Moral judgement

5. The virtues of moral judgement and moral epistemology

It is often said that good moral judgement requires a form of sensitivity or discernment that is ‘nonalgorithmic’ or ‘goes beyond the application of rules’. This is an unhelpful way of putting an important point. It is unhelpful for a reason that has just been indicated. If you do successfully apply and follow the moral rule, ‘Respond appropriately to all the moral reasons you encounter’, then you will certainly have exercised a flawless moral sensitivity. However, the point can be put more helpfully as follows. For some rules, a full understanding of the statement of the rule is sufficient for its correct application. But for others, that is not true. If I am told that my interview manner should be neither too formal nor too familiar, I might know that ‘too’ means excessively, and understand all the other terms of the instruction, without knowing what is too formal. And the same surely applies to the moral rule just mentioned: I can know the meaning of the word ‘appropriate’ without knowing what is appropriate. A virtue of good judgement is required when no rule can be supplied for which full understanding of the statement of the rule is sufficient for its correct application.

Plausibly, more than one virtue of good judgement is required in connection with morality. I might be a good judge of when charity is demeaning without being a good judge of when withholding the truth is dishonest. There are several different reasons for thinking that good moral judgement requires virtues that go beyond simply understanding rule-statements.

One of them arose above: it is often overlooked. Moral inarticulacy is common. We often judge that there is a determinative justification for a moral judgement, without being able to spell it out. Sometimes, we are presented with arguments which seem hard to fault for conclusions it is hard to accept. So one form of good judgement which is important (especially for philosophers) is knowing when to trust one’s pretheoretical judgement over a theory that is incompatible with it.

More commonly, however, proponents of the need for a ‘nonalgorithmic’ form of moral judgement have in mind one of the following three further points. First, no rule is self-interpreting. So even if there are verdictive moral principles, applying those principles correctly may involve capacities of discernment that go beyond merely understanding them. Secondly, and more obviously, if we are equipped only with contributory principles, we need to go beyond the application of them, making judgements about the relative importance of defeasible reasons (and any other relevant relationships between those reasons) in order to reach overall moral verdicts. And thirdly, moral particularists make the more radical claim that even in assessing whether a fact is a contributory reason at all in a given context, we need to exercise a form of judgement that goes beyond rule-understanding.

This leaves open two core questions for moral epistemology. One is the subject of intense current debate: the extent to which the articulation of rules is required in order to possess a fully adequate warrant for moral judgement, and is therefore a proper goal of moral reflection. The other has received less discussion, but is at least as important. On any plausible view, my warrant for making a judgement about a particular situation will presuppose a warrant for thinking that I am exercising the virtue of good moral judgement in judging as I do. If reaching the right moral opinion requires exercising the virtue of good moral judgement, I must be warranted in judging that I am exercising that virtue in order to be warranted in thinking that I have reached the right opinion. I need a warrant for thinking that my judgement is superior to that of the people who disagree with me. And once any plausible moral principles have been articulated, I need a further warrant for being confident that I have applied them correctly. One of the most important tasks for a plausible moral epistemology is to spell out the conditions I must meet for that to be true of me.