Where does the evolutionary argument for naturalism work?

I’ve never been moved by Plantinga’s evolutionary argument against naturalism in general, but I’ve also always found it plausible that naturalism and evolution undercuts cognitive reliability in certain areas, such as metaphysics. It seems, on the other hand, really plausible that we would get cognitive reliability for empirical things (largely because of the fact that naturalism makes causal theories of content very likely).

One might go on to conjecture that Plantinga’s argument works everywhere outside of empirical areas. I thought so until I realized that there is a significant area of normativity where the argument doesn’t work: prudential value judgments. This is because that life and reproduction is good for living things, and many other goods, noncoincidentally, contribute to life and reproduction. But at the same time, we are evolutionarily selected for successful promotion of life and reproduction. A being that believed that life is bad would be unlikely to promote its own survival, and hence unlikely to pass on its genes.

Plantinga’s standard answer to similar objections in the empirical arena is that behavior does not come just from beliefs, but from a combination of belief and desire. But this response is rather implausible in the prudential rationality case. It is extremely plausible that there is a conceptual link between a mental state representing something as good for one and having a desire for that thing. If there were no correlation between a mental state S respecting a thing and having a desire for that thing, that mental state just is not a belief that the thing is good for one.

Epistemic goods

We think highly morally of teachers who put an enormous effort into getting their students to know and understand the material. Moreover, we think highly of these teachers regardless of whether they are in a discipline, like some branches of engineering, where the knowledge and understanding exists primarily for the sake of non-epistemic goods, as when they are in a discipline, like cosmology, where the knowledge and understanding is primarily aimed at epistemic goods.

The virtues and vices in disseminating epistemic goods are just as much moral virtues and vices as those in disseminating other goods, such as food, shelter, friendship, or play, and there need be little difference in kind. The person who is jealous of another’s knowledge has essentially the same kind of vice as the one who is jealous of another’s physical strength. The person generous with their time in teaching exhibits essentially the same virtue as the one generous with their time in feeding others.

There is, thus, no significant difference in kind between the pursuit of epistemic goods and the norms of the pursuit of other goods. We not infrequently have to weigh one against the other, and it is a mark of the virtuous person that they do this well.

But if this is all correct, then by parallel we should not make a significant distinction in kind between the pursuit of epistemic goods for oneself and the pursuit of non-epistemic goods for oneself. Hence, norms governing the pursuit of knowledge and understanding seem to be just a species of prudential norms.

Does this mean that epistemic norms are just a species of prudential norms?

I don’t think so. Consider that prudentially we also pursue goods of physical health. However, norms of physical health are not a species of prudential norms. It is the medical professional who is the expert on the norms of physical health, not the prudent person as such. Prudential norms apply to voluntary behavior as such, while the norms of physical health apply to the body’s state and function. We might say that norms of the voluntary pursuit of the fulfillment of the norms of physical health are prudential norms, but the norms of physical health themselves are not prudential norms. Similarly, the norms of the voluntary pursuit of the fulfillment of epistemic norms are prudential norms, but the epistemic norms themselves are no more prudential norms than the health norms are.

Nonoverriding morality

Some philosophers think that sometimes norms other than moral norms—e.g., prudential norms or norms of the meaningfulness of life—take precedence over moral norms and make permissible actions that are morally impermissible. Let F-norms be such norms.

A view where F-norms always override moral norms does not seem plausible. In the case of prudential or meaningfulness, it would point to a fundamental selfishness in the normative constitution of the human being.

So the view has to be that sometimes F-norms take precedence over moral norms, but not always. There must thus be norms which are neither F-norms nor moral norms that decide whether F-norms or moral norms take precedence. We can call these “overall norms of combination”. And it is crucial to the view that the norms of combination themselves be neither F-norms nor moral norms.

