Practical Thought Essays On Reason Intuition and Action Jonathan Dancy All Chapter

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Practical Thought
Practical Thought
Essays on Reason, Intuition, and Action
JONATHAN DANCY
1
3
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Contents
Preface vii
Introduction: No More Answers? 1

1. The Logical Conscience 15
SECTION 1: TOWARDS PARTICULARISM

IN ETHICS AND EPISTEMOLOGY
2. On Moral Properties 21
3. Ethical Particularism and Morally Relevant Properties 37
4. Intuitionism in Meta-Epistemology 51
5. The Role of Imaginary Cases in Ethics 62
6. Externalism for Internalists 75
7. The Particularist’s Progress 91
8. Necessity, Universality, and the A Priori in Ethics 114
SECTION 2: MORAL METAPHYSICS
9. Two Conceptions of Moral Realism 129

10. Contemplating One’s Nagel 145
11. In Defence of Thick Concepts 160
12. McDowell, Williams, and Intuitionism 178
13. Practical Concepts 197
14. Should We Pass the Buck? 213
SECTION 3: ACTION AND REASONS

15. Arguments from Illusion 229
16. Why There Is Really No Such Thing as the Theory of Motivation 247
17. On How to Act—Disjunctively 261
vi 
18. Enticing Reasons 281

19. On Knowing One’s Reason 304
SECTION 4: LEARNING FROM THE INTUITIONISTS

20. Prichard on Duty and Ignorance of Fact 321
21. Moore’s Account of Vindictive Punishment: A Test Case
for Theories of Organic Unities 338
22. Has Anyone Ever Been a Non-Intuitionist? 355
23. More Right than Wrong 375
24. Prichard on Causing a Change 394
Places of First Publication 405

Works Cited 407
Index 413
Preface
This collection consists of papers all of which have been previously published.
I am grateful to Wiley-Blackwell, the Royal Institute of Philosophy and Ridgeway
Publishers for permission to reprint material of which they hold the copyright.
The papers are preceded by an Introduction which is intended as an intellectual
autobiography. I have found the attempt to put order into what was a pretty
random process both difficult and interesting. To the extent to which one can
discern a pattern, it was certainly not one determined in advance. Like most
people, I lurched from topic to topic as the mood struck me—stimulated of course
by invitations and other similar motives. But looking at things in retrospective, a
shape does emerge.
In selecting papers for this collection I had three criteria in mind. The first was
absolute quality (real or supposed). The second was to try to construct as much of
a narrative as possible. The third was to try to show the range of areas within
which I have worked. In the last respect, I was sad not to be able to find room for
two papers which are way outside my normal stamping ground, one on Proust’s
conception of the self (Dancy 1995d) and the other on Hume’s Dialogues
Concerning Natural Religion (Dancy 1995c).
I owe thanks to many, of course. In the two departments in which I taught in
the UK, I had enormous support from David McNaughton, Philip Stratton-Lake,
and Brad Hooker. David and I invented what I once (with great pride) heard
referred to as Keele Realism. Philip was supposedly a Kantian when we hired him
at Keele, but by the time he followed me to Reading he was as interested in Ross as
in Kant. Brad didn’t agree with anything I thought but did everything he could to
help me work it all out anyway.
Outside my own departments, the people with whom I have had the most
sustained philosophical interactions are, or were, Derek Parfit (on whom I wrote a
biographical piece for the British Academy: see Dancy 2020), Joseph Raz, Michael
Smith, and John Broome. To these people I owe a particular debt because of the
many ways in which they have influenced my work directly, and for that peculiar
mix of personal and philosophical friendship that so enriches academic life. But of
course, after fifty years in the profession there are many others whose friendship
and support, both philosophical and otherwise, have been very important to me.
With respect to this collection, I owe thanks to two people in particular for wise
advice: to Peter Momtchiloff, conversations with whom persuaded me that a
collection like this might make sense and that I should not dismiss the idea as
little better than vanity publishing, and to my wife Sarah, who has given me all
viii 
sorts of wise advice and who kindly agreed to do the copy-editing. I am also
grateful to the three anonymous advisers for OUP, and to Michael Smith and Jay
Wallace for advising me about my Introduction.
Actually, of course, I owe Sarah much more than this. One signal instance: in
the late 1980s I had been teaching at Keele for seventeen years and had begun to
publish in a way that I was quite satisfied with, but she thought I could do more, or
better. So she suggested that I should try to set up a sort of lecturing tour in the US,
so as to put myself about a bit. When I said that we could not possibly afford such
a thing, she pointed out that US departments give honoraria to speakers at their
colloquia, and pay expenses too, which meant that if I could get four or five
invitations the honoraria would cover the trans-Atlantic fare and the whole thing
would cost us nothing. So with many misgivings I wrote to a few people in the US
saying that I hoped to be flying over their institution on the way from one talk to
another and asking whether there would be any interest in my stopping off to give
a talk for them. And it worked. So I had this nice little tour set up. But the icing on
the cake came when I was writing to John McDowell about something else and
with some hesitation made the same suggestion to him. The completely unex-
pected result was a phone call from the then Chair at Pitt offering me a Visiting
Professorship for a year.
Introduction: No More Answers?
This book is a selection from papers published between 1977 and 2015. Most of
the earlier papers were published in journals, but then, as has happened to many,
nearly everything I wrote emerged in collections, either as records of conferences
or in celebration of the work of others, and so became less easily available.
The title that I originally intended to give to this collection as a whole was ‘No
More Answers’, which seemed appropriate to a collection published at the end of
one’s intellectual career. (Sadly, my publishers would not allow me this title, for
marketing reasons.¹) I owe that title to my son Hugh, but in a rather different
context. I was amusing myself when he was about six years old by asking him why
I should not send him to bed. His answer was, ‘I don’t want to go to bed’. So
I asked him why I should not make him do what he didn’t want to do. He said, ‘It
would make me unhappy’. I asked him why I shouldn’t do what would make him
unhappy. And his reply was, ‘There are no more answers, Daddy’. This seemed to
me to be the right reply. We can often enough explain why a consideration is a
reason, but eventually that desire for explanation will hit a brick wall, in the form
of a point at which no more can be said, without that doing anything to destabilize
the reason we were trying to explain.
My introduction to philosophy was peculiar. At the end of six terms reading
Greats at Oxford, with J. O. Urmson and C. C. W. Taylor as my tutors, I had read
Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Ethics (in Greek), Locke and Hume on the social
contract, Mill on utilitarianism, Russell on denoting, and then pretty much
everything written in Oxford since 1950 (but not including Anscombe’s
Intention). Not only was this rather limited fare, but I found the whole thing
very bewildering and had no real idea what was supposed to be going on. Luckily
for me, I experienced a kind of revelation one afternoon in the Spring vacation of
my final year as an undergraduate when on a reading week with some friends, a
moment at which things suddenly started to make sense. I returned to Oxford for
the final summer term full of new enthusiasm, and even applied to read for the
BPhil. In those days, doing the BPhil at Oxford was a truly hazardous procedure
because only around 25 per cent of the annual entry managed even to pass. But
I didn’t care whether I passed or not. All I wanted to do was to rectify some of the
most glaring gaps in my philosophical education, expecting after that to become a
¹ OUP was unwilling to allow this title on the grounds that the titles of academic books should send
clear signals about their content, which this certainly wouldn’t.
Practical Thought: Essays on Reason, Intuition, and Action. Jonathan Dancy, Oxford University Press.
© Jonathan Dancy 2021. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198865605.003.0001
2 
schoolmaster like my father, or perhaps enter the Civil Service. But somehow
I enjoyed my time doing the BPhil enough for me at least to apply for such
university lectureships as were advertised, and so ended up moving to Keele
University, where I spent the next twenty-five years. In my application I had
announced that I specialized in philosophical logic, without any very clear under-
standing of what that amounted to.
It was during my two years reading for the BPhil (1969–71) that Donald
Davidson hit Oxford, not in person (though he gave the Locke Lectures there in
1970), but in the form of his paper ‘Truth and Meaning’ (1967). I remember
reading this paper then and thinking what a difference it could make to moral
philosophy, which at that time, at least in Oxford, still seemed to be dominated by
R. M. Hare. It looked as if a Tarski-style theory of truth could be written for moral
sentences (apologies for this expression—perhaps I should have written ‘sentences
in the Language of Morals’) as for any others, and that there need be no misgivings
about whether the ‘if and only if ’s involved were other than straightforwardly
truth-functional—which they would have to be if Hare’s prescriptivism were to
survive, since prescriptive utterances, for him, were not capable of truth. In this
enthusiasm I was merely following the local flow (without yet knowing that I was
doing so). In the next few years, David Wiggins, John McDowell, and Mark Platts,
with Philippa Foot and Iris Murdoch in very different ways, contended for the
possibility of truth in ethics after a bleak period in which all such thought had been
banished into outer darkness. I found this renewal of cognitivism in a new form
exciting, and of course it opened the doors for a revival of interest in the history of
cognitivism in ethics, especially the local history of moral philosophy in Oxford
and Cambridge.
When I got to Keele, I found an environment in which there was no pressure to
publish at all, since publication was not then required for tenure—which was just
as well because as far as I knew I had absolutely nothing to say. I now think that
I could have published my BPhil thesis, which was on the theory of categories; but
I had such a low opinion of my abilities at that time that such a thing never
occurred to me (even though it was awarded a distinction in the BPhil, and I did
eventually publish part of it in a collection of papers on Gilbert Ryle (Dancy 2015).
So with no pressure I had time just to look around. As I said, I was, if anything, at
that stage officially a philosophical logician; at least that was the guise under which
Keele had hired me. But with no formal training in logic I was definitely at a
disadvantage. So I learnt up basic logic and worked through Hughes and
Cresswell’s textbook on modal logic, and this led to my first article, ‘The Logical
Conscience’, reprinted in this volume as Chapter 1, which applied modal distinc-
tions to moral philosophy, specifically to an argument of Ewing’s, and to the
theory of rationality. The general idea concerned the very plausible thought that
one ought not to do what one believes to be wrong. What if it is not wrong? Then
one’s belief that it is wrong would be false. But that would mean that it would not
   ? 3
be wrong to do what one believes to be wrong, so long as one is mistaken about

