Fact Sensitivity of Principles - Something to get folks talking

Thanks for this: it’s really quite interesting. If I have understood your argument correctly, it runs something like this.

1. For some x to count as an example of some y, it will have to have certain features. For example, for some mental state to count as a belief, it has to stand in certain sorts of relationships to truth. If it does not stand in those relationships, it is not a belief but some other sort of mental state.

2. Hence, for some moral or political principle to count as a principle of justice, it must have to have certain features. Those features may make principles of justice sensitive to facts. For example, it may be a conceptual truth about principles of justice that they make societies in which they are enacted stable (or usefulness or knowable).

3. If this were the case, it would show that x could be a principle of justice that it made a society stable. Therefore, if this were the case, the second premise of Cohen’s argument would be false, since that premise says that a fact can only support an action-guiding principle in virtue of some more ultimate action-guiding principle explaining how it does so. It would be false because facts about the interaction of a society and a principle could support that principle being a principle of justice without the intervention of any more ultimate action-guiding principle, because a principle ‘understand as principles of justice only those principles which when enacted would make a society stable’ is not an action-guiding principle.

4. Cohen does not argue that principles of justice do not have fact-sensitive conceptual requirements. Since it seems not only possible but likely that they do, we are justified in assuming in the absence of argument to the contrary that they do.

I don’t have my copy of RJE to hand here, so I’m not sure whether Cohen expands on this reply in RJE itself, but he imagines something like this objection in F&P in Section G (ii) (pp. 220-222). There, he only really attempts to deal with the objection if it is cast as a defence of a contractualist device of representation, so what he says may not be applicable to your ‘how are we going to pick out principles of justice to principles of anything else’ argument. However, what he does say is to first, basically re-iterate his central claim and then second, hold that whatever methodological claim is being made will itself depend on some normative principle. For example, the original position methodology depends on some principle requiring that we treat people as free and equal.

This second reply indicates what he might say about your argument here though. The idea would be that stability is a requirement of justice for a reason: that violations of legitimate expectations are always unjust, for example. If that’s the case, though, then there’s going to be some action-guiding principle, something like ‘when acting from justice, never violate legitimate expectations’, which explains the methodological principle. he might even try and recast the methodological principle as an action-guiding principle directly itself. For this reason, I’d avoid the usefulness and knowability requirements, both of which look like they might violate ‘ought implies can’ which could fairly easily be cast as an action-guiding principle (’do not act on the basis of principles which cannot be fulfilled’ should work I think).

The other thing he could try would be to deny that picking out action-guiding principles as principles of x rather than y is itself a matter of supporting the principle. Whether or not x is a principle of justice or not does not tell us whether to act on x: it tells us how we should understand ourselves when acting on x. Hence, the fact is not providing support for the principle: it’s providing support for a description of the principle. Facts which supporting picking principles as of particular kinds would then not be counter-examples to the claim that factual support for a principle qua normative principle requires a further normative principle to explain that support. This may be more promising for him, although I’m not sure whether it’d work.

I think your argument may share certain features with that of Ronzoni and Valentini in PPE, which also tries to show that methodological principles can ground action-guiding ones. I also have a piece under review which I might be able to send you; I suppose I should probably check with the journal first.

On 1. So, what I said wasn’t very clear. What I meant was that a principle which is in principle unknowable or useless would seem to violate ought implies can, which can be restated as an action-guiding principle. Hence if those are conceptual requirements, Cohen can say ‘ah, but the fact that this principle is knowable supports it in virtue of this further action-guiding principle’.

On 2. I suppose the paradigmatic case of facts supporting/grounding a principle would be the promising example Cohen uses at the beginning of F&P. ‘Keep promises’ is not fact-sensitive in your sense - I think: if it were, then all principles would be fact-sensitive, since it would be fact-sensitive in virtue of what it would have you do depending on which promises you actually made - but our argument for it does depend on the truth of some combination of a fact, that promises promote project-pursuit, and a more ultimate principle, that we ought to promote project-pursuit. If the fact and the principle weren’t true, our argument for it would fail. So it would seem that the grounding relation, that in the absence of the relevant fact-principle pair, the argument would fail, is primary. But that may not be the way that Cohen uses the argument throughout RJE.

On 3. I was being elliptical again. What I meant was Ronzoni and Valentini also try and argue that certain methodological principles could explain why certain things (and not certain other things) ground action-guiding principles. Sorry.