But here is an oddity. Morality already combines F-considerations and first order paradigmatically moral considerations. Consider two actions:

1. Sacrifice a slight amount of F-considerations for a great deal of good for one’s children.

2. Sacrifice an enormous amount of F-considerations for a slight good for one’s children.

Morality says that (1) is obligatory but (2) is permitted. Thus, morality already weighs F and paradigmatically moral concerns and provides a combination verdict. In other words, there already are moral norms of combination. So the view would be that there are moral norms of combination and overall norms of combination, both of which take into account exactly the same first order considerations, but sometimes come to different conclusions because they weigh the very same first order considerations differently (e.g., in the case where a moderate amount of F-considerations needs to be sacrificed for a moderate amount of good for one’s children).

This view violates Ockham’s razor: Why would we have moral norms of combination if the overall norms of combination always override them anyway?

Moreover, the view has the following difficulty: It seems that the best way to define a type of norm (prudential, meaningfulness, moral, etc.) is in terms of the types of consideration that the norm is based on. But if the overall norms of combination take into account the very same types of consideration as the moral norms of combination, then this way of distinguishing the types of norms is no longer available.

Maybe there is a view on which the overall ones take into account not the first-order moral and F-considerations, but only the deliverances of the moral and F-norms of combination, but that seems needlessly complex.

Is it prudent to start drinking alcohol?

Here is an interesing exercise in decision theory.

Suppose (as is basically the case for me, if one doesn’t count chocolates with alcohol or the one or two spoonfuls of wine that my parents gave me as a kid to allay my curiosity) I am a man who never drunk alcohol. Should I?

Well, 6.8% of American males 12 and up suffer from alcoholism. And 83% of American males 12 and up report having drunk alcohol. It follows that the probability of developing alcoholism after drinking is around 8%, whle the probability of developing alcoholism without drinking is around 0%.

Family history might provide one with some reason to think that in one’s own case the statistics on developing would be more pessimistic or more optimistic, but let’s suppose that family history does not provide significant data one way or another.

So, the question is: are the benefits of drinks containing alcohol worth an 8% chance of alcoholism?

Alcoholism is a very serious side-effect. It damages people’s moral lives in significant ways, besides having serious physical health repercussions. The moral damage is actually more worrying to me than the physical health repercussions, both because of the direct harms to self and the indirect harms to others, but the physical health considerations are easier to quantify. Alcoholism reduces life expectancy by about 30%. Thus, developing alcoholism is like getting a 30% chance of instant death at a very young age. Hence, the physical badness of facing an 8% chance of developing alcoholism is like a young child’s facing a 2.4% chance of instant death.

At this point, I think, we can get some intuitions going. Imagine that a parent is trying to decide whether their child should have an operation that has about a 2.4% chance of death. There definitely are cases where it would be reasonable to go for such an operation. But here is one that is not. Suppose that the child has a condition that makes them unable to enjoy any food that has chocolate in it—the chocolate is harmless to them, but it renders the food containing it pleasureless. There is a childhood operation that can treat this condition, but about one in forty children who have the operation die on the operating table. It seems to me clear that parents should refuse this operation and doctors should not offer it, despite the fact that chocolate has great gustatory pleasures associated it. Indeed, I think it is unlikely that the medical profession would approve of the operation.

But I doubt that alcohol’s morally legitimate pleasures exceed those of chocolate.

I said that the moral ills of alcoholism are larger than the physical, but harder to quantify. Still, we can say something. If the physical badness of an 8% chance of alcoholism is like a young child’s facing a 2.4% chance of instant death, and there is a worse moral effect, it follows that the overall badness of an 8% chance of alcoholism is at least as bad as a young child’s facing a 5% chance of instant death. And with a one in twenty chance of death, there are very few operations we would be willing to have performed on a child or ourselves. The operation would have to correct a very dangerous or a seriously debilitating condition. And alcohol does neither.

This suggests to me that if the only information one has is that one is male, the risk of alcoholism is sufficient that the virtue of prudence favors not starting to drink. If one is female, the risk is smaller, but it still seems to me to be sufficiently large for prudence to favor not starting to drink.

