Evaluation

In this chapter, I have discussed several prominent arguments in favour of extremism. If extremism is correct, the demandingness objection is a bad objection – morality should make extreme demands. I have argued that we should not accept extremism, favouring instead the moderate position. In the remaining chapters, I do not argue any more for this position, though I make a concession to the extremists in the final chapter, suggesting that this type of investigation informs us about what they should say about moderates and the intuitions which support a moderate position.

Accepting that the extremists are mistaken entails that the demanding- ness objection does provide us motivation to reject overly demanding moral theories. We may wonder what it is about those theories that causes them to be excessively demanding. I consider several options for diagnosing the problem in the next chapter.

3

What Makes a Theory

Overly Demanding?

“Where did it all go wrong?”

– Oasis,Standing on the Shoulders of Giants

There are several obvious suggestions we might consider for what makes a theory overly demanding. Here I shall consider these, as well as some less obvious candidate properties and discuss whether they have any structural role in generating demandingness objections.

3.0.1 Aside: Types of Cases

Before discussing the features of a theory which make it vulnerable to de- mandingness objections, it might first be worth considering the types of examples this objection yields and what makes the verdict seem too de- manding in each case. The cases given will all be question-begging to an extent. For example, the type of case given most so far – an iterative case like Cullity’s – when taken as a paradigm example of a problem case will claim that the situation is too demanding. This will of course be rejected by those who see the objection as misplaced because they think morality actually is (and should be) extremely demanding.

The main type of case that will be of use is the iterative case. Any theories which allow for plausibly small demands to be iterated repeatedly until an extremely high level of demand is reached will face charges of de- mandingness.

On top of this, we might consider cases that give one-off verdicts which seem too demanding. We must be careful here, however, to ensure that what is objected to in the case is the demandingness of the theory, rather than some other perceived issue it presents. To illustrate this, we might consider van Ackeren and Sticker’s example of demandingness in Kant:

“The specific form of Kantian demandingness [they discuss] comes in the form of the threat that an agent at any time might find herself in a situation in which she has to sacrifice all of her non-moral goods. Such a case is explicitly described in the

Second Critique’s gallows case in which an agent is rationally required to sacrifice his life (he is sent to the gallows) when a tyrant demands of him on pain of execution that he lies in court.”

(2015, p.85)

In cases like this, where it is suggested that one is not permitted to lie even about something trivial – and even when doing so might save one’s life (or even the lives of many others) – it might strike us that the reason this is so wrong is not its demandingness, but that it gives the wrong ver- dict of what the agent should do.1 Of course, if one did think telling the truth was the right (or best) action in this case, but thinks it too demand- ing to be obligatory, this would be the type of case that would provide a demandingness objection.

To give a hopefully clearer example, we might think that there are single actions that might be accepted to be the best action available, but such that we do not think it compulsory because of the demand it would impose upon the agent. Suppose that a nearby rescue situation arises and the agent with the ability to save the victim estimates that there is a 51% chance she could save him, but a 49% chance she would fail and die in doing so. We might think we should not blame her for not putting herself at such a risk, even if it appears to be the best thing to do, and that this indicates that failing to perform the best act is not morally wrong. A theory that made such acts requirements would probably appear overly demanding.

1_{McElwee discusses objecting to a theory on these grounds. He labels this the “The}

wrong moral ranking objection” (2017, p.89), which he notes is logically distinct from the puredemandingness objection.

Similarly, we might consider how demanding it could be to have some acts forbidden. In Ashford’s discussion of Scanlon’s contractualism, for ex- ample, she suggests that in any practically realisable state of the world, personal air travel will be forbidden (2003, p.299). This is because in Scan- lon’s account principles permitting actions which have a chance — even a very remote one — of being harmful may be reasonably rejected by agents who cannot benefit (or expect to benefit) from those actions (1998, p.208). Because personal travel can only be expected to be enjoyed by the very rich, the slight chance that those planes could crash into persons or property who could not benefit from them is enough for a reasonable rejection. We might think that a theory which contains requirements to abstain from certain individual acts could also be overly demanding.

Having given types of cases that are iterative act-requirements, singu- lar act-requirements and singular restriction-requirements, a fourth category seems to present itself: iterative restriction-requirements. For such an ex- ample, we might simply think of cases like the above — say a prohibition against certain modes of travel — but where it seems an individual instance would not be extremely demanding. Not making use of a car/plane (or something else useful) on one situation, it might be supposed, would not be overly demanding, but if this is repeated ad infinitum, it may impose signif- icant demands. This is sometimes described as a confinement objection.2

It seems that a theory might be seen as overly demanding if it can generate any of these types of cases. With this in mind, I will now consider various features of theories that might make a theory susceptible to this.