Abstract
One of the popular albeit controversial ideas in the last century of moral philosophy is that what we ought to do is explained by our reasons. And one of the central features of reasons that accounts for their popularity among normative theorists is that they can conflict. But I argue that the fact that reasons conflict actually also poses two closely related problems for this popular idea in moral philosophy. The first problem is a generalization of a problem in deontic logic concerning the existence of conflicting obligations. The second problem arises from a tension between the fact that reasons can conflict and a model of how reasons explain ‘ought’s that has been widely accepted. Having presented each of these problems, I develop a unified solution to them that is informed by results in both ethics and deontic logic. An important implication of this solution is that we must distinguish between derivative and nonderivative reasons and revise our conception how it is that reasons explain ‘ought’s .
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Notes
For simplicity, I adopt the assumption that ‘ought’ and ‘should’ are roughly synonymous.
Cf. Cariani (2013): n. 1.
Cf. van Fraassen (1973: 18), Horty (2003: 578), Goble (2009: 459). It may also be worth noting that this case assumes a kind of pluralism about the sources of our reasons (in this case, one reason is due to the laws and the other is due to personal commitments). While the details of our reasons’ sources are controversial, pluralism in general has been a commitment in the spirit of the popular idea in ethics since Ross. In any case, this pluralism is inessential to the structure of this case and is included only out of deference to the history of the case.
Throughout the main text, I will rely on our pretheortical grasp of the notion of doing one act involving doing another. “Appendix 2” provides a simple formal model of this notion of involvement in terms of logical entailment in propositional logic (other more complicated formal models are also possible though I do not have the space in this paper to develop them).
Three clarifications may be in order. First, for it to be the case that S can do a is for doing a to be under S’s intentional control in the sense that both (a) if S intends to do a, S does a and (b) if S intends to not do a, then S does not do a.
Second, claims about reasons are naturally understood to be doubly-tensed in much the way other constructions such as ‘want’-constructions are. For example, ‘John wants to eat dinner’ is tenses both on the time of the wanting and the time of the thing wanted (this can be made vivid by comparing the meaning of ‘Tomorrow it will be the case that John wants to eat dinner’ and ‘John wants to eat dinner tomorrow’. In most natural contexts, the time of the wanting is tomorrow in the first but not the second. And the time of the thing wanted is tomorrow in the second). I intend Consistent Reasons Agglomeration to concern cases where the time of the reason is the same but the time of the thing that there is a reason to do may be different (though of course whether an agent can do two acts may depend on the time of the things that there is a reason to do).
Third, throughout this paper, I will concentrate on what there is a reason to do. An interesting further question is what the reason is to do it. A generalization of the formal model that I describe in “Appendix 2” answers this question, but I do not have the space here to present this theory (though the theory entails that the reason do the conjunction is the a conjunction of the reasons to do each conjunct). In any case, it is not strictly speaking required to present or solve the problems that I describe in this paper. Thanks to an anonymous referee for pressing me to clarify these issues.
Suppose there is a reason for S to do a and there is a reason for S to do b and S cannot do a and b. Now doing b involves not doing a because S cannot do a and b, so by Single Reason Closure there is a reason for S to do not-a. And by another two application of Single Reason Closure, we get a reason to do a or c and a reason to do not-a or c for any c such that S can do c. Next notice that for any such c it must be that either S can do a and c or S can do not-a and c.
Suppose S can do a and c. This means S can do [[not-a or c] and a]. So by Consistent Reasons Agglomeration, we can generate a reason to do [[not-a or c] and a]. Finally since doing [[not-a or c] and a] involves doing c, we get the results by Single Reason Closure there is a reason to do c.
If we suppose instead that S can do not-a and c and start this time with the reason to do a or c, we get by analogous reasoning the result that there is a reason to do c. So either way there is a reason to do c for any c that S can do. This completes the proof.
For general discussion of the problem of conflicting obligations, see Brink (1994), Chellas (1980), Foot (1983), Gowans (1987b), Lemmon (1962), Marcus (1980), McConnell (2010), Pietroski (1993), Sinnott-Armstrong (1988), van Fraassen (1973), and Williams (1965). And see the helpful collection Gowans (1987a). For more recent discussion that bears particularly on the issues discussed in this section see Hansen (2004), McNamara (2004), van der Torre and Tan (2000), and especially Goble (2009, 2013) and Horty (2003).
