The Foundations of Impartiality
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Description
Can an ethical theory be too successful? If it proposes a foundation for moral argument that lies beyond the reach of moral disagreement, it may leave the existence and intractability of actual moral disagreements unexplained. If it tries to appeal only to facts outside morality which all parties must admit, then the most fundamental disagreements are likely to resurface, either in the interpretation of what has been proved or in dispute over moral assumptions hidden in the premisses. I believe that Hare's attempt to ground morality in the logic of the moral concepts runs into this problem. It is true that when people disagree about what is right and wrong, and how they should live, they must mean the same thing by the terms they use to express their differences. But this common ground does not by itself provide the materials needed to settle their disagreements, and the attempt to show that it does inevitably introduces morally controversial elements into the interpretation of the alleged common ground. This happens elsewhere in philosophy, when one or another view is criticized for violating the logic of the terms in which it is stated. The mistake, if there is one, is usually located in another place. It may happen sometimes, in the case of specialized, quasi-legalistic disputes among members of the same moral sect, that the method of settling a moral disagreement can be extracted from the meanings of the terms that parties to the disagreement must use in common. But I believe this is not possible with respect to those large-scale moral issues that are of greatest philosophical interest. There we must look beyond the terminology, and we may find that no shared method is available at all that is not itself the subject of moral controversy. The best we can hope for is to discover arguments and counter-arguments that display the basis of disagreement more clearly within the confines of morality, and perhaps to identify some contributing non-moral differences. This puts us in a better position to continue the search for a method on which wider agreement can be secured, as we gradually emerge from the moral bronze age. The theory developed in Moral Thinking holds that the possible content of a morality is more narrowly restricted by the logic of moral language than Hare had thought it was at the time of The Language of Morals. That is because he includes in his later account of what moral judgements mean an interpretation of their universality which amounts to a strong substantive requirement of impartiality among all persons. It is this interpretation that I want to discuss, concentrating mostly on its relation to the logic of moral language, rather than on its independent plausibility as a moral assumption. Hare believes that actual moral disagreements, if they are not based on confusion, can best be accounted for as differences over what follows from such a requirement, in conjunction with the facts—differences due partly to variation in the accuracy of reasoning and partly to variation in belief about the relevant non-moral facts. But I believe that some disagreements are at the level of the principle itself—disagreements within morality about the stringency and proper interpretation of moral impartiality.
Source Publication
Hare and Critics: Essays on Moral Thinking
Source Editors/Authors
Douglas Seanor, N. Fotion
Publication Date
1988
Recommended Citation
Nagel, Thomas, "The Foundations of Impartiality" (1988). Faculty Chapters. 1310.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/1310
