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Wishful Thinking in Moral Theorizing: Comment on Enoch

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 November 2011

ROB VAN SOMEREN GREVE
ROB VAN SOMEREN GREVE*
Affiliation:
University of [email protected]
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Abstract

David Enoch recently defended the idea that there are valid inferences of the form ‘it would be good if p, therefore, p’. I argue that Enoch's proposal allows us to infer the absurd conclusion that ours is the best of all possible worlds.

Type
Discussion
Information
Utilitas , Volume 23 , Issue 4 , December 2011 , pp. 447 - 450
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

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References

1 Nagel, T., ‘Personal Rights and Public Space’, Philosophy and Public Affairs 24 (1995), pp. 83–107, at 92CrossRefGoogle Scholar; emphasis in original. The defence may have, in its general form, a much longer history. Jeremy Bentham accused the drafters of the French Declaration of Human Rights of relying on an inference of roughly the form ‘it would be good if we have rights, therefore, we have rights’, an inference he deemed fallacious. As Bentham puts it when commenting on Article 2 of the declaration in Anarchical Fallacies (many editions, first published in 1816), ‘[i]n proportion to the want of happiness resulting from the want of rights, a reason exists for wishing that there were such things as rights. But reasons for wishing there were such things as rights, are not rights; – a reason for wishing that a certain right were established, is not that right – want is not supply – hunger is not bread.’

2 Nagel, ‘Personal Rights’, pp. 91, 92; emphases in original.

3 Nagel, ‘Personal Rights’, p. 92.

4 McNaughton, D. and Rawling, P., ‘On Defending Deontology’, Ratio 11 (1999), pp. 37–54, at 48–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Enoch, D., ‘Wouldn't It Be Nice If p, therefore p (for a moral p)’, Utilitas 21 (2009), pp. 222–4CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Enoch, ‘Wouldn't It’, p. 223. As Enoch notes, comparable arguments have been offered in other debates in moral theory, for instance in the debate over whether there is such a thing as moral luck.

7 If ‘G’ were a factive operator, it would be no surprise that GGp entails Gp; the entailment would hold for the same (and rather uninteresting) reason that Gp, thus understood, entails p.

8 I assume we can shift seamlessly between ‘good’ and ‘better’ in what follows.

9 To be clear, the claim here is only that it would be better if it was not the case that there are things that could be better, on the assumption that indeed there are things that could be improved in the actual world. Whether or not there are possible improvements does not depend only on how good or bad the world is, of course. We can imagine a universe in which an all-powerful evil demon prevents us from improving a (rather miserable) world by changing it in ways we think will amount to improvements, by invariably making the world even worse whenever we undertake such an action. In such a universe, though, it seems that there is nothing that could be better, for any improvement is impossible because of the demon's interventions.

10 I am indebted to Emily Given, Nate Sharadin, an anonymous referee for Utilitas, and, especially, David Enoch, for helpful comments on an earlier version of this article.