All Reasons Are Moral

Daniel Muñoz MIT Draft of 10/23/18

I argue that the distinction between moral (“deontic”) and non-moral (“enticing”) reasons is a bogus one, and that “reasons first” approaches to ethics can’t account for the optionality of prudent self-care (flossing one’s teeth) or supererogatory gifts (of favors and kidneys). Non-moral reasons are, by definition, those that can’t ground moral obligations, even when unopposed by other reasons. But all reasons can ground obligations. When our unopposed reasons of self-interest, e.g., leave things optional, that isn’t due to a lack of intrinsic oomph; it is due to a countervailing prerogative, which lets us act against the balance of reasons. My main argument is that we face a dilemma in trying to delimit the non-moral, whereas there is a clean way to say which prerogatives we have: they correspond to our rights against others, allowing us to omit actions that others may not do to us sans consent.

What does morality require of us? You might think it requires following the balance of reasons, doing whatever we have most reason to do. This seems true in the case of:

Harm to Others I have most reason not to harm strangers, and indeed I’m morally obligated not to harm.

Here my reasons tell against senseless harm, and sure enough, I must refrain.

But we don’t always have to follow the reasons, as in cases of pure self-interest:

Benefit to Self I have most reason to floss my teeth tonight, but flossing is morally optional.1

Here my reasons favor flossing, but don’t ground a moral requirement. Even though prudence and virtue tell in favor of dental hygiene—it is the choiceworthy path—abstaining isn’t morally wrong, as evidenced by the fact that it would be silly to blame or punish me. My smile is my business.

So what’s the difference? Why do only some reasons ground obligations? The standard answer is that there are two kinds of reasons: moral and non-moral. Both kinds favor actions.2 The

1 See e.g. Stocker 1976, Slote 1984, Sider 1993: 120–22, Harman 2015: 227. 2 Following Parfit 2011 and Chang 2014: 485, I take “counting in favor” to be the essential mark of normative reasons for action—my topic in this paper. (I won’t discuss epistemic or motivating reasons.)

1 difference is that only moral reasons can ground moral obligations; non-moral reasons favor without any hope of morally obligating, even if unopposed. Some authors draw this distinction using other terms: “peremptory” vs. “enticing” reasons (Dancy 2004a, 2004b), “insistent” vs. “non-insistent” reasons (Kagan 1989), “deontic” vs. “commendatory” reasons (Little and McNamara 2017).3 But the move is always the same: distinguish reasons that can obligate from reasons that cannot.

I argue that this distinction—despite its clear rationale—is bogus. There is no such thing as a non-moral reason. When the balance of reasons fails to generate an obligation, that is not because the winning reasons are intrinsically mellow; it is because of a countervailing prerogative entitling us to be suboptimal. A prerogative isn’t a reason; it doesn’t count in favor of anything. But even without favoring, prerogatives tend to make actions permissible; we can cite prerogatives to justify our actions, rebuffing demands from the moral community, as when we say things like “It’s my kidney”

(so I don’t have to give it for the greater good), and “I have a right to be here” (even though we all know I should really be somewhere else).4 By leaning on prerogatives, I’m not making excuses— deflecting blame while copping to problematic conduct. Nor am I citing reasons for my action. I’m saying that I don’t need excuses or further reasons to defend my choice as permissible. Prerogatives, not “non-moral” reasons, explain why morality allows us to do less than best.

My argument is (1) that the main points in favor of non-moral reasons—e.g. that they are revealed in experience and allow us to handle certain cases—are also points in favor of prerogatives;

(2) that it’s very hard to draw the line between the moral and non-moral without generating

3 For more writers sympathetic to the non-moral, see Wolf 1982, Nagel 1986: 198, Raz 1999: 103 (on “optional” reasons), Kolodny 2003, Dreier 2004, Greenspan 2005, 2010 (on “positive” reasons), Horgan and Timmons 2010, Portmore 2012, Darwall 2013a, Little 2013, Scanlon 2014, and Kauppinen 2015 (on “evaluative reasons”). Robertson (2008) objects to Dancy’s “enticing” reasons, but doesn’t use prerogatives. 4 See Darwall 2013b for the idea that morally obligatory acts are those that can be legitimately demanded by representatives of the moral community. When I talk about “justification,” I mean rebuffing the community’s demands, by showing that one’s action to be defensible. I also assume the classic scheme of definitions for obligation, wrongness, and permission: ‘obligatory’ and ‘permissible’ are duals, and wrong options are those we’re obligated to omit.

