The de se route to justifying prime face claims

There is quite a lot of utility in distinguishing prime facie and pro tanto reasons for action. It sure seems to many of us that philosophical or meta-ethical good sense to articulate ethical claims (including, come to that, duties) in terms of reasons. But if that’s true, then at least on face value, it would seem natural to also suppose that the magnitude of a claim (or duty) should track the magnitude of a reason, all other things equal.

So, for example, there is just plumb good sense in understanding minimally good reasons for action as ones that have “squatter’s rights” (to borrow a phrase from Graham & Horgan, itself borrowed from Owen Flanagan). The idea here is that a normative “stickiness” is intrinsic to pro tanto claims, and such claims have a default hold upon us that has to be positively displaced by another claim before it can be dismissed or outweighed. This property is somehow lacking for prime facie ethical claims — or, anyway, those prime facie claims that are not also pro tanto ones. For instance, ‘gratitude’ does not readily apply at all to the strict interpretation of the trolley problem, so it can’t be said to have a normative ‘stickiness’ in that context. It does not have squatter’s rights, since it is not even squatting.

When thinking about what it is that the prime facie ethical claims are lacking, my first temptation is to assimilate the idea of apparent (prime facie) reasons for action to de se reasons, i.e., the sort that are entertained in rational, relativistic judgments. For there are such things as relativistic rational judgments (e.g., in art). Hence, apparently, Youtube McCray’s opinion that The Last Jedi is a bad film may be reason for McCray to boycott it. It just isn’t a proper reason to boycott it (de re), because it does not direct my action in the slightest. It is just a reason-for-McCray (de se).* The upshot of this analysis is that merely apparent reasons for action are minimally good reasons for you, but not minimally good for everyone else (pro tanto & de se == prime facie & de re).

Does it work? Well, it seems like a viable characterization of our duties of self-improvement, which are certainly part of the Big Seven Topics that Ross cared about. As I mentioned previously, this was a major point of contention for Ross in his description of his project. So there is a useful sense in talking about merely apparent reasons in ordinary talk, if only to capture the common denominator of the Big Seven.

Does it make sense to say that all of Ross’s prime facie claims are de se reasons? Here is one reason to think not: some people would like to say that such relativistic (de se) reasons are not distinctively ethical, in the sense of commanding shared rational attention of particular (virtue-leaning) kinds of people. For example, Hume’s obtuse man who refuses to scratch his finger to save the world: while this might be a case of someone who has a prime facie reason in some amoral sense, it is not a prime facie ethical claim. And since Ross is interested in the objective parts of the moral situation, one might think any talk of objectivity precludes reference to relativistic (de se) reasons, since they sound suspiciously like subjective features of a situation. So a critic might allege that this talk about apparent reasons is so ethically defective as to be indefensible. My first inclinations, then, are seemingly off base.

*No such person exists. I would have used the more obvious empty name, “Youtube McGee”, except that it doesn’t rhyme with “de se”.

A prime facie what?

On the heels of the previous post, I have been wondering about what it would really take to be a prime facie duty. Ideally, an account should make it clear whether or not Ross has correctly identified the nature and usefulness of the familiar Big Seven topics (beneficence, non-maleficence, fidelity, etc.) by choosing ‘prime facie‘ as a label. And it is not an embarrassing question, given that Ross’s original remarks from The Right and The Good are provisional and apology-laden, so surely invite friendly re-evaluation (even if it must be confessed that one is not breaking new ground in thinking through a text that is almost a century old).

In my previous post I alleged that there is such a thing as a prime facie reason that is not minimally good (pro tanto). Some reasons are not, as a matter of fact, good reasons — they only seem to be good under some description. This is a point I have explored in other blogging (here and here). Now the question is whether any of those prime facie reasons are helpful in expressing the grounds upon which one might make a claim of responsibility over actions and events (to take up Brandon’s suggestion), and in that sense be worthy of being called ‘prime facie duties’.

