Nobody said it was easy
No one ever said it would be this hard— Coldplay, The Scientist
In the wake of Dylan Matthews’ recent piece on the cost effectiveness of rebuilding Notre Dame, I have seen many people on Twitter hand wave away the demandingness objection to utilitarianism,[1] which says that always trying to do the most good is an impossible obligation.
To redeem their version of morality from the demangingness objection, the tweeters assert that some good deeds are supererogatory, which is philosophy for “nice to do, but not obligatory.” The problem is that they do not present a reason why doing more good would ever be supererogatory, other than the implicit convenience of ducking the demandingness objection.
That convenience is not a sufficient justification. The universe made you no promise that morality would not be demanding. If your moral reasoning leads you to believe that you ought take some action, even donating your last dollar, the burden is yours to supply an additional argument why the action is supererogatory.
I think it was strategically valuable for the early growth of EA that leaders denied its demandingness, but I worry some EAs got unduly inoculated against the idea.
Until we find a principled reason to reject the demandingness objection, the best available response is still to concede the objection with grace, not to deny it.
- ^
Utilitarianism is often the target of demangingess critiques, but you can make similar arguments about other kind of ethics. Even deontologists face the same burden to provide a reason why certain kinds of actions are supererogatory.
"To redeem their version of morality from the demangingness objection, the tweeters assert that some good deeds are supererogatory, which is philosophy for “nice to do, but not obligatory.” The problem is that they do not present a reason why doing more good would ever be supererogatory, other than the implicit convenience of ducking the demandingness objection."
I think this might be addressed to me. My reasoning is at https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/28/contra-askell-on-moral-offsets/ . Other than that, I'm not sure how you get a coherent theory of obligatory vs. supererogatory.
What would it mean for a thing which nobody does (donate literally all their money beyond minimum required to live) to be obligatory? I think of "obligatory" as meaning that if someone doesn't do a thing, then we all agree to consider them a bad person. But we can't make that agreement regarding donating 100% of income beyond survival level, because we'd never stick to it - I think of the EAs who donate 50% of their income as extremely good people, I can't self-modify to not do that even if I wanted to, and I don't want to.
Without something like that, how do you distinguish "obligatory" from simply "a good thing to do" (which I and IIUC everyone in the discussion agrees that donating more is).
For what it's worth I didn't have your tweets in mind when I wrote this, but it's possible I saw them a couple weeks ago when the Discourse was happening.
Thanks for linking to the post! It satisfies most of my complaint about people not providing reasoning.
I still have some objections to it, but now I'm arguing for "there are no good reasons for certain actions to be supererogatory," which is a layer down from "I wish people would try to give reasons."
On obligatory: maybe using this word was a mistake, I used it because it's what everyone uses. If it means "blameworthy not to do," then I don't have a position. Finding the optimal schedule of blame and praise for acts of varying levels of demandingess is an empirical problem.
I meant obligatory in the sense that moral reasoning typically obligates you to take actions. When you do a bit of moral reasoning that leads you to believe that some action would be good to take, you should feel equally bound by the moral force of that reasoning, whether it implies you should donate your first dollar or your last.
Do you agree with something like "trying to apply your axiology in the real world is probably demanding"?
I basically agree with Scott. You need to ask what it even means to call something 'obligatory'. For many utilitarians (from Sidgwick to Peter Singer), they mean nothing more than what you have most reason to do. But that is not what anyone else means by the term, which (as J.S. Mill better recognized) has important connections to blameworthiness. So then the question arises why you would think that anything less than perfection was automatically deserving of blame. You might just as well claim that anything better than maximal evil is thereby deserving of praise!
For related discussion, see my posts:
And for a systematic exploration of demandingness and its limits (published in a top academic journal), see:
Thanks for the links, Richard!
See my response to Scott - I think "obligatory" might have been a distracting word choice. I'm not trying to make any claims about blame/praiseworthiness, including toward oneself for (not) acting.
The post is aimed at someone who sits down to do some moral reasoning, arrives at a conclusion that's not demanding (eg make a small donation), and feels the pull of taking that action. But when they reach a demanding conclusion (eg make a large donation), they don't think they should feel the same pull.
Fair enough - I think I agree with that. Something that I discuss a lot in my writing is that we clearly have strong moral reasons to do more good rather than less, but that an over-emphasis on 'obligation' and 'demands' can get in the way of people appreciating this. I think I'm basically channeling the same frustration that you have, but rather than denying that there is such a thing as 'supererogation', I would frame it as emphasizing that we obviously have really good reasons to do supererogatory things, and refusing to do so can even be a straightforward normative error. See, especially, What Permissibility Could Be, where I emphatically reject the "rationalist" conception of permissibility on which we have no more reason to do supererogatory acts than selfish ones.