2 counterexamples involving how we treat ourselves; and (3) that prerogatives do a better job. For one thing, it is relatively easy to say which prerogatives we have: they allow us to omit an act just if our rights forbid others from doing it to us without consent—so we may refrain from causing ourselves harm, using our things, and using our bodies. Moreover, prerogatives can explain a wider range of cases, including cases of supererogation—optimal yet optional action “beyond the call of duty.”

If my argument works, three main things follow. (1) We can’t do moral theory with reasons alone—they aren’t the sole fundamental elements of ethics, since we also need prerogatives. (2) We can simplify and unify our theory of reasons, since we no longer need to make exceptions for the non-moral; most notably, we no longer need to posit an asymmetry between self and other in order to make self-interest uniquely optional or especially weighty. Finally, (3) we no longer have to explain why moral reasons have or lack “authority” over other things that matter. Nothing matters except what matters from the moral point of view. The point here isn’t that we are on the hook for everything, that morality’s demands extend everywhere. We aren’t, and they don’t, precisely because we have prerogatives, which serve as vetoes on morality’s demand to do what is best.

But my goal here isn’t to conclusively defend prerogatives; it is to show that the moral/non- moral distinction isn’t the only game in town—and that even if it were, we might not want to play.

1. Against non-moral reasons

We need to explain why flossing one’s teeth is optional, whereas it’s mandatory not to go around harming others. The standard view is that the harm is opposed by bossy moral reasons, whereas flossing is backed by mousy non-moral reasons, and only the moral ones make for obligations. It all comes down to the moral/non-moral divide. But is there any decent way to draw the line, any principled way of saying which reasons are non-moral? If not, that is a sign that the non-moral reasons don’t really have anything intrinsic in common.

3 Let’s start with the most natural option: that morality is other-regarding, and that non-moral reasons concern only oneself—in particular, self-interest.5 The non-moral, on this view, is just prudence, the promotion of one’s own well-being. A reason is non-moral if and only if it’s prudential. But there are clear, simple problems with both directions of the biconditional. Benefits to others aren’t always obligatory:

Benefit to Others I have most reason to do a stranger a costless favor, but it’s morally optional.

For example, the favor might be lending someone a screwdriver, cleaning a few extra dishes at a dinner party, or sharing the last pieces of a candy bar that one would otherwise throw away.6 The reasons to act all concern others’ welfare, and the cost on self-interest is negligible. Still, it would be unduly moralistic to insist that the agent is obliged to give the benefit.

In the other direction, harms to oneself often seem quite morally wrong. For example, supposing there’s a way to harm myself without negative downstream effects on others:

Harm to Self I have most reason not to grievously harm myself, and indeed I’m morally required not to.

An example might be tragic suicides, or inflicting needless torment. To be sure, we don’t tend to think of people who self-harm as evil, like people who harm others. Our feelings are mixed. Often the very things that move people to self-harm also make it harder to think straight; we are inclined to excuse bad choices made while distraught or depressed. But here is a clue that huge self-harms can still be wrong: bystanders have greater moral latitude to intervene, stopping the harm by force.

(Excuses make blame inapt, but they don’t rule out deterrence!)

5 See Baier 1958: 215–17, 231, Frankena 1966: 692, Finlay 2007. And here is Portmore (2008: 376): “But there is nothing, morally speaking, that counts in favor of promoting one’s self-interest, as such.” 6 Related examples include showing mercy and granting forgiveness. Ferry (2013: 580) gives the nice example of “buying a book for a friend,” which “may be morally optimific and also be quite pleasant for the agent, and yet it would hardly seem obligatory.” The gift still seems morally optional when the pleasantness compensates for the cost, and even when it slightly outweighs the cost, so that the gift is rewarding on balance.

4 Now, in response to these cases, one might look for quick tweaks. Maybe moral reasons have to be decently weighty, and that’s why we have only non-moral reasons for favors and flossing.

