Ralph Wedgwood's blog

Weighing Aggregative and Non-aggregative Considerations

In a famous passage in What We Owe to Each Other, T.M. Scanlon introduced a case where we have to choose between saving one person from a terrible harm and saving an enormous number of people from much smaller harms. This quickly inspired an enormous literature on whether the right approach to such moral questions is aggregative or non-aggregative.

In this debate, I claim that one can simply have one’s cake and eat it. Both aggregative considerations and non-aggregative considerations are genuine sources of reasons. The right response to simply to weigh these two kinds of reasons against each other.

The quality of pains

Chap. 2 of J. S. Mill’s Utilitarianism is widely interpreted as defending qualitative hedonism, as a view about the nature of personal well-being. On views of this sort, your level of well-being is determined by certain facts about your pleasures and pains. However, it is not determined purely by “quantitative” facts about these pleasures’ and pains’ duration and intensity. Instead, it is determined by three dimensions of these pleasures and pains – namely, by their duration, intensity, and quality.

Extant discussions of this view have much to say about the quality of pleasures. But they have virtually nothing to say about the quality of pains. In this post, I shall sketch a version of qualitative hedonism that gives what seems to me a plausible account of the quality of both pleasures and pains.

An unsound argument for non-trivial higher-order evidence

Many epistemologists have claimed that there is such a thing as non-trivial higher-order evidence – in other words, potentially misleading higher-order evidence. According to this claim, sometimes your evidence may support giving at least some credence to false propositions about what your evidence is – or even to false propositions about what your evidence supports.

In this post, I try to cast doubt on the main argument that has been advanced for this claim.

Objective and subjective akrasia

Suppose that there is both an objective ‘ought’ and a subjective ‘ought’. Which of these two kinds of ‘ought’ figures in the anti-akrasia principle that it is irrational to do something at the same time as believing that one ought not to do it?

There is a simple of way of understanding the relation between the objective and the subjective ‘ought’ on which the answer to this question is: Both! It is irrational to do something at the same time as believing that one objectively ought not to do it; and it is also irrational to do something at the same time as believing that one subjectively ought not to do it.

Permissible suboptimality: A triple-ranking view

Some philosophers – let’s call them “teleologists” – believe that there is an intimate connection between deontic terms like ‘required’, ‘ought’, and ‘permissible’, on the one hand, and evaluative terms like ‘better’ and ‘best’, on the other.

Teleologists face a problem with the intuitive idea of supererogation. This is the idea that sometimes we are not morally required to do the morally best thing, but may permissibly take options (e.g. to pursue our own personal projects, or to safeguard our own interests) that are morally suboptimal. As Sam Scheffler would say, we sometimes have an agent-centered prerogative to act in morally suboptimal ways.

In this post, I shall argue that two attempts at solving this problem – a simple threshold view, and a dual-ranking view – face serious intuitive difficulties. The best solution, I shall suggest, is not a dual-ranking view, but a triple-ranking view.

Rationality is permissibility

Many philosophers seem to think that – even if the notions of a belief’s being “justified” or “rational” are indeed normative notions, as is widely held to be the case – to say that a belief is “justified” is “rational” is to say something stronger than merely that the belief is permissible.

This is a mistake. It is easy to prove that if the notions of a belief’s being “justified” or “rational” are normative at all, then the permissibility of a belief is sufficient for the belief’s being justified or rational.

Is normative necessity distinct from metaphysical necessity?

In “Varieties of Necessity” (in Gendler and Hawthorne, Conceivability and Possibility, Oxford 2002), Kit Fine argued that we need to recognize that certain normative truths are in a sense necessary, and that the kind of necessity in question is sui generis, rather than being a special case of metaphysical necessity.

I shall not dispute Fine’s argument for the conclusion that there are normative necessities. However, I shall dispute his argument for the conclusion that these normative necessities are sui generis. On the contrary, as I shall argue, Fine does not give us a compelling reason to deny that normative necessity is a species of metaphysical necessity.

Internalism = coherentism

Many epistemologists accept the mentalist version of internalism about rationality. In a slogan, this is the view that rationality supervenes on the mental states that the relevant thinker has at the relevant time.

Coherentism, as I shall understand it here, is the view that rationality requires nothing except that one’s mental states should cohere in certain ways: for it to be rational for you to have a certain belief (or other attitude) at a certain time is just for your having that belief (or attitude) at that time to be part of a system of mental states that meet all these rational requirements of coherence.

I shall argue here that given the right understanding of what “coherence” is, the only plausible form of internalism is equivalent to coherentism.

State-given reasons for (and against) intending

In my previous post, I argued that there are state-given reasons not to believe propositions. In this post, I shall argue that there are also state-given reasons both for and against intending.

State-given reasons not to believe

According to a common view, the difference between the “right” kind of reasons that support the distinctive rationality of belief, intention, or other attitudes, and the “wrong” kind of reasons that do not, is that the former are “object-given” reasons while the latter are “state-given” reasons. As I shall argue here, this view is false: it is open to some simple counterexamples.

In this post, I shall explain why the reason that explains why it is irrational to believe Moore-paradoxical propositions (like the proposition that you might express by uttering a first-person present-tensed sentence of the form ‘p and I don’t believe that p’) is a state-given reason, even though it is a reason of “the right kind”. (In a later post, I shall explain why our reasons not to have intentions that would frustrate their own realization are similarly “state-given”.)