Talbot Brewer

Moral Knowledge and Ethical Character

This book presents an ethical theory that uniquely integrates naturalistic and rationalistic elements. Robert Audi develops his theory in four areas: moral epistemology, the metaphysics of ethics, moral psychology, and the foundations of ethics. Comprising both new and published work, the book sets forth a moderate intuitionism, clarifies the relation between reason and motivation, constructs a theory of intrinsic value and its place in moral obligation, and presents a sophisticated account of moral justification. The concluding chapter articulates a new normative framework built from both Kantian and intuitionist elements. Connecting ethics in novel ways to both the theory of value and the philosophy of action, the essays explore topics such as ethical intuition, reason and judgement, and virtue. Audi also considers major views in the history of ethics, including those of Aristotle, Hume, Kant, Mill, Moore, and W. D. Ross, and engages contemporary work on autonomy, responsibility, objectivity, reasons, and other issues. Clear and conceptually rich, this book makes vital reading for students and scholars of ethics.

Maxims and Virtues

Perhaps the most fundamental and distinctive idea of Kantian moral psychology is that no behavior can count as action unless it is performed on a subjective practical principle, or a maxim of action. The maxim is supposed to provide the target of moral assessment of all actions, whether this assessment is prospective (as it is in deliberation) or retrospective. The presence of a maxim is also supposed to illuminate how it is that agents are active in, hence responsible for, the peculiar species of events we call actions. To put the point roughly, agents are the sources of their actions in that they have in some sense affirmed or endorsed the maxims of these actions.

The Real Problem With Internalism About Reasons

Over the past two decades, moral philosophers have been engaged in a seemingly interminable debate about the role of internal and external reasons in practical reasoning. The rough distinction between these two sorts of reasons is this: internal reasons apply to particular agents in virtue of their relation to that agents desires, preferences, or other motivational states, while external reasons are normative for particular agents quite independently of their relation to the subjective motivational states of these agents. The debate has pitted internalists, who claim that the only reasons are internal reasons, against externalists, who claim that there are or might be external reasons. The upshot of the internalist position is that no reason for action applies to any person regardless of that persons subjective motivational states.2 If part of what we mean when we call a reason moral is that the reason applies to us regardless of our subjective motivational states, then internalism implies that there are no moral reasons.

IS WELFARE AN INDEPENDENT GOOD

In recent years, philosophical inquiry into individual welfare has blossomed into something of a cottage industry, and this literature has provided the conceptual foundations for an equally voluminous literature on aggregate social welfare. In this essay, I argue that substantial portions of both bodies of literature ought to be viewed as philosophical manifestations of a characteristically modern illusion—the illusion, in particular, that there is a special kind of goodness that is irreducibly person-relative. Theories that are built upon this idea suffer from a recurring defect. Such theories relativize welfare to subjective states that are wholly unsuited to settling deliberative questions concerning what it would be good for us to do, because they themselves are subjective outlooks on value and their dependability is itself fair game for deliberative review. They are unstable, then, in the course of first-person deliberation, which is precisely where they are supposed to have their primary application. The idea of an irreducibly person-relative kind of goodness is of modern vintage, and its rise has distorted prevailing interpretations of pre-modern alternatives, including the appealing alternative found in Plato and Aristotle. A further objective of this essay is to recover this alternative, bring out its appeal, and answer some possible objections to it.

The Character of Temptation: Towards a More Plausible Kantian Moral Psychology

Kant maintained that dutiful action can have the fullest measure of moral worth even if chosen in the face of powerful inclinations to act immorally, and indeed that opposing inclinations only highlight the worth of the action. I argue that this conclusion rests on an implausibly mechanistic account of desires, and that many desires are constituted by tendencies to see certain features of one’s circumstances as reasons to perform one or another action. I try to show that inclinations to violate moral requirements sometimes manifest a morally objectionable half-heartedness in one’s commitment to those very requirements, and - by extension - to the values that undergird these requirements.

