Abstract
A relatively new debate in ethics concerns the relationship between one's present obligations and how one would act in the future. One popular view is actualism, which holds that what an agent would do in the future affects her present obligations. Agent's future behavior is held fixed and the agent's present obligations are determined by what would be best to do now in light of how the agent would act in the future. Doug Portmore defends a new view he calls moral securitism, which is supposed to avoid the problems associated with actualism. On this account, what an agent would do in the future is treated as fixed iff that agent's future actions are not currently under the agent's present deliberative control. φ-ing is under an agent's present deliberative control iff whether the agent φ's depends upon the immediate outcome of the agent's present deliberations. I argue that moral securitism falls prey to two of the same serious problems that actualism does: it lets agents avoid incurring moral obligations because they have rotten moral dispositions and entails that agents ought to perform truly terribly acts. After providing a few standard counter-examples to actualism to show how it is plagued with these two problems, I offer my own example which demonstrates that moral securitism is subject to a version of these same two problems. I then review Portmore's response to my objection, arguing that it fails. I end the paper by offering a tentative revision of moral securitism that would allow it to avoid the aforementioned problems.
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Notes
This example is borrowed from Doug Portmore’s description of the actualism and possibilism debate on PhilPapers. http://philpapers.org/browse/actualism-and-possibilism-in-ethics.
There are a few formulations of securitism that Portmore provides, which vary in terms of specificity, but each formulation Portmore accepts requires that any obligatory action is scrupulously securable by the agent. As we will see, it is this “scrupulously securable” requirement that creates trouble for Portmore’s view. So the specific formulation of securitism I consider is not important for the purposes of this paper.
For various formulations of actualism, see Goldman (1976), Sobel (1976), Jackson and Pargetter (1986, p. 198), Zimmerman (2006, p. 189) and, importantly, Portmore (2011, p. 151). Any slight differences between the formulations are irrelevant for the purposes of this debate because all formulations of actualism are subject to the two problems I focus on in this paper. Goldman’s revised version of actualism (1978, p. 207) might be the sole exception, as it might avoid the second problem with actualism.
More specifically, Portmore argues that the “problem with actualism is that it takes as given certain future actions that an agent will perform only because she will not come to have the intentions that she ought to come to have” (Portmore 2011, p. 206).
Portmore is not completely clear about what constitutes “permissible background attitudes,” but he seems to have in mind something akin to “justified beliefs and/or justified dispositions to believe.”
Portmore goes on to defend more detailed and substantive versions of his view, which he calls securitist consequentialism and teleological maximizing securitism. However, for the sake of simplicity, I will not review them here. For the purposes of this paper, it does not matter whether we consider moral securitism or its more detailed versions because all are committed to the claim that morally obligatory actions must be scrupulously securable by the agent and it is that necessary condition that creates the problem for Portmore’s view.
Portmore considers this example in his (2014, ‘What are Our Options?’ “unpublished manuscript”), which is taken from my (2011, ‘Why There is a Relevant Difference Between Inter- and Intra-Agent Act-Sets in Terms of Moral Responsibility’ “unpublished manuscript”) and a personal correspondence. See also (Portmore 2013).
As is standard in the literature, I am concerned with objective obligations, as opposed to subjective obligations. An agent S is objectively obligated to ϕ if and only if ϕ-ing is “what a normatively conscientious person would do if she faced S’s choice of alternatives and was aware of all of the relevant reasons-constituting facts” (Portmore 2011, p. 244). Alternatively, an agent S is subjectively obligated to ϕ if and only if ϕ-ing is “what a normatively conscientious person would do if she were in the exact same situation that S is in, facing S’s choice of alternatives and all the normative and non-normative uncertainty that goes along with being in S’s epistemic position” (Portmore 2011, p. 247). This leaves open the possibility that Sid is subjectively obligated to keep the money in his account because of a lack of certainty about how he would use the money tomorrow if it is in his account. To keep it simple, I am also happy to stipulate that Sid is aware of all of the relevant normative and non-normative facts, so his objective and subjective obligations should be identical in Selfish Sid.
If I stipulate that Sid has neither a permissible nor impermissible set of background attitudes that would allow him, today, to ensure that he follows through on an intention to save the three lives tomorrow, then it is also not, as of today, securable by Sid to save the three lives tomorrow. Anything I say about cases involving scrupulous securitism can be framed in this way so as to include securitism as well. As such, a version of moral securitism that replaced the scrupulous securitism requirement with a mere securitism requirement would still be subject to the same two problems.
I am stipulating this. For readers who think that there is a morally relevant difference between killing and letting die, notice that an analogue example could be constructed that only concerns letting one of the victims die instead of killing them. To make the example more uncontroversial, one may also change the numbers in any way she wishes to create a moral obligation for Sid to sacrifice (by killing or letting die) one of the victims to save the others.
