Christopher Woodard: Taking Utilitarianism Seriously
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Christopher Woodard: Taking Utilitarianism Seriously Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press, 2019. ISBN: 9780198732624, $65, HbK Luke Semrau1
© Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Woodard’s Taking Utilitarianism Seriously is an ambitious work, offering, among other things, a novel account of reasons and rightness, a theory of moral rights and a related theory of justice, and a defense of democracy. It’s also measured. Much of the discussion is exploratory, and conclusions are qualified and tentative. Naturally, those with an interest in utilitarianism will find the book worthwhile. But they are, perhaps, not the target audience. Woodard’s proposal may be better understood as aimed at those who have already dismissed utilitarianism. The book serves as an invitation to reconsider its prospects. Why accept the invitation? Many regard utilitarianism as too simple, lacking the resources to account for the complexity of the moral phenomena it seeks to explain. It implies, for example, that act types, such as promise keeping, have no independent normative significance. This makes constraints hard to explain. If the view is too simple, complexity is in order. One way to complexify the theory is to incorporate agent-relative considerations into its axiology. This is not Woodard’s approach. “Taken by themselves,” he explains, “these claims about value are incredible” (p. 88). Instead, he seeks complexity in the structure of the theory. His chief innovation is the notion of pattern-based reasons. On this proposal, we have act-based reasons to causally contribute to good outcomes, just as the simple theory says. But these reasons do not exhaust the field. We also have reasons to play our parts in beneficial patterns of action. The two kinds of reason thus posited more closely fit the reasons we pre-theoretically think there are. This supplies some motivation – call it the Extensional Fit Motivation – to believe in them. The resulting account, as I shell explain, has certain charms. It, indeed, is worth taking seriously. Woodard covers a lot of ground and I won’t attempt to be comprehensive. After a brief description of the early chapters, I’ll elaborate the role of pattern-based reasons. This bit of theoretical machinery is deployed to account for moral rights, and moral rights, in turn, are deployed to explain justice. Needless to say, much hangs * Luke Semrau [email protected] 1
Georgetown University, Washington, DC, USA
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on the acceptability of such reasons. I won’t venture an all-things-considered assessment. I will, however, gesture at a problem. It is a virtue of the account that it posits the reasons we take ourselves to have. But it may also admit many more that we’d rather exclude. If so, the Extensional Fit Motivation may in fact counsel against the theory. The book is well organized. An introductory chapter clarifies what Woodard takes to be essential to utilitarianism – a commitment to consequentialism, welfarism, and sum-ranking – and acknowledges the strengths and w
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