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Consequentialising Practical Reason
Durham University, MA in Philosophy
Module: Current Issues in Ethics
Abstract: (152 words)
In this essay, I argue that recent consequentialising approaches to normative theory have
worse prospects than a little-considered alternative. I begin by discussing the aims of
theory, and presenting an account of the central standards against which adequate
theories must measure up. I then present three normative phenomena that have often been
considered to pose problems for consequentialism. Following this, I characterise the
consequentialising project in normative theory, describing general features, as well as
strengths and weaknesses. Then I describe Douglas Portmore’s sophisticated version of
consequentialism about practical reason in some detail, before addressing its relative
success at dealing with the ordinarily problematic phenomena. In the final section, I
present some reasons to think that Portmore’s theory may not be as secure as it seems,
and note that there is an alternative that might perform better. I compare this alternative
favourably to a similar thesis of Susan Wolf’s, and then I conclude.
I declare that this essay is 4981 words long.
Ben Bessey
1 Douglas Villas, Durham, DH11JL
Tutor’s Name: Dr. Nick Zangwill
Journal Conventions Followed: Analysis
14th June, Easter, 2010
Page 1 of 16
In this essay, I shall argue that certain attempts to create normative theories that preserve
the basic features of consequentialism1, while incorporating phenomena that have
traditionally been regarded as problematic for it, fail to be the best candidates for theories
of practical reason. In §1, I sketch an account of the norms of theoretical adequacy
against which normative theories are to be judged, and describe possible problems for
consequentialist theories. In §2, I outline the major elements of Douglas Portmore’s
ambitious consequentialist project, showing the way that it responds to problems. In §3, I
argue that this mode of response is likely to be less cogent than an available alternative.
§1. Theoretical aims and consequentialist problems.
§1.1. The aims of theory
In this section, I shall address issues concerning the aims of theories about practical
norms, and the standards of adequacy to which they should conform. My subject matter
consists of practical norms in their entirety; that is, just whatever norms there are that
govern right action. As such, my focus is not on any one taxon of norms that might be
implicated, such as the taxon ‘morality’2. On the other hand, because my focus is right
action, I am not concerned with evaluation that does not involve deontic concepts.
Normative theories are primarily supposed to provide a systematisation of our norm-
guided practical thought3. This element, upon which I shall focus, consists in an attempt
to save the phenomena of practical reason. However, the total picture is more
complicated than this, for the creation of normative theory is generally4 an attempt to
account for a specific perspective within practical reason (usually, the perspective of the
theorising agent). So the contents of the set of phenomena ‘practical reason’, which
1 I focus on act-consequentialism; the considerations I discuss here are likely relevant to other forms, including satisficing, indirect, and rule utilitarianisms, but I cannot discuss them here.2 It is necessary to draw a distinction between the bundle of normative phenomena that are designated ‘moral’ pre-theoretically, and those that appear in moral theory. Throughout, I use ‘morality’ for the pre-theoretic bundle, and morality for the phenomena given this designation in a theory.3 Such theories are also supposed to be a guide to action, and to some extent this would just be a natural corollary of their being accurate systematisations of existing norms, given that those norms are already action-guiding. Any further sense in which they might aim at guiding action is not something I can discuss here.4 At least some of the explicitly ‘experimental’ approaches that have appeared recently would seem to be an exception to this, but I cannot address this here. See for example Mikhail 2007.
Page 2 of 16
normative theories are meant to save, cannot merely be established by performing a
survey. Instead, theorists argue about which putative contents of that set are correct
(according to phenomena-internal standards), even as they engage in meta-level disputes
about how best to account for a given set according to the theoretical norms of
descriptive and explanatory adequacy. Although first-order dispute about the norms that
are relevant to practical reason is one way of engaging in debate about theory, I cannot
defend at length the relevance and strength of the various intuitive responses that I refer
to throughout the essay.