Contrary to actualists, Portmore also endorses this principle. He discusses related issues at length in his (2013).
This could be because ((a) & (b)) is the maximal act-set Sid is obligated to perform or because performing ((a) & (b)) is a proper subset of the maximal act-set Sid is obligated to perform.
Hille Paakkunainen suggested an additional response to Portmore that is worth noting. This seems like a viable alternative for those who may find my response wanting. We can say that whether one is presently obligated to [save the money today and save the three people tomorrow] depends on what the available act alternatives are at present. One’s obligations do, in general, depend on what the available act alternatives are. So one could grant that it seems objectionable to hold that Sid (in Selfish Sid 2) straightforwardly should [save the money today and save the three people tomorrow] and deny ought implies scrupulously securable. This is because we can consistently say that in the original Selfish Sid case, Sid should [save the money today and save the three people tomorrow], and say that, in Selfish Sid 2, Sid should instead save the two people today because the available act alternatives are different from what they were in the original Selfish Sid case. In short, it might be that Portmore’s alteration of my Selfish Sid case changes the relevant options, such that Sid is obligated to save the two people today instead of the three tomorrow. But accepting that doesn’t commit us to the further claim that Sid is not obligated to [save the money today and save the three people tomorrow] in the original Selfish Sid case.
I wish to reiterate here that am talking about objective oughts. That is, I am focusing on what agents “ought to do given what the reason-constituting facts about their choice situation happen to be, and so irrespective of what they take those facts to be and of what their evidence suggests that those facts might be” (Portmore 2011, p. 12). Though Amy doesn’t have an objective obligation to [transfer the $500 today to save the three tomorrow], since she may not know for certain whether Sid would save the three people tomorrow, she may (as a conscientious moral agent) have a subjective obligation to transfer the money today in (false) hopes that Sid will use it to save the three lives tomorrow.
It should generate the intuitively right verdict for Selfish Sid 2 if we adopt the amendment I propose for moral securitism in the next section.
One worry is that any intermediate view between actualism and possibilism will necessarily incur the problems of at least one of these views. By moving moral securitism away from actualism and towards possibilism, one might think that set scrupulous securitism inherits the following problem with possibilism. It will entail that agents can have action-guiding obligations to perform some act, ϕ, even if that agent would perform a subsequent act-set that is deeply morally wrong, and significantly worse than the act-set that agent would subsequently perform if she were to ~ϕ. That is the supposed problem for set scrupulous securitism that Selfish Sid 2 makes salient. I address that specific worry in this section. With respect to the more high-level worry, Yishai Cohen and I argue in our (2014, ‘Actualism, Possibilism or Hybridism?’ “unpublished manuscript”) in favor of a hybrid position that posits an actualist moral ought and a possibilist moral ought and, by doing so, avoids the problems that plague each view. My goal in this paper is not to argue for my favored hybrid view, however. Instead, my first aim is to demonstrate that two problems with actualism are also problems for moral securitism. My second aim is to demonstrate how moral securistists can revise their view to avoid said problems while still remaining a securitist position. Still, I do think that there is much to be said for a properly revised moral securitism and believe that it can avoid succumbing to any of the problems of either actualism or possibilism.
I am implicitly assuming here that moral rationalism is true. If moral rationalism is false, then DYB would require the agent to perform a rationally permissible immoral act over a rationally impermissible immoral act whenever both options are under an agent’s present deliberative control.
I formulated DYB in terms of moral obligations, but an analogue principle can also be formulated in terms of rational obligations.
The intuitive pull of this verdict seems to, at least in part, have motivated McKinsey’s level of obligations view (McKinsey 1979).
Alternative, and seemingly more parsimonious, views remain viable options. In his (2009), Christopher Woodard translates actualism and possibilism into views about reasons for action instead of obligations. He does so to illuminate a supposed gratuitous extremity of possibilism, but he also creates an interesting framework to think about analogues of actualism, possibilism and moderate views. Moderate views fall in between the actualism and possibilism and can take into account both the reasons for action actualists endorse and those that possibilists endorse without having to adopt any additional normative principles. See also chapters four and five in Woodard’s (2008).
I am assuming that I do not have an uncontrollable compulsion to clip my nails. Parfit uses an example like this in his (2011, Vol. 1, p. 68). But he does so for a different reason.
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Acknowledgments
I thank Hille Paakkunainen, Christopher Woodard, Yishai Cohen, Ben Bradley, Sean Clancy, Amanda O’Neil and Karl Ekendahl for the helpful comments they provided on earlier drafts of this paper. I especially thank Doug Portmore for the very helpful feedback he provided concerning my proposed solution to moral securitism.
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Timmerman, T. Does scrupulous securitism stand-up to scrutiny? Two problems for moral securitism and how we might fix them. Philos Stud 172, 1509–1528 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-014-0362-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-014-0362-4