Abstract
Deontic buck-passing aims to analyse deontic properties of acts in terms of reasons. Many authors accept deontic buck-passing, but only few have discussed how to understand the relation between reasons and deontic properties exactly. Justin Snedegar has suggested understanding deontic properties of acts in terms of both reasons and reasons to require: A is required to φ iff (1) A has most reason to φ, and (2) there is most reason to require A to φ. This promising proposal faces two open questions: the question of why there can only be most reason to require A to φ if A has most reason to φ, and the question of what role agent-relative reasons play in generating requirements. In this paper, I address these questions and argue that the key to answering them is to reject evaluative buck-passing and accept a value-based theory of practical reasons instead. The result is a two-level theory of moral explanation: on the first level, practical reasons are explained in terms of appropriate responses to value; on the second level, deontic properties of acts are explained in terms of reasons: reasons to act as well as reasons to require.
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Notes
For a different argument that deontic buck-passing is more plausible than evaluative buck-passing see Dancy (2000).
In what follows, I will use the term (moral) “requirements” as synonymous with (moral) duties. My usage of the term therefore differs from John Broome’s in his seminal work on normative requirements. Broome understands a normative requirement as a relation that should be distinguished from the reason relation as well as the ought relation (Broome 1999). I agree that requirements should be distinguished from reasons and oughts, but in my view, requirements entail oughts. Broome denies this.
This seems to be the view of Philip Pettit (2015: 205).
Are all moral duties directed in this way? I tend to think that they are, but this is a controversial claim, and I do not have the space to defend it here. However, even if not all moral duties are directed, many of them are, and the straightforward view has problems with this important subset of moral requirements.
I will return to this point below, as it is slightly more complicated.
Some readers might find talking of reasons to require odd since nobody does the actual requiring. However, the view does not presuppose agents who actually do the requiring. Reasons to require can also be understood along the lines of moral principles that parties agree upon in contractualist accounts of morality. Just as, say, the Rawlsian principles of justice hold even if nobody actually agreed upon them, there can be reasons to require even if nobody actually does the requiring.
I cannot provide a full defense of RRR here. Rather, I will assume that it is a promising approach and discuss how to best formulate the view. For a more detailed defense of RRR, see Snedegar (2016).
I do not claim that Hurka would accept everything that I am about to say. However, the view developed here has been inspired by his work.
Note that, even though this formulation includes the notion of appropriateness, it is a value-based account of practical reasons, not a fittingness-first approach as defended by Yetter Chappel (2012) or McHugh and Way (2016). The idea is that the appropriateness of a response to a valuable entity is determined by the valuable entity and needs to be explained by the value of the entity. It is not normative bedrock. In other words: according to my view, the value of the entity determines the appropriateness of the response, whereas fittingness-first approaches hold that the appropriateness of the response determines the value of the object. I thank an anonymous referee for pressing me on this point.
For example, it might be that it is an appropriate response to the value of a person to befriend her, but it is not an appropriate response to the value of a person to require others to befriend her. It is more difficult to come up with an example where it is an appropriate response to some entity E to require a person to φ, whereas it is not an appropriate response to E to φ. The important point, however, is that there is simply no guarantee that, whenever it is an appropriate response to E to require an agent to φ, it is also an appropriate response to E to φ. Even if it is difficult to come up with a counterexample, this does not show that there are the necessary conceptual connections between reasons to φ and reasons to require to φ for RRR to work.
The same problem emerges for an alternative view according to which reasons to require to φ are appropriate responses to the value of requiring an agent to φ.
An anonymous referee has pointed out to me that this appeal to enablers is available to everyone interested in the connection between reasons to φ and reasons to require to φ and does not require the recursive account. This is true, and what I am about to say should therefore be interesting for proponents of alternative approaches as well. However, for reasons given above, I think that we should also accept the recursive theory. Even if an alternative view can explain conceptual connections between reasons to φ and reasons to require to φ by appealing to enablers, it cannot account for the intuitively plausible idea that reasons to require must have something to do with the value of the φ-ing, and it cannot account for the plausible view about the relative strengths of the reasons to φ and the reasons to require to φ.
