Table Of ContentON REASONS TO LIVE JUSTIFIABLY:
IN SUPPORT OF A HUMEAN CONTRACTUALIST ACCOUNT OF MORAL REASONS
A Dissertation
submitted to the Faculty of the
Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
of Georgetown University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the
degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
in Philosophy
By
Travis N. Rieder, M.A.
Washington, DC
May 5, 2014
Copyright 2014 by Travis N. Rieder
All Rights Reserved
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ON REASONS TO LIVE JUSTIFIABLY:
IN SUPPORT OF A HUMEAN CONTRACTUALIST ACCOUNT OF MORAL
REASONS
Travis N. Rieder, M.A.
Thesis Advisor: Henry S. Richardson, J.D. Ph.D.
ABSTRACT
The goal of this dissertation is to explore a new answer to the very old question, “Why be
moral?” Or, as the question is often phrased today, “What reason does one have to be moral?” I
begin my investigation into this question (what I call the ‘WM’ question) with the keen analysis
of it given by T. M. Scanlon in articulating his contractualist answer in What We Owe to Each
Other (1998). Although I take Scanlon’s view – what he calls an account of the ‘motivational
basis of morality’ – to be quite promising, I lodge two objections against it. First, Scanlon does
not avail himself of the most complete answer that he could to the WM question. And second,
his account of which reason one has to be moral is imbedded in a grand theory that provides a
problematic explanation of the existence of reasons. I then argue that strengthening Scanlon’s
account in response to the first observation makes attractive an alternative theory of reasons, the
adoption of which responds to the second objection. In short, I argue that Scanlon can and
should accept an account on which one has reason to act rightly because one has reason to live
with others on mutually justifiable terms – a reason that one has because she has the further
reason to have intimate relationships with others. This latter reason, then, is explainable in a
plausible, naturalistic way by the Humean Theory of Reasons (HTR), on which an agent’s
particular desires explain her reasons for action.
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The result of modifying Scanlon’s account in the direction suggested is a view that I call
a Humean Contractualist Account of Moral Reasons, or HCA. After making the initial case for
such a view in the first two chapters, I spend chapters 3 and 4 completing a sketch of HCA. I
then spend the final three chapters defending it from important criticisms. In the end, I conclude
that HCA is promising and deserving of further consideration.
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What I now think of as the first draft of this dissertation was written nearly eight years ago, as a
term paper in my first semester as a graduate student. Between then and now, I have had an
unbelievable amount of support from my mentors, colleagues, friends and family. As such, I
don’t even know how to begin thanking them all. So I will simply do my best, knowing that I
likely have left many people out. But they all have my gratitude.
To Justin Weinberg, for encouraging the early, fledgling drafts of this project, and for
introducing me to my eventual mentor, Henry Richardson. And to Kevin Elliott for taking the
ideas articulated here seriously, and for believing that some of the things I argue for may even be
true.
To my friends and colleagues – at the University of South Carolina, at Georgetown, and at the
various conferences and workshops I attended over the years – who have read and listened to
many of the arguments presented here, and who have provided helpful thoughts, insightful
criticism, and wonderful discussions.
To my dissertation Readers, Mark Murphy and Steve Kuhn, who caught many errors, and
provided me with more feedback than I could have been justified in requesting; and to my
Advisor, Henry Richardson, from whom I learned how to do professional philosophy. Whatever
care, precision and rigor appear in these pages is due largely to the influence of these three
individuals.
And finally: to my parents, Joyce and Brent, for raising me to be curious; to Yumosh, for
keeping me company while I wrote; to my amazing partner, Sadiye, for her love and support; and
to our beautiful daughter, Sinem, whose arrival motivated the completion of this dissertation, and
whose smiles kept me sane in the meantime.
To all of these people, and for all of these reasons, I am indebted.
With great appreciation,
Travis N. Rieder
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction ...................................................................................................................... 1
Chapter 1 ........................................................................................................................ 16
Chapter 2 ......................................................................................................................... 49
Chapter 3 ......................................................................................................................... 84
Chapter 4 ...................................................................................................................... 126
Chapter 5 ...................................................................................................................... 160
Chapter 6 ...................................................................................................................... 209
Conclusion ................................................................................................................... 243
Bibliography ................................................................................................................. 255
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INTRODUCTION
The central question of this dissertation is the very old one, “Why be moral?” Or, as I
tend to think of it now: “What reason does one have to be moral?” As an undergraduate at a
small, liberal-arts college, where heavy, late-night philosophical discussions were common, I
remember being especially bothered by Dostoyevsky’s version of this challenge, which focuses
on what the answer could be without an all-powerful, rewarding or punishing god. If such a god
doesn’t exist, what reason could one have to be moral? Isn’t it the case that, if God doesn’t exist,
‘everything is permitted’? I quickly came to believe that the existence or non-existence of a god
would not, in fact, help or hinder my attempt to answer this question (at least, not in the way my
20-year-old brain had expected), since promise of eternal reward or punishment did not offer a
satisfactory answer anyway. And so, as I continued my philosophical education, I kept looking
for answers – a search which ultimately led to this dissertation.
