The good in the right: A theory of intuition and intrinsic value

The Good in the Right: A Theory of Intuition and Intrinsic Value

Volumn , Issue , 2009, Pages

  Audi, Robert ^a  

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References (101)

1. Henry More, Enchiridion Ethicum (1667), John Balguy, The Foundations of Moral Goodness (1728-29),
2. Samuel Clarke, A Discourse Concerning the Unchangeable Obligations of Natural Religion (1738),
3. Richard Price, Review of the Chief Questions and Difficulties of Morals (1757),
4. Ralph Cudworth, A Treatise Concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality (1781) are among the significant figures here.
5. Henry Sidgwick, Outlines of the History of Ethics (1866; Boston: Beacon Hill, 1960).
6. David McNaughton, "Intuitionism," in The Blackwell Guide to Ethical Theory, ed. Hugh LaFollette (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 268-87;
7. Berys Gaut, "Moral Pluralism," Philosophical Papers 22 (1993): 17-40;
8. Mark Nelson, "Morally Serious Critics of Intuitionism," Ratio 12 (1999): 54-79;
9. see Charles Larmore, The Morals of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
10. Henry Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics (London: Macmillan, 1907; reissued by the University of Chicago Press in 1962), 96. Most references to this book will hereinafter be parenthetically included in the text.
11. H. A. Prichard, "Does Moral Philosophy Rest on a Mistake?" Mind 21 (1912); reprinted in his Moral Obligation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1949), 8, emphasis added.
12. H. A. Prichard, Duty and Interest (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1928), reprinted in Readings in Ethical Theory, ed. Wilfrid Sellars and John Hospers, 2d ed. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1970), 694-95.
13. See "Moral Obligation," in his Moral Obligation, 158.
14. C. D. Broad, Five Types of Ethical Theory (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1930), reprinted by Littlefield, Adams (Paterson, 1959). Page references to this book will hereinafter be parenthetically included in the text.
15. Detailed discussion and references to a wide range of relevant literature are provided in my "Philosophical Naturalism at the Turn of the Century," Journal of Philosophical Research 25 (2000).
16. See W. D. Ross, The Right and the Good (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1930), reprinted by Hackett Pub. Co. (Indianapolis, 1988), esp. chap. 2, 16-39.
17. See A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), 34-35.
18. According to Bernard Williams, in the 1950s and 1960s "it was taken for granted that intuitionism in ethics was an epistemological doctrine . . . the kind of view held, for instance, by W. D. Ross and H. A. Prichard." See "What Does Intuitionism Imply?" in Human Agency, ed. R. Dancy, J. Moravcsik, and C. Taylor (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), 198.
19. William K. Frankena, "An intuitionist must believe in simple indefinable properties, properties that are of a peculiar non-natural or normative sort, a priori or nonempirical concepts, and self-evident or synthetic necessary propositions." See Ethics, 2d ed. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1973), 103.
20. Bruce Russell, at least, intuitionism need not be pluralist. See his "In Defense of Intuitionism," presented at the Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association in 1999.
21. I am not alone in so conceiving the matter; see Walter Sinnott-Armstrong's valuable account of intuitionism in The Encyclopedia of Ethics (New York and London: Garland Publishing Co., 1992), 628-30.
22. See Ross, The Right and the Good, 21.
23. He contrasts his view, e.g., with that of "Professor Moore and Dr. Rashdall, that there is only the duty of producing good, and that all 'conflicts of duties' should be resolved by asking 'by which action will most good be produced'?" 18-19.
24. The Right and the Good, 39-41.
25. Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, "Moral Dilemmas and Incomparability," American Philosophical Quarterly 22 (1985).
26. Caroline J. Simon, "The Intuitionist Argument," Southern Journal of Philosophy 28 (1990).
27. see "Sidgwick and the Boundaries of Intuitionism," in Stratton-Lake, Ethical Intuitionism, 57-60.
28. "Intuition and the Autonomy of Philosophy," in Rethinking Intuition, ed. Michael R. DePaul and William Ramsey (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998). This volume also contains instructive papers by psychologists and philosophical accounts of intuition largely complementary to mine ("Minimal Intuition," by Ernest Sosa, 257-69, and "Southern Fundamentalism and the Ends of Philosophy," by George Graham and Terry Horgan, 271-92), as well as one which provides cognitive-psychological hypotheses that bear on the status of my account ("Philosophical Theory and Intuitional Evidence," by Alvin I. Goldman and Joel Pust, 179-97). Cf. William Tolhurst, "Seemings," American Philosophical Quarterly 35 (1998).
29. Cf. William Tolhurst, "Seemings," American Philosophical Quarterly 35 (1998).
30. A. C. Ewing is explicit on the point, at least for basic intuitions. See, e.g., Ethics (London: English Universities Press, 1953), 136, where he says that "propositions, particularly in ethics but also in other fields of thought, sometimes present themselves to a person in such a way that he . . . knows or rationally believes them to be true without having reasons or at least seems to himself to do so . . . some ethical propositions must be known immediately if any are to be known at all." Cf. his The Fundamental Questions of Philosophy (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1951), 48-49.
