Knowing What To Do - Are There Objectively Correct Decisions?

1 Knowing What To Do – Are There Objectively Correct Decisions? When one has reasons both for and against doing something and one deliberates about whether to do it, is one looking for a right answer and if one is, is such a thing to be had? I shall begin by summarising an earlier paper of mine dealing with Philippa Foot’s work on the fact-value problem.1 Foot’s Arguments, Cogent and Fallacious. My summary of Foot’s position and of my agreements and disagreements it will be brief and may, at least when I come to the points on which I disagree, sound like a caricature. If so, I can only ask the worried reader to consult Foot’s paper and mine. Foot argues that there are certain things that every rational human being (and perhaps every rational agent) must care about. These include injury and danger to oneself and the general state of one’s health. One must care about them, since one needs to be able-bodied to have a good chance of obtaining the things one wants and avoiding the things to which one is averse.2 She believes that this gives us a perfectly good sense in which certain values and disvalues are objective. It is simply a fact that injury is bad for a human being, and that health is good and that dangers to one’s health and bodily integrity are to be avoided. She acknowledges that there are occasions when health and bodily integrity can work to one’s detriment (‘when the order has gone out that able-bodied men are to be put to the sword’3) but they are rare and normally one is better off for being in good physical shape. She might have added that, even in those cases where being able-bodied is liable to bring about one’s downfall, this is a matter of the facts of one’s situation not of one’s own choice. A similar point can be made about cases in which someone can afford to ignore dangers to his health because he has not long to live anyway: it is the facts of his situation that make this so. Foot also argues that, in addition to health and bodily integrity, there are mental capacities that every rational agent will want to maintain.4 I regard Foot’s reasoning on this question, very slightly amended by myself, as sound and shall refer to it as her ‘cogent argument’. Unfortunately she goes on to offer a similar argument that the so-called ‘cardinal virtues’ are something one must, if one is rational, want to possess. Disregarding what she says about prudence and justice, let us consider her treatment of temperance and courage. Here her argument seems so patently fallacious that the reader who has not read her paper is almost bound to wonder whether I am misrepresenting her. The following passage seems to me to be the core of her argument: [Does not any man] need to resist the temptation of pleasure when there is harm involved? And how could it be argued that he would never need to face what was fearful for the sake of some good?5 But one could equally well come up with the following two rhetorical questions: Does not any man need to accept the risk of harm if he is to indulge in certain pleasures? And how could it be argued that he would never need to forgo some good in order to avoid what was fearful? How is one to weigh ‘needs’ against each other, to decide what one needs most? What has gone wrong is that Foot is trying to use an argument that can only show that one has some reason to seek or avoid certain things to show that one should act on 2 certain reasons rather than others. Her argument about injury, danger and so on goes through because it is not intended to show that one has overriding reason to act in certain ways6, and so it will have nothing to say about what one should do when reasons conflict, when one has reasons, however objective, both for and against a certain course of action. I shall speak of Foot’s argument about temperance and courage as her ‘fallacious argument’. But does what I call her ‘cogent argument’ really go through, the reader might wonder? And I have to confess that every now and again I find myself asking, ‘Is it perhaps a very clever sophistry?’ For between fifteen and twenty years I believed that there was a sharp distinction between fact and value; and Foot’s paper contains a passage that neatly summarises my thinking on the subject: When a man uses a word such as ‘good’ in an ‘evaluative’ and not an ‘inverted comma’ sense, he is supposed to commit his will. From this it has seemed to follow inevitably that there is a logical gap between fact and value, for is it not one thing to say that a thing is so, and another thing to have a particular attitude towards its being so; one thing to see that certain effects will follow from a given action, and another to care?7 Exactly, I would have said, one can accept that a certain situation obtains; whether one cares one way or the other is something else again. I could not see any way round this. I suspect too that I associated Foot’s cogent argument with her fallacious argument and this made it difficult for me to give the former a fair hearing. What is crucial for Foot’s cogent argument is that is not intended to show that any