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The Meaning of “Ought”
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Matthew Chrisman
Practical Knowledge
Selected Essays
Kieran Setiya
Articulating the Moral Community Toward a Constructive Ethical Pragmatism
Henry S. Richardson
ARTICULATING THE MORAL COMMUNITY
Toward a Constructive Ethical Pragmatism
Henry S. Richardson
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Richardson, Henry S., 1955– author.
Title: Articulating the Moral Community : Toward a Constructive Ethical Pragmatism / Henry S. Richardson.
Description: New York : Oxford University Press, 2018.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018001345 | ISBN 9780190247744 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780190247768 (online component) | ISBN 9780190884635 (e book)
Subjects: LCSH: Applied ethics. | Ethics, Modern. | Pragmatism. | Communities. Classification: LCC BJ1031 .R53 2018 | DDC 171/.7—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018001345
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For Mary—my articulate muse
PART ONE: Preliminaries
I.1. The Universality of the Moral Community 4
I.2. Illustrative Examples of Decentered Moral Innovation 9
I.3. The Possibility of Indeterminacy-Reducing Moral Progress 13
I.4. Basic Conditions on How New Moral Norms Can Be Socially Introduced 21
1.3. The Flexibility of Constructive Ethical Pragmatism 48
1.4. Constructive Ethical Pragmatism Will Guide Deliberation Better 56
PART TWO: The Moral Authority of the Moral Community
2. The Idea of the Moral Community 63
2.1. Ways of Modeling the Moral Community 64
2.2. Kant on the Ethical Community 69
2.3. Norms to Structure the Moral Community 73
2.4. The Unity of the Universal Moral Community: Thompson’s Challenge 75
3. Authoritative Input: Dyadic Duties and Rights 85
3.1. The Specificatory Theory of Dyadic Moral Rights and Duties 85
3.2. Rival Theories of Dyadic Rights and Duties? 89
3.3. Addressing Human Rights 93
3.4. Generalizing the Account to Include Transactional Duties and Private Rights 98
3.5. From Specific Address to the Specificatory Theory of Dyadic Rights and Duties 105
3.6. Objections to the Specificatory Theory 111
3.7. The Specificatory Theory Compared to the Will Theory 114
3.8. The Input Stage 115
4. The Unity of the Moral Community 118
4.1. Bringing Intelligent Beings Together Under One System of Norms 120
4.2. Effacing the Boundaries Between Distinct Practices 121
4.3. Knitting Together Morally Disagreeing Communities 124
4.4. Looking Beyond Individual Human Nature to the Social 126
4.5. Beyond Interacting Intelligent Beings 129
4.6. How All Persons Can Be United in a Single Moral Community 133
5. Introducing New Moral Norms 135
5.1. Selection and Convergence 137
5.2. The Very Idea of Moral Authority 142
5.3. The Moral Community’s Authority Respects Autonomy 145
5.4. New Moral Norms 149
5.5. New Objective Norms 152
6. Working It Out together: Joint Moral Reasoning 154
6.1. Why a New Account of Jointly Embodied Moral Reasoning Is Needed 157
6.2. Generality, Inclusiveness, and Deference to Authority 165
6.3. A Model of Embodied, Joint Moral Reasoning 169
7. Ratification of New Moral Norms 176
7.1. Mutual Recognition of Acceptance 177
7.2. The Problem of Future Persons 184
7.3. Backward-Looking Awareness 187
7.4. Reasoning in the Ratification Stage 189
7.5. Ratification: Summing up 191
PART THREE: Defending and Extending the Account
8. Reasons, Indeterminacy, and Compromise 195
8.1. The Appeal of the Set of First- Order Reasons 196
8.2. The Moral-Psychological Objection 201
8.3. Reasoning in Terms of Ends 205
8.4. The Role of Commitments 211
8.5. Compromise: Working Things Out Together 212
8.6. Reasons and Reasoning 216
9. Noneternal Moral Principles 218
9.1. Cudworth’s Essentialist Argument for Moral Rationalism 219
9.2. Cohen’s Argument Against Fact-Sensitive Principles 226
9.3. Working with Moral Principles in Medias Res 235
10. Objectivity and Path-Dependence 238
10.1. A Working Conception of Moral Objectivity 241
10.2. Objectivity in the Introduction of New Moral Norms 245
10.3. Path-Dependence 247
10.4. Retrospective Moral Judgment 250
10.5. Taint by Actual Injustice and Corruption 256 Conclusion 260
C.1. Results of the Argument 260
C.2. Implications for Constructive Ethical Pragmatism 264
