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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
T. M. Scanlon is one of the world’s leading philosophers, widely known for his contractualist moral theory and his distinctive account of moral responsibility and blame. In these important essays, written between 2001 and 2021, Scanlon reflects on the lines of thinking that led him to these views, considers objections to them, and locates them in relation to the views of others, including Derek Parfit, Harry Frankfurt, Gary Watson, and Christine Korsgaard.
The result will be essential reading for scholars and students in moral philosophy, political philosophy, and the philosophy of law.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025
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CONTENTS
Cover
Table of Contents
Dedication
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part I Morality
1 What Is Morality?
2 Contractualism and Justification
3 Wrongness and Reasons: A Re-examination
4 Ideas of the Good in Moral and Political Philosophy
Sidgwick’s Dualism of Practical Reason
Marx, Rawls, and Williams on Acceptance
Answering the Question of Acceptance
Part II Responsibility
5 Reasons and Passions
I
II
III
6 Interpreting Blame
I
II
III
7 Giving Desert Its Due
Legal Punishment
Moral Reactive Attitudes
Desert and Distributive Justice
Conclusion
8 Forms and Conditions of Responsibility
Moral Reaction Responsibility
Substantive Responsibility
9 Responsibility and the Value of Choice
10 Responsibility for Health and the Value of Choice
Appendix: Response to Peter Chau
11 Learning from Psychopaths
12 Korsgaard on Responsibility
Holding Responsible and Being Responsible
Conditions of Responsibility
Relationships, Reasons, and Responsibility
Korsgaard on the Theoretical Conception of Responsibility
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Dedication
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Begin Reading
Bibliography
Index
End User License Agreement
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Dedication
To Lucy, as ever
Morality and Responsibility
T. M. Scanlon
polity
Copyright © T. M. Scanlon 2025
The right of T. M. Scanlon to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2025 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press111 River StreetHoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-6698-3
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2024942501
The publisher has used its best endeavors to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website:politybooks.com
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Ian Malcolm for suggesting that I put together a collection of papers, and for his patient help in deciding which papers to include. I also thank to the two anonymous reviewers for Polity Press for their suggestions, Susan Beer for her careful and patient copy-editing, and Angela Smith for her very helpful comments on the introduction.
This book is dedicated to Lucy, with extra thanks for bearing with good humor all the interferences with life that these papers entailed.
The papers in this volume originally appeared in the following places:
“Contractualism and Justification” originally appeared in Reason, Justification and Contractualism: Themes from Scanlon, Markus Stepanians and Michael Frauchiger, eds. (Berlin: de Gruyter Publishing, 2021). Used here with permission of de Gruyter Publishing.
“Wrongness and Reasons: A Re-examination” originally appeared in Oxford Studies in Metaethics, Vol. 2, Russ Shafer-Landau, ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). Used here with permission of Oxford University Press.
“What Is Morality?” originally appeared in A Harvard Sampler: Liberal Education for the Twenty-first Century, Jennifer M. Shepard, Stephen M. Koslyn, and Evelynn M. Hammonds, eds. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Copyright © 2011 the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
“Ideas of the Good in Moral and Political Philosophy” originally appeared in Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics, Vol. 5, Mark Timmons, ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). Used here with permission of Oxford University Press.
“Reasons and Passions” originally appeared in Contours of Agency: Essays in Honor of Harry Frankfurt, Sarah Buss and Lee Overton, eds. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002). Used here with the permission of MIT Press.
“Interpreting Blame” originally appeared in Blame, Justin Coates and Neal Tognazzini, eds. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 84–100. Used here with permission of Oxford University Press.
“Giving Desert its Due” originally appeared in Philosophical Explorations 16 (2013). Used here with permission of Taylor & Francis.
“Forms and Conditions of Responsibility” originally appeared in The Nature of Responsibility: New Essays, Randolph Clarke, Michael McKenna, and Angela M. Smith, eds. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). Used here with permission of Oxford University Press.
“Responsibility and the Value of Choice” originally appeared in Think 12 (2013). Used here with permission of Cambridge University Press.
“Responsibility for Health and the Value of Choice,” and “Response to Peter Chau,” originally appeared in Lanson Lectures in Bioethics (2016–2022), Hon-Lam Li, ed. (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024). Used here with the permission of Palgrave Macmillan.
“Learning from Psychopaths” originally appeared in Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility, Volume 5: Themes from the Philosophy of Gary Watson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), pp. 127–141. Used here with permission of Oxford University Press.
“Korsgaard on Responsibility” originally appeared in Normativity and Agency: Themes from the Philosophy of Christine M. Korsgaard, Tamar Schapiro, Kyla Ebels Duggan, and Sharon Street, eds. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022). Used here with the permission of Oxford University Press.
Introduction
The papers on morality and responsibility collected here were written between 2001 and 2021. Most of them originally appeared in Festschrifts or conference proceedings. “What Is Morality?” is somewhat different. It is a summary of an introductory course in moral philosophy that I gave at Harvard for many years, written for a volume of summaries of courses in Harvard’s general education curriculum. I include it here because it sounds several themes that I think are important.
