| OCR Text |
Show Chapter V. A Refutation of Anscombe's Thesis 192 what the theory stipulates to be good and what it stipulates to be right - without, however, specifying how the conceptually prior value is to be realized: causally or constitutively. To claim, for example, that justice is the highest good and that the good has priority over the right implies that those actions, institutions, or states of affairs are right which promote justice, and only insofar as they do so. But justice can be promoted causally, for example by effecting dispositions to just behavior in oneself and others, or constitutively, by acting justly or participating in just institutions oneself. Terms like "promotes," "furthers," or "realizes" are neutral between these two possibilities, and the value-theoretic part of a moral theory does not explicitly commit itself to either. Often the choice is made at the practical level, where the action-guiding directives prescribe how the value is to be promoted under particular circumstances. But this matter of value-theoretic policy is not made explicit as a policy at the practical level. Typically we just assume, when a value theory announces itself as consequentialist, that its conceptually prior value is to be promoted causally and instrumentally, whereas the value espoused by a deontological theory is to be promoted constitutively. But these assumptions are mistaken, for they suppose that a choice between these two possibilities is precisely what distinguishes value theories as consequentialist or deontological. In Section 3 of this chapter I show that the failure of such value theories to commit themselves explicitly one way or the other is better explained by the fact that any acceptable value theory must include both causal and constitutive relations, and so that no such distinction can be made. Examples of purely value-theoretic normative theories that contain no practical parts are Rawls's theory of justice as originally elaborated in his book of that title, and Plato's theory of justice in the Republic. In both cases we are presented with an elaborated conception of the just society and a rationale for adopting it as a social ideal. But in neither case are we given any guidelines for bridging the gap between this ideal and our actual social condition. By contrast, Marx's social ideal of the truly human society is buttressed by an immediate call to revolutionary activity on the part of the proletariat in the service of this ideal. To be sure, the directive to overthrow the bourgeois system of exploitation through revolution does not specify the prescribed actions in the degree of detail one might like. But the degree of abstractness with which a prescribed action is described does not prevent it from being a practical prescription. Rawls' and Plato's normative theories contain no such prescriptions at all. 1.2. Practical Decision-Making A second application of the consequentialist/ deontological distinction is therefore to the formulation of these prescriptions or directives to action. Call this the practical use of this distinction. Here the distinction differentiates between two different methods for deciding what to do. The consequentialist © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
