Explaining Value: and Other Essays in Moral Philosophy

Explaining Value

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Explaining Value and Other Essays in Moral Philosophy

Gilbert Harman

CLARENDON PRESS · OXFORD

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Bangkok Buenos Aires Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kolkata Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi São Paulo Shanghai Taipei Tokyo Toronto Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York © Gilbert Harman 2000 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2000 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographcs rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Explaining value and other essays in moral philosophy / Gilbert Harman. Includes bibliographical references 1. Ethics. I. Title. BJ1012 .H31354 2000 170—dc21 00–035603 ISBN 0–19–823805–3 ISBN 0–19–823804–5 (pbk.)

For My Brothers Bill and Roger

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Acknowledgements Preparation of some of the material in this book was supported in part by a grant to Princeton University from the James S. McDonnell Foundation. I am also grateful to the publishers of the original versions of the essays in this book for permission to reprint them. ‘Moral Relativism Defended’, Philosophical Review 84 (1975), 3–22. ‘What is Moral Relativism?’, in A. I. Goldman and J. Kim (eds.), Values and Morals (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1978), 143–61. ‘Relativistic Ethics: Morality as Politics’, Midwest Studies in Philosophy 3 (1978), 109–21. ‘Justice and Moral Bargaining’, Social Philosophy and Policy 1 (1983), 114–31. ‘Is There a Single True Morality?’, in David Copp and David Zimmerman (eds.), Morality, Reason and Truth (Totowa, N. J.: Rowan & Littlefield, 1985), 27–48. ‘Toward a Theory of Intrinsic Value’, Journal of Philosophy 64 (1967), 792–804. ‘Desired Desires’, in Ray Frey and Chris Morris (eds.), Value, Welfare, and Morality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 138–57. An earlier version of ‘Intrinsic Value’ appeared as ‘La valeur intrinsèque’, translated by Laurie Calhoun, Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 99 (1994), 245–55. ‘Human Flourishing, Ethics, and Liberty’, Philosophy and Public Affairs 12 (1983), 307–22. ‘Moral Philosophy Meets Social Psychology: Virtue Ethics and the Fundamental Attribution Error’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 99 (1998–9), 315–31. ‘Moral Agent and Impartial Spectator’, Lindley Lecture (Lawrence Kan.: University of Kansas, 1986). ‘Explaining Value’, Social Philosophy and Policy 11 (1994), 229–48. ‘Moral Philosophy and Linguistics’, Proceedings of the 20th World Congress of Philosophy, vol. I: Ethics, ed. Klaus Brinkmann (Bowling Green, Ohio: Philosophy Documentation Center, 1999), 107–15.

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Contents Introduction Part I. Moral Relativism 1. Moral Relativism Defended 2. What is Moral Relativism? 3. Relativistic Ethics: Morality as Politics 4. Justice and Moral Bargaining 5. Is There a Single True Morality? Part II. Intrinsic Value 6. Toward a Theory of Intrinsic Value 7. Desired Desires 8. Intrinsic Value Part III. Virtue 9. Human Flourishing, Ethics, and Liberty 10. Moral Philosophy Meets Social Psychology: Virtue Ethics and the Fundamental Attribution Error Part IV. Explaining Value 11. Moral Agent and Impartial Spectator 12. Explaining Value 13. Moral Philosophy and Linguistics Bibliography Index of Names Index of Subjects

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Introduction These essays have all been previously published. I have modified them to have the same format, making (what seem to me to be) corrections where needed, adding additional references, and tinkering with wording. Throughout these essays I am concerned with explaining aspects of morality. What accounts for the existence of basic moral disagreements? Why do most people think it is worse to injure someone than to fail to save them from injury? Where does the right of self-defence come from? Why do many people think it is morally permissible to treat animals in ways we would not treat people? Why do people disagree about moral relativism to the extent that they do? What is it to value something and what is it to value something intrinsically? How are a person's values (noun) related to what the person values (verb)? How much of morality can or should be explained in terms of human flourishing or the possession of virtuous character traits? For that matter, are there character traits of the sort we normally suppose there are? How do people come to be moral? Is morality something one learns or does it arise in everyone naturally without instruction? I have somewhat arbitrarily divided the essays into four groups, which I have labelled (1) moral relativism, (2) intrinsic value, (3) virtue, and (4) explaining values. Here are summaries of the essays. The first five essays are concerned with moral relativism. In Essay 1, ‘Moral Relativism Defended’, I argue that a version of moral relativism can be formulated as an intelligible thesis, the thesis that morality derives from an implicit agreement and moral judgements are true or false only in relation to such an agreement. I appeal to this thesis to explain otherwise puzzling aspects of some of our own moral views, in particular why we think that it is more important to avoid harm to others than to help others avoid harm. I go on to argue that traditional objections to implicit agreement theories can be met. In Essay 2, ‘What is Moral Relativism?’, I discuss three views that have been considered to be versions of moral relativism—normative moral relativism, moral judgement relativism, and meta-ethical relativism. After discussing what may seem to be conclusive objections to each view, I argue

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that the objections can all be met and that all three versions of moral relativism are correct. Essay 3, ‘Relativistic Ethics: Morality as Politics’, formulates the ‘naive view’ that morality is based on certain moral demands that everyone accepts, or at least has reasons to accept, as demands on everyone and on which all moral reasons depend. I argue that the naive view must be rejected because there are no substantive moral demands satisfying those conditions. I suggest that moral conventionalism or ‘morality as politics’ is the best replacement for the naive view. Other conceptions of morality retain less of the content of the naive view and tend toward unrealistic accounts of what morality requires. Extremely agent-centred theories, as in certain forms of existentialism, practically abandon morality as a social enterprise, as do extremely critic-centred theories, like certain forms of emotivism and Hare's theory, which are best seen as rejecting the moral ought in favour of the ought of evaluation. In Essay 4, ‘Justice and Moral Bargaining’, I claim that substantive principles of justice derive from actual agreements that result from actual but usually tacit moral bargaining. I criticize arguments by Gewirth, Nagel, and Kohlberg for thinking that all rational or normal people must recognize certain requirements of justice. I note that mere hypothetical agreements could not give people reasons. I show how moral bargaining might explain moral concern and respect, and show that this explanation does not undermine the moral force of the principles we accept. I go on to advocate that we be more explicit about moral bargaining, suggesting that this will improve moral argument and lead to greater tolerance. In Essay 5, ‘Is There a Single True Morality?’, I ask why people, especially philosophers, disagree in the way they do about moral relativism. Although people appear to be quite divided, with about half being moral relativists and half moral absolutists, there is a tendency to suppose that the view one takes about this is obviously correct and that anyone who takes the opposite view is just denying the plain truth. I trace some of the disagreement to methodology and to the attitude one takes about how ethics fits with a scientific conception of the world. Those who take it to be important how one's moral views cohere with science tend to be moral relativists; those who do not take that issue to be all important tend to be moral absolutists. The next three essays are concerned with value and intrinsic value. In Essay 6, ‘Toward a Theory of Intrinsic Value’, I am concerned with what would or would not be a good or worthwhile or desirable states of

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affairs, as when one says, ‘It would be a good thing if P.’ Some theorists have attempted to provide such a theory by providing a theory of intrinsic value. I examine what was once a standard textbook account of intrinsic value and argue that (a) it is not clear whether a theory of intrinsic value can be developed along the lines of that standard account; (b) if one is to develop such a theory, one will need to introduce a notion of ‘basic intrinsic value’ in addition to the notion of ‘intrinsic value’; and (c) several different theories of intrinsic value may account for the same judgements concerning desirability, and it may be arbitrary to choose one such theory over another. In Essay 7, ‘Desired Desires’, I argue against appeals to second-order desires in order to explain freedom of the will, valuing, or values. Along the way, I defend a number of subsidiary points: (1) Positive intentions are reflexive or selfreferential. (2) Intrinsic desires are not just noninstrumental desires. (3) To value something is in part to want it. (4) There is sometimes a difference between believing that something is good and valuing it. (5) There is a difference between valuing something and having something as one of your values. In Essay 8, ‘Intrinsic Value’, I observe that good news might be desirable to you even though it is not of value to you. I also note that something not valued intrinsically might be valued as contributing to a larger whole that is valued intrinsically, in the sense that the whole with that part is intrinsically preferred to the whole without that part. I apply this point to the value of some good news, to retributive punishment, to Dworkin's account of sacred value, etc. Essays 9 and 10 discuss character traits and virtue ethics. In Essay 9, ‘Human Flourishing, Ethics, and Liberty’, I discuss attempts to derive at least some of morality from a conception of human flourishing and those character traits or virtues that would contribute to human flourishing. I raise serious problems for such an approach to ethics. In Essay 10, ‘Moral Philosophy Meets Social Psychology: Virtue Ethics and the Fundamental Attribution Error’, I discuss results in social psychology that cast doubt on the existence of robust character traits of the sort that people normally take for granted and that virtue ethics must appeal to. I conclude that we should try to stop thinking in terms of character tratis. The final three essays discuss various ways in which we might be able to explain aspects of morality.

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In Essay 11, ‘Moral Agent and Impartial Spectator’, I start with a standard objection to impartial spectator theories of morality, namely, that they offer an aesthetic, critic-centred conception of morality, and so cannot adequately account for moral motivation and the way morality presents itself to an agent. I describe the issue as it arose in the eighteenth Century for Hutcheson, Hume, and Smith, and note that Smith provides an elegant account of why agents might be motivated to act in ways that impartial spectators would approve, an account that is premised on an insightful critique of Hume's theory of sympathy. In Essay 12, ‘Explaining Values’, I consider various ways in which people's moral values might be explained, starting with Hume's account of our different attitudes toward chastity in men and in women. I go on to consider Hume's somewhat utilitarian explanation of moral sentiments in general, various theories of moral development, explanations of aspects of morality in terms of natural selection, Posner's explanation of aspects of morality in terms of wealth maximization, explanations that appeal to principles like double effect, and sociological and historical explanations of aspects of morality. Finally, in Essay 13, ‘Moral Philosophy and Linguistics’, I observe that languages are at least as diverse on the surface as moralities, yet linguistics thrives by studying linguistic universals. I suggest that linguistics provides a model in searching for moral universals.

Part I Moral Relativism

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1 Moral Relativism Defended In the first four essays, I argue that morality arises when people reach an implicit agreement or come to a tacit understanding about their relations with one another. Part of what I mean by this is that moral judgements—or, rather, an important class of them—are true or false only in relation to and with reference to one or another such agreement or understanding. This is vague, but I will try to make it more precise in what follows. In any event, it should be clear that I intend to argue for a version of what has been called ‘moral relativism’. In doing so, I am taking sides in an ancient controversy, discussed further in Essay 5, below. Many people believe that the sort of view which I am going to defend is obviously correct—indeed, that it is the only sort of account that could make sense of the phenomenon of morality. At the same time there are also many who think that moral relativism is confused, incoherent, and even immoral, at the very least obviously wrong. Some arguments against relativism make use of a strategy of dissuasive definition; they simply define moral relativism as an inconsistent thesis. For example, moral relativism might be defined as committed to the following three claims (Williams, 1972: 20–21; M. Singer, 1961: 332): (a) There are no universal principles. (b) One ought to act in accordance with the principles of one's own group. (c) Principle (b) is a universal moral principle. It is easy enough to show that this version of moral relativism will not do, but surely a defender of moral relativism can find a better definition. My moral relativism is a soberly logical thesis—a thesis about logical form, if you like. Just as the judgement that something is large is true or false only in relation to one or another comparison class, so too, I will argue, the judgement that it is wrong of someone to do something is true or false only in relation to an agreement or understanding. A dog may be large in relation to chihuahuas but not large in relation to dogs in general.

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Similarly, I will argue, an action may be wrong in relation to one agreement but not in relation to another. Just as it is indeterminate whether a dog is large, period, apart from any relation to a comparison class, so too, I will argue, it is indeterminate whether an action is wrong, period, apart from any relation to an agreement. There is an agreement, in the relevant sense, if each of a number of people intends to adhere to some schedule, plan, or set of principles, intending to do this on the understanding that the others similarly intend. The agreement or understanding need not be conscious or explicit. I will not try to say what distinguishes moral agreements from, for example, conventions of the road or conventions of etiquette, since these distinctions will not be important as regards the purely logical thesis that I will be defending. Although I want to say that certain moral judgements are made in relation to an agreement, my present argument does not apply to all moral judgements. It is true that I argue elsewhere that all moral judgements are made in relation to an agreement (Essays 2–4, below; Harman and Thomson, 1996), but that is not what I defend in the present essay. In this essay I argue that there is a way in which certain moral judgements are relative to an agreement but other moral judgements are not. This relativism is a thesis only about what I call ‘inner judgements’, such as the judgement that someone morally ought or ought not to have acted in a certain way or the judgement that it was morally right or wrong of him to have done so. The relativism defended in this first essay is not meant to apply, for example, to the judgement that someone is evil or the judgement that a given institution is unjust. (I do argue that justice is a relative matter in Essay 4.)

1.1 Inner Judgements Many of us believe on reflection that different people have reasons to observe different moral requirements, depending on the moralities those people accept. Those of us who have this ‘relativistic’ view make inner judgements about a person only if we suppose that he or she has reasons to be motivated by the relevant moral considerations. We make other sorts of judgement about those whom we suppose not to have such reasons. Inner judgements include judgements in which we say that someone morally should or ought to have done something or that someone was morally right or wrong to have done something. Inner judgements do not

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include judgements that someone is a savage, inhuman, evil, a betrayer, a traitor, or an enemy. Consider this imaginary example. Intelligent beings from outer space land on Earth, beings without the slightest concern for human life and happiness. Some of us seem to be able to imagine that the fact that a certain course of action on their part will injure inhabitants of Earth might mean nothing to them and might in particular give them no reason to avoid the action. Those of us who think we can imagine this find it odd to go on to say that the beings ought nevertheless to avoid injuring human beings or that it would be wrong of them to attack human beings. Of course we would want to resist them if they did such things and we would certainly make negative judgements about them; but we would judge that they are dreadful enemies to be repelled and even destroyed, not that they morally ought not to act as they do. Closer to home, suppose that a contented employee of Murder, Incorporated was raised as a child to honour and respect members of the ‘family’ but to have nothing but contempt for the rest of society. His current assignment, let us suppose, is to kill a certain bank manager, Bernard J. Ortcutt. Since Ortcutt is not a member of the ‘family’, the employee in question has no compunction about carrying out his assignment. If we were to try to convince him that he should not kill Ortcutt, our argument would merely amuse him. Thinking of this case, some of us find it plausible that we might not be able to provide the assassin with the slightest reason to desist unless we were to point to practical difficulties, such as the likelihood of his getting caught. Given that assumption about reasons, it strikes us as a misuse of language to say of the assassin that he ought not to kill Ortcutt or that it would be wrong of him to do so. To say such things seems to imply that our own moral considerations carry some weight with him, which they do not. Instead we can only judge that he is a criminal, someone to be hunted down by the police, an enemy of peace-loving citizens, and so forth. It is true that we can make certain judgements about him using the word ‘ought’, even given that he has no reasons not to kill. Investigators who are waiting for the assassin to appear at the bank might use the ‘ought’ of expectation to say, ‘He ought to arrive soon.’ They mean that on the basis of their information one would expect him to arrive soon. The same investigators might use the ‘ought’ of rationality to say that the assassin ought to go in by the rear door. They would mean that it would be more rational for him to do that than to go in by the front door. But in neither of these cases is the moral ‘ought’ in question.

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There is another use of ‘ought’ that is normative and in a sense moral, but which is distinct from what I am calling the moral ‘ought’, when we say that something ought or ought not to be the case. It ought not to be the case that members of Murder, Incorporated kill their victims; in other words, it is a terrible thing that they do so. The same thought can perhaps be expressed as ‘They ought not to go around killing people’, meaning that it ought not to be the case that they do, not that they are wrong to do what they do. The normative ‘ought to be’ is used to assess a situation; the moral ‘ought to do’ is used to describe a relation between an agent and a type of act that he might perform or has performed (Humberstone, 1971–2). (Thomas Nagel has pointed out to me that, when we use the evaluative ‘ought to be’ to say that something ought to be the case, we often imply that someone ought to do something or ought to have done something about it. To take his example, we would not say that a certain hurricane ought not to have killed fifty people just because it was terrible that the hurricane did so. But we might say this if we had in mind that the deaths from the hurricane would not have occurred except for the absence of safety or evacuation procedures that the authorities ought to have provided.) The sentence, ‘They ought not to go around killing people,’ is therefore multiply ambiguous. It can mean, roughly: (a) (b) (c) (d)

One would expect them not to do so (the ‘ought’ of expectation). It is not in their interest to do so (the ‘ought’ of rationality). It is a bad thing that they do so (the normative ‘ought to be’). It is wrong of them to do so (the moral ‘ought to do’).

For the most part I am here concerned only with the last interpretation, (d). The word ‘should’ behaves very much like ‘ought to’. There is a ‘should’ of expectation (‘They should be here soon’); a ‘should’ of rationality (‘He should go in by the back door’); a normative ‘should be’ (‘They shouldn't go around killing people like that’); and the moral ‘should do’ (‘You should keep that promise’). I am of course concerned mainly with the last sense of ‘should’. ‘Right’ and ‘wrong’ also have multiple uses. I will not try to say what all of them are, but I do want to distinguish using the word ‘wrong’ to say that a particular situation or action is wrong from using the word to say that it is wrong of someone to do something. In the former case, the word ‘wrong’ is used to assess an act or situation. In the latter case, it is used to

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describe a relation between an agent and an act. Only the latter sort of judgement is an inner judgement. Although those of us I have referred to earlier would not say that it was morally wrong of the assassin to kill Ortcutt, we could say that his action was wrong, and we could say that it is wrong that there is so much killing. To take another example, it sounds odd to many of us to say that Hitler morally ought not to have ordered the extermination of the Jews, or that it was morally wrong of him to have done so. That sounds somehow ‘too weak’ a thing to say. Instead we want to say that Hitler was an evil man. Yet it does not sound odd to us to say, ‘Hitler ought not to have ordered the extermination of the Jews’, if what we mean is that it ought never to have happened; and we can say without oddity that what Hitler did was wrong. Oddity seems to us to affect only the inner judgement that Hitler was wrong to have acted in that way. That is what sounds ‘too weak’ to us. It is worth noting that the inner judgements do not sound too weak simply because of the enormity of what Hitler did. What is relevant is our supposition that in acting as he did he shows that he could not have been susceptible to the moral considerations on the basis of which we make our judgement. He is in the relevant sense beyond the pale and we therefore cannot make inner judgements about him. Consider another mass-murderer, Stalin. Those of us who have trouble making inner moral judgements about Hitler can imagine someone taking a sympathetic view of Stalin. In this view, Stalin realised that the course he was going to pursue would mean the murder of millions of people and he dreaded such a prospect; however, the alternative seemed to offer an even greater disaster—so, reluctantly and with great anguish, he went ahead. In relation to this view of Stalin, inner judgements about Stalin are not as odd to some of us as are similar judgements about Hitler. For we might easily continue the story by saying that, despite what he hoped to gain, Stalin should not have undertaken that course of action. It was wrong of him to have done so. What makes inner judgements about Hitler odd or ‘too weak’ for some of us is not that the acts judged seem too terrible for the words used, but rather that the agent judged seems beyond the pale—in other words, beyond the motivational reach of the relevant moral considerations. It is true that many people find that there is nothing deviant about inner judgements about Hitler. Furthermore, even in my own case I find that it is possible to describe Stalin and Hitler in ways that reverse these points, so that inner judgements about Hitler do not sound odd to me and inner judgements about Stalin do sound odd.

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It is also true that for various reasons we might pretend that an agent is or is not susceptible to certain moral considerations. For example, a speaker may for rhetorical or political reasons wish to suggest that someone is beyond the pale, that he should not be listened to, that he can be treated as an enemy. On the other hand, a speaker may pretend that someone is susceptible to certain moral considerations in an effort to make that person or others susceptible to those considerations. Inner judgements about one's children sometimes have this function. So do inner judgements made in political speeches that aim at restoring a lapsed sense of morality in government.

1.2 The Logical Form of Inner Judgements Inner judgements have two important characteristics. First, they imply that the agent has reasons to do something. Second, the speaker in some sense endorses these reasons and supposes that the audience also endorses them. Other moral judgements about an agent, on the other hand, do not imply that the agent has reasons for acting that are endorsed by the speaker. If someone S says that A (morally) ought to do D, S implies that A has reasons to do D and S endorses those reasons. If S says that B was evil in what B did, S does not imply that the reasons S would endorse for not doing what B did were reasons for B not to do that thing. In fact, S implies that such reasons were not reasons for B. Let us examine this more closely. If S says that (morally) A ought to do D, S implies that A has reasons to do D that S endorses. I shall be concerned only with any speaker, S, who assumes, controversially, that such reasons would have to have their source in values, goals, desires, or intentions that S takes A to have, and that S approves of A's having those values, goals, desires, or intentions because S shares them. So, if S says that (morally) A ought to do D, there are certain motivational attitudes M which S assumes are shared by S, A, and S's audience. In other words, I am discussing the use of moral language by speakers who assume (contrary to Nagel, 1970) that the possession of rationality is not sufficient to provide a source for relevant reasons, that certain values, desires, goals, or intentions are also necessary. In particular, the speakers in question assume that there might be no reasons at all for a being from outer space to avoid harm to us. They assume that, for Hitler, there might

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have been no reason at all not to order the extermination of the Jews. They assume that the contented employee of Murder, Incorporated might have no reason at all not to kill Ortcutt. Many speakers who accept such assumptions find that they distinguish inner moral judgements from other moral judgements in the way that I have indicated. Ultimately, I want to argue that the shared motivational attitudes M should be identified with intentions to keep an agreement (supposing that others similarly intend). For I want to argue that inner moral judgements are made relative to such an agreement. That is, I want to argue that, when a relevant speaker S makes the inner judgement that A ought to do D, S assumes that A intends to act in accordance with an agreement that S and S's audience also intend to observe. In other words, I want to argue that the source of the reasons for doing D that S ascribes to A consists in A's sincere intention to observe a certain agreement. I have not yet argued for the stronger thesis, however. I have argued only that S makes his or her judgement relative to some motivational attitudes M that S assumes are shared by S, A, and S's audience. Formulating this as a logical thesis, I want to treat this use of the moral ‘ought’ as involving a four-place relation. ‘Ought (A, D, C, M)’ relates an agent A, a type of act D, considerations C, and motivating attitudes M. The relativity to considerations C can be brought out by considering what are sometimes called statements of prima facie obligation. ‘Considering that you promised, you ought to go to the board meeting. Considering that you are the sole surviving relative, you ought to go to the funeral. All things considered, it is not clear what you ought to do’ (Cf. Davidson, 1969). The claim that there is this relativity to considerations is not, of course, what makes my thesis a version of moral relativism, since any theory must acknowledge relativity to considerations. The relativity to considerations does, however, provide a model for a coherent interpretation of moral relativism as a similar kind of relativity. It is not as easy to exhibit the relativity to motivating attitudes as it is to exhibit the relativity to considerations. Normally, a speaker who makes this sort of moral ‘ought’ judgement intends the relevant motivating attitudes to be ones that the speaker shares with the agent and the audience, and normally it will be obvious what attitudes these are. But sometimes a speaker does invoke different attitudes by invoking a morality the speaker does not share. Someone may say, for example, ‘As a Christian, you ought to turn the other cheek; I, however, propose to strike back.’ A spy who has been found out by a friend might say, ‘As a citizen, you ought to turn me in, but I hope that you will not.’ In these and similar cases a speaker makes

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a moral ‘ought’ judgement that is explicitly relative to motivating attitudes that the speaker does not share. In order to be somewhat more precise, then, my thesis is this. As used by the relevant sort of speaker, ‘Ought (A, D, C, M)’ means roughly this: given that A has motivating attitudes M and given C, D is the course of action for A that is supported by the best reasons. In judgements using this sense of ‘ought’, C and M are often not explicitly mentioned but are indicated by the context of utterance. Normally, when that happens, C will be ‘all things considered’ and M will be attitudes that are shared by the speaker and audience. I mentioned that inner judgements have two characteristics. First, they imply that the agent has reasons to do something that are capable of motivating the agent. Second, the speaker endorses those reasons and supposes that the audience does too. Now, any ‘Ought (A, D, C, M)’ judgement has the first of these characteristics, but as we have just seen a judgement of this sort will not necessarily have the second characteristic if made with explicit reference to motivating attitudes not shared by the speaker. If reference is made either implicitly or explicitly (for example, through the use of the adverb ‘morally’) to attitudes that are shared by the speaker and audience, the resulting judgement has both characteristics and is an inner judgement. If reference is made to attitudes that are not shared by the speaker, the resulting judgement is not an inner judgement and does not represent a full-fledged moral judgement on the part of the speaker. In such a case we have an example of what Hare (1952: 164–8) calls an inverted-commas use of ‘ought’.

1.3 Moral Bargaining I have argued that the relevant sort of moral ‘ought’ judgements are relational, ‘Ought (A, D, C, M)’, where M represents certain motivating attitudes. I now want to argue that the attitudes M derive from an agreement. That is, they are intentions to adhere to a particular agreement on the understanding that others also intend to do so. I put this forward as a hypothesis to account for an otherwise puzzling aspect of ordinary moral views that, as far as I know, there is no other way to account for. I will use the word ‘intention’ in a somewhat extended sense to cover certain dispositions or habits. Someone may habitually act in accordance with the relevant understanding and therefore may be disposed to act in that way without having any conscious intention. In such a case it may

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sound odd to say that he or she intends to act in accordance with the moral understanding. Nevertheless, for present purposes I will count that as his or her having the relevant intention in a dispositional sense. I now want to consider the following puzzle about our moral views, a puzzle that has figured in philosophical discussion of issues such as abortion. Many people assign greater weight to the duty not to harm others than to the duty to help others. For example, many believe that a doctor ought not to save five patients who would otherwise die by cutting up a sixth patient in order to distribute healthy organs where needed to the others. People believe this even though they think that the doctor has a duty to try to help as many of his patients as possible. In other words, people think that a doctor has a stronger duty to try not to harm any of his patients (or anyone else) even if by so doing the doctor could help five others (Foot, 1978). This aspect of ordinary moral views can seem very puzzling, especially on the supposition that moral feelings derive from sympathy and concern for others. But the hypothesis that morality derives from an agreement among people of varying powers and resources provides a possible explanation. The rich, the poor, the strong, and the weak would all benefit if all were to try to avoid harming one another. So everyone could agree to that arrangement. But the rich and the strong would not benefit from an arrangement whereby everyone would try to do as much as possible to help those in need. The poor and weak would get all of the benefit of this latter arrangement. Since the rich and the strong could foresee that they would be required to do most of the helping and that they would receive little in return, they would be reluctant to agree to a strong principle of mutual aid. A compromise would be likely and a weaker principle would probably be accepted. In other words, although everyone could agree to a strong principle concerning the avoidance of harm, it would not be true that everyone would favour an equally strong principle of mutual aid. It is likely that only a weaker principle of the latter sort would gain general acceptance. So the hypothesis that morality derives from an understanding among people of different powers and resources can explain why in our morality avoiding harm to others is taken to be more important than helping those who need help. By the way, I am here only trying to explain an aspect of our moral views. I am not therefore endorsing that aspect. And I defer until later a relativistic account of the way in which aspects of our moral view can be criticised ‘from within’. There is no need to suppose that the agreement or understanding in

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question is explicit. It is enough if various members of society knowingly reach an agreement in intentions—each intending to act in certain ways on the understanding that the others have similar intentions. Such an implicit agreement is reached through a process of mutual adjustment and implicit bargaining. Indeed, it is essential to the proposed explanation of this aspect of our moral views to suppose that the relevant moral understanding is the result of some sort of bargaining, either explicit or implicit. It is necessary to suppose that, in order to further our interests, we form certain conditional intentions, hoping that others will do the same. The others, who have different interests, will form somewhat different conditional intentions. After some sort of negotiation, a compromise is reached. Seeing morality in this way as a compromise based on implicit bargaining could explain why our morality takes it to be worse to harm someone than to refuse to help someone. The explanation requires that we view our morality as an implicit agreement about what to do. This sort of explanation could not be given if we were to suppose, say, that our morality represented an agreement only about the facts (naturalism). Nor is it enough simply to suppose that our morality represents an agreement in attitude, if we forget that such agreement can be reached not only by way of such principles as are mentioned, for example, in Hare's (1952, 1963) ‘logic of imperatives’, but also through bargaining. According to Hare (1952: 18–20, 168–9), to accept a general moral principle is to intend to do something. If we add to his theory that the relevant intentions can be reached through implicit bargaining, the resulting theory begins to look like the one that I am defending. Many aspects of our moral views can be given a utilitarian explanation. We could account for these aspects, using the logical analysis I presented in the previous section of this essay, by supposing that the relevant ‘ought’ judgements presuppose shared attitudes of sympathy and benevolence. We can equally well explain them by supposing that considerations of utility influence implicit agreements, so that the appeal is to a shared intention to adhere to those agreements. Any aspect of morality that is susceptible of a utilitarian explanation can also be explained by an implicit agreement, but not conversely. There are aspects of our moral views that seem to be explicable only in the second way, on the assumption that morality derives from an agreement. One example, already cited, is the distinction we make between harming and not helping. Another is our feeling that each person has an inalienable right of self-defence and self-preservation. Philosophers have not been able to come up with a really

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satisfactory utilitarian justification of such a right, but it is easily intelligible on our present hypothesis, as Hobbes observed (1957: Pt. I, ch. 14). You cannot, except in very special circumstances, rationally form the intention not to try to preserve your life if it should ever be threatened, say, by society or the state, since you know that you cannot now control what you would do in such a situation. No matter what you now decided to do, when the time came, you would ignore your prior decision and try to save your life. Since you cannot now intend to do something later that you now know that you would not do, you cannot now intend to keep an agreement not to preserve your life if it is threatened by others in your society. This concludes the positive side of my argument. I have argued that inner moral judgements are made in relation to an implicit agreement. I now want to argue that this theory avoids difficulties traditionally associated with implicit agreement theories of morality.