Given my working assumption that ‘ought’s never conflict, we can, in fact, raise the first problem in a slightly different way. Almost everyone who accepts the popular idea in ethics accepts the following intuitively plausible connection between reasons and what we ought to do:
‘Ought’s Entail Reasons: if S ought to do a, then there is a reason for S to do a
If we accept ‘Ought’s Entail Reasons, this means that there is a reason corresponding to each thing we ought to do. Now since we are assuming that ‘ought’s never conflict and since given this assumption, the ‘ought’ analogs of Single Reason Closure and Consistent Reasons Agglomeration:
Single ‘Ought’ Closure: if S ought to do a and doing a involves doing b, then S ought to do b
Consistent ‘Ought’ Agglomeration: if S ought to do a, S ought to do b, and S can do a and b, then S ought to do a and b
provide a simple explanation of the ‘ought’ analogs of Speeding Law and Fighting or Serving, we may accept these two claims describing entailments among ‘ought’s.
If we accept these entailments and accept ‘Ought’s Entail Reasons, we would need to ensure that there are reasons corresponding to each thing we ought to do that is generated by Single ‘Ought’ Closure and ‘Consistent ‘Ought’ Agglomeration. A natural question to ask the advocate of the popular idea in ethics who accepts 'Ought's Entail Reasons is what guarantees that there are reasons corresponding to each thing we ought to do that is generated by these entailments: what guarantees that reasons and what we ought to do walk in lock-step in the way that ‘Ought’s Entail Reasons requires? An elegant answer would be that the analogous entailments hold among reasons. That is, Single Reason Closure and Consistent Reasons Agglomeration hold. This then shows that there is a tension between providing a systematic the ‘ought’ analogs of Speeding Law and Fighting or Serving while preserving natural connections between ‘ought’s and reasons and the platitude that reasons conflict.
Horty (2003: 572–573) was the first to notice the issue discussed in §3.1. But, as he presents it, the difficulty is narrowly tailored to the view in Brink (1994). Horty does not isolate the problem as one that arises from accepting the three principles discussed below. Horty also does not consider, as we will below, whether the view can be saved by supplementing it with principles concerning entailments among reasons.
Goble (2013: 22) is the first to recognize the issue in §3.2 The contribution of my development of this difficulty is that it shows that the problem arises as a tension between the three ethical principle discussed below. Goble’s presentation focuses on validating so-called Standard Deontic Logic, delivering the disjunctive response, and explaining certain cases. My work is heavily indebted to Horty and Goble’s discussions.
The explanation may be partial because facts about other reasons and the strength of reasons may need to be mentioned. I The explanation is supposed to be essential in the sense that there is no complete explanation of why S ought to do a in terms of reasons that fails to mention the reason for S to do a.
According to my usage, reasons explain ‘ought’s and therefore Reasons Explain 'Ought's Directly assume that facts about reasons are prior to and explanatory of facts about what we ought to do So according to this usage, Broome (2004) does not accept the popular idea in ethics. This is because Broome explains the notion of a reason in terms of the prior notions of what we ought to do and a weighing explanation.
For our purposes, certain variants of Reasons Explain 'Ought's Directly and 'Ought's Entail Reasons will do just as well. While it is difficult to provide a general statement of what the weakest commitment is that would still be sufficient for my argument that is not hopelessly abstract, it is important to know that those who favor revisions to simplistic formulation of reasons explain ‘ought’s such as Bedke (2011), Dany (2004b), Gert (2007), and Greenspan (2007) will be committed to variants of Reasons Explain 'Ought's Directly that will suffice for our problem. John Horty, Lou Goble, and Douglas Portmore are the only theorists that I know of who do not accept some such variant of Reasons Explain 'Ought's Directly. Horty also rejects 'Ought's Entail Reasons. “Appendix 2” discusses their work.
Of course, many philosophers who reject the popular idea in ethics also reject ‘Ought’s Entail Reasons. For example, Foot (1972) famously rejects an analog of ‘Ought’s Entail Reasons that concerns what we morally ought to do (rather than what we ought to do all things considered; Foot’s stance on our version is not transparent). Similar comments apply to Reasons Explain ‘Ought’s Directly.
I say this line of reasoning is suggestive because it makes a number of unstated assumptions about the nature of explanation and the space of options. Indeed, I end up rejecting one such assumption in giving my solution and so I am presenting this line of thought as foil for the solution that I will eventually offer.
