SUBJECTIVISM AND SERIOUSNESS
E. P. BRANDON
THE PHILOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY VoL. 30 No. 119 APRIL 1980
"But if he does really think there is no distinction between virtue and vice, why, Sir, when he leaves our houses let us count our spoons." If we may count this among Dr Johnson's pragmatic refutations of absurd philosophical theses (Boswell records it under July 14th, 1763) it shares with the rest an insensitivity to the precise doctrine to be refuted but also instructively reveals what many think the doctrine does commit one to. In this case, it is that subjectivism about morality (not that there is no distinction between virtue and vice, rather no intrinsic objectively prescriptive distinction) brings with it a disdain for the moral law, encourages cynicism or a lack of seriousness. Despite many philosophers' concern to rebut the charge of corrupting the young with subjectivist or non-cognitivist theories of ethics, I wish to argue that the thought that there are these subversive consequences is largely correct.
This is a topic I approach with some trepidation, for two reasons. The first is that I am centrally concerned with the relation between a factual claim, albeit an abstruse part of general metaphysics, and our attitudes; and this relation is clearly not a matter of entailment, not a matter for comparatively cut-and-dried argument. Perhaps, it might be thought, not a matter for argument at all. Be that as it may, my main concern will be to show that argument cannot rule certain attitudes out, though I may well suggest that my arguments can give those attitudes some positive support. My second reservation is due to the diversity of attitudes I shall be lumping together, uniting them only perhaps because they all involve a lack of commitment to morality. So I shall be moving about among: a carefree "anything goes!" attitude, à la Feyerabend; a gloomy apathy or indifference to moral considerations; the diffidence or lack of confidence that Williams misdescribes as indifference (Williams [1973] p. 40); cynical manipulation of morality in one's own interests; and possibly other distinguishable attitudes. It is at the moment only a pious hope that I do not need to take account of the differences between these various attitudes.
My strategy is to examine two recent extended discussions of subjectivism those of Williams (1973] and Mackie [1977] with an eye to their answers to the question whether "morality can be got off the ground rationally", as Williams puts it (p. 18). In Williams' case I shall argue that for all his elegant handling of "dialectical skeins" in the cause of "defusing subjectivism" he misses the most serious challenge that it poses. Having seen what this is, we can then see that Mackie, while not pretending to have answered it fully, keeps very quiet about how little he is able to salvage from the wreck. That is to say, on his own admission, there is no grounding for the larger part, and that the more strenuously contested, of our moral or sociopolitical thought, in particular for the kind of thinking that leads towards what most of us recognize as moral advance and the enlargement of our moral horizons. I shall conclude by suggesting that there may also be less of a basis for conformity even in that part of morality that he does rescue. The case rests that subjectivism is a threat to most moralities actually promulgated, i.e., is a threat.
I
As its author is the first to admit, the overall structure of Williams' argument is difficult to discern. The first half of his book begins by asking "Why should I do anything?", and quickly transforms this into the amoralist's question why moral reasons should be listened to. It is the amoralist who is to be argued into morality, and I shall take Williams' subsequent arguments as attempts to achieve this aim. Let us bypass Williams' next remarks by assuming a consistent amoralist; we then have to ask ourselves whether he is concerned about anyone else. If the answer is no, we have conjured up a psychopath, not a prima facie desirable alternative to being moral. But if it is yes, "then we do not have to ascribe to him any fundamentally new kind of thought or experience to include him in the world of morality, but only what is recognizably an extension of what he already has" (p. 26). But while he may need no new thoughts or experience, he does need to give some of the thoughts he has greater weight in his deliberations and action, he needs to reflect on unrealized possibilities and let the results of such speculation also influence his decisions. In a word, he has to take morality seriously; which is my problem, and no nearer a solution.
It is at this point, with an amiable but carefree amoralist, that subjectivism enters, to be quickly followed by vulgar relativism. As Williams effectively shows, what he calls "vulgar relativism" is inconsistent, and consistent toleration of any and everything is not a very appealing doctrine when you confront it with the savage practices to be found all over the world. My only comment on this part of his discussion is that it seems to me that the move from some kind of sociological perspective on moralities to a premature tolerance appeals to the same kind of consideration as I defend below with respect to "indifference", i.e., it includes the thought that something external is required to pass condemnatory judgement upon someone's values; and argues invalidly that since there is no such external authority one should not condemn any values.
