What Permissibility Could Be

Justifications vs excuses for letting children die

There’s a straightforward sense in which we ought to do whatever we have (all things considered) most reason to do. But permissibility is a laxer notion than this. Conceptually, it may be permissible to do less than what we have most reason to do. So the concept of permissibility cannot just be that of what we have most reason to do.

The puzzle is to explain what else permissibility could be. I’m aware of two broad options, which we can dub the ‘rationalist’ and the ‘sentimentalist’ accounts.

On the rationalist account, permissibility emerges from the interplay between moral and non-moral reasons (and prerogatives).¹ When the two kinds of reasons pull in different directions, agents may have some leeway in how much weight they assign each type of reason. Some acts might emerge as prohibited (or impermissible) on any allowable weighting, whereas others are reasonable by the lights of some allowable weighting, and so emerge as permissible. Supererogatory options may be supported by stronger moral reasons, while falling short of being rationally decisive because some morally worse alterative is nonetheless supported by sufficient non-moral reasons (or prerogatives). When agents act contrary to decisive moral reasons, without adequate excuse, they are presumably blameworthy.

Sentimentalist accounts, by contrast, understand permissibility in terms of reactive attitudes. We might think, for example, that for an act to be wrong just is for it to be such that any full-informed agent performing it would thereby warrant negative reactive attitudes such as blame or resentment. This might be because the act harms others in a way that’s incompatible with adequate quality of will or concern for their interests. Supererogatory acts are suggestive of having greater concern for others than is required for minimal moral decency. Some worse acts are nonetheless permissible, because a modest and imperfect degree of concern for others may nonetheless suffice to avoid blameworthiness.

Either account invokes some disputable philosophical commitments to generate a principled boundary between the permissible and the impermissible. Rationalists are committed to a deep distinction between moral and non-moral reasons, and to a broadly permissive (within limits) view of their comparative weighting. The precise specification of those limits could seem puzzling. Sentimentalists instead posit a special (albeit suboptimal) degree of moral concern that qualifies as “adequate” to avoid warranting negative reactive attitudes.² But this may seem similarly inexplicable. Either strategy has its costs.

I’m more sympathetic to the latter, myself. One reason for this is that I find it impossible to believe that intuitively “permissible” degrees of self-interest among the global affluent are really supported by normative reasons that would justify letting children die from easily preventable causes. The most I can honestly credit is that our everyday disregard for the global poor may be (in a sense) excusable.³ We may be satisficers about obligation, but not—I think—about practical reason.

What, is there something better to do in a shallow pond?

The sentimentalist understanding of permissibility better reflects this moral modesty. It offers a weak form of absolution—a mere immunity to warranted guilt and blame—without need for the full-blown normative justification that rationalists build into their understanding of permissible action. When it comes to practical reasons and rationality, I find maximization too plausible to hold out any hope for a rationalist vindication of broad moral latitude. I don’t believe we’re fully justified in doing less than the best, and I don’t think anyone else should really believe this either. What seems intuitive to me is just the weaker claim that an ordinary degree of moral imperfection is in some sense acceptable, in that it doesn’t warrant the kind of negative reaction that a clearly impermissible act like theft or murder would warrant. So the sentimentalist understanding seems sufficient to capture the intuitive data, and can do so more cheaply than rationalism.

We can sharpen the contrast by considering the paradox of supererogation. On a rationalist understanding, all permissible actions are normatively on a par. For example, suppose that it is supererogatory to cancel your summer vacation plans and instead use the money to save a child’s life. On a rationalist understanding, while you have more moral reason to save the child’s life, this is balanced by a comparably strong self-interested reason to take the vacation. There is no all-things-considered practical error involved in prioritizing your self-interest. Accordingly, there is nothing especially correct—or all-things-considered normatively better—about prioritizing the child’s life.⁴ I find this absurd. Anyone who shares my judgment that the morally best decisions are—or even just conceptually could be—all-things-considered better than their merely permissible alternatives thereby has strong grounds for preferring a sentimentalist conception of permissibility.⁵

1. By “rationalism” here I mean a reasons-based account of the essential nature of permissibility. This is distinct from “moral rationalism”, the thesis that we have decisive reason to do what we’re morally required to do. I accept moral rationalism, so understood, even though I reject what I’m calling the “rationalist” account of permissibility.

2. The appropriate degree of concern may be option-sensitive rather than constant, as I argue in Willpower Satisficing, to avoid various objections.

3. A second reason, explained here, is that sentimentalism offers the best account of the significance (and limits) of familiar moral distinctions, e.g., between killing and letting die.

4. Can one avoid this implication by replacing non-moral “reasons” with mere (non-favoring) “prerogatives”? I’m not sure. The puzzle is how to make sense of combining the claims that (i) it is all things considered better (i.e., rationally superior) to perform the supererogatory act, and yet (ii) there is no rational error involved in choosing the rationally inferior, merely permissible option. My sentimentalism rejects (ii): not all errors are so egregious as to merit blame. But I find it puzzling to deny that deliberately choosing an all-things-considered option is an error at all. I don’t know that calling it a “prerogative” is sufficient to dispel the mystery. Perhaps a better option is to say that we have a “prerogative” when we can make some errors without warranting blame; that would be to collapse the prerogatives view into sentimentalism.

5. This post is an excerpt from by book manuscript-in-progress, Beyond Right and Wrong.