I have claimed that we do not want to say that Mary ought to do nothing. But one might object that it would be unfair to keep one promise rather than the other so Mary ought to keep neither and do nothing. I have three responses to this objection. First, though here is not the place to argue about first order issues in the theory of promises and fairness, I will simply report that I do not think it is unfair to keep one of the promises in this case. Second, insofar as we accept that it is unfair, the most natural way to capture this is to claim that there is a strong reason not to keep exactly one promise in this case. If we were to do that, then the case at hand would not be one of the structure that I intended it to be (one where there are only two relevant reasons and they are equally good but incompatible), but the objection would also would not undermine the structural claim that I am making. Third, consider a different case where the competition is not between two promises but between a promise and, e.g., harm to others, the agent’s own rational aims, or pleasure. Though people’s judgments about exactly which cases involving these kinds of reasons are ones where the reasons that are not worse than one another, people generally will agree that there are such cases. In such cases, I claim that the agent ought to perform the disjunctive act. And in such cases issues of fairness have no obvious role to play. Thanks to Nick Laskowski and an anonymous referee for pressing me on this point.
This is of course not the only principle that could be used to tackle this case. One could instead adopt the principle that if there is a reason to do a and a reason to do b, then there is a reason to do a or b. As I said, I will not have the space here to discuss all the alternative principles that one might try because there are too many to discuss (but see n. 22 for a guide to what the issues with different families of principles are). My aim is to only present one solution to the problems developed in this paper. That said, it is worth noting that adopting this principle and rejecting Single Reason Closure would leave Speeding Law unexplained.
Goble (2013: 22) concurs with this judgment about the case.
There are four kinds of views about conflicting ‘ought’s that do not have this structure. First Goble (2009) solves the problem of conflicting ‘ought’s by modifying Single ‘Ought’ Closure. We should not go in for this as a solution to our problem because Goble’s modification would not allow us to generate the required reasons in Two Breakfasts. Second others accept something like Single ‘Ought’ Closure and Consistent ‘Ought’ Agglomeration but go on to deny the derivation of explosion (see, e.g., Beirlaen et al. 2013). Though these solutions are plausible as theories of reasoning, I believe they are not adequate for dealing with (necessary) entailments among reasons because they give up on certain structural properties of logical consequence (see Nair 2014 for discussion). Third some views either fail to avoid explosion or fail to give any account of the cases that motivate our principles, for a comprehensive survey see Goble (2013). Thus, these three kinds of views cannot solve our problem. Finally, I have recently learned of a fourth kind of view being developed in work in progress by Lou Goble. This view involves a radical departure from Single ‘Ought’ Closure, but has other features that may allow it to solve our problem. Unfortunately, I do not have the space here to discuss the prospects of this proposal.
To say that something is non-derivatively good is to say that its goodness is not explained by something else being good. This does not rule out that it can be explained in terms of some other normative or non-normative notion.
Two comments may be in order. First, the exact analog of Consistent ‘Basically Ought’s Agglomeration would not say ‘there is a derivative reason’ in the consequent but would merely say ‘there is a reason (perhaps derivative, perhaps non-derivative)’. So the principle given in the text is strictly stronger than the exact analog of Consistent ‘Basically Ought’s Agglomeration. But this stronger principle is plausible and also solves our problem. Indeed, I accept the even stronger claim that says the non-derivative reasons explain the derivative reasons.
Second, there are complications that arise from the fact that I am only focusing on there being reasons to do acts in this paper and not discussing what those reasons are. In particular, there can be cases in which there is a derivative reasons as well as a non-derivative reason to do an act where these reasons are provided by different facts. While the ideas I develop below are compatible with this, they do not provide as clear verdicts about these cases. However, a generalization of the model in appendix two that I develop in work in progress can provide a clear treatment of these cases.
The derivative/non-derivative distinction also allows us to notice a more restricted version of Reasons Explain ‘Ought’s Directly that would suffice for our second problem:
Reasons Explain ‘Non-Derivatvie Ought’s Directly: If an agent non-derivatively ought to do a, then this is in part because the agent has a non-derivative reason to do a.
We can see that the problem arises even if we assume only Reasons Explain ‘Non-Derivative Ought’s Directly’ rather than Reasons Explain ‘Ought’s Directly. This is because what Mary and Sally non-derivatively ought to do are those disjunctive acts. This ‘ought’ is not explained by some other ‘ought’.
Though I do not have the space to discuss the details here, the fact that our problem arises even only assuming Reasons Explain ‘Non-Derivative Ought’s Directly distinguishes it from superficially similar problems concerning instrumental reasons and ‘ought’s. See Bedke (2009), Raz (2005), Schroeder (2009), and especially Kolodny Forthcoming and Millsap ms for discussion of instrumental reasons.
