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Wrong Kind of Reasons and Consequences

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 July 2013

RACH-COSKER ROWLAND
RACH-COSKER ROWLAND*
Affiliation:
University of Reading, [email protected]
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Abstract

In a recent issue of Utilitas Gerald Lang provided an appealing new solution to the Wrong Kind of Reason problem for the buck-passing account of value. In subsequent issues Jonas Olson and John Brunero have provided objections to Lang's solution. I argue that Brunero's objection is not a problem for Lang's solution, and that a revised version of Lang's solution avoids Olson's objections. I conclude that we can solve the Wrong Kind of Reason problem, and that the wrong kind of reasons for pro-attitudes are reasons that would not still be reasons for pro-attitudes if it were not for the additional consequences of having those pro-attitudes.

Type
Research Article
Information
Utilitas , Volume 25 , Issue 3 , September 2013 , pp. 405 - 416
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

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Footnotes

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Article last updated 1 November 2024

References

1 See Scanlon, T. M., What We Owe to Each Other (Cambridge, Mass., 1998), pp. 95–7Google Scholar, and Lang, Gerald, ‘The Right Kind of Solution to the Wrong Kind of Reason Problem’, Utilitas 20 (2008), pp. 472–89CrossRefGoogle Scholar. As Stratton-Lake and Hooker point out, ‘give us reasons’ should be understood as ‘give everyone reasons’. I use ‘us’ instead of ‘everyone’ throughout this article because those I discuss use ‘us’ rather than ‘everyone’; see Stratton-Lake, Philip and Hooker, Brad, ‘Scanlon versus Moore on Goodness’, Metaethics After Moore, ed. Timmons, Mark (Oxford, 2006), pp. 149–68Google Scholar, at 152–3.

2 Hereafter I will use ‘goodness’ and ‘value’ to refer to goodness simpliciter and final value. Something is good simpliciter if it is good for its own sake, good full stop, or non-elliptically good. This type of goodness is the type of goodness that Peter Geach and Judith Jarvis Thomson deny exists; see Geach, P. T., ‘Good and Evil’, Analysis 17 (1956), pp. 33–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Thomson, Judith Jarvis, Normativity (Ithaca, 2008), pp. 1–17Google Scholar. Something is of final value if it is of value for its own sake, if it is of non-instrumental non-attributive value; see Korsgaard, Christine, ‘Two Distinctions in Goodness’, Philosophical Review 92 (1983), pp. 169–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 See Rabinowicz, Wlodek and R, Toni, ‘The Strike of the Demon: On Fitting Pro-Attitudes and Value’, Ethics 114 (2004), pp. 391–423CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 405–7.

4 See Lang, ‘Right Kind of Solution’, p. 484, and Olson, Jonas, ‘The Wrong Kind of Solution to the Wrong Kind of Reason Problem’, Utilitas 21 (2009), pp. 225–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 226.

5 See Lang, ‘Right Kind of Solution’, p. 484.

6 Brunero might hold that these two types of consequentialism, which he calls direct and indirect, cover all the possible consequentialist views. However, this is not clear in general, and is far less clear given the way Brunero describes these views.

7 See Brunero, John, ‘Consequentialism and the Wrong Kind of Reasons: A Reply to Lang’, Utilitas 22 (2010), pp. 351–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 357. Brunero detailed and assessed this case in this way in private correspondence. I detail this case and not the analogous case discussed in Brunero's article because it is so easy to mistake Brunero's argument with regard to the case in his article for an argument that is a non-starter because it equivocates between final and instrumental value.

8 Even if aiming to have friends would be having a pro-attitude towards pleasure in this case, (3) and (4′) would not entail that pleasure is not of final value. Pleasure not only gives us reasons to aim to have friends in this case; pleasure gives us reasons to have other pro-attitudes such as to desire it for its own sake and to wish that others had it. And pleasure would still give us reasons to desire it for its own sake and to wish that others had it even if there were no benefits to our desiring it for its own sake and wishing that others had it.

9 See Brunero, ‘Consequentialism’, p. 357.

10 This view is often called global consequentialism.

11 Brunero made clear that this was the worry behind his objections in private correspondence.

12 See Rabinowicz and Rønnow-Rasmussen, ‘Strike of the Demon’, p. 403, and Lang, ‘Right Kind of Solution’, p. 474.

13 Samuelsson, Lars, ‘The Right Version of “the Right Kind of Solution to the Wrong Kind of Reason Problem”’, Utilitas (2013), doi:10.1017/S095382081200057XCrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 Samuelsson, L., ‘The Right Version of ‘the Right Kind of Solution to the Wrong Kind of Reason Problem’’, Utilitas 25 (2013), pp. 383–404CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15 See Ewing, A. C., The Definition of Good (London, 1947), esp. p. 149Google Scholar, Ewing, A. C., Second Thoughts in Moral Philosophy (London, 1959), pp. 86–90Google Scholar, and Rabinowicz and Rønnow-Rasmussen, ‘Strike of the Demon’, pp. 395–7.

16 See above, n. 12.

17 Samuelsson might claim that we should endorse a BPA in terms of counterfactual reasons for action. In this case, the being's pleasure is of value because it has properties that would provide reasons to promote it if anyone could promote it; see Suikkanen, Jussi, ‘Reasons and Value: In Defence of the Buck-Passing Account’, Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 7 (2004), pp. 513–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 532–3. However, there are several problems with a counterfactual BPA. The first is that there could be value even if no one could possibly have pro-actions in response to it. Suppose that there were a being which cannot act, is in pleasure, and to which no one could ever respond with a pro-action. This being's pleasure might be of value even though no one could possibly have a pro-action in response to this value, and so it seems like the counterfactual BPA entails that, contra hedonism, this being's pleasure is not of value. Second, imagine a creature that is in an isolated world in a state of pleasure, but would no longer be in pleasure if there were beings that could respond to reasons or perform actions around. In this case the counterfactual BPA fails also because this creature's pleasure is of value – according to hedonism, for example – but its pleasure would not provide reasons to perform pro-actions in response to it if there were beings that could perform pro-actions in response to it, because if there were such beings, then it would not be in a state of pleasure.

18 Olson, ‘Wrong Kind of Solution’, pp. 226–7.

19 Olson, ‘Wrong Kind of Solution’, p. 227.

20 Although it might be that the wrong kind of reasons to have pro-attitudes are not reasons to have pro-attitudes at all. See for instance Way, Jonathan, ‘Transmission and the Wrong Kind of Reason’, Ethics 122 (2012), pp. 489–515CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21 I would like to thank John Brunero, Brad Hooker and Philip Stratton-Lake for comments on and discussions of previous drafts of this article. An Arts and Humanities Research Council studentship funded the writing of this article.