particular reason for action is overriding. (Although she is quite explicit about this, perhaps she does not emphasise it enough and she certainly seems to forget it when expounding her fallacious argument.) One might certainly have reason to avoid injury but this does not prevent one from also having reason to do something that involves the risk or even the certainty of injury. Once this is fully recognised, it does not seem so bizarre to suggest that all human beings might, on pain of being irrational, have to care about injury to themselves and therefore to acknowledge that they have some reason to avoid injury. Whatever may be the case with extraterrestrials, androids and purely spiritual agents, human beings are biological entities of flesh and blood who can be harmed in various ways that reduce their ability to get things they want and avoid things to which they are averse. To adopt the terminology of J. L. Mackie, Foot seems to have pointed out certain considerations that are equally factual and evaluative without being ‘metaphysically queer’.8 Rather, they are biologically intelligible. I strongly suspect that, if there were facts about which values outweigh which other values, they would be ‘metaphysically queer’ with a vengeance.9 I do not know how widely applicable Foot’s (cogent) reasoning is: how many values and disvalues could be shown to have the kind of objectivity in question. I cannot see, for example, how it could be used to show that everyone must, on pain of irrationality, care about injury to others. But the fact that we are not looking for overriding reasons may be significant again. After all, we are, in one respect, not asking for very much: only that people can be shown to have some, not necessarily overriding, reason to care about certain things. But on this question I lack inspiration. 3 Let me close this section with two comments on Foot’s general strategy. First, what strikes me as peculiar about it is that the acceptability of her cogent argument is closely related to the unacceptability of her fallacious argument. The strength of the former depends precisely upon its not being intended to establish the sort of thing the latter is intended to establish. There is an irony here, though an unusual one.10 Second, the fact that Foot fails to show that a rational human being must want to be temperate and courageous does not show that there is no way that this could be done. Is there objective outweighing? It seems clear that if Foot had been able to show that any person needs temperance (or courage), she would have had to show that there are cases where the fact that an action is pleasurable (or dangerous) is outweighed by other considerations. Notice two things: a) This outweighing must be somehow objective. Obviously people sometimes do judge pleasure or danger to be outweighed by other considerations but are there occasions in which they must do so if they are not to be somehow irrational and guilty of ignoring the facts? Foot has successfully argued that a rational human being must acknowledge certain reasons as reasons for him, though not necessarily overriding ones. Is there any cogent way of arguing that a rational human being must acknowledge certain reasons as outweighing certain others, as being overriding? For example, might it be somehow objectively worth the risk (or not worth it) to face danger for the sake of some other good? b) The word ‘outweigh’ here is a metaphor, though a dead or at least moribund one, but it is quantitative. Is this important? If one moves from talking of having some reason to do something to talking of having overriding reason to do it, is this necessarily a transition to the quantitative? I shall postpone consideration of (b) for the moment. Let us consider (a). In an earlier paper I discussed two papers by Donald Davidson and tried to extract from them arguments bearing upon this question of outweighing.11 Again I offer a summary of what I said there. Anyone who finds it too brief or suspects me of misrepresenting Davidson is urged to consult the papers in question. I should point out that neither of Davidson’s papers is primarily concerned with our problem here. Nevertheless in both he finds it necessary to stress that the practical syllogism cannot explain why someone chooses to act on one reason rather than another (or why she ought to do so). It can only explain how she comes to see herself as having a reason to do something: The practical syllogism exhausts its role in displaying an action as falling under one reason; so it cannot be subtilized into a reconstruction of practical reasoning, which involves the weighing of competing reasons. The practical syllogism provides a model neither for a predictive science of action nor for a normative account of evaluative reasoning.12 In the later paper he spells this out by imagining someone contemplating an act of fornication. The person reasons that the act will be pleasurable, that all acts that are pleasurable ought to be performed and that therefore it ought to be performed; but also that the act is one of fornication, that no act of fornication ought to be performed