C.3. Broadening the Argument’s Reach 267
C.4. The Significance of These Conclusions 271
PREFACE
This project’s origin traces to a question that my graduate-school friend Andreas Føllesdal asked me three decades ago. I was then in the midst of working on an article about the idea of specifying norms, thought of as an alternative way of bringing moral norms to bear on situations of choice—one more flexible than deductively subsuming cases under rules and more readily made explicit than intuitively balancing opposing considerations.1 Andreas told me that this alternative model sounded attractive, but he had a question: Who gets to specify moral norms?
This book provides a long-delayed answer to this insightful question: we do, as equal members of the moral community, which embraces all persons. More specifically, we do, as individuals to whom responsibilities for promoting or protecting certain rights of others are specifically addressed. Once I had come to this conclusion, however, I saw that answering Andreas’s question opened up a broader and more exciting philosophical possibility. Supposing that concrete opportunities arise for authorizedly specifying moral norms for the purposes of resolving particular practical difficulties raised intriguing further questions about what would become of those efforts. Would they have any uptake? And if they did get uptake, what might that mean for the content of morality?
As I pursued these further questions, I came to see how these particular exercises of special authority could constitute the moral community’s initial steps toward adopting new, objectively valid moral norms. These individual or local efforts represent an appropriately decentered initial source of the moral community’s moral authority. In this promising idea, I thought I saw the prospect of reconciling the objectivity of morality with the possibility that we can have a hand in shaping it over the contingent course of history. You will have to judge whether I have succeeded in this aim.
1. This work appeared a few years later (Richardson 1990b).
Attempting to make good on the promise of these ideas required clarifying the concept of the moral community and nailing down why it is that those specially addressed with responsibilities regarding certain others’ rights have the moral power that Andreas was curious about—the moral power to specify rights and duties.2 Dealing with these issues brought me straight to the heart of contemporary philosophical debates about the nature of dyadic rights and duties—rights against certain others and duties owed to certain others. That material makes for some difficult going at the start of Part II, but it is the key not only to answering Andreas’s initial question, but also to understanding the nature of the moral community and grasping the possibility of its exercising its moral authority to establish new moral norms.
Years after Andreas asked me his question, and yet long before I began to attempt to answer it, I had written a promissory note extoling the virtues of an undiscussed and largely unexplored type of moral theory, one that I called “constructive ethical pragmatism” (Richardson 1995). This type of theory—as I will explain again in the body of this book, reviving a distinction that has come to be questioned—rejects the idea that moral theory should treat either the right or the good as independently fixed, whether by taking right actions to be determined solely on the basis of some function of what is better or worse, or by taking it that which actions are right can be determined wholly independently of the good. Rather, I suggested, constructive ethical pragmatism (CEP) treats the right and the good as each being revisable in terms of the other. Yet here we encounter Andreas’s question on a larger scale: Who gets to revise the right and the good? This book does not develop or fully defend CEP; but it does explain the attractions of that kind of moral theory in order to further motivate the book’s pursuit of an account of the moral community’s moral authority. As a whole, we might say, the book offers the crucial part of the groundwork of the metaphysics of CEP. It does so by explaining how we, as the members of the moral community, can revise principles of right by further specifying them.
The philosophical value of this book is revealed only once all the elements of its account of moral authority are in place. This fact has made its bits and pieces, inapt for journal publication. I hope that, nonetheless, even if its overall theses do not convince, its discussions along the way of the moral community and its unity, dyadic rights and duties, joint moral reasoning, moral indeterminacy, moral psychology, moral justification, and moral objectivity will each be found of interest, independently of their contribution to the overall enterprise.
2. In paradigmatic cases, as I will explain, these duty-holders will exercise this power jointly with the corresponding right-holders.
Having had little benefit of responses to published trial balloons, I am especially indebted to the many people who have posed questions and offered comments and suggestions along the way—beginning, of course, with Andreas Føllesdal, and including, I am afraid, many whose contributions I have failed adequately to record. I begin by acknowledging my deep debt to three extraordinary teachers whose influence still reverberates here: Hilary Putnam, who first suggested that I take a serious look at Dewey’s pragmatism; Martha C. Nussbaum, who taught me Aristotle and whose reading of his moral psychology shapes my approach to it; and John Rawls, with whom I discussed how the distinction between the right and the good might map onto Aristotle’s ethics, and whose Theory of Justice is a model of how to specify norms by weaving the right and the good coherently together.
Support for two research leaves made the writing of this book possible. In 2008–2009, I was the grateful recipient of a Georgetown University Senior Faculty Research Fellowship, a Fellowship for University Teachers from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and a two-month visiting fellowship at the Philosophy Program of the Research School for Social Sciences in Canberra, Australia, which was a stimulating yet relaxing environment for exchanging ideas about moral philosophy and evolution of social norms. The manuscript took roughly its current form during a sabbatical year in 2012–2013, which I blissfully spent as a Laurence S. Rockefeller Visiting Fellow at the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University.
Back at Georgetown University in the two succeeding years, I then benefited from the extraordinary support of Georgetown’s Normative Orders Collaborative, an initiative of the university’s president, John J. DeGioia, himself a philosopher with a deep interest in moral progress. In 2014–2015, this initiative sponsored a yearlong Moral Innovation Seminar that I led with my colleague Terry Pinkard, and at which we hosted a world-class string of visiting presenters. The visitors whose presentations most influenced this book were Kyla Ebels-Duggan, Rainer Forst, Barbara Herman, Rahel Jaeggi, Anja Karnein, Charles Larmore, Christoph Menke, and Robert Pippin. I am also thankful to the regular attenders of this seminar for their comments on my own presentations, especially Michael Barnes, Gabriel Broughton, Clark Donley, Hailey Huget, Matthew Shields, Daniel Threet, Molly Wilder, and my cocaptain, Terry.
In the preceding semester (spring 2014), with the idea of preparing graduate students for the coming Moral Innovation Seminar, I taught a graduate seminar on authority, in which I assigned the book manuscript as it then stood. This gave me my first feedback on a reasonably complete version of the project. I am very grateful to all the graduate students who participated, from whom I learned a lot.
As a kind of capstone to this seminar, at the end of that semester, the Normative Orders Collaborative sponsored a daylong workshop on the book manuscript. It was daunting and thrilling to have challenging and varied criticism from three brilliant commentators: Michael Smith, Talbot Brewer, and Margaret O. Little. I was also proud of, and grateful for comments from, my Georgetown colleagues and students (past and present) in attendance, especially Mark Lance, Judith Lichtenberg, James Mattingly, Matthew McAdam, Mark Murphy, and Travis Rieder.
The early version of the complete manuscript that formed the basis of this workshop also went to Oxford University Press. It came back to me with three fantastically useful sets of comments—one of which, I now know, was from Anthony Laden. Roughly at the same time, I received an even more detailed and probing set of comments on almost the whole manuscript from Gabriel Broughton, who at the time was about to begin studying toward a PhD in philosophy. This wealth of constructive and insightful criticism led eventually to deep revisions in the book’s order and argument.
