This Is Ethical Theory

By Jan Narveson

Ethical questions lie at the very heart of all philosophy, and no one is better equipped to untangle the many facets of ethical theory than respected thinker and professor Jan Narveson. Drawing from theoretical notions as well as everyday applications, Narveson simplifies these nuanced ideas for any beginning ethicist. Discussing theoretical elements ranging from intuitionism to naturalism, emotivism to metaethics, Narveson’s approach to this complex topic is one that any reader will find accessible.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Court
• Release date: Nov 5, 2015
• ISBN: 9780812699357

Book preview

Preface

This is not quite your ordinary introduction to ethical theory, but I hope it is not too far off that model either. People with no previous background in ethical theory can certainly read this book. On the other hand, I certainly intend for people who do have such a background, including many colleagues and other professionals, to read it. I make many novel claims and arguments.

This is neither a history nor a historical introduction, but I frequently refer to various classics. The reader will not fail to notice my interest and affection for those endlessly fascinating writings. In my bibliography I mention a set of those, as well as the many books and papers I have singled out for discussion.

I not only discuss many theories, including all of the historically popular theories, but I also put forth a new theory, the one that seems to me to be the best general account of morals. I distinguish between moral theory in particular and a much more general subject that I call ethics, in the appropriately more general sense that I try to spell out in part 2. That more general subject I do not propose a theory of, and suppose—in agreement with most of my fellow professional philosophers—that we need not and probably should not have such a theory, except in a sense in which perhaps everyone has one, and in which, anyway, a huge variety can be found.

It remains to thank quite a few people. First, there are my students down through a lifetime of university teaching. So many of these have provided stimulus, inspiration, and the peculiar kind of pleasure that only discourse with young minds can bring. Second, there are many, many people with whom I have discussed many of these matters, and the still more whose works I am familiar with but who did not make it into these pages—the book is much longer than originally intended already. I am especially grateful to David Gauthier, the influence of whose ideas will be, I hope, obvious. Finally, there are my dear and remarkable family, and many good friends, among whom I must single out Mr. James Leger for no end of helpful services and ideas over several decades.

Introduction: Ethical Theorizing

What It’s About

Everybody—well, almost everybody—occasionally thinks or says that something is right or wrong, ought or ought not to be done, is a good or bad thing to do; or that someone is a good or bad person, a good guy or a creep; or that some way to live is a good or bad one. Almost all of us have a bundle of more or less definite moral beliefs, very likely—say, that killing innocent people or lying is wrong. But almost anyone old enough to be reading this kind of book will also have noticed that every now and then there is serious disagreement between, say, herself and someone else, or among some people you know or have read about, concerning the rights and wrongs of someone’s actions or some institution’s programs. When that happens, it quite possibly has occurred to you to wonder how such disagreements might be settled in a reasonable way. How do we figure out who’s right? And you may also have encountered people—perhaps even yourself—who deny that such issues can be settled, perhaps on the ground that ethics is subjective or some such dismissive category. If so, books such as this one are written for people like you. For this book is about ethical theory. Theorists worry about things like that, and attempt to do something about them.

So what is ethical theory? An old-fashioned view of the matter will have it that the point of ethical theory is to get to the root of the matter—to try to come up with the true general picture of what’s going on when we make ethical judgments, along with some sort of general recommended program of conduct. But there are newer fashions, and prominent among them are ones that involve major doubts about the possibility of doing any such thing as getting to the root of the matter. They ask, Whose justice? Which rationality?¹ And they will tell us about the failure of the Enlightenment and that there is no absolute standpoint from which we can arrive at absolute moral truths.² The variety of positions about such things among professional philosophers is quite disconcerting, indeed. Perhaps it attests to the plausibility of the contention that there is no truth to be found. We will have to consider that idea, and we will, presently. But interestingly, among this same set of thinkers, there is likely to be a much smaller degree of disagreement about many concrete issues of the day, and very little indeed about certain very general principles of morality. No one seriously thinks that killing people for fun, for example, is perfectly all right.

See Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame: Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 1988). This was said by Dr. Muhammad Legenhausen, in his review of the aforementioned work, at http://www.al-islam.org/al-tawhid/whosejustice/title.htm.

I will show that the arguments against the possibility of reasonable views on ethics are muddled and unpersuasive, and even that the Enlightenment view, as it has been called, looks pretty good. But in the course of coming to such conclusions, we will consider the major options in ethical theory, especially as found in the past century or so. This is not just a tour. We will try to assess those various theories as well, and tentatively accept or reject them, perhaps with some modifications. Many of them are more compatible than is usually claimed; but some are not, and I think that some among those contending theories can be shown to be unacceptable.

In the process, we will have to pay a good deal of attention to methodological matters. These have been, and remain, the subject of intense discussion, especially during that same past century or so. Readers who get interested in these sometimes arcane-seeming matters will want to consult some of the literature, a selection of which will be mentioned in the bibliography at the end of this book. All readers will, I hope, nevertheless leave with a sense that there is decent hope for ethical theory after all, as well as an appreciation of its major issues.

Ethical theory is no new thing. Ever since at least Plato (427–347 B.C.)—who himself made some major contributions to the subject—intelligent people have been interested in, and often concerned about, this subject. Sometimes they have done so simply because it is interesting—one never needs more than that, after all, to pursue a subject. But many writers have in addition had a sense that things were not going well in the social world they lived in, and that they could be improved, that there is practical benefit as well as intellectual pleasure to be had from thinking about the sort of issues we’ll be getting into here. It’s difficult not to agree with them.

Organizing the Subject

A familiar map of our subject divides it into two parts, known as metaethics and normative ethics or sometimes substantive ethics. With some reservations, we’ll accept that division here. A further division is between normative ethics as a general, theoretical subject, and normative ethics in the sense of inquiries into quite specific moral issues and questions. It is especially this last subject that we will not be much concerned with in this book, although we will discuss the relation between abstract and general theorizing about normative ethics and its hands-on application.

For much of the twentieth century, a view prevailed that philosophical ethics can only be concerned with the first of this pair, which now goes by the name metaethics. And it is certainly an important one—indeed, it is the paradigmatic task of the philosopher. Metaethics is concerned especially with meaning: just what are we talking about when we talk about ethical matters? And it is concerned with logical matters: just how do we go from one sort of claim to another, especially if one of them is an ethical claim and the other not? Saying this brings up what have become deep and sometimes highly technical issues about language. One of my theoretical guidelines in this inquiry is that it is misguided to think that a subject like ethics can turn on subtle and technical distinctions in semantic theory. We are looking for something that should, I think, be accessible to any normally intelligent person. This is not just a prejudice—there are special reasons for thinking that, as we will see later on.

Meanwhile, however, the other general division, normative ethics, is intended to cover the propounding, elaboration, and development of ethical claims themselves—not just statements about what other statements mean, but claims that some of those statements are true, or at any rate plausible, or acceptable. Metaethics includes as a major one of its tasks that of deciding which of those terms, ‘true’, ‘acceptable’, or maybe something else, is the best one to use for this purpose. But whichever, the normative theorist hopes to show us that, indeed, some kinds of actions really are right, others wrong, what sorts of things we ought and ought not to do, which kinds of people are good people and which are, by comparison, bad, in the respects in which ethics is concerned with goodness and badness. Or, that in some cases the matter may be difficult or even impossible to decide.

A further distinction can also be made here, as well: between the general theory of normative ethics, with which this book will be concerned, and applied ethics, with which it will deal scarcely at all. Applied ethics gets down to quite concrete and specific issues, such as whether in vitro fertilization is morally acceptable. A general theory of normative ethics would provide the major premises of discussions about such issues, but the actual application to such things requires further, detailed knowledge, which is well beyond the province of a book on theory such as this.

