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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 July 2009
The French have already discovered that the blackness of the skin is no reason why a human being should be abandoned without redress to the caprice of a tormentor. It may one day come to be recognized that the number of legs, the villosity of the skin, or the termination of the os sacrum, are reasons equally insufficient of abandoning a sensitive being to the same fate.
Jeremy Bentham, Principles of Morals and LegislationThis last chapter – in part a twin of, and complementary to, the previous one – is intended to clarify some central methodological aspects of practical decision making and of ethical knowledge and moral deliberation. What is the role of reasons in practical decision making? What is the role of the dichotomy abstract versus concrete in ethical deliberation? What are ethical “reasons”? The first part of the chapter will reconsider and reevaluate some aspects of the tradition of “casuistry” and analyze the concept of abduction as a form of hypothetical reasoning that clarifies the process of “inferring reasons.” As I have explained in the previous methodological chapter “Creating Ethics,” I contend that morality is the effort to guide one's conduct by reasons, that is, to do what there are the best reasons for doing while giving equal weight to the interests of every individual who will be affected by one's conduct.
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