R. Jay Wallace is a professor in the philosophy department at the University of California, Berkeley, where he has taught since 2000. Wallace is interested in all parts of moral philosophy, and in related areas such as the philosophy of action, the philosophy of law, and political philosophy.
What is your work about?
The Moral Nexus is a study of the relational structure of the moral domain. But what does this mean?
Well, imagine that you promise a friend you will read their book manuscript and provide some comments on it over the summer. It is natural to conclude that, in virtue of the promise, you now owe it to your friend to help them with their project over the summer, and that the friend has a claim against you to your scholarly assistance. We might think of this as a kind of normative nexus that links you to your friend, consisting of a directed obligation (one that is owed by you to the friend) and a corresponding claim (one that is held by the friend against you).
The leading idea of my book is that interpersonal morality can be understood to involve a normative nexus of this kind, one that links agents individually to each of the persons who stand to be affected by things that the agents might do. Morality, according to this “relational” interpretation of it, is a matter of what we owe to each other, just in virtue of the fact that we are persons with moral standing. The relational norms that specify these moral requirements that we owe to each other are the moral nexus of my title.
Does this mean that morality rests on a promise or contractual agreement that we make with those to whom we are yoked through the moral nexus? No, that would be an implausible position, for several reasons. For one thing, promises are themselves morally binding, creating new moral obligations that are owed to the recipient of the promise. So they presuppose moral norms, and cannot be understood as non-moral exchanges that somehow give rise to morality in the first place.
Furthermore, the moral nexus of my book is meant to reflect a cosmopolitan conception of morality on which it links us to any individual who might be affected by our agency. This includes individuals whom we have never even met before, and who for that reason cannot possibly be recipients of promises we have made in the past. You owe it to the strangers whom you encounter on the urban sidewalk not to impede their forward progress; but you certainly haven’t promised them that you would act in this way, since you don’t know them at all and are now encountering them for the very first time.
Promises and contracts illustrate the idea of a normative nexus of relational obligations and claims that link two individuals to each other. But the idea is not that the moral nexus has its source in the promissory agreements we make to each other. Rather, it is that the same kind of relational obligations and claims that we find in the promising case can be understood to link us to any individual whose interests might be affected by the things it is open to us to do.
An obvious question that is raised by this proposal is whether there can be a nexus of directed obligations and claims in the absence of an antecedent transaction or exchange between the parties whom the nexus links. The worry is that relational requirements, if they are to connect two individuals, need to be anchored somehow in non-normative facts about the relations that the individuals stand in to each other.
Thus, in the natural history of the human species, morality plausibly first emerged in the context of family and tribal relations between individuals who were forced by social circumstances to interact with each other repeatedly, and who shared a common social life of some kind. These are natural contexts for the application of relational moral ideas (where we have specific interactions with other individuals, as recipients of their generosity, or people who rely on them to keep their word, or participants in shared projects an activities). But some philosophers believe we need entirely novel resources to deal with the salient moral challenges of the modern age, which often have to do with our relations to people who are not already members of our parochial community or life form. Think of the future individuals, for instance, who are likely to suffer significant harms as a result of the effects of our actions today on the earth’s climate.
I push back against this way of thinking in the book. Most people are prepared to accept that there might be things that we owe to each other in cases in which we have interacted with each other socially, or entered into transactions with each other of some kind. But if this much is granted, then there is no reason to think that there couldn’t equally be a similar nexus of obligations and claims that links us with individuals with whom we do not already share a social life. Thus, we plausibly owe it to future people not to bequeath to them a planet that is inhospitable to human life, even if we do not already share social relations with them. Or so I maintain.
How does it fit in with your larger research project?
I’ve long been interested both in issues about moral responsibility, and in questions about practical reason and the normative significance of moral considerations in particular. The book draws on my work in these areas in developing its central argument for interpreting the moral realm in relation terms.
That argument might aptly be characterized as interpretative. It starts with a substantive premise that most of us in the contemporary world find it difficult to reject. This is the assumption of basic equality: that from the moral point of view (whatever that means), nobody is either more or less important than anyone else. We need a way of making sense of this postulate of equal standing that at the same time does justice to other basic features of morality, as a system of norms. I emphasize two features in particular, which are both salient and potentially puzzling:
First, there is the problem of moral obligation. Morality strikes us, intuitively, not merely as a source of reasons for action, but as a set of practical requirements. If it would be wrong to do something (humiliate another person publicly, say, or disappoint the trust they have invested in you), this isn’t merely a consideration to be weighed in the balance in deciding what to do. It is a constraint, making it the case that the wrongful action is off the table. This is the distinctive kind of deliberative significance that attaches to moral considerations, and an account of morality should help us to make sense of it.
Second, there is the fact that morality has normative significance not just for the agent, but for other parties as well. If you flout a moral requirement, this isn’t merely a personal failing, without importance for anyone else. Rather, indifference or hostility to moral requirements matters to other people, giving them a basis for reactions in the general register of blame. The challenge is to make sense of this social dimension of morality, its suitability to structure relations of interpersonal accountability between individuals.
