Ethics
ReviewsEthical Theory - Applied Ethics - Ethics Videos - Case Studies - Forums - Library - Resources
Jonathan DancyDepartment of Philosophy Review of:
|
 |
Philip Stratton-Lake’s Kant, Duty and Moral Worth offers us an outline of a moral theory. It is pretty eclectic. There is an element of Kant there – more than an element, in fact. There is a certain amount of Ross. And there is an element of contemporary Aristotelianism, too. My contribution to today’s discussion will concern the way in which these three elements hang together. I start with a brief account of the main themes of the book.
Stratton-Lake starts from Kant’s claim that only actions done from the motive of duty have moral worth. This claim, he thinks, is a deep truth, but as ordinarily understood it is not even true. We have become used to thinking of an action that is done from the motive of duty as one done for the reason that one ought to do it. But the fact that one ought to do an action is no reason whatever for doing it, any more than the fact that the act is right is a reason why it is right. It is the reasons why one ought that are the reasons for doing the action, and that one ought to do it cannot be among the reasons why one ought. So if we think of an action done from duty in this way, as one done for the reason that one ought to do it, we sever the Kantian link between morality and rationality – between doing the right thing and acting for the right reasons. We sever that link because an action with moral worth turns out to be done from duty, but that an action is one’s duty is no reason to do it.
The reasons for doing an action are the considerations, whatever they may be, that count in favour of doing it – features of the situation, that sort of thing. Now consider what Stratton-Lake calls the symmetry thesis: that a good-willed person is disposed to be motivated to do what she ought by the normative reasons why she ought so to act. This requires that the good-willed person is disposed to be motivated by something other than duty. How can it be, then, that a morally worthy action is one done from the motive of duty? Stratton-Lake’s Kantian answer is that moral motivation has a dual structure. The good-willed person’s primary motive will be the reasons for doing the action. But such a person will also have a secondary motive, which is constituted by her commitment to morality, to doing what she ought. To have this secondary motive is not just to have another, explicitly moral motive in addition to the ones already in place. (This would run contrary to the symmetry thesis.) It is to be disposed to do an action only in so far as one judges that the action is morally required. To put it another way, where duty is my secondary motive I regard the considerations that form my primary motive as sufficient solely because I judge them to give rise to an obligation. (p. 62).
According to Stratton-Lake, then, we can retain Kant’s deep truth if we understand him as saying that actions that have moral worth are ones done from duty as a secondary motive. And we should do this, because in this way we can retain the idea that with actions done from duty there is a non-accidental connection between the rightness of an action and its moral worth.
With this in hand, Stratton-Lake now asks whether the new understanding of Kant’s dictum about the motive of duty is consistent with what Kant has to say about the moral law. Kant is often understood as saying that the moral law is the ground for all particular duties, and we have denied this, because we have taken it that the ground for a particular duty – the features that make it a duty – are such things as that she is in trouble, or that he is a friend. That one’s maxim cannot be universalised looks, on this account, as if it is quite the wrong sort of thing to be the ground for any duty whatever. We are committed, therefore, to giving a different interpretation of Kant’s remarks about the role of the Moral Law. Stratton-Lake’s suggestion is that we should approach this task by thinking about the way in which Kant thinks about causation. According to Kant, there are particular causal relations between events in the world, but such relations are only possible if there are specific causal laws governing those relations, and such specific laws are only possible if there is a Principle of Causation (or more generally because of the Transcendental Unity of Apperception). So we have a three-tiered structure here. Note, what is more, that the causal laws do not act as causes, any more than does the Principle of Causation. What the laws do is to make possible the particular causal relations (the necessitation that binds cause and effect), and the Principle of Causation is the condition of possibility for the laws.
By analogy, then, Stratton-Lake wants us to take Kant to be 
suggesting that
there is a similar three-tier structure on the moral side. There are normative
relations in the world, between the reasons for doing an action and the action
that they are reasons for doing; there are specific moral laws specifying
which features are reasons for what; and there is a Moral Law which plays
the sort of transcendental role played by the Principle of Causation. The
moral laws are conditions for the possibility of particular moral reasons,
and the Moral Law is the condition for the possibility of specific moral
laws. The question that is driving us here is like the causal question. We
asked ‘how could there be such a thing as one thing making another
happen?’ – and our answer consisted in an appeal to specific
laws and then to the Principle of Causation. Similarly, we ask ‘how
could there be such a thing as a feature that requires or necessitates an
action?’, and our answer consists in an appeal to specific laws, and
then to the Moral Law behind them.
