Dworkin Interpretation Morality Truth

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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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Interpretation, Morality and Truth 1

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

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