Chapter Seven and the Middle Material from The Limits of Morality

I. The focus of the debate is "ordinary morality"–the moral view that most of us hold, and that most of our intuitions support.

A. Ordinary morality is defended by the person Kagan calls the Moderate.

B. The moderate holds a position halfway between the minimalist (who thinks that morality demands little if anything from us, and in particular that there is no moral requirement to promote the general good) and the extremist (who thinks that morality requires that we do all that we possibly can to promote the general good).

II. Ordinary Morality (OM)–the position that the Moderate defends–claims that we are SOMETIMES required to do things that promote the general good. However, OM also holds that there are LIMITS on the duty to promote the general good.

A. One kind of limit is an OPTION. An option limits the duty to promote the geranl good by making it sometimes optional.

B. The other kind of limit on morality is a CONSTRAINT. A constraint limits the duty to promote the general good by forbidding certain actions even in situations in which those actions would promote the general good.

III. Now the kind of morality that most of us believe in, and the kind of morality that most of our intuitions support–includes both options and constraints.

IV. As we saw last time, Kagan argues that the moderate cannot defend anything like or ordinary moral views unless she defends BOTH options and constraints.

V. On Kagan's view, the moderate will have to have some way of arguing for constraints in order to prevent the appeal to cost from generating options to do harm.

A. Thus, if it is too costly to me to for morality to require me to ignore my drowning friend and go save two drowning strangers, then why isn't it also too costly to forbid me from killing a stranger and using his organs (and money) to help my friend who is dying of a disease that can only be cured by an organ transplant?

B. The point is that if we need options because not having them it too much of a burden on an agent, then why aren’t constraints also a burden?

1. A morality that withholds an option to do X that I want to do is burdensome, but so is a morality that has a constraint on doing X that I want to do.

VI. So if the appeal to cost is going to ground the RIGHT kind of options, then we will need some constraint against harming.

A. What do I mean by the "right" kind of options?

B. The options that ordinary morality, the moral theory most of us know and love, endorses, namely options to fail to do all we can to promote the good but not options to do positive harm.

C. In other words, the options that OM–and the intuitions of most regular folks–believe in are LIMITED OPTIONS. They are limited in the sense that they are only options to OPT OUT of the pro tanto duty to promote the good, BUT NOT an option to do bad.

D. If the moderate cannot defend these limited options, then she will not be able to defend the kind of morality that most of us believe in.

 

CONSTRAINTS AND THE DO/ALLOW DISTINCTION

I. Now, the argument of the middle part of the book--the part we are skippng, is an examination of the various arguments one might put forward to justify such constraints.

II. We have already looked at the main problem with constraints–the "paradox" that we discussed at great length when we discussed Scheffler. In the middle of Kagan’s book, he discusses various possibilities for overcoming this problem and justifying constraints anyway.

III. The most prevalent--and seemingly most promising-- strategies for doing this involve appeal to the distinction between what we do versus what we merely allow.

VI. The basic idea is the claim that there is a morally significant distinction between what we do on the one hand and what we allow to happen on the other.

A. The idea comes across nicely in common intuitions about cases like the following

B. Suppose that Person A kills person B directly and intentionally. Suppose that person D is dying and that Person C could save him, but does not. Thus Person C allows Person D to die.

C. In cases like this, most people’s intuitions would say that Person A’s conduct is morally worse than that of Person C.

D. To generalize, most people’s intuitions hold that it is worse to CAUSE something bad than to simply sit back and allow it to occur.

V. If this intuitive position is correct, then it could be used as the basis for a defense of the kind of limited options that the moderate needs if she is to defend the ordinary moral views of ordinary persons.

A. How would this work?

B. The first step would be to use the distinction to justify a constraint against DOING HARM that does not apply to merely allowing harm.

C. Such a constraint would limit the option so that we did not have an option to DO harm. However, it would leave us with an option to allow harm, at least when preventing it would be too costly.

1. For example, we would then be able to claim that we have a moral option to ALLOW people to die of hunger if preventing this would be too costly to us.

2. Yet we would NOT have to claim that we can opt to kill another person, no matter how costly it is to us to have that person go on living.

3. So if we return to the Uncle Milty example, we might have the option of not spending a million dollars to cure his disease, but we would NOT have an option to kill him in order to inherit a million dollars from him.

4. The reason for this owuld be that there would be a distinction between doing harm and allowing harm, such that there is a CONSTRAINT against doing harm but not against allowing it.

VI. Clearly all of this line of thought depends on the claim that there is a MORALLY SIGNIFICANT distinction between doing harm and allowing harm.

