Reasons and direct support

A standard view of reasons is that reasons are propositions or facts that support an action. Thus, that I promised to visit is a reason to visit, that pain is bad is a reason to take an aspirin, and that I am hungry is a reason to eat.

But notice that any such facts can also be a reason for the opposite action. That I promised to visit is a reason not to visit, if you begged me not to keep any of my promises to you. That pain is bad is a reason not to take an aspirin and that I am hungry is a reason not to eat when I am striving to learn to endure harship.

One might think that this kind of contingency in what the reasons—considered as propositions or facts—support disappears when the reasons are fully normatively loaded. That I owe you a visit is always a reason to visit, and that I ought to relieve my hunger is always a reason to eat.

This is actually mistaken, too. That I owe you a visit is indeed always a reason to visit. But it can also be a reason—and even a moral one—not to visit. For instance, if a trickster informs me that that if I engage in an owed visit to you, they will cause you some minor harm—say, give you a hangnail—then the fact that I owe you a visit gives me a reason not to visit you, though that reason will be outweighed (indeed, it has to be outweighed, or else it wouldn’t be true that I owe you the visit).

In fact, plausibly, that an action is the right one is typically also a moral reason not to perform the action. For whenever we do the right thing, that has a potential of feeding our pride, and we have reason not to feed our pride. Of course, that reason is always outweighed. But it’s still there. And we might even say that the fact that an action is wrong is a reason, albeit not a moral one, to perform that action in order to exhibit one’s will to power (this is a morally bad reason to act on, but one that is probably minimally rational—we understand someone who does this).

All this suggests to me that we need a distinction: some reasons directly support doing something. That I owe you a visit directly supports my visiting you, but only indirectly supports my not visiting you to avoid pride in fulfilling my duties.

But now it is an interesting question what determined what reasons directly support what action. One option is that the relation is due to entailment: a reason directly supports ϕing provided that that reason entails that ϕing is good or right. But this misses the hyperintentionality in reasons. It is necessarily true that it’s right for me to respect my neighbor; a necessary truth is entailed by every proposition; but that my neighbor is annoying is not directly a reason to respect my neighbor. One might try for some “relevant entailment”, but I am dubious. Perhaps the fact that an action is wrong relevantly entails that there is reason to do it to exhibit one’s will to power, but that ϕing is wrong is directly a reason not to ϕ, and only indirectly a reason to ϕ.

I suspect the right answer is that this direct support relation comes from our human nature: if it is our nature to be directly motivated to ϕ because of R, then R directly supports ϕing. Hmm. This may work for epistemic support, too.

Acting without knowledge of rightness

Some philosophers think that for your right action to be morally worthy you have to know that the action is right.

On the contrary, there are cases where an action is even more morally worthy when you don’t know it’s right.

1. Alice is tasked with a dangerous mission to rescue hikers stranded on a mountain. She knows it’s right, and she fulfills the mission.

2. Bob is tasked with a dangerous mission to rescue hikers stranded on a mountain. He knows it’s right, but then just before he heads out, a clever philosopher gives him a powerful argument that there is no right or wrong. He is not fully convinced, but he has no time to figure out whether the argument works before the mission starts. Instead, he reasons quickly: “Well, there is a 50% chance that the argument is sound and there is no such thing as right and wrong, in which case at least I’m not doing anything wrong by rescuing. But there is a 50% chance that there is such a thing as right and wrong, and if anything is right, it’s rescuing these hikers.” And he fulfills the mission.

Bob’s action is, I think, even more worthy and praiseworthy than Alice’s. For while Alice risks her life for a certainty of doing the right thing, Bob is willing to risk his life in the face of uncertainty. Some people would take the uncertainty as an excuse, but Bob does not.

Moral fetishism and intentional aiming

For a long time I’ve had an odd fascination with cases where you have to intentionally aim at something that is neither your end nor a means to your end. The first case to come to my mind was something like this: Let’s say you want to send a nerve signal from your brain to your forearm (e.g., maybe you are hooked up to a device that detects these nerve signals and dispenses chocolate covered almonds). What do you? You wiggle your fingers! Wiggling your fingers, however, is not your end. But neither is it a means to the sending of the nerve signals. On the contrary, the nerve signals are the cause of the finger motions. But you can’t directly aim at the nerve signals, so you have to aim at finger wiggling instead.

A more ordinary kind of case I’ve found is follow-through in racquet sports, where you continue racquet motion after hitting the ball (or shuttle), because your brain will make the swing weaker at the time of contact unless you’re trying to continue the movement after the swing. But there is no point to the movement after the time of contact—the ball isn’t somehow magically steered by the racquet once it no longer touches it. So the movement of the racquet after impact is neither means nor end.

Outside weird laboratory setups and some sports cases, it is hard to think of cases of this odd phenomenon where one takes aim at an action that one neither instrumentally or finally cares about. But I’ve just realized a very interesting application. There is a philosophical literature about what people call “moral fetishism”. Those who push this line of thought think that there is something wrong with aiming your actions specifically at rightness of action, instead of at the thick reasons (your friend’s need, your promise, etc.) that make the action right.

Now, I think there are cases where you need to aim at rightness. The cases that come to mind are ones where you need to rely on a moral expert to figure out what is the right thing to do and why. One family of cases is where you are a small child and are relying on parental authority. Another is when you are a medical professional, are dealing with a morally complex case, and are relying on the advice of an ethics committee. And probably the most common case is when you are a religious believer and you are relying on what you take to be divine revelation about what is right (a different case is where you are a believer and are relying on supposed revelation about what is commanded by God). One may take these cases to be a refutation of the objections to moral fetishism, since in these cases one may be driven to pursue rightness by genuine conscientiousness rather than by any fetishism.

However, over the last couple of days I’ve realized that there may be a way of acting in these cases in a way that gives the objectors to moral fetishism what they want—and that I actually rather like this way of acting in the cases. When an action is right, there are reasons why it is right. In straightforward cases, we can easily say what these are: it helps a friend in need, it fulfills a promise, etc. But the cases in the previous paragraph are ones where the agent cannot give these reasons. Nonetheless, these reasons exist, and the adviser is thought to have them.

We can now imagine that the agent aims at rightness not because the agent values rightness in and of itself, but because the agent values the thick but unknown reasons for which the action is right. This could be rather like the finger-wiggling and racquet-sport cases. For it could be that just as the agent doesn’t care about the finger-wiggling and follow-through as an end, and neither is a means to what the agent cares about, similarly the agent doesn’t care about the rightness, and the rightness is not a means to what the agent cares about, by aiming at rightness the agent gets what they do care about, which is acting in accordance with thick (but unknown) reasons. Furthermore, like in the finger-wiggling case, the thing one really cares about—the nerve signal or the satisfaction of thick reasons—is explanatorily prior to the thing one aims at. (The follow-through case is a bit more complicated; probably what aims at is a whole swing, of which the good hit is a part, so the good hit is a part of the whole swing and in that way prior to it.)

It may help to think about a specific moral theory. Suppose utilitarianism is correct, and one has a moral oracle that tells one what the right action is, and one acts on the deliverances of this oracle. One need not care about the rightness of these actions—but they are right if and only if they maximize utility, and it is the utility maximization one cares about.

Thus in the case where one relies on testimony to do what is right, but one cares about rightness because one cares about the values that rightness yields, one is no more and no less a rightness fetishist than the typical racquet-sport coach is a follow-through fetishist. But in any case, what is going on is not problematic.

All that said, I think caring about rightness as such to some degree is also appropriate. That’s because one should care about oneself, and acting rightly is good for one.