Cohen on Rescuing Justice from the Facts (ch.6)

by Jon Mandle on March 19, 2009

Part I of Rescuing Justice and Equality consisted in a series of chapters designed to rescue equality from the arguments of Rawlsians who sought to dilute an underlying egalitarian commitment with the incentives argument, the Pareto argument, the restricted focus on the basic structure, and then the difference principle itself. In each case, the structure of the argument was a kind of imminent critique. As far as I recall, Cohen nowhere directly defended the egalitarian commitment itself. Rather, he pointed to alleged tensions in the Rawlsian edifice and submitted that they should be resolved in the direction of greater egalitarianism than Rawls’s position recommends.

Part II aims to rescue the concept of justice itself, and the argument is structured very differently. The critique does not proceed from tensions within Rawls’s work. Rather, we get an argument in defense of a certain meta-ethical position. Cohen remarks that “the meta-ethical literature says very little about the question pursued in the present chapter. But a notable exception is the work of John Rawls, who argued that fundamental principles of justice and, indeed, ‘first principles’ in general, are a response to the facts of the human condition” – which is exactly the position that Cohen rejects. (pp.258-259) Rawls is simply mistaken, Cohen thinks, because he confuses “the first principles of justice with the principles that we should adopt to regulate society.” (p.265)

First, definitions. A “principle” is “a general directive that tells agents what (they ought, or ought not) to do.” (p.229) And a “fact is, or corresponds to, any truth other than (if any principles are truths) a principle, of a kind that someone might reasonably think supports a principle.” (p.229) (Cohen recognizes a distinct sense of “fact” that might be suggested by the phrase “the moral facts,” but the meta-ethical question that this possibility raises is not his concern.)

Next, the thesis – “a principle can respond to (that is, be grounded in) a fact only because it is also a response to a more ultimate principle that is not a response to a fact: accordingly, if principles respond to facts, then the principles at the summit of our conviction are grounded in no facts whatsoever.” (p.229) Cohen is apparently using “respond to” and “grounded in” synonymously – and later he uses “grounds for affirming,” “reflects,” “represents a reason to endorse,” and “justifies” in similar ways. Cohen claims that his thesis applies “to anyone’s principles, be they correct or not, so long as she has a clear grasp both of what her principles are and of why she holds them.” (p.233)

And then the argument, which contains three premises:
1. “whenever a fact F confers support on a principle P, there is an explanation why F supports P, an explanation of how, that is, F represents a reason to endorse P. That first premise rests upon the more general claim that there is always an explanation why any ground grounds what it grounds.” This general claim, Cohen says, is “self-evidently true.” (p.236)
2. “the explanation whose existence is affirmed by the first premise invokes or implies a more ultimate principle, commitment to which would survive denial of F, a more ultimate principle that explains why F supports P.” (p.236) Cohen challenges anyone who denies this to “provide an example in which a credible and satisfying explanation of why some F supports some P invokes or implies no such more ultimate principle.” (p.236)
3. the process of citing more ultimate principles in the second premise cannot continue indefinitely. Cohen believes it is simply “implausible that a credible interrogation of that form might go on indefinitely.” Furthermore, such a process would require “something like an infinite nesting of principles, and few will think that there exist a relevantly infinite number of principles.” And finally, if such an infinite sequence were necessary to justify some fact-based principle, this would imply that the anyone affirming the fact-based principle did not have “a clear grasp of what her principles are and of why she holds them.” (p.237)

Hence, the conclusion: “every fact-sensitive principle reflects a fact-insensitive principle.” (p.237)

The picture is supposed to be something like this: Suppose we endorse a principle only on the assumption that certain factual conditions hold – say, assumptions about human nature or about natural or social circumstances. There is an explanation as to why these factual conditions are relevant, and the explanation is going to invoke another more general principle that is not dependent on those conditions holding. Repeating this procedure, we will eventually reach a principle that is not conditional on any factual assumptions at all – it is fully general in that sense. Although Cohen says that the more general principles explain why the facts are relevant, it seems to me that they also justify the more specific, conditional principles (in conditions where the relevant facts obtain). The issue is confused by talk of factual conditions themselves justifying principles. (That’s what calls for explanation, according to Cohen.) The correct question should not be why some fact justifies some principle, but why some principle is justified when some fact obtains. And when we ask that question, it becomes more clear that Cohen has an unduly narrow understanding of justification. This may also be revealed by his use of “grounding,” “reflects,” etc. as synonyms for “justifies.” What seems to be excluded is some kind of process of reflective equilibrium, in which justification goes not only from more general to more specific, but potentially in either direction. (See note 19 on p.243.) Perhaps Cohen holds that such a justification would not be sufficiently “satisfying.”

The reason this matters for Cohen, I think it is safe to say, is because it allows him to distinguish “fundamental principles” from “rules of regulation.” I think the next two chapters will be better places to discuss this distinction, but here I’ll just record what he says about the distinction and make one comment. A rule of regulation is “a certain type of social instrument, to be legislated and implemented whether by government itself or within social consciousness and practice. A rule of regulation is ‘a device for having certain effects,’ [quoting Nozick] which we adopt or not, in the light of an evaluation, precisely, of its likely effects, and, therefore, in the light of an understanding of the facts. And we evaluate those effects, and thereby decide which fact-bound principles to adopt, by reference to principles that are not devices for achieving effects but statements of our more ultimate and fact-free convictions [i.e., fundamental principles].” (p.265) (Elsewhere, e.g. p.21, he says that rules of regulation can be responsive to values other than justice.) My comment is simply this: given this characterization, the rules of regulation are not simply fact-dependent (non-ultimate) principles. And fundamental principles are not simply maximally general (non-fact-dependent) rules of regulation.

One reason this distinction is important is that Cohen thinks that philosophers should be especially concerned to identify fundamental principles. He complains that there has been “insufficient effort to identify” fact-free principles (p.269), and that “the question for political philosophy is not what we should do but what we should think, even when what we should think makes no practical difference.” (p.268) This may seem somewhat peculiar since a principle is practical by definition – it’s “a general directive that tells agents what (they ought, or ought not) to do.” (p.229) His point, I think, is that philosophy should still be concerned to distinguish between principles that differ in their recommendations only under circumstances that do not and will not obtain. The choice between two such principles makes no “practical difference” but is still important for philosophers. It is only when we know what our principles recommend under all conceivable factual circumstances that we will fully understand them.

