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Show Chapter X. The Criterion of Inclusiveness 386 disadvantageous because it implies the conceptual impossibility of disconfirmation, which undermines its status as a genuine theory. By contrast, it is generally better for a theory to aspire to greater inclusiveness, in order to be able to bring within the purview of consideration the new and conceptually anomalous data that are always waiting in the wings, and against which the scope and adequacy of the theory is tested. Under these conditions a conservative epistemic policy may well be the best response. However, a practice of recognizing bona fide anomalous data, the existence of which is ascertained through replication and intersubjective confirmation, as official impetus for further revision, elaboration and hypothesis-construction in the theory is not methodologically unrealistic. Certainly it is more rational than denying the existence of such data in the hope of preserving the credibility of the theory intact. 2. Moral Inclusiveness Similarly, to advance a moral theory that, like Kant's, purports to explain the behavior of an ideally rational agent in terms of character, principles, aims, desires, etc., that nevertheless denied, dissociated or minimized the moral significance of, for example, the treatment of men and women by one another or the treatment of children by adults would be to insure the explanatory impotence and practical irrelevance of the theory in virtually every situation in which such a theory might be expected to provide guidance. This would be a paradigm case of pseudorationality. A practically adequate moral theory cannot ignore the actual data of moral experience, on pain of vitiating the formulation, scope and practical application of its laws. As an antidote to pseudorationality in the construction of a moral theory, we may therefore require of a moral theory that it be maximally sensitive to what counts as moral data; that it include all morally significant behavior within its domain of reference, and not confine its purview to simplistic injunctions to keep promises or maximize happiness. As in the case of the ERA, this may require explicit mention of subjects, or of properties of subjects, to which the original formulation of the theory already implicitly applied. 2.1. Moral Recognition We can then require, as a criterion of practical adequacy, that the theory be sufficiently inclusive such that in the formulation of its descriptive laws and practical principles, it is practically capable of recognizing as morally significant all the behavior to which moral praise, blame, or acquittal is a relevant and appropriate response. For example, a moral theory that yields applications to newly formulated specific issues, such as contemporary Utilitarianism has done with regard to the issue of animal rights,6 satisfies the Peter Singer, Animal Liberation, Second Edition (New York, NY: New York Review Books, 1990). 6 © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
