Interdisciplinary Workshop on Morality and Cognition

Good to see you have given up on your appeal to authority. What does Harvard have compared to Notre Dame anyway?

But now I am a little puzzled.  In your appeal-to-authority days, you asked: Why should we go with Notre Dame’s Sterba and his deep egalitarianism, when we can have Harvard’s Rawls with his acceptance of some inegalitarianism?

In reply, I happily made you aware of your deeper anti-authoritarian sentiments and also pointed out that Rawls’s lesser inegalitarianism is only provisional, and that when his view is extended, like mine, to meet squarely issues of distant peoples and future generations, his view too would probably become as deeply egalitarian as mine it.

But now you seem to be shifting gear 360 degrees.  Before you seemed happy with Rawls but unhappy with Sterba.  Now your worry about what the rich might find reasonable seems to go against both our views.  Of course, both of us have arguments for a “preferential option for the poor.” You presumably know Rawls’s argument.  Mine is given in the APA address  and briefly in my earlier comment “Reply to Ed.”  What is it that you now don’t find convincing about either Rawls’s or my arguments?

Neither of us endorse property rights as they are.  How would Rawls achieve his ideal of equal opportunity that gives each person in a society the same opportunities for success as anyone else with the same native abilities.  Imagine the redistribution of educational resources necessary to achieve that!  So do you think that the rich have a good moral argument against the redistributive policies that both Rawls and I endorse?  The way I address my argument to libertarians, using their premises, makes it difficult from them to reject my conclusions. So were do you see a problem with Rawls’s or my moral arguments against the rich?

I don’t think you are following my argument closely enough. You come at it with respect to the conflict between rich and poor. Fine.  I assume then that you accept the first part of the argument against egoism and that we are imagining the rich and poor to be arguing within morality. It is here that I assume that we are using a libertarian morality, one that the rich usually feel very comfortable with.  Using that morality, I expose a conflict between the liberty of the rich and the liberty of the poor that needs resolving within morality.  I claim that the only way to resolve this conflict that both sides can reasonably accept (and libertarians are committed to just such a resolution) would favor the liberty of the poor enough to provide a right to welfare. So what is the reasonable argument that the poor should accept that would not have that conclusion?

Dear Josh,

I enjoyed very much reading some of your work and participating in the workshop with you via teleconference this past Friday. I am hoping we can discuss our common concerns a bit further. I think can think of two ways to proceed.

First, you can tell me in what way your philosophical argument or psychological findings in your work under cut my Kantian-inspired argument from rationality to equality. I have attached below the version of this argument that I gave as my APA Presidential Address in 2008. Currently, I am trying to develop the argument into a book that is under contract with Oxford. If the argument is flawed in some way, philosophically or empirically, I would really like to know about it. I could write another book if this one is in trouble. I have this idea about developing the problem of evil… So any thought you have here would be appreciated.

Second, we could also focus our discussion on the ethical theory that is supposed to explain the difference between the Trolley case and the Footbridge case. That theory is sometimes taken to be a version of double effect theory, with its difference between foreseen and intended consequences. Now I know that Thomson did not like this explanation but I don’t think the alternative one she gave works as well.

So what is supposed to be wrong with using the difference between foreseen and intended consequences? Is it that common folk and maybe some of our less thoughtful colleagues judge the Loop case differently from the Footbridge case and don’t recognize that the individual is being used as a means in the Loop case just as much as in the Footbridge case? Didn’t you argue something like this with your Trapdoor case? Of course, common folk and some of our colleagues do get confused about these cases because of the less direct way that the person is being used. But when you are trying to come up with the best theory about how people should behave I think we should just discount such factors which clearly do not seem to be morally relevant except in so far as ordinary folk and our less thoughtful colleagues may get honestly confused by them to some degree so we should calibrate our blame of them accordingly.

But maybe you think there really is nothing morally significant about the difference between foreseen and intended consequence, I admit that its moral significance is more often just assumed than explained. Below is a short defense I gave of it in one of my books Justice For Here and Now (Cambridge, 1998). p.158 Maybe it will trigger some some discussion. (The selection may appear cut off on the right. But when printed out, I think all the text will show.)

“Initially, it might appear to matter little whether the harm was intended or merely foreseen by those who caused it. From the perspective of those suffering harm, it might appear that what matters is simply that the overall amount of harm be restricted, irrespective of whether it is foreseen or intended. But consider. Don’t those who suffer harm have more reason to protest when the harm is done to them by agents who are directly engaged in causing harm to them than when it is done incidentally by agents whose ends and means are good? Don’t we have more reason to protest when we are being used by others than when we are affected by them only incidentally?

” Moreover, if we examine the question from the perspective of those causing the harm, additional support for this line of reasoning can be found. For it would seem that we have more reason to protest a restriction against foreseen harm than we do to protest a comparable restriction against intended harm. This is because a restriction against foreseen harm limits our actions when our ends and means are good, whereas a restriction against intended harm only limits our actions when our ends or means are evil or harmful, and it would seem that we have stronger grounds for acting when both our ends and means are good than when they are not. Consequently, because we have more reason to protest when we are being used by others than when we are being affected by them only incidentally, and because we have more reason to act when both our ends and means are good than when they are not, we should favor the foreseen/intended distinction that is incorporated into just means.”

Looking forward to hearing from you.

Best wishes,

Jim