But if Cohen wants us to focus on ultimate principles, how does he think they should be justified? Officially, he remains agnostic. He specifically rejects the implication that “ultimate principles cannot themselves be justified.” (p.238) He believes he is only committed to the claim that “ultimate principles cannot be justified by facts.” (p.238) But facts are anything other than principles. So if principles are not justified by facts, they can only be justified by other principles. And ultimate principles must somehow be self-justifying or not justified at all. Rawls’s characterization of this position as a form of “rational intuitionism” seems appropriate.

An alternative model of justification, I suggested above, is some kind of reflective equilibrium. If that’s right, then justification proceeds from where our considered judgments are most secure. And as Cohen recognizes, our most secure moral judgments are fact-dependent: “it is, for example, bewildering to try to say what principles we would affirm for beings who were otherwise like us as we are in our adult state but whose normal life spans occupied only twenty-four hours…” (p.246) Yes, that is bewildering. I suppose that if pressed, I might concede that we don’t fully understand the concept of justice until we know what it would require for beings such as that – and for all other conceivable beings in all conceivable circumstances. But there are still plenty of things that we – or at least I – don’t understand about justice for beings like us in circumstances like those that we face. And I’m quite confident that our prospects for improving our understanding of justice are greater when we make certain factual assumptions, even if doing so postpones the question of justice in its full generality.

{ 44 comments }

1

Paul 03.19.09 at 4:30 pm

“Rescuring” justice – please check your copy ! :-) [fixed – ed]

2

Jeff R. 03.19.09 at 6:19 pm

What struck me most in this chapter is the failure to go to what is (to me) the obvious next step. Luck-egalitarianism is (at least as a practical level) fact-dependent; premised on the fact that positional and genetic advantages are morally arbitrary. But we can easily (and cultures have, in fact) conceive of an alternative to that fact.

Consider another set of persons mostly like us, built in a lab or simulated by AIs in a matrix or whatever, with the difference being that these persons reincarnate with a strict adherence to a karmic law, such that all positional advantage and talent differential is not at all morally arbitrary. My strong suspicion is that Cohen would still think that an egalitarian society is the one that they should adopt, making me think that there is in fact a more ultimate principle informing his position that I would have liked to have seen stated…

3

Tom Hurka 03.19.09 at 9:51 pm

I read Cohen’s original ‘Facts and Principles’ article; though I haven’t read the book chapter I hope that’s enough to let me comment.

I think immense problems are caused in this post by the word ‘justify,’ which blurs the distinction between what used to be called the context of explanation and the context of discovery. The law of gravitational attraction *explains* why a ball thrown up in the air falls to earth, but we *discover* that the law’s true by seeing that it fits observations such as that balls fall to earth. Aristotle used to ask whether we’re on the way to or from first principles, and something that’s at the end of a journey from a principle, because it’s explained by it, can be at the start of the journey to the principle, because it’s part of our evidence for it.

Though I admit Cohen’s language isn’t entirely clear, I think his main argument (with premises 1-3 above) is only about explanation. He argues that the ultimate explanation why a normative principle is true is never that it responds to certain facts; ultimate normative principles are underivative, in the sense that there’s no deeper explanation of why they’re true.

And this implies nothing at all about methods of discovery, and in particular does nothing to exclude reflective equilibrium methods of arriving at moral principles. Just as the fact that there’s no deeper explanation of why gravity holds doesn’t stop us from discovering that it holds by reasoning from observations, so the fact that certain normative principles are underivatively true doesn’t stop us from counting it as evidence for them that they fit our particular moral judgements.

In fact lots of moral philosophers have held this view and even Rawls recognizes the possibility, since he both calls Sidgwick a rational intuitionist and holds that Sidgwick argued for his principles in part on the ground that they cohere with common-sense morality.

So if Jon’s suggestion is that Cohen’s problem is that his view excludes reflective equilibrium, I don’t see it. Read charitably, Cohen’s argument allows as much reflective equilibrium as you want.

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Pete 03.19.09 at 11:13 pm

Tom, I’m not sure that the law of gravity does much explaining of anything. I think that causal explanation has more to do with identifying robust causal mechanisms than with identifying so-called laws of nature (but this is the anti-Humean in me). Cohen’s view, as you present it, sounds to me kind of like a moral version of this deductive nomological account of causal explanation, where explanation involves deduction of particular events from general laws. The claim that this is the best or sole form of explanation has been quite discredited in philosophy of science, and I think is on its way out in philosophy of mind as well. Perhaps ethics is its last bastion. I’d like to see us get rid of it, too.

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Chris Bertram 03.20.09 at 8:49 am

This is one of those discussions where each side thinks their view just obviously correct, and can’t see how anyone could even be tempted by the other!

I think Tom gets it basically right, but I think Pete’s reply goes off on an unhelpful tangent.

There’s the way the world _is_ and the way we find out about it. Ultimate principles of justice are part of the way the world is, reflective equilibrium is a method of finding out about justice. That’s the distinction here.

Contra Cohen, I suppose Rawlsians are going to want to say that principles of justice, even ultimate ones, are just things we _make_ rather than _discover_, and that RE is part of the means to their construction.

6

Pete 03.20.09 at 3:17 pm

I started thinking about an analogy between models of causal systems in causal explanation and… something in the explanation of moral principles, but the more I thought about it the less sense it made.

So I’ll try a different tack. I’m not sure that I’m clear on the relationship between explanation and justification for Cohen. Let’s say that we both accept a principle A. If I give you an explanation of how principle B, in circumstances C, follows from principle A, I think that I have given a justification to you of principle B (in circumstances C). What I think distinguishes my view from Cohen’s is that I think this argument form can work both if A is a more or if it is a less fact-dependent principle than B. I can explain my commitments against slavery and exploitation on the basis of my commitment to moral equality, and I can explain my commitment to equality on the basis of my rejection of slavery and exploitation; in either case, assuming the commitments I started from were shared by my interlocutor, I believe I have given a justification.