VII. Kagan argues that this distinction is NOT sufficient to explain why there should be constraints.

A. In effect, he holds that distinction between doing harm and allowing harm "dangles." (Refer back to chapter one for the notion of a "dangling distinction.").

B. Now of course something is not true just because Shelly Kagan says so, and so you are invited to go read what he has to say for yourself and see what you think. What follows is a very brief discussion of Kagan’s basic line of argument.

 

PROBLEMS WITH THE DO/ALLOW DISTINCTION

I.  What the moderate needs is not just the claim that it is worse to cause harm than to allow it. She also needs some account of what it is to cause harm that explains WHY causing harm is worse than letting it happen.

II.  Now you might just think that it is OBVIOUS that there is a clear difference between causing harm and merely allowing it to happen, and you may think that it is equally obvious that this difference is MORALLY SIGNIFICANT, so that causing harm is worse than merely allowing it to happen.

III.  There are two kinds of cases which call this conventional wisdom into serious doubt.

A.  Some are cases in which it is very difficult to determine whether the person is causing harm or merely letting it happen. These cases raise doubts about whetehr there really is a clear distinction between the two.

B.  Others are cases in which the it is pretty clear that there is a distinction between doing harm and merely allowing it, but in which that distinction does not seem to make any moral difference. These cases raise doubts about whether the distinction between causing and allowing harm (assuming that it can be drawn in the first place) has any moral significance. In particular, they raise questions about whether causing harm really is worse than merely allowing it.

IV.  Let’s look at just a couple of cases of the first kind.

A.  One is suggested by Isaacs: Does pulling the plug count as causing death or merely allowing it? To make it more devious: Suppose instead that we string the extension cord across the hallway and wait for someone to trip over it and dislodge it from the socket. Or suppose that we merely stop paying the electric bill and wait for the electric company to turn off the power.

B.  Another kind of case is suggested by Kagan (though I have beefed it up a bit and changed the details somewhat).  There is a village in a far off land. Joe does not like the villagers, and wants them to be dead.

Case 1: Joe drops a bomb on the village. The villagers die.

Case 2: Joe puts poison in the village's communal grain storage facility. The villagers die from eating the poisoned grain.

Case 3: The villagers are poor and live in an isolated area. Food is in short supply; in fact, the only food the villagers have is in the communal grain storage facility. The village has no communication or transportation links to the outside world. If something were to happen the village's grain supply, the villagers would die of starvation. Joe knows all of this, and so he sneaks into the village at night and plunders the communal storage facility. As a result, the villagers all starve to death.

Case 4: Same village. This time, however, the grain was not stolen by Joe. Instead, it simply ran out. The villagers have no food and will starve to death if they do not get some food. (There is no food source around them.) However, there is help on the way. A private charity group has sent a truck with enough food to save the villagers. Bill hijacks the truck and steals the food. The villagers starve to death.

Case 5: Just like Case 4, except that the truck contains not food, but a supply of money which can be used to purchase food for the villagers. Joe hijacks the truck and steals the money. The villagers starve to death.

Case 6. Just like Case 5, except that the truck contains not cash, but a check. Joe hijacks the truck and steal the check, which he then cashes by forging the signature. The villagers starve to death.

Case 7. Just like Case 6, except that the check was written by Joe himself. Originally, let us say, he liked the villagers. He gave the check to the relief organization and told them to use it to save the villagers. They have put it in the truck and sent the truck toward the village. But now he has had a change of heart, and wants to see them all dead. So he hijacks the truck and steals the check that he wrote. The villagers starve to death.

Case 8. Just like case 7, except that this time, there is no truck. This is because as soon as Joe wrote the check, he tore it up. The villagers starve to death.

Case 9. Like case 8, except that Joe had his change of heart before he wrote any check. That is, he did not write the check, although he had enough money that he could easily have done so if he had wanted to. The villagers starve to death.

V.  Now let's look at a couple of cases of the second kind.  Remember that the point of these cases is to call into question the commonsense intuition that causing harm is worse than merely allowing it.

A.  James Rachels's:  Two men, two children, and two bathtubs.   Both intend for the child to die, so as to inherit money.  However, one drowns his nephew, while the other merely lets his nephew drown on his own (ready, of course, to push him back under the water should he recover).

B.  The "Cleaning Fluid" case.

C.  Proposal:  If all other things are equal (which is unusual), then causing harm is not morally different from merely allowing it to happen.