My first attempt to put forward the ideas developed here had come years before, in 2004, at the First Annual Metaethics Workshop at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and the following year at the Workshop on Rights at Tulane University’s Murphy Institute, at the University of Amsterdam, and at the Fourth Moral Philosophy Conference in Granada, Spain. I am thankful for valuable input on all these occasions, as well as at subsequent presentations at Georgia State University, the 75th anniversary conference of Theoria in Stockholm, the OSU-Maribor-Rijeka Conference in Dubrovnik, and the University of Delaware.
I am particularly grateful to Charles Beitz, Rüdiger Bittner, Michael Bratman, John Broome, David Copp, Stephen Darwall, Govert den Hartogh, James Dreier, William Edmundson, Gerald Gaus, Joshua Gert, James Griffin, Richard Hanley, Ulrike Heuer, Donald Hubin, Nadeem Hussain, Eric Mack, Marina Oshana, Philip Pettit, Wlødek Rabinowicz, George Rainbolt, Jonathan Riley, Connie Rosati, Gideon Rosen, Daniel Rothstein, Geoffrey Sayre-McCord, John Skorupski, Michael Smith, Horacio Spector, Gopal Sreenivasan, Hillel Steiner, Bruno Verbeek, and Leif Wenar. Others who offered valuable advice during this early stage included Christian Barry, Geoffrey Brennan, Lina Ericksson, Robert Goodin, John F. Horty, Steven T. Kuhn, Rebecca Kukla, Mark Lance, Daniel Levine, Margaret O. Little, Mark C. Murphy, Thomas Pogge, and Nicholas Southwood.
As I proceeded, I got invaluable help with various developing parts of the book. I presented an earlier version of the material now spread out over chapters 2– 4 at a workshop on rights in 2012 at Stirling University, the fellows’ seminar at the
University Center for Human Values at Princeton, the Social Norms Conference at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, the Philosophy Department of the University of Vienna, and the Eighth Moral Philosophy Conference in Rungsted, Denmark. At these occasions and others in 2012–2013, I was lucky to get valuable advice and criticism from Elizabeth Ashford, John Broome, Tom Campbell, Sophie- Grace Chappell, Alexandra Couto, Adam Cureton, Jonathan Dancy, Stephen Darwall, Yuval Elon, Kimberly Kessler Ferzan, Jon Garthoff, Stefan Gosepath, Christoph Hanisch, Alon Harel, Elizabeth Harman, Tim Hayward, Christopher Heathwood, Marcus Hedahl, Bennett Helm, Tom Hill, Brad Hooker, Simon Hope, Peter Jones, Frances Kamm, Felix Koch, Douglas McLean, John Nolan, Marina Oshana, Mike Otsuka, Allen Patten, Herlinde Pauer-Studer, Philip Pettit, Wlødek Rabinowicz, Tom Sinclair, Hillel Steiner, Jesse Tumulty, Alex Voorhoeve, and Susan R. Wolf. I am particularly grateful to Rowan Cruft and Leif Wenar for continued (and, I hope, ongoing) interchange about the nature of dyadic rights and duties—a topic that they have each well illuminated and that I approach from a heterodox angle.
Some other chapters have also benefited from focused comments. I recently received invaluable advice and objections from James Dreier, Douglas Portmore, and S. Andrew Schroeder on my discussion of consequentializing in chapter 1. The framing of my discussion of moral psychology in chapter 8 owes a lot to a long lunchtime conversation with Michael Smith in 2012. The core argument of chapter 9 was tried out at a workshop on moral rationalism that Smith organized at Princeton that same year, where particularly telling points were made by Elizabeth Harman, Tristram MacPherson, Mike Otsuka, Philip Pettit, and R. Jay Wallace. And early thoughts toward chapter 10 received valuable comments in 2008 at the Philosophy Department Faculties Seminar at the Australian National University in Canberra, and at the University of Zurich as well.
Much more recently, I have gladly garnered useful input on this book’s arguments from comments on a paper still in progress on law and morality: at Stefan Gosepath’s Kolloquium at the Free University, Berlin, including from Valentin Beck, Tamara Jugov, Felix Koch, Ralph Wedgwood, and Prof. Gosepath; at Rainer Forst’s Kolloquium at the Goethe University, Frankfurt, including from Gabriele Badano, William Barbieri, Eva Buddeberg, Dorothea Gädeke, Klaus Günther, and Prof. Forst; and at another workshop on rights at Stirling University, including from Rowan Cruft, Pavlos Eleftheriadis, and Carol Gould.
During the last nine years of working on this book, I have had the privilege of being the editor of Ethics. This responsibility has perhaps slowed down my writing, but it has more than compensated for that by immeasurably broadening
and deepening my acquaintance with the amazing range of exciting and creative work being done in contemporary philosophical ethics.
None of this work would have been possible without the support of my beloved wife, Mary Challinor, from whom I have learned most of what I know about working things out together with someone, and, even more rewardingly, about the full depth and the potential joys of commitment.
ARTICULATING THE MORAL COMMUNITY
INTRODUCTION
In response to our changing circumstances, our moral norms appear to be constantly adapting. They stretch and ramify as we confront the possibility of human genetic enhancements, debate just ways of allocating the burdens of climate change, attempt to articulate moral constraints on the conduct of counterinsurgency warfare, and consider other newly prominent moral issues. On a suspiciously selfcongratulatory reading of what is happening, our moral views are becoming ever more discerning. A rather more sober view has it that the various adaptations are simply conventional supplements to whatever skeleton of universal, objective morality there may be. While this sober understanding is the more credible of these two, its free-handed appeal to convention threatens to undercut its supposed recognition of a skeletal moral objectivity. There is a third possibility, though, which is that at least some of the novel moral adaptations involve the objectively authorized exercise of moral authority—changes that build on morality’s objective core and adding to morality’s objective content.
Developing this third possibility is this book’s direct aim and its explicit focus. It sets out an account of how we, working together in certain ways as members of the moral community, can fill out the objective content of morality by authorizedly narrowing its zones of indeterminacy. The book also has a secondary aim. Indirectly, it seeks to defend a viable alternative to consequentialist moral theories: one that I sketched some time ago, calling it “constructive ethical pragmatism” (Richardson 1995). Uniting the book’s direct and indirect aims is its effort to argue that our everyday, ongoing moral practices, imperfect though they are, provide an adequate basis for moral reflection that enables us intelligently and conscientiously to work out what we morally ought to do.1 In practice, we have little choice but to begin our
1. I am indebted to an anonymous reviewer for this formulation.
moral reflections in the middle of things. Both the book’s central, direct effort to develop an account of our moral authority as members of the moral community and its indirect defense of constructive ethical pragmatism (CEP) help explain how moral reflection beginning in medias res can generate objective moral conclusions, including some having a general constitutive effect on what is right and wrong.
It is only as members of the moral community that we can exercise moral authority of this kind. The distinctive, defining element of the idea of the moral community is that it is the community of all persons. The reason that this feature is distinctive to morality is that moral norms, unlike the norms of prudence, law, or statecraft, purport to be valid for, and to bind, all persons.2 Starting from a recognition of this fact, it is possible to develop two divergent interpretations of the idea of morality.3 On a purely descriptive interpretation, the morality of a given society consists of the set of norms that, in that society, are taken to be binding upon all persons. (According to many, understandings of morality are also distinguished by their claim to be putting forward overriding reasons for action.)
Although this purported universality will thus help distinguish morality from other codes of conduct, such as etiquette or the rules of games, it remains fully possible, on this descriptive reading, for different societies to have quite different moralities. On a normative interpretation, by contrast, morality consists in the set of norms that do bind all persons.4 The normative interpretation does not fit well with the idea that different societies have different moralities. It is with morality on this second, normative interpretation that this book is concerned.
I.1 The Universality of the Moral Community
The universal bindingness of morality sets this book’s task. What it takes for norms to bind all persons is, of course, the subject of the most central and
2. Compare with Bernard Gert’s statement (2005, 13): “Morality is an informal public system that applies to all rational persons.”
3. The importance of this distinction between two ways of understanding morality is emphasized in Gert (2012).
4. So to interpret morality clashes to some extent with moral particularism, which questions whether there are any true or defensible moral principles: see, e.g. Dancy (1993, 2004). I will shortly be softening this clash, however, by distinguishing between moral principles and whatever the ultimate truth-makers of moral claims may be. In addition, given the stress laid on moral psychology in Dancy (2013), I should also note that the moral psychology of principled commitment that I develop in chapter 8 does not view deliberation as proceeding by subsuming cases under principles, and it builds in a central role for perception—which could and should be finely tuned and sensitive.
longest-lasting controversy of moral philosophy. I do not enter deeply into that controversy here, which concerns—as it is sometimes put—the authority of morality itself. Rather, I suppose that there is a universal, objective core to morality the truth or validity of which is independent of our beliefs about which norms bind all persons, and concentrate on attempting to explicate how we can exercise authority in a way that modifies what morality in fact requires. We can say, though, what it means for morality’s norms to bind all persons. It means that morality is not sensitive to people’s particular identities. It may be quite sensitive to specific facts about people, such as that they have children, have certain “ground projects” (Williams 1981, 13) or identity-defining commitments, have made certain promises or are citizens of a reasonably just democracy; but it is not sensitive to the particular identities that distinguish one person from another. To say that morality’s norms are universally binding, then, is to say that they overlook the particular identities of persons. This distinguishes morality from, say, the legal norms of some jurisdiction or another, which bind only those identifiable by the particular characteristic of being citizens or residents of that jurisdiction.5
This claim that morality is insensitive to particular identities can be defended in three complementary ways: as an implication of the concept of morality, as an implication of the relationship between moral properties and ordinary prescriptive properties, and as a fundamental normative commitment. R. M. Hare most fully developed the first sort of defense of what he called the “universalizability” of moral judgments, which he claimed to draw from an analysis of the concept of morality. As he put it, “[I]f we make different moral judgments about situations which we admit to be identical in their universal descriptive properties, we contradict ourselves” (Hare 1981, 21).6 The metaphysical view supporting this thought is the widely accepted idea that moral judgments supervene on descriptive properties: there is no moral difference between cases without there being a difference in their universal descriptive properties.7 Reinforcing these conceptual and metaphysical grounds for taking moral judgments to be universal with respect to the set of particular persons involved is a normative condition of anonymity parallel to that introduced by Kenneth May in the context of voting
5. As A. John Simmons has famously insisted, many attempted accounts of the obligation to obey the law come to grief because they have difficulty incorporating this element of particularity into an account that otherwise has a moral basis. See, e.g., Simmons (2005, 166–179).
6. For a similarly abstract interpretation of the thesis that all values are either universal or subsumable under universal values, see Raz (2001b, 46–60).
7. These first two grounds may not actually be distinct: Jonathan Dancy writes that Hare (1991) “uses the term ‘universalizability’ to mean what most people mean by ‘supervenience’ ” (Dancy 1993, 258).
theory.8 In this vein, we might say that a moral judgment satisfies the anonymity condition just in case the judgment does (or would) remain unchanged through all possible variations of the particular identities of the persons occupying the various descriptively identified positions made relevant by the judgment—including features of the individuals’ psychologies, if these are relevant. For all these reasons, then, it is appropriate to think of moral judgments as applying to all persons.
