Nonlegislative Justification

Nonlegislative Justification

Description

If we take for granted that familiar moral constraints on the treatment of other people cannot be explained away in terms of the beneficial consequences of adopting certain standing dispositions and deliberative rules of thumb, the question remains as to what kind of explanation and justification of them is available. Can more be said than that it is self-evident to ‘thoughtful and well-educated people’ that certain ways of treating people are wrong? As most moral philosophers are in this respect Rawlsians now, most answer yes. Moral theory starts but does not end with a statement of considered judgments; it aims to provide a set of principles or a moral conception that matches our considered judgments in reflective equilibrium. Even philosophers such as Judith Jarvis Thomson and F. M. Kamm, who, unlike Rawls, insist that some considered judgments about particular cases must be treated as fixed, nonetheless see the point of moral theory as providing explanation and justification for those beliefs. Thomson writes, invoking Socrates, that ‘while a cluster of beliefs may be a cluster of true beliefs . . . , knowledge that they are true requires knowledge of what makes them true’. And Kamm, who insists that the first step in moral theory is the formulation of intricate moral principles as generalizations of ‘as many case-based judgments . . . as prove necessary’, holds that we cannot conclude that any principle is correct unless we find that it ‘expresses some plausible value or conception of the person or relations between persons’. Thomas Nagel well expresses the standard view: ‘Common sense doesn’t have the last word in ethics or anywhere else, but it has, as J. L. Austin said about ordinary language, the first word: it should be examined before it is discarded.’ A rather different approach has been explored by T. M. Scanlon since ‘Rights, Goals, and Fairness’ in 1975. His ‘reductive’ strategy does not start from considered judgments about particular cases or proposed principles as data. The project has been to find an intuitively compelling unified account of the domain of nonconsequentialist principles as a whole, reasoning to particular conclusions about moral principles from within the terms of that account. In a recent paper, Scanlon writes: ‘In developing my contractualist view, I was following Aristotle’s model. I was using the method of reflective equilibrium to identify the contractualist procedure of justification, which I thought gave the best account of (at least a portion of) morality, and then taking this procedure to be a way of reasoning “from first Principles” about what the content of this morality is and why.’ Scanlon does indicate that the overall plausibility of his contractualist method will depend not just on its appeal—in reflective equilibrium—as a general account of what makes certain ways of treating people wrong, but also on the intuitive acceptability of its outputs. Some principles may just seem obviously reasonably rejectable, and the task would then be to figure out what the grounds for this could be. Moreover, in some instances the structure of the contractualist method itself might have to be tweaked if it is the only way to block unacceptable results for particular cases. Still, the primary direction of argument is to judgments of right and wrong rather than from them.

Source Publication

Principles and Persons: The Legacy of Derek Parfit

Source Editors/Authors

Jeff McMahan, Tim Campbell, James Goodrich, Ketan Ramakrishnan

Publication Date

2021

Nonlegislative Justification

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