Prescriptivism, Constructivism, and Rights
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Largely under the inspiration of R. M. Hare, contemporary moral philosophy insists on the profound unity of metaethical and substantive moral inquiries. Our conception of how to test and assess an abstract metaethical theory of what ethical claims are and mean is, as Hare taught us it must be, linked to the way in which the metaethical theory informs critical understanding of substantive normative principles and their applications both to easy and hard cases. Thus, Hare has taught us to be sceptical of familiar forms of intuitionism, not only because of their questionable epistemic and ontological commitments, but, more profoundly, because they rendered mysteriously inexplicable how and why moral predicates connect both to the world and to the moral psychology of the persons who use them. We have justly come to expect more from moral theory than we previously did, rediscovering the ancient wisdom of moral philosophy as, at once, integrally theory and practice. The measure of R. M. Hare's achievement is that he has made possible this rediscovery, and given us one well-wrought exemplar of how to relive this ancient wisdom which places moral philosophy at the core of humane and civilizing learning. The best way to pay tribute to Hare's achievement is, in my judgement, critically to assess it from within the terms of discourse he made possible: viz., does the view more powerfully illuminate the linkages between its metaethical and normative components than other perspectives? Hare's most recent book is a naturally provocative stimulus to this style of assessment for two good reasons. First, Hare here elaborates his familiar metaethical position as one part of a two-stage or –level account of moral thinking. The first stage (combining the metaethics of universal prescriptivism and the normative ethics of utilitarianism) is the stage of the critical moral thinking of those with the time, inclination, and talent freshly to assess all moral issues in a systematically philosophical way. The second stage (ordinary, uncritical moral thought) is one in which people lack the luxury of philosophical reflection and must do their moral best to live a good life in accord with those lower-order practical maxims, norms, and rules which, when generally accepted and acted on, best realize what the critical morality of the previous stage would require. Second, Hare deploys this two-stage theory of moral thinking in a quite clear-headed and argued defence of utilitarianism against a range of arguments which have led many good philosophers to suppose that utilitarianism fails to give appropriate weight to some of our central judgements of critical morality (for example, distributive constraints on utilitarian aggregation, or the muscularity of arguments of rights as trumps over utilitarian arguments of policy). Hare argues that the familiar arguments against utilitarianism erroneously confuse good arguments of the uncritical stage of ordinary moral thinking with good arguments of the critical stage. Properly understood, the soundest metaethical theory (universal prescriptivism) justifies preference-utilitarianism as the best substantive theory of critical morality. Critical morality, thus understood, itself justifies various rules, maxims, and norms of ordinary moral thinking (including distributive or rights-based constraints on utilitarian aggregation), and thus the appeal to such constraints confuses ordinary with critical moral thinking. In support of this claim, Hare makes two points: first, familiar forms of these anti-utilitarian arguments appeal, for their plausibility, to unreal factual situations, precisely those with which ordinary moral thinking of the second stage has not to deal; and second, these anti-utilitarian arguments are themselves made in a style of intuitionist or, more broadly, intuitive moral argument which we have good reason now to distrust, as I earlier noted, in the absence of any systematic philosophical or explanatory account which connects these intuitions either to the world or to the moral psychology of persons. In Moral Thinking, the appeal to intuition is an expression of philosophical bad faith, a failure to take seriously both the theoretical and practical mission of moral philosophy as an essential tool of critical moral thinking. For Hare, such intuitive reasoning is an expression of theoretical failure, a kind of contemptible defence against probing more deeply into the metaethical foundation of ethical thought and the way it structures substantive moral principles. Utilitarianism is, on this view, the better critical morality because it is the fuller expression of this more profoundly elaborated kind of philosophical reason. In contrast, the intuitive reasoning of its critics appears philosophically shallow, superficial, undemanding, and, of course, question-begging. Hare's challenge to the critics of utilitarianism can, I believe, be met and on terms not fairly regarded as improperly intuitionistic or intuitive. His metaethical theory of critical moral thinking does not, I believe, give the best, fairest, or most natural expression to his own internal ideals of critical thought or his general constructivist approach, and is not naturally associated with the substantive morality of utilitarianism in any of its forms. On the contrary, a metaethical perspective, more fully expressive of the internal ideals of critical moral thought, yields principles of substantive critical morality which precisely constrain the morally permissible scope of utilitarian aggregation in ways that critics of utilitarianism have justly urged. Accordingly, the claims of these critics do not draw their plausibility from a conflation of ordinary and critical moral discourse; these critics precisely identify anti-utilitarian constraints internal to critical morality itself. Hare's two arguments against these critics of utilitarianism are, on examination, unconvincing.
Source Publication
Hare and Critics: Essays on Moral Thinking
Source Editors/Authors
Douglas Seanor, N. Fotion
Publication Date
1988
Recommended Citation
Richards, David A. J., "Prescriptivism, Constructivism, and Rights" (1988). Faculty Chapters. 1311.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/1311
