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Interpretation, Morality and Truth
Note to the Colloquium: This essay is intended to supply one or two chapters to a book I am
writing that will tie together topics I have discussed independently in a general interpretive
account of value. The essay therefore covers a good deal of material that I have discussedelsewhere, some of it in past presentations to the Colloquium over several years. I apologize
to those who are familiar with my views on these topics. The material in this essay will befollowed by chapters on democracy and other political values adapted from lectures I gave at
Columbia some years ago entitled Justice for Hedgehogs.
I. BackgroundWhat I Said Before.
In this essay I assume arguments I made in two earlier essays: one published several
years ago1 and the other presented to this colloquium last year. In the first of these essays, I
distinguished two forms of skepticism about morality and other values. Archimedean or
external skepticism purports to base its skeptical conclusions on arguments that contain no
evaluative premises: it tries to find wholly factual or metaphysical arguments it points, for
example, to the diversity of moral opinions or the metaphysical queerness of alleged moral
facts to show that moral propositions cannot sensibly be understood as claims of objective
fact, but must instead be understood as expressions or projections of emotion. That is the
position of philosophers who call themselves subjectivists, projectivists, emotivists and
non-cognitivists. Internal skepticism, on the contrary, bases its skepticism about some part
of morality on positive assumptions that are themselves of a moral character. The internally
skeptical argument that morality is bunk because God is dead, for example, rests on the
evaluative claim that God and only God can be a source of moral obligation or responsibility.
I argued that external skepticism cannot succeed, and that the only intelligible form of
skepticism is internal. It follows that we cannot be skeptical about morality all the way down:
skeptics must leave something of morality standing in order to knock down the rest.
In the second essay I made a parallel distinction between Archimedean or external
realism about morals and internal realism. Both hold that propositions about moral rights and
duties can be objectively true. Internal realism argues for that proposition by supplying
ordinary moral arguments for some illustrative concrete moral claim: that it is wrong to
1Objectivity and Truth: Youd Better Believe It, Philosophy and Public Affairs. This article is available
on the NYU Philosophy Department web site.
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torture people for fun, for example. External realism, on the other hand, hopes to defend the
objectivity of morals without itself relying on moral or evaluative premises. It treats moral
realism as a claim not about what is right or wrong or good or bad but about what is
fundamentally or basically real. I argue, in the second essay, that external realism is also
infirm. It depends, as much as external skepticism does, on supposing two distinct
philosophical levels a metaphysical level at which we attack questions of fundamental
reality and a substantive level at which we confront questions of right and wrong. If my
argument is sound, and this distinction between philosophical levels is indefensible, then
Archimedean realism is as misconceived as Archimedean skepticism or anti-realism. Moral
philosophy is all substantive: no part of it can usefully be split off as meta ethics.
This Essays Project
Two questions arise, among many others. First, if Archimedean realism and anti-
realism are both misconceived, if moral philosophy and other departments of the philosophy
of value are entirely substantive, why have so many distinguished philosophers assumed the
contrary? Why have they wanted or missed external props for morality as a whole? Second, if
Archimedean realism and anti-realism are both misconceived, if there is no useful meta
ethics, if all philosophical reflection about morality is substantive, then what becomes of
moral philosophy? How can it then be different from the ordinary substantive moral debate in
which almost everyone sometimes engages, mainly in the middle or on the fringes of politics?
Is there anything left to say about moral obligation and virtue that is distinctly philosophical?
Any answer to the first of these two questions, about the motives and impulses of
centuries of moral philosophers, must of course be speculative and concededly partial. It must
also make historical sense. Part of the explanation, I believe, lies in the continuing appeal of
an old philosophical idea, which I need a distinction to explain. The case for any proposition
of science, or value, or anything else is the strongest set of reasons or arguments that we
can supply for accepting that proposition as true. Thegroundof the proposition, if it is true, is
the basic state of the world some entity or inherent property of an entity in virtue of which
it is true. The old idea is that the ordinary day-to-day arguments that make up the case for any
moral proposition the arguments you and I would make to show why torturing for fun is
wrong, for instance cannot by themselves constitute a ground for that proposition, because
these statements presuppose rather than confirm that morality has a basis in reality. We need
an independent metaphysical or meta-ethical demonstration that morality has a ground.
God was once thought to provide all that was needed by way of ground: true moral
claims were true in virtue of Gods will or canon which is a matter of the most fundamental
reality. But when God was upstaged in the Enlightenment morality needed a different ground,
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and many philosophers accordingly embraced the metaphysical thesis that moral obligations
are themselves part of the ultimate nature of reality, and that people sense or intuit those
obligations through a special faculty of moral perception. But that moral metaphysics seemed
silly to other philosophers, who drew a different conclusion from Gods departure: that
morality is not a matter of seeking objective truth at all, but only a matter of subjective
expression or projection. The stage was set for the Archimedean wars.
In the final Part IV of this essay, I respond to the issues raised in this speculative
explanation: I discuss the case/ground distinction and the isolation of morality as a
department of value. But in the essays next two parts, partly in preparation for that final
discussion, I try to meet the second of the two challenges I mentioned earlier. If Archimedean
meta-ethics is misconceived, if all useful moral theory is substantive, then what distinct role
remains for moral philosophy? In Part III I argue that moral philosophy is best understood and
practiced as a genre of interpretation. But what is interpretation? Is there any such thing asinterpretation in general, of which moral philosophy can then be seen to be one genre? If so,
what is interpretations character, and how does it differ, in general, from non-interpretive
inquiry? These are the questions of Part II. They are of independent philosophical importance,
quite apart from their bearing on the role of moral philosophy, and they are relatively
understudied. I have written about interpretation before,2 but my discussion here expands and
corrects my earlier arguments in several respects.
II. Interpretation in GeneralDoes It Exist?
We interpret poems and plays and paintings, statutes and constitutions, and epochs
and events in history. Doctors interpret dreams, theologians sacred texts, sociologists social
patterns or movements, and philosophers concepts. We interpret each other, in conversation,
all day long. Do all these genres of interpretation have anything significant in common? Is
there a general intellectual activity of which these different genres are all manifestations?
The fact that we use interpretation in describing all these activities does not settle
that matter. As Wittgenstein pointed out, though we use game to describe a great variety ofactivities, from solitaire to school-yard tag, these various activities actually have no single
thing in common, and a philosophical theory of games in general would be useless. That
might be true of interpretation as well. It is a striking fact, moreover, that there is no such
2Most elaborately inLaw as Interpretation in my book,A Matter of Principle (1985), and inLaws
Empire (1986).
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activity as interpreting in general. Suppose a set of flashing lights now appears on the wall
you are facing and someone asks you to interpret that phenomenon, or to describe its
meaning. There is no first interpretive step you could take without discovering how the lights
come to be on the wall and, if by human design, with what intention. How you even begin
depends on whether you take the dancing lights to be a natural phenomenon, or an artists
light show, or a coded message.
Nevertheless many philosophers, including Willhelm Dilthy and Hans Gadamer,
assumed not only that interpretation in its different modes is at bottom the same activity, but
that the difference between that activity and other forms of investigation is fundamental. They
pointed out one property that all the genres of interpretation seem to share: it is common to
report our interpretive opinions as someones or somethings meaning. It would be odd to
report the result of some simple observation or scientific theory that way. We would not say,
glancing out the window, that the meaning of what we have seen is that it is snowing, or thatthe universes meaning lies in its expansion. But we do find it natural to put all our
interpretive conclusions in that vocabulary. We speak of the meaning of a play or statute or
dream or historical epoch, and that suggests that we think that interpretation, in all its forms,
reveals or rests on purposes. That linguistic fact is not conclusive either, and so we should not
assume, in advance of studying the matter, that there is something useful to be said about
interpretation in general. But we should not rule it out either.
