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"Moral Necessity and Particular Cases"
Jonathan Dancy
1. A brief outline of the book.
Philip Stratton-Lake’s Kant,
Duty and Moral Worth offers us an outline
of a moral theory. It is pretty eclectic. There is an element of Kant there
– more than an element, in fact. There is a certain amount of Ross. And there
is an element of contemporary Aristoteliani
Stratton-Lake starts from Kant’s
claim that only actions done from the motive of duty have moral worth. This
claim, he thinks, is a deep truth, but as ordinarily understood it is not even
true. We have become used to thinking of an action that is done from the motive
of duty as one done for the reason that one ought to do it. But the fact that
one ought to do an action is no reason whatever for doing it, any more than the
fact that the act is right is a reason why it is right. It is the reasons why
one ought that are the reasons for doing the action, and that one ought to do
it cannot be among the reasons why one ought. So if we think of an action done
from duty in this way, as one done for the reason that one ought to do it, we
sever the Kantian link between morality and rationality – between doing the
right thing and acting for the right reasons. We sever that link because an
action with moral worth turns out to be done from duty, but that an action is
one’s duty is no reason to do it.
The reasons for doing an action are
the considerations, whatever they may be, that count in favour of doing it –
features of the situation, that sort of thing. Now consider what Stratton-Lake
calls the symmetry thesis: that a good-willed person is disposed to be
motivated to do what she ought by the normative reasons why she ought so to
act. This requires that the good-willed person is disposed to be motivated by
something other than duty. How can it be, then, that a morally worthy action is
one done from the motive of duty? Stratton-Lake’s Kantian answer is that moral
motivation has a dual structure. The good-willed person’s primary motive
will be the reasons for doing the action. But such a person will also have a secondary
motive, which is constituted by her commitment to morality, to doing what she
ought. To have this secondary motive is not just to have another, explicitly
moral motive in addition to the ones already in place. (This would run contrary
to the symmetry thesis.) It is to be disposed to do an action only in so far as
one judges that the action is morally required. To put it another way, where
duty is my secondary motive I regard the considerations that form my primary
motive as sufficient solely because I judge them to give rise to an obligation.
(p. 62).
According to Stratton-Lake, then, we
can retain Kant’s deep truth if we understand him as saying that actions
that have moral worth are ones done from duty as a secondary motive. And we should
do this, because in this way we can retain the idea that with actions done from
duty there is a non-accidental connection between the rightness of an action
and its moral worth.
With this in hand, Stratton-Lake now
asks whether the new understanding of Kant’s dictum about the motive of duty is
consistent with what Kant has to say about the moral law. Kant is often
understood as saying that the moral law is the ground for all particular
duties, and we have denied this, because we have taken it that the ground for a
particular duty – the features that make it a duty – are such things as that
she is in trouble, or that he is a friend. That one’s maxim cannot be
universalised looks, on this account, as if it is quite the wrong sort of thing
to be the ground for any duty whatever. We are committed, therefore, to giving
a different interpretation of Kant’s remarks about the role of the Moral Law.
Stratton-Lake’s suggestion is that we should approach this task by thinking
about the way in which Kant thinks about causation. According to Kant, there
are particular causal relations between events in the world, but such relations
are only possible if there are specific causal laws governing those relations,
and such specific laws are only possible if there is a Principle of Causation
(or more generally because of the Transcendental Unity of Apperception). So we
have a three-tiered structure here. Note, what is more, that the causal laws do
not act as causes, any more than does the Principle of Causation. What the laws
do is to make possible the particular causal relations (the necessitation that
binds cause and effect), and the Principle of Causation is the condition of
possibility for the laws.
By analogy, then, Stratton-Lake
wants us to take Kant to be suggesting that there is a similar three-tier
structure on the moral side. There are normative relations in the world,
between the reasons for doing an action and the action that they are reasons
for doing; there are specific moral laws specifying which features are reasons
for what; and there is a Moral Law which plays the sort of transcendental role
played by the Principle of Causation. The moral laws are conditions for the
possibility of particular moral reasons, and the Moral Law is the condition for
the possibility of specific moral laws. The question that is driving us here is
like the causal question. We asked ‘how could there be such a thing as one
thing making another happen?’ – and our answer
consisted in an appeal to specific laws and then to the Principle of Causation.