It is also essential to note that disagreement about the proper contents of the set of
practical norms can take two forms. Firstly, there is the set of outcomes; the judgements
on alternative actions or courses of action that the norms collectively produce all things
considered. In terms of theory, this corresponds to the set of deontic statuses or degree-
of-rightness5 outputs that are generated. The fundamental deontic statuses are
permissible, impermissible, and required, where an act is required just in case it is the
only one that is permissible6; there are also other, more controversial, deontic statuses, for
which see below. It is relatively uncontroversial that this is an essential feature of
successful theory7. A theory does best, on this account, if the output set it produces is
identical to that produced by the pre-theoretic norms of which it is a theory. Secondly,
there is the set of norms themselves, the actual reasons that are given in favour of
practical alternatives. It is surely necessary for successful normative theory that the
agents to whose norms the theory is supposed to stand as an exegesis are able to
recognise it as such. This is not likely to happen unless the content of the norms
themselves is preserved (Zangwill 2010, 4-9). On this level, a theory will succeed if it can
include the same reasons that have intuitive force pre-theoretically.
5 It is necessary to include degrees of rightness because there are plainly gradations of difference between the rightness of acts within, as well as between, the deontic categories.6 It may seem possible that this doesn’t hold universally, because there could be two or more equally required alternatives. However, these can be treated as a set (because they fit together such that choice can permissibly be made only between them, not externally), so the characterisation holds.7 The revisionary consequentialists that I shall discuss later accept it (Brown 2010, 1; Portmore 2010c, 1).
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In addition, there is another dimension along which responses to the problem of
accounting for ‘morality’ can differ. This dimension amounts to a decision upon an
approach to the creation of theory from norms. It is ultimately on the advocation of an
alternative approach along this dimension that my argument turns. It is possible for
normative theories, rather than taking some pre-theoretical category such as ‘morality’ as
a given, and trying to introduce that as a whole into theory, instead to split up ‘morality’
into different areas of normative content, which share different properties. I shall return
to this in §3.
There appear, then, to be three main dimensions along which approaches to normative
theorising can differ. A theory is best if it performs better than the available alternatives
on a weighted8 sum of these three variables. For example, a theory that is excellent at
duplicating the substance of norms, but cannot reproduce a decent approximation of their
outputs, and fails to respect the pre-theoretic placings-into-taxa that they involve, is not
likely to perform well relative to others. It is not to be expected that any theory will be
perfect on even one of these three accounts, no matter on all of them, unless the norms
that they aim to provide a theoretical treatment of are extremely simple. Nevertheless,
this account of the aims of theory provides a plausible set of criteria9 for theory-choice in
this area.
§1.2 Problems for consequentialist theory
Given this account of what good moral theory would look like, in this section I shall
describe three normative phenomena, generally placed in the ‘moral’ taxon, that are
potential problems for fundamentally consequentialist normative theories.
Consequentialism, as I work with it here, is a (any) moral theory that produces
judgements of deontic status and degree of rightness as a function of judgements of the
goodness involved in actions. This allows consequentialisms to include not only
8 Weighting will be necessary because the third dimension is plainly less important than the first two. The relative weight that ought to be assigned to those variables is less clear, however. For the purposes of this essay, I shall treat them as having roughly equal weight.9 Other standard theory-choice criteria, such as coherence, simplicity, and efficacy of application to new areas (Kagan 1989, 11) are also important. Coherence is plausibly an absolute pre-requisite (here I mean coherence within practical reason, as well as within each taxon); while the other criteria seem more like tiebreakers – at any rate they are not as weighty as the three dimensions I have proposed.
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extrinsic, contingent features such as consequences traditionally considered, but also
intrinsic and otherwise unorthodox features. For instance, one could consider an act’s
being an instantiation of courage as a good-maker, or even an act’s being respectful of
humanity in some quasi-Kantian sense. Portmore’s ‘consequentialising’ theory, on which
I shall focus my criticism, is a particularly sophisticated consequentialism in this broad
vein. Nevertheless, throughout this essay I in effect assume that there is something right
about consequentialist norms, which ought to be reflected in theory. The fact that my
argument is directed against a wholly consequentialist account of practical reason, then,
should not be taken to involve the view that such an account is appropriate in no part of it
(see §3). I cannot argue for this assumption here.
Two of these problematic phenomena are part of the group of issues surrounding norms
that seem to be10 irreducibly partial, for instance, norms involved in personal
relationships. The primary example I shall use here comes from (Wolf 1992, 253), and
concerns the relationship of a mother with her son. It may be summarised as follows:
(MS): S is a mother with only one son. Her son comes home one night and
admits that he has committed a terrible crime, and asks that she hide him
from the police. If he is caught, he will suffer greatly in prison, but if he is
not caught, an innocent man will be imprisoned instead.
