The Implicit Awareness Response

The Voluntarist Response was an attempt to resolve the tension within Korsgaard’s account by denying that absolute universality was ever meant to play the role of a norm that applies to every single exercise of the will. According to the voluntarist, that role is played by a weaker norm, a norm that amounts to little more than the demand to be consistent. The response that we will consider now tackles the tension from the opposite direction. Perhaps we misunderstood Korsgaard’s talk of encoun- tering exceptions and making revisions, perhaps this talk is not intended to character- ize an ongoing epistemic journey towards absolute universality after all.

In sect. 2.1 we assumed that, when Korsgaard speaks of an agent discovering an exception to their principle, she is thinking of someone who has discovered that they made a mistake, and that when she speaks of revisions and addendums, she is think- ing of someone who has changed their mind (as they should, given the mistake). I have to admit, however, that the textual evidence here is ambiguous. On some occa- sions, Korsgaard’s phrasing suggests a rather different picture, a picture on which the “discovery” of an exception is really more of a recollection or a bringing to attention of something that one was implicitly aware of all along. At one point, for instance, Korsgaard discusses the example of “someone who decides to become a doctor in the full light of reflection” (2009: 74). What she seems to have in mind is that, through reflection, this person could concentrate their attention on something that they knew all along, namely that a principle according to which one is allowed to enter a profession when one desires to do so is subject to a range of background conditions, e.g. the condition that there is a social need. To encounter an exception, on this account, is not to discover a counterexample to a principle that is insufficient- ly circumstance-sensitive, but to be prompted to foreground (in deliberation or in a conversation) part of the hidden structure of an adequately sensitive principle, to be prompted to attend to one of its unless-clauses because, for once, the defeater that it specifies is present. Accordingly, to “revise” a principle is not to change one’s mind, but to think about or cite something that was in the back of one’s mind all along, and to say that a principle holds “everything else equal” is not to acknowledge one’s epis- temic limitations or, worse, one’s fallibility, but rather to simply indicate that one has not spelled out which conditions the principle is subject to. If this is indeed what Korsgaard’s talk of exceptions and revisions amounts to, then finite agents are not necessarily “on their way”. They may already know everything they need to know, and thus there is no reason to think that they are constantly making mistakes.

In ch. 3, I will argue that we can and should regard our principles of duty as de- feasible in the sense intended here, so, in my criticism of the Implicit Awareness Re- sponse, I want to focus on why Korsgaard can’t avail herself of the resources needed to maintain this view. In particular, I will argue that she cannot avail herself of the distinction between foreground and background. But first we need to think about the point of this distinction: how would it help if it could be upheld? The answer to this question becomes apparent once we rephrase it: why is Korsgaard unwilling to say

that we have to act from absolutely universal principles without any hidden struc- ture? Why does she introduce the notion of provisional universality in the first place?

In sect. 2.1, we explained this unwillingness by appeal to Asymmetry. Opting for such a view, we said, would allow her to satisfy Universality and Complexity, but leave her unable to explain why it is that, in standard cases, our explanations and justifica- tions seem to make no mention of defeaters at all. She would be unable to explain, for instance, why it is that, in a standard situation, I can justify my decision to tell the truth without mentioning that the addressee of my utterance has a thick skin or that they are not a murderer, or some such. That I do not need to mention these things is important for several reasons. Some have already come up when we cited Dancy in sect. 1 above. First, depending on how much variability there is, the list of defeaters that one would have to rule out might be extremely long or even open-ended. In this case, complete explanations and justifications would be a matter of impossibility. Second, even if it the list was “merely” long, the resulting explanations and justifica- tions would not be very good ones. After all, it is their job to reveal why something is or is taken to be the case. As such, they should not be cluttered with irrelevancies: with considerations that could make a difference on some other occasion, but are not actually pertinent here and now.101

