The Oxford Companion to Philosophy Part 65 pptx

There may well be room for creativity in the moral life, but with basic moral values and principles, the agent’s characteristic experience is: ‘Here I have no option: my will and judgeme

since typically we all—themselves included—knew that

they were true What then was seriously, genuinely

prob-lematic? Moore’s answer—hugely influential for most of

the twentieth century—was: the analysis of propositions.

Among English-language philosophers, at any rate, this

seemed radically to transform the philosophical agenda

We know what a given proposition means, and we know

it to be true; the question, then, is not ‘Is it true?’ or even

‘Do we know it to be true?’, but ‘What is its correct

analysis?’

The notion of *analysis was itself always controversial,

but Moore’s own most persistent pursuit of analyses dealt

with very ordinary propositions about familiar objects, for

example ‘This is a hand’ He held that the analysis of these

must always bring in the very puzzling items he called

*‘data’—the proposition is really about a

sense-datum that one has, and the problem is how in the

analy-sis the relation between sense-datum and object should be

spelled out He never believed that he had worked this out

quite satisfactorily

Also vastly influential was Moore’s work in ethics,

notably in Principia Ethica (1903) Here his insistence on

the indefinability of ‘good’ and his exposition of the

so-called *‘naturalistic fallacy’ were long regarded by

many as path-breaking advances in moral philosophy In

historical perspective, however, this work looks a good

deal less impressive and durable than his contributions in

other fields See also his Ethics (1912).

Moore’s working life was spent mainly in Cambridge,

though he taught for some years in America during the

Second World War He was a university lecturer from

1911, and Professor of Philosophy and Fellow of Trinity

College from 1925 to 1939 He was editor of the periodical

Mind from 1921 to 1947, and was appointed to the Order

*common-sense; paradox of analysis

A Ambrose and M Lazerowitz (eds.), G E Moore: Essays in

Retro-spect (London, 1970).

Thomas Baldwin, G E Moore (London, 1990).

G E Moore, Philosophical Studies (London, 1922).

—— Some Main Problems of Philosophy (London, 1953).

P A Schilpp (ed.), The Philosophy of G E Moore (Chicago, 1942).

Moore’s paradox.‘[S]uch a thing as “I went to the

pic-tures last Tuesday, but I don’t believe that I did” is a

per-fectly absurd thing to say, although what is asserted is

something perfectly possible logically’ (Moore 1959)

Per-haps I have my dates mixed up, and someone else says,

‘You went to the pictures last Tuesday, but you don’t

believe that you did’ If what is asserted here is true, why is

it an absurd thing for me to say about myself ? The task is to

give an account of the absurdity Moore’s attempt turns

on the notion of implied belief—saying or asserting p

implies believing p—and in the case above the belief

implied by the first clause conflicts with the belief asserted

in the second Hence the absurdity But what should we

make of a philosophically inclined scientist, who sincerely

says, ‘Although I believe our current theories are true, I

have good inductive grounds based on the dramatic fail-ures of past science for my belief that some of our current theories are false’? Some expressions, at least akin to Moore Paradoxical ones, are not perfectly absurd things to say, and debates about the nature of such claims continue

j.gar

G E Moore, Philosophical Papers (London, 1959).

—— ‘A Reply to My Critics’, in P A Schilpp (ed.), The Philosophy

of G E Moore (Chicago, 1942).

moral ideals: see ideals.

moralities, agent-relative: see agent-relative moralities morality, public: see enforcement of morals; public

morality; public–private distinction

morality, sexual: see sexual morality.

morality, slave: see slave morality.

morality and art: see art and morality.

morality and religion: see religion and morality morality in political philosophy.Whether morality has a role to play in political philosophy is controversial Polit-ical economists of the eighteenth century argued that the good of the collective was best achieved by encouraging agents to act in their self-interest, not by rousing their moral sentiments or their pity for the unfortunate Marx maintained that morality is a figment of the imagination, though his political theory is arguably influenced by moral values Gauthier’s conception of the ideal market as a

‘morally free zone’ that is a model of social justice reflects the conviction that at least some sectors of political phil-osophy can be given non-moral foundations and that the notions of virtue and self-sacrifice that are central to the concept of morality can be expunged from the theory of just distributions Yet the claim that agents are entitled to retain or exchange all resources they have extracted from the human or non-human environment through the

mar-ket and need not bestow them gratis on other claimants is

itself morally controversial

Many pressing issues in political philosophy, including socio-economic inequality, racism and sexism, conscrip-tion and war, punishment, rights of self-determinaconscrip-tion, and free speech appear to have an ineliminable moral dimension They raise the question how much security,

utility, or liberty A should be called upon sacrifice in order

to improve B’s lot, when A and B are differently situated, and what motives should induce A to make any sacrifice

whatsoever Socio-economic inequality is implausibly treated as requiring a bargaining solution in the form of a

deal struck between wealthy A and poor B For B’s best option from amongst those A is prepared to offer or

threaten may be an improvement relative to his current

level, but not just, and all B’s offers except the status quo

620 Moore, G E.

may be unacceptable to A The postulate that A should be

prepared to accept his own offer, were he B, changes

noth-ing Justice is a feature of the offer or threat we observers

will judge that A ought to make and B to accept, given the

respective positions of A and B. cath.w

David Gauthier, Morals by Agreement (Oxford, 1986).

moral judgement Is *‘judgement’ the most appropriate

word for what properly terminates moral deliberation? Or

are we seeking, when we reflect on a morally perplexing

situation, rather to elicit and stabilize some response of

feeling, whether of attraction or repulsion? Or again, do

we (more accurately) decide on our moral stance—in a

personally inventive or even creative way, much as a

painter decides after thought to add a highlight here or to

deepen a shadow there, where there is no pre-existing

reality to guide or constrict him?

