Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- Abbreviations for Kant's works
- PART ONE KANT'S MORAL PHILOSOPHY
- PART TWO COMPARATIVE ESSAYS
- 8 Aristotle and Kant on the source of value
- 9 Two distinctions in goodness
- 10 The reasons we can share: An attack on the distinction between agent-relative and agent-neutral values
- 11 Skepticism about practical reason
- 12 Two arguments against lying
- 13 Personal identity and the unity of agency: A Kantian response to Parfit
- Bibliography
- Sources
- Other publications by the author
- Index
- Index of citations
10 - The reasons we can share: An attack on the distinction between agent-relative and agent-neutral values
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- Abbreviations for Kant's works
- PART ONE KANT'S MORAL PHILOSOPHY
- PART TWO COMPARATIVE ESSAYS
- 8 Aristotle and Kant on the source of value
- 9 Two distinctions in goodness
- 10 The reasons we can share: An attack on the distinction between agent-relative and agent-neutral values
- 11 Skepticism about practical reason
- 12 Two arguments against lying
- 13 Personal identity and the unity of agency: A Kantian response to Parfit
- Bibliography
- Sources
- Other publications by the author
- Index
- Index of citations
Summary
To later generations, much of the moral philosophy of the twentieth century will look like a struggle to escape from utilitarianism. We seem to succeed in disproving one utilitarian doctrine, only to find ourselves caught in the grip of another. I believe that this is because a basic feature of the consequentialist outlook still pervades and distorts our thinking: the view that the business of morality is to bring something about. Too often, the rest of us have pitched our protests as if we were merely objecting to the utilitarian account of what the moral agent ought to bring about or how he ought to do it. Deontological considerations have been characterized as “side constraints” as if they were essentially restrictions on ways to realize ends. More importantly, moral philosophers have persistently assumed that the primal scene of morality is a scene in which someone does something to or for someone else. This is the same mistake that children make about another primal scene. The primal scene of morality, I will argue, is not one in which I do something to you or you do something to me, but one in which we do something together. The subject matter of morality is not what we should bring about, but how we should relate to one another. If only Rawls has succeeded in escaping utilitarianism, it is because only Rawls has fully grasped this point.
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- Creating the Kingdom of Ends , pp. 275 - 310Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1996
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