1 All Reasons Are Moral Daniel Muñoz MIT Draft of 10/23/18 I Argue
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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.