The Reasons of a Living Being

Abstract

When I came to the University of Michigan twenty-five years ago, Charles Stevenson had just retired, and I came to occupy his budget line. Over the next few years, this seems to have had a deep effect on me. Previously I had thought hard about moral disputes and what is at issue in them, but I had just been baffled; I hoped some solution would turn up. Now some Stevenson-like ways of tackling the puzzle began to occur to me, and I convinced myself that they have more power than I had previously thought possible. Perhaps I had good reason to be convinced-or perhaps you'll find it was just the subliminal influence of the budget line. The puzzle about moral issues was Moore's puzzle, the one that G. E. Moore made especially vivid a century ago. As we all learn at our philosophical parents' knees, Moore argued that moral questions concern a non-natural property. When we try to settle a moral question, he maintained, we're not in the same line of inquiry as when we use empirical, scientific methods to inquire into the natural world. Notoriously, Moore had an open question argument which seems in retrospect to be dubious, and a naturalistic fallacy which he put in many different ways, all of which seem to beg the question. Later on he saw his first book as terribly confused. But he had another line of argument which, it seems to me, just won't go away; I call it the at issue? argument. Jack, imagine, claims that all pleasure is good in itself, but Jill says that guilty pleasures are not in themselves good. So Jack says that all pleasure is intrinsically good, and Jill disagrees. What's at issue in all this? The two disagree about something, sure enoughbut what? Jack, imagine, adds that after all, 'good' just means pleasant. But if he is right about what 'good' means, then they can't be disputing whether all pleasure is good, for they both agree that all pleasure is pleasant. Take any proferred definition of 'good', Moore argued, and we can construct a similar puzzle for it. Now whether any Moore-like argument can be made to work is still a matter of controversy, but Moore does, with this argument, offer us a broad test for any account of what moral claims consist in: ask what's at issue. What, according to the account, is at issue in moral disputes? What does the disagreement consist in? Some accounts, even today, fail to offer plausible answers to this question.