The problem of irrelevancies is particularly pressing when it comes to justifying our actions to others. Normally, we would think that standard cases of truth telling should not leave much room for disagreement: I ask why you said x, you respond that x is true, and that is it. But now imagine your response had to feature a long (if not open-ended) list of defeaters. The chances of disagreement would increase enormously. Is the fact that some chatty acquaintance might tell your thin-skinned friend what you really think a defeater of the defeating import of the prospect of hurting your friend with respect to whether you should lie? Who knows. You might think it is, I might think it is not. If we had to agree on these sorts of details, then successful justificatory exchanges would be hard to come by. (Note that this inter- personal dimension of the problem of irrelevancies is more of a threat to Kantian Constructivists than to their realist opponents, because constructivists maintain that a moral judgment is correct precisely in virtue of being justifiable in light of an inter-

101 _{If principles contained long lists of unless-clauses, this would affect their ability to serve as guides}

as well (Dancy 2004: 87), but, as I said in the introduction, I am focusing on their role as explanatory standards, at least for now.

subjectively intelligible procedure of construction or scrutiny (Korsgaard 2008: 321- 4).102 That might be why this dimension does not come up in Dancy’s critique; after

all, he is a moral realist.)

Here the foreground-background distinction might seem to come in useful. For if there is such a distinction, then Korsgaard can argue that there are indeed absolute- ly universal principles of duty that cover all cases, standard as well as exceptional, but that, in explaining and justifying ourselves, we only have to explicitly appeal to the pertinent elements of these principles, with the other elements remaining implicit. On the face of it, this is a viable response to the Trilemma, as summed up in the Par- ticularist Challenge (sect. 1), and it seems all the more convincing when the argument for it draws on an analogy with the inexact sciences (Korsgaard 2009: 74). It is a commonplace that the inexact sciences, e.g. clinical medicine or economics, trade in ceteris paribus laws, whose validity is subject to a wide range of conditions (Brandom 2000: 88).103 In these sciences, to say that a given generalization is a genuine law is not

to say that one could fully specify the whole range of conditions to which it is sub- ject. In fact, the list of conditions can be treated as open-ended. Rather, to say that a generalization is a law, and hence a source of genuine explanations, is (at least, i.a.) to say that it is counterfactually robust or, in other words, that its truth is not merely accidental. To put it crudely: there must be a causal connection. Similarly, Korsgaard could argue that what we take to be a principle of duty can be a genuine “practical law” (Kant CPrR 5:19), a law that we can appeal to when justifying our actions or explaining the obtaining of a deontic status, even if we are not in a position to fully specify the whole range of conditions on which its validity depends. (We will return to this comparison of principles of duty to laws of nature in ch. 3).

Unfortunately, the analogy does not hold up. It does not hold up because, ac- cording to Korsgaard’s reading of the Categorical Imperative, a principle of duty is valid precisely in virtue of being robust across not only an unspecifiable range of cases but absolutely all cases (anticipating a distinction to be drawn below, we could say: in virtue of being Case-Scope universal). That is what “absolute universality” means in the context of her account, and that is the role that it plays if we treat it as a norm of

102 _{In ch. 5, I will argue that this is how Kantian Constructivism should be understood.}

103 _{Marc Lange argues that all sciences appeal to laws that are only robust across a certain range of}

possible worlds (2000). For a discussion of how his view bears on the generalism-particularism debate see Lance and Little 2007.

good wiling rather than an ideal endpoint of a epistemic journey – as we chose to in setting up the present defence. The norm of correctness in the inexact sciences is a different one. There a generalization counts as lawful (and the explanations it yields as correct) if it captures a necessary connection rather than an accidental one or, again, if it captures a causal nexus rather than a mere correlation. The explanatory import of an alleged cause is not constituted by and doesn’t depend on its being em- bedded in an absolutely universal law, but, for Korsgaard and many other Kantians, the deontic import of a feature is and does. This is why ruling out all potential de- featers, and hence explicating what is supposed to remain implicit, is precisely what it would take for you to justify telling the truth or to explain to me why telling the truth was obligatory. And if this is right, if Korsgaard cannot avail herself of the distinction between foreground and background,104 then the Implicit Awareness Response fails.

It fails in the sense that it leads to the Fine Print Reading, according to which princi- ples of duty are indefeasible and cumbersome.