There are limitations of the above argument. If one has already started drinking, one may have additional data that goes beyond the base rates of alcoholism—for instance, one may know that in twenty years of drinking, one has not had any serious problems with moderation, in which case the argument does not apply (but of course one might also have data that makes alcoholism a more likely outcome than at the base rate). Similarly, one might have data from family history showing that the danger of alcoholism is smaller than average or from one’s own personal history showing that one lacks the “addictive personality” (but in the latter case, one must beware of self-deceit).

I am a little suspicious of the above arguments because of the Church’s consistent message, clearly tied to Jesus’s own practice, that the drinking of alcohol is intrinsically permissible.

It may be that I am overly cautious in thinking which degree of risk prudence bids us to avoid. Perhaps one thing to say is that while there are serious reasons of prudence not to start drinking, I may be underestimating the weight of the benefits of drinking.

I also think the utilities were different in the past. If spices and chocolate are unavailable or prohibitively expensive, wine might be the main gustatory pleasure available to one, and so the loss of gustatory pleasure would be a more serious loss. Likewise, alcoholic drinks may have health benefits over unsafe drinking water. Finally, even now, one might live in a cultural setting where there are few venues for socialization other than over moderate alcoholic consumption.

Of course, in my own case there are also hedonic reasons not to drink alcoholic drinks: the stuff smells like a disinfectant.

Evil, omniscience, and other matters

If God exists, there are many evils that God doesn’t prevent, even though it seems that we would have been obligated to prevent them if we could.

A sceptical theist move is that God knows something about the situations that we don’t. For instance, it may seem to us that the evil is pointless, but God sees it as interwoven with greater goods.

An interesting response to this is that even if we knew about the greater goods, we would be obligated to prevent the evil. Say, Carl sees Alice about to torture Bob, and Carl somehow knows (maybe God told him) that one day Alice will repent of the evil in response to a beautiful offer of forgiveness from Bob. Then I am inclined to think Carl should still prevent Alice from torturing Bob, even if repentance and forgiveness are goods so great that it would have been better for both Alice and Bob if the torture happened.

Here is an interesting sceptical theist response to this response. Normally, we don’t know the future well enough to know that great goods would arise from our permitting an evil. Because of this, our moral obligations to prevent grave evils have a bias in them towards what is causally closer to us. Moreover, this bias in the obligations, although it is explained by the fact that normally we don’t know the future very well, is present even in the exceptional cases where we do know the future sufficiently well, as in the Carl, Alice and Bob case.

This move requires an ethical system where a moral rule that applies in all circumstances can be explained by its usefulness in normal circumstances. Rule utilitarianism is of course such an ethical system. Divine command theory is as well: God can be motivated to issue an exceptionless rule because of the fact that normally the rule is a good one and it might not be good for us to be trying to figure out whether a case at hand is an exception to the rule (this is something I learned from Steve Evans). And St. Thomas Aquinas in his argument against nonmarital sex holds that natural law is also like that (he argues that typically nonmarital sex is bad for the offspring, and concludes that it is wrong even in the exceptional cases where it’s not bad for the offspring, because, as he says, laws are made with regard to the typical case).

Historically, this approach tends to be used to derive or explain deontic prohibitions (e.g., Aquinas’ prohibition on nonmarital sex). But the move from typical beneficiality of a rule to its holding always does not require that the rule be a deontic prohibition. A rule that weights nearer causal consequences more heavily could just as easily be justified in such a way, even if the rule did not amount to a deontic prohibition.

Similarly, one might use typical facts about our relationships with those closer to us—that we know what is good for them better than for strangers, that they are more likely to accept our help, that the material benefits of our help enhance the relationship—to explain why helping those closer to us should be more heavily weighted in our moral calculus than helping strangers, even in those cases where the the typical facts do not obtain. Once again, this isn’t a deontic case.

One might even have such typical-case-justified rules in prudential reasoning (perhaps a bias towards the nearer future is not irrational after all) and maybe even in theoretical reasoning (perhaps we shouldn’t be perfect Bayesian agents after all, because that’s not in our nature, given that normally Bayesian reasoning is too hard for us).