A major thesis of this book will be that there is an extremely important distinction within ethics, between what I shall call ‘ethics’ more generally, and a narrower subject that I will designate by the fairly old-fashioned word ‘morals’ or ‘morality.’ The need for and importance of a distinction of that kind will be argued for. Some of the historically famous muddles of ethics are due, I think, to the failure to make that distinction. And some of the historically famous writers on ethics, on the other hand, have been fairly well aware of it, and made brilliant contributions to the subject in the course of doing so.

It remains to say that the division between metaethics as concerned narrowly with meaning and normative ethics as concerned with making ethical pronouncements themselves is misleading and unsatisfactory. There’s a good deal more to it than that, as will be seen. But while there is, the division as such is not wrong or confused—just inadequate.

I won’t go further than this by way of introduction, for each of my topics must be explained as I go along. What I will do, however, is say some more about general questions of how to proceed in this rather special and fascinating subject.

Is There Something Special about Ethics?

We live in a world of various kinds of objects, some of which we put to many uses, others of which we see, or bump into, daily. Still, few of us go around with physical theories in our heads. We’ve heard of the law of gravity, perhaps, though we have little notion of how it works or precisely what it says. We more or less settle for a crude understanding that could be summarized as things fall, a familiar fact of experience. By contrast, however, a great many people do have some moral laws in their heads. They’ve learned them in their youth, and they have stuck there ever since. Moreover, those rules have effect. People frequently do refrain from certain actions because they think those actions would be wrong, and they often cite some general rules or maxims in support of their judgments. In this respect, it seems that ethics stands in considerable contrast to physics, or more generally, to science. Claims that somebody acted wrongly (or rightly) seem to be made on the basis of antecedently held general beliefs, rather than being made in the way that our usual factual claims are made. The post office is right down the street is not said on the basis of some sort of theory held by the speaker, but on the basis of information about that particular fact. You do have to have some idea what a post office is if you are to answer someone’s query about its location, but that idea needn’t amount to much, and especially, it needn’t amount to a generalization or a rule.

Naively speaking, we have a great deal of information about the world on the basis of ordinary perception. We see the lightning strike the barn because our eyes are open and there it was—not because we know anything about how lightning works. Philosophers have raised difficulties about the empiricist theory of knowledge, and yet they can hardly deny that we all find out a great many things by seeing and hearing. There might be some antecedent theory involved—no doubt the concept of a material object is not one that we can easily analyze in terms of sense perceptions, if at all, and we do make daily use of a vocabulary of what philosophers call material object terms. Yet if we tried to state the alleged theory, we’d be very hard put to do it. We can assert with confidence that things don’t just disappear in thin air (except certain kinds of things, now and then), and that the bed I sleep on will still be there supporting my body as I sleep, and a thousand other things. But do these amount to a theory?

Moral judgments are different. The claim that some particular action is wrong requires some sort of a reason for its support. We don’t formulate the generalization that murder is wrong from having observed many cases of murder, noted in each case that it is wrong, and concluded that murder is wrong. The generalization is antecedent to the fact: this murder is wrong because it’s murder, and murder is a kind of action that is wrong.

David Hume asks us to

Take any action allow’d to be vicious: Willful murder, for instance. Examine it in all lights, and see if you can find that matter of fact, or real existence, which you call vice. In whichever way you take it, you find only certain passions, motives, volitions and thoughts. There is no other matter of fact in the case. The vice entirely escapes you, till you turn your reflection into your own breast, and find a sentiment of disapprobation, which arises in you, towards this action.³

David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, edited by L. A. Selby-Bigge. (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1955), bk. III, part I, sec. I, 468–69.

