Naïve Practical Reasoning and the Second-Person Standpoint: Simple Reasons for Simple People?

Abstract

Much contemporary first-order moral theory revolves around the debate between consequentialists and deontologists. Depressingly, this debate often seems to come down to irresolvable first-order intuition mongering about runaway trolleys, drowning children in shallow ponds, lying to murderers at doors, and the like. Prima facie, common sense morality contains both consequentialist and deontological elements, so it may be no surprise that direct appeal to first-order intuitions tend towards stalemate. One might infer from this that we should simply embrace some sort of pluralism in the style of W.D. Ross, but there are problems with this approach too. For one thing, pluralism provides precious little guidance in hard cases. For another, there is something inherently conservative about giving Rossian pluralism any sort of default status as the correct view. If common sense morality is itself deeply mistaken in some ways (it is worth recalling what odious doctrines have historically been considered ‘‘common sense’’), then a Rossian pluralism which codifies common sense morality will codify those mistakes too. What seems to be needed is an argument for either consequentialism or deontology which does not depend so heavily on first-order moral intuitions. Such arguments have been given in the past, but without much success. Kant famously offered an a priori derivation of the moral law, but this argument is known to be open to a number of powerful objections. Thomas Nagel at one point argued for a