Similarly, we ask ‘how could there be such a thing as a feature that requires
or necessitates an action?’, and our answer consists in an appeal to specific
laws, and then to the Moral Law behind them.
Actually I am not quite sure if this
is the right way to express how Stratton-Lake sees the relation between the
three tiers. Sometimes it looks as if there are two questions raised by any
suggestion that here we are dealing with an action that is required, demanded,
obligatory. The first is ‘how could there be such a thing at all?’ and the
answer is given by direct appeal to the Moral Law. The second is ‘how could it be that this action is obligatory here and that one
is not?’, and the answer to this question is given by appeal to the specific
moral laws for which the Moral Law stands as the condition for their
possibility.
One final move is necessary to
complete the picture. Ordinary reasons are to be found at the bottom layer. At
the top we have the Moral Law, playing its transcendental role. In between
there are specific moral principles. But on this picture Kant’s remarks appear
to focus on the relation between the top layer and the bottom layer. As
Stratton-Lake sees things, this leaves a gap in Kant’s overall theory, because
on his account it says nothing about normative moral reasons (now that we have
abandoned the idea that the basic moral reason for doing anything is some
thought about the universalisability of one’s maxim).
Stratton-Lake proposes to fill this gap by plugging Ross’s theory of Prima
Facie Duties into it. This proposal has the advantage that it offers a set of
specific moral laws, which go to explain the possibility of the particular
duties that we find case by case. According to Ross, if there were no
principles of Prima Facie Duty, there could be no particular moral obligations.
So Ross’s theory is the right sort of theory to stand in between what Kant has
to say about the Moral Law and what we want to say about particular normative
reasons.
Stratton-Lake offers his tripartite
structure as affording some compromise between Kantians, with their emphasis on
necessity and laws, and Aristotelian particularists,
who seem to be keen to do without laws and look only at the detailed nature of
particular cases. As he sees it, he is able to give something to either side of
this controversy. The particularists are right in
what they have to say about our ground-level moral reasons. Kant, however, is
right in what he has to say about the very possibility of moral requirements.
And each side must admit the justice of the other’s concerns. Particularists must accept the force of the question how it
is that there can even be such things as moral requirements, and need have no
special quarrel with a Kantian answer; Kantians cannot suppose that principles
and laws can stand as reasons for doing anything at all, and need have no
special quarrel with what particularists have to say
on that front. We need a bit of both, then. This is a philosophically
respectable compromise.
2. Worries
My worries about
this story come under two broad heads:
- What exactly is the transcendental
role, and how does the Moral Law manage to play that role? Further, how is
it that that role is also played by specific moral laws (a.k.a.
Ross’s principles of Prima Facie Duty)?
- Why do we need specific moral laws in
addition to the Moral Law?
The first of
these questions I ask in a spirit of enquiry. I accept Stratton-Lake’s
suggestion that the question of ‘the nature and possibility of practical
necessity’ (p. 130) is one to which all should attempt to provide an answer.
The second question I ask in more combative spirit. As a particularist,
I see no need for moral reasons to be supported, held in place by or otherwise
dependent on a panoply of specific principles, whether Ross’s or someone
else’s. So I want to see good reason before I admit that this intermediate
layer is there at all. Why isn’t it enough to have particular reasons case by
case, with the Moral Law (or something else) telling us how it is possible for
such reasons to generate moral necessity, moral requirements and moral duties?
The Moral Law is supposed to explain
the possibility of a moral ‘must’, just as the Principle of Causation explains
the possibility of a causal ‘must’. STRATTON-LAKE characterises this moral
‘must’ in two ways. First, there is the ontological way: we are to explain the
possibility of an action’s being actually required (p. 4). Second, there is the
phenomenological way: we are to explain how it is possible for an action to be
experienced as, or represented as, unconditionally necessary (p. 70). In terms
of the latter, we are told that finite rational beings experience moral
requirements as commands, expressed in imperatives – categorical imperatives.