That actions of that kind are to be disapproved of is something the onlooker already knows—or if he does not, then observing another one isn’t likely to make much difference. Hume says that the difference lies in our own breasts. He means this in a sense that would distinguish it from the usual cases of perception. Breasts are not eyes: it is not my own eyes that cause the trees to look green, even though if I had no eyes I would not be able to have the experience I have when I see them. Hume’s point is that you can observe anything there may be to observe about the events in which the murder consists, but the classification of it as murder involves more than a summary of information received. It involves also, he says, a reaction on our part—not just more information. And it is pretty difficult to deny Hume’s claim. (Not impossible. In philosophy, it’s hard to think of anything, however apparently obvious, that is not seriously questioned or denied by someone out there.)

Is it the other way around too? Do I need to react with some kind of interest, perhaps with approval or disapproval, before I can see anything? No. Always, I will see something because I am looking in that direction, and often I am looking in that direction because I am interested in something, or even because I approve or disapprove of something. But in the first place, I might not be looking out of interest for or at something: I might just be taking in the passing scene. And in the second, whether I have the reaction of seeing blue, or whatever else I see, is not due to my looking, but to the fact that there is something there causing my perceptions. One can’t just decide to see something: one simply sees it.

But do we decide to approve or disapprove of something? Often not, to be sure. Our upbringings, likely, will be such that a reaction of that kind might be quite spontaneous. But, for one thing, very often we do have to think before deciding how to react. And for another, we can always ask whether a given reaction was reasonable, well taken. It might be that we come, after further thought, to think that we reacted inappropriately. No such thing can be said about a typical case of seeing blue. You do, or you don’t, and that’s it.

Fact and Value

All this suggests, at least, that there is some kind of a general distinction of fact and value. As we shall see, the word ‘value’ in this last sentence has to be taken in a very general way, for theorists may insist that it covers at least three very different things: value, taken generally; obligation or perhaps duty; and virtue, taken as an aspect of character. All sorts of things can be good or bad—implements, the weather, works of art, governments, as well as moral actions and their effects; but only acts can be morally right or wrong, obligatory or forbidden; and only character can be morally virtuous or vicious (though virtue concepts apply widely in nonmoral contexts as well). We will be discussing those distinctions more carefully later on, but I think it nevertheless true that we can recognize that all of these fall on one side of a line, and that it has another side—the realm, as we might put it, of fact. (But facts too come at various levels: are gravity, or the forces that hold the parts of an atom together, or the big bang to be reckoned as facts, along with the blueness of the sky? For present purposes, I am taking it that the answer is in the affirmative.)

We can also see that there are canons of science. Scientific investigation and theorizing can be done well or badly; and scientists value their activity, and its results. Still, when you take a theory, however strongly supported, elegant, or whatever, and then ask whether we ought to do something about some situation where this theory might be applicable in the construction of devices or artifacts, we cross the line over into the territory of ethics. That it was possible to build an atomic bomb was a major result of science; but whether it ought to be used was obviously quite another matter, about which physics as such says nothing at all.

To try to identify this fundamental distinction between fact and value—if indeed there is one —has been a major preoccupation of ethical theory. But another and much narrower one has been the other two subjects, obligation and virtue. The latter two will, in fact, be much more prominent in this book than the former. We would scarcely have a subject of ethics if it were not so. We would, however, have a subject of aesthetics, for example, and it is important to raise the question of how the two, among many other domains in which we use the vocabulary of good and bad, better and worse, are related, if at all. We will be doing some of that, too.

Is the distinction of fact and value fundamental and generic? Or are values really just one special department, as it were, of facts? To put it another way: are values some facts among others? Or, are they not facts at all? This sort of question has been a preoccupation of ethical theory for a very long time, and will be a major concern in the next many pages. Later, we will even look at a contribution to the subject by St. Thomas Aquinas (thirteenth century). But it was a special concern—some would say, a mania—of twentieth-century philosophy. Getting somehow straight about it is a sort of Holy Grail of moral philosophy. We will be very much concerned with it in this book.

