Fact and value revisited: Why Gewirth is not a cognitivist
✍ Scribed by Gary Seay
- Publisher
- Springer
- Year
- 1983
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 558 KB
- Volume
- 17
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0022-5363
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
Among the most significant developments in moral philosophy over the past decade and a half has been the attempt to provide a meta-ethical foundation for normative ethics. Some philosophers have attempted to show that adequate rational justification for moral judgments can be found in the very concepts of rational action necessarily employed in moral reasoning. John Rawls's monumental work, A Theory of Justice, 1 has been the most influential and widely discussed example of this innovation. But a more recent opus of Professor Alan Gewirth has attempted to reach this elusive goal by a rather different route, and one that successfully avoids some of the problems that have plagued Rawls's theory.
Gewirth's book, Reason and Morality, 2 is a philosophical tour de force which, like Rawls's work, owes much to Kant; but unlike Rawls's, Gewirth's argument does not rely upon the special presuppositions of a hypothetical social-contract situation where a certain decision procedure must generate just certain normative principles. Rather, Gewirth has proposed a straightforward derivation of the foundations of morality from an analysis Of the concept of action. From a consideration of the nature of action as both volitional and purposive, he holds, it is possible to infer a general normative ethical rule defining specific genetic rights to freedom and well-being that must be respected in all persons insotar as they are prospective purposive agents. Such a rule, he maintains, would be the first principle of morality. This principle, addressed to all agents, Gewirth calls the Principle of Generic Consistency: Act in accordance with the generic rights of your recipients as well as of yourself 3
The argument Gewirth presents for the derivation of this principle is note. worthy both for its originality and for its careful attention to detail, yet its greatest importance for contemporary ethical theory lies in its claim to be a derivation of 'ought' from 'is.' Gewirth asserts that his argument amounts to nothing less than a bridging of the 'fact-value gap' by showing, first, how evaluative claims are implicit in any action, and then how, on the basis of this, universal moral judgments can be seen to follow necessarily from descriptive statements of fact. Thus the theory, in Gewirth's view, must be described as a 'modified naturalism'; and although some of its elements are plainly prescriptivist in formulation, it is therefore