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Published online: 29 Aug 2008.
To cite this article: Will Kymlicka (1991) The Ethics of Inarticulacy, Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy, 34:2,
155-182, DOI: 10.1080/00201749108602250
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00201749108602250
In his impressive and wide-ranging new book, Sources of the Self, Charles Taylor
argues that modern moral philosophy, at least within the Anglo-American tradition, .
offers a 'cramped' view of morality. Taylor attributes this problem to three
distinctive features of contemporary moral theory - its commitment to procedural
rather than substantive rationality, its preference for basic reasons rather than
qualitative distinctions, and its belief in the priority of the right over the good.
According to Taylor, the result of these features is that contemporary moral
theories cannot explain the nature of a worthwhile life, or the grounds for moral
respect. Indeed, they render these questions unintelligible. I argue that Taylor has
misunderstood the basic structure of most modern moral theory, which seeks to
relocate, rather than suppress, these important questions. In particular, he fails to
note the difference between general and specific conceptions of the good, between
procedures for assessing the good and specific outcomes of that procedure, and
between society's enforcement of morality and an individual's voluntary compliance
with morality. Each of these distinctions plays an important role in contemporary
moral theory. Once they are made explicit, it is clear that many contemporary
theorists operate with a more sophisticated account of moral sources than Taylor
attributes to them.
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connections I want to draw here are incomprehensible in its terms. This moral
philosophy has tended to focus on what it is right to do rather than on what it is
good to be, on defining the content of obligation rather than the nature of the good
life; and it has no conceptual place left for a notion of the good as the object of
our love or allegiance or, as Iris Murdoch portrayed it in her work, as the privileged
focus of attention or will. This philosophy has accredited a cramped and truncated
view of morality in a narrow sense, as well as of the whole range of issues involved
in the attempt to live the best possible life, and this not only among professional
philosophers, but with a wider public, (p. 3)
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I accept Taylor's central arguments against Mackie's subjectivism. Similar anti-subjectivist arguments about our aspiration to lead genuinely valuable lives can be found in Rawls, Dworkin, Nozick, Raz, and many others.1
However, subjectivists are not Taylor's main target. After all, Taylor is
concerned to describe 'the modern identity', and subjectivism of this sort
is not a distinctively modern phenomenon. For as long as moral philosophy
has existed, there have been sceptics about the objectivity of our value
judgments. Moreover, as Taylor recognizes, many modern moral philosophers reject Mackie's claim. Most philosophers in the Anglo-American
school want to retain a notion of right and wrong which is binding on all
agents, whatever their subjective preferences or beliefs. Taylor's main
focus, therefore, is not the age-old heresy of subjectivism, but the three
distinctively modern ideas I listed above: procedural rationality, the appeal
to basic reasons, and the priority of the right over the good. According to
Taylor, these three features have made almost all modern moral philosophy
inarticulate about the good. Taylor mentions Rawls and Habermas as
people who fall into this trap. Even though they wish to retain some notion
of moral objectivity, Taylor claims that they are precluded by these three
features from saying anything coherent about what those values are, or
how they could have some claim on our allegiance.
test of a moral action is the 'Golden Rule' - i.e. an action is morally justified
only if you could still endorse it after putting yourself in the other person's
shoes. This idea of putting yourself in other people's shoes is invoked, in
various forms, by almost every major modern moral theorist, utilitarian or
Kantian, from Mill's invoking of the Golden Rule, to Rawls's original
position, Hare's impartial sympathizer, and Scanlon's 'contractualism'.2
Any theory that accepts this basic principle of impartiality must answer
two questions: what are people's interests, and what does it mean to show
equal concern for those interests? The differences between modern moral
theories can be traced, by and large, to different answers to these two
questions. For example, what divides Bentham from John Stuart Mill is
their answer to the first question. Bentham was a hedonist who believed
that people's good lies in the maximization of their pleasure. For Mill, on
the other hand, people's well-being resides in the expression of their
uniqueness, or in the development of their most essential capacities, rather
than in the maximization of pleasure. However, both agreed on the second
question - that is, both agreed that the best account of equal concern for
people's interests (however these interests are defined) requires that we
act so as to satisfy as many interests as possible, even if this requires
sacrificing some people for the greater benefit of others. It is this shared
answer to the second question which forms the essential continuity of
utilitarian thought, from Bentham through Mill and Sidgwick to Hare and
Griffin, despite their different answers to the first question. (Of course,
there are minor variations in this shared answer to the second question some apply the test of utility-maximization to acts, some to rules, some
apply it directly, some indirectly.)