31. where he says that "propositions, particularly in ethics but also in other fields of thought, sometimes present themselves to a person in such a way that he . . . knows or rationally believes them to be true without having reasons or at least seems to himself to do so . . . some ethical propositions must be known immediately if any are to be known at all." Cf. his The Fundamental Questions of Philosophy (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1951), 48-49.
32. See The Right and the Good, 21.
33. Ross, The Right and the Good, 39-41.
34. Ewing, "Reason and Intuition," 39.
35. He also brings Broad to mind in calling intuitions in the sense that concerns him "both non-empirical and immediate" (41).
36. Laurence BonJour's construal of the "traditional rationalist account of a priori knowledge as the intuitive grasp or apprehension of necessity" in his The Structure of Empirical Knowledge (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), 207.
37. As Alvin Plantinga puts it, "the tradition . . . held that self-evident propositions- simple truths of arithmetic and logic, for example-are such that we can't even grasp or understand them without seeing that they are true . . . A better position, I think, is that a self-evident proposition is such that a properly functioning (mature) human being can't grasp it without believing it." See Warrant and Proper Function (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 108-9. The view developed in this chapter contrasts with both positions.
38. This is an issue discussed in some detail in my "Self-Evidence," Philosophical Perspectives 13 (1999).
39. On the importance of this in ethics, see Margaret Walker's "Feminist Skepticism, Authority, and Transparency," inWalter Sinnott-Armstrong and Mark Timmons, Moral Knowledge? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).
40. Ross says, e.g., that "a great deal has been made of 'what we really think' about moral questions" (39);
41. The verdicts of the moral consciousness of the best people are the foundation on which we must build; though he [the theorist] must first compare them with one another and eliminate any contradictions they may contain (41).
42. See the Groundwork, secs. 428-29.
43. Lewis White Beck (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1958), secs. 29-31.
44. For a portrait and defense of contextualism in moral epistemology, see Mark Timmons, "Outline of a Contextualist Moral Epistemology," in Sinnott-Armstrong and Timmons, Moral Knowledge?, and Morality without Foundations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). Cf. the contextual particularism of Jonathan Dancy's view in Moral Reasons (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), esp. chaps. 4-6. Some of Dancy's views are considered in sec. 5.
45. A similar objection is voiced and partially answered by J. R. Lucas, in a paper defending Rossian intuitionism against objections by P. F. Strawson and others. See "Ethical Intuitionism II," Philosophy 46, no. 175 (1971): 1-11, 5.
46. see The Foundations of Ethics, e.g. 304-10.
47. See Henry Sidgwick, Practical Ethics (London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co., 1909), 8.
48. Ross, The Right and the Good, 16.
49. He introduces the list of duties "without claiming completeness of finality for it" (The Right and the Good, 20).
50. Since I am only sketching a normative theory, I largely ignore the point that one may have conflicting sets of duties, say two pulling one way and two pulling another. Moreover, I take a set of duties to A that conflicts with a set of duties to B (where A and B are incompatible) to be final only if the deontic weight of the first set is greater than that of the second. If they are equally weighty, presumably one is morally free to A and to B (though the choice may be difficult or even in some way tragic). Cf. David O. Brink, "Moral Conflict and Its Structure," Philosophical Review 103, no. 2 (1994): 215-47, critically discussed by Walter Sinnott-Armstrong in "Moral Dilemmas and Rights," in Moral Dilemmas and Moral Theory, ed. H. E. Mason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).
51. Mark C. Timmons, "Decision Procedures, Moral Criteria, and the Problem of Relevant Descriptions," Jahrbuch für Recht und Ethic 5 (1997).
52. Kant, Groundwork, 89.
53. Kant, Groundwork, 96.
54. A brief account of how maxims should be formulated, with special emphasis on intention, is given in chap. 3 of my Practical Reasoning. A much more detailed treatment of the question in given by Derek Parfit in his forthcoming Tanner Lectures on Kant's ethics. For a valuable short treatment, see Jens Timmerman, "Kant's Puzzling Ethics of Maxims," Harvard Review of Philosophy 8 (2000). Also instructive is Barbara Herman, "The Practice of Moral Judgment," Journal of Philosophy 82 (1985).
55. Ross, The Right and the Good, 21.
56. Cf. Ross's affirmation of a duty to produce as much good as we can (27) and Sidgwick: "The Utilitarian doctrine . . . is that each man ought to consider the happiness of any other as theoretically of equal importance with his own, and only of less importance practically, in so far as he is better able to realise the latter)," Methods, 252.
57. Ross, The Right and the Good, 21 and 17-18.
58. Kant says, e.g., "The autonomy of the will is the sole principle of all moral laws . . . the moral law expresses nothing else than the autonomy of the pure practical reason, i.e., freedom." See the Critique of Practical Reason, sec. 33 (34-35).
59. see The Architecture of Reason, esp. 162-64.
60. Groundwork, sec. 423,
61. Kant says, e.g., "Suppose there were something whose existence has in itself an absolute value, something which as an end in itself could be a ground of determinate laws; then . . . in it alone, would there be the ground of a possible categorical imperative."
62. See the Groundwork, sec. 428.
