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Personal Concern1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Erin Kelly
Erin Kelly*
Affiliation:
Tufts University, Medford, MA02155-7059, USA
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Extract

Recent moral philosophy has been characterized by some serious attempts to show that both Kantian and utilitarian moralities leave us with insufficient room to pursue our personal projects and relationships. These moralities have been charged with demanding a kind of impartiality that leaves us with too little space for developing ourselves and our friendships, family relations, communities, and nations in the ways best suited for us. Critics claim these theories implausibly maintain that if our personal relationships and affinities do not further the ends of moral duty or maximum utility, they are of no value and hence we lack reason to devote ourselves to them. In what follows, I will assume that a conception of morality would indeed be implausible if it were to demand impartiality in the strong sense that it would be impermissible to favor our own projects and ambitions, to care especially about the welfare of certain persons rather than others, and sometimes to give preference to those we care most about, even when we could benefit strangers more.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 30 , Issue 1 , March 2000 , pp. 115 - 136
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 2000

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References

2 An agent-relative permission (or reason) holds only for a particular person(s). An agent-neutral permission (or reason), by contrast, holds for anyone. If I have an agent-relative moral permission to save my own arm rather than a stranger's life, it would not follow that anyone else is morally permitted to save my arm rather than a stranger's life. If my permission to save my arm rather than a stranger's life were agent-neutral, then anyone would be permitted to save my arm rather than some stranger's life. See Parfit, Derek ‘Innumerate Ethics,’ Philosophy and Public Affairs 7 (1978), 287Google Scholar and Reasons and Persons (New York: Oxford University Press 1984), 143. See also Nagel, Thomas The View From Nowhere (New York: Oxford University Press 1986), 152-3Google Scholar.

3 I do not plan to explore how far or how adequately particular versions of Kantian or utilitarian theories can accommodate our basic interest in and need for developing personal projects and relationships. For an excellent discussion of the capacity of Kant's ethics to accommodate the requirements of the personal, see Herman's, Barbara essays, ‘Integrity and Impartiality,’ and ‘Agency, Attachment, and Difference,’ The Practice of Moral Judgment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1993)Google Scholar.

4 By ‘morally justifiable reasons,’ or more simply ‘moral reasons,’ I mean reasons that are either morally required or morally permissible. We may think of the demand for justification as arising pragmatically, in view of potential conflict with others, for instance. Thus the moral compatibility requirement need not imply that we must reason about and attempt to justify everything we do.

5 See Rorty, Richard Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (New York: Cambridge University Press 1989)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and his ‘On Ethnocentrism: A Reply to Clifford Geertz,’ Michigan Quarterly Review 25 (1986) 525-34 and ‘Solidarity or Objectivity?’ Post-Analytic Philosophy, Rajchman, John and West, Cornell eds. (New York: Columbia University Press 1985)Google Scholar; Walzer, Michael ‘Spheres of Affection,’ in Nussbaum, Martha For Love of Country: Debating the Limits of Patriotism, Cohen, Joshua ed. (Boston: Beacon Press 1996)Google Scholar; Scheffler, Samuel ‘Families, Nations, and Strangers,’ The Lindley Lecture, The University of Kansas (1994)Google Scholar and ‘Relationships and Responsibilities,’ Philosophy and Public Affairs 26 (1997) 189-209; Taylor, Charles ‘Cross-Purposes: The Liberal-Communitarian Debate,’ reprinted in Philosophical Arguments (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1995)Google Scholar and ‘Why Democracy Needs Patriotism,’ in Martha Nussbaum, For Love of Country: Debating the Limits of Patriotism and ‘The Politics of Recognition,’ Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, Gutmann, Amy ed. with intro. (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1994) 25–73Google Scholar.

6 See the essays referred to in footnote 5.

7 Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 190-1Google Scholar.

8 Rorty carries his critical proposal even further, holding that when there are no persons who share our interests and values, we may treat our personal commitments as morally justifiable simply because they define the terms of an individual life. He claims that,

any such thing can play the role in an individual life which philosophers have thought could, or at least should, be played only by things which were universal, common to us all.. .. Any seemingly random constellation of such things can set the tone of a life, Any such constellation can set up an unconditional commandment to whose service a life may be devoted — a commandment no less unconditional because it may be intelligible to, at most, only one person. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 37.

Such things might include, says Rorty, ‘what … people do with their spouses and children, their fellow workers, the tools of their trade, the cash accounts of their businesses, the possessions they accumulate in their homes, the music they listen to, the sports they play or watch, or the trees they pass on their way to work’ (Ibid.). It is, however, not obvious what an unconditional commitment within a personal relationship would amount to or why we should ever take it to be a requirement of personal concern.

9 See Rorty, Richard ‘Justice as a Larger Loyalty,’ in Justice and Democracy: Cross-Cultural Perspectives, Bontekoe, Ron and Stepaniants, Marietta eds. (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press 1997)Google Scholar.

10 Some defenders of the moral compatibility requirement could resist what I am suggesting are the implications of that requirement for this case. They would have to show that the ‘sacrifice’ that would be imposed upon wealthier nations would be too burdensome, and hence could reasonably be rejected. This argument is not very convincing, especially when basic human rights are at stake. See Shue, Hemy Basic Rights: Subsistence, Affluence, and U.S. Foreign Policy, 2nd ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1980), especially chapters 4 and 5Google Scholar.

