10 - Reasons to Be Good?

Summary

There seems to be a question about reason and morality. Do we have reasons for being good? Can we have reasons? Do we need reasons?

Someone may ask himself whether a person who seems indifferent, say, to the demands of justice, or honesty, or faithfulness, or humanity can be brought around to taking those demands seriously, and if she can, what would be the best way of doing so? Could we do so by making her realize that there is something she has overlooked or has failed to grasp? Can we think, or be led by others to think, our way to a morally responsible stance?

In this essay, I want to discuss this question from three different angles. In Section 1 I bring up an essay by Philippa Foot, in which she criticizes the non-cognitivist notion that moral judgements are ultimately independent of reasoning. She goes on to argue that if a person is to have reasons for living a life of justice, he must come to think that doing so will, on the whole, serve his self-interest better than living a life in which he turns his back on the demands of justice. Against her, I argue that self-interest cannot ground a genuine life of justice, and that if someone is in need of a reason for a just life, nothing can fulfil that need. In Section 2, I discuss Bernard Williams's position according to which a person can only have a reason for acting well if the reason accords with some motive she embraces. I claim that he develops his position in such a way that it is left unclear whether it actually excludes any conceivable reason. In Section 3, I take up the case of the Badou family, as presented by the writer Larissa MacFarquhar. The Badous, out of a sense of moral necessity, over the years adopted a huge number of children. The reasons they might give do not differ from reasons most of us would embrace. They had come to embrace their special way of life not through a peculiar line of thought, but through a kind of moral responsiveness different from the customary one.