The Subject-Matter of this Inquiry
Until about thirty years ago, philosophical courses in ethics were devoted almost exclusively to the study of moral theory, in a very rarefied sense of the term ‘theory’: to theories about morality, about the concepts of right and wrong, good and bad, and so on. This book, however, stems from a course concerned with what philosophers call “normative,” “substantive,” or, broadly, “applied” ethics: with views about which sorts of acts are right or wrong, which moral rules to follow, which moral principles we should actually have. In this book, we will be looking at a number of fairly specific areas of life in regard to which there has been and still is considerable, and understandable, controversy. Even the perennial ones are live issues in the minds of many people.
We will not look much into the history of ethical theory. Yet we will find in every case that issues of moral theory do crop up, demanding an idea of what morality is for - what it is all about - if we are to have any resolution. For some time now, philosophers have been aware that no rigid separation between the high-level, “meta-ethical” theory to which philosophy, it was previously thought, should be exclusively devoted, and the actual questions of what is right or wrong, questions we face in our daily lives. But lately there has been a tendency to go to an opposite extreme and suppose that we can reflect on “practice” without doing “theory” at all. That is a theoretical stance that I roundly reject. Our involvement in particular issues will get us, willy-nilly, into fundamental questions that cannot be swept under the theoretical carpet. The appropriate response is to accept the need, and do the best we can.
This work aims to be a reasoned inquiry into moral matters. We want to know what reasons there might be to think that this or that sort of act is right or wrong. Many of the answers suggested and argued for will, I am sure, be quite familiar to the reader. They will, I hope, have the “feel of rightness” about them. They will, in the jargon of recent philosophy, agree with “our intuitions”. Others may not; some may even seem quite radical. But in all cases, I hope to show that there are good reasons for the views in question: that, indeed, is the purpose of this whole inquiry. We are not here simply to confirm your or my antecedent prejudices, or what we have learned at our mother’s knee - nor, like refractory children, simply to deny them. We must, as Aristotle says, “value the truth above our friends” - and this includes the case where our “friends” are pet beliefs, or our mothers, or our fellow members of the various tribes we live among or stem from. They too, one hopes, will prefer the truth to their own previous views, should those conflict.
So we can hardly help trying to come up with general ideas about morality, as we attempt to come to grips with moral matters. We do so starting from, and keeping our focus on, the real world of action rather than general theories that various philosophers have proposed. Still, as I say, theory is inevitable. We all have theories, whatever we call them, and so the only question is whether they are any good. Thus the rest of this introduction does what we mostly won’t do thereafter: namely, to sketch a general conception of what morals is all about.
What is morality about?
The specific connotations of the terms ‘morals’ and ‘morality’ are important here. There are issues of a kind that could reasonably be called “ethical” whose resolution lies quite beyond the limits of this course. That is one main reason why we need an introduction, to explain what we are and are not going to be inquiring into.
To start with, morality is not about vanilla versus chocolate - nor even about Prokofiev versus Rachmaninoff, or Homer versus Virgil. Those are matters of taste, however “high-brow” the latter may be. Matters of taste, though, go very far beyond food or even literature. People have preferences for ways of life as well as for books and dishes. Even when the varying involvements are at that level, amounting even to different “philosophies of life,” morals is still not about that. So what is the difference?
Briefly, matters of taste concern those that are up to you. An old saying: “there’s no disputing about taste”. That saying is plainly false in one clear sense: after all, people do disputes about such things, and frequently. But while we may dispute, there is notorious difficulty settling any such disputes. Establishing that my taste is superior to yours - except, of course, in my own mind! - is no easy matter. And when, as so often, we do not come to agreement on that level, then what? That is where there is room for morals, which purport to offer principles and rules which can be used to overrule or set aside the deliverances of taste. Morals say to all, “Do this! Don’t do that!,” and “This is recommended, that is discouraged.” They cannot do that reasonably if they are nothing but further expressions of taste. Indeed, for this purpose the view strongly recommends itself that people simply have no business imposing their tastes on others. We can recommend, we can criticize, and we do, certainly, “dispute” - but that’s all. What we choose in such areas is our own business.
We ust realize that the very claim that the items listed are “matters of taste,” and that such matters have no authority over those who do not share them, is itself a moral one. That people ought to be allowed to make their own decisions about matters of taste is a moral conclusion, not an aesthetic one. In fact, taste is a fine example of an area about which there are and have long been moral issues. The example of pornography, for instance, brings it up in a major way. Moral criticism of pornography comes to mind here: moral criticism of pornography ust not amount to mere assertions of taste. Thus we need to try to explain the difference.
Subjectivity
It is an important view, popular over at least twenty-three centuries, that morals are “subjective” in a sense implying that they are merely a “matter of opinion,” there being no such thing as moral knowledge, nothing about which we can be really correct or incorrect. A pure subjectivist view would have it that for Jones to think that x is wrong is merely for Jones to be “against” x - nothing more. That view assimilates matters of morals to matters of taste.
But the subjectivist view embodies a fallacy, a greatly mistaken inference from an important enough truth. Morality is about action and decision, and therefore about subjective states - feelings, desires, interests. And certainly people do have sharply opposed opinions on moral questions. Yet it doesn’t follow that morals is just a matter of feelings or opinions, beyond the reach of rational improvement, any more than a similar conclusion would follow about geology, despite the sharp differences of view often held by different geologists.
In fact, the case is just the opposite of what subjectivism holds. When we have an opinion about morals, it isn’t just an opinion about what we, in particular, are to do. For it is also an opinion about what everybody else should do. When we think murder is wrong, we think that no one ought to murder anyone. When we think that Colgate is the “right” brand of toothpaste, on the other hand, we do not think that everybody must agree, and heap censre all who don’t choose the same brand.
That moral matters aren’t just matters of how we feel, of what feelings we actually have, may be seen from looking at a pure case of feeling. Consider the claims (1) that I have a headache, and (2) that you don’t. Do we “disagree”? Clearly not. Yet one who thinks that abortion is wrong disagrees with one who thinks that it is not wrong.
Do they, perhaps only “disagree” in attitude? This idea was seriously advanced at one time.¹ But whatever one might think of its logic, one thing is clear: insofar as disagreements in attitude are just that - differences in attitude - they are incapable of rational resolution. If we are to get anywhere by rational methods, we must examine the bearing of facts, accessible to the familiar, publicly accessible methods of evidence and scientific reasoning, relevant to the matters in question. And if resolution or at least progress is then possible, then moral “attitudes,” as such, don’t constitute enough of the story about morality to be fundamental.
Politics and Morals
Nor is morals a matter of who has more votes. That’s a political method of settling things, and one that is itself morally controversial; whether a given issue is one that ought to be settled by voting is itself a moral question. Whether the fact that a majority thinks x to be morally right is logically enough to show that x is morally right is a conceptual question about morals. And the answer is flatly negative. We can never simply identify what is wrong with what is, however widely, merely thought to be wrong. It is not a part of the very meaning of morals that whatever the majority approves is right, whatever it disapproves wrong. It is, on the other hand, part of the very meaning of morals that attitudes require justification beyond themselves, that mere feelings aren’t enough.
Law and Morals
Morality and immorality are also not the same as legality and illegality. A law requiring or forbidding us to do something, may itself be either morally justified or not. There can be, and surely have been, unjust or immoral laws. What to do about them is, again, a moral question, and not one that can be answered simply by reiterating that the law in question “is the law”. (Chapter 13 concerns that question.)
Legislatures pass laws. But they cannot “pass” morals. Legislators must consider, among other things, whether proposed laws are morally acceptable. One does not determine this just by noting that enough other legislators will vote for a law to ensure passage, nor even that it would be very popular with the electorate. For they could all be acting immorally - and not infrequently have.
Morals are Public
What we are talking about in this book are rules or principles - directives intended for people generally. They are public guides to behaviour. What, then, is a “public rule of action” of the kind exemplified by moral rules?
First, it is one that applies to everyone in the public in question: it tells everybody in that public what to do or not do, in one way or another. It is easy to misunderstand this point. Might there not be rules about the treatment of children, or of the disabled, or pregnant women, and so on? Of course there can. But even in those cases, where only some are directly involved, everyone else is involved indirectly - indirectly, but very importantly. It is of the essence of moral rules that all people are called on to reprove those who do wrong, to approve and encourage those who do right, and to teach whomever one can which way is right and which not. These secondary or indirect activities of reinforcement of the primary rules are in fact what make rules moral. By contrast, the typical individual need say or do nothing at all regarding, say, optimal strategies at poker or the management of shoe stores.
