Abstract
In this paper, we raise and discuss a puzzle about the relationships among goods, reasons, and deontic status. Suppose you have it within your power to give someone something they would enjoy. The following claims seem platitudinous: (1) you can use this power to reward whatever kind of option you want, thereby making that option better and generating a reason for that person to perform it; (2) this reason is then weighed alongside and against the other reasons at play; and (3) altogether, the reasons determine the deontic statuses of that person’s options. We show, however, that in a certain class of cases at least one of these apparent platitudes must be false. In particular, we show that in a certain kind of case wrongfulness cannot be rewarded. In some cases, if one tries to reward wrongfulness, something surprising must go awry: either what you attempt to give as a reward would not, in fact, be good, or it would not generate a reason, or it would have a surprising effect (or non-effect) on the deontic status of the relevant options. The upshot is that the relationships among goods, reasons, and deontic status are complicated in ways that have not previously been remarked.
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Notes
As we mention just below, the purpose of the ensuing project is to raise and examine a puzzle about normativity, not to critique or defend a particular account of rewards. So if you disagree that being good and being reason-generating are necessary conditions for being a reward, then treat our use of ‘reward’ in this way as stipulative.
See, for example, Bedke (2011, pp. 130–131).
In Sect. 3.2.2, we consider the possibility of a disjunctive response that rejects Forbidden Iff Worst, on different grounds, in low- and high-stakes cases, respectively.
Even an idiosyncratic parent like Frances, who wants to reward wrongful behavior, could avoid generating our puzzle simply by selecting an appropriately small reward. For any given forbidden action, there is, in principle, some good thing that could be used to reward it without causing the trouble that arises in The Pickle Popsicle. (Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for pressing us on this point.)
Helpful comments from reviewers, inter alia, brought to our attention Bradley’s (2007) discussion of a related puzzle for a certain kind of desire-satisfaction theory of welfare. This theory (together with some plausible background assumptions) yields a contradiction when, in addition to some unsatisfied first-order desires, an agent has a sufficiently intense desire that her life go badly. Some of the proposals we consider in this section are analogous to proposals discussed by Bradley [see also Feldman (2004) and Skow (2009)]. But, despite this, we take our puzzle to be of independent interest for at least three reasons. First, as we discuss below, our puzzle raises distinctive metaethical issues that merit discussion in their own right. Second, our puzzle suggests that, rather than a local problem for a particular version of desire-satisfactionism, Bradley’s puzzle is an instance of a general class of puzzles about normativity. Third, and relatedly, if there is such a class of puzzles, then it seems reasonable to hope that considering our related puzzle might help to point toward a general diagnosis and solution.
See Dancy (2004) for a canonical account.
Kagan (1988, p. 20).
It’s especially difficult to see given that, on this reading, the reward fact would have to pull double duty: both counting in favor of not flossing and impacting the relative weights of f1 and f2 to ensure that (contra Reasons Are Unbalanced) f1 is weightier than {Rnot floss and f2}.
There might be other ways of developing this kind of response to the puzzle. One might, for example, maintain that facts about the deontic status of an option over which one is deliberating can never serve as premises in (good) deliberation about what to do because they represent the conclusion of practical deliberation, and hence such deliberation would be (in some sense) circular. This strikes us as an implausibly strong version of the deliberative constraint. But, in any case, we take the criticisms that follow–perhaps with some modest variation—to apply to it.
Notably, it’s of no help to try to conceive of this as a non-misfire response. If we suppose the deontic statuses of Nadia’s options do change, then this change calls out for an explanation. And, presumably, this explanation should involve some appeal to a change in Nadia’s reasons. But the response to our puzzle currently under consideration is a response that attempts to deny that Frances’s offer is reason-generating. So, it’s hard to see how the deliberative constraint on reasons could be employed to motivate any kind of non-misfire response, either.
See Smith’s (1997) discussion and motivation of a principle which would have the effect of “prohibit[ing] individuals from imposing obligations on themselves to do what is independently morally objectionable” (158).
Contextualism, so characterized, is inspired by Kratzer’s (2012) work on the semantics of modals. Our gloss here follows Worsnip (2019), who helpfully distinguishes “generic contextualism” from the specific versions of the view that appear in the metaethical literature. Since the contextually determined parameters are rarely explicit, we’ll place them in brackets and precede them—following Kratzer—with “in view of”. (We’re grateful to an anonymous reviewer for pressing us to discuss how contextualists might respond to our puzzle.)
Or, alternatively, [in view of the facts that obtained before this very offer], or any other modal base that excludes the fact of Frances’s offer.
In precisely this way, the contextualist gives us a straightforward way to understand everyday offers of rewards that do not generate our puzzle. But our project doesn’t require our puzzle to arise in any actual instance of reward-offering—only in a possible one. And the point here is that we don’t see how the contextualist can show that our preferred reading of Frances’s offer is impossible.
In fact, to tell such a story, one might draw on some of the other solutions to our puzzle canvassed above and below to explain why Frances can’t mean what, on its face, it seems she does (or at least might) mean. Contextualism’s ability to—in this way—pair with other solutions to our puzzle is, we think, a point in its favor. But it also emphasizes (1) the extent to which contextualism is, all by itself, an at best incomplete solution to our puzzle, and (2) the ways in which the theoretical upshots of a contextualist solution very much depend on why the meaning of ‘forbidden’, as uttered by Frances, is restricted in the way that the contextualist insists that it is.