1.4 Objections and Replies One traditional difficulty for implicit agreement theories concerns one's motivation for doing what one has agreed to do. It will, obviously, not be enough to say that one has implicitly agreed to keep agreements, since the issue would then be why one keeps that agreement. And this suggests an objection to implicit agreement theories. But the apparent force of the objection derives entirely from taking an agreement to be a kind of ritual. To agree in the relevant sense is not just to say something; it is to intend to do something—namely, to intend to carry out one's part of the agreement on the condition that others do their parts. If one agrees in this sense to do something, one intends to do it, and intending to do it is already to be motivated to do it. So there is no problem as to why one is motivated to keep one's agreements in this sense. We do believe that in general one ought not to pretend to agree in this sense in order to trick someone else into agreeing. But that suggests no objection to the present view. All that it indicates is that our moral understanding contains or implies an agreement to be open and honest with others. If it is supposed that this leaves a problem about someone who has not accepted our agreement—‘What reason does he have not to pretend to accept our agreement so that he can then trick others into agreeing to various things?’—the answer is that such a person may or may not have such a reason. If someone does not already accept something of our

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morality, it may or may not be possible to find reasons why he or she should. A second traditional objection to implicit agreement theories is that there is not a perfect correlation between what is generally believed to be morally right and what actually is morally right. Not everything generally agreed on is right, and sometimes courses of action are right that would not be generally agreed to be right. But this is no objection to my thesis. My thesis is not that morality derives from an agreement in moral judgement; the thesis is rather that moral judgements make reference to and are made in relation to an agreement in intentions. Given that people have agreed in this sense, there can still be disputes as to what the agreement implies for various situations. In my view, many moral disputes are of this sort. They presuppose a basic agreement and they concern what implications that agreement has for particular cases. There can also be various things wrong with the agreement that a group of people reach, even from the point of view of that agreement, just as there can be defects in an individual's plan of action even from the point of view of that plan. Given what is known about the situation, a plan or agreement can in various ways be inconsistent, incoherent, or selfdefeating. In my view, certain moral disputes are concerned with internal defects of the basic moral understanding of a group, and what changes should be made from the perspective of that understanding itself. This is another way in which moral disputes make sense with reference to and in relation to an underlying agreement. Another objection to implicit agreement theories is that not all agreements are morally binding—for example, those made under compulsion or from a position of unfair disadvantage—which may seem to indicate that there are moral principles prior to those that derive from an implicit agreement. But, again, the force of the objection derives from an equivocation concerning what an agreement is. The principle that compelled agreements do not obligate, concerns agreement in the sense of a certain sort of ritual indicating that one agrees. My thesis concerns a kind of agreement in intentions. The principle about compelled agreements is part of, or is implied by, our agreement in intentions. According to me, it is only with reference to some such agreement in intentions that a principle of this sort makes sense. Maybe our moral agreement in intentions implies that it is wrong to compel people who are in a greatly inferior position to accept an agreement in intentions that they would not otherwise accept. Maybe some people in an inferior position have been compelled thus to settle for

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accepting a basic moral understanding that they would not have accepted had they not been in such an inferior position. In that case our basic moral understanding is incoherent, and various suggestions might be made concerning the ways in which this understanding should be modified. But this moral critique of the understanding can proceed from the understanding itself, rather than from ‘prior’ moral principles. In order to fix ideas, consider a society in which there is a well-established and long-standing tradition of hereditary slavery. Let us suppose that everyone accepts this institution, including the slaves. Everyone treats it as in the nature of things that there should be such slavery. Furthermore, let us suppose that there are also aspects of the basic moral agreement which speak against slavery. That is, these aspects together with certain facts about the situation imply that people should not own slaves and that slaves have no obligation to acquiesce in their condition. In such a case, the moral understanding would be defective, although its defectiveness would somehow be hidden from participants, perhaps by means of a myth that slaves are physically and mentally subhuman in a way that makes appropriate the sort of treatment elsewhere reserved for beasts of burden. If this myth were to be exposed, the members of the society would then be faced with an obvious incoherence in their basic moral agreement and might come eventually to modify their agreement so as to eliminate its acceptance of slavery. In such a case, even relative to the old agreement it might be true that slave owners ought to free their slaves, that slaves need not obey their masters, and that people ought to work to eliminate slavery. For the course supported by the best reasons, given that one starts out with the intention of adhering to a particular agreement, may be that one should stop intending to adhere to certain aspects of that agreement and should try to get others to do the same. On the other hand, we might envision a second society with hereditary slavery whose agreement has no aspects that speak against slavery. In this case, even if the facts of the situation were fully appreciated, no incoherence would appear in the basic moral understanding of the society. It would not be true in relation to that understanding that slave owners ought to free their slaves, that slaves need not obey their masters, and so forth. There might nevertheless come a time when there were reasons of a different sort to modify the basic understanding, either because of an external threat from other societies opposed to slavery or because of an internal threat of rebellion by the slaves. Now, it is easier for us to make what I have called inner moral judgements

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about slave owners in the first society than in the second. For we can, with reference to members of the first society, invoke principles that they share with us and, with reference to those principles, we can say of them that they ought not to have kept slaves and that they were immoral to have done so. This sort of inner judgement becomes increasingly inappropriate, however, the more distant they are from us and the less easy it is for us to think of our moral understanding as continuous with and perhaps a later development of theirs. Furthermore, it may be appropriate to make only non-inner judgements of the slave owners in the second society. We can say that the second society is unfair and unjust, that the slavery that exists is wrong, that it ought not to exist. But it may be inappropriate in this case to say that it was morally wrong of the slave owners to own slaves. The relevant aspects of our moral understanding, which we would invoke in moral judgements about them, are not aspects of the moral understanding that exists in the second society. (However, I come back to the question of slavery below.) Let me turn now to another objection to implicit agreement theories, an objection that challenges the idea that there is an agreement of the relevant sort. For, if we have agreed, when did we do so? Does anyone really remember having agreed? How did we indicate our agreement? What about those who do not want to agree? How do they indicate that they do not agree and what are the consequences of their not agreeing? Reflection on these and similar questions can make the hypothesis of implicit agreement seem too weak a basis on which to found morality. But once again there is equivocation about agreements. The objection treats the thesis as the claim that morality is based on some sort of ritual rather than an agreement in intentions. But, as I have said, there is an agreement in the relevant sense when each of a number of people has an intention on the assumption that others have the same intention. In this sense of ‘agreement’, there is no single moment at which one agrees, since one continues to agree in this sense as long as one continues to have the relevant intentions. Someone refuses to agree to the extent that he or she does not share these intentions. Those who do not agree are outside the agreement; in extreme cases they are outlaws or enemies. It does not follow, however, that there are no constraints on how those who agree may act toward those who do not, since for various reasons the agreement itself may contain provisions for dealing with outlaws and enemies. This brings me to one last objection, which derives from the difficulty people have in trying to give an explicit and systematic account of their moral views. If one actually agrees to something, why is it so hard to say

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what one has agreed? In response, I can say only that many understandings are tacit in this way. It is often possible to recognize what is in accordance with the understanding and what would violate it, without being able to specify the understanding in any general way. Consider, for example, the understanding that exists among the members of a team of acrobats or a symphony orchestra. Another reason why it is so difficult to give a precise and systematic specification of any actual moral understanding is that such an understanding will not in general be constituted by absolute rules but will take a vaguer form, specifying goals and areas of responsibility. The agreement may indicate that one is to show respect for others by trying where possible to avoid actions that will harm them or interfere with what they are doing. It may indicate the duties and responsibilities of various members of the family, who is to be responsible for bringing up the children, and so forth. Often what will be important will be not so much exactly what actions are done as how willing participants are to do their parts and what attitudes they have—for example, whether they give sufficient weight to the interests of others. The vague nature of moral understandings is to some extent alleviated in practice. One learns what can and cannot be done in various situations. Expectations are adjusted to other expectations. Moral disputes arise, nonetheless. Such disputes may concern what the basic moral agreement implies for particular situations; and, if so, that may be either because of disputes over the facts or because of a difference in basic understanding. Moral disputes may also arise concerning whether or not changes should be made in the basic agreement. Racial and sexual issues seem often to be of this second sort. But there is no clear line between the two kinds of dispute. When the implications of an agreement for a particular situation are considered, one possible outcome is that it becomes clear that the agreement should be modified. Moral reasoning is a form of practical reasoning. One begins with certain beliefs and intentions, including intentions that are part of one's acceptance of the moral understanding in a given group. In reasoning, one modifies one's intentions, often by forming new intentions, sometimes by giving up old ones, so that one's plans become more rational and coherent—or, rather, one seeks to make all of one's attitudes coherent with each other (Harman, 1976). The relevant sort of coherence is not simply consistency. It is something very like the explanatory coherence that is so important in theoretical reasoning (Harman, 1999: 32–5). Coherence involves generality and lack of

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arbitrariness. Consider our feelings about cruelty to animals. Obviously these do not derive from an agreement that has been reached with animals. Instead it is a matter of coherence. There is a prima facie arbitrariness and lack of generality in a plan that involves avoiding cruelty to people but not to animals. On the other hand, coherence in this sense is not the only relevant factor in practical reasoning. Another is conservatism or inertia. A third is an interest in satisfying basic desires or needs. One tries to make the least change that will best satisfy one's desires while maximizing the overall coherence of one's attitudes. Coherence by itself is not an overwhelming force. That is why our attitudes towards animals are weak and wavering, allowing us to use them in ways we would not use people. Consider again the second hereditary slave society I mentioned above. This society was to be one in which no aspects of the moral understanding shared by the masters spoke against slavery. In fact that is unlikely, since there is some arbitrariness in the idea that people are to be treated in different ways depending on whether they are born slave or free. Coherence of attitude will speak at least a little against the system of slavery. But the factors of conservatism and desire might speak more strongly in favour of the status quo, so that, all things considered, the slave owners might have no reason to change their understanding. One thing that distinguishes slaves from animals is that slaves can organize and threaten revolt, whereas animals cannot. Slaves can see to it that both coherence and desire oppose conservatism, so that it becomes rational for the slave owners to arrive at a new, broader, more coherent understanding, one which includes the slaves. It should be noted that coherence of attitude provides a constant pressure to widen the consensus and eliminate arbitrary distinctions. In this connection it is useful to recall ancient attitudes toward foreigners, and the ways people used to think about ‘savages’, ‘natives’, and ‘Indians’. Also, recall that infanticide used to be considered as acceptable as many consider abortion to be. There has been a change here in moral attitudes, prompted, I suggest, largely by considerations of coherence of attitude. Finally, I would like to say a few brief words about the limiting case of group morality, when the group has only one member—when, as it were, a person comes to an understanding with himself. In my view, a person can make inner judgements in relation to such an individual morality only about himself. A familiar form of pacifism is of this sort. Certain pacifists judge that it would be wrong of them to participate in killing, although they are not willing to make a similar judgement about others.

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(Such a pacifist is only unwilling to make inner moral judgements about others. Although he is unwilling to judge that those who do participate are wrong to do so, he is perfectly willing to say that it is a bad thing that they participate.) There are, of course, many other examples of individual morality in this sense, when a person imposes standards on himself that he does not apply to others. The existence of such examples is further confirmation of the relativist thesis that I have presented. My conclusion is that relativism can be formulated as an intelligible thesis, the thesis that morality derives from an implicit agreement and moral judgements are true or false only in relation to such an agreement. Such a theory helps to explain otherwise puzzling aspects of some of our own moral views, in particular, why we think that it is more important to avoid harm to others than to help others. The theory is also partially confirmed by what is, as far as I can tell, a previously unnoticed distinction between inner and non-inner moral judgements. Furthermore, traditional objections to implicit agreement theories can be met. Moral relativism is discussed further in Essays 2–5 and 13, below.

2 What Is Moral Relativism? Of the various views that have been called ‘moral relativism’, we can distinguish three plausible versions, which, for the purposes of this essay, I will label ‘normative moral relativism’, ‘moral judgement relativism’, and ‘meta-ethical relativism’. Normative moral relativism asserts that different people, as agents, can be subject to different ultimate moral demands. Moral judgement relativism holds that moral judgements make implicit reference to the speaker or to some other person or to some group or to one or another set of moral standards, etc. Meta-ethical relativism says that conflicting moral judgements about a particular case can both be right.

2.1 Normative Moral Relativism According to my initial statement of normative moral relativism, different people, as agents, can be subject to different ultimate moral demands. Only ultimate differences are supposed to be relevant, since even the nonrelativist will agree that different agents are subject to some different moral demands because of differences in situation. Jack is morally obligated to pay George ten dollars. Mary is not. That is not yet normative moral relativism. Maybe Jack has borrowed ten dollars from George and Mary has not. In that case, Mary and Jack might still be subject to the same ultimate moral demands, including, for example, that one should pay one's debts. Differences in situation can include differences in custom. In England in 1977 Jack ought to drive on the left side of the road. In France, Mary ought to drive on the right. This is again not yet normative moral relativism, since Jack and Mary may still be subject to the same overriding principle—for example, one ought to drive on the side of the road designated by law and custom. Similarly, other differences between what Jack and Mary ought to do may reflect differences in custom concerning

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politeness and etiquette, family responsibility, property, and so forth, rather than any difference in ultimate principle. What is an ultimate moral demand? A given demandD is an ultimate moral demand on an agentA if and only if there is no further moral demand D* on A which, given A's situation, accounts forA's being subject toD. However, quite apart from the issue of relativism, it seems to be a possible nonrelativistic view that there are no ultimate moral demands on a person in the following sense: wheneverD applies toA there is always a more fundamentalD* which explains whyD applies. According to my initial formulation of normative moral relativism, anyone who denies that there are ultimate moral principles must be a normative moral relativist. That is wrong. We need a better formulation. Can we take normative moral relativism to be the view that there are no moral demands to which everyone is subject? No, because a nonrelativist can coherently suppose that there are people subject to no moral demands at all, for example, infants and idiots. Can we take moral relativism to say that there are no moral demands that apply to everyone who is subject to at least some moral demands? That would cover only a very strong form of normative moral relativism. We also need to include a weaker version that is compatible with the existence of some universal moral demands. The weaker version claims there can be two people subject to different moral demands and not subject to some more basic demand that accounts for this, given differences in their situation. More formally, it says that there can be two peopleA and B and a moral demand D such that (1) (2) (3) (4)

A is subject to D, B is not subject to D, although B is subject to some moral demands, and there is no demand D* to which A and B are both subject which accounts for (1) and (2) given the differences in situation between A and B.

This formulation allows for some moral universality and is compatible with the claim that there are no ultimate moral demands. It is basically the same view that Frankena (1973) calls ‘normative relativism’. He formulates the view as follows: ‘[W]hat is right or good for one individual or society is not right or good for another, even if the situations involved are similar.’ This is inexact, because any two situations are similar in some respects and different in others. We need to say that the situations are similar in the sense that there are no morally significant differences between the two situations.

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If we suppose that a difference is morally significant only if it is counted significant by some moral principle or demand, we are led to something like the formulations I have offered for ‘normative moral relativism’. Brandt (1967) uses the term ‘normative relativism’ differently for any view that asserts something is wrong or blameworthy if some person or group thinks it is wrong or blameworthy. He gives two examples of such a view. (1) If someone thinks it is right (or wrong) to do A, then it is right (wrong) for him to do A. (2) If the moral principles recognized in the society of which X is a member imply that it is wrong to do A in circumstances C, then it is wrong for X to do A in C. These are not very plausible views. Nor are they clearly versions of relativism, since they appear to be advocating moral principles that might be taken to have universal applications. In any event, they are certainly not good examples of what I am calling normative moral relativism, which says that two people can be subject to different moral demands and not subject to some more basic demand that accounts for this given their situation. This ends my preliminary discussion of normative moral relativism, which makes a claim about moral agents. I turn now to a relativistic thesis about the meaning or form of moral judgements.

2.2 Moral Judgement Relativism According to moral judgement relativism, moral judgements contain an implicit reference to the speaker or some other person or some group or certain moral standards, etc. One version holds that moral judgements are always implicitly egocentric in the sense that they are always equivalent to judgements containing egocentric terms essentially. Egocentric terms in English include I, me, this, and now. So one example of this sort of moral judgement relativism would be Brandt's (1954), ‘It would be wrong to do X’ means the same as ‘If I were normal, impartial, and fully informed, I should feel obligated not to perform X.’ (Brandt, 1959, abandons this suggestion.)

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Notice that this form of moral judgement relativism says that egocentric terms are essential to the equivalent paraphrase. Anyone can agree that ‘Stealing is wrong’ is equivalent to ‘My stealing is wrong and so is everyone else's.’ But that does not guarantee the truth of this form of moral judgement relativism. Notice also that this form of moral judgement relativism holds that all moral judgements are egocentric in this sense. It is obvious that some are, for example, ‘I should not steal’ is, but, again, that is not enough to establish the truth of this form of moral judgement relativism. Another version of moral judgement relativism takes moral judgements to be implicitly relative to one or another morality in something like the way in which a judgement that someone is tall is implicitly relative to one or another comparison class. George can be tall in relation to one such class and not tall in relation to another. For example, George might be tall for a man but not tall for a basketball player. It makes no sense to ask whether George is tall, period, apart from one comparison class or another. Similarly, this form of moral judgement relativism holds that moral judgements make sense (are true or false) only in relation to one or another set of moral demands. Something can be right in relation to one morality and not right in relation to another. ‘As a Christian, you ought to turn the other cheek; I however, propose to strike back.’ The judgement that X is wrong is always incomplete, just as the judgement that P is tall is incomplete. We always understand the latter judgement as the judgement that P is tall for a person, or for a basketball player, etc. Similarly, we must understand the former judgement as saying that X is wrong for a Christian, for a Muslim, for someone who accepts such and such demands, or something. Stevenson (1963b) uses the term ‘relativism’ to indicate something like this second form of moral judgement relativism. On the other hand, Firth (1952) counts an analysis as ‘relativistic’ if it is a version of the first form of moral judgement relativism in its essential use of egocentric terms. An analysis that is relativistic in Firth's sense will not necessarily count as a form of relativism in Stevenson's sense. Nevertheless, both views see a more or less implicit relativity in the logical form or meaning of moral judgements, so both count as forms of moral judgement relativism in my sense. I turn now to a third form of relativism which sees a different sort of relativity in moral judgements, a relativity in the correctness of moral judgements.

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2.3 Meta-Ethical Relativism According to meta-ethical relativism, there can be conflicting moral judgements about a particular case that are both fully correct. The idea is that two people with different moralities might reach conflicting moral judgements concerning a particular case—for example, one saying the agent was morally right, the other saying the agent was morally wrong—where both opinions are correct. The two judgements must really conflict and therefore must be judgements about the same particular case. It is not enough to contrast a judgement about an act in one society with a judgement about the ‘same act’ in another society. Furthermore, it is not enough for meta-ethical relativism that there should be such conflicting judgements. Both judgements must be correct. In particular, neither judgement can rest on mistakes about the facts of the case, a failure fully to appreciate these facts, incorrect reasoning, or anything else that might distort someone's judgement. Finally, both judgements must be fully correct. Borderline cases are not enough, cases in which one might be equally justified in saying one thing or the opposite. According to meta-ethical relativism, the one judgement is fully correct for the one speaker, the conflicting judgement is fully correct for the other speaker, and it would not be correct for either speaker to make the other judgement. Both Brandt and Frankena use the term ‘meta-ethical relativism’ in roughly this sense. According to Brandt (1967), the meta-ethical relativist ‘denies that there is always one correct moral evaluation’ of a given issue. Elsewhere, Brandt (1959: 272) calls the same view ‘ethical relativism’, which he defines as the thesis that ‘there are conflicting ethical opinions that are equally valid’. However, Brandt (1959: 3278-9; 1967: 75) would allow certain merely apparently conflicting opinions to count as conflicting, if moral judgement relativism should be true. So certain moral judgement relativists will count as meta-ethical relativists as Brandt uses this term but not as I am using it. As Frankena (1973) explains meta-ethical relativism, ‘It holds that, in the case of basic ethical judgements, there is no objectively valid, rational way of justifying one against the other; consequently two conflicting basic judgements may be equally valid.’ Presumably he refers to ‘basic ethical judgements’ to allow for the possibility that less basic judgements might be justified on the basis of more basic judgements, the question then being how the most basic judgements are to be justified. But this part of his definition

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is best omitted, since I want to allow both relativists and nonrelativists to be able to deny that there are basic ethical judgements in this sense. This leaves us with the claim that two conflicting ethical judgements may be equally valid, which is essentially the way in which I have defined meta-ethical relativism. (Cf. Frankena, 1976b: 123, where this position is called simply ‘relativism’: ‘[I]f two people hold conflicting normative judgements . . . both judgements may be rational or justified.’) Brandt (1959: 275; 1967: 76) uses the term ‘methodological relativism’ to refer to what he takes to be a particular version of what I am calling meta-ethical relativism, a version which holds that ‘there is no unique rational method in ethics' for assessing moral judgements.’ Stevenson (1963b) uses the term ‘methodological relativism’ slightly differently for the claim that statements about the reasons and justification of moral judgements are themselves implicitly relational, in something like the way in which moral judgements are held to be implicitly relational according to moral judgement relativism. Brandt's but not Stevenson's definition counts as a ‘methodological relativist’ the sceptic who denies that moral judgements are ever correct or justified in any sense. Such a sceptic clearly does not count as a metaethical relativist in my sense, because a meta-ethical relativist holds that conflicting moral judgements can both be correct, whereas such a sceptic denies that any moral judgement is ever correct.

2.4 The Three Versions of Moral Relativism Briey Compared I have distinguished three versions of moral relativism. (1) Normative moral relativism holds that two people can be subject to different moral demands and not subject to some more basic demand that accounts for this given their different situations. (2) Moral judgement relativism says that moral judgements implicitly refer to one or another person, group, or set of moral demands. And (3) meta-ethical relativism holds that conflicting moral judgements about a particular case can both be right. It is clearly possible to accept one of these versions without accepting the others. For example, an emotivist might accept meta-ethical relativism on the ground that people can differ in their moral attitudes without having relevantly different beliefs, without having reasoned incorrectly or failed to appreciate certain things, without being prejudiced or biased, etc. But, as

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Stevenson (1963b) points out, the emotivist need not (and probably will not) accept moral judgement relativism. And the emotivist can also deny normative moral relativism, since he can (and no doubt will) suppose that the principles he accepts apply to all agents. Moreover, an existentialist might accept normative moral relativism on the grounds that each person is subject only to the principles that person accepts. This does not imply moral judgement relativism or meta-ethical relativism, since the existentialist can suppose that conflicting moral judgements about a particular agent cannot both be correct. Given the moral principles that agent accepts, at most one of the judgements will be right. Finally, a relativistic ideal observer theorist with the sort of view Brandt (1954) defends can accept moral judgement relativism without accepting meta-ethical relativism, since he can suppose that two really (as opposed to merely apparently) conflicting moral judgements cannot both be right. And such a theorist can reject normative moral relativism too, for example, on the grounds that if he were an ideal observer he would apply the same basic principles to everyone. So, it is possible to accept any one of these versions of moral relativism without being committed to the others. It is also possible, consistently, to accept more than one of these versions. Indeed, I am inclined to accept all three. But someone might say that none of these is really a possible view—for each is subject to serious objections that I must now consider.

2.5 An Objection to Normative Moral Relativism According to normative moral relativism there can be two people A and B and a moral demand D such that (1) (2) (3) (4)

A is subject to D, B is not subject to D, B is subject to some moral demands, there is no moral demand D* to which A and B are both subject and which accounts for (1) and (2) given the difference in situation between A and B.

The obvious objection to this is that, if (1), (2), and (3) are true, there must be some reason why A but not B is subject to D, for surely this cannot

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be an arbitrary fact. Something must be true of A but not true of B which accounts for why A but not B is subject to D. It follows that there must be some sort of general principle which implies that people with certain characteristics F are subject to D, and others are not. So there must be a general principle P more basic than that expressing the demand D which accounts for (1) and (2) given the difference in situation between A and B, that is, given that A is F and B is not. But then it can seem that (4) must be false. For won't P express just the moral demand D* whose existence (4) denies? Consider, for example, an existentialist who advocates normative moral relativism on the grounds that each person is subject only to moral principles that he or she accepts. Then A is subject to D but B is not, because A accepts a principle expressing the demand D and B does not. But then it may seem that the existentialist is committed to supposing that there is after all a moral demand D* that applies both to A and to B and explains why A but not B is subject to D, namely, the demand of non-hypocrisy, the demand that one should act in accordance with those principles one accepts. And it can seem that the same point will apply to any attempt to defend normative moral relativism, leading to the conclusion that this is not after all a coherent form of moral relativism. I suspect, indeed, that reflections along these lines leads Brandt to use the term ‘normative relativism’ not for what I am calling normative moral relativism but for the view that something is wrong or blameworthy if some person or group thinks it is wrong or blameworthy. For it can seem that the existentialist is more plausibly taken to be advocating normative relativism in Brandt's sense than normative moral relativism in my sense; for it can seem that normative moral relativism in my sense is quite incoherent. I believe that this is wrong, and that normative moral relativism is not only coherent but true. Before saying why, let me mention objections to the two other forms of moral relativism.

2.6 An Objection to Moral Judgement Relativism Moral judgement relativism holds that moral judgements make implicit reference to the speaker, some other person or persons, or some set of moral demands. It follows from this that apparently conflicting moral judgements do not actually conflict if they are made by different speakers

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or are made in relation to different people or moralities. But, as Stevenson (1963a, 1963b) persuasively argues, this seems to imply that certain genuine moral disagreements are mere pseudo-issues. Recall the suggestion in Brandt (1953) that ‘It would be wrong to do X’ means ‘If I were normal, impartial, and fully informed, I should feel obligated not to perform X.’ Now suppose that A and B are discussing whether abortion is wrong. A maintains that abortion is wrong; B maintains that it is not wrong. A and B imagine that they are disagreeing; they mean to be disagreeing with each other. But Brandt's analysis implies that they are not really disagreeing. A is saying that if she, A, were normal, impartial, and fully informed, she would feel obligated not to have an abortion in certain circumstances. B is saying that if she, B, were normal, impartial, and fully informed, she would not feel obligated not to have an abortion in those circumstances. And both of these claims could be true. It is possible that under these conditions A would feel obligated not to have an abortion and B would not feel obligated. But it is quite implausible that A and B do not disagree. For it seems that if A and B are using words normally they do genuinely disagree. Stevenson (1963a) argues that, even if they fail to disagree in belief, they certainly disagree in their attitude toward abortion. He takes this to be evidence for his view that moral judgements express favourable or unfavourable attitudes rather than beliefs.

