Abstract
In this paper, I examine critically Kimberley Brownlee’s descriptive criteria for identifying when a person has a conscientious moral conviction. Then, I contrast her conception of conscience with other ideas of conscience, including a religious conception, a relativist conception, and those of Butler and Kant. The concepts examined here are central in her argument that, if civil disobedience is grounded in citizens’ conscience-based conscientious convictions, then it deserves legal and moral protection.
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Notes
Kimberley Brownlee (2012) (2). The first part of my comments on this book were initially presented at the meetings of the American Philosophical Association (Central Division) in Atlanta, 2012. I am grateful to Brownlee for her response on that occasion and to Jordan MacKenzie for helpful editing on the fuller version presented here.
Brownlee (2012) (5).
Brownlee (2012) (10).
Brownlee (2012) (29–47).
Brownlee (2012) (2 and 83).
Brownlee (2012) (11).
Brownlee (2012) (62–72 and 114–117).
Brownlee (2012) (1). My italics.
Brownlee (2012) (5).
Brownlee (2012) (29–46).
Brownlee (2012) (29 and 50).
Brownlee (2012) (29).
Brownlee (2012) (29–30).
Brownlee (2012) (29).
Brownlee (2012) (14).
Brownlee (2012) (30).
Brownlee (2012) (30).
Hart (1961) (171–173).
Kant (2000) (135–137 [5: 29–25]). Bracketed numbers refer to page and volume of the standard Prussian Academy edition.
Brownlee discusses the qualification that, because genuine reform is possible, consistency across time is not always necessary. See Brownlee (2012) (32–34).
Suppose, for example, a person sincerely believes both (a) that she should whip her child for serious misbehavior and (b) that she should always follow a certain sacred text; but unbeknownst to her the long and complex text forbids whipping a child. It should be noted that the consistency condition, as Brownlee explains it, is not just about consistency in what one says or in the theoretical propositions one believes. Rather, “there must be consistency between judgments, motivations, and conduct to the best extent that we are able” (2012) (30).
Brownlee (2012) (34). My italics.
Brownlee (2012) (35).
The issues that I briefly mention here have been the subject of a vast literature, especially in response to works of Kant and Hare, and so my comments should be taken as at best a cautionary note.
Add to the second story that More*’s reasons for concealment and evasion were simply self-protection, not concern for his family, etc.
Note my admission above that I am unsure whether the conditions are meant to be jointly sufficient for a sincere conviction to be a moral one, but it is still a matter worth discussing because, if the convictions are not moral ones, it becomes unclear why they deserve respect and protection.
I am assuming that the etiquette-obsessed person in my story did not have some bizarre belief that would reveal her devotion to etiquette to be based on an assumption that connects it to something morally significant, for example, a delusional belief that adherence to her rules of etiquette is necessary to preserve world peace and prosperity. We should also note that the claim that a judgment is “a moral one” can be ambiguous between (1) morally correct, justifiable, or good and (2) of a kind that is moral in contrast to legal, military, customary, etiquette-based, etc. Some contemporary philosophers have thought that criteria for a moral judgment in the second sense do not imply and place little or no constraint on what answers to criteria for the first (if any) can be. I think the second criteria do seriously constrain the first, but there is still ample room for sincere moral judgments that are mistaken.
Brownlee no doubt agrees with this last point because her conception of conscience (in contrast with mere conscientious moral judgment) requires genuine moral awareness even if conscience is not fully developed.
Hill (2012) (chpts. 8, 9, 11, and 13).
Brownlee (2012) (2).
Brownlee (2012) (52 and 57).
Brownlee (2012) (54).
Brownlee (2012) (50).
Brownlee (2012) (54). Note #5 adds: “We can speak of having ‘a conscience’ in the same way as we can speak of having ‘a knowledge’, that is, we have a knowledge of something and we have a conscience of something.”
Brownlee (2012) (54 and 60).
Brownlee (2012) (60). See also note #18, (60–61).
Brownlee (2012) (10).
Brownlee (2012) (83).
Hill (2002) (277–309).
Her core principle of humanism is “a principle of respect for our agency and dignity as persons” (2012) (7). The principle says, “first, that society has a duty to honor the fact that we are reasoning and feeling beings capable of forming deep moral commitments and second, that genuine moral conviction is essentially non-evasive and communicative” (7). According to Brownlee, the principle is what gives rise to the important rights to free thought and free expression (120).
