Abstract
There are many ways of criticizing a moral theory or principle, and it is not my intention to propose a formal procedure to accomplish this task. I will mention some features upon which I think it might be useful to reflect. Some of them will have direct relevance for the discussion of human dignity; others only indirect relevance.
Philosophers these days frequently elicit “our institutions” about this or that and appeal, implicity or explicitly, to our feelings and sentiments, and to moral consensus. They invent imaginary cases and tell us bizarre stories which are intended to illuminate these institutions. Pick up any recent journal or Moral Problems anthology, and it seems as if everyone is going about ethics in a similar way.
William Shaw “Intuition and Moral Philosophy”
Whatever the avowed methodological stance. it’s a radically rare ethicist who’ll actually advocate, and continue to maintain, a morally substantive proposition that’s strongly at odds with his reactions to more than a few cases he considers.
Peter Unger Living High and Letting Die
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Notes
Cf. M. White (1981) and also W. D. Ross who has claimed that “the moral convictions of thoughtful and well-educated people are the data of ethics just as sense-perceptions are the data of natural science” (1930: 41).
If this is what we think, we will use a sense of intuition which in D. D. Raphael’s terms leads more to probability than to necessity, i.e. if having an intuition is analogous to making an observation, then it must be something weaker than “an intellectual grasp of a necessary truth” (1994: 63).
The ambition may concern both direct and indirect changes, i.e. either changing the world oneself or changing the people (by putting moral pressure on them, for instance) so that they change the world.
In his first articles on the subject Hare thought that the universalizability requirement is conceptually tied to the word “moral”. Later his thesis seems instead to be that it is tied to the word “ought”. See Hare (1963: 37).
Cf. John Deigh (1995: 751) who seems to claim that it is not at all a consistency requirement in the sense of a demand not to contradict oneself.
Here, just as Hare seems to do (1988: 284), I have to assume that Leibniz’s so-called principle of indiscernibles which in Rønnow-Rasmussen’s formulation states that “exact similarity amounts to identity” (1993: 111) might be false. Otherwise being in another’s exact shoes would be the same as being identical with her. This principle can of course be called into question. See for instance Zeno Vendler, who claims that “there are bodies, and there are persons, but there are no ‘I’s’. If I imagine being you, I do not fancy ‘transporting’ something into your body, or ‘mixing’ two entities. What I do is assume, as far as it is in the power of my imagination, the coherent set of experiences corresponding to your present situation (your ‘Humean self as it were). But, as Hume pointed out, there is no specific experience of an ‘I’ in that totality. Nor is there one in mine. The ‘I’ as such has no content: it is the empty frame of consciousness indifferent to content. Consequently, by constructing in my fancy the image of what I would experience in your situation, I ipso facto represent your experiences” (1988: 176). Thus, imagining being another person I just imagine what it would be like to see a situation from his perspective. I believe, however, that there is a distinction here between imagining being like another and imagining being another, since the last expression is equivalent to saying that one imagines that one particular thing is not that particular thing but instead another particular thing, and that does not sound intelligible in my ears. I am not claiming that this will refute Vendler’s view; what I am doing is more like describing an alternative view. But, once again, one reason why I feel free to reject the principle of indiscernibles without any strong argument is that also Hare seems to reject it, at least the strong version described above.
What I say of universalizability should not be seen as a faithful interpretation of Hare.
I owe this reflection to Wlodek Rabinowicz.
Bernard Williams, for instance, does not think so: “We just don’t know what we are talking about if we suppose that that very person hadn’t been a human being” (1990: 178). See also Saul Kripke who expresses this idea somewhat more guardedly: “supposing Nixon is in fact a human being, it would seem that we cannot think of a possible counterfactual situation in which he was, say, an inanimate object; perhaps it is not even possible for him not to have been a human being” (1980: 46).
Cf. Slobodchikoff (1976: 1).
Observe that essentialism in this context is fairly innocent and concerns merely properties essential for membership in a species. Certain properties are thus defining properties of a species or a natural kind. There is also a non-trivial form of essentialism, according to which these properties defining a natural kind are essential for the individual that possesses them. Sober interprets essentialism in the innocent way.
See also Mayr (1963: 19 ff.).
These are not the only alternatives. For instance, there are variants of the second alternative not discussed here. D. L. Hull (1976) wants to define species merely in terms of its continuity in space and time. See also Elliot Sober (1993), who holds that species are historical entities. The main problem with this suggestion is, in my view, that it yields an unnecessary indeterminacy of classification. Who could tell whether we humans consist of one or two species?