Subjectivism, of the sort that elsewhere Williams says is true of morality (Williams [1975]), is held to be the main premise of an argument to what he calls "indifference", but which seems more a kind of diffidence "who am I to say they're wrong?". Looking at the overall pattern of argument, Williams first offers the amoralist a demonstration that subjectivism does not entail indifference and then casts around for the respect in which subjectivism fails to measure up to what we think roughly has to be true about morality. This is finally identified as its denial of "something out there" to ground moral claims, but we are assured that this denial justifies "at most resentment rather than panic" (p. 51). And this seems to be all Williams offers in exchange for morality not exactly a "hard sell", more like giving medicine to a baby, you swallow morality while your attention is pre-occupied with all the things you are not being offered. It is hardly a reason for joining a club to be told merely that one argument from a true premise that would keep you out is invalid. Williams can only regard his strategy as successful if be assumes that this is the only argument that would keep the amoralist out and that the onus is on the amoralist to find reasons for staying out rather than on the moralist to find ones for coming inside. Williams himself begins by assuming the opposite of this second point; and I shall show that the first is profoundly mistaken Williams has overlooked subjectivism's most serious threat to the seriousness of morality.
Williams dismisses indifference with a dilemma. He supposes a man confronted with some monstrous injustice thinking "because subjectivism is true, I am not justified in protesting" (p. 40). This man's thought must be "either because, if subjectivism is true, no one is justified in doing anything; or because, if subjectivism is true, he is specially not justified in protesting" (ibid.). Taking these in turn, Williams replies that if the first, then "the inflicters of the injustice are not justified in what they are doing either, nor is this man justified in not protesting, and these considerations remove any basis he was supposed to have for his indifference" (p. 41). If the second, the subjectivist is seen to be inconsistently relying on the notion of objective justification, wondering whether perhaps his opponents are objectively right after all. "Sticking to the subjectivist path, he must recognize that if he chooses to think that they are wrong and that he is right in protesting, then no one can say he is wrong either, and he can be no less justified in protesting than they are in doing what they are doing" (p. 41).
Williams thus neatly shows that subjectivism does not entail indifference, or indeed any other attitude to moral principles though you might wonder whether to be told that I have no more justification for protesting than for not protesting is not, practically, an invitation to indifference. But what is most striking about Williams' elegant argumentation is its irrelevance to the serious problem raised by subjectivism. A subjectivist with a firm enough grasp of the distinction between facts and values1 need not confuse himself by arguing that any fact, even a metaphysical one of the non-existence of a certain type of property, entails a particular evaluative stance. But neither does he need to forgo asking whether some facts, even metaphysical ones, may not support or make reasonable one kind of evaluation or attitude rather than another. The fact that this kind of reasonableness is as obscure, indeed more obscure, than the very different support of evidence for a hypothesis is no reason for not indulging in arguments using it, just as science need not wait upon confirmation theorists. Pointing out a lack of entailment between A and B would then only be of interest if that fact entailed that A cannot support B; in the scientific case, only a hardy inductive sceptic would explicitly claim so much, and in the moral case Williams should not, and does not in fact, assume without argument a comparable scepticism. His handling of the issues in the passage I have quoted above does, however, seem to be another instance of the almost unconscious appeal to "deduction or nothing" that Stove has attacked in a very different context (Stove [1970]). It is the more surprising when we see his much more "realistic", support-oriented, discussion of the consequences of God's existence for morality (pp. 77-86).
As I have said, indifference is dismissed before Williams sets about discovering how far subjectivism falls short of our expectations of morality; he thus does not allow himself to wonder whether the denial of intrinsic objectively prescriptive items might support apathy, indifference, or playfulness. And this is not just a technical gap in his argument, an omission of a bizarre logical possibility, but a serious lacuna, since it would seem that some such arguments are quite plausible. Taking Williams' case again, one such train of thought might run: something "out there" would give authority to my claims, but in morals there is nothing out there. The fact that neither I nor my opponents have that kind of authority does not leave us both in the same boat since it is precisely that kind of authority which is needful and which I once thought I had (as an unenlightened user of ordinary language). Its absence saps my will because without it my commitments are only my commitments, and why should I bother when the going gets rough, or when I simply do not feel like it any more? The fact that my opponents either do not recognize its absence or do not care about it leaves them where they were, confident; and thus we have, in practice, an asymmetry.