Actually I am not quite sure if this is the right way to express how Stratton-Lake sees the relation between the three tiers. Sometimes it looks as if there are two questions raised by any suggestion that here we are dealing with an action that is required, demanded, obligatory. The first is ‘how could there be such a thing at all?’ and the answer is given by direct appeal to the Moral Law. The second is ‘how could it be that this action is obligatory here and that one is not?’, and the answer to this question is given by appeal to the specific moral laws for which the Moral Law stands as the condition for their possibility.
One final move is necessary to complete the picture. Ordinary reasons are to be found at the bottom layer. At the top we have the Moral Law, playing its transcendental role. In between there are specific moral principles. But on this picture Kant’s remarks appear to focus on the relation between the top layer and the bottom layer. As Stratton-Lake sees things, this leaves a gap in Kant’s overall theory, because on his account it says nothing about normative moral reasons (now that we have abandoned the idea that the basic moral reason for doing anything is some thought about the universalisability of one’s maxim). Stratton-Lake proposes to fill this gap by plugging Ross’s theory of Prima Facie Duties into it. This proposal has the advantage that it offers a set of specific moral laws, which go to explain the possibility of the particular duties that we find case by case. According to Ross, if there were no principles of Prima Facie Duty, there could be no particular moral obligations. So Ross’s theory is the right sort of theory to stand in between what Kant has to say about the Moral Law and what we want to say about particular normative reasons.
Stratton-Lake offers his tripartite structure as affording some compromise between Kantians, with their emphasis on necessity and laws, and Aristotelian particularists, who seem to be keen to do without laws and look only at the detailed nature of particular cases. As he sees it, he is able to give something to either side of this controversy. The particularists are right in what they have to say about our ground-level moral reasons. Kant, however, is right in what he has to say about the very possibility of moral requirements. And each side must admit the justice of the other’s concerns. Particularists must accept the force of the question how it is that there can even be such things as moral requirements, and need have no special quarrel with a Kantian answer; Kantians cannot suppose that principles and laws can stand as reasons for doing anything at all, and need have no special quarrel with what particularists have to say on that front. We need a bit of both, then. This is a philosophically respectable compromise.
2. Worries
My worries about this story come under two broad heads:
What exactly is the transcendental role, and how does the Moral Law manage to play that role? Further, how is it that that role is also played by specific moral laws (a.k.a. Ross’s principles of Prima Facie Duty)?
Why do we need specific moral laws in addition to the Moral Law?
The first of these questions I ask in a spirit of enquiry. I accept Stratton-Lake’s
suggestion that the question of ‘the nature and possibility of practical
necessity’ (p. 130) is one to which all should attempt to provide an
answer. The second question I ask in more combative spirit. As a particularist,
I see no need for moral reasons to be supported, held in place by or otherwise
dependent on a panoply of specific principles, whether Ross’s or someone
else’s. So I want to see good reason before I admit that this intermediate
layer is there at all. Why isn’t it enough to have particular reasons
case by case, with the Moral Law (or something else) telling us how it is possible
for such reasons to generate moral necessity, moral requirements and moral
duties?
The Moral Law is supposed to explain the possibility of a moral ‘must’, just as the Principle of Causation explains the possibility of a causal ‘must’. STRATTON-LAKE characterises this moral ‘must’ in two ways. First, there is the ontological way: we are to explain the possibility of an action’s being actually required (p. 4). Second, there is the phenomenological way: we are to explain how it is possible for an action to be experienced as, or represented as, unconditionally necessary (p. 70). In terms of the latter, we are told that finite rational beings experience moral requirements as commands, expressed in imperatives – categorical imperatives. How is this possible? If the answer is to be given in terms of the Moral Law, there is a problem with it. For that law itself is a categorical imperative, and surely we cannot appeal to a categorical imperative, no matter how majestic, to explain the very possibility of categorical imperatives. Further, nothing has yet been said to persuade us that the sort of necessity we are dealing with is other than a matter of degree. It might be that both alternatives have some of it, but one has more than the other. But if this is even a possibility, we know that appeal to the Moral Law will not be able to act as explanans for this sort of necessity, because the relevant aspects of the Moral Law are not matters of degree.
