1、THE VARIETIES OF GOODNESS by Georg Henrik von Wright LONDON ROUTLEDGE the extent to which he will practise otherregarding virtues depends on contingencies 152 1. Is there an intrinsic connexion between values and norms? The axiologist and the deontologist position. On the necessity of discussing the
2、 problem within the frame of a general theory of norms and of values 155 2. The three aspects of norms as commands, as rules, and as practical necessities. Their linguistic counterparts: imperative, deontic, and anankastic sentences 157 3. Commands. Commands as efforts, on the part of a normauthorit
3、y, to make norm-subjects do or forbear things. Promulgation and sanction essential aspects of norms as commands. Heteronomous and autonomous norms (commands) 158 4. Technical norms - Kants hypothetical imperatives. Technical norms viewed as contracted forms of Practical Syllogisms. Note on the varie
4、ty of Practical Syllogisms 160 -xii- 5. Means and ends. Necessary and productive means to an end. The probabilistic nature of means-end relationships 163 6. Practical syllogisms and the explanation of action from without 166 7. Practical syllogisms and the explanation of action from within. Practica
5、l necessitation. Note on reason and passion (Hume). Answer to the question, whether practical syllogisms are logically conclusive arguments 168 8. Practical syllogisms and autonomous norms. Analogies between norms as practical necessities and norms as commands 171 9. Heteronomous norms and practical
6、 necessities. The notion of a well-grounded norm. The necessity of obeying 174 10. Practical necessities and the intrinsic connexion between norms and values 176 1. A norm, which is well-grounded relative to the good of some being, imposes a duty. Division of duties into autonomous and heteronomous,
7、 self-regarding and other-regarding, positive and negative duties. Negative other-regarding duties and rights 178 2. Autonomous self-regarding duties. Two senses, in which a man can be said to care for his own good. Deliberation about ends. Self-protective self-prohibitions 179 3. Autonomous other-r
8、egarding duties. Their relation to the other-regarding virtues. Love as an ultimate interest in the good of 182 another being 4. The problem of Egoism. Egoistic and altruistic action. The fallacy of psychological egoism. Comparison between egoism, eudaimonism, and hedonism. Is altruistic interest le
9、ss natural to man than self-interest? 183 5. Heteronomous self-regarding duties 186 6. The notions of moral authority, moral command, and moral education. The relation of parents and children as example. The reasons and the justification of moral commanding 187 7. Heteronomous other-regarding duties
10、 190 8. The possibility of commanding not founded on a recognized authority or right to command, but on superior strength of the commander over the commanded. Discussion of the concept of strength. Men are by nature approximate equals. Natural inequalities between men; adults and children as example
11、. The twofold importance of the fact that men can co-operate. Co-operation can overrule natural and create artificial inequalities. The institutionalization of normative power 191 -xiii- 1. Co-operation. What makes men co-operate? Autonomously necessitated co-operation for a common good 197 2. Excha
12、nge of goods and services. Mutual advantage. The Golden Rule. How can respect of my neighbours good be my duty? 199 3. A basic inequality of goods in a community of men. It is better never to suffer harm than sometimes to do harm. The notions of share, due, and parasitic action 202 4. Revenge as nat
13、ural punishment of evil-doing. How mens self-interested pursuit of a common good may engender a practical necessity of adopting a practice, which is to the mutual advantage of them all 204 5. Love of man. Pathological love contrasted with love of thy neighbour as thyself 205 6. Survey of the general
14、 features of our derivation of the duty to abstain from evil. The Principle of Justice. Justice the corner-stone of morality. How action in accordance with the Principle of Justice may become moral duty. The inner and the outer way. Action from a moral motive and action inspired by a Christian love
15、of man; the two are essentially the same 206 7. Moral duties exist only within a moral community. The moral community determined by similarity of wants and needs and powers of men. The fiction of the super-man. Justice and mercy 211 8. The utilitarian foundation of justice and morality. The two are
16、necessarily of public utility, but their contraries may contingently be of private utility. Moral action is not autonomous self-regarding duty 214 INDEX 217 -xiv- I THE VARIETIES OF GOODNESS 1. ETHICS is often said to be the philosophy of morals or theory of morals. Questions of morals are, to a lar
17、ge extent, questions of good and evil and duty. Not all good, however, is morally relevant and not every duty is a moral duty. With the conception of ethics as the philosophy of morals is sometimes associated a view, according to which there is a peculiar moral sense of good and duty, which is the p
18、roper object of ethical study. I shall refer to this view as the idea of the conceptual autonomy of morals. I am referring not so much to a well-defined position as to a certain climate of opinion in moral theory. Nobody, I believe, has contributed more to the creation of this climate of opinion tha
19、n Kant. One could therefore also refer to it as a Kantian tradition in ethics. I have no objection to a definition of ethics as the philosophy of morals. There is not much talk in this book of moral concepts or judgments or rules or principles - and the little which there is, is not very systematic.