MS is a difficult case, and it is plausible that S is ultimately required (at least under some
taxon of reasons, if not overall by practical reason) to surrender her son. It seems, then,
that the problems that MS throws up are not problems of replicating deontic output, but
of accounting for the specific norms involved. Other examples might be more conclusive,
offering instances where both specific norms, and the output of consequentialist theory,
are a poor match for pre-theoretic intuition. However, the fact that MS remains troubling
nonetheless illustrates the importance of specific-norm based theoretical adequacy, as
well as the more commonly recognised requirement of replicating outputs. MS is
10 I cannot address arguments to the effect that impartial theories such as traditional consequentialism can, in fact, accommodate such phenomena, for an example of which see Railton 1984. Neither can I respond to first-order normative critique of the genuine force of such phenomena.
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troubling because it is plausible that S has some genuine reason to hide her son in this
case, even if that reason is ultimately overruled in such a way that doing so is
impermissible (253-4).
There are three ‘moral’ phenomena that I shall draw out here, two of which may be
illustrated using MS. These are either kinds of deontic status, or of factors that have an
influence on the degree of rightness of actions. All have frequently been regarded11 as
major problems for a consequentialist account of ‘practical reason’ in general and
‘morality’ in particular. The first phenomenon is that of agent-centred options. This term
denotes the intuitive existence of multiple permissible alternatives available to agents.
Traditionally, consequentialist theories have had difficulty including such options,
because failure to promote the good to the greatest extent is regarded as being
automatically impermissible. Thus, S in MS has reasons that count some way towards
making it permissible to help her son, even if those reasons ultimately fail. The second
phenomenon is that of agent-centred restrictions. These constraints on action tend to
make actions impermissible if they are violated, and stem from a feature of the individual
agent. So S plausibly has a special, specific relationship with her son, giving an
obligation to him of significant normative force (again, even if the reasons it gives her are
subsequently overruled). The third of the phenomena is that of supererogation. This
deontic status is in effect a special case of that of options, resulting when one or more
alternative action has so many reasons in favour of it that it goes beyond being required,
and is thus both better than some otherwise required alternative could be, and not itself
required. Intuitively, working for a worthy charity for a subsistence wage for the rest of
one’s life is supererogatory.
§2. Portmore’s Consequentialism
§2.1. Consequentialising
The above problems may seem straightforwardly to prevent consequentialisms from
providing for adequate theories of practical reason. However, over the past few decades a
movement within consequentialism has aimed to incorporate answers to these questions
11 As well as Portmore 2005, 98-99; see e.g. Cottingham 1981, 86-90; Railton 1984, 136-140.
Page 6 of 16
within that framework12. The idea behind this project is simple: there is no reason why
consequentialists cannot endorse as complicated and pluralistic a version of the good as is
needed (Sen 1982) They can even endorse goods that are agent-relative rather than
neutral13, goods that take into account the particular place of the agent, rather than being
impersonal (Sen 1983). The thought then is that any moral theory can be
‘consequentialised’ by combining a specially tailored conception of the good with the
standard consequentialist foundation to translate this into outputs about rightness (Dreier
1994). Consequentialising appears to be a useful tool if it can be successful, because it
raises the prospect of being able to create normative theories that can produce as output
whatever you like; including, of course, otherwise problematic features like the three
above.
This simple form of consequentialising move is not the primary one with which I shall be
concerned here, however, because it is inadequate when judged by the three theoretical
criteria. On the first, judged on its ability to replicate the output of any moral theory one
might imitate using it, it could potentially do fairly well, although Portmore has argued
that it cannot account for options and supererogation (2008a, 412) with its simple
rightness function, although it can include agent-centred restrictions (Portmore 2005, 99-
100). On the second, however, judged on its ability to incorporate the actual norms of
traditionally non-consequentialist theories, it surely has terrible prospects. It must convert
them from their current state of (typically) proposing a direct right-making consideration,
to being a right-making consideration only indirectly, via the theory of the good. This
does violence to the pre-theoretically held and intuitively supported content of such
norms; making it far less likely that an agent would accept the theoretical version of the
norm as an exegesis of her own view. Finally, it is not clear how such theories must fare
on the third criterion, given that they typically present themselves as theories of ‘moral’
norms only. If they hold that only those norms are relevant to reason-guided action, they
will miss out any others. If others are thought to be relevant but unconsequentialisable,
12 Work not otherwise mentioned includes Dreier 1994; Louise 2004; Smith 2009; Suikkannen 2009. Critical responses include Schroeder 2006, and 2007.13 Agent-relative reasons are those that contain ineliminable references to the agent in the antecedent clause a of reason statements of the form (if a, S has reason to do x) (Ridge 2005).
