Articles by Andrew Lister

I summarized Section 14 in a separate post; here I want to raise a question about the reactive attitudes and authority claims that Gaus argues are essential parts of our ordinary moral practices. For the purposes of this post, I want to accept Gaus’s claim that recognition of sincere and conscientious disagreement has to undermine feelings of resentment and indignation at rule-violations. The question I want to ask is why in identifying the rules of social morality we must assent only to those rules that all members of the partly idealized public have sufficient reason to accept.

A rule that fails to meet this standard will be one that will not support the normal reactive attitudes with respect to all normal moral agents. But so what? Why is it crucial that all normal moral agents be subject to resentment and indignation for rule violations, to the point that it would be preferable not to have a rule at all, than to have a rule that (in virtue of being reasonably rejectable) would fail to license reactive attitudes with respect to even just one normal moral agent? Gaus’s answer, I think, is that our moral practices include not only reactive attitudes such as resentment and indignation, but prescriptions that claim to be authoritative. We express resentment and indignation as a prelude to issuing imperatives. But if someone doesn’t have sufficient reasons to endorse a rule, it would be wrong for us to order them to comply with it, which means that the rule would effectively not apply to them. But then we would not have a common set of rules of social morality; instead, we would have a parcellized set of rules covering the various overlapping bits of conflicting evaluative perspectives. Morality would not fulfill its function.

If this is the argument, I have two doubts. The first is that I’m still not clear that moral practices involve claims to authority, in the specific sense of authority of one person over another, authority to command compliance in face of disagreement, e.g. “Even though you don’t think you should ?, you should still ? simply because I am ordering you to ?.” Moral practice clearly involves expression of reactive attitudes and claims that others should respect the authority of morality, but these claims may simply be epistemic claims about what is right, rather than claims that others should defer to our judgment about what is right.

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I summarized Section 14 in a previous post; here I raise some critical points about the question of whether public justifiability should include a shared reasons requirement, and how this relates to sincerity in public deliberation.

Gaus rejects the requirement that deliberators deliberate in terms of shared reasons. To be a bona fide moral rule, a rule must be endorsed by each and every member of the appropriately (i.e. partly) idealized public, each based on the total set of reasons he or she accepts. “Mutual intelligibility” requires only that these personal evaluative standards pass some threshold of plausibility such that they can be generally recognized as genuine moral perspectives. But members of the public will still think that many of the reasons their fellows appeal to are bad reasons. They also think that this use of bad reasons for the assessment of moral rules is appropriate. In intellectual argument each will criticize the other for accepting bad reasons, and argue that others ought to change their views. When it comes to determining what count as valid moral rules, however, everyone accepts that each will assess proposed rules based on his or her own evaluative standards, and that rules will count as valid only if they meet with the unanimous approval from these diverse perspectives.

An alternate view would be that deliberators accept that they are to deliberate only on the basis of the reasons they share. What is wrong with the shared reasons view? Gaus’s answer in Section 14.4 (d) comes in the form of a response to Jon Quong’s argument for the shared reasons view.¹ Quong’s argument is based on the requirement that public reasoning be sincere. I will explain the dispute, then briefly argue that the underlying issue isn’t really about sincerity.

Insincere deliberation may be justified in some circumstances, but it is pro tanto morally bad because it makes public reasoning into a form of manipulation. If I argue that your beliefs commit you to supporting a particular proposal even when I don’t think they do, then I am not respecting your capacity for rational moral agency; I am treating you as a thing to be moved, not a person to be reasoned with. Conversely, sincerity in public reasoning expresses respect, helping to sustain civic friendship. Quong formulates the idea of sincerity in public justification in terms of three conditions, involving persons A(lf) and B(etty) and a proposal X.

1. A reasonably believes he is justified in endorsing X,
2. A reasonably believes that B is justified in endorsing X (…)
3. A may only… offer arguments in favour of X to B that he reasonably believes B would be justified in accepting.²

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1. Jonathan Quong, Liberalism Without Perfection, OUP 2010, Chapter 9 “The Scope and Structure of Public Reason” [↩]
2. Gaus cites the first two of these conditions on 288. All my quotes from Quong are from Chapter 9 of from Liberalism Without Perfection [↩]

This post provides an overview of Section 14 and explains the relationship of this section with previous sections; I make some critical comments in separate posts linked below. I hope I haven’t gone overboard, in terms of the total length of the posts, but section 14 is important because it lays the groundwork for Jerry’s conception of public justification. At the same time, it is the conclusion of the previous 100 or so pages of argument about the moral emotions. So I want to summarize the main claims of section 14, but also explain how they follow from earlier sections. And of course I have some questions and criticisms.

Overview

Section 14 defines the “Basic Principle of Public Justification” (BPPJ) and lays out “the deliberative model” that specifies the principle. The BPPJ provides a necessary condition for a moral imperative to be authoritative. The assumption is that an imperative “?” is made in a particular context C based on a rule L. The condition is (1) that each normal moral agent has sufficient reasons to internalize L and hold that L requires ? in circumstances C, and (2) that moral agents do generally conform to L.

The BPPJ provides a rule-based standard for assessing particular moral demands in context, and so has as one of its components a criterion for determining when a rule counts as a bona fide moral rule; each and every normal moral agent must have sufficient reasons to internalize the rule. The idea of a normal moral agent (NMA) has figured in Gaus’s earlier discussions of moral psychology. A person is a moral agent if they have the capacity to understand and care about following social rules for its own sake; such an agent is normal if they have the cognitive capacities of a fully-functioning but still boundedly-rational human being. Thus some people do not qualify as NMAs, either due to lack of cognitive capacity (young children, severe mental disabilities) or lack of ability to internalize rules (young children, psychopaths). The reasons an NMA “has” are not the reasons there truly are, nor simply the reasons that agent thinks she has. On the one hand, Gaus argues that there is no point in saying that I “have” a reason if it is completely inaccessible to me, given my epistemic situation. On the other hand, he accepts that I have a reason not to cross the bridge in front of me even if I don’t think I have such a reason, if a reasonable amount of investigation and reflection would reveal the bridge to be unsafe (234-6). The reasons a NMA has are thus the reasons she would have if she engaged in a respectable amount of good reasoning based on what she currently believes (summarizing 250).¹

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1. For doubts about the idea that we have reasons that we would recognize if we deliberated more, see Alexander Moon’s comment to the previous installment of the discussion group [↩]

In this chapter Sen explains in more detail the idea of a “realization-focused” approach to justice.  As discussed in earlier posts, Sen’s book is organized around a contrast between “transcendental institutionalism” and “realization-focused comparison” (p.7).  Earlier chapters dealt with the transcendental - comparative contrast.  This chapter explores the rule - realization contrast.  I will begin by reviewing what the Introduction (Ch.1) had to say about this issue.  Sen’s general point was that justice must be concerned with the lives people end up leading, the experiences and development of capacities that these lives involve, not just the institutions and rules within which people make choices.  He also made two more specific points about this realization-focused approach, one about liberty, the other about responsibility and agency, both of which can be framed as responses to objections.  

One natural objection to the focus on realized human capacities is that if just institutions are in place, then whatever happens as a result of the decisions people make within this framework (consistent with the preservation of this framework over time) is neither just nor unjust, since it is the product of voluntary choice under fair conditions.  According to this line of reasoning, any attempt to correct realization-outcomes given a just background structure would involve disrespect for people as autonomous agents.  I think Sen’s response to this objection would be that his focus on realization includes the freedom to choose, as a significant component of well-being (pp.18-19), and so doesn’t involve forcing people to flourish.

A second objection would be that the focus on outcomes ignores the important distinction between what happens and what one does.  The focus on outcomes assumes that the only relationship one can have to a value is to promote its maximal realization (by whatever actions lead to this result) rather than to honour or respect the value in one’s own conduct (e.g. by a commitment not to perform at least some morally objectionable actions no matter their expected result).  I think Sen’s response to this objection would be to assert that a focus on realizations permits assigning signficance to the processes through which states of affairs come about.  His realization-based approach considers the “comprehensive outcome,” not simply the “culmination outcome” (pp.22, 215-217).  As an example, Sen cites the real moral difference between people dying of starvation due to circumstances beyond anyone’s control and people being intentionally starved (p.23).  However, we can acknowledge the moral difference between me starving people and nature starving people while still taking a consequentialist view of morality.  Since the intentional starvation of others is so horrible, one could argue that we should do whatever we can to prevent its occurrence, even if - invent your own outlandish seminar scenario here - we have to starve some people in order to prevent a third party from starving many more people.  Sen would I think respond that a realization-focused approach can assign disvalue to the individual’s doing something bad (for each individual but only for that individual), over and above the disvalue of the bad thing happening.  

Chapter 10 uses Arjuna’s debate with Krishna to develop this idea of a comprehensive or inclusive realization-focused approach to justice.  Arjuna the great warrior is about to fight a major battle.  His cause is just, because his brother is legitimate heir to the throne, but their cousins the Kauravas have usurped the throne.  Arjuna’s duty, conventionally understood, is to lead his side to victory, as his adviser Krishna argues.  Yet Arjuna expresses doubts, because (a) a great many people will die, many of them guilty of nothing more than agreeing to support their friends and kin, and (b) Arjuna will himself have to kill members of his extended kin group, for some of whom he has real affection.  Sen emphasizes three aspects of Arjuna’s thinking.  First, he does not focus only on the suitability of his actions based on past events and existing rules or norms; he also considers what will actually happen to the world (p.212).  However, second, Arjuna is not concerned only with what happens but also with what he himself does (pp.213-4).  Third, in assessing what he himself does, the special relationships he has with specific others matter (pp.214).  Arjuna’s mode of reasoning is thus a good example of the sophisticated, inclusive, “informationally rich” (pp.216-7) consequentialism Sen is advocating.  Sen dislikes the label “consequentialist” (pp.217-8), but seems prepared to tolerate its use in a suitably general sense, as the notes on p.217 and p.210 suggest.  The p.17 note accepts Pettit’s definition of consequentialism, so long as the “consequences” of a decision are taken to include “agencies, processes, [and] relations”.  The p.210 note uses “consequentialism” as part of the definition of utilitarianism as welfarist, sum-ranking consequentialism.  Sen claims that some of the “deontological dilemmas” (p.219) generally presented to discredit narrow consequentialist reasoning (the “colourful counterexamples” from p.217) do not arise for a realization-focused approach that takes a broad view of the consequences that follow from a decision.  A broad view would include “the nature of the agencies involved, the processes used, and the relationships of people” (219).