Over the course of the next seven chapters, I will slowly build and defend a new answer
to the ‘why be moral’ question, or as I will later call it, the ‘WM’ question. However, as I will
explain further below, to say that I ‘argue for’ an answer to the WM question would be a bit
misleading; although I certainly provide arguments for aspects of the view I lay out, I do not take
myself to be providing anyone with sufficient reason to take my answer to be the answer.
Instead, I am here engaging simultaneously in two, more modest projects: first, I am answering
the question of what is plausibly true concerning one’s reason to be moral, whatever else is true;
and second, I am offering my answer to that first question as a view of moral reasons that
deserves further attention as a candidate for the correct view. In what follows, I will say a bit
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more about this methodology, after which I will preview the key arguments and positions to
come.
0.1 The Methodology of the Dissertation
Long after those late nights in college, I came to identify my interest in a non-religious
answer to the WM question as being part of an overall philosophical modesty to which I was
committed. This modesty sometimes comes out as an expression of ‘naturalism’, ‘minimalism’,
or even ‘eliminativism’ in various discussions, but I do not here want to defend any specific one
of these positions. Instead, I will just stick with the language of modesty to signify an interest in
philosophical arguments and positions that require as little as possible in the way of substantive
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philosophical assumptions. On this understanding, the goal of this dissertation is to see what
can be done in terms of answering the WM question modestly.
My hypothesis is that the answer is: more than one might expect. I tend to think that our
(philosophers’) knee-jerk reactions to views and positions that seem to get something wrong
harms our ability to clearly evaluate philosophical positions. In the case of explaining moral
reasons, for instance, some views have the (admittedly) strange implication that hypothetical,
idiosyncratic characters have no reason to be moral. An example, explored in detail in Chapter
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As an example: although many will identify my project here as a naturalistic one, I am not
arguing, as a naturalist might, that one reason to accept the view is its naturalism. Rather, to the
extent that the view is appropriately described as naturalistic, the reason for this is that I am
attempting to utilize positions and arguments that most anyone could accept. And so, while the
non-naturalist, for instance, does not believe that the natural exhausts what there is, the non-
naturalists does believe in the natural. Thus, developing a theory that is broadly naturalistic is
part of my methodology, not because I want to argue for naturalism, but because I want to
develop a position that anyone could accept, whether or not they might in fact accept other
positions as well.
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6, is that of Alan Gibbard’s ‘ideally coherent Caligula’. According to some accounts of the
reason to be moral (including my own), if there were such a person as Caligula, who had a
perfectly coherent psychology (although not logically impossible, likely practically impossible),
then this individual would have no reason not to, say, torture for fun. And a common reaction to
such an implication is as follows: well, it is obvious that Caligula, coherent or not, has a reason
not to torture for fun, and so the view under consideration must be false. It is, as we like to say, a
reductio of the view.
I tend to think that many fewer things are ‘reductios’ than are claimed. The better
strategy for evaluating the success of any position, whether it implies that the Ideally Coherent
Caligula has a reason to be moral or not, is to explore the account in some detail and to spend a
good deal of time asking just how successful the view is, overall, according to many theoretical
dimensions. And when we do this, I suspect that many fewer views are ‘obviously false’ than
are claimed to be so.
Back to the hypothesis, then: answering the WM question modestly can accomplish more
than one might expect. I am not hypothesizing, notice, that a modest view can do everything –
which is to say, that it might be explanatorily perfect. Rather, I am predicting that, if we give a
modest answer to the WM question a fair shake, we might be surprised at how successful it is.
For my purposes, there are two interesting ways in which the relative success of my
answer to the WM question would matter. Most ambitiously, it might be so (surprisingly)
successful at explaining one’s reason to be moral, that it provides good reason not to advance a
more theoretically ambitious view. That is: once we give the view a fair shake, as it were, we
decide that it is so successful by any reasonable standard that, given its additional virtue of
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modesty, we decide to treat it as a serious candidate for being the correct view. Indeed, this is
my own suspicion about the view that I ultimately defend.
However, as will become obvious, I simply cannot, in this one document, provide the
number of arguments that would be required to be considered a serious defense of some
particular view of the reason to be moral. Why? Because an explanation of ‘the reason to be
moral’ turns out to be theoretically massive, constituted by an account of permissibility, reasons,
the weight of reasons, and moral motivation – each of which could be the subject of a book (or
many!) on its own. And so, rather than take as my primary aim to argue for my own view of the
reason to be moral, I will here claim to put forward a view motivated by its philosophical
modesty, but which is also surprisingly successful. That is, I will return, at the end, to the
question of whether I have rendered the view articulated ‘defensible’, and suggest that I have;
but if it’s true, this will not be a result of ground-up argument for the position.
In contrast to the goal of ‘arguing for’ a view of moral reasons, the primary methodology
of the dissertation will aim at the second sense in which my answer to the WM question might
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succeed: it might, as I put it later, provide a comforting ‘back-up’ theory of moral reasons. A
back-up theory is one that might not have some of the virtues of one’s favored primary
candidate, but which is there to serve the function in case the primary candidate fails. And why
is having a back-up important? Well, because more ambitious theories might be false, and so if
we put all of our effort into defending those views, and they fail, then we are left without an
explanation of moral reasons. The goal of a modest, back-up view, then, is to provide an account
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I will spend more time discussing this idea explicitly at the end of Chapter 2.
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