and that therefore it ought not to be performed.13 Two practical syllogisms, one of 4 which tells one that an act ought to be performed while the other tells one that it ought not. But conjoining them does not tell one whether, in the light of the reasons for and those against, it ought to be performed. The practical syllogism has, to use Davidson’s earlier turn of phrase, exhausted its role (though of course further use of it might provide further reasons for and against the action). It cannot tell one how the reasons ‘add up’.14 Davidson, unlike Foot, is not concerned with whether any of the competing reasons have a claim to be called ‘objective’; rather, with how one gets from recognising that one has competing reasons to making a decision in the light of them. And he clearly brings it out that it cannot be via a practical syllogism. This is not to deny the importance of practical syllogisms – they have a vital role in explaining what is going on in means-end reasoning, for example – but they cannot tell one on which reasons to act. In their different ways Foot and Davidson lead up to the problem of how to choose between conflicting reasons but, so far as I can see, they leave us with it, unresolved. Well, how might one approach it? Let us look at some possibilities. Virtue Ethics. Look again at how the problem arose in the context of Foot’s discussion. The difficulty was that she suggested no way of deciding when a danger ought to be faced or a pleasure forgone for the sake of something else. She just seemed to be assuming that there are cases in which risks must be taken or sacrifices made and that a rational human being can recognise them. Someone might suggest that we go back to Aristotle and resurrect his doctrine of the mean. Perhaps there is such a thing as being too concerned about something or not concerned enough. In a sense, of course, anyone who believes that some character-traits are virtues and others vices will say this. He will say that someone who is intemperate is too concerned about pleasure and that someone who lacks courage is too concerned about danger. But I am suggesting that someone might make this the fundamental thought of his ethics.15 Once again we will be brought up against the problem of objectivity. People do make judgments about when risks are worth taking and pleasures worth pursuing and they make judgments about other people’s judgments on these matters. But is there such a thing as being right or wrong in such judgments? Aristotle suggests that the cowardly man thinks the courageous man foolhardy and that the foolhardy man thinks the courageous man cowardly.16 He clearly believes that the cowardly and foolhardy men are wrong and that the courageous man is right. But this is all in terms of what he, Aristotle, thinks is cowardly, foolhardy and courageous. What if anything would determine who is right and who is wrong? What is it to be too concerned about danger; and not to be concerned enough; and to get it just right? I cannot see how Aristotle can help us here. Note however the clear appearance of quantitative considerations in the discussion.17 Utilitarianism. The approach to ethics that most obviously brings quantitative considerations to the fore is of course utilitarianism. The whole point of utilitarianism is to establish a common currency in which the merits and demerits of rival policies can be cashed. And the utilitarian, it has to be admitted, deserves qualified approval for seeing clearly that there is a need for some way of bringing conflicting reasons together and adjudicating between them. Arguably, she sees this more clearly than do any of the proponents of rival first-order moral doctrines. One might see her as 5 saying, ‘If we are to decide what to do in the face of conflicting reasons, then these reasons will have to be weighed, measured, against each other. Let us take this seriously, indeed literally or as close to literally as possible’. But whether she has anything helpful to say on the question of objectivity is another matter. If two people agree about the pros and cons of a particular course of action but differ about the weights to be given to them (a not uncommon situation), how is the disagreement to be resolved? Whether the pros and cons are explicated in terms of pain and pleasure, happiness and unhappiness, or just goodness and badness, the question will arise. Or does the utilitarian think that if the pros and cons are spelt out in enough detail, there will be no such disagreement? Moral Absolutism. Perhaps we should not be thinking quantitatively. Perhaps there is another way of reaching conclusions about practical matters that does not involve trying to maximise or minimise something. The moral absolutist holds that there are some things that should never be done, irrespective of what reasons there might be for doing them (most usually expressed as ‘whatever the consequences’). Certain reasons are held to defeat any combination of countervailing reasons, and so quantitative considerations need not – and should not – be brought into the matter. Reasons, therefore, can override other reasons without