Against the ultimacy of feelings and *emotions, it may

be argued that our feelings themselves are properly

sub-ject to moral judgement: even love needs to be

moni-tored, as it may take selfish and corrupt forms

There may well be room for creativity in the moral life,

but with basic moral values and principles, the agent’s

characteristic experience is: ‘Here I have no option: my

will and judgement are constrained’ I cannot decide that

a life dedicated, say, to the expression of sadistic impulses

is a morally fine life It is not up to me Even my rebellion

against a particular moral code or principle or practice will

be fuelled by a commitment to values to which there seem

to be no alternatives—I grasp these as ( judge them to be)

basic or ultimate Early and immature anticipations of

moral judgement may be nothing more than unreflective

responses of feeling learned in early childhood Somewhat

later, the pressures of peer group and ‘society’ may

mod-ify these—but still as external pressures to conform

Cru-cial for moral maturity, however, is the possibility of

distancing oneself from all pressures from without,

reflec-tively and critically sifting the evaluations of others,

endorsing some and rejecting others, forming a ranking of

one’s own Not, however, wilfully and idiosyncratically;

rather with the sense of clarifying, ‘tuning’, or ‘focusing’

more accurately on moral values, principles, goals that are

not of one’s own contriving For all this activity of

dis-crimination—without which there can be no moral

growth, moral reform, necessary dissidence—the

vocabu-lary of ‘judgement’, with its cognitive and rational

conno-tations, is more appropriate by far than its rivals

What are the proper objects of moral judgement?—the

particular acts of responsible agents, their general policies,

their traits of character: but these considered in a special

(moral) context or from a special point of view

Under-standing these is a major task of normative ethical theory

However humanly complex and specific the situation in

which I have to act, to reach a distinctively moral

judge-ment on how I *ought to act is to introduce an impersonal

note It is to ask what universal rules or principles bear

upon my situation, and what are their relative urgencies?

Does a strong requirement of *justice or fairness take

precedence, for instance, over all other, even benevolent, actions? Am I considering the interests of everyone involved, not self-deceivingly masking, giving privilege

to, my personal inclinations?

For a serious and convincing moral judgement, there are both formal and substantive requirements to be met The readiness to universalize, the impersonal note: but also deference to basic human values that alone can make these procedures and attitudes intelligible, and a concern with the regulation of life that furthers their realization and enjoyment

In some moral contexts, ‘judgement’ refers not to an epistemological act, but rather to the quality possessed by someone with a particular sensitivity to complex moral situations, where no rule of thumb, no simple appeal to a single principle, can ensure a rational outcome A case in which none of the conflicting factors loses its serious claim

to compliant action calls upon, not arbitrary decision, but fine or ‘nice’ moral judgement r.w.h

*good; right; right action; moral philosophy, histories of; moral philosophy, problems of

J Finnis, Fundamentals of Ethics (Oxford, 1983).

J McDowell, ‘Are Moral Requirements Hypothetical

Impera-tives?’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, supp vol (1978)

and later articles on moral philosophy

moral knowledge presupposes that there are moral truths accessible to us It is often said that the opposing view that moral judgements are devoid of truth-value does not do justice to our conviction that having true moral beliefs matters in a way that having certain, e.g aes-thetic, preferences does not

It is not easy, however, to make sense of the hypothesis that there are reliable methods for acquiring moral know-ledge Clear and distinct perception of wrong-making fea-tures in actions by a competent moral observer might be proposed as the criterion of their truth Thus I might be supposed to know that torturing cats is morally wrong on the grounds that when I observe or merely think about the action of torturing cats I perceive immediately its wrong-ness However, my claim to be a competent observer is established by my delivering judgements taken by others

to be correct If moral perception is as uniform across the species as colour perception, and if incompetent observers can be identified by ingenious tests, we might accept this account of moral knowledge If there are no such con-venient tests, it will be impossible to obtain moral know-ledge in controversial matters, since claims to perceive wrong-making features in e.g wearing leather shoes leave the competence of the perceiver an open question Another approach to the problem of moral knowledge, more appropriate to the settling of controversial moral questions, involves supposing that the provision of new evidence and argument has the effect of reinforcing or transforming beliefs about how morally good and bad agents behave If the evidence supplied consists of true propositions, and if the arguments employed are valid, the resulting moral beliefs should count as moral knowledge,

moral knowledge 621

provided they are sufficient to decide the question This

account lends itself to an interpretation of how we came

to know that slavery was wrong when this was formerly a

controversial proposition However, it is unclear that

apprehension of this allegedly previously unknown fact

can be distinguished from the formation of a new

prefer-ence, formally analogous to an aesthetic preferprefer-ence, for

abolishing slavery Whether widely shared preferences

acquired in this manner should be termed ‘knowledge’

John McDowell, Mind, Value and Reality (Cambridge, Mass.,

1998)

moral law Most generally, the idea of the moral law is the

idea of that set of standards or principles, cast in the form

of ‘Thou shalts’ or ‘Thou shalt nots’, which set down how

one should behave morally The Ten Commandments

provide the classic model for what moral laws will be like

More specifically, the notion of the moral law is central to

Kant’s moral philosophy He argues that moral

require-ments have the form of *categorical imperatives which

prescribe what is to be done regardless of what one may

want He then proposes that the (singular) moral law is a

test by which to determine whether or not we should do

what we intend It states that we should act only on those

maxims (rules of action) which we can will to be a

univer-sal law for all agents Both Hume and Schopenhauer think

it is a fundamental mistake to conceive of morality as a

*right action

I Kant’s The Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals should be read

on this topic

moral luck. Phenomenon that, supposedly, challenges

traditional ideas about moral assessment For Kant and

others, moral judgement ought not (unfairly) to depend

on factors not under the agent’s control Reflection on our

actual judgements, however, reveals their widespread

determination by various kind of luck A driver who

neglects to check his brakes is guilty, if no harm ensues, of

mere negligence But if (through bad luck) the driver kills

a child in his path, he is judged (and judges himself ) more

harshly, even though his input is the same s.d.r

Thomas Nagel, ‘Moral Luck’, reprinted in his Mortal Questions

(Cambridge, 1979)

