In Defence of the Proportionality Principle

ABSTRACT

Glen Pettigrove argues against the proportionality principle that it cannot accommodate important phenomena of our moral practice, namely forgiveness, love, and ambition: each of the cases involve pro- or contra-attitudes that are disproportionate to the intrinsic value or disvalue of their object. In this commentary, I offer alternative interpretations of forgiveness, love, and ambition and show that each of these phenomena is in line with the proportionality principle.

KEYWORDS:

• proportionality principle
• recursive account of value
• personal projects
• personal relationships
• forgiveness

Acknowledgements

This research has been funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation as part of the research project on ‘Value-Based Non-Consequentialism’ [Grant Number PP00P1_176703].

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 I am not sure whether all proponents of the proportionality principle would put it in this deontic language of ‘ought’. An alternative interpretation understands proportionality in terms of appropriateness: a response to value is appropriate only if the response matches the value of its object. Whether agents ought to exemplify such appropriate responses might be a further question. As far as I can see, not much in what follows depends on this, and hence I will follow Pettigrove in understanding the proportionality principle in terms of ‘ought’.

2 It is not entirely clear [at least to me] in what sense actions can match the value of an object. After all, actions do not allow for degrees: either I perform some act, or I don’t. Actions cannot be stronger or weaker in the way that attitudes can be. One possibility here is to analyse actions in terms of desires and claim that desires can be stronger or weaker; another possibility is to analyse the ‘strength’ of an action in terms of how costly the action is, since cost allows for degrees. I cannot discuss this question here, and therefore I will mostly talk about attitudes in what follows.

3 In this commentary, I will refer to ambition as pursuing personal projects.

4 I have discussed this aspect of relationships and its implications in more detail in Löschke [2017, 2020].

5 For a more detailed defence of the claim that complex unity constitutes value, see, among others, Nozick [1981] or Oddie [2005].

6 Perhaps there is some value even in such projects because of the structure that the project gives to one’s life, but this value is outweighed by the badness of treating something as valuable that is in fact not valuable.

7 See also Joseph Raz’s [2001: 163–5] discussion of engaging with value.