Types of normativity

It is widely thought that our actions are governed by at least multiple types of normativity, including the moral, the prudential and the epistemic, and that each type of normativity comes along with a store of reasons and an ought. Moreover, some actions—mental ones—can simultaneously fall under all three types of normativity.

Let’s explore this hypothesis. If we make this distinction between types of normativity, we will presumably say that morality is the realm of other-concerned reasons and prudence is the realm of self-concerned reasons. Suppose that at the cost of an hour of torture, you can save me from a minor inconvenience. Then (a) you have a moral reason to save me from the inconvenience and (b) you have a prudential reason not to save me.

It seems clear that you ought to not save me from the inconvenience. But what is this ought? It isn’t moral, since you have no moral reasons not to save me. Moreover, what explains the existence of this ought seem to be prudential reasons. So it seems to be a prudential ought.

But actually it’s not so clear that this is a prudential ought. For a further part of the explanation of why you ought not save me is that the moral reasons in favor of saving me from a minor inconvenience are so very weak. So this is an ought that is explained by the presence of prudential reasons and the weakness of the opposed moral reasons. That doesn’t sound like an ought belonging to prudential normativity. It seems to be a fourth kind of ought—an overall ought.

But perhaps moving to a fourth kind of ought was too quick. Consider that it would be wrongheaded in this case to say that you morally ought to save me, even though all the relevant moral reasons favor saving me and if these were all the reasons you had, i.e., if there were no cost to saving me from inconvenience, it would be the case that you morally ought to save me. (Or so I think. Add background assumptions about our relationship as needed to make it true if you’re not sure.) So whether you morally ought to save me depends on what non-moral reasons you have. So maybe we can say that in the original case, the ought really is a prudential ought, even though its existence depends on the weakness of the opposed moral reasons.

This, however, is probably not the way to go. For it leads to a great multiplication of types of ought. Consider a situation where you have moral and prudential reasons in favor of some action A, but epistemic reasons to the contrary. We can suppose that the situation is such that the moral reasons by themselves are insufficient to make it be the case that you ought to perform A, and the prudential reasons by themselves are insufficient, but when combined they become sufficiently strong in contrast with the epistemic reasons to generate an ought. The ought which they generate, then, is neither moral nor prudential. Unless we’ve admitted the overall ought as a fourth kind, it seems we have to say that the moral and prudential reasons generate a moral-and-prudential ought. And then we immediately get two other kinds of ought in other cases: a moral-and-epistemic ought and a prudential-and-epistemic ought. So now we have six types of ought.

And the types multiply. Suppose you learn, by consulting an expert, that an action has no cost and there are either moral or prudential considerations in favor of the action, but not both. You ought to do the action. But what kind of ought is that? It’s some kind of seventh ought, a disjunctive moral-exclusive-or-prudential kind. Furthermore, there will be graded versions. There will be a mostly-moral-but-slightly-epistemic ought, and a slighty-moral-but-mostly-epistemic ought, and so on. And what if this happens? An expert tells you, correctly or not, that she has discovered there is a fourth kind of reason, beyond the moral, prudential and epistemic, and that some action A has no cost but is overwhelmingly favored by the fourth kind of reason. If you trust the expert, you ought to perform the action. But what is the ought here? Is it "unknown type ought"?

It is not plausible to think that oughts divide in any fundamental way into all these many kinds, corresponding to different kinds of normativity.

Rather, it seems, we should just say that there is a single type of ought, an overall ought. If we still want to maintain there are different kinds of reasons, we should say that there is variation in what kinds of reasons and in what proportion explain that overall ought.

But the kinds of reasons are subject to the same line of thought. You learn that some action benefits you or a stranger, but you don’t know which. Is this a moral or a prudential reason to do the action? I suppose one could say: You have a moral reason to do the action in light of the fact that the action has a chance of benefiting you, and you have a prudential reason to do the action in light of the fact that the action has a chance of benefiting a stranger. But the reason-giving force of the fact that action benefits you or a stranger is different from the reason-giving force of the facts that it has a chance of benefiting you and a chance of benefiting the stranger.

