Smith, Holly M. <i>Making Morality Work</i>. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pp. 432. $67.00 (cloth).

Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewsSmith, Holly M. Making Morality Work. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pp. 432. $67.00 (cloth).Andrew SepielliAndrew SepielliUniversity of Toronto Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreMany of today’s “hot topics” in value theory concern how or whether our assessments of a person’s behavior ought to be sensitive to her shortcomings and limitations. In ethics, we have the debates about moral uncertainty, subjective and objective reasons, and blameworthiness for moral ignorance; in epistemology, there’s luminosity, “operationalized epistemology,” and higher-order evidence. Decades before this spate of work, back when many philosophers were treating such concerns as afterthoughts, Holly Smith was laying bare with painstaking precision the vitality and the difficulty of questions about culpable ignorance and “deciding how to decide.” She has returned to such issues in recent years, and her long-awaited first book, Making Morality Work, is the culmination of these efforts.The book considers the merits of three “responses” (4) to two putative “impediments” (3) to the exercise of our ability to guide our actions by morality. The first impediment is error: we often have difficulty acting in accordance with our moral beliefs because we often have false beliefs about the way the world is, nonmorally speaking. The second is uncertainty: we will have difficulty, to say the least, guiding our actions by our moral views when we are uncertain about the nonmoral facts to which these views assign moral relevance.Smith calls the three possible responses to these impediments “Austere,” “Pragmatic,” and “Hybrid” (4–5). These responses differ in how or whether they tailor moral theory to agents’ cognitive limitations. The Austere theorist would not tailor it at all. A rock weighs 30 kg, say, whether or not we believe that it does or have evidence that it does; similarly, the Austerist would say, an action is right or wrong regardless of our beliefs, or the evidence we possess, or what have you. The Pragmatist (in Smith’s sense) would tailor the entirety of her moral theory to the agent’s limitations. Moral theory is supposed to be useful, after all—and, more specifically, is supposed to help us guide our actions; a theory that doesn’t play this role is defective as a moral theory. The Hybrid theorist tries to get the best of both worlds, through a moral framework consisting of both “theoretical” and “practical” levels (2). The theoretical level gives us an explanation of actions’ rightness or wrongness that may be independent of action-guidance considerations. The practical level provides a guide to action for agents who want to steer their behavior ultimately by the lights of the theoretical one but who find they cannot do so directly.Smith’s position is, I guess you could say, a “meta-hybrid.” She adopts the Hybrid approach as a way to deal with uncertainty and the Austere one as a response to error. Her reasoning for the latter goes like this: We can be wrong about anything, including the beliefs or evidence or probabilities that the Pragmatic approach and the practical part of the Hybrid one designate as morally significant. So there is really no way to ensure that benighted agents will always be in a position to act in accordance with the moral views they accept—that they will find these views usable in what Smith calls the “extended” sense (15). The best we can do is to help the agent guide her behavior in the “core” sense (14)—that is, to derive an action-initiating prescription from her moral theory. But the Austere approach can provide that. A moral theory that says, for example, “If an action has F, you should do it” can provide core guidance to an agent who believes that an action she’s contemplating has F, whether that belief is true or not. Given that, we should favor the Austere approach because it at least does not water down its prescriptions with agent-accommodating elements. It does not sacrifice what Smith calls “deontic merit” as the other two approaches seem to do (137).But a theory that says “If an action has F, you should do it” will not help an agent who is consciously uncertain, rather than simply wrong, about whether some action has F. Here we would need…well, something else. But what? Maybe an action-guiding element that adverts to the probability of the action’s having F would help, or one that counsels us to maximize expected F-ness? Maybe we should employ a rule that advises us to do an action with another feature, G, which often co-occurs with F, and is typically easier for us to discover? Maybe Aleister Crowley’s clean-and-simple “Do what thou wilt” deserves a second look?Smith’s answer: it’s all of the above. Whereas previous Hybrid approaches have supplemented a theoretical account of right and wrong (e.g., “You should maximize utility”) with a single rule designed for cases of uncertainty (e.g., “You should maximize expected utility”), Smith argues persuasively that this will generally be inadequate for action-guiding purposes. What we need, first and foremost, is a “multiple-rule hybrid” view (253), consisting of a theoretical account, plus a hierarchy of norms crafted with an eye toward guidance. The norms at the top of the hierarchy will more closely approximate the verdicts of the theoretical account but will be usable by fewer agents than those lower down. Additionally, Smith argues, we need rules for agents who are uncertain about which rules best approximate the pure, theoretical ones, rules for those who are uncertain about those rules, and so on.Making Morality Work is chock-full of arguments—and indeed, I think, a bit too full. Smith gives a lot of airtime to some not terribly plausible alternative views, raising concerns that may be instructive for some people but that will likely strike her primary audience as hardly worth mentioning. With that said, I’d encourage anyone with even the faintest interest in these topics to read this book, for its many argumentative highlights repay careful attention. Here are three that stood out for me.Smith offers a very interesting argument against any Pragmatic view that incorporates nonconsequentialist elements. Her claim is that these views cannot be squared with a general prima facie duty to inform oneself—to gather evidence, to do the calculations, whatever—prior to action. For consider a Pragmatic view on which my deontological duties depend on my beliefs regarding certain nonmoral facts. On such a view, updating these beliefs based on new information does not put me in a better position to apprehend duties that existed antecedently; rather, it creates (and destroys) duties. But on any plausible deontological view, while there is value in