Second, these rules of action are intended to overrule particular individuals when they wish to do otherwise. If I want to do something, but that thing, as it turns out, would be wrong, then I ought not to do it. Here we have a large part of the idea of morals: it is to be a set of rules for action having authority over everybody in the group whose morality it is intended to be.
Now, there may also be cases where I want to do something, but realize that it would be silly, or too expensive. If so, that too implies a reason for me not to do it. But it implies a different sort of reason from the moral type. It may not matter to the public what I do, or it may be none of their business. The moral rule may be “So go ahead, dummy!” Morals may leave the decision up to you, but that doesn’t mean there is no further question whether you should do it. Of course there is, but it goes beyond the limited realm of morals, into the much wider one of how to live one’s life.
The question of morals, we may say, is always of this type: When is someone not to be allowed to do what he or she might prefer? More loosely, when is someone to be discouraged from doing that? When must one yield to some rule that supposedly holds for everybody? When would some action (or inaction) be what one ought to do, whether one likes it or not? And when would it be desirable, advisable, or sensible to do or refrain from some such act?
Custom vs. Morality
Our inquiry concerns what the public rules of action should be. But in every human community, we will find an accepted set of moral rules, a prevailing morality. What those rules actually are in a given community is a matter for empirical investigation: anthropologists make it their business to gather facts about such things. But we must make a distinction between moralities in that sense and what we may call “ideal” morality - the set of rules that there ought to be, even if it does not quite, or at all, exist here and now. We might find that there is some generally accepted view about what we ought to do that is, nevertheless, untenable or even irrational. Then what do we do?
What we should do about that is itself an interesting moral question. Do I just act on my own preferred view of what’s right, or do I go along with the prevailing rule, even if I think my own to be better? How much may we do, and how much ought we to do, to try to change the current practice, if we think it wrong? That is another interesting subject that we will not discuss in detail in this book - though we will say something about it in relation to the analogous subject of obedience to the law, in Chapter 13.
What, you may ask, does the word ’should’ mean when we say that some moral rule of our society “should be” different from what it currently is? We can put the answer in terms of reasons: the claim is that there is a good reason for the public to have a rule of the proposed type. Of course that leads us to the next, very fundamental question: what constitutes a good reason for action? Plainly, if we are going to have a reasoned inquiry, we must have some idea about that. We will discuss it often when we look at particular issues.
In one sense, the question of what constitute good reasons for action is the question of what life is all about. However, an interesting feature of morals is that we can discern reasonable moral rules even though we do not claim to know how to answer that ultimate question. We can identify reasons for action for any given individual without actually having the answer to the hard question just asked: the reasons for action for a given agent are whatever considerations that agent actually accepts as recommending an action over its alternatives. Our reasons for action are based on our interests - or more precisely, on our understanding of them. If we can be shown that our understanding is in error, then we shall perhaps come to regret what we have done on its basis, perhaps. But until then, the agent must act on what he believes.
Now we must recall the central feature of morality, one that it is impossible to emphasize too strongly: namely, that it applies to everyone -- not just me or you, not just us and our friends, or people with the same religion or the same interests in music, or persons of the same sex, but all of us. The importance of this will become very clear as we proceed. In case after case, we will have occasion to reject some proposed rule on the ground that it could not be reasonable to require certain people to follow it. It fails to be universal.
Universality has been a much-discussed and, I think, much misunderstood subject in moral philosophy. When the great German philosopher, Immanuel Kant, tells us that the fundamental principle of morals is “Act only on maxims that you could will to be universal law,” he effectively points to a defining feature of morals. Morality consists of rules for all; if it is impossible for everyone to act successfully on a given rule, then that rule is ipso facto ineligible for the role of moral rule.
We can go further. What matters for morals is that its rules are individually reasonable for people to accept and to follow, so long as others do too. No proposed moral rule that fails to be thus reasonable can be accepted by everyone. It is unreasonable to expect people to follow rules that have no basis in their interests, their reasons. Moral rules, then, have to be framed with a view to advancing the interests of all, insofar as their interests can all be advanced. Of course this requires that their interests not be inescapably in conflict. Some interests are intrinsically impossible to advance without someone else’s being thwarted - Smith’s interest in making Jones miserable, for instance. Such interests can’t be condoned by a reasonable morality: sadism, and certain sorts of “elitism,” as in typical forms of racism, will necessarily fail to qualify. By contrast, consider competitive game-playing. Both sides can’t win, indeed: but both do agree to be bound by specific rules, and both prefer playing, despite the chance of losing, to not playing at all. That provides, in fact, a paradigm of how conflicts of interest may be resolved in a rational way.
The challenge of Moral Relativism
Moral questions, we have seen, concern rules for a group, and especially for a group whose members are more or less thrown together, such as by the chance of being born to people who already live in it. But how large a group? Is there, and should there be, group variability?
This question brings up the familiar theoretical subject of relativism. There is certainly some level at which different cultures, especially, have different moral beliefs and rules. But it is unclear, and the subject of much discussion, whether the variation is of fundamental significance. Is morality “at bottom” relative? Or is the variation a matter of relative detail, against an underlying structure that is the same for all?
At the limit, it might be held that the idea of a common morality for all people is a mirage. That view has, I believe, been shown after centuries of discussion to be flatly untenable, and based on misunderstandings. Pronouncements to the effect that something cannot be done tend to be short-sighted: they look at the difficulties in the way, but fail to consider the larger benefits of solution.
In the case of morality, those potential benefits are enormous. The absence of morality applying to individuals within a group would make life perfectly miserable for everyone. That is the reply to what we may call individual relativism, the view that morality is only valid for the individual whose morality it is. But the same can hold of groups. When different groups nevertheless come in contact with each other, the absence of a solution to problems encountered as a result of those contacts, the problems of juxtaposed societies that can and do have relations with each other, means, in effect, a worse life for people in both groups. No common morality means no solution to those problems. If we know what’s good for us, we will find solutions to them, rather than throwing up our hands and declaring that it can’t be done. In the realm of the practical, solutions are generally achievable - but not without effort.
Whether the fact of cultural variability implies any criticism of our own culture or our own rules is a related question, and one that is practically very important. The moral issues we will discuss here at least have to do with our own “group,” and that group I take to comprise at least all people living in our modern world. Whether we can learn something from, say, the Inuit or the Bantu is a reasonable and open question. In turn, whether we are doing the right thing to or about such groups is another, and not only a “reasonable” one but, in the case of mixed modern societies such as that of the Americans and Canadians most likely to see this book, one to which finding answers is a pressing matter. Yet it is hardly easy or obvious.
Meanwhile, we may make an observation about moral relativism that might do much to dispel any tendency the idea may have to captivate the fancy of the reader. Societies contain members who deal with each other in various ways, who “interact.” When societies do not interact, as was often true of various pairs or sets of them in times past, then the question of a common morality dealing with their relations to each other is moot. In that case, moral relativism will look perfectly possible. But as soon as the members of different groups start to have dealings with each other, the situation becomes similar, and in the end identical, to what obtains between one individual and another within the same community. In the modern world, we talk, quite reasonably, of the “global community.” When global community is a fact, global morality becomes a necessity.
Moral Rules and Moral Inquiry: How to Proceed?
Moral theory asks what a moral rule is and what, if anything, would “validate” or “confirm” such a rule. To the first, there is a plausible general answer, in two parts - two, because the expression ‘moral rule’ has, as we have already seen, two different, though related, senses. First there is the sense in which a moral rule is an actual feature of the social life of some group of people. Second is the sense in which a rule is being proposed or advocated as an improvement over what we have, or alternatively is claimed to be a good rule which we are fortunate to have.
Regarding the first sense, we may say that a rule in a certain group is one of its moral rules when
(1) Members of the group typically criticize each other for deviating from the rule in question, and/or praise each other for conforming to it. The people they feel they can do this to are at least, in principle, all members of their own society (though there might also be rules of etiquette, say, that restrict the occasions or linguistic form of such criticism); but it will hardly be surprising if they attempt also to do so regarding non-members as well. Most members of most cultural groups are probably not cultural relativists!
