Kagan VI

THESE NOTES ARE QUITE ROUGH

Kagan-Chapter 9--The Positive Argument

I. Recall that (333) the positive argument "stresses the desirability of' fully repeating or ‘harmonizing’ with the fact of the personal point of view."

II. We are looking for a reason to prefer a theory that fully reflects–celebrates–the personal point of view over a theory that only minimally reflects the personal point of view by merely avoiding either denying or ignoring it.

III. This would seem to require finding some reason for thinking that the personal point of view is something that should be celebrated and thus fully reflected by a moral theory, and not merely something to be regretfully acknowledged.

I. Kagan suggests that if we have a reason to prefer the personal point of view to the impartial point of view, then those reasons must be in some sense "subjective." 334.

A. To say this (and the term choice could probably be better) just means that they are reasons that each person has for preferring her own personal point of view to the impartial point of view. So, perhaps agent-centered would be a better term.

B. Now notice that these subjective reasons, if they exist, will be reasons for each person to endorses her own personal point of view. Thus they will be different for each person, since each person has her own personal point of view.

C. This means that they will be very different from the pro tanto, reason, which is agent neutral, or in kagan’s somewhat misleading terminology, objective.

II. Thus: pro tanto reason: the reason everyone has to bring about the state of affairs that is ranked highest on the impartial point of view "master" list.

A. It is the same reason for everyone--it does not vary from person to person, for it tells each person to go for the highest state of affairs on the same list.

III. Subjective reason give each separate person a reason to favor her own projects, and to bring about her personal favorite state of affairs.

A. Since each person has different projects, each person will have different subjective reasons that favor their distinctive projects for favorite SOAs

IV. The positive argument will work by showing that we have good reasons to promote our own interests, and that sometimes these outweigh the pro tanto reason to promote the good.

V. These reasons will, in effect, endorse what Kagan called a bias, namely the personal point of view (336).

VI. Thus they will have to be reasons for us to be GLAD we have a personal point of view and to celebrate that fact by allowing it to guide our actions at least to some extent. To do that, we will, it seems, want to allow some room for action on the personal point of view even if it is not optimal on the impartial point of view.

DETAILS

I. In the acknowledgments page, Kagan thanks many people for their comments and criticisms. He says "I think the book got longer as a result of this process; at any rate, it certainly got longer."

II. Here is a place where it did get longer, and I'm not sure whether it is better or not. I won’t talk about this in class, and you are only responsible for it if it is relevant for you term paper.

III. Remember Scheffler on the INDEPENDENCE THESIS and the ASYMMETRY THESIS? His claim was that the arg for constraints had to be logically separate from that of options.

IV. Now, Kagan's argument above contradicts the Independence Thesis. Kagan suggests that constraints and options can both come from the appeal to the PERSONAL POINT OF VIEW (the appeal to cost),

V. At this point, however, he is reconsidering this possibility: For he htinks that we might run into a problem (364f)

VI. One reason we want constraints (we being he moderate) is to make sure that the appeal to cost does not end up giving us more options than we wanted--i.e. options to do harm when refraining from doing harm would be costly.

VIII The problem is that even if Kagan is right that we can get options and constraints from the same place, this may be of only minor comfort to the moderate, since if they come from the same place, they will presumably have the same stringency or strength (and if not, we need to know why not).

IX. And if that is so, the reasons favoring constraints (the "patient protecting reasons") will not be able to block the agent-protecting reasons (the ones trying to give us options) from winning and giving us options to do anything--including harming others or sacrificing them--that it would be too costly to us not to do.

I. FINALLY, at long last, Kagan is going to tell us how the moderate might argue for the claim that the mere existence of he personal point of view generates reasons that can sometimes outweigh the pro tanto reason to promote the good. (And thus defeat the moral requirement always to promote the good).

II. 351: a good statement of what it would be for the personal point of view to be reflected in moral theory: "the balance of reasons confronting an agent need not coincide with the verdict of the objective point of view."