See “Appendix 2” for some details about how the collection of undefeated non-derivative reasons is determined and some complications associated with this issue.
In order to explain why we ought to do a in terms of reasons to do a, we must be able to say something about how the strength of derivative reasons is determined. It is in fact easy enough to say when there is decisive derivative reason to do a: there is a decisive derivative reason to do a just in case doing a is involved in doing any most inclusive compossible collection of acts that there is undefeated non-derivative reason to do. That said, whether a reasons is derivative is determined by whether the reasons for doing something are better than the reasons against doing this. So to actually vindicate this definition, I take it, we must be able to say in general when one derivative reason is stronger than the other and show that the definition of a decisive reason can be recovered as the special case of the reasons to do a being better than the reasons to do any alternative. This task is one that no one to my knowledge has accomplished. In work in progress, I show how this can be done with some considerable complication. But while the possibility of doing this is interesting, I do not believe that it shows that ‘ought’s are explained in the way the alternative explanatory structure suggests. This is because the explanation directly in terms of non-derivative reasons is considerably simpler and more elegant.
Now the alternative explanatory structure may seem more attractive because it vindicated Reasons Explain ‘Ought’s Directly. But there are two points to be made about this. First, I do not believe that Reasons Explain ‘Ought’s Directly is a principle that there is independent reason to capture even though many theorists accept it. This is why I developed a motivation for it based on ‘Ought’s Entail Reasons. Second, as I am understanding Reasons Explain ‘Ought’s Directly, it claims that the reason to do a is an essential component of an explanation of why we ought to a in terms of reasons. This proposal does not vindicate that idea as I explain in the main text. Thanks to an anonymous referee for pressing me on this issue.
Since it is an open question in moral philosophy what the non-derivative reasons are, what entitles me to make the assumption each promise provides a non-derivative reason? I make these assumptions for simplicity. Many other assumptions but not all assumptions would work. All that can be done to answer suspicion about my solution on this score is to consider alternative proposals on a case-by-case basis.
For example, the alternative view that we have non-derivative reason to keep as many promises as we can or that we have non-derivative reason to minimize promise-breaking would work for my purposes But the idea that we only have non-derivative reason to keep all of our promises would not.
This is the right result. If the only thing that we have non-derivative reason to do is keep all of our promises and we can’t keep all of our promises, then it is not the case that we ought to keep two of three promises. Indeed, this consequence of my view shows just what is so implausible about this view of the normative significance of promises.
Similar comments apply to Fighting or Serving. Thus, though I cannot prove this, I believe my view will get the right results in these cases.
Thanks to an anonymous referee for pressing me on this issue.
There will always be such an M’ because we can always let M’ be [M and not-E].
It is important to be clear here about why this response is not question begging against a reasonable objector. A reasonable objector may reject the motivation for Single Reason Closure for the reason provided, but she should not reject the first claim of my argument (the claim that sometimes we have reasons to take non-sufficient means to our ends). For those who wish to reject the first assumption of my argument, I do not offer any response. I simply note that this is a highly theoretical commitment that, to my mind, hardly provides a starting point for an objection to simple judgements about cases unless the commitment can be bolstered by strong independent argument.
Counterexamples to the ‘ought’ version of the bridge premise can also be had with the help of the simple observation that for almost anything we ought to do there are sufficient means for doing it that are impermissible. Some of these counterexamples may also falsify the bridge premise stated in the text but judgments about these examples involving reasons are less clear.
I discuss only two puzzles here. Begin with, a generalization of Ross’s paradox (Ross 1941). Though I do not have the space here to engage with the literature on this topic in the level of detail it deserves, let me make four points. First a popular solution to Ross’s paradox explains the paradox away on pragmatic grounds (Castañeda 1981). Second though not clearly impossible, it is not obvious that the speeding law case can be explained without allowing the Rossian inference: that case can be thought of as going from ‘there is a reason to drive forty-nine mph or forty-eight mph or…’ to ‘there is a reason to drive ninety-nine mph or ninety-eight mph or … or forty-nine mph or forty-eight mph or….’. Third, Single Reason Closure is entailed by other plausible principle so those who reject it face the task of explaining which of these principles they reject. For example Single Reason Closure follows from the principle that if there is a reason to do a and b, then there is a reason to do a together with the principle that there is a reason to do a just in case there is a reason to do b when doing a involves doing b and doing b involves doing a. Fourth and finally, the Rossian intuition is suspect. Apply the same intuition pump to neither mailing nor burning the letter. Neither mailing nor burning the letter is an act that you do not have a reason to do and indeed an act you have a reason to not do. So this intuition pump suggests that you have strong reasons to not [neither sending nor burning the letter]. Now if we make the extremely weak assumption that you have a reason to do a then you also have a reason to do b where b is the result of performing a de Morgans transformation on a, it follows that you do indeed have a reason to mail or burn the letter. So the Rossian intuition itself pulls in both directions and those who wish to draw the conclusion that Single Reason Closure fails based on it must face up to denying much more than Single Reason Closure.
