consequentialising practical reason

Consequentialising Practical Reason

Durham University, MA in Philosophy

Module: Current Issues in Ethics

Abstract: (152 words)

In this essay, I argue that recent consequentialising approaches to normative theory have

worse prospects than a little-considered alternative. I begin by discussing the aims of

theory, and presenting an account of the central standards against which adequate

theories must measure up. I then present three normative phenomena that have often been

considered to pose problems for consequentialism. Following this, I characterise the

consequentialising project in normative theory, describing general features, as well as

strengths and weaknesses. Then I describe Douglas Portmore’s sophisticated version of

consequentialism about practical reason in some detail, before addressing its relative

success at dealing with the ordinarily problematic phenomena. In the final section, I

present some reasons to think that Portmore’s theory may not be as secure as it seems,

and note that there is an alternative that might perform better. I compare this alternative

favourably to a similar thesis of Susan Wolf’s, and then I conclude.

I declare that this essay is 4981 words long.

Ben Bessey

1 Douglas Villas, Durham, DH11JL

Tutor’s Name: Dr. Nick Zangwill

Journal Conventions Followed: Analysis

14th June, Easter, 2010

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In this essay, I shall argue that certain attempts to create normative theories that preserve

the basic features of consequentialism1, while incorporating phenomena that have

traditionally been regarded as problematic for it, fail to be the best candidates for theories

of practical reason. In §1, I sketch an account of the norms of theoretical adequacy

against which normative theories are to be judged, and describe possible problems for

consequentialist theories. In §2, I outline the major elements of Douglas Portmore’s

ambitious consequentialist project, showing the way that it responds to problems. In §3, I

argue that this mode of response is likely to be less cogent than an available alternative.

§1. Theoretical aims and consequentialist problems.

§1.1. The aims of theory

In this section, I shall address issues concerning the aims of theories about practical

norms, and the standards of adequacy to which they should conform. My subject matter

consists of practical norms in their entirety; that is, just whatever norms there are that

govern right action. As such, my focus is not on any one taxon of norms that might be

implicated, such as the taxon ‘morality’2. On the other hand, because my focus is right

action, I am not concerned with evaluation that does not involve deontic concepts.

Normative theories are primarily supposed to provide a systematisation of our norm-

guided practical thought3. This element, upon which I shall focus, consists in an attempt

to save the phenomena of practical reason. However, the total picture is more

complicated than this, for the creation of normative theory is generally4 an attempt to

account for a specific perspective within practical reason (usually, the perspective of the

theorising agent). So the contents of the set of phenomena ‘practical reason’, which

1 I focus on act-consequentialism; the considerations I discuss here are likely relevant to other forms, including satisficing, indirect, and rule utilitarianisms, but I cannot discuss them here.2 It is necessary to draw a distinction between the bundle of normative phenomena that are designated ‘moral’ pre-theoretically, and those that appear in moral theory. Throughout, I use ‘morality’ for the pre-theoretic bundle, and morality for the phenomena given this designation in a theory.3 Such theories are also supposed to be a guide to action, and to some extent this would just be a natural corollary of their being accurate systematisations of existing norms, given that those norms are already action-guiding. Any further sense in which they might aim at guiding action is not something I can discuss here.4 At least some of the explicitly ‘experimental’ approaches that have appeared recently would seem to be an exception to this, but I cannot address this here. See for example Mikhail 2007.

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normative theories are meant to save, cannot merely be established by performing a

survey. Instead, theorists argue about which putative contents of that set are correct

(according to phenomena-internal standards), even as they engage in meta-level disputes

about how best to account for a given set according to the theoretical norms of

descriptive and explanatory adequacy. Although first-order dispute about the norms that

are relevant to practical reason is one way of engaging in debate about theory, I cannot

defend at length the relevance and strength of the various intuitive responses that I refer

to throughout the essay.

