How to be a deontic buck-passer
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How to be a deontic buck-passer Euan K. H. Metz1
The Author(s) 2019
Abstract Deontic, as opposed to evaluative buck-passing theories seem to be easier to accept, since there appears to be an intimate connection between deontic properties, such as ‘ought’, ‘requirement’, and ‘permission’ on the one hand, and normative reasons on the other. However, it is far from obvious what, precisely, the connection consists in, and this topic has suffered from a paucity of discussion. This paper seeks to address that paucity by providing a novel deontic buck-passing view, one that avoids the pitfalls both of the most straightforward view on the matter (what I call the ‘‘standard view’’) as well as a recently articulated view, due to Matt Bedke. It does so by appealing first to the distinction between a reason for, and a reason against, and uses this distinction to clarify what are taken to be two fundamental, but distinct, deontic properties—ought and requirement. The resulting view allows us to capture these properties, the structural relations between them, and does so in a way that avoids making supererogation impossible. Keywords Deontic properties Reasons Normative Normativity Buck-passing Requirements Oughts
1 Introduction Recent work on normativity has seen an interest in extending the much-discussed buck-passing analysis of evaluative properties (such as good, bad, better, worse) to deontic properties (such as ought, permissible, required). According to a commonly expressed view, the all-in deontic property ought can be given the following analysis: & Euan K. H. Metz [email protected] 1
Open University, Milton Keynes, UK
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E. K. H. Metz
Standard view
A ought to U if, and only if, A has most reason to U, where to have most reason to U is for the reasons which favour A’s Uing to be stronger than the reasons against A’s U-ing
There are two important objections to the standard view. The first objection is that the standard view appears to make supererogation impossible. Suppose that it is supererogatory for A to give almost all of her annual income to charities providing aid to starving people. That is, although she would be praiseworthy if she did that, it is false that she ought to do it. Doing so would be ‘above and beyond the call of duty’. Given a typical way of understanding normative reasons, if the suffering of those that could be saved by A provides her with a reason to donate, then the greater the extent of that suffering, the weightier the reason she has. Thus, it is possible to imagine that this reason is strong enough to outweigh any other reasons that A has. But if there can be a case in which A has most reason to donate almost all of her income to the charity, according to the standard view, she therefore ought to donate almost all of her income. But it is plausible that if anything is a supererogatory act, donating almost all of one’s income to charity is a supererogatory act. Thus, the standard view is false because it falsely implies that A’s donating almost all their income to char
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