The first obstacle is that Ross himself did not believe that he was describing a set of duties at all. The product is not as advertised:

I suggest ‘prima facie duty’ or ‘conditional duty’ as a brief way of referring to the characteristic (quite distinct from that of being a duty proper) which an act has, in virtue of being of a certain kind (e.g. the keeping of a promise), of being an act which would be a duty proper if it were not at the same time of another kind which is morally significant. Whether an act is a duty proper or actual duty depends on all the morally significant kinds it is an instance of. The phrase ‘prima facie duty’ must be apologized for, since (1) it suggests that what we are speaking of is a certain kind of duty, whereas it is in fact not a duty, but something related in a special way to duty. Strictly speaking, we want not a phrase in which duty is qualified by an adjective, but a separate noun.

I think we are obliged to flagrantly ignore Ross’s secondary suggestion of ‘conditional duty’ as a synonym for ‘prime facie duty’. For, given that Ross is at great pains to walk around eggshells when it comes to description of the idea of a ‘duty’, the phrase sounds very much like it is describing the same thing as a hypothetical imperative. And the connotation has consequences. For if you (like Philippa Foot) think that all of morality is a system of hypothetical imperatives, then it’s going to be hard to distinguish between prime facie duties and minimally good (pro tanto) reasons for action. His intent, of course, was to say that these are duties in context, but not duties as such. That would make them hypothetical principles which fall short of being imperatives. But you can’t untie a knot by adding new ones, so let’s just put the matter aside.

For Ross, prime facie duties are not duties. This is, of course, a needlessly paradoxical way of speaking, but it has some traction in ordinary language. Consider, by analogy, the fact that we currently describe the solar system in terms of ‘dwarf planets’ (Pluto, Eres, The Goblin) and ‘planets’ (Earth, Mars, etc.), but our terminology is not very good, because strictly speaking a dwarf planet is not a species of planet, but rather is a near-miss case. If we kept our lexical house in order, we should be calling Pluto and friends something else entirely — a planetelle, planetilly, planetaine, or whatever. So long as a distinction is made between bodies which have ordinary and extraordinary orbits around the sun, the label is not important. Similarly, Ross is telling us that the “prime facie duties” are not really duties, but strictly speaking are near-miss cases of duties, and if we knew what was good for us we would call them something else — claims, topics, grounds, or whatever. So long as the idea of an ethically probative reason is retained, the label can be left to future lexical housekeeping.

Instead, it seems best to adopt the phrase ‘prime facie claim‘. This option is explicitly rejected by Ross because he thinks a “claim” strongly implies sociality, and hence fails to describe claims one might make upon oneself. To me, however, this seems like a bad lexical choice. It is better to prefer the artificial to the positively misleading. And anyway I find nothing at all unintuitive or odd about the idea that one may make claims of oneself. Perhaps conventions have changed; my sense is that many contemporary philosophers (e.g., Lon Fuller) are willing to say that there are self-directed or agentic duties. We proceed, however, on the assumption that nothing will be lost in the new usage except a little verbal confusion.

Topical duties and the force of reasons

Over at Siris (a great blog), Brandon has a nice post on Ross’s “prime facie” duties. I’ve been thinking about Rossian pluralism for the last little while, so it caught my attention. I agree with much of the post, but also think I have a minor philosophical (not scholarly) quarrel with it. I confess it is a little nitpicky — to the point where I would ordinarily have just posted it over there in the form of a question. However, I can’t comment over there without using Discus, and Discus is either incompatible with Firefox or is otherwise cranky, so I’ll have to post my thoughts here. I’m sorry / you’re welcome.

For the sake of context, here is a brief summary of the post. Broadly speaking, Brandon’s argument seems to have three aims. First, he offers a few observations about the inadequacies of the label of “prime facie” duty, suggesting that we are better-off calling these topical duties (deontic topoi). Second, he suggests that the character of the duties are best understood as the kinds of reasons that are relevant when we assume responsibility over actions and situations. And, third, he suggests that the nature of the inter-relations of the duties is best understood when viewed in the context of the humanitarian tradition, concerned with medicine, apparently as opposed to (e.g.) law.