It is also essential to note that disagreement about the proper contents of the set of

practical norms can take two forms. Firstly, there is the set of outcomes; the judgements

on alternative actions or courses of action that the norms collectively produce all things

considered. In terms of theory, this corresponds to the set of deontic statuses or degree-

of-rightness5 outputs that are generated. The fundamental deontic statuses are

permissible, impermissible, and required, where an act is required just in case it is the

only one that is permissible6; there are also other, more controversial, deontic statuses, for

which see below. It is relatively uncontroversial that this is an essential feature of

successful theory7. A theory does best, on this account, if the output set it produces is

identical to that produced by the pre-theoretic norms of which it is a theory. Secondly,

there is the set of norms themselves, the actual reasons that are given in favour of

practical alternatives. It is surely necessary for successful normative theory that the

agents to whose norms the theory is supposed to stand as an exegesis are able to

recognise it as such. This is not likely to happen unless the content of the norms

themselves is preserved (Zangwill 2010, 4-9). On this level, a theory will succeed if it can

include the same reasons that have intuitive force pre-theoretically.

5 It is necessary to include degrees of rightness because there are plainly gradations of difference between the rightness of acts within, as well as between, the deontic categories.6 It may seem possible that this doesn’t hold universally, because there could be two or more equally required alternatives. However, these can be treated as a set (because they fit together such that choice can permissibly be made only between them, not externally), so the characterisation holds.7 The revisionary consequentialists that I shall discuss later accept it (Brown 2010, 1; Portmore 2010c, 1).

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In addition, there is another dimension along which responses to the problem of

accounting for ‘morality’ can differ. This dimension amounts to a decision upon an

approach to the creation of theory from norms. It is ultimately on the advocation of an

alternative approach along this dimension that my argument turns. It is possible for

normative theories, rather than taking some pre-theoretical category such as ‘morality’ as

a given, and trying to introduce that as a whole into theory, instead to split up ‘morality’

into different areas of normative content, which share different properties. I shall return

to this in §3.

There appear, then, to be three main dimensions along which approaches to normative

theorising can differ. A theory is best if it performs better than the available alternatives

on a weighted8 sum of these three variables. For example, a theory that is excellent at

duplicating the substance of norms, but cannot reproduce a decent approximation of their

outputs, and fails to respect the pre-theoretic placings-into-taxa that they involve, is not

likely to perform well relative to others. It is not to be expected that any theory will be

perfect on even one of these three accounts, no matter on all of them, unless the norms

that they aim to provide a theoretical treatment of are extremely simple. Nevertheless,

this account of the aims of theory provides a plausible set of criteria9 for theory-choice in

this area.

§1.2 Problems for consequentialist theory

Given this account of what good moral theory would look like, in this section I shall

describe three normative phenomena, generally placed in the ‘moral’ taxon, that are

potential problems for fundamentally consequentialist normative theories.

Consequentialism, as I work with it here, is a (any) moral theory that produces

judgements of deontic status and degree of rightness as a function of judgements of the

goodness involved in actions. This allows consequentialisms to include not only

8 Weighting will be necessary because the third dimension is plainly less important than the first two. The relative weight that ought to be assigned to those variables is less clear, however. For the purposes of this essay, I shall treat them as having roughly equal weight.9 Other standard theory-choice criteria, such as coherence, simplicity, and efficacy of application to new areas (Kagan 1989, 11) are also important. Coherence is plausibly an absolute pre-requisite (here I mean coherence within practical reason, as well as within each taxon); while the other criteria seem more like tiebreakers – at any rate they are not as weighty as the three dimensions I have proposed.

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extrinsic, contingent features such as consequences traditionally considered, but also

intrinsic and otherwise unorthodox features. For instance, one could consider an act’s

being an instantiation of courage as a good-maker, or even an act’s being respectful of

humanity in some quasi-Kantian sense. Portmore’s ‘consequentialising’ theory, on which

I shall focus my criticism, is a particularly sophisticated consequentialism in this broad

vein. Nevertheless, throughout this essay I in effect assume that there is something right

about consequentialist norms, which ought to be reflected in theory. The fact that my

argument is directed against a wholly consequentialist account of practical reason, then,

should not be taken to involve the view that such an account is appropriate in no part of it

(see §3). I cannot argue for this assumption here.

Two of these problematic phenomena are part of the group of issues surrounding norms

that seem to be10 irreducibly partial, for instance, norms involved in personal

relationships. The primary example I shall use here comes from (Wolf 1992, 253), and

concerns the relationship of a mother with her son. It may be summarised as follows:

(MS): S is a mother with only one son. Her son comes home one night and

admits that he has committed a terrible crime, and asks that she hide him

from the police. If he is caught, he will suffer greatly in prison, but if he is

not caught, an innocent man will be imprisoned instead.