Next consider a generalization of Professor Procrastinate type cases (Jackson and Pargetter 1986). Again, there is a rich literature on this topic that I cannot do justice to, but let me say two things in response. First and most importantly let me note that one prominent family of accounts of this case and solution to the so-called actualism/possibilism debate it is involved in preserves Single Reason Closure. This family of accounts is motivated by consideration independent of the ones here and I myself find these solutions plausible (see Portmore 2013 and Ross 2012 for a recent defense). Second, one of the original arguments used to suggest that we have a failure of Single Reason Closure in the Professor Procrastinate case involved appealing to a certain simple consequentialist semantics for ‘ought’. But this semantics is controversial not only for its implication in first order ethics but also because (1) it is not the only consequentialist approach possible and there are alternatives that validate Single Reason Closure (Portmore 2011), (2) non-consequentialist semantics abound that do not have this result such as the usual modal semantics given for the so-called Standard Deontic Logic and such as a more recent semantic treatment due to Wedgwood (2006) that integrates insights from logic, linguistics, and moral philosophy, and (3) the approach that I develop is an alternative account of the nature of what we ought to do so the argument from Jackson’s theory simply begs the question against it.
Horty notices that his system cannot accept ‘Ought’s Entail Reasons and, for this reason, says he has an “austere” theory of reasons (2012: Ch. 2, §1). By my lights, such austerity is a cost and the interpretation provided here can be thought of as an amendment to his system that does not have this cost.
Strictly speaking, what I have defined is the notion of a reason being not worse than any other reasons. A reason being not worse and a reason being at least as good come apart in cases where reasons are incomparable with one another. But in order to present my ideas as simply as possible, I will ignore incomparability among reasons. Indeed, there are a whole host of phenomena concerning the weight of reasons that I will be ignoring in order to present my system simply (e.g., undercutting defeat, attenuation, how multiple reasons can “add up” to provide more support for an act, reinstatement). Luckily, as I said before, my system can be developed using the full resources of Horty’s system and these extra resources were developed precisely to understand these phenomena (see Hansen 2008 and Horty 2012 for further discussion).
We do not focus on non-derivative reasons that are better than reasons that conflict with them because the set of such non-derivative reasons is empty in cases like Two Breakfasts and Lunch-Coffee-Dinner where we have equally good non-derivative reasons (cf. Horty 2003: 572–573).
It may be worth noting how this system is related to two other systems. First, the system that can be found in Goble (2013: §4.4) is very similar to mine. When I came up with my system, Goble’s paper did not contain the system that is now found in his §4.4. At that time, the system that was closest to mine did not validate ‘Ought’s Entail Reasons. Goble since has, perhaps independently, developed the system now found in §4.4. Second Portmore (2013) argues on very different grounds for a special case of my view (see n. 36 for further discussion). According to Portmore, if an agent has a non-derivative reason to do α, a non-derivative reason to do β, and α ≠ β, then α and β are inconsistent. In effect, Portmore thinks that there are only non-derivative reasons to do maximal consistent acts.
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Acknowledgment
For helpful comments thanks to the audience of the USC speculative society, Tony Anderson, Josh Crabill, Steve Finlay, Lou Goble, Keith Hall, Matthew Hanser, Ben Lennertz, Alida Liberman, Nick Laskowski, Errol Lord, Doug Portmore, Indrek Reiland, Henry Richardson, Jacob Ross, Barry Schein, Sam Shpall, Justin Snedegar, Julia Staffel, Sigrún Svavarsdóttir, Gabriel Uzquiano-Cruz, Ryan Walsh, Aness Webster, Ralph Wedgwood, Aaron Zimmerman, and especially two anonymous referees at Philosophical Studies. Thanks most of all to Mark Schroeder for advice and criticism on every issue at every stage of this project. Finally, I thank the USC Provost’s Ph.D. Fellowship and Russell Fellowship for support.
