Moral Obligations

Action, Intention, and Valuation

Thomas E. Wren, Carol Harding

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781412813402
• eBook ISBN: 9781351504690
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

There are many ways of writing about the moral life; Moral Obligations follows the way of what philosophers call ""meta-ethics"": the analysis, not of particular moral problems, but of how the concepts used in formulating and solving them, concepts like ""right"" and ""obligatory,"" have significance and power over us. The meta-ethical part of this book is preceded by a discussion of action, in which Wren lays the foundations for the argument that moral obligation is a part of the formal structure of human agency.

Wren's argument is practical and social-psychological: it is to help all, starting with those who are already committed to some version of the ethic of individual dignity, to promote interagency fellowship and peace as a result of seeing a certain truth, namely, the truth that the urgency of their feelings of moral obligation derives from a unspoken intention to belong to a community of agents.

Moral Obligations begins with the philosophy of action, and then it reviews the historical debate about the nature of obligation and its social context. This is followed by a section about action in general: it establishes the standpoint of the agent and makes an inventory of several species of action. Later chapters summarize the foregoing themes, with emphasis on the unspoken side of intention, and develop them in conjunction with an analysis of the hypothetical imperative. The work closes with a discussion of the dilemma of membership in competing moral communities.

1

Action

“In the beginning was the act!” wrote Faust, and as he did so his hand trembled. In Goethe’s play this is the point at which the tragedy begins. Faust denies the primacy of rationality canonized in St. John’s verse “In the beginning was the word,” Mephistopheles the archsymbol of irrationality appears, and Faust’s sad decline begins. The rest we know. Or do we?

In the following chapters I will try to repair the Faustian split between acts and words, especially in the moral domain where I think words like “good” and “bad” or “right” and “wrong” are best understood as actions, not descriptions, and as choices, not announcements. Contra Faust, I will argue that rational moral judgments are incipient actions, and that they have their unique seriousness by virtue of certain ultimate structures of action. In my version of the story, Faust’s hand trembles because he suddenly realizes that responsibility derives its urgency from the nature of action and that it provides action with its direction and fulfillment.

These are the themes of this chapter and the next, where I will not speak very much about morality as such but instead lay out certain theses about action. What I have to say about moral obligation in subsequent chapters will presuppose this analysis of action which, as I explain in the present chapter, understands agency as a composite concept that includes actions, activities, and states. This inventory is the first part of the language-oriented philosophical psychology that I will introduce and build on in order to answer in a general but by no means vacuous way the seemingly simple question, “What is action?”

The Standpoint of the Agent

The task before us is to do moral philosophy from the standpoint of the agent, but just what is that standpoint? In one sense it seems to be a contradiction in terms since to philosophize is to suspend one’s own agency in a very real way. In another, slightly softer sense the phrase “from the standpoint of the agent” is simply malapropos, for an agent qua agent is not standing but moving and being moved. In either case it would seem that a philosopher can be considered as an agent only in the diluted sense under which anyone who thinks, anyone who performs mental acts and linguistic operations, can be called an agent. Nevertheless, philosophers are as familiar as anyone else is with the experience of agency, and they have no reason to pretend otherwise. As our language shows, to adopt the standpoint of the agent in philosophy is not to renounce reflective thinking in favor of decisive action, but to engage in action vicariously, at a slower pace and with more careful self-reflection than is possible in real action. That vicarious action is not a shadow image of real action is, of course, incontestable if for no other reason than that real action is irreversible, whereas a fantasy can be re-enacted indefinitely and in various ways. But we can think and talk as though we are in action, even if our thinking and talking is necessarily asymmetrical with that of agents engaged in concrete actions.

For example, thinking from the standpoint of agency involves remembering that as an agent I always find myself “in situation,” to use a familiar existentialist phrase. This means not only that I must “insert my action into a network of determinism,”¹ but also that each act is preceded and conditioned by other free actions of mine, even those long forgotten or repudiated. Furthermore, my present situation as an agent is molded by the future as well as by the past, in the sense that previous actions have left me not only with their psychic traces—dispositions, dependencies, emotional vulnerabilities, and so forth—but also with appointments to be kept and debts to be paid. I can, of course, refuse any given piece of the future. That is, I can neutralize a possibility as far as its action-guiding influence is concerned, but even neutralized actions are performed “in situation.” Were I not located in just this way by my past and by the futures suggested by that past, I would not need to choose between keeping and abandoning the rendezvous in question. No action is ever performed in a vacuum, and to philosophize from the standpoint of the agent is, among other things, to bear this fact continually in mind.

