Duncan-Jones on moral error

Abstract

IN 'Good Things and Good Thieves' (ANALYSIS, March 1966), Prof. Duncan-Jones' main object is to refute a view of Geach's (and Aristotle's) about 'good', and on that subject I think he makes some progress. In doing so, however, he says something about moral error which seems to me to be seriously (if not morally) in error. His Thesis 3 is that 'Error concerning Thesis 2 is moral error'; and Thesis 2 was that 'The sense of the statement, is a good can only be fully seen in the light of the question whether X is a good sort of thing'. Presumably Thesis 3 is intended to be understood as having a universal quantifier: that is, to say that any error of that sort is moral error, that to be in error of that sort is, i so facto, to be morally in error. This is, I think, importantly wrong. Part of what Thesis 3 comes to is this, which is true enough: that the fact that A is a good X does not, as such, earn A any moral points. It depends on which sort X is. Furthermore, it seems reasonable to say that if X is a morally good sort of thing, then A's being a good one of that sort does earn moral points for A; and also, to cover the cases DuncanJones concentrates on, if X is a morally bad sort of thing, then the better an X A is, the morally worse A is: the best criminals (Geachian 'best') are the morally worst. However, Duncan-Jones purports to be speaking of the 'intrinsic goodness' of X's, and not of the moral goodness of them as such. He seems to be arguing that there is a connection between the two, such that if X's are an intrinsically bad kind of thing, then A's which are good X's are morally bad in some way. Now, some values of 'X' will be such that it would not be directly possible to apply moral terminology to A's which are of that kind. One might, I suppose, think that apple pie is intrinsically bad, but it is not sensible to say of a piece of pie that it is morally bad. Moore would have brought morals into it by suggesting that any action which consisted of bringing intrinsically bad things into existence was, to that extent, morally bad; and it seems to me that Duncan-Jones would have to say the same if we take his Thesis 3 seriously. But in any case, there are further types of things where this difficulty is not present; for example, to use Duncan-Jones' own list (p. 114), 'Style of life sorts'. So let us ask: is the fact that A is a good X, where X is an intrinsically (non-Geachian) bad style of life, such as to show that A is morally bad? Surely not, unless instead of 'intrinsically bad' we say 'morally bad' (perhaps 'intrinsically morally bad', but this is no matter). One might easily hold, for 111