Parfit on directly collectively self-defeating moral theories
✍ Scribed by Joseph Mendola
- Publisher
- Springer Netherlands
- Year
- 1986
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 716 KB
- Volume
- 50
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0031-8116
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
This paper assesses the price of a certain way of doing moral theory, a manner that is currently popular but surprisingly radical in its hidden implications. Before I say what way that is, let me sketch some background.
Ethicists have observed what seems to be a close connection between rationality and morality. They also have noticed that rationality seems to demand consistency. It has occurred to them that a property somewhat like logical consistency might do interesting moral work. They have suggested that the immoral, or those with false beliefs about morality, suffer from a lack of that property.
One prominent family of such suggestions makes use of what is called "universalization.". Perhaps, some have thought, morality demands consistency in our responses to the situations of ourselves and others. Perhaps morality requires that we treat like cases alike, whether our goose is in the fire or not. Hare, Nagel, and Gewirth are notable current examples of those in this tradition. 1
Here I focus on a second family of attempts to make something like consistency yield interesting normative results. A number of authors have suggested that a moral theory or a theory of rationality should not be selfdefeating. A consistent normative theory will not demand its own abandonment, they say, just as a consistent descriptive theory will not state that it itself is false. David Gauthier and Stephen Darwall have produced recent work in this tradition, but I mainly will restrict my consideration to another current, distinguished example: 2 Derek Parfit, in the first part of his recent book, Reasons and Persons, argues that moral theories must meet a particular formal constraint. 3 He says that moral theories must not be "directly collectively self-defeating". I will argue that the constraint Parfit proposes is improper, that it would rule out most plausible theories of morality and, indeed, the theory he favors.