What is a moral theory? Bernard Williams’ characterisation gives us a first
approximation: “a philosophical structure which, together with some degree of
empirical fact, will yield a decision procedure for moral reasoning”.( William 1985,
p13) The clearest examples are the systematic normative theories that are
considered and compared in ethics are consequentialism, virtue ethics,
contractualism, Kantianism and natural law ethics.
Every “moral theory” in the tight sense—every first-order system of normative
practical philosophy—aspires to be an ethical outlook. It is not clear what point there
would be to a moral theory that did not have this aspiration. But there are problems
about supposing that any moral theory could adequately play the role that we want,
Some of the reasons why this is so begin to appear when we note the intimate
connections that an adequate ethical outlook will inevitably have with motivation and
deliberation on the one hand, and explanation and prediction on the other. We want
our ethical outlook to be something which, in real time, can be the source of our
reasons to act (motivation), and which can structure our thinking and deciding about
how to act as it actually happens (deliberation). We also want our ethical outlook to
be something which, can articulate and deepen our understanding of what
counts as good or bad and right or wrong action, and why (explanation); and we
want it to be something which can explain what will or would be good or bad and
right or wrong action, in future or hypothetical situations that we ourselves have not
actually met, but which we or others might conceivably meet (prediction). (Thompson
Moral theory is ill-fitted for any of these four roles. To see why, let us consider
them one by one. I have argued above that “we want our ethical outlook to be
something which can, itself, be the source of our reasons to act.” At a first look, it
seems that consequentialism identifies The Overall Good as the thing for good
people to be motivated by; that Kantianism’s motivational goal is rational action, in a
special sense of “rational”, or Duty, in a special sense of “Duty”; that virtue ethics
tells us to act out of the virtues; and so on. Perhaps some moral theorists in these
schools do think about motivation in this direct way: Peter Singer, for example,
seems more than once to suggest that we really should aim to be motivated by “the
overall good”; that there is nothing better to be motivated by, because there is
nothing bigger;
: “If we take the point of view of the universe we can recognise the urgency of doing
something about the pain and suffering of others, before we even consider promoting other possible
values...” Singer 1995, 276:
But this is not the line about what should motivate us among moral theorists, and
the reason why is obvious: the sheer implausibility of the moral theories’ adopting
any such direct account of motivation. As Wolf pointed out:
“There is something odd about the idea of morality itself, or moral goodness,
serving as the object of a dominant passion in the way that a more concrete
and specific vision of a goal (even a concrete moral goal) might be imagined
to serve… when one reflects, for example, on the… Saint… giving up his
fishing trip or his stereo or his hot fudge sundae at the drop of the moral hat,
one is apt to wonder not at how much he loves morality, but at how little he
We want our ethical outlook to be one which can structure our thinking and
deciding about how to act as it actually happens. It is difficult to imagine a really
clean separation between questions about motivation, what moves us to act, and
about deliberation, our reasoning about how to act. For anyone, reasoning about
how to act will be an integral part of being moved to act, and vice versa. So doubts
about the place of moral theory in motivation are also, mutatis mutandis, doubts
about the place of moral theory in deliberation. If Utility or Duty or Virtue cannot
plausibly be the main spring of our motivation, then it cannot plausibly be central to
our deliberation either. It is no more plausible to say that a psychologically healthy
moral agent’s deliberations are typically guided by the question “What would
maximise utility?” than it is to say that she typically acts on the motive of maximising
utility.
Moral theorists will talk about moral theory as providing a constraint on
deliberation, or the form of deliberation, rather than the subject-matter or content of
deliberation. Deliberation, they argue , may take as its subject-matter whatever
desires motivate us, but it must always pass the universalisability test, or must
always be maximising deliberation, or must never be contrary to the rules laid down
by the virtues—and so on.
The first thing to say about this manoeuvre is just to point out that this too is a
retreat from our expectations of an ethical outlook, which, we might hope, will
provide both the content and the form of our deliberation. We would be justifiably
disappointed in an ethical outlook that was topic-neutral in the familiar way that
Humean and Hobbesian moral theories are: one that had nothing to say about what
We desired, and told us only how to pursue it. (Thompson
1994 p 85)
It is unrealistic to hope that moral theory will give us even the form of deliberation,
never mind both the form and the content. There is simply no reason to think that all
good deliberation must be universalisable or in accord with the virtues, or that it must
satisfy such supposed rules of rationality as a maximising rule. Theorists’ attempts to
argue the contrary are always vulnerable to the question posed by Williams “by what
right they legislate to the moral sentiments”. Of course good deliberation sometimes
calls upon considerations which look very like thoughts about universalisability or
utility or maximisation. But not always—and even when good deliberation does
deploy one of these thoughts in one context, that is no guarantee that it must deploy
that same thought in every other context. As soon as we look in detail at actual good
agents actually deliberating, the idea that any moral theory even gives the form of
their deliberations becomes hopelessly implausible. Good deliberation simply isn’t
that “programmed”.
It becomes implausible to think that good agents who are deliberating must be
explicitly and consciously using some moral theory as a constraint on that
deliberation. It may be that moral theory serve as a universal constraint on their
deliberation? That is to say: can’t deliberations in fact be always responsive to
such a constraint even if that constraint is not always a conscious part of their actual
thoughts in real-time moral reasoning—part of their “decision procedure”?
