Abstract
In this paper we discuss Pettit’s attempt to prove the compatibility of consequentialism with common moral psychology. By specifying how moral agents should deliberate, Pettit’s indirect consequentialism allegedly saves pure consequentialism from becoming revisionary or self-effacing. After discussing various possibilities of understanding his model of moral deliberation, we object that indirect consequentialism cannot meet both challenges at once. If it does not turn into a self-effacing theory, it still runs counter to common moral psychology. Ultimately, we suggest that the aspiration to stay true to ordinary moral psychology gives moral philosophers a reason to abandon strict value neutrality.
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Notes
- 1.
Admittedly, Pettit does not claim to incontrovertibly prove the “inescapability of consequentialism”. Rather, he ultimately suggests that the political need for consequentialist deliberation and the desirability of theoretical unity in practical philosophy give us good reason to accept consequentialism in the domain of private morality, too. Since we do not want to engage in a metaphilosophical debate on different theory ideals in philosophy here, our main aspiration in this paper is to indicate that the price for theoretical unity is higher than Pettit suggests.
- 2.
Assigning relative value to friendship is thus different from recognizing friendship as a reflexive value. The former gives me a reason to promote the well-being of a friend of mine, the latter gives me a reason to promote instances of friendship. See Pettit (2012, 48).
- 3.
Naturally, a moral philosopher going in this direction faces a lot of different challenges, but that is beyond our main focus in this article.
- 4.
More precisely, one could, again, distinguish between three different ways of making pure consequentialism compatible with the moral-psychological facts (Scheffler 1992, 17 ff.). A pure consequentialist could, firstly, narrow the scope of his moral theory and, thus, exempt certain areas of human action from the demands of his theory. Secondly, he could challenge the authority of morality and so concede that it is sometimes rational for people to ignore the demands of morality. Or he could, thirdly, qualify the way moral considerations must enter into the deliberation of moral agents. In this paper, we will not discuss all three possible options and instead concentrate our discussion on Pettit’s answer to the moral-psychological objection.
- 5.
See also Pettit (CP, 161): “Any decent moral theory must enable defenders to sustain the ordinary sort of moral psychology described […].”
- 6.
As indicated before, Pettit attempts to counter the moral-psychological objection by specifying the mode of deliberation his theory calls for. With this move, he especially wards off an objection that has, since Bernard Williams, become popular under the catchphrase “one thought too many” (Williams 1981, 18). While Williams’s famous critique seems to rest on the presupposition that a consequentialist must hold the moral norm to be the “motivating thought” (ibid.) of an agent, Pettit’s theory explicitly curbs the deliberative role of moral considerations by limiting direct consequentialist deliberation to morally alarming situations.
- 7.
Of course, the causal origin of an action is not morally relevant in itself. It is only morally relevant insofar as the causal origin reflects certain behavioral patterns that are relevant to the promotion of the neutral good.
- 8.
Pettit explicitly builds indirection into his account of consequentialism to answer this challenge. See Pettit (2012, 45): “Does it amount to the sort of self-effacing consequentialism in which the agent eliminates the possibility of deliberating over consequences (Parfit 1984)? No, because I offload only active control, not control period.”
- 9.
As part of her critique of “moral sainthood” Susan Wolf (1982, 429) raises a related objection against consequentialist theories, claiming that a “limited and carefully monitored allotment of time to be devoted to the pursuit of nonmoral interests […] would make a person a better contributor to the general welfare.” Although her critique deviates from our argument in some respects, Wolf also emphasizes that “the need to monitor will restrict not only the extent but also the quality of one’s attachment to these interests and traits” (ibid.).
- 10.
To be sure, this thesis does not commit us to the normative claim that non-consequentialist reasons should be privileged or cannot be outweighed by consequentialist reasons.
- 11.
Jonathan Dancy (1993, 236) poses a dilemma of this sort to consequentialism: “There is an awkward dilemma here. The first horn is one in which the admission of the agent-relative is a mere sham or pretence, because the way in which we are allowed to find value in love and friendship is not one which fits any value that those states actually have […]. On the second horn we allow that there really is the sort of value that we find in those states of partiality, at the cost of preventing ourselves from reasserting the dependence of such value on neutral value.”
References
Dancy, J. 1993. Moral reasons. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Pettit, P. 2012. The inescapability of consequentialism. In Luck, value and commitment: Themes from the ethics of Bernard Williams, ed. U. Heuer and G. Lang, 41–70. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Scheffler, S. 1992. Human morality. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Williams, B. 1981. Persons, character and morality. In Moral luck, ed. B. Williams, 1–19. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wolf, S. 1982. Moral saints. The Journal of Philosophy 79: 419–439.
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Blundell, A.M., Derpmann, S., Schnieder, K., Geese, R. (2016). Indirect Consequentialism and Moral Psychology. In: Derpmann, S., Schweikard, D. (eds) Philip Pettit: Five Themes from his Work. Münster Lectures in Philosophy, vol 1. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-26103-4_8
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