MS is a difficult case, and it is plausible that S is ultimately required (at least under some

taxon of reasons, if not overall by practical reason) to surrender her son. It seems, then,

that the problems that MS throws up are not problems of replicating deontic output, but

of accounting for the specific norms involved. Other examples might be more conclusive,

offering instances where both specific norms, and the output of consequentialist theory,

are a poor match for pre-theoretic intuition. However, the fact that MS remains troubling

nonetheless illustrates the importance of specific-norm based theoretical adequacy, as

well as the more commonly recognised requirement of replicating outputs. MS is

10 I cannot address arguments to the effect that impartial theories such as traditional consequentialism can, in fact, accommodate such phenomena, for an example of which see Railton 1984. Neither can I respond to first-order normative critique of the genuine force of such phenomena.

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troubling because it is plausible that S has some genuine reason to hide her son in this

case, even if that reason is ultimately overruled in such a way that doing so is

impermissible (253-4).

There are three ‘moral’ phenomena that I shall draw out here, two of which may be

illustrated using MS. These are either kinds of deontic status, or of factors that have an

influence on the degree of rightness of actions. All have frequently been regarded11 as

major problems for a consequentialist account of ‘practical reason’ in general and

‘morality’ in particular. The first phenomenon is that of agent-centred options. This term

denotes the intuitive existence of multiple permissible alternatives available to agents.

Traditionally, consequentialist theories have had difficulty including such options,

because failure to promote the good to the greatest extent is regarded as being

automatically impermissible. Thus, S in MS has reasons that count some way towards

making it permissible to help her son, even if those reasons ultimately fail. The second

phenomenon is that of agent-centred restrictions. These constraints on action tend to

make actions impermissible if they are violated, and stem from a feature of the individual

agent. So S plausibly has a special, specific relationship with her son, giving an

obligation to him of significant normative force (again, even if the reasons it gives her are

subsequently overruled). The third of the phenomena is that of supererogation. This

deontic status is in effect a special case of that of options, resulting when one or more

alternative action has so many reasons in favour of it that it goes beyond being required,

and is thus both better than some otherwise required alternative could be, and not itself

required. Intuitively, working for a worthy charity for a subsistence wage for the rest of

one’s life is supererogatory.

§2. Portmore’s Consequentialism

§2.1. Consequentialising

The above problems may seem straightforwardly to prevent consequentialisms from

providing for adequate theories of practical reason. However, over the past few decades a

movement within consequentialism has aimed to incorporate answers to these questions

11 As well as Portmore 2005, 98-99; see e.g. Cottingham 1981, 86-90; Railton 1984, 136-140.

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within that framework12. The idea behind this project is simple: there is no reason why

consequentialists cannot endorse as complicated and pluralistic a version of the good as is

needed (Sen 1982) They can even endorse goods that are agent-relative rather than

neutral13, goods that take into account the particular place of the agent, rather than being

impersonal (Sen 1983). The thought then is that any moral theory can be

‘consequentialised’ by combining a specially tailored conception of the good with the

standard consequentialist foundation to translate this into outputs about rightness (Dreier

1994). Consequentialising appears to be a useful tool if it can be successful, because it

raises the prospect of being able to create normative theories that can produce as output

whatever you like; including, of course, otherwise problematic features like the three

above.

This simple form of consequentialising move is not the primary one with which I shall be

concerned here, however, because it is inadequate when judged by the three theoretical

criteria. On the first, judged on its ability to replicate the output of any moral theory one

might imitate using it, it could potentially do fairly well, although Portmore has argued

that it cannot account for options and supererogation (2008a, 412) with its simple

rightness function, although it can include agent-centred restrictions (Portmore 2005, 99-

100). On the second, however, judged on its ability to incorporate the actual norms of

traditionally non-consequentialist theories, it surely has terrible prospects. It must convert

them from their current state of (typically) proposing a direct right-making consideration,

to being a right-making consideration only indirectly, via the theory of the good. This

does violence to the pre-theoretically held and intuitively supported content of such

norms; making it far less likely that an agent would accept the theoretical version of the

norm as an exegesis of her own view. Finally, it is not clear how such theories must fare

on the third criterion, given that they typically present themselves as theories of ‘moral’

norms only. If they hold that only those norms are relevant to reason-guided action, they

will miss out any others. If others are thought to be relevant but unconsequentialisable,

12 Work not otherwise mentioned includes Dreier 1994; Louise 2004; Smith 2009; Suikkannen 2009. Critical responses include Schroeder 2006, and 2007.13 Agent-relative reasons are those that contain ineliminable references to the agent in the antecedent clause a of reason statements of the form (if a, S has reason to do x) (Ridge 2005).

