Reasons and the Good – Roger Crisp

In his new book, Roger Crisp takes two steps back and one step forwards. In order to answer certain fundamental questions in ethics, Reasons and the Good creates an original mix of provocative views which most others have abandoned long ago. Crisp defends these views bravely against the philosophical currents that have run against them. His case for them remains inconclusive, but he manages to make them serious contenders again in the main debates of ethics.

Crisp's style is admirably lucid. I have only two minor complaints. First, even though he explicitly endorses constructive philosophical debate (p. 95), many of the defenders of the conflicting views are straw men. As a result, we do not always get to the heart of the interesting philosophical issues. Instead, the undeveloped ‘opponents’ are occasionally dismissed with rhetorical questions, straight denials and accusations of question‐begging. Secondly, even though conciseness is a virtue, this book is at places too concise. Many of the crucial arguments, replies to objections and refinements of views are presented in the space of just a few sentences. This makes their assessment rather difficult. Given the shortness of the book, there would have been room for explaining the insights more patiently for the reader.

In the following, I shall briefly reconstruct the main argument of the book in a slightly different order of presentation. I shall finish by raising my main worries about the philosophical methodology on which the theory rests.

At the heart of the book lies hedonism in the theory of well‐being (ch. 4). According to this view, something is good for individuals only in so far as it increases their balance of enjoyment over suffering. A pluralist view of enjoyment is then added. There are qualitatively different determinate experiences of enjoyment which are unified on the determinable level of being enjoyable by the shared physiological processes that realize these experiences. Hedonism does not lead to ‘a philosophy of swine’, because enjoyment can be of non‐physical things, and for most people this is where the greatest enjoyments are. Crisp admits that we do not agree with hedonism that life in a Nozickian ‘experience machine’ would be as good for the agent as a phenomenologically identical life in the real world. However, he advises us to ignore this intuition, because there is a non‐rational evolutionary and social explanation of why we have it.

The next step is to argue that we know for certain that if the results of an act are good for an individual A, this provides an ultimate pro tanto reason for A to do the act (ch. 3). The more enjoyment an act creates for A, the more A has reason to do it. If we master the relevant concepts and understand the proposition expressed by this universal principle, our rational intuition can directly grasp its truth a priori. Our grasp of the truth of this principle, furthermore, justifies our belief in it. Crisp goes so far as to say that the falsehood of this self‐interest principle is inconceivable. Disagreement can only follow from misunderstandings or prior commitments to allegedly implausible theories like particularism.

What we then have is certainty about our ultimate normative reasons, which are grounded on our well‐being. According to this welfarist view, all other reasons are derivative from these basic reasons. We are next given a realist account of these ultimate normative reasons (ch. 2). Practical reasons are properties of actions that count in favour of them. Furthermore, it is a fact that conduciveness to the agent's well‐being objectively favours the act. Contrary to many popular views, then, what reasons there are is independent of our motivations, and our beliefs about reasons are motivationally inert. In addition, reasons are conceptually independent both of the deliberative justification for choosing an act and of the value of the choices.

Finally, Crisp's argument extends in two directions concerning morality, positive and negative. The positive line defends the idea that what is good for agents, our enjoyment, is not the only thing that gives us ultimate reasons to act: the well‐being of others also provides some reasons for us (ch. 5). Thus the fundamental question of ethics, what reasons we have, must be answered by comparing the self‐interested egoistic reasons and the impartial altruistic reasons we have for maximizing the general well‐being. In the case of the latter reasons, some priority should be given for advancing the well‐being of those who fall below a certain threshold (ch. 6).

The negative line of argument is against the idea that morality in itself would be reason‐providing (ch. 1). The more developed part of this argument concerns so‐called positive morality. It is plausible that the mere fact that some acts are agreed to be wrong, right, cruel or kind could provide us with ultimate reasons. The more controversial part is Crisp's campaign against the common sense intuition that if some acts actually were wrong, right, cruel or kind, then we would have good reasons to do and avoid doing them just on that basis. That acts may have such properties is identified with their being forbidden (or required) by special principles. It is then denied that being forbidden by any principles could be reason‐providing beyond whatever reasons already exist for having the forbidding principles. As we therefore do not need moral terms for stating our ultimate reasons, such things as pure moral reasons are a mere illusion of common sense morality for which a debunking evolutionary explanation can be given. This does not mean that we do not have reasons to act in moral ways. We have the reasons when our acting morally is enjoyable for ourselves and others.

Many of Crisp's arguments and views will deserve detailed critical examination and further positive development. They are bound to create controversy. For reasons of space, I can express only my main methodological worries about the project. Crisp divides our practical intuitions into two completely distinct categories, common sense moral intuitions, and rational intuitions about welfare‐based ultimate reasons. That we have the former intuitions can be explained by evolution. After we become aware of the contingent genealogical background of our moral commitments, we realize that they cannot provide knowledge of how the world is in the respects about which morality wishes to speak. By contrast, our rational intuitions are supposed to be based on the direct access of the mind's eye (i.e., of reason) to normative reality.

Such a radical difference between these two sets of intuitions is rather hard to accept. First, the biological evolutionary advantages of modern moral beliefs for the hunter‐gatherer societies are hypothetical. If these beliefs are instead a result of social development, then it is hard to believe that they are a result of blind non‐rational processes. Much of the moral development of our moral community seems to have resulted from rational moral argument and debate. Also, as Sharon Street has argued, if there is a good evolutionary explanation for any normative belief, there is one for our conviction that for each of us, our own individual well‐being is reason‐providing. The evolutionary advantages of having this belief are obvious, and thus it is likely that it is biologically imprinted in us. Hence this dilemma faces Crisp: either it is otiose to appeal to reason‐facts to support the belief that individual well‐being is reason‐providing, since this is a belief which we are unable to give up anyway; or else the fact that a given normative belief has an evolutionary origin which explains it is unable to undermine that belief's credentials.

I also worry about how Crisp's intuitionist epistemology can be squared with his metaphysical realism about reasons. A popular thought is that realism about a given discourse makes truth in that discourse a semantic relation of correspondence between the propositions we entertain in thought and how things are in the world. Thus the truth of a belief depends on its content, i.e., the believed proposition, and on whether the world does its part to match that content. Crisp explicitly accepts this robust notion of truth in his defence of substantive realism (pp. 52–3). According to his view, claims about reasons are made true by independent ‘intrinsically normative entities’ – facts about reasons.

In this sort of realist framework, how would one spell out Crisp's claim that just by reflecting on certain propositions we can grasp their truth? Apparently this claim would mean that just by reflecting on the content of any such proposition, reason could provide a ‘sideways on’ perspective of the relation between the proposition in the mind and how things are in the external world. This is mysterious. Since the days of Crisp's heroes, there have been attempts to solve this difficulty, either by providing causal stories about how the relevant belief‐forming mechanisms are reliably in touch with the given facts, or by making the facts of the discourse less real and less independently ‘out there’. The latter anti‐realist move can be made either by grounding the facts on the meaning of the terms or by making the facts projections of our cognitive or non‐cognitive responses, or shadows of the satisfaction of the epistemic norms of assertion in the given discourse. It is disappointing that Crisp does not address these issues; they are central to his project.

Universities of Reading, Helsinki and North Carolina at Chapel Hill