Commentary on Baumtrog’s “Investigating the Impact of Moral Relativism and Objectivism on Practical Reasonableness”
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abstract
Anders Breivik’s unusually comprehensive and articulate descriptions of the reasoning that led him to slaughter dozens of his fellow Norwegians provide a basis for testing models of practical reasoning, practical rationality and practical reasonableness. Michael Baumtrog’s model takes a decision to be practically reasonable if and only if it adopts a set of means that are sufficient for realizing a goal that the decision-maker has a reason to pursue, provided that both the goal and the means are preferable to any incompatible goals that the decision-maker has or should have. Breivik’s reasoning fits Baumtrog’s model, but his homicides are neither necessary nor sufficient for achieving his stated goal of making people aware of his manifesto. Thus his decision was not practically reasonable, even aside from its gross immorality. Other mass killings might however be practically reasonable on Baumtrog’s model, if one abstracts from moral considerations. We can stipulate that U.S. President Harry Truman’s decision in 1945 to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was sufficient to achieve his goal of an immediate unconditional surrender by Japan and that both the goal and the means were preferable to other goals that he had or should have had. In assessing the impact of different moral perspectives on the all-things-considered reasonableness of his decision, we should pay attention to substantive ethical theories, not to meta-ethical positions. If we do, we discover that his decision is morally justifiable on consequentialist or weak deontological theories, but unjustifiable on strong deontological theories. But this result does not show that a strong deontological theory was the appropriate moral theory for Truman to use, since even people who take moral considerations into account will disagree about the reasonableness of Truman’s decision. Thus it is unlikely that a model of practical reasoning can be used to determine which moral theory is appropriate in a given decision-making situation.
