Kagan II
Kagan, Chapter 2
I have not finished discussing chapter one, but I will start with two and then come back to One toward the end.
Kagan invites us to skip all of chapter two. I think that this would be a mistake. For what he says here provides much of the foundation for the rest, and it is important to know whether he rests his later claims on a sound foundation.
THE PRO TANTO REASON AGAIN
I. On page 47, we get some reiteration: the pro tanto reason is the best explanation for what the moderate wants to say.
II. In other words, it is difficult to make any sense of the moderate position as A THEORY unless the judgments that the moderate makes are based on the existence of the PTR (pro tanto reason to promote the good).
A. Otherwise, the moderate position may smply seem ot be a collection of "intutions in search of a foundation." And of course unless the collection of intuitions can be given a coherent and defensible justification, then all of the old worries about intuitions will be back to haunt the moderate.
B. Thus to the extent that the moderate position can be expressed as a coherent theorya theory which explains rather than merely listing the moderates typical moral judgementsto that extent, Kagan claims that it has to be committed to the existence of the PTR.
III. A careful definition of the PTR appears on page 49: "A PTR is one that always has force, but this force can be countered and overridden in various ways; a given act can be supported by a PTR even though that act is not morally required."
IV. In cases in which the moderate would say that you do not have a MORAL REQUIREMENT to promote the good, then this will be because of SOME OTHER REASON, and not because the PTR has simply gone away.
V. The case of the drowning child again (49):
A. If it costs the agent very little, then the moderate would claim that the agent is morally required to save the child from drowning.
B. However, if the situation changed so that saving the child would be costly (suppose the pool is full of sharks with lasers on their heads, or with ill-tempered sea bass), then the moderate would say that the agent is not required to save the child.
C. Well, what happened?
D. Kagan says that the sensible thing for the moderate to say is that the new fact about the cost to the agent produced a new reason which is stronger than the PTR.
E. It would make no sense to say that the addition of the sharks causes the PTR to disappear.
F. Or, as Kagan puts it, "The reason to promote the good does not pop into and out of existence as the cost of promoting the good varies: rather there is a standing reason to promote the good, which may or may not be overrriddedn" [by some other reason which may be operative in the given situation].
VI. The previous example illustrates an OPTION at work: To say that there are options is to say, roughly, that SOMETIMES there are reasons that outweigh the PTR.
A. Where do these reasons come from?
B. As we saw from Chapter I, Kagan thinks that it is most likely that the moderate will say that they come from considerations about the COST TO THE AGENT
C. That is, the most likely argument for the Moderates claim that there are options will rest on the claim that every agent has a reason not to do things that will be extremely costly in terms of her integrity i.e. her deepest concerns.
VII. Here is an example of how a constraint might work: (50) Suppose that we have a case in which the only way to avoid haivng two people killed is to kill one person (how about the spelunker case).
A. Now, the moderate will say that we must not kill the one.
B. Kagan suggests that this does NOT mean that the moderate denies the PTR to promote the good, or that the PTR favors saving the two.
C. Rather, according to Kagan, the moderates claim is best explained as appealing to SOME OTHER REASON that overrides the PTR in this case.
D. As he puts it: "The moderate wants to claim that were it possible to save the two through some morally permissible means, there would be a very strong reason to save the two. I take it that the moderate does not want to deny that that strong reason to save the two still exists in the case where doing so requires killing the one. ON the contrary, there is the very same reason to save the two in both cases; it is simply that when the violation of a constraint is involved, this overrides that reason, without eliminating it."
The structure of the Moderate Position (Ordinary Morality)
I. PTR plus additional reasons that underlie (ie provide a rationale or defense of) constraints and options.
II. These additional reasons sometimes outweigh the PTR and thus prevent the agent from being morally required to promote the good.
III. Thus (51) "the acceptance of such a reason [the PTR] does not commit the moderate to any sort of general requirement to promote the overall good. That a given ration would promote the greater good provides SOME reason for reacting in that way, but various countervailing reasons may well make the given reaction merely optional or even forbidden."
Moral reasons versus moral requirements:
I. The PTR is a moral reason. There may be others, eg those that ground the moderates constraints and options.
II. For a moral reason to ground or become a moral REQUIREMENT, it has to be "DECISIVE."
III. Now surely a reason has to be the strongest in order for it to be decisive. If it is not the strongest reason operating in the situation, then it cannot be decisive.
IV. However, is that all that is necessary for a reason to be decisive? Maybe not. There could be some other condition that helps to determine whether or not a moral reason is decisive.
V. So there are two main ways that a reason can fail to be decisive:
(1) it can be outweighed, OR
(2) there can be some further requirement besides having the greatest weight on being decisive.
VI. Now, Kagan warns us that the appeal to cost could go either of these two routes:
A. it could try to show that costs to agents are reasons that outweigh the pro tanto reason to promote the good, or at least they do so in lots of cases.
B. Or it could try to show that there is some further condition on decisiveness that the appeal to cost somehow shows that the pro tanto reason to promote the good typically cannot meet.