D.  Corollary:  The reason that we THINK that causing harm is worse than merely allowing it is just that MOST of the time, all else is not equal.  NORMALLY, we find people causing harm with a bad intention but allowing harm with no intention to do so.

VI.  Isaac's Dilemma:  We can define causing harm and allowing harm carefully enough to get rid of gray areas, but when we do so, the definitions no longer seem to have any clear moral significance.  In the end, we cannot draw the line in a way that is at the same time CLEAR and morally significant.

VIII.  There is a TON more to say about this claim.  In fact, we could spend many weeks on it.  I'm not going to say more about it now, though.  It would make a good independent reading project if anyone is interested in picking up a credit or so.

GRANTING CONSTRAINTS ARGUENDO (for the sake of argument)

I. At any rate, in the rest of the book, Kagan will grant, for the sake of argument, what he thinks is in fact false, namely, that the moderate can come up with a rationale for constraints. He makes this concession at the beginning of Chapter 6.

II. This is, of course, very powerful methodology: he's not content to offer a single argument against the moderate. Instead, he has two.

III. The first is as follows: You need constraints to get the right kind of options for defending ordinary morality. However, you cannot get constraints, therefeore you cannot get the rihgt kind of options, and therefore you cannot defend ordinary moraltiy

IV. The second one will have the following form: Even if you could defend constraints, and thus reign in the options, you still do not have a good argument for options in the first place.

V. In case you are interested, the rest of Chapter 6 deals with the question of whetehr the moderate could somehow derive options from constraints.

A. The basic idea here is that if there are constraints against harming, then a morality without options IS IMPLAUSIBLE because it requires an agent to sacrifice her own most basic concerns when doing so is necessary for promoting the best STATE OF AFFAIRS.

1. In so doing, morality itself is in effect HARMING the person in much the same way that one person might harm another.

2. In other words, a moral requirement that we sacrifice our own interests harms us just as surely as a person could harm us.

3. If there are moral constraints against harming, then morality itself violates those constraints when it requires us to sacrifice our own most basic concerns in order to promote the best STATE OF AFFAIRS.

B. Kagan’s (to my mind rather too quick) response to this argument is essentially that morality is not an agent, and so it cannot violate constratins or harm someone (208).

C. As you might expect, there are plenty more twists and turns, and I am not entirely sure that Kagan’s line on all of this is sufficient. However, the line of thought only works if there are constraints, and we saw that, for a lot of reasons, constraints are rather problematic. So for that reason, I am not going to pursue this argument in this class. However, you are welcome to look at it and to see whether you can find holes in Kagan’s refutation. It might prove to be a fruitful term paper topic.

 

Some Terminology

I. A "reaction" covers both an act and a failure to act. Since Kagan is skeptical about the distinction between doing something and merely letting it happen, he needs a term to cover both. The term "action" technically only covers doing soemthing. So he uses the term "reaction" to cover both. The idea is that I can react to a given situation either by doing something or by merely standing by and letting nature take its course.

II. To "countenance" something is related to this: We countenance an outcome or STATE OF AFFAIRS either by bringing it about or by allowing it to come about on its own.

Chapter Seven: THE APPEAL TO COST

I. So we are back to the quesiton of options: The most plausible way of defending them (putting aside the strategy discussed in Chapter Six) will be the by-now familiar appeal to cost.

II. The cost, of course, is going to be the cost to the agent measured in terms of her ability to pursue her own interests, where interests roughly coincide with what Williams calls projects. (Actually interests include more than projects, but this is relatively unimportant for our discussion.)

III. Recall again that the intuitive idea here is that considerations about integrity and the need for moralty to respect the agent’s most ultimate concerns are meant to defend or provide a rationale for options.

IV. According to Kagan, this makes the appeal to cost the best way for the moderate to defend the ordinary morality that most of us believe in.

A. The appeal to cost fits with what we normally say when we think that we are not morally required to make a given sacrifice to promote the best state of affairs.

B. In so doing, it allows us to emphasize that we are not saying that we just don’t feel like promoting the good. Rather, it allows us to articulate the idea that promoting the good sometimes interferes with other things that are deeply important to us.

C. This, in turn, seems to give us options in just those cases in which ordinary morality endorses them: We have to help the drowning child when we can do so at no great cost, but if the cost to us is high, then the requirement goes away and helping becomes optional.

V. But the question remains: WHY does the cost to the agent justify an option?

A. Note here a possible jab at Scheffler: Kagan thinks that we need to do more than just to SAY that options would make morality less costly to prove that there are options.