Among these themes is the idea that what is commonly referred to as “morality” includes a number of distinct values. In “Contractualism and Utilitarianism” I said that I was offering an account of “morality,” both of its content and its “motivational basis”; that is to say, what reason we have to care about whether our actions are morally right or wrong. But, by the time I was writing What We Owe to Each Other, I had come to see that there were a number of things commonly called moral faults that are not covered by my contractualist account. Three that I mentioned there are the faults of not caring about the development of one’s talents, of failing to care about one’s children, and of some attitudes toward sex.1 Recognizing this diversity, I said that I was offering an account not of all of what is commonly called morality but of only a part, to which I gave the name “what we owe to each other.”
This move to a pluralist view of the content of morality comes with a risk of triviality. It may seem that, as Derek Parfit has suggested, I am claiming to account not for morality but, trivially, just for that part of it that fits the theory I am offering. But, applying what I call the remorse test, it seems to me that the reasons we have to care about these distinct kinds of moral fault are different, and this leads me to believe that they constitute different normative subject matters. So the pluralist implication of my contractualist view seems to me a strength rather than a weakness. I discuss and reply to Parfit’s objections in “Wrongness and Reasons.”
“Contractualism and Justification” is part of my continuing reassessment of contractualism as a moral theory. It was written for a conference on my work, which explains its somewhat autobiographical character. In it, I describe the line of thinking that led me to contractualism, and consider both what I see as its strengths, and the problems that it faces. The strengths seem to me to lie in what I call its reductive character: the fact that it explains the rightness and wrongness of actions in terms of the sufficiency of reasons for rejecting principles that would permit them. This reductive analysis seems to me to provide both an enlightening way of thinking about the content of moral requirements and an appealing explanation of our reasons for taking these requirements seriously. The main problems with this reductive strategy lie in how facts about the sufficiency of reasons for rejection are to be understood, specifically in the amount of moral content that these facts already have. I am continuing to struggle with this problem.
Both my reductive account of the content of moral requirements and my answer to the question of why one should care about these requirements are based on claims about what an individual has reason to want, which are, in different senses, claims about what is good for an individual or good from that individual’s point of view. In “Ideas of the Good in Moral and Political Philosophy” I discuss different ways of understanding an individual’s good, and the tensions between these that arise in works of Henry Sidgwick, Karl Marx, John Rawls, and Bernard Williams.
The papers in the section on responsibility record steps in the evolution of my thinking about blame and responsibility. Two aspects of my view remain constant across these papers, however. The first is my understanding of “free will.” As I understand it, we have free will if our thoughts and actions are not all caused, ultimately, by factors over which we have no control. I don’t see how we could have free will in this sense. So, I am an incompatibilist about free will. But I believe that the lack of free will is not a problem for moral responsibility. I am led to this compatibilism about moral responsibility by the second aspect of my view that is constant across these papers. Conditions of responsibility are conditions under which a fact about what a person is like or has done can have certain moral consequences. Therefore, to determine what these conditions are, one must first clearly identify the moral consequence that is in question and then consider the moral question of what is required in order for some fact about a person to have this moral effect.
This question is not directly addressed as often or as fully as I believe it should be. It is often assumed, without moral argument, that blame is appropriate only for things that are under a person’s control. Galen Strawson, for example, simply states: “But to be truly responsible for how one is, mentally speaking, in certain respects, one must have brought it about that one is the way one is, mentally speaking, in certain respects.”2 I believe, on the contrary, that blame does not require control, and that the things that, at the most basic level, make it appropriate to blame a person are generally facts about how the person is “in certain mental respects” that are not under that person’s control. I reach this conclusion not simply by considering examples, but rather by examining the moral question of why it should be the case that control is a condition for moral reactions such as blame.3
I followed this strategy in chapter 4 of Moral Dimensions, offering a somewhat novel account of blame, and investigating the conditions necessary for blame, so interpreted, to be appropriate. I continue this investigation in “Interpreting Blame.” In “Forms and Conditions of Responsibility” I take a slightly different view. It now seems to me that blame is too broad a concept to be the starting point for an investigation of the conditions of responsibility. Blame can involve many different things, including many different reactive attitudes, and it seems to me pointless to argue about what blame really is. I still believe that the reactive attitudes having to do with the modification of relationships, which I discussed in Moral Dimensions, are important and have not been sufficiently recognized in discussions of blame and responsibility. But I no longer see any point in arguing that they are what blame really is. Rather than starting from an analysis of blame, it seems to me that an investigation of the conditions of moral reaction responsibility should begin with more specific moral reactions and then consider the conditions required in order for these reactions to be morally appropriate.
This pluralism about blame brings with it a risk akin to the threat of triviality I discussed above in the case of morality. I argue that certain moral reactions, such as a modification of a relationship of the kind that I discuss, can be appropriate reactions to facts about a person that are not under that person’s control. Even if I am correct in this, however, it would not follow that there is in general no problem about free will and moral reaction responsibility. Other reactions may have different preconditions, and some forms of blame that we have reason to care about may require some form of control. To reach the conclusion that lack of freedom or control does not represent a problem for moral reaction responsibility in general one needs to show that this is true about all the moral reactions that we have good reason to hold.