Interpretation and Truth
A general theory would have to explain why most interpreters think that their claims
and arguments aim at truth, whether they are right in that assumption, and, if they are, in what
the truth of an interpretive claim consists.3 We do normally assume that interpretations can be
right or wrong, true or false. We accuse some people of misinterpreting us or Yeats or the
Renaissance or the Sherman Act; we suppose that there is truth to be found or missed about
the meaning of each of these. We also assume the existence of truth in interpretation in
another way: we distinguish between a successful interpretation and something that is
admirable in some other way. A musician might find great pleasure in listening to a Glen
Gould performance of a Beethoven sonata, but nevertheless think that as an interpretation of
the sonata Goulds performance is a travesty. An American lawyer might wish that the Equal
Protection Clause had made plain that states are not allowed to spend less per student on
3A distinctive theory of any particular interpretive genre would have to answer these questions for that
genre. The demand on a general theory is to answer them for all genres through an account of
interpretation in general.
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schools in poor districts than in rich ones, but nevertheless agree that the correct interpretation
of that clause, as it was written, does not include that requirement.4
True, in some contexts it would sound odd for an interpreter to claim unique success.
A director who offers a political interpretation of Hamlet need not (and better not) propose
that his interpretation is the only correct one and that all other approaches to the play are flatly
wrong.5
But it would be equally odd for an historian who has devoted his life to the meaning
of the French Revolution to add, in a final paragraph, that his study represents only one
interesting approach to that problem, and that other approaches are equally valid. In some
circumstances that would seem not only odd but outrageous. Imagine a judge who sent an
accused criminal to jail, perhaps to death, or who awarded a huge verdict against a civil
defendant, and then conceded in the course of his opinion that other interpretations of the law,
which would have required contrary decisions, are equally valid to his own. Or a friend who
insists that you keep a promise, though he concedes that a different interpretation of what yousaid, which contains no promise, would be equally successful.
So what we might call the phenomenology of interpretation how it feels to
interpreters at least often includes a sense that interpretation aims at some kind of truth. But
interpreters are often uncomfortable in making that claim explicitly. Many lawyers, for
example, who would be shocked to find the language I imagined in a judges opinion are
nevertheless troubled by the general jurisprudential claim that there is always one best
interpretation of a legal provision or precedent, and that all the other interpretations are
wrong. They prefer locutions that avoid that flat claim: a lawyer might say, for example, that
though a particular interpretation of the Equal Protection Clause seems the best to him, he
knows that others disagree, and he cannot say that there is only one correct interpretation, that
those who disagree with him are simply mistaken. That bizarre form of words makes no
sense: if in his opinion one interpretation is best then, also in his opinion, contrary
interpretations are inferior, and he contradicts himself when he asserts that some of them are
not. But the popularity of statements like these underscores the uncertainty we feel about the
truth-seeking status of interpretation.
It is not hard to see why we are sometimes troubled in claiming unique truth for our
interpretive judgments. We know that other people, who seem at least equally competent at
4Reference to Supreme Court decisions.
5A performance, particularly of a classic, is a distinct sub-genre of interpretation with its own
standards, which include originality and freshness, and this provides a reason internal to that sub-genre
why claims of unique success are inappropriate.
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the task, have very different views from ours about the meaning of particular poems,
historical events and statutes, and we can often find nothing to say that converts them to our
opinion. Indeed, we find that different interpretations of the same object appeal to us
ourselves at different times. Worse, people disagree widely even about the conditions of
interpretive truth. Even when they agree about the hidden motives of a character in a novel, or
the force of an allegory in explaining a poem, they might well disagree about what makes
their shared views the truth about the meaning of the novel or the poem. Worse still, very few
of us can even make plain what our own answer is to that question: what, in our view, makes
an interpretation true when it is true. Interpretation often seems ineffable. We sense that some
reading of a poem or performance of a piece of music or production of a play is right, that it
brings out what is really in the work, but that sense often far outruns our ability to explain
why it is right. We must fall back on the idea that what seems or feels right is right. But
ineffability is troubling: it doesnt seem to go with truth. If our instincts are right, and one
interpretation is better than another, then why cant we explain, all the way down, why it is?
One answer to the question what makes an interpretation correct when it is correct is
very popular in certain genres of interpretation: this is psychological reductionism, which
holds that as a conceptual matter interpretive truth can be achieved, and can only be achieved,
by retrieving a mental state of the author or creator of what is being interpreted. The correct
answer to the interpretive question whether Shylocks daughter, Jessica, hated him for her
Jewishness is fixed by Shakepeares intention or decision as to that matter; if he had no
pertinent intention then there is no right answer at all. We may, on this view, have to
speculate in deciding what an authors intention was, and we may even be forced to
counterfactual speculation. A pianist playing a Mozart sonata might have to consult Mozarts
orchestral work in order to imagine how he would have used the additional color and warmth
of a piano if it had been available to him. But when the authors intention is divined, there
interpretation ends, and since it is an historical, even if sometimes counterfactual, fact what
the author intended or would have wanted, interpretation is unproblematically truth-seeking.
In some genres of interpretation, psychological reductionism may seem immediately
persuasive. You are now trying to retrieve what I intended to say. In other genres it seems
wholly ineligible: an historical age or epoch has no intentions, and the meaning of the French
Revolution is not a matter of the intentions of any of the actors in that drama. In still other
genres in literature and in law, for example psychological reductionism has had powerful
defenders. Many literary critics just assume that interpreting a novel means finding a pertinent
intention of the author, and many lawyers assume that interpreting a statute means scouring
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history for the intentions of lawmakers. But other critics and lawyers have rejected
psychological reductionism as plainly inadequate.6 The arguments against that theory seem
very strong in law,7
and also, on reflection, almost equally strong in literature. Would the
many critical studies of the relationship between Shylock and Jessica really be shown to be
pointless if we discovered that Shakespeare had never turned his mind to that issue? In any
case, psychological reductionism cannot explain why so many critics would reject that
suggestion but still count what they do as interpretation. We must abandon the idea that
interpretation just means identifying an authors intention. We need a more general account
that explains why some interpreters believe that seeking the authors intention is the best
interpretive method and also explains why rival interpreters think it almost never is. We must
identify a more abstract standard of success that the authors intention school and its rivals
compete to meet.
I shall make a suggestion along those lines, but I must first acknowledge that myassumption, that interpretation is a truth-seeking activity, can be and has been challenged.
Skeptics insist that the popular assumption that interpreters can discover the truth about the
meaning of some object or event is an illusion: there is finally no difference between
interpretation and invention, between understanding a work one way rather than another and
preferring one work to another. It is important to remember, however, that any internally
skeptical claim must be extremely ambitious: it must itself rest on a general theory of what
would count as interpretative truth in order to argue or even to propose that no interpretation
can achieve that truth. We can imagine the structure of such a theory: someone might argue,
for example, that only retrieving an authors intention could count as success in interpretation,
and then also argue that in the nature of the case because of the famous hermeneutical
circle, for example an authors intention can never be wholly or unambiguously retrieved.
But it would take a very powerful argument to persuade us of either part of that ambitious
argument.
