Attempts to meet Rosati’s objection

For these reasons I submit that the ideal advisor theory gives us the best account of condition C available in the literature.⁴⁵ This leaves Rosati’s objection standing and even more powerful; yet, it does not make her charge unanswerable. First, we have not yet considered the different ways

45 This does not rule out that we can change Brandt’s or Williams’ theory in such a way that they become a version of the ideal advisor view. However, certain rationales they appeal to in defense of their theories may rule out such a transformation. Brandt, for instance, takes cognitive psychotherapy to unite the two, what he regards as most important, roles of moral philosophy. One is that a proper method should provide a standard for rational desires and aversions; the other is that it should provide a therapeutic method for discovering rational desires and aversions. The discovery is therapeutic because it is a form of (self)-therapy: the individual who undergoes the process of cognitive psychotherapy is supposed to acquire the desire or rid himself of the aversion by that very process. Therefore it might seem logical to exclude non-cognitive methods as well as unattainable information. Through the former the theorist could smuggle in his prior values or, because being too powerful, these methods could extinguish non-mistaken desires too. Unattainable information, on the other hand, would be of no real use of administering therapy to actual agents in the real world. See Daniels (1983), pp. 777 and Rosati (2000), pp. 785-6. In the case of Williams Sobel (2001b), pp. 226-33 has argued that Williams’ explanatory condition and existence internalism is inconsistent with the ideal advisor model. Others have made similar claims with respect to Williams as well as to the ideal advisor model in general. See Noggle (1999), Loeb (1995), section 3 and Enoch (2005), pp. 768-9. While I tend to agree with the claim about Brandt’s theory, I am more skeptical about the alleged disconnection of internalism and the ideal advisor view. However, I set this problem aside here as not being directly relevant for the present discussion.

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the naturalist might try to incorporate an ideal of the person and, second, we have not yet considered the idea that the naturalist does not need an ideal in his theory. In this sub-section I will deal with the first strategy, then proceed on to the second and with this end my discussion.

We have left the presentation of Rosati’s argument with the claim that naturalists cannot appeal to prior normative commitments as a means of inclusion. But even if this claim is accepted, naturalists still have several responses open to them. They are of two kinds: naturalists can try to show that an ideal of the person is derivable from the already existing features of their theory, or they can appeal to alternative methods of inclusion. Start with the first idea. In the case of the hypothetical desire reading of the Model, the ground for the approach is provided by the already mentioned thought that in perfecting the actual agent epistemically as well as cognitively, we also change his existing psychological make-up. In fact, in an argument that I cannot present here in detail, Rosati shows that the changes the agent goes through as a result of idealization, are very dramatic. (Rosati 1995a, 304-11; cf. also Noggle 1999) This is because the requirement that the advisor should be fully informed brings with it special forms of information processing. On the one hand, the advisor should not only have the information but he should also appreciate that information: the information should sink in and take hold of him. On the other hand, since assessing information also depends on the order one receives it, the advisor should consider information from all possible angles in all possible orders. These two requirements, argues Rosati, turn the advisor into someone who is dramatically different from the actual agent.

Now, the naturalist might say, if, through the idealization process, the agent changes dramatically, then perhaps these changes give us just what we need. The claim here is that the process of idealization produces just those traits in the advisor that we are looking for. But this is only an empirical thesis with no grounding in a proper psychological theory. Furthermore, to say that idealization produces exactly those traits that are desirable in an advisor amounts to taking a

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stance on how the ideal personality looks like. And, at this point of the argument, this implies invoking substantive normative judgments, which would put the naturalist in a position he is not willing to embrace, or so I have argued before.

Nor does the actual desire approach do better. True, both Hubin and Noggle have candidates for an ideal of the person, namely the self understood as being composed of the actual desires they prefer. Recall the discussion in the previous chapter. Hubin gives priority to the intrinsic values of the agent, whereas Noggle prefers those desires that the agent most deeply identifies with. Both, moreover, take these desires to constitute the agent’s self and thus secure his psychological identity over time (in fact, as we know, in the case of Noggle all this is built into an ideal advisor framework). (Hubin 1996, 47, 49-50; 2003, 327, 329; Noggle 1999, 314-6) The question is why this would answer Rosati’s worries. After all, what Hubin and Noggle do is merely to equate an ideal of the person with the agent’s actual self. But if there was anything behind Rosati’s point, then it surely was included that someone like Sally can have serious doubts about even those character traits of her that constitute her intrinsic values or the core of her self.

