Tradeoffs Among Reasons for Action

Abstract

Lexical rules are rules for decision making that give one type of consideration absolute priority over another, e.g., life over money. At the normative level | the level of reasoning designed for people with perfect self-control and unlimited time for reection | there is no good justication for lexical rules. Whenever we are tempted to say that (for example) life is always more important than money, we can imagine a situation in which a tiny probability of loss of life is pitted against a great gain in money for a great many people. Arguments for lexical rules at the prescriptive level | the level appropriate for real people to teach to their children | may be made, but these arguments are often weaker than they rst appear to be. Hence, ‘simple moral systems,’ moral codes based primarily on lexical prohibitions, are fallacious. These arguments may expose other fallacies in everyday moral codes as well, such as reliance on distinctions between omission and commission. A prescriptive theory is proposed that is closer to the normative one. A funny thing happened to me at a workshop given by Professor Lawrence Kohlberg about moral thinking. Kohlberg presented his classic dilemma (e.g., Kohlberg, 1970) about whether a husband should steal a drug in order to save his wife's life. When Kohlberg asked how many thought that the husband should steal the drug, almost all hands went up, including mine. The next question was, roughly, `How many think that a person would be wrong to think that the husband should not steal the drug?' To my surprise, my hand was one of the few not to go up. I wondered why not. Was I really a closet relativist (or subjectivist)? Was I the one who was wrong? This paper is the result of that wondering.