I rely here on an intuitive notion of the action-guidance of moral duties. As an anonymous referee has pointed out to me, this might not be entirely unproblematic, because it is often unclear how to determine when some reason, requirement, or ought is action-guiding in the relevant sense. I cannot address the question of a proper understanding of the action-guidance of moral duties here, but I hope to do so in future research.
An anonymous referee has objected that the argument from action-guidance only supports that the agent having most reason to φ is an enabler for the normative status of the agent being required to φ to hold, but not necessarily that there would be any troubling conflict between an agent having most reason to φ and some other agent having most reason to ψ, even if ψ-ing consists in requiring the first agent to do something other than φ-ing. I do not think that this is a problem for the account suggested here. Either the other agent’s ψ-ing has the normative upshot that the first agent is required to ψ, or it doesn’t. If it does, then the argument does show that the agent having most reason to φ is an enabler for the other agent to ψ (where ψ-ing means requiring the first agent to do something else than φ-ing), since the other agent’s ψ-ing would lead to conflicting overall judgements. If the other agent’s ψ-ing does not lead to the first agent being required to ψ, then there might be no troubling conflict between the first agent having most reason to φ and the second agent having most reason to ψ—this is true. But this would not be problematic for the view put forward here, since it would support the claim that reasons to require to ψ are not sufficient for the normative status of being required to ψ to hold.
I thank an anonymous referee for encouraging me to discuss the difference between my proposal and the one that Snedegar discusses.
I take this to be an advantage of the view proposed here, because, as Snedegar himself points out, the conceptual claim might be difficult to defend.
This leads to the question how to cash out the notion of appropriateness. The notion of appropriateness denotes a relation between a valuable entity and an action, and this relation holds by providing reasons for the action. However, the notion of appropriateness itself is not to be cashed out in terms of reasons. Rather than saying that φ-ing is appropriate if and because there is reason to φ, the idea is that there is reason to φ if and because φ-ing would be appropriate. The appropriateness of the requiring therefore does not depend on there being reasons to require, otherwise my proposal would not be very illuminating. But neither is appropriateness a primitive notion: it is possible to explain the appropriateness of a response with reference to the valuable entity. In this case, the value in question is the agent’s φ-ing; and since φ-ing is an action, and actions are done for reasons, agents must be capable of acting on their reasons, and verdicts about reasons must thus be action-guiding. And again, if the agent would be required to φ, but ought to ψ, then this action-guidance would be lost. In this sense, it would be inappropriate to require somebody to do something that she ought not to do. I thank an anonymous referee for pressing me on this point.
More work needs to be done here. For example, third parties have a greater standing to blame an agent who has violated a deontological restriction than to blame an agent who has failed to fulfil an associative duty. I do not have the space to provide a full explanation of this difference here, but I am optimistic that this can be done: presumably the explanation will refer to the fact that deontological restrictions structure the relations between all members of the moral community, whereas relationship-dependent reasons do not. A’s violation of a deontological restriction therefore affects every member of the moral community, and all members of the moral community have a reason to hold A accountable.
For the idea of a two-level theory of moral explanation with a different focus see Maguire (2016).
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Acknowledgements
Funding was supported by Schweizerischer Nationalfonds zur Förderung der Wissenschaftlichen Forschung (Grant No. PP00P1_176703). For helpful discussion and feedback, I am grateful to Monika Betzler, Julian Nida-Rümelin, Justin Snedegar, Ralph Wedgwood, Atay Kozlovski, Erasmus Mayr, Gerhard Ernst, as well as audiences at LMU Munich and Kloster Rohr, and two very helpful referees.
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Löschke, J. Reasons to act, reasons to require, and the two-level theory of moral explanation. Philos Stud 178, 169–185 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-020-01426-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-020-01426-x