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this will form a significant lacuna at the level of practical reason that would need to be

filled for such consequentialisms to be theories of right action per se.

This conjunction of factors makes the simpler form of consequentialising project that

functions solely by revising the theory of the good highly unlikely to be the best theory

available. Portmore, however, has suggested that theories can be modified in other ways,

to do with the good-to-right transformation, and yet remain fundamentally

consequentialist. He holds that this is possible because the essential feature of a

consequentialism is the fact the right is some function of the good, and his theory

preserves that basic link, with its direction from good to right (Portmore 2008a, 409-10).

It seems plausible then that Portmore’s version can perform better on my three criteria

than the simplistic consequentialising project assessed above.

§2.2. Basic features

In this subsection, I shall provide a brief overview of Portmore’s consequentialism, which

I shall then use to illustrate its successes, and ultimately its flaws.

To begin, Portmore provides a distinction between requirement-giving reasons (or right-

making features) and justification-giving ones. The identification of which specific

reasons are requiring reasons, and which are mere justifying ones is a matter of

substantive first-order theory; although Portmore holds both that no non-moral reasons

carry requirement (MR below), and that some moral reasons also do not (specifically,

they do not when instantiated only in oneself14). Requiring reasons increase the force of

requirement on an agent, shifting actions that possess them towards the deontic status

‘required’. Justifying reasons, on the other hand, tend to make actions justifiable, i.e.

permissible but not required. Portmore identifies justifying reasons as all-things-

considered reasons in favour of an act’s basic rightness (that is, permissibility). (Portmore

2008a, 413-14) In so doing, he aims to expand his theory’s scope to all of practical

reason, such that it is the kind of theory that I am concerned with here15. Justifying 14 This is intended to accommodate the intuition that it is never required not to do something that will harm only oneself. (Portmore 2008a, 411-12)15 He refers to it as a theory of what is morally right, qua what one has most moral reason to do (2008a, 421). However, his rightful insistence that non-moral features can be relevant to moral rightness (2008b)

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reasons are, then, a complex of moral and non-moral kinds, while requiring reasons are

exclusively moral. It follows that the only notion of requirement within (or by) practical

reason that he can accommodate is that of moral requirement. This adds up to a position

he calls ‘Moral Rationalism’16:

(MR): If a subject, S, is morally required to perform an act, x, then S has decisive

reason to perform x, all things considered. (Portmore 2010a, 4).

The basic image that Portmore is working with should be becoming clear. He pictures

practically-rational deliberation as a weighing up of exclusively moral features that, if

dominant, cause the action to be required, and a set of moral and non-moral features that,

if dominant, cause it to be one of a number of permissible options.

He couples this with a specific account of the good-right relationship, advocating what he

calls ‘Dual-Ranking [Act] Consequentialism’17 to do this work. This involves taking two

separate ranking functions, one to play the purely-moral requiring role, the other to play

the all-things-considered justifying role, and using both together to generate a joint-

ranking, which is then directly used to generate deontic status (and degree of rightness)

(Portmore 2008a, 411-14). The fact that all of the normative content here, moral and non-

moral, is rankable in terms of the degree of goodness of outcomes expresses Portmore’s

acceptance of the ‘Teleological Conception of Practical Reason’ (see 2010b). In effect, it

signifies that Portmore is here involving consequentialism (in the basic sense) in the

evaluation of all elements of practical reason. The relationship between the two rankings

that is used to generate the complete ranking can be expressed as follows:

(DRAC): S’s performing x is morally permissible iff, and because, there is

no available act alternative that would produce an outcome that S

suggests that ultimately this is just a matter of terminology: his definition of moral will essentially refer to rightness, while the way in which I use the term need not. 16 This principle is later revised, along with much else, to accommodate his emphasis on sets of actions being the proper objects of ideal evaluation, rather than individual ones. This shouldn’t make any difference for my purposes here.17 Scheffler’s options-allowing consequentialism is also an instance of this type. See Scheffler 1994; Portmore 2008a, 411-12.

