Robert R. Dow

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.