(2) When individuals thus praise or blame each other, they suppose that they are justified. They assume that the rule they invoke has some basis, making it a reasonable rule to follow, so that it’s not just an arbitrary imposition. (That is, it must not be just arbitrary. In cases where it may seem so, there may be a need for an arbitrary rule regarding the matter at hand - deciding things by lot, for instance. Or there may be a reason why we should follow some rule or other, even when it is arbitrary just which rule we have - driving on the right, for instance.) They may well not be able to state that justification, however. They will, rather, have an obscure sense of rightness: an “intuition,” as moral philosophers have come to call it.
Many philosophers seem to have come to the conclusion that these intuitions are actually all there is to morals - the very stuff or essence of the subject. That idea will come in for occasional comment in the rest of this book. It is, I think, a mistake, but an understandable one. Most of us are like this regarding arithmetic, too: we don’t know why 2+2=4, but we are very sure that it is. However, going on to suggest that there actually isn’t any further reason why it is is quite another matter, and would make arithmetic a mysterious and undiscussable subject. To say that about morals would make it too a fundamentally undiscussable subject - but with much more serious practical consequences than saying it about arithmetic.
The informality of morals is one of the main points that distinguish it from law. Law is bound up with an institution, in which certain specified persons make the rules, which are written up in black and white; the same or other specified persons then administer them, by publishing them, judging disputed cases under them, and administering punishments to those who don’t conform. By contrast, moral rules are not made by anyone in particular, are not written up anywhere “officially,” and are administered by everybody, not just by certain people with a license to do so. De facto morality is an informal social phenomenon: we are all involved in morals, whatever else.
The second feature confronts us with the need for a decent answer to the question of justification. A moral rule must be nonarbitrary, must have reason behind it. Yet some particular rules of some group might well be thought to be arbitrary and unreasonable - and that criticism might be plausible, too.
That point brings up the need for a second sense of ‘moral rule’: that in which a certain sentence formulates a possible rule for a certain group, or for all of humankind in general, and that proposal is claimed to be reasonable, to be the very rule we ought all to accept and live by. This sense is given the tag ‘ideal’ morality: morality as it ought to be. The choice of ‘ideal’ here is not ideal, either, for it suggests an unattainable state of affairs, whereas a proposed moral rule, claimed to be better than what we now have, might be perfectly “attainable.” For example, in North American society, attitudes toward unmarried couples have changed enormously. Neither the old attitude nor the new were “utopian,” but the new one can reasonably be regarded as much better.
At any rate, both parts of morals are essential - the generality despite informality, and the implicit claim to reasonableness - and perhaps they are all we need.
The Meaning of ‘Moral’
What, then, does one mean by saying that some act is morally wrong? We have distinguished, in effect, three components:
1. One professes to disapproves of anyone’s doing it, and therefore implies that one disapproves of doing it oneself.
2. One thinks that everybody else should also disapprove and refrain from it - in short, that there ought to be (if there isn’t already) a social rule against it.
3. One thinks that there is a good reason why (2) should be the case - a good reason from the point of view of everybody, not just oneself. (It could be claimed that this good reason is “absolute,” having nothing to do with points of view. But then, if a reason is absolutely so, it must be so from everyone’s point of view, properly understood. Those who claim to disbelieve it must, on this view, be irrational, confused.)
The notion of there “being” a “moral rule” against or in favor of this or that is quite vague. The above characterization of having a social rule adopted, after all, would only be literally realized if absolutely everyone in the community agreed about it. Yet such a degree of agreement is doubtless all but nonexistent. How many does it take, then, to say that there is “a community rule”? This is like asking how many hairs it takes to make a beard: a lot, obviously, but no precise number. As a working definition, we could say that a community, C, has a rule, R, if a “great majority” of the people in C adopt and reinforce R. For many purposes, including ours, precise answers to this question do not matter, for we are interested mainly in the justificatory question, not the factual question of just what our society’s morals currently are.
Moral Issues
This book is about moral matters, many of which are in at least some respects controversial. They are, as we say, issues, moral issues in our and many other communities. But to see that there are moral issues in a society is to see that there are matters on which there is no consensus, not even a great majority, regarding the specific point at issue, and thus that there really is no such thing as “the current view” on those matters.
Notice, by the way, that my characterization of the meaning of ‘moral’ does not require that there be actual consensus on the actions in question, but only that it would be reasonable (because there is reason) for everyone to accept the rule in question: to believe that x is wrong is to believe that disapproval of x would get a rational consensus, if all addressed themselves to it clearly. Which, of course, they most likely will not. This makes it clear enough why there can be moral issues in a community, unsettled matters regarding the status of certain sorts of general conduct, including the human community at large.
Even when there clearly is a consensus on some point, condition (2) provides for the legitimacy of criticism. No matter how well received it may be, we can ask whether we ought to have it or not. And of course, there is room to ask what the reason for the rule is, even if it seems perfectly obvious that it is a good one. Many of the rules proposed as we go along will, I hope, be of that kind: pretty obvious, but still worth knowing their basis.
Inquiring into the basis of a moral rule is especially important in disputed cases. We all agree that killing innocent normal adults is wrong, and people aren’t greatly concerned to discern why. But we do not all agree that abortion is wrong, even though abortion is a sort of killing, and those killed are certainly not guilty of anything. Nor is there complete agreement on whether a parent may put to death an incurably suffering child who is severely mentally handicapped.² Clearly we can only get to the bottom of the abortion issue if we know why killing is wrong, not just that it is. (Chapter 9 takes up that particular issue.)
Moral Rules and Their Application
All explanations of morality in terms of systems of rules or general principles encounter the need for a distinction between the general and abstract judgments embodied in the rules, and the concrete and particular judgments that we must make in daily life. When one asks, “Ought I to do this?,” the action one contemplates may be the subject of some general rule, such as a rule against lying. Suppose you are thinking of telling someone an untruth. However, the act being considered has another feature, too: it would, let us say, spare the feelings of the host at the party you have just been to. No, you didn’t enjoy the party very much, but do you have to say that to the people who went to so much trouble to put it on? We should not lie, true; but neither should we wound or offend. In this case, we must choose between these two rules, for here they conflict: to tell the truth in this case is to offend. Which is one to do? Most of us think that one should tell a “white lie.” We are probably right about that.
Philosophers have coined a useful term for the sort of moral judging that is embodied in general rules: prima facie (literally, “on first face”). They describe actions in a certain way, and then declare that insofar as they are of that description, they are to be done or to be avoided. But this leaves room for the possibility that in a particular situation where an act of that description could be performed, that act would turn out to have other features, other descriptions, that would bring it under another and contrary rule. What then is the moral agent to do? Clearly, she must decide which of the different rules that apparently apply is the “weightier” one in the circumstances and act accordingly. When we say that a particular act is right or wrong, we are making an overall judgment, not just a prima facie judgment. To do that involves taking account of the action in all its complexity - or at any rate, as much of its complexity as we can manage to get a grip on, finite beings that we are.³
Some theorists, and some ordinary people, would like to believe that there are some general rules that always hold, without qualification. Depending on which rules they single out for that status, these people often strike others as rigid, hidebound, perhaps unfeeling. Be warned: philosophers have come to appreciate that there probably are no rules at all that can plausibly be held in that wholly inflexible manner. But it is crucial to realize that giving up on rigid principles does not mean giving up on principles altogether. Plenty of actual lies are wrong, even though the fact that an act is a lie does not wholly settle the question of whether it is wrong, taking all things into account. Which rules there are makes a big difference, even if no one of them can be maintained with absolute strictness.
Moral Inquiry: Approaches
So how are we to proceed on these disputed issues? Current philosophical writing on these matters tends to distinguish two allegedly contrasting general approaches: “foundationalist” and “anti-foundationalist”.
(1) The foundationalist approach holds that we should identify the small number of fundamental, underlying truths in the area, and then carefully deduce their implications for the issue at hand; our results, if properly arrived at, will give us the truth of the matter. In this sense, the foundationalist’s moral theory is like mathematics, especially Euclidean geometry. In the case of morals, this approach would try to identify the basic moral principles, and then carefully apply them to particular issues.
(2) The antifoundationalist (also known as the “neointuitionist”) approach, on the other hand, denies that there are any “fundamental principles” in the field, and holds that we must piece together the truth from many different sources. We are always, as it were, flying by the seat of our pants. In particular, we will always take what is currently believed as our starting point. Presumably reflection might make us change a pre-existing belief, for instance by showing that it conflicts with another of our pre-existing beliefs to which we find ourselves even more attached. Still, the sheer fact that we hold those beliefs is supposed to count in their favour, even if we have no idea why we hold them.
