Precis of The Limits of Morality

Abstract

Most of us believe that there are limits to the sacrifices that morality can demand of us. Intuitively, it seems, I am not morally required to be forever making my greatest possible contribution to the overall good-for this would involve considerable hardship and sacrifice on my part. Instead, I am permitted to favor the various goals and projects that I most care about, even if by doing so I fail to perform the act that would lead to the best consequences overall. Of course, if I so choose, I am permitted to sacrifice my interests for the sake of the greater good. But such sacrifices are only rarely required. Typically, I am permitted to promote my own interests instead. In short, morality includes agent-centered options: the agent has the option of performing (or not performing) acts which from a neutral perspective are less than optimal. This, at least, is the view of ordinary, commonsense morality. Despite its considerable intuitive appeal, however, I think that the belief in options cannot in fact be justified. Or so I argue in The Limits of Morality. More precisely, the attempt to defend options runs afoul of various other beliefs that are themselves important parts of our commonsense moral view; defending options pushes us in directions that are unacceptable from the standpoint of ordinary morality. Thus, options of the sort we intuitively believe in cannot be given anything like an adequate defense. In embracing options, the defender of ordinary morality-the moderaterejects a general requirement to promote the good. His position is thus less extreme than that of someone who actually endorses such a general requirement-the extremist. This is not to say, of course, that the moderate believes that there is never any case at all in which an agent is required to perform some act for the sake of the greater good. But such cases tend to be rather modest and limited. Still, there are cases of this sort. For example, ordinary morality would require me to throw a life preserver to save a drowning child, even though the