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Show Chapter X. Rawls's Instrumentalism 412 and, similarly, to establish the objectivity of moral rules, and the decisions based upon them, we must exhibit the decision procedure, which can be shown to be both reasonable and reliable, at least in some cases, for deciding between moral rules and lines of conduct consequent to them.5 In this passage Rawls expresses impatience with the traditional treatment of metaethical issues as a branch of speculative metaphysics. He reconfigures the issue of moral objectivity and reorients the practice of metaethics from linguistic analysis to decision theory. By turning attention to the correct procedure for making substantive moral decisions - about what action is right as well as about what kind of society would be good for human beings, Rawls thereby revitalized the practice of normative moral philosophy, and of casuistry more concretely, after a century of relative neglect. At the time Rawls wrote "Outline of a Decision Procedure for Ethics," moral philosophers did not often address normative moral questions. They were more centrally concerned with the metaethical status of such questions themselves, and were accustomed to couching their concerns about the objectivity of moral judgments in the following terms: Do terms such as "good" and "right" refer to anything? And if so, to what do they refer? Abstract entities? Emotional states of the speaker? Can a moral judgment be objectively true independently of the local moral code in which it figures? If so, in what does this truth consist? If moral terms do not refer, on what basis do we accept the judgments in which they figure as objectively valid? Or are all moral terms and judgments valid only relative to a particular speaker, community, or culture? This last conclusion would entail a correspondingly relativized and reduced role for the normative moral philosopher, and so a contraction in the scope of philosophical ambition of the kind already discussed: If some such form of relativism were true, we would have no moral justification for intervening in any of the practices or behavior of other individuals or groups whose actions we found objectionable. Fighting for civil rights, protesting international human rights violations, and helping the needy would find no more solid legitimation than imperialism, hegemony, or meddling. In response to this possibility, Rawls replaced Moore's question, Do moral terms refer? with a different one: Can moral judgments be the outcome of a rational and reliable procedure? He argues in the above passage that the conception of moral objectivity on the basis of which these issues traditionally have been framed is itself wrongheaded. The project, he argues, should not consist in a search for abstract metaphysical entities, corresponding to moral terms and judgments, which we can metaphorically pinch, kick and pummel to reassure ourselves of their objective reality as we physically do bodies, ibid. 5 © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