that. And this does not seem comfortable. My solution to this conundrum appeals
to a structural distinction between the thought ‘if you believe it to be wrong, you
should not do it’ and ‘you ought, if you believe it wrong, not to do it; the ‘ought
‘has been relocated in such a way that its scope has been changed. This is logic in
the service of ethics.
So I must already have been reading some of the moral philosophy written in
the 1930s. My father was amazed to hear that I had been reading Ross; he had
attended the last series of lectures that Ross ever gave, just after the war. (My first
copies of The Right and the Good and Foundations of Ethics belonged originally to
my father and my father-in-law, respectively.) When I first started The Right and
the Good, I could not believe that nobody had even mentioned this book to me
when I was at Oxford. All such moral philosophy had been blown away by Hare.
But it was coming back.
My first serious foray into moral philosophy was really into moral metaphysics
and the theory of reasons. ‘On Moral Properties’, Chapter 2 in this collection, was
driven by an interest in the distinction between supervenience and resultance.
Supervenience is a co-variance relation. The moral supervenes on the natural if
and only if, wherever the same pack of natural (subvenient) properties recurs, you
get the same moral (supervenient) property. And the ‘same pack’ here has to
consist of all the natural properties of the action, for any difference will undermine
the requirement that where these natural properties recur, the same moral prop-
erty must recur. Resultance is a different and much more selective relation—a
‘making relation’, one might say, or a form of ‘because’. The action’s wrongness
results from its uncharitableness, say, if it is made wrong by being so uncharitable.
It is perfectly possible for one action to resemble another in the respects that made
the latter wrong, but to differ in other respects so that what made the latter action
wrong does not have the same effect in the former. And the same applies to the
features that made the latter action uncharitable; they might not have that effect in
another case. As I began to put it, what is a reason in one case may not be the same
reason in another; if it isn’t, the second case will have some feature that prevents
what was a reason there from being the same reason here—a disabler, as I called it.
Such distinctions have a significant impact on Hare’s doctrine of the universaliz-
ability of moral judgement, to its detriment—or so I argued.
But as well as Hare, Ross was a target—more specifically so in my ‘Ethical
Particularism and Morally Relevant Properties’ (Chapter 3). It was in thinking
about Ross’s system of prima facie duties that it occurred to me that matters were
less regular in ethics than Ross supposed. Ross thought that a promise invariably
generated a prima facie duty, but it seemed to me that though most promises did
that, some promises did not. A promise might, and would, if the circumstances
were right (or should I say wrong?), generate no duty of any sort, prima facie or
otherwise. For the circumstances to have this effect, it must be possible for there to
4 
be considerations that would prevent what would otherwise ground a prima facie
duty from doing so—disablers, again. And this is really the same problem as the
one I had seen for Hare, because the logic of Hare’s system required you, once you
have approved of one action, to approve of any other that shared with the first the
features that were your reasons for that approval. But there was in fact no such
requirement, because of the ever-present possibility of disablers present in the
second case and not present in the first. So Ross’s system collapsed in the same
sort of way that Hare’s did, and so would any other system of exceptionless
principles. But principles have to be exceptionless, or they are not principles.
And so it looks as if principled ethics in general is in trouble.
As well as these questions about the structure of moral thought and reasoning,
there is also the metaphysical question what sort of property rightness and
wrongness are in the first place, the answer to which should be able to tell us
how we can recognize instances of these properties. We know we are dealing with
to-be-doneness and not-to-be-doneness, but what sort of properties are these?
And what is it to recognize instances of these properties? One answer to the
metaphysical question is that to be wrong is to be such as to merit disapproval, or
abstention. This is a normativized version of the dispositional conception of
secondary properties, e.g. colour, as the property of being such as to appear in a
certain way to beings equipped with the relevant faculties. I spent many happy
hours worrying about these metaphysical issues and their epistemological aspect.
One product was ‘Two Conceptions of Moral Realism’ (Chapter 9 here), but I was
also led into the theory of thick (rather than thin) ethical concepts, as appears
in ‘In Defence of Thick Concepts’ (Chapter 11) and ‘Practical Concepts’
(Chapter 13), spanning nearly thirty years.
Probably one should not poke one’s nose into the thickets of moral epistemol-
ogy without some competence in epistemology more generally. But it was no such
grand motivation that led me in the latter direction. At Keele I found myself
lecturing on all sorts of topics that were not officially my business. One especially
tough year was the one in which I gave all the first-year lectures myself (except for
the ones on political philosophy, a subject which consequently I have never
touched). This was for the simple reason that everyone else was on leave at the
wrong time. Still, I found myself giving the second-year lectures on epistemology,
starting in the late 1970s, which required a lot of work to get up. This was the
period when epistemology was beginning to release itself from the coils of Gettier,
and it was therefore a good time to plunge in. As I learnt more each year, the
lectures developed, but by 1983 I found that they had ceased to change. So it
seemed to me that I should either stop giving them, because giving the same
lectures year after year is not what universities are about, or write them down and
then stop giving them, since giving one’s own book as lectures is not what
universities are about either. So I opted for the latter course; An Introduction to
Contemporary Epistemology appeared in 1985, and I never lectured on
   ? 5
epistemology again—though I edited, with Ernest Sosa, the first edition of A

Companion to Epistemology in 1991, and continued to receive invitations to give
papers at conferences on epistemology for many years.
One of the positions for which I expressed support in that 1985 book was direct
realism in the theory of perception, which holds that in perception we are (or at
least can be) directly aware of the nature of our surroundings. My interest in this
theory no doubt contributed to the interpretation of Berkeley’s metaphysics which
I offered in Berkeley: An Introduction (1987). For Berkeley, the physical world
consists of ideas in the mind of God—ideas that God shares with us when we
perceive the nature of our surroundings. Perception is, therefore, a form of direct
(unmediated) awareness of aspects of that world. Berkeley emerges as a direct
realist in the theory of perception. But those perceived aspects of the world do not
consist of instantiations of primary qualities, understood as ways in which lumps
of inert matter can be. What we are aware of, for Berkeley, is always an idea, and
some ideas—namely the ones that God shares with us—are physical things. So the
physical world is a set of ideas—ideas that God is sharing with us. Since to share
one’s ideas intentionally is to communicate, physical events are, for Berkeley,
instances of divine communication. The world we perceive is really a set of divine
utterances; the world in its entirety is a sort of book, which we understand in the
sort of way in which we understand a conversation. In this way Berkeley arrives at
a traditional understanding of natural events as a sort of text. The natural world is
not an inert lump of meaningless matter. Natural events are a book written by God
for us to read.
Returning to my epistemology textbook: the final pages of that book suggest
that an influential sceptical argument against the possibility of empirical know-
ledge is effectively identical with an argument in ethics, and that both arguments
can be shown to be fallacious. In ethics the appeal is to a principle of universal-
izability: if in one case we pronounce an action right because it has certain
features, we must say the same of any relevantly similar action, where ‘relevantly
similar’ means ‘similar in all the respects that were our reasons for judging
the first action right’. I had already argued that this principle is false; it is false
because a second case, despite being similar to the first in all features that were
our reasons for judgement there, might have further features that prevent what
were reasons there from being reasons here. So similarity in the reasons-base, as
it were, cannot generate a rational requirement that one make the same judge-
ment the second time. What would generate such a requirement would be that
the second case is entirely indistinguishable from the first. But this appeal is to
supervenience, not to a more limited similarity. And supervenience has no teeth,
because there cannot be two cases that are similar in all natural respects (because
of the identity of indiscernibles). The most we could claim is similarity in all
relevant natural respects, but any requirement expressed in those terms would
be toothless.
6 
This appeal to an argument whose home ground is ethics, to address an issue in