doing things that conduce to my fulfillment of my existing duties, there is often no value in doing things that bring about new duties that I may then fulfill. (Some of you may be thinking, “Okay, but what about views that index right and wrong to reasonable or well-supported beliefs?” Let me simply say that she’s thought of that and has got a couple of clever responses.) Of course, Smith herself acknowledges that there’s more argument to be had on this issue.Second, I enjoyed working through the two chapters on what Smith calls “non-ideal Pragmatic” strategies (126)—ones that seek to make morality more usable in the aforementioned “extended” sense but that are willing to accept imperfect usability, to trade off usability against fidelity to the canons of ideal morality. These chapters were probably the least interesting for those interested solely in, say, elucidating the nature or concept of subjective normativity. But anyone who’s more interested in actually making morality work—in implementing it in a nonideal agent with the goal of helping this agent to act well—will find much value in this discussion of how such a trade-off of these two very different, difficult-to-commensurate desiderata might work.Third, I commend really the entirety of her development of her positive view—the “multiple-rule hybrid” account. To lay my cards on the table: I’ve also spilled a lot of ink trying to make morality more action-guiding, and I came away from Smith’s book realizing that really doing this, rather than simply gesturing at how it might be done, is more difficult than I’d realized.So where could the book have been improved, other than by spending less time on certain implausible alternative views? Well, I should say that I’m very sympathetic to the general “line” of the book, and I can’t in all honesty find fault with its main conclusions or with the main arguments for those conclusions. But there are some places where the edifice could have been stronger or more fully built up.First, Smith might have done more to address the worry that Hybrid views, especially “multiple-rule” ones like hers, introduce the possibility of an unacceptable conflict between levels. For in my experience, at least, many Austerists and Pragmatists are quick to claim it as a virtue that their approaches do not generate such a conflict. Interlevel conflict is most glaring in, for example, Regan/Jackson/mineshaft cases. These are imagined situations in which the agent faces several options, all of which stand roughly the same chance of being, objectively, the right thing to do, but might also be disastrous—and then at least one option that is certainly not the objectively right thing to do but comes very close. This option would seem to be subjectively right—right in the sense that’s relevant to action-guidance under uncertainty—and hence recommended by a Hybrid-type theory, but remember, it is certainly objectively wrong. How can the Hybrid theorist claim to offer a unified prescription for action here?This is a good, hard question. Smith addresses it by saying that positive prescriptions (“Do X!”) should take precedence over negative prescriptions (“Don’t do X!”) in the case of a conflict. She suggests that this is because the former are capable of guiding you to do something, whereas the latter can only inhibit you, guide you not to do it. But this seems to be, at most, a reason why positive recommendations would be more precise and, in that respect, more useful guides than negative ones. I can’t see why it would tell in favor of the former overriding the latter when they conflict. To be up front: I do think that Smith’s conclusion here is correct and that it admits of a satisfactory explanation. I just think that Smith’s own explanation isn’t it.Second, for a book that goes to such great lengths to ensure morality’s action-guidingness, Making Morality Work does little to persuade us that the guiding role is all that important. Smith surveys four main rationales for the “usability demand” (11). The first is that usability for the guidance of action is required by the very concept of morality. The second is likewise “conceptual”—that it’s part of the very concept of morality that it’s “available to everyone,” which it can’t be unless it’s usable in certain ways. The third and fourth rationales are what she calls “goal-oriented” (58): morality can promote social welfare (e.g., by promoting cooperation) only to the extent that its canons are usable, and finally, people can engage in the best pattern of actions in the long run only if they are able to guide their actions by moral rules.None of these rationales strike me as getting quite to the heart of the demand that morality (or, at least, one part or level of a comprehensive moral code) be action-guiding. And indeed, Smith—to her credit—goes out of her way in various places to register doubts about them.My own take is that guidance matters because trying matters, and the concept of guidance is bound up with this action-theoretic notion of a try. I can sensibly think that an action might be the right thing to do, in the objective sense, even if I am not certain that that’s the case and, as such, cannot guide my doing it by the thought that it’s the case. However, as I’ve argued elsewhere, I can’t think that one action might be a better try or attempt than another at doing, now, what objective normativity favors, in cases where I am consciously uncertain about whether it’s a better try. To think that some action might be a better try than another in the relevant sense, I’ve got to think, straight up, that it is a better try—such that I could guide my performance of that action by that thought.Were I to accept a moral framework that denied the truth of any moral views sufficient, in the present instance, to use to guide my actions, then I would be committed to denying that any action I could perform now would count as a better try than any other at doing what objective normativity favors. But it would be implausible to deny that in most cases. Typically, there are not only better and worse things to do in the objective sense but also actions that are better and worse specifically as tries at doing what is better in the objective sense.I regard this second shortcoming as an artifact of the book’s focus. It is not primarily a defense of a theory of what it would take for morality to “work,” or of a story about why “working” matters. It is aimed at, well, making morality work—developing a kind of theoretical apparatus the use of which gives us flawed and kludgy mortals our best shot at living up to our ideals. In this it succeeds wonderfully. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Ethics Volume 130, Number 1October 2019 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/704353 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

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