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I. Non-consequentialist constraints
Although consequentialism may be more theoretically elegant, everyday moral thinking seems more naturally captured in non-consequentialist terms. One striking illustration is provided by ‘agent-relative constraints’, which disallow certain courses of action even if these appear to have the best consequences. These can seem puzzling, even irrational, despite widespread intuitive acceptance of them. Non-consequentialists have therefore been at pains to try to give a theoretical rationale for them, and even some consequentialists have tried to show that their favoured view can accommodate them.
Question: Is it sometimes wrong to harm someone even when I can save more people from comparable harms thereby? Why?
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- Frances Kamm, ‘Nonconsequentialism’, in LaFollette (ed.), The Blackwell Guide to Ethical Theory (Blackwell, 2013)
Kamm sets out some of the key doctrines that distinguish non-consequentialism—in particular, the ‘Doctrine of Doing and Allowing’ (DDA) and the ‘Doctrine of Double Effect‘ (DDE)—and discusses some refinements of and rationales for them, connecting non-consequentialism to ideals of inviolability. She then turns to a discussion of non-consequentialist approaches to providing aid. Along the way, she introduces many of the best-known thought-experiments discussed by proponents and critics of non-consequentialism.
- James Rachels, ‘Active and Passive Euthanasia’, The New England Journal of Medicine vol. 292 (1975)
In the context of an argument against the view that ‘passive euthanasia’ is morally superior to ‘active euthanasia’, Rachels argues that the distinction between killing and letting die is not morally significant in itself, and that our inclination to judge otherwise is the result of distorting factors.
- Shelly Kagan, The Limits of Morality (Oxford, 1991), chapter 3
Kagan argues that every formulation of the distinction between doing and allowing will face decisively counterintuitive implications, and furthermore that the distinction cannot be given a compelling rationale.
- Jeff McMahan, ‘Killing, Letting Die, and Withdrawing Aid’, Ethics vol. 103, no. 2 (1993)
Through examination of intuitive reactions to a series of hypothetical cases, McMahan defends the view that a carefully formulated version of the distinction between killing and letting die is morally significant. He goes on to suggest that the commonsense morality of harm has a structure that is too complex to be captured in one or two simple principles, ending with a note of scepticism about whether a satisfying rationale can be found for it.
- Fiona Woollard, Doing and Allowing Harm (Oxford, 2015), chapter 6
The first five chapters in Woollard’s book are devoted to arriving at the formulation of the DDA that best accounts for our intuitions about various examples. Chapter 6 offers a rationale for the DDA so formulated, appealing to a notion of imposition.
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- Peter Unger, Living High and Letting Die (Oxford, 1996), chapter 4
Unger defends “Liberationist” moral thinking, which, guided by “Basic Moral Values”, rejects the sorts of non-consequentialist distinctions (including the DDA) accepted by “Preservationist” moral thinking. He argues that acceptance of these constraints reflects distorting factors, as is made evident, he thinks, by the way our intuitions are affected by the presentation of some examples that he details.
- Kai Draper, ‘Rights and the Doctrine of Doing and Allowing’, Philosophy & Public Affairs vol. 33, no. 3 (2005)
Draper argues that an appeal to rights does a better job of explaining the intuitive verdicts that are adduced in favour of the DDA than the DDA itself does.
- Warren Quinn, ‘Actions, Intentions, and Consequences: The Doctrine of Doing and Allowing’, The Philosophical Review vol. 98, no. 3 (1989)
- Jonathan Bennet, The Act Itself
- Frances Kamm, Intricate Ethics (Oxford, 2007), chapter 5
- Fiona Woollard, Doing and Allowing Harm (Oxford, 2015)
- Peter Singer, ‘Ethics and Intuitions’, The Journal of Ethics vol. 9, no. 3 (2005)
- Douglas Portmore, ‘Combining Teleologial Ethics with Evaluator Relativism: A Promising Result’, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly vol. 86, no. 1 (2005)
Portmore proposes that an ‘agent-relative’ form of teleological ethics accommodates non-consequentialist agent-relativity in the case of constraints, special obligations, and prerogatives while preserving consequentialism's most attractive feature (the idea that it's never impermissible to bring about the best state of affairs). Hence, acceptance of constraints etc. need not commit one to non-consequentialism (or rather, to non-teleology).
- Mark Schroeder, ‘Teleology, Agent-Relative Value, and “Good”’, Ethics vol. 117, no. 2 (2007)
- Jamie Dreier, ‘Structures of Normative Theories’, The Monist vol. 76, no. 1 (1993)
- Campbell Brown, ‘Consequentialize This’, Ethics vol. 121, no. 4 (2011)
- Jussi Suikkanen, ‘Consequentializing Moral Dilemmas’, Journal of Moral Philosophy (forthcoming)
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II. Kant: acting from duty
Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals is perhaps the greatest work of moral philosophy in the Western philosophical tradition, and certainly one of that tradition's great peaks. It is dazzling in its creativity, in its technical ingenuity, and in its ambition—although it can also seem forbidding, thanks to Kant's difficult style. From an analysis of everyday moral thinking that identifies the notion of a good will at its heart, Kant proceeds to argue that our very freedom depends on conforming to the moral law. On the way, he introduces ideas of universalisation and humanity as ‘an end in itself’ that have great resonance even for many of those who reject Kant's theory.
