Society's Choices Social and Ethical Decision Making in Biomedicine (1995) / Chapter Skim
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Moral Epistemology
Moral Epistemology
Pages 201-214
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From page 201... ...
But for most of this discussion I won't distinguish between the morality of public and of private choice, but will talk about the foundations of moral judgment in general. Because of the essentially public concerns which prompt the discussion, however, I shall leave aside the morality of individual virtue, which may have some bearing on the conduct of particular public officials but has little to do with technology assessment.
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From page 202... ...
If such an answer is available, it should permit you to justify your conduct not only to yourself but to others. So the search for moral knowledge is the search for a basis for objective judgments about what people ought to do—judgments on which they can agree and which allow them to offer justifications to one another for their conduct.
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From page 203... ...
Because our personal desires are so individual and conflicts of interest and attitude are often so severe, the question whether moral objectivity is possible is more serious than the comparable question about other fields. Nonevaluative subjects like mathematics, science, and history don't provide models for a conception of moral knowledge: In trying to determine how to live together, we are not talking about abstract timeless structures or about the observable external world.
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From page 204... ...
However, the important point for our purposes is that Hobbes thought moral discovery did not depend on any modification of human motives. Rather, the convergence on common standards of conduct characteristic of morality was the result of social and psychological theory, on the basis of a single principle of motivation.
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From page 205... ...
Hume, by contrast with both of them, held that the motivational foundation of morality was a single sentiment of impartial benevolence, or concern for people's well-being, but that it did not express itself directly in the recognition of equal rights. Rather, rights of property, obligations of contract and promise, and other strict moral boundaries are in his view conventions sometimes legally enforced which are justified by the contribution of their strict application to the overall or general welfare of persons living under them: justified, in other words, by their utility.
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From page 206... ...
For example, the answer to the question of how much discretion people should have over the use and disposition of their property will depend significantly on whether property rights are, as Locke thought, an aspect of a natural right to equal liberty, or, as Hume thought, a set of conventions designed to promote security, stable long-term expectations, and the general welfare in which case their appropriate scope will vary with contingent circumstances. In its development by Bentham and Mills and later writers utilitarianism became the clearest example of a moral theory based on only a single purely moral intuition, with everything else following from it with the help of nonmoral, factual premises.
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From page 207... ...
The method has something in common with traditional social contract theory, but it attempts to place the different points of view to be combined on a footing of greater equality, by making the contract a hypothetical rather than an actual one, to avoid the influence on its outcome of differences in power or threat advantage. What equally situated individuals would agree to or converge on as a common standard is offered as a justification for accepting it as morally correct.3 But here again, the process of justification seems normative "all the way down." This raises a particularly vexed issue in moral theory: whether the reliance on evaluative or normative judgment in deriving particular moral conclusions from general moral principles makes the whole process circular and the system empty.
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From page 208... ...
, there are independent values of equality, not derivative from the maximization of utility, which in fact limit the way it is permissible to treat people even in order to advance the general welfare. Certain rights to equal treatment, equal liberty, equal inviolability, and equal opportunity are not, in other words, merely instrumental to the promotion of the good, but are morally basic.
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From page 209... ...
Similar reasoning may assign priority to the protection of certain basic individual rights, whose violation can't then be justified by appeals to the general welfare. The present state of moral controversy reveals a high level of uncertainty about both methods and conclusions, but at the same time there is clearly a lot of value in the three primary standards I have described: common interest, overall utility, and equal rights.
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From page 210... ...
In the exercise of public responsibility, those judgments cannot be merely personal, but must attempt to express a moral outlook that the public in whose name the decision is being taken can reasonably be expected to adopt, in light of the reasons offered. This doesn't mean that the acceptable justifications have to be discovered by surveys of antecedent moral opinion, since carefully reasoned decisions about public questions should attempt to supply the grounds for their own acceptance.
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From page 211... ...
According to the conception common to Hobbes and the utilitarians, the basic motive stays the same self-interest or benevolenceand the details of morality are developed by attaching that motive to different policies, institutions, and courses of action, on the basis of information about what will actually promote either the common interest or the aggregate general welfare. According to the other conception, characteristic of the modern Kantian tradition, moral thought involves the development of more complex, morally influenced motives, as our sense of what is and is not a sufficient reason for action is altered by changing conceptions of equity, fairness, responsibility, cruelty, desert, and so forth.
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From page 212... ...
Moral judgments are everyone's job, and while some people are better at them than others, the reasons behind them ought to be made available, for the purposes of public choice, in a way that those responsible, and eventually the public at large, can find directly persuasive. Moral grounds for public decisions, unlike scientific grounds, should be at least potentially part of public rather than expert knowledge.
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From page 213... ...
It can affect not only the rules of conduct one accepts, but also the correct measure of individual well-being for the purpose of calculating benefit, harm, and overall utility. For example, the fact that someone cares more about spending money on a religious pilgrimage than on basic medical care may provide a good reason for that person to decide how to use his own resources, but it is a poor reason for a program of public assistance to support his religious rather than his medical expenditures because the value of medical treatment can command public recognition and the religious claim cannot.
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From page 214... ...
5. Something corresponding to it has been proposed by Rawls in his hypothetical social contract model called the Original Position.
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