Clima

According to the hybrid view, suffering (and similar states) are intrinsically disvaluable, and pleasure (etc.) intrinsically valuable. This is the realist domain, and the value is taken as being derivative from the phenomenology. There are also obligations which obtain between

persons: these address solutions to co-ordination problems (broadly construed), and are mediated via moral principles – and so depend on each party being able to moderate their conduct accordingly. So understood, this ‘constructivist’ domain ranges only over rational, social animals. It seems plausible (although I do not wish to argue for this claim here) that rational animals must be language-using animals, and must also have a sense of self.

Certainly, creatures able to bind themselves by moral principles must be language-using; and one might think that in order to act intentionally, creatures must be able to conceive of their

aims and goals, and this requires having a sense of self. But this is peripheral to the thesis.

The core claim is that there are two sources of moral reasons: one which is shared by all sentient beings, and one which is specific to rational, social animals. But (of course) each of these admits of degrees: pain is not an all-or-nothing affair, and neither is rationality. As

regards sentience, the more vivid and intense the pain, the stronger the reason to avoid inflicting it. Less clear, however, is the question of rationality; it is not obvious that the constructivist account allows for degrees, despite the fact that the capacity for rationality (or sociability, or – presumably – language use) does come in degrees. The problem is that whether or not we have obligations towards other entities depends in part on whether or not they are rational, but the strength of these obligations is not a function of the degree to which they are rational (contrast the case where we ought to revere persons insofar as they are rational: this obligation does admit of degrees).4 To borrow a Kantian metaphor: whether or not we have constructivist obligations to others depends on whether they are members of the Kingdom of Ends. But membership of the Kingdom of Ends is an all-or-nothing affair.

We might, therefore, worry about our obligations towards dolphins, chimpanzees, and the like. But a central element of the constructivist account is that it applies only to those who can deliberate over, and are capable of moderating their conduct by, moral principles. So the real issue, here, is whether membership of this category comes in degrees, and, if so, whether that matters. Now the extent to which persons are able to deliberate over, and moderate their conduct by, moral principles does vary: some people engage in careful thought, and display self-control; others do so to a lesser extent. But the vast majority, at least, have the relevant capacity, even if their success in exercising it varies. Again, the problem can be refocussed: on the assumption that this capacity is not an all-or-nothing matter (is a capacity with fuzzy edges, so to speak), we might respond by claiming that, although some people have more of this capacity than others, the mere fact that they have this capacity grounds their membership within the constructivist sphere. It is clear that normal adults have the relevant capacity; it is equally clear that inanimate objects do not. If the constructivist account does not allow for degrees, then there must, at some point, exist a threshold. It is hard to see how to specify this threshold in a non-arbitrary fashion. Nonetheless, our inability to specify this threshold does not mean that the threshold does not exist; rather, our existing conceptual framework may be too coarse-grained to specify it (there may be vagueness at the conceptual level), or we may simply be unable to know where this threshold is (that is, this vagueness may amount to an epistemic difficulty). The specification problem by itself does not pose a serious threat to constructivism. It would become problematic if the number of borderline cases were large in comparison to the number of determinate cases; fortunately, this is not so. We are therefore left with a number of worrisome cases where the capacity is either barely present, or far from fully developed. This, however, need not be a problem, insofar as we can specify (non-

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C.f. Scruton 1996: 28-29. Scruton claims that membership of the moral community requires rationality, freedom, the desire to obtain co-operation, the willingness to co-operate, and the ability to understand and accept obligations.

arbitarily) a way of handling these cases. The most obvious way of doing this would be to simply extend the benefit of the doubt, and treat them as if they were full moral agents. Given the importance of the threshold in question, there is good reason to treat all borderline cases as above the threshold.

There are actual instances of such borderline cases: most obviously, children, and the severely mentally impaired. On the assumption that we have (realist) obligations towards each of these cases, what are we to make of their relation to the constructed part of ethics? Talk of their inclusion in the constructivist sphere needs, here, to be clarified. There are at least three issues: whether we have constructivist obligations towards them (for instance, whether we have obligations to respect their personal property); whether they have constructivist obligations towards us (for instance, whether they have obligations to respect our personal property); and what role they play in determining our moral obligations (whether they are to be counted in the assessment of constructivist moral principles).

If we assume (reasonably) that we do not have constructivist obligations towards animals, then it is natural to conclude that our having these obligations depends on the nature of the recipient. Since the constructed sphere counts, in the determination of its principles, only those who share the capacities for motivation, and standards of justification (as with the Rawlsian suggestion that the principles should be acceptable to all under certain conditions, or the Scanlonian that they should not be reasonably rejectable by anyone motivated to find principles which all could accept as the basis for an unforced, general agreement). We therefore only have constructivist obligations towards other moral agents (in contrast with the realist case, where no agency is required).

