Annette Claire Baier

(1929 - 2012)

Frankena sees moral point of view theories as steering a middle course between scepticism or relativism in ethics and absolutism or dogmatism. The constraints of a distinctive point of view limit the range of moral judgments, provide some basis to expect agreement between different moral judges, and generate standards if not of moral truth at least of moral acceptability. Since however these constraints arise only from the moral point of view, they are avoidable if the point of view is avoidable, and do not impose absolute inescapable demands on every person. Frankena sees the judgments made from the moral point of view to include categorical ones, but since he does not characterize the point of view itself as either the final court of practical reason or as an inevitable point of view, the categorical judgments made from that point of view are themselves externally conditional on taking that view-point. The most that can be said is that when and if one takes that viewpoint, certain demands are inescapable and unconditional. The whole illocutionary act of making the categorical moral judgment is as it were limited by the condition that one’s hearers, including oneself as hearer, share the point of view. Made fully explicit, what I am calling the external conditional would take this form: “Provided that one takes the moral point of view, one must acknowledge the unconditional obligation to …”. This is quite different from claims like “If one is a parent one has obligations to one’s child,” which is itself presumably a claim which may have an implicit initial qualifier of the form “From the moral point of view …” or “From the legal point of view …”. It might of course also be saying “From the point of view of practical rationality as such, a point of view which one cannot refuse to take, and beyond which lies no more comprehensive or corrected point of view …”. Frankena distinguishes this ultimately authoritative practical judgment from a moral judgment, while nevertheless suggesting that practical reason will normally endorse what morality has decreed. It is not, however, part of the very meaning of “moral point of view” that that point be final or inescapable for human persons.

Maclntyre’s contrast between contemporary individualist versions of morality, expressive of arbitrary selfwill, and some less willful or less arbitrary moral guidance, is queried. All social practices, both those Maclntyre disapproves of and those he prefers, are claimed to contain elements of arbitrariness, and some scope for the expression of some individual human wills. Maclntyre’s neglect of the question of what allocation of power a particular practice or set of practices involves is contrasted with Hume’s due but not undue attention to this matter. Maclntyre’s treatment of Hume’s place in the history of the Aristotelian conception of the moral life as cultivation of virtues is criticized and tentatively explained as really due not to Hume’s anti-rationalism, but to his acceptance of the political and commercial practices which Maclntyre distrusts, and to his rejection of the non-Aristotelian religious concepts of other-worldly goods, sin and redemption from it, which Maclntyre wants added on to Aristotle’s moral theory.