## 1. The Philosophical Importance of Moral Reasoning


### 1.1 Defining "Moral Reasoning"



This article takes up moral reasoning as a species of practical
reasoning - that is, as a type of reasoning directed towards
deciding what to do and, when successful, issuing in an intention (see
entry on
 practical reason).
 Of course, we also reason theoretically about what morality requires
of us; but the nature of purely theoretical reasoning about ethics is
adequately addressed in the various articles on
 ethics.
 It is also true that, on some understandings, moral reasoning
directed towards deciding what to do involves forming judgments about
what one ought, morally, to do. On these understandings, asking what
one ought (morally) to do can be a practical question, a certain way
of asking about what to do. (See
 section 1.5
 on the question of whether this is a distinctive practical question.)
In order to do justice to the full range of philosophical views about
moral reasoning, we will need to have a capacious understanding of
what counts as a moral question. For instance, since a prominent
position about moral reasoning is that the relevant considerations are
not codifiable, we would beg a central question if we here defined
 "morality"
 as involving codifiable principles or rules. For present purposes, we
may understand issues about what is right or wrong, or virtuous or
vicious, as raising moral questions. 



Even when moral questions explicitly arise in daily life, just as when
we are faced with child-rearing, agricultural, and business questions,
sometimes we act impulsively or instinctively rather than pausing to
reason, not just about what to do, but about what we ought to do.
Jean-Paul Sartre described a case of one of his students who came to
him in occupied Paris during World War II, asking advice about whether
to stay by his mother, who otherwise would have been left alone, or
rather to go join the forces of the Free French, then massing in
England (Sartre 1975). In the capacious sense just described, this is
probably a moral question; and the young man paused long enough to ask
Sartre's advice. Does that mean that this young man was
reasoning about his practical question? Not necessarily. Indeed,
Sartre used the case to expound his skepticism about the possibility
of addressing such a practical question by reasoning. But what is
reasoning?



Reasoning, of the sort discussed here, is active or explicit thinking,
in which the reasoner, responsibly guided by her assessments of her
reasons (Kolodny 2005) and of any applicable requirements of
rationality (Broome 2009, 2013), attempts to reach a well-supported
answer to a well-defined question (Hieronymi 2013). For Sartre's
student, at least such a question had arisen. Indeed, the question was
relatively definite, implying that the student had already engaged in
some reflection about the various alternatives available to him
- a process that has well been described as an important phase
of practical reasoning, one that aptly precedes the effort to make up
one's mind (Harman 1986, 2).



Characterizing reasoning as responsibly conducted thinking of course
does not suffice to analyze the notion. For one thing, it fails to
address the fraught question of reasoning's relation to
inference (Harman 1986, Broome 2009). In addition, it does not settle
whether formulating an intention about what to do suffices to conclude
practical reasoning or whether such intentions cannot be adequately
worked out except by starting to act. Perhaps one cannot adequately
reason about how to repair a stone wall or how to make an omelet with
the available ingredients without actually starting to repair or to
cook (cf. Fernandez 2016). Still, it will do for present purposes. It
suffices to make clear that the idea of reasoning involves norms of
thinking. These norms of aptness or correctness in practical thinking
surely do not require us to think along a single prescribed pathway,
but rather permit only certain pathways and not others (Broome 2013,
219). Even so, we doubtless often fail to live up to them. 


### 1.2 Empirical Challenges to Moral Reasoning



Our thinking, including our moral thinking, is often not explicit. We
could say that we also reason tacitly, thinking in much the same way
as during explicit reasoning, but without any explicit attempt to
reach well-supported answers. In some situations, even moral ones, we
might be ill-advised to attempt to answer our practical questions by
explicit reasoning. In others, it might even be a mistake to reason
tacitly - because, say, we face a pressing emergency. "Sometimes
we should not deliberate about what to do, and just drive" (Arpaly and
Schroeder 2014, 50). Yet even if we are not called upon to think
through our options in all situations, and even if sometimes it would
be positively better if we did not, still, if we are called upon to do
so, then we should conduct our thinking responsibly: we should
reason.



Recent work in empirical ethics has indicated that even when we are
called upon to reason morally, we often do so badly. When asked to
give reasons for our moral intuitions, we are often
"dumbfounded," finding nothing to say in their defense
(Haidt 2001). Our thinking about hypothetical moral scenarios has been
shown to be highly sensitive to arbitrary variations, such as in the
order of presentation. Even professional philosophers have been found
to be prone to such lapses of clear thinking (e.g., Schwitzgebel &
Cushman 2012). Some of our dumbfounding and confusion has been laid at
the feet of our having both a fast, more emotional way of processing
moral stimuli and a slow, more cognitive way (e.g., Greene 2014). An
alternative explanation of moral dumbfounding looks to social norms of
moral reasoning (Sneddon 2007). And a more optimistic reaction to our
confusion sees our established patterns of "moral consistency
reasoning" as being well-suited to cope with the clashing input
generated by our fast and slow systems (Campbell & Kumar 2012) or
as constituting "a flexible learning system that generates and updates
a multidimensional evaluative landscape to guide decision and action"
(Railton, 2014, 813). 



Eventually, such empirical work on our moral reasoning may yield
revisions in our norms of moral reasoning. This has not yet happened.
This article is principally concerned with philosophical issues posed
by our current norms of moral reasoning. For example, given those
norms and assuming that they are more or less followed, how do moral
considerations enter into moral reasoning, get sorted out by it when
they clash, and lead to action? And what do those norms indicate about
what we ought to do do?


### 1.3 Situating Moral Reasoning



The topic of moral reasoning lies in between two other commonly
addressed topics in moral philosophy. On the one side, there is the
first-order question of what moral truths there are, if any. For
instance, are there any true general principles of morality, and if
so, what are they? At this level utilitarianism competes with
Kantianism, for instance, and both compete with anti-theorists of
various stripes, who recognize only particular truths about morality
(Clarke & Simpson 1989). On the other side, a quite different sort
of question arises from seeking to give a metaphysical grounding for
moral truths or for the claim that there are none. Supposing there are
some moral truths, what *makes* them true? What account can be
given of the truth-conditions of moral statements? Here arise familiar
questions of
 moral skepticism
 and
 moral relativism;
 here, the idea of "a reason" is wielded by many hoping to
defend a non-skeptical moral metaphysics (e.g., Smith 2013). The topic
of moral reasoning lies in between these two other familiar topics in
the following simple sense: moral reasoners operate with what they
take to be morally true but, instead of asking what *makes*
their moral beliefs true, they proceed *responsibly to attempt to
figure out* what to do in light of those considerations. The
philosophical study of moral reasoning concerns itself with the nature
of these attempts. 



These three topics clearly interrelate. Conceivably, the relations
between them would be so tight as to rule out any independent interest
in the topic of moral reasoning. For instance, if all that could
usefully be said about moral reasoning were that it is a matter of
attending to the moral facts, then all interest would devolve upon the
question of what those facts are - with some residual focus on
the idea of moral attention (McNaughton 1988). Alternatively, it might
be thought that moral reasoning is simply a matter of applying the
correct moral theory via ordinary modes of deductive and empirical
reasoning. Again, if that were true, one's sufficient goal would
be to find that theory and get the non-moral facts right. Neither of
these reductive extremes seems plausible, however. Take the potential
reduction to getting the facts right, first. 



Contemporary advocates of the importance of correctly perceiving the
morally relevant facts tend to focus on facts that we can perceive
using our ordinary sense faculties and our ordinary capacities of
recognition, such as *that this person has an infection* or
*that this person needs my medical help*. On such a footing, it
is possible to launch powerful arguments against the claim that moral
principles undergird every moral truth (Dancy 1993) and for the claim
that we can sometimes perfectly well decide what to do by acting on
the reasons we perceive instinctively - or as we have been
trained - without engaging in any moral reasoning. Yet this is
*not* a sound footing for arguing that moral reasoning, beyond
simply attending to the moral facts, is always unnecessary. On the
contrary, we often find ourselves facing novel perplexities and moral
conflicts in which our moral perception is an inadequate guide. In
addressing the moral questions surrounding whether society ought to
enforce surrogate-motherhood contracts, for instance, the scientific
and technological novelties involved make our moral perceptions
unreliable and shaky guides. When a medical researcher who has noted
an individual's illness also notes the fact *that diverting
resources to caring, clinically, for this individual would inhibit the
progress of my research, thus harming the long-term health chances of
future sufferers of this illness*, he or she comes face to face
with conflicting moral considerations. At this juncture, it is far
less plausible or satisfying simply to say that, employing one's
ordinary sensory and recognitional capacities, one sees what is to be
done, both things considered. To posit a special faculty of moral
intuition that generates such overall judgments in the face of
conflicting considerations is to wheel in a *deus ex machina*.
It cuts inquiry short in a way that serves the purposes of fiction
better than it serves the purposes of understanding. It is plausible
instead to suppose that moral reasoning comes in at this point
(Campbell & Kumar 2012). 