Question: Is Kant right to conclude that only action from duty has moral worth?
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- Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, edited by Mary Gregor (Cambridge, 1997), Preface (but you can skim this) and section I
Kant aims to work out the supreme principle that underlies moral thinking, and eventually to vindicate it. He starts by analysing the notion of a good will, which is, he argues, the only thing of unconditional moral value. The idea is to identify what a good will consists in, and thence arrive at its fundamental principle. As it will turn out in sections II–III, this principle coincides with the only possible “categorical imperative”.
- Stephen Darwall, Philosophical Ethics (Westview, 1998), pp. 144–154
Darwall offers helpful, clear exegesis of the Preface and section I of the Groundwork.
- Christine Korsgaard, Creating the Kingdom of Ends (Cambridge, 1996), chapter 2
After a brief account of the history of a debate between rationalist and sentimentalist moral philosophers (don't worry too much about which view is whose as you read), Korsgaard offers a careful reading of key passages in Groundwork I, defending Kant from some common objections and elaborating on some key notions. She then situates Kant's argument with respect to the historical debate.
- Bernard Williams, ‘Persons, Character, and Morality’, in Moral Luck (Cambridge, 1981)
Williams makes a case for the importance of character and personal relations and their independence from morality as understood in the Kantian frame, and accordingly charges Kantian ethics with a deeply impoverished account of individual agency that produces a misrepresentation of the moral life.
- Marcia Baron, ‘The Alleged Moral Repugnance of Acting from Duty’, The Journal of Philosophy vol. 81, no. 4 (1984)
Baron analyses the objection, sometimes levelled against Kantian ethics, that being motivated by duty is not essential to morally good conduct—indeed, that it is morally repugnant or alienating. (Williams is one proponent of this objection.) She considers several versions of the objection and rejects them all.
- Susan Wolf, ‘Moral Saints’, in The Variety of Values (Oxford, 2015)
In this influential discussion, Wolf argues against Kantian and other moral theories that the maximising ideal of moral sainthood she takes to be implicit in them should be rejected on the grounds that there are important values other than those of morality and self-interest.
- Jessica Isserow, ‘Doubts about Duty as a Secondary Motive’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (2021)
Isserow discusses the idea of duty as a ‘secondary motive’ that is appealed to by Baron, Herman, and others as a means of avoiding objections that Kant’'s conception of moral worth is too austere or involves a ‘thought too many’. Via an analysis of different interpretations of the idea, she argues that it is not capable of serving the purpose for which it is invoked, and concludes that a pluralistic approach to moral worth is to be preferred.
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Further reading (Hide)
- Barbara Herman, The Practice of Moral Judgment (Harvard ,1993), chapters 1 and 7. (An earlier version of chapter 1 is available here, but the book is preferable.)
- Jens Timmermann, ‘Acting from duty: inclination, reason and moral worth’, in Jens Timmermann (ed.), Kant's ‘Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals’: A Critical Guide (Cambridge, 2009)
- Christine Korsgaard, ‘From Duty and for the Sake of the Noble’, in her The Constitution of Agency (Oxford, 2008)
- Michael Stocker, ‘The Schizophrenia of Modern Ethical Theories’, The Journal of Philosophy vol. 73, no. 14 (1976)
Stocker argues that something important is missing in accounts of moral goodness that make the motive of duty central, as Kant's does: the accounts present a stunted version of the moral life.
- Nomy Arpaly, Unprincipled Virtue: An Inquiry into Moral Agency, chapter 3
- Julia Annas, ‘Why Virtue Ethics Does Not Have a Problem with Right Action’, in Mark Timmons (ed.), Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics, Volume 4 (Oxford, 2014)
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III. Scanlonian contractualism
Scanlonian contractualism is a non-consequentialist moral theory according to which an act is wrong if and only if it is disallowed by a principle that no one could reasonably reject who was motivated to find such principles. Developed in the second half of the 20th century by T.M. Scanlon, it has become enormously influential in contemporary ethical theorising. Its key attraction is in the way it captures the idea that permissible actions must be acceptable from all reasonable points of view. But there are doubts about whether the theory is genuinely explanatory, about whether its avoidance of the unpalatable conclusions associated with consequentialism is gerrymandered, and about the way it handles risk, among other things.
Question: Does contractualism offer a compelling account of wrongness?
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- T.M. Scanlon, What We Owe to Each Other (Harvard, 1998), chapters 4–5
In chapter 4, Scanlon sets out some challenges for a satisfactory moral theory, including the challenges of explaining the reason-giving and motivating force of moral judgment, and explaining morality's importance and priority in practical deliberation. He sets out the contractualist answer to these challenges. In chapter 5, Scanlon contrasts his contractualism with that of others such as Kant and Rawls, clarifies some of the terms employed in its master principle, and explains how it generates its verdicts of wrongness. In the process, Scanlon anticipates many of the main lines of objection to his view and tries to respond to them.