As its title indicates, “Giving Desert its Due” reflects a change in my view of desert. In earlier work4 I had rejected appeals to desert altogether because I identified them with what I called “the Desert Thesis.” This is the idea that facts about what a person is like or has done can, in themselves, make it a good thing for that person to suffer some loss, or at least less bad that some innocent person should suffer that loss. This thesis struck me as morally repellent. I believe that (whether we have free will or not) it is never a morally good thing, in itself, that someone should suffer some loss. This is still my view, but my wholesale rejection of desert on this basis now seems to me to have been too quick. I believe that there are cases, what I call “pure desert cases,” in which certain reactions, such as forms of blame, can be made appropriate simply by facts about what a person is like or has done. “Giving Desert its Due” explores conditions under which this can be so.
In “Reasons and Passions,” I discuss Harry Frankfurt’s various attempts to characterize, among the things that occur in a person’s mental life, the ones that “belong to” a person in the sense required for moral responsibility. In “Learning from Psychopaths” I examine Gary Watson’s arguments that some moral reactions require more than the attributability to a person of morally deficient actions and attitudes, and in “Korsgaard on Responsibility” I consider Christine Korsgaard’s view that a person’s being responsible is not just a fact about that person.
These papers are all concerned with what I call moral reaction responsibility, that is to say, with the conditions required to make forms of blame and other reactive attitudes appropriate. “Responsibility and the Value of Choice,” and “Responsibility for Health and the Value of Choice,” on the other hand, deal with what I call substantive responsibility, that is to say, form of responsibility that is required in order, for example, for some fact about a person to have the kind of moral significance involved in giving consent or undertaking an obligation. These two chapters examine the conditions that this form of responsibility requires, and illustrate the importance of distinguishing between these two forms of responsibility.
1.
See Scanlon,
What We Owe to Each Other
, pp. 171–177.
2.
Strawson, “The Impossibility of Moral Responsibility,” p. 213. I discuss Strawson’s views in
Moral Dimensions
, pp. 182–184, and 190–192.
3.
I consider reasons for thinking that blame requires control and explain why they do not seem to me convincing in
Moral Dimensions
, pp. 179–198.
4.
My Tanner Lectures “The Significance of Choice,” and ch. 6 of
What We Owe to Each Other.
Part IMorality
1What Is Morality?
Terms such as “moral,” “morality,” and “morally wrong,” occur frequently in personal discourse and political argument. But it is often unclear what the people using these familiar terms have in mind, and unclear whether they are all even referring to the same thing. For example, many people seem to believe that sexual conduct is a central element in morality. When you read in the newspaper that there is a question about some politician’s morals, you know right away that it has to do with sex. But others believe that, although some moral wrongs, such as rape, or infidelity, involve sex, these things are wrong because they are instances of more generic wrongs that are not essentially concerned with sex, such as coercion, or promise-breaking. When no other form of harm or wrong is involved, sex itself is not a moral issue, according to this view. Differences such as this, which are not so much about the content of morality as about its scope – the range of actions it applies to – suggest that people disagree not just about which things are morally wrong but also about what it is to be morally wrong.
These different views of morality agree in taking moral standards to be ones that we all have good reason to accept as a normally conclusive basis for deciding what to do and for assessing our claims against others. Some people who believe morality is authoritative in this way may have specific ideas about the reasons why this is so – for example, that these standards are commands of God. But different people may have different ideas about this, and I believe that many people, even though they take moral standards seriously, are quite unclear about exactly why one should do so.
Answering this question has been one of the central aims of moral philosophy since its beginning. Plato’s dialogue Gorgias, for example, is devoted to the question of why we should act justly, and whether there are correct answers to basic questions of morality and justice, or whether, as some participants in the dialogue maintain, these are matters of opinion rather than knowledge, and mere persuasion rather than argument. Callicles, the toughest of these participants, holds that the best life, if one could attain it, would be a life in which one was able to persuade other people to do whatever one wanted them to, without regard to considerations of justice or morality. Socrates’ response to this challenge illustrates several important features of this central question of moral philosophy.
The first is that any attempt to answer the question, “Why be moral?” faces a dilemma. On the one hand, a satisfactory answer to this question cannot be based on any avowedly moral claim. It would be obviously circular to argue that one should obey moral requirements because it would be morally wrong not to do so, or because one would be morally bad if one did not. On the other hand, a response to this question that appealed to some consideration that was obviously unconnected to morality – such as that being moral would make one rich, because “honesty is the best policy” – would offer the wrong kind of answer, which would fail to give morality the kind of significance that it is generally thought to have. It would be more like a bribe, making what had been thought of as noble behavior in fact self-interested.
Socrates’ answer responds to this dilemma. He maintains that immoral or unjust action is only possible if one has a disordered soul, and that the health of one’s soul is the most important thing in life. Because of this, he says, acting unjustly is worse than suffering even the most severe injustice at the hands of others.1 This answer may not be very convincing, but it has the form required to avoid the dilemma I just described. Socrates’ conception of the health of one’s soul is not simply a circular appeal to morality, but rather offers an independent reason for being moral, and one that does not seem like a bribe.