My own view is rather contrary to typical current philosophical practice in favoring a version of the foundationalist approach. The trouble with the other approach is that it seems mushy: we are told nothing about what makes a given bit of information a piece of “evidence” for or against a moral rule, nor what it means for a rule to be a moral rule. Indeed, it isn’t even clear whether evidence is relevant at all. It is as if we expose ourselves to facts and other people’s opinions and just let them bounce around, without controls, regarding whatever emerges as somehow “justified”. That seems an absurd picture of justification: “Here, you are to do so-and-so, because I think you should, even though I have no idea why!” Antifoundationalists will, no doubt, deny that it is an accurate picture of their views. The question in my mind is whether their view can really be sustained without, in effect, moving in the direction of the view proposed here.
Perhaps a sort of compromise is possible. We must agree with the antifoundationalists that systematic study of anything emerges out of a background of unsystematic experience, and that results supposedly confirmed in our systematic study that conflicted totally with that background would be meaningless, unrecognizable, and thus rejected. But it doesn’t follow that systematic study could not show us what underlies our background experience, making it more intelligible and prompting us to rely on the carefully reasoned results of systematic inquiry in preference to the chaotic inputs of unorganized experience.
Meanwhile, we may lay down a few pointers about moral inquiry. If we are seriously inquiring into something we must
1. suppose that there is a truth to be discovered on the matter, and thus
2. that some possible facts are relevant to it, others not; and so, we should
3. try to think through the problem and discern what is relevant, what not. Once we know that a given kind of information is relevant, then we must
4. try to find out what the relevant facts actually are; after which, we are to
5. discern what follows, and then let our opinions be guided by those results, rather than on sheer feeling. If we are reluctant to accept those results,then we need to try to figure out where we went wrong. Until we do so, our reluctance is not justified.
This is not to say that we should ignore what others have to say. The path of reason is refutation, not exclusion from the mind. No matter what our view may be, we can agree that it is a good thing to have rival views available, as illustrated in the anthologies of readings on these matters, with many conflicting views represented. However, we must treat them as views, reasoned workings-out of proposed solutions, not simply as expressions of attitudes that happen to be held by those people. We must consider those views and try to see what there is to be said for or against them.
Logic: Moral Argumentation
In this book, we will always ask why we are supposed to think that such-and-such is right or wrong, as the view we are considering holds. Its proponent must give us an argument, that is:
a set of statements (called premises) put forward as supporting some other statements (the conclusions drawn from the first set).
The premises are claimed to be truths of some kind (just what that means will be considered a few paragraphs below). Premises needn’t even be verbal: one may also invoke nonverbal presentations instead of verbally articulated premises, by presenting a picture or pointing to something in real life. Still, words are pretty central in arguments, for arguments in the sense relevant to these discussions are social affairs, and language is a social institution, a vehicle for communication. Our conclusions are in words, and if we try to go straight from pictures or other presented nonverbal happenings to words, there is much room for misinterpretation. Language is not inherently precise, but it is capable of being made more so, when that is needed.
Once we have assembled our premises, and identified the proposed conclusion(s), we are then in a position to ask two questions:
(1) Validity. Does the first set really imply the second? To determine this, we ask whether the conclusions could be false even if the premises were true. If so, then those premises aren’t enough to do the job at hand, and the argument must be changed or abandoned. One way to change it would be to admit that the conclusions could be false even if the premisses are true, but that they are very unlikely to be false, given true premisses. We should then have to inquiry into the state of the evidence for this weaker claim. It has not been proved, but perhaps nevertheless some reason has been given in support of it, and maybe even enough to do. The question, though, is then made difficult: how much is enough, and why is it enough? But when the conclusions cannot be false if the premises are true, that problem doesn’t arise. That is the feature of argument known as “validity”: a valid argument is one in which the premisses, if true, really do reqire the truth of the conclusion.
(2) Soundness. If the argument is valid and its premises are true, then the argument is said to be “sound”; with such an argument, the conclusion is proven. But when are the premises true?
Here it becomes very important indeed to distinguish different kinds of premises. Philosophers have divided them into a variety of types, of which we will distinguish three.
First, there are factual claims. Such claims purport to describe the world, and can, hopefully, be established by suitable investigation. Science and common sense experience are our sources here. Sometimes we can lead our interlocutor to the relevant area and just point out the facts - or he can lead us there and show us that they aren’t as we claimed. At other times, we will appeal to the currently published results of scientific work. And sometimes we must admit that we just don’t have enough evidence. In that case, of course, our conclusions are going to be weakened to the extent that evidence is lacking - and what to do about that may become a matter of serious moral importance.
Second, there are sometimes statements intended to be true “by definition”; here we appeal to the very meaning of the terms employed. A bachelor is unmarried: we don’t have to examine bachelors to know this - merely need to be aware of the word’s normal sense. Sometimes we do use words in non-normal senses, and in that case, we must take care to explain how we are using them. There is no point in using words in a way that differs arbitrarily from the uses of those we hope to persuade. That will cause only confusion. (Which may be intended, of course; but in this inquiry, as in any serious inquiry, our purpose is truth, not persuasion for its own sake.)
Other premises may be “a priori” - conceptual truths, such as those of mathematics. It is rare for such things to loom large in moral arguments, but by no means impossible. Proof for such claims is a matter of conceptual argument of the appropriate kind. Most of us, if the claim is highly technical, will have to depend on the pronouncements of those who are learned in such matters - if they are agreed. And if they are not, we do well not to depend on the claim in question.
Finally, however, there will be claims of value: that something is right or wrong, good or bad, just or unjust, beautiful or ugly, virtuous or vicious, and so on. In the twentieth century especially, philosophers (and others) have become very concerned about claims of these kinds. How do we go about “confirming” or “verifying” such judgments? Plainly it is crucial to have a good understanding of this matter, for it is immensely plausible to think that no argument whose conclusion is evaluative can be devoid of evaluative premises. If it is claimed that “facts” support “values,” then an explanation is needed. Sometimes the explanation is that what the arguer says is a “fact” is, after all, a value in disguise. And sometimes, the fact is a fact about someone’s values. Whether Picasso is a great artist is debatable, but we can at least establish, sometimes, that Jones thinks he is.
The present essays are about morals in particular, not values in general. There is serious question just what truth consists of in the case of evaluative assertions. But in the special case of morals, we may propose something that some may at first find rather disconcerting: namely, that what really matters is whether the premises in question are accepted by all concerned. For if they are, then our argument, if it passes the first test, will at any rate convince them. That proposal may sound outrageous to some, and they may be somewhat mollified if we go to on to suggest that what is accepted should be reasonably accepted. But that won’t get us very far in many cases. Should we say that Smith’s preference for Bordeaux over sherry is “reasonable”? If we do, what could we mean? What has reason got to do with taste in wines?
We can answer that a value is held “reasonably” by person A when A holds it without doing so on the basis of some detectable factual mistake or of logic, and has actually thought about the matter, at least a little. And that is enough because of two crucial things. First, morality is practical: it intends to issue in actions, and decisions whether to do some action, or approve of its being done. As the classic Greek philosopher Aristotle pointed out, we act on our values, and we do this whether they are reasoned or not. In arguments, we are reasoning about action: we are trying, on the basis of articulate speech, to influence action. If we can show someone that his action is unreasonable, fine: that will influence his behavior, or at least reconcile him to the sorts of reactions to his behavior that reason indicates to be appropriate. But otherwise, we can make no criticism that will be relevant from his point of view; we will then have failed to influence his actions. And if influence is what matters, then that failure matters.
The leading methodological idea of this book is suggested by the very idea, the definition, of morals: a set of informally reinforced rules that is to be the same for all in the group whose morals it is intended to be. Rational action is action directed by one’s values - the things one prefers - in light of one’s information about the likely effects of one’s actions. A reasonable moral rule is one that is reasonable for all those who are subject to it. When we tell someone that his behavior is wrong, we intend to affect his actions. Our saying that will do so only if we can connect his values with the rule which would declare what he does to be wrong. In that case, he cannot deny that the judgment is relevant, and that it is grounded, for it is his grounds, plus various facts about the world that in turn he cannot reasonably deny, that support the judgment in question. That is our aim in using moral language.
