What a Moral Theory Is
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A list of verdicts is not a theory. Anyone can produce the list: lying is wrong, torture is wrong, keeping promises is required. What that leaves out is the thing every entry on the list has in common, and supplying it is the job.
The demand
Definition
Moral theory
A systematic account of what makes actions right or wrong, stated generally enough to deliver verdicts on cases it was not built from.
The last clause is the demanding one. A theory has to reach beyond the examples that motivated it, and this is what makes moral theories refutable. Build an account from the cases everyone agrees on, apply it to a case nobody had considered, and it will return a verdict. If the verdict is monstrous, the theory is in trouble.
Definition
Moral principle
A general normative claim of the form that actions with some feature are right, wrong, or required, in virtue of having it. Principles are the components a theory is assembled from.
The words in virtue of are carrying the weight. A principle claims not merely that the two things go together but that the one holds because of the other. "Acts that break promises are wrong" states a connection; the principle says the breaking is what does it.
That is why a theory is not falsified only by wrong verdicts. It can get every case right and still fail, if it identifies the wrong feature as the one that matters. An account on which cruelty is wrong because it tends to be punished delivers the correct verdict for a reason nobody accepts.
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What the verdicts are verdicts about
Definition
Right action
An action that is morally in order: not wrong to perform. The term covers both what is required and what is merely allowed.
Definition
Permissibility
The status of an action that may be performed without doing anything wrong, whether or not it must be performed.
Three categories do most of the work, and keeping them straight prevents a great deal of confusion. An action can be required, so that not doing it is wrong. It can be forbidden, so that doing it is wrong. Or it can be permitted, so that either doing it or not doing it is in order.
The third category is larger than beginners expect. Almost everything anyone does falls into it. Morality is not a schedule of duties covering every moment; it constrains, and within the constraints there is room.
Some moral vocabulary does not fit these categories at all, and it is a defect in a theory to have no place for it. Actions can be admirable beyond what is required, and can be mean-spirited without being forbidden. The applied-ethics ladder takes up the category of the beyond-required, which theories of the required have a hard time accommodating.
Criterion and procedure
A distinction here removes a large class of bad objections, and it is regularly missed.
A theory can state what makes actions right without recommending that anyone think in its terms when deciding. The first is a criterion of rightness, an account of what the property consists in. The second is a decision procedure, a method to use in real time under real conditions.
R. Eugene Bales pressed the point in 1971 against critics of act utilitarianism, and the shape of the reply generalises. Almost nobody holds that a person about to break a promise should stop and calculate consequences, since the calculation is slow, the information is unavailable, and people who attempt it are unusually good at reaching the conclusion that suits them. A theory can say that consequences are what make actions right and that the reliable way to produce good consequences is to keep your promises without calculating.
So the objection that a theory would be a disaster to apply is not by itself an objection to the theory. It becomes one when the theory also claims to be a decision procedure, or when no workable procedure fits the criterion at all.
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What a theory owes
Four demands are standardly made, and a theory can fail each independently.
It should get the clear cases right, since a theory implying that gratuitous cruelty is fine has been refuted by that fact rather than merely embarrassed. It should explain rather than merely track, identifying the feature that does the work. It should be usable, in the sense of connecting to some procedure a person could actually follow. And it should be consistent, delivering one verdict per case, since a theory that condemns and permits the same act has told you nothing.
The four pull against each other, which is why the subject is hard. Making a theory match every intuition tends to cost it the generality that made it explanatory. Making it simple and explanatory tends to cost it a case somewhere.
Objection
Nobody uses one. People with excellent moral judgement have never read a moral theory, and people who have read them do not behave better. Whatever produces good conduct, it is not the possession of a criterion of right action, so the theories are an academic exercise with no claim on anybody.
Reply
The premises are largely true and the conclusion does not follow.
The criterion and procedure distinction handles most of it. A theory need not be what anyone consults, any more than a theory of grammar is what a fluent speaker consults. That competent speakers do not use it is not evidence that there is nothing to state.
The rest is handled by noticing when theory is actually wanted. It is not in the clear cases, where judgement is enough. It is in the cases where judgement runs out, where decent people disagree, or where a practice everyone accepted turns out to have been indefensible. Working out why the practice was indefensible is theoretical work, and it has repeatedly been the thing that changed people's minds.
There is also a defensive use. Bad arguments for bad conduct are usually not stupid, and answering them requires being able to say what is wrong with the principle they invoke rather than only that the conclusion feels wrong.
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Where the theories differ
Theories agree on the form and disagree about the content: which feature of an action makes it right. There are three standing answers, and the next article sets them against each other on the same case.
Further reading
- R. Eugene Bales, "Act-Utilitarianism: Account of Right-Making Characteristics or Decision-Making Procedure?", American Philosophical Quarterly, volume 8, number 3 (1971), pages 257 to 265.
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Consequentialism", for the criterion and procedure distinction in use.
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