Comment

Richard, thanks for this very insightful post. I'm thinking about working on related topics for part of my dissertation, so I had some thoughts I wanted to run by you.

To begin with, rather than being false, isn't naive instrumentalism in fact the true theory of instrumental rationality if anything is? That is, naive instrumentalism describes how an ideally rational agent reasons. Not only that, but this fact is fairly easy to appreciate. What is hard to appreciate is that humans ought not to follow the true theory of instrumental rationality because humans are not ideally rational. What I find interesting is that philosophers in the consequentialist tradition have (as you observe) been the ones to appreciate this most clearly, whereas non-consequentialists often assume that knowing the ideal moral goals is sufficient to enable a good-willed, naively-instrumental person to be moral. However, as you say, this in fact has nothing to do with core moral differences between consequentialism and non-consequentialism, but is in fact a dispute about practical rationality - so what explains this difference?

One possible explanation is that as a substantive matter, non-consequentialists tend to believe that the ideal moral goals are ones which a good-willed, morally knowledgeable human being will do best at following by being naively instrumental. For example, the Rossian prima facie duties seem to be like this - or at least Ross and his followers seem to believe that they are.

Another possibility is that non-consequentialists believe (perhaps implicitly) that lowering the standards of morality or rationality in response to human imperfection is morally unjustified and/or tends to make us worse people because it removes a source of (internal and external) pressure for self-improvement. I don't care much for the in-principle objection, but I do think that the second point has been neglected in the consequentialist tradition, whereas (e.g.) virtue ethicists have always been impressed by it. It happens to be true about human beings, though it isn't true in the abstract, that we are habit-forming agents, and the choices we make now shape the way we make future choices. To this extent, there's pressure on the non-ideal theory of rationality to strike a balance between accommodating and correcting human imperfection.

What I am now thinking about is the prospects for an ecumenical (i.e. theory-neutral) synthesis of these ideas. Since these questions about rationality are properly independent from disputes over what you call the core content of morality, this seems reasonably achievable. But I may have overlooked some reasons for pessimism here. For example, one reason to be pessimistic is that it's really true that for some non-consequentialist theories, naively instrumental pursuit of the ideal moral goals is as good as anything else human beings could manage.

(Let's use Rossian deontology as a case study. The duty of beneficence seems to be an obvious candidate for one that naively instrumental humans would fail to successfully discharge; however, given the relatively lax demands of the duty of beneficence as Ross conceives of it this may not in fact be true. (After all, the types of actions commonsensically associated with beneficence, like giving money to the homeless and volunteering at soup kitchens, are genuinely beneficent! They just often fail to be effectively beneficent.) Insofar as the duties of non-maleficence, fidelity, reparations, and gratitude are limited to face-to-face human relations, I think naively-instrumental, good-willed human beings probably do as well as any alternative. The question is whether it is plausible, by Rossian lights, to have such a restrictive understanding of the scope of these duties. If we understood, for instance, the question of what to do about various forms of social injustice as falling within the scope of the duty of reparations, then I think there's a strong case to be made that naively-instrumental, good-willed human beings often go wrong and would do better by being principled proceduralists.)