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Strategies for Defusing the Demandingness Objection University of Nebraska - Lincoln DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln Philosophy Dissertations, Theses, & Student Research Philosophy, Department of 2011 Strategies for Defusing the Demandingness Objection Justin J. Moss University of Nebraska-Lincoln, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/philosophydiss Part of the Ethics and Political Philosophy Commons Moss, Justin J., "Strategies for Defusing the Demandingness Objection" (2011). Philosophy Dissertations, Theses, & Student Research. 6. https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/philosophydiss/6 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Philosophy, Department of at DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. It has been accepted for inclusion in Philosophy Dissertations, Theses, & Student Research by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. STRATEGIES FOR DEFUSING THE DEMANDINGNESS OBJECTION by Justin James Moss A DISSERTATION Presented to the Faculty of The Graduate College at the University of Nebraska In Partial Fulfillment of Requirements For the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Major: Philosophy Under the Supervision of Professor David Sobel Lincoln, Nebraska December, 2011 STRATEGIES FOR DEFUSING THE DEMANDINGNESS OBJECTION Justin James Moss, Ph.D. University of Nebraska , 2011 Adviser: David Sobel Bernard Williams’s formulation of the Demandingness Objection holds that living a moral life, as the consequentialist understands it, is incompatible with living a life that is good for human beings. This is because the demands of consequentialist morality threaten to overwhelm the life of the person who cares about being moral, thus leaving no time for their own projects and interests. Several prominent consequentialists have responded to the Demandingness Objection by seeking a more moderate and indirect form of consequentialism that does not require as strong a duty of beneficence as classical utilitarianism. I review and criticize three prominent moderate forms of consequentialism: Brad Hooker’s rule consequentialism; the theories of Samuel Scheffler and Tim Mulgan, which share an agent centered prerogative; and Liam Murphy’s collective principle of beneficence. As the primary method of criticism, I develop a type of collective action problem, which I refer to as the Polluter’s Dilemma. This dilemma occurs when a moral theory permits agents to favor their own interests and in doing so create a very small harm that affects all other agents. These small harms accumulate, and the result is that the long-term interests of all agents are greatly harmed. I provide reasons to think that acceptable forms of consequentialism must avoid the Polluter’s Dilemma, and I argue that the three mentioned forms of moderate consequentialism do not avoid the Polluter’s Dilemma. In concluding, I review a form of consequentialism that, I argue, avoids both the Polluter’s Dilemma and the Demandingness Objection. Based on this result, I make recommendations about how future consequentialist moral theories should develop. Consequentialists should seek a moral theory that leaves agents room for their own projects, but that theory should be flexible enough to recognize which stringent demands are appropriate and which stringent demands are not, and the theory should not support the aims of agents that leave everyone worse off in the long term. i Copyright 2011, Justin James Moss. ii To my parents Gary and Nancy Moss who always demanded excellence from me. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I have been the recipient of a great deal of support from numerous sources in the writing of this dissertation. Above all, my thanks must go to my adviser, David Sobel, for his extensive support and advice. He guided me through every stage of the dissertation- writing process, offering valuable feedback on every draft, and helped me make this work better by making important suggestions for revision. I am very grateful to him for his guidance, mentorship, and friendship. My other committee members, Joseph Mendola and Mark van Roojen, assisted me by providing valuable feedback on my dissertation and many suggestions for how to make improvements. Quite apart from their duties as my readers, their influence, leadership, and support of all graduate students in the UNL Philosophy Department has helped to make the positive intellectual and professional climate of the department possible. This dissertation has benefitted from the input and influence of many others in the Philosophy Department, faculty and graduate students alike. I especially wish to thank Aaron Bronfman, who pushed me to think harder about a crucial point in the central argument of the dissertation; David Henderson, whose friendly support kept me motivated and on track; and the graduate students of the UNL Philosophy Department, who attended three sessions of the Graduate Student Colloquia series in which I presented pieces of this dissertation. For their feedback, encouragement, and questioning, I wish to thank Patrick Arnold, David Chavez, Matthew Dee, Allison Fritz, Cullen Gatten, Shane George, Christopher Gibilisco, Landon Hedrick, Cliff Hill, Andrew Jaeger, iv Clare LaFrance, Timothy Loughlin, Christopher Richards, Steven Swartzer, Adam Thompson, and Preston Werner. My wife, Vanessa Steinroetter, supported me and encouraged me throughout the process of my graduate education and especially through the intense months of drafting, revising, and completing this dissertation. I am deeply grateful to her for all her support, and could never have done it without her. v Table of Contents Introduction ......................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter 1: Permissiveness and the Agent-Centered Prerogative ...................................... 14 1. Introduction ............................................................................................................................ 14 2. Scheffler’s Original Agent-Centered Prerogative .................................................................. 15 3. An Improved Prerogative: Mulgan’s Combined Consequentialism ...................................... 26 4. Polluter’s Dilemmas and the Demandingness of Combined Consequentialism .................... 30 5. Why the Agent-Centered Prerogative is Generally Unacceptable as a Component of a Consequentialist Moral Theory .................................................................................................. 39 Chapter 2: Rule Consequentialism’s Dilemma: Demandingness or Self-Defeat ............. 48 1. What is Rule Consequentialism? ............................................................................................ 48 2. How Hooker Hopes to Avoid the Demandingness Objection ................................................ 53 3. Being Careful about Hypothetical Behavior and Belief ......................................................... 57 4. Rule Consequentialism and Polluter’s Dilemmas .................................................................. 66 Chapter 3: The Inconsistency of the Collective Principle ................................................ 74 1. The Collective Principle and the Compliance Condition ....................................................... 74 2. Does the Collective Principle Fairly Evaluate Rescue Cases? ............................................... 79 3. Mulgan’s Wrong Facts Objection and the Problems of Global Climate Change .................. 89 4. The Modified Compliance Condition .................................................................................... 97 Chapter 4: Multiple-Act Consequentialism and Constraints on Acceptable Forms of Consequentialism ............................................................................................................ 104 1. Introduction .......................................................................................................................... 104 vi 2. Consequentialism, Its Rivals, and Climate Change ............................................................. 105 3. The Polluter’s Dilemma as a Constraint on Acceptable Forms of Consequentialism ......... 108 4. Mendola’s Multiple-Act Consequentialism ......................................................................... 118 5. Atomic Agency Within a Life? ............................................................................................ 123 6. How Overlapping Group Agency Plausibly Solves the Polluter’s Dilemma ....................... 127 References ....................................................................................................................... 132 1 Introduction Consequentialism – the view that an action’s moral permissibility depends solely on the rankings of states of affairs on some evaluative scale – is widely viewed as a candidate for the best general approach to doing ethics. Its most famous version – classical act utilitarianism, the view that the rightness of an action depends solely upon the propensity of that action to maximize happiness - has many attractive features. It is an impartial theory; it asks that we treat the interests of all relevant parties equally and impartially, all other things being equal. It is an inclusive theory; the moral community, or the class of beings whose interests we are morally obligated to take into account, includes not only all human beings within the bounds of the moral community, but all sentient beings. It is a flexible
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