11 Rorty, ‘On Ethnocentrism,’ 529-30Google Scholar

12 See the essays referred to in footnote 5.

13 Walzer, ‘Spheres of Affection,’ 126Google Scholar

14 Cf. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 194-5Google Scholar

15 In this conception both sorts of duties will have basically the same source.

16 Rorty, ‘On Ethnocentrism: A Reply to Clifford Geertz,’ 529Google Scholar

17 See Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 196Google Scholar

18 This is essentially a Humean view.

19 Rorty, ‘On Ethnocentrism,’ 529-30Google Scholar

20 Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 190-1Google Scholar

21 Rorty, ‘Solidarity or Objectivity?’ 13Google Scholar

22 It could be argued that moral concern is grounded in an innate universal benevolence, for example. This was Francis Hutcheson's view. See his Illustrations on the Moral Sense (Part II of An Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections with Illustrations on the Moral Sense [1728]), Peach, Bernard ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1971)Google Scholar. See also Sidgwick, Henry The Methods of Ethics (1874; Indianapolis: Hackett 1981), 238-63Google Scholar.

23 For an account of how a morality of principles that meet this requirement could develop from a morality of personal attachments, see Rawls, John A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1971)Google Scholar, chapter 8.

24 See Frankfurt's, Harry discussion of the idea that we can make something important to us by caring about it, ‘The Importance of What We Care About,’ reprinted in The Importance of What We Care About (New York: Cambridge University Press 1988), 80–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

25 Whiting, Jennifer ‘Impersonal Friends,’ The Monist 74 (1991), 7Google Scholar

26 Whiting agrees that once a relation based upon personal concern has been established, even if largely in a rationally arbitrary way, one may well have further reasons to continue to care for the particular person one cares about that one did not initially have. Ibid. For instance, one may have certain moral reasons. Personal relations are often relations of dependence; the welfare of those I care about may come to depend on my concern. Insofar as I have through my caring encouraged this dependence, I may have a reason or responsibility to respond to the needs I have helped to cause.

27 Otherwise I could have some reason to care also about other persons who exemplify the traits I admire in my loved ones. My reasons would be, in that sense, impersonal.

28 Communitarians avoid this objection by focusing on examples of reciprocal concern: persons are justified in caring about one another insofar as they have made each other's good part of their own. Concern for others is still related to self-concern, but the identity of the self is embedded in (and not prior to) interpersonal relations. Hence the view is not obviously egocentric. This response was suggested to me by Bernard Williams. It seems to me, however, that the communitarian position can still be described as egocentric in a more extended sense.

29 I have already acknowledged, in the opening paragraph of this paper, that the interest we each have in some measure of personal autonomy has moral value. Here I am addressing how the rational aspects of personal concern can be seen to support the moral significance of the importance that relationships of personal concern have for us.

30 Or it could be argued that morality has (non-metaphysical) psychological roots in innate universal benevolence. In that case, the cause of moral concern would bear a close relationship to its content. I defer discussion on the difference between moral motivation (understood as motivation to meet the moral compatibility requirement) and benevolence.

31 Scheffler, ‘Families, Nations, and Strangers,’ 1Google Scholar

32 I draw this point from Scheffler's discussion of the ‘distributivist objection’ (Ibid., 9-18). See also his ‘Relationships and Responsibilities,’ 192-4, 205-9.

33 I thank Philip Clark for pushing me to be clearer on this point.

34 Scheffler, ‘Families, Nations, and Strangers,’ 3Google Scholar. See also Scheffler, ‘Relationships and Responsibilities,’ 200-1, 206Google Scholar.

35 Philip Clark's comments helped me to formulate this point.

36 Scheffler, ‘Families, Nations, and Strangers,’ 18Google Scholar

37 Taylor, ‘Cross-Purposes: The Liberal-Communitarian Debate,’ 191Google Scholar

38 Taylor, ‘Why Democracy Needs Patriotism,’ 120Google Scholar

39 I interpret Taylor to be saying that the existence of democracies also benefits persons who are not members of democratic states because, for instance, democratic states are less likely to be aggressive and expansionist. If the ‘interest of humanity’ is not understood in this way, then it is not clear that the associative duties of patriotism that Taylor praises would meet the moral compatibility requirement.

40 Taylor, ‘Cross-Purposes: The Liberal-Communitarian Debate,’ 188Google Scholar

41 Taylor, ‘The Politics of Recognition,’ 39Google Scholar

42 Stocker, Michael ‘The Schizophrenia of Modem Ethical Theories,’ The Journal of Philosophy 73 (1976), 454CrossRefGoogle Scholar

43 For a similar account of moral motivation, see Scanlon, T.M. ‘Contractualism and Utilitarianism,’ Utilitarianism and Beyond, Sen, Amartya and Williams, Bernard eds. (New York: Cambridge University Press 1982), especially 111, 116-7.Google Scholar

44 See Williams, Bernard ‘Moral Luck,’ Moral Luck (New York: Cambridge University Press 1981), 20–39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar