Robert R. Dow

I describe the conceptual and substantive foundations of consequentialist moral justification, then describe and evaluate competing theories and objections. Moral theorists agree that moral domains require rational agents and that greater rational justification makes actions morally better. Like other people, they continue to disagree about the nature of justifying reasons. I begin with the common sense view that various directly experienced pursue and avoid states, such as pleasure, pain, vitality and fatigue, are intrinsic reasons to pursue or avoid those states. We call these kinds of states good and bad, the greater overall magnitude of which is greater rational reason to act and therefore more justified morally. Nonconsequentialists argue that overall better is not always morally better. Yet, justifications of less good actions must in some way 1) matter but have no value and 2) not disrespect the losers in the suboptimal trade-off, which no theory adequately explains or provides. Most plausibly, consequentialist comparative value is the sole valid criterion of rational justification. Although contract, intuitionist and virtue ethics are not foundational, they remain functionally important within a consequentialist framework.

Twentieth century ethicists have challenged the ordinary view that moral judgments can be nonarbitrary, universalizable, cognitive, and overarchingly authoritative. I argue that a modified version of Shaftesbury's moral sensibility theory goes a good way--and as far as can be gone--toward vindicating this view. ;Shaftesbury's "sense of right and wrong" has two functional parts: pre-moral value judgments of the form "State of affairs X is good for entity Y" and pro-good concern for Y. These parts together generate moral judgments of the form "It is right to foster X for Y, ceteris paribus." I argue that moral arbitrariness is limited because many values and their etiologies are knowable and nonarbitrary; that reasoned moral criticism and justification presuppose universalizability, the principle that what is true of one case must be true of relevantly similar cases; and that moral judgments arguably have enough in common with secondary quality judgments to be truth-bearing. ;However, if pro-good concerns are morally foundational, sensibility theory has no neutral, non-question-begging way to establish moral authority over people who lack such concerns. Hutcheson's and Hume's response--that the moral sense is universal--is false. Wiggins and McDowell fare no better. I offer two Shaftesburian responses that deflate this criticism. First, the demand for stance-neutral justification of an action-guiding stance is unintelligible and can be dismissed. Second, a naturalistic explanation stands in lieu of justification: pro-good concerns are such strong instrumental goods that their very existence is socio-ecologically favored, authoritatively and nonarbitrarily, over contrary stances. ;Sensibility theory revitalizes the common view of morality. It is structurally and ontologically simple, satisfies contextual concerns of care/virtue ethics, and extends to matters of social justice, both by motive and as a conceptual model. Its unifying elegance and nonrevisionism make it an attractive moral theory.