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South. So we have agreed to bury intuitionism. Well, I dare say it is right. But we ought to bury some of the grave-diggers too. Some of the things that Ross said are no doubt wrong, or at least misleading: but they are a lot less wrong than most of the things said since the war.
I wish here to advance the still unfashionable thesis that there can be ‘political experts’ not just in the sense (a) that some people are better than others at practical politics (getting bills passed, etc.), nor (b) that there are experts who can tell us the best means to achieve our ends, nor (c) that some people are expert in reconciling political interests, making good compromises, and so forth. I mean (d) that there are people better equipped than others to decide what is right, in the context of ends as well as means, for a society or a state: the thesis maintained but inadequately defended in Plato's Republic. The thesis does not, of course, entail (e) that these experts are eo ipso entitled to enforce their status as experts, or their decisions, on the rest of us: at most, it would entail that the rest of us would be wise to entrust such decisions to the experts.
In the following paper, I will be operating within the framework of moral concepts set out by R. M. Hare in his Language of Morals and Freedom and Reason. Using this framework, I shall attempt to show that (a) if we claim that certain attitudes we have toward animals are moral, then the application of the consequences of these principles leads us into a rather bizarre, if not outlandish, position, which few would accept as prima facie moral; and (b) if we adopt what can be accepted as a truly moral position with respect to animals, this will turn out to be indistinguishable in kind, if not in degree, from our morality with respect to humans.
Is it possible to do something intentionally and yet be unconscious of so doing? Many philosophers would answer ‘No’ to this question on the grounds that it is of the essence of intention that if we do something intentionally we do it knowing what we are doing.