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has both more moral reason, and more reason, all things

considered, to want to obtain than to want x’s outcome to obtain.

(Portmore 2010d, 1).

It is sufficient, in this statement, to refer only to moral permissibility because (given the

caveat of fn.6) requirement is a special case of permissibility; it is what holds when only

one action is permissible. It is important to note that because DRAC requires betterness

in terms of both justifying and requiring right-makers, it does not allow a mere increase

in moral value, without a corresponding increase in all-things-considered value, to make

an act impermissible. Another central feature is that both kinds of reason are relativised

to the perspective of S, the agent (Portmore 2005). So in a case like MS, if the special

relationship with her son were a sufficiently strong justifying reason for S to hide him,

DRAC would make it a permissible option. Note that this does not mean that there could

never be a case in which S is required to give up her son, because the conception of the

moral and non-moral goods on the justifying side can be gerrymandered such that S has

more justifying reason, as well as more requiring reason, to do so.

§2.3. Dealing with the problems.

This normative theory18 can, based on these features, cope relatively well with the

problems posed for consequentialist theory in §1.2. An agent-centred option will be

available at any time when the permissibility condition in DRAC is met by more than one

alternative act. For most plausible accounts of the good, this will result in multiple

permissible options being available in most situations. Agent-centred restrictions are also

allowed for because relativisation to the agent means that e.g. in MS, S’s obligation to her

son acts as a requiring wrong-maker with a greater strength than would be possessed by

her act’s negative effect on someone else’s otherwise-identical relationship (Portmore

2005, 99-100). The third feature, supererogation, is also accounted for. Treating

supererogation as the feature of having at least one permissible alternative action that is

better (more right) than an alternative that would otherwise be required, it is plausible to

construe the kind of right-makers involved here as those of requirement. It will then be

18 I here pass over the fact that these theories are necessarily incomplete; not containing a specific account of the good. This doesn’t matter for my purposes.

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the case that an act that is better in requiring-reason terms can at the same time be

optional, as long as the greater degree of requiring right-makers is matched by a

corresponding increase in justifying right-makers, such that they (at least) balance out

(Portmore 2008a, 413-14).

The superior ability to incorporate these deontic features, relative to solely good-based

consequentialising theories, and certainly relative to traditional consequentialisms such as

utilitarianism, constitutes a clear advantage of Portmore’s theory. It does so relative to all

three criteria. Firstly, given that these deontic features are part of the output of theory, it

amounts to an improvement in theoretical adequacy judged using the first criterion.

Secondly, it amounts to a marked improvement using the second criterion too. If, say, the

deontic output ‘permissible’ just happened to be produced for an act x, x being pre-

theoretically regarded as supererogatory, with no further normative content attached, that

would amount to an improvement for the first criterion but a dismal performance for the

second. This does not seem to be the case with Portmore’s theory. He is able to include

much more of the content of the pre-theoretical status than that, replicating e.g. the sense

of x’s being ‘beyond the call of duty’ as well. And thirdly, it is likely to preserve some of

the pre-theoretical placings of norms, being capable of putting e.g. S’s special obligation

in the moral category, just as they would be in ‘morality’. What is more, it does so while

providing a theory of practical reason, rather than just of some more limited concern.

§3. The Bounds of ‘Morality’

§3.1. Problems with second-criterion adequacy

As I have shown, Portmore’s version of the consequentialising project offers much in the

way of theoretical resources. Likewise, it represents a significant improvement over

simpler consequentialisms in its capacity to satisfy the first and second criteria of

theoretical adequacy. However, there are good reasons to think that it does not do as well

as may first appear judged against the second criterion.

Firstly, consider how strict in principle the second criterion is; how much extra weight it

places on remaining true to the content of pre-theoretical morality. There are inevitably

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going to be a great many small ways in which even a theory as sophisticated as

Portmore’s problematically alters the substance of intuitively- relevant norms. For

example, consider the fundamental consequentialist structure that is present throughout

practical reason on Portmore’s account. The fact that each norm now exists as a part of a

structure that goes far beyond it, one that contains extra normative content over and

above their content, is itself plausibly a change. It is not plausible, after all, that it is

actually a part of the pre-theoretical content of a prudential norm, say, that it is linked to

the requiring moral norms that might plausibly oppose it in every case via a justifier-

related auxiliary ranking that is itself half of a total goodness ranking, and so on. It seems

unlikely, then, that transformation into a theory like Portmore’s is purely an exegesis of

already-implicit content, and in no respect an alteration to that content.