I’m not confident that the ultimate principle of justice are part of the way the world is. I can’t find them in the world in the way that I find out that gravity compels things to fall, or that my cat is black. But it isn’t just because these principles are made rather than discovered. While I have some idea what this distinction amounts to with respect to the empirical, I’m actually just not sure what to make of the distinction between made and discovered in the normative sphere. So, I think that the source of moral norms are the norms implicit in practical reasoning. But I have no idea whether they are made or discovered: they are in one sense products of reasoning (made?), but at the same time they just are the norms of my reason (discovered?). So do I create them or discover them? Others, of course, will just reject this view of morality (I don’t think the view is obviously or self-evidently correct, but I have come to believe that something like this is correct).

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Jon Mandle 03.20.09 at 3:32 pm

I don’t see where I say anything at all about making v. discovering moral principles. I talked about justifying them – giving reasons to believe them. Justifications (and reasons) can be good or bad, so I certainly don’t think that moral principles are whatever we happen to think they are – we don’t make them in that sense. But I don’t see the relevance to the present concern.

Neither Cohen nor I are talking about “explanation” in the sense of psychological or causal mechanisms of belief formation. Tom suggests (#3) that what Cohen wants to say is that “the ultimate explanation why a normative principle is true is never that it responds to certain facts; ultimate normative principles are underivative, in the sense that there’s no deeper explanation of why they’re true.” Like Pete (#6), I don’t understand the kind of “explanation” that is at issue here if it’s supposed to be something other than justification. If I wanted to give an account of what explains why some normative principle is true, I would say various things to try to justify my belief in that principle. Alternatively, I might try to show why it is appropriate to use the word “true” to describe moral principles in the first place – the semantics of “true” in a moral context or something – but this isn’t Cohen’s concern, either. So how is an explanation of the truth of P something other than a justification of (believing that) P? (Actually, it’s not quite right that Cohen is interested in the explanation for why a principle is true. He says that he is interested in the explanation of why a fact justifies a principle. But I think his position can be restated in the way that Tom does.)

Cohen advocates pursuing a certain path in political philosophy – he thinks we should spend more time trying to “identify” fundamental principles. I assume he means that we should be trying to identify the true ones – the one’s that we should accept and endorse. We do that by considering the reasons for and against various proposals. That is, we try to justify them. But I argued (against his denial) that his account makes such justification impossible. Either the justification will depend on another principle, in which case it is not fundamental. Or it will depend on a fact, in which case, the main argument of the chapter establishes that there is another principle that explains why that fact justifies the principle – which again isn’t fundamental.

When Cohen claims agnosticism on the possibility of justifying ultimate principles, he gives some possibilities that are supposed to be compatible with his position (p.238). Fundamental principles might be “self-evidently true” or “require no grounds” or “not be objects of belief at all.” I take these to be various ways of denying that there can be any justification of fundamental principles. Suppose someone says that we should endorse a fundamental principle because it elicits an emotion in all or in most people – or just in me. Or because we would have some disposition under certain idealized circumstances. All of these are (purported) facts, according to Cohen. So there must be an explanation of why these facts justify the principle, which turns out not to be fundamental after all.

I admit to not understanding Cohen’s attitude toward reflective equilibrium, and I’m surprised he doesn’t discuss it more. I referenced, but didn’t discuss, Cohen’s note 19 on p.243. In that note he says: “Nor need I deny that, to employ Geoffrey Sayre-McCord’s description of the ‘method of reflective equilibrium,’ ‘the process of developing an acceptable moral theory is a matter of shifting back and forth among the various moral judgments one is initially inclined to make and the more or less abstract theoretical principles one is examining …’‘” After the quote, he adds: “What I would deny is an expanded description that adds factual beliefs to the mix.” So, as Tom suggests, Cohen claims not to exclude reflective equilibrium. But he explicitly excludes factual beliefs from the process. And notice that he is talking about the process of developing a moral theory. I take this to mean that as we develop a moral theory, we ought not rely on assumptions about human nature, etc. And that’s what I was trying to argue against.

8

Chris Bertram 03.20.09 at 5:10 pm

Jon, I think you are still running together two issues.

One is “What justifies my belief that P?”

(Where the answer might be that I have come to believe P by a reliable method: including methods such as that Jon Mandle informed me that P, where Jon Mandle is a reliable expert on facts such as P.)

The other is “What makes it the case that P?”

Now I’m guessing that Cohen would concede that (even fact-infected) reflective equlibrium might be a good way of getting true moral beliefs. But he’d deny that any of the facts relied upon in the process of RE make any contribution to the truth of ultimate principles.

And if those ultimate principles are indeed ultimate, then there is no further thing (whether fact or principle) that makes it the case that they are true. Of course, we might, when challenged to justify our belief in such a putative principle then (for instance) cite the contribution that it might make to our overall moral position etc etc, but we wouldn’t thereby be saying that that contribution contributes to the truth of the principle.

9

Tom Hurka 03.20.09 at 5:25 pm

To echo Chris:

Jon says, ‘If I wanted to give an account of what explains why some normative principle is true, I would say various things to try to justify my belief in that principle.’ But consider again the scientific case. My belief that the ball fell to the ground is justified by the fact that I saw it fall, but the fact that I saw it fall doesn’t explain why it fell — gravity does, and it does so even if I’ve never heard of gravity.

Explanation is about what makes something true, justification about what makes it reasonable for us to believe that it’s true — and the two are entirely different. Cohen, I believe, is talking only about the former — about moral metaphysics, not moral epistemology. And his views about moral metaphysics leave him perfectly free to adopt reflective equilibrium as his moral epistemology.

