In Reasons and the Good Roger Crisp sets out to develop several broadly interconnecting claims in metaethics and normative ethics. The book is ambitious, well written, and successfully delivers on interesting and novel approaches to persistent problems relating to the nature of well-being, reasons, and equality. One of the nicest features of the book is its integrated treatment of these issues, one that demonstrates a broad normative vision. Though Crisp leaves some important issues unresolved (to my mind) the trade-off is worth it to get clear picture of how various metaethical and normative issues fit together overall.

In the first three chapters of the book Crisp focuses on reasons. He wants to defend the view that reasons are real, as opposed to projections, and that it is facts about human welfare that underwrite reasons. However, he does not believe that there are ultimate moral reasons. What this means is that ‘there is no reason to do what is morally right . . . except in so far as there is some ultimate reason that can be stated in non-moral terms’ (36). The thesis he explicitly articulates and defends is ‘Welfarism about Reasons’, which holds that ‘Any ultimate reason for action must be grounded in well-being’ (37). This allows for realism with respect to reasons while also holding the view that there are no ultimate moral reasons. Facts about well-being are objective.

In the service of this approach he ends up defending an intuitionistic metaethical position. Later in the book he develops a view of what well-being consists in that is, currently, at any rate, controversial: hedonism. The book then ends with a consideration of distributive issues in which Crisp defends his own view of prioritarianism, or giving priority to the least well off in one's distribution schemes.

A short review cannot do justice to all of Crisp's claims and arguments, so I have chosen to focus on a few that I find most intriguing, and to focus as well on the sort of ‘debunking’ strategy that Crisp takes seriously as providing an argument against the view that there are moral properties that underlie fundamental moral reasons. What this ultimately means is that when we seek to provide fundamental justification for actions, we need to do so without invoking moral concepts. Moral concepts may work at the intermediary level, but not at the basic level.

The debunking strategy rests on well-known observations that our moral intuitions, feelings, and so forth are the result of evolutionary forces. As such, their development is the result of numerous historical contingencies.

The ultimate reasons he has in mind, again, are welfarist. He begins by noting as a ‘bedrock principle’ that ‘any individual has an ultimate normative reason to advance their own well-being, a reason that varies in strength in proportion to the degree of such advancement’ (61). Of course, they may be others, but we start with this. We also have reasons relating to the welfare of others, though Crisp argues for a view that comes closer to common-sense morality than standard utilitarianism does. He holds the view that, though the balance of reason may sometimes favor self-sacrifice for others, there are limits to this. This ‘dual-source’ view is based on two insights. First, that ‘each of us has a separate capacity for consciousness’ which is a recognition of the separateness of persons, and, second, that we as individuals are not the only ones with this capacity, and that it provides reasons for action with respect to others as with respect to ourselves. The second insight is impartial but the first is not. And we need to balance. It is this balancing act that has led to the puzzles plaguing many versions of impartialist systems. Of course, Crisp still has a problem, which he notes: that is the problem of special obligations to others who are close to us. But this bias, he suggested, is prone to debunking as well (143).

This leads me to a worry about Crisp's use of the debunking strategy. The problem with this strategy is that it can be used fairly indiscriminately. For example, someone opposed to Crisp's dual-source view might try to show that one of the ‘sources’ is the result of a bias we have that can be laid at the feet of our evolutionary heritage, and thus ‘debunk’ Crisp's overall strategy. More on how this can be avoided, in a systematic and principled way, would have helped Crisp's argument tremendously.

Part of Crisp's project is also to defend a particular view of well-being, which, as he notes, has been in decline. This is hedonism, or the view that well-being is in some way reducible to enjoyment (NB: there are other ways one might spell out hedonism, but this is the form Crisp considers). Crisp's defense is limited to showing that the view is at least reasonable. He does this by defending it against what he takes to be its most serious problems: ‘the swine morality’ problem and Nozick's experience machine. The response to the swine morality objections is most interesting, so that is the one I will focus on here. The swine morality objection has to do with the criticism, made against Bentham, that it reduces the good to experiences that pigs could have, as well as people. Does this mean that, in principle, a pig's life could be just as good or even better than a human being's life (or, in preference to the way Crisp understands the problem, could a pig be capable of well-being just as much as a person)? Crisp defends a view that is quite similar to Mill's in that he argues that some pleasures are lexically better than others. This is to avoid the implications of the Haydn and oyster case, in which one is presented with a choice between the life of a gifted composer who enjoys honors and achievement, which will end at age 77, or that of an oyster which will live as long as you want, but only experiencing purely sensual enjoyments – like floating in a warm bath when one is drunk (112). Haydn's life is better, though Crisp doesn't think it is because of the quality/quantity distinction made famous by Mill. He does think Mill identified something important, however, in that certain activities such as reading great novels are better than floating in bathtubs. But on Crisp's view this is just because such experiences contain more pleasure. His example of this is someone who has read a Jane Austen novel while drinking a cool glass of lemonade:

There are two things going on with our reactions to such cases. On the one hand, I think that most people do think they ought to prefer the Jane Austen novel to drinking lemonade. But I'm not sure that they would enjoy it more, even though they ought to. This reaction to the case might undermine Crisp's point, since it would be in virtue of the greater amount of enjoyment that the sense that they ought to enjoy it would be justified. Further, a lemonade sommelier might well hold that there is a good deal of nuance and structure in a really fine glass of lemonade, and feel justified in choosing that over the Jane Austen. But really this is not a major point against Crisp's account at all. The major worry that I have is that the debunking strategy again could come into play and undercut his own position. There's no reason to hold that there is more enjoyment in sophisticated pleasures than in sensual ones. We have just developed so as to prize those enjoyments more, as a by-product of our evolutionary history – perhaps because the sophisticated pleasures allow us to show off a bit.

This is a lovely book. I think it would be wonderful to use as a teaching text, for example, since it presents a novel view that ties together a good deal of issues that continue to be vigorously discussed in both metaethics and normative ethics. I highly recommend it.