The Foundations of Ethics

Historically, many ethical thinkers would say that they were interested in identifying the foundations of ethics. (W. D. Ross’s second book is called just that.⁴) In recent decades, however, many philosophers have insisted that there are no such things, or at least that we don’t need any. Antifoundationalism has become one of the familiar ideas in philosophy. Is it a good one? A classic quip has it that A philosopher is someone who, when he gets into trouble, makes a distinction.⁵ It is really a major insight into our field. Something puzzles us; we form a question about it. But perhaps something is wrong with the question. Further analysis may divide it into two or more questions each of which has an answer, and the appearance of puzzlement in the original question then, perhaps, disappears. Or at least, we have a better idea how to proceed. So let’s make some of the needed distinctions.

W. D. Ross, The Foundations of Ethics (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1930). Alas, I don’t know who said this first. I wish it had been myself!

A first question is: Foundations of what? A major thesis of this book will be that there is a rather special branch of ethics, which has sometimes been called morals. Hume’s Inquiry concerning the Principles of Morals and Kant’s famous Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals are about that subject, and neither of them, as such, has anything to say about aesthetics, for example. What’s more, I want to suggest that the view called antifoundationalism has a good deal to be said for it in aesthetics, but much less to be said for it in strictly moral philosophy. Is there some general feature in common to all beautiful things, which makes them beautiful? No. But is there some general feature in common to all wrong acts that makes them wrong? Yes—so I shall argue. A recent writer, Jonathan Dancy, addressing this matter, says, It is odd that nobody has spent much time on principles of aesthetics . . . unless there is some significant difference between moral and aesthetic valuations.⁶ To this there are two responses: one, that some (possibly misguided) people do claim to find principles of aesthetics—witness the well-known (except apparently to Dancy) American (that’s probably why) classic by DeWitt H. Parker, Principles of Aesthetics.⁷ But the other response is—yes, there is a striking difference between the two, which will be developed and emphasized in the ensuing pages. We will see both that and why there is such a difference.

Jonathan Dancy, in a review of a recent book, Times Literary Supplement, Dec. 1, 2006, p. 32. Consider for example, the semi-classic The Principles of Aesthetics by Dewitt H. Parker (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1946).

Next, we must ask, What is a foundation? What are we talking about here? Here we can distinguish four different (though related) things which might reasonably be so called:

(1) Meaning: One could identify the foundations of a subject with a general analysis of what the subject is—of what it means, then, to say that something belongs to that subject. In this sense the foundations are its cognitive location—precisely where it is in the firmament of things and ideas. That is the subject of metaethics, with which we will be concerned very soon.

(2) Explanation: Why do we have such a thing as morals at all? This would further divide into two subquestions:

(a) Moral psychology: what is it about people that enables them to have such a thing as moral ideas, moral principles, moral qualms and questionings?—and

(b) Why do we need or want morals? What’s the point? Or is there any—maybe we’re just born that way?

(3) Are there some features of things or actions that are the basic ones that make those things good or those actions right or wrong?

Here we need to make yet a finer distinction. Some philosophers, notably Dancy, hold that there are no rules in morals—no general statements of the familiar kind such as killing innocent people is wrong that are both truths, and basic in the sense that they identify the general and fundamental wrong-making feature of certain broad kinds of acts. Yet Dancy is far from denying that we can explain, in any given case, what makes that particular action right or wrong. Antifoundationalism is not the view that there are literally no features of acts to which we can point by way of good and relevant explanation of their moral status. It is, rather, a denial that we can give a meaningful but broad account of what makes all wrong acts wrong, say, or at any rate come up with a short list—perhaps just a half-dozen or so—of the really fundamental principles (as in the famous theory of Sir W. D. Ross, or for that matter as suggested by codes like the Ten Commandments) such that all acts will be right or wrong by virtue of their relation to those general rules. In this book, I shall be taking sides with the foundationalists, but with important qualifications that may help to explain why foundations seem to be different things from justifications. Are they really different? We will have to consider the matter.