epistemology, presupposes that ethics and epistemology have the same rational
base. The theory of reasons is the place where that base is to be found.
The connection between ethics and epistemology surfaces again in ‘Externalism
for Internalists’ (Chapter 6), which was written rather later. Here I try to delineate
fruitful similarities between a distinction between internalism and externalism in
the theory of justification and a similar distinction in moral theory. One of my
main moves is the scope distinction introduced in Chapter 1 in this collection. But
the hope evinced by these efforts is that normative theory will look pretty much
the same in its application to belief as it does in application to action, despite the
admitted differences between belief and action. (But all this leaves special issues
about knowledge out of account.) This hope remains with me today and drove my
last book, Practical Shape (2018).²
Section 1 of this collection contains philosophical reflections that are more
direct than subtle. The tripartite distinction between reasons, enablers/disablers
and intensifiers/attenuators, which first emerges in ‘On Moral Properties’
(Chapter 2), is fairly basic stuff and has, I think, been largely accepted by people
who work in the area. But it took me a long time to work out how to run, and then
how to present, a full theory of moral thought which does without principles
altogether. By 2000 I had achieved a sort of position statement for a collection
edited by Brad Hooker and Margaret Little, reprinted here as Chapter 7. That
paper, ‘The Particularist’s Progress’, is preceded by one written fifteen years
earlier, ‘The Role of Imaginary Cases in Ethics’ (Chapter 5). Appeal to imaginary
cases is often made in the search for a defensible set of principles, but that was not
my concern in that paper. My concern was rather to make sense of what I took to
be a perfectly standard practice of appealing to imaginary cases to help one
determine how to act in an actual, particular situation. The standard way of
understanding that practice is to suppose that the imaginary case reveals a
principle which we can then apply to the actual case that we are really struggling
with. Obviously, as a particularist, I could not run that story—but neither could
I simply denounce the appeal to imaginary cases as misguided. My response to
this difficulty is to show that everyone is in trouble here, which I still believe. The
challenge is to explain the force of the move from what we want to say about an
artificially foreshortened imaginary case, which has no properties other than those
specified in the (often very limited) description of that case, to what we want to say
in a real case which necessarily has a vast range of properties beyond those in
which it resembles the imaginary case. But I don’t think that the ‘solution’ I offer
on behalf of particularism is anything like fully satisfactory. My suggestion was
that an imaginary case acts as a sort of reminder of the importance that a
² I note here that I first introduced the notion of practical shape in a very early paper on
supererogation: Dancy (1988).
   ? 7
consideration can have, which therefore needs to be born in mind when one is
considering a complex case where that consideration is in play. But I have never
been very happy with this suggestion, and tend to agree with those who thought
that my puzzle was better than my solution.
Section 2 of this collection is concerned with far more complex issues, mainly in
moral metaphysics. I have already floated the question what sort of properties
rightness and wrongness could be, if they are to be properties at all. ‘Right’ and
‘ought’ are often treated similarly, but this should probably be avoided. I tend to
suppose that all ‘ought’s are attached to some agent; it cannot be true that
something ought to be done about this unless there is someone who ought to do
it—which there often won’t be. But rightness is not in that sort of way attached to
an agent, as perhaps is shown by the fact that ‘ought’ implies ‘can’ but ‘is right’
does not. The right response might sadly not be one that anyone is capable of
achieving.
One conception of deontic properties, already mentioned, is dispositional: to be
right is to be such as to elicit approval in a disinterested moral agent. (For this to be
informative, approving cannot be understood as ‘thinking right’.) I wondered
whether this dispositional conception can be got to run. It was an application to
moral metaphysics of a dispositional conception of colour: to be red is to be such
as to appear a certain way to creatures suitably equipped. But that conception of
colour seemed challengeable to me too, because it is at odds with the phenomen-
ology. The redness of a red object does not present itself to a perceiver as a
disposition to look that way. This of course raises the question what it would be
for a disposition to appear as such. We need to have an example to work on, of a
disposition that appears as such, and my suggestion was the sharpness of a knife.
We can experience that sharpness by running a finger along the blade without the
knife doing any cutting at all. What we sense is that the knife would cut easily. But
it did not seem to me that rightness is experienceable as a disposition in any
similar way.
In addition, there are many evaluative concepts that are not deontic, by which
I mean that they are not the same sort of concept as ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, but which
still raise many of the same metaphysical and epistemological issues. In particular,
there are the so-called ‘thick’ concepts. Most terms of aesthetic approval and
disapproval, praise and disparagement, are thick rather than thin. It is a debatable
question whether ‘beautiful’ and ‘ugly’ play the same role in aesthetic appraisal as
‘right’ and ‘wrong’ do in ethics, though my answer would be ‘no’, simply on the
grounds that beauty and ugliness are evaluative rather than deontic notions. There
may then be no thin aesthetic concepts, and perhaps that is what we should
expect. (But could ethics dispense with ‘right’ and ‘wrong’?)
The theory of thick concepts has interested me ever since I chaired a sympo-
sium on that topic between Allan Gibbard and Simon Blackburn in 1992. In many
debates these two were on the same side, and indeed their basic presuppositions
8 
were very similar on this occasion. But Gibbard was willing to accept current
presuppositions about the thick and work with them within his system, while
Blackburn wanted to shake things up much more. I had some comments about
their debate, which I was supposed to deliver before opening the discussion to
contributions from the audience, but in fact the two protagonists talked for so long
that I suppressed my comments entirely. Frustrated, I turned those comments into
a stand-alone paper (‘In Defence of Thick Concepts’, Chapter 11 in this volume).
Blackburn had argued that there are no thick concepts, and therefore the notion of
the thick could not generate any argument against non-cognitivism in ethics.
I wanted to accept many of his observations but still retain the possibility of thick
concepts, supposing that the thick is a fruitful area of enquiry, and one which non-
cognitivists may yet find it hard to accommodate. Here again I built on work by
McDowell and Wiggins. The question we were all worrying about was the
question what sort of fact the fact that a joke was funny or an action brave
could be.
By this stage of my intellectual progress I had firmly in place the two
motivations that have driven most of my philosophical thinking. These are,
first, the merits of disjunctivism, and second, the effects of holism in normative
theory. The latter I thought up for myself, but the former I learnt from others.
The main lesson of disjunctivism is that one should not let the nature of the
bad case (or cases) upset one’s account of the good case, and in particular
that one should not start with the bad case and then write one’s account of the
good case as the case that, though essentially resembling the bad case, has some
redeeming features.
Disjunctivism appeared on the philosophical scene in the early 1980s—
Snowdon (1981) and McDowell (1982)—though everyone acknowledged an ori-
gin in Hinton (1973). Its role at that point was restricted to the theory of
perception and the theory of knowledge. In the theory of perception (the original
primary example) the question was whether perception was a sort of illusion-plus,
or whether there might in fact be no common element between perception and
illusion. In the theory of knowledge more generally the question was whether
knowledge is some grand form of belief—a sort of belief-plus—or a different state
altogether, a sort of openness to a fact rather than a closed state dignified by its
having latched on to a fact. Once one sees the possibility of the latter view, one can
make a lot more sense of the talk of intuition that is common in Ross and
Prichard—and indeed in Oxford-based theory of knowledge more generally.
I had mentioned disjunctivism approvingly in my epistemology textbook, but
did not allow it to play a large part there because it was at the time only in its
infancy and did not seem to me to be appropriate fodder for undergraduates. But
the possibility of disjunctive conceptions more generally has been ever with me,
though, as will emerge, I have found it hard to follow the disjunctivists in the
philosophy of action.
   ? 9
Still, once one sees the possibility of disjunctive conceptions, one is ready to
refuse all attempts to understand good cases in terms taken from our account of
bad cases. And this lay at the bottom of my attempt in 1995 to write a new theory
of motivation (‘Why There is No Such Thing as the Theory of Motivation’, here
Chapter 16), one that made it possible for us to act for good reasons, while
allowing that some of the reasons for which we act are not good reasons at all.
This suggestion emerged in full dress in my Practical Reality (2000a). I reached it
as the final stage of a process of examination, and then rejection, of Humean
conceptions of motivation. In Moral Reasons (1993: chs.1–2) I started with an
examination of current responses to Humeanism, which largely consisted of
suggestions by Nagel and McDowell. I found their responses insufficiently radical,
and proposed instead a conception of motivation which was still a theory of
motivating states, but which conceived those states as entirely cognitive. Desire,
I suggested, though it must be found a place within a conception of motivation,
should be conceived not as what motivates, but as one’s being motivated—
motivated, therefore, by something other than desire. One could of course allow
this but still insist that what motivates one must be a state of oneself—a psycho-
logical state that one is in. And if one does so insist, the natural alternative to
Humeanism is the view that one is motivated solely by one’s beliefs; on this form
of anti-Humeanism, one would be motivated by the gap between one’s beliefs
about how things are and how they might be if one were to act in a certain way.
This non-Humean, cognitivist conception of motivation was still psychologis-
tic, in the sense that it maintains that motivation is the product of certain
psychological states in the agent. But I also suggested, as a step beyond pure
cognitivism, a non-psychologistic conception of motivation, under which one is
motivated, not by one’s believings, but by what one believes (1993: ch. 2.5). In this
volume, Chapter 16 pursues this idea, whose importance I don’t think I really saw
at the time, and which reached its fullest expression in Practical Reality. The main
argument in that book is that it must be possible to act for a good reason, and that
good reasons are not restricted to psychological states of the agent—in fact, most
good reasons are not states of the agent at all. I still think this is a really good
argument. But of course it was attacked by people who wanted to know about
acting for bad reasons and actions where one’s reason would be a good reason
were it the case, but where since it is not the case it isn’t a reason of any sort. The
argument continued between those who wanted to understand acting for a good
reason in terms that would also capture the nature of acting for a bad reason, and
those who wanted to understand acting for a bad reason in terms that would also
capture acting for a good one.
There are various possibilities here. The first is that the agent’s beliefs about the
situation that confronts him are true, he acts in that light, and what he believes is a
reason so to act. The second is that the agent’s beliefs about the situation that
confronts him are true, he acts in that light, but what he believes is no reason so to
10 
act. The third is that the agent’s beliefs about the situation that confronts him are
false, but he still acts in that light, and what he believes would be a reason so to act,
were it the case. The fourth is that the agent’s beliefs about the situation that
confronts him are false, he acts in that light, but what he believes would be no
reason so to act, even if it were the case. So there is the good case, and then various
less successful versions. My proposal was to understand all the less successful cases
in the light of the good case. But note that my good case was characterized in
terms of true belief, not in terms of knowledge. I left to one side any difference
there might be between acting out of true belief and acting out of knowledge.
As I said, I had one very simple argument, which was that it must be possible to
act for a good reason: otherwise put, it must be possible for a motivating reason to
be a good reason. Good reasons for action include such things as that he needs our
help, or that the sun is very hot today; and these are not psychological states of any
agent. If the agent’s psychological states are not the only good reasons for him to
do anything, the reasons for which agents do what they do cannot be restricted to
their own psychological states. It is true, of course, that when an agent acts for a
good reason, say, the reason that p, she will believe that p. But that she believes
that p is not the same reason as the reason that p, and her reason for doing what
she does should not be simply identified with her believing that p. Sometimes, of
course, the good reason to act will consist entirely of psychological states of the
agent—as, for instance, where she checks again because she is worried about
something, or because she has forgotten something. But this does nothing to
establish psychologism as a general theory of the reasons for which one acts.
I might check again because (or for the reason that) my wife is worried about
something.
If motivating reasons are not psychological states of the agent, we might still
suppose that they are not matters of fact, because one can be motivated by
something that is not the case. Something that is not the case is a false proposition,
let us allow. So perhaps we are motivated, not by our own believings, but by what
we believe, understood as a proposition. Again, we reach this position by thinking
about a case where things are not in perfect order—the case where things are not
as we take them to be but still we act in that light. But I maintained against this
that no proposition is capable of being a good reason, even though we express
reasons, good or bad, in propositional form. Propositions are just the wrong sort
of thing to be reasons of any sort.
I described my position here as realism in the theory of motivating reasons, as
opposed both to psychologism and to what one might call propositionalism. The
main opposition to my position—or at least the opposition that I took most
seriously—was some form of disjunctivism. This might seem odd, when I have
been heralding the force of disjunctive conceptions. But now we hit the fact that
disjunctivists do not agree among themselves, or perhaps I should say that there is
debate about what disjunctivism really amounts to. Having got embroiled in this
   ? 11
debate in Practical Reality (see esp. ch. 7.1), I returned to it in the papers presented
here as Chapters 17 and 19 (‘How to Act—Disjunctively’ and ‘On Knowing One’s
Reason’).
The main worry here is whether I should insist that the agent’s reason is
always of the same form, ‘that p’ rather than, say, ‘that I believe that p’. Now of
course we all know that these are different reasons—different normative reasons,
that is. But when we turn to the theory of the reasons for which people act, are
there two types of reason, ‘that p’ and ‘that I believe that p’? It is possible to hold
that when things are as the agent supposes, the reason for which she acts will be
the matter of fact, for instance that it is beginning to rain. But when it is not in
fact beginning to rain (perhaps she has just walked under her neighbour’s
sprinkler), can the reason for which she puts her coat on be that it is beginning
to rain? Must we not rather say, of such a case, not only that she put on her coat
because she thought it was beginning to rain, but that her reason for putting on
her coat was that she thought it was beginning to rain? And once we do say that,
should we not also allow that even when she is right about the rain, her reason
for putting on her coat will never be that it is beginning to rain, but always that
she so believes?
These may seem like comparatively incidental matters, but large decisions
about the nature of the explanation of intentional action hang on them. One
characteristic of disjunctivist approaches is that they do not let their account of the
good case be driven by what they are forced to say about the bad case, and that was
the feature I was hoping to exploit. But there are other ways of doing it. The most
forceful alternative to my position is the one that restricts acting for a reason that
is a fact to the case where the agent knows that fact rather than merely believes it.
For this to work, as the basis for an alternative picture, we are going to have to
think of knowledge as something other than a specially secure form of belief. And
there is a formidable band of philosophers whom I respect and who, taking such a
view, suppose that the only cases where our reason for action is a fact are cases
where we know that fact. I have in mind here especially John McDowell, Jennifer
Hornsby, and John Hyman.
It is important to be clear what the options are here. I maintain that what
motivates me is what I believe, not my believing it; and though I allow that
knowledge is not a form of belief, I say the same about cases in which what
motivates me is what I know. McDowell, Hornsby, and Hyman say, against this,
that the difference between belief and knowledge is stark enough to draw a
distinction in motivation: I am only motivated by a fact if I know that fact to be
so. McDowell writes, with characteristic force, that ‘if the truth of the relevant
belief is merely good luck, cognitively speaking, . . . it would be absurd to say the
agent’s reason for acting is the fact itself ’ (2013: 17). So we agree that the reasons
for which we act are never propositions, and that when things go best, the reason
for which we act is a fact. But we differ about cases in which we do not know that
12 
things are as we suppose when we act in that light. I pursue this debate in ‘On
Knowing One’s Reason’ (Chapter 19), and below.
It was around this time that it occurred to me that two views to which I was
already committed gave me a third view for free (see Dancy 2021). This third view
emerged in my Practical Shape (2018). The two views already on the table were (1)
holism in the theory of reasons and (2) the idea that the reasons for which we act
and believe are never propositions, but matters of fact (real or supposed). And it
seemed to me that this generated a much stronger form of Aristotelianism in the
theory of reasoning than any that had been suggested so far. Aristotle maintains in
various places that the conclusion of a practical syllogism is an action, and this
idea has been one of which nobody has been able to make much sense. But
whatever one says about the practical syllogism, we need not suppose that the
conclusion of practical reasoning need be anything other than an action. After all,
we act in the light of a simple reason; so why should we not also be able to act in
the light of the sort of complexity thrown up in practical reasoning, where we
consider reasons for and against, along with intensifiers, attenuators, enablers,
disablers and whatever other complications our reasoning may throw up?
Complexity in that from which we reason to action need not affect in any way
the directness of the relation between that from which we reason—matters of
fact, real or supposed—and that to which we reason, the action which we take in
that light.
This picture needs to confront views of reasoning which start from preconcep-
tions about theoretical reasoning. There is a tradition of supposing that in
reasoning to belief, we reason from propositions to propositions; and the study
of such reasoning has even been called ‘propositional logic’. Now of course, if
there are such things as propositions, there are going to be relations between
propositions. If one proposition is true, another might be made more probable
than it would otherwise be; and several propositions might together guarantee the
truth of another one. All this is undeniable. But I hold that no proposition (true or
otherwise) is a reason for anything. When we engage in serious (rather than
classroom) reasoning, we reason from—and only from—things that we take to
be so. Being so is not the same as being true. And even when the things we take to
be so are not so, that does not affect the light in which we are treating them when
we reason from them.
These thoughts apply with equal ease to practical reasoning—reasoning to
action—and to theoretical reasoning—reasoning to belief. The main difference
between practical and theoretical reasoning (other than their distinctive ‘conclu-
sions’) lies in the way we explain the force of the reasoning. In reasoning to belief
we mainly reason from considerations which raise the probability of our conclu-
sion, and the force of the reasoning is the extent to which that probability is raised;
in logical reasoning we reason from considerations which guarantee the truth of
our conclusion, and the force of the reasoning lies in that guarantee; in reasoning
   ? 13
to action we reason from considerations which raise the value of so acting, and the
force of the reasoning lies in the extent to which it reveals that course of action as
worthwhile, and as more worthwhile than others. But these differences in explan-
ation should not be allowed to obscure a fundamental sameness in the processes
we think of as reasoning.
At the end of his 2013 paper, however, McDowell makes a point that I have yet
to assimilate. A main purpose of Practical Shape was to contribute to making sense
of a remark of Kant’s at the beginning of the Groundwork, that practical and
theoretical rationality must at bottom be one. Kant makes very little progress
towards showing how this could be, and I hoped to do better. But McDowell
suggests that the only way to succeed in that direction is to award a certain
primacy to the case where the agent is reasoning from knowledge rather than
mere true belief. He writes:
But if the perfect manifestation of practical rationality is acting in the light of a