Perhaps, however, that was not the quite the point. Perhaps the main point is the relation between necessity and law. What is necessary is not the law, but the action required by the circumstances. Similarly, on the causal side of the analogy, what is necessary is the effect, not the law in virtue of which the cause necessitates the effect. (Of course, the law may itself be necessary, but this will be in a different sense.) Now if we are to explain these necessities, for Kant, we will have to appeal to something universal, since Kant holds that where there is necessity there must be universality. In the causal case there are the causal laws there, ready to provide the required element of universality. In the moral case, by analogy, there must again be law if there is necessity, and the Moral Law is appropriately universal. So we explain the necessity of the action by appeal to the universality of the Moral Law (maybe via the specific moral laws as intermediaries).
The problem with this is that moral necessity is of a quite different order from causal necessity. Causal necessity is, as one might put it, factive: an event that is causally necessitated will certainly occur, indeed, it must occur. Moral necessity is not factive: an action that is morally necessary may not occur at all. Given this vast difference, it is not very attractive to argue that since causal necessity requires law, or something universal, moral necessity does so as well. In fact, it is far from obvious that we need to explain the moral must in terms of universal law at all. If there is a moral must here, there must be a law, since a ‘must’ just is a law. But the law could be fully particular. What is not yet clear is why the way to explain the possibility of a particular law is to appeal to a universal law.
Of course this leaves things quite open. It may be that though there is no antecedent reason to look to something universal to explain a particularised necessity, still, as things turn out, this is the right way to go about things. And the claim I just made, that we might be able to rest content with particular law, is vulnerable to the extent that as yet it offers no way of explaining the nature and possibility of practical necessity.
What is the phenomenon we are trying to explain? Stratton-Lake writes ‘to say, therefore, that the moral law appears to finite rational beings as a command, is to say that it appears to them as necessitating certain actions – that is, it appears as an imperative … as a categorical imperative’ (p. 37). Here we have three concepts – command, categorical imperative and necessitation – all bundled together. It looks, however, as if the basic one is intended to be the notion of the categorical imperative. The question then should be how it is possible for something to appear as a categorical imperative. And the most direct answer Stratton-Lake gives to this is that ‘The awareness of necessitation is explained with reference to our taking ourselves as standing under an a priori law’ (p. 70). I take this to mean that those who take themselves to be subject to the Moral Law are in a position to experience specific moral commands as categorical imperatives. But the force of this explanation depends entirely on the idea that if one takes oneself to be subject to a very general command, one can experience as a requirement more particular commands which are appropriately related to the first one – which can be subsumed under it, to use an expression that Stratton-Lake sometimes wields. And this, I think, excludes from its domain all those who do not, in some sense however weak, suppose that they are subject to Kant’s Moral Law. I am myself just such a one, and yet I seem perfectly able to experience moral requirements as such case by case. So it seems to me that Kant’s explanation cannot be the right one – at least not for me. And if it is not, it cannot be that the Moral Law stands as a condition for the possibility of moral experience, conceived as the experience of requirements.
Stratton-Lake is aware of this objection (p. 70), but his response to it seems inadequate. He suggests that Kant is not engaged here in what he would have called empirical psychology, but is rather specifying something presupposed in any particular moral judgement. ‘We can only judge that some act is necessary in the circumstances in so far as we subsume it under universally valid principles, which are in turn only possible in so far as they are subsumed under the a priori principle of universality as such’ (pp. 70-1). But I think I am a counterexample to this claim, if the ‘can’ in it is non-normative, i.e. if ‘can’ here does not mean ‘should’ or ‘have a right to’. I do judge acts to be necessary in their circumstances, and I don’t think that I subsume these acts under universally valid principles, nor that I subsume those principles under the principle of universality as such. Perhaps I am wrong about this, but I would be surprised if I am.
So far I have been suggesting that it is hard to see how to explain the experience of moral necessitation by appeal to (an implicit acceptance of) the Moral Law. This leaves open the question how else one might explain it. A particularist should allow that we can think of an action as required in the circumstances, and this is Stratton-Lake’s explanandum. If one wants to stay at that level rather than move up to a transcendental one, what explanatory resources are available to one? One possibility is to try to appeal simply to the differences between different types of reasons. This approach would probably involve minimising the differences between moral reasons and others, working exactly in the opposite direction to Kant. Obviously we need to respect any peculiarities that moral reasons might turn out to have; but since nobody is able to say what makes a reason moral, we might be pardoned the suspicion that moral reasons as a class are not going to turn out to be very special. If they are not special, they will not be special in being ‘categorical’, and if so, the experience of moral imperatives as categorical will probably not be correctly explained by appeal to the Moral Law. There are right ways of doing things that are neither moral nor aesthetic. For instance, there is a right and a wrong way of using a tool. This is not an instrumental matter; one may have instrumental reasons for using the tool in a/the wrong way. Carpentry creates categorical imperatives that are not moral imperatives, I would say. If so, the only way of explaining the categorical nature of the imperatives involved is by reference to the fact that the reasons at issue make no appeal to the purposes of the agent, to pleasure, to enjoyment or the like. The same applies to philosophical reasons. There are right and wrong ways of going about philosophical enquiry, in ways that are grounded in the nature of the subject matter rather than in the purposes of the enquirer. And so on.