But there are plenty of puny moral reasons, like my reason not to wiggle your ear. (Wiggles are trivial, but still it’s wrong to mess with your body without consent; see Thomson 1990: Chapter 9 on body rights.) Another possibility is that reasons to be polite in social contexts—the realm of etiquette and favors—should count as non-moral (Dorsey 2013: 380).7 But favors aren’t just backed by reasons of politeness. Optional favors may still cause a boost in others’ wellbeing—a paradigm moral reason, especially since we know that big benefits to others can be mandatory.8

So perhaps we could try out the other natural candidate: moral reasons are impartial reasons

(paradigm example: reasons to reduce pain, no matter whose it is), and non-moral reasons are partial

(paradigm example: reasons to favor the welfare of one’s own family, friends, projects, and dear self over the interests of strangers).9 This helps explain the wrongness of Harm to Self. But it wrongly predicts that flossing (Benefit to Self) and favors (Benefit to Others) are morally obligatory, since we have impartial reasons to care about everyone’s welfare, even when the benefit is small—and even when it goes to us.

So far, not so good. Even if non-moral reasons can explain why a Benefit to Self is optional, they seem to make a mess in other cases.

In fairness, however, there is a further kind of case where non-moral reasons might be useful: supererogation. We need to understand why some noble sacrifices lie “beyond the call of duty”—and why their suboptimal omissions are optional, as in:

7 Or consider Dancy’s (2004b: 21) claim: “Enticing reasons are to do with what would be fun, amusing, attractive, exciting, pleasant, and so on.” 8 Someone could try combining the two amendments, so that we have moral reason only when it comes to sufficiently big boosts to others’ welfare. But (1) this is ad hoc, and (2) we can imagine cases where billions of small boosts are at stake, either within or across lives; surely the aggregated reasons can ground moral obligations, and yet this isn’t possible if the component reasons are non-moral. 9 For a typical take on partial reasons, see Parfit 2011: 40–1. For objections, see Worsnip forthcoming fn. 25.

5 Agent Favoring Amanda has a smaller headache than Bert, and she may keep her last pain pill to herself.

Here, some say Amanda may keep the pill because her non-moral reasons (to cure her own headache) weigh against her moral reasons (which favor curing Bert’s—assume that other things are equal, Bert is a stranger, etc.).10 By contrast, if all reasons are moral (and we have to follow the balance of reasons), then Amanda has no choice but to give up the pill—which would make morality awfully demanding.

So non-moral reasons get things right with Agent Favoring. But—if moral reasons just are impartial reasons—then we end up with exactly the wrong take on:

Agent Sacrifice Amanda has a bigger headache than Bert, though she may give her last pain pill to Bert.

Here, the gift to Bert is partially and impartially worse: Amanda could reduce pain overall and within her circle of associates if she would just gulp the pill herself. But surely it’s not wrong of her to help Bert, sacrificing her own interests for another’s somewhat lesser good.11 The gift seems morally optional.

What if morality is other-regarding? Then, in Agent Sacrifice, we no longer have to say that

Amanda has more moral reason to keep the pill, even though she has the bigger headache. For she has no moral reason to promote self-interest; her choice involves a sheer tradeoff between the moral and non-moral, just like Agent Favoring. So, supposing that non-moral reasons can offset moral obligations, then both gifts to Bert can be optional.12 But if self-interest isn’t moral, then as noted

10 The idea here is that non-moral reasons are, if you like, “moral prerogatives.” They don’t “morally” count in favor—they don’t have any shot at backing a moral obligation—but they do tend to make actions morally permissible. See e.g. Slote 1991, Bratman 1994, Parfit 2011: 137-41, and especially Portmore 2012: Chapter 5. To explain why Agent Favoring is morally optional, Dreier (2004) suggests that reasons of beneficence are non- moral in my sense (though still “moral” in another sense). But, as Dorsey (2013: 361) and Portmore (2012: 136) point out, when the stakes are high and costs low, surely we are morally required to give benefits to others. If I can stop a hurricane for a nickel, it’s wrong to keep the nickel! 11 Stocker (1976, 1994), Slote (1984, 1985: Chapter 1), Sider (1993), Parfit (2011: 139), Portmore (2012: 95), and Harman (2015, 2016) all share the intuition that Agent Sacrifice is optional. 12 To make the gift optional in both cases, we would need parity of reasons, in Chang’s (2002) sense: the weights are comparable, but in neither case does Amanda have more, less, or exactly equal reason to take the pill. (The main other option is that the reasons are incomparable—i.e. they can’t even be roughly compared.)

6 earlier, we can’t condemn Harm to Self as wrong.

Now we have all of the cases before us, and we can finally see the shape of what I’ll call the

Non-Moralist’s Dilemma. If morality is just impartiality, then Agent Sacrificing gifts are wrong, and so is omitting a Benefit to Self. If morality is just concern for others, then grave Harms to Self are morally optional. And either way, we are morally required to give costless Benefits to Others.