10

Jon Mandle 03.20.09 at 6:32 pm

Thanks, Chris and Tom. That’s helpful. I still don’t understand the second question – “what makes it the case that P?” – in a way that is distinct from asking for a justification for (believing that) P. But you (Chris) rightly point out that this justification can’t simply be a report of some reliable process or an appeal to authority. The reason for this (I hypothesize) is that (in order to be reliable) the indicator must itself be responding to the right reasons, and they are doing the justifying work, not the fact that the indicator indicates what it does. They – those reasons – explain what makes it the case that P by justifying it.

But I want to ask you the same question. When you say that Cohen might “concede that (even fact-infected) reflective equilibrium might be a good way of getting true moral beliefs,” what do you mean by “getting”? Do you mean that this process – along with a good night’s sleep, putting aside your petty aggravations, clearing your mind, and maybe having some coffee – may be a reliable procedure for identifying true moral beliefs, or do you mean that this is the way to come up with reasons that justify P? Neither Cohen nor I are concerned with the former. If the latter, then once we have given the reasons for P, what more needs to be explained? Of course, someone might challenge whether some purported reason actually supports P, and then further justification may be required. But Cohen seems to have something else in mind when he says that there must be an explanation for why those reasons justify. I don’t know what that could be except further justification – further reasons to believe that P. It seems that you are trying to capture that further relationship by talking about one principle contributing to the truth of another. But how can one principle contribute to the truth of another without justifying it?

Do you think that I am wrong to read this chapter as including a brief for investigating fundamental principles? And what would it mean to investigate other than trying to justify them?

Tom – you distinguish between asking for the justification of your belief that the ball fell and asking for the explanation for the ball falling. These certainly are different. But notice the following asymmetry. Although we can ask for an explanation for the ball falling, it doesn’t make sense to ask for its justification (considered as a natural phenomenon, at least). Things are different on the moral side. A principle is a normative entity so we can ask for a justification of the principle itself (which we can’t do in the case of a natural phenomenon). When we ask for a justification of one’s belief in the principle, we might be asking the merely epistemic question that parallels the natural case – and could be answered by pointing to a reliable indicator, as Chris suggests above – or we could be asking for a justification of the principle itself. I’m only interested in the latter. And I don’t see the further metaphysical question about explaining the truth of a principle beyond justifying it in that sense.

11

Pete 03.20.09 at 7:38 pm

Jon says,

“Although we can ask for an explanation for the ball falling, it doesn’t make sense to ask for its justification (considered as a natural phenomenon, at least). Things are different on the moral side. A principle is a normative entity so we can ask for a justification of the principle itself (which we can’t do in the case of a natural phenomenon).”

I think the comments by Chris, Tom, and Jon have highlighted the central issue nicely. I agree with Jon here. In the empirical sphere, we give explanations by identifying causes. But in the normative sphere, the parallel activity is to give justifications by identifying reasons. This parallel lays bare Cohen’s argumentative strategy, and reminds me of Aristotle’s famous old argument. A is caused by B, B was caused by C, and so on. At some point there must be an uncaused cause. Cohen argues that there must be some (what to call them? “Unjustified justifiers”? “Unreasoned reasons”? These just don’t have the zing of “Uncaused cause”) unjustified principles – principles that can’t be given reasons.

I’m hesitant to push the explanation/justification analogy too hard though, because there are disanalogies between norms of moral and empirical reasoning. For example, Kant argues that if x is good, then the condition for x’s being good must also be good. (This is how he establishes the goodness of the good will.) This argument is arguably valid, but the parallel argument in the empirical sphere is clearly not. For example, “x is falling, therefore the condition for x’s falling must also be falling. Therefore gravity is falling.”

12

Chris Bertram 03.20.09 at 8:43 pm

I need to think about Jon’s post a bit more, but I’m very puzzled by Pete’s resistance to unjustified justifiers, because it seems clear to me that there are such entities. The principle that suffering is bad doesn’t stand in need of further justification and yet can itself play a justificatory role.

13

Jeff R. 03.20.09 at 9:59 pm

I get the impression that “suffering is bad” isn’t that useful of a principle to Cohen since it can’t be placed at the top of a lexical ordering of principles. And, for that matter, it can’t play much of a justificatory role without being slotted into a lexical ordering (or, ‘worse’, given a weighing as one among a list of competing principles). That ordering or weighing is itself going to be in need of further justification, quite possible in an unsupportable chain. So only something that can stand, unjustified, as a topmost, overriding consideration is going to work.

14

Pete 03.20.09 at 10:18 pm

Just to be clear, I didn’t yet resist unjustified justifiers in my previous post, I just noted the analogy with Aristotle’s argument (which, granted, has seen a lot of criticism). However, Chris is still correct that I’m not convinced that there are such things. Take the example of suffering. I think suffering is not always bad. Sometimes, suffering can be a good thing. For instance, a little suffering is needed to build character. Or, I might think it a good thing that a bad person suffer in some way. It might always be unpleasant (I would think this is part of what it is to be suffering), but this doesn’t lead me to accept the claim that it is always bad. Of course there are a vast number of instances in which I would count suffering as bad, and would think it evil to cause it. But, the upshot is that I think the claim that suffering should count as bad in some instance does stand in need of justification.

15

Chris Bertram 03.20.09 at 10:49 pm

That suffering is bad is _pro tanto_. But as such, it doesn’t stand in need of further support.

16

Chris Bertram 03.20.09 at 10:54 pm

(And my point about suffering is bad, was merely directed to the _narrow_ point that basic principles needn’t be justified by any further consideration.)

17

salient 03.21.09 at 12:05 am

Specifically with regard to fact-insensitive principles: I lack the language to say this clearly, but it seems to me that what Cohen is doing, is embedding facts within principles. In particular, statements like “P1: If it is possible to avoid causing pain in a being capable of feeling pain, then one ought to avoid…” demonstrate this. The justification for adopting this principle, I think Cohen is suggesting, lies in its innocuous phrasing: if a fact about pain-sensitivity encourages us to adopt principle P, we can instead adopt P1 and let P1 do the work, if/when necessary, of grounding and justifying our adoption of principle P.

