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This goes to Toby’s point (hi Toby!) that rationality is undertheorized at the outset. As I wrote above, I think this is deliberate: Parfit doesn’t have a robust theory of rationality. Instead, he’ll accept any theory that offers an answer to the question “What do we have the most reason to do?” A theory of rationality only fails if there’s some other theory that gives us ‘more’ reason to do something. ‘More’ and ‘most’ suggest we might eventually be able to rank theories of rationality in scales of magnitude, on the basis of emergent criteria in Chris’s/Kierkegaard’s “svaevende” style. I think he’s even willing to consider a pluralist theory of reasons in which different do-ers are motivated by different reasons, though I’m not sure how seriously he’ll take this pluralism.

I didn’t misread the passage. I did probably do a poor job of explaining myself. What I am trying to say that if reason is to matter, we need to feel a compulsion to want to reform our sub-optimal S choices.

The Clare story is possibly self-undermining for Consequentialism, but the reason this is really bad is that we want consequentialism to be robust enough for us to care about the choice in the first place. I assume if we are being good Parfitians, we do not want Clare to say, “I’m a mother, and my natural human instincts told e to save my baby. end of story.” We need to say to Clare, “You need to have better reasons than that, because we live in a world with consequences and these consequences make moral demands on us.” But if Clare can say back to us, “If I take consequences seriously, I appear to get a really stupid answer,” then, we’ve got a massive problem.

Alternatively, perhaps theories of rationality do not attempt to describe some actual activity, but rather to tell us what kind of activity we ought to adopt. Such theories would be normative rather than descriptive. But if so, then I do not know how to evaluate competing theories of rationality. Take, for example, two of the three varieties of S: the hedonistic theory says it is rational for each individual to maximize his or her happiness, whereas the objective list theory says it is rational for one to pursue things that are objectively good for him or her even if these do not make her happy. This is a disagreement, but is it more than just a verbal disagreement? I am suspicious that each theory makes itself true by definition—hedonists can define “rationality” as the maximization of happiness, objective listers can define “rationality” as the pursuit of objective goods, but this is merely a verbal and not a substantive disagreement. Is there a substantive disagreement between the two theories?

Parfit perhaps avoids my concerns by taking theories on their own terms and seeing if they fail on those terms. I assume that a theory that fails on its own terms is not a good one, but we should not assume that a theory that succeeds on its own terms is a good one. Whether a theory of rationality is good depends in part on what such theories are supposed to do. If they are supposed to describe some actual activity, then that activity must be specified as the object of inquiry, since otherwise one would not be able to decide whether a theory has accurately described that object. If instead theories of rationality are supposed to be normative, then it should be specified what would make some such theories better than others without resorting to making them trivially true by definition. Has Parfit either (1) specified the object of inquiry or (2) explained what would make a theory of rationality a good one?

Steve: I think you’re misreading the passage. Clare may have no choice but to reject the overly demanding needs of strangers, but this illustrates one of the conditions of indirect self-defeat for consequentialism.

“According to C (Consequentialism), we can always avoid doing what deserves to be BLAMED.”

It seems to me humans react to feelings of blameworthiness in one of the following ways:

1. Don’t worry about it (releases guilt)
2. Self-correct (internalizes guilt)
3. Feel Shame/Resentment (moralizes guilt)
4. Blame someone else/ Act out on someone else (transfers guilt)

Perhaps philosophy, in this sense, is working our “thumos” to prefer some combination of 2 and 3 over 1 and 4.

One of the supposed advantages of 2 and 3 over 1 and 4 as options is that they can be justified as socially responsible because if everyone handled blameworthiness through 1 and 4, then people would hurt one another without hesitation, and all would be worse off.

But if everyone were to choose 2 and 3 to the best possible effect (consequential perfection), it would also turn out worse for all. As of the end of chapter one, we are left without a strong reason why our conscience ought to side with reason, since, if we take Parfit to be reason’s representative, it is self-defeating (and uses too many prepositions without clear reference to what they refer).

At this point, Nietzsche’s looking pretty good with his position 1. If Clare has to cause the deaths of many to save her child, maybe she just should go with her motherly instincts and not worry about it.

ON AN EVEN MORE UNRELATED NOTE:

Has anyone noticed the freakish similarities between examples in this chapter and “LOST”?? A bomb in which a code must be entered repeatedly or it goes off. A woman named Clare who might have been better off had she never loved her child? A hedonist named Kate who ay either embrace or not embrace particular views of free will and determinism? Just saying….

I’d first like to endorse Parfit’s “thesis please!” style that Josh problematizes in “Reasons and Dispositions.” There’s a lot of honesty in such a non-negative, or “hovering” (svaevende) dialectic, as Kierkegaard might call it, and at first blush it seems tied to what Josh called Parfit’s ultimate critique of an “underlying overcommitment to rationality as such.” If (following Kant et al.) reason takes it as its duty to respond to other good-faith efforts to describe its purpose rather than to construct its own private reality from some conditioned principle, then it’s inevitably going to find that these other viewpoints are never going to contradict themselves in the systematic and constructive way that it (reason) would like. To mobilize failures of theories both Hegel and the successors of Popper saw that you need some sort of speculative principle. So methodologically, I think I’m on board so far.

But (and I’m barely caught up with the reading, so I could turn out to be fantastically wrong) I’m suspicious that Parfit is still overcommitted to reason in his emphasis on *giving reasons* for adopting a particular ethical standpoint. I’m totally down with using the crazy examples from the real Schelling’s illegitimate great-great-great grandson to establish the non-absoluteness of reason, but where does this get us if our task as philosophers is still to share public (and thus exchangeable) accounts of how one ought to live one’s life. It would seem that we would be forced either 1) to determine our actions and the meanings we assign ourselves according to objective reasons (which would fall victim to Hegel’s critique of utilitarianism) 2) embrace certain reasons with an ironic self-awareness of their non-absoluteness, or 3) abandon such reason-giving as a meaningful philosophical project.

Of course, there’s always option 4): just read page 54, Chris, where your 200-year-old objections are answered. Anyway, I’m late for a date with Carmello and Kobe. Take care, everybody!

Undercommitted,
Chris