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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 January 2009
I distinguish two different arguments against cognitivism in Bernard Williams's writings on moral dilemmas. The first turns on there being a truth of the matter about what we ought to do in a moral dilemma. That argument can be met by appealing to our epistemic shortcomings and to pro tanto obligations. However, those responses make no headway with the second argument, which concerns the rationality of the moral regret that we feel in dilemma situations. I show how the rationality of moral regret can be explained on an ‘independent desire’ model. And I show how Williams's second argument only appears to have force because of a certain faulty way of conceiving the issue over cognitivism. But Williams's argument rightly alerts us to the rational role of desire in our moral thought.
1 See his papers ‘Ethical Consistency’ and ‘Consistency and Realism’, both of which can be found in his Problems of the Self, Cambridge, 1973Google Scholar.
2 What I say often ties in with, or runs up against, what the various authors have said. But I shall not clutter the text with too many footnotes referring to the corpus of post-Williams literature.
3 I defend this conception of moral realism in ‘Quietism’, Midwest Studies, xvii (1992)Google Scholar.
4 See Zangwill, Nick, ‘Direction of Fit and Normative Functionalism’, Philosophical Studies, lxix (1998)Google Scholar. For the dispositional account see Smith, Michael, The Moral Problem, Oxford, 1994Google Scholar.
5 See Blackburn, Simon, Essays on Quasi-Realism, Oxford, 1993Google Scholar, who sets the debate up in this way.
6 Williams's first argument assumes that only the cognitivist thinks that there is a truth of the matter – that a judgement and its opposite cannot both be true. Since Williams assumes this, it is worth noting that not all non-cognitivists will agree. Simon Blackburn has tried to show that a non-cognitivist ‘projectivist’ – who thinks that our moral judgements should be understood as projections of non-cognitive attitudes onto the world – can construct the idea that there is a truth of the matter. (See, for example, ch. 6 of his Spreading the Word, Oxford, 1984Google Scholar and Essays on Quasi-realism.) If Blackburn is right, then he is also vulnerable to Williams's first argument.
7 Foot, Philippa, ‘Moral Realism and Moral Dilemma’, Journal of Philosophy, lxxx (1983), p. 396Google Scholar.
8 Something like this was mooted very briefly in Foot.
9 Why do philosophers not think that there are aesthetic dilemmas? I suspect that this is an oversight or a prejudice. If we are choosing decor, for example, we might be torn between two curtain designs. Or when gardening, we might be torn over which type of shrub to plant. And an artist might be in a dilemma about how to proceed at a certain point. If there are problems arising from dilemmas in moral philosophy, it is difficult to see why similar problems do not arise in aesthetics.
10 Plato, , Apology in Plato's Collected Dialogues, ed. Cooper, John, Indianapolis, 1997Google Scholar.
11 Contrast ‘Ethical Consistency’, pp. 175 f. quoted above.
12 Brink, David pursues this line in his paper ‘Moral Conflict and its Structure’, Philosophical Review, ciii (1994)Google Scholar.
13 This pro tanto approach to dilemmas presupposes that we have a notion of degrees of obligation in terms of which to cast the overall obligation.
14 Suppose consequentialism is true and an action has the property of causing a state of affairs A which is good (to a certain degree), but on the other hand, it also has the property of causing a state of affairs B which is bad (to a certain degree). However, overall the action ought to be done because, on balance, an [A and B] world is better than a [not-A and not-B] world. Imagine that we do not have any doubt about this. We might then regret the way the world is. We might lament: ‘If only we could have an [A and not-B] world!’ For example, Agamemnon might well have regretted that he could not both set sail and keep his daughter. Sartre's youth presumably regretted that he could not both join the resistance and look after his mother.
15 This issue is discussed by Searle, John in ‘Prima Facie Obligations’, in Practical Reasoning, Raz, Joseph, ed., Oxford, 1978Google Scholar; see also Philippa Foot.
16 See Conee, Earl, ‘Against Moral Dilemmas’, Philosophical Review, xci (1982)Google Scholar, and also Brink, sect. 5.
17 The issue which I find in Williams's second argument cuts across issues about dilemmas that many others have discussed. For example, Michael Stocker argues that we need a ‘pluralistic’ theory of the good in order to explain rational regret. Thomas Hurka disputes this. He thinks that a ‘monistic’ theory of the good can explain rational regret. See Stocker, Michael, Plural and Conflicting Values, Oxford, 1990Google Scholar. Hurka, Thomas, ‘Monism, Pluralism, and Rational Regret’, Ethics, cvii (1996)Google Scholar.) But all this misses the issue I am interested in, which is whether rational moral regret is differently explained on cognitivist and non-cognitivist models. If judgments of moral obligation are beliefs, it looks as if neither monistic nor pluralistic accounts can explain rational moral regret.
18 See for example Bittner, Rüdiger, ‘Is It Reasonable to Regret Things One Did?’, Journal of Philosophy, lxxxix (1992)Google Scholar; and Foot.
19 See further Zangwill, Nick, ‘Moral Supervenience’, Midwest Studies, XX (1995)Google Scholar; and ‘Explaining Supervenience: Moral and Mental’, Journal of Philosophical Research, xxii (1997)Google Scholar.
20 I am grateful for helpful comments from Earl Conee, Ruth Chang, and two anonymous referees for Utilitas.
