Rawls and "Classical Utilitarianism" (II)

In a recent posting I looked at Rawls' critical response to utilitarianism in the fifth section of the first chapter of A Theory of Justice. However, the reply to "classical utilitarianism" carries on after this fifth section into the sixth section. Whilst the discussion in the sixth section does repeat some of the motifs of the fifth section, particularly the claim concerning utilitarianism abstracting from the separateness of persons, it also expands the contrast set out in the previous section between utilitarianism and justice as fairness.

The first contrast Rawls draws in the sixth section is between the two theories' response to common sense morality. Again, as was pointed out in the previous posting, Rawls has Sidgwick implicitly in mind here given that the Methods of Ethics took seriously from the first the notion of "common sense morality". Naturally Rawls' response to the challenge of common sense morality differs from that of Sidgwick since Rawls assumes that justice as fairness can take the claims of common sense morality more seriously than can utilitarianism. The main reason given for taking this to be true is that the convictions of common sense morality concerning justice are assumed to be consequences of the principles that would be chosen in the original position. This assumption is quite different from the utilitarian one which adopts the more empiricist argument of viewing common sense morality as having a generic good function even though the rules of it are secondary to those of utilitarianism. (Rawls does not here invoke the general "Government House" conception that Sidgwick adheres to of taking the dictates of common sense morality to be ones that might be publicly adhered to whilst secretly one is committed to utilitarianism. Given Rawls' own conviction of the importance of the publicity of principles of justice and the way this conception cuts directly against requirements of common sense morality we have here a stronger argument for viewing justice as fairness as taking common sense morality more seriously than utilitarianism than Rawls gives in the text!)

The second contrast between justice as fairness and utilitarianism is the more familiar one that suggests the contractarian nature of the former is effectively more social in form than the principle of the latter given that the latter extends the principle of choice for one man to the whole of society. This contrast invokes the charge of abstraction from the separateness of persons against utilitarianism and so is simply a restatement of the argument of the fifth section.

The third contrast invokes the distinction between deontological and teleological approaches to ethics, a contrast related to the question of the priority of the right over the good or vice versa. The sense in which justice as fairness is a deontological view is specified here as being that it does not interpret the right as maximising the good. Whilst this point is familiar in some respects the means by which Rawls defends it in this sixth section is unexpected. It concerns the manner in which the good is taken to be prior to the right by utilitarians. If the utilitarian theory is viewed as giving priority to the good over the right the natural question arises concerning what the good is taken to be by this theory. Here Rawls makes the key point that the good is simply assumed to be that which is desired. In other terms, whatever is desired would appear to have value so the question of maximisation arises due to a prior commitment to this conflation of the good with the desirable. It is natural to wish to maximise the desirable and if the good is viewed through the prism of the desirable then the maximisation strategy is intuitively plausible as a whole.

However, following Kant's argument concerning the nature of happiness, Rawls does not accept a prima facie value as attached to whatever is desired. Rather, Rawls takes it to be the case that only that which matches the principles of right has value. The principle of right restricts (and thereby realises) what can be taken to be good. This is the point of the notion of the priority of the right over the good: the right provides us with formal characteristics that have to be satisfied in order that something can be taken to be good. In lieu of these being satisfied you merely have something that some may wish for but not something that has any status of value as such. As Rawls puts this: "desires and aspirations are restricted from the outset by the principles of justice which specify the boundaries that men's systems of ends must respect". So only certain kinds of ends will be taken seriously as only these ends are worthy of being taken seriously (just as Kant writes that it is only under certain conditions that one is "worthy of" happiness).

Because of the way the contrast between utilitarianism and justice as fairness has here been characterised the priority of the right over the good becomes clarified as central to the conception of justice that justice as fairness elaborates. It has a moral ideal that guides the selection of any possible end as being acceptable as a value and there is therefore no value in a basic sense prior to the formal criteria of right. This second set of contrasts hence makes much clearer the core conceptions of justice as fairness.

W.D. Ross and Intuitionism

I suggested earlier, when I first introduced the topic of intuitionism, that it would be incorrect to characterise this view of ethics as directly competitive with consequentialism. One of the reasons why it is not is because intuitionism in fact occupies a number of different roles in moral theory. One of those roles is as a form of account of moral knowledge and, indeed, it is its role in this aspect that is most often referred to when people think of intuitionism. In this role, however, it need not be incompatible with consequentialism as is seen in the case of G.E. Moore who adopts an intuitionist view of moral epistemology but whose normative principles embody what is often termed an "ideal utilitarianism". 


