Thomas Hurka

Values typically come in pairs. Most obviously, there are the pairs of an intrinsic good and its contrasting intrinsic evil, such as pleasure and pain, virtue and vice, and desert and undesert, or getting what one deserves and getting its opposite. But in more complex cases there can be contrasting pairs with the same value. Thus, virtue has the positive form of benevolent pleasure in another’s pleasure and the negative form of compassionate pain for his pain, while desert has the positive form of happiness for the virtuous and the negative form of pain for the vicious

Though primarily focussed on philosophy of language, metaphysics, and epistemology, Scott Soames’s Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century contains several discussions of ethics. Volume 1 contains two chapters on Moore’s ethics, one on the emotivism of Ayer and Stevenson, and one on Ross; Volume 2 adds a chapter on Hare’s prescriptivism. The bulk of the Moore chapters as well as the ones on emotivism and Hare concern metaethics, but there is also discussion of Moore’s normative views and the chapter on Ross is entirely normative. Since there is no material on ethics after Hare, the book concentrates on figures from the first half of the century. But there is much of interest in what it says about them.

Discussions of the morality of capital punishment, and indeed discussions of the morality of punishment in general, usually assume that there are two possible justifications of punishment, a deterrence justification associated with utilitarianism and other consequentialist moral theories, and a retributive justification associated with deontological moral theories. But now that rights-based theories are attracting the increasing attention of moral philosophers it is worth asking whether these theories may not employ a different justification of punishment, with different consequences for the morality of particular forms of punishment. I will argue that rights theories do employ a different justification of punishment, and that this justification combines many of the attractive features of the deterrence and retributive justifications while avoiding their unattractive features. In particular, I will argue that the rights-based justification has more attractive consequences for the morality of capital punishment than either the deterrence or retributive justifications.

I became interested in normative ethics in my last term as a philosophy undergraduate at the University of Toronto. Influenced by a traditional conception of the discipline, I’d till then studied mostly history of philosophy, with a special interest in, of all things, Hegel. But seeing the value of a balanced philosophy program, I enrolled in an ethics seminar in the winter of 1975. I’d studied the ethics of Plato, Leibniz, Hegel, and others in my history courses, but this was my first exposure to contemporary thought on the subject. The seminar had only one other student, and since he was fairly quiet I had something close to a one-on-one tutorial with the instructor, Wayne Sumner – another contributor to this volume. I was immensely taken both by Wayne’s teaching and by the seminar’s topic, which was utilitarianism. Our study of it included both theoretical questions such as act- vs. ruleutilitarianism and applied ones such as our obligations to future generations. I found all these questions intellectually engaging and also humanly important, given their connection to live ethical issues – in short, I was hooked. I was especially impressed by two non-utilitarian texts we read. One was the last chapter of G. E. Moore’s Principia Ethica, meant to illustrate a non- 1 utilitarian or ideal consequentialist theory. I was attracted by Moore’s general account of the good, which values states such as love and aesthetic appreciation alongside pleasure, and saw in his principle of organic unities a far clearer statement of ideas I had encountered in more pretentious form in Hegel. The second was Chapter 2 of W. D. Ross’s The Right and the Good, which defends a pluralist deontology against consequentialism. I thought Ross’s criticisms of consequentialism were right on the mark, and again clearly and precisely expressed. I had no idea these texts were largely passé in current discussions of the subject. At this time I was applying to graduate programs in philosophy, and given my new interest decided to specialize in ethics..

T. M. Scanlon has cited the value of friendship in arguing against a ‘teleological’ view of value which says that value inheres only in states of affairs and demands only that we promote it. This article argues that, whatever the teleological view's final merits, the case against it cannot be made on the basis of friendship. The view can capture Scanlon's claims about friendship if it holds, as it can consistently with its basic ideas, that (i) friendship is a higher-level good consisting in appropriate attitudes to other goods and evils in a friend's life, (ii) these goods and evils have agent-relative value, i.e. more value than similar states of strangers, and (iii) the attitudes constituting friendship have less value than their objects. Given these independently plausible claims, the teleological view can agree with Scanlon that, e.g., it is wrong to betray a friend in order to promote more friendships among other people. (Published Online August 21 2006).

The rhetoric of Principia Ethica, as of not a few philosophy books, is that of the clean break. Moore claims that the vast majority of previous writing on ethics has been misguided and that an entirely new start is needed. In its time, however, the book’s claims to novelty were widely disputed. Reviews in Mind, Ethics, and The Journal of Philosophy applauded the clarity of Moore’s criticisms of Mill, Spencer, and others, but said they were “not altogether original,” had for the most part “already been brought out by other critics,” and were even “the standard criticisms.”1 To the Mind reviewer, “The book indicates throughout how strongly the author has been affected by Sidgwick’s views.”2 Hastings Rashdall rejected as historically inaccurate Moore’s claim that only Sidgwick before him had recognized that “good” is indefinable: “To say nothing of writers who (like Mr. Moore and myself) learned the doctrine largely from Sidgwick, I should contend that it was taught with sufficient distinctness by Plato ..., Aristotle, and a host of other writers who have studied in their school.”3 Rashdall also described Moore’s principle of organic unities as just “a new and striking way of stating a very old truth.”4 Some recent commentators have taken a similar line. Bernard Williams has said that much of Principia Ethica comes from Sidgwick,5 while Thomas Baldwin, discussing the book’s substantive values, has said the principle of organic unities “was expressly stated by Bradley,” while “McTaggart had for some years extolled the value of love, and the value of art is a central theme of romanticism.”.

My topic in this essay is the comparative moral value of self-interest and altruism. I take self-interest to consist in a positive attitude toward one's own good and altruism to consist in a similar attitude toward the good of others, and I assess these attitudes within a general theory of the intrinsic value of attitudes toward goods and evils. The first two sections of the essay apply this theory in a simple form, one that treats self-interest and altruism symmetrically. The third section examines whether the theory can be revised to accommodate an apparent asymmetry in our common-sense thinking about self-interested and altruistic attitudes. I will start by assuming that each person has a good, or that certain states of the person are intrinsically desirable and others undesirable. Of course, philosophers have disagreed for centuries about what this good consists in, or what particular states are desirable. Welfarists take each person's good to consist in pleasure, the fulfillment of her preferences, or something describable as “welfare” or “happiness.” Perfectionists hold that certain states of a person are good apart from any connection with happiness. Thus, some perfectionists hold that knowledge, achievement, and deep personal relations are good independently of how much a person wants or enjoys them. For the purposes of this essay it does not matter much which initial claims about the good we accept. To discuss issues about self-interest and altruism we need only some initial theory of each person's good, whatever its specific content. Consequently, and to cover as many bases as possible, I will start by assuming a mixed welfarist-perfectionist theory of the good, one claiming that pleasure, knowledge, and achievement are all intrinsically good

This chapter surveys a variety of views about which states of affairs are intrinsically good, that is, in themselves or apart from their consequences. It considers the claims to intrinsic value of such states of individuals as pleasure, the fulfillment of desire, knowledge, achievement, moral virtue, and personal relationships; the different ways such goods can be compared and aggregated both within and across individual lives; and the possibility, given a principle of “organic unities,” of goods located in wholes larger than individual lives, such as complex ecosystems.

This paper discusses the idea, which arises within perfectionist theories of the good, that there can be special value in a well-rounded life, one that contains a balance of different intrinsic goods, e.g. knowledge and achievement, rather than specializing narrowly on just one. It uses the economists' device of indifference graphs to 1) formulate the view the well-roundedness is other things equal a good, and 2) to combine that view with empirical theses about the (at times) instrumental benefits and (at times) instrumental costs of trying to seek balance among goods. The upshot is that for most of us the best individual lives will involve moderate, but only moderate, specialization on one or a few types of intrinsic good.

Two main foundations have been proposed for the side-constraints that deontologists think make it sometimes wrong to do what will have the best effects. Thomist views agree with consequentialism that the bearers of value are always states of affairs, but hold that alongside the duty to promote good states are stronger duties not to choose against them.1 Kantian views locate the relevant values in persons, saying it is respect for persons rather than for any state that makes it wrong to kill, lie, and so on.2 The central innovation of Stephen Darwall’s Welfare and Rational Care is to extend this Kantian idea from side-constraints to the concept of welfare, or of what is good for a person.3 As a good-to-be-promoted, welfare is usually understood as located in states of affairs. Darwall agrees that a person’s welfare involves her being in certain states, but argues that the value in these states derives from her value as a person. More specifically, his “rational care” theory of welfare equates a person’s welfare with those states it would be rational to want for her insofar as one cared for her for her sake, so an attitude to her is primary and to her states is derivative. Whereas standard theories take the concept of welfare to come first and define care as a desire for that, Darwall reverses this ordering.

The moral issues about nationalism arise from the character of nationalism as a form of partiality. Nationalists care more about their own nation and its members than about other nations and their members; in that way nationalists are partial to their own national group. The question, then, is whether this national partiality is morally justified or, on the contrary, whether everyone ought to care impartially about all members of all nations. As Jeff McMahan emphasizes in [another chapter of the book in which this essay appears], a philosophical examination of this question must consider the specific features of nationalism as one form of partiality among others. Some partiality--for example, toward one's spouse and children--seems morally acceptable and even a duty. According to commonsense moral thinking, one not only may but also should care more about one's family members than about strangers. But other instances of partiality, most notably racial partiality, are in most circumstances widely condemned. Is national partiality more like familial partiality or more like racial partiality? To answer this question, we must know what in general justifies attitudes of partiality. Caring more about certain people is appropriate when one stands in certain special relations to those people. But what are these relations, and to what degree do they hold among members of the same nation? Assuming they are present within families and not within races, to what degree are they present within nations?

I am pleased to participate in this joint Critical Notice, in part because it is an opportunity to pay a debt of gratitude. Thirteen years ago, as a Toronto undergraduate with interests in things like Hegelian metaphysics, I enrolled in an ethics seminar with Wayne Sumner. I had not done any ethics before, and took this course largely because I thought I ought to. But it turned out to be the best course of my undergraduate career, and permanently changed my philosophical interests. Having learned what I did in the seminar I have been doing ethics ever since—so, thank you, Wayne.