Bernard Williams, ‘Moral Luck’ reprinted in his Moral Luck

(Cam-bridge, 1981)

moral motivation.Motivation to do what one (believes

one) morally ought to do or what one (believes one) has

moral reasons to do A central topic of debate is whether

moral motivation differs from other kinds of motivation

only in its subject-matter or in a deeper way Some

philosophers maintain that, necessarily, anyone who

believes that she herself morally ought to help Joe has

motivation to help him, even though they would deny

that the same is true of people who believe that they

legally ought to help Joe Other philosophers argue that

the former claim is true of rational agents, even though they would reject a parallel claim about rational agents who believe that they legally ought to help Joe There are also philosophers who reject both claims about moral motivation and argue that such motivation is on a par

M Smith, The Moral Problem (Oxford, 1994).

moral particularism.The particularist holds that the pos-sibility of moral thought and judgement in no way depends on an adequate supply of moral principles or gen-eral rules Moral judgement is primarily concerned with the particular case Experience can help us discover moral generalities, such as that it is normally or standardly wrong to lie Such generalities are as important in moral-ity as elsewhere But they can serve only as rules of thumb; the moral aspects of a particular situation are not con-structed out of relations between its non-moral features and relevant principles Particularists tend to base their view on the claim that what is a moral reason in one case may be an opposite reason, or no reason at all, in another—a sort of moral reasons-holism They argue for this either by appeal to examples, or by trying to show that

this sort of holism is true of all reasons, and a fortiori of

B W Hooker and M Little (eds.), Moral Particularism (Oxford,

2000)

moral philosophy, histories of: see histories of moral

philosophy

moral philosophy, history of

Greek Ethics Ethical thought, in the sense of the attempt

to formulate codes and principles of moral behaviour, has always been a necessary feature of human cultures, but moral philosophy in the more precise sense can be said to begin with the *Sophists of the Greek world in the fifth centurybc They were the first thinkers we know to have raised critical questions about the very idea of moral con-duct, about what morality is and why it should exist Their teaching of rhetoric and of techniques of persuasion invited the charge that such techniques could be used to make wrong more persuasive than right, and would enable people to flout moral standards with impunity The more conservative Sophists such as Protagoras defended the idea of moral codes as useful human cre-ations, sets of customs and conventions which make social life possible, and were thus committed to a form of ethical relativism and to the denial of any universal code of moral-ity or any absolute moral truth The more radical of their followers, such as the perhaps fictional Callicles and Thrasymachus portrayed in Plato’s dialogues, concluded that, since traditional moral standards are mere conven-tions, they have no binding force, and the rational way to live is therefore to pursue one’s own interests and power, acting unjustly if one can get away with it These challenges to traditional moral codes thus raised the

622 moral knowledge

fundamental question ‘Why be moral?’ The moral

philosophies of Plato and Aristotle can be seen as

system-atic attempts to answer that question

Plato’s early dialogues, which probably reflect the

activity of the historical Socrates, portray him searching

for definitions of the traditional *virtues—temperance,

courage, justice, piety The theme which emerges is that if

these are good qualities, this must be because they make

for a good life for those who possess them, and underlying

all the virtues must therefore be the ability to know what

constitutes the human good Plato’s own positive attempt

to answer that question obtains its classic formulation in

the Republic There Plato argues that the good life consists

in the harmony of the soul, with each part of the soul—

reason, spirit, and appetite—performing its proper

func-tion The traditional virtues can then all be defined as

aspects of this underlying condition of psychic harmony

Since such a condition is one in which the person is happy

and flourishing, the morally good life lived in accordance

with the virtues is thereby shown to be the best life for

human beings This is Plato’s answer to the question

‘Why should I be moral?’

Although there are important differences between the

moral philosophies of Plato and Aristotle, the latter

employs the same broad framework In the Nicomachean

Ethics (generally regarded as the definitive version of his

lectures on ethics), Aristotle asserts that the ultimate end

of all human action is *happiness (*eudaimonia) To know

what this happiness or flourishing consists in, Aristotle

suggests that we must identify the distinctive function of

human beings, and this he takes to be activity in

accord-ance with reason This then provides the basis for a

gen-eral account of the moral virtues; they are dispositions in

which our feelings and emotions are guided by reason so

that our behaviour is appropriate to the situation In

par-ticular the guidance of reason requires the avoidance of

excess or deficiency, and therefore each virtue is, in

Aris-totle’s famous phrase, a *‘mean’ between these extremes

The later Greek schools shared this same broad ethical

framework, the concern with the relation between the

virtues and happiness, but we should note two ideas

intro-duced by the *Epicureans and the *Stoics which were to

play important roles in the philosophical tradition

Epi-curean ethics was a form of *hedonism, identifying the

good with *pleasure Plato appears, at least in his Protagoras,

to have given hedonism serious consideration, though

later decisively rejecting it, and some of Plato’s pupils

explicitly defended hedonism, but the doctrine finds its

classic formulation with the Epicureans For this reason

the word ‘epicurean’ has become a label for the pursuit of

sensuous pleasures, but unjustly so, for the pleasure which

they advocated was principally that of mental tranquillity,

to be achieved by banishing superstitious fears of the gods

and the afterlife The influential concept introduced by

the Stoics was that of the good life as one lived ‘in

accord-ance with nature’ or ‘the natural law’ Such an idea had

been to some extent implicit in the ethics of Plato and

Aristotle, and the Stoics followed them in equating the

idea of living ‘according to nature’ with that of acting in accordance with reason Since for the Stoics this meant especially rendering oneself immune to the disturbances

of the emotions, their ideal was in practice akin to the mental tranquillity of the Epicureans The concept of

