My major objection to Hurka’s implementation of the recursive clauses is that it focuses too much on goodness and maximizing it. He focused little on whether an action is right or wrong, and I was left believing that he would always give precedence to maximizing good rather than preserving moral rightness. Hurka anticipated this objection and sought to redeem his theory to someone with my objection; however, I’m left feeling unsatisfied with the way he presented it.
From 212-217, Hurka briefly describes how someone who believes right and wrong have some place in ethics might go about applying his recursive clauses. The whole section feels very lackluster and empty-hearted: Hurka speaks in a lot of hypotheticals and does little in the way of argumentation. If he had put some more effort into rounding out this section I would be a lot more open to his view. However all he does in this section is state that once you allow conscientiousness into the game, you can apply the recursive clauses to loving morally right actions and hating morally wrong ones (and taking pleasure in someone else loving right actions, etc).
While this isn’t unacceptable, it does little to persuade that his recursive clauses are really necessary for someone with this view. It seems obvious that if an agent is always concerned with acting morally, he will inherently love acts that are right and hate acts that are wrong. In the interest of parsimony, it seems that if you accept moral rightness and wrongness as a part of ethics, it’s redundant (and unnecessary) to apply the recursive clauses to them.
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Hurka actually states early on in the section you pointed out that he acknowledges the dilemma between right and wrong and maximizing the good. He understands the concepts behind non-consequentialist theories and realizes the subtle clash they might have with his recursive account of virtue, ethics and goodness. And I actually agree with you. Throughout the section Hurka doesn’t really drive his argument to be parallel to the non-consequentialist theory so that the recursive account could be applied to it. Instead he kind of sidesteps around the issue and comes back to the theme of maximizing the good. It seems Hurka has it set in his mind that consequentialism and maximizing the good is how ethics should be applied and doesn’t try to mold his argument to fit any other or different theory. But then I remember that Hurka is conducting his thinking on an agent-neutral basis (a problem I have with his arguments throughout the whole book). Hurka doesn’t care how right and wrong fall into the equation because at the end of the day his objective view of Base Goods and Base Evils outweigh any moral right or wrong which could skew his virtues in a subjective or relative manner. He talks about agent-relative virtues in the previous section but in the pages you pointed out I think he has abandoned that type of thinking while taking on other theories. So as far as his argument goes, I think it’s perfectly fine for him to say that right and wrong simply follow from the recursive account of maximizing the good because his arguments are totally objective to begin with.
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