Like the utilitarians, Kantians disagree on how best to characterize
people's interests. Some give priority to people's interest in autonomy,
others accord different levels of 'urgency' to different sorts of choices.
However, they share a similar view about the second question - namely,
they agree that the best account of impartial concern for people's interests
(however these interests are defined) will set some limits on the extent to
which one person's interests can be endlessly sacrificed for the benefit of
others. It is this shared concern for the inviolability of certain basic human
rights which defines the essential continuity of contemporary Kantian
thought, despite their different answers to the first question. Again, there
are variations on this shared answer to the second question. Some Kantians
are committed to a principle of equal rights and resources, others to
maximizing the well-being of the worst off; some use contractarian decisionprocedures in order to make impartial decisions, others don't.
This thumbnail sketch is, of course, full of lacunae that would have to
be filled in order to describe any particular theory. However, I hope the
basic outline will strike a familiar chord in most readers. It gives a fair
be said at a general level. But another important reason is that even the
most informed and insightful person may come to doubt the correctness of
their earlier judgments about the good, in the light of new information,
opportunities, or experiences. Hence the freedom to re-evaluate our
notions of the good is critically important. Precisely because these judgments concern distinctions that are independent of the will, no judgment
of the will is beyond question.
Given these difficulties, the strategy adopted by most modern moral
theorists is not to come up with lists of substantive goods, but rather to
think about what we might call 'discovery procedures' - i.e. about what
sorts of social conditions are best suited to enabling individuals to make
these judgments on an on-going basis. And this requires abstracting a bit
from particular ends, and thinking at a more general level about what is
involved in adopting and pursuing an informed conception of the good.
This, of course, is what Rawls aims to do with his much-maligned 'thin
theory of the good'. According to Rawls, whatever the differences between
people's ways of life, 'there is something like pursuing a conception of the
good life that all people, even those with the most diverse commitments,
can be said to be engaged i n . . . although people do not share one another's
ideals, they can at least abstract from their experience a sense of what it is
like to be committed to an ideal of the good life1.* On the basis of this more
general conceptualization of what is involved in evaluating and pursuing a
conception of the good, Rawls develops a theory about the rights, resources,
and social conditions which will enable individuals to make informed
choices on an on-going basis, and which will enable worthwhile ways of life
to be sustained. Although Rawls himself does not try to make judgments
regarding the relative worth of particular ways of life, he leaves conceptual
room for these qualitative distinctions about the good by describing the
conditions under which these judgments can be made in a free and informed
manner.6
Given this characterization of modern moral theories, it should be clear
that Taylor's three contrasts between classical and modern moral theories
are either false or misleading. Consider the contrast between procedural
and substantive conceptions of ethics. It is true that Kantians and utilitarians
invoke various procedures to ascertain the right action. But this does not
compete with, or preclude, the idea that there are substantively correct
ends which define a valuable or worthwhile life. In order to apply a
procedural test of impartiality, we must have an account of people's
interests. And, as noted above, while some theorists accept a hedonistic
theory of the good, others use an 'informed preferences' theory of the
good, or an 'objective list' theory of the good. Both of these are compatible
with the view that a good life requires a substantively correct perception
of qualitative distinctions. For those who do accept this view, it will be
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important that the procedure, in deciding upon the requirements of impartial concern, operate with some account of the conditions under which
individuals can best identify and pursue those substantively correct ends.