Someone may, on further consideration, decide that he was mistaken in accepting some premise. If so, that will reopen the argument. It will, however, leave him in a poor position to complain about his treatment in the meantime, for after all, did he not accept it then? One could suggest that we have something like “absolute” truth when all parties accept premises which they would never change their minds about, no matter how much new evidence they consider, nor how carefully they scrutinize it. This ideal is doubtless a remote one, but that needn’t detain us here. Getting to principles that are well based in the actually held values of all concerned, where those values are not likely to change in relevant ways so far as we can see, is a lot, and for almost all purposes, enough.
Putting Argument in Perspective Arguments that fail on the first score depicted above are invalid. Arguments failing in the second way are unsound. It is extremely important to bear in mind that an argument can be either invalid or unsound, that is, it can fail one or both of tests (1) and (2), even though its conclusion is true. A bad argument fails to prove its conclusion. But its badness does not prove that its conclusion is false; truth is not the same as proof. Failure of an argument shows that one set of alleged reasons does not establish its conclusion. If those are the only reasons we had for believing it, then its effect will be to undermine that conclusion. Our belief is shown, at least for the time being, to be unreasonable. In moral argument, unlike some other areas of life, this is important. For if you have an admittedly unreasonable moral belief, then you are in a pretty weak position to be proposing to control other people’s actions on the basis of it. should they happen to disagree. Yet such control, as pointed out, is the very essence of the matter. Conclusions affecting only yourself, on the other hand, are your business - whether reasonable or not. Morality, as we will see, consists in considerable part of making room for precisely such conclusions. We think, or at any rate I will argue that we should think, that people may not be compelled to do anything other than what they like to do, in the case where what they like to do is sufficiently isolated from others that it has no adverse effect on those others. Bad moral arguments undermine the authority of the arguer to deprive people of their freedom of action.
But unreasonableness isn’t the same as falsehood: unreasonable beliefs could be true. In order to show that the conclusion of our bad argument is actually false, we would need another argument, one that has the denial of that conclusion as its conclusion, and this other argument, in turn, would have to be a good one: its premises must be both true and such as to imply its conclusion. Often, of course, we will have neither. We won’t be able to show decisively that a conclusion is false, nor yet that some other is true. We shall then have to try to decide whether on the whole the evidence favours one more than another. We will have to do more homework before we can be secure in our beliefs. Not many beliefs, in fact, will be totally secure. But many of them will be reasonably secure: they will be well supported by wide experience, and they fit well with the rest of what we know. If we can’t do “better,” we may still do well enough for all practical purposes; and practice is our subject, after all.
Why argument? It may occur to the reader to ask why these beliefs have to be supported by argument at all. Why not just suppose that there are some “fundamental moral truths,” that we can know by a kind of “perception,” like the color of the sky? The belief in question would then admit of no argument - one either sees it or one doesn’t! The answer is as before. If we can find a belief that everybody accepts without argument, fine. But what if we can’t? What if people disagree in action, some feeling free to stamp out contrary opinions by force rather than reason - reason being, they suppose, not available? And what if, as is frequently the case, the “everybody” who agree is not quite everybody, but only everybody except some few who will suffer greatly at the hands of the many who agree? That, I think, shows the crucial weakness of what has been called “intuition” in morals. Those who proceed this way are in the position of saying: “Admittedly I have no reason for believing that this is right; nevertheless, I am orally entitled to force you to act this way!” If you don’t think that an acceptable way to proceed, then my point is made: arguments are indispensable in morals, even though they aren’t in many other areas of life.
A cautionary note is in order. I am not assuming that real people, in the course of their lives, normally go about producing arguments. Arguments, in general, occur when people are challenged, either by others or by themselves in a reflective moment. Philosophers are always arguing because they are always trying to improve their (and our) systems of belief. Even so, the method of inquiry by argument is not based on a distortion of real life. Instead, it scrutinizes real life more carefully than, perhaps, we normally do.
An important example: Theological ethics In the past it seems to have been almost universally supposed - at least in European-derived cultures - that there was an important connection between morality and religion: namely, that morality depends on religion. This view in effect holds that if there were no god or gods, then nothing would be morally right or wrong. A simple formulation would be that to be right is to be approved by God; to be wrong to be disapproved by that personage. This religious view is still held, it seems, by many people today. It is a useful example, for despite its popularity, it is provably untenable. It is worth a brief detour here to see why.
If we ask the theological theorist of ethics why the word of God is what makes an act right or wrong, we are likely to be met at first with a reaction of hostility or silence: who are we to question the ways of the Divinity? But what is meant is this: what is it about God that makes his word so authoritative in this area? To this, two answers, or variants of them, are (and as far as I can see are the only two that could be) given:
(1) It will be said that God is supremely powerful - “Omnipotent”.
(2) It will be said that God is supremely Good.
The first answer invites the following response: Look, surely you don’t believe that might makes right? On this view, morals could be just anything: suppose God decides he doesn’t like the look of people with white skin, so he declares that everyone is to torture people with white skin. No serious religious person will allow this. To make the “omnipotence” answer relevant, he will have to make it much subtler. For example, he might point out that God has, after all, created everything, and therefore created the whole of whatever makes morality a possible subject.
Of course, if we don’t think there is any truth to theology, we won’t accept that premise. However, we can table that. For what matters here is that it is a way of retreating from the image of God as a kind of whimsical despot, and moving toward one that could reconcile that omnipotence with the kind of thing morality really is. For instance, it may be that various facts about people are what make morality true; the theologian is merely contending that those facts were, ultimately, created by a deity. Provided we all agreed which facts were relevant, we could then table the subject of whether a deity did actually create the world containing them.
(2) The answer that God is good is, at first sight, much more promising. At second sight, however, it is seen to be too promising. For what could the theological moralist mean when he says that God is “good”? For one thing, he must have meant that he is morally good - we don’t expect moral truth to be based on the will of an infinitely great basketball player or violinist. Only an infinitely just person, a morally good one, could possibly qualify.
Very well, but then the question arises, what are we saying about someone when we say that he is just or morally good? Of course there are various answers that have been given to that - we will be exploring one general sort of answer to it in the pages of this book (which I think to be the right answers). But the point is that if we can answer that independently of any knowledge of God, then we demonstrate that morality is, as philosophers put it, “logically prior” to theology, rather than the other way around, as theological ethics would have it.
And what if we can’t answer it? Alas, in that case the term ‘God’ turns out to be meaningless. For to be God is to be an omnipotent and perfectly good being; but now one of those two defining features would be without meaning!
The result is straightforward: referring to the supposed will of God in moral matters is pointless. God will, necessarily, be in favor of whatever is right, and so those who believe in God will believe that whatever they think is right is also approved by God. But its being so will do nothing at all to explain what makes it right, and therefore nothing at all to help us understand what is right. Theology is necessarily a fifth wheel in morals: it can do no useful work.
It can, however, do a great deal to make moral discussion intractable, for of course to hold that morality depends on God is to make it unfathomable and undiscussable. All too often, unfortunately, this goes along with resorting to plastic bombs and machine guns. This is another reason why moral theory and moral application or practice cannot really be separated. Moral theory matters because morals matter; we can’t adequately discuss moral matters without any understanding of what morality is.
Tolerance and Liberalism
Suppose that your view about a certain practical matter is unsupported, but mine is no better. Then what? Should we say, “To each his own”? Interestingly enough, when it’s a moral matter, we can’t do that, for there is a problem: what these beliefs are about, remember, is what everyone is to do. It is therefore not possible to “tolerate” two opposing views in morals. A given act cannot be both okay and not okay from this perspective. We cannot say, “Jones thinks that everyone ought to do x, and I think that no one ought to do x, and neither of us has proved his case; therefore, I should “tolerate” Jones’ view”. What could it mean for me to do this? Am I going to believe that everyone should do x on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and avoid it on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays (and perhaps do nothing on Sunday)? That makes no sense. I may say that Jones is entitled to his belief, and me to mine - but if the “resolution” of our disagreement is that people may do x if they please, then this is not toleration of Jones’ view, but rejection. For his view, remember, is that everyone ought to do it. It it also a rejection of mine, if mine was that no one ought to do x. It is, instead, a new view: the view that the situation in which those who please may go ahead and do x, and those who don’t please ay go ahead and refrain from doing x, is to be accepted by everybody, including both Jones and me.
In other cases, though, the alternative of toleration may be unacceptable. If x is murder, then there is a set of people - the proposed victims - who, very reasonably, do not agree that people should be able to do this just as they please. We have to find out what can be tolerated and what not. Murder is a good example of what cannot be; there are others.