What this line of thought shows is that moral lack of confidence betrays, in at least some cases, a longing for the external standards of some non-subjectivism, standards undermined by the metaphysical fact. Williams only recognizes this hankering after the old gods in his reply to the second horn of his dilemma, but even then he fails to take the measure of the possible challenge, since all he says is "be a consistent (serious) subjectivist!". If we compare the situation in the case of religious beliefs we can see the possibility Williams omits. If one begins by believing traditional Christian claims about objective reality and then comes to think them false, one has at least two possible options one may retain the language and behaviour, excising any claim to literal objective truth about transcendent entities through changing the meaning of the language; or one becomes an atheist and tries to give up those beliefs and practices that crucially depend upon beliefs one now considers false. With regard to morality, Williams seems to think that the only option is the first, the Bishop of Woolwich feint; but why should not these imposing self-addressed imperatives of a rational win, or Jehovah's commands, seem tawdry rubbish when their objectivity, the source of their authority, is seen to vanish? The argument to apathy, then, is not so much a subjectivist's confusion as the despair of an inconsolable ex-objectivist. Morality being a matter of my choice, why should I take it so seriously? Why should I seek to impose my preferences on others? Why should I take much notice of their preferences when we can all come to see morality's all-too-human origins, and all treat it lightly? Even if we all came to agree on them, moral principles would still be crucially different from scientific theories; they lack the solidity the latter's aim for verisimilitude gives them.2 They have no authority beyond that which I choose to give them, and thus, strictly speaking, no authority at all.
The nearest to a reply to this line of thought I can find in Williams' writings is his reliance on the notion of what a person can live with (cf. Smart and Williams [1973]), which surfaces in our focal context in the discussion of relativism where Williams asks us to consider a person confronting extreme cases of inhuman treatment. Our upbringing has, we may hope, been such that when faced with human sacrifice we do not agonize about the existence of objective moral prescriptions, we act out of deep conviction. As Harris [1974] says, these gut-reactions almost only occur when the events in question are under our "moral nose", but anyway gut reactions are hardly a victory for reason, especially since cruel and inhuman reactions could equally well be deeply ingrained in a person. And even if not positively unpleasant, many of the things that do get built into people may be such as we feel it worth liberating ourselves from, and think that we ought not to impose on future generations. Nor is it much consolation to most conventional moralities if the constraints on people are thus extreme, a matter of what you can live with. Many people might well manage to survive without having to face the dilemmas that Williams introduces in his critique of utilitarianism, but within such people's lives there will still be much room for either taking their obligations seriously or merely cynically manipulating other people's conformity, either subscribing to principles or tailoring their principles to suit their inclinations. It is no doubt valuable to be reminded that subjectivists have a place for the notion of self-sacrifice; it may be true that for each person there is something that he cannot live with, some point where he will make a stand; my only point now is that this may be quite a lot farther on than our natural expectations about morality require.
II
Williams fails to move his amoralist into the moral arena by argument because he is unwilling, true to the "feel" of moral thought, to make a distinction that is fundamental on Mackie's account of morality. Mackie explains his distinction thus:
A morality in the broad sense would be a general, all-inclusive theory of conduct: the morality to which someone subscribed would be whatever body of principles he allowed ultimately to guide or determine his choices of action. In the narrow sense, a morality is a system of a particular sort of constraints on conduct ones whose central task is to protect the interests of persons other than the agent and which present themselves to an agent as checks on his natural inclinations or spontaneous tendencies to act ([1977] p. 106).
Morality in the narrow sense is characterized later as a "device for counteracting limited sympathies", but not just negatively by prohibiting certain kinds of action, since it also provides mechanisms to facilitate co-operation.
It is for this morality in the narrow sense that Mackie, following in the tradition of Protagoras, Hobbes, and Hume, is able to offer powerful reasons for adoption by our amoralist. And not merely this morality as a set of principles but also those dispositions that support the institution of such a morality prudence, a certain limited range of sympathy, limited loyalties, promise-keeping, etc. The reasons he offers are admittedly (p. 190) not totally self-interested, since morality in the narrow sense sometimes checks the operations of unmitigated self-interest, but it also offers many people advantages they otherwise could not have had, and Mackie suggests that the lack of fine discriminations in the workings of our dispositions (which it is in our general interest to cultivate) will carry the highly self-interested person across the odd occasion when he loses by being moral.