For present purposes, it is worth noting, David Hume and the moral
sense theorists do not count as short-circuiting our understanding of
moral reasoning in this way. It is true that Hume presents himself,
especially in the *Treatise of Human Nature*, as a disbeliever
in any specifically practical or moral reasoning. In doing so,
however, he employs an exceedingly narrow definition of
"reasoning" (Hume 2000, Book I, Part iii, sect. ii). For
present purposes, by contrast, we are using a broader working gloss of
"reasoning," one not controlled by an ambition to parse
out the relative contributions of (the faculty of) reason and of the
passions. And about moral reasoning in this broader sense, as
responsible thinking about what one ought to do, Hume has many
interesting things to say, starting with the thought that
*moral* reasoning must involve a double correction of
perspective (see
 section 2.4)
 adequately to account for the claims of other people and of the
farther future, a double correction that is accomplished with the aid
of the so-called "calm passions."



If we turn from the possibility that perceiving the facts aright will
displace moral reasoning to the possibility that applying the correct
moral theory will displace - or exhaust - moral reasoning,
there are again reasons to be skeptical. One reason is that moral
theories do not arise in a vacuum; instead, they develop against a
broad backdrop of moral convictions. Insofar as the first potentially
reductive strand, emphasizing the importance of perceiving moral
facts, has force - and it does have some - it also tends
to show that moral theories need to gain support by systematizing or
accounting for a wide range of moral facts (Sidgwick 1981). As in most
other arenas in which theoretical explanation is called for, the
degree of explanatory success will remain partial and open to
improvement via revisions in the theory (see
 section 2.6).
 Unlike the natural sciences, however, moral theory is an endeavor
that, as John Rawls once put it, is "Socratic" in that it
is a subject pertaining to actions "shaped by
self-examination" (Rawls 1971, 48f.). If this observation is
correct, it suggests that the moral questions we set out to answer
arise from our reflections about what matters. By the same token
- and this is the present point - a moral theory is
subject to being overturned because it generates concrete implications
that do not sit well with us on due reflection. This being so, and
granting the great complexity of the moral terrain, it seems highly
unlikely that we will ever generate a moral theory on the basis of
which we can serenely and confidently proceed in a deductive way to
generate answers to what we ought to do in all concrete cases. This
conclusion is reinforced by a second consideration, namely that
insofar as a moral theory is faithful to the complexity of the moral
phenomena, it will contain within it many possibilities for conflicts
among its own elements. Even if it does deploy some priority rules,
these are unlikely to be able to cover all contingencies. Hence, some
moral reasoning that goes beyond the deductive application of the
correct theory is bound to be needed. 



In short, a sound understanding of moral reasoning will not take the
form of reducing it to one of the other two levels of moral philosophy
identified above. Neither the demand to attend to the moral facts nor
the directive to apply the correct moral theory exhausts or
sufficiently describes moral reasoning. 


### 1.4 Gaining Moral Insight from Studying Moral Reasoning



In addition to posing philosophical problems in its own right, moral
reasoning is of interest on account of its implications for moral
facts and moral theories. Accordingly, attending to moral reasoning
will often be useful to those whose real interest is in determining
the right answer to some concrete moral problem or in arguing for or
against some moral theory. The characteristic ways we attempt to work
through a given sort of moral quandary can be just as revealing about
our considered approaches to these matters as are any bottom-line
judgments we may characteristically come to. Further, we may have
firm, reflective convictions about how a given class of problems is
best tackled, deliberatively, even when we remain in doubt about what
should be done. In such cases, attending to the modes of moral
reasoning that we characteristically accept can usefully expand the
set of moral information from which we start, suggesting ways to
structure the competing considerations. 



Facts about the nature of moral inference and moral reasoning may have
important direct implications for moral theory. For instance, it might
be taken to be a condition of adequacy of any moral theory that it
play a practically useful role in our efforts at self-understanding
and deliberation. It should be deliberation-guiding (Richardson 2018,
SS1.2). If this condition is accepted, then any moral theory that
would require agents to engage in abstruse or difficult reasoning may
be inadequate for that reason, as would be any theory that assumes
that ordinary individuals are generally unable to reason in the ways
that the theory calls for. J.S. Mill (1979) conceded that we are
generally unable to do the calculations called for by utilitarianism,
as he understood it, and argued that we should be consoled by the fact
that, over the course of history, experience has generated secondary
principles that guide us well enough. Rather more dramatically, R. M.
Hare defended utilitarianism as well capturing the reasoning of
ideally informed and rational "archangels" (1981). Taking seriously a
deliberation-guidance desideratum for moral theory would favor,
instead, theories that more directly inform efforts at moral reasoning
by we "proletarians," to use Hare's contrasting term. 



Accordingly, the close relations between moral reasoning, the moral
facts, and moral theory do not eliminate moral reasoning as a topic of
interest. To the contrary, because moral reasoning has important
implications about moral facts and moral theories, these close
relations lend additional interest to the topic of moral reasoning.



### 1.5 How Distinct is Moral Reasoning from Practical Reasoning in General?



The final threshold question is whether moral reasoning is truly
distinct from practical reasoning more generally understood. (The
question of whether moral reasoning, even if practical, is
structurally distinct from theoretical reasoning that simply proceeds
from a proper recognition of the moral facts has already been
implicitly addressed and answered, for the purposes of the present
discussion, in the affirmative.) In addressing this final question, it
is difficult to overlook the way different moral theories project
quite different models of moral reasoning - again a link that
might be pursued by the moral philosopher seeking leverage in either
direction. For instance, Aristotle's views might be as follows:
a quite general account can be given of practical reasoning, which
includes selecting means to ends and determining the constituents of a
desired activity. The difference between the reasoning of a vicious
person and that of a virtuous person differs not at all in its
structure, but only in its content, for the virtuous person pursues
true goods, whereas the vicious person simply gets side-tracked by
apparent ones. To be sure, the virtuous person may be able to achieve
a greater integration of his or her ends via practical reasoning
(because of the way the various virtues cohere), but this is a
difference in the result of practical reasoning and not in its
structure. At an opposite extreme, Kant's categorical imperative
has been taken to generate an approach to practical reasoning (via a
"typic of practical judgment") that is distinctive from
other practical reasoning both in the range of considerations it
addresses and its structure (Nell 1975). Whereas prudential practical
reasoning, on Kant's view, aims to maximize one's
happiness, moral reasoning addresses the potential universalizability
of the maxims - roughly, the intentions - on which one
acts. Views intermediate between Aristotle's and Kant's in
this respect include Hare's utilitarian view and Aquinas'
natural-law view. On Hare's view, just as an ideal prudential
agent applies maximizing rationality to his or her own preferences, an
ideal moral agent's reasoning applies maximizing rationality to
the set of everyone's preferences that its archangelic capacity
for sympathy has enabled it to internalize (Hare 1981). Thomistic,
natural-law views share the Aristotelian view about the general unity
of practical reasoning in pursuit of the good, rightly or wrongly
conceived, but add that practical reason, in addition to demanding
that we pursue the fundamental human goods, also, and distinctly,
demands that we not attack these goods. In this way, natural-law views
incorporate some distinctively moral structuring - such as the
distinctions between doing and allowing and the so-called
 doctrine of double effect's
 distinction between intending as a means and accepting as a
by-product - within a unified account of practical reasoning
(see entry on the
 natural law tradition in ethics).
 In light of this diversity of views about the relation between moral
reasoning and practical or prudential reasoning, a general account of
moral reasoning that does not want to presume the correctness of a
definite moral theory will do well to remain agnostic on the question
of how moral reasoning relates to non-moral practical reasoning. 