How is this possible? If the answer is to be given in terms of the Moral Law,
there is a problem with it. For that law itself is a categorical imperative,
and surely we cannot appeal to a categorical imperative, no matter how
majestic, to explain the very possibility of categorical imperatives. Further,
nothing has yet been said to persuade us that the sort of necessity we are
dealing with is other than a matter of degree. It might be that both
alternatives have some of it, but one has more than the other. But if this is
even a possibility, we know that appeal to the Moral Law will not be able to
act as explanans for this sort of necessity, because
the relevant aspects of the Moral Law are not matters of degree.
Perhaps, however, that was not the
quite the point. Perhaps the main point is the relation between necessity and law.
What is necessary is not the law, but the action required by the circumstances.
Similarly, on the causal side of the analogy, what is necessary is the effect,
not the law in virtue of which the cause necessitates the effect. (Of course,
the law may itself be necessary, but this will be in a different sense.) Now if
we are to explain these necessities, for Kant, we will have to appeal to
something universal, since Kant holds that where there is necessity there must
be universality. In the causal case there are the causal laws there, ready to
provide the required element of universality. In the moral case, by analogy,
there must again be law if there is necessity, and the Moral Law is
appropriately universal. So we explain the necessity of the action by appeal to
the universality of the Moral Law (maybe via the specific moral laws as
intermediaries).
The problem with this is that moral
necessity is of a quite different order from causal necessity. Causal necessity
is, as one might put it, factive: an event that is
causally necessitated will certainly occur, indeed, it must occur. Moral
necessity is not factive: an action that is morally
necessary may not occur at all. Given this vast difference, it is not very
attractive to argue that since causal necessity requires law, or something
universal, moral necessity does so as well. In fact, it is far from obvious
that we need to explain the moral must in terms of universal law at all. If
there is a moral must here, there must be a law, since a ‘must’ just is a law.
But the law could be fully particular. What is not yet clear is why the way to
explain the possibility of a particular law is to appeal to a universal law.
Of course this leaves things quite
open. It may be that though there is no antecedent reason to look to something
universal to explain a particularised necessity, still, as things turn out,
this is the right way to go about things. And the claim I just made, that we
might be able to rest content with particular law, is vulnerable to the extent
that as yet it offers no way of explaining the nature and possibility of
practical necessity.
What is the phenomenon we are trying
to explain? Stratton-Lake writes ‘to say, therefore, that the moral law appears
to finite rational beings as a command, is to say that it appears to them as
necessitating certain actions – that is, it appears as an imperative … as a
categorical imperative’ (p. 37). Here we have three concepts – command, categorical
imperative and necessitation – all bundled together. It looks, however, as if
the basic one is intended to be the notion of the categorical imperative. The
question then should be how it is possible for something to appear as a
categorical imperative. And the most direct answer Stratton-Lake gives to this
is that ‘The awareness of necessitation is explained with reference to our
taking ourselves as standing under an a priori law’ (p. 70). I take this to
mean that those who take themselves to be subject to the Moral Law are in a
position to experience specific moral commands as categorical imperatives. But
the force of this explanation depends entirely on the idea that if one takes
oneself to be subject to a very general command, one can experience as a
requirement more particular commands which are appropriately related to the first
one – which can be subsumed under it, to use an expression that Stratton-Lake
sometimes wields. And this, I think, excludes from its domain all those who do
not, in some sense however weak, suppose that they are subject to Kant’s Moral
Law. I am myself just such a one, and yet I seem perfectly able to experience
moral requirements as such case by case. So it seems to me that Kant’s
explanation cannot be the right one – at least not for me. And if it is not, it
cannot be that the Moral Law stands as a condition for the possibility of moral
experience, conceived as the experience of requirements.
Stratton-Lake is aware of this
objection (p. 70), but his response to it seems inadequate. He suggests that
Kant is not engaged here in what he would have called empirical psychology, but
is rather specifying something presupposed in any particular moral judgement.
‘We can only judge that some act is necessary in the circumstances in so far as
we subsume it under universally valid principles, which are in turn only
possible in so far as they are subsumed under the a priori principle of
universality as such’ (pp. 70-1). But I think I am a counterexample to this
claim, if the ‘can’ in it is non-normative, i.e. if ‘can’ here does not mean
‘should’ or ‘have a right to’. I do judge acts to be necessary in their
circumstances, and I don’t think that I subsume these acts under universally
valid principles, nor that I subsume those principles
under the principle of universality as such. Perhaps I am wrong about this, but
I would be surprised if I am.