(4) Finally, there are the basic principles (if any) of morality itself: the most fundamental of the general truths in which we say such-and-such kind of acts are right, so-and-so are wrong, and so on. Again, this may well follow on the heels of the right answers to the previous questions. That, indeed, is what moral philosophers hope (I think). Certainly it is what I hope (and think)! But whether that is so—and many deny it—this last sense of foundations is that the basic principles are the foundations on which the less basic ones are built. For example, if we ought not to harm people, and breaking their limbs harms them, then we ought not to break their limbs. Or, if all people are to be treated with respect, then women should be. And so on.

An important temptation, and a very common confusion among students, pundits on public affairs, and so on, is to confuse the job of definition, as in (1), with the job of finding the basic moral criterion or criteria (3) and with the basic principles themselves (4). We will see, in the next section, why that is a confusion. Nevertheless, however, these four should go together. If we are clear about meaning, that should at least suggest where we should be looking for answers to the other questions. If we are clear about what these basic ideas mean, then we should be able to get some sense of why we want or need morals. And that in turn should help suggest what makes something right or wrong. If we know that, though, then surely we should be not far from having a fair idea what the general principles of morals should be like. It will be a virtue of a theory that the answers to these questions harmonize with each other.

Intuitions

The main relevant sense of ‘foundations’ in which it is possible to ask whether the subject has such things is, then, the one identified in sense (3) above. But closely related to that matter is a major issue of method in ethics. No one who becomes interested in this subject, very likely, will fail to come to it equipped with many moral opinions or beliefs. (Let us, for the moment, simply tag things like the strong sense that killing innocent people is wrong with the word ‘belief,’ leaving for later the question whether that is exactly the right category for ethical claims.) In this respect, ethics is again distinctive. Few of us come to chemistry preequipped with a body of chemical lore: we expect to learn a good deal that is very new, and often very surprising, in such a well-developed and highly technical field. But will the moral philosopher be equipping us with brand new and surprising doctrines? It is tempting to answer this with a simple negative.

Well, maybe that is too fast. For quite possibly there have been some who, immersing themselves in the writings of philosophers, have been persuaded very far away from the beliefs they acquired in childhood, say. That is unusual but not impossible. On the other hand, the new views are unlikely to be highly technical or esoteric. Moreover, such a reaction is rare, and there is room to question whether persons having such reactions have perhaps gone, so to say, seriously off the rails. At any rate, the point is that an encounter with philosophy that doesn’t leave a considerable number of one’s prephilosophical moral views intact would be very surprising, unexpected. Which is to say, to be sure, that it never happens.

But some philosophers have gone considerably further than merely recognizing that this would be surprising. For they have also suggested that at least a good many of these beliefs are something like data or constraints on our investigation. Thus, if someone concludes that lying, on perfectly normal occasions to quite normal people, is a matter of complete moral indifference, these philosophers will take the fact of reaching that conclusion as conclusive evidence that the philosopher in question has gone wrong. Their reasoning is something like this:

(1) In a good argument, the premises have to be more plausible than the conclusions inferred from them. If something crazy follows logically from p, then we logically conclude that there must be something seriously wrong with p.

(2) But how can anything be more plausible than that (say) murder is wrong?

(3) Therefore, arguments claiming that it isn’t, if they are logically valid, can be dismissed without further investigation. If the arguments aren’t even valid, that’s another matter. But validity is a matter of the premises actually implying the conclusion, and thus either the conclusion must be accepted, or one or more premises rejected. The idea here is that, under the circumstances, it must always be the latter.

But this raises the question of why we should accept (2)? Are we really entitled to be so convinced of something whose reasons we professedly do not understand—viz., claims about right and wrong—that we can just reject arguments purporting to show that they are in error after all? Why?