*‘natural law’ can, however, lend itself to a variety of inter-pretations, and was subsequently to do so

Christian Ethics Popular conceptions of morality often

assume some kind of link between morality and religion, equating moral precepts with divine commands Although both Plato and Aristotle were theists, their ethics is not a religious ethics and their god is not a divine lawgiver; at most he is an exemplar of the ideal life The moral philosophy of medieval Christendom, however, involved an attempt to marry Christian morality to Greek philosophy, and the most influential version of this enter-prise was that of Thomas Aquinas Aristotle had talked of

a human ‘function’, but had made no use of the idea that this function might be seen as a purpose with which human beings are endowed by a divine creator Such was the idea which enabled Aquinas to effect the synthesis he needed From an understanding of human nature we can identify the natural purposes proper to human beings, and

to fulfil these purposes is to follow ‘natural law’ Since this natural law reflects our participation in the eternal law by which the universe is governed, it is exhibited also in the divine law laid down for us by the divine creator, and the moral precepts of natural law will therefore coincide with the moral rules revealed by the Christian religion

It is doubtful whether this synthesis can be a stable one Any attempt to identify moral principles with divine com-mands must run up against a dilemma first formulated in

Plato’s Euthyphro Is the good good because God

com-mands it, or does God command it because it is good? If the former, then morality is the product of arbitrary will, and obedience to morality is mere obedience to authority

If the latter, then morality is independent of God’s will, and knowledge of the divine will is at best redundant Aquinas’s synthesis is therefore liable to collapse in one of two directions If we maintain that morality is to be found

in the commands of God revealed in a particular organ-ized religion, these commands will have to be taken on trust and moral philosophy will have no role to play Alter-natively, if philosophical understanding can lead to the formulation of moral theory, religious belief will play no distinctive part in this process The second alternative is the one adopted by moral philosophy in the modern epoch; the mainstream tradition has been essentially a secular one

Ethical Naturalism A moral philosophy which looks to

‘nature’ as the foundation for moral beliefs, independently

of any religious framework, is most likely to appeal to the facts of human psychology The tradition often referred to

as that of the ‘British Moralists’ in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is a prime example of this way of doing moral philosophy Two questions dominate the tradition: the question whether morality is ultimately

moral philosophy, history of 623

grounded in *‘self-love’ or *‘benevolence’, and the

ques-tion whether moral judgements are the product of

*‘rea-son’ or ‘sentiment’

The first question is posed sharply by Hobbes, whose

egoistic view of human nature and morality is the

contro-versial stimulus for the work of his successors in much the

same way as the Sophists were for Plato and Aristotle

Hobbes is usually thought of as a political philosopher

rather than a moral philosopher, and that is essentially the

point: morality, for him, can have no authority over our

behaviour unless backed by political authority All human

passions are manifestations of the desire for good for

one-self In a *state of nature, men’s desire for happiness brings

them into conflict with one another, their lives are

gov-erned by a ‘perpetual and restless desire of power after

power’, and their condition is therefore one of ‘a war of

every man against every man’ It is in everyone’s interest

to escape from this condition of war Hobbes uses the

vocabulary of natural law to express this requirement of

self-interest; it is the fundamental law of nature ‘that every

man ought to endeavour peace’ This law of nature is not

yet, however, a moral law, since in a state of nature the

ideas of right and wrong, justice and injustice, have no

meaning A law of nature is merely a rule of reason

direct-ing one to the effective means of self-preservation This

law dictates that men should contract with one another to

restrict their liberty for the sake of peace, provided others

do likewise Hobbes’s egoistic theory entails, however,

that in a state of nature there can be no moral obligation to

abide by such a *contract Men therefore have to establish

a sovereign who will enforce the contract, for ‘covenants

without the sword are but words’ Thus the constraints of

morality, though they are in everyone’s interests, are

binding only in so far as they are backed by political

authority

Attempts to answer Hobbes took two forms One was

the ‘rationalist’ response: that our reason acquaints us

with moral duties which are, in some sense, part of the

natural order of the universe, and which are independent

both of the divine will and of any social contract or

polit-ical authority Samuel Clarke, for instance, claims it to be

a requirement of reason that we should ‘deal with every

man as in like circumstances we could reasonably expect

he should deal with us’, and that we should ‘endeavour, by

an universal benevolence, to promote the welfare and

happiness of all men’ This ‘rule of righteousness’ is part of

our knowledge of the natural relations and ‘fitnesses’ of

things Our certainty of its truth is comparable to our

cer-tainty of the truths of mathematics Similar claims about

the capacity of reason to apprehend moral truths were

made by Ralph Cudworth, John Balguy, and Richard

Price

The other response to Hobbes was to question his view

of human nature and of human passions and affections

Shaftesbury asserts that human beings have not only an

‘affection towards private good’ but also a natural

‘affec-tion towards public good’, though these are not in

oppos-ition to one another since virtue, grounded in the social

affections, is to the advantage of everyone Hutcheson claims that the moral virtues all flow from our feelings of benevolence towards others, and that there is no need to trace them back to self-love Butler argues that the egoistic view of *human nature is in any case incoherent Self-love

is the desire for our own happiness, but this, he says, we can experience only through the satisfaction of our ‘par-ticular passions’ for external things Therefore self-love cannot possibly be the only passion It presupposes and is consistent with the ‘particular passions’, and there is no reason why these should not include also benevolence, an affection to the good of our fellow creatures

With such anti-Hobbesian views of human nature goes also a view of the basis of moral judgements If human beings are naturally benevolent, then it can be similarly supposed that they have a natural liking for virtue, which Shaftesbury calls a ‘sense of right and wrong’ akin to our natural sense of the sublime and beautiful, and which Hutcheson calls a ‘moral sense’ Though they regard this capacity to perceive moral qualities of good and evil

as unique to rational beings, their description of it as a

‘sense’ implies something different from the rationalists’ apprehension of moral truths, and more akin to sense-perception