2.7 An Objection to Meta-Ethical Relativism Metal-ethical relativism holds that actually conflicting moral judgements about a particular case can both be right in nonborderline cases. An obvious objection is that it is not clear what this could mean. It would seem that to say that a judgement is right is to agree with it. The meta-ethical relativist therefore seems to be committed to agreeing with each of two judgements which, also according to the same theorist, genuinely conflict. This seems to involve an inconsistency. What can the meta-ethical relativist have in mind? I am supposing that the people making the judgements genuinely, and not merely apparently, disagree. So it seems that the meta-ethical relativist, in agreeing with both, must be inconsistent! In saying that both judgements are right, the meta-ethical relativist might mean either that both are true or that both are justified, given the facts and all other relevant considerations. In either case the objection

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seems to apply. Reverting to my earlier example, let us suppose again that A maintains that abortion is wrong and that B maintains that abortion is not wrong, and let us agree that this is a genuine disagreement—that these judgements really, and not just apparently, conflict. Then what could it mean to say that both judgements are true? Presumably, abortion is wrong if it is true that abortion is wrong, and abortion is not wrong if it is true that abortion is not wrong. If the meta-ethical relativist says both judgements are true, this seems to imply the contradictory conclusion that abortion is both wrong and not wrong. On the other hand, suppose that the meta-ethical relativist says that, given all the facts and all other relevant considerations, the judgement that abortion is wrong is justified and so is the judgement that abortion is not wrong. What could this mean? It might mean that this is a borderline case, like deciding whether a certain man is bald—perhaps given all the facts, etc., the judgement that he is bald is justified, and so is the judgement that he is not bald. But to say that there are borderline moral issues of this sort is not to say anything interesting—of course there are. I am supposing that the meta-ethical relativist claims something more—that in a case like this, both judgements might be justified, although it is not a borderline case. But what can such a claim mean? Stevenson's (1963b) suggestion might seem to help here. Perhaps the meta-ethical relativist is a methodological relativist in Stevenson's sense, holding that the term ‘justified’ is a relative term here, having application only to one or another person. Neither judgement is justified, period; rather, the one judgement is justified for A but not B, and the other judgement is justified for B but not A. However, as Stevenson observes, this sort of methodological relativism is faced with the same sort of objections raised against moral judgement relativism. For A and B will disagree not only about whether abortion is wrong but also about whether the judgement that abortion is wrong is justified, A maintaining that it is, B denying this. The second disagreement, like the first, seems to be a real disagreement and not the pseudo-issue it is taken to be by this sort of normative relativism. There are, then, serious objections to each of the versions of moral relativism I have distinguished. Against normative moral relativism, it can be said that if A is subject to a moral demand that B is not subject to, then there must be some reason for this, a reason that invokes a demand on both A and B, contrary to what is claimed in normative moral relativism. The objection to moral judgement relativism is that it wrongly treats certain real disagreements as verbal pseudo-issues. Finally, it can be objected

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that meta-ethical relativism faces a dilemma. On the one hand, it inconsistently agrees with each of two conflicting judgements. Or, on the other hand, in supposing that ‘justified’ is a relative term, it misrepresents real disagreements about justification as merely apparent disagreements. But all these objections can be met. I will now describe what strikes me as a highly plausible view that, in one way or another, involves all three versions of moral relativism and shows how the objections to each version can be avoided.

2.8 An Argument for Normative Moral Relativism Normative moral relativism can be derived from two assumptions. The first is this. ASSUMPTION 1. A moral demand D applies to a person only if that person either accepts D (i.e. intends to act in accordance with D) or fails to accept D only because of ignorance of relevant (nonmoral) facts, a failure to reason something through, or some sort of (nonmoral) mental defect like irrationality, stupidity, confusion, or mental illness. This assumption might be defended by an appeal to the sorts of considerations sometimes offered in support of ‘internalist’ accounts of moral demands. (Frankena, 1976a, usefully discusses such considerations.) It might be said, for example, that ASSUMPTION 1 captures what distinguishes moral demands from demands of other sorts, such as legal demands. Moral demands have to be acceptable to those to whom they apply in a way that legal demands do not. The point might be made in terms of the notion of a reason to do something, because, if a moral demand applies to someone, that person has a compelling reason to act in accordance with that demand. This is not true of legal demands. A legal demand applies to anyone in a given area who satisfies certain conditions, whether or not he or she has a compelling reason to act in accordance with that demand. Now, reasons seem to depend on reasoning. To say that a person has a conclusive reason to do something seems to be to say that there is warranted practical reasoning available to the person that would culminate in a decision to do the act in question. Such reasoning is available in the

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sense that the person could reason in that way if he or she was of sufficient intelligence, was rational, knew all the relevant facts, etc. Frankena (1976a: 52) observes that an ‘externalist’ might object to the considerations just mentioned by claiming that they rest on an ambiguity in the term ‘reason’, which might mean either ‘justifying reason’, that is, reason to think one ought to do something, or ‘motivating reason’. The externalist can say that the analysis of ‘conclusive reason to do something’ in terms of practical reasoning culminating in a decision to do it is, perhaps, an analysis of ‘motivating reason to do something’. But this, the externalist can say, is irrelevant to the point that, if a moral demand applies to someone, that person has a compelling reason to act in accordance with that demand. For here the relevant type of reason is a justifying reason: if a moral demand applies to someone, that person has a compelling reason to think he or she ought to do that thing. The internalist will reply that this is an ad hoc manœuvre, since no evidence has been offered for the alleged ambiguity. (Frankena, 1976a, gives examples which show that reasons for doing something might be either moral or nonmoral, e. g. self-interested. But that seems irrelevant to a claim of ambiguity.) Furthermore, the notion of a ‘justifying reason’, as a reason to think one ought, leads to a potential regress. To think one ought to do something is to think one has reasons to do it. These reasons must not in turn be taken to be justifying reasons. Otherwise, thinking one ought to do something would be explained as thinking one has reason to think one ought to do that thing. The internalist point is obscured if talk involving ‘ought’ is not clearly distinguished from talk of obligation. It can happen that, according to the law, one is supposed to do a certain thing, although there is not the slightest reason actually to do it—perhaps there is no penalty for not doing it and one has no moral reasons to observe this particular law. Here we might speak of legal obligation, but we should not say that legally one ought to do the act in question, even though there is a legal ‘justification’ only for doing that. The word ‘ought’ is used to speak of reasons in a way that ‘obligation’ is not. Of course, if, according to morality, one is supposed to do a certain thing, then one ought to do it—one does have a reason in that case. So, even though there is no way to prove the relativist's first assumption, a strong case can be made for it, and it is at the very least a possible view to take. The second assumption can be stronger or weaker, depending on how

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strong a form of normative moral relativism is to be defended. The strongest assumption is this. ASSUMPTION 2S. For any moral demand D, there is someone subject to some moral demands who does not accept D as a legitimate demand on himself or herself, where this nonacceptance is not the result of any relevant (nonmoral) ignorance on that person's part or any failure to reason something through or any sort of (nonmoral) mental defect such as irrationality, stupidity, confusion, or mental illness. Assumptions 1 and 2S jointly imply that there are no universal moral demands which apply to everyone who is subject to some moral demands. I am interested here in a weaker normative moral relativism that can be based on a correspondingly weaker second assumption. ASSUMPTION 2W. There are two people A and B and a moral demand D such that: (1) A is subject to D. (2) B does not accept D as a legitimate moral demand on him or herself. (3) B's nonacceptance is not the result of any relevant (nonmoral) ignorance on B's part or any failure to reason something through or any sort of (nonmoral) mental defect such as irrationality, stupidity, confusion, or mental illness. (4) B is subject to some moral demands. (5) Neither A nor B accepts a moral demand D* that would account for A but not B being subject to D given the difference in situation between A and B. (6) In neither case is this failure to accept such a D* the result of any relevant (nonmoral) ignorance or any failure to reason something through or any sort of (nonmoral) mental defect such as irrationality, stupidity, confusion, or mental illness. Assumptions 1 and 2W jointly imply normative moral relativism as I have defined it above. What can be said on behalf of assumption 2W? Let us consider a couple of possible examples. Consider first the issue of cruelty to animals as it appears to typical middle-class American citizens and as it appears to Hopi Indians as described by Brandt (1954). It seems plausible to suppose that a moral demand applies to the typical middle-class American citizen

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forbidding the infliction of needless suffering on animals. On the other hand, according to Brandt (1954), a typical Hopi Indian did not accept such a strong demand as a legitimate moral demand, where this nonacceptance was not the result of ignorance, irrationality, stupidity, etc. Furthermore, neither the typical middle-class American citizen nor the typical Hopi Indian appears to accept any more basic demand that would account for why this should apply to middleclass American citizens but not Hopi Indians given differences in their situations. And it would seem that in neither case is the failure to accept such a basic principle the result of ignorance, irrationality, stupidity, etc. So this seems to be an example establishing the truth of assumption 2W. (The issue of cruelty to animals is discussed further in Essay 4, section 4.10, and Essay 5, section 5.6.1, below.) I am myself inclined to think there are many examples of this sort even within American society. Consider the moral demand that one not kill other people. Some professional criminals do not seem to accept this demand. These criminals have no qualms about killing other people if there is something to be gained from doing so. In some cases, their lack of acceptance of the relevant principle does not appear to rest on a failure to notice certain facts or incorrect reasoning or any failure to follow out certain reasoning. Nor is it always because of stupidity, irrationality, confusion, or mental illness. Furthermore, clearly this is not because there is some more basic moral demand which accounts, given differences in situation, for why most people but not these criminals are subject to the prohibition against the killing of other people. After thinking over these and similar examples, some people (like me) will suppose that assumption 2W is true. Others will not. Some philosophers have argued—unconvincingly—that a rejection of moral demands of this sort must involve ignorance, irrationality, or some other (nonmoral) mental defect. (See Essay 4, sections 4.6-4.7.) Others might hope that psychology would resolve the issue. ‘Unfortunately,’ as Brandt (1959: 282) remarks about a related issue, ‘psychological theories do not provide a uniform answer to our question.’ Gestalt theory and Piagetian theory point in one way, Hullean learning theory and psychoanalytic theory point in the other way (Brandt, 1959: 114-50; Hoffman, 1970). In any event, I believe it is safe to say that neither philosophy nor psychology has produced a strong case against assumption 2W. Assumption 1 says, roughly, that a moral demand applies to someone only if it is rational for that person to accept that demand. Assumption 2W says, roughly, that it can be rational for different people to accept different

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moral demands ‘all the way down’. Together these assumptions logically imply, roughly, that different people can be subject to different moral demands ‘all the way down’. How can it be rational for different people to accept different moral demands ‘all the way down’? This might be because what it is rational to accept depends on how one's mind works, and different people's minds work in different ways. A less radical suggestion is that the demands it is rational to accept depend on the demands one already accepts, where different people accept demands sufficiently different to begin with that it is rational for them to end up accepting different demands. This is not to say that if one accepts a demand it is automatically rational for one to do so. Nor is it to say that the only thing relevant to the question whether it is rational to accept a given demand is what demands one already accepts. Presumably one's desires, other intentions, and beliefs are important too. To accept a moral demand, in the relevant sense, is to intend to adhere to it. Whether it is rational to do this is a question of practical reasoning, which in my opinion is to be resolved (roughly) by minimally modifying antecedent intentions, beliefs, desires, etc. in the interest of a certain sort of coherence (Harman, 1976). But the details are not important here. We must now see how my earlier objection to normative moral relativism can be met. The objection was that, if A is subject to D and B is not, then something must be true of A, but not B, which accounts for this. So there must be some sort of general principle which accounts for why people who are F are subject to D, and why those who are not F are not subject to D. This general principle will express a moral demand D* which accounts for why A, but not B, is subject to D. So, there must always be such a demand D*. But normative moral relativism denies that there is always such a demand D*. The answer to the objection is that the principle in question does not always express a moral demand. A, but not B, may be subject to D because it is rational for A to accept D, but not rational for B to do so, and this is sometimes not the result of some more basic moral principle applying to both A and B, but rather due simply to the fact that A and B start out accepting sufficiently different moral demands in the first place. Perhaps even in the key case for the relativist there is a demand which applies both to A and B and which, given the differences in their situations, accounts for why A, but not B, is subject to D. But the demand is not a moral demand—it is simply the demand that one be rational.

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2.9 Relativism and Universalizability Frankena (1973: 109) raises a somewhat different objection to normative moral relativism: ‘Such a normative principle seems to violate the requirements of consistency and universalization.’ Elsewhere (p. 25) he refers to the relevant principle as ‘The Principle of Universalizability’: ‘If one judges that X is right or good, then one is committed to judging that anything exactly like X, or like X in relevant respects, is right or good. Otherwise he has no business using these words.’ Here Frankena seems to be suggesting that the use of moral terminology normally presupposes a Principle of Universalizability that is incompatible with normative moral relativism. This implies that normative moral relativism involves a misuse of language. Clearly that is too strong a conclusion. Many people may use moral terminology in a way that presupposes a Principle of Universalizability that is incompatible with normative moral relativism. Perhaps such a principle is even partly constitutive of what these people mean by these terms. Nevertheless, other people—relativists, for example—do not use moral terminology in this way. It must be argued, and not just assumed, that there is something wrong with this second usage. Indeed, suppose that, although one initially uses moral terminology in the first way, one becomes convinced of assumptions 1 and 2W. These assumptions logically imply normative moral relativism. Then one has become convinced of the falsity of a presupposition of one's use of moral terminology. What should one do? There are two options here. One might simply abandon moral terminology altogether in the way that one abandons certain racist or sexist terminology after becoming aware of the false presuppositions of its usage. Or one might modify one's usage so that it no longer involves the presuppositions one takes to be false, in the way that Einstein modified the scientific usage of terms like ‘simultaneous’, ‘acceleration’, and ‘mass’, after arguing that prior usage had involved a false presupposition. This second course, of modifying one's usage of moral terminology so as to eliminate the unwanted presupposition, seems clearly the preferable alternative. How should one's usage be modified? Presumably along the lines suggested by moral judgement relativism. Judgements expressing moral demands can be treated as involving an implicit reference to a person or to a group of people who are presumed to accept certain demands, or reference simply to certain demands themselves. But it is important to avoid

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or evade the objection raised against moral judgement relativism, namely, that it represents certain real disagreements as mere pseudo-issues. If two people—even two relativists—disagree about whether it is morally wrong to cause pain and injury to animals, they really do disagree and are not just talking past each other. It is not just that one says that causing pain and injury to animals is wrong in relation to our morality, while the other says that it is not wrong in relation to Hopi morality. Within a relativistic theory, the objection can be partially met as follows. When a relativist makes a simple moral judgement with no explicit reference to one or another morality, the speaker makes this judgement in relation to a morality he or she accepts. The speaker also presupposes that this morality is accepted by anyone to whom the judgement is addressed. The speaker may also presuppose that it is accepted by any agents referred to in the judgement (if what is at issue is whether it is wrong of them to do a certain thing). A relativist can make moral judgements in relation to moralities he or she (or the audience) does not accept, but it is normally a misuse of moral language—even when it has been relativized—to do this without making it clear that one is doing so. It is, furthermore, always a misuse of language to make certain moral judgements about an agent in relation to a morality not sufficiently accepted by the agent. (The relevant judgements are the ‘inner judgements’ discussed in Essay 1.) If two relativists disagree, one saying simply that it is morally wrong to cause pain and injury to animals, the other saying simply that this is not wrong, they do mean to be disagreeing with each other. They presuppose that they are making these judgements in relation to the same relevant moral demands. Of course, they may be mistaken about that, in which case they really are talking past each other, despite their intentions. If they come to see that they are speaking in relation to relevantly different moralities, they will have to stop saying what they are saying or indeed be guilty of misuse of language. A relativist can intelligibly disagree with an absolutist over whether something is wrong if the relativist makes his judgement in relation to a morality the absolutist accepts, in the same way that a relativity-theory physicist can disagree with a Newtonian over what the mass of a certain object is, if the relativity theorist makes his judgement in relation to an appropriate inertial framework. A relativistic judgement made in relation to a given morality concerning the moral demands applicable to a particular agent presupposes that the agent in question accepts that morality. So relativists with different moralities will, if they have their wits about them, tend not to make this

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sort of judgement about the same agents. And, at least as a first approximation, it will turn out that even superficially conflicting judgements cannot both be true of the same agent even if the judgements are made in relation to different moralities, since the judgements will involve conflicting presuppositions about the morality the agent accepts. That is only a ‘first approximation’, because a particular agent will typically accept more than one morality and those moralities can make conflicting demands concerning a particular case. In that case, superficially conflicting moral judgements about that agent (e.g. Antigone) made in relation to different moralities can both be true if the agent accepts both moralities relative to which each of the judgements is made. In any event, the relativist's usage does not permit unrestricted universalization. As a relativist, I cannot accept the principle that, if it would be wrong for me to do something, it would be wrong for anyone else in a similar situation to do that thing. I do not suppose that the principle is true for those who have no reason to accept the relevant aspects of my morality. But the following principle is acceptable. If it is wrong for someone else to do something, it would be wrong for me to do that in a similar situation. In other words, if it is okay for me to do something, it cannot be wrong for anyone else in my situation. (Universalizability is discussed further in Essay 3.)

2.10 Assessing Meta-Ethical Relativism My second and third versions of moral relativism are theses about moral judgements. But we need to specify whose judgements these versions are about: the relativist's or the nonrelativist's? And, moral judgement relativism is clearly a thesis about the relativist's usage; it is not meant to apply to the nonrelativist's usage. What about meta-ethical relativism? This is the claim that really conflicting moral judgements can both be right. Now, superficially conflicting relativistic moral judgements can both be right if made in relation to different moralities, but these judgements do not really conflict. And it does not seem to make sense to suppose that really conflicting relativistic moral judgements can both be right. So meta-ethical relativism does not seem correct as a thesis about relativistic moral judgements. Is it correct as a thesis about nonrelativistic moral judgements? One might suppose that normative moral relativism implies that no nonrelativistic moral judgements can be right, since all such judgements presuppose

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an unrestricted principle of universalizability. But that would be like denying that any Newtonian judgements concerning the mass of a particular object could be right, on the grounds that these judgements presuppose that mass is invariant from one inertial framework to another. In practice we would say that a Newtonian judgement of mass is right if the corresponding relativistic judgement is correct made in relation to an inertial framework that is salient to the person making the Newtonian judgement. Similarly, we should count a nonrelativistic moral judgement right if the corresponding relativistic moral judgement is right made in relation to the morality accepted by the person making the nonrelativistic moral judgement. The relativist can intelligibly suppose that really conflicting nonrelativistic moral judgements are both right in this sense. I conclude, then, that there is a reasonable form of moral relativism that involves normative moral relativism, moral judgement relativism as a thesis about relativistic but not nonrelativistic moral judgements, and meta-ethical relativism as a thesis about nonrelativistic but not relativistic moral judgements.

3 Relativistic Ethics: Morality as Politics 3.1 The Naive View of Morality Let me begin by saying something about what I will call ‘the naive view’ of morality. In this view, morality involves one or more basic moral demands that everyone accepts, or has reasons to accept, as demands on everyone on which all moral reasons to do things depend. I do not mean to suggest that the naive view is the ordinary view of morality. There is not a single ordinary view of morality. It is possible that most people do not accept the naive view. But many people do accept it, especially teachers of moral philosophy, and people who accept it often take it to be the ordinary view. (See Essay 5 below, especially section 5.2.4) The naive view has three parts. First, it says that there are certain basic moral demands that everyone accepts or at least has reasons to accept. Let me refer to this as the claim that morality is ‘absolute’. Second, these demands are supposed to be accepted as demands on everyone. They are to have universal application. I will refer to this as the claim that morality is ‘universal’. Third, these demands are supposed to be the source of all moral reasons for agents to do things. I will refer to this as the claim that morality is ‘agent-centred’ or, sometimes, that it ‘takes the point of view of an agent’ rather than a critic. In the naive view, then, morality is absolute, universal, and agent-centred. In the naive view, the basic moral demands are or ought to be accepted by everyone, as demands on everyone, providing reasons for everyone. But who is ‘everyone’? Kant (1788) thought every rational being should be included, not only human beings but also angels and rational inhabitants of other planets. A rational Martian would accept or have reasons to accept the basic demands of morality, because according to Kant the basic moral demands are simply demands of rationality that follow from the nature of reason (which he took to be the same in all rational beings).

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We need not be so strict, however. Some people who accept what I am calling the naive view may not wish to commit themselves about Martians. They may see the source of moral demands in human nature, rather than in an absolutely universal reason. They may suppose, for example, that moral demands derive either from a natural human sympathy that people feel for others, or from some other fact about the human condition. They may therefore wish to restrict the range of ‘everyone’, claiming only that every rational human being accepts or has reasons to accept the basic demands of morality. Some may even want to restrict the range of ‘everyone’ to those who have been exposed to ‘civilized morality’, for they may not wish to claim that so-called ‘ignorant savages’ have any reason to accept the basic demands of morality.

3.2 Against Absolutism For present purposes, it does not matter whether or not the range of ‘everyone’ is restricted in one of these ways. It seems to me highly probable that, whether or not the range of ‘everyone’ is thus restricted, there are no substantive moral demands everyone has a reason to accept. I am inclined to believe that, for any such demand, someone might fail to accept it without being ignorant of relevant facts, without having miscalculated, without having failed to see the consequences of his or her opinions, and without being in any way irrational. You cannot always argue someone into being moral. Much depends on a person's antecedent interests and principles. If these principles and interests diverge sufficiently from yours, it may happen that the other person has no reason to accept your morality. Invaders from outer space who are unaffected by weapons we might use against them may have no reason to concern themselves with this. The fact that their actions are harmful to us may carry no weight at all with them, without their being in any way ignorant or irrational. Certain successful criminals seem to have no reason to be at all concerned about their victims; they simply do not care, seemingly without being irrational or ignorant in not caring. Cynical politicians who are interested only in acquiring and maintaining power lie to the public without necessarily being uninformed, irrational, or stupid. Certain business executives successfully pursue their profits without concern for the rights of others with full information, rationality, and cleverness. In each of these cases, someone would seem not to have reasons to accept moral demands most of us take

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to be important. Many other cases might also be cited, including cases of commonplace amorality as well as cases in which other people accept moralities that are radically different from ours. (See Essay 4.)

3.3 Hare's Response Such cases obviously pose a problem for the naive view. Various responses are possible. Consider for example, R. M. Hare's early theory (Hare, 1952, 1963). Recall that, in the naive view, morality involves one or more basic demands that everyone accepts or ought to accept as demands on everyone on which all moral reasons to do things depend; morality is, in other words, absolute, universal, and agent-centred. In his early writings, Hare was attracted to this naive position but also supposed that there was no single substantive set of moral demands that everyone had a reason to accept. His response was to abandon absolutism, while attempting to retain universality and the point of view of the agent. In his view, then, each person accepted certain basic demands as demands on everyone on which all moral reasons to do things depended, but the demands in question varied from one person to another. This meant that Hare took himself to accept certain moral demands as demands on everyone even though he also agreed that some people had no reason at all to act in accordance with those demands. This is puzzling. To accept a demand as a moral demand on George, among others, would seem to involve the thought that George ought to act in accordance with that demand—that there are moral reasons for him to do so. How, then, could Hare have also supposed that George may, after all, have had no reasons to act in accordance with that demand? The answer is that, in Hare's early view, one could accept a moral demand as a demand on everyone without supposing that everyone now had a reason to act in accordance with that demand. Hare argued that it was enough if one intended to try to get everyone else to accept that demand as a demand on him or herself. There were two things wrong with this. First, it did not seem to provide a reasonable interpretation of universality. It seemed that Hare could be only pretending to accept certain demands as demands on everyone. Rather, he would be accepting them merely as demands on himself which he intended to try to get everyone else to accept. Second, the intention to try to get everyone else to accept a given demand seemed itself quite unusual. It was unclear that many people ever had such intentions. So it

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seemed unlikely that many people would accept moral demands in the way that Hare's early theory said they should. A related difficulty arose for Hare's analysis of the moral ‘ought’. In Hare's early view, ‘George ought not to eat meat’ was roughly equivalent to ‘George's not eating meat is in accordance with the general imperatives I hereby accept’. This allowed a vegetarian to judge that George ought not to eat meat even if the vegetarian also believed that George (who was not a vegetarian) had no reason not to eat meat. But this was surely to misuse the moral ‘ought’, which is normally used to speak of things an agent has moral reasons to do. Indeed, in each of its uses, the word ‘ought’ is used to speak of things for which someone has reasons. The epistemic ‘ought’, for example, is used to speak of things that there are reasons to expect, as when we say that the train ought to be here soon. The evaluative ‘ought’ is used to speak of what there are reasons to hope or wish for or take some other positive attitude towards, as when we say that there ought to be more love in the world or that a knife ought to be sharp. The simple ‘ought’ of rationality is used to speak of something for which an agent has reasons of any sort to do, as when we say that a burglar ought to wear gloves. And the moral ‘ought’ is used to speak of things an agent has moral reasons to do, as when we say that a burglar ought to reform and go straight. In elaborating this connection between the moral ‘ought’ and talk of reasons, I do not mean that the fact that an agent morally ought to do something is itself a moral reason to do it. That would be open to the objection that such a fact gives an agent a reason to do something only if he or she has some reason to care about what he or she ought morally to do. The issue here would be whether the fact that an agent has a reason to do something is itself a reason for him or her to do that thing. Similarly, imagine a dispute as to whether the fact that the train ought to be here soon is a reason to expect the train to be here soon. That would be to dispute whether the fact that there is a reason to expect the train to be here soon is itself a reason to expect the train to be here soon. This sort of technical issue is not directly relevant to our present concerns, and I will not try to resolve it.

3.4 Against Universality The problems mentioned for Hare's early view result from the attempt to retain universality and the point of view of the agent while abandoning

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absolutism. Given the point of view of the agent, for any substantive moral demand D, there will be the following argument against the universality of D. (1) There is someone S who fails to adhere to D without being in any relevant way irrational, stupid, or uninformed. So, (2) S has no reason to adhere to D. So, (3) It is not true that S ought morally to adhere to D. We have been discussing the move from (2), ‘S has no reason,’ to (3), ‘It is not true that S ought.’To reject this step of the argument is, I think, to distort the meaning of the moral ‘ought’. Similarly, to reject the step from (1), ‘S can fail to adhere to D without being irrational, etc.,’ to (2), ‘S has no reason to adhere to D,’ is to break the connection between reasons and rationality, in my view thereby draining the term ‘reason’ of its ordinary meaning. It might be objected that, despite the truth of (1), S does have a reason to adhere to D, namely, the fact that he or she ought morally to do so. But, first, as we have seen, it is obscure whether such a fact itself gives S a reason to adhere to D. And, second, it begs the question to assume that this is a fact, because the argument purports to show that it is not a fact. To suppose that it is a fact that S ought morally to adhere to D is simply to suppose that S has a moral reason to adhere to D. But S has no such reason, if he or she can fail to adhere to D without being irrational, stupid, or uninformed.

3.4.1 Reasons A related objection (Frankena, 1976a; Holmes, 1973–4) is that (2), ‘S has no reason to adhere to D,’ is ambiguous. In this view, ‘reason forS to adhere to D’ might mean either of two things. It might mean ‘motivating reason forS to adhere to D’. Or it might mean ‘reason forS to think he or she ought to adhere to D’. The objection says (2) follows from (1) only on the first interpretation of ‘reason’. And (3) follows from (2) only on the second interpretation. Therefore, the argument rests upon equivocation in this view. In fact, the term ‘reason’ is not ambiguous in this way, and there is no equivocation in the argument. ‘Reason for S to adhere to D’ never means either ‘motivating reason’ or ‘reason for S to think he or she ought to

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adhere to D’. The second interpretation gets things backwards, since ‘S ought to adhere to D’ means roughly that S has a reason to adhere to D. A reason for S to think he or she ought to adhere to D is not directly a reason for S to adhere to D. It is only a reason for S to think he or she has a reason to adhere to D. The question whether this is indirectly a reason for S to adhere to D is the same obscure technical issue previously mentioned as not directly to the point. On the other hand, ‘reason for S to adhere to D’ cannot ever mean motivating reason, since it is always consistent to suppose that such a reason is not a motivating reason because S is unaware of it, or is aware of it but is acting irrationally, and so on. So the objection is simply mistaken. A different objection distinguishes S's having reasons to do D from there being reasons for S to do D. According to this objection, for it to be true that S ought to do D, it is enough that there be reasons for S to do D. It is not required that S actually have those reasons to do D. (S might be quite unaware of the reasons.) So (3), ‘It is not true that S ought,’ does not follow from (2), ‘S has no reason,’ according to this objection. This raises a complex issue. For one thing, we must note an ambiguity in the remark that there are reasons for S to do D. This might refer to reasons for doing D that S has or would have if he or she was aware of them. It might also refer to reasons for our hoping or wanting S to do D. In this second sense, ‘There are reasons for S to do D’ is clearly not equivalent to ‘S ought morally to do D.’ It is equivalent only to ‘S ought to do D,’ meaning, ‘It ought to be the case that S does D.’ So only the first interpretation of ‘There are reasons for S to do D’ is relevant to our present concerns. Now, the distinction between there being reasons for S to do D, in this sense, and S's having reasons to do D, is a subtle and difficult one. I am not exactly sure what the distinction rests on. It is not simply a question of whether S is aware of the reasons, since S may have a reason of which he or she is unaware. The distinction seems to have something to do with how easy it would be for S to become aware of relevant facts or do the relevant reasoning, etc. If it is relatively easy, we might say S has reasons and, if it is less easy, we might say only that there are reasons for S. In any event, the distinction is obviously not crucial in the context of the argument (1)–(3). In premise (1), we suppose that S is fully informed, etc. In this context, then, to speak of the reasons there are is to speak of the reasons S has. If S has no reasons to do D, then in the relevant sense there are no reasons for S to do D. So, one cannot escape the argument (l)–(3) by distinguishing reasons forS to do D from reasons S has to do D.