this being a question of the quantitative. Of course, the absolutist is not claiming that people always obey these absolute prohibitions or even recognise them. So the overriding of contrary reasons has to be thought of as de jure, not de facto. And the question will arise as to where the principles of the absolutist get their built-in power of veto over other reasons.18 How are we to demonstrate that they have this right of veto? We may have been given a significantly different picture of choice between actions from that offered by the utilitarian but it faces a similar problem: What justifies the power, the overwhelming, indefeasible power, given to absolutist principles? Another problem is that absolutism does not tell us what to do instead of breaking an absolute prohibition. One rejects a course of action on the grounds, let us say, that it involves the deliberate killing of an innocent human being. Deciding what one should do instead would, it seems, confront one with the kind of problem to which the virtue ethicist and the utilitarian offer their solutions. Only in exceptional circumstances will rejecting a course of action as absolutely excluded leave one with nothing more to decide. One reason I find the absolutist position worth dwelling on is that it has brought home to me just how pervasive is quantitative language in discussions of reasons for action, deliberation and choice. It is very easy to formulate the question we are discussing in terms that seem to exclude the absolutist from the outset simply because of the extensive use of quantitative language. When trying, in this and other papers, to formulate it in a way that will be acceptable to the absolutist I have not found the task easy. Indeed absolutism has often come across as a nuisance, something that makes questions that would otherwise be easy to formulate difficult. Grammatical comparatives and superlatives, for example, become suspect.19 Reading through what I have said about virtue ethics, utilitarianism and absolutism, I am struck by its somewhat dismissive tone. Perhaps I can mitigate this to some extent by stressing that we do owe a debt to those who have tried to work out the details of the various approaches, especially to those who have made a real effort to take the 6 quantitative and non-quantitative approaches seriously. It is just that I am not greatly impressed by the results of their labours. Feeling the Force of the Problem. Clearly the moral traditions we have examined all face the same kind of problem, and it is hard to imagine what one would be like that did not. They must tell us what to do when reasons conflict. Can there be any objective grounding for their recommendations? Won’t there have to be some feature of reasons that enable them to be compared – either an intrinsic weight or a built-in power of veto? I want the reader to be absolutely clear that this is a problem confronting any first-order moral system of whatever kind. So let me offer a number of formulations, or perhaps not so much formulations as ways of bringing out the inescapability and difficulty of the problem. a) We saw how Davidson emphasises the limitations on what one can expect from the practical syllogism when deciding what to do. One might put it thus: If there is such a thing as reasoning one’s way to a decision what to do, it will have to employ a completely different logic from that of the Aristotelian practical syllogism.20 Competing reasons, when brought together, will have to generate some kind of ‘logical resultant’. ‘Resultant’, a term taken from physics, suggests the quantitative; but the ‘logical’ perhaps cancels this. Or maybe ‘logical upshot’ would be safer. What would this logic of competing reasons be like? There is in general no difficulty in setting out formally why in a given situation two reasons for action conflict – why for example one cannot have both X and Y, even though one wants both. But what a logic would be like that enabled one to infer what one should do in such a situation I have not the remotest notion. b) A slimmed-down version of (a) might appeal to some: When two or more reasons conflict, how do they relate to each other – apart from by conflicting? c) Anyone who has read much first-order moral philosophy will not need to be told how good philosophers are at demolishing each other’s moral edifices. So far no moral system has been devised that convincingly explains how to decide nonarbitrarily between competing reasons. What reason is there to expect this situation to change? d) Bernard Williams, after lamenting the tendency in modern society to try to quantify all goods and evils and perforce to do so in monetary terms, writes: There is great pressure for research into techniques to make larger ranges of social value commensurable. Some of the effort should rather be devoted to learning – or learning again, perhaps – how to think intelligently about conflicts of values which are incommensurable.21 Well, how does one – or did one – or should one – think intelligently about values that are incommensurable. How does one ‘commensurate the incommensurable’? If one can’t compare them