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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 April 2014
According to act-consequentialism the right action is the one that produces the best results as judged from an impersonal perspective. Some claim that this requirement is unreasonably demanding and therefore consequentialism is unacceptable as a moral theory. The article breaks with dominant trends in discussing this so-called Overdemandingness Objection. Instead of focusing on theoretical responses, it empirically investigates whether there exists a widely shared intuition that consequentialist demands are unreasonable. This discussion takes the form of examining what people think about the normative significance of consequentialist requirements. In two experiments, the article finds that although people are sensitive to consequentialist requirements and, on average, find more extreme demands less reasonable, the level of disagreement with consequentialism falls short of qualifying as a widely shared intuition, even when demands are the highest. The article then ends with a general discussion of possible objections to its methods and its findings.
1 OD is one of those charges that are most clearly stated by those who oppose it. For an early statement see Sidgwick, Henry, The Methods of Ethics, 7th edn. (London, 1907), p. 87Google Scholar; for a recent statement see Cullity, Garrett, The Moral Demand of Affluence (Oxford, 2004), ch. 1CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For further references see Hooker, Brad, ‘The Demandingness Objection’, The Problem of Moral Demandingness: New Philosophical Essays, ed. Chappell, T. (London, 2009), pp. 148–63, at p. 162 n. 4Google Scholar, and Alan Carter, ‘Is Utilitarian Morality Necessarily too Demanding?’, The Problem of Moral Demandingness, pp. 163–85, as well as the works to be cited in the next section.
2 A similar presentation of OD can be found in Mulgan, Tim, The Demands of Consequentialism (Oxford, 2001), p. 24Google Scholar and in his Understanding Utilitarianism (Stocksfield, 2007), p. 99.
3 The first approach is critically discussed in Mulgan, The Demands of Consequentialism. Influential examples of the second approach include Scheffler, Samuel, The Rejection of Consequentialism, rev. edn. (Oxford, 1994)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Slote, Michael, ‘Satisficing Consequentialism’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume, 58 (1984), pp. 139–63CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
4 See e.g. Singer, Peter, ‘Famine, Affluence and Morality’, Philosophy and Public Affairs 1 (1972), pp. 229–43Google Scholar; Kagan, Shelly, The Limits of Morality (Oxford, 1989)Google Scholar, and Sobel, David, ‘The Impotence of the Demandingness Objection’, Philosophers’ Imprint 7 (2007), pp. 1–17Google Scholar.
5 The recent position of scalar-consequentialism opts for the first alternative. See Norcross, Alastair, ‘Reasons without Demands: Rethinking Rightness’, Contemporary Debates in Moral Theory, ed. Dreier, J. (Oxford, 2006), pp. 38–53Google Scholar. The second alternative is less controversial, and several consequentialists have held it. Note, though, that the position of moral rationalism holds that this is conceptually not possible; see Portmore, Douglas W., Commonsense Consequentialism: Wherein Morality Meets Rationality (Oxford, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar for this claim. See also Bykvist, Krister, Understanding Utilitarianism (London, 2010), pp. 101–2Google Scholar for a discussion of this strategy of moderation.
6 E.g. Knobe, Joshua, ‘Intentional Action in Folk Psychology: An Experimental Investigation’, Philosophical Psychology 16 (2003), pp. 309–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
7 We mentioned the opposite of this in our discussion of the strategy of moderation above, i.e. that people can think that whatever they are morally required to do, they also have the most reason to do. But of course there is no reason to think that this is the only way people can think of morality and its relation to reasons for actions.
8 How about the case when the demands of consequentialism are found intuitively reasonable but not demanded by morality? Although this case is interesting – not least because one is curious why these demands are contrary to morality – it does not have relevance for us. For though the moral intuition now speaks against consequentialism, it does so on grounds other than its alleged overdemandingness. And this has no bearing on OD and hence is not something we need to be concerned with in this article.
9 Although it helped us to design our experiments, our main reason for making this distinction lay in our interest in the role of emotions not reported in this article. We hypothesized that whereas subjective demands should be strongly related to anticipated individual emotions in relation to the decision, objective demands should be more strongly related to anticipations concerning the emotions of others. Indeed, our analyses suggest that this is the case (research on this is ongoing and will be reported in another article). Beyond its role in relation to moral emotions and the design of our experiments, the distinction is, however, also helpful in identifying whether different kinds of demands are differentially susceptible to perceptions of overdemandingness and in examining whether such different kinds of demands interact with each other (i.e. do not merely have additive effects).
10 There were further questions that are not relevant to the present purpose. These focused, in particular, on anticipated emotional reactions to their decisions (see n. 9 for some details).
11 For the reasons given in n. 8, the other way that answers to the questions can come apart – when consequentialist demands are deemed reasonable but not demanded by morality – does not change our analysis.
12 SD = 4 years; range: 18 to 42 years.
13 2 (Objective Demands: high vs. low) × 2 (Subjective Demands: high vs. low) × 4 (Scenario: Africa vs. investigator vs. inheritance vs. fire) with the first two variables manipulated within subjects and the latter variable manipulated between subjects.
14 Objective demands: F(1, 136) = 13.88, p < .001, η2p = .093; subjective demands: F(1, 136) = 9.95, p = .002, η2p = .068.