The answer to this question will be among the most important methodological moves in ethical theory. One idea about this has come from a school that we might call official intuitionism. That idea is that when we affirm ethical claims, we are giving voice to ideas that are logically primitive. For example, G. E. Moore argued that ‘good’ names or designates a unique, simple, nonnatural property.⁸ We will explore his view in more detail later, but for the present, we can see that this, if it is true, would explain why ethical statements could be uttered with great confidence despite ignorance of their foundations. For in a sense, they wouldn’t have any foundations. Like seeing yellow, sensing goodness would be something that just happened, and statements about it would be deliverances or expressions of this basic experience about which, from the human point of view, no more could be said. Like the proposition that this thing looks yellow, it would be an ultimate, final, unquestionable truth.

G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1903), sec. 15. Moore never uses the exact phrase. He says, there is a simple, indefinable, unanalysable object of thought by reference to which it must be defined and, later in the same paragraph, this unique property . . .

Official intuitionism is widely rejected today—and for very good reason, I shall suggest. Yet many philosophers continue to regard firmly held preanalytic ethical beliefs as having the status of evidence in and of themselves—of being deliverances that we just can’t reject, and so as putting limits or constraints on ethical theorizing. Are they right about this?

We shall, at this point, say only this much more about the issue. Firstly, anyone tempted to say this will have a severe problem if there is serious disagreement among different persons. If Jones sees yellow where I see blue, that’s bad. If you see right where I see wrong, that’s similarly bad. Whom do we believe? My tendency to believe my own view is unsurprising, but obviously Jones could view it as sheer bias, and I can see his point. There is also the problem that we ourselves might change. Today we think that x is wrong, but next week, suddenly, it appears right. Those can’t both be unquestionable truths, since one denies the other. So, now what? Indeed, philosophers of this persuasion agree that the main work of moral philosophy is to render our various judgments consistent with each other. And with the facts, if there should chance to be any possibility of conflict with them . . .

Secondly, we may take the pervasiveness of certain ethical beliefs—if such they be—to supply evidence for something, without crediting them as direct prima facie evidence for their own truth. Perhaps we shall find good reason, once we got into the matter, why it is unsurprising that so many people affirm these things, but that this reason is considerably removed from the front burner where our ethical affirmations occur. I passionately exclaim, That’s wrong! But our careful philosopher says, Yes, it’s understandable that you say this, and moreover, there’s pretty good reason for you to say it—but even when you’re right, all of that can be explained by a more basic theory, and so it should not be taken as having fundamental status in the field. For the present, then, the point is that there are ways of handling intuitions that continue to take them seriously, yet allow for the possibility that further and deeper explanations might be correct accounts of the subject.

Free Will

In introductory philosophy courses professors often discuss the topic of responsibility and free will. This important and interesting concept has been presupposed but not analyzed in this book, so far. In part, responsibility is something we can and should teach and learn. If people cannot be somehow held responsible for their actions, moral principles can have no force, no bite.

Nevertheless, it is worth noting that general philosophical worries about the freedom of the will have no interest for moral philosophy in particular. It does matter, and very much, whether people are sometimes not capable of doing what we think they should do, for it will then be unreasonable to require them to do those things. But that they often are thus capable is, I take it, obvious. It is also something that a general, metaphysical denial of free will cannot genuinely deny in any interesting way. What matters for morals is the difference between being unable to do x (as when tied to a tree, say) and being somehow able to do so, however that is to be accounted for. If every event really does have a cause or causes, so that even the most responsible actions are nevertheless accountable in causal terms, so be it.

That it cannot make a genuine difference to morals whether this is so or not is evident on reflection. Consider the man who says, We are never responsible. Is he going to go on to say, therefore, we ought not to punish this criminal? His saying that we ‘ought’ not to implies that we have some sort of choice in the matter. But—didn’t he just get through saying that we don’t? If so, his advice makes no sense on his own view.

But it makes no sense anyway. Whether we accept or reject certain moral assessments makes a difference to our behavior; and obviously people sometimes succeed in learning to make such distinctions, while those who do not are a menace to others and to themselves. Thus general worries about free will, however fascinating, must be purely academic.

I emphasized the word ‘interesting’ above. The philosophical determinist claims that nobody ever has any real choice whatever, about anything. Yet, in all likelihood, when