We want our ethical outlook to be something which can articulate and deepen our
understanding of what counts as good or bad and right or wrong action, and why.”
We might have expected moral theories to be on home ground here. After all,
explanation and prediction are supposed to be the main strength of sophisticated
moral theories. Those moral theorists who admit that moral theory cannot plausibly
be directly involved in motivation and deliberation see its main role, instead, in
explaining why it is good for agents to be motivate, and to deliberate, in whatever
way it is that their theory recommends.
One case where moral theory creates problems is a supposed difficulty about
punishment. When someone is punished for a crime, the crime has already
happened, and now the punishment is proposed as a way of dealing with it. But, the
objection runs (it is an old one: it goes back at least as far as Plato’s Protagoras),
how can it be good to make two bad things happen instead of just one? The heart of
this “problem” about punishment is the theory-driven assumption that all reasons
must be future-directed—that wherever there is a reason to act, it is because there is
some future state of affairs that can be brought about by so acting
.
Consequentialist moral theorists, for instance, have tended, in line with their general
and characteristic preoccupation with the future, to suggest that the wrongness of
murder lies in something like its depriving its victim of a “future like ours” or a “future
life of value” (Marquis 2002). Such suggestions seem obviously false. Knowing that
some person’s future will be radically unlike “ours”, or drastically deprived of positive
value, falls well short of what we need to know in order to know not only that it is not
wrong for that person to die; not only that it is not wrong for someone to kill that
person; but also that it is not wrong for us to kill that person.
Kantians, meanwhile, are likely to speak of murder either as a nonuniversalisable
choice, or as a failure to respect someone as an “end in himself”, or both. Both these
descriptions too seem right, as far as they go. But appeal to universalisability begs
the question as to why murder might not be universalisable; (Thompson
1994 p 101) similarly, the contractualist appeal to “the reasonably rejectable” begs
the question why murder might be reasonably rejected . As for failure to respect an
end in himself, this description does not explain why murder involves such a failure.
And here too the key notions of “respect” and of “ends in themselves” get more
complicated the more closely one looks at them; here too it would be nice to be able
to explain something that seems relatively simple and basic, the wrongness of
murder,without having to make the “detour through theory” that obliges us to thrash
out an account of these very difficult and obscure notions.
We want our ethical outlook “to explain what will or would be good or bad and right
or wrong action, in future or hypothetical situations that we ourselves have not
actually met, but which we or others might conceivably meet”. Prediction is, of
course, just the future or hypothetical correlate of explanation. Still, it is worth
considering separately, because thinking about prediction brings out more clearly
some difficulties for moral theory which are already latent in the notion of
Moral theory’s difficulty about prediction is basically a problem of overambition.
What the moral theorist wants to say is that hypothetical case A would
inevitably be a case of right action (or wrong action, or good or bad action, or
whatever) because case A is just like real case B, which is right action: or again, that
cases A and B both fall under moral type T, and every instance of type T is a case of
right action.
The problem here is not restricted to the cases, common though they are,
where moral theorists expect us to produce clear and definite intuitions about
hypothetical cases which are very complicated, or very unlikely, or both. The trouble
is completely general, and it begins with the “inevitably”. As moral theorists
frequently point out, it is a requirement of rationality that the same moral verdict must
be returned on two qualitatively indiscernible cases. Of course. The only problem is
that there are no qualitatively indiscernible cases—not even in everyday life, never
mind in trolley or reduplicated human-shield problems. There are only cases which
are more or less roughly similar. Judgements about which similarities and which
differences matter, and how much, and why, and which exceptions override which
similarities, and how often, and why, can certainly be made. But the idea that there is
any set of similarity-judgements which is rationally required of us is simply a myth.
Picking up a similarity-judgement between two cases as the one that matters morally
is not a matter of pure reason or value-neutral logic; it is itself an exercise of moral
perception. So here the point is not exactly that non-theoretical ethical outlooks do
better at prediction than moral theories. Rather, it is that moral theories have an
overambitious explanatory pretension that they cannot possibly sustain, because it
rests on the false assumption that some pattern or other of similarity-judgements is
rationally required, and that anyone who fails to judge in line with this pattern is
cognitively deficient.
To sum up: most moral theories fail to fill the deliberative and motivational roles
that we want our ethical outlook to play—as the most moral theorists themselves
agree. And the explanations that moral theory offers of good and bad, rightness and
wrongness, typically do not articulate or deepen our understanding of those notions,
as a good ethical outlook does: where moral theory’s explanations are not clearly
false or frustratingly incomplete, they are generally just unhelpfully obscure. In the
final role that we want our ethical outlook to play, prediction of what will be right/
wrong// good/ bad in hypothetical cases, moral theory typically proves over-
ambitious: it tries to enforce a uniformity of similarity-judgements that simply cannot
be rationally required. In all these respects, typical moral theories fail the tests that
they need to pass to count as credible ethical outlooks in showing one theory better
than any other.
References
Marquis, D., “An argument that abortion is wrong” [2002]. In Hugh LaFollette (ed.),
Ethics in Practice. Oxford, Blackwell, pp. 83-93.
Singer, P (1995). How Are We to Live?, Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books.
Thomson , M (1994) Ethics , Hodder Education ,London
Williams, B.A.O. (1985). Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. London:
Harmondsworth.
Wolf, S. “Moral Saints” [1997]. In Roger Crisp and Michael Slote (eds.), Virtue
Ethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp.79-98.
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