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Perform a Justified Option

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2014

JOSHUA GERT
JOSHUA GERT*
Affiliation:
The College of William and Mary, [email protected]
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Abstract

In a number of recent publications, Douglas Portmore has defended consequentialism, largely on the basis of a maximizing view of practical rationality. I have criticized such maximizing views, arguing that we need to distinguish two independent dimensions of normative strength: justifying strength and requiring strength. I have also argued that this distinction helps to explain why we typically have so many rational options. Engaging with these arguments, Portmore has (a) developed his own novel maximization-friendly method of explaining the ubiquity of rational options, and (b) criticized one argument in favour of a substantive justifying/requiring distinction in the domain of practical rationality. The present article defends the justifying/requiring distinction, and criticizes Portmore's maximization-friendly strategy for explaining the ubiquity of rational options.

Type
Research Article
Information
Utilitas , Volume 26 , Issue 2 , June 2014 , pp. 206 - 217
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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References

1 Portmore, Douglas, ‘Perform your Best Option’, The Journal of Philosophy 110 (2013), pp. 436–69, at 436CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Portmore, Douglas, Commonsense Consequentialism (New York, 2011), pp. 163, 178, 233Google Scholar.

2 Portmore, Consequentialism, ch. 2.

3 Many of these arguments are collected in Gert, Joshua, Brute Rationality (New York, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. But see also Gert, Joshua, ‘Normative Strength and the Balance of Reasons’, Philosophical Review 116 (2007), pp. 533–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Raz, Joseph, Engaging Reason (New York, 1999), p. 100Google Scholar; Portmore, ‘Perform’, p. 453.

5 Portmore, ‘Perform’, p. 440 n. 9.

6 Portmore, Douglas, ‘Imperfect Reasons and Rational Options’, Noûs 46 (2012), pp. 24–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Tenenbaum, Sergio, ‘Brute Requirements’, Canadian Journal of Philosophy 37 (2007), pp. 153–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 Gert, Joshua, Normative Bedrock: Response-Dependence, Rationality and Reasons (Oxford, 2012), pp. 117–18CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In brief, the criticisms were based on the fact that I wrongly focused on either/or choice situations, which ignored the relevance of additional alternatives. In more recent work I have acknowledged the merits of these criticisms. But I have also modified my view so that rational assessment takes all available alternatives into account. As a result, the criticisms no longer apply.

8 Portmore, ‘Perform’, p. 441. See also Portmore, Consequentialism, p. 130.

9 Portmore, Consequentialism, pp. 51, 92 n. 26, 118, 128. But see Gert, Joshua, ‘Moral Reasons and Rational Status’, Reasons to be Moral Revisited: Canadian Journal of Philosophy Supplementary Volume 33, ed. Black, Sam and Tiffany, Evan (Calgary, 2010), pp. 171–96Google Scholar.

10 Portmore, Consequentialism, pp. 39, 53, 123.

11 Portmore, Consequentialism, p. 123 n. 7. See also p. 128.

12 Michael Slote, whom Portmore cites with approval, essentially does this by defining moral reasons as ‘considerations having argumentational force toward one or another moral conclusion’, though Slote himself later ignores this definition. See Slote, Michael, ‘Kagan's, ShellyThe Limits of Morality’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 51 (1991), pp. 915–17CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Similarly, Michael Bratman – whom Portmore also cites with approval – countenances talk of reasons as being moral if ‘they, among others, count in determining the moral balance’. See Bratman, Michael, ‘Kagan on “The Appeal to Cost”’, Ethics 104 (1994), pp. 325–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13 For those worried about the substantive claims here, it may be worth noting that Portmore's definition of ‘more morally requiring strength’ (Portmore, Consequentialism, p. 121) agrees with common sense in giving the reason to prevent blindness more such strength than the reason to prevent someone's car from being towed.

14 Portmore, ‘Perform’, p. 448.

15 Portmore, ‘Perform’, p. 442.

16 Portmore, ‘Perform’, p. 443.

17 Portmore, ‘Perform’, p. 448. C-PYBO is potentially confusing in suggesting that an agent might have more reason to perform one optimal maximal option than another. But here Portmore is talking about restricted optimal maximal options: maximal options that are the best one can do given that one performs a certain act.

18 Thanks to Douglas Portmore for a long and fruitful exchange on the topics discussed in this article.