References
- I'd like to thank Nate Rockwood for prompting me to take up one topic of this paper, and Pepe Chang for getting me to think about the other. I'm grateful to Jonathan Dancy, Zohar Geva, and Alison Hills for helpful conversation, to Leslie Francis, Sam Black, and the latter's students for comments, and to All Souls College for fellowship support.
- 1958 . Australasian Journal of Philosophy , 36 The observation is meant to recall Hamblin's Dictum; see C. L. Hamblin, “Questions,”: 162. Cora Diamond, “Riddles and Anselm's Riddle,” in The Realistic Spirit (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991): 267–89, suggests that when this demand is not satisfied, what is being posed may still be a riddle— something rather different than a question.
- Prichard , H. A. 1912 . “Does Moral Philosophy Rest on a Mistake?” . Mind , 21 : 21 – 37 .
- Genealogy Nietzsche, for one, thought that it was; in the he develops the idea that morality “overcomes itself,” that is, that once the demands of morality are uniformly enforced, the effect will be to undercut the commitment to morality itself. In particular, when the moral demand for honesty is extended and deepened to include thoroughgoing intellectual honesty, moral agents will have to surrender their justifications for morality. His view is a healthy corrective to the presumption that because morality will of course be self-endorsing, the problem that arises here is vicious circularity.
- March of the Penguins. Luc Jacquet, Produced by Hann Girard. Warner Independent Pictures.
- Callcut , D. , ed. 2009 . Reading Bernard Williams London : Routledge . See Elijah Millgram, “D'où venons-nous. Que sommes nous. Où allons-nous,” in ed.: 141–165, for further discussion. Although plasticity has come in for much attention in recent evolutionary biology, the slogan I have just introduced is not meant as a claim about our evolutionary history. While I mean my claims to be compatible with current science, the point is not that hyperspecializing strategies are the products of past selection pressures, but rather that, however we got this way, it is how we are suited to function now. Relatedly, neither do I mean to suggest that all human societies allow for full or even partial exercise of this capacity.
- The justification for the practice, as I understand it, is that when the judge does not so much supervise an investigation as determine the merits of arguments presented to him by opposing sides, clients are ill-served by an attorney who fails to present arguments that the judge might find compelling. (I'm grateful to Alice Clapman for discussion on this point, and for the illustration.)
- I'm grateful to Carla Bagnoli for serving as a native informant.
- I'm grateful to Candace Vogler for alerting me to the central role in these standards of definitions of injuries.
- 2005 . Ethics Done Right: Practical Reasoning as a Foundation for Moral Theory Cambridge : Cambridge University Press . For discussion of the cognitive equipment, see Elijah Millgram, chap. 2 and sec. 5.7.
- Williams Report The force of the requirement is exhibited in Bernard Williams's venture into applied ethics. The constructs its argument around the Harm Principle, not because there is some philosophically satisfying argument for it, but because it was the only criterion on which the witnesses interviewed by the commission seemed to agree (Bernard Williams, Obscenity and Film Censorship: An Abridgement of the Williams Report [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1981]). For further discussion of the problems posed by this requirement, see Millgram, Ethics Done Right, chap. 8.
- Here's the sort of thing I mean. Historically inclined Americans will recall the anti-Communist posturing in which Richard Nixon had to engage in order eventually to be in a position to recognize what was then called “Red China.” Politicians are in some circumstances expected to lie in just this way about what they are going to do. The sort of concern to be alleviated is that a politician who refrained from lying would be neither effective in advancing the interests of his constituents, nor in reshaping those interests; yet these are among the most important parts of a politician's job. To be sure, there is an air of paradox in the thought that not lying to one's constituents is to betray their trust; nonetheless, it would be hasty to dismiss even this instance of the so-called problem of dirty hands on that basis.
- Kaufman , Peter , ed. Poor Charlie's Almanack In putting it this way, I mean to be neutral as to whether such an agent takes himself to have reasons, not derived from his professional niche, for being moral (so that he is worrying about whether they are perhaps trumped by niche-based reasons to disregard moral requirements), or whether he is considering reasons for morality that are directly niche-derived. For an interesting example of a mixed stance, see Charles Munger, (expanded 2nd ed.), ed. (Marceline: Walsworth, 2007), 80, describing the investment firm that he and Warren Buffett manage: “this place. tries harder than most places to be ethical. despite the presence of some human failing, we've had an amazingly low amount of litigation or scandal or anything of that sort over. decades. And people notice that. I don't think we deserve a lot of credit for that because we early understood that we'd make more money that way. I'd like to believe that we'd all behave well even if it didn't work so well financially. And every once in a while, we get an opportunity to behave that way. But more often we've made extra money out of morality. Ben Franklin was right for us. He didn't say honesty was the best morals, he said it was the best policy.”
