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On There Being Some Limits to Morality*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 January 2009

John Kekes
John Kekes
Affiliation:
Philosophy, State University of New York at Albany
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Extract

It is doubtful that our age can lay claim to having formulated a significant moral ideal, but perhaps the most promising candidate is the ideal of pluralism. It involves rejection of the destructive quest for a summum bonum, and the growing recognition that the legitimate ends of life are many, that there is a wide variety of good and admirable lives, and that there is no blueprint drawn in heaven which would provide those who gained access to it with the knowledge of how to live well.

The implications of pluralism are many, and some of them are subversive of widely accepted values. The aim of this essay is to discuss one unsettling consequence of pluralism. Pluralism is a thesis about values, and it is part of this thesis that many values are incommensurable and conflicting. It is usual to interpret the plurality of incommensurable values, and the conflicts thereby produced, as obtaining within morality. Incommensurability is taken to hold between moral values, and the resulting conflicts are regarded as moral. Much has been written about this, and I do not propose to add to it. My interest is in discussing pluralism as it affects a particular type of conflict between moral and nonmoral values.

Since it will be central to the discussion, I must now indicate what I mean by “moral” and “nonmoral” values. All values derive from benefits and harms to sentient beings, but I shall ignore other sentient beings here and concentrate on benefits and harms for human beings.

Type
Research Article
Information
Social Philosophy and Policy , Volume 9 , Issue 2 , Summer 1992 , pp. 63 - 80
Copyright
Copyright © Social Philosophy and Policy Foundation 1992

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References

1 See, for instance, Berlin, Isaiah, Four Essays on Liberty (London: Oxford University Press, 1969)Google Scholar; Hampshire, Stuart, Morality and Conflict (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983)Google Scholar; Nagel, Thomas, “The Fragmentation of Values”, in Mortal Questions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979)Google Scholar; Nussbaum, Martha, The Fragility of Goodness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986)Google Scholar; and Williams, Bernard, “Conflicts of Values”, in Moral Luck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 For seminal articles and a good bibliography, see Moral Dilemmas, ed. Gowans, Christopher W. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).Google Scholar

3 Foot, Philippa, “Are Moral Considerations Overriding?” in Virtues and Vices (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978).Google Scholar

4 Perhaps the best-known representatives of this approach are Slote, Michael, “Admirable Immorality”, in Goods and Virtues (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983)Google Scholar; Williams, “Moral Luck”, in Moral Luck; and Wolf, Susan, “Moral Saints”, Journal of Philosophy, vol. 79 (1982), pp. 419–39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5 Two examples of this approach are Bacon, Marcia, “On Admirable Immorality”, Ethics, vol. 96 (1986), pp. 557–66Google Scholar, and Louden, Robert B., “Can We Be Too Moral?” Ethics, vol. 98 (1988), pp. 361–78.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6 Chatwin, Bruce, Utz (New York: Viking, 1989).Google Scholar

7 The Paris Review Interviews, Writers At Work (London: Secker & Warburg, 1958), p. 112.

8 See Gert, Bernard, Morality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988)Google Scholar, ch. 2, and its predecessor, The Moral Rules (New York: Harper, 1970).

9 Kierkegaard, Soren, Fear and Trembling, trans. Lowrie, W. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1941), pp. 79–101.Google Scholar

10 Walzer, Michael, “Political Action: The Problem of Dirty Hands”, Philosophy and Public Affairs, vol. 2 (1973), pp. 160–80.Google Scholar

11 Williams, “Moral Luck”.

12 For a detailed version of this argument, see Cooper, Neil, The Diversity of Moral Thinking (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), pp. 97–101.Google Scholar

13 See Foot, “Are Moral Considerations Overriding?”

14 Williams, Bernard, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (London: Fontana, 1985), pp. 174–96.Google Scholar For a recent consequentialist response to Williams's argument, see Brandt, Robert B., “Morality and Its Critics”, American Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 26 (1989), pp. 89–100.Google Scholar

15 Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, p. 183.

16 Becker, Lawrence C., Reciprocity (London: Routledge, 1986)Google Scholar, ch. 1.