I now turn to my second worry. Why is there any need for specific moral laws?
As I suggested earlier, Stratton-Lake seems to be offering two ways in which the moral laws might be functioning in his system. The first is that the specific moral laws act as conditions of possibility for the existence of particular requirements, and that the Moral Law acts as the condition of possibility for specific moral laws. The second is that the Moral Law acts directly as the condition of possibility for the existence of particular requirements, and that the specific laws merely tell us why these acts rather than those are the ones required. To the extent that these options are really distinct, I prefer the second of them. I don’t think that the relation in which the specific laws stand to particular requirements is the same as that in which the Moral Law stands to the specific laws. To my mind, there is really only one possibility question, which is how there can be such a thing as an action that is unconditionally required of an agent. Questions about which actions are of that peculiar sort are not possibility-questions in the same way. But if this is the right way of looking at things, the question why we need the intermediate layer of specific laws becomes more pressing.
It is worth reminding ourselves of the fact that Stratton-Lake argues for the need for this intermediate layer in a distinctive way. I have quite a list of ways in which people have tried to run such arguments in the past. Normally it is suggested that there cannot be moral reasons without specific moral principles. These may be principles of the Rossian sort rather than absolute, ‘Kantian’ principles. If pressed on why there cannot be particular reasons without principles, appeal is often made to a subjunctive conditional. Ross himself produces an example of this conditional, which Stratton-Lake quotes:
I suggest ‘prima facie duty’ or ‘conditional duty’ as a brief way of referring to the characteristic (quite distinct from that of being a duty proper) which an act has, in virtue of being of a certain kind, (e.g. the keeping of a promise), of being an act which would be a duty proper if it were not at the same time of another kind which is morally significant.
The idea is that a feature gives us a moral reason for doing an action if and only if it would make the action a duty if it were the only morally relevant feature. If true, this would establish the claim that every particular reason rests on a principle. It would establish that claim because it establishes a sense in which every reason is a general reason. Every reason-giving feature is such that if alone it is a duty-making feature.
Now this is not the only way of trying to establish the need for specific general principles if there are to be any moral reasons at all. I mention it only because it is (one of) Ross’s, and because it is so common in other writers too. I also mention if because I think it can be conclusively shown to be mistaken, and because Stratton-Lake is as suspicious of it as I am. My point here is that Stratton-Lake’s approach seems, at least, to be very different and rather more interesting. Whether it is as different as it seems will, however, depend on which line he takes of the two I distinguished above. If he is arguing that specific principles are required to play for particular requirements the same role as the Moral Law plays for them, I would think of this as distinctive. If, by contrast, he is arguing only that the Moral Law stands as a condition of possibility for particular requirements, with the specific laws telling us which actions actually have that peculiar feature of being required, I think he is more likely to be making some more ordinary appeal to the need for principles if there are to be reasons.
Supposing, then, that he is taking the more interesting line, how well is it likely to work? The difficulty that I see with it derives from the fact that the specific principles that Stratton-Lake is thinking of are Rossian ones, and these are not absolute principles of the traditional, supposedly Kantian sort, but principles of, as one might put it, contributory reason. Each principle specifies not an ought, but a reason-giving feature. It is because of this that the principles are not principles of duty, as Ross repeatedly stresses. But it is also because of this that the principles are not well suited to act as conditions for the possibility of particular moral requirements. Remember that the phenomenon to be explained is our experience of particular acts as being required of us by the circumstances. As far as that goes, the Moral Law is just the right sort of explanans, since it is, as one might put it, in the requiring business. But Rossian principles are not - and rightly not. Any attempt to capture the notion of a contributory moral reason that either thinks of reasons as requiring something or other, or more cautiously tries to capture the ‘normative force’ of a reason in terms of some more indirect relation to ‘oughts’, is going to fail. This is a general point (and I have merely asserted it here, not argued it). But as far as Stratton-Lake’s project goes, the point is merely that Rossian Prima Facie principles are conceived by him as specifying what he (rather unsuitably, in my view) calls evidential moral considerations. But with such considerations there is no sign of a command, of an imperative, of obligation or of requirement – not, at least, once we have seen that the attempt to capture the force of a reason in terms of subjunctive conditionals is not going to work. So it is not very plausible to suggest that such evidential considerations stands as conditions of possibility for particular requirements.
