Abstract
The (perhaps too ambitious) aim of this work is to find out which is the (most) acceptable moral code, that is, the social morality we all should adopt (cf. Sect. 1.5 above). In earlier chapters I have scrutinized the proposals made by (what I claim are) the most plausible candidates, viz. consequentialism (C) and deontological ethics (D). I have argued that neither proposal is (fully) acceptable. Is it then possible to show that either C or D is (wholly) unacceptable? In the previous chapter I argued that the answer is No. I also argued that hitherto attempted reconciliations of C and D have not been successful. In this final chapter I will present my own proposal as to how C and D may be reconciled.
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Notes
- 1.
It does not, it is true, involve a negotiated compromise between conflicting interests. According to this theory, people make no agreements—explicitly or tacitly—with each other; rather each person (hypothetically) agrees to (conform to) a certain moral code—on condition that others do so as well (see Sect. 7.2). But this is enough to make my theory a contractualist one. Requiring negotiated compromise for a theory to be contractualist would be to exclude, e.g., Hobbes, Kant, Rousseau, and Rawls from the contractualist camp.
- 2.
Elisabeth Ashford and Tim Mulgan, “Contractualism”, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2008 Edition, Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2008/entries/contractualism/), p. 3. Modern versions of Hobbesian contractarianism are developed in, e.g., James Buchanan, The Limits of Liberty: Between Anarchy and Leviathan (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1975) and David Gauthier, Morals by Agreement; versions of Kantian contractualism are set forth in, e.g., John Rawls, A Theory of Justice and David Richards, A Theory of Reasons for Action (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970).
- 3.
It is true that Gauthier (op. cit.) advocates, what he calls, “constrained maximization”: people should school themselves not to take advantage of those who will not take advantage of them. But the alleged reason for becoming a constrained maximizer is that it is straightforwardly maximizing to do so.
- 4.
T. M. Scanlon, What We Owe to Each Other (Cambridge, MA and London, England: Harvard University Press, 1998).
- 5.
Will Kymlicka, “The Social Contract Tradition”, in Peter Singer (ed.), A Companion to Ethics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), pp. 186–96; p. 190.
- 6.
This means that I assume that there is exactly one code that satisfies the condition. Later on I will try to substantiate this assumption.
- 7.
The last qualification, I take it, excludes the psychopath as well as the amoralist (should he exist).
- 8.
That an acceptable moral code ensures efficient co-operation follows from the claim, stated above, that morality should be in the service of people; the requirement that co-operation should be fair expresses the principle of moral equality, soon to be explained.
- 9.
Shelly Kagan, Normative Ethics, p. 255 f. (Notice that Kagan uses “contractarianism” to refer indiscriminately to both Hobbesian contractarianism and Kantian contractualism.) In my opinion (see Sect. 7.5), we are bound to obey the resulting rules only with respect to people who themselves obey them with respect to us. I do not think that Kagan disagrees.
- 10.
Jonathan Dancy, “Moral realism”, Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), 6: 534–39; p. 534.
- 11.
It might be claimed that no substantive moral principle can conflict with any meta-ethical principle: since you cannot derive an “ought” from a meta-ethical “is”, there are no logical or conceptual relations between principles of the first and of the second kind.
- 12.
Of course, in certain cases actions which are forbidden for one person are permitted for another. If, e.g., X is a policeman, an acceptable moral code may permit him to use violence to an extent that other citizens are not permitted to.
- 13.
Arthur Danto, Mysticism and Morality: Oriental Thought and Moral Philosophy (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), p. 43 f. According to Hinduism, Danto states, each one of us “must find his way, and though it is a plight that we have in common, essentially there is nothing we can do for one another” (ibid., p. 49).
- 14.
Even if there is only one true metaphysical view of this kind, it is highly probable that people cannot agree as to which one it is. So someone may falsely believe that M is the true metaphysical view and, on account of this, falsely believe that C is the moral code he would ideally agree to. Thus, as I said some pages ago, according to AC we can be mistaken about what code we ourselves would ideally agree to.
(In the present case one may, of course, question the underlying normative Hindu premise—that it is not the case that one ought to treat human beings of different castes as equals. Would qualified people really agree to this principle?)
- 15.
It is, of course, important that the moral code is realistic, in the sense that people could (motivationally and otherwise) conform to it.
- 16.
Remember that C* and D* are the, in my opinion, most plausible versions of, respectively, C (consequentialism) and D (deontological ethics). C* was introduced at the end of Sect. 4.3 and D* at the end of Sect. 3.4. (What I will say concerning C* and D* in Sect. 7.4, and many things I will say in Sect. 7.5, are, however, just as relevant to most other versions of C and D.)
- 17.
Derek Parfit, On What Matters, Draft of 28 April 2008 (Derek Parfit’s Homepage).
- 18.
Ibid., p. 268. Parfit mentions (on p. 314) a variant of this formula in which “universal acceptance” is substituted by “being universally followed”, but he does not attempt to decide which formula is to be preferred. Of course, also AC could be similarly changed.
- 19.
T. M. Scanlon, What We Owe to Each Other (Cambridge, Mass,: Harvard University Press, 1998), p. 4 f. (Parfit’s rendering and discussion of Scanlon’s Formula is on p. 318 f.)
- 20.
Parfit, op. cit., p. 296. As with KCF, there is a variant of this formula, mentioned on p. 314, where “universally accepted” is substituted by “universally followed”.
- 21.
In Sect. 6.1, I rejected rule consequentialism. But if (as I claim) AC entails KFC, and if (as Parfit claims) KFC entails UARC, then AC entails (a version of) rule consequentialism. In that case, I cannot consistently both accept AC and reject (all versions of) rule consequentialism.