Perhaps one of Mackie's most important revisions of ordinary morality concerns the way he thinks morality in the narrow sense should colour a person's broad morality. Morality in the narrow sense is given point in a context of conflict and competition between interacting agents I have already noted that it requires limited sympathies, limited loyalties. He himself suggests (p. 10) that its workings can be best understood by reflecting on honour among thieves. The sympathies, the altruism, that it generates are then "self-referential" principles are framed in terms which mention the holder of the principle (help my family; my friends; my compatriots; etc.). I have elsewhere ([1979] esp. pp. 29-31) suggested a generalization of this idea to cover "socially recognized" categories principles which deal with mothers, employers, teachers, slaves, etc. Mackie's message, as it seems to me, is that the considerations which ground morality in the narrow sense also argue strongly for a broad morality likewise framed in s-r terms (i.e., self-referential and socially recognized). He certainly inveighs against broad moralities of a universalistic kind, such as utilitarianism and Christian agape, in which only a very few properties are regarded as morally relevant, in which "there is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision, Barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free" (Colossians iii 11).
I do not wish to argue against this view. My point is rather how far short this s-r morality falls from the pretensions of "our" ordinary morality. Ideals and universal principles,3 a passion for justice on the grand scale, tolerance, liberty, equality, fraternity . . ., these are left unsupported by the structure of largely prudential reasoning Mackie employs. Williams' diffident subjectivist was not himself the victim of injustice, but rather a concerned spectator wondering whether to make someone else's cause his own; the force of Mackie's arguments is to tell him to steer well clear of it. And this seems not merely mistaken but immoral because the very principles framed in universalistic, clearly morally relevant terms, that Mackie seeks to replace are the ones which our critical, self-conscious moral thought employs in its questioning, and undermining, of the s-r principles embodied in our actual, morally inadequate, practice. Mackie is urging not merely a revision of ordinary morality, he is standing it on its head. He tries hard not to acknowledge this collision between his own preferred approach and the principles employed in most of our critical thinking about morality (I shall turn shortly to examine his arguments that it is not so bad after all), but it reveals itself in his style. He keeps telling us how important various issues are, questions of life and death are indeed questions of life and death, but there is what one reviewer has seen as a lightheartedness about the book that sits more easily with the destructive doctrine I have claimed it really teaches.4
Mackie himself clearly does not espouse anything so destructive he commends courageous non-conformity, he is against the death-penalty, and he would like a reasonable equality in the distribution of goods. My point is that these can only be ungrounded choices on his own terms; not positions one could argue our amoralist into. But Mackie does have some arguments for thinking that his prudential starting point will lead more in the direction of critically acceptable principles than I have allowed.
One of these that has a certain technical charm but surely no persuasive force is that prudence is itself perhaps more questionable than it seems. It involves a conception of enduring personal identity that Mackie calls an institution in the same way as promise-keeping is an institution. I am not sure how important in this is the claim that our ordinary thinking about our future selves involves a false, absolute, notion of personal identity; but if it is significant I fail to see why we may not replace that false conception with a truer one (such as Mackie has elsewhere spelt out, [1976] ch. 6) and continue being prudential. Long-term prudence will always suffer from the changes and chances of this mortal life, but that only urges me to gather my rosebuds; I fail to see any other source of doubt about self-interested motivation.
More persuasive is his noting that calculation of longer-term effects may introduce into the bargaining unit persons we might have supposed absent. Care for the old may encourage co-operation now from the young who will one day probably survive to be old; likewise the temporarily sick can expect some help. But while this is so, it is clear both that this falls far short of what universalistic morality would require and that it inverts the typically moral mode of argument even with respect to what it does let in we help the sick because they are sick, not because they might help us later, or because others will be encouraged to help us when they see our generosity.