A caveat here: of course it is easy to allow that without reasons, there is no possibility of requirements. In this limited sense, the evidential principles are required (let us suppose pro tem.) if there are to be any duties. The problem I am trying to get at is more a matter of what is expected to explain what. A plethora of Prima Facie principles does nothing to explain the phenomenon of overall requiredness. What is needed to explain that is something like a principle of Most Reason: that one ought to do what there is most moral reason to do. But this is not itself a principle that is operating at the Prima Facie level at all. And it is not one that itself would be inapplicable in the absence of Ross-style principles of prima facie duty. All that is necessary for an appeal to the Principle of Most Reason is that there be reasons – particular normative reasons, of the sort with which we are familiar – and that those reasons go together so as to determine on which side there is most reason (and we need not think of this as additive in any way). We may think of this as compatible with the Kantian explanation in terms of the Moral Law; or we may think of it as competing, partly since it is more general and covers non-moral reasons as well as moral ones. But my target here is not the force of the explanation of moral requiredness in terms of the Moral Law. It is the suggestion that that explanation needs an intermediate level if it is to work properly.
At the very end of his book Stratton-Lake turns directly to the particularist challenge to principle-based ethics. He accepts – as many would not- the force of the particularist argument that is based on the doctrine of organic unities. If value can vary according to context, and if there is a close link between reasons and values, there will be no sign of the sort of regularities required if general principles of reason are to have a chance of being true. Or rather, as Stratton-Lake himself puts it, it would be a sort of cosmic accident, a world-historical chance (p. 128), if there turned out to be some principled relation between certain natural and certain moral properties. He goes on (p. 130):
One cannot, therefore, attack particularists simply by defending the particular principles to which they offer counter-examples. One must attack the doctrine that is doing the damage, namely, the doctrine of organic wholes. The transcendental conception of the moral law and moral laws provides us with a way of doing this. For according to this understanding of moral principles the focus shifts away from moral deliberation (where particularists are understandably happy to engage with their opponents) to the practical necessity actions must possess if they are morally required. According to the transcendental account of the moral law, our moral experience can only be explained with reference to strictly universal principles, which in turn must be explained with reference to the purely formal principle of universal law as such – that is the moral law. Consequently there must be strictly universal moral principles.
I understand this as a sort of blueprint for a defence against particularism.
As such, my remarks have been intended to suggest why I don’t think
it is going to work.
Phillip Stratton-Lake - 06:48am Nov 27, 2002 (1.)
University of Reading
Reply to Jonathan Dancy
1. JD’s first point is a request for clarification. He notes a certain ambiguity in what it is I say needs explaining. He notes that sometimes I claim that it is the possibility of a normative fact - the moral must – that needs explaining. At other times I claim it is the possibility of a phenomenological fact – our experience of the moral must – that needs explaining. I have to admit that in the book I did switch from the normative to phenomenological in this way. But it is really the phenomenological fact that I start from. Like Kant, I assume that we can learn about the object of this experience, the moral must itself, by understanding our experience of it and how this experience is possible. I claim that Kant is best understood as maintaining that the Moral Law explains the possibility of this experience. Given the validity of some form of transcendental idealism, if the moral law explains the possibility of this experience it also explains the possibility of the object of this experience. But my primary interest is in explaining the possibility of the experience of the moral must, the experience of being bound to do some act in a way that is independent of our desires and concerns. As I understand him, Kant argues that it is the moral law that explains this experience. When we experience some act as necessary in the circumstances we take ourselves to stand under an absolutely universal law. The strict universality of this law must, in turn, be traced back to the moral law itself. What I wanted to emphasise is that this law is not to be taken as a very abstract ground of duty. It should, rather, be understood as having a transcendental, not a justificatory role.
2. JD, asks, how the moral law can explain the possibility of our experience of particular imperatives if the moral law is itself experienced as an imperative. It seems that my account simply begs the question at issue, or at least leaves one such experience unexplained.
