Academic

Crisp on Scanlon on the Buck Passing Account of Goodness

By Lawrence Solum

Roger Crisp's Goodness and Reasons: Accentuating the Negative is available via the Mind website (subscription required). Here is the abstract:

This paper concerns the relation between goodness, or value, and practical reasons, and in particular the so-called ?buck-passing? account (BPA) of that relation recently offered by T. M. Scanlon, according to which goodness is not reason-providing but merely the higher-order property of possessing lower-order properties that provide reasons to respond in certain ways. The paper begins by briefly describing BPA and the motivation for it, noting that Scanlon now accepts that the lower-order properties in question may be evaluative. He also insists that the BPA is not biconditional (wisely, since otherwise goodness becomes a ?Cambridge property?), which leaves him with the task of explaining why goodness arises only in a sub-set of cases in which lower-order properties ground reasons. Having rejected two attempts to do this, based on elucidation of the responses and of the reasons, I suggest that Scanlon may claim that goodness arises in, and only in, cases where the lower-order properties are evaluative and that goodness itself provides us with a way of distinguishing the evaluative from the non-evaluative. In other words, he should retain the negative component of BPA, according to which being good is not itself reason-providing, while surrendering the positive, according to which the property of goodness is merely the higher-order property of having lower-order properties that provide reasons to respond. 

I like this paper & it has a very clear account of Scanlon's buck-passing account of goodness.

Full post as published by Legal Theory Blog on April 16, 2008 (boomark / email).