I like Tucker's paper! But I wasn't convinced by his argument for thinking that it's the "general features that matter" (rather than, as I argue, the specific ones) for constituting right-making reasons. His "proportionality" test assumes that we want to find the most general feature that co-varies with wrongness. But that would be a tes…
I like Tucker's paper! But I wasn't convinced by his argument for thinking that it's the "general features that matter" (rather than, as I argue, the specific ones) for constituting right-making reasons. His "proportionality" test assumes that we want to find the most general feature that co-varies with wrongness. But that would be a test of being (what I call) *criterial* for rightness, not for *grounding* it. It implicitly assumes that all wrong acts must be wrong *for the same reason*. But we should not assume this. We should leave room for the possibility that acts may be wrong for related-but-normatively-distinct reasons; and so we should reject Tucker's proportionality test.
But this is a subtle disagreement, and there is much else in the paper that I agree with. (And even the bits that I happen to disagree with are, I think, nonetheless well-argued, and present a very reasonable alternative to my preferred view.)
I like Tucker's paper! But I wasn't convinced by his argument for thinking that it's the "general features that matter" (rather than, as I argue, the specific ones) for constituting right-making reasons. His "proportionality" test assumes that we want to find the most general feature that co-varies with wrongness. But that would be a test of being (what I call) *criterial* for rightness, not for *grounding* it. It implicitly assumes that all wrong acts must be wrong *for the same reason*. But we should not assume this. We should leave room for the possibility that acts may be wrong for related-but-normatively-distinct reasons; and so we should reject Tucker's proportionality test.
But this is a subtle disagreement, and there is much else in the paper that I agree with. (And even the bits that I happen to disagree with are, I think, nonetheless well-argued, and present a very reasonable alternative to my preferred view.)
Oh, yes, you can certainly be a hybrid utilitarian (allowing for fittingness assessments of motives / quality of will, and hence blameworthiness) without believing in desert adjustments. See: https://www.utilitarianism.net/types-of-utilitarianism/#global-utilitarianism-and-hybrid-utilitarianism