What we must say, then, is this: if nobody’s view about what everyone ought to do or ought not to do is any better than anybody else’s, then people may do what they like in that respect. For instance, if it is not established that no one may perform abortions, then we must allow anyone who wants one to get one, and anyone competent to perform them to do so upon arranging that with the client in question. But to say that is to take a real moral stand - not just to refrain from having one. It is to accept that people have, in general, the right to do what they want, in the absence of publicly good reason for denying that right.
In short, tolerance, the liberal option, is itself the expression of a proposed uniformity: the social rule that each may do as he or she likes, using his or her own judgment about the matter. Views that people “may do what they like” are not, when acceptable, merely vague expressions of a wishy-washy refusal to address the issue. The view that somebody may do as he likes is the view that we may not prevent him from doing so. A moral view to the effect that someone may not do something must be supported by reasons that are good ones from everybody’s point of view. Morals is not one group ganging up on another; instead, it is the whole group, the group of all of us, finding that there are good reasons for each of us to accept a rule of the type in question. In cases where we differ, if some of us are to be justified in preventing the others from acting as they prefer in their own cases, we need to find a reason in terms not only of our own preferences, but of theirs as well. That’s a lot more difficult.
Reason and Tolerance So why is tolerance, or liberalism in the above sense, the indicated social rule in cases where there is not sufficient reason to have any other social rule? The answer has much to do with the nature of reasons. We are, of course, talking about practical reasons here, that is, reasons for doing or not doing something. But whose reasons are those? The answer to this is that individuals are the only beings that can reason in an articulate manner, and their conclusions are their reasons for acting - what get them into action. Reasons are essentially individual.
If we are to justify imposing uniformities of behaviour, we have to appeal to facts about people in respect of which they are uniform, facts about all people that give us all good reason to support these rules, which purport to override individual reasons to the contrary.⁴ In the end, the support for a moral rule to be applied to your action has to come from you. Where people’s reasons differ and there is no such uniformity about people to support restrictions on the behavior of individuals, we always have reason to be allowed to do what we want. What a given individual wants is what life is about, so far as that individual is concerned.
Weighed against this principle of preferring to be allowed to do what we want might be a preference that others be made to do what we want, too - and thus, not allowed to do as they want. Looked at from the point of view of the others, of course, this is not a desirable policy. Suppose that we have no reason that makes sense to them why they shouldn’t be allowed to act on their own interests and values? If so, then how can my preferences regarding their action have any rational weight with them? The sheer desire of mine that others do this or that is clearly not a reasonable basis for their action, and thus not for general action. And they in turn, we may be sure, have plenty of preferences for suppressing our own freedom to do what we want.
Consider the rule against murder, for instance. Everybody normally has the strongest reasons to want not to be killed. The murderer doesn’t want to die, any more than his victim does. Given this configuration of preferences, what is to be done? It is extremely plausible to suggest that anyone’s reasons for not wanting to be killed far outweigh their reasons for wanting to kill others. The conflict of interest between killer and victim is total: there is no compromise.
But a murderer will get no benefit from his act if others then proceed to make him the victim. Yet, as Thomas Hobbes so long ago pointed out, anyone has the capacity to kill anyone else.⁵ Thus all, including even murderers themselves, have reasons to support a rule against murder. There is a common interest, which makes the rule against killing a rational rule. Those who murder people go against a rule that they themselves agree to be reasonable.
Can we imagine someone of whom this is not true? In cases of suicide and euthanasia, persons do think they have reason to want to die, and even to be killed by others. In a duel, both killer and victim agree to a competition from which only one emerges alive. Those special cases are so far from normal that they set the case for normally forbidding murder in a particularly clear light. The rule against murder is a rule against the killing of involuntary victims. Determining when an act is voluntary is not always easy, to be sure; but it is a highly relevant difference when we understand morality to be a set of rules of our own making, rather than deliverances from on high.
Are there any other grounds for exception? Does anyone think his reasons for being free to kill others outweigh his own reasons for not wanting to be killed by them? Such a person can have no objection to our killing him. If the rest of us forbid murder, and propose to execute those who do murder someone, they can have no reasonable objection. That was the moral of Hobbes’s “State of Nature”: insofar as there are no agreed rules, anything goes, and no one can effectively complain about anything.
Moral liberalism, then, is certainly not the view that “anything goes”. It is, rather, the view that freedom is the presumptive rule. Making it into a rule involves recognizing an obligation to let people do as they see fit, unless and until some reason in terms of everyone’s interests (including the agent’s own interests) defeats this. There often are such reasons, as we will see.
A Note about ‘Right’ and ‘Wrong’
What is in question when we ask whether a certain action is wrong is, I think, reasonably clear. For an act to be wrong is for there to be good reason to discourage or even to prevent people from doing it, blaming and perhaps punishing those who do it: we are to avoid doing it. But when we ask whether a certain action is right, things are not quite so clear. The term ‘right’ turns out to be importantly ambiguous. Specifically, we need to distinguish two senses of the term, which I’ll call the “strong” and the “weak” senses.
Strong: sometimes, the word ‘right’ has the sense of ‘morally required’ or ‘obligatory.’ Such an action is one that you positively ought to do, that you must do, that it is your duty to do. You are to be blamed, perhaps punished, if you do not do it.
Weak: Many actions that we’d hesitate to say are wrong, and if we must choose would want to say are “right,” are nevertheless surely not right in our “strong” sense. In these cases, what we’re really saying when we say they’re right is that they are “all right,” or “okay” - morally permitted, but not required. For these you get neither praise nor blame. (In an important category of cases, such as heroism or charity, you get praise for doing them, but no blame for not doing them.)
There is a neat way to define both of these in terms of the one notion of being wrong. We can capture the strong sense by specifying that it is wrong not to do the action so called: omission is wrong. In its weak sense, however, ‘right’ means merely that the act is not wrong - neither wrong to do nor wrong not to do. Weakly right actions are up to you - you may do as you like, so far as morals are concerned.
Moral vocabularly is not easy to pin down. The word ‘right’, for instance, is also used to mean that the act is either strongly or weakly right - if an act is positively required, after all, it must at least be permitted. To complicate life still further, we sometimes employ the term ‘right’ to signify admirable actions, which are by no means morally indifferent, but which people should nevertheless be left free to decide for themselves whether to do or not. The heroic or the extraordinarily benevolent may think in their own consciences that they are “merely doing their duty,” but we certainly have no business insisting that anyone fulfil such a “duty”. Instead, we should be grateful and show our respect and admiration for those who do such things. Their actions, we might say, are the most truly “right” of all: the actions that we as people in general are most enthusiastic about.
In the following inquiries on moral issues, we will mainly be asking whether some or other kind of behaviour is wrong. If the answer is that it is not wrong, then the indicated moral rule is that people may do it or not as they please, without fear of punishment, preventive actions, or even serious criticism. For example, when some people say that suicide is right, what they mean is that it isn’t wrong. Very few people have ever supposed that suicide is generally required (though many have thought that it was on certain occasions and for certain persons). But the main question to be addressed is whether suicide is generally wrong: is there some generally operative reason why we should regard suicide as disreputable, deplorable, and to be forbidden?
If we want to know whether some act is right in the strong sense, we are asking whether there is any reason to forbid the nondoing of the action in question. Are we, for instance, to be allowed to omit to help feed the hungry? A negative answer amounts to holding that feeding the hungry is obligatory, i.e., that it is right in our strong sense.
So our apparently myopic focus on wrongness won’t deprive us of the main categories of right and wrong action. Concentrating on right and wrong, however, may well leave in the background considerations of virtue and vice, and thus of good and bad character. Nor will we be mainly concerned with moral value, or moral ideals. This calls for explanation, since I in no way mean to denigrate or deny the usefulness of those concepts.
Right and Wrong, Good and Bad Here we should take a moment to consider, though briefly, a pervasive distinction of great importance to the whole field. On the one hand, we sometimes say not that an act was right or wrong, but that it would be a good or a bad thing to do; or that it would produce good or bad results; or, quite often, that it was done from good or bad motives, that one who does or would do such things is admirable or despicable, a good person or a bad one. On the other hand, we often ask whether an act is right or wrong, as discussed in the preceding. What, then, is the connection between these two parts of the moral vocabulary - the good/bad/better/ worse part and the right/wrong/obligatory/forbidden part?