Moore's combination of intuitionism with a version of utilitarian normative principles is certainly intriguing though, it has to be said, that his normative principles have been rarely taken that seriously in the history of ethics (despite apparently having some influence on the Bloomsbury Group!). William David Ross is a different kind of character and his work embodies a combination of intuitionist epistemology with an approach to normative principles that is decidedly non-consequentialist. Ross' most famous work is surely The Right and the Good and in this work Ross argues that neither "the right" nor "the good" can be understood in a monistic way.


Essentially Ross distinguishes "the right" from "the good" by indicating that the former concerns what is obligatory and concerning this he departs clearly from consequentialism as when he writes: 


"An act is not right because it, being one thing, produces good results different from itself; it is right because it is in itself the production of a certain state of affairs. Such production is right in itself, apart from any consequence." (pp. 46-7.)


There is, then, as he puts it on page 47, some "intrinsic rightness" attaching to certain types of act due to the nature of these acts regardless of any reference to consequences. So, whatever it is that is "right" is not so judged in terms of anything like the normative principles adopted by Moore. If we next turn to how Ross accounts for "the good" we might then expect that in relation to this we could yet find some kind of admixture such as applied to the case of Moore. However, this is not so. With regard to the property of "goodness" Ross claims that it is objective and intrinsic to the things that are good. These things include virtue, pleasure, the allocation of pleasure to the virtuous, and knowledge, but moral goodness is taken primarily to consist in adoption of a sense of duty (despite the fact that this is not itself something we are "obliged" to adopt on Ross' view of "the right"). Hence the account of moral goodness, like that of rightness, turns away from a consequentialist account and when Ross repudiates assessing rightness in terms of production of consequences he rejects any view of moral goodness that sees the latter as determinative of rightness due to the former being understood in a productive sense. Hence Ross appears to come much closer to the ideal type of deontologist that Broad describes. To this needs to be added a fuller consideration of the way the normative structure of Ross' theory works in relation to acts and rules. This requires, however, a discussion of his account of prima facie duties, a topic that needs a separate posting.

Ethics and Teleology

In the previous two postings I have looked at the notions of deontology and the alleged priority of the "right" over the "good" and whilst the former notion has proved trickier than the latter there would appear to have been a certain message emerging from consideration of these notions with regard to the nature of Kant's ethics. However, when turning to the views alleged to be held by those who think of ethics in a teleological way, we will discover some areas of substantial confusion.


Samuel Freeman, as noted in the earlier posting on deontology, views deontological theories as involving pluralism with regard to value whilst, by contrast, he presents teleological views of ethics as having a monistic conception of value. This position of Freeman's is, however, not sustained when we look back in the history of ethics. One of the first works to present a broad characterisation of teleological conceptions of ethics and, in the process, to distinguish such a view from the deontological conception, is by C. D. Broad. Broad's classic text Five Types of Ethical Theory agrees with contemporary usage in that it opens by treating teleological conceptions of ethics as primarily concerned with consequences as certain types of consequences are viewed as intrinsically good or bad. However, whilst this equation of teleological conceptions of ethics with consequentialism might seem to confirm certain contemporary views of teleological ethics there are further complications in Broad's account which converge rather less with contemporary usage. So Broad is, for example, unconvinced that there are any ethical theories are either purely deontological or purely teleological and he presents these conceptions as instead ideal limits of theory rather than characterising any ethical view as such. Secondly, and an important corrective to the claim of Freeman, Broad is quite clear that there can be pluralist forms of teleological conceptions of ethics in which several distinguishable views of the good can be held in tandem. So there is, for Broad, nothing intrinsic to teleological views that requires them to be classed as monistic.


William Frankena, as mentioned in the earlier posting on deontology, presents teleological theories of ethics in a different way to Broad. On Frankena's view, the distinctive point about teleological theories is that they assess the moral qualities of actions and persons in relation to certain non-moral values which are held to be important. So, for Frankena, what is important is the claim concerning value that is held by teleologists though, like Freeman, he does tend to view teleological theories as monistic in nature. 


If we move from these general conceptions of teleological accounts of ethics to attempts to view Kant's ethics in terms that are either resistant to deontology or embracing of teleology we will note that the problems already inherent in the accounts of teleological ethics considered will multiply. The two most prominent dissenters from the view that Kant should be considered to embrace a kind of (rule)-deontology are Barbara Herman and Paul Guyer. The reasons why Herman and Guyer resist the deontological characterisation are different but they lead both to views that require a revision of the simple conception that Kant asserts a priority for the right over the good. Barbara Herman focuses on the opening section of Kant's Groundwork where the "good will" is taken to have absolute value and she uses this to resist attributing a deontological conception of ethics to Kant where she means by "deontology" a thesis concerning value (a claimed independence of moral considerations from value). Herman claims that Kant has a view of the good "both as the formal final end and as the ultimate internal condition of rational agency". 