15 There was no interaction between objective and subjective demands, F(1, 136) = .07, p = .78, η2p = .001. For the more conservative analysis, there was a tendency for such an interaction, F(1, 78) = 3.37, p = .070, η2p = .041, with a particularly pronounced effect of subjective demands when objective demands were low.
16 F(3, 136) = 2.49, p = .016, η2p = .072.
17 All two-way interactions with the scenario manipulation: F(3, 136) < 1.90, p > .139, η2p < .040. Three-way interaction: F(3, 136) = .43, p = .730, η2p = .009.
18 Objective demands: F(1, 136) = 10.91, p = .001, η2p = .074; subjective demands: F(1, 136) = 3.89, p = .051, η2p = .028.
19 All two-way interactions with the scenario manipulation: F(1, 136) < 1.08, p > .362, η2p < .023. Three-way interaction: F(3, 136) = 2.40, p = .070, η2p = .050.
20 Carmel, David, ‘Experimental Philosophy: Surveys Alone Won't Fly’, Science 332 (2011), p. 1262CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Nichols, Shaun, ‘Response’, Science 332 (2011), pp. 1262–3CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
21 Parkinson, Brian and Manstead, Antony S. R., ‘Making Sense of Emotion in Stories and Social Life’, Cognition & Emotion 7 (1993), pp. 295–323CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
22 Aguiar, Fernando, Brañas-Garza, Pablo and Miller, Luis M., ‘Moral Distance in Dictator Games’, Judgment and Decision Making 3 (2008), pp. 344–54Google Scholar; Eckel, Catherine C. and Grossman, Philip J., ‘Altruism in Anonymous Dictator Games’, Games and Economic Behavior 16 (1996), pp. 181–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
23 Cherry, Todd L. and Shogren, Jason F., ‘Self-interest, Sympathy and the Origin of Endowments’, Economics Letters 101 (2008), pp. 69–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
24 As in Experiment 1, further questions mainly concerned anticipated emotional reactions to their decisions and are not relevant to the present purpose.
25 SD = 3.9 years.
26 2 (Objective Demands: high vs. low) × 2 (Subjective Demands: high vs. low) between subjects.
27 Objective demands: F(1, 353) = 5.33, p = .022, η2p = .015; subjective demands: F(1, 353) = 6.49, p = .011, η2p = .018.
28 F(1, 353) = 30.58, p < .001, η2p = .080
29 Fs(1, 353) > 267.62, ps < .001, η2p > .431.
30 We say more about these questions in Martin Bruder and Attila Tanyi, ‘How to Gauge Moral Intuitions? Prospects for a New Methodology’, Experimental Ethics, ed. Christoph Lütge, Hannes Rusch and Matthias Uhl (forthcoming).
31 In moral philosophy recent works include, on the sceptical side, Singer, Peter, ‘Ethics and Intuitions’, The Journal of Ethics 9 (2005), pp. 331–52CrossRefGoogle Scholar; on the anti-sceptical side, Tersman, Folke, ‘The Reliability of Moral Intuitions: A Challenge From Neuroscience’, Australasian Journal of Philosophy 86 (2008), pp. 389–405CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Liao, Matthew, ‘A Defence of Intuitions’, Philosophical Studies 140 (2008), pp. 247–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Tedesco, Matthew (‘Intuitions and the Demands of Consequentialism’, Utilitas 23 (2011), pp. 94–104CrossRefGoogle Scholar) who pursues this line further, in our particular context, by bringing in neuroscientific evidence.
32 See Weinberg, Jonathan M., Gonnerman, Chad, Buckner, Cameron, and Alexander, Joshua, ‘Are Philosophers Expert Intuiters?’, Philosophical Psychology 23 (2010), pp. 331–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Schwitzgebel, Eric and Cushman, Fiery, ‘Expertise in Moral Reasoning? Order Effects on Moral Judgment in Professional Philosophers and Non-Philosophers’, Mind & Language 27 (2012), pp. 135–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Smith, M. B. E., ‘Does Humanity Share a Common Moral Faculty?’, The Journal of Moral Philosophy 7 (2010), pp. 37–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
33 Henrich, Joseph, Heine, Steven J. and Norenzayan, Ara, ‘The Weirdest People in the World?’, Behavioral and Brain Sciences 33 (2010), pp. 61–83CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
34 For the examples see Bykvist, Utilitarianism, pp. 98–9, and Mulgan, Understanding Utilitarianism, pp. 95–6.
35 An anonymous reviewer for this journal has also pointed out to us that iterative demands could be a problem for our article. The best discussion of iterative demands in the context of OD is in Cullity, The Moral Demands of Affluence.
36 SD = 4 years. Range from 18 to 51.
37 One recalls here Rawls's well-known remarks about the usefulness of counterexamples, in his A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass., 1971), p. 52.
38 See our ‘How to Gauge Moral Intuitions?’, as well as Martin Bruder and Attila Tanyi, ‘Consequentialism and its Demands: A Representative Study’, forthcoming in a special issue of the Journal of Value Inquiry, ed. Sabine Roeser and Joel Rickard. See also Bengson, John, ‘Experimental Attacks on Intuitions and Answers’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 86 (2013), pp. 495–532CrossRefGoogle Scholar.