Abstract
In this paper, I argue that those moral theorists who wish to accommodate agent-centered options and supererogatory acts must accept both that the reason an agent has to promote her own interests is a nonmoral reason and that this nonmoral reason can prevent the moral reason she has to sacrifice those interests for the sake of doing more to promote the interests of others from generating a moral requirement to do so. These theorists must, then, deny that moral reasons morally override nonmoral reasons, such that even the weakest moral reason trumps the strongest nonmoral reason in the determination of an act’s moral status (e.g., morally permissible or impermissible). If this is right, then it seems that these theorists have their work cut out for them. It will not be enough for them to provide a criterion of rightness that accommodates agent-centered options and supererogatory acts, for, in doing so, they incur a debt. As I will show, in accommodating agent-centered options, they commit themselves to the view that moral reasons are not morally overriding, and so they owe us an account of how both moral reasons and nonmoral reasons come together to determine an act’s moral status.
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Notes
For one possible account, see Chang (2004).
I attempt to do some of this work in Portmore (2008b).
An act is objectively irrational if and only if the agent has decisive reasons not to perform that act. Thus, the objective rational status of an act is purely a function of the reasons for and against it and its alternatives, regardless of whether or not the agent is aware of them. By contrast, the subjective rational status of an act depends, not on what reasons there are, but on what reasons the agent takes there to be, or, alternatively, on the practical mental functioning of the agent – see Parfit (2008) and Gert (2004), respectively.
A separate question is whether an agent can be morally required to perform an act that she does not have most reason to perform, all things considered. Sarah Stroud argues that the answer is ‘No’, and she calls her thesis the “Overridingness Thesis”—see Stroud (1998). What Stroud calls the “Overridingness Thesis” is more often called moral rationalism, but, again, this thesis is distinct from the one that I’ll be discussing: the thesis that moral reasons are morally overriding. There is, however, the following interesting relationship between the two. If moral rationalism is true, and if moral reasons are not rationally overriding, then moral reasons won’t be morally overriding, for, in that case, what we can be morally obligated to do will be limited to those acts that we have most reason to perform, all things considered.
Nor does the fact that I would personally gain by performing the act count against my performing it, morally speaking.
These are adapted from Joshua Gert’s criteria for rational requiring strength and rational justifying strength. See Gert (2003, pp. 15–16).
Of course, John Taurek has argued that it might be permissible to save the one instead of the two if one were to flip a coin to decide which group to save—see Taurek (1977). Nevertheless, I’m claiming only that, on commonsense morality, it would be impermissible to save the one instead of the two absent some special reason for saving the one.
If the reader believes that, given that lives are at stake, Fiona is morally required to click on button B, then imagine a revised version of the case where the net benefit that the strangers would receive were Fiona to click on button B is only slightly more significant than the net benefit that Fiona would receive were she to click on button A.
See Kagan (1989, p. 49). Of course, particularists might object that a reason can have a great deal of moral requiring strength in one context (e.g., the context in which the cost of acting altruistically is quite low) but very little to no moral requiring strength in another context (e.g., the context in which the cost of acting altruistically is quite high), for particularists will deny that reasons have any stable valence or strength values across possible contexts. But see Gert (2007) for an interesting and powerful response. Gert argues that the particularist “cannot merely deny that it makes sense to ascribe stable strength values to reasons: values that they keep from context to context. Rather, the particularist must make the blanket claim that talk of the strength of a reason makes no real sense even in a restricted context” (2007, p. 553). This is because, when we assign a strength value to a reason, we are providing a concise representation of the way it affects the normative statuses of acts across a range of contexts. For instance, if we assign greater moral requiring strength to one reason than another, we are committed to a claim about how these two reasons affect the moral statuses of acts across contexts: specifically, we must claim that the one reason would make it morally impermissible to do anything that the other reason would make it morally impermissible to do. Since this is precisely the sort of claim that particularists must deny, they must deny that talk of the strength of a reason makes any sense at all, even in particular contexts.
If this just seems like an instance of the Sorites Paradox to you, then increase the size of the incremental changes to the point where vagueness is no longer an issue. I don’t see how the size of the increases matters. It seems to me that even if we increase the cost to the agent in one thousand dollar increments, it still won’t feel like there is less and less to be said in favor of her benefiting the strangers with each incremental increase. Thanks to Dale Dorsey for raising this worry.
If a given reason for action did have some moral requiring strength, it would thereby count in favor of performing that act, morally speaking, and would, therefore, be a moral reason.
Perfectionist goods are not equivalent to, and do not necessarily correlate with, prudential goods. See Sumner (1996, pp. 23–4).
One way this might be true is if moral rationalism is true. Moral rationalism is the view that an agent can be morally required to perform a given act only if there is most reason, all things considered, to perform that act. If this is right, then a nonmoral reason to do something other than x could prevent a moral reason to do x from generating a moral requirement to do x by tipping the balance of reasons, all things considered, in favor of doing something other than x. Alternatively, one might suppose that the nonmoral reasons the agent has to do something other than x need not outweigh what moral reasons she has to do x in order to prevent it from generating a moral requirement to do x. Perhaps, these nonmoral reasons need only be sufficiently weighty, even if not weighty enough to outweigh the opposing moral reasons, to prevent these moral reasons from generating a moral requirement. I thank an anonymous reviewer from this journal for pointing out this other possibility to me.