## 2. General Philosophical Questions about Moral Reasoning



To be sure, most great philosophers who have addressed the nature of
moral reasoning were far from agnostic about the content of the
correct moral theory, and developed their reflections about moral
reasoning in support of or in derivation from their moral theory.
Nonetheless, contemporary discussions that are somewhat agnostic about
the content of moral theory have arisen around important and
controversial aspects of moral reasoning. We may group these around
the following seven questions: 


1. How do relevant considerations get taken up in moral reasoning?
2. Is it essential to moral reasoning for the considerations it takes
up to be crystallized into, or ranged under, principles?
3. How do we sort out which moral considerations are most relevant?
4. In what ways do motivational elements shape moral reasoning?
5. What is the best way to model the kinds of conflicts among
considerations that arise in moral reasoning?
6. Does moral reasoning include learning from experience and changing
one's mind?
7. How can we reason, morally, with one another?



The remainder of this article takes up these seven questions in turn.



### 2.1 Moral Uptake



One advantage to defining "reasoning" capaciously, as
here, is that it helps one recognize that the processes whereby we
come to be concretely aware of moral issues are integral to moral
reasoning as it might more narrowly be understood. Recognizing moral
issues when they arise requires a highly trained set of capacities and
a broad range of emotional attunements. Philosophers of the moral
sense school of the 17th and 18th centuries stressed innate emotional
propensities, such as sympathy with other humans. Classically
influenced virtue theorists, by contrast, give more importance to the
training of perception and the emotional growth that must accompany
it. Among contemporary philosophers working in empirical ethics there
is a similar divide, with some arguing that we process situations
using an innate moral grammar (Mikhail 2011) and some emphasizing the
role of emotions in that processing (Haidt 2001, Prinz 2007, Greene
2014). For the moral reasoner, a crucial task for our capacities of
moral recognition is to mark out certain features of a situation as
being morally salient. Sartre's student, for instance, focused
on the competing claims of his mother and the Free French, giving them
each an importance to his situation that he did not give to eating
French cheese or wearing a uniform. To say that certain features are
marked out as morally salient is not to imply that the features thus
singled out answer to the terms of some general principle or other: we
will come to the question of particularism, below. Rather, it is
simply to say that recognitional attention must have a selective
focus. 



What will be counted as a moral issue or difficulty, in the sense
requiring moral agents' recognition, will again vary by moral
theory. Not all moral theories would count filial loyalty and
patriotism as moral duties. It is only at great cost, however, that
any moral theory could claim to do without a layer of moral thinking
involving situation-recognition. A calculative sort of utilitarianism,
perhaps, might be imagined according to which there is no need to spot
a moral issue or difficulty, as *every* choice node in life
presents the agent with the same, utility-maximizing task. Perhaps
Jeremy Bentham held a utilitarianism of this sort. For the more
plausible utilitarianisms mentioned above, however, such as
Mill's and Hare's, agents need not always calculate
afresh, but must instead be alive to the possibility that because the
ordinary "landmarks and direction posts" lead one astray
in the situation at hand, they must make recourse to a more direct and
critical mode of moral reasoning. Recognizing whether one is in one of
those situations thus becomes the principal recognitional task for the
utilitarian agent. (Whether this task can be suitably confined, of
course, has long been one of the crucial questions about whether such
indirect forms of utilitarianism, attractive on other grounds, can
prevent themselves from collapsing into a more Benthamite, direct
form: cf. Brandt 1979.) 



Note that, as we have been describing moral uptake, we have not
implied that what is perceived is ever a moral fact. Rather, it might
be that what is perceived is some ordinary, descriptive feature of a
situation that is, for whatever reason, morally relevant. An account
of moral uptake will interestingly impinge upon the metaphysics of
moral facts, however, if it holds that moral facts can be perceived.
Importantly intermediate, in this respect, is the set of judgments
involving so-called "thick" evaluative concepts -
for example, that someone is callous, boorish, just, or brave (see the
entry on
 thick ethical concepts).
 These do not invoke the supposedly "thinner" terms of
overall moral assessment, "good," or "right."
Yet they are not innocent of normative content, either. Plainly, we do
recognize callousness when we see clear cases of it. Plainly, too
- whatever the metaphysical implications of the last fact
- our ability to describe our situations in these thick
normative terms is crucial to our ability to reason morally. 



It is debated how closely our abilities of moral discernment are tied
to our moral motivations. For Aristotle and many of his ancient
successors, the two are closely linked, in that someone not brought up
into virtuous motivations will not see things correctly. For instance,
cowards will overestimate dangers, the rash will underestimate them,
and the virtuous will perceive them correctly (*Eudemian
Ethics* 1229b23-27). By the Stoics, too, having the right
motivations was regarded as intimately tied to perceiving the world
correctly; but whereas Aristotle saw the emotions as allies to enlist
in support of sound moral discernment, the Stoics saw them as inimical
to clear perception of the truth (cf. Nussbaum 2001). 


### 2.2 Moral Principles



That one discerns features and qualities of some situation that are
relevant to sizing it up morally does not yet imply that one
explicitly or even implicitly employs any general claims in describing
it. Perhaps all that one perceives are particularly embedded features
and qualities, without saliently perceiving them *as*
instantiations of any types. Sartre's student may be focused on
his mother and on the particular plights of several of his fellow
Frenchmen under Nazi occupation, rather than on any purported
requirements of filial duty or patriotism. Having become aware of some
moral issue in such relatively particular terms, he might proceed
directly to sorting out the conflict between them. Another
possibility, however, and one that we frequently seem to exploit, is
to formulate the issue in general terms: "An only child should
stick by an otherwise isolated parent," for instance, or
"one should help those in dire need if one can do so without
significant personal sacrifice." Such general statements would
be examples of "moral principles," in a broad sense. (We
do not here distinguish between principles and rules. Those who do
include Dworkin 1978 and Gert 1998.) 



We must be careful, here, to distinguish the issue of whether
principles commonly play an implicit or explicit role in moral
reasoning, including well-conducted moral reasoning, from the issue of
whether principles necessarily figure as part of the basis of moral
truth. The latter issue is best understood as a metaphysical question
about the nature and basis of moral facts. What is currently known as
 moral particularism
 is the view that there are no defensible moral principles and that
moral reasons, or well-grounded moral facts, can exist independently
of any basis in a general principle. A contrary view holds that moral
reasons are necessarily general, whether because the sources of their
justification are all general or because a moral claim is ill-formed
if it contains particularities. But whether principles play a useful
role in moral reasoning is certainly a different question from whether
principles play a necessary role in accounting for the ultimate
truth-conditions of moral statements. Moral particularism, as just
defined, denies their latter role. Some moral particularists seem also
to believe that moral particularism *implies* that moral
principles cannot soundly play a useful role in reasoning. This claim
is disputable, as it seems a contingent matter whether the relevant
particular facts arrange themselves in ways susceptible to general
summary and whether our cognitive apparatus can cope with them at all
without employing general principles. Although the metaphysical
controversy about moral particularism lies largely outside our topic,
we will revisit it in
 section 2.5,
 in connection with the weighing of conflicting reasons. 



With regard to moral reasoning, while there are some self-styled
"anti-theorists" who deny that abstract structures of
linked generalities are important to moral reasoning (Clarke, et al.
1989), it is more common to find philosophers who recognize both some
role for particular judgment and some role for moral principles. Thus,
neo-Aristotelians like Nussbaum who emphasize the importance of
"finely tuned and richly aware" particular discernment
also regard that discernment as being guided by a set of generally
describable virtues whose general descriptions will come into play in
at least some kinds of cases (Nussbaum 1990). "Situation
ethicists" of an earlier generation (e.g. Fletcher 1997)
emphasized the importance of taking into account a wide range of
circumstantial differentiae, but against the background of some
general principles whose application the differentiae help sort out.
Feminist ethicists influenced by Carol Gilligan's path breaking
work on moral development have stressed the moral centrality of the
kind of care and discernment that are salient and well-developed by
people immersed in particular relationships (Held 1995); but this
emphasis is consistent with such general principles as "one
ought to be sensitive to the wishes of one's friends"(see
the entry on
 feminist moral psychology).
 Again, if we distinguish the question of whether principles are
useful in responsibly-conducted moral thinking from the question of
whether moral reasons ultimately all derive from general principles,
and concentrate our attention solely on the former, we will see that
some of the opposition to general moral principles melts away. 



