Abstract
The metaethical subjectivist claims that there is nothing more to a moral disagreement than a conflict in the desires of the parties involved. Recently, David Enoch has argued that metaethical subjectivism has unacceptable ethical implications. If the subjectivist is right about moral disagreement, then it follows, according to Enoch, that we cannot stand our ground in moral disagreements without violating the demands of impartiality. For being impartial, we’re told, involves being willing to compromise in conflicts that are merely due to competing desires—the parties to such conflicts should decide what to do on the basis of a coin flip. I suggest that Enoch is mistaken in his conception of what it means to be impartial. Once impartiality is properly construed, standing one’s ground in desire-based conflicts, whether or not moral values are at stake in the conflict, is consistent with being impartial. I defend a view on which impartiality can be understood in terms of features of our desiring attitudes. An agent acts impartially in desire-based conflicts whenever she is motivated by a final (i.e. non-instrumental) desire that aims at promoting the wellbeing of persons in a way that is insensitive to the identities of persons and their morally arbitrary features like their gender or skin color. Based on the account, I explain where Enoch’s discussion of the argument goes wrong, as well as why responses to the argument from Enoch’s critics have so far missed the mark.
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Notes
While the argument is principally intended as a reductio of subjectivism, Enoch suggests that it easily generalizes to threaten even the expressivist. My response on behalf of the subjectivist is one the expressivist can also help herself to.
On the significance of first-order challenges to meta-ethical views, see Sect. 1.3.
Although Fantl (2006, p. 30) does not put the point in terms of impartiality, he argues that given the subjectivist’s meta-ethical beliefs, her participation in our ordinary (presumably justified) practice of interfering violently when persons intend to cause great suffering seems morally inappropriate.
The objections to my view that I consider towards the end of the discussion allow me to comment on the relationship between morality and the good in acting impartially as well as on the general relevance of an agent’s meta-ethical beliefs to the moral evaluation of her practical attitudes.
Later I will suggest that 4a is correct for the most part. That is, there may be special cases of desire-based conflict where we should all agree (realists and subjectivists alike) that we ought not to be impartial (See Sect. 1.4). Indeed, Enoch recognizes that the principle is one that need not hold without exception. All he needs is for the principle to hold often enough to make trouble for the subjectivist.
We will return, in Sect. 1.4, to the purported virtues of an account of impartiality specified in terms of belief in response-independent truth.
Throughout the remainder of the discussion I will use ‘impartial’ to refer to the quality of an act or person that the relevant moral considerations in fact favor; the quality that Enoch’s principle purports to capture. I will use Impartial to express Enoch’s stipulated meaning.
A single state of affairs can be desired under different descriptions, and I know of no argument that shows that when I finally desire some outcome, I must finally desire it under every possible description.
A fact can causally explain why the agent acted without being the agent’s reason for acting in the sense at issue.
Admittedly, the view of an agent’s reasons being presupposed here is not entirely uncontroversial. But as far as I can tell, the presupposition is dialectically fair. Notably, Enoch is happy to regard an agent’s reasons (unlike normative reasons) as ordinary features of actions and states of affairs: “The reasons for which we act—that it contains vitamin C, that she needs help, that he’s charming, that it’s so expensive, that I really want to—these can be perfectly ordinary, naturalistically respectable things” (2011, p. 219).
In fact, the subjectivist might say a good deal more about what is involved in a consideration striking one is practically relevant (or, in other words, it seeming to one that the consideration is relevant). It involves experiencing a desire with a particular aim and, perhaps, forming appropriate beliefs about one’s desire. To judge that the fact that ϕ-ing promotes states of affairs with feature F is a reason to ϕ is to judge that one desires to realize states of affairs with feature F. For further discussion on this point, see footnotes 13 and 14.
Although the details of the subjectivist’s view are not entirely relevant, here is what I think she can say. Sometimes the agent can be mistaken about her reasons in the sense that the considerations that strike her as relevant do not in fact motivate her. It might seem to me that the fact that ϕ-ing maximizes happiness is a reason to ϕ, when in fact I only ϕ because it promotes my own interests (my motivating desire to ϕ finally aims at my own happiness). Nevertheless, for it to seem to the agent that F is a reason to ϕ, the agent must, at the very least, be in a state that seems, phenomenologically, like a motivating desire state with the appropriate content. As far as I can tell, nothing in Enoch’s argument rules out the subjectivist’s commitment to such theses.
The focus on such cases is reasonable because, as I go on to suggest, her reasons are relevant to her impartiality only insofar as they are indicative of what motivates her.