The first point I would like to make in response to this is that the moral law is not intrinsically imperatival. In itself it is the mere form of law as such, which for Kant is the feature that all laws, qua laws, possess – namely, mere universality. It is for this reason that he calls it the mere form of law as such. In itself, then, the moral law is not an imperative. On Kant’s view, perfectly rational beings act from the same fundamental principle as we do; though it does not appear to them in the form it appears to us. It appears to us as an imperative because of our finitude, because we do not necessarily act in accordance with law-like maxims.
The second, and more important, point is that we do not have an experience of being bound by the moral law that is distinct from our experience of being bound to do some particular act. Kant need not be understood as claiming that we first experience the moral law as an imperative and then have a distinct experience of being required to do particular acts in particular contexts. [1] If we did, both experiences of moral necessity would have to be explained. Kant may, however, be understood as claiming that we only experience the imperatival character of the moral law in our experience of being bound to do some particular act. This experience is explained with reference to our finite nature and our taking ourselves to stand under an unconditional law which, qua unconditional, must be subsumed under the mere form of universality as such, i.e. the moral law. But the imperatival character of this law is only felt in our feeling constrained to do some specific action, and is not separable from this. Understood in this way, there is not a separate question of how we are to experience the moral law as an imperative.
3. Isn’t the Kantian explanation of the experience of moral necessity I outline refuted by particularists who deny any important role for universal principles? Many people do not think that they are subject to Kant’s moral law: JD confesses to being such a person. But such people are still able to experience moral requirements. JD notes that I do not think transcendental claims can be refuted in this way, but insists that if the ‘can’ that is at issue is non-normative, then it is falsified by particularists. Particularists do not see themselves as subsuming particular acts under strictly universal principles. If they did they wouldn’t be particularists. Isn’t it presumptuous to insist that particularists’s self-understanding is mistaken?
Well, this may sound presumptuous, but I think that transcendental principles cannot be refuted in this way. This is not because the relevant ‘can’ is normative, but because the claim that is being made is transcendental rather than psychological. I do not think I refute what Kant says in the first Critique by claiming, on the basis of introspection, that I am not aware of subsuming my intuitions under the categories. I suspect none of us are aware of doing this. If introspection could refute what Kant says in the first Critique, then no complex arguments are needed against Kant’s view. We need only note that no one has ever caught himself or herself applying the categories. We could then conclude that since these people have experience without applying the categories, the categories cannot be necessary for experience.
This is not of course to say that particularists are mistaken about the form of their moral deliberation. I am not insisting that universal moral principles must figure in one’s practical deliberation if one is to conclude that one must act in a certain way. The distinction between the transcendental and the justificatory role of moral principles enables us to claim some essential role for moral principles without insisting that they must, or should, figure in our deliberation. On the view I favour, the moral law and the more specific, intermediate moral principles function solely as transcendental conditions of some consideration necessitating some act. They do not also function as considerations that necessitate this act, or as part of some more complex consideration that necessitates this act. As such, there is no presumption that they should figure in our deliberation about what to do.
Kant may be wrong in maintaining that we need to synthesise our experience by means of the categories, but I do not think that he can be shown to be wrong by introspection. Similarly, if the moral law is to be understood as a transcendental principle, explaining the possibility of moral experience, I do not think it can be refuted by introspection.
4. JD suggests that the possibility of the moral must might be explained in some other way, a way with which the particularist would be more comfortable. One possibility JD suggests is that the possibility of fully particular laws that explain particular musts, which do not need to be explained by universal laws. This proposal accepts the assumption that the relevant sort of law is one that states what must be done, but pushes the possibility that this law could be fully particular. It could be fully particular in the sense that the thing that must be done is a particular action and the law only requires this particular action in this particular set of circumstances. According to this proposal, there is no universal claim to the effect that this type of act must always be done in this type of circumstances. Call this the ‘particular law’ account of moral necessity.
Another possibility JD suggests is ‘to try to appeal simply to the differences between different types of reasons’. The type of reasons he has in mind are those that are categorical n the sense that they independent of the agent’s purposes or concerns. The idea is that the balance of categorical reasons can explain the categorical musts they give rise to. Call this the ‘balance of reasons’ account of moral necessity.
In my book I do not offer arguments for the view that particularists cannot explain moral necessity. I simply outline a Kantian explanation of this. Whether some particularist alternative is better will depend on the details of their alternative account, and this is not the place to push this matter. I shall, however, briefly mention some problems the particular law and balance of reasons accounts of moral necessity may run into.
