Human Morality's Authority

Abstract

A central theme of Samuel Scheffler's impressive Human Morality is that considered view of the relation between morality and the individual (5) requires distinguishing frequently confused issues concerning morality's content, scope, authority, and deliberative role, and appreciating interrelations among these. He suggests a nice example of the latter. Some are inclined to believe morality lacks the overriding authority others claim to have because they assume that morality's content is stringent. They may think, for instance, that morality gives no weight to the agent's interests and concerns (except as one person among others) but argue that, since would be irrational to weight one's concerns and interests in rational deliberation, moral requirements lack overriding reason-giving force. But this assumes without defense a conception of morality that is controversial. If morality is not stringent but moderate, agents' interests and concerns will be relevant as such to determining their moral obligations, and will be less clear that the best reasons can ever dictate violating them. For me, Scheffler's treatment of morality's authority is the most interesting, suggestive, and original part of the book. But is also the hardest to pin down. I want to raise some questions about his ideas in this area, therefore, in the hope of clarifying directions in which they might be developed further. Scheffler dubs CO (claim of overridingness) the thesis that it can never be rational knowingly to do what morality forbids. (52) His attitude towards CO is complex. He says repeatedly that CO is implausibly strong (e.g., 56) but he doesn't deny CO and appears to agree with Kant's thesis that something like is a presupposition of our pre-philosophical conception of morality. (61-66) Moreover, he argues that the reasons writers have had for denying CO have often been less than convincing. Some have simply assumed morality to be stringent, thereby saddling CO with an unfavorable theory of morality's content. (56-60) And others have interpreted a plausible internalist premise linking reasons and motives (nothing can count as a reason for a person to act in a certain way unless is capable of actually motivating him to do so (61, 74)) in terms of an implausible Humean theory of