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Show Chapter V. A Refutation of Anscombe's Thesis 218 morally significant circumstances are expressed. But what would count as instrumental value strictly speaking? Sidgwick claims that friendship was an important means to the Utilitarian end.31 But friendship cannot be strictly speaking a means or instrument through which happiness is achieved. Only genuine instruments, such as machines that stimulate the pleasure centers of the brain, can be means or instruments in the strict sense. Certainly we are free to view friendship in this way, metaphorically speaking; and in Chapters X.6 through XII I look more closely at some metaethical views that conceive certain key activities similarly. But the same metaphoric liberality then entitles us to view fulfilling our obligations as a means or instrument through which morally significant circumstances are expressed as well. And we need not be consequentialists to do so. So it appears that so, far, there is reason to suppose a structural equivalence between consequentialist and deontological value theories after all. In both cases, the moral value of action, institutions, and practices have only provisional value relative to their carriers of primitive value - whether the favored normative theory is consequentialist or deontological. 3.3.3. Causation Earlier, consequentialist theories were represented as insisting upon a causal relation between that which is morally right and the CPV it promotes (3.3.i.c), whereas a deontological theory was supposed to make this relation noncausal and constitutive (3.3.ii). But a consequentialist value theory must accommodate a noncausal constitutive relation between a morally right state of affairs and its independent CPV, and a deontological theory must accommodate a causal relation between a morally right state of affairs and its CPV. If a consequentialist value theory ruled out all such noncausal and constitutive relations, it could not be morally right within a consequentialist theory to promote happiness through friendship, or to make someone happy by32 arousing his competitive tendencies at chess, or to promote human perfection by developing and exercising one's talents. In each such case, the morally right action is related to the carrier of primitive value as a constitutive part and not as a causal antecedent. But a reasonable consequentialist will rightly exhort its performance nevertheless. Indeed a consequentialist value theory that consisted only of causal relations would be impossible because it would require us to cause the desired end, but never to participate in it through our own actions or experiences. For example, we might cause happiness to occur, but could do nothing that would be constitutive of being happy. This would imply, first, Henry Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics (New York, N.Y.: Dover, 1966), p. 437. For a discussion of this claim see Chapter XI. 32 in Goldman's sense (op. cit. Note 28, pp. 5-6, 20-21). 31 © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
