Abstract
Moral theories often issue general principles that explain our moral judgments in terms of underlying moral considerations. But it is unclear whether the general principles have an explanatory role beyond the underlying moral considerations. In order to avoid the redundancy of their principles, two-level theories issue principles that appear to generalize beyond the considerations that ground them. In doing so, the principles appear to overgeneralize. The problem is conspicuous in the case of contractualism, which proposes that moral principles are grounded in generic reasons that operate in only a subset of the cases covered by the relevant principle. Arguments that motivate the use of generic reasons on the basis of guidance, institutional necessity, or fairness are unsatisfactory. But the generality of moral principles can be justified in terms of the idea of a generic interest, which is an interest that all occupants of a standpoint have in virtue of what occupants of the standpoint as such typically take an interest in. The notion of a generic interest therefore acknowledges a distinction between having and taking an interest, and its use in moral theory is a way of giving expression to the significance of autonomy. This is reminiscent of the idea of a normative power; but the idea of a generic interest is less expensive and makes better sense of the way in which autonomy features in our moral lives.
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Notes
It has become commonplace to distinguish between the metaphysical grounding of some moral fact p (what makes p necessary) and its normative grounding (what makes it normatively necessary). See Leary (forthcoming), Bader (2017), and Fine (2012). I abstain from discussion of the relation between these two concepts, and by moral grounding refer to a kind of normative grounding.
It is tempting to frame the project of moral theory in term of explanation, but work on the nature of moral explanation, such as Leibowitz (2011), Schroeder (2014), and Väyrynen (2009, 2013, 2019, forthcoming) suggests that notions such as explanation and justification must be treated with great caution in the moral domain. By making use of the notion of moral grounding I hope to distinguish my subject matter from several otherwise legitimate avenues of theorizing that are suggested by the idea of explaining or justifying moral facts. First among these is the metaethical pursuit which seeks to show the metaphysical underpinnings of the normativity of moral facts, and which may be understood as an attempt to explain how there could be any such facts. Second, there is the project of reconstructing practical reason in a manner that explains the priority that moral facts have amongst the other considerations that bear on what one should do. This project aims to justify the general force of moral requirements, but it may stop short of justifying particular moral requirements. Third, there is the project of showing that our moral judgments are epistemically well-grounded, a project which may well advance by showing that our capacity to make accurate moral judgments is not accidental in light of the kind of creature we are. The success of that project may rest on showing that we have epistemic access to the grounds of particular moral judgments, but the focus is on our epistemic access, rather than the grounds themselves.
The qualifications in this principles are attempts to say what would save an instance of non-compliance with a particular promise from being an impermissible promise-breaking in the first place. Some may think that particular such instances—say those which are responses to unforeseen emergencies—are still promise-breakings, though they are excused for reasons that go to the culpability of the promise-breaker rather than permissibility of their action. But no doubt there are some qualifications to the impermissibility of not complying with one’s promise. Any reader who thinks my statement of a principle of impermissible promise-breaking has failed to come close to the correct qualifications may substitute their own principle for Promising.
Berker (2018) specifies redundancy as the claim that moral principles are not explanation-serving—they could not have any role in explaining our moral judgments about particular cases. We could accept this (roughly Humean) conclusion, except that once we lose our sense that moral principles have an explanatory role, we might also lose confidence that they do a good job reflecting the generality of our patterns of moral judgment (for a different concern see Enoch 2019). That is because the intuitive plausibility of a principle like Promising rests not on the fact that it appears to be a good summary of our particular judgments, but rather on the fact that it appears to play an important role in our deliberation. Displacing it from this role, we may easily come to wonder whether its generality is an accurate summary. In what follows it will be plain that I am not much concerned about redundancy so long as we can vindicate the generality of our patterns of moral judgment.
From a certain viewpoint, the problem may appear to be better described as one of underdetermination. If the Promising appropriately applies in cases X and Y, but our best theory grounds the principle in considerations that appear only in X, then its scope of application is underdetermined by the considerations we have supplied. Too bad for our theory, one might think; but too bad for the principle, whether we correct its scope or our explanation of its scope.
