Winch on Moral Dilemmas and Moral Modality

Abstract

Peter Winch's famous argument in “The Universalizability of Moral Judgments” that moral judgments are not always universalizable is widely thought to involve an essentially sceptical claim about the limitations of moral theories and moral theorising more generally. In this paper I argue that responses to Winch have generally missed the central positive idea upon which Winch's argument is founded: that what is right for a particular agent to do in a given situation may depend on what is and is not morally possible for them. I then defend the existence of certain genuine moral necessities and impossibilities in order to show how certain first‐person moral judgements may be essentially personal.

Notes

1. Peter Winch, (1972) The Universalizability of Moral Judgments. Hereafter, Universalizability. References to Winch are to this paper unless otherwise indicated.

2. See here respectively: David Wiggins, (1987) “Truth, and Truth as Predicated of Moral Judgments”; Alan Thomas, (1997) “Values Reasons and Perspectives”; Lillian Alweiss, (2003) “On Moral Dilemmas: Winch, Kant and Billy Budd”. On the implications of Winch's position in Universalizability for moral cognitivism see my “Moral Cognitivism and Character” (2005).

3. Of course, a Kantian may see the conflict here as between the requirements of the moral law according to which Billy ought to be convicted and the promptings of inclination—especially here sympathy—that speak in favor of acquitting him. Further, for the Kantian it follows from the very contingency of our inclinations that the actions they motivate have no moral worth. Winch's argument, then as we shall see, presents a basic challenge to Kantian ethics.

4. Roger Montague makes a similar objection in his “Winch on Agent's Judgements” (1974).

5. Peter Winch (1987) “Who is my Neighbour?”, p. 158. Note that a psychological incapacity need not be something like a phobia. What is crucial to distinguishing genuine moral incapacities from mere psychological incapacities is the nature of the values that explain the existence of the relevant incapacity: specifically, that unlike mere psychological incapacities moral incapacities are explained in terms of certain fundamental moral ideas. Suppose, for example, I have chosen to live a healthy lifestyle. It may be that if I am offered a job as a travel and food writer reporting on luxury resorts around the world that I may turn the job down claiming that I cannot abandon my healthy lifestyle. The choice of a healthy lifestyle may be expressive of my character in some sense, but it is hardly expressive of my moral identity or character—and so there is no genuine moral incapacity here. Consider that in this case it really does make sense at least for a person to try and encourage me to take the job. Perhaps the suggestion will be that I think too much of health. But now compare with this the suggestion that, say, Winch thinks too much of innocence; that suggestion would be as Winch might say a kind of tasteless joke. Of course while my claim that I cannot abandon my healthy lifestyle does not express a moral incapacity, it may not express a psychological incapacity either. Like so many New Year's resolutions, this commitment may not go nearly so deep, in which case perhaps the most natural thing to say here may be simply that I am self‐deceived, that there is no incapacity here at all.

6. I have done so elsewhere. See my “Moral Incapacity” (1995) and “Moral Incapacity and Huckleberry Finn” (2001).

7. Bernard Williams, (1993) “Moral Incapacity”. Note though that my own view of moral incapacity (Taylor (1995); (2001)) differs markedly from that of Williams.

8. Ibid, p. 60.

9. See Wiggins, who argues that Winch has failed to attend to Melville's “thought that war makes men like Captain Vere selectively but dangerously mad” (Wiggins (1987), p. 172).

10. See Alweiss (2003); and Kolenda (1975) “Moral Conflicts and Universalizability”.

11. See Atwell (1967) “A Note on Decisions, Judgments, and Universalizability”.

12. Melville [1924] (1967), p. 391. My emphasis.