20、 The major part of this book does not treat of morals at all. Therefore the title Ethics would not have been well suited for it. I do, however, object strongly against the view, which I called that of the conceptual autonomy of morals. As I shall try to argue presently, moral goodness is not a form
21、of the good on a level with certain other basic forms of it, which we are going to distinguish. The so-called moral sense of good is a derivative or secondary sense, which must be explained in the terms of non-moral uses of the word. Something similar holds true of the moral sense -1- of ought and d
22、uty. For this reason it seems to me that a philosophic understanding of morality must be based on a much more comprehensive study of the good (and of the ought) than has been customary in ethics. The name Prolegomena to Ethics would not be ill-suited for such a study. I had thought of using this tit
23、le. But besides the fact that it has been used before, it would be too ambitious. For it is, after all, only an aspect of the broader approach needed for ethics, which I have ventured to study with any thoroughness in the present work. What it is and what the other main aspects are, I shall indicate
24、 later in this chapter (sect. 4). 2. It has long been current among philosophers to distinguish between normative ethics and ethics which is not normative. Ethics of the first type is supposed to tell what is good and bad and what is our moral duty. Ethics of the second type does not value or prescr
25、ibe. The idea of a sharp distinction between ethics which is normative and ethics which is not normative can, I think, be regarded as an off-shoot of a more general idea of a sharp distinction between norm and fact, between the ought and the is. This second idea has become associated, in particular,
26、 with the name of Hume. One could, though with caution, talk of a Humean tradition in moral philosophy. The distinctions between the ought and the is and between the two types of ethics is commonly understood in such a way that the term ought covers both norms and values and that normative as an att
27、ribute of ethics refers both to the prescriptive and to the evaluative. As another off-shoot of the idea of a sharp distinction between the evaluative and prescriptive on the one hand and the factual on the other hand may be regarded the idea that science is value-free (Die Wertfreiheit der Vissense
28、haften). On the question, what a non-normative study of morals is, there is much obscurity and many divergent opinions. Some philosophers, particularly from the decades round the turn of the century, used to conceive of ethics which is not normative as a science des mu-urs,ie. as a sociological and/
29、or psychological study of the natural history of moral ideas, codes, and customs. There is no doubt a way of studying moral phenomena, which is detached and scientific and which can be sharply distinguished -2- from normative ethics. But it is at least doubtful whether an empirical study of morals i
30、s the only form of ethics which is not normative. Many philosophers would deny this. They would maintain that there is a philosophical study of moral concepts and judgments, which is distinct both from normative ethics and from the empirical study of moral phenomena. For this type of study of morals
31、 the term meta-ethies has recently become fashionable. On the further question of the nature of meta-ethics opinions are not settled. Some would call meta-ethics a conceptual or logical study of morals. And some would wish to add that a conceptual study of morals is essentially a logical study of th
32、e language of morals. Meta-ethics - this seems to be agreed - does not aim at telling what things are good and bad and what are our moral duties. It aims at a better understanding of what good and bad and duty mean. All these characterizations are loaded with problems. They do not suffice by themsel
33、ves for drawing a sharp boundary either between meta-ethics and normative ethics or between meta-ethics and empirical investigation. The idea of a sharp separation of normative ethics and metaethics seems to me to rest on an oversimplified and superficial view of the first and on an insufficient und
34、erstanding of the nature of the second. The view of normative ethics as (some sort of) moral legislation, perhaps in combination with a criticism of current moral standards, is one-sided. So is the view of normative ethics as casuistry. Normative ethics is not a suitable name for any one thing. Thos
