Berkley Center

Henry Richardson, one of the two conveners of the seminar, led a discussion of the latest installments in his book on moral innovation. He began by reviewing of some of the material covered in the first semester, emphasizing the varied examples of possible moral innovation that were covered. Some involved excruciatingly slow realizations (slavery and climate change). Others concerned faster responses to novel problems: urbanization, medical research, and the contingently arisen social forms. He also emphasized the presentations reading Kant as insisting that for morality to be real, society had to “embody” moral norms within itself in contingent ways. 

One of the themes of the Spring semester carries over from the Fall: what it means to reduce moral indeterminacy and how that might possibly occur in a legitimate and authoritative way. Richardson restated his three-stage account of this, which runs from conscientious input to convergence to acceptance of a new norm.  

Looking ahead to the rest of the spring semester, Richardson argued that something roughly like this three stage procedure should be of interest, even if one rejected his specific way of characterizing them. Mere coincidence in views, or “agreement” in a thin sense, could never found a genuine moral norm. (Richardson defends the view that although we might all agree, we might all still be wrong about an objective moral norm.) Practices that complement morality (such as assuring others by uttering the words, “I promise”) may be conventions founded on agreement, facilitative conventions lack underivative moral force. Further, Morality can bind the unborn (future generations), and agreement cannot do that.  

Richardson argued that accepting Joseph Raz’s account of authority as the moral power to make changes in people’s rights and duties and taking the equality of moral persons as axiomatic implies that the authority to introduce new moral norms must belong the moral community itself (as a community). The problem then becomes to conceive how it exercises this authority.  Unavoidably lacking the constitutional structure necessary for democratic politics, it must depend on some other way of structuring moral deliberation.  

One participant pressed the question why a ratification stage wouldn’t suffice to establish a new moral norm. This question was answered by another participant, who suggested that the supposed “ratification” simply acknowledges a pre-existing, slowly evolved convergence.   

The new material for this session concerned Richardson’s way of accounting for the authoritativeness of the input stage, which hinges on his specificatory theory of dyadic (or “bipolar”) rights and duties. We reviewed the familiar Hohfeldian table of rights and duties.    

Because the specificatory theory looks to the moral powers that either party has to specify other’s right or duty, Richardson suggested, it can claim the advantage of being open to the idea of duties to morally non-competent individuals (such as non-human animals). It was noted, however, that his ratification stage has both sides agreeing to the principle—something non-human animals cannot do.  

Drawing on Michael Thompson’s work, Richardson suggested that we think of the moral community as including all those who can be wronged or who can wrong others and that we distinguish between agents and persons. An agent is an entity seeking a good. A person is an entity that can be wronged or can wrong another.  “Ontologically correlative” dyadic rights and duties thus structure the moral community.  

Casting the “interest theory” of rights as not attempting to capture this dyadic structure, Richardson set it aside. The principal competitor to his specificatory theory, in this regard, is the “will theory” of dyadic duties, which hinges on the right-holder having the power to waive the right. The will theory, he suggested, has trouble with being open to the possibility of morally non-competent individuals being right-holders and with recognizing the existence of inalienable rights.   

This brought us back to the nature of the stages in Richardson’s account. Why not a convergence stage that looked like Dewey’s “experiments in living” where groups simply said, “Hey, this worked for us,” as a proposal for the moral community to entertain? Richardson professed being open to any mechanism of convergence.   

The comparison with traditional Chinese Confucian ethics was raised. It was argued that Confucian thought is all dyadic, always in relation to others, but that the goal of a life was to become a virtuoso in dealing with others, rather than the master of abstract principles. Accepting the importance of situational discernment, Richardson noted that his emphasis on conflicts among moral considerations seems to have much in common with Confucian situationism. In contrast to the moral particularism of someone like Jonathan Dancy, who provocatively holds that “all moral principles are false,” however, Richardson’s “constructive ethical pragmatism” emphasizes that we can and should continue to work out better specifications of our principles.   

Another objection posed to Richardson’s view was the following. In cases of moral indeterminacy, morality has, as it were, run out. It can’t tell us what to do. So when we decide what it is that we have to do in that situation, the reason cannot be a moral reason but has to be something else (pragmatic, etc.). Yet after going through the three-stage process, we finally emerge at the other end with a moral reason. How do we make that transition? Richardson’s reply was two-pronged: As an objective matter, the moral import of purported moral innovations depends upon higher-order empowering norms. As a subjective matter, the view holds that authorized input depends upon the parties not believing that they are facing a case of genuine moral indeterminacy. Yet since, by hypothesis, they are in fact facing a moral indeterminacy that stands ready to be reduced, it is also false to say that there is a right answer to the problem simply waiting to be discovered. As an epistemic stance, one might just say that even though we can’t see the answer, we have a duty to do the best we can.