Why Care About the Moral Law?

Subtitle: When it hurts overall well-being

Morality is made for man, not man for morality — William K. Frankena

My deepest objection to non-consequentialist ethics is that it seems to require incomprehensible preferences or intrinsic concern for things that simply make no sense to care about (non-instrumentally). As a result, if deontology were true, I’d rather be a beneficent amoralist, saying “screw morality; just be good.”

So whenever I see non-consequentialists appeal to intuitions about permissibility, I want to ask: why care? If you imagine that cannibalism, necrophilia, or whatever, proves to be entirely harmless, what’s the point of opposing it? If you appeal to the broader instrumental value of the taboo, then a multi-level utilitarian account would suffice to accommodate your concerns. If you’re really a non-consequentialist, then you should be able to point to norms that you endorse even though they make welfare subjects overall worse-off, at which point I reply, “Why do you care more about abstractions than about real people? Seems bad!”

I care about morality insofar as it serves welfare subjects (sentient beings capable of being harmed or benefited). Co-operative norms help us to coordinate and avoid bad (e.g. low-trust) equilibria. Altruistic norms encourage us to look beyond our own narrow interests and help others in need. These are clearly good norms. Taboos are less clearly good, but some may serve a protective instrumental role given contingent flaws in human nature or areas of persisting cultural irrationality. If so, then that could be a good reason to uphold the taboo. But otherwise, if it’s really just an arbitrary emotional fixation—a moral fetish—it seems like we’d do better to abandon it. Why cling to moral beliefs or norms that are overall bad for us?^[1]

I suspect that the underlying psychological story for many^[2] people involves: (i) introspecting on the set of practical norms that one has internalized; (ii) an implicit or inchoate sense that these are (instrumentally) good norms, or that you’d have reason to mistrust one who violated them; and (iii) an implicit assumption of naive instrumentalism, and thus a failure to grasp the structural distance that can be opened up between our fundamental moral theory and our endorsed practical norms.

This diagnosis of the dialectic is why I’m especially interested in arguing that my Bleeding-Heart Consequentialism can provide a sounder, more principled basis for our practical norms than can rival non-consequentialist views.

The dilemma for non-consequentialists in a nutshell:

1. Either putatively non-consequentialist norms serve the general welfare, or they don’t.
2. If they do, then they are not distinctively non-consequentialist. Consequentialism offers a better explanation of why we should endorse welfare-promoting norms.

3. If they do not, then we should collectively agree to replace those non-consequentialist norms with alternatives that better serve moral subjects. (Morality should serve the interests of moral subjects, not the other way around.)

   Conclusion: what practical norms are worth accepting is better settled by consequentialist than by non-consequentialist moral theories.

To expand briefly on the third premise, consider the argument from ex ante pre-commitment. It seems awfully strange to propose moral norms that any prudent person would wish to reject from behind a veil of ignorance. Moreover, it seems outright inconsistent with the values of autonomy and respect to impose arbitrary norms on people—allegedly for their own sake—that they would (from an unbiased position) rationally prefer to waive (on condition that others do likewise).^[3]

Is anyone aware of attempts by non-consequentialists to grapple with this challenge? It seems (to me, at least) at once obvious and utterly devastating, so it’s odd that it isn’t discussed more.

1. ^{^}

   As my Curse of Deontology song puts it:

   I hope you’ll put my rules to flame
   I know you wish I’d do the same
   This paradox suggests a game:
   Let’s each agree to choose the good
   Free each other from these chains
   Find the truth in what remains

2. ^{^}

   No doubt there are exceptions: I’m happy to trust non-consequentialists when they tell me that they’ve seriously considered multi-level consequentialism and nonetheless find fundamental deontology more plausible. What I don’t understand is why anyone would care about the object of the deontologist’s theorizing—fundamental deontology undercuts the reasons why morality seemed worth caring about to begin with! So I’m trying to offer a charitable reconstruction of what may lead an intelligent non-specialist to initially feel drawn towards deontology, compatibly with their maintaining a broadly pragmatic attitude towards morality.

3. ^{^}

   “You have inviolable dignity and you’ll get it good and hard, even though you would—if prudent—prefer the moral status of a rescuable welfare subject attributed by utilitarianism” is quite the adversarial stance for a moral theorist to take towards moral subjects!