B. Options, in effect, provide an excuse for not doing all that we can to promote the best state of affairs.

C. The qeustion is whether this is a LEGITIMATE excuse. Is the fact that doing all that we can to promote the best state of affairs is costly to us a good REASON to claim that we have options, or is it a MERE RATIOANLIZATION of our own selfishness?

MORAL AUTONOMY

I. One possible form of the appeal to cost that Kagan dismisses quickly (maybe too quickly) is framed in terms of freedom or "moral autonomy."

II. This is the idea that morality should leave us with a certain freedom; in other words, morality should not seek to govern every single thing we do.

A. (236) "Each additional moal requirement diministh the [moral] agent’s abiltiy to mold her life by her own lights or in accordance with her own plans. We can speak of an agent’s moral autonomy being limited or diminished by further moral requirments."

1. I sometimes use the term "elbow room" here, and some of you used the same phrase on your mid-terms: The idea is that moral requirements diminish our "elbow room" and if we have no elbow room, then we have no room to decide how to live our own lives.

2. Thus this "moral elbow room" is a more picturesque way of speaking of what Kagan calls "moral autonomy."

B. If the extremist is right, then this is exactly what morality does--for it includes a relentless requirement to promote the good.

C. So one version of the appeal to cost would be that E fails to respect our moral autonomy or give us freedom from the relentless demand to promote the good.

D. And this seems like an undesirable thing for a moral theory to do: "Intuitively, we place considerable value on freedom from interference within, say, the political or social domain. Similarly, then, freedom from moral interference should be seen as having significant value as well. . . . . By understanding moral autonomy as one more instance of the same basic value which underwrites the value of politcal autonomy, or personal autonomy, we can see options as expresing–within the moral realm–a value which is of general and pervasive significance." (237).

III. Now, as Kagan points out, p 237, if this is all there is to the argument, then it just begs the question.

A. For it assumes that not giving us freedom from the demands of morality is a bad thing.

B. But it is only a bad thing if we SHOULD have that freedom.

C. And we should have that freedom only if there should be options.

D. So the argument, in this simple form, assumes what it tries to prove, namely that we are entitled to options.

IV. That is, according to Kagan, the claim that we are entitled to options is just restated as the claim that we have moral autonomy or that we are entitled to freedom from the relentless demands to promote the good.

V. He goes on to claim (238) that "it is implausible to claim that this ‘loss of freedom’ is genuinely offensive or undesirable."

A. For the record, this claim seems to me to outstrip Kagan’s argument: All Kagan has really shown is that one sort of argumetn for the claim that the loss of freedom is undesirable is based on a questionable analogy between the freedom from "totalitarian morality" and other kinds of totalitarianism. Simply noting that an analogy that supports a claim is questionable is not enough to disprove the claim itslef.

B. I think, however, that Kagan would be on safer ground if he were instead to claim that the analogy with other kinds of freedom is at best inconclusive.

C. And his point still remains that the claim that freedom from "moral totalitarianism" is important cannot all by itself justify the claim that moraltiy must include options, since it is just another way to state the claim that moraltiy should include options.

VI: A further issue: If we are worried mainoly about freedom or "moral elbow room" then we have to ask whether the optiosn we are after protect just any old choice or whether they only apply to decisions to pursue the most important of our concerns.

A. That is, should the moderate be defending optiosn that will protect trivial choices and whims, or should she be defending optiosn that only protect one’s deepest concenrs, projects, etc.?

B. On page 241, Kagan launches into a long digression on this issue. I will not discuss it here, and as far as I am concerned you can ignore it (unless it is relevant to your term paper).

C. Kagan can see reasons why OM is probably better construed as including an option that only protects one’s deepest concerns, AND resaons why OM may be best construed as protecting even trivial choices and whims ("mere wants"). He thinks that the decision between which way to spell out OM could cause the moderate some problems, but he is not going to pursue them further, and neither will I.

 

"IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD OF THE ACCOUNT"

I. It is important to keep in mind that we are not going to get a defense of options just by claiming that it is BAD to have people unable to pursue their projects and deepest concenrs.

II. As Kagan reminds us, if BADNESS is all that we have to go on, then the extremist will simply say to MINIMIZE it.

III. That is, if the only thing we can say about sacrificing interests is that it is bad when an agent must do this, then the extremist will simply say that this bad is to be minimized, and that the best STATE OF AFFAIRS is the one in which the greatest number of people are able to pursue their projects and deepest concenrs.

IV. We saw this with Scheffler’s "maximization strategy" for responding to the personal point of view. Kagan’s point (252) is essentially the same.