Here’s a technical example of this. Suppose you have no evidence at all whether the action benefits you or the stranger, but it must be one or the other, to the point that no meaningful probability can be assigned to either hypothesis. (Maybe a dart is thrown at a target, and you are benefited if it hits a saturated non-measurable subset and a stranger is benefited otherwise.) That you have no meaningful probability that the action benefits you is a reason whose prudential reason-giving force is quite unclear. That you have no meaningful probability that the action benefits a stranger is a reason whose moral reason-giving force is quite unclear. But the disjunctive fact, that the action benefits you or the stranger, is a quite clear reason.

All this makes me think that reasons do not divide into discrete boxes like the moral, the prudential and the epistemic.

Disjunctive victimization?

Alice, Bob and Carl are suffering from a deadly disease. Alice possesses one dose of a medication necessary and sufficient to cure the disease. She has four relevant options. First there are:

1. Use the medication on herself.
2. Use the medication on Bob.
3. Use the medication on Carl.

Option 1 is permissible. Options 2 and 3 are supererogatory. But what Alice actually does is:

4. Destroy the medication.

Alice clearly did something wicked by failing to use the medication to save a life. But how do we describe this wicked deed?

It seems that Alice’s action was a fatal negligence of a duty towards herself, and a fatal negligence of a duty towards Bob and a fatal negligence of a duty towards Carl. But that makes it sound like three counts of fatal negligence, which is triple-counting the wrongful act.

I suppose what we can say is something like this: Alice neglected to use the medication to save a life. Whom did she act against? Maybe each of: herself, Bob and Carl. But we shouldn’t look at the action as the violation of three duties, but only of one duty, to use the medication to save herself, Bob or Carl. So she violated a single duty, to the tune of a single life, but that single duty was one she owed to three people.

Question 1: Does it follow that one can have a duty to a group which does not reduce to a duty to each member? For Alice surely doesn’t owe Bob that she save herself, Bob or Carl, and she doesn’t owe Bob that she save Bob, since she can permissibly save herself or Carl.

Answer: I don’t know. Maybe we can say:

• Alice owes herself that if she doesn’t use the medication to save Bob or Carl, she use it to save herself
• Alice owes Bob that if she doesn’t use the medication to save herself or Carl, she use it to save Bob
• Alice owes Carl that if she doesn’t use the medication to save herself or Bob, she use it to save Carl.

And so Alice wrongs each of herself, Bob and Carl. A problem with this solution, however, is that it seems to triple counting Alice’s wrongdoing, by making it seem like she fatally wronged each of three people—but she is only responsible for a single death. Maybe, though, we can say that the duty to the three reduces to the three individual duties, but that the culpabilities don’t sum?

Question 2: Does the case provide an argument that one can wrong oneself? My above description of the case as one one where Alice owes it to herself, Bob and Carl that she save herself, Bob or Carl presupposes duties to herself. What can someone who thinks there are no duties to self say?

Answer: I don’t know. Maybe she can say: Alice owes Bob and Carl that she save herself, Bob or Carl. But it would be a little weird to think that by saving herself, Alice would be fulfilling a duty to Bob and Carl.

Final remarks: I am far from clear how to morally describe the case. I think the neatest description is one where a group is non-reducibly victimized, and where there are duties to self. But that may not be the only admissible description.

From a principle about looking down on people to some controversial consequences

It’s wrong to look down on people simply for having physical or intellectual disabilities. But it doesn’t seem wrong to look down on, say, someone who has devoted her life to the pursuit of money above all else. Where is the line to be drawn? Whom is it permissible for people to look down on?

