Abstract
Before beginning my final attempt to find an alternative to moral skepticism, perhaps I should stipulate the requirements that any theory of moral knowledge must meet, if it is to be successful. Two are essential. First, it must enable us to make some statement asserting a moral obligation, whose truth we can justify without committing the deductive fallacy. To do this we must seek, in the manner of Prichard and the intuitionists, some moral proposition whose truth we can demonstrate to be self-evident. In demonstrating the self-evidence of this moral proposition, however, we must use a method that avoids begging any crucial questions, a feat which intuitionism is incapable of performing.
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It should be noted that I do not rest my case on this particular example or on any example, for that matter, but rather on logical considerations. The illustrations I use serve the purpose simply of helping to make clear what these logical considerations are and how they can be applied to practical affairs. I would agree with Kant that principles of morality cannot be derived from examples.
My historian friends assure me that the story is apocryphal; nevertheless it persists. Suetonius tells a somewhat similar story about the military career of Caesar Augustus so perhaps it is just one of those legends that are brought up-to-date by each generation. That the event I describe ever actually occurred is, after all, not crucial to my argument.
I shall limit my discussion here to what may be called extreme egoism, the view that each individual ought to seek his own welfare exclusively, without any regard to the welfare of others, rather than moderate egoism, which holds that each individual should always give precedence to his own welfare over that of others yet at the same time acknowledges that there are situations in which an individual can rightly be said to have duties to others. Although both types of egoism are incompatible with my principle of personal impartiality, only the extreme egoistic position, by denying the existence of moral obligation altogether, implies the impossibility of moral knowledge. Hence, I must refute it if I am to defend my thesis that we have duties and can know that we do.
There is one other argument that an egoist could use to avoid moral censure under my principle. I shall discuss it in the next chapter (8.1).
In my Rightness and Goodness. Although I would not now accept either the conceptual framework in which my argument in that book is cast nor the appeal to moral insight on which many of my main conclusions rest, I still believe that the “axiological” position that I defend in it (which is an expanded form of ideal utilitarianism) provides a more satisfactory account of the moral life than the alternative view offered by the deontologists.
I have omitted from the theory the concepts of Tightness and wrongness, as attributes of our actions, as well, for the same reasons that I give for omitting good and evil.
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© 1966 Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, Netherlands
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Johnson, O.A. (1966). Reason and Duty. In: Moral Knowledge. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-9317-7_7
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