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Notes
Thomson (2008); all parenthetical page citations in what follows refer to this book.
See, for example, Wedgwood (2006). A helpful general discussion, from which I have profited, is Schroeder, “Do Oughts Take Propositions?” (unpublished manuscript).
An agent, in the intended sense, is a creature capable of both thought and action, and so a subject of the kinds of attitudes and actions that admit of assessment in terms of reasons. I return to the subject of reasons below.
Compare Harman (1973).
Thomson’s defect-based analysis of directives might seem to derive plausibility from its implicit unity, identifying a single underlying meaning that is common to directives about e.g. artifacts and agents. But as this passage confirms, Thomson herself acknowledges several irreducibly different meanings of “ought”: in addition to the defect-based directives, there are also not only epistemic “oughts”, but also “oughts” that are to be understood by reference to thoughts about betterness relations between possible ways the world might be.
Thomson denies that the beefsteak tomato is a “function kind” (2008, p. 210), presumably because being big and fat is not literally a function that tomatoes of this kind could be said to perform (it is a way they can be, not something that they do). Nevertheless, tomatoes of this kind were presumably deliberately bred to have these properties, which are in turn conducive to certain familiar culinary purposes, and this is enough to give application to the language of “defect” and “end” in this context.
Thus Thomson writes: “it is precisely by virtue of what we learn when we attend to directives that are about nonhuman things that we can understand all of the directives, and thus those that are about people as well” (2008, p. 207).
I don’t mean to deny that we entertain directive thoughts in contexts that do not involve either deliberation or advice (in reflection, for instance, about whether Caesar ought to have crossed the Rubicon). The point is just that the agential “ought” is constitutively suited to figure directly in deliberation and advice.
A different position, intermediate between Thomson’s and mine, would take the normative “ought” to be the functional “ought” as it applies to individual living things, so that there are true normative “ought” claims that can be made about tomato plants and gerbils and human beings, but not about toasters and can openers. A view of this kind is suggested by Thompson (2008), part 1.
Thomson (1990, p. 229).
By contrast with her original “Days End” case, in which the lightning flash is the result of “an extraordinary series of coincidences, unpredictable in advance by anyone” (1990, p. 229); or the Russian Roulette example in Normativity, about which it is said that “even if our world is deterministic, God alone could have known all of the facts about the gun that were going to determine that the barrel would stop spinning when there was no bullet under the firing pin” (p. 198).
I agree here with Scanlon (2008, pp. 47–52).
I borrow this variant of a familiar case from Niko Kolodny and John MacFarlane, “Ought: Between Objective and Subjective” (unpublished manuscript).
She also thinks that it conflicts with our intuitions about the judgments of better-informed observers who are not in a position to give advice (p. 190). But this seems wrong to me: a third party who knows which shaft the miners are in will still think that Alfred ought to let the water into both shafts.
For a provocative response to the problem of reconciling the “oughts” of deliberation and advice, see Kolodny and MacFarlane, “Ought: Between Objective and Subjective”, a paper that has had a strong influence on my thinking about the normative “ought” and on my argument in the present paper.
Thomson (2003, pp. 74–80).
A clear expression of this now common view is the following quotation from Joseph Raz: “[t]he normativity of all that is normative consists in the way it is, or provides, or is otherwise related to reasons”, in Raz (1999, p. 67).
The considerations that “lend weight” to propositions, on Thomson’s account (2008, p. 130), are reasons for believing the propositions. Her account could therefore be said to treat reasons for action as reasons for a special kind of belief (namely, a directive belief).
Thus if it is true that A ought to do V, then the considerations X that lend weight to that proposition presumably lend more weight to it than considerations Y lend to the conflicting conclusions they support about what A ought to do. Those considerations X are the reasons why A ought to do V, on Thomson’s analysis; so it follows pretty automatically that there is most reason for A to do V.
Or consider the fact there is a modest itch in the vicinity of my left ear, which seems to be a reason for me to scratch in that general area, even though it lends no weight to the conclusion that I would be a defective human being if I failed so to scratch. Thomson discusses similar examples on pp. 147–148 of Normativity, contending that the considerations at issue lend some weight to weak directives about what an agent “should” do (where this in turn is not to be interpreted as a claim about moral obligation). But this seems implausible if, as Thomson maintains, “should” directives are conceptually linked to being defective as a human being.
Thomson notes that there is plenty of room on her account for other forms of (non-directive) positive evaluation about people who exceed what duty requires of them, evaluations of the kind that might figure in praise (2008, p. 231). But the account doesn’t allow us to treat these evaluative considerations as reasons, since by hypothesis they do not lend weight to the conclusion that the agent who fails to act on them would be defective as a human being.
Williams (1995, p. 190). I should stress that Williams did not use this striking formulation to characterize the general strategy of deriving reasons from facts about the avoidance of vice. He was referring to the different and more specific idea that we might explain the reasons for action of non-virtuous agents by thinking about what the phronimos would do if they were in circumstances of ethical imperfection or vice. Williams found this more specific idea problematic, and his objection to it also locates an interesting question for Thomson, of how she would account for reasons for action that agents have only because they are defective as human beings. But I will not go into this question here.
Contrast Normativity, pp. 159–160, where Thomson contends that it is less clear what it comes to for X to be a reason to do something than it is what it comes to for X to lend weight to a directive proposition about human action.
References
Foot, P. (2001). Natural goodness. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Harman, G. (1973). Review of the significance of sense. Meaning, modality, and morality. The Philosophical Review, 82, 235–239.
Raz, J. (1999). Explaining normativity: On rationality and the justification of reason. In Engaging reason: On the theory of value and action (pp. 67–89). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Scanlon, T. M. (2008). Moral dimensions. Permissibility, meaning, blame (pp. 47–52). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Thompson, M. (2008). Life and action. Elementary structures of practice and practical thought. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Thomson, J. J. (1990). The realm of rights. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Thomson, J. J. (2003). Goodness and advice (pp. 74–80). Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Thomson, J. J. (2008). Normativity. Chicago: Open Court.
Wedgwood, R. (2006). The meaning of ‘ought’. Oxford Studies in Metaethics I, 127–160.
Williams, B. (1995). Replies. In J. Altham & R. Harrison (Eds.), World, mind and ethics. Essays on the ethical philosophy of Bernard Williams (pp. 185–224). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Acknowledgments
I received very helpful feedback on earlier versions of this paper from Niko Kolodny.
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Jay Wallace, R. “Ought”, reasons, and vice: a comment on Judith Jarvis Thomson’s Normativity . Philos Stud 154, 451–463 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-011-9738-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-011-9738-x