The most influential work in ethics by an American philosopher in the second half of the 20th century was A Theory of Justice (1971), by John Rawls (1921–2002). Although the book was primarily concerned with normative ethics (and so will be discussed in the next section), it made significant contributions to metaethics as well. To argue for his principles of justice, Rawls revived the 17th-century idea of a hypothetical social contract. In Rawls’s thought experiment, the contracting parties are placed behind a “veil of ignorance” that prevents them from knowing any particular details about their origins and attributes, including their wealth, their sex, their race, their age, their intelligence, and their talents or skills. Thus, the parties would be discouraged from choosing principles that favour one group at the expense of others, because none of the parties would know whether he belongs to one (or more) of the groups whose interests would thus be neglected. As with the naturalists, the practical effect of this requirement was to make Rawls’s principles of justice in many ways similar to those that are universalizable in Hare’s sense. As a result of Rawls’s work, social contract theory, which had largely been neglected since the time of Rousseau, enjoyed a renewed popularity in ethics in the late 20th century.
John Rawls.Harvard University News office
Another aspect of Rawls’s work that was significant in metaethics was his so-called method of “reflective equilibrium”: the idea that the test of a sound ethical theory is that it provide a plausible account of the moral judgments that rational people would endorse upon serious reflection—or at least that it represent the best “balance” between plausibility on the one hand and moral judgments accounted for on the other. In A Theory of Justice, Rawls used this method to justify revising the original model of the social contract until it produced results that were not too much at odds with ordinary ideas of justice. To his critics, this move signaled the reemergence of a conservative form of intuitionism, for it meant that the acceptability of an ethical theory would be determined in large part by its agreement with conventional moral opinion.
Rawls addressed the metaethical implications of the method of reflective equilibrium in a later work, Political Liberalism (1993), describing it there as “Kantian constructivism.” According to Rawls, whereas intuitionism seeks rational insight into true ethical principles, constructivism searches for “reasonable grounds of reaching agreement rooted in our conception of ourselves and in our relation to society.” Philosophers do not discover moral truth, they construct it from concepts that they (and other members of society) already have. Because different peoples may conceive of themselves in different ways or be related to their societies in different ways, it is possible for them to reach different reflective equilibria and, on that basis, to construct different principles of justice. In that case, it could not be said that one set of principles is true and another false. The most that could be claimed for the particular principles defended by Rawls is that they offer reasonable grounds of agreement for people in a society such as the one he inhabited. Irrealist views: projectivism and expressivism
The English philosopher Simon Blackburn agreed with Mackie that the realist presuppositions of ordinary moral language are mistaken. In Spreading the Word (1985) and Ruling Passions (2000), he argued that moral judgments are not statements of fact about the world but a product of one’s moral attitudes. Unlike the emotivists, however, he did not regard moral judgments as mere expressions of approval or disapproval. Rather, they are “projections” of people’s attitudes onto the world, which are then treated as though they correspond to objective facts. Although moral judgments are thus not about anything really “out there,” Blackburn saw no reason to shatter the illusion that they are, for this misconception facilitates the kind of serious, reflective discussion that people need to have about their moral attitudes. (Of course, if Blackburn is correct, then the “fact” that it is good for people to engage in serious, reflective discussion about their moral attitudes is itself merely a projection of Blackburn’s attitudes.) Thus, morality, according to Blackburn, is something that can and should be treated as if it were objective, even though it is not.
The American philosopher Alan Gibbard took a similar view of ethics in his Wise Choices, Apt Feelings (1990). Although he was an expressivist, holding that moral judgments are expressions of attitude rather than statements of fact, he suggested that thinking of morality as a realm of objective fact helps people to coordinate their behaviour with other members of their group. Because this kind of coordination has survival value, humans have naturally developed the tendency to think and talk of morality in “objectivist” terms. Like Blackburn, Gibbard thought that there is no need to change this way of thinking and talking—and indeed that it would be harmful to do so.
In his last work, Sorting Out Ethics (1997), Hare suggested that the debate between realism and irrealism is less important than the question of whether there is such a thing as moral reasoning, about which one can say that it is done well or badly. Indeed, in their answers to this key question, some forms of realism differ more from each other than they do from certain forms of irrealism. But the most important issue, Hare contended, is not so much whether moral judgments express something real about the world but whether people can reason together to decide what they ought to do. Ethics and reasons for action
As noted above, Hume argued that moral judgments cannot be the product of reason alone, because they are characterized by a natural inclination to action that reason by itself cannot provide. The view that moral judgments naturally impel one to act in accordance with them—that they are themselves a “motivating reason” for acting—was adopted in the early 20th century by intuitionists such as H.A. Prichard, who insisted that anyone who understood and accepted a moral judgment would naturally be inclined to act on it. This view was opposed by those who believed that the motivation to act on a moral judgment requires an additional, extraneous desire that such action would directly or indirectly satisfy. According to this opposing position, even if a person understands and accepts that a certain course of action is the right thing to do, he may choose to do otherwise if he lacks the necessary desire to do what he believes is right. In the late 20th century, interest in this question enjoyed a revival among moral philosophers, and the two opposing views came to be known as “internalism” and “externalism,” respectively.
The ancient debate concerning the compatibility or conflict between morality and self-interest can be seen as a dispute within the externalist camp. Among those who held that an additional desire, external to the moral judgment, is necessary to motivate moral action, there were those who believed that acting morally is in the interest of the individual in the long run and thus that one who acts morally out of self-interest will eventually do well by this standard; others argued that he will inevitably do poorly. Beginning in the second half of the 20th century, this debate was often conducted in terms of the question “Why should I be moral?”
For Hare, the question “Why should I be moral?” amounted to asking why one should act only on those judgments that one is prepared to universalize. His answer was that it may not be possible to give such a reason to a person who does not already want to behave morally. At the same time, Hare believed that the reason why children should be brought up to be moral is that the habits of moral behaviour they thereby acquire make it more likely that they will be happy.