I say partly because it is not enough to be considered impartial to not take self-regarding considerations as ones reasons. For one might still be motivated by self-regarding final desires. In fact, on the view I am proposing the agent’s impartiality is essentially determined by the content of the final desires that motivate her, and insofar as the agent’s reasons are relevant at all it is because the considerations she takes as practically significant are (generally) indicative of what motivates her. Even the falsidical state of being mistaken about one’s reasons (in the sense that the considerations one regards as relevant are not what motivate one) might reveal something about the agent’s motivational set. This is because, as I understand the falsidical state, it is due to the agent’s being in a non-motivating desire or ‘desire-like’ state. Roughly, for it to seem to an agent that the fact that ϕ-ing will promote states of affairs with feature F is her reason to ϕ, she should experience a state that is phenomenologically a lot like a motivating desire for states of affairs with feature F. Ideally, an agent’s desires (whether or not they motivate her) should not be in any way self-regarding; and impartiality may be, on the view I am proposing, a matter of degree—in particular, the degree to which an agent’s motivational states are at all self-regarding. These finer details of the view I have kept out of the main discussion because they are not essential to countering Enoch’s argument. They might be useful, however, in explaining why one might have the intuition that an agent’s reasons bear on her impartiality. An agent’s reasons have a kind of derivative (evidential) significance and only because of the significance of her actual desires—a fact that should become vivid once the overall conception of impartiality is fully fleshed out.
Of course, a less caricatured subjectivist might give a richer account of the ‘taking’ state, but I am embracing the caricature for purposes of the argument.
Schroeder states the view in terms of normative reasons. The view is that anything involved in the explanation of what makes it the case that something is a normative reason is itself part of the reason. I have deliberately eschewed talk of normative reasons to avoid giving the impression that my response on behalf of the subjectivist illicitly relies on robustly realistic meta-ethical commitments. Of course, the subjectivist is entitled to speak in terms of normative reasons. I suspect that the response being offered is more illuminating when put in terms of desires and the agent’s reasons.
“We are no more inclined to think that the deliberating agent always considers his desire-states than we are to imagine that he always considers his states of belief. In deliberating, and more generally in inference, the agent will consider alleged facts such as that p or that q without considering the fact about himself, if it is a fact, that he believes that p or that q. He may take cognizance of the fact that he has this or that passion or yen or hankering. But such self-concern seems to be the exception, not the rule.” Smith and Pettit (1990). See also Enoch (2011, p. 221).
Smith and Pettit (1990) sometimes seem to suggest that it suffices for an agent’s desire to be part of her reasons (in their terms: ‘deliberatively foregrounded’) for the desire to be phenomenologically salient during deliberation. On my view, this is not the case. For the desire to be part of her reason, the agent must think something like ‘ϕ-ing has the property of promising to satisfy my desire to ϕ, so I should ϕ’.
Which features count as morally arbitrary will, of course, depend on the correct moral theory.
I do not mean to suggest that the impartial perspective has to be cashed out in terms of desires that aim at wellbeing promotion. The characterization in terms of wellbeing promotion is largely illustrative, as I go on to explain.
Pure desire-satisfaction theories of wellbeing are being ruled out for being overly reductive. There are well-known objections to these theories that I need not discuss here.
A further clarification: like Enoch’s principle, the one on offer holds for the most part. I explain in Sect. 1.4 that there may be special cases of desire-based conflict where we should all agree that one ought not to be impartial.
Here is Enoch’s principle for reference: “In an interpersonal conflict, we should step back from our mere preferences, or feelings, or attitudes, or some such, and to the extent the conflict is due to those, an impartial, egalitarian solution is called for. Furthermore, each party to the conflict should acknowledge as much: Standing one’s ground is, in such cases, morally wrong”.
If I were to decide to conciliate, perhaps because I prioritize respecting personal autonomy over promoting happiness, I would qualify as impartial so long as my final desires remain identity-independent and non-arbitrary.
In a review of Taking Morality Seriously, Sepielli (2012) argues, in a similar vein, that the subjectivist should explain why standing one’s ground in such a case does not offend against impartiality by appeal to the intuition that some tastes are simply offensive and so do not warrant our concern. Enoch might reasonably ask why we shouldn’t think that in disregarding the torturer’s tastes the subjectivist is simply revealing her partiality towards herself and her own preferences. In my terms, the disregard of offensive tastes may reflect a side-constraint on the promotion of wellbeing. So long as the subjectivist’s refusal to take offensive tastes into account does not reflect bias or prejudice towards particular persons or sensitivity to arbitrary features—that is to say, so long as she finally desires outcomes under identity-independent, non-arbitrary descriptions—her conduct qualifies as impartial. See the discussion in Sect.1.4 for additional objections Enoch might raise against such a view and how they might be answered.
I am not entirely sure about the degree to which the subjectivist, in light of her meta-ethical beliefs, may be psychologically prone to what Mark Johnston (2001) describes as the “pornographic attitude,” one involving a “change of attentive focus from the appeal of other things and other people to their agreeable effects on us.” I discuss the relevance of this issue briefly at the end of Sect. 1.4.
For a general discussion of the relationship between motivational silencing and virtuous action, see McDowell (1998).
