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What’s wrong with Moorean buck-passing?

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Abstract

In this paper I discuss and try to remove some major stumbling blocks for a Moorean buck-passing account of reasons in terms of value (MBP): There is a pro tanto reason to favour X if and only if X is intrinsically good, or X is instrumentally good, or favouring X is intrinsically good, or favouring X is instrumentally good. I suggest that MBP can embrace and explain the buck-passing intuition behind the far more popular buck-passing account of value, and has the means to avoid the wrong kind of reasons problem. Further, I counter the common suspicion that a Moorean account cannot make sense of deontological views such as Ross’s, and that it generally leaves no room for agent-relative reasons. In order to do this, I appeal to the idea that a Moorean account does not dictate the substantive view that values have to be maximized. In some cases, expressing them might be a better response. Finally I lay out and reply to a potentially devastating argument to the effect that a Moorean account makes oughts and reasons non-normative. I also criticize Scanlon’s attempt to favour his own buck-passing account via consideration of the open question argument. MBP thus emerges as a live option in the buck-passing debate.

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Notes

  1. I am in complete agreement with Olson 2006 regarding common misunderstandings of Moore’s views on this aspect. My paper picks up the theoretical challenge of developing to some extent the Moorean view in Principia that Olson correctly identifies (2006, pp. 527–529). Olson is practically the only philosopher who seems to take seriously such a view, though his preferences go to the fitting-attitude account of value (Danielsson and Olson 2007).

  2. Scanlon (1998, p. 97). Crisp (2005) calls it the redundancy argument.

  3. Thanks to a referee for raising this point.

  4. E.g.: Object-given reasons (Parfit 2001), ultimate reasons (Stratton-Lake 2005), evaluative reasons (Skorupski 2007), content-reasons (Danielsson and Olson 2007).

  5. For the sake of presenting a stark contrast with MBP, I have adopted here the radical interpretation of Ross given in Dancy (1998). As one reviewer noted, the claim accepted by Ross that some right acts (e.g. beneficence) have instrumental value would make them fall under condition (3) of MBP4+, so a Moorean account would be able to explain the reasons for performing them in terms of value. However, other Rossian prima facie duties, like promise-keeping, are supposed to hold regardless of any instrumental value, so the contrast with a Moorean account is still present.

  6. This claim is by no means original (see Pettit 1997), but its value in defending a Moorean account of reasons has not been appreciated.

  7. For reasons given in Sect. 2, MBP will agree with Ross that the reason-providing considerations for these duties are non-evaluative facts such as that I made a promise, rather than the evaluative fact that keeping the promise would have intrinsic value.

  8. For instance, acts as such have no intrinsic value because they are not mental states, and only mental states have intrinsic value (Ross 2002, p. 140). Interestingly, Ross later came to recognize that the performance of a right act such as promise-keeping has a certain kind of intrinsic value (it is a “situational good”); only, such value depends on the prior rightness of the act (Ross 1939, p. 278).

  9. Darwall also raises the further objection that Moorean value gives us a merely instrumental view of agency. This is a separate point, however, which cannot be discussed here.

  10. See Bykvist (2009), Olson (2009), Zimmerman (2011).

  11. A different insulation strategy is adopted by Zimmerman (2011). Other strategies are discussed and rejected in Bykvist (2009). BP’s strategies discussed above in order to allow for valueless right acts are also of the insulation kind.

  12. See Hurka (2003), who claims that the move away from the Moorean indefinability of good made room for agent-relative value.

  13. For an antecedent, see Ewing (1947, p. 192). Moore seems to have a similar idea in mind as he claims: “[B]y saying that different emotions are appropriate to different kinds of beauty, we mean that the whole which is formed by the consciousness of that kind of beauty together with the emotion appropriate to it, is better than if any other emotion had been felt in contemplating that particular beautiful object” (1993, p. 239). More in general: “[B]y saying that a certain relation between two things is fitting or appropriate, we can only mean that the existence of that relation is absolutely good in itself” (ibid., p. 152). This is as close as Moore gets to defining fittingness in terms of intrinsic value in Principia Ethica.

  14. Olson surely must think that the reason why it is fitting to morally approve of such a parent is that the attitude shows him as a good parent. Given the necessary link between moral ought and fittingness of moral approval, the fact that the attitude shows him or would show him as a good parent also must be the reason why he morally ought to have the partial attitude. What Olson must deny, somewhat awkwardly, is the further claim that this would also be the reason why it would be fitting for him to have the partial attitude, because on BP this claim would entail that his child’s happiness is better. However, the further claim is perfectly harmless on MBP5, because (in this case) it can be taken to simply entail that having the partial attitude is better.

  15. To this strategy, in a footnote Olson replies that if X [Ewing favours A more than B] is better than Y [Ewing favours A and B equally], then everyone ought to favour X more than Y, but this doesn’t change the fact that everyone, including Ewing, ought to favour A and B equally (Olson (2009), fn. 15). But, as said in the main text, MBP5 grants that there is both pro tanto reason for Ewing to favour A more than B (given that X is better than Y from the point of view of filial love), and pro tanto reason for Ewing to favour them equally (given that A and B are equal in value). Introducing the value of filial love does not mean that there is no pro tanto reason for Ewing, like for anyone else, to favour A and B equally.

  16. Of course, her friends might have agent-relative reasons to care about her acting prudently. But these reasons would stem from the value of friendship that such caring would express.

  17. It would be wrong to see MBP as doing the same kind of job as analytic or synthetic reductions of reasons to (e.g.) fully informed desires do.

  18. I grant here that one should be interested in establishing whatever meta-ethical truth the open question argument is supposed to convey.

  19. E.g. some may worry that MBP cannot account for the phenomenon of supererogation. I think this worry can be answered. Moreover, to the extent that such failure is determined by assuming the identity between facts about reasons and facts about value, the worry applies to BP as well.

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank two anonymous referees for Philosophical Studies. This article was written while holding Mobilitas Grant MJD111.

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Correspondence to Francesco Orsi.

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Orsi, F. What’s wrong with Moorean buck-passing?. Philos Stud 164, 727–746 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-012-9905-8

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