So we have obligations to, for instance, keep our promises to children precisely to the extent that they share the relevant concepts and capacities, and to the extent that they are able to be motivated to respect the promises which they have made to others. Similarly with the severely mentally impaired: to the extent that they are able to be active participants in the moral community, we have constructivist obligations towards them. Other obligations, such as those concerning property, are less clear-cut: although it is not unreasonable to think that we ought to respect children’s property rights over their toys (those gifted to them by other adults, in particular), we might also conceive of the child’s toys as being owned by the parent (or guardian, etc.), but given over for use by the child.5 Children’s bank accounts, also, are taken

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There is an independent legal issue: persons in certain situations may not be able to own property, or this right may be subject to waivers (as when, for instance, the police confiscate the property of

to be held in trust for them by their parents or guardians, with ownership transferring to the child on maturity: here the child acts as the beneficial owner of the money held in trust, while the legal owners, the parents or guardians, are under a duty to keep the account for the child’s (future) use. In the limit, extreme youth or mental impairment may result in an absence of moral agency; this would be problematic if all moral obligations depended on the moral agency of the recipient. But again, as with animals, our obligations may also derive from the recipient’s sentience.

There is an immediate problem with this suggestion, namely that there may be– indeed, are, and have been – cases where people lack the relevant concepts, but where we nonetheless think that we ought to respect their property. Suppose that a boatload of colonists arrives on an island where the indigenous population lacks an institution of property altogether: do the colonists not have an obligation to treat the indigenous population as though they had some title to the land? On the one hand, on the account being given, it does seem that the natives’ incapacity gives the colonists a pass to behave as they will. The colonists, then, may annex the land, put up walls and fences, and exclude the indigenous population from their habitat (although not from their means of subsistence, on account of the suffering which would ensue). This seems problematic. But, conversely, the natives are under no obligation to respect the colonists’ property: indeed, the colonists may have property rights over certain goods against other colonists, but not against the natives. So whilst the colonists may establish smallholdings without wrongdoing, their property rights over these smallholdings yield obligations for other colonists, but not for the natives.

However, property rights do not only entail obligations on behalf of others; they also bear on the issue of whether, for instance, we are entitled to forcibly exclude others from the use of certain goods. In the case of the colonists, the issue is not only whether the colonists can make certain demands on the natives, but whether they are entitled to displace them. The question deals with how we are to treat others, as well as how we are to go about engaging in processes of moral discourse and justification. We need to know what kind of behaviours could be justified – but that raises the question of what justification, in this context, amounts to.

There are four possibilities here. The first is that justification is a relative matter; the actions of the colonists may be justifiable-to-the-colonists but unjustifiable-to-the-natives. For various reasons, this possibility is unpalatable – but in any case, can be put to one side, since the relevant issue is whether or not the colonists’ behaviour is justifiable to the colonists (or,

criminals). But this is a distinct issue from the question of when we may take ourselves to have

closer to home, whether there is any difference between how we are to treat contracting and non-contracting parties). The second possibility is that the colonists’ property rights justify enforcing a monopoly on those goods only against other colonists. The third is that the colonists’ property rights justify enforcing a monopoly on those goods against all other parties, and the fourth is that no special justification obtains.6

To recap: the initial worry was that if property rights are dependent on some contingent feature of persons (e.g. their conceptual framework), then there will be cases where this feature is absent, and where those persons would consequently lack property rights.

Conversely, I suggested, there will be a range of obligations which those persons also lack – in the case under consideration, regarding others’ property rights. This lessens, but does not remove, the initial worry: if talk of property rights, and corresponding obligations, does not apply to the natives, then the colonists cannot assert these rights or obligations against the natives, and hence cannot claim the natives’ land for themselves. But there still seems to be something unpalatable about a situation where colonists displace natives from their traditional hunting grounds and relocate them to, for instance, a specially-designated reserve – even where that reserve contains sufficient resources to meet their needs.

The obvious route to capturing this unpalatability is via a constructed principle which enshrines the value of freedom, or autonomy; that is, one which stipulates that persons ought not to have their freedom restricted by others, absent some special justification. If the natives object to the way in which they are treated by the colonists, then there will be terms in which these objections are couched. Consequently, on the assumption that there is some shared conceptual framework, there will be a principle couched in these general terms which gives rise to obligations on behalf of both colonists and natives. There are two concerns with this suggestion, which run parallel to the previous discussion: firstly, this assumption stands in need of justification; secondly, even without this shared framework, we might think that we would nonetheless have special obligations towards persons, obligations which the

constructivist account hopes to capture.

