Abstract
Many of us think that perspective-taking is relevant to moral judgment. In this paper I claim that Scanlon’s contractualism provides an appealing and distinctive account of why this is so. Contractualism interprets our moral judgments as making claims about the reasons of individuals in various situations, reasons that we can only recognise by considering their perspectives. Contractualism thereby commits itself to the view that our capacity for moral judgment depends on our capacity for perspective-taking. I show that neither utilitarianism nor Kantianism assign a similar significance to our capacity for perspective-taking.
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Notes
The Golden Rule is sometimes read to require projecting oneself in the other’s situation rather than adopting the other’s perspective. As Derek Parfit points out, this does not seem to be the most plausible interpretation of the Golden Rule as it leads to counterintuitive implications (see Parfit 2011, pp. 324–325). Whether the Golden Rule requires perspective-taking does not, however, depend on which interpretation is correct: since both imagining oneself in the other’s position and imagining oneself as being the other in his or her position are forms of perspective-taking (cf. Batson 2009), then on either interpretation applying the Golden Rule requires perspective-taking. I say more about the various forms of perspective-taking in Section 3.
The word ‘utilitarianism’ is generally used to refer not to an account of the subject matter of moral judgment but to a family of theories about the standard of moral evaluation, including theories such as act and rule utilitarianism. Philosophical utilitarianism and the various variants of ‘normative utilitarianism’ are not unrelated, of course. If we accept philosophical utilitarianism as the correct account of the subject matter of morality, it seems that we must also accept some variant of normative utilitarianism. As Scanlon puts it, “[i]f all that counts morally is the well-being of individuals, no one of whom is singled out as counting for more than the others, and if all that matters in the case of each individual is the degree to which his or her well-being is affected, then it would seem to follow that the basis of moral appraisal is the goal of maximizing the sum of individual well-being” (1982, p. 109). Accepting normative utilitarianism, however, does not require that one also accepts philosophical utilitarianism as the correct account of the subject matter of morality. Indeed, when he first described contractualism, Scanlon (1982) acknowledged the possibility of defending normative utilitarianism on the basis of a contractualist account of moral judgment.
Haidt et al. (1993) and colleagues have studied our responses to the first example.
As this description make clear, perspective-taking is related to empathy. Most researchers, however, take empathy to include a vicarious affective component; ‘feeling what one takes another to be feeling’ (Prinz 2011). This component does not seem to be essential to perspective-taking: we seem to be able to imagine how another feels without feeling what we take him or her to be feeling. While perspective-taking is conceptually distinct from empathy, it does often evoke empathy; indeed, when researchers want participants to experience empathy with a target person they sometimes manipulate them into adopting that person’s perspective (e.g. Batson et al. 1997).
I intend to be neutral on how people adopt other perspectives. In the philosophy of mind, theory and simulation theory are the best known accounts of how we do this. Nicholas Epley and his colleagues (2004) provide an empirically informed explanation of our capacity for perspective-taking that is similar to simulation theory.
I am indebted to an anonymous reviewer for suggestions that helped me clarify this point.
One reason for this is practical. As Scanlon writes: “[s]ince we cannot know, when we are making this assessment, which particular individuals will be affected by it in which ways (who will be affected as an agent required to act a certain way, who as a potential victim, who as a bystander, and so on) our assessment cannot be based on the particular aims, preferences, and other characteristics of specific individuals” (1998, p. 204).
Note that insofar as contractualism assumes not only that it is possible to form judgments about the subject matter of morality but also that people can do so reliably under various types of circumstances that call for moral judgment, there are further questions about our skill in perspective-taking that cannot be answered so quickly.
For a discussion of what empirical findings show about the role of perspective-taking in moral judgment, see Timmerman (2014), Chapter 3.
See footnote 2 for an explanation why. One can imagine versions of satisficing utilitarianism that hold that moral judgments are true when they make correct claims about what promotes welfare adequately rather than what promotes it most (cf. Vallentyne 2007). The argument presented in this paragraph also counts for such variants: it seems that for any plausible criterion of adequacy, we can imagine a pair of alternatives, one of which evidently satisfies the criterion without us having to engage in perspective-taking to see so.
If we assume that the well-being of individuals cannot be specified independently of their perspectives, it seems that perspective-taking will be needed to understand information about effects on well-being. This does not affect my conclusion, however. That utilitarianism in combination with such a notion of well-being but not with other notions requires perspective-taking still means that utilitarianism, taken on its own, does not imply that moral judgment requires perspective-taking. It is also worth noting that such a notion of well-being seems to be in tension with the utilitarian idea that the welfare of different individuals can be aggregated. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for raising this issue and providing helpful suggestions.
I believe this is also true for reasons based on the effects that acceptance of a principle would have on an individual’s well-being, but the point is clearer with respect to other considerations.
I wish to thank an anonymous referee for helping me clarify this issue.
For other examples in which contractualism yields more plausible answers than Kantianism, see Parfit (2011).
Many thanks to Frank Hindriks, Pauline Kleingeld, Bart Streumer, Herman Veluwenkamp and two anonymous reviewers for Ethical Theory and Moral Practice for stimulating comments and helpful suggestions.
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Timmerman, P. Contractualism and the Significance of Perspective-Taking. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 18, 909–925 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-014-9543-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-014-9543-7