V—Chess and Life: The Structure of a Moral Code

Abstract

Some things are absolutely wrong. They are not to be done, no matter what the consequences or circumstances. To put it another way, certain descriptions of acts are such that if a proposed course of action satisfies any of them it is thereby ruled out, regardless of whatever other descriptions it may satisfy. For some things are morally impossible; and if a thing is impossible for any reason then it is an error even to think of doing such a thing, and still more of an error to try it, whatever the good that might be attained or evil averted if one were, per impossibile, to do that thing.' Declaring that some things are morally impossible exposes one to charges of incoherence from both intuitionists and consequentialists. It is not that either need doubt that the things declared to be morally impossible are indeed evil. When an absolutist declares that murder for example is absolutely wrong both consequentialist and intuitionist can agree with him that there is something bad about murder. Their point will be rather the formal one that whatever content you give it an absolutist ethic is structurally absurd. In this paper I want to look at the consequentialist and intuitionist objections to absolutism and at their alternative conceptions of the structure that a moral theory should have. I will show by an analogy with chess that the objections are not sound, and that a moral theory can coherently be given an absolutist structure. I will concede nevertheless that there is some truth in both consequentialism and intuitionism, and will use again the chess analogy to show how we may build upon an absolutist ethic to do justice to those truths about the correct structure for moral theory. Let me start with the consequentialist objection to absolutist ethics. To focus discussion let us assume that our absolutism holds murder to be absolutely wrong. Now circumstances might