Brains, Persons, and Society *** ABSTRACTS    Cervelli, Persone e Società ***ABSTRACTS

Francesco Orsi
Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa, Italy

What Does Goodness Do?

         It is far from clear how value-based practical reasons should be explained. I argue that two leading accounts of value make it hard to keep believing in value-based reasons. The Moorean account—which perhaps does not represent G. E. Moore’s real views—has it that thin evaluative properties of goodness and badness are themselves reason-giving features. The reason for f-ing is always the fact that f-ing, or a consequence of f-ing, is good. This account can hardly be true, given what I call the buck-passing intuition, whereby it is either redundant or uninformative to cite goodness when asked for a normative reason. The only acceptable answer to such a request is given by citing the good-making features.

The other account is the buck-passing one, as developed by T. Scanlon (1998) and many others. Goodness is the higher order property of an object to have features that provide reasons for a positive attitude towards it. On this view, value-based reasons are given by the features of an object that make it good, thereby respecting the buck-passing intuition. But the very claim that “value-based reasons are given by the features of an object that make it good”, if the analysis is true, is nothing but the empty one “value-based reasons are given by the features of an object that make it such as to provide reasons”. The idea of an explanatory priority of the evaluative over the normative, implicit in the claim that there are value-based reasons, gets completely lost here.

The dilemma then is that, on the Moorean account, goodness itself gives reasons, but that is a role that goodness cannot play; on the buck-passing account, goodness does not give reasons, but neither does it contribute in any way to explaining reasons, being nothing but the presence of reason-giving features. A solution seems required. Two desiderata should be satisfied. First, goodness should not end up as a reason-giving property over and above—nor indeed beside—the good-making properties. Second, claims about the relation between reasons and value should not end up being empty. This means that a solution must consist in finding the appropriate explanatory role for goodness in respect to reasons.

I argue that the notion of programming explanation as devised by F. Jackson and P. Pettit (1990) in the theory of causal explanation provides the right kind of explanatory level for goodness. A glass breaks: is it because the water contained in it is extremely hot or because of certain molecular properties of the water? There is reason to think that the latter is what is really causally efficacious. Is the heat then explanatorily superfluous? No: its presence programs for the glass breaking, though it doesn’t cause it. The situation with reasons is analogous. Good-making features are what really provides reasons. Is goodness then superfluous? No: its presence programs for the existence of reasons. Better: the fact that certain features are good-making programs, that is, enables, renders possible, that they are also reason-giving, though that fact itself is not reason-giving. If so, the evaluative can be seen to play a role that is not that of reasons, but neither is reducible to the presence of reasons.

Some may feel that such a programming role is not needed: the buck-passing view is much more economical. I argue instead that there are important questions about reasons that the buck-passing view does not even allow one to ask, and that this alternative view of goodness—or something like it—goes some way towards answering. The questions are: Why do certain features and not others give reasons? And: What do reason-giving features have in common? My answer is that the good-making capacity of certain features is what distinguishes reason-giving from not reason-giving features, without thereby thinking that goodness is a higher reason-giving property. Value-based reasons are thus features which give reasons in virtue of their making good what possesses them. Whether this is a viable third way to the dilemma remains to be seen. My main hope is to show that a third way seems to be needed, and that the “programming” view put forward is not an obviously flawed one. 

References (in the abstract)

 
Jackson F. and Pettit P., 1990, “Program Explanation: A General Perspective”, in Analysis, 50, 2.

Parfit D., 2001, “Rationality and Reasons”, in Exploring Practical Philosophy, edited by D. Egonsson, J. Josefsson, B. Petersson, & T. Rønnow-Rasmussen, Aldershot: Ashgate.

Raz J., 1999, Engaging Reason, OUP.

Scanlon T., 1998, What We Owe to Each Other, Harvard University Press.