Following the Rules

1 Following the Rules Practical Reasoning and Deontic Constraint Joseph Heath Department of Philosophy University of Toronto 2 Preface My thanks to those who have helped me with this book over the years, along with those who have read and commented on it. Special thanks to Joel Anderson, Benoît Dubreuil, Vida Panitch, Patrick Turmel, Scott Woodcock and Sergio Tenenbaum. Thanks also to my colleague Ronald De Sousa, along with Peter Ohlin and Peter Momtchiloff, both of Oxford University Press, for giving the entire project a boost when it most needed it. This book incorporates, in revised form, ideas that have been presented in journal articles over the years. My thanks to the editors and referees at these journals, along with all those who helped me with these papers. The formulation of my arguments in this work should be taken to supersede those presented in: “Foundationalism and Practical Reason,” Mind, 106:3 (1997):452- 73; “The Structure of Normative Control,” Law and Philosophy, 17:4 (1998): 419-442; “Brandom et les sources de la normativité,” Philosophiques, 28 (2001) : 27-46; “Rational Choice with Deontic Constraint,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 31:3 (2001): 361-388; “Practical Irrationality and the Structure of Decision Theory,” in Sarah Stroud and Christine Tappolet, eds Weakness of Will and Practical Irrationality (Oxford: Clarendon, 2003); and “The Transcendental Necessity of Morality,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 67 (2003): 378-395. This book covers a lot of ground. I would like to thank those who, at crucial junctures, have introduced me to ideas and bodies of work that I might otherwise have been oblivious to, but which subsequently proved central in the development of my views. These include Thomas 3 McCarthy, James Johnson, Stephen Toulmin, Michael Williams, Paul Thompson and Ronald De Sousa. I would also like to acknowledge the generous support that I have received, over the years, from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Canada Research Chairs Program, along with the Departments of Philosophy at the University of Toronto and the Université de Montréal. 4 Table of Contents Introduction 1. Instrumental rationality 2. Social order 3. Deontic constraint 4. Intentional states 5. Preference noncognitivism 6. A naturalistic perspective 7. Transcendental necessity 8. Weakness of will 9. Normative ethics Conclusion 5 Introduction There are many aspects of morality that are puzzling. Perhaps the most puzzling is that it often requires us to act in ways that are contrary to our self-interest. We may find ourselves wanting something, but feeling that morality prohibits us from doing what is necessary to obtain it. Morality therefore presents itself to us in the form of a duty to refrain from the pursuit of individual advantage, or to use the more technical term, in the form of a deontic constraint. It is not difficult to see how this aspect of morality could come to seem paradoxical. What is our “self-interest,” if not the set of goals that we have good reason to pursue? And if our self-interest is the set of goals that we have good reason to pursue, then any constraint on the pursuit of self- interest would seem to be, by definition, irrational. These sorts of considerations have led many philosophers to deny the phenomenon, and to suggest that any conflict between morality and self-interest must be merely apparent. After all, it is not just morality that presents itself to us with the appearance of a constraint. We also find ourselves subject to prudential constraints in our practical deliberations. There is often something that we would like to do, but feel that we should restrain ourselves from doing because of the long-term consequences of the act. In this case, it seems clear that while “prudence” seems to express itself as a constraint on the pursuit of self-interest, this is merely an appearance. The illusion is dissolved as soon as one sees that the conflict is not really between a prudential constraint and self-interest, but merely between one’s short-term interests and one’s long-term 6 interests. Prudence therefore turns out to be not really a constraint, but rather an expression of one’s self-interest, correctly understood. Many philosophers have felt that moral constraints, insofar as they are justifiable, must have an analogous structure. Morality often expresses itself as a duty to perform an action that advances the interests of another, to the detriment of one’s own. However, moral actions usually do not occur in isolation, but rather as part of a generalized system of reciprocity (one which stands at the core of the social order in every human society). This system of reciprocity generates benefits for everyone involved (benefits that include many intangibles, such as freedom from worry about certain depredations). If compliance with one’s own duties represents the price of admission into this generalized system of reciprocity, then