Of course, one way out of the dilemma is to find some third way to draw the line between moral and non-moral. But we should expect any line to look awfully squiggly, for two reasons. First, the elusive import of self-interest. Self-care isn’t typically obligatory—which is why the impartial conception of morality leads to trouble—but nor is it always optional, which is why morality can’t just concern others. There are subtle but crucial limits on how we may treat ourselves. Second, the problem of favors. Helping others can be optional even when it’s costless—and yet others’ welfare is a moral reason par excellence. How can we say that only some boons to others are morally weighty?

Any line we draw around the moral will need to rule in the classic mandatory benefits to others, along with the intuitive duties to take minimal care of oneself, while somehow excluding the benefits of flossing one’s own teeth and doing nice favors for other people. This is not an easy line to draw; these benefits do not seem so intrinsically different.

So I don’t think we will find any snappy, natural accounts of the non-moral that can fit our intuitions in the above cases. But perhaps that’s fine, for the friends of non-moral reasons. They might say:

Sure, it would be nice to have an independent account of which reasons are non-moral. But we don’t need one to justify our belief in non-moral reasons. For we know a priori that we need non-moral reasons, or else we can’t possibly explain the fact that we sometimes have most reason to do what is morally optional.

But this doesn’t erase the worry. For one thing, if we can’t clearly say which reasons are non-moral, that makes the appeal to non-moral reasons worse as an explanation. The explanation ends up ad hoc, in the case of Benefit to Self (e.g.), because we are left wondering why my reasons to floss are

7 non-moral when so many similar reasons aren’t.

But there is a more fundamental point to make. Even if there is some nice way to single out non-moral reasons, we don’t need them. Whatever they can explain, we can explain with the distinction between reasons and prerogatives. And with that distinction in place, we can also explain why non- moral reasons are so hard to single out: they have nothing in common. There is no distinctive “non- moral” way of counting in favor, no special non-moral “flavor” of reason. There is just the extrinsic distinction between reasons that are offset by prerogatives—and therefore unable to ground moral duties—and reasons that are not.

With that in mind, let me make a final point against non-moral reasons. Sometimes they are argued for by appeal to experience. According to Horgan and Timmons, the reasons to do a duty feel “demanding,” but reasons to supererogate, such as Olivia’s reasons to do a favor for her friend

Mary, feel like they “favor” without demanding:

Olivia does not experience the reasons she has to initiate contact with Mary as requiring her to do so, although, of course, the reasons in question are experienced as favoring the initiation of contact. Such reasons, then, are experienced differently than are the reasons involved in experiences of obligation. (Horgan and Timmons 2010: 48)

On the basis of this “difference in moral phenomenology,” Horgan and Timmons infer a distinction between “requiring” (i.e. moral) and “nonrequiring” (i.e. non-moral) reasons, assuming that a reason’s “feel” must reflect something intrinsic to the reason. But why assume that? Again, non-moral reasons aren’t the only explanation. Instead of detecting “non-morality” in a reason, we could just as well be sensing the presence of prerogatives.

But what are prerogatives, exactly? And how could they do the work of non-moral reasons?

2. Prerogatives and interests

The core fact about reasons is that they favor actions, which tends to make them required (and therefore permissible); the core of prerogatives is that they make permissible without favoring. Put

8 the two together, and you get a simple, punchy theory of obligation:

Prerogatives Principle The option of φ-ing is morally obligatory iff, for any other option of ψ-ing, the reasons to φ outweigh the combination of reasons and prerogatives to ψ.

In short: I have to do what the reasons favor unless I have enough combined reason and prerogative to do something else. Prerogatives are the gap between “most reason” and “must.”

The concept of a prerogative is a mainstay in nonconsequentialist ethics, thanks to the work of Samuel Scheffler (1982) and Frances Kamm (1996).13 So it’s a bit strange that prerogatives have been ignored in recent work on non-moral reasons. For example, here is Douglas Portmore’s (2003:

309) definition of a moral reason:

To start, let me just stipulate that by a moral reason I mean a reason that generates a moral requirement in the absence of countervailing reasons. In other words, P’s reason to φ is a moral reason if and only if P would be morally required to φ in a situation where P had no reason (moral or nonmoral) to do otherwise.