I agree with his first point entirely, and I love the second point. I am inclined to disagree with the third point, because it seems to me that privileging one relevant responsibility-bearing context over another might lead us to miss out on the most promising features of Ross’s contextual pluralism. But I will the main issues aside. My concern for the moment is with a footnoted remark he makes related to the second thesis, where he explores the relationship between topical duties and reasons.

Before I make a deep dive into the discussion, I will interpret the Latin qualifiers in the following way. ‘Prime facie‘ (preferred spelling, sorry) means ‘on the face of it’, ‘pro tanto‘ means ‘minimally good’, and ‘prime ultima‘ means ‘peremptory’ or ‘decisive’.

Here is the footnote (reposted in its entirety to give you a sense of its context, bolding added):

People have argued that Ross should have used ‘pro tanto‘ rather than ‘prima facie‘, but I don’t think this is any sort of improvement. ‘Prima facie duties’ at least has the merit of suggesting that they are not necessarily duties, which thus far is at least not wrong; ‘pro tanto duties’ suggests that they are partial duties, which is certainly not right. Nor does it help to switch to ‘pro tanto reasons’, because (while they would certainly be more accurately called ‘reasons’ than ‘duties’), they are not ‘pro tanto‘ as reasons; they are just reasons. At least, if we call them ‘pro tanto‘ they aren’t so in any sense that they don’t share with most of the things we call ‘reasons’.

Here is how I understand what is happening in this paragraph. In the unbolded passage, Brandon considers the possibility that we should examine topical duties in terms of pro tanto duties, and then dismisses that possibility as untenable. Which is fair enough; after all, in some contexts, some topical duties (e.g., gratitude) are just not relevant to the moral features of the situation. Then, in the bolded passage, he considers the possibility that topical duties are pro tanto reasons, and dismisses that claim. Which is almost fine — since, like him, I doubt that topical duties are themselves minimally good (pro tanto) reasons for action. To be very clear, I essentially agree with both claims. Ross’s topical duties are not straightforwardly described as pro tanto reasons, nor can they be understood as pro tanto duties.

What I am concerned with is the reason he uses to dismiss the ‘pro tanto reasons’ reading — he claims that topical duties “are not ‘pro tanto’ as reasons; they are just reasons“. I am not sure what this amounts to. In particular, I am concerned with the contrast between minimally good (pro tanto) reasons and reasons as such. It is natural, as either a reading or a misreading, to think that this passage is telling us that there is no reason to believe that topical duties provide minimally good reasons for action, in any sense that does not apply to all talk to reasons. That is to say, all reasons are minimally good reasons, in some sense, so adding ‘pro tanto’ in front of the name is not any help. Hopefully that is an accurate characterization of what Brandon had in mind, here. Anyway, let’s assume it is. Is it true?

I think not. While it is true that all reasons are presented under the guise of being good reasons, that does not imply that all reasons are in fact minimally good, in any sense that is usually at issue in reasons-talk in ethical contexts. For some reasons only seem to be good, but dissolve under scrutiny, as the weight against them overwhelms (or subverts!) their initial, first-blush appeal. Those, and only those, are worth being called prime facie reasons or duties.

So, for an example of a prime facie reason, take Hume’s obtuse rational man, who says “Let the whole world burn, for the sake of a scratch of my finger”. The reason to avoid a finger-prick is presented as good, and intelligible enough to understand Hume’s point, but it is not minimally good. For, as I see it, when presented out of context, “scratching my finger” is bad, and so avoiding that is a minimally good reason for me to act in a certain way. But when that same event is presented in the context of saving the world, it is not a minimally good reason. For persons of conscience, there is no rational contest, no agonizing over the relative weight of mid-level principles, where ‘avoid pricking your finger’ plays the role of a defeated contestant. In that context, it is mere ephemera. We call it a reason for action only because we want to understand the obtuse rational man’s claim, which includes understanding what is wrong with it.

I suggest that this Humean example is only a prime facie reason; I do not suggest it is a prime facie duty. My aim here has only been to offer reason to doubt that most of our talk about reasons are also about pro tanto reasons.