So far I have been suggesting that
it is hard to see how to explain the experience of moral necessitation by
appeal to (an implicit acceptance of) the Moral Law. This leaves open the
question how else one might explain it. A particularist
should allow that we can think of an action as required in the circumstances,
and this is Stratton-Lake’s explanandum. If one wants
to stay at that level rather than move up to a transcendental one, what
explanatory resources are available to one? One possibility is to try to appeal
simply to the differences between different types of reasons. This approach
would probably involve minimising the differences between moral reasons and
others, working exactly in the opposite direction to Kant. Obviously we need to
respect any peculiarities that moral reasons might turn out to have; but since
nobody is able to say what makes a reason moral, we might be pardoned the
suspicion that moral reasons as a class are not going to turn out to be very
special. If they are not special, they will not be special in being
‘categorical’, and if so, the experience of moral imperatives as categorical
will probably not be correctly explained by appeal to the Moral Law. There are
right ways of doing things that are neither moral nor aesthetic. For instance,
there is a right and a wrong way of using a tool. This is not an instrumental
matter; one may have instrumental reasons for using the tool in a/the wrong
way. Carpentry creates categorical imperatives that are not moral imperatives,
I would say. If so, the only way of explaining the
categorical nature of the imperatives involved is by reference to the fact that
the reasons at issue make no appeal to the purposes of the agent, to pleasure,
to enjoyment or the like. The same applies to philosophical reasons.
There are right and wrong ways of going about philosophical enquiry, in ways
that are grounded in the nature of the subject matter rather than in the
purposes of the enquirer. And so on.
I now turn to my second worry. Why
is there any need for specific moral laws?
As I suggested earlier,
Stratton-Lake seems to be offering two ways in which the moral laws might be
functioning in his system. The first is that the specific moral laws act as
conditions of possibility for the existence of particular requirements, and
that the Moral Law acts as the condition of possibility for specific moral
laws. The second is that the Moral Law acts directly as the condition of
possibility for the existence of particular requirements, and that the specific
laws merely tell us why these acts rather than those are the ones required. To
the extent that these options are really distinct, I prefer the second of them.
I don’t think that the relation in which the specific laws stand to particular
requirements is the same as that in which the Moral Law stands to the specific
laws. To my mind, there is really only one possibility question, which is how
there can be such a thing as an action that is unconditionally required of an
agent. Questions about which actions are of that peculiar sort are not
possibility-questions in the same way. But if this is the right way of looking
at things, the question why we need the intermediate layer of specific laws
becomes more pressing.
It is worth reminding ourselves of
the fact that Stratton-Lake argues for the need for this intermediate layer in
a distinctive way. I have quite a list of ways in which people have tried to
run such arguments in the past. Normally it is suggested that there cannot be
moral reasons without specific moral principles. These may be principles of the
Rossian sort rather than absolute, ‘Kantian’
principles. If pressed on why there cannot be particular reasons without
principles, appeal is often made to a subjunctive conditional. Ross himself produces
an example of this conditional, which Stratton-Lake quotes:
I suggest ‘prima
facie duty’ or ‘conditional duty’ as a brief way of referring to the
characteristic (quite distinct from that of being a duty proper) which an act
has, in virtue of being of a certain kind, (e.g. the keeping of a promise), of
being an act which would be a duty proper if it were not at the same time of
another kind which is morally significant.
The idea is that
a feature gives us a moral reason for doing an action if and only if it would
make the action a duty if it were the only morally relevant feature. If true,
this would establish the claim that every particular reason rests on a
principle. It would establish that claim because it establishes a sense in
which every reason is a general reason. Every reason-giving feature is such
that if alone it is a duty-making feature.
Now this is not the only way of
trying to establish the need for specific general principles if there are to be
any moral reasons at all. I mention it only because it is (one of) Ross’s, and
because it is so common in other writers too. I also mention if because I think
it can be conclusively shown to be mistaken, and because Stratton-Lake is as
suspicious of it as I am. My point here is that Stratton-Lake’s approach seems,
at least, to be very different and rather more interesting. Whether it is as
different as it seems will, however, depend on which line he takes of the two I
distinguished above. If he is arguing that specific principles are required to play
for particular requirements the same role as the Moral Law plays for them, I
would think of this as distinctive. If, by contrast, he is arguing only that
the Moral Law stands as a condition of possibility for particular requirements,
with the specific laws telling us which actions actually have that peculiar
feature of being required, I think he is more likely to be making some more
ordinary appeal to the need for principles if there are to be reasons.