The high point in the tradition of the British Moralists is generally acknowledged to be the moral philosophy of Hume A key concept for Hume is that of *‘sympathy’, which he also calls ‘humanity’ and ‘fellow-feeling’ By this

he means our capacity to share other people’s feelings of happiness and misery Hume rejects the ‘self-love’ hypothesis; though sympathy may often lack the strength

to have a decisive influence on our conduct, all human beings are to some extent moved by it It is through the operation of sympathy that we regard as ‘virtues’ those qualities which are useful or agreeable to their possessor (such as ‘courage’ and ‘industry’) and those qualities which are useful or agreeable to others (such as ‘benevo-lence’, ‘justice’, and ‘fidelity’) In the last analysis, there-fore, our moral judgements stem from this sentiment rather than from reason Reason is necessary to instruct us

in the consequences of actions, but when all such facts are known, some feeling or sentiment is necessary to lead us

to a judgement of approbation or disapprobation Reason

by itself, says Hume, is no motive to action, but it is in the nature of our moral principles that they should guide our actions Hence, though reason has a part to play, sentiment must be decisive in the forming of moral conclusions

Utilitarianism Hume stressed the utility of the virtues.

Hutcheson suggested that, since benevolence is the foun-dation of all moral virtue, ‘that action is best which pro-cures the greatest happiness for the greatest numbers’ These phrases went to the making of the moral theory which was the most important successor to the work of the British Moralists—the theory of *utilitarianism Though it builds on much previous thought, the first clas-sic formulation of modern utilitarianism is the work of

624 moral philosophy, history of

Jeremy Bentham The ‘principle of utility’ is, according to

Bentham, the test of all morals and legislation Actions are

right or wrong to the extent that they tend to increase or

diminish the general happiness

The attraction of utilitarianism is its apparent

simpli-city It purports to provide a succinct criterion to settle all

moral disputes Its weakness is that it seems over-simple

Bentham’s version is certainly pretty crude He suggests

(as Hutcheson had done) that one can quantify the

amounts of pleasure or pain to be produced by any action,

and by a process of addition and subtraction one can then

determine which action ought to be performed The

gen-eral happiness is thus envisaged as a sum of *pleasures,

minus the pains, and these pleasures and pains differ from

one another only in quantitative respects such as their

duration and intensity Critics of utilitarianism were not

slow to point out how limited a view of the good life this

appeared to be The most influential attempt to produce a

more plausible version of the theory was that of John

Stuart Mill He allowed that pleasures may differ from one

another not only in quantity but also in quality The

pleas-ures of the intellect, of the feelings, and the imagination

are what Mill calls the ‘higher pleasures’, and a good

human life is one in which such pleasures are

predo-minant It is debatable whether Mill can consistently

maintain this within a utilitarian context, for if pleasure is

itself the only criterion of value, it is not clear how one

pleasure can be better than another, other than by being

greater in quantity Nevertheless, utilitarianism as refined

by Mill and by others such as Henry Sidgwick has

occupied a dominant place in the moral philosophy of the

nineteenth and twentieth centuries

Kant and Post-Kantian Ethics In stark contrast to utilitarian

ethics is the moral philosophy of Kant The only thing

which is good without qualification is, according to Kant,

‘the good will’, which is good not because of the effects

which it produces in the world, not because of its utility,

but simply in its character as will It is the motivation to

perform one’s *duty simply for its own sake Since duty

gets its distinctive character from its contrast with our

nat-ural inclinations, including both our desire for our own

happiness and our benevolent inclinations towards

others, no understanding of these natural inclinations can

contribute to our understanding of morality, and Kant’s

ethics therefore stands opposed not only to utilitarianism

but to ethical naturalism in general Kant nevertheless

thinks that reason, without any reference to the

inclin-ations, can determine the form of our moral duty Since

the requirement of duty is that of acting in accordance

with the *moral law, and since this moral law cannot get

its content from any consideration of desirable

conse-quences, there remains simply the formal requirement

that one’s actions should conform to the idea of moral law

as such One must therefore act in such a way that one can

will the maxim of one’s action to be a universal law This

requirement is what Kant calls the *‘categorical

impera-tive’ From such exiguous resources Kant nevertheless

thinks that we can arrive at concrete judgements about the morality of particular actions It would, for instance,

be wrong to make a false promise, one which I do not intend to keep, for if it were a universal law that people made false promises, promises would themselves become impossible, and this is therefore not something which I can consistently will

Kant offers also a second formulation of the categorical imperative This uses in a different way the idea of the uni-versality of reason which is shared by all moral agents Morality requires that I should respect this capacity for rational agency, and therefore that I should treat all per-sons never merely as means to an end but always also as ends in themselves This idea of ‘respect for persons’ may again conflict with utilitarian morality Utilitarianism can set no absolute limit to the evils which I might, in certain circumstances, be justified in inflicting on others, pro-vided that the overall sum of human happiness is maxi-mized by my so doing In contrast, ‘respect for persons’ implies that I may not use others simply as instruments for however worthy an aim It thus reflects the common idea that morality imposes certain constraints on the permis-sible treatment of others, that all human beings have certain basic moral rights which may not be overridden, and it is this dimension of Kantian ethics which has perhaps been the most influential

Within this section we may notice briefly three nine-teenth-century philosophers who have in common only their reaction against Kantian ethics Schopenhauer rejects Kant’s separation of morality from natural human feelings of compassion This can be seen as a reversion to the British Moralists’ emphasis on natural benevolence, but in Schopenhauer’s case it is linked with an ambitious metaphysical thesis: that the ‘principle of individuation’ is

an illusion, that the essential being of all persons is literally one and the same, and that our moral concern for the suf-fering of others is a recognition of this