On the question of shared conceptual schemes, one could take a Davidsonian line, and claim that interpreting creatures as persons requires interpreting them as thinking, which in turn requires interpreting them as using language, which, in turn, requires supposing the possibility

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There is a notional fifth possibility, which is that some special justification obtains but is trumped by an overarching principle. But I take it that this is equivalent to the fourth possibility – that no special justification obtains.

of understanding – and therefore translating – their language.7 The conclusion of Davidson’s argument is that all conceptual schemes are, in principle, intertranslatable: there is no such thing as a radically different ‘alternative’ conceptual scheme. Even if the argument from treating creatures as thinking beings to supposing the translatability of their conceptual scheme goes through, however, this would only establish that we are constrained to suppose that there are no alternative conceptual schemes.

However, it is far from clear that Davidson’s argument succeeds even in this respect. There are at least two dubious premises in the argument: the first being that thought requires language, and the second being that interpreting a set of noises as language presupposes that this language is translatable into our own. Each is, I think, too strong. If thought requires language, then what are we to make of creatures who appear to deliberate about some problem before finding a (possibly creative) solution? Crows, for instance, have been observed forming pieces of wire into hooks in order to retrieve food from cylindrical containers.8 This is not a piece of behaviour which occurs in the wild (there is, after all, a shortage of wire in their natural environment), and nor need it be taught. Prior to extracting the food, however, there is a period where the crow devotes its attention to the cylinder and to the wire. If crows, as non-linguistic animals, cannot think, then we are denied the resources to describe what is happening when the crow inspects the cylinder and wire, or to explain how the crow manages to generate a solution to the problem - unless, of course, we maintain that the process of generating a solution does not require thought. But that seems objectionably ad hoc.

Davidson does have reason for thinking that taking someone to be a language-user

presupposes that we take their language to be (potentially) translatable into our own: to treat an utterance as linguistic is to treat it as meaningful, and to treat it as meaningful is to suppose that there is a meaning which can be attributed to it - and therefore that it is translatable into our own language. If we don’t presuppose translatability, then we have no grounds for taking the noises which others generate to be part of a language. There is here the same difficulty as before: there is a difference between being compelled to assume that p, and having some proof that p. Furthermore, I think that Davidson is wrong to say that translatability is a necessary presupposition of thinking of some practice as a language. There are other reasons open to us for thinking of something as a language - for instance, the observation that a practice consists of systematic utterances, appears to be used for co-ordinating action or transmitting information, and so on.

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Davidson 1974.

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If we suppose that there can exist languages which are entirely untranslatable into our own, or which lack cognate terms for central elements of our moral discourse (rights, obligations, etc.), then there is the possibility of agents who are rational, social creatures, much like ourselves, but incapable of sharing with us a conception of the moral life. This is problematic if we think that we would nonetheless have duties or obligations towards such creatures above and beyond those of refraining from harming (etc). It isn’t clear that such a supposition would be warranted, since rationality requires being able to respond to (theoretical or practical) reasons. Since to think of a creature as rational is to think of it as responsive to universal considerations of a certain kind, there is an element to all rational mentality which is

common, and hence shareable. But again, the worry with such cases is that we would (on the theory being offered) have no constructed obligations towards such creatures. Were

constructed obligations to constitute the whole of morality, this would be deeply problematic: but it seems entirely plausible to suppose that, were we to encounter creatures who were alien to us in this respect (i.e. unable to play an active part in our moral community), we would have no obligations towards them beyond those which require us to avoid harming them unnecessarily.

Similarly with the case of the colonists and the natives: the realist sphere will also significantly restrict the extent to which the colonists may use force in displacing the

colonists; absent some special justification, the disvalue of inflicting harm on others provides reason not to engage in the relevant course of action (importantly, the required justification is justification to the colonists: what is at issue is whether any reason can be given to the colonists to moderate their behaviour). But those considerations will be too weak: firstly, I take it that we are entitled to use force to prevent animals from interfering with our

smallholdings (for instance), and the valence of pain and pleasure holds equally for animals as for humans; secondly, there are methods of coercion which do not involve causing pain, but which obviate agency nonetheless. As suggested earlier, therefore, we should assume that the obligations to refrain from displacing others derive from more general principles to respect individual autonomy and interests, and that these in turn are a function of the extent to which

In document Centro de Difusión e Interpretación Cultural para el Visitante en el Valle de Chilina Mirador de Carmen Alto Arequipa (página 100-109)