One of the main aims of the book is to show that the relational interpretation is uniquely well-suited to meet these interpretative challenges. The moral nexus that I describe offers an account of morality that illuminates its distinctive deliberative and interpersonal significance, and provides an attractive way of thinking about the equal standing of persons.
I couldn’t have developed this argument if I hadn’t been thinking for a long time about questions concerning morality, the nature and different forms of normativity, and the theory of moral responsibility. The book is connected to my earlier work, insofar as it is as a kind of summation of how I see the different strands in my thinking about these areas fitting together.
It sounds like your project is most closely aligned with deontology. How does it challenge other normative views like utilitarianism?
The normative commitments of the relational view I defend do indeed amount to a form of deontology. The view entails that there are constraints on what an individual is permitted to do in pursuit of the personal or impersonal good. It is wrong to break your promise, even if doing so would produce a better outcome—indeed, even if it would produce a better outcome with respect specifically to promissory fidelity (by e.g. somehow bringing it about that there are fewer broken promises overall in the community in which you live).
Deontological constraints of this kind have a firm place within conventional thinking about interpersonal morality. But they are also notoriously puzzling. A natural picture of rational agency is basically individualistic. Reasons for action are provided by the values that it is open to us to realize through our agency, and we are rational to the extent we respond appropriately to these opportunities for good. But it is hard to articulate a convincing rationale for deontological constraints within this framework. If promissory fidelity is valuable, why are we relating to it in the right way only when we try to realize it in our own lives (as opposed to encouraging its instantiation in the broader community)? One might say that the right way to relate to some values is by “honoring” them rather than promoting their impersonal realization. But this just labels the intuition that there is something fishy about maximizing with respect to core moral values; it doesn’t really explain that intuition.
The relational framework I propose seems an improvement in this respect. According to my approach, the norms at the heart of morality do not derive from values that we are called on, as individuals, to relate to in some way or other. They involve, at the most basic level, deontic claims that are held by other persons specifically against us. The structural features characteristic of deontological constraints fall out of this fundamentally relational picture directly, as a kind of natural byproduct. The recipients of my promises have claims against me to fidelity; this fact distinguishes them from the recipients of promissory assurance by other promisors, whose claims are not similarly held against me. But the basic deliberative function of such claims is to constrain presumptively the deliberations of the agents against whom they are held. Deontological moral constraints begin to become fully intelligible, in this way, once we understand the moral domain in terms of directed requirements and claims that have the essentially relational structure discussed in my book.
One way I challenge utilitarianism and other consequentialist views, then, is by articulating a framework within which intuitively deontological moral notions begin to make sense. But I challenge consequentialist approaches on other levels as well. Among other things, I show that consequentialist approaches are unable to explain the central features of morality that I mentioned above. It is fundamentally unclear why moral rightness, understood in consequentialist terms, should function in deliberation as a source of obligations, defining presumptive constraints on the agent’s activity. Nor does consequentialism illuminate the distinctive interpersonal role of moral considerations, as a normative basis for accountability relations between individuals. The burden of my interpretative argument for the relational approach is that it does much better than the alternatives, including consequentialism, at making sense of these basic features of interpersonal morality.
Consequentialism derives much of its appeal from the straightforward way in which it accommodates the postulate of equal standing (as I referred to it above). If the interests of each person matter, and matter equally, it is natural to suppose that morality will require us to maximize the impartial good, taking the good of each to be equally important. In my view, this has always been a large part of the appeal of consequentialist approaches, and the appeal will persist so long as we lack an alternative way of thinking about the significance of basic equality for individual agency. The relational approach that I develop is meant to contribute at this level, as well. According to this approach, the interests of others matter not as items that are to be counted equally in maximizing the impartial good, but as potential bases of normative claims that are held by other individuals against the agent. Conceptualizing equal standing in this way allows us to make sense of its significance for moral thought, while at the same time hanging onto some of the deontological intuitions that are deeply embedded in such thought.
Who has influenced this work the most?
The senior figures whose work has been most important to me in writing this book are probably G. E. M. Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Thomas Nagel, Joseph Raz, T. M. Scanlon, and Bernard Williams. (It’s that kind of book.)
Why did you feel the need to write this work?
I felt there were relational elements implicit in ordinary moral thought that are extremely important for understanding the character of morality as a normative domain, but that haven’t been developed and defended systematically. We intuitively fall back on a relational idiom in characterizing central phenomena of moral life; the thing that paradigmatically occasions blame, for instance, is not merely wrongful conduct, but behavior that wrongs another party in particular. And yet the main moral theories in the tradition are monadic, interpreting moral norms as standards that provide reasons for an agent, but that do not correspond to normative entitlements on the part of others.