Before answering that question, I need to qualify it. I think that a plausible case can be made that it is not permissible for us to look down on anyone. The reason for that is that (a) we have all failed morally in many ways, (b) we would very likely have failed in many more had we been in certain other circumstances that we are lucky not to have been in, and (c) we are not epistemically in a position to judge that a specific other person’s failures are morally worse than our own would likely be in circumstances that it is only our luck (or divine providence) not to be in, especially when we take into account the fact that we know much less about other people’s responsibility than about our own. So I want to talk, instead, about when it is intrinsically permissible to look down on people—when it would be permissible if we were in a position to throw the first mental stone.

Let’s go back to the person who has devoted her life to the pursuit of money above all else. Suppose that it turns out that she suffered from a serious intellectual disability that rendered her incapable of grasping values. But her parents, with enormous but misguided rehabilitative effort, have managed to instill in her the grasp of one value: that of money. Given this backstory, it’s clear that looking down on her for pursuing money above all else is not relevantly different from looking down on her for having a disability. On the other hand, it still doesn’t seem wrong to look down on a person of normal intellectual capacities in normal circumstances who has devoted her life to the pursuit of money through making greedy choice after greedy choice.

This suggests a plausible principle:

1. It is only permissible to look down on someone if one is looking down on her for morally wrong choices she is responsible for and conditions that are caused by these choices in a relevant way.

If so, then it is wrong to look down on people for reasoning badly, unless this bad reasoning is a function of morally wrong choices they are responsible for. This has some interesting implications. It sure seems typically intrinsically permissible to look down on someone who reasons badly because she is trying to avoid finding out that she’s wrong about something. If this is right, then typically trying to avoid finding out that one is wrong is itself morally wrong. This suggests that typically:

2. We typically have a moral duty (an imperfect one, to be sure) to strive to avoid error.

Moreover, I think it is implausible to think that this moral duty holds simply in virtue of the practical consequences of error. Suppose that Sally has an esoteric astronomical theory that she isn’t going to share with anybody but you and you tell her that the latest issue of Nature has an article refuting the theory. Sally, however, refuses to look at the data. This seems like the kind of avoidance of finding out that one is wrong that it seems intrinsically permissible to look down on, even though it has no negative practical consequences for Sally or anybody else. Thus:

3. We typically have a moral duty (an imperfect one) to strive for its own sake to avoid error.

But the intrinsic bad in being wrong is primarily to oneself (there might be some derivative bad to the community, but this does not seem strong enough to ground the duty in question). Hence:

4. We have duties to self.

Thus, the principle (1), together with some plausible considerations, leads to a controversial conclusion about the morals of the intellectual life, namely (3), and to the controversial conclusion that we have duties to self.

Prudential rationality

Prudential rationality is about what an agent should do in the light of what is good or bad for the agent. Prudential or self-interested rationality is a major philosophical topic and considered fairly philosophically fundamental. Why? There are many (infinitely many) other categories of goods and bads, and for each category it makes sense to ask what one should do in the light of that category. For instance, family rationality is concerned with what an agent should do in the light of what is good or bad for people in the agent's family; leftward rationality is concerned with the good and bad for the people located to the agent's left; nearest-neighbor rationality with the good or bad for the person other than the agent whose center of mass is closest to the agent's center of mass; green-eye rationality with the good or bad for green-eyed people; and descendant rationality with the good or bad for one's descendants. Why should prudential rationality get singled out as a topic?

It's true that in terms of agent-relative categories, the agent is particularly natural. But the agent's descendants is also a quite natural agent-relative category.

This question reminds me of this thought (inspired by Nancy Cartwright's work). Physicists study things that don't exist. They study the motion of objects in isolated gravitational systems, in isolated quantum systems, and so on. But there are no isolated systems, and any system includes a number of other forces. It is, however, sometimes useful to study the influences that particular forces would have on their own.

However, in the end what we want to predict in physics is how real things move. And they move in the light of all the forces. And likewise in action theory we want to figure out how real people should act. And they should act in the light of all the goods and bads. We get useful insight into how and why real things move by studying how they would move if they were isolated or if only one force was relevant. We likewise get useful insight into how and why real people should act by studying what actions would be appropriate if they were isolated or if only one set of considerations were relevant. As a result we have people who study prudential rationality and people who study epistemic rationality.