Any global skepticism about interpretation faces a further formidable obstacle,
moreover: in at least some circumstances in which we are unclear about the abstract
philosophical question of what counts as interpretive success, we are nevertheless quite
6For a fascinating example of interpretive controversy, and of controversy about the role of authorial
intention, see Andrew Butterfield's review of Leo Steinberg's book,Leonardo's Incessant Last Supper,The New York Review of Books, July 18, 2000, and the exchange about that review among
Butterfield, Steinberg and Helen Vendler in The New York Review of Books, November 7, 2002.
(Steinberg argues that the subject of The Last Supperis not the coming betrayal of Christ but theEucharist.)
7Reference to Chapter 9 ofLaws Empire.
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certain that we have achieved it. In an early chapter of Henry James novel, The Wings of the
Dove, the rich American heroine, Milly Theale, visiting England is shown a Bronzino portrait
by an English aristocrat who claims to see an incredible likeness between her and the woman
in the portrait. Milly thinks, But she is dead, dead, dead, and tears come to her eyes as she
also thinks I shall never be as I am. There can be no doubt, I believe, that this incident
foretells Millys early death, which is the novels organizing event, and I am aware of no
interpreter who thinks otherwise. (The Bronzino portrait is on the cover of the Norton Critical
Edition of the novel.) Other interpretations might conceivably be constructed: that the
American Milly is repelled by the suggestion of a likeness to an aristocrat from a hierarchal
society long past, or that she thinks the comparison insulting because the lady in the portrait is
dead in the way dull people are, or that she is fearful that she will lose her allure which
cannot be preserved as the beauty in a portrait can, or something of the sort. But these are all
plainly wrong: we know they are wrong. We cannot say, with anything like the same
confidence, why the interpretation we know is true is true. We are confident that James
intended the incident to foretell the death, but we may think this only because we know this
interpretation to be the right one, not the other way around. I am not aware that James ever
explicitly confirmed that interpretation, and though I might well be wrong, the interpretation
would still be right even if he hadnt. Even readers who reject the authors intention theory of
interpretation must think it right.
A Proposal
I shall try to defend a general account of interpretation, which I shall first stateenigmatically but then try immediately to illustrate. Interpretation is indeed a distinct form of
inquiry. Its goal is to display its objects value for some purpose. That purpose is given by the
interpretive genre itself. Each genre of interpretation is defined by a collective practice; each
of these practices has a history and each is assumed by its practitioners to have a point or
purpose. Any concrete interpretive claim begins in an assumption, most often hidden and
unacknowledged, about what goal or goals should be attributed to the overall practice that
constitutes the interpretive genre in which the concrete claim is placed. These assumptions are
themselves interpretive: they aim to display the value in the interpretive practice from which
they are drawn. An interpretation of some object succeeds it achieves the truth about that
objects meaning when it best realizes, for that object, the purpose properly assigned to the
genre. It is often controversial, to a greater or lesser degree, what the purpose of a genre
should be taken to be; it is therefore controversial, in parallel degree, what the best
interpretation is, in that genre, of any particular object.
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I can illustrate this schematic account most quickly by falling back on my own
account of legal interpretation, which I have spelled out in some detail elsewhere.8 The
purpose of the practice of statutory interpretation is political: the practice has, as its most
general aim and justification, making the governance of the pertinent community fairer, wiser
and more just. That conception of the point of the practice fits what lawyers and judges do
when they interpret statutes, it justifies that practice, in a general way, and it suggests, also in
a very general way, what kind of standards are appropriate for deciding which of various
competing interpretations of any particular statute is most successful. But it is very abstract,
and lawyers must rely on a more refined statement of the point of the practice actually to
decide between competing interpretations: they must decide, for example, what division of
political authority among different branches of government and civil society is best all things
considered. That question in turn forces upon American lawyers, at least, further and more
general questions of democratic theory; they must decide, for example, drawing on
assumptions or instincts of that kind, how far unelected judges should assume an authority to
decide for themselves which of the semantically available interpretations of a controversial
statute would produce the best law. Each of these further questions, in its turn, implicates still
further questions that might range far into political and moral theory, and take lawyers further
still from the particular statute that is their initial challenge. Disagreements among lawyers
about the best interpretation of particular statutes are often best explained as the consequence
of disagreements about these extensions and refinements. Lawyers who disagree about the
best conception of democracy are likely to disagree, for that reason, about the best
interpretation of the Equal Protection Clause or the Sherman Act.
Intrinsic and Extrinsic Goals
Even that quick illustration suggests a crucial feature of interpretation: it is holistic in
tendency. An interpretation weaves together a great variety of different kinds of values,
collected through the lens of some presumed purpose of the genre as a whole, in an overall
judgment about the meaning of some particular object. The network of value it constructs is
intrinsically open-ended and expanding. I will try to illustrate that description in genres of
interpretation other than law, but I want first to call attention to the deep difference it
supposes between scientific and interpretive inquiry. Whenever we investigate anything
black holes or the meaning of the French Revolution or the population of the Cayman Islands
or whether the rich have an obligation to share their wealth with the poor or whether
Shylocks daughter hated her own Jewishness, our intrinsic goal is to find the truth about the
8 SeeLaws Empire, particularly Chapter 9.
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matters in play. If we did not have that goal, we would not be inquiring at all. But we also
have extrinsic goals of inquiry: these are the goals or purposes of finding the truth that justify
the inquiry. We believe that medical research is justified, for example, because it prevents and
cures disease. Many of what we take to be the extrinsic goals of science are practical in that
way: we think that research in agricultural biology is justified because it promises to feed
more people, and that research in consumer electronics in justified because it will provide
improved recreation and prosperity. The extrinsic goals of science are not always that
immediately practical. We study cosmology to advance our understanding of the basic
structure of our universe. That is not a practical goal, but it is nevertheless an extrinsic one,
because it includes not only an ambition for truth but for truth about something we deem of
fundamental importance for us to know. We do not try to discover how many rocks weighing
two pounds or more there are in Africa. If we did, then the intrinsic goal of the study would
be to determine the truth of that matter, but we do not because the study would not serve any
justifying extrinsic goal, practical or theoretical.
Extrinsic goals play a very important role in determining the course of scientific
inquiry. They explain not only which questions scientists attempt to answer, and which
studies governments or foundations finance, but also when we think it right to rest content
with some claim of truth that falls short, as all significant scientific claims do, of certainty.
Nevertheless, in spite of these important effects, we must never confuse the extrinsic and
intrinsic goals of science; in particular we must not suppose that extrinsic goals enter into any
test of success in achieving the intrinsic goal of truth. The truth of our principles of
engineering is quite independent of the benefits we receive by building our bridges in
accordance with their formulae. That we want to cross rivers is no part of the case for the
truth of the principles that govern when bridges stay up or fall down. To think otherwise
would collapse the indispensable distinction between scientific truth and our reasons for
wanting the truth. (The strength of the pragmatist tradition is its insistence on the importance
of extrinsic goals; its weakness is its tendency to define truth in terms of those extrinsic
goals.) It is part of the corpus of our science part of what it is essential to our extrinsic goals
to understand that these extrinsic goals have nothing to do with truth. We are part of the
physical world and subject to its laws, and this would be true even if, for some unimaginable
reason, like a God punishing us for knowledge, we would be better off not knowing it.
But if the general theory of interpretation I have now described is correct, none of that
is true of interpretation. Our success in finding the true meaning of a poem or a statute or an
epoch does depend on our accuracy in identifying the reasons we have for wanting to find it.
