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Hurley, P. Consequentialism and the Standard Story of Action. J Ethics 22, 25–44 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10892-017-9261-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10892-017-9261-1