quantitatively, what sort of comparison is in order and how does it tell one what to do? 7 e) I remember reading in the Seventies a recently published paper that deplored the failure of moral philosophers to engage with concrete moral issues. (I seem to recall that this worry was often voiced at the time.) It concluded with some such advice as, ‘Don’t feel that you must constantly be trying to be second-order’. Now I have always been a second-order man about ethics.22 It has seemed to me that unless a philosopher has some reason to think that her moral judgments are – or are not – objective, her contributions to any moral debate are bound to be half-baked. To be sure, she will be, or ought to be, better able than most to spot fallacies, inconsistencies and ambiguities in what people say. So she can act as a kind of referee. But this is still second-order. If she does not know, or is wrong about, whether there are right answers to questions about what one ought to do when reasons conflict, her contributions to moral debate are going to be, in an obvious sense, amateurish. f) Let us not forget that when we have reasons both for and against doing something we usually manage to reach a decision. Although there is certainly such a thing as being paralysed by indecision, somehow or other we usually muddle through. Is this ever anything more than mere muddling through and, if it is not, could it be made so? g) Finally, a formulation that is unashamedly quantitative. When reasons conflict, which are the more reasonable reasons? Which have more of what it is to be a reason? Is there ever a right answer to such questions? Are they even well-formed? Second-Order Reasons. So what are the prospects for rationally deciding which reasons to act on? They don’t look good. It rather looks as though the best one can do is to review carefully the reasons for and against a course of action that occur to one and then – well, choose. I do not intend this to have any particular existentialist or libertarian flavour. I am not making any assumptions about freewill or determinism.23 But it will be objected – and the reader may have been itching to say this for some time – can there not be second-order reasons, reasons for acting on particular reasons. My answer is: Yes, there can, but it is hard to see how they can be prevented from becoming just further reasons, reasons among others. Consider habit. Aristotle is often commended for seeing the importance of habit in character-formation: acting on a motive strengthens it and refraining weakens it.24 One might wonder whether this fits all cases. Sometimes, it seems, frequently indulging a desire for something can lead one eventually to lose interest in that something. And are there no cases where a ‘Freudian’ model is appropriate: where damming an impulse leads to its building up strength and eventually bursting forth in grotesque forms or with unacceptable vigour? But there are plenty of cases that do seem to fit the Aristotelian model and it is easy to see how they can furnish one with second-order reasons, reasons for acting or not acting on particular reasons. I might find that an alcoholic nightcap helps me get to sleep but I might also worry that I might become dependent on it and have to increase the dose to get the same effect. So I see myself as having a reason to forgo the alcoholic nightcap and perhaps I decide to do so. 8 Now, although in this case my worry about dependency may have made the difference, it was still just a reason among others. A full statement of my reasons might perhaps have been: on the one hand, my desire to sleep and my enjoyment of alcoholic beverages and, on the other, the financial cost of drinking every night and the second-order reason, the worry about dependency. I had to choose between them. As I would have had to even if I had been able to think of many reasons on both sides – or many reasons on one side but only one on the other. Consider another example: Aristotle’s well-know discussion of the development of virtuous dispositions.25 On his view, one becomes courageous, for example, by performing courageous acts. Well, perhaps one does and, perhaps if one really wants to be courageous, one can train oneself to be. (How certain is this, I wonder?) But that is just one reason among others. It conflicts with one’s natural fear of danger. One still has to choose. It ought also to occur to one that Aristotle’s point, assuming it is right, cuts both ways. If one becomes more courageous over time, one will presumably expose oneself, or be ready to expose oneself, to danger more often and this could be seen as a secondary danger, the danger of coming to live dangerously. But this last point could itself be given a positive slant (or ‘spin’, to use the modern idiom). The Aristotelian tradition maintains that the really virtuous person takes pleasure in performing virtuous acts – does not find them difficult or against the grain.26 So a ready and cheerful acceptance of risk, as against a reluctant and calculated one, might be thought to be something to aim for. Obviously, much more could be said about second-order reasons.27 