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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 January 2009
Here are some kinds of reasons for taking an action to have been morally right.
(1) It was done out of a good intention or a pure good will on the part of the agent, or was owed to a virtue of hers.
(2) It issued from the agent's moral perception or intuition with respect to a situation, not from the application of a general principle or from calculation of the consequences of possible actions.
(3) Although it would give rise to distress or worse, the action was one of integrity, autonomy, or self-concern, perhaps in accord with the agent's aversion to killing by her own hand, or true to her life-hope to achieve a success on her own.
1 I am grateful to James Cornwell especially, and to Shahrar Ali, Ingrid Coggin, Roger Crisp, Nicholas Dent, Brad Hooker, Joel Kupperman, Jane O'Grady, Hayley Roberts, Michael Slote, Michael Targett, Alan Thomas, and Catherine Wilson, who commented on earlier drafts of this paper. We are not in agreement. For advocacy of or sympathy with reasons of the first group, see Williams, Bernard, ‘A Critique of Utilitarianism’, in Williams and J. J. C. Smart, Utilitarianism: For and Against (Cambridge University Press, 1973)Google Scholar; Williams, , Moral Luck (Cambridge University Press, 1981)Google Scholar; Sen, Amartya and Williams, , (eds),Utilitarianism and Beyond (Cambridge University Press, 1982), especially the IntroductionGoogle Scholar; Williams, , Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (London:Fontana, 1985)Google Scholar; Scheffler, Samuel, The Rejection of Consequentialism (Oxford University Press, 1982)Google Scholar; Scheffler, , (ed.), Consequentialism and Its Critics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988) and in particular the included papers by Thomas Nagel, Robert Nozick, and Philippa FootGoogle Scholar; Scheffler, , Human Morality (Oxford University Press, 1992)Google Scholar; McDowell, John, ‘Virtue and Reason’, The Monist, 62, 1979Google Scholar; Wiggins, David, Needs, Values, Truth (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987).Google Scholar
2 For advocary of or sympathy with reasons of the second group, see Rawls, John, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971)Google Scholar; articles by Parfit, Derek, Railton, Peter, Scanlon, T. M., and Scheffler, in Consequentialism and Its CriticsGoogle Scholar; articles by Hare, R. M., Harsanyi, John C. and Mirrlees, J. A. in Utilitarianism and BeyondGoogle Scholar; Kagan, Shelly, The Limits of Morality (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989)Google Scholar; Honderich, , ‘The Problem of Well-Being and the Principle of Equality’, Mind, 1981 or Violence for Equality: Inquiries in Political Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1989), Ch. 2. However, the latter egalitarian morality has not been adequately worked out in personal as distinct from social or political terms.Google Scholar
3 For example, Kagan, , The Limits of Morality, p.9Google Scholar; Maclean, Anne, The Elimination of Morality (London: Routledge, 1993), p.81Google Scholar; Pettit, Philip, ‘Consequentialism’. Companion to Ethics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), ed. Singer, Peter, p. 231.Google Scholar
4 See the discussion of the nature of effects and causes in my A Theory of Determinism: The Mind, Neuroscience, and Life-Hopes (Oxford:Clarendon Press, 1988), pp. 14–16Google Scholar, or Mind and Brain (Oxford:Clarendon Press, 1990), pp. 14–16.Google Scholar
5 This strong point is owed to Griffin, James, ‘Consequentialism’, in The Oxford Companion to Philosophy (Oxford University Press, 1995), ed. Honderich, Ted. I disagree, however, with Griffin's wide use of ‘consequences’, such that they are not confined to what follows an action.Google Scholar
6 Scheffler, , Consequentialism and Its Critics, p. 1.Google ScholarSen, Cf. and Williams, , (eds), Utilitarianism and Beyond, pp. 11–14.Google Scholar
7 See for example Crisp, Roger, ‘Deontological Ethics’, The Oxford Companion to Philosophy.Google Scholar
8 It needs to be kept in mind, with respect to (19) and its going into the second group, that we are contemplating a clarified or supplemented version of the wholly consequential conception of the second group, one which does allow that reasons of the group have to do not only with consequences of actions but also antecedents–a version which escapes the earlier objections, based on (11) and (12), to the unrevised wholly consequential conception.