Multi-Act Consequentialism?

I used to be a Mill-style utilitarian, and continue to admire many aspects of his moral philosophy. That said, the theory eventually seemed too logically messy for me to endorse. So I abandoned it maybe a little less than a decade ago.

I started to come back around to Millianism a few months ago after discovering Mendola’s (2006) “Multiple-act consequentialism” (MAC). Mendola points out that “act-consequentialism” usually refers only to individual actions, and makes no sense of group actions (or relegates such actions to the status of remoter effects). But once you admit that there are such things as group actions (as many now do), it follows that one and the same behavior can involve multiple actions: the one that proceeds the individual’s intention, and the ones that proceed from the group’s intentions. So a moral theory needs to have some kind of choice-procedure for weighing between the individual act and participation in the group.

But then you start to learn the details of Mendola’s choice-procedure. For Mendola, we might say that the right thing to do is to conform to group actions so long as the benefits of the group activity as a whole are greater than the individual benefits of defection. That is the theory.

Now suppose that you are a cop and discover corruption in your police department. Suppose also that if you rat on the corruption, you risk sending the department into chaos. Finally, suppose the status quo produces a lot of good — more good than would be achieved by defection alone. What do you do?

On first blush, MAC should ask us not to defect. But I do not see that as an especially compelling moral result. Not just because it is unintuitive, but because it violates an internally held conviction I have held for some time: when you’re in a no-win scenario, go with your integrity.

(To unpack that a little. If you’ve got any morals at all, you’ve got to try to make a better world — but along the way, you can’t undermine your capacity to choose to make a better world. This owes to the fact that there is no such thing as a ‘better world’ without people there to fight for it. Goodness is a property both ascribed and aspired, if it is anything at all.)

That is not to say that Mendola’s MAC cannot be defended. We might be engaged in still other group projects that might recommend snitching. Still, even if his choice-procedure did turn out to be a dud, I do like the idea of MAC. Though I am not for the moment sure that my parenthetical principles do it any justice.

Notes on J.J. Thomson’s “Normativity”

Reading Thomson’s ‘Normativity’. I have questions.

Consider the following statement:

[1.] I prefer watching ‘Game of Thrones’ over watching ‘Penny Dreadful’.

Many preferences originate in intuitions, and in that sense, begin their life as [1] or something like it. That’s fine, sort of, but there are better ways of talking about my preference. e.g.:

[2.] I prefer watching ‘Game of Thrones’ over watching ‘Penny Dreadful’, insofar as these are both good dark fantasy shows.

[3.] I prefer… insofar as these are the only good things on television right now.

[4.] I prefer… insofar as they are good dark fantasy shows considering what is on right now.

[5.] I prefer… insofar as their opening themes are good to dance to.

(Each of these involves a different kind of standard for evaluation, ranked roughly from least surprising to most surprising.) [2-5] are reflective preferences, not just intuited ones. Reflective preferences are different from intuited preferences because they are tagged with some evaluative standard by which one thing is to be ranked in relation to another. That standard is laid out after the phrase, ‘insofar as’. Which is more useful for a practical theory of decision-making, intuitive or reflective preferences? Well, taken on face value, the reflective references are more informative and in a sense more rational than [1].

But — not so fast: [2-5] are also potentially inconsistent with each other. So, e.g., maybe I dislike dark fantasy shows, but hate everything else on TV: in that case, [3] would be a false statement, but [2] and [4] would be true ones. And even if [2-4] were true, [5] could be false, just in case Penny Dreadful’s opening theme is actually better to dance to than Game of Thrones’s.