fact in the sense that goes missing in Dancy’s treatment, we cannot consider
practical rationality in abstraction from cognitive capacities, and we have to
recognize that practical rationality is more deeply embedded in rationality at
large than the highest common factor conception allows it to be. (2013: 28)
This stern rebuke deserves a careful response. The ‘highest common factor
conception’ holds that the distinction between knowledge and true belief is not
significant for the theory of practical rationality. And it is true that I saw no real
significance in the distinction between acting in the light of what one believes and
acting in the light of what one knows. My phrase ‘in the light of ’ applied equally to
either side of that distinction. Was that a mistake? One point on which we agree is
that theoretical rationality is more deeply embedded in practical rationality than
generations of theorists have been willing to allow. But is practical rationality
deeply embedded in theoretical rationality, or in ‘rationality at large’, on anyone’s
view? Isn’t it rather a one-way matter, as I just put it: theoretical rationality is more
deeply embedded in practical rationality than we have supposed?
I begin to wonder whether McDowell has as good a right to claim to express
Kant’s identity thesis as he claims. I had hoped to make progress on that point by
laying what I thought of as structural similarities between practical and theoretical
thought. In both, I suggested, we reason to the specific form of response best
suited to the situation as we conceive it. Can I stick to that picture while accepting
McDowell’s conception of the difference between knowledge and (mere) justified
true belief? It seems to me possible that I can. What needs to be done, to make
progress in that direction, is to accommodate the distinction between reasoning
from knowledge and reasoning from justified belief, so that this distinction makes
a significant difference in both practical and theoretical reasoning, while also
doing justice to points I have been at pains to make about cases that involve
14 
belief. McDowell himself does not quite meet this challenge, as becomes clear
when we look closely at his treatment of the less favoured cases, the ones that
involve reasoning in the absence of knowledge. Is he going to be able to avoid the
conclusion (which officially he rejects) that the only possible account of the case
where we are acting in the light of things as we believe but do not know them to be
is that we are acting in the light of our own mental states? Since we cannot be
acting in the light of the fact believed (because acting in the light of a fact is
restricted to the knowledge case), there may be nothing left for us to be ‘acting in
the light of ’ other than our own mental states—our beliefs. But the light in which
we act is not our grip on the world; it is the world as we present it to ourselves—
and these are different things. Officially McDowell applauds my insistence that
when we are wrong, and when we are luckily right (and so do not know), our
reason for doing what we do is not that we believe that p; it is still that p. But what
is this ‘that p’ in the less favoured case? It is not a proposition, and it is not a fact
either. What is there left for it to be?
My official answer to this question is that we are dealing with an intensional
context, and in such a context there is no need to take ‘that p’ as a referring clause.
As McDowell says, it is the analogue in English of the Latin ‘quod’ when followed
by a subjunctive clause.
So I still worry that McDowell may be forced into giving a distorted account of
the less favoured case. I don’t see the need to insist on McDowell’s reading of the
locution ‘acting in the light of a fact’. Much more important is the distinction that
underlies McDowell’s insistence, and the awarding of rational primacy to the case
of action in the light of knowledge. Here too I think we can agree. But clearly there
are answers still to come.
1
The Logical Conscience
On pp. 144–5 of his Ethics, A. C. Ewing writes:
It is a recognised principle of ethics that it is always our duty to do what we when

considering it sincerely think we ought to do, but suppose we are mistaken, then
we by this principle ought to do something which is wrong and which therefore
we ought not to do. Is not this a contradiction? It would be if we were not using
two different senses of ‘ought’.
The appeal to this contradiction is commonly cited as evidence that there must be
two senses of ‘ought’. Little, however, is said about what these two ‘senses’ are and
how, if at all, they are related.
Using the following crude notation:
Ba: a believes that

da: a does d
O: it ought to be the case that
we might try to represent Ewing as taking the line that the complex formula
‘(BaOda ! Oda) · BaOda · ~Oda’ is inconsistent, unless ‘O’ equivocates. And
there is no doubt at least that if all the terms in this formula are univocal, the
formula is inconsistent. But there is a much less awkward method of dealing with
the difficulty than that adopted by Ewing, a method which still retains his original
intuitions. We can instead suppose that he is mistaken about the logical form of
one of the conjuncts; specifically, the first. As in other modal contexts, questions of
scope arise, and with them in mind we notice the similarity between
(1) BaOda ! Oda

and (2) O(BaOda ! da).
If (2) improves on our original representation of Ewing’s original intuition that

‘it is always our duty to do what we when considering it sincerely think we ought
to do’, it looks as though Ewing was wrong in holding there to be a contradiction
here. For (2) appears to be consistent with
16   
(3) BaOda · ~Oda
in which case the revised Ewing formula
(4) O(BaOda!da) · BaOda · ~Oda
is unproblematic. But can we be sure that (2) and (3) are consistent? What we
want here is a proof of the invalidity of
(5) O(BaOda!da)!(BaOda!Oda).
Such a proof can be obtained within Hintikka’s system of deontic logic,¹ which
interprets the operator ‘O’ in terms of deontically possible worlds. Suppose the
consequent false; this tells us that BaOda · ~Oda. ‘~Oda’ is equivalent to ‘P~da’
(‘P’ = ‘it is permitted that’), which tells us that in some deontic alternatives² to our
world, ~da. Given the antecedent ‘O(BaOda!da)’, we deduce that in those
alternatives ~BaOda. Nothing in this leads to a contradiction, for the falsity of
the consequent makes ‘BaOda’ true in our world, not in any alternatives.
More formally, we can show (5) to be invalid by showing (4), its negation, to be
satisfied by the model system which consists of the following two model sets:
(α) BaOda, ~Oda, P~BaOda, O(~BaOda v da), da

