Niveles del lenguaje.

The case of rational sadism poses a serious concern for the account on offer. A rational sadist is an agent who causes pain precisely because it is unpleasant to the sufferer, but appears to be entirely rational in all other respects, and appears to display competent mastery of the concept ‘pain’. When the victim complains that the pain is too awful to bear, the sadist replies that this is precisely the reason for inflicting the pain in the first place. The problem is that the sadist appears to take the qualitative nature of the sensation to count in favour of, rather than against, causing that sensation. On the account being developed, however, there is a conceptual connection between pain and disvalue such that the fact that someone is in pain suffices to provide reason to alleviate that pain – and we become aware of this reason by coming to understand that they are in pain. An increased capacity for empathy should make us more, rather than less, vividly aware of these reasons. But the rational sadist uses her capacity for empathy to make the pain more, rather

than less, severe.50

The term ‘rational’ is, here, problematic. Let us understand ‘rational’ in this context to mean ‘devoid of procedural irrationality’. Perhaps the sadist’s preferences are, in some sense of the word, irrational – but that is beside the point. The worry is that, on the account being given, the qualitative nature of unpleasant conscious states provides reason to avoid causing them, and these reasons are inaccessible to the rational sadist; but it was supposed to be our empathic and rational

capacities which show us that the nature of these states provides reason to avoid causing them. The rational sadist has intact empathic faculties and intact rational faculties. And if our concept of

pain (or unpleasantness) is intrinsically normative, in that it comes with attached ‘to-be- avoidedness’, then the rational sadist turns out not to be using the same concept as us.51 _That

seems implausible.

In relation to this topic, I wish to make three points. Firstly, it is question-begging to suppose that the sadist is rational in the sense of being fully responsive to all reasons present, although equally question-begging to suppose that she is not: whether or not she is fully responsive to all reasons present is precisely what is at issue here. Secondly, the question of whether or not the sadist is genuinely rational may be something of a side issue: being fully rational need not entail being responsive to all of the (agent-neutral) reasons present. It will help, here, to distinguish between two senses of rationality, one which is merely a matter of internal consistency (call this the ‘purely procedural’ conception) and one which requires responsiveness to certain reasons (the ‘substantive’ conception).52 _{The sadist, then, is fully rational in the ‘purely procedural’ sense; this}

is uncontroversial. But in the substantive sense, she fails to be fully rational, since she fails to respond to certain reasons for action. The fact that the sadist is acting consistently does not, by itself, show that there are no reasons for her to refrain from acting as she does. Thirdly, even if there is a conceptual connection between pain and disvalue, this does not entail that all agents need perceive pain as disvaluable: as with the motivational constraint discussed in Chapter Two, the connection here may be governed by a ‘necessarily, generally’ operator, such that it need only be the case that agents generally perceive pain as disvaluable.

Now it does seem that, in actual cases, empathy is dependent on performing some kind of internal modelling and re-enactment.53 _{If empathy requires simulation of others’ mental states, therefore,}

rational sadism seems less plausible. On the other hand, if attribution of mental states to others is a matter of theorising, rather than simulation, there is clear scope for rational sadism. I do not have the space here to adjudicate over the debate between simulation theory and theory theory here, however.54 I discuss the issue of empathy in more detail in Section 7.2.

As regards the issue of rationality, consider Searle’s ‘universalisation’ argument outlined above. If Searle is correct, then the sadist may open herself up to rational criticism. For if she, when in pain, believes that others have a reason to help her, then she is committed to thinking that she has

51 _{This chapter, Section 3.5.}

52 _{See Hooker & Streumer 2004. I take it that both senses of ‘rational’ are at work in common parlance.} 53 _{See e.g. Batson et al. 1987; Bavelas et al. 1987.}

a reason to help others who are relevantly situated. Of course, a particularly hard-nosed sadist may deny that others have reasons to help her; perhaps she has conditioned herself such that she does not resent being in pain, does not believe that it creates a need on her part, and so on. People like this are few and far between, if, indeed, any exist. Indeed, I suspect that a world full of such agents would be so unlike our own world that their concept of ‘pain’ would be distinct from ours. In particular, they would have to think that the unpleasant character of pain gives reason to cause it in others. This returns us to the now-familiar ‘Twin Earth’ cases which have so far been adduced in relation to internalism: if the reason for causing these states in others really is their intrinsic character, as opposed to the delight which their infliction causes to the sadist, this fact would be inexplicable.55 _{Perhaps some extrinsic reason – a desire to harm others, for instance –}

could explain the sadist’s behaviour, but not the qualitative nature of their victim’s suffering as such.

Irrespective of whether sadists can be shown to be internally inconsistent, however, I suspect that these cases are something of a side issue. This is partly because not all normative reasons need provide motivating reasons, or even be responded to by all agents. Rather, as the discussion of Chapters One and Two indicated, the epistemic and motivational constraints apply to groups of agents, rather than individuals. But even if rational sadists do exist (in the strict sense, taking there to be no intrinsic reasons to avoid promoting others’ suffering), their existence need only be troubling insofar as it is widespread. There are parallels here between practical and theoretical rationality: it is troubling for any theory of normative reasons if these reasons turn out to be epistemically inaccessible, but surely a merit for the theory if it allows that we may, on occasion, be sufficiently obtuse that we are blind to these reasons.

Suppose, further, that we could show sadists to be irrational. What would follow from this? Insofar as the sadist cares about being rational, she can thereby be brought to see that she has a reason to refrain from harming others. But she might equally delight in being inconsistent (some Zen philosophy seems to do precisely this), or simply refuse to admit that there is a reason not to be inconsistent. So again, even if there are cases where the subject is simply blind to the relevant reasons, this does not show that such reasons do not exist. Nor should we think it a constraint on our metaethical theory that we must be able to convince all persons in all contexts that they have reasons to, for instance, refrain from causing harm.

5.4. Desert

A stock objection to naive hedonism (according to which all pleasurable experiences are pro tanto valuable) is that pleasurable experiences are only valuable when they are deserved. One

might even think that pleasurable experiences are only good for their subject when they are

deserved. Kant, for instance, held this view, arguing that we fail to treat people as ends in

themselves when we fail to punish them, because in doing so we fail to give them their due. There are at least two distinct concerns here. The first is that the valence of pleasure (or whichever states the hedonist invokes) is not intrinsic, as it is conditional on an extrinsic factor (desert). The second is that desert itself may be inexplicable on any account which takes consequences to be morally fundamental. Utilitarians, for instance, have traditionally had problems accounting for the phenomenon of moral desert: for instance, if what we ought to do is purely a matter of what would maximise overall utility, then there is no room for other considerations (i.e. desert) to impact on what we ought to do.56 _{I will assume, for the sake of argument, that a moderately}

sophisticated rule-utilitarian approach – on which desert-involving practices are justified by reference to utility-maximisation, even where individual acts mandated by the practice need not themselves maximise overall utility – can deal with the second problem57_{. However, the first}

objection needs to be addressed: even if utilitarianism leaves room for the thought that we should treat people as they deserve, we still need to account for the worry that pleasure is only valuable when it is deserved.

There is one way in which pleasure might be intrinsically valuable, yet only conditionally yield reasons for action, and that is if the following analysis holds: