Morosidad de pago

any complicated issues. The whole point is to fix morality to a domain that is unproblematic, over which there will be no problem of agreement. And supervenience is a kind of structural way of relating the moral judgments to non-moral judgments that are relatively speaking unproblematic. Now because morality is just a system for guiding society in a good way, and its function is to be argumentatively persuasive there has to be the principle of universalizability – or so they claim. So the status of universalizability there is a kind of side constraint on what morality is.

In effect we have two sources of the universalizability principle. One is just a principle of consistency, which follows from a requirement of truth. You have truth as an antecedent commitment and you can’t have truth without consistency. The alternative view is that there is no truth but the point of morality is to be something that people can address in argument. The important thing to keep in mind is that, as we can see, there are various reasons why one might want to believe in consistency.

In the same way there are various reasons why one might believe in supervenience, and the different kinds of supervenience one can subscribe to. One can accept all such things as consistency, supervenience, and rationality, but still disagree with universalizability in the worrying form. The question then is, how is this possible?

6. Legitimate Morally Relevant Differences Between People:

One thing that we are doing in this chapter is “clearing the terrain”, in terms of carefully distinguishing acceptance of consistency and acceptance of supervenience from any other commitments involved in the universalizability thesis as I understand it. That is important because such a distinction remains blurred throughout the tradition of

this debate. Let’s look at the following formulation of the universalizability thesis by Sidgwick:

“… whatever action any of us judges to be right for himself, he implicitly judges to be right for all similar persons in similar circumstances. Or, as we may otherwise put it, if a kind of conduct that is right (or wrong) for me is not right (or wrong) for someone else, it must be on the ground of some difference between the two cases, other than the fact that I and he are different persons”

(Sidgwick 1962, p. 379).

In the first claim of the quote above Sidgwick basically introduces the principle of consistency by presenting things in terms of “all similar persons in similar circumstances”. Whereas in the second claim he seems to introduce the worrying form of universalizability, by stating that the difference between two cases must be something “other than the fact that I and he are different persons”. There are two importantly distinct possible senses for the second claim made by Sidgwick. One is highly problematic in that it contradicts the first claim with the claim – insisted by universalizability – that who you are doesn’t matter. The second sense is unproblematic and helpful in that it clarifies the point that though one may acknowledge that different people may be demanded to act in different ways in relevantly similar circumstances, there needs to be substance to the differences on people that ground their different demands. In Mackie’s words:

“It may be that what is wrong for you is right for me; but if it is, this can only be because there is some qualitative difference, some difference of kind, between you and me or between your situation and mine which can be held to be, in the actual context, morally relevant. What is wrong for you cannot be right for me merely because I am I and you are you, or because I am John Mackie and you are, say, Richard Roe” (Mackie 1977, pp. 83-84).

On the quote above we can see once more how what the universalizability theorist is really concerned with is consistency. We can also see that Mackie is ready to accept that “what is wrong for you is right for me”, as long as what grounds the difference is “some

qualitative difference, some difference in kind, between you and me”.

Otherwise it mustn’t count as a morally relevant difference. But there is something interesting going on here. For Mackie (as for most of the other universalizability theorists) one is making the same point when one says that ‘similar people in similar circumstances must be judged similarly’, and when one says that ‘in similar circumstances everybody ought to do the same thing’.

While keeping that in mind let’s ask ourselves, why in the end Mackie says that ‘What is wrong for you cannot be right for me merely because I am I and you are you, or because I am John Mackie and you are, say, Richard Roe’? What the rhetoric of that is suggesting is that if it depends on who you are that is like depending on what your name is.

So effectively the universalizability theorist has a kind of minimal conception of personal identity. Their view is that effectively a person is just a kind of blank in a situation. They don’t think of a person as something with a whole character being what is essential to being them.

Mackie imagines that none of the relevant differences between situations attach to the person. So he has a minimal conception of what it is to be that person. It is just to be the bearer of that name. Basically Mackie is saying that if we were to take into consideration the differences between people, it can’t be merely because I am André Almeida and you are Richard Roe. But since there is nothing else that is essential to people, then differences between people don’t matter in moral terms.

In the following quote Sidgwick makes a point quite similar to the one made by Mackie:

“… no one will deny that there may be differences in the circumstances — and even in the natures — of two individuals, A and B, which would make it wrong for A to treat B in the way in which it is right for B to treat A. In short the self-evident principle [the Golden Rule²] strictly stated must take some such

2 Sidgwick’s formulation of the Golden Rule is: ‘Do to others as you would have them do to you’.

negative form as this; ‘it cannot be right for A to treat B in a manner in which it would be wrong for B to treat A, merely on the ground that they are two different individuals, and without there being any difference between the natures or circumstances of the two which can be stated as a reasonable ground for difference of treatment… ” (Sidgwick 1962, p. 380)

Here Sidgwick not only acknowledges that differences on the natures of individuals may be morally relevant, but goes even further in saying that “no one will deny” that. But for him things like “they are two different individuals” don’t count as a morally relevant difference.

Sidgwick basically treats the requirement of consistency and the universalizability thesis as if they were the same. And it appears that this happens because like Mackie he has a minimal conception of personal identity.

As we have seen, for authors like Hare, Mackie and Sidgwick consistency in morality doesn’t follow from a requirement of truth. And they want to use universalizability as a way of enforcing it:

“… an agent whose judgments are universalizable will be morally consistent, in the sense that she will judge her own actions by the same standards she applies to others. Such an agent will not make an exception of herself by allowing herself to break a rule she regards as binding for others…” (Jollimore 2011).

What the universalizability theorist seems not to see is that though they acknowledge that all that consistency requires is that similar cases be judged similarly (what includes the thought that certain substantive features of the agent are in fact morally relevant) they also end up insisting that taking the agent into account is a matter of ‘making an exception in one’s own case’ without noticing that this involves a substantial extra commitment. And they arrive at this result out of their

“… concern about the evils of arbitrariness” (Kramer 2005, pp. 173-4).

What is puzzling is that though the universalizability theorist holds universalizability in order to have consistency and ‘avoid the evils of

arbitrariness’, if one holds a position such as Agent Particularism one comes to see that there is no real problem here. There is not a problem of lack of consistency, there is no failure of supervenience, there is no lack of objectivity, or anything like that. All those things apply perfectly well while holding that it does matter who you are.

Some philosophers have already hinted at the point that there is no real problem at stake, but in a different sense. In Alasdair Macintyre’s words:

Where there is real moral perplexity it is often in a highly complex situation, and sometimes a situation so complex that the question “What ought I to do?”

can only be translated trivially into “What ought someone like me to do in this kind of situation?” (…) where a situation is too complex, phrases like

“someone like me” or “this kind of situation” become vacuous. For I am the only person sufficiently “like me” to be morally relevant and no situation could be sufficiently like “this kind of situation” without being precisely this situation”

(Macintyre 1957, p. 335).

Ironically universalizability theorists such as Mackie went on that same road, “… in practice no two cases will ever be exactly alike” (Mackie 1977, p. 83). And the same can be said for Hare:

“Since we cannot know everything about another actual person’s concrete situation (including how it strikes him, which may make all the difference), it is nearly always presumptuous to suppose that another person’s situation is exactly like one we have ourselves been in, or even like it in the relevant particulars” (Hare 1963, p. 49).