So we turn to the second strategy. If an ideal of the person is not derivable from the theory itself and if a naturalist cannot appeal to substantive normative judgments, he should look for alternative means of inclusion. There are well-known candidates - conceptual analysis for analytical naturalists, linguistic intuitions and empirical research for non-analytical naturalists – as well as methods we may not be aware of yet. One could say, for instance, that our use of terms like ‘advisor’ or ‘reason’ follows our ideas about what features a person must possess to be a competent judge, and those features exclude certain disturbing factors and include others, or, alternatively, involve certain character traits and exclude others. If these moves are defensible, naturalists have a solution at hand. They will have an interpretation (of the ideal advisor or of what actual desires of the agent matter) that does not make use of normative judgments

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concerning the inclusion or exclusion of certain motives, character traits and the like. And they may then use this interpretation to back up either the motives idealization produces or the actual desires they prefer, or to defend a separate set of character traits in addition to (or even as a critique of) the ones idealization generates or the actual desires they prefer.

I take this point. I certainly do not think that I have presented anything that would rule out the possibility of a possible naturalist answer along the above lines. It is telling in this respect that Rosati herself considers her objection not as a refutation of the ideal advisor view but more of an attempt to set a new task for it. (Rosati 1995b, 63; 2000, 810-1; 2003, 496, 527) Yet, this admission does not change the fact that at present there are no such accounts available in the literature. True, as noted in passing in the previous chapter, many naturalists find a role for certain motives in their theory.⁴⁶ Williams, for instance, at one point in his argument refers to ignorance and its undesirable effects on the agent’s deliberation. (Williams 1981a, 104) Smith, as we saw, argues that the advisor has a maximally unified and coherent desire set as a result of the idealization process. (Smith 1994, 159-161) And Roderick Firth claims that our linguistic intuitions support the idea that the ‘ideal observer’ must be disinterested, dispassionate and consistent but otherwise normal. (Firth 1952, 335-344)

But none of these attempts give us what we need. Smith’s description of the ideal advisor is just too thin for our purposes. A maximally coherent and unified desire set is compatible with advisors who are not, at least not without argument, authoritative for the actual agent. This kind of psychology goes well together with Stoics and Buddhists whose advices often we do not admire, since their unification and coherence are achieved by total disengagement. (Blackburn

46 I am here not investigating whether they give any reason for such moves, nor whether they would be right to do so.

Such issues, it seems to me, arise especially with regard to Williams’ theory since he says very little about the meta-ethical background of his theory. For matters of interpretation see Parfit (1997), pp. 109-110; for problems with Williams’ construal of his theory see Sobel (2001b), pp. 224-5.

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1998, 117) And William’s exclusion of ignorance does not in itself give us an ideal whose advice we would take to be authoritative, or even produce an example that we would follow. But besides this trait Williams mentions none other, in fact, he says explicitly that no further substantive constraints on the correct deliberator’s psychology are allowed. (Williams 1995a, 37; 1995c, 190) Finally, though Firth’s characterization is more substantial, it is so only from the viewpoint of what he intends to define, namely, rightness. Being disinterested and dispassionate are traits that are important for an observer whose job is to judge the rightness of an act, but they would be much less welcome in an account of what reasons there are for a given person to act. What we need in such an account is an advisor, not an observer and the latter, unlike the former, is interested in and perhaps even passionate about the agent.⁴⁷

There is one last idea we need to consider. Although the objection we are dealing with comes from Rosati, her own preferred version of the ideal advisor theory may also provide the proper response to it. Her idea is that for φ-ing to be good for the agent, not only must the agent be able to care about φ-ing in some set of counterfactual conditions, but those counterfactual conditions must themselves answer to her concerns. (Rosati 1996, 305) That is, besides the first link between the agent’s concerns and what she would choose in certain conditions, there must be a second link between her concerns and those conditions themselves. The decision, furthermore, whether the second link is secured is made in circumstances we already accept: they are presupposed by and central to our normative discourse.

Setting now aside what these circumstances are (Rosati calls them ‘ordinary optimal conditions’), it appears reasonable that the epistemic and cognitive conditions the ideal advisor model operates with would be accepted there. (Rosati ibid. 308-9; cf. Railton 2003a, 54;

47 In the text I do not consider another problem with Firth’s proposal: that the particular method of inclusion he uses, namely appealing to linguistic intuitions is not among the favoured methods of naturalists nowadays. For a thorough criticism of the method see Brandt (1979), pp. 6-8.

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Williams 1995a, 37) But the issue is whether an ideal of the person would be accepted too – and Rosati says nothing about this. As a result, her version of the theory offers more of a diagnosis of the problem, not a solution to it. It shows that that problem with the ideal advisor model as Railton and others formulate it is that it fails to secure the second link; in fact, in another formulation of the objection, Rosati says just this. (Rosati 1995a, 313-4) Otherwise, though Rosati may be right that her version best encapsulates the intuitions behind theory (a bit more about this later and in Chapter IV), it does not do much more. It offers us another means of including an ideal of the person but says nothing about how this inclusion would happen. And in lack of a properly defended account of inclusion, we cannot take Rosati’s version as a response to her own objection. Again, she admits this. (Rosati 1996, 309)