III. That is, there will still be the agent neutral reasons--most particularly the agent neutral pro tanto reason to promote the good, but there will also be reasons specific to AND GENERATED BY each person's personal point of view that will be reasons FOR THAT PERSON AND NO OTHERS.

A. Thus the fact that writing a book is MY project gives me an extra, subjective reason that it does not give you.

B. Now it is important to see here that whatever good that comes from me writing this book DOES count OBJECTIVELY in terms of affecting the impartial ranking of SOAs.

1. That is, there is some value that the book has just because some people (mostly me) will obtain some pleasure or good from having it be written.

2. We do, of course, count that value into the overall impartial ranking of SOAs.

3. So, if all other things are equal, a state of affairs in which the book is written (assuming that its being written has a positive effect on the net good!) is a bit better than an state of affairs in which it is not written.

IV. Now of course the fact of the personal point of view is really this: It the fact that our pet projects "count" in this way does not really satisfy us.

A. We may not expect others to take them as seriously as we do, but we do think that they matter TO US more than other persons’ projects that may be just as important from the impartial point of view.

B. This is just the same as Scheffler’s point about strict proportionality–the PERSONAL POINT OF VIEW is the fact that we care about our own concerns OUT OF PROPORTION to their importance from the IMPARTIAL POINT OF VIEW.

V. Now we can, in fact, see things from both perspectives, both points of view.

A. You can appreciate things from the point of view of an ideal observer, or some such point of view, for you can recognize that you yourself are simply one person among others, and that there is no real difference between you and your concerns and other persons and their concerns.

1. There is nothing, in short, special about you FROM AN OBJECTIVE standpoint.

2. If you see things from this standpoint, you are in effect looking at things from the impartial point of view.

3. To do this is to take up the point of view that extremism recommends.

4. Now of course as we saw before, we probably cannot fully adopt this point of view, and we cannot probalby maintain anything like it for more than a short period of time.

5. Nevertheless, we CAN figure out what moral principles would make sense from such a point of view. (The reasoning here, is, of course, implicit in much of what we saw when we discussed Hare.)

B. Yet you can also see things (and it is much more natural to see things this way) from our own personal point of view.

1. From this point of view, we may recognize that other persons and the things they care about matter, but we cannot help but to see certain things as mattering more to us simply because of their relations to us.

2. Some persons matter more TO US than they do from the impartial point of view (from which all persons matter equally) simply because they are close to us in various ways.

VI. This much should be familiar enough–it is implicit in everything we’ve been talking about since we started discussing Scheffler.

VII. But it really is the key to the issue: For in effect, both options and constraints are things that get their "force" from the personal point of view. That is, they are both ways of recognizing that certain things matter more to us from our own personal point of view than they do from the impartial point of view.

A. The option does this most clearly, since it allows us to give more weight to whatever matters most to us, despite the fact that from the objective point of view, these things really matter much less than we recognize.

B. But as we saw from the discussion earlier, the constraint also recognizes the disproportionate mattering of certain things from the subjective personal point of view. From my own point of view, my suffering matters a whole lot more than it does from the impartial point of view.

VIII. Now when the moderate claims that htere are options and constraints (i.e. that morality must recognized/include moral optiosn and moral constraints), what she is really claiming is that morality must recognized not only "objective" reasons that come from the impartial point of view, but also "subjective" reasons that come from each person’s personal point of view.

IX. In order for this to be true, it would have to be true that morality can recognize BOTH objective reasons arising from the impartial point of view AND subjective reasons arising from the personal point of view.

X. If this is correct, then each person would have two sorts of moral reasons confronting her:

(1) Some of these moral reasons would arise from the impartial point of view; they would, in effect, ground the pro tanto reason to promote the good.

(2) Some of these moral reasons would arise from the agent’s own personal point of view. These reasons would be subjective in the sense that they vary from person to person and arise from the individual person’s personal point of view.

XI. Now if we look at it this way, the question of whether moderate morality is defensible can be put this way: Is there any reason for morality to endorse the subjective personal point of view? Is the personal point of view a legitimate source of moral reasons?