- T. M. Scanlon, ‘How I Am Not a Kantian’, in Derek Parfit, On What Matters, Volume Two (Oxford: Oxford, 2011)
In this comment on Parfit's On What Matters, in which Parfit claims that rule consequentialism and contractualism converge, Scanlon describes some of the ways in which his contractualism departs from Kantian views.
- R. Jay Wallace, ‘Scanlon's Contractualism’, Ethics 112, no. 3 (2002), introduction and sections 3–4
Wallace provides helpful exposition of Scanlon's arguments and raises some illuminating doubts about them (many of which are further pursued in the other readings), although he remains very sympathetic to the contractualist project. Sections 1–2 are also highly illuminating and worth reading if you have the time.
- Pamela Hieronymi, ‘On Metaethics and Motivation: The Appeal of Contractualism’, in Wallace et al. (eds), Reasons and Recognition: Essays on the Philosophy of T. M. Scanlon (Oxford, 2011)
Hieronymi anatomises Scanlon's contractualist account of moral motivation, arguing that the ultimate appeal of contractualism lies in an ideal of respect for each person, and that it is surprisingly difficult to combine this ideal with any theory of theory of what it is for an act to be wrong other than contractualism, despite some appearances.
- Elizabeth Ashford, ‘The Demandingness of Scanlon's Contractualism’, Ethics 113, no. 2 (2003)
Ashford argues that contractualism is just as vulnerable to charges of demandingness as its rival, utilitarianism. Indeed, she argues, it is more demanding, because it disallows any collective activity such as air travel that imposes even a remote risk of great harm to very few others, so long as the cost of forgoing that activity to any one individual is not greater than the harm in question.
- Rahul Kumar, ‘Defending the Moral Moderate: Contractualism and Common Sense’, Philosophy & Public Affairs vol. 28, no. 4 (1999)
Kumar sets out contractualism’s advantages in making sense of commonsense morality’s commitment to options and constraints, contrasting its resources with those of consequentialism in this matter. In the course of doing this, he offers a clear account of the structure of contractualist moral reasoning and useful illustrations.
- Michael Otsuka, ‘Saving Lives, Moral Theory, and the Claims of Individuals’, Philosophy & Public Affairs vol. 34, no. 2 (2006)
Otsuka criticises Scanlon's approach to ‘Saving the Greater Number’ cases, alongside some other similarly anti-aggregationist approaches. He then argues that the core ideas and attractions of contractualism cannot be preserved while rejecting the ‘individualist restriction’ that blocks aggregation in Scanlon's theory.
- Johann Frick, ‘Contractualism and Social Risk’, Philosophy & Public Affairs vol. 43, no. 3 (2015)
Frick focuses on a problem for contractualism relating to the way it handles cases of risk. He asks: does it assess the justifiability of risky acts and policies by asking about people’s reasons for rejecting a principle permitting a risky act when the act is in prospect (‘ex ante’)? Or does it ask about those reasons after the outcome is clear (‘ex post’)? Scanlon explicitly favours ex post assessment in What We Owe To Each Other, but Frick argues that this rules out intuitively permissible acts and policies. Although he thinks it comes with significant costs, he favours ex ante assessment, and defends this view against objections from Scanlon and others.
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Further reading (Hide)
- Derek Parfit, ‘Justifiability to Each Person’, Ratio vol. 16, no. 4 (2003)
Parfit argues against Scanlon's ‘individualist restriction’ and some other anti-utilitarian views by appeal to some ‘Saving the Greater Number’ cases. He goes on to suggest that the core idea and appeal of Scanlonian contractualism is the idea of justifiability to each person, which survives the rejection of the individualist restriction. (Note that the numbers in Case 2, at p. 381, are misprinted. They should read: 100, 100; 100, 0; 0, 100.)
- T.M. Scanlon, ‘Replies’, Ratio vol. 16, no. 4 (2003)
- Rahul Kumar, ‘Who Can Be Wronged?’, Philosophy & Public Affairs vol. 31, no. 2 (2003)
Kumar argues for a contractualist approach to the famous ‘non-identity problem’, which he thinks avoids the counter-intuitive implications that the non-identity problem is standardly supposed to have. In the process of doing so, he provides useful clarification of some aspects of contractualism.
- Philip Stratton-Lake, ‘Scanlon's contractualism and the redundancy objection’, Analysis vol. 63, no. 277 (2003)
Stratton-Lake explores the objection that Scanlon's contractualist principle adds nothing to the concrete considerations that ground reasonable rejection in explaining wrongness. He argues that the principle should be regarded as an account, not of the grounds of wrongness, but of its nature. He then suggests that in order to accept this reply to the objection, Scanlon must abandon the claim that wrongness is reason-giving.
- Michael Ridge, ‘Contractualism and the new and improved redundancy objection’, Analysis, vol. 63, no. 280 (2003)
Ridge suggests that, contrary to the arguments of Stratton-Lake (see the further reading below), Scanlon needs to hold on to the claim that wrongness is reason-giving, but that he can avoid the objections that Stratton-Lake takes this to generate once the relation and nature of the reasons for rejection and the reason that wrongness provides are clarified.