Page 7 of 16
this will form a significant lacuna at the level of practical reason that would need to be
filled for such consequentialisms to be theories of right action per se.
This conjunction of factors makes the simpler form of consequentialising project that
functions solely by revising the theory of the good highly unlikely to be the best theory
available. Portmore, however, has suggested that theories can be modified in other ways,
to do with the good-to-right transformation, and yet remain fundamentally
consequentialist. He holds that this is possible because the essential feature of a
consequentialism is the fact the right is some function of the good, and his theory
preserves that basic link, with its direction from good to right (Portmore 2008a, 409-10).
It seems plausible then that Portmore’s version can perform better on my three criteria
than the simplistic consequentialising project assessed above.
§2.2. Basic features
In this subsection, I shall provide a brief overview of Portmore’s consequentialism, which
I shall then use to illustrate its successes, and ultimately its flaws.
To begin, Portmore provides a distinction between requirement-giving reasons (or right-
making features) and justification-giving ones. The identification of which specific
reasons are requiring reasons, and which are mere justifying ones is a matter of
substantive first-order theory; although Portmore holds both that no non-moral reasons
carry requirement (MR below), and that some moral reasons also do not (specifically,
they do not when instantiated only in oneself14). Requiring reasons increase the force of
requirement on an agent, shifting actions that possess them towards the deontic status
‘required’. Justifying reasons, on the other hand, tend to make actions justifiable, i.e.
permissible but not required. Portmore identifies justifying reasons as all-things-
considered reasons in favour of an act’s basic rightness (that is, permissibility). (Portmore
2008a, 413-14) In so doing, he aims to expand his theory’s scope to all of practical
reason, such that it is the kind of theory that I am concerned with here15. Justifying 14 This is intended to accommodate the intuition that it is never required not to do something that will harm only oneself. (Portmore 2008a, 411-12)15 He refers to it as a theory of what is morally right, qua what one has most moral reason to do (2008a, 421). However, his rightful insistence that non-moral features can be relevant to moral rightness (2008b)
Page 8 of 16
reasons are, then, a complex of moral and non-moral kinds, while requiring reasons are
exclusively moral. It follows that the only notion of requirement within (or by) practical
reason that he can accommodate is that of moral requirement. This adds up to a position
he calls ‘Moral Rationalism’16:
(MR): If a subject, S, is morally required to perform an act, x, then S has decisive
reason to perform x, all things considered. (Portmore 2010a, 4).
The basic image that Portmore is working with should be becoming clear. He pictures
practically-rational deliberation as a weighing up of exclusively moral features that, if
dominant, cause the action to be required, and a set of moral and non-moral features that,
if dominant, cause it to be one of a number of permissible options.
He couples this with a specific account of the good-right relationship, advocating what he
calls ‘Dual-Ranking [Act] Consequentialism’17 to do this work. This involves taking two
separate ranking functions, one to play the purely-moral requiring role, the other to play
the all-things-considered justifying role, and using both together to generate a joint-
ranking, which is then directly used to generate deontic status (and degree of rightness)
(Portmore 2008a, 411-14). The fact that all of the normative content here, moral and non-
moral, is rankable in terms of the degree of goodness of outcomes expresses Portmore’s
acceptance of the ‘Teleological Conception of Practical Reason’ (see 2010b). In effect, it
signifies that Portmore is here involving consequentialism (in the basic sense) in the
evaluation of all elements of practical reason. The relationship between the two rankings
that is used to generate the complete ranking can be expressed as follows:
(DRAC): S’s performing x is morally permissible iff, and because, there is
no available act alternative that would produce an outcome that S
suggests that ultimately this is just a matter of terminology: his definition of moral will essentially refer to rightness, while the way in which I use the term need not. 16 This principle is later revised, along with much else, to accommodate his emphasis on sets of actions being the proper objects of ideal evaluation, rather than individual ones. This shouldn’t make any difference for my purposes here.17 Scheffler’s options-allowing consequentialism is also an instance of this type. See Scheffler 1994; Portmore 2008a, 411-12.
Page 9 of 16
has both more moral reason, and more reason, all things
considered, to want to obtain than to want x’s outcome to obtain.