- 22.
The UA-optimific principles (“UA” being short for “universal acceptance”) are the principles mentioned by UARC, that is, the principles whose universal acceptance would make things go best.
- 23.
Parfit, op. cit., p. 296 f.
- 24.
Ibid., p. 291 f.
- 25.
Ibid., p. 310.
- 26.
Ibid., p. 302. On p. 300, Parfit generalizes this claim so that it applies “both to our own well-being and to the well-being of those to whom we have close ties, such as our close relatives and those we love”. (But here our partiality is said to be permitted but not required.)
- 27.
Cf. my discussion, in the first part of Sect. 3.3, of Parfit’s claim that CSM is directly collectively self-defeating. Even if each individual agent follows UARC or CSM, they sometimes fail to bring about the best outcome—due to lack of communication and/or lack of trust.
- 28.
John Harris, “The Survival Lottery”, Ch. 5 in his Violence and Responsibility (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980). It is, of course, somewhat misleading to say that Harris “advocates” the lottery. Harris thinks that the lottery is “sound in principle but [alas] self-defeating in practice” (p. 82) since it tends to lead to “a gradual deterioration of the health of any society which operates it” (p. 79). This, he thinks, is due to two circumstances. One is that “the computer [used to administrate the lottery] would select only healthy donors, thus […] gradually leading to a society in which those with healthy organs, and perhaps healthy living patterns, were weeded out” (p. 80). The second is that that it would remove “disincentives to imprudent action” (ibid.), since people could then carelessly count on having their diseased organs replaced.
I think that neither circumstance is in fact an obstacle to implementing the lottery. Firstly, it is seldom the case that all of a person’s vital organs are diseased and therefore unsuitable for being reused. And, secondly, people could be warned that those with unhealthy living patterns would be allowed only a small probability of themselves having a transplant should they need one. This, I am sure, would deter at least many people from debauchery.
- 29.
Ibid., p. 70.
- 30.
It is sometimes alleged that, as used in moral contexts, saying that you ought to do something implies (or suggests, presupposes, etc.) that there are reasons for doing it, whereas saying that you shall do something does not imply this. If that is true, “shall” does not imply “ought” in these contexts. In my use of the terms, however, there is no such difference: both terms are meant to be reason-implying.
- 31.
M* is thus rather similar to J. S. Mill’s theory in Ch. 5 of his Utilitarianism and also to the one proposed by J. O. Urmson in his “Saints and Heroes”. We should look for a theory, Urmson says, “that will allow for both absolute duties, which, in Mill’s phrase, can be exacted from a man like a debt, to omit which is to do wrong and to deserve censure, and which may be embodied in formal rules or principles, and also for a range of actions which are of moral value and which an agent may feel called upon to perform, but which cannot be demanded and whose omission cannot be called wrong-doing.” (J. O. Urmson, “Saints and Heroes”, in Joel Feinberg, Moral Concepts: 60–73; p, 67; originally published in A. I. Melden (ed.), Essays in Moral Philosophy (Washington: University of Washington Press, 1958): 198–216.)
- 32.
Ibid., p. 65.
- 33.
The meaning of “ideally” here is, mutatis mutandis, the same as in the above formulation of AC. If somebody ideally prefers a code X to any other code, then he ideally agrees to X.
- 34.
This is not, of course, quite true. According to some versions of PSC so-called anti-social (sadistic, malevolent, etc.) preferences do not count, whereas according to other versions only self-regarding preferences count.
- 35.
An analogue to the present version of PSC, but concerned with individual actions, is the “self-interest-vote” utilitarianism discussed by Ronald Glossop in “Is Hume a ‘Classical Utilitarian’?”, Hume Studies, 2 (1976): 1–16; p. 2 f. Like the present version, this version is not sensitive to intensities of preferences.
- 36.
Note that the second and the third of the above arguments are quite different: the second is about preferences had by people in the actual world, the third is about preferences had by people in two merely possible worlds.
- 37.
Of course, these terms are sometimes used in different, more narrowly circumscribed ways and are in these contexts not synonymous.
- 38.
That one ought to bring about anything intrinsically good and ought not to bring about anything intrinsically bad means that (i) one ought to maximize the good and (ii) one ought to minimize the bad. Consequentialism as usually understood is the combination of (i) and (ii) with (iii), the sum-ranking principle, which says that the value of the consequences of an action is assessed by just adding up their positive and negative values. (See the “Introduction” to Amartya Sen and Bernard Williams (eds.), Utilitarianism and beyond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 4.) What I call, maybe somewhat gratuitously, the Core of C* consists of (i) and (ii). (iii), which is what gives rise to the Argument from Horrendous Actions (see Sect. 5.3), is excluded by the first cause of M*. (I offer no substitute for the sum-ranking principle.) My theory, then, bears some resemblance to Frankena’s theory, discussed in Sect. 6.1.
- 39.
The distinction presupposed by the question is the same as the distinction made by Rawls between strict compliance theory and partial compliance theory. (See Rawls, A Theory of Justice, p. 8 f.; cf. also Sect. 2.3.)
- 40.
That a person is innocent here means that, at the time in question, he does not harm or intends to harm other people.
- 41.
Since benefiting other people is supererogatory, not obligatory (see the beginning of this section), there is a demand, not a duty, to benefit.
- 42.
David Hume, An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals, p. 86.
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Österberg, J. (2019). My Solution. In: Towards Reunion in Ethics. Philosophical Studies Series, vol 138. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-12410-6_7
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