A decade ago I wrote an introductory essay on 'Objective and Subjective Oughts', and the theoretical role of each. In short: the objective ought identifies the best (most desirable) decision, or what an ideal observer would advise and hope that you choose. The subjective or rational ought identifies the wisest or most sensible decision (given your available evidence), departures from which would indicate a kind of internal failure on your part as an agent. Both of these seem like legitimate theoretical roles. (Beyond that, various more-subjective senses of ought -- derived from instructions that any agent could infallibly follow -- risk veering into triviality, and are best avoided.)
Now, Peter Graham's Subjective versus Objective Moral Wrongness (p.5) claims that there's a single "notion of wrongness [either objective or subjective] about which Kantians and Utilitarians disagree when they give their respective accounts of moral wrongness." This strikes me as a strange claim, as the debate between Kantians and Utilitarians seems entirely orthogonal to Graham's debate between objectivists and subjectivists. More promisingly, Graham continues: "And that notion of wrongness is the notion of wrongness that is of ultimate concern to the morally conscientious person when in their deliberations about what to do they ask themself, 'What would be morally wrong for me to do in this situation?'."
My worry about the latter approach is that our assertoric practices reveal the deliberative question to be ill-formed (in that "correct" answers do not correspond to any fixed normative property). It doesn't truly ask about the objective or the subjective/rational 'ought', but instead a dubious relativistic (or expressivist) construct. As I summarize (in the linked post):
We effectively end up understanding the deliberative question as having the constant meaning 'What should I do relative to the relevant evidence?' whilst allowing the relevant evidence to vary across assessors. Disagreeing as to what evidence is relevant thus translates into disagreeing about the deliberative question. But there's no absolute fact of the matter as to which evidence really is "relevant", and hence the correct answer varies from perspective to perspective, even when assessing a single token utterance.
rightness is an unworthy goal because it is influenced not only by the intrinsic choiceworthiness of the action but also by the capabilities of the agent. This suggests two very different strategies for acting rightly: One is to perform morally great actions. Another is to stunt your own agency: become irremediably incompetent, and very little can be required of you in future. By manipulating morality's demands in this way, you can be confident in meeting its (now minimal) demands without difficulty.
Sorry, but I fail to see how your Moral Stunting Objection is supposed to work.
ReplyDeleteAs you quote, Graham says that what is of ultimate concern, when we ask ourselves 'What would be morally wrong for me to do in this situation?', is objective moral rightness and wrongness. The strategy of making oneself incompetent would therefore be morally wrong. Graham has only the one strategy. For Graham, the future is not different to the present.
Suppose that by default you will, at t2, have the choice to either (1) help lots, (2) help a little, or (3) do nothing. You've good inductive evidence to suggest that you'll wrongly choose 2. But then you learn there's a chance that, through no fault of your own, options 1 and 2 will no longer be available, forcing you to permissibly do 3. How would the conscientious agent at t1 regard this prospect? I say poorly. There is no morally appropriate goal that is served by losing good options. But the goal of *avoiding wrongdoing* is so served. So avoiding wrongdoing cannot be a morally appropriate goal.
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