- Alex Voorhoeve, ‘How Should We Aggregate Competing Claims?’, Ethics vol. 125, no. 1 (2014)
Voohoeve defends a partially aggregative moral theory according to which claims (such as claims to avoid harm) may be multiplied by the number of people facing them so as to outweigh competing claims that are individually stronger if and only if the competing claims are individually sufficiently close in strength to one another. This represents a middle way between fully aggregative theories such as utilitarianism and anti-aggregative theories such as Scanlon's contractualism. Voorhoeve offers a rationale for the view by appeal to independent judgments about when it is permissible to decline to suffer a harm to oneself for the sake of saving someone else from a bigger harm.
- Joe Horton, ‘Aggregation, Complaints, and Risk’, Philosophy & Public Affairs vol. 45, no. 1 (2017)
Horton argues that neither ‘ex ante’ nor an ‘ex post’ accounts of the reasons within contractualism for rejecting principles covering risky acts are satisfactory. He goes on to argue that his objections also apply to variants of contractualism that allow restricted aggregation, such as the one defended by Alex Voorhoeve, before concluding in favour of an approach that allows unrestricted aggregation—but of complaints, not (as in utilitarianism) benefits and burdens.
- R. Jay Wallace, The Moral Nexus (Princeton, 2019)
Wallace defends contractualism as the theory that emerges as appropriate to morality on a ‘relational conception’, according to which all moral requirements are owed to someone, so that failure to conform to them wrongs that person. Wallace defends the relational conception in the first half of the book, and then argues for contractualism as the correct theory of morality so conceived in the second half.
- Nicholas Southwood, Contractualism and the Foundations of Morality (Oxford, 2010)
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IV. Virtue ethics
According to one narrative about modern moral philosophy, it was by the end of the 19th century regarded as a contest between two ‘methods of ethics’: deontology and consequentialism. The 20th century saw the revival of a third method, inspired by classical Greek ethics. This third method has come to be known as ‘virtue ethics’. It makes the notion of a virtue theoretically central, displacing the deontological emphasis on duties or rules and the consequentialist focus on assessment of acts by reference to the good that they produce instrumentally. Critics argue that virtue ethics fails to be action-guiding, or that it is fundamentally unattractively egoistic, or that it's not really a distinctive method of ethics at all, among other objections.
Question: Are virtue ethicists right to make virtue fundamental in ethical theory?
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- Rosalind Hursthouse, On Virtue Ethics (Oxford, 2002), pp. 8–16 and chapter 1
In the Introduction, Hursthouse clarifies some of the core ideas of the neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics that she defends in the rest of the book. Chapter 1 addresses the objection that virtue ethics lacks an adequate account of right action. Hursthouse replies by arguing that it does have an account of right action, and that the suggestion that the account is inadequate relies on unreasonable ambitions for ethics as well as excessive charity to rival theories. In the course of her reply, Hursthouse sets out the structure of her favoured form of virtue ethics, which is widely treated as paradigmatic.
- Robert Johnson, ‘Virtue and Right’, Ethics vol. 113, no. 4 (2003)
After outlining the main features of virtue ethics as he understands it, Johnson argues that virtue ethicists are unable to explain why the right thing to do in cases of less than perfect virtue is not what the virtuous person would do.
- Thomas Hurka, Virtue, Vice, and Value (Oxford, 2001), chapter 8
Hurka distinguishes various forms of virtue ethics and deploys a battery of objections against them. Against the neo-Aristotelian form endorsed by Hursthouse and others, Hurka's most challenging charges are of redundancy, motivational inadequacy, an inability to distinguish the moral or explain its priority, and fundamental egoism.
- Roger Crisp, ‘A Third Method of Ethics?’, Philosophy & Phenomenological Research vol. 90, no. 2 (2015)
Crisp argues that virtue ethics isn’t really a novel and distinctive type of moral theory, but rather a version of deontology akin to W. D. Ross’s non-principle-based view. He ends by suggesting that what is distinctive about virtue ethics is best captured by interpreting it as endorsing virtue as intrinsically valuable.
- Julia Annas, ‘Virtue Ethics and the Charge of Egoism’, in Paul Bloomfield (ed.), Morality and Self-Interest (Oxford, 2007)
Annas is perhaps the most sophisticated contemporary virtue ethicist. In this chapter, she explores the ‘egoism’ objection to virtue ethics, focusing in particular on Hurka's articulation of it. Annas argues that the objection fails, clarifying as she does so some aspects of the structure of a plausible virtue ethics—in particular, the place of an independent account of human flourishing as a ground for the virtues.
- Mark LeBar, ‘Virtue Ethics and Deontic Constraints’, Ethics vol. 119 (2009)
LeBar considers the objection that virtue ethics gives the wrong explanation of the wrongness of harms to others by explaining by appeal to features of the agent rather than of the victim. He suggests that virtue ethicists can respond by appealing to the idea that taking up the ‘second-person standpoint’, which involves viewing others as sources of constraints on our actions, is both constitutive of virtue and indispensable for human flourishing.