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3.4.2 Ought S to Care? Let me consider one other objection. According to this objection, S ought to care about certain things, whether or not S actually does care. For example, S ought to care about the welfare of other people, even if in fact S does not care. If S did care about others, that would give S a reason to treat others in certain ways. Since S does not care, S fails to have this reason to treat others in that way. But, S ought to treat others in that way, since S ought to care about their welfare, according to this objection. So, according to the objection, it can be true that S ought to do D even if S has no reason to do D. I believe this objection confuses different senses of ‘ought’. If S ought to care about the welfare of others in the sense that he or she has reasons to care, then these reasons are also reasons for S to act in the appropriate way towards others. But, it may be that S ought to care only in the sense that it ought to be the case that S cared; it would be a good thing if S cared. In that case all that follows is that it ought to be the case that S act in that way. It does not follow that S ought morally to act in that way. So this last objection fails too. Since the objections do not go through, it seems that the argument (1)–(3) does show that, if absolutism is denied, universality must also be denied, given the point of view of the agent.

3.5 Reconsidering Absolutism Now, there do not seem to be any very persuasive direct arguments in favour of absolutism. Someone might claim that it is part of the meaning of rational, as the term is ordinarily used, that someone is correctly called rational only if he or she accepts certain basic moral demands. But that is clearly false as a piece of empirical linguistics. There is also Thomas Nagel's (1970) ingenious argument, which seeks to show how the failure to accept certain moral demands involves a failure to appreciate the objective nature of reasons, a failure that amounts to ‘practical solipsism’. But Nagel does not show that any mistake or irrationality is involved in not taking reasons to be objective, in his sense; he does not show that people have reasons to avoid ‘practical solipsism’. So, he does not show that everyone has reasons to accept the relevant moral demands. (I say more about Nagel's argument in Essay 4.)

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There is, however, a more promising indirect argument in favour of absolutism. Many people take morality to involve universality, so that basic moral demands are demands on everyone. But we have seen in (1)–(3) that the falsity of absolutism implies the falsity of universality, given the point of view of the agent. Putting this the other way round, from the point of view of the agent, universality implies absolutism. So, assuming the truth of universality, (l)–(3) can be used in reverse to argue for absolutism. Rather, we should say this: two plausible ideas are in conflict, the denial of absolutism, on one hand, and universality, on the other. It is difficult to believe in absolutism because it is difficult to believe that there are substantive moral demands that everyone has reasons to accept. But, if absolutism is false, then universality is false, and many people find that hard to believe, because they find it hard to believe that basic moral principles do not apply to everyone. More precisely, if absolutism is false, as seems likely, one common conception of morality is based on a false presupposition. Those who are attracted to that conception find themselves in the position of those who think morality is the law of God and then decide there is no God. Relativism implies that morality so understood is a delusion, a vain and chimerical notion. Fortunately, there is a reasonable substitute. They can reject absolutism and still have a good approximation of morality as conceived by many, if they modify their naive view by relativizing the range of ‘everyone’ throughout to those who accept or have reasons to accept certain basic moral demands. In this relativistic view, there are various moralities, each involving different basic demands, demands that certain people accept or have reasons to accept as demands on those same people, demands on which depend all reasons arising from that morality for those people to do things.

3.6 Morality as Conventional This is a natural view of morality to take if one supposes that morality rests on a tacit agreement or convention among a group of people. Other things being equal, the existence of an agreement or convention gives someone a reason to act in accordance with it only if he or she accepts the agreement or has reasons to do so. Furthermore, the hypothesis that moral demands derive from conventions arrived at through implicit bargaining

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and mutual adjustment helps to account for the content of actual moralities. The fact that participants aim at provisions that are in their own interests helps to explain the rough utilitarian character of our own morality. As discussed in Essay 1, the fact that compromises are necessary among people of different powers and resources may account for the relative strictness of the duty to avoid harm to others as compared with the weaker duty to help those who need help. Everyone benefits equally from a duty not to harm others. But the poor and weak benefit much more from a duty of mutual aid than the rich and powerful would. The expected compromise is a fairly strong prohibition against harm and a weaker duty of mutual aid. That is what we have in our morality.

3.6.1 Trammel's Alternative Explanation It is difficult to see how else the distinction we make might be explained. Consider, for example, the suggestion made by Trammel (1975) that three factors are relevant. (1) You can avoid harming anyone but you cannot help all who would benefit from your help, since there are too many for you to help them all. (2) If you harm someone, that person is necessarily harmed; but, if you fail to help someone who needs help, that person is not necessarily unhelped, because someone else may help. (3) If you harm someone, you are necessarily responsible for that person's plight; but, if you fail to help someone who needs help, you are not necessarily responsible for that person's plight. These three factors are real enough, but they fail to explain the moral distinction in question. For (1) and (3) presuppose that very distinction and (2) is a purely verbal point. Let us begin with (2) If you harm someone, that person is necessarily harmed; but, if you fail to help someone who needs help, that person is not necessarily unhelped, because someone else may help. In order to see that (2) makes a purely verbal point, it is sufficient to observe that, if you act so that a particular person will be harmed unless someone else intervenes to save that person, that person is not necessarily harmed, because someone else may intervene. On the other hand, if you fail to help a person needing help whom no one else is going to help, that

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person is necessarily unhelped. Now, almost any case in which someone violates the duty not to harm someone can he described either as a case of harming someone or as a case of acting in such a way that the person in question will be harmed unless someone intervenes to save that person. Given the one description, the person is necessarily harmed; given the other description of the same act, the person is not necessarily harmed. Similarly, almost any case in which someone violates what we take to be the weaker duty to help someone can be described either as a case of failing to help someone needing help or as a case of failing to help someone needing help whom no one else is going to help. Given the one description, the person is not necessarily unhelped; given the other description of the same act, the person is necessarily unhelped. We do not suppose, however, that the strength of these duties depends on how cases falling under them are described. Let us now consider Trammel's (1) You can avoid harming anyone but you cannot help all who would benefit from your help, since there are too many for you to help them all. To see that this presupposes that we distinguish harming and not helping as we now do, consider what would be true in a society in which people were as strongly motivated morally to help each other as not to harm each other. Such a society would be much more egalitarian and altruistic than ours. There would not be the vast numbers of people needing help in such a society that there are in our society, because the members of the imagined society would be quick to provide help whenever they perceived a need for it. In that society, (1) would no longer be true. You would be able to help all who would benefit from your help to the same extent that you could avoid harming anyone. Proposition (1) is true of our society only because our recognition of a moral distinction between harming and not helping is responsible for there being vast numbers of people who need help who do not get it. Let us turn now to Trammel's (3) If you harm someone, you are necessarily responsible for that person's plight; but, if you fail to help someone who needs help, you are not necessarily responsible for that person's plight. This is true of our society only because what someone is responsible for depends in part on that person's duties and obligations. In a more egalitarian and altruistic society, which did not recognize a moral distinction

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between harming and not helping, you would be considered responsible for a person's plight if you failed to give the person help when it was needed. Trammel's account of our intuitive distinction is therefore no real alternative to a tacit agreement theory that explains the intuitive distinction as arising as a result of a compromise between people of varying powers and resources.

3.7 Senses of ‘Ought’ Moral argument can involve not only argument over the consequences of basic demands but also bargaining over the basic demands themselves. Morality is continuous with politics. Furthermore, a person may belong to a number of different groups with different moralities that may sometimes have conflicting implications. When that happens, a person must decide what side he or she wants to be on. As in Hare's analysis, a moral ‘ought’ judgement will be made in relation to moral demands accepted by the person making the judgement. But, since such a judgement says that a certain agent has reasons to do something, the judgement presupposes that the agent also accepts the relevant moral demands, or at least has reasons to accept them. ‘George morally ought not to eat meat’ means roughly that George's not eating meat is in accordance with the moral demands that ‘we’ accept, where ‘we’ includes the speaker, George, and the intended audience, if any. Moral ‘ought’ judgements are therefore a species of what I call ‘inner judgements’. Such judgements are made only about those who are assumed to accept (or have reasons to accept) the moral demands on which the judgements are based. Inner moral judgements include not only moral ‘ought’ judgements but also any other moral judgements that attribute moral reasons to someone—for example, the judgement that it was morally wrong of someone to have done a certain thing. Although all moral judgements are, in this view, relative judgements made in relation to certain moral demands, not all moral judgements are inner judgements in this sense. One can judge that certain outsiders are good or bad or evil from the point of view of one's morality, even if they do not share that morality, just as one can judge that outsiders are friends or enemies. Similarly, one can judge that certain situations are good or bad or right or wrong or that they ought or ought not to be the case, even if these situations involve agents that do not participate in the morality relative to which the judgement is made.

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As noted in Essay 1, it is important to distinguish the moral ‘ought’, which is used to make inner moral judgements about agents, from the evaluative ‘ought’, which is used to make non-inner judgements about situations. The sentence, ‘George ought not to eat meat,’ is ambiguous. It may be used to express an inner moral judgement of George, which presupposes that he accepts or has reasons to accept the relevant moral demands. It may instead be used to express a favourable evaluation of the possible state of affairs in which George does not eat meat. Such an evaluation does not imply or assume that George himself has any reason to avoid meat. It implies only that we, with our standards, have a reason to hope or wish that George will not eat meat (and therefore perhaps a reason to try to bring it about that George does not eat meat). The first interpretation, as an inner judgement, is more natural if we say George ought morally not to eat meat. The second interpretation, as a non-inner evaluation, is more natural if we say meat ought not to be eaten by George or it ought not to be the case that George eats meat.

3.8 Universalizability Now, philosophers commonly say that moral ‘ought’ judgements are ‘universalizable’, by which they mean in part this: If you judge of someone that he or she ought morally to do a particular thing, then you are committed to the further judgement that anyone else in similar circumstances ought morally to do the same thing. This does not hold in the relativistic conception of morality I have been describing (section 2.9 of Essay 2). A moral ought judgement about someone who accepts, or has reasons to accept, the relevant moral demands has no implications about anyone who neither accepts nor has reasons to accept those demands. A useful special case does hold, however: If you judge of someone that he or she ought morally to do a particular thing, then you are committed to the further judgement that in similar circumstances you ought to do the same thing. This means, in particular, that you cannot complain about him or her unless you agree that if the situation were reversed, yon ought not to act as he or she is acting.

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Moral ‘ought’ judgements are also often said to be universalizable in another respect, which is supposed to rule out arbitrary discrimination: If you ought to treat someone in a particular way, you ought to treat any other person in the same way unless there is a morally relevant difference between them. This principle can be counted trivially true, since any difference in the way you ought morally to treat people can be counted as a ‘morally relevant’ difference. Still, the spirit of the principle can be violated in a relativistic conception of morality if the distinction between ‘us’ and ‘them’ is taken to be ‘morally relevant’. In fact, many moralities afford less protection for outsiders than for the primary members of the group, without basing this distinction on any further ground. A morality is, of course, not forced to discriminate in this particular way, but almost every morality does so to some extent.

3.9 Substitutes for the Naive View Of course, a morality may be the product of a tacit convention or agreement without participants realizing it. Participants may in fact accept the naive view, with its presupposition of absolutism. I do not wish to say that the relativistic theory I have been describing, morality as politics, captures everyone's conception of morality. My claim is, first, that morality as conceived by the naive view does not exist. Second, the moralities that do exist derive from convention or tacit agreement. And third, morality as politics is an acceptable substitute for the naive conception, and indeed is the most acceptable substitute for it. Notice that in this conception of morality, which I am calling ‘morality as politics’, a morality is basically a group affair, depending on moral demands jointly accepted by several people after a certain amount of tacit bargaining and adjustment. We might allow also for a purely personal morality in which someone places demands only upon himself or herself. But that is a special and limiting case.

3.9.1 Existentialism and Emotivism There are other possible substitutes for naive morality, substitutes that take a morality to be essentially an individual, personal matter, depending only on the moral demands accepted by a single person. Such conceptions

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tend to be either extremely agent-centred, as in one form of existentialism, or extremely critic-centred, as in Hare (1952, 1963) and in one version of emotivism (Sartre, 1973). In an extremely agent-centred conception of morality, someone accepts moral demands only as demands on himself or herself. He or she is therefore able to judge his or her own actions morally, but not those of anyone else. In an extremely critic-centred conception, like Hare's, someone accepts certain demands as demands that can be used in morally judging anyone's actions, including those who have no reasons to act in accordance with those demands. The same is true of that version of emotivism which takes moral ‘ought’ judgements merely to express one's favourable approval of someone's doing something (Ayer, 1936)—obviously one can be in favour of someone's doing a particular thing without supposing that he or she has any reasons to do it. Such a conception of morality is best thought of as abandoning the moral ought to do, used to speak of an agent's reasons, in favour of the evaluative ought to be, used to evaluate possible states of affairs. It matters a great deal in practice which substitute for naive morality is adopted. The acceptance of an extremely agentcentred conception of morality would make moral discourse among different people virtually impossible. The acceptance of an extremely critic-centred conception, on the other hand, would tend to lead to the acceptance of unrealistic normative theories like one or another version of utilitarianism or hypothetical contract theory.

3.9.2 Act Utilitarianism Consider act utilitarianism, which says that everyone ought always to do whatever promises to have the best consequences; in other words, everyone ought always to act so as to maximize utility (Smart, 1961). This view has many implausible consequences. It would have you break your solemn promise whenever that would have better consequences than keeping your promise. It forbids you to favour friends and relatives over perfect strangers in distributing the benefits of your actions. It implies that almost everything you do is morally wrong, since there is almost always an alternative action open to you that promises to have better consequences. It treats your failure to help someone as morally equivalent to actually harming someone. One objection to act utilitarianism is that it has such implausible consequences. Another perhaps more revealing objection is that people are not only motivated to maximize utility, but also have other motives which

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they take to be morally respectable, in some cases even morally required, without being irrational, stupid, or uninformed. Act utilitarianism is therefore quite unrealistic as a theory about the moral reasons that people actually have. So, it is unrealistic as an account of what people ought, morally, to do. This lack of realism arises, I suggest, from a failure to distinguish the moral ought to do from the evaluative ought to be. Act utilitarianism makes some sense as an account of what ought to be the case. Act utilitarianism makes no sense as an account of what people ought morally to do. It ought to be the case that utility was maximized; that would be wonderful! It does not follow that a person has moral reasons only to maximize expected utility and do nothing else. Now, an extremely critic-centred theory, like emotivism, can make an unrealistic moral theory like act utilitarianism seem quite plausible. For, it may well be that, as critics, we would always be in favour of utility being maximized. This does not mean, however, that we do or should suppose that a person always has moral reasons only to maximize utility.

3.9.3 Rule Utilitarianism Similar remarks apply to other versions of utilitarianism. Ideal rule utilitarianism, for example, says that you should always follow the best rules, namely the rules it would maximize utility for everyone to follow. Philosophers disagree as to whether this version has more plausible implications concerning what people ought to do than act utilitarianism does. But that disagreement is unimportant, since it is anyway obvious that no one has any reason to act as ideal rule utilitarianism recommends. To follow the best rules because it would maximize utility for everyone to follow them is to overlook the fact that other people will not in fact follow those rules. This is the Pacifist Fallacy. Pacifism says that one should never use force against other people, even to defend oneself against a direct attack, because (a) the world would be a much better place if no one ever used force against others, and (b) if no one ever used force against other people, there would be no need to use force to defend oneself against a direct attack by someone else, since no such attack would ever occur. This overlooks the obvious point that in the real world people do sometimes attack other people and, in such a case, the person attacked often has a reason to use force to repel that attack. In endorsing this sort of argument

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for pacifism, ideal rule utilitarianism confuses how one should act in an ideal world in which everyone followed the best rules, with how one should act in the actual world in which people do not follow those rules. There is a similar lack of realism in Kant's (1785) suggestion that you ought always to act as if you were a member of a Kingdom of Ends in which everyone always did the right thing. The fact that people often do not do the right thing is something that you cannot ignore in deciding what you ought morally to do. The same point applies to hypothetical contract theories that say one ought to act in accordance with the rules that would be accepted under certain ideal conditions rather than the rules that have actually been accepted in the real world. Like act utilitarianism, ideal rule utilitarianism is quite unrealistic as an account of what people ought morally to do—that is, as an account of what they have moral reasons to do—and is more plausible instead as an account of something that would be desirable—that is, as an account of what ought to be the case. It would be wonderful if everyone always acted on the best set of rules—perhaps it ought to be the case that everyone so acted. It does not follow that anyone now has any reason to act in that way. Ideal rule utilitarianism, like act utilitarianism, is critic-centred rather than agent-centred, although there is a difference in what is being judged in the two cases. Whereas a simple form of emotivism can make act utilitarianism look plausible, Hare's theory, with its Kantian overtones, can make ideal rule utilitarianism look plausible. In the first view, what is taken to be relevant is one's attitude towards a particular agent's doing something given the actual circumstances of the case. In Hare's view, what is relevant is one's attitude towards universal adherence to one or another set of principles. Philosophers have sometimes argued that act utilitarianism and ideal rule utilitarianism must coincide (Lyons, 1965)—that they are ‘extensionally equivalent’. The point is that, if everyone were to follow the best set of rules, each person would presumably also always be acting so as to maximize expected utility. What that shows, however, is that act utilitarianism and ideal rule utilitarianism would be ‘extensionally equivalent’ in an ideal world in which everyone acted on the best set of rules. It does not show that these views are ‘extensionally equivalent’ in the actual world. And clearly they are not, since ideal rule utilitarianism recommends total pacifism, even in the real world, whereas act utilitarianism recommends against total pacifism in the real world, on the grounds that there are times when using force has better consequences than not using it. Other versions of utilitarianism can be mentioned. Actual rule utilitarianism

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says that a person ought to follow the actual rules accepted by the members of his or her group and that these rules are themselves to be assessed on utilitarian grounds. As an account of what people ought morally to do, this seems more realistic but not completely right, since you should sometimes not follow the rules everyone else follows. This suggests a variant of actual rule utilitarianism: a person ought to follow those actual rules which are justified on utilitarian grounds. This leaves a number of questions. What is it for a rule to be justified on utilitarian grounds? Different views are possible. It might be required that the rules have the best possible consequences, or it might be required only that its consequences be better than those of having no rule at all. What if the relevant actual rule fails this test? What should you do then? Again, there is a range of options. You might be left free to do what you want. Or you might be required in this case to maximize expected utility. Or you might be required to act on the best rule, from a utilitarian point of view. We might try to put various pieces together so as to obtain, almost by brute force, the utilitarian theory with the most plausible implications for what one ought morally to do. But this would hardly be an illuminating exercise. The complications in such a theory would make it difficult to see what implications the theory really had concerning what people ought morally to do. It is likely that the most that could really be said for such a theory would be that there were no clear counter-examples to it. Furthermore, the theory would almost certainly fail to say why anyone would have reasons to act in the way it said they had reasons to act.

3.10 Morality as Politics Consider, by contrast, how easily the conception I have been calling morality as politics can account for utilitarian aspects of the moral reasons people actually have. As we have already noted, if a morality is based on a tacit agreement, it is to be expected that the rules of such a morality will be of some benefit to the people involved. Why else would they accept those rules? This, of course, does not mean that the rules actually accepted are ideal from a utilitarian point of view or even that all the rules accepted really do have good consequences. Compare morality as politics with actual rule utilitarianism. Both say that moral reasons derive from actual rules or principles. But there are important differences. A number of difficulties facing actual rule utilitarianism are easily resolved in the conception of morality as politics. Actual

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rule utilitarianism says that you should follow the actual rules—the rules that people actually follow. But which people? Different people follow different rules. Which rules should you follow? It might be said that you should follow the principles of your society—not those of some other society. But what makes a society your society? Won't it turn out that there are a number of different groups to which you belong, with different principles? Should you adhere to all of these principles? What if they conflict? What rules do you follow then? And, anyway, why should you follow certain rules simply because other people do? According to the conception of morality as politics, the principles that give you moral reasons to do things are the moral principles that you actually accept. You accept them as principles also accepted by the members of some more or less well-defined group. What makes a society your society is not, say, the proximity of its other members, but rather that you accept the principles of that society as principles for you and other members of that society. You are indeed, in the relevant sense, a member of different groups with different principles: your family, friends, neighbours, colleagues at work, and so on. Since you accept all of the principles of all of these groups, all of the principles give you reasons to do things. This is not to say that once you accept certain principles you must blindly adhere to them ever after. Your acceptance of certain principles can give you reasons to give up or modify other principles you accept. Your other goals and interests can have the same effect. The principles you accept may conflict. In that case, there is typically no easy answer as to what you ought to do. You will have to choose, reasoning somewhat as in any other case in which prior goals, intentions, or principles conflict, making a minimal change in your antecedent principles, etc., which will promote the coherence of your resulting overall view. What reason do you have to follow the relevant principles? You accept them; and your acceptance of them gives you reason to follow them. What reasons did you have to accept the principles in the first place? Reasons of various sorts, for example, reasons of self-interest: for, if you accept certain principles as governing your dealings with others, those others will tend to accept the principles as governing their dealings with you. And, as previously mentioned, once you accept certain moral principles, that may give you reasons to accept other principles. I conclude that morality as politics provides the most reasonable substitute for the naive conception of morality. Recall that in what I am calling the naive view morality is based on certain moral demands which everyone accepts, or at least has reasons to accept, as demands on everyone

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and on which all moral reasons depend. Although this seems to capture essential aspects of many people's conception of morality, I have suggested that it must almost certainly be rejected on the grounds that there are no substantive moral demands satisfying those conditions. Morality as politics retains much of the content of the naive view but restricts the references to ‘everyone’ to the members of one or another group, all of whom accept certain moral demands as demands on themselves and other members of the group. I have argued that other conceptions of morality retain less of the content of the naive view and tend toward unrealistic accounts of what morality requires. Extremely agent-centred theories, as in certain forms of existentialism, practically abandon morality as a social enterprise. This is also, though less obviously, true of extremely critic-centred theories, like certain forms of emotivism and like Hare's theory, which are best seen as rejecting the moral ‘ought’ in favour of the might of evaluation. This is, I have suggested, why these theories can make some very unrealistic accounts of what morality requires seem plausible, such as one or another form of utilitarianism.

4 Justice and Moral Bargaining 4.1 Introduction In my view, although there may be universal formal principles of justice (Perelman, 1963; Essay 13, below), substantial principles of justice derive from continual tacit bargaining and adjustment. This is not to say social arrangements are just whenever they are in accordance with the principles of justice accepted in that society. We can use our own principles of justice in judging the institutions of another society, and we can appeal to some principles we accept in order to criticize other principles we accept. To use Hume's (1739) model of the relevant sort of convention, two people rowing a boat continually adjust their rates of rowing to each other so that they come to row at the same rate, a rate that is normally somewhere between the rate at which each would prefer to row. In the same way, the basic principles of justice accepted by people of different powers and resources are the result of a continually changing compromise affecting such things as the relative importance attached to helping others as compared with the importance attached to not harming others. Hume's rowers provide an example of a ‘convention’ that is normally completely tacit. There are other models in which the bargaining can be more explicit, for example, when a seller comes to set prices that are acceptable to customers, when employers reach understandings with employees concerning wages, or when political groups influence legislation. I want eventually to consider the implications for moral reasoning and argument of the thesis that principles of justice result from implicit bargaining and convention in this way. But first, let us review the reasons for thinking that justice is, indeed, conventional.

4.2 Is There a Single True Morality? A first point is that it seems extremely unlikely that there is any substantive moral demand which all rational agents have sufficient reasons to

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accept. This seems unlikely because, for any given moral demand, it is possible to find people who do not seem to have sufficient reasons to accept that demand. The people in question may be either professional criminals, or simple egoists, or adherents to a competing moral principle. No matter what the moral demand, there will be people of this or some other sort who fail to accept that demand, whose failure does not seem to be the result of their having overlooked reasons they have to accept that demand. That is, it does not seem that they had to accept the demand in question because they have overlooked or not understood certain reasoning, nor because they are in some way irrational or ignorant of relevant facts, nor because weakness of will leads them to do something they think they really should not do.

4.3 Neutral Versus Normative Reasons It might be said that the people in question are after all overlooking something, namely, the fact that what they are doing is morally wrong. It might be argued that, if they were to realize it is wrong not to follow the moral demand in question, and were to fully understand this, and were not subject to weakness of will, then they would act in accordance with the moral demand. This strikes me as an unsatisfactory and question-begging response. Following a terminological suggestion of Mark Johnston's (personal communication), let us distinguish two conceptions of moral reasons, two senses in which someone might be said to have moral reasons, a ‘neutral’ conception of moral reasons and an ‘evaluative’ conception. In either conception, to say an agent has sufficient moral reasons to do something is to make an evaluative judgement about that person and to express one's moral approval of the agent's doing it. In the neutral conception of moral reasons, it is also to imply that, if the agent doesn't do it, he or she either lacks certain nonmoral information, or fails to appreciate certain reasoning, or has a nonmoral defect like weakness of will or some other sort of nonmoral irrationality. On the other hand, in the evaluative conception of moral reasons, to say an agent has sufficient moral reasons to do something is merely to make a moral evaluation of the agent's doing it, where this allows that the agent could fail to do it without lacking nonmoral knowledge, without failing to appreciate any reasoning (in a neutral sense of ‘appreciate’), and without being subject to any other sort of nonmoral defect.

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Observe that the evaluative conception of moral reasons is compatible with a purely emotivist analysis of judgements about such reasons. According to such an analysis, for a speaker to judge that an agent has sufficient moral reasons to do something is simply for the speaker to express approval of the agent's doing it. Since the considerations that move the speaker to approve of the agent's following certain rules might be considerations that carry no weight at all with the agent, it is possible for an emotivist to claim the agent has sufficient moral reasons to follow those rules while agreeing there may be no considerations that carry weight with the agent favouring the agent's doing so. Now, when I say that it seems likely there is no single set of moral demands all rational agents have sufficient reasons to follow, I mean, of course, reasons in the neutral sense, reasons of a sort that carry weight with the agent, or would carry weight apart from nonmoral defects in the agent, failure to follow or appreciate (in a neutral sense of this term) some argument or other reasoning, and lack of nonmoral information. I see no point in talking about reasons in the evaluative sense. Why should an agent care about what the speaker takes to be reasons for the agent to accept a given rule, if the relevant considerations carry no weight with the agent? True, the speaker will approve of the agent's caring about these things and so can correctly say the agent ‘should’ care, given an emotivist account of ‘should’. But it is no answer to the question the agent would ask, ‘Why should I care?’ that the speaker cares. And to allow no other account of this question is simply to try to define a legitimate question out of existence. In my opinion, this represents a reductio ad absurdum of an emotivist account of what it is to say another person has sufficient reasons to do something. Similar remarks apply to Nozick's discussion of the ‘value sanction’ (1981: 409–11). Nozick says that an immoral person is ‘worse off ’ than a moral person because his life is not as ‘valuable’. A speaker can believe that another person is worse off in this sense without the relevant considerations carrying any weight with the other person.

4.4 Moral Values It also seems likely that there are no nontrivial universal moral values. It seems unlikely that there is anything of a very substantive sort that everyone values morally, or has reasons to value morally, even if we restrict our consideration to people who have some clearly moral values. It may or

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may not be true that all people have a capacity for sympathy with others, and even with animals, which leads to an instinctive or automatic reaction against suffering in people and animals. But this by itself is not to value the absence of suffering, certainly not to value it morally. And even when the absence of suffering is valued morally, it may be assigned various degrees of importance. One's moral values depend on the morality one accepts. Different people attach different relative weights to the things they value. During the war in Vietnam, some people were more upset about the bombing of ancient temples than about the bombing of civilian populations, others were more upset about the bombing of civilians. It is implausible to suppose this difference reflects, say, a difference in the calculation of the human happiness that would be increased as the result of the preservation of the ancient temples. It almost certainly reflects a difference in basic moral values. Similarly, people differ in the extent to which they value individuality and freedom as compared with community spirit and a harmonious society. And this affects the way in which they evaluate their own and other social systems.

4.5 Justice Judgements about the justice of a particular transaction or arrangement are evaluative judgements, and justice seems to be relative in the way that other values are. It may be that everyone has some innate inclination towards ‘fairness’, but it seems likely that, in the absence of actual bargaining, agreement is possible only on a formal conception of justice, not on a substantive conception. There are many competing ideals of justice: as rewarding virtue and punishing vice, as treating people equally, as protecting property and entitlement, as ensuring that basic needs are satisfied, and so on. Many people feel the appeal of several of these ideals but value them differently. I do not mean merely that different societies have different arrangements. I mean that people give different weights to various considerations in judging, say, Chinese society in the 1970s. For some, equality is more important than liberty or entitlement; for others, the reverse is true. Such disagreements would seem to reflect different basic values. It is hard to believe that in the nature of things one side is right about this and the other is wrong. It is hard to believe there is reasoning which, once appreciated, makes all but one weighting of these values irrational.