One way to resolve the question in favor of the reflective mode of articulating preferences is to say that each time you introduce a new standard of evaluation (i.e., whatever follows the “…insofar as…”), you’re actually making a brand new list, that is itself eventually broken down into intuited preferences. e.g.:

GOOD TO DANCE TO LIST

1. Penny Dreadful

2. Game of Thrones

3. Shakira

GOOD DARK FANTASY SHOWS

1. Game of Thrones

2. Penny Dreadful

3. True Blood

And then you can put these very lists on a global list of preferences that looks like this:

META-LIST

1. LIST OF GOOD DARK FANTASY SHOWS

2. LIST OF GOOD TO DANCE TO SHOWS

3. LIST OF USEFUL LIFE SKILLS

At that point, you will seemingly have given up on the intuited sense of [1], since Game of Thrones doesn’t just exist in some amorphous BETTER THAN relation to Penny Dreadful. Instead you’ll have replaced the intuited preference with something more rational and informative. Indeed, at this point, once we have all these standards of evaluation under our belt, it is tempting to say that [1] is not a rational claim about the state of my preferences at all. But that’s too quick, because [1] could just be an elliptical version of one of [2-5]. And so, one might say, it is only correct to say that [1] is not a rational claim about the state of my preferences at this point so long as there is there is no rational formula for picking out a more precise context of evaluation.

So, one might say that there is always a strict default context, in which we have to interpret sentences like [1] into their least surprising form, e.g., [2]. Will this work? I have my doubts. That is, intuitively, I doubt that charity alone will help us to identify some context-invariant mechanical *formula* that tells us what the most rational default interpretation should look like. I suspect that, at best, when confronted with intuitive preference-statements like [1], we only have *defeasible strategies for interpreting* it in terms of one or more of [2-5].

Moving on to (Chapter IV): “Suppose a person asks us, “Was St. Francis better than chocolate?” What can he mean? In what respect ‘better than’ does he mean to be asking whether St. Francis was better in that respect than chocolate? If he says, “No, no, what I am asking is not for a certain respect R whether St. Frances was better in respect R than chocolate. What I am asking is just whether St. Francis was (simply) better than chocolate,” then he hasn’t asked us any question, so it is no wonder we can’t answer it.” She suggests that there is a bifurcation between attributing simple superiority to something and attributing superiority in some respect.

I do not know why these are incompatible modes of evaluation. Saying that something is simply better than another thing does not seem to imply that there is no respect R in which an evaluation can be made. There are obviously salient respects in which one might compare the value of chocolate and St. Francis (say, when comparing the value of vulgar hedonism vs. asceticism). But when one says one is simply better than the other, they aren’t wiping these respects off the map, denying them up and down and sideways. Instead, it seems to imply that it is not rationally necessary to specify the respect R in the course of answering the question — that the respects are being left implicit and uncommitted. I think what she means to say is that it is meaningless to ask, “Is chocolate worse than St. Francis, given that there is no respect in which they might be compared?” But that’s kind of obvious.

Where does moral responsibility come from?

I am uncomfortable with the idea of moral responsibility. Not because I deny there is such a thing, or because I don’t know what it entails, but because I’m not sure where it comes from.

We might want to say that moral responsibility emerges naturally from the facts, and is not dependent upon our other moral convictions. So, moral responsibility is a kind of gloss on causal responsibility, which can itself be read off of the world, and which subsequently forms an indispensable part of a complete moral theory. If that were the case, we should expect non-confused convictions about the nature of responsibility to be relatively insensitive to the contents of normative moral doctrines. Evidence of its truth might be the fact (if it is a fact) that people really do think that responsibility has some important connection to agency, consciousness, and control.

Lately I have been teasing myself with another idea. Maybe the idea of moral responsibility plays no antecedent part in a moral theory at all — perhaps it is the output of such theories in practical application. If that were the case, we should expect our non-confused convictions about the nature of responsibility to be very sensitive to the contents of theory. Evidence of its truth might be the fact that utilitarians endorse a theory of responsibility that will be wildly at odds with a Williamsian theory of responsibility.

I suppose that another possibility is that the notion of responsibility is just a convention which contingently functions as an input to our moral theories, and which itself has no moral significance. That is a confused relativistic position that I find upsetting, but I suppose it’s possible.

