The latest
text in the series on Contemporary Debates in Philosophy provides contrasting
views on eight central arguments in normative and metaethical theory. Each
article is written by a prominent figure within the field and is pitched at a
level which is demanding but significantly more accessible than the texts and
journal articles on which it draws. The articles are all by figures of the
highest standing (e.g. William Shaw, Philip Petit and Robert Audi). As a
result, this is not a text for absolute beginners but it may be a useful
teaching tool and a good source for those who are trying to raise their game.
(It taught me a thing or two, and I can claim a reasonable familiarity with the
primary material.)

Conveniently,
it splits into a section on normative ethics (looking at rights,
contract theory and the virtues); a section on motivation; and a section
on the idea of moral facts. Each issue is tackled in a pair of opposing
essays. For example Nicholas Sturgeon and Nick Zangwill battle it out to
determine whether we need to appeal to moral facts in order to explain why
we have our moral beliefs. Sturgeon argues that moral facts can play a role in
plausible explanations of how we form such beliefs. Against this, Zangwill
argues that they are redundant. (And there is, therefore, an important
disanalogy between our moral thinking and our thought about the natural world.)

The
danger of a focus upon intellectual duels of this sort is that the wrong
impression might be given: the impression that there are only two sides
to every story. James Drier’s useful introduction to the volume attempts to defuse
this danger, stressing instead that such binary oppositions are a convenient
oversimplification. Apart from the existence of other, unmentioned, contenders,
two-sided debates tend to generate intermediate, compromise positions.
Similarly, the boundaries of normative and metaethics, are not to be taken as watertight.

It
may be a tell-tale sign of my own area of interest, but the section on normative
ethics immediately caught my eye, partly because of the competing essays by
Rosalind Hursthouse and Julia Driver. They go quickly to the heart of the
matter with Hursthouse claiming that virtue ethics initially encountered a
tough reception because of a reductionism exemplified by the work of John
Rawls. Whether or not it is quite fair to single Rawls out, the reductionist
assumption is taken to be as follows:  two central ethical concepts, the right
and the good, form the basis of all ethical deliberation.

Hursthouse
points out that what drops from view if we reduce deliberation in this way is
the option of a third approach which emphasizes the way in which a wide range
of finely nuanced (thick) ethical concepts are interconnected. The concepts in
question are those concerned with virtues and vices, e.g. being honest, being
charitable, modest, practically wise, and so on. These do more than register
approval. They are interconnected, to have one of the relevant character traits
we need to have others.

Hursthouse
is particularly well-known for suggesting that the concept of right, (far from
being more basic than such thick concepts) can itself be understood in terms of
the virtues, i.e. that the proper direction of explanation is from the latter to
the former. This is something she sticks to, defending a qualified version of
the following biconditional: an action is right if and only if it is what a
virtuous agent would characteristically do in the circumstances. And here,
the virtue called for may be of this sort or that sort, we may need to do what
a wise, courageous, temperate, or just person would do, and so on.

Julia
Driver’s objection to this biconditional is that someone with a phobia about
water should probably not jump into a lake in order to save someone else
from drowning. There would be no point. They would fail and possibly drown. Admittedly
such a phobia would not strictly be a vice, but here we might think of similar
examples of not acting above ourselves, where the moral parallels are perhaps closer.
For example, in mountain climbing, it is not a good idea for a novice to take
the same route as an experienced climber. Accordingly, a question remains about
the wisdom of identifying virtue ethics too closely with the position that
Hursthouse so ably champions.

The
debate on the question of moral motivation is pitched at a similar, comparatively
accessible, level. Samuel Kerstein argues that morality is rationally inescapable,
that moral obligations stem from reason and not from our gut feelings. Against
this Kantian and rationalist position, Simon Blackburn responds with ‘Must We
Weep for Sentimentalism?’ Backburn’s sentimentalism is the view that the
feelings that we (characteristically) have account for moral motivation and the
authoritative nature of moral judgements. That is to say, he appeals to the
emotional responses of appropriate responders. When moral talk is
understood with reference to the latter, our claims can be true of false.
Kerstein is in agreement about the truth-aptness of moral discourse but argues
that sentimentalism of Blackburn’s sort clashes with our ordinary moral
thinking because it leads us into thinking that we only have obligations when
we happen to have the right emotional feelings.

For
Blackburn, this amounts to a misunderstanding of an interesting sort: obligations
don’t depend upon their recognition by those who have them, any more than debts
depend upon their recognition by debtors. But this does not mean to say that we
can demonstrate to a knave that he is mistaken about having such obligations. That
particular Holy Grail of rationalist ethics eludes us, we don’t have it and, according
to Blackburn it is quite wrong to imagine that we need it. ‘We think instead
that human beings are ruled by passions and the best we can do is to educate
people so that the best passions are also the most forceful’. Whatever
reservations I have about Blackburn’s position, I am happy to concede that he
is in good form.

Overall,
this is a fairly accessible text with some very fine individual contributions.

© 2006 Tony Milligan

Tony
Milligan completed his doctorate on Iris Murdoch at Glasgow University where he
currently tutors in philosophy. He also teaches philosophy with the Lifelong
Learning Centre at the University of Strathclyde.

Categories: Philosophical, Ethics