Although I am not purporting to give an exhaustive characterization of morality, then, I am thinking of it as involving a set of norms valid for, or binding on, all persons. To characterize morality this way is to stick fairly closely to the way that we experience it as agents. Accordingly, this normative characterization of morality contrasts not only with the sort of merely descriptive characterization already mentioned, but also with philosophical attempts to push more deeply so as to directly characterize the ultimate (and perhaps timeless) truth-conditions or truth-makers of moral statements.
In my own view, we have at best only a highly fragmentary window on these, largely via the moral norms that we find acceptable on reflection. From this, I infer that we have no firm knowledge about the relationship that may hold between morality’s ultimate truth-conditions and the moral principles that are validly binding on us. I recognize, however, that this is a controversial view, and one for which I have not argued—although I would note that it clashes with the principle that “ought” implies “can” to hold that moral provisions of which we are all ignorant validly bind our actions.
About the ultimate truth-conditions or truth-makers of morality, then, I will simply assume that—depending on their form—they either include or accommodate second-order principles that authorize the moral community to further specify certain of morality’s valid norms. As I shall discuss further in chapter 9, even rationalist forms of moral realism, on which all moral truths trace to a priori or eternal principles, seem perfectly compatible with the view that I defend in this book, which argues that new moral norms can result from authorized changes. The second-order principles that I assume to be included in or accommodated by morality’s ultimate truth-makers would assure this compatibility.
Once it is clear that the moral community is the community of all persons, it is immediately obvious that it is difficult for the moral community to find its voice so that it might speak authoritatively. Thomas Hobbes’s social contract
8. Cf. Sen (2017, 118), about May (1952). May’s anonymity condition involved permuting individuals’ preferences among the set of particular persons. Whether all descriptive characteristics can coherently be permuted among the set of particular persons is a question I will not broach, except to note Hare’s suggestion “that ‘I’ is not wholly a descriptive word but in part prescriptive” (1981, 96).
theory has accustomed us to thinking of each political community as being forged by creating a unified sovereign wielding at least a sword, if not also a crosier. Establishing a unified world state of this kind, uniting all human persons, would be a difficult undertaking of dubious worth. Even if it were accomplished, it would not well serve as a basis for moral community.
For one thing, the sorts of strategic consideration that serve, in Hobbesian arguments, to rationalize (and perhaps to legitimize) instituting a unified sovereign are too lax to pass muster as conditions of legitimacy for the moral community. For another, as liberals such as Immanuel Kant and J. S. Mill have emphasized, important parts of the domain of morality are not properly the subject of coercive sanctions. That being so, it is a mistake to draw too heavily on the analogy to a political sovereign’s legal power. Finally, as I shall be emphasizing in chapter 4, the very idea that the moral community might be modeled on the basis of a political community of global reach understates the essential openness of the moral community’s boundaries. The moral community includes all persons, wherever they may be found.
The analogy to politics thus is no help in modeling how the moral community may act in a unified way. How it may do so is not easy to conceive. Accordingly, “articulating the moral community,” as understood via the metaphor of voice, names this book’s primary subject. The problem is to conceive of how an openended society of all persons might be so arranged as to find an authoritative voice, as it were. The incoherence of viewing morality as a whole as being unified on the basis of coercively backed institutions such as a political constitution effectively guarantees that this problem cannot be solved for morality the way it is for democracies, via the use of the election of representatives, majority rule, and contestatory mechanisms.
While accounting for the possibility of moral authority thus faces some constraints not faced by accounts of political authority, the latter faces one important constraint that the former does not. Accounts of political authority typically attempt to shoulder the burden of establishing that a regime meeting the named conditions is empowered to issue authoritative directives across a very broad range of competence.9 To be sure, all accounts will imply that there are some limits to legitimate and authoritative government action; but most accounts of political authority aim to show how, within those limits, governments may authoritatively act on a huge range of potential issues, from environmental regulation to military intervention, from tax policy to establishing national holidays. Thus, in political philosophy, the problem of authority involves showing how 9. An exception is Raz (1986; see esp. chap. 4).