- 1991 . The Woman Beneath the Skin Cambridge , MA : Harvard University Press . For an historical example, see Barbara Duden, trans. Thomas Dunlap which contrasts the standards of the barber-surgeon or the town physicus of eighteenth-century Europe with those shared by today's medical specializations.
- 1996 . The Sources of Normativity Cambridge : Cambridge University Press . There have, however, been philosophers, most recently of a Kantian constructivist bent, who thought that individual systems of standards, whatever they are, must carry commitments enabling a uniform answer to the Question. Christine M. Korsgaard, is a well-known example.
- Once we have the sketch of humanity as serial hyperspecializers on hand, and we are alert to the likely effects of a strategy of serial hyperspecialization, a survey of the more traditional sorts of platform for answering the Question ought to make one think twice about just how much in the way of truly niche-independent platforms we have. Traditional platforms may not be alternatives to niche-based platforms, just because serial hyperspecializers are cognitively equipped to internalize the standards of the niches they occupy. Take the sample platforms to which I alluded earlier: Professionals typically desire success in their profession, and there are many other ways goals and ends are shaped by a serial hyperspecializer's niche; they are thus not normally independent of the niche one occupies. One's well-being is likewise shaped by the niche one occupies: doing well at what one does is a large part of doing well. (This indicates how keeping an eye out for consequences of the serial hyperspecialization strategy can give content to an otherwise amorphous concept; on the other hand, that cannot be all there is to well-being, because a serial hyperspecializer can do well by switching niches.) And I gestured at reasons for thinking that not all of rationality is, pace Kant, niche-independent: recall how standards for successful argument varied by field.
- A caveat: This may explain why we are so often resistant to the notion of moral expertise: moral guidance is picked out in part as guidance of which we can avail ourselves where expertise is beside the point. However, traditions in moral philosophy differ on this point. And codes of professional ethics attempt to extend the moral mode of regulation into areas of disciplinary practice; where they do so, moral expertise is much more in place. A hospital's hiring a bio- ethicist does not prompt nearly the puzzlement that appeals to moral expertise in non-professional contexts would.
- Urmson , J. O. 1968 . The Emotive Theory of Ethics 83 – 85 . London : Hutchinson . , presents a consideration that can both be taken as an argument that we don't treat others as authorities in matters of morals, and a quick and dirty test for whether we are willing to treat people as experts and authorities in some region of applied ethics. He observes that questions prefaced with “Is it true that.?” are normally addressed to authorities, and that prefacing questions on moral matters with this formula sounds distinctly odd. (”Is it true that killing is wrong?”) However, notice how much less odd it sounds when the subject is applied ethics: “Is it true that medical providers should obtain informed consent whenever possible?” (Another caveat: old-school applied ethics lives up to its name by taking its task to be that of applying one or another niche-independent moral theory to a problem posed by, e.g., medical practice. The commitment to informed consent, in the example I just gave, is derived from views about the importance of autonomy, not in medicine, but in general. However, I certainly don't mean to endorse that way of doing it; better work in applied ethics rarely looks like this.)
- 2006 . Ethics and Politics Cambridge : Cambridge University Press . That said, it does need to be qualified. Alasdair Maclntyre, 183ff, see also 198iff., describes a case in which there is less than meets the eye to the apparently shared signon to a set of generically coordinating priorities. Death is agreed to be bad and to be prevented when possible and within reason, but how bad (and how it is bad) varies startlingly from one set of niche-specific guidelines to another.
- Ethics and Politics For some discussion of what the defect amounts to, see Maclntyre, chap. 11.
- 2004 . Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society , 104 For discussion, see Elijah Millgram, “On Being Bored Out of Your Mind,”: 163–84. In “Moral Values and Secondary Qualities,” American Philosophical Quarterly 36 (1999): 253–55, I contrasted evanescent affective responses with the stable reasons typical of morality; I now worry that I was too hasty in assuming without argument that moral reasons must be all that stable. There is also a tricky worry that I do not want to resolve now: when affective responses shift, do we want to say that the reasons have shifted, or rather that our sensitivity to the reasons has changed?
- This sort of approach to the topic may be the source of two related and not uncommon presumptions that I earlier mentioned in passing: that morality has in the first place to do with managing interactions of generic agents rather than specialists, and that there is no such thing as moral expertise.
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