(Portmore 2010d, 1).
It is sufficient, in this statement, to refer only to moral permissibility because (given the
caveat of fn.6) requirement is a special case of permissibility; it is what holds when only
one action is permissible. It is important to note that because DRAC requires betterness
in terms of both justifying and requiring right-makers, it does not allow a mere increase
in moral value, without a corresponding increase in all-things-considered value, to make
an act impermissible. Another central feature is that both kinds of reason are relativised
to the perspective of S, the agent (Portmore 2005). So in a case like MS, if the special
relationship with her son were a sufficiently strong justifying reason for S to hide him,
DRAC would make it a permissible option. Note that this does not mean that there could
never be a case in which S is required to give up her son, because the conception of the
moral and non-moral goods on the justifying side can be gerrymandered such that S has
more justifying reason, as well as more requiring reason, to do so.
§2.3. Dealing with the problems.
This normative theory18 can, based on these features, cope relatively well with the
problems posed for consequentialist theory in §1.2. An agent-centred option will be
available at any time when the permissibility condition in DRAC is met by more than one
alternative act. For most plausible accounts of the good, this will result in multiple
permissible options being available in most situations. Agent-centred restrictions are also
allowed for because relativisation to the agent means that e.g. in MS, S’s obligation to her
son acts as a requiring wrong-maker with a greater strength than would be possessed by
her act’s negative effect on someone else’s otherwise-identical relationship (Portmore
2005, 99-100). The third feature, supererogation, is also accounted for. Treating
supererogation as the feature of having at least one permissible alternative action that is
better (more right) than an alternative that would otherwise be required, it is plausible to
construe the kind of right-makers involved here as those of requirement. It will then be
18 I here pass over the fact that these theories are necessarily incomplete; not containing a specific account of the good. This doesn’t matter for my purposes.
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the case that an act that is better in requiring-reason terms can at the same time be
optional, as long as the greater degree of requiring right-makers is matched by a
corresponding increase in justifying right-makers, such that they (at least) balance out
(Portmore 2008a, 413-14).
The superior ability to incorporate these deontic features, relative to solely good-based
consequentialising theories, and certainly relative to traditional consequentialisms such as
utilitarianism, constitutes a clear advantage of Portmore’s theory. It does so relative to all
three criteria. Firstly, given that these deontic features are part of the output of theory, it
amounts to an improvement in theoretical adequacy judged using the first criterion.
Secondly, it amounts to a marked improvement using the second criterion too. If, say, the
deontic output ‘permissible’ just happened to be produced for an act x, x being pre-
theoretically regarded as supererogatory, with no further normative content attached, that
would amount to an improvement for the first criterion but a dismal performance for the
second. This does not seem to be the case with Portmore’s theory. He is able to include
much more of the content of the pre-theoretical status than that, replicating e.g. the sense
of x’s being ‘beyond the call of duty’ as well. And thirdly, it is likely to preserve some of
the pre-theoretical placings of norms, being capable of putting e.g. S’s special obligation
in the moral category, just as they would be in ‘morality’. What is more, it does so while
providing a theory of practical reason, rather than just of some more limited concern.
§3. The Bounds of ‘Morality’
§3.1. Problems with second-criterion adequacy
As I have shown, Portmore’s version of the consequentialising project offers much in the
way of theoretical resources. Likewise, it represents a significant improvement over
simpler consequentialisms in its capacity to satisfy the first and second criteria of
theoretical adequacy. However, there are good reasons to think that it does not do as well
as may first appear judged against the second criterion.
Firstly, consider how strict in principle the second criterion is; how much extra weight it
places on remaining true to the content of pre-theoretical morality. There are inevitably
Page 11 of 16
going to be a great many small ways in which even a theory as sophisticated as
Portmore’s problematically alters the substance of intuitively- relevant norms. For
example, consider the fundamental consequentialist structure that is present throughout
practical reason on Portmore’s account. The fact that each norm now exists as a part of a
structure that goes far beyond it, one that contains extra normative content over and
above their content, is itself plausibly a change. It is not plausible, after all, that it is
actually a part of the pre-theoretical content of a prudential norm, say, that it is linked to
the requiring moral norms that might plausibly oppose it in every case via a justifier-
related auxiliary ranking that is itself half of a total goodness ranking, and so on. It seems
unlikely, then, that transformation into a theory like Portmore’s is purely an exegesis of
already-implicit content, and in no respect an alteration to that content.
