The right can be derived from the good

There is a way to connect the right and wrong with the good and bad:

1. An action is right (respectively, wrong) if and only if it is noninstrumentally good (respectively, bad) to do it.

This is compatible with there being cases where it is bad for one to do the right thing. Thus, refraining from stealing the money that one would need to sign up for a class on virtue is right and noninstrumentally good, but if the class is really effective then stealing the money might be instrumentally good for one, though noninstrumentally ba.

I think (1) is something that everyone should accept. Even consequentialists can and should accept (1) (though utilitarian consequentialists have too shallow an axiology to make (1) true). But natural law theorists might add a further claim to (1): the left-hand-side is true because the right-hand-side is true.

The title of this post contradicts the title of another recent post, but the contents do not.

The right cannot be derived from the good

Consider the following thesis that both Kantians, utilitarians and New Natural Law thinkers will agree on:

1. All facts about rightness and wrongness can be derived from descriptive facts, facts about non-rightness value, and a small number of fundamental abstract moral principles.

The restriction to non-rightness good and bad is to avoid triviality. By “rightness value” here, I mean only the value that an action or character has in virtue of its being right or wrong to the extent that it is.

I don’t have a good definition of “abstract moral principle”, but I want them to be highly general principles about moral agency such as “Choose the greater over the lesser good”, “Do not will the evil”, etc.

I think (1) is false.

Consider this:

2. It is not wrong for the government to forcibly and non-punitively take 20% of your lifetime income, but it is wrong for the government to forcibly and non-punitively take one of your kidneys.

I don’t think we can derive (2) in accordance with the strictures in (1). If a kidney were a lot more valuable than 20% of lifetime income, we would have some hope of deriving (2) from descriptive facts, non-rightness value facts, and abstract moral principles, for we might have some abstract moral principle prohibiting the government from forcibly and non-punitively taking something above some value. But a kidney is not a lot more valuable than 20% of lifetime income. Indeed, if it would cost you 20% of your lifetime income to prevent the destruction of one of your kidneys, it need not be unreasonable for you to refuse to pay. Indeed, it seems that either 20% of lifetime income is incommensurable with a kidney, or in some cases it is more valuable than a kidney.

If loss of a kidney were to impact one’s autonomy significantly more than loss of 20% of your lifetime income, then again there would be some hope for a derivation of (2). But whether loss of a kidney is more of an autonomy impact than loss of 20% of income will differ from person to person.

One might suppose that among the small number of fundamental abstract moral principles one will have some principles about respect for bodily integrity. I doubt it, though. Respect for bodily integrity is an immensely complex area of ethics, and it is very unlikely that it can be encapsulated in a small number of abstract moral principles. Respect for bodily integrity differs in very complex ways depending on the body part and the nature of the relationship between the agent and the patient.

I think counterexamples to (1) can be multiplied.

I should note that the above argument fails against divine command theories. Divine command theorists will say that about rightness and wrongness are identified with descriptive facts about what God commands, and these facts can be very rich and hence include enough data to determine (2). For the argument against (1) to work, the “descriptive facts” have to be more like the facts of natural science than like facts about divine commands.

Reducing the right to the good

Here is a simple reductive account of right and wrong that now seems to me to be obviously correct:

1. An action is right if and only if it is non-instrumentally wholly good; it is wrong if and only if it is non-instrumentally at least partly bad.

Think, after all, how easily we move between saying that someone acted badly and that someone acted wrongly.

If (1) is a correct reduction, then we can reduce facts about right and wrong to facts about the value of particular kinds of things, namely actions.

By the way, if we accept (1), then consequentialism is equivalent to the following thesis:

2. An action is non-instrumentally good if and only if it is on balance (instrumentally and non-instrumentally) best.

But it is quite strange to think that there be an entity that is non-instrumentally good if and only if it is on balance best.

Consequentialism and counterfactuals

According to standard act consequentialist theories, an action is right if and only if that there is no alternate action within one's power do that would in fact have better consequences. Focus on the words "would in fact". Here we have a counterfactual. Moreover, it is a counterfactual where the consequent depends indeterministically on the antecedent. But suppose that one denies Molinism, and more generally denies that there can be any non-trivial counterfactuals where the consequent depends indeterministically (either via libertarian-free actions or through quantum randomness) on the antecedent. Then the act consequentialist theory cannot work.

One might say that our actions concern a subset of the world that we may assume is deterministic. But remember that standard consequentialist theories involve also the weighing of distant consequences. It is highly likely that between the present and a distant future, indeterministic events will have some quite significant consequences. It seems pretty likely that over a long enough period of time, for instance, there will be some car crashes for indeterministic causes (e.g., indeterministic effects in the brains of drivers, or quantum effects in defective engine-control electronics, or the like). Moreover, we surely shouldn't assume something false. If we accept quantum indeterminism, then strictly speaking all the stuff around is indeterministic, though it may have extremely high probability. But extremely high probability won't help those worried about whether there are non-trivial counterfactuals involving stochastic dependence.

Suppose one bites the bullet. One denies that there are any true counterfactuals about future results, but one accepts the analysis of rightness. Then one gets the result that every action is right. For no action is such that there is an action that would have better consequences, since there are not enough facts to make such a "would" true.

If we take this criticism seriously, we will either abandon consequentialism, or define rightness not in terms of what it is true to say "would happen", but in terms of expected values of actual and counterfactual outcomes. There is still a problem, though, whether it makes sense to talk of the expected values of counterfactual outcomes when one believes that there is no such thing as a "counterfactual outcome", as the typical Molinist does. One might be able to define the expected values in terms of present tendencies, but now the theory is sounding less and less like consequentialism.[note 1]