But on a theory of prerogatives, any reason could generate a moral requirement when unopposed by other reasons—and any reason could fail to generate a requirement. It all depends on whether the reason is opposed by a decisive prerogative.14

Consider some cases. Since I have a prerogative not to floss my teeth tonight, I don’t have to. But if I somehow lacked the prerogative, then I would be accountable for flossing; it would be wrong to refrain. Moreover, my reasons not to harm others—typically decisive—can be countered by a prerogative; say an acquaintance validly consents to being bonked hard with a tennis ball.

Maybe that wasn’t a smart thing to consent to; maybe there’s no good reason for me to oblige him.

13 For related work, see Gert 2007 on reasons with “justifying” strength, and Hurka and Shubert 2012 on “prima facie permissions.” (I don’t think Gert quite has the concept of a prerogative, since his “justifying” reasons count in favor of actions and ground ‘ought’ claims; on ‘ought’, see fn. 15 below.) Portmore (2012) sees non-moral reasons as specifically moral prerogatives (see fn. 10), and grounds of “rational” requirements. 14 To be clear: when I say that “all reasons are moral,” I didn’t have in mind this definition of Portmore’s. I have in mind my earlier definition: “moral” reasons are ones that can sometimes ground moral obligations, and “non-moral” reasons are ones that cannot. I’m just citing Portmore’s other definition to show that prerogatives are off some writers’ radar.

9 Still it wouldn’t be morally wrong. If someone tried to blame or punish me, I could point out that I was acting with consent, and that I was only using my own arm and tennis ball. This wouldn’t show that my action is beyond criticism; maybe I should feel ashamed. But I had a prerogative, so I don’t deserve blame; I didn’t do wrong. (Again, a clue: no one can force me not to hit him.)

Now, let’s suppose that we have prerogatives. Can they explain the cases? That will depend on which prerogatives we have. There are two basic options: one to do with rights, the other with self-interest. We can start with the more familiar ground of prerogatives—self-interest (Scheffler

1982). Intuitively, we have a prerogative to look out for our precious selves. That would explain:

Agent Favoring Amanda has a smaller headache than Bert, and she may keep her last pain pill to herself.

Here, though the reasons favor giving the pill to Bert, Amanda has a prerogative to keep it; so the supererogatory gift is morally optional. So far, so good.15

But we need something more to deal with:

Agent Sacrifice Amanda has a bigger headache than Bert, though she may give her last pain pill to Bert.

Here, Hurka and Shubert (2012) posit the “agent-sacrificing” prerogative, letting us sacrifice our own interests even when it’s against the greater good.16 Costs to oneself help to justify actions. That would cover Agent Sacrifice, along with:

15 Moreover, as Hurka and Shubert (2012: 8, 9) point out, we now have an explanation for why it’s all things considered better to give the pill—there is more reason to do it. (If there is only more moral reason, we can only say that the gift is better in a respect.) I would go a step further: I think we can explain why Amanda should (and ought to) give the pill to Bert, all things considered. We should do whatever is most choiceworthy, and the most choiceworthy option is whatever there is most reason to do. (Prerogatives only affect what is obligatory.) So we have an attractive definition of weak deontic necessity modals like ‘should’ and ‘ought’: we should/ought to do what we have most reason to do; and we are required to do an option A if, and only if, for any other option B, the reasons to do A outweigh the combination of reasons and prerogatives to do B. This account has a coveted property: ‘must’ (requirement) entails ‘should’ (most reason), but not vice versa. (Snedegar 2016 argues that this one-way entailment is desirable, and that it is not easy to achieve if we define ‘ought’ and ‘must’ just in terms of reasons. So this is another point in favor of going beyond reasons and accepting prerogatives.) 16 Their full term is “agent-sacrificing permission.” Seth Lazar (ms.) also defends both agent-favoring and agent-sacrificing prerogatives, though he prefers the terminology of “options” to that of prerogatives.

10 Benefit to Self I have most reason to floss my teeth tonight, but flossing is morally optional.

That said, I think this new prerogative is a bit strange. Why should the fact that flossing benefits me do anything to justify not flossing? How could the pain to Amanda justify the gift to Bert? It would be one thing if Amanda were a demonic menace who deserves some cosmic justice—but she isn’t.

She just has a headache.

There is also a problem presented by variations on:

Harm to Others I have most reason not to harm strangers, and indeed I’m morally obligated not to harm.