(β) ~da, ~BaOda, (~BaOda v da), O(~BaOda v da)
where (β) is assumed to be a deontic alternative to (α). Inspection will reveal that
this set of sets of sentences satisfies Hintikka’s defining conditions for a model
system. We conclude, therefore, that (2) and (3) are consistent, while (1) and (3)
are not.
So if (2) can be taken as a reasonable version of the intentions behind (1),
Ewing’s ‘contradiction’ is resolved without appeal to different senses of ‘ought’.
How is (2) to be interpreted, and how far does its superficial resemblance to (1)
enable us to suppose them to have been confused? According to (2), in all deontic
alternatives to our world people do in fact do what, in those worlds, they believe
they ought to do. This differs markedly from (1), which tells us that in all deontic
alternatives to this world people do in fact do what, in this world, they believe they
ought to do. There is a further difference between (1) and (2). (1) tells us that in
this area everyone’s beliefs are true, (2) neither guarantees nor requires the truth of
¹ For this and other concepts of deontic logic, see, for instance, Hintikka (1969).
² Deontic alternatives to our world are, roughly, worlds in which people do in fact do what, in this
world, they ought to do; worlds, that is, in which all our duties are fulfilled. This is made much more
precise in Hintikka (1969).
   17
any beliefs, even of those beliefs only which are held in better worlds than this; for
the thing believed, Oda, is not identical with the thing true, da. We shall be unable,
therefore, to show (2) true by simple appeal to the doctrine that the inhabitants of
deontically acceptable worlds hold only true beliefs about what they ought to do.
For that is the further statement
(6) O(BaOda!Oda)
which may or not be true. If true, then together with the more probable doctrine
(7) O(Oda!da)
it will entail our (2). But we need not appeal to this dubious parentage in order to
be allowed to hold (2), which is after all only an attempt to capture the better
intuitions that lay behind (1). Our formula thus leaves undecided the question
whether in deontic alternatives to our world people still hold mistaken beliefs
about their duties.
It is here that the crucial difference between (1) and (2) is to be found. Both are
concerned, and in fairly similar ways, with getting people to do the things they
think they ought to do. Both have the consequence, on fairly natural assumptions,
that we are right to blame a man for failing to follow his conscience. But, crucially,
we do not need to stipulate that all the dictates of his conscience are true in order
to obtain this result. The distinction between (1) and (2) lies in the fact that, by
asserting (2), we require that people do what they believe they ought to do,
without committing ourselves to endorsing all those beliefs.
It is impossible, of course, to validate all the intuitions that led to the production
of (1) in that sense in which it conflicts with (3). Ewing’s expression of the point,
however, can be read as an interpretation either of (1) or of (2). Anyone therefore
who feels sympathy with Ewing’s account will know which to choose. In this case,
as in the case of other syntactical modal ambiguities, the ambiguity is cloaked in
natural language. This is a reason for supposing there to have been confusion
between (1) and (2).
It seems to me, therefore, that this way of resolving the initial contradiction has
great advantages over the resort to different ‘senses’ of ‘ought’. There are, of
course, other ways of achieving the same result. One is to reject the possibility
of (3). Since (3) is intended merely as the expression of a particular instance of a
general truth, this move amounts to the rejection of objective duties. Some of
those who have supported (1) or some similar doctrine have attempted to do so
while admitting the existence of objective duties; this is what led them to postulate
subjective duties as well, and it is these people with whom I am chiefly concerned.
My analysis offers them a way of admitting objective duties while requiring people
18   
to act according to their conscience, without validating everybody’s opinions and

thereby falling into contradiction.
Finally, a general point. The contradiction which I have tried to resolve is itself
only an instance of a group of similar paradoxes, all of which concern the relation
between a man’s beliefs, his actions, and the facts. We can ask whether it is rational
or sensible to act according to the facts or merely according to one’s beliefs about
the facts. We can ask whether it is wise/stupid to do what one thinks it is wise/
stupid to do. The more such examples are multiplied, the less plausible it is to
maintain that there are two senses of each of the key words ‘rational’, ‘sensible’,
‘wise’, ‘stupid’, etc. Any solution, however, to one of these paradoxes ought to be
generalizable to the rest. And this is in fact the case with the one offered here. For
it is, I think, entirely independent of the particular nature of the modal operator
used. The same result can be obtained if we use instead a ‘rationality’ operator
from epistemic logic. Using ‘R’ rather ungrammatically for ‘it is rational that’, we
derive the same distinction between ‘(BaRda!Rda)’, which is false, and ‘R
(BaRda!da)’, which is, I think, true.
SECTION 1
T O W A R D S PA R T I C U L A R I S M I N
ETHICS AND EPISTEMOLOGY
2
On Moral Properties
1. Resultance
We know a priori that if an action has a moral property, it has it in view of some
other properties which it has. I want to investigate this truism and explore its
relationship with two other truisms, but I shall not be offering an analysis of it.
Taken baldly as I have first expressed it, it does not go so far as some philosophers
would like. A more demanding version is:
We know a priori that if an action has a moral property it has it in virtue of

some non-moral properties which it has.
Both of these truisms are true enough. To express them reasonably simply, we can
use the term ‘resultant’ thus:
The F-ness of an object results from properties P¹ . . . Pn of that object iff the
object is F in virtue of its possession of P¹ . . . Pn, where F-ness is not identical
with P¹ . . . Pn nor with any truth function of members of P¹ . . . Pn.
And I shall allow myself to talk of one property resulting from a set of other
properties. So we have it that if an action has a moral property M, its M-ness
results from some of its non-moral properties. These non-moral properties may
be called the reasons why it is M, and typically they will form a rather small group
among the action’s non-moral properties. But when a man decides that the action
is M, his reasons will probably form an even smaller group; in a favourable case,
his reasons will be among the reasons why it is M, but in an unfavourable case,
they will not. In morals as elsewhere, a man can reach the right conclusion for the
wrong reasons, and even where he reaches the right conclusion for sound reasons,
he need not have exhausted all the available reasons.
All this might seem, from a certain point of view, uncontentious enough. Sir
David Ross expresses it this way:
It is clear that it is in virtue of my thinking the act to have some other

characteristic that I think that I ought to do it. Rightness is always a resultant
attribute—an attribute that an action has because it has another attribute.
(1939: 168)
22     
But he also writes:
An act that is right is right in virtue of its whole intrinsic nature and not of any
part of it. In respect of certain elements in its nature it may be prima facie right
and in respect of others prima facie wrong; whether it is actually right or wrong,
and if it is wrong the degree of its wrongness, are determined only by its whole
nature. (1930: 123)
Is this simply another conception which also needs to be spelled out, or is it a new
conception of resultance which competes with our previous one? In The Right and
the Good, his earlier work, Ross distinguishes carefully between the type of
resultance which I have already mentioned, and which he calls parti-resultance,
and the new type of resultance, called toti-resultance. We might take it that moral
properties are both parti-resultant and toti-resultant, it being true both that they
exist in virtue of the sum total of all the non-moral properties, and that some of
the non-moral properties of an action still play a special role in the determination
of its moral properties. But there can be objections to this attempt to have it both
ways—objections from both sides. Ross’s view, at least in The Right and the Good,
was quite clear: moral properties are toti-resultant and not parti-resultant. What
arguments can be produced in favour of this position?
I think it possible to discern two arguments in Ross. The first is as follows:
The equality of the two angles is a parti-resultant attribute. And the same is true
of all mathematical attributes. It is true, I may add, of prima facie rightness. But
no act is ever, in virtue of falling under some general description, necessarily
actually right; its rightness depends on its whole nature and not on any element
in it. (1930: 33)
If this is an argument, Ross is moving from the anti-naturalistic view that no

natural character is sufficient to guarantee rightness, to the view that rightness is
toti-resultant. Is this move valid? It is interesting that in a footnote to the passage
cited, Ross tells us that he has rather overstated his view in the interest of
simplicity:
Any act is the origination of a great variety of things many of which make no
difference to its rightness or wrongness. But there are always many elements in
its nature . . . that make a difference to its rightness or wrongness, and no element
in its nature can be dismissed without consideration as indifferent. (1930: 33)
But if the above argument is valid, it is valid against the position sketched in this
footnote. For the converse of the inference is that if rightness is not toti-resultant,
then some natural character is sufficient to guarantee rightness. Since Ross’s ‘true’
   23
view is that rightness is not toti-resultant, he should by his own reasoning

conclude what he believes false, that some natural character is sufficient to
guarantee rightness. This conclusion is not made more palatable by the qualifica-
tion that the natural character concerned is a complex one consisting of many
different qualities. However, as well as there being this ad hominem argument
against Ross, it is clear that the inference is invalid. Perhaps the way to show this is
to distinguish between two views:
1. Some limited natural character guarantees the rightness of any action which
has it.
2. Some limited natural character makes this particular action right.
Ross is arguing from the falsehood of the first to the falsehood of the second. But it
seems clear that this action can be right because it is the returning of an axe to its
owner, without such actions always being ‘necessarily actually right’. I shall return
to this point later.
The second argument discernible in Ross in favour of toti-resultance is based
on the agreed fact that ‘no element in the nature of an action can be dismissed
without consideration as indifferent’. This is the point that although an action
may have several properties in virtue of which it is prima facie right, there still may
be some overwhelming characteristic in virtue of which it is prima facie wrong and
which is strong enough to tip the scales so that the action is actually wrong. And
we cannot know whether the action is right or wrong until we have seen the effect
of each property on the sum total of its values.
The reply to this argument is as before. First, Ross’s own backsliding from true
toti-resultance indicates that he thinks the argument unsound. Second, he is right;
the argument confuses the truth that each property may make a difference with
the falsehood that each property does make a difference. The consideration
offered here in favour of toti-resultance is an epistemological one; but the con-
clusion is, in a broad sense, logical. The intuitionists seem agreed that in order to
discover the moral properties of an action or object, one needs first to discover all
its non-moral properties. Why should this be so? For no other reason, it seemed,
than that the action’s moral properties are toti-resultant; and so any moral
conclusion we come to before all the non-moral facts are in can at best have the
status of a well-ordered guess and might best be expressed in terms of the prima
facie. There are two complaints here: the first is that the notion of the prima facie
being used is not Ross’s technical one (for which, see below and Ross’s second
apology on page 20 of The Right and the Good) but the normal one, incompatible
with Ross’s, of an appearance presented at first sight but which later may turn out
to be illusory. Second, all the epistemological facts can be accounted for using just
the notion of parti-resultance. The crucial point here is that we can never know in
advance whether a given non-moral property is or is not relevant to the moral
24     
properties of the action. This is why we need to look at all the non-moral facts
before coming to our moral decision, and does not at all weight the balance in
favour of the notion of toti-resultance. It can still be the case that our final decision
is that the action is right in virtue of some of its non-moral properties, for its
properties in general are such that the action is right and that its rightness does
result from a limited number of them.
This being so, what can be said in favour of parti-resultance and against toti-
resultance? Again, there seem to be two points to be made here. The first is made
by Ross: ‘Any act is the origination of a great variety of things which make no
difference to its rightness or wrongness’ (1930: 33). Assuming that parti-
resultance and toti-resultance are competitors (on the basis that both are expli-
cated using the phrase ‘in virtue of ’), this point must create a difficulty for toti-
resultance. Moore’s doctrine of organic wholes may be an attempt to solve it. But a
worse difficulty for toti-resultance is created by its reliance on Ross’s notion of a
prima facie duty. This notion is subject to grave doubts.
The notion of a prima facie duty is introduced for two purposes. First, it is
introduced in order to increase the consistency of any complex moral position.
Suppose that I have as moral principles the following:
Murder is wrong
Breaking a promise is wrong
Lying is wrong
Helping others in distress is right (and so not wrong)
and so on. I will soon find a case arising of an action which comes under more
than one of these principles and is said by one to be right and by another to be
wrong. If I read my principles as universally quantified implications, I find myself
in self-contradiction and must adjust my moral scheme somewhere. But this, Ross
thinks, distorts the case; the validity of moral principles is not impugned by their
coming into conflict. Ergo, they must be of some other form. Ross therefore finds a
form under which they cannot conflict.
Murder is prima facie wrong