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4.6 Morality as a Commitment of a Rational Agency Now, philosophers occasionally argue that there are certain basic moral principles to which all rational agents are committed. Kant (1785) famously argues in this way for his ‘categorical imperative’, and so does Gewirth (1978). But none of these arguments succeed. A typical argument of this sort asks you to consider a given situation from another person's point of view with the aim of showing you that you have a reason to take the other's interests into account in the present unreversed situation. To suppose you do not have sufficient reason to take the other's interests into account in this situation is to suppose the other would not have sufficient reason to take your interests into account in the reversed situation. The argument is that, since you cannot accept the other's not taking your interests into account in the reversed situation, you would be inconsistent not to take the other's interests into account in the actual situation. But this depends upon an equivocation concerning what it is to ‘accept’ a person's doing something, which may be either (a) to want the person to do it (or at least not want the person not to do it) or (b) to think the person has sufficient reasons to do it. The sense in which you cannot ‘accept’ the other person's ignoring your interests is sense (a): you do not want the other person to ignore your interests. From your point of view it ought not to be the case that the other person ignores your interests. It does not follow that you cannot ‘accept’ the other person's ignoring your interests in sense (b). You may very well realize that from the other person's point of view it ought to be the case that he or she ignores your interests. You may see that the other person, indeed, has sufficient reasons to ignore your interests. According to Gewirth (1978), you are committed as a rational agent to thinking of your freedom and well-being as ‘necessary goods’. So, he argues, you are committed to supposing others must not interfere with your obtaining and possessing freedom and well-being. And this, Gewirth claims, is to suppose you have a right to freedom and well-being simply because you are a rational agent. But, he concludes, that supposition commits you to allowing that all other rational agents have the same right and, therefore, that you must not interfere with their obtaining and possessing freedom and well being. Gewirth's argument can be interpreted in many different ways; but I see no way to interpret it that avoids equivocation. For example, it might be

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interpreted so that the equivocation occurs in the second step of this argument. The supposition that others must not interfere with your obtaining and possessing freedom and well-being is ambiguous. It can mean either (1) it must not happen that they interfere or (2) there is a requirement on them, giving them reasons not to interfere. The supposition that your freedom and well-being are necessary goods to you as an agent provides grounds for concluding that others must not interfere with you only in sense (1): it must not be the case (from your point of view) that they interfere with you. This supposition does not logically imply that there is any requirement on them, giving them compelling reasons not to interfere with you. That is sense (2). But sense (2) of the supposition that they must not interfere is what is needed to get to the supposition that you have a right to such noninterference and, therefore, that others have a similar right. The supposition that you have such a right does not follow simply from the thought that from your point of view they must not interfere. Alternatively, the equivocation might be located at a later point in the notion of a right. We might say that you have a ‘right’ to noninterference in the sense of a ‘justified claim’ to noninterference because your self-interest justifies you in making such a claim. Then others have a similar right; they have a self-interested justification for a similar claim that they not be interfered with. However, it still does not follow that you have any reason to accept their claim in the sense of being motivated not to interfere with them. That follows only from a different notion of ‘right’. McMahon (1986) gives an elegant account of various other ways to understand Gewirth's argument, all involving some sort of equivocation or other error.

4.7 Defective Agents Some philosophers and psychologists claim that anyone who fails to accept certain basic moral requirements can be shown to be defective as an agent, in a sense of ‘defective’ that does not mean simply ‘morally defective’. For example, Nagel (1970) argues that to think you have no reasons to try to satisfy the interests of others is to be a ‘practical solipsist’, because you deny the reality of others in your practical reasoning even if you accept their reality in your theoretical reasoning. And Kohlberg (1981) argues for stages of moral development leading to a sixth and highest stage at which people agree on basic moral principles. According to Kohlberg, people who do not yet accept these principles have a defective

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conception of morality. But neither Nagel nor Kohlberg makes a good case.

4.7.1 Nagel and the Avoidance of Practical Solipsism Nagel argues that, as a rational person who is not a solipsist, you must acknowledge that a judgement in the first person, like ‘I am five feet nine inches tall’, has the same content as the corresponding judgement in the third person, ‘That person is five feet nine inches tall’, except for a difference in perspective. Nagel argues further that your judgement that you have certain reasons to do or want something has ‘motivational content’ in that such a judgement is capable of motivating you to do the act in question if no other reasons are relevant. He concludes that you are committed to supposing that the corresponding third-person judgement has motivational content, too; otherwise you would be a ‘practical solipsist’. But to be committed to taking third-person judgements of this sort to have motivational content is, according to Nagel, to be committed to being motivated to help others do things they have reasons to do or want. This argument depends crucially on what we might call the ‘objectivity principle’, namely, that first- and third-person judgements have the same content, apart from considerations of perspective. Nagel argues for this principle by noting that it seems to hold for certain judgements, and by observing that certain violations of the principle are associated with solipsism, namely, cases in which you take judgements about your own feelings to have an entirely different content from judgements about the feelings of others. However, this leaves obscure exactly what is to count as part of the ‘content’ of a judgement for the purposes of the objectivity principle. An analogous argument with respect to pains yields the following bizarre result. We might say that first-person judgements about pains have ‘affective content’, in the sense that if you sincerely judge you are in pain, you normally are in pain. By Nagel's objectivity principle, your third-person judgements should have a similar affective content, so that you can only judge that another person is in pain if it hurts you too. That is clearly absurd. So, the objectivity principle cannot apply to ‘affective content’. But then some further argument is needed to show it should be applied to ‘motivational content’. Since he does not offer any such argument, Nagel does not show that there is anything defective about the practical reasoning of an agent who fails to take the interests of others as providing him or her with reasons.

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4.7.2 Kohlberg's Stages of Moral Development Kohlberg's argument combines empirical and philosophical considerations. His theory is that there are six stages of moral development which come in pairs, two ‘preconventional’ stages, two ‘conventional’ stages, and two ‘postconventional’ stages. In the first stage, a child takes doing what is right to be a matter of obeying authority, avoiding punishment, and not harming others. In the second stage, doing what is right also includes making fair deals in terms of concrete exchange and satisfying immediate needs. The third and fourth stages are centred on socially approved virtue and character (third stage), or social rules and principles (fourth stage). At the end of the fourth stage, people begin to think about the whole system of societal morality and its justification. Some people become and remain sceptical or relativistic at this point; others ‘progress’ to the post-conventional fifth stage in which they take people to have rights that are prior to society. Finally, at the sixth stage people come to ‘realize’ that there are universal ethical principles all humanity ought to follow—principles of respect for other persons as ends in themselves. Social rules are judged by considering whether one would find them acceptable if one did not know one's place in society. The principles accepted at the sixth stage are similar to those defended in Rawls (1971). Kohlberg hypothesizes that moral development from one stage to the next occurs as someone acquires a more adequate conception of morality. He suggests that Stage VI is the highest stage reached because it represents the most adequate conception of morality. However, the evidence does not support such a strong hypothesis. Obviously, the key issue concerns what happens after Stage IV, because the development from Stage I (obedience to authority) to Stage IV (acceptance of the authority of the moral rules of your society) involves nothing more than coming to appreciate conventional morality. But Kohlberg's data do not indicate a single direction of development from Stage IV on. Development from that point occurs when people raise questions about the rules of their own society and become aware of alternative possibilities. Kohlberg's data (and common observation as well) show that at this point people in fact go off in various directions. Many people come to accept something like the egoism of the second stage (leading Kohlberg to speak of a Stage 4½). Some people become moral relativists. Some people become utilitarians, taking morality to be concerned with the promotion of the general happiness. Some people decide moral rules are binding only on those who consent to them. Some people try to reach their own arrangements with a ‘counter-culture’.

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And there are many other options. Kohlberg's fifth stage is not specially privileged. Indeed, it is not a single option at all, but a collection of some of the possibilities. For example, it includes both utilitarianism and also the competing view that moral principles are binding only on those who consent to those principles. Finally, Kohlberg's sixth stage simply seems to represent the sort of thinking Kohlberg himself thinks is most adequate. Nothing in Kohlberg's data supports a privileged position for his fifth and sixth stages.

4.8 Reasons and Morality So, it seems to me that there is no single set of basic moral principles everyone has reasons to follow. From this I infer that there are no basic moral principles that apply to everyone. For it seems to me that to say a moral principle applies to someone is to say he or she ought to follow the principle, which is to say he or she has sufficient reason to follow it. This marks a conspicuous difference between law and morality. A law applies to someone if that person satisfies the conditions of application specified in the relevant legal system, quite apart from whether or not the person ought (i.e. has sufficient reason) to do what the law requires. But morality is not like that. To think a moral principle applies to someone is to think he or she ought morally to follow that principle, and that is to think he or she has sufficient moral reasons to follow it. So, if there are no basic moral principles that everyone has sufficient reasons to follow, then there can be no single morality that applies to everyone, no single basic set of moral values, no uniquely correct principles of justice.

4.9 Hypothetical Agreement Theories The basic moral principles that apply to a given person are principles that person actually accepts as principles regulating the conduct of members of some group to which the person belongs, where these are principles arrived at through a process of mutual adjustment and implicit bargaining. Ignore the special case in which the person is the only member of the relevant group, when personal ideals take on a moral character. The point is that the relevant principles are the principles that actually are accepted, not those that would be agreed to under certain conditions of ‘initial

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equality’ (Rawls, 1971) or ‘constrained neutral dialogue’ (Ackerman, 1980). One problem with a hypothetical agreement theory might be that there is no reason to expect agreement to be reached under the stated conditions, or at least no reason to think a unique agreement would be reached under those conditions. Another problem is that, even if a unique agreement would be reached under the specified hypothetical conditions, that by itself would not give someone in actual conditions any reason to follow the rules that would be agreed to. Since to say someone ought to follow certain rules is to say he or she has sufficient reason to follow those rules, the fact that certain rules would be agreed to under those conditions does not imply anyone ought to follow those rules. A qualification is needed here. It may be possible to give a hypothetical, or conditional, analysis of what it is to have sufficient reasons to do something. According to one such analysis, having sufficient reasons to D consists in the situation's being such that one would D if one were fully informed, fully rational, aware of relevant arguments and able to follow and understand these arguments, not suffering from weakness of will, and so forth. Given this analysis, the fact that one would accept certain rules under those conditions does imply one ought to accept those rules. However, there is still the first sort of problem for hypothetical agreement theories. There are no substantive moral principles everyone would accept under such conditions. For any principle one might choose, it is possible to find someone who does not accept it where this does not seem to be because that person is ignorant of something, irrational in some way, unable to follow some argument, suffering from weakness of will, and so forth. There are no moral principles that everyone has sufficient reasons to accept. Something else should be noted here. I said above that the moral principles that apply to a person are the principles the person actually accepts. That is not quite right. The principles a person accepts are the principles that give a person reasons to act in various ways. But this does not mean a person always has sufficient reasons to act in accordance with the principles he or she accepts. Nor does it mean that what a person has sufficient moral reasons to do always falls under some antecedently accepted moral principle. Some of the principles a person accepts may conflict with others and/or with nonmoral goals and policies of the person in question. In the light of such a conflict, it may be that what the person ought to do, all things considered, is to modify some of the moral principles he or she accepts. The moral principles a person accepts ‘apply’ to that person only

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in the sense that they are the source of that person's moral reasons to do things (Harman, 1976, 1995).

4.10 Moral Conventions Suppose I am right about all this. Suppose there is no single true morality all people have reasons to accept. Suppose the source of moral reasons lies not in reason itself or in universal human nature but in the particular variable principles a person happens to accept. This raises the question what reason anyone has to accept any particular moral principles. There are various reasons, but the main reason why a person accepts the principles he or she does is that it is in his or her interest to do so if others do too. I accept a policy of acting in a certain way towards you so that you will accept that policy in acting towards me. I don't push you around so that you won't push me around. You are nice to me so that I will be nice to you. In other words, we accept the moral principles we do, as useful conventions. This is not to say that people are always aware of the conventional nature of moral principles. The conventions are normally arrived at tacitly, by mutual adjustment of different people's behaviour, without conscious awareness. Nor is it to say that the appeal to self-interest is the only appeal. Once some moral principles and values are accepted, these restrict further appeals to self-interest. But self-interest never becomes completely irrelevant. People can always opt out of the morality they currently accept; and they can always threaten to opt out if their self-interest is not sufficiently taken into account by the current morality. As emphasized in earlier essays, one can begin to appreciate the conventional self-interested source of principles of justice by considering otherwise puzzling aspects of ordinary moral views. For example, the duty not to initiate harm to others is usually taken to be more important and more stringent than the duty to help others avoid the same sort of harm (Foot, 1978, Thomson, 1978). From a utilitarian point of view, this is puzzling, because the same utility is lost when one fails to help someone avoid harm as when one initiates the harm oneself. And, although there have been ingenious attempts to try to give a nonbargaining rationale for the different strengths of these duties, none of these attempts has been successful (see Essay 3, above). In Essay 1, I suggest that the difference in strengths in these duties is a

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consequence of the fact that morality represents a compromise between people of different powers and resources, since everyone benefits from a strict duty not to harm others, but only the poor and weak would benefit from an equally strict duty to help others avoid harm. The rich and powerful would not benefit from such a strict duty of mutual aid because, given their resources, they would be called upon to do most of the helping and would have little need of such help for themselves. The rich and powerful would benefit from a strict duty not to harm others, however, since they could be harmed if the weak and poor were to organize against them. Therefore, although everyone will be in favour of a strict duty not to initiate harm against others, an equally strict duty of mutual aid will be favoured only by the poor and weak and not by the rich and powerful. Thus, if, as I suggest, our principles of justice represent a compromise between the rich and powerful on the one hand and the poor and weak on the other, that would explain why our morality contains a strict principle of non-injury and a somewhat weaker principle of mutual aid, the exact relative strengths of each depending on the relative bargaining positions of the rich and powerful versus the poor and weak. I want to consider in a moment whether such an explanation in terms of relative bargaining positions shows that there is no morally relevant difference between harming and not preventing harm. But before I get to that, let me mention a related example, the difference in the way we think we should behave towards animals and towards people. Although most of us feel that some ways of treating animals are wrong, most of us believe that the moral limits on behaviour towards animals are quite different from the moral limits on behaviour towards people. Most people see nothing wrong with the ways in which animals are kept as pets, raised as food, hunted for sport, and used for medical experiments, although they would think it wrong to treat people in this way. From a utilitarian point of view, there is little justification for this difference. Animals are sentient beings with their own lives to lead. Why should they be given such an inferior status as compared with people (P. Singer, 1973)? On the other hand, it is relatively easy to explain the difference in moral status of people and animals if we suppose this has its source in conventions we accept for mainly self-interested reasons. Our moral conventions favour people over animals because they are conventions arrived at by people, for people. The animals do not participate. If at a given time morality discriminates against some part of society, the affected people can try to put pressure on the others to change this part of morality. They can threaten to withhold their own participation in the moral conventions.

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This can lead to changes in the morality. But the animals cannot get together to put pressure on people in the same way. The convention theory of justice has no problem explaining why animals have a lower moral status than people. If there is a problem, it is the opposite one of explaining why animals have any status at all in our morality. What explains our moral disapproval of cruelty to animals, given that animals do not participate in our conventions? We can say, of course, that this is connected with our caring about animals, with our having some sympathy with them. But then the explanatory work is being done by the assumption about what people care about, not by the assumption that justice is conventional. If we had to explain moral conventions for dealing with people by invoking the assumption that people care about other people, then convention would not play as major a role in morality as I believe it does.

4.11 Explaining Concern for Others There is clearly some connection between morality and concern and respect for others. One possible view is that we are generically constructed so as to feel such concern and respect for others, and that makes morality possible. There is obviously something to this (discussed further in the final three essays in this volume); but I suggest that there is also a conventional basis to our moral concern and respect for other people. One develops concern and respect for others as part of accepting a convention, on the supposition that others are developing or have developed similar concern and respect. Such concern and respect can be developed through practice. One develops a habit of taking an interest in others. This is possible because taking an interest in something or someone is the kind of thing one can do. One watches a game on television and decides to root for one or another of the teams; one does this to make the game more interesting to watch; doing so structures one's perception of the game. Similarly, one takes an interest in a conversation at a party because that makes it less boring to stand there and listen. In playing a game with friends, one takes an interest in winning; otherwise one's friends will be mad. In the same way, I suggest, one takes an interest in the welfare of other people. This is something one is encouraged to do as a child and one develops the habit of doing so. Initially, you tend to feel concern and respect only for certain selected

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people, those who participate in the relevant conventions, which at first are the practices of your family and later are the practices of those you came into contact with. Some sort of ‘stimulus generalization’ may occur also. You have a habit of feeling concern and respect for certain people. There will be a tendency for this habit to apply to similar cases, so you may feel some concern and respect for outsiders, too. You may even come, through stimulus generalization. to be disposed to feel a certain concern for animals. So, it is possible to explain our feelings about animals by appeal to the theory that morality is conventional, without supposing a primitive, unexplained sympathy we have with animals.

4.11.1 Implications of This Sort of Explanation One possible reaction to this sort of explanation of our moral views in terms of bargaining positions and power relationships, is to think that the explanation actually undermines our views by showing that they are based on morally irrelevant considerations. Two different reasons ought to be given for this. First, it might be thought that true morality has some other source than convention, and that supposing our views have a conventional source conflicts with supposing their source is true morality. I will not consider this possibility, since I have already explained why I do not believe there is such an alternative source for true morality. Second, it might be thought there is something unjust about agreements whose outcome is affected by the differences in power relationships among the affected parties. It may not seem fair that the poor and weak should have to accept only limited help from the rich and powerful simply because of the bargaining strength of the rich and powerful. It may not seem fair that animals should be placed in an inferior moral status simply because they are not able to participate in the bargaining which leads to the relevant moral conventions. This is the worry I want to consider now. What is the source of these moral judgements about unfairness? If there is no a priori morality, these judgements must be based ultimately on values that are part of the conventional morality accepted by those who make the judgements. This suggests there is a tension or instability between our current moral views and any explanation of those views in terms of differences in bargaining position. This tension might be resolved by giving up that sort of explanation, but I see no other way to explain the moral distinction we make between harming and not helping, or the differences in treatment

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we feel are appropriate toward animals and people. Suppose, then, that we do not give up these explanations. How else might the tension be resolved? Someone might suggest it is part of our moral view that agreements are null and void if they are reached under circumstances where the affected parties have little or no bargaining power. They might suggest, furthermore, that the explanations I have offered are of that sort; that is, the explanations of the moral distinction we make between harming and not helping, and the difference in moral status of people and animals. It would follow that, according to our ordinary moral view, these aspects of that view are null and void. In fact, I do not think we would normally take even explicit agreements of this sort to be null and void; but suppose this were part of our moral view. What would our options be? One possibility would be to conclude that the relevant agreements are, indeed, null and void. That would presumably mean we had no moral reason to adhere to these agreements; for example, no reason to refrain from harming other people. I hope people would not reach this conclusion. The other possibility would be to give up the idea that such agreements are completely null and void, at least when they are basic moral agreements of this sort. One might go on, also, to give up the idea that there is something unfair about the agreement. Or one could retain one's view that there is some unfairness in such agreements, taking this to provide some reason to modify the results of the agreement so that they come to be more in accord with what might have emerged if the bargaining position of affected parties had been the same. Presumably, those with the superior bargaining position favour giving up the idea that the agreement is unfair, and those with the inferior bargaining position will favour retaining the idea that the agreement is unfair, taking this as a reason to make the outcome fairer. Does either side have the edge here? It might be said that those who conclude that the agreement is unfair have a bit of an edge, since they are simply drawing a consequence from the principles that have been accepted now by all in the relevant group. But the other side can say with equal justice that they too are simply drawing a consequence from principles accepted by all until now, since those principles have involved taking harming to be more seriously wrong than not helping, and have taken animals to have an inferior moral status to humans. When there is a tension or inconsistency in a set of accepted moral principles, given certain factual assumptions, conflicting positions can be derived. The resulting dispute can only be resolved when some new, consistent consensus is reached.

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4.12 Explicit Moral Bargaining I have suggested that our current principles of justice are the result of ongoing implicit bargaining and adjustment. What would happen if this view were widely accepted? What if moral bargaining became more explicit and people came to see self-interest as relevant to whether one accepts certain principles of justice in the same way it is relevant to whether one accepts a certain salary? It might be suggested that it would be terrible if the rich and powerful were to come to see self-interest as a legitimate moral consideration of this sort. The rich and powerful already tend to be too concerned to support efforts to attack egalitarian aspects of our current moral and political understanding, as embodied, for example, in progressive taxation. It might be feared that if the rich were to acquire a completely clear conscience about appeals to their own self-interest, they might, then, come to run roughshod over the poorer and weaker members of society with no moral restraint. A similar but opposite worry might be raised about the poor and weak. If they came to think appeals to self-interest were quite in order in moral thinking, they might come to see no moral reason to avoid organizing together to try to get all they can from those better off than they are. One might reply that such worries assume self-interest is the only motive. In fact, rich and poor will have other motives, including those derived from the moral values they have lived with for many years, which they are not going to abandon in a day. However, I am not sure this makes much difference. It is certainly true that self-interest is not the only consideration, as is shown by our moral disapproval of cruelty to animals. But it is also true that self-interest is a particularly strong and stable motivation when compared with other motives, as is shown by the inferior moral status we assign to animals. A better reply is that if it becomes generally believed that justice rests on bargaining in which self-interest plays a major role, then the bargaining between the rich and the powerful, on the one hand, and the poor and weak, on the other, will become more explicit. I see no reason to think the result will be much different from our current moral consensus, which is the result of implicit bargaining. It is already widely believed that self-interest plays a major role in the moral positions that other people adopt. Those who are not rich and powerful have not failed to notice the self-interested motives that can lead the rich and powerful to appeal to liberty and property rights. The rich and

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powerful have in turn not failed to notice the self-interested motives that can lead the poor and weak to emphasize equality. Each side is conscious of the self-interested reasons the other side has, while being less conscious of the way in which they themselves are motivated by self interest. There are advantages to making such self-interested motives explicit. Doing so would lead to greater clarity and honesty and less hypocrisy in moral argument. This would further values that are already part of our morality. It would also tend to diminish pointless taboos and superstitions and might reduce certain sorts of exploitation.

4.13 Moral Argument Moral argument often involves consideration of how previously accepted principles apply to new cases, as well as the way in which various moral judgements might be accommodated by appeal to newly stated principles. It also happens that new principles and new interpretations of old principles are put forward because they are seen to be in the selfinterest of the people putting them forward. This is often thought to be quite disreputable, but I am saying we ought to count it as a perfectly acceptable form of moral argument: explicit moral bargaining. Moral bargaining is always involved in moral argument because there is the ever-present possibility that those dissatisfied with the outcome will drop out of the moral consensus. To the extent that others have a reason to keep them from dropping out, those others have a reason to accept the suggested reinterpretation of the principles involved. Often what looks like a simple dispute as to the implications of previously accepted moral principles is really an instance of this sort of moral bargaining. Members of disadvantaged groups argue that considerations of fairness support certain conclusions, even if these considerations have not been previously understood as supporting those conclusions. Conservatives reject this sort of argument. I suggest that in such a case the disadvantaged people are usefully interpreted as expressing dissatisfaction with the current consensus, and are threatening to withdraw support unless this consensus is modified in certain ways. The conservatives are threatening not to go along with any such change, and are invoking worries about what it would be like to abandon any sort of moral consensus altogether. Of course, as I have emphasized all along, self-interest is not the only factor that can fuel such disputes. This emerges in the argument over

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abortion. Self-interest plays a part in that argument, namely the self-interest of those who see themselves as benefiting from women having the right to abortion. But prior principle is what is most important on the other side. Indeed, prior principle almost always plays an important role in a moral dispute, and not just as a peg on which to hang one's selfinterested claims. What a person has reason to do depends on that person's various desires, plans, intentions, and values. Some of these come from a person's acceptance of one or more moral understandings with others. But acceptance is not forever. A person can have reasons to stop accepting a given moral understanding, reasons that derive from these prior desires, etc. Your prior commitments can give you reasons to modify some of your prior commitments. These reasons can be purely internal to morality, but may also reflect considerations of self-interest if the morality you accept is getting in your way too much. Similarly, a person can have reason to try to change the general moral consensus in some group, because the person does not want simply to opt out of that group and yet thinks things would either be morally better from the point of view of prior moral standards as they have been understood all along, or better from the point of view of self-interest or the interest of someone the person cares about, if the change were made. All this applies whether these considerations are explicit or implicit.

4.14 Tolerance Finally, since the conventionalist theory of justice I am defending is a form of moral relativism and moral relativism is often thought to imply tolerance of other moralities, I want to consider briefly what the implications of explicit moral bargaining would be for tolerance and moral compromise. Consider the question of vegetarianism. Suppose it is agreed on all sides that morality is conventional in the way I have suggested. Moral vegetarians, then, cannot suppose that they have some sort of privileged insight into moral values, and must agree that their view represents values that they but not others accept. These values are, perhaps, accepted as an interpretation of more widely accepted moral conventions, an interpretation not universally accepted, however, but one which can be rejected without mistake of fact or reasoning. This should lead moral vegetarians to a certain tolerance of nonvegetarians.

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Exactly the same considerations apply to the case of abortion. Once it is agreed by anti-abortionists that their view does not represent the one true morality but arises from values that they but not others accept, perhaps as an interpretation of more widely accepted conventions, then it would seem they should be more tolerant of those who are not opposed to abortion. It should come to seem less appropriate to have laws against abortion, given the large numbers of people who are not opposed to abortion. This is not to say that this sort of relativism leads to tolerance of everything. Moral relativists need not be tolerant of harms committed by criminals who have not accepted conventional morality. There are strong self-interested reasons for us to include in our moral understanding the proviso that we can use force against those who harm others. There are not similarly strong, self-interested reasons for vegetarians to include in their moral understanding the condition that they can use force against those who raise animals for food. I do not mean to suggest self-interested reasons are the only reasons that might play a role, here. Moral vegetarians may value animal life very highly, and that can lead them to favour laws against cruelty to animals, against animal experimentation, against certain methods of treating livestock, and so forth. But moral vegetarians must as a practical matter also reach some understanding with the rest of us; and that is where the pressure of tolerance comes from. On the other hand, in a society in which all but a very few people were moral vegetarians, there would be little or no reason for them to tolerate meat-eating. The question of tolerance of abortions is harder to judge. On the one hand, some sentiment against abortions is derived from certain religious views. It is not easy to say how much opposition to abortion would survive acceptance of moral conventionalism. Much opposition might survive. If there were enough, it might be thought unnecessary to reach a compromise with those who favour allowing abortions. Abortionists might continue to accept principles permitting the use of force to prevent abortions. But as a practical matter, it is hard to believe that this can prevail in the actual situation because of the many people who perceive their own self-interest to lie on the other side. They cannot at this point agree to permitting this use of force. Eventually, some sort of compromise must be reached, one mostly favouring the pro-abortion side, since self-interest plays no direct role on the other side.

5 Is There a Single True Morality? 5.1 Confession I have always been a moral relativist. As far back as I can remember thinking about it, it has always seemed to me obvious that the dictates of morality arise from some sort of convention or understanding among people, that different people arrive at different understandings, and that there are no basic moral demands that apply to everyone. For many years this seemed so obvious to me that I assumed it was everyone's instinctive view, at least everyone who gave the matter any thought. When I first studied philosophical ethics, I was not disabused of this opinion. The main issue at the time seemed to be to determine exactly what form of ‘noncognitivism’ was correct. (According to noncognitivism, moral judgements do not function to describe a moral reality, but do something else—express feelings, prescribe a course of action, and so forth.) It is true that many of the philosophers I studied seemed for some reason to want to avoid calling themselves ‘relativists’. This was usually accomplished by defining moral relativism to be an obviously inconsistent position (M. Singer, 1961; Williams, 1972); for example, the view both that there are no universal moral truths and also that everyone ought to follow the dictates of his or her group, where this last claim is taken to be a universal moral truth. I wasn't sure what this verbal manœuvre was supposed to accomplish. Why would anyone want to give such a definition of moral relativism? Moral relativism was obviously correct, and the philosophers I was studying seemed all to be moral relativists even if they did not want to describe themselves in that way. Later I was distressed to hear from various people teaching ethics that students in their classes tended to proclaim themselves moral relativists until they had been shown how confused they were about ethics. I suspected that the confusions were not confusions of the students, but were confusions of their teachers, due perhaps to a faulty definition of moral relativism. The obvious solution was to show that moral relativism can be

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consistently defined as a plausible view and that standard objections to moral relativism are mistaken. So, I eventually wrote and published an essay about this (the original version of Essay 1, above), thinking it would clear things up and end worries about moral relativism. I was surprised to discover that this did not happen. I was also startled to find that many students in my own ethics courses resisted my attempt to make clear what I thought they instinctively believed. After some study I concluded that in fact only some of the students in my courses were instinctive moral relativists; a significant number of them were instinctive absolutists. I had known, of course, that there were philosophers and friends of mine who were not moral relativists. For a long time I attributed this to their perversity and love of the bizarre, and attached no significance to it. But then I discovered that some of them thought moral relativism was the perverse view, a kind of philosophical folly like scepticism about other minds or the external world (for example, Nagel, 1980). I was stunned! How could they think that, when they knew so many moral relativists (like me) and no epistemological sceptics (at least none who took such scepticism seriously in ordinary life)? It then occurred to me to wonder how I could think of moral absolutism as such a perverse view, when I knew so many moral absolutists.