And, indeed, this is just what Rawls does. His belief that people can
rationally evaluate and revise their ends affects how he describes the
motivations of the parties in his original position.7 Nothing in the idea of
a procedural modelling of impartiality precludes the idea of substantively
correct ends.
Taylor may be misled by the fact that some moral philosophers don't
define 'rationality' in terms of the correct apprehension of qualitative
distinctions, but rather define it in terms of (say) adjusting means to ends.
But that is often just a matter of terminology. It doesn't mean that these
philosophers don't think there is such a thing as qualitative distinctions, or
that correctly perceiving them is not a virtue. They would just employ other
terms to describe that virtue - e.g. sensitivity, or maturity, or wisdom,
or insight. It is true that on the definition of rationality used by some
contemporary moral theorists, a person who is 'rational' may not be very
insightful, and so may be leading a trivial life. But that just shows that
rationality (so defined) is not the only value, and few of these theorists say
it is. The failure to include the correct perception of qualitative distinctions
within the definition of 'rationality' would only be a problem if these
theorists said that rationality was the only criterion we should use to
evaluate ways of life, and they don't say this.
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account of the good, in order to assess the sort of social conditions required
for people to judge and pursue more particular conceptions of the good.
Is it a problem that contemporary moral philosophers have not tried to
determine the particular content of a worthwhile conception of the good?
This depends on one's conception of the task of moral philosophy. Taylor
clearly believes that moral philosophers have abandoned their true calling
to distinguish the truly valuable from the merely trivial. This is reminiscent
of the preface to E. J. Bond's Reason and Value, where Bond speaks of
the disappointment he felt with what he was taught in a moral philosophy
class:
I Temember being puzzled, as an undergraduate, when my professor and my fellow
students all seemed to accept without question that only moral considerations stood
in the way of doing what one pleased, and that otherwise there was nothing
problematic about the pursuit of ends. One simply had desires for certain things,
and if one could, and if there were no moral reasons against it, then one just went
ahead and set out to do or get or keep them. . . . Here, then, were a couple of
dozen or so people equipped with a set of ready-made wants, which it was the
business of their lives to set about satisfying, only taking care not to violate the
principles of morality. I was certainly the odd-man-out, for I did not have any such
set of wants (except the obvious appetites of course) and did not know what to do
with my life. I wanted to find out what was of value, what goals were genuinely
worth pursuing, before I could formulate a 'rational life plan', and that required
something more than the consultation of my already existing desires or 'concerns'
or speculations about my future ones. My fundamental practical questions were not
'When can I not do what I want?' or 'How can I best accomplish what I want the
most with the least frustration of my desires along the way?' but 'What ends would
be worth my while?' or 'What, of the things open to me, would be most profitable
or rewarding?' and 'How can I realize the most worth or value in my life?'.12
Like Bond, Taylor looks to moral philosophy to find out what ends are
most worth while, and is disappointed to find out that the philosophers are
only discussing what is morally impermissible.
Moral philosophers today, however, do not view themselves as having
that task. This is not because they think that qualitative questions of the
good are unimportant. On the contrary, as Rawls emphasizes, enforcing
principles of right 'would serve no purpose - would have no point - unless
[they] not only permitted but also sustained ways of life that citizens can
affirm as worthy of their full allegiance. . . . In a phrase: justice draws the
limits, the good shows the point'. 13 Their belief is simply that the ways of
life which are worthy of our allegiance are suitably protected by principles of
right which provide people with the resources, rights, and social conditions
under which they can make their own informed judgments about the good
on an on-going basis. Indeed, as Rawls says, this ability to pursue goods
that are worthy of our allegiance is the whole point of having principles of
right.
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Taylor considers two sorts of answers to this question. One answer is the
Christian view that grace makes benevolence possible. Being dedicated to
the cause of God includes the affirming of life, and
What differentiates God from humans in this respect is the fulness, the force of the
affirmation - something humans can't match on their own, but which they can
participate in by following God. . . . In the Christian case, the key notion is that
of agape, or charity, God's affirming love for the world (John 3:16), which humans
through receiving can then give in turn. (p. 270)
The second answer is secular, emphasizing either our natural sympathy
which is troubled at the site of human suffering, or our respect for the
dignity of human reason (p. 411).