More generally, I think this argument leads us to inserting some phrase along these lines into principles in order to fact-desensitize them: if it is possible to avoid Z, and Z is relevant, then one should avoid Z. Still not sure what the bolded phrase should be exactly, but for each principle, it apparently needs to be something that sweeps up all relevant facts about the human condition. Example: If it is possible to avoid causing X pain, where X denotes a pain-sensitive being, then one should avoid causing X pain.

It seems that Cohen wins his thesis precisely because any fact used to ground a principle carries with it some implicit reference to a principle. I would maintain, that’s the only way a fact can ground a principle: by appealing to, establishing a clear connection to, some other principle; by showing evidence that the P condition of an If P Then Q statement of principle holds. All Cohen seems to be doing, in Chapter 6, is explicitly illustrating this relationship of grounding facts to principles.

18

salient 03.21.09 at 12:07 am

(Oh, and I hereby certify I’ve read Chapter 6.)

Unrelatedly, and I suspect this will only betray some lack of basic understanding in me, what of the fact It is possible for actions to cause suffering.? (You might substitute “undesirable consequences” for suffering, if you prefer.) Isn’t there an implicit appeal to this fact as grounding for any statement of what one ought to do?

19

Pete 03.21.09 at 12:11 am

I wonder if I’m misunderstanding you Chris. Here’s how I’m thinking about it: you say that “suffering is bad” is a pro tanto reason: I take it you mean, to avoid suffering. But I don’t think that’s right: in some contexts suffering might be the very thing you seek, and in others the suffering might count as no kind of reason at all (which is different than saying that it is outweighed by other reasons, all things considered).

Here’s a quick example of the latter (suffering not counting as a reason): a talented musician’s young child is part of an elementary school concert. The musician considers avoiding the concert because he knows he will suffer from the inexpert, tuneless hammering of instruments. Now, I think that Chris could say something like this: all things considered, the musician should go even though he would suffer. The reaction I have in mind is different: see here musician, I might say, you’re thinking about this all wrong. Your suffering matters not at all. This night is about your child, not about you. Your suffering isn’t something to be outweighed. It is, rather, morally irrelevant to the matter at hand, and you do wrong by counting it as a reason at all in your deliberation.

20

Yarrow 03.21.09 at 1:59 am

Pete: Your suffering matters not at all. This night is about your child, not about you. Your suffering isn’t something to be outweighed. It is, rather, morally irrelevant to the matter at hand . . .

If the exhibition in question is not a concert but a light show, and the parent not a musician but an epileptic, who may undergo a seizure from the flashing lights — is the (merely potential!) suffering of the parent still morally irrelevant?

21

John Quiggin 03.21.09 at 3:06 am

Chris

There’s the way the world is and the way we find out about it. Ultimate principles of justice are part of the way the world is, reflective equilibrium is a method of finding out about justice. That’s the distinction here.

Contra Cohen, I suppose Rawlsians are going to want to say that principles of justice, even ultimate ones, are just things we make rather than discover

I think this is at the core of the disagreements we had earlier. To me (and I think some other commentators) the idea that ultimate principles of justice are part of the world, independent of human beings who might or might not act on them, seems like some kind of category mistake. Justice is, as your Rawlsian would so, something you make (or not).

22

Chris Bertram 03.21.09 at 8:18 am

By the way, reflecting on Jeff R’s comment above, I think there may be an inconsistency in Cohen’s views.

In this chapter, the ultimate principles are _principles of justice_. But earlier in the book, justice isn’t always overriding, rather, other considerations, such as welfare, can lead us to prefer (by Cohen’s lights) a less just outcome. Now either justice is one value to be balance in some pluralistic/intuitionistic procedure or it is some kind of master value that governs other values. Earlier it seemed to be the former; here the ultimate principles play the latter role. Are the ultimate principles principles of justice or not?

23

Chris Bertram 03.21.09 at 8:25 am

John, well sort of (though I can’t see the “category mistake” point. I think you could distinguish the question of whether the existence of value in the world is conditional on the existence of humans (or other sentient or rational creatures) from the question of whether it is something that we make.

So, for any world in which there are creatures with such-and-such a nature, there are moral constraints on them that hold, independently of their choices or views on the matter, and it is a fact independent of whether there is any such world, that if there were such a world etc etc (But hardcore metaphysics isn’t really my thing, and it’s probably showing.)

(And we can also distinguish between whether the logic of moral discourse implies a realist view of the metaphysics and the question of whether such realism is independently defensible.)

24

Chris Bertram 03.21.09 at 9:02 am

_in others the suffering might count as no kind of reason at all (which is different than saying that it is outweighed by other reasons, all things considered)._

Well I don’t doubt that their are complexities in the way reasons relate to one another, with some reasons outweighing others, some excluding others etc. But I’m not sure how the possibility of exclusionary reasons is germane here. I take it that your person is, in any case, experiencing moderate to serious discomfort rather than unspeakable agony?

25

Tom Hurka 03.21.09 at 11:23 am

John Q at #21:

In previous discussions you’ve expressed sympathy for something like utilitarianism. Do you think humans ‘make’ that? If so, how? I’d love to see the factory.

And there’s no reason to think principles of justice has a different status from the utilitarian principle.

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Alex Gregory 03.21.09 at 11:51 am

(Like Tom Hurka, I’ve read the article but not yet the chapter of the book – which I’ve only just found time to start reading. I hope that’s enough.)

Just a thought: Presumably, even those who think that we “make” the principles of justice think that there are better and worse ways to make them. If we adopted principles of justice that requried nothing but the production of inordinate amounts of cheese, we’d have made principles of justice that were somehow suboptimal. So there are constraints on just how we make justice up. But once you allow that much, you can presumably push something similar in form to Cohen’s argument: The rules for how we make up justice are themselves not made up, or if they are, then the rules for how we make the rules for how we make up justice are themselves not made up, or if they are… At some point we’ve got to either admit that literally anything goes (which looks bizarre), or else agree that there are some normative principles that are features of the world. (Not, of course, physical features, or objects, but features in some other sense.)

(I’d like to connect this to Jon Mandle’s comment, but I’m a little tired. Perhaps if what I’ve said has merit, someone else will manage.)

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Jon Mandle 03.21.09 at 6:11 pm

Chris – can I try to spell out your concern at #22 – tell me if I’ve got it. I’m confident that Cohen’s considered view is that justice is only one among multiple, possibly competing values – it is not always overriding. Here is this chapter, we are only concerned with principles of justice. And the argument is supposed to show that there are fundamental principles of justice (that are not fact-dependent). So far, I don’t see the inconsistency you are worried about.

But now imagine a circumstance in which the virtue of justice conflicts with some other value – welfare, say. In this case, the facts of this particular case, plus the relevant principles of justice and the relevant principles of welfare justify some course of action overall. But now we invoke the argument of this chapter, which is perfectly general over normative domains – there must be a principle that explains why those considerations justify that course of action. And that principle must be general to the facts of the case, the justice principle, and the welfare principle. So, it turns out that the fundamental principle of justice isn’t normatively fundamental after all.

This is related to a growing concern I’ve had. For all his talk about justice being what it is in itself and how Rawls confuses it with “all things considered” judgments, I haven’t seen Cohen explain how the virtue of justice differs from other virtues. The ideas of “giving each person her due” (p.8) or “the distribution of benefits and burdens to individuals” (p.126) don’t really help – considerations of welfare may affect who gets what, but they are supposed to be distinct from justice. Perhaps it’s still coming, but I haven’t seen it, yet.

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Jeff R. 03.21.09 at 6:41 pm

Chris: Cohen’s project here is separating justice from any other considerations. He’s not making the claim that a maximally just society is the one that should be adopted; he’s said before and will say again next chapter that justice is not the (lexically) first rule for governing societies. He’s willing to consider Pareto, welfare, and possibly even liberty-based arguments against the adoption of a perfectly just society. He just doesn’t want those considerations to be subsumed into the definition of “justice”.

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Chris Bertram 03.21.09 at 7:39 pm

Jon M (middle para) has expressed exactly the worry that I was trying to. What I’m not clear about is whether the principle that decides whether welfare should trump justice or not is itself a principle of justice.

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John Quiggin 03.21.09 at 9:04 pm

“In previous discussions you’ve expressed sympathy for something like utilitarianism. Do you think humans ‘make’ that? If so, how? I’d love to see the factory.”

Tom, I won’t claim that “make” is exactly right, but here’s how my “something like utilitarianism” is produced .

First, I think, like Bob Goodin, that utilitarianism and its variants are best thought of as public philosophies, not as guides to individual ethics. I think (more so following the discussion we’ve had of Cohen) that something similar is true of “justice”; it’s a summary description of desirable outcomes that can be pursued in political and social action, not an abstract principle with an independent existence.

As regards utilitarianism, I support egalitarian (in the sense I’ll describe) versions of consequentialism of which utilitarianism is the oldest. I guess consequentialism plays the role of unmoved mover here – I don’t derive it from anything else. My support for egalitarianism starts with (my interpretation of) an argument by Bentham. Starting from the default position that, in the evaluation of political actions, everyone should count equally, Bentham argues that no one person or group is better than the rest in a way that would justify (to the rest) a claim that they should be given special weight in evaluating outcomes. This claim is contingent – if there really were a class of beings categorically different from ordinary humans in some way recognised by all, it wouldn’t apply.

That gets as far as “consequences for everyone should count equally”, and then some form of egalitarianism in the provision of goods and services follows from diminishing marginal utility (or some variant for different ways of evaluating welfare), as expressed in Rawls or Harsanyi style reflective equilibrium.

That concludes your factory tour.

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Tom Hurka 03.21.09 at 9:24 pm

John Q:

That’s not a factory tour at all — you’re buying ready-made.

1) A ‘summary description of desirable outcomes’ makes claims about which outcomes are desirable — claims it apparently treats as independently true, i.e. as having independent existence.

2) And ‘consequentialism plays the role of unmoved mover here — I don’t derive it from anything else’ makes precisely my point. You treat consequentialism as underivatively true, in just the way Cohen treats his principles of justice. And there’s no reason to think consequentialism or any other view has preferred status here. Utilitarians, economists, etc. like to claim their view has preferred status over alternatives, but it’s a ploy that doesn’t fool anyone. We’re all in the same boat.

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Dan 03.21.09 at 11:05 pm

John Q,

I don’t think “then some form of egalitarianism in the provision of goods and services follows from diminishing marginal utility” is true at all. Even with the assumptions that everyone has a similar utility function, and redistribution is costless, and there are no adverse incentive effects caused by redistribution, the conclusion doesn’t follow, as I think is pretty clearly shown by David Schmidtz in his paper Diminishing Marginal Utility and Egalitarian Redistribution.

I’ve been told off on here before for pointing this out and not including the argument, so here goes: in a world where there is production as well as consumption, DMU might be precisely what causes people to invest rather than consume, which increases the total stock of goods produced, and thereby increases utility. To follow Schmidtz’s example, it may well be true that Jane Poor gets more utility from consuming an extra unit of corn than Joe Rich, but it is this very fact that makes Joe Rich more likely to plant (rather than consume) his second unit of corn than Jane. Taking it from Joe and giving it to Jane would mean that there is less corn to be enjoyed as a result. I think you fall into the trap Schmidtz mentions, along with a lot of other smart people, of thinking that even though the DMU argument yields strongly egalitarian conclusions only in a world without production, some suitably weakened egalitarian conclusions still hold in a world with production. But this is not necessarily the case.

Chris B,

What I’m not clear about is whether the principle that decides whether welfare should trump justice or not is itself a principle of justice.

It seems as though Cohen has ruled out the possibility that it is, by all his talk of ‘all-things considered’ judgements, which he explicitly distinguishes from considerations of justice. So yeah, it does seem as though there must be a higher level normative principle (or set of principles) that resolves any conflict between the important considerations (justice i.e. equality for Cohen, Pareto, welfare, liberty, etc) that we want to take into account. But it also seems as though these higher level principles have a better claim to being principles of justice than what Cohen has put forward as principles of justice, because they (the higher level principles) are the fundamental principles that we use to decide, crudely speaking, who should get what.

