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Morality in the first person plural

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References

  1. Conrad D. Johnson,Moral Legislation: A Legal-Political Model for Indirect Consequentialist Reasoning (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), hereafter referred to asML.

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  2. Or so, at least, I have argued, taking my lead from Hume, in “Public Practical Reason: An Archeology,”Social Philosophy and Policy 12 (1995): 43–80.

  3. The account I develop here complements, and is further developed in, ibid. and “Public Practical Reason: Political Practice” inNOMOS XXXVII: Theory and Practice, J. W. DeCew and I. Shapiro, eds. (New York: New York University Press, 1995): 345–85.

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  4. D. Hume,Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (hereafterEnquiry), L. A. Selby-Bigge and P. H. Nidditch, eds., 3rd edition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), p. 272. I discuss Hume's account of the moral point of view in “Public Practical Reason: An Archeology,” section II. I will not repeat that discussion here.

  5. ML, 26–29, 45. Hume's story can be found primarily in hisTreatise of Human Nature (hereafter:Treatise), L. A. Selby-Bigge and P. H. Nidditch, eds., 2d edition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), Bk III, Pt II, secs. II–III; see also hisEnquiry, sec. III.

  6. The term “unit of agency” is Susan Hurley's term; see herNatural Reasons (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 140–59. I explain the idea in section III.

  7. Even if the parties are all committed to cooperation, salience can provide no solution so long as they remain committed to the point of view of individual rationality. See Postema,Bentham and the Common Law Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986, revisited edition 1989), pp. 129–30. For an especially cogent statement of the argument see R. Sugden, “Thinking as a Team,”Social Philosophy and Policy 10 (1993): 82–84. See also M. Gilbert, “Rationality and Salience,”Philosophical Studies 57 (1989): 61–77.

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  10. A. Rapoport and A. M. Chammah,Prisoner's Dilemma (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1965), p. 29.

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  12. R. M. Kramer and M. B. Brewer, “Social Group Identity and the Emergence of Cooperation to Resource Conservation Dilemmas,” in Wilke et al., ibid. pp. 205–34, especially pp. 227–28.

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  13. E. Shafir and A. Tversky, “Thinking through Uncertainty: Non-consequential Reasoning and Choice”,Cognitive Psychology 24 (1992): 449–74.

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  14. A. K. Sen suggests this explanation in “Goals, Commitment and Identity,” 348–49, 352.

  15. See below, section III, B.

  16. Shafir and Tversky, op. cit. 458–59, 463–65.

  17. J. M. Orbell, R. M. Dawes and A. J. C. van de Kragt, “Explaining Discussion-Induced Cooperation,”Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 54 (1988): 811–19; see also “Doing Well and Doing Good as Ways of Resolving Social Dilemmas,” in Wilke et al., op. cit., pp. 177–203; “Not Me or Thee but We: The Importance of Group Identity in Eliciting Cooperation in Dilemma Situations: Experimental Manipulations,”Acta Psychologica 68 (1988): 83–97; “The Limits of Multilateral Promising,”Ethics 100 (1990): 616–27; “Cooperation for the Benefit of Us — Not Me, or My Conscience,” in J. J. Mansbridge, ed.,Beyond Self-Interest (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), pp. 97–110.

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  18. In a parallel study Orbell and his associates reported that they “did not hear much explicit invoking of cooperation norms such as fairness and right behavior, but [they] did hear considerable effort to clarity the consequences for oneself and for other members of the group of cooperating or defecting ...” J. M. Orbell, P. Schwartz-Shea and R. T. Simmons, “Do Cooperators Exit More Readily than Defectors?”,The American Political Science Review 78 (1984): 160.

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  19. Orbell et al., “Multilateral Promising,” op. cit., pp. 620–21.

  20. Dawes et al. entertain both explanations and discuss their respective merits at length. See references in note 18.

  21. See. H. H. Clark and D. Wilkes-Gibbs, “Referring as a Collaborative Process,” in P. R. Cohen, J. Morgan and M. E. Pollack,Intentions in Communication (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991), pp. 463–93. The authors suggest that conversation is governed by a “principle of mutual responsibility,” according to which “the participants in a conversation try to establish, roughly by the initiation of each new contribution, the mutual belief that the listeners have understood what the speaker meant in the last utterance ...” (488).

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  22. Bernard Williams calls this the “act-adequacy thesis” (J.J.C. Smart and B. Williams,Utilitarianism: For and Against (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), pp. 119–20); The act-adequacy thesis denies that there are any “surplus causal effects” of cooperative action, that is, effects of structured sets of actions ordered according to plan or rule, especially when it is widely known that actions are likely to conform to that plan or rule, that cannot in any natural or plausible way be divided among the constituent acts alone. See alsoML, 26–30.

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  23. Is it ever irrational or unreasonable to adopt this differential approach (or the universalized singularism approach)? Hurley argues that it is irrational to adopt the singular perspective when a plural perspective is practically available to a deliberator. It is irrational, she insists, because it assumes that the perspective/unit of agency is fixed or given. (Hurley, pp. 145–48.) There is something unreasonable about treating matters as fixed when they are not, especially when important consequences turn on which perspective one chooses. But this argument does not touch the self-conscious deliberator who, recognizing the options, deliberately chooses the singular (or radically differential singular) point of view. Is this choice irrational? Perhaps so, but it is not easy to see clearly what the terms of the indictment are.

  24. Hurley, op. cit., p. 141.

  25. See John Searle, “Collective Intentions and Actions,” in Cohen, Morgan and Pollack, op. cit., p. 410.

  26. Searle describes the practical orientation of the plural perspective this way: “Just as my stance toward the objects around me and the ground underneath me is that of their being solid, without my needing or having a special belief that they are solid; and just as my stance toward others is that of their being conscious agents, without my needing or having a special belief that they are conscious; so my stance toward others with whom I am engaged in collective behavior is that of their being conscious agents in a cooperative activity, without my needing or having a special belief to that effect.” Searle, op. cit., 414.

  27. See, for example, J. Elster, “Weakness of Will and the Free-Rider Problem,”Economics and Philosophy 1 (1985): 231–65; Hurley, op. cit. pp. 139–40; G. S. Kavka, “Is Individual Choice Less Problematic than Collective Choice,”Economics and Philosophy 7 (1991): 143–65.

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  28. See M. Bratman, “What is Intention?” in Cohen, Morgan, and Pollack, op. cit., pp. 17–21, and generally Bratman,Intention, Plans, and Practical Reason (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987).

  29. See Shafir and Tversky, op. cit. pp. 458–59.

  30. M. Bratman, “Shared Intention,”Ethics 104 (1993): 102. His cites his own intention that Scott clean up his room as an ordinary example of anintention that.

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  31. Ibid., see also Bratman, “What is Intention?” op. cit. 17–21.

  32. M. Bratman, “Shared Cooperative Activity,”Philosophical Review 101 (1992): 331.

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  33. Ibid., 332–33, and Bratman, “Shared Intention,” op. cit., 104.

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  34. Bratman, “Shared Cooperative Activity,” op. cit., 335.

  35. Bratman, “Shared Intentions,” op. cit., 105–7 and “Shared Cooperative Activity,” op. cit., 331–34.

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    Gerald J. Postema

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Postema, G.J. Morality in the first person plural. Law Philos 14, 35–64 (1995). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01000524

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