Deciding between these two sorts of answers is important, Taylor says,
because '[h]igh standards need strong sources' (p. 516). The issue of
empowerment is particularly acute for contemporary theorists because they
demand greater sacrifices than earlier theorists did, and 'any belief that we
can and ought to lay stronger demands on ourselves than prevailed in the
past, must contain at least implicitly some answer to this question' of moral
sources (pp. 398-9). We aspire to universal justice, but 'What can enable
us to transcend in this way the limits we normally observe to human
moral action?' - i.e. the limits created by 'our restricted sympathies, our
understandable self-preoccupation, and the common human tendency to
define one's identity in opposition to some adversary or out group' (p.
398).
According to Taylor, the only answer which can provide these 'strong
sources' is the Christian one: 'It all depends on what the most illusion-free
moral sources are, and they seem to me to involve a God' (p. 342). Without
the belief that creation is good, it is likely that critics of morality, like
Schopenhauer, will undermine 'the grounds on which universal benevolence was seen as a good, the value of human life and happiness' (p.
448).
I will not pursue Taylor's answer to this question of moral sources - i.e.
his views of the relative merits of secular and theistic sources, and of where
the burden of proof lies.17 Instead, I want to step back and consider the
way he poses the question. According to Taylor, high standards require
strong sources, and so '[t]he question which arises from all this is whether
we are not living beyond our moral means in continuing allegiance to our
standards of justice and benevolence' (p. 517). If we do not have strong
sources, we must moderate our claims, because it is important that we not
'live beyond our moral means'. It is 'morally corrupting, even dangerous' to
make moral demands where it will simply create 'the feeling of undischarged
obligation, [or] guilt, or its obverse, self-satisfaction' (p. 516).
I think that Taylor is raising an important point, although, here as
elsewhere, it is obscured by his insistence that modern theorists seek to
VII. Conclusion
According to Taylor, modern moral philosophy offers us a cramped view
of morality. His evidence for this claim is that philosophers have focused
exclusively on a narrow set of questions about our rightful obligations to
other people, while neglecting a wide range of other moral questions, like
what it is good to be, or why we should show concern and respect for other
people's lives. Taylor's explanation for this narrow focus is that modern
moral philosophy denies the existence of 'qualitative distinctions' which
are independent of the will. This denial renders moral theory 'inarticulate'
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about the 'moral sources' which underlie our beliefs about the good life,
or about the worth of human life.
I have tried to offer an alternative account of the modern focus on
principles of right conduct. Taylor is right to note that contemporary moral
philosophers do not attempt to describe the precise contours of the good
life. But his explanation is wrong. The explanation is not that they deny
the existence of qualitative distinctions. Most theorists affirm that there is
a real difference, independent of the will, between trivial and worthwhile
ways of life. They just do not view it as the task of moral philosophy to
make that distinction. This is because each person has a natural pre-moral
interest in sorting out the contours of a worthwhile life, and the institution
of morality is not required to get people to take that question seriously.
All moral philosophy must do on this question is ensure that people have
the social space required to let this aspect of their practical reasoning work
itself out.
For modern theorists, the institution of morality has a different function.
It is required to focus attention not on the worth of one's own activities
but on the needs of other people, since other people's good is as important,
from a moral point of view, as one's own. Our everyday practical reasoning
cannot be relied on here, because the pursuit of a fulfilling or worthwhile
life, as opposed to a trivial or alienating one, will not necessarily lead us
towards morality. The line between fulfilling and trivial lives cuts across
the line between moral and immoral lives. The problem, from the point of
view of modern theorists, is not that there are no such things as truly
worthwhile goods, but rather that there are too many of them, and some
of them can conflict with the demands of morality. Hence, modern theorists
believe, a different kind of reasoning is required to ensure that attention
is focused on the legitimate claims of others.