When Socrates offers this answer, Polus, another participant in the dialogue, says that it is ridiculous. He adds that if Socrates were to go into the assembly and say that committing an injustice is worse for a person than suffering an injustice, people would laugh at him, and no one would agree. Socrates responds that the kind of inquiry he is engaged in is not settled by taking a vote. The only relevant way to show him to be wrong, he says, would be to offer an argument refuting what he has claimed.2
This illustrates a second important point about philosophical inquiry into morality (or into any other philosophical issue). However plausible or implausible Socrates’ thesis may be, any answer to the question he is addressing is bound to be controversial. Given any account of the reasons for taking moral requirements seriously, there are bound to be some people who reject this account and are not convinced by the arguments we offer (as, indeed, the opponents in Plato’s dialogue seem in the end not to be really convinced by the argument Socrates has offered).
This would be discouraging if the aim of philosophical inquiry were to find an argument that would force any imagined opponent to accept one’s conclusion. But this is not the aim of philosophy, not only because it is unrealistic to think we could attain it, but also because it is not the main thing we have reason to aim at. Philosophical inquiry is a process of making up one’s own mind what to think. It is not, primarily, about convincing others. After all, one does not know what one wants to convince others of until one figures out what to think oneself.3 The dialogue format of Plato’s writings can be confusing on this point. It is natural to read dialogues as debates, in which Socrates is trying to “defeat” his “opponents.” But this is not the way Socrates himself sees it. He emphasizes that being shown to be wrong is not defeat, but something to be welcomed, because one will have benefited by learning something.4 He sees his interlocutors not as opponents but as coinvestigators. This is why he insists that he is interested in talking only with people who will say what they themselves believe, and will submit to questioning about what they say.
The fact that philosophical inquiry aims at deciding what to believe oneself rather than at convincing real or imagined opponents does not mean that one is free to ignore what others think. It just alters the relevance of conflicting opinions. The question is not “How could I convince them?” “They” may be unreasonable, and refuse to accept even good arguments. The relevant questions, rather, are, “Why do they think that?” and “Do their reasons provide good grounds for me to accept their view?” If one can resolve these questions satisfactorily, then one need not change one’s mind, even if others continue to disagree.
Before taking up the question of the basis of morality, we need to consider the broader question of what makes a life a good life for the person who lives it. This is relevant to an account of morality in two ways. First, an answer to the question, “Why be moral?” must consider how morality is related to the kind of life that is desirable for the person whose life it is. Second, the content of morality depends in part on the answer to this question, since one thing morality requires of us is that we help others in various ways, and at least not harm them. So, to know what morality requires we need to know what is good for people – what makes their lives better, and what makes them worse.
In his argument with Callicles, Socrates considers and rejects two accounts of what makes a person’s life better that still have appeal for many people today. These are hedonism, which is the view that the quality of a life for the person who lives it is measured by the amount of pleasure that it contains, and a desire theory, according to which the quality of a life for a person depends on the degree to which it fulfils his or her desires. Although each of these views has considerable appeal, neither is in fact a satisfactory account, for reasons that Plato recognized in Gorgias.5
Consider hedonism first. There is, of course, the difficult question of exactly what pleasure is, and which kinds of pleasure are most worth having. Advocates of hedonism may underestimate this problem, but there is a further objection to hedonism, which can be seen by noting that it is a form of experientialism – that is, it makes the quality of a life for the person living it depend entirely on the experience of living that life. Robert Nozick provided a famous argument against experientialism with his thought experiment of the “experience machine.”6 Suppose, he said, that it were possible to have oneself connected to a very powerful computer, which would stimulate your brain in a way that would make it seem to you exactly as if you were living whatever kind of life you take to be best. Would a life connected to such a machine actually be as good as a life could be? Nozick claimed, very convincingly I think, that it would not be. The quality of a life depends on what one actually does, and what actually happens to one, not just on what it seems like. The same point can be made without the science fiction involved in Nozick’s example. Consider the possibility that the people whom I think of as my good friends are in fact not friends at all. Perhaps, just to make the point graphic, they are alumni of the Harvard Lampoon who have a project of deceiving me, and who meet every week to plot their strategy and laugh at how gullible I am. It seems clear that I have good reason to want this not to be the case. It matters whether I have friends or not. Similarly, it matters whether the arguments in my articles are really valid, rather than containing subtle errors. And these things are so even if I never discover the errors, or the falseness of my supposed friends.
So even though the experience of living a life – whether it is enjoyable, exciting, satisfying, and so on – matters to how good a life it is, and is perhaps one of the most important factors, it is not the only thing that matters. This weakness of experientialism also brings out how hedonism, as a form of experientialism, differs from a desire-fulfillment theory. The two may sound the same because “fulfillment” maybe taken to refer to the experience of having one’s desires fulfilled. But this is not the way a desire theory should be understood. The relevant idea of a desire being fulfilled is like the idea of a belief being true: a desire is fulfilled, in the relevant sense, just in that case that the world is in fact (not just seems to be) the way the person desires it to be, whether or not the person is aware of the difference. So according to a desire theory the things that make a person’s life go better include factors that lie outside that person’s experience, as Nozick’s experience machine example and the other examples I mentioned suggest. Indeed, these examples might be taken to support a desire theory, that is, to call our attention to the fact that if a person cares about whether he or she has true friends or whether his or her arguments are valid, then that person’s life is going better if these things are in fact the case.