Lying is prima facie wrong
Helping others is prima facie right
In the case of a conflict of principles all we can do is to consider the case and
decide where the balance of wrongness or rightness lies.
Second, the prima facie is used to explain the fact that often, if an act that is a
duty is so in virtue of all its non-moral properties, among the properties in virtue
of which it is a duty will be some in virtue of which it is wrong. This paradoxical
situation can be resolved by deft use of the prima facie. The sentence ‘Among the
   25
properties in virtue of which it is a duty proper are some in virtue of which it is

prima facie wrong’ lacks any appearance of contradiction (cf. Ross 1930: 123).
There is a lot to be said about this notion of the prima facie, but I shall restrict
myself to two points in order to indicate where it is unsatisfactory. The first
concerns the nature of a conflict of duties. Where such a conflict occurs, one
may predominate; but the other is not for that reason abolished; it may create
residual obligations such as the duty to apologize for failing to keep a promise even
though it was in the circumstances one’s duty to break it, or may give rise to
feelings of regret for the action that one was unable to perform. Ross was aware of
this and tried to account for it by saying that prima facie duties are of the nature of
a claim on one, which is not abolished but overridden in certain circumstances.
But his explicit accounts of a prima facie duty leave no room for this sort of
remark. He offers us two:
(A) An action is a prima facie duty if it is an action which tends to be a duty

(1930: 28).
(B) An action is a prima facie duty if it is of such a kind that it would be a duty
proper if it were not at the same time of another kind which is morally
significant (1930: 19). (Ross also suggests the phrase ‘conditional duty’ in the
place of ‘prima facie duty’.)
The first of these accounts, in terms of tendencies, will not touch the particular
case; a particular action, even as an action of a certain type, does not tend to be a
duty but either is one or is not one. The second account cannot be faulted on that
score, but fails elsewhere. What it tells us is that where an action is prima facie
right in virtue of being the keeping of a promise, prima facie wrong in virtue of
being the neglect of the duty of self-preservation, and actually wrong since the
prima facie wrongness predominates over the prima facie rightness, the prima
facie rightness is the characteristic that the action would have been a duty had it
not been an action of some other morally significant kind. But why should this
characteristic create residual duties or a feeling of regret? Despite Ross’s good
intentions here, the notion of the prima facie seems quite unable to produce what
is wanted.
I now turn to the second, and for present purposes more important, area in
which we might look (without success) for help to the prima facie. Linked with
toti-resultance, we learn that an action is a prima facie duty in virtue of being a
promise-keeping if, if it had no other morally relevant characteristics, it would be a
duty in virtue of all its characteristics. This position attempts to account for the
peculiar place of promise-keeping among those characteristics by putting it
completely at the level of the prima facie. But it surely distorts the matter to
suppose that among the characteristics in virtue of which it is a duty proper,
promise-keeping has not some special place; particularly when we remember that
26     
in a case of conflict our action will have some characteristics in virtue of which it is
prima facie wrong but which still count, equally with promise-keeping, among
those in virtue of which it is actually right. Something must be said to pick out a
special relationship between the rightness of the act and some among its qualities,
and the notion of the prima facie does not provide what we need.
I conclude that the claim that moral properties are toti-resultant is not satis-
factory until either the notion of the prima facie is improved or some other
method is found to express the special place that some qualities have in deter-
mining the moral property of an act.
2. Supervenience
Even if the notion of toti-resultance gives an unsatisfactory account of the relation

between a moral property of an action and all its non-moral or natural properties,
there remains another and much more popular account of that relation. This is the
notion of supervenience. To say that moral properties supervene on the non-moral
is to say that if an action satisfies N₁, N₂ . . . Nn, where N₁, N₂ . . . Nn is a complete
natural description, and also has the moral property M, then any other action
satisfying N₁, N₂ . . . Nn must also have M, and the first action cannot change in
respect of M without changing in respect of N₁, N₂ . . . Nn, even though the
possession of N₁, N₂ . . . Nn does not entail the possession of M. This notion of
supervenience clearly falls into two parts, which are worth separating. Here is an
attempt¹ at a bipartite definition:
(S) If a property M is supervenient upon a class of properties C, then: M is not

identical with any member of C or with any truth function of members of C,
and if an object has M and C¹ . . . Cn (where C¹ . . . Cn are all the members of
C which it has), then it is impossible that it should cease to be M or become
more or less M than before without changing in respect of some member of C.
(S¹) If a property M is supervenient on a class of properties C, then: M is not

identical with any member of C nor with any truth-function of members of C,
and if an object has M and C¹ . . . Cn (where C¹ . . . Cn are all the members of
C which it has), then necessarily any other object which possesses C¹ . . . Cn to
the same degree also possesses M to the same degree.
Let us restrict ourselves for the moment, to considering the supervenience of

the moral on the non-moral, that is the case where M is goodness and C is the class
¹ (S) and (S¹) are taken from Blackburn (1971: 106).

   27
of non-moral properties. These definitions bring to light several difficulties with

the notion of moral supervenience. Apart from general problems concerning the
possibility of a sharp distinction between the moral and the non-moral, and any
doubt there may be about conceiving of all the non-moral qualities, the main
difficulty here is to prevent the right-hand sides of (S) and (S¹) from being too true
(where M is goodness and C is the class of all the non-moral properties) and so
proving the supervenience of the moral on the non-moral at the cost of making it
trivial. The right-hand side of (S) is too true in this case, since no person can
change in any respect without becoming older, and I am not sure that an action
can be said to change at all. The right-hand side of (S¹) is too true in this case, since
the identity of indiscernibles guarantees it, it being impossible for two things both
to possess all the same non-moral properties to the same degree. Assuming for the
moment that we are trying to preserve both (S) and (S¹), there seem to be two
methods of improving them. One is to look to the literature on the identity of
indiscernibles to provide some satisfactory minimal restriction on the notion of all
the non-moral properties. The other is to make a more radical change in our
version of C, the class of properties on which the moral properties supervene. The
natural candidate here is that of all the morally relevant properties: the moral
properties would supervene not on all the non-moral properties, but only on those
of them that are morally relevant. Of these two options, I very much favour the
first. Considerations here are twofold. First, can we produce a sound notion of the
morally relevant properties under which it will be true that the moral supervenes
on them? I shall provide reasons in the next section for doubting this. Second, it is
desirable at this stage to make some effort to distinguish between the super-
venience of moral properties on the non-moral and the universalizability of
moral judgements as propounded by R. M. Hare. Narrowing the subvenient
class in the way suggested simply collapses the two notions into one. But there
would be room on the alternative proposal to reject Hare’s doctrine of universal-
izability without rejecting the doctrine of moral supervenience, and this is an
option which ought to be left open as long as possible.
In the hope that the supervenience of the moral on the non-moral can become a
non-trival matter by an alteration in our account of supervenience along the lines
of the first alternative, I shall continue to speak as if it were a moral principle of
substance that two actions that share all their non-moral properties to the same
degree must share all their moral properties to the same degree, and that no object
can change its moral properties without changing its non-moral properties. This
gives us our third truism. And it gives us, so far, three relations between the moral
property M-ness of an object and its non-moral properties. The first is between
M-ness and the speaker’s reasons for asserting M-ness of the object; the second is
between M-ness and those properties from which the M-ness results; the third is
between M-ness and all the properties together. The possibility that some non-
moral properties are in some special way morally relevant suggests further such
28     
relations. But in order to introduce these, I need to return to my starting point and
look again at the relation of resultance.
A few further difficulties in the definition of supervenience emerge in Section 4.
3. Resultance and universalizability
The truism that actions have their moral properties in virtue of their non-moral
properties should not blind us to the fact that sometimes an action has a moral
property in virtue of its possession of another moral property. An action can be
good because it is generous. In the terminology of resultance, although a moral
property of an action always results from some of its non-moral properties,
sometimes a moral property results, on the way, so to speak, from another
moral property. The goodness of this action results from its generosity, which
in its turn results from some non-moral properties of the action, for instance its
being a substantial donation to a needy cause. And if this is true, one thing that
we might otherwise feel inclined to say is ruled out. We might, that is, want to
suppose that there is some short list of qualities from which moral qualities
result; a list, that is, of qualities in virtue of which actions get to be good or
bad. But this supposition is ruled out. There is no short list of qualities
from which all moral properties result. And we know this because we know
that many of the putatively exclusive qualities that are specially reasons for
moral assessment are themselves resultant. The quality of being a human being
is resultant, because if it is true that someone is a human being, it is true in
virtue of some other properties which he has. And we know that if a moral
property M results from a non-moral property A which itself results from
another non-moral property B, not only is it the case that M results from A,
but also that M results from B. For resultance is transitive. If it were not
transitive, i.e. if it were not true that where A results from B, and B results
from C, A results from C, then we would have been unable to assert our second
truism, viz. that moral properties always result from non-moral ones. They do,
but sometimes they only do so via intermediate moral qualities, as in the case of
the action which is good because it is generous.
What we know so far is that we cannot insist that the qualities from which
moral qualities in particular cases result should be general criteria for the ascrip-
tion of moral properties, for there is no shortlist of properties from which moral
qualities result. Nor can we in general say, where an action has a moral property
M in virtue of having non-moral properties, A, B, and C, that the presence of A, B,
and C count generally as reasons for calling actions M. The transitivity of
resultance makes it the case that there are many abstruse properties from which
sometimes moral properties result; we are not going to insist on that account that
the presence of those properties counts as a reason for moral assessment. It is not,
that is to say, the case that noticing the presence of these qualities ought to
   29
increase one’s confidence that the action is good. As we continue down the train of
resultance, we reach properties that are very unlike such qualities as being
conducive to human happiness, being commanded by God or whatever else
may be thought of as being intrinsically relevant to moral assessment. And so
we cannot say in general that where an action has a moral property M in virtue of
having non-moral properties, A, B, and C, then the presence of A, B, and C count
generally as reasons for calling actions M.
There is another and perhaps a more conclusive consideration which defeats
the identification of the properties in virtue of which a particular action is good
with reasons in general for calling actions good. When I decide that an action is
good, I see it as being good in virtue of my recognition of other non-moral
properties which the action has. These properties, perhaps, count as my reasons
for calling this action good, and in making my decision I shall probably focus on a
few special properties among all those from which, in the light of the transitivity of
resultance, the goodness of this action results. My reasons for calling it good, then,
are standardly to be found among the qualities from which the goodness results.
Can we say that my reasons for calling this action good must be generalizable, i.e.
that I must also call good any action similar to it in those respects? In general we
cannot say this; but it all depends on how similar the second action is to the
original one. If my reasons for calling the first action good are that it had qualities
ABC, I am not committed to calling any action similar to it in those respects, i.e.
which also has qualities ABC, good. For the second action might have some
further quality D which defeats any tendency that ABC had to make the action
good. Thus if my reasons for calling this girl good are that she is chaste and pious,
I am not committed to calling another girl good if, for example, besides being
chaste and pious she is also cruel. The natural tendency at this point is to revert to
the first girl and insist that her lack of cruelty must have been among my reasons
for calling her good. But I do not think this is so. I do not call someone good
because he is not cruel, though I may refrain from calling someone good on the
grounds that he is cruel. An argument of the same structure can be used also to
defeat the belief that if an action has a moral property M-ness which results from
its non-moral properties ABC, then any action which is ABC must have M-ness as
well. The properties ABC that go to make the action M may only do so in the
absence of some defeating property D-ness. If D-ness is present in the second
action, that action will not be M. But we cannot insist that the absence of D-ness
must have been one of the properties that made the first action M, just as (and this
is an analogy only) the facts that cause me to be writing now can only do so in the
absence of a nuclear explosion, but such an absence is not for that reason among
the causes of my writing. So it is not the case that where a moral property results
from a particular set of non-moral properties, any action that has that set of non-
moral properties will also have the moral quality. And it is not the case that where
my reasons for calling an action good are that it has properties ABC I am
committed to calling any other action which has the properties ABC good.
30     
It is not difficult to find people who have fallen into error on this point. Here are
some examples:
Hence to give a reason in support of the judgment that a certain individual, A,

