Article by Robert P. George
In Morality, Politics, and Law, Michael Perry adumbrates a “naturalist” account of moral knowledge. According to Perry, such knowledge is “primarily about what sort of person a particular human being ought to be—what projects she ought to pursue, what commitments she ought to make, what traits of character she ought to cultivate—if she is to live the most deeply satisfying life of which she is capable.” “Only secondarily . . . is it about what choices a particular human being ought to make in particular situations of choice, given the person she is, which means, in part, given the person she is committed to becoming.”
Perry claims that all moral imperatives, though not all moral judgments, are hypothetical. They indicate what a person should do if he wishes to flourish. Why should a person make a commitment to flourishing? Perry's reply to this question is worth quoting at length:
[T]here is no noncircular way to justify the claim ‘One ought to try to flourish.’ Any putative justification would presuppose the authority of that which is at issue: flourishing. . . . We cannot justify flourishing. Nonetheless, most human beings are committed to (their own) flourishing; they do value it. . . . Just as the commitment to, the value of, rationality is not at issue for most of us, the commitment to, the value of, flourishing is not at issue either.
So, the question, while neither meaningless nor trivial, cannot be answered; yet it stands in need of no answer. “Naturalist ought-talk,” he says, “presupposes that any person to whom an ought-claim is addressed is committed to her own flourishing.”
Perry proposes to distinguish his view of the foundations of moral knowledge from the views of two other contemporary naturalists, Mortimer Adler and John Finnis. These philosophers, as Perry interprets them, correctly judge that ethics is eudaimonistic—that is, has to do with human flourishing—but misguidedly propose to answer the unanswerable question: “Why flourish?” I shall use the occasion of Perry's criticisms of Adler and Finnis to offer a critique of Perry's own eudaimonistic ethical theory.
My thesis is that Perry's account of the axial foundations of moral knowledge is seriously defective, and that its defects lead him to embrace a correspondingly defective method of normative moral judgment (consequentialism). I shall present my critique in three sections. First, I shall argue that Perry's case against Adler fails because he misunderstands the notion of self-evidence, as it is applied to foundational practical (including axial) principles. Second, I shall argue that Perry's case against Finnis is marred not only by his misunderstanding of claims of self-evidence, but also by a deep confusion about the foundational axial principles that Finnis claims to be self-evident. Finally, I shall argue that Perry fails in his efforts to establish the commensurability of basic forms of human good. Perry needs to establish this commensurability in order to vindicate his consequentialist method of normative moral judgment. If basic human goods are incommensurable, as Finnis and others claim they are, then comparisons of value, which all forms of consequentialism require, are unworkable.
About the Author
Robert P. George. Visiting Fellow in Law, New College, Oxford University; Assistant Professor of Public Law and Jurisprudence, Department of Politics, Princeton University.
Citation
63 Tul. L. Rev. 1455 (1989)