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How we do Ethics now

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 January 2010

James Griffin
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Extract

By far the most common form of argument in ethics nowadays is what can be called piecemeal appeal to intuition. Any reader of philosophy will know the kind of thing I mean. ‘On your principle, it would be all right to do such-and-such. But that's counter-intuitive. So your principle is wrong.’ The word ‘intuition’ here is not used, as it was in earlier times, to refer to a special way of knowing; instead it is used to mean merely a moral sentiment or belief that persons have independently of the moral theory or philosophy or stance that they might adopt.

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Papers
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Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 35 , September 1993 , pp. 159 - 177
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Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 1993

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References

1 I have in mind particularly the attacks of R. M. Hare and R. B. Brandt. See Hare, 1971, and 1981, ch. 8; Brandt, 1979, ch. 1. See also Singer 1974.

2 On, e.g., psychological causes, see Freud (1957, 138): ‘Ethics must be regarded … as a therapeutic effort: as an endeavour to achieve something through the standards imposed by the super-ego which had not been attained by the work of civilization in other ways. We already know—it is what we have been discussing—that the question is how to dislodge the greatest obstacle to civilization, the constitutional tendency in men to aggressions against one another …’ Freud ought to have inserted ‘in part’ between ‘regarded’ and ‘as a therapeutic effort’. But he must have identified here an important cause of why one person inclines to one set of moral views and another to a different set. I myself suspect that often we find, through the workings of a mechanism of compensation, an overly strict super-ego associated with relatively unstrict moral intuitions, and vice versa. But the moral views of any reflective person will be shaped by vastly more sorts of causes than just the ones that Freud mentions. For an example of such psychological speculation, see E. Westermarck, 1932, chs. 8 and 9.

3 W. V. Quine, 1953, 91ff. On intuition in the natural sciences, see e.g., Newton-Smith, 1981, 197, 212–213. On intuition in philosophy, see e.g., Nozick, 1981, 546; Rorty, 1980, 34. We find what seems to me the right sort of ambivalence about intuitions, the right mixture of scepticism and respect, much more commonly in these other departments of thought, On the side of respect, see Hintikka, 1967, Introduction, p. 3: ‘An intriguing aspect of the completeness and incompleteness results is that one of their starting-points (viz. our concept of what constitutes completeness) is inevitably an idea which can perhaps be formulated in naive set-theoretic terms but which either is not formulated axiomatically to begin with or which (in the case of incompleteness) cannot even possibly be so formulated. Yet concepts of this kind are most interesting. We seem to have many clear intuitions concerning them, and it is important to develop ways of handling them.’ On the side of scepticism, see Daniel Dennett's and Douglas Hofstadter's complaint about the ‘intuition pump’, the use of one sort of example to push our intuitions in a particular direction (say, in a debate about whether computers think), in Hofstadter and Dennett, 1982, 375, 459.

4 Kant, 1948, esp. sect. 2. I explain my views about Kant's categorical imperative and its ethical content somewhat more fully in Weil-Being, ch. X, sect. 4.

5 See Hare, 1952, ch. 11; 1963, chs. 2, 3, 6, 7; 1981, chs. 1, 2.5, 4.Iff., 8.Iff. For further discussion, see J. L. Mackie's objections in ‘Rights, Utility and Universalization’ and Hare's response in ‘Reply to J. L. Mackie’, both in Frey, 1984.

6 See Brand, 1979, ch. 1 and his further thoughts in ‘Criteria for Explications of Moral Language’, in Copp and Zimmerman, 1985.

7 See Wittgenstein, 1953, passim but esp. sects. 1–38, 136–156, 167–238; 1967, sects. 338–391. For references to ‘form of life’, see 1953, sects. 19, 23,241; 1969, sects. 358–359, 559.

8 See, e.g., Davidson, ‘Psychology as Philosophy’, p.237, and ‘Mental Events’, p. 222, both in Davidson, 1980.

9 See, e.g., Lakatos, 1964. See also Michael Dummett's argument against the Law of Excluded Middle and in favour of an intuitionist mathematics; for a recent statement of the issue see Dummett, 1991, 9–11. See also discussion of these matters in Newton-Smith, 1981.

10 John Rawls is its most influential proponent (1972, sects. 4 and 9). See also Rawls, 1951; 1975, esp. sect. 2; 1980.

11 See Scanlon, 1990. He speaks there of ‘the method of Reflective Equilibrium’: ‘What “authority” do the conclusions of this kind of reflection enjoy? The short answer is that they are the judgements that seem to us to be supported by the balance of relevant reasons, and this is a kind of “authority” it is hard to top.’

12 I have John Rawls particularly in mind. For his definition of ‘considered judgements’, see Rawls, 1972, 47—48; see also p. 20.

13 A point made by Daniels, (1979, 258).

14 For example, Brink, 1989, 135–139.

15 See Rawls, 1972, 5Iff; 1975, 5–7; 1980, 554.

16 See Rawls, 1975,8.

17 See Rawls, 1975, 9; 1980, 554, 570.

18 See Rawls, 1980, 564–565.

19 See Rawls, 1975, 9,21.

20 See Rawls, 1972, 53; 1975, 6, 21.

21 See Rawls, 1972, 50, 53, 121, 452; 1975, 8–9; 1980, 534, 568–569.

22 See Rawls, 1975,15; 1980, 534.

23 See Rawls, 1975,9

24 On the distinction between justification as epistemological and as practical, see Rawls, 1980, 554, 560–561; 1985, 224 n. 2.