Weighing Moral Reasons

Abstract

Since the publication of Kurt Baier's The Moral Point of View it has been common for philosophers to speak of moral decision-making as a matter of weighing moral reasons. Unfortunately, however, the question of how weights are assigned to reasons is rarely addressed. In particular, there has been little systematic discussion of whether the weight of a moral reason is constant or whether it varies from context to context.1 Some important writers claim that the weights of moral reasons do not vary with the context, while others presuppose this position in discussions of specific moral questions. More precisely, both sets of writers are committed to the view that if a morally relevant consideration makes a difference of a certain magnitude between two otherwise identical cases, it makes a difference of the same magnitude between any two otherwise identical cases. I shall call this the Constancy Assumption, and I shall argue that it is false. I shall maintain instead that the weights of moral reasons (rules or principles) vary from context to context in certain systematic ways, and that the systematic character of these variations must be explained in teleological terms.