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Michael Smith and the Daleks: Reason, Morality, and Contingency

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 January 2009

James Lenman
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Abstract

Smith has defended the rationalist's conceptual claim that moral requirements are categorical requirements of reason, arguing that no status short of this would make sense of our taking these requirements as seriously as we do. Against this I argue that Smith has failed to show either that our moral commitments would be undermined by possessing only an internal, contextual justification or that they need presuppose any expectation that rational agents must converge on their acceptance. His claim that this rationalistic understanding of metaethics is required for the intelligibility of moral disagreement is also found to be inadequately supported. It is further proposed that the rationalist's substantive claims – that there are such categorical requirements of reason and that our actual moral commitments are a case in point – are liable to disappointment; and that the conceptual claim is fatally undermined by reflection on how we might best respond to such disappointment.

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Type
Research Article
Information
Utilitas , Volume 11 , Issue 2 , July 1999, pp. 164 - 177
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1999

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References

1 ‘Morality as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives’, repr. in her Virtues and Vices, Oxford, 1978, p. 167.

2 There are numerous relevant passages in Kant but see especially pp. 59–63 of the Groundwork (second edition pagination).

3 Foot, p. 167.

4 Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, suppl. vol., lxiii (1989)Google Scholar.

5 Oxford, 1994.

6 Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, lv (1995)Google Scholar.

7 ‘Dispositional Theories of Value’, 103.

8 Ibid., 105.

9 As Smith does. See ‘Internal Reasons’, 124.

10 The Moral Problem, pp. 170 f.; also ‘Internal Reasons’, 122 f.

11 See especially The Moral Problem, pp. 167 f.; ‘Internal Reasons’, 120 f.

12 ‘Dispositional Theories of Value’, 98 f.

13 Stevenson, Charles L., Ethics and Language, New Haven, 1944Google Scholar, ch. 1; Harman, Gilbert and Thomson, Judith Jarvis, Moral Relativism and Moral Objectivity, Oxford, 1996Google Scholar, ch. 3.

14 See e.g. The Moral Problem, 5.5–5.7; ‘Internalism's Wheel’, Ratio, viii (1995Google Scholar, sect. 1.

15 For an elaboration and defence of this commitment see my ‘The Externalist and the Amoralist’, forthcoming in Philosophia. I there argue in particular that the depressive, whom Smith takes to make particular trouble for the expressivist (The Moral Problem, pp. 135 f.) may be understood very much as Smith himself favours understanding the amoralist – as failing to make genuine moral (or otherwise practical) judgements.

16 Spreading the Word, Oxford, 1984, p. 222Google Scholar.

17 Smith, , ‘Dispositional Theories of Value’, 106 fGoogle Scholar.

18 Daleks are pervasive icons of British popular culture but some non-British readers may need to be told they are malign, imperialistic aliens featuring heavily in the vintage BBC series Dr Who.

19 The Moral Problem, pp. 86 f.

20 See Wright, Crispin, Truth and Objectivity, Cambridge, Mass., 1992Google Scholar.

21 Nicomachean Ethics, X. 9.

22 See Gibbard, Alan, Wise Choices, Apt Feelings, Oxford, 1990Google Scholar, chs. 10–13.

23 Wise Choices, Apt Feelings, pp. 174 ff.

24 See ‘Internalism's Wheel’.

25 Cf. Nussbaum, Martha, The Fragility of Goodness, Cambridge, 1986Google Scholar, esp. ch. 13.

26 On ‘one of us’ it is instructive to compare Smith's, ‘Dispositional Theories of Value’, 107 fGoogle Scholar., to Gibbard's, Wise Choices, Apt Feelings, p. 206Google Scholar. It is one thing to say, as Johnston, does (‘Dispositional Theories of Value’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, supp. vol., lviii (1989), 169 f.)Google Scholar that the community of our evaluative judgement is ideally inclusive, another to suggest that our values are discredited if the ideal somewhere fails.

27 Wise Choices, Apt Feelings, p. 201.

28 Smith, , ‘Dispositional Theories of Value’, 99Google Scholar.

29 Repr. in Essays in Quasi-Realism, Oxford, 1993.

30 Ibid., p. 150.

31 Morality: An Introduction to Ethics, Cambridge, 1972, p. 47Google Scholar.

32 I've been helped with this by my former colleagues at Lancaster, especially John Foster, Alan Holland and John O'Neill, and by participants in the British Society for Ethical Theory's 1996 conference at Keele, especially Matthew Kieran, David McNaughton, Philip Stratton-Lake and Nick Zangwill; as well as by referees for Utilitas. Many thanks to all these.