In interpretation, we might now say, extrinsic and intrinsic goals merge. I do not mean that
people who interpret the same object differently are not really disagreeing if their motives for
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trying to discover what it means are different. The extrinsic purposes that are interwoven with
the intrinsic purposes of interpretation are not the individual motives of discrete literary
critics, lawyers and historians, who might act as they do to gain fame or win cases. They are
the purposes of the interpretive enterprise as a whole: interpreters, as I said, make
assumptions and disagree in these assumptions about what the purpose of a particular
enterprise should be taken to be. Nor do I assume that interpreters self-consciously reflect
about the best purpose to assign to the whole practice in which they are engaged. Our
judgments of that kind are patterns of our professional and ordinary lives rather than the
subjects of direct reflection. Our interpretive judgments are often indeed, in many genres are
almost entirely ineffable: our confidence in their truth or success, as I said, outstrips our
ability to argue or even to give reasons for these convictions. This part of my proposal is not
meant to capture the phenomenology of interpretation, but to construct a structure that can
explain that phenomenology and rationalize the judgments that are part of it.
Collaborative, Explanatory and Conceptual Interpretation
I shall try to broaden the range of my examples, and I call again upon an ideally self-
conscious and articulate interpreter. Hermes, as we might call him, is a perfectly general
interpreter who stands ready to take up any interpretive challenge offered to him, in any of the
genres I have mentioned.9 He accepts the structure of interpretation I have so far described in
schematic terms, and he wishes to prepare himself for his ambitious duties. He must form
opinions about what I called the point or purpose of each of these genres, and he will begin by
making a crucial threshold classification among groups of them. He will distinguish amongcollaborative interpretation, explanatory interpretation, and conceptual interpretation. (It is a
principal defect of my earlier attempts to explain interpretation not to have noticed the
importance of this threshold classification.) Collaborative interpretation, in its different
genres, assumes that the object of interpretation has an author or creator, and that the author
has begun a project that the interpreter will try to advance. Literary and artistic interpretation,
legal interpretation, and conversational interpretation are all instances of this type.
Explanatory interpretation presupposes something different: not that interpreters are in
partnership with those who created some object or event, but that an event has some particular
significance for the audience the interpreter addresses. Historical, sociological and
psychodynamic interpretation are examples of this type of genre. An historian who constructs
a theory about the meaning of the French Revolution or the holocaust is not in partnership
9Hermes' tasks include but are greater than those of Hercules, a clever and learned judge I invented to
carry out only legal interpretation (seeLaws Empire), so Hermes bears the name of a full god.
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with Jacobins or Nazis. Instead he tries to find the significance of these epochs for us.
Conceptual interpretation, which I shall later argue includes much of substantive moral and
political philosophy, is structured by yet a different assumption: that the interpreter seeks the
meaning of a concept that is created and recreated not by single authors but by the community
whose concept it is.
I shall follow Hermes' preparations only for collaborative interpretation now. Literary
interpretation, to take that example of this group, aims to expose the meaning of a literary
work by showing how its different elements its plot, character, image, diction and style
contribute, so far as these can be seen to contribute, to an artistic achievement. This ambition
may be realized in a variety of ways and combinations of these ways: by assigning a
clarifying overall theme or message to the work, by isolating and emphasizing particular
narrative events, or particular metaphors or other symbols, by proposing motives or ambitions
for literary characters, or relationships between them beyond what is explicitly declared in thework, by suggesting allegorical or symbolic significance below the surface of the work, by
classifying the work in one literary genre rather than another, or in dozens of other ways.
Hermes may be called upon for any of these tasks, and so his initial judgment, about the
overall point of literary interpretation, must be comprehensive as well as abstract.
He has decided that the point of literary interpretation, stated most abstractly, is
collaborative: that an interpreter contributes to the realization of artistic value in what an
author has at least begun to create. So any more refined statement of the point of the practice
that he composes must draw on the full range of his perhaps not already fully articulated
convictions about artistic value. He must have opinions on thousands of issues including, just
by way of suggestion, about which literary themes are noble and which vulgar or banal, about
whether the greatest art is morally revealing or improving, about whether the poetry in a play
contributes to its value only so far as its tropes and music resonate in some overall dramatic
theme, about how important originality is to art, and, of course, about what is wonderful,
beautiful, or exciting, and what is not. Each of these opinions is, moreover, porous to a great
many other convictions. If he thinks that great art is morally improving, he must also have
opinions about which themes or messages actually do improve morals.
If Hermes is correctly to gauge and apply the point of the practice, moreover, he must
also confront a very different set of issues: about the correct division of labor between the
author of a work of art and himself as its interpreter. Interpretation is different from creation
because an interpreter accepts that someone else has begun the process of creation and
respects that authors authority in some way. Hermes must ask how far he must defer to the
authors artistic judgment, if this can be discovered, and how far he is permitted or required to
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exercise his own creative judgment. He need not give a monistic answer to these questions; he
need not join one of the academic schools of interpretation like the authors intention school
I described earlier. He may suppose different divisions of artistic labor for different kinds of
literary work, or for literary work with different kinds of expressed ambition, or a different
division for older works than contemporary ones, or for classics that are now embedded in a
vast literature of criticism or a vast history of performance than for works that lack such a
history. Ordinary literary scholars and critics make these distinctions naturally and
unreflectively, but Hermes, given his ambitions, must do the best he can to make his opinions
transparent.
In his answers to these question about the division of labor, moreover, he must
respect what seems a defining convention of collaborative interpretation in all its genres,
which is that the author of a work has sole authority to dictate what we might call the
constitutive elements that individuate the work. He or it is in charge of which words or notesor shapes it contains, their order, and where the work begins and ends. Inventive judges,
directors, performers and critical essayists construct interpretations or understandings of a
statute or opera or play or poem that it would be fanciful to suppose the author had in mind,
and sometimes fanciful to imagine even that he would have approved had they been suggested
to him. But these inventive interpreters do not add words or notes even when these would
make the work more successful in their view. If Hermes did not take account of that
convention in his account of the point of interpreting in collaborative genres he would not
have a theory of the point of those institutions at all.10 He cannot take account of it only as an
independent side constraint on his interpretive imagination, moreover. because that would
make it arbitrary. He must assign some purpose to the convention some explanation, that is,
of why it is important to individuate the objects of interpretation in that way and his further
opinions about the division of labor between an author and himself must be consistent with
accepting that purpose as important. He could not assign all interpretive issues to himself, no
matter what the author thought, without explaining how such a division of authority was
consistent in principle with assigning the author autonomy over the constitutive form.
So Hermes needs more than just a comprehensive statement of his own critical
judgments about the value of various works of art to prepare himself for a career in
10Some readers might find this claim exaggerated or dictatorial. The German theatrical movement of
the 60s called total theatre freely interpolated characters, dialog and even events in the plays theyperformed. We treat jokes and legends that way: we have no compunction about improving a joke we
hear while thinking we are telling the same joke. You might think that the total theatre movement used
a kind of interpretive strategy, and that we do interpret jokes. On my present account, these are
eccentric of stretched uses of interpretation.
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collaborative interpretation. He needs opinions about why an author controls the constituent
elements of a work, and he needs further opinions about the proper division of authority
between authors and interpreters that respect his explanation of that feature of interpretation.
Of course, such opinions also draw on his artistic convictions and sensibilities. But these
convictions and sensibilities must now be deployed differently, because they now implicate
authorship as a distinct phenomenon, and may for that reason require more abstract judgments
not only about value in art but about the value of art. Suppose Hermes thinks, for example,
that a major part of the value of aesthetic experience lies in the appreciation of the full
originality and insight of which some human beings are capable; that opinion will dispose
him, at least, to greater authority of an author or composer, even of a classic, over his work.
But suppose he thinks that the value of art lies not so much in the opportunity it offers for the
appreciation of genius as in its power to transform or at least move readers or listeners or
viewers. Then he will be disposed to think that the point of interpreting a classic is to make
that transforming power available in a very different age, with very different associations and
reactions, from that in which it was composed. Hermes' conclusions about these various
matters will be controversial. People disagree about the right way to play a Mozart sonata,
about the interpretive importance of various events and symbols in The Wings of a Dove, and
about the correct reading of the Equal Protection Clause. Hermes fully developed theory of
interpretation will take sides in these and all other interpretive controversies, and those who
disagree with him will also disagree with the general theory he has constructed, even if they
are unable to say how and where.
My explanation has emphasized so far only one of the many dimensions of value
(albeit a particularly important dimension) on which an interpretation draws. But Hermes
completed theory of interpretation is full of values: discrete values interwoven so that each
illuminates, reinforces and checks the others. He begins, I said, by finding and refining value
in the project of interpretation itself. But that initial step demands identifying and refining
further values: in the literary case it demands an integrated theory of literary value and of the
proper allocation of responsibility among the agents who collaborate to produce that value.
These different values may compete as well as cooperate in an overall judgment of which
interpretation of a given object of art best fulfills his collaborative responsibilities. Each of his
final concrete interpretive judgments about how to read a particular poem, for example
further refines and checks the entire elaborate theory on which it is built because an
interpretation that feels right will confirm the values that analysis shows it deploys, and an
interpretation that feels wrong will ripple back into and change, to a greater or lesser degree,
the structure on which it was based. Integration, we might say, is shot full of value, but values
that confirm and check one another like answers to a complex set of simultaneous equations.
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This general account of interpretation is not only consistent with but explains the fact
I noticed earlier: that interpretation is wholly sensitive to genre, so that there is no activity of
interpreting in general. If the truth of an interpretative claim depends on the point or purpose
of interpretation in its genre, then of course interpretation cannot begin until that genre is
specified or assumed. The point of interpreting light flashes as a message is dramatically
different from the point of interpreting them as artistic expression. The general account also
explains the ambivalent reactions I described to the truth-seeking character of interpretation.
If interpreters believe that the practice they have entered has a point, then they must also
believe that the point can be identified and better served by one particular interpretation, on
any interpretive occasion, than by others, and if one interpretation strikes them as best, then
they must also think that that interpretation best serves that point. But interpreters know that
they disagree with other interpreters along many dimensions of that complex overall
judgment: they can disagree about how best to describe the point of the practice they share,
and also and independently disagree about what counts as the best realization of that point on
any particular occasion. The disagreement in concrete claims will be evident one lawyer
will read the statute to favor the defendant and the other to favor the plaintiff, one critic will
see Piero della Francescos painting ofThe Risen Christas deeply Christian and another as
deeply pagan but the source of that disagreement in more abstract disagreement may be
obscure, and those who disagree will often be unable to state the more abstract convictions on
which their concrete conviction relies. They will therefore be tempted, as I said, by modesty
and a variety of other virtues, to declare that there is no exclusive truth of the matter, that
though they see the statute or painting one way others, who see it another, are not making amistake. These opinions are incoherent, as I also said, but their incoherence is explained by
the complexity of the interpretive structure and the variety of judgments, many of them
difficult fully to articulate, that it requires.
III. Morality as InterpretationMoralitys Point?
I proposed this brief discussion of interpretation in general not just for its independent
philosophical interest but in hopes that it would help us to claim a role for moral philosophy
once we reject the meta-ethical distinction between philosophical study and substantive
conviction. Can we explain and conduct moral reasoning as an interpretive enterprise? If so,
then we can treat moral philosophy as the abstract, self-conscious and professional edge of
that practice, and in that way continue to treat it as special.
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Morality is certainly a practice: we make moral claims of ourselves and one another,
both in our personal lives and in politics, and we expect and make certain standard forms of
argument in support or denigration of such claims. It might seem surprising to call this an
interpretive practice, however, for two reasons. First, in the ordinary, quotidian practice of
morality people do not put their claims and convictions in the vocabulary of meaning: you say
that I must keep my promise, not that that obligation follows from or is part of the meaning of
what I have done or said. We are now particularly interested in the character of moral
philosophy, however, which is the professional level of moral practice, and it is not
uncommon for moral philosophers to frame their claims as propositions about the very
meaning of right and wrong, duty, obligation and the rest. Second, morality, as a practice, is
different from the other practices we have been discussing in one dramatic way: participation
is not optional as it is in other interpretive practices. We need not speculate about the meaning
of poems or novels or even statutes if we do not wish to do so, and may even largely drop out
of the practice of conversation. But we cannot drop out of morality: we can stop caring about
it, of course, but that does not exempt us from its burdens. That feature of morality does not
bar us from treating it as interpretive, however, though it is a feature that any competent
interpretation of morality must explain.
The crucial question is how to begin. What reasonably abstract purpose or point can
we attribute to the practice of criticizing ourselves and others in moral terms, and puzzling
over what those terms should be? It is crucial, now, to avoid settling for a causal explanation
of some kind. We might or might not be tempted by arguments that the institution of morality
had beneficial evolutionary effects for our species, or that the particular rules of any
communitys conventional morality promote, in its special economic and other circumstances,
its security or prosperity. That is beside the present point. We must now try to provide some
account of the institutions point that can play a role in an interpretive argument; that goal
requires not a causal explanation but a justification of the practice. Darwinism of some kind
might have a place in such a justification some philosophers apparently think it does but
only if we suppose not just that we have been shaped by genes and culture to do what is good
for the species, or for some community, but that we have a moral responsibility to do so.
The difficulty is plain. How can we supply a general justification for morality without
presupposing too much by way of controversial claims within the practice? We want an
account of morality as an interpretive practice that will allow us to test propositions like the
proposition that people should always act to improve the wealth of their community, and we
must therefore not build such claims into the defining point of the practice. We must try to
find a point or goal for the institution that does not rest on any particular, even very general,
substantive moral theory. We must ask, not whether the institution of morality serves some
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particular moral principle, but what other, not distinctly moral, purpose we can sensibly take
the entire practice to have. Putting the matter that way might seem to cast great doubt on the
plausibility of the project, however, because morality, many philosophers think, is its own
point. We must act as our moral duties require not to gain some other kind of advantage but
just because our duties are what they are. This is a crucial challenge to the project of
understanding morality as interpretive, and we must take care to consider and respond to it.
Integrated and Detached Values
We will find another distinction useful for that purpose: between ethically integrated
and ethically detached values.11 Our interest in questions of value what a good life is like,
what we owe to other people, what is beautiful and admirable, and so forth is of course not
simply abstract and theoretical. It is intensely practical, because we want to live well and we
think that acting in accordance with wise judgment about these matters is essential to living
well. But there are two views we might take, in the case of each of our values, about the
connection between the character of the value and the contribution that understanding and
respecting its character makes to our lives. We might, first, treat the value as detached from
and fixed independently of our concern to live well: we must respect it simply because it is, in
itself, something of value and we do wrong or badly not to recognize that value. Or, second,
we might treat the value as derivative from our interest in living well: we might suppose that
it is a value, and has the character it does, because accepting it as a value with that character
enhances our life in some other way.
Religions take the first view of the central values of their faith: they treat these as
ethically detached. They insist that living well requires devotion to one or more gods, but they
deny that the nature of these gods, or their standing as gods, in any way derives from the fact
that a good life consists in respecting them, or that we can advance our understanding of their
nature by asking how, more precisely, they would have to be in order to make respecting them
good or better for us. The gods, they insist, are what they are, and our responsibility is to try
to discover that, so far as we can, and to act in the light of what we discover. That is like the
view we take of scientific fact: the view I summarized earlier in the distinction I drew
between extrinsic and intrinsic goals in science. We think that it is good for us to understand
the structure of the universe, but we do not think unless we are pragmatists or mad that
that structure depends on what structure would be good for us.
11I made that distinction, in somewhat different terminology, inLifes Dominion. I used the word
"derivative" to describe what I now call ethically integrated values. The former term now seems tome too instrumental in connotation. Much of the discussion of this and the next paragraph repeats what
I said in that book.
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Many people take the same view of the value of art. We are responsible for
discovering what is wonderful in art, and respecting its wonder, but we must take care not to
commit the fallacy of supposing that something is beautiful because it makes our life better to
appreciate it, or that we can identify and analyze its beauty by considering what it would be
otherwise good for us to admire in the way we admire art. G. E. Moore held a very strong
form of the view that art is ethically detached: he said that art would retain its full value even
if all the creatures who could appreciate it perished never to return. We need not go that far to
suppose that arts value is detached, however: we can say that a painting would have no value
if it could have no meaning for or impact on any sensibility, without also supposing that its
value depends on the impact that it actually has, or the independent value of that impact for
any creature.
If the central moral values are ethically detached in this way, then we would have to
take the point of the practice of morality to be wholly internal: simply to identify and enforcethe demands of morality, the way religion hopes to identify the commands of a god that we
must obey for no reason other than that he has so commanded. Then taking morality to be an
interpretive practice would not add to our critical understanding of moral argument. If, on the
other hand, moral values are best understood as ethically integrated rather than detached, if
we can identify some more general benefit of the practice of morality, then taking that more
general benefit to play the role of a defining lens in an interpretive practice might be very
helpful. So the question are moral values integrative or detached? is crucial.
The question is not whether some people benefit from the practice. Of course they do:
the weak, for example, whose lives and property would be at greater risk without moral
constraints on what the strong might do. But we cannot take protecting such people to be the
point of morality without begging, once again, the question of what morality requires. We
need some benefit that can plausibly be claimed for everyone. As I said, many of our instincts
about morality suggest that there is no such general benefit. We should be moral, we think,
out of concern for others, not ourselves: being moral means subordinating not elevating our
own interests and concerns. It seems a matter of plain common sense, moreover, that acting
morally is not in everyones interests: justice is not in the interests of the rich, for example, if
it requires them to share with the poor. True, ingenious philosophers have tried to show that
some familiar moral requirements are indeed in everyones interests if these interests are
viewed from a certain perspective: from behind some veil of ignorance, for example. But it
does not follow from these hypothetical stories that morality is in everyones interests in real
life. If we think that stories about hypothetical or counterfactual agreements play some role in
the case for moral claims, we must appeal to additional principles to justify that role, and we
can hardly suppose that these further principles are in everyones interests.
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Nevertheless, on a second look, it seems even odder to suppose that the value of
morality is ethically detached, that we must bend to its doom, like climbing Everest, just
because it is there. It is too pervasive, demanding and imperative for that: it would be
fetishistic to be governed in that imperial way by the rules of some celestial but pointless
game. We can think the value of art detached because we can think its objects wonderful in
themselves. But the Golden Rule is not wonderful in itself; it can be wonderful only for the
impact it makes on the lives of those whose embrace it. We do believe that it demeans
morality to paint it as instrumental, but we must take that conviction as a guide to discovering
moralitys true extrinsic goals, not to deny that it has any.
We must find a point for morality that meets the varied conditions that we have
identified, which I shall now summarize. Moralitys most abstract point must be general: it
must appeal to some interest that it is plausible to suppose everyone has who is a subject of
morality, whether he recognizes it or not; some interest that is in that sense part of humannature. Its abstract point cannot be simply furthering what I just called narrow self-interest:
peoples pleasure or wealth or the satisfaction of desires people happen to have. It must
therefore lie in ethics more broadly conceived: in some account of what makes peoples lives
go better that is not limited to narrow self-interest.12
But it cannot plausibly be all of ethics: it
would be implausible to suppose that a fully moral life is always the best life, because we
know that morality sometimes requires people to make grave sacrifices in the overall quality
of their lives. The abstract point we select must appeal to some dimension of a lifes success
that is sufficiently compelling, on its own, to justify the demand for such sacrifices.
It must, moreover, promise to confirm at least the most basic structural idea of
morality, which is bounded impartiality. Moral principles must not favor any particular class
or type of person, but must nevertheless leave agents free each to pay special attention to his
own needs and interests, and to those of people with whom he has special connections or for
whom he has special responsibilities. That is, of course, only a schematic statement of
moralitys basic design: it must be given content by some account of what impartiality means
in particular circumstances, and of how impartiality is bounded. If morality is an interpretive
practice, that content must be supplied, at least in principal part, by refinement of the point we
attribute to the practice. But we know in advance that no supposed point that does not promise
some conception of bounded impartiality can govern the practice.
12I distinguish between ethics, which is the study of how to live well, and morality, which is the
study of right and wrong actions. I believe Bernard Williams was the first to distinguish the two ideas
in that way.
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Self-respect
We can find the interpretive fulcrum we need in an idea I shall call self-respect. That
phrase is not ideal: it has different connotations for different people, and might seem too
prissy for the job I have described. But I can think of no better phrase dignity and
integrity seem worse and I hope to give the phrase enough content in the discussion that
follows. The nerve of self-respect is the conviction that it is important what we do with our
own lives. Most people make major plans and decisions out of a sense that their lives, as a
whole, go better or worse in one direction rather than another, and they take pride or
disappointment, in retrospect, in how their lives have gone. We cannot think that it is
important how we live only because we take this to be important, only because, as it happens,
we want to lead successful rather than wasted lives. We would then have no reason to want
this: we might sensibly want our future to be pleasant rather than unpleasant, but could have
no reason for caring otherwise about its shape as a whole, or in retrospect, or in prospect inany other way. We must think that it is important how we live, and that if we didnt recognize
this we would be making an important mistake. Self-respect means understanding that
importance and acting consistently with it. I do not mean that skepticism about the importance
of how we live is impossible: on the contrary it is all too real. But any skeptical challenge
must be internal: it must claim, not that our sense that it is important how we live is
subjective, but that it is wrong.
Most people, even today, think they know why it is important that human lives
succeed. It is important because God has made it important; a wasted life is an insult to him.
But the Enlightenment humanists thought they had discovered that we do not need him for
self-respect. Their declaration of independence made it inevitable that the idea of self-respect
would become, as it did in Kant's philosophy, an engine of impartiality. If my life were
important only because God created me and had expectations for me, there would be space for
the idea that it was more important what I made of my life than what anyone else made of his.
God might care more about me than him, or have greater expectations or use for me. There
would also, of course, be space for the opposite idea, that all Gods creatures are of equal
importance, and the best of religions chose that alternative. But a free-standing assumption of
importance is inherently and inescapably egalitarian. It makes no sense to suppose that my
life is important because I can make something important of it, or because my ambitions are
grand, or because I am famous. If it were not already important whether I make something of
or waste my life, then it would not matter whether I had talent or ambition or fame: these
would not give me a special reason for anything. The differences among us become pertinent
on the assumption that it is important what we do with our life; they are not part of any
justification for that assumption.
