| OCR Text |
Show Rationality and the Structure of the Self, Volume I: The Humean Conception 193 method directs us to decide what to do by evaluating the expected outcomes of alternative available actions with reference to some wanted or valued state of affairs, and to perform that action most conducive to it. The deontological method bids us invoke other criteria for making this decision: It may, for example, direct us to perform that action the maxim of which can be consistently willed as a universal law of nature; or to perform that action we intuitively know to be right. In either case, the method for deciding what to do does not supply normative value criteria for deciding what to do. Rather, it supplies a particular model of moral deliberation. Writers who observe the consequentialist/ deontological taxonomy have not been sensitive to the further distinction between its value-theoretic and practical uses. Frankena, for example, begins by characterizing a teleological moral theory as one that "says that the basic or ultimate criterion or standard of what is morally right, wrong, obligatory, etc., is the nonmoral value that is brought into being," and concludes a few paragraphs later that "in order to know whether something is right, ought to be done, or is morally good, one must first know what is good in the nonmoral sense and whether the thing in question promotes or is intended to promote what is good in this sense."7 That is, he thinks it follows from the independent and prior characterization of the good typical of a consequentialist or teleological theory in the value-theoretic sense that the practical decisions of a person who accepts this theory must take a consequentialist cast; that the person must decide what to do by evaluating the outcomes of her actions with a view to promoting the good that is value-theoretically characterized. Similarly, Brandt, in explaining Ross's deontological or formalist theory of prima facie obligations, criticizes it as incomplete on the grounds that "it is not possible to infer, from the principles he explicitly states, what is our duty in a particular situation ... even ... when it is known which act would maximize the welfare of sentient beings ... [and] with full factual information at our disposal, because he does not give us the second-order (much less third-order) principles necessary for determining our obligation overall, when prima facie obligations conflict."8 Again, the suggestion is that a complete deontological theory implies a method for deriving practical directives for action that are as deontological in character as the substantive theory of value itself. 1.3. Kant's Mixed Theory But there is no reason why consequentialist value theories need to be linked with practical consequentialist decision-making methods, nor why deontological value theories need to be linked with practical deontological Frankena, op. cit. Note 3, pp. 14-15. Brandt, op. cit. Note 4, pp. 393-394. 7 8 © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