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Appendices
Appendix 1: The life of Single Reason Closure
In my experience, Single Reason Closure is a principle that some people find highly suspect. This appendix is dedicated to briefly discussing the status of this principle.Footnote 31
I should start by admitting that it is unlikely that what I can say in this paper that is not directly dedicated to considering all aspects of Single Reason Closure will satisfy everyone. This is because this principle, or more accurately a version of it concerning ‘ought’s, has a rather complicated status in ethics and in deontic logic: some think it is obviously true (Hilpinen and Føllesdal 1971: 22 and Nute and Yu 1997: 5); other obviously false. But, I submit, this fact—that people’s assessments differ—tells us that a thorough and even handed assessment of Single Reason Closure requires careful consideration of both its merits and its problems. This paper will show some positive applications of Single Reason Closure. This contributes one important piece of evidence to the large body of evidence that we must consider in order to responsibly evaluate Single Reason Closure. What this piece of evidence tells us is that those who wish to reject Single Reason Closure must identify an alternative to it that is capable of resolving our two problems. So the main contribution of this paper with regard to Single Reason Closure will not be to defend it from problems others have raised but to highlight some underappreciated virtues of this principle.
That said, let me make two points about Single Reason Closure and the cases that motivate it. First let me mention one weakening of Single Reason Closure that avoids many problems for this principle that people raise (e.g., the problem that Single Reason Closure entails that we have reasons to do “tautological actions” such as murder or not murder). The weakening is this:
if there is a reason for S to do a, doing a involves doing b, and doing b is under S’s intentional control, then there is a reason for S to do b
where we say that doing an act is under an agent’s intentional control just in case both (1) if she intends to do it, she does it and (2) if she intends to not do it, she does not do it. It will be easy for the interested reader to check that even this restricted version of Single Reason Closure gives rise to the problem that I have described when combined with Consistent Reasons Agglomeration. And though I did not complicate the presentation of my solution so that it only validates this restricted principle, it will not be hard to see that the solution could be modified in this way.
Next, recall that we considered Single Reason Closure in the first place because we wanted to explain why there is a reason to drive less than one hundred miles per hour given that there is a reason to drive less than fifty miles per hour in Speeding Law. The second issue I would like to consider is an objection to the idea that there really is a reason to drive less than one hundred miles per hour in that case.
The objection begins with the observation that one can drive less than one hundred miles per hour by driving exactly eighty miles per hour. But, plausibly, there is no reason to drive exactly eighty miles per hour in this case. On the basis of these two premises, the objection concludes that there is no reason to drive less than one hundred miles per hour.
Before responding to what I take the heart of the objection, let me make two preliminary points. First Single Reason Closure alone does not imply that there is a reason to drive exactly eighty miles per hour so it gets this fact right. Second, not only is there not a reason to drive exactly eighty miles per hour, there is a reason not to drive exactly eighty miles per hour in this case. And Single Reason Closure is the most natural explanation of why there is this reason. Since driving less than fifty miles per hour involves failing to drive exactly eighty miles per hour, Single Reason Closure predicts that there is a reason not to drive exactly eighty miles per hour. These are two correct results about the case and the second result follows from Single Reason Closure and is a piece of evidence in its favor.
However, the heart of the objection, I take it, does not focus on whether Single Reason Closure alone predicts that driving exactly eighty miles an hour is something that you have a reason to do (as I said, it does not). Rather the heart of the objection is that Single Reason Closure predicts that there is a reason to do something (namely, drive less than one hundred miles per hour) and one way of complying with this reason (namely driving exactly eighty miles per hour) is not something you have a reason to do and indeed have a reason against doing. This observation seems to be that it cannot be the case that there is no reason to do an act which is a way of complying with something you have a reason to do.
So the bridge premise this objection relies on is this:
if there is a reason to do a and b is a way of doing a, then there must be a reason to do b
or something similar to this perhaps restricted to cases in which you ought to do a as well. Since there is no reason to drive exactly eighty miles per hour, the objector concludes by modus tollens that there is no reason to drive less than one hundred miles per hour. My response to the objection is that this bridge premise is false.
My response rests on three claims. First, at least in some cases (though perhaps not all) we have a reason to accomplish an end E that gives us a reason to take a (perhaps necessary, perhaps not) means M to E that is not a sufficient means to E. For example, I may have an excellent reason to drive my friend to the airport and that gives me a reason to clear the snow off of my car.
