Sarah Stroud

Richard Brandt's last book discusses foundational questions in metaethics and normative ethics. Many of the central views expressed, as well as the topics taken up, will be familiar to those who know Brandt's earlier works, although some parts of the book represent new and welcome additions to his corpus. Brandt was very much a systematic moral philosopher, a theory builder. I can here only sketch the outlines of the theory he developed in the book, and suggest some points at which one might wish to demur.

The first four chapters develop his account of reason and reasons in general. Baier calls actions, beliefs, and feelings that can be assessed as rational or irrational “performances”. He argues that the aim of the enterprise of reason is to arrive at performances that are as good as possible ; in order to further this aim, societies promulgate guidelines of rationality. Baier thinks that a being cannot be fully rational unless it has the benefit of such publicly available guidelines. Indeed, “a being’s performances cannot be judged rational or irrational until he and his “fellows” have available to them [socially provided] apparatus for determining what … is according and what contrary to reason”. Reason is thus essentially social.

This paper examines the nature of what I call moral commitment: that is, a standing commitment to live up to moral demands. I first consider what kind of psychological state moral commitment might be, arguing that moral commitment is a species of commitment to a counterfactual condition. I explore the general structural features of attitudes of this type in order to shed light on how moral commitment might function in an agent’s motivational economy. I then use this understanding of moral commitment to respond to charges raised by prominent critics of moral theory; I argue that the counterfactual-condition account of moral commitment can successfully defuse the worries they express about the effects of moral commitment on one’s other attachments. In the final section, I suggest that these attractive general results may not be available to the consequentialist, which, if true, is a count against consequentialism.