It should be noted that we have been using a weak notion of
generality, here. It is contrasted only with the kind of strict
particularity that comes with indexicals and proper names. General
statements or claims - ones that contain no such particular
references - are not necessarily universal generalizations,
making an assertion about *all* cases of the mentioned type.
Thus, "one should normally help those in dire need" is a
general principle, in this weak sense. Possibly, such logically loose
principles would be obfuscatory in the context of an attempt to
reconstruct the ultimate truth-conditions of moral statements. Such
logically loose principles would clearly be useless in any attempt to
generate a deductively tight "practical syllogism." In our
day-to-day, non-deductive reasoning, however, such logically loose
principles appear to be quite useful. (Recall that we are
understanding "reasoning" quite broadly, as responsibly
conducted thinking: nothing in this understanding of reasoning
suggests any uniquely privileged place for deductive inference: cf.
Harman 1986. For more on defeasible or "default"
principles, see
 section 2.5.)
 



In this terminology, establishing that general principles are
essential to moral reasoning leaves open the further question whether
logically tight, or exceptionless, principles are also essential to
moral reasoning. Certainly, much of our actual moral reasoning seems
to be driven by attempts to recast or reinterpret principles so that
they can be *taken to be* exceptionless. Adherents and
inheritors of the natural-law tradition in ethics (e.g. Donagan 1977)
are particularly supple defenders of exceptionless moral principles,
as they are able to avail themselves not only of a refined tradition
of casuistry but also of a wide array of subtle - some would say
overly subtle - distinctions, such as those mentioned above
between doing and allowing and between intending as a means and
accepting as a byproduct. 



A related role for a strong form of generality in moral reasoning
comes from the Kantian thought that one's moral reasoning must
counter one's tendency to make exceptions for oneself.
Accordingly, Kant holds, as we have noted, that we must ask whether
the maxims of our actions can serve as universal laws. As most
contemporary readers understand this demand, it requires that we
engage in a kind of hypothetical generalization across agents, and ask
about the implications of everybody acting that way in those
circumstances. The grounds for developing Kant's thought in this
direction have been well explored (e.g., Nell 1975, Korsgaard 1996,
Engstrom 2009). The importance and the difficulties of such a
hypothetical generalization test in ethics were discussed the
influential works Gibbard 1965 and Goldman 1974. 


### 2.3 Sorting Out Which Considerations Are Most Relevant



Whether or not moral considerations need the backing of general
principles, we must expect situations of action to present us with
multiple moral considerations. In addition, of course, these
situations will also present us with a lot of information that is not
morally relevant. On any realistic account, a central task of moral
reasoning is to sort out relevant considerations from irrelevant ones,
as well as to determine which are especially relevant and which only
slightly so. That a certain woman is Sartre's student's
*mother* seems arguably to be a morally relevant fact; what
about the fact (supposing it is one) that she has no other children to
take care of her? Addressing the task of sorting what is morally
relevant from what is not, some philosophers have offered general
accounts of moral relevant features. Others have given accounts of how
we sort out which of the relevant features are *most* relevant,
a process of thinking that sometimes goes by the name of
"casuistry."



Before we look at ways of sorting out which features are morally
relevant or *most* morally relevant, it may be useful to note a
prior step taken by some casuists, which was to attempt to set out a
schema that would capture *all* of the features of an action or
proposed action. The Roman Catholic casuists of the middle ages did so
by drawing on Aristotle's categories. Accordingly, they asked,
where, when, why, how, by what means, to whom, or by whom the action
in question is to be done or avoided (see Jonsen and Toulmin 1988).
The idea was that complete answers to these questions would contain
all of the features of the action, of which the morally relevant ones
would be a subset. Although metaphysically uninteresting, the idea of
attempting to list all of an action's features in this way
represents a distinctive - and extreme - heuristic for
moral reasoning. 



Turning to the morally relevant features, one of the most developed
accounts is Bernard Gert's. He develops a list of features
relevant to whether the violation of a moral rule should be generally
allowed. Given the designed function of Gert's list, it is
natural that most of his morally relevant features make reference to
the set of moral rules he defended. Accordingly, some of Gert's
distinctions between dimensions of relevant features reflect
controversial stances in moral theory. For example, one of the
dimensions is whether "the violation [is] done intentionally or
only knowingly" (Gert 1998, 234) - a distinction that
those who reject the doctrine of double effect would not find
relevant. 



In deliberating about what we ought, morally, to do, we also often
attempt to figure out which considerations are *most* relevant.
To take an issue mentioned above: Are surrogate motherhood contracts
more akin to agreements with babysitters (clearly acceptable) or to
agreements with prostitutes (not clearly so)? That is, which feature
of surrogate motherhood is more relevant: that it involves a contract
for child-care services or that it involves payment for the intimate
use of the body? Both in such relatively novel cases and in more
familiar ones, reasoning by analogy plays a large role in ordinary
moral thinking. When this reasoning by analogy starts to become
systematic - a social achievement that requires some historical
stability and reflectiveness about what are taken to be moral norms
- it begins to exploit comparison to cases that are
"paradigmatic," in the sense of being taken as settled.
Within such a stable background, a system of casuistry can develop
that lends some order to the appeal to analogous cases. To use an
analogy: the availability of a widely accepted and systematic set of
analogies and the availability of what are taken to be moral norms may
stand to one another as chicken does to egg: each may be an
indispensable moment in the genesis of the other. 



Casuistry, thus understood, is an indispensable aid to moral
reasoning. At least, that it is would follow from conjoining two
features of the human moral situation mentioned above: the
multifariousness of moral considerations that arise in particular
cases and the need and possibility for employing moral principles in
sound moral reasoning. We require moral judgment, not simply a
deductive application of principles or a particularist bottom-line
intuition about what we should do. This judgment must be responsible
to moral principles yet cannot be straightforwardly derived from them.
Accordingly, our moral judgment is greatly aided if it is able to rest
on the sort of heuristic support that casuistry offers. Thinking
through which of two analogous cases provides a better key to
understanding the case at hand is a useful way of organizing our moral
reasoning, and one on which we must continue to depend. If we lack the
kind of broad consensus on a set of paradigm cases on which the
Renaissance Catholic or Talmudic casuists could draw, our casuistic
efforts will necessarily be more controversial and tentative than
theirs; but we are not wholly without settled cases from which to
work. Indeed, as Jonsen and Toulmin suggest at the outset of their
thorough explanation and defense of casuistry, the depth of
disagreement about moral theories that characterizes a pluralist
society may leave us having to rest comparatively *more* weight
on the cases about which we can find agreement than did the classic
casuists (Jonsen and Toulmin 1988). 



Despite the long history of casuistry, there is little that can
usefully be said about how one ought to reason about competing
analogies. In the law, where previous cases have precedential
importance, more can be said. As Sunstein notes (Sunstein 1996, chap.
3), the law deals with particular cases, which are always
"potentially distinguishable" (72); yet the law also
imposes "a requirement of practical consistency" (67).
This combination of features makes reasoning by analogy particularly
influential in the law, for one must decide whether a given case is
more like one set of precedents or more like another. Since the law
must proceed even within a pluralist society such as ours, Sunstein
argues, we see that analogical reasoning can go forward on the basis
of "incompletely theorized judgments" or of what Rawls
calls an "overlapping consensus" (Rawls 1996). That is,
although a robust use of analogous cases depends, as we have noted, on
some shared background agreement, this agreement need not extend to
all matters or all levels of individuals' moral thinking.
Accordingly, although in a pluralist society we may lack the kind of
comprehensive normative agreement that made the high casuistry of
Renaissance Christianity possible, the path of the law suggests that
normatively forceful, case-based, analogical reasoning can still go
on. A modern, competing approach to case-based or precedent-respecting
reasoning has been developed by John F. Horty (2016). On Horty's
approach, which builds on the default logic developed in (Horty 2012),
the body of precedent systematically shifts the weights of the reasons
arising in a new case.



