Universalism and Reasons

This post is going to be pretty inchoate; it’s just going to be me putting down some thoughts I’ve been having on how to make sense of the claim that morality is universal.

I like to think that I am a moral universalist, where the universalist thesis is something like the claim that the principles of morality apply equally to each person. The problem is that exactly what that is supposed to mean is not clear to me. Surely it does not mean that everyone has the same obligations; context is important for determining what obligations someone has. So the obvious move is to say something like this: all that is meant by the claim that morality is universal is to say that the same principles of generating obligations govern everyone, but those principles make crucial reference to contextually-defined facts, which is how people end up with different obligations. I want to spend some time trying to formalize that claim in an enlightening way.

Here is a way of describing reasons, borrowed from Mark Schroeder: reasons are instantiations of a three-place relation between a fact, a person, and an action (or desire, on some views), schematically presented so: “F is a reason for A to phi.” I find this description plausible, and I want to consider its application to the view I’ve presented above.

Consider the following view. Every moral reason R is describable as an instance of the following scheme: F is a reason for anyone to phi. I say ‘describable as’ because of the generality issue about individuating actions. I might have a moral reason to go to the pawn shop because it is part of fulfilling my promise, but the view I present here does not require that everyone has a reason to go to the pawn shop. What matters is that the action I take in going to the pawn shop can also be described as keeping my promise, and surely that is something everyone has a reason to do.

It strikes me as plausible that people’s welfare is morally relevant. As a special case of that principle, it strikes me as plausible that my welfare is morally relevant to my actions; that is, I could perform an action that was immoral by virtue of its harming me (there are some complications here, but I’ll ignore them for now). So now we have an instance of my scheme: ‘That phi-ing would make x better off’ is a reason for x to phi. The problem for the universalist should now be pretty obvious. For people who are, for example, deeply sadistic, their welfare is going to be critically tied to making other people suffer. And now the view doesn’t seem all that universalist at all, because what moral reasons you have depend pretty deeply on how you are constructed, and that seems to be exactly what a universalist should deny. I also don’t think this is a problem with how I’m construing universalism; I think this is exactly the kind of problem Michael Smith ran into in

The Moral Problem with the person who prefers beer versus the person who prefers wine. I think universalists have to figure out how to distinguish the kinds of facts about a person that gives them moral reasons from the kinds of facts about a person that don’t. ‘That x made a promise to phi’ and ‘that x would die without food’ seem to create moral reasons; ‘that x desires the death of all sentient beings’ does not seem to, in the same way. But I am not at all convinced that there is a principled line to be drawn there, and I’m pretty sure the ways that Michael Smith and Derek Parfit try don’t work. And that’s a problem for my universalism.

Side note: I talk about moral reasons because I have the strong intuition that morality is universal in something like the way I’ve been explicating, but I don’t necessarily believe that about nonmoral reasons. Now, the relationship between moral and nonmoral reasons is a difficult question, and I hope to simply avoid that issue at the moment.

This entry was posted on 11. December 2009 at 16:46 and is filed under Reasons for Action, Ethics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.