9 The situation is complicated, but not much affected, if the attempt to justify punishment by retribution must be regarded, unusually, as resting on the satisfaction of retributive or grievance desires had by victims of offences and others. See my Punishment, The Supposed Justifications (Oxford: Polity Press, 1989).
10 Williamś ‘A Critique of Utilitarianism’, seminal for the whole subject of consequentialism, includes a good discussion in its second section. For brisk criticisms of the adequacy of other conceptions than the traditional ones, see Crisp, ‘Deontological Ethics’.
11 Sen, Cf. and Williams, , Utilitarianism and Beyond, pp.3–4.Google Scholar
12 See ‘The Problem of Weil-Being and the Principle of Equality’.
13 Sen and Williams speak of such moralities as involving a ‘drastic obliteration of useful information’ (Utilitarianism and Beyond, p. 5).They have in mind other ways of comparing people, those indicated in the first group of reasons. Sympathizers with (8)–(14), of course, in so far as their fundamental principles are concerned, regard this ‘drastic obliteration’ as precisely the great moral strength of their principles. However, the fundamental principles also give a qualified role to other ways of comparing people. See the last two paragraphs of this section and note 14.
14 As will be understood, I do not agree with Williams, (Moral Luck, pp. 51–53)Google Scholar that there are large problems in the way of combining, say, the Principle of Equality, with injunctions related to (3)–(7). On the contrary, the principle has one source in such injunctions. Nor do I agree that supporters of such general principles of justice or fairness, or Utilitarians, are at all committed, by their principled support of moral rules, to support for something else, a moral elite which arranges for ordinary people to abide by the rules unthinkingly. One form of this would be the ‘Government House utilitarianism’ referred to by Sen, and Williams, , Utilitarianism and Beyond, p. 16.Google Scholar
15 The matter is more fully discussed in my A Theory of Determinism, sections 7.6, 7.7 or The Consequences of Determinism (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990), sections 1.6, 1.7. For a rapid dismissal of the distinction between ‘judging the act and judging the agent’, see Williams, Moral Luck, p. 53. (cf. p. 84.) The dismissal rests, I take it, on refusing to distinguish between a good man's dispositions and his deliberations–in effect, refusing to judge a good man's deliberations as mistaken. No reason is given for this.Google Scholar
16 A reason for an action in a third sense, used elsewhere in this paper but not relevant here, is simply the thing thought of or represented either in a primary or, in a way, a secondary reason–in short, a property of an action.
17 I am aware that what is a truism in the philosophy of mind has also been subjected to interesting examination in moral philosophy. That examination is one of several things that must go unexamined in this overview of the two groups of reasons. See Nagel, Thomas, The Possibility of Altruism (Oxford University Press, 1970)Google Scholar; McDowell, John, ‘Are Moral Requirements Hypothetical Imperatives?’, Supplementary Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 52, 1978Google Scholar; Foot, Philippa, ‘Reasons for Actions and Desires,’ Supplementary Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 61, 1972.Google Scholar
18 The suspicion of selfishness is clearly not the suspicion that agents who act on these reasons are ‘morally self-indulgent’, where this is to be taken up with a self-image, engaged in a kind of self-esteem. The latter suspicion, more easily dealt with, is considered by Williams. See ‘Utilitarianism and Moral Self-Indulgence’ in Moral Luck. Nagel, Cf.Thomas, Mortal Questions (Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 63. In Human Morality, Scheffler considers relations between ‘self-interest’ and reasons of the first group, and touches on the matter of the politics and political philosophy associated with them. For the use of some of these reasons in one political tradition, see my Conservatism (Boulder:Westview, 1991).Google Scholar
19 See, for example, Hare, R. M., The Language of Morals (Oxford University Press, 1952), Freedom and Reason (Oxford, 1963), and Moral Thinking (Oxford University Press, 1981).Google Scholar
20 See above, p. 511.