I have one main concern about this chapter.  It seems to me that Sen’s defense of sophisticated or inclusive consequentialism succeeds only by watering down the distinctiveness of the view.  The claim that we should adopt a realization-focused approach to justice initially seems to be a significant thesis, since it appears to rule out some deontological views.  Yet the defense of the realization-focused approach against deontological objections involves expanding the notion of a “consequence” so that deontological intuitions can be formulated in terms of consequence-based modes of reasoning (e.g. by assigning extra disvalue to my torturing someone that is not for you a similar disvalue).  This move simply relocates the debate between consequentialists and deontologists.  Instead of disagreeing about the form moral reasoning should take, the two sides disagree about the extent to which the function to be maximized must or may include agent-relative components.  I’m not sure it illuminates the debate to cast it as a dispute about whether value functions should have this indexical aspect (or as a question about the exact weight to be assigned to the indexical aspect of value functions).  I can see how standard deontological views can be rendered in this way, so as to be consistent with an account of rational action as choosing the option that maximizes the value of the expected consequences.  The problem is that this broad definition of outcomes would make even the most rule-obsessed view count as a realization-focused theory.  On this account, there would be no purely institutional or rule-focused approaches to justice, but simply realization-focused approaches that place heavier weights, on “agencies, processes [and] relations.”  Presumably Sen wants to argue for an approach to justice that is realization-focused in the more specific sense of placing less weight on processes, etc., but this chapter does not provide an argument for such an approach.  No doubt the rest of the book will speak to this question.  What I suppose I would have liked to see in this chapter is an explanation of why it is preferable to understand the debate between deontology and consequentialism as a dispute about the weighting of the indexical elements of value functions, as opposed to a debate about the form moral reasoning should take.

In the previous chapter, David showed that procedural fairness could not by itself justify democracy. According to “fair proceduralism”, a law that is the outcome of a democratic vote is legitimate because everyone had an equal role in determining the outcome, regardless of whether it is good or just by other standards. Yet since a coin flip also provides equal input, fair proceduralism must incorporate some substantive value, such as the principle that outcomes should be positively sensitive to voter preferences.

Chapter 5 confronts a possible response to this argument, a response based on a partial concession. Yes, we have to appeal to substantive values to justify democracy, but we can do so with respect to the intrinsic characteristics of decision-procedures, without making any claims about their tendency to yield good decisions or (incidentally) to generate other desirable outcomes. We thus avoid any substantive assessment of political decisions / outcomes (except for endorsing the preservation of democracy, which is an outcome, but the outcome that consists in the continued functioning of our intrinsically-valued procedure). David calls this position “intrinsic democratic proceduralism” (86). The chapter criticizes 3 versions of this doctrine: Habermas, Cohen, and Waldron. Read the rest of this entry »

Does anyone one know if Rousseau had read Hume’s essay “Of Original Contract”? I’m teaching Hume this year in my second year history of political thought course, in between Locke and Rousseau. Hume showed that political legitimacy and obligation cannot be based on actual consent - the poor unilingual peasant has no real exit option. Remnants of an actual consent theory persist in Rousseau’s Social Contract, as in the footnote to 4.2, which says that residency implies consent and hence legitimacy of institutions only in a free state, where people have the right to leave. Yet Rousseau also advances the new view that the idea of free agreement between equals can help us design legitimate institutions, as in 1.6 of the Social Contract, where the idea of a social contract is clearly not legitimating whatever is agreed to, but rather helping us figure out what we should agree to, in order to preserve our freedom. If Rousseau had read Hume’s essay, it seems he would have distinguished these two types of consent and these two roles consent can play more clearly. I’m hoping someone can help me out with the biography / history (though also with the interpretation, if I’m missing something). For a clear misreading of this history, and its relation to Rawls, see here and compare to pp.336-7 of A Theory of Justice, in particular note 2, where Rawls says that he does not accept the whole of Hume’s argument, but believes that it is correct as applied to the political duty for citizens. (What part did Rawls not accept?)