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There are many ways in which I can deny or denigrate the importance of my own life
or of my assignment to make something of it.13 I can become a drunk, for example, or fritter
away my time in what I know to be trivial. But I can also denigrate the importance of my life
by indifference toward someone elses life, because that, too, denies the assumption on which
my self-respect is premised, which is that a human life, once begun, must not be wasted and
that when I accept such a waste with equanimity I show contempt for my own life as well.
That might seem an extravagantly academic and pious claim. But people often feel that they
would demean themselves if they acted selfishly, cheating on what they know are their
obligations, even when no one else would know. I couldnt live with myself, they say, if I
did that. They feel cheapened as well as guilty when they ignore the interests of others, and
the idea I suggest, that respect for oneself entails respect for others, seems the best available
explanation of why.
The idea of self-respect, understood in that way, seems at least initially to meet thevarious conditions we identified for a useful attribution of an external point to morality.
Though self-respect is intuitively connected to morality, for the reasons I just suggested, it is
not itself a subject within at least that core part of morality that defines, in Scanlons phrase,
what we owe to one other. Self-respect is a suitably general interest as well; it expresses a
property human beings share we are all self-conscious and all have lives to lead that
distinguishes us as a species from other animals. Self-respect is not all that counts as having a
good or successful life, so taking self-respect to be of peculiar importance to morality does
not require us to claim that morality is always is the agents own interest, even in the broadest
sense. We can claim only that morality is what I called, in Sovereign Virtue: a weak parameter
of a successful life.14 But self-respect does seem, at least initially, of such importance within
ethics as to make it plausible that someone should make great sacrifices in other aspects of his
life to protect his self-respect.
Two Principles of Ethical Individualism
Let us assume, then, as a working hypothesis, that self-respect is at least some major
part of the point of the institution of morality. We can try to construct an interpretive account
of morality on that foundation. Just as a critics various and diverse judgments of artistic
13I recently came across, in Janet Malcolm's book,Reading Checkhov: A Critical Journey, this passage
from Checkhovs story, The Lady with the Dog: Gurov thought how in reality everything is beautiful
in the world when one reflects: everything except what we think or do ourselves when we forget ourhuman dignity and the higher aims of our existence.
14Reference to Sovereign Virtue.
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value play a role in his interpretation of a poem or a painting, and just as a lawyers complex
political values play a role in his interpretation of a statute, so our understanding of what self-
respect requires plays a role in our various judgments of moral responsibility. Once again, it
bears emphasis that, in morality as in these other theatres of interpretation, this is a two-way
process. Our sense of our moral responsibility plays a role in our understanding of self-
respect. Interpretation is, as always, inherently holistic: we work out conceptions of the values
in play each in the light of the others.
But now we are exploring the direction from self-respect to morality. Self-respect has,
as I said, at least for humanists, strong egalitarian implications. But it remains to be seen how
it promises to support bounded rather than unlimited impartiality. Morality would be
voracious if we understood it only as a scheme through which we recognize the equal
importance of the lives of all human beings. That might suggest a life of full benevolence, a
life, that is, dominated by the requirement that one show no more concern for his owninterests, or those of people in different ways special to him, than he does for strangers. Some
philosophers, including utilitarians, do suppose that that requirement is at the heart of
morality. John Rawls and others criticize utilitarianism for its demand that peoples interests
be aggregated, so that morality requires accepting a large, even catastrophic, injury to a small
number of people if the aggregate of small benefits to each of a very large number of people
would outweigh that large injury. Rawls says that this claim ignores the difference between
people. Utilitarianism is subject to a different objection, however, made by Bernard Williams
among others, which is that it ignores the difference between people in a different way. It
ignores the special responsibility that each person has for his own life.
This, too, is an aspect of self-respect. It is essential to self-respect that we try to make
something out of our own lives rather than having something made of them by others, and the
proposition that each person has as great an interest in and responsibility for the lives of every
other human being, if we took it seriously, would mean the death of individual responsibility.
If we are to find an adequate conception of self-respect, we must add to the idea that every
human life is equally important the further idea that one person has a special and distinct
responsibility for the success of each important human life, and that is the person whose life it
is.
We can describe the two foundational requirements of self-respect that we have now
identified in two principles. It is objectively important, first, that any human life once begun
be successful rather than wasted, and it is essential, second, that each person take special
responsibility for the success of his own life. These principles may seem competitive, even
contradictory, and it is indeed common to say that we must balance our moral responsibilities
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for the interests of others against our own needs and interests, or, perhaps, our responsibilities
to ourselves and those close to us. That would be one way of putting my point, but I want to
resist it, not only because the familiar metaphors of balance and compromise are lazy and
uninformative, but also because we are trying now to discover, not how respect for the
importance of human lives generally might be balanced against some independent and special
concern for self, but how the embracing notion of self-respect contains both ideas, so that
morality can be seen, not as a compromise between equality and partiality, but as the
fulfillment of a more structured and unified ethics.
Let us say instead that in order to lead our own lives with the right kind of self-
respect we must find a way to heed both the intrinsic importance of a human life, of which
ours is one, and the special responsibility we each have for the life that is ours. We must find
attractive and plausible conceptions of each of these two responsibilities that permit them
both fully to be realized, if we can, and we must try to see morality as a crucial theatre of thatpersonal drama. Which obligations to others should we acknowledge, and allow to override
our own plans and interests, if we are to achieve the self-respect of which we are capable?
History
Much of Western moral philosophy can fairly be understood as answering that
cardinal question. The naturalistic tradition of Hume and Aristotle, for example, takes certain
impulses or sensibilities to be central to peoples conceptions of a flourishing and successful
life for themselves, and attempts to show how familiar requirements of morality confirm and
channel those impulses. Kantian moral philosophy, in its most metaphysical formulation,
identifies a conception of freedom as indispensable to genuine self-respect, and then
constructs the familiar Kantian formulations of the moral law to show how moral
requirements express and protect that freedom. The social contract tradition, at least in most
of its manifestations, tries to connect morality to ethics in some parallel way. It imagines
people in strange circumstances in a state of nature, or behind a veil of ignorance that
force them to identify themselves only through properties they share with everyone else, and
therefore to choose principles of governance that treat all lives as of equal importance.
However it imagines them choosing principles, in these strange circumstances, that assume
that each is responsible for himself in particular. He must decide for himself what would
count as success in his life in order to know what contractual principles to accept. He cannot
coherently assign that responsibility to the community the contract will create.
John Rawls version of the social contract is particularly illuminating of that second
feature: the participants in his original position do not know their own ethical convictions, but
they protect their responsibility to decide ethical issues for themselves, later, when the veil of
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ignorance has been lifted. They insist now on a priority of liberty that provides maximal
protection for freedoms of choice and conscience and they adopt a resource-based rather than
a welfare-based principle of distributive justice, because the latter would require officials
rather than they themselves to decide which lives are best to lead, or which dimensions of
success in living are the most important.15
The social contract tradition has generally endorsed
egalitarian and liberal conceptions of justice not, as is often supposed, because it is somehow
grounded in consent or consensus any pretensions to consensus are bogus because
hypothetical consent is no consent but because the humanitarian conception of self-respect
on which it is based is inherently egalitarian and liberal.