ought or has the right to do some act, presupposes that anyone with the
characteristics specified in the statement of the reason ought or has the right to
do the same kind of act in a situation of the kind specified. (Singer 1967: 24)
Now if it is the possession of certain natural features which makes the action
wrong, then any other action which had just those natural features would also be
wrong. In this sense all moral judgments are universalisable.
(Swinburne 1976: 8)
If I say ‘x is good’ I must be able to say that any x which has the same relevant
qualities or properties as x is also good, because we judge x to be good for having
those qualities or properties. (Kovesi 1967: 158)
Sometimes, as in Swinburne’s case, the view I am denying is called the universal-

izability of moral judgements. If this is what universalizability is, it is false. But
Professor Hare’s way of formulating the doctrine is apparently different:
[A]ny singular descriptive judgment is universalisable . . . in the sense that it

commits the speaker to the further proposition that anything exactly like the
subject of the first judgment, or like it in the relevant respects, possesses the
quality attributed to it in the first judgment. (1963: 12)
The phrase ‘exactly like . . . or like it in the relevant respects’ looks like an attempt
to have two doctrines in one. Admitting that no two objects can be exactly alike,
let us take it that Hare’s true intention is that the speaker is committed to a similar
description of anything like the first object in the relevant respects. What does
Hare mean by this phrase, and does it offer a better notion of universalizability?
Unfortunately, Hare’s practice reveals that he, at least, means no more by this
phrase than the position we have already considered and rejected:
If a person says that a thing is red, he is committed to the view that anything
which was like it in the relevant respects would likewise be red. The relevant
respects are those which, he thought, entitled him to call the first thing red.
(1963: 11)
If he makes a moral judgment about one object, this must be in virtue of the
possession by the object of certain non-moral features . . . and therefore any other
object which possesses those features must have the same moral judgment made
about it. (1963: 20; cf. also p. 21)
   31
I think, however, that it is possible to find in the notion of a relevant respect

something more promising than what has so far been unearthed, and something
which Hare’s use of the phrase ‘exactly like’ makes one wonder whether he was not
implicitly considering. The purpose of introducing the phrase ‘relevant respects’
was to broaden the basis for comparison between the first action and subsequent
ones, in such a way as to escape the possibility of a subsequent action having a
non-moral quality which defeats in its case an attribution of the same moral
quality (viz. a quality such as D-ness in the previous example). It seems to me that
the phrase ‘similar in relevant respects’ has two promising interpretations. The
first is ‘similar in respects relevant to the moral properties of the first action’
where, in order to make such respects more wide-ranging than are the speaker’s
reasons or even the properties from which the moral properties result, we define
the notion of a relevant respect in this way: the qualities relevant to the ϕ-ness of a
ϕ object are those in virtue of which it is ϕ or which if it had had, or lacked, it
would not be ϕ; or which if it had had or lacked, it would have been more or less ϕ
than it is. Using the previous example of the girl who is good because she is chaste
and pious, the fact that she is not cruel is relevant to her goodness though it does
not count among the reasons why we call her good or among the qualities from
which her goodness results. So we are at least doing better than before. But
nonetheless, the doctrine of universalizability constructed using this sense of
‘relevantly similar’ is also false. For it may still be the case that the second action
is similar to the first in all respects relevant to the goodness of the first, but is still
so specially circumstanced that in its case those qualities do not suffice to make it
good. To see this, suppose that two subjects S¹ and S² share the qualities ABC in
virtue of which S¹ is good. Then S² may have a quality D which is a defeater. Now
suppose that S¹ and S³ share all qualities relevant to S¹’s goodness. D must be
among these, and in general the list of shared qualities will be much longer,
though still containing only some of S¹’s qualities. Suppose we have this
situation then:
S¹ S³
qualities
ABC A¹B¹C¹ . . . D
ABC A¹B¹C¹ . . . D

E, F, G, H, I, J
Now, though no single quality in the list E–J can be a defeater by itself, and so
prevent S³ from being good, the combination of E and F may do so without the
absence of E or the absence of F being by itself relevant to S¹’s goodness, on the
present definition of relevance. It seems to me that any relaxation of that defin-
ition to exclude the possibility of two qualities combining to make a defeater will
turn our present conception of qualities relevant to S¹’s goodness into a concep-
tion too broad to exclude any of S¹’s qualities.
32     
The other interpretation of the phrase ‘relevantly similar’ is to be found in the

principle that where one action resembles another in all respects relevant to moral
assessment in general, both actions must be given the same assessment. I have
given reasons already for supposing that there is no shortlist of respects that are
relevant to moral assessment. On the account of relevance given earlier, where the
notion of relevance is built on the notion of resultance but rather wider than it, we
cannot know in advance whether a given property may or may not be relevant to
our moral assessment of some object which has it. So there is not too much
difference between a principle that talks of any property relevant to moral
assessment in general and one which talks of any property whatever, since any
property may, in the sense defined, be relevant to the moral property of some
action. If this is so, the requirement of universalizability amounts to no more, in
the only defensible version, than the requirement that the speaker recognize the
supervenience of the property he is attributing to the action, and even this
requirement is trivial unless we can devise a non-trivial concept of supervenience.
What is more, we can now see a further reason why an attempt to do this by
restricting the subvenient class to that of all morally relevant properties is unlikely
to be successful, since on one interpretation of this restriction we are sinking
supervenience into a false doctrine of universalizability, and on another we are not
in fact making any progress at all, since there is no difference between all the
properties of an action and all its morally relevant qualities.
4. Moral resultance and supervenience contrasted
I hope that the previous section may have helped to emphasize the difference
between resultance and supervenience. Admittedly, both in some sense concern
the relation between the moral and the non-moral properties of an action. Both
seem to provide us with a sense in which the moral properties depend on or are
‘fixed’ by the non-moral properties. Both in some way encourage us to look for an
account in which we can say that, case by case, the moral properties of actions
consist in their non-moral properties. But the dissimilarity between the two
notions is far more impressive than their similarities. The crucial causes of
dissimilarity are first that resultance is a relation between a moral property of an
action and only some of its non-moral properties, whereas supervenience con-
cerns itself with all the non-moral properties; and, second, that in talking of
resultance we are talking about the properties of the particular action at hand
without necessarily comparing it to any other action, whereas in talk of super-
venience we are always working from the moral property of one action (already
determined) to the moral property of some other action (or that action itself at a
later date?). This is why resultance offers much more convincing answers in the
three areas I mentioned, viz.:
   33
1. Supervenience is not really a relation between the moral and the non-moral
properties of an action, but is either a relation between moral and non-moral
properties in general or a consequence of whatever relation holds in the particular
case between moral and non-moral properties. It is dubious to talk of those
qualities on which this action’s goodness supervenes, just as it is dubious to talk
of those qualities from which in general goodness results.
2. Only resultance provides a genuine sense in which the non-moral proper-
ties fix the moral properties. Supervenience only tells us that once they are
fixed, they cannot change without a change in the non-moral properties and
that if all (?) those properties recur in another action they would ‘fix’ the same
moral property.
3. The intuition that there is nothing more to the moral properties of an action
than its non-moral properties (a sort of token identity theory in ethics) is one
which is only plausible if expressed in terms of resultance. Stated in terms of
supervenience it is simply unattractive. For the intuition
(I¹) In a given case, the action’s goodness just consists in all its non-moral
properties
cannot hold a candle to
(I²) In a given case, the action’s goodness just consists in those non-moral
properties in virtue of which it is good
because whatever the relation of ‘consisting in’, it is not one which holds between
supervenient and subvenient in a given case. In fact the attraction of that relation,
for semi-reductive purposes, is not one which we need supervenience to formu-
late. As a fundamental element in an identity theory, therefore, supervenience is
distinctly disappointing. And this should not surprise us, so long as we see reason
to adhere to our original definition of supervenience. For according to that
definition, it is possible where M is supervenient on C for an object to have
M without having any properties in C at all. This is unworrying in the special
case of moral properties, because of the independently probable absence of objects
with a total lack of non-moral properties. It is more contentious when we turn to
other potential instances of supervenience, for instance that of mental states on
physical states. But it is difficult to discover from the supporters of this super-
venience whether they intend it to include the thesis that no object can have a
mental state without having a physical state. If they do, then the supervenience of
the mental will be very much harder to establish, and not, I think, in any way
necessary to the purposes of the supporters of supervenience, whose main interest
in it is that it provides a further way in which the mental and the physical cannot
come apart. The non-existence of mental states in a non-physical object is
34     
established separately by the identity theory; supervenience is an addition to this

