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The Definition of Morality*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 January 2010

Extract

We use such terms as good, bad, right, wrong, should, ought, in many ways other than moral: good evidence and bad argument, right answers and wrong notes, novels which should be read and policies which ought not to be adopted. The moral is a sphere of the practical and the practical itself only a sphere or the normative. Norms guide us in all we believe, feel and do. Do these normative words then have a specifically moral sense? If so can it be defined?

Type
Papers
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 1993

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References

1 It has recently been refurbished by Alan Gibbard, in his book, Wise Choices, Apt Feelings, Oxford 1990, ch. 1, pp. 40–45, ch. 7. For a comprehensive discussion of Mill's view see Lyons, 1976.

2 He differs here from those contemporary consequentialists who follow Moore rather than Mill, by defining ‘morally right action’ and ‘moral duty’ directly in terms of optimal consequence—with predictably disconcerting results (Moore, 1903, section 89). If consequentialism is defined as a view which accepts these Moorean definitions, then the classical nineteenth century utilitarians, Bentham, Mill and Sidgwick, cannot readily be classed as consequentialists.

3 The distinction between cognitive role and semantic content underpins the distinction I make between a constructon and a definition of the concept of the moral. I discuss it in ‘Anti-realism, inference and the logical constants’ (1993).

4 See Skorupski, 1985–1986.

5 Kant classes moral judgments as ‘logical’ rather ‘than ‘aesthetic’ for related reasons. See Kant, 1928.

6 ‘No more fiendish punishment could be devised, were such a thing physically possible, than that one should be turned loose in society and remain absolutely unnoticed by all the members thereof. If no one turned round when we entered, answered when we spoke, or minded what we did, but if every person we met “cut us dead”, and acted as if we were non-existing things, a kind of rage and impotent despair would ere long well up in us, from which the cruellest bodily torture would be a relief; for these would make us feel that, however bad might be our plight, we had not sunk to such a depth as to be unworthy of attention at all.’ (James, 1890, vol. 1., 293–294.)

7 Hegel is a source of this view, as of the notion of recognition which I have made use of in this section.

8 Williams is wrong in holding that Kant also thinks every reason must ‘speak’ to a ‘motivation the agent already has’ (ibid, my emphases). It is truistic, of course, that a reason must engage with something ‘already’ in the agent, if it is to affect his belief or his action. It must engage with a capacity to recognize reasons and a disposition to respond to them, but it is not true, and Kant does not hold, that it must engage with an already existing motivation. To identify the formal, place-holding, notion of a disposition to act or believe on reasons, with the psychologically robust notion of a ‘motivation’—a desire to act or believe on them—is to beg the question against the believer in what Williams calls ‘external reasons’. Let me add here that in equating Kants autonomy and Mill's moral freedom for the purposes of this paper I do not mean to suggest that they are identical. They have in common the idea of rational mastery of one's desires; but Mill, of course, does not identify the moral with the rational— as the passages quoted in Section 11 suffice to make clear.

9 It is however easy to overstate the importance of autonomy in the ethics (let alone the political economy and political sociology) of classical liberalism. See my ‘Autonomy in its Place’, in Knowles and Skorupski, 1993, and my ‘Liberal Elitism’, 1992.