Next consider that there will always be a sufficient means M’ to accomplishing M that precludes accomplishing E.Footnote 32 To return to the example, a sufficient means to clearing the snow off of my car would be to murder my friend, steal his shovel, and use it to shovel the snow off of my car.
Finally I submit there is no reason to do M’ (at least only given the reason to do E and the reason to do M that it generates). To return to the example, there is no reason to murder my friend, steal his shovel, and shovel the snow off of my car.
These three general claims then provide a counterexample to the bridge premise because there is a reason to do M, M’ is a way of doing M, and nonetheless there is no reason to do M’. More generally, this argument suggest that the bridge principle is false when applied to reasons to do acts that are generated by other reasons. It should be no surprise then that there is no reason to drive exactly eighty miles per hour in Speeding Law.Footnote 33 , Footnote 34
This conclude my response to concerns about Single Reason Closure. That said, these comments do not suffice to address all of the problems that have been offered for Single Reason Closure. But as I said, my aim is not to solve all the problem for Single Reason Closure here. It is to show that there are certain problems understanding conflicting reasons and their connection to what we ought to do and that Single Reason Closure can be a part of a solution to these problems. That said, for those interested in these problems, I briefly discuss them in a note.Footnote 35
Appendix 2: A simple formal model
The formal theory that I will develop is an adaptation of a formal system developed by John Horty (2012). I adapt the system in two ways. First I considerably simplify the system. Though my ideas could be developed using the full resources of Horty’s system, I am simplifying here in order to introduce my main ideas in the most approachable form. Second as will become clearer as we go on, I interpret some of the objects in my system differently than Horty interprets the analogous objects in his system. As we will see, this difference in interpretation is important because it is what will allow me to do something Horty cannot do: reject Reasons Explain ‘Ought’s Directly while accepting ‘Ought’s Entail Reasons and thereby solve our problem.Footnote 36
Let’s develop the system. To begin, instead of discussing action and involvements among actions, I will simplify things by discussing sentences and logical entailments among them. Let lowercase Greek letters α, β, γ, etc. be sentences. Accordingly, we will also officially have to treat ‘reason’ and ‘ought’ as operators on sentences.
Next since we know that the notion of a non-derivative reason is going to play an important role in this system, we should introduce a way of representing them. So let !(α) represent a non-derivative reason to do α. While this formalism does not allow us to represent what the reason is to do α, we do not need to add such details to our system because our problem does not turn on exactly what the reason is.
Since we will often be interested in discussing not just individual non-derivative reasons but also collections of non-derivative reasons, we should introduce a device for representing these as well. We therefore use ℜ for a set of non-derivative reasons.
It will also turn out to be useful when we are giving some definitions below to have a function, Consequent, that takes a non-derivative reason and returns the thing that we have a non-derivative reason to do and similarly for sets of non-derivative reasons. So we define:
Consequent[!(α)] = α
Consequent[ℜ] = {x| ∃y∈ℜ and Consequent[y] = x}
Next, we must distinguish the undefeated non-derivative reasons from the non-derivative reasons.
To do this, let’s help ourselves to an ordering on non-derivative reasons ≤. We read !(α) ≤ !(β) as ‘there is a least as good of a non-derivative reason to α as there is to do β’. We assume ≤ is a reflexive relation in the sense that the following claim holds:
!(α) ≤ !(α)
and assume that ≤ is a transitive relation in the sense that the following claim holds:
if !(α) ≤ !(β) and !(β) ≤ !(γ), then !(α) ≤ !(γ)
Finally, since we have seen that it plausible to think that there are equally good conflicting reasons, we know that there can be situations where α is inconsistent with β, !(α) ≤ !(β), and !(β) ≤ !(α).
We can now define an operator Undefeated that takes us from a set of non-derivative reason to the subset of it that contains undefeated non-derivative reasons:
Undefeated≤(ℜ) = {x∈ℜ|there is no y∈ℜ such that (i) x < y and (ii) Consequent[x] is inconsistent with Consequent[y]}
In other words, a reason to do some act is defeated if there is a better reason to do some act that conflicts with it. And an undefeated reason is just a reason that is not defeated.Footnote 37 , Footnote 38
There are many simplifications involved in this formalism (see n. 36), but it is enough for our purpose. And our purpose, recall, is to develop an account on which non-derivative reasons explain derivative reasons and ‘ought’s by showing that they stand in an important logical relation to non-derivative reasons. What we still need to do is describe this logical relation.
