Reply to Horta: Spectrum Arguments, the “Unhelpfulness” of Rejecting Transitivity, and Implications for Moral Realism

This article responds to Oscar Horta’s article “In Defense of the Internal
Aspects View: Person-Affecting Reasons, Spectrum Arguments and
Inconsistent Intuitions”. I begin by noting various points of agreement
with Horta. I agree that the “better than relation” is asymmetric, and point
out that this will be so on an Essentially Comparative View as well as on an
Internal Aspects View. I also agree that there are various possible Person-
Affecting Principles, other than the one my book focuses on, that people
might find plausible, and that in some circumstances, at least, these might
have deontological, rather than axiological significance. In particular,
I grant that Horta’s Actuality-Dependent Person-Affecting Principle, his
Time-Dependent Person-Affecting Principle, and his Identity-Dependent
Person-Affecting Principle, might each be relevant to what we ought to
do, without necessarily being relevant to which of two outcomes is better.
But I reject Horta’s claim that essentially comparative principles don’t
apply in Spectrum Arguments. I also argue against Horta’s view that the
two Standard Views that underlie our intuitions in Spectrum Arguments
are contradictory. I question Horta’s (seeming) position that there is
no point in rejecting the transitivity of the “better than” relation on the
basis of Spectrum Arguments, on the grounds that doing so won’t solve
the predicament that Spectrum Arguments pose. Finally, I conclude my
paper by challenging Horta’s interesting contention that my views about
nontransitivity support an anti-realist metaethics, and are incompatible
with the sort of realist approach to metaethics that I favor.