Reasoning by appeal to cases is also a favorite mode of some recent
moral philosophers. Since our focus here is not on the methods of
moral theory, we do not need to go into any detail in comparing
different ways in which philosophers wield cases for and against
alternative moral theories. There is, however, an important and
broadly applicable point worth making about ordinary reasoning by
reference to cases that emerges most clearly from the philosophical
use of such reasoning. Philosophers often feel free to imagine cases,
often quite unlikely ones, in order to attempt to isolate relevant
differences. An infamous example is a pair of cases offered by James
Rachels to cast doubt on the moral significance of the distinction
between killing and letting die, here slightly redescribed. In both
cases, there is at the outset a boy in a bathtub and a greedy older
cousin downstairs who will inherit the family manse if and only if the
boy predeceases him (Rachels 1975). In Case A, the cousin hears a
thump, runs up to find the boy unconscious in the bath, and reaches
out to turn on the tap so that the water will rise up to drown the
boy. In Case B, the cousin hears a thump, runs up to find the boy
unconscious in the bath with the water running, and decides to sit
back and do nothing until the boy drowns. Since there is surely no
moral difference between these cases, Rachels argued, the general
distinction between killing and letting die is undercut. "Not so
fast!" is the well-justified reaction (cf. Beauchamp 1979). Just
because a factor is morally relevant in a certain way in comparing one
pair of cases does not mean that it either is or must be relevant in
the same way or to the same degree when comparing other cases. Shelly
Kagan has dubbed the failure to take account of this fact of
contextual interaction when wielding comparison cases the
"additive fallacy" (1988). Kagan concludes from this that
the reasoning of moral theorists must depend upon some theory that
helps us anticipate and account for ways in which factors will
interact in various contexts. A parallel lesson, reinforcing what we
have already observed in connection with casuistry proper, would apply
for moral reasoning in general: reasoning from cases must at least
implicitly rely upon a set of organizing judgments or beliefs, of a
kind that would, on some understandings, count as a moral
"theory." If this is correct, it provides another kind of
reason to think that moral considerations could be crystallized into
principles that make manifest the organizing structure involved. 


### 2.4 Moral Reasoning and Moral Psychology



We are concerned here with moral reasoning as a species of practical
reasoning - reasoning directed to deciding what to do and, if
successful, issuing in an intention. But how can such practical
reasoning succeed? How can moral reasoning hook up with motivationally
effective psychological states so as to have this kind of causal
effect? "Moral psychology" - the traditional name
for the philosophical study of intention and action - has a lot
to say to such questions, both in its traditional, *a priori*
form and its newly popular empirical form. In addition, the
conclusions of moral psychology can have substantive moral
implications, for it may be reasonable to assume that if there are
deep reasons that a given type of moral reasoning *cannot* be
practical, then any principles that demand such reasoning are unsound.
In this spirit, Samuel Scheffler has explored "the importance
for moral philosophy of some tolerably realistic understanding of
human motivational psychology" (Scheffler 1992, 8) and Peter
Railton has developed the idea that certain moral principles might
generate a kind of "alienation" (Railton 1984). In short,
we may be interested in what makes practical reasoning of a certain
sort psychologically possible both for its own sake and as a way of
working out some of the content of moral theory. 



The issue of psychological possibility is an important one for all
kinds of practical reasoning (cf. Audi 1989). In morality, it is
especially pressing, as morality often asks individuals to depart from
satisfying their own interests. As a result, it may appear that moral
reasoning's practical effect could not be explained by a simple
appeal to the initial motivations that shape or constitute
someone's interests, in combination with a requirement, like
that mentioned above, to will the necessary means to one's ends.
Morality, it may seem, instead requires individuals to act on ends
that may not be part of their "motivational set," in the
terminology of Williams 1981. How can moral reasoning lead people to
do that? The question is a traditional one. Plato's
*Republic* answered that the appearances are deceiving, and
that acting morally is, in fact, in the enlightened self-interest of
the agent. Kant, in stark contrast, held that our transcendent
capacity to act on our conception of a practical law enables us to set
ends and to follow morality even when doing so sharply conflicts with
our interests. Many other answers have been given. In recent times,
philosophers have defended what has been called
"internalism" about morality, which claims that there is a
necessary conceptual link between agents' moral judgment and
their motivation. Michael Smith, for instance, puts the claim as
follows (Smith 1994, 61):



> 
> If an agent judges that it is right for her to Ph in circumstances
> *C*, then either she is motivated to Ph in *C* or she
> is practically irrational.
> 



Even this defeasible version of moral judgment internalism may be too
strong; but instead of pursuing this issue further, let us turn to a
question more internal to moral reasoning. (For more on the issue of
moral judgment internalism, see
 moral motivation.)
 



The traditional question we were just glancing at picks up when moral
reasoning is done. Supposing that we have some moral conclusion, it
asks how agents can be motivated to go along with it. A different
question about the intersection of moral reasoning and moral
psychology, one more immanent to the former, concerns how motivational
elements shape the reasoning process itself. 



A powerful philosophical picture of human psychology, stemming from
Hume, insists that beliefs and desires are distinct existences (Hume
2000, Book II, part iii, sect. iii; cf. Smith 1994, 7). This means
that there is always a potential problem about how reasoning, which
seems to work by concatenating beliefs, links up to the motivations
that desire provides. The paradigmatic link is that of instrumental
action: the desire to Ps links with the belief that by Phing in
circumstances *C* one will Ps. Accordingly, philosophers who
have examined moral reasoning within an essentially Humean,
belief-desire psychology have sometimes accepted a constrained account
of moral reasoning. Hume's own account exemplifies the sort of
constraint that is involved. As Hume has it, the calm passions support
the dual correction of perspective constitutive of morality, alluded
to above. Since these calm passions are seen as competing with our
other passions in essentially the same motivational coinage, as it
were, our passions limit the reach of moral reasoning. 



An important step away from a narrow understanding of Humean moral
psychology is taken if one recognizes the existence of what Rawls has
called "principle-dependent desires" (Rawls 1996, 82-83;
Rawls 2000, 46-47). These are desires whose objects cannot be
characterized without reference to some rational or moral principle.
An important special case of these is that of
"conception-dependent desires," in which the
principle-dependent desire in question is seen by the agent as
belonging to a broader conception, and as important on that account
(Rawls 1996, 83-84; Rawls 2000, 148-152). For instance,
conceiving of oneself as a citizen, one may desire to bear one's
fair share of society's burdens. Although it may look like any
content, including this, may substitute for Ps in the Humean
conception of desire, and although Hume set out to show how moral
sentiments such as pride could be explained in terms of simple
psychological mechanisms, his influential empiricism actually tends to
restrict the possible content of desires. Introducing
principle-dependent desires thus seems to mark a departure from a
Humean psychology. As Rawls remarks, if "we may find ourselves
drawn to the conceptions and ideals that both the right and the good
express ... , [h]ow is one to fix limits on what people might be
moved by in thought and deliberation and hence may act from?"
(1996, 85). While Rawls developed this point by contrasting
Hume's moral psychology with Kant's, the same basic point
is also made by neo-Aristotelians (e.g., McDowell 1998). 



The introduction of principle-dependent desires bursts any would-be
naturalist limit on their content; nonetheless, some philosophers hold
that this notion remains too beholden to an essentially Humean picture
to be able to capture the idea of a moral commitment. Desires, it may
seem, remain motivational items that compete on the basis of strength.
Saying that one's desire to be just may be outweighed by
one's desire for advancement may seem to fail to capture the
thought that one has a commitment - even a non-absolute one
- to justice. Sartre designed his example of the student torn
between staying with his mother and going to fight with the Free
French so as to make it seem implausible that he ought to decide
simply by determining which he more strongly wanted to do. 



One way to get at the idea of commitment is to emphasize our capacity
to reflect about what we want. By this route, one might distinguish,
in the fashion of Harry Frankfurt, between the strength of our desires
and "the importance of what we care about" (Frankfurt
1988). Although this idea is evocative, it provides relatively little
insight into *how* it is that we thus reflect. Another way to
model commitment is to take it that our intentions operate at a level
distinct from our desires, structuring what we are willing to
reconsider at any point in our deliberations (e.g. Bratman 1999).
While this two-level approach offers some advantages, it is limited by
its concession of a kind of normative primacy to the unreconstructed
desires at the unreflective level. A more integrated approach might
model the psychology of commitment in a way that reconceives the
nature of desire from the ground up. One attractive possibility is to
return to the Aristotelian conception of desire as being for the sake
of some good or apparent good (cf. Richardson 2004). On this
conception, the end for the sake of which an action is done plays an
important regulating role, indicating, in part, what one will
*not* do (Richardson 2018, SSSS8.3-8.4). Reasoning about final
ends accordingly has a distinctive character (see Richardson 1994,
Schmidtz 1995). Whatever the best philosophical account of the notion
of a commitment - for another alternative, see (Tiberius
2000) - much of our moral reasoning does seem to involve
expressions of and challenges to our commitments (Anderson and Pildes
2000). 



