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FEASIBILITY IN OPTIMIZING ETHICS*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 February 2014

Geoffrey Brennan
Geoffrey Brennan*
Affiliation:
Philosophy, Australian National University, Philosophy, Politics, and Economics, Duke University and University of North Carolina
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Abstract

Doing the best we can in the world as it is requires that appropriate account be taken of “feasibility considerations.” The object of this essay is to examine what “appropriate account” amounts to — and specifically how “feasibility” should be conceptualized so as to operate most congenially with “desirability considerations.” One element in this exercise is to recognize “feasibility” not so much as a category as “coming in degrees” (just as desirability must be recognized). A second element is to specify evaluands as actions — objects that the advisee controls — rather than as objects that lie somewhere intermediate along the path from actions to final desirability principles. This move serves to collapse all feasibility issues to ones relating to the consequences of genuine actions rather than “feasibility of” other kinds of objects of evaluation. A particular problem in the proper treatment of feasibility considerations is the tendency to begin from the “ought-implies-can” principle, a point of departure that frames feasibility considerations in a dismissive or otherwise inadequate way.

Type
Research Article
Information
Social Philosophy and Policy , Volume 30 , Issue 1-2 , January 2013 , pp. 314 - 329
Copyright
Copyright © Social Philosophy and Policy Foundation 2013 

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Footnotes

*

I am grateful to David Estlund, Nic Southwood, and David Wiens for comments on an earlier draft. I thank the contributors to this volume, especially Guido Pincione, the editors of Social Philosophy and Policy, and Dan Russell for excellent discussion of the essay and guidance in its improvement. Final responsibility, however, rests alas with the author.

References

1 Cohen, G. A., “Facts and Principles,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 31, no. 3 (2003): 211–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 I am especially interested in the “interdisciplinary” aspects of the issues here, because it seems to me that ambiguities about the role of feasibility analysis lie along the fault line between economics and philosophy.

3 Many of the issues relevant to starting-point dependence seem to be at stake in the fraught “debate” (if so it can be described) between “ideal” and “non-ideal” theory; that debate, however, is so mired in mutual misunderstanding that it does not seem to me to be a good point of departure in trying to come to grips with the issues.

4 This is not the only problem. Economists routinely work with a model of human motivation that excludes (or at least seriously downplays) the role of ethical considerations in motivating agent behavior. But the aim of the paper is not to apportion blame as between economist/social theorists and philosophers for the failure of “starting-point independence.” I take my audience here to be philosophers—and I focus my remarks on what I see as failures of many philosophers.

5 There is an issue as to whether this kind of procedure involves “reduction” of the various principles to some master value—“overall normative desirability”—or whether it simply shows the appropriate terms of trade between those different principles at various levels of realization. Chang, Ruth “All Things Considered” Philosophical Perspectives 18 (2004): 1–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar argues the former position against positions like those of, say, Barry, Brian, Sociologists, Economists, and Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970)Google Scholar.

6 He makes the remark in his essay “Goodness is Reducible to Betterness: The Evil of Death is the Value of Life” in Broome, John, Ethics out of Economics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 162–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 Two other contexts in which the distinction comes into play are in relation to (i) voting because voting is much more like an expression of an attitude than it is an action in the full sense (see Brennan, Geoffrey and Lomasky, Loren, Democracy and Decision [New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993]CrossRefGoogle Scholar), and (ii) the forces of esteem where one's attitudes can have consequences for others' actions even though they are not developed with those consequences in mind (see Brennan, Geoffrey and Pettit, Philip, The Economy of Esteem [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004]CrossRefGoogle Scholar).

8 Margaret Thatcher in Britain had implemented the idea through the sale of “council houses” often at highly concessional rates.

9 Bush, George W., Address to a Conference on Minority Homeownership at George Washington University (October 2002), http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2002/10/20021015-7.htmlGoogle Scholar. I am grateful to Dan Russell for this and the ensuing reference.

10 Nussbaum, Martha “Beyond the Social Contract: Capabilities and Global Justice” in The Political Philosophy of Cosmopolitanism, ed. Brock, G. and Brighouse, H. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 211Google Scholar.

11 As distinct perhaps from what one ought to do. Nicholas Southwood has pressed this distinction on me. See his “‘The Thing to Do’ Implies ‘Can’” Nous (forthcoming)

12 This does not establish that one ought not try to do what one cannot do—though what one's best attempt would be in such circumstances deserves to be spelled out.

13 The distinction between what one ought to do and what one should feel bad about not doing seems to be a significant element in cases like Professor Procrastinate—made famous by Jackson, Frank and Pargetter, Robert, “Oughts, Options, and Actualism,” The Philosophical Review 95 (1986): 233–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 In Gilabert, Pablo and Lawford-Smith, Holly, “Political Feasibility: A Conceptual Exploration,” Political Studies 60 (2012): 809–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15 It is worth noting that once we jettison F1 in favor of something more demanding it follows that lots of things that actually happen are not “feasible” in the F2 sense. I am grateful to Nicholas Southwood and David Wiens for pressing this point. On the other hand, things that “actually happen” by virtue of perhaps random movement might become F2 feasible once they have occurred: it is often quite F2 feasible to hold onto an emergent feature of the world when it would not have been F2 feasible to bring it about ex ante. Once you have won the lottery, you can normally hold onto the winnings.

16 Once we enter a probabilistic world, there is an issue about whether we should be risk neutral about desirability. That is a significant question that I cannot hope to engage here. I would simply note that risk neutrality (in relation to desirability) is a quite specific assumption and I have done nothing here to justify it.

17 The role of such factors is a theme in Brennan, and Lomasky, , Democracy and Decision (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.