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Further reading (Hide)
- Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Books I–II; Book VI, chapters 1, 5–13; Book VII, chapters 1–10; and Book X, chapters 6–9
- Julia Annas, Intelligent Virtue (Oxford, 2011); and ‘Why Virtue Ethics Does Not Have a Problem with Right Action’, in Mark Timmons (ed.), Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics, Volume 4 (Oxford, 2014)
- Jason Kawall, ‘In Defense of the Primacy of the Virtues’, Journal of Ethics & Social Philosophy vol. 3, no. 2 (2009)
Kawall defends what he takes to be the paradigmatic form of virtue ethics from objections to the way it makes virtue fundamental—in particular, to the way it gives it priority over deontic properties. At the centre of Kawall's defence is a distinction between various senses of the question ‘what makes X wrong?’ that evokes some of the discussions of Scanlon's theory last week.
- Julia Driver, Uneasy Virtue (Cambridge, 2001), chapters 2–3
- Rachana Kamtekar, ‘Situationism and Virtue Ethics on the Content of Our Character’, Ethics vol. 114, no. 3 (2004)
- Alison Hills, ‘The Intellectuals and the Virtues’, Ethics vol. 126, no. 1 (2015)
- Christine Swanton, Virtue Ethics: A Pluralistic View (Oxford, 2003)
- John McDowell, ‘Virtue and Reason’, The Monist vol. 62, no. 3 (1979)
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V. Rights and wrongings
Rights feature heavily in contemporary political and moral discourse as well as in contemporary moral and political philosophy. But their analysis, force, and justification remain controversial. On some accounts, the notion of a right emerged only relatively recently, and that raises the question what, if anything, they add to our moral repertoire, particularly if we already have the notion of a moral duty. There are also puzzles concerning the possibility and resolution of conflicts of rights and the relations between rights and the greater good. This week, we consider some of these issues. For the most part we steer clear, however, of the major theoretical dispute in rights theory (between Will and Interest theorists), which concerns whether rights are grounded in interests or in something like normative autonomy. Instead we focus on the role rights play in morality and moral thinking more generally. (You can find more on the Will and Interest theories in the further reading.)
Question: What are rights? What is wrong with violating them? Can they ever be permissibly infringed?
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- Frances Kamm, ‘Rights’, in Coleman and Shapiro (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Jurisprudence and the Philosophy of Law (Oxford University Press, 2002)
In this advanced introduction to rights, Kamm sets out some conceptual basics and the two major theories of rights before investigating various aspects of rights theory via a focus on conflicts, both between rights and other rights and between rights and other goods.
- Judith Jarvis Thomson, The Realm of Rights (Harvard University Press, 1990), chapter 3
Thomson investigates the nature of rights as constraints, giving influential arguments against the view that rights are absolute and the ‘specificationist’ view that the full specification of rights includes various qualifications that have the effect of making conflicts of rights impossible.
- John Oberdiek, ‘Lost in Moral Space: on the Infringing/Violating and its Place in the Theory of Rights’, Law and Philosophy vol. 23 (2004)
Oberdiek defends ‘specificationism’ against Thomson and others according to whose ‘generalism’ rights can be permissibly overridden in cases of conflict.
- Rowan Cruft, ‘Why is it Disrespectful to Violate Rights?’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society vol. 113 (2013)
Cruft argues that we cannot explain why it is disrespectful to violate rights that are not grounded in the interests of the individual whose rights they are, and that since many important rights aren’t so grounded, there is an unresolved problem.
- Joel Feinberg, ‘The Nature and Value of Rights’, The Journal of Value Inquiry vol. 4 (1970)
Feinberg sets out a famous thought experiment, imagining ‘Nowheresville’, a world without rights, in order to identify what it is about rights that makes them valuable. He focuses on the notion of claiming and connections between this and ideals of respect and dignity.
- Michael Thompson, ‘What is it to Wrong Someone? A Puzzle about Justice’, in Wallace et al (eds.), Reason and Value: Themes from the Moral Philosophy of Joseph Raz (Oxford University Press, 2004)
Thompson gives an account of directed duties and wronging as a matter of ‘bipolar’ normativity before arguing that the Humean, Aristotelian, and Kantian theories that might seem capable of vindicating this form of normativity in fact come with intolerable commitments that make them each unsatisfactory.
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Further reading (Hide)
- Leif Wenar, ‘The Nature of Rights’, Philosophy & Public Affairs vol. 33, no. 3 (2005)
This is an excllent introduction to Hohfeldian analysis of rights and the two major theories of rights, the Will and Interest theories. (Wenar also offers his own theory, but that has not been so influential.)
- R. Jay Wallace, The Moral Nexus (Princeton University Press, 2019), chapter 2
Wallace distinguishes and analyses key features of moral obligation that raise philosophical problems in accounting for its normativity. He goes on to present the ‘relational’ approach to moral obligation that he defends in the rest of the book as a good way to make sense of these features.
- Kieran Setiya, ‘Other People’, in Buss and Theunissen (eds.), Rethinking the Value of Humanity (Oxford University Press, forthcoming)
Setiya tries to pinpoint the relation to other people that seems necessary to rationalise love and, as it turns out, seems also to have a distinctive moral significance.
- Hallie Liberto, ‘The Moral Specification of Rights: a Restricted Account’, Law and Philosophy vol. 33 (2014)
Liberto argues for a position somewhere between rights specificationism and rights generalism, arguing that some specification is appropriate when exceptions are justified by the same considerations that justify the rights, but not otherwise.