But we should not be too quick here. The correctness of a desire theory depends on whether the “if clause” in the previous sentence is really necessary. A desire theory maintains that things such as friendship make a person’s life go better only if he or she desires these things. Contrary to what a desire theory maintains, however, it may be the case that friendship would make a person’s life better even if she or he doesn’t desire friendship, and that because this is so the person should desire to have friends.
This brings us to another famous argument of Plato’s, from his dialogue Euthyphro. In this dialogue, the title character tells Socrates that he is going to the assembly to denounce his father because this is the pious thing to do. Socrates asks Euthyphro what piety is, and he replies that piety is doing what is pleasing to the gods. Socrates then asks Euthyphro whether actions are pious because they are pleasing to the gods or whether these actions please the gods because they are pious.7 This is one of the most famous questions in all of philosophy because it has application to any attempt to explain a property in terms of the reaction that some person or persons would have under certain conditions. So, for example, if it is said that an object is red if it would look a certain way to a normal human observer in good light, then it may be asked whether things are red because they look that way, or whether they look that way because they are red.
In the case just considered the proposal was that certain things make a person’s life better if that person desires them. The “Euthyphro question” is then whether these things make a person’s life better because he or she desires them or whether the person desires them because they make his or her life better. And the answer seems to be that in most cases the latter is closer to the truth. That is to say, we do not generally think that we have reason to pursue things because we desire them, but, rather, we desire them because we see something about them that seems to us to make them worth pursuing.
These reflections strongly suggest that neither a hedonistic theory nor a desire fulfillment theory gives the full explanation of what makes someone’s life better, although each contains an element of the truth. A plausible account of what makes someone’s life better needs to recognize that the quality of a life depends at least on the following:
The quality of the experience of living it: the extent to which it includes more of desirable states such as pleasure, excitement, and challenge, and less of undesirable ones such as pain, sorrow, and frustration.
The person’s success in achieving his or her main aims, provided that these are ones that there is reason to pursue.
The degree to which it includes other valuable things, including personal relations such as friendship and the development and exercise of valuable talents.
The first of these points gives hedonism its due: pleasure (or more broadly the quality of one’s experience) is a good, and an important one, even though it is not the only good. The second point recognizes the truth in desire theory: the things that make a person’s life better or worse depend on the aims that person actually has. But aims or desires do not, by themselves, make things valuable: they do so only if they are aims worth having. Achieving a foolish aim, such as getting up every day at exactly the same time, does not make one’s life better. Finally, the third point recognizes that some ingredients in a life other than success in one’s aims are worth desiring for their own sake, rather than being good only if one desires them.
These three points are just a list, not an overall theory of what makes a life better.8 It is not at all clear that there could be such a theory. But the foregoing reflections seem to me to strongly suggest that, whether it is an overall theory or a list, a plausible account of what makes someone’s life better will be a substantive good account: a claim or set of claims about what things are good in themselves, not good because they are desired. Hedonism is one such an account; it is just an implausibly narrow one, a list that includes only one element. Socrates’ claim about the health of the soul is also a substantive good account, although not to my mind a very plausible one.
Any account of what makes someone’s life go better, especially one that rests on claims about what is substantively good, is bound to be controversial. So one might ask (as some student in my course always does), “Who’s to decide what makes a life better?” It is important to see that this is a facile debating move, not a serious question. To say of some person that he or she is “the one to decide” whether A is the case or not suggests that this person has the authority to settle this question: that their deciding that A is the case would make it so. Sometimes, in some institutional settings, for example, there is authority of this kind. The Supreme Court, for example, has the authority to decide whether something is the law of the United States. But with respect to the questions we are considering there obviously is no authority of this kind. So the answer to the question, “Who’s to decide?” is “No one.” That is to say, no one has the authority to settle the question.
But in another, more relevant sense the answer to “Who’s to decide?” is “Each of us.” That is to say, it is up to each of us to make up his or her own mind about questions such as what makes a life better for the person who lives it. This is not to say that each of us has any authority to settle this question. It is up to each of us to assess the merits of competing answers and arrive at our own conclusion as to which one is correct. But whether this conclusion is correct depends on its merits, not on our decision.
It may seem that each person has special authority to settle the question of what life is the best life for him or her. This may be true in a sense, but not in the sense relevant to our present discussion. It is up to each person to decide how to live, and each person has authority over this question in the sense that (within limits, at least) his or her decision has a claim not to be interfered with. But authority of this kind should not be confused with authority to settle the question of what makes a life worth living – to determine, by one’s decision, what the right answer to this question is. We do not have this authority. We can be mistaken about what life would be best for us, although it is also true that our choices about how to live, even if misguided, ought not to be interfered with.
There is now a growing body of empirical investigations, by psychologists and economists, of what makes people happy, and it might be thought that their findings could provide an answer to the question we are considering. At the most fundamental level, this is not so, for a reason that goes back to our discussion of Socrates’ philosophical method. Philosophical questions, such as whether the quality of a life for the person who lives it depends only on the person’s experience, or only on what he or she desires, or also on something else, cannot be settled by taking a poll. The correctness of an answer depends on the merits of the argument supporting it, not on how many people believe it to be correct.
Our present discussion is, however, relevant to these empirical findings in two ways. The distinctions we have been making are important in deciding how to interpret survey data of this kind and in deciding what kind of importance it has. Consider, for example, a study by Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers.9 They report the results of surveys in which women were asked how happy they were with their lives. These surveys were conducted over a period of more than thirty years, from the early 1970s to 2006, and Stevenson and Wolfers report that over this period women’s reported happiness declined both in absolute terms and relative to the reported happiness of men.
The first question to which our present discussion is relevant is how to understand what the women in these surveys were reporting. They were sometimes asked to say how happy they were. In other cases they were asked how satisfied they were with their lives, or with how their lives were going in certain respects: as far as their family life was concerned, or their careers. The former wording suggests that in answering this question they were assessing their lives on the basis of a hedonistic standard. The latter suggests they were reporting how fully they thought their desires about their lives (or about some part of their lives) were fulfilled. This makes a difference to the significance of the results. If the subjects are assessing the quality of their experience then, presuming they know how they feel, and are being truthful, these results indicate a decline in at least this particular aspect of wellbeing (the first component on my list above). On the other hand, if the subjects are assessing how fully their desires are fulfilled, this is something they can be mistaken about, and what the data may indicate is not that the women in 2006 are worse off by a desire fulfillment standard but rather that they have a different view about the degree to which their desires are fulfilled, or a different idea of the level of fulfillment it is reasonable for them to hope for.
It is also quite possible that the women in the later period had different, perhaps more ambitious, desires than women interviewed in 1972. If so, then in order to decide whether the reported “decline in happiness” was a bad thing or not we would need to decide whether it was better or worse to have lives which led them to have these new desires if this involved having a lower level of desire fulfillment. That is to say, in order to assess the significance of this study we need to distinguish between the different aspects of wellbeing that we have been discussing and make judgments about their relative importance.
I return now to questions of moral right and wrong, which are our main topic. I will consider two theories that aim to give a general characterization of morality that, on the one hand, explains the authority and importance of conclusions about right and wrong and, on the other, provides an account of the kind of reasoning that leads to these conclusions. The two theories I will consider are John Stuart Mill’s version of utilitarianism and my own version of contractualism. Both of these theories characterize morality in entirely secular terms. Before considering them, however, I want to consider why it might seem that morality must have a religious basis and that there can be no morality if there is no God. Many people seem to believe that this is so, including both some believers in God, who understand morality as His commands, and some people who do not believe in God, and conclude that morality is a sham. Without taking either of these positions, I want to consider why the premise that they have in common, that there can be no morality if there is no God, should seem plausible.
A crude answer, which I mention only to set it aside, would appeal to God’s role in rewarding those who obey moral requirements and punishing those who do not. Morality, as I have said, purports to be a set of standards that everyone has good reason to follow, and the idea is that only Divine sanctions could ensure that everyone has such reasons. I referred to this as a crude answer because it does not provide the right kind of reason for being moral. Someone who avoids morally wrong actions – who does not kill his neighbors and steal their possessions, for example – only out of fear of punishment and hope for future reward – is not a moral person. As I said earlier, a satisfactory answer to the question, “Why be moral?” cannot appeal to morality itself, but it also cannot appeal to purely extrinsic factors, as this account seems to do. But this is not the only way to understand the idea that moral requirements have a religious basis.
A much more plausible interpretation would see moral requirements, or some specific set of such requirements, as the commands of a loving God, a God that is concerned for all of us and gives these commands out of His concern for us. We should follow moral requirements, it would be said, out of respect for God’s wisdom and in response to His love. This account of our reasons for being moral avoids the dilemma I mentioned above: it is neither circular nor does it appeal to considerations that are implausibly extrinsic to morality.
This account also avoids one standard objection to a Divine command theory of morality, which is an application of the Euthyphro question. If morally right actions are those which accord with God’s commands, are these actions right because God commands them, or does God command them because they are right? If the former, then, it might be objected, these commands are arbitrary: God could just as well have commanded the opposite, and then those things would be right. On the other hand, if God commands things because (antecedent to His commands) they are right, then what is morally right does not, after all, depend on what God commands. The present account avoids this objection. It holds that actions are right because God commands them, but His commandments are not arbitrary. They are based on His knowledge of what is (antecedent to these commands) conducive to our wellbeing.
So understood, a Divine command theory seems coherent, and plausible if there is reason to believe in God. But such an account leaves open the possibility of other explanations of the basis of morality. According to this account, moral requirements are the rules of behavior that God commands because following them is conducive to our wellbeing. But these things are conducive to our wellbeing whether God commands them or not. So the authority and importance of morality can be seen as resting simply on its relation to our wellbeing – that is, to the reasons we have to want our lives to go in certain ways and not others. This is what secular moral philosophies do, in various ways. Various secular accounts differ in how they interpret the way in which the good of each person is understood (corresponding to what a loving God would be concerned about) and in how they get from this kind of concern for each person to principles of action (corresponding, in particular, to how a loving God would decide between principles that benefit some and principles that benefit others).
Utilitarianism is a moral theory formulated by Jeremy Bentham at the very end of the eighteenth century and given a more subtle and sophisticated form by John Stuart Mill in the middle of the nineteenth century, in his famous short book Utilitarianism. Utilitarianism identifies individual wellbeing with happiness, and in its simplest form holds that an action or policy is right if it would produce a greater sum of happiness than any alternative, taking into account the happiness of everyone affected, and giving the happiness of every person (or every sentient being) equal weight.
Bentham was primarily a legal reformer, interested in particular in the reform of the British penal system. He believed that pleasure was the ultimate basis of justification and the only form of human motivation. The aim of legal reform and social policy, in his view, was to establish rewards and penalties that would (making use of pleasure and pain as motivators) induce people to behave in ways that would lead to the greatest sum of pleasure for all. Although legal reform and social policy were his main aims, he also stated utilitarianism as a general account of what we ought, morally, to do. When they are interpreted in the way that utilitarianism prescribes, he wrote, “the words ought, and right and wrong, and others of that stamp, have a meaning: when considered otherwise, they have none.”10 One thing he may have meant by this is that the general happiness is the only value sufficient to give moral requirements the authority and importance they are generally assumed to have. If they are understood as having any other basis, he thought, the supposed authority of these requirements is mere pretense.
Bentham understood pleasures as specific psychological states that could be compared and evaluated in terms of their duration, their “intensity,” and what he called their “fecundity,” their tendency to produce other pleasurable states. Mill came to believe that this represented a narrow and impoverished conception of what made human lives better. Although he continued to speak of “happiness” as the only thing desirable in itself, his conception of what it involved was much richer and more complex than Bentham’s. His conception gave special place to “higher pleasures” such as the enjoyment of poetry, and he even allowed that virtue could be valued for its own sake, but said that when a person valued it, then being virtuous had become “a part of his happiness.”11
Mill’s account of the relation between moral wrongness and the promotion of general happiness is more complex than the simple version of utilitarianism that I stated a few paragraphs back, according to which an action is wrong if it would lead to less total happiness than some alternative available to the agent. Mill calls an action, policy, or state of character “expeditious” if it tends to promote the general happiness. But the fact that an action is not expeditious does not in his view, mean that it is morally wrong. “We do not call anything wrong,” he writes, “unless we mean to imply that a person ought to be punished in some way or other for doing it; if not by law, by the opinion of his fellow creatures; if not by opinion, by the reproaches of his own conscience.”12 As a utilitarian, Mill takes the general happiness as the basis for determining what “ought” to be the case. So, in his view, to say that an action is morally wrong is to say that it would be expeditious (that is, productive of the greatest total happiness) for such actions to be punished in one of the three ways he lists.
In understanding morality in this way, as a system of institutionalized norms backed by formal or informal punishments and justified by their tendency to promote the greatest happiness, Mill is in one way just following Bentham – applying Bentham’s view of law to morality, as Bentham himself would have done. But Mill also criticizes Bentham for the way in which he understands the “expeditiousness” of a policy, and hence the rightness or wrongness of an action. Bentham’s greatest error, Mill said, was to assume that in assessing the rightness or wrongness of an action (in asking whether it would be “expeditious” to punish such actions) we should consider only the consequences of that action, or of similar actions if performed generally.13 We need also to consider, he said, the kind of character that these punishments would lead people to form. The character of people around us (the kinds of things that they are likely to do if a suitable occasion arises) can affect general happiness in ways other than through the actions that these people actually perform. Their character affects happiness by determining the kinds of relations (of trust, for example) that others can have with them, the kinds of cooperation that are possible, and the kinds of precautions that we need to take in dealing with them. For example, if others are not generally disposed to help us when we need help, then we need to be prepared to help ourselves should the circumstances arise, and this imposes a cost whether or not an occasion ever arises on which we need their help, and they refuse to give it.
The account of morality offered by utilitarianism is appealing in many ways. First, the general happiness seems to be a sufficiently important value to explain the authority of moral requirements, and it offers an explanation of the right kind: neither circular nor implausibly unrelated to morality. Second, this standard has an appealingly egalitarian character: “each to count for one, none for more than one,” as Bentham wrote. Third, it offers an appealingly clear and simple account of the basis of all of morality, giving reason to believe that all moral questions have, in principle, determinate answers – although it may in practice be difficult to ascertain what these answers are because of the difficulty of predicting which actions and policies will have the best consequences.
Mill’s utilitarianism is a version of the common idea that morality is a system of social control – an informal form of law. In his view, it is a system aimed at and justified by the general good. In determining what is right, it takes everyone equally into account, but one may question whether it does this in the right way. In utilitarian moral thinking everyone is taken into account in two ways: as someone whose happiness is a part of the overall goal that is to be promoted and as an agent who is to be motivated by sanctions (one might say manipulated) to act in ways that promote this goal.
Although this mode of thinking is formally egalitarian – it gives each person’s happiness equal weight – there is no guarantee that it will require that everyone be treated equally. Whether this is so depends on whether equal treatment would yield the largest sum of happiness, and there is no limit, in principle, to the degree to which the interests of a few might be sacrificed in order to produce greater happiness for many. Given the fact that it is the sum of happiness that is to be maximized, there is even no limit to the degree to which very small increases in happiness for a great many people could justify great losses to a few. It appears that we could, for example, be justified on utilitarian grounds in letting someone die in order to prevent a sufficiently large number of brief headaches.
Mill attempts to forestall such objections by pointing out that what he calls “security,” by which he seems to mean assurance that one’s life will not be interfered with in certain ways, is the most important precondition for happiness.14 But this still leaves the question of whether small increases in the security of a sufficiently large number of people would not, on his view, justify serious invasions of the security of a very few. The larger question that this raises is whether people are “taken into account” in the right way simply by having their happiness counted as contributing to the sum that is to be promoted.
A second question concerns the way in which agents are supposed to be motivated by utilitarian morality. Responding to the idea that there can be no morality without God, Mill observes that, through proper education, people can become motivated to follow utilitarian moral standards just as they can be led to internalize any other standards. But, he observes, if this is merely a process of indoctrination, then when people reflect on this motivation it will come to seem arbitrary to them, and its effects will “yield by degrees to the dissolving force of analysis” unless it is linked with some powerful class of natural sentiments.15
Another way to approach this same question is to ask what the content of guilt feelings is supposed to be according to Mill. He says that an action is wrong if it would promote overall happiness to have people feel the reproaches of conscience if they do such things. But what is it, according to Mill, to feel these “reproaches”? It cannot be just to feel that it would promote the greatest happiness if people felt that it was wrong to do such things, since this still leaves the content of the thought “it would be wrong” unexplained. Mill’s answer, in chapter III of Utilitarianism, is that the “natural basis of sentiment for utilitarian morality” lies in “the social feelings of mankind, the desire to be in unity with our fellow creatures.”
The idea that we have such a desire is an attractive thought, but it figures in Mill’s theory simply as a psychological propensity that can be drawn upon to provide a motivational basis for utilitarian morality. The moral theory called contractualism interprets “being in unity with one’s fellow creatures” in a different way, as being able to justify one’s actions to them. It also draws on this idea in another way, treating the desire to be in unity with one’s fellow creatures not just as a psychological state (such as empathy) that motivates us to comply with morality, but also as a desire whose content helps us to see what morality is about, and why we should care about it.
According to contractualism, moral standards are not primarily instruments of social control but rather arise out of our interest in acting in ways that we can justify to others. An action is wrong, in this view, if a principle that permitted it would be one that others could reasonably reject, even if they, too, were concerned with the justifiability of their actions. This account of the content of morality is directly linked with an account of its motivational basis: we are motivated to do what is right, according to contractualism, because we care about whether our actions are justifiable to others, and we have good reason to care about this.
This seems to me to capture very well the experience of believing that one has done the wrong thing. To take a familiar example, Peter Singer, in his famous article “Famine, Affluence, and Morality,” argued forcefully that we are morally required to do much more than is commonly recognized to help starving people in other parts of the world. He defends this demand, in part, on utilitarian grounds: greater happiness would be produced by a starving person’s having the food he or she could buy with $5 than would be lost by my giving up the coffee and pastry that I would buy if I kept this money. But the sense that it is wrong not to do more to help people in starving lands does not seem to me to be well captured only by the thought this would produce greater happiness. Much more relevant is the thought that, given how much the money would mean for them, and how little I would lose, I could not justify to them a policy of keeping it for myself.
More needs to be said about the relevant notions of justifiability and reasonableness than I can undertake in this chapter.16 Here I will confine myself to a few important points. The first is that to decide whether it would be reasonable for a person who would be affected by a principle in a certain way to reject that principle, one needs to compare that person’s reasons for objecting with the reasons that others have for insisting on such a principle (that is, for objecting to the way they would fare under alternative principles.) To “take a person into account” in the way that morality requires is, according to contractualism, simply to recognize him or her as someone to whom justification is owed, someone whose reasons for objecting to a principle need to be considered and answered.
Second, more needs to be said about the kind of reasons that can be grounds for rejecting a principle. These cannot include objecting to a principle on the grounds that the conduct it would allow would be wrong. This would make the contractualist account of morality circular. In addition, although this is more controversial, according to the version of contractualism I favor, a principle cannot be rejected on the grounds that it would permit actions that would lead to states of the world that are bad in an impersonal sense, even though they are not bad for any person. (For example, if they are bad because some object of great beauty would be destroyed, even though no one would ever have enjoyed seeing that object.)
Although the reasons for rejecting a principle must have to do with how some person is affected, they need not be concerned narrowly with a person’s happiness or welfare in the hedonistic sense. They can also include, for example, the reasons that people have to want to be in control of their own lives, and not be controlled by others (even if others could manipulate them in such a way as to make them happy).