Hegel reacts against what he sees as the empty formal-ism of Kant’s categorical imperative, particularly in its first version Any maxim can in itself, according to Hegel, be willed as a universal law If our willing it generates a con-tradiction, this must be because it contradicts some moral content which is already presupposed Where does this content come from? According to Hegel, from the institu-tions and practices of society What prevents us from will-ing the makwill-ing of false promises as a universal law, for instance, is the social institution of promising which is already presupposed by the moral dilemma More gener-ally, the substantial content of our moral lives is drawn from ‘ethical life’, from the ethical institutions of the fam-ily, civil society, and the state Ethics is essentially a social phenomenon

That conclusion is one with which Nietzsche could agree Where Hegel, however, sees different historical societies as stages in the evolving self-consciousness of reason, Nietzsche has no such unifying conception For him, therefore, there is no such thing as morality, there are only different moralities He is particularly

moral philosophy, history of 625

preoccupied with the opposition between two types of

morality, ‘master morality’ (in which ideas of nobility,

courage, and honesty have a central place) and *‘slave

morality’ (which he tends to identify with Christian

morality and ideas of duty and self-sacrifice) Nietzsche

appears to oscillate between seeing any distinctive

moral-ity as an achievement of human creativmoral-ity, and

denigrat-ing slave morality as the psychological veneer of

concealed resentment and vindictiveness

Twentieth-Century Ethics For much of the century,

philosophers within the English-language tradition have

been preoccupied with questions of *meta-ethics The

tone was set by G E Moore’s book Principia Ethica of

1903 Moore espoused a normative theory akin to

utilitar-ianism, but much more influential was his criticism of

what he called the *‘naturalistic fallacy’—the fallacy of

identifying the simple and unanalysable property ‘good’

with some ‘natural’ property According to Moore, no

argument can be offered to show that something is good

as an end in itself We cannot, for instance, argue, as

Moore thinks that the classical Utilitarians were guilty of

arguing, that pleasure is good because that is part of the

meaning of the word ‘good’ It may be true that pleasure is

good, but it is not true by definition, and this we can see,

Moore thinks, when we recognize that any question of the

form ‘Is pleasure good?’ is always an *open question

Moore’s rejection of naturalism as fallacious seems to rule

out any attempt to base ethics on an understanding of

human nature or human psychology No facts about

fea-tures of human existence, nor indeed any metaphysical

facts about the nature of reality, can entail any conclusion

about what is good Moore himself thinks that, once the

question is properly understood, people can recognize

that the most important things which are good in

them-selves are the pleasures of human intercourse and the

enjoyment of beautiful objects No argument, however,

can be provided in support of these truths They are

sim-ply self-evident

Other philosophers, however, took issue with the very

idea of moral truths which are ‘self-evident’ or can be

known ‘intuitively’ If such supposed truths cannot be

supported by any argument, then, it was suggested, they

cannot be called ‘truths’ at all, they are merely expressions

of personal feeling Bertrand Russell, for instance, who

had at one time accepted Moore’s theory, subsequently

came to reject it and to maintain instead that if two people

disagree over whether, say, the enjoyment of beautiful

objects is good in itself, and if neither can offer any

argu-ment, then they are not disagreeing about facts which can

be true or false, but simply expressing their differing

feel-ings and desires

The suggestion that, strictly speaking, there are no

moral facts was developed further within the context of

*Logical Positivism If, as philosophers such as A J Ayer

maintained, the only meaningful statements are either

empirically verifiable propositions or analytic truths,

value-judgements do not fall into either category and are

therefore not meaningful statements at all; they are merely expressions of feelings and emotions A more accommodating version of this *emotive theory of ethics was formulated by Charles Stevenson, who maintained not that moral utterances are meaningless but that they have a distinctive kind of meaning, *‘emotive meaning’,

to be distinguished from descriptive meaning The emo-tive meaning of ethical terms consists in their lending themselves to use, not only to express the speaker’s own feelings, but also to arouse or affect the feelings and atti-tudes of others Moral discourse is thus seen by Stevenson

as a kind of behaviour modification

Critics retorted that this account of moral discourse made it indistinguishable from emotionally manipulative practices such as advertising and propaganda What many philosophers retained, however, was the idea that there is

a distinction between ‘prescriptive’ and ‘descriptive’ meaning, and that the distinctive feature of moral terms is their prescriptive meaning, their use to guide actions and tell people what to do ‘Values’, it was suggested, must not

be confused with ‘facts’ Much writing of the 1950s and 1960s was concerned with meta-ethical questions about the validity of the *‘fact–value distinction’, the relation between *‘is’ and ‘ought’, and whether ‘is’ statements can ever logically entail an ‘ought’ conclusion

More recently there has been a revival of interest in sub-stantive moral theory Utilitarianism was the first of the traditional normative theories to be resurrected R M Hare, for instance, argued that moral terms are not only

‘prescriptive’ but also ‘universalizable’, and that when properly understood the *universalizability of moral lan-guage commits us to some form of utilitarianism The revival of utilitarian thinking has been particularly appar-ent in work on *applied ethics

Other normative theories which were current in the 1970s and 1980s can usefully be seen as responses to the perceived shortcomings of utilitarianism One principal criticism of it has been that it is an aggregative theory It allows the interests of some to be outweighed by the inests of others, and can therefore justify the infliction of ter-rible atrocities on some persons for the sake of the greater good What this shows, it has been said, is that utilitarian-ism, by aggregating interests into a single ‘general good’, fails to recognize the separateness of individuals Two forms of ethical theory which have aspired to incorporate that recognition have been ‘contractarian’ theories and