The main problem I have with the particular law account of moral necessity is that there does not seem to be enough of a gap between the fully particular law and the particular act it requires. What is the difference between a law that states that I must do some particular act A in a particular set of circumstances C and the fact that I must do A in C? There must be a difference if the particular must is to be explained by the particular law, but it is unclear what this difference is.
One might also wonder what conception of law is at work here. The Humean, regularity theory of laws has trouble even with laws that are instantiated only once, and whereas Armstrong’s conception of laws [2] as relations between universals allows for there to be just one instance of a law in a possible world, this falls a long way short of JD’s fully particular law. As JD understands it, a fully particular law not only might be instantiated only once, but could only be instantiated once. It would seem that any law cannot be fully particular in the way JD suggests, but would have to pick out some sort of regularity. If this is right, then a particular moral must could not be explained with reference to a fully particular law.
Finally, it is not clear to me that we make sense of a law that requires that some particular (token) act be done prior to the doing of that particular act? It seems to me that prior to the doing of the token act we can only talk of act types.
I have to say that I am more inclined to the balance of reasons account of moral necessity than I was when I wrote the book, but I still have some doubts about it. There is, I think no doubt that the balance of reasons fully explains the oughts they give rise to. The only issue, then, is whether musts are different from oughts. I think there are a number of ways in which they are different, and these are intimated in the way in which we use ‘must’ instead of ‘ought’. In particular, in thinking that I must do something I think not only that the balance of reasons favours this act, but also think of myself as unable to do anything else. As Bernard Williams has pointed out, this feature is particularly conspicuous when we apply these terms to the past. There is nothing odd about saying ‘I ought to have ¦ed, but I didn’t’. It would, however, be odd to say ‘I had to ¦, but I didn’t’.
If there is something to the idea that ‘ought’ is distinct from ‘must’, and if ‘ought’ can be understood solely in terms of the balance of reasons, then we cannot understand ‘must’ in this way. There seems to be more to the moral must (and not just the moral one) than that the balance of reasons come down a certain way, or even that they come done emphatically a certain way. A necessitating reason is not simply an undefeated reason, not even an undefeated categorical reason. I think the fact that I could save my life by jumping off the burning building is a reason for me to jump if my future life would be worth living. I also think I have this reason even if I do not, at present care about my future life, so this reason looks categorical. But although I think this undefeated reason means that I ought to jump, it is not clear to me that it implies that I must jump. I am not, therefore, wholly convinced that one can understand the moral must with the idea of an undefeated categorical reason.
It might be that a necessitating reason is one that not only favours a certain course of action but also silences (McDowell) or excludes (Raz) other competing considerations. This seems to me to be the right way to go in understanding moral necessity in terms of reasons. But however much such an account helps us to understand the nature of moral necessity, it still seems to leave us with a possibility question. How is it possible not only for some consideration to favour an action, but also to exclude other competing reasons from consideration? Why do some considerations exclude as well as favour, whereas others do not? It seems to me that the prospects for the balance of reasons account will depend on its ability to answer these questions, or at least to show why it does not have to answer them.
5. JD notes that the standard objection to particularism is to insist that moral reasons obtain if and only if certain principles obtain. This biconditional is often defended by the claim that a moral reason for X just is a feature that would make X a duty if it were the only morally relevant feature. ‘Every reason-giving feature is such that if alone it is a duty-making feature’ (7). JD thinks that there is a decisive refutation of this argument. Whether my defence of universal principles is different from this, and so not vulnerable to the same refutation, depends, on the details of my view. He claims there are two ways in which I propose the relation between the moral law, intermediate moral principles and required acts. On one interpretation my view is distinctive, but, he claims, can be objected to on other grounds. On the other interpretation my view is not distinctive, and so is vulnerable to the same objection as the standard (subjunctive conditional) view.
On the first interpretation of my view the necessity of specific acts is explained with reference to intermediate moral principles, the possibility of which is explained in turn by the moral law. On this view, the moral law does not stand in a direct enabling relation to the deontic feature of particular acts, but stands in this relation to the intermediate moral principles. These intermediate principles then stand in the same enabling relation to the relevant feature of particular acts that fall under them (7). Call this the possibility view.
On the second view, the moral law stands in a direct, enabling, relation to particular acts, and the intermediate moral principles merely determine to which acts the moral law is to be related. Here the intermediate moral principles stand in a different relation to the particular acts and the moral law than the moral law stands to the particular acts. The moral law stands in an enabling relation to the particular acts, whereas the intermediate principles stand in what might be called an act-specifying relation. On this view, JD claims, there is only one possibility question. Questions about which action is required are not possibility questions (7). Call this the mixed view. JD thinks the possibility view is distinctive, whereas the mixed view looks more like the standard defence of moral principles (7).
