13 - Concluding Remarks

Summary

Being deprived of deontic anchors does exact serious costs. I have discussed some of these in the past few chapters. One is that, without deontic anchors, there would be no grounds for reactive attitudes such as resentment and forgiveness. A second is that, in the absence of deontic anchors, deontic appraisals of rightness, wrongness, and obligatoriness would lack propriety. A third cost is affiliated with concerns of overridingness. If the moral “ought” is overriding, and its verdict is definitive in settling what one plain ought to do in situations in which different sorts of obligation conflict, we will be dispossessed of this ultimate standard of appeal if there are no deontic anchors. One might be, as I am, skeptical about morality's being overriding. Determinism, though, threatens overridingness itself in another way. As I explained, the Overridingness Thesis presupposes the existence of an overarching standard, “Reason,” that passes judgment on the relative normative stringency of special standards of obligation such as moral or prudential obligation. The “plain ought” dictates of Reason, it seems, just like those of the deontic moral “ought,” require alternative possibilities. But if this is so and determinism effaces alternative possibilities, determinism would undermine plain “ought” prescriptions as well.

In this chapter, I first single out an additional cost of being deprived of deontic anchors: In a world devoid of such anchors, we are not, in a way to be explained, “sources” of deontic morality.