‘What Is To Be Done?’

Abstract

It has been remarked that ‘beginning with the eighteenth century, the important, if not the principle, task of ethics becomes that of reducing human conflict to a minimum.’1 To speak, as I have done, of the ‘limits’ of moral philosophy is to suggest a sense in which it cannot be the task of moral philosophy to resolve moral conflicts. Ethics, I have wanted to say, is descriptive: it cannot dictate what in any circumstances ought to be done. It might even be said that insofar as the adjudication of social or moral conflict has become the work of the moral philosopher, to that extent ethics has been subsumed by politics, the ‘good’ has been subordinated to the ‘necessary’. And yet the fact of social and moral conflict remains. So the philosopher concerned about the practical consequences of such conflict may want to turn his attention from the ‘speculative’ to the ‘practical’ and simply put the question ‘What is to be done?’. Given the fact of social and moral conflict and the difficulties to be faced in the achievement of any widespread moral agreement, ‘reason’ may seem to suggest at least some means of adjudicating conflicts, even if it suggests no means of altogether resolving them. ‘Reason’ might seem to demand and to provide precisely the sort of moral theory or system of morality found in the accounts of Glaucon, Hobbes and Rawls.