Thoughts on Tucker's Best Self

It's pretty good! Apart from the bits where he disagrees with me :-)

Miles Tucker’s (2022) ‘Consequentialism and Our Best Selves,’ defends a “maximizing theory of moral motivation”, on which we should have just those motives (among those “available” to us) that would make things go best.

The restriction to “available” motivations is quite interesting, and helps to mitigate the demandingness of a maximizing approach, given that extreme altruism probably isn’t literally “available” to most of us. It’s a neat move!

I have two main points of disagreement to explore:

1. Right-Making Features

I think there’s a distinct sense in which we “should” desire just those things that are good or desirable, as opposed to desiring just those things which are such that our desiring them would be good or desirable. (Of course, we can talk either way. I don’t take this to mark a substantive normative disagreement about what we really should desire, in any shared sense of “should”. Rather, it’s a terminological issue concerning which normative concept it’s most illuminating to use the word “should” to express.)

This is often expressed as the view that we should be motivated by the “right-making features” of an action, or the reasons that make it the right thing to do. I’ve argued that a theory’s right-making features are much more specific (and individual-involving) than other philosophers assume. In particular, I argued that utilitarians should be motivated by consideration of each individual’s well-being (separately), rather than by the mere aggregate of well-being.

Tucker’s objection to my view, in section 2 of his paper, rests on an appeal to tracking counterfactuals: “Counterfactual reasoning reveals that maximizing the good is the proportional explanation.”

This mistakenly assumes that all right acts must be right for the same (normative) reason. We shouldn’t assume that. Suppose that saving either of two people (when you can’t save both) would equally well maximize the good. So either act is equally permissible. Still, it seems reasonable to hold that the acts are importantly distinct: right for different reasons, and each admitting of pro tanto reasons to regret not choosing the other.

So I don’t think he has identified any reason to reject my account of right-making features and associated fitting motivations.

2. Fittingness

I found the argument of section 3 (Against Fittingness) hard to follow. The challenge for Tucker is how to accommodate the intuition that there’s something morally mistaken about desiring that others suffer even if the desire has (purely) good effects. I say that the desire’s content fails to fit with the facts about what is truly good & desirable. Tucker seems to agree: “We get it wrong when we have this desire, because we think something deeply false about morality.” But then he adds, confusingly, “This thought is not unfitting, it is merely false.”

At first pass, you might think that that (or the evidence-relative analogue) is just what it is for an attitude to be morally unfitting: for its implicit moral claims to be false or unjustified.¹ There’s a distinctive kind of criticism to which we’re liable when we have unjustified explicit beliefs about normative matters, and a very similar kind of criticism extends to other “unfitting” attitudes, involving implicit commitments to those unjustified normative thoughts.

There’s more to this than mere falsity. Consider a non-committal attitude, like supposition. You could suppose, for sake of argument, that pain was good. The attitude then contains a false thought. But there’s nothing criticizable or unfitting about supposing false things, because supposition doesn’t aim at truth in the way that belief does. So fittingness clearly goes beyond mere assessment of truth or falsehood.

Further, in desiring the bad, you don’t merely have a commitment to a false thought; the desire practically orients you towards the bad in a way that is deeply perverse. In the same way that “belief aims at the truth”, we might say that “desire aims at the good (or desirable).” This is why we know that malice is a vice, not a virtue, even if we imagine circumstances in which it happens to work out for the best. If you don’t understand fittingness, then you don’t understand virtue either. And that ends up being a pretty significant swath of the normative landscape to block from one’s vision. That’s a big loss, and (it seems to me) an entirely gratuitous one — there’s no downside to taking fittingness seriously. So that’s why I really recommend that consequentialists be more willing to consider fittingness and related concepts. (Maybe in return, we can convince deontologists to think about preferability.)

1. In a footnote, Tucker grants that the “contains false claims” analysis of (un)fittingness is unobjectionable, but insists that there’s nothing normative about it. But broaden the analysis to “contains unjustified claims”, and the normative element may pop more clearly into view. (Justification is a normative concept.) Further, as I go on to explain, false or unjustified assertions seem open to a distinctive kind of criticism. And criticizability is a normative property. Finally, the “claims” we are considering here are normative claims. So there are arguably three points at which normativity can enter the picture: we’re talking about criticizable instances of false or unjustified claims about normative matters.