According to Brownlee, within moral pluralism “the function [of conscience] is not to give objectively right answers to moral questions” and sometimes, perhaps often, there may be no such answers, but nevertheless with conscience that is well-cultivated one can have a genuine awareness of actual values and responsibilities and priorities among them (2012) (10).
Brownlee presents a well-developed conscience as a genuine self-conscious responsiveness to moral values and one’s special responsibilities. To say that a person’s conscience is well-developed, then, implies that the person has moral knowledge, but does not explain how it was acquired, and to say that a person has an inadequately developed conscience implies that the person’s moral beliefs are to some extent mistaken or distorted, but does not explain how or why. Brownlee has interesting things to say about different types of moral error (2012) (66–70), but she does not explicitly address underlying metaethical questions about the nature of moral reasons and how we are aware of them. Her position seems to have affinities to the ideas of Joseph Raz and is suggestive of metaethical intuitionism, but she clearly wants to avoid explicit metaethical commitments.
Hill (2002) (286–292).
Brownlee (2012) (97–103).
Butler (1983), for example, 13 and 19.
Butler (1983) (20).
Butler (1983) (14ff).
Brownlee (2012) (27–33).
Butler (1983) (69).
Brownlee (2012) (59–60).
Brownlee (2012) (55–56). Brownlee describes Butler’s view as “juridical” and lacking “an emotional dimension.” (58).
Butler does not present this as a first principle from which particular duties can be derived as utilitarians present their utility principle and as Kantians presents formulations of the Categorical Imperative. Given a full and proper understanding of its meaning, Butler’s first principle could also be expressed as “Follow Nature.”
An exception where Butler does argue that conscience gives us strong non-consequentialist moral rules or principles is in his “Dissertation Upon the Nature of Virtue” (1983) (69–70).
Brownlee (2012) (72–79).
Kant (1996b) (88–89 [6:438]).
Kant (1996b) (188–191 [6:437–440]). See also (160–161 [6:400–401]).
Kant (1996a) (178–179 [6:185–186]).
Brownlee (2012) (61, n.18). She gives a fuller description of her moral pluralism (quoted above from p. 60) that includes other features, such as acceptance that basic moral values cannot be reduced, ranked, or made commensurable or immune to conflict. Whether to be a monist, in her view, one must deny all these features of her pluralism is not clear to me, but my comments will assume that proposing a single, ultimate moral principle suffices to make one a monist. If a monist were defined as one who denied every feature of her pluralism, then there would be a huge open space between monism and pluralism.
See Brownlee’s description of her moral pluralism, (2012) (60–61).
References
Jonathan Bennett, “The Conscience of Huckleberry Finn,” Philosophy 49 (1974): pp. 123–134.
Kimberley Brownlee, Conscience and Conviction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
Joseph Butler, Five Sermons, Stephen Darwall (ed.), (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1983).
R.M. Hare, The Language of Morals (Oxford University Press, 1952).
R.M. Hare, Freedom and Reason (Oxford University Press, 1963).
R.M. Hare, Moral Thinking (Oxford University Press, 1981).
H.L.A Hart, The Concept of Law (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981).
Thomas E. Hill, Jr., “Kant on Wrongdoing, Desert, and Punishment,” Law and Philosophy 18(1) (1999): pp. 207–241.
Thomas E. Hill, Jr., Human Welfare and Moral Worth: Kantian Perspectives (Oxford University Press, 2002).
Thomas E. Hill, Jr., Virtue, Rules, and Justice: Kantian Aspirations (Oxford University Press, 2012).
Immanuel Kant, Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, Allen Wood and George di Giovanni (eds.), (Cambridge University Press: 1996a).
Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, Mary Gregor (ed.), (Cambridge University Press: 1996b).
Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment. Paul Guyer (ed.), (Cambridge University Press, 2000).
Immanuel Kant, Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, Thomas E. Hill, Jr. and Arnulf Zweig (eds.), (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).
Onora O’Neill, Acting on Principle (New York: Columbia University Press, 1975).
Onora O’Neill, “Consistency in Action,” in Constructions of Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
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Hill, T.E. Conscientious Conviction and Conscience. Criminal Law, Philosophy 10, 677–692 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11572-014-9354-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11572-014-9354-x