A version of the first strategy, as an explicit response to redundancy, is found in Warnock (1971: 53–70). Presaging Raz, Warnock suggests that the force of a rule is ‘to exclude from practical consideration the particular merits of particular cases, by specifying in advance what is to be done, whatever the circumstances of the particular cases may be’ (65). But (as Warnock agrees) this will not solve the problem. While it may be important from a psychological point of view for deliberation to have the guardrails of exclusionary reasons, the agent who does properly consider all the merits of a particular case will surely come to the conclusion that he should not phi in a case whose merits support the rule. In such a case there is no need for the rule beyond convenience. Where the case’s particular merits do not support the rule, we may wonder why it is then covered by the rule. At this point we are confronted with the problem of overgeneralization.
This claim is familiar from earlier ethical arguments e.g. Singer (1971).
For defense of the claim that G necessarily follows from F, see Trogdon (2013).
The idea of generic reasons also plays a crucial role in Scanlon’s account of the importance of choice (1998: 248–67, especially at 263). My alternative suggestion in what follows is that the importance of choice in fact plays a more fundamental role in moral theory than the generality that the idea of generic reasons aims to capture.
Going beyond Scanlon’s applications, Kumar (2003, 2009, 2018) has noticed that generic reasons might be used to provide a contractualist response to venerable puzzles such as the non-identity problem and the non-consequentialist approach to problems involving risk and aggregation. I set aside whether my alternative can retain the distinctiveness of contractualism in these areas.
In what follows I focus on the possibility that principles are rooted in our epistemic boundedness. Another possibility, but one which could be dealt with along similar lines, is that morality issues principles as a way of accommodating our tendency to overgeneralize—see Lerner and Leslie (2013).
On the distinction between excuse and justification, see Austin (1956), Zimmerman (2004), and Williamson (forthcoming). Williamson is prepared to apply the distinction to the case of justified belief, and the statement in the text above could be read in this way too i.e. one may be sufficiently badly placed to understand what interests bear on one’s phi-ing such that one has an excuse, though no justification, for believing that it is right to phi. This would not detract from the fact that one also has an excuse for phi-ing.
Note that you can take an interest in whether there is a swimming pool or not even if you do not hope that there is a swimming pool. You may hope that there is not, perhaps because you think it wastes water. But note that ‘taking an interest in whether x’ is best understood as ‘taking an interest in knowing whether x.’ Knowing that x is the case, you may now take an interest in x not obtaining.
The threat seems to me to arise insofar as interests are presumptively universal. Suppose it serves my own autonomy that I have more than others, by providing me with opportunities for making others serve me and enjoying positional status. Still, morality does not respond to such an interest insofar as there is no reason for me to have it specially; and it does not respond to such an interest on behalf of everyone, since it makes no sense for each to have more than everyone else.
I don’t mean to narrow the value of control to what Scanlon calls its ‘predictive’ or ‘instrumental’ value (1998: 251–53). Perhaps one reason that a promisee has a generic interest worth protecting is that, even where promissory assurance plays no actual role in their life, having the open possibility of relying upon the promisor’s assurance represents the independent fact that the promisee is vulnerable to the promisor’s actions, or stands in some other relation of power to the promisor. (Consider especially the dynamics of promises in intimate relationships described by Shiffrin 2008.) There is a non-instrumental connection between the promisee’s choice and their interest in the quality of their relationship with the promisor in such cases, though its importance stands in need of vindication.
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Acknowledgments
This paper was presented at the British Society for Ethical Theory Annual Conference 2019. I am grateful to the organizers, and to audience members for valuable comments. I also received valuable comments from members of the Penn Normative Philosophy Group, and two anonymous reviewers. I am especially indebted to Rahul Kumar, Errol Lord, Pekka Väyrynen, and Daniel Wodak for patient discussion of the issues. I regret that I was unable to accommodate all of the wise recommendations I received.
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Jonker, J. Generic Moral Grounding. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 23, 23–38 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-020-10074-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-020-10074-3