In the book I made a number of claims that made it look as though I sometimes advocated a mixed view. But although I sometimes state that the intermediate moral principles have an act-specifying role, I did not mean to imply by this that they did not also have an enabling role, and I do not see why I cannot regard particular moral principles as playing both roles. The sort of view I had in mind was that moral necessity gets to particular acts from the moral law via more specific moral laws, and that the specific moral laws also determine which particular acts this necessity finds its way to. By itself the moral law explains the possibility of some act being required. More specific principles are needed to explain the possibility of some particular act’s being required in some specific set of circumstances. These intermediate principles are needed not only in their act-specifying role, but also because their having this role enables them to complete the explanation of the possibility of the imperatival character of the specific acts they specify. I am not sure that the act-specifying role commits me to the subjunctive conditional claim, but I do not see why it forces me to abandon the enabling role for these intermediary principles. As I see it, the act-specifying role of these principles is part of the enabling story.
The question is, though, whether I can defend the possibility view given the way in which I understand the intermediate principles. JD claims that because Rossian principles are not absolute in the traditional sense, they are not well suited to explain practical necessity.
‘ The moral law is just the right sort of explanans, since it is, as one might put it, in the requiring business. But Rossian principles are not - and rightly not’ (8).
Given JD’s earlier criticism this is a surprising objection. For here he seems to be insisting that the imperatival character of required acts be explained by requiring principles, whereas he earlier objected to an explanation of this form as question-begging. Together these two points make it impossible for the problem of moral necessity to be solved. For, he claims, the only hope of solving it is with reference to a principle that itself necessitates, but he also objects that explaining moral necessity in this way merely relocates the problem at a higher level. If, therefore, the problem is solvable, one horn of the dilemma must be graspable.
I have tried to respond to the first by arguing that the experience of the categorical imperative is not a distinct phenomenon from the experience of the necessity of some particular act. Consequently, it does not stand in need of a separate explanation. I think one could also deny the second horn of the dilemma. I do not see why all of the conditions that explain the possibility of moral necessity must be necessitating principles. If ought implies can, then my ability to X enables X to be an act I ought to do. But although my ability makes this deontic feature of my act possible, ability is not itself deontic. Not everything that enables an ought must itself be an ought. It may also be that not everything that enables a must need be a must. As I understand him Kant’s aim is to explain moral necessity by the kind of universality that is embedded in universally valid principles, and Ross-style principles are as universally valid as more traditional (verdictive) deontic principles. The basic principles of prima facie duty specify which features give us moral reason to act in certain ways, and claims that these features give us these reasons in every possible case. The presence of such reasons does not imply that we have a moral requirement, for we may have moral reason not to do what we morally must do. So the reasons that fall under principles of prima facie duty are not in the requiring business in the sense that their presence implies a requirement. But they are in the requiring business in the very real sense that they are apt to give rise to moral requirements. It is for this reason that if undefeated they succeed in giving rise to a moral requirement. [3] Not all reasons are like this. The fact that something will be pleasant, interesting, or will enable me to live a good life, often gives me reason to pursue it, but is not such that if undefeated it will give rise to a moral must (or even a non-moral must). There is then something about moral reasons, the sort of reasons picked out by prima facie duties, that is different from other reasons. And this something seems to be that they are in the requiring business in this weaker sense.
How is it that these reasons have the distinctive feature of being apt to require? It is that they, and not others, fall under principles of prima facie duty that are strictly universal, and that inherit this strict universality by falling under the mere form of universality as such. It is through such principles, I argue, that the imperatival character of the moral law finds its way down to some specific act.
[1] I understand the ‘fact of reason’ as Allison does as a consciousness of standing under the moral law (CPrR, 31 & 48). But as Allison notes, ‘This cannot mean… that everyone is supposed to have a distinct and explicit awareness of the moral law… It is rather... of particular moral constraints’ (Kant’s Theory of Freedom, p. 233. Allison, however, seems to think that the Moral Law plays a justificatory role.
[2] His focus is on natural laws, but I do not see why it cannot be applied to moral laws.
[3] This is not quite the standard subjunctive conditional account of a moral reason, as it makes no reference to how the reason-giving feature would act if it were the only relevant consideration. All it says is how it would behave if it were undefeated.