Moral judgement

4. Moral judgement and rules

Since talk of the justification of moral judgement can mean two things, there are two correspondingly different questions about the relationship between justified moral judgement and rules. One is: what role in moral deliberation is properly played by the application of rules? The second is: does the determinative justification of moral judgement-contents – what makes them true – come from their instantiation of rules?

Again, however, these different questions seem to be related. If what makes a moral judgement-content correct is its instantiation of a rule, then there is a case for thinking that good moral deliberation will include following that rule: rule-following activity will be conducive to the formation of correct judgements. Admittedly, if my moral judgements are formed out of blind obedience to a code of moral rules whose point I do not understand, the moral judgements I make might all be true but the way I make them still defective. Following the right rules could not therefore be sufficient for good moral deliberation, but it would still seem to be an important part of it.

So, in order to identify alternative views concerning the role of rules in good deliberation, we should start by canvassing the possible positions concerning the role of rules in the determinative justification of judgement-contents themselves. Three main claims need to be distinguished. According to the first, for any overall moral verdict about a particular case to be true, there must be an exceptionless, nontrivial, general moral principle under which that verdict is subsumed (a ‘verdictive principle’) – for example: ‘It is always wrong to punish a person for an offence he did not commit.’ A second, less ambitious claim does not concern overall moral verdicts but rather the reasons that make defeasible contributions in favour of or against such verdicts. Perhaps, for a fact to be a contributory reason of this kind, there must be an exceptionless principle specifying that it is always a contributory reason for the same verdict, wherever it appears (a ‘contributory principle’) – such as: ‘The fact that you are relying on me for help is always a reason why I ought to help you.’ This second claim is disputed by ‘holists’ about moral reasons. That you are relying on me for help is sometimes a reason why I ought to help you, but not always (as when you need the help as part of a fraudulent scheme). However, although they reject the second claim, some holists make a third. This is that contributory moral reasons derive from general principles specifying facts that have the default status of moral reasons, but can lose it (‘default principles’) – for example: ‘The fact that you are relying on me for help has the status of a reason why I ought to help you, unless that status is defeated.’

Different combinations of those three claims are possible. The first and second are consistent, since a verdictive principle might specify how to move from contributory principles to verdicts in any given case. And the first and third are consistent, since a verdictive principle might spell out all the possible defeaters allowed for by a set of default principles.

Given this, there are also many possible resulting views about the proper place of rules in moral deliberation. Of those, four main views have attracted support. The first sees good deliberation as guided by the aim of articulating adequate verdictive principles. We cannot expect to be equipped with such principles prior to all deliberation. But in making moral judgements, I should be guided by the aim of citing verdictive principles in their support, and progressively refining my formulation of those principles in the light of my exposure to new circumstances and my possession of fuller experience. A second view sees verdictive principles as essential to the determinative justification of judgement-contents, but as playing a background role in the activity of moral deliberation. For that, we are better served by employing rougher, exception-ridden ‘rules of thumb’ which are adequate for practical purposes – supplemented perhaps by a need to resort to a more fundamental verdictive principle in those harder cases where our rules of thumb conflict. Those who deny that determinative justification requires the backing of verdictive principles often advocate a third view. This holds that deliberation is properly guided by the application of contributory and/or default principles, through which the moral reasons bearing on a case can be identified, but that in order to reach an overall verdict about the case this needs to be supplemented by a form of judgement about their relative strengths, and any other relationships between those reasons, which goes beyond the application of any rule. The fourth, most radical view is a ‘particularism’ about moral deliberation, according to which rule-application plays no part in good deliberation. Advocates of this view usually ground it in a corresponding particularism about determinative justification: moral deliberation should not be seen as an activity of rule-application because moral judgement-contents are not themselves made true by the instantiation of principles of any of these kinds (see Moral particularism).

At issue between the proponents of these different views are questions about the force and relevance of the following points. The pressure to guide one’s deliberation by statable rules comes from two main thoughts. One is that this is required in order to prevent deliberation and judgement from being arbitrary: it must conform to independent, regular standards. The second is that moral justification is primarily justification presented to others in support of standards of interpersonal conduct. Justification to others is only possible if it can be articulated, and it means showing that there are standards being met in one case which are equally applicable to others. On the other hand, resistance to this pressure comes from two opposing sources. It is claimed that the complexity of moral reasons makes them incapable of being captured in usable moral rules – the principal argument for this being the apparent failure of every attempt to state such rules. This is often supplemented by appealing to Wittgenstein-inspired claims about the nature of rule-following (see Wittgenstein, L. §11;Meaning and rule-following). Suppose I set out to follow the practice of applying some concept c. For the practice of concept-application to be nonarbitrary, there must be a standard of correctness which that practice succeeds in meeting: we cannot simply be making it up as we go along. This can make it tempting to think that if our practice is to be nonarbitrary, there must be some further rule which specifies in what its correct application consists. However, that does not follow. We correctly apply the concept c when we follow the rule, ‘Identify instances falling under concept c ’. If there are to be right and wrong ways of applying the concept c, this rule must rule some things in and others out. But it does not follow that there must be some further, independently articulable rule for when one counts as following this first one. After all, a general requirement of this kind would apply to the concepts employed in any further rule, producing either circularity or a vicious regress – vicious, because it would yield an infinite and therefore unfulfillable chain of relationships of dependence. There must, therefore, be some concepts for which there are no independently articulable rules: perhaps one such concept is morally right action.