But the problem is clear. Could there be what one might call ‘an adjudicating reason’, a reason that was not just a reason among others but one that somehow arbitrated between the competing reasons?28 One can of course sometimes point to decisive reasons – ‘For me that was the decisive factor’. And one can sometimes say that a certain reasons would alone, even without the support of other reasons, have been sufficient to make one act as one did. But these are still reasons among others, though ones one happens to think especially important.29 Or am I missing something? An Ignorance Theory. I have repeatedly said, here and elsewhere, that I have no idea what a way of rationally, logically, irrefutably deriving a conclusion about what to do from a consideration of competing reasons would be like.30 I have also confessed that I have no proof that there could not conceivably be any such thing. This suggests that I embody my thinking in an ‘ignorance theory’ of what one ought to do. As is well-known, J. L. Mackie puts forward an ‘error theory’ of morality.31 He believes (rightly, in my view) that moral judgments cannot be exhaustively analysed as expressions of emotion, attempts to evoke emotions in others or imperatives – or any combination of these. Rather, he says that we must see them as making factual claims, i.e. ones that are intended to be factual.32 The ordinary person thinks he is stating a fact when he says that an action is wrong. Mackie holds that there are no such moral facts but he does not deny that people believe there are. Hence his ‘error theory’. People are making a mistake when they claim, or in the case of nonphilosophers more often just assume, that there are moral facts. 9 My position is somewhat different. First, Foot has convinced me that there are at least some evaluative facts. (Not everyone would call them ‘moral facts’, but I cannot see that anything much turns on that.33) Second, I am somewhat more cautious than Mackie about speaking of ‘error’ here. I cannot prove that there is no such thing as demonstrating that one reason outweighs or outranks another. On the other hand, I would agree with Mackie that there is a vast amount of error in this region. People claim to know far more than they do and this is error, not just ignorance. Even if there is something to be known here, people’s reasons for their beliefs about what should or should not be done are nowhere near strong enough for these beliefs to constitute knowledge. (And I am not just talking about non-philosophers either.) There is no need for Gettier-type subtleties here.34 Surely no one as yet has a justified true belief that certain reasons outweigh or outrank others. Someone might object to my calling my position ‘a theory’. I am not thinking of Wittgensteinian scruples about theories in philosophy.35 There are any number of discussable general claims in philosophy that it seems perfectly natural to call ‘theories’. They may not (usually) be much like scientific theories, but what of it? What I am a little concerned about is the possibility that I might not be thought to be making a sufficiently substantial claim to credit myself with a theory. After all, I include myself among the ignorant! By contrast, Mackie’s view, whether right or wrong, does deserve to be called ‘a theory’. Well, I am claiming that we have a problem about reasons for action that no firstorder moral doctrine even begins to address convincingly and that we have no idea what the answer is or how it might be argued for. We lack (a) a way of demonstrating that certain reasons outweigh or outrank others, or (b) a way of demonstrating that no such demonstration is possible.36 Theory or not, that is what I am putting forward for consideration. A Note on Weakness of Will. I have written in the above as though people simply decide what to do and ignored the possibility that things might be more complicated. Perhaps they decide what is the best thing to do, or the right thing to do or what ought to be done and then do that. Or perhaps they don’t always do what they have decided is best, right or the thing that ought to be done. Am I justified in ignoring weakness of will, assuming it is a genuine possibility? The short answer is that the problem I am discussing arises as much for a judgment about which action is best, right or what ought to be done as for the action one actually performs. I leave it to the reader to satisfy herself that this is so. Yet a little more might usefully be said. A natural point at which I might have introduced the notion of weakness of will would have been when discussing Aristotle on habit. Someone worried about the policy of taking an alcoholic nightcap might think, ‘The more I get into the habit of having a drink every night, the more difficult it will be to stop drinking if I want to and I might eventually find that I am drinking every night even though I think it best not to’. This is surely the natural territory in which to seek weakness of will. The point I wish to make here is that one would be concerned with a fairly accommodating, inclusive notion of weakness of will. 10 Anyone who has read my ‘The hard problem of weakness of will’37 will know that, building on the work of Davidson, I impose a rather elaborate and stringent set of conditions on the genuinely paradoxical cases of weakness: the one where one really does wonder, ‘Is that logically possible?’