As he tells us in the preface, Alastair Norcross has argued for scalar utilitarianism since 1988, when he was a graduate student. Since then, he has developed the view over the course of many papers, and Morality by Degrees is a book-length defence of this long-term project.
Scalar utilitarianism is the view that morality gives us reasons for action which ‘are both scalar and essentially comparative. Thus, the judgment that a possible action, A, would be better than an alternative, B, provides a stronger reason to perform A than B, how much stronger depending on how much better A would be than B’ (p. 12). Crucially, at the ‘fundamental level’, moral injunctions are exhausted by scalar comparative reasons.
What about other moral concepts, e.g. an action's being right or wrong, good or bad, or harming someone? [C]onsequentialism is not fundamentally concerned with such staples of moral theory as rightness, duty, permissibility, obligation, moral requirements, goodness (as applied to actions), and harm’ (p. 108). The view developed in the book leaves such judgments outside the scope of the fundamental level of moral theory but develops a companion contextualist account that explains the legitimacy of talking in these terms.
After an accessible introduction, Chapter 2 sets out the scalar approach and argues that the concept of ‘right/wrong action’ is not available to consequentialists. Chapters 3 and 4 extend the negative arguments to ‘good/bad action’ and ‘harm’ and argue that these concepts are also not available to consequentialists. Chapter 5 then develops a contextualist account to explain why judgments involving these concepts can be non-trivially true. And finally Chapter 6 applies the contextualist account to some other problems in moral philosophy, e.g. determinism-based worries for consequentialism, and the non-identity problem.
Chapter 2 argues that once consequentialists have a scale of comparative reasons at the fundamental level of moral theory, the concept of a right or wrong action is redundant. Norcross provides a series of arguments to the effect that the difference between right and wrong actions is not more important than differences in goodness. To give you just a taste of the arguments, suppose ‘the threshold for rightness in a case of charitable giving were $10,000 for both Smith and Jones’. If rightness matters, ‘the difference between Smith giving $10,000 and giving $9,000 must be more significant than the difference between Jones giving $9,000 and giving somewhat less than $8,000. But suppose that Smith is wavering between giving $10,000 and giving $9,000, and that Jones is wavering between giving $9,000 and giving $7,999. No utilitarian would consider it more important to persuade Smith to give the higher amount than to persuade Jones to give the higher amount’ (p. 24).
Chapters 3 and 4 argue that consequentialist accounts of ‘good/bad action’ and ‘harm’ are indeterminate. The strategy in both cases is to go through multiple ways of precisifying the concepts in as charitable a way as possible, and then employ a series of increasingly ingenious (and often amusing) thought experiments to show that they are all unsatisfactory. Intuitively, an act is good iff the world would have been worse if it had not been performed. Similarly, an act harms someone iff that person will be worse off as a consequence of the act compared to how they would have been had it not been performed. These definitions leave it indeterminate what the result would have been had the act not been performed. Norcross goes through multiple candidates for specifying the appropriate alternative and concludes that they are all unsatisfactory. For example, an angry person attacks me. The attack is pointless and unprovoked but done with a bit of restraint and only hurts me slightly. Usually the assailant is much more violent. Had they not done the attack, they would have attacked me more vigorously and hurt me even more. It would be weird to say that they did not harm me because I would have been worse off otherwise.
If we find these arguments against judgments about right, wrong, good, bad and harming actions convincing, how should we respond? An eliminativist response would be to abandon these concepts and do ethics only with scalar comparative reasons. Although Norcross does not find eliminativism counter-intuitive, he develops a positive account of why we make judgments employing these concepts and why they can be non-trivially true or false. This is the task of the last two chapters of the book. Had the book ended before, there would have been a pending challenge to explain why we think and might be justified in thinking in terms of right, good or harming actions. A great contribution of the book is that it meets this challenge and uses linguistic contextualism to account for these concepts.
Basically: ‘An action is right iff it is at least as good as the appropriate alternative’ (p. 122). ‘An action is good iff it is better than the appropriate alternative’ (p. 113). And an action harms someone iff it leaves them worse off than they would have been had the appropriate alternative been performed (p. 117). The contextualism kicks in when we try to determine the appropriate alternative. In all cases, it is determined by the conversational context. In most conversational contexts, the appropriate alternative to attacking someone with restraint is not to attack them even more vigorously, which is why attacking me even with restraint harms me.
On the view developed, the range of alternatives which are available in the first place is also determined by the conversational context. In some contexts, genuinely possible alternatives might be inappropriate; and in some contexts, counter-possible alternatives might become appropriate. It is genuinely possible for me to beat a brilliant chess master by playing a particular sequence of moves, but in most conversational contexts this is not an appropriate option because I am not good at chess.
The view that emerges has a scalar utilitarian theory based only on scalar comparative reasons for action at the fundamental level, partnered with a contextualist account that explains the legitimacy of talking in terms of harm and of right/wrong and good/bad as applied to actions. However, some questions about this picture and whether to extend it are not considered. For example, even though at times other focal points for consequentialism (rules, institutions or character traits) get mentioned, the book focuses only on reasons for action, which raises the question: can we have similar reasons for adopting rules, institutions, etc.? We can also ask whether we can have (indirect) reasons for action because of their relation to rules or character traits. For example, can I have a reason to perform A rather than B because A is the instance of a disposition that is more beneficial, even if B is directly more beneficial? And once the domain of reasons is established, we should ask how they are to be weighed against each other and against other types of reasons such as prudential reasons. (And whether there is perhaps a connection between what one has overall most reason to do and the ‘right’ thing to do.)
That said, the upside to these omissions is that Morality by Degrees is a highly readable volume. As Norcross tells us in the preface, the book is deliberately short because it is supposed to be ‘motivating and arguing for the approach’ he takes, and he wants to ‘maximize the chances […] that a reader will get through the whole thing’ (pp. vi–vii). I can testify that the book delivers on this, and is accessible and of interest to both consequentialists and non-consequentialists.
The book is primarily addressed to ‘core consequentialists’ who believe that reasons for action entirely depend on the comparative goodness of the worlds resulting from them. Norcross puts forward a strong alternative to familiar varieties of consequentialism (e.g. maximising act consequentialism) that takes us back to something more in line with Mill's famous characterisation of actions as being ‘right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness’ (p. 10). It also takes a novel approach in responding to the charge that consequentialism is too demanding in at least one sense of the objection: at the fundamental level, morality is not in the business of placing demands.
More generally, the book's arguments have a bearing on concepts used in non-consequentialist ethics as well (e.g. duty, beneficence and harm) and raise profound questions about which fundamental moral concepts to work with. Norcross presents a radical vision of what distinguishes consequentialist from non-consequentialist ethical theories: they trade in fundamentally different moral concepts. If taken seriously, it implies drawing the lines in standard taxonomies of normative ethics differently. It will also make consequentialism either more or less attractive depending on what you think about the fundamental moral concepts. In either case, Morality by Degrees is unlikely to leave your views unchanged.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Nadine Dietrich and Barry Maguire for their very helpful comments.
