Believe it or not, I received a request to live-tweet this book. Here’s the result, less the “live” part, and frequently in violation of Twitter character limitations. Perhaps I should call my adaptation of the request a Postmortem-Rattle?

Chapter One! Here we go!

Moral dilemmas and impossible moral requirements. Do they exist? Discuss!

SPOILER: YES THEY DO.

If you’re a Deontologist or Consequentialist you might be saying "SHOOT NO WAY. I can solve EVERY problem!”

But Lisa Tessman (LT) says: NOPE. All you guys think about is action-guidance! You are under the false impression that once a choice is made the other (unchosen) option magically disappears. Wishing doesn’t make it so, Young Dreamers!

The Skeptic: K, so what happens to it?

LT: It fuckin lingers and haunts you is what. As it should because in choosing one, you still failed the other. You can try to “out-out-damn-spot” it but your hands are irrevocably dirty. There’s no moment of moral triumph for you.

Morality doesn’t save the day, sheeple. If you want a philosophy of consolation, please continue towards the door marked Idealism. In here we’re grown-ups and we know that everything doesn’t always turn out fine.

The so-called “conflict-resolution” action-guiding moral theories (looking at you consequentialists) are more often than not ineffective or incapable of providing satisfactory solutions. Some resolution of conflict.

An honest moral theory needs to acknowledge that we have non-negotiable, non-voluntary moral obligations that can--and often do--conflict. Sometimes ought doesn’t imply can.

An honest moral theory doesn’t ask us to pretend there’s no moral remainder--to pretend that no one is injured by the unchosen choice. It doesn’t lie and tell us that we did the right thing when there was no right thing to do.

CHAPTER TWO! MORAL INTUITION AND MORAL REASONING!

Oh boy! Empirical studies show that two parts of the brain are activated when making moral judgments.

A judgment is first processed automatically (an intuitive or “gut reaction”), and then a reasoning process comes on the scene to check the intuitive judgment.

LT: You know what that means, my rationalist homies? It means that (ew icky messy) feelings are biologically encrypted into your putatively pristine “objective reason" you use to make a choice. Take a sec to let that soak in.

So how reasonable is reason really?

LT: Maybe we don’t need reason at all. Maybe it fouls up the whole game. My automatic intuitions have authority all their own, and, having confidence in them, I sacralize those values. To violate the sacred is unthinkable.

[LT: P.S. We still need impartial (rational) principles to tell us what to do in cases of strangers and distant others.]

CHAPTER THREE! RISKING CONFIDENCE!

LT: I gotta be up front with you. There’s no such thing as value. Well, there is, not in the way you probably think. There are no real (in the sense of “objectively existing”) values to discover. We have to make them up.

Skeptic: So aren’t we on pretty shaky ground here? How do we know our values are any good?

LT: *Sigh.* There is no ground at all. We are asea on a Neurathian boat in need of repair, and the best we can do is stand on one plank while we repair the damages.

Skeptic: What does that even mean?

LT: It means that we need a critical metaethical constructivism is what.

It means the only way to know if our values are any good is to subject them to scrutiny and see if they pass muster.

Skeptic: What kind of scrutiny if reason is essentially either unavailable or unnecessary for passing judgment?

LT: Still working on that. Something like but not Rawlsian Reflective Equilibrium.

Maybe Margaret Urban Walker’s Transparency Testing, but where we don’t use reason to test.

Skeptic: You said earlier that your intuitive judgments impose non-negotiable moral requirements that must not be violated, and said that to even call them into question in the first place would be to transgress them.

LT: Yes. “Confidence is all that can back the moral authority of any requirement, so that is all I can offer.” (102)

Skeptic: So on the one hand we must have unshaking confidence in the correctness of our intuitive judgments, and on the other we are supposed to subject them to some kind of critical review. How does that work?

LT: Messily. Socially. “All that I can do is acknowledge that this automatic (rather than reflectively equilibriated) confidence is risky, but that in some cases I am willing to take the risk.” (102)

CHAPTER 4! WITNESSING MORAL FAILURE :(

LT: Now I needta tell you something else you probably don’t want to hear. You can’t fix it. Any of it.

100% of the Tessman/BABO household agree that it is annoying when students do not dwell on suffering, but instead evade it by quickly shifting to the “prevention question:” How do we make it so [X awful thing] never happens again?

LT+BABO: These kids are living in a fairytale world if they think that suffering is a question that can be theoretically solved once and for all.

The point is PEOPLE FUCKING SUFFERED AND CONTINUE TO SUFFER. Sit on that and spin for a while. Look it hard in the face.

LT: The Holocaust isn’t a moral parable; no one is redeemed or redeemable. To find redemption therein is to pretend morality triumphed.

Morality didn’t triumph. Morality didn’t prevent Auschwitz from happening. Morality disappeared behind the camp gates.

CHAPTER 5--IDEALIZING MORALITY!

Spoiler alert: ideal theory sucks.

Spoiler alert: also (most) nonidealizing theory sucks.

Skeptic: I get why you’d reject ideal morality based on everything you've said, but what’s wrong with nonideal theory?

LT: Lemme tell ya. It’s “both insufficiently nonidealizing (because it idealizes the moral agent by falsely characterizing the agent as always able to avoid moral wrongdoing)…”

LT: Annnnnnd it’s “too strongly adapted to the nonideal (because normative expectations are lowered and detrimentally adapted to options that, while the best possible, are still unacceptable.” (7)

LT: Nonideal theorists who exclusively focus on action guidance have no space for worthier values--the first-best (rather than the second-best) choices. I’m talking about unattainable values.

PART III--ENDLESS DEMANDS!

Skeptic: So I hear you saying that the existence of moral dilemmas means we must also accept what that entails for morality, namely that there are moral requirements that are impossible to fulfill.

LT: Yes, exactly, there are endless demands that we (necessarily) constantly fail to meet. Especially so under systems of oppression because they themselves can produce indelible traumas.

Skeptic: Suppose I accept your claim about endless demands. Still, aren’t there some limitations on what can be demanded of me? I’m only one person after all.

LT: Ah, you want some theory of supererogation, to limit the realm of your obligations to a chewable portion?

Skeptic: I sense that you’re going to say that theories of supererogation of problematic.

LT: Yes and I’ll tell you why. Most of them are consent-based deontological arguments that are predicated on contract models.

LT: If you agree with me that we have automatic responses that justify the imperative to protect the ones we love, then you have to consider contract models as “off limits” for oodles of reasons.

Skeptic: So there’s no limit on what can be demanded of me?

LT: Pretty much yep. You are--unavoidably so--a moral failure. Have heart. Fail, fail again. Fail better. ( )