To illustrate our skepticism on this point, suppose that in this ‘high-stakes’ version of the case both options are forbidden. Then the prospect of getting a pickle popsicle favors each option. Either the set of reasons favoring flossing is weightier than the set of reasons favoring not flossing (and so this response amounts to rejecting Forbidden Iff Worst) or it is not (and so this response amounts to rejecting Reasons Are Unbalanced). Suppose the former possibility. Then, given the nature of the considerations that bear on Nadia’s choice and the fact that one option is more favored than the other, it is puzzling how Nadia could be thought to face a dilemma at all. Suppose now the latter possibility. Then, given the stipulated individual weights of the considerations that bear on Nadia’s decision, it is puzzling how it could be the case that neither option is more favored than the other. In either case, it is hard to see how to motivate the dilemma response.
Each of these views recalls Temkin’s (2012) thesis that reasons are sometimes ‘essentially comparative’. But, again, whether or not this highly controversial thesis is correct, the considerations that Temkin takes to motivate the thesis do not appear to be present in the present case.
Since T is false, the disjunction F or T is true just in case F is true. But if F is true, then since Arthur consciously believes at the midnight the disjunction F or T, and nothing he consciously believes at midnight is true, F is false. On the other hand, if F is not true, then something Arthur consciously believes at midnight is true; but at midnight he consciously believes (only) the disjunction F or T, so F is true.
As Fraser and Hawthorne also note, there are more abstruse possibilities that would be consistent with such a ‘blockage’. On might suggest that, in any world in which Nostradamus tries to tell Arthur F, his tongue freezes or he slips on a banana peel. Or one might suggest that, even in worlds in which Arthur has the words that express F running through his mind, he simply does not succeed in consciously believing F. Transposing the former proposal to our case, one might suggest that, in any world in which Frances tries to make her offer to Nadia, her tongue freezes or she slips. Or, transposing the latter proposal to our case, one might suggest that the pickle popsicle would simply not be something Nadia would enjoy or that it would be something she would enjoy but would simply not be a reason. (These versions of the misfire proposal differ from those considered in Sect. 3.1, insofar as they each take the relevant misfire to be a brute fact, not admitting of further explanation.) We join Fraser and Hawthorne in finding these kinds of misfire proposals quite unsatisfactory, and hence we won’t address them further.
This is an unusual sense of addition, since it has the effect of making what would otherwise have been a reason (the pickle popsicle) not a reason. See Fraser and Hawthorne (2015, p. 172) on analogous difficulties in spelling out the addition proposal, in their context, in a way that successfully avoids contradiction.
For discussion of the prospects of making good on these claims, see Fraser and Hawthorne (2015, pp. 171–173).
Fraser and Hawthorne (2015, pp. 174–175 n2) suggest a similar distinction between solutions to a puzzle that are ‘internal’ to the domain in which it arises and solutions which are not.
One might alternatively suggest analogies with other paradoxes (e.g., the liar paradox). We focus on Russell’s paradox in part because of some particularly instructive parallels with our case. We are grateful to a reviewer for the suggestion.
The proof is a simple variant of the one given in Sect. 2. Given 1′, along with Reasons Are Unbalanced and Forbidden Iff Worst, Fx holds just in case x ∉ A. So 1′ entails ∃A∀x (x ∈ A ↔ x ∉ A). And when instantiated with respect to either flossing or not flossing, this yields a contradiction.
Analogous responses to the liar paradox have it that the truth predicate has gaps or gluts (i.e., is such that there are sentences that neither fall in its extension or anti-extension (gaps), or that fall in both its extension and its anti-extension (gluts)). Pursuing instead the analogy with the liar paradox, one might propose that the ‘… is forbidden’ predicate likewise has gaps or gluts. Similar remarks apply to these responses.
These implications are so surprising, in fact, that they count against the plausibility of this kind of solution to our puzzle. If neither flossing nor not flossing is in either the extension or anti-extension of the ‘… is forbidden’ predicate, then neither action is forbidden, and so the prospect of a pickle popsicle fails to favor either of Nadia’s options because no action is forbidden. But if Nadia won’t get a pickle popsicle no matter what she does, in virtue of what does Frances’s offer alter the deontic landscape? In this sense, this solution makes Frances’s offer a non-misfire—it induces a surprising change in the deontic landscape—and, moreover, one that cries out for further explanation.
The vicious-circularity diagnosis may make it appear that our puzzle does not concern wrongfulness in particular. Suppose that, in our case, Frances had instead offered Nadia a pickle popsicle just in case Nadia does what is favored by an odd number of reasons. It may seem that a similar puzzle would then arise [see Fraser and Hawthorne (2015, p. 176 n15)]. Perhaps this is so. (And, if it is so, it would be count against those responses, considered above in Sects. 3.1.2 and 3.1.3, that rest on the fact that Nadia is offered a reward to do what is wrongful.) But this puzzle, if it is one, would arise only given a particular view about how reasons are to be individuated. Our puzzle, by contrast, arises so long as actions can have the property of being forbidden.
See Irvine and Deutsch (2020) and the references therein.
Similar remarks apply to the related thought that one might respond to our puzzle by appeal to a ‘ramified’ view of reasons or oughts, analogous to Russell’s theory of types. (On this view, a ‘type-0’ ought would correspond to the balance of ‘type-0’ reasons; to ‘type-1’ reasons, namely those which depend on ‘level-0’ normative facts, would correspond a ‘type-1’ ought; and so on.) See Fraser and Hawthorne’s (2015, pp. 174–175) remarks about how an analogous way out of their puzzle would imply implausibly radical revisions to our understanding of the epistemic domain.
One might of course try to explain this fact by appeal to one of the solutions canvassed in Sect. 3.1. But we won’t rehearse the costs of those responses here.
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Acknowledgements
We are grateful to Jeff Behrends for feedback on an earlier draft of this paper and to Shyam Nair and Dan Hausman for helpful conversation.
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O’Brien, D., Schwan, B. Wrongfulness rewarded?. Synthese 199, 6897–6916 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-021-03098-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-021-03098-4