Secondly, there are a number of major assumptions built in to Portmore’s theory that,

although I do not have space to argue against them here, open vulnerabilities that another

kind of theory might not have. Most important of these are MR, and the Teleological

Conception of Practical Reason above. As I have detailed, MR precludes the possibility

of any non-moral reason having requirement-generating power. Similarly, it rules out the

possibility that an action might be morally required and yet practical-rationally

permissible. The teleological conception of practical reason is even more controversial –

it requires not only that paradigmatically ‘moral’ considerations like norms forbidding

murder be outcome-oriented, but that non-‘moral’ reasons like those of etiquette19 are too.

These considerations do not show that Portmore’s theory is a bad one, but they do imply

that it is insecure. I suggest that it is unnecessarily so. For there is another kind of theory-

building that has a good chance of accommodating both consequentialist norms within

‘morality’ and the phenomena, both ‘moral’ and non-‘moral’, that are difficult to fit

within totalising consequentialisms. This kind of theory adopts a relatively iconoclastic

stance towards the traditional dominance of the ‘moral’ within practical reason, and its

taxonomic unity, in the name of remaining true to all of our norms. If there is great

difficulty fitting two norms together, why not place them in different taxa, with different

19 NB. We are allowing agent-relativity, so a norm such as ‘conform to the standards of etiquette of your society’ is acceptable.

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features in common? In this way, we can have a taxon of consequentialist norms as well

as numerous non-consequentialist ones.

§3.2. Wolf’s critique: splitting up ‘morality’.

My suggestion here may be elucidated using Susan Wolf’s similar critique of common

approaches to the problem that partial norms pose for impartialist theories (like

traditional consequentialism) about ‘morality’. Wolf’s position, in (1992)20, is that the

proper response is to maintain an impartialist stance on morality, but to place the

problematic norms elsewhere, in a separate taxon under the umbrella of practical reason.

Her argument, is essence, is that there is more than one response available to those who

think that a given normative theory, taken as applying to the entirety of a taxonomic

region, and that region taken as occupying most if not all of the total space, is deeply

inadequate. One response is indeed to propose a completely different theory, linked to the

same area, but this response runs the serious risk of just replacing an implausible

totalising moral impartialism with an implausible totalising moral partialism. A better

alternative may be to keep the impartialist bent of the theory, but only as an account of a

smaller area of the normative space, and accommodate the partial norms elsewhere.

However, I do not wish to endorse much of the detail of her argument. In particular, she

presents the move that she recommends as a change in the way that we view norms like

those of S in MS from seeing them as moral to seeing them as non-moral. This is not

essential, and greatly damages the theory’s prospects with respect to the third criterion.

There is no reason why partial norms (in this instance) could not still be regarded as a

part of morality, in line with their usual placing in ‘morality’. The move should be seen

as the realisation that ‘morality’ is not really a coherent set at all, with the result that it

needs to be split into theoretical sub-categories with differing characteristics, rather than

as a redefinition of ‘morality’ so as not to include items like the putatively partial

obligations.

20 Other relevant papers include (1982), (1997), and (1999).

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This notwithstanding, Wolf’s position illustrates the availability of a way of doing

normative theory that does not take the constituents and fundamental character of pre-

theoretic taxa such as ‘morality’ for granted, letting them vary as other elements of theory

do. If we take this kind of view, it should be possible to accommodate more directly

many of the norms that cause problems for consequentialisms, staying true to the second

as well as the first criterion. However, there are two obvious problems with this

approach. Firstly, it must distort the pre-theoretical taxa to some extent, by introducing a

split that destroys the unity of ‘morality’. This looks like a small price to pay, however,

for gains that might be made around the second criterion. The second problem might be

more significant. This kind of move transfers the burden of theoretical work from within-

taxon complexity to a newly required complexity in the account of practical reason itself.

Given that this just moves around existing theoretical burdens, however, rather than

creating new ones, there doesn’t seem to be any clear reason to think that the move

makes the theory worse off overall.

§4. Conclusion

I conclude that, measured against plausible criteria for the adequacy of normative

theories, sophisticated consequentialisms are likely to be inferior as candidates to a style

of theorising that privileges accuracy over simplicity and respect for pre-theoretic

normative taxa.

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