It seems permissible to eat out instead of doing more good by donating to a charity that effectively prevents suffering. Many ethicists infer that partiality can be permissible, that it can be permissible to choose less good over more. A common thought is that our autonomy somehow explains such permissible partiality. Past attempts to vindicate this natural thought collapse the role of autonomy into the agent’s wellbeing or something that is itself morally assessable, such as attitudes, projects, or dispositions. This paper explains how autonomy gives rise to permissible partiality without such collapse.
Mereological Middleism (MM) is the view that fundamental objects are mereologically intermediate. Together with Mereological Bottomism (MB), the view that fundamental objects are mereologically atomic, and Mereological Topism (MT), the view that fundamental objects are mereologically coatomic, MM constitutes one of the three standard answers to Schaffer’s Question of Fundamental Mereology (QFM). In this paper, I present a novel argument against the claim that MM is necessarily true (Nec-MM). If one assumes that any answer to the QFM, if true, is necessarily true (QFM Necessitarianism), then MM itself is under threat. To support this conclusion, I develop two sets of arguments: the Arguments from Atoms and Quasi-Atoms, and the Arguments from Dependence and Non-Dependence. I further show that the middleist faces a dilemma, since the most promising strategy for resisting the first set of arguments undermines the most promising strategy for resisting the second, and vice versa. After considering and rejecting several responses, I argue that Nec-MM should be abandoned as a naïve formulation of the necessity of middleism and replaced with a more sophisticated formulation that preserves the core commitments of MM. This provides the middleist with a principled reason to reject QFM Necessitarianism, thereby avoiding the argument. Finally, I suggest that analogous reformulations are available to proponents of MB and MT, and that this has important implications for how the QFM itself ought to be understood.
Selim Berker argues that the distinction between requiring and justifying weight or strength is not in good standing. In this response I argue that all his worries, when directed at my view, can be answered. It is only certain mistaken or optional interpretive moves that lead him to have doubts in the first place. He interprets me as holding that the criterion for one reason having greater weight in a role than another involves counterfactual conditionals thought of in terms of possible worlds, which would leave me open to the charge than I am committing a version of Shope’s Conditional Fallacy. He also interprets my talk of intelligible objects of human motivation as being so wide as to include absolutely anything we can imagine a person being motivated by, even if it is the result of a “bizarre fixation”. And he interprets me as agreeing with his controversial monistic view of reasons, such that it makes sense to say that all reasons, by their nature, can be taken together to yield an overall verdict as to what one ought to do, simpliciter. In contrast to this, I hold that moral reasons are considerations that make systematic contributions to moral status, legal reasons are considerations that make systematic contributions to legal status, and generic practical reasons – which are the reasons I am concerned with – are considerations that make systematic contribution to rational status.
The dual ranking model holds that when what is permissible or required is determined by the balance of competing reasons, different roles are played by the reasons that require and the reasons that permit. Proponents of this idea often go further, and accept the multidimensional view that this is because there is a deep or fundamental distinction between two kinds of reasons, or between two kinds of weight of reasons, or between two dimensions along which reasons have weight. This paper defends the dual ranking model but offers several arguments against the multidimensional view. The distinction between two roles for reasons in the determination of what is required and what is permissible can be satisfactorily ultimately explained in terms of a single dimension of reasons' weight.