Recent experimental work, employing both survey instruments and brain
imaging technologies, has allowed philosophers to approach questions
about the psychological basis of moral reasoning from novel angles.
The initial brain data seems to show that individuals with damage to
the pre-frontal lobes tend to reason in more straightforwardly
consequentialist fashion than those without such damage (Koenigs et
al. 2007). Some theorists take this finding as tending to confirm that
fully competent human moral reasoning goes beyond a simple weighing of
pros and cons to include assessment of moral constraints (e.g.,
Wellman & Miller 2008, Young & Saxe 2008). Others, however,
have argued that the emotional responses of the prefrontal lobes
interfere with the more sober and sound, consequentialist-style
reasoning of the other parts of the brain (e.g. Greene 2014). The
survey data reveals or confirms, among other things, interesting,
normatively loaded asymmetries in our attribution of such concepts as
responsibility and causality (Knobe 2006). It also reveals that many
of moral theory's most subtle distinctions, such as the
distinction between an intended means and a foreseen side-effect, are
deeply built into our psychologies, being present cross-culturally and
in young children, in a way that suggests to some the possibility of
an innate "moral grammar" (Mikhail 2011). 



A final question about the connection between moral motivation and
moral reasoning is whether someone without the right motivational
commitments can reason well, morally. On Hume's official, narrow
conception of reasoning, which essentially limits it to tracing
empirical and logical connections, the answer would be yes. The
vicious person could trace the causal and logical implications of
acting in a certain way just as a virtuous person could. The only
difference would be practical, not rational: the two would not act in
the same way. Note, however, that the Humean's affirmative
answer depends on departing from the working definition of
"moral reasoning" used in this article, which casts it as
a species of practical reasoning. Interestingly, Kant can answer
"yes" while still casting moral reasoning as practical. On
his view in the *Groundwork* and the *Critique of Practical
Reason*, reasoning well, morally, does not depend on any prior
motivational commitment, yet remains practical reasoning. That is
because he thinks the moral law can itself generate motivation.
(Kant's *Metaphysics of Morals* and *Religion*
offer a more complex psychology.) For Aristotle, by contrast, an agent
whose motivations are not virtuously constituted will systematically
misperceive what is good and what is bad, and hence will be unable to
reason excellently. The best reasoning that a vicious person is
capable of, according to Aristotle, is a defective simulacrum of
practical wisdom that he calls "cleverness"
(*Nicomachean Ethics* 1144a25). 


### 2.5 Modeling Conflicting Moral Considerations



Moral considerations often conflict with one another. So do moral
principles and moral commitments. Assuming that filial loyalty and
patriotism are moral considerations, then Sartre's student faces
a moral conflict. Recall that it is one thing to model the metaphysics
of morality or the truth conditions of moral statements and another to
give an account of moral reasoning. In now looking at conflicting
considerations, our interest here remains with the latter and not the
former. Our principal interest is in ways that we need to structure or
think about conflicting considerations in order to negotiate well our
reasoning involving them. 



One influential building-block for thinking about moral conflicts is
W. D. Ross's notion of a "*prima facie*
duty". Although this term misleadingly suggests mere appearance
- the way things seem at first glance - it has stuck. Some
moral philosophers prefer the term "*pro tanto*
duty" (e.g., Hurley 1989). Ross explained that his term provides
"a brief way of referring to the characteristic (quite distinct
from that of being a duty proper) which an act has, in virtue of being
of a certain kind (e.g., the keeping of a promise), of being an act
which would be a duty proper if it were not at the same time of
another kind which is morally significant." Illustrating the
point, he noted that a *prima facie* duty to keep a promise can
be overridden by a *prima facie* duty to avert a serious
accident, resulting in a proper, or unqualified, duty to do the latter
(Ross 1988, 18-19). Ross described each *prima facie* duty as a
"parti-resultant" attribute, grounded or explained by one
aspect of an act, whereas "being one's [actual]
duty" is a "toti-resultant" attribute resulting from
all such aspects of an act, taken together (28; see Pietroski 1993).
This suggests that in each case there is, in principle, some function
that generally maps from the partial contributions of each *prima
facie* duty to some actual duty. What might that function be? To
Ross's credit, he writes that "for the estimation of the
comparative stringency of these *prima facie* obligations no
general rules can, so far as I can see, be laid down" (41).
Accordingly, a second strand in Ross simply emphasizes, following
Aristotle, the need for practical judgment by those who have been
brought up into virtue (42). 



How might considerations of the sort constituted by *prima
facie* duties enter our moral reasoning? They might do so
explicitly, or only implicitly. There is also a third, still weaker
possibility (Scheffler 1992, 32): it might simply be the case that if
the agent *had* recognized a *prima facie* duty, he
would have acted on it unless he considered it to be overridden. This
is a fact about how he *would* have reasoned. 



Despite Ross's denial that there is any general method for
estimating the comparative stringency of *prima facie* duties,
there is a further strand in his exposition that many find
irresistible and that tends to undercut this denial. In the very same
paragraph in which he states that he sees no general rules for dealing
with conflicts, he speaks in terms of "the greatest balance of
*prima facie* rightness." This language, together with
the idea of "comparative stringency," ineluctably suggests
the idea that the mapping function might be the same in each case of
conflict and that it might be a quantitative one. On this conception,
if there is a conflict between two *prima facie* duties, the
one that is strongest in the circumstances should be taken to win.
Duly cautioned about the additive fallacy (see
 section 2.3),
 we might recognize that the strength of a moral consideration in one
set of circumstances cannot be inferred from its strength in other
circumstances. Hence, this approach will need still to rely on
intuitive judgments in many cases. But this intuitive judgment will be
about which *prima facie* consideration is stronger in the
circumstances, not simply about what ought to be done. 



The thought that our moral reasoning either requires or is benefited
by a virtual quantitative crutch of this kind has a long pedigree. Can
we really reason well morally in a way that boils down to assessing
the weights of the competing considerations? Addressing this question
will require an excursus on the nature of moral reasons. Philosophical
support for this possibility involves an idea of practical
commensurability. We need to distinguish, here, two kinds of practical
commensurability or incommensurability, one defined in metaphysical
terms and one in deliberative terms. Each of these forms might be
stated evaluatively or deontically. The first, metaphysical sort of
value incommensurability is defined directly in terms of what is the
case. Thus, to state an evaluative version: two values are
metaphysically incommensurable just in case neither is better than the
other nor are they equally good (see Chang 1998). Now, the
metaphysical incommensurability of values, or its absence, is only
loosely linked to how it would be reasonable to deliberate. If all
values or moral considerations are metaphysically (that is, in fact)
commensurable, still it might well be the case that our access to the
ultimate commensurating function is so limited that we would fare ill
by proceeding in our deliberations to try to think about which
outcomes are "better" or which considerations are
"stronger." We might have no clue about how to measure the
relevant "strength." Conversely, even if metaphysical
value incommensurability is common, we might do well, deliberatively,
to proceed as if this were not the case, just as we proceed in
thermodynamics as if the gas laws obtained in their idealized form.
Hence, in thinking about the deliberative implications of
 incommensurable values,
 we would do well to think in terms of a definition tailored to the
deliberative context. Start with a local, pairwise form. We may say
that two options, A and B, are deliberatively commensurable just in
case there is some one dimension of value in terms of which, prior to
- or logically independently of - choosing between them,
it is possible adequately to represent the force of the considerations
bearing on the choice. 



Philosophers as diverse as Immanuel Kant and John Stuart Mill have
argued that unless two options are deliberatively commensurable, in
this sense, it is impossible to choose rationally between them.
Interestingly, Kant limited this claim to the domain of prudential
considerations, recognizing moral reasoning as invoking considerations
incommensurable with those of prudence. For Mill, this claim formed an
important part of his argument that there must be some one, ultimate
"umpire" principle - namely, on his view, the
principle of utility. Henry Sidgwick elaborated Mill's argument
and helpfully made explicit its crucial assumption, which he called
the "principle of superior validity" (Sidgwick 1981; cf.
Schneewind 1977). This is the principle that conflict between distinct
moral or practical considerations can be rationally resolved only on
the basis of some third principle or consideration that is both more
general and more firmly warranted than the two initial competitors.
From this assumption, one can readily build an argument for the
rational necessity not merely of local deliberative commensurability,
but of a global deliberative commensurability that, like Mill and
Sidgwick, accepts just one ultimate umpire principle (cf. Richardson
1994, chap. 6). 



