Alonzo Fyfe

For those who like to put labels on things, my own view of morality can most accurately be labeled motive- (desire-) utilitarianism. The two phrases are identical because desires are the only entities with motivational force.

Among historical philosophers, this view I find most in common with the writings of David Hume and J.L. Mackie. I also hold that this J.S. Mill can better be interpreted as a motive-utilitarian than (as is currently popular) as a rule-utilitarian.

I arrived at this view by first cutting everything out of my ontology that could not be independently justified. There is no God giving divine commands, no intrinsic "ought to be doneness" built into the fabric of the world.

Accordingly, I also dismiss all theories based on these entities.

The only relevant entitites that existed as far as I could tell were desires themselves. Desires are propositional attitudes (X desires that P, where P is a proposition -- capable of being true or false) with motivational force (X is motivated to make it the case that P is true proportional to the strength of X's desire that P).

This handled the objective/subjective debate about values, because values ended up being both objective and subjective at the same time. If X desires that P, then P has value for X. The value of P depends on X's subjective state. At the same time, P has value for X is as much of an objective fact as X desires that P -- it is a true description of the real world, or it is not.

If we introduce a second person, Y, we then have three objective value-facts about P. We can know P's value for X, P's value for Y, and P's "all-things-considered" value that includes both X and Y.

Both of the "some-things-considered" value-facts treated those whose values were not considered as mere things -- as tools having value only insofar as they were useful in the fulfillment of the desires that were included. The value of Y, for X, rests solely in Y's usefulness in fulfilling X's desires (which may include a desire that Y be happy, but also may not). This permission to treat others as mere things (even if as a well-loved thing if one happened, in fact, to have such an interest) ruled out using the term "moral value" for all some-things-considered evaluations, leaving only the all-things-considered fact-value.

It also seemed necessary to limit the object of moral evaluations. An all-things-considered evaluation of the color of a car is not an appropriate moral issue.

The first candidate to suggest itself was actions -- moral evaluations are all-things-considered evaluations of actions. Yet, actions are causally linked to desires. If you say that X "ought to have done something else" you must imply (materially, at least) that X ought to have had different desires so that X would have done something else.

Significant problems arise where one action A is good all-things-considered, and action B is good all-things-considered, a person motivated to have done A would not have done B.

So, ultimately, the object of moral evaluations fell back to evaluations of desires -- and "right action" became a derived concept. The right action is that action which would have been performed by a person with good desires, and good desires are determined through an all-things-considered evaluation of their relationship to other desires.

This sounds circular to some (a desire is evaluated according to its relationship to other desires which, in turn, are evaluated according to their relationship to the first). But it is the same type of circularity found in coherentist epistemologies, hermaneutics in the philosophy of language, reflective equilibrium in some competing moral theories, and recursive functions in mathematics.

All competing theories suffer from one of two fatal flaws. Either (1) they rely on the existence of entities that do not in fact exist (e.g., intrinsic values), or (2) they ultimately defend some-things-considered moral judgments whereby others may be treated as mere things, good only insofar as they make useful tools in fulfilling a subset of all values. Which, I think, is ultimately the same thing -- since I can see no ultimate justification for a claim that "these desires ought to be included in moral evaluations and those excluded" other than "these desires contain an intrinsic ought-to-be-includedness and those contain an intrinsic ought-to-be-excludedness.

And, thus, I ended up at desire-utilitarianism.