Supposing, then, that he is taking
the more interesting line, how well is it likely to work? The difficulty that I
see with it derives from the fact that the specific principles that
Stratton-Lake is thinking of are Rossian ones, and
these are not absolute principles of the traditional, supposedly Kantian sort,
but principles of, as one might put it, contributory reason. Each principle
specifies not an ought, but a reason-giving feature.
It is because of this that the principles are not principles of duty, as Ross
repeatedly stresses. But it is also because of this that the principles are not
well suited to act as conditions for the possibility of particular moral
requirements. Remember that the phenomenon to be explained is our experience of
particular acts as being required of us by the circumstances. As far as that
goes, the Moral Law is just the right sort of explanans,
since it is, as one might put it, in the requiring business. But Rossian principles are not - and rightly not. Any attempt
to capture the notion of a contributory moral reason that either thinks of
reasons as requiring something or other, or more cautiously tries to capture
the ‘normative force’ of a reason in terms of some more indirect relation to ‘oughts’, is going to fail. This is a general point (and I
have merely asserted it here, not argued it). But as far as Stratton-Lake’s
project goes, the point is merely that Rossian Prima
Facie principles are conceived by him as specifying what he (rather
unsuitably, in my view) calls evidential moral considerations. But with such
considerations there is no sign of a command, of an imperative, of obligation
or of requirement – not, at least, once we have seen that the attempt to
capture the force of a reason in terms of subjunctive conditionals is not going
to work. So it is not very plausible to suggest that such evidential considerations stands as conditions of possibility for
particular requirements.
A caveat here: of course it is easy
to allow that without reasons, there is no possibility of requirements. In this
limited sense, the evidential principles are required (let us suppose pro tem.)
if there are to be any duties. The problem I am trying to get at is more a
matter of what is expected to explain what. A plethora of Prima Facie
principles does nothing to explain the phenomenon of overall requiredness. What is needed to explain that is something
like a principle of Most Reason: that one ought to do what there is most moral
reason to do. But this is not itself a principle that is operating at the Prima
Facie level at all. And it is not one that itself would be inapplicable in the
absence of Ross-style principles of prima facie duty. All that is
necessary for an appeal to the Principle of Most Reason is that there be
reasons – particular normative reasons, of the sort with which we are familiar –
and that those reasons go together so as to determine on which side there is
most reason (and we need not think of this as additive in any way). We may
think of this as compatible with the Kantian explanation in terms of the Moral
Law; or we may think of it as competing, partly since it is more general and
covers non-moral reasons as well as moral ones. But my target here is not the
force of the explanation of moral requiredness in
terms of the Moral Law. It is the suggestion that that explanation needs an
intermediate level if it is to work properly.
At the very end of his book
Stratton-Lake turns directly to the particularist
challenge to principle-based ethics. He accepts – as many would not- the force
of the particularist argument that is based on the doctrine
of organic unities. If value can vary according to context, and if there is a
close link between reasons and values, there will be no sign of the sort of
regularities required if general principles of reason are to have a chance of
being true. Or rather, as Stratton-Lake himself puts it, it would be a sort of
co
One cannot, therefore,
attack particularists simply by defending the
particular principles to which they offer counter-examples. One must attack the
doctrine that is doing the damage, namely, the doctrine of organic wholes. The
transcendental conception of the moral law and moral laws provides us with a
way of doing this. For according to this understanding of moral principles the
focus shifts away from moral deliberation (where particularists
are understandably happy to engage with their opponents) to the practical necessity
actions must possess if they are morally required. According to the
transcendental account of the moral law, our moral experience can only be
explained with reference to strictly universal principles, which in turn must
be explained with reference to the purely formal principle of universal law as
such – that is the moral law. Consequently there must be strictly universal
moral principles.
I understand this
as a sort of blueprint for a defence against particulari