So far so good, but it may not seem as though we’ve made much progress–we’ve just re-framed the problem.

356: one strategy for the moderate: try to find something that you just cannot account for with only the objective POV: that is, some value that we all agree is a value but which cannot be pursued or even exit perhaps, if all moral reasons come from the impartial point of view.

357: so we are going to try to find something morally vital that can only be incorporated into morality via the personal point of view and not the impartial point of view.

So let's see what sorts of values might be left out of morality if we do not recognize the personal point of view in the robust way, ie via options and constraints.

No one should ever have fun, because they should always be out promoting the good. So there goes hocky, philosophy, beer, movies, TV (well, maybe no great loss there) CD's (uh oh), etc. All those things waste time, energy and resources that could be devoted to promoting the good. Surely--the mod argues--a world without options to see movies and drink beer would be a bad world, and so surely any morality that requires us to always promote the good and denies us options is an inadequate morality.

Reply: Probably we'd get to have beer and a movie now and then; after all, our happiness counts in the total. But yup, expensive champaign and caviar must go. But then, given the scarcity of the world's resources, maybe that is the right answer after all.

This is obviously related to the first one. This one claims that being moral--on the extremist view--would basically suck, because we'd have to give up so much of our goodies.

REPLY: as before: maybe we SHOULD give up a bunch of our goodies. Besides, the E is not saying that the goodies are not good, just that expensive goodies are not worth it in terms of the sufferign that could be alleviated by forgoing them. Also, MAYBE if we all did our parts, none of us would alive to give up all that much. The reaosn that the E moral life would suck is that becuase of all these misguided moderates around, anyone who tried to live by the True Extreme moraltiy could keep giving and giving and tehre would still be more good to do. IF we all shared the load, the burden might not be so great.

Williams tells the story of a utilitarian noticing that his spouse is drowning, and thinking: OK, there are not two people drowning over there, so I can go save him. That is, Williams says, "one thought too many." How can we be really committed--in the way real commitments seem to require--to our projects or loved ones if we have to say to hell with them anytime we can promote the best SOA by doing so.

Reply: Sure, we are motivated this way, but why think it is reasonable? Such commitment out of proportion to a things value from the impartial point of view is only a good thing if we already assume the very thing that the moderate wants to prove, namely that it is OK morally to be concerned about things out of proportion to their importance from the impartial point of view.

And if the moderate replies that committment itself is valuable, and that morality MUST allow people to pursue their commitments, then how can the moderate respond to someone who values a commitment enough to override the WHOLE pro tanto reason? (364). If commitment is worth endorsing, then how can the moderate resist the claim that we should endorse ALL commitments, even those that are manifestly selfish or downright immoral?

By their very nature these things are partial. To be firend is to care morea bout the friend than one cares about a stranger. But E tells us to act according to the IPV, and this prevents us from putting our partial care into action (or at least makes doing so immoral).

Reply: But (367) is this partial concern an essential part of love or friendship? Kagan does not think this is obvious.

The main point is that if we really want to know the truth, and if there is a truth about morality that can be discovered through thinking carefully about it, then we should not be afraid of it when we find it.

Kagan’s claim is that the following thing is true: Moderate morality cannot be defended rationally. If we take seriously the pro tanto reason to promote the good, then logically the only conclusion is that extremism is true. Of course we may simply reject the pro tanto reason to promote the good, and if we do this, then Kagan is all out of arguments.

But assuming that we are not going to accept minimalism, the only rational option is extremism. How might we implement it? Part of the answer will be via a political system: We might reconceive the role of the state to be to help promote the general good. Doing so might free us from the need to do this ourselves, and it would ensure that everyone complied with our moral obligations.

But in any event, if Kagan is right, then the one thing that we should not do is to deny that we have failed and continue to fail to live up to the demands of morality, for those demands have no limit.

Ironically there is a connection here with the Christian doctrine of original sin: We are inevitably sinful, both in what we do, and in what we leave undone.