4 - Substantive reasons

Summary

EXTERNAL REASONS AS REASONS INTERNAL TO ETHICS

How do we critically assess whether an ethical external reasons statement is true, whether coming to believe it is really coming to see matters aright? According to McDowell, in order for the statement to pass critical scrutiny, it is not necessary to show that anybody who counts as a rational person must – on pain of violating the principles of some reasoning process – come to believe it. It is not necessary to show that, starting from reasons external to ethics, there is an argument demonstrating the correctness of the ethical reasons. Rather, in order to establish the correctness of an ethical outlook, an ethical evaluation of ethical reasons is required. Of course, this does not mean that whatever it takes to become a rational person is irrelevant to the evaluation of an ethical outlook. It just means that the evaluation cannot be done entirely from a standpoint outside of an ethical sensibility: “[e]thical external reasons are not external to ethics.”

These remarks on ethical justification are of particular relevance to my goals in this book. The aim of rationalism is to address the rational moral skeptic on her own grounds and show that the skeptic's commitment to a formal notion of rationality also commits her to accepting certain specific moral principles. This is precisely the sort of move that McDowell wants to resist. The moral skeptic may be a rational person and nevertheless miss the ethical external reasons that she has.