Practical Reason and the Status of Moral Obligation
- Practical Reason and the Status of Moral Obligation
The power of skepticism depends on the apparent possibility of rationally asking, for virtually any kind of proposition commonly thought to be known, how it is known or what justifies believing it. Moral claims are among those commonly subjected to skeptical challenges and doubts, even on the part of some people who are not skeptical about ordinary claims regarding the external world. There may be even more skepticism about the possibility of justifying moral actions, particularly if they are against the agent's self-interest. Both problems – how to justify moral claims and how to justify moral action – come within the scope of the troubling question "Why be moral?" Even a brief response to moral skepticism should consider both kinds of targets of justification, cognitive and behavioural, and should indicate some important relations between the two types of skeptical challenge. I will begin with the cognitive case – with skepticism about the scope of theoretical reason in ethics – proceed to practical skepticism, which concerns the scope of practical reason, and then show how an adequate account of rationality may enable us to respond to moral skepticism.
I. Skepticism: General, Moral, and Practical
There are many kinds of skepticism, far more than can be even catalogued here.1 Call the view that there is no knowledge or justification, [End Page 197] whether theoretical or practical, comprehensive general skepticism. This has rarely been held, but the view that no one has knowledge or justified belief regarding the external world – a kind of general cognitive skepticism – is an arguably defensible position. (Comprehensive cognitive skepticism – the view that there is no knowledge or justified belief whatever – has not been plausibly defended.) Most who are inclined to hold this version of external world skepticism would also tend to maintain that there is no moral knowledge and no justification for holding moral views. Call that position cognitive moral skepticism. This position is distinct from behavioural moral skepticism, which is the view that there are no fully justifying moral reasons for action (in a strong form this view would entail that there are no moral reasons for action at all). Moral skepticism of both kinds is implicit in comprehensive practical skepticism, the view that there are no justifying reasons, moral or other, for any sort for action.
One might think that any kind of cognitive skeptic would have to be a practical skeptic as well; but since a certain kind of normative (say, ethical) noncognitivist would hold that there are no moral propositions, such a position opens up the possibility that there could be justification for action, say in terms of rational desires, which is not dependent on justification for any moral proposition concerning the action. Noncognitivism entails that there are no moral properties and, correspondingly, that there are no moral propositions to be known or justifiedly believed. This implies skepticism about moral knowledge, and indeed about cognitive moral justification; but such skepticism does not obviously rule out non-cognitive justifiers of action as distinct from belief.
In broad terms, skepticism presents a challenge to one or another view of the power of reason, usually some common-sense view. My concern here is the power of skepticism in the moral domain. To simplify matters, I propose to say that reason has cognitive normative authority provided it enables its possessor – and I have in mind normal adult human beings with a mastery of a language having approximately the expressive power of English – to be justified in believing normative propositions. These include ascriptions of justification to beliefs, but in ethics the chief cognitive focus is "practical": it includes both deontic propositions – roughly those to the effect that some act or kind of act is right, or wrong, or obligatory – and axiological [End Page 198] propositions, roughly those to the effect that something is good, or bad, in itself.
I propose to say that reason has practical normative authority provided it enables its possessor (say, a rational adult) to have normative reasons for action. This formulation leaves open how much practical authority is in question; but I will be concerned only with versions claiming that the authority suffices for a...