The problem with deontological conceptions of ethics, according to Herman, is that they do not provide us with an understanding of how it is that moral rules have any kind of claim upon us. To account for this is to give what she calls "a grounding conception of value" and we need this in order to make intelligible moral requirements. So the key for Herman is to provide an account of Kant's ethics that enables us to see it as giving us a motivational view of practical reason that provides a conception of principles that allows for a notion of value. The interesting point about these claims is that they aim less at providing a strictly teleological conception of ethics than one that does not rest so evidently as the previous posting might have led one to think on an assumed priority of the right over the good.


Paul Guyer brings together teleology with a view about the relation between the right and the good as he views teleological ethics as consisting in an assertion of an antecedent good prior to principles of right being established but whilst the notion of the good tends to be assimilated with some notion of consequences it is not so understood by Guyer for whom the intrinsic value of freedom could be grasped as such a "good". Since, though, somewhat unsurprisingly, Guyer views Kantian freedom as autonomy (or freedom governed by law) it would follow that such freedom incorporates a sense of duty, though, on his view, it also includes the value that is so important to Herman. On these grounds, however, Guyer asserts a surprising preference for the argument of the Groundwork over that of the Critique of Practical Reason and dismisses Kant's claim for the "fact of reason" in the latter as indicative of a view that abandons finding reasons for why we would adopt the moral law (hence effectively finding in the Second Critique the view that Herman rejects). Like Herman, Guyer views the good will as something that is antecedently valuable and indicative on Kant's part of an understanding of a substantive conception of the good with the second part of the Groundwork amplifying this into the notion of rational being as an end-in-itself.


Guyer's view hence includes elements not present in Herman's and allows for at least one point not congruent with Herman's. This is that Guyer allows that the intrinsic value of freedom is not itself demonstrable, something that seems to ensure that it does not meet Herman's demand for a rational construction of Kantian ethics.


What we have noted in this posting is that the view of what teleological views of ethics consists in is less settled than many think.  Further, at least some prominent contemporary Kantians are less than happy with the effect of characterising Kant's ethics in a way that does not make room for considerations that have often been thought to belong only with teleological views. In the next posting we will consider consequentialism.

The Priority of the Right Over the Good

Following the discussion in the last posting of the sense(s) that can be given to the characterisation of a view as deontological I will, in this posting, look at the ways the assertion of the priority of the right over the good has been understood. The first thing that is obvious about the assertion of the priority of the right over the good is that it asserts a lexical ordering. According to Samuel Freeman, the point of asserting the priority of the right over the good is to make a claim concerning "the desires and interests moral agents can take into account".


On this conception of the claim for the priority of the right it is a principle that limits what we should include in our practical reasoning. This point is also made explicit by John Rawls in A Theory of Justice which states that the principles of right "put limits on which satisfactions have value; they impose restrictions on what are reasonable conceptions of one's good" (TJ 27 rev/31 original). So to assert the priority of the right is to have some standards by which we can determine what things would be "good" for us though here the point seems to be a more limited one than Freeman has suggested as in this citation it is clear that the limit is placed on satisfactions. However, although the formulation from Rawls is in this respect more limited than that from Freeman, it is, in another sense, more inclusive. After all, on the Rawls conception given, the assertion of the priority of the right does involve a thesis concerning value (whilst, on at least some construals, deontology, by contrast, seems not to be concerned with value).


Similarly, in Political Liberalism, Rawls suggests that the priority of the right "characterizes the structure and content" of his view such that it indicates what can count as a good reason. If it so determines what counts as good reasons then in a sense the assertion of the priority of the right indicates what kind of place things that might be deemed to be "good" can have in the view in question. The connection of this claim to Kant involves an appeal to the view Kant presents in the Critique of Practical Reason as a "paradox" of method where he claims that the concepts of good and evil "must be defined after and by means of the law" (Ak. 5: 63). This is more fully set out when Kant effectively articulates something like a "Copernican turn" in ethics by discerning the error of philosophers when previously discussing the supreme principle of morals:


"they sought an object of the will in order to make it into the material and the foundation of a law (which would then not be the directly determining ground of the will, but would be the determining ground of the will indirectly, only by means of that object referred to the feeling of pleasure or displeasure); instead, they should have first looked for a law that a priori and directly determined the will, and only then determined the object conformable to it." (Ak. 5: 64)


This second passage makes clearer the type of change involved. Kant is indicating that we should not begin by finding something we take to have "value" and then base our notion of moral law upon it but rather articulate the moral law that is a priori and then comprehend what can be said to have value in terms of what fits with it. If this is the kind of consideration that is at work in the notion of the assertion of the priority of the right over the good then it will be necessary next to turning to what it is that is involved in viewing an ethical position as teleological.