63. David McNaughton might have been thinking of such passages in saying, "I am more skeptical than Audi about the possibility of any other theory providing independent support for a list of duties of Ross's kind. Kantianism, for example, appears to hold that some principles are exceptionless, and not prima facie." See "Intuitionism," 283.
64. See The Foundations of Ethics, 189.
65. See, e.g., The Doctrine of Virtue, 84-87 (secs. 421-23).
66. see Jeanine M. Grenberg, "Feeling, Desire and Interest in Kant's Theory of Action," Kant-Studien 92 (2001).
67. See the Groundwork, sec. 408.
68. These terms are found in Ross, The Right and the Good, 21
69. see Roger Crisp, "The Dualism of Practical Reason," Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 96 (1996): 53-73.
70. Another pertinent discussion is John Deigh's "Sidgwick on Ethical Judgment," in his The Sources of Moral Agency: Essays on Moral Psychology and Freudian Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
71. "the conduct which, under any given circumstances, is objectively right, is that which will produce the greatest amount of happiness on the whole" (411); and
72. Moore, e.g. Ethics, where he says that "the total consequences of right actions must always be as good, intrinsically, as any which it was possible for the agent to produce under the circumstances" (98).
73. See Noah Lemos, Intrinsic Value (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994)
74. see Michael J. Zimmerman, "Virtual Intrinsic Value and the Principle of Organic Unities," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 59 (1999): 653-66.
75. The Right and the Good, 86.
76. As William K. Frankena has done: he says, of the items on a very diverse list, "all of them may be kept on the list, and perhaps others may be added, if it is understood that it is the experience of them that is good in itself. Sidgwick seems to me to be right on this point . . . truth is not itself intrinsically good . . . what is good in itself is knowledge or belief in the truth." Ethics, 89.
77. See Principia, esp. 83-85.
78. see his Ethics, 82 and 89.
79. The Right and the Good, 132.
80. Kant says, e.g., that "an action of this kind [helping others from a "sympathetic temper" and an "inner pleasure in spreading happiness"], however right and however amiable it may be, has still no genuinely moral worth." See the Groundwork, sec. 10.
81. see, e.g. his Well-Being (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986).
82. As William Frankena put it, "morality was made for man, not man for morality." See Ethics, 44.
83. Ross says, e.g., that "when we think of an act as right we think that either something good or some pleasure for another will be brought into being" (The Right and the Good, 162),
84. A similar compatibility with my view might hold for the moral realism of Richard Boyd's related "How to Be a Moral Realist," in Essays on Moral Realism, ed. Geoffrey Sayre-McCord (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988).
85. See the Groundwork, sec. 428 (Paton trans.).
86. See Principia, 149.
87. See, e.g., The Right and the Good, 25-26.
88. Robert Nozick, ed. David Schmidtz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
89. I take this objection from Rawls, "Kantian Constructivism"; see esp. 91-92.
90. The first objection is echoed by John McDowell in "Projection and Truth in Ethics," The Lindley Lecture (Lawrence: University of Kansas, 1987), reprinted in Moral Discourse and Practice, ed. Stephen Darwall, Allan Gibbard, and Peter Railton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 215-25. It is interesting to note the lengths to which Rawls went in criticizing intuitionism; perhaps this is in part because, as a kind of intuitivist, he shared some important intuitionist ideas. He says, e.g., in Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), "A second reason the ideal cannot be fully attained is that the balance of reasons itself rests on judgment, though judgment informed and guided by reasoning . . . we must rely on judgment as to what considerations are more or less significant, and when in practice to close the list of reasons" (134). Even in A Theory of Justice, there is at least one place where he seems to allow, as an intuitionist would, for possible exceptions to the priority of the liberty principle over the difference principle (45).
91. Ross notes defeasibility when he compares moral convictions with sense-perceptions, The Right and the Good, 41.
92. This is treated by David McNaughton, "An Unconnected Heap of Duties?" Philosophical Quarterly 46 (1996): 443-47;
93. see Terrance McConnell, Gratitude (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993).
94. Hooker, "Ross-Style Pluralism versus Rule- Consequentialism," and others.
95. See also David McNaughton and Piers Rawling, "On Defending Deontology," Ratio 11, no. 1 (1998): 37-54, both for interpretation of Rossian intuitionism and for criticism of an attempt (quite different from the approach outlined here) to derive a related deontological standard from considerations of value.
96. see Brian Lepard, Rethinking Humanitarian Intervention (College Park: Penn State University Press, 2002).
97. Rosalind Hursthouse, On Virtue Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).
98. See her "Moral Beliefs," Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 59 (1958-59): 410-25.
99. see my "Reasons and Rationality in the Moral Philosophy of Bernard Gert," in Rationality, Rules, and Ideals: Critical Essays on Bernard Gert's Moral Theory, ed.Walter Sinnott-Armstrong and Robert Audi (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002).
100. see my Religious Commitment and Secular Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
101. see Gregory Mellema, The Expectations of Morality (forthcoming from Rodopi in 2004).