. But someone concerned about the addictive possibilities of an alcoholic nightcap need have no such narrow focus. He may be concerned about coming to drink too much (irrespective of whether he will then believe he is drinking too much). He may be worried about having to struggle to control his drinking (even if he is confident that he would eventually succeed). Or he may be worried about becoming an alcoholic, unable to control his drinking (whether or not he makes much attempt to do so). In short he is probably worried about drinking too much and not about the minutiae of his state of mind when drinking. What he is worried about may well include the seemingly paradoxical cases but is unlikely to be limited to them – even if he is a philosopher. Notes. 1. ‘Facts, values and priorities: Philippa Foot on objectivity in ethics’. The paper I discuss is ‘Moral Beliefs’ (Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Vol. 59, 1958-59), reprinted in Virtues and Vices, Oxford: Blackwell, 1978 (to which references are given here). 2. Op. cit., p. 116-17, 122. I give more detailed references in ‘Facts, values and priorities’. 3. Op. cit., p. 123. 4. Op. cit., p. 117. 5. Op. cit., pp. 123-24. 6. Foot says this quite clearly on p. 123, but she does not seem to realise the extent to which it restricts the scope of her argument. 7. Op. cit., p. 121. 8. J. L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977, pp. 38-42. 9. For all I know, it might be possible, on the basis of current medical knowledge, to give a recipe for the life-style that is most conducive to preserving oneself – alive and in one piece. I do not see that one would be dealing in anything ‘metaphysically queer’. But suppose one is also concerned about the quality of life: how many pleasures would one have to forgo to maximise the chances of a long and healthy life? If it were claimed that there is a correct answer to the question how much one should care about survival and how much about pleasure, that is the sort of thing that would strike me as metaphysically fishy. Notice, by the way, that I have been speaking only of self-interested concerns. If one were to bring in concern for the interests of others and to claim that there was a correct answer to the question of how much one should care about these in relation to one’s own pleasure and survival, that would only increase the impression of fishiness. 10. What gives one a particular jolt is that Foot has just been emphasising the disvalue of danger: that everyone has reason to avoid it. When she begins to discuss courage, danger suddenly appears on the opposite side, as something that in certain circumstances ought not to be avoided. There is less of a jolt with her discussion of temperance, since she has not previously been at pains to argue that pleasure is objectively valuable. 11. ‘The seemingly ineliminable non sequitur of practical reason: Davidson and Kolnai on deliberation’. The papers by Davidson are ‘Actions, reasons and causes’ 11 and ‘How is weakness of the will possible?’ in Essays on Actions and Events. Oxford: Clarendon, 1980. 12. Davidson, p. 16. 13. Op. cit., pp. 33-37. 14. Op. cit., p. 36. 15. There is a need for a distinction between those moral philosophers who admit the virtues into their systems and those who make them fundamental to their systems. Those utilitarians and Kantians who regard the character-traits that facilitate obedience to the Principle of Utility or the Categorical Imperative as virtues would be of the first sort, whereas only the latter are what are normally called ‘virtue ethicists’. Someone who makes the thought that a person can be too concerned about some things and not sufficiently concerned about others the fundamental thought of his ethics would, so far as I can see, be a virtue ethicist but I am not sure whether the reverse is true: whether virtue ethicists must take degree of concern as their fundamental notion. 16. Nicomachean Ethics, Bk. 2, Ch. 8. 17. I am no doubt revealing my ignorance here but has there been much attempt to work out the quantitative details of Aristotle’s doctrine of the mean? The quantitative details of utilitarianism have generated reams of discussion – either about how to determine optimific policies or about whether the whole project is feasible. But it would not surprise me if a nonchalant ‘usually and for the most part’ has done duty for any serious examination of the quantitative issues raised by the notion of the mean. I confess to finding much of the technical literature on utilitarianism tedious, to put it mildly; so it is not with great eagerness that I enquire about parallel developments in Aristotelian studies. 