Made in the Shade: Moral Compatibilism and the Aims of Moral Theory

Canadian Journal of Philosophy

Volumn 25, Issue sup1, 1995, Pages 79-106

  Railton, Peter ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 84954813491     PISSN: 00455091     EISSN: 19110820     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/00455091.1995.10717434     Document Type: Article

References (16)

1. A Theory of justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1971) 425.
2. It seems to me that the notion of a funding theory is close to T.M. Scanlon's notion of a ‘philosophical theory, ’ as found in his “Contractualism and Utilitarianism,” in A. Sen and B. Williams, eds., Utilitarianism and Beyond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1982) 106f. Bernard Williams, in an influential discussion of ethical theory, divides things up differently. On his account: “An ethical theory is a theoretical account of what ethical thought and practice are, which account either implies a general test of the correctness of basic ethical beliefs and principles or else implies that there cannot be such a test.” Up to the comma, I would say, Williams could be describing the general aim of a funding theory. After the comma, however, Williams adds a quite special condition, which implies that a funding theory that allowed for a plurality of ‘tests of correctness ’ would not (for Williams) constitute an ‘ethical theory ’ See his Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985) 72. ‘Funding theory ’ is a more catholic category than ‘metaethics, ’ at least as the latter term has been understood in recent years. For it need not present its central theses in the form of theories of the meaning of moral terms; nor need it carry the assumption that the theories developed will always be analytic, arrived at a priori, or that the theories will be devoid of substantive moral content (‘neutral ’). If we could remove these associations from the term — for indeed they are no more than associations — then ‘metaethics ’ would serve admirably in place of the cumbersome ‘funding theory for morality. ’ Finally, a funding theory need not be realist in ambition. Antirealists and irrealists are often at pains to show that their accounts show moral thought and practice to be in good order.
3. See Thomas Nagel, “Ethics as an Autonomous Theoretical Subject,” in Gunther Stent, ed., Morality as a Biological Phenomenon (Berkeley: University of California Press 1978). I do not claim to be explicating Nagel's view, but I hope that he would find he has some sympathies with the ‘autonomist ’ position represented herein.
4. See G.E. Moore, Principia Ethica (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1903).
5. Stevenson went on to give a substantive explanation of this claim about the limits of scientific method: the non-cognitive character of moral judgments. See C.L. Stevenson, “The Emotive Meaning of Ethical Terms,” Mind 46 (1937) 14–31, esp. 16–17.
6. Gilbert Harman, The Nature of Morality (New York: Oxford University Press 1977) ch. 1.
7. The classic discussion of reflective equilibrium is to be found in John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, esp. sees. 9 and 87.
8. For an influential early discussion of the distinction between narrow and broad (what he calls ‘wide ’) reflective equilibrium, see Norman Daniels, “Wide Reflective Equilibrium and Theory Acceptance in Ethics,” Journal of Philosophy 76 (1979) 256–82.
9. This point is made by David Copp, “Explanation and Justification in Ethics,” Ethics 100 (1990) 237–58.
10. On the academic side, see the special issue, “Ethical Theory: Character and Virtue,” of Midwest Studies in Philosophy 13 (1988) and also Michael Slote, From Morality to Virtue (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1992).
11. See the discussion of the classic experiments of Newcombe on extroversion and Hartshorne and May on honesty, as well as the more recent controversy over Mischel's claims about cross-situational consistency, found in L. Ross and R. Nisbett, The Person and the Situation (Philadelphia: Temple University Press 1991) ch. 4.
12. For discussion of the ‘representativeness heuristic’ the ‘fundamental attribution error’ and the asymmetries between positive and negative evidence, see R. Nisbett and L. Ross, Human Inference: Strategies and Shortcomings of Social Judgment (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall 1980).
13. See for example Nicholas Sturgeon's well-known discussion of Hitler and of Passed Midshipman Woodworth in his “Moral Explanations,” in David Copp and David Zimmerman, eds., Morality, Reason, and Truth (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Allanheld 1985).
14. Not all explanations are causal. Rationalists in general need to avail themselves of a notion of explanation in which a non-causal, underlying rational order can explain the realm of (causal) appearances. (Compare here Leibniz's notion of ‘well-founded phenomena. ’) But rationalism aside, even in contemporary natural science, many explanations are not evidently causal in nature — e.g., explanation by reduction, by reference to the structure of space-time, by ‘least energy ’ principles, and so on. Recent formulations of the doctrine of ‘inference to the best explanation, ’ it should also be noted, do not assume that all explanations are causal. Mathematical explanations, for example, need not be. See G. Harman, “The Inference to the Best Explanation,” The Philosophical Review 74 (1965) 88–95.
15. G.E. Moore, “A Reply to My Critics,” in P.A. Schilpp, ed., The Philosophy of G.E. Moore, vol. 2 (La Salle, IL: Open Court 1942) 588.
16. David Hume, “Of the Original Contract,” Essays Moral, Political, and Literary. The passage quoted here can be found on p. 60 of the selected volume of Hume's Political Essays, C.W. Hendel, ed. (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill 1953).