Slote, Michael - The Tanner Lectures on Human Values

74 <strong>The</strong> <strong>Tanner</strong> <strong>Lectures</strong> on Human Values
cover in the sphere of individualistic rationality. 15
<strong>The</strong> individualistic
rational satisficer does not seek the best for herself and
may sometimes deliberately reject the better for the good enough,
and I think common-sense morality permits something rather similar
within its sphere. Consider an occasion when a moral agent
can choose to do either more or less good for others and where
the choice of greater good entails no (relative) personal sacrifice
to the agent and no violation of deontological restrictions or sideconstraints.
In such a situation ordinary individuals sometimes do
the lesser good for others and yet act in a way that ordinary
morality would not condemn or find unacceptable. I have elsewhere
provided lengthy illustrations of these sorts of situations,
and I shall not repeat the descriptions here. <strong>The</strong> main point is
that rational individualistic satisficing finds a parallel in commonsense
moral satisficing, and the latter phenomenon, in turn, evokes
the further possibility of satisficing forms of (act-) utilitarianism
and (act-) consequentialism. A consistent consequentialist can
hold, for example, that an act is morally right if and only if its
consequences are good enough in comparison with the consequences
of the other acts open to the agent. An act may be morally
acceptable, even when there are alternatives whose consequences
would be better, if its consequences are very good and close
enough to the best that can be accomplished in the circumstances.
And such a satisficing version of (utilitarian) act-consequentialism
gains support not only from the prevalence and plausibility of
moral satisficing within everyday morality, but also from any support
we are able to give to the idea of rational individualistic satisficing,
Satisficing act-consequentialism has distinct advantages
that I have described elsewhere over prevalent optimizing forms
of act-consequentialism, but there is no time here to pursue this
purely moral-theoretic development of the idea of satisficing
15 In my own contribution to the symposium “Satisficing Consequentialism,”
and at greater length in chapter 3 of Common-Sense Morality and Consequentialism
(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985).