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Ethics and Social Policy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Elizabeth Rapaport
Elizabeth Rapaport*
Affiliation:
Boston University
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Extract

During the past ten years moral philosophers in the English-speaking world have executed an astonishing volte face on the question of whether philosophers qua philosophers have a role as advocates in public policy debates. The standard answer to this question a decade ago was that philosophers were peculiarly qualified to analyze the logic and meaning of moral discourse but were in no way privileged in their ability to make correct moral judgments. This doctrine was a straightforward application of the then equally standard (but of course not universal) trichotomous fact/ value/ analysis distinction. Moral discourse was divided from scientific discourse and philosophy from both. Today philosophers are more than willing to take a stand on public issues — abortion, euthanasia, violence as instrument of social change, any element of foreign policy, preferential treatment of previously discriminated against social groups, and so on. This reversal is easy enough to account for historically.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 11 , Issue 2 , June 1981 , pp. 285 - 308
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1981

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References

1 See Macintyre, Alasdair ‘How Virtues Become Vices,” in Engelhardt, T. and Spicker, Stuart eds. Evaluation and Explanation in the Biomedical Sciences, (Dordrecht: D. Reidel 1974),Google Scholar and Rapaport, Elizabeth and Sagal, Paul T. ‘Abortion and Ethical Theory,’ in Baker, R. et al, eds. Sex: From the Philosophical Point of View (Totowa: Littlefield Adams 1977).Google Scholar

2 See Fried, Marlene Gerber ‘In Defense of Preferential Hiring’ and Thalberg, Irving ‘Reverse Discrimination and the Future,’ in Gould, C.G. and Wartofsky, M.W. eds. Women and Philosophy (New York: Putnam 1976)Google Scholar in support of the greater soundness of defending preferential placement as a necessary institutional reform rather than as a measure of remedial Justice.

3 See Nagel, Thomas ‘Equal Treatment and Compensatory Discrimination,’ Philosophy and Public Affairs 2 (1973)Google Scholar for a discussion of the movement of the social debate about preferential placement which demonstrates the conditions under which these emerge as the alternatives.

4 Judith Thomson makes the argument that male place seekers ought to bear the cost of reform, since they have profitted from the wrongs done to women doubly, by the diminished competition they have had to face for positions and by their advantages of self-confidence and social respect the lack of which undermine the women with whom they have had to complete. See, ‘Preferential Hiring,’ Philosophy and Public Affairs 2 (1973). This is a powerful argument in that it bids fair to compel all opportunity-meritocrats to support preferential placement. However, once the variable of class is considered, the use of this argument must be restricted in that working-class males will be seen to have suffered some of the same disabilities as women and blacks. See section Ill of this essay. See also Fried's response to Thomson in her essay cited above.

5 But not always. See Smart, J.J.C. ‘Extreme and Restricted Utilitarianism’ Philosophical Quarterly 6 (1956).CrossRefGoogle Scholar He does not elaborate an alternative position but he does repudiate fidelity to common conviction as a criterion of theoretical adequacy.

6 Notably, R.M. Hare-see Freedom and Reason (Oxford: Oxford U.P. 1963)Google Scholar on the problem of fanaticism.

7 See Israel Scheffler, ‘On Some Anti-Naturalist Strictures,’ Journal of Philosophy, (1958) on the difficulties of determining when a predicate is a natural predicate and how natural and non-natural predicates differ.

8 Hume has sometimes mistakenly been read as a critic of naturalism. Hume holds an expressivist doctrine on the nature of moral Judgment: No one can sincerely assent to, and hence no evidence can compel someone to assent to, a moral Judgment unless his or her faculty of moral sense registers the requisite reaction of approbation of disapprobation. He is a naturalist in that he regards the aim of moral theory to be the discovery of true inductive generalizations about the operations of our moral sense and the empirical circumstances of human life which explain why it operates as it does. Hume disagrees with any naturalist or non-naturalist who holds that anyone who knows or believes a true statement (about) ethics, e.g., that acts of wanton cruelty are wrong, must on that account Judge that wantonly cruel act x is wrong. The warrant for anyone's saying ‘x is wrong’ is that his or her moral sense is repelled by x, not the possession of an applicable true principle that actions of that kind are wrong.

9 A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. Selby-Bigge, (Oxford: Oxford U.P. 1961) 494.

10 Ibid., 495.

11 A Theory of Justice, (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard U.P. 1971). See Section 22, ‘The Circumstances of Justice,’ 126ff.

12 That the theory is teleological in this phase was pointed out to me by William Burkert.

13 For the notion of reflective equilibrium, see Rawls, 48ff.

14 Rawls, 47.

15 See Giddens, Anthony Capitalism and Modern Social Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P. 1971)CrossRefGoogle Scholar for a brief and accurate account of historical materialism and citations to Marx's texts.

16 Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (International Publishers 1970).Google Scholar See Marx's famous preface to this work.

17 ‘The Subjection of Women,’ in Rossi, Alice S. ed. Essays on Sex Equality (Chicago: U. of Chicago Press 1970) 142-4.Google Scholar

18 Rawls, 106.

19 Rawls, 302. See statement of Second Principle, part (a).

20 Ibid .. See Second Principle, part (b).

21 Rawls, 73.

22 Rawls, 104.

23 Rawls, 302-303.

24 These figures are drawn from the American example. See The Statistical Abstract of the United States for more precise figures. Other western industrial countries, with or without substantial racial minorities, reveal similar patterns mutatis mutandis.

25 ‘Critique of the Gotha Program,’ Marx and Engels, Selected Works (International Publishers 1963).