‘rights-based’ theories Contractarianism came to the fore

in political philosophy with John Rawls’s theory of *just-ice The idea of basing principles of justice on a hypothet-ical *contract is that, if they are principles which everyone can agree to, then no one’s basic interests will be sacrificed

to anyone else’s Contractarian attempts to develop a gen-eral moral theory include those of Russell Grice and David Gauthier Gauthier’s theory is very much in the spirit of Hobbes as an attempt to show how morality can be gen-erated by agreement between self-interested individuals Basing morality on rights has likewise been seen as a way

of building in the requirement that no one’s basic interests

626 moral philosophy, history of

should be sacrificed The focus on rights, like

contract-arianism, first emerged in political philosophy, and the

work of Robert Nozick and that of Ronald Dworkin have,

in contrasting ways, emphasized the importance of *rights

as a counter to utilitarian social theory Alan Gewirth and

John Mackie are among those who have proposed a

com-prehensive moral theory based on the concept of rights

Other critics of utilitarianism have argued that by

focus-ing exclusively on outcomes it gives insufficient

import-ance to the significimport-ance of moral agency A more

‘agent-centred’ approach can be found, for instance, in the

work of Bernard Williams He suggests that a person’s

moral identity is constituted by his or her ‘ground

pro-jects’ and ‘commitments’ and that utilitarianism, in so far

as it would require one to abandon these whenever the

actions of others so order the consequences as to make it

necessary, can give no adequate account of concepts such

as ‘moral integrity’ Another approach which can be called

‘agent-centred’ is the work of Philippa Foot and others

which refocuses attention on the *virtues Whereas

utili-tarianism assesses actions by their production of good

consequences, virtue ethics aims rather to identify those

ways of acting which go to make up a good human life

Foot, indeed, has argued that the idea of ‘the best state of

affairs’, which is supposed to serve as the utilitarian

criter-ion of right actcriter-ion, does not as it stands have any clear

sense

Contemporary virtue ethics traces its ancestry to

Aris-totle, and rights-based theories look to Kant Considering

also the continuing vitality of utilitarianism, and of

con-tractarian ethics in the Hobbesian mode, we may fairly

conclude that the main ethical traditions of previous

centuries are still, in one incarnation or another, alive

*histories of moral philosophy; moral philosophy,

problems of; consequentialism; deontological ethics;

applied ethics; intuitionism, ethical

W D Hudson (ed.), New Studies in Ethics, 2 vols (London, 1974).

Alasdair MacIntyre, A Short History of Ethics (London, 1967).

J B Schneewind, The Invention of Autonomy: A History of Modern

Moral Philosophy (Cambridge, 1998).

—— (ed.), Moral Philosophy from Montaigne to Kant: An Anthology

(Cambridge, 1990)

Henry Sidgwick, Outlines of the History of Ethics (first pub 1886;

6th edn 1931)

moral philosophy, problems of If we include in moral

philosophy the entire history of ethics going back all the

way (at least) to Socrates, the topic of right and wrong

action is perhaps the most important single issue in the

dis-cipline Although in the present century scepticism about

the possibility of moral truth or objectivity has led

philoso-phers to pay attention to semantical issues in ethics, to

questions about the meaning of terms like ‘right’, ‘wrong’,

and ‘obligatory’, most ethicists have been and still are

interested in offering, debating, and criticizing substantive

conceptions of moral rightness and wrongness Perhaps

the major problem of current and traditional moral

philosophy, then, is coming up with a rationally defensible theory of right and wrong action Such a theory would presumably ground or defend certain principles of right action (or, as with Aristotle, show us why rightness cannot

be captured by general principles and must be perceived situationally)

The current scene in moral philosophy is dominated by five basic views or theories of right and wrong action (Here I exclude approaches that are principally concerned with the political sphere.) Utilitarians (or at least ‘act-utilitarians’, who represent, I think, a current majority among all utilitarians) hold that *right action must be understood in terms of human good or well-being The latter is conceived hedonistically in terms of pleasure, desire-satisfaction, or, more broadly, happiness, and right action is then said to be action that leads, or is likely to lead, to the greatest balance of human (or sentient) pleas-ure or happiness over pain or unhappiness (This is one version of the so-called *principle of utility.) Such a purely instrumental or consequentialistic conception of morality and also virtue—in effect, any means can be justified by a good enough end—has always been controversial, but in fact one of the biggest problems now facing *utilitarianism

is to defend itself against less monolithic forms of *conse-quentialism that are willing to accommodate intrinsic human goods other than pleasure or desire-satisfaction and to acknowledge considerations of equality and fair-ness and even of natural beauty and diversity that go con-siderably beyond the purely quantitative utilitarian approach A consequentialist can say, for example, that (a fair degree of ) equality in happiness or income is itself a good that should be taken into account in seeking to act for the best, and on such a view and contrary to act-utilitarianism an act might produce more pleasure on balance than any alternative but be wrong because of how unequally it caused the pleasure to be distributed

By contrast with the utilitarian emphasis on human desire-satisfaction, *Kantianism argues that morality must

be understood independently of all empirical or sensuous motives For Kant and many contemporary Kantians, moral rightness in behaviour is a matter of acting consist-ently and rationally, and a major challenge and burden of Kantianism has been to show how ordinary immoralities like promise-breaking, stealing, and indifference to the welfare of others can be fundamentally understood as forms of conative or practical inconsistency Formula-tions of the *‘categorical imperative’ in terms of one or another form of inconsistency (or in terms of the idea that people should never be used simply as means) have typ-ically ruled out too little or too much as morally wrong

Or else they have been unacceptably vague in their implications However, present-day Kantians are actively engaged in trying to make good on these deficiencies

