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REFLECTION AND MORALITY

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 June 2010

Charles Larmore
Charles Larmore
Affiliation:
Philosophy, Brown University
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Abstract

Our capacity for impersonal reflection, for looking at our own perspective from without, as part of a world that exists independently of us, is our most distinctive trait as human beings. It finds its most striking expression in our moral thinking. For we are moral beings insofar as we stand back from our individual concerns and see in the good of others, in and of itself, a reason for action on our part. It is not, to be sure, in morality alone that we exercise this power of impersonal reflection. We do so too, whenever we set about weighing the evidence for some belief without regard for what we would like to be true or for what common opinion would say. Yet nowhere does this self-transcendence show forth more vividly than when we turn our attention from our own happiness to that of another, taking the same immediate interest in that person's good—just because it is his or hers—as we naturally harbor for our own. In this essay, I explore the way that the moral point of view is shaped by the nature of impersonal reflection and thus constitutes a signal expression of our humanity.

Type
Research Article
Information
Social Philosophy and Policy , Volume 27 , Issue 2 , July 2010 , pp. 1 - 28
Copyright
Copyright © Social Philosophy and Policy Foundation 2010

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References

1 Kant, Immanuel, Kritik der praktischen Vernunft (Critique of Practical Reason) (1788), Akademie-Ausgabe (Berlin: Reimer, 1900–), V, 86–87.Google Scholar

2 Impersonal reasons are what Nagel, Thomas, in The Possibility of Altruism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970)Google Scholar, chapter 10, called “objective” reasons, whose “defining predicate” contains no free, unbound, occurrence of the variable referring to the agent whose reasons they are. (If I jump out of the way of an oncoming truck because that will preserve my life—and not just someone's life, that “someone” happening to be me—then my reason will count as “subjective,” not “objective” or impersonal.) I prefer my terminology, since reasons that are not impersonal are, in my view, nonetheless real.

3 In my book Les pratiques du moi (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2004)Google Scholar, I discuss at greater length the nature of reflection and self-knowledge.

4 Cf. Smith, Adam, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759, 1790; Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Classics, 1976)Google Scholar, part III, chapters 2–3, as well as Mead, George Herbert, Mind, Self, and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1934), part IIIGoogle Scholar.

5 For a closer discussion, see Larmore, Charles, The Autonomy of Morality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), chapter 1, “History and Truth.”CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6 A more detailed version of the following argument is presented in Larmore, The Autonomy of Morality, chapter 5, especially sections 7–8.

7 The classic statement of such a doctrine is Davidson, Donald, “Actions, Reasons, and Causes” (1963), reprinted in Davidson, , Essays on Actions and Events (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 3–19Google Scholar.

8 “Internal” reasons, as Bernard Williams famously defined them, are reasons we would come to grasp, were we to deliberate soundly on the basis of our present beliefs and desires. See Williams, , “Internal and External Reasons,” in Williams, , Moral Luck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 101–13CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Whether or not such reasons are, as he claimed, the only sorts of reasons we can rightly be said to have, they are not (contrary to what the term suggests) anything “in” the mind. When we conclude that our present convictions give us a reason to believe this or to do that, we do not think we have discovered a fact about our own psychology. For the reason does not derive from our having those convictions, but from what those convictions are about. What they are about, not the convictions in and of themselves, is after all the object of our deliberation.

9 See, for example, Smith, Michael, The Moral Problem (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 94ffGoogle Scholar.

10 Gibbard, Allan, Wise Choices, Apt Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990)Google Scholar.

11 So says Christine Korsgaard, one of the most important neo-Kantians of our day, in Korsgaard, , The Sources of Normativity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 5CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a more extensive version of the following critique of Korsgaard, see Larmore, The Autonomy of Morality, chapter 5, sections 6, 8. I find much to endorse in Parfit, Derek's similar criticisms, as developed in his essay “Normativity,” in Oxford Studies in Metaethics, 1, ed. Shafer-Landau, Russ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 325–80Google Scholar.

12 Such is the way Korsgaard defines her “procedural moral realism,” in contrast to a “substantive” realism that regards reasons as a reality to which our reasoning responds (Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity, 36). I caution that the sense of “autonomy” in question is the one for which Kant coined the term and which concerns our relation to the reasons for which we think and act. It is not the sense that has to do with our relation to other people, as when it is said that autonomous agents decide matters for themselves instead of being impelled by custom or coercion. Autonomy in this latter sense is not my concern here.