- Alec Walen, The Mechanics of Claims and Permissible Killing in War (Oxford University Press, 2019), chapter 4
Walen gives an extended argument against the generalist ‘infringement’ model of rights associated with Thomson and Feinberg, arguing that the largely specificationist approach of his own view, the ‘mechanics of claims’ is preferable.
- Matthew Kramer, N. E. Simmonds, and Hillel Steiner, A Debate Over Rights (Oxford University Press, 2000)
This is a detailed, comprehensive presentation of the dispute between Will and Interest theorists of rights, including one essay each from two leading proponents of the will theory and interest theory respectively, and a sophisticated birds-eye view of the debate to boot.
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VI. Internal and external reasons
Can we have reasons to do things—that is, normative reasons rather than motivating reasons—even if we do not have any desires or concerns at any level that are furthered by acting in accordance with them? An influential essay by Bennard Williams effectively answers “no”, defending the view that all practical reasons are what he calls ‘internal reasons’. But if Williams is right, then it seems that many practical reasons that seem obviously to apply to us are in fact surprisingly fragile—not least moral reasons.
Question: Are there external reasons?
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- Bernard Williams, ‘Internal and external reasons’, in Moral Luck (Cambridge University Press, 1981)
Williams argues that there are no external reasons, appealing to ideas about motivation and the explanation of action. According to Williams, if performing an action is not appropriately favoured by elements in a person's “motivational set”, then she has no reason to perform it.'
- Kieran Setiya, ‘Introduction: Internal Reasons’, in Setiya and Paakkunainen (eds.), Internal Reasons: Contemporary Readings (MIT Press, 2011)
Setiya offers an introduction to and exposition of Williams‘s essay together with an analysis of options for responding to Williams’s arguments and a guide to some of the most important published responses.
- Christine Korsgaard, ‘Skepticism about Practical Reason’, in Creating the Kingdom of Ends (Cambridge University Press, 1996)
This is one of the classic responses to Williams, in which Korsgaard accepts the premiss (on which she takes Williams’s argument to be based) that practical reasons must be capable of moving us, but argues that it does not limit what reasons people have in the way that Williams thinks.
- John McDowell, ‘Might there be external reasons?’, in Altham and Harrison (eds.), World, Mind, and Ethics: Essays on the Ethical Philosophy of Bernard Williams (Cambridge University Press, 1995)
In another classic response, McDowell puts pressure on the notion of a “sound deliberative route” from an agent’s present motivational set, which Williams employs as a way to avoid an excessively narrow means-end conception of reasons for action. McDowell’s argument is in effect that it is only by unjustifiably restricting what counts as a sound deliberative route that Williams can sustain his resistance to the possibility of external reasons.
- Stephen Finlay, ‘The Obscurity of Internal Reasons’, Philosophers’ Imprint vol. 9, no. 7 (2009)
Finlay distinguishes what he regards as the orthodox reading of Williams’s essay, appealing to what Setiya calls ‘internalism about reasons’, from an alternative reading that he goes on to endorse and defend. According to this alternative reading, the foundation of Williams’s argument is the concept of a reason as an explanation of why the agent would be motivated if she deliberated soundly.
- Julia Markovits, Moral Reason (Oxford University Press, 2014), chapters 2–3
Markovits offers analysis of Williams’s argument before raising doubts about it. She then defends an revised internal reasons thesis that understands reasons as counting in favour of actions not in virtue of counterfactual motivation but in virtue of justificatory connections with the agent’s ends.
- T. M. Scanlon, What We Owe to Each Other (Harvard University Press, 1998), pp. 363–73
Scanlon argues that the universality of reasons judgments and the seeming categoricity of many of our practical reasons tell against reasons internalism. He also suggests that the most plausible version of Williams’s internalism is not going to differ in very significant ways from externalism anyway.
- Bernard Williams, ‘Replies’, in Altham and Harrison (eds.), World, Mind, and Ethics: Essays on the Ethical Philosophy of Bernard Williams (Cambridge University Press, 1995)
Williams responds to McDowell’s argument in the first part of this set of replies. (Note the overlap with Johnson’'s critique of virtue ethics.)
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Further reading (Hide)
- Bernard Williams, ‘Internal reasons and the obscurity of blame’
- Michael Smith, The Moral Problem (Oxford University Press, 1994), chapter 5, especially pp. 164–75
Smith effectively accepts the internal reasons thesis, but argues that it does not deliver a relativistic account of reasons.
- Derek Parfit, On What Matters, Volume Two, sections 8–13, 83–4, and 106–8
These sections are the core of Parfit’s defence of external reasons, which consists partly of examples designed to show the intuitive plausibility of external reasons, partly of diagnoses of the attractions of Williams-style views that admit of internal reasons only, and partly of attacks on internal reasons and their importance.
- Thomas Nagel, The Possibility of Altruism (Princeton University Press, 1970)
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VII. The authority of morality
One of the most abiding questions in moral philosophy is: “why be moral?” This question presses us to find a reason that would be sufficient to persuade a sceptic (the ‘amoralist’) to comply with moral requirements. Of course, sometimes the sceptic's self-interest will favour doing the morally right thing anyway, but that doesn't seem to be the kind of reason we are seeking. Some try to show that moral reasons are constructed from self-interested reasons; others doubt that the question even makes sense. This week, we try to get to grips with the question, and we consider various strategies for addressing it.
Question: Why should I be moral?
Priority reading (Hide)
- Plato, Republic, Book II, 357a–367e
Plato has Glaucon and Adeimantus set out a fundamental challenge: to show that justice is worth pursuing for its own sake, and not merely for the sake of the consequences of being seen to have been just. Glaucon tells a story about the origins of justice (anticipating the social contract theorists) which suggests that the contrary is true, and that what's good in itself for a person is limited rather than served by justice.
- Christine Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity (Cambridge, 1996), chapters 1–2
Korsgaard sets out, clarifies, and motivates what she calls “the normative question”: the question what the authority of moral principles or claims is. She distinguishes four approaches to answering it and relates them to one another. In these two chapters she criticises the first three approaches; she defends the Kantian fourth approach in the rest of the book.
- Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, edited by Mary Gregor (Cambridge, 1997), section III
In this final section of the Groundwork, Kant argues that acting under the moral law and acting freely are the same thing, and that insofar as we are rational, we cannot avoid acting under the assumption of our own freedom. He then goes on to argue that we are bound to view ourselves as fundamentally identified with our rational selves, and hence that the moral law is binding for us.
- Philippa Foot, ‘Morality as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives’, The Philosophical Review vol. 81, no. 3 (1972)
Observing that the categorical form of moral imperatives doesn't distinguish them from imperatives of etiquette or grammar, Foot raises doubts about the binding force of morality for someone who doesn't care about it. But, she argues, that should not trouble us as much as it sometimes does: many people do care about it, after all.
- John McDowell, ‘Are Moral Requirements Hypothetical Imperatives?’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volumes, vol. 52 (1978)
McDowell argues in response to Foot’s paper that an independently intelligible desire (e.g. for the well-being of others) is not needed to make sense of the rationality of moral behaviour any more than an independently intelligible desire for one’s own well-being is needed to make sense of the rationality of prudence. Instead, we can simply appeal to the light in which a virtuous agent would see the situation.
- Joseph Raz, ‘The Central Conflict: Morality and Self-Interest’, in his Engaging Reason (Oxford, 2002)
Raz argues against a conception of reasons of morality and self-interest that takes them to be at odds, attempting to debunk examples supposed to show that they are categorically or typically opposed. He then attempts to solve a puzzle about how, on the alternative view he favours, it is ever possible that doing the right thing should conflict with my self-interest (as surely it can), or that I can make self-sacrifices. His solution appeals to the idea that in paradigmatic cases of conflict, well being is not itself a source of reasons for the agent, and that acting rightly doesn't contribute to well-being in proportion to the stringency of the reasons so to act. Like much of Raz's writing, this is deep but dense and difficult reading.
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Further reading (Hide)
- David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (Oxford, 1975) sections 3, 5, 9, and Appendices II and III
- Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford, 1984), sections 1–9, 23–24
- Brad Hooker, ‘Does Moral Virtue Constitute a Benefit to the Agent?’, in Roger Crisp (ed.), How Should One Live? (Oxford, 1998)
Focusing on ‘objective list’ theories of well being, Hooker identifies a number of arguments that might be made in support of the claim that moral virtue constitutes a benefit to the agent. He argues that the fail, and that, furthermore, one of them powerfully suggests that moral virtue does not constitute such a benefit.
- Bernard Williams, ‘The Amoralist’, in his Morality: An Introduction to Ethics (Cambridge, 1993)
- Alison Hills, The Beloved Self: Morality and the Challenge from Egoism (Oxford, 2010), especially parts I–II
- J.L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (Penguin, 1977), pp. 107–20, 189–92
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VIII. Blame
Many have been suspicious of blame, seeing it as too close to an expression of a desire for vengeance to be morally respectable. Philosophers sympathetic to blame have accordingly been moved to defend it. Defences have appealed to its valuable effects, to the role it plays in interpersonal relationships, and to the way it partly constitutes others for us as free. But perhaps these defences depend on blame’s being understood as less vindictive than it really is.
Question: How should we understand blame? Would we be better off without it?
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- Daniel Dennett, Elbow Room, New Edition (MIT Press, 2015), chapter 7
Dennett proposes a forward-looking defence of our practices of holding responsible by appeal to their good effects.
- R. Jay Wallace, Responsibility and the Moral Sentiments (Harvard University Press, 1994), chapter 3
Wallace argues that forward-looking defences of blame are false to the phenomenology and practice of blame. He goes on to present an account of blame that understands it in terms of the ‘reactive attitudes’ of resentment and indignation, among others, and of holding people responsible in terms of disposition to feel those attitudes.
- T. M. Scanlon, Moral Dimensions: Meaning, Permissibility, Blame (Harvard University Press, 2008), chapter 4
Scanlon argues that to be blameworthy is for one’s action to have shown something about one’s attitudes to others that impairs the relations they can have with one, and to blame someone is to judge her blameworthy and to take one’s relationship (and so appropriate conduct with respect to her) with her to be modified in light of the impairment. Focusing on reactive attitudes alone, he suggests, makes for “too thin” an account of blame.