If we look at the writings of professional philosophers, one could easily get the impression that there is some kind of basic conflict between these two sets of concepts. Philosophers have long distinguished two schools of thought on moral matters. “Deontologists” are said to hold that whether an act is right or wrong is quite independent of any considerations of good and bad consequences. Others, the “teleologists” (also called “consequentialists”), are said to hold the opposite: that whether an act is right or wrong must depend on its consequences for good or bad, better or worse.
If these were indeed two “sides,” as they are so often said to be, then the choice between them would be difficult indeed, for we can easily see that both have a point. How, asks the teleologist, could there be any meaningful, sensible criticisms of conduct having nothing to do with whether we produce good or bad results? We all want to live the best life we can, to be happy rather than miserable; how can this ever be irrelevant in practical matters?
But then, deontologists can point out that whether an act is right or wrong isn’t always simply settled by seeing whether it’s good or bad in certain obvious, specifiable respects, and certainly not by seeing only whether it actually does succeed in producing certain specific good or bad consequences. The decision about an act’s morality cannot await anything so uncertain.
But this supposed general division into two camps is seriously muddled. The “teleologists” are said to hold that the way to decide whether something is right or wrong is by looking at “the consequences”. But consequences from whose point of view? To whom do they matter? The trouble is that consequentialism is characterized as if there is a single way of appraising consequences that is the same for everyone. And this simply isn’t so. People are different: what counts for one person is frequently of no interest to another. If we all had literally the same values, the same set of preferences, then we could just be “consequentialists,” no doubt; for of course each of us is concerned about results. But it is not so. I am concerned about some results, you are concerned about others, and so on.
Talk about “consequences” in moral matters suggests a high level of agreement about which ones are good and which not. To counter this, we need to appreciate that relevant agreement about consequences is not at hand if we only agree about the general descriptions of those consequences. Hunger, for instance, may be agreed to be an evil, and satisfying it a good - to those who are hungry or well-fed. Yet well-filled people in place X may have no concern at all for the very hungry people over in place Y. To have genuine agreement relevant to practice, the particular states of affairs favoured by one party must be the same ones as those favoured by the other; and moreover, they must be favoured to the same degree, so that they constitute motives sufficient to stimulate acceptance of the same actions. Real disagreement on such things is masked by semantics when it is blandly “agreed” that, say, hunger is evil. Jones and Smith may agree that the “best man should win,” but if they disagree over which man that is, or what constitutes being “best’ disagreement about who gets the prize will persist.
When we are fully aware of the point just made, then we also see that the characteristic condition of people is divergence, not agreement, concerning the merits, the goodness or badness, of particular consequences. And when we do not agree in that sense, then the question of what uniform rule all are to follow cannot even be intelligibly answered in terms of general appeals to “consequences”.
Those who think it can probably think that people who agree about generalities (like the badness of hunger), yet disagree about particulars (such as whether Ms. Brown should do anything to alleviate Mr. Black’s hunger) are thereby showing themselves to be unreasonable, or to be not looking at things from “the moral point of view”. But that is question-begging.
Consider, especially, the moral view known as utilitarianism, according to which the morally right action is the one that produces the greatest net utility or benefit for all. On this view, a given “amount” of benefit for you should count the same as a like amount for me. But quite apart from the obviously enormous difficulty of making the required measurements, it is plainly questionable whether the most rational resolution of our disagreements is one that ignores our individual differences in the way that the Utilitarian’s supposedly uniform measure does. The act that is claimed to maximize general utility may be totally awful for some people. To say that they are being unreasonable in objecting to that is absurd.
If the utilitarian says that individuals ought not to care who they are or what they want in particular, there is a large problem awaiting them. We are, after all, dealing with people, not with pure ideal types or computer-generated models of what we think people should be like. Individual people do not attach equal weight to the “equal interests” of all persons, counting themselves as just one more person along with the rest. If a philosopher comes along and tells them that they ought to do so, those individual people will ask why they ought. Whatever the answer to that, it should be realized, it can’t be a “consequentialist” one. “You should adopt utilitarianism, because if you do, that will produce more general utility!” is not going to convince anyone not already convinced of the truth of utilitarianism.
Yet each individual is, indeed, concerned about consequences: about how good or bad things would be if she or someone or everyone did this rather than that. Which consequences will be accounted “good” ones, and how good, are highly variable matters from one person to another. This helps to explain why it is not obvious that just because something is “bad,” then it is also wrong, or that if it is “good,” then it is right. Right and wrong have to do with how I should treat you, and you me; good and bad, on the other hand, have to do with how attractive various things are to someone contemplating them with a possible view to choosing among them. It is wrong for you not to pay your voluntarily-incurred debts, even though you think the uses to which the payee will put the money are bad ones. It is wrong for you to murder Smith even though you and many others think his life quite worthless. It is wrong for me to hold up a bank in order to finance a chamber music concert, even though I can hardly imagine a better use for anyone’s money. And so on. So consequentialisms have to explain to us why we should use their favoured schedule of consequences instead of ours - when these differ greatly. Adopting principles that don’t depend on spurious agreement on consequences is clearly the recommended course.
The point is still clearer when we talk not in terms of right and wrong, as such, but in terms of whether people have a right to do something. For clearly we can have a right to do something that turns out to be not very good for us, such as the right to listen to bad music - to take an example close to this writer’s heart. And clearly people can do what has good effects from quite deplorable motives. And so on. Thus, the idea that there is one view in the field called “consequentialism” by means of which right and wrong can be determined is fundamentally baseless.
Meanwhile, those philosophers who proclaim that right and wrong have nothing to do with consequences, right actions being so in virtue of their “form” as distinct from their “consequences,” face a different conceptual problem that, so far as I can see, is completely insuperable. Their view requires that the “form” of an act should be specifiable independently of any considerations of consequences, and yet plausibly relevant to morality when so specified. But reviewing any selection of perfectly obvious examples shows that this is not so. Suppose I promise you that I’ll do something. Can I keep any promise without producing any results? Or consider murder. How can Mr. A murder Mr. B without producing the consequence that Mr. B is dead? The idea of a “pure form of murder” which leaves no one actually dead is nonsense. Yet any actual murder will consist of performing some action, such as pulling a trigger or plunging a knife into a breast, such that as a consequence the victim dies. But anyone who thinks that pulling a trigger is wrong apart from its consequences has a very bizarre view of morality.⁶
In short, the alleged contrast between “deontology” and “consequentialism” is fundamentally untenable. There is a tendency for writers on ethics to classify the basic views in the field into these two camps. It should be sobering to appreciate that both views, as they are usually depicted, are fundamentally just wrong -- at least if what is wanted is to depict views about which reasonable people may differ.
Having a Right vs. Being Right
Before leaving these general discussions, it will be useful to identify one more concept that will often enough be employed in what follows: the concept of right as in ‘having a right’, the nominal rather than adjective form of the word. What is the relation between an act’s being right or wrong, on the one hand, and someone’s having or not having a right, on the other? The answer is this. When you have a right to do something, the situation is that other people thereby have duties toward you. Minimally, they have to let you do it, that is, they have a duty to refrain from preventing you from doing it: it would be wrong for them to stop you. One person’s having a right, then, means that there is something about that person such that some other person or persons would be acting wrongly were they to do certain things to or concerning the first rightholder.
Rights are always “against” some other person or persons. “Special” rights are against specific other people, such as the person you bought the new vacuum cleaner from, who now has a duty to deliver it. “General” rights are against other people generally: your right to life, for instance, requires all others to refrain from killing you.
There is substantial moral controversy, of course, about which general rights we have and why we have them. The account of morality sketched here supplies a recipe for basic answers to this question: rights are those conditions that it is in everyone’s interest that everyone should be protected in respect of. The essays themselves argue for some more specific answers.
But before we move to another subject, there is one distinction among types of rights that is too important to omit at this point; it will loom rather large in the essays to follow. This is the distinction between “negative” and “positive” rights (and duties).
Negative and Positive Rights A right, as we have seen, is essentially a ground of duties or obligations on the part of others in relation to the rightholder. Those rights that entail only duties to refrain - duties not to do something - are “negative” rights. Jones’ negative right to do x is Smith’s duty not to prevent Jones from doing x. Of course there are many things Smith might do that fall short of outright prevention, but which would nevertheless make it more difficult for Jones to do x; a precise statement of that right will have to tell us which of these are to be proscribed and which not.