Sidgwick's explicitness, here, is valuable also in helping one
see how to resist the demand for deliberative commensurability.
Deliberative commensurability is not necessary for proceeding
rationally if conflicting considerations can be rationally dealt with
in a holistic way that does not involve the appeal to a principle of
"superior validity." That our moral reasoning can proceed
holistically is strongly affirmed by Rawls. Rawls's
characterizations of the influential ideal of
 reflective equilibrium
 and his related ideas about the nature of justification imply that we
can deal with conflicting considerations in less hierarchical ways
than imagined by Mill or Sidgwick. Instead of proceeding up a ladder
of appeal to some highest court or supreme umpire, Rawls suggests,
when we face conflicting considerations "we work from both
ends" (Rawls 1999, 18). Sometimes indeed we revise our more
particular judgments in light of some general principle to which we
adhere; but we are also free to revise more general principles in
light of some relatively concrete considered judgment. On this
picture, there is no necessary correlation between degree of
generality and strength of authority or warrant. That this holistic
way of proceeding (whether in building moral theory or in
deliberating: cf. Hurley 1989) can be rational is confirmed by the
possibility of a form of justification that is similarly holistic:
"justification is a matter of the mutual support of many
considerations, of everything fitting together into one coherent
view" (Rawls 1999, 19, 507). (Note that this statement, which
expresses a necessary aspect of moral or practical justification,
should not be taken as a definition or analysis thereof.) So there is
an alternative to depending, deliberatively, on finding a dimension in
terms of which considerations can be ranked as "stronger"
or "better" or "more stringent": one can
instead "prune and adjust" with an eye to building more
mutual support among the considerations that one endorses on due
reflection. If even the desideratum of practical coherence is subject
to such re-specification, then this holistic possibility really does
represent an alternative to commensuration, as the deliberator, and
not some coherence standard, retains reflective sovereignty
(Richardson 1994, sec. 26). The result can be one in which the
originally competing considerations are not so much compared as
transformed (Richardson 2018, chap. 1)



Suppose that we start with a set of first-order moral considerations
that are all commensurable as a matter of ultimate, metaphysical fact,
but that our grasp of the actual strength of these considerations is
quite poor and subject to systematic distortions. Perhaps some people
are much better placed than others to appreciate certain
considerations, and perhaps our strategic interactions would cause us
to reach suboptimal outcomes if we each pursued our own unfettered
judgment of how the overall set of considerations plays out. In such
circumstances, there is a strong case for departing from maximizing
reasoning without swinging all the way to the holist alternative. This
case has been influentially articulated by Joseph Raz, who develops
the notion of an "exclusionary reason" to occupy this
middle position (Raz 1990). 



"An exclusionary reason," in Raz's terminology,
"is a second order reason to refrain from acting for some
reason" (39). A simple example is that of Ann, who is tired
after a long and stressful day, and hence has reason not to act on her
best assessment of the reasons bearing on a particularly important
investment decision that she immediately faces (37). This notion of an
exclusionary reason allowed Raz to capture many of the complexities of
our moral reasoning, especially as it involves principled commitments,
while conceding that, at the first order, all practical reasons might
be commensurable. Raz's early strategy for reconciling
commensurability with complexity of structure was to limit the claim
that reasons are comparable with regard to strength to reasons of a
given order. First-order reasons compete on the basis of strength; but
conflicts between first- and second-order reasons "are resolved
not by the strength of the competing reasons but by a general
principle of practical reasoning which determines that exclusionary
reasons always prevail" (40). 



If we take for granted this "general principle of practical
reasoning," why should we recognize the existence of any
exclusionary reasons, which by definition prevail independently of any
contest of strength? Raz's principal answer to this question
shifts from the metaphysical domain of the strengths that various
reasons "have" to the epistemically limited viewpoint of
the deliberator. As in Ann's case, we can see in certain
contexts that a deliberator is likely to get things wrong if he or she
acts on his or her perception of the first-order reasons. Second-order
reasons indicate, with respect to a certain range of first-order
reasons, that the agent "must not act *for* those
reasons" (185). The broader justification of an exclusionary
reason, then, can consistently be put in terms of the commensurable
first-order reasons. Such a justification can have the following form:
"Given this agent's deliberative limitations, the balance
of first-order reasons will likely be better conformed with if he or
she refrains from acting for certain of those reasons."



Raz's account of exclusionary reasons might be used to reconcile
ultimate commensurability with the structured complexity of our moral
reasoning. Whether such an attempt could succeed would depend, in
part, on the extent to which we have an actual grasp of first-order
reasons, conflict among which can be settled solely on the basis of
their comparative strength. Our consideration, above, of casuistry,
the additive fallacy, and deliberative incommensurability may combine
to make it seem that only in rare pockets of our practice do we have a
good grasp of first-order reasons, if these are defined, a la
Raz, as competing only in terms of strength. If that is right, then we
will almost always have good exclusionary reasons to reason on some
other basis than in terms of the relative strength of first-order
reasons. Under those assumptions, the middle way that Raz's idea
of exclusionary reasons seems to open up would more closely approach
the holist's.



The notion of a moral consideration's "strength,"
whether put forward as part of a metaphysical picture of how
first-order considerations interact in fact or as a suggestion about
how to go about resolving a moral conflict, should not be confused
with the bottom-line determination of whether one consideration, and
specifically one duty, overrides another. In Ross's example of
conflicting *prima facie* duties, someone must choose between
averting a serious accident and keeping a promise to meet someone.
(Ross chose the case to illustrate that an "imperfect"
duty, or a duty of commission, can override a strict, prohibitive
duty.) Ross's assumption is that all well brought-up people
would agree, in this case, that the duty to avert serious harm to
someone overrides the duty to keep such a promise. We may take it, if
we like, that this judgment implies that we consider the duty to save
a life, here, to be stronger than the duty to keep the promise; but in
fact this claim about relative strength adds nothing to our
understanding of the situation. Yet we do not reach our practical
conclusion in this case *by* determining that the duty to save
the boy's life is stronger. The statement that this duty is here
stronger is simply a way to embellish the conclusion that of the two
*prima facie* duties that here conflict, it is the one that
states the all-things-considered duty. To be "overridden"
is just to be a *prima facie* duty that fails to generate an
actual duty because another *prima facie* duty that conflicts
with it - or several of them that do - does generate an
actual duty. Hence, the judgment that some duties override others can
be understood just in terms of their deontic upshots and without
reference to considerations of strength. To confirm this, note that we
can say, "As a matter of fidelity, we ought to keep the promise;
as a matter of beneficence, we ought to save the life; we cannot do
both; and both categories considered we ought to save the life."




Understanding the notion of one duty overriding another in this way
puts us in a position to take up the topic of
 moral dilemmas.
 Since this topic is covered in a separate article, here we may simply
take up one attractive definition of a moral dilemma.
Sinnott-Armstrong (1988) suggested that a moral dilemma is a situation
in which the following are true of a single agent:


1. He ought to do *A*.
2. He ought to do *B*.
3. He cannot do both *A* and *B*.
4. (1) does not override (2) and (2) does not override (1).



This way of defining moral dilemmas distinguishes them from the kind
of moral conflict, such as Ross's
promise-keeping/accident-prevention case, in which one of the duties
is overridden by the other. Arguably, Sartre's student faces a
moral dilemma. Making sense of a situation in which neither of two
duties overrides the other is easier if deliberative commensurability
is denied. Whether moral dilemmas are possible will depend crucially
on whether "ought" implies "can" and whether
any pair of duties such as those comprised by (1) and (2) implies a
single, "agglomerated" duty that the agent do both
*A* and *B*. If either of these purported principles of
the logic of duties is false, then moral dilemmas are possible. 



Jonathan Dancy has well highlighted a kind of contextual variability
in moral reasons that has come to be known as "reasons
holism": "a feature that is a reason in one case may be no
reason at all, or an opposite reason, in another" (Dancy 2004).
To adapt one of his examples: while there is often moral reason not to
lie, when playing liar's poker one generally ought to lie;
otherwise, one will spoil the game (cf. Dancy 1993, 61). Dancy argues
that reasons holism supports moral particularism of the kind discussed
in
 section 2.2,
 according to which there are no defensible moral principles. Taking
this conclusion seriously would radically affect how we conducted our
moral reasoning. The argument's premise of holism has been
challenged (e.g., Audi 2004, McKeever & Ridge 2006). Philosophers
have also challenged the inference from reasons holism to
particularism in various ways. Mark Lance and Margaret Olivia Little
(2007) have done so by exhibiting how defeasible generalizations, in
ethics and elsewhere, depend *systematically* on context. We
can work with them, they suggest, by utilizing a skill that is similar
to the skill of discerning morally salient considerations, namely the
skill of discerning relevant similarities among possible worlds. More
generally, John F. Horty has developed a logical and semantic account
according to which reasons are defaults and so behave holistically,
but there are nonetheless general principles that explain how they
behave (Horty 2012). And Mark Schroeder has argued that our holistic
views about reasons are actually better explained by supposing that
there are general principles (Schroeder 2011). 



