Right, so one crucial clarification is that weâre talking about act-inclusive states of affairs, not mere âoutcomesâ considered in abstraction from how they were brought about. Deontologists certainly donât think that we can get far merely thinking about the latter, but if they assess an action positively then it seems natural enough to take them to be committed to the actionâs actually being performed (all things considered, including what follows from it). Iâve written about this more in Deontology and Preferability. A key passage:
If you think that other things besides impartial value (e.g. deontic constraints) truly matter, then you presumably think that moral agents ought to care about more than just impartial value, and thus sometimes should prefer a less-valuable outcome over a more-valuable one, on the basis of these further considerations. Deontologists are free to have, and to recommend, deontologically-flavored preferences. The basic concept of preferability is theory-neutral on its face, begging no questions.
Yeah that makes sense to me. I still think that one doesnât need to be conceptually confused (even though this is probably a common source of disagreement) to believe both that (i) one actionâs outcome is preferable to the other actionâs outcome even though (ii) one ought to perform the latter action. For example, one might think the former outcome is overall preferable because it has much better consequences. But conceptual possibility aside, I agree that this is a weird view to have. At the very least, it seems that all else equal one should prefer the outcome of the action that one takes to be the most choiceworthy. Not sure if it has some plausibility to say that this doesnât necessarily hold if other things are not equalâsuch as in the case where the other action has the better consequences.
My main puzzlement there is how you could think that you ought to perform an act that you simultaneously ought to hope that you fail to perform, subsequently (and predictably) regret performing, etc. (I assume here that all-things-considered preferences are not cognitively isolated, but have implications for other attitudes like hope and regret.) It seems like thereâs a kind of incoherence in that combination of attitudes, that undermines the normative authority of the original âoughtâ claim. We should expect genuinely authoritative oughts to be more wholeheartedly endorsable.
Right, so one crucial clarification is that weâre talking about act-inclusive states of affairs, not mere âoutcomesâ considered in abstraction from how they were brought about. Deontologists certainly donât think that we can get far merely thinking about the latter, but if they assess an action positively then it seems natural enough to take them to be committed to the actionâs actually being performed (all things considered, including what follows from it). Iâve written about this more in Deontology and Preferability. A key passage:
Yeah that makes sense to me. I still think that one doesnât need to be conceptually confused (even though this is probably a common source of disagreement) to believe both that (i) one actionâs outcome is preferable to the other actionâs outcome even though (ii) one ought to perform the latter action. For example, one might think the former outcome is overall preferable because it has much better consequences. But conceptual possibility aside, I agree that this is a weird view to have. At the very least, it seems that all else equal one should prefer the outcome of the action that one takes to be the most choiceworthy. Not sure if it has some plausibility to say that this doesnât necessarily hold if other things are not equalâsuch as in the case where the other action has the better consequences.
My main puzzlement there is how you could think that you ought to perform an act that you simultaneously ought to hope that you fail to perform, subsequently (and predictably) regret performing, etc. (I assume here that all-things-considered preferences are not cognitively isolated, but have implications for other attitudes like hope and regret.) It seems like thereâs a kind of incoherence in that combination of attitudes, that undermines the normative authority of the original âoughtâ claim. We should expect genuinely authoritative oughts to be more wholeheartedly endorsable.
That seems like a strange combination indeed! I will need to think more about this...