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Moral Reasons, Moral Action, and Rationality
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2020
Extract
I want to examine a relationship between rationality and moral behavior (morally right behavior). To do this, I shall first set out some basic intuitions. Then, within that framework I shall raise a problem about the relationship between rationality and moral behavior; in particular, I shall suggest that present in these basic intuitions is an inconsistency which can be remedied only by a radical alteration of one intuition.
It is rational to perform a morally right action. The sense of this claim is fairly clear, but the claim itself needs further articulation. For example, it is rational to conclude that the sum of 37 and 22 is 59, but the conclusion has not been reached rationally if the way in which one hit on 59 as the answer was to pluck a pea - luckily enough, number 59 - from the bingo basket. In speaking about a belief or an action being rational, reference must be made to an agent, to reasons, and to the agent's reasons.
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- Copyright © The Authors 1982
References
1 This intuition may be closely related to that concerning the rationality of moral action. Some social convention theories of morality aside, perhaps this intuition is even a corollary of the first. The overridingness of moral reasons may explain why it is that morally right actions, unlike, for example, prudentially or preferentially efficacious actions, are categorically rational.
2 ‘Distinctions Among Blame Concepts,’ Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 38 (1977) 149-66
3 As with other excusing conditions, however, the presence of irrationality as a valid excuse does not itself mean that nothing should be done to or about the agent who has this excuse. The presence of an excuse does not, by itself, preclude or warrant any subsequent action whatever toward the agent who possesses the excuse. The presence of this or any other excuse means only that the agent is not blameworthy; an adverse moral Judgment of him is inap· propriate.
4 Kurt Baier, ‘The Social Source of Reason,’ Proceedings and Addresses of The American Philosophical Association, 51 (1977-78) 713-14
5 ‘Rationality and Responsibility: A Central Thesis,’ The Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 63 (1982) 75-85
6 I am here concerned to note that affect and volition, as well as cognition, feature in the performance of a rational action. Later I shall discuss their role in relation to overriding reasons.
7 Again (cf., n. 3) this is not to say that nothing should be done to or about the agent who has this excuse, or that because of his excuse he should necessarily escape what Joel Feinberg has referred to as the ‘state's clutches’ ('Crime, Clutchability, and Individuated Treatment,’ in Feinberg's Doing and Deserving [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1970], 252-71 ). It is to say only that the agent is not culpable.
8 Baier, 718-19
9 Kenner, Lionel ‘On Blaming,’ Mind, 76 (1967), particularly pp. 239-41Google Scholar
10 Model Penal Code (Philadelphia: The American Law Institute 1955), Tentative Draft No. 4, Article 4, Comments on Sec. 4.01, 156
11 Model Penal Code, 160
12 I am grateful to Dr. Paul Hughes for this opthalmological example of something which is a symptom of only one ‘disease.'