On the idea that normative reasons are indistinguishable from their force

I think that the following claims have no practical normative force. i.e., regardless of the form of normative discourse (legal, moral, etc.) we have in mind, each of these claims are either paradoxical, or guilty of equivocation because their truth is strictly irrelevant to the project of guiding the actions of persons.

a) “The asylum inmate is responsible for what he did.”
b) “My personal reasons for acting are never minimally good reasons for action.”
c) “There is a pretty useful short-cut, but you should ignore it if you’re trying to get there quickest.”
d) “You shouldn’t put anti-septic on your wound, just because that feels bad.”
e) “The doctor probably knows what’s best for me, but that’s no reason at all to follow their advice.”
f) “The fact that state terrorism is a horrible thing has no bearing on whether or not we ought to endorse it.”
g) “There is never any difference between blameworthiness and responsibility.”

Notably, none of these claims are absurd — that is, none of them are straightforwardly incoherent or nonsensical. Rather, it seems to me that they are only false or irrelevant on reflection.

Of course, they are problematic in their own ways: on my reading, (a) denies that practical responsibility involves epistemic responsibility, (b) alienates the agent from their own rational agency, (c) is imprudent, (d) confuses feelings for reasons, (e) is mindlessly anti-deferential, (f) takes an oddly ironic stance towards what matters, and (g) fails to recognize that individual capacities for practical action are almost never at their peak. They are all false, or fallacious, by some standard or other. Hence, they lack normative force.

That said. It seems reasonable to expect that for more of these defects that a claim about practical action has, the more it will seem absurd or internally incoherent. i.e., like contradictions. And if that were the case, then it should tell us something about how the truth-conditions of practical normative claims have an important connection to their reason-giving force. That, in other words, the semantics of a claim is intimately connected with its practical effects.

I put this forward as a line of inquiry, a speculation. Whether it is true or not will have to wait for another occasion.

The conditions for moral objectivity

If there are genuine moral truths, then they are objective truths. But this is not very interesting, because all it amounts to saying is that there is an appropriate moral authority out there who says this thing that must be done.

The harder question is what to say about the rational constraints that produce the authority in the first place. Are these king-making features that ground moral authority “objective”?

Well… sort of. The funny thing about moral authority is that it gets lost when it stops being worthwhile. This is in apparent contrast to legal authority, which arguably continues onward beyond the point where it has stopped being worthwhile. Still, these are matters of degree, not of kind — morality is relatively more sensitive to the idea of worthiness than law, but both do care.

So the right thing to do is to ask, not whether or not the claims are true or false, but instead: when is the authority *earned*? Some practices will be geared towards the achievement of goals (“technology-like”), others will be more geared towards maintaining expectations (“convention-like”), and some are geared towards the expression of lived experience (“art-like”). Morality qua morality is a kind of social technology, whose central point is to get things done by telling us who has the best advice on how to get on with things. In contrast, law qua law is a set of conventional verdicts, whose central point is to keep things going as they’ve been going.

If moral authority were earned only as a means towards the expression of lived experience, then the grounds of moral authority would turn out to be subjective, in the relevant sense. In those conditions, some kind of error theory would be best to hold. But I am inclined to believe that error theory is a mistake, so I won’t be saying that.

“Ought implies can, if ought implies must”

Here is an argument. If ought implies can, then cannot implies not ought. Not ought implies either permission or ought not. But permission implies can, since one cannot permit what is impossible. So cannot implies ought not. If can is a descriptive term, then this shows how to derive an ought from an is.

[Update from August 21]

Wesley Buckwalter brought it to my attention that, actually, very few subjects will agree that moral ought implies moral can. This appears to be reason to dispute the argument above.

I think part of my conviction that ‘ought implies can’ has been undermined in part because there is an ambiguity to the word ‘ought’. It seems to me that ‘ought’ implies either ‘should’ or ‘must’. While ‘should’ only implies ‘sometimes can’, ‘must’ implies ‘can’ in some broader sense. And the moralist tends to be more interested in imperative-like statements (e.g., musts over shoulds).

A dialogue on error theory

I wrote this imaginary dialogue between an error theorist and someone who endorses the idea that there are moral truths. Take a look, if you’re interested.