This excursus on moral reasons suggests that there are a number of
good reasons why reasoning about moral matters might not simply reduce
to assessing the weights of competing considerations. 


### 2.6 Moral Learning and the Revision of Moral Views



If we have any moral knowledge, whether concerning general moral
principles or concrete moral conclusions, it is surely very imperfect.
What moral knowledge we are capable of will depend, in part, on what
sorts of moral reasoning we are capable of. Although some moral
learning may result from the theoretical work of moral philosophers
and theorists, much of what we learn with regard to morality surely
arises in the practical context of deliberation about new and
difficult cases. This deliberation might be merely instrumental,
concerned only with settling on means to moral ends, or it might be
concerned with settling those ends. There is no special problem about
learning what conduces to morally obligatory ends: that is an ordinary
matter of empirical learning. But by what sorts of process can we
learn which ends are morally obligatory, or which norms morally
required? And, more specifically, is strictly moral learning possible
via moral reasoning? 



Much of what was said above with regard to moral uptake applies again
in this context, with approximately the same degree of dubiousness or
persuasiveness. If there is a role for moral perception or for
emotions in agents' becoming aware of moral considerations,
these may function also to guide agents to new conclusions. For
instance, it is conceivable that our capacity for outrage is a
relatively reliable detector of wrong actions, even novel ones, or
that our capacity for pleasure is a reliable detector of actions worth
doing, even novel ones. (For a thorough defense of the latter
possibility, which intriguingly interprets pleasure as a judgment of
value, see Millgram 1997.) Perhaps these capacities for emotional
judgment enable strictly moral learning in roughly the same way that
chess-players' trained sensibilities enable them to recognize
the threat in a previously unencountered situation on the chessboard
(Lance and Tanesini 2004). That is to say, perhaps our moral emotions
play a crucial role in the exercise of a skill whereby we come to be
able to articulate moral insights that we have never before attained.
Perhaps competing moral considerations interact in contextually
specific and complex ways much as competing chess considerations do.
If so, it would make sense to rely on our emotionally-guided
capacities of judgment to cope with complexities that we cannot model
explicitly, but also to hope that, once having been so guided, we
might in retrospect be able to articulate something about the lesson
of a well-navigated situation. 



A different model of strictly moral learning puts the emphasis on our
after-the-fact reactions rather than on any prior, tacit emotional or
judgmental guidance: the model of "experiments in living,"
to use John Stuart Mill's phrase (see Anderson 1991). Here, the
basic thought is that we can try something and see if "it
works." For this to be an alternative to empirical learning
about what causally conduces to what, it must be the case that we
remain open as to what we mean by things "working." In
Mill's terminology, for instance, we need to remain open as to
what are the important "parts" of happiness. If we are,
then perhaps we can learn by experience what some of them are -
that is, what are some of the constitutive means of happiness. These
paired thoughts, that our practical life is experimental and that we
have no firmly fixed conception of what it is for something to
"work," come to the fore in Dewey's pragmatist
ethics (see esp. Dewey 1967 [1922]). This experimentalist conception
of strictly moral learning is brought to bear on moral reasoning in
Dewey's eloquent characterizations of "practical
intelligence" as involving a creative and flexible approach to
figuring out "what works" in a way that is thoroughly open
to rethinking our ultimate aims. 



Once we recognize that moral learning is a possibility for us, we can
recognize a broader range of ways of coping with moral conflicts than
was canvassed in the last section. There, moral conflicts were
described in a way that assumed that the set of moral considerations,
among which conflicts were arising, was to be taken as fixed. If we
can learn, morally, however, then we probably can and should revise
the set of moral considerations that we recognize. Often, we do this
by re-interpreting some moral principle that we had started with,
whether by making it more specific, making it more abstract, or in
some other way (cf. Richardson 2000 and 2018). 


### 2.7 How Can We Reason, Morally, With One Another?



So far, we have mainly been discussing moral reasoning as if it were a
solitary endeavor. This is, at best, a convenient simplification. At
worst, it is, as Jurgen Habermas has long argued, deeply
distorting of reasoning's essentially dialogical or
conversational character (e.g., Habermas 1984; cf. Laden 2012). In any
case, it is clear that we often do need to reason morally with one
another. 



Here, we are interested in how people may actually reason with one
another - not in how imagined participants in an original
position or ideal speech situation may be said to reason with one
another, which is a concern for moral theory, proper. There are two
salient and distinct ways of thinking about people morally reasoning
with one another: as members of an organized or corporate body that is
capable of reaching practical decisions of its own; and as autonomous
individuals working outside any such structure to figure out with each
other what they ought, morally, to do. 



The nature and possibility of collective reasoning within an organized
collective body has recently been the subject of some discussion.
Collectives can reason if they are structured as an agent. This
structure might or might not be institutionalized. In line with the
gloss of reasoning offered above, which presupposes being guided by an
assessment of one's reasons, it is plausible to hold that a
group agent "counts as reasoning, not just rational, only if it
is able to form not only beliefs *in* propositions - that
is, object-language beliefs - but also belief *about*
propositions" (List and Pettit 2011, 63). As List and Pettit
have shown (2011, 109-113), participants in a collective agent
will unavoidably have incentives to misrepresent their own preferences
in conditions involving ideologically structured disagreements where
the contending parties are oriented to achieving or avoiding certain
outcomes - as is sometimes the case where serious moral
disagreements arise. In contexts where what ultimately matters is how
well the relevant group or collective ends up faring, "team
reasoning" that takes advantage of orientation towards the
collective flourishing of the group can help it reach a collectively
optimal outcome (Sugden 1993, Bacharach 2006; see entry on
 collective intentionality).
 Where the group in question is smaller than the set of persons,
however, such a collectively prudential focus is distinct from a moral
focus and seems at odds with the kind of impartiality typically
thought distinctive of the moral point of view. Thinking about what a
"team-orientation" to the set all persons might look like might bring
us back to thoughts of Kantian universalizability; but recall that
here we are focused on actual reasoning, not hypothetical reasoning.
With regard to actual reasoning, even if individuals can take up such
an orientation towards the "team" of all persons, there is serious
reason, highlighted by another strand of the Kantian tradition, for
doubting that any individual can aptly surrender their moral judgment
to any group's verdict (Wolff 1998). 



This does not mean that people cannot reason together, morally. It
suggests, however, that such joint reasoning is best pursued as a
matter of working out together, as independent moral agents, what they
ought to do with regard to an issue on which they have some need to
cooperate. Even if deferring to another agent's verdict as to
how one morally ought to act is off the cards, it is still possible
that one may licitly take account of the moral testimony of others
(for differing views, see McGrath 2009, Enoch 2014).



In the case of independent individuals reasoning morally with one
another, we may expect that moral disagreement provides the occasion
rather than an obstacle. To be sure, if individuals' moral
disagreement is very deep, they may not be able to get this reasoning
off the ground; but as Kant's example of Charles V and his
brother each wanting Milan reminds us, intractable disagreement can
arise also from disagreements that, while conceptually shallow, are
circumstantially sharp. If it were true that clear-headed
justification of one's moral beliefs required seeing them as
being ultimately grounded in a priori principles, as G.A. Cohen argued
(Cohen 2008, chap. 6), then room for individuals to work out their
moral disagreements by reasoning with one another would seem to be
relatively restricted; but whether the nature of (clearheaded) moral
grounding is really so restricted is seriously doubtful (Richardson
2018, SS9.2). In contrast to what such a picture suggests,
individuals' moral commitments seem sufficiently open to being
re-thought that people seem able to engage in principled - that
is, not simply loss-minimizing - compromise (Richardson 2018,
SS8.5). 



What about the possibility that the moral community as a whole -
roughly, the community of all persons - can reason? This
possibility does not raise the kind of threat to impartiality that is
raised by the team reasoning of a smaller group of people; but it is
hard to see it working in a way that does not run afoul of the concern
about whether any person can aptly defer, in a strong sense, to the
moral judgments of another agent. Even so, a residual possibility
remains, which is that the moral community can reason in just one way,
namely by accepting or ratifying a moral conclusion that has already
become shared in a sufficiently inclusive and broad way (Richardson
2018, chap. 7).