It is nonetheless crucial not to forget that the study of how one should act in the light of a subset of the goods and bads is not a study of how one should act, but only a study of how one would need to act if that subset were all that's relevant, just as the study of gravitational systems is not a study of how things move, but only of how things would move if gravity were all that's relevant.

That said, I am not sure prudential rationality is actually that useful to study. Its main value is that it restricts the goods and bads to one person, thereby avoiding the difficult problem of balancing goods and bads between persons (and maybe even non-persons). But that value can be had by studying not prudential or self-interested rationality, but one-recipient rationality, where one studies how one should act in the light of the goods and bads to a single recipient, whether that recipient is or is not the agent.

It might seem innocent to make the simplifying assumption that the single recipient is the agent. But I think that doing this has a tendency to hide important questions that become clearer when we do not make this assumption. For instance, when one studies risk-averseness, we lose sight of the crucially important question of whose risk-averseness is relevant: the agent's or the recipient's? Presumably both, but they need to interact in a subtle and important way. To study risk-averseness in the special case where the recipient is the agent risks losing sight of something crucial in the phenomenon, just as one loses a lot of structure when instead of studying a mathematical function of two variables, say, f(x,y)=sin x cos y, one studies merely how that function behaves in the special case where the variables are equal. Although one does simplify by not studying the interaction between the agent's and the recipient's risk-averseness, one does so at the cost of confusing the two and not knowing which aspect of one's results is due to the risk-averseness of the person qua agent and which part is due to the risk-averseness of the person qua recipient.

Similarly, when one is interested--as decision theorists centrally are--in decision-making under conditions of uncertainty, it is important to distinguish between the relevance of the uncertainty of the person qua agent and the uncertainty of the person qua recipient. When we do that, we might discover a structure that was hidden in the special case where the agent and recipient are the same. For instance, we may discover that with respect to means the agent's uncertainty is much more important than the recipient's, but with respect to ends the recipient's uncertainty is very important.

To go back to the gravitational analogy, it's very useful to consider the gravitational interaction between particles x and y. But we lose an enormous amount of structure when we restrict our attention to the case where x=y. We would do better to make the simplifying assumption that we're considering two different particles, and then think of the one-particle case as a limiting case. Likewise for rationality. While we do need to study simplified cases, we need to choose the cases in a way that does not lose too much structure.

Of course, if we have an Aristotelian theory on which all one's actions are fundamentally aimed at one's own good, then what I say above will be unhelpful. For in that case, prudential rationality does capture the central structure of rationality. But such theories are simply false.

Externalism about prudential reasons

Consider this case, which a colleague tells me is standard. You are bleeding badly, and you need to get to the hospital. You get in your car. No ambulance is available. However, unbeknownst to you, your car's ignition is wired to a bomb. What should you, prudentially, do? Suppose you say "Don't go to the hospital, try to self-treat." Why would you say that? Well, it has better consequences than turning on the ignition. Call somebody who says this a "consequences externalist".

But what does it mean to say that it has better consequences than turning on the ignition? I suppose it's because something like this pair of conditionals is true:

1. Were you to turn on the ignition, the bomb would explode and you'd die immediately.
2. Were you not to turn on the ignition, you'd live longer.

But in fact we live in a world that, as far as we know, is suffused with indeterminism. There is a tiny chance that if you turn on the ignition, the electrons from the battery will quantum tunnel around the bomb's igniter and to the car's spark plug. There is a tiny chance that if you don't turn on the ignition, a quantum event will increase the heat in the bomb and make it explode. And so on.

If something like generalized standard Molinism (i.e., Molinism generalized to indeterministic stuff other than free will) is true, (1) and (2) are perfectly well defined. But suppose no such view is true. So, really, all we have at the time of the decision are objective probabilities: it is overwhelmingly likely, given the physical state of the world, that if you turn on the ignition, the bomb will explode and you'll die immediately, etc. So, it seems, the consequences externalist has to be deeming the conditionals true when the probabilities are high enough.