See also Roger Trigg (1982: 95).
Being a human being is therefore a non-essential property for me as an individual. But it is also what P. F. Snowdon calls a non-abiding sort, which is a sort “to which a thing can belong at a given time and then cease to belong, despite remaining in existence” (1990: 87). Observe, however, that Snowdon thinks that “being an animal” is an abiding sort, meaning that if an animal belongs to it “at a given time, then that entity must belong to it as long as that entity remains in being” (1990: 87). For a discussion of this distinction, see also Stefan Berglund (1995: 28-9, 48-9). Observe that the question of essentialism concerns what property one has to have in every possible world, whereas the question of abidingness concerns what property one can have in this world and then lose.
This as well as other aspects of the universalizability thesis has been treated in depth by other philosophers. See, for instance, Rønnow-Rasmussen (1993), Wlodek Rabinowicz (1979) and Torbjörn Tännsjö (1974).
Which I owe to Wlodek Rabinowicz.
Which is an effect of the fact that universalizability discussed here is not an impartiality thesis, but instead a thesis about what Richard Norman has called consistency and impersonality (1983: 117).
My account of moral intuitions will be meta-ethically neutral in so far as the nature of these intuitions is concerned. Therefore I will speak interchangeably of moral intuitions, moral beliefs, moral feelings and moral preferences. Nevertheless, I believe that a meta-ethical analysis has to do justice to the fact that all these aspects of a moral attitude somehow coexist.
Some of the problems with such an alleged analogy are discussed by James Griffin (1996: 12 ff.).
The distinction between principles and situations seems to provide room for a choice between generalism and particularism, for instance the kind of particularism defended by Jonathan Dancy (1993a) and (1981). But observe that Dancy rejects the universalizability thesis that we took for granted in the previous chapter. Compare also John McDowell (1985).
Compare William Shaw: “The basic justification for intuitionistic procedures is simply that, despite difficulties, there is no other way to proceed, no alternative to pulling ourselves up by our own bootstraps” (1980: 130). Compare also Samuel Scheffler: “it is difficult for me to see how there could be any plausible conception of ethical justification that did not assign a substantial role of some kind of ethical beliefs and intuitions” (1992: 144). See also Walter Sinnott-Armstrong who writes that the “most common way to argue for intuitionism is to rule out its alternatives one by one” (1992: 629).
Jonathan Bennett calls this “the neutrality thesis”, which is equivalent to a negative answer to the following question: “If someone’s behavior has a bad state of affairs as a consequence, is the morality of his conduct affected by whether he made the consequence obtain or only allowed it to do so?” (1993: 76).
One point which Hare makes here, but which I have not tried to make, is about the genesis of intuitions. Hare believes that they are shaped by ourselves or alternatively by our moral upbringing, which may be a result of our own or someone else’s efforts. Moral intuitions are in his view chosen and implanted in order to reach a moral result determined independently of any moral intuitions.
Mackie’s arguments are by no means fatal to every version of objectivism. One way to escape his argument is simply to challenge the Humean account of motivation on which the criticism is built. Cf. also Thomas Nagel (1986) and John McDowell (1985).
See Michael Tooley (1983: 29).
We may also have derived moral principles that are not very specific. For instance, consider Mill’s On Liberty, where he states a very general principle, namely the well-known principle saying that “the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others” (1978: 9), and from which he derives fundamental human liberties, such as freedom of pursuing our own good in our own way. Observe that this principle is not a basic one, but instead derived in turn from the principle of utility. Given some important facts of human life, for instance that a society in order to prosper has to promote and encourage personality and individuality, the principle of utility will yield something like Mill’s liberty principle.
Again, I am not here defending pure particularism against generalism, at least not if particularism involves denial of the universalizability thesis. But I think there is a case for giving priority to the reactions to the particular case before the reactions to general principles without claiming that the second kind of reaction is without any value. So in the end the reasonable position might be some kind of coherentism which weighs intuitions concerning particular situations against intuitions concerning general principles but which, in view of these arguments, places the former kind of intuition slightly before the latter. Cf. also Tom L. Beauchamp’s and James F. Childress’ discussion of deductivism, inductivism and coherentism (1994: 14 ff.). See also Peter Unger, who would describe the conflict discussed here as a conflict between “our moral intuitions on particular cases” on the one hand and “our general moral common sense” on the other (1996: 28).
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Egonsson, D. (1998). Methodological Background. In: Dimensions of Dignity. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-4974-7_2
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