Mackie also makes some use of the natural imprecision of our sentiments rational self-interested calculation might endorse sympathy with our immediate family and some of our relatives and friends, but if we once have a disposition to sympathize with these peoples sufferings, it is natural for the similar sufferings of other people, even of non-humans, to arouse a similar sympathy. The extent to which this is so does not, however, suffice for Mackie's purposes Harris' article to which I have already referred makes an eloquent appeal against the limitations of these reactions. Universalistic moral thought does indeed conclude that there is an unacceptable arbitrariness in limiting sympathy to my compatriots or to people of my non-religion or my skin colour; but these s-r categories are precisely the ones Mackie's general strategy asks us to accept with but little hope of overcoming (and no argument analogous to that for narrow morality to urge such overcoming upon us). Mackie may have indicated an important part of the explanation for the existence of universalistic tendencies; but an explanation is not ipso facto a justification, certainly not a justification for our supposed amoralist, who may be willing to try to school his dispositions more precisely than most of us are encouraged to do.
The same objection, that explanation does not amount to rational justification, also undermines Mackie's invocation of evolutionary pressures towards wider sympathies, towards a less s-r broad morality. In any event, this pressure is not very great: in his [1978] Mackie argues that natural selection arguments support self-referential altruism against both pure selfishness and pure altruism; any moves towards the latter that may be encouraged are thus pretty peripheral. But more importantly, these arguments might explain a tendency to action in so far as it promotes the survival of a "gene-clone"; but I am not a gene-clone. Whatever kind of evolutionary theory one adopts, it is not going to put my survival at the centre; but that is the concern that worries our amoralist. The evolutionary argument might give him a reason for doing his bit to maintain other people's adherence to a high-minded conventional morality; it gives him no reason to subscribe to it himself.
If we may view Mackie's arguments as attempts to argue our amoralist into morality, they can be seen only to have botched the job. A morality in the narrow sense he may have; certain dispositions which through human frailty and inattention serve to extend his narrow sympathies; a mode of arguing that is the opposite of that we find in our sophisticated moral thought. Our amoralist will rest content with, nay will insist upon, the contingent categories of whatever social life he finds around him; his moral thought will occur after the main decisions have been taken, in a small area left over for the luxury of moral reflection; he will tend to dismiss as utopian irrelevance the idea that moral considerations might transform his life, might change the boundaries of what he takes for granted. I am prepared to believe that this is the best that can be done; my present argument is only to show that Mackie is rather disingenuous in concealing the disparity between what he is offering and what the guardians of youth require. Subjectivism ả la Mackie certainly overturns the conventional proprieties; it justifies the fear that this fragment of metaphysics at any rate may have subversive social consequences. No one is much worried for the persistence of honour among thieves; Mackie's subjectivism undermines the seriousness of the moralities of the owners these thieves conspire to rob.
III
To conclude, I wish to question a part of Mackie's account I have so far acquiesced in the universal acceptance of a morality in the narrow sense. Writers in the tradition Mackie calls upon have often based general agreement with parts of conventional morality, Mackie's morality in the narrow sense, upon a particular sort of equality among those agreeing. Hobbes is characteristically blunt: "For as to the strength of body, the weakest has strength enough to kill the strongest, either by secret machination, or by confederacy with others, that are in the same danger with himselfe" (Leviathan, I xiii). Hume is more polite, but the message is the same: ". . . consider how nearly equal all men are in their bodily force, and even in their mental powers and faculties, till cultivated by education" (Essay, "Of the Original Contract"); and it is supported by his attempt to analyse power into opinion: "The soldan of Egypt, or the emperor of Rome, might drive his harmless subjects, like brute beasts, against their sentiments and inclination. But he must, at least, have led his mamalukes or praetorian bands, like men, by their opinion" (Essay, "Of the First Principles of Government").
While these views may seem almost obvious truths, they are equally obviously impotent truths in the world as we know it, not least, perhaps, because of the prevalence of moralities. As far as I can see, Mackie does not invoke this kind of equality to secure universal agreement, and he explicitly recognizes that moral codes often support very considerable inequalities (p. 153). Harman actually bases his subjectivist construction of part of our morality upon the existence of inequalities of power (Harman [1975]), so this sort of equality is by no means necessary to get morality in the narrow sense off the ground. But where there are inequalities of power, it seems to me that they should make the agreements much less stable than they are usually supposed to be. Why should the weaker parties keep to the agreements? Mackie's answer is that it is better to be unjustly treated than to put up with total anarchy or be crushed for resistance. Unfortunately this is all too true, but surely its lesson is not to recommend blind acceptance of the ruling morality but rather a kind of urban guerrilla warfare against the holders of power, honour among confidence tricksters. Since many of those worried by the consequences of the dissemination of subjectivism are in positions of power vis-ả-vis potential converts, I think this consideration further supports their apprehensions.