Savoring time: Desire, pleasure and wholehearted activity

There is considerable appeal to the Aristotelian idea that taking pleasure in an activity is sometimes simply a matter of attending to it in such a way as to render it wholehearted. However, the proponents of this idea have not made adequately clear what kind of attention it is that can perform the surprising feat of transforming otherwise indifferent activities into pleasurable ones. I build upon Gilbert Ryles suggestion that taking pleasure in an activity is tantamount to engaging in the activity while fervently desiring to do it and it alone. More specifically, I draw upon insights into the sort of evaluative attention involved in having a desire to generate corollary insights into the sort of attention that makes activity pleasurable. My aim is to offer a compelling account of a certain class of pleasures, and to shed light on their relation to reasons. I argue that prospective pleasures in this class are not always reasons for action, and that even when they are reasons they have this status only derivatively, as vivid apprehensions of an independent realm of values. This does not mean that such pleasures are never good. They are good provided that they track real values, for then they constitute a proper savoring of ones activities and/or circumstances, and provide a valuable respite from the distractions and unwarranted doubts that so often leave us at odds with ourselves and alienated from our own doings.

Kant and Rawls on the Cultivation of Virtue.

In ‘Two conceptions of virtue’, Thomas Hill reconstructs the conceptions of virtue, and of proper moral upbringing, found in Kant and Rawls. Here I offer some brief reflections on these conceptions of virtue and its cultivation. I argue that Kant’s conception of virtue is grounded in a mistaken conception of desire, and that this makes it difficult to account properly for the role of ‘sentimental education’ in a good moral upbringing. I then suggest that, in addition to the explicit conception of moral upbringing to which Hill attends, Rawls has an implicit conception of the cultivation of the virtue of justice. This conception is implicit in Rawls’ philosophical methodology, and it assigns a central and recognizably Hegelian role to reasoned philosophical reflection.

On Moral Alchemy: A Critical Examination of Post-9/11 U.S. Military Policy

There is a growing consensus, even within the United States, that the decision to attack Iraq was morally unjustifiable and strategically disastrous. But there has been relatively little public scrutiny of two fundamental shifts in U.S. foreign policy and military doctrine that accompanied the war and that threaten to have a long-term impact on the use of the world’ s most powerful military force. Half a year before attacking Iraq, the U.S. Department of State attempted to prepare the legal and moral basis for the war by issuing a new National Security Strategy that broke decisively with prior limitations on the self-defensive use of military violence, declaring that the United States would attack other nations to defuse long-term threats to its security even when those nations had no imminent plans to attack the United States or its allies. Two years after invading Iraq, the U.S. Army and Marine Corps made an equally fundamental change in their strategic doctrine—a change aimed at improving its capacity to suppress the sort of resistance movement that has arisen in Iraq and that might confront its operations in other foreign nations. I believe that both of these fundamental changes in war policy are strategically unwise, but I will not pursue that matter here. My aim is to show that they are both morally indefensible. The doctrine of preventive self-defense could be counted as moral only on the exceedingly implausible supposition that when a group of individuals forms a state, this gives them a newly enhanced right to kill their fellow human beings. The new counterinsurgency doctrine would be morally benign only if put into practice by an army of angels. Applied to an army of human beings it is a recipe for brutality and oppression, and it will often result in the violent death of many innocent human beings.

Rethinking our Maxims: Perceptual Salience and Practical Judgment in Kantian Ethics

Some contemporary Kantians have argued that one could not be virtuous without having internalized certain patterns of awareness that permit one to identify and respond reliably to moral reasons for action. I agree, but I argue that this insight requires unrecognized, far‐reaching, and thoroughly welcome changes in the traditional Kantian understanding of maxims and virtues. In particular, it implies that ones characteristic emotions and desires will partly determine ones maxims, and hence the praiseworthiness of ones actions. I try to show this by pointing out an instability in the Kantian understanding of maxims. On the one hand, maxims are thought of as consciously affirmed, subjective principles of action. On the other hand, Kantians claim that nothing counts as an action, nor as morally assessable, unless it has a maxim. One cannot take both thoughts seriously without implausibly constricting the range of behavior that counts as action, hence as morally assessable. This difficulty can be overcome, I suggest, by jettisoning the idea that maxims must be consciously affirmed, and by stressing the way in which maxims are grounded in the pruning and shaping of ones emotions and desires during socialization. This opens the door to a rich Kantian theory of virtue. It also raises questions about the scope and ground of our moral responsibility, which I address at the end of the paper.