In still other cases, side-effects of what Smith does, rather than the directly intended point of his action, make it difficult or impossible for Jones to do it. So when we talk of rights of this type, there is ample room for consideration of just what we are thereby proscribed from doing. All, however, have this in common: you could completely fulfil the requirements of a purely negative right by doing nothing at all. As we sleep, we refrain from killing, lying to, cheating, or assaulting everybody in the entire world. Only if some antecedent duty is established, on some other grounds, can a non-action be held to “cause” anyone’s injury: if we fall asleep at our post, of course, we are responsible for what we had previously undertaken to do or avoid.
But it is widely held that there are rights of another sort, called “positive” rights. These are rights that entail for others not just the duty to refrain from interfering or preventing, but also the duty to help, at least in the cases where the rightholder would not be able to do the thing without help. Positive duties call for action, not nonaction; in the circumstances in which they apply, they cannot be fulfilled by doing nothing. If you will die unless I act, and you have a positive right to life that holds against me, then I must act; lying down and going off to sleep won’t do. That is the defining difference between them. We shall say much more about this in relevant places, for issues about positive rights loom large in all the issues we will be considering. Moreover, it is all too easy for people to slip from one to the other.
To sum up: For someone to have a right is for certain acts of other people to be wrong. The difference between negative and positive rights is due to the difference between the kind of duties it imposes on those others: duties to refrain from interfering, in the one set of cases, or to do something to help, in the other.
Duties that ask us only to refrain leave us where we are. We may not like being where we are, and where we prefer to be might violate a negative duty; in that case, a duty to refrain is a cost to us. Duties asking us to do something, however, draw upon our resources, our repertoire of abilities, our time; thus, they impose costs in excess of whatever costs, if any, are imposed by being required to refrain. All costs require justification, from the point of view of those on whom they are imposed. It is not always easy to produce that justification. But it is much easier in the case of negative ones than positive ones. It is very obvious that the benefit one gets from not being killed by anybody, or stolen from, or injured, outweigh whatever one might gain by doing any of those things to someone else.
Values: Moral and Nonmoral We can, and very frequently do, make judgments of value that we don’t think of as moral judgments at all. Whether Suzie should get a permanent hair-do is not a moral question; nor whether we should have a picnic this afternoon, or whether I should take up the sitar. But whether people are starving or not is something we suppose to be of moral importance. We talk as though moral value is involved in the latter cases, but not in the former.
What is involved in saying that something is of moral value, then? Or are there any such things, once right and wrong are accounted for? I suggest this: moral values are things that there should be a public attitude about, namely an attitude of support (for what is good) or of disdain (for what is bad). Morality is always a matter of uniformities. A morally favorable public attitude toward x is one that there is reason from everyone’s point of view that everyone should have, rather than leaving it entirely to individual taste. What makes you happy or unhappy is up to you; but to think that happiness as such is a moral value is to think that we should all be concerned about it. Everyone should have a positive attitude toward anyone’s being happy, and a negative attitude toward their being unhappy, whatever brings about the happiness or unhappiness in question - unless, of course, that person’s happiness stems from an immoral way of life, devoted to the doing of what makes others miserable; murderers should not be happy.
Again, we will have much to say about such matters as we go along. For the present, let’s just note that whether we should have a positive attitude toward goal G is one thing, but whether we should force people to work toward G is quite another. The liberal attitude suggested earlier will in general object to using force for such purposes. If you agree that G is a good thing, then you will be thereby motivated to do something to achieve it; even so, we in general may not compel others to do it. Your values, your ideals of life, are yours, and it is for you to decide how much to do on behalf of any given value that you accept. But recognition that there is good reason for all to have favourable attitudes toward certain things, such as other people’s happiness, may evaporate when the proposal is to require that all contribute to it. If you are required to do x, then it does not matter that you don’t want to do it; if you are merely encouraged and advised to do x, the fact that you really don’t want to do it does matter, and morally decides the issue in your case.
The Issues Having made a number of distinctions and definitions that will be important throughout this book - and are important in ordinary life - we are ready to address the issues. It remains to say something about the selection and organization of these essays.
Broadly speaking, the first seven issues -- suicide, euthanasia, punishment, war, animal rights, hunger, and abortion -- are life and death issues. There is a certain logic to their arrangement. Suicide is the special case where killer and victim are the same person. In euthanasia, they aren’t the same, yet the idea is that the victim benefits from the killing, and may have requested it. Punishment and war, on the other hand, have non-voluntary victims, and this raises very different questions about their justification.
The issues of animal rights and abortion raise another fundamental issue. Both the animal and the fetus are involuntary participants: the farm animal is driven to the plow or the slaughterhouse, and the fetus is not consulted on whether an abortion should be performed. Yet both are thought by many not to be wrong, though many others hold that they are so. Those issues raise the question of just which organisms have the right to life. All? All animals? All humans? All post-fetal humans? Or what?
The hunger issue, on the other hand, poses acutely the question of the relation between killing and allowing to die. Is there only a negative right to life, entailing the duty that we not kill, or is there also a positive one, entailing that we must help feed the hungry and nurse the life-threateningly sick?
The issue of population control could involve discussions of killing, at a macabre extreme, but more normally it is about how many (and/or, perhaps, which sorts of) people are to be brought into being at all, and of who is to produce them and why. It is at the “life” end of the life-and-death spectrum. Finally, the much-discussed issue of abortion is placed at the end of the series because, as will be seen, it touches on almost all of the issues raised in the preceding essays. To have considered them first will, I hope, make the task less formidable when we get there.
Issues about sexual ethics, marriage, and the family get a sizable chapter of their own, though of course they could easily get many (and have rightly been the subjects of vast literatures.) They are not life-and-death issues, as such, but clearly a major aspect of sexual ethics concerns acts that can and characteristically do affect the production of new people, while family matters have much to do with both the size and character of the generations produced by them. However, the focus in these issues is again on life, and especially its quality, rather than death.
Issues concerning discrimination, affirmative action, censorship, and pornography are important because they shape the kind of society we will live in, and not, mainly, because of their bearing on whether anyone will live or die as a result of the principles adopted. They also raise, in very acute form, issues about the liberalism that informs this whole study.
New to this edition is a short chapter on Environmental Ethics. In part, this chapter follows up on the chapters on animal rights and abortion, for some hold that the environment itself has rights, even though it is not an organism at all. And it does concern, very greatly, the question of on what kind of grounds we may reasonably insist that others do or refrain from certain actions. Some environmental problems may be life-threatening, just as the environment in this planet is life-sustaining for us humans. But in others, what is in question is what kind of environment we want: Clean? Beautiful? In whose view?
A concluding chapter about obedience to the law is added for a similar reason that Aristotle ended his Ethics as he did: to consider the interface between morals and politics. Of course, such interfacing will have been in evidence throughout, but the question of how and why political and legal institutions are authoritative looms very large in the life of any modern individual. At the heart of this is the question of obligation to do what is legally required of us. The difference between one attitude and another on this matter can be the difference between totalitarianism and a free society.
This does not pretend to be an exhaustive study, and no book could be, for our subject, after all, ranges over most of the book of human life itself. But the issues discussed are all prominent now and undeniably important in almost any society or state of society we can readily envisage. I hope that these essays will interest you, the reader, and help to sharpen your critical faculties. I hope also that the views I have tried to support are indeed the right views. Nevertheless, what matters is the truth, and not my or your opinions. These essays will be successful insofar as they take us closer to such truth as there may be in morals. Of that, each reader must judge for himself or herself.
The Literature
The reader will find few references in these essays to specific articles and books by the thousands of others who have contributed to discussion of these subjects. There is a definite reason for that. The point of this book is to set forth my views. Detailed discussion of others would take hundreds of further pages. Moreover, if this book is read in the context of a course on moral matters - which is how it was engendered in the first place - then it will surely, and certainly ought to be, coupled with at least one among the many excellent anthologies that are widely available in this field. In any such anthology you will find a variety of essays on most or all of the topics discussed here. Getting acquainted with those is essential for a fully informed view. A few specific titles were mentioned in the Preface, a few others will be mentioned later on, and the reader will then be able to find much more. I hope that upon looking into these writings, the reader will be the more convinced of the wisdom of my own approach. But looking into them is essential in any case.
Summing Up In all of the following chapters, I append a brief summary of my results. This opening chapter, however, with its many important distinctions, defies summary. The reader will, I hope, return to it now and then to re-read the accounts in which some important distinction is made, in the light of its later application to the real-life problems with which this book is mainly concerned.