and does not entail it.
Are resultance and supervenience logically independent of each other?
Supervenience does not entail resultance, for we could know (in whatever way
such things are known) that one property supervenes on a class of others without
knowing that in each case some of those others will play a special part. But, as
I hinted above, I think that there is a sense in which resultance entails super-
venience, since supervenience appears as a consequence of whatever relation holds
between moral and non-moral properties of particular actions. Given a non-trivial
formulation of supervenience, we know that the relationship between a moral
property and those from which it is parti-resultant is necessarily repeated in
another object which resembles the first in all (?) non-moral respects. Not only
must the second object have the same moral property; it must have it for the same
reasons, since there is ex hypothesi no question of a defeater.
5. Epistemology
It has been held that the fact that moral properties are resultant (whether toti-
resultant or parti-resultant), has consequences for our epistemology. Thus Ross in
his later book (in which he supports parti-resultance) writes:
Now it is clear that it is in virtue of my thinking the act to have some other
character that I think I ought to do it. Rightness is always a resultant attribute, an
attribute that an act has because it has another attribute. (1939: 168)
He continues:
It is not an attribute that its subject is just directly perceived in experience to

have, as I perceive a particular extended patch to be yellow or a particular noise to
be loud. No doubt there are causes which cause this patch to be yellow, or that
noise to be loud; but I can perceive the one to be yellow, or the other to be loud,
without knowing anything of the causes that account for this. I see the attributes
in question to attach to the subjects merely as these subjects, not as subjects of
such and such a character. On the other hand, it is only by knowing or thinking
my act to have a particular character, out of the many that it in fact has, that
I know or think it to be right. (1939: 168)
It is not very clear which of the two aspects of rightness mentioned, resultance or
inability to be directly perceived, is leading here. Is Ross contending that since
rightness is resultant, it cannot be directly perceived, or that since it cannot be
directly perceived, it is resultant? The first is the stronger; but neither line is
   35
acceptable. One reason for a bogus distinction between colours and moral qual-
ities with respect to resultance is the view that if a quality is resultant it can never
be perceived entirely on its own account, but only via awareness of the qualities
from which, in this instance, it results; since colours can be directly perceived, they
cannot be resultant. And another similar reason derives from the fear that if moral
qualities are truly perceivable, we should be able to learn the meanings of moral
terms by pure observation and ostension, which would remove from them the
elements of personal decision, action-relevance, sensitivity to conscience, etc.
Observability itself has no such consequences.
It is however a simple matter to show that a quality may be resultant but be
perceivable without any awareness of the qualities from which, in this instance, it
results. The quality of weakness is resultant. A chess position cannot be simply
weak; it must be weak because of some other characteristic. But a chess expert can
see weakness in a position without yet being able to see the particular failing in
which its weakness consists. Maybe he cannot see the weakness directly in the
sense that he sees from the shape of the position that it is weak. But this is
irrelevant to the question whether resultance is compatible with direct perceiva-
bility, for that question gives a different sense to the notion of direct perception.
For our purposes, what we want to know is whether a resultant property can ever
be perceived without some awareness of the qualities from which it results. And
the answer is clearly that it can. In the case of moral properties, then, there seems
to be no reason to argue from their resultance to the conclusion that they cannot
be perceived in their own right. We may of course still wish to accept this
conclusion for other reasons, although probably in that case we will give a
different sense to the phrase ‘in their own right’, i.e. we will make different
exclusions.
As far as resultance can take us, then, we may talk of seeing that the position is
weak, or seeing that the action is right. A quality can be resultant and directly
perceptible, or resultant and only indirectly perceptible, or non-resultant and
directly perceptible. So are there no relations between the epistemology of moral
concepts and their ‘logic’? To point to what is possible is not to reduce the
importance of what is typical. It may typically be the case that colours are
perceived in their own right, though this will not prevent colours from being
resultant. We know empirically that colours are parti-resultant from other phys-
ical properties, and supervenient on a certain sub-class of physical properties. The
contrast between resultances known a priori and those known empirically does
not seem to me to be crucial; on general Quinean grounds, I take it to be based on
a difference of degree rather than of type, although of course a difference of degree
is still a difference. Again, it may typically be the case that in moral judgement we
consider properties that are non-moral on which to base our evaluations. Is it
because of this that we know that moral properties result from non-moral
properties? It is important to see here that the fact adduced, namely that our
36     
reasons for moral judgements are standardly the presence of non-moral proper-
ties, falls short of establishing between the moral and the non-moral a transitive
relation of resultance, since the resultance-relation is much broader than the
reasons-relation. How then do we know that moral properties result from non-
moral ones if we cannot infer this from the fact that non-moral properties count as
reasons for moral judgements or that we cannot directly (in some sense) observe
the moral? It looks as if we shall have to make a bald claim to a priori knowledge of
moral resultance. With such knowledge, we can prove the supervenience of moral
properties, if we want. Alternatively, we can claim independent a priori knowledge
of supervenience. Neither approach seems very objectionable in the case of moral
resultance and supervenience.
6. Summary
The main aim of this paper has been to separate the notions of resultance and
supervenience; perhaps the central element of that separation is the view that
supervenience is not a relation between moral and non-moral properties in a
given case, but rather a consequence of that relation, whatever it may be. And
I gave reasons in Section 4 for finding resultance a much more profitable notion
from the point of view of moral theory; here and elsewhere I have had in mind the
attractions of an intuitionist theory of ethics, but I hope that the points I make
would be acceptable regardless of one’s general ethical standpoint. Theorists of
different standpoints should be able to agree on whether moral properties are
parti-resultant or toti-resultant, whether and in what sense they are supervenient
or universalizable etc., despite differences in the ways in which these claims are
interpreted in the different classical ethical theories.
A secondary theme in the paper has been the attempt to keep supervenience
separate from universalizability and so open the prospect of accepting the former
while rejecting the latter. Confusion here seems to me to have earned for univer-
salizability an unjustifiably easy ride.²
² I thank Harry Lewis and David McNaughton for their attempts to improve this paper.
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Practical Thought Essays On Reason Intuition and Action Jonathan Dancy All Chapter

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Practical Thought: Essays on Reason,

Intuition, and Action Jonathan Dancy

Introduction: No More Answers? 1

SECTION 1: TOWARDS PARTICULARISM

SECTION 2: MORAL METAPHYSICS

9. Two Conceptions of Moral Realism 129

SECTION 3: ACTION AND REASONS

18. Enticing Reasons 281

SECTION 4: LEARNING FROM THE INTUITIONISTS

Places of First Publication 405

Introduction: No More Answers?

be wrong to do what one believes to be wrong, so long as one is mistaken about

epistemology again—though I edited, with Ernest Sosa, the ﬁrst edition of A

This appeal to an argument whose home ground is ethics, to address an issue in

But if the perfect manifestation of practical rationality is acting in the light of a

On pp. 144–5 of his Ethics, A. C. Ewing writes:

It is a recognised principle of ethics that it is always our duty to do what we when

Ba: a believes that

(1) BaOda ! Oda

If (2) improves on our original representation of Ewing’s original intuition that

16   

(3) BaOda · ~Oda

in which case the revised Ewing formula

(4) O(BaOda!da) · BaOda · ~Oda

(α) BaOda, ~Oda, P~BaOda, O(~BaOda v da), da

   17

18   

to act according to their conscience, without validating everybody’s opinions and

We know a priori that if an action has a moral property it has it in virtue of

It is clear that it is in virtue of my thinking the act to have some other

22     

But he also writes:

If this is an argument, Ross is moving from the anti-naturalistic view that no

view is that rightness is not toti-resultant, he should by his own reasoning

24     

Murder is prima facie wrong

properties in virtue of which it is a duty proper are some in virtue of which it is

(A) An action is a prima facie duty if it is an action which tends to be a duty

26     

Even if the notion of toti-resultance gives an unsatisfactory account of the relation

(S) If a property M is supervenient upon a class of properties C, then: M is not

(S¹) If a property M is supervenient on a class of properties C, then: M is not

Let us restrict ourselves for the moment, to considering the supervenience of

¹ (S) and (S¹) are taken from Blackburn (1971: 106).

of non-moral properties. These deﬁnitions bring to light several difﬁculties with

28     

3. Resultance and universalizability

30     

Hence to give a reason in support of the judgment that a certain individual, A,

Sometimes, as in Swinburne’s case, the view I am denying is called the universal-

[A]ny singular descriptive judgment is universalisable . . . in the sense that it

I think, however, that it is possible to ﬁnd in the notion of a relevant respect

32     

The other interpretation of the phrase ‘relevantly similar’ is to be found in the

4. Moral resultance and supervenience contrasted

cannot hold a candle to

34     

established separately by the identity theory; supervenience is an addition to this

It is not an attribute that its subject is just directly perceived in experience to

36     

1.E.7. Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,

1.E.8. You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing

• You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who