Memoria pionera: los y las que llegaron primero

To conclude the first part of this thesis, I want to briefly reflect on what my Kantian brand of generalism can contribute to the contemporary debate between generalists and particularists. In the introduction (sect. 1.2), I noted that the Particularist Challenge to Kantian ethics is an instance of the broader challenge that particularists mount against their generalist opponents: the challenge to devise moral principles that are both deserving of their name and suited to accommodate holism. More specifically, I pointed out that principles proper are expected to fulfil two demands, which holism seems to render incompatible: the demand to cover a determinate range of cases and the demand to play the role of guides and/or explanatory standards. By showing how the Agent-Scope Reading of Universality and the concomitant account of principles of duty dissolve the trilemma, I have already indicated how my brand of generalism meets some of these demands. Now I want to broaden the perspective further and ask the more general question of how it fares in comparison to other generalist ap- proaches.

My argument in this chapter aims to meet the challenge that particularists mount against their opponents, not to reject it, as other generalists have (e.g. McNaughton and Rawling 2000: 267, Raz 2006: 107-13). Accordingly, I have sought to dissolve the trilemma instead of embracing one of its horns, as some other Kantians have (e.g. Timmermann 2001: 65-67, Cholbi 2013: 447). Broadly speaking, generalists’ attempts to meet their opponents’ challenge fall into two categories. Some appeal to unhedged

198 _{For an illuminating discussion of how Kantians can appeal to Kant’s notion of happiness and its}

role in practical reasoning to address empty formalism concerns, see Bojanowski 2017: 4, 6, 8, and 10.

199 _{This account of contradictions in willing is, of course, evocative of Rawls’ original position (1999:}

15-19), who I think would agree with my main thesis that moral and political principles should be understood as Agent-Scope universal.

principles (see e.g. Hooker 2008: 22-3), others to various kinds of hedged principles (e.g. Lance and Little 2004, Väyrynen 2009). I touched on some of the difficulties that haunt theories of unhedged principles in ch. 2., sect. 2.3.2 and 3.3.2. Roughly speaking, such principles fulfil the demand of covering a determinate range of cases, but they do not seem suited for the role of guides or explanatory standards, partly, because they obscure the relevant features by embedding them in a host of irrelevant features. In this chapter, I have presented an account of hedged principles. The main difficulty that proponents of such accounts face is to devise a type of hedging clause that does not trivialise the principles to which it is attached. Think of the principle “Ceteris paribus, lying is impermissible”. If this principle boiled down to the claim that lying is impermissible except when it is not, then this principle, although trivially true, would be utterly useless because it would leave undetermined when lying is imper- missible and when it is permissible or obligatory, and why. As such, this principle would fail to fulfil both of the demands that proper moral principles are supposed to fulfil. Does my hedging clause fare any better?

One of the conclusions reached in the above discussion is that Kant’s principles of duty come with the hedging clause “in objectively suitable circumstances”. As I noted in sect. 3.3, one might worry that this hedging clause is empty,200 that it is one of

the hedging clauses that trivialise the principles to which they are attached. This is a worry that I tried to address by further unpacking this clause. First, I pointed out that the objective suitability of circumstances is determined by our shared understanding of the deontic concept that the relevant principle contains. Consider the principle “In objectively suitable circumstances, lying is impermissible”, and how it applies in the Murderer at the Door case. Whether the circumstances in this case are objectively suita- ble, and thus whether this lie is impermissible, depends on whether it is part of our shared understanding of the concept of a lie that the addressee’s intention to use the information provided to murder an innocent victim functions as a defeater: whether it makes lying permissible or obligatory. This is a first step, but, as I acknowledged in sect. 3.3, it is not enough to fully address the emptiness concern. More substantive constraints are required. I therefore added the following second point. In order to determine whether treating a given feature as a defeater is warranted by our shared

200 _{We discussed this in the context of Hegel’s Empty Formalism Objection in sect. 3.3 above; see, in}

understanding of the deontic concept in question, I need to ask myself, first of all, whether, if all parties involved shared this understanding of the relevant concept, my envisaged action or interaction could be successful or whether I am presupposing a pseudo-concept (contradiction in conception). If my action does not presuppose that my own understanding of the relevant concept diverges from that of others, then I need to ask a more intricate question: could a community of finite agents like us, with our needs and limitations, choose this concept, so understood, to organise their lives together, or is the fact that this concept and this understanding of it is indeed ours a result of the fact that this concept was not chosen or developed together, that it evolved under the influence of power structures, say? (contradiction in willing). For if it is a result of the fact that this concept was not chosen or developed together, then the purportedly shared understanding of it is not truly shared.

Once the hedging clause “in objectively suitable circumstances” is unpacked in this way, it becomes apparent that it is not empty: that, although the list of defeaters that this hedging clause admits is open-ended and subject to ongoing negotiations,201

it does provide some guidance on how to conduct these negotiations, how to identify defeaters, and how to determine the range of cases in which a given principle of duty is valid.202 As a result, the principles of duty to which this clause is attached are suited

to play their role in explanations and to serve as guides. What my argument has also shown, however, is that explaining and guiding are not the only and not the primary

201 _{I think it is the wish to acknowledge this open-endedness, the de facto impossibility of compiling a}

complete list of defeaters, that leads McDowell to argue that the knowledge of the virtuous person is uncodifiable (1998: 57-65). He does not mean to say that, in morally deliberating, or explaining and justifying our actions to each other, we aren’t guided by the thought that we share an understanding of the deontic import of features that could, in principle, be codified as well as articulated. In short, he isn’t saying that principles don’t have any role to play at all or that we can make sense of a given moral situation without referring to others, as Dancy takes him to be saying, when he presents McDowell as the main source of inspiration for his particularism (e.g. in his 1993: xii, 79-80).

202 _{My account of hedged principles can be understood as an instance of the broader framework or}

theory of hedged principles put forward by Pekka Väyrynen (2009). Väyrynen shows that, if we hedge moral principles by reference to so-called normative bases, then they will satisfy the two demands on principles outlined above. They will cover a determinate range of cases and they will be able to serve as explanatory standards. Väyrynen defines a normative basis as the factor because of which a given feature has a normative import and which explains that normative import (2009: 96). Let us assume, for example, that the normative basis of the deontic import of lying is that it destroys trust. If this is so, we can hedge the principle “Lying is impermissible” by adding the clause “unless the lie does not destroy trust”. Väyrynen points out that normative bases need not be features with the same deontic import on a higher level (e.g., higher-order reasons or wrong-makers) (2009: 101-2), and he notes that such bases might be able to contribute to explanations even if they are purely formal (2009: 117). If this is so, then my hedging clause fits the bill.

functions of Kantian principles of duty (see introduction, sect. 1.1). Their primary role is much more basic: qua constituents of concepts, they first enable us to think about and act in a shared objective world.

PART TWO

In the following chapters, I will argue that the Agent-Scope Reading of Universality can strengthen the position of Kantians in two contemporary debates: the debate concerning the so-called Problem of Relevant Descriptions (ch. 4) and the debate between Humean and Kantian Constructivists (ch. 5). In each case, I will begin the discussion without presupposing any of the conclusions reached in ch. 1-3, and show how Kantians run into problems without them. Then, towards the end, I will present the Agent-Scope Reading as a solution.

Chapter 4

A Kantian Standard of Moral Relevance?

Dissolving The Problem of Relevant Descriptions