In this chapter, we will continue for a moment our exploration of tethering by considering two more thinkers who are less reticent about identifying their positions with more comprehensive frameworks— namely, Gerald Gaus and Steven Darwall. We should bear in mind that all the theories in both this and the preceding chapter share the tendency to employ the legislative model of ethics. By combating these positions, we hope we are contributing to our main task of liberating ethics from that particular comprehensive context.

Gaus

While we have complained in Chapter 3 of some authors being either unwilling to acknowledge, or in denial about, that to which their doctrines are tethered, Gerald Gaus is not the least bit reticent to tie his views to basic philosophical positions. In his monumental and sophisticated work, The Order of Public Reason, Gaus explicitly distances himself from the very roots of the type of position we would defend. His work is about what he calls “social morality,” which involves “rules that we are required to act upon and which provide the basis for authoritative demands of one person addressed to another.” Or further, Gaus understands social morality as “the set of social-moral rules that require or prohibit actions, and so ground moral imperatives that we direct to each to engage in, or refrain from, certain lines of conduct.” The chief and defining problem for social morality is: “How can free and equal moral persons claim authority to prescribe to other free and equal moral persons?” (We shall call this the central concern of social morality.) Hence, social morality is, for Gaus, imperatival in nature, and not concerned with what is good or desirable for a human being—that is, with what is attractive. Its core notions—right, wrong, duty, and obligation—are seen as independent of what is attractive; and these notions Gaus takes to be definitive of Modernity's approach to morality, because its ultimate concern is with what actions and forbearances we can justifiably owe to, or exact from, strangers.