I leave open the question of whether there are any further necessary conditions, such as (c) S’s performing x is more morally praiseworthy than S’s performing y.
Someone else might deny (b), suggesting that a supererogatory act is one that involves a greater self-sacrifice for the sake of others than is required, whether or not there is necessarily any moral reason for agents to make such self-sacrifices — see, for instance, Hardwood (1998) and Vessel (2008). One problem with such an account is that it rules out the possibility of supererogation with respect to self-regarding duties. Yet it certainly seems possible to go above and beyond what such duties require—see Kawall (2003). Another problem is that if we deny that there is any better moral reason to go beyond what duty requires in terms of making self-sacrifices for others than to go beyond what duty requires in terms of, say, perspiration, then it’s hard to see why only the former and not the latter would count as supererogatory. For more on this, see Portmore (2007, pp. 39–73).
One might rightly point out that even a morally undefeated reason of considerable moral requiring strength will fail to generate a moral requirement when it is opposed by some moral reason of equal or incommensurate moral requiring strength. But this cannot explain why the morally undefeated reason that favors performing the supererogatory act fails to generate a moral requirement in those instances where it defeats whatever moral reasons there are for performing some permissible non-supererogatory alternative. Moreover, the morally undefeated reason that favors performing the supererogatory act must defeat (not just equal) these moral reasons for performing the permissible non-supererogatory alternative if it is to meet condition (b). Thus, assuming that moral reasons are morally overriding, the explanation for why the morally undefeated reason for performing the supererogatory alternative fails to generate a moral requirement has to be that it has insufficient moral requiring strength.
That Dreier thinks that an act’s moral status is a function of solely moral reasons is clear from the first sentence in the above quote as well as from what he says on p. 149 of the same article. Zimmerman, by contrast, is less explicit, but he does say that if there being more moral reason to perform the supererogatory alternative is essential to supererogation, then any theory wishing to accommodate supererogation will have to declare that there are two sets of moral reasons, deontic and non-deontic reasons (or what I am calling moral reasons with, and moral reasons without, sufficient moral requiring strength)— see Zimmerman (1993, pp. 375–6).
Similarly, in note 11, Zimmerman (1993) offers an example where he supposes that reasons of fidelity have considerable moral requiring strength but that reasons of beneficence have little to no moral requiring strength.
I borrow this example from Kagan (1989, pp. 374–5).
And, as mentioned in note 18, one could claim that the nonmoral reason the agent has to act self-interestedly need only be sufficiently weighty, even if not weighty enough to outweigh the opposing moral reasons, to prevent these moral reasons from generating a moral requirement. Either way, there will, on the satisficing view, be a rational option to act either altruistically or self-interestedly so long as the relevant reasons in favor of each alternative are sufficiently weighty.
As Ruth Chang notes, many philosophers think that “if two items A and B are evaluatively comparable, then A must be better or worse than B, or A and B must be equally good. Call this the ‘Trichotomy Thesis’”—see Chang (2002). Chang rejects the Trichotomy Thesis and argues that, in addition to these three, A and B might be on a par. The difference between being on a par and being equally good is that A and B can be on a par and a small improvement in either A or B would not necessarily make the improved item better than the unimproved item—the improved item might still just be on a par with the unimproved item. By contrast, if A and B are equally good, then a small improvement in one or the other would necessarily make the improved item better than the unimproved item.
Of course, we must deny that, morally speaking, they are on a par if we hope to account for the fact that acting altruistically is supererogatory.
If two types of reasons, x-R and y-R, are wholly incomparable, then there is, for no pair of token instances of x-R and y-R, some truth as to how the two compare—that is, as to whether the one is stronger than, weaker than, or equally strong as (or on a par with) the other. If, by contrast, two types of reasons, x-R and y-R, are only very roughly comparable, then there is, for only a few pairs of token instances of x-R and y-R, some truth as to how the two compare. Just how rough the comparability of the two types of reasons is in proportion to how few pairs there are for which there is some truth as to how the two compare. The notions of ‘wholly incomparable’ and ‘roughly comparable’ come from Parfit (2008).
I thank G. Shyam Nair for raising this concern.
For both a more thorough explication and an extended defense of this possible solution, see Portmore (2008a).
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Acknowledgement
For helpful comments and discussions, I thank Richard Arneson, Noell Birondo, Dan Boisvert, Campbell Brown, Michael Byron, Dale Dorsey, Nir Eyal, Joshua Glasgow, G. Shyam Nair, Derek Parfit, Betsy Postow, Mark Schroeder, David Shoemaker, Mark van Roojen, Michael J. Zimmerman, numerous anonymous referees, students in my Spring 2006 seminar entitled “The Limits of Morality,” and the audience at my 2006 Pacific APA colloquium.
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Portmore, D.W. Are Moral Reasons Morally Overriding?. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 11, 369–388 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-008-9110-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-008-9110-1