Suppose that harming you would result in injury to me (I’ll get thwacked). Does that really make it easier to justify the harm? The agent-sacrificing prerogative shouldn’t apply. There’s also trouble for agent-favoring prerogatives; consider a case where I would enjoy harming you—or one where I need to harm you, e.g. by stealing a kidney to save my life. Even here I’m morally required to refrain; my welfare seems to give me no prerogative. Hurka and Shubert (2012: 9–10) acknowledge this last point, and respond by stipulating that the agent-favoring prerogative has zero weight against others’ rights (e.g. renal rights); they could stipulate the same for agent-sacrifice. While this isn’t an attractive move, it does help with Harm to Others.

But no prerogatives based in self-interest—not even ones with variable weights—will be able to accommodate all the cases. Remember:

Benefit to Others I have most reason to do a stranger a costless favor, but it’s morally optional.

Here, the favor is costless but optional—which means that we need a prerogative that isn’t based in the agent’s interests.17

17 The agent-sacrificing prerogative doesn’t have too much trouble with Harm to Self. It rightly predicts that moderate self-harm is morally optional, and that extreme harms can be wrong. (Prerogatives aren’t absolute!) But it does give an awkward rationale. Intuitively, when I’m allowed to harm myself, that’s not because of the harmfulness of what I do; it’s just because it’s my choice, and I’m not violating anybody’s rights. It should be at

11 (I can imagine an objection:

The problem isn’t with basing prerogatives in interests, per se. We just need a broader conception of what’s in our interests—it’s not only wellbeing that counts, but also satisfied desires and averted exertions. After all, even ‘costless’ favors require me to move my body, which takes effort, and which I might not feel inclined to do.

Two replies. First, we don’t usually have prerogatives to avoid things just because they are effortful or undesirable. Suppose I accept payment in exchange for helping you move tomorrow. While it’s true that helping you is strenuous, and that I would rather lounge at home, that doesn’t at all justify breaking our agreement; at best it is an excuse. Second, no matter how broad our conception of interests, the agent-favoring prerogative still won’t cover favors and gifts that are rewarding for the agent. A small-stakes case might be buying books for a friend, which feels nice (fn. 5). More serious is compensated organ transfer. Imagine that someone, taking the moral stance, accosts you with a demand: “You have to give me your kidney, because I’ll use it for the greater good and make it worth your while—just name your price.” I don’t think morality demands that you name a price.)18

Bottom line: agent-favoring prerogatives are helpful; agent-sacrificing prerogatives are awkward; but even combined (and stretched), they can’t cover all of the cases.

3. Prerogatives and rights

So what can account for the optionality of favors, modest harms and boons to oneself, and supererogatory sacrifices? (While still letting us condemn those nasty Harms to Self and Others?)

We need prerogatives to have more latitude and less contingency on cost. The key, I think, is to base prerogatives in rights. Here is a simple proposal: prerogatives protect precisely the things that are forbidden by our rights against others; prerogatives are the flip-side of interpersonal rights.19 If

least as easy to justify sitting around doing nothing as it is to justify bopping my head against the wall. 18 The usual caveat: unless the person can offer something outrageously valuable—the sort of thing, assuming there is one, that could even justify taking someone else’s kidney out against their protests. 19 For early versions of this view, see Kagan 1989: Chapter 6, Section 2 and Hurley 1995. Intruigingly, Dancy

12 others can’t take my kidney out, I don’t have to give it. If I have a right that you not shuffle my vases and wiggle my ears, I have a prerogative to shuffle them and wiggle them. More precisely,

Prerogatives from Rights Other things equal, an agent A has a prerogative not to φ iff A has rights that others not φ.

There are plenty of things to qualify and clarify here, particularly when it comes to which kinds of acts we’re quantifying over. (They should be things that can be done either to oneself or another— like “alienate A from A’s kidney,” “wiggle A’s ear,” or “stab A in the neck.” Not “kick herself” or

“buy himself a treat.”) We will also want to allow that some rights don’t correlate with prerogatives.

But I think the basic idea, and its proper scope, should be clear enough for us to treat the examples.

First up:

Benefit to Others I have most reason to do a stranger a costless favor, but it’s morally optional.