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John Quiggin 03.22.09 at 6:09 am

Dan, the paper is offline and the only review I’ve seen seems to use the same example as you, so I’ll respond to that. Your setting of the problem (apparently taken from Schmidtz) appears to be wrong. Presumably you mean to start with a position where Joe has two grains and Jane has one (otherwise the names don’t mean what they are supposed two) then argue that Joe is more likely to plant a third grain, while Jane is more likely to consume a second. (If you mean something different, please say so).

Granting that this is true, so what? Diminishing marginal utility* applies equally to lifetime consumption streams as to consumption at a point in time. Taking account of production doesn’t change anything. It’s still true that transferring half a grain from Jane to Joe will increase aggregate lifetime utility for the two of them.

*Note that I’m using this formulation since that’s the one that has been challenged. We can do the same thing in Rawlsian terms if we want.

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John Quiggin 03.22.09 at 6:26 am

Tom, I agree that I’m getting consequentialism ready-made. But, while I’m happy to be persuaded otherwise, it seems to me that a commitment to consequentialism is pretty much the same as a commitment to the proposition that justice is something we make, and that the rest of my post spells out the construction process.

(Attempting a restatement):
(a) The view that justice is a thing-in-itself, or part of the way the world is, seems to me to be inconsistent with consequentialism (in my interpretation, the view that the social institutions that should be described as “just” are those which we collectively judge as likely to have the best consequences).
(b) In making a collective judgement about the best consequences, we are, in some sense, making justice
(c ) Independently of the above, I’m specifically advocating procedures in which all count equally, and in which more equal allocations are preferred to less on the grounds of contingent facts about humans

As I say, I could easily be getting all this wrong. But I don’t see how anything I’ve written lumps me in with “Utilitarians, economists, etc. [who] like to claim their view has preferred status over alternatives,”, unless you mean “preferred by me”.

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Chris Bertram 03.22.09 at 7:38 am

John,

I don’t think that you are getting the point that Tom is making, namely that you are taking a standard as the right one and that you (must) think that people who take a different view are making _a mistake_. Something (some standard or principle) is supplying your interpretation of “best consequences” (and, for that matter, explaining why equality is of value). Suppose you respond by saying, as I suspect you’re tempted to, that your view is based in what people want, or choose, or prefer, you still have to provide an explanation of why a state of affairs in which people get those things is better than one in which they don’t. Perhaps you shrug and find the demand for some justification of _that_ weird (in which case see “unjustified justifier” and “suffering is bad” above) or perhaps you gesture to some further, deeper principle …

On equality, I can’t see how you can’t see that your interpretation of Bentham above presupposes all kinds of stuff (equality as default, no intrisic differences in moral worth among humans, possibly hypothethical differences in moral worth between humans and some other creatures justifying weighting differences).

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John Quiggin 03.22.09 at 8:40 am

Chris, I don’t think I’ve said that people who take a different view (in particular, the view that justice is a thing-in-itself) are making a mistake. What I meant to say is that this view seemed to be assumed by quite a few participants and that I don’t share it. I also thought I’d already agreed that consequentialism is an “unjustified justifier” and that my interpretation of it included the position that “best consequences” means “those that we collectively judge as best”. So, without saying that the demand for a justification is “weird”, I do indeed shrug and say that this is where my justificatory regress stops.

My interpretation of Bentham obviously entails the stuff you mention. OTOH, I’m happy to give arguments in support of them if they are challenged, so I don’t think it’s right to describe them as presuppositions. Which do you have a problem with?

On a different tack, I started by saying that the view I hold seems to me to be more consistent with the statement “justice is something we make” than with “justice is part of the world as it exists”. Tom disputed that – I’d be interested in your views.

Finally, sorry for derailing the thread to some extent. In my defence, the points raised were suggested to me by my reading of Cohen and the discussion here, even if I have gone off at a bit of a tangent.

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Chris Bertram 03.22.09 at 9:30 am

I just had a Eureka moment in the shower (appropriately enough!) concerning where you’re coming from John.

Your position seems to be this: that justice is basically a matter of institutions and that we ought to make these in a way that maximizes the good, where “maximizing the good” is given content by your equality-adjusted utilitarianism. So we “make” justice in the sense that all there is to justice is the devising of institutions, and where this may vary from place to place and from time to time, depending on the facts.

That’s not a view I agree with, but it is certainly one I recognise as respectable. So you clearly disagree with the whole idea that “justice” has any kind of free-floating, pre-institutional content. Again, fair enough, though I’d just register the suspicion that your views about equality may commit you to more than you suppose!

What goaded me (and Tom, I think) was the suggestion both from you and from some of the orthodox Rawlsians in the discussion, that people who think of justice as an independent value in the way Cohen does, are thereby committed to some kind of metaphysical weirdness that you are not. We may or may not be committed to metaphysical weirdness (I’d rather not be, but I’ll bite the bullet if I have to), but everyone who grants authority to any kind of objective normative standard (does’t have to be justice, doesn’t even have to be part of morality) is in the same boat.

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Pete 03.22.09 at 12:34 pm

To Chris way back at 24:

By highlighting that in some circumstances suffering is not always bad, and the different point that “suffering is bad” is not always even a pro tanto reason, I mean to show that it is not an unjustified justifier.

Now, someone may offer suffering as a reason to do or avoid doing, and I may accept this reason without comment or concern. But here’s the point: I think that it is always open to me to ask, “Why is suffering here bad?” or “Why should it give me a reason?” When I do this, I’m asking for justification. (Looking at what Chris says in 35, I want to acknowledge that this request may indeed sometimes seem weird, but I think the weirdness is just that in some cases it seems obvious that suffering is bad. But this does not mean that a justification cannot be given – it doesn’t mean that there is no reason, as with the uncaused cause there is no cause.)

In fact, doesn’t Cohen’s position entail that there aren’t any unjustified justifiers, other than the ultimate principles, whatever they are (and whether they are principles of justice or something else)? Cohen holds that any principle that is non-ultimate can be explained/endorsed/affirmed/justified/grounded in some other principle, all the way up to the non-fact-dependent ultimate principles. So, unless “Suffering is bad” is an ultimate principle of justice, then I don’t think it will count even for Cohen as what I’m thinking of as an unjustified justifier.

