Judith
Jarvis Thomson is an important philosopher who specializes in ethics.  The book here reviewed contains revised
versions of her 1999 Tanner Lectures, along with comments by four other
prominent academics and Thomson’s response to them. 

Due
to her authorship of the ubiquitous philosophical essay, "A Defense of
Abortion," Thomson’s name should ring a bell with many educated
lay-people. That paper has served for three decades as an intellectual landmark
in the debate over abortion.  Built around
fantastical and thought-provoking moral dilemmas, it became perhaps the most
frequently assigned 20^th century text in undergraduate philosophy
courses.  The book here reviewed takes a
quite different tone.  It was written
for philosophers concerned with ethical theory.  Such philosophers will appreciate its contribution to the present
state of the field.  Non-philosophers
may find it close to unreadable. 
However, its lack of literary charm is not accidental, but rather reflects
a principled attitude regarding how serious philosophy should be written.  The commentators are well aware that
Thomson’s lectures provoke debate regarding issues of style as well as debates
regarding content.  But more of style
later.

Goodness
and Advice is
concerned with quite theoretical issues in ethics.  In the first of her two lectures, "Goodness", Thomson
argues against the doctrine of consequentialism, which holds that one
must always choose to act in the way that will bring about the best
consequences.  But what are the best
consequences?  They could not simply be
the consequences that involve the greatest general sum of pleasure; we would
not want to count the pleasure that some people enjoy when inflicting pain on
others as a positive consequence. 
Thomson goes farther and claims that there is no universal notion of
"best", or, for that matter, of "better" or
"good" to be used for the evaluation and ranking of
consequences.  These terms can only be
used in connection with a particular function or beneficiary: when I help a
friend, I have done something good for that friend.  Attempts to evaluate actions in terms of The
Good invite confusion and ethical relativism.  Asking if an action is good in some way is the key to
objective ethical thinking. By claiming that the fact that someone’s
action is good in some way constitutes a reason for that person’s
action, Thomson attempts to solve additional philosophical problems.

 The second lecture, "Advice", sets
out some fundamental structural characteristics which Thomson demands of the
ethical theories that will succeed consequentialism.  Such theories must help us discover what we "ought to
do" in what Thomson calls the "advice" sense of
"ought" €“ what we ought to do "all things considered."  It ends up that the "all things"
that we must consider includes respect for the rights of others and the
avoidance of "miserliness" €“ we mustn’t begrudge great benefits to
others that involve little cost to ourselves. (These considerations are brought
to bear in terms of a system of inter-locking claims that cannot be described
in the space of this review).  Thomson
also argues that her schema successfully avoids the possibility of ethical
paradoxes that demand that a person both follow and refrain from a certain
course of action.

None
of this will sound terribly exciting to lay people.  The mode of presentation is, itself, far from exciting. Indeed,
Thomson seems to go out of her way to avoid spicing-up her lectures with apt
literary allusions or illustrative historical anecdotes.  She follows the strictest canons of analytic
philosophical prose, striving to say precisely what she wants to say €“ not a
jot more or less €“ and all in the plainest and clearest possible language.  No clever turns of phrase or mind-bending
thought experiments to be found here!

Two
of her commentators, Philip Fisher, and Barbara Hernstein Smith are professors
of literature.  A third, Martha
Nussbaum, is a philosopher whose work is deeply rooted in the classics, and who
has risen (or fallen, depending on whom you ask) to the status of "public
intellectual." It is not difficult to imagine how these three must have
suffered through Thomson’s dry yet precise prose, how they must have champed at
the bit, awaiting their opportunity to demonstrate that literature offers more
subtle treatments of ethics than are dreamt of in analytic philosophy.  Given the opportunity, they attack Thomson
for her trivial examples, for her insensitivity to tragically insolvable moral
dilemmas, for her forgetting that ethical judgments must be formulated against
the broader narrative of the moral agent’s life.  It is to her credit that in her response, Thomson handles these
criticisms quite neatly.  The critics
have not paid sufficient attention to what she has said and to what she has not
said. Thomson reminds her critics that she is dealing with abstract issues that
will not benefit from being discussed in terms of dramatic or complicated
examples, and that her treatment of conflicting rights does confront the
issue of tragic moral dilemmas. 

It
seems that analytic philosophers still have something to teach literary types
about the discipline of careful reading.

© 2002 Berel Dov Lerner

Born
in Washington, D.C., Berel Dov Lerner studied at Johns Hopkins and the
University of Chicago, before becoming a member of Kibbutz Sheluhot in Israel’s
Beit Shean Valley.  He completed his
Ph.D. at Tel-Aviv University, and currently teaches philosophy at the Western
Galilee Academic College.  His first
book, Rules, Magic and Instrumental Reason was published in 2001 by
Routledge.

Categories: Philosophical, Ethics