13 Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity, 93.

14 For more detail, see Larmore, The Autonomy of Morality, chapter 3 and chapter 5, sections 7–8.

15 According to Gibbard, for instance, to say that we have a reason to do X independently of our interests and attachments is to mean that we accept both a norm requiring us to do X and a (higher-order) norm requiring us to accept that norm whether we want to or not (Gibbard, Wise Choices, Apt Feelings, 155–70). Now, is our supposed acceptance of this higher-order norm a brute fact or mere decision, or is the norm instead one we ought or have reason to accept? Only the latter will allow this analysis to keep pace with what is meant by an impersonal reason to do X. And yet Gibbard must analyze this alternative, in turn, as our acceptance of a still higher-order norm requiring us to accept the first higher-order norm whether we want to or not. The Gibbardian theory is constantly chasing after the idea of impersonality without ever catching up.

16 See Larmore, The Autonomy of Morality, chapter 5, sections 1–6. There I examine, among other attempts, David Gauthier's version of the Hobbesian argument; a summary of my objections appears in the next two paragraphs.

17 Cf. Nussbaum, Martha, The Frontiers of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006)Google Scholar. I should note that I am talking here about our moral thinking, and not about political life, for which, unlike Nussbaum, I hold that a principle of respect for persons understood as being able to think and act for reasons should be determinative. (See, e.g., Larmore, The Autonomy of Morality, chapter 6.)

18 Kant, Immanuel, Grundlegung der Metaphysik der Sitten (Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals) (1785), Akademie-Ausgabe (Berlin: Reimer, 1900–), IV, 398–99Google Scholar.

19 Leviticus 19:18; Matthew 19:19, 22:39; Mark 12:31. Note that this precept is quite different from the Golden Rule of doing unto others as we would have them do unto us (Matthew 7:12), at least when the latter is understood as a norm of reciprocity, for then it ties our treatment of others to what would be conducive to our own interests.

20 Williams, Bernard, “Persons, Character, and Morality,” in Williams, , Moral Luck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 17–19CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In this essay, Williams was not as clear as he should have been that the problem is not with the conception of morality as impersonal, but rather with the belief that moral considerations are always supreme.

21 In an earlier work, The Patterns of Moral Complexity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987)Google Scholar, chapter 6, I called this the “heterogeneity” of morality. The term now seems to me a bit misleading. The two principles are best understood as competing interpretations of the same root idea.

22 Darwall, Stephen, The Second-Person Standpoint (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 8, 60, 102Google Scholar.

23 For illuminating remarks on this strict sense of moral obligation, see Hart, H. L. A., “Are There Any Natural Rights?” Philosophical Review 64, no. 2 (April 1955): 175–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Hart, H. L. A., “Legal and Moral Obligation,” in Melden, A. I., ed., Essays in Moral Philosophy (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1958), 82–107Google Scholar.

24 Darwall distinguishes between our “obligation to” someone having a correlative right and the idea of “obligation simpliciter” or “obligation period.” (See Darwall, Stephen, “Reply to Korsgaard, Wallace, and Watson,” Ethics 118, no. 1 [October 2007]: 52–69, at 60–63CrossRefGoogle Scholar.) But what he means by the latter notion is the authority belonging to members of the moral community in general (and not just to those whom we owe certain duties) to demand that we honor our rights-entailing obligations—an authority entitling them to claim, if we fail, that we have done wrong (simpliciter) even if we have not wronged them. Consequently, this point does nothing to acknowledge that there exist obligations based in agent-neutral reasons. Darwall also broaches the idea that an agent-neutral concern with the welfare of others might be housed within an agent-relative conception of morality, but without explaining how such a derivation would go (Darwall, The Second-Person Standpoint, 95, 130).

25 Ross, W. D., The Right and the Good (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1930), 18Google Scholar.

26 I should also observe that Darwall's account attributes an intrinsic moral standing only to those able to make moral claims of others, a view of the sort I criticized at the beginning of Section V. For Darwall's own reflections on this score, see The Second-Person Standpoint, 28–29.

27 The great champion of this view was, of course, Friedrich Nietzsche, followed more recently by Bernard Williams. See, in particular, Williams, , “Nietzsche's Minimalist Moral Psychology,” in his Making Sense of Humanity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 65–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar.