Daniel Webber

Many metaethicists hold that particular moral facts must be explained in part by general moral principles, but they have struggled to give a satisfactory account of the nature of these explanatory moral laws. While the content of the moral laws has always been taken to be a matter of normative ethics, I explore the possibility that we could turn to normative ethical theory for an account of their nature as well. Could it be that the moral laws just are the contractualist’s principles that no one could reasonably reject, or the rule-consequentialist’s optimific rules, or the dispositions of the virtuous agent? I argue that accounts of this kind offer at least a partial solution to the problem: though they may not succeed as fully general accounts of moral lawhood, they show considerable promise as accounts of the deontic laws—the moral laws that explain facts about right and wrong.

When policymakers craft rules for use by the general public, they must take into account the ways in which their rules are likely to be misapplied. Should contractualists and rule consequentialists do the same when they search for rules whose general acceptance would be non-rejectable or ideal? I argue that these theorists face a dilemma. If they ignore the possibility of misapplication, they end up with an unrealistic view that rejects rules designed to protect us from others’ mistakes. On the other hand, if they take misapplication into account, they end up rejecting rules that appeal to what really matters morally in favor of easier-to-apply proxies for these rules. This leaves them unable to say why certain wrong acts are wrong, which in turn may lead them to mistaken verdicts about moral worth and wronging. I show how this misapplication dilemma applies to standard contractualist and rule consequentialist theories, but also suggest how it might generalize to other two-level theories, including those designed to avoid the ideal world objection.