In the course of working out his philosophy of history R.G. Collingwood made the very useful distinction between the outside and the inside of an event. As he put it, the outside is that “which can be described in terms of bodies and their movements: the passage of Caesar, accompanied by certain men, across a river called the Rubicon at one date, or the spilling of his blood on the floor of the senate-house at another”—whereas the inside is that “which can only be described in terms of thought [i.e., intention]: Caesar’s defiance of Republican law, or the clash of constitutional policy between himself and his assassins.”² It is not necessary to adopt the standpoint of the agent in order to examine the outside of an event, even an intentional event such as Caesar’s crossing the Rubicon. But where the event is more than a mere event, where it has an inside as well as an outside, the standpoint of the agent is the most appropriate one from which to make a philosophical inquiry or even, as Collingwood argued, a historical one.

The inside of an action can be considered from either the spectator’s point of view or that of the agent, but in either case to consider it is in some way to consider the question of what to do. This generates the further question: How do these two sorts of consideration differ from each other? In a recent treatise on action D.G. Brown has answered this question nicely:

[Seen from the point of view of the agent,] the question of what to do is not a question of what some particular person is to do (which might be anyone’s question) but some particular person’s question of: what to do.³

This means, among other things, that from the standpoint of the agent it is meaningless or else redundant to ask what an agent will do, since asking this question requires that one set oneself at a distance from the agent and be or pretend to be a mere bystander, thoroughly disengaged from the agent’s action.

But we must be careful not to oversimplify here: the ability to distance oneself from one’s own action, to be an observer of one’s own deeds, is a constitutive condition of being an agent. For whenever we deliberate we take an external point of view toward ourselves and our situation, and admit in the most personal way possible that things are not always as they seem to be. We acknowledge the possibility of a discrepancy between how things appear to us and how they would appear to an impartial spectator, and we thereby recognize that our actions have an outside as well as an inside. This is no idle speculation on our part: we do it regularly and methodically in order to head off disappointment and failure. In a word, as agents we take care, and in taking care we incorporate the spectator’s standpoint within our own point of view as agents.

It is, then, somewhat artificial to contrast these two points of view as though they were mutually exclusive. But if we are aware of this artificiality, it will do no harm and indeed some good to think of the two standpoints in as stark a contrast to each other as possible, and thereby see how the standpoint of agency provides a uniquely intimate relationship of the self to reality.

In terms of its conceptual structure (rather than its psychological genesis), the understanding that an agent has of his or her own action is less complex than that which a spectator has of it. The main reason for this greater logical simplicity is that from the agent’s standpoint the practical issue “What to do?” is considered directly and without any explicit reference to the doer, who in this case is none other than oneself. That is, the agent possesses an immediate, pre-reflective knowledge of himself that is not available to the spectator. As Brown rightly observes, the non-complexity of this knowledge is reflected in the grammar of imperative sentences, which are normally addressed to the person whose action is in question but which do not normally mention that person.⁴

Brown pushes this insight a bit too far, however, in a subsequent claim that I will discuss because, if it were correct, it would have the implication that the content of moral commandments is limited to overt actions and does not extend to the motives or the manner of doing the actions. The offending claim is that it is not feasible to construct a genuinely imperative sentence involving any of the “complexities” proper to (1) betraying a secret unintentionally, absentmindedly, or accidentally; (2) buying something under a misapprehension of its value, by mistake, or for insufficient reasons; and (3) publishing something out of ambition, or for the sake of duty.

As I understand them, these are, respectively, complexities of intention, of judgment, and of motive. Brown’s point seems to rest on the assumption that there can be no indecisiveness on the part of the agent with regard to the actions mentioned (although there can be on the part of the spectator, who may wonder, for instance, whether an agent’s slip of the tongue was intentional or not), and that it would be meaningless because useless to direct an imperative to that agent. That is, it would be useless to say to someone either “Do x!” or “Don’t do x!” where x is an action of anyone of these three types. That Brown is correct in the second case, that of complexities of judgment, is, I think, both obvious and very relevant to the whole notion of the standpoint of agency adopted in the present book. But his claims about the first and third cases are less convincing, and I suspect that if they were true without qualification the philosophical utility of the practical standpoint would be negligible, especially as regards the language-based metaethical theory that I will develop in later chapters. This is not the place to launch a full-scale critique of Brown’s position, however, and so by way of reply I will examine two imperatives that I think are meaningful in spite of the fact that they contain complexities of intention and of motive. These imperatives are, respectively, “Don’t forget!” and “Be ambitious!”

The command “Do x!” carries with it the implicit command “Don’t forget (to do x)!” and vice-versa, but it does not thereby follow that these two are really the same command in different words, or that the latter command is superfluous. The forgetful failure to heed commands involving complexities of intention constitutes negligence (assuming of course that the person giving the commands has a right to give them), and since negligence is itself a matter for blame and remorse, it follows that not being negligent is both commendable and commandable in its own right. Medals may not be struck in honor of those who are not neglectful, but, on the other hand, society takes an unmistakably severe stand against those who are, as a close look at the juridical notion of criminal negligence shows.

