Two Arguments for Objectivism about Moral Permissibility

ABSTRACT

Is what we’re morally permitted to do grounded in our subjective situation? Subjectivists maintain that it is. Objectivists deny this. I shall offer two arguments for Objectivism about moral permissibility.

KEYWORDS:

• subjectivism
• objectivism
• moral permissibility

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Subjectivists about morality include Sidgwick [1907], Prichard [1932], and Ross [1939]. Objectivists about morality include Moore [1903], Ross [1930], Feldman [1986], Thomson [1990], Graham [2010], and Smith [2014].

2 Some (Jackson [1991, 2014], Zimmerman [2008, 2014], and Kiesewetter [2011]) hold that the permissibility of an agent’s action is grounded only almost entirely in her subjective circumstances. Technically, they count as Objectivists according to my definitions. Nevertheless, in so far as they maintain that the permissibility of an agent’s action is grounded predominantly in the agent’s subjective circumstances, they lie within the crosshairs of my arguments in this paper.

3 This is a variation on a case that I originally offered and briefly discussed elsewhere [2010].

4 According to this Objectivist reply, although the risk is a subjective risk, it is a subjective risk of committing an objective wrong.

5 Although it may indeed be objectively wrong to do so, given the availability of the cadaver, it would be less objectively wrong than would be letting her liver-failure patient die, given the wishes of, and the consent that she has been given by, the father.

6 Although it may indeed be objectively wrong to do so, given the availability of the cadaver, it would be less objectively wrong than would be letting her liver-failure patient die, given the villainy of the colonoscopy patient.

7 It might be suggested that premise 1 is false because what best explains the intuitive riskiness of taking option A or option B in cases like Transplant1 and Transplant4 is not the risk of acting objectively wrongly, but rather the risk of acting in a way that exemplifies whatever non-deontic property on which supervenes the objective wrongness of whichever of option A and option B is objectively wrong. The problem with such a reply is that that non-deontic property may be wildly disjunctive. To see this, consider the following amalgamation of Transplant1 and Transplant4:

Transplant6. In front of Kim lie two bodies. Kim knows that she is either in the situation of Transplant1 or the situation of Transplant4 but she doesn’t know which.

Just as in both Transplant1 and Transplant4, if she is morally conscientious, Kim will refrain from taking either option A or option B in Transplant6. What’s more, she will so refrain because, again like in Transplant1 and in Transplant4, taking either option A or option B would be too risky. But now, if we don’t appeal to the risk of acting seriously objectively wrongly to explain why taking option A or option B is too risky, and instead we appeal to the risk of performing an action with property, N, where N is the non-deontic property on which supervenes the objective wrongness of her taking whichever is the objectively wrong one of option A and option B, then we would have to say that taking option A or option B is too risky in virtue of its running too high a risk of resulting in the performance of an action that would have the property of being-either-the-unconsented-to-and-undeserved-killing-of-an-innocent-colonoscopy-patient-or-the-saving-only-of-one-person-when-one-could-instead-have-saved-four. But, I submit, it is more plausible that it is the running of too high a risk of acting seriously objectively wrongly, instead of the running of too high a risk of performing an action with that disjunctive property that explains why taking either option A or option B would be too risky in Transplant6. (It is clear how cases could be cooked up with even more wildly disjunctive supervenience bases than that in Transplant6.)

8 For helpful comments and suggestions for improvement on earlier drafts of this paper I thank Chris Meacham, Elizabeth Harman, two anonymous referees, and the editor of this journal.