18. There is perhaps a sense in which any reason for action has a built-in power of veto in that it can conflict with other reasons and has the potential to defeat them or at least be on the winning side. But there is nothing de jure about this. 19. I have ignored the fact that most absolutists set their absolutism in a religious, Divine Law context. This may seem perverse of me, but what I am concerned with is whether there is any alternative to thinking quantitatively about conflict between reasons for action. In fact, absolutists sometimes seem to be thinking ‘God knows what is best, and we will follow His judgment’. And sometimes they seem concerned with the consequences to themselves of disobeying God’s commands. Neither of these points of view represents a clear break with the quantitative. But they also often express a genuine horror at the thought of deliberately doing certain things and it is this that seems to me to be such a break. Examples of all three points of view can be found in the writings of G. E. M. Anscombe. 20. This point is further elaborated in ‘The seemingly ineliminable non sequitur of practical reason’, particularly in the discussion of Aurel Kolnai’s paper ‘Deliberation is of ends’. Kolnai is arguing against the Aristotelain doctrine that deliberation is of means. If it were about means, or solely about means, it could presumably be adequately conceptualised in terms of the practical syllogism. 21. Morality: An Introduction to Ethics, Harmondsworth: Pelican, 197, p. 103. 22. In spite of some changes in my overall position on fact and value, such as my coming to accept what I have called Foot’s ‘cogent argument’. 23. If some readers are unconvinced, I refer them to my ‘Peter Geach on nonsense, confusion and sin’ on academia.edu, pp. 6, 10 and ‘The seemingly ineliminable non sequitur of practical reason’, p. 6. 24. Nicomachean Ethics, Bk. 2, Ch. 1, 2. 12 25. Op. cit., Bk. 2, Ch. 1, 2, 4. 26. Op. cit., Bk. 2, Ch. 3. 27. Harry G. Frankfurt has written extensively on second-order desires (see his The Importance of What We Care About, Cambridge: C.U.P., 1988, particularly essays 2 and 5) but he is mainly concerned with (a) wanting to have or not to have certain desires and (b) wanting certain desires to be the ones that one acts on. These concerns are not quite the same as what I have in mind here, which is closer to: What sort of reason if any could one have for (b) wanting certain desires to be the ones that one acts on? 28. Perhaps it is confusing to call it an ‘adjudicating reason’ if we want it not to be just a reason among others. An ‘adjudicating consideration’, then. But there is probably little point in agonising about the appropriate terminology so long as we have no idea what such a consideration would be like. 29. Another kind of case is this. It sometimes happens that, when one has great difficulty deciding what to do, thinking of a new pro or new con can break the deadlock. This can sometimes be something relatively trivial – something that one would oneself say was trivial. 30. ‘Logically, irrefutably’? Someone might suggest that we should be looking for some kind of non-demonstrative inference, something like inductive inference perhaps. I cannot see that this suggestion will get us very far. Imagine you are undecided whether to do something. You have two friends, one of whom thinks you should do it and one of whom thinks you shouldn’t. They acknowledge the same reasons as you do, yet one of them thinks the pros outweigh the cons and the other thinks the reverse. Each tries to persuade you. How would the suggestion that deliberation involves non-demonstrative reasoning help? Non-demonstrative, no doubt, but why reasoning? Or if it is reasoning, would not its looseness affect each of your friends’ arguments in the same way? For more on the possibility of a useful comparison with inductive reasoning see ‘The seemingly ineliminable non sequitur of practical reason’, p. 4. 31. Mackie, op. cit., pp. 35, 48-49. 32. Op. cit., pp. 30-35. 33. I am not certain what Mackie’s position is on the general fact-value issue, whether he wants to propound an error theory about all values whatsoever. This is not to deny that he has a great deal to say about what moral values are: Chapters 4 and 5, for example, discuss various ways of delimiting the realm of the moral. It is just that non-moral values, or at least ones that many philosophers would regard as non-moral, are left rather in the dark. 34. Edmund L. Gettier, ‘Is justified true belief knowledge?’, Analysis, Vol 23, 1963. 35. L. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, I, 109. 36. A way of approaching the problem that might prove fruitful would be this. Assume for the sake of argument that there are right answers to questions about what one should do when reasons conflict – and ask how to find them. Philosophers will differ about the weight they attach to the ‘for the sake of argument’. For some it will be an invitation to consider a counterfactual. Others will genuinely believe that there are right answers. And for others it will be an open question. Of course, the question of objectivity – Are there right answers? – will never be far away, but a direct confrontation with it might possibly not be the best way of making progress, if there is progress to be made. 37. On academia.edu.