Christopher W. Morris

Value, Welfare, and Morality

List of contributors Preface 1. Value, welfare and morality R. G. Frey and Christopher W. Morris 2. The land of lost content Simon Blackburn 3. Putting rationality in its place Warren Quinn 4. Can a Humean be moderate? John Broome 5. Welfare, preference and rationality L. W. Sumner 6. Preference Arthur Ripstein 7. Reason and needs David Copp 8. Desired desires Gilbert Harman 9. On the winding road from good to right James Griffin 10. Value, reasons and the sense of justice David Gauthier 11. Agent-relativity of value, deontic restraints and self-ownership Eric Mack 12. Agent-relativity - the very idea Jonathan Dancy 13. The separateness of persons, distributive norms and moral theory David Brink 14. Harmful goods, harmless bads Larry Temkin.

Punishment and Loss of Moral Standing

1 Earlier versions of this essay were discussed at the UCLA Law & Philosophy Discussion Group in the spring of 1986, the Pacific meetings of the American Philosophical Association, San Francisco, March 1987, the Research Triangle Ethics Circle, September 1988, and the University of California, Riverside, January 1990. I am grateful to those present for comments and criticisms, as well as to Jacob Adler, Richard Arneson, Dorit Bar-On, David Copp, Michael Corrado, Jean Hampton, Thomas E. Hill, Jr., Gregory Kavka, Richard Mohr, Stephen Munzer, Reed Richter, Geoffrey Sayre-McCord, Keith Simmons, and the editors of this journal. And I am especially indebted to Jean Hampton, as well as to Warren Quinn, for interesting me in the subject of punishment.

Practical Rationality and Preference: Essays for David Gauthier

List of contributors 1. Practical reason and preference Christopher W. Morris and Arthur Ripstein 2. What do expressions of preference express? Robert Brandom 3. Preference Arthur Ripstein 4. Rational temptation Claire Finkelstein 5. Bombs and coconuts, or rational irrationality Derek Parfit 6. Are intentions reasons? And how should we cope with incommensurable values? John Broome 7. Two forms of practical generality Michael Thompson 8. Psychology for cooperators Adam Morton 9. Which games should constrained maximizers play? Peter Danielson 10. The strategy of cooperation Edward F. McClennen 11. We were never in paradise Candace Vogler.

The Very Idea of Popular Sovereignty: “We the People” Reconsidered

The sovereignty of the people, it is widely said, is the foundation of modern democracy. The truth of this claim depends on the plausibility of attributing sovereignty to “the people” in the first place, and I shall express skepticism about this possibility. I shall suggest as well that the notion of popular sovereignty is complex, and that appeals to the notion may be best understood as expressing several different ideas and ideals. This essay distinguishes many of these and suggests that greater clarity at least would be obtained by focusing directly on these notions and ideals and eschewing that of sovereignty. My claim, however, will not merely be that the notion is multifaceted and complex. I shall argue as well that the doctrine that the people are, or ought to be, sovereign is misleading in potentially dangerous ways, and is conducive to a misunderstanding of the nature of politics, governance, and social order. It would be well to do without the doctrine, but it may be equally important to understand its errors. Our understandings and justifications of democracy, certainly, should dispense with popular sovereignty.

Making exceptions without abandoning the principle: or how a Kantian might think about terrorism

THE PROBLEM FOR KANTIANS AND THE LARGER ISSUE Terrorism poses a practical problem that is urgent and difficult. How, within the bounds of conscience, can we respond effectively to violent terrorist activities and threats, especially given the ideological fanaticism and nonnegotiable demands that typically accompany them? The problem is partly instrumental and partly moral. The instrumental task is to find, among the morally permissible means, the best way to minimize terrorist violence, taking into account our other goals and values. The moral task is to determine what means of response are morally permissible. I shall focus here on this second problem, or rather on one way of thinking about it. Terrorists, of course, often claim that their ends are morally worthy and that their means are morally justified in the context. Some of these claims deserve a serious hearing, and even the more outrageous claims can pose challenges that moral philosophers should not ignore. For present purposes, however, I shall simply assume that terrorism is morally indefensible, at least in the cases to be considered; and I will not be discussing why this is so. My inquiry, instead, is about what responses are permissible when terrorists immorally threaten the lives of innocent hostages. Even this somewhat more limited question is too large to undertake here. To give an adequate answer would require us not only to resolve deep issues in moral theory but also to investigate relevant matters of fact, make careful distinctions among cases, review our moral judgments regarding similar problems, and so on.

STATE COERCION AND FORCE

State power is widely thought to be coercive. The view that governments must wield force or that their power is necessarily coercive is widespread in contemporary political thought. John Rawls is representative in claiming that (political power is always coercive power backed up by the government(s use of sanctions, for government alone has the authority to use force in upholding its laws.( This belief in the centrality of coercion and force plays an important but not well appreciated role in contemporary political thought. I wish to challenge this belief and the considerations that motivate it. States are not necessarily coercive or coercive (by definition.( Their claimed authority is prior to the force they wield. Legitimate states should need to resort to coercion and force much less than other states, and that fact seems unappreciated in contemporary political thought.