An alternative way of characterizing the impartial agent’s final desires may be in terms of outcomes that are familiarly regarded as morally good and are consistent with the identity-independence and non-arbitrariness conditions. I discuss alternative characterizations in Sect. 1.4.
In other words, the subjectivist needs to deny the parity thesis—that all preferences/desires are “on a par” (p. 27).
Indeed, the subjectivist is granted, if only for the sake of argument, use of ordinary normative vocabulary. She is allowed to say things like ‘A is inherently better than B’ or that ‘A ought to be preferred to B.’ Of course, the subjectivist has a precise understanding of what such claims amount to—namely, that they involve the self-attribution of preferences or desires. For example, the claim that preferring A is inherently better than preferring B simply amounts to the self-attribution of a higher-order non-instrumental preference: ‘I finally prefer preferring A to preferring B.’ Enoch’s line of attack involves questioning the plausibility of the subjectivist’s normative explanation quite apart from her meta-ethical commitments. The approach is dialectically fair and we should embrace it.
A realist might insist that the relevant aspect of my deliberation, as far as my impartiality is concerned, is that it is guided by some belief about the response-independent moral truth about what we ought to do. I argue against this proposal in Sect. 1.4.
Similar problems beset other responses on behalf of the subjectivist discussed by Enoch; e.g. the responses he attributes to Stephen Finlay and Ronald Dworkin (fn. 310). Both are implausible because they locate the normative difference maker in a feature of the moral case that seems largely irrelevant (how deeply rooted moral desires are, in the case of Dworkin, and their strength, in Finlay’s case). For a related response that attempts to distinguish cases based on how ‘well-informed’ the preferences happen to be and Enoch’s discussion of it, see Enoch (2014).
In saying that her first-order desires reflect an impartial attitude, we need not be attributing fundamental better-making features to her motivational states that militate in favor of giving them added weight in the decision making calculus. In fact, her rival’s desires may be just as impartial, on the present definition. It is not as though the fact that her first-order desires—desires, say, to prevent the torturer from harming persons—reflect her impartiality counts as a further reason for her to act on them on top of such favoring considerations as the fact that by acting on them she might be helping those in most need.
The response I have offered is thus one that even a caricatured subjectivist can sign on to. The subjectivist can grant, if only for the sake of argument, that insofar as essentially psychological facts about the preferrings of the parties involved in a disagreement have any inherent normative significance for how one should behave, all preferrings count equally regardless of content. In that precise sense, the preferences, construed as psychological phenomena, are indeed “on a par,” and to be given equal weight (if any) in deciding how to act. Accepting the parity thesis so construed does not mean that the subjectivist cannot impartially act on her own preference for morally good outcomes in cases of disagreement.
Note that it would be unrealistic to suppose that I might be acting out of an identity-independent desire to act consistently with morality’s demands. Acting out of a sense of moral duty instead of affection for one’s child may even be inappropriate in a case like this: see Williams (1981, p. 18). Thus, even if we, suppose, with the realist, that we act impartially whenever we aim to act in conformity with the objective truths about morality, it would not allow us to say that I behave impartially in saving my child from drowning, supposing that my impartiality (or lack thereof) is a function of my actual motivations.
Even his principle demanding that we compromise during desire-based conflicts was supposed to hold for the most part and not in every case. See discussion in Sect. 1.1.
Relatedly, the realist might suggest that that my account of impartiality only seems plausible if we suppose that there is a response-independent fact of the matter about whether we should promote wellbeing in a manner that is non-arbitrary and identity-independent. Perhaps once it is made clear that, according to the subjectivist, wellbeing is just a condition of persons that the morally steadfast happen to have a strong preference for promoting, it seems less than plausible that acting on such a preference, when others prefer differently, suffices for acting impartially.
It remains true that, for the subjectivist, taking some feature of a situation to be normatively significant or good simply amounts to having a desire to promote it (or some such), but that should not detract from the point.
Although the claim is rarely defended explicitly, its proponents sometimes appeal to, on the one hand, an alleged first-order normative principle that states something like ‘if morality is response-dependent, then anything goes,’ and, on the other, a psychological claim that ‘if anything goes’ then we are more likely to be selfish than other-regarding. Kit Fine (2001) attributes a principle of this kind to Ronald Dworkin. Jonas Olson (2010) thinks that something like the principle is ordinarily assumed and underlies a widely-felt discomfort about expressivism. For discussions of the worry that a denial of moral objectivity entails giving up on our moral commitments, see Smith (1989) and Foot (1978, p. 167).
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Acknowledgments
Special thanks to David Enoch, Erin Miller, and Sarah McGrath for their feedback on earlier versions of the paper and for pushing me with hard objections. Thanks, also, to Johann Frick, Elizabeth Harman, Eric Hubble, Sebastian Koehler, Michael Smith, and Nat Tabris for their comments.
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Atiq, E.H. How to be impartial as a subjectivist. Philos Stud 173, 757–779 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-015-0518-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-015-0518-x