V. This means that if the moderate is to justify a genuine OPTION, then she will have to avoid claiming that it is the MERE BADNESS of being alienated from one’s proejcts that is the reason for options.

VI. The way Kagan puts it is to say that the moderate must locate something that is "problematic" about a moralt heroy that requries us to sacrifice or abandon our projects and deepest concerns (253).

VII. And the moderate must be clear that it is the REQUIREMENT that is problematic, and not the sacrifice or abandomnet itself.

A. Why is this?

B. Becasue if the sacrifice or abandonment of your project or concern is problematic, then it LOOKS like such an abandonment or sacrifice woudlb e PROHIBITED.

C. What the moderate defender of OM should claim (assuming that she is trying to defend the ordinary moral views of common folk) is that such sacrifices are ABOVE AND BEYOND THE CALL OF DUTY, but that they are NOT forbidden. Indeed, they are HEROIC.

D. So the bottom line is that the moderate should claim that (255) "it is no the sacrifice of interests per se that is problematic, but rather the requirement of such sacrifices."

VIII. So we are ready to focus again on the issue of moral requirement. If we focus only on the sacrifice, we are likely to bark up the wrong tree.

IX. But we also have to keep in mind that it is not just "any old requiremetn" (257) that the moderate finds to be morally problematic, but rather a requirement to sacrifice your own projects and deepest concerns.

X. So what the moderate needs to stay focussed on is the idea that a REQUIRED SACRIFICE is morally problematic.

XI. If the moderate wants to show that certain sacrifices cannot be morally required (and that they are, instead, merely optional), she must hammer away at the requirement, and the hammer she will use is the sacrifice. That is, she her best bet is to claim that something about the nature of the sacrifice makes it improper to require it.

XII. Or, as Kagan himself puts it (256): "tehre is something about he sacrifice of interstrs that (typically) prevents the rules out the general requirement to promote the good, [and thus that] prevents the pro tanto reason from being morally decisive."

XII. In other words, "if the moderate is to rejet a requirement to promtoe the good, it is inevetabilet hat he must argue of rthe exsitence of coutnevailing considrations that prefent the pro tanto reason to promote the good from generating a requiement." (257).

XIII. However, there may be more than one way to attempt to do this. But all of them are, he thinks, likely to involve some sort of an appeal to the nature of persons, namely the existence of the personal point of view. "The most promising suggestion is that he moderate should basie his claim upon a thesis about the nature of persons." (257)

THE PERSONAL POINT OF VIEW

I. The personal point of view, remember, is just the fact that there is a difference between our favorite SOAs (or consequences) on the one hand and the BEST SOAs (or consequences) on the other. The BEST state of affairs (or "the good" for short) is the state of affairs that is best for everyone, and not just for me. Another way to put it is to say that the fact that our subjective, personal evaluations of things can diverge significantly from the evaluations of things from an impartial, God's eye, sub specie aeternatatis ("under the view of eternity") p.o.v.

II. Now it is worth noting how he talks about the PPV, even from the beginning: He calls it a BIAS. (258).

A. This tips his hand, perhaps, and gives us a glimpse of his overall attitude toward the PPV: it is something that is sub-optimal and that hsould be overcome.

B. One thing we will notice later is that Kagan takes a very different attitude toward the personal point of view than does someone like Williams or Scheffler. Whereas they see the personal point of view as something that morality should value by including options, Kagan will suggest that it is really a BIAS that morality ought not to pander to.

III. As we noted earlier when we discussed Scheffler, the appeal to the PPV or projectis or anyhtnga bout hte nature of persons to try to tell us about the shape of the correct moral theory prsupposes either a commitment to naturalism as a meta-ethical view, OR it will require a linking principle that makes some claim about the proper relationship between moral theory and facts about human nature.

A. Kagan does not put his argument in quite these terms, but essentially, he's going to be distinguishing two possible ways that a moral theory can "reflect" the personal point of view.

B.. Now the fact that we have a personal point of view can only tell us something about moral theory if we commit to naturalism or if we commit to some sort of linking principle

C. So what might htat linking pfinciple be? Well, presumably it is going to have to be something like: Any plausible moral theory is going ot have to adequately reflect the nature of persons.

D. Since the PPV is a crucial component of the nature of persosn, any plausible moral theory will have to adequately reflect the PPV.

IV. Though Kagan does not quite use the idea of linking principle, this is pretty much the argument he gives up to page 262.

(For notes on the rest of the chapter, see Kagan IV)