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Scheffler on Morality and Ideals of the Person

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Stephen L. Darwall
Stephen L. Darwall*
Affiliation:
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
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Extract

Scheffler's paper divides into two parts. In the first, he argues that Parfit's argument from the complex view of personal identity neither can, nor is intended to, establish any moral theory; in particular, it cannot establish utilitarianism. Rather, Parfit's aim must have been simply to weaken our attachment to non-utilitarian theories. In discovering that the only philosophically respectable view of personal identity holds it to consist simply in bodily or psychological continuities and connections, we come to see that the distinctness of persons is a less deep fact than we naively supposed that it was. And this weakens the attraction of moral theories which take the distinctness of persons as fundamental and reject utilitarianism on that account. Scheffler points out that Parfit's argument cannot establish, nor can it be extended to establish, anything stronger than this. For the complex view can only rule out nonutilitarian theories if it simply denies that in any sense persons exist over time. But this view rules out not only non-utilitarian moral theories, but every moral theory.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 12 , Issue 2 , June 1982 , pp. 247 - 255
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1982

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References

1 ‘Moral Skepticism and Ideals of the Person,’ The Monist, 62 (1979) 288-303

2 I discuss the Kantian interpretation of Justice as fairness in ‘Is There a Kantian Foundation for Rawlsian Justice?', in Blocker, H. Gene and Smith, Elizabeth eds., John Rawls’ Theory of Social Justice, (Athens: Ohio University Press 1980) 311-45.Google Scholar

3 In Essays on Ethics, Social Behavior, and Scientific Explanation (Dordrecht: D. Reidel 1976) 37-63

4 I am indebted to Terry Moore for this point, and to Arthur Kuflik for discussions of it.

5 I take this to be the thrust of such passages as: ‘In other words, the relative merits of competing moral conceptions cannot be assessed categorically, on this view; they can be assessed only from the perspective of some ideal of the person' (244).