Scanlon’s What We Owe To Each Other is, as the title strongly suggests, the ethical theory that comes closest to capturing the relational structure of the moral; but this isn’t something that Scanlon himself has tended to emphasize. Indeed, he in some ways seems to have backed away from it in his more recent work, especially in response to pressure from Parfit and others friendly to aggregative moral thinking. So I thought it was high time to put this important approach more squarely on the agenda for discussion.
A perhaps unusual feature of the book, in the contemporary philosophical context, is that it doesn’t really respect the boundaries that have become increasingly well-defined between the discrete sub-areas within moral philosophy. At one of the workshops on the first draft of the book, someone commented that they found the project really interesting, but they were having trouble figuring out whether it was supposed to be a contribution to metaethics, normative ethics, the theory of practical reason, or the study of moral responsibility. I was pleased by this observation, because it was part of my design to write a book that would explore connections between parts of moral philosophy that are increasingly pursued in isolation from each other in the contemporary academy.
Thus, discussions in normative ethics often proceed without any sense for how they might relate to some of the larger concerns that have traditionally animated the subject of moral philosophy. Batteries of stylized and highly artificial cases are cleverly deployed to elicit intuitions about what we have “moral reason” to do, or what would be best “from the moral point of view”. But philosophers working in these areas rarely pause to reflect on whether the principles they propose are adequate to the deliberative and interpersonal roles that we expect morality to play.
Similarly, metaethical discussions about the status of reasons and value have become highly sophisticated. But they often lose sight of some of the normative features that are distinctive of morality in particular. As Anscombe pointed out long ago, modern morality is understood by us to collect a set of obligations, which are considerations that do not merely speak for and against candidate actions, but demand that we perform them. Moral requirements also, as I noted above, function as a normative basis for relations of interpersonal accountability.
It is a central challenge for moral theory to make sense of morality as a source of obligations of this special kind. This is a challenge, moreover, that those toiling in the metaethical vineyards have not really come to grips with. Relentless attention is paid to the same familiar debates about normativity writ large: Can there be reasons in a world of natural objects and causal processes? Are there normative standards that are independent of agents’ subjective motivations, or must normative standards be understood in relation to those motivations? These are fundamental questions, and metaethics has done much to illuminate the options for thinking about them. In the process, however, some of the most important normative dimensions of morality have drifted out of view.
So another consideration that led me to write the book was the desire highlight some of these neglected challenges to ethical theory, which come into clear focus only when we pay close attention to the connections between the different parts of moral philosophy.
How have readers responded? (Or how do you hope they will respond?)
I first presented some of this material in three lectures at Princeton in 2015, lectures that I also discussed with participants in a graduate seminar at Berkeley in the same semester. The very sharp audiences at both Berkeley and Princeton were interested enough in the lectures to encourage me to think that there might be something in them. But they were also understandably puzzled by many things I said. Their reactions convinced me of the need to go back to the drawing board, to explain things more slowly and carefully, and to face up to some of the challenges and hard cases that were not squarely addressed in the lectures.
The first complete draft of the manuscript was discussed at a couple of workshops in 2017, and the reaction was again pretty encouraging. Participants certainly didn’t agree with me about very much—it’s philosophy, after all. But I came away with the impression that my early readers were helped to understand what is distinctive about the relational approach by thinking about the manuscript, and to see why the approach might be a promising way of interpreting the moral domain. I felt like the pieces were starting to fall into place, though there was still a lot more work to be done.
The published book is a much more polished presentation of ideas in the earlier draft, greatly improved as a result of feedback from many kind and thoughtful friends and critics. I hope that readers of the final version—including participants in the four workshops scheduled on it this summer—will continue to find that it helps them to understand the basic features of the relational interpretation of the moral, and to see why this approach is worth taking seriously. I’d also be gratified if they were led by the book to grapple with the philosophical challenges that figure centrally in my argument for the relational interpretation, including the role of moral standards both as intrapersonal obligations and as a basis for relations of accountability between individuals.
What’s next for you?
The broadly Strawsonian conception of moral responsibility that I favor takes for granted the centrality of the reactive attitudes to our practices of interpersonal accountability. Resentment, indignation, and guilt are the paradigms here, and they can be understood as refinements of angry disapprobation. But anger has come in for a lot of critical attention from philosophers over the years, including assorted Stoics, Confucians, Buddhists, utilitarians, and others. I think anger has gotten a bad rap in much of this literature, and would like to write a short book that makes a positive case for its value and importance.
One leading idea here is that reactive anger has a constructive role to play in the context of unfolding relations between two individuals. It helps to make the norms that regulate their interactions legible as practical requirements, and it contributes to constituting a conception of individuals as possessed of dignity and self-respect.
A further aim of the project will be to explore the possibilities for assessing and managing anger, and the ways in which the norms of aptness for the reactive attitudes come apart from the practical reasons we can have to manage it in different ways. Interactions between these different standards are interestingly at work in cases that have long puzzled philosophers, including forgiveness and hypocrisy, and I hope to shed some new light on these phenomena by attending to this neglected dimension of them.
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