Susan Wolf

Two Levels of Pluralism

Pluralism in ethics, as I understand it, is the view that there is an irreducible plurality of values or principles that are relevant to moral judgment. While the utilitarian says that all morally significant considerations can be reduced to quantities of pleasure and pain, and the Kantian says that all moraljudgment can be reduced to a single principle having to do with respect for rationality and the bearers of rationality, the pluralist insists that morality is not at the fundamental level so simple. Moreover, as many use the term, and as I shall use it in this essay, the pluralist believes that the plurality of morally significant values is not subject to a complete rational ordering. Thus, it is held that no principle or decision procedure exists that can guarantee a unique and determinate answer to every moral question involving a choice among different fundamental moral values or principles. My aim in this article is not to argue for the truth of ethical pluralism but, rather, to explore some implications of its truth, or even of the self-conscious recognition of the possibility of its truth. Specifically, I shall argue that pluralism, or, indeed, even the possibility of pluralism, has implications for the way we understand issues concerning moral objectivity and moral relativism, as well as implications for the positions we take on them. I shall begin by sketching a common pattern of thought about these issues.

Morality and the View from Here

According to one influential conception of morality, being moral is a matter of acting from or in accordance with a moral point of view, a point of view which is arrived at by abstracting from a more natural, pre-ethical, personal point of view, and recognizing that each persons personal point of view has equal standing. The idea that, were it not for morality, rational persons would act from their respectively personal points of view is, however, simplistic and misleading. Because our nonmoral reasons cannot all be adequately captured as falling within any single, unified and coherent point of view, morality cannot be adequately understood as a matter of abstracting from such points of view and taking them all equally into account. After considering several ways of modifying the initial conception of morality in a way that accommodates the variety of nonmoral reasons that do not have their source in a personal point of view, the paper concludes with the suggestion that we free ourselves more thoroughly from the grip of the metaphor that takes morality as a whole to be a matter of acting in accordance with the judgments of a single unified and coherent point of view.

Responsibility, Moral and Otherwise

Abstract Philosophers frequently distinguish between causal responsibility and moral responsibility, but that distinction is either ambiguous or confused. We can distinguish between causal responsibility and a deeper kind of responsibility, that licenses reactive attitudes and judgments that a merely causal connection would not, and we can distinguish between holding people accountable for their moral qualities and holding people accountable for their nonmoral qualities. But, because we sometimes hold people deeply responsible for nonmoral qualities of behavior and character, these distinctions are not the same. A number of recent accounts of responsibility identify deep responsibility with moral responsibility and in consequence miss some key features of the concept of which they are trying to give an account. A view that distinguishes two levels of responsibility, according to which the conditions of attributability are weaker than the conditions of accountability, might seem to account for a kind of nonmoral responsibility while still conceiving of moral responsibility as involving a deeper kind of agency. This paper considers and rejects this view, suggesting that whether we are ever as deeply responsible for anything as we tend to presume can be as fruitfully asked about our nonmoral successes and failures as about our moral ones.

Deconstructing Welfare: Reflections on Stephen Darwall's Welfare and Rational Care

In his book Welfare and Rational Care , Stephen Darwall proposes to give an account of human welfare. Or rather, he offers two accounts, a metaethical and a normative account. The two accounts, he suggests, are somewhat supportive of each other though they are logically independent.

Science and the search for meaning

Susan R. Wolf considers an ambitious attempt to employ scientific and philosophical reasoning to understand our place in the cosmos