Ethics and the Vision of Value
Timothy Chappell
If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear
to man as it is, infinite.
William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Plate 14
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Ethics and the Vision of Value
Contents
Preface
Part One: Metaethics
Chapter 1: Moral perception
Chapter 2: Expressivism, error theory, and relativism
Chapter 3: Emotion, moral perception, and desire
Chapter 4: Normative and non-normative properties
Part Two: Normative Ethics
Chapter 5: The Good-to-Right Function: Some Unsuccessful Accounts
Chapter 6: Practical Rationality for Value-Pluralists
Chapter 7: Goods and Persons
Chapter 8: The action-omission and double-effect distinctions
Bibliography
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Preface
This book begins with the idea of vision in moral theory. Part One is about
metaethics: it develops the thesis that one of the ways in which we can know about
moral properties is by means of something that can reasonably be called perception.
In chapter 1, the guiding idea is that perception is pattern-recognition. When we see or
hear or smell, we are picking up a pattern. When we read a sentence in a book, we are
picking up a pattern. When we see that murder or treachery is bad and that friendship
or kindness is good, that too is pattern-recognition—and this moral pattern that we
pick up is just as real as the other patterns that we pick up in other forms of
perception.
Developing this metaethical view involves me in showing how it does better
than important contemporary rivals such as expressivism. Familiarly, expressivism
makes moral utterance at bottom a matter of expressing our attitudes, and only a
matter of asserting truths insofar as a quasi-realist discourse of truth-apt assertions can
be constructed on the basis of such expressive utterances. Such a construction cannot,
or so I argue in chapter 2, get anywhere near far enough. One rough way of putting
the basic reason why not is this: attitudes require owners in a way that truths do not.
The attitude, say, that slavery is wrong is always and essentially someone’s attitude,
whereas the truth that slavery is wrong is not essentially anyone’s: it is “public
property” in a way that no attitude can ever be. To put it another way, expressivism is
a relativism. I add (in chapter 3) that expressivism also presupposes an untenable view
of the emotions, as unstructured, non-cognitive reactions to the facts; the perceptual
version of moral realism generates a more plausible analysis of the emotions, and of
some other important phenomena too, such as desire.
If normative properties are patterns in reality like other properties, and if
perception is pattern-recognition, then recognising normative properties can be just as
much a matter of perception as, say, reading is, or understanding spoken language.
Such a picture of normative properties pushes us naturally towards a key question
about them, addressed in chapter 4: how to characterise the difference between
normative properties and non-normative properties. I argue against some of the bestknown ways of attempting to do this (the “is-ought gap” distinction; the descriptive/
prescriptive distinction; the natural/ non-natural distinction), and propose that in fact
there are two gaps in the relevant area: between mere description and evaluation, and
between evaluation and prescription.
I begin Part Two of the book with the key normative-ethical question of what
we ought to do about these normative moral properties and their instances: as we
might also say, how we ought to respond to them, or what reasons they give us. After
criticising consequentialist accounts of response to the goods in chapter 5, I develop a
non-consequentialist picture in chapter 6. The basic thought is that the goods are
irreducibly different, and that this puts limits on the ways we can trade off one good
for another. Where we acknowledge a plurality of goods as different but of equally
fundamental importance, we cannot see just any sacrifice of one as legitimated by the
demands of the other, and vice versa. Each good is therefore “ring-fenced”, protected,
against the demands of the other goods. Certain ways of treating it while pursuing the
other goods are off limits, because to treat it those ways would be to cease to treat it
as a good at all; as I shall say, it would be to violate that good.
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The questions which the goods are, and which of them are the goods of
fundamental importance, are the central questions of chapter 7. My answer focuses on
persons. The notion of a person is notoriously problematic, and exhibits some slide
between a tight and exclusive notion of personhood such as that found, say, in
Frankfurt 1988: 14’s contention that nothing can be a person unless it has secondorder volitions, and a looser and more inclusive notion of persons in something like
the legal sense of that term—as human (or similar) animals. I argue that this looseness
in the term “person” is no accident, and that it is crucial to see that personhood in the
exclusive sense is always an achievement of persons in the inclusive sense—an
achievement that is only made possible by our treating one another as persons in this
tight sense, even when we fail to display the marks of tight-sense personhood. Tightsense personhood is an ideal to which members of the moral community aspire. That
means that it cannot be used to set the boundary of the moral community; it is the
loose sense of personhood that does that.
So persons are the most important goods, and this means persons in the
inclusive sense—human and similar animals. A further question is what counts as
violation of the goods that persons are. I argue that deliberate and direct killing of
persons is a central form of violation, a conclusion that has important implications for
our society’s debates about abortion, euthanasia, capital punishment, and war.
This distinction between “deliberate and direct” and other killing needs to be
spelled out. Spelling it out brings us to the classic distinctions between actions and
omissions, and between the foreseen-and-intended and the merely foreseen—
distinctions that in any case have a natural place in a pluralist normative ethics. In
chapter 8 I develop a strategy for defending the reality and moral significance of both
distinctions. This strategy appeals to a particular view of causation, and to a
distinction between local and global conceptions that has already been proposed in
chapter 5. The local/ global distinction turns out to play a crucial role, also, in dealing
with some technical problem-cases for the action/ omission and double-effect
distinctions.
My views on all these issues have been much refined, though no doubt not
refined enough, by criticism and encouragement from other philosophers. Among
many others, I am particularly grateful for their help and comments to Liz Ashford,
Alex Barber, Peter Baumann, Chris Belshaw, Michael Brady, Tal Brewer, Sarah
Broadie, Vivienne Brown, Alan Carter, John Cottingham, Christopher Coope, Rowan
Cruft, Garrett Cullity, Ashley Cummins, Cora Diamond, Sabine Doering, Jamie Dow,
Antony Duff, Keith Frankish, Peter Goldie, John Haldane, Katherine Hawley, Brad
Hooker, Kent Hurtig, Rosalind Hursthouse, Simon Kirchin, Dudley Knowles, Jimmy
Lenman, Stephen Makin, Derek Matravers, Alan Millar, Fred Miller, Adam Morton,
Tim Mulgan, David Oderberg, Eric Olson, Onora O’Neill, Tim O’Hagan, Jon Pike,
Carolyn Price, Duncan Pritchard, Michael Ridge, Paul Russell, Dory Scaltsas, John
Skorupski, Christine Swanton, Jussi Suikkanen, Alan Thomas, Chris Tollefsen,
Bernard Williams, Nick Zangwill, Linda Zagzebski.
I have been very privileged, too, in the level of institutional and financial
support that I have received while writing this book, not only from my own
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institution, that unique phenomenon The Open University, but also from the Institute
for Advanced Studies at the University of Edinburgh, and the Centre for Ethics,
Philosophy and Public Affairs at the University of St Andrews, who were kind
enough to offer me Visiting Fellowships during my year’s sabbatical in 2005-6.
Thanks are due also to the Arts and Humanities Research Council for their funding of
that sabbatical.
Finally, the love and support of my family represents a quite different sort of
debt: one that I am happy to acknowledge as unrepayable, and to continue incurring
indefinitely.
Timothy Chappell
The Open University
Walton Hall
Milton Keynes, England
February 2007
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