Decisiones metodológicas y didácticas

According to fiduciary non-cognitivism, moral judgements about actions in what we normally take to be ‘specific’ circumstances are, in part, and presumptively, preferences for conformity to sets of norms making prescriptions about what to do in circumstances that do not fully specify the agent’s pre-trust dispositions, but which are maximally specific in all other respects. I now wish to say something about the ‘presumptively’ qualifier. This is supposed to signify that it is not a necessary feature of a moral judgement about an action in a ‘specific’ circumstance that these circumstances are dispositionally non-specific. The ‘specific’ circumstances to which such moral judgements apply may actually be as specific as the circumstances to which moralists’ preferred norms apply—that is, they may fully specify the agent’s pre-trust dispositions. If they concern what to do in circumstances of this sort, judgements permitting and requiring the same action will be identical and indistinguishable. Alternatively the relevant ‘specific circumstances’ may not be fully specific as regards pre-trust dispositions, but may still be more specific in this regard than is conventionally presumed. They may narrow down the range of dispositional circumstances of the actions they apply to, instead of being entirely silent about them.

Fiduciary non-cognitivism needs to allow this if it is to account for the diversity of our moral judgements. The prescriptions that preference utilitarians give an agent could potentially vary depending on that agent’s own preferences. On some views, whether someone is permitted or required to torture a terrorist for information about a ticking bomb might depend on whether or not the agent desires to torture the terrorist—having such a desire might make the action wrong. An accurate characterization of the dispositions that are part of the circumstances of the actions to which these judgements apply would presumably not say anything about pre-trust dispositions specifically, but it

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would presumably narrow down the possible dispositional circumstances that the parties can occupy. The torture example points toward an odd possibility, namely, that a moralist might judge that a moralist S is required to φ just in case S is pre-trust disposed to not-φ. On my account, this is not a special kind of judgement (e.g. an ‘anti- permission’ judgement); it is merely a set of requirement judgements applying to dispositional circumstances that are more fully specified than usual.

We could exhaustively describe any moralist’s voiceable preferences by talking only of the requirement and impermissibility judgements she accepts, where those judgements pertain to genuinely fully specified circumstances. Permissibility judgements are thus reducible to requirement judgements applying to genuinely fully specified circumstances. Our conceptual schemes make room for permissibility judgements as a salient category of moral judgement because this facilitates more efficient moral discourse (and perhaps moral thinking as well). Most of the time, the efficient reporting and voicing of voiceable preferences is made easier if (a) moralists all presume that the circumstances to which moral judgements explicitly apply are dispositionally non-specific, and (b) when more specific information about the dispositional circumstances to which moral judgements apply needs to be communicated, this is normally done, not by elaborating on the explicit circumstances, but by specifying that the judgement is of a certain kind, viz., a permission judgement.

Why is the information about dispositional circumstances that is communicated by specifying that a moral judgement is a permission judgement of such special interest that it warrants being communicated in this peculiar way? Relatedly, why is it relatively unusual for moralists to want to communicate any sorts of information about the dispositional circumstances of the actions to which their voiceable preferences apply, unless it is the information that they communicate by talking of permissions and permission judgements? I cannot provide an independently plausible answer these questions; all I can do is postulate and hypothesize. Accordingly, I hypothesize that the answer lies in the content of our altruistic desires. The extent to which an agent S’s φ- ing satisfies our altruistic desires does not, ordinarily and in most respects, depend on facts about the agential dispositions S has when she φs. But there is one possible feature of S’s dispositional circumstances that would be fairly likely to affect the extent to which her φ-ing satisfies our altruistic desires, viz., her having a pre-trust disposition to φ. S’s φ-ing is less likely to frustrate our altruistic desires if she does it in accordance with a pre-trust disposition than if she does it out of a desire not to violate trust. Perhaps

149 our altruistic desires are generally frustrated to some degree by instances in which trust- based obligations induce people to do otherwise than they would be disposed to do if left alone—that is, by trust-based impositions. Unfortunately this somewhat intuitively appealing suggestion would, if true, create complications that I cannot address at present, so I must leave it undeveloped.

To reiterate, I have hypothesized that altruistic desires are in many cases less well satisfied by deeds done contrary to pre-trust dispositions, and largely unaffected by the dispositional circumstances of actions in other respects. This hypothesized fact does not necessarily mean that moralists will prefer conformity to norms that disproportionately require people to perform actions that they are pre-trust disposed to perform, but whose prescriptions do not depend on pre-trust dispositions in other respects. This will only be a tendency; and considerations of simplicity will sometimes favour norms that defy this tendency. Certain altruistic desires may militate against this tendency too—for instance, the desire that people shouldn’t indulge their (pre-trust) desires to torture. But the tendency, if strong enough, would explain the special place of permission judgements among moral judgements.