35、e, who use the name, tend to heap under it a number of different philosophic and moralistic activities. One of these activities, thus classified as normative, I would myself call conceptual investigation; and I would not know how to distinguish it sharply from the allegedly non-normative conceptual
36、analysis belonging to meta-ethics. Anyone who thinks that a sharp distinction can be maintained between meta-ethics and normative ethics is invited to consider the nature of such works as Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics, Kant Grundlegung Zur Metaphjsik der Sitten, or John Stuart Mill Utilitarianism. Is
37、 their contents meta-ethics or normative ethics? Some, I think, would answer that the works mentioned contain elements of both types of ethics and perhaps deplore that their authors did not distinguish more sharply between the two. My own inclination -3- would rather be to say that the difficulties
38、in classification here show the artificiality of the distinction. 3. I would call the investigations conducted in the present work conceptual. I would also agree to saying that the subject-matter of conceptual investigations is the meaning of certain words and expressions - and not the things and st
39、ates of affairs themselves about which we talk, when using those words and expressions. Why is it that I nevertheless do not wish to call the inquiry metaethical and to regard it as sharply distinguishable from the pursuits of normative ethics? My hesitation has to do with the question of the nature
40、 of a conceptual investigation. This is a question on which I wish I had and could state a clearer view than I have actually been able to form for myself. I shall here in a brief and somewhat dogmatic way try to state my position with regard to some aspects of it. First of all I think that there are
41、 many types of conceptual investigation, many methods in philosophy. The choice of a method may depend upon the nature of the problem to be treated or it may, perhaps, depend upon the temperament of the individual philosopher. I have come to think that the types of conceptual investigation, which ar
42、e best suited for ethics, are essentially different from the types suited for theory of knowledge or metaphysics. This difference is probably connected with the fact that the aims, as I see them, of so-called practical and so-called theoretical philosophy are intrinsically different. An urge to do c
43、onceptual investigations - and one of the main urges to do philosophy, I think - is bewilderment concerning the meaning of some words. With the words in question we are usually familiar. We know on the whole, how and when to use them. But sometimes we are at a loss as to whether a thing should be ca
44、lled by some such word x. We are at a loss, not because we are ignorant as to whether this thing has some feature y, which would be a ground for or against calling it x. We hesitate because we do not know which features of this thing are grounds for or against calling it x. We are challened to refle
45、ct on the grounds. Instead of grounds for calling things x, I could also have said criteria or standards for deciding, whether a thing is x or not. How are grounds or criteria or standards for calling things by words related to meaning? This is a complicated problem, on which -4- I shall here only s
46、ay this much: The meaning of a word has many aspects - and the grounds for calling something by a word I shall call an aspect of the meaning of this word. (If someone wants to distinguish here between criteria and meaning, I need not quarrel with him about the meaning of meaning.) Reflexion on the g
47、rounds for calling things by words is a type of conceptual investigation. How is such investigation conducted? Here a warning is in place. The aim of the type of investigation, of which I am speaking, is not to uncover the existing meaning (or aspect of meaning) of some word or expression, veiled as
48、 it were behind the bewildering complexities of common usage. The idea of the philosopher as a searcher of meanings should not be coupled with an idea or postulate that the searched entities actually are there - awaiting the vision of the philosopher. If this picture of the philosophers pursuit were
49、 accurate, then a conceptual investigation would, for all I can see, be an empirical inquiry into the actual use of language or the meaning of expressions. Philosophic reflexion on the grounds for calling a thing x is challenged in situations, when the grounds have not been fixed, when there is no settled opinion as to what the grounds are. The concept still remains to be moulded and therewith its logical connexions with other concepts to be established. The words and expressions, the use of wh
