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Morality, Accountability and the Wrong Kind of Reasons

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 July 2015

MICAH LOTT
MICAH LOTT*
Affiliation:
Boston [email protected]
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Abstract

In The Second Person Standpoint, Stephen Darwall makes a new argument against consequentialism, appealing to: (a) the conceptual tie between obligation and accountability, and (b) the ‘right kind of reasons’ for holding others accountable. I argue that Darwall's argument, as it stands, fails against indirect consequentialism, because it relies on a confusion between our being right to establish practices, and our having a right to do so. I also explore two ways of augmenting Darwall's argument. However, while the second of these ways is more promising than the first, neither provides a convincing argument against indirect consequentialism.

Type
Research Article
Information
Utilitas , Volume 28 , Issue 1 , March 2016 , pp. 28 - 40
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

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References

1 Darwall, S., The Second Person Standpoint (Cambridge, MA, 2006), pp. 5–10, 58-9, 68Google Scholar. This scene also figures in some of Darwall's more recent essays. See Darwall, S., ‘Authority and Second-Personal Reasons for Acting’, Morality, Authority, and Law: Essays in Second-Personal Ethics I (Oxford, 2013), pp. 135–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Darwall, S.‘Authority and Reasons: Exclusionary and Second Personal’, Morality, Authority, and Law: Essays in Second-Personal Ethics I (Oxford, 2013), pp. 151–67.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 Darwall, Second Person, pp. 8–10.

3 The sense of responsibility that interests Darwall is accountability. I here follow Darwall and use the two terms interchangeably.

4 None of the following assessments of SPS consider Darwall's anti-consequentialism argument: Korsgaard, C., ‘Authority and the Second Person Within’, Ethics 118 (2007), pp. 8–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Jay Wallace, R., ‘Reasons, Relations, and Commands’, Ethics 118 (2007), pp. 24–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Watson, G., ‘Morality as Equal Accountability’, Ethics 118 (2007), pp. 37–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Fleischacker, S., ‘Review of Stephen Darwall, The Second Person Standpoint: Morality, Respect, and Accountability’, Utilitas 21 (2009), pp. 117–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Shapiro, T., ‘Desires as Demands: How the Second-Person Standpoint Might Be Internal to Reflective Agency’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 81 (2010), pp. 229–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Yaffe, G., ‘Comment on Stephen Darwall's Second Person Standpoint: Morality, Respect and Accountability’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 81 (2010), pp. 246–52CrossRefGoogle Scholar. A partial exception to this lack of attention is Smith, M. and Twedt Strabbing, J., ‘Moral Obligation, Accountability, and Second-Personal Reasons’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 81 (2010), pp. 237–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar. However, while Smith and Strabbing touch on some issues relevant to the anti-consequentialism argument, they do not consider the argument directly. Perhaps surprisingly, there is also no mention of Darwall's anti-consequentialism argument in Parfit, D., On What Matters (Oxford, 2011)Google Scholar, although Parfit's earlier work is an explicit target of Darwall's argument.

5 Darwall, ‘Authority and Second-Personal Reasons’, p. 138.

6 Darwall, Second Person, p. 99.

7 Darwall, Second Person, p. 103.

8 Darwall, Second Person, p. 16.

9 Darwall, Second Person, p. 16.

10 Darwall, Second Person, p. 13.

11 Whereas the desirable ‘concerns norms and reasons that are specific to desire’, the responsible and culpable ‘concern norms for the distinctive attitudes and actions that are involved in holding people responsible and blaming them’ (Darwall, Second Person, pp. 16–17).

12 Darwall, Second Person, pp. 15–17.

13 Darwall, Second Person, p. 15; italics in original.

14 Darwall, Second Person, pp. 311–312.

15 Darwall, Second Person, p. 91 n. 1; p. 104 n. 27; pp. 312-13.

16 Smart, J. J. C. and Williams, B., Utilitarianism: For and Against (Cambridge, 1973), pp. 69–73.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

17 On the idea of ‘conscience utilitarianism’, see Hooker, Brad, Ideal Code, Real World (Oxford, 2000), pp. 91–2.Google Scholar

18 Darwall, Second Person, pp. 311–13.

19 This example is from Darwall. See his ‘Contractualism, Root and Branch: A Review Essay’, Philosophy and Public Affairs 34 (2006), pp. 193-214.

20 Darwall, ‘Contractualism, Root and Branch’, p. 204; italics in original.

21 This claim is suggested by some of Darwall's comments. See, e.g. Second Person, pp. 311-12.

22 Darwall, Second Person, pp. 91–5.

23 As Darwall says, ‘Morality involves a distinctive kind of accountability by its very nature. If I fail to act as I am morally required without adequate excuse, then distinctively second-personal responses like blame and guilt are thereby warranted. But it is only in certain contexts that responses like these seem appropriate to logical blunders, and even here what seems to be in question is a moral error of some kind (as when I have a special responsibility for reasoning properly) . . . Anyone who feels guilty about logical errors would seem to have a “moralized” sense of the logical’ (Second Person, pp. 26-7).

24 Darwall, ‘Contractualism, Root and Branch’, p. 205.

25 We should keep in mind that the target of Darwall's argument is an ‘all the way down’ consequentialism.

26 Cf. Darwall's comment that ‘agreement on fundamental principles is not simply a collective epistemic achievement’, quoted above. In that passage, Darwall is contrasting his view with ‘philosophical utilitarianism’.

27 Darwall, Second Person, pp. 91–9.

28 For helpful comments on this article, I thank Daniel Groll, Jennifer Lockhart, Daniel McKaughan, Marius Stan, and Jonathan Trejo-Mathys. Thanks also to three anonymous reviewers for Utilitas.