To sum up, then, subjectivism does not seem able to sustain the kind of seriousness with which morality demands to be taken. While it entails no attitudes one way or the other, it does seem to encourage the attitudes appropriate to what Gellner has called "ironic cultures" ([1974] p. 193), viz., a candid admission that in many areas, at least, this is merely how we do things, that other people can do them differently without dire consequences, so that we should not make too much of a meal out of our (moral) conventions. We have seen, however, that there may well come a point where we have to say "here I stand", beyond which we cannot live with ourselves, but we have seen that this is usually also one that we may hope never to have to face; asserting it is hardly saving most of the moral phenomena. We have seen, also, that largely self-interested reasons can be given to get an amoralist into a fragment of morality, Mackie's morality in the narrow sense, though I have suggested that when such an amoralist finds himself exploited his commitment even to such a morality should not be unfeigned. Letting the same kind of reasons prevail in formulating one's broad morality leads to a broad morality in Mackie's sense, but it is one that looks very different from anything that the defenders of conventional moralities would acknowledge; it surely confirms their fears that subjectivism undermines most of what they hold dear; it may not undermine all morality (on Mackie's usage only a randomly motivated "agent" would be lacking a morality), but it undermines the atavistic ones and many of the more enlightened that are their concern. Perhaps even more disturbing, it may undermine also ways of looking at ourselves that may not make for ease but make at least for a little dignity. I am thinking particularly of the comprehensibility of tragedy and of ascriptions of responsibility such as Williams and Nagel [1976] discuss in a symposium on "moral luck" with which compare Mackie's ch. 9. These matters may not be directly related to subjectivism, but certainly march with it. But that is an issue for another time.
REFERENCES
Brandon, E. P. [1979] "The Key of the Door", Educational Philosophy & Theory, 11, p. 23.
Gellner, E. [1974] The Legitimation of Belief (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Harman, G. [1975] "Moral Relativism Defended", The Philosophical Review, 84, p. 3.
Harris, J. [1974] "Williams on Negative Responsibility and Integrity", Philosophical Quarterly, 24, p. 265.
Hart, W. [1975] "How are we to read philosophy?", The Haltwhistle Quarterly, 3, p. 47.
Mackie, J. L. [1976] Problems from Locke (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Mackie, J.L. [1977] Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (Harmondsworth: Penguin).
Mackie, J.L. [1978] "The Law of the Jungle", Philosophy, 53, p. 455.
Nagel, T. [1976] "Moral Luck", Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume 50, p. 137.
Smart, J. J. C. & Williams, B. [1973] Utilitarianism: For and Against (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Stove, D. [1970] "Deductivism", Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 48, p. 76.
Williams, B. [1973] Morality: An Introduction to Ethics (Harmondsworth: Penguin).
Williams, B. [1975] "The Truth in Relativism", Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 75, p. 216.
Williams, B. [1976] "Moral Luck", Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume 50, p. 115.
1. In the darkness of these times it is sadly necessary to insist, as Mackie puts it, that "the distinction between the factual and the evaluative is not something with which we are presented, but something that has to be achieved by analysis" (Mackie [1977) p. 73).
2. At the climax of his reflections on subjectivism Williams invokes not science but mathematics to suggest that we need to distinguish the thought of something "out there" and the thought of our thinking being constrained to reach one conclusion rather than another. Williams has illustrious precedents for blinding us with the rational science, but given the freedom not to use the various distinctively moral modes of argument Mackie argues for ([1977], ch. 4), subjectivism about morality leaves precious little room for non-self-imposed, non-objective constraints, and thus for constraints at all.
3. Mackie has commented here that in more recent work he has stressed the universalistic virtues (honesty, promise-keeping, etc.) that are indirectly supported by s-r altruism. In his [1977] the universalistic tendencies here certainly receive powerful checks (cf. his remarks on honesty, p. 183), and I have tried to undermine in what follows the reasons there offered for gaining indirect support. Of what I have not read I can say nothing.
4. The reviewer is Fred Feldman in The Philosophical Review for January 1979, p. 137. I am indebted to Hart [1975] for the suggestion that attention to style might be as important as attention to argument in elucidating and criticizing works of philosophy.
URL http://www.uwichill.edu.bb/bnccde/epb/S&S.html