State Legitimacy and Social Order

Our world is one of states. Virtually all of the land mass of the globe today is the territory of a (single) state, and virtually all humans alive are subject to the laws of a state. Some countries or societies are degenerate cases of a state (e.g., Somalia, Congo), and others are relics of pre-modern Europe (e.g., Liechtenstein, San Marino, the Vatican). But even these aspire to be states or are often thought of as states. “International relations” are principally relations that obtain between states. The concept of legitimacy seems to be essential to making sense of this world of states. States always claim to be legitimate, and they are often recognized as such. Legitimacy is widely held to be very important, and the lack of it debilitating. With some frequency it is said that we face a crisis of legitimacy, and often a particular state is said to lack legitimacy. Without legitimacy, it is sometimes thought, there is not much that states, even very powerful ones, can do. There is, however, massive confusion about legitimacy. Contemporary discussions betray a notable lack of clarity and understanding about legitimacy and associated concepts. Sometimes it seems that parties to a dispute have different conceptions in mind – possibly different concepts – and may not, in effect, be talking about the same thing. Other times it is hard to know what they are thinking of. Disorder in the world may not be unrelated to disorder in our thoughts. What follows is an opinionated overview of the topic of state legitimacy and of its connections to social order. Much that I shall offer will be analysis, with part of the needed evidence or argument left out for reasons of space. But I think that clarity alone is immensely helpful with respect to the questions at hand.

NATURAL RIGHTS AND POLITICAL LEGITIMACY

If we have a natural right to liberty, it is hard to see how a state could be legitimate without first obtaining the (genuine) consent of the governed. I consider the threat natural rights pose to state legitimacy. I distinguish minimal from full legitimacy and explore different understandings of the nature of our natural rights. Even though I conclude that natural rights do threaten the full legitimacy of states, I suggest that understanding our natural right to liberty to be grounded in our interests in a certain way might not commit us to requiring consent for minimal legitimacy. Thus, even if natural rights effectively block the full legitimacy of states - on the assumption that rarely, if ever, the requisite consent will be forthcoming - they may allow minimal state legitimacy.

A Hobbesian Welfare State

Suppose that we have negative, natural rights to our lives, liberty, and possessions and that these rights are absolute or indefeasible. Then at best only minimal states will be legitimate, where such are states that restrict their activities to the enforcement of the basic rights of individuals and the like. (Indeed, it is possible that no actual states, minimal or not, will be legitimate.) Such appears to be the consequence of absolute natural rights. When made aware of these implications of absolute natural rights, many philosophers deny their existence. In the absence of a convincing defense of absolute natural rights, the defense of the minimal state thereby loses force.

Book ReviewsPeter J. Steinberger, The Idea of the State.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Pp. 329.

yet one would like a theory of environmental virtues to consider it for two reasons. First, it contains the Great Hope of a good many environmentalists. Can our cultures learn to see—if they haven’t already—that humans are greener than we think, at least when we develop self-knowledge? The Great Hope is to show how we are so thoroughly environmental that it is inconceivable to have a discourse about being human—the human good, character, or wisdom—that does not begin with how we are indebted to the Earth’s natural environment and does not end by including thoughtfulness about the environment as a necessary element of being human, the human good, character, and wisdom. The second reason why an environmental virtue theorist should consider how the environment shapes character is that virtue theory should help us rethink who we are. It should help us not only to revise our characters but to rediscover them. Although I follow Aristotle on this, I am speaking firsthand of one of the benefits that virtue ethics brings now in contrast to other forms of modern moral philosophy. Virtue theory considers persons, not just actions, and in doing so considers also relationships, social organization, culture, biology, tradition, and natural history. It stands to teach us about who we are, could be, and have not realized we should be. As such, it is well positioned to make us rethink many aspects of our ethical context, assumptions, and the nature of them. For this reason alone—not just because of the Great Hope—I would like a theorist of environmental virtues to take a good deal of time examining how our relation to the environment shapes the nature of character and, first off, by shaping what it is to be human, to have a culture, to evaluate, to feel, and so on. Sandler ends his book with a section called “Work Ahead” (143–44). Some of that work involves aspects of his theory—for example, his blending of a generality commitment and reflective equilibrium about intrinsic values with a natural goodness approach. Other work calls for filling out the content of environmental virtues—for example, “to specifying the dispositions constitutive of environmental virtues and vices” (143). What I have been saying here suggests work ahead, too. I believe Sandler—or someone developing his work—should write a book on the environmental nature of character and from there show us how that meta-ethics affects environmental virtues. I think we’ll be in a better position to specify environmental virtues more adequately then. In any event, Sandler’s book is a substantial contribution to both virtue ethics and environmental ethics and is strongly recommended for graduate seminars or reading lists in either field.