Taylor is aware of this view of the function of morality. He responds that
contemporary moral philosophers fail to provide any guidance even with
respect to this more limited function, because they refuse to make explicit
that impartiality is a value commanding our allegiance, and fail to explain
why other people are worthy of our concern. Here, I think, Taylor is simply
wrong. Many modern theorists do make clear that impartiality has a higher
claim on our allegiance than egoism or maliciousness, and they do tie this
to some theory of why humans are worthy of moral consideration. Most
appeal to either sentience or rationality as grounds for saying that humans
are worthy of consideration.
Once again, Taylor is aware that some moral philosophers have advanced
such views. He responds that these philosophers have failed to prove that
these secular accounts of moral sources are sufficient to empower people
to live up to standards of universal justice. In particular, theorists have
failed to show that these moral sources are strong enough to outweigh our
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NOTES
1 I discuss the centrality of this argument to recent liberal political theory in my Liberalism,
Community, and Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), ch. 2.
2 'In the Golden Rule of Jesus of Nazareth, we read the complete spirit of the ethics of
utility. To do as you would be done by, and to love your neighbour as yourself, constitute
the ideal perfection of utilitarian morality.' J. S. Mill, Utilitarianism, Liberty, Representative
Government (London: Dent & Sons, 1968), p. 16. I discuss the various ways that putting
yourself in other people's shoes is used by utilitarians and Kantians as a model of
impartiality in my Contemporary Political Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1990), chs 2-3. See also the discussion in Ronald Dworkin, 'In Defense of Equality', Social
Philosophy and Policy 1 (1983).
3 On utilitarian definitions of people's interests, see Richard Brandt, A Theory of the Right
and the Good (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979); James Griffin, Well-Being: Its Meaning,
Measurement, and Moral Importance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986); Derek Parfit,
Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984). On the application of the principle
of utility-maximization to rules and acts, see David Lyons, Forms and Limits of Utilitarianism (London: Oxford University Press, 1965), and Richard Hare, Freedom and
Reason (London: Clarendon Press, 1963).
4 On Kantian debates about the good, see David Richards, A Theory of Reasons for Action
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971); Thomas Scanlon, 'Preference and Urgency', Journal of
Philosophy 72 (1975); Scanlon, 'The Significance of Choice', in The Tanner Lectures on
Human Values, vol. 8, S. McMurrin (ed.) (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1988);
John Rawls, 'The Priority of Right and Ideas of the Good', Philosophy and Public Affairs
17(1988). On different models of impartial concern, compare Rawls's defence of the
original position (A Theory of Justice [London: Oxford University Press, 1971]) with the
critiques in Thomas Scanlon, 'Contractualism and Utilitarianism', in Utilitarianism and
Beyond, A. Sen and B. Williams (eds) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982),
Brian Barry, Theories of Justice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), and B.
J. Diggs, 'A Contractarian View of Respect for Persons', American Philosophical Quarterly
18 (1981).
5 Jeremy Waldron, 'Theoretical Foundations of Liberalism', Philosophical Quarterly 37
(1987), p. 145; cf. Rawls, Theory of Justice, pp. 92-95, 407-16.
6 Taylor says that for people like Rawls, 'The idea that moral thought should concern itself
with our different visions of the qualitatively higher, with strong goods, is never even
mooted' (p. 84). This is entirely unfair. Rawls discusses perfectionism at length, and gives
a number of arguments against it. I discuss Rawls's arguments on this issue in 'Liberal
Individualism and Liberal Neutrality', Ethics 99 (1989). See also D. A. Lloyd Thomas, In
Defence of Liberalism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988).
7 I discuss Rawls's argument on this issue in 'Liberalism and Communitarianism', Canadian
Journal of Philosophy 18 (1988).
8 Rawls, Theory of Justice, op. cit., pp. 505-10. However, I agree with Taylor that many
people who 'remain quite unattracted by the naturalist attempt to deny ontology altogether,
and while on the contrary they recognize that their moral reactions show them to be
committed to some adequate basis, are perplexed and uncertain when it comes to saying
what this basis is' (p. 10).