PROBLEM: OPTIONS TO HARM (This is from Chapter One)
I. Kagan is going to talk a lot more about the appeal to cost later in the book, but right now he wants to make some preliminary remarks as a sort of preview.
II. One big problem that Kagan sees on the horizon for the M who wants to defend options on the basis of the cost to the agent (e.g. the cost to the agent's integrity) is that the argument might work TOO WELL.
III. That is, the appeal to cost might prove TOO MUCH. In particular, it might prove that there are options of a kind that the Moderate may not like.
IV. To see how this might be so, we must first remember that --as we saw from Scheffler--you don't get constraints "for free" --that is, if you show there are options, that does not in and of itself show that there are constraints.
V. Now, if the FORM of the argument from cost to options is going to go like this:
A. It is unreasonable for morality to impose great costs on agents (see how much this is like Williams's charge that utilitarianism is "unreasonable")
B. Not recognizing options imposes a great cost on agents
C. Therefore it is unreasonable for morality to fail to give us options.
VI. The problem is that if this is the argument that the M wants to use, then it also seems to support the conclusion that we have options to HARM others.
A. For if it is costly to benefit others as much as possible--e.g. by giving all your time and money to charity--then surely it is also going to be costly to refrain from actively harming others sometimes.
B. Thus if you have a million dollars, E will tell you to give it up to charity. If you say, no no no, that is too costly, for it deprives me of my fortune.
C. But if that is a good answer to E, then why does that same appeal not apply to the person who can bump off uncle Milty and inherit a million dollars?
D. Either way, you are out a million bucks you could otherwise have had.
VII. So one challenge for the M who wants to use the appeal to cost is going to be to show that it will not also give us options to DO harm.
VIII. Rather, moderates typically think that we have options to refrain from helping, but not options to harm. Notice that Scheffler's formulation of the ACP seems to fall prey to Kagan's worry here, for it seems to allow us to harm others at least a little bit (i.e. within the limits of whatever the weighting factor is for our projects).
IX. So it would appear, says Kagan, that if the moderate is going to defend the ordinary morality that most of us know and love, she will not be able to stop--like Scheffler does--at options, for those options will also, it seems, be options to harm, and most moderates do no think that we have such options.
X. Thus for that reason, if we are to justify the kind of morality that most people believe in--the kind that allows us the option of NOT BENEFITING, but not the option of ACTIVELY HARMING, then we will also need to argue for constraints as well, for this seems like the only way that we are going to be able to have options but not options to harm, i.e. by having constraints that rule out harming.
Problems with Constraints (also from Chapter 1)
Given the apparent need for constraints to rule out options to harm, and thus to justify ordinary morality (which certainly does NOT give us options to harm), the question of whether they are justifiable becomes quite important.
I. For reasons that are much the same as we saw in Scheffler, Kagan points out that constraints are going to be extremely difficult to justify.
II. Of course Kagan has read Scheffler, and essentially rephrases lots of the arguments we dealt with earlier.
III. Kagan gives his version of the moral that Scheffler draws, on page 29: "constraints cannot be erected on considerations of badness."
IV. This is because constraints have the paradoxical feature that we discussed earlier: it seems irrational to forbid the performance of one horrible action in cases in which doing so would prevent several equally horrible actions.
V. What Kagan says, however, is that this should worry the moderate.
VI. Kagan argues that a theory that has options but not constraints will have no way to rule out options to harm.
A. Now this may be a point of disagreement between Scheffler and Kagan.
B. Scheffler suggests that the distribution sensitive conception of the good will be able to do much or most of the work that the constraint would have done.
C. That is, Scheffler seems not to be particularly worried about the possibility of options to do harm because he seems to think that the distribution sensitive theory of the good will ensure that most if not all deliberate harms will NOT produce a good SOA, since part of what makes an SOA good is the equality of the distribution of happiness, and Scheffler thinks that actions that deliberately harm others will usually produce a less equal (and therefore less good) SOA.
D. If that is true, then Scheffler's hybrid theory will prohibit most deliberate harms not because of a constraint, but because the distribution sensitive theory of the good will normally rule the consequences of such actions to be bad because they make the distribution of utility less equal.
E. A good term paper topic would center on this debate: Is Scheffler wise to reject the ACR/constraint in favor of the distribution sensitive theory of the good as a way to get his theory to prohibit actions which deliberately harm others?
ASYMMETRY
I. Furthermore, we can tell that (p 78) if we are going to get options to fail to do all we can to promote the best SOA, but not options to harm, then we will need one kind of reasons (like cost to the agent) to get us options in the first place, but another kind of reasons to provide the basis for constraints against doing harm.
II. For if we appeal to cost for both, then since cost seems to provide a rationale for letting us to more things we would not already be allowed to do, then it is not at all clear how that could both ground options and constraints that would be costly to obey.
III. So here is a rather different kind of argument for
Scheffler's "Independence Thesis": you CANNOT use the same rationale
for both options and restrictions, since on is trying to get you more freedom
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