Deontology

It's a commonplace in discussions of Kant's moral philosophy to characterise it as "deontological" where the term "deontological" is meant to indicate that Kant places a priority of the right over the good. However, I have long been troubled by the assumption that in terming Kant's moral philosophy "deontological" that there is a basic and simple rationale for describing him as not allowing teleological considerations into his ethics when it has seemed to me that there are a lot of pretty good reasons for seeing his ethics as being teleological. In fact the suggestion to the effect that Kant's ethics are teleological was a prime motive when I wrote my book Kant's Practical Philosophy: From Critique to Doctrine. However, when this work was reviewed in Mind by Oliver Sensen the objection to this argument followed the lines I have suggested, namely, it pitted against the book's line concerning teleology the view that Kant asserts the priority of the right over the good and is hence committed to a form of deontological ethics. Sensen's review in Mind was very fair (unlike some that appear there) and took a considerable amount of time to make a lot of my argument explicit so I am far from complaining about it. But in making this stock response to the work he reiterated a distinction which I had been trying to unsettle. It has recently struck me that, in responding to the view that Sensen was orthodoxly presenting, it is necessary to attempt a very nuanced set of distinctions and I'm going to use a few postings to attempt to draw them out. After doing so, I will then return to the question of the view that I was attributing to Kant in my book when I presented an argument for understanding his ethics as teleological.


So: I think the following distinctions need to be made. First of all, the difference between "deontology" and the priority of the right over the good. Secondly, the difference between a teleological view of ethics and a consequentialist one. Thirdly, the prospects for constructing a picture of Kant's ethics that views it as teleological whilst also allowing for the point that Kant does articulate a reason for viewing the right as prior to the good. In order to arrive at the picture suggested here though it will first be necessary, for these three points to be convincingly made, to articulate what, in any event, the real meaning is of such expressions as "deontology", "teleology", "the priority of the right over the good" and "consequentialism", each of which are more challenging than is often thought.


In this post I will begin with a focus on "deontology" looking at what is specific to it. The problem with doing with this is that those who specifically try to focus on it in order to discuss the nature of it, by contradistinction to any other view, hold very conflicting and contrary views as to what it consists in. So, Barbara Herman, for example, in a piece articulating a reason why Kantians should bid farewell to deontology, views it as primarily a thesis about value where deontology is understood to be asserting that, in some sense, ethics is "independent" of value. By contrast, Samuel Freeman articulates what is distinctive to deontology by asserting that on such a view there is not a single rational good or, put positively, that there is a plurality of rational goods. So, on one of these views deontology is a thesis concerning value, whilst on the other, it is a pluralist theory of what is good.


These quite different views of the nature of deontology indicate a reason to look more carefully at how it has been characterised in previous works, works that may well be at the back of contemporary definitions but whose implications may have been forgotten or only remotely remembered, hence indicating a basis for the divergent conceptions of deontology. So, if we look back at William Frankena's 1963 volume Ethics we will find ways in which the divergent characterisations of Herman and Freeman can be brought together. In relation to Herman's conception, to begin with, we should note that Frankena describes the deontological view as concerned with "certain features of the act itself other than the value it brings into existence" and in making this point Frankena suggests that taking account of the "value" in moral considerations is to bring in reference to something that is, in some way, distinct from the moral nature of the act, something, that is, that has non-moral force. Since the deontologist is committed to understanding acts in this way it would appear that there is an independence from "value" thus understood in their considerations.


However, Frankena makes a further set of claims concerning deontology that appear to make more sense of the view of it proclaimed by Freeman. So, on further examination of deontology, Frankena claims that it can be distinguished into two separate forms, one that is termed act-deontology and another that he labels rule-deontology. Starting with act-deontology we get quickly moved towards a view of ethics very similar to situation ethics though this is slightly complicated by Frankena's suggestions of a distinction between moderate and extreme views of act-deontology. On the moderate view of act-deontology, Frankena claims, general rules can be built up on the basis of particular cases but a general rule cannot ever supersede a particular judgment concerning what should be done. By contrast, extreme act-deontologists assert "we can and must see in or somehow decide separately in each particular situation what is the right or obligatory thing to do" in a way that is independent of general rules which gives us a form of particularism that effectively converges with situation ethics. Either form of act-deontology clearly amounts to a suspicion of general principles with attention focusing on specifics of situations and does imply, as Freeman suggested, a form of pluralism.


Frankena subsequently distinguishes both forms of act-deontology from the view that he calls rule-deontology. The latter does embrace some sense of rules where these rules establish the nature of what is right or wrong and do so independently of considerations of production of the type of non-moral "value" that Frankena had earlier mentioned. So it would appear that there are grounds for accepting that both Herman and Freeman have captured part of the point of a deontological view though both are also partially misleading. In the next posting I'll set out how, by contrast, the question of the claim of the priority of the right over the good should be understood.