5.2 The Issue It turns out, to my surprise, that the question whether there is a single true morality is an unresolved issue in moral philosophy. On one side are relativists, sceptics, nihilists, and noncognitivists. On the other side are those who believe in absolute values and a moral law that applies to everyone. Strangely, only a few people seem to be undecided. Almost everyone seems to be firmly on one side or the other, and almost everyone seems to think his or her side is obviously right, the other side representing a kind of ridiculous folly. This is strange, since everyone knows, or ought to know, that many intelligent people are on each side of this issue.

5.2.1 Two Approaches In this essay I want to suggest that part of the explanation for this mutual incomprehension is that there are two different ways to do moral philosophy. If one approach is taken, moral relativism, noncognitivism, or

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scepticism may seem obviously correct and moral absolutism may seem foolish. If the other approach is taken, absolutism may seem clearly right and scepticism, relativism, and noncognitivism may seem foolish. The difference in approaches is, to put it crudely, a difference in attitude toward science. One side says we must concentrate on finding the place of value and obligation in the world of facts as revealed by science. The other side says we must ignore that problem and concentrate on ethics proper. Both sides agree that we must begin at the beginning with our initial beliefs, moral and nonmoral, and consider possible modifications that will make these beliefs more coherent with each other and with plausible generalizations and other explanatory principles. Eventually, we hope to arrive at a ‘reflective equilibrium’ (Rawls, 1971) when no further modifications seem called for, at least for the time being. The process will leave some issues unresolved; in particular, we may find ourselves with no account of the place that value and obligation have in the world of facts. This will not dismay someone who is willing to leave that question unanswered. But it will be disturbing to someone who, on the way to reflective equilibrium, has come to think that the basic issue in moral philosophy is precisely how value and obligation fit into the scientific conception of the world. I will use the term ‘naturalism’ for an approach to ethics that is in this way dominated by a concern with the place of values in the natural world. I will call any approach that is not so dominated an instance of ‘autonomous ethics’, because such an approach allows us to pursue ethics internally. Autonomous ethics allows that science is relevant to ethics in as much as ethical assessment depends on the facts of the case. But unlike naturalism, autonomous ethics does not take the main question of philosophical ethics to be the naturalistic status of values and obligations.

5.2.2 Naturalism I hope the terms ‘naturalism’ and ‘autonomous ethics’ are not misleading. The term ‘naturalism’ is sometimes reserved for the thesis that moral judgements can be analysed into or reduced to factual statements of a sort clearly compatible with the scientific world view. I am using the term ‘naturalism’ more broadly. Naturalism in this sense does not have to lead to naturalistic reduction, although that is one possibility. Another possibility is that there is no way in which ethics could fit into the scientific conception of the world. In that case, naturalism leads to moral nihilism, as in Mackie (1977). Mackie supposes that ethics requires absolute values.

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Such values would have the property that anyone aware of their existence must necessarily be motivated to act morally. Because our scientific conception of the world has no place for entities of this sort, and because there is no way in which we could become aware of such entities, Mackie concludes that ethics must be rejected as resting on a false presupposition. That is a version of naturalism as I am using the term. Naturalism can also lead one to a noncognitive analysis of moral judgements. In this view, moral judgements do not function to describe the world, but to do something else—to express one's attitudes for and against things, as Stevenson (1963a) argues—or to recommend one or another course of action or general policy, as Hare (1952, 1963) proposes. Or a naturalist may decide that moral judgements do make factual claims that fit in with the claims of science. This can be illustrated by some sort of naturalistic reduction. One example would be an analysis that takes moral claims to be claims about the reactions of a hypothetical impartial observer as in Hume (1739) or Firth (1952). More complex positions are possible. Mackie (1977) argues in chapter 1 that ethics rests on a false presupposition, but then he goes on in later chapters to discuss particular moral issues. It is almost as if he had first demonstrated that God does not exist and had then gone on to consider whether He is wise and loving. Presumably, Mackie believes that ethics as normally conceived must be or can be replaced with something else. But he does not indicate exactly what sort of replacement he has in mind—whether it is an institution of some sort, for example. Nor does he say how moral claims made within this replacement fit in with the claims of science. I suspect he would accept some sort of noncognitivist account of the judgements that are to replace the old moral judgements. It is possible to be both a naturalist and an absolutist, although this is not very common. Firth (1952) defends an absolutist version of the ideal observer theory and Hare (1963) defends an absolutist version of noncognitivism. But I believe that the most plausible versions of naturalism involve a moral relativism that says different agents are subject to different basic moral requirements depending on the moral conventions in which they participate.

5.2.3 Autonomous Ethics Naturalism tends toward relativism. What I am calling autonomous ethics, on the other hand, can have a very different tendency. In this approach, science is relevant, since our moral judgements depend on what

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we take the facts to be; but we attach no special importance to saying how obligations and values can be part of the world revealed by science. Rather, we do ethics internally. We begin with our initial moral beliefs and search for general principles. Our initial opinions can be changed to some extent so as to come into agreement with appealing general principles and our beliefs about the facts, but an important aspect of the appeal of such principles will be the way in which they account for what we already accept. The autonomous approach normally (but not always) involves an initial assumption of moral absolutism. In this context, absolutism is of course not the thesis that there are simple moral principles that hold absolutely without exceptions. It is rather the thesis that there are basic moral demands that apply to all moral agents. Autonomous ethics tends to retain that absolutist thesis. It may also involve some sort of intuitionism, claiming that each of us has immediate insight into the truths of certain moral principles. It sometimes leads to a fairly conservative morality, not much different from one's initial starting point. That is not surprising, given the privileged position assigned to our initial moral beliefs. But let me stress that conservatism is not inevitable, and autonomous ethics can and often does lead to more radical moralities, too. It leads some philosophers to a radical utilitarianism. It leads Rawls (1971) to principles of social justice that appear to be considerably more egalitarian than those most people accept. Nozick (1974), using the same general approach, comes out at a very different place, in which he ends up denying that any sort of egalitarian redistribution by governments is ever morally justified. (However, the moral theory in Nozick, 1981, as contrasted with the political theory in Nozick, 1974, insists on the moral requirement of helping others.) Indeed, there are many different ways in which ethics can be pursued as an autonomous discipline with its own principles that are not reducible to the principles of any science. I can illustrate this variety by mentioning a few of the many other contemporary philosophers who accept some form of autonomous ethics: Baier (1958), Darwall (1983), Donagan (1977), Frankena (1976a), Fried (1978), Gewirth (1978), Grice (1967), Nagel (1970, 1980), and Richards (1971). Each of these philosophers has a somewhat different approach, although all are absolutists who rely on some form of autonomous ethics. I should say that it is possible to believe in autonomous ethics without being an absolutist. One might be impressed by the variety of views held by those who accept autonomous ethics and so be led to allow for relativism while continuing to accept the method of autonomous ethics,

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believing that naturalism must be rejected. But the tendency of autonomism in ethics is toward absolutism. In what follows I will restrict my discussion to absolutist versions of autonomous ethics and to relativistic versions of naturalism.

5.2.4 Teachers of Ethics I might also mention that ethics pursued internally, as in autonomous ethics, is more interesting to many people than ethics as pursued by naturalism. That is because autonomous ethics allows one to spend more of one's time thinking about interesting, complicated moral puzzles than naturalistic ethics does, and many people find moral puzzles more interesting than ‘abstract’ questions about the objectivity of value and its place in nature. Philosophers attracted by naturalism tend not to find ethics as interesting a subject as do philosophers attracted by autonomous ethics. So, relativists tend to be less interested in ethics than absolutists. For example, logicians, philosophers of science, and philosophers of mathematics, who tend toward naturalism, are usually not moral absolutists and are not very interested in ethics as a philosophical subject. Philosophers who are relatively interested in ethics tend to be those who favour autonomous ethics and therefore tend to be absolutists. This is why teachers of ethics tend, more than their students, to be absolutists. It is not merely, as they sometimes suppose, that ethics teachers have seen through confusions that affect their students. A more important factor is that relativists tend not to become teachers of ethics. (I am an exception!)

5.3 Why Do We Believe What We Believe? Autonomous ethics and naturalism represent very different attitudes towards the relation between science and ethics. Consider, for example, the question of what explains our believing what we in fact believe. Naturalists see an important difference between our factual beliefs and our moral beliefs. Our ordinary factual beliefs provide us with evidence that there is an independent world of objects, because our having those beliefs cannot be plausibly explained without assuming we interact with an independent world of objects external to ourselves, objects we perceive and manipulate. But our having the moral beliefs we do can be explained entirely in terms of our upbringing and our psychology, without any appeal to an independent realm of values and obligations. So our moral

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beliefs do not provide us with evidence for such an independent realm of values and obligations, and we must choose between scepticism, noncognitivism, and relativism (Harman, 1977: ch. 1). Autonomists disagree with this. They claim we often believe that something is good or right or obligatory in part because it is good or right or obligatory. They accuse naturalists of begging the question. When naturalists say that a belief cannot be explained by virtue of something's being right, unless that thing's being right consists in some psychological or sociological fact, they simply assume that all explanatory factors are part of the world revealed by science. But this is the point at issue. Autonomists argue that it is more obvious that we sometimes recognize what is right than that naturalism is correct. True, we may be unable to say how a given ‘moral fact’ and someone's recognition of it fit into the world of facts as revealed by science. But there are always unanswered questions. To jump from our current inability to answer this question to scepticism, relativism, or noncognitivism is to make a more drastic move than this puzzle warrants, from the point of view of autonomous ethics.

5.3.1 Explanation and Reduction The naturalist seeks to locate the place of value, justice, right, and wrong, and so forth in the world in a way that makes clear how they might explain what we take them to explain. A naturalist cannot understand how value, justice, right, and wrong might figure in explanations without having some sense of their ‘location’ in the world. We can say that this involves ‘naturalistic reduction’, but it need not involve reductive definitions of a serious sort. Indeed, reduction rarely (if ever) involves serious reductive definitions. We identify tables with clusters of atoms in a way that allows us to understand how tables can hold up the things they hold up without having to suppose the word ‘table’ is definable using only the concepts of physics. Similarly, we identify colours with dispositional properties of objects, namely, their tendency to look in certain ways to certain sorts of observers in certain conditions, without having to suppose there is a satisfactory definition in these terms. Similarly for temperatures, genes, and so on. What a naturalist wants is to be able to locate value, justice, right, wrong, and so forth in the world in the way that tables, colours, genes, temperatures, and so on can be located in the world. What is at issue here is understanding how moral facts might explain something, how the badness of someone's character might explain why that person acts in a certain way, to take an example from Sturgeon

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(1985). It is not sufficient that one be prepared to accept the counterfactual judgement that the person would not have acted in that way if the person had not had a bad character, if one does not see how the badness of the person's character could have such an effect. A naturalist believes one can see that only by locating badness of character in aspects of the world that one sees can have the relevant effect. Notice that a naturalist, as I am here using the term, is not just someone who supposes that all aspects of the world have a naturalistic location in this way, but rather someone who takes it to be of overriding importance in doing moral philosophy actually to attempt to locate moral properties. My claim is that, when one takes this attempt seriously, one will tend to become sceptical or relativistic. Sturgeon is not a naturalist in my sense, despite his insistence that he takes moral facts to be natural facts.

5.4 Moral Absolutism Dened I now want to be more specific about what is to count as moral absolutism. Various things might be meant by the claim that there are absolute values and one true morality. Moral absolutists in one sense might not be moral absolutists in other senses. We must be careful not to mix up real issues with purely verbal issues. So let me stipulate that I will take moral absolutism to be a view about the moral reasons people have to do things and to want or hope for things. I will understand a belief about absolute values to be a belief that there are things that everyone has a reason to hope or wish for. To say that there is a moral law that ‘applies to everyone’ is, I hereby stipulate, to say that everyone has sufficient reasons to follow that law. It is true that many philosophers pursue something that resembles autonomous ethics when they ask what principles an ‘ideal’ moral code of one or another sort would have, quite apart from the question whether people now have any reason to follow that code. Depending on what sort of idealization is being considered, there may or may not be a unique ideal code of that sort. But I am not going to count as a form of moral absolutism the claim that there is a unique ideal moral code of such and such a type. Relativists and absolutists in my sense might very well agree about this claim without that having any effect at all on what I take to be the basic issue that separates them. A claim about ideal codes has no immediate relevance to questions about what reasons people actually have to hope for certain things or to do certain things.

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Similarly, I am not going to count as a form of moral absolutism the claim that there is one true morality that applies to everyone in that everyone ought to follow it, if this is not taken to imply that everyone has a sufficient reason to follow it. I am not sure what ‘ought’ is supposed to mean if it is disconnected in this way from reasons to do things. If what is meant is that it ought to be the case that everyone followed the one true morality—in other words, that it would be a good thing if they did—then this is a version of the view that there is a unique ideal moral code. I am not sure what else might be meant, although a great deal more could be said here (see Essay 4). Rather than try to say it, however, I simply stipulate that this sort of claim is not a version of what I am counting as moral absolutism. I should note that, of the contemporary philosophers I have identified as absolutists, Baier, Darwall, Donagan, Frankena, Gewirth, Grice, Nagel, and Richards clearly advocate moral absolutism in this sense. They all think that there are basic moral demands that in some sense every competent adult has reasons to adhere to. I believe the others I mentioned—namely, Rawls, Nozick, and Fried—also agree with this, although they do not explicitly say so in the works I have cited.

5.5 Does a Single Moral Law Apply to Everyone? Consider the issue between absolutism and relativism concerning reasons people have for doing things. According to moral absolutism about this, there is a single moral law that applies to everyone; in other words, there are moral demands that everyone has sufficient reasons to follow, and these demands are the source of all moral reasons. Moral relativism denies that there are universal basic moral demands, and says different people are subject to different basic moral demands depending on the social customs, practices, conventions, values, and principles that they accept. For example, a moral absolutist might suppose there is a basic moral prohibition on causing harm or injury to other people. This prohibition is in one sense not absolute, since it can be overridden by more compelling considerations and since it allows exceptions in order to punish criminals, for instance. But the prohibition is supposed to be universal in the sense that it applies to absolutely all agents and not just to those who happen to participate in certain conventions. The absolutist claims that absolutely everyone has sufficient reasons to observe this prohibition and to act as it and other basic moral requirements dictate.

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A moral relativist denies this, and claims that many people have no reasons to observe this prohibition. Many people participate in moralities that sharply distinguish insiders and outsiders and do not prohibit harm or injury to outsiders, except perhaps as this is likely to lead to retaliation against insiders. A person participating in such a morality has no reason to avoid harm or injury to outsiders, according to the relativist, and so the general prohibition does not apply to that person. The person may be a member of some primitive tribal group, but he or she need not be. He or she might also be part of contemporary society, a successful professional criminal who recognizes various obligations to other members of a criminal organization but not to those on the outside. According to the moral relativist, the successful criminal may well have no reason at all not to harm his or her victims.

5.5.1 An Argument for Relativism Let us concentrate on this case. The moral absolutist says the demands of the one true morality apply as much to this successful criminal as to anyone else, so this criminal does have a reason not to harm a given victim. The relativist denies the criminal has any such reason, and so denies the relevant moral demand is a universal demand that applies to everyone. Here naturalism tends to support relativism in the following way. Consider what it is for someone to have a sufficient reason to do something. Naturalism requires that this should be explained in terms congenial to science. We cannot simply treat this as irreducibly normative, saying, for example, that someone has a sufficient reason to do something if and only if he or she ought to do it. Now, presumably, someone has a sufficient reason to do something if and only if there is warranted reasoning that person could do that would lead him or her to decide to do that thing. A naturalist will suppose that a person with a sufficient reason to do something might fail to reason in this way to such a decision only because of some sort of empirically discoverable failure. Such a failure might be inattention, lack of time, failure to consider or appreciate certain arguments, ignorance of certain available evidence, an error in reasoning, some sort of irrationality or unreasonableness, or weakness of will. If the person does not intend to do something and that is not because he or she has failed in some such empirically discoverable way to reason to a decision to do that thing, then according to the naturalist the person cannot have a sufficient reason to do that thing. This is the first premise in a naturalistic argument in support of the relativist.

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The other premise is that there are people, such as certain professional criminals, who do not act in accordance with the alleged requirement not to harm or injure others, where this is not due to any these failings. The argument for this is simply that there clearly are people who do not adhere to the requirement in question and who do not seem to have failed in any of the ways mentioned. So, in the absence of special theoretical reasons, for example, deriving from psychology, to think these people must have failed in one of the specified ways, we can conclude they have not done so. From these two premises it follows that there are people who do not have sufficient reasons, and therefore do not have sufficient moral reasons, to adhere to the general prohibition against harming or injuring others. In particular, a successful criminal may not have a sufficient reason not to harm his or her victims. The moral prohibition against harming others may simply fail to apply to such a person. It may fail to apply in the relevant sense, which is of course not to say that the principle makes an explicit exception for criminals, allowing them but not others to injure and harm people without restraint. Rather, the principle may fail to apply in the sense that the criminal in question may fail to have sufficient reason to act in accordance with the principle.

5.5.2 An Absolutist Reply Moral absolutism must reject this argument. It can do so by invoking autonomous ethics at the place at which moral relativism invokes naturalism. Autonomous ethics does not suppose that we must give some sort of naturalistic account of having a sufficient reason to do something. Nor does it suppose that only a science like psychology can discover the conditions under which someone has failed to reason in a certain way because of inattention, irrationality, unreasonableness, or any of the other causes of failure mentioned in the relativistic argument. Autonomous ethics approaches this issue in the following way. We begin with certain beliefs. Presumably these imply that everyone has a sufficient reason to observe the prohibition against harm to others, including the successful criminal who does not participate in or accept any practice of observing this general prohibition. At the start we therefore believe that the criminal does have sufficient reason not to harm his or her victims. Following autonomous ethics, then, we should continue to believe this unless such continued belief conflicts with generalizations or other theoretical principles internal to ethics that we find attractive because they do a better job at making sense of most of the things we originally believe.

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Taking this approach, the absolutist must claim that the relativistic argument does not provide sufficient reason to abandon our original absolutism. It is more plausible, according to the absolutist, that at least one of the premises of the relativistic argument is false, than that its conclusion is true.

5.5.3 Assessing the First Premise The first premise of the relativistic argument is that for someone to have a sufficient reason to do something, there must be warranted reasoning available to that person that leads to a decision to do that thing. So, if the person fails to intend to do that thing, this must be because of inattention, lack of time, failure to consider or appreciate certain arguments, ignorance of relevant evidence, an error in reasoning, irrationality, unreasonableness, or weakness of will. The absolutist might object that this is oversimplified. If a person with sufficient reason to do something does not do it, then something has gone wrong. It might be one of the things the relativist mentions, but it might be something else as well. There might just be something wrong with the person in question. That person might be immoral. The failure might simply be a failure not to care enough about other people. A person ought to care about others and there is something wrong with a person who does not care, even if that person is not inattentive, ignorant, rushed, or defective in any other of the particular ways the relativist mentions. So, even if some people fail to observe the prohibition against harming others not because of inattention, lack of time, and so forth, but simply because of lack of concern and respect for others, such people still do have sufficient reason not to harm others. (Thomas M. Scanlon suggested this response on behalf of absolutism to me.) This response to the relativistic argument is a response within autonomous ethics. It does not explain having a sufficient reason to do something in terms that are acceptably factual from a naturalistic perspective. It also appeals to the notion of something's being wrong with someone, where what might be wrong is simply that the person is immoral. It is like saying one has a sufficient reason to do something if and only if one ought to do it, or if and only if it would be wrong not to do it. The relativist claims that the only plausible accounts of these normative notions are relativistic ones. There is no prohibition on harm to outsiders, in the criminals' morality. There is such a prohibition only in some other morality. In that other morality, something is wrong with a

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person who has no compunction about injuring someone else; but nothing is wrong with such a person with respect to the criminal morality, as long as those injured are outsiders. But how can it be a sufficient reason for the criminal not to harm his or her victims that this is prohibited by somebody else's morality? How can its being bad, immoral, or wrong in this other morality not to care about and respect others give the criminal, who does not accept that morality, a sufficient reason to do anything? The absolutist responds that failure to respect others is not just wrong according to some morality the criminal does not accept; it is also wrong, period. Something is really wrong with lack of respect and concern for others. It is not just wrong in relation to one or another morality. Of course, the relativist will not be satisfied with this answer and, appealing to naturalism, will ask what it is for something to be wrong in this way. The absolutist supposes that the failure to care about and respect others does involve something the absolutist points to by saying this failure is wrong. But what is this thing that is true of such a failure to care and that can give the criminal a sufficient reason not to harm and injure others? The relativist can see no aspect of such a failure that could provide such a reason. This is because the relativist, as a naturalist, considers only aspects of the failure that are clearly compatible with a scientific world view. The relativist disregards putative aspects that can be specified only in normative terms. But the absolutist, as an autonomist, can specify the relevant aspect of such a failure to care about others: it is bad, immoral, wrong not to care. The criminal ought to have this concern and respect and so ought not to harm and injure others, and therefore has a sufficient reason not to harm and injure them.

5.5.4 Assessing the Second Premise We have been discussing an argument for relativism concerning moral reasons. We have seen that naturalism supports the first premise of this argument and that autonomous ethics allows the rejection of this premise. The same thing is true of the second premise, which says that there are people, such as the successful criminal, who do not observe the alleged requirement not to harm or injure others, and this is not due to inattention, failure to consider or appreciate certain arguments, ignorance of relevant evidence, errors in reasoning, irrationality, unreasonableness, or weakness of will. Naturalism supports this, because there do seem to be such people, and no scientifically acceptable grounds exist for thinking this is an illusion. On the other hand, autonomous ethics allows other

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grounds, not reducible to scientific grounds, for thinking this is an illusion. In autonomous ethics we begin by supposing that we recognize the wrongness of harming others, where this is to recognize a sufficient reason not to harm others. If that is something we recognize, then it must be there to be recognized, so the successful criminal in question must be failing to recognize and appreciate something that is there. The absolutist might argue that the criminal must be irrational, or at least unreasonable. Seeing that a proposed course of action will probably cause serious injury to some outsider, the criminal does not treat this as a reason not to undertake that course of action. This must be irrational or unreasonable, because such a consideration simply is such a reason and indeed is an obvious reason, a basic reason, not one that has to be derived in some complex way through arcane reasoning. But then it must be irrational, or at least unreasonable, for the criminal not to care sufficiently about others. The criminal's lack of concern for others is what is responsible for the criminal's not taking the likelihood of harm to an outsider to be a reason against a proposed course of action. This is one way an absolutist might argue. The relativist's reply to such an argument is that, on any plausible characterization of reasonableness and unreasonableness (or rationality and irrationality) as notions that can be part of the scientific conception of the world, the absolutist's claim is just false. Someone can be completely rational without feeling concern and respect for outsiders. But, of course, this reply appeals to naturalism. The absolutist who rejects naturalism in favour of autonomous ethics relies on an unreduced normative characterization of rationality and irrationality (or reasonableness and unreasonableness). Now the argument continues as before. The relativist argues that, if rationality and irrationality (or reasonableness and unreasonableness) are conceived normatively, they become relative notions. What one morality counts as irrational or unreasonable, another does not. The criminal is not irrational or unreasonable in relation to criminal morality, but only in relation to a morality the criminal rejects. But the fact that it is irrational or unreasonable in relation to this other morality not to have concern and respect for others, does not give the criminal who rejects that morality any reason to avoid harming or injuring others. The absolutist replies that relative irrationality or unreasonableness is not what is in question. The criminal is irrational, or at least unreasonable, period; not just irrational or unreasonable in relation to a morality he or she does accept. Since it is irrational or unreasonable for anyone not to care sufficiently about others,

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everyone has a sufficient reason not to injure others. This is so, whether he or she recognizes this reason or, through irrationality or unreasonableness, does not recognize it. The naturalist is unconvinced by this because the naturalist can find no aspect of the criminal the absolutist might be referring to in saying the criminal is ‘irrational’ or ‘unreasonable’, if this aspect is to give the criminal any reason to care about others. This, of course, is because the naturalist is considering only naturalistic aspects of the criminal, whereas the absolutist, as an autonomist, is thinking about an unreduced normative aspect, something the naturalist cannot appeal to. So, as was true of the first premise of the relativistic argument about reasons, the second premise depends on an assumption of naturalism. By appealing to autonomous ethics, an absolutist can reject this premise. An absolutist may in fact actually accept one or the other of the premises of the relativistic argument (although, of course, not both). A given absolutist might reject either the first premise, or the second, or both premises. An absolutist might even be undecided, holding merely that one or the other premise must be rejected, without saying which. There is nothing wrong with being undecided about this. Reflective equilibrium leaves many issues unresolved.

5.6 Are There Absolute Moral Values? The situation is similar in the theory of value. Naturalism tends to support the conclusion that all value is relative and that something is always good for one or another person or group of people or in relation to a specified set of purposes or interests or aims. Autonomous ethics allows also for absolute values, things that are good, period, and not just good for someone or some group or for some purpose. The issue here concerns the goodness or value of a possible state of affairs, not the goodness or value of something as a thing of a given sort. The issue is not what it is for something to be a good thing of a kind, a good knife, a good watch, a good backswing, a good apple, a good farmer, a good poem. The issue is rather what it is for an event or situation to be a good thing; what is it, for example, to be a good thing that it is raining or that Egypt and Israel signed a peace treaty. It is uncontroversial that this sort of goodness is sometimes relational. A situation is good for someone or some group of people, good from a certain point of view, in relation to certain purposes or interests. That it is

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raining is a good thing for the farmer, but not for the vacationer. That Egypt and Israel signed a peace treaty might be good from their point of view, but not from the point of view of the PLO. Given a fixed point of reference, we can evaluate states of affairs as better or worse. The value of a state of affairs in relation to that reference point represents the degree to which someone with the relevant purposes and interests has a reason to try to bring about, or want, or at least hope for that state of affairs. Now, it can be argued that there is also a kind of absolute value. (However, one can be a moral absolutist without believing in absolute values. Thomson, 1997, is an example.) The claim is that states of affairs can be good or bad, period, and not merely good or bad for someone or in relation to given purposes or interests. On hearing of pointless painful experiments on laboratory animals, for example, one immediately reacts with the thought that this is bad and it would be good to eliminate such practices. Clearly, one does not simply mean that these tortures are bad for the animals involved and that these animals would benefit if such experiments were ended. A heartless experimenter might agree that what he does is bad for the animals without having to agree that it would be a good thing to eliminate this sort of experimentation. Similarly, it seems intelligible to suppose that it would be better if there were no inequalities of wealth and income in the world even though this would not be better for everyone, not for those who are now relatively wealthy, for instance. And this seems to say more, for example, than that the average person would be better off if there were no such inequalities, since an elitist might agree with that but not agree that the envisioned state of affairs would be better, period, than our present situation. Again, we can consider which of various population policies would lead to the best resulting state of affairs even though these policies would result in different populations, so that we cannot be simply considering the interests and purposes of some fixed group. It may seem, then, that we can consider the absolute value of a possible state of affairs.

5.6.1 Scepticism About Absolute Values The relative value of a possible state of affairs in relation to given purposes and interests is a measure of the extent to which someone with those purposes and interests has a reason to try to bring about, or want, or hope for that state of affairs. The absolute value of a possible state of affairs is a measure of the extent to which anyone, apart from having a personal stake in the matter, has a reason to try to bring about, or want, or hope for that

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state of affairs. Naturalism leads to scepticism at this point. How could we ever be aware of absolute values? How could we ever know that everyone has a reason to want a certain possible state of affairs? Further reflection along naturalistic lines suggests that apparent absolute values are often illusory projections of one's personal values onto the world. Sometimes this sort of projection yields plausible results, but usually it does not. To begin with the most plausible sort of case: in hearing about the pain involved in animal experimentation, our sympathies are immediately and vividly engaged. We immediately side with the animals against the experimenters. In saying, ‘That is awful!’ we are not just saying, ‘That is awful for the animals,’ because our remark expresses our sympathetic identification with the point of view of the animals. We do not merely state a fact; we express our feelings and we expect an awareness of this state of affairs to call forth the same feelings of dismay in everyone. This expectation seems reasonable enough in this case, because it may well be, as Brandt (1976) argues, that everyone has a sympathetic reaction to suffering. But plausibility vanishes as soon as the case becomes even a little complex. Suppose the animal experiments are not pointless. Suppose they are an essential part of a kind of medical research that promises to alleviate a certain amount of human suffering. Alternatively, suppose that, although the experiments promise no practical benefit of this sort, they are relevant to a theoretical issue in psychology. Someone may still feel that it is bad that the experiments should occur and that it would be good if they were not done, the gain not being worth the cost. Again, this is not just to say that the experiments are bad for the animals, something to which everyone would agree. The remark expresses overall disapproval of the experiments, with the expectation that others will also disapprove, at least if they consider the issue in an impartial way. The trouble is that people react differently to these cases. Consider the question whether it is good or bad to experiment painfully on animals in order to resolve certain theoretical issues in psychology. The extent to which this is (absolutely) good is the extent to which everyone (apart from any personal stake in the matter) has a reason to try to bring it about that such experiments are done, or to want them to be done, or hope that they are done. The extent to which this is (absolutely) bad is the extent to which everyone (apart from any personal stake) has a reason to try to end the experiments, or want them to end, or hope they end. But naturalism suggests that there is no unique answer here. What a person has a reason to want will depend on the relative value he or she

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attaches to animal suffering, to using animals as means, and to theoretical progress in psychology. Different people can attach different values to these things without having overlooked something, and without being irrational or unreasonable. So it seems that some people will have reason to be in favour of the experiments and others will have reason to be opposed to the experiments, where this is determined by the personal values of those people. If we suppose that our answer is the right answer, we are merely projecting our own values onto the world.

5.6.2 The Issue Joined Of course, autonomous ethics sees nothing wrong with projecting our own values onto the world, holding that such projection is exactly what is needed, at least at the beginning. We begin with our initial valuations and modify them only in the interests of theoretical simplicity. If we start out believing in absolute values, we should continue believing this until forced to believe otherwise. Clearly the controversy over absolute values parallels the controversy about reasons to do things. The argument against absolute values has the same structure as the relativistic argument about reasons to do things. Its first premise is that a person has a reason to want, hope for, or try to bring about a particular state of affairs, only to the extent that he or she would be irrational or unreasonable not to want that state of affairs, unless he or she was unaware of some relevant consideration, was confused, or had some other specified defect. Its second premise is that, except for the simplest cases, a person can fail to want a given state of affairs without being irrational or unreasonable or ignorant or whatever. The conclusion is that, except possibly for simple cases where, for example, the only thing relevant is that a creature suffers, there are no reasons everyone has to want or hope for or try to bring about a given state of affairs. So there are no nontrivial absolute values. As before, the two premises are defended in each case by an appeal to naturalism: We must give a naturalistic account of reasons and we must give empirical grounds for supposing someone to be irrational or unreasonable. The absolutist rejects the argument as before by invoking autonomous ethics, perhaps by rejecting the naturalistic account of reasons, perhaps by rejecting the requirement that scientific grounds must be given for a judgement of irrationality or unreasonableness, possibly remaining undecided between these alternatives.

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5.7 Naturalism Versus Autonomous Ethics So the issue between relativism and absolutism comes down to the dispute between naturalism and autonomous ethics. Which is the best approach in moral philosophy? Should we concentrate on the place of values and reasons in the world of scientific fact, as naturalism recommends? Or should we start with our initial moral beliefs and look for general principles and moral theories that will eventually yield a reflective equilibrium, not putting too much weight on the question of the place of value in the world of facts?

5.7.1 Religious Beliefs In thinking of the issue between naturalism and autonomous ethics, it is useful to consider analogous issues that arise in other areas. Consider religious beliefs. Our scientific conception of the world has no place for gods, angels, demons, or devils. Naturalists hold that there is no empirical evidence for the existence of such beings, nor for any sort of divine intervention in human history. Naturalists say that people's religious beliefs can be explained in terms of their upbringing and psychology without any supernatural assumptions, so these beliefs provide no evidence whatsoever for the truth of religious claims. Naturalists therefore incline toward scepticism and atheism, although naturalism might also lead to a kind of religious noncognitivism holding that religious language makes no factual claims about a supernatural realm but has a different function, for example, in religious ritual. Another approach to religion is for a believer to start with his or her initial religious beliefs, including beliefs in the authority of certain writings, and then to develop general principles and theories that would accommodate these beliefs, allowing modifications in the interest of more plausible general principles. This will continue until no further modifications seem useful in improving the organization and coherence of that person's views. Inevitably, many questions will remain unanswered, and these may include issues concerning the relation between that person's religious views and his or her scientific views, for example, as regards creation. But this is not a serious worry for autonomous religion, which will say this shows merely that science is not everything, or at least that there are things we do not know and perhaps never will understand. Naturalists say there is no reason to accept religious claims, because the

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fact that people have the religious beliefs they have can be explained without any supernatural assumptions. Religious autonomists say there is reason to accept religious claims, at least for someone who begins with religious beliefs, since the process of generalization, systematization, and theory construction internal to religion will give that person no reason to abandon more than a few, if any, of those religious beliefs. Furthermore, certain supernatural events might be part of the correct explanation of the appearance of sacred texts, the occurrence of miracles, and particular religious experiences. There is at present no way to say how these religious explanations mesh with ordinary scientific conceptions, but that by itself is no more an objection to religion than it is an objection to science. Naturalists in ethics might urge this religious analogy as an ad hominem argument against those defenders of autonomous ethics who are not willing to take the same line with respect to religion.

5.7.2 Beliefs About the Mind There is another sort of issue in which an autonomous position comes off looking rather good, namely, the so-called mind–body problem. Here the naturalistic position corresponds to the thesis of physicalism, according to which all real aspects of mind must be features of the physical brain and central nervous system, its atomic or neural structure, or some more complex structure that the brain and nervous system instantiate. This may involve behaviourism or some sort of functionalism that treats the brain as an information-processing system like a computer in a robot. A few defenders of this approach, like Skinner (1974), conclude that there are no mental events, no mind, no consciousness, no sensation. (Rorty, 1965, sympathetically describes a similar view, ‘eliminative materialism’.) But most physicalists suppose that mental events and other aspects of mind do exist and can be identified with certain physical or structural or functional aspects of the brain and central nervous system. On the other side is autonomous mentalism, which holds that the physicalist hypothesis leaves something out. In this view, we know we are conscious, can initiate action, and have experiences of a distinctive phenomenological character and feeling. The physicalist hypothesis does not account for this knowledge. A computer or robot is not conscious. Although a robot can move, it does not act in the way people can act. And a robot has no sensuous experience. Indeed, something could have exactly the functional structure of the human brain and nervous system without

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being conscious. Block (1978) describes a case in which one billion people in radio communication with each other model a particular brain for an hour, each person corresponding to a particular neuron in the brain. Block takes it to be absurd to suppose that this vast collection of people would have a group consciousness that was phenomenologically the same as the consciousness of the person whose brain and central nervous system was being modelled. Nagel (1974) observes that we might know everything there was to know about the neurophysiological structure and functioning of the brain and central nervous system of a bat without knowing what the experience of the bat was like. Defenders of autonomous mentalism agree that this leaves a mind–body problem. They agree that they are unable to say how consciousness, free will, and sensory experience can be part of the world described by physics. But they deny that this means we must stop believing in consciousness or must identify it with some aspect of physical or functional structure. For they claim, with considerable plausibility, that it is much more reasonable to believe in consciousness, free will, and sensory experience, and to believe that these are not aspects of neurophysiological functional structure, than it is to believe in physicalism. I do not say that autonomous mentalism is more plausible than physicalism. After all is said and done, I find a physicalistic functionalism more plausible than autonomous mentalism. My point is that autonomous mentalism is a perfectly respectable philosophical position. A defender of autonomous ethics might even argue that naturalism in ethics loses much of its plausibility once autonomous mentalism is recognized as plausible. For that casts doubt on the universal applicability of the naturalistic approach and therefore casts doubt on the naturalist's argument that a belief that something is right cannot be explained by that thing's being actually right unless that thing's being right consists in some psychological or sociological fact. The naturalist's only argument for this, it might be said, depends on accepting the general applicability of naturalism. But it is not obvious that this approach, is generally applicable, since it is not obviously correct as compared with autonomous mentalism. There is at least some plausibility to the claim that one's awareness of what red looks like is to be explained by appeal to an experience of redness that does not consist entirely in some neurophysiological event. It might be said that the naturalist has no argument against autonomous ethics, since the naturalist cannot take for granted the general applicability of naturalism.

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5.7.3 Ethics Defenders of autonomous ethics argue that their approach represents the only undogmatic way to proceed. They say that naturalism begs the question in supposing that everything true must fit into a scientific account of the world and by supposing that the central question about morality is how, if at all, morality fits into such a scientific account. Defenders of naturalism reply that naturalism itself is the result of following the method of reflective equilibrium. Autonomous ethics begs the question by assigning a specially protected status to initial moral beliefs as compared, say, with initial beliefs about the flatness of the earth or the influence of the stars on human history. Naturalists say that, starting with our initial beliefs, we are led to develop a scientific conception of the world as an account of everything there is. In doing so, we also acquire beliefs about how we learn about the world and about how errors can arise in our thinking. We come to see how superstition arises. We begin to worry about our moral views: are they mere superstitions? We note certain sorts of disagreement in morality and extreme differences in moral customs. We observe that some people are not much influenced by what we consider important moral considerations. All this leads us to raise as a central question about morality how morality fits in with our scientific conception of the world. Naturalism is no mere prejudice in favour of science; it is an inevitable consequence of intelligent thought. This, at least, is what a defender of naturalism will say. A defender of autonomous ethics will reply that moral disagreements, differences in custom, and the behaviour of criminals prove nothing. All these things are compatible with moral absolutism. The naturalist retorts that any view can be made compatible with the evidence; astrology, for example, is perfectly compatible with the evidence. The issue is not what is compatible with the evidence, but what best accounts for it. The naturalist argues that relativism accounts for the evidence better than absolutism does, since relativism is able to say how reasons and values are part of the world science describes, whereas absolutism is not able to do that. The defender of autonomous ethics replies that such an argument is no better than the corresponding argument for behaviourism. Behaviourism is able to say how mental states (as it conceives them) are part of the world physics describes, and autonomous mentalism is not able to say how mental states (as it conceives them) are part of the world physics describes. But one should not for this reason alone abandon one's initial view that one is

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conscious, makes decisions, has feelings, and so on, where this is not just being disposed to act in various ways. Something could have the dispositions without being conscious and could be conscious without having the dispositions. Similarly, one should not accept the naturalistic argument and give up one's belief in absolute values and universal moral reasons. I see no knockdown argument for either side. A question of judgement is involved: ‘Which view is more plausible, all things considered?’ To me, the relativistic, naturalist position seems more plausible. Others find the absolutist position of autonomous ethics more plausible. In this essay, I have not tried to argue that one side is correct. I have tried to bring out the central issue.

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Part II Intrinsic Value

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6 Toward a Theory of Intrinsic Value A normative theory of value might include an account of when something's being the case would or would not be a ‘good thing’, a ‘worthwhile thing’, or a ‘desirable thing’. Some philosophers believe that in order to give such an account, one need (and need only) say when something's being the case would or would not be intrinsically good, worthwhile, or desirable. To do this would be to present a theory of intrinsic value. In this essay, I examine what was once a standard account of intrinsic value as it appeared in certain textbooks (Hospers, 1961: 104–5; Frankena, 1963: 67; Brandt, 1959: 32, 1963: 18–20). I argue: (a) it is not clear whether a theory of intrinsic value can be developed along the lines of that standard account; (b) if one is to develop such a theory, one will need to introduce a notion of ‘basic intrinsic value’ in addition to the notion of ‘intrinsic value’; and (c) several different theories of intrinsic value may account for the same judgements concerning desirability, and it will be arbitrary to choose one of these theories over another. I discuss other ways of looking at intrinsic value in Essays 7 and 8.

6.1 Preliminary Remarks For the purposes of this essay, I consider the following expressions to be equivalent: ‘X is (or would be) a good thing,’ ‘X is (or would be) a worthwhile thing,’ ‘X is (or would be) a desirable thing,’ ‘X is (or would be) good,’ ‘X is (or would be) desirable,’ ‘X is (or would be) worthwhile,’ ‘X has (or would have) value.’ I am interested only in cases in which the X of these sentence forms is replaced with the nominalized form of some sentence. For example, taking ‘The cat is on the mat’ as the sentence to be nominalized, the first of these sentence forms could be realized in any of the following ways: ‘That the cat is on the mat is a good thing,’ ‘That the

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cat would be on the mat would be a good thing,’ ‘For the cat to be on the mat would be a good thing,’ ‘The cat's being on the mat is a good thing,’ etc. Again, for the purposes of this essay, I consider all these sentences to be equivalent. (I will not be concerned with whether such nominalised sentences refer to anything or, if they do refer, with whether they refer to states of affairs, possible events, sentences, etc.) So, I am not concerned with cases in which the X is replaced by something that refers to an object in a restricted sense of ‘object’. For example, Beardsley (1965: 8) discusses the value of a rare postage stamp. The standard theory of intrinsic value does not have any application to such a case. It makes sense to ask whether my having such a stamp would be intrinsically worthwhile or whether such a stamp's existing would be intrinsically desirable. But, since it does not make sense to ask whether such a stamp is itself intrinsically valuable, apart from one or another of these possibilities, I will not be interested in discussing the value of objects like stamps, per se. I provisionally accept a distinction between the normative theory of value and a metaethical theory of value. I understand a normative theory of value to be a systematic account of when something's being the case would be a good thing. A metaethical theory is a theory about the meaning of value judgements in ordinary language and, possibly, a theory about the way in which these judgements are to be ‘proved’ or ‘validated’. I take the notion of intrinsic value to be a technical notion introduced to simplify the normative theory of value: once one has specified what has intrinsic value, one can then say that anything has value to the extent that it ‘leads to’ something having intrinsic value. I doubt that the notion of intrinsic value plays an important role in metaethics. For example, I do not think that it is intuitively obvious what things have intrinsic value; nor do I believe one ordinarily decides whether something's being the case would have value by discovering whether it would ‘lead to’ intrinsically desirable things. Frankena (1963: 67) disagrees. In the following passage he says we ordinarily determine what things have value on the basis of what things have intrinsic value: But it still remains true that in order to come to a judgement about whether something is good on the whole or good in any of the other senses, we must first determine what its intrinsic value is, what the intrinsic value of its consequences or of the experience of contemplating it is, or how much it contributes to the intrinsically good life.

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This very strong claim about intrinsic value contrary to Beardsley's (1965: 7) claim that ‘The paradoxical feature of our value knowledge is just that we have a good deal of sound knowledge about instrumental values, but are in considerable doubt about intrinsic values’. Brandt (1959: 302) is rightly more cautious than Frankena: It would seem, however, that if anything is desirable at all, it must be because some facts or events (perhaps the thing itself) are intrinsically desirable. But a person would not be contradicting himself if he denied this statement, and it is an interesting question for reflection what one should say to a person who did deny it. In this essay I attempt to explain why it can seem that what is desirable depends upon what is intrinsically desirable; and I try to specify what would be involved in denying this claim.

6.2 The Standard Account Hospers (1961: 104–5) introduces the notion of intrinsic value in a standard way: Our question, ‘What things are good?’ is ambiguous. There are some things which we consider good (or desirable) only for their results—for what they lead to. There are other things which we consider good not because of what they lead to but because of what they are in themselves: we consider them worth having or pursuing not merely as ways of getting other things but because of their own intrinsic nature. The first kind of good is called instrumental good because the goodness or worthwhileness of these things lies in their being instruments toward the attainment of the other things which are considered good not merely as instruments. The second kind of good is called intrinsic good because we value these things (whatever they may turn out to be) not for what they lead to but for what they are. Brandt (1959: 302) says, ‘To say that something is intrinsically desirable is to say that it is desirable, taken just for itself, viewed abstractly, and in particular, viewed without respect to any consequences its existence will or may produce’. Brandt (1963: 18) offers what he calls ‘a rough definition of “intrinsic value” ’: ‘Something is intrinsically desirable if it would be properly valued or desired or chosen for its own sake, when considered independently of its consequences.’ His more precise explanation (p. 19) is: Some facts or events, then, are desirable for no reason beyond their being what they are; they are solely intrinsically desirable. Other facts or events are desirable

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solely for reasons beyond themselves, usually their effects; they are not intrinsically desirable at all. Still other things are desirable partly just because of what they are but partly because of other things, pre-eminently their effects; they are in part intrinsically desirable but in part desirable for other reasons. Each account obscurely distinguishes two sorts of reasons for which something may be desirable. Hospers says the one sort of reason mentions what things ‘lead to’; the other sort mentions ‘what they are’. But how are we to tell when a reason mentions what S is rather than what S leads to? Similarly, how are we to understand Brandt's distinction between reasons for things' being desirable which are ‘their being what they are’ and reasons for things' being desirable which are ‘reasons beyond themselves’? Brandt (1963: 19) answers these questions by saying, of the ‘facts’ that might be cited as reasons: Now such facts that make an event desirable may or may not be different from the very fact or event originally said to be desirable and may be different from anything included in, or logically required or necessitated by, this fact or event. I think this remark can be interpreted as follows: A reason (for S's being desirable) refers to ‘what S is’ and is, therefore, ‘included in S’, if and only if the reason is that something is logically required or necessitated by S; so S is intrinsically desirable to the extent that what makes S desirable is that S entails something, T. S fails to be intrinsically desirable and is instrumentally desirable to the extent that what makes S desirable is something other than S's entailing something. (This interpretation does not quite fit what Brandt says. Instead of saying that S is intrinsically desirable if what makes S desirable is that S entails something, Brandt seems to say that S is intrinsically desirable if S entails what makes S desirable. However, this last remark is obscure when taken literally: and I think Brandt meant to say what I interpret him as saying.) It still remains to be explained how a reason why S is desirable can be what makes S desirable in the required sense. There are reasons why S is desirable that are not the sort of reason Brandt must have in mind. For example, if something is a reason why S is desirable in that it is the causal reason why S will have desirable consequences this time, then this reason would not be what Brandt has in mind when he speaks of what makes S desirable. Again, if something is a reason why S is desirable in that it provides a reason for inferring that S is desirable (e.g. the reason is that someone reliable has said that S is desirable), then such a reason would also not be what Brandt has in mind. Brandt suggests something of the nature of the relevant sort of reason when he equates ‘desirable’ with ‘properly

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desired or chosen’ and remarks: ‘Something is intrinsically desirable if it would be properly desired or chosen for its own sake’ (p. 18). This indicates that the relevant sort of reason must be a reason for desiring or choosing the thing in question. If S is not already desired, reasons for desiring S typically cite S's connection with something that is already desired. The connection may be that S entails something already desired or that S would ‘lead to’ something already desired. We want to adapt these remarks to desirability; although we cannot of course make use of a literal distinction between what is already desirable and what is not already desirable (to parallel the distinction between what is already desired and what is not already desired). In effect, the standard account identifies what has intrinsic value with what is already properly desired. This works well for instrumental desirability: if S does not entail but ‘leads to’ something intrinsically desirable, then S is instrumentally desirable. However, if S entails something having intrinsic value, we want to be able to say that S is itself intrinsically desirable. Perhaps the best way to handle this case is to say that, if S entails something already properly desired, then S is already implicitly properly desired and is therefore intrinsically desirable. (The awkwardness of this manœuvre arises from the fact that the real parallel is not between what is already desired and what is intrinsically desirable, but is rather between what is already desired and what is basically intrinsically desirable. The notion of basic intrinsic value is discussed in section 6.5 below.) The standard account says: (1) S is intrinsically desirable to the extent that S entails something that is intrinsically desirable. (2) S is instrumentally desirable to the extent that S does not entail but ‘leads to’ something intrinsically desirable. Notice that neither of these propositions permits a noncircular definition of ‘intrinsic value’ or of ‘instrumental value’.

6.3 An Improvement in the Standard Account Hospers's introduction of the term ‘intrinsic value’, quoted above, suggests that the second type of reason for properly desiring S must be that S would ‘lead to’ things of intrinsic value. It is natural to interpret ‘S would lead to T’ to mean ‘S would cause or result in T’ or ‘T would be an effect

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of S’. Brandt is nearer the truth. He says the reasons for which things are instrumentally desirable are only ‘preeminently their effects’ (p. 19). (I understand him to mean that the reasons are pre-eminently that these things have certain effects.) Even Brandt's claim is too strong. An important way in which T may provide a reason for properly desiring S is that S increases the likelihood of T, where T is desirable. S may be a sign of something desirable or of something undesirable, without necessarily being a cause of something desirable or undesirable. For example, whether or not it would be a good thing for me to receive one hundred thousand dollars sometime this year depends heavily on how it happens that I receive this money. If the only probable way in which this could happen requires the death of some member of my family so that I receive insurance, then I cannot think of receiving this money as a desirable thing (Jeffrey, 1965: 198). So, the desirability of S will be affected by the desirability of those things which S makes more or less probable. Furthermore, just how the desirability of S will be affected depends upon just how desirable these things are and just how S would affect their likelihood. To spell this out will require our being able to speak meaningfully of assigning some measure to desirability. Even if we were to restrict our attention to S's effects, it would be an oversimplification to say that S is desirable because of what it would lead to. Instead, we must say that S is desirable because of what it is likely to lead to. S may happen in various ways having different consequences. For example, your giving me ten dollars will have varying consequences depending on whether you give me the money as a gift, to hold for the purposes of a bet, or to give to someone else. Its consequences will also depend upon whether you give me the money in pennies, in dollar bills, or in the form of a cheque (Jeffrey, 1965: 190–2, 196–9). S's being desirable because of what it would lead to must be taken as a special case of S's being desirable because of what it would make more likely. Judgements about what has already happened are only apparent counterinstances to this claim. It is true that, when we judge Caesar's crossing the Rubicon to be a good thing, we base this judgement on the actual consequences of his crossing the Rubicon and not on the probable consequences of this crossing. It is also true that, relative to our present knowledge of those consequences, we cannot say that Caesar's crossing made or would make these consequences probable. However, the judgement that Caesar's crossing the Rubicon was a good thing amounts to the judgement that it was better than his not crossing the Rubicon. To evaluate this latter claim involves an estimate of what the consequences of his

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not crossing would have been; and, since there are various ways in which it might have happened that he did not cross, one would have to estimate the probabilities of various consequences in a way similar to how one estimates the probabilities of consequences of something that has not yet happened. Although past events are not judged desirable or undesirable because of what consequences they made likely, they are judged desirable or undesirable because of what consequences alternatives would have made more or less likely. In what follows, I will not make use of the special formulations needed because of the indirect and counterfactual character of judgements about the past. Therefore, the improved standard account of intrinsic value says: (1) S is intrinsically desirable to the extent that S entails something that is intrinsically desirable. (2′) S is instrumentally desirable to the extent that S does not entail but increases the probability of something intrinsically desirable.

6.4 An Unexpected Problem We are closer to being able to say just what is involved in a theory of intrinsic value. According to our new version, the value or desirability of something S depends upon S's intrinsic value and also upon the intrinsic value of those things S makes more or less probable. Given (1) and (2′), this amounts to the claim that all value is either intrinsic or instrumental or both. In order to specify the theory further, we would like to be precise about what contribution something else can make to the value of S. Suppose that we are able to make sense of the notion of a definite amount of value. Then it would seem natural to say that T's contribution to the value of S is the intrinsic value of T multiplied by the amount that S increases the probability of T. But this will not do. Let V(X) be the overall value of anything X. Let I(X) be the intrinsic value of X. Let P(X) be the (unconditional) probability of X and let (P(X | Y) be the conditional probability of X, given Y. Then MP (X | Y) = P(X | Y) – P(X) is the amount that Y increases the probability of X. For any function F whose values are real numbers, positive or negative, let ∑XF(X)

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be the sum of the values of F for every possible value of the argument X. Suppose also that S and T are identical if and only if they entail each other. Then the proposal under discussion is (3) For any (3) For any S,V(S)=∑T[I(T)×MP(T|S) The difficulty with the proposal is that, according to (1), something may have intrinsic value because it entails something else of intrinsic value. For example, suppose that S has intrinsic value. Then so does S & T, since S & T entails S. But, once we have given S & T credit for increasing the probability of something that has intrinsic value in its own right, we do not want to give S & T further credit for increasing the probability of something else, itself, that has intrinsic value just because it entails the first thing. For example, suppose that someone's getting pleasure at noon today would have an intrinsic value of ten units and has an initial probability of 0.50. Then my getting pleasure at noon today would also have an intrinsic value of ten units, and an initial probability of 0.50 or less, because it entails someone's getting pleasure. And my getting pleasure at noon today in this room would also have an intrinsic value of ten units, and an initial probability of 0.50 or less, for the same reason. My getting pleasure at noon in this room increases the probability by at least 0.50 of at least three things, each possessing ten units of intrinsic value: itself, my getting pleasure at noon, and someone's getting pleasure at noon. Using (3), my getting pleasure at noon would have to be worth at least fifteen units of value. But this result must be wrong.

6.5 Basic Intrinsic Value The example suggests that something may have intrinsic value in a more or less basic way. Someone's getting pleasure at noon today might have intrinsic value in the most basic way, whereas my getting pleasure at noon today in this room may have intrinsic value only in a derivative way, because it entails something that has intrinsic value in the most basic way. Something made more or less probable by S contributes to the value of S only if it possesses intrinsic value in the most basic way. If S makes probable my getting pleasure at noon today in this room and if this has intrinsic value only because it entails someone's getting pleasure at noon today, then we want to give S credit only for increasing the probability of someone's getting pleasure at noon today. It would be an error to give S further

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credit for increasing the probability of my getting pleasure at noon today in this room. Therefore the theory of intrinsic value requires the introduction of the notion of basic intrinsic value and a basic intrinsic value function B satisfying the following two requirements. (Here I am indebted to Robert Nozick.) First, for any function F, let ∑T:S⇒TF(T)be the sum of the values of F for all arguments T such that S entails T, Then the intrinsic value of S is given by (4) I(S)=∑S⇒TB(T) The total value of S is given by (5) (5) V(S)=∑T[B(T)×MP(T|S)] So, the following statement represents a necessary condition of the truth of any theory of intrinsic value: (6) There is a function B, the basic intrinsic value function, such that the intrinsic value of any S is given by (4) and the value of S is given by (5). Statement (6) is a strong thesis. First, it presupposes that there is a measure of desirability susceptible to the sort of addition and multiplication envisioned in (4) and (5). Second, it also claims that there is at least one function, B, determining the values of everything by satisfying (5). Third, it claims that, of the functions satisfying (5), at least one represents basic intrinsic value in that it satisfies (4). None of these claims is obviously true. So it cannot be obvious that anything has intrinsic value.

6.6 A First-Cause Argument There is a familiar argument for the claim that some things must be intrinsically desirable. (Beardsley (1965: 6) calls this argument, ‘The Dialectical Demonstration’.) It goes as follows: Consider something A that is desirable. Either A is desirable for itself, and therefore something is intrinsically desirable, or A is desirable only because A leads to something else, B, that is desirable. Then either B is intrinsically desirable or B is desirable only because B

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leads to something else, C, that is desirable. And so on. But if nothing is intrinsically desirable, how can A ever be desirable, since A is desirable only because B is desirable, B is desirable only because C is desirable, and so on ad infinitum, with no explanation why any of the members of this series is desirable? As it stands, this argument is no more compelling than the first-cause argument for the existence of God. There is nothing inconsistent in the notion of an infinite series A, B, C, etc., each member of which is desirable only because the next is. However, it is by now easy to see why one can think it obvious that something must have intrinsic value and why one might be tempted to argue for this using the ‘first-cause argument’ just outlined, if one identifies intrinsic value with basic intrinsic value. Suppose there is a basic intrinsic value function B satisfying (5). If nothing had basic intrinsic value, then B(T) = 0 for all T, and V(S)=∑T0×MP(T|S)=0,for arbitrary S. So, if nothing had basic intrinsic value, then (as the proponents of the ‘first-cause’ argument maintain) nothing would have any value at all. Since something does have value, it would follow that something must have basic intrinsic value. However, this conclusion follows only because one has assumed that there exists a basic intrinsic value function B, satisfying (5). Since the assumption is not obviously true, it is not obviously true that something has basic intrinsic value.

6.7 An Argument Against the Theory of Intrinsic Value Consideration of the following arguments helps to clarify what is involved in the theory of intrinsic value. The first is a familiar argument against the theory that all pleasure and only pleasure is of intrinsic value: Suppose that during a war a prisoner, Smith, is being tortured in an attempt to extract information from him. His torturer, Jones, is someone who has never done this sort of thing before. In a few minutes, Jones and Smith are going to die when a bomb destroys their building. Call these circumstances C. Then compare the relative desirabilities of S and S′, where S is that in C Jones enjoys himself, and where S′ is that in C Jones does not enjoy himself. S and S′ are quite similar in what they make more or less probable, except that S

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entails that Jones will have pleasure that S′ entails Jones will not have. On the assumption that all and only pleasure is of intrinsic worth, S ought to be more desirable than S′. But S is less desirable than S′. (Suppose for the sake of argument that this premise is true.) Therefore, the assumption that all and only pleasure is of intrinsic worth must be false. A similar argument against the possibility of any basic intrinsic value function B continues as follows: Suppose there is a function B satisfying (5). Then,V(S)=∑T[B(T)×PM(T|S)]andV(S′)=∑T[B(T)×MP(T|S′)]The difference between these sums must result from the difference between S and S′. Since this difference is solely that S entails Jones will have pleasure that S′ entails Jones will not have, it follows that the respective sums will be exactly the same, except that the first sum will contain terms representing the value of Jones's pleasure, whereas the second sum will not contain these terms. V(S)=∑T[B(T)×PM(T|S)]=∑T[B(T)×MP(T|S′)]+(terms representing the value of Jones's pleasure)=V(S′)+(terms representing the value of Jones's pleasure).. The terms representing the value of Jones's pleasure are those terms in the sum for the value of P, where P is that Jones enjoys himself during a certain interval of time; so V(S) = V(S′) + V(P). Since V(P) > 0, it follows thatV(S) > V(S′). But, by hypothesis, V(S) < V(S′). The original assumption that there is a basic intrinsic value function B has led us into contradiction; so that assumption must be incorrect. The first argument, against the view that all and only pleasure is intrinsically good, seems valid. (The truth of the premise that S is less desirable than S′ is another matter.) The second argument, against the view that there is a basic intrinsic value function B, goes wrong in claiming that the terms representing the value of Jones's pleasure are simply the terms in the sum for V(P). In fact, there need be no simple relationship between the sums for V(S) and V(S′). The slight difference between S and S′ may make a great deal of difference in what S and S′ make more or less probable. S′ makes it certain that Jones is not taking pleasure in Smith's suffering, whereas P (i.e. Jones's getting pleasure over a certain interval of time) does not, taken by itself, make it highly probable that Jones is taking pleasure in

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Smith's suffering; yet S does make it highly probable that Jones is taking pleasure in Smith's suffering. Although S makes it certain that Jones is getting pleasure, something to which the basic intrinsic value function will perhaps assign a positive value, S also makes it highly probable that Jones is getting sadistic pleasure, and the basic intrinsic value function might assign this a low enough intrinsic value so that, as a result, S ends up with a lower total value than S′. Therefore, the above argument cannot be used to show that there is no basic intrinsic value function B.

6.7 Possible Arbitrariness in the Theory of Intrinsic Value Beardsley (1965) offers a different type of argument against the theory of intrinsic value. He claims that ‘the concept of intrinsic value is inapplicable’—even if something has intrinsic value, we could not know it, and therefore that it can play no role in ethical or aesthetic reasoning (pp. 12–13). His argument is that, since we cannot discover the intrinsic desirability of S by discovering that S would lead to other desirable things, the only other way to discover S′s intrinsic desirability would be via immediate intuition. He takes this consequence to discredit the theory of intrinsic value. But it is not true that the only way to show that something is desirable is to show that it would lead to (i.e. make more or less probable) something else. Another way to show that something is desirable is to show how the assumption that it is desirable would explain why other things are desirable. In other words, we might use in ethics the same sort of argument we would use elsewhere, an argument that something is the best explanation of our data. And that is just the way in which one would want to defend a theory of intrinsic value. One would want to argue that it is possible to simplify and thus explain the theory of value by assuming, for example, that someone's getting pleasure is always of basic intrinsic value. Beardsley has not shown that such an argument could not be given for some theory of intrinsic value. Therefore, he has not shown that ‘even if something has intrinsic value, we could not know it’. Nevertheless, it is not obvious that the theory of intrinsic value can be defended in the way just suggested. Beardsley points out (personal communication) that there may be more than one function B, satisfying (5). If so, then these different B's may define different intrinsic value functions I, by virtue of (4), and one would need to have some way of deciding

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which such function was the real intrinsic value function. (Of course, there may be several functions B, satisfying (5), each defining what turns out to be the same intrinsic value function by virtue of (4).) For example, suppose one wants to defend the view that getting pleasure is always and only of intrinsic value. It would seem that the same values of V will be determined if we take someone's getting pleasure to be of basic intrinsic value, or if we take it that, for any person P, P's getting pleasure has basic intrinsic value. This would seem to be a case where different B's might satisfy (5). But (4) will define different intrinsic value functions depending on which B is selected. If we say that, for any P, P's getting pleasure is of basic intrinsic value and is the only sort of thing that is, then it will not follow that either Jack's getting pleasure or Bill's getting pleasure will be of intrinsic value, since, for any P, this does not entail P's getting pleasure. On the other hand, if we say that someone's getting pleasure is of basic intrinsic value, then either Jack's getting pleasure or Bill's getting pleasure will be of intrinsic value, since it entails someone's getting pleasure. Therefore, there may be several intrinsic value functions satisfying (4) and (5). But if there are several such functions, nothing said so far can choose among them, since all the restrictions stated so far have been encapsulated in (4) and (5). This suggests that we ought to give up the idea of a unique intrinsic value function giving the real intrinsic value of various things. Instead we ought to take the choice among the functions satisfying (4) and (5) to be arbitrary in the way that the choice of axioms for a formalised theory is arbitrary. A particular choice of axioms is made for reasons of simplicity and economy; and one would want to choose the basic intrinsic value function for similar reasons.

6.9 Conclusion There are, no doubt, other problems with the conception of intrinsic value outlined in this essay. For example, if an infinite number of things have basic intrinsic value, then the sum in (5) may not be well defined. This problem would arise if, following a suggestion in Jeffrey (1965: 196–9), we took the things having basic intrinsic value to be represented by what Jeffrey refers to as ‘novels’. These are infinite sets of sentences such that, for every S, either S or not-S is included in any particular set. Since, in general, S will increase the probability of any novel by an infinitesimal

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amount, the sum in (5) cannot be used to give V(S) on this proposal. On the other hand, there is no reason why we must accept this proposal. I cannot think of a way to show there is a function B, satisfying (5); nor can I think of a way to show there is no such function. It would be useful to discover such a function B, or prove that there can be no such function. Until this has been done, it is difficult to evaluate the claim made by Frankena, Brandt, and Hospers, and possibly denied by Beardsley, that the notion of intrinsic value enables us to simplify the theory of value. Alternatively, we might use Brandt's equation: desirable = properly desired. For example, one might distinguish intrinsic desires from instrumental desires, and equate intrinsically desirable with properly desired intrinsically. Then one might concentrate on developing a theory of intrinsic desires. This idea is explored further in Essays 7 and 8.

7 Desired Desires A number of philosophers have appealed to ‘second-order desires’ (desires about desires) in order to explain basic moral notions. Frankfurt (1971) suggests that freedom of the will might be identified with the ability to satisfy a certain sort of second-order desire; Jeffrey (1974) makes a similar proposal. Watson (1975) objects that the resulting account of freedom of the will does not work and that the appeals made to second-order desires should be replaced with references to what an agent values. Watson's view can be reconciled with Frankfurt's if valuing is identified with a kind of second-order desire. Lewis (1989) offers such an identification and Copp (1993) suggests that we might identify a person's values with preferences for which the person has a certain second-order preference. However, these appeals to second-order desires in order to explain freedom of the will, valuing, or values are all unsuccessful. In arguing for this negative conclusion, I defend a number of subsidiary points: (1) Positive intentions are reflexive or self-referential; (2) Intrinsic desires are not just noninstrumental desires; (3) To value something is in part to want it; (4) There is sometimes a difference between believing that something is good and valuing it; (5) There is a difference between valuing something and having it as one of your values.

7.1 Frankfurt on Freedom of the Will Frankfurt motivates his view by criticizing Strawson's (1959) account of the concept of a person. Strawson holds that the concept of a person is ‘the concept of a type of entity such that both predicates ascribing states of consciousness and predicates ascribing corporeal characteristics . . . are equally applicable to a single individual of that single type’ (pp. 101–2). Frankfurt points out that Strawson's suggestion fails to distinguish people

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from many other animate beings and announces his own view that ‘one essential difference between persons and other creatures is to be found in the structure of a person's will. . . . [Persons] are able to form what I shall call “second-order desires” or “desires of the second order” . . . No animal other than man . . . appears to have the capacity for reflective self-evaluation that is manifested in the formation of second-order desires.’ Frankfurt explains that he means ‘desire’ loosely to include anything a person can be said ‘to want’, where this covers ‘a rather broad range of possibilities’ (pp. 6, 7, 12–13). Frankfurt says, ‘it is having second-order volitions, and not having second-order desires generally, that I regard as essential to being a person’, where a second-order volition is wanting a certain desire to be one's will, that is, wanting a certain desire to be ‘effective in action’. He uses the term ‘wanton’ to refer to agents who have first-order desires but who are not persons because, whether or not they have desires of the second order, they have no second-order volitions. . . . The class of wantons includes all nonhuman animals that have desires and all very young children. Perhaps it also includes some adult human beings as well. In any case, adult humans may be more or less wanton; they may act wantonly, in response to first-order desires concerning which they have no volitions of the second order, more or less frequently. (1971: 10–11) To illustrate his thesis, Frankfurt distinguishes between two kinds of drug addict: an unwilling addict, who wants his desire for the drug not to be effective, and a wanton, who is not ‘concerned whether the desires that move him to act are desires by which he wants to be moved to act’. Frankfurt claims that the wanton addict may deliberate and make plans to obtain the drug he desires. ‘But it never occurs to him to consider whether he wants the relations among his desires to result in his having the will he has’ (p. 12). Frankfurt connects the capacity for forming second-order volitions and the capacity ‘both of enjoying and of lacking freedom of the will’, where freedom of the will is not just ‘freedom of action’. He says: freedom of action is (roughly, at least) the freedom to do what one wants to do. Analogously, then, the statement that a person enjoys freedom of the will means (also roughly) that he is free to want what he wants to want. More precisely, it means that he is free to will what he wants to will, or to have the will he wants. . . . It is in securing the conformity of his will to his second-order volitions, then, that a person exercises freedom of the will. (1971: 14, 15)

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7.1.1 Wanting Someone to Do Something for You One way to begin to explore Frankfurt's proposals is to consider the different ways in which you might want someone to do something for you. In one case, you want someone to do something for you because that person knows that you want it. For example, you want a friend to bring you flowers as a result of your friend's recognition that you want flowers. In a different case, brought to my attention by Claudia Mills, you want someone to do something but not because of your desire. For example, you want a doctor to say you are going to recover because he thinks you are going to recover, not merely because he realizes you want him to say that you are going to recover. Often when you want someone P to do something for you, your hope is that P will recognize your desire and be motivated by that recognition to do what you want. In such cases, you have a second-order desire that your first-order desire will be effective in getting you what you want, via its recognition by P. Second-order desires also figure in H. P. Grice's (1957) theory of communicative meaning. According to Grice, a speaker S communicating with an audience A means that M only if S intends A to think that M by virtue of A's recognition of S's intention that A should think that M. Now, intentions count as desires for Frankfurt because, if you intend to do something, there is a sense in which that is what you want to do (even if there are other respects in which you do not want to do it). So, wherever Grice's analysis of communicative intentions applies, such communication will involve a second-order desire that a first-order desire should be effective. To have such a second-order desire is not yet to have a second-order ‘volition’ in Frankfurt's sense, because it is not the same as having the second-order desire that your first-order desire to do something should be effective in action. To have the second-order desire that your first-order desire for flowers will be effective in getting you what you want via your friend's recognition of that desire is not quite the same, for example, as having the second-order desire that your first-order desire to say, ‘I'd love some flowers,’ should be effective in leading you to say, ‘I'd love some flowers.’ Everyone, or almost everyone, has second-order nonvolitional desires, because everyone, or almost everyone, has communicative intentions. In particular, almost any actual human addict will have communicative intentions in trying to purchase the needed drug. Almost any addict will be capable of wanting a friend to provide some of the drug on recognizing

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the addict's desire for it. Furthermore, it is likely that some animals can have communicative intentions.

7.1.2 Positive Intentions I have argued earlier (1976; 1986: ch. 8) that intentions are typically self-referential and therefore are not only firstorder, but second-order and every higher-order as well. In particular, an intention is typically the intention that that very intention will result in your doing what you intend to do. Searle (1983: ch. 3) defends a similar conclusion by way of a different argument. A ‘positive intention’ is an intention to do something that you suppose you will do in consequence of your adopting that intention. For example, consider the intention to clean up your room. Normally, this would be a positive intention, because when you form such an intention you suppose that you will clean up your room only if your having that intention leads to your doing so. Positive intentions contrast with negative intentions, as for example when you decide not to clean up your room, where you suppose that what you intend, namely that you not clean up your room, will be so whether or not you form the negative intention not to clean up your room, as long as you do not form the positive intention to clean up your room. There are also conditional intentions, like the intention to clean up your room if asked to do so, where you do not unconditionally suppose that the intention will lead to success but suppose only that it will have an effect if you are asked to clean up your room. There is a sense of ‘doing something’ in which cleaning up your room is doing something and not cleaning up your room is not doing something. The positive intention to clean up your room is an intention to do something. The negative intention not to clean up your room is not an intention to do something in this sense. (The distinction is not merely a grammatical distinction. The intention to stay home can be a negative intention that is not an intention to do something in the relevant sense even though the intention is not negatively expressed.) Doing something is active, an action. What makes an event your action in this sense is in part that it is controlled or ‘guided’ by your intentions. The term ‘guided’ is used in Frankfurt (1978). Mele (1987) also takes an action to be guided by an intention or plan. It may be that usually a plan guides an action by virtue of causing aspects of the action, but, as Frankfurt points out, there are also cases in which there is merely a conditional dependence between plan and action, a readiness to intervene if

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things go off track. A positive intention to run someone down blends into a merely conditional intention to turn the wheel if needed to adjust the aim of your car. To intend to do something that is an action is therefore to intend that there be an event of a certain sort that is controlled or guided by your intentions. So, a positive intention is an intention that something will happen in a way that is controlled or guided by your intentions. In particular, your intention is that something will happen that is controlled or guided by that very intention. So, a positive intention is reflexive or self-referential—it refers to itself. The practical reasoning that culminates in a positive intention has to be sensitive to whether the conclusion of the reasoning will make a relevant difference and lead to your doing what you intend to do. Negative and conditional intentions aside, you can't rationally decide to do something if you believe that your decision will make no difference. It is not enough to suppose that what you propose to do will make a difference; you must also suppose that your decision will make a difference. If you fall off a cliff and realize that you will continue to fall whatever your intentions are, then you cannot rationally decide to stop falling. What you would propose to do, namely, to stop falling, would make a difference to what happens: things would work out differently if you could stop falling. The trouble is that a decision to stop falling won't make a difference. A decision to stop falling can be a reasonable practical conclusion only if you can suppose that your practical conclusion can influence what happens. If you can't conclude that your intention will lead to your doing what you intend, then you can't reach that conclusion as the result of practical reasoning. And that is just what would be expected if the intention (that is, the conclusion of your practical reasoning) includes the thought that it leads (in a more or less specific way) to an intended result. Furthermore, I can't think of any other natural way to capture this point without appeal to self-referential intentions. You can rationally form a positive intention to do something only if you can see how your intention might lead you to do it. You do not have to have all the details worked out if your plan is that you will work out the details later, as needed. But you do need to be able to suppose that whether you do it or not might depend on whether you have the intention to do it, at least in the sense that your intention might contribute to your doing it. If you cannot see your intention as a possible means, you have no reason to form the intention. So, in forming that intention, you have to intend that your intention will contribute to the intended effect. Your full plan is

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that your intention will lead in a certain (more or less clearly specified) way to your acting in the way you intend. There are two arguments here for the conclusion that positive intentions are self-referential. First, when an intention is the result of practical reasoning, the intention is the conclusion of that reasoning. You can rationally reach a positive intention through practical reasoning only if you can conclude (C) that the intention will make a difference by leading to your doing as you intend. The conclusion (C) that your intention will lead to your doing as you intend has to be part of your practical conclusion. (C cannot follow your practical conclusion P because P can be reached only if C has already been reached. C cannot precede P either, since C has to be a conclusion about that particular P: C makes sense only if P exists.) So, the conclusion (C) that your intention will lead to your doing as you intend has to be part of your intention. Second, if an intention to do A is a positive intention, you suppose you will do A only if you intend to do A and you suppose that intending to do A promises to lead to your doing A. To make such suppositions about your intention is to view your intention as part of your means for doing A. If you form the intention of doing A, supposing that M will be part of your means for doing A, then your intention to do A includes an intention to do A by virtue of M. So, your positive intention to do A is in part the intention to do A by virtue of having that intention.

7.1.3 Ends and Means Frankfurt (personal communication) offers the following objection: [O]ne usually selects a means in the light of an end one has adopted; but since the formation of an intention is itself the adoption of an end, how can it also be the selection or provision of a means to that end? it would be as though every end automatically came provided with one useful means to attaining it—namely, the intention to attain it! . . . In deciding upon what means to use in seeking a certain end, I will have reasons for regarding M as an appropriate means or for selecting it over other possible means. My reasons for forming an intention are not like that. They are simply my reasons for adopting the end; they are not reasons, given that the end has been adopted, for using certain means to achieve it. It is true that I cannot rationally adopt an end unless I believe that I might be able to achieve it. But that is not the same as believing that my intention to achieve it might lead me to achieve it.

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My response is that we must distinguish the narrow notion of intention from the wider notion of desire. All intentions are desires, in Frankfurt's wide sense of ‘desire’, but not all desires are intentions. So we have to distinguish intended ends from merely desired and not intended ends. One can desire an end without any idea of how it might be obtained; but one cannot intend to obtain an end without some idea of how it might be obtained. I agree that one usually selects a means in the light of an end one has adopted. But that does not mean one must first select an end and only then select a means to that end. My claim is that, if selecting an end is forming a positive intention, one can select that end only if one has some idea of how to achieve it. Such an idea is an idea of what one might do to achieve that end. But an idea of what one might do is an idea of one or more events that are controlled or guided by one's intention. So one can select an end only if one has a conception of how one's intention might lead to or guide or control one's achieving that end. In accepting that end, what one accepts is a plan that includes an account of how one's acceptance of that plan leads to one's achieving that end. So I am arguing that every such end does come ‘provided with one useful means to attaining it—namely, the intention to attain it!’ One's reasons for forming an intention are not just one's reasons for adopting the intended end rather than some other end, since one's reasons for forming an intention also include one's reasons for forming an intention as opposed to merely desiring or hoping for that end. One's acceptance of a given end or goal is part of a larger practical conclusion. The reasons why some parts of that larger conclusion are there are not the same as the reasons why other parts are there. One's reasons for including a given end or goal are not the same as one's reasons for including a particular means to that goal. One selects the means in order to achieve the goal, not the other way round. But one's whole practical conclusion is what one intends. One intends the whole plan, not just the final end. One's plan is that one's intention will lead in a certain way to a certain result. In other words, one's whole practical conclusion involves as a part the thought that that whole conclusion will lead in a certain way to a certain result. The relevant sense in which you cannot rationally adopt an end unless you believe you might be able to achieve it is this: you cannot rationally adopt an end as part of a positive intention unless at the same time you can rationally conclude (as part of your plan) that your having that intention

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will lead to your achieving that end. Whether or not you believe that your intention will lead you to achieve it, your plan must be that your having that intention will lead you to achieve it.

7.1.4 Innite Regress ‘If positive intentions are self-referential, isn't a bad infinite regress generated?’ To have a positive intention to do D is then to have an intention that your intention will lead you to do D. ‘So do you not also have an intention concerning your intention that your intention will lead you to do D? And so forth?’ (Frankfurt, personal communication, 1990). My reply is that the regress is not a ‘bad infinite regress’. There is only a single intention that refers to itself. It is the intention that that very intention will lead in such and such a more or less specified way to such and such a result. In words: my acceptance of this very conclusion will lead to such and such a result. I discuss issues raised by self-reference further in Harman (1986: 87–8).

7.1.5 A Baby's Intentions Mele (1987) objects that his then eight-month-old daughter can intend to crawl towards him without having any concept of intention and, he argues, if she does not have the concept of an intention, her intention in crawling towards him cannot be in part that her intention will lead her to get to him. He concludes that we must reject the thesis that positive intentions are always self-referential. I reply that the baby does not need a full-fledged concept of intention in order to have self-referential intentions. The question is whether she acts as she does because of a complex planning procedure that is sensitive to whether and how the conclusion of this procedure might affect what happens. It is irrelevant whether the baby has a concept of intention beyond that. For example, the baby does not need to have the concept of a state of intention that others might be in. It is also irrelevant whether the baby has an explicit mental representation of her intention. (Wilson, 1989: 277–8, expresses scepticism about such explicit mental representation.) Perry (1990) observes that a child can have the thought that ‘it is raining’ without having any concepts of places or times and without any inner mental representations of particular places and times, even though the content of the child's thought concerns rain at a particular place and a particular time. The child can have thoughts that are about particular

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places and times without having concepts or representations of those places and times. Similarly, the content of a child's intention can be in part about that intention without the child having any distinctive concept or mental representation of that intention. Furthermore, it is important to distinguish purely verbal questions about how we use the word ‘intention’ from more substantive questions concerning what goes on in full-fledged practical reasoning leading to decisions and plans. As Mele observes, it is an empirical question what leads his eight-month-old daughter to crawl towards him as she does. It may very well be true that his daughter acts as she does because of a complex internal planning procedure that is highly sensitive to whether and how the conclusion of this procedure might affect what happens. Or it may be true that there is no such procedure going on when his daughter crawls towards him. The purely verbal issue is whether it would be correct to describe his daughter as ‘intending’ to crawl towards him on the assumption that there was no such inner procedure. Suppose, for example, that she was simply disposed to crawl in the direction in which she saw him, whether or not there was an obstacle, with no planning at all concerning how to get to him. If so, would it be correct to describe her as ‘intending’ to crawl towards her father? Mele himself may want to say this. Then such ‘intentions’ are (presumably) not about themselves. But this does not touch the substantive point that positive intentions that are the conclusions of full-fledged practical reasoning have to be about themselves, since full-fledged practical reasoning is sensitive to the effects of accepting the practical conclusions to which it leads.

7.1.5 Autonomy and Second-Order Volitions Recall Frankfurt's proposal: the difference between an autonomous agent and a wanton is that an autonomous agent but not a wanton has second-order volitions, where a second-order volition is a second-order desire that a first-order desire should be effective in action. Frankfurt uses the term ‘desire’ loosely to include any case in which a person might be said to ‘want’ to do something. Therefore, intentions count as desires for Frankfurt. So any positive intention is a second-order volition of the relevant sort. A positive intention is in part the intention (desire) that one's intention (desire) should be effective. This implies that any creature with positive intentions is an autonomous agent and not a mere wanton.

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But then Frankfurt must be wrong about animals being nonautonomous wantons. Animals are capable of avoiding obstacles and of sufficient (even if limited) planning, which means that they must be capable of the sort of practical reasoning that is sensitive to which practical conclusions might be effective in action. So animals must have secondorder volitions in Frankfurt's sense. Consider also Frankfurt's distinction between the willing addict, the wanton, and the unwilling addict. Frankfurt says that all three addicts want to take the drug. The unwilling addict desires not to desire to take the drug and desires that his desire to take the drug not be effective. But his first-order desire to take the drug is stronger than his desire that the first-order desire not be effective. So he is unfree. He acts against his will even though he does what he wants. By contrast, the willing addict is quite happy that his desire for the drug should be effective and the wanton has no desire one way or the other as to whether his desire for the drug should be effective, according to Frankfurt. The trouble is that both the unwilling addict and the alleged wanton intend to take the drug. This intention is a positive intention, namely, the intention that that very intention will lead him to take the drug. Given Frankfurt's loose sense of ‘desire’, this counts as a second-order volition in Frankfurt's sense. So, Frankfurt has to count all three addicts as autonomous agents with free will. I conclude that Frankfurt's appeal to second-order volitions is not the key to distinguishing autonomy from nonautonomy and does not allow an account of freedom of the will.

7.2 Lewis on Valuing I now turn to Lewis's (1989) proposal to identify valuing something with desiring to desire it. Lewis's stated reasons for this identification are perfunctory; he is mainly concerned to argue for a dispositional theory of value, a theory with which I will not be concerned. Lewis motivates his account of valuing as follows. He first suggests that valuing something ‘might be a feeling, or a belief, or a desire. Or a combination of these; or something that is two or three of them at once; or some fourth thing. But let us set these hypotheses aside, and hope to get by with some thing simpler’ (p. 14). Notice, by the way, that Lewis must here be using the term ‘desire’ broadly, in the way Frankfurt does, to include anything

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a person might be said to want. Otherwise the threefold classification would not be plausible. So, in particular, Lewis too must count an intention as a desire. After ruling out the hypothesis that valuing is just a feeling or just a belief, Lewis is left with the conclusion that valuing is a desire. ‘But’, he adds, we'd better not say that valuing something is just the same as desiring it. That may do for some of us: those who manage, by strength of will or by good luck, to desire exactly as they desire to desire. But not all of us are so fortunate. The thoughtful addict may desire his euphoric daze, but not value it. Even apart from all the costs and risks, he may hate himself for desiring something he values not at all. It is a desire he wants very much to get rid of. He desires his high, but he does not desire to desire it, and in fact he desires not to desire it. He does not desire an unaltered, mundane state of consciousness, but he does desire to desire it. We conclude that he does not value what he desires, but rather he values what he desires to desire. (1989: 115, with references to Frankfurt and Jeffrey) After saying that it is hard to imagine more complicated cases involving desires of a higher order and also that we have to allow for ‘someone who desires to value differently than he does’, Lewis ‘hesitantly’ concludes, ‘we do better to stop on the second rung: valuing is just desiring to desire’. However, there is an important footnote: It is comparatively easy to imagine instrumental third-order desires. Maybe our addict wishes he could like himself better than he does; and not by doing away with his addiction, which he takes to be impossible, but by becoming reconciled to it and accepting himself as he is. Or maybe he just fears that his second-order desire not to be addicted will someday lead him to suffer the pains of withdrawal. Either way, he wants to be rid of his second-order desire not to be addicted, but he wants it not for itself but as a means to some end. This is irrelevant: presumably it is intrinsic, not instrumental desiring that is relevant to what someone values. This footnote is puzzling. You can value something instrumentally. For example, you may value someone's opinion without having an intrinsic desire to know that person's opinion and without having an intrinsic second-order desire to want to know that opinion. Why then does Lewis presume that only intrinsic desiring is relevant to what someone values? Perhaps he means that his theory only works for valuing something intrinsically. If so, Lewis's view is, more specifically, that to value something intrinsically is to have an intrinsic desire that you have an (intrinsic) desire for it.

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7.2.1 Communicative Intentions and Values One way to motivate Lewis's footnoted restriction to intrinsic value and intrinsic desires is to recall our earlier discussion of communicative intentions and second-order desires that first-order desires should be effective in getting you what you want. Consider what the theory would look like without this restriction and, in particular, consider the following scenario. You want flowers, you want John to recognize that you want flowers, and you want this to lead John to give you flowers. You want to do something that will indicate to John that you want flowers. You want to say to John, ‘I would love to have some flowers.’ So, you want to form the intention of saying it. Here you want to have the intention of saying, ‘I would love to have some flowers.’ Since an intention counts as a desire for Lewis, you have a desire for a certain sort of desire that you say this. So Lewis's theory without any restriction to intrinsic desires would imply that you value saying this. But normally in this situation this would not be something you value. By restricting the relevant desires to intrinsic desires, Lewis avoids the conclusion that you value saying, ‘I would love to have some flowers.’ In the scenario given, only the flowers are wanted intrinsically. Your desire to say, ‘I would love to have some flowers,’ is an instrumental desire, since you want to say it because of hoped-for results of saying it. Furthermore, you have only an instrumental desire to intend to say it, because of results you expect from having that intention. At this point, we need to say more about the distinction between intrinsic and other sorts of desires.

7.2.2 Instrumental and Intrinsic Desires Your desire for D is instrumental if you desire D because you think getting D will get you something else E that you desire. You see D as a means to E. It might be proposed that we define intrinsic desires by contrast with instrumental desires. If you desire D but not as a means to anything else, then your desire for D would be an intrinsic desire, according to this criterion. But, consider a desire to hear good news—for example, the desire to hear the doctor say you will recover. This is not an instrumental desire; you do not suppose that the doctor's saying this would promote any end of yours. So it would be an intrinsic desire, by the proposed criterion.

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