Defending Moral Options

Abstract

Shelly Kagan has produced a sustained and powerful attack on two central features of ordinary morality (the defender of which he calls the moderate) the belief in agent-relative options to give special weight to one's own interests and projects and thereby not maximally to promote the good, and the belief in agent-relative constraints against harming persons even if doing so would prevent more such harms done by others or would, more generally, maximally promote the good. The extremist, in contrast, rejects both options and constraints and believes that we are always morally required maximally to promote the good. Kagan argues that it is a combination of several fundamental features of the moderate's position that together cannot be coherently defended, but I will focus only on agent-relative options in order to suggest that the moderate at least has more resources for their defense than Kagan grants. I believe the moderate's defense of options against the extremist should to two moral notions-individual autonomy (or self-determination) and fairness. Both are important components of ordinary moral views, yet Kagan only briefly discusses autonomy (pp. 236-39) and essentially ignores fairness. We need to see how Kagan frames the problem of defending options in order to see how autonomy might play a role in their defense. Kagan argues that the moderate is committed to accepting a pro tanto reason to promote the good-meaning that a person always has a reason to perform an action if that action will maximally promote the good, though it is possible that some other moral consideration can either override that reason or keep it in particular circumstances from being morally decisive. This commitment can be seen in the stock case of a drowning child where the moderate believes that one is morally required to save the child if one can do so at little risk or to oneself. However, if the or risk to the agent of saving the child becomes great enough, the moderate holds that doing so is not morally required, even if from an objective standpoint doing so would still maximize the good. It is this appeal to cost that the moderate believes overrides the reason to promote the good, or prevents it from being morally decisive in the