it seems clear that respecting moral constraints also generates benefits. The primary difference between morality and prudence is simply that, in the latter case, the long-term benefits are secured through one’s own agency, whereas in the former case, they are mediated through the agency of another, viz. the person whose reciprocity is secured thanks to one’s compliance with the moral law. Thus moral philosophers have labored long and hard to show that morality is also a component of self-interest, correctly understood. Such an argument, were it to be carried through successfully, would not only solve one of the central puzzles in our understanding of morality, but would also constitute a decisive refutation of moral skepticism, since it would provide a reason for acting morally that, in principle, any rational person should be obliged to acknowledge. Unfortunately, no one has ever been able to develop this argument in a thoroughly convincing way. When the idea is sketched out at a high level of abstraction, it seems enormously plausible. Certainly it cannot be a coincidence that, on the one hand, people feel obliged to respect moral obligations, and on the other hand, very significant cooperative benefits 7 are realized when everyone respects such obligations. But whenever anyone has tried to work out the details in a rigorous manner – to show how you get from one hand to the other – the argument always seems to require some philosophical prestigitation at a key point. Furthermore, no matter how ingenious the argumentation strategy, the phenomenology of moral life remains stubbornly resistant to this sort of reduction. Many people find Immanuel Kant’s analysis of common-sense morality, in the first part of the Foundations of the Metaphysic of Morals, intuitively correct.1 Morality imposes duties, in the form of actions that must be performed for their own sake, and not for the sake of some anticipated reward. If morality were just some indirect way of advancing one’s personal interests, then it wouldn’t really be morality any more. Thus the phenomenology of moral life – the way the moral obligations are experienced by the individual, at the point of action – remains resolutely deontic. And yet if one takes this phenomenology seriously, then the puzzle about deontic constraint imposes itself with renewed force: How is it possible that, even though it may not be in one’s interest to act morally, it is still rational to do so? Much as this may seem like a timeless and eternal question, there have been a number of recent theoretical developments that promise to make it more tractable. The term “self-interest” has always tended to be vague. It is possible to offer a much sharper characterization of the phenomenon of deontic constraint by contrasting a concern over the character of an action from a concern over its consequences. When Kant distinguished a categorical imperative (“do x”) from a hypothetical imperative (“if you want y, do x”), what he set up in effect was an opposition between actions valued for their own sake, or for their intrinsic properties, and actions valued for their consequences. The value of an action that is valued for the sake of its consequences is contingent upon those very consequences. The value of an action that is valued for its own sake 8 is independent of its consequences. The fact that morality is a system of deontic constraint is reflected, according to Kant, in the fact that moral value is of the latter type. Thus one way to approach the puzzle of deontic constraint is to ask whether rational action necessarily has a consequentialist structure, or whether it can incorporate non- consequential considerations. This is another way of asking whether an instrumental conception of practical rationality – one which maintains that actions are valued only as means to the attainment of certain valued ends – is correct. When formulated this way, the puzzle about deontic constraint comes to be seen as just a special instance of a more general puzzle about the rational basis of rule-following behavior. Economists, for example, have long observed (and have sometimes even been troubled by the fact) that people are not nearly as responsive to incentives as a strictly instrumental theory of rational action would lead one to anticipate. In particular, people tend to engage in spontaneously cooperative behavior even when the incentives have been carefully aligned to promote failures of cooperation.2 Some of this can be written off as irrationality. But with irrational conduct, people often correct themselves as soon as the error is pointed out to them. Much of the behavior that has troubled economists (and more lately, game theorists) remains stubbornly resistant to any attempt at correction. People seem to have a good idea what they are doing, and why they are doing it; yet so far the structure of their reasoning has eluded all attempts at formal reconstruction.

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