Thomas Scanlons form of contractarianism, set out in his recent bookWhat We Owe
to Each Other, is more explicit in linking moral to ethical theory and is, in my view if not in
his, the best available example of moral reasoning as an interpretive exercise. In an earlier
influential article, Scanlon had supposed that people wish to justify their actions to those whoare affected by those actions, and then argued that people with that motive would think it right
that their conduct be governed by principles that no one could reasonably reject. In his book,
he treats that motive as an ethical ambition it is not just a motive that people might have but
one that people with the right sense of their own interests do have and he argues for his
contractarianism on that basis.16 It is surely an appealing idea that a proper respect for our
own humanity requires us to recognize that humanity in others, and to respect it by offering
them an adequate justification for acts that damage or disappoint them.
Sometimes the interpretive character of moral philosophy is obscured by a distinction
that seems to deny that character: between the question of what morality requires and the
supposedly different question of why we should care about morality. Christine Korsgaard, for
example, in her bookThe Sources of Normativity,17
assumes that we mainly agree about what
morality demands, but must find an explanation of the importance of morality, which she
finds by arguing, with Kant, that self-legislation is the ground of morality, and that self-
legislation is indispensable to recognizing oneself as truly human. The interpretive approach,
on the contrary, fuses Korsgaards two questions: only by reflecting on why morality is
important can we ratify or change our sense of what it requires. Nothing important to the
arguments of the various philosophers I just mentioned would change, however, if they
explicitly adopted that interpretive premise.
15See Sovereign Virtue, Chapters 1 and 7.
16See R. Jay Wallaces contribution to the Ethics symposium on Scanlons book.
17Citation.
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Insurance and Morals
Our main concern now, however, is not with the history of moral and political
philosophy but with the interpretive model of moral reasoning itself. We want, I said, to use
the connection between morality and ethics that we have identified to clarify what morality
requires, and I shall suggest various strategies for that purpose, using perennial issues of
academic moral theory as examples. The first two of these ask how we are permitted to act
when we have opportunity to help different groups of people but can help only one such
group. First, are we required or permitted to allow numbers to count in our decision: is it
permissible, for example, to save many people from significant injury at the cost of failing to
save one person from a much greater injury? Second, is there a crucial distinction, in acting to
save one group of people, between acts that we can foresee will result in death to others and
acts that include killing those others? The third issue I discuss is the more pervasive puzzle
with which I introduced this general discussion. How far does morality require us, not just toignore the interests of some people in helping others, but to ignore our own interests as well?
I have elsewhere defended an insurance approach to issues of social justice: we
should design welfare programs of different kinds, so far as we can, to provide people with
the protection against various risks that they would themselves choose if they had to bear the
cost of that insurance.18 That ambition, I argued, is superior to other approaches to social
welfare (including both Rawls stringent difference principle and the apparently more
reasonable but finally wholly unhelpful advice that we give some more limited priority to
the situation of the worst-off) because it better recognizes people's special responsibility for
their own lives. We might imagine, as a special form of insurance, a compact among a group
each of whom agrees to aid any of the others if they need his help in specified circumstances,
in return for the others agreement to aid him in those circumstances. A proposed compact
might provide, for example, that any member will come to the aid of any other when the
danger to the latter is substantial and the rescue involves no significant risk to the former. Or
it might be much more rigorous: it might provide for rescue whenever the discounted cost of
rescue to one member is less than the discounted danger to the other.
Suppose we assume (in many circumstances this would be a realistic assumption) that
no one offered a particular compact has a significantly greater chance, at the time of the
compact, of needing the help it specifies than anyone else in the potential group. We can then
sensibly ask a variety of questions that have been made familiar by social contract theory.
18Sovereign Virtue, particularly Chapters 2, 8 and 9. See also Sovereign Virtue Revisitedin
forthcomingEthics issue about that book
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How would some particular person who is invited to join a particular compact respond after
reflection? His decision would depend, presumably, on what he thought best calculated to
improve his own prospects. We might also ask how most people would respond. Or whether
everyone would decide the same way if he was rational. Or if he was ignorant of his own
circumstances in some way. Or if he had a particular assumed motive, or something else of
that sort. Those are the questions, as I said, that different forms of the contractarian tradition
would suggest. But there is a different question to ask, and on the interpretive model it is that
different question, and not the more traditional ones, that is in point when we ask what our
moral responsibilities are to others in trouble or need. What decision would someone make
who took the rightview about a successful life? What compacts could someone who is
reasonable in thatsense reject? I shall call that the ethical question. To the degree to which
there is a correct answer to the ethical question, that answer fixes the extent of our moral
responsibility to others, because it fixes the right way to integrate the two demands of self-
respect.
Much of the contractarian tradition, and much other moral philosophy as well,
supposes that moral theory should take peoples ethical convictions what Rawls calls their
conceptions of the good as given, as facts about them to be taken into account in deciding
what justice requires in the same way as facts about their medical history. We note that people
differ in these convictions, and we ask what programs or policies or theories of justice are
appropriate given those differences. But people do not cannot think about their own
ethical convictions in that reportorial way. The ethical questions we face in our lives demand
judgment not discovery. People confronted with proposed compacts of the kind I imagined
would face ethical issues and on the interpretive model moral issues turn, at least in part, on
the judgments they should make. I concede, at least for this discussion, that some ethical
questions have no single right answer: which questions these are is an internal question for
ethics.19
The interpretive model holds that, if there is no single right answer to a particular
ethical question, there is no single right answer to the corresponding moral question either.
Since people do differ in their ethical convictions, however, the interpretive model
implies that they will also differ in their moral convictions in a corresponding way. Consider
the first of the academic perennials I just listed. When should numbers count in deciding
whom we should, individually or collectively, help? Let us assume (as most people would)
that it would not be in peoples interests to agree to a compact requiring them always to act in
whatever way would improve average welfare on some stipulated conception of welfare. Such
19See Youd Better Believe It.
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a compact would indeed improve its members expected welfare on the stipulated conception,
but the judgment that people live best when their lives are most packed with any particular
conception of welfare is both rare and wrong. So we need not worry about the extreme
dangers of counting numbers: we need not worry that an interpretive morality would require
people to ignore or cause great pain to a single individual when that would give small
pleasure to each of thousands of others. Numbers cannot count in that way.
What about the case in which the dangers to different numbers of people are
comparable? Should I choose to save the lives of five strangers or of one stranger when I
cannot save the lives of all six? The compact/insurance device gives a straightforward answer:
it would be irrational for anyone to reject a compact requiring each to save the greater number
of members in that situation. But what of the more complex case when the dangers are great
for everyone in the story, but greater for the smaller number? Imagine that you are in a
position to save a few people from starvation in a particular African village, or a much largernumber from serious economic devastation elsewhere. Some philosophers think it would be
wrong to save the larger number in this case: for them the magnitude of the threat is decisive.
The insurance device makes the case more difficult. Suppose you are offered a compact in
which members agree to save a significantly larger number of their fellows from economic
ruin rather than a smaller number from death. Ethical judgments would play an obvious role
in your decision whether to join. People who thought dying earlier than necessary a great and
incomparable tragedy would reject the compact in favor of one that requires saving fewer
people from the greater danger. People who thought death not so plainly the worst thing, and
dreaded a life under serious privation, would not. The right answer to the moral issue turns on
the best answer to the ethical one.
Consider the second issue I mentioned: the supposedly crucial distinction between
killing and letting die. We have one powerful reason to join a compact that permits members
collectively to kill one member when that would spare the lives of two or more other
members. That compact increases the life expectancy of each of its members, and is in that
way in the interests of all. But we might also think we had powerful reasons not to join. We
might think, for example, that it would stain our lives, perhaps irretrievably, to take another
human life except, perhaps, in self-defense: certainly many peop