Secondly, there are a number of major assumptions built in to Portmore’s theory that,
although I do not have space to argue against them here, open vulnerabilities that another
kind of theory might not have. Most important of these are MR, and the Teleological
Conception of Practical Reason above. As I have detailed, MR precludes the possibility
of any non-moral reason having requirement-generating power. Similarly, it rules out the
possibility that an action might be morally required and yet practical-rationally
permissible. The teleological conception of practical reason is even more controversial –
it requires not only that paradigmatically ‘moral’ considerations like norms forbidding
murder be outcome-oriented, but that non-‘moral’ reasons like those of etiquette19 are too.
These considerations do not show that Portmore’s theory is a bad one, but they do imply
that it is insecure. I suggest that it is unnecessarily so. For there is another kind of theory-
building that has a good chance of accommodating both consequentialist norms within
‘morality’ and the phenomena, both ‘moral’ and non-‘moral’, that are difficult to fit
within totalising consequentialisms. This kind of theory adopts a relatively iconoclastic
stance towards the traditional dominance of the ‘moral’ within practical reason, and its
taxonomic unity, in the name of remaining true to all of our norms. If there is great
difficulty fitting two norms together, why not place them in different taxa, with different
19 NB. We are allowing agent-relativity, so a norm such as ‘conform to the standards of etiquette of your society’ is acceptable.
Page 12 of 16
features in common? In this way, we can have a taxon of consequentialist norms as well
as numerous non-consequentialist ones.
§3.2. Wolf’s critique: splitting up ‘morality’.
My suggestion here may be elucidated using Susan Wolf’s similar critique of common
approaches to the problem that partial norms pose for impartialist theories (like
traditional consequentialism) about ‘morality’. Wolf’s position, in (1992)20, is that the
proper response is to maintain an impartialist stance on morality, but to place the
problematic norms elsewhere, in a separate taxon under the umbrella of practical reason.
Her argument, is essence, is that there is more than one response available to those who
think that a given normative theory, taken as applying to the entirety of a taxonomic
region, and that region taken as occupying most if not all of the total space, is deeply
inadequate. One response is indeed to propose a completely different theory, linked to the
same area, but this response runs the serious risk of just replacing an implausible
totalising moral impartialism with an implausible totalising moral partialism. A better
alternative may be to keep the impartialist bent of the theory, but only as an account of a
smaller area of the normative space, and accommodate the partial norms elsewhere.
However, I do not wish to endorse much of the detail of her argument. In particular, she
presents the move that she recommends as a change in the way that we view norms like
those of S in MS from seeing them as moral to seeing them as non-moral. This is not
essential, and greatly damages the theory’s prospects with respect to the third criterion.
There is no reason why partial norms (in this instance) could not still be regarded as a
part of morality, in line with their usual placing in ‘morality’. The move should be seen
as the realisation that ‘morality’ is not really a coherent set at all, with the result that it
needs to be split into theoretical sub-categories with differing characteristics, rather than
as a redefinition of ‘morality’ so as not to include items like the putatively partial
obligations.
20 Other relevant papers include (1982), (1997), and (1999).
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This notwithstanding, Wolf’s position illustrates the availability of a way of doing
normative theory that does not take the constituents and fundamental character of pre-
theoretic taxa such as ‘morality’ for granted, letting them vary as other elements of theory
do. If we take this kind of view, it should be possible to accommodate more directly
many of the norms that cause problems for consequentialisms, staying true to the second
as well as the first criterion. However, there are two obvious problems with this
approach. Firstly, it must distort the pre-theoretical taxa to some extent, by introducing a
split that destroys the unity of ‘morality’. This looks like a small price to pay, however,
for gains that might be made around the second criterion. The second problem might be
more significant. This kind of move transfers the burden of theoretical work from within-
taxon complexity to a newly required complexity in the account of practical reason itself.
Given that this just moves around existing theoretical burdens, however, rather than
creating new ones, there doesn’t seem to be any clear reason to think that the move
makes the theory worse off overall.
§4. Conclusion
I conclude that, measured against plausible criteria for the adequacy of normative
theories, sophisticated consequentialisms are likely to be inferior as candidates to a style
of theorising that privileges accuracy over simplicity and respect for pre-theoretic
normative taxa.
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