So, it seems, the consequences externalist is saying that you ought not to turn on the ignition because it is exceedingly likely, given the actual arrangement of the universe at the time of the action, that doing so will let you live longer, and it is exceedingly likely that turning on the ignition will not.

Fine. Now imagine that you in fact turn the ignition, the electrons quantum-tunnel around the bomb, and all is well (maybe eventually the bomb quantum-tunnels into the sun, too). This is exceedingly unlikely, but is compatible with everything in the story so far. According to the consequences externalist position I've sketched, you in fact did the wrong thing—even though it had better consequences than the alternative. You did the wrong thing, because at the time of the decision the objective probabilities were against this decision.

But to say that in this case you did the wrong thing goes against the guiding intuitions of the consequence externalist. Once you admit that you might have done the wrong thing even though it had the better consequences, you should probably just abandon the consequence externalism altogether, and move from objective to subjective probabilities.

Now, there is something the consequence externalist can say. She can say that we evaluate subjunctives by probabilities when their antecedents are false, and by consequents when the antecedents are true. This is messy, but not crazy. So, in the case I've described, (1) is false because it has a false consequent and true antecedent, but (2) is true because the objective probability of the consequent given the antecedent is low at the time of the action.

But if the consequence externalist says this, she has the following weird thing to say. She has to say that (a) turning on the ignition was in fact right, but (b) had you not turned on the ignition, turning on the ignition would have been wrong. Why does she have to say (b)? For if you had not turned on the ignition, the subjunctive conditional (1) would have been true. It would have been true because it would have had a false antecedent and hence would have to have been evaluated according to the objective probabilities.

So, oddly, you did the right thing, but had you not done it, it would have been the wrong thing. That is weird indeed.

Risks

Consider the following ordinary form of argument. Risk R₁ is less than risk R₀. Risk R₀ is a reasonable risk to take. Therefore, risk R₁ is as well. Typically, R₀ is a risk that reasonable people routinely take, without worrying about it. Thus, we might be told that flying is safer than driving, and since (this premise is usually implicit) it is reasonable to risk driving, it is reasonable to risk flying.

This is a bad form of argument as it stands, for two reasons. The first is that it needs to be established that the benefits associated with taking risk R₁ are no less than those of risk R₀. The second is that even if the benefit claim is true, this only shows that it would be rational to take R₁ instead of of R₀. It does not show that it would be rational to take R₁ in addition to R₀. (Thus, it would be reasonable to fly regularly instead of driving regularly. But given that one is driving regularly, it does not follow from the risk-comparison alone that it is reasonable also to fly.)

Here's an example to show the second failure. The fatality rate for Mount Everest climbs is apparently about 9%. Let us suppose that Kenya is a single woman, with no family, and who does not do any job for which she is essential (e.g., she is not an irreplaceable top cancer researcher). It might (I actually doubt it) be reasonable for Kenya to climb Mount Everest, for the sake of the various goods instantiated by the climb, despite the 9% risk of death. But if the above argument-form were sound, it would be likewise reasonable for her to additionally engage in another activity that carries an 8.9% risk of death and has similar benefits. But the argument could then be iterated. If there was some third activity that carried an 8.8% risk of death, it would be reasonable to additionally do that. Therefore, by repeated application of the argument form, we would conclude that if it is reasonable for Kenya to climb Mount Everest, it would be reasonable for her to do climb Mount Everest and do A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H and I, each of which has a slightly lower risk of death than the previous. Let's say the risks are 9.0, 8.9, 8.8 and so on. Assuming independence (not quite right), her chance of surving all ten activities is less than 47%. But it seems that it is only reasonable to engage in a series of actions that one is less likely to survive than not for the gravest of reasons (such as saving someone's life). The sorts of reasons involved in the climb of Mount Everest are not like that, and even having the benefits ten times over is not worth it.

A related, but I think not identical, issue is that benefits need not be additive. The benefit of both A and B need not be the sum of the benefits of A and of B in isolation. It might be more, or it might be less.