Abstract
In Reason and Morality and in numerous essays, Alan Gewirth has attempted to show that every purposive agent is logically committed to a supreme moral principle purely by dint of his or her status as such an agent.2 Having defined the basic conditions of purposiveness, Gewirth maintains that each agent is committed to a positive evaluation of those conditions (as applied to herself) and is thereby committed to some sweeping claims about the right of every agent to enjoy those fundamental conditions. Since these claims to which every agent is committed are the stuff of a supreme moral principle, such a principle is binding on everyone to whom it could possibly be addressed. (One should readily notice some resemblances between this effort by Gewirth to ground morality and the effort by Finnis to refute skepticism, which was studied in Essay 1.)
‘They will get it straight one day at the Sorbonne. We shall return at twilight from the lecture Pleased that the irrational is rational.’
(Wallace Stevens, Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction1)
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Notes
Reason and Morality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978) (hereinafter cited as RM). Other relevant writings by Gewirth, both antecedent and subsequent to Reason and Morality, are listed in the ‘References’ to Deryck Beyleveld, The Dialectical Necessity of Morality: An Analysis and Defense of Alan Gewirth’s Argument to the Principle of Generic Consistency (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991) (hereinafter cited as DNM), 489–93. Gewirth’s latest book is The Community of Rights (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), to which we do not respond here. In the sentence to which this note is attached, and elsewhere throughout this essay, we use the word ‘committed’ only in its logical sense — as opposed to any psychological sense. We generally use female pronouns in this essay when referring to agents, not because we are politically correct but because we thereby shall have made clear that the pronouns do not refer to Gewirth or Beyleveld. Although we came up with our objections to Gewirth’s moral theory before consulting the secondary literature at all, our essay is in certain respects akin to a number of critical analyses which Beyleveld tries to rebut in DNM, 201–31, 257–81. Still, many of the analyses that partly anticipate our own have committed faux pas or have developed in questionable directions. We try to avoid such stumbles, and, more generally, we try to present our critique with an extremely tight focus. Moreover, we furnish some specific lines of argument that have not been put forward by our predecessors. At any rate, Beyleveld obviously feels that he has succeeded in countering the earlier critiques; Gewirth presumably feels the same way, given his effusive praise of Beyleveld in the Foreword to DNM. We have therefore felt a need to re-emphasize the unsoundness of Gewirth’s basic argument — in an attack that should be more telling than previous attacks because it takes account of Beyleveld’s parries.
Because the notion of ‘having a reason’ plays a prominent role in our critique of Gewirth and Beyleveld, we should of fer a brief preliminary explication. (We here opt for an explication that is relatively expansive and thus in keeping with the Kantianism of Gewirth and Beyleveld. Some philosophers have opted for a narrower explication of ‘having a reason’. See, e.g., Philippa Foot, ‘Reasons for Action and Desires’, in Virtues and Vices (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 148; Bernard Williams, ‘Internal and External Reasons’, in Moral Luck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 101; Bernard Williams, ‘Replies’, in J. E. J. Altham and Ross Harrison (eds), World, Mind, and Ethics: Essays on the Ethical Philosophy of Bernard Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 185, 186–94, 214–15. However, we wish to avoid any stipulations that would make our critique too easy.) In our usage, to say that an agent X has a reason for doing ϕ is to say that his doing ϕ will further one or more of his interests or that his doing ϕ is required by a valid moral precept (or by the circumstances that render the precept applicable). Now, as will be allowed repeatedly herein, someone who has a reason for doing ϕ can easily be unaware of that fact; a person can be unaware of the means for furthering his interests, and can likewise be unaware or scornful of the valid moral principles that apply to his conduct. Hence, to say that someone has a reason for doing ϕ is not necessarily to say that the person knows that he has such a reason. Even more obviously, it is not necessarily to say that the person accepts the reason or seeks to act upon it.
We do not mean to suggest, of course, that an agent acting for prudential reasons cannot be acting out of concern for others. Everything hinges on how a person has defined his or her own interests; an altruistic person will be advancing her own interests by engaging in self-sacrificing acts. When prudence is broadly understood to cover all preferences or interests, it obviously encompasses solicitous preferences as well as selfish or neutral preferences. But exactly because prudence covers all preferences or interests (selfish as well as solicitous), a prudential reason for action can be a nonmoral reason or even an immoral reason. Purely on the basis of information that someone is acting out of prudence, we can never validly infer that the person is acting for moral reasons. Prudence is compatible with moral concern but does not entail it. As Gewirth and Beyleveld are both very well aware, they cannot presume that the chosen purposes of each particular agent are moral purposes. Gewirth’s argument cannot work unless it applies to agents’ purposes regardless of what those purposes are. Hence, our statement (in the text) that ‘the only available reasons for action are prudential reasons’ is meant to indicate that the only available reasons are reasons that are not necessarily moral.
Alan Gewirth, “‘Ought” and Reasons for Action’, 35 Southern Journal of Philosophy 171 (1997) (hereinafter cited by page numbers only).
of course, certain readers may think that some of the commitments involved in a loving relationship cannot be properly described as either moral or prudential, and that they likewise cannot be properly described as both moral and prudential. For an account of friendship along these lines, see Joseph Raz, The Authority of Law (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), 253–6. Cf. Joseph Raz, The Morality of Freedom (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 33. Although we feel that such a position takes too narrow a view of morality and prudence — a far narrower view of morality than Gewirth’s, for example — we have no wish to quarrel about this point. After all, the lover/beloved relationship can hardly serve in any event as a model for the fundamental relationships among Gewirthian agents; if Gewirth were to assume at the outset that the basic interaction among agents involves largely the same degree of mutual concern that characterizes the interaction between two people in love, then he would be flagrantly presupposing the ties of mutual supportiveness which he has to demonstrate.
We here of fer only a rough account of the distinction. For a more precise and nuanced account, see Matthew Kramer, ‘Scrupulousness Without Scruples: A Critique of Lon Fuller and His Defenders’, 18 Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 235 (1998).
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© 1999 Matthew H. Kramer
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Kramer, M.H. (1999). Reason Without Reasons: A Critique of Alan Gewirth’s Moral Philosophy. In: In the Realm of Legal and Moral Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230377493_11
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