To do this, we need the notion of a most inclusive collection of non-derivative reasons. We define this in terms a maximal consistent subset of a certain set as follows:
A is a maximal consistent subset of B iff (1) A ⊆ B, (2) A is consistent, and (3) it is not the case that there is a C such that C is consistent and A ⊂ C⊆B.
With this in hand, we can now define a relation | ~HNRE that we interpret as telling us how non-derivative reasons explain ‘ought’s.
This relation will hold between a collection of reasons of a certain weight and an ‘ought’ just in case the reasons explain the ‘ought’. Recall that a collection of reasons of a certain weight is formally represented by a pair 〈ℜ, ≤ 〉 and we can represent an ‘ought’ with the operator O. So we may define this relation as follows:
〈ℜ, ≤ 〉 | ~HNRE O(α) iff M ⊢α for every maximal consistent subset M of Consequent[Undefeated ≤(ℜ)]
where ⊢ is the logical consequence relation of ordinary propositional logic. And we can also define when when | ~HNRE holds between a pair 〈ℜ, ≤ 〉 and the claim ‘there is a reason for it to be the case that α’ which we write as R(α):
〈ℜ, ≤ 〉 | ~HNRE R(α) iff M ⊢ α for some maximal consistent subset M of Consequent[ℜ]
As I have defined it, R(α) is a claim about reasons derivative or otherwise. Having defined this notion, we may define a derivative reason as a reason that is not non-derivative. Formally this ends up looking like this:
〈ℜ, ≤ 〉 | ~HNRE DR(α) iff 〈ℜ, ≤ 〉 | ~HNRE R(α) and !(α)∉ℜ.
where DR(α) is read as ‘there is a derivative reason for it to be the case that α’.
Thus, my formal framework adapts Horty’s formal framework by thinking of the elements of ℜ as non-derivative reasons.Footnote 39 It is easy to use this framework to now formally verify each of the claims I made about the principles.
Here I will verify Single Reason Closure, Consistent Non-Derivative Reasons Agglomeration, and ‘Ought’s Entail Reasons. I leave it to the reader to perform the simple verification of other claims that she may be interested in:
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(1)
Formally, Single Reason Closure says that if 〈ℜ, ≤〉 | ~HNRE R(α) and {α} ⊢ β, then 〈ℜ, ≤〉 |~HNRE R(β). Suppose then 〈ℜ, ≤〉 |~HNRE R(α) and {α} ⊢ β. Since 〈ℜ, ≤〉 | ~HNRE R(α), there must be some maximal consistent subset M of Consequent[ℜ] such that M ⊢ α. Since ⊢ is a transitive relation and since {α} ⊢ β, M ⊢ β. Thus, 〈ℜ, ≤〉 | ~HNRE R(β).
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(2)
Formally, Consistent Non-Derivative Reasons Agglomeration says that if !(α)∈ℜ, !(β)∈ℜ, and {α, β} is consistent, 〈ℜ, ≤ 〉 | ~HNRE R(α ∧ β). Assume !(α)∈ℜ, !(β)∈ℜ, and {α, β} is consistent. There is then some maximal consistent subset M of Consequent[ℜ] such that {α, β} ⊆ M. Since {α, β} ⊢ α ∧ β and since ⊢ is monotonic, M ⊢ α ∧ β. Thus, 〈ℜ, ≤〉 | ~HNRE R(α ∧ β).
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(3)
Formally ‘Ought’s Entail Reasons says that if 〈ℜ, ≤〉 | ~HNRE O(α), then 〈ℜ, ≤〉 | ~HNRE R(α). So suppose 〈ℜ, ≤〉 | ~HNRE O(α). Consider some maximal consistent subset of Consequent[Undefeated ≤[ℜ]], M. By our supposition, M ⊢ α. By the definition of an Undefeated ≤, M ⊆ Consequent[ℜ] and M is consistent. So M is either a maximal consistent subset of Consequent[ℜ] or it isn’t. If it is, then we have 〈ℜ, ≤〉 | ~HNRE R(α) because M ⊢ α. If it is not, then by definition there is some maximal consistent subset of Consequent[ℜ], M’, such that M ⊆ M’. By the monotonicity of ⊢, it follows that M’ ⊢ α. So 〈ℜ, ≤〉 | ~HNRE R(α). Thus, 〈ℜ, ≤ 〉 | ~HNRE R(α).
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Nair, S. Conflicting reasons, unconflicting ‘ought’s. Philos Stud 173, 629–663 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-015-0511-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-015-0511-4