Moral Judges and Human Ideals: A Discussion of Human Morality

Abstract

Developing vision of morality that is at once compelling and comprehensive is an enormous task. The questions and answers all interlock, making it difficult to know where to start. Most of us, I think, just jump in, with whatever issue or controversy grabs us. We make what headway we can with the section of the moral puzzle on which we choose to work and hope or trust that when we or others work on other sections, the results will fit smoothly, consistently, even supportively with our current attempts. This seems to me to be useful way to think about Samuel Scheffler's excellent book, Human Morality. The book takes on significant section of the moral puzzle, addressing the questions of how much morality demands and of how morality is related to self-interest. Scheffler himself is admirably sensitive to the number of interlocking claims involved in the discussion of these topics, and his careful distinctions among questions of morality's content, its scope, its authority, and its deliberative role are extremely helpful for anyone wanting to think clearly about these issues. In what follows I shall be concerned to call attention to some related issues that lurk in the background. These are the issues that Scheffler must hope will be resolved in ways that fit smoothly with his claims. More generally, these are issues that those who are, like me, sympathetic to Scheffler's views, will need eventually to address in order more completely and persuasively to defend the proposal that Human Morality puts forward and to link it to other issues that are equally central to comprehensive moral theory. The proposal is basically that morality be understood as a reasonable and humane phenomenon (6), neither coincident with self-interest nor diametrically opposed to it. While morality places substantial constraints on what in-