What makes the gifts we call “favors” typically optional, in my view, is that the gift involves the use of one’s property and body; we have rights over our property and bodies. If I own the candy bar, for example, then I have a prerogative to do whatever I want with it—including throwing it away—and so I have a prerogative not to give you the final pieces, even if I’m full and have no reason to hang on to them. This is reflected in the fact that I have a right that forbids you from taking the bar, despite the fact that you would enjoy it and I wouldn’t. And when I have the chance to do you a favor by cleaning dishes, my prerogative to refrain reflects my rights over my body; it’s not an instrument for the greater good, and so I have some veto power over the demand to use it optimifically—whether that means giving a kidney, injuring a leg, or just waving my hands around.

The rights-based view of prerogatives gives the same explanation for:

Benefit to Self I have most reason to floss my teeth tonight, but flossing is morally optional.

(2004b: 21) uses the notion of a right to describe enticing (non-moral) reasons: he says one “has the right not to” act on them, however pleasant it would be.

13 Here, again, I don’t have to expend my effort and wiggle my fingers just to promote the greater good. They’re my fingers; the stakes aren’t too high; and I don’t owe it to anyone to floss my teeth—so it’s my choice. And the same kind of explanation also works for:

Agent Favoring Amanda has a smaller headache than Bert, and she may keep her last pain pill to herself.

Agent Sacrifice Amanda has a bigger headache than Bert, though she may give her last pain pill to Bert.

In both cases, the prerogative is due to Amanda’s rights over her pill. If the pill were Bert’s, or a third party’s, then she would have no prerogative to take it, even though it’s in her interests.

That last point is important: mere benefits to self don’t generate prerogatives. This allows us to explain versions of:

Harm to Others I have most reason not to harm strangers, and indeed I’m morally obligated not to harm.

In particular, I’m thinking of the cases that were trouble for Hurka and Shubert, where an agent stands to benefit from harming others, in violation of their rights; e.g. Bert wants his headache gone, so he steals and scarfs Amanda’s pill. Clearly he has no prerogative: if he dove for Amanda’s pill, we would be morally allowed to restrain him, and he would be blameworthy without an excuse. Hurka and Shubert captured this fact by stipulation—prerogatives have zero weight against rights. Now, we can give a more natural explanation—Bert has no rights regarding that pill; he therefore has no corresponding prerogatives.

So rights-based prerogatives have quite a bit of explanatory power, and the explanations sound quite natural. Amanda may do as she wishes with the pill (though Bert may not) because it is hers. But to be sure, rights and prerogatives aren’t all powerful. Let’s finally turn to:

Harm to Self I have most reason not to grievously harm myself, and indeed I’m morally required not to.

What goes on in this case, I think, is that my reasons override my prerogative. This is possible if

14 prerogatives aren’t absolute and instead have finite weights, as I think they do. Plausibly, they have the same weights as the interpersonal rights to which they correspond—again, two sides, one moral coin. To be clear, I think prerogatives and reasons can have comparable weights despite being different. The key is that both can be called on to defend one’s actions when a representative of the moral community comes along to press demands. The “weight” of a prerogative is just how much of a gap it puts between “most reason” and “must”—between what’s best and what can be demanded.

So we need to go beyond the theory of reasons. Reasons might be basic, but they aren’t

“first” in the sense of being the sole fundamental elements of ethics.20 To explain the optionality of self-care and self-sacrifice, we shouldn’t use two kinds of rational weight, one “deontic” and the other

“enticing.” Instead, we need two occasions for weighing. In rational deliberation, reasons are everything; what matters is what is favored. In negotiating demands from the moral community—when one is defending a choice as permissible, not necessarily as optimal—prerogatives are also fair game. In fact, that is all there is to being a prerogative: to be a prerogative is to make defensible without favoring, to count in defense but not deliberation. A “reasons first” view collapses these two activities, distorting one to simulate the other. This approach has the virtue of simplifying things, and there may be much more to be said in favor. But I’ve tried to show that it’s not our only option.

4. Conclusion

Non-moral reasons are summoned for a clear and noble purpose: to explain why it’s not mandatory to sacrifice one’s interests for others’ greater good, and why it’s not wrong to be imprudent. But the most natural ways to delimit the non-moral lead us into the Non-Moralist’s Dilemma: if morality is

20 For example, Scanlon (2014: 2, emphasis original) says that he is “inclined to believe” that “reasons are fundamental,” in the strong sense of being “the only fundamental elements of the normative domain, other normative notions such as good and ought being analyzable in terms of reasons.” See Wedgwood 2015 for critical discussion and further citations.

15 other-regarding, we are allowed to do terrible things to ourselves (Harm to Self); if morality is impartial, we are required to floss our teeth (Benefit to Self) and forbidden from helping others’ at our greater expense (Agent Sacrifice); and on both views, we may not withhold costless favors

(Benefit to Others).