9 While utilitarians are in explicit agreement that benevolence is a higher value than people's
de facto desires, there is considerable debate about how exactly this standard should be
reflected in our day-to-day motivations. It is widely held by many utilitarians that people
181
16 E.g., some people reject Rawls's claim that it is possible to abstract from our particular
conceptions of the good a more general theory of what it means to hold a conception of
the good, and hence of the conditions under which qualitative judgments about the good
can be made in an informed manner. On this view, the social conditions which contemporary
moral philosophers say are adequate for worthwhile ways of life to sustain themselves are
in fact based on only one or two specific ways of life, and unfairly preclude others. There
is no one set of social conditions which people can accept as providing a fair basis for
different ways of life to prove their worth, and so moral philosophers cannot avoid implicitly
evaluating specific ways of life in choosing a discovery procedure. This is an important
criticism of the modern view of the restricted role of moral philosophy, and I suspect that
Taylor is sympathetic to it. However, he does not discuss this criticism, or the various
responses that have been made to it. (Actually, this criticism presupposes what Taylor
denies - i.e. that modem moral theories do, after all, have an account of the sort of space
required for judgments about the good.) Moreover, if this were a real problem with moral
philosophy, it would seem to undermine Taylor's claim that 'we agree surprisingly well,
across great differences of theological and metaphysical belief, about the demands of
justice and benevolence, and their importance' (p. 515), or that we are 'united around the
norms' (p. 515). This is in any event a surprising admission, given Taylor's repeated ctaim
that contemporary moral philosophy has no sense at all of what people care about. How
could moral philosophers have got the norms right unless they had an understanding of
the sort of space people require to pursue the things they most care about?
17 According to Taylor, secular appeals to sentience or reason are 'inherently contestable in
a way that the theistic outlook is not. Theism is, of course, contested as to its truth. . . .
But no one doubts that those who embrace it will find a fully adequate moral source in it'.
For secular theorists, however, '[t]he question is whether, even granted we fully recognize
the dignity of disengaged reason, or the goodness of nature, this is in fact enough to justify
the importance we put on it, the moral store we set by i t . . . . [w]hereas faith is questioned
as to its truth, dignity and nature are also called into question in respect of their adequacy
if true. The nagging question for modern theism is simply: Is there really a God? The
threat at the margin of modern non-theistic humanism is: So what?' (p. 317).
I do not think that most secular people will share Taylor's assessment of the burden of
proof. It is certainly true that the existence of God would affect the schedule of rewards
and punishments that would accompany particular actions. But many of us who are children
of the 'unbelieving Enlightenment' are not at all clear in what other (non-prudential) sense
God provides an adequate moral source, and unfortunately Taylor provides no examples
of what he has in mind. One common theistic argument that arises in my new line of work
is that we should not perform medical experiments on human embryos because they bear
the image of God, or at least that we should only do so if we cannot acquire the needed
information through experiments on other species who do not bear His image. Now one
secular response is to deny that God exists. But another response is to say, So what? The
fact that an embryo bears the image of God has no obvious moral relevance. And if we
look at what are obviously morally relevant qualities, like the capacit to feel pain, then
it seems perverse to say that it is better to conduct experiments on sentient animals than
on non-sentient embryos. Human embryos may bear the image of God, or may have a
favoured place in His creation, but these are not obviously moral considerations (except
that He may punish us for ignoring them). They do not really explain why human embryos
deserve greater moral consideration than sentient animals. Theists might respond that I
have failed to understand the full moral significance of the fact that God loves human
embryos. But of course secular theorists can say the same about someone who fails to
understand the full moral significance of rationality or sentience. There is no sense in which
the theist position is less 'inherently contestable'.
18 It is often unclear whether Taylor, in demanding a clearer account of moral sources, is
asking for a clearer account of the moral point of impartiality, or whether he is asking for
a clearer account of how respecting impartiality fits within the contours of the truly good
life.
19 On the preconditions for the development of an effective sense of justice, and their
implications for principles of justice, see Susan Okin, 'Reason and Feeling in Thinking
About Justice', Ethics 99 (1989).