En el campo: al lado del fogón con ovejeros y visiones

The reductio argument against the view that “there is no problem left to solve” that I presented in the previous section invites a response. My opponent may grant that subjectivizing Kant’s ethics is an inadequate way of dealing with the problem, but still maintain that no additional stipulations are needed. All that is needed to solve the problem, they may argue, is a conditional restatement of the Formula of Univer- sal Law, according to which the latter determines the deontic status of an action if and only if the action is based on a maxim that matches the circumstances. This pro- posal assumes that the Problem of Relevant Descriptions arises from the possibility of epistemic failure in the contemporary sense of the term. In what follows, I argue that this conception of the problem overlooks an important distinction between two ways in which one may fail to choose a relevant description, thus making it impossi- ble to account for the core instances of such failure.

We find an example of such a conflation in O’Neill’s early work. In sect. 2.3 above, I argued against those who deny the possibility of acting under irrelevant de- scriptions altogether. O’Neill admits this possibility, but, as a proponent of the sub- jectivizing move, she treats it as deontically insignificant.234 Let us consider how

O’Neill explains the occurrence of actions performed under descriptions that are

233 _{Recall that this is Herman’s objection to the view that the Categorical Imperative is an algorithm}

for moral deliberation: that, if it was, there would be no way of ensuring that the resulting judgments take account of all and only the morally relevant features of the case. For this reason, she aims to develop an account of moral deliberation on which the classification of features as morally relevant is regulated. See ch. 2, sect. 3.1.

234 _{On this point see sect. 2.3 and O’Neill 2013: 230. O’Neill does not distinguish between approaches}

that take Anscombe to be worried about what an agent’s maxim is and those that take her to be wor- ried about what it ought to be; instead she treats the two worries as different aspects of the problem. For the former aspect see, in particular, 2013: 106-10 and 1989: 83-9; for the latter 2013: 223-32 and 246- 77.

irrelevant from the “bird’s-eye point of view” (O’Neill 2013: 257). She lists three types of error that can afflict agents when they are forming their maxims of action: self-deception, ignorance, and bias (O’Neill 2013: 225-30). In sect. 2.2, I showed that the first type is not a genuine instance of the problem at all,235 so we can focus on the

latter two. O’Neill treats them both as corollaries of the pervasive epistemic limita- tions that affect human agents in decision situations. In doing so, however, she ne- glects a key difference between them, which bears on the prospects of resolving dis- agreements about whether a description is relevant or not.

Recall the Grandmother example. If you stayed on the bench playing the guitar, thereby ignoring a promise that you made to your grandmother, it would be rather odd for you to reply to your friend’s why-question in the way you did (“I was practic- ing in order to develop my guitar skills”) unless the promise had completely slipped your mind. Let us assume that this was the case. Now imagine your friend were to point out to you that you had made that promise. Naturally you would spring to your feet and get going. In instances of inadvertent ignorance, instances where an agent fails to remember or notice something or where they draw a false conclusion, disa- greements about the relevance of their description are usually easy to resolve. There is, at any rate, a truth of the matter, visible from the bird’s-eye point of view, on which the parties to the disagreement can converge.236 Now recall the Asylum

2 cases. Of officer A we cannot say that he inadvertently ignored the fact that he was facing a distressed victim of sexual persecution (they spoke face to face, he could not have deemed the ground she appealed to invalid if he wasn’t aware of it, etc.). If the de- scription under which he acted seems irrelevant to us, then this is because we regard the above fact as morally relevant and he does not. We may want to accuse him of being biased, but how could we justify this accusation? How would we go about re- solving such a disagreement? An advocate of Kant’s Formula of Universal Law seems forced to say that this kind of disagreement, unlike the first one, is potentially intractable, because there is no standard of moral relevance prior to the universalisa-

235 _{Self-deception, in the sense emphasized by Kant, is usually taken to lead to a mismatch between}

the maxim one is actually acting on (perhaps the fundamental maxim one is acting on, see fn. 225) and the maxim that one takes oneself to be acting on, not a mismatch between maxim and circumstances. Accordingly, self-deception and the errors that are pertinent here operate on different levels. This is not to deny that they can go hand in hand. In fact, the former often helps to sustain the latter.

236 _{The assumption that in cases of ideally informed factual disagreement normal methods of rational}

bility requirement (no “stipulations”) that the parties to the disagreement could ap- peal to, even if they were to take up the bird’s-eye viewpoint.237 There seems to be no

objectively relevant description that represents the situation as it really is, morally speaking, and thus no possibility of getting it wrong.

Instead of properly appreciating the difference between these two varieties of er- ror, O’Neill contradicts herself by claiming both that there is a meaningful distinction between relevant and irrelevant descriptions and that “Kant’s theory of right does not provide any method for determining the relevant ... act description under which to assess an act when we take the bird’s-eye point of view” (O’Neill 2013: 257). What she should have said is that there is a distinction between epistemic failure and suc- cess, between getting the facts right and getting them wrong, but that, for a Kantian, there is no (or does not seem to be)238 any meaningful distinction between correct

and incorrect claims concerning the moral relevance of facts. But given that some mismatches between maxims and circumstances do result from epistemic failure, one may wonder why the conception that we considered here is a misconception rather than a partially correct conception.