The command “Be ambitious!” can also carry with it an implicit command to do x, such as “Publish this poem!” and vice-versa, but here the one command can be detached from the other much more easily than in the previous case. That is, we can be ambitious by doing something other than publishing poetry—just as we can publish poetry for other motives than ambition—whereas we cannot avoid being negligent except by performing a definite task, the one that was already specified by the time the command “Don’t forget!” was given. Clearly one cannot “just be” ambitious without intending to do anything at all, but it is nevertheless true that motives such as ambition have a certain self-subsistent status, like oranges. In a sense that is very important for everyday ethics, we can pick and choose among motives, just as we can select oranges from the grocery bin, although it is not nearly so easy to put a motive back after having once taken it up. The clarification of this fact is an important philosophical as well as psychological problem, but for our purposes it is enough to observe that there is nothing illogical about commanding someone to adopt this or that motive. To do so would not generate a vicious regress as Brown has suggested. Although the question can arise, “What motive lies behind John’s choice of M?” where the chosen M is itself a motive, the answer to this question will cite an altogether different motive, say N, and not the original motive M. Thus John’s choice of an aggression motive (M) may be itself motivated by some sort of fear (N) and so on. The phrase “and so on” suggests the rather inconvenient possibility of an infinite regress, but it would not be the vicious one that Brown claims it is.⁵ The regressive analysis of a concrete action in terms of motives M, N and so on, is not circular but spiral, just as the rules for ordering logical rules usually repeat the structure of the latter set of rules on a higher, “meta” level. (Whether or not the term “motive” is appropriate as we move on up the spiral is quite another matter.) In short, if it is true that motives are in any sense subject to an agent’s own freedom, then it is feasible and meaningful to formulate imperatives about them. This is shown in the efforts of parents to teach their children to avoid what were once called the seven capital sins—which are sins because they are chosen, and capital, that is, primary, because they are motives.

The Primacy of Action

An action seen from the standpoint of an agent is, then, conceptually less complex than that same action taken from the spectator’s point of view, for in considering his own action the agent has no need to make an explicit reference to the doer. This logical simplicity is itself one reason for our adopting the practical standpoint in the subsequent pages. Another reason, which we will now take up in some detail, is that the concept of human action is an important sense irreducible, one that has a priority over other non-personal concepts and is in some sense their source. This conceptual irreducibility is, to be sure, closely related to the conceptual simplicity just noted of action considerations that are made from the practical standpoint (of course, this simplicity is one of logical trimness, not of psychological naiveté). However, it is not identical with that simplicity and so a separate discussion of it is in order.

Against this alleged irreducibility it will be immediately objected by many philosophers that the concept of human action is a far more sophisticated and hence reducible one than the concepts we have of non-human phenomena, especially the concept of causation. But this is true only when action is conceived of from the spectator’s standpoint, as a conjunction of observata, and it is just this standpoint that is being called into question here. In other words, the question before us is whether the concept of action can be reduced to that of a relationship among observed events, or whether it is not the other way around—that such concepts as “event,” “cause,” and even “observation” are to be explained in terms of action.

A look at the dictionary supports the latter view, which we may call that of the conceptual irreducibility of action. The initial entry under “action” in the Oxford English Dictionary defines it as “the process or condition of acting or doing, the exertion of energy or influence; working, agency, operation.” Helpful though it may be to someone who is not familiar with the word, this list of terms is nothing but a list of synonyms, none of which differs from the definiendum “action,” except in nuance or etymological circumstances: for instance, “agency” has a Latin root whereas that of “working” is Anglo-Saxon. If a person knows what even one of these words or phrases means, coming to know the others will require no new conceptualization on his part, but only a certain mnemonic effort.

An apparent exception to all this, however, is the second element in the dictionary definition, the phrase “the exertion of energy or influence.” At first sight it seems that we have here something that is no mere synonym for action but which on the contrary is an even more basic concept. This suspicion is strengthened if we return to the O.E.D. and discover a remarkably similar definition given as the first entry under the word “cause”: “that which gives rise to any action, phenomenon, or condition.” The notion of action, it would seem, is constituted wholly or at least in large part by the ideas of cause, energy, and influence, although there is at least one more idea, that of freedom, which is usually invoked by philosophers when they want to di...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction to the Transaction Edition
• Chapter 1. Action
• Chapter 2. Intention
• Chapter 3. Valuation
• Chapter 4. Obligation
• Chapter 5: The Moral Community
• Chapter 6: The Moral Domain
• Index