To handle the full range of cases, I’ve argued, we could instead use prerogatives—in particular, prerogatives that let us omit those acts that our rights forbid others from doing without our consent: body movements, alienation of property, the infliction of harm. Prerogatives have limits, so it can be wrong to harm oneself in gratuitous ways, and to promote one’s welfare by violating rights. Even so, the prerogatives we have are crucially important; without them, we would have no relief from the demand to be morally ideal.

So I conclude that there is really no such thing as a non-moral (“non-insistent,” “enticing”) reason. Any reason, if unopposed by reasons and prerogatives, would ground a moral obligation.

This is true because any reason can serve as the basis for a legitimate moral demand, and what is morally obligatory just is what can be morally demanded. The background idea here is that the moral community has standards: other things equal, we are accountable for making the best choices we can—the demand is to follow our reasons.21 But we have a pass if we have prerogatives to do otherwise. That means that whether a batch of reasons is “obligating” is extrinsic to those reasons, even if we assume away any countervailing reasons; it all depends on our prerogatives. By contrast, on the “non-moralist” picture, the reasons to floss one’s teeth are intrinsically and apparently by nature unfit to ground an obligation. I’ve argued that we don’t need such reasons, and that they aren’t helpful.

We can still allow for a distinction between self- and other-regarding reasons; if one wants to

21 This suggests another clarification. “Moral reason” may itself be a misleading notion, if it is taken to imply that duties are just simply produced by reasons, without any role for the community’s standards and demands. Reasons set the standards; the moral community issues the command.

16 call these “non-moral” and “moral,” that is fine, as long as we’re mindful of ambiguities.22 But I think we should resist any distinction between rational (“all things considered”) obligations and specifically moral ones. This distinction comes with a host of thorny questions. Does moral obligation override rational obligation? (Is morality “authoritative?”) Could we be rationally required to do what’s morally wrong? How could there be a point of view that includes both morality and prudence?23

But the idea of a specifically moral obligation, as distinct from an all-encompassing “rational” one, only makes sense given non-moral reasons. The distinction is then defined so that moral obligations are sensitive just to the moral subset of reasons (e.g. Dorsey 2013), or so that they are at any rate grounded only in the moral (Portmore 2012). If all reasons are moral, however, the moral point of view is not so myopic; even by itself, it “considers” all of the relevant things: permissive prerogatives on the one side, and on the other, pushy reasons of all stripes. The only obligations we need are moral, through and through, and rather than rebelling against morality’s authority, reasons of self-interest are right within its jurisdiction.

22 I am skeptical, however, that we have any sui generis, extra-weighty, categorical reasons to promote our wellbeing, regardless of whether these reasons are “moral” in the sense of being “insistent.” For some cogent arguments (independent of mine) against such reasons, see Worsnip forthcoming, and see also Setiya 2015. (Worsnip, following Chang 2013, believes that it is to some extent up to us what reasons we have, since we can control the balance of our “aim-based” reasons. An interesting question, which I won’t try to answer here, is how these reasons relate to prerogatives. There are similarities—neither is essentially a constraint on deliberation, and both are available for ex post justification of one’s choices—but they are different enough that we might end up needing both.) 23 On the question of whether morality overrides non-moral concerns, see Baier 1958: 308, Stroud 1997: 176, Portmore 2008, and Dorsey 2016. On the question of whether there is a point of view that “includes” morality and the non-moral, see Copp 2007: 292, Tiffany 2007: 233, and Dorsey 2016: Chapter 1.

17 Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Tamar Schapiro, Kieran Setiya, Caspar Hare, Renee Jorgensen Bolinger, Jack Spencer, Aleksy Tarasenko-Struc, and Nathaniel Baron-Schmitt for enormously helpful discussion about reasons and prerogatives. In particular, in her seminar on the British Moralists, Tamar taught me about the early modern distinction between “counsel” and “command,” which first got me wondering about the gaps between “most reason” and “must.” I also learned so much about rights and permissions from MIT’s Realm of Rights Reading Group, 2017–18, which included Thomas Byrne, Brendan de Kenessey, Sandy Diehl, Sam Dishaw, Sara Ellenbogen, Leonard Katz, Anni Räty, Quinn White, and Judy Thomson. Finally, my thanks to David Builes for his generous, challenging, and definitely supererogatory comments.

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