A third approach to right and wrong, intuitionism or common-sensism, insists, against both Kant and utilitar-ianism, that there can be no unified or unifying account of our moral obligations; these, it claims, are irreducibly plural, and the only general moral principles it is willing to

moral philosophy, problems of 627

john rawls’s A Theory of Justice galvanized political

phi-losophy in the early 1970s: it was a careful elaboration of an

original approach to the eternal problem of

accommo-dating egalitarianism and liberalism

alasdair macintyre’s distinctive and often polemical approach to moral enquiry insists on the historical dimen-tion of ethics

saul a kripke published innovations in logic in his teens,

but later became reluctant to commit his ideas to print In

his published lectures on Naming and Necessity he examined

standard theories of reference and pulled back the curtain to

reveal a metaphysics of modality and necessity

daniel c dennett has been one of the leading figures in the project of fertilizing the philosophy of mind with the findings of the sciences of the mind After arguing for a scientific explanation of consciousness, he looked to evo-lution, ‘Darwin’s dangerous idea’, for the explanation of humanity’s place in the natural universe

recent american philosophy (2)

recognize are prima-facie principles (it is prima-facie

wrong to harm another person, it is prima-facie wrong to

break a promise, etc.) that are individually defeasible and

cannot be ranked in any absolute order of precedence

But, unlike Kantianism, intuitionism doesn’t even

attempt to explain why it is wrong, e.g., to kill an innocent

person in order to prevent a greater number of deaths

The latter claim is typical of *deontological theories like

intuitionism and Kantian ethics, and definitely runs

counter to act-utilitarianism But the intuitionist can only

insist on the intuitive implausibility of the implications of

act-utilitarianism for such cases and has no (further)

philo-sophical argument against it

A fourth way of dealing with substantive issues of right

and wrong action can be found in Thomas Scanlon’s

‘con-tractualist’ view of the morality of obligation (of what we

‘owe to each other’) This new approach in part derives

from *John Rawls’s contract theory of social justice, but,

unlike the latter, its principal focus is on issues of personal

morality It holds, roughly, that an act is wrong if it would

be disallowed by any principle that no one seeking an

agreement on moral principles for the general regulation

of behaviour could reasonably reject This form of

con-tractualism has encountered the criticism that it builds too

much of morality into its claims about reasonableness; but

others worry that the approach isn’t strong enough to

jus-tify all the claims that are plausible within the sphere of

moral obligation

The final (major contemporary) way of dealing

the-oretically with right and wrong can be found in virtue

ethics, a kind of moral theory with origins in the schools of

ancient philosophy Virtue ethicists think right and wrong

cannot be captured by independently or basically valid

moral rules or principles, but are a matter rather of

situ-ational sensitivity (Aristotle) or of the expression or

main-tenance of fundamentally good or admirable inner

motives or states (Plato, Hume) Among the chief

prob-lems for such views are explaining how agents can

per-ceive what is right to do in given situations without the

help of general principles and/or showing how

evalu-ations based in the moral agent can sufficiently constrain

what the agent does outside, in the world, to other people.

However, ethics or moral philosophy in the broadest

sense includes much more than attempts to describe or

explain the nature of moral right and wrong As I indicated

just above, the utilitarians attempt to ground our

standing of right and wrong in an independent

under-standing of human good But all systematic theories of

ethics seek to understand human good, or the good life,

and not just the issue of right and wrong action What is

good for a person is not necessarily morally good (there is

nothing morally good about enjoying a sauna bath), and

the distinction, therefore, between moral good and

obligation, on the one hand, and non-moral personal,

human, or life goods, on the other, raises two further

important problems for ethics

First, the nature of human good and the good life is not

self-evident Utilitarians think of human or personal good

in hedonistic terms, but it is not necessary to do so, and some self-realization theorists and *virtue ethicists have, for example, held that (some of ) the greatest human, per-sonal, or life goods are things like knowledge, autonomy, achievement, honour, and virtue itself One of the main problems of ethics, then, is to determine what things are (basic) personal goods in addition to such obvious goods

as pleasure and desire-satisfaction But this problem raises

a second interesting issue The utilitarians understand right and wrong derivatively from human good: the moral is what is instrumental to the greatest abundance of personal good(s) But it is possible to reverse the order, in the manner of the Stoics, and claim that human well-being

or good is confined to and understandable in terms of human virtue: to be well-off is simply to be virtuous (This means pain is no evil, is not a bad thing in one’s life, unless

it undermines one’s virtue.) But there is also the possibility that neither well-being nor virtue is ethically prior to the other, so that ethics is faced with a dualism of fundamen-tal concepts (this is Kant’s and Ross’s view) And so ethics faces a general issue about its basic values that goes beyond the confines of morality proper: the question how

to connect moral values with personal well-being and the question whether either of these notions or notion-types

is the basis for the other

I mentioned earlier that recent moral philosophy has been greatly concerned with issues about the meaning of moral terms In fact, *‘meta-ethics’, which deals not only with semantic issues but also with questions about the objectivity and verifiability of moral judgements, practic-ally dominated English-speaking philosophy during the first half of the twentieth century The reason has some-thing to do with the emergence of *Logical Positivism during the early part of that period The positivists ques-tioned whether moral, religious, or metaphysical dis-course was cognitively meaningful; and the force of their sceptical views, and of questions raised by G E Moore about whether goodness was a natural or non-natural property, led many or even most ethicists to abandon sub-stantive issues of right and wrong and good for a consider-ation of questions about the meaning and rconsider-ational or epistemic status of moral and other value-claims

In the heyday of meta-ethics, certain schools of thought dominated the scene and their disagreements constituted the main substance of moral-philosophical discussion Non-naturalists like Moore held that goodness and right-ness were not understandable in terms of purely natural phenomena or properties, but were metaphysically real and rationally intuitable ethical properties none the less Their targets, the naturalists, argued that ethical terms or concepts were analysable in terms of such natural notions

as pleasure, evolutionary fitness, or (more complexly) what would be chosen by a totally informed and dispas-sionate human(-like) observer Against such anti-sceptical

‘cognitivist’ views, another school of meta-ethics, the emotivists, held that there is no property of goodness or rightness and that moral discourse simply expresses the emotions or preferences of speakers rather than making

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