James Dreier

To _consequentialize_ a moral theory is to construct a consequentialist version of the theory. The new theory is a ‘version’ of the old in the sense that they deliver the same deontic verdicts on actions: permissible, impermissible, required. This chapter gives some reasons for consequentializing and assesses some obstacles to completing the project consonant with those reasons. It considers the difficulties posed by theoretical verdicts of moral worth, by potential differences between theories not traceable to their ranking of outcomes, and by worries about whether reasons for action are really teleological.

This chapter deals with the concept “world-centered value” which seems to be a natural extension of some concepts that already exist in ethical theory and also seems useful for understanding some confusing ideas (about the representation of prohibition dilemmas or about apparent failures of transitivity of “better than”) in the work of other philosophers. The chapter explains that concept and employs it to explicate the confusing ideas. If the concept makes sense, and if it can be useful in understanding the ideas by placing them in the consequentialist framework, then world-centered value earns its keep and should find a place next to agent-centered and time-centered value in the ethical theorist’s toolbox.

There is a reasonably well-known objection to metanormative realism, which Christine Korsgaard calls “The Normative Question” argument. Derek Parfit has a reply to this argument, and to similar arguments from Nowell-Smith, Hare, Gibbard, and Bernard Williams, in _On What Matters_. This chapter argues that the objection is a serious one. The first section sets out several versions of the objection and Parfit’s replies. The second section provides an interpretation of the objection and formulates it in a way that shows how the replies miss the point. The third section argues that the kernel of the problem lies in the question of how reasons, motivations, and rationality are connected: the critics who pressed the objection have illuminating _explanations_ of this nexus, while Parfit’s realism apparently has none. The fourth section sketches further arguments that deepen the difficulty.

This chapter discusses whether Quasi-Realism gains any advantage over Robust Realism with respect to the problem of explaining supervenience. The chapter starts with a summary of what the supervenience problem is and recounts the history of expressivist thinking about supervenience: the supervenience problem was a challenge raised by expressivist Robust Realists, with the idea that expressivism had an excellent explanation of the phenomenon and realism had none. The chapter then contrasts Quasi-Realism and Robust Realism in order to bring the big problem out in the open, namely that Quasi-Realists have not provided any explanation at all for the phenomenon of supervenience. In this respect they are, it appears, in the same boat as Robust Realists. The chapter maps out the possible paths for Quasi-Realists to travel in pursuit of Quasi-Explananda, and gives some reasons to be optimistic. The chapter ends with a suggestive analogy and a synopsis of the state of the dialectic.

According to common wisdom in moral theory, some moral views are consequentialist and some are not. Since ‘consequentialism’ is a term of art, there is no _correct_ way to define it, but this paper assumes that a view is consequentialist iff the deontic status it assigns an act is an increasing function of the goodness it assigns the consequences. The main point of the paper is to defend an _equivalence thesis_: each plausible moral view has a consequentialist equivalent. The paper is in effect a defense of an equivalence thesis against some recent objections. The thesis has two parts: Extensional Equivalence says that each plausible moral view has a consequentialist counterpart that agrees with it on the deontic status of every act; Extensionality says that nothing but extension matters in a moral view. Together these entail that every plausible moral view is a mere notational variant of a consequentialist view.

__Contemporary Debates in Moral Theory_ features pairs of newly commissioned essays by some of the leading theorists working in the field today._ Brings together fresh debates on the most controversial issues in moral theory Questions include: Are moral requirements derived from reason? How demanding is morality? Are virtues the proper starting point for moral theorizing? Lively debate format sharply defines the issues, and paves the way for further discussion. Will serve as an accessible introduction to the major topics in contemporary moral theory, while also capturing the imagination of professional philosophers.

The chapter discusses moral nihilism and moral relativism, with some sympathy, especially to relativism. It considers some arguments for the views, some arguments against them, and some arguments designed to decide between them. Moral nihilism and moral relativism are meta-ethical theories, theories of the nature of morality. Nihilism is the view that there are no moral facts, that nothing is right or wrong, or morally good or bad. Relativism is the view that moral statements are true or false only relative to some standard or other, that things are right or wrong relative to Catholic morality, say, and different things are right or wrong relative to Confucian morality, but nothing is right or wrong simpliciter.

Amie Thomasson's Norms and Necessity offers a non-factualist theory of the language of metaphysical necessity, centering on the idea that statements of necessity express semantic norms. This article identifies a potential problem for the view by distinguishing two kinds of conditional necessity, investigates a solution derived from a well-known parallel pair of conditional necessities in deontic logic, but finds it is not up to the job. The last part of the paper suggests a different route, largely in keeping with the underlying ideas behind Thomasson's approach.

Dreier shows how the formal apparatus of decision theory is connected to some abstract issues in moral theory. He begins by explaining how to think about utility and the advice that decision theory gives us, in particular, decision theory does not assume or insist that all rational agents act in their own self-interest. Next he examines decision theory’s contributions to social contract theory, with emphasis on David Gauthier’s rationalist contractualism. Dreier’s third section considers a reinterpretation of the formal theory that decision theorists use: utility might represent goodness rather than preference. His last section discusses Harsanyi’s Theorem.

The consequentializing project relies on agentcentered value (aka agent-relative value), but many philosophers find the idea incomprehensible or incoherent. Discussions of agent-centered value often model it with a theory that assigns distinct better-than rankings of states of affairs to each agent, rather than assigning a single ranking common to all. A less popular kind of model uses a single ranking, but takes the value-bearing objects to be properties (sets of centered worlds) rather than states of affairs (sets of worlds). There are rhetorical, presentational differences between these kinds of models, but are there also structural differences? Do the two kinds of models differ in their capacity to represent normative theories? Despite an initial appearance of equivalence, the two kinds of models are different. The single ranking of properties has greater representational power; its representations contain more information. The main question I address in this article is whether this extra information is useful, in the sense that it distinguishes between normative views that we think are really different, or whether it is just junk information.

This chapter discusses whether Quasi-Realism gains any advantage over Robust Realism with respect to the problem of explaining supervenience. The chapter starts with a summary of what the supervenience problem is and recounts the history of expressivist thinking about supervenience: the supervenience problem was a challenge raised by expressivist Robust Realists, with the idea that expressivism had an excellent explanation of the phenomenon and realism had none. The chapter then contrasts Quasi-Realism and Robust Realism in order to bring the big problem out in the open, namely that Quasi-Realists have not provided any explanation at all for the phenomenon of supervenience. In this respect they are, it appears, in the same boat as Robust Realists. The chapter maps out the possible paths for Quasi-Realists to travel in pursuit of Quasi-Explananda, and gives some reasons to be optimistic. The chapter ends with a suggestive analogy and a synopsis of the state of the dialectic.

The paper describes the problem for robust moral realism of explaining the supervenience of the moral on the non-moral, and examines five objections to the argument: The moral does not supervene on the descriptive, because we may owe different obligations to duplicates. If the supervenience thesis is repaired to block, it becomes trivial and easy to explain. Supervenience is a moral doctrine and should get an explanation from within normative ethics rather than metaethics. Supervenience is a conceptual truth and should be explained by the nature of our concepts rather than by a metaphysical theory. The moral does not supervene on the descriptive, because moral principles are not metaphysically necessary. It concludes that none of these objections is successful, so Robust Realists do have an explanatory debt to worry about.