Abstract
I discuss Bernard Williams’ ‘integrity objection’ – his version of the demandingness objection to unreasonably demanding ‘extremist’ moral theories such as consequentialism – and argue that it is best understood as presupposing the internal reasons thesis. However, since the internal reasons thesis is questionable, so is Williams’ integrity objection. I propose an alternative way of bringing out the unreasonableness of extremism, based on the notion of the agent’s autonomy, and show how an objection to this proposal can be outflanked by a strategy that also outflanks the ‘paradox of deontology.’
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Notes
We cannot ever demonstrate that any option O is literally “the best available to us.” To prove this, we would have to prove that, for every other available option N, O was better than N. But quite generally, this cannot be proved: there is no way of quantifying over ranges of available options. I pass over this argument here; I develop it in Chappell (2001). A similar view is now argued in Wiland (2005).
My aim in this paper is not mainly Williams exegesis; for that see Chappell (2005).
One author who apparently falls into this error is Honderich (online), though his treatment of integrity is very much en passant. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/integrity/ is a useful (though apparently unintentional) survey of the main misinterpretations.
Pace Korsgaard 1996: 101–2, who says that your “practical identity” is “a description under which you value yourself, under which you find your life worth living and your actions to be worth undertaking,” and infers from this that for you to violate your deepest obligations is “to lose your integrity and so your identity, and to no longer be who you are... It is to no longer be able to think of yourself under the description under which you value yourself and find your life to be worth living and your actions to be worth undertaking. It is to be for all practical purposes dead or worse than dead.” Korsgaard’s claim seems exaggerated. It is a matter of common experience that people can and do recover from violating their own deepest obligations; it is rather less of a commonplace that they can recover from death.Rather similarly, Ashford 2003 reads Williams as offering an argument that, for George and Jim, “performing the right action will involve their acting against their conscience, as a result of which their moral identity will be threatened,” and that utilitarianism requires “agents to act in a way which contravenes their present self-conception.” If this was Williams’ key point, it would be wide open to the familiar charge of self-indulgence.
UFA: 90: “[Moral absolutism] is a much stronger position than any involved, as I have defined the issues, in the denial of consequentialism... It is perfectly consistent, and it might be thought a mark of sense, to believe, while not being a consequentialist, that there was no type of action which satisfied [the conditions for counting as morally prohibited no matter what].” Contrast Anscombe 1958, who makes it a defining feature of non-consequentialism to believe in such absolute prohibitions, and so must presumably count Williams, of all people, as a consequentialist.
“But we should distinguish the ability (a) to enumerate all of some agent’s motives from the ability (b) to say, of any motive, whether some agent has that motive. (b) is much less difficult to imagine than (a)!” Indeed it is, but this doesn’t help; the point is that we often don’t have even (b).
Or indeed by performing any number of murders, provided doing these murders prevents even more murders. “Consequentialist rationality... will have something to say even on the difference between massacring seven million, and massacring seven million and one” (Williams UFA: 93).
In fact, the non-consequentialist might not claim that the non-breaching of the constraint is itself a good, as opposed to saying that whatever the constraint protects is a good. This would be my own view. However, the distinction makes no difference to the present argument except to add a complication, so I leave it out of the main text.
For the idea that non-consequentialism is essentially agent-relativist see e.g. McNaughton and Rawling 1993.
Strictly speaking value pluralism does not even share the consequentialist commitment to promote goods, since value pluralism is not a maximising theory and consequentialism is; value pluralism’s strong commitment might better be called pursuit of a good than promotion or maximisation of it. For simplicity I pass over this here.
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Acknowledgement
Thanks for helpful discussion to Liz Ashford, John Cottingham, Garrett Cullity, Brian Feltham, Brad Hooker, Jussi Jaskelainen, Michelle Mason, Adrian Moore, Tim Mulgan, David Oderberg, Michael Ridge, Philip Stratton-Lake, and Andrew Williams.
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Chappell, T. Integrity and Demandingness. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 10, 255–265 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-007-9073-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-007-9073-7