Today I have, on the advice of a friendly
professor, been returning to the works of T. M. Scanlon. His book "What we
owe to Each Other" has been helpful before, but I did not remember his
work on moral principles until this re-reading.
It strikes me that this account might be thought of
as quite weak. The debate is highly interesting, partly for that reason. The
way the debate is stated, for reasons I will go into, make the account sound
circular. Obviously Scanlon is a clever chap, so I do not want to say he has
got things obviously wrong. So when he defines principals it seems strange to
say this:
Principles.. are general conclusions about the status of various kinds of reasons for action. So understood principals may rule out some action by ruling out the reasons on which they would be based, but they also leave wide room for interpretation and judgement (p190)
Scanlon wants to support the idea of moral
principles and says as much, but he also supports the idea that they are not
simple rules, and require judgement to hold in a particular case. The
principles are not rules - as I would have initially thought - but rather the
conclusions we as agents reach about reasons for action. These 'reasons' seem
like atomic bits of principals, but I think that Scanlon would resist this
idea.
Firstly, he does not think the reasons or
principals are the sorts of things that make sense without an agent’s judgement
(p190). Secondly he admits that there are possibly an indefinite number of principals (p201). This thought
first makes me think that the principals themselves are so numerous that more
basic entities are not needed.. but then I think that chemical substances are
numerous indeed, and yet the a finite range of elements make them up. Perhaps that
is the kind of analogy Scanlon has in mind, of reasons 'supporting',
'building', or 'acting as foundations for' principles, except we cannot 'transmit' these judgements exactly. The
judgements are something we get once we 'get' the principle itself.
It is at this point it starts to sound wrong. If
principles are founded on reasons, but we only 'get' the reasons once we
understand the principles then haven't we come full circle? If we are looking for a
clear definition then perhaps we have, but I think that this is the point.
There is no clear definition to be had of moral principles, because they always
rely upon learned judgements which the agent cannot easily convey. Scanlon
seems to think there is a necessary barrier to conveying these reasons, because
they rely upon the complications relevant to
each principle. The complications in even simple principals like "do not
lie" rely upon a great deal of agent specific knowledge about when such
rules can be broken, if at all.
I think this is a good introduction to the topic,
and having taken a lot of notes I am going to mull it over.
I have been thinking about this some more, and researching further works. I now think that my initial view of moral principles was of something like the ten commandments - a set of rules laid down which must be obeyed.
ReplyDeleteScanlon sees this as misleading because it is simply not a good reflection of how we use principles. Dancy, in a similar vein, points out that such law-like principles would give no room for conflicting principles. If they were accepted, then an agent who felt they had conflicting moral duties would be mistaken.
I still suspect that the notion of a moral principle which relies upon judgement might have something about it which was not at all like a rule. This is because I initially supposed that a principle might be algorithmic, as suggested by McKeever and Ridge in their book "Principled Ethics". They introduce this idea as an implausible view which has not been argued for, and perhaps they are right.
I think my naive view was that simple 'commandment style' principles could be algorithmic, and arbitrarily complicated, and thus allow moral conflict: perhaps with a 'you will do act A and feel regret in this situation' clause. Dancy argues against this kind of thing, because he supposes that it would no longer be a principle... He may be right but I am just not sure.