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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 June 2010
In this paper I wish to put forward and defend a certain candidate for—I borrow the expression from Kant—the supreme principle of morality, understanding by ‘morality’ moral requirement or necessity.
It is a matter of fairly general agreement concerning judgments of moral requirement (which I shall call deontic judgments) (1) that singular judgments are generalizable, and (2) that all nonanalytic deontic judgments have prescriptive force. To amplify: An individual act, if it is judged to be morally required or morally wrong (its omission required), is judged to be such as falling under some completely general description, i.e. a description containing no uniquely referring expressions, and a general judgment respecting acts as acts of that description is implied. And it belongs to the very nature of non-analytic deontic judgments, i.e. it is true as a matter of meaning, that they bear on questions of rational decision or choice. The latter is true, of course, of all moral and other practical judgments. The case for the prescriptive force of affirmative deontic judgments can be put even more strongly, since they are understood not merely to provide, or affirm the existence of, reasons for choice, but to provide, or affirm the existence of overriding or imperative reasons, reasons which are therefore normally sufficient or conclusive, regardless of what the agent's wants may otherwise be.
1 The judgment that an act is morally required (obligatory) and the judgment that an act is morally wrong (its omission required) are both affirmative deontic judgments. Negative deontic judgments, which deny that an act is morally required or morally wrong, are judgments of permissibility (to do or omit or both).
2 Kant, Grundlegung, 440 ad. fin., 445.
3 Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics, 7th ed., pp. 379–80.
4 Singer, M. G., Generalization in Ethics (New York, 1961), pp. 46–51Google Scholar.
5 Baier, Kurt, The Moral Point of View, 2nd ed. (New York, 1965), pp. 100–106Google Scholar.
6 Hare, R. M., Freedom and Reason (Oxford, 1963), Chapter 6Google Scholar.
7 M. G. Singer, op. cit., Chapter 4.
8 The description of a kind or type of act is to be understood throughout as possibly (but not necessarily) including an account of the position (station) of the agent, or of specific circumstances, or both.
9 By this I mean acts of that kind in respect of their being acts of that kind. I mean to include what an act consists in, as being of a certain description, and the certain or probable consequences of an act in respect of being of that description. I mean to exclude the accidental, remote and unforeseeable consequences of acts of the description in question. By ‘accidental consequences’, I mean consequences that an act of the description in question has in respect of some other or further description.
10 Rawls, John, “Two Concepts of Rules,” Philosophical Review, 64 (1955), 3–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
11 Kant, Grundlegung, 431.
12 Cf. Hare, op. cit., pp. 160–177.
13 Cf. Singer, op. cit., pp. 71–95.
14 Cf. Baier, op. cit., p. 135.