Desire-Utilitarianism

Abstract

6.1 We have seen that scepticism with respect to attitude theories in general, which entails the distressing consequence that moral utterances are all false, can be overcome. But there is another less severe kind of scepticism which philosophical laymen would not find as distressing as do or would professional moralists: namely, scepticism about whether it is possible to devise an adequate theory which possesses what John Rawls calls ‘wide reflective equilibrium’, i.e. which explains and predicts the intuitions (attitudes) of IOs and, to some extent, enables us to correct borderline intuitions. We now know that some things are morally good and some things are morally bad and that these are things which are (and would be) favoured, in the case of morally good things, and disfavoured, in the case of morally bad things, by an IO; but we also need a general account of precisely what those things are or should be.