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Chris Bertram 03.22.09 at 2:00 pm

Pete: I don’t think “suffering is bad” is an ultimate principle of _justice_, but I do think it plausibly stands as an ultimate reason that doesn’t require further reasons to be given in its support. You have pointed out that it might be overridden or excluded in the process by which we form an all things considered judgement, but, unlike you, I don’t see that as damaging to the point. Is it an “unjustified justifier”? Well only in the sense that it doesn’t stand in need of further _underlying_ reasons.

_But here’s the point: I think that it is always open to me to ask, “Why is suffering here bad?” or “Why should it give me a reason?” When I do this, I’m asking for justification._

Well of course you can ask! (Your formulations here aren’t always helpful, by the way, since “Why should it give _me_ a reason?” might have a different focus to the one we’re interested in here.)

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Pete 03.22.09 at 5:10 pm

That was helpful. I didn’t realize that you were thinking of ‘suffering is bad’ as an ultimate principle, though I suppose I should have. It struck me as a principle too concrete to be ultimate.

Well of course you can ask!

I understand the confusion: I don’t mean, of course, simply that it is physically possible to ask. In light of my examples and arguments above, I think that it is open for me to ask in the sense of being an open question whether suffering in some factual context actually counts as something bad. If this is true, then it really doesn’t look like “suffering is bad” is any kind of ultimate principle, of justice or any other kind. If suffering only counts as bad in some contexts, but not in others, then whether “suffering is bad” is true depends in part on the facts of the case. I believe this means that it cannot be ultimate in Cohen’s sense.

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John Quiggin 03.22.09 at 8:19 pm

Chris @ 37. I think that’s about right, and the discussion has certainly helped me clarify my own ideas.

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Dan 03.22.09 at 8:25 pm

John Q,

The hypothetical setup is basically this: suppose Rich has 2 units of corn, while Poor has none. Suppose further that eating corn is not a matter of life or death, but that those who have no corn are forced to eat something horrible instead. To have one unit of corn is to have enough to eat, while to have two units of corn is to have so much that eating the second unit would make you sick. So the marginal utility of consuming the first unit is high, and the marginal utility of consuming the second unit is very low. The standard utilitarian-egalitarian would conclude that in order to maximize utility, we should take the second unit from Rich and give it to Poor; but this doesn’t follow.

It doesn’t follow because what has not been taken into account is the possibility of production. It is precisely because there is a very low marginal utility of consuming the second unit of corn that Joe Rich prefers to plant it, rather than eat it (having been already satiated by the first unit he has eaten.) If you do take the corn away from Rich and give it to Poor, you have a situation where all the corn is eaten, leaving none for planting – which means that there is no corn for anyone to eat for the indefinite future (and, needless to say, this is an outcome with lower long run utility than just leaving both units in the hands of Rich.)

It is of course still possible in the real world that utility could be maximized by widespread redistribution, but it certainly doesn’t follow with anything like as much ease as people often think it does.

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Rob 03.23.09 at 3:52 pm

Tom Hurka #9

“Explanation is about what makes something true, justification about what makes it reasonable for us to believe that it’s true—and the two are entirely different. Cohen, I believe, is talking only about the former—about moral metaphysics, not moral epistemology. And his views about moral metaphysics leave him perfectly free to adopt reflective equilibrium as his moral epistemology.”

That Cohen is perfectly free to adopt reflective equilibrium as his moral epistemology doesn’t mean that he in fact (coherently) does, because he may fail to make the perfectly sensible distinction between epistemology and metaphysics that Tom does.

Jon Mandle #7

“I referenced, but didn’t discuss, Cohen’s note 19 on p.243. In that note he says: “Nor need I deny that, to employ Geoffrey Sayre-McCord’s description of the ‘method of reflective equilibrium,’ ‘the process of developing an acceptable moral theory is a matter of shifting back and forth among the various moral judgments one is initially inclined to make and the more or less abstract theoretical principles one is examining …’‘” After the quote, he adds: “What I would deny is an expanded description that adds factual beliefs to the mix.”

Cohen seems to think that the metaphysical claim about explanation applies to the epistemological issue of justification, since he thinks that reflective equilibrium must exclude facts. This is why, presumably, as Jon points out in the post, his language about the precise content of his thesis is so sloppy in the chapter (I admit, I’ve only skim read the chapter, having read F&P some time ago; although the appendix about God is quite interesting). The question then become whether the polemical uses which Cohen puts the thesis to are ones that a thesis which seems to have no defensible – unless someone wants to defend them – epistemological implications can be put to. Is the original position machine supposed to be giving us a metaphysical explanation, or an epistemological justification of the principles it generates? Would it make sense for, say, a view like the later Rawls’ which is supposed to be abjuring from deep metaphysical claims to regard the original position as explaining what grounded, rather than justified, the principles it generated? Does it follow, as Cohen claims, that because Rawls says that the difference principle wouldn’t cause too much inequality that an equality principle is prior to the difference principle, rather than the other way round (as in, ‘do things which help people pursue their projects’; why?; it means people ought to keep their promises)? Are we ever going to be really interested in what metaphysically explains a principle as opposed to what justifies it epistemologically?

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zdenekv 03.24.09 at 11:00 am

On the disagreement between Tom and John. This is a realism /constructivism dispute : John is arguing that justice is constructed and hence he seems to be committed to some form of anti realism ( this is why he says that justice cannot be ‘thing in itself’ etc.) . Tom on the other hand seems to be a moral realist a la John Boyd / Peter Railton who argue that goodness is a natural property and something that is not constructed. John seems to be opposed to realism because he thinks that realists have to think that moral properties are completely mind independent ( like cats or stars ) but that is not true. Railton for instance doesn’t think this at all but rather that moral properties are judgment- independent rather than mind- independent. It seems to me in other words that John thinks that he needs constructivism because otherwise he would have to subscribe to some weird metaphysics but that doesn’t seem to be true.

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