On 4. This seems to me like a burden of proof disagreement, and may even be a mostly semantic one then. I suppose I think that the intuitive power of Cohen’s regress argument gives him quite a lot of leeway, especially given that he does have a sort of argument against the principles which explain the support granted by facts being methodological rather than normative. Conversely, you think since he doesn’t have a general argument against the possibility of factual conceptual limits on ultimate principles, his second premise is false. But that it is possible that something is true does not mean that something which would be false if it were true is false. So it must be that we’re entitled to assume his second premise is false, given the plausibility of that there is some factual conceptual limit on justice.

Relevant here may be what he says about God in an appendix to the reproduction of F&P in RJE. What he says seems to be, we might obey God’s commands because of features God has, in which case our obedience is because we ought to be obedient to any being with the features God has, but we might also obey God just because He is God. That though, would be a fact, and hence, he acknowledges, a refutation of his second premise. There’s also some stuff he says about ought implies can which isn’t in the original paper, I think, which seems to be along the lines of all factual limits on principles will imply conditional ought statements, and so ought implies can is not a limit on normative principles (I think).

This is an interesting paper; I agree with the point from the discussion above that understanding the relevant notion of ‘grounding’ is key to understanding what, if anything, is important about Cohen’s argument. Alas, I don’t have a good account to offer.

I’ll try to post some more specific points later, but first, here is a quick worry about the way in which the argument of the paper is framed.

You proceed from a somewhat puzzling assumption about where the burden of proof lies. You quote Cohen as offering only the following in defense of his second premise:

[M]y defense is simply to challenge anyone who disagrees to provide an example in which a credible and satisfying explanation of why some F supports some P invokes or implies no such more ultimate principle.

And you respond: “In this paper, I take up that challenge.”

So it would seem Cohen never purported to give a direct argument in favor of the premise; rather, he found it to be compelling and challenged his opponents to provide a counterexample. In taking up that challenge, I would have thought you were accepting that way of assigning the burden of proof.

Instead, you show a general strategy of how one might go about trying to find a counterexample, then insist that Cohen must prove that no version of that strategy succeeds. Even when you give your two examples, you are careful to insist that it isn’t enough for Cohen to be able to simply respond to those .

It’s true, I suppose, that Cohen hasn’t demonstrated the truth of the premise unless he does that. But however far that objection goes, it could have been made at the very beginning without any of the theoretical machinery you bring in. He never purported to give such a demonstration; he merely issued a challenge.

I think the claim that Cohen merely asserts the second premise is a little unfair. As I noted above, he defends it against an objection not entirely dissimilar to yours in the paper. Further, the second premise is asserted as part of an explanation of a phenomenon - the set of examples he adduces at the beginning of the paper - which it seems pretty well placed to explain. So Cohen’s argument is something like this:

1. Philosophical phenomenon which looks like this set of premises explain.

2. Ways to respond to potential objections to these premises.

3. These premises are true.

Admittedly, in the paper 2 and 3 are switched, and he doesn’t respond to the specific objection you raise, but he does, explicitly, defend the second premise against a number of potential objections. That, especially when combined with the fact that the premises are supposed to be part of an explanation of a phenomenon, is not just asserting it. That’s not to say that your argument doesn’t work; it’s to make a claim about the distribution of the burden of proof.

Matthew,

My main point was just that your initial presentation of Cohen’s argument accepted a framing in which he had not given a substantive defense of the premise in question but was simply challenging those who deny it to provide a justification why.
I certainly didn’t mean to commit to the claim that “p, therefore p” counts as an argument; I took it that you were reading Cohen as not providing and direct argument and accepting the resulting dialectic. I don’t see that, in general, there is anything wrong with that. All arguments require premises, and we cannot, at least as a practical matter, give further argument for each of our premises. If I have no argument for my premise, to that extent I have nothing to say to someone who disagrees. But absent an argument against the premise, someone who disagrees has no more to say to me than I to her.
Your elaboration above makes the structure of your argument clearer, and I think changing the way you present and respond to Cohen’s challenge in the paper would help avoid some of the confusion. But I’m not sure it is enough to substantiate some of the stronger claims you make about the state of the debate (e.g. p. 11-12 “Cohen must provide a completely general argument…[or] consider each possible concept of justice”). Rather, I think your general argument (excluding examples), if it works, supports a conclusion more like the one you draw about knowability on p. 15, “I have no argument for why Cohen ought to accept the knowability requirement, but Cohen has similarly offered no reasons …why we should reject the knowability requirement.”
As Robert says above, none of this is yet about the merits of your argument. I think that, unlike in courts of law, very little turns on the assignment of the burden of proof in philosophical discussions. But, on the assumption you might want to do something more with this paper down the line, I do think it can be important to the presentation of the argument. Anyway, I hope to return with some more substantive remarks this weekend after I’ve had a chance to reread the Cohen.