- Susan Wolf, ‘Blame, Italian Style’, in Wallace, Kumar, and Freeman (eds.), Reasons and Recognition: Essays on the Philosophy of T. M. Scanlon (Oxford University Press, 2011)
Wolf argues that Scanlon’s account of blame neglects a fundamental connection between blame and anger or anger-like attitudes that go beyond mere withdrawal of good will, and suggests that blame characterised in part by the involvement of such attitudes (“angry blame”) is bound up with valuable relationships, and tends to raise questions of freedom more than Scanlonian blame.
- Angela Smith, ‘Moral Blame and Moral Protest’, in Coates and Tognazzini (eds.), Blame: its Nature and Contours (Oxford University Press, 2013)
Smith summarises doubts about sanction, reactive-attitude, and mere-moral-assessment accounts of blame before criticising Sher’s and Scanlon’s (as she sees it) more promising accounts in more detail. She argues that what is missing from these accounts is an appreciation of the sense in which blame involves protest against the attitudes implicit in wrongdoing.
- Victoria McGeer, ‘Civilizing Blame’, in Coates and Tognazzini (eds.), Blame: its Nature and Contours (Oxford University Press, 2013)
McGeer argues that too many accounts of blame ‘sanitize’ it in the hope of presenting blaming practices acceptable (e.g. not unfair to the blamed). She presents a warts-and-all evolutionary theoretical account of blame as an angry, punitive attitude that has both backwards-looking appraising and forward-looking regulative elements, and argues that it does not need sanitising; in particular, that its regulative element need not be disrespectful and that its emotional element is not superfluous.
- Bernard Williams, ‘Internal Reasons and the Obscurity of Blame’ and ‘Nietzsche's Minimalist Moral Psychology’, in Making Sense of Humanity (Cambridge University Press, 1995)
In the first of these papers, Williams distinguishes ‘proleptic’ operations of blame from cases of blame as a blunter “instrument of correction and disapproval”, and argues that the obscurity in any individual instance of what blame is doing is an advantage of the internal reasons view with which he associates his account of blame. In the second paper, Williams raises suspicions about blame in the course of a discussion of Nietzchean doubts about the notion of willing.
- Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Routledge, 1986), chapter 10
This is the locus classicus of Williams’s famous critique of the “morality system”. At pp. 192–6, he discusses blame in particular, linking the morality system’s account of blame to ideals of purity and justice and raising doubts about their expression in it.
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- George Sher, In Praise of Blame (Oxford University Press, 2005)
Sher argues that to blame someone is to believe that she acted badly or has bad character and to desire that she should not have so acted or have such character, where this belief-desire pair explains various other attitudes and behaviours characteristic of blame. Being susceptible to blame is, moreover, a necessary concomitant of a commitment to morality.
- Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality (Cambridge University Press, 2006), first and second essays
- P. F. Strawson, ‘Freedom and Resentment’, in Freedom and Resentment and other essays (Routledge, 2008)
One of the most influential philosophical texts of the twentieth century, Strawson’s essay distinguishes the ‘reactive attitudes’ of resentment, indignation, and hurt feelings (among others) in our practices of holding people responsible, arguing that doubts about free will could be answered by appeal to the value of such practices as constitutive elements in indispensable human relationships.
- Bernard Williams, Shame and Necessity (University of California Press, 1993), chapter 4 and endnote 1
In chapter 4, Williams gives an account of what is standardly understood to be shame as it appears in ancient Greek literature as bound up with the judgment of a generalised, internalised other who belongs to a community of shared ethical attitudes. He goes on to that elements in the ancient Greek notion had significant overlap with guilt, but were not separated off as belonging to something distinct in Homeric culture as they are taken to be now. Williams argues that recognising this sheds light on the nature of guilt and shame and some pathologies of contemporary moral thinking. In the endnote, Williams gives a kind of genealogical account of guilt as developed from a more primitive fear at the anger of an enforcer or victim and shame as at root a sense of exposure as loss of power, and suggests that development of guilt into more sophisticated forms (or philosophical constructions) costs some of what makes it valuable.
- R. Jay Wallace, ‘Dispassionate Opprobrium’, in Wallace, Kumar, and Freeman (eds.), Reasons and Recognition: Essays on the Philosophy of T. M. Scanlon (Oxford University Press, 2011)
Making similar points to those made by Susan Wolf (see the priority reading), Wallace criticises Scanlon’s account of blame for “leaving the blame out of blame”.
- Christopher Evan Franklin, ‘Valuing Blame’, in Coates and Tognazzini (eds.), Blame: its Nature and Contours (Oxford University Press, 2013)
Franklin argues that blame is an essential way of protecting moral values that we are required to protect by the requirement to commit to them, criticising Sher’s and Wallace’s accounts for failing, by contrast, to explain why the angry emotional character of blame is justified.
- Pamela Hieronymi, ‘The Force and Fairness of Blame’, Philosophical Perspectives vol. 18 (2004)
- Coleen Macnamara, ‘Taking the demands out of blame’, in Coates and Tognazzini (eds.), Blame: its Nature and Contours (Oxford University Press, 2013)
Macnamara argues against a widespread conception of blaming and other practices of holding responsible as expressing demands.
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